This steamrolling of facts, this false narrative, this hate-mongering is precisely the technique employed by Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. From Hitler’s election as chancellor in January 1933 to the anti-Jewish riot of Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, in November 1938, they raised anti-Semitic rhetoric from moderate to fanatical.
Hitler used unwarranted fear to rally Germany against the Jews. In a September 1942 speech to the Reichstag (the German parliament), he generated fear when he said—repeating a promise he had made in a prewar speech—“If world Jewry launches another war in order to destroy the Aryan nations of Europe, it will not be the Aryan nations that will be destroyed, but the Jews.”22
Jews did not start World War I. Not even close. Jews weren’t even present in many of the tinderboxes, such as the Austria-Hungary annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbian group the Black Hand was responsible for the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand, not Jews.23 Hitler employed demonstrably fake news, even though he constantly decried the “lugenpresse” (lying press).24 But the words came from a voice that was trusted by many Germans during a time of great economic need and suffering, and they were accepted as fact. The words enflamed many otherwise rational people and created hatred against a soft target. Mass hysteria allowed the execution of six million blameless souls.
To reap more latent hate, the Nazis threw Gypsies and homosexuals into the mix. Lest you think history does not repeat itself, Hitler employed the same tactics that were used against the Salem “witches” in the seventeenth century. We’ll be discussing that hysteria later; I mention it now because in August 1992, at a ceremony commemorating the three hundredth anniversary of the original “War on Women,” the Witch Trials Memorial in Salem was fittingly dedicated by one of the most famous survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.25
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Mass hysteria casts a long shadow of cognitive dissonance, a state of mind that gives people the ability to hold conflicting views without realizing or acknowledging it. This hypocrisy was exemplified in the 1970s by lunatic liberals who were fiercely pro-abortion but ferociously against the death penalty. Today these same rabid loudmouths who want to tear down the Confederate flag they find so offensive proudly parade the gay pride flag, which others find equally offensive.
These unhinged screamers also demand the removal of nativity scenes in town squares—even though they are American traditions—yet march to defend the “religion of peace” in whose name our citizens and homeland has been attacked over and over since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It goes back long before that, if you count the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s, in which Muslim pirates seized American merchant ships. The aggressively liberated women who participate in these marches conveniently ignore that in many of the nations dominated by this faith, women are shrouded, denied education, not permitted to drive or be in the company of men who are not their husbands, and are treated like second-class citizens. Gays are thrown off rooftops to their deaths in countries where this religion dominates.
More recently, you may recall an infamous communications professor, a rabble-rouser at the University of Missouri who, while participating in a racial protest—an issue of rights—was so caught up in her own tunnel vision, her own grandeur, her own hysteria, that when she was approached by a student journalist making a film, the only thing she could think to do was yell, “I need some muscle over here!”26 She shut down his First Amendment rights while protesting for other rights.
There is a difference between what used to be a college education and what it is today, which is merely college attendance for the purpose of forming like-minded tribes. The danger in that is obvious, but I’ll paraphrase the Benjamin Franklin character in the wonderful musical 1776, anyway. He defended the legality of revolution by saying it’s always legal in the first person, as in “our” revolution, but not in the third person, as in “their” revolution. The same is true of free speech on college campuses.
Cognitive dissonance is the lubricant that greases the gears of mass hysteria.
The mainstream media, the megaphones of the left, have embraced one of the basic precepts of brainwashing, articulated by Goebbels himself, who said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”27
Mass hysteria can be triggered by a mistaken interpretation of reality, as in West’s novel. It can be launched by destructive design, like the terroristic Occupy movements of 2011. It can be opportunistic, like the looting that masqueraded as racial indignation after the August 2014 shooting of African American Michael Brown by white officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.28 Or it can be driven entirely by paid hooligans, as was the case in Paris in 1795 and Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, the latter incident perpetrated by AntiFA barbarians, financed by George Soros.29
No matter how mob violence comes about, it’s an ugly aspect of the human condition. It is generally mindless and formless, failing to distinguish between legitimate enemies and incidental victims—which differentiates it from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which we’ll be talking about more in the next chapter.
Many of you know I am a dog lover. In particular, I am devoted to my canine companion, Teddy, who is with me in the studio, at dinner, in my car, on my boat, when I’m shopping, on my regular walks through my neighborhood—you get the picture. Teddy may nip at my sound engineer’s sneakers from time to time, but he is generally peaceful. I’ll say that another way: if all humans were as even-tempered as Teddy, the world would be a very serene, loving place.
But people are not like Teddy. This applies in particular to mass hysteria. Animal behaviorists have identified a phenomenon called “terrier frenzy.” The phenomenon supposedly applies specifically to Boston terriers, but I have seen it in Jack Russells and other terriers as well. In short, an outside stimulus causes the excitable breed to go a little nuts.
In time, the frenzy burns itself off. But if there are two terriers, the actions of the first will trigger a similar response in the second. The frenzy of the second will reignite the first and typically send that dog into an even greater frenzy. And so it goes until the two of them have completely lost control. God help you if there are three terriers.
