Designer War By Default - Seven Types of Elite Madness
Politics / GeoPolitics Jul 30, 2014 - 10:38 AM GMTBy: Andrew_McKillop
The straight majority of all major wars, and many minor wars are disputed as to their exact causes and origins. Historians debating the causes, in the plural, of World War I are still far from any consensus on how this war started. Put another way, their causes are unknown or even impossible to know.
Eccentric, strange or deranged political decisions and elite behaviour obviously aid the process. Elites living in a special world where fantasy blots out reality can easily have what is called a split mind. Also called schizophrenia, its earliest definition and clinical description of how schizoid denial of reality works was in 1911, by the Swiss psychologist Eugen Bleuler.
He moved on from previous medical definitions of dementia by including the key parameter of “positive and negative” schizoid states. The number of these states, at least 5 and perhaps 7, is still a question of debate among psychiatrists, neurologists, biologists - and political scientists seeking explanations for the deliberately irrational “group think” behavior of the elites, as well as their individual decisions and behavior.
Bleuler defined schizoid states as often occurring in pairs, or paired opposites of “split minds”. Well known examples include paranoia-megalomania and catatonia-hebephrenia. In other words megalomaniacs such as Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin were often paranoid, also. Many Americans retrospectively consider George W. Bush was a paranoid with strong megalomanic tendencies, also. Some French political journalists and scientists have suggested former president Nicolas Sarkozy suffered from catatonic-hebephrenic disorder. He often sulked in an intense way, then broke out into excited speechmaking. He is now in deep legal trouble, for example due to his “special relations” with Muammar Gaddafi before being a leading advocate of war against Libya and the death of Gaddafi.
Denial of Reality
The denial of reality is a key diagnostic factor of the disease called schizophrenia. The real world is literally blotted out. General or undifferentiated schizophrenia is increasingly identified as a biologically-based syndrome operating by self-willed, or medically-induced (technically called iatrogenic) destruction of brain function in specific areas of the brain. This damage is able to co-exist or interact with, and reinforce other forms of schizophrenia.
Wielding political power, leaders affected by schizophrenia can not only infect their fellow elites, but also impose a schizoid framework on society.
The Wikipedia page “Public image of George W. Bush” notes the ironical shift, in American public opinion of Bush from initial paranoid fear among the public - public fear of Bush and his policies – to increasing fear among Americans that Bush was himself the paranoid, and dangerous. Long after Bush quit politics, Dr. Justin Frank's 2014 book “Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President” notes that the former president had a "lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over (Texan) state executions ... and pumping his fist gleefully before the mass bombing of Baghdad."
A sadist and a war criminal who whooped to war and nodded through every possible excess of the crony capitalist elite, sealing the fate of the American economy. Biologically-induced brain impairment in the Bush case is suggested by Frank as possible, and if so was probably due to Bush's heavy and continued alcoholism as well as the medication used by Bush in his many attempts to “go dry”.
Collective Schizophrenia
Collective unknowing in western society is a sure and certain symptom and major factor in the long-term process of destroying social reality – what we can call the “political assassination of knowing”. Mass or collective amnesia is a major part of the process, and we can note that amnesia is considered by many psychologists as very frequent among sufferers of general or undifferentiated schizophrenia.
Politically, “herd amnesia” of the ruling elite, enables them to simply reproduce and replicate previous, provenly-defective, guaranteed-failure policies and programs, such as Keynesian mumbo-jumbo money printing and debt-raising“remedies” for the economy, knowing or believing that the voting public has “forgotten all about” its previous failures. As the schizophrenia intensifies, the elite has an ever-shorter collective memory of their decisions and the political life-cycle shrinks. The record gets stuck but the turntable rotates ever faster.
Mixing stupefying arrogance with gut-level misanthropy, intensified by the frequent paranoia among our schizoid elites, they see “the mass” as child-like creatures with no memory, little better than insects. Counting on totally automatic and unquestioning support at all times from their venal glove puppet media, their first goal is to keep the public dumbed down. This process, in western society today, has however continued for too long and has been far too successful. In fact a near-total success.
