“Shameless self-willed infatuation
Emboldens men to dare damnation,
And starts the wheels of doom which roll
Relentless to their piteous goal”
– Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy: Agamemnon
Many people are saying that Donald Trump is insane. He may be. So too Benjamin Netanyahu. But if so, it is a form of insanity that includes the calm sanity of Adolf Eichmann and Harry Truman as they went about their business of mass extermination.
Crazy, to use the vernacular, is an elusive word nearly impossible to define, especially when an entire society can be crazy, as Erich Fromm, the German-American social-psychologist, has argued. Obedience is a much touted virtue, not only in overt police regimes but in so-called democracies – but obedience to whom? To mass murderers?
Obedience can be imbibed through osmosis. I remember Regis, my Jesuit high school’s motto – Deo et Patriae, for God and country – and how it linked obedience to God with obedience to the United States. I am certain that such a linkage would be denied by school authorities, but of course the Jesuits are known for their guile. So it didn’t surprise me when I was applying for a discharge from the Marines during the Vietnam War and was being questioned by a group of Marine Officers and one starting screaming at me: “What the hell kind of God are you talking about? I’m a Catholic, too, and my God supports the Marines and the war in Vietnam.” It was hard not to laugh sardonically, especially as he gesticulated with his large cigar for emphasis. I was then sent to a psychiatrist for evaluation who told me, to my great surprise, that he agreed with me and that the country’s leaders were insane.
Adolf Eichmann was declared “perfectly sane” by a psychiatrist who examined him when he went on trial for his routine daily tasks of carrying out Hitler’s orders to exterminate Jews. It was just another day at the office for Eichmann.
Harry Truman was not examined after he ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he was assumed to be sane in committing these satanic crimes of mass murder. Just another state executive doing his duty by carrying out the orders of his puppet masters.
Those were the good old days when everyone knew who was sane and who was nuts. Now we seem very confused. Perhaps Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. have discombobulated many minds about who is sane or not, who is a mass murderer, who evil and who good, depending on which functionary is in the White House. Perhaps not.
If Trump is insane, how did he twice become the president of the United States? Do “sane” people – the well-adjusted ones? – not realize that Trump is the nominal head of an immense system whose history is one of mass murder from Wounded Knee to the recent U.S. slaughter of hundreds, mostly young girls, at the elementary school in Minab, Iran.
Trump gave the orders, but he did not launch those missiles. Nor did Netanyahu massacre Palestinians with his own hands. These fat boy killers prefer to keep their dainty hands clean of blood – to have their functionaries do the killing. I think of other functionaries and the names they gave to the atomic bombs they dropped on Japan: “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” And we talk about sanity.
The “sane” obedient ones do the killing; the soldiers who carry out orders. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his profound book of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable, in 1966:
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is “sane” he is therefore in his “right mind.” The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless.
Our problem, as the historian Howard Zinn once said, is civil obedience, surely not civil disobedience, that people everywhere are so submissive to authority that they will dutifully obey the orders of people like Trump and Netanyahu. Such obedience, all false rhetoric to the contrary, is drilled into us from birth through overt and covert methods of fear inculcation.
My dear departed mother’s father was a New York City cop. When she was young, he made her and her mother, trembling with fear, sit at the kitchen table, upon which he put his revolver, and warned them to obey him or else. Such tyrannical behavior was slightly mitigated decades later when he and my grandmother lived with us. When he heard that any of us eight kids were misbehaving, he, old, feeble, and long retired, would don his police uniform and stomp down the stairs waving his long baton to frighten us. I never got to ask my mother why she tolerated this. Such is the long life of fear.
There are reports that by April’s end the U.S. will have 60,000 troops in Iran’s vicinity. If Trump gives the orders to invade Iran, how many will refuse? How many will refuse to send missiles into more Iranian schools and homes? If Trump gives orders for a nuclear strike, can we expect military individuals with consciences to disobey? Will any heed Pope Leo’s voice about this war? That it is immoral.
