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.

****

Just five years ago, the US abruptly left the scene of its crime of aggressive war in Afghanistan, the longest in its history but with the usual outcome, defeat. Americans attacked this small, backward, landlocked and poverty-stricken country to punish its rulers for harbouring the remnant al Qaeda mob who had “obliterated” New York’s World Trade Centre in September 2001. In fact, the Taliban had offered to find and hand over bin Laden and crew, whom they didn’t like, but their kind offer was rejected in favour of invasion. So, 20 years, $2trillion and 175,000 deaths after invading to remove the Taliban, the US left and the Taliban took over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It had nothing to do with finding bin Laden, it was all about getting rid of a government that wouldn’t do as it was told.

An editorial in this week’s The Economist (13.08.2026, paywall) bemoans the “vile” government in Afghanistan, pointing out that they mistreat and repress women, gays and anybody else they don’t like. As a result, but mainly because they defeated the US and its indescribably corrupt puppet “democratic” government, the forlorn country and its ragtag government are under punitive “sanctions” by the usual Western offenders. Afghanistan’s $4.2billion of foreign exchange remains frozen in a Swiss bank, most of its ministers can’t travel outside a few countries, foreign banks and investors can’t deal with them and so on but that hardly bothers the Talib rulers. They believe they don’t need Western approval to run their show, they don’t want swarms of corrupt mining companies stealing their assets and, unlike their predecessors, they have no intention of living it up in the fleshpots of Monaco or Las Vegas. Even by the very high bar of extremist Islamists, the current head of the Taliban is considered humourless, so stalemate. After agreeing that Afghanis are generally better off now than during the past 40 years of war, The Economist suggests a drastic move: “The Taliban are vile. Five years after America’s exit, the Afghan regime is not going anywhere ... So it is time for America and other democracies to hold their collective noses and talk to the Taliban.” That assumes the Taliban would want to talk to the people who devastated their country but there you are.

This region has an ancient and complex history. Modern Afghanistan began in 1919 when one of the local rulers declared an independent state, followed in 1926 when he proclaimed himself king. They muddled along until 1973 when the king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, was overthrown in a coup and a secular, leftist government took over. They forced a rapid modernisation including education for girls, land reform and so on, provoking violent opposition in the rural areas which soon became guerilla warfare, actively funded and supported by the American CIA. Their services included flying in a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden to organise the extreme right wing religious mujahideen who refused to speak to infidels. OBL soon got them fighting the secular government instead of each other. The government asked the USSR to intervene, which became a major military expedition, leading to war, war and more war.

From the beginning, the American goal was to bog the USSR in an unwinnable war, their “Vietnam” as it was called at the time. This duly happened, the USSR teetered on bankruptcy so they withdrew then fell apart. Financed by sales of drugs which were flown to market by the CIA (see Whitney Webb for details, [1]), the mujahideen launched a vicious civil war against the urban liberal/leftist/Marxists in Kabul who responded in kind. While all this was going on, millions of Afghanis fled across the nearest border for safety until in 1996, a group of seminary students known as Taliban took over, mainly because they were organised and disciplined. A few years later, and unbeknown to the Taliban, Mr bin Laden achieved his dream of attacking The Great Satan, which launched yet another invasion that duly bogged them in an unwinnable war until they too teetered on bankruptcy and withdrew, allowing the Taliban to move back in.

Surely there’s a moral in this? Well, if there is, you won’t get it from reading The Economist. As far as they’re concerned, the West can do no wrong and the rest are never right. Similarly, the experts in international relations in the “offensive realism” school will tell you that the US was right to invade Afghanistan. In their view, international relations are anarchic and chaotic so, to ensure stability, the US had to exert dominance over the wild and unruly Pushtuns (as though nobody else had tried and failed). Except Afghanistan is about as remote from the US as it comes. In 1973, the US did no trade with that tiny, broke country, sold them no weapons or Big Macs, wasn’t trying to convert them from their traditional ways, nothing, so why did it matter to them when a left wing government took over? This is where offensive realism fails. The US did not get involved in that distant country to guarantee stability in Kansas, its goal was to prevent the USSR dominating a chaotic country on its most unstable border. If, the US reasoned, the fanatical mujahideen managed to export their brand of ultra-extremist religion to the Muslim regions in the USSR, so much the better.

It’s all about domination, this is all it’s ever about. The rest is propaganda. In a recent report, Mr Rubio, for example, has recently declared Cuba, a country of 5million impoverished people, to be an “existential threat” to the US, so the larger country has decided to strangle Cuba and force a change of government. Cuba is broke because of nearly 70 years of hostility, including economic and political “sanctions” applied to that tiny country but still the US won’t give up, per the report:

Cuba is the capital of 21^st Century communism, an anti-American espionage empire exporting revolution, committed to overthrowing the US by indoctrinating our youth and fomenting a racial revolution blah blah.

If Rubio believes Cuba can threaten the very existence of the US, he is overtly delusional. In fact, he doesn’t believe a word of it. He knows exactly what goes on there, he is simply lying. Was Iran ever a sufficient threat to the US to justify a preemptive attack? In no way. Was Venezuela ever a sufficient threat to the US to justify kidnapping its president? In no way. Libya? Well, yes, they were a threat in that Muammar Gaddafi had announced a plan to convert their oil sales to a gold-backed currency unit and had invited other oil producers to join, which interested them enough to talk to him. This threatened the petrodollar, which threatened the US bond market, which threatened US supremacy, so Mrs Gaddafi’s little boy had to learn the hard way that everything is connected. And at the core of it is the urge to dominate.

Domination is the name of the greatest human game of all. It is the most powerful game, the game the entire world can play, the most pervasive and persistent because it never wears off, and is the cause of practically all the trouble throughout our woeful history. Every fight is one person or one side trying to dominate the other. Each fight leads to a gleeful winner and a resentful loser, and sets up the next round because the urge to dominate is hard-wired into every one of us; if it loses a battle, it simply slinks back into its cave to glower for a while then, when things look peaceful, it sneaks out again and starts the same old same old: “Don’t let them get away with it, they cheated, you deserve more, they don’t deserve it, don’t let them think they can beat you, they don’t know how to use it, they’re inferior, they’re subhuman, let’s get ‘em!” We saw an example of this last week. Itamar ben Gvir, the Israeli minister for internal security, meaning police, prisons and others, called for the Israeli military to kill 30 to 40 Palestinians every day:

There are people there (Gaza) who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people. I’m doing them a favor by calling them people.

“Not even people.” He wasn’t exaggerating, this is what he believes, as do this zionist lawyer and Netanyuha’s personal rabbi. Ben Gvir believes: “We’re superior, you’re inferior, so we can do what we like but if you resist, we will destroy you.” This is precisely the attitude that is pushing the world to cataclysm. For example, the full production chain required to drop a single 2000lb bomb generates anything up to 100 tons of CO₂ per bomb, plus a heap of other toxic gases and chemicals. Factoring in the greenhouse gases required to build and run the radars, air bases, transport and all the rest is incalculable. Militarism is destroying the planet, and militarism is driven by the entirely optional urge to dominate. It is not a drive like breathing or finding food, it is something we think about and choose, and we are choosing the wrong path. However, Mr Rubio doesn’t stand in front of the microphones and cameras and say this. He twists the narrative so it’s everybody else’s fault, as in the opening sentences of his report:

For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.

There is not a word of truth in any of this, it is pure paranoid fantasy, a complete inversion of the historical record which shows: For nearly seven decades, the American regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against Cuba. The truth is that Rubio is power-hungry and will do or say anything to get votes. He knows perfectly well that Cuba is on its knees and he is determined to kick them as hard and often as he can because this plays well with the Cuban “refugee” community in Florida, which owns him. His parents left Cuba two years before the revolution in 1959. He was born in Florida in 1971, 14 years after they left, and has never been there.

After the revolution, practically the entire wealthy class took their money and left but even after 70 years, they still hate. These people live in a bubble vomiting poison against the poor students and peasants who overthrew the incompetent and corrupt Batista government all those years ago. Rubio got into the Senate on their vote so he tells them whatever they want to hear. There’s nothing so bad that they won’t believe, so he feeds it to them on the State Department letterhead. And it’s all built on hatred, the unquenchable hatred that comes from being turfed out of a high position in the dominance hierarchy and being forced to mix with the poor trash. They were rich and powerful in Cuba but, on landing in Miami, they soon found nobody wanted to know them. They had lost all their status, the ultimate humiliation.

The Cuban revolution, like all revolutions, didn’t happen because some nasty people woke one morning and decided to start chopping heads off. It had causes, all of which centred on poverty for the masses caused by the crime and corruption of the wealthy. Cuba was where the American mafia and all the other gangs parked their black money. Castro stopped the party by nationalising their casinos and hotels, so they will hate him and his party until rigor mortis sets in. Don’t worry that his new government immediately took steps to improve the standard of living for the average Cuban. If they’d been allowed to work on this and not divert so much of their resources to defend themselves (e.g. the opera bouffe Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961), Cuba would now have a standard of living equal to Spain. But the idea that 90 miles off the Florida coast lies a country that refuses to bend the knee drives the American power elite to the brink of insanity.

Is any of this rational? No, not at all, it is entirely biological, the US government functioning at the level of a pack of curs in the street snapping and snarling at each other to see who’s top dog. Let’s say they overthrow the Cuban government, which is entirely possible. How will that benefit the citizens of Great Bend, Kansas? It won’t, they won’t notice but their school wasn’t repaired this year because the money was spent on missiles to bomb Iran and a dozen other places. How will regime change benefit the citizens of Camaguey, Cuba? It won’t. On the track record of American “regime change” operations, life will suddenly get very much worse for most of them.

So where does all this leave us? In a bad place, that’s for sure, and rapidly getting worse because it is all evidence that the empire is crumbling. It has just lost a major war, as distinct from all the minor wars such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and so on, and is on the back foot in Ukraine. Financially, it is in serious trouble as it has had to bail out Japan due to the pressure on the yen caused by the blockade in Strait of Hormuz caused by the war it started with a country that wasn’t threatening it but had promised that if attacked, it would close the Strait ... You get the drift. Everything is connected.

The War Party in the US, meaning the entire political, financial, industrial, military, academic, religious and wealth establishments, have always believed they could do what they liked and there would be no repercussions. True, in the past, there weren’t any repercussions in the US, although there were plenty everywhere else. Now, they’re coming home. Lake Powell, the water supply for some 40million people in the hottest part of the country, is nearly empty as the snowpack on the Rockies is failing due to global warming. Farms are going bankrupt at record rates. Fertilisers aren’t available, so the crops will be down by half. Another ebola outbreak in Africa just when the US has decided it needs to divert its aid money to a $1.5trillion budget for weapons; on and on. All because small groups of people in most countries believe they are superior and should be dominant while the rest of the world should kneel down and accept subjugation (that man is seriously paranoid but very powerful).

