Part Two: A Madhouse Against the Nazis: the Story of François Tosquelles and Saint-Albans
01:11:02 Share

In Mississippi, Yazoo Clay keeps secrets. 7,000 bodies out there or more. A forgotten asylum cemetery. It was my family's mystery. Shame, guilt, propriety. Something keeps it all buried deep until it's not. I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Under Yazoo Clay. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that actually comes out twice a week, and yet I've been introducing it as a weekly podcast for however long, because in my head, two episodes is one episode, because I do it by weeks, and that's the way that my brain is able to handle it. My name is Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Alison Raskin. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing on our second episode of the day? I know. Well...

You're the author of Save the Date, which came out yesterday. And I just want to ask, how did the release go? I don't believe in manifesting at all, but for a hot second, I'll pretend to and I'll say it went so well. Amazing. It took the world by storm. Yeah. And probably nothing world-endingly bad happened randomly on the day that your book came out.

Well, God, I hope not. Oh, just the current administration and all that stuff. I know. Well, probably something rather bad happened. Yeah. It is every day. Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, the whole weird subtitle of this show is that when there's bad things happening, there's also good things happening. And we pay attention to the good things, even if we have to understand the bad things to understand how the good things are related to the bad things. That's my ontological viewpoint that makes the world into good and bad. Don't question that too much. But instead...

We can say that our producer is Sophie, who isn't here today. And our audio engineer is Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And this is part two of a two-parter about Saint-Alban, which I did not successfully find out how to pronounce. And so usually when I read French, I just start dropping letters and hope for the best.

And I think I'm vaguely better at pronouncing it than I am other languages. I do try. I hate one of my least favorite things is exactly what I'm doing right now, where podcasters are like, I can't pronounce things. It's literally your job to figure out how to pronounce things and then say them on air. And I try to do that. I just want to say I try to do that and I don't always succeed. And so now I'm paying way more attention to this and making it all worse. But this is part two about podcasting.

A revolutionary, in multiple senses, psychotherapy psychiatric hospital in rural France that changed a lot about how psychotherapy and psychiatry can be done, and sometimes how it has been done.

And where we last left our hero, he had just crossed the Pyrenees and then set up in a concentration camp and then gotten out of the concentration camp to go take over, not take over, but go help Ahsan al-Ban and pick up after the work of Agnes Masson, who's, you know, as I've complained about, largely left out of history.

So Tosquieta shows up at this place that had a really solid anti-fascist reformer who had been hard at work for years, but she's been gone for about two years at this point. The guy who replaced her was genuinely also pretty good, like he was trying to make things better. He just wasn't as like specifically groundbreaking as either other person. The fact that he was trying to make the place better is probably why he invited an anti-authoritarian socialist to come help.

At the time that Francesc shows up there, there's only 20 caretakers and a few nuns. I don't know how many patients are there. The nuns were from the Order of Saint-Régi, which is the patron saint of at-risk women and orphans. So he's a world-famous psychotherapist who's run huge chunks of shit for the Spanish Republic. But because he's a foreigner, the French government is like, you can be assistant nurse. So his, like, salary and job title is assistant nurse.

But as far as I can tell, he's kind of running the place. Or rather, since he's pretty into non-hierarchy, he's restructuring the place in a way in which his ideas are agreed upon by people. And when he shows up, he's really impressed by what's been started. Because again, he doesn't write out the things that women have done. He's specifically impressed by the abandoning of straitjackets. He's like, oh shit, that's amazing. You know?

He wanted to change things up right away and keep going even further. A lot of the infrastructural changes have been done, but there's all this other stuff that he wants to do, and people start letting him do it. He's never formally in charge, at least as far as we're going to get in the story this week. Now it's actually named after him, this place. They've changed the name of it. It's still around. And one of the reasons that people are down to listen to him

is that he says that the average French person knows how badly they fucked up by not helping in the Spanish Civil War. Remember I was saying how last time how they like, they had a popular front that's supposed to stop fascism, but then didn't do anything when their neighbor fell to fascism, you know? He said, quote, they all carried significant guilt over France's non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. They realized after the fact that if the French government or workers had supported the republic...

If they had transformed the popular front movement into a revolutionary movement and not a demand for paid vacations, the whole history of the world would have unfolded different. Wow. That's a sick burn. I know. I know. That paid vacations jab? I mean, he got to the point. Like, oh, to make things a little better for the workers until both countries fell to fascism, you cowardly fucks. Like,

That is an interesting sliding door moment, right? Wait, what's a sliding door moment? It's the idea of like, if one thing was different, like your whole reality would be different. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It's also a delightful movie called Sliding Doors. No, I think a lot about...

I think I spend way too much of my time thinking about the Spanish Civil War in general. But like, yeah, if people had prevented Spain from falling, like how much worse the world would have gotten. But on the other hand, the other thing that I spend way too much of my time thinking about, and I could be wrong about this, but okay, hear me out. Mm-hmm.

Franco tried to have a coup. He tried to have a simple thing where he became in charge. He didn't get it. Instead, he got three years of war where he had to fight tooth and nail across Spain. And because anti-fascists threw down so hard, Franco took over a country that was gutted financially, half his army's fucking dead, all of his munitions are spent, right? Because of that,

That is part of why he doesn't enter World War II on the fascist side, is that Spain isn't in a position to enter a war. They just barely won one, right? Oh. And now the argument is whether or not if Spain had entered the war on the side of the Nazis, whether or not the Nazis would have won. And I don't know the answer to it, but there's a version where some cops and some anarchists who don't like each other working together...

saved the fucking world by not letting him take Spain in a coup and dragging it out into a war. I like this thesis. Thank you. Thank you. I do too. I'm behind it. Yeah, I like versions where the things we do, even when it looks like we lose, still matter, you know? Yeah.

Well, that's a good, that's a very good thing to hold on to right now in this moment in American history. I think about all the time when I'm reading history too, right? Because there's so many things that like, like eventually we stopped chattel slavery in this country, right? And it took the deadliest war that America has ever participated in, in terms of American lives lost. And the things that led up to it looked like failures. You had Nat Turner's rebellion. You had John Brown's rebellion, right?

And a lot of other rebellions besides that is the two off the top of my head. And overall, you're like, well, those people lost and they died. Right. But like, they also sparked this war and they helped end chattel slavery. Um,

I don't know. Yeah, that's what I hold on to. That's actually very helpful. And I shall now be holding on to it as well. Cool. And also all of my personal failures are just laying the groundwork for, you know, a huge success later on. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I actually like to kind of genuinely, but right. Cause like literally the way you learn to do things is by failing at it. Yeah. You know, if you only ever succeed at stuff, you are not trying hard enough.

