Bruno Boccara @[email protected]

PSYCHOSOCIAL ANALYSIS OF THE PANDEMIC AND OF ITS AFTERMATH: Hoping for a Magical Undoing There comes a time when ideas potentially capable of profoundly changing the world must be brought to the centers of decision making. That time is now upon us.

1943 is the year of Goebbels’ famous speech, Wolt Ihr Ein Totalen Krieg? to which the masses responded Ja. The analogy suggests that a lot of hardships and harsh responses would still be coming from Israel -and from its (former and still existing) supporters- hence a substantial worsening of the war worldwide. The West may not be willing to give up easily the until recently existing world order. A psychosocially wounded and terrified Israel also represents an extreme danger to the world in light of the existing mental representations underpinning the nation. Managing the transition, if this is what is in store for Iran and its allies, will also require a subtle balancing act.

The position of Israel right now is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in 1943. A nation understanding for the first time that its expansionism in the name of its quest for regional domination has a cost as it faces serious bombings for the first time and reversals in the battlefield after years of successful expansionist campaigns. A nation trying to repress the consequences of the genocide it committed, while knowing that a reckoning is coming.

Same way Gaza led straight to what we are seeing today and there might be hell to pay as a consequence, so did the pandemic. Very few people fully understand this. Yet psychosocial aspects of policies hugely matter as the world is about find out. Covid denial ushered indifference which was also supported by seismic behavioral shifts ushered by social media. Not caring,turniing a blind eye, led to Gaza (tolerating the plight), and Tehran today as well as possible forthcoming annihilation, including that of the Jewish state (or people). The US has very much entered an ear of self sabotage. The latter is first and foremost psychosocial; hence why psychosocial dynamics are key to disseminate and enabling internalization of societies understanding what is at stake and stopping it. For now, psychosocial defenses determine policy choices and outcomes and, as a consequence our collective fate. Societies are being HIJACKED by these internal psychosocial dynamics.

If Israel uses nuclear weapons against Iran, it self-identifies as the most evil nation in the world today and should be targeted by all nations of the world for immediate eradication. We know Israel is a genocidal entity based upon its actions in Gaza and the Palestinian people over time. But the evil nature of this despicable nation is on full display as they manufacture a case for war on a well-known lie (Iranian nuclear weapons), carry out a surprise attack that puts them in the same category as Imperial Japan when it comes to perfidy, and now uses the war it started as justification for the employment of its own arsenal of illegally acquired nuclear weapons. A nuclear-armed Israel is the greatest threat to peace and security in the world today. There can be no peace as long as this cancerous parasite continues to manifest itself as a nuclear-capable nation state. The choice is simple: verifiably disarm Israel of its illegal nuclear arsenal, or remove Israel from the map of history.

Joyeux Anniversaire a 92 ans. Elle a bien raison. Gerer demande de comprendre dans la subtilite et elle a beaucoup de souvenirs, meme s’ils ne sont pas toujours verbalises. Le personnel devrait comprendre. Elle ne refusait pas de manger, au contraire. Il fallait que cela lui evoque quelque chose qu’elle associait à la nourriture et a ses plaisirs.

Alors qu'on paye quelqu'un pour être à ses côtés lors des repas et la stimuler, ils l'ont passé au sein de l'établissement au mixé sans raison. Résultat : elle a Alzheimer mais toujours son petit caractère et ne cède rien. Elle a refusé de manger 3 jours de suite plutôt que d'avaler quelque chose qu'elle n'identifiait pas. Conséquence : très fatiguée mais elle a obtenu gain de cause, ils l'ont remise à l'alimentation normale et aujourd'hui, elle a remangé avec plaisir car elle pouvait identifier ce qu'elle avait dans l'assiette. Elle a toujours été très difficile au niveau alimentaire. Fatiguée de vivre cela... Dans l'angoisse constante pour elle.... Ma maman, hier, 92 ans bientôt Je l'aime et la trouve encore si jolie...