Mass hysteria is like that. It’s like an old joke, updated: a hippie, a Millennial, and Hillary Clinton walk into a bar at Trump Tower…
I do not mention Hillary Clinton simply because she’s a moderate who has been converted to progressivism, because she was a purveyor of Goebbels-level lies, or because despite those two “surefire” techniques the voters of America sanely rejected her as the forty-fifth president of the United States. The truth is—and the political correctness crowds better avert their eyes and close their minds a little tighter here—women are often prominent in news stories about what we call hysteria, whether perpetrators, victims, or both. The word hysteria itself derives from the Greek word for womb, hysterikos—whence also hysterectomy.30
Until World War I, hysteria as a psychoanalytical diagnosis was seen as a women’s disorder. That changed when returning soldiers exhibited what was then called “war neurosis” and “shell shock.”31 These conditions resulted from the big artillery battles that hammered entrenched soldiers with unending concussive noise and instability of the ground and walls, resulting in the inability to sleep. Today we call the aftereffects of combat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The then all-male soldiery with this condition demonstrated overlapping symptoms with the hysteria exhibited predominantly by women.
History is littered with examples of exclusively female hysteria. During the Middle Ages, entire convents fell prey to hysteria, including a sixteenth-century outbreak of meowing nuns in France, and German sisters suddenly biting each other.32 In 1894, sixty women at a Montreal seminary developed seizures.33 In 2012, more than a dozen girls in Le Roy, New York, simultaneously began twitching, spasming, a
nd exhibiting identical vocal tics.34 The psychological waters got muddied when the environmental movement became involved, with activist Erin Brockovich blaming chemicals released during a 1970 train derailment for an increased incidence of cancer. After that, biology was no longer the cause of women’s problems. It was evil capitalists in corporate America.
In the Brockovich matter, the truth was much simpler, as it usually is. Once neurologists examined the girls, they concluded that the outbreak was psychological, not physical. It wasn’t the result of a toxic spill, but in fact mass hysteria.35 The problem with that, of course, is that there’s no one to blame but yourself. No one to sue.
No boogeyman to make you a victim.
A more recent example of female mass hysteria was the hundreds of thousands of women who felt compelled to march and stomp their feet just one day—one day!—after President Trump had been sworn into office. What were these useful idiots marching against? They couldn’t have been marching against his policies… he hadn’t enacted any!
No, they weren’t marching against any real injustice. They were marching based upon their inclinations and the dictates of their passions. And they were dissonant, dare I say crazy inclinations and passions at that, since who in their right minds could protest what I have been saying for decades are the cornerstones of the American identity: borders, language, and culture? But these women were not in their right minds. They had been told Donald Trump would oppress them and they were primed and willing to believe everything they were told. They were wrong. As I write this, they are wrong. But they’re still hammering the same fantasies.
This was modern-day mass hysteria. The number of women marching out of true conviction was minuscule. These women felt compelled by their peers, their coworkers, and their so-called friends to be part of the crowd, part of the mob, to—as the rock group Rush sings—“Be cool or be cast out.”
We’re going to be returning to this foundational idea of women and hysteria, because history shows that mass panic and groupthink can take root more easily among them. And before any of you says this is sexism, it isn’t. It’s biology. It’s the unique capacity of a woman to mother and nurture.
Remember the day care scare of the 1980s, when every child care operation seemed to have a molester on staff? Who do you think was getting the kids to say they had been touched in a bad way? The fathers? No. As investigation after investigation proved, it was the mothers who needed their kids to be “special” in some way—even if that way was victimhood. Like the girls in Salem who needed attention and parental approval, their kids realized that mommy wouldn’t love them unless they said they had been touched inappropriately. As a result, people lost their jobs and had horrible stains on their records. And most of them were innocent.
Again, I am not saying, as Freud once did, that mass hysteria is solely a female condition. He rooted that belief in Verführungstheorie, in seduction theory,36 which suggested repressed memories of sexual abuse were responsible for hysteria. Obviously, women would be the recipients of those unwanted attentions.
However, hundreds of men in 1967 Singapore became convinced there had been an outbreak of koro, that their penises were withdrawing into their bodies. They flooded hospitals seeking help. Some even tied pieces of string around their genitals so they could constantly pull their penises back out should they so recede.37
It was just an instance of mind over matter, of mass hysteria in the form of hypochondria. This reflected the research conducted at the end of the nineteenth century by the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who employed hypnosis to study hysteria in both men and women. He proved that thoughts alone could result in stigmata and other physical symptoms.38 But at least the penis-challenged men weren’t marching with penis hats. At least they weren’t attacking cultural institutions. At least they weren’t being manipulated by powers greater than themselves. Even the profit-minded hospitals in Singapore at the time weren’t interested in starting a Great Koro Scare.
