These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.
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The US Secretary of State (= foreign minister), Mr Marco Rubio, has recently announced that the US intends to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague as “the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty.” His concern was that ICE agents posted to the US border to repel immigrants could be arrested and taken for trial before non-American judges. In fact, he’s lying as he knows perfectly well the US is not a member of the ICC so it has no jurisdiction over events in the US. It can, however, take action against US citizens if they commit war crimes in other countries that are members, and that’s what he doesn’t want. The US has already imposed crippling financial “sanctions” on some members of the ICC, including the chief prosecutor, British barrister Karim Khan after is issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others for crimes in Gaza.
While a few US senators praised him for taking on the “corrupt” ICC, criticism was immediate and widespread. Some commentators have been wringing their hands over the “death of the international rules-based order” (IRBO) which the US was largely responsible for establishing after World War II. People point to the UN and its many agencies, the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, the ICJ, the World Bank and IMF which flowed from the Bretton Woods agreement that set the US$ as the world’s reserve currency, GATT (1947), NATO, IAEA, IATA and a host of other bodies. As a result, there have been no major wars and trade and commerce have mostly flourished, to the benefit of all. If the US hadn’t pushed for these after 1945, which generally meant funding them and often providing offices, then chaos would have reigned. But if Narco Rubio (so-called because of his brother in law’s involvement in drugs) has his way, say the hand-wringers, the IRBO will collapse. Now that’s a bit strange because I thought it had been strangled at birth, 80 years ago.
The idea behind an IRBO is fairly clear: everybody agrees on a set of rules for all, then everybody works to apply them themselves and to make sure everybody else sticks to them. Trouble is, there was never any intention of having a single set of rules to apply to all: what about the exceptional nations? Surely they can’t be expected to get down there with the common herd so that their voices were lost in the lowing of cattle and the mewling of frightened pussies? No, the leaders of the world had to be heard, and heard clearly so everything was set up to make sure they remained the unchallenged leaders. In fact, there was only one such country and it made sure from the very beginning that it would run the show the way it thought it ought to be run. So the US awarded the victors of World War II permanent seats on the UN Security Council and the power of veto, including the brutal and egregiously corrupt Nationalist regime in China. Through an arrangement with the ramshackle Saudi autocracy, it arranged for all oil sales to be in USD, which meant that any country that wanted to buy Saudi oil first had to get USD. This led to the “exorbitant privilege” where the US could spy on practically all international commercial and financial transactions, to its great benefit. And because it had lots of weapons for sale, it was then able to offer unlimited credit for arms sales to all its friends, provided they bought American.
While all this was going on, the “war against communism” was in full flight, mostly behind the scenes as in Guatamala in 1954 or Indonesia in 1958 but occasionally reaching the front pages, as in Korea. The principle driving this crusade was very simple: “Unspeakably evil godless communism is trying to take control of your country, we’ll help you fight them. And yes, you do want our help, don’t you.” It was always and only ever a case of diabolical outsiders trying to subvert the innocent peasants and turn the country into a concentration camp, so the kindly US of A would step in to save them. However, what was dressed up as benevolence concealed two points. The first was that communism was almost always home-grown. Peasants suffering under feudal oppression didn’t need outsiders telling them they had to free themselves from the plutocratic yoke, they had eyes, they knew the UN Charter promised self-determination to all people so that’s what they wanted. And if they wanted a socialist government, then they were prepared to fight for it.
