Let’s start by meeting Ken Allen. He was incredibly adept at his job, and led a peaceful life. Liked and respected by his local community, he achieved fame as an escape artist, demonstrating forward thinking skills and dexterity. Even as an adolescent, Ken displayed the aptitude with mechanical skills that would serve him well as an adult. Admired by his fans, he passed away in 2000 at the young age of 29.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, Ken Allen was not a person, he was a Bornean orangutan. Dubbed the ‘Hairy Houdini’ by the local media, Ken escaped captivity from San Diego zoo nine times from 1985 till the late 1990s. After climbing what were thought to be escape-proof walls, he would wander around the zoo like a tourist.

He was never aggressive or violent towards any human or animal. Well, just once, when he threw rocks at another orangutan Otis, the latter known to be obnoxious and unpleasant to other animals and humans. Zookeepers were constantly amazed at Ken Allen’s ingenuity. He could unscrew bolts, remember the location of pathways to follow, and even enlisted the support of other orangutans.

The zoo authorities provided Ken with three females, hoping to divert Ken’s energies from wanderlust to just plain sexual lust. They were wrong. One of his female companions found a crowbar left behind by a zoo worker; she opened a window and Ken climbed through it in yet another escape.

Zoo keepers went ‘undercover’, posing as tourists in the hopes of finding out how exactly Ken was escaping. The other orangutans, and Ken, spotted the zoo agents. Lulling them into a false sense of security, Ken would stage elaborate wall climbing ‘escape attempts’, thus fooling the zoo agents to relax their guard. Ken, increasingly aided and abetted by orangutan accomplices, would carry out the real escape days later.

Sadly, Ken was diagnosed with a type of cancer – lymphoma – and euthanised in 2000. His exploits as an escape artist provide us with an interesting insight into animal cognition. Can our primate cousins understand the world the way we do? Certainly Ken demonstrated a level of planning, tool use and perception sophisticated enough to outsmart the San Diego zoo authorities.

Jane Goodall (1934 – 2025), the English primatologist, passed away in October this year. Multiple commentaries have elaborated her astonishing career and accomplishments as a scientist, a woman in a male-dominated field. Let’s highlight a few of the ways she made us rethink our relationship with primates.

Rather than mindless, brutish simpletons, our primate cousins display in basic form the emotional and social complexities that humans navigate every day. For instance, chimpanzees and gorillas have used tools, experience emotional states, and form webs of interrelationships. Goodall made us consider the emotional and social lives of primates, even in their embryonic form. We can see them demonstrate what we regard as intelligence.

Animal cognition is not the exclusive preserve of primates; there is a growing and extensive body of literature documenting and exploring the realm of cephalopod intelligence. Cephalopods are a class of marine animals which include squid, cuttlefish and octopus. The latter, a marine invertebrate, seems like an unusual candidate for the study of animal cognition. Yet, there are numerous documentary specials and biological studies examining the remarkable smarts of the octopus.

The octopus not only has eight tentacles, but nine brains. These brains, rather than located in one spot, operate as a distributed network of information gathering and processing centres. Octopuses are known to have used coconut shells as protection from predators, even using corals as a defensive shield. In captivity, they have been observed opening jar lids to extract food, even escaping through gaps in the water pipes, swimming hundreds of metres to an open ocean.

The octopus, unlike other molluscs, lost its protective shell millions of years ago. Without it, the soft flesh of the octopus became vulnerable to predators. Compensating for this loss, the octopus had to rely on developing street smarts, so to speak, outmanoeuvring its hunters. The octopus did have defence mechanisms before it lost its shell, to be certain. But that crucial change provided an enormous boost to the development of cephalopod intelligence.

While being solitary creatures, octopuses display moods and emotional reactions – hiding under rocks being shy, but also curious and attempting interactions with observers or objects in their vicinity.

We cannot conclude our exploration into the world of animal cognition without paying our respects to C341 – the number assigned to Félicette, the first cat to survive a journey into space. Long forgotten in the rough and tumble Cold War competition for spaceflight supremacy, Félicette was a stray cat launched into space by the French authorities in 1963.

From the 1950s onwards, scientists wanted to study the effects of space travel and cosmic radiation on living organisms. Both the US and USSR had sent mammals on cosmic journeys; the most famous was that of Laika the dog in 1957.

