From the summer of 1982 on, the group-fantasies of most of America slowly regressed into a full-blown paranoid delusion. Psychotic ways of thinking became more and more prevalent in the conduct of government,

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exactly in the same manner as an individual who develops a paranoid delusion. Psychoanalyst John Frosch describes the typical stages of a paranoid delusion in his book The Psychotic Process:

A man becomes increasingly concerned about some bodily function. He goes from doctor to doctor and has all sorts of tests. Temporarily he is reassured by the negative findings. Eventually, however, he returns to the same symptoms and complaints, or variations thereof. Little by little his bodily functioning becomes his main preoccupation, in a sense his whole life and whole concern. If the patient remains at this stage, his clinical condition is characterized as hypochondriasis.

But further developments may ensue. The patient may become extremely worried about his drowsiness, his headaches, the way his stomach feels, etc. Suddenly one day, in a flash, it becomes clear to him when all this began. It was the day his neighbor offered him a cup of coffee. Now that he thinks back, he remembers that it really did taste kind of funny and as soon as he drank it he did notice a slight dizziness and confusion The coffee was poisoned; it affected his brain, his stomach, and other parts of his body. They have begun to disintegrate and deteriorate. Here we see the emergence of somatic delusions. With this retrospective falsification of the origins of his physical complaints, a familiar mechanism comes into play-projection. The patient's somatic sensations, the peculiar way he feels, are attributed to external forces; they are something that someone caused to happen to him.

It is with this sudden realization-"Now I understand it"-that we see the beginning development of the systematized delusion. Yet this burst of clarification brings in its wake a shift of anxiety and the confusional state may subside. It is not beside the point that sometimes the initiation of a delusional system brings a kind of reintegration of the personality in other areas. Systematized delusions are sometimes considered to have an integrative effect on the ego.

The process may stop here. But let us see what happens if the condition progresses. The plot thickens. Groups of people are involved. The patient is the focus of a conspiracy, involving at first a few, then more people (both close to him and not). It may grow into a worldwide conspiracy. These people are out to get him, to hurt him, to stop some important function he has to per-form. But why pick on him? Why has he been made the focus of a worldwide conspiracy? Obviously he must be an important

person. Now we begin to see the beginning evolution of the delu-sion into the grandiose stage. The patient's own importance expands. Why are so many people involved? Little by little, the idea takes shape that this is all an attempt to interfere with an important mission entrusted to him. He is to save the world. He begins to see himself as the messenger of God, or even God Himself. (34)

Like the individual who goes through a paranoid episode, Reagan's America would go through the same stages during the following years, as more and more of reality would come to be dominated by internal delusions. We had just spent several months worrying about staring eyes and being stuck in a birth canal, "dead in the water." We would now spend the next several months feeling we were being poisoned, by Tylenol, by Dioxin, by herpes, by AIDS, by a profusion of poisons which would come to dominate our group-fantasies. Then, like Frosch's patient, we would have a "psychotic insight" into where all this poison was coming from.

We would become convinced that there was one central source of evil, and that a worldwide conspiracy was spreading the poison into "hot spots" around the globe which were dangerous to our body politic. Our delusion would then enter its final grandiose stage. We would believe it was our mission to save the world. We would instruct our leader to attack this dangerous poisoner in whatever guise he might appear, even in seemingly unthreatening places, to prevent the apocalypse which was about to over-whelm the world. Beginning in the summer of 1982, America would sink more and more into overt paranoid group-fantasies. Led by a group of men who believed the biblical apocalypse was near, from Ronald Reagan, who believed America was under attack by "an evil force that would ex-tinguish the light we've been tending for 6,000 years," to Caspar Weinberger, who believed that "the world is going to end as in the Book of Revelations.. .by an act of God.. every day I think that time is run-ning out,"(35) America foreign policy was becoming more and more divorced from reality. During 1982, the White House began playing "worldwide nuclear war games" for the first time since 1956, with

Apocalyptic fantasies began to proliferate.

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Reagan, Weinberger, Bush and others directing nuclear exchange games while pretending they were flying safely above the holocaust.(36) It was after the first of these nuclear war games, during the summer of 1982, that Weinberger revealed new Pentagon plans "for fighting a long nuclear war"(37) which he said would be "far more survivable" than we had previously thought.

