West warns Russia not to disrupt Kiev polls<\/a>\u201d\u00a0– a typical headline these days. You tell others that they will be punished if they do what you are consistently doing yourself.<\/p>\nProjection means transferring your own dark sides onto the other and thereby believing you have cleaned yourself and may have a right to punish that \u201ddark\u201d enemy.<\/p>\n
This of course is built on the denial of the well-documented fact that you yourself interfered massively in Kiev and brought about a de facto coup d\u2019etat.<\/p>\n
If integrated into everything you do this becomes pathological. It\u2019s spells the end of “Realpolitik” and a sense of shared<\/em> reality with the rest – not living in the same world.<\/p>\nAutism\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nIt slowly but surely becomes more difficult to take in what really happens in the world. Your compass is out of order. Top leaders increasingly gather only yes-people who confirm the \u2019group think\u2019 values instead of challenging them.<\/p>\n
Intellectualism is replaced by salesmanship and you begin to believe in your own propaganda as if it were the truth. Media and academia follow and genuinely independent critical questions and analyses drop. The Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, gains strength.<\/p>\n
Psychic numbing<\/strong><\/p>\nA concept coined by eminent psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton. When seeing terrible suffering repeatedly over time, you get less an less touched by it. The first Hiroshima film may touch you deeply. When you\u2019ve seen dozens, they don\u2019t<\/p>\n
The same applies to the consequences of cruelties committed by yourself: You minimise the evil things you do and you argue that others have committed worse crimes. Thus, no need for assessing the mass murder you committed on, say, the Iraqi people. (\u201dWell, it was a necessary price for getting rid of Saddam…\u201d)<\/p>\n
Lack of empathy<\/strong><\/p>\nYou have sunk so far down in your own position that your decisions no longer rest on some kind of analysis of the most important of all questions: How will the others feel and react to what we now decide to do?<\/p>\n
Instead, you increasingly believe they\u2019ll react as you think they should<\/em> react. If they don\u2019t you feel confirmed that they are the bad guys and you threaten them even more.<\/p>\nExceptionalism<\/strong><\/p>\nYour basic assumption is that you are better or more civilised than the rest. This permits you to operate outside common laws and norms. Of course it\u2019s because you are noble: You carry a \u201dwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d, you promote democracy and freedom.<\/p>\n
Israel and the U.S. are exceptionalist states. They share the idea of being \u201dchosen\u201d to lead for the common good – often referred to as the \u201dinternational community\u201d – while, in reality, it is all about their own interests.<\/p>\n
Exceptionalism also means that any criticism of your policies<\/em> is met with the – psycho-wounded argument that you are really attacking their soul, their identity.<\/em> Thus, words like \u201danti-American\u201d and \u201danti-semite\u201d is hurled at anyone who does not endorse blindly what you do.<\/p>\nThis fundamental weakness is interpreted as strength. Over time it nourishes the autism and makes democratic debate impossible.<\/p>\n
Narcissist judging good from evil<\/strong><\/p>\nYou divide the world into two – good or evil, us or them – and the violence you commit is good violence believed to be necessary to stop evil violence. So no matter what you do you are the good guy and they<\/em> are the bad guys.<\/p>\nIt never fails, cannot fail and, thus, no need for apologising for anything and also no need for learning anything. \u201dWe don\u2019t learn, we teach\u201d and \u201dwe are good people\u201d.<\/p>\n
There may be much more but these 8 elements will do here.<\/p>\n
Who won’t catch this?<\/strong><\/p>\nOf course the elites themselves, including President Obama and NATO-leaders. Neither those who over decades have spent their lives supporting U.S. policies no matter what at American and European universities.<\/p>\n
Those who just criticise policies for just being double-standard<\/em> are missing completely the depth of this civilisational crisis and just how serious it all is.<\/p>\nFinally, don’t expect political scientists and their media colleagues with their state-centric, military, material and geo-political focus plus traditional methods learnt from only American textbooks to catch any of it.<\/p>\n
The ultimate dangers of denial<\/strong><\/p>\nThe 8 indicators of psycho-politics above coupled with nuclear weapons, drones and a warfare system second to none in human history is an extremely dangerous mix.<\/p>\n
I fear what more we have to go through while the West gets weaker relative to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
Rome, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and the Soviet Union – all empires go down. The U.S. empire is the second nuclear-weapons based empire to go down. Will there be a statesman like Gorbachev in the West, or are we doomed by psycho-political denial?<\/p>\n
_____________________________<\/p>\n
TFF Director Prof. Jan Oberg is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/em><\/p>\nGo to Original \u2013 icontact-archive.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201dRealpolitik\u201d has become a mixture of marketing soundbites, propaganda and leaders making statement that borders on the Theatre of the Absurd. Thinner and thinner links to Real-ity. This is what happens when decline in being denied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}