Photo credit: iStock / Clarini
In the 1980 film classic, Elephant Man, the severely deformed and grotesque-looking character John Merrick, an intelligent and kindhearted soul played by actor John Hurt, is feared by most people in his aristocratic milieu. Arguably the most poignant scene in the film is when Merrick is chased by an angry mob down a flight of stairs and is finally cornered in a dingy latrine. The moment they are ready to pounce on him, the mob stops dead in their tracks when they hear Merrick vehemently proclaim, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” Merrick’s often-quoted outburst affirming his humanity resonates with audiences for reasons—consciously or unconsciously—that go way beyond the film’s dramatic entertainment value.
A simple yet impassioned declaration, these words penetrate the deep recesses of our subconscious and are the foundation of our primal fear as humans—a breathing, eating, and defecating species conscious of its imminent demise, desperate to distance itself from animals in a futile quest to endure, prosper, and achieve immortality.
In the last of his seminal books, Escape from Evil, a piercing psychological analysis of human aggression, American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker writes:
Because he [man] knows he is mortal, the thing he wants most to deny is this mortality. Mortality is connected to the natural, animal side of his existence; and so man reaches beyond and away from that side. So much so that he tries to deny it completely. As soon as man reached new historical forms of power, he turned against the animals with whom he had previously identified—with a vengeance, we now see, because the animals embodied what man feared most, a nameless and faceless death.
Our endless pursuit to establish superiority over animals to assert and justify our existence is just one component of human aggression. Becker maintained that if one were to grasp the full significance of their impending expiration, it would thrust them into a state of paralyzing anxiety. He asserted that, in order to maintain relative composure, humans strive to alleviate their looming fear of death by denying in some way that death—perceived by most people to be a dark abyss of eternal nothingness—is their final destiny.
Many organized religions offer a solution to this nagging dilemma by prophesizing an afterlife for those who follow unconditionally. Their reward: an all-expense paid, one-way trip to a heavenly destination offering true believers with a clean track record the peace and tranquility they’ve earned and deserve after enduring a lifetime of turmoil and anxiety—no passports, no carry-on bags, no assigned seating, no scanning for firearms, no humiliating cavity checks or proof of vaccinations needed. Just step right through the pearly gates and you’re good to go.
Other earthlings, less spiritual, gravitate toward a more secular approach to feeding their immortality ideology. They mitigate the fear of death by attempting to live a life that will influence the course of things long after they’ve checked out. Often, these are individuals driven by an insatiable lust for power and celebrity, folks heavily invested in money, status, and politics. Their worth, contributions, and legacy are immortalized and can be easily identified by sky-high erections that grace city skylines and exhibit their names for all the world to witness and admire. Who on earth hasn’t visited or at least heard of Rockefeller Center, Trump Tower, or the Chrysler Building? Name one actor, director, writer, or producer starved for fame and fortune who wouldn’t bend over backward to have their name and handprints cemented and proudly displayed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to be viewed by the masses long after their final curtain.
As Becker explained, what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted for something, if not for himself, then at least in the larger scheme of things. He wants the assurance that his existence has meaning.
Our twin fears of life and death are submerged in our subconscious, a theory established by psychologist Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud’s studies revealed that our fears are mostly repressed, a mechanism developed during childhood that helps us cope with death anxiety, the fear of the unknown, and the overwhelming and ever-present awareness of the majestic universe, a constant reminder of our relative puniness and insignificance.
The nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described the universe as a dread-evoking mystery:
The whole order of things fills me with a sense of anguish, from the gnat to the mysteries of incarnation; all is entirely unintelligible to me, and particularly my own person. Great is my sorrow, without limits.
These fears are not random or subjective. They are inherent in every human being regardless of race, color, creed, or nationality. How well we establish a solid foundation to cope with death anxiety as individuals is a matter of degree, evidenced, for example, by the disparity in mental stability and self-control between, say, a devout Zen Buddhist and a psychopathic dictator or serial killer. The possibility that these divergent profiles might somehow flip and suddenly reverse roles is highly unlikely, but I dare say, not inconceivable. Similar to the unanticipated impact of a comet dropping out of the sky and crashing into the surface of the earth at seventy to eighty thousand miles an hour, wiping out entire species in minutes, anything is in the realm of possibility.
While our fears are mostly repressed, close observation of everyday speech is a dead giveaway (no pun intended) of what might be hidden behind the doors of an individual’s, happy-go-lucky, customer-facing conscious persona. How often have you heard any of the following? “If looks could kill”; “I swear, I almost died”; “Go out there and knock’em dead”; “The food was to die for”; She had “drop-dead good looks”; “Stop it, you’re killing me”; or the ever-popular universal vow, “Until death do us part, so help me God.”
