Jung Love, Tough Love

So Bloody Dick Cheney was the featured guest on the CNN Sunday news show "State of the Onion" with John King today. Video of this event isn't posted yet, which is just as well 'cause I couldn't bear to watch it anyway. I don't know which is more dreadful, King or Cheney. Probably Cheney, since in his day he was much more powerful than any corporate media shill.

So I didn't see, but I heard that old Doc Strangelove was bragging that we've now accomplished just about everything we set out to do in Iraq.

To which I reply, "I throw a shoe at your phony Iraq War. In fact, I throw both my shoes."

And since I'm certain John King and Dick both would dodge the question -- why are we so worried about Iraq's sins when our own are so egregious? -- I'll let someone else frame it again, another way. Since the question can only adequately be answered by a psychiatrist rather than a political commentator, I call on the great Swiss doctor Carl Gustav Jung, who said:

The evil that comes to light in man and that undoubtedly dwells within him is of gigantic proportions, so that for the Church to talk of original sin and to trace it back to Adam's relatively innocent slip-up with Eve is almost a euphemism. The case is far graver and is grossly underestimated.

Since it is universally believed that man is merely what his consciousness knows of itself, he regards himself as harmless and so adds stupidity to iniquity. He does not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always "the others" who do them.

(snip)

...one would therefore do well to possess some "imagination for evil," for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil.

So I'll ask again, why is it that we ignored the presence of a lunatic at the top of our own government, a person who brags about loving to torture people, and one who was armed up past his eyeballs with weapons of mass destruction, to travel halfway around the world and attack a lunatic who offered no immediate threat?

Why did we seriously nod in agreement with this same insane monster, who was a threat to the safety of the human race due to his possession of a nuclear arsenal, when he threatened to drop nuclear bombs on Iran? In a breathtaking example of psychological projection as described by Dr. CG Jung above, he justified this proposed action with the bald lie and false premise that Iran is "a nuclear threat."

And we would do well to ask why Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue, to this day, to harp on the fictitious Iranian nuclear threat, when their own national security chief has testified before Congress that Iran does not possess uranium enriched to anywhere near the level required for weapons production, and has no program or plan to do so.

It's not just Saddam Hussein who is evil. It's never just "them." It's us too. And by "us" I mean you and me. We really need to critically look in the mirror every day, without fail. Otherwise, we're liable to commit unspeakable crimes.

And if you were to ask why we're liable to wreak so much evil on the world, I'll let Dr. Jung answer for me again: It is not that present-day man is capable of greater evil than the man of antiquity or the primitive. He merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his propensity to evil.

What the good doctor was saying is that if Alexander the Great had possessed a couple of nukes, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

(All quotes are from CG Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," first published in 1957. Bollingen Edition, published by Princeton University, 1970, pages 52-54.)