@ChrisLynnHedges TOMORROW IS ANOTHER WORLD Many, me included, have seemingly become overwhelmed by an unbearable angst. While I have my own profound doubts that anything but a point of no return awaits us, I embarked a long time ago on a solitary journey of applying -after adapting the field- psychoanalytic thinking to public policies and country level enactments. The main idea is that the latter are first and foremost driven by collective, largely unconscious, defenses mobilized against anxieties. The latter, in turn, are what needs to be understood and worked through. While current developments have shaken me to the core, I still hold to the belief that humanity finding meaning through a collective working through of extinction anxieties might offer a way out. The increased likelihood of psychosocial collapses, as evidenced by the United States or Israel suggest however that working through may be elusive. Yet, the acute psychosocial issues revealed by pandemic denial, the psychosocial break par excellence that paved the way to today’s decompensation, could have been avoided. This suggests that we may only be witnessing an eclipse of goodness and sanity rather than having reached a point of no return.

A commenter recently asked me if the the possibility of the death of our current system giving birth to a new cultural, economic and social paradigm is a cause for hope. The reality is human progress is a myth —societies often go backwards. I fear that we are now ushering in a new Dark Age of fascist authoritarianism.

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER WORLD Many, me included, have seemingly become overwhelmed by an unbearable angst. While I have my own profound doubts that anything but a point of no return awaits us, I embarked a long time ago on a solitary journey of applying -after adapting the field- psychoanalytic thinking to public policies and country level enactments. The main idea is that the latter are first and foremost driven by collective, largely unconscious, defenses mobilized against anxieties. The latter, in turn, are what needs to be understood and worked through. While current developments have shaken me to the core, I still hold to the belief that humanity finding meaning through a collective working through of extinction anxieties might offer a way out. The increased likelihood of psychosocial collapses, as evidenced by the United States or Israel suggest however that working through may be elusive. Yet, the acute psychosocial issues revealed by pandemic denial, the psychosocial break par excellence that paved the way to today’s decompensation, could have been avoided. This suggests that we may only be witnessing an eclipse of goodness and sanity rather than having reached a point of no return.

Immigration is not the cause of Western Europe's problems. It is merely a symptom. The Western Europeans who think they just need to solve the immigration problem are BRAIN DEAD. The real problem is structural collapse. Immigration is the inevitable pressure release for a society that has stopped functioning at its most basic demographic and cultural levels. It is the visible smoke rising from a building where the foundation has already turned to sand. The reliance on outside labor isn't a choice driven by ideology as much as it is a desperate attempt to keep the gears of the economy turning and the pension systems solvent. If you don't have enough young people to work, pay taxes, and care for the elderly, you either import them or you watch the entire social contract vanish. Fixating on the arrival of people while ignoring the fact that the native population is choosing slow-motion extinction is a classic case of ignoring the fire to complain about the smoke. Furthermore, the crisis of integration is not necessarily a testament to the strength of foreign cultures, but rather a reflection of a total loss of confidence in European identity. You cannot expect anyone to assimilate into a vacuum or a culture that is perpetually apologizing for its own existence. When a civilization loses its "civilizational nerve" and stops believing in its own values, history, and future, it loses the ability to exert any gravity on those who enter it. The lack of assimilation is merely a mirror held up to the host society's own internal fragmentation and self-loathing. Ultimately, if every immigrant were removed tomorrow, Western Europe would still be an aging, stagnating collection of nations that are too comfortable to work hard and too tired to innovate. The obsession with the border is a convenient distraction from the much harder work of addressing the internal rot of institutional incompetence and demographic suicide. Until the continent addresses the underlying engine of its own decline—its refusal to reproduce, its economic parasitism, and its cultural identity crisis—it will continue to struggle, regardless of who is crossing its borders.

@fitterhappierAJ @1goodtern Thanks for writing this. It will help tremendously in my own work whereas I denounce how psychosocial dynamics can hijack entire systems and lead to dangerous enactments, violence and inadequate public policies.