It takes a system to wage war, and civil and military obedience to support it. That system – what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has adroitly named MICIMATT: The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank system – is so deeply woven into American society and therefore the hearts and minds of its citizens and military personnel that one can only hope against hope that Trump’s orders will be disobeyed by many. It is a desperate hope, I realize.
War Is A Racket, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler once put it. It is waged for the tyrannical oligarchs and always kills mostly civilians. Over ninety percent now, probably more. Innocent people, little girls at school, babies in their mothers arms – it is organized state terror. War is immoral. It is not complex. It is simple. Like the gospel message the Pope is conveying.
Like all tyrants, Trump is surrounded by sycophants, fearful little people like Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Peter Hegseth, Robert Kennedy, Jr., et al. The whole crew groveling at his feet are implicated in his war crimes. To hear Kennedy defend Trump’s war on Iran, his Ukraine and other policies, by claiming his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, and his uncle, President Kennedy, would agree with Trump is to pass through the looking glass. Kennedy, also a staunch defender of Israel and its savage policies, makes me shake my head in wonder. Was his political conversion, like St. Paul’s, from a light from heaven that sent him to the ground where Trump’s divine voice asked him to hop on the MAGA train? Or was the voice more insidious and subtle, a quiet call from someone else late in the night? However it happened, it is complete, and he is now fully marching to the drums of war along with Trump’s ass-kissing entourage. I, once Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s ardent supporter when he announced his run for the presidency, feel like a fool.
Let me recommend an important film – Terence Malik’s A Hidden Life – about a different type of man, Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant farmer from an isolated small mountainous village who refuses to take an oath to Hitler and fight in the German army. He knew that his refusal would not stop Hitler; but he also knew his conscience came from God and not the state. So he said no. NO! I will not follow orders, despite everyone telling him to do so. For his refusal, he suffered terribly and was beheaded. In my review of this film which I wrote six years ago as Joseph Biden was three weeks into his presidency, I said:
While Franz is eventually put on trial by the German government, it is we as viewers who must judge ourselves and ask how guilty or innocent are we for supporting or resisting the immoral killing machine of our own country now. Hitler and his Nazis were then, but we are faced with what Martin Luther King called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’
Many Americans surely ask with Franz, ‘What has happened to the country that we love?’ But how many look in the mirror and ask, “Am I a guilty bystander or an active supporter of the United States’ immoral and illegal wars all around the world that have been going on for so many years under presidents of both parties and have no end? Do I support the new cold war with its push for nuclear war with its first strike policy? Do I support, by my silence, a nuclear holocaust?’
The questions still linger. Let first Thomas Merton and then the twenty-two years-old Bob Dylan have the last words:
For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be by far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest and most ridiculous of all the false gods. We can call ourselves innocent only if we refuse to forget this, and if we also do everything we can to make others realize it.
Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His latest book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press).
That opening quote from Aeschylus shows how long this kind of thing has been going on. The hubris and behavioral extremes, demonstrated again and again over history, show this to be an immutable part of human nature. They say we share about 98% of our genes with our close relatives, the Chimps. A so-called rational mind riding on top of a mountain of instinctive and often violent compulsions. In that regard, evolution is a very slow train.
And pregnant women and young children will be targeted, killed. After all, they can’t grow up to be dissenting adults.
Killing every single day out of ruthlessness, sadistic target practice. The bible says this is okay. The bishops state the people are to be used as donkey’s.
What will change the barbarism that is us? I don’t think singing, quoting, hoping, praying, lying will bring any sanity to planet earth!
Selling more books with repetitive information will not bring civility to the people’s who live between the atlantic and pacific oceans.
Practicing what we need to transcend will not be helpful for the living dead. Habits, addictions, worthless nostalgia sessions. Marching in place in quick sand while staring at an iPod hoping face fraud will bring us answers. It is very sad.
