October, 2011: Biggest Month Ever for EGREGORES

Well, the last day of the month still has several hours left in it, but according to the stats that are generated by blogspot, October, 2011 is already the biggest month yet for this humble blog of mine. There have (already) been over 28,000 pageviews, which, according to my calculations comes in at nearly 1,000 page views per day.

But wait, you say, perhaps there is some mad scientist out there who has fiendishly implanted electrodes into some poor ferret's brain so that each time the ferret pushes a little lever (which causes to be clicked the refresh button on the little ferret's web browser, which is hard wired to only display pages from the egregores blog) the pleasure center of the ferret's brain receives a small electrical impulse, with the result that said ferret pushes and pushes and pushes the lever until it dies, blissfully, from exhaustion, dehydration and starvation, only to be replaced by the next ferret.

Not true, I say. For I have also been independently collecting statistics on "unique visitors", of which this blog has consistently averaged over (and sometimes well over) 200 per day for the last year. So there.

To be honest I wish I were above such things, but to be even more honest I have to admit that it is nice to be noticed.

Below is the list of the "top posts" over the last month. (That is, these were the posts with the most pageviews during the last month. None of them were actually posted during October, 2011.)

These posts are not the ones I would pick for my all-time best, nor are they broadly representative of the content of this blog. But I see nothing to be embarrassed or to complain about in the list. I did do my own "top 25 list" after the first year of this blog, and the interested reader is encouraged to look there, as well: One Year of "egregores" (My Top 25).

Happy Zombie Jesus Day Apr 24, 2011, 3 comments; 1,461 Pageviews

Gods bless the Navy SEALs May 3, 2011, 3 comments; 1,197 Pageviews

From the desk of Rajan Zed: Miley Cyrus, Naked Yoga, the Church of Norway, and so forth .... Aug 1, 2011; 1,055 Pageviews

Possibly Blasphemous Images of the Virgin Mary (then again, possibly not) Oct 22, 2010, 5 comments; 751 Pageviews

extremely cool natural fractals Dec 2, 2010, 3 comments; 449 Pageviews

Bogus Hakuin Quote on Life and Death: "Yes, but not a dead one." Sep 14, 2011; 260 Pageviews

Mencius, Mencius, Mencius (Three posts on the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius) Aug 3, 2011; 240 Pageviews

Book Burning Hindus? Jul 28, 2011 ; 231 Pageviews

Elvira: "I'm you, with bigger tits" Oct 21, 2010, 1 comment; 196 Pageviews

Teddy Roosevelt Was A Socialist!!!!! Jan 9, 2011, 2 comments; 166 Pageviews

C. G. Jung and the Nazis: notes on two specific allegations

1. Preliminaries
This blog post addresses two of the most commonly encountered accusations that have been made against Carl Jung:

(a) That Jung collaborated with the Nazis in his role as the President of the International Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

(b) That Jung's psychological theories are closely related to, and even helped to give rise to, Nazi ideas about "race" and "nation".

I am particularly interested in the way in which these two accusations are combined to form a key component of the essentialist canard against Jung that he (and his philosophy) had a natural attraction to the Nazis and vice versa. This mode of attacking Jung was also discussed by me recently in the previous post titled Carl Jung and the Cowardly Blood Sport of Nazi Baiting.

Before going any further, though, let's look at two high profile examples of specific instances in which these allegations are made, just to make it clear that what follows is not an exercise in precision bayonet practice.

First up is Richard Wolin who begins the second chapter of his The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism (that chapter has the very subtle title of "Prometheus Unhinged: C. G. Jung and the Temptations of Aryan Religion") like this:

For many years in the aftermath of World War II, Jung's doctrines had trouble catching on. Jung's willingness to assume a position of leadership among Nazi psychologists--shortly after the war there was even talk among Allies about prosecuting him as a war criminal--constituted an irremediable taint, as did his numerous public declarations in favor of German and Italian fascism. The approval Jung bestowed upon the Nazis confirmed the suspicions of many concerning the peculiarities of his 'analytical psychology'. Since his demonstrative break with Freud in 1914, Jung's approach increasingly flirted with the theosophical doctrines that had nourished the Nazi Weltanshauung in its early stages. Whereas Freud had always proudly asserted his Enlightenment patrimony, Jung's voluminous theoretical writings denounced the failings of Western civilization in a proto-Spenglerian idiom."
[p. 64]

Compared to the above extravagant litany of anathemas posthumously pronounced upon Carl Jung's head, the following denunciation, found in Goggin and Goggin's Death of a Jewish Science (comprising the second example), is a veritable monument to concision:

"The Göring Institute [explained further below] did not need to develop a separate theory of psychotherapy for Germany. Jung's own theory provided an almost perfect match for National Socialism."
[p. 76]

Many more examples can be given, some of which are found in the previous post in this blog on Carl Jung and the Cowardly Blood Sport of Nazi-Baiting.

A key aspect of both of these accusations is that they are presented in a way that singles out Jung among European intellectuals, and especially among leading thinkers in the interrelated and overlapping fields comprising the psychological sciences (psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychology itself). To be more precise, the charge is that a natural affinity exists between Jung's thinking and National Socialism, and that this is a unique and fundamental characteristic of Jung's thought. Or, put another way: (1) this supposed affinity between Jung and Nazism is something unique to Jung and not shared by other schools of psychological thought at the time, and (2) this supposed affinity is an essential quality of Jung's own school of psychological thought.

2. Guilt By Association: The General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, the Berlin Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the Göring Institute
It is often claimed that in 1933, after the Nazis had come to power, Carl Jung was chosen to replace Ernst Kretschmer as president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, and that this was done because of Jung's supposedly greater sympathy for National Socialism. This claim is wrong on two counts.

In the first place, Kretschmer was not replaced by Jung, but rather by Matthias Göring. Göring was a Nazi party member (although he had only recently joined) who had been trained in psychoanalysis by Leonhard Seif, who was part of the psychoanalytic school of Alfred Adler (who, as a matter of fact, was a Jewish Marxist). Simultaneously with the change in presidents from Kretschmer to Göring, the organization's name was changed to the German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. It should be emphasized that the Society, which had been in existence for over six years by then, had always been primarily a German organization. Its founding members were all German citizens, and each of its six Congresses (going back to 1925) had been held in German cities. There was a direct continuity between the old "General" Society and the new "German General" one.

Carl Jung became the president of the newly formed International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, which was distinguished from the "German" Society by, among other things, allowing Jews, who were now excluded from the "German" Society, as members (because German Jews had by that time been stripped of their German citizenship). The International Society also made of point of holding meetings outside of Germany, and of having non-Germans as officers.

