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My PhD is in Experimental (Social) Psychology. My dissertation is Experimenter-Subject Interaction in Verbal Conditioning. Upon receipt of my degree, I asked myself : "What is the most important question that human beings seem to be trying to answer nowadays?" The big question that I decided to attack was, "Why did the Holocaust occur?"
Based on the rigorous training I'd received (at the New School for Social Research), I developed a methodology based on identifying the central images and metaphors contained within Hitler's writings and speeches. I presented my findings in tabular form. Each Table in my book reveals a central theme.
"Table 1: The Country is a Living Organism" appears below.
I was astonished at what I discovered, namely that organic images and metaphors lay at the heart of Hitler's thinking and ideology. The fundamental metaphor was that of Germany as an actual body, or body politic.
Hitler explained that the Nazi movement had created a "national organism." He called the state a "volkic organism." In place of "the State," Hitler said, must be set the "living organism, the people."
For Hitler, Germany was not simply an "imagined community," but a "living substance;" an actual "substance of flesh and blood." The task of National Socialism was to build up the state until it became a "close organic whole, pulsing with life;" a "body corporate pulsing through and through with a vital inner life."
I was not an expert on German history at the time I wrote Hitler Ideology. As it has turned out, however, the image of the nation as a real body politic lay at the heart of everything that occurred in Nazi Germany.
There was another mysterious sentence (from Mein Kampf) that appears in the Table below: "Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?" I did not understand what this meant at the time.
Since then--based on a substantial body of research that has emerged--it turns out that Hitler was referring is the Law of the Immune System, that biological tendency or principle (applying to all organisms, not just human organisms) whereby bodies reject entities identified as "not self."
Hitler was averring that the Germany was not unlike other organisms that reject or destroy what is "alien" to its body. The law of the immune system would become the central principle governing the Nazi's biological state.
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