Pachacutec of Firedoglake has an excellent post up about Dick Cheney as a paranoid person using the formulations in Shapiro’s classic, Neurotic Styles. The more definitive discussions of Paranoia are in the work of W.W. Meissner [Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process]. Meissner describes the paranoid person as extremely fragile, intolerant of emotional ambiguity of any kind. The resulting paranoid ideas are the solution to a disintegration of the psyche, and, as such, are fixed in stone. Faced with the confusion of complex situations, the world is simplified along only two simple axes: - Superior vs Inferior
- Victim vs Persecutor
In such situations, the paranoid person feels like the victim of an evil force, justifying extreme retaliation, and deals with fears of inferiority with a cold, superior attitude – alway accompanied by the conviction of "rightness." Cheney is classic. We were attacked on 9/11. Cheney and Rumsfeld were sure Hussein was behind the attack. In spite of no credible link from the C.I.A., their conviction was unwavering, and was a major force in the invasion of Iraq that followed. There was "an axis of evil" including Iraq, Iran, and Korea. In spite of finding no Weapons of Mass Destruction and no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, their idea never wavered. We were "right" and fighting a holy war on terror. Cheney’s icy superiority has become entrenched, and he continues to pursue a military confrontation with Iran.
Anyone who has ever worked in a mental hospital knows what happens when you try to talk a paranoid person out of their paranoid ideas. You are simply discounted as a blind person [if you’re lucky] or, more often, included in the group of persecutors. The point is that there’s no turning back from a strongly held paranoid idea. Evidence to the contrary is discounted as a trick to hide the absolute truth and rightness of the thought [which cannot be wrong].
In Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler muses for a while about what is wrong with Germany, then he concludes that what’s wrong is clear to him – it’s the Jews. From that point on, his paranoid idea becomes the nidus for the greatest human tragedy in history – the Holocaust. Cheney speaks with the same conviction, and left to his own devices will push to bomb Iran, independent of either our intelligence or the will of the American people. He did it with Iraq, and he will do it again.
Yes, Pachacutec, Dick Cheney is crazy, as crazy as Osama bin Laden…
An outstanding post overall, and I agree with you on Cheney’s nefarious intentions. Just one quibble: “From that point on, his paranoid idea becomes the nidus for the greatest human tragedy in history – the Holocaust. ”
One of the worst human tragedies, yes, but after reading “Late Victorian Holocausts” by Mike Davis, I’m now inclined to say that the 19th-century British colonialists in India and Ireland were ever worse than the Nazis. If anything, the genocidal ideology of the Nazis came directly from the racist mass murders of the British in the previous century, who were claiming to be so civilized.
Davis points out that the British forced Indians into work camps, where the rations for Indian workers– as decided by Curzon and other British officials– were even less than those given to prisoners at Buchenwald! The British also manipulated food prices for maximum profit and ruthlessly exported food from India even as the Indians were starving, as they’d done in Ireland, while taxing Indians heavily to pay for their other (generally failing) imperial wars elsewhere. Over 25 million Indians were thereby killed by the British, in the famines and British military operations against them! The British also utterly wrecked India’s industries, which had been among the world’s most advanced before the British came.
http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2003_02_02_limitedinc_archive.html
Plus the British very nearly wiped out the native population of Australia, deliberately by giving bounties for hunting aborigines, while brutally slaughtering the Maoris in NZ, starting up the concentration camps in South Africa to house Boers and rebellions Africans (killing tens of thousands of women and children through neglect and deliberate killing), plus forcing opium onto the Chinese and killing thousands of Afghan civilians (where the Brits had their a**es kicked– the Afghans humiliatingly defeated the British in the 1840’s).
If you put it together, the British Empire in the 19th century was a far more murderous entity than both the Nazis and the Stalinists. At the very least, modern Germany has openly apologized and made amends for the Holocaust (even though quite a few Germans bitterly opposed Hitler and large numbers fought against him even at great risk to their lives– Stauffenberg, Weisse Rose, Popitz and many others), and they don’t advocate for Hitler. Whereas, quite a few British people today still try to pretend that their empire “civilized” the darkies, trying to ignore the murderous tendencies of the British imperialists before the British were defeated and expelled in Indonesia, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus and Aden following WWII.
If anything, the idiocy in Iraq stems to a big extent from the Anglo-American failure to confront their own bloody histories. The British are especially hypocritical in this regard, and until they admit how ruinous and genocidal their Empire was, the US and British will continue to blunder into Iraq and elsewhere.