So if you only succeed politically, you're not asking for enough. That's interesting. And so, yeah, he shows up and the French people, because the average peasant in France, there's a really good chance they're a communist or a socialist of some stripe, right? At this point in history. We tend to forget that because of the Cold War and misunderstandings about what communism and socialism are that have been ingrained to us since we were little kids, you know? And so they're not wild-eyed radicals, but they're communists or socialists.

And they feel guilty. So they are like, okay, guy, we'll follow your lead. And just to follow up on the concentration camp that he left, on June 22nd, 1940, France formally surrendered to Nazi Germany. And you get the start of what's called the Vichy government, the collaborationist government of France, where they're basically just run by the Nazis.

By 1942, that same camp, that infrastructure that was built to hold refugees, was now controlled by the fascists. Which is a thing with a lot of modern parallels, right? When Democrats build up state power and the ability to do repression, and clearly Biden did a lot of stuff to expand border patrols and set up concentration camps on the border. All of that is then inherited by fascists, right? So...

This camp is inherited by fascists in 1942, and it became what we understand as a Nazi concentration camp, from which Jews were shipped to Auschwitz. In August 1944, it was liberated by the French resistance. At this point in the war, the USSR and Stalin are still allied with the Nazis. The U.S. hasn't entered the war yet, and so the U.K. is kind of the only one still standing against fascism.

Which must have just honestly straight up been one of the worst times to be alive in terms of fighting despair. Like, I really hate when I got to hand it to the UK. But like, and even like Churchill's advisors and shit are like, yeah, you got to surrender to the Nazis. We're just going to lose. You know that, right? England should just go fascist. We should just give up. We should surrender, you know? And them being like, nah, but we can't though because they're Nazis. Yeah.

was crucial. Yeah. Changed the world. So it was a hard time to be alive. Tuskeus, he is reinventing what an asylum can be in the middle of all of this fucking shit. Just like, like this is the moment where he's like, let's try some radically new shit. Well, maybe because everyone had bigger things to worry about. Nobody was like bothering with what he was up to. Oh my God. That's, that's actually a decent point. Yeah. Yeah.

And like, everyone's like, well, we're all dead anyway. So like, all right, you know? Yeah. It's like, whatever this guy's doing, who cares? I got to deal with it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And so he actually, to the end of his days, he really likes the term asylum for these kinds of places. He likes it because it's a place of refuge. And he himself is a refugee. He immediately pulls the bars off all the windows and he starts letting patients go into town and trade things and sell things and make friends and participate in the social life of this small town. He also starts sending postcards to his wife, to Helene. And specifically, Helene.

They're not just postcards of like, here's the pretty place I'm at. But he's like left notes. It's like maps of the town. And he's like, he's basically being like, well, they're all annotated so that according to his daughter, quote, so that my mother could get to know the area. Because he's like, you're going to be here, you know? And also you're going to be smuggled in. So like, get to know the area. Yeah.

Helene, who is absolutely a badass in her own right, she starts saving up money to pay a trafficker to get her and her daughter north and is selling off furniture on the black market. Under Franco, this is the kind of thing I'm afraid of here, under Franco, there's no free travel around the country. So Helene managed to get a maybe forged, but I'm not sure, safe conduct certificate to allow them to travel to Barcelona.

So they're not even leaving, like, Catalonia. But even within Catalonia, in order to go from one town to the big city, they gotta get permission. Marie Rose was four and a half years old. On the night that they left, her grandmother cried and kissed her and said how she would die without ever seeing her again. They made it to Barcelona to stay with family, and Helene started sewing and cooking for fascist generals in order to save money. And then...

They travel at night in a train of refugees through the mountains. I want to say there's about like 10 of them or so. And they're led by a smuggler, a trafficker. Marie Rose remembers the huge moon over the hills and asks her mom, does Papa see the same moon? And, you know, mom's like, yeah. And that was like kind of, it was a hard time as a four and a half year old to cross over the mountains. Impressive. She remembers it.

I know. And I think it's like kind of one of those things that's like around where memory starts and then you throw in like this. And also her letters, she clearly, she actually wrote a whole book about her family's history, but it's only in French. And so I think she's also probably drawing from her mother's memory as well when she writes about this. But the trafficker betrayed them. He led them through the mountains and down into a valley. And he's like, yeah, you're in France. Give me your money. And so he gives them, you know, all this money they've been saving up for a fucking year or whatever. And he's like,

And he takes off. They are still in Spain. That's such bullshit. I mean... I know. What an evil, deeply, deeply evil person. I know. Marie Rose, like, in her letters, talks about how the plight of the modern refugee is nothing different than what she experienced. And one of the things she talks about is she's like, the people who do the smuggling and trafficking are just motivated by profit and, like, you know. Right. But...

Here's where it turns around and fucking humans rule. They're in this tiny Spanish, probably Bosque, but I'm not certain. They're in this tiny town and a shepherd from the little village is like, all right, my nephew will take you for free. And so this young man like throws the four-year-old over his shoulders and they fucking take off through the mountains and they hike all night. They camp in the ruins of a church.

And she wakes up in the morning. Marie Rose wakes up in the morning to see snow for the first time in her life. What a metaphor that everything's going to be different now. I know. This is the story I want to see a movie of. The closest I've ever seen, there's a movie that

I didn't want to watch because of its title. And then I finally watched. That's actually really beautiful. There's a movie called The Anarchist's Wife, and it's either French or Spanish. And it's about a refugee family from the Spanish Civil War of anarchists where the husband was the militant, but the woman is the protagonist. And just as much of a part of everything just like happened to not have been at the front or whatever.

And it's about their time doing partisan resistance and shit. It's actually a really beautiful movie. But I was like, she could be a fucking anarchist too. Fuck you. You know? It's provocative. Yeah, it's true. It did provoke me. And it actually is probably why I watched it in the end too. And...

This whole account is worth reading. Honestly, her account is one of the coolest things I've read for this show. If you read French, she wrote a whole ass book. But if you want to read these letters, there's four of them. They're on Ben Platt's Mills blog. The link to it will be in the show notes and the sources. And so they go down into the valley. This time it's actually in France. And gendarmes catch them. And they're like, no, you're not French. You got to go back.

But Marie Rose actually believes the gendarmes were kind of in on it. The gendarmes are like, look, we got to take you back in the morning. Why don't you stay at this hotel for a night and then we'll take you back in the morning. And they go in and the hotel worker is like, this woman is like, no, fuck no. I'm going to hide your asses like you're not getting deported. Like, what the fuck? That's amazing.