Launched into space on Sputnik-2 by the Soviets, she became world famous for this mission. However, at that time, there was no technology for reentry to Earth. The Moscow space scientists knew that Laika’s first voyage would be her last. She died in space.

Félicette was one of 13 stray cats recruited into the French space medicine agency, the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique (CERMA). Passing a rigorous training programme, Félicette was selected to be the first cat launched by France into space.

The mission was launched from the Sahara, French Algeria in October 1963. Félicette passed the Karman line, the technical boundary between the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Lasting 15 minutes, Félicette spent a longer time in space than Katy Perry and her glitzy friends.

Scientists back on Earth were monitoring the cat’s heart rate, breathing and other vitals through electrodes implanted in her body. The capsule carrying Félicette detached from the rocket, and parachuted safely back to Earth. She had made history for the French space programme.

A few months after she completed her mission, Félicette was euthanised so the scientists could examine her brain for any impact from cosmic radiation. What they learned from the autopsy is exactly nothing. She was gone, and forgotten – well, not quite.

In 2019, a bronze statue of the intrepid feline was unveiled at the International Space University near Strasbourg, France. It depicts sitting atop the Earth. She takes her place among the other animals sacrificed for space exploration.

Studying animal cognition and behaviour will hopefully lead to a better understanding of ourselves, our relationship with the natural world, an equip us with the skills to comprehend the subjective experience of our animal relatives.

This month, 80 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began. What were they and why are they important as a starting point for the current article? In brief, the trials were a series of international military tribunals formed for the express purpose of prosecuting the top Nazi German politicians, military commanders and economic leaders for the crimes they committed in pursuit of aggressive predatory warfare.

The victorious allies – the US, Britain, France and the USSR – agreed to form a tribunal, assembling irrefutable evidence of Nazi atrocities, such as the extermination of European Jews, exploiting forced labour in concentration camps, and systematic violence directed at civilian populations. Indictments were filed against the main Nazi defendants in October 1945, and trial itself commenced in November.

The network of concentration camps established by the Nazi hierarchy was extensively documented, and its inner workings were elaborated in full detail. The horrific nature of these camps constituted a powerful indictment of Nazi atrocities.

Let us now examine an irony of history.

In 1945, British soldiers, among others, helped to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp complex in northern Germany. Originally a prisoner of war camp, it was expanded during the war to accommodate civilian prisoners. The full horrors of the place, the use of forced labour, mass starvation of prisoners, the sadistic beatings of inmates by SS guards, were publicised to highlight the crimes of the Nazis.

Only a few years after that, the British military and colonial authorities in Kenya, established a nation-wide network of internment camps, where Kenyans were held without trial, subjected to inhumane torture, and used as forced labour.

The British military was waging an anticolonial counterinsurgency against the Kikuyu nation, and its military wing, the Mau Mau. The English took civilians as hostages, a practice that had been condemned as a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg trials.

In our own times, the genocidal violence inflicted by the Israeli military on the Palestinians, and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, constitute grievous crimes against humanity. Millions were killed and displaced, and many more Iraqis and Palestinians are still suffering. The perpetrators of these crimes, the politicians whose decisions led to these criminal actions, remain free and unaccountable.

Multiple human rights and nongovernmental organisations are explicitly stating that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. I am not making this up; no, I am not motivated by a homicidal antisemitism. Numerous scholarly and mainstream organisations, such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, (Medicins sans Frontieres) are all collecting evidence that the Israeli government, and its military forces, are guilty of genocide in Palestine.

Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and former Israeli military officer, arrives at the inescapable conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. His article ‘I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It’ is worth reading in its entirety.

We should always be cautious when applying serious terms, like the word genocide, to a given situation. There is no disputing the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. The immediate results of the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials were to establish a framework of international laws and rules by which all states (and nonstate forces for that matter) must comply when dealing with each other, and their respective populations.

We must continue to teach the lessons of the Holocaust, so that future generations never forget. The phrase Never Again is certainly one way of sensitising ourselves against those who would repeat the crimes of the past.

The Nuremberg trials, and the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings, established a precedent where individual military officers, politicians, and businesspeople could be held to account for crimes against humanity.