A year earlier, an army general had been fired for publicly saying that "the Soviets are on the move. They are going to strike."(38) But from the summer of 1982 on, Reagan and his aides all began openly making statements equally as paranoid, so that soon we all became so frightened that, as The New Yorker put it, "the first thing that people want to know when they turn on the news is.. whether World War III has started."(39) Books on the coming apocalypse began selling in the millions,(40) and Es-quire would soon report that "most Americans, says the Gallup poll, now think World War III may break out in the Eighties, that they themselves may not survive the attack, and that they would rather not think about the prospects."(41) As Senator David Pryor put it, "We are entering a period of sheer madness. It's time when the Unthinkable is becoming the Thinkable. "(42)

Reagan said his best friend was an MX missile.

What was "unthinkable" to a few, however, was not only thinkable but unconsciously necessary to most of America. War and even a nuclear holocaust provided places for us to dump our violent internal fantasies, and thus were friends of ours, poison containers into which our worst psychotic delusions could be dumped. As Reagan himself said, during a picture-taking session with his MX commission members, "Some of my best friends are M,X missiles."(43) Without them we would feel overwhelmed by our internal anxieties, helpless to combat their terrifying content. Better to put our fantasies outside us, where, we hoped, they could be controlled in the deadly ritual of war.

Like the Aztecs, we would have to set up three sacrificial stages to provide for three group-fantasy levels(44)

1. Individual Sacrifice: Individual men, women and children were regularly sacrificed by the Aztecs in cyclical rituals in order to feed the voracious gods and prevent the sun from becoming polluted. America decided to hold its individual sacrificial ritual in Lebanon, where unarmed Marines would be delegated as victims.

Since individual victims would not really cleanse us, only providing us with more evidence of further humiliation for our paranoid fantasies, we also would have to set up a second sacrificial stage.

2. Mass Sacrifice: in addition to individual sacrifices, the Aztecs would engage in sacred wars, including "Flower Wars" where their army fought tournaments amongst themselves solely to provide blood for the gods. America decided to hold its mass sacrificial wars in Central America and the Carribean, where we would send our youth into battle against "the international conspiracy."

Since enough victims to cleanse us still might not be produced by limited wars in Central America and the Caribbean, we would also have to ready a third sacrificial stage.

3. Holocaust Sacrifice' Despite all the victims provided by individual and mass sacrifices, the Aztec sun still built up so much pollution that every 52 years they had to go through a fantasied holocaust, an apocalyptic end of the world, which their New Fire Ceremony was supposed to act out. America decided to prepare Europe as the main stage for our holocaust sacrifice, should it be needed, in a group-fantasy that this would "clear up the bad blood" by destroying the source of the international conspiracy, and that America would be able to survive the nuclear war and enjoy the cleansed earth once again.

The sacrifice of individuals in Lebanon was relatively simple to set up. After a limited and well-defined mission in Beirut in August 1982 to supervise the withdrawal of PLO forces, the Marines were sent back into the warring city under pretexts so flimsy that the New York Times reported on them under such headlines as "Role Is Uncertain" and "Confusion Surrounds...Mission."(45) Just as in Teheran in early 1979, during the setting up of Carter's sacrificial stage, the security of the American embassy was kept in-sufficient as compared to other

The Marines were sent back into Beirut as sacrificial victims.

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embassies, so, too, in Beirut the Marines were the only forces instructed to carry "unloaded weapons even during Condition One alerts, the highest state of alert."(46) Signs were posted outside their compound, in clear view of terrorist factions, saying "Unload weapons before entering compound,"(47) and American newspapers at the time printed the sacrificial invitation in bold headlines:

MARINES IN E. BEIRUT
Unloaded Guns Carried On Patrol

United States Marines carrying unloaded machine guns, rifles and pistols entered East Beirut for the first time yesterday.. The marines in Lebanon do not carry loaded weapons.. (48)

To further assure the sacrifice, 350 Marines were told to sleep together in a single building on top of an ammunition depot- rather than spread out as did other forces in the city- and were not allowed to build the usual "S-shaped" barricades which would slow down terrorist vehicles before reaching the building in which they slept.(49)

War in Central America was sexually exciting (fire),
but we had to avoid guilt over starting it (Vietnam syndrome.)

