Striptease

200 veils later...

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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Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Arnold J Toynbee (1889-1975, British historian. From A Study of History)

George Orwell dismissed the autobiography of the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, as “a striptease conducted in pink limelight.” He was so lucky. For decades, we’ve been treated to a long, slow striptease, an elaborate Dance of the Seven Veils conducted in full technicolour under glaring floodlights to the soundtrack of screaming jets and exploding bombs. Now, the dance has reached its inevitable end, the Seventh Veil lies torn, scuffed and crumpled on the floor, and all the pretence and suspense is over. Standing stark naked on the world stage is Uncle Sam, in the unlovely form of his president, one DJ Trump, bulges, warts, trusses and all. When asked if she was scared while giving evidence against Trump, the porn actress Stormy Daniels replied: “Not at all. I’ve seen Donald Trump naked. After that, nothing is scary.” Seeing the US stripped of all its lies and pretence shouldn’t be scary but a lot of people around the world seem to be having trouble getting used to it.

The idea that the US could invade Venezuela, a sovereign country, kill 82 people and kidnap its president and his wife scares a lot of people to the point where they have to tell each other: “Maduro has been captured.” That makes it sound, not like the major international crime that it is, but like a Hollywood goodies vs baddies tale where the brave and noble goodies have finally run the evil one to ground and now he’s trussed up in the van and going to the place he deserves. Except there’s no truth in it. First point: a head of state has absolute immunity, just as Trump has managed to winkle out of his tame Supreme Court. Second: no American court has jurisdiction outside its borders. Third: even if it did, no evidence of drug trafficking has been presented because, as the US DEA has said, there isn’t any. Four: only the UN Security Council can authorise an invasion of a sovereign state, and they haven’t and wouldn’t. Five: the US recently ignored the international arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of crimes against humanity, including murdering and torturing children. Six: Trump and various minions have made it perfectly clear that the whole thing is about oil. And seven: If he gets away with this, he’ll try it again and again.

Starting with the genocide in Gaza and now with the attack on Venezuela, the final veil has dropped. The whole world sees the idea of an American designed and led “rules-based international order” as a total fraud, smoke and mirrors intended to keep the hoi-polloi quiet while the US got on with its manifest destiny of looting the planet. In fact, there have been so many veils of obfuscation, deceit and treachery that it’s always been hard to keep up with them. An early and important example was the idea of “national self-determination” written into the UN Charter. Sounds great, but it quickly got in the way and was pushed aside. The European countries wanted to keep their empires; they needed American support and money to recover them; if they didn’t get them, they would have drifted into neutrality so the US helped them reoccupy their colonies.

In South-East Asia, France faced formidable opposition from the nationalist movement, led by the resourceful Marxist known as Ho Chi Minh. The French were supplied with American money, arms and aircraft but it wasn’t enough. At Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they were defeated by a guerilla army, creeping through the jungle with bits of car tyres tied to their feet for sandals, so the US pushed the French aside and took over. A conference in Geneva in 1954 promised a national election for 1956 but when it became clear the communist Viet Minh would win, the Americans cancelled it and started another war which they duly lost, setting the trend for the next fifty years. But the veil of deceit drawn over this dreadful episode is that the US was fighting monolithic international communism for Vietnamese freedom and democracy, all of which was false. They were fighting for the power to dominate South East Asia and isolate and weaken Maoist China. Even the casus belli, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was a fabrication from beginning to end. There have been so many cases like this. The Wikipedia page on American Regime Change operations since 1945 names 45 countries, but there were more. For example, it doesn’t include the CIA-MI6 operation in Australia in 1975 to topple the Whitlam Labor government, which was thinking of not renewing the lease on Pine Gap CIA station in Central Australia (after Langley, VA, this is the most important US spy base in the world).

