His definition of schizophrenia depends heavily on the notion that, for the schizophrenic, development over time has become incomprehensible, while relations in space have become all-important. In space we can often choose to move, but time does not permit this.
Therefore there is a close relationship between a radically anti-historical view of the world, as for example among the neocons and the Bush regime, and the syndromes of clinical schizophrenia, prominent among whose symptoms Gabel sees morbid rationalism, understood as a weak hold on reality: "In the light of recent work, schizophrenia appears as a loss of the sense of personal history, and psychotherapy therefore consists of a reconstruction of the totality of the person with a reintegration into history. From the viewpoint of the investigator the schizophrenic loss of the historico-dialectical perception of reality can be seen in the form of a preponderance of the spatial factor or as a loss of experienced time: as over-spatialization or as sub-temporalization." (Gabel 116) Gabel's work here dovetails with that of Frank, who points to Bush 43's notorious refusal to discuss the details of his youthful debauchery before the age of about 40. It is as if these episodes were repressed and no longer accessible to memory -- at least, in Bush's own propaganda patter.
Frank is certainly on firm ground when he points to the fundamentalist belief structure of Bush and of so much of his base as representing a rejection of human history, personal history, and of natural history as well: "Just as fundamentalist creationist teachings deny history, the fundamentalist notion of conversion or rebirth encourages the believer to see himself as disconnected from history. George W. Bush's evasive, self-serving defense of his life before he was born again displays just this tendency. To the believer, the power of spiritual absolution not only erases the sins of the past, but divorces the current self from the historical sinner." (Frank 59- 60)
A vital part of the WUE brought about inside the perfect system by evil forces is that these evil forces are axiomatically seen as coming from outside of that perfect system.
Evil is always external, never home grown, as it was for the racist southern sheriff who thought that all racial tensions were the work of outside agitators. "The result is that when the evidence of the historicity of existence forces itself on the misoneism [hatred of change] of reified consciousness, it appears as an unexpected catastrophe, inexplicable and often attributed therefore to external action ....
For sociocentrism, the privileged system being perfect, any change (particularly any unfavorable change) is the work of external maleficent powers." (Gabel 288 and note) Gerhard Wisnewski has related this idea most directly to 9/11. As Wisnewski points out, "from outside" is the central slogan of the official version of 9/11. "The impression is produced that the perpetrators came 'from outside': from outside of the building, from outside of America, even from outside civilization. The official version of these events screams 'outside, outside, outside.'" (Wisnewski 143)
In a world axiomatically defined by terrorism, the Manichean outlook seems destined always to win out. Sanguinetti saw something similar in Italy at the beginning of the strategy of tension:
"In view of terrorism presented as absolute evil, evil in itself and for itself: all the other evils fade in to the background and are even forgotten; since the fight against terrorism coincides with the common interest, it already is the general good, and the State, which magnanimously conducts it, is good in itself and for itself.
Without the wickedness of the devil, God's infinite bounty could not appear and be appreciated as is fitting." (Sanguinetti 3)
Gabel insists again and again on the key role played by the loss of the historical dimension, and it is clear that this problem was shared by twentieth-century America with Nazi Germany and with Soviet Russia. Anglo-American propaganda exhibits an overwhelming tendency to demonize enemy leaders: Noriega, Milosevic, Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are notable examples, but the tendency goes back to Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least. Today the explicit speech of propaganda is conducted on the overtly infantile plane: we hear of good guys and bad guys, of bad actors, and most of all of terrorists. Gabel writes: "For Gabel, this is another symptom of reification (hypostatization): "As a prisoner of a universe where space takes the place of duration, man in the reified world cannot understand history as the expression of creativity and spontaneity. Consequently the undeniable fact of change forces itself on this 'consciousness of immediacy' as a catastrophe, as a sudden change coming from the outside that excludes mediation. ...Seen in this perspective, history appears as a function of demiurgic action. An external force (God, the hero, a party) transcends the efficiency of its autonomous dialectic. Reified consciousness is essentially ahistorical: mens momentanea seu carens recordatione,' [a mind in the moment, or lacking memory] said Leibniz on this subject." (Gabel 151)
Here is history reduced to a fairy tale, with the cocaine-abusing, alcoholic, mentally-impaired Bush as the hero of the good, and the rich, misfit, raving ideologue Bin Laden as the champion of evil. How can hundreds of millions of people believe in such a product?
Gabel discusses the stress on biological heredity and race as one of the leading anti-historical features of the Nazi outlook, and there is evidence that Hitler was also well aware of this. Gabel points out that Nazi ideology, with its glorification of race and biology, was marked by "morbid rationalism in its worst form."
