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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Three weeks ago, I reported on the UN report on the state of children in Gaza, beginning with: “What follows is utterly repugnant.” Another week, another report, this time from the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) and Progressive International, titled: A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians (available on the PFC site). Be warned: What it contains in its nearly 200 pages is beyond repugnant, far beyond merely “bestial” or “subhuman” depravity, because no animals on earth behave in the way this report describes is routine for members of the Israeli state apparatus.
Starting with background in the Nakba of 1948 and dealing with each decade since, it shows that the most extreme forms of sexualised violence and torture, expressly designed to crush, isolate and humiliate the victims, is neither rare nor the sporadic actions of a few bad actors. Instead, it is institutionalised and protected within the entire structure of the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) including the military, spy agencies, civil police, judicial services, prisons system and, crucially, the brutal civil militias commonly called settlers:
... sexualized violence is a systemic Israeli practice that has accelerated in frequency and scale of brutality since October 7, 2023. We conclude that Israeli sexualized violence is a central method of political, psychological, and physical warfare intentionally deployed to cause mass bodily and mental harm and injury. We further conclude that sexualized violence is intentionally deployed to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part and therefore must be regarded as a genocidal act (p60, emphasis added).
Since the October 7th rebellion by Hamas, matters have become much worse, with regular reports of rape by trained dogs of male and female prisoners, most of whom are never charged because they are civilians who have no connection with any armed forces. It’s not just Palestinians. After she was abducted from the Sumud Flotilla, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg reported deliberate sexual harrassment and emotional abuse:
If Israel, with the eyes of the world on it, can treat a well‑known white person with a Swedish passport like this, imagine what they do to Palestinians in secret (p108).
The report exposes what they do in secret. We’re constantly told we have to support Israel as an island of democracy and Judeo-Christian liberalism in a sea of barbarians, that Israelis are the world victims who have to be favoured in every respect as victims can do no wrong, and that opposing the Jewish State’s activities in any way or likening them to Nazis amounts to the grievous crime of antisemitism and will be punished for life. I haven’t read the whole of this report and don’t plan to as it’s truly horrifying but the case against Israel is crystal clear. For nearly a hundred years, it has planned and implemented the enforced expulsion of the indigenous population of Palestine, using lethal violence and grotesque humiliation as weapons of genocide. The question is: how does this come about? How can people who suffered grievously within living memory turn into depraved monsters who actually train dogs to rape humans? That would take a lot of effort, it doesn’t come naturally to dogs, which says the dog trainers and the handlers knew exactly what they were doing at all times.
The simple answer would be: that’s what Europeans do, they colonise other people’s lands and treat the indigenous population either as slave labour or as vermin to be eradicated. Look at Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US, where the native people were cheated of their land and driven to the brink, or Australia where the same thing happened. There were about 300,000 Aboriginal people when the British colony was established in Sydney in 1788. Within a few years, smallpox had swept through the Sydney tribes, leaving the land more or less bare for the colonists to seize. This pattern repeated throughout the country, albeit as the product of different diseases. Within ten years of whites arriving in an area, 90% of the Aboriginal population would be dead. 80% of those deaths were due to diseases such as influenza, chickenpox, measles, whooping cough and so on. 10% were usually due to direct white violence and the remainder due to Aboriginal violence, which was standard British policy: set the tribes against each other and move in when they were worn down. More recently, there are the examples of the British opium wars against China, the unspeakable violence of Belgium in Congo and France in Algeria and other parts of North Africa. We are not taught this history, and that’s not an accident. It is simply not mentioned. At school, we learned about the Black Hole of Calcutta (with capitals); we were not told of the Amritsar massacre of 1919 or the Bengal famine of 1943, when 3.5million people died because Britain took the crops they grew for its armies.
That’s one possibility, that white people are incapable of treating people of colour as their equals and will always try to wipe them out. However, that was mostly a couple of hundred years ago, we’re supposed to be more civilised now. We have the example of the Nazi genocide which gave us a body of international law, we have treaties and obligations, so how come Israel is able to act in such a depraved manner? There are a lot of factors involved but one part we can call the curse of zionism although it should really be called the curse of superiority.
The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism is humanity’s biological urge to dominate everything in sight. This is largely a male activity and is common to all species studied although women certainly aren’t immune (“Let them eat cake”). This reaches right throughout our existence as social animals. Practically everything we do is built around the idea of dominance hierarchies, starting in infancy and continuing after death when the rich and powerful have grandiose headstones in the cemetary and the poor get just a number on a post. The basis of any dominance hierarchy is the belief that I have rights you don’t have, and I can do whatever is necessary to exercise my rights. What did the British believe that justified their merciless treatment of the indigenes? I don’t know for sure but probably much as Churchill said of the King-Emperor’s unwilling Indian subjects: “A beastly people with a beastly religion.” It would be something like: “We are cultured and civilised people with the true religion while you are ignorant pagans and savages with all this land that you don’t know how to use. We’ll take over and impose our religion on you and teach you our superior language and how to wear shoes, plus we’ve got the guns,” as Hilaire Belloc put it in his satiric poem The Modern Traveller, (1898):
Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun and they have not..