The world is chaotic and anarchic just because humans want to dominate each other. It isn’t some metaphysical force driving us to the edge of the abyss, it is the result of a few percent of the population getting together to take control of the political process and push in a direction that excites them. They have no idea, they can’t see beyond the ends of their noses, they are simply greedy, stupid and evil people who get a kick out of crushing other people. If we don’t take control back, things will get worse and worse until we do. But by then it may be too late.

Reference:

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.

****

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 a recent article, The Economist asked: “Can French nukes protect Europe if Donald Trump walks away?” (paywall). Beside Trump’s petulance, they raise two themes: Gallic haughtiness and swagger, and the glowering threat of Putin’s Russia. On the one hand, being English, the authors can’t pass the chance of mocking their age-old frenemies, the Frogs, including snide shots at de Gaulle’s “cavalry boots to his aquiline nose.” On the other, they sit wetting themselves over the “nightmare scenario haunt(ing) Europe,” a Russian attack during one of Trump’s hissy fits. If Putin’s orc armies suddenly exploded westward while Trump wasn’t talking to anybody, would the relatively small French nuclear arsenal be enough to protect Europe? France has 300 air-and submarine-launched nuclear weapons, compared with Russia’s 1,700 actively deployed (i.e. ready to fire) bombs. That is, France can “credibly threaten massive retaliation” even after a surprise attack: “But should a nuclear war begin, powers the size of France (or Britain), know that there is a good chance they will not survive.” But they’re planning for it, anyway.

This article has to be seen in two contexts, reality and fantasy. Reality is that Europe’s economy is running on empty. Since Biden made good on his promise to blow up the Nordstream II pipeline bringing cheap Russian gas to power Germany’s factories, hundreds of thousands of high quality industrial jobs have been lost as manufacturing rapidly decamps to China, Vietnam and other places. Biden and the rest of his America-First crew were warned that shutting off the supply of Russian gas would devastate the European economy but he shrugged it off: “That’s a price we’re prepared to pay,” he replied sternly. Now it’s happening, just as Trump is in one of “off again” moods about NATO, so the Europeans are panicking: What if the Russians come, who will defend us? OMG we’ll have to do it ourselves. Quick, let’s spend a heap of money to built up our armies over the next ten years. Two trillion euros is the figure being tossed around, which is a very great deal of money for a continent with a floundering economy that can’t get the oil it needs from the Gulf or the gas it needs from its historical enemy to the east. That’s reality and, as Freud said, you can’t fight reality.

The fantasy is that Europe is in danger. The notion that 145million Russians who have 17.6million sqkm of territory and 37,500km of coast to defend are all sitting on their western border, crossbows at the ready, waiting for the word to invade Europe’s 550millions in their pokey little countries, is pure paranoid fantasy. Actually, that’s not quite true. Some of it is a genuine racist hatred and fear of Russians but a large part of it is artfully concocted propaganda designed to funnel squillions to weapons manufacturers and high tech spying and so on. This mixed delusion and deceit washes around with another fanciful theme, that the Russian economy is on its knees and Mr Putin is about to get the bullet. In fact, their economy is doing reasonably well, undergoing a crash conversion away from Europe to Asia, and Putin is secure, with about 50% net approval (Trump’s is about -33% and dropping).

Unlike the US president and the people around him, the Russian president and his advisors are not complete fools. They know that if Europe is about to spend a fortune to bring its collective military to the point where they could defend themselves, then the time to attack is now. You don’t wait until the other side calls out “We’re ready, you can attack now.” But it’s not going to happen. In order to attack somebody, you need three things. You need the means to do it, the track record, and the motive. Russia does not have the means to attack Western Europe. The fighting in Ukraine has now gone on longer than the Great Patriotic War, i.e. World War II, during which time the Red Army pounded 1,800km from Moscow to Berlin on a front about 3,000km long. In 4.5yrs in Ukraine, Russian troops have penetrated about 50km deep, sometimes advancing only a fraction of 1sqkm in a month, while taking heavy casualties due to drones. They simply do not have the means to attack Europe.

Do they have the track record of unprovoked invasions? Some people would say they do, pointing to Ukraine, but that ignores their history. Last century, Russia/USSR was invaded five times in under 40 years producing death and devastation on an unimaginable scale. After beating off the last attack in 1945, they announced: “Nobody will ever threaten us again.” And they meant it. Unfortunately, the US has not stopped threatening them since that day. The current war was to prevent Ukraine joining NATO because that would mean American nuclear weapons stationed directly on their border, ready to launch in moments. That had long warned that this would be “the brightest of red lines” which must not be crossed. Rightly or wrongly, they believed this was about to happen so they invaded to prevent it. This apart, they have largely kept to themselves. The ordinary Russian has no interest in invading other countries, only an interest in making sure others don’t invade them. They’ve been there, done that and didn’t like it.

Last question: Do they have the motive to attack Europe? No, they have made it absolutely clear that they will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, whereas the US refuses to give that assurance. However, they are very aware of the ceaseless flood of hostility directed at them by the US and its vassal states in Europe, as in the article in The Economist: “The Russians are coming, quick, we have to spend ten years arming ourselves.” Naturally enough, when your neighbour starts amassing the heavy duty stuff, you have to take steps to protect yourself. Unfortunately, the neighbour then peers across the fence, sees you are busy building forts and things, and shouts: “There, we told you, look how aggressive those dogs are!”

It all goes back to the twin drives in Homo sapiens: the drive to dominate, and the drive to resist being dominated. That’s it, that’s all it is. Unfortunately, we all have to share the planet with a country that thinks it has the god-given right to dominate the entire world in every respect at all times, and that anybody who resists is implacably hostile/satanic and has to be obliterated, as Trump says. About 20% of the rest of the world are happy to sit in the dirt and lick that country’s boots but the rest are finally getting tired of it and pushing back. So we have the bizarre spectacle of a person elected as the “president of peace” who thought he should have the Nobel peace prize, who has impulsively started a war and has just had his fat arse kicked in. Good. All power to Iran, just don’t make the mistake of thinking Trump and his mates can be trusted. Now it’s over to the US political establishment to turf him out as a danger to the country and the world. Except it’s not going to happen, there are so many people in positions of power who would have to admit defeat and lose their chance of a tilt at the top job that they would rather leave him in power.

The good news is that the War Party in the US and its lickspittle vassals is permanently discredited, especially among the young. Perhaps we can get ourselves out of this mess and set a new course for the future? Not much chance of that yet, things aren’t bad enough. Fascism doesn’t just ride off into the sunset, it has to be burned out of the national psyche. It has to be crushed utterly, as happened in Germany and Japan in 1945, or it has to tear itself apart from inside. In 1984, Orwell was pessimistic that it could ever be defeated. At the end, after his years of imprisonment in the Ministry of Love, Winston Smith is sitting in a cafe when hears of the great victory over the hordes of Eurasia and is won over:

Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, his struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Trump has lost his chance of a place among the immortals, he has completely blown it. In October 2024, I wasn’t much concerned whether he got in or not. If he lost the election and Harris got the nod, then we would have four more years of the same old mayhem. If he won, then there was a good chance he would wreck two things that I want dismantled: NATO and AUKUS. Looks like he’s doing it so we can only keep our fingers crossed. As a bonus, he may in fact be tipping the balance in the US against the neoliberal neoconservatives, aka fascists, but don’t underestimate them. Bertolt Brecht understood that the urge to dominate is in us all and is only waiting for a chance to break out:

Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!

Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,

The bitch that bore him is in heat again (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,1941).

But leave that for the minute. Granted we all have the blood lust in some form or another, maybe just to see our toddlers win the egg and spoon race, can it be controlled? Can relations between Russia and the West ever settle to the point, if not of bosom buddies, at least of civility? The answer is yes, they can, but not with the current crop of political crooks and cranks running the show. What happens at present, and what guarantees failure in negotiations, is that one side or other announces: “This is what you must do.” The move will have to come from the West as, after the perfidious attacks on Iran, nobody trusts Western politicians any more. They’d be fools to trust again, they have to keep their eyes open and their powder dry.

Is there any hope of transition from permanent war to a sort of pacific state? Yes there is but again, we’d need entirely different people in charge as the first step would be for the West to declare: “After thousands of years of war, we wish to live in peace. We are not superior to you and have no ambition to dominate you, so what guarantees do you need from us in order to start the process of disarmament?” There is no way any American politician, or businessman or general or whatever, could say anything like that, partly because they devoutly believe they are superior and couldn’t stand the humiliation of admitting that to a foreigner, and partly because it would be political and every other sort of suicide. But if they did, we know what the other side will say: “What you need to do is stop threatening us,” to which, and entirely without blushing, the collective West would say: “Oh, but we’ve never threatened anybody. We’ve only ever wanted to live in peace, it’s those demonic neighbours, they’re the problem.” So in strangling Cuba today, the US insists it is not being aggressive, it’s only responding to an existential threat from this tiny, bankrupt island.

Are the entire upper echelons of the US political establishment mad? Are they frankly psychotic? No, but they are seriously grandiose, which is a variant of the paranoid state. They’re determined to be the unrestrained world hegemon so they’re allergic to the slightest hint that somebody isn’t going to do as they’re told. Henry Mencken defined puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” In his self-appointed role as Universal Big Brother, Uncle Sam’s haunting fear is that someone, somewhere, is having an independent thought, so he has to find that person and destroy him before the contagion spreads. No matter that in his endless search for dissidents, Sam builds a surveillance state that eclipses Orwell’s dystopia, that he destroys one country after another, impoverishes his own people, pushes the world to the brink of climate catastrophe, none of that matters in the frenzied hunt for heretics (for a truly frightening look at the rapidly growing tendrils of the surveillance state, watch Chris Hedges interview the remarkable Whitney Webb). The paranoid state doesn’t fade away quietly, it reinforces itself.

The world is not safe if one group thinks they can dominate another with no consequences. The paradox of hierarchy is that our urge to dominate is balanced by an even more durable urge to resist oppression. The entire world political and economic structure today is built around the idea that one country can lord it over the rest of the world, but this political program is doomed. It is already failing but rather than admit it, the 1% redouble their efforts, such as the disastrous attack on Iran. Fortunately, the American defeat gives us a chance to dismantle some of the militarist and neoliberal structures that are driving us toward either nuclear or climate catastrophe or both, but the people with all the money and power aren’t going to give up without a fight. As their power grows, so does their sense of entitlement. They are likely to pull a Samson stunt in order to prevent the undeserving poor getting a decent share of the world’s bounty, i.e. to pull the temple down on everybody. In his article The paranoid style in American politics, historian Richard Hofstadter concluded:

In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all (in Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1964).