Setting up the mass sacrificial stage in Central America and the Carib-bean would take much more planning if we were to avoid guilt over starting the war, guilt which was encoded in media language as "the Vietnam syndrome." Once we could accept the delusion that Central America and the Caribbean were not only part of the conspiracy but were also capable of poisoning us, we could "overcome the Vietnam syndrome" and have our mass sacrifice there.

Such a delusional conviction would not be easy to bring about. There was little new going on in Central America that had not been present in earlier years when we had paid no attention to the area and felt quite un-threatened by what was happening there. Reagan himself, when asked earlier, "Can you just envision any circumstances under which we would

be sending U.S. combat troops to El Salvador?" thought the idea so laughable that he answered, "Well, maybe if they dropped a bomb on the White Rouse I might get mad." Central American countries were simply too small to take seriously by anyone who was sane on the issue.

In a series of articles, public speeches and radio broadcasts in the summer of 1982, psychohistorian Casper Schmidt predicted that America would be ready to go to war against Nicaragua by the end of 1983, basing his analysis on American group-fantasies contained in the media and public opinion polls.(50) American excitement during the invasion of the

Ragan began to get excited about war in Central America.

Falklands, he argued, represented both a rehearsal and an authorization for future American invasion. The most likely area for the war would be Nicaragua and Honduras, where, he pointed out, cartoonists had already begun showing our intentions and military officers had already begun mapping out for Congress how such a plan could be accomplished. One army officer described in September 1982 to the Rouse Committee on Foreign Affairs how "One possible scenario for the outbreak of a con-flict between Nicaragua and Honduras" might be that "Sandinista troops or militia are in hot pursuit of a counter-revolutionary group that is escaping back into Honduras. . . they will likely confront a unit of the Honduran Regular Army. That confrontation would be an act of war... Such a war could easily spark off a regional conflagration involving all the nations of Central America, and perhaps the U.S."(51)

Nicaragua would be an ideal place to locate our paranoid fantasies. Since the purpose of the war would be to wipe out our own sexual vitality and our feelings about our on-going revolutionary changes in lifestyle, we would have to go to war against people very much like ourselves,

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people involved in their own revolutionary social experiments. Nicaragua was the Central American country most like America. It was a country which was, according to The Boston Globe, a "serious, popular, mostly well-intentioned and frequently competent national experiment not altogether unlike our own revolution."(52) Killing Nicaraguans would be like beating up Berkeley students, our own sons, so much like us. We could first identify with their revolutionary vitality and then wipe them out to kill these desires in ourselves. For Reagan personally, it would be like killing in himself the revolutionary seventeen-year-old "Dutch" Reagan who led the 1928 student rebellion which had successfully ousted the President of Eureka College.(53)

Militarily, we had to import enough violence into the area to produce turmoil in the fragile institutions of each country and to justify our group-fantasy that there was what the State Department called "a conspiratorial outside power" which was "destabilizing our hemisphere...from the Panama Canal to Mexico on our southern border," and which was about to threaten our borders.(54) To do this, we first moved to the Central American desks at the State Department seventeen out of eighteen of the most important people who had dealt with Vietnam during the Vietnam War.(55) We then began pouring military equipment into the hands of what even Time called "motley bands of rebels"(56) and death-squad leaders in several countries, counting on them to produce violence in the region. Like the violence-prone father who leaves loaded guns around the house and then feigns shock when his son uses them, we were not really surprised when much of the weaponry we sent to El Salvador ended up in rebel hands. Nor were we upset when the contras blew up civilian targets in Nicaragua - just as long as violence was created outside us, making the paranoid fantasies inside our heads feel more real. Marines pretended to invade an island which everyone knew was meant to be Grenada "to save American hostages," practicing on the island of Vieques near Puerto Rico in a naval exercise known as Ocean Venture 81. We had to be ready to attack "the international conspiracy" which had "the head of an octopus" in Moscow with "tentacles" in Cuba and the Caribbean and "tips of tentacles" in Central America. All these countries were in fact so small they posed no real threat to a country like America, whose power was literally millions of times greater than theirs. Invading them would be like the case of an abusive father who viciously beats up his four-year-old boy "because he said 'fuck you' to me."(57) Yet this type of psychotic thinking was precisely what was becoming an everyday occurrence beginning in 1982 for much of America. When The Washington Post headlined an article "New Dangers, Opportunities.. Central America Seethes,"(58) the real meaning was "America Seethes with New Dangers and sees Opportunities to dump them into Central America."