The subsequent Nuremberg trials, held by the International Military Tribunal, prosecuted second-level Nazis, and those in the wider business community who assisted and actively participated in the commission of crimes against humanity. For instance, one of those trials – out of a series of twelve – charged German doctors and administrators with conducting inhumane medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, without their consent.

One of the main defendants at the original Nuremberg trials with Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892 – 1946), an Austrian-born Nazi and Reichskommisar (Reich commissioner) of German-occupied Netherlands. He was basically the governor of the Netherlands for Germany. When the Dutch resisted his rule, he cut off the supply of food and coal (the latter used for fuel) as collective punishment.

The 1944-45 winter is known as the Hunger Winter. Intentionally starving large portions of the Netherlands, thousands died of malnutrition and freezing. The effects of this human-made famine are still examined by medical professionals and historians today. Dutch authorities commemorate – if that is the right word – that particularly painful chapter in their nation’s history out of respect to the victims.

Seyss-Inquart was convicted of crimes against humanity, sentenced to death and hanged in 1946.

The BBC, hardly a bastion of leftist propaganda, published an article in August this year detailing how Israel’s actions have resulted in a human-induced famine in Gaza. Citing spiralling rates of child malnutrition and poverty, the situation for the Palestinians is dire. Who are the Israeli politicians and military commanders responsible for this crime? Who are the Israeli equivalents of Seyss-Inquart?

Let us perform a revealing comparison when it comes to the treatment of genocide. This examination owes its origin to Caitlin Johnstone, a political writer. There is no shortage of condemnations of the genocidal atrocities committed by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The massacres carried out by this murderous militia are plain for all the world to see.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a major funder and military ally of the RSF. The UAE receives extensive financial and military backing from the United States. Numerous American politicians have been able to draw the dots – the US is complicit in the genocidal actions of the Darfur-based paramilitary group.

No-one has lost their job because they denounced the RSF. No-one been canceled or silenced for speaking out about the genocidal RSF. No-one has faced an army of online trolls, hysterically accusing the anti-genocide voices of being hateful, or propaganda tools of a foreign power, or apologists for racial hatred.

Yet pro-Palestine advocates face precisely that kind of sustained, organised political pressure. And there are academics who have lost their jobs for speaking up about Palestine.

The state that claims to be the inheritor of the victims of the Holocaust has been misusing and repurposing the memory of the dead to insulate itself from any and all criticism. If the phrase Never Again is to have any meaning and relevance today, it must be applicable to all victims of genocide, including the Palestinians.

Every mobile device has a camera, and every drone takes detailed pictures of the territory it surveils. We can all take on the role of explorers, photographing what we see around us. We take pristine pictures of the landscape, close up shots of flowers, videos of cats, and drone photos of enemy movements. Surely our knowledge has increased because of the easy accessibility of all this information?

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, reports of cryptids have increased exponentially. Throughout this year, people have reporting sightings, or submitted photos, purportedly showing the existence of one or more of these mysterious creatures.

What are cryptids? They are animals, or human-animal hybrids, whose existence is unproven. The lack of evidence has not stopped people believing in these mythical creatures – much like belief in gods and goddesses. We are all familiar with Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Yeti, Chupacabra, multiple werewolves, the half- human half-chimpanzee Bili Ape – the list goes on.

We can see the grainy picture of some murky, mysterious creature – our high tech society still likes to engage in rampant speculation about hazy photographs. Certainly Australia has its fair share of cryptids – the bunyip, the Yowie man – and these stories stem from distortions and retellings of indigenous people’s culture. They also undoubtedly help promote tourism to Australia.

The interlinking of humans with other species challenges our taxonomic understanding. When an unidentified creature is discovered, scientists undertake a verification procedure. A type specimen is identified, its features and structure catalogued, models made and morphological analysis performed before any definitive pronouncement can be made.

While keeping an open mind, the best response to the repeated and unverified claims of mythic human-beast creatures is scientific skepticism. It is important to have an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out. We need to keep a bullshit filter on, to weed out beliefs that are harmful or fictional.

In our age of social media, belief in cryptids has gained in popularity. Television channels airing purported documentaries – finding Bigfoot – help to shape public perceptions. Indeed, the irony is that such publicity helps to humanise these half-beastly creatures, portraying them as just much misunderstood beings – an updated Harry and the Hendesons scenario. Surely these Shreks of the underworld require empathy and understanding, not unending malice?