And so when the gendarmes come back the next morning and they're like, we're looking for the person. And then the hotel workers like, I don't know, they must have left in the middle of the night. They're hidden in the attic and they hide there for days, maybe for weeks. Because it's also worth knowing this is Nazi controlled territory. Right. You know, like even though it's like, oh, we made it out of Spain, frying pan fire, et cetera. You know, her husband's in the fire. So she's going to the fire, you know.

And so they hid there for days, maybe weeks in this attic. Meanwhile, Francesc, it's not safe for him to travel either because Nazis do as Nazis do. There's no free travel within Nazi-controlled France. But he sorts it out. The prefect of Lozere, the province or whatever, fakes up a document for him to travel. And so he takes it and he heads off. And Francesc walks into that attic room. And the daughter walks up and is like, hello, sir, and like sticks out her hand.

And she said, quote,

And so on December 6th, 1940, she met her dad and got to grow up with him after all. And they went to St. Albans. And you know what may or may not have been on the carriage, like the train walls?

What? Advertisements. I don't know if they had invented in-train advertisements at that point. But if they hadn't, they'd been really missing out on a lucrative opportunity for people to hear about all kinds of things. Some of the ads are even for good things, like going hiking with your friends. That's literally sometimes we get an ad for go to the woods. And, you know, only listen to whatever. Use your own fucking judgment. You know how advertising works. You live in this society. Here they are.

It's spring savings at Bray and Scarf. Going on now with huge savings throughout the store. Save up to 30% on select GE profile and cafe appliances. You can also save on in-stock GE profile refrigerators and best-selling washers. Shop local and save now during spring savings at Bray and Scarf. Visit any of their convenient locations or shop online at BrayandScarf.com where it doesn't cost more to get more.

There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo clay. It's thick, burnt orange, and it's

got a reputation. It's terrible, terrible dirt. Yazoo clay eats everything. So things that get buried there tend to stay buried. Until they're not. In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery. 7,000 bodies out there or more. All former patients of the old state asylum. And nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery.

But in this corner of the South, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets. Nobody talks about it. Nobody has any information. When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think. The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larison Campbell. Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

And we're back. Okay. And I was listening to this other podcast that everyone should listen to called 16th Minute of Fame with Jamie Loftus. That's also a part of the Cool Zone Media Network. And in it, she does this thing where she's talking to everyone who's, I'm completely off script here, but everyone probably has figured that out. She's talking to the people who do brand Twitter and like brand TikTok, you know? And like how they like, like the horny Duolingo owl and shit like that, right? Didn't they kill him?

Yeah, they killed him. Yeah. I learned that through the podcast. I don't know anything about pop culture, so I learned it through Jamie's podcast. And they specifically have a word for anti-advertising, which is when you are real cynical and you're like, I hate capitalism, but here's some ads. I genuinely think that's why they let me get away with it.

Well, when we were growing our YouTube channel, we would do branded content. Like we would just be like, hey, everyone, we need money. And then it would be this wonderful thing where our audience would be like, get the bag. Yeah, exactly. Understood. I think it's fair to just bring people in on it because it's like, look, we all have jobs, you know, like, yeah, my dog eats food for some reason. And so do I, you know.

And yeah, I like that. I like just kind of being like just up front. Like, look, we're doing a thing. Yeah. Because I'm not like ashamed of it either. Right. It's just a thing, you know. And it's how advertisements have like been the backbone of so much media. Yeah. For I mean, that's why you get E! That's why you get a lot of newspapers. Totally. So it's important. Yeah.

Yeah. Until we live in a better society. And then I can't even be like, literally last week's was about how in the USSR, all art had to be state sponsored. So if you weren't hired by the state to make art, you like weren't allowed to write, you know, and publish. And so it was all about how people got around that by writing anyway. So never forget that more than one thing can be bad at once. Yeah.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Trump does with the Kennedy Center and what beautiful shows he'll bring to the stage. Their programming is now just Trump's interests. I bet you every now and then there'll be like someone playing Trump and he like won't be handsome enough and then we'll get arrested or something. Oh, my God. That's so true. That whole thing where he freaked out about the painting that wasn't good enough of him really just was like...

Yeah, we got a dictator. That's what this is. Well, I mean, it's really just so glaring how much everything is fueled by his insecurity. Yeah. That he is just like a true narcissist who cannot handle any sort of attack at his being. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hopefully redacted. And anyway...

So, Francesc and Helene and Marie Rose make it to St. Albain. And in most texts, Francesc gets basically all the credit for doing everything. But like, some are actually aware that Helene was just as vital to the functioning of the place. And that's the, I'm more likely to believe that. But also specifically, the patients and the other doctors and the nurses and the nuns

All work together. And I know they work together because they restructured the place to work together. And so like the idea of big man of history, an anarchist who got rid of the hierarchy or an actual communist who doesn't believe in hierarchy, who got rid of the hierarchy within this place, it's just obscene. So they're at the asylum and they're transforming it. They're drawing on psychoanalysis, anti-authoritarian communism, and surrealism are like their three like wellsprings.

He takes the bars off the window. He's letting people go into town. He taught the basics of therapy to villagers because he figured everyone was going to need it because they're all under occupation. I mean, he's not wrong. Yeah, no, totally. Together, they developed geopsychiatry in which space itself is part of the therapy and that the space itself needed to be healed. It wasn't until the 50s that this gets more of the proper name, but I'll get to in a second.

A lot of their stuff is stuff that we've seen elsewhere, usually later, but actually Fountainhouse is around the same time as this. They try to break down the social hierarchy between doctor and patient. They start like sleeping in the same place, eating the same food. The nurses aren't wearing different uniforms. And they become mutually involved in keeping the space clean and functional. So people have a stake in the place working, you know, being maintained and cleaned and things like that.

This strange madhouse is where the movement with the misleading name, I told you that I was eventually going to have a name. The name of this style is institutional psychotherapy. That doesn't sound good. It sounds terrible. Yeah.

The idea, as best as I can understand, isn't institutionalized psychotherapy, right? Right. But rather, the institution itself is sick and it needs psychotherapy. Oh, now that's beautiful. Yeah. But again, it's a language use problem. Uh-huh. And all this is coming from French. And then like,

They're actually literally going to inspire a lot of the people who are sort of the continental theorist model of philosophy, like Deleuze and Guattari and Frantz Fanon. And actually, he's probably considered anti-colonial, not continental. And I think Foucault, but I can more specifically tie in Deleuze and Guattari and Frantz Fanon.

And Deleuze and Guattari are philosophers who specifically write in this continental theory style that's so fucking hard to understand. But it's sort of meant to be that way. According to a Greek theory head, I asked about this once. I was like, why the fuck is all this incomprehensible? And he was like, literally in France, they developed this idea that it should be poetic and kind of make you uneasy and make you really interrogate the text. And I'm like,

I'm a simple girl. I like like like George Orwell's rules for writing, which is like write as simply as you can, you know, like don't dumb things down, but make things as simple as you possibly can. Yeah, but that's not necessarily the page they're on. So they probably didn't even give a shit that it's a fucking incomprehensible name institutional psychotherapy to quote author Sasha Warren. The hospital was sick.