In the second place, far from being some kind of principled and stalwart opponent of National Socialism who needed to be gotten out of the way, Ernst Kretschmer was a signatory to the November, 1933 Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat ("Vow of allegiance of the professors of the German universities and high-schools of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State"). Kretschmer continued to work as a psychiatrist in Nazi Germany throughout the war without any sign of conflict with the National Socialist State, to which he had pledged his allegiance. At best, Kretschmer, like other "good Germans", cooperated with the Nazis simply in order to survive. Whether or not he went further than that is not clear from the historical record. There are accusations that (like many others in his profession) Kretschmer cooperated with Nazi eugenics policies (that is, in mass sterilizations and mass killings). It is also claimed that he authored a paper in 1934 advocating the sterilization of Schwachsinniger ("mental defectives"), and that he served in the so-called "Hereditary Health Courts" which enforced "racial hygiene" policies, and even that he may have been in the SS.

What then, if anything, are we to make of the fact that Jung became president of the newly minted International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933? Often one is given the impression that this by itself was tantamount to being a Nazi collaborator. But what about the Vice President of the Society, Hugh Crichton-Miller? Crichton-Miller was a British psychiatrist who had applied Freudian theories to the treatment of "shell-shocked" soldiers during and after WWI. He founded Tavistock Clinic in London in 1920, where to this day a large statue of Sigmund Freud sits in front of the main clinic building. There has never been any suggestion that Crichton-Miller had Nazi sympathies, despite his role in the Society during the same time that Jung was president.

And then there is the case of John Rittmeister, who left Switzerland in 1937 and moved to Berlin to work directly under the Nazi Matthias Göring. Rittmeister took the high profile job of head of the outpatient clinic of the Berlin Psychiatric Institute (which by then was subsumed under the "Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie e.v.", more commonly referred to simply as the Göring Institute). While working for Göring, Rittmeister underwent training analysis with the Freudian Werner Kemper (under whom Göring's wife was also undergoing analysis). Being a known Marxist didn't prevent Rittmeister from holding an important position at the Göring Institute and giving public lectures in Berlin. But when it was discovered in 1942 that he was also a member of the "Red Orchestra", an underground resistance group working with the Soviet Union, he was executed.

Rittmeister and Crichton-Miller should always be kept in mind as counter-examples to the lazy and facile guilt-by-association argument that is often employed (very selectively) against Carl Jung because of his serving as an officer in the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

This seems like a good place to bring up the fact that Rittmeister wasn't the only one working secretly for the Allies. A certain Carl Gustav Jung was recruited by the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) in 1942, and he worked directly with Allen Dulles, who would later be the first head of the CIA. Jung's cooperation with the OSS against the Nazis is discussed in at least three separate books about Allen Dulles: Allen Dulles by James Srodes (1999), Gentleman spy by Peter Grose (1996), and From Hitler’s doorstep by Neal Petersen (1998). The subject is also gone over in Dierdre Bair's biography of Jung, and in the autobiography of Mary Bancroft (The Autobiography of a Spy), who was simultaneously Dulles' lover and Jung's patient at the time (and she was responsible for introducing Dulles to Jung in the first place).

There were actual Nazis in the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, including the most famous Nazi psychotherapist of them all, Matthias Göring (whose cousin was the famous Field Marshall). Göring worked closely with a number of prominent Freudians throughout this period, including Werner Kemper, with whom Göring's wife, Erna, underwent psychoanalysis, and Carl Müller-Braunschweig, who trained Göring's son Ernst in analysis. Müller-Braunschweig, along with fellow Freudian Felix Boehm, headed the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute during the same period that Jung was president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

Felix Boehm and Carl Muller-Braunschweig (both Freudians) cooperated fully in the Aryanization and Nazification of the BPI, and Boehm even managed to receive, at least in part, the blessings of Freud himself for some of this. See, for example, Felix Boehm's entry in the online International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/boehm-felix-julius

In addition both Leonhard Seif, under whom Göring trained in psychoanalysis, and also Fritz Künkel, are frequently referred to as Nazis, but it is not clear that this is justified. Göring, Seif, and Künkel were all Adlerians. In fact, very few of the prominent psychotherapists, psychiatrists and psychologists in Germany who can definitely be linked with National Socialism were Jungians.

Also see Göring's entry (by Geoffrey Cocks) in the online International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/goring-matthias-heinrich

[Some day I will put some more references in this section, but good old google will lead you to the same sources I found!]

3. National Socialist Psychology: Erich Jaensch, u.s.w.
The field of psychology itself (as opposed to psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and/or psychiatry) also underwent Nazification. Erich Jaensch is universally recognized as the most important German psychologist to explicitly and enthusiastically embrace National Socialism. In fact Jaensch himself claimed (retroactively) that his work going back to the 20s had always had the aim of developing a psychological theory based on National Socialism, and Nazi racial ideas in particular. Jaensch was appointed Editor of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie in 1933, and in that year he delivered a major paper on psychological types at the October Congress of German Psychologial Association, in which Jaensch contrasted the superiority of the German psychological type with that of "the enemy" (the "counter-type"). It is important to note that Jaensch's psychological theories had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Jung. In fact, Jaensch's mentor as a young up-and-coming academic had been Hermann Cohen, who, according to his entry in the biography at the Jewish Virtual Library, was "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century." Also see Hermann Cohen's entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Others who presented major papers at that meeting included Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, who gave a talk on "The Germanic Soul", and Karl Wilhelm von Isenburg, who delivered an address on "Racial Purity". The meeting was also addressed by Jaensch as mentioned above. [see especially A History of Modern Experimental Psychology: From James and Wundt to Cognitive Science by George Mandler, p. 128; and The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany by Ulfried Geuter and Richard Holmes, p. 171]

For more on Erich Jaensch, see: The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany By Ulfried Geuter, Richard Holmes, pp. xvii, 44-45, 62-66; Psychology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Society by Mitchell G. Ash, William R. Woodward, pp. 171-174; The Search for the Silver Lining: The American Academic Establishment and the "Aryanization" of German Scholarship by Karen J. Greenberg (link goes to the full article hosted online by the Simon Wiesenthal Center); and The Norton history of the human sciences by Roger Smith, p. 604.