In the realm of TikTok and hashtags, fascination with the unknown creates a community based on shared beliefs. Cryptid believers get together, share their stories, hold conventions and rail against a stubborn and recalcitrant scientific establishment. Type the terms ‘cryptid fan art’ into your favourite search engine, and you will see millions of results.

To be sure, folklore is the origin of many of these cryptid stories, cultural beliefs that have evolved over the ages. Pagan religions, as distinct from the monotheistic cousins (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) involve multiple interacting gods and mysterious creatures. The line between human and nonhuman was blurred, and thus there arose beings that occupied that borderline space between human and nonhuman animals.

Every nagging fear that we humans seem to have is projected into a cryptid creature to provide bodily form to those fears. The ancient Greeks, being a seafaring people, were aware of the dangers of navigating the open sea. While they were expert navigators, they gave expression to their anxieties about the risks of the open oceans.

The aspidochelone, the giant sea turtle or whale, was alleged to have been so huge it was mistaken for an island. A fabled sea creature, it was said to have drowned and devoured sailors who mistakenly, docked and set up settlements on its gigantic back. In the Greek mythological tradition, it is the functional equivalent of Satan, a fabled creature who deceives those unsuspecting souls it eventually devours.

There are humanoid cryptids that are of more recent origin. Our fascination with life in the depths of the oceans has not abated with marine discoveries. In 2002, Japanese whaling researchers, operating in the icy waters of Antarctica, reported seeing the Ningen, a mysterious half-human half-whale creature.

Antarctic waters are an open field for cryptozoological discoveries. What is interesting about the Ningen is that it was first reported on online message boards. From there, the Ningen took on a life of its own – no pun intended. Japanese whaling constitutes a heatedly debated topic in Australia and other Anglophone nations. The Japanese government, while admitting its whale hunting practices, couches its maritime whaling as scientific research.

Reporting on an as yet unidentified sea creature, especially one with curiously human features, may be a way to deflect the moral outrage at whale hunting, blunting the attacks on Japan from foreign governments. Indeed, as reports of the Ningen were amplified on social media, the creature took on more human forms; a head resting on two walking legs, a kind of Antarctic version of Bigfoot.

It is important to balance curiosity about the wonders of the natural world with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism. Folkloric monsters and cryptids are fascinating as cultural artefacts. They tell us more about how cultures evolve, rather than revealing any mysteries of nature.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan far right politician Maria Corina Machado has been met with scorn and derision as a travesty by multiple writers and commentators. Machado, a ultrarightist agitator for the Venezuelan oligarchy, is anything but a peace activist.

Aligning with the policy goals of the Trump administration, she has consistently supported the violent overthrow of the Bolivarian revolution in her home nation. Her record as an advocate for violence and a coup plotter is clear for all to see.

Strongly supporting the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Machado has welcomed Israel’s attack on Gaza, and expressing her solidarity with the Israeli military as a joint civilisational struggle against Islam. It may initially appear unusual that an extreme right winger from Venezuela would openly link up with the Israeli government, but dig a little deeper and we can observe an ideological connection.

The European far right, with whom Netanyahu’s political bloc is aligned, conceives of Islam as a major threat – the ‘infidels’ – who must be expunged from Western nations. Obsessed with reliving and revisiting the Reconquista – the 15th century European Christian struggle to physically expel the Muslim population from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain/Portugal) – views Europe as under siege from Islamic infiltration today. Machado, a representative of the Venezuelan ultraright, sees herself as part of this inter-civilisational conflict.

That is enough about Machado – you may read the evaluation of her Nobel peace prize award from commentators more knowledgeable than myself. What we should focus on now is the deliberate cultivation of celebrity dissidents, advocates of US regime change wars who grace our television screens, have access to the major corporate media, and whose opinions we are supposed to take seriously.

Machado is only one example of a carefully cultivated regime change asset, provided credibility in our corporate media, and whose function is to soften up public opinion for a barbaric US regime change war. Spokespersons for imperial power, these celebrity dissidents become a familiar fixture, setting the terms of how we understand overseas wars.