It had a social life, but it was impoverished and dehumanizing. It claimed to offer shelter and refuge from the outside world, but it took the form of a prison or even a camp. If the asylum was to become a real refuge, then its role must be to disoccupy and disalienate the person, not replace one alienation with another. Like, that's reasonably clear. Yeah.

One alienation, what is the other? So one alienation is like being removed from regular society and then just replacing it with like being alienated within the Institute. Yeah.

I think so. Yeah, I think it's about, I mean, they also present this idea that like society, modern capitalist society is itself alienating and that it is like breaking down social bonds and things like that. But I think that they, I think they are talking about the specific alienation of being, you know, quote unquote mad. Mentally ill. Or whatever. Yeah. And then going into this place where you're now just another alienation. Yeah.

One of the interesting things about reading about all of this is I'm much more interested in the part where they're going to smuggle guns to partisans and less interested in the theory. But most of what is written, the overwhelming majority of what is written and what I read is about the theory. And so I actually read a lot about their ideas of alienation, but I kind of didn't get it all. I'm a simple girl. Yeah.

You had to save your storage for the gun stuff. Yeah, exactly. And this was very specifically not an anti-institutional framework for care. That is a movement within like certain psychiatric movements or anti-psychiatric movements, right, is to be anti-institutional.

But they believed deeply that place mattered. During Francesc's time in Spain, he had tried to make sure that each region had its own therapeutic methods that fit their own culture and land and community. He tried to engage the actual community in people's care. So the institution had to become a place of actual care and an actual home. And people needed to be disalienated from the place that they were, like that they literally are right then, you know?

And this approach was specifically practical in the Vichy France world. Okay, so Nazi Germany had like, we'll call it hard genetics, where they just kind of killed everyone, right? Very famously. Like if you're disabled in some way, they're like, we're going to fucking kill you. We're horrible Nazis. Vichy France were soft eugenicists. Their policy was,

Which isn't better, was to just leave institutionalized people to starve or freeze to death by stopping taking care of them. Ah, all right. Yeah. Sort of a passive approach to your eugenics. Yeah, exactly. And their definition of madness at the time, madness is always socially constructed, but the definition of madness that Vichy France is working on includes criminals, it includes disabled people, it includes queer people.

40,000 people died of starvation and neglect or were murdered by Vichy France through soft eugenics. No one, not one of the patients died as Saint-Alban during the occupation of starvation or neglect because they had a collective process to solve their immediate needs. The barrier between patient and doctor and partisan hiding in the place all blurred together. Because did I mention they're hiding partisans? I will get to that soon.

Tuskeus wrote, quote, the human is a creature that goes from one space to another. She cannot stay all the time in the same place. That's to say that the human is always a pilgrim, a creature who goes elsewhere. And this idea of migration and change is fundamental to his philosophy. And I fucking love it so much that I shoehorned it in the script where it didn't really fit.

He wrote that the first right of man is to wander. I also love that he's like both writing like the first right of man and then he's using like she pronouns and this stuff. I get the impression that he was doing the kind of thing that people were doing back in the day where like everything is gendered. And so they just kind of go back and forth, you know?

But there's a level of awareness there that's nice to see. Oh, yeah, no, totally. Like, I actually think that was a very conscious thing that people did a lot is that they were like, he will do this, she will do that, you know, as a way to, again, not a man who wrote the women out of his script in his life.

And they also developed this idea, well, they're not the only people who developed this idea. It comes from a lot of different leftist political tendencies. They believe in a permanent revolution, and including like in the psychotherapy world. That is to say, there is no perfect revolution

thing you'll reach. You don't reach utopia. You build utopia and you are constantly building it. The place, the institution can always be improved. We will always learn new methods. We will always be trying to do better.

I love that approach. Yeah, me too. Because I think especially with a lot of people in their mental health journeys, it's like, but why aren't I all better yet? And it's like, you're never going to be all better. Yeah. You're just taking care of yourself throughout your life. Yeah, totally. And I wonder if that even like helps to be like, just like the institution you live at and are working kind of with as a patient, you know, being like, look, you're never going to fully clean the floor.

But we want the floors to be clean and you want the floors to be clean too. And you're never going to not have anger issues or whatever your thing is, but we can work on it. You know? Exactly. They set up a lot of occupational therapy things. Like one of the things I love is that like this story and Fountain House and Bethel House, they all kind of hit upon really similar stuff. And there's some conscious communication happening, but like

Well, now there is a lot because I know that, well, I know people work at Fountain House and they're the people who told me about this story. But I don't know that there was like conscious communication happening when both things are happening at the same time, right? They set up occupational therapy things. There's art and trades. There's throwing parties and festivals. Patients ran their own bar. And I think it's not just for patients. I think it's for villagers too, but I'm not 100% certain.

If you were playing cool people bingo, they also had a newspaper. And I think they had a newspaper for specifically only the people living at the place. So it was a kind of internal and they could kind of like talk shit and stuff, you know?

I'd love if they had like a gossip column of like BNBC and of like who was eating lunch with who. I would not be surprised if they did. Like a page six of just the people that are in the house. I would not be surprised. I only found one essay from one of these newspapers and it was very internal and it was like some nuns talking about like how they felt about their position within the place. But I would not be surprised at all if it was like

Can you believe that Sam is eating fucking beans again? There's Sam always eating beans. Doesn't he know he farts? You know, they also. And so in addition to just being like, hey, you get to do arts and crafts. They politically set it up so that the patients have power. They set up a patient club, which is a political body made up of patients that had significant power over the asylum.

And this is a thing that I run across with a lot of syndicalist ideas is it's not just about one thing I love is I love worker cooperatives where workers own the store. Whereas most like co-op grocery stores are owners cooperatives where the like customers own the store. I am currently distracted because a dog has appeared in my field of vision on screen. Allison, what is that dog's name?

This is Phantom. Hi, Phantom. No one else can see Phantom because Phantom's invisible. They're a phantom. But Phantom is very cute. He's a really nice guy. So instead of just having a workers' cooperative or an owners' cooperative, people tried to set up both. Like a lot of the ideas a syndicalist would have would be like, look, if there's a school...

It should be run by the teachers and the students and the parents of the students. It's everyone who has a stake in how it happens, right? So if there's a store, the people who want to buy stuff from that store and the people who work in the store should probably be the people who make the decisions about the store collectively. So they have the patients and the doctors have their own sort of political and the caretakers or whatever have their own political bodies to help control what's happening.