4. Alfred Hoche, "Life Unworthy of Life", and Aktion T4
No one in the psychological sciences had a more profound impact on the Third Reich than Alfred Hoche. Hoche was a German psychiatrist who was a bitter critic of both Jung and Freud, whose psychoanalysis he attacked as a "new religious sect". Hoche's criticism came at a time when Jung and Freud were close allies. He delivered his famous speech condemning psychoanalysis as "A Psychic Epidemic Among Physicians" in Baden-Baden on May 8, 1910. A contemporary account of that speech reads, in part:

"Freud's followers, he [Hoche] said, did not belong to a 'School' in the scientific sense but a kind of sect, that does not bring forth verifiable facts but articles of faith. Psychoanalysis shows all the features of a sect: the fanatical conviction of being superior to others, its jargon, the sharp intolerance of and tendency to vilify those of another belief, its high veneration fo the Master, its tendency to proselytize, its readiness to accept the most monstrous improbabilities, and the fantastic overevaluation of what has already been accomplished and can be accomplished by adherents of the sect ... Hoche concluded that the Freudian movement was the 'return in a modernized form of a magical medicine, a kind of secret teaching ....'" [quoted in The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberber, p. 806]

Ten years after Hoche's "Psychic Epidemic" speech, he published Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens ("Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life"). 19 years after Hoche's book appeared, the Nazi government put Hoche's ideas into practice by way of a program called Aktion T4, in which at least 200,000 people were killed after being "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination" (as per the edict issued by Adolf Hitler on September 1, 1939).

Hoche himself was not in any way directly involved with the actual T4 program, which was headed up by Philipp Bouhler, with much of the actual work delegated to Bouhler's deputy, Victor Brack. Neither Bouhler nor Brack appear to have had backgrounds in medicine or psychology. Bouhler was a career Nazi, having been in the party since 1920, whereas Brack became Bouhler's chauffeur sometime in the late 20s. No one has ever suggested that either men had any connection with Jung.

There were many formally trained psychiatrists involved with the T4 program, and the most important of these was Max de Crinis. He was not the most famous student of Theodor Meynert, Director of the Psychiatric Institute at the University of Vienna, for that honor goes to Sigmund Freud, but Max de Crinis is undoubtedly the most infamous of Meynert's students, for he went on to be the most fanatic Nazi in the psychiatric profession in Germany during the Third Reich. And de Crinis' fanaticism wasn't mere talk, for he played a central role in the T4 program of mass killings of those deemed "Unworthy of Life".

One could fill a small library with books that have been published about "Nazi Doctors". All of these books have three things in common: (1) they all point out the role of the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in providing the ideological arguments justifying mass sterilization and mass killings directed against "Life Unworthy of Life", (2) they all emphasize the role of physicians and especially psychiatrists in implementing the Nazi programs of mass sterilization and mass killings, (3) none of them have anything whatsoever to say about the physician and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung and his psychological theories, because he and his ideas had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

White Explorers versus Black Magic (And Black Jesus versus White Jesus)

.
Human sacrifice cult battles with police
By Nick Squires in Sydney 12:01AM BST 10 May 2007 UK Telegraph

Nick Squires' 2007 story about a "human sacrifice cult" in Papua New Guinea (linked to above) begins with the dire warning that Papua New Guinea was "undergoing a dramatic resurgence in sorcery and witchcraft," and that, in particular, a new "shadowy cult" had appeared that was "accused of beheading villagers and offering them as human sacrifices."

These macabre goings on, we are told, were taking place in "The central highlands [which] were only penetrated by white explorers in the 1930s and belief in black magic remains strong."

The obvious implication is that these hinterlands had still been insufficiently "penetrated" by "whites" to bring about the eradication of "black magic".

Here are some similar "news" stories from around the same time:

Police manhunt for cult leader who 'eats girls' Daily Mail, 8 Feb, 2007

Cult leader on the run in Papua New Guinea Sydney Morning Herald, June 2, 2006

Cannibal 'Black Jesus' Faces Death Penalty FOX News, March 20, 2007

But wait, what's this about a "Black Jesus"?? It turns out there is more to this story. The "cult" in question was led by a man calling himself "Black Jesus". His given (that is, "Christian") name is Steven Tari, and he received his religious education not at Hogwarts (or some other school that teaches "Sorcery and Witchcraft"), but rather at Amron Bible College, where he studied to be a Lutheran minister. After leaving the Bible College (accounts differ as to whether he dropped out or was expelled) he started claiming to be "the true Christ". This caused him to run afoul of officials with both Church and State, and eventually he was being widely accused of "raping, killing and eating young sex slaves."

Tari was captured in 2005, but then he escaped. As it turns out, his escape was facilitated by the Lutheran pastor who had been given the job of counseling Tari while in prison. Tari was captured again in 2007, only to escape again in 2010, but was then recaptured quickly. In October of 2010 Tari was convicted of raping four girls between the ages of 15 and 17 and, in December, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The denouement of the story is told in the following two stories:

PNG's Black Jesus guilty of rape Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 8, 2010

Cult Leader Sentenced to 20 Years, islandsbusines.com, Dec 14, 2010

But wait, there's even more. Early reports about the doings of Steven "Black Jesus" Tari say nothing about "human sacrifice", although they do accuse him of sexually exploiting underage girls (the crime for which he was eventually convicted). But it appears that the girls who testified against Tari only did so after they were themselves arrested as criminals simply for being part of Tari's "cult" (see Patrick Matbob's article referred to and linked to in the next paragraph).

In a Nov 2007 article, Patrick Matbob (writing for the Fiji based "Islands Business" website) describes the beginnings of Steven Tari's "cult" in an article titled "Cult Worries Church Authorities". We find in that article, for example, that although Tari himself dropped out of (or was possibly expelled from) the Lutheran seminary that he attended, a number of registered Lutheran pastors were supporters of "Black Jesus":

"Lutheran Church authorities in Madang are particularly concerned because a number of the church’s registered pastors have joined the cult. This has confused church members in the area who are questioning whether the cult activities are being condoned by the church."

And in addition to the pastors who publicly supported Tari (while still publicly representing themselves as part of the Lutheran Church), there were others who continued to operate, in essence, as secret agents for Tari within the Evangelical Lutheran Church (about 1/5 of the PNG population is Lutheran). One of these underground supporters was none other than Pastor Logan Sepus, who masterminded a mass prison escape of Tari and his supporters in 2005.

The whole story of this "cult" and its leader and its followers is quite complex and fascinating. For a detailed "on the scene" account from someone who is highly critical of Steven Tari, check out anthropologist Nancy Sullivan's fascinating blogpost: Tari's Question. While discussing Steven Tari and how he fits in with the modern religious scene in PNG (and especially his relationship, or, at least according to Sullivan, total lack thereof) with the Dabsau Movement, founded by Yali Singina, Sullivan is primarily focussed on exposing Jared Diamond, the semi-famous author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, as a lying sack of shit. It's good stuff -- go and read it!!


Related posts to check out:

• "Wierd Negro Order Raided": Human Sacrifice In The News
• Blood Libel Against African Traditional Religions: "Child Sacrifice" Accusations Surface Again in Uganda
• Witchcraft: Black and White in Color
• A Witch Burning in Ghana: How the Role of Christianity Has Been Obscured
  
• Blood Libel Against Africans & African Traditional Religion
• Al Jazeera's New Racist Documentary: "Magic & Murder"
  

"Black Jesus Colored" (direct link) by Christopher Taylor at orbitercloud99.blogspot.com.

