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Sept. 30, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:24
1161 The Seven Stages of Going to War

Chapter 5 of 'The Origins of War in Child Abuse' by Lloyd DeMause.

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The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd DeMoss www.psychohistory.com Read by Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio www.freedomainradio.com Chapter 5 The Seven Phases of Going to War George Modelsky's considerable research into war patterns shows conclusively that wars most often occur after periods of innovation and prosperity,
synchronized with the so-called Kondratiev cycles.
Frank Klingberg and Jack Holmes show repeating patterns over the past two centuries of what they call extrovert, belligerent, reactionary, and introvert, peaceful, progressive, moods in American foreign policy imagery.
Joshua Goldstein shows, quote, a clear association between long economic expansion periods and the severity of major intracore wars.
Fatalities were approximately four times higher during long expansion periods than during stagnation periods.
Thompson and Zuck found that, quote, wars are more likely to begin near the end of an expansion.
Obviously, economic and social progress throughout history have triggered the pathological emotional conditions that have periodically led to war.
Because of what I have termed growth panic fears.
With each new generation, more evolved parenting with reduced child abuse, psychogenesis, in a majority of the population produces new historical personalities, new psychoclasses, who begin to create greater economic and social progress that involves greater challenges and more independence from the values and obedience patterns of their parents.
This makes the majority of society, the earlier, more authoritarian psychoclasses, Fear that the nation has been guilty of hubris, of sinful freedom from parental values, and this fear of growth sends them down the path to sacrificial wars.
In my book, The Emotional Life of Nations, I have described the psychodynamics of growth panic in psychoanalysis and in history, what Eric Fromm calls the fear of freedom.
I show how psychoanalysts like Masterson and Succarides have described the origins of all fears of growth in child abuse and neglect.
They describe in their patients how they reenact their early traumas when too much progress makes them feel annihilation, anxiety, fears that they are being abandoned by the punitive parent embedded in their brains.
Quote, If we grow, we will never be what mommy or daddy wants us to be, and we will never get their love.
As Masterson interprets to his female patient, the function of the mother in her head was to help her deal with the feelings of being alone by fusing with the object she defends against, being alone.
Entire societies also react to innovative, progressive historical phases by defending against the loss of parental approval.
They move toward war through seven phases, first splitting off both the bad motherland and their bad self, and projecting them into, quote, enemies, who are then killed, sacrificed, because they have fused with an all-powerful killer motherland.
As each phase is reached, the group switches further into a war trance.
In remaining chapters, I will examine historical societies from tribes to modern nations and show how all wars follow the same seven phases.
Each phase involves group fantasies that can be analyzed and interrupted by peace advocates.
I will also show that although mature democracies do not war against each other, states undergoing democratization are especially prone to start wars, since they confront the most emotional growth, producing what Sagan terms the paranoid position of developing democracies.
In this chapter we will describe the emotional contents of the seven phases of going to war, which are 1.
Freedom. Increasing independence, innovations, growth of real self.
2. Fear.
Growth panic, loss of parental approval, disintegration of real self.
3. Fission.
Splitting into in-group and out-group.
4. Fusion.
Merging with powerful, punishing, killer motherland.
5. Fracture.
Projection of bad self into helpless, victim, quote, enemy.
6. Faked provocation.
Faking a provocative attack by an, quote, enemy.
7. Fight.
becoming the "hero" of the killer motherland and being sacrificed for her while killing the bad self "enemy".
Phase 1: Freedom The lithograph in the book shows a typical group fantasy of Phase 1: Freedom, with the motherland pregnant with promise for the future and a radiant Frankfurt behind her.
Entitled Schönen guten Morgen, Germania, It reveals the hope that Germany could stand new ways of living, more political freedoms, new industries, more women's rights, and greater personal happiness than it had enjoyed in more authoritarian traditional German culture.
States in this freedom phase manage to settle their disagreements with other states without resorting to violence, and the increased cooperation and trade produces further economic progress.
Improvements in family interactions during the freedom phase become particularly powerful sources of fear to the earlier, more reactionary psycho classes.
As men see their wives get new divorce and voting rights, as girls get more education and more access to jobs, the new freedoms blow the mind of the older generation of men and reactionary attempts to turn back or limit women's freedoms begin.
Looking at charts of economic growth reveals a clear picture of how closely major wars follow upon periods of prosperity.
The powerful economic advances of the last half of the 19th century, of over 5% year after year, after centuries of economic growth of under 1% per annum, were the real causes of the huge carnage of the two world wars of the first half of the 20th century.