Tuskegas wrote, quote, "'Nothing should ever be obvious. Everything is subject to discussion. Everybody must be consulted. Everybody can decide. Not just for the sake of democracy, but in order to facilitate the progressive conquest of speech, to learn mutual respect, the patients must be able to have a say on the conditions of their stay and their care, their rights of exchanges, expression, and circulation.'"

And so it's like part of their therapy to be empowered. I think mutual respect is such an important backbone of like all relationships. Totally. One of the things that like, okay, well, it's even the next sentence. Conflict was a source of socialization. So it's not like everyone just got along. Like these are people with serious mental illnesses and they're in the middle of a war and they're starving, right? Yeah.

They are in conflict with each other and learning how to deescalate and work through their conflict is part of their therapy and part of survival.

Definitely. I mean, that's like one of the main reasons why like therapy can help is because you'll learn how to navigate like issues with your therapist. Totally. And to see like you'll maybe like have an argument about something or disagree about something, but then you learn how to like repair it and share your thoughts and work through it. And that like those skills you then can take out of the therapy room. I remember once I was in this conflict mediation workshop at a

earth first camp, you know, so like people are tree sitting and stuff. We're getting together and we're talking about like, you know, someone's presenting here's ideas about conflict resolution and, and all of this stuff. And we're talking to these skills. And when a friend of mine worked at a, um, a kindergarten basically, and was like, oh yeah, when kids have conflict, um,

They get really excited and they run up to us and they're like, teacher, teacher, we're in a conflict. I want to play with this toy and so does he. And then they get really excited to work through it together. And it was funny because in that circle, everyone was like, ah, yes, children are very wise. They are naturally very wise and they know these things. And then my friend is like, not really, doesn't really talk a lot and things. It was already a huge thing for them to bring up a story at all. Afterwards, they came up to me and they're like,

No, we taught those kids that. Like, it's not that they're just magic creatures, you know? It's that we can learn better ways of doing things. But you know what is also a better way of... No, I got nothing. I got nothing. There's just a bunch of ads that's going to happen now. That's what's going to happen.

There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo clay. It's thick, burnt orange, and it's

got a reputation. It's terrible, terrible dirt. Yazoo clay eats everything, so things that get buried there tend to stay buried. Until they're not. In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery. 7,000 bodies out there or more. All former patients of the old state asylum. And nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery.

But in this corner of the South, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets. Nobody talks about it. Nobody has any information. When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think. The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larison Campbell. Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. Okay, so medical staff regularly performed manual labor, including farming. They're also like trying to grow as much food as possible, like everyone is, right? And patients regularly taught classes about the stuff they know. And then they did the thing that is how I learned about them in the first place, the thing I can find the least information about. They helped the partisans, the French resistance of communists and anarchists and just not Nazis, who would one day liberate France.

Which means that you've got this asylum, a castle in the mountains, where the patients are making their own decisions alongside their caretakers, anarchists, communists, and nuns. And the decision that they make is that they're going to hide and arm partisan guerrillas on the third floor of their castle.

And I couldn't make that shit up. It is too perfect to my interests. I love so much that this is all happening in a castle. I know. Like, I want to write this. But it already happened, you know? Well, you could fictionalize it and make it into quite an epic story. It's true. One of my, like, retire from everything else goals is to just start writing, like,

queer historical romance. Why do you have to wait to retire to do that? Podcasting takes so much of my energy and I also have several books that I eventually I'll do it. I just various excuses. Every author has various excuses. I'm working on other books right now and I dream of one day being like I'm going to write about dark ages Ireland and gay people or something you know. You know what I think one day you will. I hope so too. Assuming I make it through the next several years of

But you know what? Just as a spoiler, Francesca's going to make it through the next several years. He's going to make it through the occupation. So there's hope for me.

Literally, he fought in two fucking wars against fascism. And one of them he lost and one of them he won. And that's not terrible, you know? Those are pretty, I mean, pretty good stats. Yeah. And the bigger one is the one he won. The one where we're playing for more chips all of the world. Besides Spain, which stayed fascist until the fucking 70s, 80s, whenever fucking Franco died. I sometimes know that date and I don't currently. Yeah.

So the resistance is airdropping them arms to distribute to guerrillas. They care for wounded soldiers. I think it's like the nuns are caring for wounded soldiers who show up. They distribute underground newspapers. They forge documents to get soldiers and Jews into the place as patients. So they were just taking in refugees to be like, oh yeah, you're like crazy. That's so smart. Yeah. Yeah.

They even had a sick name for themselves, although I won't pronounce it right, unfortunately. They called themselves the Society of Gévaudan, based on a local legend, which I will now relate because it's really cool. This part is real. In the 1760s, over the course of three years, the Beast of Gévaudan killed at least 100 people in rural France. Like, that actually happened.

What kind of beast? That's the question. That's the history doesn't know part. It would rip out people's throats. Sometimes it would rip off entire heads of people, which is not a thing that most animals do. And it would do this in the French countryside in the area where the hospital was, which was historically called Gavodon. Now it's called Luzer, I think. I forgot because it's not written in front of me.

The beast gets described by eyewitnesses as like a wolf, but not a wolf. And there's a couple reasons I like that. One, there's this like cryptid in Appalachia that is mostly an internet thing, but I think it's kind of based on a real thing, even though it's not, whatever. There's a thing called a not a deer, which is like sometimes you see a deer and you're like, that deer is real weird. Yeah.

And you're like, what the fuck is going on? And then you're like, I don't think that's a deer, you know? And it's the kind of thing you see like late at night when you're like walking around and there's a deer and you're like, wait, that's not a deer. And I really like the not a deer. So the fact that there's a not a wolf. Yeah. I'm like, would love that. There's just some animals out and about that we just like have not seen. I know.

Although the thing that makes me sadder than anything is thinking about species going extinct that we never saw, like under the ocean or whatever. How we have killed fish that we've never seen before. Well, who knows what's going on in the ocean, to be honest. That's true. They could be preparing to destroy us all. And you know what? That's okay. Like, truly. Like, wild stuff could be going on in the deep ocean. It's true. Okay, to quote History.com about the beast of Gerodon. Or Gerodon. Quote...

The beast was consistently described by eyewitnesses as something other than a typical wolf. It was as large as a calf or sometimes a horse. Its coat was a reddish-gray with a long, strong panther-like tail. The head and legs were short-haired and the color of a deer. It had a black stripe on its back and talons on its feet.

And so hunters combed the woods looking for this. The like king put out a fucking bounty on it. It was wounded several times by a musket and then a bayonet, but it escaped each time and continued to kill people. Do you think there's a chance it's a guy in a suit? There is a small chance that it's a guy in a suit. That is actually one of the things that people consider as a possibility.