"Wierd Negro Order Raided": Human Sacrifice In The News

Coverage of the much hyped trials of Casey Anthony and Amanda Knox both involved accusations of "human sacrifice":

Amanda Knox described as 'she-devil,' 'witch' (kabc, los angeles)

Minister Says Enquirer's 'Casey Anthony Human Sacrifice Ritual' Story Defamed Him (courthousenews.com)

Inspired by the recent headlines above, and also by a string of hysterical stories in the mainstream media about an "epidemic of human sacrifice in Uganda" (if you don't know what I'm talking about look here), let's take a little random walk down memory lane and look at some other notable instances (all from the 20th century and all from the United States) of Human Sacrifice In The News:

Mysterious Negro Cult Performed The Rite Of Human Sacrifice Biddeford [Maine] Weekly Journal, April 5, 1912

Woman Confesses Killing 17 Negroes; Leader of Church of Sacrifice Explains Creed Which Called for Wholesale Murders. NYT April 2, 1912

The Occult Murders by Al Profit
"The year is 1929 and Detroit is bursting at the seams, immigrants from the edges of the world burrowing their way into the city’s flesh ...."

"Human Sacrifice by Cult: Wierd Negro Order Raided" Vancouver Sun, Nov 22, 1932
[Story about a murder in Detroit connected to a cult led by a guy calling himself "Ugan Ali, God of the Asiatic Nation".]

RAIDED TEMPLE BARES GRIP OF VOODOO IN CITY Detroit Free Press, Nov 23, 1932
"Detectives investigating to learn the scope of Voodooism among ignorant and superstitious Detroit Negroes spent Tuesday night running down the myriad leads uncovered earlier in the day when they raided a fantastic "temple" and arrested a Negro who styled himself "God of the Asiatic Nation."

The Voodoo Murders David A. Spitzley's "Mythic Detroit" (collection of news items about the case)

David A. Spitzley's overview of "The Voodoo Murders"
(Wherein it is explained that, well, there was just one murder. Oh, and it had nothing to do with "Voodoo".)

Human Sacrifice Offered As Part Of Odd Ceremony Held By Cult In Kentucky St. Petersburg, Florida, Evening Independent, Feb. 9, 1933

Woman's Life Taken During Weird Rites: Sacrifice Causes 8 Arrests In Kentucky St. Joseph [Missouri] Gazette, Feb. 9, 1933

Three Convicted In 'Human Sacrifice' Trial St. Petersburg, Florida, Evening Independent, April 12, 1933

Child Slayings Linked To Cult: Mother Hunted: Girl, 5, Believed Victim Of Cult That Practices Human Sacrifice Miami News, Feb 20, 1940

Mother of Slain Tot Captured: Grandmother Claims Parents Belong To Sacrifice Cult San Jose News, Feb 19, 1940

"The Doctor Prescribes Additional Human Sacrifice" (racist cartoon from 1960 in the Sarasota Journal)

"Five bodies found believed to be part of human sacrifice" (Portsmouth [Ohio] Daily Times, Jan 5, 1990)
[Thsi story involves a "cult" that was, supposedly, a Mormon splinter group.]

13 Face Charges In Family Killlings NYT, Jan 6, 1990 (same case as above)
"Thirteen former members of a religious commune were charged with murder or conspiracy yesterday after the bodies of a family of five were found buried at an Ohio farm in what a prosecutor called a human sacrifice."

"You can be part of this Kalachakra anywhere"

I had been assuming that the upcoming Kalachakra Empowerment in Bodhgaya, India (Dec 31, 2011 thru Jan 10, 2012) would be both videotaped and streamed live on the Internet, as the one in DC in July was. But then I looked at the kalachakra2012 website, and I could not find any mention of videotaping or streaming.

So I wrote to the great Bodhisattvas who are putting this event together, and I received this reply:

"Yes the 32nd Kalachakra will be live streaming via the Internet. So, you can be part of this Kalachakra anywhere."

Below is the schedule for the eleven day ceremony (taken from the website linked to above):

Kalachakra Teaching & Initiation Schedule

Bodh Gaya – December 31 – January 10, 2012

December 31, Saturday 0630 hrs 0700 hrs – 0930 hrs 0930 hrs – 1030 hrs 1030 hrs – 1230 hrs 1230 hrs – 1330 hrs 1330 hrs – 1415 hrs January 1, Sunday 0630 hrs 0700 hrs – 1130 hrs 1130 hrs – 1230 hrs 1230 hrs – 1430 hrs 1430 hrs – 1630 hrs January 2, Monday 0630 hrs 0700 hrs – 1200 hrs 1200 hrs – 1300 hrs 1300 hrs – 1430 hrs January 3, Tuesday 0800 hrs 0815 hrs – 1030 hrs 1130 hrs - 1300 hrs 1300 hrs – 1530 hrs January 4, Wednesday 0800 hrs 0815 hrs – 1030 hrs 1130 hrs - 1300 hrs 1300 hrs – 1530 hrs January 5, Thursday 0800 hrs 0815 hrs – 1030 hrs 1130 hrs – 1300 hrs 1300 hrs – 1530 hrs January 6, Friday 0645 hrs 0700 hrs – 1130 hrs 1130 hrs – 1300 hrs 1300 hrs - 1415 hrs January 7, Saturday 0645 hrs 0700 hrs – 1130 hrs 1130 hrs – 1300 hrs 1300 hrs - 1630 hrs January 8, Sunday 0645 hrs 0700 hrs – 1130 hrs 1130 hrs – 1245 hrs 1245 hrs – 1700 hrs January 9, Monday 0630 hrs 0700 hrs – 1130 hrs 1130 hrs – 1245 hrs 1245 hrs – 1730 hrs January 10, Tuesday 0700 hrs 0715 hrs – 0800 hrs 0800 hrs – 0900 hrs 0900 hrs – 1000 hrs 1200 hrs

Kalachakra Ritual Preparation Depart for Teaching Hall Earth Ritual Prayers Teaching for about 30 – 40 main disciples (Optional for Public) Earth Ritual Prayers (Optional for Public) Lunch & Rest Earth Ritual Prayers (Optional for Public) Kalachakra Ritual Preparation Depart for Teaching Hall Prayers (Optional for Public) Lunch Earth Ritual Dance (Optional for Public) Prayers (Optional for Public) Kalachakra Ritual Preparation Depart for Teaching Hall Prayers (Optional for Public) Lunch Prayers (Optional for Public) Preliminary Teachings – Day 1 Depart for Teaching Hall Prayers Lunch Teaching Preliminary Teachings – Day 2 Depart for Teaching Hall Prayers Lunch Teaching Preliminary Teachings – Day 3 Depart for Teaching Hall Prayers Lunch Teaching Kalachakra Ritual and offering Dance Depart for Teaching Hall Prayers Lunch Ritual Offering Dance Students Preparation (Preliminary Initiation) Depart for Teaching Hall Self-Generation Lunch Preliminary Initiation for Students Kalachakra Initiation Depart for Teaching Hall Self-Generation Prayers Lunch Kalachakra Initiation Kalachakra Initiation (15th day of 11th Tibetan month) Depart for Teaching Hall Self-Generation Prayers Lunch Kalachakra Initiation Long Life Empowerment for the Public and Long Life Ceremony for His Holiness Depart for Teaching Hall Self-Generation Prayers Long Life Empowerment for Public Long Life Ceremony for His Holiness Lunch

America's greatest business genius was an Arab-American liberal hippie Buddhist. So there.