Prosperity and liberal reforms before World War I made the reactionary psychoclasts wonder if, quote,"...no more rank, titles, or race meant all is mixed, confused, and blurred, and the end of the world seems nigh, with the decline of religiosity,
a disintegration of the patriarchal family, and the decline of respect for authority." Women at the end of the nineteenth century had new rights, and husbands began to fear that their wives would soon become, quote,"...oversexed wives who threaten her husband's life with her insatiable erotic demands." If women were to continue to get equal rights, men would soon become women.
So wars are necessary, as Machiavelli claimed, to purge nations of, quote, effeminato, the daily accretion of poisonous matter caused by women's conspiracy to poison manhood.
Only in war, men agreed, could males regain their endangered masculinity.
As early as the freedom phase, people began voicing their feeling that materialism, economic progress, should be opposed.
A.J.P. Taylor notes, quote, years before the war, men's minds had become unconsciously weary of peace and security.
They welcomed war as a relief from materialism.
Before World War I, quote, there was a feeling of approaching apocalypse.
The world as it is now wants to die, wants to perish, and it will.
Only a sacrificial slaughter could cure Europe of the freedoms offered by cities.
Infinite opportunities, but also rootlessness and loss of social ties.
Factory man is neurasthenic, bored, unable to endow any experience with value.
Being bored by change and challenges meant having your real self-feelings cut off by your dissociated, punitive, parent-altar, whose authoritarian, quote, culture was opposed to innovation.
Quote, City life and Gesellschaft doom the common people to decay and death, the doom of culture itself, i.e., individualism spells the doom of your parents' authoritarian culture.
All abused children assume it was their fault they were abused.
Quote, I must have deserved it.
I must have been too selfish.
As Masterson puts it succinctly, quote, Self-activation leads to abandonment, depression, and death.
Phase 2. Fear.
The loss of approval by the internal dissociated parental altar means one is alone.
As Masterson's patient put it, quote, I've run up against a wall about mother.
When I was alone I was afraid of death.
Being alone was like being dead.
The inner attacking mother is experienced as a voice inside.
The voice attacks me at every turn.
Whenever I feel I've won, I'm attacked by the voice.
It never stops. Hanging on to the attacking voice inside is a way of holding on to the mother, even if it means she is now a killer mother voice.
The result is a total loss of self-esteem.
If your mother doesn't like you, how can anyone else like you?
The attacking inner voice and the sense of despair of nations in their fear phase has nothing to do with the real condition of society.
As we will see in the next chapter, Germany, during the later Weimar period, began feeling despair because there was no respect for authority anymore, and everyone was arguing in the legislature.
So they voted more and more for Nazis, even though this was actually a period of increasing economic prosperity and freedoms.
Most theories of war posit, quote, As triggering political fears and wars.
Only my psychohistorical theory connects shared fears to new freedoms and individuations.
The killer mother voice inside feeds into killer women group fantasy images before all wars in magazine covers, political cartoons, and cinema.
These fears of killer mothers are all essentially flashbacks to the central fears of early childhood.
Being devoured, starving to death, being chopped up, drowning, overpowered, etc.
All the standard contents of early nightmares that were embedded in dissociated fearful alters.
In the extremely rare cases where the father is the major early caretaker, it is a killer father alter.
These altars, quote, carry the memory of early abuse.
They may be ascribed to other nations, who are imagined to be encircling us, or strangling us.
But the deadly encirclement is, in fact, the inner killer mother altar experienced as nations switch into their dissociated memories of the dangerous mother, who is imagined by the infant to be about to devour him.
Some chimp mothers and some human tribal mothers actually do eat their babies.
That these fears are paranoid goes without saying, and books on war are filled with the paranoid group fantasies that precede wars, from the Great Fear before the French Revolution to the Saddam Has WMD fantasies of the US before the Iraqi War.
The paranoid group fantasies have the same delusional contents as those of paranoid schizophrenics.
As one describes them, people are trying to kill me.
I am especially bad.
I am a piece of shit and I deserve to die.
I can destroy cities with my mind and kill children.
I must hurt myself.
I think I'm dissolving.
A monster keeps killing me.
I must kill her.
There are voices in commands.
One must do what they say.
When the wars of the 20th century are described as enormous, quote, headlong, irrepressible rushes to death and destruction, the motivations are clinically psychotic.
If the interferes are particularly paranoid, the nation has apocalyptic fantasies that the world is about to end, destroyed for its sins by God.
Again, the actual condition of the nation has no relationship to the apocalyptic fantasies.
America was the strongest nation on earth with the highest personal income at any time in history, when President Reagan was elected.
But he saw himself as...
Under attack by an evil force that would extinguish the light we've been tending for six thousand years.
And chose as his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, who said, quote, The world is going to end, as in the Book of Revelations, by an act of God.
Every day, I think that time is running out.
