PSYCHOTECHNIQUE

Modern Art as Torture

Reconstructed “psychotechnical” torture chamber, used to break the enemies of Bolshevism in Spain

I have warned my children against reading, citing myself as evidence as to what that does to a man.

Since I am suspicious of good advice, especially my own, I read this by John Carter over the weekend:

To Shatter Men’s Souls

I have read a lot of gulag literature, the best of it being Kolyma by Varlam Shalamov. I cannot remember being struck so profoundly by the horrors of Bolshevik fanaticism than when I read “To Shatter Men’s Souls”.

Today I bring you a brief account to partner this insight into the minds of the vanguard of permanent progress.

The people who do this are the Good People, calling all men evil who refuse to destroy civilisation in the service of a vengeful fantasy.

Today we examine how modern art was used to break the men who stood against the enemies of civilisation.

This is a post about Psychotechnique: The Modern Art of Torture.

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“Why the Chekas of Barcelona were made" - Laurencic before the Council of War - Chacon’s 1939 account of the artist of psychotechnique

In 2003, historian Jose Milicua told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that he had discovered evidence that

Some Civil War jail cells were built like 3-D modern art paintings in order to torture prisoners.

The intention was not only to torment - but also to drive the prisoners insane. This was a new art and craft of normophobia. This was psychotechnique: the use of art and confinement to make sane men resent being alive.

As the New York Times recorded in 2003

Construction of the cells was begun in May 1938, primarily in Barcelona, the capital of Spanish-Catalan Modernism. Their principal designer, as documented in a book by R. L. Chacon called ''Why I Made the Cells in Barcelona,'' was a shifty character named Alfonso Laurencic.

Alongside routine starving, cold showering, hot irons on the testicles, prisoners were tormented by a series of “psychotechnical” torture chambers inspired by the pioneers of modern art.

Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere

Loud noises, bright lights, heat, and disorienting images combined with floors rendering movement and standing impossible without pain. Sloped surfaces prevented sleep.

Some prisoners were forced to watch the Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, which contains the shocking scene of a human eye being slit open with a razor.

A cutout design of a checa, made by Laurencic.

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AN ART TO BREAK THE MIND

The cells designed by Laurencic may have been used to torture dissident leftwingers - such as himself.

Laurencic, who claimed to be a painter and conductor in civilian life, created his so-called "coloured cells" as a contribution to the fight against General Franco's rightwing rebel forces.

They may also have been used to house members of other leftwing factions battling for power with the anarchist National Confederation of Workers, to which Laurencic belonged.

The torture facility pictured above, known as a “cheka” or “checa”, was one of two designed by Laurencic.

It was housed in a former convent at Vallmajor in Barcelona. These torture facilities were reportedly hidden from visiting foreign journalists.

The Church of Santa Maria Magdalena, Barcelona, where the Vallmajor checa was housed.

Laurencic designed two of these “houses of horror” - the other being in Zaragoza, according to this account.

The purpose of the torture chambers Laurencic designed was to make captives “sing” -

…and betray other alleged enemies of the Republic (later including members of the POUM and the FAI)

Reconstruction of two “Checa” cells originally located in a convent in Valencia

Laurencic was a member of the FAI himself. George Orwell fought with the POUM, documented in his romantic account of the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia¹. Laurencic seems to have first come as a prisoner himself, only to walk free following his service in designing psychotechnical torture chambers.

The testimony of Julio Degollada Castanys, a prisoner at Vallmajor,

…indicates, that [Laurencic] stopped being a detainee and that he later entered and left the Checa with complete freedom.

Reconstruction of a checa torture cabinet.

Laurencic, a French-speaking Austrian citizen and Anarchist, did not build the chambers of the cheka himself, but the account of one man he directed to do so survives.

Victor Esteban Ripaux, a Barcelona native,

…had been arrested on charges of practising White Relief, that is, financially helping supporters of nationalists

Ripaux said of his time at the Checa of Vallmajor

I do not remember any guard, but I do remember a certain Laurencic.

I was under his command, I as a bricklayer's pawn.

