Between barbarity and exclusion, ritual circumcision, an artificial racism
masked behind religion, tradition, culture and folklore
(the dramatic psycho-sociological outcomes of circumcision make it
the worst of racisms and the greatest crime against humanity,
catalyst of fanaticism, terrorism, genocide and feminicide)
"Every man who has chosen lie as an instrument must inexorably choose violence as a rule." Alexander Soljenitsyne
"The sex of the (child) well appears as a stake of possession, a symbol of submission." After Simone Veil, who had written "woman", not "child"[1]
Crime against humanity is the outcome of a totalitarianism one of the structural aspects of which is abolition of individual consciousness." Mazarine Pingeot
The pleasures of autosexuality are traditionally despised, to the point that a minority of cultures (20% of humanity) destroy its specific organs of (the foreskin, and sometimes the clitoris). The frequent use of the same term for both mutilations shows their common, allegedly purifying, end. However, the horrible havocs of excision are only the tip of the iceberg of sexual mutilation. For if the sexological and sometimes serious physiological damage[2] of circumcision is the most often overshadowed, we are going to see that its psychic-sociological outcome on the planetary level is dramatic. The ineptitude of this mutilation is blatant in the fact that one of the main expected results: reducing sexual desire, is not reached, and it must be thought that other goals are aimed at. Massively practised upon minors unable to defend themselves, these human sacrifices and tortures are the height of brutal methods of education that teach the reason of the strongest, violence, barbarity, sexism and its corollary: racism. These techniques of submission play upon a confusion between identity and belonging characteristic of racist thought. For primitive rites of belonging are artificial conditions certainly not of identity, but only of belonging, through marking. Imposed by violent and barbarous tortures, those markings have nothing to do with the deep feelings that insure the social dimension of identity.
Miriam Pollack showed that circumcision is the expression of a masculinist sexism[3]. It is all the more sexist as it forces men to dominate women, laboriously, in coitus. Sexism being degree zero of racism, it is not astonishing that the latter should be present in mutilations that discriminate children, individuals and communities from the rest of humanity. Besides, we must add up to her demonstration that, since Jewishness is transmitted by women, then, Judaism is also, paradoxically, a feminist sexism; Jewish fathers' children with non-Jewish mothers are excluded in an as sexist as racist way, with the complicity of Judaic mothers.
I – The racist intention of sexual mutilation:
mixture of ideas and conflations
Reasoning through conflation is at the heart of racist thought. Then, sexual mutilation lies on a series of conflations:
1/ The conflation between gender and sex.
Sometimes present (African cultures), it imagines that the suppression of the sexual organs evoking the opposite sex would grant a superiority through an additional femininity or masculinity. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has taken on the responsibility for that delirious primitive fantasy[4] in a hallucinating anti-Freudian delirious.
2/ The conflation between sexual mutilation and physical and moral superiority.
Trite but wild, the feeling of aesthetic and hygienic superiority provided by circumcision has been exposed by Reyes and Zagdanski[5]. But above all, circumcision belongs to a puritan moral order[6] the unavowed design of which is dominating the population, beginning with the youth, through the terror of a human sacrifice that is above all a threat of castration and death: "I cut you a little bit for the moment but watch it!" This moral order backs itself upon the statement of a moral superiority that circumcision would warrant. Indeed, it pretends to make supermen (superwomen), morally superior, elected by God or the ancestors. Based on a physical differentiation, this discrimination is an artificial racism that well keeps its hands up. For resting upon a guilt and will of punishment (original sin) as nonsensical the one as the other, this claim of moral, and even spiritual superiority (the mutilation suggests abstention and despise of autosexuality decreed a sin), is as hypocrite as megalomaniac.
3/ The conflation between identity and affiliations to the community.
"Narcissism and identity are notions that refer the one to the other, the notion of identity being located at the interface between narcissistic area and social area. Let us notice first that the term identity implies the report of a permanence within time of elements characteristic of personality, perceptible for the subject itself and for others. Therefore, within identity, two sides must be acknowledged that concern two aspects of narcissism. One is intimate: being oneself at one's own eyes, and the other social: what we present to others in order for them to recognize us, in all the meanings of the term. So, identity appears under the double sides of a reason of being, and a social reason referring to the personal field on the one hand, relational, familial and social field on the other hand."
"... iterative narcissistic wounds, incestual or incestuous situations, induce an over-investment of the present and hinder the narration constitutive of identity."Paul Denis[7]
That is telling to which point, for victims of sexual mutilation, the conflation is easy, and even unavoidable, between what appears like a most intimate physical identity to them and their belonging to national or ethnical community; an irreversible surgical inscription, collectively and systematically committed in the most tender infancy with the active complicity of the parents, cannot not appear as a major and hardly arguable sign of belonging to the social group. That is at the price of a negation of human identity the most concretely and objectively racist that can be imagined.