The specifics of each of these apocalyptic group fantasies reveal their origin in early Killer Mother Fears, as in the current series of apocalyptic Left Behind novels, 62 million in print, that show the monsters of the apocalypse will have, quote, faces like human faces, teeth like lion's teeth, and hair like women's hair.
By my ongoing analysis of thousands of political cartoons and magazine covers, I predicted the coming of the Gulf War before it started, by seeing an upsurge in dangerous women and sacrificed children images in the media.
The neurobiology of switching into dissociated fearful alters is becoming clear from new studies of alarm centers in the brain.
Particularly revealing is the work of Helen Mayberg on Area 25 of the medial prefrontal cortex, located just above the roof of the mouth, with rich connections to the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, which she saw in her brain scans as hot, hyperactive during periods of depression and fear.
In fact, she put electrodes into this area and calmed down the alarm condition and found the depression and fearfulness disappeared.
She described the hyperactivity of Area 25 to, quote, like a gate left open, allowing negative emotions from the amygdala to overwhelm thinking and mood.
Inserting the electrodes closed this gate and rapidly alleviated the depression.
It is likely that the fear phase of going to war is a result of the growing hyperactivity of what Mayberg terms the alarm center of the brain because of the reactivation of fearful memories of punishment and abandonment by the mother.
Many clinical studies have confirmed that children of depressed mothers grow up more violent than other children.
Going to war is a defense against and reenactment of early alarms, early childhood traumas, early abandonments, especially those embedded in the first three years of life.
Phase 3.
Fission. As nations realize that they feel their motherland has rejected them as too independent, as bad, they begin to split the motherland image into a good motherland and a bad motherland, dividing the world into us and them, with the in-group idealized as clean, pure, and the out-group seen as polluted, filthy.
When two or more states fission into idealized and disparaged groups, they increase their violent nationalism and enter into a hostile, escalating spiral of military build-ups and collection of allies.
Fission is produced by fears of growing freedoms, creating imaginary communities that must be defended by the killer-mother altars.
When the fission takes place only within a state, civil war or genocide results.
Any rationalization for the fission makes sense to people entering into the fission trance.
As one observer of the Serbo-Croatian Civil War notes, I'm trying to figure out why neighbors should start killing each other.
So I say, I can't tell Serbs and Croats apart.
What makes you think you're so different?
The man I'm talking to takes a cigarette pack out of his cocky jacket.
See this? These are Serbian cigarettes.
Over there they smoke Croatian cigarettes.
But they're both cigarettes, right?
Ah, you foreigners don't understand anything.
He shrugs and begins cleaning his Zastovo machine pistol.
The two planes of consciousness, the political and the personal, just can't confront each other.
So they float around in his head.
They often occur more on opposite sides of the brain, the left one more rational, the right one containing the dissociated fears that split people into in-groups and out-groups, so-called imagined communities.
The in-group is a place where you store the grandiose fantasies of childhood, a place where you can re-experience the traumas and dominations and defences of your formative period.
The out-group is imagined to contain projected fears that were embedded in childhood in violent perpetrator alters Outgroups are beasts who will devour us, they encircle us, they have a need to dominate us, and so on.
Outgroups are usually called names that are the same as the names parents called their children when they were resented, when they were, quote, bad.
Abused and neglected children have been found clinically to be especially liable to externalizing their problems.
Those who received constant love as children and were allowed to individuate do not need in-group and out-group splitting.
Since all the bad mommy traits are now contained in the polluted, quote, enemy, the in-group is felt to be purified by the fission process, and nations suddenly feel cleansed.
I have previously described in detail how nations conduct purity crusades as they plan to go to war, closing down brothels, regulating dance halls, prohibiting obscene literature, opposing feminism, etc.
The persecutors are products of loveless families.
Those they choose to persecute are the more loving psychoclasses.
Persecutors are usually reactionary politically and look for an authoritarian leader who can be a container for their cleansing group fantasies, a delegate for their punitive inner altar, the killer mother, the dissociated perpetrator altar in the brain that Maccabee calls the sacred executioner.
Terror management theorists have shown experimentally that, quote, reminders of death led to increased preference for charismatic political candidates.
War leaders, quote, revel in victory and gore, like Theodore Roosevelt, who never felt more alive than when killing something.
Studies of the language used by hardline political leaders show that those who scored highest in interpersonal dominance more often advocated the use of military force.
War leaders were almost always raised by dominating mothers who used shame regularly to control their children.
The war leader is himself a narcissistic, authoritarian, grandiose personality without empathy.
Who, while he tries to restore his failed masculinity, allows the populace under him to enjoy what Masterson terms closet narcissism, so that the nation feels ecstasy as chosen ones who are so strong they cannot be defeated.
Nations going to war usually delegate decisions to dictators.
Even democracies like Britain suspend elections during wars.
This authoritarianism soon leads to what Dominic Johnson calls, quote, delusional overconfidence in planning which nation to attack.
