It's absolutely ridiculous that they couldn't identify the very obvious balance in how you teach kids about the body and their developing sexuality. Your job is to teach them that their bodies are normal, touching yourself is normal, they have a right to say "no" to other people's touch, and other people also have that right and need respect. You're not supposed to be "encouraging" anything, just affirming what's there and teaching consent.

In regards to your discussion about politically-motivated child abuse, you can also see this in right-wing parents who are otherwise fairly decent parents but feel compelled to punish their children if they express curiosity/exploration of LGBTQ identities. I watched a long video essay on Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt (weird mormon influencer child abuse case) that had an account of right-wing parents being told that they *had* to punish their daughter for googling a quiz to find out if she was gay or not, and the parents seemed upset about it because they didn't feel like she'd done anything worthy of punishment (their rationale being "she's such a good girl, I'm sure she's just Confused") and had only asked for advice because they were just worried about what their response should be. Only to be told they have to Perform right-wing xtian ideology by punishing her even when they didn't want to. It's kind of wild and scary to think about just how much harm is done to the most vulnerable people in society purely for the sake of not falling out of your in-group.

I hope the phrase "politically motivated child abuse" is as prevalent in the textbooks of future generations as the phrase "civil rights" was in mine. Between how right-wingers treat queer kids and how they homeschool in general, it can be pointed to as one of the singular worst evils in modern America today.

"Marcelle died in 2001." Jesus fucking christ.

Oh cool, more manmade horrors beyond comprehension

oh my god Marko's story literally caused me to tear up. I was afraid that this series was going to involve some Josef Fritzl-level shit, but this is worse. this is _way_ worse. those poor guys.

Oh boy, _just_ what I needed to focus on scrubbing the _hell_ out of some dishes! edit: history without discomfort is propaganda, _but still._ 2001. jesus on a gas-powered pogo stick. what the _fuck,_ humanity.

I think it's super valuable to analyze our movement, throughout it's history, with all the good, bad and the ugly included. It's not always easy to listen to, but it's always enlightening. I consider this to be the best historical, and only acceptable, TRUE true crime podcast available online. You bastards are awesome!

I gasped when he said that Marcel died in 2001. I can’t believe how long this abuse went on.

I really hope we get a palate cleanser episode next week after this fucking nightmare fuel.

Robert I've been able to make it through all of your episodes except this one. You are absolutely right about this being the darkest episode.

A comment in the last episode said that hearing about the Holocaust was preferable to this topic, and honestly. I’m inclined to agree

Im german and just found out about this through you guys. holy fuck how have i never heard of all this shit before

I weep for the day when this title turns out to be untrue :(

It was fascinating that you mentioned To Train Up a Child. I was ready thinking of that before you brought it up. My mom was more a fan of James Dobson ("Dare to Discipline"), but it was a pretty similar idea. I think she was mean and found a scholarly sounding writer to support it, but my dad seemed different. He seemed to really want what was best for me, and had been convinced that only what I would call child abuse could shape me into an adult of good character.

Madness. But yeah, I can definitely see how not touching a generation of kids leads to this kind of nonsense.

Wow, this is. Jesus christ this does not have a single moment that could be called a soft landing

Apart from the harrowing story of Marco the thing that I keep thinking of is those parents who abused their children because they really thought it would make the world better or those who were so disappointed that they couldn't push themselves to do it. It's so awful.

I cried listening to this on the way into work this morning...thanks Robert.

Hey, Robert. I appreciate your program.

It's insane how much we know about all the terrible things that happened in Germany during WW2 but I personally knew very little about all these things happening to children after the war and almost all the way up to today.

Great episode! Difficult, but important, to hear. Once again people with horrible self-serving ideas spread them without checking for evidence or support. Keep fighting for a better future! Call out the cruelty where ever you see it.

You guys should seriously do a video on the grift of tarot reading specifically, but more broadly, The scam astrology in general. I imagine there are SO many characters in that saga that would fit in perfectly with your podcast

This episode is definitely the heaviest one for me

Awww man, no violence at the beginning?

Really appreciate the conversation at the end (and throughout.)

Thank you for ending this episode the way you did. We needed a postive palette cleanser.

I'm at 29 minutes and I don't know if Robert will bring this up, but I remember a group from about 30 years ago called Iriadamant, who claimed to live like native Americans and would move around Europe wherever they were accepted. They lived in Finland (my home country) for about two years before they were kicked out for accusations of... well, you know... They weren't Germans though. They were mostly French and Belgian, as far as I know. They were kind of a typical cult in some ways, because their leader was actually living in Helsinki in a hotel, while the rest were living in miserable conditions in Lappland.

Wow there's just not a great point in this podcast where you wanna be listening to it in a silent room inside a Midwestern machine shop with people around.