The problem facing us today is that the entire Western world, and much of the rest, has been raised on a relentless diet of “We’re in the right, anybody who opposes us is evil and must be crushed.” Most people believe it, partly because it requires no intellectual effort but mainly because a lie endlessly repeated will eventually be accepted as truth, especially if it’s a Big Lie. For 45years, the enemy was “monolithic international communism” which was also used to taint anything remotely socialist. However, it was never “monolithic” but a range of more or less nationalist, anti-imperialist socialist governments of various flavours. In fact, with his policy of “Socialism in One Country,” Stalin declared this himself. He wanted to build the USSR; other countries could look after themselves, which led to the split with Mao’s China because Stalin wouldn’t help them. There were doctrinal reasons as well but the antagonism was mainly nationalistic. Vietnam was a clear example: their revolution was primarily nationalist and anti-imperialist; the Marxists took control because they had a ready-made doctrine that seemed to answer complex questions, and they were the hard men who could unite the country to fight the foreign invaders. But they were never Chinese or Soviet poodles, as we have since seen. The American slogan of “toppling dominoes” was pure propaganda.

At all times and in all respects, the problem was always the insane American urge to dominate and control the world. Full spectrum dominance, they call it: total domination of the entire world in every conceivable respect, political, military, social, financial, cultural, communications, everything. And religion, if they get their way. This has been the policy since 1945 but we were never told this. It was always “We’re the goodies, they’re the baddies, let’s get ‘em.” For example, the Korean peninsula was divided as a result of the agreement reached at the Yalta conference in February 1945. In the South, the US installed a vicious proto-fascist president named Syngman Rhee; he soon sent his military to slaughter anybody of leftist tendencies in a series of brutal massacres but this was all kept quiet. In addition, he kept up probing attacks across the border, to which the North eventually responded in kind, but it was always labelled an “invasion by North Korea.”

Same in Congo. After 70 years of unspeakable cruelty and exploitation, Belgium was forced to give independence to the Congo. However, so that the Belgian mining company Union Miniere could keep control of its very lucrative businesses and, with major American assistance, they encouraged the minerals-rich province of Katanga to secede under Moise Tshombe. The elected socialist prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was forced out, kidnapped and murdered by Belgian mercenaries flown around in American military planes. In his place, the US installed one Joseph Mobutu, for whom the term “kleptocrat” was coined; Congo descended into chaos from which it has never emerged. Somewhere in all of that, the plane carrying the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was shot down, killing all on board. In the past thirty years, about 5 million people have been killed in the endless wars in East Congo. While Trump babbles on about imposing a peace deal on a place he couldn’t find on a map, none of it would have started without American weapons and support.

Almost since its inception, but certainly since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the US has been a classic capitalist-imperialist power. Bill Clinton made this clear in an address to Congress in 1993, repeated at the UN:

…the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power … (to ensure) … uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources (27^th Sept. 1993).

This didn’t come from nowhere, he was simply echoing what he had imbibed with his mother’s milk but it was highly contagious. His Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, who arrived in the US in 1948, aged 11, echoed his view: “If we have to use force it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Novelist John Updike commented on the irony of conquest as foreign policy:

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.

Under Herr Drumpf, however, all gloves are off, all pretence is dropped: We are the rulers of the world, the most powerful country in history so all you foreigners and poor and other riff-raff can bow down before our majesty. Since January 20^th last year, US warplanes directed by the “president of peace” have bombed at least nine countries, now including Nigeria and Venezuela, neither of which is remotely a threat to the US. There have probably been more but we don’t know about them yet. He has laid claim to Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Gaza and now Venezuela. The problem is just this: what he shows is the classic psychopathic ploy. He floats an idea, apparently in passing. If people boo and hiss, he drops it and moves on to the next bit of crap that drifts into his head. If nobody objects too strongly, he repeats it several times then, convinced he can get away with it, he does it.

The attacks on so-called “narco-terrorist boats” in the Caribbean is textbook psychopathia. He talked about it, nobody said anything, so he tried it. Nobody complained, so he did it again and again, then added boats in the Pacific. Then he blockaded Venezuela’s ports, then he snatched some tankers and unloaded their fuel in Texas, saying they would keep it, then he bombed a remote port in Venezuela, then they attacked and kidnapped the president (which had been months in the planning and involved massive bribes to Venezuelan air force commanders not to shoot the helicopters down). Then he gloated briefly until, bored, his fickle fancy turned to Greenland again. If nobody pushes back, he will send a contingent of troops to the base at Pituffik, northern Greenland, formerly Thule base. They will grab more territory, saying they need it for “national security,” then he will land troops in the towns (both of them) to “maintain peace and security,” and that will be that. Greenland will be ingested by the giant, grasping amoeba called the USA and slowly digested.