Similarly, according to the philosopher Michel Serres, in pure logic, identity can only be individual and speaking of collective identity is a mistake. So, according to him, it cannot be said: "I am English." But: "I belong to English community." Thinking differently risks in making fall into xenophobia or racism.
Then, techniques of education through violence create a confusion between identity and affiliations that is likely to participate of racist thought. Mrs. Chirac's "A good spanking never harmed anyone!" tends to tell that spankers are superior to non-spankers whereas, very obviously, the reverse is true; the best are very obviously those who do not need violence to impose authority.
Therefore, initiation rites through maiming markings do not constitute any identity. They only are accessory elements of identification, mere "distinguishing features". Imposed by torture, those barbarities have nothing to do with the feelings of belonging that ensure the social and human dimension of identity.
4/ The conflation between imposed distinguishing feature (ignored handicap) and elective sign of ethnical identity is a collective madness.
That conflationis denounced by those who condemn circumcision of children. However, they most often admit its voluntary realization at adulthood. So, May 7 2012, obtaining the approval of seventy per cent of the population, the high court of Köln condemned the circumcision of minors but tolerated elective mutilation in adulthood.
However, elementary bioethics[8] [9][10][11] forbids all mutilation without "very serious medical motive"[12]. There is neither a right to mutilate someone neither that to mutilate oneself through discriminating oneself from the human species by a sectarian choice. Distinguishing the ethnic group through a surgical operation is a discriminatory, hyper-racist collective madness[13]. Psychiatry would speak of transgenerational and collective syndrome of Münchhausen by proxy[14], and the psychoanalyst of medically (in the best case) assisted collective sexual auto-punishment. The fanatic worshipers of Cybele (ancient Greece), those of the sect of Skoptzis (Russia), and the Hidjas (India) did or do (Hidjas) not stop at the castration of the foreskin; they would (or do) cut the whole penis off!
5/ The antiJew- or anti-Islam / anticircumcision conflation.
It holds sway in the communities, notably in the Jewish one, through denying the existence of the multi-millennial Jewish current against circumcision, illustrated by Queen Jezebel and King Ahab, the Seleucids (slaughtered by the Maccabeus), the supporters of baptism by water with John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, Peter and Paul, the German Reform rabbis of the 19th century around Abraham Geiger and their followers in the United States, politicians Olry Terquem and Bernard Lazare, psychoanalysts Freud, Groddeck, Reich, Bettelheim, Lewinter, Julia Kristeva, Alice Miller, Tobie Nathan, philosophers Spinoza, Jacques Rosenberg and Jacques Derrida, the medicine Nobel prizes Francis Crick and George Wald, Professor Alexandre Minkowski, pediatrician Aldo Naouri, intellectual Jérome Ségal, the lawyer Linda Weil-Curiel, Judge Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig, the powerful US Jewish movement against circumcision, filmmakers Woody Allen, Ivan Attal, Nurith Aviv and Daniel Burman, etc. Systematically used by the religious who claim that the abandonment of circumcision would provoke the end of the community, it is the worst of all, the most paranoid, the most dangerous. It is accompanied by an emotional blackmail that easily creates outcries: "If circumcision is forbidden to us, we shall quit the country!" As if circumcision could be a prerequisite of the existence of a religion or a people.
II –The racist beliefs of sexual mutilation
1/ A religious racism through divine right(!)
Primitive thought happens to make sexual mutilation a condition of belonging to the social group:
"An uncircumcised is not a man." African saying
"And the uncircumcised male,who will not havecut offthe flesh of his outgrowth,will himself becut offfrom his people for having broken my covenant." Genesis, 17: 14
and even a brand of divine election
"... if you keep my covenant, you will be my treasure between all peoples..." Exodus, 19: 5
Proclaimed by religion, the artificial racism of circumcision is more virulent than ordinary racism. Its most impudent form is the hegemony granted by the God of the Bible:
"… you will be the father of a multitude of nations…" Genesis, 17: 5
in exchange of circumcision:
"At the age of eight days, that every male from amongst you be circumcised…" Genesis, 17: 12
Hitler reversed the first proposal in order to affirm:
"There cannot be two elected peoples. We are the elected people."[15]
So, even if, on occasions, other religions show themselves more barbarous, Judaism, in its very principle, is the worst religion, the most racist, the only one that makes of a barbarous mutilation the condition of a national identity paradoxically decreed by a "God" who would correct a minority of his own creation, in order to discriminate the rest of it! That Judaic racism is responsible for the Zionist colonialist invasion, in spite of Freud's advice to the Jewish Agency in Vienna:
"It seems to me that it would have been much more reasonable to create a Jewish home in a land less encumbered with historical significance… I notice with regret that the unrealistic fanaticism of our people is partly responsible for the arousing of Arabs’ distrust. I can muster no sympathy whatever for the misguided piety that makes a national religion from the remains of the wall of Herod, so challenging the feelings of the local natives..." [16]
Only racists through "divine right" can take no account of the feelings, not to say more, of the Palestinian people.
