“Once you conceive an abiding and unappeasable resentment against your symbolic “father,” whether it’s your country, or your civilization, or nature, or God, or any other principle that embodies the structuring principle of your existence, you are compelled by an internal logic to embrace whatever is the opposite and adversary of your “father,” seeing it as the embodiment of the warm humanity that your “father” lacks. Thus the recent photo of the America-hating film director Oliver Stone standing next to Fidel Castro, looking content and at home for the first time in his life.”

This is a profound truth. It explains, among other things, why a true-believer can never be persuaded by facts and logic. No matter how much you argue with him, no matter how many facts you cite, you’re wasting your time. His conviction does not come from facts or logic; it comes from an emotion that he transforms into a belief-system. Only an inner change can open his mind to them, as innumerable ex-Marxists and other sorts of ex-radicals can testify from personal experience.

Having once been a socialist (in my defense I was a teenager) I can testify that Mr Auster’s thesis is spot on. While on a rational level I took socialist ideology seriously, on a deeper emotional level I was rebelling against my father, who was a military man (U.S Navy). Rebelling against one’s father easily slides into rebellion against one’s nation. This quickly becomes irrational, leading people to side with all manner of oppressive and evil regimes solely on the basis that they are opposed to America. The 1960’s was essentially one big adolescent rebellion against dad, but sadly many people of that era, while having grown in years have not grown out of their adolesence. Oliver Stone, amongst many others, is a good example of this.

Thankfully I was saved form the idiocy of socialism through, as odd as it may seem, science fiction author Robert Heinlein. Starship Troopers should be compulsory reading in school.

I am suspicious of psychoanalysis to provide explanatory variables of nations’ foreign policy positions. I am doubly suspicious when that psychoanalysis is conducted by amateurs. I am triply suspicious when the analyst has never met any of the people (e.g. Schroeder, Chirac, “the French”, Miss Germany) he is analyzing.

I think that most anti-war posters here have avoided the “Bush wants war ‘cause he tried to kill my Daddy” school of thought. Maybe the warhawks should follow our example in avoiding pop psychology.

What we’ve been discussing here is not psychoanalysis, and it’s not pop psychology, any more than Books VIII and IX of Plato’s Republic (where he discusses the transformation of Oligarchic Man into Democratic Man into Tyrannical Man) is psychoanalysis or pop psychology. Society, and thus politics, is man’s soul writ large. To think about politics is to think about man’s soul.

And this is especially the case when we are dealing with ideological phenomena—such as Western liberals identifying with a third-world mass murdering tyrant—that have an obvious non-rational component.

Another point that ought to be mentioned in this connection is that rage against their own parents for some real or imagined injury is an explicit theme in the writings and interviews of many leading post-Sixties leftists. For example, the radical feminist writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote of how when she discovered a dark family secret her parents had hid from her, it turned her against all authority figures and made her suspicious of all claims made by society, and that this became the basis of her later leftism. Oliver Stone has spoken in an interview of how he hated his father, who had abandoned Stone’s mother, and that quality of hatred is evident in his work. Lots of people are angry at their parents. But a common theme on the left is that that anger is not resolved by the individual but instead becomes formative in his adult world view. Hatred of the parent is thus a significant factor in contemporary political reality, and is as deserving of attention as any other political phenomenon.

A friend contributed a further interesting angle on this topic (his idea may also feed into the discussion in another thread on whether women should have the vote http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001208.html#4207):

Larry,

While there are many different reasons as to why people embrace evil dictators, I think a thread that is true for most men is as you say, a rejection of “father” (either the real one or a symbolic one). However, for women, it is the inherent trait of wanting to nurture and fix a “bad boy,” (women naturally nurture babies who whine, cry and misbehave). That is why murderers get so many marriage proposals while in prison and the reason you see those gorgeous, nice women with really “bad guys.” It is a natural instinct for women to want to make us men better, especially the worst men!

When I lived in Europe a German friend told me of a German woman of his acquaintance whose first name was Hitlerike (I’m guessing the spelling; it was pronounced Hitler-eeka), given her by her Hitler-worshipping mother during the dictator’s rise to power. Not long ago I read somewhere that Hitler, during his rise to power, was indeed viewed by the ladies in Germany, if this can be believed, as quite a bourreau-des-cœurs. It must have been something like the way impeached former “president” Bill Clinton was viewed by women in this country, from Arianna Huffington on down (which we HAVE to believe, since we saw it with our own eyes).

For some radical women the problem seems to be not so much hating their father, but a perceived absence of father love.

Two of the early books of third wave feminism were Jill Johnston’s “Autobiography in Search of a Father” and Germaine Greer’s “Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.”

