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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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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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.

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

****

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nexus

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

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

Listen now

3 months ago · 1 like · Mark Solar

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference:

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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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Just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does. In the US, Sen. Adam Schiff refers to the highest levels of the current administration as “All a pack of liars” (at 0.20). If, as seems likely, the UK prime minister is pushed out, his replacement will be the seventh in ten years. However, the most likely candidate, Wes Streeting, has just admitted that in providing Israel with arms, Britain is breaking its own laws although people aren’t paying attention as they’re transfixed by scandals in the royal family. France has had three PMs in two years and is barely able to pass the budget. Australia’s Labor prime minister is widely despised as weak and indecisive but the right wing opposition is too busy tearing itself to bits to do any decent opposing. Germany is floundering; Belgium goes two years without a government; the Netherlands has more holes in its dykes than it has fingers; Norway’s crown princess is likely to be turfed out, taking the monarchy with her; on and on it goes. All this when the standard of living in the Western world is high; stock markets are peaking; science and medical science are powering ahead; the usual wars are somewhere else, so what’s going on? If we’ve never had it so good, why is everything so bad and getting worse?

The standard answer is and always has been: “It’s not our fault, it’s Them. They’re wrecking things so we need to deal with Them severely.” In the past, that has usually meant another war but these days, the West’s economies are creaking and would probably fall apart under the strain but I disagree with that diagnosis. I would say that the entirety of the West’s current problems, and most of everybody else’s, rest on one point: the truly abysmal quality of the people who push themselves into positions of power. What we’re seeing in the Epstein files is a pervasive pattern of profound and institutionalised corruption at the highest levels, reaching around the world. What I say next, you have to take my word for it but the proof will come. Well, I hope it does, I hope the corrupt people aren’t able to conceal it, and it’s this: What we’re seeing with the Epstein files is just the tip of the iceberg. The corruption extends far, far further than just a bunch of ridiculous old men cavorting around with no clothes on, even including their crimes that deserve decades in prison. Fact is, the corruption touches practically every aspect of modern life.

Today, corruption affects government at all levels, national, state and local; it reaches into industry and finance, communications (especially communications), health, the military, academia, entertainment, agriculture and fishing, construction, everything, and there’s a reason. Actually, it’s several reasons, synergising to produce a tornado of corruption, sucking wealth from the lower levels of society and funneling it to the upper, where it is used to finance further corruption in a self-sustaining cycle.

The first reason is what we see every day in the news: with few exceptions, people at the highest levels of society are of psychopathic character, some less so but mostly full-blown psychopaths, meaning totally self-centred, totally lacking in any empathy for other humans, remorseless in their pursuit of power and wealth and prepared to stop at nothing in order to get it. It’s important to remember that most psychopaths have never been convicted, they’re too clever for that and can generally arrange for other people to carry the can or even to have an unfortunate accident with some cement overshoes while fishing in the river. Bernard Madoff is the classic example of the suave, charming and utterly ruthless psychopath who fooled everybody. He was convicted only after a lifetime of honours, adulation, cheating, lying and stealing. He was Jewish, and he used that fact to steal from Jewish victims of the Holocaust, including the saintly Eli Wiesel. It really doesn’t get much more heartless than that.

There are two major factors involved in causing this state of affairs. First, our political system selects for the ruthlessly determined, the scheming and manipulative, the suave and seductive liars and cheats who are fascinated, beguiled and themselves seduced by power. As I show in Narcisso-Fascism, power and sexuality are intimately intertwined, especially in men although there’s no shortage of psychopathic women, albeit mostly a little more discreet. However, the drive to dominate, the lust for power precedes sexual expression. Getting to the top unleashes the sexual urge. Low down in the hierarchy, most people keep their sexual urges out of sight, they can generally manage to keep their pants on but once they get to the top, they let it all hang out, as they say. More importantly, the sexual urge fades with age (fortunately) but the lust for power? Never. The decrepit elderly can be truly vicious as they fight to hang on to power, long after they’ve sent their enemies to meet the headsman.

The second factor is that power and great wealth produce psychopathy. Now hang on sunshine, people object, are you saying that people’s personalities change just because they go up the golden staircase? You can’t say that, everybody knows that personality is inherited, psychology has proven it’s all in the DNA. Psychologists like Hans Eysenck and Robert Plomin spent their lives on vast studies to show it’s genetic and now genome assay is confirming it. To which I reply: Rubbish. They started with the idea that personality is genetic and shaped their research to “prove” it. Psychologist Jay Joseph, of UC Davis, has devoted his career to showing where they went wrong [1,2]; in particular, twin studies, he concludes, are so flawed as to be meaningless. The very definition of personality says that the influence of heredity on personality, if any, is so slight as to be lost in the noise:

Personality is the total set of explicit and implicit mental rules (including attitudes, beliefs, etc) that, in the stable adult mode of behaviour, generates the uniquely distinguishing habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and the environment [3, Chap 8].

Rules are cognitive elements, part of the informational space that constitutes the mind, and are acquired by life experience; DNA codes for proteins, not for ideas and beliefs. As with all such cognitive elements, our rules can be changed at will and commonly are. The clearest example is the group of post-traumatic mental disorders, where a person’s belief in the world as a pleasant, predictable place and the self as capable and reliable changes after bad experiences to seeing the world as a dangerous, unpredictable place and the self as weak and useless. That’s sudden, that’s obvious. These changes are wholly psychological, nothing to do with biology, a programming error, if you like.

On the other hand, changes due to coming into great wealth or great power can be just as extensive, but they’re subtle, they occur over years rather than minutes and others generally don’t see it, not least because people are able to conceal it. It’s not like the explosive anxiety of PTSD, as it’s called, which morphs into rage in a split second and can’t possibly be concealed. The truly psychopathic personality is (mostly) not anxious, they don’t have anything but bad behaviour to conceal so they aren’t driven to drink or get into fights and so on. They’re calm and in full control while they plan bad things so they can take the time to hide the evidence, to set up decoys or bury the bodies far away. The mechanism of the change in personality is that when a person comes into money or power, his sense of entitlement and privilege expands accordingly: “I worked hard for what I’ve got, not like all those people I’m carrying so I deserve a little bit extra.” But that little bit extra soon becomes quite a lot extra, and then a great deal extra and they don’t stop. They move from the small house to the big house then to the mansion, then add a beach house and a mountain house; the little car becomes a big car, then two huge cars, then they need a new house with a much bigger garage to house the daughter’s Mercedes and the son’s Lambo (the one he later smashes doing burnouts); then the husband needs a glamorous girlfriend or two and the daughter marries into oil money and whole new vistas of wealth open up.

A sense of privilege is simply the sense that “I am exempt from the normal rules of life, they don’t apply to me because I’m special and I can do what I like. And if anybody doesn’t like it, fuggem or maybe arrange an accident for them.” The principal is as Lord Acton didn’t quite say 150 years ago:

Money and power attract the corruptible, and the corruptible are quickly corrupted by money and power.

This is not genetic. This are personality changes for the worse induced by life experiences because they are rewarding. These people have a choice: they can either remain honest and not get immensely rich, or they can adopt new, self-centred rules and turn into monsters. As far as I can see, they all choose the latter so we need to ask: What is it about the societies we have built that rewards psychopathy? It’s not new, of course, the rich and powerful have always believed the ordinary rules don’t apply to them, as in droit du seigneur, etc, but it’s rapidly getting worse. The reason is that the vast fortunes people can build today are far beyond stratospheric; several of them have actually ridden into space on their fortunes and one of them thinks he can reach Mars. As the fortune grows, so grows the sense of entitlement: “I have all this money, it’s mine so I can do what I like with it but if you don’t like it, tough shit.” So is that all it is, just people making different decisions? Yes, that’s all it is. The value of an information-based theory of mind [3] is that it allows new information to be incorporated as quickly or slowly as conditions dictate. A “genetic theory of personality” can’t account for this.

Now we’ve identified the problem, we need some solutions. First step is to flatten the power hierarchies. Concentrations of power, such as the near-absolute power of a sitting US president, should be avoided at all costs. There is not a person on earth who doesn’t know that Trump is both seriously corrupt and dementing, yet nobody is able to touch him. Compare that with the Westminster system in Britain where, on less evidence of wrongdoing, an hereditary prince has been defenestrated, one of the most influential politicians of the past 50years has been expelled from Lords and is looking at prison, and the prime minister himself is dangling by a thread. Same in Norway: the shenanigans of a wayward crown princess and her psychopathic but incredibly stupid son could easily cause the fall of the House of Glücksburg (the short name of their monarchy). Don’t forget the two Norwegian politicians who negotiated the Oslo Accords in 1993: they can feel the hot breath of the police dogs on their ankles since it was revealed Epstein left their children $5million each in his will. Meantime, across the Atlantic under the Trump imperium, first son in law Kushner pockets billions from the Saudis and everybody claps and cheers his business acumen. Not to mention the “gift” of the $400million 747 with the gold-plated crapper for “dad.” The oleaginous Howard Lutnick lies through his back teeth on TV but later dismisses it as nothing to get hot about. They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong but the real issue is that nobody can do anything about them without the regal nod. That won’t be forthcoming because the only nodding the old man is doing is off to sleep. The problem is that the power hierarchy in the US is too steep, unless it is flattened, there will be further trouble.

