Revolutionary Futures

We all know that advertising is more than just corporations sharing information about their products and services in the hopes of winning customers. They use various psychological tricks to convince us that we want things we don’t need, and to spend money we don’t have, to meet some manufactured standard of social status. If this is not something you already knew, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

If you haven’t already I highly recommend watching the Adam Curtis film The Century of the Self. Among other things, this film will explain how Edward Bernays leveraged the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to take mass manipulation to a new level, ultimately developing what is now known as the “Public Relations” field.

Most of us know the government and news media do this too, but usually they do it in service of manufacturing consent for unpopular policies such as war and austerity, or to disrupt and dismantle political organizations that threaten the status quo. We call these machinations PSYOPS, an abbreviation for ‘psychological operations’.

Something else most of us know by now is that there is something called the “Israel Lobby”, which is a vast, loosely connected network of organizations and people who are deeply invested in defending Israel against any criticism, and promoting it, dishonestly, as both a liberal democracy and invaluable ally to the United States and the West/Global north more broadly.

We also know by now that one of the tools Israel uses extensively is propaganda, or what they call ‘hasbara’. So extensively that Israel’s publicly acknowledged hasbara budget has been set at nearly $750 million for 2026. Hasbara is a PSYOP, consisting of what the revolutionary psychoanalyst Dr. Lara Sheehi calls ‘psychic intrusions’, and the prescription she argues for in her new book is ‘psychic militancy’.

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From The Clinic To The Streets

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but I first became aware of Dr. Sheehi when we were seated across from each other at the ArabCon banquet last year in Dearborn. She was sitting next to Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News (subscribe!) and although I didn’t really know either of them I enjoyed the banter greatly. (By the way, do yourself a favor and listen to this fantastic discussion they had recently.)

From the Introduction to the book: “[...] psychic intrusions [are] modes of violation of our psychic province with the intent of carceral discipline and, perhaps more importantly, the necessity for psychic militancy to ward off the intended violence of such intrusions. [...] psychic intrusions mobilize their impact through mechanics that are meant to undermine and dismantle one’s ability to remain affirmatively connected to material reality. [...] Psychic militancy, on the other hand, is unbendingly affixed to material reality. The practice of remaining aligned with psychic militancy is the focus of this book.”

I had a great conversation with Dr. Sheehi about the book a couple nights ago. Well, I say it was a conversation about the book but let’s be honest, it was largely me trauma-dumping my personal history and fumbling attempts to explain how impactful her analysis had been on my own understanding of colonialism and militancy. We’re going to have a more focused conversation about the book in the near future as part of the new Tech for Palestine Book Club, so stay tuned for that!

As someone who is deathly allergic to authoritarianism, dogmatism, fundamentalism, and all related ‘ism’s, words like ‘revolutionary’ and ‘militant’ make me uneasy. I’m also quite skeptical of psychoanalysis, though I think people like Edward Bernays have made it impossible to deny the substantial impact of the psychology on belief and behavior. How deeply embedded the counterintuitively pro-Israel sentiment is among non-Jews in the West is another indication.

In other words I think it’s obvious that a major goal of people in the “pro-Israel” (Zionist) movement, whether conscious or unconscious, is to capture hearts and minds by way of psychological manipulation, or ‘psychic intrusions’. It seems equally obvious that in a war where one side is using PSYOPS, the other side needs to cultivate ways of resisting that manipulation in an uncompromising, and dare I say militant, way.

There is some lingo in the book that takes some getting used to if you aren’t really familiar with revolutionary and decolonial politics, but in my opinion she explains Franz Fanon in a way that makes it much easier to understand than his own writing. I read The Wretched of the Earth and found it very hard to follow, but possibly only because it was written for a colonized audience, which isn’t me. I do believe that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is an anti-colonial struggle though, so while I may not be directly impacted by colonization I’m definitely in the fight against it.

I’ll wrap here even though there is so much more I could say, because really you shouldn’t be spending time reading this that you should spend reading the book.