Poor Little Fuhrer

Rich Jewish shop owners. From a Nazi poster.

It is a truism in the social sciences that abusers are people who have themselves been abused. But this is obviously wrong.

Simple common sense: who would understand the pain of being abused more than one who has suffered it? How then could they visit it on others? Moreover, abusing others morally legitimizes the original abuse. This should be an intolerable contradiction to anyone who has themselves been abused. So the I Ching, repository of the wisdom of the east, observes that “through oppression one learns to lessen rancor.” Just the reverse of what the social scientists say.

Social science has been interviewing abusers, the abusers have all said they were themselves abused, and the social scientists, not being very bright, are accepting this at face value.

Enter history. History is a far better source for understanding humanity than social sciences will ever be. Social sciences are worthless in principle. The study of history, however, leads to wisdom. Wisdom comes with experience. History is the study of the whole world’s experience.

To get to the bottom of what causes people to become abusive, consider societies and groups of people from the past universally understood to have been abusive. Who comes first to mind? Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, the segregated US South.

All of them would indeed, like those modern abusers interviewed by social scientists, have insisted that they have been abused. They too would have insisted that this is the reason for their actions. The Nazis held themselves intolerably oppressed by the Versailles Treaty--and, yes, by the rich Jews. The Boers considered themselves oppressed by the British during the Boer War, and by Imperial policy after that that they felt favoured blacks. The Southerners considered themselves oppressed by carpetbaggers and reconstruction following the Civil War.

An oppressed Afrikaner.

Were they in fact oppressed? Perhaps briefly; but this came within a wider experience of privilege. Versailles may have been bitter to the Germans, but it followed a period of success after success, culturally, economically, and militarily, during the late nineteenth century, not incidentally including imposing punitive treaties on their own opponents several times. Up until 1918, they were very much accustomed to seeing themselves as the rising star of Europe and of the world. The growing tip of evolution; the master race. It is when that seemed to be thwarted that they went berserk.

So too, the Afrikaners had a credible claim to being oppressed, but this was brief. Fifteen percent of all Boers died in British concentration camps during the Boer War. But this was a group accustomed for many years to owning and commanding black slaves, and to moving into new lands and throwing off the former inhabitants at will. They were a group of people so accustomed to having their own way that they found virtually any government intolerable.

A carpetbagger oppressing Southern U.S. whites.

And so with the whites in the US South: used to having black slaves do all the hard work, they saw themselves as New World aristocrats. Virginia credibly claimed to be the leading state of the union, home of most US presidents, until they lost the Civil War. Or the Protestants of Northern Ireland, accustomed to seeing themselves as the ruling class, then faced with the loss of that status at Irish independence.

Compare Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, or Jomo Kenyatta, who emerged from the deliberate oppression of years in prison to prove exceptionally mild rulers, reconciliation turning out to be their main concern. You don't hear a lot of whining from the Armenians either.

The lesson here is that it is not the oppressed who abuse, but those who have been accustomed to being pampered and to having their will obeyed. When they suddenly have that rug pulled out from under their jackboots and stilettos, they shift into overdrive, becoming obvious abusers. In other words, it is not the abused, but the spoiled, who abuse.

Yet these abusers will also see themselves as abused, and complain loudly about it. This is the psychological phenomenon dealt with so well in “The Princess and the Pea.” By contrast, the truly abused are most often incapable of seeing the extent of their own oppression, since it is what they have always been accustomed to. Fish know nothing of water.

Why do we hear so much more about the holocaust of the Jews by Hitler than about the holocaust of the Ukrainians by Stalin? Or the holocaust of the gypsies or Jehovah's Witnesses by Hitler? Or the much higher death rate under Mao? Because the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe were indeed, as the Nazis portrayed them, wealthier than their non-Jewish neighbours. Until the holocaust, they were accustomed to viewing themselves as in the higher reaches of the social order. They knew immediately that there was something wrong with the way they were suddenly being treated. Ukrainian or Chinese peasants? Gypsies? Not so much.

Therefore, those who complain most loudly of abuse or of being bullied in the public square are not those who have been treated the worst, but most often the bullies themselves. When these squeaking wheels are inevitably given government grease, it is almost always an additional injustice, which aids and abets their injustices against others.

Thus we see abusers branding the abused with being abusers.

Oppressed women, NYC, 1912

Such, for example, is the case with feminism. Who is more accustomed to being pampered than the average young woman?