HYSTERIA, VICTIMHOOD, AND TRUE TRAUMA
Fiction, myth, and folklore similarly inform the history of hysteria in its earliest expressions, a mixture of rage and despair, resulting in irrational fits. The Sumerian saga The Epic of Gilgamesh dates to roughly 2500 B.C. and is widely considered to be mankind’s earliest surviving work of fiction. In it, the titular hero, a great leader and demigod, loses his dear friend Enkidu to disease. Gilgamesh reacts by running wild, driven to mayhem by the thought of his own mortality. What we now call hysteria ensues.
In 1597, William Shakespeare described PTSD in Romeo and Juliet, act 1, scene 4, when Mercutio says, of soldiers, “[H]e starts and wakes, / And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two, / And sleeps again.” In Mary Shelley’s 1817 novel, Frankenstein, the response of scientist Victor Frankenstein to the destructiveness of his monster is increasing hysteria. Victor himself calls his condition “enthusiastic madness,” as if well-intentioned zeal can atone for a trail of death.
So, the etymology aside, women and men are both susceptible to mass hysteria. Today, in pursuit of “likes” for their cell phone videos posted on the Internet, mass hysterics have added the terrorist tactics of fire and destruction to what were once verbal protests, sit-ins, peaceful marches, and the like. Unable to persuade with their flawed arguments, they seek to cause fear using flamethrowers, tossing soda cans filled with concrete, hurling bottles of urine, and of course planting bombs and firing guns. The left is taking up arms, despite their desire to curb the reach and power of the National Rifle Association.
Mass hysteria has often changed the course of history, rarely for the better. To understand the danger it poses now, we must look back to see how mass hysteria was spawned, the damage it caused, and how it was eventually dissipated. Ultimately, the American system is a masterpiece of self-policing and self-correction. After the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 or the 1972 break-in at the Watergate hotel and office complex, we did not require an outside tribunal to come in and set things right, as Germany did at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. We were able to rely on our national conscience, enlightened by a free, objective, and independent press.
That entire system—our system—is now at risk, and the drift toward disaster must be corrected. The mass hysteria of special interests, political correctness, Internet memes, and social media tropes must be identified as the partisan, anti-American force it is. It must be called out and stopped, if our republic is to survive.
Mass hysteria is not a new phenomenon. The PC-obsessed universities of today were actually born in the fifteenth century, when unpopular religious and political beliefs were often targeted. The impetus for Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492 was in part the persecution he suffered for his religious beliefs. The New World he opened was equally hostile to outsiders. In seventeenth-century New England, rival religious factions vied for power by labeling powerless, often foreign women as pawns and then executing the “witches.” Then they were burned at the stake. Today, victims are destroyed in Internet “flame wars.”
4.
FROM PLYMOUTH ROCK TO CITY HALL
The Seeds and Blossoms of Mass Hysteria
Context matters. That’s something the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) who spread mass hysteria for this or against that either don’t understand or choose to ignore. After all, if you admit that Confederates and their descendants are Americans with rights, you can’t take it upon yourself to climb a flagpole and rip down the Stars and Bars because it offends you. Until the reign of Barack Obama, our nation did not work that way.
That’s not even the most egregious example of misguided “justice.” In July 2016, a Yale University maintenance worker decided to smash a stained-glass window with a broom handle. Exhibiting a frightening lack of self-control and an equally frightening level of self-interest, he didn’t care whether anyone would be hurt by the falling glass: he just was tired of looking at the window, which depicted a scene of two slaves carrying bales of cotton.
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br /> Yale rightly fired him and pressed charges… and then rehired him and dropped the charges after SJWs throughout the nation’s college campuses protested.1 And now this violent man is again walking among students. That’s context.
Before we talk about Christopher Columbus per se—before anyone talks about any explorer or scientist, artist, or politician—we need to understand the subject’s motivation, background, and environment. Again, as a novelist, I can tell you that one of the greatest jokes of modern sociopolitical propaganda is that the kind of basic detail every reader demands in fiction, such as “Why is that sea captain chasing that white whale?” or “Why is Dorothy so unhappy in Kansas?”, somehow is not required to be present in real life, in the memes and tropes and mantras of the left and right. In other words, fiction has to be more real than reality. That’s not surprising: if the mainstream media had looked carefully and objectively at the backstory of Barack and Michelle Obama, the Obamas never would have lived in the White House. If we give Columbus the courtesy due any historical subject, it would not be possible to manipulate gullible SJWs into upending his statue—or that of Robert E. Lee or anyone else.
As anyone who went to school before the PC police started scrubbing the curricula of anything that some minority might find offensive would know, Columbus sailed from Spain. That nation has always been a hotbed of religious turmoil. In the eleventh century, more than half of Spain, the southern portion, was under Muslim rule and known as the Caliphate of Cordoba. Spain’s national hero, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar—popularly known as El Cid, “The Lord”—participated in the Reconquista, the military retaking of those regions under Muslim rule. The task took more than four hundred years but was completed at last in January 1492. Spain was once again a Catholic nation, both wholly and holy.2
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