My job was to finish tearing down the Church choir and once itwas knocked down, Laurencic himself drew up the plans to make small cells

Images of cells at Vallmajor

How did this artist of torture redesign the choir, to make men sing not hymns but the names of their friends, that they might be broken in kind?

Our protagonist designed different compartments or punishment cells that would be used in Vallmajor to torture the prisoners.

One of these compartments was called ‘La Verbena‘ and inside there were several ‘cells – cabinet ’.

These basically consisted of three drawers 50 centimeters wide by 40 deep, with the ceiling consisting of a movable and height adjustable wooden board.

The prisoner who entered these drawers had little room to move since, attached to the bottom, was a 13-centimeter sloping ledge intended for the victim to be unable to lean on.

This ledge did not allow the inmate to sit completely on it. Also, the adjustable ceiling plate was placed so that the inmate had to remain shrunk and with his head bowed. In addition, the cell floor was concave in shape, preventing normal foot support.

The discordant art of the early Modern period had migrated from the galleries and into the the dark recesses of the project of progress.

Vallmajor “wardrobe cell”

On the inside of the doors, there was a wooden board that when closed, it entered the victim's legs, preventing him from changing his posture and forcing him to remain in a stress position.

At the top of these doors, two small windows were opened that were placed at the level of the prisoner's eyes and in which a very powerful electrical spotlight was placed.

In addition to the discomfort of the light for the eyes, the lamp also provided terrible heat. At head level, a powerful electric bell was placed that was constantly working and reproducing a terrible sound.

The prisoners who entered these closet boxes stayed for about three or four hours inside it. Few were the ones who stoically endured this torture, however, the vast majority ended up singing what the jailers said to avoid further suffering.

The garden of the former convent was the location of the psychotechnical torture chambers, which used the bizarre inspirations of modern art to inflict physical and psychological damage on the captives.

One of the psychotechnical cells was pictured during an October 1940 inspection by the then SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, seen here with the Spanish Nationalist Colonel Sagardia Ramos.

Note the bricks on the floor, and the disorienting pattern on the wall. Laurencic had intended for coloured lights to be shone on these patterns, to give the impression of movement and further disorient prisoners.

They were intentionally constructed in former places of Catholic worship.

The Military Information Service of the Second Spanish Republic settled its checas in previously confiscated monasteries and churches.

The profanation of these sacred places was compounded by the desecration of the ideals of art, when Laurenicic had the idea of applying the psychological effects of the form and color theorized by Kandinsky and other members of the Bauhaus to the inmates.

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THE TORTURE GARDEN

In addition to these psychotechnic torture chambers, Laurencic had erected a pulley to dunk prisoners head first into a well, alongside

…a patio he designed in the checa courtyard of Vallmajor. There was a a firing wall, in which a kind of grave had also been raised.

There, a large number of mock executions were carried out on almost all the prisoners who were locked up.

The objective was to create a climate of permanent panic, in addition to the dehumanization they had when they were locked in Launrencic’s macabre cells.

The execution drills were a psychological torture from which not all the prisoners managed to recover.

A tiny, deliberately cramped passageway was constructed beneath the Vallmajor checa, to permit the movement of prisoners between areas of the checa without being seen by the public.

Shortly after the war ended, members of the Francoist SIPM came across countless prison names engraved with pencil on the walls of this hallway, as if they had tried to immortalize their presence there.

Many of these names had a cross next to them. The reader can already imagine what it meant.

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THE RED DEATH

The sign of the Cross is significant for another reason. Outside the walls of the Checas, the Red Terror was raging. Churches were ransacked and burned.

Public desecration, Vich, Barcelona province 1936.

Javier Paredes wrote for Hispanidad in 2021 that in the Spanish Civil War,

13 bishops, 4,184 secular priests, 2,365 friars and 296 nuns were assassinated, which was equivalent to one in seven priests and one in five friars

Corpse of a Carmelite nun on display, Barcelona, 1936

As Robert Royal noted in 2011,

“Spain is one place where brutality against the Catholic Church in the 20th century was really quite extraordinary”

He estimates that there were around 6,000 Catholics killed in Spain during the civil conflict.

