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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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 19th 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.
Incredible writing
Thank you, Niall, a fearless analysis.