But most serial killers aren't killing like a hundred people, you know? Well, that's not true. We have no idea. That's a good point. No, you're right. I think a lot of serial killers, their numbers are way higher than what we think they are, especially if they're targeting like sex workers where people don't, no one is paying enough attention. That's true. And especially like back in the day when like, imagine how much easier crime was before like fucking fingerprinting and shit, you know?

And honestly, crime is still pretty easy. Like most people don't. Most people get away with murder if you look at like the murder solve. Yeah. But we need more police. Yeah, totally. That'll solve it. Even though they've been proven in court to not have an obligation to help people. So someone killed a huge wolf and everyone was like, we did it. But then the attacks kept coming. So it was clearly not that.

A few years later, folks killed a like a wolf but not thing that had human remains inside of it. It was probably a wolf, right? Or a bunch of wolves. It was almost certainly not rabid because no humans during all this were getting rabies, right? And a lot of people did survive the attacks. Oh. And they all said the same description? More or less. This is like one of the things that there's like a million fucking stories about, right? But like overall. Yeah.

The most likely thing is that it was a wolf and just people were like, no, I don't like fucking fangs or whatever, you know, like it's also possible that it was a hyena or a lion that especially a not yet adult male lion that which would then have a stripe down its back of hair instead of a mane that had escaped from some menagerie. Right. Oh, interesting.

Or people have said it might have been a guy in a suit and the whole like beheaded thing kind of ties into that a little bit. Right. Or it could have been a werewolf. I don't know. Whatever. Who am I to say it wasn't? My money is on wolf. But my money is on guy in a suit. Yeah. Maybe two guys in a suit based on how big it was. Like those horse costumes. Yeah. It's true. That's my. Okay. I'm going with that one.

I'm going with that one. So when they started working with partisans in the same mountains, they called themselves the Society of Givaudan as a reference to the Beast of Givaudan because the guerrillas are now functioning as that, right? They're like hiding and fucking taking out Nazis. And it's a society of communists and nuns working together. And I love it. And about that fact, Tuskegee Edis wrote, quote, I have two specialties.

turning communists into communists and nuns into nuns. Because most Catholics are not actually Catholic. I have nothing against being Catholic or communist. I am against those claiming to be communists when they are radical socialists or public servants, and against the nuns who believe they are nuns when they are only officials of the church. Part of my job has consisted of converting people into what they really are, beyond their appearance, beyond what they believe they are, and their ideal self.

I love the idea of converting someone into who they really are.

Yeah. That's such a succinct and like powerful way to think about transformation. I know. And in the context of being like, oh, you call yourself a communist, then why are you standing for Stalin? What the fuck? You know, like, oh, you call yourself a nun. Well, are you actually just taking care of poor people or are you just like doing whatever the church says? You know, I fucking love it. Yeah. Like challenge people to be their best selves, which mostly I don't think about doing that to other people. I try and think about that like

we should all just try and do that with ourselves and encourage each other to do it, you know, be our best selves. But why do you think he preferred communism to socialism? Okay. So I actually think in this sense, when he says I'm turning communist into communist, I think that he's not identifying as a communist here in the same way that he's not Catholic. I actually think this is actually evidence in my, he's an anarcho syndicalist theory, but in this particular context, he,

Everyone's going to use these words differently at different times, right? But imagine a three-sided leftist triangle and you have socialism and communism and anarchism. Now, theoretically, socialism is a broader umbrella about who owns the means of production. And under that...

That has a lot of different things that that could be. But generally speaking, when people are using it around this time in the 20th century, they're sort of saying democratic socialism. They're saying something that doesn't really exist in the US, but is a very common European thing of being kind of left of center, being like Bernie-ish, right? And there's not a bad thing to be, but it is a distinct thing from the far left that

which wouldn't be the socialists, but would instead be the communists and the anarchists. To make things even more confusing, communism theoretically means a stateless society. It actually means anarchism. But the people who call themselves communists, especially in the middle of the 20th century, are referring to the communist party and therefore Soviet control and capital C communism overall. And so...

If someone is a radical leftist and a communist at this point, instead of calling themselves a socialist, it means that they are like a revolutionary. They want to seize the means of production. Whereas a socialist probably wants to like vote in socialists into power. And then a syndicalist, an anarcho-syndicalist wants trade unions to build power and then slowly make the state obsolete. That's my rough overview. Yeah.

And what do you think? And so you think he identified as that last one that you said, that thing I could never pronounce? I can't tell because his parents were that. And that was a huge part of the Spanish movement. But he was also a Marxist and Marxism was slightly different. He was probably what we would call now a like small C communist. He was probably didn't believe in the state or like USSR and Stalin and shit.

I've read some things that called him an anarcho-syndicalist, and I've read some things that called him an anti-Stalin communist. But in the end, those are not wildly disparate positions. They want a revolutionarily different society in which the means of production are entirely owned by the workers and also the people who make use of the products of them or whatever, right? Yeah.

Thank you. Yeah, no, that was a useful question. It's the kind of thing, it took me like 20 years of being political before I could actually articulate that because it's so messy. It's confusing, yeah. 20 years later or earlier, people would have said a completely different thing. And also there's such charged terms. So people bring a lot of bias to them without necessarily understanding what they mean. Yeah, to all of them. Yeah. And it's hard because in some ways, I think that knowing his position is,

is useful because it's useful to see like lineages and like where things come from and where they're going, but it's so murky. And so I think really at the end of the day being like, well, he was like a radical. Absolutely.

But he also was just like trying to be good to everyone all the time. Yeah. You know, and like the fact that he also doesn't have a problem with the Catholics, a lot of communists and anarchists had problems with the Catholics and still do or any Christians or religion. A lot of them are like militantly atheist, especially from Spain. So like he's clearly not obsessed with like, I must fit this label, you know? Yeah. And that's probably one of the reasons that he was such a force for good.

I think so too. I always like to imagine that anarchism wants to not can hold itself constrained because it's theoretically the one that's about free thinking, but it absolutely sometimes just ends up just another ideology or whatever. So by hanging out with all these folks, all these people hanging out together, the nuns themselves and their order become less and less hierarchical as time goes on.

They write essays in this, I was saying I read an essay that was in the newspaper that they circulated only for themselves. They wrote an essay about how they hated being called guards and they were not guards and they did not, were not armed masculine forces of enforcement. You know, they were insulted to be called guards. And the mother superior started off as one of Francesc's fiercest critics and then wound up one of his strongest allies. Makes me really happy.