Second step to reduce the risk of psychopathic behaviour among the rich and powerful is to prevent people getting too rich in the first place. Is there such a thing as “too rich”? If you ask the rich, they would say “Don’t be ridiculous, too rich is a contradiction of terms.” However, that claim is based on the faulty concept of economics known as neoliberalism. This says that governments must not interfere with the smooth functioning of the market. The market already knows everything needed to make proper decisions on allocation of investment, setting prices and deciding rewards and punishments. Bureaucrats can never have enough information to make a proper decision. If they try, they’ll end up creating an inefficient market and all will suffer. This is accepted as gospel. If the market produces vast wealth for a few, so be it, they must have earned it otherwise it wouldn’t have happened because markets are never wrong. It’s said that 85% of economists in the world today accept the principles of neoliberalism; all they’re doing in their journals is arguing over the seating plan at the Nobel ceremony.

My view is that this is completely fallacious. There is a real thing called “too rich.” It is the point at which people abandon the rules of normal behaviour society imposes on them and start making up their own. Neoliberalism is built on a phony model of human psychology in which people are mindless little robots, buying and selling entirely dispassionately according to what makes economic sense. It’s a system designed by some decidedly psychopathic economists, sold to cunning politicians who sensed in it the chance to make truckloads of money, and foisted on a befuddled public who had no choice but to accept that what they were told was a “scientific system designed by experts.” It is nothing of the sort. Neoliberalism is a system intended to make a small part of the population very wealthy while leaving the rest behind. How do we know? Because if it hadn’t produced vast wealth for the few, allowing them to subvert the political system to their advantage, if it had paid relatively more to workers than to the wealthy, it wouldn’t have lasted one election cycle. That didn’t happen. It worked perfectly as planned, making the rich richer and, crucially, giving them excess funds that have allowed them to buy the political process.

There are other arguments against neoliberalism, for example, if all economic activity is driven by rational self-interest, how come there are wars? How does it make economic sense for somebody to be blown up or, what is often worse, left severely injured and unable to work, in pain and mentally disturbed for life? It doesn’t. There is something else going on to produce wars. Sure, some people make vast profits from constant warfare but the phenomenon itself is driven by factors that neoliberalism pretends don’t exist, specifically the irresistible urge to dominate. Another case for neoliberals to answer is precisely what we see being uncovered by the Trump files: corruption. Corruption is, of course, the rational self-interest of greed in purest form, untempered by emotion or any sense of fair play. Given the “light touch” neoliberal economic system, where regulation and supervision are seen as evil, people will take advantage of it. They’ll see the opportunity and they’ll take it, making them wealthy enough to bribe politicians and so they can get even wealthier. When it comes to inequity fueled by corruption, neoliberalism is a self-reinforcing system. And it needs to be dismantled before it destroys us, as economist Karl Polanyi predicted back in 1944 [4].

Today, we have the technology to track all money transfers; we have the precedent of taxation as a means of reducing inequality; and we have tried and tested models of social welfare that lift all boats, as it were, leaving nobody stranded. All we lack is the political will. Trouble is, the people who have the political power to enact these types of changes are themselves wannabe millionaires who are standing drooling in line, waiting for their turn to start shovelling money into their tax haven accounts. If we do nothing, things will get worse, because power and great wealth produce psychopathic personality changes.

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As an example of capture of state administrative machinery by corporate interests, consider two sovereign wealth funds, Norway and Australia. In 1990, Norway, popn. 5million, established a fund to collect all the royalties on its newly-discovered oil and gas reserves. Their fund now stands at about $1.9trillion, or $340,000 per person. Per capita, Australia is quite likely the biggest combined mineral and energy exporter in the world. Australia does not have a sovereign wealth fund. Between them, the Commonwealth and state governments collect a pittance in royalties so all the money goes to the miners. The last decent attempt to correct this, Kevin Rudd’s Mineral Resource Rental Tax in about 2012, was defeated by the mining companies spending huge amounts to influence politicians. Most of the big companies channel their wealth through obscure shell companies in offshore tax havens so they pay little or no tax. Britain made the same mistake with its “North Sea gas and oil bonanza,” paying their royalties into the current account. Now the oil has run out but the money was spent on high living, not socked away for a rainy day, and they’re being pissed on.

All this is justified under the doctrine called neoliberalism. The economic doctrine known as neoliberalism is a political choice, not a law of nature. There are laws of nature that profoundly influence the economy, chief among which is the urge to form dominance hierarchies. It is not, however, a law as in “law of gravity” or the need to eat and breathe, but an inclination to respond in certain ways to the environment. We can influence the outcomes by changing the rewards and punishments the environment dishes out. That’s a matter of politics and is well within reach.

Great wealth produces psychopathy in a self-reinforcing loop. Trouble is, the people now holding the money and power will fight to the death (your death) to prevent you prising their fingers off the honey pot. If we do nothing, we will remain stuck in a doom loop.

References:

1. Joseph J. 2004. The Gene Illusion. New York: Algora Press.

2. Joseph J (2014) The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. New York: Routledge.

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

4. Polanyi K (1944). The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon Press (available online).

****

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 loose assembly of nations known as “The West” has long claimed to be bound by a “rules-based international order” based in a welter of international treaties and institutions, of which the UN is the most important. Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state …

Wars of actual defence are permitted (not preemptive) but other than that, only the UN Security Council can authorise an armed attack on another state. Everything else is deemed aggressive war. The Nuremberg Principles state:

Aggressive war … is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole …

This could not be clearer yet time and time again since the Charter was signed in 1945, nations have launched wars of aggression. To date, only one, Russia, has been penalised, following its attack on Ukraine 4 years ago. On its side, Russia asserts its “special military operation” is entirely defensive, to prevent Ukraine joining NATO as it would mean Western nuclear weapons could be stored in Ukraine for immediate use against Russia. Moreover, for decades, civil wars have raged which the international community either can’t or won’t control, but civil wars tend to stay in their boundaries and most of them don’t have access to high-grade weapons systems. They can still do a lot of damage, e.g. with machetes in Ruanda, but the many aggressive wars by “Western” countries have carried no consequences, so they’ve kept doing it. Now, their impunity has brought us to the point where we face an existential risk from nuclear-armed states starting something they can’t control.

The unprovoked Israeli-US attacks on Iran in June last year are a classic example of such folly: two nuclear-armed states using the very latest in high tech spyware, satellite surveillance, stealth fighters and bombers launched an unprovoked and undeclared “war” on a state whose defences have been seriously degraded by decades of “sanctions” and illegal attacks. The ostensible reason for this act of aggressive war was to prevent Iran gaining nuclear weapons, even though there was an effective treaty until, in 2018, in a fit of jealous pique, Trump tore it up. Iran has repeatedly stated it is not developing nuclear weapons, which is confirmed by the IAEA (GOV/2025/38). The real risk here is that China gains about 80% of its sea-borne oil from Iran and anything that threatens that supply is seen by them as potentially an act of war, which could conceivably lead to a response in kind. As I recently said would happen, if Trump got away with his attack on Venezuela, he would immediately start looking around for another target and he did. He and his dear friend in Tel Aviv decided they would attack Iran again and moved a massive fleet to the Gulf, along with EWACS planes and others but, a few days ago, they abruptly lost interest. What changed their minds was how, in a massive airlift, China sent its most advanced air defence systems, including radar and missile systems that can take out any Western aircraft or ships currently in service and survive the attack intact. Whoops. Forget it, just kidding, we weren’t interested anyway, their oil stinks.

This is the level of international relations today. We are in the grip of people who function at the level of playground bullies looking for the smallest or weakest kid they can pound, just to make themselves feel bigger. You may ask: What the hell is going on? If we take John Mearsheimer’s approach, the US and Israel have to dominate Iran to maintain hegemony as this is the only way they can feel secure. But that makes no sense as the US is once again threatening a massive blockade on Cuba. By Mearsheimer’s analysis, would only happen because the US feels threatened by Cuba, which is beyond ridiculous. The US population is about 35 times larger than Cuba’s, and their GDP about 500 times larger. The idea that the US feels “threatened” by this miniscule, bankrupt opéra bouffe island is the stuff of delusion. Well, it would be a delusion except none of the people, such as Trump, Vance, Rubio, Gabbard and all the rest who are putting this story around believe a word of it. Their sense of “threat” is not a delusion, they are simply lying. Which means Mearsheimer’s completely wrong so we can forget him.

The Trumpists also don’t believe that Iran is a threat, or Venezuela, or North Korea, or Columbia. Russia and China, yes, they see them as a threat but not a military threat. With the minnows, there is only one possible explanation for “The West’s” consistently aggressive stance: these countries won’t grovel when they’re told to. They can’t be dominated, they won’t kiss Trump’s “ass” as he boasted, and that drives Americans insane. That’s all. There is nothing complex about it, you do not need to be an emeritus professor to realise that the whole international drama is the human urge to dominate writ large. Of course, the other side of the domination coin is that humans resent being dominated, as in “the irresistible force meets the immovable object,” and will fight to the death for their freedom. Why is this self-evident truth so difficult to grasp? If everybody stays within their borders, life is quiet but trouble arises when one group of people get the idea they’re superior, that they’re entitled to be dominant, and they act on it. As it happens, Americans believe they have a god-given right to dominate the entire planet in every respect for all time (“full spectrum dominance”) and this is drummed into them from infancy. Don’t believe it? Have a look at this photo of the “school room” in a prison for five year old children (it’s called an immigration detention centre but don’t be fooled).

