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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(for some reason, this isn’t indenting quotes, I’ll try to sort it out)
A couple of questions arrived regarding last week’s post. First one: “You said that in prosperity gospel, the belief is: ‘If you’re rich, it’s a sign that God favours you.’ What’s wrong with that?” There are two things wrong with it. First, it directly contradicts a critical message in Christianity, one which is common to all the major religions, that we all have a duty to care for the poor and broken, e.g.:
Matt.25.40: And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
I John 3.17: But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?
Second fault: it leads directly to corruption, usually on a massive scale. It’s not a fault of the individuals that so many pastors of prosperity type churches are corrupt, corruption is built into the system, e.g. it’s happened that twice in the past few years, I’ve found wallets in the street with several hundred dollars in them, not to mention credit cards etc. Naturally enough, I contacted the owners and gave them back; the blokes who’d lost them were ordinary working people, they were so grateful as in both cases they were on their way to pay their rent. However, as a member of a prosperity church, I could have said: “Oh look, God has put some money in my path, obviously he wants me to have it. And these cards, of course, I’m sure they’re part of my reward for being such a virtuous chap.” To paraphrase Lord Acton, the system corrupts, but the system also attracts the corruptible.
Q2: “You said: ‘Zionism is an heretical, idolatrous, criminal cult but the trouble is, it has found common cause with the christian heresies spreading and financed from the US.’ Isn’t that to their benefit?” Sure it is. The so-called christian zionists send guns and money to the Jewish zionists who then kill to their hearts’ content to get what they believe is their divine inheritance in West Asia, minus its 120million unbelieving inhabitants. Remember that not all Jewish zionists are religious; a lot of them are like Trump, they pretend to be religious but they don’t follow the rules and do essentially what they like. They want to dominate their neighbours to the extent of driving them off their land and/or killing them so they can have the land themselves. They are no different from the European colonists in North and South America, in Africa and Australia. In Asia, the Europeans wanted to push the inhabitants into a form of serfdom, which the British did in their vast Indian empire, forcing the population to work the land or the factories that enriched the British. In particular, the zionist goal in West Asia today is precisely the same political phenomenon as the Nazi plan to invade and occupy the USSR. Nazi ideology said:
“The Nordic races are superior types, the Slavic inferior; by some cruel twist of history, we Germans have ended up with little land in central Europe, boxed in by jealous neighbours yet the Slavs have unlimited land and resources that they can’t use as they don’t know how to; it is a law of nature that the superior should dominate the inferior, not vice versa; ipso facto we are entitled to that land; therefore we should invade the USSR, take their land, kill off half of them and enslave the rest to build a glorious empire that will last a thousand years and will take humanity to new heights of achievement.”
That was their reason for World War. It was not a war to wipe out the Jews, they were a clean-up job to sort out behind the lines because they were diluting the pure Aryan racial stock and spreading transnational, Bolshevik ideas. Hitler did not attack France to snatch its Jews, the intent was to neutralise France, to prevent them and Britain launching a war to his rear while he was busy in the East, i.e. a war on two fronts which had been Germany’s downfall in the Great War. Similarly, zionism says:
Deut. 28:1. Now it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth (added emphasis).
That means: “We are chosen by God to be superior to all nations of the earth; God has promised us all the land from the east bank of the Nile to the west bank of the Euphrates (Genesis 15. 18-21); we were driven off it 2000 years ago but it is our unassailable religious duty to take it back from the unbelievers who have stolen it; by doing so, we are doing God’s duty; if the unbelievers resist, they will feel God’s fiery wrath upon their heads; then we will build a mighty empire that will usher in the coming of the messiah and an age of universal peace under Jewish leadership” (or something, that bit isn’t entirely clear).
Nazism and zionism are the same political phenomenon: a group feel they are hard done by and covet their neighbours’ lands, so they decide to even the balance by any means necessary so they can preside over a glorious future. That’s Jewish zionism. Christian zionism agrees that Jews have to be gathered into their promised land, then the Christian messiah can come except that in the end, the Jews will get the chop and be sent to the big cooker downstairs. In a Monty Python twist, Jewish zionists and so-called christian zionists are actually cooperating for contradictory ends, which only goes to show that if it made sense, it wouldn’t be religion.
Is it fair to say of Jewish zionism that they have an attitude of superiority, at least to the indigenous inhabitants of modern Palestine? Yes, it is fair. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who refounded the very influential Chabad movement in New York, made it quite clear that Palestinians were inferior beings. We see this attitude in the “settlers,” the extremists who are paid to move to houses built for them in the West Bank. In this video, one of them freely tells the interviewer that one Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives (from start to 0.45). Two points to note. First, this is not exceptional. This is normal for the 750,000 settlers who now occupy the West Bank, and there are thousands more on the way as the Israeli government pours money into building new ones, bulldozing Palestinian houses in the process. For a government whose economy is on the brink of collapse from war, where does all the money come from? From supporters in the US, who hold equally noxious Jewish supremacist views.
