An article by: Martin Sieff

US Policymakers on Dr. Freud's Couch

Dr. Sigmund Freud and his famous couch

Dr. Sigmund Freud is despised and sneered at: not only by fundamentalist hick Know-Nothings but by all the endless legions of psychotherapists and psychologists who stand on his giant shoulders in 21st century America, and it is easy to see why.

Freud was an adult, a meticulous scientist, and he fearlessly acknowledged processes and human conditions even when they astonished and appalled him. He made huge mistakes, as all pioneers do: but his insights and explanations into the mechanisms of human behavior remain unsurpassed to this day.

For more than 90 years, Freud’s late work exploring the delusional insanities of President Woodrow Wilson, co-authored with eminent US veteran diplomat Bill Bullitt, has remained out of print. It is virtually verboten in America. For there too, Freud fearlessly and relentlessly exposed a driving force of America in its age of global power and attempted dominance.

For Wilson, one of the supposed Towering Beings in the Pantheon of 20th Century American God-Emperors was clearly a narcissistic egomaniac; he was a total ignoramus in the fields of human history and politics – which he only entered two years as elected governor of the state of New Jersey in 1910 before being catapulted into the presidency of the entire country in the election of 1912. And it was Wilson who established the modern, fatal, ever-repeating precedent that America Knew Best and was uniquely placed to redraw the maps of Europe and solve the problems of international relations and human nature that had forever plagued the human race. If that’s not an insane messianic complex, what is?

The United States continues to repeat the same failed policies into which it fell hopelessly in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s

Stalwarts of the American Psychiatric Association, Harvard University and the New York Review of Books, those Eternal Pillars of Human Goodness and Wisdom, have opined that poor Freud was contemptible and ethically challenged in proposing to psycho-analyze a recent world leader. Of course, CIA psychologists have routinely drawn up such profiles of every world leader under the sun for more than three quarters of a century now. Yet none of these worthy figures has ever dared to publicly point out a classic major symptom of deranged behavior according to Freud that has plagued US policy making around the world for at least 60 years now.

That is: why does the United States continue to repeat – at costs of trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives every time – the same failed policies it wildly indulged in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s? Most recently, we have seen this phenomenon repeat itself in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now it is playing out again in Ukraine.

Ever since Vietnam, the US government and both parties have wasted trillions of dollars to prop up worthless, kleptocratic, drug-dealing, disgusting, totally corrupt regimes around the world and have been amazed when all America’s supposedly “superlatively trained and equipped” puppet militaries from Iraq to Afghanistan and soon Ukraine have evaporated like snow in the desert. Why do Americans endlessly repeat the same mistakes? Why do they never learn?

One does not have to be a Freudian devotee to recognize that repetitive patterns of addiction and compulsive behavior are always all around us.

Freud has a simple explanation: individuals who have suffered traumatic experiences – both humiliating and debilitating, especially in their impressionable younger years – need to recognize and identify them, preferably through the therapy process. Because if they do not acknowledge and recognize these behavioral patterns, they will be doomed to subconsciously reenact the same ruinous, destructive patterns of behavior all their lives.

One should not have to be a Freudian true believer to recognize the unavoidable truth of this insight. From serial killers to national leaders and from international investors to addicted gamblers on Atlantic City and Las Vegas slot machines, repeated patterns of behavior in addiction and compulsive neurosis are around us all the time.

The great principle of science known as Ockham’s Razor, named after the amazing 13th century English Franciscan friar William of Ockham, elegantly confirms Freud’s insight as applied to US foreign policy making. The simplest hypothesis that explains the largest number of observable and confirmable facts will almost certainly be the correct one. And what are we now seeing in the policymaking of the Biden administration and without doubt – by any Kamala Harris administration to follow it – on the war in Ukraine? We see a determination to prosecute and escalate that war and to block every possible road to peacefully end the war and to settle the underlying issues that have been put forward not just by Russia but also by the US-installed and manipulated puppet rulers of Ukraine itself!

In other words, the current generation of US policymakers in the Biden administration and the wall-to-wall consensus of old fashioned, open borders, One World, New World Order, “Bomb Them Whenever They Defy Us” Republicans and Democrats in Congress still Just Don’t Get It. They are stuck in the past. They are trapped in one of Freud’s classic conditions – compulsively and eternally repeating the same suicidal, self-destructive behaviors mindlessly, utterly in denial of the real meaning and inevitable sufferings inflicted by their actions. They remain in denial and grow ever more violent as their destructive actions repeatedly fail to bring the desired imagined happy results.

And so, the Biden administration and its myriad enablers today are mindlessly repeating, yet again, all the appalling crimes, stupidities, bungles and enormous waste of American lives and wealth – at the far greater cost to scores of millions of people in the countries they claim to be “saving.”

It is always the same old story. First, US policymakers and opinion shapers literally fall in love with a brutal, corrupt, vicious and incompetent tyrant or sociopathic conman who knows how to flatter them and assure them that they are Geniuses. This in the past has been President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, The Shah of Iran, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, Suharto in Indonesia and now of course the ludicrous and repulsive Volodymyr Zelensky who has led the Ukrainian people into total destruction.

The American media mindlessly swallows all the nonsense and lies about how Zaire-Vietnam-Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Indonesia-Pakistan were “saved” and magically transformed into a “modern, democratic” society…

Billions of dollars and tens of thousands of obscenely well-paid US “advisers” are poured into these countries. All pretense at respect for local constitutional norms of any kind and human rights are thrown out of the window. The US media, like a gigantic, castrated brainwashed whale mindlessly swallows all the initial nonsense and lies about how Zaire-Vietnam-Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Indonesia-Pakistan has been “saved” and is being magically transformed into a “modern, democratic” society with full rights for women, universal health care, abortion on demand and with enlightened schools teaching the fairytales of Dr. Seuss, etc., etc.

It is of course all lies. In reality, rates of crime, corruption, random and targeted murders, drug addiction, hard drug trafficking and the trafficking of women and children for sexual enslavement, rape and murder around the world at ever vaster profits soars sky high. Eventually, even the State Department is forced to record the escalating social pathologies in its prim and judgmental annual “human rights” reports.

Sometimes the US-supported tyrant-monsters, our “best friends,” manage to die in office. Sometimes Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and their successors manage to spirit them out to “enjoy” their drug and sex-addled last few years in opulent though always degrading dotage somewhere else. Often, they literally end up fleeing for their lives with their pockets literally stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

None of this is fantasy, exaggeration or conspiracy theory. It is all well and repeatedly documented history. And the story never changes. Every time, the Americans manage to delude themselves that the tyrant-whores and their mercenary armies of bullies, torturers, rapists and gangsters are “our true friends.” Yet as soon as the money tap is finally switched off – as happened in South Vietnam in 1975, Iran in 1978 and Afghanistan in 2022 and is about to happen in Ukraine, all those trillions of dollars in supposedly state-of-the-art weapons and invincible militaries trained by the “Most Invincible Warriors the Universe Has Ever Seen” magically vanish like snow on a typical hot noon day in the Sahara or Mojave deserts.

When will they ever learn?

As Peter, Paul and Mary sang – Where Have All the Flowers Gone (25th Anniversary Concert).

They won’t. They can’t. Ever.

Peter, Paul and Mary – Where Have All the Flowers Gone

Writer, Journalist, Political Analyst

Martin Sieff