This episode made me very pro-bricking

You beat me. I can not listen to anymore. See y'all on the next one.

The weird B is a double S.

This whole episode was incredibly enlightening, and the passages about politically motivated child abuse and having your ideology grounded in yourself, your morals, first and foremost really crystalised some concepts I'd been gnawing on for awhile. This was hard to get through, and Marko, Marcel and Sven's story in particular made me cry, but I really do think it's one of your bests. Also, Margeret is a great guest :)

I hope "phalanx-maxxing" enters the lexicon

The circle of abuse thing is terrifying. The only pedo I've ever known (crime discovered in his suicide note) was himself a victim. Also horrifying is the 1% figure. I know hundreds of people. The notion that several of them may be predators is deeply disturbing.

I got uhhhh 3 and a bit minutes in and uttered a deathly groan when Robert said "a 3 year old..." and didn't stop until I ran out of oxygen in my lungs

20:38 dialectical materialism is **precisely** about meeting people where they are! To each according to their needs means to each according to their needs! It also means precisely the same as from each according to their abilities!

I will say I think some of the German parents in the 70s (maybe the ones who just told a bunch of sex jokes despite being uncomfortable with them?) were less subsumed by ideology and dealing with a lack of personal moral identity, and more ... New parents who were very confused and afraid of doing the wrong thing? Being a new parent is really intimidating, and it's not realistic to think you'll go into it knowing exactly what to do all the time, or how to raise kids in a way that's healthy for them. In fact, it's generally good to be open to advice on these things, or to be willing to be wrong or learn new things. So it's normal for a lot of parents to read about child development or parenting techniques from people who have academically, professionally studied children and human development and may have valuable insights on those things. If a lot of those people are claiming that it's good for children to be (at least) exposed to sexual stuff by their parents, then just like parents in the American religious right who don't like beating their children but think they have to because it's good for them, German parents during this time might have thought, "I don't enjoy doing this, but these experts are telling me it's healthy and important, and I don't know enough to push back on that... So maybe?" That doesn't excuse much of anything, but I think it's less of a deep political identity issue, and more of just a "people want/need and seek advice sometimes, and it's important to make sure the people we as a society position as 'experts' to get guidance from, are actually trustworthy sources of information, and that the information they give is as empirically backed up and/or transparently peer-reviewed as possible." (And at the risk of "trying to change people/make people better," I think if we could give people the knowledge/tools to be more scientifically literate and to be better critical thinkers, that would help, too.)

Yep. This is really fucking dark. 2001. Jesus.

I love yall

"Gen Z's gonna save us!" Listen man, as an elder millennial/last-class gen X depending on how you delineate the boundary, I heard no end to how "Your generation is the one that's going to change everything!" in school. This slimy rhetoric has been around F O R E V E R.

The amount of internal screaming I am doing while listening to this…

Not only was this the most disturbing episode I've heard, but Male Fantasies, despite being a great read, is also one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. I'm only 286 pages in but I'm taking a little break due to how sickeningly prescient it reads.

I remember reading about this. Jeez....

Sort of a spoiler now but there's this 2005 Danish film called Accused (Anklaget) by director Jacob Thuesen, which is a lot like the also danish "Th Hunt" (Jakten) film from 2012, starred by Mads Mikkelsen, direction by Thomas Vinterberg.

Ugh...this is so hard to hear. But here I am.

I couldnt make it even 20 mins in. Just vile stuff my god

Re: the folly of remaking people - I dunno, I feel like we kind of need to. But that's also just to say that a lot of the fundamental lessons we learn from society are completely and utterly fucked. Imo we need to be teaching people compassion, optimism, and coexistence, and.... well, the concept of hope is so central to *my* being that that does seem like a fundamental changing of a lot of folks' identities.

The end tag where you explain how you should have hard lines like "dont kill children or massacre civilians" was incredibly valuable; specially with the current of popular leftist content creators steering their audiences today. Honestly, I disagree with your differentation between killing the Russian Tzar's kids and Nat Turner killing the kids he did; it really just seems like you were toeing a line just to avoid p****ing off certain people in your in-group (or your network actually) I'm pro-palestine and STILL managed to draw a hardline when other leftists pointed to the massacre of civilians on Oct 7th and called that "liberation struggle" and I gotta be honest; I think it REALLY doesn't help when creators like you still make analytical exceptions because "its not our right to judge." Yes it is. It's ALWAYS your right to judge when kids and civilians are massacred and you shouldn't fold or turn into a doormat on that point because of white guilt.

Did Marco ever reunite with his parents?

Was there no legal age of consent at this time in Germany? Was this all legal, or did just no one care that it violated laws?

I'd love fo hear more about the new left movement. Wretched people.