"I doubt Bill Gates, for example, ever listened to Dark Side of The Moon with the headphones on–though I love the image. But a single minded-focus on programming may have helped them imitate, but not create."

I have been a Mac person since the mid 1980s when I became a research assistant for a Chemistry professor who is a Mac person. Gods bless her! For a few years I admit that I wandered in the wilderness of Windows, but then Steve Jobs returned to Apple and so did I. Gods bless him. Now Steve Jobs has left Apple for good.

I would think of Steve Jobs as a genius of historical proportions even if it did not turn out that he and I happened to agree about stuff like global warming and Buddhism. I know plenty of idiots and assholes who are environmentalists and Buddhists, and I know conservative Republican Christians who are good, decent, intelligent human beings.

But for whatever it might be worth, Steve Jobs was, as a matter of fact, an Arab-American, a liberal hippie, and a Buddhist.

The life and times of Steve Jobs’ Syrian father

Steve Jobs' Liberal Hippie Education

Apple Quits Chamber Of Commerce Over Global Warming

His mantra was focus and simplicity

Steve Jobs: Arab-American, Buddhist, Psychedelic Drug User, and Capitalist World-Changer

Steve Jobs was a Buddhist

The Zen of Steve Jobs

Blood Libel Against African Traditional Religions: "Child Sacrifice" Accusations Surface Again in Uganda

0. A contemptible amalgam of racism and religious bigotry
Yet another variation on the tired old claims about "Child Sacrifice in Uganda" is now making the rounds. This time it is Chris Rogers, writing for the BBC, who has taken up the challenge of trying to pass this story off as legitimate. Rogers has already made a minor career out of lurid exposes involving sexual improprieties and/or violence against children (preferably both). More recently, though, Rogers has also attracted attention as a strikebreaking scab, when he took advantage of last winter's work stoppage by Britain's National Union of Journalists to get his mug on telly as a BBC One presenter (normally Rogers is restricted to those journalistic nether regions of radio and print).

Since Rogers' new piece, titled "Where Child Sacrifice is a Business", neglects to mention the recent slew of imbroglios involving precisely the same yellow-journalistic claims about "child sacrifice" in Uganda that he is now trotting out, I have taken the trouble to put together some links and brief summaries below.

As to Rogers' own contribution, the most important thing to know is that his two primary "sources" are (1) a Christian missionary (named Peter Sewakiryanga) who calls his headquarters "Jesus House", and (2) a rabidly fundamentalist Christian missionary group based in the UK called Jubilee Campaign.

In addition to the educational value of comparing Chris Roger's new treatment of this predictable, recurring "story" to the farcical travesties outlined below, there is the even more important and more educational comparison with that "recurring cultural pattern in Western history" known as "blood libel". Any student of history can immediately recognize the unmistakable parallels between the modern day accusations against practitioners of African Traditional Religions and those made against European Jews as a prelude to pogroms, mass expulsions and outright genocide.

It is sadly the case that horrific violence against children is a reality of modern human societies around the world (just as it undoubtedly was in medieval European societies). For example, the rate at which children in the United States die every day as a direct result of physical abuse and neglect has nearly doubled since 1998 (see the graphic at the top of this post, which is taken from the childhelp.org website). All those who honestly draw our attention to the objective realities of this problem are doing a great public service. But when our instinctual revulsion against all forms of child abuse (and especially the murder of children) is cynically manipulated to target specific religious groups (such as, in this case, followers of African Traditional Religions) that is a completely different matter. It is difficult to imagine that a more contemptible amalgam of racism and religious bigotry could be possible.

To learn more about the ugly pattern of Blood Libel accusations against African Traditional Religions in modern "respectable" media, see the following posts from this blog:
Blood Libel Against Africans and African Traditional Religions
Al Jazeera's Racist "Documentary": "Magic and Murder"

1. Two typical examples of the "evidence"
On February 25, 2009, The Ugandan Indpendent (independent.co.ug) ran a story by Mubatsi Asinja Habati titled "Uganda's Epidemic of Child Sacrifice". The story starts out with the case of a 6-month old boy who was murdered by the child's father. But in the fourth paragraph we are finally told this: "Police later said that 30-year-old Sserubiri beheaded his son in a witchcraft-inspired ritual. Later examination, however, revealed that Sserubiri was a regular user of narcotics and had once been admitted to a mental health hospital."

The story then goes on to tell about an accused "witchdoctor" named Musa Bogere. Bogere "confessed" to engaging in ritual murders, but only after being beaten by a mob that was already convinced of his guilt. Soon after his confession, Bogere died in police custody.

With a straight face the Ugandan Independent story then states that: "It is clear that the stories of Bogere and Sseribiri represent just the tip of the silent morgue of ritual murders in Uganda"!


2. The best sources money can buy
On January 7, 2010, the BBC published a story by Tim Whewell titled "Witch-doctors reveal extent of child sacrifice in Uganda." Whewell's star witness for that story was a man named Polino Angela who claimed to be a "former witch-doctor turned anti-sacrifice campaigner". Angela claimed to have been "initiated as a witchdoctor" during a ceremony in which a 13 year old boy was ritually murdered. Angela then went home and murdered his own 10-year old son. In all, Polino Angela "confessed" to a grand total of personally conducting 70 acts of ritual murder.

When Ugandan officials heard about what Angela had told the BBC, they (quite naturally) decided to question this man who claimed to be a mass murderer. But the story that Angela told Ugandan police was somewhat different. He said that the BBC had paid him for his story, and that he had lied about the murders:
Uganda witch doctor 'lied to BBC' over child sacrifice 25 February 2010 BBC.co.uk
Uganda priest nabbed for BBC hoax was paid to dramatize 25 February 2010, Afrik-News.Com


3. Digging up a good story
On April 16 of 2010, photojournalist Marco Vernaschi, associated with the Pulitzer Center, came out with three stories titled "Uganda: Child Sacrifice Not a Cultural Issue", "Uganda: Babirye, The Girl from Katugwe", and "The Man Behind RACHO". These three stories were part of the Pulitzer Center's "Child Sacrifice Uganda Project." But it was soon discovered that Vernaschi had paid the people he interviewed for his stories, and that the "graphic images that may not be suitable for all audiences" were in fact staged photographs. For more on the Vernaschi saga check out these stories and other sources found therein:
On digging up the truth, and Marco Vernaschi
Update on the Marco Vernaschi Uganda ethics discussion
Marco Vernaschi and a debate about ethics
Interview with Marco Vernaschi Retracted

Carl Jung & the Cowardly Blood Sport of Nazi-Baiting

[Also see this follow-up post: C. G. Jung and the Nazis: notes on two specific allegations.]

