Traumatized Americans and Dissociative Hysteria

[numan]

Traumatized Americans and Dissociative Hysteria

Trauma is the standard method of controling Americans. Almost all Americans are subjected to trauma, which freezes their mentality into what Janet called "hysteria" and "dissociation." Janet's work is far more important than that of the fraud Freud, and so Janet's work is almost unknown today.

A Reader's Guide To Pierre Janet: A Neglected Intellectual Heritage

A century ago there occurred a peak of interest in dissociation and the dissociative disorders, then labeled hysteria. The most important scientific and clinical investigator of this subject was Pierre Janet (1859-1947)....The evolution of his dissociation theory and its major principles are traced throughout his writings. Janet's introduction of the term "subconscious" and his concept of the existence of consciousness outside of personal awareness are explained. The viability and relevance of dissociation as the underlying phenomenon in a wide range of disorders is presented....

A century ago, Pierre Janet became France's most important student of dissociation and hysteria. At that time, hysteria included a broad range of disorders now categorized in the DSM-III-R (American Psychiatric Association, 1987) as dissociative, somatization, conversion, borderline personality, and post-traumatic stress disorders. Through extensive study, observation and experiments using hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria, Janet discovered that dissociation was the underlying characteristic mechanism present in each of these disorders.

Unfortunately, his view of the importance of dissociation in hysteria and its treatment were abandoned when hypnosis fell into disrepute. This retreat from hypnosis at the end of the nineteenth century coincided with the publication and popularity of Freud's early psychoanalytic studies. Historically, Janet's considerable body of work was neglected in favor of the rising popularity and acceptance of Freud's psychoanalytical observations and conceptualizations.

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[numan]

'
A description of the ideal American consumer-unit :

L'Automatisme Psychologique

Janet related the origin of subconscious phenomena in hysterical patients to the narrowing of their field of consciousness. This concept refers to the reduction of the number of psychological phenomena that can be simultaneously united or integrated in one and the same personal consciousness. Some register in conscious awareness, others are relegated to a subconscious area in much the same way that central and peripheral items in a visual field are noticed. In Janet's view, narrowing the field of consciousness is one of the two basic characteristics of hysteria. The other is dissociation....

Dissociation and mental dissolution...denote the manner in which this narrowing of the field of consciousness occurs in hysterical patients. Dissociation occurs when different factors disturb the integrative capacity. This disturbance leads to the splitting off or doubling (dédoublement), separation and isolation of certain psychological regulating activities. These dissociated systems of activities (states of consciousness) vary in complexity from a simple image, thought or statement and its attendant feelings or bodily manifestations, to the alter personalities of patients with multiple personality disorder....

While clinicians such as Bemheim and Babinski regarded hyper-suggestibility as the basic characteristic of hysterical patients, Janet stated that hyper-suggestibility depended on the narrowing of the field of consciousness and the predisposition to dissociation. The patient is suggestible because dissociated parts of his mind lack the higher mental functions of critical judgment. By distracting the patient, the hypnotist is able to communicate directly with these parts....

Janet introduced the concept of "psychological misery" to denote the mental status of patients in whom the field of consciousness was narrowed and whose integrative powers were strongly diminished, thus allowing dissociative phenomena to occur....

...vehement emotion such as the fear and anger inherent in traumatic experiences are primary causes of "psychological misery." This state is marked by a serious decline of the integrative power of the mind and, in hysterical patients, an increase in dissociative phenomena.
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[tecoyah]

'
A description of the ideal American consumer-unit :

L'Automatisme Psychologique

Janet related the origin of subconscious phenomena in hysterical patients to the narrowing of their field of consciousness. This concept refers to the reduction of the number of psychological phenomena that can be simultaneously united or integrated in one and the same personal consciousness. Some register in conscious awareness, others are relegated to a subconscious area in much the same way that central and peripheral items in a visual field are noticed. In Janet's view, narrowing the field of consciousness is one of the two basic characteristics of hysteria. The other is dissociation....

