If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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What follows is utterly repugnant.

On June 26^th, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (ICI), submitted another report to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR) which “examines Israeli violations and crimes against Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as their short- to long-term impact on children, between 7 October 2023 and 31 March 2026.” The 94 page report, titled “The essence of childhood has been destroyed,” is available at UNHQ online, click this code: A/HRC/62/CRP.2.

In language rendered all the more damning by the lack of emotion, it provides forensic detail of the carefully planned and executed attacks on Palestinian children, mainly in Gaza but also the Occupied West Bank, by members of the Israeli military. The Commission chairman, Mr Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, of India, also gave an interview on RT India in which he described how Israeli troops deliberately target babies, to the extent of shooting them through the head while they are being breastfed without injuring the mother. This requires considerable skill and determination. Mr Muralidhar said:

When you shoot a 10-day-old baby breastfeeding on his mother… through his head, you can by no means label such a baby as an enemy of the State of Israel and justify these kinds of attacks.

Their systematic, genocidal cruelty is one side of the matter. For the tens of thousands of murdered children, their families will never see them grow up, a monstrous crime in its own right. The other side is the destruction of the surviving children’s lives. They have had no schooling for three years and their schools and universities have been deliberately destroyed, even bulldozed. They live in a demolition zone, deprived of all but the barest essentials of life, unable to play, unable to see their relatives or friends. Their families are devastated, their health blighted, even their teeth ruined, and there is no recovering. Mentally, they will suffer to the same extent that Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide suffered, although we could hope their communities are more forgiving than Israelis were of survivors of the Holocaust.

This report cannot be dismissed as a case of rogue troops defying orders, or of antisemitic propaganda. It proves at the level of criminal responsibility that these appalling crimes are the direct result of deliberately-formulated and freely-broadcast Israeli government policy. Time and time again, senior Israeli officials including cabinet officers state that the destruction of the Palestinian people is their life’s ambition, and part of that is eliminating every Palestinian child since they will grow up to hate Israel, they can’t help themselves. This stems from the pervasive Zionist fantasy that all gentiles hate Jews as an innate compulsion, and disregards the twin facts of ceaseless brutal Israeli aggression and that the great majority of gentiles around the world who do not hate Jews. These include large numbers of very powerful people in the West, such as the leaders of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, so-called Christian Zionists and many others, who are actively aiding and abetting the ceaseless Israeli wars against the Muslim nations of West Asia. The US and other countries are not sending weapons to Israel and funding their military because they are in the grip of an uncontrollable hatred of Jews. That is a lie. If anything, their barely-concealed racism is directed against the indigenous populations of West Asia.

Every fair-minded person should be familiar with this report, although not everybody will be able to read it. It is the latest of many issued by ICI in the face of frenzied opposition from the Israeli government and their powerful supporters in the West. For example, ICC prosecutor Mr Karim Khan, who issued the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others, has recently revealed threats that were made against him if he did so. He went ahead anyway. But when the “essence of childhood is destroyed,” what does it tell us about the whole “Greater Israel” project, as implemented by the “most moral army in the world”? We are told that the reason Israel is constantly pushing beyond its borders, driving millions of people from their ancestral homes and destroying everything so they can’t return is that Zionists are fulfilling God’s plan for them. That’s all very well but as Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion said as early as 1956:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? [1, p99].

Nobody should ever doubt that ethnic cleansing is and always has been their plan, to take the “promised land” back again and to clear it of any “defilement.” Once they take control of it, they will not return it. Recovering the land is a divine mission but ipso facto, the idea of handing it back again is inconceivable as it would be the most grievous sin, a denial of the divine plan. That’s interesting, they’re certainly not the first people on earth to believe they had a stronger claim on land than its indigenous population. All the European countries in their many colonies, the US expanding into native tribal territories, the Nazis pushing into the USSR, Japan invading China, on and on. They all had a reason based on the idea of a hierarchy of races, religions, etc., in which their tribe was on top and all the others down below. Humans do this, the joy of dominating others is hard-wired into us and, without strong social restraints, it takes control just because being on top is so exhilerating. This is so fundamental that hierarchies are built into practically every aspect of every human society that has ever been. In addition, Israel is the only country in the world that has not defined either its borders, so they can keep expanding them, or its citizens, so it can deprive non-Jews of civil rights. By this means, domination is covertly written into their constitution.

Israel’s drive to dominate is perhaps a little different from say Nazi Germany as they say: “We’re special because God appointed us to be, he made a covenant with our ancestors and we have to fulfill it. By expelling our neighbours, we are actually doing good works.” However, on the ground in the rubble of Gaza and for the people being expelled, that’s no different from Hitler’s view that unless Germany could reach its proper place as leader of the world, humanity was likely to slide into a new dark age. However, we’ll put that aside and focus on the Covenant, which said: “I will give you this land if you keep my law” (Deuteronomy 11:8-32 among others; emphasis added).

If you keep my law. For a devout Jew, this isn’t quite the cakewalk it seems to be. Turns out it’s a covenant with a catch as there are 613 laws they must observe, 248 positive (Thou shalts) and 365 negative (Thou shalt nots). Since the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70AD, a lot of them have fallen into abeyance, also burnt offerings and stonings seem to have gone out of fashion. However, that still leaves an awful lot of very strict laws. Negative rule No. 57, for example, from Deuteronomy 20:19 says “Do not destroy fruit trees.” Regardless, the first thing the marauding bands of “settlers” do on their regular, carefully planned and state-protected pogroms do is destroy the olive and orange groves in Palestinian villages. Similarly:

Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour’s wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour’s (Deuteronomy 5:21).

Coveting just is the essence of Zionism, that’s what it’s about: remove the coveting of the neighbour’s land and there is no Zionism. Above all, Deuteronomy 5:17 states simply “Thou shalt not kill.” There doesn’t seem to be much wriggle room in that, so when the Israeli army rock up to a Palestinian village and announce, “Hi folks, we’re God’s little helpers and he says you gotta F off but just to prove the point, we’ll shoot a few of you and set fire to your houses and farms,” there would appear to be a bit of cognitive dissonance. Except they don’t show it. In all the videos the troops post of themselves blowing up schools and hospitals, they seem to be having a whale of a time, laughing and joking with no sign of upset at all. In the UN OCHR report, troops even report that they are commended for shooting children. How does this happen? 92% of Israeli Jews fully support their government in its genocidal activities, and plenty think they should do more. How can they say, on the one hand, “By destroying Gaza and Lebanon and Iran, we’re doing God’s will,” and on the other, break every known divine law, including sex with animals (Leviticus 18:23)?

There is an answer but it isn’t widely known among gentiles: in simple terms, non-Jews aren’t actually human. According to the Kabala, Jews come from the divine sphere but goyim come from the Satanic sphere so, by wiping them out, Jewish troops are simply cleaning out pollution and paving the way for their messiah. Among many others, historians Shahak and Mezvinsky mention the enormously influential American Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994), leader of the Chabad sect (of which J Kushner is a powerful member) and mentor of one Binyamin Mileikowsky (aka Netanyahu):

The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies (of Jews and non-Jews) should be considered as completely different species … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness [2, Chap 4].

That’s pretty clear but it’s not isolated: they quote the Rabbis Kook (father and son) who believed:

… the Lurianic doctrine that non-Jews have satanic souls: ‘Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge’ [2, Chap 4].

When Zionists say that all goyim hate Jews as a natural phenomenon, it is what the Freudians call a projection: attributing to another person motives or beliefs which one holds oneself but which are in some sense forbidden or prohibited. The proof of the projection is that if all gentiles hate Jews in their DNA, there would be no Christian Zionists. End of story. Speaking of DNA, Shahak and Mezvinsky continue:

Rabbi Ginsberg, supporter of Chabad Hassids and Goldstein, ‘… speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based, spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of the Torah ... If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA … There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.’ (Baruch Goldstein was the fanatical Jewish American physician who murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in 1994. He is widely revered as a great Jewish hero in Israel and in the diaspora and people make pilgrimages to his grave).

This is the mental set that encourages perfectly healthy, sane, intelligent, educated young men (and quite a few women) to use children for target practice. The troops have been raised in the atmosphere that constantly denigrates and debases their neighbours as subhuman, animals in human form, satanic, defilers of the divine plan and so on, as described by educator and professor, Nurit Peled Elhanan (sister of Miko Peled). This sort of brainwashing, this abomination of one’s neighbours is human. This is what humans do. It has absolutely nothing to do with race, religion, intelligence, education, nationality, tribe, wealth, size, you name it. Humans are hierarchical animals, we love to dominate but at the same time, we will fight to the end for freedom from domination. If the Zionists think they can pound their neighbours hard enough, they will give in and either accept a form of slavery or disappear quietly, they’re completely wrong. The Palestinians will not accept it, any more than you or I would accept it. Moreover, worldwide, a generation is now coming of age who have seen that the entire Zionist project is a crime from beginning to end. The self-styled “most moral army in the world” turns out to be a bunch of cowardly murderers.

Zionism is a political movement. It is not a religion, it is not a race, so it is subject to the same criticism as any other political movement (see this recent decision by an Australian court that antizionism is not racism). Zionism is heretical as it purports to use their Torah (first five books of the Christian bible) as the justification of their expansion yet they ignore the most basic rules: “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t open to interpretation. That is, they pick and choose the bits that suit their innate drive to dominate, and laugh at the rest. Zionism is idolatrous, in that it elevates the land previously known as Palestine to the level of an idol, the pursuit of which is more important than following the vast majority of rules of the religion, thereby overriding the main message of Judaism, which is a religion of peace and contemplation. Zionism is a criminal endeavour, in that it deliberately sets out to steal other people’s land and to kill them if they resist. These are crimes as defined in the UN Charter and in many other points in international humanitarian law. Israel is a member of the UN and has signed the Charter but routinely breaks it: expansion was written into the Zionist plan from the very beginning and has been elaborated a million times since.

Everybody should have a copy of the ICI report on the destruction of childhood in Gaza and the occupied territories by Israel. Not everybody will want to or be able to read it but when your grandchildren ask: “What did you do for the children of Gaza?” what will you tell them?

PS. If you can face it, here is an interview that sets out part of the endless corruption of the Kushner/Trump branch of the Epstein class. It is completely insane. I’ll correct that. The insanity is that these people don’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing and fully expect to be able to keep getting away with it. The day of reckoning is approaching.

References:

1. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

2. Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press: London.

(Both of these works are available as pdf on line. And yes, I am aware of the controversy surrounding Shahak, most of which was hasbara).

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Fascism is not a political doctrine in the sense that democracy, aristocracy, autocracy, theocracy or kakistocracy (government by the worst) are doctrines dictating how a government is to be organised and acquitted. It is not an economic doctrine, as socialism and capitalism are. It is essentially a technology for gaining and maintaining power, based on the innate, hormonally-driven human urge to dominate others, to gain more and more power, territory and possessions, even at the expense of others – or deliberately at their expense, to subjugate them. A sense of power and domination is its own reward: it feels good but, at the same time, being forced down the dominance hierarchy or out of the tribe feels bad in and of itself. This is the paradox of hierarchy: essentially equal and opposite urges operate in each and every member of Homo sapiens but if one person’s urge to dominate is satisfied, then a hundred miss out.

Fascist technology is any technique or action that increases or encourages the urge to gain power or amplifies the rewards of being dominant. The technology can be applied to any group of people organised according to a dominance hierarchy: politics of course but also armies, religions, big companies, academia, and definitely football clubs. Because the urge to dominate is based in the hormone testosterone, it is strongly male-oriented but women are quickly swept up and form an important part of the background of any fascist movement. Crucially, the technology is directed at building and expanding the hierarchy; the drive to dominate is easily switched on but, apart from defeat, there is no off-switch. We have in us a lust for more and more but no innate mechanism to say “Enough is enough, I’ll leave some for others.” That’s a learned, moral matter but it is not innate and most people who want to go up the ladder slept through that lesson.

In practical politics, this means that fascism is a self-amplifying movement, powered by ever-increasing excitement, driven more and more to extremes, to want more territory, to see more enemies to crush. Because it is based in the idea “We are the greatest,” no member is allowed to say: “Actually, it’s not that important. Let’s be satisfied with what we’ve got” or “Really, we’re no different from everybody else.” The winning team of last year’s grand final doesn’t choose to spend this year surfing, no way, they’re straight back into the fray to prove who’s top dog. Politically, any fascist group is locked into a one way path: To the extreme and beyond, to paraphrase Toy Story. There’s an up escalator, but no down; it ratchets up but there is no rappell rope to come down again. Moderates are replaced by extremists, reasonable demands by unreasonable, realistic plans by unrealistic and so on until ... until what? Once under way, how does a fascist movement end? To answer that, we have to look to history but in the main, the answers are not pretty, a Götterdämmerung imposed from without or exploding within.

It is extremely rare for people to give up power voluntarily. Even very old people tenaciously hang on to their offices or wealth, long after they are able to do anything beyond look at it. It doesn’t make any difference whether they built the empire themselves or inherited it, their gnarled old hands have to be prised off the treasure or the throne, even their dead hands. Politically, people with serious power – or wealth, it’s the same thing – would rather die than give it up, especially to their enemies. They’re certainly keen for other people to die so they can hang on. But as a system that rewards the in group or the leader above all others, there are always lots of people who want to take top spot themselves. Fascism is inherently unstable but Orwell foretold a grim stability, a balance of terror between huge and massively-armed states:

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity [1, p26].

In this essay, You and the Atom Bomb, from late 1945, and presaging his 1984, he coined the term “cold war” to describe the state of unwavering hostility, a “peace that is no peace” that had split the wartime anti-fascist allies, essentially the US and USSR as Britain was prostrate. This is important, because one way fascism ends is when the external enemies it has created overcome their differences to form an alliance to defeat it. The alliance to defeat Napoleon was another example. On the large scale, those days are probably gone because nuclear weapons are great levellers, but smaller examples still happen from time to time, e.g. when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge.

More commonly, fascism tears itself apart from within. This might be when the founders die and the new generation fight over who is going to rule, or they can’t agree on a single course, or when the ultra-extremist group decides to eliminate a more moderate group or vice versa, resulting in civil war. This happened in the USSR in 1989, leading to its collapse. In China, when Mao died in September 1976, his wife and a small group (the “gang of four”) attempted to seize power but were thwarted by moderates led by Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiopeng and others.

Today, we see this playing out in two important far-right states, the US and Israel, both of which have largely turned the world against them. As bad as they are, I don’t think anybody is yet thinking of invading two dangerously unstable nuclear states. Everybody is hoping nature will take its course and they implode from within. In the US, Trump regained power by an artful alliance of frustrated nativists and working class people, his MAGAts who provided the votes he needed, and money invested by mainly Zionist billionaires (note invested, not donated). These groups are not natural allies. The American right wing is traditionally antisemitic, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. In the 1930s, the US had strict quotas on immigration of Jews. Thomas Szasz recounts the trouble his family had in migrating from Hungary, and how, despite having excellent marks, he struggled to enter medical school. At that time, many states had strict race-based laws, mainly directed against African-Americans but easily stretched to cover Asians or Jews as the fancy took them. This was normal then but the reality is, vulgar racism has never really gone away, it has simply hidden itself in Smalltown, USA.

So Trump’s political machine, such as it is, had wheels going in opposite directions and, to nobody’s surprise, the wheels are falling off. By trying to satisfy the Zionists with a war on Iran, he has infuriated his nativist, America-First base, the “deplorables” who actually vote for him. By signing a capitulation with Iran, he is haemorrhaging support from the billionaire Zionists such as the bizarre Miriam Adelson who gave Trump $250million and is now shitty he isn’t doing what Israel wants. With one supremely stupid war, he has managed to alienate both bases and he is now in serious political trouble. When he was elected, I predicted he would be pushed out by the end of 2026; that’s still looking very likely but we’ll see how much more damage he can do before then.

All this is proceeding according to Fascist script 101: take advantage of the sense of decline and immiseration to gain power; appoint external enemies (Muslims, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and China) and internal enemies (immigrants, antifa, lefties of various shapes and colours) and then start pogroms to neutralise them; build a sense of national crisis; appoint yourself as the saviour of the nation and its moral heritage and so on. This is textbook stuff, straight from Mein Kampf per courtesy of the reptilian Stephen Miller (and yes, unfair to snakes). Where Trump has failed is his corruption. Ordinary people don’t like corruption. They don’t like the sense that their superiors in the national hierarchy are using their power and influence to enrich themselves in ways ordinary people can’t and wouldn’t.

Overwhelmingly, people appointed as treasurer of the local church or golf club wouldn’t dream of stealing money or giving advantages to their friends or relatives, and this is the standard they demand of their leaders. For the German people, one of Hitler’s electoral strengths was that he was decidedly ascetic with no interest in accumulating wealth for himself; also, he was not promiscuous and was always courteous to women. The contrast with the Trump crime family just couldn’t be greater (see Kevin Walmsley today re the Trump sons’ investment in a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan which has just been given $1.6bln in Federal grants; interesting article; we won’t start on the loathsome Kushner’s diabolical plans for Albania but if you really want to ruin your day, watch Patrick Henningsen here). Another reason Trump is on the slide is his erratic behaviour, which comes from trying to bignote himself all the time while stealing the family silver and handing it to his rich friends and making sure nobody ever sees the paedophilic dirt in the Epstein files. That’s too many balls for a dementing man to juggle.

Fortunately, there is something called the midterm elections due in November. At this stage, Trump is heading for a shattering defeat but nobody should underestimate the capacity of the wealthy to swing things in their favour. He knows that if he loses control of the Senate, he’ll be heading straight to a federal prison for a long time. There are still four months to go; trapped rats are the most dangerous. He could easily pull some stunt out of his hat that normal people wouldn’t think of and, because of the imperial American political system, he could impose it. Politically, the US is an anachronism, a hangover from the French Revolution that modelled the Republic on the Ancien Regime, and the US simply copied it (Ben Franklin had been ambassador to France for nearly 10 years, and Thomas Paine was strongly aligned with the revolution). It’s not at all like the Westminster system, where Britain has just defenestrated yet another prime minister for being a bit aimless. In the US, the presidency holds immense power and is not so much the pinnacle of a pyramid as the peak of an extremely high pillar, with the rest of the country milling around its base, following orders as they drift down from on high. If Trump were PM in the UK or Australia, he would have been out on his fat arse in his first term. It would be easy to say “That’s their problem” but it’s also our problem. All we can do is watch but there will be more trouble. Let’s hope it doesn’t spread our way.

Meantime, Israel is no longer drifting toward fascism, it’s a full gallop. In Narcisso-Fascism, I listed the features of a fascist movement (pp30-34) and how Israel meets them (pp165-171). Remember that was written in 2023, before the current ultra-fanatical government took office. There are 22 criteria. We can give each country, political party or social movement a score on each feature, where 0 = not at all, 1 = a bit, 2 = quite a lot and 3 = a great deal. Israel is right up there at the top, a bit below North Korea and Nazi Germany. Even though they have fairly open borders and tolerate opposition newspapers, what pushes them up the scale is the overtly genocidal nature of their political program. North Korea doesn’t plan on killing all the South Koreans. Israel makes no secret of its genocidal intentions; au contraire, they boast about it and then get enraged when anybody objects and try to smear them as “antisemitic.” Truly amazing that apparently intelligent and educated people could be so far out of touch with socio-political reality without actually being psychotic.

In any event, their show is falling apart. They are seriously isolated in the world with, as Vance says, only one friend, DJ Trump, who has one foot in prison and the other on a banana skin. Israel’s secret alliances, e.g. with the UAE and Albania, are falling apart (see the Henningsen interview above); their allies in the West are being pushed out (Starmer and his gang) and so on but, above all, their unitary state is cracking. Most readers will know that religious students in Israel are exempt from military service (nobody else is, it is the most militarised state in the world). The army is running short of troops so they want to conscript the ultra-orthodox who are objecting violently, thereby splitting Netanyahu’s entire base of support. If he persists with this plan, and he has little choice if he wants to hold all the stolen territory, then he will lose the clerical-fascist parties in his coalition. He will lose office and the public prosecutor is waiting around the corner to nab him on charges of corruption. No wonder he seems to be losing weight. Either way, we can all sit back to watch as the plot twists and turns but I don’t think we are going to see a moderate, sane government take over. The different pretenders to the throne all hate each other violently (Israel Shahak: “The hatred of the gentiles for the Jews is as nothing compared with the hatred of Jews for each other”). Their only policy difference is how much land they steal and how quickly they wipe out the Palestinians, not whether they should withdraw to their own borders and start to be sensible.

We live in interesting times, unfortunately. I don’t think anybody can predict what will happen over the next twelve months. If the US political class had any brains, they would remove Trump and the trumpists, settle with Iran, tell the Israelis to STFU and F Off, and quietly sort out their financial mess before it engulfs them. But collectively, they don’t have any brains. They are obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of nations, which is the logical development of their earlier and still current obsession with hierarchies of races and religions. It is now written into the national charter that they have to be Numero Uno in every respect, “full spectrum dominance,” they call it: see that word? Domination. It’s all to do with testosterone. Trump’s rantings about being the most powerful nation on earth is the same psychobiological phenomenon as bull elephant seals fighting on a beach.

Israel, I believe, is a lost cause. An interesting question: In giving Israel carte blanche for 75yrs, has the West done it any favours or simply encouraged the growth of clerical-fascist regime where 80% of the population support actual genocide? Is it the product of a benign neglect coming from crude self-interest? 50% of Republicans under 40 are now opposed to Israel, and everywhere else it’s worse for them. The US will have to cut them off financially because the working class are being forced to choose between supporting the Zionist wars or Medicare For All. That’s a no-brainer but never underestimate the capacity of the American power elite to convince the average Joe and Josephine Voter to vote against their interests (Aneurin Bevan, architect of the British NHS: “The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power”).

If and when the torrents of US$ stop flowing to Israel, it will collapse in a heap. The remaining intelligentsia will pack up and leave; the secular Jews in the military will wonder why they’re being blown up to keep the religious fanatics chanting safely in their schools; the wealthy will take their money and run to their mansions in Monaco and Manhattan; the Epstein-Kushner class will slide out of sight in the murk and just keep on doing what they do best; and the rest will have to realise the party’s over, the Chosen People will have to choose peace – or oblivion. We live in interesting times although I never had any problem with boredom.

1. Orwell G (1945) You and the Atom Bomb, in Collected Essays Vol 4, In Front of Your Nose. London: Penguin. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Trump has declared victory in his illegal war of aggression on Iran and is now walking back to his golf cart, waving graciously to the crowds who never wanted another forever war. To celebrate, I will coin a new term: “A Trumpian Victory.” This differs from a pyrrhic victory (“One more victory like that and we are undone”) in that he was defeated but is telling everybody he won and is generously accepting the vanquished Iranians’ terms. In other words, he is lying (Henry Mencken: “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars”). Overlooked in the applause is the crucial point that, in glaring contrast to the blood-stained Americans and Israelis, Iran won their chapter of The Great American War on Everybody by non-lethal means. This will keep historians and sociologists in jobs for decades: in defeating the obscene coupling of “the most powerful country in history” and “the most moral army in the world,” Iran did not incinerate 100,000 civilians, or even a dozen. As promised if they were attacked, they simply took the world in a squirrel grip and squeezed. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, they exerted the only sort of power that governments understand, the power of economics.

Trump, as he makes crystal clear, has no comprehension of morality but money always makes his nose and other organs twitch. Netanyahu, Trump’s BFF, is ably filling the role of nuclear-armed mad dog from hell doing his best to sabotage everything but even he has his fatal weakness: that Israel, as Trump finally blurted out, exists wholly and solely because the US pays for it to exist:

If it weren’t for the United States of America, with me … Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, one hundred percent — and every smart person in Israel knows that.

Since Day 1 of the Israeli state in 1948, every smart person in the world who watches these things has known that. Israel exists just because, every year for nearly 80 years, it receives from US government and private sources, as well as the German government and many other Europeans, a flood of money, about $10billion a year and often far more. Without that loot, the Zionist state would be on the same economic footing as Jordan, meaning on its knees. Instead, and on their perpetual life support of foreign lucre, Jewish Israelis live like kings, with free education, free health care, full pensions and a myriad other benefits, subsidies and grants, none of which are available to ordinary Americans. How come?

The details of these arrangements we don’t know and probably never will but we can summarise them with one word: corruption. Corruption and criminality at a truly cosmic level reach deep into every government in the world (even puritanical China), into every bank and every major company, into armies and spy services, all the big universities, many churches and religious foundations and so on. But it’s certainly not just Israel, it’s a mesh of interlocking criminal enterprises with no defining division between the good and the bad. Israel is simply a node, albeit a centrally placed one, in a vast subterranean network of corruption. Granted, Trump and Netanyahu are fairly extreme examples but they have shaken hands with, sat next to, eaten and partied with, laughed and plotted with, and taken money from many of the century’s most accomplished and enterprising criminals.Tellingly, where they lead, everybody else follows.

To her credit, Whitney Webb has lifted a couple of manholes on the vast, interconnected sewers of illegal money and influence that ceaselessly pulse and flow beneath our unwitting feet [1]. Her story goes back about a hundred years to the beginnings of organised crime but we are then forced to ask: Was it ever thus? Was there always this huge hidden economy of vice sucking at the vitals of ordinary people? I think there was but for most of human history, it wasn’t the underworld at all, it was right out in the open: the Atlantic slave trade; Britain’s vast drug trade, moving shiploads of opium from forced labour plantations in India to poison the Chinese population; Leopold II’s monstrous criminality in the rubber trade in Congo; invasion and annexation of native lands in North America, Africa and Oceania; genocide in a dozen places, on and on.

Western wealth was built on wickedness, lauded either as the civilising influence of Christendom or the nobility of Western arms subduing the unruly savages. Stealing somebody else’s land or enslaving their children wasn’t crime as it was out in the open and everybody was doing it. The British occupation of the Subcontinent (now seven countries) lasted 250 years. In that time, the Poms extracted some $45trillion (modern value), caused the premature deaths of 145million people and reduced their standard of living from among the highest in the world to the lowest, from which they will probably never recover. And they still won’t hand back the Kohinoor diamond.

I doubt that the conduct today of the wealthy and powerful is any better or worse than it ever was. They’ve always believed in droit de seigneur, their right to have whatever they want when they want it, e.g. the comically disgusting behaviour of one Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as exposed by historian and author Andrew Lownie. The only differences these days are the extent and reach of crime enabled by the prodigiously complex, computerised, neoliberal economic system, which means it’s all hidden. Anybody who tries to expose it gets either a sentence for spying (e.g. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden) or a bullet in the back of the neck (see [1] for examples). You and me, we’re fools. We work hard for our living, we pay our taxes and bills, we help with charities, we clean up our mess, and we get nowhere. Meantime, Herr Musk is now the world’s first private trillionaire even though his DOGE closed a quarantine and veterinary surveillance service in the Agriculture Dept. to save $15million, and the US now has an outbreak of the dreaded screwworm that will cost at least $1billion to eradicate and will push up the price of beef. As though the rich care or even know how much food costs. Suggestions that Musk should pay the $1billion have been laughed off. How does such inequality exist, and what is its likely effect? Consider this:

Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens.

That was written in 1912, well before the Russian Revolution, by the French-British author, poet and politician, Hilaire Belloc [2, p62]; nothing has changed. We should not, however, complain too loudly as, according to neoliberal doctrine, massively unequal individual wealth is a necessary precondition to a general rise in living standards. As ourlined by economists such as von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Friedman, only private citizens know enough about their needs and resources to make the crucial decisions that lead to successful businesses. By the simple expedient of reducing government regulations and red tape to a minimum, individuals should be allowed and, indeed, encouraged to amass personal wealth because, once they have made their pile, they then have to invest it. This will produce jobs for the working classes whose standard of living will therefore rise (“the rising tide lifts all boats”) and all will be well. It sounds wonderful, so why isn’t it working? Two reasons, the first explained in another of the revealing posts by China-based American businessman, Kevin Walmsley.

In his latest post, Mr Walmsley looks at the impending birth of 6G telephone systems. This will be thousands of times faster than today’s 5G, too fast for household and personal use, as he notes: “To download a 21 terabyte-sized file will take 5 hours on a 5G network, and just 18 seconds on a 6G.” That, however, is ideal for industry, science and, unfortunately, spying agencies and the military. However, almost the entire development is taking place in China because China alone has the supplies of gallium nitride needed to manufacture the ultrafast chips 6G relies on. The wily Chinese will have the rest of the world in the ultimate squirrel grip, as China produces 99% of the entire world’s supply of gallium, just because neoliberalism. Gallium is almost entirely a by-product of aluminium smelting, which is dominated by China, Russia and, until a few weeks ago, the Gulf petrostates.

Decades ago, western businessmen decided it was cheaper to import gallium than mine the stuff so, strictly in keeping with the clever economists mentioned above, that’s just what they did. It would take the West at least a dozen years to get to the stage of producing enough gallium of their own to bring their 6G systems to where China is today, by which time China will be a dozen years ahead of them anyway and will have set the standards itself. And to add insult to injury, gallium is essential for the precise radars used by the F-35s that bombed the girls’ school at Minab, and by the billion dollar radars recently destroyed by Iran’s cheap drones (read Kevin’s article; he shows a picture of the ballast now being installed in F-35s in place of the radars to stop them flipping over). The US now needs to build lots of missiles to replace the expensive gear they fired in their recent war but China holds the essential ingredient to make them work. And it is not releasing it.

So that’s one reason why we shouldn’t have trillionaires, or even billionaires: they will adjust the world economy to make themselves richer and more powerful while leaving us to sort out the consequences, because that’s what the rich and powerful do. We have strong, biologically-determined inclinations to gain property, power and status. We switch these drives on because they’re incredibly exciting but the off-switch takes all the fun out of life so, unless we’re compelled to, we rarely choose to “do the right thing” and stop trying to grab all the cake. As the example of gallium shows, neoliberalism is producing and reinforcing inequality but this time, and unlike the imperial examples mentioned above (slaves, opium etc), this time, it’s the West that’s getting its nuts squeezed, and they don’t like it. Tough shit, sunshine, pigeons come home to roost.

The second reason untrammelled wealth and power aren’t a good idea is seen in a quote from Trump’s immensely powerful deputy chief of staff, the man who was recently likened to a rectal polyp, Mrs Miller’s little boy, Stevie (check the picture; a reader suggested the polyp looked benign). In an interview soon after Trump 2.0 was let out of its dungeon, he said:

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower ... We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world.

Unlike his boss, who can’t read, I’d say Miller has read Mein Kampf, which says:

...the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist [3, p182].

The whole thrust of neoliberalism has been to let the Stephen Millers, Trumps and Epsteins of the world loose, to remove any legal or, above all, moral shackles from them and license them to pillage the planet until they are forced to say “No more, I’ve got enough.” Except they never do. Neoliberalism justifies “more, more, more for me.” It authorises cruel disdain and contempt for those who are stuck in the mud and can’t escape just because the wealthy and powerful have recast the economic and legal systems to suit themselves. Over the past 35 years, the US has lost at least 18 million well-paying industrial jobs. The great majority of these have gone to China where the standards of living for the common people are fast approaching those of the US. A reader of Kevin’s Substack commented:

China has a socialist free market economy where the government builds the infrastructure and businesses must learn to survive under intense market competition. The USA has a corporate welfare economy, where corporations feed a price-is-no-object government demand, and corporations deemed “too-big-to-fail” are continually bailed out by the government.