Which brings up the second point: the sole goal of successive US governments was for untrammeled access to each and every market by their corporations; the only way this could achieved was through total world domination, and the socialists were getting in the way. Therefore, as in Iran in 1953 and so many other countries, they had to go. Why were corporations so important to the various US governments? Money. Seats on their boards. Connections, influence. And the “international rules-based order” was a major part of it. As the funder-in-chief of the IMF and World Bank, the US was able to decide who got what at what rates. With a few phone calls, they could make or break governments but if the peasants didn’t take hints and clearly didn’t know what was good for them, well, overthrow the government. So simple. Take Cuba, for example. In 1958, home-grown revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro overthrew the ineffably corrupt Batista government and promptly nationalised a heap of American assets, many of which were owned by the US mafia or otherwise stolen. Humiliated, the US imposed a blockade on Cuba which remains in force to this day: 65 years of penury, just because they refused to grovel to Uncle Sam. Two years later, the CIA engineered an “invasion” of Cuba by a bunch of pirates, drunks and crooks that ended in disaster. All of these are examples of how the “IRBO” existed in name only and entirely at the whim of the US government.
There was much the same disaster in the Congo after Belgium limped out in 1960. With the very active support of the US and of Belgium which feared losing its ill-gotten assets, the mildly socialist government under Patrice Lumumba was overthrown by General Mobutu whose unrivalled kleptocracy held power for 35 years. In 1961, the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in an air crash as they were negotiating a settlement; everything says his plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary although you and I will never know the truth. The fighting has never stopped. In the chaos of the war in Eastern Congo in the late 1990s, about 3 million people died, and many more since them. Where were the internationa rules then? And where are they now when the US and Israel freely attack neighbouring countries just because it suits them? Aggressive war is the supreme international crime, that’s all there is to that, yet Trump freely and cheerfully threatens to “obliterate” Iran, to bomb it back to the stone age and wipe out their culture, but there are no repercussions. Genocide is forbidden by every statute and every moral system known yet Israel freely repeats its intention to force the Palestinians out or destroy them (see here for a record of events).
The ‘golden rule’ has always been “He who has the gold makes the rules.” We can supplement that with “... and he who has the guns enforces them.” In threatening to dismantle the ICC, the US is doing nothing that it hasn’t been doing for the last 80 years. It chooses whatever will be to its benefit, it enforces it and the rest of the world can plait its shit. Take the arch-psychopath Henry Kissinger on ovverthrowing the Allende government in Chile:
I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves (June 1970).
In fact, there was never any risk of a Soviet government in Chile but tens of thousands of people died under Kissinger’s and Thatcher’s good friend, Gen. Pinochet. The problem was that the Allende government had nationalised the gigantic copper mines owned by the US companies Anaconda Copper and Kennecott, among others. Kissinger never bothered to hide his soulless cynicism, e.g.: “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one” (Washington Post, Mar 5 2014).
The list of countries the US has actually attacked or invaded since January 1946 is truly frightening. Add to that the coups it has staged, the elections in which it has interfered, the totally corrupt and/or evil dictators it has supported and it becomes clear: the “international rules-based order” is a charade. The rules exist when it suits the US to impose them, and they are ignored when it doesn’t. Nobody, however, should think that this is exclusively an American hobby, everything they know they learned from the British imperialists, and the French and Spanish and so on. The urge to dominate is human. We see it in full force in the Persian Gulf today. Iran is not and never has been a threat to the US. Every time Trump, Biden, Rubio and all the others say it is, they’re lying, for the explicit purpose of gaining control over the entire region for Wall St and for their equally corrupt friends in Tel Aviv. To paraphrase Kissinger: “For the West, the demonization of Iran is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” The only threat Iran presents is to the American ego and to the demonic plans of the zionists to reduce every one of its neighbours to rubble.
Is there anything new in any of this? No, unless you still see the world through the monochromatic lens of “Us goodies and them baddies.” The important message is: Stand back, strip away all the propaganda and look objectively at what is happening. In particular, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to people, companies, groups, countries, religions, political parties and so on. The presumption must always be that they’re in it for themselves. If you have time, watch this video by the British rapper Lowkey. I have no idea where this chap gets his information from, he can practically tell you what a politician ate for lunch one day eight years ago. Similarly, Australia likes to present itself as everybody’s good mate, the cheerful helpful kid over the road but corruption is deeply entrenched in this country. Jack Waterford was the leading political reporter in Canberra for decades; he knows everybody and how they got to where they got. This article on systemic corruption in NSW is worth reading; corruption in this country is not quite so much paper bags stuffed full of cash but is the corruption of influence, of jobs for the boys and a few selected girls. The running sore of the $380billion AUKUS submarines has been corrupt from the very moment the idea was spawned by the disgusting serial liar and former PM, Morrisson and his equally febrile evangelical mate, Mike Pompeo.