Dissociation and mental dissolution...denote the manner in which this narrowing of the field of consciousness occurs in hysterical patients. Dissociation occurs when different factors disturb the integrative capacity. This disturbance leads to the splitting off or doubling (dédoublement), separation and isolation of certain psychological regulating activities. These dissociated systems of activities (states of consciousness) vary in complexity from a simple image, thought or statement and its attendant feelings or bodily manifestations, to the alter personalities of patients with multiple personality disorder....

While clinicians such as Bemheim and Babinski regarded hyper-suggestibility as the basic characteristic of hysterical patients, Janet stated that hyper-suggestibility depended on the narrowing of the field of consciousness and the predisposition to dissociation. The patient is suggestible because dissociated parts of his mind lack the higher mental functions of critical judgment. By distracting the patient, the hypnotist is able to communicate directly with these parts....

Janet introduced the concept of "psychological misery" to denote the mental status of patients in whom the field of consciousness was narrowed and whose integrative powers were strongly diminished, thus allowing dissociative phenomena to occur....

...vehement emotion such as the fear and anger inherent in traumatic experiences are primary causes of "psychological misery." This state is marked by a serious decline of the integrative power of the mind and, in hysterical patients, an increase in dissociative phenomena.
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An interesting hypothesis, yet totally speculative and rather pointless considering the variables of human mental abilities and response to stimuli.

 

[numan]

An interesting hypothesis, yet totally speculative and rather pointless considering the variables of human mental abilities and response to stimuli.

Well, I think most Americans are suffering (a quite deliberately inflicted) state of POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER.

Think of what the "authorities" did when they repetitively re-broadcast the horrors of 9/11! A simple way to traumatize the entire population of the USA. And we see how Americans' consciousness about what happened then has been narrowed and limited about that event, to the extent that they are unable to endure rational discussion and criticism about the "official conspiracy theory" they have all been sold by the organs of brainwashing.

But trauma extends far beyond 9/11. American public schools are violent concentration camps where students are bullied and assaulted. People fear the police, fear being shot and killed, fear crime, fear to let their children walk to school by themselves, fear a myriad of things which the mass media have conditioned them to fear.

Meanwhile, the obscene pornography of violence coming from Hollyweird and the rest of the info-tainment industry traumatizes the billionaires' human cattle right in their homes with TV blood and gore and torture, delivered by hypnotic flashing lights and colors, while these mental slaves are exhausted by their daily slave labor and mentally at their most vulnerable.

There are many reasons why I call the United States "the United States of Hysteria".

An English friend of mine calls it the "Excited States of America".

You should also ask yourself why people in so many other countries do not suffer anywhere near the same levels of stress and near-hysteria as so many people in the USA.
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[arcturus88]

Well, I think most Americans are suffering (a quite deliberately inflicted) state of POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER.

Think of what the "authorities" did when they repetitively re-broadcast the horrors of 9/11! A simple way to traumatize the entire population of the USA. And we see how Americans' consciousness about what happened then has been narrowed and limited about that event, to the extent that they are unable to endure rational discussion and criticism about the "official conspiracy theory" they have all been sold by the organs of brainwashing.

But trauma extends far beyond 9/11. American public schools are violent concentration camps where students are bullied and assaulted. People fear the police, fear being shot and killed, fear crime, fear to let their children walk to school by themselves, fear a myriad of things which the mass media have conditioned them to fear.

Meanwhile, the obscene pornography of violence coming from Hollyweird and the rest of the info-tainment industry traumatizes the billionaires' human cattle right in their homes with TV blood and gore and torture, delivered by hypnotic flashing lights and colors, while these mental slaves are exhausted by their daily slave labor and mentally at their most vulnerable.

There are many reasons why I call the United States "the United States of Hysteria".

An English friend of mine calls it the "Excited States of America".