That was 60 years ago. It’s much, much worse now. Trump and Co. seem determined to make sure the US empire doesn’t survive much longer. We, the other passengers on Planet Earth, can only wait in trepidation to see if the damage can be restricted. The omens aren’t promising but the important point is that everybody everywhere has to stop seeing the other side as demonic and start to realise that Russians are human, too (and Iranians, and Chinese and Cubans and Venezuelans...).

****

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.

****

(for some reason, this isn’t indenting quotes, I’ll try to sort it out)

A couple of questions arrived regarding last week’s post. First one: “You said that in prosperity gospel, the belief is: ‘If you’re rich, it’s a sign that God favours you.’ What’s wrong with that?” There are two things wrong with it. First, it directly contradicts a critical message in Christianity, one which is common to all the major religions, that we all have a duty to care for the poor and broken, e.g.:

Matt.25.40: And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

I John 3.17: But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

Second fault: it leads directly to corruption, usually on a massive scale. It’s not a fault of the individuals that so many pastors of prosperity type churches are corrupt, corruption is built into the system, e.g. it’s happened that twice in the past few years, I’ve found wallets in the street with several hundred dollars in them, not to mention credit cards etc. Naturally enough, I contacted the owners and gave them back; the blokes who’d lost them were ordinary working people, they were so grateful as in both cases they were on their way to pay their rent. However, as a member of a prosperity church, I could have said: “Oh look, God has put some money in my path, obviously he wants me to have it. And these cards, of course, I’m sure they’re part of my reward for being such a virtuous chap.” To paraphrase Lord Acton, the system corrupts, but the system also attracts the corruptible.

Q2: “You said: ‘Zionism is an heretical, idolatrous, criminal cult but the trouble is, it has found common cause with the christian heresies spreading and financed from the US.’ Isn’t that to their benefit?” Sure it is. The so-called christian zionists send guns and money to the Jewish zionists who then kill to their hearts’ content to get what they believe is their divine inheritance in West Asia, minus its 120million unbelieving inhabitants. Remember that not all Jewish zionists are religious; a lot of them are like Trump, they pretend to be religious but they don’t follow the rules and do essentially what they like. They want to dominate their neighbours to the extent of driving them off their land and/or killing them so they can have the land themselves. They are no different from the European colonists in North and South America, in Africa and Australia. In Asia, the Europeans wanted to push the inhabitants into a form of serfdom, which the British did in their vast Indian empire, forcing the population to work the land or the factories that enriched the British. In particular, the zionist goal in West Asia today is precisely the same political phenomenon as the Nazi plan to invade and occupy the USSR. Nazi ideology said:

“The Nordic races are superior types, the Slavic inferior; by some cruel twist of history, we Germans have ended up with little land in central Europe, boxed in by jealous neighbours yet the Slavs have unlimited land and resources that they can’t use as they don’t know how to; it is a law of nature that the superior should dominate the inferior, not vice versa; ipso facto we are entitled to that land; therefore we should invade the USSR, take their land, kill off half of them and enslave the rest to build a glorious empire that will last a thousand years and will take humanity to new heights of achievement.”

That was their reason for World War. It was not a war to wipe out the Jews, they were a clean-up job to sort out behind the lines because they were diluting the pure Aryan racial stock and spreading transnational, Bolshevik ideas. Hitler did not attack France to snatch its Jews, the intent was to neutralise France, to prevent them and Britain launching a war to his rear while he was busy in the East, i.e. a war on two fronts which had been Germany’s downfall in the Great War. Similarly, zionism says:

Deut. 28:1. Now it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth (added emphasis).

That means: “We are chosen by God to be superior to all nations of the earth; God has promised us all the land from the east bank of the Nile to the west bank of the Euphrates (Genesis 15. 18-21); we were driven off it 2000 years ago but it is our unassailable religious duty to take it back from the unbelievers who have stolen it; by doing so, we are doing God’s duty; if the unbelievers resist, they will feel God’s fiery wrath upon their heads; then we will build a mighty empire that will usher in the coming of the messiah and an age of universal peace under Jewish leadership” (or something, that bit isn’t entirely clear).

Nazism and zionism are the same political phenomenon: a group feel they are hard done by and covet their neighbours’ lands, so they decide to even the balance by any means necessary so they can preside over a glorious future. That’s Jewish zionism. Christian zionism agrees that Jews have to be gathered into their promised land, then the Christian messiah can come except that in the end, the Jews will get the chop and be sent to the big cooker downstairs. In a Monty Python twist, Jewish zionists and so-called christian zionists are actually cooperating for contradictory ends, which only goes to show that if it made sense, it wouldn’t be religion.

Is it fair to say of Jewish zionism that they have an attitude of superiority, at least to the indigenous inhabitants of modern Palestine? Yes, it is fair. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who refounded the very influential Chabad movement in New York, made it quite clear that Palestinians were inferior beings. We see this attitude in the “settlers,” the extremists who are paid to move to houses built for them in the West Bank. In this video, one of them freely tells the interviewer that one Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives (from start to 0.45). Two points to note. First, this is not exceptional. This is normal for the 750,000 settlers who now occupy the West Bank, and there are thousands more on the way as the Israeli government pours money into building new ones, bulldozing Palestinian houses in the process. For a government whose economy is on the brink of collapse from war, where does all the money come from? From supporters in the US, who hold equally noxious Jewish supremacist views.

Second point: this attitude is not new. It did not spring into existence following Oct 7^th, or in 1948, or 1885, it goes back forever. The only difference is that normally, people who believe it don’t say it on camera but now they don’t care, they think they’re winning and can say what they like. For the record, this is fascism. It is not a nationalist fascism, as per Mussolini, Nazis, Japan or imperial Britain; or a socialist fascism, as per Stalin and Mao; or a capitalist fascism, as is growing in the US today; it is a religious or clericalist fascism, of which there have been hundreds of examples throughout history. Fascism is not itself a form of government. It is a technology which can be used by any group anywhere to gain and hold power. It relies on the innate human urge to dominate, employing a wide variety of techniques to excite people and license them to act in a brutal manner toward their neighbours which, ordinarily, most of them wouldn’t do. The urge to dominate is built in; normally, it is quiescent but it just needs the right triggers to erupt forth, and fascism provides them. Fascism is as fascism does, and the “settler” in that video is doing it.

But it raises an important question: if it’s fine for the zionists to kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for killing Israelis on October 7^th, how come the Israeli government ordered the Hannibal doctrine on that day, to kill Israelis (military and civilian) to prevent them being captured by Hamas? That too goes back a very long way, to the medieval concept of the informer. Any Jew who gives any information to the goyim that in any way allows one Jew or many to suffer in any way is a traitor to the religion and must be punished grievously. As Shahak and Mezvinsky explain, a rabbinical court decides who is guilty of informing and appoints a “pursuer” to carry out its sentence:

“In chapter 10, rule 1 of Laws of Idolatry, Maimonides (the great Spanish-born Talmudic scholar, d. 1204) , after explaining the extermination of the ancient Canaanites and again asserting that no Jews should be killed, said: “All this applies to the seven [Canaanite] nations, but Jewish informers and heretics should be exterminated by one’s own hand and put into hell, because they cause trouble to Jews by removing their hearts from being true to the Lord, like Tzadok, and Beitos [the alleged founders of the Sadducean sect] and their pupils. Let the name of the wicked perish” [1, Chap. 7]

That is, anybody who causes trouble to Jews must die. Israelis taken prisoner by Hamas will cause trouble to Jews. Therefore they must die, and at least 600 Israelis were killed by the Israeli military on that day (this was also the justification for the assassination of former PM Yitzhak Rabin by religious fanatics, same as happened to Gandhi and for the same reason, i.e. betraying the religion).

We live in dangerous times but the trouble lies with the people at the controls. Three years ago, there was a terrible bus accident in the Hunter Valley, NSW. A bus carrying a group coming home from a wedding party rolled over, killing 10 people. At the trial, the driver admitted taking a large dose of tramadol, an opiate, and driving too fast. Several passengers had told him to slow down but apparently, he said he would show them what the bus could do and rolled it on a corner. He was sentenced to 32 years. It’s an allegory for the world we live in. The passengers on planet earth bus are frightened and telling the drivers to slow down, we’re travelling too fast, using too much, causing too much damage but the drivers scoff, telling us we’re communists or softcocks or traitors, they know what they’re doing, it’s all the enemy’s fault, we’re blameless, god’s on our side, he’s given us nuclear weapons to subdue them, on and on. Three days after Hiroshima, speaking on a national radio broadcast, US president Harry S Truman said: “We thank God that it (the atomic bomb) has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” Americans are impervious to irony, and that persists today in a new YouTube channel.

John Mearsheimer (b 1947), professor of political science at Chicago University, has long had a presence on the internet but has now started his own channel. The first two talks are available but it’s easier to skim through the transcript than sit through his plodding style. Mearsheimer propounds the notion of “offensive realism” in international relations (OR in IR). Very briefly, this says that the reality of the international scene is anarchic. Any nation that wants to maintain peace within its borders must take steps to protect itself from the anarchy spilling inwards. It therefore needs to exert control over its neighbours to make sure they don’t get any funny ideas about invading. This doctrine is widely taken as licence to act aggressively as a preemptive measure. Gaining local hegemony is the only way a nation can guarantee a peaceful life for its citizenry. For a big and powerful country, its hegemony must extend as far as it feels it needs to feel safe; for the US, this means global hegemony or, as they say, full spectrum dominance. This is the idea of the Pax Romanorum, the peace Rome was able to impose throughout its empire, with gibbets regularly spaced along their roads to remind the proles of their place in the imperial order.

In his first talk, Mearsheimer describes three strategies for conventional war: blitzkrieg, or lightning war; a war of attrition; and a war with limited aims, e.g. conquering and holding part of the enemy’s territory. The first two are directed at strategic victory. Blitzkrieg implies a sudden attack intended to overwhelm the defenders by massive force and rapid movement so they are unable to mount a counter-offensive. A war of attrition is launched where the opposing forces are more evenly balanced and “decapitation” is clearly not going to be possible but the attacking force expects to be able to wear the other side down over time. The last one, with limited aims, may succeed at first but it will soon turn into a defensive war as the enemy will not accept losing its territory and will settle down to recovering it by one means or another. At 13.50, he says: “By definition, you don’t think about launching an attack against an adversary unless you think there is a strong set of political reasons for doing so.”

The second lecture talks about the five possible strategies an attacking force can use: discriminate air war (i.e. bombing restricted to military targets); indiscriminate air war (“bombing them back to stone age”); “tit-for-tat” bombing; naval blockade; and land war. This talk is repetitious and again, skimming the transcript is the way to go. He uses the example of the illegal Trump-Netanyahu war of aggression against Iran to argue that Trump should have settled for very limited aims months ago. Now, he is caught in a trap of his own making. He needed a distraction from Epstein so he launched a war; now he needs a distraction from losing his war (I added that bit). The trap is that he has been defeated but Americans never admit defeat, especially just before an election when the people are unhappy, and he can’t find a way of convincing the Iranians that he decides who wins, not them.