Animals, both predator and prey, are aware of threatening sources of potential danger, but unlike humans, they are unencumbered with the knowledge and dread of mortal inevitabilities like heart disease, cancer, stroke, and dementia. Gazelles and chimpanzees are not concerned with health insurance, nor do they prepare living wills or secure burial plots with engraved headstones. As Becker explains, Homo sapiens are the one species cognizant of their vulnerability. With every breath and step we take, we are plagued with the subtle yet ever-present awareness that our existence can be snuffed out in an instant. A cruel joke whipped up by the cosmos? Possibly. This existential dread would have terminated humankind out of the box had we not developed, through millennia of psychological evolution, ways to reduce the cosmic evil we perceive into smaller, more manageable forms.
Scapegoating
One such manageable form is scapegoating: choosing a single arbitrary object as the embodiment of all evil. In doing so, we selectively pick a scapegoat and then, with mass consensus and complicity, ritually destroy it, an act that allows participants to feel like they are destroying evil itself. The history of this vile act has primitive roots, conceived eons before the invention of mustard gas, flamethrowers, napalm, and the atomic bomb.
In one of its forms, scapegoating is also magical in origin: a ritual is performed over a goat, by which all the tribe’s uncleanliness (sin) is transferred to the animal; it is then driven off or killed, leaving the village clean.
How convenient—just slit the throat of a defenseless goat and all the guilt, shame, inferiority, self-hatred, and hostility are wiped clean in an instant. If scapegoating were a viable, foolproof method of ridding humans of their sins, the earth’s goats and other four-legged docile creatures would probably go extinct in less than a month.
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“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
The introductory line from the radio adaptation of The Shadow, 1937 to 1954
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Carl Jung, the distinguished psychologist and colleague of Freud, referred to scapegoating as shadow projection: the act of refusing to face the darker elements within us and unconsciously projecting them onto other people. Amplifying Jung’s concept of shadow projection, Becker writes:
As Jung put it, the shadow becomes a dark thing in one’s own psyche, “an inferiority which nonetheless really exists even though only dimly suspected.” The person wants to get away from this inferiority, naturally; he wants to “jump over his shadow.” The most direct way of doing this is by “looking for everything dark, inferior, and culpable in others.”
Jumping over one’s shadow by seeking everything dark, inferior, and culpable in others—be it an individual person, a culture, or an entire nation state—has been going on since the decimation of the Carthaginians by the Romans around 146 BC, considered to be the first recorded genocide where an estimated 150,000 Carthaginians perished along with their culture and traditions.
One would think that humanity, with all its great art, architecture, and scientific discoveries would have evolved enough by now to put this senseless and horrific ritual to bed. Sadly, not only is scapegoating alive and well, but it is also still the most popular item on the menu of human fallibilities.
Mass killing—what most people refer to as genocide—was rampant in the last two centuries. The atrocities committed by the Germans, the Russians, the Americans, and their allies during World War II drew closer attention to the issue.
Article II of the 1948 United Nations (UN) Genocide Convention clearly defined genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
While the UN’s resolution was a historic step in the right direction, critics believe that definitions were too broad and didn’t go far enough. They say that the legal definition of genocide failed to include the mass killing of groups based on political identity, physical ability, or sexual orientation. Such omissions made it difficult, for example, to account for a few minor incidentals like the Soviet liquidation of the Kulaks (landowners) and other people including political rivals identified as enemies of the state in the 1920s and 30s, or the execution of tens of thousands of so-called social deviants living in Nazi-controlled territories in the early 1940s that included Communist Party members, homosexuals, Gypsies, and people with physical and mental disabilities.
In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, author and political philosopher Hannah Arendt examines the run-of-the-mill persona of Adolf Eichmann, one of Nazi Germany’s star executioners. Arendt, who was herself a Holocaust survivor, wrote:
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
One would only have to listen to Eichmann’s 1961 testimony in Jerusalem to understand the importance of Arendt’s statement. Maintaining his dignity, Eichmann spoke with a composed and confident demeanor without a scintilla of guilt, shame, or remorse. If you didn’t know that Eichmann was the monster on trial for the brutal execution of hundreds of thousands of people, you might have easily mistaken him for an ordinary guy who went home every night and hugged his wife and kids after an uneventful day at work.
A “normal,” fun-loving gaggle of Nazis letting down their hair after an exhausting day at nearby Auschwitz where thousands of people were being exterminated. Photo credit: US Holocaust Museum
Other Losses
If history has taught us anything, we know that international treaties, resolutions, agreements, and pacts are often worth little more than the paper they are written on. We’ve also come to learn that history is subjective depending on who is composing the history books and laws, a task usually awarded to the conquerors in any given conflict.
