Max Teichmann

Psycho politics has been a recurring explanatory option, at least in academia, since Freud’s volumes in the early 1920s, with Reich, Fromm, and the Frankfurt school building on Freud’s earlier forays, from the early 1930s onwards. Obviously, philosophers, historians, and political theorists had provided many kinds of psychological explanations of leaders’ movements and classes from Greek times onwards, but there is little doubt that Freud involved some new ways of considering political behaviour. Psycho politics has waxed and waned ever since.

These books are about the American Empire and its influence, with the first taking Australia as its focal point. Kolko’s monumental study of Vietnam and its War, and the American role therein and elsewhere, doesn’t even mention Australia. Fair enough, for we were only one of the cosmetic effects employed by Washington to try to cover the hideous face of the War she was conducting.