bring me up, they dragged me up, until the age of eight or nine, and Uncle Georg had to step in and gradually undo the almost total havoc they had wrought. He went to immense pains, I told Gambetti, to turn my totally chaotic mind into one that was acceptable and receptive. My parents believed that they were bringing me up, but they actually destroyed me, just as they destroyed my brother and my sisters. Instead of talking about bringing me up, they should have talked about bringing me down. Thanks to their upbringing, which was purely and simply a process of destruction, as I have said, everything in my mind was mutilated beyond recognition, to borrow a phrase that is normally used in a different context. In their brutal Catholic National Socialist way they had stirred things around in my young mind and created total confusion, so that it took Uncle Georg just as long to raise order out of my mental chaos as it had taken them to create the chaos. Instead of educating us, our parents actually mutilated our minds. Being Catholics first and foremost, I told Gambetti, they ruined our minds with their appalling Catholic methods. The Catholic Church can do unimaginable harm to a child’s mind if the parents are Catholic and adhere more or less automatically to the Catholic religion. To say that we had a Catholic upbringing amounts to saying that we were utterly destroyed, Gambetti. Catholicism is the supreme annihilator of the child’s soul, the supreme inspirer of terror, the supreme destroyer of character. That’s the truth. Untold millions owe it to the Catholic Church that they have been utterly destroyed, that their lives have been ruined, their nature denaturized. The Catholic Church has the destruction of the human personality on its conscience — that’s the truth. For the Catholic Church won’t tolerate any human being other than the Catholic human being. Its unswerving aim is to turn human beings into Catholics, mindless creatures who’ve forgotten how to think for themselves and betrayed independence of thought to the Catholic religion — that’s the truth, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. We country children always delighted in Catholic ritual, which at first seemed like a fairy tale, Gambetti, undoubtedly the most beautiful we knew. And for the grown-ups it was a lifelong spectacle, the only one they knew. But the fairy tale and the spectacle have between them perverted and destroyed all that’s natural in human beings. Using the fairy tale for children and the spectacle for adults, the Catholic Church pursues a single aim, the total seduction of all who fall into its clutches. It uses the fairy tale and the spectacle to bend them to its will, to extinguish them as human beings, to turn them into unthinking Catholics who have no will of their own and whom it insolently calls the faithful. The Catholic faith, like all faiths, is a perversion of nature, a sickness to which millions succumb quite deliberately because it’s their only salvation, the salvation of the weak, who are quite incapable of independent thought and, having no minds of their own, need a higher mind to think for them. Catholics allow the Church to think for them and consequently act for them, because this makes their lives easier and they’re convinced they can’t do otherwise. And the Catholic mind of the Catholic Church has a terrible way of thinking, I told Gambetti, wholly self-serving and inimical to human nature, conducive only to its own ends and its own glory. No other state in Europe calls itself a Catholic state, I told Gambetti, or allows the Catholic mind to do its thinking, and the results are plain to see. In Austria there are only Catholics, no human beings with free and independent minds. In Austria the Catholic mind does all the thinking. Nothing has been changed by the various political turnarounds of recent years: in Austria even the socialists allow the Catholic mind to do their thinking for them, as they haven’t developed a socialist mind. Everywhere we’re confronted by the Catholic spirit, which has admittedly given us hundreds and thousands of Catholic works of art but destroyed the spirit of freedom and independence, the only natural spirit. What use are these works of art, these Catholic churches and palaces, when for centuries we’ve had no minds of our own? I asked Gambetti. Our nation suffers from chronic mental debility, I told Gambetti, which the Church has exploited more than in any other European country, even more than in Germany, where a degree of intellectual freedom and self-sufficiency still survives. In our country the Catholic Church has never had any difficulty in bringing the necessary pressure to bear and forcing the Austrian people, and hence the Austrian state, into total submission. Only in recent decades have there been hints of emancipation from Catholic dominion, from the monstrous pressure of the Church, from the age-old stranglehold of Catholicism. Only recently has it become possible to discern, here and there, the tentative emergence of a kind of thinking and philosophizing that owes nothing to Catholicism, I told Gambetti. Only in recent decades have a few Austrian minds begun to think independently, to use their Austrian heads, not just their Catholic heads. Catholicism is to blame for the fact that for so many centuries Austria had no philosophers, no philosophical thought, no philosophy. It’s fair to say that in the last thousand years all thought has been ruthlessly suppressed by the Catholic Church. And the nation has made life easy for itself under the aegis of the Catholic mind, which has always done its thinking for it, on a proxy basis and in its own way, I told Gambetti. In the last thousand years Catholicism and the Habsburgs have had a devastating effect, a lethal effect, on the nation’s spirit, as all the evidence shows. In these thousand years, one can say, Catholicism extirpated thought and ushered in an efflorescence of music. The mind having been suppressed for centuries, Austria became the land of music. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Catholicism, I told Gambetti, we are now a thoroughly musical people. Having been driven out of our minds by Catholicism, we have allowed music to flourish. True, this has given us Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, I said, yet I can’t applaud the fact that we have Mozart but have lost our minds, that we have Haydn but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Schubert but have become more or less brainless. No other country, I told Gambetti, has allowed the Catholic Church to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by Catholicism. We have no Montaigne, no Descartes, no Voltaire, I told Gambetti, only monkish and aristocratic poetasters with their Catholic inanities. In recent years, I told Gambetti, we’ve seen the beginnings of a change, but it’ll take centuries, not just decades, to repair the intellectual depredations of Catholicism. If they can be repaired. Our nation has allowed itself to be exploited more than any other by the Catholic Church. For nearly a thousand years! It will be hard put to break free from the Catholic stranglehold, from the talons of the Church. Superficial and amateurish revolutions won’t do any good, I told Gambetti, as we see from the experience of other European countries. We can be saved only by a fundamental and radical revolution, starting with the total destruction and demolition of everything,