A MAD bill in the Senate.

A change of emphasis today as I want to look at politics for a while. Everybody will be familiar with the complaint that the media are stuffed full of half-truths, untruths and propaganda. I agree, there is a great deal of fake news, to the extent that it’s very difficult for us plebs to sort out truth from fiction, reality from fantasy. Part of the problem is that the media ceaselessly spins the narrative that everything they say is trustworthy but anything the other side says is lies and propaganda. Yet we know that, all too often, what is presented as reliable and factual is outright lies specifically designed to lead the general public to support something they would not support if they had the facts.

There are thousands of examples to prove this. The (illegal) Bush-Blair-Howard invasion of Iraq in 2002 was based on claims that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” ready to fire which, as Blair told the nation, could reach London in 45 minutes from launching. They and their minions repeated this over and over again, even though they all knew at the time that there were no such weapons, they didn’t exist. The invasion proved this but nobody said anything about the huge web of lies that had led to millions of deaths. Blair himself resolutely refuses to apologise or admit he was wrong.

However, recent events in Amsterdam show that, far from simply repeating lies they have been told by governments, the media will, when it suits them, actively manipulate facts to present a totally false story. On November 7^th, as part of the Europa Cup, the Amsterdam team Ajax played the Israeli team, Maccabi Tel Aviv. Some three thousand wildly enthusiastic Maccabi supporters made the trip to the Netherlands. As it happened, the visitors were thrashed, five-nil, but even before the match, there was trouble brewing. After the match, there were numerous street fights with fans being attacked amid near-riot conditions. Next day, the mainstream media (MSM) went to town. “Israeli supporters attacked in antisemitic pogrom,” they shrieked, “a national and international disgrace, mobs of Muslim thugs chase and beat Jewish fans” and so on. All this was accompanied by various amateur videos showing people being attacked and beaten, or mobs with iron bars and planks of wood chasing people or attacking cars.

Practically every person in any position of authority in the West joined the chorus of condemnation, criticising the citizens of Amsterdam and offering support to the Jewish fans. The Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, said: “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.” He personally called the Israeli president and prime minister to apologise on behalf of his country, and Netanyahu said he would send two military transports to evacuate the Maccabi fans. For days, the headlines and videos ricocheted around the world, drowning the protestations of the people who had taken the videos and reporters who were on the spot: that the whole story was completely false. All the trouble was started by the Maccabi fans, actually beginning before the match when the stadium was asked to observe a minute’s silence for the victims of the floods in Spain earlier that week. Spain is loathed by the right wing in Israel as it has recognised the Palestinian state and supports the Palestinian cause so, during the silence, the Maccabi fans starting chanting and singing: “Death to the Arabs, let the IDF fuck the Arabs.” After the match, the trouble was caused entirely by the Maccabi fans who attacked taxi drivers and passers-by, tore down Palestinian flags and generally behaved like the drunken hooligans their well-deserved reputation says they are.

The whole story of an “antisemitic pogrom” was a fabrication from beginning to end. Videos of Israeli fans attacking citizens were rescripted in the MSM as Muslims attacking Jews, etc. This was not an accident as Sky News took down a factual video and replaced it with one showing the same incidents with a different commentary. It was a deliberate farrago of lies involving governments and MSM in dozens of countries, repeated over and over to prevent people hearing the truth. If you think this was just one-off, think again. Its normal. In fact, it’s now so normal that the Australian government has proposed a bill to prevent the circulation of “mis- and dis-information,” commonly known as the MAD bill. Because it is.

The bill proposes to attack false news by penalising platforms such as digital, broadcast, physical papers, etc., that spread junk, not the people who spread it. That’s nice, you say, but what does this have to do with critical psychiatry? A lot, as it emerges. The preamble is a bit vague as to how they will go about this:

It does not intend to cover all dissemination of content that may be considered false, but rather, dissemination of content that is verifiably false, misleading or deceptive, and causing or contributing to serious harm.

It has to be proven false, and it has to be causing “serious harm.” The wriggle-room built into this is glaringly obvious but the real failing comes clear when we leave the soothing bits at the beginning of the bill and look into the details. At Schedule 9, we read the bill will give new powers to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA): 

… empowers the ACMA to … determine misinformation standards … for sections of the digital platforms industry (relating to potential) harm to public health in Australia including the efficacy of preventative health measures …

That is, the decision between innocent truth or harmful falsity will be decided by a government committee. However, as the examples above show, not all governments can be trusted all the time. For myself, I’d say that due to a toxic mix of incompetence, self-interest, venality and malice, most governments can’t be trusted most of the time. If this bill is approved by the Senate, and it is touch and go at present, it will become very relevant for psychiatry just on this bit of Schedule 9. Let’s say an influential psychiatrist, somebody like the president of the RANZCP (college of psychiatrists) says, I dunno, something like: “... the biopsychosocial model (is) ...the predominant theoretical framework underpinning contemporary psychiatry ... a relevant and useful component of training and practice ...”

