A Lamb Among Wolves (Occult Yorkshire 17)

My grandfather sent all of his children to school at extremely young ages. My father was sent away at five, and his youngest sister, Gilda (the only other family member to suffer from the degenerative disease), was sent away at age three. I have looked into the schools but found no evidence of direct affiliation with Fabian agendas, or with any kind of child abuse. But, if John Taylor Gatto is right, education itself was a Fabian agenda; and in those days, people had a very different idea of abuse. Add to that the possibility that sexual interference with children may be an unacknowledged, intrinsic part of British schooling, particularly for the upper classes.

For example, the author Richard Dawkins describes, in his best-selling book The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, p. 355), his experience at three British boarding schools, all of which “employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety.” Dawkins adds that, “if, fifty years later, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defense, even as a victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).” He then warns against “false memories” concocted with the help of unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers.[1]

The view that sexually interfering with children is harmless (combined with the seemingly contradictory one that a patient might invent traumatic memories of such an incident) is of course one that runs through the entirety of this investigation, and which is very much the central argument for those who would exploit children for their own ends—and/or for imagined “social liberation” purposes. Except that, the social engineering programs underway, at least since Havelock Ellis, appear to be based on an even more radical belief, that sexual interference with children is actually beneficial to them, at least some of the time. What’s implicit in Dawkins’ account is that he himself is the proof that these sorts of experience do no harm, being that he is now a successful, award-winning author (and social reformer), and a man of great intellectual prowess.

Dawkins follows up his personal anecdote by stating that the damage done by sexual abuse is “arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” As evidence, he offers an anecdote about a young girl who was sexually abused in a car by her parish priest; around about the same time, a Protestant friend died and consequently the girl believed her friend had gone to hell. She wrote to Dawkins to say that the sexual fondling was just a “yucky” impression, while the memory of her friend going to hell “left a cold, immeasurable fear” that gave her nightmares. (Dawkins, p. 356-7). What’s interesting is how Dawkins uses the example, both to bolster his case against religion, and to downplay the psychological impact of sexual abuse. Putting the two examples of abuse side by side as an either/or—when it was clearly a case of both/and—serves to further his own ideological ends. It also leaves completely unaddressed the question of whether sexual interference can harm a child’s psyche in ways not immediately apparent, then or later. For example, the “cold immeasurable fear” the girl felt consciously when thinking of her friend’s damnation might have been part of the unconscious affect of being molested. This would be especially so when the person who sexually molested her was also the person whom she had entrusted with the care of her soul: she might well feel damned herself by such a molestation, and hence all the more identified with her doomed and sinful friend.

My brother seemed to share Dawkins’ views about both religion and sexual abuse. On one occasion in a teahouse in Soho, he passionately insisted to me that orally raping a baby would not do it any harm. When I argued with him fiercely, he would have nothing of it. Where did he come up with this idea? Based on everything I have uncovered in this investigation, this is a not-uncommon philosophy, albeit one that is generally kept private. Leaving out the very delicate question as to whether my brother was involved in such “harmless” activities—as victim, perpetrator, or both—it seems likely he didn’t come up with the idea all by himself.

Another example. After his death, it came out that Gore Vidal had been “terrified” that William F. Buckley would release a file accusing Vidal of having sex with underage boys. According to family members, Vidal ran up a million-dollar legal bill trying to prevent this from happening. Vidal’s half-sister told a Vidal biographer that she believed the records alleged that the author committed “Jerry Sandusky acts”—Sandusky being the Penn State University football coach convicted of sexually abusing young boys. Vidal also “had a ‘very weird take’ on the disclosures of sexual abuse of boys by priests in the Roman Catholic Church, dismissing the victims as ‘hustlers who were sending signals.’”

Researcher Ian Pace wrote at his blog about Vidal’s sexual predilections, referring to his “most notorious novel, Myra Breckinridge (1968), specifically the passage which relates with relish the brutal rape of a teenage boy, Rusty, presented in terms of female/gay empowerment so as to titillate liberal left readers.” Pace argued that the chapter “indicates what type of a predator, rapist and child abuser Vidal was”; he then reproduces the chapter in its entirety. It is just under 9000 words of grisly, salacious, and deliberately eroticized descriptions of Myra Breckinridge’s medical rape (ending with the use of a dildo) of a young boy. Early on in the chapter, Myra persuades the boy, Rusty, to stay:

“’I’m sorry. But this is more important than your social life. After all, you want to be a star, don’t you?’ That was always the clincher in dealing with any of the students. They have been conditioned from childhood in the knowledge that to achieve stardom they might be called upon to do anything, and of course they would do anything because stardom is everything and worth any humiliation or anguish. So the saints must have felt in the days of Christendom, as they burned to death with their eyes on heaven where the true stars shine.”

