Torture, Mutilation and the Negation of Responsibility for the Trans Movement
“All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.”
-Joseph de Maistre, The Executioner
Torture, Mutilation and the Negation of Responsibility for the Trans Movement
Capital punishments have been inflicted on other humans by legal regimes since the beginning of civilization. Foremost among premodern forms of legal punishment have been the corporal (damaging the body) and the capital (killing the person). Yet, the transgressive nature of meting out such punishment has always carried an aura of pollution, in almost every society that implemented them. People want to disassociate from the stink of such acts, even if they may socially approve of them. There is simply something about it that seems unsettling, unwholesome, contaminated.
In medieval Germany, executioners were a separate, endogamous caste, that married within known families of executioners and lived apart from other townsfolk. In France, executioners were shunned by other citizens. In England, they wore hoods to protect their identities. In Japan, only a class of untouchables called burukumin performed executions. In the Ottoman Empire, gypsies, already socially ostracized, held this position in a monopoly. In India, executioners were a literal untouchable caste, that no one respectable would associate with. Professional torturers often were executioners as well, and were similarly ostracized, in every society that had them. In those that had no regular torturers, the men hired to do it often hid their identities as to not incur social ostracism from the community.
Yet, the torturers and executioners retained a kind of ambivalence about their profession. They viewed their job as a socially necessary one, something vital for society and yet unpleasant, like water treatment or garbage disposal. This is why Joseph De Maistre, the French reactionary, wrote so effusively of the executioner’s trade- he was the tip of the spear of the social order. Without the pointy end, no law would have force, and society would fall apart. And the killers themselves were able to dissociate themselves from the brutality of what they did by placing the blame for the sentence elsewhere- on the prince, the judge, the law itself- not them. They were simply the instrument of a system that was necessary and good. This is how they slept at night.
Torture and mutilation, although we associate the term with interrogation, was often not related to gaining a confession, but was simply thought to be a more severe way to execute a particular criminal- for example, Jan van Leiden, the leader of the Munster Rebellion in reformation-era Germany, was sentenced to being “attached to a pole by an iron spiked collar and his body ripped with red-hot tongs for the space of an hour”, followed by the removal of his tongue, followed by the act of execution itself. Banda Singh Bahadur, the Sikh rebel against the Mughal government, was executed in 1716 by blinding, dismemberment and then being skinned alive. His executioners pleaded with him for a pardon- they claimed they were just doing their job, and the real cruelty lay with the Mughal Emperor, Farrukh Siyar.
None of this is to say that execution and torture were unpopular in these premodern societies. In fact, they were quite popular, with large crowds treating these events as fair days, and as public entertainment. Vendors sold snacks and drinks to the crowd; people would rent out their roofs to those looking to get a better view.
Despite the popularity of gruesome tortures and executions, no one wanted to be associated with the trade that actually performed them. Those that performed them sought to distance themselves from it by displacing the blame. There is an inherent human desire to distance oneself from the horror of mutilation. We instinctually know it is abhorrent. Nature and nature’s god has written this in our hearts.
And when one comes to know one has been complicit with the mutilation or death of someone, potent psychological mechanisms begin working to deny their responsibility. For example, Adolf Eichmann, during his trial in Jerusalem, blandly insisted that he had merely organized train schedules and logistics. And, he maintained, he had never killed anyone personally.
In China, a plank of Mao-era executions was to involve so many people in political executions that there would be no clean hands. Multitudes of people were involved in the process of execution- the denouncers, the party apparatus meeting, official witnesses, one passes the sentence, one signs a slip for the bullets, another for the gun, another transports, another clears the ground, others pull triggers, others dispose of the corpse, yet another committee registers the death and accounts for the cost- eventually so many people were involved that both blame and complicity were widely disbursed. A potent psychological law was in effect- since so many people were involved, in one way or another, the number of executioners makes possible both denial- of the Eichmann variety- and the guilt being spread so far, if one were to admit the enormity of the horrors- that no one can bear to acknowledge that the crimes actually happened. Yet Mao openly boasted about it:
"It is absolutely necessary and legitimate to sentence to death by the People's Court and the democratic government criminals who actively and grievously oppose the People's Democratic Revolution and commit acts of sabotage against agrarian reform."