To me, and bearing in mind that this is only about 75minutes of his stuff, there is a glaring fault in Mearsheimer’s presentation: he doesn’t say WHY humans want to keep attacking each other. He doesn’t say WHY Trump and the zionists are obsessed with attacking Iran, or all the other places they’ve destroyed over the past 80 years. This means that his “theory of IR” is actually back to front. Mearsheimer says: International relations are anarchic, therefore nations must dominate their neighbours. I say: Wrong. Nations are constantly trying to dominate their neighbours just because humans, and that creates international anarchy. His explanation stops at the level of the observations, he doesn’t attempt to reduce it. A reductionist explanation says that the behaviour and properties of a higher order entity (such as a nation or alliance of nations) are determined by the behaviour and properties of the lower order entities of which it is composed.

In the case of nations, the lower order entities are individual humans. Individual humans have an innate, biologically-mediated urge to dominate each other, and this translates into nations trying to dominate each other. As a matter of simple logic, if interpersonal relations take the form of dominance hierarchies, then that will apply a fortiori to nations unless there is something to prevent it. This drive is not absolute: with training from an early age, it can be moderated or switched off as required but most people don’t learn that lesson very well. With very, very few excepstions, our “leaders” didn’t learn to keep their hands to themselves. Like the bus driver who wanted to show what his powerful bus could do and ended up killing his passengers, they’re determined to show what their armies can do, how they can crush their enemies into the dirt, regardless of the risks they’re running. Like Trump, most of them are convinced they’re so smart and so powerful and so superior that they can just flick their fingers and their enemies will melt away.

The UN was set up to prevent a repetition of World War II but it was promptly neutered by the US and other Western countries so it hasn’t been very effective. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN Human Rights Commissioner recently visited the West Bank again. In a brief report, she said:

“I arrived at a clear conclusion: the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally and politically.”

That is, genocide. Netanyahu’s illegal and inhuman conduct, and that of his government and the 92% of Israelis who support his war, flows directly from the notion that Group A can dominate Group B just because they feel like it. This has nothing to do with what they believe god told them, as former Israeli PM David ben Gurion agreed:

“If I was an Arab leader, I would not sign an agreement with Israel. It’s natural. We took their land. I mean yes, god promised it to us, but our god is not their god. Why would they accept? Why would that mean anything? Yes, there was antisemitism, Nazis, the Jews, Auschwitz, but why would they pay for it? We are coming here to take their land and they should not accept it” (from this list).

The US has conducted aggressive war since its inception, since that’s what countries blessed by god do. Since before its inception, Israel has conducted a war of attrition against its neighbours, constantly nibbling at their borders and taking each step forward not, as they say, as the end point of their ambitions but as the starting point of the next set of goals. Both countries are gripped by a sense of superiority which they believe is divinely ordained. What they don’t realise, and what they don’t want to be told, is that it’s just hormones raging in the dark. They also don’t get the paradox of hierarchy, that yes, it feels good to dominate but that means it feels bad to be oppressed, and the oppressed will inevitably fight back because humans. Anybody who believes that one life from his tribe is worth ten million of the other tribe will inevitably find out the hard way. On that day, the settlers will learn what it means to cry for help and nobody comes. Better still, before they crash the bus we’re all travelling on, maybe they should negotiate an end to the fighting. For that, we’ll need an entirely new set of leaders.

Reference:

Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). The Religious Background of Rabin’s Assassination. Chap. 7 in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press: 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.

****

In a truly bizarre incident in Queensland a few years ago, an 8yo diabetic child died after her parents withheld her insulin. They were members of a small religious group who believed in divine intervention, that she didn’t need the drug as she would be healed by faith and prayer. For days as the child sickened and finally died, they sang and prayed around her, even refusing to call police or ambulance when she had been dead for 24hrs as she wasn’t dead, just sleeping. All 14 adults have since been convicted of manslaughter. The leader of the group, whom the judge described as “a dangerous, highly manipulative individual” was sentenced to 13 yrs in prison while her parents, who made the decision to stop the insulin, got 14yrs. All the other members who were accomplices to her death were given between six and nine years to think about it.

Fortunately, this sort of thing is fairly rare in this country but not so in the US. Given its long history as a refuge for European heretics, it has a rich tradition of spawning cults of various sorts. Indeed, what’s a cult? There are various definitions but mostly they focus on the idea of a small group of people, usually following a charismatic leader who demands absolute loyalty to his ideas (most are men), be they original or his interpretations of standard texts. Members of the group are tightly bound to the leader and to each other and are mostly required to make considerable sacrifices, such as withdrawing from the larger society and from their families, giving up wordly pleasures and handing over large sums of money or property to the leader. Often, they wear distinctive clothes or have unusual haircuts or beards and use a jargon or cant that outsiders struggle to follow. People can join cults themselves or be born into them but typically, leaving is made as difficult as possible.

Given all this, why would anybody bother joining? Why give up the comforts of suburbia, such as a beer while watching the footy on TV or a day at the beach ogling the bikini-clad belles, just to stand around with a group of weird-looking people singing hymns and yelling “Praise be with you, brother”? The answer is that people only do anything because they expect a pay-off. It may be that they expect a reward of some sort in their crappy lives or they fear punishment but hoping for a benefit of some form keeps them on the hook.

Typically, cult-like religious revivals and radical political movements are the product of unhappy people in unstable times; people are dissatisfied and are inclined to follow anybody who confidently spouts that he has the answer to all their questions and the solution to their discontents. The 20^th Century saw several of the biggest political cults of all time, Stalinism in the USSR, fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan, and Maoism in China. They were totalitarian, meaning total control over every aspect of life for the whole population at all times. They had the power of the state behind them: anybody who questioned The Party or The Leader was likely to get the chop.

These days, religious cults can’t quite match that although ISIS tried. In the main, they rely on people choosing to join and stay so they have to keep the excitement flowing in order to keep the punters but a big part of their spiel is fear of leaving, fear of the ever-alert enemy waiting to pounce. For mainstream religions, cultish offshoots are heresies that need to be opposed. In the old days, that led to bitter wars that dragged on and on. Where possible, heretics were crushed and burned although if they took control, they did the same to the remnants of the old orthodoxy. Fortunately, in the West, we have moved beyond internecine religious wars although we’re still quite partial to fighting other religions when the chance presents.

As everybody will know, the West is experiencing a resurgence of religiosity which, depending on where you stand, is either a return to the True Religion or a slide into heresy. As usual, the epicentre is the US, spreading rapidly around the world but this illustrates an important point: religious revivals start with a panicky populace but they spread and develop according to the money. In the US, the conventional or mainstream churches are loaded but this is mainly property that they picked up 100 years ago or comes via deceased estates. The new, megachurches rely much more on donations, and that is a large part of their appeal.

Firstly, they are mostly based on an electrifying personality rather than a novel interpretation of the scriptures, and second, they are in the business of marketing prosperity. The message is: “Come to hear Pastor X, you’ll feel better, and stay to get rich.” Instead of the old Christian notion of helping the poor, the modern version is prosperity gospel, as in the old “God ’elps them wot ’elps ’emselves.” If you’re rich, it’s a sign that God favours you; if you want to get rich, donate to the pastor and you’ll get your money back seven times” (seven is the magic number). Behind it all looms the ever-present temptor, Satan himself; if the promise of riches isn’t enough to keep them in line, the fear of the devil will. As a result, the pastors become exceedingly wealthy and use that as a drawcard: “I believe and look how rich I’ve become. You can do it too, just drop your money in this pot.” This idea isn’t restricted to the fringes of Christianity, it’s actually quite common in a lot of religions, especially among poor people. And the priests and pastors take advantage of it, and the more narcissistic and psychopathic they are, the worse it gets. This means there are some very wealthy churches in the US which send money overseas to poor countries to build their empires. It also means there are lots of preachers who believe they’re above the law and take advantage of it.

The same thing happens in Islam, where the fundamentalist Saudi sect, the Wahabists, have access to rivers of money which they use to build religious schools or madrassahs in poor countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. Very often, parents don’t know what they’re agreeing to when they let their sons (only boys) enter them, they think they’re normal schools but they definitely aren’t. Once the boys are in, they’re indoctrinated in an intolerant and socially-regressive form of Islam, but they get very little actual education so it is extremely difficult for them to leave. Practically the only job available to them is as an imam in a dirt poor community where they spread the harsh gospel they’ve been taught, because they don’t know any better. They are definitely not taught to question their teachers (sounds a bit like psychiatry, doesn’t it).

Anyway, more or less since 1945, there has been a widespread religious revival in the US, coupled with a growing secularisation of the mainstream. However, nobody who wants to get ahead in any field dares question the often twisted religiosity as that would invite a massive pile-on from the hard core fanatics. Even Herr Drumpf, who doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, pretends to be on their side. None of this is encouraging as the religious hard right and the crackpot hard right are very much in bed together. We saw this at the January 6^th debacle in Washington when QAnon flags were mixed with signs proclaiming “Jesus is my saviour.” How can this be? Simple: they are united in their hatred of the same enemies. But, you protest, Christians aren’t supposed to hate anybody, turn the other cheek, love your enemies and all that, isn’t that the message? Perhaps it is, in the mainstream, but we’re not talking mainstream. We’re talking of what happened when Hollywood met Madison Avenue in a disused church and got a brilliant idea for making money: new christianity (note it loses its capital). Instead of having little old ladies quavering through monotonous hymns in draughty churches, they realised that the market for hip churches was wide open. Crank it up, get rid of the candles and bring in the strobes, out with the organ and in with electric guitars, make Sunday Funday and the money will come.

In the process, the message morphed. The idea of Christianity as a religion of peace and care was quietly led out the back and strangled, to be replaced by the bloodthirsty and vengeful god of the old testament, the hellfire and brimstone, tear-your-enemies’-heads-off and enslave their children version. The Sermon on the Mount was dumped and the Book of Revelation pushed to centre-stage, complete with its hallucinated monsters and lambs with seven horns and seven eyes (the magic seven again), its battles with demons and plagues and damnation. What is called evangelical, pentecostal or charismatic christianity is a heresy from beginning to end, but the good news is that it has probably peaked. The figures don’t show this: worldwide, charismatic churches are growing rapidly but this is by recruiting people in poor countries, especially by luring them away from the mainstream. In the West, the average age of congregations is rising rapidly as young people refuse to enter, or those born into it leave, sorely aware that the hyped up promise behind the spectacle was hollow.