You should also ask yourself why people in so many other countries do not suffer anywhere near the same levels of stress and near-hysteria as so many people in the USA.
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I agree with some of your assessment about the violence on TV, etc. but it seems more a matter of degraded society rather than top-down manipulation.

in other words, violence sells so it is produced.
This seems a more parsimonious explanation than illuminati-like billionaires scheming to control the masses with violent tv programming.

Curious... you seem to deviate the US from the rest of humanity. Why are we so special and different (in the negative context) than the rest of humanity. if you can explain, please explain the etiology of the "badness" and not the behaviors that make us "bad".

you've done a good bit of that already.

 

[numan]

'
People seem to ignore the importance of hysteria in American life. Of course, one can find examples of hysteria in the life of all nations, but what is peculiar about the psychology of Americans is the repeated recurrence of hysteria, and the regularity of the recurrence. I don't see how one can make sense of the American Experience without taking it into consideration.

Leaving aside the hysteria of the Terrorist Uprising of 1776, there was the hysteria associated with the Alien and Sedition Acts at the end of the 1790's.

There was a revival of hysteria at the time of the War of 1812, then a period of quiescence until the election of Andrew Jackson. That repulsive demagogue initiated an almost uninterrupted period of hysteria for more than a decade: the destruction of the Bank of the United States, the first great economic depression, the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Five Nations, the anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-Mason hysteria of the Know-Nothing Party, and, of course, the Manifest Destiny hysteria that led to the Mexican-American War.

That war, with barely a pause for breath, initiated the ever-growing hysteria of the 1850's which brought on the Civil War. That war was the most useless and unnecessary war of modern times; more than two percent of the American population died because of the war -- about the same number and percentage of deaths in Iraq for which America bears such responsibility. If both sides, North and South, had just sat on their hands for thirty years, slavery would have ended anyway -- serfdom in Russia and slavery in Brazil were long gone by 1890, or was the United States so much more backward than Russia and Brazil that slavery would have hung on until the twentieth century? All that misery and death could have been avoided, and all the wounds and bitterness and injustice that lasted so long. But, Oh no, Americans must have their hysterical fits; by the late 1850's each side had so worked itself into a passion, so convinced itself that it was agrieved and wronged, so filled itself with righteous indignation, self-pity and intransigence that a paroxysm of gibbering, murderous rage could not be avoided.

Then there was the peace of exhaustion for thirty-odd years until the nonsense of Free Silver and "You shall not crucify Mankind upon a cross of gold" primed the pump for the "Maine Incident" and the Spanish-American War. By this time the hysteria was being much more consciously directed.

Next was the war hysteria of the First World War, the Ku Klux Klan hysteria of the early twenties, not forgetting the hysteria that led to Prohibition, which made the world safe for the Mafia and the FBI.

Take another hop and a skip to the Second World War, when hysteria made it seem perfectly acceptable to throw American citizens into concentration camps, mass-murder civilians in bombing raids, and rain atomic destruction down upon a defeated Japan.

Then there was the hysteria of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts which fastened the oppressive Military-Industrial Complex upon the American people ever after. People should have paid attention to Eisenhower's warnings !!

Next, the coup of the Kennedy Assassination set the stage for the prolonged hysteria of the Vietnam War.

Then there was a longer than usual period of relative quiet---just constant, low-level hysteria -- until Monika Lewinski, 2000 election fraud, hysterical over-reaction to the 9-11 attacks, the Iraq War and "Homeland Security" -- the tightening hand of surveillance and totalitarian "Patriot Act" (what an example of Orwellian "double-speak"!).

Now, with Trump-Fascism there is the present bout of general mayhem, hysteria and ever increasing totalitarian tyranny.

We still have the collapse of the dollar to look forward to, and the somewhat slower collapse of the American military. And when the six percent of the world's population which is represented by the citizens of the US find it necessary to live on six percent of the world's resources rather than the present twenty-five percent -- that should be quite adequate to fuel another round of perfectly futile hysteria.
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[numan]

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I think that the tendency of American culture to descend into hysteria takes its origin, at least in a large part, to the convulsion of insanity which initiated the cycles of dementia which we call modern American history. I mean, of course, what most Americans call the Revolutionary War, or the War of Independence, but which I prefer to call the Terrorist Insurrection of 1776.