Later on, Vidal/Myra writes, “Now I sit at the surgical table, making the greatest effort to calm myself, to put it all down not only for its own sake but also for you . . . who never dreamed that anyone could ever act out totally his fantasies and survive.”

 

I cite this example because I think it provides a clue to the whole awful mess of my childhood and the culture that enveloped it, and me, like a spider’s web or an octopus’ inky cloud. I think there is a view among the ruling class that sexual abuse—which they do not admit is abuse—is just an inescapable part of the world of the power elite. Everyone is fair game for such research/methods, and only those with the genetic mettle to turn abuse into personal power ever really understand the nature of the beast they are riding. The rest get thrown and trampled into the dirt.

In this view sexual interference is, as my brother and Dawkins and Vidal saw it, a silly thing to get worked up about. Those who are selected to be part of the ruling class, who have gone through the “hazing” rituals of the private school system, Baliol, etc., have transitioned from being objects of abuse to perpetrators, acting at a conscious, empowered level. The poison containers have become the poison deliverers. The sociopathic virus necessary to become one of the social engineers has taken root. We never really see the hideous truth of this, because the sociopaths present themselves to us as social leaders and cultural heroes. They are the proof of their own pudding.

The question that drives this written investigation, of course, is: to what extent am I also carrying this virus? Was I a victim of sexual interference as a child? If so, was it directly related to the groups and individuals, the philosophies, methods, and goals, being described, or only indirectly? Part of me wants to write that I have no reason to believe I was sexually abused, while knowing that this entire piece is nothing but a checklist of reasons. Combine all of this with the fact that, like my brother, I exhibit countless symptoms of being abused, from compulsive nose-picking to nighttime butt cramps, from anxiety about physical contact and general discomfort with my sexuality to all manner of dreams and waking fantasies—and it no longer really seems like a question of if, but only of when, who, how severe, how often, and under what circumstances? There may be no way to know, because of course, while there is every reason to believe, there is no memory to substantiate the belief. And memory, to reasonable creatures, is the substance of reality.

At the end of this epic uncovering of facts that may or may not make up a coherent narrative, the passage in my brother’s book referring to my “marvelous beauty [as a child] which stopped strangers in the streets,” and to “a pedophile invited into the family circle [who] could hardly have been expected to be indifferent,” begins to look like the proverbial smoking gun—the ferocious tip of a family iceberg.[2] At this point, I would think anyone reading might wonder how I could even doubt that something terrible happened to me. A lamb does not fall among wolves without getting devoured, Nature does what it is, and the truth is, I no longer doubt it, if nothing else because I have persuaded myself, which was really what all of this digging up of old bones, and painstaking reconstruction of the corpse, was about. I have persuaded myself to accept the unacceptable.

Nor would I think it would—or should—be of any great interest to readers who are not directly involved in the same circles; except that, if the evidence speaks as clearly as I hope it does, these circles probably include anyone who grew up in the UK, or the US, or Europe, during the 50s, or 60s, or 70s, or 80s, or . . . . Most of all, I hope this testimony makes it clear that a person can be in the very thick of wolves—and even have one’s psyche torn to shreds by them—and somehow maintain the illusion of living quietly among sheep, unharmed and whole.

That’s the last thing this piece testifies to: the sheer lasting damage done by such unwanted, undefended proximity to sexual predations and to destructive, deceptive, sociopathic ideologies. An ironic point, because the sheer fact of my compulsive need to map all of this out (which has only gone on overtly for about eighteen months, but which I see now has been underway my entire adult life and drove me to write and travel the world in the first place) is the proof of how profoundly impacted I have been by those early, suppressed experiences, whatever they were. I have been cut off from my own life force, my own sense of reality; and there is nothing more tormenting than being cut off from a sense of reality.

Going into the past has been a way to identify all the ways in which I have been unable to be myself, and why: the false beliefs, values, complexes, neuroses, fears, drives, compulsions, obsessions, all sourced in a network of traumas that make up both my own false identity and the Fabian-fueled, Savile-saturated culture that spawned it. All the ways in which I have been unable to live inside my own body, to have access to my total psyche, and to be my own man. All the ways in which my life has not been mine to live.

*

 

“To know, to will, to dare, and to keep silence” is the magical oath of occult fraternities down through the ages.