For the first time since 1963, cartoonists began picturing Fidel Castro as being able to destroy the United States, this time through Central America, and thousands of articles and books began appearing claiming that various groups in Central America and the Caribbean were part of a worldwide conspiracy that was intimately threatening us in various ways. The delusion would take time to spread, but eventually most Americans would believe it implicitly.

Cuba was seen as possessing the power of destroying
the United States through Central America.

Like the Aztecs, America had been preparing its holocaust sacrificial ritual for several decades. By 1982, the main psychological condition for the holocaust had already been accomplished-a shared belief by most people in the central delusion that nuclear war was survivable. The scien-tific evidence against such a belief was overwhelming. Most scientists had agreed for some time that a nuclear exchange involving only a fraction of the 50,000 nuclear warheads that existed would kill hundreds of millions of human beings, and more recent studies have showed that the explosion of as few as 1,000 missiles would produce a radioactive "nuclear winter" that could easily end all photosynthesis and kill all human life on earth.(59) Therefore, all discussions and actions involving

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"nuclear options" and "limited nuclear exchanges" required psychotic thinking, under the delusion that those holding the discussion would survive. The fantasy is the same one which many individuals have when committing suicide, imagining how good they will feel watching their families come to their funerals. Fantasies of surviving one's own death and being "cleansed" by the experience - all "badness" being removed by death-are very common in suicidal individuals.(60)

Every aspect of current American nuclear strategy, every new warhead produced and deployed anywhere in the world, required the delusion that most Americans would "prevail in a limited nuclear exchange," as official Pentagon policy statements phrased it.(61) Reagan's 1983 Budget promised America could "successfully fight (a] nuclear war." Reagan himself, when asked if America could survive a nuclear war, replied that it could: "It would be a survival of some of your people and some of your facilities and you could start again."(62) So, too, public opinion polls showed that the majority of Americans shared the delusion that they would probably survive a limited nuclear war.(63)

Setting up the holocaust sacrifice would take longer to accomplish. Since it would involve too much guilt for either America or Russia to simply start a war out of the blue, war would have to be brought about by some other means. To date, conventional wars had been started by delegating the initial attack to a more impulse-prone group, so setting off the initial nuclear explosions would also have to be delegated to such a group. There were three main ways of accomplishing this delegation:

[1] by allowing terrorists to get nuclear bombs, [2] by putting nuclear bombs in the hands of impulsive Third World countries and [3] by reducing the reaction time to a nuclear strike to just a few minutes, less time than a human needs to respond reliably, so that computers, pre-programmed to react "impulsively," could begin the holocaust.

Getting nuclear bombs into the hands of terrorists was the simplest task. Atomic bombs can be made from as little as four pounds of enriched plutonium. By proliferating unnecessary nuclear facilities and leaving them relatively unprotected, we have in the past three decades allowed tens of thousands of pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium to be stolen and unaccounted-for from American facilities alone.(64) There is also little question that terrorists are able to buy the technology needed to produce crude nuclear bombs from this material.

In addition, according to the most recent study on terrorist use of nuclear weapons, The First Nuclear World War,

Stolen nuclear bombs, mostly artillery shells taken from European arsenals, are also available for a price.. thirty-odd thousand U.S. nuclear bombs are stored in as many as two hundred domestic locations in forty states and several more in

Europe... security around U.S. nuclear weapons is apparently lax enough to warrant significant concern. . In 1979 journalist Joseph Albright testified that by posing as a fencing contractor he was allowed into two Strategic Air Command bomb depots in late 1977. He came "within a stone's throw of four.. nuclear weapons while slowly riding in a jeep driven by a soldier (who had both hands on the wheel) armed only with a pistol. Albright noted that his briefcase was not searched before he toured the bomb storage areas, and he was allowed to keep it with him. He was later able to obtain by mail complete blueprints showing the depot's layout, a method of disabling the alarms, and the locations of two unguarded gates through the inner-most security fence.(65)

The "carelessness" required to "lose" tens of thousands of pounds of fissionable material and complete atomic warheads is exactly equivalent to the so-called "carelessness" of adults who habitually leave loaded guns or poisons near little children - that is to say, it is motivated, not accidental. It is not surprising, therefore, that there have already been at least (65) terrorist threats to use nuclear weapons in the U.S. alone.(66) How many of these involved real bombs remains a highly classified secret.

