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• Sunday, May 18, 2008 09:48 PM

  why religious zionism has adopted the bleak stance that it has

  I think it's worth my pursuing this line of thought, since no one has yet denied my basic claim, which is that the re-energisation of the US Religious Right in the direction of seeking a new world war since the end of the cold war is to some important extent driven by religious zionism. I think that there is an initiatory process involved in joining the cliques informed by this, whether they are referred to as neocons, kool-aid drinkers, or more religious terminology.

  This initiatory process could be compared to a deliberately induced bad trip, in which the inductee is forced to watch a very unsparing depiction of, shall we say, US indifference during the Holocaust. This can be used to impose a pessimistic view of human nature in general, which then proceeds to the inference that humans cannot be relied upon either individually or en masse to resist radical large scale genocidal evil when it sets up shop somewhere, whether geographically near or far but in either case quite visible to them. The process then infers from this that mass psychological engineering techniques HAVE to be used, to drive the population in the necessary direction in order to mobilise against the threat, because there is NO ALTERNATIVE.

  Because the induction process works in this way, I have found that the only way to get to grips with it and challenge its pessimistic view of human nature is to do so from inside the state I described, the 'induced bad trip' state. One has to find convenient ways to increase one's own suggestibility, of which there are quite a few - it doesn't have to be literally an acid trip - and gradually immunise oneself against what the CIA called "psychic driving."

  —Rowan Berkeley Read Rowan Berkeley's other letters
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