The MAGA Suicides
Trumps' Total War on America
Very fortunate for us
That monsters of their own peculiarities
Perish.—Karl ShapiroI]
“Ratttlesnakes don’t commit suicide.” It’s a saying from the early days of the Civil Rights struggle. As one participant put it, a Black pastor:
“We thought that you could just shame America, so now, America, look at your promises[…]. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. But, you know, segregation, you can't shame segregation, you can't — rattlesnakes don't commit suicide. Ball teams don't strike themselves out. You got to put 'em out.”1
Perhaps the pastor was wrong after all. Perhaps, on occasion, rattlesnakes do commit suicide. Perhaps out of shame, even. Matt Livelsberger has shown us the way, the charmer who self-destructed this New Year’s Day when he rammed a Tesla into a Trump tower, leaving us all drenched in venom and rattling the worried brains of the mainstream media as they struggled for explanations. Livelsberger’s suicide, they will us to believe, was a simple case of PTSD acquired in service in Afghanistan as a special operations soldier: just a regular old Trump supporter in need of a helping hand, a nurturing Trump environment. A normal American who concluded his last suicide note with:
“Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.”2
Livelsberger’s suicide presents itself simultaneously as a celebration of the Leader’s triumph, and an attack on the symbols of that leadership; it’s the the kind of conundrum American media, and American-style psychologism, are unable to resolve. In their minds the two—the US war machine and the Trumpian civil war machine—are separate entities. They’re not. Only, one is worse than the other. Guess which.
II]
Sigmund Freud had his own take on this. In 1920 he was called to testify in the war-crimes trial of Julius Wagner-Jauregg, a prominent Viennese psychiatrist who would go on to earn a Nobel Prize and join the Nazi Party— no causal relation there, maybe. Wagner-Jauregg had been accused of “curing” traumatized soldiers in World War I by, among other things, applying electricity to their testicles. Some had committed suicide. Sig’s response represented, as one critic has written, “Freud in one of his finest moments,” adding,
“Freud was supporting, albeit in modulated fashion, those veterans who, having just encountered the grinding, horrifying reality of war, were trying in effect to refute the militarist articles of faith of a Germanic state.”3
In a memorandum sent to the Tribunal, Freud wondered whether Wagner-Jauregg’s treatment of traumatized soldiers could be considered a physiological response to an organic disturbance, or whether, instead, the symptoms of a psychological problem had been addressed by psychological means that amounted to deliberate, violent persuasion through corporal and psychological pain. If the latter, then the purported cure was not the cure it claimed to be, but another form of the initial psychic pain inflicted on the soldier patient under military service, adding trauma to trauma: the real source of the affliction was the military itself, and the “ruthless suppression of one’s own personality by one’s superiors.” („Die rücksichtlose Unterdrückung der eigenen Persönlichkeit durch die Vorgesetzten“).4 The floggings would continue until morale improved.
Freud begins by pointing out the fundamental distinction between war neuroses and everyday trauma. In most cultures, everyday trauma is accepted as an emotional response triggered by an inevitable event — for instance, he writes, a railway accident. However, war neuroses are not an unmediated psychic response to a social happenstance; they’re a predictable, healthy response to a socially constructed perception that’s imposed on the patient, forcing them into a socially mediated relationship with those who would construct the meaning of an event for them. The Army psychiatrist who claims to provide the cure stands for that same Army that initially caused the disease:
“In this way it has been easy to recognize the subsequent cause of all war neuroses in the unconscious tendency of soldiers to detach from the dangerous or emotionally offensive demands of military service. Fear for one's own life, resistance to orders to kill others, revolt against the callous suppression of one's own personality by commanding officers: those have been the most important sources of affect that feed the tendency to flee from war.”
„Es ergab sich also leicht als die nächste Ursache aller Kriegsneurosen die dem Soldaten unbewuβte Tendenz, sich den gefahrvollen oder das Gefühl empörenden Anforderungen des Kriegsdienstes zu entziehen. Angst um das eigene Leben, Sträuben gegen den Auftrag andere zu tödten, Auflehnung gegen die rücksichtlose Unterdrückung der eigenen Persönlichkeit durch die Vorgesetzten, waren die wichtigsten Affektquellen, aus denen die kriegsflüchtige Tendenz gespeist wurde.“5
Compare to Livelsberger, who justifies his attack as follows:
Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.6
From this last it’s easy to draw simplistic conclusions: soldier is traumatized by experience of killing and seeing his friends killed. Soldier commits suicide out of guilt and shame. What’s puzzling and distinctive is the “now:” why did the soldier in question choose to resolve a conflict by proclaiming his loyalty to the leadership he praised, while sending a blazing car (a symbol of that leadership) into another symbol of that leadership, the Trump building in Vegas? This suggests that Livelsberger’s suicide was not so much the outcome of his previous army experience, as of the internalized, unresolved conflict between his fear of being killed and revulsion at killing others on the one hand, and his loyalty to Trumpian authority figures on the other.