2/ A racism denounced by psychoanalysis and philosophy
The artificial creation of a physical peculiarity isolates the ethnic group from other ethnic groups and several Jewish authors have emphasized the fact that circumcision generates racism:
- in 1909, Freud exposed the danger of a racism induced as soon as childhood by circumcision with non-Jewish people:
"The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery, little boys hear that the Jews have something cut off in their penis – a piece of their penis, they think – and this gives them a right to despise the Jews."[17],
- in 2001, in philosophical terms, Rozenberg[18] spread the remark to adults including the Jews themselves:
"... the otherness of the Jew confronts itself with the fellow creature, and only has for equivalent that of woman.",
"The Jewish people bothers and scares because it represents the Other. This equivalence precisely points at the thematic link that gathers myth and psychopathology, themselves epiphenomena of a double crisis of sexual and cultural identity. This equivalence provokes in both cases a phantasmagoria bearing, on the one hand upon the anatomical difference, perceptible as well with woman as with the circumcised Jew, and, on the other hand, upon an attachment to the natural and carnal materiality that they similarly embody."
3/ A quasi-natural racism exposed by Zagdanski
In 2002 and in terms accessible to the general public, Reyes and Zagdanski have exposed that inescapable consequence of circumcision with young Jewish boys:
"In my kid'shead, an uncircumcised penis looked like the sex organ of a dog, the unevenaspect, the bright red little top…That really did not seem very aesthetic to me compared to my own or my brothers' penises... A feeling of great difference, thus... between me and the nonJews, the majority. In other words, between me and all the others. With, all the same, a slight complex of superiority because of that disclosure, namely that the non-Jews' penises looked like the sex organs of dogs."[19]
With the child Zagdanski, circumcision, through the unconsciousness of a handicap reversed into an advantage, has generated a deep, intimate, emotional belief in an ethnic superiority of quasi-biological order. That belief does not even need to resort to the religious vindications of that so-called superiority. This quasi-automatic racism is the most monstrous outcome of the circumcising pedo-criminality.
4/ The reactions of other great thinkers
Many other thinkers took a stand against that abomination:
"…not only does not the child's body belong to us but... her or his sex still less." Françoise Dolto[20]
"For it is a barbarous thing to meet a newly born infant with the knife, with a deliberate mutilation." George Wald, medicine Nobel prize
"How could a being that has been aggressed in this way, while totally helpless, develop into a relaxed, loving, trusting person? Indeed he will never be able to trust anyone in life, he will always be on the defensive, unable to open up to others and to life." Frédérick Leboyer[21]
"... circumcision is an appalling aggression practised without anaesthesia and that can only leave an as unconscious as abominable memory to the being who suffered it and makes him a slave for life." Frédérick Leboyer [22]
"Another psychological consequenceof early circumcision is that it imprints an aggressive and traumatic situation onto the mind of the newborn… The impossibility of processing such a tremendous infusion of inwardly focused aggression may lead, a posteriori, to the emergence of psychopathic and violent behaviour or, in many other cases, to the emergence of extreme masochistic behaviour." Moisés Tractenberg[23]
"Ritual practices of circumcision and excision have effects that reach not only the individual and their descendants but also other men." Alice Miller[24]
"… (the handicap) confronts each one of those who are not affected by this disablement to the anguish of castration, to the horror of the narcissistic wound, and, beyond, to the irreparable of physical or psychic death, thus establishing the most uncompromising of exclusions." Julia Kristeva[25]
"But a private person may not perform such an ablation (mutilation of a member), even with the patient's consent; it would be committing an injustice to society, to which man belongs with all his limbs." Saint Thomas Aquinas8
"… the Jews having lived apart from all nations in such a way that they incurred universal hatred, and this not only by observing exterior rites contrary to those of other nations, but by the sign of circumcision…"Baruch Spinoza[26].
But Freud and Roheim stated the deepest observations concerning the sexual rituals of separation from the mother with worth of threat of castration-exclusion:
"The results of the threat of castration are multifarious and incalculable; they affect the whole of a boy’s relations with his father and mother and subsequently with men and women in general." Sigmund Freud[27]
with, as a foot note:
"(1) … The primaeval custom of circumcision, another substitute for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father's will… "
This radical condemnation of circumcision remains discrete and does not underline that, consisting in a beginning of realization, circumcision is the worst threat of castration. But the son does not submit to the father; the father submits to the grand-father, notably for fear of being disinherited.