Meantime, another revival has gone off the rails. The political doctrine of zionism was developed in the 1880s and 90s as a solution to the problem of Jewish people living in Europe being exposed to violence from their neighbours. Note that this was Europe: Jews living in North Africa and West Asia didn’t have an antisemitic problem (even today, there are 15,000 Jews living in Iran, with their own seat in the Majlis). It was decided that the only way they could be safe was to have their own country, subject to their own laws and protected by their own police.

To begin with, they looked at different countries including Argentina and Uganda and apparently also Tasmania, then decided that the Ottoman province of Palestine would be best as that would bring in the religious crowd (with all their money). Orthodox Jews were well-organised and disciplined; without them, the zionist project probably wouldn’t get off the ground. Aided by wealthy Jews like Baron Edmond de Rothschild in France, they started buying land in Palestine but soon ran into difficulties as the locals resented groups of white people who had no intention of assimilating (e.g. learning Arabic) moving in and trying to take over. That soon led to fighting, the uprising in 1936, World War II intervened and, in 1948, the Jewish population, by then 32% of the region, were awarded 56% of the land by the UN and declared their own state. Then the serious ethnic cleansing started, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced off their land, thousands were murdered, and hundreds of villages demolished without trace. As we see, this process of grabbing more and more land has never stopped.

It has to be remembered that, like most groups, the world’s Jewish community represents a wide range of opinions. There is a significant Orthodox movement that says Israel’s existence is a heresy and they will never go there. There are large numbers of secular Jews who are horrified by the actions of the Jewish State and will never set foot there, let alone give them money to buy more weapons. These and others have very little influence as the great bulk of Israeli Jews and probably most in the diaspora have embraced a hybrid religious, political and racist movement called zionism. This has the form of a cult. As it stands today, zionism is a project directed at expanding the borders of the Jewish state to the limits described in their mythology:

Deut. 28:1. Now it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth. 2 And all these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

That’s all pretty clear, except for two points. First, there’s no written or reliable record of this, it’s just what they believe. Modern zionists resolutely believe that they are on a mission from God to recover the lands from the Nile to the Euphrates and to clear it of all defilement, meaning unbelievers. The corollary is that they can’t stop trying to expand and drive the indigenous people off their ancient lands. They also believe that withdrawing from any conquered land or handing it back represents the most grievous of all sins, rejecting God. So they will not hand it back. This matches perfectly with the inherent human drive to dominate others at any cost. But here comes the second point: yes, their mythology says they had a contract with God which would give them all this land but a contract is a contract, it goes both ways:

Deut. 28: 15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: 16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field ... (rest of the curses here)

That is what is called the consideration in the contract: I will do this for you but, in consideration, you will do this for me; if you don’t, here’s the penalty. This particular contract, known as a covenant but it’s the same thing, therefore becomes: “All this I will give to you if you obey my law.” That is the consideration the Jews must pay. Now obviously the modern zionists have jumped for joy at this but then some party pooper looked at the laws and found there are 613 of them, including the well-known Ten Commandments (of which Henry Mencken said: “Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you can’t beat the fact that there were only ten of them”). That’s a lot to remember, and they’re pretty onerous. In fact, they’re so onerous that it’s quite possible that no living Jew today keeps to all of them. Certainly, zionists don’t because one of the rules says “Thou shalt not kill.” Another says adulterers should be stoned to death but Messrs Weinstein and Epstein somehow escaped that fate, perhaps because they were rich.

So it has happened that the zionists pick the bits from their Bible that suit them, ignore lots of others (“Thou shalt not destroy fruit trees,” a favourite hobby of settlers on their cowardly pogroms), and have work-arounds for the rest. How do they slip out of killing a quarter of a million Palestinians in Gaza? Simple: Palestinians are not actually human. They’re animals in human form so they can be killed as easily as we kill a rat. Jewish souls come from heaven, goyim (unbelievers) come from the satanic sphere so they’re fair game for Hellfire missiles. How do they account for the Hannibal doctrine, that killed hundreds of Jews on October 7^th? I haven’t seen a justification for this but I’m sure a rabbi could be found who would devise one. By this means, the original religion of Judaism has been dumped in favour of a heretical version of it.

Another rule says “No idols” but the land has assumed the role of an idol. Similarly, the general thrust of many of the rules is against anything that would constitute criminal behaviour, e.g. theft. However, driving people off their land and annexing it, as in Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, is theft, as is looting by Israeli troops in Lebanon. Because the goal of zionism is to take other people’s land, zionism is a criminal enterprise. It is an heretical, idolatrous, criminal cult but the trouble is, it has found common cause with the christian heresies spreading and financed from the US. There are now millions of people who call themselves “christian zionists,” a contradiction of terms, who actively support genocide and other crimes against humanity. As Blaise Pascal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Even though they don’t pull the triggers or drop the bombs that incinerate children, zoinist gpyim support it and pay for it, so they’re as guilty as though they were doing it themselves. In the process, they have forgotten that Christianity started as a revulsion against Judaism, which had become degenerate. So has Christianity. Granted, there is a lot of argument about just what happened 2000 years ago [1] but there’s no argument over the central message of the Nazarene:

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God (Matt.5:9).

The good news is that all cults eventually either die out or moderate. The bad news is that they kill a lot of people in the process.

****

1. Zuesse Eric (2012). Christ’s Ventriloquists: the event that created Christianity. Hancock, MI: Hyacinth 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.

****

Three weeks ago, I reported on the UN report on the state of children in Gaza, beginning with: “What follows is utterly repugnant.” Another week, another report, this time from the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) and Progressive International, titled: A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians (available on the PFC site). Be warned: What it contains in its nearly 200 pages is beyond repugnant, far beyond merely “bestial” or “subhuman” depravity, because no animals on earth behave in the way this report describes is routine for members of the Israeli state apparatus.

Starting with background in the Nakba of 1948 and dealing with each decade since, it shows that the most extreme forms of sexualised violence and torture, expressly designed to crush, isolate and humiliate the victims, is neither rare nor the sporadic actions of a few bad actors. Instead, it is institutionalised and protected within the entire structure of the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) including the military, spy agencies, civil police, judicial services, prisons system and, crucially, the brutal civil militias commonly called settlers:

... sexualized violence is a systemic Israeli practice that has accelerated in frequency and scale of brutality since October 7, 2023. We conclude that Israeli sexualized violence is a central method of political, psychological, and physical warfare intentionally deployed to cause mass bodily and mental harm and injury. We further conclude that sexualized violence is intentionally deployed to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part and therefore must be regarded as a genocidal act (p60, emphasis added).

Since the October 7^th rebellion by Hamas, matters have become much worse, with regular reports of rape by trained dogs of male and female prisoners, most of whom are never charged because they are civilians who have no connection with any armed forces. It’s not just Palestinians. After she was abducted from the Sumud Flotilla, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg reported deliberate sexual harrassment and emotional abuse:

If Israel, with the eyes of the world on it, can treat a well‑known white person with a Swedish passport like this, imagine what they do to Palestinians in secret (p108).

The report exposes what they do in secret. We’re constantly told we have to support Israel as an island of democracy and Judeo-Christian liberalism in a sea of barbarians, that Israelis are the world victims who have to be favoured in every respect as victims can do no wrong, and that opposing the Jewish State’s activities in any way or likening them to Nazis amounts to the grievous crime of antisemitism and will be punished for life. I haven’t read the whole of this report and don’t plan to as it’s truly horrifying but the case against Israel is crystal clear. For nearly a hundred years, it has planned and implemented the enforced expulsion of the indigenous population of Palestine, using lethal violence and grotesque humiliation as weapons of genocide. The question is: how does this come about? How can people who suffered grievously within living memory turn into depraved monsters who actually train dogs to rape humans? That would take a lot of effort, it doesn’t come naturally to dogs, which says the dog trainers and the handlers knew exactly what they were doing at all times.

The simple answer would be: that’s what Europeans do, they colonise other people’s lands and treat the indigenous population either as slave labour or as vermin to be eradicated. Look at Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US, where the native people were cheated of their land and driven to the brink, or Australia where the same thing happened. There were about 300,000 Aboriginal people when the British colony was established in Sydney in 1788. Within a few years, smallpox had swept through the Sydney tribes, leaving the land more or less bare for the colonists to seize. This pattern repeated throughout the country, albeit as the product of different diseases. Within ten years of whites arriving in an area, 90% of the Aboriginal population would be dead. 80% of those deaths were due to diseases such as influenza, chickenpox, measles, whooping cough and so on. 10% were usually due to direct white violence and the remainder due to Aboriginal violence, which was standard British policy: set the tribes against each other and move in when they were worn down. More recently, there are the examples of the British opium wars against China, the unspeakable violence of Belgium in Congo and France in Algeria and other parts of North Africa. We are not taught this history, and that’s not an accident. It is simply not mentioned. At school, we learned about the Black Hole of Calcutta (with capitals); we were not told of the Amritsar massacre of 1919 or the Bengal famine of 1943, when 3.5million people died because Britain took the crops they grew for its armies.

That’s one possibility, that white people are incapable of treating people of colour as their equals and will always try to wipe them out. However, that was mostly a couple of hundred years ago, we’re supposed to be more civilised now. We have the example of the Nazi genocide which gave us a body of international law, we have treaties and obligations, so how come Israel is able to act in such a depraved manner? There are a lot of factors involved but one part we can call the curse of zionism although it should really be called the curse of superiority.

The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism is humanity’s biological urge to dominate everything in sight. This is largely a male activity and is common to all species studied although women certainly aren’t immune (“Let them eat cake”). This reaches right throughout our existence as social animals. Practically everything we do is built around the idea of dominance hierarchies, starting in infancy and continuing after death when the rich and powerful have grandiose headstones in the cemetary and the poor get just a number on a post. The basis of any dominance hierarchy is the belief that I have rights you don’t have, and I can do whatever is necessary to exercise my rights. What did the British believe that justified their merciless treatment of the indigenes? I don’t know for sure but probably much as Churchill said of the King-Emperor’s unwilling Indian subjects: “A beastly people with a beastly religion.” It would be something like: “We are cultured and civilised people with the true religion while you are ignorant pagans and savages with all this land that you don’t know how to use. We’ll take over and impose our religion on you and teach you our superior language and how to wear shoes, plus we’ve got the guns,” as Hilaire Belloc put it in his satiric poem The Modern Traveller, (1898):

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim gun and they have not..