Elite herd schizophrenia also has a higher and more dangerous goal, moving on from the cult of mass amnesia to not only denying reality, but to wrecking the framework of rational knowledge in society by engaging in frequent – even continuous – acts of deliberate and willful elite irrationality. To achieve the needed state of supine public acceptance (or even approval) of this, public knowledge itself must be subverted, dissipated, perverted and destroyed.
Waltzing to War
To be sure, irrationality can be innocent, as in childhood games of fantasy – but for the elites their cravings for blatant fantasy can easily end in war with massive loss of life and economic collapse. This can be compared with psychological games operated by children and their parents, where the two parents can be treated as “good” or “bad” by the children, and the parents can similarly define “good” children to reward, and “bad” children to scold. This is a divide-and-rule strategy, which in politics often has a major role in the run-up to declaring wars.
On a daily basis in 2014, Western elite schizophrenia was on view, with the Ukraine crisis. The Kiev flash mob government which used street protest to overthrew the previous elected government was the “good” child to reward. The pro-Russian rebels in the east were the “bad” children.
In true schizoid fashion, western elites made daily shifts from imperious and megalomanic threats of Nato-led military force to “roll back the Russian Bear” - to plaintive and almost euphoric offers of increased trade and investment in Russia.
Angela Merkel was the first Western leader to publicly and theatrically “cast out Russia” from the G8 group, restricting it to its 1975-era format of G7, which in fact has a sharply declining relationship with world economic power today. Merkel's asides that Putin was “being irrational' was quickly transformed by the glove puppet media to Putin being a madman – that is a megalomaniac and a paranoiac.
Merkel's Economics and Energy minister, also Vice chancellor of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel at a 7 April conference in the presence of Gazprom chairman Alexei Miller, noted that Germany is Russia’s number one partner in Europe’s gas and energy markets supplying close to 40% of its gas and about 35% of German oil. Gabriel added that: “Looking at these statistics”, it is clear that talk about Atlantic solidarity is having little effect on “our [the German government's] rational-based decision making”.
Britain's David Cameron was quick to call the Crimean referendum, and following referenda in eastern Ukraine “a war crime”. At the same time major British corporations such as BP “pursue development of closer economic ties with Russia”.
There is no point seeking any logic in this behavior. This is elite schizophrenia, not just hypocrisy.
Therapeutic War and the Urge to Bomb
Western elite schizophrenia or political dementia, in the Ukraine crisis, almost instantly went “over the top” or “off the wall”. At one and the same time, public opinion in the western democracies was supposed to rally to the defence of the totally unelected Flash Mob government in Kiev, call the holding of referenda in Crimea and eastern Ukraine a war crime, consider Nato-led military response to “Russian expansionism” desirable and necessary – but also pursue economic ties with Russia!
European Union countries would of course continue importing Russian oil and gas, but they would also “look elsewhere” so as to prevent Madman Putin from intensifying his blackmail of the West and oppression of the Kiev group of unelected leaders. With no surprise at all, the more psychologically fragile, most aggressive western politicians such as the USA's John McCain were very quick to say that all-out nuclear war against Russia was an option that “must not be ignored”.
Certainly for decades, the need to justify go-anywhere bombing or “designer wars” has an important place in the mindset of western elites but until the present case of Russia this only concerned selected smaller countries, without nuclear weapons, that could or might have oil, or heroin in the case of Afghanistan, or could simply be bombed “to defend democracy” such as bombing Serbia in 1995 to enable the Islamic-dominated micro state of Kosovo to be created - and exist in broken-backed poverty. Wrecked countries are inevitably left behind, but this reality is “shielded” from public opinion in the west. Talk of coming and massive “peace dividends” is flooded through the glove puppet media.
The real sequels of these designer wars are not the affair of the public, the sequels will be “unknown”.
We can say the process of “the run-up to war” is a political ritual in western society, a drunken dance by the Dogs of War baying for blood and sacrifice – but of course not themselves! Alternately, we might posit that periodic war fever outbreaks and the run-up to war are “normal risks” in western society, driven by its tendency towards allowing schizophrenics and psychopaths to rule.