Second point: this attitude is not new. It did not spring into existence following Oct 7th, or in 1948, or 1885, it goes back forever. The only difference is that normally, people who believe it don’t say it on camera but now they don’t care, they think they’re winning and can say what they like. For the record, this is fascism. It is not a nationalist fascism, as per Mussolini, Nazis, Japan or imperial Britain; or a socialist fascism, as per Stalin and Mao; or a capitalist fascism, as is growing in the US today; it is a religious or clericalist fascism, of which there have been hundreds of examples throughout history. Fascism is not itself a form of government. It is a technology which can be used by any group anywhere to gain and hold power. It relies on the innate human urge to dominate, employing a wide variety of techniques to excite people and license them to act in a brutal manner toward their neighbours which, ordinarily, most of them wouldn’t do. The urge to dominate is built in; normally, it is quiescent but it just needs the right triggers to erupt forth, and fascism provides them. Fascism is as fascism does, and the “settler” in that video is doing it.
But it raises an important question: if it’s fine for the zionists to kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for killing Israelis on October 7th, how come the Israeli government ordered the Hannibal doctrine on that day, to kill Israelis (military and civilian) to prevent them being captured by Hamas? That too goes back a very long way, to the medieval concept of the informer. Any Jew who gives any information to the goyim that in any way allows one Jew or many to suffer in any way is a traitor to the religion and must be punished grievously. As Shahak and Mezvinsky explain, a rabbinical court decides who is guilty of informing and appoints a “pursuer” to carry out its sentence:
“In chapter 10, rule 1 of Laws of Idolatry, Maimonides (the great Spanish-born Talmudic scholar, d. 1204) , after explaining the extermination of the ancient Canaanites and again asserting that no Jews should be killed, said: “All this applies to the seven [Canaanite] nations, but Jewish informers and heretics should be exterminated by one’s own hand and put into hell, because they cause trouble to Jews by removing their hearts from being true to the Lord, like Tzadok, and Beitos [the alleged founders of the Sadducean sect] and their pupils. Let the name of the wicked perish” [1, Chap. 7]
That is, anybody who causes trouble to Jews must die. Israelis taken prisoner by Hamas will cause trouble to Jews. Therefore they must die, and at least 600 Israelis were killed by the Israeli military on that day (this was also the justification for the assassination of former PM Yitzhak Rabin by religious fanatics, same as happened to Gandhi and for the same reason, i.e. betraying the religion).
We live in dangerous times but the trouble lies with the people at the controls. Three years ago, there was a terrible bus accident in the Hunter Valley, NSW. A bus carrying a group coming home from a wedding party rolled over, killing 10 people. At the trial, the driver admitted taking a large dose of tramadol, an opiate, and driving too fast. Several passengers had told him to slow down but apparently, he said he would show them what the bus could do and rolled it on a corner. He was sentenced to 32 years. It’s an allegory for the world we live in. The passengers on planet earth bus are frightened and telling the drivers to slow down, we’re travelling too fast, using too much, causing too much damage but the drivers scoff, telling us we’re communists or softcocks or traitors, they know what they’re doing, it’s all the enemy’s fault, we’re blameless, god’s on our side, he’s given us nuclear weapons to subdue them, on and on. Three days after Hiroshima, speaking on a national radio broadcast, US president Harry S Truman said: “We thank God that it (the atomic bomb) has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” Americans are impervious to irony, and that persists today in a new YouTube channel.
John Mearsheimer (b 1947), professor of political science at Chicago University, has long had a presence on the internet but has now started his own channel. The first two talks are available but it’s easier to skim through the transcript than sit through his plodding style. Mearsheimer propounds the notion of “offensive realism” in international relations (OR in IR). Very briefly, this says that the reality of the international scene is anarchic. Any nation that wants to maintain peace within its borders must take steps to protect itself from the anarchy spilling inwards. It therefore needs to exert control over its neighbours to make sure they don’t get any funny ideas about invading. This doctrine is widely taken as licence to act aggressively as a preemptive measure. Gaining local hegemony is the only way a nation can guarantee a peaceful life for its citizenry. For a big and powerful country, its hegemony must extend as far as it feels it needs to feel safe; for the US, this means global hegemony or, as they say, full spectrum dominance. This is the idea of the Pax Romanorum, the peace Rome was able to impose throughout its empire, with gibbets regularly spaced along their roads to remind the proles of their place in the imperial order.