I think it’s time to declare the neoliberal experiment a failure and go back to the idea of fairness, which Hilaire Belloc championed as the “distributive state” [2]. The reason neoliberalism failed is as clear as daylight: the economists who wrote it, known as the Austrian School because most of them came from Vienna, had no idea about humans. Not a clue. That’s a bit strange as several of them had served in the Great War so they must have had some notion that humans aren’t the nicest creatures around. In particular, their model of human psychology was palsied as they assumed people are ordered little robots who go through life checking prices and demands and making calm, rational decisions as to what they should produce, buy or sell. They thought that what they called “rational self-interest” was enough to explain human economic behaviour and, critically, to keep it in line with human interests. They forgot about war. That parody of psychology is the entire basis of the economic policies directly or indirectly running most of the world today.

They didn’t think that, once given the green light, businessmen would look to invest their wealth where it produced the greatest returns, not the greatest benefit. That is, they would immediately look overseas to poor countries with low-paid workers, lax environmental and commercial regulations, and easily-bribed police. As long as they made money, they didn’t care that it impoverished their own working classes. They certainly didn’t think far enough to realise that shifting critical supply chains overseas exposed their country to the ultimate squirrel grip. And as the Austrian economists were probably quite decent bourgeoisie themselves, they had no idea what arseholes the wealthy and powerful actually are. They didn’t understand that, blessed with minimal regulations and oversight, crooks like Trump, Kushner, Epstein, Netanyahu, MBS, MBZ, Boris J and so many others would move in and quickly reshape the legal and financial systems to suit themselves, because crooks. They should have listened to Lord Acton, who said: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control” (1887). The old boy was absolutely right. Power attracts people who are hungry for power, and people who hunger for power will never willingly switch off their hunger, they’re incapable of saying “Enough’s enough.”

This is the heart of the problem: war is about domination and domination is the most pointless and destructive game in town. Only when we view war with the same intuitive abhorrence as we look upon bestiality, incest or paedophilia will we start to bring it under control.

Just a suggestion: Can we leave the neolibs in control for a bit longer, until they’ve completely wrecked the American and zionist capacity to launch aggressive wars?

References:

1. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

2. Belloc H (1912). The Servile State. London: TN Foulis.

3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

In 1987, I left the comforts of Perth, the most isolated capital city in the world, to travel to West Australia’s remote Kimberley region to set up an isolated psychiatric service. Isolated meant “no staff and no facilities” as the nearest psychiatric unit was 2,200km away. It also turned out to mean no support, no assistance and, above all, no interest of any sort from the Health Dept or the college of psychiatrists. In fact, I spent the next six years as the world’s most isolated psychiatrist covering an area of 425,000sqkm, or 165,000 sqm, nearly twice the size of the state of Victoria. The population was then about 25,000, about half white and half Aboriginal people, most of whom were still living more or less according to their traditions. The older people, especially woman, generally couldn’t speak English and young people spoke their own languages at home. My role was to stop Aboriginals being sent to the mental hospital in Perth, a bit less than the distance from London to Moscow but, for them, a much greater climatic and cultural leap. To prepare myself, I worked through a pile of textbooks of Aboriginal anthopology, which is a big topic as there was considerable interest in preliterate cultures in the 19^th Century, especially from Germany. With academic papers and so on, I eventually slogged through about 3,000 pages of material.

Aboriginal society was an ancient, preliterate culture whose people had lived for 50,000 years in one of the harshest climates on earth, with no metals or technology other than they could make with stones and wood. It was and largely still is a patriarchal gerontocracy, where the old men hold power due to their control of religious matters. After long practice, they survived; most authorities estimate there were about 300,000 Aboriginals when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788. However, western diseases quickly devastated them. As the land is totemic, people are tied to the land of their birth so, by staying within their own boundaries, there would normally be no conflict. It also meant they couldn’t leave if they get into trouble, so they had to keep on good terms with the old men, who controlled the most valuable asset of all, the marriage market.

However, my reading soon showed something strange. I had long been interested in anthropology, having previously worked in Southern Thailand, and in ethology, the study of animal behaviour, for what it tells us about human behaviour. In those fields, one of the biggest topics is aggression, both intra- and interspecific. Normally, for humans and for other animals, the index to any textbook will contain a hundred or more references to aggression or similar topics but, when it came to Aboriginal anthropology, there were hardly any. A number of researchers I spoke to said that this was because human conflict is directed at gaining control of the primary source of wealth, meaning land. However, because it was totemic, Aboriginals couldn’t steal another tribe’s land as it would reject them, so they lived in peace within their own boundaries.

This seemed odd since a few days in the casualty department of any local hospital shows one of the striking features of Aboriginal life today is fighting. Ah, I was told, that’s due to government policy of forcing them off their land so that different tribes are mixed in the same small area, and the traditional power structures run by the old men had broken down. Also, alcohol had made everything a hundred times worse. If they were able to go back to their precontact state, i.e. as hunter-gatherers in their own, remote areas, they would be fine. That didn’t seem very realistic, as they also said they would need the flying doctor and other health services.

It seems the reason behind this omission was that early researchers and their modern counterparts wanted to believe that pre-contact Aboriginals lived in a state of Rousseauesque bliss, so they simply overlooked aggression. The clues were there, however. One eminent researcher at University of WA wrote that when they were travelling, women routinely carried all their domestic goods and the children because men had to carry their spears and be ready to use them. Hang on, use them against what? There are no large predators in Australia; crocodiles are easy to avoid, just keep out of the water, and spears are useless against them anyway. Snakes were quickly despatched by the women and ended up on the fire for supper. The only conceivable threat was other humans, and this turned out to be true. Missionary reports from the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, which were not in the academic literature, reported periodic flare-ups that involved all the men in a couple of adjoining tribes meeting on their borders in highly-ritualised “battles,” with more shouting and waving of spears than actual fighting.

There was, however, more or less constant low-grade fighting from stealing the most valuable asset of all: young women. The old men liked to keep a few young women for themselves, which meant there were always a few young men who missed out, so they snuck across to an adjoining tribe’s land to steal wives for themselves. However, that provoked payback raids so the fighting would rarely resolve. A tribe on the move was at risk of being attacked so the men had to be ready, which meant the women did all the heavy work. But before anybody says “Oh, how dreadfully primitive, they obviously needed to be pacified and taught to wear clothes,” just remember that nothing has changed. Anywhere. We terribly superior, gifted and cultured Westerners are still doing exactly the same thing, constantly invading other people’s land to steal their assets and turn them into slaves of one sort or another. In the old days, that meant physical slaves but now it means wage and monetary slaves. Much the same thing except that the modern slave driver doesn’t worry if his slave sickens and dies, he just gets another one from the queues of desperate people milling around his gate. Does it have to be this way? Definitely not.

In 1989, the financial contradictions within the USSR meant that it lost control of its satellites in Eastern Europe, and soon after of itself as the various republics snatched their independence. By 1991, “monolithic international communism” had proven to be anything but. The entire Western power elite were beside themselves with joy: “We won the Cold War,” they crowed. “We’ve proven our superiority.” Political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed: “This is the end of history, the end of social evolution. Liberal democracy is triumphant and humanity will forever owe us a debt of gratitude for our clear-sighted fortitude.” The project to develop and implement neoliberal economics went into overdrive. There was even talk of a “peace dividend,” that because the foreign threat had gone, the military budget could be diverted to good works at home.

It didn’t happen, of course, the arms manufacturers weren’t inclined to close up shop. Within a year or two, in its role as guardian of freedom and democracy, the US had pivoted to face two new “mortal enemies,” rabid jihadist Islamism and fanatical Chinese communist autocracy. A few weeks ago, Trump announced that this year’s budget for the aptly-renamed Department of War will be $1.5trillion, 50% more than last year, to meet the threat. What threat? The same threat that WJ Clinton identified in his speech to the UN General Assembly, 27^th Sept. 1993, in which he reiterated his earlier statement to Congress re the looming threat that the US would be forced to follow the same rules as everybody else:

… the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power … (to ensure) … uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.

In other words, we have the right to bomb you in order to maintain “full spectrum dominance,” absolute domination of the entire world in all possible respects, economic, military, financial, cultural, sporting, and so on. The threat for the US, the only threat, is of not being Number One. What right? The right called “might.” Macht hat Recht, as Adolf used to say. We have the power, therefore we will use it. The question then arises: Why? Why is it necessary to exert total dominance of the world for all time? If you ask this of an American with any sort of power, they just look at you blankly:

“What do you mean, why? Isnt it obvious? We’re the most powerful, smartest, most generous, most democratic and generally most amazing people in history, it is our destiny to lead the world to the sunny uplands and your role to be grateful.”

But, you object, what if we don’t want to be led? What if we’re happy down here on ground level? That gets you nowhere. Once offered the prize of la liberation americaine, there is no refusing: “This is for your benefit. Do as you’re told or we’ll bomb you.” You may then be tempted to ask: “If we can’t see the benefit, then what’s in it for you?” This brings us back to the Clinton Doctrine. Reality is, full spectrum dominance by Uncle Sam is not for the benefit of the world, it’s strictly for the benefit of the US. In particular, it’s for the entrenched power elite of that country and their dear friends in other countries, commonly known as the Epstein Class. British journalist Jonathon Cook nailed it:

Fukayama forgot that capitalism isn’t socialism. It doesn’t seek the best for everyone. It doesn’t want to share the wealth. It doesn’t prioritise dignity over profit. Its lifeblood is exploitation – of individuals and of entire peoples. He forgot that there would be resistance (Substack, 10.06.2026; emphasis added).

This is the crucial point: neoliberal capitalism isn’t in the business of looking after the people who aren’t in a position to take advantage of it. That’s not its purpose. It isn’t about catching the people who fall through the cracks, it’s about helping the front-runners get further ahead by eliminating any possible handicaps in their race to be dominant. Why be dominant? Because human nature. The urge to dominate is hard-wired into us but in such a way that we don’t see it as odd or out of place, we never question it. Dominating is fun, it feels great and we always want more. We never pause to ask how the people we’re dominating feel about it. Britain occupied the entire Subcontinent, now seven different countries, for 250 years, and when Churchill was advised India wanted independence, he got shitty: “”I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire” (Nov. 10^th 1942). This is normal. This is human, but it is not thereby desirable or rational. Invariably, the downtrodden must come to want their freedom, and to fight for it.

Insight is being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and imagine how they feel. Political maturity is not deceiving yourself over your motives. People talk about the post-war period being a “pax Americana” due to the liberal rules-based international order (the IMF, World Bank, UN agencies, WTO, etc) but it wasn’t. It was peaceful and ordered for the people who used it to rake in lots of money but chaotic for everybody else. There hasn’t been a day of peace in the world since 1945 and the US was always in the thick of the fighting, telling everybody else how they should live for the benefit of international capital. The North Koreans realised this a long time ago, as historian Alfred McCoy commented recently:

And mindful that nuclear-armed North Korea remains safe while Iran has been ravaged, even medium-sized states will undoubtedly be seeking the security of nuclear arms... (Common Dreams June 10^th, well worth reading)

A similar thing is playing out in West Asia at present. Israel’s plan for “Greater Israel” involves displacing something like 100million people from their traditional lands, to be replaced by 10million Zionist Israelis. Somewhere along the line, what started as a socialist dream of a safe national home for Europe’s Jews mated with Kabalistic Judaism to produce an endlessly expansionist clericalist-fascist state. How they expect to hold this vast area isn’t clear. Swedish-Iranian political scientist Trita Parsi said: “Israel believes that the only way it can be secure is for everybody else not to be secure.” That way lies madness as there can be no security in a landscape filled with people who hate you. Do Netanyahu and Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all the rest know this? No, they have managed to convince themselves that they can do to Palestinians what they hated when the Nazis did it to their grandparents, and that there will be no repercussions because God and the US are on their side, backed up by The Bomb. Macht hat Recht noch einmal. Might is right recycled. All this is human, none of it has anything to do with the rights or wrongs of any political or economic system, or of any religion or the superiority of any race or such like.

Now we can look at the state of Aboriginal society 200 years ago, with the population of a small modern city scattered thinly across a vast continent, and smile indulgently at their pointless squabbles and posturing “wars.” However, they had one thing that we just can’t seem to get our heads around: everybody had enough to survive but nobody had enough to dominate the neighbouring tribes. Their totemic structure forced the tribes to stay apart, to stay in their land and not try to take over the neighbour’s place. Yes, the old men were a bit greedy but don’t overlook the modern habit of old white men taking young “trophy wives.” Trump, of course, took three wives from a different tribe as well as hundreds of more or less forced dalliances on the side.

Neoliberal economics, meaning monopoly private capitalism, and the collapsing “rules based international order” were specifically designed to create inequality and cement it in place. Monopoly state capitalism, aka Stalinist socialism, does the same. There is a median path, the distributive state, that equalises opportunity while allowing a few to climb a few rungs higher in the hierarchy. Aboriginals managed it, so there’s no reason apart from greed and hubris that we can’t. That, however, is a hard sell to people who can only think in terms of domination as the be-all and end-all of human existence. We need to start before it’s too late.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Last week’s post ended ominously: “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” A reader asked:

Your conclusion about the guillotine is probably meant metaphorically, and I would like you to answer plainly: how do you think the plutocracy can be defeated? There was a time when the ruling class needed the serfs for their labour, so that was a power the people had, but that will not be the case for much longer. The middle class had their place too in administrative work, again, that is not going to last. In those terms, how can the people overthrow the 1%?

This is a huge concept, we can only start on it today but I will answer plainly: I was not speaking metaphorically. It was intended literally. The 1% will not be displaced voluntarily or politely, as the inestimable Chris Hedges noted in another of his superlative essays this week:

Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.

Mao Zedung knew this too well:

Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism, which is the entire modus operandi of the rich, is that Homo sapiens form dominance hierarchies just because the rewards of being dominant are so thrilling. Paradoxically, because the pain of oppression knows no end, each of us has two strong innate drives, one to dominate and one to resist domination. For those who, by one means or another, get to the top, the thought of going back down the ladder is intolerable. They simply cannot conceive of life “down among the riffraff,” so they will do anything open to them to resist a drop in status. That means anything, without limit, just to protect their status. Very often, they would rather die; better still, they send other people to die in their place. In the competition between their status and other people’s right, their status wins. Always. We see this in West Asia at present: with the full-blooded support of the great majority of its citizens, Israel is using genocide to cement its position as the dominant power in the entire region (for a truly disgusting display of the ecstatic joy humans get from crushing their conspecifics underfoot, see this video, starts at 0.40; that is not random, it is now institutionalised in the culture).

Purely as mammals, the thrill of defeating other people, of dominating them and making them look small so that we can feel big, is hard-wired into us. We all have it. Each and every healthy human infant comes equipped with the hardware to want to rise up the hierarchy. If we have to push somebody else down in order to do it, that is what we will do unless it is trained out of us in childhood. The urge to dominate is not a conscious thing, as in “I’ll plant a tree and watch it grow so other people can enjoy it.” It is the excitement small children display when they win a race, and the even greater excitement their parents show when their little darling wins a race. It is the pride of parents when their child graduates, ranging up to the ecstasy of fifty thousand football fans linking arms and singing as their team wins, the thunderous roars of delight from the stadium when one country gets gold at the Olympics, the drunken rampaging after a football match or an election that soon turns into violence. The urge to dominate is built into our culture but, because the joy of winning is readily amplified by bashing the other side, violence is never far away.

When it comes to the wealthy and powerful, there are two groups, inherited wealth and the self-made. Those who inherit wealth and status haven’t had to struggle to get anywhere so they believe being on top is their natural right. Being dominant becomes the basis of their sense of self-esteem, from which they believe they have rights and abilities other people don’t have. We need no better examples than Trump DJ and the Andrew formerly known as Prince. Trump was a millionaire at age eight as his father secretly transferred money to him without paying tax. Now, he boasts that by hardly ever paying tax, he proves he is smarter than those who do. When he is deposed and the investigations start, it will take decades to sort out the webs of corruption he has woven around the world. He does this because he believes he is a higher sort of person who deserves more than the common herd. Similarly, by all accounts, Andrew MBW is a selfish, dishonest and abusive little shit. His ex-wife, who seems to have disappeared into an exclusive wellness chalet in the Austrian Alps at thousands a day, was apparently no better. Fitzgerald nailed it a hundred years ago:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different (The Rich Boy, 1926).

As for the self-made, most weren’t. They had head starts you and I never knew existed. As a teenager, one William Gates, for example, had money, advantages and, above all, connections to people in the growing world of IT. Yes, he made the most of it but he remains the same person who constantly tried to nobble the competition and was intimately involved with Epstein. The self-made rich are ultracompetitive and terrible people because for them, getting ahead is the only thing that counts. Nothing else matters, certainly not relationships or other people’s rights. They fight dirty to get to the top and will fight with all their resources and dirt to stay on top. Again, look no further than Trump. For him, the idea that he could get into the White House took hold gradually. As soon as he got there, his first moves have been to disable any opposition and take revenge on anybody who opposed him in any way. These people are not called the Epstein class for nothing.

The important point is this: the 1%, and in particular, the 0.01%, do not think like ordinary human beings. They are utterly self-involved, obsessed to the point of mania with getting to the top and staying there, and determined to crush by any means necessary anybody who gets in the way. As they rise up the ladder, so their sense of entitlement grows and expands, as does their sense of grievance for long-forgotten slights and insults, and their determination to pound their perceived enemies. Trump, for example, is obsessed with Obama and Biden. They didn’t actually do anything wrong, they just beat him in a race and he is incapable of getting over the narcissistic hurt. He doesn’t see elections as a fair decision by the majority unless he wins, when it’s a case of “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” The only thing is, he’s not joking because, like so many of these people, Trump is devoid of a sense of humour. They only laugh when they’re winning and somebody else is getting hurt, as in that vile video (above) of the evil Itamar Ben Gvir.

That’s at the individual level but crucially, humans gain a sense of status by identifying with a larger, more powerful group. This is true of male humans, and especially so of adolescents and young adults. They bond just because being part of a group feels more powerful and more exciting than being a suburban nobody. They leave the family of birth and latch on to a larger group, maybe sporting, or politics, or religion or, above all, the military, and by that means, they feel stronger and more confident. That’s why they wear uniforms or club regalia, it identifies them as “one of the powerful.” They swagger around, thrilled by the buzz of power they get from people looking at them but also from seeing their mates and themselves. It’s homoerotic without necessarily being sexual, and it is very, very exciting. If for any reason, people are pushed out of the group, they fall in a hole for a long time, as seen in peacetime soldiers who are injured and discharged medically unfit. Troops injured during fighting don’t feel so bad as they know they’re seen as honourable and still part of the gang. Women can always gain self-esteem and prestige by being mothers but the important point is this: nobody willingly gives up high status to mix with the slobs down there, to become one of them.

It’s true that every group, from small tribes or gatherings to the national level, wants to feel superior to the rest but when the idea of superiority is woven into the national psyche, we’re in trouble. This was crystal clear in Nazi Germany’s concept of die Herrenvolk, the master race. At that time, the idea of a hierarchy of nations or races was accepted by everybody who had any influence, not just Germans, and avidly soaked up by everybody else who wanted to feel more powerful than they were, such as workers. The concept of social Darwinism was normal, that people who got to the top deserved to be there while those who didn’t make it had earned their fates. The upper classes genuinely believed they were a better class of humans; conversely, the poor were substandard who, if they didn’t work harder and behave better, really didn’t deserve to live. Eugenics was seen as progressive, not as distasteful and certainly not as evil.

Since the Third Reich and the horrors of World War II, people are much less likely to talk about this in public but they still believe it. Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia who recently escaped from his mausoleum for a second run at power, liked to talk about “lifters and leaners.” Lifters are the hard workers (like him) who run things and pay their taxes while leaners are the morally feckless who choose to parasitise the welfare state and be carried through life by the industrious. For the wealthy and powerful, success is seen in moral terms: “I earned my status and my wealth by hard work and self-denial. I went without to get ahead and everybody else can, too, if they make the right moral choices.” In social Darwinism, success is seen as proof of moral superiority, not genetic. Most definitely, it is never seen as structural, the result of social conditions over which people have no control, and never as luck. This is at its worst in the military, where injuries are always and only seen as moral failings. They even say it: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” If you’re a soldier who gets a back injury, don’t even bother reporting it.

Today, once more, the world is convulsed by the idea that certain nations have rights that others don’t have, that they are superior beings just by virtue of birth. Americans freely proclaim this, that they are the Leaders of the Free World, World Policeman, the Shining City on the Hill, Fount of Democracy, Most Favoured Nation, Most Powerful in History, and. They. Can. Do. What. They. Like. To anybody, anywhere, for any reason that suits them at the time. Thus, they can strangle Cuba for 67 years then tell the Cubans their government can’t provide for them and must be overthrown, preferably by invasion. Trump’s military has murdered over 200 people by blowing up boats in the Caribbean yet they indict former President Raoul Castro because in 1996, he ordered his military to shoot down some planes that, despite repeated warnings from Cuba and the US authorities to stop, kept flying over Cuba from Florida to drop leaflets. The US has over 850 military bases around the world, threatening everybody who doesn’t toe the line, yet are driven mad by Russian and Chinese listening posts in Cuba. Their hypocrisy is overwhelming but, for them, this is not hypocrisy. Their double standards come directly from believing the old, old lie: We’re better than everybody else so we can do what we like but you have to do as we tell you. As a rule, any nation that has more guns and flags than people is a menace but the cracks in Uncle Sam’s foundations are growing rapidly. International dollar-based finance, their “exorbitant privilege,” is on the way out. Their economy, carefully deindustrialised by neoliberals, is in serious trouble. More significantly, Trump and his gang of halfwits, crooks and predators are splitting the country apart. Expect more trouble as the cost of being world hegemon exceeds any possible benefits, even the wondrous benefit of thinking you’re Number One in the world.

When we come to Israel, we see the concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism at their worst. From infancy, it is drummed into Israeli children that they are special, they are chosen, God favours them and has promised them a land like no other but it was stolen by outsiders and unbelievers, so it is their proud and unwavering duty to fight to recover their divine birthright. This is the ultimate racism, there is no step beyond believing that your enemies are satanic so you can do what you like just because everything you do is already blessed by God, and any lenience toward them is defiling God’s work. So, as we see in that video above and in so many others, that is what they do. This is no accident. Israeli educator and researcher, Nurit Peled Elhanan (b. 1949) is the granddaughter of one of the signatories of their declaration of statehood; the daughter of a revered general; and elder sister of Miko, a noted peace activist and author.

Over her long lifetime, her research has shown that Israeli children are exposed to non-stop ideological indoctrination which, if it occurs in Russia or China, is known as brain-washing. Her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, from 2012, sets this out in detail but she has (very bravely) written hundreds of articles and lectures on this topic (podcast of a recent interview here, transcript here). The gist is that “Arabs” (they never use the word Palestinians) are subhuman interlopers who must be expelled by any means possible, as leaving the Promised Land in their vile hands is an unforgivable sin against God. This means that, in reclaiming Greater Israel, Jews are unable to sin because they are doing God’s will. Therefore rape, torture and genocide are not bad, and anybody who says they are is acting as an agent of the satanic sphere. This is, of course, precisely the racist dogma of the Nazis, but with God replacing the Aryan race.

Naturally enough, when anybody accuses Israelis of crimes such as sodomising the crews of the Sumud Flotilla, there is a chorus of screeches from the president down that this is just another example of the “blood libel” from the medieval era. They’re lying, of course, they know exactly what goes on in their prisons. Israel isn’t Germany during World War II. The Nazi government went to considerable lengths to keep their death camps secret because they knew the civilian population wouldn’t stand for it [1]. Yet in Israel today, e.g. “Israel Day,” May 15^th, gangs of flag-draped youths routinely rampage through Palestinian areas screaming “Death to the Arabs.” During the pogroms in the West Bank, police and military stand by to make sure Palestinians offer no resistance. This is the direct result, she says of a state-coordinated program that turns young Israelis into:

... murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olive [orchards], and poisoners of wells . . . who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. [These] children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbors, the gentiles, children who were brought up in the fear of Islam – a fear that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass murderers [2].

Her point is perfectly clear: these people will not willingly give up their power to crush their neighbours. They will keep trying to expand to fill the borders of their self-appointed “homeland” of Greater Israel, all 2million sqkm of it, until somebody does something to stop them. That may come from within, when enough voters are disgusted by what their government is doing to turf them out but don’t bet on it: 82% support expelling all Gazans by any means. More likely, it will come from the world turning against Israel and turning off their life support. Israel has essentially no natural resources. Without many hundreds of billions of dollars of support, mainly from the US and Germany, and preferential treatment in a myriad ways, their economy would collapse overnight to the level of Jordan or Lebanon. For example, at the beginning of the current round of fighting, Israel had about 1,700 combat-ready Merkava tanks, costing about $5million each (I think that’s an understatement; a new Abrams battle tank costs about $24million), plus dozens of F-35s and so on. Who paid for that? Not Israel, that’s for sure. However, the capital cost of weapons is only part of it; maintaining and arming them more than doubles the price. You don’t get that sort of weaponry by exporting oranges. People say “But Israel exports lots of software and arms.” True, but that’s all developed by American money.

Israel’s folly is that it is engaged in an imperialist, racist project that relies totally on the goodwill of foreign supporters. If that support evaporates, and it is doing so rapidly, then they’re finished. But its architects will not give up easily, their entire self-esteem and raison d’être are built on the idea that God loves them above all other people and wants them to clean all the second-class humans from His Promised Land. Take that away and they’re nobodies. It’s the same in the US. The white population of the South slept easily on the idea that they were superior to the nigras working in their fields to keep them in lives of ease. Even dirt-poor whites in the Delta could look at a black labourer and say “I may be poor but at least I’m not a nigger.” The Civil War notwithstanding, they never gave that up. That same attitude of racial/national superiority has since seeped throughout the whole country but its focus shifted, to foreigners. Even poor Americans feel superior to the rest of the world, for example, many of them believe American health services are the best in the world. Truly amazing what you can do with propaganda.

There is a point worth making. Around the world, we see a headlong Drang nach rechts, a drive to the extreme right. In the UK and in Australia, extremist right wing parties have suddenly surged to the front. In the US, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, you name it, the neonazis are out in force. I think there are two forces operating. First, as mentioned many times, is the malign influence of neoliberal economics causing explosive increases in inequality, deindustrialisation, commercialisation of education and health, lowering public standards, ever-more oppressive surveillance of workers coupled with pervasive corruption at the highest levels of society, and so on. Workers are aware something is seriously wrong with their lives, they’re just not sure what it is.

The second comes directly from Israel, which has normalised far rightist/protofascist conduct just because nobody is allowed to criticise Israel: “Anything Israel does is right and proper. Nobody is allowed to criticise us as that’s antisemitism and blood libel which are worse crimes than genocide.” Israel has colonised the extreme right wing with impunity, giving it an ersatz respectability. What Israel gets away with, the neonazis quickly copy mit größter Freude, with the greatest of delight. The huge, militarised D8 bulldozers Israel uses to flatten Gaza and south Lebanon, without a squeak of protest from the West, are also building a gigantic autobahn to a right wing hell on earth, down which are stampeding Republicans in the US, Reform in the UK, Alternatif fur Deutschland, Italy’s League, Bolsonarists in Brazil, BJP in India, One Nation in Australia and so many others. Where Israel leads, the lunatic fringe follows. As they say in QAnon: Where we go one, we go all.

That’s this week’s limit but to summarise, an attitude of superiority is not compatible with peace on the planet. However, people won’t give it up willingly. How do we force them to do that? Slowly, at the ballot box where possible, and by constant activism. But the most important thing is to know how extremists work: by terrifying normal people. The key point is to stop fearing them. We will talk more.

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One point to show you how the 1% think, or don’t think. After all the hooha about Epstein Island, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, each the offspring of convicted felons, have hit upon a fantabulous idea to invest all the money they got from Middle East potentates: they’re going to build a super-resort for the wealthy in Albania with no riffraff allowed. Very expensive and very exclusive, the wealthy will be able to let their hair down without the risk of paparazzi snapping them. Where in Albania? In a wildlife refuge. On an island. Yes folks, in a mind-numbing display of insightlessness spawned by their congenital contempt for public opinion, they plan to build another bigger, more secure Epstein Island. Don’t you just love it? We can be sure they’ll have queues of rich people dropping by for lunch, à la the lying Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary.

Fortunately, the Albanian people have worked out their prime minister has corruptly approved the development, so they threw molotov cocktails into his house. As I said, “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” All power to the Albanians.

References:

1. Johnson E, Reuband K-H (2005) What we knew: terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany. London: John Murray/Hodder Headline.

2. This is referenced to: Svirsky, Gila. “Address at the 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Jerusalem, 28 December 2007”. Gila Svirsky: A Personal Website. The link has recently disappeared.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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A Mr Eli Groner, former director general of the office of the prime minister in Israel under Netanyahu, and intimately connected to every major endeavour by that government in the past 15 years, with a list of connections throughout the Middle East and the US and Europe and elsewhere that would fill a sizeable book, is not happy with the current state of affairs vis a vis their surprise attack on Iran, as he tweeted this week:

Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war. They will point to more extreme leadership, to the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are now the centre of gravity and to the fact that the US is blinking in the face of them. All of this is true. But there is something far more serious: Iran has proven that it is capable of instilling fear in the global economy and order through the threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s critical energy arteries. And the moment the world begins to treat iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto that policy must be managed around, the implication is that Iran is no longer just threatening the Middle East. It is actually influencing the rules of the global game.

This is a strategic victory far deeper than any point specific military achievement.

Disaster (here, at 1.30).

There’s a little rule that Master Groaner obviously failed to learn in kindergarten: Be careful what you wish for. When the illegal, immoral and unprovoked US-Israeli war of aggression was launched, Netanyahu gloated: “I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.” Well, sunshine, you’ve got it. You’ve got it good and hard and I hope it’s as painful for you as it is for all the Palestinians who are raped in your prisons – about which you know everything, by the way, and laugh about it with your mates in the lunatic fringe parties. Let’s just look at Groaner’s points in light of Narcisso-Fascism to see what they add up to:

“Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war.” I’d say about 99.5% of the world’s population agree with that, and every one of them is delighted. The sight of the Exceptional Nation and God’s Chosen People being demoted in the hierarchy by your actual coloured people is a delight that most of us never imagined.

“More extreme leadership.” Well, if you murder about 50 of the experienced and highly qualified people in a country, including the revered leader of their religion which venerates martyrdom, then the survivors are not going to overlook it, especially the new supreme leader who was injured in the same attack that killed his father, mother, wife and sister (see this article which calls him a “hardliner” about 20 times and only mentions the deaths of his womenfolk in the last line). What do you people expect? If somebody blew away half of Groaner’s family, would that make him more moderate? I’ll tell you what they expected. Against all the advice of professionals in the military, the diplomatic corps and academia, not to mention the more level heads in the international community, Trump and Co. expected Iranians to fall on their knees and throw flowers and kisses at their “liberators.” Truly. Now that it hasn’t happened, the militants are genuinely put out and have no idea what to do, no Plan B.

