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 Mr Eli Groner, former director general of the office of the prime minister in Israel under Netanyahu, and intimately connected to every major endeavour by that government in the past 15 years, with a list of connections throughout the Middle East and the US and Europe and elsewhere that would fill a sizeable book, is not happy with the current state of affairs vis a vis their surprise attack on Iran, as he tweeted this week:
Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war. They will point to more extreme leadership, to the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are now the centre of gravity and to the fact that the US is blinking in the face of them. All of this is true. But there is something far more serious: Iran has proven that it is capable of instilling fear in the global economy and order through the threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s critical energy arteries. And the moment the world begins to treat iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto that policy must be managed around, the implication is that Iran is no longer just threatening the Middle East. It is actually influencing the rules of the global game.
This is a strategic victory far deeper than any point specific military achievement.
Disaster (here, at 1.30).
There’s a little rule that Master Groaner obviously failed to learn in kindergarten: Be careful what you wish for. When the illegal, immoral and unprovoked US-Israeli war of aggression was launched, Netanyahu gloated: “I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.” Well, sunshine, you’ve got it. You’ve got it good and hard and I hope it’s as painful for you as it is for all the Palestinians who are raped in your prisons – about which you know everything, by the way, and laugh about it with your mates in the lunatic fringe parties. Let’s just look at Groaner’s points in light of Narcisso-Fascism to see what they add up to:
“Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war.” I’d say about 99.5% of the world’s population agree with that, and every one of them is delighted. The sight of the Exceptional Nation and God’s Chosen People being demoted in the hierarchy by your actual coloured people is a delight that most of us never imagined.
“More extreme leadership.” Well, if you murder about 50 of the experienced and highly qualified people in a country, including the revered leader of their religion which venerates martyrdom, then the survivors are not going to overlook it, especially the new supreme leader who was injured in the same attack that killed his father, mother, wife and sister (see this article which calls him a “hardliner” about 20 times and only mentions the deaths of his womenfolk in the last line). What do you people expect? If somebody blew away half of Groaner’s family, would that make him more moderate? I’ll tell you what they expected. Against all the advice of professionals in the military, the diplomatic corps and academia, not to mention the more level heads in the international community, Trump and Co. expected Iranians to fall on their knees and throw flowers and kisses at their “liberators.” Truly. Now that it hasn’t happened, the militants are genuinely put out and have no idea what to do, no Plan B.
“The IRGC are now the centre of gravity.” In wartime, the people who are charged with the actual defence of the nation do tend to drift to the centre of things, yes, that’s absolutely right. Clever boys, Donny and Benny, go to the top of the class. What a pity you didn’t think about this before you unleashed the poodles of war but there you are. If the people at the top of the hierarchy are short-sighted idiots, then obviously the processes they used to get there are corrupted.
“The US is blinking in the face of them.” Can we let you in on a little secret? If you start a war, you’re actually supposed to have something called “war aims.” This is a bit more complicated than aiming at a urinal, it involves something called “planning” and even “anticipated outcome.” Yes, I know, all these big words, it’s a strain, but if you say to the bombers “Go over there and start bombing,” you’re actually supposed to know WHY, you’re supposed to have an excuse for breaking the law. A bummer indeed but the Nuremberg tribunals sorted that out 80years ago and you’ve had long enough to study it. So we ask again: WHY is the US-Zionist axis bombing a country that has not attacked another country in 300years and that poses no conceivable threat to either of them? No idea. Groaner is right: the US is indeed blinking, but it’s as in: “WTF do we do now?” They really, genuinely, don’t know what to do. All these incredibly clever, educated, self-confident, self-important and pompous people only have one way of dealing with stroppy foreigners, bomb them. Like in Afghanistan, 20 years and a few hundred thousand deaths and environmental devastation and $2trillion, all to get rid of the Taliban but the day the Yanks pulled out, the Taliban took over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
“Iran is showing it can frighten the world by squeezing its throat.” Cause and effect, dear fellow, your mother would have told you: “If you pull pussy’s tail, she’ll scratch you.” For 25 years, Iran has trumpeted to anybody who would listen that if they were attacked again, they would close the Strait of Hormuz. For 25 years they stood holding up a map and pointing to the choke point saying: “If you attack us, we will choke you right here. So don’t attack us.” Nobody believed them, nobody listened; they were attacked so they closed the Strait. QED. Actually, they didn’t. Lloyds of London closed it by cancelling all the insurance policies for the ships. So don’t any of you clever people say you weren’t warned, because you were. Don’t say you didn’t expect it, as Trump said, because only a person living in a fantasy land could fail to see that attacking another country will invite retaliation. Oh, Trump, yes well he does live in fantasy land. One Benjamin Netanhooha has provided the furniture while Eli Groaner was the delivery driver. It seems that the entire US-Zio axis had convinced themselves that the Strait could only be closed by laying thousands of sea mines, and the US Navy could prevent that. How dumb are these people? How indescribably stupid and arrogantly short-sighted? The entire Yankee-Zio military and political establishment didn’t know that missiles don’t actually have to be fired to stop ships moving, that the threat is enough to scare insurers? Jesus wept, there is seriously no hope for the human race.