It requires special treatment because it is the foundation of that uncritical and childish worship of the Founding Fathers which is so nauseating to a clear-minded observer of the American scene. Many Americans are like drug-addicts and alcoholics, but what they are addicted to are illusion and lies. Someday, I hope that they will "Kick the Habit."

Americans suffer from recurrent hysteria, suspicion, defensiveness, and an ingrained drive to escape from facts and live in a fantasy-world. This pathology requires explanation. I suggest that this disease takes its origin from the very foundation of the Republic, and that it is the accumulated effect of a Fundamental Lie which Americans have ever taken pains to hide and deny, until it has become a festering infection touching every part of the American psyche. This Lie is that the American Revolution was a courageous overthrowing of tyranny and oppression, which founded a republic based on reason and respect for human rights.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a large segment of the colonial population was swindled by a devious, unscrupulous, corrupt and traitorous cabal which, for its own selfish ends, acted against the best interests of the people and the state.

This conspiracy had two main foci of evil. In the South there was an extravagant and nearly bankrupt group of Virginia planters who wanted a break with England so that they could escape the legal debts which they had incurred in the Home Country due to their addiction to foreign luxuries. They also wanted to escape the restrictions of orderly rule, and were determined to gain exclusive control over the government of their state and the exploitation of its people and resources. The biggest landowner and real estate speculator in Virginia was George Washington. Who of you would trust the biggest wheeler-dealer in real estate in your state? Amongst his many shenanigans was the business coup of inducing the new federal government to buy a large chunk of malarial swamp which he owned -- as a part of the new District of Columbia!

In the North there was a sinister and corrupt group of traitors which was most prominently represented by the smuggler-kingpin of Boston, John Hancock -- the richest man in America at the time. He was a rum-runner, slave-dealer and smuggler whose counterpart in modern America would be a Mafia don. In grade school I was taught that he wrote his signature in an enormous scrawl on the Declaration of Independence "so that the King of England might read it without his eye-glasses." Well, that is a fable typical of the American "educational" system!

In fact, with his wealth he was bankrolling the rebellion, and in his vanity felt that he who pays the piper calls the tune! He was deeply grieved and offended that George Washington was chosen to lead the troops rather than himself! Amongst Hancock's many illegal and nefarious activities was the smuggling of tea from Holland into New England. The Boston Tea Party Conspiracy arose because the English had set the tax on imported tea too low! It was cheaper to buy legal tea from the East India Company than to buy Hancock's smuggled tea!

The Mafioso of Boston was not going to stand for that! The rest is history -- the official history. Objective historians have noted that twenty-five percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were either smugglers themselves or were connected to the smuggling racket. The smuggling of luxury items into early America was as much a curse then as illegal-drug smuggling is today.
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[numan]

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What can possibly account for the prevalence of hysteria in American society and in American history? What would drive people living in the peace and good order of Colonial society to support the Terrorists who attacked the established government and created social chaos?

Those who actively supported the Rebellion were a small minority of the population -- mainly the dregs of society. Their savagery and brutality were clearly shown by their treatment of the Loyalists and of those who did not want to be involved on either side of the fracas.

The rebels would stop at nothing. Murder, torture, the burning of homes and farms, the slaughter of domestic animals, the incitement of Indians against those who resisted their treason -- all this was commonplace. The terror was particularly bad in the South, where the situation was little different from that created by the American government in Iraq. The large number of refugees who fled America at the time shows how intolerable the situation was. And all this horror was because of some small taxes on tea and legal documents? Such trivialities would not even be noticed amid the depredations which the modern American government visits upon its subject population!!

The history of hysteria in the United States is fascinating and complex, but certainly a major factor all through its history has been the ignorance and miseducation of its people, and their consequent reliance for their opinions on the facile misrepresentations of the popular press.