Most wars begin with a self-destructive manic overconfidence, like Germany stating that World War I would be just a, quote, short cleansing thunderstorm.
As war experts show, in great detail, quote, Excessive military optimism is frequently associated with the outbreak of war, undertaken with each side believing that it would win since God is on our side.
Usually, the, quote, dirty enemy, who must be cleansed, includes parts of their own motherland, whether the Jews in Germany who were, quote, poisoning our blood, Or the foreigners contaminating Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge cleansing, or the traitors within nations when patriots move toward violence.
Both Hitler and Pol Pot were, quote, obsessed with ridding corporate and individual bodies of impurities, contaminants, filth, reenacting their parents' disgust with them as, quote, dirty babies that needed cleansing.
Even though the nation knows the cleansing will be self-destructive, the fission produces results in enormous relief, since it shows that the enemy is real and not just imagined.
Designating the enemy always shows evidence of revenge toward the mother.
Women are regularly tortured and killed in wars despite their innocence, from the rape of Nanking to the torture, rape, and twisting of women's nipples with pliers by Ethiopian soldiers.
There is a surge of not only opiates but also of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin, as the dangerous maternal altar is put out there.
What Vulcan calls chosen glories are mythologized as collective victories, and chosen traumas are imagined to be former injustices and humiliations that need to be revenged.
The coming war is experienced as a, quote, dreamlike, serene, manic, high, As young Winston Churchill observed, war was always exhilarating to the nation,
and its warriors felt to be ecstatic, in the same sense as the original meaning of the term, namely, a state of being outside the self, absorbed in the greater whole, fused into the maternal body.
Evenreich shows that warriors of all kinds overcome any empathy toward, quote, enemies by being, quote, swept up into a kind of altered state.
Almost any drug or intoxicant has served to facilitate the transformation of man into warrior and transforming entire nations into warrior states.
The fission process produces violence whenever groups switch into their dominating and subservient altars, even when there is no rational justification for enmity.
This is the finding of the famous experiment of Philip Zimbardo who randomly assigned college-age men to roles as prisoners or guards in the basement of a university building.
The guards quickly developed tyrannical and abusive strategies for controlling their prisoners, forgetting that it was an experiment.
They obviously switched into their violent early alters, turned off their empathy mirror neurons in their insulas and anterior cingulates, and acted out their childhood traumas, just as warriors and terrorists do.
The same switching can be seen in the much-cited experiment of Stanley Milgram, where volunteers followed, quote, university experimenters, who inflicted seemingly harmful damage upon victims when asked to do so.
The only time the experimenters refused to obey was when the university arranged an acting out of a group rebellion, breaking the alter-switching fission process.
The experiment didn't prove obedience, as is usually claimed.
If they had asked them to reach into their pockets and give others money rather than shocks, they would not have obeyed.
Inner alters are always harmful, never beneficent.
Phase 4.
Fusion It is the fusion with the power of the killer motherland that gives the war leader his charismatic strength.
Not any real strength he has.
Hitler was a weak person physically and mentally, but he was adored by Germans because he was fused with the Mutterland, with the Volk, a powerful, mystical being utterly lacking in empathy.
Money Carly describes a Hitler rally, quote, The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality and become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful monster, which was not quite sane and therefore capable of anything.
Wars begin in this fused state, claiming, Motherland in danger!
The nation fantasizes it will lose its motherland if it does not rescue her, even when there is no external enemy.
Nations march off to war as heroes, quote, losing ourselves in ecstasy because we are conscious of a power outside us with which we can merge.
Warriors are the favorites of their motherland, her heroes, as they always wished they could have been with their real mothers.
Those who die in wars are said to, quote, die peacefully.
He who has a motherland dies in comfort, in her, like a baby falling asleep.
War leaders are exactly like tribal shamans who cure group despair by exercising bad spirits through healing sacrifices.
Leaders can be disobeyed whenever they do not interpret and carry out the group fantasy of the internal fearful altar.
They must make real the growing paranoia of the nation, saying, Let me help you by naming your persecutors.
Evil is out there in the real world, and you thought it was all in your head.
The war leader is an expert in switching into his abusive parental altar, his war trance.
Mussolini once told a visitor that, quote, he is subject to periods of trance at which time he is inspired by influences outside his ordinary self.
The war trance has the same psychodynamics as the possession trance of tribal cultures.
Both are results of being taken over by dissociated inner perpetrator alters.
Tribal warriors often eat the inner organs of their enemies.
Cambodian fighters have been photographed smiling as they eat the livers of their enemies.
Both are fused with the cruel nightmares implanted as inner alters in childhood.
Because they're killed as dissociated alters, psychiatrists can describe them as, quote, normal.
They could be you.