When their perspective closely aligns the goals of the Pentagon and US State Department, they are welcomed as agents of change, no matter how remote their ideas are from reality. The Nobel peace prize is looking less like a reward for services to peace, and more as a reward for subservience to US foreign policy objectives.

What do I have mind when I talk about celebrity dissidents? I have written about ultranationalist Israeli politician and ex-Soviet dissenter Natan Sharansky before. Today, let’s explore a similar dissident turned regime change spokesperson – Garry Kasparov.

Famous the world over as a chess champion, which he undoubtedly is, he gained a new generation of fans as the grand chess master defeated by Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer in 1997. Computer algorithms, through sheer processing power, finally out-calculated Kasparov over multiple chess games.

That was not the end of Kasparov, by no means. Born Garik Kimovich Weinstein in 1963 in then Soviet Azerbaijan, he is Armenian on his mother’s side. Taking up chess from an early age, chess was and still is a national sport in former Soviet republics.

From an early age, Kasparov adopted a stridently pro-US imperialist outlook, courtesy of his conservative parents. He admitted, many years later, that he was named after former US President Harry Truman, whom his parents admired. Truman was responsible for the saturation bombing of North Korea, which cost millions of lives and decimated the country’s infrastructure. Admiring the Korean War was only the first US imperial war of which Kasparov would approve.

As chairperson of the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), and vice president of the World Liberty Congress, he has vociferously advocated for US invasions of Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela – nations which, despite the nature of their politically differing governments, are all targets of US hostility, sanctions and cultural warfare.

These groups, while officially classified as nongovernmental organisations, receive copious amounts of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a think tank well known for its links to the CIA. The NED is a soft power instrument for US imperial objectives. The World Liberty Congress and RDI have US military generals and former intelligence operatives on their boards of directors. It is easy to be a dissident when you have the financial and media backing of powerful organisations.

Kasparov reminds me of another chess champion, the late Bobby Fischer. The latter, after a successful career in chess, sank into the cesspit of conspiracy theories. Fischer was rightly ostracised for his bizarre beliefs. Kasparov has certainly promoted his fair share of bizarre conspiracy theories, such as the New Chronology.

Believers of this particular flavour of eccentricity claim that the Middle Ages never happened, that Ancient Greece and Rome only ended a few hundred years ago, and that Jesus actually lived in the 12th century. Kasparov is free to believe whatever he likes, but far from being ostracised like Fischer, he continues to have access to international media platforms.

Kasparov is absolutely certain that Russia’s 2022 invasion of eastern Ukraine constitutes genocide. He has repeated this claim ad nauseam in his multiple media interviews. If that is the case, he has demonstrated a glaring hypocrisy – failing to similarly denounce the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza as amounting to genocide. Increasing numbers of international observers and groups, including Physicians for Human Rights, have explicitly stated that Israel is guilty of genocide.

The plight of the Palestinians is of no interest to a regime change operative such as Kasparov. Deploying the term genocide in a cynical, emotionally manipulative way to further US imperial interests is his only concern.

Exposing the agenda of celebrity dissidents helps us to avoid falling into their political cesspit. Kasparov has built a financially lucrative career as a paid propagandist for an imperial regime; so did Julius Streicher.

My late father, in a burst of enthusiasm, excitedly explained to me the story of the German pocket battleship, the Graf Spee. The Kriegsmarine, the German war navy, had been targeting British commercial shipping in the Atlantic in the 1930s. The much vaunted British navy, inheritors of the triumphant mantle of Lord Nelson and Trafalgar, had suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the German navy.

I remember my father explaining to me the battles this naval vessel had with English warships – I was about eight or nine years old. I listened intently, and got caught up in the shared excitement; my father was not a man of outwardly expressive emotions, so to see him so animated about a topic was something worth remembering.

In fact, hey dad, do I detect a certain underlying yet unmistakable admiration for the skill and determination of the commander of the German Panzerschiff (armoured ship)?

The German navy, according to the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, was restricted from building heavy warships by the Allied powers. The German government however, managed to circumvent these impositions by redesigning and reclassifying its ships as ‘pocket cruisers’. Make no mistake, there was nothing harmless or diminutive about them – the German navy took the naval battle to the Royal Navy with gusto.