Gabel argues that "any unfavorable event for this racial pseudo-value is itself extra-historicized and 'understood' in terms of treason or conspiracy:the ideology of national socialism is logically inseparable from the theory of the 'stab in the back."' (Gabel 117)
If fascism comes to the United States, it is now certain that its ideology will prominently feature the 9/11 events as a stab in the back to a benefactor by an ungrateful and treacherous outside world; fascist neocons are already spouting this point of view.
Ironically, the German request for an armistice in 1918, which Hitler later condemned as a stab in the back by Social Democratic politicians, was actually the work of Field Marshal Ludendorff and other future backers of Hitler. As for 9/11, which Bush blames on the Arab and Moslem world, it too had some of its main backers inside the US military and intelligence services.
Frank sees Bush's paranoid schizophrenic hostility to real historical processes reflected in some well-known aspects of his bureaucratic methods. One is his insistence on absolute, unquestioning loyalty on the part of his underlings: "Like the alcoholic father who is threatened by the independence of his family members, Bush demands absolute loyalty and conformity, trying to freeze his national family in time. ..." (Frank 46) For Frank, Bush has no use for history in any form; he remarks, "with a president who refuses to view history as anything but an enemy he cannot afford to acknowledge or engage, it's impossible not to wonder what painful lessons of history we may be doomed to repeat." (Frank 161)
One way of denying historical reality is to wipe out the past; another is to insist that the leading delusion of one's own time is destined to last forever. The Nazis did this in one way, Bush in another: "the historical time of national socialism was dominated ... by the chimerical hope of an empty eternity" -- there was the promise of a thousand year Reich, sometimes escalated to 20,000 years of Nazi world domination. (Gabel 134) For Bush and the neocons, this has become the nightmare vision of a war against terrorism which is literally endless.
Bush's fraudulent "war on terrorism" is of course a war of civilizations directed against the 1 billion Arab and Moslem people in the world; it is more hypocritical than Hitlerism because it assiduously denies its own real content.
In reality, the "war on terrorism" is a racist war against Arabs and Moslems today, with China and perhaps Russia as candidates for all-out attack at some later time. From time to time the real essence explodes to the surface, as in Bush's call for a crusade, or in General Boykin's comments on satanic Islam. Neocon radio talk show hosts like Michael Savage are more explicit every day, and it is they who service the belief structure of Bush's hard-core followers.
Gabel sees racism as another denial of reality and history: "The racist perception of human reality is schizophrenic in several ways," he observes. Gabel also detects a depersonalization of members of the targeted group, "which is reflected particularly in caricature, the strongest weapon of ethnocentrism." (Gabel 123)
In Bush's fear-mongering oratory, the denial of reality is so great that it often approaches the qualities of hallucination, and sometimes enters into that domain. "It will be admitted that there exists a certain analogy between hallucinatory consciousness which, in its demand for homogeneity, is forced to alienate in a hallucinatory form the tendencies that it no longer manages to organize in a concrete totality, and, on the other hand, reified political consciousness which, in its postulate of political homogeneity -- a postulate which the totalitarian state tries to put into practice -- attributes to the foreigner (in the widest sense of the term, implying also political heterodoxy) facts for which a simple dialectical consideration of reality would permit a rational explanation to be given." (Gabel 279-280)
Frank connects this to the hatred of the lawful character of reality, which we see manifested in Bush -- who loves to live outside the law as an individual, from his drunk driving arrests through his National Guard shenanigans to his illegal election -- and in the neocons -- who hate the very concept of international law: "Wilfred R. Bion points out that the part of the personality that hates internal law -- the laws of reality, of time, of responsibility, of loss -- hates external reality as well. It attacks links made in the mind, undermining the capacity to think and organize that comes from facing reality and its limitations. Living outside the law of mature responsibility becomes both the midwife of omnipotent fantasy and the mortician of the capacity to think." (Frank 89)
Bush boasts about his own penchant for seeing the world in black and white, as a single Manichean opposition of good and evil, with no nuances or gray areas. As Frank notes, "there are no shades of gray in this fight for civilization .... Either you're with the United States of America, or you're against the United States of America." (Frank 13)
Gabel saw the same phenomenon in the Nazis: "By virtue of the implicit Manichean postulate of ideological thought, the enemies of enemies so often enjoy an undeserved favorable prejudice; for the political Manichean one is either "with us or against us," as Bush constantly repeats. (Gabel 97 note)