Only those who are fused with their inner violent perpetrator alters, quote, obeying the inner voice of the purified community, are able to join in the worship of flags, parades, and other group fantasies.
Volcan terms this fusion group fantasy blind trust.
Those fused with their killer motherlands are clinically paranoid, produce inner terror campaigns in their in-group, and call all those who disagree with them traitors.
War leaders are regularly abandoned by their parents as children.
One study of British Prime Ministers discovered that over two-thirds of them had been orphaned in childhood, compared to about two percent of the general population.
Fusion with the abandoning mother as a defense against the collapse of the self can be seen in the Hitchcock film Psycho, where Norman fuses with and dresses up like his killer mother, and carries out terrorizing and killing people as if he were her.
Saying that motherlands and war leaders are loved is quite inaccurate.
People worship their motherlands and war leaders, which reveals not love, but unfulfilled infant needs.
Fusion is needed as a defense against being abandoned again.
People defend the honor of the motherland and revenge insults to her reputation as defenses to avoid remembering their own rage against their rejecting, abandoning mothers.
Going to war because you are fused with your motherland is the opposite, from defending your group out of empathy.
It is a defensive need, a need to relive the dominations of your childhood.
Warrior cultures value martyrdom, self-sacrifice, not self-interest.
To say that domination and power are the secrets of success in international relations is a delusion that began in families by abused children needing to restore their hope that they still have a powerful mother who will take care of them.
And when motherlands begin compulsive wars, war leaders regularly admit, like Churchill in 1914.
Churchill was regularly abandoned by his parents in infancy and later.
Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse.
I am interested, geared up, and happy.
Is it not horrible to be built like that?
And during the war, he admitted, I love this war.
I know its smashing and shattering lives of thousands every moment, and yet I enjoy every second of it.
Tocqueville puts the need for violence when fused with your in-group bluntly, quote, We have such a passionate taste for war that there is no enterprise so reckless or dangerous to the state, but it is thought glorious to die for it with arms in one's but it is thought glorious to die for it with arms
Neurobiologically, the fusion phase involves the same attenuation of death anxieties as when religious people experience God's presence, which is also preceded by the fear of being killed.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Persinger shows that both are quote, temporal lobe transients, similar to the seizures of temporal lobe epileptics, and they can be easily recognized by their brain patterns that include quote, a release of the brain's own opiates causing a narcotic high.
These opiates are found within the amygdala Both patriotic highs and God highs represent fusion events.
Revitalization movements, solutions to the anxiety generated by novelty, uncertainty, and complexity.
The voice of God and the voice of the motherland that are experienced in revitalization movements both come, says Persinger, from the release of, quote, images and proto-sensations long locked within the old context of the temporal lobe, amygdala, of the infant self, to which he or she has not had access for decades.
The most obvious of these revitalization movements is, of course, the millennialism that breaks out before so many wars, a world-ending group fantasy promising fusion with the deity as a reward for the cleansing of sin.
Phase 5 Fracture In order for the good child self to be loved, the bad child must die.
That is why there are so many early societies like Carthage, where tens of thousands of jars have been found with charred bones of sacrificed children, and inscriptions saying they had been killed by their parents to cleanse the world of their sinfulness.
Once the bad self is fractured off and projected into an enemy, located either inside or outside the society, empathy is entirely lost because the punitive parental alter in the amygdala cuts off all contact with the mirror neurons in the insula and anterior cingulate.
A poster described in this book illustrates this projection of the bad self dramatically.
It shows a Nazi view of, quote, a crippled idiot bound forever to his bed, which, in the 1930s, rather than eliciting sympathy from other Germans, instead was intended to incite disgust at helpless German children who contributed nothing to the Wok and who were, in fact, murdered by the thousands with the approval of their parents.
As we will see in the next chapter, the gassing of useless eaters, a phrase often used by German parents for their own children, actually preceded the gassing of Jews and others in the Holocaust.
Epithets that enemies are called invariably repeat epithets that originally were used by parents for their children.
Usually it is obvious, since it is the intent of the war leaders to act out the violent parental altars of the people.
As when Wilson called Latin Americans, naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown-ups and require a stiff hand, an authoritative hand.
Or enemies are shown to be just greedy babies.
As when the Bush representative told Larry King, You can't sit down and talk to North Koreans.
They want cookies.
Then more cookies. Always more cookies.
Or when George W. Bush himself regularly repeats the injunction, You've got to hit them hard to teach them a lesson.
They only respect force.
A phrase that was used on him by his mother.
Eurendreich details admirably how nations regularly go to war against enemies who are children, who must be taught a lesson.
Often enemies are even called dirty or they stink, as though they are babies left by mothers in their excrement.
When an American soldier kills a North Vietnamese soldier and, quote, balances a large piece of shit on his head, he says he laughed.
