Awakening to the Specter of Apocalypse
What do you do when you’re confronted with a madman willfully committing the war crime of aggression and who threatens nuclear annihilation if anyone tries to stop him?
When I initially envisioned ShrinkRap, this being only its second post and podcast, I had really hoped to dwell more on emotional intelligence and the related course that I'm preparing and also to opine on a diversity of topics related to the field of psychiatry and mental health issues in society. However, recent events in southwestern Russia and Ukraine have so preoccupied me that I felt I needed to devote immediate attention to it. As I reflected more about it, I realized that it was not at all off-topic and that it had everything to do with societal, indeed global, mental health.
And so this particular post and podcast is a look at the evolving crisis in Ukraine and some of the psychological dimensions that I don't see being sufficiently explored elsewhere in public discourse.
Witnessing Assault – The Psychological Impact on the Captive Bystander
Imagine that someone broke into your house, tied you up and forced you to witness a vicious assault on a loved one, and then told you that if you tried to break free to protect them, they would kill you. And for good measure, they would kill everyone else in the vicinity. Of course you would be horrified, and frightened, and enraged.
Examining this from a psychological perspective, you would have been multiply traumatized – both via the threat to yourself and via witnessing the assault to your loved one. But further, you would have been traumatized by the anticipatory horror of this murderous psychopath killing innumerable others, whatever the outcome for your assaulted loved one.
Once freed from this madman’s grip, you would most likely do all you could to ensure that the assailant was captured and imprisoned. That is unless in some nightmarish scenario the murderer still stalked you and vowed to unleash unimaginable harm to you and all whom you love, in other words terrorizing you.
It sounds like a scene out of the Marvel Comics Joker series. Alas in this upside down world of unhinged violence and cruelty, reality can eclipse fiction. The events of the prior several weeks have been similarly shocking, but even more so because of their scope and their implications.
Mutually Assured Destruction and Nuclear Annihilation Denial
As a psychiatrist who was involved in the global physicians anti-nuclear war movement IPPNW in the 1980s, I became much more familiar with the catastrophic medical and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and the very real threats to entire societal populations – if not global annihilation altogether – as a result of a rapidly escalating full-scale nuclear war. The policy at that time was one of M A D – mutually assured destruction. It is quite a telling acronym as it is indeed madness that mankind would develop weapons that when used in a full-scale exchange, which is all too possible given the instantaneous decisions being made and the algorithms employed, a conflagration could occur so quickly that would destroy mankind and make human – and virtually all animal life – extinct. This is not some fantasy that one can dismiss as though it were simply a sci-fi fictional thriller or an engrossing video game that one could walk away from.
It's been recognized for some time, especially by the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote extensively on the subject, that we live in a state of what might best be termed "nuclear annihilation denial."
The Bio-psychological Purpose of Psychic Denial
The bio-psychological purpose of denial is to keep our perception of extreme threats at bay so that we're not overpowered by them. Unfortunately, the defense mechanism denial is an unconsciously mediated automatic psychological process that can serve to keep the threat entirely out of our consciousness. In other words, we live as though the threat did not exist at all, at that, never did and never will.
The purpose of a defense mechanism may initially be adaptive, namely to ensure that we are not mentally overpowered and thus psychologically immobilized by that threat. However, defense mechanisms can be like an exuberant immune response in the mind. Denial can encapsulate consciousness and entirely wall off the intruding thought refusing to allow entry into consciousness of the immediate dire threat. It's like taking the blinking red warning light entirely off of our dashboard. Clearly one can see that this becomes a maladaptive psychological mechanism.
While there is so much focus on the immediacy of the ground war – the brutality of Russian soldiers’ killing of civilians and the sheer vastness of destruction,
The Profound Implications Of Overtly Making A Nuclear War Threat
I fear that because of our denial of the nuclear threat, too little attention is being paid to the fact of and profound implications of overtly making a nuclear war threat.1 This is not simply the marauding of a superpower leader who wants to take over another territory in the deluded belief that the territory belongs to him and that he is restoring its glory by taking it into his empire.
It's struck me for some time how much power we entrust to leaders who apparently have little to no training in understanding the profound ethical implications of their foreign policy and military actions. It's as though they too are all in a state of denial or willful ignorance about the massive devastation and human carnage that can occur when they send their armies into battle, especially with the ever-increasing sophistication and reach of our vast array of destructive weapons. And yet, it is so incomprehensible now to conceive here in the present, we witness a leader of a superpower, one holding a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons that could destroy the world 10 times over, who is now threatening to utilize those weapons against anyone who would oppose his hegemonic designs. It would seem that the fundamental compact, that of the shared recognition of the delicate balance of powers among sovereign nations, has been willfully broached.