Re: “an entire society can be crazy, as Erich Fromm, the German-American social-psychologist, has argued.” Being theologically deficient, I’m always trying to understand how what is claiming to be Christian is managing to avoid New Testament, Christ’s, revelation of God’s love. Maybe it isn’t true, but I ran into that Erich Fromm supposedly (along with a Lutheran theologian, Nygren, of same era) coined and/or developed the theology of “unconditional love”. [Oh boy, synchronicity, must be true.] Well, the church seems to have sucked up this seemingly warm fuzzy ‘unconditional love’ as the ultimate new definition of Agape and Christ like a dry sponge, never questioning the implications – such as dethroning Christ who is the one and absolute condition and definition, and burying accountability. [Darwin, new is superior.] For conditional beings that cannot know or think apart from conditions, in practice must reject the unthinkable. No surprise the defaulting to games of relativism. Without Christ’s love, (and visible everywhere on wretched stickers since 9-11 –>), the “Power of Pride”, floods in with signs and wonders and cheesy false prophets to guide the theologically desolate. We LOVE Pride now; though for most of Church history, Pride was clearly a grievous SIN. Savior Pride informs us that low-self esteem is our root problem and that we are innocent victims. Pride offers no end of enchanting and powerful self-reflecting idolatries. The New Testament? Who reads that? I’ve heard ‘Christian’ adulterers rationalize by abusing David, as do the rabid warmongers. They’re unlike David; they’re unrepentant, self-guided, accepting no consequences from the unconditional fuzzball. Holiness? retards self-development. “Behold the Lion”! And here come Trump’s colorful icons to explain the new way to our Biblically illiterate generation. How much did Fromm’s/Nygren’s ostensibly innocuous coinage allow us to buy into the insane apostasia of bloodletting for Jesus? This idiot wonders.
Thank you, Edward.
Obedience to authority. Let’s recall Stanley Milgram’s experiments which demonstrated that, as long as a white-jacketed authority figure with a clipboard was standing nearby assuring them that, “You must continue,” a solid majority of Real Murkans would continue to administer electric shocks to a fellow human who had given an incorrect response on a memory test, past the point at which the subject was screaming, and even past the point at which they had stopped screaming and were presumably unconscious or dead.
A white jacket and a clipboard. Most people do not need to have a gun pointed at their head to commit such abuses.
It would be sad enough were such behavior to be found among people who acknowledged their lickspittle, abased condition, but it is especially grim in a people who never tire of bellowing about their free-thinking maverick rogue independence.
Trump is not insane – he is the product of a plutocratic “insane” system: unbridled US gangster capitalism and “Full spectrum dominance” (as the motto of Foreign Policy).
When Erich Fromm was asked to comment on the fact that mental diseases were on the rise in the US (already in the 1960s) he gave an astonishing answer: (paraphrasing)
The real problems are the people who thrive in the capitalist, profit-driven society. What he meant was that in order to reach the top, become part of the “elites” you have to discard your HUMANITY (empathy, humility, striving for truth and justice) and RATIONALIZE the pathological drive for more power and more profit (even if it means enormous suffering, mass-murder and mass-destruction in other countries).
“US foreign policy has been the greatest crime since 1945” (Ramsey Clark, fmr. US attorney general; context: first Iraq war)
“My government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” (MLK, 1967, “Beyond Vietnam” speech)
I would encourage people to listen to Fromm’s lecture about the importance of disobedience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xklxMvq0vA
He distinguishes between the “authoritarian conscience” (the internalized voice of an authority – e.g. in the military telling soldiers the are doing “their duty” and “the right thing” (by killing the dehumanized “enemy”) and by claiming the MORAL HIGHGROUND (as Trump and Hegseth do now and as all US presidents have done before).
He contrasts this with the “humanistic conscience” which is intrinsic and independent of rewards and external sanctions.
The “inner voice” that tells us – “this is wrong, it is inhumane, immoral and unjust”… we must not take part in it…
Obedience to the “authoritarian conscience” (which is obedience to outside thoughts and power) disables our humanistic conscience and our ability to make our OWN judgements (based on morality and humanity, not power).
