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The Madman Theory: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 9/11

“Mad?! You call ME mad?!?!?!
I who hold the secret of eternal empire?!”
-- apologies to The Cramps, “Most Exalted Potentate of Love”

Bringing Stanley Kubrick’s name into a discussion of bad movies and worse realities may strike the discerning filmgoer as incongruous. After all, in the whole history of American cinema, there has never been as consistently excellent a director as the late Mr. Kubrick. Sometimes, however, the good can illuminate the bad, just as the bad can illuminate the good. John Waters, avatar of the so-bad-it’s-good school of filmmaking, says his bourgeois parents’ impeccable good taste helped develop his own considerable understanding of shock and schlock. Conversely, it sometimes takes a Kubrick to remind us that our nation and its cinema is really baaaa-aa-aaad. His masterpiece Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is perhaps the most perceptive commentary ever on the insanity of American society and its leadership during the Cold War.

Kubrick’s film, like the German expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and its hellish brood, is a riff on what might be called the madman theory of power. According to this theory, those who seek and achieve power are quite literally insane. At best, they are control freaks, as Tim Leary and friends euphemistically called them. At worst, they are absolutely psychotic—but, unlike ordinary lunatics, they have the means to impose their own mental breakdowns on whole nations. Power is not, as Henry Kissinger said, the ultimate aphrodisiac, but the ultimate PCP overdose.

Siegfried Kracauer writes that Caligari’s theme is “the soul being faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternatives of tyranny or chaos” (From Caligari to Hitler, 77). Caligari, the dictator-hypnotist, tyrannically imposes his will on the population, along with plenty of surplus sadism, in order to stave off the nightmare of chaos—a projection of his own mind that is teetering on the brink of collapse. The parallels between Caligari’s world and our own fictitious “war on terror” are stark: “Like the Nazi world, that of Caligari overflows with sinister portents, acts of terror and outbursts of panic. The equation of horror and hopelessness comes to a climax in the final episode which pretends to re-establish a normal life...normality realizes itself through a crowd of insane moving in their bizarre surroundings. The normal as a madhouse: frustration could not be pictured more finally. And in this film...is unleashed a strong sadism and an appetite for destruction” (74).

The neocons, like their mentors Strauss/Hitler, seek desperately to impose order and stave off their own inner demons of chaos—which they quaintly project on enemies whom they identify with the “chaotic 1960s.” Their minds, like the American empire, are on the brink of collapse; it was not for nothing that Colin Powell has called the “the fucking crazies” and others have referred to them as “the crazies in the basement” of the Bush Sr. administration. Terrified by their collapsing minds, and the impending collapses of Israel and the American empire it depends on, the neocon crazies set off the 9/11 firecracker, crawled out of the basement, and imposed their madness on the nation, and the world. The irony is astounding: In an effort to prevent moral- cultural-imperial collapse and re-impose order and sanity, they murdered thousands of Americans in a false-flag terrorist attack aimed at re-establishing the “normalcy” of the two decades after Pearl Harbor, the heyday of the American empire. But this “normalcy” has turned out to be a madhouse; post-9/11 American culture is “a crowd of insane moving in their bizarre surroundings.” Beneath the thin veneer of normalcy in the Dawn-of-the-Dead shopping malls, “a strong sadism and an appetite for destruction” has been unleashed, exemplified by the unspeakably horrific US-supervised boxcar massacre in Afghanistan, the re-enactment of Pasolini’s Salo at Abu Ghraib, and the sprawling CIA sex-torture gulag that metastasized from Guantanamo. Meanwhile, the people of New York continue to go about their daily lives, fully half of them believing that top US officials conspired to commit mass murder and high treason on September 11th, 2001. The cognitive dissonance of unspeakable horror has driven them hopelessly mad, and they wander about like the undead in the last flickering shadows of an empire of doom.

What is the source of madness of such scale and scope? I submit that the madman theory of power is essentially correct—power drives men mad, and absolute power drives them absolutely mad—but that the special neocon madness derives directly from the specter of nuclear destruction. The “crazies from the basement” did not crawl out of just any basement, but from a very special one: The basement where people with very high intellectual IQs and grossly subnormal moral-emotional IQs sit around contemplating the consequences of various varieties of nuclear exchange. Wolfowitz and the other “defense intellectuals” who brought us 9/11 cut their teeth on the so-called science of nuclear strategy—a board-game for certified lunatics if ever there was one. Like Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Wolfowitz & Co. stared MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) in the face for too long, and emerged from the experience completely deranged.

Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (aren’t you glad we finally got there?) is the definitive statement on the identity of nuclear strategy and madness. Anyone who plays this game will end up, like Dr. Strangelove himself, in a state of paranoid dementia, identifiable by the spastic tic of an involuntary Hitler salute.

Why does nuclear strategy drive men mad? Simply put, the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and the chaos they promise to unleash, are overwhelming and unbearable. They represent absolute chaos—the end of everything we know. Deaths of individuals, and empires, can be borne, because we know that life goes on. The specter of all-out nuclear exchange, however, is different. We cannot be sure that life would go on, in any recognizable form, after such an event. And yet the seemingly inescapable logic of human power relations drives us ineluctably toward that very event. We are caught in a swift current a few hundred feet from Niagara Falls. And the worst part is that we are the very current that bears us toward our own destruction.

The mind, overwhelmed by this unbearable image of absolute chaos and helplessness, can respond in one of three ways: Sanity, neurosis, or psychosis. The sane response, of course, is to devote all or most of one’s resources to dismantling nuclear weapons and the structure of militarism, nationalism and imperialism from which they emerge. The few sane ones among us are mostly in jail for pouring blood on missiles and attacking warheads with hammers. Most of us, unfortunately, are not that sane; we shrink from the horror and try to go about our daily lives—a classic neurotic response of repression and denial. The third response is psychosis: Embrace the horror, and get a job thinking the unthinkable for the Rand Corporation.

Dr. Strangelove is prince of the psychotics. Modeled on the German Jew Henry Kissinger, the Kubrick-Sellers character sports an accent that is the German equivalent of the French accent of Inspector Clouseau as he cackles his way through a learned disquisition on strategic nuclear options interspersed with tics, twitches, and involuntary heil-Hitlers. One imagines Paul Wolfowitz in this role pre-9/11, convincing General Buck Turgidson, played by Dick Cheney, that the only way to impose order upon the looming chaos is to build a pax Americana on the smoldering ruins of a New Pearl Harbor at the World Trade Center.

The neocon madmen, unlike their precursors of the Kissinger-Strangelove generation, are postmodern lunatics: They are self-conscious about their own insanity. The repulsive Kissinger viewed himself as a suave, debonair gentleman employing clever negotiation, and the virtue of moderation, to turn the madness of men like Nixon to strategic advantage. Indeed, Kissinger invented the “strategic madman theory” (not to be confused with the madman theory tout court) by vaunting Nixon’s obvious instability to the North Vietnamese and others, suggesting that if they didn’t do what he, Kissinger, wanted them to do, Nixon might just be crazy enough to nuke them. That this was not entirely a ruse is suggested by the historically-documented fact that during Nixon’s “final daze” of Watergate-induced inebriation, the keys to America’s nuclear arsenal were removed from Nixon’s grasp at the instigation of Henry Kissinger.

One-upping the rational calculations of Kissinger’s madman theory, the neocons have given us a whole new postmodern strategy of insanity by not just pretending to be mad. They really are crazy—and they know it! Richard Pearle revels in the nickname “the Prince of Darkness” as the whole sick neocon crew revels in sex-torture gulags, unprovoked invasions of other nations, a fiscal policy so spendthrift as to be far beyond the bounds of reason, and plans for pre-emptive nuclear strikes. When Colin Powell called them “fucking crazies” they undoubtedly took it as a compliment.

Perhaps the neocons took their cue from the failure of Kissinger’s version of the madman theory. The North Vietnamese had gambled on the probability that the American’s weren’t really crazy enough to perpetrate a crime of that magnitude, for no particular geo-strategic reason. The neocons, already half-crazed by the delirious theories of Leo Strauss and hours spent contemplating 1001 flavors of Armageddon, reasoned (if that word may be employed) that the whole problem was that the American leadership during the Vietnam era was not crazy. If the top leadership had been truly psychotic, they COULD and WOULD have nuked North Vietnam. After that, NOBODY would have messed with us! A nation with a preponderance of military power and a certifiably insane leadership could easily rule the world!!!!!! Bwa-ha-ha!!!!!!!!!! Intoxicated by their plans, they drafted an unstable dry-drunk and ex-cokehead to play the role of drooling-idiot-in-chief, and set in motion the 9/11 operation, which was designed to drive the American people insane so they would accept insane leadership.