Germans have a word for this: Ehrentod, literally: “noble death,” as distinct from selbstmord, ordinary suicide. Ehrentod was, and still is today, a a common way to prove one’s loyalty to the Regime while resolving the unbearable conflicts posed by the demands of the Regime and one’s own sense of self. One might easily compare the Austrian soldier sacrificing his life to demonstrate his loyalty to the Common Good to those immigrants in the United States who voted for Trump despite his pledge to deport them, a form of civic suicide out of loyalty to the greater good, the ultimate surrender to the pressure to conform to the Trumpian norm.
III]
Freud, in his response to the Wagner-Jauregg proceedings, “was intent on advancing a larger concern, the connection between individual and social violence.”7 That same year he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he addressed the sources of aggression, directed at self or at others, as part of a broad questioning of the relation of individuals to the society that endeavored to define and control their behavior. Violence and aggression must be acknowledged as fundamental human traits or “drives,” with the caveat that the application of violence is not universal and inescapable, it’s a variable effect of cultural norms. Social and cultural norms were far more transitory than the drives and impulses constructive or destructive, that originated in the psyche. So much for Freud-the-Moralist.8
Ten years later, in the concluding pages of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud would return to this conundrum:
“We first approach an individual neurosis by means of the contrast that makes the patient stands out from their environment, which is assumed to be ‘normal.’ Such contexts do not exist for a group whose members are all afflicted in the same manner. They would have to be found elsewhere.”
„Bei der Einzelneurose dient uns als nächster Anhalt der Kontrast, in dem sich der Kranke von seiner als »normal« angenommenen Umgebung abhebt. Ein solcher Hintergrund entfällt bei einer gleichartig affizierten Masse, er müßte anderswoher geholt werden.“9
This is the same conundrum that’s addressed in the opening sentence of Freud’s memorandum against Wagner-Jauregg, in which he suggests as an example of a normal, “peacetime” type of trauma the mental anguish from a railroad accident: no-one, he implies, would think of addressing that kind of psychological disturbance by assigning moral responsibility in one way or another, unlike the uses and misuses of war-time trauma. Freud, obviously, did not live in 21st Century America, where a mundane occurrence like a traffic ja, provokes sanctioned or unsanctioned retaliation, whether lawsuit, or road-rage or straight-out Karenism. Those are similar to the war-time culture of Austria, which Freud, in 1920, hoped had been left behind. It hadn’t been. A year later, during the planned activities in celebration of Antisemitentag (“Anti-Semite Day”), a gang took over the trolley system in Vienna and proceeded to beat up whoever they identified as Jewish.10 The norming of wartime violence and wartime attitudes in the last years of World War One was to pave the way for the Nazi takeover. In the same way, the norming of a similar attitude has paved the way for Donald Trump’s election and re-election.
IV]
Even before the War, the toll of suicides in the Austro-Hungarian Army was catastrophic. Suicide by duel; suicide out of excessive heroism and loyalty; suicide by taking ridiculous risks, the Habsburg equivalent of Suicide by Cop in the USA today: Joseph Roth’s great novel, The Radetzky March, is book-ended by two representations of such attempts at self-destruction in the service of the State, the latter one successful.
In his groundbreaking overview of Austro-Hungary at war, Manfried Rauchensteiner lays the responsibility for the war neuroses and suicides, for the psychic and physical exhaustion of the combatants, at the feet of politicians and generals on all sides:
“With its blockade measures, Great Britain aimed at the paralysis and exhaustion of combatants and non-combatants alike. No questions were posed as to the humanity and legitimacy of such a strategy. [In Germany and Austria-Hungary] as well, humanity and international law got caught under the wheels.
[…]
The will to fight was supposed to be lastingly undermined and the military war, if it could not be decided directly at the front, was to be spun out in order to bring about a moral and material exhaustion. […] The total war ‘took aim at the “psychological cohesion” of the nations’.”11
This was “Total War” in the sense that it aimed to modify the behavior of citizens and soldiery alike at all levels of life on all sides of the conflict, and that it would involve each and every citizen on a permanent and continuous basis. It was a double-edged strategy.
First, the civilian population as a whole was to be enlisted in the war effort, following the French Revolutionary concept of total mobilization. In the case of Austria, as Freud and Rauchensteiner saw, this would entail re-traumatizing a population already traumatized by the violence and privations of war, in the same way a traumatized soldier is retraumatized by the intervention of the military psychiatrist, made to realign to a social norm that is in reality the desired norm of war. Extreme nationalism, dehumanization of the foe, permanent hyperalertness, PTSD, total psychic warfare: those were to be the new norm. Freud himself had been drawn in at the beginning of World War One. He had shared the widespread belief that war was merely the inescapable effect of the Zeitgeist. In this he had been no different from those intellectuals today who fantasize that the accession to power of a certifiable sociopath is merely a reflection of an objective historical situation, a social norm before which it’s best to fall in line.