Bettelheim précised:
"In Western society, circumcision is imposed on the defenceless child to whom it offers no definite advantage and for whom it is, consequently, undesirable and threatening…"[28]
Roheim went further on through insisting upon the great danger of circumcision for personal development:
"... the superabundance (with Australian aborigenes) of ritual dealing with this theme (orality) is a camouflage of the Oedipus complex."[29]
At last, having drawn the political consequences of the phenomenon by comparing circumcision to the Nazi initiation falls to Tobie Nathan; initiation through sadism is initiation to barbarity:
"Himmler ignored his nourishing sadistic drives, the initiation he received in the corpse of the SS revealed it to him... "[30], p. 20
"The combination of these three levels (isolated emotion, and its ability to trigger perplexity, the attack against strongly invested parts of the body and its ability to trigger "anguish of castration", the paradoxical terms and their ability to trigger confusion) is essential to the expulsion of a subject from her or his envelope of meaning." p. 21
How better tell that sexual mutilation risks seriously destabilizing the individual, and the whole humanity, as every day proven by the various group or state terrorisms of religious-feudal societies of the Middle-East and Africa? These observations explain why, with sensitive persons notably (feminists, far right), sexual mutilation provokes, more or less consciously, an aversion that may go up to the fiercest, and sometimes sexist, hatred.
5/ The legal reactions
The legislator also took a stand:
"The child shall be protected from practices that… may foster racial, religious or any other form of discrimination..." Principle 10 of the International convention on the rights of the child of the UNO
"Subjecting a person whose vulnerability or state of dependence are apparent or known to the author, to working or living conditions incompatible with human dignity is punished by five years in prison and a 150,000 Euros fine." article 225-14 of the French criminal code
But since sexual mutilation is on the one hand, committed within collective madness, on the other hand, within love, "for the sake of the child", and therefore without intention of harming, criminal law is unenforceable, so that the only means of repressing it are granting important damages to victims and denouncing its endogamous and racist aim.
However, the latter proves to be difficult. June 14 2013 in La Sorbonne, Mrs Christine Lazerges, the president of the French National consultative commission of human rights, declared that she would mention in her report to the President of the republic that sexual mutilation is discriminatory. But after the outcry from the religious provoked by the 1st October 2013 decision of the Parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe who pronounced with a strong majority for the respect of the right of the child to physical integrity, the 2 December 2013 report of the French NCCHR did nothing of the sort!
6/ The belief in a superiority resulting from sexual mutilation is the central element of a racist thought that excludes the "non-circumcised"
Exclusion is the sanction of the group to opponents of sexual mutilation. It is the symptom of a feeling of superiority that enables the sexually handicapped to overcome the trauma of the operation and, for the majority of women notably, the depression and sadness provoked by a sexuality that is the most often wrecked. As a corollary, mutilation is a condition for marriage and a barrier to marrying outside the group, which is a great concern of a racism that goes up to excluding foreigners from cemeteries, and even forbidding them burial on the national territory (Islam). The superiority allegedly conferred by sexual mutilation is affirmed in the Bible (dogma of election). According to some pseudo-philosophical rationalizations, circumcision wouldinscribe man into the dimension of lack (sic). Maimonides and Philo of Alexandria, uphold that it grants the individual with virtue, loftiness of the mind, purity, chastity, and even a fidelity that nevertheless condones (Muslims) or condoned polygamy (Jews till the XIVth century):
"This commandment has not been prescribed to correct a physical deficiency but a moral deficiency." Maimonides[31]
In one word, the "noncircumcised" are profligate! Reference to the "moral order" is explicit. This fantastical belief seems to be at the origin of Freud's affirmation of a superior ability of the Jews for spirituality[32]. Males of the planet would be divided between great mystics, sexuallymutilated, and other men, meanly earth-bound for having kept their foreskin. The trite insult: "Uncircumcised dog" testifies that in the circumcising imaginary, circumcision differentiates man from animals. Birds do not have a foreskin but circumcision does not seem to give the wings of the angel.
That superstition finds its origin in the likening of sexuality, and very particularly autosexuality, with sin. This queasy conception, generating addictions and perversions, notably paedophilia, and land of election of rape, rests upon the ignorance and/or guilt of the delights provided by the specific organs for autosexuality. In her preface to an Italian work entitled "The mutilated sex", Élisabeth Roudinesco praises the latter:
"...if, in the course of the second half of the XXth century, mas........n has ceased to be classified as a mental disease, thanks, to a great extent, to Freudian theory, it is henceforth claimed, by numerous post-Freudian liberation movements, as the purest expression of a sexuality that, at last rid of the rags of puritan moral, allows unlimited pleasure, without risk of contamination, without procreation, without a bothering partner.
A symbol of modern individualism, lonely sex may at last be seen – particularly on the internet – as a discovery of oneself or as an exile that sinks into melancholy. In the case in point, the "surrogated danger", reduced by Freud to the polymorph triteness of infancy, has become the emblem of a (sexuality)(*) raised into an ethics of liberty."[33],
But she goes on calling autosexuality a perversion and a melancholic practice. A deep unconscious guilt weighs upon autosexuality. The chapter of his teaching in the Collège de France[34] that Michel Foucault dedicates to the repression of autosexuality seems a hoax. Using the term "mas........n", he acutely blames Christianity, the medical order, and excision and circumcision practised by the latter in the XIXth century without saying a word about ritual circumcision! The title of his lessons being "Abnormal persons", we are forced to think that he considers mass circumcision as normal when it is traditional or religious.