“The IRGC are now the centre of gravity.” In wartime, the people who are charged with the actual defence of the nation do tend to drift to the centre of things, yes, that’s absolutely right. Clever boys, Donny and Benny, go to the top of the class. What a pity you didn’t think about this before you unleashed the poodles of war but there you are. If the people at the top of the hierarchy are short-sighted idiots, then obviously the processes they used to get there are corrupted.

“The US is blinking in the face of them.” Can we let you in on a little secret? If you start a war, you’re actually supposed to have something called “war aims.” This is a bit more complicated than aiming at a urinal, it involves something called “planning” and even “anticipated outcome.” Yes, I know, all these big words, it’s a strain, but if you say to the bombers “Go over there and start bombing,” you’re actually supposed to know WHY, you’re supposed to have an excuse for breaking the law. A bummer indeed but the Nuremberg tribunals sorted that out 80years ago and you’ve had long enough to study it. So we ask again: WHY is the US-Zionist axis bombing a country that has not attacked another country in 300years and that poses no conceivable threat to either of them? No idea. Groaner is right: the US is indeed blinking, but it’s as in: “WTF do we do now?” They really, genuinely, don’t know what to do. All these incredibly clever, educated, self-confident, self-important and pompous people only have one way of dealing with stroppy foreigners, bomb them. Like in Afghanistan, 20 years and a few hundred thousand deaths and environmental devastation and $2trillion, all to get rid of the Taliban but the day the Yanks pulled out, the Taliban took over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

“Iran is showing it can frighten the world by squeezing its throat.” Cause and effect, dear fellow, your mother would have told you: “If you pull pussy’s tail, she’ll scratch you.” For 25 years, Iran has trumpeted to anybody who would listen that if they were attacked again, they would close the Strait of Hormuz. For 25 years they stood holding up a map and pointing to the choke point saying: “If you attack us, we will choke you right here. So don’t attack us.” Nobody believed them, nobody listened; they were attacked so they closed the Strait. QED. Actually, they didn’t. Lloyds of London closed it by cancelling all the insurance policies for the ships. So don’t any of you clever people say you weren’t warned, because you were. Don’t say you didn’t expect it, as Trump said, because only a person living in a fantasy land could fail to see that attacking another country will invite retaliation. Oh, Trump, yes well he does live in fantasy land. One Benjamin Netanhooha has provided the furniture while Eli Groaner was the delivery driver. It seems that the entire US-Zio axis had convinced themselves that the Strait could only be closed by laying thousands of sea mines, and the US Navy could prevent that. How dumb are these people? How indescribably stupid and arrogantly short-sighted? The entire Yankee-Zio military and political establishment didn’t know that missiles don’t actually have to be fired to stop ships moving, that the threat is enough to scare insurers? Jesus wept, there is seriously no hope for the human race.

“One of the world’s critical energy arteries.” Probably a good idea to look at a map before you launch a war, then check what goes where. I admit I wasn’t aware of just how much of the world’s fertilisers come from the Persian Gulf but I knew it was a lot and I knew it would have an effect on the northern growing season, and that the Arab Spring came from rising bread prices. Et cetera.

“If the world treats Iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto to be managed...” Welcome to the new reality, junior. The people who have had guns pointed at their heads for the last few hundred years have realised they’ve got a few guns of their own. The world has had enough of Exceptional Nations and Chosen People wrecking the place. Also, if you’re all so clever and exceptional, what about you turn your minds to working out how to live in peace for a change? The US has been at war for all but eight of its 250 years of existence, and Zionism was built on the notion that the indigenous people of Palestine would never accept being pushed off their traditional lands, so war was the only option, as Gen. Moshe Dayan admitted:

The Israeli army is called a “defense force” but it is not a defensive army. … The Sinai campaign (1956), the reprisal acts and the raids across the border were purely offensive operations, and were of decisive value. … Not only the actions which were actually carried out but also the IDF’s prevailing conception is offensive … the IDF is a characteristically offensive army as regards theory, planning and execution, in body and spirit … Israel must be like a mad dog. Too dangerous to bother.

Compare that with Iran which, remarkably, has won this war by non-lethal means. What we’re seeing is the colllapse of the unipolar world, dominated by the US and its vassal states (including Australia), and the emergence of a multipolar world where various power centres have to negotiate on equal terms to balance their interests. Simply issuing diktats, punitive financial “sanctions” or sending gunboats has had its day. The US-Zionist-British-French imperialist buccaneers have finally driven the rest of the world to create a new world order, where a relatively unitary Eurasian land mass acts as a counter-balance to the peripheral empires of the US, UK, France, Japan and so on.

“Iran is actually influencing the rules of the global game.” They’re what? How dare they? It would be easy to mock this brazenly inane comment but the matter is too serious – the voiceless dead of Gaza plead for recognition. This is an admission by a person who is connected to everybody who is anybody in the world of international power politics, finance and the high crimes that flow from them, that their old game has run out of steam. The old game, the one developed by Spain in the Inca empires, France in North and West Africa and SE Asia, the Netherlands in Indonesia, Portugal here and there, and Britain and the US everywhere, is at an end. Party’s over, boys. Time to pick up your guns and your booze and drugs, your suitcases full of cash and your high class prostitutes and head home, where life just won’t be quite as much fun as it used to be. Look at seedy Britain, slowly sinking into the mud; their Victorian splendour was kept aloft by the breathtaking fortunes they were extracting from their colonies. Now that the colonies have closed the door, Britain is looking for a comfortable old people’s home. Get used to it because the world’s poor people have realised they have power and will not be giving it up again.

Groaner is right: there’s a new game in town. The old one was called “The rules-based international order,” which everybody knew meant “We make the rules and you obey the orders.” It was a racket from beginning to end, in which the gun and the shackles of slavery were replaced with the IMF loan and the tied grants and the preferential trade deals that benefited the West. This kept the darkies in their place in the bush where they could dig and quarry and harvest but they could never escape the shackles of monetary slavery and the omnipresent threat of “Step out of line, nigra, an’ we’ll stage a coup. An’ send you the bill.” So what else has Herr Groaner had to say?

“This is a strategic victory.” Insight dawns! Yessir, you’re absolutely right. You have indeed been dealt a humiliating defeat. You’ve lost the battle but you’ve also lost the far more important war for public sympathy. Finally, neoliberals and zionists stand exposed for what they are, greedy, brutal and utterly callous colonists who are intent on spreading chaos through a large part of the world just for their own enrichment, as WJ Clinton told the UN GA:

…the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power … (to ensure)…uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources (27^th Sept. 1993; various references).

Essentially, he meant “We clever Westerners have the guns to do what we like and you coloureds can’t stop us.” In fact, the whole Zionist idea is just a plan to get people’s land without paying for it, but Iran just said: “No you can’t, and here’s proof.” We, the innocent but interested bystanders in all this mayhem can only hope the message sinks in but Trump being Trump and his puppet master in Tel Aviv being who he is, I suspect they will need a further pummeling before they really understand what “NO” means.

“Disaster.” So were the ludicrously-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and a dozen others. The only success the US has achieved since World War II (and bear in mind it was actually the USSR that won that war) has been in stringing out wars indefinitely at great profit to the arms manufacturers and their good friends in Wall St. Other than that, disaster all round. Will they learn? Probably not, because the entire political process in the West has been suborned by neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is a socio-economic doctrine specifically designed to favour the power elite, to amplify their wealth so they can then invest it and create jobs for the hoi polloi. This is called “trickle down” economics and, so far, it has been staggeringly successful in its first part, sucking money out of the working and middle classes and handing it to the 1%. We’re waiting for them to invest it in creative jobs, except we now find all the jobs and all the money have gone offshore (see figures here from Robert Reich) .

Politics used to be about service; generally people had a career and then entered politics after they had been watched for decades and were then judged fit to roam the corridors of power. Now, it’s a career, in fact an impassioned vocation, which usually starts in high school and then only gets worse. Every young aspiring pollie needs a sponsor, and sponsors aren’t doing it out of love. Sponsors are investing, and they expect a return. They expect favourable laws and access to contracts and tax benefits, and that’s what they get. Everything is tilted in their favour. For example, the US is using its fleet of B2 bombers against Iran. The original plan was to build 160 of these but it stopped in 1996 after producing 21 as they were too expensive to build and run. Total cost then was $44.7 billion (equivalent to $92 billion in 2025), an average cost of $2.13 billion per plane (equivalent to $4.37billion in 2025), plus about $15million each per year to maintain. Meantime, Trump says the US can’t afford day care for children as it has wars to run. Wars that kill foreign children are more important than caring for your own.

Societies are inherently hierarchical but neoliberalism drives the process to extremes. It rewards political manipulation to the extent that conspiracy trumps policy (conspiracy is where two or more people meet in secret to organise something they could not achieve if it were known to the public). Neoliberalism favours the interests of one billionaire over a billion children’s interests, that’s what it’s intended to do and that’s what it does. But with this unbelievably stupid, unplanned, unauthorised, illegal, immoral and downright evil, unprovoked war of aggression, it seems the target has found a way to hit back. Good. Let’s hope it’s painful and causes governments to topple. Trouble is, the first people to feel the pain are the poor in India who can’t get cooking gas and the peasant farmers in Thailand who can’t fertilise their rice and the poor of Egypt who can’t afford bread. Poverty exists not because we can’t provide for the poor. It exists because it’s impossible to satisfy the rich. The doctrine behind Narcisso-Fascism says the wealthy and powerful never willingly surrender their wealth and power. The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they can hear the rumbling tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine. Bring it on.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

The neoliberal economic ideology says that individual freedom is a virtue and government interference a vice. As rational creatures, it continues, humans know what is best for them and should therefore be left to their own devices as the free market will provide efficiently for all. If this produces inequities of wealth, so be it as the market is self-correcting in that it rewards industry and punishes sloth; ergo poverty equals sloth. Accumulations of wealth are not bad as they must be invested which will produce jobs for all except the lazy, thereby lifting the community’s standards of living. Governments should stand back and let this happen; any interference must reduce economic efficiency to the detriment of all. The ideal government is therefore the smallest government that is needed to look after the jobs that nobody wants or can manage, but if nobody wants them, why bother with them? In essence, more money for rich encourages them to work harder, whereas more money for the poor encourages them to sit down and expect to be kept by the state.

The concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism say this is all wrong: humans are not invariably rational. A very large part of human behaviour is driven by the irrational urge to dominate others in any way possible, just because domination is biologically self-reinforcing. While most people are mostly motivated by a sense of fair play and constrained by a sense of decency, there are plenty of ratbags who see the opportunities for self-enrichment provided by neoliberalism and take over. Neoliberalism licenses this. It provides intellectual and moral cover for scoundrels whose arguments are deliberately at the level of: “If you oppose the free market, you oppose personal freedom and you therefore want a Stalinist dictatorship.” This tends to leave their (decent) opponents speechless so scoundrels of various degrees have taken over most of the world’s governments. That doesn’t say there weren’t scoundrels before the rise of neoliberalism, there have always been crooks but they have never been able to wield an economic argument justifying greed.

Neoliberalism started with a small group of economists in Vienna but soon transplanted to the US where it appealed to people who had a lot of money and wanted more. They were able to influence generations of economists although the Depression also left its mark. In turn, the economists influenced politicians to turn away from the post-war welfare state consensus, with its powerful unions, stringent regulation, high taxation and widespread government involvement in business and public services. Starting with Thatcher and Reagan, governments began divesting of their many and varied commercial enterprises such as airlines, railways, water and power utilities, etc. In practice, this meant selling them at knock-down prices to their mates and then getting a job on the board post-retirement. Unions were essentially broken, restrictive regulations shoved aside, welfare programs curtailed and so on. The goal was to free the market to work its magic on the economy. People were free to participate or not as they saw fit, but they couldn’t expect the government to pick them up if they sat and moaned about their lot. If they chose to starve or die of preventable diseases, well, whose fault was that?

The US was ground zero for the neoliberal experiment, although neoliberals object bitterly to that label. “Look at all the scientific research,” they bluster. “There has never been such a carefully controlled application of science to the economy.” Yes, there are indeed terabytes of data produced each day telling us how wonderful things are and how we should apply for another credit card and sit back to enjoy the ride. But data aren’t information, information isn’t knowledge, knowledge isn’t wisdom and wisdom isn’t painless.

I mentioned last week how neoliberal ideology is based on a false human psychology, essentially no psychology at all. When we look at the people involved, it starts to become clear that they weren’t exploring economics dispassionately. All too often, they started with a particular social-psychological viewpoint and then spent their careers trying to prove it right. We see the same thing in psychiatry, of course. Too many shrinks start their careers convinced mental disorder is biological and then shape their research to prove this point rather than let the results tell them what to believe. For economists, who like to think of themselves as sober, rational sorts, an economics without a psychology means they’re not at risk of being exposed as weirdos or ideologues: just sit there crunching the numbers and don’t take any notice of all those poor people in the street. They’re poor because they chose to be or they’re inferior beings who will be culled by the great Darwinian scythe. Buried under the prejudices economists bring to their research, we find the paradox of hierarchy, the fact that built into all of us is an urge to dominate and an opposite drive to avoid being dominated.

For neoliberal capitalists, the urge to dominate others prevails; for their tame ideologues, beavering away in their ivory towers, * the drive to avoid being dominated is the stronger and has coloured their entire output. Two different facets of the same biological phenomenon supporting the same political agenda: “I want to be free to dominate you so I can be richer,” and “Being free of oppression is more important than being free to screw the poor.” In their expression, these are personality factors which come from early life experiences (and not from genes): we can choose to dominate or we can choose to be fair; we can choose to submit or choose to resist. But these two drives can come together on the same side of the political divide as both groups firmly believe that individual freedom is the primary sociopolitical virtue. They just want it for different reasons.

Three figures, all larger than life, should be mentioned but we can only talk about two today: Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), Milton Friedman (1912-2006; Nobel Prize 1976) while the third, the Russian-American author, Ayn Rand (1905-1982, pronounced “yne”), was not an economist herself but influenced some very powerful figures in the profession. Friedman was such a prolific author that his writings have their own entry in Wikipedia. He more or less dominated American economics for decades but we’ll leave him for another day. Before we say anything, we need to talk about -isms, because there are a lot.

We’re accustomed to think of politics in terms of right wing and left, where the right is conservative and capitalist, and the left is radical and socialist. This is not a good classification. For example, ask anybody where fascism sits on this spectrum and they will point to the far right. That’s not correct. Fascism is a technology of gaining and holding power, and is freely used by left (Stalin, North Korea) and right (Hitler, modern Israel). A better analogy is of a political smorgasbord, where a large array of choices is on offer and politicians can mix and match as the fancy takes them. The political buffet has different forms of government (hereditary autocracy, democracy, theocracy, etc); different economic systems (individualist or monopoly private capitalism, collectivist or monopoly state capitalism, social welfare, dirigist etc); different doctrines (religious, secular, nationalist, racist, militarist, etc); different power structures (tolerant, authoritarian/totalitarian, centralised, dispersed, anarchist), and so on. Even that short list gives several hundred combinations of dishes rom the buffet; no wonder countries with apparently similar political structures often end up arguing.

Complicating this is the fact that politically-minded individuals will chop and change throughout their lives, picking up one doctrine for a while then later swapping to something else, even its opposite. Within and between groups, alliances form, deform, reform and dissolve; ideas move from one side to the other and back again, the only constant being that the people involved are all convinced they’re right and their opponents need to be smacked down. Generally, people start their political careers on the progressive-social welfare-egalitarian-internationalist-tolerant side of things and drift to the other side as they age, i.e. toward intolerant, conservative, nationalist, hierarchical opinions. Murray Rothbard didn’t. He started life almost as a caricature of the hardline, intolerant, arrogant far right wing teenager and didn’t so much as drift to the extreme or libertarian wing as gallop headlong. His early life took him through the Depression and World War II but as a comfortable middle-class New Yorker, he had a pretty easy time of it. At Columbia University in the 1940s and 50s, as one of the very few Republican supporters in the entire school, he swam against the “tide of extreme leftists” (essentially normal students), emerging as a “libertarian.”

Libertarianism is an extreme version of classic liberalism, which developed during the Enlightenment as a reaction against the theocracies and hereditary autocracies of Europe. Liberalism says the free individual is supreme; it values freedom of thought, assembly, religion, movement, commerce, etc. Liberaliasm is secular, rational, progressive, with its eyes firmly fixed on the future. Taken to extreme, libertarians oppose any form of external control by governments etc; they generally oppose taxation for any purpose other than police and military; oppose social safety nets or public services on the basis that anything the government touches is necessarily inefficient and oppressive, and so on. The ultimate form is what are called “sovereign individuals,” a motley bunch who insist that nobody is allowed to tell them what to do under any circumstances. This is actually a variant of the paranoid personality disorder but there is no dividing line between hard-line but sane libertarians and these ultra-extremists, whose pathological hatred of authority periodically erupts into gunfights with police. While Rothbard was never violent or advocated it, they are all drenched in the same ideology, all talking the same language of domination: “Don’t tread on me because I will fight back.”

On graduating, Rothbard started teaching but was soon picked up by a fund that promoted right wing ideologies. He was supported by them to write a textbook which emerged in 1962 as Man, Economy and State, a 1460 page doorstopper (I have no plans to read it). Later, he was supported by the Koch brothers (pronounced ‘coke,’ which is appropriate), billionaire sons of Fred Koch, one of the founders of the protofascist John Birch Society and a major investor in refining in Nazi Germany. Rothbard’s work was directed at providing intellectual cover for a rapacious, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Although he spent his entire life in and around universities and the rapidly growing far right think tanks, he was always regarded as fringe and was never accepted by the mainstream. Nonetheless, whatever standing he lacked in academia, he made up in the febrile, fractious and often bizarre world of far right politics. At different times, he was close friends with Sen. Joe McCarthy; with David Duke, the scurrilous former grand wizard of the KKK; and a variety of holocaust deniers. It is a measure of his internal contradictions that he often referred to Jews as “kikes” even though he was himself Jewish. This meant he was on a collision course with the Jewish state as he was a lifelong opponent of wars and colonialism.

In a short piece from 1967, decrying the cancer of socialism in America (truly) [1], he mocked government and taxes as misdirected and wasteful in that they encourage people to think they can get a free ride. Conservatives moaned that the country was being brought to its knees by “liberal intellectuals, aided and abetted by trade unions and farmers,” but they neglected to mention that the real danger was actually big business working behind the scenes, that “war, culminating in the present garrison state and military-industrial economy, has been the royal road to aggravated statism in America.” The welfare state was allegedly built to serve the poor but the poor were actually the overweaning state’s victims, through being conscripted to fight in foreign wars, to work as wage slaves while being hit hardest by the mortal sin of income tax, and so on. In other places, he attacked egalitianism, women’s rights, civil rights and the welfare state as the products of men dominated by their mothers and wives, of Jewish women and lesbian spinsters “whose busybody inclinations are not fettered by the responsibilities of home and hearth.” Nobody escaped his acid tongue, which suited his avaricious paymasters to the ground.

Rothbard argued with everybody, starting, joining and leaving groups or making and breaking friendships with abandon. Even though he was never an establishment figure, he knew everybody: during his childhood, his family’s neighbour and close friend was Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1970-78. Burns helped introduce him to many powerful people, which brings to mind a comment by Rachel Ball of the Human Rights Law Centre: “It’s easy to stand atop a mountain of privilege, and tell those at the bottom of the mountain that privilege is irrelevant.” One of Rothbard’s on-again, off-again friendships was with the author, self-styled philosopher and enfant terrible, Ayn Rand. This quite bizarre woman’s reputation rested mainly on two epic novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). When I was 16, a friend at school lent me Fountainhead, saying it was the greatest thing he had ever read. I thought it was odd, I couldn’t understand why people could be so selfish but, of course, selfishness just was her philosophy. Of Atlas, John Rogers said:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I tried to read it once but soon gave up, bored by the cardboard characters and what I now see as its narcissism. Nonetheless, she had a major influence in the US, for example, she was close friends with Alan Greenspan, the longest serving chairman of the US Federal Reserve (1987-2006) who famously failed to see the GFC coming as he thought the free market would act rationally to preserve itself (he also said: “Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said,” 1987). Rand’s philosophy, called “Objectivism,” is summed up by a well-known passage in Atlas:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

This quote, her leitmotif, is taken as gospel by millions. In reality, it says: “The unrestrained individual is the highest social good. My happiness is my only moral justification. If I want something, I get it but I am not responsible for how you feel about it. How you live, or even if you live or die, is no concern of mine.” It directly licences the wanton selfishness and disregard of the Epstein class. Ayn Rand was a psychopath, no question about that. She was domineering, almost grotesquely narcissistic, paranoid and argued with everybody. She never gained any sort of academic or literary approval during her life time which offended her greatly. These days, as the high priestess of egotism, she is widely read by incels, the alt-right, QAnon followers, neonazis and deniers of all sizes, shapes and inclinations, as well as by right wing politicians of all stripes, capitalists, libertarians, sovereign citizens and various other whizzbangs, religious fanatics and fruitcakes. There is no psychology as such in her work, just her opinions.

Rothbard was greatly offended by the welfare state as he believed it was an enormous fraud imposed on society by a small power elite for their benefit:

In sum, the most important fact about (Lyndon Johnson’s) Great Society under which we live is the enormous disparity between rhetoric and content. In rhetoric, America is the land of the free and the generous, enjoying the fused blessings of a free market tempered by and joined to accelerating social welfare, bountifully distributing its unstinting largesse to the less fortunate in the world. In actual practice, the free economy is virtually gone, replaced by an imperial corporate state Leviathan that organizes, commands, exploits the rest of society and, indeed, the rest of the world, for its own power and pelf. We have experienced, as Garet Garrett keenly pointed out over a decade ago, a “revolution within the form.” The old limited republic (of the Constitution) has been replaced by Empire, within and without our borders [1].

True. Couldn’t agree more. Watching what the US has become and what it is doing to itself and the world, Rothbard is surely turning in his grave even though he is responsible at least in part for the looming catastophe. He, Rand and so many others are fascist enablers, and it’s all because their “neoliberalism” is an ideology of human behaviour with no basis in a formal theory of psychology. It assumes that, bound by a minimum set of rules, people will act rationally. They do: they make as much money as they can by throttling everybody else. What was missing was something to make them act decently. As a result, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and Netanyahu and all the gang came along, found the myriad loopholes where people are expected to do the right thing, and leapt right in. These people are not aberrations, they are the products of neoliberalism, a psychopathic sociopolitical system that has no means of stopping them. And the world suffers.

* If you want to know, the expression comes from Song of Solomon 7:4. “Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus.” Doesn’t seem very romantic to me.

Reference:

1. Rothbard, M (1967). The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique. First published in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein (New York: Vintage, 1967). Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150618045339/http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Politically, there’s something unexpected happening around the world. In one country after another, the traditional two-party duopoly of right wing vs. left wing is crumbling. We saw it in last week’s local government elections in the UK where the Conservatives, the oldest political party in the world, were hammered into about fourth position. Labour, the governing party, lost thousands of council seats around the country and the Labour prime minister’s political career hangs by a thread. In a by-election here in Australia on the weekend, one of the most rock-solid rural seats fell to a far-right insurgent party. In France, prime ministers come and go; India’s recent elections show a lunge to the right; Israel’s government is willing hostage to religious fanatics who are fascist in all but name; Argentina’s doctrinaire right wing is dismantling decades of social safeguards; Japan has recently lurched to the right and is busy rearming; and then there’s the US. Something strange is happening.

In fact, it’s been happening for quite a while but now it’s really starting to show. Chaos, destruction, social breakdown, and rage. Everywhere people are so angry yet what are they angry about? Except where there are actual wars going on, the overwhelming bulk of the population are far, far bettter off than they were 70, 50 or even 30 years ago. Literacy rates and standards of education are rising, especially for girls, health standards are rising, the average life span is rising, women are no longer trapped by a pregnancy every year, housing is better, roads are better, cars are cheaper, mobile phones and the internet are ubiquitous yet people are still not happy. In the US, what are called “deaths of despair,” meaning suicide and overdoses, are now so common that the mean life span is actually dropping, first time in modern history that has happened in a developed country not at war. Even popular music is suffering: the yearning lyricism of “Love me do” has been drowned by the angry gabble of gangsta rap.

It wasn’t always so. The decades after World War II were seen as a “golden age” for ordinary people. In the UK, rationing during the war had given the working classes their first balanced diet in history. Even in the late 1930s, Orwell reported that people doing heavy work and pregnant women lived mainly on oatmeal made with water, white bread and potatoes. In the 1950s, Britain built its NHS, extended schooling and had a huge housing program to replace bombed areas and the vast Victorian slums crammed together with no building codes [1,2]. In the US, the GI Bill extended education to the masses, the huge highway system provided brought markets to the hinterland, and industry hummed to replace the destruction of the war. The salary of the average CEO was about 20 times that of the median worker. Australia welcomed immigrants to work on massive projects such as the Snowy River Hydro Scheme and the rapidly expanding public housing and infrastructure (schools and hospitals) to cope with the baby boom. Education was essentially free. Take-home pay for workers had never been so high. An ordinary worker could raise a family in their own home with their own car, as British PM Harold McMillan snorted: “You’ve never had it so good.”

That’s all gone. Industrial jobs have vanished overseas, housing is impossibly expensive, especially for young people weighed down with student debt, public health services groan as people are forced out of high cost private practice or simply go without, drugs, alcohol, overbearing police who can never seem to catch the big fish, red tape, loss of privacy to private and government domestic spying agencies, and the average CEO in the US takes home nearly 400 times the median worker’s salary. Things were supposed to get better but they’re not, they’re getting worse by the day. Our brain dead governments can’t seem to stop fighting with everybody, universities have turned into repressive factories that simply mine students for their money, gambling flourishes and the Epstein business shows our leaders are corrupt to the core. Our leaders. What a joke. How did such a ghastly shower of no-hopers, conmen, parasites and paedophiles get their slimy hands on the controls? Did we take a wrong turn somewhere? Yes, we did. It’s called neoliberal economics and it has a lot to answer for.

The doctrine of neoliberalism emerged in the early 1920s in a small group of economists in Vienna, so it’s often called the Austrian school of economics. The first and most influential was Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) who built his system of economics on the notion that only individuals are effective; essentially, if everybody cares for themselves, we don’t need bossy governments. Only individuals know enough about what they want and their local business to make the essential decisions to bring it about. Governments can never know what individuals know and their decisions are inherently inefficient; therefore, the only good government is the smallest possible that can do the jobs that nobody else wants or is able to do. Anything that impedes an individual’s self-directed actions or encourages individuals to rely on others, especially government services, is anathema. It’s said that 80% of economists in the world today follow the Austrian school or one of its variants. Governments everywhere are in a race to the bottom to see who can be first to sell off assets and reduce services to “improve efficiency.”

Von Mises and his many disciples such as Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992; Nobel Prize 1974) developed the notion of “trickle-down economics,” that accumulation of capital by individuals was entirely laudable as they would then invest the money, providing jobs for workers and generally lifting the wider economy. Government doesn’t have any significant role in this process, which is natural and flows from self-interested human activity. People don’t need to be told what is good for them. All governments have to do is guarantee a “level playing field” for all actors in the market economy built on essentially common sense laws that will facilitate economic activity and provide safety for all citizens.

As economists, the Austrians had very little effect in the early post-war period when governments in most countries were building welfare states with “safety nets” to provide for their citizens. By the early 1970s, everything was humming along as the “baby boomers” were getting into their stride. Apart from the usual wars, life was generally a lot better so people who weren’t doing so well or who had been elbowed aside began to press for their rights. This alarmed the elite who didn’t like the idea of an uppity working class threatening what they saw as their natural right to an ever-larger share of the expanding national wealth. This was especially true in the US where the wealthy lived in fear of two potential events: a workers’ revolution aimed at restricting or even abolishing capitalism, and an uprising by the long-repressed black people. The real nightmare was that these two movements would fuse into a single, irresistible force, ending their privilege. So, in 1970, they decided they needed to get in first. Just as Marxists have their Communist Manifesto, or fascists their Mein Kampf, so the power elite had a guiding doctrine known as the Powell Memorandum (1971). Its author, the lawyer and future Supreme Court judge, Lewis Powell, was a former counsel for the tobacco industry and a major influence on the “tobacco playbook,” the general recipe for industrial skullduggery.

We will never know the full history of the neoconservative, neoliberal movement. They’re called neoliberals because they wanted to return to the liberal principles of the 19^th Century, based on universal laws and rights, freedom and the supremacy of the individual over institutions, rationality, reasonableness, sobriety and restraint, and so on. That’s a gigantic topic in its own right; suffice it to say that Powell urged “responsible citizens” to take control of the community before it was too late, meaning before the long-haired, rebellious youth of the day got power and began to – shudder – dismantle privilege. He set out a program by which the hotbeds of rebellion, such as universities, the press and broader media, etc., could be captured and neutered, turning them into faithful servants of capital rather than breeding grounds of wannabe bolsheviks trying to steal the wealth of the hard-working and self-denying elite. Central to his plan was the establishment of a network of what are now called “think tanks,” very well-financed institutions with credentialed researchers on the payroll working on programs to hand to governments for immediate implementation.

A major part of their plan involved developing and publicising the Austrian or neoliberal school of economics. They had their work cut out for them as practically all of the economists were prolific and generally terrible writers. The bad news was that they were prolix, vague and generally woolly thinkers; the good news was that as prolix, vague and generally woolly thinkers, their work could, with a little massage, support exactly what the reactionaries wanted: minimal government restraint and maximal freedom to get as rich and powerful as they wanted. In essence, it was a lunge for power. They wanted to take control of the entire government, society and economy and redirect it to satisfy their wishes in such a way that it could never again be taken off them.

A central element was what they called “trickle-down economics,” which said that capital must be given to individuals to invest because only they know enough about the community’s needs to satisfy them. Therefore, taxation and other economic policies have to be reshaped to funnel capital from the factory floor and the farmer’s paddocks, to the “captains of industry and finance” in their eyries in Wall St so that, armed only with their dispassionate self-interest, they could work out where best to invest it. That would provide jobs for all and the “rising tide” of GDP would “lift all boats.” All this made perfect sense to busy politicians and lawmakers, whose understanding was aided in no small part by the generosity of the caring people who had taken so much time to write the legislation for them and were keen to help with troublesome side issues such as campaign funds. In the first step, moving money from the poor to the rich, they have been outstandingly successful, as US Sen. Bernie Sanders reports:

As Republicans prepare legislation to provide more tax breaks to billionaires with massive cuts to programs working families need, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today highlighted a new report from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation, which found that nearly $80 trillion in wealth in the United States has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1% over the past 50 years (my emphasis).