On the wall is a huge American flag, with a large sign saying telling the pint-sized detainees they are in the “Land of the free, Home of the brave.” The Orwellian irony of this is totally lost on the many “adults” involved since, from birth, they are themselves completely brainwashed by this sort of nonsense (thank heavens we don’t have that shit in Australia, I would have been in serious trouble). They don’t see anything wrong with saying to the weeping children: “Hey kids, be happy, you’re in the Land of the Free. Those large, heavily-armed men in masks who snatched you on the way to school are your Brave Defenders.” The children know they’re not free, so why can’t adults see this? Because they don’t want to, they like to believe this pseudo-patriotic drivel. Looking at that flag fluttering bravely in the breeze gives them a thrill because it means power and domination, it means people in every corner of the globe bowing and scraping and “kissing ass” as Uncle Sam passes by, and they can share it. For the nobodies running that prison, the power flows through them too, it lifts them above the foreign riffraff they’re guarding, lightens their step and gives them better erections. This is what humans want. We all need to feel worthwhile and if we have no inner sense of self-worth, as Trump has none, the easiest way to boost yourself is by putting your knee on other people’s necks.

The entire American sense of self-worth is now inextricably tied to being “leader of the free world, the greatest and most powerful nation in human history, Number One in every respect, either revered or feared by all because we’re so powerful and benevolent.” No. No. No. Bullies are not respected. If there is a person who feels good from being dominant, ipso facto there is also a person who feels bad from being dominated. That’s a law of human nature (it’s actually primate nature but we’re just naked primates). Bullies may be feared but the downtrodden are not mindless, they’re storing grievances and waiting for the chance to push back. And they will, because their self-esteem depends on it.

Two things flow from looking at the international scene as simply the wanton expression of the urge to be most powerful. The first comes from the dump last week of half of the 6 million Epstein files that were supposed to be released in December (a lengthy review here, which includes part of this shorter review; both are by garrulous “lefties” as there has been a notable silence from the evangelical and right wing camps; they are both reliable). What it shows is the endless webs of institutionalised depravity and corruption at the highest levels of society. At one point in the longer video, the speaker asks: “What happens when people become billionaires, does it rot their morals?” You got it, sunshine, that’s exactly what happens. Great wealth increases the sense of privilege and entitlement. As the sense of entitlement expands, the sense of any need for moral restraint contracts to make room for it because they’re incompatible. Regardless of how they got their pelf, the truly wealthy genuinely believe they’re different, that the ordinary rules of life and the universe do not apply to them. Morality is flipped on its head: for them, it’s not a case of ‘How I need to act toward you’ but ‘What you need to do for me.’ Thus, the rich become enraged when somebody tries to stop them doing what they want to do, which mainly means getting more money to spend on themselves while humiliating the untermenschen, like darling Andrew crouching over a barely pubertal girl.

This is why they take not the slightest notice of warnings about global warming, the impending extinction crisis or even nuclear war: the poor may be wiped out in their billions but the wealthy couldn’t give a shit. They have no doubt that, in their bunkers deep in the mountains or on their island hideaways, they’ll survive the apocalypse, that life will actually be better after the smoke has cleared because there won’t be so many cars on the freeways and they’ll be able to drive their Bugatti Veyrons at full speed. And no pesky highway police, of course, only their private militias to keep the peons in line. It’s hard for ordinary people to believe this but the wealthy really, genuinely, do not care about anybody or anything but themselves. And their kind, of course, they stick together. This is why great wealth has to be eliminated: it is an existential threat to the planet. Wealth and power poison the mind.

The second point is the danger of people who genuinely believe in a hierarchy of humanity, with one group at the top and all the others lined up in order beneath. This is precisely what the Nazis believed: Deutschland über alles, the Aryan master race at the top giving all the orders with the rest working the fields or factories or dug in as fertiliser. We all know where that went but the idea of racial superiority is still with us, it didn’t vanish in 1945. There has never been the slightest question in any European mind that they are superior to the coloured races, and other races often thought the same of each other. The Japanese thought they were superior to Chinese who deserved to be colonised; the paler northern Indians built a religion on racial intolerance of the darker southerners; the ethnic Arabic people of northern Sudan despised the Africans to the south and tried to drive them out, a slaughter that continues today.

These days, well, we’re a bit chary about mentioning racial superiority in public but people don’t have any such qualms about the concept of national superiority: “Panama hasn’t looked after the Canal, we should take it back. Canada should be our 51^st state. We want Greenland. We’ll redevelop Gaza as a riviera (bizarre picture at 1.04). We should just take Venezuela’s oil. We want regime change in Cuba and Iran,” and so on. There is no sense, no awareness of the concept that laws actually apply to all, only Macht hat Recht, that right grows from might. Ominously, there is practically no pushback within the US to this sort of talk.

People who believe they are superior to others will act on it, that’s inevitable. It doesn’t matter how they justify it, either Manifest Destiny or religion or genes or Darwinism, it will cause trouble. We see this in the Middle East where one state believes it has a right to other people’s territory and is hell-bent on driving them out. Their religion says “We are the Chosen People, God gave us all this. In taking it back we’re fulfilling God’s plan so if you oppose us, you are Satanic and our ordained duty is to destroy you, man, woman, child and donkey, because in so doing, we become beloved in God’s eyes.” That’s what extremist Zionists believe. At the funeral of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin roared: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” He believed it and so did his huge audience; hardly anybody in Israel complained. In The Jewish Paradox [1], Nahum Goldmann, one of the most important architects of the modern Zionist state and a person of great culture, put it clearly:

The Jews are the most separatist people in the world. Their belief in the notion of the chosen people is the basis of their entire religion. All down the centuries the Jews have intensified their separation from the non-Jewish world; they have rejected, and still do reject, mixed marriages; they have put up one wall after another to protect their existence as a people apart, and have built their ghettos with their own hands, from the shtetl of Eastern Europe to the mellah of Morocco (p8) … the Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race… Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil: he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud— in other words he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates (p12-13) … the worst of these encounters (oppression) was with the Christians, not with the Muslims, and also to stress that 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 (p66).

A sense of innate superiority creates a sense of entitlement and privilege which grows as it has no inherent bounds: feeling more powerful feels better than less, so people always try to gain more power and wealth (Herr Musk is now worth $852billion, and wants more). It’s called sequential targeting: last year’s goal becomes this year’s starting point. A sense of superiority also breeds intense resentment among those regarded as “inferior races… illiterates.” That builds up until, one fine day, it explodes. Why? Because anybody who believes they’re special actually wants the world to know it, they want to be treated differently, they don’t want anybody calling out: “Hey, you there, wait your turn like everybody else.” So they tell people in subtle ways: “I’m a superior type so you lesser beings better know your place.” This infuriates the lesser beings until one day, they start greasing the tumbrils.

As long as there are people who believe in a hierarchy of races or nations or religions or wealth or whatever and are prepared to enforce it, the world is not safe. Your children are not safe. Goldmann understood this: “Characteristic of this attitude is Prime Minister Begin’s statement that Israel does not require Arab acceptance because its existence is the affirmation of God’s promise and Jewish tradition.” Tell that to the Palestinians. Simply holding that attitude causes people to act in a repressive manner toward their neighbours who, in turn, will react, violently if necessary, to preserve their sense of self-worth. That’s elementary. It’s called psychology.

The idea that for any reason, one group is superior to another is not compatible with the peace of the world. The notion that one’s sense of superiority is authorised by god or history or race or power is a falsehood invented to justify what humans want to do anyway: crush other people in order to feel good. The drive to dominate comes first, the justification is second. These days, when an aggressive, nuclear-armed state feels entitled to take what it likes, the continued existence of the planet is at grave risk. Regardless of its justification, be it god, race or destiny, that idea has to go. But, you ask, if Americans and Zionists are as clever as they seem to think they are, how come they can’t see this elementary truth? I’ll tell you: they don’t want to see it because they think they’re winning. That blinds them. One day, it will all come crashing down and then their eyes will be opened. Too late.

Reference:

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

For those who are interested: The Doomsday Clock in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moved one second closer to midnight, now 85 seconds from annihilation. “The Doomsday Clock is about global risks, and what we have seen is a global failure in leadership,” said the Bulletin’s president.

****

It’s easy to be shocked into silence by the corruption, brutality and squalor of the Trumpian regime, its constant threats of war, of people being shot on the streets and corruption reaching to every corner of the state but it’s important not to miss the broader view of what’s actually going on. What is going on is that none of this is new. There hasn’t been a day of peace for the past 125 years; nobody knows how many people are shot by US police because the government doesn’t keep a record but it’s well in excess of 1,200 a year; and as the Epstein saga shows [1], corruption at the highest levels of the transnational plutocracy is not just so normal as to be banal, but de rigueur: that’s how they got there.

None of this mayhem makes sense. The mean standard of living in the world has been rising steadily for decades; standards of health are higher and life span is much longer; levels of education are far higher than ever before; the sum total of human knowledge is doubling every few years; yet morally, we are no better than the most corrupt, the most wantonly violent and decadent of the late imperial Roman courts. Wars abound yet on practically every parameter, we are hurtling toward climate catastrophe, lulled by the blizzard of platitudes on sustainability streaming from our leaders’ mouths and other orifices. We need to keep asking: How did this come about? Where is it heading and, above all, how will it end? What will make our leaders come to their senses? These are critically important questions; to answer them, let’s have a look at a major but underrated influence in everything going on in the US today, one Stephen Miller.

Miller, born in 1985 and now 40, is deputy chief of staff in the White House, meaning he was not elected and doesn’t need Congressional approval to get his key to the gold-plated crappers. He comes from an upper middle class family (mother a social worker, father a lawyer) in the wealthy suburb of Santa Monica in LA; as a child, he was considered “contrarian,” given to racial taunts and self-publicity. There are videos of him at age 17 showing signs of the nasty person he was shaping himself to be (a longer history here). He has a basic university degree but has never worked in the real world, only ever in politics. He is a total political animal, obsessed with power and domination, who prefers working behind the scenes, possibly because he knows he couldn’t win election as council dog catcher (one of the dogs would surely beat him). His political stance is ultra-right wing/fascist, nativist and xenophobic/racist, and he has duly taken control of the administration’s immigration policy, which he dictates in minute detail. Miller is fully responsible for the swarms of thuggish enforcement officers (ICE) terrorising people on the streets and in their homes, and the vast, expanding network of “detention centres,” aka concentration camps, springing up around the country. He plays a major part in actions like blowing up boats in the Caribbean and would have been up to his ears in the Maduro kidnapping. His role in the US today is evocative of Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. Müller, said the historian Richard Evans, was:

… a stickler for duty and discipline, and approached the tasks he was set as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who never took a vacation, Müller was determined to serve the German state, irrespective of what political form it took, and believed it was everyone’s duty, including his own, to obey its dictates without question.

