Psychiatry, as Soviet experience teaches us, is impossible to understand out of the political context. And understanding American politics is hardly possible without reading at least one of the books by Noam Chomsky. His writings have had a significant influence on me lately.

To put it very briefly, America is not just a country: it is an empire. An empire is a kind of state that does not want to mind its own business, but rather feels like looking around and telling its neighbors how to live and what to do. The real reason for this nosiness is, of course, the resources that other countries possess and the empire wants to get a hold of. The neighbors, obviously, do not want to share their resources, or be told how to live, so the empire ends up achieving its goal by means of force. Which, in plain language, means killing lots and lots of people.

The citizens of the empire state would, of course, be opposed to and shocked by the amount of blood being shed under their implied consent, – if they realized the truth. So the government of an empire ends up fighting two wars: the external, armed war against its foreign enemies, and the internal, ideological war against its own inhabitants. Read the rest of this entry »