The real reason being because he had killed his shitty, bad baby self.
Americans regularly refer to the need to get the bad guys as if enemies were playground bullies or we'll get those little bastards as if they were illegitimate children.
War itself is filled with references to children's games like dominoes falling, the checkerboard of war, or the iron dice about to be rolled.
The clinical term for all these returns to dissociated childhood alters is flashbacks.
The enemy is always the helpless victim self, the bad child.
And when Nazis or Tutsis smash babies' heads against walls, they're doing so fused with the killer mothers of their early nightmares.
Killing babies is certainly not a contribution to the winning of wars, but it always occurs because it is your own bad baby self, who you blame for your losing your mother's love, who she screamed at when furious with her life.
I wish I never had you!
Humiliation by the parent is always repeated toward the out-groups so that humiliation and counter-humiliation become the central tasks of international affairs.
The creation of the bad self-enemy is purely a group fantasy and often is created out of whole cloth.
Quote, In the Soviet Union, so-called kulaks were killed without guilt, despite the fact that before the revolution, we were just neighbors.
Now we are bedniaki, seredniaki, kulaks.
And we are supposed to have class war, one against the other, you understand?
The same thing happened in Cambodia, where, quote, anyone with an education became subhuman new people.
Finding an enemy to kill carries out the paranoid position begun when fusing with the killer motherland.
Unfortunately, the projection of the childhood bad self into an enemy who is either inside your own nation or is in a neighboring nation does not rid one of the problem.
Since national growth and progress continue, the motherland alter voice continues to hate the bad self alter, and even peaceful minorities and neighbors seem to be growing more and more threatening.
Thus Germany started two world wars with their more peaceful neighbors because they fantasized that Germany had to strike first, saying, quote,"...the future belongs to Russia, which grows and grows and becomes an even greater nightmare to us." This is the essence of paranoia in international affairs.
Germans agreeing that, quote, if Germany does not rule the world, it will disappear from the map.
All major wars since antiquity have been imagined to be, quote, preventive.
We must kill them before they overpower us.
As France said when they attacked Austria during the French Revolution, Time only improves their position and makes ours deteriorate, so we must make the storm cloud burst instead of letting it grow.
Because of the steady growth of the bad self projected into the enemy, it is a main task of a war leader to find a war-willing neighbor and invent a faked provocation for beginning the war in order to get their people to agree to eliminate them.
Internal enemies are rather easy to find and invent threats from.
Even the most bizarre accusations are believed when the internal enemy is said to be an out-group, as when Jews were believed to be lice that are poisoning German bloodstream, or when Tutsis were believed to be cockroaches killing Hutus.
But the idea that nations regularly used fake provocations of other nations as war pretext incidents as casus belli is less often admitted by international affairs experts.
Phase 6.
Faked Provocation A summary of many of the faked provocations used by the United States during the past two centuries reveals a pattern of lying in order to make it appear that an unprovoked threat or threatening condition makes war inevitable.
Since most of the nation is in a war trance by Phase 6, they do not question the lie.
A cartoon depicted in the book shows Saddam Hussein as a killer of children, one of the central fantasies that led to the Gulf War.
Although Iraq was one of the best Middle Eastern nations for childcare and education, the American media kept picturing him as a child abuser and baby killer, with US faked incidents like one where babies were supposedly being removed by Iraqis from their incubators and murdered.
Initially, President Bush told his representative to tell Saddam, we have no opinion on your border disagreement with Kuwait, in order to give him a green light to invade.
The entire war was a set-up because the U.S. needed a war to feel masculine.
Bush was being shown in cartoons as a wimp who wore women's dresses.
And when Saddam said he would pull his troops out of Kuwait himself, the U.S. ignored him, Bush saying to his diplomat simply, We have to have a war.
U.S. faked provocations have occurred in some form in every war it has entered, so that, as one psychiatrist puts it, our paranoia switch is tripped.
The Mexican-American War was started by President Polk announcing he was about to declare war on Mexico, even if they did not attack the U.S., then sending 3,500 American soldiers into Mexican territory so they could be accused of shedding American blood.
The American Civil War began after the South was tricked into firing on Fort Sumter.
The Spanish-American War began when an interior explosion of the USS Maine caused by coal dust was claimed by US authorities and a belligerent media as reason for war.
The U.S. got into World War I, supposedly because the British ship the Lusitania was sunk with Americans on board, when it purposefully was sent, quote, at a considerably reduced speed into an area where a German U-boat was known to be waiting and with her escorts withdrawn.
Thus carrying out Theodore Roosevelt's earlier wish that, quote, I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.