Making nuclear bombs available to Third World countries has required a much larger effort, involving shipment to these countries of enormous amounts of nuclear facilities and material from which they can make nuclear warheads. In January of 1980, when asked about his coming policy on nuclear proliferation, Reagan had said: "I just don't think it is any of our business," and during his term he had reversed many of Carter's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act policies, allowing, for instance, the shipment of U.S.-enriched spent fuel rods and the export of reprocessing technology, even to nations like Argentina, which has open-ly stated that it intends to make nuclear weapons.(67) Such stepped-up exportation of nuclear equipment, fuel and technology-much of it financed by multi-billion-dollar American contributions to the Export - Import Bank - guarantees that countries such as Argentina, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Taiwan and South Korea will soon join India, Israel, South Africa and Pakistan as nations with nuclear weapons. Once this is accomplished, local wars between Third World countries - wars which have been increasing in frequency in the past decade due to stepped-up arms shipments by the major powers - can produce the first nuclear explosion. This, in turn, under any one of dozens of scenerios, could escalate into the full holocaust.

Since each of America's thirty-one Poseidon submarines has enough warhead capacity to destroy all two hundred eighteen Soviet cities of one hundred thousands population, deterrence alone could be accomplished by having only a few submarines beneath the sea. Yet it would be wrong to conclude from this that all the remaining thousands of missiles, including the new MXs, cruise missiles and Pershing 2s, are aggressive

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The world seemed dominated the nuclear vulture. America imagined Reagan as a vulture sitting on human bones.

weapons, motivated by macho display or redundant "overkill" purposes. In fact, their purpose is solely suicidal, not aggressive at all. The reaction time to Pershing 2 and cruise missiles is about six minutes. Bringing the reaction time down so low produces such a hair-trigger situation that, according to one member of the House defense task force, "most probably, the Russians will have to give a computer the authority to launch.. whenever the computer thinks it perceives a United States launch."(69) In addition, putting the new missiles into Europe would encourage the Russians to put their SS20s and new cruise missiles even closer to by Europe and the U.S., into Eastern Europe, into northern areas close to the U.S. and into submarines in the Atlantic. This, of course, would reduce our reaction time to a few minutes, making it likely that we, too, will give a computer the authority to trigger the holocaust. The day will soon come when both the Soviet Premier and the American President - and of course the heads of all European countries - will be only pretending to have control over the holocaust. Setting the stage for the holocaust sacrifice by reducing reaction time to just a few minutes is often talked about as an "accidental" nuclear war. This is like calling the death of a little child "accidental" after the parent carefully places it on the edge of a cliff to play. In both cases the reduction of reaction time below that required to prevent disaster is the decision to produce the disaster.

Thus, putting Pershing 2 and cruise missiles into Europe is the decision to begin the holocaust sacrifice. And since NATO military experts have recently said they can now easily stop a conventional Soviet attack on Europe without using nuclear weapons-as one NATO expert put it, "We have the technology to run circles around the Soviets"(70) - the placement of these new missiles is nothing but suicidal. Both the Americans who want the

missiles there and the Europeans who agree to receive them are members of the older psychoclasses, sharing common anxieties about too much prosperity, personal freedom and sexuality in recent decades. Both are the same older psychoclasses who produced European wars every genera-tion for centuries. Both imagine a holocaust will cleanse the world of evil forces, rather as World War II cleansed Europe for postwar renewal. And both share the delusion that they will survive the holocaust.

In order for Reagan's America to set the three sacrificial stages successfully, the most important condition would be to keep our real wishes from reaching consciousness, since it is only unconscious wishes which are compulsively acted out, beyond the reach of reality testing. Ronald Reagan - who, according to the polls, was turning out to be one of America's most effective fantasy leaders of the century - knew intuitively just how to bring about the sacrifices needed without making our real wishes conscious. We first would need a renewal of prosperity, producing new fears about too much poisonous pleasure building up. We would then need a formal announcement of who the enemy was, and some humiliating incidents and martyrs to prove how threatening the enemy was. Finally, we would need an authorization by the American people for the sacrificial war.

For Ronald Reagan, used to carrying out so many of his parents' unconscious desires, the grisly task which we would require of him in the months to come would be a labor of love.

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