That’s only the US, there are plenty of other places following the same policies. Trouble is, there was a small hole in the Austrian theory of economics, a hole just big enough to allow $80trillion to slide through, largely unnoticed. I don’t think it was the intention of von Mises and his disciples to leave a hole in their theories, and I doubt if Mr Powell noticed it in 1971. I don’t think many people have found the exact hole since then but a lot of rich and powerful people have noticed its effect and were delighted to stand and watch as the geysers of money jetted aloft, perchance to fall upon their heads. The name of the hole is “human psychology,” and we could possibly forgive economists, lawyers and certainly politicians and bankers and so on for not seeing it. The effect of the hole in their theory has been to negate the second part of their theory of trickle-down economics, to invest their new wealth for the benefit of society.

In the original works, wealthy people are seen as rational actors, calmly going about their business of making sure their little bit of the world runs efficiently and satisfies their needs. They follow rules, check the information, weigh up what’s needed and what people will pay for, and then invest. Workers, the people for whom the investments are made, are even more robotic. They go to work, provide for their families, pay their bills, live and quietly die. Nowhere in the theory is there any recognition of what utter pricks humans are. The seminal works by von Mises, Hayek and others do not talk about corruption, or greed, or of putting your foot on your opponent’s throat and pressing just for the sheer joy of crushing another person and taking his property. That is, while they are strong on humans as rational creatures, they don’t give any account of the irrational human drives, the most irrational of which is the drive to dominate. They have a lot to say about humans as rational actors, and plenty of humans are indeed rational actors, but not the rich. Above all, there’s nothing in neoliberalism on scoundrels like Donald J Trump, who don’t have a rational bone in their bodies. As it exists, neoliberal economics doesn’t just fail to keep psychopaths out, to stop them taking over, it invites them in and makes them comfortable by relieving them of any residual guilt. So that’s just what they do. Instead of investing the money in their home markets where they made it, they ship it offshore to secretive banks in tax havens, then lend it back to themselves at brutal interest rates that consume all the profits so they don’t pay tax at home, either. So simple, why didn’t Hayek think of that?

Look at a couple of examples. Kevin Walmsley is an American businessman in Kunming, China, who writes brief and informative Substack posts and YouTube videos on how the US is shooting itself in both feet with its antagonistic and generally corrupt attitude toward China. In this video, he describes how a fire truck made in the US takes 4 years and $2million to deliver, whereas the same thing in China (and generally better) takes six weeks and $400,000, but nobody is allowed to import Chinese trucks because Trump and the firetruck manufacturers. The extra cost is entirely artificial. I have the same problem here in Brisbane with my solar power system. We have full solar PV and batteries. When we installed it in 2017, the power company (commonly known as AGL and the Forty Thieves) paid us 22c per kwh for power we exported to the grid, which they then sold for 35c per unit. We paid off our installation in 6 years and could look forward to 20 years of free, totally clean power and about $2,400 a year as a small profit. Then they reduced it to 20c/kwh, and again a while later to 17c per unit. We could still make about $1700 a year, but they have just changed it to 3c/kwh, which they sell for 35c, giving them nearly 1,100% profit and wiping out our little payments. Oh, and they now charge us a “pole fee” for the pleasure of exporting our electricity back to their grid. The person who buys the power at the other end also pays the pole fee, which is like me buying a stamp to post a letter, and the postman charging the addressees another fee to put the letter in their box.

It’s a small example but, multiplied over the million or so home solar installations in the state, it gives the company about $3billion extra profit each year for no further investment, and they don’t pay tax as they are largely foreign-owned (i.e. owned by shell companies in tax havens). To cap it off, they are classic rentiers, i.e. they have inserted themselves in the production and distribution process without contributing anything to it, but charging the end user a fee they can’t avoid. They don’t generate power, they buy it from the power generators and they even rent the poles. It’s a fantastic little racket if you can persuade the politicians to let you get away with it but we’ll fix them. We’ll get an electric car and put our excess power in the car, saving petrol and depriving the pricks of the eye-watering profits they make at our expense. But this is what a free market is, this is what a free market does. It gives insiders the power to tilt the playing field in their favour and there’s nothing the dumb consumers can do about it.

The neocons who set this up, who persuaded Thatcher and Reagan of the virtues of “small government,” probably didn’t realise all this at the time but they woke up to it very quickly, quick enough to push the legislation through before any troublemakers sat up and said: “Hey, your model of human behaviour is crap, like, you haven’t got a model. This is fantasy, it opens the door to a ghastly shower of no-hopers, conmen, parasites and paedophiles.” Because that’s what it’s done, and that’s why everybody is so angry, and that’s why it’s all going to fall apart. What we’re seeing today in terms of the widespread dispossession of the working and middle classes (who actually carry the country on their backs); of the concentration and, above all, the encryption of wealth by and for the 1%; their criminality and their utter cynicism; coupled with the ever-growing threat of global warming and of nuclear war; these are the direct and predictable results of allowing a class of people to believe that they could plunder the commonweal for their personal benefit with impunity while broadcasting to the world that they are doing us all a great favour by getting richer.

As a social experiment, neoliberalism has absolutely failed in every respect. It did not lift billions out of poverty, China did that without any help from von Mises, Hayek and Co. It has not spread the benefits of industry, science or education evenly, has not helped the disabled or neglected, has not stopped war and is driving us toward the precipice of environmental catastrophe, just because the project deliberately weakened the ability of the great mass of people to influence their governments. As we see in the illegal, immoral and abhorrent wars of aggression in West Asia. It’s time to call a halt to the gathering disaster before it’s too late. We’re only seconds from midnight.

Don’t think for one instant that people of the character of Trump or Netanyahu give a shit about ordinary people and will come to their senses. They’re only interested in domination for domination sake. They won’t stop as they don’t have a better self. If you want your grandchildren to have a future, then speak up.

References:
1, 2: See George Orwell’s classic reportage, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Timeless.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Last week, reader Moebius commented:

My quick conclusion is: The class of people who treat others as sub-human showed how sub-human they are themselves. But how to deal with that as humans? If we would exterminate the actual sub humans then we would be just as bad. Yet if we dont do enough against them then they will just continue.

This is a critically important conundrum: How does a reasonable person deal with an unreasonable person without becoming unreasonable in the process? It is at the basis of the concept of a “just war,” recently in the news as Pope Leo has challenged the legality and humanity of the Netanyahu-Trump war of aggression against Iran. However, nobody, not even a pope, has ever been able to resolve this issue. The Christian principle is “turn the other cheek” but that presumes the other person has a conscience. A lot of people don’t, which is why they’re aggressive in the first place. The evidence is that when it comes to imposing their agenda, hard-core zionists do not regard people opposing them as worthy of consideration. We see this in southern Lebanon right now. The Israeli military has ordered something like a million civilians to leave their homes and move north, even though there are no facilities for them. As they go, workers move in with explosives and heavy machinery to demolish their homes and everything they can (wach the brief video in that link). This is precisely the program they have been implementing in Gaza for the past 30 months, which is itself a copy of their policies developed in the 1930s and honed to perfection in the Nakba, or catastrophe, the violent ethnic cleansing of the area allocated to Jews in the partition of 1948.

Just as a reminder, the mandated territory of Palestine was divided by a UN resolution, handing 56% of the territory to the Jews, who were about 35% of the population, and 44% to the 65% who were indigenous Palestinians. As soon as the UN resolution was implemented, the new Israeli army, formed from terrorist groups and former troops in the British army and armed by the British, began a violent action to force as many Palestinians out of the designated Jewish areas as possible. In the following months, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by attacks on their villages during which some 10-15,000 were murdered. By the end of the year, Israel had expanded its territory to 78% of the mandate. The story put about that the indigenous people “chose” to move is an absolute, unmitigated lie. They no more “chose” to move than you would suddenly pack a few bags tonight, grab your kids and rush out on to the streets clutching them, abandoning your home while heading for who knows where (a brief directed video here). Israel is the only country in the world that has not defined its borders just because, ab initio, it has intended to keep expanding them, as in the illegally annexed Golan Heights of Syria and is now taking place in Gaza, the West Bank and in Lebanon.

In excess of 500 villages were destroyed during the Nakba, and this is where it becomes significant. The Israelis had in place a plan to eradicate all traces of those villages and overplant them with trees, so that nobody would be able to return and nobody would know of their crime of ethnic cleansing. The person responsible for this plan was one Yosef Weitz (1890-1972), whom I’ve mentioned before. Weitz came from Czarist occupied Poland and became head of the Land and Afforestation department of the Jewish National Fund, which had been established in 1901 to collect money to buy Palestinian land. He joined the JNF in 1932 and soon became head of the afforestation section but his main role was in forcing Palestinians off their traditional land. Post World War II, he was very active and influential in the program to “transfer” Palestinians into neighbouring countries (who were all nearly bankrupt anyway) and wipe all trace of Palestinian occupation from the landscape. In this, he was successful to the extent that he is known in Israel as the “architect of the transfer,” meaning ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population:

Our army is steadily conquering Arab villages and their inhabitants are afraid and flee like mice. You have no idea what happened in the Arab villages. It is enough that during the night several shells whistle overhead and they flee for their lives. Villages are steadily emptying, and if we continue on this course – and we shall certainly do so as our strength increases - then tens of villages will empty of their inhabitants. This time these self-confident ones, too, will feel what it is like to be refugees (Yosef Weitz, Diary, 21st April 1948).

There was never at any stage any doubt that this was the program to be financed and pursued by the Jewish state (see here for more quotes by Weitz on ethnic cleansing). It was written into zionism from the beginning in about 1891. In 1924, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), one of the main figures in the early movement, wrote an essay entitled The Iron Wall (1923) in which he explicitly stated that the Palestinian population would oppose their replacement, so they would have to be pushed aside and held in place by an “iron wall”:

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach (emphasis added).

Soon after, he said that this zionist project was “moral and just” because “national self-determination” is itself a moral objective which Palestinians reserved for themselves so they couldn’t complain if somebody else applied it. There was no mention of prior claims to the land. Ethnic cleansing is deemed a crime against humanity. If it takes place during wartime, it is also a war crime. Granted that prior to the Nuremberg trials, it had never been formulated in these terms, mainly because all the major world powers practised it avidly, but it certainly had been by 1948 and was written into the UN Charter. Before 1946, it was considered evil, which is why the imperialists kept quiet about it, but after that it was a crime. On this basis alone, repeated statements of intent of criminal action by many leading zionists over the past 125 years prove that the entire zionist movement is a criminal enterprise. There is no conceivable defence to this charge, but it gets worse.

I’ve previously mentioned how Hitler justified the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 (chapter 14 of Mein Kampf). The explicitly stated goal of the German fascist government was to invade the Slavic lands to their east; to conquer the various governments; to eliminate half the population and to enslave the remainder as labourers to build an empire glorifying the Aryan race. Hitler firmly believed that all good in human progress had come from the Germanic races so, in building their Thousand Year Reich, they were preventing a slide into another dark age and thus doing humanity a great favour. Essentially, the backward Slavs owed everything worthwhile in their lives to the tall, handsome and clever people to their west, so the Nazi invasion was morally justifiable, even if 30million “excess” Soviet citizens were slated for liquidation in the first year of the occupation. That was the entire purpose behind launching what became World War II. The notion that it was a war against Jews is false. As Hitler himself stated, eliminating the Jewish populations was a side issue. They did not invade France or the Low Countries to snatch their Jewish populations, they did it to safeguard their major ambition, the conquest and colonisation of the Slavic heartlands.

From very early following the invasion of Poland in 1939, SS squads known as Einsatzgruppen (special groups or task forces), working close behind the lines began the process of exterminating millions of people and destroying their means of survival – their homes, schools, farms, bridges etc. Their goal was to transform the landscape from its traditional or historic form into a form suited to the expanding empire. By the time of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, they were ready and waiting and immediately began their evil work. This included the well-known massacres in Ukraine such as Babi-Yar but, more importantly for the Nazi project and largely unknown to outsiders, the murder of some 650,000 villagers in what is now Belarus. Come and See, a Soviet era film from about 1985, shows this in brutal detail with the unmistakable message: “Nobody will ever be allowed to do this to us again.” The point is that the Jewish demolition squads operating in southern Lebanon right now are doing essentially the same job as the SS Einsatzgruppen did in the USSR for four years from June 1941: eliminating their means of survival. Granted they are not lining people up and shooting them but the Israeli military is doing that daily on a piecemeal basis. During the infamous Seige of Leningrad of 1941-44, about 1.5million people died. Gaza has been under seige and continuing bombardment for 30 months, and people are dying of starvation or preventable illness, often spread by the plagues of rats.

The similarities between the Nazi conduct in World War II and zionist conduct in Palestine for the past century are not loose analogies. Politically, they are precise homologies: Fascism is as fascism does. Their inhuman conduct comes directly from the belief: “We are superior and you are inferior so we can do what we like to you.” In turn, this arises from the biologically-based, universal human drive to form dominance hierarchies, with me at the top and you down below just because it feels so very good for me. The converse, of course, is that people will resist subjugation, even to death. This is the paradox of hierarchy, that we humans all come equipped with two opposing drives, to dominate and to resist domination. That’s all anybody needs to know about politics. All of the nationalist or religious, racist, historical or social justification lathered over this base is cosmetic. It’s propaganda designed to hide the brutal reality of Macht hat Recht, might confers right, which is Trump’s modus operandi. Nobody should be taken in by it.

Now there are people who try to say that we should not even use the words “fascist” and “zionist” in the same sentence, let alone compare them objectively, but that’s both absurd and dishonest. We can compare any two governments in the world, or the actions of any two armies, or political systems, or organised crime in different countries, or companies, health systems, schools, sports teams, anything. Comparison of different political and social systems is a value-free exercise. We can, for example, state that even though the US has always claimed to be a democratic state founded upon universal principles, its actions have always been those of the imperial states that ruled most of the world when the US first formed itself. To examine this proposition, we write a list of all the characteristics of imperial states through the ages, then give the US a score on each of those factors to see how it stands. In fact, it comes out badly. This is not anti-American. While it is possibly true that the great bulk of Americans would be heartily offended by the exercise, that testifies to their ignorance of their own history, not to the nature of the process.

We can also see how the US rates as a fascist state using the criteria listed in Chapter 2 of Narcisso-Fascism (pp32-33). If we give a score for each factor where 0= not at all, 1= a bit, 2 = quite a lot and 3= a great deal, the US doesn’t do very well, especially under the present regime. Indeed, if certain well-known oligarchs had their way, it would be right up there with Mussolini. I doubt the US would ever reach the Nazi class as the American 1% are too corrupt and would divert everything to themselves. This is a perfectly legitimate intellectual exercise and can be applied to any government anywhere. Israel, for example, scores very high, not far below North Korea but it doesn’t stop at just the form of government, it extends to their programs and future plans. For example, the Israeli government’s policy of confining Palestinian civilians to a very limited part of their former lands, restricting their diet, spying on them, controlling all movement and information and periodically blowing them up is precisely what the Nazis did in the Warsaw ghetto and so many other cities that they occupied.

As a matter of sociopolitical fact, the current Israeli government is following the expansionist policies championed by the Nazi party in Germany, and is using many of the techniques developed by the SS and others. That is, the victims have become persecutors. Having assumed a position of absolute power and impunity, they have adopted the methods and doctrines and, most importantly, the self-justification of previous fascist governments. All this springs from the very human urge to dominate other people. Once a group gains power over another, they will eventually come to despise their underlings who, in turn, will grow to hate their overlords and will want to overthrow them. That’s biology; don’t waste your time arguing with biology because it means there will be no peace in the world while one group believes it is superior to another and grants itself rights and powers it denies the other. As long as it exists, expansionist zionism is a mortal threat to world peace.

So back to the reader’s question at the head of this post: How do reasonable people deal with unreasonable people without themselves becoming unreasonable? I think the answer to that is: You can’t. You have to hold your nose and strike with the least force necessary to do the job while doing the minimum damage to the troublemakers and none to those who aren’t involved or who had no say in it, all the while seeing it not as an opportunity to get rich or get even with people but as an unsavoury but absolutely necessary duty to safeguard the future of the planet (see this article for more detail). Fighting may not be nice but, as the reader points out, if we do nothing, the power-hungry will get worse.

This is why the world is turning against the US: for all their talk, everybody can see that the citizenry are doing next to nothing about the evil people who have taken control of the country and its vast military for their personal benefit and profit. What Americans do to themselves is their business but what they do to everybody else is ours. Bad people have to be removed from office and denied access to power. Israel can be brought to heel just by cutting off the vast flows of funds that keep it afloat. Without the untold billions that pour into it each year, it will collapse in a heap (which is already happening). People worry about the illegal nuclear weapons gifted to the zionists by the West but they can be dealt with easily: simply hit the kill switches in all their aircraft. Without planes to deliver them, the weapons are useless. All it takes is political will, but Netanyahu has Trump in the squirrel group over the Epstein files. We soldier on.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

A report issued recently by Euro-Med Human Rights Centre makes chilling reading, as the title warns: “Another genocide behind walls” Sexual violence in Israeli prisons and detention centres and engineered impunity. I started reading it but soon stopped as the contents are truly appalling. It describes levels of institutionalised depravity far exceeding anything that we know of the Abu Ghraib crimes. In the overwhelming majority of cases of torture in Israeli prisons, inmates are not subjected to what Americans call “enhanced interrogation” i.e. torture to get information. They are tortured partly for the amusement of the military guards and partly to hammer home to their victims that they’re nothing, they have no human rights because they don’t even rate as humans. This is most important as it indicates that the state of Israel has crossed a deadly line.

For decades, we have been bombarded by propaganda about Israel’s industrial scale victimhood and its “most moral army in the world.” We are constantly told that the Jewish experience of persecution justifies anything and everything that Israel does anywhere in the world to the extent that nobody is allowed to say or do anything that a devout Zionist may not like. For example, in Queensland, the Liberal-National government has recently passed a law forbidding anybody from using the expressions “from the river to the sea” or “globalise the intifada.” The ostensible purpose is to prevent some people who identify as Jewish from feeling “threatened.” At a recent protest, the first person arrested by a large squad of heavily armed police was a Jewish man in his 70s. Meantime, the Zionist state gets on with what is manifestly genocide in Gaza; encourages and assists brutal pogroms and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank; deliberately targets civilian populations and infrastructure while invading and occupying neighbouring countries; destroys homes and farms in Lebanon in order to force the displacement of a million civilians; and launches aggressive war against a distant country under cover of peace negotiations. That’s about the full extent of the crimes prosecuted at the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals.

Fortunately, we are no longer hearing of the “most moral army in the world.” To my mind, it takes a special sort of cowardice to fly five minutes in a $100million supersonic bomber to a refugee encampment, drop a 1000kg shrapnel bomb on the ragged tents huddled in the sandhills below, incinerating children, and then fly back for breakfast. That indicates it is not just the state of Israel that has crossed the deadly line, it is all its inhabitants, too.

Granted Israel has the most active cooperation and unconditional support of the US in committing these crimes –legally, they are equally culpable cobelligerants – but one thing is crystal clear: the people running Israel, and the 92% of the population who want the wars to continue, are concerned only with opinions within the beltway in Washington DC. They do not have the slightest regard for public opinion anywhere in the world. The overwhelming majority of the world’s population, probably 99%+, are horrified by what they see each day on their screens and want it to stop, yet it continues just because the US authorises it. There has been a “ceasefire” in Lebanon now for 12 days; in that time, Israel has sent its bombers and tanks across the border hundreds of times, killing at least 45 people and injuring many more. As they say, in Israel, “ceasefire” means “you cease and we fire,” because they don’t care what people think. They are utterly impervious to public opinion and absolutely confident that they can keep attacking and killing with complete impunity. As a matter of psychology, you have to ask: how can they divorce themselves from any regard for other people’s opinions? How can they cut themselves off from the rest of the human species and just live their lives as though nobody else’s views count? Well, that’s just the point, isn’t it, because as far as they’re concerned, other people’s views don’t count, for a particular reason.

Let’s go back a bit in history, to my childhood in rural Western Australia many years ago. In Grade 4 of primary school (aged 8), we were taught how the colony was founded in 1827 and how the brave settlers had to fight the Aboriginals who killed their stock. In one lesson, we learned of the “Battle of Pinjarra” in 1834, when the Aboriginal people south of Perth were finally subdued in a pitched battle. It is now correctly known as the Pinjarra Massacre although I doubt anybody talks about it these days. I can still remember the pictures in our text books, of white men crouched behind fallen logs firing as prancing Aboriginal warriors hurled spears at them or bit the dust. Decades later, I found that this was absolutely false. The people who wrote that text for children must have known it was a carefully planned slaughter. The British military (as they were) and the settlers waited until all the Aboriginal men in the district would be away at an important corroboree, leaving only the women and children and a few old men at the main camp. The whites attacked at dawn, killing a large number of the terrified and defenceless people and hunting the survivors on horseback through the bush.

With great artifice, we were not told any of this. The narrative were we given was of the brave-hearted and far-sighted colonists working hard to tame a wild land and bring it under cultivation. We were not told that within 10 years of whites arriving in a region, 90% of the Aboriginal population would be dead. Most figures say 80% of deaths were due to European diseases, against which they had no resistance (smallpox, measles, whooping cough etc); 10% died by white violence and another 10% died by Aboriginal violence, especially the brutal Aboriginal Mounted Police. These were recruited from distant tribes and were pleased to settle ancient vendettas with British guns. They were eventually disbanded due to their violence. This was classic British imperial “divide and conquer” policy, honed to perfection in India and so many other places. The reason we were not told any of this was because it was a source of shame. Even today, most white Australians still know nothing about the Frontier Wars.

Other history lessons that year were much the same. Of the colonisation of India, for example, we were taught about the Black Hole of Calcutta, in 1756; we were not told of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919. In high school, I studied languages instead of American history, but the little we read said next to nothing about slavery or the destruction of the indigenous people. The same thing happened in Germany during World War II. Everybody knew about the concentration camps but they knew enough to keep quiet about them. Everybody would have known that entire sections of the community were disappearing, Jews, Romany, Africans, alcoholics, mentally troubled people, criminals, but there was never any public mention of what was happening to them. Post-war, large numbers of people insisted they did not know of the extermination programs in occupied territories, which was apparently true for many [1]. All news was controlled and people knew well enough not to listen to or spread rumours. It was safer to know nothing.

Modern Israel, however, is different. Marauding troops gleefully post videos and photos of themselves destroying civilian property or looting damaged buildings – blowing up a university is a great joke – or attacking other religions. Back home, gangs of youths wrapped in flags regularly storm through streets in the Palestinian quarters yelling “Death to the Arabs,” and nobody blinks an eye (here for Abby Martin’s excellent report). Instead of concealing their crimes, they revel in them, luxuriate and celebrate them, then head off to commit more. Within living memory, they have gone from being victims of one of humanity’s worst crimes, to cheerful perpetrators of the defining crimes of this century. How does this come about? We need to know because until we do, there is nothing to stop it happening again. And again.

My view is that what is happening in West Asia now is the predictable result of the most basic human impulses. These are in fact common to practically all mammals and to many other species. Once we have met our obligatory biological needs for air, food, water and shelter, we move to the next level, of optional drives which have a strong basis in biology (some people prefer to call them instincts). The first is that we are social animals; we gravitate together to form little groups. The other side of that coin is xenophobia, that while we feel better with familiar faces around us, we mistrust outsiders. All too often, that mistrust turns to hostility and aggression. We are both drawn to our own group and repel other groups, especially when it comes to the next drive, our home territory.

Practically all predatory animals are territorial. Saltwater crocodiles, for example, are intensely territorial, our only difference being that all other animals know when enough territory is enough. If they can’t defend it, they will lose it. Humans, however, have no idea when enough is enough as we have something other animals don’t have: a sense of privilege and entitlement. For us, territory includes property and people, especially sexual partners. The more we have, the more we feel we’re entitled to have, so we take more, leading to a bigger sense of entitlement in a self-reinforcing cycle. Crucially, there is no limit to the lust for property. We have an On-switch for acquisitiveness, but no Off-switch.

The final drive that defines us is our urge to form dominance hierarchies, for which territory is an integral part: we identify with our territory and use it to dominate others, which is intensely rewarding. Conversely, being forced into a submissive role is painful and we will resist it to death. Taken together, these features amount to a human nature, if you will, but of course it’s essentially higher primate nature. Thus, the natural history of human society leads to tribalism where the winner takes all while the losers fester in resentment and plot revenge. It means that, without proper regulation, human society is inherently unstable, which is precisely what we see playing out in West Asia today (and many other places). That still doesn’t explain the wanton violence of the Israeli assaults on Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, or why they think a perfidious attack on Iran is justified. There needs to be a further step, a step that crosses the deadly line between a bit of playful jousting and crimes against humanity.

Despite the blizzard of propaganda which says that nothing Israel did before October 7^th justifies the Hamas attack, but that event justifies everything Israel has done since, the record of deliberate violence by Israeli immigrants against the indigenous Palestinian population goes back to at least 1919. The original architects of Zionism, the plan to build a Jewish state in Palestine, knew there were at least 750,000 inhabitants in the region who would not be happy to be shoved aside, and who would resist. The plan was therefore to push most of them out and to use the remainder as labourers to build the new state. In the 1920s and 30s, self-proclaimed Jewish terror gangs led by, among others, future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, attacked Palestinian gatherings, such as markets and cinemas and isolated villages, their express goal being to make life intolerable until the people were forced out.

As the occupying power, Britain actively cooperated in this. I am not aware that any pre-war Jewish terrorists were ever prosecuted, even though Britain used its full imperial might to suppress a Palestinian revolt and backlash in the 1930s. During World War II, Britain recruited and trained many thousands of Jewish men in the British Army but not, to my knowledge, more than a few ethnic Palestians. Post-war, these troops formed the nucleus of the new Israeli army, gifted their weapons and fighting machines by the departing British. The Palestinians didn’t stand a chance. Disarmed during the 1936-7 rebellion, they were at the mercy of the combined Israeli army and terror gangs, who showed no mercy. The message, usually delivered in a hail of gunfire and grenades, was “Get out or get killed.” Once the state of Israel was declared in May 1948, the serious ethnic cleansing began.

We are constantly told that Israel was born in a “war of independence.” This is false. Shortly after the proclamation, the ramshackle Arab armies crossed the border to try to prevent the very obvious ethnic cleansing that was going on, but they stood no chance against the heavily-armed, well-trained and blood-thirsty Israeli forces. A lot of the Arab trucks were in fact unarmed, sent to rescue the fleeing civilians and take them to safety. Don’t ever believe the story that the Palestinians left voluntarily. They were no more inclined to walk out of their ancestral homes, leaving everything, than you would walk away from your home tonight, taking just what you could carry. Since then, the plan to occupy the territories identified in Herzl’s original work, Der Judenstaat, in 1896, as “Greater Israel,” has been pursued with unwavering devotion. It is correctly called ‘devotion’ as liberating the “promised lands” for the “Chosen People” of Israel is seen as a religious duty, not just a matter of greed. They believe they can get away with this because God is on their side, urging them on to slaughter every Palestinian man, woman, child and donkey: “Kill all Amalek,” as Netanyahu said. As physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg noted: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

In fact, this has nothing to do with religion, as Blaise Pascal commented: “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” Why is smashing your neighbours seen as attractive by the Israelis? For exactly the same reason the Nazi armies were delighted to smash into the USSR in June, 1941: invade and conquer the inferior races, wipe out half of them and use the remainder as labourers to build a Thousand Year Reich to glorify the German race. Even the former head of Mossad saw that Israel is exactly the same. Yosef Weitz, one of the early influential Zionists, had no doubts:

It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples. No ‘development’ will bring us to our goal of independent nationhood in this small country. Without the Arabs, the land will become wide and spacious for us; with the Arabs, the land will remain sparse and cramped... The only solution is Palestine, at least Western Palestine, without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises!... The way is to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries … Not one village, not one tribe should be left. And the form of the transfer needs to be the creation of a refuge for them in Iraq, in Syria and even in Transjordan. There is no other way out (diary entry, Dec. 20^th 1940)

Their plan was built wholly and solely on the notion: I will take your territory because you don’t count. This is the deadly line that must never be crossed, because by converting your enemies into subhumans, you licence yourself to be inhuman. Subhumans can be exterminated with no regret. This is the point at which educated, intelligent people stop being reasonable and become fanatics. The British crossed it in Australia and many other places. Germany crossed it in 1933. Israel has crossed it. Rabbi Yaacov Perrin stated this aloud at the funeral of the American physician and mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Nobody in Israel objected, the president did not criticise him. Same on October 8^th when then defence minister Yoav Gallant named Gazans as “human animals.” In fact, the president agreed with him. What Gallant meant was “Palestinians are animals in human form, and we can therefore wipe them out without breaking the Third Commandment.” Nobody said a word because the dehumanisation of Palestinians is now institutionalised within the state of Israel. It is accepted without question within the Jewish zionist diaspora and, most important because they support Israel’s plan of conquest, within the American evangelical and christian nationalist zionist support base. Without this vital American financial and political support, Israel would fall apart.

Genocide is the natural and predictable outcome of starting with the belief that I am in some vital sense “chosen” or “special,” because the other side of that is the belief “and you are not chosen or special, so we can do what we like with you because God is on our side.” This has nothing to do with religion. The religion was tacked on later to justify what they wanted to do, which was to give themselves a testosterone boost by crushing their neighbours. That has everything to do with physiology, the same physiology we share with bull elephant seals slugging it out on an Antarctic beach. As long as any group in the world believes is it superior to others and is therefore exempt from the normal laws of human conduct, that only they have rights while all the rest have duties, there will be no peace. Zionists believe they are superior and have rights that others don’t have. Therefore, while zionism persists, there will be no peace unless they withdraw from the world, find an uninhabited place, build a wall around it and get on with their endless squabbling. But that is what ghetto means, as Nahum Goldmann said:

..the worst of (our) encounters was with the Christians, not with the Muslims … the ghetto is historically a Jewish invention. It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the ghetto limits, Jews lived there already … the Jews lived a life apart, without worrying about the laws or customs of others [2, p66]. .

Fascism ends either when the enemies it has created combine to wipe it out, or it destroys itself from within. Fascism starts with the belief: “I am superior to you, you must do as I say.” From this flows the sense that one has the right to treat others as subhuman, to treat them in a bestial manner. This is not delusion, qua mental illness, it is self-delusion, the deliberate and willed choice to do something evil just because it feels good. Evil is as evil does: people who choose to believe they are sanctified by a higher force to pursue certain evil tasks, that whatever they do to lesser beings is justified, are capable of the most egregious crimes, limited only by their imagination and physical means, as Voltaire noted:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil (from Miracles and Idolatory).

And because they are acting in a higher purpose, whenever something goes wrong or their project fails, some less pure person must be held responsible and punished. So they turn on each other, the evil they have unleashed consumes them. This is happening now in the White House; Israel is next on the list.

References:

1. Johnson E, Reuband K-H (2005). What We Knew: terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany. An oral history. London: Hodder Headline.

2. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

An excellent commentary on the infiltration of Australian politics by the zionist lobby:

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-enforcement-the-lobby-that-bought-australian-democracy/

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

****

Everybody knows there’s a war going on in West Asia (actually one of about six around the world), that the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded (by both sides, in fact) so practically no oil or LNG can get through. That’s part of it, because a heap of important chemicals are also unable to move, including urea fertiliser, sulphur, aluminium and nickel from refineries, and a huge array of feedstocks for the plastics and chemical industries. Equally, the huge quantities of food the Gulf states normally import, as they don’t grow their own, is stuck in ships or on wharves overseas. I expect that most people reading this haven’t noticed much change yet but reserves of fuels and chemicals such as jet fuel will soon start to run out. That, however, is the predictable bit. The people who started this war apparently had convinced themselves it would be over in a few days and nobody would notice, so they didn’t do anything to prepare for a siege, which is what it now is. They were so confident that they did nothing. BAU, business as usual, they said, except this time it isn’t BAU. After the Iranians had spent 25 years issuing the clearest of warnings, that if attacked, they would close the Strait, somebody attacked them so now it’s closed. “Unfair!!!” shriek the people who attacked them, “you didn’t warn us!” But they did warn, and now it’s happened so stop pretending because very soon, the consequences will start to flow. The first consequence is that fuel prices around the world have risen sharply. DropSite News reports this morning:

EU Energy Commissioner warns war will affect prices for years: European Union Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen said Wednesday the Iran war was costing Europe around 500 million euros (approx. $585 million) each day and would affect prices for years to come. “This is not a short-term, small increase in prices. This is a crisis that is probably as serious as the 1973 and the 2022 crises combined,” he said… (I strongly recommend DropSite News as independent media).

That’s inconvenient for the West but, in many parts of the world, it’s very serious. Thai farmers can’t afford fuel for their little tractors to plant rice, so they have to do it by hand; that grows enough for the family and a bit for sale but none for export. Oh dear, we didn’t think of that. But even if they can plant enough rice, there won’t be any fertiliser for it during the growing season, so the harvest will be down another 20% or so. Thailand is a major rice exporter, to Africa and the Middle East as it happens, but the ships can’t get through to deliver it anyway. Golly gosh, who could possibly have expected this? Oh well, if they can’t have rice, let them eat bread, there’s lots of wheat, isn’t there. Er, no, there’s not.

One of the world’s major wheat exporters, Ukraine, is having a spot of bother and its exports of wheat are down by about 50%. Its neighbour, also a major exporter, is also in trouble as they keep bombing each other’s railways and ports and threatening ships that try to come through the Black Sea. Well, don’t worry, there’s always the US of A, they grow a lot of wheat. True, they do, normally, but these aren’t normal times. Large numbers of American farms are facing bankruptcy because tariffs imposed (illegally) by the politician they voted for have disrupted international trade in their major crop, soybeans. As a result, they don’t actually have the money to plant wheat as their alternative crop. It takes very big machinery and a lot of money to seed 2,000 acres of wheat, you certainly can’t do that by hand. Even if they had money, which they don’t, there’s a severe shortage of diesel and, in the free market economy they all champion, that means the price has doubled and will soon double again when the summer demand hits. Then there’s the fertiliser they can’t get, partly because Chinese fertilisers are under heavy tariffs, partly because there’s none coming from the Persian Gulf, which normally supplies about 33% of their needs. Oh dear, looks like the American food bowl of the world is going to be a bit empty this year. OK, put them aside, there’s always Australia, a major wheat exporter.

When I was a student, I used to work on the wheat bins, always had a great time standing knee deep on mountains of wheat but this year, guess what? That’s right, El Niño. Now I can guarantee that not one of the “very stable geniuses” in Washington and Tel Aviv (DC/TA to the incrowd) who planned this shitshow of a war has ever heard of this, and even if they had, they would neither understand nor care about it. It’s the oscillation of cool and hot water across the Pacific which governs rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere. This year, as predicted, it’s indicating a drought in Australia, which is not good for growing wheat, and floods in South America, ditto. It gets worse. Australian soil is light and deficient in minerals so it requires specialised fertiliser. The main one is superphosphate, which is manufactured by mixing rock phosphate and sulphuric acid H₂SO₄, which comes from sulphur, which is a by-product of refining heavy sulphur oil, which comes from … the Persian Gulf.

A major, world-wide food crisis is now firmly booked, starting in a few months, although the rich don’t care, they’ll still be able to afford their caviar and their bubbly. That’s not true for the 20million or so expatriate workers in the Gulf, from poorer countries in South and South-East Asia. Their remittances are often key to their families’ survival. In 2025, remittances comprised some 6.5% of Bangladesh’s GDP. That’s big money when you don’t have much else. Suddenly, business in the Gulf isn’t looking so good and millions are being sent home.

It all goes to prove that old saw, “Be careful what you wish for.” The President of Peace and his God-fearing sidekick in Israel have long wished for a war with Iran; now they’ve started it but before long, there will be a lot of people wishing they hadn’t. In the good old days, kings and prime ministers who stuffed up found their heads on a pike by the city gate. Ah, the good old days….

All of this was entirely predictable. Iran had warned for a quarter of a century about closure of the Strait; everybody knew exactly what products went through it, how much went each way each day and where; they knew that farmers in four of the biggest grain exporters, US, Ukraine, Russia and Australia, were struggling and couldn’t take another body blow; and they know what happened in 2011, last time grain prices leapt: Arab Spring, governments falling left right and centre. This time, it’s worse, there are more countries on the brink; more people living hand to mouth; more health services broken by war; more guns floating around; more bombers and, of course, the poor man’s bombers, drones, yet these clowns still couldn’t put their political ambitions aside and sort out their differences without killing heaps of the vulnerable and pushing the world economy to the brink. The only silver lining is that lots of people are now swapping to electric cars. What’s wrong with us? Talking of the atomic bomb in 1946, Bertrand Russell said:

If any of the things that we value are to survive, the problem must be solved. How it can be solved is clear; the difficulty is to persuade the human race to acquiesce in its own survival.

If things were bad in 1946, they’re worse now. In the past eighty years, we’ve gone backwards. At least in those days, the trouble was all due to a clash of doctrines; today, it’s just vastly-inflated egos and religious cranks slogging it out to see who can be king of the castle and looter-in-chief. Polling figures indicate that, at most, 10million people in the world think the fighting in the Gulf is a good idea (half of them live on the opposite side of the world so it hardly affects them). That’s about 0.12% of the world in favour, 99.88% against. So much for democracy.

It seems that in his dozen trips to the US over the past year, Netanyahu has been working on Trump to launch a war. They had a half-hearted one in June last year; in February this year, Netanyahu was taken into the White House Situation Room, the ultra-top secret room buried deep underground where no foreigner has ever been, especially one without a security clearance, and was seated at the head of the table in the president’s chair, to spin his spiel. Of the twenty members of the US cabinet present, 18 thought it was brainless (even Rubio said it was BS); Trump and Hegseth were in favour so, under cover of peace negotiations, they attacked on February 28^th.

Of the 29,452 days since the end of World War II, there has not been a single one that the Exceptional Nation has not been actively involved in one war or another. Not one day, not an hour, not even a minute of peace. That’s pretty exceptional. Yet the crucial point is this: It is always somebody else’s fault. For forty years, it was the commies (remember that word? Nixon liked it), driven by their urge to destroy capitalism. That’s what we were told, but it wasn’t true. Marxist doctrine said that so as long as there were capitalists, they would always try to crush socialism. Especially in late stage capitalism, socialist countries would be under attack and would have to defend themselves. History shows the truth in that. However, Marx also said that the march of history is inevitable, capitalism must eventually fail and socialism would triumph, as Khruschev said: “We will bury you.” People laughed at him, called him an ignorant Ukrainian peasant but he didn’t see the real problem, that capitalism may bury all of us.

What’s wrong with us? We can be sure that if they had been given true information before being polled, 90% or more of American citizens would have voted against war. In every other country except one, it would be even more. Only in Israel do a majority (85-90%) favour continuing the fight but remember that large numbers of people have already left the country and are unlikely to return. In the US, “The majority of American Jews (60%) oppose the US war with Iran, viewing it as a reckless escalation without a clear mission or exit strategy.” It is being run entirely at the behest of a minuscule group of the world’s population, for the benefit of … whom? Cui bono, as they say? At his trial in Nuremberg in 1946, former Reichsmarschall Herman Göring was in no doubt:

People don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America nor, for that matter, in Germany. That is understood. But, after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

This gives us an idea of what’s wrong with us. Like all primates, humans have a series of fundamental, biologically-based drives that essentially define us. We are social animals, meaning we like to be surrounded by our kind, but we are also xenophobic, meaning we fear The Other and don’t trust strangers. We are intensely territorial, which covers not just land but physical possessions, including the most valuable of all, sexual partners. Last and definitely not least, we are hierarchical animals, we form dominance hierarchies where the top dog feels great lording it over the rest, and the rest simmer resentfully and plot revenge. Given just these four characteristics, the basis of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism, tribes form themselves with a leader and a heap of followers who will aggressively try to steal the neighbouring tribes’ territory and goods because they don’t like their faces. Or just kill and rape them for fun.

That’s humans in a nutshell. Don’t remind me of altruism, the people who get to the top couldn’t give a rat’s arse about altruism, they’re in it for Number One. As Göring said, the leaders and their financiers are driven by the urge to conquer and gain territory and power, while the troops are told they must defend family and territory against the ruthless enemy, which they believe and will altruistically do, even at terrible cost. Different stories for different classes. So who is winning from this brutal war? It’s not, as Göring said, the poor slobs who get blown to bits, often they’re better off. I have interviewed at depth thousands of veterans, very often listening to stories that they have kept secret all their lives. I never once met a veteran who considered the sacrifice worthwhile. Sure, many of them from World War II felt they had no choice but to defend the country but the many “wars of choice” this country has engaged in since are different. They were all “somebody else’s war,” which makes the injuries, mental and physical, so much worse. Listen to Mohaddeseh Fallahat, a mother who spoke to the UN Human Rights Council this month after her daughter was killed in the US airstrike at Minab school on Day 1 of the US-Israeli war on Iran:

As they walked out the door, they simply said, Mum, come pick us up after school. That simple sentence now repeats in my mind a thousand times. Each time my heart burns with pain. No mother ever thinks she will send her child off to school with a smile, only to be met with silence. (from Eugene Doyle, NZ)

The stupidity of our “leaders” beggars the imagination. What do they think they’re up to? Where is the cost-benefit analysis they should have done? Who’s winning? Cui bono? I write the Israelis off. They are now totally brainwashed by a clericalist-fascist fantasy that they can push a hundred million people off their traditional lands to satisfy some ancient myth and the world will sit back and applaud. As I’ve said before, the Zionist plan to colonise vast areas in West Asia is precisely the same program the Nazis had planned for the USSR in 1941: invade, conquer, wipe out half the population and keep the rest as slave labour in order to build an eternal empire for the greater glory of us. “Master Race,” “Exceptional Nation,” “Chosen People,” these are all the same lie, just expressions of the primeval urge to dominate other humans as subhumans. As long as any group on earth believes these stories, there will be no peace.

If the Zionists were on their own, none of this would happen but they have the Americans in tow, like a child leading a piglet along by a string tied around its nuts. Perhaps 30million Americans are also in the grip of an apocalyptic fantasy, that if all the Jews go back to Israel, there will be a huge war of Good vs Bad, the Goodies (American evangelicals) will prevail, their messiah will return, the Jews will all be sent to hell and there will be a glorious empire for a thousand years before 144,000 “true believers” are wafted up to heaven while the rest go down to the furnaces. They call themselves Christians but they ignore all the squishy stuff about “Thou shalt not kill” or “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” Instead, they salivate and masturbate to the gory bits about killing every man, woman, child and donkey (1 Samuel 15:3).

These are the people who elected Donald Trump, who then overrode 18 members of his cabinet and 80% of the population to launch a war that, in his occasional lucid moments, even he now realises was a monumental screw up, certainly the worst in that country’s history. Not the worst thing they’ve ever done, but the worst outcome for them because this will upend the balance of power that has prevailed for the past few hundred years. We stand at the end of the “rules-based international order” where the dollar reigns supreme. Good. Bring it on, but just keep the nuclear weapons out of it, can you? Despite anything you self-defined Godly people have been told, defeat is endurable, but nuclear winter is not.

Last word to Bertrand Russell: “The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

There is no question, we live in epochal times (adj.: describing events, changes or discoveries so significant they mark the beginning of a new era or epoch; implying momentous, historic or revolutionary importance). The last time we saw seismic changes in the world order was 1989, when the vast USSR and its satellites began to fall apart and go their separate ways. “The end of history,” shouted the rather histrionic Francis Fukuyama, who said the end of communism (P.S. not in China) and the rise of liberal capitalism indicated that human social evolution had reached its end in a post-ideological world. All we had to do was sit back and enjoy its fruits. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way. No sooner had the Iron Curtain fallen than Yugoslavia caught fire, then Kuwait and the first Gulf War, then the attacks on New York, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza and finally Iran in this, the Third Gulf War.

It’s worth noting that we have had the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and now the Iran War but these are actually all just chapters in one long-running American War Against Everybody, with an Israeli side. This time, however, it seems the combination of The Exceptional Nation and The Chosen People have bitten off more than they can chew. Without warning, without provocation, without UN Security Council authority, and under cover of “peace” negotiations, they attacked on Friday night, fully expecting to be able to declare victory before the stock markets opened on Monday morning. To their utter astonishment, the Islamic Republic didn’t collapse. Amazingly and without any precedent in history, the people rallied around their flag and leaders and actually fought back!!! Can you believe the sheer effrontery of those Persian ingrates? But it gets worse. Not content with knocking out all the billion dollar American radars and control systems and flattening 17 of their hugely expensive military bases in the Gulf monarchies, quel horreur, they closed the Strait of Hormuz. In less fraught times, 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas, not to mention 30% of the world’s fertilizers and a huge range of basic chemical feedstocks for the plastics and other industries, passes through this narrow stretch. Such ingratitude: post-ideological neoliberal capitalism comes knocking and they slam the door shut on everybody, upsetting the entire capitalist order. Truly breathtaking and just sooo unexpected, as the Israeli ambassador to Australia announced this week:

Dr Newman said Israel tried to take all scenarios into consideration, including worst-case scenarios such as the potential for Iran to already have nuclear warfare (sic). But he admitted Iran’s closure of the vital waterway was “not part of our planning … You hope and pray that … even a rogue entity like Iran, will not do what is worst for them and for the international community,” he said. Israel also did not expect Iran to carry out retaliation attacks on certain Gulf countries.

Assuming this person was not lying and not out of his mind, it seems the world is being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by people who launch wars on the strength of “hopes and prayers” and without having read the news for the past 25 years. Complete idiots, in other words, and ambassador Newman is one of them. For a quarter of a century, Iran has responded to the gale of threats blowing from Washington and Tel Aviv (usually abbreviated to DC/TA, as they are essentially one and the same) with the promise that, if attacked, they would close the Strait. As they had long expected, they were attacked so, as they had long promised, they have retaliated by, and note this crucial point, by the non-lethal means of slipping an elastrator ring around capitalism’s enticingly dangling balls. The ever-honourable US-Zionist axis, including the most moral army in the world, attacks traditional targets like girls’ schools, hospitals, bridges and so on, killing and maiming just a few tens of thousands, yet the crafty Orientals in Tehran drop a turd on the desks of the world’s hard-working bankers and industrialists by threatening their profits!!! OMG, what’s the world come to? You can’t even launch a war these days without the duly-appointed enemy rugpulling you. Such is their concern that the IMF has issued a warning of global recession. Forget the schoolgirls, it says, think of the poor billionaires.

But this raises a crucial point that has been overlooked by so many in the uproar: that we are not and never have been in a “post-ideological world.” The very idea is an impossibility, a self-contradiction because every human society is based in a set of unargued opinions, i.e. an ideology. They’re unargued because they’re considered so basic they can’t be argued. For example, the idea that humans have rights can’t be argued. You either accept it or reject it because without that principle, there’s no society. Sure, history and modern politics show that very often, one group believe they have more rights than another, or even all the rights, but that’s inherently destabilising as the oppressed group will eventually get sick of being crushed and will fight for their freedom. Calling them “terrorists” and bombing their schools and homes is self-defeating. You cannot bomb your way to peace as equality is the sine qua non of a peaceful world. Thus, when people shout that hey, we’re all in a post-ideological world, all they’re saying is that you have to accept their belief system as the unquestionable reality, the only conceivable possibility, while everything you hold precious is twisted ideology. So what is the fundamental belief system of the western world that has to be accepted as bedrock reality? Neoliberal capitalism, which is simply social Darwinism rewritten in economic jargon to justify the rich getting richer and the poor going to hell.

Social Darwinism is the law of the jungle applied to society, survival of the fittest by any means necessary, but with a twist. Social Darwinism says that if you’re on top, that’s because you’re a superior type and you therefore deserve more than the hoi polloi. It’s very popular with people born with a silver spigot in every orifice because it takes the universal, biologically-driven concept of dominance hierarchies and hides it under a moral cloak. Social Darwinism says superior people rise to the top; if you’re on top, you’re superior but if you’re not, you’re clearly inferior and you should be quietly grateful for any scraps that come your way. As we know, every human comes equipped with twin opposing drives, one to try to get to the top and the other to resist being pushed down. Common sense says that’s a recipe for instability: not everybody can live on the top floor. Somebody has to take out the rubbish so the best system would be one where everybody takes a turn at the fun jobs and then the dirty jobs. That wouldn’t work very well: not everybody can be a surgeon and planes need only one pilot. Swapping jobs all the time would be inefficient, so we specialise and society becomes more productive. However, as soon as we allow specialisation, we get a hierarchy and with it comes inequality, because that’s what hierarchy means. Neoliberals say that’s actually good because it’s efficient. It rewards productive people and encourages the less productive to work harder, all without anybody having to issue orders.

Neoliberal capitalism says that the most productive society will give the greatest benefit to all citizens as the most efficient society is the most productive. However, there is no human or group of humans with sufficient knowledge to decide the best path to high productivity. That has to be left to the market, which is just the sum total of all citizens acting dispassionately in their rational self-interest to maximise their benefits. The market is self-regulating in that it rewards good ideas and penalises failures. People with bright ideas must be allowed to put them into practice, thereby creating more wealth. Anything that interferes with this process, such as government regulation, interferes with the efficient market and reduces overall wealth, which is bad in itself. From this cluster of beliefs, aka ideology, flows the view that economies are self-correcting so the best government is the smallest possible. Regulation is bad; only private enterprise is able to direct resources where they’re needed and most likely to do good; and public enterprise is necessarily inefficient as it directs investment to inefficient sectors and encourages the indolent in the idea that somebody else will provide for them. This is the ideology of Thatcherism-Reaganism-neoliberalism in a nutshell. It comes from the group of economists known as the Austrian school, whence came many of its originators, principally Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, but nowadays, about 85% of economists follow their creed.

After fifty years, we can pronounce it a total failure. The reason for its failure is crystal clear: it is a doctrine of human behaviour, but it is not built on a foundation of a human psychology. It assumes humans will always act in rational self-interest and that ipso facto, this is beneficial to the society. It doesn’t take into account the possibility that people will realise they can more efficiently (quicker, less effort) advance their self-interest by working against the interests of the broader society, i.e. by crime and corruption. Granted, the neoliberal economy rewards hard work and self-denial but it has no basis in morality, it rewards the cheat just as effectively as the honest worker, but a lot quicker and with less tax. Just by a little light cheating or skullduggery, people can leapfrog themselves up the hierarchy, but why stop there? They soon learn they can use their wealth and power to influence the workings of the economy even further in their favour, to tilt the level playing field, to nobble their opponents or dump them in the river. Thus is fascism born.

The inequality leads to widespread resentment, which the clever operators exploit to favour themselves, but capitalism is never content. It can’t say “Enough’s enough, somebody else can have a go,” it has to keep going as it is built on the notion of the dominance hierarchy, the twin drive to get to the top and its opposite fear of falling down the ladder: “If I slow down, somebody will overtake me. I won’t be No. 1, and that’s worse than death. Or definitely worse than the deaths of 165 superfluous Iranian schoolgirls.” This is the entire motivation behind the perfidious American-Zionist attack on Iran. It’s all greed, the insatiable lust for power and dominance, the delirium of crushing other people underfoot, especially brown or black foreigners.

Neoliberalism is simply the dominance hierarchy, the core principle of narcisso-fascism, applied to economics, so where does it end? There are only two ways fascism ends, either the external enemies it has created unite to overthrow it, or it turns on itself internally and tears itself to bits. In fact, I’d say it’s already ending. Hungary threw out its odious little wannabe-dictator this week but more importantly, over in Godzone, the dementing Trump has gone just a teensy bit too far and his base are turning against him. His failing war has turned a lot of people against him, the Zionist killing machine has alienated the entire younger generation around the world, and Trump himself has over-reached. First was when his failing frontal lobes allowed his grandiose personality to break out and insult the Pope. It’s OK to shoot people in the streets but don’t upset His Holiness: lose the Catholic 10% of your voters immediately. Then he released the bizarre picture of himself as JC, laying on his healing hands, which upset huge numbers of evangelicals in his MAGA base, and spawned libraries of spoof videos (watch for a good laugh). And then some industrious souls found that somebody close to the administration had been profiting from insider-trading on Trump’s on-again-off-again threats in his war. Hundreds of millions of dollars were traded after hours, shortly before he dropped his threat of all-out war; somebody knew in advance as that was statistically impossible. Finally, the depth of cheating in his so-called World Liberty Financial crypto currency is emerging, which has allowed the Trump Tribe to make off with at least $1.5billion (if Justin Sun accuses you of corruption, you know you’re in trouble). Not to mention the billions devout Zionist Bruh Kushner has trousered while pretending to be the US envoy to the Middle East. There’s heaps more, even darling Melania felt the need to tell the world she never knew Epstein despite the photographic evidence.

Anyway, all this is interesting but not surprising, this is the natural history of fascism. We, the great unwashed, can only hope the whole shitshow collapses in ruins before Trump’s ever-decreasing mind gets the idea a nuclear bomb will fix those upstart Iranians, or Cubans, or Venezuelans, or Chinese… Don’t fall for the story that this is all part of a big plan, a feint to fool the Russians or Chinese while Trump snatches the big prize, whatever it is. This is the end of empire, the final thrashings of a society built on the notion that greed is good and dominance is better. Sure it is, for small elite, for a while. Then the bills start coming in.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

On Monday, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Dem, Mich.) posted on social media:

After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide. It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office.

Is Trump a maniac? I’ve said often enough that he is not psychotic. He is a grotesquely narcissistic and psychopathic personality, with the emphasis on the former but the danger in the latter. He doesn’t have the steely resolve of the true psychopath, e.g. Reinhard Heydrich, Stalin, Bernard Madoff, because he is actually very anxious but he conceals it. He is scared of men and is therefore attracted to tough, steely men who he thinks won’t assail him or humiliate him. A very large part of his abuse of women is intended to make him feel tough but also to impress other men that he is really successful with women. He surrounds himself with men such as Hegseth, Bongino, Miller, Bannon and Patel who also treat women like objects whereas men who can relate to women reasonably normally, perhaps Bessant and a few others, are not central figures. Women in his life have only two duties: look glamorous to impress people how successful he is with women, and worship him. And come across, of course, except he’s now too fat and too old to try: a late night and a rough woman would be the end of him.

He is psychopathic in the sense that he has no capacity for feeling for humans, as his niece, PhD psychologist Mary Trump, says often enough. People exist to do as he tells them; if they don’t, he either walks away from them or loses his temper and starts issuing threats but when it comes to action, he goes to water and walks away, throwing insults over his shoulder. TACO (things have reached a sorry state when you have a Wikipedia page saying you’re chicken). His main goal in life is dominating people, either by having them worship him, by cheating them as that proves how clever he is, or by getting somebody else to bash them to the ground. He has never been in a fight in his life and would panic if anybody shaped up to him. Having the world’s largest nuclear arsenal makes him feel like he’s a real person instead of a hollow shell, as he has no self-esteem. He is not like a lot of people whose self-esteem is negative, as in “I hate myself, I’m a piece of shit,” but the concept simply doesn’t apply to him. There’s nothing inside, it’s just empty, echoing space which is why he has to surround himself with golden ornaments, attractive women and put his name on everything within reach: “If I have a gorgeous blonde on my arm and my name in gold on a big tower, that tells people I’m really somebody. Aren’t I?”

Throughout his life, he has relied on two things that allow him to dominate people: his inherited and/or borrowed money, and lying. He lies to cover his many deficiencies, to cheat people so he can gloat how smart he is, and because his money allowed him to get away with it. People have known since his schooldays that he is a liar but they hung around and agreed with him in the hope they could get their hands in the honey pot too. Now, they hang around because they hope some of his power will rub off on them, or through fear that he will use his power to crush them if they disagree. He doesn’t lie in the calculated sense defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, he is not a compulsive liar:

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship... [1].

Instead, he lies in the sense that he says anything that comes into his head that seems likely to get him what he wants at that time. He doesn’t remember what he has said because he knows he doesn’t have to, he can lie and people will fall for it and tomorrow he can say the opposite and they’ll lap that up, too. He thinks their applause means he is a “very stable genius” but mostly it’s because they like the way he hates their enemies. They also think he’s a complete idiot who says any bit of shit that comes into his head and doesn’t remember it next day but his supporters convince themselves he’s on their side.

He says he likes to surround himself with losers. That’s true. He can’t stand any competition, especially from smart people who can trip him up with words. That’s why he totally dominates meetings, by forcing people to remain silent while he rambles on. He is an instinctive racist, he doesn’t like foreigners of any sort, especially if they’re not tall white northern European males, but if those tall white northern European males are clever or good looking or athletic or betray any sense of not falling into line to worship him, he hates them too. Xenophobia is a normal human drive but his is exaggerated by his lack of self-esteem: he hates people speaking foreign languages around him because he can’t. Just as he can’t drive and can’t cook and has never planted anything or repaired a child’s bike or helped an old lady across the street or surfed or cleaned anything or done anything normal. Nothing. He can play golf but even at that, he is a notorious cheat. Oh, and all his so-called religiosity, with the lunatic and charlatan Paula White “blessing” him, that’s performative only. He doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, doesn’t know anything about it and doesn’t care but he will go along with it as long as he’s centre of attention and all the stiffs are standing around, eyes closed and touching his hem, and it gets votes.

Why then, do people vote for him when they know he is a cheat and a liar and a failure at businesss? Because he appeals to their prejudices, The reason he does this so astutely is because the prejudices of the working class, his MAGA base, are also his prejudices, he hates their enemies and he licenses them to hate openly. Why do they have enemies? Partly because the US has always hated outsiders, be they native tribes, black slaves or immigrant workers stealing their jobs, but the main reason is neoliberal capitalism exporting their factories and telling them to hate immigrants. Socially, Trump is a nobody and he has all the prejudices and hatreds of a nobody. His grandfather got his start running brothels; his father, Fred Sr, cheated and lied that to a sizeable fortune; and Donald inherited all their vices, including the need to be accepted by classy society. Somewhere along the line, somebody put the idea in his head: “You could be president one day.” That idea caught and grew and grew because if it came true, it would be the ultimate put-down for all the upper crust people who had sneered at his gauche behaviour or laughed at his ignorance or refused to return his calls. That’s the only reason he ever thought he could reach the White House. Oh, and the chance to make truckloads of money on the side, which he has left to his sons and his egregriously corrupt son-in-law. He was never interested in government, he has no idea how many government departments there are or what they do, all he wants is to get power, to humiliate his enemies and to reward the rich people who helped him scramble up the ladder in the hope they’ll like him. Again, this is the normal human urge to dominate people but turbo-charged to the point of a compulsion by his vast sense of inadequacy. Still, it’s not psychotic.

That’s his personality, so what’s going on now? Well, as I constantly say, he’s dementing. It was slow at first but since about mid 2025, it’s accelerated. He is forgetful but that’s not the dominant sign: for him, it’s the degradation of what has never been a strong sense of proprietary, of judgement and social awareness. We have to be trained to be aware of other people as creatures with minds of their own and rights of their own, it doesn’t come naturally, and he was never trained. Mary Trump said that in his family, money was everything. If you had no money, you were nothing but if you had money, you were Big. That’s it. No emphasis on honesty and integrity and empathy or any of that tender-hearted slop, just gimme the money and stand back. Fred Trump Jr, Mary’s father and Donald’s older brother, wasn’t much interested in money or business. He wanted to be an airline pilot so he was shoved out, lost his inheritance and died of alcoholism at 42, when Mary was still 16 and which, understandably, she will never forgive. Significantly, Fred Trump Sr, Donald’s father, died of Alzheimer’s Disease. Mary says she sees in Donald’s eyes the same sort of detached vacancy she saw in her grandfather’s eyes. She’s not wrong on that, you can see it when somebody else is talking and he fades out.

To me, his dementia was perfectly clear 3-4 years ago (I have extensive experience dealing with dementing and brain damaged people of half a dozen races and cultures). He should not have been allowed to stand the second time but by that stage, he had the wind in his sails, the voters in his pockets and the big donors lining up to shower money over him in return for favours. Given the bizarre, quasi-imperial American electoral system, nobody could stand against him for fear of reprisals, which are an integral part of his seamy background, and the rich donors knew they could make squillions out of him, so they didn’t support any competition. So, with a bit of help from cheating and lying and manipulating the voter rolls, he got back in but this time, his many helpers and hangers-on were ready. Driven by the reptilian Stephen Miller and a squad of equally poisonous individuals, they had all the lists of names ready, one list of toadies to be appointed to vital positions and the other of enemies to be persecuted to destruction. This is Trump’s paranoid personality but it is not a paranoid psychosis. Thus far, this would be a fairly simple story of a dimwitted and ignorant proto-fascist gaining power and making a huge mess of things until people got tired of it and turfed him out, but then there is Epstein.

For background on the cosmic levels of corruption in the US and so many other countries that allowed Epstein to get ahead, see Whitney Webb [2]. She also posts regularly on YouTube although she needs to be very careful of an accident with a speeding bullet. Epstein was a psychopathic crook and pervert, and also happened to be a Jew. That meant he was as one with the entire wealthy and corrupt element in the Zionist movement for whom perversion and criminality are not social disqualifiers. They could do their dirty work together to mutual profit but Epstein knew that if he dared put a toe out of line, they would glom him. While he did what they wanted, they would give him all the secret assistance he needed, and what they wanted was dirt, something in which he specialised and was delighted to cooperate. He was never an employee or “agent” of the Israeli state or Mossad or anything, but he cooperated by feeding them the dirt and secrets they wanted. In turn, they were happy to arrange for people to give him what he wanted, money and connections, up to and including the slimy Leslie Wexner, he of Victoria’s Secret fame, who granted Epstein power of attorney over his entire estate, then worth billions.