That guilt leads to reciprocal despise between circumcised and intacts. The psychiatrist Michel Erlich points out that "goy", "uncircumcised" and "uncircumcised dog", are grave insults[35]. That claim of superiority sometimes degenerates into snobbery, which was the case in the United Kingdom, where circumcision first spread within the nobility, and in the United States where it is a criterion of social standing. It finds its sanctioning in language: the intact is never named as such but as a "non" or as "un" -circumcised, with the connotation of loss and emptiness linked up to negation. A height has been reached by Jacques Derrida when, in a depressive episode it is true, he came to wonder whether his decision not to have his sons circumcised would not make them suffer from "a lack of lack"[36]! This inversion (denial) of realities is characteristic of perversion. Isn’t it perverse indeed to pretend oneself "elected by God" in order to reassure oneself about one's own difference through lessening the others by humiliating instead of simply exact naming? A basic principle of right applies to that pseudo-spirituality:
"No one may take advantage of their own turpitude."
That conviction of superiority does not stop there. From all antiquity, the circumcised believe themselves cleaner:
"Also, neither man nor woman in Egypt would kiss a Greek on the mouth nor use a Greek’s … knife." Herodote[37]
The intact are assumed lustful, impure and even unclean! The popular prejudice of the sexually maimed that the intact are "masturbators without hygiene" is not likely to put racism at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the circumcised plunge their organ without fear into the feminine one which, following them, would be a culture fluid. They also spread the rumour according to which they would perform sexual exploits. Whatever it may be, a superiority resting upon a physical difference is of racist type. The foreskin does not smell like cheese, circumcision stinks of racism.
7/ The endogamic aim
We are not only in the presence of racism. We are also facing a sexist manipulation. Indeed, young women easily believe the superstitions according to which the "non-circumcised" are without hygiene, bad lovers, profligate and, in cultures that practise the mutilation after the age of speech, coward ("A non-circumcised is not a man.", African saying). So that a foreigner can hardly marry a Muslim or a Jewish woman. As acknowledged or even denounced by Maimonides's historical hoax, it is obvious that these rumours are the work of a patriarchy that, in the illusion to reinforce the cohesion and perpetuation of the community, aims at making sure of the possession of women through endogamy.
This racism is strikingly affirmed with feminine excision for which, in Western countries, parents would affirm: "If we don't do it, she will not find a husband." Inside their ethnic group maybe! And the same can be said of circumcision: "If we do not circumcise him, he won't find a wife.", meaning "within the community". A surgically strengthened racism is the height of racism.
8/ The sexist aim
To top it all, circumcision is intended to separate the child from the mother, from the world of women and childhood. There precisely lies the most criminal intention, the most odiously sexist, the most abject, the most contrary to life, love, tenderness, and the best of existence. All this in the deep aim of steering the child’s affects towards the world of men, ploughmen and makers, excluding women of it in order to dominate them, and men too, better.
That discriminatory attitude, conscious and resolute with extremist elites, remains unconscious and denied by the masses. Sexual mutilation is less religious than sectarian. Like the castration of barbarous sects, it aims at shutting the group upon itself in order to ensure the power of the chiefs. Indeed, that sexist and racist arrogance is cultivated by religious-political elites who cherish circumcision like the apple of their eyes because it is at the basis of their power. They deliberately use it as a technique of manipulation of the masses:
"It is well-known how much men like and help each other when they all have the same distinctive mark which is for them a kind of alliance and agreement." Maimonides[38]
Separating the group from others by the sectarian display of a small but significant difference that flatters and exacerbates the narcissism of the group, a hyper-racism finds a privileged means of expression in sexual mutilation:
"It is my opinion that circumcision has another important motive: it makes that those who profess this idea of the unity of God distinguish themselves by a same body sign which is imprinted on them all, so that the one who is not part of them cannot, being a stranger, pretend belonging to them." Maimonides35
So, circumcision is a sexist artificial racism masked behind religion, tradition, culture and folklore. That insidious chauvinism is easily rooted in the mind as well by its link with the weighty taboo of autosexuality as by woman’s (man’s) denial of her (his) own femininity (masculinity). It is strengthened by an unconscious awe of castration and death, generated with the victims as well as their neighbours.