The British, priding themselves on having the most powerful maritime force in the world, had taken a battering at the hands of the Kriegsmarine. Between September and December 1939, the Admiral Graf Spee had sunk a total of nine ships. She had a top speed of 28 knots, which meant at the time that only the elite of English naval forces could keep up with her.

The English Admiralty, under the leadership of Winston Churchill, had deployed numerous warships to target the Graf Spee – the Germans managed to sink all of them. The Royal Oak, the pride of the English navy, was safely anchored at Scapa Flow – the Germans sank her as well.

Serious questions were being asked about the competency of Churchill, and the wider Admiralty, in confronting the German threat. A public propaganda victory was needed – and the battle involving the Graf Spee provided that.

Confronted by three British warships in the South Atlantic in December 1939, the Graf Spee exchanged heavy fire with the British forces, before escaping to the neutral port of Montevideo, Uruguay. The latter remained neutral during the war.

Lacking any reinforcements, and discouraged by reports that the British navy was sending extra warships (reports that turned out to be false), the commander of the Graf Spee ordered the scuttling of the ship. He committed suicide three days later.

The English side milked this victory for its propaganda value. Here was the Royal Navy, victorious again, reviving the best traditions of Lord Nelson and Trafalgar. While London was eager to capitalise on this success, the battle was not a straight-out David versus Goliath story. Indeed, the US Naval Institute states that this battle was badly fought by the English, the latter even allowing the Graf Spee a certain leeway to escape.

Be that as it may, the propaganda value of the sinking of the Graf Spee proved immeasurably incalculable to the British side. The value of morale, bolstered by propaganda victories, is even more important than the details of military engagements.

Propaganda value comes to mind when we consider the most fatal event of the short lived 1982 Falklands war. Britain, in fighting the Argentine forces, deliberately sank the ARA Belgrano, an Argentine warship. The attack, carried out by a nuclear-armed British submarine, resulted in the deaths of 323 Argentine sailors. The ship was outside the exclusion zone established by the British government around the islands.

What is important to note here is the response of the British tabloid media, particularly the Murdoch-owned press. The headlines in May 1982 were dominated by the gloating, screaming statement ‘GOTCHA’. Our lads sank that ship, and this was an occasion for jingoistic flag waving.

Ironically, the Belgrano started its life as the USS Phoenix, an American navy ship. Surviving the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, she was sold to Argentina in 1951. Updated with British missiles in the 1970s, she was sunk in May 1982.

The effects of imperial propaganda outlast the actual military conflict, influencing public debate and perceptions of overseas wars. World War 2 ended 80 years ago, yet we are still living in its shadow, in many ways. It took 80 years, but finally, the United States authorities publicly acknowledged what they always knew privately; they did not need to use nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those atomic bombings were militarily needless, but served a powerful propaganda purpose.

Japan was exhausted and drained, and the Anglo-American allies knew it. Truman’s closest advisers warned him against using nuclear weapons, but the Cold War was on. The bombings served as a warning shot to the USSR – look at this new powerful weapon we have.

In this era when Hollywood movies mediate our understanding of World War 2, it is more important than ever to clear the obfuscatory role of imperial propaganda so we can see the reality of the world in which we live.

Sorry Uncle, I never became a psychiatrist.

That may seem like a strange way to begin an article, but there is a reason behind it.

Decades ago, when I was a young university student, I studied psychology, among other subjects. My uncle, a friendly and outgoing fellow, would make jokes about my grandfather (his father) getting free therapy once I became a psychiatrist. Indicating towards me, he told my grandad, ‘he’s going to be a psychiatrist, so you can get all the free therapy you need!’

Beneath the joking around, I sensed that my uncle carried a certain pride that his nephew was going to be a psychiatrist. I did not have the heart to tell him that I was never going to be a psychiatrist. Psychology is a distinct field from psychiatry – I did not want to spoil the moment.

Psychiatry is based in medicine; psychiatrists are medical doctors who specialise in workings and disorders of the brain. They are trained in neuroscience, and approach patients from a clinical and neurological perspective. They can prescribe medications if required.

Psychologists are not medical doctors, but they study human behaviour, emotions, cognitive processes and development, and the neuroscience of the brain and nervous system. They approach mental health through talk therapy, solving mental health problems through nonmedical techniques, such as behavioural modification and cognitive changes.

