Alice Miller (1923–2010), the preeminent and influential Swiss psychologist, devoted her life to spreading this message: The roots of violence are known. No child, she says, is ever born violent. Violence is driven by nurture, not nature. Violence exists because most children on this planet are raised in violence … often beaten, humiliated, and broken in the first years of their lives.
Consider the options available to a battered child. If a child runs away, who will provide food and shelter? Self-defense is no option because fending off an overpowering adult is more likely to result in further mistreatment. How can a child resolve the contradictory experiences of adult as caregiver versus adult as tormenter? A child may try to be perfect, but perfection never works.
In most corners of the world, child abuse is sanctioned - even held in high regard as long as it is defined as child rearing. Thus, abusive practices are allowed to originate, flourish, and pass from generation to generation often under the cover of righteous piety and administered with this injunction: This is for your own good.
The normal emotional release for anxiety, pain, and resentment is forbidden to battered children, who will suppress their feelings, repress all memory of trauma, even put their abusers on pedestals and idealize them. The life of an abused child turned adult may take many paths. Some may turn their repressed rage against themselves in the form of addictions, anxiety disorders, and depression, even suicide. Others may turn their suppressed rage against their own children ... or against society as criminal offenders.
The issues raised by Alice Miller have social and historical implications. Sometimes abused and traumatized children reenact their childhoods on the political stage and turn themselves into tyrants or become the adherents, adulators, and henchman of tyrants and lunatic ideologues. Systemic child abuse is the wellspring of injustice, ignorance, and evil in the world.
If we write a history of tyrants through the ages - along with their adherents, adulators, and henchman - what should we write about them? Shall we focus on recorded events, on the mass murder of their victims, and their legacy as villains of history? Or might we gain more insight in studying the abuse and violence that shaped their lives?
Joseph Stalin. From historical accounts, Stalin’s father, Vissarion, was a cobbler whose alcoholism led to business failures, domestic violence, and frequent relocations that left his family in poverty and deprivation. A family acquaintance recalls: “Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father.” Thus, the brutal and ruthless dictator remained faithful to his father’s example.In the biographies of dictators, there is a consistent thread of early abuse in the lives of Ceausescu, Franco, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein, as examples. Furthermore, brutal tyrants have an uncanny ability to mobilize the suppressed rage of followers, presumably abused as children, who become their adherents, adulators, and henchman.
Adolph Hitler. Numerous biographies recall the Führer’s obsession with doubts over his family lineage - the illegitimate birth of his father, Alois Schicklgruber, and the true identity of his paternal grandfather. The presumptive fathers of Alois were two brothers, Johann Hüttler or Johann Georg Hielder. A third possibility was a Jewish family from Graz who employed the maternal grandmother during her pregnancy and paid her support money for 14 years. For Alois, the stigma of being born illegitimate, and part Jewish in a time of rising anti-Semitism, was a source of intolerable shame. Alois projected his self-loathing upon his sons, especially Adolph, in the form of daily beatings that once left the boy unconscious and near death at 11 years old. Later, Adolph Hitler would write:
More to the point, Hitler avenged his father’s shame upon the political stage … culminating in the Final Solution.I want the young to be violent, domineering, undismayed, cruel (…) They must be able to bear pain. There must be nothing weak or gentle about them.
It should come as no surprise that brutal tyrants and serial killers share common traits. Neurologist Jonathan Pincus interviewed violent criminals on Death Row to study the long-term consequences of severe childhood mistreatment. His findings:
- Every perpetrator had been exposed to extreme physical and emotional abuse by at least one parent or caregiver;
- Each homicide reflected the same kind of brutality that the murderer had endured in childhood;
- Those who experienced extreme cruelty as children directed their anger at others as a form of retaliation;
- None of the convicts incriminated their abusers, even when consciously aware of the abuse;
- The pathologies of convicted murders were similar to the pathologies of their abusers;
- The biography of each and every convict represents a feedback loop of terror directed back at society.
Is it possible for a nation, a society, and a culture to follow a similar path? When demagogues and hacks strut their hypocrisy, hysteria and lies upon a national stage, why shouldn’t we regard these as analogous to abuse? When citizens brandish guns, or imply Second Amendment remedies as an alternative to civil discourse, why shouldn’t we assume their purpose to bully, stifle debate, and suppress the rights of others? Does the impulse to win by any means and win at all cost remind you of the tactics of tyrants? Are these the signs and symptoms of Abused Nation Syndrome?
Don't Retreat, Reload.
(chilling - have a listen.)
(chilling - have a listen.)
Is this the kind of society in which we want to raise our children - and the legacy we want to leave for future generations?
Open for comments …