Even World War II was started, according to the very well-documented book by Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit, The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, after President Franklin Roosevelt had set up a secret team assigned the task of getting Japan to attack the U.S. As Secretary of War Stimson wrote, The question was, how should we maneuver them, the Japanese, into the position of firing the first shot?
The answer was, by such provocations as sending U.S. submarines into Japanese waters, embargoing trade with Japan so they would run out of oil, putting the U.S. fleet into Pearl Harbor undefended, and not telling the Pearl Harbor commander that Japanese planes were on their way because FDR's team had broken the Japanese secret code.
The Korean War came about because Truman needed a war with a communist nation and encouraged the US-backed South Koreans to conduct over 400 border battles and military incursions into the North.
Then John Foster Dulles promised Korean President Singman Rhee, quote, If he was ready to attack the communist North, the US would lend help through the UN if he persuaded the world that the ROK was attacked first.
This eventually provoked North Korean military into South Korean territory.
The provocations continued when Truman permitted General MacArthur to go north toward the Chinese border, despite Chinese warnings that they would respond militarily, producing a new war with China, resulting in an additional 2 million deaths.
The Cold War continued in the Cuban provocations of the Soviets by John F. Kennedy.
After making all kinds of plans for faking an attack by Cuba on U.S. citizens, after arranging the Bay of Pigs invasion over the objections of its military advisors that it would fail, After authorizing various assassination attempts on Castro, JFK sent 40,000 American troops to the Bahamas to begin practice invading Cuba,
which led Khrushchev to say, quote, An attack on Cuba is being prepared, and the only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there.
JFK concluded that, quote, if Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it's all over, and led a showdown with the Soviets that put American bombers armed with 1,300 nuclear bombs in the air, ready to bomb Russia and start World War III. Americans were deep into their war trance,
too. Although 60% of them thought Kennedy's actions might lead to a nuclear World War III, only 4% of them opposed the nuclear showdown.
The Vietnam War was begun with a traditional faked provocation, when the U.S. sent a destroyer into the Tonkin Gulf of Vietnam, primarily for provocation, and then President Johnson lied and said it was attacked, quote, in neutral waters, when, actually, U.S. overhead patrol plans reported to him that there were no Vietnamese PT boats anywhere near the ship.
LBJ thereby easily got his authorization from Congress to begin the war.
And of course, the Iraqi war was full of faked, quote, evidence on weapons of mass destruction and Saddam bin Laden contacts that were used to justify America's attack on a sovereign nation.
The invasion of Iraq will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter.
Plus, there has recently been one extremely important provocation that the media has simply overlooked.
Bush is announcing in his National Security Strategy report that the U.S. would now, for the first time, allow themselves to make first-strike nuclear attacks against non-nuclear nations, a policy certain to cause many smaller nations to develop nuclear weapons in order to be able to show that they can strike back if attacked with a nuke.
Nothing could be more provocative for future wars than announcing a first-strike nuclear policy.
Bush has stated several times that this new pre-emptive nuclear war policy was needed, quote, to rid the world of evil.
Phase 7 Fight With the switches into the war trance of the first six phases complete, the nation goes off to their sacrificial war ritual to kill and be killed.
The nations involved now are controlled by their hyperactive alarm centers, Area 25, in the brain.
Both trust and empathy are gone.
The warriors on both sides are fully switched into their violent right hemisphere altars, their time bombs from early childhood, and are convinced that they are fully fused with their killer motherland and have her power so they can kill and die and are convinced that they are fully fused with their killer motherland and
In the drawing depicted in the book, the Sumerian war-goddess Inanna controls the death of her heroes and enemies, even though the king may appear to be in charge of the battle.
In tribal wars, culture heroes are openly shown as, quote,"'Good children, who do what their mothers want them to do.
Renew her.'" In modern state wars, the aim is the same.
As Paoli explained, We have laid ourselves over the body of the motherland, Britannia, in order to revive her.
I hope that she will soon recover entirely her vigour and her health.
Plutarch recounts a typical Greek mother as she was burying her son, saying she had, Good luck, for I bore him that he might die for Sparta.
And soldiers, in every century, write home to their mothers letters like this one.
"'Darling Mama, I had always prayed to show my love by doing something famous for you, to justify what you called me when I got back from France, my hero's son.' To show that they go to war fused with their mothers, warriors even wear symbols of her in wars.
Her feathers on their helmets, goddess pictures on their shields, swastikas on their uniforms, and regularly display flags in their battles.
Heroes are never ones who reduce violence.
Heroes kill.
Kill innocent others, and kill themselves, setting off their inner time-bombs embedded in childhood, and therefore become a martyr beloved by God, the Killer Mother.
Partridge observed the mood of war as, quote, one of ecstasy, heroism, taking part in great events, or of victory.
The sense of self-loss, of merger into some greater whole.
Dopamine is released.
Fantasies of grandiosity soar.