1. "Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality ...."
The heyday of European fascism was the period between the end of World War I and the end of World War II. During this time there were a great many fascists in Europe. Tens of millions of them, in fact. The most well known fascist movements were in Germany, Italy and Spain, but there were also large home-grown fascist parties in other countries, especially Austria, Romania and Bulgaria, and smaller fascist groups and grouplets in every European state and also in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. An excellent overview of fascism as a mass, popular movement in Europe is Michael Mann's book Fascists, pictured to the right.

Ironically (perhaps), one of the best ways of gauging the numerical strength of fascist organizations is by their electoral performance. For example, in the German federal election of 1924 the Nazis received 2 million votes. In 1930 that shot up to 6.5 million, and in 1933 over 17 million Germans voted for the Nazis (that was 43.9% of the total vote, almost as high a percentage as John McCain received in 2008).

The United States was home to a very successful and politically influential fascist group during the interwar period: the Ku Klux Klan. During the 20s the Klan wielded tremendous political power in a number of states, including states well outside "the south" like Indiana and Arizona. At its height, the Klan had over three million paid members, and claimed to control half of all the state legislatures in the US. (Here is a link to a long essay on the Klan that delves into the question of identifying the KKK as "fascist". The essay is by John McClymer, Lucia Knoles, and Arnold Pulda, and it draws heavily on the book Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton.)

When the time and place was right, being a fascist was something that people were positively proud of or at least not ashamed of. Out-in-the-open fascists often later looked for ways to cover their tracks and make excuses, but by then it was in many cases too late. For example, everyone knows about the Nazi sympathies of Henry Ford (who was given a fucking medal by the Nazis). Somehow the Klan managed to remain respectable, after a fashion, longer than many other fascist groups. For example the late Robert Byrd said in his autobiography that the main reason he got involved in the Klan in 1946 (after European fascism had been thoroughly defeated and discredited) was in order to help his political career in West Virginia!

After WWII, European fascism had definitely lost it's luster (although as noted above, America's own unique contribution to fascism, the KKK, was a somewhat different story). It quickly became an increasingly popular past-time to accuse anyone you disagreed with, or simply didn't like, of having been a secret Nazi, or of having secretly harbored fascistic "sympathies". Britain was well ahead of the curve on this, to the extent that fascist-baiting had become so ubiquitous there that George Orwell could say already in 1944 (in his essay "What is Fascism?"):

[I]f you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term ‘Fascist’. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words ‘Fascist in sympathy’, or ‘of Fascist tendency’, or just plain ‘Fascist’, applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:

Conservatives: All Conservatives, appeasers or anti-appeasers, are held to be subjectively pro-Fascist. British rule in India and the Colonies is held to be indistinguishable from Nazism. Organizations of what one might call a patriotic and traditional type are labelled crypto-Fascist or ‘Fascist-minded’. Examples are the Boy Scouts, the Metropolitan Police, M.I.5, the British Legion. Key phrase: ‘The public schools are breeding-grounds of Fascism’.

Socialists: Defenders of old-style capitalism (example, Sir Ernest Benn) maintain that Socialism and Fascism are the same thing. Some Catholic journalists maintain that Socialists have been the principal collaborators in the Nazi-occupied countries. The same accusation is made from a different angle by the Communist party during its ultra-Left phases. In the period 1930-35 the Daily Worker habitually referred to the Labour Party as the Labour Fascists. This is echoed by other Left extremists such as Anarchists. Some Indian Nationalists consider the British trade unions to be Fascist organizations.

Communists: A considerable school of thought (examples, Rauschning, Peter Drucker, James Burnham, F. A. Voigt) refuses to recognize a difference between the Nazi and Soviet régimes, and holds that all Fascists and Communists are aiming at approximately the same thing and are even to some extent the same people. Leaders in The Times (pre-war) have referred to the U.S.S.R. as a ‘Fascist country’. Again from a different angle this is echoed by Anarchists and Trotskyists.

Trotskyists: Communists charge the Trotskyists proper, i.e. Trotsky's own organization, with being a crypto-Fascist organization in Nazi pay. This was widely believed on the Left during the Popular Front period. In their ultra-Right phases the Communists tend to apply the same accusation to all factions to the Left of themselves, e.g. Common Wealth or the I.L.P.

Catholics: Outside its own ranks, the Catholic Church is almost universally regarded as pro-Fascist, both objectively and subjectively;

War resisters: Pacifists and others who are anti-war are frequently accused not only of making things easier for the Axis, but of becoming tinged with pro-Fascist feeling.

Supporters of the war: War resisters usually base their case on the claim that British imperialism is worse than Nazism, and tend to apply the term ‘Fascist’ to anyone who wishes for a military victory. The supporters of the People's Convention came near to claiming that willingness to resist a Nazi invasion was a sign of Fascist sympathies. The Home Guard was denounced as a Fascist organization as soon as it appeared. In addition, the whole of the Left tends to equate militarism with Fascism. Politically conscious private soldiers nearly always refer to their officers as ‘Fascist-minded’ or ‘natural Fascists’. Battle-schools, spit and polish, saluting of officers are all considered conducive to Fascism. Before the war, joining the Territorials was regarded as a sign of Fascist tendencies. Conscription and a professional army are both denounced as Fascist phenomena.

Nationalists: Nationalism is universally regarded as inherently Fascist, but this is held only to apply to such national movements as the speaker happens to disapprove of. Arab nationalism, Polish nationalism, Finnish nationalism, the Indian Congress Party, the Muslim League, Zionism, and the I.R.A. are all described as Fascist but not by the same people.

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

Orwell ended that essay by expressing the hope that in the future cooler heads would prevail making it possible to define fascism objectively as "an economic and political system" rather than as "a swearword". But if anything the situation is significantly worse in the 21st century than it was in 1944!

2. What did you do during the war, Herr Doktor Professor?
There is no evidence that Carl Gustav Jung was ever one of those tens of millions of fascists in Europe. Nor is there any evidence that he ever expressed support, admiration or "sympathy" for Nazism or fascism. Nor is there is any evidence that Jung ever "collaborated" in any way with fascism or Nazism.