III – The consequences: hatred and violence
and the limpidity of the psychoanalytical explanation
"If hatred creates the object, it is also what threatens the most its existence. Because it makes of the identity of oneself to oneself an exclusive, and even fetishicized concept, hatred carries in itself the rejection of all otherness. When it makes itself the ally of a narcissism enemy of "little differences", it becomes the carrier of a purity that no longer tolerates any variegation, any mixing. Purity of the race, purge, ethnic cleansing, the pure and hatred dwell in the same countries." Jacques André and Isée Bernateau
Exclusion calls for hatred. Spinoza and Freud exposed circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples. This hatred is reciprocal. An extremely serious collective pathology: transgenerational and collective syndrome of Münchhausen by proxy and collective syndrome of Stockholm, circumcision generates particularly high violence. Of the twenty three genocides of modern times: Circassian Muslims (1860), Congolese (1870), Hereros (1904-07), Greeks (1914-18), Assyrians (1914-20), Armenians (1915), Serbs (41-45), Jews (1942-45), Tziganes (1942-45), Chechens (1944-48), Indonesian communists (1965-66), Biafrans (1966-68), Guineans (1968-79), Bengalis (1971), Hutus (1972), East Timor inhabitants (1975-99), Kurds (1988-89), Tutsis (1994), Bengalis (1990-2000), Bosnians (1991-95), inhabitants of Darfur (2003), Iraqi Kurds (2005), Rohinghyas (2012), twenty (87%) involvedcircumcised on at least one side and five on both sides. The circumcised perpetrated twelve of them, of which seven against intacts. That strong correlation is logical; a voluntary violation of the human body creates a feeling of superiority with those who practise it and the inverse feeling with the others. But for one civil war (Sri Lanka), all wars between 1996 and 2002 involved at least one circumcising country and they were more than three times more numerous in circumcising countries. The death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they are the only ones to practise excision.[39] In Norway, between 2006 and 2010, 2% of the population who are circumcised committed all the rapes upon ninety per cent of native Norwegians. Circumcised Congo holds the world record for rape: 400,000 over a period of one year. Sexual mutilation separates the child from the mother at the age of bonding. This is monstrous, the result is catastrophic. Circumcision is the breeding ground of paranoia, sexism, fanaticism and group or state terrorism. It makes the equilibrium of terror and the fortune of gun merchants.
Psychoanalysis explains why circumcision is a push to genocide
The correlation between genocide and circumcision becomes causality if there is a reason for causality. Now, that reason exists; psychiatry will speak of collective madness without explaining anything but psychoanalysis enlightens us. Indeed, Freud stated a theory of the racism generated by circumcision that, pushing it up at its end, enables to explain the madness of genocide:
"The hypothesis that a root of those hatreds of the Jews which occur in such primary ways and lead to such irrational behaviour among the nations of the West, must be sought here too, seems inescapable to me. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration."[40]
Since, according to him and to the results of psychoanalytical clinic, the unconscious likens the part to the whole, then, a threat of castration is also a threat of death. But exerted on a whole ethnic group, the individual death threat of circumcision becomes, through addition, a threat of extermination of the whole group, immediately projected upon the adverse group by the unconscious. So, circumcision is a push towards reciprocal genocide.
In an attempt to psychologizing, circumcision is a particularly monstrous technique of domination of individuals inasmuch as, in the name of a totally and foolishly misguided and reversed ethics, it speaks against pleasure and life. Because of that, the mundane domination instinct, that would be content with merely enslaving the enemy, degenerates into destructive drive of foreign groups, paradoxically regarded as purely detrimental because of a difference deemed fundamental and essential (hence the islamizations by mutilation, of both sexes possibly). The reverse phenomenon occurs as well with other circumcising groups as with non-circumcising groups.
Freud has laid the foundation for the analysis of the phenomenon and his condemnation of Zionism shows that he has approached both sides of it.
So, the abolition of consciousness (Hannah Arendt's triviality of evil) emphasized by Mazarine Pingeot is a submission to the unconscious that, run by rules just as rigorous as that of ethics, ignores good and evil (sadism). The triviality of circumcision is thus directly responsible for the multiplication of genocides, of which several, still through contact with circumcision, are ongoing (Darfour, Rohinghyas) and two, reciprocal and atomic, are threatening, still through contact with circumcision (Palestine, Korea).
Conclusion
More fascist than fascism since it aims at children, sexual mutilation is unbearable to fascists. But democrats may not tolerate these ordeals. Taking the festivities of folklore for alibi, it is imposed by military and religious elites with adolescent behaviour. It has a sexist character. It considers women and children as objects of a right of property. It does not welcome the child into a society regulated by the difference of sexes and ages but socializes or affiliates through the trauma of a barbarous military initiation that enlists for war. So, it is encouraged by tyrannical regimes which use it as an induction to violence and a sign of rallying. The community sign is always a call for nationalism, a sign of war, of possession of the individual and exclusion of foreigners. Sexual mutilation makes the people carry the can (the hat in the French expression!) of a non-existent guilt: scarf, veil, burka, kippah, tattoos, forced obesity, breast ironing, stretched oral or vulvar labia, scarification, knocked off teeth, bound-feet, cut off clitorises, foreskins, uvulas and tongue fraenums, the death penalty, to arms et cetera. That escalation of techniques of manipulation of the minds through marking and mutilating the bodies is the worst tools of the war of generations. It channels human needs at the service of the interests of the ruling classes and generations.
