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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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 7th 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. 20th 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 8th 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/
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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.