Reply #4: This bears out what Alice Miller has always maintained

[MikeH]

The recently deceased Swiss writer and psychotherapist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_%28psychologist%29">Alice Miller, in her http://www.alice-miller.com/books_en.php">books and on her http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php">web http://www.naturalchild.org/alice_miller/">sites, wrote about the consequences of childhood abuse and mistreatment.

In the opening to one of her articles titled http://www.naturalchild.org/alice_miller/childhood_trauma.html">Childhood Trauma, which she originally presented as a lecture in October 1998, she deals with the question as to why many people take pleasure in tormenting and humiliating others, while others do not. She rejects, among other things, the idea that genetic makeup has anything to do with the matter, or that some people are "born bad".

Since adolescence I have wondered why so many people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge to hurt is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don't?

Philosophy failed to answer my question and the Freudian theory of the death instinct has never convinced me. Nor could I make sense of genetic explanations of the evil, of the naive idea that a human being can be "born bad." Nobody could answer the crucial question: How is it that so many turn-of-the-century German children were born with such malignant genes that they'd later become Hitler's willing executioners? It has always been inconceivable to me that a child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective caregivers could become a monster. Then, by closely examining the childhood histories of murderers, especially mass murderers and dictators, I began to comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes, as commonly believed, but in the earliest days of life. Today, neurobiological research seems to fully corroborate what I discovered almost twenty years ago.

(Emphasis mine)

In her now online book http://www.nospank.net/fyog.htm">For Your Own Good she http://www.nospank.net/fyog4.htm">documents horrendous child rearing practices that were openly advocated and practiced in past centuries, including in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, i.e. during the time that the future perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust were being raised as children.

In http://www.nospank.net/fyog9.htm#values">this section of For Your Own Good she makes the statement (at the end of the fourth paragraph from the start of this section):

Among all the leading figures of the Third Reich, I have not been able to find a single one who did not have a strict and rigid upbringing. Shouldn't that give us a great deal of food for thought?

She writes about specific figures in the Nazi regime, and has an http://www.nospank.net/fyog13.htm">entire chapter about Hitler and how he was raised. She documents how the authoritarian an totalitarian household in which Hitler was raised, where he was often beaten by his brutal father, anticipated the authoritarian and totalitarian regime which Hitler as an adult later came to establish in Germany.

She also has a http://www.nospank.net/fyog15.htm">chapter about the child murderer Jürgen Bartsch, and how the manner in which he we was mistreated as a child came to manifest itself (unconsciously to Jürgen) in the way he would later come to murder young boys.

Finally, an interesting http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=63&grp=13">article on Alice Miller's web site (not written by Alice) deals with findings of the book http://www.librarything.com/work/554266">Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill? by Jonathan H. Pincus. The following conclusions from the book are enumerated in the article:

Without any doubt and with no exception the inquiries regarding serial killers and their relatives proved the following:

1. every perpetrator had been exposed to extreme physical and sexual childhood abuse at the hand of their parents;
2. each homicide reflected the very kind of brutality the murderer had suffered as a child;
3. the control of hatred and aggression accumulated in childhood is generally not being erased by genetical defects but by brain damage, usually as an after-effect of the toddler's brutal mistreatment or the mother's drug abuse during pregnancy;
4. poverty does not cause aggressive impulses, but enforces the urge to act them out (many serial killers are of white middle-class origin, meaning that every social class is involved in generating hatred and perversions);
5. former parental cruelty gets directed at others as a form of retaliation;
6. none of the perpetrators dared to incriminate their abusive parents, even in the case of being consciously aware of what had happened to them as children;
7. the perpetrators' perversions were identical with the perversions their parents had inflicted on them as children;
8. the biographies of the murderers represent hermetic systems of terror which get directed back at society: even previously non-involved members of society are being hurt and consequently have to suffer the very same way the former child suffered.

(Emphasis mine)