Trouble is, an attitude of superiority is cursed from the beginning as it has no natural end. It feeds on itself and encourages people to become more and more extreme, rewarding militancy and penalising moderation. Within any movement, there is a moderate branch and an extreme branch. The moderates are motivated by the desire to do the right thing, to be fair and reasonable. Extremists, on the other hand, are driven by the urge to get to the top, to get bigger and more powerful, to crush anybody who stands in their way just because they only feel good when they have their boot on somebody’s throat. Which explains why moderates are always done in by the extremists. If in about 1850, a British politician had said in parliament: “Look, chaps, we’ve probably painted enough of the world red, why don’t we sit back and enjoy it, let other people have some?” he would have been thrown in the putrid River Thames. American politicians were rewarded for crushing the plains tribes into reserves so settlers could take their land. Australians after Federation in 1901 didn’t worry too much about the “native problem” as they were fully expected to die out before long, but also the idea that mere black people could “own” land was too absurd to think about. God gave us “... dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26-30), but He gave it to us true believers, not to them pagans. As Churchill, then Secretary of State for Colonies, said after the 1937 Peel Report on the Palestinian uprising:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

“I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people.” I rest my case. It is the nature of the fanaticism of superiority that it intensifies, it ratchets up but it never ratchets down. By late 1941, the Nazi government realised nobody in the world wanted to help solve their “Jewish problem” by taking millions of Jews from their growing empire. They could have said: “Oh well, looks like we’re stuck with them. Maybe we should just ignore them, or send them to Khazakhstan and they can have their own rotten country,” but they didn’t. The momentum of their own propaganda was such that nobody could back down. After twenty years of yelling that Jews were a mortal threat to the nation and the race, it was impossible for them to choose a moderate path. Anybody who had said “Let’s be reasonable” would have been shouted down, would have lost status, probably demoted and sent to the Russian Front so nobody did. The fear of appearing weak, of losing status in the hierarchy was enough to silence dissent so, at a conference at Wannsee in January 1942, they opted for the unthinkable, extermination. We’ve all done it, we’ve all had a time when we knew we should have spoken up but the gang of rowdy, aggressive people would have turned on us, or they had worn us down, or everybody else kept their heads down so we kept quiet and the extremists won. This is the curse of superiority, and zionism has a very bad case of it.

Is the political movement known as zionism based in the idea that one group has superior rights to another, and is entitled to exercise them? Absolutely, but that’s not how it started. It began in the 1880s and 90s as the notion that Jews could not be safe in Europe as they were always outsiders, always resented by the natives (after 2,000 years, why were they still outsiders? That’s another question). The only way they could be safe would be in their own country, except all of Europe was taken, so they looked further afield. Argentina, Patagonia, Uganda, even Tasmania were considered, then they settled on the Ottoman province of Palestine. That would kill two birds with one stone, as they say, it would appeal to the many Jewish socialists who could set up their idea of egalitarian paradise, and to the religious who had always toasted each other: “Next year in the Promised Land.” Yes, there were about 700,000 Palestinians already there but they could be dealt with by one means or another, as outlined in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall from 1923, which is headed: “Colonisation of Palestine. Agreement with Arabs Impossible at present. Zionism Must Go Forward.” First, they had to get the support of the Western democracies, for which the Great War provided a golden opportunity, quite literally. Britain’s totally illegal “Balfour Declaration” was simply a ploy to get money.

Gradually, this morphed into a religious crusade of recovery of the “Promised Land” from the defiling unbelievers. The older moderates, such as Nahum Goldmann, died out and extremists like Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Kahane, Schneerson, Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and so many others took over. Conquering the land of Greater Israel (from the Nile to the Euphrates) became a combined religious and national imperative, such that failing to do so was either an unforgivable sin against God’s plan or a cowardly humiliation and betrayal of the Holocaust in the face of the mocking Arabs, or both according to the direction of the wind, and nobody dared say “Enough is enough.” Actively aided by the West, meaning the US, UK and France with Germany paying the bills, Israel has continued its relentless, murderous expansion but any morality behind it, like providing a safe haven for Jews who wanted to move there, has long since been lost in the uproar. Now, the religious atmosphere has become near-delusional, with many of the hard core religious fanatics convinced the normal laws don’t apply to them: see here for an account of widespread, institutionalised sexual abuse of children within extremist religious communities; the channel is trustworthy. If this is what they do to their own children, no wonder Epstein thought he could get away with a bit of hanky-panky with the goyim. And it is all now based on the logical progression of the idea of a “Chosen People taking God’s Promised Land,” that anybody who opposes them is satanic and must be destroyed with gratuitous violence. The violence is both cleansing and sanctifying in and of itself.

Each time, the demands increase. From 1937 on, Britain trained and armed the merciless Jewish militias which became the Israeli army, becoming more merciless in the process, as well as disarming and weakening the Palestinian opposition. Israel’s so-called “war of independence” of 1948 was actually a concerted ethnic cleansing operation which the Arab Legion tried to stop with their ramshackle armies. Many of the Arab trucks that entered the territory were unarmed as they were meant to help shift the hundreds of thousands of displaced people but were attacked and destroyed by the well-armed, well-trained and utterly merciless Israeli military on their “mission from God.” Out of that, the zionist leaders decided they needed tanks and jets, all of which were supplied and then used against Egypt in 1956, and then nuclear weapons, with the reactor provided by France, paid by the US and all the scientists trained within the top secret US nuclear establishment.

It just goes on and on, gets worse and worse because extremists accept no limits on their ambitions. If they achieve one goal, they immediately look ahead and select another. Anybody in the movement who objects is dismissed as weak and expelled, or a traitor and locked up or has an accident while checking the view from a 20^th floor window. The other side of it dehumanising the enemy. In elevating myself, there comes a point where I force him off the hierarchy of humans, he becomes a “human animal.” That is the nature of extremism. Extremism has only one end, either its many enemies combine to crush it or it burns itself out from within. That is the curse of superiority.

Zionism exists only because a group of people believe they have the divine seal of approval to do what they like to their neighbours. They are very willing prisoners of the curse of superiority. Because this is historically so significant in the world today, we can rename it the Curse of Zionism and, in a hundred years’ time, people will know just what that means. The end-stage depravity of the moral crime of superiority.

PS See this article. Somebody should point this out to the US, they should get off the escalator before the curse of superiority takes control of them. Or has it already?

****

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 US Secretary of State (= foreign minister), Mr Marco Rubio, has recently announced that the US intends to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague as “the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty.” His concern was that ICE agents posted to the US border to repel immigrants could be arrested and taken for trial before non-American judges. In fact, he’s lying as he knows perfectly well the US is not a member of the ICC so it has no jurisdiction over events in the US. It can, however, take action against US citizens if they commit war crimes in other countries that are members, and that’s what he doesn’t want. The US has already imposed crippling financial “sanctions” on some members of the ICC, including the chief prosecutor, British barrister Karim Khan after is issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others for crimes in Gaza.

While a few US senators praised him for taking on the “corrupt” ICC, criticism was immediate and widespread. Some commentators have been wringing their hands over the “death of the international rules-based order” (IRBO) which the US was largely responsible for establishing after World War II. People point to the UN and its many agencies, the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, the ICJ, the World Bank and IMF which flowed from the Bretton Woods agreement that set the US$ as the world’s reserve currency, GATT (1947), NATO, IAEA, IATA and a host of other bodies. As a result, there have been no major wars and trade and commerce have mostly flourished, to the benefit of all. If the US hadn’t pushed for these after 1945, which generally meant funding them and often providing offices, then chaos would have reigned. But if Narco Rubio (so-called because of his brother in law’s involvement in drugs) has his way, say the hand-wringers, the IRBO will collapse. Now that’s a bit strange because I thought it had been strangled at birth, 80 years ago.

The idea behind an IRBO is fairly clear: everybody agrees on a set of rules for all, then everybody works to apply them themselves and to make sure everybody else sticks to them. Trouble is, there was never any intention of having a single set of rules to apply to all: what about the exceptional nations? Surely they can’t be expected to get down there with the common herd so that their voices were lost in the lowing of cattle and the mewling of frightened pussies? No, the leaders of the world had to be heard, and heard clearly so everything was set up to make sure they remained the unchallenged leaders. In fact, there was only one such country and it made sure from the very beginning that it would run the show the way it thought it ought to be run. So the US awarded the victors of World War II permanent seats on the UN Security Council and the power of veto, including the brutal and egregiously corrupt Nationalist regime in China. Through an arrangement with the ramshackle Saudi autocracy, it arranged for all oil sales to be in USD, which meant that any country that wanted to buy Saudi oil first had to get USD. This led to the “exorbitant privilege” where the US could spy on practically all international commercial and financial transactions, to its great benefit. And because it had lots of weapons for sale, it was then able to offer unlimited credit for arms sales to all its friends, provided they bought American.

While all this was going on, the “war against communism” was in full flight, mostly behind the scenes as in Guatamala in 1954 or Indonesia in 1958 but occasionally reaching the front pages, as in Korea. The principle driving this crusade was very simple: “Unspeakably evil godless communism is trying to take control of your country, we’ll help you fight them. And yes, you do want our help, don’t you.” It was always and only ever a case of diabolical outsiders trying to subvert the innocent peasants and turn the country into a concentration camp, so the kindly US of A would step in to save them. However, what was dressed up as benevolence concealed two points. The first was that communism was almost always home-grown. Peasants suffering under feudal oppression didn’t need outsiders telling them they had to free themselves from the plutocratic yoke, they had eyes, they knew the UN Charter promised self-determination to all people so that’s what they wanted. And if they wanted a socialist government, then they were prepared to fight for it.

Which brings up the second point: the sole goal of successive US governments was for untrammeled access to each and every market by their corporations; the only way this could achieved was through total world domination, and the socialists were getting in the way. Therefore, as in Iran in 1953 and so many other countries, they had to go. Why were corporations so important to the various US governments? Money. Seats on their boards. Connections, influence. And the “international rules-based order” was a major part of it. As the funder-in-chief of the IMF and World Bank, the US was able to decide who got what at what rates. With a few phone calls, they could make or break governments but if the peasants didn’t take hints and clearly didn’t know what was good for them, well, overthrow the government. So simple. Take Cuba, for example. In 1958, home-grown revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro overthrew the ineffably corrupt Batista government and promptly nationalised a heap of American assets, many of which were owned by the US mafia or otherwise stolen. Humiliated, the US imposed a blockade on Cuba which remains in force to this day: 65 years of penury, just because they refused to grovel to Uncle Sam. Two years later, the CIA engineered an “invasion” of Cuba by a bunch of pirates, drunks and crooks that ended in disaster. All of these are examples of how the “IRBO” existed in name only and entirely at the whim of the US government.