To know the secret of empowerment through sexual abuse.

To will to be included in the continuance of this “system.”

To dare to participate in the acts that cement inclusion in the “club.”

To keep silence about it, to death and beyond.

After spending half my life researching this sort of material, I have reached a place where I more or less believe there’s no one in a position of social or cultural influence who hasn’t either been sexually interfered with as a child or, worse, participated in the abuse—if only by being useful in some way to the programs and institutions implementing it. When our entire culture starts to appear dependent on the sexual abuse of children, when people I had previously admired, even emulated, are increasingly implicated in a horrendous network of exploitation—as victims or perpetrators, or both—the question of what constitutes criminal abuse starts to come undone. For one thing, since the idea of crime has been largely created by criminal institutions, the concept of criminal behavior starts to seem unworkable. In the same way, morality is no way to combat abuse, because people who wish to abuse others know how to use moralism as a way, not only to conceal, but to justify and rationalize the abuse.

Taboo is a means to order society; yet those who are powerful enough to create taboos always seem to end up secretly breaking them (perhaps they create them expressly in order to break them?). Society is dependent, not only on the maintenance of taboos, but also on the willful flouting of them by the ones who established the taboos in the first place. In a world created by and for the ruling class, there is no option of participation besides that of rule or be ruled.

There is no meritocracy where all the standards of social advancement are created and maintained by aristocracy. Having been born into that, however closeted, the drive in me became powerful-to-overwhelming to challenge assumptions about history, ancient and modern, personal and collective, to assert that nothing unfolds the way we have been told it does. Nothing. There is always a shadowy and malevolent agenda working behind the scenes of everything, from pop music to politics, from industry to the arts. Events and individuals are being constantly manipulated to serve and further this black agenda. Appearances deceive and are not to be trusted.

Where do these grim convictions come from—this feeling of living inside a malignant culture? If this poisoning has driven me to write—this and every other piece I ever composed—does that prove the Fabian sexologists and social engineers are right? Am I only proving the efficacy of their methods and the soundness of their philosophy by working so tirelessly to disprove it? Once again, the evidence is found in those less fortunate than myself, those who were not made stronger by what did not kill them, who were torn from the ground of their bodies and souls to live haunted, disembodied, ghoulish half-lives. My father lived mostly for the sensual gratifications of food and sex, and for the mental and emotional relief which alcohol gave him. He was confined to a wheelchair for the last years of his life—not even a shadow of his former self (though that too), more the shadow of a self he never got to be.

To me he was the shadow of a father, living a ghost of a life. He was an emotional shell hiding behind the Sunday papers. The last time I saw him was when I visited him in Barbados. He spent the days sitting in his wheelchair at his house, near the pool, reading the papers and trashy novels. I sat with him some of the time, but we hardly ever said a word. It wasn’t until evening came and he had a first drink in his hand that he—and I—were able to relax enough to talk; even then, I don’t think we ever had a conversation that lasted for more than ten minutes without requiring some form of artificial resuscitation. My father was like the man on the stair: he was not there.

The legacy he left me (besides the money, which I threw away at twenty-four) was tragedy: the unlived life of the parent. And what was my father’s most treasured and frustrated goal? To write. He was never able to do it. He was unable even to speak the truth of his life, or about how he never got to live it. Apparently that left it to me. Writing this account, I have begun to understand, not just why I write, but what writing is really for. The programming can be undone. It’s possible to reverse the damage of decades of forced “education,” to place intelligence in service of wisdom, to bring about an understanding that finally heals the split between father and son, body and soul, world and self.

All of this is a way to understand the depth of the wound I’ve been walking around with. It is the same wound that crippled and killed my God-denying father and brother: the wound of being unable to love or feel loved by the father. Understanding this, in the weirdest of possible ways, understanding what made him the man he was, I have come to know my father for the first time, and to establish him in my heart. To know someone is to love them.

This one’s for you, Nick.

*****

[1] Dawkins went on to study at Baliol College, Oxford, which a disproportionate number of Fabian society members seem to have attended. He is also friendly with New School alumni and LSE professor Nick Humphrey, John Maynard Keynes’ nephew and one-time friend of my grandfather. (Humphrey dated my father’s second wife, Sabitha, after she left him.)

[2] I made another discovery while serializing this piece that came via a family member and that, at the very least, fully corroborates my family’s involvement with PIE. Unfortunately it was passed on in confidence.

This is the 18th and final part of Occult Yorkshire. For the full PDF (without images, email the author)