It sounds great, it should soothe everybody who worries that psychiatrists don’t know what they’re doing but somewhere out there among the great unwashed there’s a busybody, a troublemaker who objects to her statement on the basis that there is no such model. He lodges a complaint with ACMA saying that her statement is demonstrably false and it causes people to take drugs or accept ECT when they shouldn’t. Now the people in ACMA are public servants, the great majority of whom have no particular qualifications, they simply got where they are by hanging around for a long time and not upsetting anybody important. They wouldn’t know a biopsychosocial model from an elephant’s ar- sorry, elephant’s ear, so they decide to ask some experts. But they also don’t know any experts in psychiatry so they reflexly ring the local director of mental health and a couple of professors at the local university, and they quickly get half a dozen opinions all saying the same thing:

The biopsychosocial model remains the prevailing aetiological and management framework through which most contemporary psychiatric training and practice is applied.

Fine, they say, the experts have spoken. From now on, everybody must say that the biopsychosocial model is the scientific basis of modern psychiatry, and anybody who says it isn’t is spreading false information and will be hung out to dry.

Very obviously, the way this bill is set up, it will stop a very large part of progress in science, because every new scientific truth starts with criticism of the status quo. As always, Shaw put his finger on it when he said: “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” All new ideas have to threaten somebody, have to shake some Established Truth, otherwise they’re useless, as Oscar Wilde scoffed: “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” And as Thomas Kuhn emphasised, novel ideas in science do not spring from presidents of colleges or from other pillars of the establishment such as well-known and well-connected professors, they come from the fringes, from the wild-eyed outsiders who upset the mainstream with their questions and objections. A classic example was the physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, who was unable to convince anybody in authority of his statistical model of atoms and thermodynamics, and eventually killed himself. It was only after he was dead that The Establishment suddenly realised he was right and started naming things after him.

Take another example that I have previously mentioned. In March, 2018 the RANZCP issued a press release saying psychiatrists “only ever” prescribe drugs after full discussion with the patient of the risks and benefits. This is absolute rubbish, patients who are on the receiving end of involuntary “treatment” get no such opportunity, while the majority of psychiatric patients report that they were told nothing about the drugs, especially nothing about drug interactions and how to withdraw from them. The then-president of the college knew this when she authorized the press release, and when she reiterated it in a letter a month later. It wasn’t a typo, or a minor slip of the tongue, or a little white lie, it was a blatant lie designed to shift attention away from psychiatry’s cavalier drug prescribing and to prevent criticism. Crucially, she has the backing of the huge and immensely powerful drug industry who closely monitor all public discussion of drug side effects and quickly act to suppress anything that threatens their incomes. We know that many of the most influential academic psychiatrists in the world are on the payrolls of the drug companies and have serious conflicts of interest, so anybody who decides to talk about, say, addictive effects of psychoactive drugs, has an uphill battle. The experts who decide what “the truth” is will be one and the same experts who advise the ACMA committee what constitutes valid information and what is “disinformation” deserving of punishment.

The problem with this bill is that it sets up a self-reinforcing system that will smother initiative, a self-licking icecream, as the boys in the Army don’t quite say. It’s Orwell’s 1984 writ small, just another incremental step toward the dystopia where the rich and powerful control the public narrative by deciding who is allowed to say what and to whom. Is this far-fetched? Not at all. The US presidency is about to be assumed by a person who told some 30,000 lies first time round, including the astounding suggestion that shining ultraviolet light down your trachea would stop the Covid virus spreading. It certainly would, but only because it would first kill the host so the virus wouldn’t be able to replicate and spread. His appointment as secretary for health, one RF Kennedy Jr (at 3.45), has an apparently endless supply of loopy ideas but it won’t worry him, he’s a multimillionaire and will get the best treatment. He would love to have a law like this to throw around.  

I think this bill is very dangerous and have written to all the senators telling them just that. It may pass, it may not. On the other hand, it may make it easier to complain about false news of the type that came from the Amsterdam riots. All the politicians and MSM people who carefully edited the amateur videos, voicing over the bits that didn’t suit them and making the Maccabi thugs out to be victims, they could be prosecuted. But on the other hand, they’re the very people who decide who gets on the committee in the first place. We saw that with the endless saga of the Robodebt racket. Very briefly, the government instituted a computerized scheme to work out when people on benefits had been overpaid and then issued automatic demands for repayment. The amounts involved were large to very large, especially if you’re unemployed. But the system was not just faulty, generating far too many overpayment notifications, it was illegal, and even though the government was warned, it was kept in place for years, ruining huge numbers of people’s lives and driving some to suicide. A meticulous enquiry showed that many highly- placed and highly-paid people in government and the public service knew perfectly well what was going on but did nothing because they didn’t want to risk their careers. Half a dozen of them were referred to the new National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) for further action. However, the commissioner decided to do nothing further and there the matter would have rested until some busybody showed that the commissioner had apparently made that decision to protect one of his friends. It’s a bit like the Spanish police chief from the drug and anti-money laundering squad who was recently arrested with €20million stashed in his home that he was laundering for drug smugglers.

The moral of this unhappy story is that critical psychiatry is, in fact, critical. If it doesn’t upset somebody, especially the “key opinion leaders” and those raking in the money, then it isn’t doing its job. We would like to think that this MAD bill will encourage the rich and powerful to be more careful what they say but I doubt it. Knowing they can be penalised will probably mean they get in first by using the new law to suppress alternative views. I don’t see any good coming out of this but perhaps Mr Wilde should have the last word:

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.