There was much the same disaster in the Congo after Belgium limped out in 1960. With the very active support of the US and of Belgium which feared losing its ill-gotten assets, the mildly socialist government under Patrice Lumumba was overthrown by General Mobutu whose unrivalled kleptocracy held power for 35 years. In 1961, the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in an air crash as they were negotiating a settlement; everything says his plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary although you and I will never know the truth. The fighting has never stopped. In the chaos of the war in Eastern Congo in the late 1990s, about 3 million people died, and many more since them. Where were the internationa rules then? And where are they now when the US and Israel freely attack neighbouring countries just because it suits them? Aggressive war is the supreme international crime, that’s all there is to that, yet Trump freely and cheerfully threatens to “obliterate” Iran, to bomb it back to the stone age and wipe out their culture, but there are no repercussions. Genocide is forbidden by every statute and every moral system known yet Israel freely repeats its intention to force the Palestinians out or destroy them (see here for a record of events).

The ‘golden rule’ has always been “He who has the gold makes the rules.” We can supplement that with “... and he who has the guns enforces them.” In threatening to dismantle the ICC, the US is doing nothing that it hasn’t been doing for the last 80 years. It chooses whatever will be to its benefit, it enforces it and the rest of the world can plait its shit. Take the arch-psychopath Henry Kissinger on ovverthrowing the Allende government in Chile:

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves (June 1970).

In fact, there was never any risk of a Soviet government in Chile but tens of thousands of people died under Kissinger’s and Thatcher’s good friend, Gen. Pinochet. The problem was that the Allende government had nationalised the gigantic copper mines owned by the US companies Anaconda Copper and Kennecott, among others. Kissinger never bothered to hide his soulless cynicism, e.g.: “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one” (Washington Post, Mar 5 2014).

The list of countries the US has actually attacked or invaded since January 1946 is truly frightening. Add to that the coups it has staged, the elections in which it has interfered, the totally corrupt and/or evil dictators it has supported and it becomes clear: the “international rules-based order” is a charade. The rules exist when it suits the US to impose them, and they are ignored when it doesn’t. Nobody, however, should think that this is exclusively an American hobby, everything they know they learned from the British imperialists, and the French and Spanish and so on. The urge to dominate is human. We see it in full force in the Persian Gulf today. Iran is not and never has been a threat to the US. Every time Trump, Biden, Rubio and all the others say it is, they’re lying, for the explicit purpose of gaining control over the entire region for Wall St and for their equally corrupt friends in Tel Aviv. To paraphrase Kissinger: “For the West, the demonization of Iran is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” The only threat Iran presents is to the American ego and to the demonic plans of the zionists to reduce every one of its neighbours to rubble.

Is there anything new in any of this? No, unless you still see the world through the monochromatic lens of “Us goodies and them baddies.” The important message is: Stand back, strip away all the propaganda and look objectively at what is happening. In particular, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to people, companies, groups, countries, religions, political parties and so on. The presumption must always be that they’re in it for themselves. If you have time, watch this video by the British rapper Lowkey. I have no idea where this chap gets his information from, he can practically tell you what a politician ate for lunch one day eight years ago. Similarly, Australia likes to present itself as everybody’s good mate, the cheerful helpful kid over the road but corruption is deeply entrenched in this country. Jack Waterford was the leading political reporter in Canberra for decades; he knows everybody and how they got to where they got. This article on systemic corruption in NSW is worth reading; corruption in this country is not quite so much paper bags stuffed full of cash but is the corruption of influence, of jobs for the boys and a few selected girls. The running sore of the $380billion AUKUS submarines has been corrupt from the very moment the idea was spawned by the disgusting serial liar and former PM, Morrisson and his equally febrile evangelical mate, Mike Pompeo.

Another example came to light a week or so ago. The Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Authority (AHPRA) recently adopted the definition of antisemitism pushed by something called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This is a little unexpected. Quite apart from the fact that there was no public discussion that I saw, it is an overtly political decision by a professional regulator. Apparently, we all have to comply with it even though the first sentence on the IHRA website says: “Read the full text of the IHRA’s non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism ...” (my emphasis). It seems this came from a meeting between the CEO of AHPRA, a Mr Untermeyer, and the woman who is anointed Australia’s “envoy on antisemitism,” an exceedingly well-paid job given to a die-hard zionist by appointment. For myself, I don’t see any point in this sort of thing, we already have perfectly adequate laws prohibiting discrimination of all sorts but apparently health practitioners are likely to slide back unless pulled up sharply. As far as I can see, this is a good example (or bad) of the corruption of influence: one group gains or seeks to gain an advantage by back room manipulation. Let’s not worry about that, though, it’s business as usual but it forced me to look at this definition. One example of what may constitute antisemitism caught my eye:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

That’s a bit strange. Even when declared and instituted Israeli policy precisely mirrors material in, say, Mein Kampf, we’re not allowed to say so? But I do that all the time, I show parallels between one group’s statements or actions and the statements or actions of their enemies. In fact, it was only a week ago that I used Mein Kamp (Chap. 15) to show how Nazi policy toward the USSR mirrored that of the British in building their empire. Similarly, the Nuremberg race laws of 1936 were actually based on the race laws of Kentucky and Tennessee, which had been in place long before Adolf was born and, Auschwitz notwithstanding, survived until the 1950s. As for Israel, there are probably thousands of quotes by a dozens of prime ministers and cabinet ministers, not to overlook extreme racist rabbis like Kahane, Kook Jr and Schneerson, that are identical to what became Nazi state policy, e.g. the little book Zionism Decoded in 101 quotes by Canadian historian, Prof. Yakob Rabkin. A few days after Kristallnacht in 1938, a Russian Jew named David Grün declared:

If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel (p37).

That is historical fact. Grün, renamed Ben Gurion, became the first prime minister of Israel. The idea of slaughtering half a million Jewish children worried him not one jot nor a tittle, and this was before the war. One of the most important of the architects of Israel, the cultured Nahum Goldmann, said of Ben Gurion:

… 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 [1, p94].

So I don’t think AHPRA need bother too much about the very rare antisemitic comments from Australia’s million or so health practitioners, the zionists do it themselves. Another item on the IHRA definition caught my eye:

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Let’s look at this more closely. Firstly, Israel is not a democratic nation: by its own constitution and laws, it is a “Jewish” state. It has two sets of laws, one for its Jewish citizens and one for everybody else. For example, foreign Jews who have never set foot there have the “right of return” whereas the millions of Palestinians, many of whom were born in Israel proper, have no such right. But the point here is not that people require Israel to behave as a sort of enclave of saints, all we want is that it should adhere to the huge body of international humanitarian law and stop killing children [2]. We don’t demand a higher standard from Israel, we’re just sick of it getting away with subhuman behaviour. So in view of the overtly political nature of AHPRA’s decision, and because I don’t support the idea of “regulation by litigation,” it would be helpful if the Agency could give some clarification where Israel’s conduct seems to fall well below acceptable international standards, i.e. using double standards to excuse them. For example:

1. Is it “antisemitic” to expect Israel to adhere to the minimum humanitarian standards expected of any other wealthy country, e.g. not dropping 2000lb bombs on tents crowded with refugees who have no air defences, or refraining from dropping white phosphorous explosives on clearly-marked hospitals?

2. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the UN OHRC report, cited above, as established fact?

3. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the many Israeli government ministers who openly advocate total ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of the ethnic Palestinian populations of Gaza, of the West Bank, of South Lebanon, the annexed Golan Heights, and of Israel itself?

4. Is it “antisemitic” to describe as pogroms the constant attacks on indigenous Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank by heavily armed gangs of Zionist “settlers,” aided and abetted by the Israeli police and military, which, over the past 30 months, have resulted in hundreds of deaths including many children?

5. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that Israel meets the definition of an apartheid state, specifically that laws applicable to Jewish citizens do not apply to non-Jewish citizens, and vice versa, e.g. the recent law imposing a mandatory death penalty on non-Jews for convictions that, if the accused were Jewish, would not apply?

6. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that the current prime minister of Israel and other senior Israeli officials are the subject of arrest warrants by the ICC for the crime of genocide in Gaza?

7. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to Israel’s recent military action against Iran as “unprovoked, illegal and immoral” in that it meets the standard of “aggressive war” as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunals?

8. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the behaviour of Israeli military and prison guards toward illegally-detained Palestinian men, women and children, including sexual assault by trained dogs, amounts to torture? [1].

9. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government and military command structure are fully aware that unconvicted and often uncharged Palestinian prisoners are routinely subject to torture and, in the case of several MKs and the minister for internal security, are strongly in favour of it, and that perpetrators of the torture are not penalised?

10. Is it “antisemitic” to express the view that if anybody treated Jewish detainees in the brutal manner described in numerous reports, that the Israeli government would react with incendiary rage, i.e. that it applies double standards in its daily activities?

11. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government enacted its “Hannibal doctrine” on October 7^th, 2023, thereby deliberately causing the death of hundreds of Israeli and other citizens?

12. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Dahiya doctrine is a crime against humanity?

13. Is it “antisemitic” to say that mobs of Israelis regularly rampage through Palestinian areas in their cities screaming “Death to the Arabs” and damaging Palestinian property while the Israeli police stand by?

14. Is it “antisemitic” to show the clear parallels between the freely expressed plans of the current prime minister of Israel regarding his vision of a “Greater Israel,” e.g. standing before the UN General Assembly with a map showing Israel occupying ethnically-cleansed territory from the Nile to the Euphrates, and the Nazi vision of an ethnically-cleansed “Gross Deutschland” extending across to the Urals, as outlined in Mein Kampf (Chap. 14, pp398-408), especially as both plans are expressly based in the idea of a hierarchy of races?

15. Is it “antisemitic” to say that one looks forward to the day when somebody does to Israel what Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran and other places, i.e. attacking and illegally occupying other countries’ territory and, as part of the plan, destroying the civilian infrastructure, especially water and sewerage facilities, schools, hospitals, energy sources, agriculture, etc., leaving the remaining civilian population huddled and starving in rat-infested rubble?

Hmm. Seems you can’t contact AHPRA, and nobody is allowed to go to their offices. Oh well, no doubt they’ll come for me. I asked a friend to cosign this to send to AHPRA. She agreed, then had to change her mind: “I asked a colleague about the letter, and they said this would likely mean I would not be renewed this year for my academic appointment, although that would not be explicitly acknowledged. It has become such a pernicious issue. I am sorry but I will have to decline to be a signatory, I don’t want to lose my academic position.”

I agree, she’s more use in her post than out, but when you have to legislate what people must believe, you know you’re losing the war.

References:

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

2. UN Human Rights Council Report: The essence of childhood has been destroyed. June 18^th 2026, document A/HRC/62/CRP.2.

****

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.

****

At the NATO conference in Ankara this week, it was announced that European countries would collaborate on building an entirely new, highly accurate, long-distance missile system for $50billion. Britain, meantime, has announced that it must reduce social security and NHS payments in order to pay for a new fighter jet, four new nuclear missile submarines and the AUKUS attack nuclear submarines. The first of these are due for delivery in about 8 years although design work hasn’t even started. Germany will boost its military budget massively and the US (i.e. Trump) has threatened a trade embargo against Spain as it has announced it will not be increasing its military budget. That’s in between him suddenly firing 81 accusations of “communism” against people he doesn’t like, such as the Democratic Socialists (DSA), of which Mamdami is a member (see Robert Reich’s rejoinder). That says Trump is losing his grip.