Trouble is, an attitude of superiority is cursed from the beginning as it has no natural end. It feeds on itself and encourages people to become more and more extreme, rewarding militancy and penalising moderation. Within any movement, there is a moderate branch and an extreme branch. The moderates are motivated by the desire to do the right thing, to be fair and reasonable. Extremists, on the other hand, are driven by the urge to get to the top, to get bigger and more powerful, to crush anybody who stands in their way just because they only feel good when they have their boot on somebody’s throat. Which explains why moderates are always done in by the extremists. If in about 1850, a British politician had said in parliament: “Look, chaps, we’ve probably painted enough of the world red, why don’t we sit back and enjoy it, let other people have some?” he would have been thrown in the putrid River Thames. American politicians were rewarded for crushing the plains tribes into reserves so settlers could take their land. Australians after Federation in 1901 didn’t worry too much about the “native problem” as they were fully expected to die out before long, but also the idea that mere black people could “own” land was too absurd to think about. God gave us “... dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26-30), but He gave it to us true believers, not to them pagans. As Churchill, then Secretary of State for Colonies, said after the 1937 Peel Report on the Palestinian uprising:
I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
“I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people.” I rest my case. It is the nature of the fanaticism of superiority that it intensifies, it ratchets up but it never ratchets down. By late 1941, the Nazi government realised nobody in the world wanted to help solve their “Jewish problem” by taking millions of Jews from their growing empire. They could have said: “Oh well, looks like we’re stuck with them. Maybe we should just ignore them, or send them to Khazakhstan and they can have their own rotten country,” but they didn’t. The momentum of their own propaganda was such that nobody could back down. After twenty years of yelling that Jews were a mortal threat to the nation and the race, it was impossible for them to choose a moderate path. Anybody who had said “Let’s be reasonable” would have been shouted down, would have lost status, probably demoted and sent to the Russian Front so nobody did. The fear of appearing weak, of losing status in the hierarchy was enough to silence dissent so, at a conference at Wannsee in January 1942, they opted for the unthinkable, extermination. We’ve all done it, we’ve all had a time when we knew we should have spoken up but the gang of rowdy, aggressive people would have turned on us, or they had worn us down, or everybody else kept their heads down so we kept quiet and the extremists won. This is the curse of superiority, and zionism has a very bad case of it.
Is the political movement known as zionism based in the idea that one group has superior rights to another, and is entitled to exercise them? Absolutely, but that’s not how it started. It began in the 1880s and 90s as the notion that Jews could not be safe in Europe as they were always outsiders, always resented by the natives (after 2,000 years, why were they still outsiders? That’s another question). The only way they could be safe would be in their own country, except all of Europe was taken, so they looked further afield. Argentina, Patagonia, Uganda, even Tasmania were considered, then they settled on the Ottoman province of Palestine. That would kill two birds with one stone, as they say, it would appeal to the many Jewish socialists who could set up their idea of egalitarian paradise, and to the religious who had always toasted each other: “Next year in the Promised Land.” Yes, there were about 700,000 Palestinians already there but they could be dealt with by one means or another, as outlined in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall from 1923, which is headed: “Colonisation of Palestine. Agreement with Arabs Impossible at present. Zionism Must Go Forward.” First, they had to get the support of the Western democracies, for which the Great War provided a golden opportunity, quite literally. Britain’s totally illegal “Balfour Declaration” was simply a ploy to get money.
Gradually, this morphed into a religious crusade of recovery of the “Promised Land” from the defiling unbelievers. The older moderates, such as Nahum Goldmann, died out and extremists like Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Kahane, Schneerson, Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and so many others took over. Conquering the land of Greater Israel (from the Nile to the Euphrates) became a combined religious and national imperative, such that failing to do so was either an unforgivable sin against God’s plan or a cowardly humiliation and betrayal of the Holocaust in the face of the mocking Arabs, or both according to the direction of the wind, and nobody dared say “Enough is enough.” Actively aided by the West, meaning the US, UK and France with Germany paying the bills, Israel has continued its relentless, murderous expansion but any morality behind it, like providing a safe haven for Jews who wanted to move there, has long since been lost in the uproar. Now, the religious atmosphere has become near-delusional, with many of the hard core religious fanatics convinced the normal laws don’t apply to them: see here for an account of widespread, institutionalised sexual abuse of children within extremist religious communities; the channel is trustworthy. If this is what they do to their own children, no wonder Epstein thought he could get away with a bit of hanky-panky with the goyim. And it is all now based on the logical progression of the idea of a “Chosen People taking God’s Promised Land,” that anybody who opposes them is satanic and must be destroyed with gratuitous violence. The violence is both cleansing and sanctifying in and of itself.
Each time, the demands increase. From 1937 on, Britain trained and armed the merciless Jewish militias which became the Israeli army, becoming more merciless in the process, as well as disarming and weakening the Palestinian opposition. Israel’s so-called “war of independence” of 1948 was actually a concerted ethnic cleansing operation which the Arab Legion tried to stop with their ramshackle armies. Many of the Arab trucks that entered the territory were unarmed as they were meant to help shift the hundreds of thousands of displaced people but were attacked and destroyed by the well-armed, well-trained and utterly merciless Israeli military on their “mission from God.” Out of that, the zionist leaders decided they needed tanks and jets, all of which were supplied and then used against Egypt in 1956, and then nuclear weapons, with the reactor provided by France, paid by the US and all the scientists trained within the top secret US nuclear establishment.
It just goes on and on, gets worse and worse because extremists accept no limits on their ambitions. If they achieve one goal, they immediately look ahead and select another. Anybody in the movement who objects is dismissed as weak and expelled, or a traitor and locked up or has an accident while checking the view from a 20th floor window. The other side of it dehumanising the enemy. In elevating myself, there comes a point where I force him off the hierarchy of humans, he becomes a “human animal.” That is the nature of extremism. Extremism has only one end, either its many enemies combine to crush it or it burns itself out from within. That is the curse of superiority.
Zionism exists only because a group of people believe they have the divine seal of approval to do what they like to their neighbours. They are very willing prisoners of the curse of superiority. Because this is historically so significant in the world today, we can rename it the Curse of Zionism and, in a hundred years’ time, people will know just what that means. The end-stage depravity of the moral crime of superiority.
PS See this article. Somebody should point this out to the US, they should get off the escalator before the curse of superiority takes control of them. Or has it already?
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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.