The Price of Denial: Early Warnings, Arrogant Dismissal, and the Lingering Cost of COVID's Immune Legacy There have been a recent number of articles framing the immune harm from Covid as a new insight. While I am pleased this has entered the mainstream, I am afraid it is too gracious to the lagging scientific consensus of how covid has been wearing away at our immune responses. Especially given how when I raised this based on T cell phenotypes, I was dismissed and attacked with extreme prejudice. Reframing Covid's immune harm as a new insight rather than a long-fought hypothesis contrary to 'immunity debt' achieves several aims: 1) It deemphasizes the role in propagating false narratives that several individuals had along with choice medical journals. For example, the BMJ extensively platformed Alasdair Munro's claims of the 'immunity debt' hypothesis. When an editor was approached with a proposal for how covid was harming immunity by individuals who had published in the BMJ before and myself, they refused to accept it. 2) It saves face for the individuals who staunchly attacked the hypothesis and dismissed it as a joke. Those people also strongly attacked me, and they would go on to claim that it is my fault such a false and ridiculous narrative of immune harm from covid even existed. These are lay people but also others. 3) it preserves a semblance of credibility for the established sources who previously denied the hypothesis and obfuscated it. 4) It shirks accountability for the duty of discernment, consideration, and equipoise that stewards of information and knowledge, like the BMJ, had to the public. They had access to the hypothesis and rationales previously and chose to trounce on it and dismiss it with extreme prejudice. To me, it highlights how many of the experts were ill-equipped to grasp early immunological changes and project them to their outcomes. This was not just an oversight, it was an editorial choice. The author of the BMJ article, Nick Tsergas, confided that the editors wanted to avoid controversy and drama. They wanted to whitewash its history. What did I do to earn such controversy? Tell the truth before other scientists could see. By the time immune harm manifests there is much damage already done. In the first half of 2020, I noted that SARS-CoV-2 had been shown in preprints to downregulate MHC Class I, overstimulate and kill CD8 T cells, and would likely accumulate harm with reinfections. I noted this even in mild cases and was dismissed by many figures, including Francois Balloux Marc Veldhoen, Zeynep Tufekci, and Antonio bertoletti. They did not dismiss kindly. Bertoletti, a senior professor at Duke NUS would reply under my posts calling me a clown and insulting me constantly. I was a medical student at the time and this behavior seemed inappropriate and offensive, especially considering how I was engaging him with genuine concern when I was discussing T cell death with him in the summer of 2020. By late 2022, I was pointing out that many people, after even mild infections, appeared to have reductions in plasmacytoid dendritic cells and other immune changes without reporting symptoms that would fit the conventional definition of Long COVID. These were not dramatic claims; they were mechanistic observations grounded in emerging data. However, the implications were stark. I had numerous media appearances discussing that immune harm was occurring. This was discussed in The Tyee by Andrew Nikiforuk. thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/… In April 2023, FactCheck.org published a piece that characterized concerns about lasting immune effects from mild infections as exaggerated. They quoted Professor Danny Altmann, who stated there was “no phenotype” resembling immunodeficiency, only “nuanced differences” that did not translate to real-world consequences. The article framed early warnings as misinformation, implying that those raising them were overstating risks. This was not neutral correction; it was authoritative closure of debate. The message was clear: mild infection left no meaningful immune scar outside severe disease or formally diagnosed Long COVID. Discussion effectively ended there for many. factcheck.org/2023/04/sciche… Where did factcheck find the authority to promise that no such immune harm was occurring? Did they truly seek to understand what the consequences of broad t cell activation, differentiation, and death would manifest in? The dismissal was reckless and arrogant. And now proven wrong. The personal cost for telling the truth when people were actually concerned about covid was immediate and lasting. I was tagged in threads alongside senior immunologists who dismissed the ideas outright, accused (implicitly or explicitly) of fearmongering or misinterpreting preliminary data. These characterizations spread quickly on social media, embedding themselves in timelines and memories. People lied about me. Zeynep and Jeremy Kamil said that I had paid for my own PhD, when it was actually paid directly by the National Cancer Institute for my discovery of a linked mechanism of T cell death and differentiation. Years later, a search of my name still surfaces echoes of those accusations, unaccompanied by context or correction. Professional relationships cooled; invitations to collaborate quietly dried up. I lost a fellowship offer at the National Cancer Institute as Tom Misteli, the head of NCI research, wrote how, "I needed to learn what I can and can not say." The energy spent defending basic mechanistic possibilities was energy not spent on research or clinical work. It was isolating, and it was unnecessary. This manifested into something remarkably shocking and completely unprecedented in scientific literature. My two greatest and most eminent antithetical-fans teamed up and published an article mocking my twitter handle, saying that mild breakthrough infections correlated with 'fit and happy' t cells. