When Domination Turns to Brutality

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.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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Last week, reader Moebius commented:

My quick conclusion is: The class of people who treat others as sub-human showed how sub-human they are themselves. But how to deal with that as humans? If we would exterminate the actual sub humans then we would be just as bad. Yet if we dont do enough against them then they will just continue.

This is a critically important conundrum: How does a reasonable person deal with an unreasonable person without becoming unreasonable in the process? It is at the basis of the concept of a “just war,” recently in the news as Pope Leo has challenged the legality and humanity of the Netanyahu-Trump war of aggression against Iran. However, nobody, not even a pope, has ever been able to resolve this issue. The Christian principle is “turn the other cheek” but that presumes the other person has a conscience. A lot of people don’t, which is why they’re aggressive in the first place. The evidence is that when it comes to imposing their agenda, hard-core zionists do not regard people opposing them as worthy of consideration. We see this in southern Lebanon right now. The Israeli military has ordered something like a million civilians to leave their homes and move north, even though there are no facilities for them. As they go, workers move in with explosives and heavy machinery to demolish their homes and everything they can (wach the brief video in that link). This is precisely the program they have been implementing in Gaza for the past 30 months, which is itself a copy of their policies developed in the 1930s and honed to perfection in the Nakba, or catastrophe, the violent ethnic cleansing of the area allocated to Jews in the partition of 1948.

Just as a reminder, the mandated territory of Palestine was divided by a UN resolution, handing 56% of the territory to the Jews, who were about 35% of the population, and 44% to the 65% who were indigenous Palestinians. As soon as the UN resolution was implemented, the new Israeli army, formed from terrorist groups and former troops in the British army and armed by the British, began a violent action to force as many Palestinians out of the designated Jewish areas as possible. In the following months, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by attacks on their villages during which some 10-15,000 were murdered. By the end of the year, Israel had expanded its territory to 78% of the mandate. The story put about that the indigenous people “chose” to move is an absolute, unmitigated lie. They no more “chose” to move than you would suddenly pack a few bags tonight, grab your kids and rush out on to the streets clutching them, abandoning your home while heading for who knows where (a brief directed video here). Israel is the only country in the world that has not defined its borders just because, ab initio, it has intended to keep expanding them, as in the illegally annexed Golan Heights of Syria and is now taking place in Gaza, the West Bank and in Lebanon.

In excess of 500 villages were destroyed during the Nakba, and this is where it becomes significant. The Israelis had in place a plan to eradicate all traces of those villages and overplant them with trees, so that nobody would be able to return and nobody would know of their crime of ethnic cleansing. The person responsible for this plan was one Yosef Weitz (1890-1972), whom I’ve mentioned before. Weitz came from Czarist occupied Poland and became head of the Land and Afforestation department of the Jewish National Fund, which had been established in 1901 to collect money to buy Palestinian land. He joined the JNF in 1932 and soon became head of the afforestation section but his main role was in forcing Palestinians off their traditional land. Post World War II, he was very active and influential in the program to “transfer” Palestinians into neighbouring countries (who were all nearly bankrupt anyway) and wipe all trace of Palestinian occupation from the landscape. In this, he was successful to the extent that he is known in Israel as the “architect of the transfer,” meaning ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population:

Our army is steadily conquering Arab villages and their inhabitants are afraid and flee like mice. You have no idea what happened in the Arab villages. It is enough that during the night several shells whistle overhead and they flee for their lives. Villages are steadily emptying, and if we continue on this course – and we shall certainly do so as our strength increases - then tens of villages will empty of their inhabitants. This time these self-confident ones, too, will feel what it is like to be refugees (Yosef Weitz, Diary, 21st April 1948).

There was never at any stage any doubt that this was the program to be financed and pursued by the Jewish state (see here for more quotes by Weitz on ethnic cleansing). It was written into zionism from the beginning in about 1891. In 1924, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), one of the main figures in the early movement, wrote an essay entitled The Iron Wall (1923) in which he explicitly stated that the Palestinian population would oppose their replacement, so they would have to be pushed aside and held in place by an “iron wall”:

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach (emphasis added).

Soon after, he said that this zionist project was “moral and just” because “national self-determination” is itself a moral objective which Palestinians reserved for themselves so they couldn’t complain if somebody else applied it. There was no mention of prior claims to the land. Ethnic cleansing is deemed a crime against humanity. If it takes place during wartime, it is also a war crime. Granted that prior to the Nuremberg trials, it had never been formulated in these terms, mainly because all the major world powers practised it avidly, but it certainly had been by 1948 and was written into the UN Charter. Before 1946, it was considered evil, which is why the imperialists kept quiet about it, but after that it was a crime. On this basis alone, repeated statements of intent of criminal action by many leading zionists over the past 125 years prove that the entire zionist movement is a criminal enterprise. There is no conceivable defence to this charge, but it gets worse.

I’ve previously mentioned how Hitler justified the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 (chapter 14 of Mein Kampf). The explicitly stated goal of the German fascist government was to invade the Slavic lands to their east; to conquer the various governments; to eliminate half the population and to enslave the remainder as labourers to build an empire glorifying the Aryan race. Hitler firmly believed that all good in human progress had come from the Germanic races so, in building their Thousand Year Reich, they were preventing a slide into another dark age and thus doing humanity a great favour. Essentially, the backward Slavs owed everything worthwhile in their lives to the tall, handsome and clever people to their west, so the Nazi invasion was morally justifiable, even if 30million “excess” Soviet citizens were slated for liquidation in the first year of the occupation. That was the entire purpose behind launching what became World War II. The notion that it was a war against Jews is false. As Hitler himself stated, eliminating the Jewish populations was a side issue. They did not invade France or the Low Countries to snatch their Jewish populations, they did it to safeguard their major ambition, the conquest and colonisation of the Slavic heartlands.

