Designer War By Default

By: Andrew_McKillop

How Did World War I Start?
Due to 2014 being the centenary of this war, which in some European countries is still called The Great War, interest in how it started has led to re-examining its many possible causes. The major problem is that disagreement on its causes and origins is widespread among academics and specialists, and has been that way since at least the 1920s – immediately after the war.

But whether this war was by design, or by default, it happened.

The simple fact is that the straight majority of all major wars, and many minor ones are disputed as to their exact causes and origins. Put another way, their causes are unknown or even impossible to know.

Eccentric, strange or infantile political decisions and behaviour obviously aid the process, producing unexpected and irrational “war motives”. Among the political, financial and military elites, and among the “media barons” influencing public opinion, we have a special world where “group think” and a pea soup fog of fantasy very often blots out reality. Not only double think rules, but also the split mind.

Called schizophrenia, the earliest definition of “split minds” and the 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 should be discussed by political scientists and war historians seeking explanations for deliberately irrational “group think” behavior of the elites, as well as their individual behavior. At times like today, this can be especially dangerous.

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. In more homely terms a paranoid-megalomaniac believes they are the constant and permanent focus of all attention, by everybody. This attention is either malevolent, for the paranoid or adoring, for the megalomaniac.

As a direct result anything said or done in their vicinity is reprogrammed by them to fit these two-only frameworks. Of course reality is shredded and denied!

The denial of reality is a key diagnostic factor of the mental disease called schizophrenia. The real world no longer exists. 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 can co-exist or interact with, and reinforce other forms of schizophrenia. Wielding political power, affected politicians can not only infect their fellow elites, but also impose a schizoid framework on the societies they have taken control of, and govern.

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 a theatrical way, then broke out into excited speechmaking.

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."  Biologically-induced brain impairment was 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
Denying reality and substituting it with a fantasy world, in the politics of western societies today, is very, very easy to prove. Fo example the “unexpected decline” of the economy and the need for more “monetary easing” and larger national debts. More serious damage from leaderships which deny reality and erect a screen of fantasy in its place includes the role of elite schizophrenia in the long-term process of destroying social reality – what we can call the “political assassination of knowing”.

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 elites enables them to simply reproduce and replicate previous, provenly-defective, guaranteed-failure policies and programs. For example Keynesian mumbo-jumbo money printing and debt-raising “remedies” for the economy, knowing or believing that the voting public has like them “forgotten all about” its previous failures. As the schizophrenia intensifies, the elites have an ever-shorter collective memory or “cycle time” for their decisions. The record gets stuck but the turntable rotates ever faster.

Megalomania is almost always present among the ruling elites. It mixes stupefying arrogance with gut-level misanthropy, and is then intensified by the frequent paranoia that can accompany megalomania. The elites see “the mass” as child-like creatures with no memory, little better than insects but also as a threat to their re-election. Counting on totally automatic and unquestioning support at all times from the “glove puppet media”, their first goal is to keep the public dumbed down. This again is very dangerous when “war fever” is being whipped up by the media barons on a daily basis.

Elite herd schizophrenia also has a higher, more dangerous goal. Moving on from the cult of mass amnesia for society, elite schizophrenia sets out to wreck the framework of rational knowledge in society by engaging in frequent – even continuous – acts of 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.

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 parents can  be treated as “good” and “bad” by the children, and the parents can similarly define “good” children to reward, and “bad” children to scold. This is divide-and-rule. On a daily basis in 2014, Western elite schizophrenia is on view with the Ukraine crisis.  The Kiev flash mob government which used street protest to overthrew the previous elected government is the “good” child to reward. The pro-Russian rebels in the east are the “bad” children to punish.

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, most specifically concerning Russian oil and gas for Europe!

Economic sanctions are of course also applied, but the very bad child, Vladimir Putin, must continue supplying oil and gas to Europe. What could be more logical?

Certainly for decades, the elite need to justify go-anywhere bombing  or “designer war” has an important place in the mindset of the 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”. On example was bombing Serbia in 1999 to enable the Islamic-dominated micro state of Kosovo to be created - and exist in broken-backed poverty after that. Kosovo is a good supply source of child prostitutes and low wage toilet cleaners for the “free flowing' economies of the European Union.

Therapeutic and liberationist bombing – in some cases it has actually been called that - sets out firstly to wreck the victim countries, whereupon “the markets” will provide a solution. So-called “failed states” are inevitably left behind, but this reality is shielded from public opinion in the west, but with less and less success as shown by the somber cases of Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

We can ask if the process of “the run-up to war” is a new political ritual in western society, or a drunken dance by the Dogs of War baying for blood and sacrifice. We might suggest that periodic war fever outbreaks and the run-up to war are “new normal risks” in western society, driven by allowing schizophrenics and psychopaths to rule society.

Thriving On Chaos
History tends to prove that elite psychosis thrives in a disoriented and changing society. There is a distinct benefit for the elites in keeping things that way. The danger of elite “group think” very quickly becoming war-prone, then war-seeking is due to its internal dynamics of “high gain positive feedback”. This quickly outstrips the pace of real events - and any public knowledge and understanding of them. For several historians, this is one of the better explanations of the “elite dynamics” which resulted in  World War I. Other terms used are for example “the fog of war”.

To be sure and at all times, the public must be fed “false flag” incidents, usually gory or macabre, with the sole intention of keeping the public “in the dark”. The major problem, here, is that our mentally-disturbed elites quickly become intoxicated by their own propaganda. In other words even if the public is merely confused by a soup of part-truths and part-lies, the elites believe it.

Some historians investigating the origins of World War I have used the term “waltzing to war”. Elite euphoria which is associated with the hebephrenia-catatonia state and condition of schizophrenics, was certainly implied in the pre-1914 genesis of the war. Conversely the claim by other historians that World War I was also engendered by the near-absence of what we call public opinion today should be qualified by the massive amounts of “non-information” that is fed to western public opinion, today. The argument that the 1914-1918 war, often called “the pan European civil war” was favored by the impossibility of ordinary persons to know what was happening, is easy to apply to our current situation. In other words massive under-information of that time has been replaced by the exact opposite today.

One hundred years after the start of this “pan European civil war” historians go on disputing its exact causes. One point of agreement was the absence of totally opposed ideologies, which was a major driver of World War II. There were of course economic causes and consequences (as John Maynard Keynes wrote) of World War I, but the causes were less important than the sequels. The previously non-chaotic economy became more chaos-prone, as shown by the Roaring Twenties followed by 1929 which can very easily be compared with the 2000-2009 period.

Other arguments and theories on the origins of World War I included concepts of “geopolitical fault lines and shatter belts”, such as the Balkans (today the Middle East), but the role of then-emerging geopolitical theory most certainly added another layer or spiral to the process of elite inability to act rationally. Geopolitical pressures and power plays are almost by definition arcane and expert-only. This feeds the constant need of mentally-disturbed elites to feel they are privy to “special knowledge” which the mass is ignorant of. Geopolitical imperatives, or so-called imperatives almost naturally excite and entice the psychologically-fragile elites into stepping or waltzing close to the brink.

As we know, as Autumn (or Fall) approaches, the multiple crises of 2014 provide us consistent 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, which can only encourage the schizophrenic behavior of the elites.

Historians can make a good case for the frequent argument that in 1914, divorced and separated from anything like the mutated and deformed public opinion of today, political leaders simply “stumbled to war”. We have to ask why this seems eminently and frighteningly possible again, today?

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.

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