“One of the world’s critical energy arteries.” Probably a good idea to look at a map before you launch a war, then check what goes where. I admit I wasn’t aware of just how much of the world’s fertilisers come from the Persian Gulf but I knew it was a lot and I knew it would have an effect on the northern growing season, and that the Arab Spring came from rising bread prices. Et cetera.
“If the world treats Iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto to be managed...” Welcome to the new reality, junior. The people who have had guns pointed at their heads for the last few hundred years have realised they’ve got a few guns of their own. The world has had enough of Exceptional Nations and Chosen People wrecking the place. Also, if you’re all so clever and exceptional, what about you turn your minds to working out how to live in peace for a change? The US has been at war for all but eight of its 250 years of existence, and Zionism was built on the notion that the indigenous people of Palestine would never accept being pushed off their traditional lands, so war was the only option, as Gen. Moshe Dayan admitted:
The Israeli army is called a “defense force” but it is not a defensive army. … The Sinai campaign (1956), the reprisal acts and the raids across the border were purely offensive operations, and were of decisive value. … Not only the actions which were actually carried out but also the IDF’s prevailing conception is offensive … the IDF is a characteristically offensive army as regards theory, planning and execution, in body and spirit … Israel must be like a mad dog. Too dangerous to bother.
Compare that with Iran which, remarkably, has won this war by non-lethal means. What we’re seeing is the colllapse of the unipolar world, dominated by the US and its vassal states (including Australia), and the emergence of a multipolar world where various power centres have to negotiate on equal terms to balance their interests. Simply issuing diktats, punitive financial “sanctions” or sending gunboats has had its day. The US-Zionist-British-French imperialist buccaneers have finally driven the rest of the world to create a new world order, where a relatively unitary Eurasian land mass acts as a counter-balance to the peripheral empires of the US, UK, France, Japan and so on.
“Iran is actually influencing the rules of the global game.” They’re what? How dare they? It would be easy to mock this brazenly inane comment but the matter is too serious – the voiceless dead of Gaza plead for recognition. This is an admission by a person who is connected to everybody who is anybody in the world of international power politics, finance and the high crimes that flow from them, that their old game has run out of steam. The old game, the one developed by Spain in the Inca empires, France in North and West Africa and SE Asia, the Netherlands in Indonesia, Portugal here and there, and Britain and the US everywhere, is at an end. Party’s over, boys. Time to pick up your guns and your booze and drugs, your suitcases full of cash and your high class prostitutes and head home, where life just won’t be quite as much fun as it used to be. Look at seedy Britain, slowly sinking into the mud; their Victorian splendour was kept aloft by the breathtaking fortunes they were extracting from their colonies. Now that the colonies have closed the door, Britain is looking for a comfortable old people’s home. Get used to it because the world’s poor people have realised they have power and will not be giving it up again.
Groaner is right: there’s a new game in town. The old one was called “The rules-based international order,” which everybody knew meant “We make the rules and you obey the orders.” It was a racket from beginning to end, in which the gun and the shackles of slavery were replaced with the IMF loan and the tied grants and the preferential trade deals that benefited the West. This kept the darkies in their place in the bush where they could dig and quarry and harvest but they could never escape the shackles of monetary slavery and the omnipresent threat of “Step out of line, nigra, an’ we’ll stage a coup. An’ send you the bill.” So what else has Herr Groaner had to say?
