Hounded in Germany, philosopher-inexile Friedrich Haller escapes the leash in Thailand.

The German philosopher Friedrich Haller’s latest philosophical work, “Science and State in the Western World as Late Forms of Theological Madness” (2008) is currently being translated into English and is due for publication later this year. In this article he outlines what prompts him to spend most of the year in Thailand and other Asian countries, in self-imposed exile from his native Germany.

In his book “It’s a Doggy-dog World” Douglas Michaels refers to the story, “Dogs”, by Steve Hands (TTO issue July 09), as follows:

“It’s about a Philippine fisherman who cooks his dogs in front of an idealistic foreigner when she tries to save them, and it ends with him telling her, ‘Back off bitch. These are my dogs. My dogs.’
What he really means is ‘It’s my country,’ which is exactly what my lawyer said to me when I got released from prison (in Cambodia) after he won my case in court. The American government had been involved in my investigation and set-up, and that pissed him off. He really didn’t believe America had any right to tell him or his people how they should conduct themselves in his country.

Which is cool.

But it also goes to show that the law in any country seems to just turn us into judicial dogs.
In Germany it is the genuine philosopher who is treated like a dog. Douglas Michaels complains about the US that “over here every time I serve someone a conversational ping pong ball, they just walk away with it or stomp on it or feed it to their fucking dog.” I’ve had the same experience – and probably worse – in Germany, where giving evidence of being alive is the greatest offence you can commit in the “Volk der Dichter and Denker”, followed by the capability to adequately judge reality. All ‘poets and thinkers’ have died from strangulation – the great Nietzsche is the most striking example. Even today the finest soul Germany has ever produced is not acknowledged as such – any German clerical buffoon gets a street named after him, yet you can scarcely find a Nietzsche Street bigger than an alley.

In Germany, with a total misunderstanding of man’s nature, ‘national laws’ are made on the basis of a perverse religion, which leads to the numbing of life and the annihilation of men. Plato’s doctrine of ideas despises men: no one can cope with the idea of man; thus the man we encounter is worthless; he is deficient; one cannot love him, one can only love the ideal. He who loves God must hate Men. The so-called philosopher despises men, and despises himself. He thinks it would be better to be dead – rather, never to have been born.

A state that deprives a father of his children, on the basis of a deeply man-despising religion like the Christian with its whorevenerating destructive purpose, establishes an anti-natural perversion in the human species. To take a father’s children away was the most infamous act that the ancients could conceive of. But this is common in Germany’s judicial system: it happened to me and to many hundreds of thousands of men, most of whom additionally become impoverished through monthly payments and live like slaves in complete sexual deprivation.
The Roman historian Tacitus in “De Germania” mentions a bizarre German tribe, which differs through the perversity “Quod femina dominator: in tantum non modo a libertate, sed etiam a servitude degerant”. (Tacitus, De Germania, Chapter 45. “that the woman has the power, so that they lose not only the sense for freedom, but also for slavery.”) – similar, by the way, to the Jews who oppose all other mortals (Tacitus, Historiae V, 4 and 5).

In Asia, on the contrary, a philosopher is recognized and honored: people are interested and listen – there is no fighting over imaginative “truth”, and a good-hearted man is taken care of by a natural woman unspoiled by crap Western ideas.

And Thailand is better off than the other countries of the East because it still manages to preserve some Buddhist culture – it hasn’t been uprooted by Americanization or from having some weird religion forced upon it. It’s an excellent place to study human nature – you encounter many unusual people who have fled Western countries they could no longer stand, and who are acquainted with the ultimate boredom of their fatal homeland.
Nature – the philosopher’s best friend – and climate are generous here year-round, with a huge variety of food and fruit. It is a Tusculanum for those who wish to age in good health while living in peace among friendly people – not aging while ailing in a climate of mutual hatred, as is typical of the West. Dialogue is welcomed, not rejected, and not only the opinion of the herd is admitted in discussion, but also the views of experienced and advanced individuals who have the right to teach the unaware and misled not for their own but for society’s sake.
Traversing the Orient, new suns may reach the Western heart of darkness!