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"We may be inhumane, but if we rescue our nation, we have performed the greatest deed in the world."
by Richard A. Koenigsberg
We don’t want to recognize that Hitler is us: his ideology of nationalism is so conventional and ordinary. Hitler took these ordinary ideas to a radical extreme, revealing the pathology contained within them. We don’t want to know that profound destructiveness and pathology are not separate from what is “normative.”
To understand war and societal violence, begin with Hitler. Hitler constitutes a model; his thinking a paradigm. Germany was conceived as an absolutely good object; and Jews the absolutely evil enemy. The essence of political leadership is to identify evil enemies. Leaders "know evil." Their own paranoia defines political culture. Jews in Nazi Germany were a paradigm for any “enemy.”
Enemies are groups of people imagined to be causing the breakdown of society; the destruction of the sacred object or sacred ideal. Collective forms of violence seek to rescue the sacred object or ideal: to destroy what seems to be working toward the disintegration of the idea.
Hitler’s objective was to “save the life” of Germany by destroying that force or enemy working to cause the nation to fall apart. Hitler’s mission was rescue. Societal violence revolves around “rescuing” a sacred objective from a destructive force. Hysterical anxiety lies at the heart of political culture. The sacred object seems threatened by a group or class of people acting to destroy this object. Radical action is necessary. Violence is required. Politics and paranoia and violence are one and the same.
Violence proceeds based on ideas to which people are attached. Ideas are love-objects. People fight for the love objects with which they identify their being. The opposite of idealized political objects is love in one's actual life, or sexuality: a real (rather than symbolic) object to which one can direct one’s libido.
We call this the “private sphere,” the sphere of sexual energy within one's own body, as opposed to sexual energy deflected into the “public sphere:” the domain of the body politic. Totalitarian cultures deny the reality of the private sphere. Pornography is a return to one's own body: liberation from the public sphere; liberation from the body politic.
Groups possess “paranoid insights” as to where evil resides. Members of a particular group “know the truth.” They know who the enemy is, that is, what must be done to rescue the nation. Leaders tell the people who the enemy is: Who must be hated and destroyed to hold the society together.
The primary function of political “leadership” is to tell the populace who has to be destroyed or eliminated in order to return society to greatness. Who must be destroyed or killed to rescue the nation? This is the fundamental question. Who is destroying our ideals? Who needs to be eliminated or removed from the nation in order to maintain our ideals?
National “glory” derives from the willingness of soldiers to give their lives to the nation; to be mutilated in its name. The job of a leader in times of war is to ask young men to sacrifice their lives in the name of a sacred ideal. The victimization of soldiers lies at the core of the institution of warfare. Victimization is conceived as honor and glory. At one time in history, soldiers “gave their lives” for their countries.
Collective forms of violence are undertaken to rescue a nation from an “evil enemy.” The evil enemy evokes rage. He is destroying the ideal. Who is the evil enemy? What is the nature of the group that must be destroyed in order to rescue the sacred object or ideal?
Who is the enemy? What class of people constitutes negation of the sacred ideal? When the Nazis said, “Kill the Jews,” they were advocating the killing of Jews as symbolic entities: a class of people imagined to be undermining the national ideal and national will. Who is the enemy? Who must be destroyed in order to rescue the nation?
In order to rescue a nation or a god, any and all actions are deemed justifiable. This is why war is ruthless and brutal: because the ideal in the name of which war is waged is conceived as an absolute. The need to save the ideal lies at the core of political violence. It’s a rescue fantasy. What is it that needs to be rescued? Why the hysteria? What is being saved when a nation is being saved? Hitler said, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.”
The case of the Holocaust is illuminating because Jews posed no actual threat to the German people. The Holocaust is a paradigm for the psychology of enemy creation. Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler believed that Jews constituted a mortal threat. This belief was irrational, bordering on psychotic. Yet it generated the Holocaust and a World War.
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