In his role, and through choice, he was a major figure in planning and implementing the Final Solution, the program to exterminate Jews and other populations. Even though he has the same surname, it’s unlikely Miller has anything like Müller’s self-discipline. Note that Stephen Miller is a Jew, confirming the opinion of Nobel Prize-winning neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek that Hitler was a fool for alienating the Jews as many of them would have been totally supportive of his policies:

We should never forget that the anti-semitism of Hitler has driven from his country, or turned into his enemies, many people who in every respect are confirmed totalitarians of the German type [2, p189-90; most of them went to then-Palestine or the US].

Miller is commonly described as reptilian but that’s insulting to reptiles. You only have to look at his photo and you can see him in an SS uniform. To me, he embodies precisely the core concepts of Narcisso-Fascism: the lascivious lust for unbridled power to dominate and control people; the hatred that flows toward anybody who dares oppose that lust; misogyny and overt homoeroticism; the grandiosity and contempt for lesser humans; a ferocious hostility toward any rules or customs that stand in his way; contemptuous anti-intellectualism; intense narcissism and self-indulgence … People of this type are inherently dangerous, as these quotes show:

1. ...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.

2. The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical... Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit — i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand — a manifestation of their vitality.

3. 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 that have existed since the beginning of time.

(Quote 1, Mein Kampf, p182; Quote 2 Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism; Quote 3 Stephen Miller interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026).

We are forced to ask: how did such an egregiously vile person gain such power over people’s lives? The short answer is that’s what power-hungry people do. They are drawn to power like flies to a sewage works to make themselves feel better: every one of those features conceals an inner void, a black hole in the psyche that holding power over others promises to fill. The fact that Miller is a Jew confirms that history does not automatically protect any human against holding the most extreme and odious fascist views. The fact that historically, people he identifies with were grievously mistreated has not inclined him to favour the underdog. He identifies with the persecutors, not with their victims.

Fascism is a form of political movement, not a form of government as capitalism or socialism are. Naturally enough, it is influenced by social and political factors but individually, it is a reaction to personal psychopathology, not a product of one’s historical background. The people who thrust themselves into leadership roles are normally at once capable, disciplined, determined and seriously discommoded in their lives (Trump is not the last of those but he’s just a figurehead for the fascists who are propping him up). It breeds in dissatisfaction but it only becomes a movement, a political force, when enough people in the community are disenchanted with the status quo. If you have a comfortable citizenry who feel well-supplied and well-supported, who do not feel threatened, then fascism doesn’t get off the ground. Hitler and Mussolini didn’t appeal to the comfortable middle class; in turn, they loathed him. Somewhere, I have a photo of a street poster from the 1933 election shrieking: Wer kann uns von Hitler retten? Nur Hindenburg. Who can save us from Hitler? Only General Hindenburg, the then-president. The middle classes knew what Hitler was about but, as they found out, Hindenburg did nothing to save them.

The critical factor in a fascist takeover is not the presence of a few malevolent individuals because by themselves, they’re nothing, just malcontents yelling into the wind. They become dangerous only in the setting of but widespread and serious discontent. When the fascists in Italy and Germany took control, their countries were basket cases, their economies broken, under threat from godless Bolshevism and in danger of splintering. The fascist agitators built on this until they could take control but, on the face of it, nobody would say that the US is in anything like that sort of state. Conditions were far, far worse during the Great Depression – just look at Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath from 1939 – but, in politics, perceptions count, not mere facts. One of the most important factors in any fascist movement is the perception that the nation is under threat, from without and, crucially, from within. If nothing is done, the country will implode, demonic forces will take control and the people will be plunged into a living hell roughly modelled on Stalinist Russia. Somehow, somebody has managed to convince enough voters that the US is a whisker away from damnation for them to vote for a convicted cheat, philanderer, liar and quite possibly paedophile. Oh, and bumbling, dementing fool as well. Why? Because he said: “Trust me, I’ll save you.” Save them from what? Now that’s a very good question: who or what is threatening the US to the extent that they should hand power to a person who said he would be a dictator? This is where the plot thickens, because a plot it is, a fifty year plot to change the entire social and economic structure of this enormous but seriously flawed country.

The 1950s and 60s in the US were a golden age for the ordinary Joe (as long as he wasn’t Black Joe, that wasn’t real flash). There was plenty of work, housing was cheap, education was cheap, health care was cheap, taxes on the rich were high, managers earned about 20 times as much as their median worker, technology was racing ahead and the US dominated the world in practically every field. Sure, there were idiots like the alcoholic Sen. Joe McCarthy screeching his tits off about the communist menace but in the main, that happened somewhere far, far away. Ordinary people had very comfortable lives, especially compared with their parents who had survived the Depression, Starting in the late 1960s, a small group of very wealthy people decided this wasn’t good enough, that the direction of the country was down and to the left. Too many young people in tertiary education were getting dangerously radical ideas, threatening the status quo of home, country, religion and prosperity. Where would it end, they asked but they had an answer to that: in the gulag.

To them, you were either 110% in favour of God, Starsnstripes, motherhood, apple pie and Pat Boone or you were Trosky in disguise. No half measures. Godless monolithic international communism was poised and waiting, ever on the brink of hurling its robotic masses across the oceans to rape and strangle America’s mothers and daughters in their beds. Or something, it was never quite clear. The only defence was to give more power to the corporations that were building America’s vast military industries. More military meant raising more tax, which could only come from having more people in work but raising taxes on workers usually doesn’t guarantee reelection. Enter the small group of marginalised and rather eccentric economists called neoliberals centred around the Austrian theorists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and others at the University of Chicago, aka the Austrian school. Government was the problem, they warned, government is inherently inefficient and repressive; the only way society can race ahead is to move capital and responsibility from government to the community. They advocated lowering taxes, severely restricting government, and allowing the market to decide where and how capital should be invested. Lowering taxes? As rates of taxation had been high to very high since World War II, ears pricked and chops were licked all round.

For the wealthy, this doctrine (because that’s what it is) had immediate appeal but first, it was necessary to convince legislators that they had it all wrong, that “tax and spend” had to be replaced by something entirely new called “trickle-down economics.” In this bold vision, low taxes on the wealthy would allow them to accumulate capital which then had to be reinvested, creating jobs and building a virtuous circle of expanding work for more employees paying more tax to make up for the lowered taxes on the wealthy. Everybody is a winner, they preached, but first they needed a few influential pollies on side so, armed with bottomless pockets, they began spreading their message around to sympathetic members of Congress. At the same time, they began financing “think tanks” to develop and spread the new gospel of neoliberalism, to influence editors and TV presenters and, above all, universities.

This was not random, they were working to a script known as the Powell Memo, written in 1971 by a lawyer named Lewis Powell (he was rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court). Powell named the danger (squishy godless young lefties egged on by academic ideologues having an easy life at the taxpayer’s expense while spreading their poison in cahoots with said monolithic international communism blah blah) and the antidote. Powell’s remedy has been followed to this day. Insidiously, right wing capital took over the US and controls it to this day but the masses are getting restive. One of the central principles of neoliberalism, “trickle-down economics,” hasn’t quite worked out the way they said it would. It began with “trickle-up economics,” so yes, starting with the ever-pliable Reagan, there were massive reductions of taxation for the wealthy, to the point where many now pay hardly any tax at all. Yes, the wealthy became wealthy beyond any level of sanity and, crucially, gained political power to match, so yes, they had to reinvest their loot. Sorry, their hard-earned rewards. And yes, acting strictly according to the neoliberal rulebook, they looked around for the best returns on their money. Where was that? Well, it certainly wasn’t where the newly poor workers thought it would be, in their existing factories or down the road at a new site. It was, of course, precisely where neoliberalism dictated profits were greatest: overseas. So the jobs just disappeared and, Trump notwithstanding, will never come back. But you can’t blame neoliberalism, after all, it’s a rational doctrine, a science free of wishy-washy moral stuff like workers’ rights and fair play and a level playing field and all that shit. Hidden under the measured and dispassionate academic language of Hayek and Co. is the crudest social Darwinism of all: get it while you can and screw the effing underdog.

A skilled worker who, 25yrs ago, worked as a machinist earning about $28 an hour plus health insurance now works sealing basements for $10 an hour in debased modern money – if he’s lucky. You can drive through what were the great industrial cities of the north and see enormous swathes of weed-infested ground where factories once stood, or devastated housing tracts which the city council can’t even afford to wreck. While the owners of capital are toasting each other in their yachts in the offshore tax havens, the steel belt became the rust belt whose workers are dying of “diseases of despair,” alcohol, drugs, suicide – the despair belt, you could say. Over 900,000 Americans have died of opiate overdoses in the cruelly misnamed opioid epidemic but its architects, the filthy rich Sackler family, are untouchable (for them, $7.4billion over 15yrs is chickenfeed). Not for nothing the US has the largest prison population in the world but only for the poor, mind you. Suicide is at an all-time high, people die of preventable diseases, on and on, because neoliberal capitalism. Needless to say, people see the inequality and they are angry. Very angry. They see their jobs disappearing, their schools collapsing, their hospitals closing but they can’t afford health care anyway. Once-free education now costs a fortune and cripples them for life; aged care is prohibitive; and even dying costs more than many can afford.

