Afrasianet - Mazen Al Najjar - The Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip has resulted in more than 75,000 martyrs and missing people, 125,000 wounded, and the annihilation of hundreds of families and their erasure from the civil registry.

It has also led to an unprecedented artificial starvation in the history of the Levant, and the displacement and displacement of two million people many times in the space of months or weeks.

The sector witnessed extensive destruction of infrastructure, with about 80% of housing, markets, hospitals, schools, universities, service centers, water wells, sewage facilities, roads and streets damaged.

The medical and municipal systems, electricity, water and telecommunications networks, as well as financial and economic institutions, collapsed.

Cultivated land, agricultural and livestock production, and fishing facilities such as ports and boats were also severely damaged, causing hundreds of thousands to be displaced out of the Strip, as well as countless other losses and disasters.

When the agreement to end the war came before the middle of October 2025, and the pace of aggression slowed down, it marked the transition of suffering to another stage, after waiting to be killed by burning an Israeli missile targeting a tent, bakery, under the rubble of a house, or shelling while waiting for a delicate bag of death trap called the US-Israeli "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation".

People began to return from the circle of annihilation, hunger and displacement to destroyed homes, destroyed livelihoods, neighborhoods and roads sunk under the devastation without features, and conditions no less bad, darkness and gloom than daily raids, shelling and killings, only to face an unknown fate and perplexing unanswered questions.

The independent French website "Mediapart" described them as "shattered souls living among the rubble struggling to survive without a horizon."

In light of all this, researchers, commentators, and influencers have wondered what treatment and rehabilitation can be provided to these victims to recover from traumatic stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, tantrums, depression, despair, lack of horizon, hallucinations, schizophrenia, psychosis, and the many physical ailments that result from them. 

Do psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, education, training and human development experts have ammunition to help victims recover from the new Nakba and overcome its catastrophic consequences?

These major questions have highlighted a larger and more important epistemological crisis. In the Western social sciences, the so-called "psychology" or psychology seems to be one of the most absurd academic and research fields, futile, epistemological confusion, moral disorder, and inhumane reductionism. It is even more closely associated with the Western imperialist project, both inside and outside the West.

Pagan theories and formulations

Psychology in this regard, like anthropology in the 19th century, flourished during the rise of the British and French colonial movements, in particular.

While anthropologists, humanists, Marxists, and progressives, have managed to escape the grip of the colonial school, to their credit, they have not escaped the shackles of the Western, secular, materialistic cosmopolitan vision, with its various tributaries, expressions, and philosophies: modernism, Nanshuvism, Darwinism, racism, fascism, imperialism, capitalism, or at least some of these shackles.

They even ignored the fact that the true human instinct finds the meaning of its existence and the starting point of its action and movement in the doctrine of monotheism and prophecy revealed from the world of the unseen and the revelation of the Creator of the universe Almighty.

The British anthropologist/sociologist, Sir James Fraser, took the lead in formulating the colonial school of anthropology, and he crystallized its early hypotheses, themes, traits and categories in his famous book The Golden Branch, as an extensive study of pagan myths and customs that examined primitive beliefs.

The study claimed to have discovered the roots of a "supposed" tree, which is in fact malevolent, not the tree of monotheism or prophecies and messages, but the tree of paganism, primitiveness and mythology with its myths, superstitions, polytheism, and tyranny, and that humanity is now living on its branches!

The book faced a wave of protest, forcing Fraser to delete material that aroused public discontent, which was forgotten a century later, as the colonial phenomenon declined, and the importance of his ideas and formulations in the biography of colonialism waned.

Fraser saw that humanity practices habits that do not know their origin, and give them superficial justifications. But we are, he claims, primitive in a way. This reductionist deconstructionist pivot to primitiveness, paganism, and evolution was prevalent in the 19th century, the era of Anglo-Saxon and Francophone colonialism par excellence, and coincided with the expansion of the Western imperialist project as a whole.

In the same temporal and spatial context, social Darwinism, which is more important, deconstructive, racist, and significant than its origin, came from biological Darwinism, which received doubts that revealed larger cracks and fabrications that do not cover up the academic mulberry leaf.

These pagan theories or formulations of the human story, the narrative of his existence and mission lie at the heart of the ideology of colonialism, its preambles and justifications, which are full of claims of white supremacy, the burden of the white man in ruling and uplifting primitive peoples, the right of Roman conquest and conquest inherited by Anglo-American imperialism, and the concept  of "just war" in the same context and framework.

A secular imperialist epistemological vision

These theories and hypotheses have taken "quasi-epistemic" or "quasi-scientific" formulations, and have remained at the center of the Western social sciences, latent or explicit, unequivocally reflecting the impairment of a secular imperialist epistemological vision, with its main features:

•    The denial of the divine honor and succession of man and the desecration of his sanctity, in a way that legitimizes his injustice, plunder, exploitation, oppression, persecution, enslavement, kidnapping of tens of millions of people, and even extermination, permissibility and transformation of him into a substance of use without immunity, prohibitions, and no guarantor law, and this is the essence of the Western imperialist project since its inception 5 centuries ago.