Repression of autosexuality by matriarchy-patriarchy is a planetary disease. Racism is all the more arrogant as it leans on mutilations that aim at submitting the people through ensuring men of the possession of women. Sexual mutilation is not properly racist but, aiming at making "supermen", it is an artificial racism more racist than racism, power two racism, some neo-Gobineau implemented by Mengele. Founding a collective identity upon an assault against that of the species is not only degrading in itself, it is above all discriminatory. The peoples who carve out an identity through the knife for themselves upon the body of their children offend the rest of humanity. Collectively exerted in the name of God and/or tradition, that hyper-racism is a monstrous abomination, generating terrorism, sometimes state terrorism, and an as virulent counter-racism.
Sexual mutilation, circumcision very particularly, is a genuine cancer that gnaws at the planet. Perpetrated upon children, it is a crime against humanity that has been first denounced in 1985 by the attendants to the first symposium of NOCIRC:
"The greatest crime against humanity is the torture and mutilation of children."[41]
followed in 1990 by Alice Miller:
"... society ... till now said yes to humanity’s greatest crimes."[42]
And, June 10 2004, in the French Académie nationale de médecine[43].
When, January 30 2014, we told the psychoanalyst Alain de Mijolla the title of our book "Feminine and masculine sexual mutilation, the greatest crime against humanity", he declared:
"This is very true!"
Due to the age of the victims, it is the sole crime against humanity which nobody complains about. It also the only one that, perpetrated in blind beliefs and/or collective madnesses, without intention of harming but at variance within love and "for the sake of the child", is not punishable. A quasi-castration for women and a genuine threat of castration for men, it is a threat of death for individuals and of extermination for the group. This is why medicine may under no pretext bring the authority of science to those primitive rituals.
The abolition of those crimes against humanity is a stage in the fight against the repression of sexuality and for the right of the human person to the free access to their own body and the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity.In a civilized society, the abolition of corporal punishment must be extended to children; not a single hair of a child must be touched. Fundamental, the right to the body must be mentioned in article 1 of the Universal declaration of human rights:
"All human beings are born free and equal in rights, in first place the right to the body, in its three dimensions of integrity, dignity and autonomy."
Nota bene: In sexual matter, moral superiority consists in not making love without love. This presupposes a good knowledge of the other and, as long as a loving and loved companion has not been found, to make love by oneself without false morality, with the tools given by nature, which is obviously an insurance of fidelity in relationships.
RELATED ARTICLES
- Genocide, war, the death penalty, excision and circumcision
- "Why genocides?"
- "Terrorism and circumcision"
https://www.academia.edu/3086635/Terrorism_and_circumcision_updated_04.26.201
Sigismond (Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau) – oldsigismund@hotmail.com
Independent psychoanalysis researcher, a former pupil of the Psychoanalysis department of Paris VIII university, author of "Feminine and masculine sexual mutilation, the greatest crime against humanity", for free at https://independent.academia.edu/Michel_Herv%C3%A9_Bertaux_Navoiseau
[1] Veil S. Preface to the supplement to the Bulletin de l'Académie nationale de médecine : Les mutilations sexuelles féminines, un autre crime contre l'humanité. 2004, 188 (6).
[2] Bertaux-Navoiseau M. An erogenous and protective-of-erogeneity lip, the foreskin is a sexual organ; its ablation is a mutilation.
https://www.academia.edu/2274700/An_erogenous_and_protective-of-erogeneity_lip_the_foreskin_is_a_sexual_organ_its_ablation_is_a_mutilation_updated_04.17.2015_
[3] Pollack M. Circumcision, identity, gender and power.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miriam-pollack/circumcision-identity-gen_b_1132896.html
[4] Lacan J Séminaire X – Anguish – 19 December 1962.
[5] Reyes A., Zagdanski S. La vérité nue. Paris: Pauvert; 2002. p. 145-46.
[6] Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Sexual mutilation and the moral order (problematic and basic concepts of the fight against sexual mutilation).
https://www.academia.edu/2108423/Sexual_mutilation_and_the_moral_order_problematics_and_basic_concepts_of_the_struggle_against_sexual_mutilation_without_distinction_of_sex_updated_04.27.2015_
[7] Denis P. Le narcissisme. Paris : PUF, Que sais-je ; 2012. p. 114 and 116.
[8] Saint Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. 1273.
[9] Haas J. The totality and integrity of the body. Ethics & Medics 1995, 20.2.
[10] Austriaco N. Requests for elective amputation. Ethics & Medics 2011, 36.2.