Epstein was not a lone wolf, he ran a sizeable business with premises in different countries and employees and agents and phones and computers and so on. His business was connections with people, trading favours, collecting dirt and selling it on. He became very wealthy but, of course, the people who made him wealthy have a strong interest in shutting down any enquiries, so we only know of the really stupid ones, like the bozo Andrew Windsor or the devious Peter Mandelson who can be sacrificed to keep the public quiet. And above all, Israel and Mossad and the entire Zionist movement have an immensely powerful interest in making sure nothing leaks but they’re in a strong position as they have all the dirt they need to keep the most stupid person of all dangling on a string, one DJ Trump. Every bit of information Epstein gathered from his myriad email spies and CCTV and hacked banks and so on, all per courtesy of the nice people in Mossad and Palantir and Microsoft and Oracle etc., all of that was backed up and stored on servers buried deep underground at Israel’s nuclear weapons site at Dimona. They have the lot proving that Trump has always been a sadistic paedophile and he knows they’ve got it, which is why he doesn’t sleep at night. So he does what Bro. Netanyahu suggests, which is anything needed to bring Greater Israel to reality so he can keep his fascist coalition together and go down in history as the greatest leader of Jews since Moses, and keep his own corrupt arse out of prison. If anybody wrote this sort of stuff in a novel, it would be laughed off the shelves; a factual account, such as Whitney Webb’s monumental effort, is just sickening.

Driven by various demons, Trump has indulged in increasingly impulsive and stupid moves, each of which he thinks will solve his problems but, because he can’t think ahead and his cabinet are too servile or self-interested or off with the pixies to say anything, each move makes things worse, so he becomes more and more agitated and says more and more ridiculous things like saying the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia had kissed his arse, or he will destroy the entire Iranian people, some of which come to pass but most don’t because he still has enough sense to realise he can’t do it so he backs down, throws insults and starts on something else, but it is all temper tantrum, not psychosis:

Truth Social: Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

(April 5^th) Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

(April 7^th) A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This is a direct threat to use nuclear weapons to commit genocide. Fortunately, he backed down, because Iran didn’t budge and possibly because the Chiefs of Staff finally found their cojones and told him No. All of this is exceedingly dangerous to the world: the Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. For years, I have been saying to anybody who would listen (full disclosure: not many) that I can remember them announcing the death of Queen Elizabeth’s father on the wireless but I am certain that things are now worse than at any stage in my life. And now, I can state with no fear of contradiction that this has been the most dangerous day of all. If Israel starts to lose seriously, like facing invasion rather than just not winning, Netanyahu is likely to start hurling nuclear weapons around. Trump could stop him, that’s technically very easy, just flick a few switches in the Pentagon, but he would be too scared of all the Epstein material being dumped in the open. If Trump were on the verge of losing, he would be highly likely to start firing them on the basis that if he can’t win, nobody else is allowed to. The entire world is being tossed around by a pair of unspeakable psychopaths as though it were a beach ball at a children’s party on the edge of a cliff in a strong wind.

Anyway, Trump backed down although Israel threw a tantrum and launched a massive wave of murderous attacks on Lebanon so the Strait remains closed. The result of all this stupidity is the international power-broker par excellence, the US is finished for all time. The US has shown itself to be utterly incompetent, dishonest to the core and utterly untrustworthy, and utterly contemptuous of all humans bar a few wealthy people connected to the president and his criminal family. This is not surprising. The country that could lie its way to war in Korea and in Vietnam and in Iraq and Libya and Syria, and then lie about the lies and blame its victims, should not have any power in the world. Time has come for the other 97% of people in the world to say: “Enough is enough,” and cut the US and Israel out entirely. If they want to be Exceptional Nations of Chosen People Fulfilling God’s Destiny, go right ahead but they can do it alone. Cease all trade, cease all banking, dump the US$ as reserve currency, replace SWIFT, swap from the American GPS to the European Galileo or Chinese BeiDou systems, end all military relationships, don’t let their planes land, move the UN back to Geneva, end all patent protection on drugs, close their embassies, nationalise their companies, don’t recognise their passports … oh, and release all the Epstein files. Then they can impose sanctions to their hearts’ content but nobody will notice.

Meantime, Trump is totally unfit for office. Is he psychotic? No, he is not psychotic. Is he dangerous? Yes, most emphatically. Does he know what he is doing? Hardly. Due to his rapidly failing intellect, his psychopathy and his agitation, he has practically no control over his actions. This puts the world in serious danger but he doesn’t give a shit. All he cares about is attention. He is a ridiculous, disorganised, self-involved, callous and heartless, fiendishly corrupt, sadistic child molester, but he is not psychotic. He must be removed from office immediately by any means necessary, up to and including one of the decapitation strikes he is so happy to use on others. The time for being polite has well and truly passed. If the US doesn’t act soon, it proves it has no moral standing, its “Christianity” is pure Hollywood.

A point to consider: Iran has just defeated the US-Israeli war machine by non-lethal methods. It must be unique in history that aggressors have been brought to their knees by people trying to keep to international law and basic humanity. All power to them. To see why their victory is important and what they are fighting, watch this.

References:

1. Frankfurt H (1986). On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 6 (2): 81–100. (Fall 1986). https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAOB-3

2. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Last week, I did an interview with Pascal Lottaz on his channel Neutrality Studies, available here. Pascal is from Switzerland but now works at Kyoto University where he seems to have the dream job of talking to interesting people around the world. He posts 3 or 4 fairly long interviews each week, worth watching as you will not get that sort of information from the mainstream.

****

The massive “No Kings” marches in the US and elsewhere came and went but it doesn’t seem as though much has changed. Herr Drumpf is still king, still camped in what’s left of the White House; American and Israeli forces continue their unprovoked and illegal attacks on Iran; Cuba is facing death by strangulation and half a dozen other countries are under threat. Meantime, the Epstein saga rolls along with no end in sight; Wall St is up and down depending on the king’s mood but it now appears that lots of his courtiers are cleaning up to the tune of hundreds of millions; allies are enlisted and dumped willy-nilly; and life is about to get much worse for half the people on the planet, the poor half who can’t do anything to defend themselves. In the US, inflation is up, employment is down, costs are up, farms are going broke, health care is unattainable, hundreds of smaller rural hospitals will be forced to close, travel largely paralysed … all in all, not a good place to be. All this from the wannabe-king who was elected to stop inflation and the Ukraine war on Day 1, bring back jobs, make everybody a winner and launch no more foreign wars. As a result, his approval rate is the lowest ever recorded for a president, but 33% still support him. What would he have to do for them to turn against him? Who knows, we’d rather not find out.

Politicians usually make at least an attempt to do what they promised in their campaigns but Trump hasn’t, quite likely because he doesn’t remember what he promised in 2024. Other politicians declare what they’re going to do and do it, but everybody is outraged because nobody believed them. One such honest fellow was Frau Schicklgruber’s little boy, Adolf, better known by his stepfather’s name, Herr Alois Hitler. In November, 1923, believing that the Bavarian state government was likely to secede from Germany and unite with Austria, forming a large Catholic state in central Europe, Hitler and his group attempted a putsch. This quickly collapsed and he was sentenced to five years in prison but served only about a year. During this time, he began dictating what became the two volumes of Mein Kampf [1]. This was published in 1925-26 and sold well, especially after he became Reichskanzler in 1933. There were a few pirated English translations but they didn’t sell. The authorised version, translated by James Murphy, wasn’t finished when war broke out, meaning very few British politicians read it until the bombers were overhead. That was a problem because in it, the author had set out in considerable detail his plans to build the Thousand Year Reich.

Most of those who had read it were very supportive of everything he had said, especially the tirades against Bolshevism and the USSR. And Jews, of course, because the English upper classes were fierce racists themselves. In Vol. I, he expanded on his version of race science, the core of which was the idea that there is a hierarchy of races, with northern Europeans at the top and all the rest down below. The Aryan races, he believed, had given humanity everything worthwhile; the other races would never amount to anything and were useful only as labourers. They had to be kept in their place and definitely not allowed to interbreed with the higher races as that would lead to racial dilution and thence to social collapse. His racial views meshed neatly with his nationalism, that each country had to be racially pure otherwise it would decline and he wanted Germany to be at the top. This led to his particular hostility for Jews as he believed they formed Bolshevism in order to dissolve nations into a single world state that they would govern for their benefit, all the while polluting the gene pool with their inferior blood. Because of what has happened since, that sounds bad today but at the time, this sort of talk was pretty standard throughout Western Europe, North America and the former British colonies such as Australia, Canada, South Africa etc.

If this were all, the rest of the world could have lived with it but he had economic ideas as well. Germany was a great nation but it was kept from its rightful place at the top of the hierarchy by not having enough land. Britain and France, the other great nations, were also quite small but they had their huge overseas empires which allowed them to become wealthy and thus to bestride the world. By contrast, the German-speaking peoples were stuck in a narrow strip of land and unable to expand. Without more land, they must decline; there were no decent territories overseas; therefore Germany must look east, to the vast tracts of Eurasia occupied by the second rate Slavic nations. In order to fulfil her destiny, Germany must take control of the under-utilised Slavic territories, thin out the excess population and keep the rest as labourers for the farms, mines and factories that German ingenuity alone could build. As Darwin said, life is a struggle in which only the fit survive which Hitler took to mean that anybody who wasn’t prepared to fight for his race didn’t deserve to survive, much less to breed and spread his defective blood. What we would call defective genes, such as criminality, mental disorder, addictions, uncontrolled violence, homosexuality, prostitution, etc, along with other defective races, had to be eliminated for the good of the nation.

That’s it, there’s his plan, set out in Chap.14 of Vol II of Mein Kampf. There were no apologies because none were needed. What he planned was simply reenacting the spread of the British and French overseas empires according to standard eugenic principles, the only difference being that he would be colonising white people. The few Englishmen of influence who had read it were generally supportive because their loathing of Bolshevism was at least as intense as his. They would support anybody who opposed the Reds, as Churchill said after meeting Mussolini in 1927:

If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been wholeheartedly from start to finish with Fascismo’s triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism … I could not help being charmed, as so many other people have been, by his gentle, simple bearing and his calm, detached poise, despite so many burdens and dangers. Any one could see he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people …

Churchill also believed in eugenics, including sterilisation of the ‘feeble-minded’ as part of a program to improve the English race. In these respects, Churchill was not an extremist. He became the prime minister, dear friend and confidant of kings and queens, the beatified hero of the 20^th Century but when it came to racial hierarchies, Churchill and Hitler were on the same page, as they say. People may object that Churchill was a minor player in the race game but he wasn’t: in 1942, he called Indians “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” In 1943, for the purpose of feeding its armies, Britain engineered a famine in Bengal that killed 3.5million people and left untold millions of children damaged for life. Churchill knew exactly what the British policies would do and pressed ahead with it.

The Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 began with the largest army ever assembled in human history. Over the next four years, between 25-35million Soviet citizens died, including deliberate genocidal programs in the occupied areas. The unspeakable horror of that period is burned into the Russian soul but most people in the West know next to nothing about it. They don’t know that 80% of German casualties were on the OstFront, the Eastern War. Post-war, the Soviet leadership swore: “Never again. Nobody will ever threaten us again,” a vow the US and NATO have completely ignored (the period is captured in the book Khatyn by Ales Adamovich, and the film Come and See, based on the book, also on YouTube; anybody who hasn’t seen it needs to but be warned). It came about entirely because one group of humans decided they were superior beings who had the right to dominate another group, slaughtering them and taking their land for their own glory. Needless to say, the people deemed “inferior” decided otherwise. At the Nuremberg trials, it was agreed that aggressive war is not permissible under any circumstances, that the Nazi leaders who committed that offence were guilty of the gravest crimes and had surrendered their right to live.

The urge to dominate and its equal and opposite urge for freedom are built into us but they are not biological absolutes. Dominating other people feels great but we don’t have to give in to that urge. If we choose, we can resist it and still lead perfectly satisfying lives. The very idea that one group is superior to another and has rights and privileges denied to others is not compatible with a peaceful world. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, and with the ever-growing threat of global warming, we could go further and say that the very idea of superiority is an unacceptable danger to the safety of the planet.

Unfortunately, the twin ideas of racial superiority and racial inferiority live on and have pushed the world into another war. Eighty years after the last great racial war, a group of humans has decided they are superior beings who have the right to dominate another group, slaughtering them and taking their land for their own glory. Once again, the aggressive group has openly declared their intention to invade other nations, to slaughter their people or drive them out while enslaving enough to provide labour, in order to build a glorious empire in which they will reign supreme. Starting in 1896 with the publication of the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, the group known as Zionists have broadcast their belief that, as the “Chosen People,” they are superior to other human beings and thereby have an right inalienable right to the lands and livelihoods of the indigenous people of the Levant. Their starting point is some writings they regard as divinely inspired in which their tribal deity promised them all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18–21). Atheistic Zionists, of whom there are plenty, rely on what they call “historical reasons” to claim the territory although they never specify what legal basis that provides. It has no basis, of course. There are plenty of very wealthy Jewish people in Australia. Imagine that tonight, a group of Aboriginal people knocked on a Jewish door and said: “Hey man, this is our land, you mob stole it from us. We got a real strong historical claim on this land so you lot can just go an’ camp on the street, we’re takin’ over this place.” I doubt very much the occupants would want to move.

Putting that aside, after an absence of 2,000 years, the Zionists decided to occupy what they say is their promised land. Particularly since 1948 when the UN granted them a sizeable part of the region, they have constantly engaged in aggressive activity intended to drive the indigenous population out and/or wipe them out. Because they have managed to gain the unqualified support of the ruling class in the US, they have been able to pursue their goal without let or hindrance and now feel sufficiently encouraged to attack a distant country, Iran, which was never part of the supposed “birthright.” That this takes us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe is dismissed by the Zionist clique and their fanatical supporters in the US as somehow “antisemitic.”

Lost in the noise is the point that, even by their own bloodthirsty standards, the Zionists are acting duplicitously. The covenant or contract between the Judaic tribes and their deity is repeated at different points in their holy book but the core message is crystal clear: “I will give you this land if you keep my law” (e.g. Deuteronomy 28:63). There were something like 613 laws in their book, one of which explicitly states: “Thou shalt not kill.” However, as we watch the world’s first genocide broadcast in real time, it is equally clear that the very people professing to be observant of their religion are committing mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and thoroughly enjoying it. How do they sleep at night? The answer is very simple: by a process of verbal trickery, they have convinced themselves that the indigenous Palestinians are not actually human, so they can be killed as we kill rats and cockroaches. That is, they have adopted the very belief system that allowed the Nazi SS to commit the defining crimes of the 20^th Century, and are now working hard on the defining crimes of the 21^st Century. They believe: “We are superior beings, you are inferior. We therefore have the right to invade your land, to conquer you, to drive you out or slaughter you, and to take your land in order to build a glorious empire.” That is precisely what the Nazis said in 1925, and acted on in 1941. In fact, Netanyahu has openly stated that his plan is that Israel will become a global superpower, potentially dominating the world.

Evil is as evil does. If this was a crime against humanity in 1945, it remains a crime against humanity in 2026. In fact, more so as Israelis are far better educated than the barely-literate German farm boys who followed the swastika to a brutal death on the steppes. The justifications offered by the very sophisticated Zionist propaganda machine are irrelevant. If the death of Anne Frank was a grievous crime, then so too was the death of Hind Rajab. It doesn’t matter how many Jews were killed in Europe so many years ago, the Palestinians were not involved, as the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion admitted in 1956:

Why should the Arabs make peace ? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them ? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them ? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that ? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out [1, p99-100].

Goldmann was clear: “…Ben Gurion is the man principally responsible for the anti-Arab policy … He had no consideration for anyone, friend or foe.”

The urge to dominate is human, it is in all of us. However, the notion that one group of humans is superior to another and therefore has privileges not available to the other and has the right to act on them without restraint leads to atrocities. The US believes it is a nation of superior humans with rights and entitlements not available to others, including the right to attack other nations when it chooses to do so. That supremacist national ethos is not compatible with the safety of the planet. Zionism is a supremacist belief system which is equally destructive of human rights. Combined, these two countries threaten the future of every living thing on earth, and it all comes about because their leaders lack the insight that while dominating others feels wonderful for them, it does not feel good for the oppressed people who must eventually fight back.

1. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

2. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

“Trump seems increasingly incoherent. Is he on the edge of mental collapse?”

Since Trump has the power to end life on the planet, the fact that a professor of politics asks that question implies we are in the most serious trouble. The Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds from catastrophe. Does everybody understand what that means? Do the people making the big decisions understand? No, they don’t, and they don’t care. They have more important things on their minds, like smashing their enemies. Two questions arise: Is Trump losing it, and how did we get here?

Q1: Is Trump losing it? Yes, most assuredly. He is 79, in poor general health, with frequent signs there is some health problem requiring regular IV therapy (e.g. lecanemab, for Alzheimer’s Disease). He hardly sleeps, gets practically no exercise, eats junk and can’t start his day before midday then runs out of steam by 5.00pm. This is in the setting of a person of mediocre intellect amd poor education, who struggles to read and knows very little about the real world. As a personality, he is psychopathic and narcissistic, meaning he is incapable of seeing things from another person’s point of view and unable to form emotional bonds. People are simply objects to him, he plays with them for a while then throws them away. He always was and still is totally corrupt and dishonest with no concept of truth: for him, truth is whatever yields a profit for him. At his best, he was jealous, suspicious, vengeful and remorseless in settling scores but his best days are long gone. All his life, he has been impulsive, disorganised, lazy, demanding, scheming, manipulative, full of prejudices and thoroughly unpleasant. Like a toddler, if something catches his eye, he reaches for it (“I want Greenland, I want the Canal…”) but has no idea why and quickly loses interest. Oh, and he has no sense of humour at all (see this one). Now, he is dementing at an accelerating rate.

If he were not very wealthy and the only person who can pull in the votes for the even more wealthy people who own the Republican party, if he were just a suburban grandfather, he probably wouldn’t be in a nursing home yet. A person at this stage of dementia would be at home but wouldn’t be allowed to go out by himself but he probably wouldn’t want to. As long as he had a TV and a regular supply of KFC, he’d be manageable, or maybe throw in a phone that isn’t connected so he could tweet away, happy with the idea the world is listening (much as they did with his father, Fred, when he was dementing; he was put in an office with a phone and a secretary who brought in piles of papers for him to sign). Mary Trump, Donald’s niece by his older brother, Fred Jr, is a astute PhD psychologist with an excellent YouTube channel. She says her uncle now shows the signs that her grandfather showed in his dotage. She’s talking about the person with the Big Red Button on his desk who has just launched an unprovoked, illegal and immoral war of aggression under cover of perfidy and nobody’s doing anything about it. Perhaps they’re waiting for the first nuclear bombs to fall just in case this one isn’t serious.

So we can be satisfied that this malignant buffoon is dementing but it’s actually worse than that. He’s half way, his memory is still relatively intact so he can fool people but his judgement, such as it ever was, is shot. Judgement is probably the highest intellectual function of all, and therefore first to go. It’s not an all-or-none phenomenon, he will have good days and bad, and mornings are usually better than evenings. If he sticks to routine, he can rely on old learned material but if he has to make a decision based on half a dozen conflicting demands, he will just go for the most salient, which is usually: “What’s in this for me?” or “How can I hit my enemies?” He would never consider: “How will this impact other people, will it make life worse for people with limited resources?” That will never come up because it never has once in his life. So we’re told that the decision to invade Iran was pushed on him by Netanyahu who told him that the two spurious “assassination” attempts in late 2024 were organised by Iranians and will have another go so Trump should get in first. That was enough. He never considered things like … Strait of Hormuz; Gulf country refineries and gas plants; body bags of US troops; impact on poor countries, and so on, because those things mean absolutely nothing to him, even if he had heard of them. He doesn’t care about dead US troops, he wriggled out of Vietnam and said soldiers who got killed were suckers. He certainly doesn’t care about dead Iranian children. The reason he fell for Netanyahu’s ploy is partly personality, partly dementia but also he can’t cope intellectually with all the demands and is increasingly agitated and unable to focus. Even a healthy person would be struggling with all the trouble he’s stirred up. That’s why he doesn’t make many appearances and his speech is slurred during them. I’d say he’s being kept upright by drugs. Same thing happened to Hitler after the July 1944 plot and explosion. His physician, Dr Theodore Morell, who was a total scoundrel, was pumping him full of a cocktail of amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, home-made vitamins and so on.

So is Trump on the edge of mental collapse? Yes. He should be removed from office immediately, but his “loyal” minions are all too scared to make the first move because they fear everybody will turn on them and they’ll be finished. Mainly, lèse-majesté is just too, too scary for the poor dears as most of them are useless, grasping psychopaths themselves.

That’s the immediate question, and so to the second: How did we get here? Again, it splits in two parts. The first relates to the way we humans form our governments, and the second asks what it is about the American system of government that allows such a disastrously unqualified person to swoop in and snatch the prize. We’d like to say that governments exist to get the job done, to make people’s lives better and smoother, to help those who need help and provide opportunities for those who will use them to benefit the community but that’s not true. Governments exist because some people are obsessed by power and work diligently and mostly dishonestly to build a hierarchy to elevate themselves so they can dominate everybody else, just because dominating feels so much better than being dominated. There is a strong biological basis for this based in the testosterone economy [1].

As a result, and whenever they can, humans will build a far-reaching dominance heirarchy that gives enormous power to a few people at the peak, and none for those at the bottom, such that the privileged can loot the community to their hearts’ content, bestowing vast wealth and luxury on themselves while those at the bottom of the pile live in holes in rubbish dumps and eat what they can forage. As people ascend the hierarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows and expands to consume all the resources in reach. It’s a bit like Parkinson’s Law, which says that the amount of work to be done expands to fill the time available and to consume all the labour (see Oscar Wilde’s comment: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.” The modern version: The police state is expanding to arrest all the people dissatisfied with the expanding police state). As people go up the heirarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows to satisfy their sense of their exalted status. This applies equally to men and women, as in “Let them eat cake.” Throughout most of history, kings lived in unbelievable luxury while the poor starved in freezing hovels or slaves died of malaria in muddy swamps (compare a small example, Brighton’s Royal Pavilion with the picture of poverty from early Victorian England in Friedrich Engel’s account [2]).

There’s nothing actually wrong with the idea of hierarchies, if you want a job done, generally it improves efficiency but their execution fails on two points. First, the ever-expanding sense of privilege of the few. The wealthy have no sense that there should be a limit to their greed: the wife of newspaper magnate and convicted felon, Conrad Black, allegedly said: “My extravance knows no bounds.” She wasn’t joking. It never occurs to them that enough is enough, that the extra they take means less for somebody else. And they don’t care. They genuinely believe they deserve it and the poor don’t. Elena Ceaucescu, wife of the Romanian dictator, apparently said just that. There had been a birthday party for one of her grandchildren at one of their country estates. The guests ate one or two pieces of the enormous cake, then it was sent back to the kitchen. The staff knew it would be thrown out so they started to cut some for themselves. Elena came into the kitchen, saw what was happening and grabbed all the cake, throwing it in the bin. “You don’t deserve that,” she snapped, and stalked out. A year or two later, she was shot.

Second problem is the quality of the people attracted to power hierarchies. They draw people who are intrigued, fascinated, beguiled and turned on by power but the process is self-winnowing. For anybody in a government or political party or business or club or church of any sort, there will come a day when they have to make a decision: choose between principled conduct that leads to loss of status, and unprincipled that opens the door to the corridors of power. Most people will choose integrity and accept a lower status but some don’t want that. For them, scruples are a handicap on the golden road to glory, so they ditch them and scramble eagerly up the slope, pausing only to kick clods of dirt on anybody coming behind them. This applies across the board and has done since Homo sapiens first appeared.

With very few exceptions, the political process throughout the world favours the self-interested and unscrupulous. People may start with noble ideas but they don’t last long. They soon realise that fortune favours the malleable so they mould themselves to the prevailing winds. The current prime minister of Australia, one Anthony Albanese, used to be strongly supportive of the Palestinian cause but no longer. These days, he and his government are 110% behind the US-Israel axis now and have no problem with US bases in this country playing major roles in the current war of aggression against Iran. For example, the instructions to sink the unarmed Iranian frigate IRIS Dena and leave the sailors to drown were received at Pine Gap station and relayed through NW Cape submarine station.

Worldwide, in every walk of life, political processes have evolved that select for the self-interested, the greedy and unscrupulous, the hypocritical (yes, Mr Scott Morrison, former PM of Oz and loud member of the scandalous Hillsong Prosperity Gospel Church, we’re most definitely talking about you), the brutal and the contemptuous, for deluded religious fanatics, messiahs, mass murderers, political saviours and all the rest of our political masters. We think we’re going to get liberation and democracy but we end up with kakistrocracy, government by the worst (apparently from Greek κακά, meaning poo).

That’s the generic fault in political systems, but the American system is much worse than most because it concentrates so much power in the presidency. What in other countries is a gradual pyramid of power in the US is a pillar rising high with the president seated alone on top. The president is executive head and appoints the cabinet who are beholden to him. Unlike the Westminster parliamentary system, and beyond a perfunctory screening by the Senate, US cabinet members are not responsible to the electorate. In fair electoral systems, cabinet ministers and even prime ministers can and do lose their seats. However, if the US Senate is controlled by the presidency, as this one is, then they simply wave through whomever the president pushes forward, with predictably disastrous results. Add to that the pervasive influence of dark money and hidden lobbies, and the system is set up for autocracy, as has happened. The Supreme Court has been stacked with corrupt and partisan sycophants; the military hasn’t so much as blinked in launching an illegal war of aggression (yet again); the Dept of Justice is run by a seriously paranoid woman who sees her job as hounding Trump’s opponents; the cowed House of Representatives is terrified of being “primaried” by a Trump wannabe; the Secretary for Health thinks he knows everything about health (as does Donald “drink bleach” Trump); police and immigration services are morphing into a Sturmabteilung; regulatory bodies hamstrung; on and on.

We could easily write a computer program for this sort of government, and it would end up with a fascist dictatorship just because the lust for power only ever ratchets up, it never ratchets down. This is humanity’s fatal flaw. The only saving feature is that the lust for power that resides in each of us is balanced by a slower but more determined drive to resist being oppressed. When the domination becames unbearable, when people feel they are about to lose the most important thing in their lives, they will rise and fight for freedom. The great revolutions of the past 200 years, France, Russia, China, didn’t come from nothing. They were created and crafted by the blind lust for power by a small minority who decided they were appointed by breeding or history or God to rule, and who found out the hard way that not everybody shared their opinion of their majesty. Any group on earth who feels superior to their neighbours and who decides to push them around is going to face a day of reckoning.

The power elite in the US in particular feel they have the moral and historical right to boss the rest of the world around and they have the bombers to do it, so they do. Israel is driven by the Zionist notion that they are special people who have the right to shove their neighbours aside, or kill them, in order to steal their land. That is exactly what Hitler set out in his vision for Germany [3]: the Germans, he said, are superior people, the Slavs inferior; Germany doesn’t have much land and can never achieve its predestined greatness while the Slavs have vast areas and will never amount to much; therefore according to the laws of nature, the Germans are entitled to invade the Slavic lands, conquer them, eliminate half their population and enslave the rest as farm and industrial labourers so Germany can build a glorious empire that will last a thousand years. This is precisely the program of the fanatic Zionist government in Israel with their plan for Greater Israel. It didn’t end well, either for Germany or the 25million Slavs they killed. Trump started this war late on Friday night, thinking it would all be over by the time the stock markets opened on Monday morning but it isn’t running to plan. Truly. That is how our world is being run.

This dumb war will not end well for the US either but, in the process of wrecking their own country, they may well end everybody else’s, too. It’s essential that the rest of the world work out where their interests lie, and form an immovable bloc to resist the US-Israel axis. The notion that two countries with 3% of the world’s population can hold the 97% to ransom just be creating havoc is beyond absurd. It’s time to ditch NATO, dump the USD as reserve currency, leave SWIFT, reform the WTO, IMF and World Bank without the US, swap to sustainable energy, reduce globalisation, dump neoliberal economics and so on. The US and Israel can live in their own little bubble, thinking of Raptures and Messiahs, while the real world gets on with business. Every crisis is an opportunity and we need to grasp this one. Either our politicians grow a pair or get shoved aside.

That’s possibly a gloomy view of humanity but I believe we’re well and truly past the point where we can kid ourselves our governments are good and they know what they’re doing. They aren’t, and they don’t. Practically every country in the West is governed by self-interested trash and if we don’t do something about it very soon, we as a species and possibly the entire biosphere may not have a future.

References:

1. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

2. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Germany’s policy in Eastern Europe. Chap 14 in Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Fresh from the joy of blowing up a huge oil depot on the outskirts of the enormous city of Tehran (about 20million) and poisoning the air, soil, water and 20million lungs for years (here, at 8.25), the US-Israeli axis have now started their usual trick of destroying hospitals and health centres. This is itself a crime but it is in the setting of an undeclared and unprovoked aggressive war, the “supreme international crime,” which was launched under cover of “negotiations to prevent war.” That is, the US and its Zionist overlords are also guilty of perfidy, the crime of treachery of the most despicable kind. What they have done is actually worse than infiltrating your troops dressed in the other side’s uniforms. When a German unit led by Otto Skorzeny did this in the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944, the disguised troops were rounded up and summarily shot by the US Army. In practice, if not in law, perfidy is punishable by death. Res ipso loquitur: Trump and Netanyahu are guilty of perfidy.

How did we get to this stage? There was a time when the noble, benevolent and God-fearing countries of the West stood shoulder to shoulder to protect the poor and downtrodden of the world against the relentless spread of godless communism in its crusade to crush the flame of freedom with its vast, robotic hordes of brainwashed troops. Now the position has been reversed. The poor and downtrodden of the world need protection from the West, as novelist John Updike warned:

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible (Rabbit Redux, 1971).

Trump won office promising never to get involved in foreign “forever” wars again. In barely 14 months, the US has bombed seven countries, each attack without provocation on essentially defenceless countries. The USSR never did that, China has never done that; Iran hasn’t attacked another country for 300 years. Add to that the six countries Israel has bombed in the past year using American planes, bombs and missiles, provided free and fueled by the US, and then look at the rest of the world: outside Ukraine, also provoked by the West, hardly a single bomb or even an apple core has fallen on foreign heads: Malum est sicut malum facit. Evil is as evil does. How did we get to this stage? How did we turn into the villains? (NB: Pakistan and Afghanistan are the exceptions).

The short answer is that nothing has changed, it’s just that now we see we’ve all been fooled. We’ve been led up the garden path by experts in duplicity, by people unburdened by the mimsy morality of the mumbling middleclass muttonheads who voted for them. Trump promised to end the Ukraine war on Day 1: 423 days later, it’s still going. He promised to reduce inflation. It’s going back up. To bring back jobs. The US lost 92,000 non-farm jobs in February alone. The only promise he’s kept is to deport foreigners but that’s having a terrible effect on farming and construction. And people still support him.

There’s nothing new or uniquely American about this. The headline in today’s Economist newsletter (paywall) screams: “Iran strikes Qatar’s main energy hub.” Right at the bottom, it says this is in retaliation for Israel attacking Iran’s main gas field after it had been warned not to. 90% of readers don’t get to the end of the article. They know that. Go back in history. Everybody knows the remarkable story of the British East India Company, how it brought industry and civilisation to India and made heaps in the process. Some may have heard of the Opium Wars, when Britain’s Royal Navy attacked China for trying to prohibit imports of opium, which was having a devastating effect on the country. Unheard is where the opium came from: from vast plantations built on peasants’ farmland in India by the East India Co., which forced the peasants off their land then employed them for next to nothing to grow the opium. When China objected by burning the bales of opium, the saintly Queen Victoria, whose Royal Estate held great parcels of East India Co. shares, lent them the Navy to blow the Chinese resistance away. When Britain first went to India, the standard of living in India was actually higher than in Britain. When it left, 250 years and $43trillion (modern money) later, India was devastated and will probably never recover.