•    The focus is on the European (Western) self, or in other words, Eurocentrism (Western), and its essence is to look at the world from a unilateral European-Western perspective and to believe that the culture of European and Western societies, and their extensions in general, and their values are higher and higher than the culture of other societies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas before the extermination of their peoples in preparation for their colonization and settlement. In the context of this centrality, European history is the ideal and inspirational model for the formulation of the history, themes and theories of international relations, international law, economics, art forms and cultural production.

Although Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Western Asia, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa enjoyed more than 4 centuries of Ottoman peace and security, while the fires of famines, epidemics, tyrannies and religious wars in Central and Western Europe – launched by the Protestant religious reform movement – were annihilating a third of its people!

But in the context of Westernism, the world had not witnessed peace or a well-established regional or international order in the sense of the word, before the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which ended the religious wars and launched the (modern) nation-states that launched their presence with fleets of extermination towards the Americas, Australia, the coasts of Africa, India, China, the East Indies and Indochina.

Indeed, what has been described as "peace after peace," as the British historian David Frumken titled his book on the end of the Ottoman Empire, is, of course, "Pax Britannica."

We have witnessed in the Levant what the nation has tasted, for more than 100 years, of the insults, humiliations, horrors and destruction of the British and American peace, penetration, occupation, colonialism, fragmentation, subjugation and settlement, and the latest forms of this Israeli genocide in Palestine and its extensions in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Qatar, and its aggressions against any Arab or Muslim country that seeks development, independence, and the provision of means of deterrence and self-defense. "Count on you from the evil of hearing it!"

Although, for example, in the 16th century, the time of Mughal rule, and before the British invasion and colonialism, from which it has not yet recovered, India was the world's largest producer and exporter of manufactured goods, Western centralism insists that there was no global industrialization before the European Industrial Revolution ( 1850).

In fact, Karl Marx himself, whose thought was directed towards the distribution of plundered wealth and surplus value from tobacco, cotton, sugarcane, gold, silver and coal mines, and the slave trade in the colonies, called for the colonization of Algeria, a change in its production system, and its annexation to the European exploitative mode of production, and to make it a source of wine and important crops for Europe, and called for the penetration of China and the destruction of the Asian mode of production in order to replace it with a European-style production system, perhaps to become a Marxist subject of study and foresight And measurement and profiling according to European standards!

•    Reduction and stereotyping of human, civilizational, and social phenomena:  In the West, the nation-state, the nation-state inherited the traditions of the tyranny of the Church, kings, and feudal princes, and absorbed its manifestations as an entity, spirit, and institutions.

Throughout their long history, especially under the control of the Church, kings, and feudalism, European nations have not witnessed cultural, religious or social diversity, despite the existence of its natural components in Europe.

They also long lacked constitutional foundations and legislative traditions that entrench the principle of checks and balances in the relationship between the nation and the state, as well as the principle of the true separation of powers and the guarantees of rights in the face of the intrusion of powers. Although these cases have been legislated since the 19th century, they are subject to ebb and flows, subject to ideological and ethnic biases, Carterians and the revival of the spirit of the Inquisition, leading to the contraction of rights, judicial guarantees, and obligatory legal procedures.

The nation-state has also not been familiar with or accepted the principle of multiple identities, subsidiary loyalties, local specificities, and ethnic protrusions, because it does not serve the stereotype necessary to supply the imperialist project with resources, and contradicts the state's quest to increase surplus power and absolute loyalty.

For example, when you are Nigerian in Nigeria, you are either an Ibo, a Yoruba, a Hausa, or a Fulani with all its cultural baggage, linguistic and ethnic specificity, social traditions, and folk proverbs. But in London he is Nigerian, and in New York he is just African. This is how reductionism and profiling is based on rigid imperialist stereotypes and norms that employ race, color, or economic skills historically associated with a colonial administration that molds human beings according to their utility, use, and position in a cycle Production and assimilation to achieve the highest profit and lowest costs.

For example, colonial companies and pirates kidnapped tens of millions of people from the West African coast to enslave them in the mines and plantations of tobacco, cotton, and sugarcane in South America, the Andes and the Caribbean, and brought their likes from Indians and East Indies to perform the same work in the same regions and territories, but without the name of slavery and slaves.

One of the great writers of Nigeria and Africa, Chinua Achebe, recounts that when he was educated in Britain during the 1950s before his country's independence from British colonialism, he wanted to mail some books to a friend in his country. The postal clerk looked at the addressee's address and asked, "Nigeria. Nigeria! Is it for us or for the French?" he replied, "but it is yours, my lady!"

In such an epistemological view, claims of white supremacy over other races, racism and contempt for the achievements and values of other civilizations arise. In fact, an important European philosopher, such as the German Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), denied in the 19th century any virtue of the East in the production of science and wisdom except for what the ancient Greeks had accomplished!