So saying “NO” to power, the ability to be disobedient is a prerequisite for real freedom (of thought and actions)
“Nothing protects us from doing the MOST CRUEL and INHUMAN things – in the name of morality” (Fromm) (Audio 14:42)
This is extremely important regarding the inhumane behaviour of Hegseth and Trump: not only have they no empathy for their victims but they see it as THEIR MORAL OBLIGATION to inflict more “punishing violence” on the Iranian people. Hegseth quotes the Old Testament and talks about “punishing the enemies of righteousness” (!!) but the god of the OT is Yaweh (not the Christian god)- see Thomas Paine’s great critique of the OT: “The Age of Reason” and Laurent Guyenot’s book: From Yaweh to Zion)
So harping on about Trump’s “insanity” is misleading … all US military officers and soldiers should have REFUSED to take part in an illegal war of aggression but even after the mass-murder of over 160 school-girls in Iran (a vicious “double-tap” strike: when the teachers gathered the surviving, frightened children after the first strike in the prayer-hall, the US bombed again and killed them all) they were “just following orders” …
From a psychological standpoint Trump and Hegseth are sociopaths: they show no empathy for the victims of their crimes by clinging to the self-delusion that they are “doing the right thing” (fighting against an “evil” enemy – the “mullah regime in Tehran). In reality, they are projecting their OWN crimes against humanity on the adversary (just like Israel has done for decades) so their aggression is transformed into “defence” (fighting the “monster in the mirror”).
USrael are Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – the US presents itself as the respected “gentleman” while its alter-ego (the deranged Mr. Hyde – Israel) is committing horrible crimes… the US posture as a MORAL AUTHORITY (fighting evil regimes in foreign countries) is the most ABSURD charade and inversion of reality (see Pinter’s Nobel lecture – second half) the world has seen since 1945 …
It will only end when Americans stand up and refuse to “obey” …
Thanks Ed.
One of my songs on obedience:
https://thebuttonsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/would-you
Hi Johnny,
I love your song. Thanks for sending it. Music is so close to my heart. I am writing an article about it with my granddaughter who is a multi-talented singer, writer, actress and just seven days short of 18.
Pax,
Ed
Thanks Ed, I always enjoy your writing. It’s obviously straight from your heart.
I wish your grandaughter well, and so young!
I didn’t perform in public until I was in my mid fifties.
Trying some catch up now by busking regularly.
PS, Wish I was multi-talented🙁
Thank you Ed. Somehow I’ve been “out of the loop” – though I knew about Gaza and Israel – I had not heard that RFK Jr. had come out supporting the Orange One in his barking-mad attack on Iran. That knowledge adds yet another surreal layer to what passes for our – “new normal.” Some days I find myself wishing I could – “social distance” myself – out to another planet. One far away from all the other “normal” humans – who seem so obedient to and enthralled with – the machine.
Good job connecting obedience with (in)sanity. Some of that “system” goes back to “Papal Bull Dum Diversas, 18 June, 1452”, a key gist of the Doctrine of Discovery and Domination (see the excellent podcast The Domination Chronicles) which led to the genocide of 95-97% of the Natives of Turtle Island and is still embedded in the US so-called legal system: “Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas
on 18 June, 1452. It authorised Afonso V of Portugal to
reduce any ‘Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any
other unbelievers’ to perpetual slavery. This facilitated
the Portuguese slave trade from West Africa….
‘- to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue
all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to
perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit –’”
RE papal documents, please see: Toward a Paradigm Change for Mother Earth / Understanding the Empire Domination Model of Christianity: A Way of Liberation / Steven Newcomb Delivers Keynote on Original Free Nations and Peoples / Spotlight of Indigenous Peoples Plenary, 8,000 People Attending / 2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions, 19 Oct 2015 / https://ratical.org/many_worlds/StevenNewcomb/ParadigmChg4MotherEarth.html
yeah, Dave, am very familiar with Newcomb’s good works!
Thank you David for bringing forth Steven Newcomb. I truly don’t understand what useful purpose the pope has or any president of any country or any bishop arrested for raping little boys! It’s like a time anchor.