“This is a strategic victory.” Insight dawns! Yessir, you’re absolutely right. You have indeed been dealt a humiliating defeat. You’ve lost the battle but you’ve also lost the far more important war for public sympathy. Finally, neoliberals and zionists stand exposed for what they are, greedy, brutal and utterly callous colonists who are intent on spreading chaos through a large part of the world just for their own enrichment, as WJ Clinton told the UN GA:
…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 (27th Sept. 1993; various references).
Essentially, he meant “We clever Westerners have the guns to do what we like and you coloureds can’t stop us.” In fact, the whole Zionist idea is just a plan to get people’s land without paying for it, but Iran just said: “No you can’t, and here’s proof.” We, the innocent but interested bystanders in all this mayhem can only hope the message sinks in but Trump being Trump and his puppet master in Tel Aviv being who he is, I suspect they will need a further pummeling before they really understand what “NO” means.
“Disaster.” So were the ludicrously-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and a dozen others. The only success the US has achieved since World War II (and bear in mind it was actually the USSR that won that war) has been in stringing out wars indefinitely at great profit to the arms manufacturers and their good friends in Wall St. Other than that, disaster all round. Will they learn? Probably not, because the entire political process in the West has been suborned by neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is a socio-economic doctrine specifically designed to favour the power elite, to amplify their wealth so they can then invest it and create jobs for the hoi polloi. This is called “trickle down” economics and, so far, it has been staggeringly successful in its first part, sucking money out of the working and middle classes and handing it to the 1%. We’re waiting for them to invest it in creative jobs, except we now find all the jobs and all the money have gone offshore (see figures here from Robert Reich) .
Politics used to be about service; generally people had a career and then entered politics after they had been watched for decades and were then judged fit to roam the corridors of power. Now, it’s a career, in fact an impassioned vocation, which usually starts in high school and then only gets worse. Every young aspiring pollie needs a sponsor, and sponsors aren’t doing it out of love. Sponsors are investing, and they expect a return. They expect favourable laws and access to contracts and tax benefits, and that’s what they get. Everything is tilted in their favour. For example, the US is using its fleet of B2 bombers against Iran. The original plan was to build 160 of these but it stopped in 1996 after producing 21 as they were too expensive to build and run. Total cost then was $44.7 billion (equivalent to $92 billion in 2025), an average cost of $2.13 billion per plane (equivalent to $4.37billion in 2025), plus about $15million each per year to maintain. Meantime, Trump says the US can’t afford day care for children as it has wars to run. Wars that kill foreign children are more important than caring for your own.
Societies are inherently hierarchical but neoliberalism drives the process to extremes. It rewards political manipulation to the extent that conspiracy trumps policy (conspiracy is where two or more people meet in secret to organise something they could not achieve if it were known to the public). Neoliberalism favours the interests of one billionaire over a billion children’s interests, that’s what it’s intended to do and that’s what it does. But with this unbelievably stupid, unplanned, unauthorised, illegal, immoral and downright evil, unprovoked war of aggression, it seems the target has found a way to hit back. Good. Let’s hope it’s painful and causes governments to topple. Trouble is, the first people to feel the pain are the poor in India who can’t get cooking gas and the peasant farmers in Thailand who can’t fertilise their rice and the poor of Egypt who can’t afford bread. Poverty exists not because we can’t provide for the poor. It exists because it’s impossible to satisfy the rich. The doctrine behind Narcisso-Fascism says the wealthy and powerful never willingly surrender their wealth and power. The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they can hear the rumbling tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine. Bring it 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.
Thank you, Niall, a brilliant exposition. Your conclusion about the guillotine, is probably meant metaphorically, and I would like you to answer plainly: how do you think the plutocracy can be defeated? There was a time when the ruling class needed the serfs for their labour, so that was a power the people had, but that will not be the case for much longer. The middle class had their place too in administrative work, again, that is not going to last. In those terms, how can the people overthrow the 1%?
Carolyn
Absolutely brilliant. Only thing I could add is that I hope the peoples if Russia and China are inspired enough by Iran's courage to force their nearly mouthed leaders to also confront the hegemonic monster and liberate the oppressed.