But instead of putting the blame where it should be, squarely on the heads of the wealthy and their neoliberal academic toadies who, through giant corporations bleeding the treasury and endless webs of Epsteinian corruption and decadence, have deliberately engineered Byzantine levels of inequality, the poor and dispossessed are told by State Propaganda Services such as Fox, Murdoch, Bezos and Co. that it’s all due to them immigrants. And Moslems, and foreigners and Russians and Chinese who are undermining the country and destroying it from within, so get ‘em. Round ‘em up and expel ‘em and then there’ll be jobs for all and we will Make America Great Again, perchance to start the whole cycle over again. Except it won’t be. Greatness is like the beauty of youth. It fades, and once it’s gone, there’s no coming back, as old Omar knew:

The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on:

not all thy piety nor wit

shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

nor all thy tears erase a word of it.

The jobs have gone forever. Also according to neoliberal doctrine, the bit they didn’t tell anybody, American wages must drop to the level of overseas workers before capitalists will reinvest in factories down the road. Trump thinks he can reverse the flow by ordering companies to relocate to the US but he’s a fool, King Donald Canute. He’s doing it not for economic reasons but because he hates the idea of foreigners doing things better than Americans (and he just hates foreigners anyway). Which of course they do as they’re desperate. This is the neoliberal ploy: keep the workers desperate, fighting each other for jobs and don’t let anybody draw attention to the real cause of their immiseration, neoliberal capitalism. And when the anger threatens to spill over, divert attention, yell “Look, there’s a wog sneaking over our border, get him!” Once that mood takes hold, people like Stephen Miller and the execrable Steve Bannon slither out of the woodwork and soon take control, carefully stage-managing the anger to their advantage while eliminating their enemies. So the slide into autocracy accelerates but, as the Greeks knew, the most important point of all is that Fascism. Never Does. Make. Anybody. Great Again. It has to end in Ekpyrosis, the cleansing fire that burns wickedness and greed out of the soul of the nation, like Germany in 1945. But, as Miller and all the other fascist Zionists show, the same old cycle of domination starts again. It’s human, you see. The cure for fascism starts with a long look in the mirror.

****

Just so you understand the extent to which State Propaganda Services are deliberately misleading the public, please read this article by Craig Murray, it doesn’t take long. He has just been to Venezuela to see for himself what is going on. Craig is a former British diplomat who works tirelessly for human rights, and for nothing. I believe his work is beyond reproach, e.g. he was a very effective supporter of Julian Assange throughout his trials.

****

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. Hayek FA von (1944). The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

Fresh from his criminal act of kidnapping the president of Venezuela and his wife, Trump’s windsock-type attention has swung north, to Greenland. “We need Greenland for national security,” he spouts but, of course, nobody believes him. The US signed a treaty with Denmark in 1951 that allowed them to establish military bases more or less as they saw fit, and to get mining permits. At the peak, the US had eight (8) fully functioning bases in Greenland, including Thule (now Pituffik or something), their most important forward radar base. Seven of them have since been closed and no mining applications have ever been lodged, not least because anything worth mining is secure under about a kilometre of ice.

Here, “national security” is just another bit of Trumpian bullshit, another lie from somebody who has never seen the difference between what he wants to be true, and what is actually true. Most children have a clear grasp of that concept by the time they start school but he missed out, mainly because his father didn’t have much idea of truth and honesty himself, and partly because, for the whole of his life, Trump has been surrounded by an echo chamber of people on the take. These days, he yells: “Don’t tell me what I said yesterday, tell me what I want to hear today,” and they fall over themselves to satisfy him, knowing that the more accurately they guess his moods and suck up, the

closer they get to sticking their greedy fingers in the rivers of black money flowing around him.

In between Venezuela and Greenland, we had the ludicrous and (for sensible US citizens) humiliating experience of The Nobel Peace Prize That Wasn’t. I have long had the gravest doubts about the sense of the Norwegian committee that administers it, going back to the travesty of Kisssinger, the architect of total war on North Vietnam, picking it up but Maria Machado is right down there with the worst. She is a member of one of the immensely wealthy white families who spent decades plundering Venezuela while the vast majority, especially the indigenous people, lived in festering slums. She wants Trump to invade her country so her family and friends can get back the key to the national treasury to pick up their party where Chavez had ended it. She doesn’t have a democratic bone in her body, she is a plutocrat through and through and she couldn’t give a shit about the poor. How many readers recall that young women from Venezuela have won dozens of titles like Miss Universe, Miss International, etc? They had a production line for the blond, pale-skinned daughters of the wealthy, which fed them through a machine and spat them out as ideals for the person who owned Miss Universe, one Donald J Trump. Small world, isn’t it. That meant the brown-skinned, dark-haired indigenous girls from the barrios or the provinces didn’t get a look in, they had to work in the fields while the wealthy practised in their bikinis and stilettos.

But where was I? Oh yes, that prize. She handed it to him and he fell for it. Partly that was his infinitely greedy personality but a lot of it was his dementia: he simply is not capable of comprehending that it isn’t like a building, something you can buy and then you own it. He wants that prize; she gave him hers (stupid woman, 200gm of gold but what does she care, that’s chicken feed for her); it sits on his wall, so therefore it’s his and everybody has to bow down. And now he’s told the Norwegian prime minister that his threats to invade Greenland are largely motivated by not getting that prize. This is the age we live in, this is the world we will hand to our children and grandchildren. However, it may well be that this time, Trump has bitten off more than he can chew. This time, and unlike his attacks on Iran and Venezuela and Nigeria and Somalia and Yemen and Syria and a few others, Europe isn’t applauding.

The Europeans, pathetic bunch of squibs that they are, have rattled around in the cupboard out the back and found an old spine they put there 80 years ago, and are trying it on to see whether it fits any of them but it’s too big. Spines can be scary, you know, but so far they haven’t had a total panic. They’ve sent a few dozen troops and a dog sled to Greenland and told Herr Drumpf that he can’t have it. He, of course, is apoplectic: Nobody, but nobody, tells DJ Trump what he can or cannot have, they’re off script!!!! Tariffs all round, he shrieks on Twitter or whatever it is, anybody who opposes me will wear 25% tariffs. That’s in addition to the 25% for anybody who trades with Iran in any way. International diplomacy reduced to the level of a child throwing a tantrum, hurling things from his play pen, except this over-sized child has his fat little fingers hovering over the Big Red Button that follows him wherever he goes: “We need Greenland for national security so we can either get it the easy way or the hard way but we’re going to get it.”

Meantime in the US, crickets. Nobody, not a single person in the US, is whispering in his ear, “Donny, you can’t actually do things like that, they’re our NATO allies.” What does he care about NATO? He hates NATO, he believes they’ve had a free ride on Uncle Sam’s coat tails and either they start to pay up or it’s all over. Trouble is, they can’t pay up. Their prosperity was built on cheap Russian natural gas but Biden blew up the Nordstream II pipeline so now their economies are grinding to a halt (The Economist this week: “Germany’s economy is so bad even sausage factories are closing”). Also, there’s actually nothing they can do to stop the US landing a couple of divisions and hoisting their flag, as they’ve done so many times before. Unless The Don changes his mind or loses it completely, it looks as though Denmark is going to shrink. Would that be so bad? Probably not good for the Greenlanders who would lose their health service and old age pensions and free education and so on, but what about Europe? Could they remain in bed with somebody who has just stolen their apples? Probably, they’ve had long practice at adjusting their morals to satisfy their greed: Europeans have spent the past 600 years landing in other people’s countries, having a look around and saying: “This is nice, we’ll have it.” Now that it’s being done to them, they don’t like it but they can’t expect their protests to be taken too seriously in their former colonies. However, the real question for Europe is this: Do they need to remain in a subservient role to the US, or has the very idea of a NATO reached its use-by date? That’s a good question: What in fact is the idea of NATO?

NATO, as they say, was intended to keep the Soviets/Russians out, the Germans down and the Americans in. From the very beginning, NATO was an American invention, built and paid for by them for their purpose “containing” the USSR (now Russia) because communism. The selling point was that without a permanent American military presence, the fanatical Soviet hordes would pour across to the Atlantic, crushing the nice, harmless people in Western Europe under their snowy boots. That’s what they said and still say, but there’s no truth in it. In 1945, Stalin wanted a united, neutral and disarmed Germany straddling the centre of Europe. That way, he reasoned, nobody could invade from the West again, freeing them to get on with the serious business of rebuilding after the Nazi invasion. That didn’t happen. The US rearmed West Germany and incorporated it in NATO, manifestly a hostile alliance directed at the USSR, who retaliated with the rickety Warsaw Pact.

Marx, according to the savants in the West, said monolithic communism was determined to destroy capitalism, hence the unremitting hostility of the West toward anything red. That’s not actually true. Marx said that capitalists hated socialists (true) and would always do whatever they could to destroy socialism (also true) so socialists had to be ready to defend their revolutions otherwise the capitalists would pounce (which they have done many times). Classic Marxism said capitalism would eventually destroy itself due to its internal contradictions; socialists had to be ready to take over but he did not say communism had to attack capitalism. In fact, Stalin’s official doctrine was called “Socialism in One Country,” meaning the USSR. This meant he did not support the Chinese Communist Party, which led to decades of hostility, including fighting on the Ussuri River in 1969. There was no such thing as “monolithic communism,” that was simply propaganda to justify Western hatred of the socialist movement.