As for the connection between father and nation, Greer once told an interviewer that “It parallels my relationship with Australia, my relationship with my father” whilst another famous left liberal Australian expatriate, the art critic Robert Hughes, has written that expatriation is about “Oedipal revolt … about the feeling that if you’re not going to kill your father, at least you’re going to kill him symbolically by getting away from him. You find a new father.”

Thanks to Mark Richardson for the further back-up. We don’t have to speculate about the link between resentment against one’s father and resentment against one’s country because Australian leftists, as much as American leftists, are entirely explicit about it.

What do we know about Miss Germany? She intends to visit hospitals, children and the people of Iraq, which is the typical method of expressing solidarity with a country’s populous. She also wants to talk to Hussein about peace, which means she is against the upcoming war.

Now given the above, if expressing a caring concern for the people of Iraq and being against the upcoming war, as with Miss Germany, is solidarity with Hussein. As Mr. Auster proposes. Then it must follow, because he also expresses caring concern for the people of Iraq and is against the upcoming war, that the Holy Father is also expressing solidarity with Hussein.

Further, although there are people who are against the war, and have demonstrated against the war, for less than pleasant reasons, And some, no doubt, are more than a bit off in one way or another, but we would be equally off and remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that the war party side also tends to drift into no-man’s land, as Justin Raimondo so delightfully explains:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j020303.html

Leftist are victims of child abuse.

For most resentment of parents is a natural phase of the 15 - 25 age group. The picture of the idealized father.

If the resent persists after those years the father has probably comitted some serious wrong.

Leftism is the search for the good father.

only leftists are victims of child abuse? yea, like anyone in his right mind would believe that

Is that Oliver Stone or Saddamm Hussein in the picture?

Abby takes my argument much too literally. I did not say anything like what she supposes. First, the alienation doesn’t have to with what actually happened to a person, but with how he reacts to that event. Lots of people have problems with their parents but get over them. What characterizes the alienated person is that he makes the hurt and anger against his parent a permanent feature of his character, and then projects that anger onto society. Second, I’m not speaking only of alienation against actual parents, but of alienation against the symbolic father, which I defined as any aspect of the structuring order of our existence, such as nationhood, law, morality, God, and so on.

Does that make it clearer?

l.auster,

my remark was directed at m. simon when i applied m. simon’s post to your opening post.

what other conclusion could a draw from m. simon’s post, except rightists are also victims of child abuse but get over it more easily, and that seemed even less believable?

My earlier sense that Oliver Stone feels a warm personal or even filial-type affection for Castro was based solely on the photograph that I posted with the article. But an April 13, 2003 op-ed in the New York Times, by Ann Louise Bardach, provides factual confirmation for my intuitive impression:

“‘Commandante,’ Stone’s encomium to Castro, depicted the dictator ‘in a chummy mood, affable, playful, sometimes defensive, yet exposing more of his personality than most Americans are used to seeing.’ At the recent Sundance Film Festival, Stone described Castro as ‘warm and bright … a very driven man, a very moral man. He’s very concerned about his country. He’s selfless in that way.’”

According to William Buckley, Stone has also said: “We should look to [Castro] as one of the earth’s wisest people, one of the people we should consult.”

How similar these comments are to something said to me by a leftist writer of my acquaintance in the late ’70s. The subject of Communist China came up, and he, who was deeply negative toward America, said in a tender, affectionate, almost pious tone: “Mao is a wonderful man.” This same writer later wrote a memoir in which he treated his own father as a contemptible non-person. Finally, the last time I saw this writer, in January 1991, three days before the first Gulf War began, the subject of the impending war came up, and his very first words were “I hate Bush.” His main reason for opposing the war was personal hatred of Bush.

So put these data together: this leftist despises his own father; he hates a moderate Republican president of the United States; and he feels awed affection for the greatest mass murderer in history. This fits the paradigm described above, of an overwhelming rage or alienation against one’s father or one’s country leading one to embrace a substitute father figure who is the opposite of one’s father or one’s country.

Oliver Stone re-confirms my idea that he has found in Fidel Castro a father figure he can identify with. In this interview at Slate.com, he refers approvingly to Castro’s “paternalism” by which he conducts show trials.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2098860/

Anne-Louise Bardach: Did it strike you as interesting that at one point in the scene with the prisoners, Castro turned to the prisoners’ defense lawyers, who just happened to be there, and he says, “I urge you to do your best to reduce the sentences”?

Oliver Stone: I love that. I thought that was hilarious. Those guys just popped up.

ALB: Is there a show-trial element here?

OS: Yeah. I thought that was funny, I did—the prosecutor and Fidel admonishing them, to make sure they worked hard. There was that paternalism. I mean “father knows best,” as opposed to totalitarianism. It’s paternalism, that’s what I meant. It’s a Latin thing.