This is not an easy listen

: I said this in the previous episode, but it's really amazing how an ideological obsession with vibes consistently create the conditions necessary to generate the worst sort of crimes humanity can commit. I quite frankly do not understand how these people can identify as leftist, let alone communist, while simultaneously ignoring the fundamental elements of dialectical materialism in their analysis of revolutionary life. The standards with which these people supposedly meet the criteria of being revleft in this context are so abstract and so divorced from economic realities that you can't argue they were actively fighting against fascism during this period of German history. Rather, they were fighting the spectre of fascism, which only led to the perversion of the spectre of communism - something that if Marx were to witness, he'd probably light his brandy on fire and throw it into the nearest public office he could find.

im gonna fucking puke

I wouldn't call 1% of the population a small number, in the case of Germany that's over 800000 people

I feel like the "uses the movement as a way to promote pedorastry" also uncomfortably cropped up in the fantasy and sci-fi communities of the 60s - 80s. Obviously not all of the works in that time advocated that sort of thing, but I feel like it gave a convenient cover for authors to advocate the pros of incest and/or pedophilia by lmlumping it in with pro-LGTBQA+ messages. Heck, you could do an entire episode just on Marion Zimmer Bradley and her lover, Walter Breen, doing just that.

A wise man once said this: Urge to kill... RISING

Citing Jan Fleischhauer. Immediate L.

Nestor Makhno was a bastard?? Say it ain't so!

1:00:00 - Anarchy is not about urinating on a rug that ties the room together. Anarchy IS communism which is the absence of monetary system of debt and governmental control. Ur-utopia, a society ruled by philosophers. In personal life, it is Zen manifest.

1:05:00 "if I thought anarchy meant that, I wouldn't be an anarchist!" exactly! That's why you're not a communist! Because you THINK it means "authoritarianism" and pig iron and dead sparrows and famines and megadeaths and stuff like that! If I thought communism meant those things, I wouldn't be a communist either! But it doesn't have to! People just need to make the right connections! "To each according to their needs" means "to each according to their needs"! It also means "from each according to their abilities"! What people NEED is not to be killed! What people HAVE is the ability not to kill! Wow! Looks like we can solve two problems at once! We can solve one problem by solving another problem! We start by meeting people's needs! Not by trying to change them! We get people to "change" BY meeting their needs! Wow! What a concept! Could even be "revolutionary"! 🙄🙄🙄

Love from a HunterAvalone and Vaush fan

I'll be honest, this episode sucks to listen to, and not cause Robert did a shitty job reading the script...

i'm going to be honest, this episode was kind of a disappointment. you certainly did good research into these events and social movements, there were things i was unaware of here! but at the same time, your analysis was muddled and kind of bad; you repeatedly vacillated between denouncing and praising the idea of politically radical pedagogy, and while (in the case of this german pedophilic nonsense) there are examples in which it is obviously and unambiguously bad, you somewhat failed to demonstrate why the nebulously-defined "anti-authoritarian" pedagogy which you praise is somehow different and more virtuous than other forms of radical educational theories, especially since (by your own admission!) many of these ideas were produced by the same environments and people as produced these pedophilic ideas you discuss in this video! on some level, i think this is a problem with anarchism. yes, if your ideology leads you to some horrific conclusion, that is a sign that your ideology is very bad (as was the case with these german radicals!), but ultimately your ideological positions should serve to provide a system for examining society and making decisions about how to change it. if you are deciding each instance of something as it comes, you do not have an ideological position, you have a collection of nebulous vibes and no real path to offer society. the marxist-leninists, for all their flaws, will at least tell you why they believe what they believe, and how they arrived at those conclusions. their methods and ideas can be examined and critiqued because their ideas follow a logical form, there is an underlying reason to them. meanwhile, the anarchists can only gesture vaguely at the spectre of "authoritarianism" and make an appeal to nature. there is no substantive critique to be made of the anarchism which some espouse, because there is no substantive anarchism to be critiqued. (to be fair, this is not a problem that is unique to anarchists, or one which all anarchists suffer from. we all know the overly enthusiastic "marxist-leninist" who thinks that baristas are secretly bourgeois, and i have a very well-read anarchist friend with whom i have had several wonderful conversations about political theory! this is simply an ideological failing that anarchists are more prone to than many others.) finally, one could argue that it was a lack of ideological rigor, not an overabundance of it, that led to these incidents in germany. marxists are not in some competition to be "the most revolutionary!", because that is not how marxism works. it is worth remembering that we are discussing *west* german political radicalism! this is not the german left taken as a whole, but in many respects it is merely the left of the german right wing!

Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? This is one of the worst verbal tics that I hear in far too much media. Interestingly it appears more often amongst communistic media. I don’t know what this means, but I don’t like it.