This does not mean the two fields are in direct opposition – far from it. Psychologists and psychiatrists can and do work in tandem, both intending to achieve the same goals of managing and improving mental health. Psychiatrists are graduates in medicine, while psychologists possess a doctorate in social sciences. Psychiatrists approach mental disorders as malfunctions in the human brain, prioritising a medical approach. Psychologists examine the social, emotional, cultural and environmental conditions that impact mental health.

Every one of us is an amateur psychologist of sorts, examining and trying to make sense of people’s behaviour. Other people are such an important part of our daily lives, we must continue our interactions within a social and cultural matrix composed of networks of people. Understanding patterns of human behaviour partly explains the persistence (and ongoing popularity) of astrology.

The particular pseudoscience of astrology exploits our basic need to understand ourselves, our cultural environment and the behaviour of the people around us. We want to know what the future holds for us, and people are an important determinant factor. Horoscopes give us ready-made tools to approach human behaviour. Astrology is still generalised balderdash, but it is widespread.

We can laugh it off, but then consider the following. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration, with its finger on the nuclear button, employed astrologers as consultants for its foreign and domestic policies. When the US administration, with its power to obliterate life on Earth, listens and takes seriously the ‘findings’ of astrology, then that is no laughing matter.

We are all aware that nuclear conflagration would mean the end of life as we know it. Surely no one is mad enough to advocate a strike that would predictably provoke a nuclear response from rival powers?

Well, in 1958, then US President Dwight Eisenhower rejected demands by his military chiefs to launch a nuclear attack on China. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leading body of uniformed officers in the Department of Defence, advocated attacking China with nuclear weapons, in particular to support Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist militants. The latter had been launching commando raids into mainland China from two northern Taiwanese islands.

Eisenhower overruled the Navy and Air Force top brass, but this incident is very revealing. Psychopaths are not always the creepy loners depicted in the movies, but also wear uniforms and business suits, ingratiate themselves into society’s institutions, and are high functioning individuals, making decisions impacting our lives.

In this day and age, we cannot talk about mental health without addressing the issue of artificial intelligence (AI). We can all see the widespread impact of AI over numerous fields of human activity, and mental health is no exception. AI chatbots are currently providing a growing avenue of mental health applications. Talking to a chatbot – is that beneficial for our mental health and wellbeing?

The answer to that question is – it depends on how you use it. Chatbots provide an easily accessible, 24/7 readily available service of mental health. The privacy of the chat is appealing, and its immediate accessibility is important. Appointments with psychologists and psychiatrists take time, and there is still the stigma surrounding seeing a therapist. For instance, the New York Times has been running a series of articles attacking the efficacy of psychiatry and psychotropic drugs.

Whether the NY Times is correct or not, I do not know. I do know that telling only one side of the story – the ‘psychiatry is bad and relies on pushing drugs’ claim – only adds to the stigma of seeking out help for mental illnesses.

While AI chatbots may be beneficial in the short term, they lack a crucial dimension – empathy. The emotional support and connections provided by human interactions cannot be replicated by AI. Chatbots are great for chatting, but they cannot diagnose and treat mental health disorders. Emotional intelligence is just as important as technical abilities when addressing mental health issues.

I feel compelled to ask how AI chatbots are going to assist the Palestinian children in Gaza, currently undergoing a catastrophic trauma facing the relentless attacks by the Israeli army. Their trauma is going to be generational, as they experience the destruction of the society in which they live. Palestinian children in Gaza are dealing with severe anxiety, depression, nightmares, and a worsening humanitarian crisis. Human solidarity and connection with the outside world is needed more than ever.

How about we construct a society that measures its success, not by the number of billionaires it has, but by the number of people lifted out of serious mental health issues?

The US Energy Department, every few months, recycles a particular proposal for approaching the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI). The proposal, last mentioned in July by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, is that the United States requires a new Manhattan Project for AI. The US, it is argued, faced with strong competition from international powers in the AI area, needs to achieve predominance in AI technology so rival nations will be forced to acquiesce to US demands.

This analogy, while seductive in its simplicity, is based on false premises, and will lead to a mutually destructive AI race. New technologies must be developed, not on the basis of national paranoia and a desire for military superiority, but in a collaborative and demilitarised setting – there is enough knowledge capital and glory to go around.