•    The imperialist epistemological vision sees no limits to the permissibility of the world through invasion, penetration, annihilation, exploitation and consumption. Nor does it recognize the non-Western right to life, existence or independence, especially if it does not possess the deterrent power equivalent to the imperialist invasion force, its fleets and guns, or what has historically been called battleship diplomacy.

Force, the power of annihilation, is the criterion of truth and the ultimate reference for this epistemological vision. Since the Industrial Revolution in 1850, the industrialized West has dumped billions of tons of pollutants from the environment, atmosphere, seas, oceans, and greenhouse gases, causing global warming that has led to climate disturbances, floods, and desertification, and has destroyed global agricultural production patterns and human food security.

Trauma Therapy and Acquired Disability

Since the early days of research into psychological phenomena, its methods have not differentiated much between humans and animals, and behavioral and instinctive experiments conducted on animals have been considered as a reliable indicator in understanding the psychology and behaviors of humans, since experiments on dogs, conducted by the Russian Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) to study the conditioned response, through the experiments of Seligman and Meyer (1967) to study the acquired learning disability.

Most of these experiments were not focused on understanding behaviors, feelings, and responses, but rather on controlling the psyches of animals and humans and shaping them from the outside, coercion, and stereotyping. Many of these studies tend to explain human behavior biologically and chemically, which is motivated by conditioned responses, which in turn are attributed to hormones, enzymes, proteins, adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and so on. It is as if it were a machine without a soul, soul, values, longings, goals, or morals!

Canadian writer and academic Naomi Klein has devoted an entire book to "The Shock Principle and the Rise of Disaster Capitalism," in which she examines the trauma therapy used by psychiatrists, revealing the striking connections between economic policies, "shock and terror" wars, and secret CIA-funded experiments related to electric shocks and sensory deprivation in the 1950s.

These research helped write the torture guidelines used at Guantanamo Bay and around the world. Klein drew a clear line linking the torture of the 1970s to Latin America to torture at Abu Ghraib (Iraq), Guantanamo (Cuba) and Bagram (Afghanistan).

Naomi Klein compared extreme capitalist economic policy to the trauma therapy used by psychiatrists. Jill Kastner, one of the victims of secret interrogation experiments conducted by the Scottish-American psychologist Ewin Cameron (1901-1967) for the CIA, was interviewed. His idea was to use electroconvulsive therapy to break the will of the patients; then reprogram them. But after Cameron broke his patients, he could never rebuild them.

The lessons learned are clear: countries are traumatized by wars, terrorism, military coups, and natural disasters, and then by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and confusion of the first shock to pass on economic shock therapy.

Sometimes, when the first two shocks fail to eliminate resistance, a third shock is used: electricity in a prison cell or a taser in the streets for those who dare to resist.

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was the greatest theorist of engulfed neoliberal capitalism, credited with writing the rules of contemporary global neoliberal economics, and rightly considered the most prominent "expert on economic shocks."

In the 1950s, while Ewin Cameron was conducting his experiments on trauma therapy, the Chicago School of Economics was developing its ideas. In one of his most influential essays, Friedman formulated the tactical secret drug of neoliberal capitalism, the "Shock Therapy Principle."

Friedman argues that "only crises, whether real or imagined, produce real change"; when a disaster strikes, or rather, a catastrophe, the actions taken depend on the ideas available.

Some people stock up on canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters, while Friedman's followers store loose free-market ideas. When the crisis strikes, Friedman is convinced that we must act quickly, to force lasting change before a crisis-stricken society returns to its former state, or what he calls "the tyranny of the status quo." It is a variation on Machiavelli's advice that "all damage should be done at once."

Despite the importance and eloquence of Klein's critique of disaster capitalism and the principle of shock therapy to break the will of nations and subject them to the most painful, impoverishing, and miserable economic policies in times of catastrophic crisis, she believes, with some simplification or naivety, that markets need not be radical fundamentalists, referring to the possibility of coexistence of social demands and a less vicious and aggressive free-market economy.

This proposition seems reasonable at first glance, since there are Western economic experiments and doctrines that show rationality and balance in the management of human society, adopt a compassionate economy, or propose visions of social or socialist justice that are not necessarily based on the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and one-party rule.

But why do these (plausible) tendencies not find their way to judgment in the context of the historical course of the Western experience? Why did Klein not pay attention to the dialectical relationship between the brutality of the free market economy and the cosmopolitan or epistemological vision of Western imperialism with its various tributaries, expressions, and philosophies?

If the emergence of capitalism is the most important result of the imperialist plunder project, why is disaster capitalism not the natural development of the first capitalism and the imperialist epistemological vision that lies behind it and is the most representative of it? After the experience of the Chicago Economic School and its disastrous results on many societies and economies over the past half century, which looked at the worst economic practices and policies, does the term "science" still apply to economics and other fields of knowledge that have been produced in the light of the long Western imperialist experience that has been going on for 5 centuries?  And its imperialist epistemological vision and in the service of its colonial project, which has not yet reached its final stage?!