History tends to prove that elite psychosis and mental disorder thrive in a disoriented and changing society. For the elites themselves, there is no perception that its own and very specific “Group Think” has its own internal dynamics, what we can call “high gain positive feedback”. This quickly outstrips the pace of real events and any public knowledge or understanding of them, and can very easily “tip into war”. This is reflected today, as it was during the run-up to World War I, by what French call the “valse-hesitation” or a constant to-and-fro of radically different urges and impulses among European and American elites, and by what many historians call the “fog of war”.
This is the uber-dangerous situation when the elites face the prospect of a military stand-off with other major military powers. In the Ukraine case this is nuclear-armed Russia.
At the same time, the public “must be kept in the dark”. Disinformation and false information – called “agit prop” in Stalin's Russia and “false flags” today – quickly become massive. The elite are literally intoxicated by their own propaganda, while the public bathes in a soup of part-truths and part-lies.
Lying Our Way to War
Historians at least agree that the run-up to World War I was probably in major part underpinned by elite confusion and double think – or schizophrenia – while the equivalent of what we call public opinion today was almost entirely in the dark. The result, the 1914-1918 war, is also often called “the pan European civil war” by historians. In any case, the denial of reality by the elites and the impossibility of ordinary persons to know what was happening were heavily implicated in the confused sequence of eccentric political decisions, and refusals to decide, that led up to this war.
One hundred years after the start of this “pan European civil war” historians go on disputing its exact causes. One thing they agree on was this war was not due to the Clash of Opposed Ideologies, which was the main driver of World War II. To be sure there were economic causes, and consequences (as John Maynard Keynes wrote) of World War I, but the causes were less important than the economic sequels. Like tectonic plate movement rather than politics, impossible to perceive on a daily basis and only with hindsight, a century after the events, we know restless humanity had stepped over the brink.
The two founders of geopolitics, Thayer Mahan and Halford Mackinder “agreed to disagree” on the role and importance of land-based population movements, sea-based commercial expansion, the exact roles of economics and religion and other factors in the run-up to the late-19th century wars which preceded World War I. Where they agreed was the relatively unimportant role, for them, of politics and the near-total absence of what we would call public opinion today.
In other words the elite of the day could give almost unbridled freedom to their individual and collective schizophrenia What Mahan and Halford underlined was that global geopolitical change and war feature a semi-automatic, almost unconscious drift of shifting political power blocs, which fatally collide at certain times in particular “high risk” zones – such as the Balkans and SE Asia. The dangers of this for us, today, is that “the geopolitical hypothesis” adds another layer or spiral to the process lost rationality in the “mature western democracies”. Geopolitical power plays and quests are almost by definition arcane and so-called geopolitical imperatives almost naturally excite and entice psychologically-fragile elites into stepping or waltzing close to the brink – without knowing it.
Elite Dementia
We can tentatively conclude that the Ukraine crisis of 2014 provides more proof that a certain type of elite dementia and desire for military “adventure” exists, as in previous times. It is driven by very complex, even unknown drivers and causes, layering the rational and irrational in a fantastic layer cake o the real and unreal, which can only reinforce the schizophrenic behavior of the elites. Some historians point out, concerning World War I, that military “adventure” was to a certain extent actively sought, as a time-hallowed diversionary and rallying tactic in a social context of accelerating change, both social and technological and economic.
There was never any question of widespread public debate on whether this war was justified. The public was in a near-perfect state of Unknowing, and war was inevitable.
Historians can make a good case for their frequent argument that in 1914, divorced and separated from anything like public opinion as we know it today, political leaderships could simply “stumble to war”. We have to ask why this seems eminently possible again, today?
My argument is that the rational bases of society have been so thoroughly subverted, diluted or destroyed in the last 30-odd years, that we have a context where the state of public awareness to this fact can be compared with its state at the start of the 20th century. The dumbed down public is now “mindless” for the schizophrenic and criminal elites, Public opinion is now “mesmerized” in the western (over)mature democracies.
There are of course massive differences in the two situations, today versus 1914, but the role of elite schizophrenia and the cult of irrationality is now very powerful – and dangerous.
By Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
© 2014 Copyright Andrew McKillop - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisor.
Andrew McKillop Archive |
© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.