You would think that when the USSR fell apart and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, all the threats to Western Europe had disappeared, so NATO could have faded away. Not so: it was rejuvenated and spread to the East, to counter the dire Russian threat. This is such utter nonsense: in the 1990s, Russia was a basket case, unable to pay its own army let alone mount an invasion of the West. There was fighting in different parts of the country; the president, Boris Yeltsin, was a totally corrupt and hopeless drunk; the entire state assets were being purloined by a small group (the “oligarchs”); industry crashed; there was mass unemployment; massive inflation and devastation of the working and middle classes … In short, post-Soviet Russia was a tableau from heaven for the vulture capitalists of the West who were slobbering in their sleep over the uncountable wealth they had almost within their hands, but a threat it was not. But then somebody threw a spanner in their plans. In his last days, Yeltsin appointed a young KGB operative as prime minister who agreed not to pursue the Yeltsin clan for their corruption but who then turned on the oligarchs and started to claw back the state assets [1].

To cut it short, Putin spoiled Wall Street’s wet dream of dismembering and looting Russia’s vast natural wealth, that’s why they hate him. He snatched the treasure from under their noses, for which they will hate him for eternity. It has nothing to do with human rights or democracy or any of that tosh (the wealthy hate human rights and democracy as well). The whole thing is money and power, nothing else. The only thing about Trump is that, in his rapidly advancing senile decay, he says out loud what the Western imperialist capitalists have been saying for half a millenium: “Either you let us prey on your country and take what we like, or we will destroy you and then take what we like.”

Also, Trump is threatening white people whereas the rules of civilised imperialism are that you can only do that to what Churchill deemed “lower grade races.”

But back to NATO: the whole thing is a lie. Western Europe is not and never has been in danger of invasion from the East. The purpose of NATO was and still is to keep the barbarians to the East constantly feeling threatened so they spend too much on arms and bankrupt themselves, as happened in 1990. NATO should be dissolved as a threat to international peace. The US should close its bases and go back to its side of the Atlantic. Europe should get rid of its current crop of deadbeat politicians and come to an agreement to work with Russia to build a Eurasian Economic Community with its own reserve currency, and maybe, maybe, we could start to escape what has been called the Hobbesian Trap.

English polymath Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) had a very gloomy view of humans. Unless they are kept on a tight leash, he said, humans turn into the very worst of animals. They need a strong central government (the “Leviathan”) otherwise society collapses into chaos:

… (without strong central authority) there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Leviathan, 1651, Ch 13).

The Hobbesian Trap says that, by nature, a state of mutual distrust exists between neighbours in which each fears the other may be about to attack; therefore, a pre-emptive attack makes perfect sense. This notion has been very influential in the relations of the US and USSR, and now the US and China and Russia, leading to the nuclear arms race, Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) and a hundred wars and bloody revolutions, Ukraine merely being the latest.

Without having read everything Hobbes wrote (a lot), I’d say he left one crucial point unanswered: Why do humans mistrust each other? There are two reasons. The first is an innate fear of the unknown, either of places or of strangers, better known as xenophobia. In that, we’re no different from practically every other animal on the planet, and clever people amuse themselves making up evolutionary arguments to “explain” it. The solution to xenophobia is to get to know people, and this is easily done within a formal social structure that assumes each party’s good intentions. That, however, is where it breaks down: what happens if the other side don’t have good intentions, if they are lying and concealing their true, evil motives? Discretion says “Don’t trust until you are certain, and even then you can get it wrong,” for which strict rules of engagement are necessary. But why should we doubt their bona fides? They could be lying. Why do we assume that? Because we lie ourselves and we assume other people will do the same. In psychology, that’s called projection, to attribute to another person one’s secret or forbidden motives or emotions. In psychology, projection is unconscious and is seen as a sign of fairly severe personality disturbance. Lying, however, is not projection as lying is fully conscious. It is the insertion of a falsehood at a particular point in a discourse in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth (Harry Frankfurt).

When it comes to politics, Side A is right to assume Side B is lying because Side A lies all the time. Trump says: “We need Greenland for national security.” That’s a lie, he just wants it. “Venezuela is running drugs into the US.” That’s a lie, they just wanted the oil. “Israel has a right to defend itself.” That’s a lie. Under international law, the Gazans had a right of armed resistance but, as the occupying power, Israel is prohibited from any form of reprisal. “Accusing Israel of genocide is antisemitism.” That’s definitely a lie, the state of Israel is not a race that can be vilified, and so on. It’s difficult to trust when the air is thick with flying lies but it doesn’t have to be. Just because humans have always lied doesn’t mean they should continue, especially when the stakes are now so high. Rules of engagement, known as confidence-building measures, are easy to formulate. They are, however, difficult to implement when one side lies habitually. As we now see the West does.

This brings us to the second reason humans mistrust each other. Side A fears Side B wants to dominate them because they want to dominate Side B themselves, and Side A knows Side B will resist because Side A hate being dominated themselves. This is the paradox of domination: in one and the same person at exactly the same time, we have two countervailing urges, to dominate others, and to resist being dominated. This is basic to human life: it is biology, universal among humans and most other animals, but it causes constant chaos because even though dominating is such fun, being oppressed is living death. However, if we choose, we can control our urge to dominate. It’s not like breathing or eating or sleeping, it doesn’t have to be. Before the impulse gets out of control, we have the ability to say: “No, stealing their land is stupid, if everybody steals all the time, where are we? We can’t live in a lawless society.” In fact, we can but lawless life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Trump, however, is different. He sees dominating people as a sign that he’s smarter than everybody else. Remember what he said about paying taxes? He doesn’t pay any, which means he’s smarter than all the people who do. If he can get his name on things, that means he’s superior to people who don’t have their names on things. If he has lots of gold around the place, that says he’s better than the common herd who can’t afford gold. If he could get lots of women, that meant he was better than men who had only one wife. All this is because he has no self-esteem, he is a hollow person. Every time he gets something new or bigger or more expensive, he feels a thrill and he does his silly little wooden marionette dance. Trouble is, the thrill quickly wears off, as thrills do. Then the emptiness creeps in and he can’t stand that, so he has to keep moving, keep reaching for more, keep clambering over people just so he can say: “Look at me, I’m the greatest.” That’s why he stays up all night texting threats to people (33 in 45 minutes at Davos on Tuesday) because inside, he knows he’s not; also, he has no idea how stupid it makes him look.

The age of the flimsy “rules-based international order” is well and truly dead, shot down after it got in their way by the very people who touted it. NATO has been an important part of the deception that we (meaning rich white countries) are the goodies and anybody who opposes us is bad and has to be crushed. We say it is defensive but necessarily, the other side see it as a mortal threat and are compelled to respond. The sooner it is gone, the better. We are only a hair’s breadth from Hobbesian anarchy, where the powerful crush the weak because they enjoy it and nobody can stop them.

Trouble is, our politicians don’t understand any of this, they think they’re doing God’s will or spreading democracy or bringing peace when all they’re doing is spreading chaos through trying to get more and more. Without NATO giving them Dutch courage, Europe would be forced to make its peace with the Slavic nations to their east, whom they have sorely abused for millenia – the very word “slave” comes from Latin sclavus, meaning Slavs, because so many of them were captured and enslaved. This was before Europe’s merchants realised African slaves were easier to transport across the Atlantic.

The real history of the West is endless violence, cruelty, theft and betrayal, all of which is driven by the unquenchable Western urge to dominate the world. Mrs Drumpf’s little boy is only in that job while he delivers for the plutocracy. We should, however, be thankful for one thing: as long as he gets the prize, he doesn’t give a shit who knows he’s a monster. Of course, if he gets away with Greenland, he’ll move on to something bigger. That’s what psychopaths do. Only a united front stops them, and the best united front would be Europe, Russia and China. So keep at it, Donny boy, keep shaking NATO until it falls apart, then people will have to think for a change instead of being told what to do. It’s time to turn.

Reference:

Belton C (2020). Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West. London: Harper Collins.

****

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.

The reality is that Trump is totally delusional about his plans for Venezuela, and especially his reliance on its defunct oil industry. … Once again Trump is demonstrating why his delusions and refusal to face the facts make him such an unreliable ally.

That last sentence is the real core of his article: Dump Trump before he shits on us. I have full sympathy for this political view but my real concern is the suggestion that he is mentally ill. Let’s be clear: If and when Trump is ever held to account before a court, he will not be able to plead not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He is not under the control of delusional beliefs. That doesn’t say he’s the full quid or that all his cylinders are firing because he’s not and they’re not. The reality of this professionally bizarre individual is a little more complex. Let’s start with a definition:

A delusion is a fixed, false belief, out of context with the person’s intellectual, educational and cultural background.

Some people add “held with a morbid intensity,” but that’s what “fixed” means: unable to be budged. A belief is false when the great majority of citizens would say it’s false and there’s no evidence to rebut them. That means truth is relative: last year’s received belief can become this year’s crackpot notion but we’re used to that. As for intellect, in general, the word ‘delusion’ should not be applied to people with intellectual disability, which in this country means somebody with an IQ score below 70. Often they will seem to believe strange things but there is usually some reality basis to it, like a mistaken identity or such like; the ideas tend to come and go; and they can usually be distracted and may forget about it for months on end. The educational background is important. Poorly educated people tend to fix on simple answers to complex questions, which means they’re at risk of people taking advantage of them. We would like to think that educated people are able to sift evidence and come to the correct conclusion but, all too often, that’s not the case. There are plenty of people with a string of degrees who hold one or two whacky ideas, and we’ll come back to them.