And here is the second aspect of the strategy of total war: the war would be brought home to all imagined enemies, civilians as well as others in order to achieve a consistent, unwavering undermining of the “psychological cohesion” of the enemy state and the its civil society. All aspects of the behavior of the designated enemy must be the focus of unending suspicion and confrontation. This was powerful poison for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was composed of a slew of ethnic groups (Jews, Czechs, Ukrainians and others) whose loyalty to the Kaiserliche abstraction was always open to suspicion: a large portion of Wagner-Jauregg’s “patients” were Czech soldiers who, according to him, were most likely to be disloyal, and therefore malingerers.
It doesn’t take much thought to see that this two-pronged strategy, as it was developed in the last years of the First World War, has become the social strategy of various forms of Fascism down to the present, including the American: electric shocks to the genitals of Society.12 Red Vienna was not undermined by some kind of battle of ideas, as some have claimed, but by the deliberate traumatization of the population as a whole.13
In some cases, such as that of Zionism today, and America as well, it would be more accurate to talk of a deliberate strategy of re-traumatization. Like the Austrian soldier in the hands of the Austrian military psychiatrist, the traumatized citizen is called upon to exchange one trauma for another. In Israel, the trauma of the Holocaust is traded for the trauma of total war. In America the multitude of individual traumas, from anti-racism, Feminism, Covid, ecological disasters, are laid at the foot of a single enemy, the “Democrat Party.” As with the military psychiatrists, personal trauma is replaced by national trauma: all social interactions, from fenderbenders on, become a national cause to be fought, and this has been the conscious strategy of the Republican Party for the past decades. In the Republican playbook, social interactions are the pursuit of war by other means.
The effects have been catastrophic. The Austrian psychiatrist’s ambition was to make the perceived deviance more unbearable than their concept of an accepted norm. The result of the Republican Strategy has been, to make the accepted social norm of total war as unbearable, if not more so, than any trauma—say, the actual war trauma originally suffered by Livelsberger.
It’s a commonplace that soldiers afflicted by PTSD must struggle to adapt to civilian life—but what if there is no civilian life? What if the cure for the original trauma is more trauma, only worse, the way shell-shock is replaced by electric shock? No surprise, then, if Livelsberger chose Ehrentod, or that Edgar Madison Welch, the Pizzagate felon, chose Suicide by Cop. Others—many others—are sure to follow. Considering the alternatives, I see no better way.
WOID XXIV-30
January 12, 2025
“Eyes on the Prize; Interview with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, November 7, 1985,”American Archive of Public Broadcasting, accessed December 24, 2024. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_151-086348h395; the statement most likely originates with Dr. Ralph Abernathy, a close confident and ally of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dana Gentry, “Cybertruck driver left behind rant praising Trump and Musk, slamming Democrats,” Nevada Current (January 3, 2025). https://nevadacurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/PO-003a-01-03-25-Livelsbergers-Letters.pdf; accessed January 7, 2025
Stanley Rosenman, “Freud Contesting the Predatory System: Review of Freud as an Expert Witness: The Discussion of War Neuroses between Freud and Wagner-Jauregg, by K.R. Eissler” in American Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1989): p. 169.
Sigmund Freud, „Gutachten über die elektrische Behandlung der Kriegsneurotiker“ in K. R. Eissler, Freud und Wagner-Jauregg vor der Kommission zur Erhebung militärischer Pflichtverletzungen (Wien: Löcker, 1979), p. 32.
ibid.
Livelsberger, as per note 2, above.
Elizabeth Ann Danto, “Trauma and the state with Sigmund Freud as witness,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 48 (2016): p. 54.
Philip Rieff, Freud : The Mind of the Moralist (London : V. Gollancz, 1960).
Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Wien: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1930), p. 134.
Klaus Taschwer, „Antisemitentag 1921: »Der Anfang des Befreiungskampfes aller Arier«“. Der Standard (March 12, 2021). https://www.academia.edu/45491415/Antisemitentag_1921_Der_Anfang_des_Befreiungskampfes_aller_Arier_M%C3%A4rz_2021_ ; accessed January 9, 2025.
Manfried Rauchensteiner, The First World War and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014), p. 58, 226-237; pp. 236-237 discuss the diagnosis of “neurasthenia” and Wagner-Jauregg’s involvement.Rauchensteiner, The last quote references a text by prominent French strategist and general: André Beaufre, „Die Strategie des Jahres 1917“, Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift, special issue on 1917 (1967): p. 70. (quoted, pp. 693-94. with modifications in the translation.)
Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I. The People's War (New York: Basic Books, 20014). It was common, during the first days of the Pétain régime, to submit political opponents to treatments usually reserved for mental patients: cold showers, etc.
cf. Paul Werner, “Blackwash. Review of Wasserman, Black Vienna. The Radical Right in the Red City,” WOID XXI-39 (June 28, 2017). https://www.academia.edu/33685518/Blackwash_Review_of_Wasserman_Black_Vienna_The_Radical_Right_in_the_Red_City