Such a leader either does not understand or is indifferent to the complexity of the consequences that result when the fragile alliance around this compact holding these powers together is disrupted. In a way, the world itself and its balance of energies amongst the prevailing superpowers is itself like a radioactive atom. Though it exists stable and contained, it can be destabilized intentionally in the same way that a radioactive atom can be, Its destructive energy rapidly unleashed by that rupture. It’s a chain reaction that happens nearly instantaneously.
The world now looks on in horrified shock and numbed helplessness as Putin, unilaterally speaking for the entire country of Russia while silencing its own people's oppositional voices under a threat of imprisonment, launches a vicious unprovoked killing rampage of its peaceful neighbor Ukraine.
War Is An Assault On The Peace
While I am only a barely informed student of the ethics and laws governing nations’ conduct of war, I was riveted some time ago by a reference made by UN Sec. General Dag Hammarskjöld (served 1953-1961 when he was killed in a plane crash, thought to have been an assassination) in which he referred to war as “an assault on the peace.” In researching this post, I learned that this concept was formally established as part of the post-WW2 Nuremberg Charter.2 But even there, its ethical genesis had a long ancestry, rooted in the core precepts of the ethics of war and ‘Just War’ theory.
As succinctly summarized by Wikipedia, while establishing as a most grievous international violation the crime of a sovereign state’s aggression, such a violation of the “world order” was pondered at least a century earlier and began to take hold in the emerging conceptualization known as ‘Just War’ theory.
Just War theory posits two clusters of philosophical considerations in establishing the ethicality of a nation’s war behavior - Jus Ad Bellum, and Jus In Bello. These two clusters delineate what ethical considerations must be examined before entering into war and those that must be abided by in the conduct of war. More recent theorists have introduced what to me is an obviously missing cluster, Jus Post Bellum, the ethical obligation of parties after war.
As early as 1815, Napoleon was outlawed and declared to be "an Enemy and Disturber of the Tranquillity of the World.” That’s a fascinating concept. Destabilizing the conditions for peace in the world, for setting the stage for aggression, was itself seen as a fundamental breakage of the compact amongst civilized nations who were newly beginning to realize their interdependence, then perhaps only through the lens of trade.
After the Nuremberg Trials (their occurrence a miracle of international cooperation in the genesis of international law), a body of understanding began to emerge. As clearly established by Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950, three categories of war crimes committed by nation-states were articulated:
More recently elaborated upon and reinforced by The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a sovereign state may be held accountable for actions which fall into one of four categories of crime: (I) Genocide, (II) Crimes Against Humanity, (III) War crimes, and (IV) Crimes of Aggression.3 In the original proceedings of the Nüremberg Trials, this last had been referred to as Crimes Against Peace.4
The Nuremberg Charter defined crimes against peace as planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.5
Even before considering the first three, the actions briefly articulated under Crimes Against The Peace (the Nuremberg category now listed in the Rome Statute under the Crime of Aggression) would all seem to apply to Russia’s assault on its neighbor.
Upping the Ante - Pointing the Nuclear Gun At Ukraine … and the Entire World
These ethical and legal concepts aside, let’s look at certain of the psychosocietal dimensions of this nation-state aggression.
Following this almost as intensely as the evolving events of 9/11, It’s like we're forced to witness in real time and on an ongoing basis a mass murderer kill his victims in cold blood. But it’s even worse in that the murderer has taken us, the entire world, hostage as a human shield to ensure that his plan is not interrupted and that no one dare challenge him. Just as for all mass murderers, it is a delusional belief.
But as awful as this violent rape of sovereignty is, this assault on the peace, the recent bombardment of the massive Z N P P nuclear power complex leaves me so stunned that I can come to no other conclusion than that this superpower leader has lost all reason6. And if he ever had it, he has abandoned even fundamental respect of that shared compact amongst civilized nations, the agreement not to violate the safety and sovereignty of other nations, not simply because of its inherent wrongfulness, but because by dint of the alliance amongst nations to protect against such violent incursion, it activates the ready arming of all nations in party to that compact. In other words, it compels engagement of all parties in war. The aggressor says in effect "I'll do what I want and there is nothing you can do about it. I have a gun to your head and all you can do is look helplessly on.”
When you combine the reckless endangerment of the attack on the Z N P P nuclear power facility with his just prior having put his nuclear forces on high alert, it's clear that Putin intends to hold the entire world helplessly hostage to his rape and pillage of Ukraine and let's be clear, thereafter of any territory of his design that he wishes to destroy. Any leader who broaches the nuclear war tripwire to achieve his grandiose ends is obviously one who disregards the entire world's safety for his own rapacious and delusional ends, no matter how couched in the nostalgic and patriotic sounding words of motherland he extols to his captive people.