This was crucial in whipping up the ignorant multitude to endure the crimes of the Terrorist Uprising of 1776. The traitors would probably never have achieved any success without their control of the primitive brainwashing apparatus of their time.

Again and again throughout American history, the manipulations and lies of the press and the developing media have been crucial in driving the populace to support stupidity, crime and violence.

And if this has been so in the past, how much more is it true now when the Brainwashing Apparatus of the nation is dominated by a handful of giant media monopolies?
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[tecoyah]

'
What can possibly account for the prevalence of hysteria in American society and in American history? What would drive people living in the peace and good order of Colonial society to support the Terrorists who attacked the established government and created social chaos?

Those who actively supported the Rebellion were a small minority of the population -- mainly the dregs of society. Their savagery and brutality were clearly shown by their treatment of the Loyalists and of those who did not want to be involved on either side of the fracas.

The rebels would stop at nothing. Murder, torture, the burning of homes and farms, the slaughter of domestic animals, the incitement of Indians against those who resisted their treason -- all this was commonplace. The terror was particularly bad in the South, where the situation was little different from that created by the American government in Iraq. The large number of refugees who fled America at the time shows how intolerable the situation was. And all this horror was because of some small taxes on tea and legal documents? Such trivialities would not even be noticed amid the depredations which the modern American government visits upon its subject population!!

The history of hysteria in the United States is fascinating and complex, but certainly a major factor all through its history has been the ignorance and miseducation of its people, and their consequent reliance for their opinions on the facile misrepresentations of the popular press.

This was crucial in whipping up the ignorant multitude to endure the crimes of the Terrorist Uprising of 1776. The traitors would probably never have achieved any success without their control of the primitive brainwashing apparatus of their time.

Again and again throughout American history, the manipulations and lies of the press and the developing media have been crucial in driving the populace to support stupidity, crime and violence.

And if this has been so in the past, how much more is it true now when the Brainwashing Apparatus of the nation is dominated by a handful of giant media monopolies?
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This type of situation is not unique to the United States, and in fact has been primarily avoided for hundreds of years by our form of Government. Unfortunately a combination of corruption in the system, corporate invasion, financial disparity and degradation of societal intellect has recently allowed our population to rebel against and damage the system designed to prevent exactly what is happening.
A reset is occurring and the outcome is not clear...we may go back to the founding principles, or we may become something quite different. The collective intelligence of our citizenry will inevitably decide our fate...I seriously hope we manage to get back to what we were intended to be.

 

[numan]

Americans are the calmest, most methodical society on the planet, and we are not fooled easily.

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[numan]

Americans are party animals. Looks like a party to me!

Well, as usual, you are wrong.
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[tecoyah]

Any so-called "traumatized Americans" have a place waiting for them. It is called an INSTITUTION. Fortunately, very, very few of us are emotionally unhinged.

Numan, did YOU flee so they won't put you in one? :giggle:

Please step back from the line.

 

[arcturus88]

Please step back from the line.

Is numan a family member of yours?

 

[tecoyah]

Is numan a family member of yours?

Perhaps instead I have been doing this long enough to note where discussion begins to become less than pleasant and try to head it off?

 

[numan]

I agree with some of your assessment about the violence on TV, etc. but it seems more a matter of degraded society rather than top-down manipulation.

in other words, violence sells so it is produced.
This seems a more parsimonious explanation than illuminati-like billionaires scheming to control the masses with violent tv programming.

Curious... you seem to deviate the US from the rest of humanity. Why are we so special and different (in the negative context) than the rest of humanity. if you can explain, please explain the etiology of the "badness" and not the behaviors that make us "bad".

you've done a good bit of that already.

I don't think Americans are that different from the rest of humanity --- it is just that it pays more to brainwash and manipulate Americans than other people. Everyone in the world is involved in the Matrix of Lies to greater or lesser degrees.

Americans are just like everyone else --- only more so! ---

I think you make a false dichotomy between, as I call it, "the Invisible Mind [sic!] of the Marketplace", and scheming, shadowy manipulators at the apex of wealth and power. Both are in operation destroying the last shreds of rationality and culture left in our disintegrating "civilization."