The story has always been: “We’re good, they’re bad, it’s our duty to blow them away.” There’s no truth in this. For 500 years, Europeans have looted the planet, attacking, plundering, slaughtering with let or hindrance. Any opposition has immediately brought the most vicious response the invaders could muster. Look at the African region of Congo which was left out of the “Scramble for Africa” because it was impenetrable. In the 19^th Century, the market in rubber was exploding, fortunes were being made overnight. Belgium didn’t have an overseas empire so the king, Leopold II, decided he would take the Congo as his personal estate and force the locals to grow rubber for him. The savagery of the occupation was legendary: “The brutality of King Leopold II in his former colony of the Congo Free State was well documented; up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908” (Wikipedia; see the photos). Nobody cared. The slaves were black, there were plenty more where they came from.

This was not exceptional. When the British colonists arrived in Australia in 1788, the Aboriginal population has been estimated at 300,000. Within ten years of whites arriving in any area, up to 90% of the Aboriginal population had died. They had no resistance to Western diseases. Smallpox devastated the tribes around Sydney while in the Kimberley, in the far north west where I worked, measles and whooping cough had the same effect. Aboriginals who resisted were met with gunfire, from whites and from the Aboriginal police brought in from other areas according to the standard British policy developed in India and other colonies.

Making hay off poor people has never gone out of fashion. Former UK Labour prime minister Tony Blair has been busy since he was booted out. Starting from nothing, his personal fortune has grown to £60-75million, and that’s only the money he has declared. Like all other wealthy people, he will have at least the same amount hidden in offshore tax havens. This is the “Epstein class,” the new name for the UHNWIs, the ultra-high net worth individuals who, with a few pretentious exceptions, travel silently and ceaselessly around the world, arranging deals, buying, selling, trading in everything licit and illicit, moving money from one tax haven to another, hiding assets, swapping favours and links, wheeling, dealing and stealing. Author and journalist Oliver Bullough wrote about them a few years ago in Moneyland: why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back. It seems we didn’t take it back and they’ve been having a great time at our expense. The slowly unfolding Epstein business is showing what the wealthy and powerful get up to when they think nobody’s watching, but what we’ve seen so far is barely scratching the surface. The sex trafficking is actually a diversion, a tiny part of the oceans of corruption that take place out of our sight.

It’s like Trump’s “war against narco-terrorists.” With no authorisation, he stages “interdictions” of alleged drug traffickers, using the US Navy as a set of bath toys to kill people on the high seas. This is properly known as murder and piracy but that’s ignored. At a cost of at least $10million per boat, he keeps his dimwitted followers happy, thinking he is doing something about the drug problem. The whole thing is performative, a show for the evening news: all he’s doing is diverting attention from the movements of vast sums of drug money, at least $500billion a year, all of which is readily tracked if they want to. He has no intention of interfering with that, it would bankrupt a lot of banks. However, it seems we now stand at a crossroads. This whole empire thing is on the verge of coming unstuck. Urged on by the evil Benzion Mileikowsky (aka Netanyahu), Trump has launched what must be the most brainless, unplanned, disorganised stuff-up of a war in history.

This monstrous mess has been 73 years in the making, since 1953 when Britain’s MI6 and the fledgeling CIA engineered a coup to overthrow the legitimately elected, mildly socialist and nationalist Iranian government because they wanted to nationalise the oil industry. This time, after at least 25years of grim warnings that they intended to attack Iran, the US and Israel have finally done so. After at least 24years of grim warnings from Iran that, if attacked, they would immediately close the Strait of Hormuz, thus strangling 25% of the world’s seaborne trade in oil and gas, the bombs started falling. Undeterred and with no plan, the US and Israel, its partner in this and many other crimes, have attacked Iran. To the collective astonishment and indignation of the West, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, thus blocking 25% of the world’s seaborne trade in oil and gas, thereby threatening global recession, not to overlook farming failure as 30% of the world’s production of the essential fertiliser, urea, also comes out through the Strait, as well as a lot of food and machinery and chemicals going the other way.

Who could possibly have expected this? Who could possibly have understood the labyrinthine complexity of the universal conditional, foisted on us by those wily Greeks (and the Indians, and the Chinese and Arabs and everybody with half a brain): If A, then B. If A happens, then B will inevitably follow as a law of nature. If you pull the cat’s tail, she will scratch you. If you touch the stove, it will burn you. If you drink and drive, you will go to prison. If you attack Iran, she will immediately disrupt the world economy for as long as it takes.

The blinding stupidity of the people ruling the world today is far, far beyond breathtaking, it’s genuinely frightening. Their braindead war has already started a huge economic meltdown, with the most vulnerable countries suffering first: indebted African and Asian countries that need ships to export their products so they can buy food, and so on. The Gulf countries, who have been very willing partners in this business since 1979, hosting American bases and enabling the attacks, are in the shit. Their economies are totally dependent on exporting hydrocarbons and associated petrochemicals, including urea, and importing food by ship. With the boundless flow of petrodollars, their populations have grown far beyond sustainable levels. The huge cities that didn’t exist even 40 years ago, Dubai, Doha, Manaman and all the rest of the steel and glass towers poking out of the desert, they’re uninhabitable without vast inputs of energy and money. 90% of their water comes from desalination which is powered by fossil fuels, not the sun. What are they going to do when they can’t flush their turds? They don’t have food reserves, it’s all JIT, just in time delivery, so maybe if they don’t eat, they won’t have any turds.

Everything comes and goes by ship. Through the Strait of Hormuz. Which is closed. Because the fuckwits in DC and TA thought they were so clever that they could suspend the universal constant, that they could attack Iran and the Strait of Hormuz would miraculously remain open to traffic. So very soon, all those millions of people in the Gulf states will start to get hungry and hot and thirsty but they can’t get out by ship because the Strait is closed and their airports and highways are within missile range. Needless to say, the ten million labourers and domestics from the Subcontinent and other places will be first to suffer but nobody worries about them, certainly not the Epstein class.

Who could possibly have expected any of this? Damned Iranians, they’re just so unfair, don’t they know their role in our 73 year drama of psychopathic grandiosity is to roll over and play dead?

Two huge questions arise. They say you get the government you deserve but I don’t believe the 97% of the world who live outside those two countries have done anything so bad as to deserve what is happening now. That’s not quite true. Through inertia and just wanting a quiet life, we have negligently allowed the political arena to become a playground for the corrupt, the amoral, the self-interested and the utterly heartless – for psychopaths, in other words. I don’t think it’s ever been any different, see the example of the East India Company’s drug dealing, but this time it’s pushed us to the brink of nuclear war. Trump was stupid enough to ignore all the advice he was given (see here for a very knowledgeable disccussion of how he was fooled into this disaster). Given he launched the war with practically no objectives or plans, he’s stupid enough to think that if he’s losing, which he is now, he could pull off a victory with a few nuclear bombs on Tehran. I doubt that any of the junior psychopaths around him would have the courage to say: “No. You’re not going to do that.”

Netanyahu has declared he has waited 40 years to attack Iran, no reason given; if he is about to lose, I think he’s sufficiently evil to say “If I’m going down, I’m going to pull them down with me.” The Samson Option, as it happens. His goal has always been to bring about Greater Israel; that way, he can go down in history as the greatest Jewish leader since Noah. He doesn’t believe all this messiah crap but the rest of his deluded fascist coalition do, and they won’t let him back down. Pushed into a corner, the one he has just made for himself, I think he would do it.

In the interests of sleeping at night, let’s assume that doesn’t happen. Let’s assume the Trump-Netanyahu clown car bumbles along and doesn’t fall off the road. Europe’s economy starts to collapse as they have refused to buy Russian gas in the past so now, when they need it, Mr Putin simply laughs and reminds them he has reliable customers to his east. Japan and South Korea, which get 90% of their oil and gas from the Middle East, start to sink very quickly. India is allowed to get some fuel so they’ll struggle along. Australia gets all its jet fuel and other chemicals from the Gulf so we’ll soon feel the pinch.

In the Gulf, refineries are already shutting down but they’re not like the aircon in your house, you can turn them off today and back on tomorrow. Oh no, once closed, a refinery takes a minimum of months to restart but oil wells have to be capped. That’s a huge job in itself but they don’t restart just be taking the cap off, lots of them will collapse. The large aluminium refinery in Qatar, source of 30% of the world’s aluminium (Russia and China make much of the rest), has already closed and will take six months or more to restart. Their huge gas train has stopped production due to damage and no ships to load; they’re a bit easier to restart but will still need months of very expensive repairs, assuming they can get the parts through the Strait of Hormuz. This was all totally predictable. Trump is now saying he wasn’t warned this would happen but he’s lying, of course.

Assuming the whole place isn’t incinerated in a nuclear war, what’s likely to happen? It’s a bit hard to tell, our “leaders” are not rational people. Their only interest in life is domination. They are true narcisso-fascists. The Iranians are obviously very rational, they’ve been organising for this for decades. After the debacle of two attacks under cover of negotiations, they’re not going to fall for that again. I think they will hold out until they get what they want: the US out of the Middle East and Israel unable to launch any more attacks, meaning no air force and, above all, their nuclear bombs removed. However, if that happens, and it seems likely, both the US and Israel will be at serious risk of falling apart. Start with the US.

Empires don’t unravel cleanly. Sometimes they collapse in a firestorm, such as after both World Wars, and sometimes they just crumble like the car in Blues Brothers (Britain, for example). Can the American empire, which has been built on “full spectrum domination,” survive being cut off at the knees? The narcissistic hurt to the US would destroy their ruling class. The whole point of empire is not to shoot all the peons, they’re needed to work the mines and plantations, but to keep them all terrified. If they stop fearing, the empire is exposed as a gigantic con job. If the US fails on its promise to keep the Gulf states safe, which it has, what does that mean to its military colony down here? Australia is a huge aircraft carrier for the empire. Pine Gap is the most important US spy base outside Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA.

Having American bases hasn’t made the Gulf states safe, it’s pulled them into the shooting range and painted a target on their foreheads. The world will see this and everybody will be having second thoughts. I hope so. The Americans should get out of the Middle East, the Islamic world can sort itself out without Americans constantly interfering and playing one off against the other. OK, then why stop at West Asia? What about Europe? Isn’t it time they stopped playing tough guys and realised they need to make peace with their large neighbour to the East? All the Russians want is to stop being threatened, and to be treated with respect. The nation of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Tschaikovsky and Shostakovich is tired of being treated like a mixture between Genghis Khan and Uncle Tom. If the oh so clever and cultured West Europeans can’t sort that out, they’re not trying.

But what about the empire itself? Could it survive without constantly beating its chest about how wonderful and powerful it is and blowing up fishermen on the high seas? I don’t think so. John Updike also said: “America is a vast conspiracy to keep you happy.” The ordinary people of the US are kept in line by a ceaseless stream of lies and propaganda about how lucky they are to live in the Land of the Free and the World Policeman and The Most Powerful Nation in History blah blah, when the reality is they can’t afford to go to hospital and their schools are falling apart and their trains and subways are rat-infested pissoirs and their politicians are all totally corrupt and screwing children. If the peons start to suspect the truth, the propaganda machine switches to the old faithful, “Look out, drug dealers and child molesters are swarming across the border to murder you in your sleep,” i.e. make them scared. Drop Site Daily reported this morning:

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is set to walk away with an $887 million compensation package after the Trump administration facilitated a monopolistic merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. As the agreement is being finalized, thousands of workers are simultaneously set to lose their jobs.

It is impossible to get that sort of money honestly. All it took was a donation to Trump’s PAC. Meanwhile, young Kushner J, Trump’s incomparably venal son-in-law and peripatetic Chabad Zionist, has been busy raking in billions of Arab money while doubling as a “negotiator,” a job for which he has zero qualifications, was not elected and didn’t get Congressional approval. That is, he got it by nepotism and promising to give some of the loot to Uncle Donny. When the common people in Coldwater, Kansas (pop. 687), realise they’ve been cheated by experts, they won’t stop with shaking their fingers at the rich. Once the façade starts to fall away, their rage will continue until the tumbrils are rolling. That’s what happens to empires.

And Israel? Their position is much more precarious. Israel meets all the criteria for a clericalist-fascist state [1, pp3-34, 165-171]. It’s held together by two things. First, the single idea that it is surrounded by crazed and satanic enemies who dream of nothing more than cutting off every Jewish head and drinking the blood. Hatred of their neighbours is the only thing that the different factions of Israeli society have in common, it stops them tearing each other apart. A fascist state can’t say “Hooray, all our enemies are vanquished, we can relax and enjoy the view.” The minute it does that, all the previously repressed tensions explode and it flies apart:

As is well known in Israel, hatred between secular Jews cannot match in intensity the mutual hatred between diverse groups of religious Jews… internecine hatred between religious Jews, and especially between Haredi rabbis, is often virulent [2, Chap. 3].

Second, American money, weapons and technology keeps them together. Financially, Israel has been on life support since before it began. Without the billions of “aid” and “donations” (including $100billion from Germany which everybody forgets) and free weapons and nuclear industry and IT and surveillance industry, its economy would collapse. Yes, they have some gas now but that’s all, the rest of their economy is entirely artificial. There are more mines and more farms within 100km of my house than there are in the whole of Israel. They have no productive base. Half their water comes from desalination and that could be blown up before you read this because Trump very foolishly had an Iranian desalination plant bombed. Great way to conduct a war, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing but that’s what happens when you give halfwits and psychopaths nuclear weapons.

So if the Americans aren’t there to foment trouble and protect Israel from the universal conditional (“If you kill Palestinians and steal their land, their relatives will come after you”), and the Muslim countries of West Asia and North Africa make their long-delayed peace, the days of the nuclear-armed, incurably aggressive Zionist-apartheid state will be numbered. That would be the best possible outcome. The worst is too scary to think about.

References:

1. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. ‎ Amazon.

2. Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press: London.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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I’ve been told I’m not to use the expressions “the Epstein class,” or “Operation Epstein fury” because the very powerful US-Zionist lobby, the Anti-Defamation League, has ruled that those term are “antisemitic.” Their reasoning isn’t clear but meantime, I’m still allowed to call the present war of aggression launched by Israel and the US “Operation Epic F*ck-Up.” Because it is. Even bearing in mind that the US has started and lost a dozen wars since 1945, this stands head and shoulders below the rest.

Kevin Walmsley is an American engineer who lives in Kunming, China. A couple of times a week, he posts brief reports on Substack and YouTube as Inside China / Business. Each time, he takes some claim made by US or Western commentators about China’s industry or economics etc. and shows with a few graphs that they’re talking rubbish. This week, he’s looked at the economics of attempting to defend against missile and drone attacks, and the effects of the fighting in the Gulf on international air travel. Bearing in mind that an Iranian Shahed drone costs from $25-50,000, depending on its configuration, and they can make 100 a month, and that each Patriot or Iron Dome ground-to-air defence missile costs from $0.5-4million but they can only make ten a month, and at least half of them miss their target, then the economics of the war Trump and Netanyahu started are not looking good. No way. Moreover, Western airlines have taken a massive hit because they have to divert away from Iranian airspace but they’re not allowed to fly over Russia, and jet fuel has doubled in price in a week and will get much, much higher as it can’t be shipped, but nobody wants to fly anyway, so he expects major airlines to start going broke before long. Add to that the effect of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, which it has long threatened to do if attacked, which upset Herr Drumpf:

If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far. Additionally, we will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again — Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them

That is, he is threatening genocide. However, Iran was attacked so they have closed the Strait and no oil can get out, nor chemicals, nor fertilisers, nor plastics; and none of the food that the Gulf countries import (80% of their consumption) or machines can get in; and Europe is seriously dependent on Gulf oil since Biden and Co. blew up the Russian Nord Stream II gas pipeline; and Ukraine won’t allow Russian gas or oil over its territory, all of which adds up to Europe teetering on the brink of collapse. Add to that the news that Gulf oil and gas producers have had to cease production, which means their refineries and gas plants have to be emptied and put on maintenance and it takes a minimum of a month to get them going again; and the world doesn’t have a month’s supply of oil and gas in reserve, then you really have to ask: “Who are the clowns who started this monstrous cock up? What were they thinking? What was their goal? How did they think they’d achieve it?”

One thing is clear: for 40 years, Netanyahu has dreamed of destroying Iran. He says so (it’s actually 47 years, since the Revolution in 1979; see Gantz, fmr defence minister here, starting at 0.55). US presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden resisted; Trump gave in. I don’t think we need to bother explaining that, he’s a dementing fool who is easily manipulated by promises of making lots of money and is terrified of the Epstein files leaking. What we would like to know is: What happened to the chiefs of staff and the National Budget Office and the CIA economics section who are supposed to understand things like the fact that 20million barrels of oil passes through Hormuz each day, 20% of world seaborne oil trade, and Europe and Japan and Korea are totally dependent on it? Didn’t they understand that airlines actually need fuel to keep flying, that they’re not huge gliders? That ships don’t move without bunkers? Where are the adults in the US who are supposed to rein in the pirates and gungho adventurers?

We can’t rely on Trump’s cabinet because he chose them on the basis of their fanatical loyalty to him. Hegseth, the so-called secretary of war is no use, he’s a fanatical christian nationalist (read: fascist) who just loves the idea of killing people. He approved the attack on the Iranian frigate that was returning from the regatta in India; he knew it was unarmed and was carrying a heap of dignitaries who’d gone for the ride; and he knew the submarine that sank it would not stop to rescue survivors, as it is required to do and as its captain knew it was required to do. So we can write him off. We can write off another important person, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, because she is seriously paranoid. Her performance before the Congressional committee a week or two ago was bizarre. Every time she was asked a question, she launched a vicious personal attack on the member who was interrogating her. She saw everything as a direct personal attack on her and her saint, D Trump. That’s paranoid, but not psychotic like Trump’s “White House director of faith matters,” one Paula White, who is completely off her head. Rubio, the secretary of state, better known as Narco Rubio because of his family connections, spilled the beans when he said they launched the attack because they knew Israel was going to attack Iran and if they did, then the Iranians would target American “assets” (radar, bases, etc) in the Gulf so they thought they’d better get in first, which is a crime (here, at 4.00). The rest of them are a bunch of liars, crooks and carpetbaggers, none worse than Trump’s nauseating son-in-law who is making a fortune out of all this, so we can’t expect any sense from them.

I don’t get this at all. Most of these people have university degrees so they’re not lacking intelligence. They have worked in and around major corporations and public service for decades, so they have some sort of experience. They were born into the closed world of wealth, power and privilege; they know exactly what goes on. They know everybody who’s anybody, and they know precisely who’s doing what with whom, where and for how much. They know that if you attack somebody, that person is going to get you back because that’s exactly what they do themselves. Before any attack, the military and CIA run these elaborate and very expensive “war games” where they start with what they want to achieve and then have to work out what the other side will do in response. Surely they can work out that if they attack Iran, it will retaliate with missiles, and that the Israeli missile defence system (Iron Dome, etc) gets its tracking info from the very high-powered and expensive US radar bases in the Gulf countries, so the first action the Iranians would have to take would be to destroy the American forward radar bases. Which is exactly what happened. I knew they would do that and the reason I knew they would do that’s because that is exactly what I would do (there is a fairly long account of it here by Richard Medhurst, a UK based reporter who was born in Syria to a Syrian mother and UK father, who speaks fluent Arabic and gets along in Hebrew; his bleached hair is recent).

I can’t answer why the Americans allowed themselves to be drawn into another “forever war,” especially as their president promised there would be no more; hubris, I expect, plus his fear of going to prison. As for the Israelis, the world needs to know that their plan for the past 80 years has been the total destruction of the entire Islamic Middle East. Not just Gaza, not just Lebanon, but the lot: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, now Iran, and their next target is Turkey, with Egypt and the rest of the Gulf to follow. This is all set out in their eschatology. There will be a mighty war in the Middle East; the Jews will triumph and build their Third Temple, their messiah will arrive, Jews will rule the world then be taken up to heaven while the rest of humanity goes to burn in hell because that’s where they came from.

Watch this video from beginning to end, especially the two rabbis at 2.55 and 11.35. The producers are reputable (I’ve checked). The videos are now quite old, perhaps 25 years or so. At the time, the belief system they propound was considered fairly extreme but these people and their millions of followers are now mainstream right wing, in Israel and in the diaspora, which more or less means the US. They are supported by the fanatical christian nationalists (they don’t get a capital C because it’s a heresy) who echo that view with the small exception that all Jews will also be sent to the deep fryer for eternity. The second speaker, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994) was leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect and hugely influential. He described the difference between Jewish and gentile souls in this way:

The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness … A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written, ‘And the strangers shall stand and feed your flocks’ [Isaiah 61:5]. The entire creation (of non-Jews) exists only for the sake of the Jews.

This is the driving principle behind the attack on Iran. It is amplified by Netanyahu’s urgent desire to satisfy the ultra-fanatics who voted for him to bring on the war that will lead to what they believe will be Zionism’s triumph.

We live in exceedingly dangerous times. A very large part of the world is being run by a coalition of religious and political extremists working hand in hand with the deeply corrupt business and political Epstein class, although it’s hard to tell them apart, not one of whom has the sense to look ahead and try to work out the consequences of their actions. Everybody knows that since the MH-17 disaster over Ukraine in 2014, in the event of a war, planes are not allowed to fly anywhere near it. If they can’t go the direct route, it costs them a heap more. Everybody knows that if the Strait of Hormuz closes for any reason, Europe and half the world are caught in the squirrel grip. Why can these people not think ahead? And if they can’t think 24 hours ahead, can we trust them to think decades ahead on something like global warming? No, we can’t. If so-called christian nationalists think that literally setting the world on fire is a good thing, can we trust them to make proper decisions about firing Tomahawk missiles (at $5million each) at a girls’ school? No, we can’t, they’re not Christians at all, they’re an apocalyptic heresy. If we said to Hegseth and all his mates “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matt.5.9), they would fall over, shrieking with laughter.

We’re in trouble, ladies and gentlemen. The world is being run by fanatics and fockwits who get their rocks off by dominating everybody else for their own advantage. They believe they can do no wrong, that everybody who disagrees with them is satanic and must be destroyed, and that violence is purifying. Remember that these people are not mad, any more than the Nazis or the British imperialists were mad. I could say this is turbo-charged narcisso-fascism but it’s worse than that. It’s truly messianic (see here for a good account of this mind-set; check the photo parody of the Last Supper, that’s Ms White in white channeling God).

Kevin Walmsley always finishes his videos and posts with two words: Be good. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

I was interviewed for a podcast in Switzerland; the interviewer is a physics graduate interested in psychology:

The Nexus

The Nexus Pod | Jock (Niall) McLaren - The Rule of Narcissism | Podcast #15

Dr. McLaren is a retired Australian psychiatrist, critic and author with decades of clinical experience. Trained in medicine and the philosophy of science, Niall takes the exotic approach of applying these psychological insights in geopolitics. He has published several book, including the most fascinating Narcisso-Fascism. My article mentioned in the cl…

Listen now

4 months ago · 1 like · Mark Solar

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Where do we start? After the Trump regime kidnapped the head of state of Venezuela, I said that if he gets away with it, he’ll try something bigger. I was right. He and his mate Netanyahu just murdered the spiritual head of some 250million Shia Muslims.

It’s tempting to say something like “Madness is engulfing the world,” except it’s not madness. There isn’t the slightest hint of insanity in the action of the US-Israel axis in attacking Iran. In clear consciousness, they have planned this for months, fully aware that in launching an aggressive war, they are committing the “supreme international crime,” illegal both in international law and under US law. They know precisely what they’re doing. With great precision, they positioned troops and weapons of fearsome power exactly where they wanted them in order to produce maximum damage to civil and military sites in Iran. Moreover, every member of ther armed forces knows exactly that in engaging in an unprovoked attack, they are committing a major crime.

Once again, the US pretended to engage in negotiations with Iran and then attacked without warning, this time in the holy month of Ramadan after the meals to break the fast when everybody goes to bed early as they have to be up early. Within a few hours, they had blown up a girls’ primary school, killing at least 175 people, mostly children, and injuring many more. Since then and following Israel’s plan in Gaza, they have selectively bombed at least ten hospitals as well as important civil infrastructure, which is itself a war crime. Even as the news of those crimes was being broadcast, Australia’s prime minister was first to issue a statement supporting what are, in law, criminal acts:

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression. For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran directed at least two attacks on Australian soil in 2024. These appalling acts targeting Australia’s Jewish community were intended to create fear, divide our society and challenge our sovereignty. In response, Australia took the unprecedented steps of expelling Iran’s Ambassador, suspending operations at our embassy in Tehran, and listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a state sponsor of terrorism. Our Government has sanctioned more than 200 Iranian-linked individuals, including more than 100 linked to the IRGC.

With international partners, including the United States and the G7, we have called for the Iranian regime to uphold the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Iran’s citizens. These calls have gone unheeded. Instead, the regime has instigated a brutal crackdown on its own people leaving thousands of Iranian civilians dead. A regime that relies on the repression and murder of its own people to retain power is without legitimacy.

It has long been recognised that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to global peace and security. The international community has been clear that the Iranian regime can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. The United Nations Security Council has reimposed sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the International Atomic Energy Agency Board has formally declared Iran in non-compliance with its non-proliferation safeguards obligations.

We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.

This bit of drivel is stuffed full of the most blatant and hypocritical lies imaginable. The oppression suffered by Iranians started in 1953, when the US CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered a coup to overthrow the mildly socialist and secular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. Because he wanted the profits for Iranians, Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry which Britain had been plundering for decades without paying royalties. Enraged, the whities threw him out and installed the protofascist regime of the so-called Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi who was addicted to grandiose pseudo-military uniforms. He allowed the US and Britain to take what they wanted while he ruled with his singularly brutal secret police, Savak. In due course, Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamist revolution and the West declared economic war on Iran. A few years later, they pushed their then good friend, Saddam Hussein, to attack Iran on the promise he could have their coastal oil fields. Iran would have smashed Saddam in a few months but with the most active assistance from the US and UK, including espionage, money and weapons, the war dragged on for eight years.

Throughout that terrible war and since, driven by the US, Western countries have imposed the most severe economic blockade on Iran, devastating the economy and producing unrest among the 90million Iranians. It used to be the case that an economic blockade was casus belli, a formal ground for war but today, the rule is Macht hat Recht: the powerful do what they want and the poor suffer what they must. In 2003, the Ayatollah Khameini declared that nuclear weapons are haram, forbidden under Islamic law, and cancelled Iran’s small nuclear weapons program, leaving only a civil program in place. Constantly prodded by Israel, the US and other NATO countries have insisted that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, that it is a week away from having The Bomb, leading to ever-more restrictive sanctions, and constant sabotage and assassinations by Israel. Eventually, during Obama’s time, the JCPOA was signed, allow intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the IAEA. By all accounts, this treaty was doing its job but, in 2018 in one of his regular anti-Obama tantrums, Trump tore it up. Iran continued to comply with it but that wasn’t good enough so last year, the US and Israel bombed their facilities.

For over seventy years, Iranians have been oppressed by the West. Naturally enough, their government has reacted in much the same way the Australian and British and US and German and other governments have acted over the past few years, by restricting civil rights, building intrusive domestic spying agencies, penalising dissent, etc. And all the time, the Iranian economy has been sinking lower and lower. If the West hadn’t overthrown the Mossadegh government all those years ago, the Iranian economy would now be about twice the size of Italy’s, with an equivalent standard of living. Iran would be a major industrial power, more so even than Germany, with a huge research and development program, far bigger than Britain has ever had. And that’s what it’s all about. The West can’t stand competition. They want to dominate. End of story. In particular, they want to dominate anybody and everybody who is not of white western European ancestry. They will stop at absolutely nothing in their mania to strangle all competition, especially as they have now lost the struggle to dominate China. And, despite their best efforts, Russia is still there, it hasn’t broken up as they confidently forecast, so they turn to Iran.

But let’s continue with Albanese’s slop: “For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force…” Fomenting coups and wars, invading sovereign nations, economic strangulation, that hasn’t been destabilising, has it? No, of course not, that’s just normal neoliberal business practice for dealing with wogs. “…and nuclear programs.” The one that ended in 2003, you mean? The same one the IAEA says doesn’t exist, the one you obliterated in June 2025? This is the old Iraqi WMD lie recycled. There were no WMD in Iraq and there was no nuclear weapons program in Iran. Netanyahu has been predicting for 30 years that Iran is a week away from having nuclear weapons but he lies easier than he breathes. Israel, let’s not forget, has up to 200 nuclear warheads and the bombers to deliver them but is not a member of any international treaties to restrict them. “…brutal acts of violence and intimidation…” Like the 1,800+ acts of terror and hundreds of murders committed by Zionist “settlers” against the Palestinians of the West bank last year, you mean?

“Iran directed at least two attacks on Australian soil in 2024.” The information that led to that conclusion came from Mossad. There is no evidence that Iran gives a shit about Australia. “… intended to create fear, divide our society” even though the overwhelming majority of Australians are opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other places. “…and challenge our sovereignty.” 47 years of economic sanctions and blockade, assassinations, sabotage and bombings is not a challenge to Iran’s sovereignty? “In response, Australia took the unprecedented steps of expelling Iran’s Ambassador…” but it hasn’t uttered so much as a whimper against Israel’s monstrous genocide in Gaza, supplying weapons and allowing US bases in Australia to function as a vital part of the espionage and control of bombers. “Our Government has sanctioned more than 200 Iranian-linked individuals…” It has sanctioned precisely zero Israelis, including those charged with genocide by the ICC, and even allowed one of its main architects to come here a few weeks ago. “…we have called for the Iranian regime to uphold the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Iran’s citizens.” They have said not one word about upholding the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Gaza’s sorely tormented surviving citizens.

“…the regime has instigated a brutal crackdown on its own people.” There is ample evidence from people on site at the time that the recent violence was instigated and carried out by people acting on instructions from the CIA and Mossad. Prior to the violence, at least 10,000 Starlink terminals and automatic weapons were smuggled into Iran and distributed to groups opposed to the government. These were used to coordinate the violence. The Iranian intelligence services worked out how to jam them, and the violence stopped immediately. “A regime that relies on the repression and murder of its own people to retain power is without legitimacy.” A bit like the Saudis killing Jamal Khashoggi, you could say. Like the US ICE killing people on the streets? Like the spreading chain of prisons run by ICE in the US? “Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to global peace and security.” Bullshit. It doesn’t exist because it was stopped in 2003 and was “obliterated” a few months ago. “…the Iranian regime can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.” Well, after all this, they’ll probably be looking at North Korea and wondering how they have survived for so long against such hostility. Something to do with their nuclear weapons, maybe?