Joseph, here’s link to Newcomb’s substack, https://stevennewcomb.substack.com/
Thank you Mankh for the Steven Newcomb site. Perhaps we can devote a post to the crimes of the vatican, the priests, the nuns and so forth. Do I have information on this? No. And I will not quote anyone on this subject. I find it difficult to accept any hierarchical organization is free of corruption, crime. If we stand side by side, instead of on each other’s heads, we might get a different interpretation of life. And perhaps it’s simply too damn late and how many generations would it take to reverse the present insanity…everywhere on this planet?
you’re welcome, Joseph. Steve’s site has link to The Domination Chronicles with him and Peter d’Errico, excellent vid-podcast where they explore various aspects of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination and how it’s affecting the world nowadays; the awareness of is a starting point for doing something, and at the least it offers many eye-openers of consciousness, how the language has been used to distract from and cover the underlying premise of domination.
I truly feel we must transcend….stop practicing….repeating….continually reminding ourselves….pushing nonsense into our brains…all the crap that has been forced on humans by those who want to control, manipulate other humans and all things. All of this simply maintains a reality, one we must throw into the trash cans. Throw it all away; every last detail. Eat good food. Learn how to grow food. Help your friend grow food. Forget the gods, the myths, the myths about myths. Speak from your own naval and heart. Or we simply continue to march in place in quick sand. Empty yourself of all the toxic information that is repeated over and over and over by 10 million authors! New information wanted you say? Grow some food and eat it while being quiet.
Thank-you, EC: From Ancient Greece to Bob Dylan – you take us through consideration of the sane monsters who lead us to perdition with God on our side! As terrible as the vision/reality is – somehow the touchstones you examine along the way bring a measure of not exactly comfort – but of familiarity at least – that I am not alone in thinking the same or similar kinds of things and of having your perceptions of our world. On Remembrance Day last year (November 11 – in the US Veterans’ Day?) my wife and I sat in an ancient church in Nottingham in England – filled with young high school cadets and members of the local regiment and flags and elderly folk there to remember their departed relatives. There were Bible readings and we sang hymns which I remember as a boy in the 1950s at school ceremonies memorialising Australia’s engagement in wars – and always “with God on our side”! There is something cloyingly sick about that claim. He certainly wasn’t with my ancestor – a member of the local regiment when it was the 45th Line of Foot – later the Sherwood Foresters – now under another name – when he died on May 5th in 1811 in a minor skirmish against the French Napoleonic Forces led by Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) at Fuentes de Oñoro in Spain – alongside the Portuguese border. Or is he (his family and descendants) to be satisfied with memorial services and stained glass windows – if not with the terrors and ugliness that befell his immediate family thereafter? As befalls all families whose young men (and women) are killed or maimed or otherwise adversely affected – my maternal and paternal grand-fathers – my step-father – classmates – a nephew, too. Much to think of – as the Australian PM has sent two small contingents – to prop up a bullying Trump – to the Gulf-states – promises of assistance in blockades – implementing or dismantling – and sending trillions of our pension funds to prop up US WMD industries! Hard to believe. Years ago in Japan I taught a university prep class of high school lads exiting to university. We read The Silver Sword (1956) by Ian Serraillier. I’d visited his widow Anne in England in the late summer of 2002 as the drums of war and the certainty of George Dubya Bush re WMD drew us inexorably and again illegally into a war against Iraq. With the new school year beginning in April 2003, our set of books on their way from the bookshop in Cambridge where I had ordered them from – George began his bombing of Baghdad while we were on our spring break in late March. And Australia’s then meagre little PM John Dubya Howard (“Man of Steel” the sobriquet applied by his Crawford playfarm sleepover buddy) joined – in fact pushed for the war… The horror is not the US alone – it is my own beguiled and weak national governments – thoroughly infiltrated by US serving quislings. Who are ignorant of literature and of history – full of hubris and the confience that only they are in possession of the lying facts which they are fed by their “minders” – serving currently either the US or the Zionists.
Good onya Jim.