[11] Peters E. Canon law and apotemnophilia. Ethics & Medics 2011, 36.2.
[12] Article 41 of the French code of medical ethics.
[13] Bertaux-Navoiseau M. H. Circumcision, a dangerous collective madness: from an individual psychosis to collective psychosis psychiatry, psychoanalysis and circumcision.
https://www.academia.edu/2098330/Circumcision_a_dangerous_and_contagious_collective_madness_from_an_individual_psychosis_to_collective_psychosis_psychiatry_psychoanalysis_and_circumcision_updated_04.27.2015_
[14]Matteoli R. Blood Ritual, the Münchhausen complex. Nunzio press; 2008.
[15]HitlerA. Mein Kampf, réédition, Paris, Les Editions Latines, 1979, p. 306-15.
[16] February 1930 letter to Chaim Koffler. Freudiana, 1973. 19.
[17] Freud S. Analysis of a phobia on a five-years-old boy (Little Hans). 1909. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1955. S.E., X, p. 36, n.
[18] Rozenberg J. Biologie de la race et psychopathologie. Archives de philosophie 64, 2001.
[19] Reyes A., Zagdanski S. La vérité nue. Paris: Pauvert; 2002. p. 145-46.
[20] Dolto F. Les jeux sexuels de vos enfants. Interview par Pierre Bénichou. Planning familial, octobre 1969 (3), 9.
[21] Leboyer F. 4 June 1980 letter to Rosemary Romberg-Weiner.
[22] Leboyer F. 17 February 2001 Letter to the author.
[23]Tractenberg M. Psychoanalysis of circumcision. Male and female circumcision. New York: Denniston et al. Plenum publishers; 1999.
[24]Miller A. Banished knowledge - Facing childhood injuries. New York: Anchor press; 1997. Chap VII.
[25] Kristeva J. Aux frontières du vivant. Le magazine littéraire, février 2004 (428). 33-36.
[26] Spinoza B. Politico-theological treatise. 1670. 3: 99.
[27] Freud S. An outline of psychoanalysis. 1938. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXII, p. 190, note 1.
[28] Bettelheim B. Symbolic wounds. The free press; 1954.
[29]Roheim G. Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New York: International university press; 1950. p. 149-150.
[30]L'art de renaître, fonction thérapeutique de l'affiliation au moyen du traumatisme sexuel. Nouvelle revue d'ethnopsychiatrie, 1992, (18) : 20-21.
[31]Maimonides M. The guide of the perplexed. 1160. Chicago: Chicago University press; 1963. p. 609.
[32] Yerushalmi Y. Freud’s Moses. Yale university press; 1991. ch. III.
(*)The Italian original does not say "sexuality" but "sexual perversion". Taking into account Freud's preceding quotation, autosexuality and perversion are rigorously antinomic and we have corrected there a very Freudian mistake, a testimony, in this otherwise admirable text, of the extreme strength of the taboo weighing upon autosexuality. On the one hand, one may not call the sexuality of children, adolescents, bachelors, widows(ers) and temporarily separated or divorced or with different sexual need couples perversion, on the other hand, it is impossible to establish that the denial of the reality of the other sex that is the essence of perversion, would accompany autosexuality. It would be paradoxical concerning the use of organs that precisely evoke the other sex. Autosexuality is certainly not a perversion. Another sign of our Lacanian's ambivalence is her persistence in the use of the pejorative, traditional term in order to designate autosexuality.
[33]RoudinescoÉ. The mutilated sex. Brief story of a chirurgical passion. Preface to "Sulla soglia della psychoanalisi, Freud i la follia infantile". Bonomi C. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri; 2007. (translated by us)
[34] Foucault M. Les anormaux, Cours au Collège de France, 1974-75. Paris : Seuil/Gallimard ; 1999. p. 217.
[35] Erlich M. Circoncision, excision et racisme. Nouvelle revue d'ethnopsychiatrie 1991, 18, 127.
[36] Bennington G., Derrida J. Circonfession. Paris: Seuil; 1991.
[37] Heredotus. The inquiry, II: 41.
[38]Maimonides M. The guide of the perplexed. 1160. Chicago: Chicago University press; 1963. p. 609.
[39]Genocide, war, the death penalty, excision and circumcision
https://www.academia.edu/3086630/Genocide_war_the_death_penalty_excision_and_circumcision_updated_04.27.2015_
[40]Freud S. Moses and monotheism. 1936. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXIII, p. 91.
[41] Declaration of the first Symposium of NOCIRC. 1985. http://montagunocircpetition.org/
[42] Miller A. Introduction to reflections about sexual mutilation, in Banished knowledge - Facing childhood injuries. New York: Doubleday; 1990., p. 131.
[43] Supplément au Bulletin de l'Académie nationale de médecine, 2014, n° 6, séance du 10 juin 2004.