-Mao Zedong, 1949
And another time, when asked by the British prime minister about allegations that he was the largest mass murderer in human history, Mao replied “I’m rather fond of that idea.” Yet in modern China, it is as if these mass killings never happened.
When half the country is culpable, there can be no justice. It touched almost everyone in the party. And so, there has been no truth and reconciliation in China, no “de-Stalinization” as in the USSR in the 1950s. Too many bloody hands mean that there will be no atonement.
Recently, the INI commented on a clip of British feminist Helen Joyce, where she discusses why the modern transsexual movement is operating under the same psychological law:
https://twitter.com/TakingoutTrash7/status/1677022224333643776?s=20
She says, that organizations are turned into pro-transsexual organizations that cannot back out of their support because of the existence of “trans parents”. She says (my paraphrase):
These people will be like those Japanese soldiers who stayed on some Pacific island, refusing to believe the war is over….some of these organizations get pulled into this social contagion….this is the worst social contagion we’ve ever seen…and the organizations, companies and NGOs won’t move on it, because “Oh, you know the vice-president has a trans child” or “the marketing director has a trans child”. Some of these people have used drugs or surgery to permanently damage their children, and they cannot believe that this is not real, because that is the worst thing a parent can do to their child. They will have to believe they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for the sake of their sanity and self-respect. And that person has to fight forever, and they will turn organizations upside down for the rest of their lives.
This is very much like the old guard in China who refusing to acknowledge the scope of their crimes. Mao remains not condemned, with only a slight concession that he might have made some mistakes. His portraits hang in public places still. Xi Jinping calls focusing on the massacres “historical nihilism” and the party does not tolerate it. To condemn Mao is the condemn his millions of helpers, and this is a burden they cannot bear.
What these people, who support mutilation and damaging drugs being given to children are doing is turning themselves into societies of executioners. As we have seen with societies of executioners in the past, in order to cope they must hold two ideas in their head at once: 1) that what they do is good and necessary, and is vital for society, and 2) they must displace blame. In this case, it is displaced onto activists in medical and psychological organizations.
We’ve never seen a social contagion quite like the trans movement before. And unlike other social contagions, which quickly pass after the memetic transmission is broken (Google ‘Tik-Tok Tourette’s if you are curious), chemical castration, surgery, and using drugs to delay puberty cause irreversible damage and permanent sterility. Coming to the realization that you have been, essentially, not only complicit but an active agent in permanently maiming and shortening your child’s lifespan would be like admitting that your driving a political prisoner to death row made you complicit in his murder. It would be like the executioner admitting that he had a choice in skinning the captive alive. They cannot do this, because they would then have to reckon with every execution before this one- it would mean responsibility, which would be unbearable.
Instead, these people will continue to fight, in every organization in which they are present, despite the weight of scientific evidence piling up against them. Because of this- the guilty conscience- this culture war will not be over soon. We may have to keep fighting it our entire lives. But is a battle we must fight, mostly because it creates so many victims, not only among those who are maimed, but in their torturers as well.
They will fight us forever, not because of our opinions, but because they are running from the truth, a bad conscience that will hang over them all their days.
“I take bad conscience to be the deep sickness into which man had to fall under the pressure of the most fundamental of all changes he ever experienced—the change of finding himself enclosed once and for all within the sway of society and peace. Just as water animals must have fared when they were forced either to become land animals or to perish, so fared these half animals who were happily adapted to wilderness, war, roaming about, adventure—all at once all their instincts were devalued and "disconnected".- F.W. Nietzsche