All this is despite the very obvious failure of conventional warfare in the Persian Gulf this past few months, but they say that generals are always ready to fight the last war. So what’s going on? Actually, it’s nothing new, just another attempt to rerun the Crimean War against everybody’s favourite monster, Mother Russia. At 17million sqkm, Russia is far and away the largest country in the world and immeasurably wealthy in natural resources, as well as having major advantages in its huge coastline (37,600km) and borders. For people who like conquest and colonisation, Russia is and always has been the prize of all prizes. Trouble is, the Russians don’t particularly like conquest and colonisation directed against them and refuse to cooperate in the Great Game.

Their history is long and fascinating but the overwhelming theme is one of endless destruction. As long as there have been records, invading armies from east and west have swept across the limitless steppes, back and forth, just because there was nothing to stop them. For hundreds of years, Russia has steadily expanded its territory, down to the Caucasus and especially east, across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. The hostility of Western Europeans to their eastern Slavic brethren goes back forever but took its modern form when Napoleon was chased out of Russia, allowing the Czar’s armies direct entry to Europe and to the settlement conferences. For the West, the problem was clear: they wanted to dominate the world themselves, and were well on the way to doing it, but then this gigantic empire of oafs suddenly thrust themselves into the party and threatened to spoil it for the countries that thought they had the right to dispose the world. Panic, which spilled into war in Crimea and various other places in 1853-56. This was the first true modern war, fought under appalling conditions, and Russia’s defeat forced it to modernise, e.g. emancipation of serfs (aka slaves) in 1861, modernisation of education, the military and so on.

In the first half of the 20^th Century, Russia and USSR were attacked or invaded six times. During the Great War, about 3.5million Russians died but nobody really knows the number. In the Civil War after the Revolution, from 7-12million citizens died; in Stalin’s Terror and the Holodomor, another 20million; during the Nazi invasion, at least 25million more. The country suffered unbelievably during each of these disasters. In 1945, the Soviet leadership swore: Never again. Nobody ever will threaten us again. This was a bit of a problem as Marxist theory said that as long as there are capitalists, they will try to destroy socialism. The US promptly obliged by surrounding the USSR and later China with some 850 foreign military bases, all aimed at the Eurasian heartland. Accordingly, the Soviet leadership pushed to develop nuclear weapons as a defensive measure and felt it had to match the West bomb for bomb. In the West, this was broadcast as “Soviet aggression”: “Look at those dreadful commies, they want to destroy us, quick, they’ve opened a missile gap, we have to beat them.” Truman thought that the US would be able to keep the peace with 200 nuclear bombs. At its peak, it had about 15,000 and still has about 7,000, of which 1,700 are actively deployed (China has 640, with 34 deployed).

We know why Russians fear and mistrust the West, there are tens of millions of skulls buried in the rich dark earth as proof. Trump’s perfidy is simply the icing on a bitter cake. They believe that the West helped the Nazis to gain power, helped them stay in power and did heaps to encourage them to invade the USSR. Trouble is, they’re right. There is a book called Conjuring Hitler, by Guido Preparata (2005, available online), which argues that the British MI6 and other spy agencies chose Hitler as their man in the early 1920s when he was still in Munich and fostered his career thereafter. I think that wildly overstates the case but it is beyond question that, given the instability in Germany from 1919 to about 1936 or 37, every politician in the West saw the choice as “anybody but the Bolsheviks.” They were delighted when the Nazis took power and immediately began throwing communists and socialists into the new KonzentrationLager. They knew Hitler’s hold on power was very weak but they also knew that if they made any sort of move against him, he would be toppled and the Reds would take over. And that was the nightmare in their nightmares: a Bolshevik alliance stretching from the Ardennes to Bering Strait. True, Churchill warned against Hitler but it was only because he threatened the British Empire, not because of all the Slavs he had earlier announced he wanted to kill (Mein Kampf, Chap 15).

Accounts in the West of World War II more or less ignore the fact that the European war was essentially a land war in the East. All the rest was a sideshow. 85% of German casualties were on the Eastern Front, 90% of their tanks left the factories and headed east, and so on, but we never hear this. It’s all a mixture of plucky Britain and Hogan’s heroes (which I’ve never seen) interspersed with the Final Solution, quite forgetting that Germany’s goal in the USSR was 30million Slavs exterminated in the first year of the invasion. They tried, but didn’t quite make it. From the time of the invasion in June 1941 to the end of that year, 3.25million Soviet troops were captured. 97% of them were dead by the end of December, 20,000 a day, the greatest single slaughter of humans in our ghastly history. I could say “All this is ignored” but it’s not ignored, it’s actually carefully suppressed. We are told the Nazi war was a war to exterminate Jews in Europe but it wasn’t, it was a war to colonise the USSR in the same way Britain had colonised India and North America, France in North and West Africa or Belgium in the Congo. Do our esteemed leaders in the West tell little fibs? Most emphatically they do. The recent American War on Everybody, Chapter 386 (Persian Gulf rerun) was on the basis the Iranian government was hanging on by its fingernails and just needed a push to fall over. Lies, lies, lies, from beginning to end. See this report from Patrick Henningsen who is currently in Iran for the Ayatollah’s funeral.

At present in Europe, there are two themes trending. The first is terrified shrieks echoing through the media: “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, get more guns.” The second is: “Russia is on the verge of collapse, they’re incompetent barbarians and we just need to push a bit and they’ll fall over.” Unstated: “... and then we can loot them to our heart’s content.”

If indeed the Russians have any military designs on Western Europe, which I seriously doubt, there are a couple of points to remember. First, all things being equal, at their present rate of advance in Ukraine, fighting a much smaller and less industrialised country, it would take them about 2,600 years to reach the Portuguese coast. Fighting a combined population and industrial production many times larger than their own, on a front about twenty times larger, we could expect to see the Tovariches jump into the surf at Nazare in about 28,700 years.

Second, all things aren’t equal. As Iran and Hezbollah have shown, the days of conventional war, where more tanks and bombers and troops means more victories, are well and truly over. In a few months, Hezbollah has destroyed over 400 Israeli Merkava tanks, costing about $5million each, using $300 home-made drones. Iran took out two high end American radar systems costing $1billion each with a couple of indigenous cruise missiles costing about $100,000 each. Once they were blinded, the Iranians launched hundreds of Shahed drones at its attackers, costing about $20,000 each, forcing their opponents to fire Patriot missile defences at $4million a pop. Iran shot down about 34 American drones, costing $30million each although the most expensive, Triton drones, cost up to $200million each. Their cheap drones destroyed air fuelling tankers costing $200million each and forced the $8billion aircraft carriers to rush to safety. The USS Gerald Ford (which cost $13billion to build and $7million a day to run) suffered major damage from a fire starting in a laundry and will be out of action for a year at a cost of a mere $25million (I don’t believe that figure, that’s a rounding error in the Pentagon).

Is there a message in this? I think so but I also think our politicians and generals are incapable of seeing it. First message: we can no longer afford militarism. We can’t afford the $19trillion (with a T) that military activity costs each year, in direct costs to build the weapons, pay for the fuel, pay the troops and so on, plus the destruction of civilian infrastructure, plus the myriad deaths and injuries and pensions and so on, plus the “opportunity cost.” That is, if we spend $1 on a bullet, that’s $1 we didn’t spend on some tomato plants to grow food. If we put one young person in uniform, that’s one industrial or nursing or farming or building or mothering job unfilled, so no production. If we buy one nuclear submarine, that’s about 800,000 public housing units we don’t build and so the ranks of the homeless swell steadily, meaning more people to look after them or put them in prison or mental hospitals. Crucial point: militarism consumes the country exponentially. If you double the size of the military, it consumes not twice as much but four times as much through the opportunity cost.

Second, and despite the overlooked fact that aggressive war is a crime against humanity, the advantage has always been with the defenders, except now that’s magnified a hundred fold. In a few hours, kids can build a drone to destroy a tank and its four crew. Iran’s marine drones, both surface and subsurface, are a match for any $2billion destroyer in the Western navies, and its home-grown missiles will deal with the really big ships. Britain was very wise not to send its navy to “assist” in the Persian Gulf. While the Iranians may have hesitated over sinking an American ship, they would have fought each other for the chance to sink HMS Dogspoop. And Trump wouldn’t have lifted a finger.

Third, we can no longer afford to pretend that Russia is a danger but global warming isn’t. So far, the war in the Persian Gulf has dumped something like 350million tonnes of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The devastation in Gaza and South Lebanon would easily double that. Every jet taking off, every missile fired, every bomb dropped or rifle fired injects poison into the air. Every military jet produced, every tank, every pair of military boots, every meal delivered to a soldier in the field, every operation to remove shrapnel, every element of this industry of death is quietly pouring deadly gases and chemicals into the biosphere and, above all, diverting attention from the looming disaster from climate change. Europe and the US have had several weeks of heat wave and they don’t like it. Good. I hope it hurts because until it really hurts, all the Trumps and Netanyuhas and Kushners and Epsteins who have the world’s steering wheel in a death grip won’t take their eyes off their bank balances to do something about it. Better still, we should throw all of them in the dumpster and lock the lid.

Final message: Who wants war? When Hitler marched to occupy Czechoslovakia, he expected ecstatic crowds to line the streets but they stayed home and wept. The troops marched through dark and silent roads as the population did not want war, even though they got it later. EU president Ursula von der Leyen and various other pollies are running around telling everybody they have to get ready for war with Russia within five years but it’s an uphill battle for the poor dears. Most Germans do not see Russia as a threat (23% although 35% see the US as the major threat to world peace). How many citizens actually think war is a good idea? None. If so, how are they convinced to pay for the military and send their sons to be killed? Simple: they are told over and over again that the bad people over there, the sinister Other, are evil subhumans who are secretly plotting to attack in the middle of the night, so we goodies need to arm ourselves to the teeth and conduct lots of military exercises which consist of sending heavily armed fighters straight at the enemy’s borders then pulling them back at the last second. The West does this all the time then wonders why the other side gets angry.

Even though the overwhelming majority of people want to live in peace, this ploy works because the fear of subjugation is so strong in humans that they can be led to do stupid things by clever operators manipulating their emotions from behind the scenes. And it has to stop. But it won’t stop until the common people rise up and take power from the 1% of unmitigated scoundrels who are running the show to suit themselves. The won’t give up power easily.

****

Further evidence of the deliberate targeting of children in Gaza.

****

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.

****

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).

****

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/

****

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.

****

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.

****

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 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.

****

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.