Entire seminaries and convents of women religious were “slaughtered,” Royal said, adding that in Madrid alone, there were over 1,100 priests killed.

Most of the priests and religious were killed in the first months of the Red Terror.

Sr. Feliza Gonzalez, a nun murdered in the Red Terror. 1936

Javier Paredes, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Alacala, said that the thousands of bishops, priests and religious killed do not include the numberless Spanish Catholics killed in the Red Terror.

To the previous data of the religious persecution that socialists and communists carried out should be added the high number —impossible to establish exactly — of so many Spanish Catholics who died victims of hatred against religion, in a persecution resembling that of the first Christians.

Paredes cites the "Fierce House",

the Madrid zoo where in 1936, Republicans threw the living to be devoured by bears and lions

This combination of ancient and modern methods of murder and cruelty is significant, as its recollection is a powerful corrective to the romanticised mythology of the 20th century.

This century, its myths and its religions of men, can be best summarised as an act of vengeance on the foundations of our civilisation by people who think they are the best of men.

Remember this when you hear the Good People denounce you as evil.

Remember what they think you deserve.

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Reconstruction of some of the psychotechnical torture chambers.

AN EXHIBITION OF TORTURE

The art world has at least tried to remember what most of the counterfeit culture industry would prefer you to forget. A Spanish artist has recreated some of the art of torture of the Red Terror, which was displayed across Spain between 2018 and 2020.

This installation is part of the work done by the artist Pedro G. Romero since the late 1990s on the psychotechnical chekas that Alphonse Laurencic built between 1937 and 1939 for the Spanish Republican Army’s Military Information Service (MIS).

The fact that these constructions were erected in holy places, churches and convents confiscated from the Catholic Church, clearly shows the antagonisms that interest the artist: aesthetics, knowledge and violence that, at one and the same time, appear as experimental art and religious profanation.

Some cells of the Checas were reconstructed in this installation. Titled

Las chekas psicotécnicas de Laurencic y la función del arte

-it displayed some details of the

“psychotechnical chekas of Laurencic and the function of art”.

A “cheka” or “checa” was

A facility used during the Spanish Civil War in the Republican zone to detain, interrogate, torture, summarily try and execute, outside the law, those suspected of sympathising with the rebel side.

The rebels, of course, was anyone who was not on the side of the Republicans and their particular brand of leftwing revolution.

These torture facilities were found in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, Lerida, Malaga and Murcia.

In the second image, the cruelly arranged blocks to prevent walking or comfortable standing can be glimpsed.

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PSYCHOTECHNIQUE

Psychotechique - the art and craft of psychological torture - was the creation of ideological fanatics who tormented anyone who betrayed the purity of their fantasies.

These are the heroes of the people who say “they shall not pass”, who today denounce as evil anyone who wishes to defend civilisation against them.

We who believe that art is the service of the beautiful, that beauty indicates the divine, are said to be evil by the children of this revolution.

For our defence of the natural order of life we deserve not only death, but the artful torments designed by twisted agents of revenge.

I am against the politics of permanent progress because I think it is an act of vengeance on our civilisation. It hates human nature and humanity, seeking to remould both in its own image.

In the trans cult we see the fusion of technological and sexual fetishism to destroy the biological basis of humanity.

Almost a century ago, what men called art was reconstructed as an ingenious form of total assault on the person, making man’s own body a prison, and his senses the pathways of pain.

Better than beauty is modern art, they say. Better than what was, says progress.

You had better believe it, they say.

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If you would like to fund my inevitable journey into a hellish torture chamber designed by my political enemies to drive me insane, please direct your money into my wife’s current account here:

I will continue with the explanation of the myth of “Liberal democracy” this week, and may bring you a rather unusual interview too. Pip pip!

1. Peter Kemp’s account of fighting on the side of Franco is called “Mine Were of Trouble.” He was not despised by his comrades in arms, unlike Orwell, and his adventures are those of a soldier and not a journalist. I think it important to read this account if you are interested in the period.