Jung was Swiss, and there were fascists and fascist groups in Switzerland throughout the interwar period. Once the Nazis were in power in Germany, there were even groups that wanted Switzerland to become part of the Third Reich. The largest and most important fascist group in Switzerland was the National Front, which advocated radical changes to the Swiss Constitution along fascist lines. A movement was initiated by the National Front, and also supported by the Young Catholic Conservatives, that succeeded in obtaining enough signatures to put their proposed Constitutional changes to a national vote (the National Front obtained 2/3 of the required signatures, while the Young Catholic Conservatives provided the rest). When the referendum took place in September of 1935 the pro-fascist side received over 25% of the total, demonstrating that while the movement was in the minority, it had a significant base of support among the Swiss population, and it is almost certain that the support was highest among German speaking Swiss, like Jung. However, there is not the slightest indication that Jung had anything whatsoever to do with the National Front, their referendum campaign, or any other fascist groups or activities in Switzerland. [For more on the National Front referendum see Ellen Lovell Evans' The Cross and the Ballot: Catholic political parties in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1785-1985, pp. 162-164.]

So what does it mean when one finds people making the claim that Jung was a Nazi, or at least a Nazi supporter, sympathizer, or collaborator? Well, it does not mean that someone has discovered secret pro-Nazi writings by Jung, or that they have discovered his secret membership in some underground Swiss Nazi group, or that they have discovered Jung's secret activities working for the Nazis or their Swiss allies.

What people mean when they say that Jung was a Nazi supporter is that they have a subjective impression that Jung's ideas have something vaguely "Nazi" about them. The basic idea is that Jung was, you know, all into völkisch-ness and mythology and folklore and Wotan and Occultism and so forth, and, well, that's all Nazi stuff. I mean, it is, right? And, like, he was German, you know? (Or Swiss-German, anyway.) Oh, and his politics were, drum roll please, conservative.

And that's it. Seriously. That's it.

Here is a typical example, taken from Richard Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism:

"When the Nazis came to power in 1933, brandishing swastikas and advocating neopaganism, it seemed like an instance of preestablished harmony: Jung thought he was witnessing his own theories come to life. Since the break with Freud, Jung had been convinced of the phylogenetic superiority of Aryan archetypes. Having rejected reason as an inferior mode of cognition, he found the National Socialists' recourse to Aryan symbols and myths highly congenial. Hitler, he was convinced, was Wotan reincarnated, a modern-day shaman. From his safe haven in Switzerland, Jung jumped aboard the Nazi bandwagon with alacrity." [p. 17]

Wolin cannot produce a single quote in which Jung himself in his own words says that he found National Socialism to be "highly congenial." And as already mentioned, there was indeed an openly organized and publicly functioning "Nazi bandwagon" in Switzerland, and there is no evidence that Jung, with or without "alacrity", was on it or even cheering from the sidelines. As far as "witnessing his own theories come to life", Jung did believe that "his own theories" helped to explain the advent of National Socialism, but that in no way meant that he supported or was sympathetic to National Socialism. In fact, when Jung did "psycho-analyze" Hitler and the Nazis he concluded that Nazi Germany was on a "course toward perdition" (see his 1936 essay Wotan, excerpted below), and that Adolf Hitler reminded him of some of his psychotic patients (see Gary Lachman's Jung the Mystic, p. 174).

In the above excerpt, Richard Wolin also states that "Since the break with Freud, Jung had been convinced of the phylogenetic superiority of Aryan archetypes." But in 1908 Sigmund Freud had famously stated that he felt more intellectually compatible with Karl Abraham than with Carl Jung, because Abraham was a Jew and, therefore, Freud and Abraham shared a closer "racial kinship" (Rassenverwandtschaft), whereas the situation was quite different with Jung whom Freud described as "a Christian and a pastor's son," and because of that Jung "finds his way to me only against great inner resistances." [See Michael Vannoy Adams' The multicultural imagination: race, color, and the unconscious pp. 41-43]

Not only did Freud himself believe in "racial differences" in the psychological make-up of Jews and Christians, the whole field of "scientific racism", which was solidly ensconced in mainstream western intellectual culture, was based first and foremost on a racist psychological hypothesis: the superior intelligence of whites. But the issue is even broader than that. Those who have expressed the opinion that there are decided racial differences in intelligence include Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Carl Linneaus, and T.H. Huxley. IQ test results in the early 20th century were claimed to demonstrate objective, measurable correspondences between "race" and intelligence. Therefore, the claim by Wolin that there was some special alignment between Nazi racial theories and Jung's psychology (any more so than the theories of other psychologists of the time) is a mind-boggling example of intellectual malfeasance, or possibly just symptomatic of the depth of Wolin's ignorance.

3. Where do ideas come from?
Lets turn to another example of the essentialist argument that Jung's thinking was intrinsically Nazi-istical. This example is notable for the refreshingly explicit way in which the author articulates his claim. In a short essay on Jung and Antisemitism (Originally published in The Jewish Quarterly Spring 1994) Andrew Samuels (University of Essex) first states that he is not interested in what he calls "psychobiology". He then explains what he is interested in:

"What I do ask is whether there is something in the deep, fundamental structure of Jung's thought, in its heart or essence, that made it inevitable that he would develop a kind of antisemitism. When Jung writes about the Jews and Jewish psychology, is there something in his whole attitude, his 'take,' to use the colloquialism, that just had to lead to antisemitism? Is there something to worry about?

"My brief answer, in contradistinction to that of many other leading Jungian analysts, is 'yes' and my hope is that by exploring the matter as deeply as we can, a form of reparation will ensue. I believe that many strengths and subtleties of analytical psychology are being lost - not just because of the alleged Nazi collaboration and antisemitism, but also because of the evident inability of many Jungians to react to such charges in an intelligent, humane way. This permits the Freudian establishment, and the rest of the civilized world, to continue to ignore the pioneering nature of Jung's contributions, and hence the work of post-Jungian analytical psychologists."

At that point in the paper, Samuels proceeds to completely ignore Jung for the moment while launching into his own potted redaction of the history of "nationalism", and in particular the historical antecedents of Hitler's ideas about "race" and "nation". In the course of this, Samuels makes a very interesting statement that is quite true: "Hitler regarded all history as consisting of struggles between competing nations for living space and, eventually, for world domination." Of course, and as Samuels is quick to point out, Hitler didn't get all worked up over "struggles between competing nations" as an abstract notion. Indeed, Hitler's mind was focused, to the exclusion of all else, on the struggle between two nations in particular: the Aryans and the Jews.