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/im… It was shared across social media with an interpretation to mock my claim that T cells were harmed. People that mocked me cheered, like the Harvard professor Mark Davis, along with zeynep saying that it was a good rebuttal to 'looney twitter-only claims.' On Indie Sage, Christina Pagel did not disagree with the scientific content but expressed disappointment at the devolution of my interlocutors, that she was not a fan of shaming and mocking no matter how outlandish my claims were. She was wrong on both counts. Their mockery is now a testament to their ignorance and the devolution. This is not something they can retract, only deny publicly. When it occurred I reached out to the editor and he asked me if I would like to reply about the scientific content. I wanted to, but, on advice of a friend who was mortified at the conduct of the individuals and the journal itself, asked for an investigation of bullying from professors. The journal concluded the investigation saying that only my followers would know that I was the one being referenced, so were under no fault or obligation to amend the title. They retracted the offer for my response. (I included this saga and the emails to Nick and the BMJ. They chose not to include it.) I continued to watch the literature. The signals did not vanish: persistent T-cell alterations, exhausted phenotypes, subtle shifts in innate compartments. These were not the province of fringe voices; they appeared in mainstream journals, yet the narrative remained that mild infection was immunologically inconsequential for most. The possibility that repeated or even single mild infections could erode immune resilience was treated as speculative at best, irresponsible at worst. I paid a price for insisting otherwise, not in fame or notoriety, but in the quieter currency of reputation and peace of mind. Now, in early 2026, the conversation has shifted. A recent Daily Mail article discusses widespread reports of people “getting sicker more often,” with doctors noting struggling immune defences against routine bugs. The piece quotes Danny Altmann again, this time describing the hypothesis of lasting immune harm from mild COVID as “reasonable.” The idea is presented as fresh and worthy of consideration. There is no mention of the earlier certainty that no such phenotype existed, no acknowledgement that some of us were attacked for articulating precisely this possibility years ago. The system lacks both memory and foresight. The absence of reckoning is striking. Those who confidently declared “no phenotype” now entertain the same hypothesis without reference to prior denial. No correction, no apology, no credit to those who endured the backlash. This is not personal grievance alone; it reflects a broader pattern in science where consensus resists challenge until the evidence becomes overwhelming, then absorbs the insight as if it were always obvious. History is replete with such examples (Semmelweis, Warren and Marshall), yet we seem incapable of learning the lesson. The societal toll compounds the individual one. Delayed acceptance meant delayed mitigation: fewer precautions against reinfection, less urgency in studying immune reconstitution, slower recognition that population-level immune dysregulation might follow waves of mild cases. Excess respiratory illness, rising cancer concerns, unexplained reactivations. These are not abstract. They represent preventable burden born of a refusal to countenance uncomfortable possibilities when they were first raised. Vindication, when it arrives quietly and without acknowledgement, is a hollow reward. The smears linger longer than the evidence ever did. Yet the deeper failure is not personal. It is the persistent hubris that treats early, mechanistic warnings as threats rather than contributions. Until we cultivate the humility to listen when the data are still emerging, rather than demanding certainty before engagement, we will pay this price again in the next crisis. I hope the record shows that some of us tried to warn you, not for credit, but because the immune system deserved better stewardship than it received. I am glad I can look upon this period knowing that I did my very best, was ruthless, about conveying what seemed so clear to me, in very unambiguous terms. What is happening was more important than my professional standing as a fragile, early-career immunologist, because I was placed in a niche position as a specialist in T cell aging and death.

