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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read This Book at Your Peril, Dec 31 2003
By A Customer
It's a sobering thing to have the answers to the deepest questions most of us ever ask about the human condition. I wouldn't trade the insights gained from reading this book for my former uneducated "bliss," but knowing the truth exacts a price. Once you understand the 'emotional physics' of how violent adults begin as violated children, violated, moreover, by the very people who are supposed to love and protect them -- you will see the results of that treatment acted out on various levels all around you, in everyone you know - for none of us have escaped being damaged on some level by abusive child-rearing practices. The 'tough to live with' aspect of such insight is realizing how far too many people become either a Persecutor or a Victim, acting out the imbalance of power they were raised with - not by confronting those who first damaged them (usually their primary caregivers) but by seeking substitute targets to attack on levels from subtle (being a control freak at work and making the lives of your subordinates miserable) to grotesque (marching Jewish children into gas chambers and still being able to sleep at night.)While the entire book is horrifying in it's illumination of sanctioned, morally enshrined cruelty to children in society, it was Ms Miller's chapter on Adolf Hitler that struck the most powerful epiphany. How often in my life had I heard Hitler described as an "unnatural monster," as "sent by the Devil," as someone not human? Miller's analysis of not only Hitler but of his father's and mother's lives, how their damaged characters intersected to create the totalitarian regime that was Adolf's childhood home, sent absolute chills of knowing through me as I read: in a less virulent form, his childhood had been my own. (Dominating father who controlled everyone in the house with his moods and rages/Passive mother who was dependant on him for survival and too frightened of her husband to protect her child.) While many people have suffered this and worse, it is the intervention on some level of an "enlightened witness," Miller maintains, that gives an abused child a perspective other than the one he lives with in the abuse situation and so salvages, on some level, the value of his genuine self. Hitler's insatiable hatred clearly showed that no one was there for him in childhood; his targeting of the Jews was a way to release the pent-up hatred from a lifetime of beatings and humiliation, inflicted on him by a father he wasn't allowed to hate. ("Honor Thy Father & Thy Mother") As we all do on some level, he found a substitute target for his rage. Hitler was also a remarkably sensitive, artistically gifted child, but an upbringing filled with abuse turned his talent toward exploiting the dammed up anger in the German adults of his generation who had also been raised with loveless brutality. What a relief, after so many beatings, so much pain and coldness and inhumanity, to have someone they could hate with impunity! The six million Jews exterminated during World War II were not each personally escorted into gas chambers by Adolf Hitler: he had plenty of help. It was through the common thread of being constantly abused, plus being indoctrinated to mindlessly obey authority, however absurd or cruel the order, that gave so many Germans the go-ahead to project all of the aspects of their' childhood selves their' authoritarian parents considered unacceptable onto the Jews and then try to destroy them. (This in the subconscious belief that the parts of themselves they'd disowned would never return to earn them new parental punishments; by killing the 'bad' part of themselves, they would become upright, perfect and pure, with no flaws, no human faults - good enough at last for their perfectionist parents and never again to be beaten.) If I could ask only one question in all the universe with certainty of a genuine reply, it would be: why do we love and hate? Thanks to Ms. Miller's book, I can't ever again pretend not to know the answer. The question now is whether this knowledge will reach enough people in enough positions of power to prevent an even greater holocaust. Ms. Miller has proven that the seeds of genocide sit squarely in the palm of the hand upraised in violence against a child. Does that sound extreme? Owing to the depth of his humiliation and suffering, the absolute commandment forbidding expression of that suffering and the unstoppable need to vent the resulting rage, I'm convinced that, had Hitler got his hands on a nuclear arsenal, none of us would be here to debate the question.
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by Alice Miller
by Alice Miller
by Alice Miller
by Alice Miller