Having established that what he is getting at is the intellectual pedigree of the specific idea of a life-and-death struggle between Aryans and Jews, Samuels is now ready to inject the following: "Jung, too, was interested in the idea of the nation." But Samuels is in such a hurry to shout "Aha!" and impugn Jung with this insinuation, that he appears to be completely unaware that it is a well established historical fact that not only did Hitler and the Nazis not get their "idea of the nation" from Jung, but the sources of Nazi ideology concerning "race" and "nation" are well known and well documented and they have nothing whatsoever to do with Jung.

Anyone who has ever bothered to look into the matter even slightly knows precisely where Hitler and the Nazis did get their idea of a global-historical winner-take-all struggle between Jews and Germans. Hitler's conception of nation and race (and Aryans and Jews in particular) were taken bodily from an ideology already spelled out very clearly and explicitly in manifesto form when young Adolf was still a schoolboy. The manifesto in question was Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, first published in the year 1900. The Nazi intellectual debt to Chamberlain was loudly, publicly, and frequently proclaimed.

Adolf Hitler was honored and delighted to personally meet his intellectual hero in 1924, just one month before the Beer Hall Putsch. As a result of the failure of the Putsch, Adolf Hitler found himself with some time on his hands. As he cooled his heels in a Berlin jail cell, the future Fuhrer began work on Mein Kampf, a work in which he singles out Houston Stewart Chamberlain and praises him by name. Chamberlain turned 70 in 1925 (the same year that the first volume of Mein Kampf was published), and on the occasion of his birthday the official Nazi press hailed his Foundations as "the gospel of the Nazi movement." That editorial was written by Alfred Rosenberg, the race-theorist-in-chief of the National Socialist movement. Rosenberg's own racist masterwork, Myth of the Twentieth Century, was explicitly written as a sequel to Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Rosenberg's paean to Chamberlain and his ideas was the second best-selling book in the Third Reich, only beat out by Mein Kampf. When Chamberlain died in 1927, Hitler personally attended the funeral.

The three key texts of the racist ideology of Nazism are Chamberlain's Foundations, Hitler's Mein Kampf, and Ronseberg's Myth. (For more on Rosenberg and Chamberlain, and also Chamberlain's life-long friend, leading Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack, see this previous post: Rosenberg, Chamberlain, Harnack.) None of these works has the slightest relationship to the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung. As for Jung, he appears to have taken little, if any, interest in the books that formed the basis for Nazi racial theory. Chamberlain's Foundations, it must be emphasized, was a world-wide best seller, and was especially popular in Germany and German speaking areas of Europe (such as the German speaking parts of Switzerland). So far as I know, the only mention that Jung ever makes of Chamberlain is in the famous 1936 essay Wotan, in which his reference to Chamberlain as "a symptom which arouses suspicion" is hardly flattering:

"For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name 'Wotan' and speak instead of the furor teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of "fury." We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer (the one who possesses) and the Ergriffener (the one who is possessed). The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously 'possessed,' has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.

"It seems to me that Wotan hits the mark as an hypothesis. Apparently he really was only asleep in the Kyffhauser mountain until the ravens called him and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of civilization like a cyclone and blows it away. Despite their crankiness, the Wotan-worshippers seem to have judged things more correctly than the worshippers of reason. Apparently everyone had forgotten that Wotan is a Germanic datum of first importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the Germans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain is a symptom which arouses suspicion that other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere. The emphasis on the Germanic race -- commonly called 'Aryan' -- the Germanic heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the ride of the Valkyries, Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St. Paul, the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise, the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior Mediterranean races -- all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama that is taking place and at the bottom they all mean the same thing: a god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a 'mighty rushing wind.' It was soon after Hitler seized power, if I am not mistaken, that a cartoon appeared in PUNCH of a raving berserker tearing himself free from his bonds. A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather.

"Things are comparatively quiet in Switzerland, though occasionally there is a puff of wind from the north or south. Sometimes it has a slightly ominous sound, sometimes it whispers so harmlessly or even idealistically that no one is alarmed. 'Let the sleeping dogs lie' -- we manage to get along pretty well with this proverbial wisdom. It is sometimes said that the Swiss are singularly averse to making a problem of themselves. I must rebut this accusation: the Swiss do have their problems, but they would not admit it for anything in the world, even though they see which way the wind is blowing. We thus pay our tribute to the time of storm and stress in Germany, but we never mention it, and this enables us to feel vastly superior."

A great deal has been made of Jung's Wotan, and it is often seized upon by those who wish to perpetuate the "Jung-was-a-Nazi/the-Nazis-were-Jungians" narrative. But if one actually reads the essay for oneself (link, again) one finds Jung describing Nationalist Socialist Germany as "rolling on its course toward perdition", and Jung is obviously glad to be at a safe distance in Switzerland!

Serious scholars of fascism, and, in particular, the genesis of fascism in interwar Europe, have very little, or in most cases nothing at all, to say about Carl Jung. The origins and roots of Nazi ideology and Nazism as a social movement remains a hotly, indeed, fiercely, debated topic among academicians, with many competing theories, but Jung simply does not figure anywhere in the discussion. Just as Jung appears to have been in no way sympathetic to Nazism, one searches in vain for any hint that Jung's ideas were in any way influential or viewed with sympathy by the Nazis. For example, there is no mention of any Jungian influence on the Nazis in the writings of such scholars as: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners, Worse Than War), Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men, The Origins of the Final Solution), Michael Mann (Fascists, The Dark Side of Democracy), Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism), Peter Fritzsche (Germans into Nazis), William Sheridan Allen (The Nazi Seizure of Power), Ernst Gellner (Nations and Nationalism), Ian Kershaw (Hitler, 1889-1936), Eric Weitz (A Century of Genocide), Richard J. Evans (The Coming of the Third Reich), Mark Mazower (Dark Continent: Europe's 20th Century), Stanley G. Payne (A History of Fascism), and Roger Griffin (The Nature of Fascism).

In those books, by the way, one does find references to Edgar Jung, personal secretary to vice-chancellor Franz von Papen, and also to the Jungdeutschland-Bund, the umbrella organization for all Nazi youth groups, including the Hitler-Jugend of which the future Pope Ratzinger was a member. But Carl Gustav Jung? Not so much. Although the last author, Griffin, does, in fact, make use of Jung's ideas in his own analysis of fascism, which is quite reasonable since Jung was a pioneer in the study of "mass psychology".

This list of authors and books given above is offered as a resource for anyone genuinely interested in understanding the phenomena of fascism and Nazism, as opposed to those who cynically view the atrocities that occurred in Europe between 1933 and 1945 as nothing more than a convenient and highly effective club for beating those whose ideas they dislike over the head.

The bottom line is that those who believe that they perceive some essential commonality between Jungian psychology and fascism are inevitably people who understand neither, and, moreover, who have made no effort whatsoever to understand either. Either that, or they have made the effort but the task is simply beyond their limited capacities.

[Also see this follow-up post: C. G. Jung and the Nazis: notes on two specific allegations]