“… Iran for failing to comply with the JCPOA..” That treaty ceased to exist when Trump tore it up but Iran largely complied with it. The IAEA report says: “…inspectors have been unable to determine whether Iran’s nuclear programme was ‘exclusively peaceful.’” That was because they no longer had the right to unrestricted access to any and all sites after Trump trashed the JCPOA. The suggestion that Iran had stockpiled 400kg of highly enriched uranium was not based on any evidence that came from within Iran. Mossad, the Israeli spy and sabotage agency, are unrivalled in their ability to spin and spread lies, that’s their stock in trade.

Finally, “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.” He forgot to mention Israel’s nuclear bombs, of course, he is always fastidiously careful not to upset the Zionist lobby, and that Israel had just killed the person who issued the fatwa against Iran developing nuclear weapons. As for threats to international peace and security, since 1945, the US has bombed 29 sovereign countries, including no less than ten since the “president of peace” wormed his way back into the White House not 14 months ago. Iran has not attacked another country for over 300 years.

Lies, lies, lies. His whole statement is a tissue of lies resting on a foundation of hypocrisy that makes my skin crawl. The Prime Minister of Australia is either a shameless liar or a nauseating hypocrite and spineless coward who repeats lies without daring to check their veracity. He is unfit for office. His proper station in life is as branch secretary of the cleaners’ and sanitary workers’ union in a small country town but it also seems these people are competing to see who can be the most disgusting. Tomorrow morning at 6.00am in Adelaide, Australian foreign minister Sen. Penny Wong will host a breakfast for International Women’s Day. I wonder if they’ll hold a minute’s silence for the 165 little girls murdered in their school in Minab on Saturday?

The most appalling part is that all this death and destruction is because Trump is flailing around creating distractions so he doesn’t have to face the Epstein stuff but nobody in the US has the courage to call him out. Not even the generals who know full well they are committing crimes, but nemesis is coming, that much is inevitable. He will lose the mid-term elections and the last 3million files will be released. Assuming he is still compos mentis, he will then go to prison. Netanyahu has a prison cell with his name on it waiting for the day he can’t plead “national security” to avoid his corruption trials but he’s having a great time just now. He has been trying to destroy Iran for, as he says, 40 years (at 6.55). Same in Britain. The egregiously dishonest Starmer, former chief Crown Prosecutor, is a dead man walking mainly because of his supine loyalty to the Zionist lobby.

None of this is madness. This is wickedness simpliciter. We have handed our governments to the Epstein Coalition.

*****

Why is hypocrisy so infuriating? Somebody says to you: “Come back, you mustn’t walk on the grass.” “Oh dear,” you reply, “I’ll have to go the long way around instead.” Somewhat peeved and a little humiliated for not knowing the rules, you set off but before you get to your goal, you see the same person walking across the grass. Why is that so annoying? I see it as a matter of dominance: you allowed that person to dominate you. In the interests of civility and doing the right thing, you gave in, only to see it was by deceit, not by honest competition. That’s humiliating, you know the other person is looking down on you and we don’t like that at all: “I allowed you to dominate me, you think you’re so smart and I don’t forgive that.” We may not spend all our time fighting to be top dog, but we don’t like being fooled into being the poodle. Going up the hierarchy is joyous but going down stings. We remember stings long after we have forgotten the fun bits.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

We’re all familiar with Orwell’s description of the total state in 1984, how it maintained power by controlling what people were told. Winston Smith’s job in the archives meant constantly revising and rewriting history so that people could only know what the Party wanted them to know:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and every street and every building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right … Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

I regard Orwell as the greatest writer of the 20^th Century, right up there with Shakespeare in the pantheon, because he was able to pick the important points and put them in clear and unforgetable prose. It’s just over 76 years since he died: what would he make of the present? I think he would look at today’s headlines from London and say: “Didn’t I tell you?”

Britain on ‘collision course’ with Russia, head of Army warns. General Sir Roly Walker says Putin is on a war footing and it is imperative UK continues to rearm (Telegraph, Feb 24).

Britain almost on WWIII ‘frontline’ says Armed Forces Minister. UK is already ‘battling’ frontlines against Russia as the world looks terrifyingly similar to pre-WWII global war build-up, warns Armed Forces Minister and war veteran (Mirror, Feb 24).

Chief of the General Staff warns UK is on a ‘collision course with Russia’. Four years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Britain’s top soldier has issued one of the starkest warnings yet about the future of European security (London Business News, Feb 24).

Russian invasion of Ukraine shares ‘similarities’ with run-up to Second World War, armed forces minister says. Al Carns, a former special forces colonel in the Royal Marines, said Ukraine is on the frontline of Europe’s defences as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale onslaught enters its fifth year (Sky News Feb 24)..

NATO chief warns of ‘inevitable’ war with Russia as ‘relentless’ troop deployment looms (Daily Express US Feb.24).

That’s pretty scary: according to the experts, war with Russia is “inevitable” so should everybody start digging trenches in their gardens and dust off their gasmasks? That same day, we see a report in the Guardian mocking Russia’s military in Ukraine:

Four years into Ukraine invasion, Russia’s gains are small, while Kyiv remains resilient. With the Russian military performing poorly, Ukraine is clarifying strategy and pushing back with modest success … Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth grim year, has already gone on longer than the entire fight on the eastern front in the second world war. The Soviets marched from the gates of Leningrad to Berlin in a little over 15 months in 1944-45; today the Russian rate of gain in Pokrovsk in Ukraine is 70 metres a day, in Kupiansk, 23 metres … The gains are trivial, given Ukraine’s size, amounting to 1,865 sq miles 4,800km2 during 2025 (about 0.8% of the country) …The diplomatic misdirection demonstrates how poorly Russia’s military is performing.

Two totally contradictory stories. One shrieks “TheRussiansarecomingTheRussians arecoming, quick, get more guns and bombers and nuclear subs…” while the other says (equally unrealistically) “The Russians are totally useless and about to fall apart.” Meantime, over in Godzone, the self-appointed “president of peace” and claimant on the Nobel Peace Prize has amassed a “mighty armada, the biggest and most beautiful armada the world has ever seen” and is making noises like “Looks like we’ll have to invade Iran to stop them getting the bomb” because they’re “a week away from getting the bomb” even though (a) Trump tore up the JCPOA to prevent it in 2018, (b) their (tiny) civil nuclear program was “totally obliterated” in the unprovoked and illegal bombing raids last June, (c) the Ayatollah has repeatedly said nuclear weapons are a crime in Islam and they will never pursue them, and (d) they’ve been a week away from a bomb for nearly 25 years. Everything faded into mist, the lie became truth.

In 1945, Orwell published Notes on Nationalism, an essay exploring what he saw as widespread but very dangerous political drives. Writing just as the war against fascism was ending, he saw common elements in Nazism and Stalinism, in religious extremism and in atheism, pacifism and aggressive nationalism, Zionism and in racism. These elements he called ‘nationalism,’ although he was aware it wasn’t a good term. In particular, he saw the struggle to get to the top, to dominate and crush the opposition as a universal human drive which we have to recognise and deal with if we wish to avoid catastophe:

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Replace his word ‘nationalism’ with ‘Narcisso-Fascism’ and we’re talking the same language. He knew his opinions would be unpopular but that never bothered him much. He wasn’t so much concerned with the recently vanquished European brand of fascism as with what we would now call Little England Fascism, of both right and left wings:

As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort … But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes.

Le fasciste, c’est moi. The drive to dominate is universal but why? As Orwell recognised, political theory can’t answer this question. In order to explain our urge to be No. 1, we have to leave politics and move to a more fundamental level. We now know the drive is genetically hard-wired into us, working at the hormonal level to control our behaviour in ways which are so much part of us that most of the time, we don’t even recognise them. Because being on top feels so much better than being pushed down the ladder, we automatically form ourselves into dominance hierarchies. This training starts very early and never lets up. Kindergarten and school, business, sport, religion, police and military, entertainment and above all, politics, are all about competing to get to the top by all possible means. We may say to our children “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, just play the game,” but we don’t mean it. Our child wins a ribbon at sport and we jump up and down and tell everybody. Our team wins the competition and we dance around cheering and laughing. Our party wins the election and we celebrate for days. Winning is ecstasy, everybody loves a winner and wants to join in. It’s exactly the same process in humans, in baboons, in dogs in the street, elephant seals, lizards, birds, you name it, we’re all hooked on the same cocktail of hormones.

Trouble is, winning may be ecstasy but on the other side of the coin, defeat, is misery. For every cheering winner, there’s a sullen and resentful loser plotting vengeance. Just as we will compete strenuously to beat the other side because winning feels so good, so we will also resist because losing feels so bad. In fact, losing and being oppressed feels so bad that, very often, people will put their lives on the line to resist. It’s called war, and it is at this point that politics has to give way to psychology. Readers will be aware that I believe the economic ideology called “neoliberalism” is utter rubbish as it is based on a false model of human psychology. It’s simply a plan to transfer as much wealth as possible from the 99% to the 1% and, from their point of view, it’s been a staggering success. We see the same flaw in mainstream political theories, e.g. Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism and Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamics. While these describe what goes on between nations, they can’t explain it because they are not built on a theory of psychology.

To explain international aggression, we have to drop from the national or macro level, to the individual or micro level. Why are nations aggressively trying to dominate each other, e.g. the US and Israel launching yet another unprovoked attack on Iran? Because individuals like to be dominant, it’s immensely exciting to be Top Dog. Why don’t the Iranians roll over and say “Come on in, take what you want, we’ll manage with the leftovers”? Same reason as you wouldn’t allow a group of strangers to move into your home and shove you out the back. Mearsheimer says: “International relations are anarchic, therefore nations must struggle to gain local hegemony to safeguard their interests.” Unfortunately, because Mearsheimer and all the other “experts” put so much emphasis on nations trying to exert “hegemony,” they fail to see that international relations are anarchic because nations are trying to dominate each other. The drive to dominate comes first, the chaos and anarchy is secondary. His view licenses the anarchy, he justifies it. Well, maybe he doesn’t personally but people grab his ideas and shout: “Look, the expert says it’s all chaos out there so we’d better arm ourselves and get in first.”

Just to complete the story, Turchin says that warfare has turned humans into cooperators. His book Ultra Society from 2015 is subtitled: How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on earth [1]. Really? We’re cooperating on preventing global warming? Cooperating on restricting arms sales to civil wars? Cooperating on preventing sexual trafficking of women and children? Eliminating the vast drug industry? What crap. We don’t cooperate at all, we just form bigger and more powerful dominance hierarchies and start attacking (I’ve just submitted a paper to Turchin’s journal pointing out the errors in his approach but expect it won’t get far).

All of this counts. In Britain, the government is trying to scare people to stop spending money on their failing social services in order to buy hugely expensive weapons that will never be used but will inevitably provoke an equal and opposite response from this week’s enemy. Similarly, Trump and his busload of clowns are talking themselves into yet another catastrophic war; and Israel announces that it intends to take almost the entire Middle East for itself. Oh, you didn’t see that? Yes, in a carefully stage-managed “slip,” the US ambassador to Israel, the Christian nationalist (racist) and ultraZionist (fascist), Mike Huckabee, gave notice that Israel is dead set on implementing its plan for “Greater Israel,” i.e. to steal any land where, according to their mythology, a Jewish foot may once have trod. This includes most of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, all of Kuwait and Jordan, one third of Saudi Arabia and over half of Egypt. The original Zionist plan for Palestine, from the 1890s, was to force at least half the indigenous population out and keep the rest as agricultural and industrial labourers. As recently as 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosel (1920-2013), former chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party said:

Goyim (gentiles) were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world, only to serve the People of Israel … Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.

Great life if you can get it but this time, their plans are a bit bigger. The population of those countries is somewhere about 250million in all; they are supposed to sit passively by while a gang of 7million Europeans takes their prime agricultural land, their oil fields and industries and many of their ancient cities and … and what? The plan, it seems, is to bulldoze all the Islamic monuments and build some sort of theocratic state according to classic Judaism, there to await their messiah. In some branches of ultra-extremist Judaism, when the Messiah arrives, Jews will rule the world for a while, then they will go to heaven and the rest of us will burn in hell for eternity. That’s their plan.

You have to understand that, even though he is a total idiot and therefore very dangerous (Idiot: a person who, coming across evidence that contradicts his beliefs, discards the evidence and keeps his beliefs), Huckabee didn’t make this up. This plan has been around a long time, I probably first heard of it in 1982, in the aftermath of the Israeli-engineered slaughters in the Palestinian refugee camps in Shatila and Sabra. Huckabee is as one with both the Zionist lobby in the US and with his Israeli hosts, and the more extreme they are, the more he likes them. He did not speak out of turn, he simply repeated what he has been hearing for years, possibly decades.

Under the influence of their fanatical religious mania, the extremists in Israel think they can forcibly displace perhaps 150million people and all will be well. The “Arabs” will simply take their donkeys and camels and kids and off they’ll go, because, as the current Israeli minister for national security, one Itamar Ben Gvir, says, “Jews are above the law.” This truly despicable human being is of much the same character as Reinhard Heydrich and must not be dismissed as the buffoon he usually seems to be. He has at least 8 convictions for terrorist activities and is closely allied with Kahane Chai, the only declared Jewish terrorist group in the US. However, he is immensely powerful in Israel and has millions of fanatical followers in Israel and in the diaspora. He meets regularly with Huckabee, who is very close to Trump (not a friend, Trump doesn’t do friends).

If the ultraZionists think the other 850million Muslims in the world, in North Africa, Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in Iran, the Gulf countries, Indonesia, etc. will sit quietly by while this plan is enacted, they are completely off their heads. They should have listened to their first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who said:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That’s natural: we’ve taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? [2, p99]

Ben Gurion loathed Palestinians: “Arabs are barbarians ... (they) only understand force.” Nahum Goldmann, one of the prime architects of the modern Israeli state, said of him:

(He was) a very able and cunning diplomat and politician, really one of the best I have ever come across. A promise from him was quite worthless. He did not hesitate to promise one thing and then do the opposite. He was absolutely unscrupulous… he never had his fill of power… he only wanted to dominate [2, p94].

He only wanted to dominate. Precisely. That is the central thesis of Narcisso-Fascism: we love to dominate because it feels so damned good. Sure, we dress it up in high-sounding words, we say God is leading us or the light of democracy or history, or Our race deserves to lead, or We are the exceptional nation, but that’s only window-dressing to make the old ladies at home feel good while their sons and grandsons are being blown to bits on some far distant shore, because the reality of domination is clear. As Orwell said: Ich bin der Faschist. I am the fascist. The fascist is in me. In Hebrew, אני הפשיסט, ani hafshist.

The idea of Greater Israel has been bouncing around in Zionist circles for probably a hundred years but Huckabee has been used to float it in public to see what sort of response it gets. If it provokes fury, they’ll shelve it for perhaps another hundred years but if nobody says much, they’ll press ahead with it. The first step will be to reduce Iran to rubble before moving on to the major Sunni powers, Egypt and Turkey. So far, only the Muslim world has reacted badly, which is progress because they’ve long been enablers of the Zionist project (e.g. encouraging the US to attack Iran, selling oil to Israel, sabotaging resistance groups, financing ISIS, etc). As a group, the West has reacted to this truly insane idea much as they reacted to Hitler’s plan [3, Chap. 14, esp. pp396-98], first published in Mein Kampf in 1925, to invade the USSR and reduce the Slavic populations to helotry: “Ho hum,” they yawned, “there’s too many of them anyway. Do be darling and pass me another cucumber sandwich.” But it won’t work. The Zionists may defeat the Palestinians and Arab armies, they may succeed in driving huge numbers of people off their traditional lands and so on but they’re only setting up trouble for themselves.

It’s usually said that women are more affected by hormonal swings than men but there’s no truth in that. The hormonal drive to dominate is much stronger in males than females; conversely, males are much more affected by defeat than females. If they’re beaten at tennis or cricket, they drop their balls and slink off. But where women don’t usually fight so insanely to get themselves to the top, they have another impetus to resist oppression, called children. Women may not be so obsessed with their football team winning (“Oh for heaven’s sake, calm down, it’s only a game.” “Are you mad, woman? This is the bloody grand final and we’re down”) but they never get over oppression. They’re not so much worried about being oppressed themselves, they tend to find ways of coping but on one point they are implacable: they want their children to reach their full potential. Quietly and without a fuss they will fight any system that prevents that. If you startle a lone female bear, she’ll run off but if you threaten her cubs, look out.

In Gaza today, mothers know that just a few kilometres to the north, happy healthy children wake after a good night’s sleep, have a solid breakfast, dress in clean clothes and walk safely to a free school with sports fields, free lunches, free health care and so on. Then they look at their own children sitting under a torn and flapping tent, their bare feet caked in mud contaminated with raw sewage, whimpering miserably because they had no sleep due to gunfire and bombs dropping nearby, cold and hungry, bitten by insects and weakened by worms, with no schooling for years and no schools left standing, no health care, knowing that even searching for a few sticks for a fire to cook some porridge will attract the snipers, and they will not forget. Maybe they would forgive losing their home, their own health and their future, even their parents and husbands but they will not forgive somebody doing it to their children. Why should they?

So the women of the Muslim world, and the women of the true Christian world (not the dupes in the heresies), and Hindu and Buddhist and everything else, have to come together and speak as one: This madness has to stop. The world can no longer be held to ransom by a few religious maniacs and their vile, corrupt, child-abusing friends in the West who are obsessed with the hormonal rush that comes from crushing people underfoot. Today, there is no place for supremacism. The entire political process in the West has to be turned around but change will not come from the people who think only in terms of competing and fighting to get to the top at any cost. Change will not come from the Trumps and Starmers and Albaneses and Sisis and Putins and Netanyahus and the royals and bankers and industrialists and all the rest of the Epstein class. They’ve been steeped in the idea of competition since infancy, they can’t think in non-competitive terms so they’re a lost cause. As for all the men who feel guilty that they’re not higher up the ladder, there’s hope still but real change will be generational. It will start early in life by teaching children that they can be happy and productive without being on top. The program to flatten dominance hierarchies starts early: get rid of all the competitions in schools, stop pushing children into sport and music competitions, just let them learn to play the game or the piano for enjoyment, without having to win.

Today’s evil and corrupt ruling class, the Trumps and Mandelsons and Epsteins and so many others, have to be shoved aside and replaced by people who believe that humans can live peaceably and profitably together without somebody standing over them with a gun. Be warned: they won’t go voluntarily. Yes, it will require changes in the way we run our lives but if we don’t start this process very soon, we’re finished. If Israel thinks it can push 200million people into the desert so it can fulfill its grandiose mythological fantasies, it needs to be shown in the clearest of terms that it can’t. There is no room in the world today for supremacism, including Zionist supremacism. And if that’s antisemitic, I wear the badge with pride.

References:

1. Turchin, P. 2025. Ultrasociety. How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators o earth. Beresta Books.

2. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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At the recent Munich Security Conference, the Australian deputy prime minister and minister for defence, Richard Marles, stood in front of the large audience of international bigwigs and announced that the current military expansion in China is the biggest seen in the world since World War II. In a commentary, Brisbane Prof. Warwick Powell provided detailed figures showing that everything Marles said is completely wrong. Since 1945, the US has been engaged in a vast military build-up that, at times, exceeded the total military outlays of the rest of the world combined. Now was Marles lying, or is he a fool? Answer: Probably not, and Yes. I would say he was engaged, as he usually is, not in lying but in what the late philosopher, Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023) of Princeton called “bullshitting” [1].

Frankfurt was an epistemologist, he studied what we can know, how we can know it, how to tell truth from falsity and other vital questions. The liar, he said, knows exactly what he is doing (and yes, there are female liars but we’ll stick to his terms). The liar knows the truth, he knows that his audience doesn’t know the truth but he doesn’t want them to know it so he feeds them some false information and does what he can to make sure they never learn the truth:

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship...

I like that, it points to the precision required to be an effective liar. Bernard Madoff was an effective liar until the GFC overtook his lies. Trump is an ineffective liar but he meets criteria for Frankfurt’s other category, Bullshit. As Frankfurt said, not everybody who utters falseties is lying. A lot of people, especially politicians, are trying to influence the audience emotionally, so they simply fill the air with words without caring whether they’re true or false. Bullshit is “...more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.” Now in giving his speech, Marles had clearly not looked at any figures on military expenditure because he would have known that even today, the US is by far the biggest spender, eclipsing China, Russia and a few others combined. But Marles wasn’t interested in figures. His only concern was to sway the audience to believe that China is a real and present danger and we need to spend heaps on eye-wateringly expensive weapons so we can repel the latest version of Australia’s perennial fear, the “Yellow Peril.” Except now they’re Reds as well, which probably makes them orange.

Marles didn’t look at any figures because he doesn’t want them: his mind is made up and figures just get in the way. So he is a foolish bullshitter and, in my view, ipso facto unfit for government but that’s up to his electorate. Anyway, if we kicked out all the fools and bullshitters, there’d be very few people left in government. Have a look at Prof Powell’s article, it’s very good but in respect of American militarism, it raises a critically important question which he doesn’t address: WHY? Why does the US spend so much more on weapons than anybody else? What do they think it will get them, what’s their payoff? Right now, the US is positioning itself to attack Iran. Jeremy Scahill at DropSite News released a truly frightening article: “‘This is Not a Dress Rehearsal’: U.S. Engaged in Massive Military Buildup as Threat To Bomb Iran Grows” (scroll down below the large picture of ships at sea). Aggressive war is deemed the supreme international crime yet here we have the “president of peace” directing the world’s policeman to an unprovoked attack on a foreign country. WHY? WTF do these nuclear clowns think they’re doing? Well we know what they’re doing, same as they did in Venezuela and Iraq and Syria and Libya and so on: destroying the country so they can take its oil and sell the victims lots of expensive stuff and keep their weapons industry in business. Except Iran is perfectly happy to sell its oil at the going price, meaning about 2% of the cost of an invasion, so what’s their game?

The game is the same as Powell’s figures outlined: total world domination for no other reason than it feels so good being the colossus astride the world, laughing at every other country quaking in fear and lining up to kiss the American ass (it means kiss their arse, not their donkey). That is why the US is running its infrastructure into the ground while it maintains about twenty times as many foreign military bases as the rest of the world put together. It suits the power elite to terrorise small countries (Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Denmark and so many others) and push everybody else around even when it is clearly working against American interests, just because domination feels good. Power is its own reward. The question is: Should the world be run by what is essentially a national neurosis taking the form of a mafia standover racket? Obviously it shouldn’t, it should be run according to a set of mutually agreed rules but the one half-hearted attempt to do that after 1945 failed when the “rules-based international order” got in the way of the world’s hegemon. We are now careering* along with essentially no rules in place, where “The rich and powerful do what they will and the poor suffer what they must.”

Was it ever different? No, not really but there was a pretence where a ceasefire meant the stopping the shooting and not just fitting a silencer and keep firing. Now, Trump says out loud what the others did quietly, behind the scenes. Bush and Blair said it was essential to invade Iraq to destroy their “weapons of mass destruction” which could reach London in 45 minutes. There were no WMD and they knew it (in the years since as some sort of grand panjandrum of the Levant, Tony Blair has amassed a fortune of between £60-75million. Pounds. And that’s only what people can track, it doesn’t include what he has hidden offshore). Trump doesn’t bother with that, he just says “We want Greenland so we’ll either get it the easy way or the hard way but we’re going to have it.” Needless to say, this blasé attitude is causing waves of panic around the world.

As the Munich Conference showed (the latest one, as well as 1938), Europe is in disarray. At home, their industry is collapsing after the US blew up the Nordstream II pipeline, cutting off the cheap and reliable Russian natural gas that had powered their factories, forcing them to buy American gas at twice the price. To their north, Trump is threatening to invade Greenland, which is part of a European country. Out east, the US pushed Europe into war over Ukraine and is now threatening to walk away, leaving the European damsel alone in the house with an enraged Russian bear. Meantime, down on the southern flank, Israel is conducting its usual mayhem while refugees fleeing the chaos stream across the seas. So far, there’s no threat from the Azores to Europe’s west but it could come, it could come. Britain’s slow post-imperial collapse is gathering speed as they neglect social services in order to build new nuclear submarines to counter the “Russian threat.” France is France while the rest of the place is slowly congealing into a state of panicky paralytic inertia. Poor things, maybe the Indians will form a West Europe Company and take over, forcing Europeans to grow drugs to sell to the US in a reversal of Britain’s role in Asia (growing drugs in India to sell to China). Or maybe Europe could do something truly radical, like declare peace and end the stalemate.

Since birth, we’ve been raised on a diet of “Us Goodies vs Them Baddies,” but the core thesis of Narcisso-Fascism is that this is a curtain of bullshit held aloft by a scaffold of lies. The proper way to see human affairs is as a ceaseless ferment of one individual/ group/ nation or alliance trying to dominate another, thereby producing permanent instability with frequent dips into anarchy. As long as there have been humans, there has been a frenzy of humans trying to dominate and oppress other humans. This isn’t recent, it’s as old as Homo sapiens. Ötzi, the Neolithic man found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps from 5,300 years ago had an arrow head buried in his back. There is ample archaeological evidence going much further back to say that humans have always fought each other. Marx got it wrong: humans don’t fight to control resources so they can have a higher standard of living, they are happy to impoverish themselves by fighting just so they can dominate other humans. That’s all we need to know.

The foundational lie beneath the endless and hugely expensive politico-military drama of the past 80 years is that we, the noble and far-sighted, generous and caring West, stand firm in the face of the barbaric Red and Yellow hordes who, if we didn’t hold them back, would erupt from the Eurasian land mass and swarm over the civilised world, raping, murdering and pillaging all the way because barbaric Eurasian hordes. Decade after decade, we’ve had this view pumped at us without a moment’s break, that without the Pax Americana, we would all be in the gulag. That’s why the US has nearly 850 overseas military bases, to “contain” the communist/Russian/Chinese aggression and threat … but there isn’t a word of truth in it. The only reason the “baddies” are heavily armed is because they feel threatened. Right now, Iran is under direct threat of a massive bombing campaign intended to destroy their infrastructure and render this hot, dry country of 85million people ungovernable, if not uninhabitable. Questions on how Europe would cope with 40million destitute refugees have been left to another day.

Why is this happening? Why is nobody freaking out about it? We’re talking of war, people getting killed for nothing. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again but expecting a different result. Invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Syria and a dozen others have been catastrophes so why will this be different? Or is the US locked in some sort of collective insanity? We can answer that. This time will be different only in the sense that an invasion of Iran will be ten times worse than all the previous invasions put together. And yes, the US is indeed locked in some form of insanity, an unquestioned urge to dominate all other people at any cost. China is NOT a threat to Australia, we do not need nuclear submarines to defend ourselves against them as they are our biggest trading partner. The moment there is any sort of shooting with China, this country will be bankrupted and ruined, immediately, totally and irremediably.

Does Deputy Dog Richard Marles know this? No, I don’t think he does. He’s too stupid, he believes whatever bullshit the spy agencies put on his desk, the stuff that they collect from the Washington fax each morning and hand to him unread. The real cause is that the US is in high alarm that China is about to overtake them, so they’re forcing everybody to enlist in their “China Containment Policy” bullshit. And the world drifts mindlessly toward catastrophic war, as though nobody is at the controls. Well, they’re not. Nobody with any brains, that is. They’re locked in a self-reinforcing group think bubble where nobody asks: “Hey, do we actually need to dominate everybody? Can we be happy without being king dick? The Kiwis are happy without being Number One, so why can’t we?” That’s not going to happen, nobody is going to be the little boy who says the emperor is wearing no clothes. Nobody in the Washington Bubble, that is, so it has to come from elsewhere. What about Europe, home to democracy and civilised tea parties and all that? Why can’t the Europeans get together and announce:

Rightio, everybody, party’s over. Pick up your toys and go home, close your bases and stop threatening everybody while we sort out how to live in peace. We’ll bring Russia into the EU, as they wanted decades ago and Washington said No. You can leave Iran alone, they’re our neighbours so we’ll sort out any problems, you outsiders who don’t know history are only screwing things up. Stop arming Israel, put any war criminals behind bars and let the Middle East develop as it will.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. We are not given any evidence that China is a threat, we are only told that it is a mortal danger to us and we must not question this or we’re China dupes. We are not told why we must support Israel come what may, only that if we don’t, we are “antisemitic” and will lose our jobs, if not be sent to jail. We are not told how Russia is a threat to Europe, only that it is and must be resisted at all costs, up to and including nuclear war. Nobody has explained what Mr Putin would do with Europe if he overran it. In Ukraine, fighting a ramshackle and totally corrupt country that is being propped up by outsiders, Russia is advancing at about seventy metres a day, at huge cost in men and material. At this rate, it would take them a thousand years to reach the Atlantic, and 500 million Europeans are supposed to be scared of them? And what would Putin do if he woke up and found he was suddenly in charge of 60 million Italians? You can’t do that to him, he’s not a young man, the bloody Italians can’t even govern themselves let alone follow orders from Moscow. All this talk of “threats” is cloud cuckoo land, the self-deluded fever dreams of fanatics, religious cranks and racist crackpots who think they can’t have a life as Number Two in anything.

Today, Europe is in serious danger of economic and political collapse just because it has allowed itself to be pushed into constant confrontation with Russia. And China. And the Muslim world, and everybody else. The simple fact is that if Europe made peace with Russia and built a super-economy extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok by way of the Stans, even including Pyongyang, something like 900 million people would instantly be immeasurably better off. Combining European brains with Russian talent and resources would be unbeatable … and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it’s all about. That idea just is the stuff of American nightmares. For the power elite in the US, facing a Eurasian superpower would be like staring down into the sulphorous pits of hell. For a hundred years, Europe has been kept at daggers drawn with Russia, to prevent them forming a pan-European economy and dislodging the US from its perch. Can there be a Eurasian Union? Yes, it’s very easy. The Europeans have to stand in public and say:

We are not interested in fighting or confrontation. We want to live in peace. There are urgent problems we all need to deal with but we cannot do it while we are fighting each other. For all the wrongs we have done you, we apologise. We will never threaten you again and to prove it, we will start the process of disarmament. For the first time in your history, you do not have to look over your shoulder to the west. We’re on your side.

I can even tell them where to give this speech: right here, at the foot of this memorial in Volgograd, commemorating the 30million Soviet citizens who died in the 20^th Century’s fifth invasion of Russia, including four by the West. I think the nation of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy would accept that; all they want is to be treated with respect and not forced into a position of subjugation. Because as much as the Americans and their toadies in the West are turned on by the thought of dominating the Slavic people, the Slavs (their very name means ‘slaves’) are absolutely determined not to be forced to kiss the American arse. They will fight every attempt to make them, and I’m on their side.

Right now, February 19^th, with two nuclear-armed aircraft carriers and a thousand planes cruising just outside Iranian waters, the world is teetering on the brink. All because of one dementing old man and 10,000 psychopathic sycophants who think they can get ahead by agreeing with him.

War is not a human necessity. Conflict is a political choice. If we don’t do better, we don’t have a future.

Reference:

1. Frankfurt H (1986). On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 6 (2): 81–100. (Fall 1986). https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAOB

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.