I mean, being able to change your mind is, I think, a sign of great intelligence. I agree. Part of their daily struggle, though, during the occupation, Vichy France, is just to survive. There's no money in the Nazi budget for feeding mental patients. Because they know how to self-organize, they refused to be isolated in their castle, and so they survived. They taught classes on mushroom foraging and would go out and forage all the time, and

The nuns in particular actually had really extensive knowledge of herbalism, thanks to the work of the previous director's wife, Germaine Beauvais, who taught them all medicinal herbs. And she's not just like an herb lady, although that's a perfectly fine thing to be. Her 1941 medical thesis, because she also is a... Anyway, whatever. Her thesis was called On the Organization of an Insulin Therapy Service and Narcotherapy in a Rural Hospital. Wow. So like...

Yeah, they do believe in medicine, you know? Yeah, there's hard science there. Yeah. And they have one of the better insulin administration regimes available in France, as best as I can tell, because she stuck around and kept working there during the occupation. People there participated in the local economy of the town. The patients and the doctors and even the, like, accountants would leave the asylum and go work in exchange for food, like butter and turnips were often some of the only food they could get.

And while there was no ration card for mental patients, there were, I promise to bring tuberculosis into this story, there were ration cards for people with tuberculosis. Because France was going to take care of people with TB, but not people with mental illness. Why? Because you can survive TB and then become part of the workforce again? Yeah, maybe it's like not a character flaw in a eugenicist way or something. Okay. Yeah.

And so in the first positive story about TB, I think I've done this whole time, they started diagnosing everyone with TB in order to get ration cards to share all the food. And you get TB! And you get TB! Totally. The place became a sort of artist colony during the war. It just keeps getting cooler. This is amazing. Various anti-fascists of all stripes would take refuge there. Picasso visited the place.

It's as important in the history of outsider art as it is in psychotherapy. Patients there wrote a ton of poetry and they painted and they made sculptures and they dresses and all of this stuff, right? And sometimes they would open up the courtyard so that villagers, as they would walk through, could buy sculptures and art for like cigarettes or a few cents. And artists and people would come like kind of like study there and like learn from the outsider artists or whatever. But there's actually some tension around this.

Some people are into what's called art brew or brutes or something. It's the French version of outsider art and it means raw art, right? Okay. And this is this new art movement, right? And there are people who are into that who are into the art that the patients made but they're into it kind of exploitatively some of them. It's like the patients aren't seen seriously as artists but instead as outsiders. Like,

Like how one might view a child, although perhaps we shouldn't view children's art this way either. Josque has fought hard against this way of seeing the art that was made by people living at the asylum. He was like, don't fucking exploit people. They are like, like art is good and they are artists. They're not, wow, even a crazy person made a crazy sculpture or whatever the fuck, you know? Yeah.

And the art's really cool. There's like, literally, if you read about this place, you're going to find, again, not enough about hiding partisans, Margaret's interest, but instead lots about an art movement and a psychotherapy movement, which are both actually perfectly valid. And I would rather do art than get shot at. So I guess what am I talking about?

I'm focusing on Tuskegee because I think he's cool and because that's where most of the information is, is about him. But the whole point, and I think he would agree, is that it's not about him and what he did, but what the institution as a living entity did. To quote Johanna Masso in Parapraxis magazine, quote, If Sanoban's legacy still appears to us as political, it is because it carries another transmission, besides the big name guys,

that the practices of women, psychiatrists and nurses, who have mostly disappeared from history of the politics of care. So like, there's so many unnamed women in this story, and I've tried to name the women where I can, right? But there's so many more. After the war, they kept going. The place is still there today. It's named after Francois Tosqueras.

And he himself, after the war, wrote a 1948 doctoral thesis called The Psychopathology of Lived Experience, which is such a sick name to be like, yeah, what do I bring to this fucking thesis? Well, I ran psychotherapy for an entire fucking country's army and then in a concentration camp and then during a war in another country. He lived under three occupations, Stalinist, Francoist, and German.

He referred to the idea of getting mentally healthy as de-occupying your mind. And so this is all political to him always. In the 1950s, he and Helene shot a number of films at the hospital. And this is where a lot of the like actual images of like, we know that women were involved because there's some fucking video of them, you know. In 1953, some folks opened up a second asylum in France operating under the same lines.

This, to me, is mostly famous because a philosopher named Felix Guattari worked there for a long time, mostly known as Guattari of Deleuze and Guattari fame. And when I say fame, I mean to people who like esoteric leftist philosophy. I named my band Nomadic War Machine after a concept that they have about the nature of states in conflict. I'm a normal person, can be trusted to do normal things. Maybe the most famous person influenced by their methods is a guy named Franz Fanon. He is a future friend of the pod, I hope.

He is one of the most important, if not the kind of cornerstone, decolonial philosophers. His book, The Wretched of the Earth, is like one of the most important books and like just literally a like, let's study the philosophy of how people get fucking free from colonization. He was an Algerian. He took the institutional psychotherapy framework about deoccupation and extended it to decolonization. And he did his medical residency in the early 1950s at Saint-Albain.

He went back to Algeria, and he improved upon the work of Saint-Alban. In case I don't get to do a whole thing about him soon, I'm just going to cover it real quick. He set up a day clinic so that patients could keep living with their families. And like Tosquietas recommended, he wanted to treat people close to where their traumas had happened. To quote author Gregory Evan Dukas, he, quote, "...organized trips where nurses could accompany patients and observe how they behaved in actual social situations."

He encouraged nurses to socialize and dine with the patients, something prohibited beforehand. His most radical innovation was his suggestion that social movements could facilitate collective transference. And I don't entirely know what transference means in this case because it's a weird philosophy thing, but I think it means getting better. Well, transference in psychology... Oh, okay, yeah, no, tell me. Transference in psychology means, like, associating, like, if I...

you were my therapist, I would like transfer my feelings about my mother onto you. So it's like transferring your feelings about something onto something else. But I don't understand exactly what it would mean in that context. So in this context, it's like the social movement allows not just an individual, but a collective of people to do that same transference. The social movement is therefore the therapy for the oppressed people.

But transference isn't necessarily like healing. Right. It's more just like something that occurs during therapy. But is it part of getting better? Is like...

I don't know. Okay. Maybe I'm stretching here. I still hold by my read of it, but I don't know. It's more like something that like the therapist would need to be aware of. Right. Because like you would be like, I'm not your mother. Right. Right. Or like aware that like maybe the client is reacting to you because of this transference that is happening. And so being aware of that and navigating that. Okay. Yeah.

Well then, I think we don't totally know what that part means. And if you are listening and you're a big Fanon head, you probably do know what it means. Let us know! And so yeah, the asylum in France kept going and also kept going has been a lot of the leftist stuff that he participates in, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, not being a Stalinist but still caring about society.