His unilateral move to take Ukraine at nuclear gunpoint is the planetary equivalent of a robber engaging in mass murder while employing the terrorist threat of global destruction, yes, of self and all others, if anybody tries to stop him. Let's call it for what it is. It's the genocidal capture of an entire country for craven gain, accompanied by an explicit threat to kill all of humanity and to make the world uninhabitable. It constitutes such a grotesque deviance from negotiated treaties, understandings amongst nations, that its sheer reneging of all international agreements carefully negotiated over decades, leaves one stunned in disbelief. Such abruption and threat of mass destruction is the ultimate tool of the terrorist. And he has made it clear, if anyone dares stop him, he threatens to kill all of humanity and to make the world uninhabitable by humans for eons.
It's like actively witnessing a bomb-laden hijacking, but here not of a single plane, but of the entire world if his demands are not met. Whether he originally thought it would be a no-resistance cakewalk or whether, as a grandiosely delusional emperor, he was conquest-crazed to recreate the autocratic communist empire within which privileged cronyism he matured, employed as one of the in-the-know gestapo-like KGB agents, the reality is he is unhinged. As one who violently assaults another sovereign and recklessly ups the ante by broaching the possibility of nuclear war and orders his forces to mercilessly and indiscriminately destroy the people of a non-aggressor nation, an entire nation!, it's clear he has no sense of limits and no regard for human life or for cooperation amongst the nations. He intends to continue to conduct his siege and openly murder, torture and starve all who stand in his way. By the criteria elaborated upon earlier, he is not just a maniacal, psychopathic killer, he is a war criminal actively and knowingly continuing in his vicious criminality.
His despotism and power lust rivals that of Adolf Hitler's. Perhaps the key hopeful difference from the Third Reich's rabid ascendancy and its descent into genocide is that his own people - that is except those who are cronies in his privileged corruption scheme - were already seething at his tyranny and suppression of their hard-won freedoms. It appears that they too are horrified at his psychopathic terrorism. They likely also sense that because his recklessly impulsive power gambit has roused not only the defiant resistance of Ukraine but the revulsion of nearly the entire world, they will now not only experience renewed suffering as a people by the array of punitive sanctions imposed, but he will likely impose harsher repression of their voices, executing those who dare take to the street to exclaim their opposition to his reprehensibly immoral tyranny. Echoing the era of the heinous Gestapo and SS, It wouldn't at all be surprising to see the Iron Curtain again fall eliminating all hints of democratization that had been in progress since Gorbachev.
Isn't that the cycle of all oligarchic fascist regimes? It has been proven throughout history that corrupt empires that abuse their own people by restricting their rights and that violate the sovereignty of other nations are doomed to eventual destruction. Our very human nature from which we derive our shared principles of human rights refuses to be subjugated by the menacing demands of a vicious tyrant.
The immediate neighbor nations witnessing such an assault by a tyrannical leader will – and, by necessity for their own survival, must – find the quickest way to contain the vicious assailant. Given the psychopathy and malignant narcissism of the leader and his free hand in extinguishing opponents while holding the world hostage, it will likely be at immense cost of human life, as well as to all other systems of ecologically balanced life. But any such marauding beast must be definitively halted and rendered powerless. And, presuming the madman will not have laid waste to civilization entirely, yet another post-war reconstruction must follow, with renewed calls for unity and collaboration among nations.
Yet again, the world must study the lessons of unbridled power and greed and strive to recognize the necessity of mutual respect and collaboration in our heretofore interdependent world.
The Transformative Power of Powerlessness
Most of us are entirely powerless as we witness this horror. We feel revulsion. And all we can do is bow our heads in sorrow and open our hearts in compassion for those who are suffering and grieving. And we must proceed most carefully in our involvement because we are negotiating with a terrorist who has the entire world at bay.
But perhaps by our unified spirit of compassion and our abhorrence of such violent behavior, together we might bring about a halt to this wanton mass murder and ecological destruction. And by doing so, hopefully enable a deeper level of understanding and healing in this troubled world.
One thing we cannot afford to do is to allow our denial to shut us off from the very real threat to our human and planetary existence due to Putin’s escalation of this conflict into the nuclear zone.
Nor can we allow our avoidance of witnessing others’ heart-rending suffering to push us into a state of walled-off isolationism, indifferent to their plight. We are all part of this interconnected and interdependent human family; now, as never before fully realized, there is no escaping that reality. And our immediate human task now is to once again strive to become mutually respectful civilizations, working collaboratively for each other's wellbeing and in harmony with the increasingly fragile planet which hosts us.
A variant of the defense mechanism of denial is that of minimization; another variant is that of rationalization. Both of these serve to tamp down the immensity of the threat.
See PRINCIPLE VI - Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950.
See more on The Rome Statute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute. I cite these principles for the established international ethical guidance re the rules governing war. While I do not know the history of these countries’ non-participation, it should be noted that both the US and Russia declined to be signatories.
Ibid - see fn 4.