Note Of Extreme Caution To Comrades: DO NOT FALL FOR THE “IT’S ALL ABOUT OIL” LIE I’ve lived through multiple imperial wars where the so-called “left” reflexively responded with the same lazy line: “They’re just there for the oil.” I remember this explicitly during the First Gulf War, and implicitly throughout Iraq, Libya, and Syria. This is historical bunk. The United States never extracted shit from Iraq. Not in any meaningful sense. Not structurally. Not in a way that lowered prices, improved supply, or benefited the American public. The argument collapses entirely once you understand the nature of financialized capital, whose primary objective is not extraction but the prevention of productive extraction in favor of rent, debt, and control. Let me walk you through the contradiction: Trump claims explicitly what the original neocons like Paul Wolfowitz claimed implicitly in the 1990s: that there is a geopolitical payoff in seizing another country’s resources. To a battered American population paying $5 a gallon, that claim sounds concrete. On a subconscious level, people imagine that “taking the oil” means cheaper gas, lower costs, relief from austerity. They don’t care about morality. They care about price. Then the left responds by framing everything as kleptocracy while still implicitly accepting the premise that resources could be taken, but that doing so would merely be “wrong.” This is a losing argument. For someone living under austerity, there is no material counter-logic being offered. You’ve conceded the terrain. But here’s the reality: it never comes. Nothing is extracted. What actually happened in Iraq was not oil extraction, but financial looting. The U.S. state shoveled pork-barrel money into the MIC, especially firms like Halliburton, through no-bid logistics, security, and “reconstruction” contracts. Iraqi oil production, which hovered around 3.5 million barrels per day in the late 1980s, collapsed to a few hundred thousand barrels per day during parts of the 1990s and early 2000s. Even after the U.S. exit in 2011, it took another decade for Iraq to claw its way back to those production levels and only then through Chinese state-led industrial investment, not American capital. So the correct response to Trump’s argument is not moral outrage. It is to deny the premise entirely: these wars produce no material gain for anyone tangibly; only financialization, debt, suppressed production, and long-term economic ruin. Then the US economy falls apart and they print more dollars to synthesize "profit" from thin air. Sure capital accumulation occurs, completely bereft of logic and reality! Ironically, Trump himself understands this. He has repeatedly mocked the old neocons for failing to “take the oil,” lamenting their sheer incompetence and lack of “management.” But that critique misses the deeper truth: they didn’t fail. The system worked exactly as designed. Which brings us to Venezuela. Do you seriously believe that Trump, along with his Palantir Technologies cronies, are about to become industrial planners? That without invasion, without regime change, without national reconstruction, they’ll somehow negotiate a $200 billion, 15-year industrial oil expansion in a country whose infrastructure has been deliberately strangled for a decade? This is a pipe dream of pipe dreams. What’s actually lined up for Venezuela is not extraction, but asset stripping. The firms positioned to “re-enter” Venezuela are overwhelmingly financial, not productive. Asset managers like BlackRock are positioned to absorb distressed sovereign and PDVSA-linked debt, restructure it, and turn future production into collateral streams rather than national revenue. U.S. and European oil majors are waiting not to build capacity but for production-sharing agreements, arbitration rulings, and debt-for-equity swaps that cap output and guarantee rents. Sanctions relief is used as leverage not to expand capacity, but to discipline the state and force Venezuela into IMF-style restructuring, privatization, and legal subordination to Western capital markets. They want the Chinese to pay for this oil in dollars, a minor nuisance for Xi, a silly ploy for the western rentier oligarchs. In a derivatives-driven, dollar-hegemonic system, money is not made by flooding markets with oil. It is made by restricting supply, inflating prices, securitizing future flows, and extracting rents through debt instruments. That is the real play. Not oil for Americans. Not development for Venezuela. But financial control, chopped-up industry, suppressed production, and higher global prices. Here is how the mechanism actually functions, step by step, as a single integrated system: PDVSA entered the 2010s with roughly $30–35 billion in external debt, much of it accumulated during the oil-price collapse after 2014. That debt was issued under New York and international commercial law, not Venezuelan law, making it immediately vulnerable to foreign litigation once payments slowed. U.S. sanctions, primarily enforced through the Treasury Department’s OFAC regime, did not simply “punish” Venezuela. They froze PDVSA’s access to dollar clearing, blocked refinancing, prohibited U.S. persons from rolling over debt, and severed access to spare parts, diluents, insurance, shipping, and reinsurance. This guaranteed production collapse. Output fell from over 2.3 million barrels per day in 2015 to under 700 thousand by 2020. This collapse was then cited as evidence of “mismanagement,” completing the narrative loop. Once payment defaults occurred under sanctions-induced conditions, creditors activated arbitration and litigation channels. Bilateral investment treaties signed in the 1990s gave foreign firms standing in ICSID, the World Bank–linked arbitration system designed explicitly to protect capital against sovereign states. Venezuela now faces tens of billions of dollars in ICSID awards and claims, many tied to pre-Chávez privatizations and post-Chávez nationalizations. Those arbitration awards are enforceable not inside Venezuela, but against Venezuelan assets abroad. This is why CITGO, PDVSA’s U.S. subsidiary, became the primary target. Courts in Delaware treat arbitration judgments as senior claims. The result is not compensation through production, but forced asset liquidation and debt waterfalls. At no point does this process require rebuilding Venezuelan oil capacity. In fact, rebuilding capacity would undermine the entire structure by increasing supply and reducing price leverage. The rational financial outcome is permanently constrained production, collateralized future barrels, and externally controlled cash flows. Sanctions create default. Default activates arbitration. Arbitration enables asset seizure. Asset seizure disciplines the state. Financial firms then step in to “stabilize” the wreckage through debt restructuring, equity swaps, and price-managed reentry. The oil stays mostly in the ground. The rents flow outward. This is why the “they just want the oil” line is not merely wrong but backwards. The oil is most valuable when it is not produced, when it exists as a future claim backing debt, derivatives, and geopolitical leverage. Anyone telling you otherwise is either historically illiterate or selling the lie. Trump is simply accelerating the debt peonage machine, not extracting resources like the Roman Raubbauwirtschaft fantasy. The reality is the western left spent decades making the "it's wrong to extract resources cus' muh morality" argument and IT NEVER HAPPENED. It's a loser, it's time to contradict the financial oligarchy as FUNDAMENTALLY UNPRODUCTIVE in all senses.