Another example came to light a week or so ago. The Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Authority (AHPRA) recently adopted the definition of antisemitism pushed by something called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This is a little unexpected. Quite apart from the fact that there was no public discussion that I saw, it is an overtly political decision by a professional regulator. Apparently, we all have to comply with it even though the first sentence on the IHRA website says: “Read the full text of the IHRA’s non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism ...” (my emphasis). It seems this came from a meeting between the CEO of AHPRA, a Mr Untermeyer, and the woman who is anointed Australia’s “envoy on antisemitism,” an exceedingly well-paid job given to a die-hard zionist by appointment. For myself, I don’t see any point in this sort of thing, we already have perfectly adequate laws prohibiting discrimination of all sorts but apparently health practitioners are likely to slide back unless pulled up sharply. As far as I can see, this is a good example (or bad) of the corruption of influence: one group gains or seeks to gain an advantage by back room manipulation. Let’s not worry about that, though, it’s business as usual but it forced me to look at this definition. One example of what may constitute antisemitism caught my eye:
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
That’s a bit strange. Even when declared and instituted Israeli policy precisely mirrors material in, say, Mein Kampf, we’re not allowed to say so? But I do that all the time, I show parallels between one group’s statements or actions and the statements or actions of their enemies. In fact, it was only a week ago that I used Mein Kamp (Chap. 15) to show how Nazi policy toward the USSR mirrored that of the British in building their empire. Similarly, the Nuremberg race laws of 1936 were actually based on the race laws of Kentucky and Tennessee, which had been in place long before Adolf was born and, Auschwitz notwithstanding, survived until the 1950s. As for Israel, there are probably thousands of quotes by a dozens of prime ministers and cabinet ministers, not to overlook extreme racist rabbis like Kahane, Kook Jr and Schneerson, that are identical to what became Nazi state policy, e.g. the little book Zionism Decoded in 101 quotes by Canadian historian, Prof. Yakob Rabkin. A few days after Kristallnacht in 1938, a Russian Jew named David Grün declared:
If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel (p37).
That is historical fact. Grün, renamed Ben Gurion, became the first prime minister of Israel. The idea of slaughtering half a million Jewish children worried him not one jot nor a tittle, and this was before the war. One of the most important of the architects of Israel, the cultured Nahum Goldmann, said of Ben Gurion:
… a very able and cunning diplomat and politician, really one of the best I have ever come across. A promise from him was quite worthless. He did not hesitate to promise one thing and then do the opposite. He was absolutely unscrupulous… he never had his fill of power… he only wanted to dominate [1, p94].
So I don’t think AHPRA need bother too much about the very rare antisemitic comments from Australia’s million or so health practitioners, the zionists do it themselves. Another item on the IHRA definition caught my eye:
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Let’s look at this more closely. Firstly, Israel is not a democratic nation: by its own constitution and laws, it is a “Jewish” state. It has two sets of laws, one for its Jewish citizens and one for everybody else. For example, foreign Jews who have never set foot there have the “right of return” whereas the millions of Palestinians, many of whom were born in Israel proper, have no such right. But the point here is not that people require Israel to behave as a sort of enclave of saints, all we want is that it should adhere to the huge body of international humanitarian law and stop killing children [2]. We don’t demand a higher standard from Israel, we’re just sick of it getting away with subhuman behaviour. So in view of the overtly political nature of AHPRA’s decision, and because I don’t support the idea of “regulation by litigation,” it would be helpful if the Agency could give some clarification where Israel’s conduct seems to fall well below acceptable international standards, i.e. using double standards to excuse them. For example:
1. Is it “antisemitic” to expect Israel to adhere to the minimum humanitarian standards expected of any other wealthy country, e.g. not dropping 2000lb bombs on tents crowded with refugees who have no air defences, or refraining from dropping white phosphorous explosives on clearly-marked hospitals?
2. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the UN OHRC report, cited above, as established fact?
3. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the many Israeli government ministers who openly advocate total ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of the ethnic Palestinian populations of Gaza, of the West Bank, of South Lebanon, the annexed Golan Heights, and of Israel itself?
4. Is it “antisemitic” to describe as pogroms the constant attacks on indigenous Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank by heavily armed gangs of Zionist “settlers,” aided and abetted by the Israeli police and military, which, over the past 30 months, have resulted in hundreds of deaths including many children?
5. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that Israel meets the definition of an apartheid state, specifically that laws applicable to Jewish citizens do not apply to non-Jewish citizens, and vice versa, e.g. the recent law imposing a mandatory death penalty on non-Jews for convictions that, if the accused were Jewish, would not apply?
6. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that the current prime minister of Israel and other senior Israeli officials are the subject of arrest warrants by the ICC for the crime of genocide in Gaza?
7. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to Israel’s recent military action against Iran as “unprovoked, illegal and immoral” in that it meets the standard of “aggressive war” as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunals?
8. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the behaviour of Israeli military and prison guards toward illegally-detained Palestinian men, women and children, including sexual assault by trained dogs, amounts to torture? [1].
9. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government and military command structure are fully aware that unconvicted and often uncharged Palestinian prisoners are routinely subject to torture and, in the case of several MKs and the minister for internal security, are strongly in favour of it, and that perpetrators of the torture are not penalised?
10. Is it “antisemitic” to express the view that if anybody treated Jewish detainees in the brutal manner described in numerous reports, that the Israeli government would react with incendiary rage, i.e. that it applies double standards in its daily activities?
11. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government enacted its “Hannibal doctrine” on October 7th, 2023, thereby deliberately causing the death of hundreds of Israeli and other citizens?
12. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Dahiya doctrine is a crime against humanity?
13. Is it “antisemitic” to say that mobs of Israelis regularly rampage through Palestinian areas in their cities screaming “Death to the Arabs” and damaging Palestinian property while the Israeli police stand by?
14. Is it “antisemitic” to show the clear parallels between the freely expressed plans of the current prime minister of Israel regarding his vision of a “Greater Israel,” e.g. standing before the UN General Assembly with a map showing Israel occupying ethnically-cleansed territory from the Nile to the Euphrates, and the Nazi vision of an ethnically-cleansed “Gross Deutschland” extending across to the Urals, as outlined in Mein Kampf (Chap. 14, pp398-408), especially as both plans are expressly based in the idea of a hierarchy of races?
15. Is it “antisemitic” to say that one looks forward to the day when somebody does to Israel what Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran and other places, i.e. attacking and illegally occupying other countries’ territory and, as part of the plan, destroying the civilian infrastructure, especially water and sewerage facilities, schools, hospitals, energy sources, agriculture, etc., leaving the remaining civilian population huddled and starving in rat-infested rubble?
Hmm. Seems you can’t contact AHPRA, and nobody is allowed to go to their offices. Oh well, no doubt they’ll come for me. I asked a friend to cosign this to send to AHPRA. She agreed, then had to change her mind: “I asked a colleague about the letter, and they said this would likely mean I would not be renewed this year for my academic appointment, although that would not be explicitly acknowledged. It has become such a pernicious issue. I am sorry but I will have to decline to be a signatory, I don’t want to lose my academic position.”
I agree, she’s more use in her post than out, but when you have to legislate what people must believe, you know you’re losing the war.
References:
1. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.
2. UN Human Rights Council Report: The essence of childhood has been destroyed. June 18th 2026, document A/HRC/62/CRP.2.
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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.