Paranoia: The madness that makes history

Cover
Half Title
Endorsement
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
The madness of Ajax
	Notes
1 What is paranoia?: Individual (clinical) paranoia
	Definitions
	Grandmother’s coffee pot
	Hypotheses about causes
	The ubiquity of paranoia
	Characteristics
	Cultural and moral aspects
	Collective (historico-cultural) paranoia
		Paranoid infection in society
		The origin of the paranoid impulse
		The present-day urban condition distorts the instincts
		Paranoia may be mild but widespread
		Psychopathy
		Paranoia and mass communication
		Collective crimes
		Paranoid climates
		Rumours
		Modern premises for the spread of paranoia
		The lack of interest in collective paranoia
	Notes
2 The beginnings: Myth and history
	Cain’s envy
	The enemy in the Aeneid
	The development of the relationship between paranoia and politics
	Columbus’s delusion
	A voice crying in the wilderness: Brother Antonio Montesinos
	The cross and interest
	Paranoid law
	Notes
3 European nationalism: From cultural renaissance to paranoia
	Supervising and mistrusting
	The pride and suspicion of nations
	The fantasies underlying national law
	The imaginary race
	The place of the Jews
	The Dreyfus Affair
	Notes
4 Naive persecutors
	The special nature of America
	The Black Legend
	The empty continent
	‘American exceptionalism’
	Moby Dick
	Founding principles and purity
	The separation of the continents and manifest destiny
	War of conquest
	Spain and Catholicism
	The ‘newspaper war’
	The United States lands in Asia
	The white man’s burden
	Notes
5 Darkness over Europe
	Great is war
	Boredom and waiting
	Pandarus’ arrow and the first casualty
	Suspicion grows
	Pre-emptive mobilization
	Do railway timetables determine the slaughter?
	The politics of Creon
	Uncontrollable feelings
	More voices crying in the wilderness
	The role of the mass media
	Suspicions, exaggerations, rumours
	The sufferings of Belgium
	Italian paranoia
	The novelty of atrocities and of the intercontinental dimension
	The silence after the gunfire
	Notes
6 Freud, Keynes and the bamboozled man
	An American messiah
	The fourteen-point dogma
	The peace negotiations
	Wilson’s self-deceptions
	The paranoid atmosphere of the negotiations
	The offence
	Arrogance
	The seeds of new paranoia
	Notes
7 Siegfried
	The illuminating explanation
	The legitimization of paranoid nationalist ‘law’
	The disappearance of multinational coexistence
	The stab in the back
	Waiting for more darkness
	Notes
8 The granite foundation and the hour of idiocy
	Hitler’s revelations
	The role of Vienna
	Mein Kampf
	The apparition of the Jew
	Other ‘logical’ steps in Mein Kampf
	From theoretician to head of state
	Impatience prevails
	The choices of death
	All obstacles are swept away
	‘Who talks about the massacre of the Armenians today?’
	War at last
	Definitive omnipotence
	Absurd calculations
	Self-burial
	The need for an enemy
	Delusion to the end
	‘Total war’
	The final revelation and the abyss
	The shadow of Nero
	Notes
9 The man of steel and the final product
	Stalin: a name with many meanings
	Character
	Radical mistrust
	Allusion and the creation of a self-contained reality
	Lenin’s heritage
	The gulag
	Yakov and Nadya
	The diagnosis of paranoia
	Some daily habits
	Similarities and differences with respect to Hitler
	‘Inversion of causes’: the leader’s mind as the origin of society
	The massacres
		The kulaks
		Famine in Ukraine and elsewhere
		The Terror and the show trials
	The twentieth-anniversary speech
	The ‘denationalizations’ and the ideology that lay behind them
	Unpreparedness for war
	Counter-attack and the conclusion of the conflict
	Suspicion hits the Jews
	Stalin’s death
	The paradoxes of paranoid totalitarianism
	Final questions
	Notes
10 Fire that feeds fire
	War crimes and Allied double standards
	Collective paranoia and forms of government
	Airborne warfare as total war
	Poetry and romantic enthusiasm in the air war
	The first bombs of the Second World War
	The three phases of Allied bombing
	Douhet’s predictions are proved wrong
	The bombing of Germany
	The bombing of Italy
	Notes
11 Further and further west
	War against an inferior race
	War between different races, total war
	The erroneous calculation of pre-emptive attack
	The impossibility of isolation
	Fear of encirclement
	A strategy founded on haste
	Suspicion and the missed opportunity
	Towards the atomic bomb
	Contagious fanaticism
	The range of options continues to narrow
	Hiroshima
	The diary of Michihiko Hachiya
	The withdrawal of projections and meeting the enemy
	More elation
	Nagasaki
	Rationalizations
	Secrecy
	Later justifications
	The Tokyo Trials
	The reawakening of Ajax
	Dr Hachiya’s farewell
	Notes
12 A plan for the twenty-first century?
	Paranoia and the new century
	The Cold War
	The disappearance of the Soviet enemy
	The appearance of the Islamic enemy
	Paranoia takes the form of a government document
	The war caused by suspicion
	The responsibility of those who disseminate paranoid messages
	The contagiousness of paranoia
	The impact on civilian life
	Notes
13 Inconclusive thoughts
	Understanding evil
	Paranoia and psychopathy again
	Individual, mass and leader
	Three generations of mass media
	‘The Giant’
	Dictators
	Giving back medals
	Eighty per cent?
	The abandonment of morality among intellectuals and among the populace
	Why modern life offers paranoia new spaces
	The relationship with the-isms
	Paranoid return
	Clandestine revolutionary groups
	The continuity between limited attacks and genocides
	Acceptance of responsibility and denial
	Who won?
	Disarmament and historiography
	Poems and anthems
	Monuments
	Open contradictions
	Some examples of everyday paranoia
	Indifference and Europe
	Notes
Iago’s whisper
	Notes
Bibliography
Index