@alon_mizrahi Your posts are always refreshing and incisive. Thanks. Hoping for a better and more just world, which can only mean a stop to the kind of policies and enactments since October 7.

I read it differently: this is a polite 'fuck you' to Netanyahu and his dreams of bringing down every powerful actor in West Asia, including Turkey, in his messianic quest to dominate the region, if not the planet. By referring to Erdogan positively, Trump is letting Israel know that the US will not go to war in the Levant for greater Israel, which would necessitate weakening and destabilizing Turkey - as well as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt

I have admired that guy for so long that I have a hard time reconciling mental representations (and idealization) with reality as it is revealed. He called me once and wanted to meet about my work and was so thrilled!!! Never happened as schedule conflict but at the time, it sure had made my day. You see through things well.

Chomsky was a fraud all along. He taught no actual resistance. It was all high-level fake. - Believe no one who doesn't preach the destruction of institutions Break, boycott, replace. There is no fixing Western establishments

Incredible new cartoon about the election of far-right governments in South America, by @monerojerge

@ori_goldberg Hey late. Glad to hear you are getting encouragement and support from the community. Stay strong and much love.

Friends, you really are lovely. Slept some and woke up to your moving messages of solidarity and support. I am much better. I'm not going anywhere any time soon. We will prevail and we will do it together, the only way it should be done. Love and solidarity and thanks ❤️💪🏻🫂❣️

I cannot believe someone would say “the measure…Jews”. I mean it matters but that also holds for any group. This is so weird that it makes me speechless. 2nd generation Holocaust btw but this is truly laughable… Too weird (and I have seen my share) to even react as hard to comprehend what goes through one’s mind to state this (especially today) while ignoring anything else… So if Hitler had been say solely focused on gypsies, it would be fine???

No. The measure of a civilization is how it treats its most downtrodden and disadvantaged, regardless of whether it is because of religion, race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic or immigration status. That may or may not be Jews. However you treat the most hated group in your society is the best measure of your morality.

A huge dip in the jet stream is dragging Arctic air deep into the mid and eastern United States — leaving large parts of the country around 12°C colder than normal. Climate instability isn’t just about record heat — it’s about wild swings and extremes.

In the next decade or so we are going to have 1 billion refugees, millions dying from the wet bulb effect, the biggest flooding and droughts for 100 000 years, and the consequential collapse of the world economy. And don't mention AMOC. rogerhallam.com/still-not-waki…

@Wisdom_HQ 2

The Israeli policy in Syria is very similar to the American one in Venezuela. Creating a crisis out of nothing in order to manufacture a war for political purposes.