From very early following the invasion of Poland in 1939, SS squads known as Einsatzgruppen (special groups or task forces), working close behind the lines began the process of exterminating millions of people and destroying their means of survival – their homes, schools, farms, bridges etc. Their goal was to transform the landscape from its traditional or historic form into a form suited to the expanding empire. By the time of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, they were ready and waiting and immediately began their evil work. This included the well-known massacres in Ukraine such as Babi-Yar but, more importantly for the Nazi project and largely unknown to outsiders, the murder of some 650,000 villagers in what is now Belarus. Come and See, a Soviet era film from about 1985, shows this in brutal detail with the unmistakable message: “Nobody will ever be allowed to do this to us again.” The point is that the Jewish demolition squads operating in southern Lebanon right now are doing essentially the same job as the SS Einsatzgruppen did in the USSR for four years from June 1941: eliminating their means of survival. Granted they are not lining people up and shooting them but the Israeli military is doing that daily on a piecemeal basis. During the infamous Seige of Leningrad of 1941-44, about 1.5million people died. Gaza has been under seige and continuing bombardment for 30 months, and people are dying of starvation or preventable illness, often spread by the plagues of rats.

The similarities between the Nazi conduct in World War II and zionist conduct in Palestine for the past century are not loose analogies. Politically, they are precise homologies: Fascism is as fascism does. Their inhuman conduct comes directly from the belief: “We are superior and you are inferior so we can do what we like to you.” In turn, this arises from the biologically-based, universal human drive to form dominance hierarchies, with me at the top and you down below just because it feels so very good for me. The converse, of course, is that people will resist subjugation, even to death. This is the paradox of hierarchy, that we humans all come equipped with two opposing drives, to dominate and to resist domination. That’s all anybody needs to know about politics. All of the nationalist or religious, racist, historical or social justification lathered over this base is cosmetic. It’s propaganda designed to hide the brutal reality of Macht hat Recht, might confers right, which is Trump’s modus operandi. Nobody should be taken in by it.

Now there are people who try to say that we should not even use the words “fascist” and “zionist” in the same sentence, let alone compare them objectively, but that’s both absurd and dishonest. We can compare any two governments in the world, or the actions of any two armies, or political systems, or organised crime in different countries, or companies, health systems, schools, sports teams, anything. Comparison of different political and social systems is a value-free exercise. We can, for example, state that even though the US has always claimed to be a democratic state founded upon universal principles, its actions have always been those of the imperial states that ruled most of the world when the US first formed itself. To examine this proposition, we write a list of all the characteristics of imperial states through the ages, then give the US a score on each of those factors to see how it stands. In fact, it comes out badly. This is not anti-American. While it is possibly true that the great bulk of Americans would be heartily offended by the exercise, that testifies to their ignorance of their own history, not to the nature of the process.

We can also see how the US rates as a fascist state using the criteria listed in Chapter 2 of Narcisso-Fascism (pp32-33). If we give a score for each factor where 0= not at all, 1= a bit, 2 = quite a lot and 3= a great deal, the US doesn’t do very well, especially under the present regime. Indeed, if certain well-known oligarchs had their way, it would be right up there with Mussolini. I doubt the US would ever reach the Nazi class as the American 1% are too corrupt and would divert everything to themselves. This is a perfectly legitimate intellectual exercise and can be applied to any government anywhere. Israel, for example, scores very high, not far below North Korea but it doesn’t stop at just the form of government, it extends to their programs and future plans. For example, the Israeli government’s policy of confining Palestinian civilians to a very limited part of their former lands, restricting their diet, spying on them, controlling all movement and information and periodically blowing them up is precisely what the Nazis did in the Warsaw ghetto and so many other cities that they occupied.

As a matter of sociopolitical fact, the current Israeli government is following the expansionist policies championed by the Nazi party in Germany, and is using many of the techniques developed by the SS and others. That is, the victims have become persecutors. Having assumed a position of absolute power and impunity, they have adopted the methods and doctrines and, most importantly, the self-justification of previous fascist governments. All this springs from the very human urge to dominate other people. Once a group gains power over another, they will eventually come to despise their underlings who, in turn, will grow to hate their overlords and will want to overthrow them. That’s biology; don’t waste your time arguing with biology because it means there will be no peace in the world while one group believes it is superior to another and grants itself rights and powers it denies the other. As long as it exists, expansionist zionism is a mortal threat to world peace.

So back to the reader’s question at the head of this post: How do reasonable people deal with unreasonable people without themselves becoming unreasonable? I think the answer to that is: You can’t. You have to hold your nose and strike with the least force necessary to do the job while doing the minimum damage to the troublemakers and none to those who aren’t involved or who had no say in it, all the while seeing it not as an opportunity to get rich or get even with people but as an unsavoury but absolutely necessary duty to safeguard the future of the planet (see this article for more detail). Fighting may not be nice but, as the reader points out, if we do nothing, the power-hungry will get worse.

This is why the world is turning against the US: for all their talk, everybody can see that the citizenry are doing next to nothing about the evil people who have taken control of the country and its vast military for their personal benefit and profit. What Americans do to themselves is their business but what they do to everybody else is ours. Bad people have to be removed from office and denied access to power. Israel can be brought to heel just by cutting off the vast flows of funds that keep it afloat. Without the untold billions that pour into it each year, it will collapse in a heap (which is already happening). People worry about the illegal nuclear weapons gifted to the zionists by the West but they can be dealt with easily: simply hit the kill switches in all their aircraft. Without planes to deliver them, the weapons are useless. All it takes is political will, but Netanyahu has Trump in the squirrel group over the Epstein files. We soldier on.

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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.