That’s how psychopaths and naughty children do it: they test the limits to see what they can get away with. If nothing happens, they push further, then further until they get what they want; if the adults impose firm limits, they pretend they were never interested and go on to something else. Moreover, they never take on everybody in a fair fight. They isolate targets and pick them off one by one, as Martin Niemöller described: “First, they came for the communists…” Trump does this intuitively all the time. Problem is, people let him get away with it. Same as has been happening in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East for the past 80 years: push push, nibble nibble, lunge and grab, move on. Psychopaths have to be reined in right at the beginning, otherwise they think they can rule the world.

However, all the politicians in Europe are pissing themselves at present. They know they can’t stop an American invasion of Greenland by military means, especially as the Wolf of Moscow is baying at their door in Ukraine. They know perfectly well that if Trump gets away with Greenland, all the little Caribbean countries will be next, including Cuba and anybody else he doesn’t like, then he will move on to the next bauble to attract his covetous eye: the rest of Diego Garcia, and what about the Falklands? And South Georgia? Oh yes, one in the eye for those bloody Limeys whom he loathes and envies in equal measure. Then Gaza, and what about Qatar? They don’t need all that gas, do they? And then, maybe, a bit of northern Australia to control China, they’ve got heaps of land and don’t do anything with it, they wouldn’t miss the tip of Cape York. Or Tasmania, very pretty, we could do a lot with it.

The sense of entitlement and privilege grows hand in hand with the sense of power and knows no bounds. Trump wants to go down as the greatest real estate mogul in American history: Long Island, the Louisiana Purchase, California, the Alaska Purchase, Texas, and now Greenland, meaning he would get the prize. Of course, all his minions have got the bug. In an “unhinged rant,” the reptilian Stephen Miller announced that the US has the “right” to take over any country it likes for its resources. Miller is far too devious to say anything he knows Trump wouldn’t like; more likely he was testing the water for his dementing boss.

Remember that Trump is only in power as the agent of the wealthy class. In a speech to the oil lobby early in 2024, he promised them that if they gave him $1billion, he would make all their dreams come true. As the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela was long their collective wet dream. Before the attack on Caracas, and even before notifying Congress, Trump told the oil companies what he was doing. Until it is blackened, his covetous eye will wander across the globe as once it wandered greedily across all the contestants in the dressing rooms of his beauty shows. There’s no difference, it’s the same psychological phenomenon writ larger: Gimme gimme gimme. The US is now a mafia state.

How can the US be given a black eye? Very simple: bankrupt them. The US needs to roll over $8-10trillion in loans this year. If 96% of the world’s population say to the 4% who live in Godzone: “Sorry, kiddo, party’s over. We’re not playing that game any more. The world doesn’t need an exceptional nation,” if they say that, it’s all over. If all those smelly foreigners from their shithole countries don’t buy its bonds, the US is stuffed. Their economy will crash, the country will grind to a halt, the foreign military bases, all 850 of them, will be abandoned, and the world will enter a new era. To reinforce the message, the world should ditch the USD as the reserve currency and isolate the US by cutting it out of the entire trading system. They’re no longer needed, everything the world needs is produced elsewhere and without them constantly jumping on the dinner table and kicking the plates around, we’ll all enjoy a much more pleasant and sociable meal. And profitable. The adjustment away from the US-centric economy won’t be comfortable, probably not worse than anything we’ve been through since 1945, but it will be better than allowing him to keep nibbling.

So that’s the message: The way to deal with psychopaths, be they individuals or nations, is this: cut out all their rewards. Act as a united front to isolate them, set limits on behaviour and enforce them. Giving in only encourages them to greater excesses. Didn’t we learn that in the 1930s?

Correction:

A number of times, I’ve said the urge to dominate and the urge to resist are equal and opposite, hence the paradox of hierarchy. Actually, that’s not quite true. The urge to resist is stronger in that it lasts longer, it doesn’t wear off. People at the peak of power and privilege and entitlement become fat and lazy because power and privilege lead to self-indulgence, which has no limit. They just get greedier and greedier, they squeeze the underlings more and more until they reach the point where they have nothing to lose, then they push back. That’s inevitable. Arnold Toynbee said that empires aren’t murdered by outsiders, they commit suicide. As we see happening to the latest empire.

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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.