Prior to the 1989 publication of Other Losses, a book by Canadian writer James Bacque who also wrote and produced a corresponding documentary film in 2015, most people were unaware of the 700,000 plus German soldiers that were massacred after the Germans had surrendered to the Americans at the end of World War II.
Given the unspeakable war crimes committed by the Nazis, sympathy for Germany was almost nonexistent. President Roosevelt and American allies had adopted the Morgenthau Plan, a document written by Henry Morgenthau Jr., the then US Secretary of the Treasury and an unwavering opponent to everything German.
Morgenthau’s plan was developed and presented to Roosevelt in 1944 prior to Germany’s surrender which included long-term measures to denazify and pastoralize Germany in an effort to destabilize the German economy and reduce its once powerful industrial base to an impoverished agrarian culture. This diabolical scheme drew criticism from many in the West who wanted peace and considered Morgenthau’s plan extreme and vengeful, and thought it would inflame German resentment and only serve to discredit the United Sates and its allies. Among Morgenthau’s detractors was New York Governor Thomas Dewey who said the plan was like adding ten divisions to the German Army.
In 1945, under the direction of President Roosevelt, the occupying forces had constructed miles of open-air prison encampments along the banks of the Rhine River, referred to as the “Rhine Meadow Camps,” a swampy morass surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and heavily armed American and French prison guards. The camps held tens of thousands of German prisoners who were beaten and left to face the harsh elements with no shelter and little or no food, water, or medical supplies.
German prisoners held captive in the Rhine Meadow Camp, 1945.
Photo credit: Other Losses, James Bacque, writer, and filmmaker.
The Geneva Convention required that German “Prisoners of War” (POWs) be fed the same rations afforded to American prisoners. However, the Americans—via the art of linguistic manipulation—reclassified the status of German prisoners as “Disarmed Enemy Forces” (DEF). This allowed the occupying US forces to cut their rations to starvation levels of 1,500 calories a day or less, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Prisoner deaths were covered up on Army records by listing them as “other losses” on charts showing weekly totals of prisoners on hand, numbers discharged, escaped, etc. While this atrocity was transpiring, war-weary people in the United States, England, France, Italy, and other European countries were parading the streets, basking in the glory of flag-waving victory parades.
Ironically, the United States of America, the land of the free and home of the brave—the heroes who gallantly liberated Europe from the Nazis, freeing thousands of concentration camp prisoners—was one of three countries to vote against the UN’s 2022 resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism.
The Whole World Is Watching!
The patina of virtue and morality enjoyed by the United States and its subservient allies in the years following WWII has long since tarnished beyond recognition. From Vietnam to the greed-driven oil and resource wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria, the illusion of democracy has morphed into a pathetic buzzword regurgitated by delusional politicians and global elites.
Today there are no ambiguities, no misconceptions about America’s crippling economic policies and imperialist goals. Many members of the American Congress and Senate on both sides of the aisle have been bought and paid for by the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). In return for thousands of dollars in donations, these corrupt individuals have vowed their unified and unwavering financial, diplomatic, and military support for Israel’s relentless destruction and genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the neighboring people in Lebanon and Syria.
So strong is their allegiance to AIPAC and Israel’s warmongering expansionist policies, the US rolled out the red carpet and invited Israeli prime minister and war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address the US legislative branch at the US Capitol in July 2024. During his speech, Netanyahu was interrupted by applause 39 times, 23 of which were accompanied by standing ovations.
Our enemies are your enemies,” Netanyahu said, affirming Israel’s relationship with his US constituents. He then went on to say, “Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel, and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization.
Two months prior to the Israeli prime minister’s visit to the US, The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) released a report, marking the 76th anniversary of the Nakba (the catastrophe, in Arabic). The report reveals that since 1948, when Israel proclaimed Palestine as their God-given homeland, approximately 134,000 Palestinians and Arabs have been killed, both inside and outside occupied Palestine.
Since October 7, 2023, the start of the most recent Hamas/Israeli flashpoint, the mid-November 2024 PCPS statistics are as follows: 43,846 deaths including 17,385 children; 11,891 women; 2,421 elderly; 1,054 medical personnel; 184 journalists; 496 educational staff; 203 United Nations staff; and 85 Civil Defense workers. Additional PCPS stats include 10,000 missing; 4,700 missing women and children; 16,900 imprisoned; 25,010 buildings destroyed; 87,000 housing units destroyed; 122 schools and universities destroyed; and 2,000,000 displaced.