The idea that our beliefs are shaped by our cultural background causes the most difficulty. In general, people can believe anything they like as long as everybody in the street or their football club believes it. People tend to believe what they’re told, especially if it’s repeated over and over, even when it’s cruel and patently false, but what about fringe religions? Cults? Cult-like political groups? They’re the clue: perfectly sane people believe what they want to believe. They will believe something that suits their purposes, or gets them what they want, or makes life easier, or makes them popular and so on. The only difference is that they can change their minds. A genuinely deluded person can’t.

Thus we have the screwball movement in the US called Q-Anon. Q is supposed to be some high-placed government official who leaks vital information in the form of cryptic messages on the internet. His/her/its followers are told, and willingly believe, that there is a secret cabal of very influential people in the US and/or world who are Satanists, paedophiles, child murderers and/or cannibals, who may or may not be shape-shifting lizards and/or aliens and are trying to take over the world but one DJ Trump has been sent by God to thwart them. Q-Anon supporters were prominent on the January 6^th insurrection but seem to have faded a bit since it has become clear that their hero could well be one of them paedowhatsits himself or is protecting them. And that most of them are Republicans as well. Some of the Q-Anon mob are frankly delusional but the most are dupes who simply want to believe bad of their political opponents. The more they hate, the more likely they are to believe nonsense but even their hatred is a sign of unbalance, mostly personal insecurity and poor self-esteem.

Apart from the ringleaders of these cult-like groups, and nobody actually knows who they are in Q-Anon [1], most of their followers can be talked around, especially when they realise they’ve been cheated. They appear to believe nonsense but it’s tied to their group and they can drop the beliefs and the group when they choose. One of the most powerful factors here is believing you know better than anybody else, that they mustn’t argue as you can’t be wrong. Clever or educated people often latch on to a screwy idea and try to shove it down everybody’s throat because it becomes a test of dominance. The incorrigible Andrew Wakefield, who started the “autism is due to vaccination” push, is one of these. He got an idea in his head that seemed so smart and outwitted everybody, and he wouldn’t give it up. Regardless of the evidence against him, he could always go through it and find a possible weakness. As Garrison Keillor said, “Intelligence is like a four wheel drive wagon; it lets you get stuck in more interesting places.”

So back to Herr Drumpf: is he deluded? The short answer is no, he doesn’t believe anything long enough or strong enough to qualify as a delusion. Trump is a person of limited intellect; of generally poor education; who doesn’t read; who believes he knows better than everybody else; that he only has to look at some issue to get the answer that will make all the experts look foolish; and everybody has to agree with him or he’ll send the men with the violin cases to break their arms, or worse, as he said of the interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she’s going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” He is totally lacking in any sense of discipline. He does whatever he thinks will feel good at the time. He says any bit of nonsense that comes into his head if it humiliates his many enemies or boosts himself; if it gets a cheer, he repeats it but if people don’t like it, he drops it and then says he never said it anyway, it’s all “fake news.” It seems as though he’s lying all the time but liars know what they’re doing, they have a plan and stick to it. He doesn’t have any plan, never has had, he just spouts whatever makes him look good with his audience because he knows he can always get away with it. He’s just an idiot (defined as a person who never lets facts spoil his opinion).

The only idea that could pass as a delusion is the belief that he won the 2020 election, but if he were faced with going to prison or recanting, he’d immediately say: “I never said that, it’s all fake noos.” Does he believe what he says? No, the word belief doesn’t apply to him. Words are just little noises he sprays around to manipulate people. This is the clue to what people call his “political genius.” In fact, he’s not a genius at anything. He simply lets out his prejudices which happen to be much the same as poorly educated people who resent what the world is doing to them. Because he is himself a poorly educated person full of resentment at the upper class world that despises him.

These, however, are all personality factors, designed to conceal his almost total lack of self-esteem and his lack of any feeling for other human beings. He’s always been like that, as his niece, Mary Trump, a PhD psychologist, tells us. Now, however, the picture is becoming more complicated as he is dementing. It’s still fairly early but seems to be advancing quite rapidly. He is forgetful and quickly loses the thread, reverting to stereotyped abuse of his many enemies or talking up himself or his projects. His talk is rambling and often incoherent. During the important meeting with oil executives after the coup in Venezuela, he abruptly stood up, wandered to the window and began rabbiting on about his “big, beautiful ballroom.” He often perseverates on B but mostly on ideas, such as threatening people or wanting to build something, and on fragments of speech. The frequent and large bruises on his hands are consistent with injections of lecanemab, a monoclonal antibody specific for Alzheimers. They are not consistent with “frequently shaking hands,” as his press mouthpiece says, especially those on his left hand.

However, the most telling sign of dementia is his loss of social awareness. Granted he has never had much, as his “Grab them by the pussy” remarks say, but now he is completely unaware of the impact of his statements and actions on others. Now, he blurts out: “We want Greenland for national security, we should have it, they’re not doing enough with it.” False: the US has had 80 years to worry about national security and have done nothing for decades, although Thule base was important during the Cold War. He wants it because it offends him to see a European flag on an island that is clearly part of the Western Hemisphere, as in: “You go away, you’re not allowed to play in our sandpit.” He says the same of the Panama Canal, of Canada, Gaza, Cuba, Columbia, Mexico, Iran, there’s no limit. Granted, all US presidents have always simply taken what they wanted but they tried to make up some vaguely plausible lies to conceal what they were doing, such as the WMD in Iraq, the communists in Grenada, etc. Trump just says it out loud because he has no self-control: If I want it, we’ll take it (in Detroit this week, he stuck his finger up at a worker who yelled something; here, 2.50). He wrecked the White House without asking anybody; he puts his name on things, causing enormous offence; he lies and lies and lies. And guess what? It’s going to get worse.

For what it’s worth, my opinion is that he’s unfit for any public position and he should be removed from office now, but nobody in his dysfunctional court is prepared to make the first move. That’s because they know he’ll use what he can to attack them, and they all want to be in the room after he goes so they can lever themselves up the pole. And, of course, when he does go, the real cat fight for power will start among his undisciplined and unqualified minions. I believe he’s on course to do something really bad that will force Congress to remove him. Our only hope is that it doesn’t involve nuclear weapons. Would he use them to keep himself in power? He probably would, he isn’t capable of seeing the damage it would do but then, why would he care? In about February 1945, when the Red Army was surrounding Berlin and the Allies were pounding it from the air, Hitler ordered Albert Speer, his minister of armaments and one of the few people he trusted, to destroy the entire infrastructure in Germany. The German people had failed him, he said, therefore they didn’t deserve anything. Speer reported back to him that the destruction was underway but fortunately, he didn’t act on it. Same for Trump: if people forced him out of the White House, he would happily wreck the world through spite: “If I can’t have it, nobody can have it.” That’s what dementing, personality disordered people do. Hang on to your hats, it’s going to get bumpy.

Reference:

1 Bloom M, Moskalenko S (2021). Pastels and Pedophiles. Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford, CA: Redwood Press.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Arnold J Toynbee (1889-1975, British historian. From A Study of History)

George Orwell dismissed the autobiography of the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, as “a striptease conducted in pink limelight.” He was so lucky. For decades, we’ve been treated to a long, slow striptease, an elaborate Dance of the Seven Veils conducted in full technicolour under glaring floodlights to the soundtrack of screaming jets and exploding bombs. Now, the dance has reached its inevitable end, the Seventh Veil lies torn, scuffed and crumpled on the floor, and all the pretence and suspense is over. Standing stark naked on the world stage is Uncle Sam, in the unlovely form of his president, one DJ Trump, bulges, warts, trusses and all. When asked if she was scared while giving evidence against Trump, the porn actress Stormy Daniels replied: “Not at all. I’ve seen Donald Trump naked. After that, nothing is scary.” Seeing the US stripped of all its lies and pretence shouldn’t be scary but a lot of people around the world seem to be having trouble getting used to it.

The idea that the US could invade Venezuela, a sovereign country, kill 82 people and kidnap its president and his wife scares a lot of people to the point where they have to tell each other: “Maduro has been captured.” That makes it sound, not like the major international crime that it is, but like a Hollywood goodies vs baddies tale where the brave and noble goodies have finally run the evil one to ground and now he’s trussed up in the van and going to the place he deserves. Except there’s no truth in it. First point: a head of state has absolute immunity, just as Trump has managed to winkle out of his tame Supreme Court. Second: no American court has jurisdiction outside its borders. Third: even if it did, no evidence of drug trafficking has been presented because, as the US DEA has said, there isn’t any. Four: only the UN Security Council can authorise an invasion of a sovereign state, and they haven’t and wouldn’t. Five: the US recently ignored the international arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of crimes against humanity, including murdering and torturing children. Six: Trump and various minions have made it perfectly clear that the whole thing is about oil. And seven: If he gets away with this, he’ll try it again and again.

Starting with the genocide in Gaza and now with the attack on Venezuela, the final veil has dropped. The whole world sees the idea of an American designed and led “rules-based international order” as a total fraud, smoke and mirrors intended to keep the hoi-polloi quiet while the US got on with its manifest destiny of looting the planet. In fact, there have been so many veils of obfuscation, deceit and treachery that it’s always been hard to keep up with them. An early and important example was the idea of “national self-determination” written into the UN Charter. Sounds great, but it quickly got in the way and was pushed aside. The European countries wanted to keep their empires; they needed American support and money to recover them; if they didn’t get them, they would have drifted into neutrality so the US helped them reoccupy their colonies.