A hundred years ago, the uncontrolled forces of economic greed were much more important than even the Rockefellers and Morgans. Today, as wealth and power are concentrated in ever fewer and fewer hands, the billionaire Feudal Oligarchs have the preponderance of power.

But they are not, as yet, elements of an "Illuminati" cabal engineering the subjugation of their human cattle.

It is quite sufficient that they individually recognize their class interests, and co-operate as much as such rivals may do in short-term alliances.

I wish people were more familiar than they are with the politics of the Ancient World.

If they understood the relations of Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Antony and Octavian with the Roman mob in the collapsing Roman Republic, or could perceive how much of Crassus and Nero there is in Trump, they would have a much better idea of what is going on today.
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[numan]

'
Vast numbers of people have been working for decades, both consciously and unconsciously, on the Modern Totalitarianism Project. I wish that I could believe that they were all doing it consciously, like some Illuminati Conspiracy. Then one could hope that they were acting out of self-interest, and that there was at least some rationality behind what is happening to us.

There are, certainly, plenty of conspirators, but I fear that mainly the drive toward totalitarianism is unconscious ---- that Americans are in a trance, being pushed forward by the inertia of history, and creating yet more inertia that we will be unable to stop or control. That is why I am so insistent on forcing people to recognize totalitarianism as totalitarianism. I know that the bulk of people are zombies who will never wake up. But there are a few, "whose eyes are lightly covered with dust," who may be able to wake up before they stumble over the edge of the cliff.

Why are people so mindless? That is a deep question, and I also can only touch upon the surface of a reply. In very simple terms, I would say that most people are living in a kind of "virtual reality." Almost their entire higher mental world is being fed into them: television, mass media, entertainment, advertising, government and commercial propaganda, schools, even family, friends and acquaintances work together synergistically to create "false consciousness" and delusion. Of course, one of their deepest delusions is that they are "free and independent thinkers."

Moreover, if you do become conscious and aware, you must pay a price that most people are unwilling to pay. Where the madmen run the asylum, you may find being sane a real danger.

He has come a long way: The loss of memory from which he suffers causes him no suffering; his lack of self-will makes life easy for him; he values his own inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against any infection of his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.
---- Hans M. Enzenberger
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[numan]

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I hope you didn't think that I was writing about you, Blowhard.

After all, I didn't say so.
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[arcturus88]

I don't think Americans are that different from the rest of humanity --- it is just that it pays more to brainwash and manipulate Americans than other people. Everyone in the world is involved in the Matrix of Lies to greater or lesser degrees.

Americans are just like everyone else --- only more so! ---

I think you make a false dichotomy between, as I call it, "the Invisible Mind [sic!] of the Marketplace", and scheming, shadowy manipulators at the apex of wealth and power. Both are in operation destroying the last shreds of rationality and culture left in our disintegrating "civilization."

A hundred years ago, the uncontrolled forces of economic greed were much more important than even the Rockefellers and Morgans. Today, as wealth and power are concentrated in ever fewer and fewer hands, the billionaire Feudal Oligarchs have the preponderance of power.

But they are not, as yet, elements of an "Illuminati" cabal engineering the subjugation of their human cattle.

It is quite sufficient that they individually recognize their class interests, and co-operate as much as such rivals may do in short-term alliances.

I wish people were more familiar than they are with the politics of the Ancient World.

If they understood the relations of Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Antony and Octavian with the Roman mob in the collapsing Roman Republic, or could perceive how much of Crassus and Nero there is in Trump, they would have a much better idea of what is going on today.
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I don't agree with your politics, but I do appreciate your intelligent and thoughtful (as opposed to emotional) responses.

 

[numan]

'
I was merely translating into English what you call yourself in German. I don't think you should complain about that!
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[numan]

'
AMERICA'S JOYOUS FUTURE

Freedom = "Wholehearted support for the Homeland"

Slavery = "Wholehearted support for the Homeland"

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