The Manhattan Project was the American government’s effort to construct an atomic weapon. That project, while seemingly successful with the detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as culminating points, contains dangerous illusions. Rather than a template for success, the Manhattan Project provides a cautionary tale about a runaway arms race, a case where a scientific project was unguided by ethical considerations.

The militarisation of nuclear technology rested on the false assumption that security and safety reside in superseding other nations. Eric Ross, writing in Common Dreams magazine, states that US President Harry Truman regarded the Manhattan Project as the biggest scientific gamble in history.

The premise for building a nuclear weapon was that Nazi Germany was rapidly constructing an atomic bomb – a premise the Allied powers knew to be false. American and British intelligence had penetrated the communications network of Nazi Germany’s military. While German scientists were working on a controlled nuclear chain reaction, they were decades away from creating anything resembling a nuclear weapon.

By 1945, with Germany’s armies in retreat, and Japan actively considering terms of surrender (months prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the original premise of nuclear weapons construction – that our enemies were building one – evaporated.

Indeed, the first human-induced controlled nuclear chain reaction was achieved in the United States in 1942. Dubbed the Chicago Pile 1, this successful nuclear chain reaction was done under the supervision of Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi. The scientists working in the Chicago laboratory were well aware of the potential military application of nuclear power, and fought tooth-and-nail to prevent the militarisation of atomic power.

Throughout the war years, the Chicago scientists, such as Leo Szilard, adamantly opposed the development of nuclear weapons. Their appeals and protests were ignored by the emergent military-scientific complex.

The Chicago physicists were acutely aware of the catastrophic consequences of building atomic weapons. They asked the US government that if these weapons were to be used against Japan, it would be advisable to first demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb by targeting a militarily neutral, uninhabited region. That would give the Tokyo authorities time to reconsider their position, should they witness the devastating effects of the atomic bomb. Such proposals were ignored by the US military authorities.

July this year marked the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test project, the first controlled nuclear explosion on Earth. Detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16 1945, the location was in desert country, but was totally uninhabited. New Mexico residents downwind of the explosion – the downwinders – suffered the effects of radiation poisoning, and died of numerous types of cancers.

The Trinity explosion was conducted under the supervision of the Los Alamos laboratory, the heart of the Manhattan Project. The scientists who protested the military application of nuclear research made their voices loud and clear at the very inception of nuclear technology. Their ethical concerns, and their warnings regarding the starkly nightmarish scenario of nuclear war, was suppressed.

Soon after the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union and other nations quickly embarked on their own nuclear weapon projects, thus ushering in the arms race predicted by the Chicago scientists. Drawing parallels between the onset of the nuclear age, and the dawning age of AI, is not completely wrong, but we must not replicate the problems and hazardous outcomes of the Manhattan Project.

Being at the forefront of a new wave of technology, numerous scientists and computer engineers have warned of the harmful consequences of untrammelled AI. In fact, more commentators are pointing out the deleterious consequences of AI data centres on the environment. Data centres, which are the powerhouses generating answers to our AI questions, consume vast quantities of water to cool down – and consume enough electricity to power small cities.

Each query that we make with AI requires natural resources to power the computer processing required for a successful answer. AI is being used as a digital substitute for human activity, answering everything from our medical questions, addressing our mental health, matching us with potential romantic partners, designing our graphics, writing our essays – and hallucinating its fair share of bullshit in the process.

It is not exaggeration to say that AI is being used to con all of us – replacing human judgements with a stochastic parrot. Are there no useful purposes for AI? Yes, we can answer our basic questions in record time. However, relying on AI will be our collective downfall. The AI arms race between nations has already begun in many ways. Note the hyper-anxiety of the Anglophone corporate media when China released its own cheaper, more easily accessible version of AI, DeepSeek.

China’s DeepSeek AI burst the US Silicon Valley AI bubble, and signalled to the world that the United States (nor any other single nation for that matter) would be able to achieve AI unipolarity, monopolising the technology as a way to coerce other countries. The United States has a long history of deploying nuclear weapons superiority as a form of geopolitical blackmail.

It is time to divest the big tech oligarchy of its power to control and deploy AI in a way that displaces human labour. AI can actually supplement labouring activities, and serve our needs, not the profit margins of the tech giants.