In South-East Asia, France faced formidable opposition from the nationalist movement, led by the resourceful Marxist known as Ho Chi Minh. The French were supplied with American money, arms and aircraft but it wasn’t enough. At Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they were defeated by a guerilla army, creeping through the jungle with bits of car tyres tied to their feet for sandals, so the US pushed the French aside and took over. A conference in Geneva in 1954 promised a national election for 1956 but when it became clear the communist Viet Minh would win, the Americans cancelled it and started another war which they duly lost, setting the trend for the next fifty years. But the veil of deceit drawn over this dreadful episode is that the US was fighting monolithic international communism for Vietnamese freedom and democracy, all of which was false. They were fighting for the power to dominate South East Asia and isolate and weaken Maoist China. Even the casus belli, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was a fabrication from beginning to end. There have been so many cases like this. The Wikipedia page on American Regime Change operations since 1945 names 45 countries, but there were more. For example, it doesn’t include the CIA-MI6 operation in Australia in 1975 to topple the Whitlam Labor government, which was thinking of not renewing the lease on Pine Gap CIA station in Central Australia (after Langley, VA, this is the most important US spy base in the world).

The problem facing us today is that the entire Western world, and much of the rest, has been raised on a relentless diet of “We’re in the right, anybody who opposes us is evil and must be crushed.” Most people believe it, partly because it requires no intellectual effort but mainly because a lie endlessly repeated will eventually be accepted as truth, especially if it’s a Big Lie. For 45years, the enemy was “monolithic international communism” which was also used to taint anything remotely socialist. However, it was never “monolithic” but a range of more or less nationalist, anti-imperialist socialist governments of various flavours. In fact, with his policy of “Socialism in One Country,” Stalin declared this himself. He wanted to build the USSR; other countries could look after themselves, which led to the split with Mao’s China because Stalin wouldn’t help them. There were doctrinal reasons as well but the antagonism was mainly nationalistic. Vietnam was a clear example: their revolution was primarily nationalist and anti-imperialist; the Marxists took control because they had a ready-made doctrine that seemed to answer complex questions, and they were the hard men who could unite the country to fight the foreign invaders. But they were never Chinese or Soviet poodles, as we have since seen. The American slogan of “toppling dominoes” was pure propaganda.

At all times and in all respects, the problem was always the insane American urge to dominate and control the world. Full spectrum dominance, they call it: total domination of the entire world in every conceivable respect, political, military, social, financial, cultural, communications, everything. And religion, if they get their way. This has been the policy since 1945 but we were never told this. It was always “We’re the goodies, they’re the baddies, let’s get ‘em.” For example, the Korean peninsula was divided as a result of the agreement reached at the Yalta conference in February 1945. In the South, the US installed a vicious proto-fascist president named Syngman Rhee; he soon sent his military to slaughter anybody of leftist tendencies in a series of brutal massacres but this was all kept quiet. In addition, he kept up probing attacks across the border, to which the North eventually responded in kind, but it was always labelled an “invasion by North Korea.”

Same in Congo. After 70 years of unspeakable cruelty and exploitation, Belgium was forced to give independence to the Congo. However, so that the Belgian mining company Union Miniere could keep control of its very lucrative businesses and, with major American assistance, they encouraged the minerals-rich province of Katanga to secede under Moise Tshombe. The elected socialist prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was forced out, kidnapped and murdered by Belgian mercenaries flown around in American military planes. In his place, the US installed one Joseph Mobutu, for whom the term “kleptocrat” was coined; Congo descended into chaos from which it has never emerged. Somewhere in all of that, the plane carrying the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was shot down, killing all on board. In the past thirty years, about 5 million people have been killed in the endless wars in East Congo. While Trump babbles on about imposing a peace deal on a place he couldn’t find on a map, none of it would have started without American weapons and support.

Almost since its inception, but certainly since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the US has been a classic capitalist-imperialist power. Bill Clinton made this clear in an address to Congress in 1993, repeated at the UN:

…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).

This didn’t come from nowhere, he was simply echoing what he had imbibed with his mother’s milk but it was highly contagious. His Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, who arrived in the US in 1948, aged 11, echoed his view: “If we have to use force it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Novelist John Updike commented on the irony of conquest as foreign policy:

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

Under Herr Drumpf, however, all gloves are off, all pretence is dropped: We are the rulers of the world, the most powerful country in history so all you foreigners and poor and other riff-raff can bow down before our majesty. Since January 20^th last year, US warplanes directed by the “president of peace” have bombed at least nine countries, now including Nigeria and Venezuela, neither of which is remotely a threat to the US. There have probably been more but we don’t know about them yet. He has laid claim to Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Gaza and now Venezuela. The problem is just this: what he shows is the classic psychopathic ploy. He floats an idea, apparently in passing. If people boo and hiss, he drops it and moves on to the next bit of crap that drifts into his head. If nobody objects too strongly, he repeats it several times then, convinced he can get away with it, he does it.

The attacks on so-called “narco-terrorist boats” in the Caribbean is textbook psychopathia. He talked about it, nobody said anything, so he tried it. Nobody complained, so he did it again and again, then added boats in the Pacific. Then he blockaded Venezuela’s ports, then he snatched some tankers and unloaded their fuel in Texas, saying they would keep it, then he bombed a remote port in Venezuela, then they attacked and kidnapped the president (which had been months in the planning and involved massive bribes to Venezuelan air force commanders not to shoot the helicopters down). Then he gloated briefly until, bored, his fickle fancy turned to Greenland again. If nobody pushes back, he will send a contingent of troops to the base at Pituffik, northern Greenland, formerly Thule base. They will grab more territory, saying they need it for “national security,” then he will land troops in the towns (both of them) to “maintain peace and security,” and that will be that. Greenland will be ingested by the giant, grasping amoeba called the USA and slowly digested.

That’s how psychopaths and naughty children do it: they test the limits to see what they can get away with. If nothing happens, they push further, then further until they get what they want; if the adults impose firm limits, they pretend they were never interested and go on to something else. Moreover, they never take on everybody in a fair fight. They isolate targets and pick them off one by one, as Martin Niemöller described: “First, they came for the communists…” Trump does this intuitively all the time. Problem is, people let him get away with it. Same as has been happening in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East for the past 80 years: push push, nibble nibble, lunge and grab, move on. Psychopaths have to be reined in right at the beginning, otherwise they think they can rule the world.

However, all the politicians in Europe are pissing themselves at present. They know they can’t stop an American invasion of Greenland by military means, especially as the Wolf of Moscow is baying at their door in Ukraine. They know perfectly well that if Trump gets away with Greenland, all the little Caribbean countries will be next, including Cuba and anybody else he doesn’t like, then he will move on to the next bauble to attract his covetous eye: the rest of Diego Garcia, and what about the Falklands? And South Georgia? Oh yes, one in the eye for those bloody Limeys whom he loathes and envies in equal measure. Then Gaza, and what about Qatar? They don’t need all that gas, do they? And then, maybe, a bit of northern Australia to control China, they’ve got heaps of land and don’t do anything with it, they wouldn’t miss the tip of Cape York. Or Tasmania, very pretty, we could do a lot with it.

The sense of entitlement and privilege grows hand in hand with the sense of power and knows no bounds. Trump wants to go down as the greatest real estate mogul in American history: Long Island, the Louisiana Purchase, California, the Alaska Purchase, Texas, and now Greenland, meaning he would get the prize. Of course, all his minions have got the bug. In an “unhinged rant,” the reptilian Stephen Miller announced that the US has the “right” to take over any country it likes for its resources. Miller is far too devious to say anything he knows Trump wouldn’t like; more likely he was testing the water for his dementing boss.

Remember that Trump is only in power as the agent of the wealthy class. In a speech to the oil lobby early in 2024, he promised them that if they gave him $1billion, he would make all their dreams come true. As the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela was long their collective wet dream. Before the attack on Caracas, and even before notifying Congress, Trump told the oil companies what he was doing. Until it is blackened, his covetous eye will wander across the globe as once it wandered greedily across all the contestants in the dressing rooms of his beauty shows. There’s no difference, it’s the same psychological phenomenon writ larger: Gimme gimme gimme. The US is now a mafia state.

How can the US be given a black eye? Very simple: bankrupt them. The US needs to roll over $8-10trillion in loans this year. If 96% of the world’s population say to the 4% who live in Godzone: “Sorry, kiddo, party’s over. We’re not playing that game any more. The world doesn’t need an exceptional nation,” if they say that, it’s all over. If all those smelly foreigners from their shithole countries don’t buy its bonds, the US is stuffed. Their economy will crash, the country will grind to a halt, the foreign military bases, all 850 of them, will be abandoned, and the world will enter a new era. To reinforce the message, the world should ditch the USD as the reserve currency and isolate the US by cutting it out of the entire trading system. They’re no longer needed, everything the world needs is produced elsewhere and without them constantly jumping on the dinner table and kicking the plates around, we’ll all enjoy a much more pleasant and sociable meal. And profitable. The adjustment away from the US-centric economy won’t be comfortable, probably not worse than anything we’ve been through since 1945, but it will be better than allowing him to keep nibbling.

So that’s the message: The way to deal with psychopaths, be they individuals or nations, is this: cut out all their rewards. Act as a united front to isolate them, set limits on behaviour and enforce them. Giving in only encourages them to greater excesses. Didn’t we learn that in the 1930s?

Correction:

A number of times, I’ve said the urge to dominate and the urge to resist are equal and opposite, hence the paradox of hierarchy. Actually, that’s not quite true. The urge to resist is stronger in that it lasts longer, it doesn’t wear off. People at the peak of power and privilege and entitlement become fat and lazy because power and privilege lead to self-indulgence, which has no limit. They just get greedier and greedier, they squeeze the underlings more and more until they reach the point where they have nothing to lose, then they push back. That’s inevitable. Arnold Toynbee said that empires aren’t murdered by outsiders, they commit suicide. As we see happening to the latest empire.

****

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.