“Shameless self-willed infatuationEmboldens men to dare damnation,And starts the wheels of doom which rollRelentless to their piteous goal”– Aeschylus,The Oresteian Trilogy: Agamemnon
Many people are saying thatDonald Trumpis insane. He may be. So tooBenjamin Netanyahu. But if so, it is a form of insanity that includes the calm sanity of Adolf Eichmann and Harry Truman as they went about their business of mass extermination.
Crazy, to use the vernacular, is an elusive word nearly impossible to define, especially when an entire society can be crazy, as Erich Fromm, the German-American social-psychologist, has argued. Obedience is a much touted virtue, not only in overt police regimes but in so-called democracies – but obedience to whom? To mass murderers?
Obedience can be imbibed through osmosis. I remember Regis, my Jesuit high school’s motto –Deo et Patriae, for God and country – and how it linked obedience to God with obedience to the United States. I am certain that such a linkage would be denied by school authorities, but of course the Jesuits are known for their guile. So it didn’t surprise me when I was applying for a discharge from the Marines during the Vietnam War and was being questioned by a group of Marine Officers and one starting screaming at me: “What the hell kind of God are you talking about? I’m a Catholic, too, and my God supports the Marines and the war in Vietnam.” It was hard not to laugh sardonically, especially as he gesticulated with his large cigar for emphasis. I was then sent to a psychiatrist for evaluation who told me, to my great surprise, that he agreed with me and that the country’s leaders were insane.
Adolf Eichmann was declared “perfectly sane” by a psychiatrist who examined him when he went on trial for his routine daily tasks of carrying out Hitler’s orders to exterminate Jews. It was just another day at the office for Eichmann.
Harry Trumanwas not examined after he ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he was assumed to be sane in committing these satanic crimes of mass murder. Just another state executive doing his duty by carrying out the orders of his puppet masters.
Those were the good old days when everyone knew who was sane and who was nuts. Now we seem very confused. Perhaps Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. have discombobulated many minds about who is sane or not, who is a mass murderer, who evil and who good, depending on which functionary is in the White House. Perhaps not.
If Trump is insane, how did he twice become the president of the United States? Do “sane” people – the well-adjusted ones? – not realize that Trump is the nominal head of an immensesystemwhose history is one of mass murder from Wounded Knee to the recent U.S. slaughter of hundreds, mostly young girls, at the elementary school in Minab, Iran.
Trump gave the orders, but he did not launch those missiles. Nor did Netanyahu massacre Palestinians with his own hands. These fat boy killers prefer to keep their dainty hands clean of blood – to have their functionaries do the killing. I think of other functionaries and the names they gave to the atomic bombs they dropped on Japan: “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” And we talk about sanity.
The “sane” obedient ones do the killing; the soldiers who carry out orders. As the Trappist monk Thomas Mertonwrotein his profound book of essays,Raids on the Unspeakable, in 1966:
Source: Global Research