In his first talk, Mearsheimer describes three strategies for conventional war: blitzkrieg, or lightning war; a war of attrition; and a war with limited aims, e.g. conquering and holding part of the enemy’s territory. The first two are directed at strategic victory. Blitzkrieg implies a sudden attack intended to overwhelm the defenders by massive force and rapid movement so they are unable to mount a counter-offensive. A war of attrition is launched where the opposing forces are more evenly balanced and “decapitation” is clearly not going to be possible but the attacking force expects to be able to wear the other side down over time. The last one, with limited aims, may succeed at first but it will soon turn into a defensive war as the enemy will not accept losing its territory and will settle down to recovering it by one means or another. At 13.50, he says: “By definition, you don’t think about launching an attack against an adversary unless you think there is a strong set of political reasons for doing so.”
The second lecture talks about the five possible strategies an attacking force can use: discriminate air war (i.e. bombing restricted to military targets); indiscriminate air war (“bombing them back to stone age”); “tit-for-tat” bombing; naval blockade; and land war. This talk is repetitious and again, skimming the transcript is the way to go. He uses the example of the illegal Trump-Netanyahu war of aggression against Iran to argue that Trump should have settled for very limited aims months ago. Now, he is caught in a trap of his own making. He needed a distraction from Epstein so he launched a war; now he needs a distraction from losing his war (I added that bit). The trap is that he has been defeated but Americans never admit defeat, especially just before an election when the people are unhappy, and he can’t find a way of convincing the Iranians that he decides who wins, not them.
To me, and bearing in mind that this is only about 75minutes of his stuff, there is a glaring fault in Mearsheimer’s presentation: he doesn’t say WHY humans want to keep attacking each other. He doesn’t say WHY Trump and the zionists are obsessed with attacking Iran, or all the other places they’ve destroyed over the past 80 years. This means that his “theory of IR” is actually back to front. Mearsheimer says: International relations are anarchic, therefore nations must dominate their neighbours. I say: Wrong. Nations are constantly trying to dominate their neighbours just because humans, and that creates international anarchy. His explanation stops at the level of the observations, he doesn’t attempt to reduce it. A reductionist explanation says that the behaviour and properties of a higher order entity (such as a nation or alliance of nations) are determined by the behaviour and properties of the lower order entities of which it is composed.
In the case of nations, the lower order entities are individual humans. Individual humans have an innate, biologically-mediated urge to dominate each other, and this translates into nations trying to dominate each other. As a matter of simple logic, if interpersonal relations take the form of dominance hierarchies, then that will apply a fortiori to nations unless there is something to prevent it. This drive is not absolute: with training from an early age, it can be moderated or switched off as required but most people don’t learn that lesson very well. With very, very few excepstions, our “leaders” didn’t learn to keep their hands to themselves. Like the bus driver who wanted to show what his powerful bus could do and ended up killing his passengers, they’re determined to show what their armies can do, how they can crush their enemies into the dirt, regardless of the risks they’re running. Like Trump, most of them are convinced they’re so smart and so powerful and so superior that they can just flick their fingers and their enemies will melt away.
The UN was set up to prevent a repetition of World War II but it was promptly neutered by the US and other Western countries so it hasn’t been very effective. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN Human Rights Commissioner recently visited the West Bank again. In a brief report, she said:
“I arrived at a clear conclusion: the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally and politically.”
That is, genocide. Netanyahu’s illegal and inhuman conduct, and that of his government and the 92% of Israelis who support his war, flows directly from the notion that Group A can dominate Group B just because they feel like it. This has nothing to do with what they believe god told them, as former Israeli PM David ben Gurion agreed:
“If I was an Arab leader, I would not sign an agreement with Israel. It’s natural. We took their land. I mean yes, god promised it to us, but our god is not their god. Why would they accept? Why would that mean anything? Yes, there was antisemitism, Nazis, the Jews, Auschwitz, but why would they pay for it? We are coming here to take their land and they should not accept it” (from this list).
The US has conducted aggressive war since its inception, since that’s what countries blessed by god do. Since before its inception, Israel has conducted a war of attrition against its neighbours, constantly nibbling at their borders and taking each step forward not, as they say, as the end point of their ambitions but as the starting point of the next set of goals. Both countries are gripped by a sense of superiority which they believe is divinely ordained. What they don’t realise, and what they don’t want to be told, is that it’s just hormones raging in the dark. They also don’t get the paradox of hierarchy, that yes, it feels good to dominate but that means it feels bad to be oppressed, and the oppressed will inevitably fight back because humans. Anybody who believes that one life from his tribe is worth ten million of the other tribe will inevitably find out the hard way. On that day, the settlers will learn what it means to cry for help and nobody comes. Better still, before they crash the bus we’re all travelling on, maybe they should negotiate an end to the fighting. For that, we’ll need an entirely new set of leaders.
Reference:
Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). The Religious Background of Rabin’s Assassination. Chap. 7 in 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.