Nations dance in the streets.
Bloody slaughter is often experienced as joyful.
Quote, As he watched pieces of men's bodies fly up into the air, he wept with joy, like getting screwed for the first time.
Furthermore, as Chris Hedges' book title puts it, war is a force that gives us meaning.
Since those who did not receive love in childhood can develop no inner self that gives them meaning, and so, as adults, must fuse with their killer motherlands to achieve meaning.
Warriors are made by switching civilians into their early altars in basic training, so they repeat the confrontations and fears between their fearsome mother and her helpless child.
As one NCO explains, quote, I try to make soldiers of them.
I give them hell from morning to sunset.
They begin to curse me.
Then they begin to curse together and become a truly cohesive group, a fighting unit.
Everything is done, quote, to take down your pride, make you feel small, and to re-experience the death fears of early childhood that are embedded in your altar.
As one military academy put it, It is not easy to fully switch into these deadly early altars.
Many soldiers do not succeed in switching into being killer warriors, since they received enough love and childhood to avoid having real killing altars.
In the infantry in World War II, only about one-seventh of the soldiers were willing to use their weapons to kill, although, by the Vietnam War, with further modifications to the training, around 80% of American soldiers were shooting to kill.
Warriors often recognize that they have switched into alternative personalities in wars and As one American soldier put it, quote, No man in battle is really sane.
The mindset of a soldier on the battlefield is a highly disturbed mind, and this is an epidemic of insanity which affects everybody.
Another one described how he killed in a dissociated state, quote, I enjoyed the killing of the Viet Cong.
It was like watching myself in a movie.
One part of me was doing something while the other part watched from a distance, shocked by the things it saw, yet powerless to stop them from happening.
Soldiers in combat often switch out of their violent altruists, often in, quote, lightning emotional changes that cause them to act like lions and then like scared hares within the passage of a few minutes.
Killing takes its toll physically.
A study of U.S. soldiers found that they report, quote, Over a third of U.S. military returning from Iraq show evidence of clinical post-traumatic stress syndrome.
But war is deemed worth it.
Quote, It gives us resolve, a cause.
It allows us to be noble.
It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.
It gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness.
Literally another self.
An alternative smallness personality fused with the killer motherland.
Loved at last.
The alternate self of the warrior draws upon the same neurobiological states of mind as pre-psychotic and autistic children access, both conditions resulting from early amygdalan, prefrontal cortex and insular damage.
Both autistics and military groups demonstrate the failure of autonomy.
This can be seen concretely in all the odd actions that the military demonstrates that are similar to autistics.
Autistics walk about with arched backs and stiff legs and arms and so do soldiers, called marching.
Autistics flap their arms and hit their heads and so do soldiers, saluting.
Autistics avoid eye contact and don't recognize you as they pass you, and neither do marching soldiers.
Autistics don't talk, troops in formation, love repetitive exercise, endless marching, retreat into their autistic shells to ward off expected attack, military armor, and are fascinated by mechanical moving parts, military vehicles.
Autistics and troops march about to drums, like the shaman's drum made of the cosmic tree of heaven that induces trance, and wear costumes with metal ornaments, like a shaman's costume.
All of these rituals explain why the military are called infantry.
They feel infantile, like infants fearing death.
They put themselves into their infantile war trance altars.
Why do nations go to war?
Not because wars achieve any utilitarian return.
The more than a trillion dollars a year the world now spends on their military is totally sacrificial, self-destructive.
Nations say they go to war for emotional reasons, like war is the greatest purifier to the race or nation that can be achieved.
Self-destructive wars are purifying because they can drown out all those terrible inner altars embedded in childhood.
Behind the defensive group fantasy need for purification is the accusation of dirtiness and badness Mommy calls me a stinky baby, leaves me in my feces and urine, hates me for making a mess, for being a mess. I am even now bad, filthy, but I can be purified by war.
I can die young, clean, pure, fresh.
I can die as a martyr to my motherland, and then I will be loved by Mommy instead of being hated.
Becoming a warrior means not needing to live in despair.
Warriors control death, choosing who lives and who dies because they pull the trigger.
All my early nightmares of death that are still in my head can be faced in reality, outside my head, in war, and I can then be sent back to join Mommy.
Dead in a casket wrapped in her dress.
Her living flag.
And I will finally be loved by her.
Buried in her bosom.
Forever. Lloyd DeMoss is editor of the Journal of Psychohistory, director of the Institute for Psychohistory, treasurer of the International Psychohistorical Association, and author or editor of seven books, including The Emotional Life of Nations.
His website is www.psychohistory.com.
My name is Stefan Molyneux, and I'm the host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the Internet, and a top 10 finalist in the 2007 Podcast Awards, You can access the show at www.freedomainradio.com.
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