Their mad scheme was quite clever (bwa-ha-ha) in that the 9/11 operation produced massive cognitive dissonance—an unresolvable contradiction between two self-evident, unquestionable truths:
1) Top US officials would never do something so awful; and
2) Overwhelming evidence shows that they did do it.

Cognitive dissonance makes people helpless. Even rats in a maze, faced with a blatant contradiction in their perceived reality, simply give up and melt into quivering blobs of furry jelly. The effect is much more powerful in humans. Cognitive dissonance renders people utterly helpless, totally susceptible to manipulation from above. The shocking images of the Twin Towers being blown up jolted us into a state of extreme susceptibility—just as other forms of psychic shock are used in cult initiations and other rituals that destroy previously-established identities in order to clear the way for a new identity. If you want to brainwash someone, first shock them in order to destroy their previous world; then program them, with emotionally-compelling repetition, to accept the new world you are creating for them. That is what was done to us on September 11th, 2001: The shocking exploding-Tower images were followed by incessant repetitions of pre-concocted propaganda telling us that this was a new Pearl Harbor, that Arab Muslims had done it, that Palestinians were celebrating the attacks (a lie—that footage had nothing to do with 9/11, but was stock footage of a martyr’s funeral conveniently provided to the networks by Israel), and on, and on, and on.
 
“But surely a plot so complex would have left evidence—surely there would be at least one whistleblower,” whine those who are still desperately clinging to their illusions. And they are right. The evidence is overwhelming—so overwhelming it would take volumes to even summarize. David Griffin, in the afterward to the second edition of The New Pearl Harbor, offers 40 smoking guns, any one of which, if it is what it appears, is enough to prove that 9/11 was an inside job. If anything, Griffin understates the case here, as he himself has come to admit by stating that the “inside job” thesis is no longer probable, it is an absolute certainty—an inevitable conclusion from ironclad evidence. And whistleblowers? A whole army of whistleblowers has come forward, from the FBI agents who told David Schippers about the date and target of the attacks months in advance and said they had been bullied into silence, to Randy Glass, Sibel Edmunds, Colleen Rowley, Delmart Vreeland, the 6-billion-dollar insurance fraudster and self-confessed demolisher of WTC-7 Larry Silverstein, the Cheney-alibi-shredders Richard Clarke and Norman Mineta, the Wall Street Journal sources who leaked the story of the CIA-ISI $100,000 payoff to Mohammed Atta, the many associates of the non-Muslim non-hijackers in Florida, the top CIA officials who have openly called 9/11 “an intelligence triumph” that was “good, positive, extraordinary” and on and on and on.

Some of the evidence proving 9/11 was an inside job may have been planted, including the cognitive-dissonance-inducing contradictory evidence about the Pentagon strike; much of it presumably emerged accidentally, through the very complexity of the operation. But the point of allowing evidence to emerge at all was precisely to create cognitive dissonance, and imbue Americans with a powerful imprint of learned helplessness. Being forced to accept something as true that you consciously or unconsciously know is not true makes you utterly helpless, passive and manipulable, as Orwell and the behaviorists knew all too well.

Learned helplessness leaves us completely unable to deal with reality, with the actual environment that surrounds us. It is a form of insanity. The neocon madmen know this, and they openly mock those who are still sane enough to try to deal with reality. That’s just reality-based politics, they cackle. We’re an empire now, we create our own reality, bwa-ha-ha!

But reality has a way of re-imposing itself. Treason trials are coming, and only time will tell whether the insanity defense will save the neocons from the scaffold. Odds are that it won’t. When they are hanged by their necks and buried beside Benedict Arnold, their epitaphs will sum up the careers of those who tried to turn the madman theory into a reality:

“Be very careful what you pretend to be, because one day you may wake up and discover that it is what you are.” –Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Kevin Barrett
Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth
http://mujca.com