And so has people fighting for refugees and the mentally ill and the neurodivergent. And one final note, I didn't know where else to stick it in, but I'm going to have it because it's a quote I like. Well, okay, so he stays in France the rest of his life, Tosquiatus. Though he left the asylum in 1962. He died in 1994. And he did this awesome thing where he figured out how to defend his bad French. He wrote in the late 1980s, quote,

I always had a theory. A psychiatrist, to be a good psychiatrist, must be a foreigner or appear to be a foreigner. So it's not coquetry on my part to speak French so badly. The patient, or even a normal guy, must make an effort to understand me. They are obliged to translate and to take an active position toward me. And I like that because, like, I'm reading about him through translation, and

And I'm running it through my own experiences and my own background and my own context of reading about the social movements that he's part of. And I like that I have to, and you listeners are doing the same thing with different set of assumptions about all of these things. And I like that he likes that. I like that he knows that it's like, we are now an active part of his story because we're trying to fucking figure it out.

And it makes you pay more attention. Yeah. Yeah, no, I spent way too much time trying to figure out exactly how he identified. Although that's my own hang up. But usually I do this thing and then I'm like, yeah, but then he did this thing. He might have done some bad things, but man, I don't know about him. And that love story of where he

He fucking loved his family, which is a low bar, but a bar that a lot of fucking people who claim to be good people don't fucking meet. Mm-hmm. And, like, getting forged passes to go meet his fucking daughter in the attic where she's hiding and, like... I don't know. I'm just, like, warm and fuzzy on that whole fucking place. I think it's okay to just sink into that. Yeah. Like, you know, some people really live by their values, and I think, like you said earlier, he did. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, there's another thing I didn't even like, because I, again, I was reading a lot of stuff that was very anecdotal and a very, very translated. And one of those, there's one story about him where near the end of his life, someone's dying. And they're like, oh, go get the Spaniard, which is what they would call him in the town. Go get the Spaniard. I think, I think they need someone to come and like therapize the dying because he's maybe not religious. He doesn't need a priest or something, right? Go get the Spaniard because he won't charge you.

So he was just like, yeah, I take care of people. That's what we fucking do. And like, I mean, obviously everyone needs a job and shit. It's not wrong to get paid for something, but like poor person's dying. Do you know how to help the dying? You fucking go do it. Fuck yeah. And that's your reputation, right? Your reputation is that's who people go to in those moments. Yeah. There was a story, I think a listener on this show told me, but I can't remember. There's a story about this like Quaker in, um,

Pennsylvania or something. I don't know. And someone comes up and is like, hey, are you a Christian? And he's like, I don't know. Go ask my neighbor. Oh, I love that. And like, yeah, whatever your best self is, can people know that you are trying to do that, you know? And we'll all fail, but... Yeah. I mean, I think that's the biggest disconnect that's happening in our country right now is how many people think they're good Christians and then are voting to like...

take away rights and punish people and like all this horrible stuff. And I do wonder like how do they just not think about it? I mean, it's like, it's, this is one of those words that just like, like any of the ideological words that I was describing, there's like 2000 years of different shit getting called Christian, you know? And like the core text isn't internally consistent. I'll phrase it that way. And like,

Yeah, you got Quakers who are like one of the main backbones of the abolitionist movement. You've got like, it's just all over the place. You have people doing horrible things in the name of ideology or religion and amazing things in the name of ideology and religion and like often under the same names. But like, I don't know. Yeah, the Catholic Nationalism, the Christian Nationalism things, right? Catholic Nationalism is Franco-Spain. Christian Nationalism, which is more Protestant that we're dealing with now. I don't.

It's a fucking nightmare. I've just been shocked, you know, as a Jewish person. Oh, people are it to me. It is so fundamentally un-Jewish to wish to wipe out a population of people. Yeah. Like, yeah, that's wild to me. And I'm having a really hard time with it. Yeah, totally. I don't fucking envy you dealing with that. And like getting your fucking name invoked as this like

hapless victim that needs Christian nationalists to fucking wipe people out. Or like anti-Semitism being used as like this magical word to allow for any kind of behavior. Yeah. In retaliation, right? Wild. Yeah. Well...

On that note. But, you know, we need more. But there are good people even in the worst of times. And so who knows in like 70 years who people will be talking about in this moment of time. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a good point. It's also always important to remember that like the great man theory of history is nonsense. And.

It's people who are just people just doing things and being like, I think we can get something done. And we are making history right now. Like I cover, you know, social movements that changed the world that started with like five people being like, what if we don't let everyone we know die of AIDS or, you know, whatever the thing is. Yeah. The things that we do have actual impact. We're part of history right now. But if you want to step outside of history and read fiction, you

Which is honestly sometimes a relaxing and necessary balm for your brain. Any book recs? Yes, I can promise that my new rom-com novel that came out yesterday when you're listening to this is called Save the Date. And I think it's escapist fun while still being grounded in realistic characters and getting to have a lot of funny family dynamics along with the love stories.

I sort of love having you on as like a rom-com writer as I'm then like, let me tell you about this like horrible war and these like radical, like, you know, political folks. But I like how these to me don't seem like, well, they're disparate in that they're not the same thing. But I really like thinking about how it's just like, well, it's all just people. And it's not, you know, like we all contain multitudes. My other work is all psychology based. It's true. Yeah. Yeah.

You're catching me on a day where I'm leading with rom-com writer, but other times. Yeah. That is why I have you on for mental health ones. I was like, I've had this story in my back pocket for a minute and ever since doing Fountain House and Bethel House. And then I was like, oh, Allison's on the schedule. This is the one we're doing. And then in Save the Date, she's a couples therapist. So I get to insert a lot of my thoughts on psychology as well. Hell yeah. Well, remember to save the date, which was

and pick up the book. And what else? Get together with your friends and make plans. That's my pitch and plug is that think about contingencies and think about how you're going to help people and think about how you're going to be your best self when bad things happen because people are going to be reading about what you're doing right now, 70 years from now. You can't control everything, but you can keep a hold of your humanity. Yeah.

All right. See you all next week.

The world is facing urgent, monumental issues, and you may be considering a career where you can take your service to the next level and make a global impact. In the heart of Washington, D.C., gain world-renowned expert knowledge and a global network as you pursue a master's degree and turn your passion into practice. Thousands of the world's leaders got their start at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Are you next?

GW is a proud Yellow Ribbon Program participant. In Mississippi, Yazoo Clay keeps secrets. 7,000 bodies out there or more. A forgotten asylum cemetery. It was my family's mystery. Shame, guilt, propriety. Something keeps it all buried deep until it's not.

I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Under Yazoo Clay. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.