Monsters From the Id: Israel and the USA

War machinery is global lust made manifest.

Map of Iran and Israel (Wikipedia Commons)

For a while, at least, Donald Trump talked a good game about diplomacy, including negotiations with Iran and Israel. But Israel is America’s id. We can’t restrain Israel because Israel is the skull beneath the American mask.

The “id” was Sigmund Freud’s term for the hidden reservoir of passions and desires which fuels the personality. The ego—“what we call reason and sanity,” as Freud phrased it—tries to restrain those passions by riding them “like a man on horseback.”

The horse has thrown its rider once again.

“Monsters from the id!” That's what Dr. Morbius shouts at the end of the 1956 science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet, as he tries to shut down the all-powerful alien engines he's learned to control with his thoughts. His subconscious urges and desires have begun to destroy his deep-space paradise and he’s powerless to stop them. The vast machinery is serving his true self, not the civilized veneer he presents to himself and others.

So it is with military might. Just as Israel is the American id, America is the id for a financialized planet driven by greed and exploitation. American war machinery is global lust made manifest: lust for power, lust for wealth, lust for more.

Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, was unable to restrain Israel from genocide, lawlessness, and slaughter. Both presidents aided and abetted snuff-movie violence on a massive scale, because that violence reflects the shadow self of the nation they represent.

If “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” we’ve been in a coma for a long time.

John F. Kennedy may have been an imperfect vessel for change, but he spoke often and well about the need for international law and world institutions. “We must create even as we destroy (nuclear arms),” he said, “creating worldwide law and law enforcement as we outlaw worldwide war and weapons.”

Read the newspaper today. Watch cable news tonight. See if they mention the plain fact that Israel’s attack is a violation of international law. The mass assassination of another country’s leaders and the under-reported deaths of civilians will be debated in tactical terms, while moral and legal questions receive little (if any) attention.

These attacks may temporarily serve Israeli and US interests, but their benefits won’t last. Iran isn’t Gaza, impoverished and defenseless and populated primarily by women and children. Iran is home to 91 million people and possesses considerable resources. Trump was already forced to back down from a confrontation with the Iran-allied Ansar Allah (the Houthis) in the Red Sea, and they’re essentially desert fighters. This attack may weaken Iran, but what will happen if, and when, it regroups and retaliates?

Like the passions of Dr. Morbius, the drive to kill inevitably becomes self-destructive. “In 20 of the 24 countries surveyed,” Pew Research reports, “around half of adults or more have an unfavorable view of Israel.” That’s from a poll published June 3. Those figures may well be even lower now. Pew continues: “Around three-quarters or more hold this view in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.”

In the United States, the percentage of adults with a negative view of Israel has risen 11 points since March 2022. 53 percent of Americans polled now hold “a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel.”

This trend represents an existential threat to both the Jewish state and the American military empire. The political consensus in Washington, however, remains unchanged.

The Israeli state isn’t acting rationally; neither is the American national security state. But how could it be otherwise? They are the manifestation of our own cravings. Our warlike impulses are leading us down the path of conflict and confrontation, seemingly oblivious to peaceful alternatives. By refusing to cooperate with China and the rising nations, we are surrendering our future to them.

That is, if we even have a future.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency tried to remind the world that “armed attacks on nuclear facilities could result in radioactive releases with grave consequences within and beyond the boundaries of the State which has been attacked.”

The world didn’t seem very interested.

Evangelical Christians—some of them, at least—are undoubtedly thrilled. With this development From the Bible (Matthew 24:6-7):

And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.

Meanwhile, Americans have forgotten the words of their fallen president. “Mankind must put an end to war,” said John Kennedy, “or war will put an end to mankind.”

Some Americans consider Matthew’s prophecy a harbinger of deliverance—for them, not for the rest of us. They’re counting on eventual, if selective, salvation through rapture.

The rest of us, believers and non-believers alike, will have to conclude with the verse that follows:

All these are the beginning of sorrows.