These devastating totals raise this question: Exactly who are the civilized and who are the barbarians that Mr. Netanyahu was referring to in his address to US lawmakers?
Even more incredulous is the claim by Mr. Netanyahu and other government and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) officials who said—with a straight face—that Israel is “the most moral army in the world.” If this blatant piece of propaganda weren’t so pitiful, it would be laughable.
It’s unfortunate that Mr. Netanyahu’s claim of moral superiority failed to include Israel’s weapons and technology industries. Jumping the shadow as a means of obliterating the fears, guilt, shame, and self-loathing of one population and projecting them onto another is not only convenient, but also extremely profitable. In his eye-opening book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Australian journalist Anthony Lowenstein, the grandson of holocaust survivors and a onetime resident living in East Jerusalem, documents Israel’s meteoric rise as the world’s leading manufacturer of weapons and surveillance technology.
In the section of the book titled “Selling Weapons to Anyone Who Wants Them,” Lowenstein wrote:
The history of Zionist militarism and the building of a viable, local defense sector began even before the establishment of Israel. The Jewish state and its backers quickly saw the potential of both developing weapons for their own benefits and then selling and promoting them to a global market. The Palestine laboratory was born. The birth of Israel in 1948 was a miracle for many Jews around the world but a catastrophe for the Palestinian population.
Lowenstein’s statement echoes the 1986 article titled “How Israel’s Economy Got Hooked on Selling Arms Abroad,” written by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem between 1984 and 1988. In his piece, Friedman notes:
Israel, with only 4 million people, has become one of the top ten arms exporters in the world and Israeli businessmen are among the world’s leading arms merchants.”
For decades, the Israelis have used the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—two of the world’s largest outdoor prison camps—as their testing grounds for developing and perfecting weapons, surveillance equipment, spyware, crowd control, and counter-insurgency tactics. In addition to the sale of Uzi machine guns to apartheid South Africa, Israeli weapons and technology manufacturers have sold weapons, tanks, drones, and biometric technology to some of the world’s most brutal dictators and repressive regimes including Bahrain, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, to name a few, as well as to the United States.
According to a June 2024 Times of Israel article:
The ministry’s International Defense Cooperation Directorate, known as SIBAT, said defense exports totaled $13 billion last year, up from $12.5 billion in 2022— the previous record high. Between 2018 and 2020, that number hovered between $7.5 billion and $8.5 billion.
The Nazis believed with their hearts and souls that the Jews and other non-Aryan people were a scourge and a threat to the existence of the German homeland and proud Germanic traditions. Sadly, the Israelis, the self-proclaimed “chosen people,” have learned all too well from their Nazi enemies and have adopted comparable ethnocentric ideologies. In doing so, they have developed a litany of justifications for their aggression toward the Palestinians that promises to redefine scapegoating and sink humanity to new levels of moral decay and depravity.
In a 2014 Times of Israel blog post titled “When Genocide is Permissible,” blogger Yochanan Gordon wrote:
If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide, is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?
Ten years later, Yochanan Gordon’s despicable proposal has germinated and become a reality. In response to Hamas militants crossing the Israeli border and taking hostages, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
How Do We End This Madness?
A good question—one that I’ve asked myself many times. Not just the insanity in the Middle East, but in Ukraine, Africa, the South China Sea, or you name it. In my humble opinion, our only hope is to end the madness before it even begins.
In my view, the real crime is the indoctrination of our precious youth—fertile minds brainwashed and infected with mindless belief systems that only serve to perpetuate the cycle of violence and endless wars.
Be it the Hitler Youth pledging their undying allegiance to a psychotic dictator, young Americans sent off to kill people in foreign lands with the patriotic belief that they are promoting “democracy,” or young Israelis, self-obsessed and imbued with the twisted ideology that their very existence is contingent upon the death and total eradication of their neighbors24, the thing that all of these onetime innocent children have in common is that from the moment they left their mother’s womb, they didn’t have a chance. Their indoctrination into a world of violence, corruption, and evil were formulated and fed to them along with their pablum, and later expanded and nurtured with the assistance of a carefully curated politicized system of education analogous to a Roach Motel, a glue-based cockroach trap that promises consumers that “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out!”
As we approach 2025, the threat of nuclear war is more real today than any other time in history. Quite frankly, we are in the hands of lunatics who are threatening to end civilization as we know it.
To all the power-hungry, warmongering, global elites hell-bent on destroying the planet, I say to you: Stop projecting your dark, soulless shadows onto the people of the world. Our enemies are NOT your enemies. Like all the vile and corrupt evil dictators in the history of humanity, you and you alone are your own worst enemy.