PART IV of GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY

Nations like bodies are defined by boundaries separating one from another. A primary objective of nation-states is to avoid invasion or penetration. This is “national defense.” Invasion may be experienced as rape. Hitler insisted Germany had to “protect its rear” against Great Britain in the West and Russia in the East. Donald Trump imagined “Mexican rapists” were invading the American body politic.

The logic of national security is “exclusionist”—keeping out “others” defined as alien or not-self. Nations draw boundaries differentiating within from without. Secure borders—the opposite of porous borders—means that a body politic cannot be easily penetrated. Nations like bodies possess immune systems preventing “foreign” or “alien” cells from crossing the boundary and entering the national organism.

In today’s world, most human beings equate their own body with some body-politic. This is especially true for political leaders. Rudolf Hess at rallies introduced his Fuehrer, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” For Hitler, there was no separation between himself and the German nation. Whatever happened to Germany he experienced as if happening to himself.

Hitler’s ideology derived from his fantasy of Germany as an enormous body politic consisting of citizens as “cells.” He aspired to bring millions of German cells together to create a single German organism. By “welding men one to another,” the German people would transform into a “single block of steel”—creating an “unbreakable unity” capable of resisting forces that might cause the nation to break into pieces.

If the “will of our people were split into forty or fifty sections,” Hitler said, “Germany would fall apart. To achieve national unity, it was necessary to eliminate political organizations working toward “disunion and disintegration.” If Germany succeeded in putting together a body politic “hard as iron,” then the nation would never again “break in pieces.”

Hitler in his mass rallies aspired to persuade millions to fuse into a “unity of spirit and will.” To resist forces working toward fragmentation, Hitler implored his people to grow closer to one another. Germans had to be thrown into “the great melting pot, the nation” to be “purified and welded one to another.” Hitler’s ideology was a fusion fantasy, Germans abandoning individual identities to melt into one body.

Identification with a nation or body politic means equating oneself with a vast geographical space: “From the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam.” “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies for amber waves of grain.” One identifies with everything within the boundaries of one’s nation, “From sea to shining sea.”

We identify with a gigantic body of territory—the entire space of our nation—yet hardly give this a second thought. Identification and the sense of omnipotence this confers upon us comes naturally: we become “part of” a great country.

Hitler took this phrase “part of” a country literally. He imagined each German as a part of or fragment of or piece of the body politic, more precisely as a cell of the national organism. Hitler, as “head” of the body politic, directed its cells to behave in a particular manner in accordance with his will. This is the deep meaning of “obedience to authority.”

If an individual human being is a cell of a body politic, this person does not have the option to disobey the brain of the body of which it is a part. Hitler, the brain of the body politic, commands; German cells respond. A cell of a body cannot rebel against the body’s brain. Unless you are a Jewish cell, a bacterium, which roams around the space of a body politic with no concern for other cells. Hitler believed it was necessary to destroy these selfish, individualistic Jewish cells that ruined the inner working of the German body politic.

Crossing the border from America to Canada, the ground upon which we walk is pretty much the same. But now one is in a “foreign” country. This boundary is symbolic not physical. Rather, the symbolic boundary defines the physical boundary. Nations are the most important symbolic constructs in the world. John Lennon asked us to “imagine there’s no country.” It seems most people don’t possess this kind of imagination.

Borders are the walls of the state. Most people could not identify a “Mexican” if they saw one. I don’t know anyone who has experienced a Mexican rapist. The National Academy of Sciences on Immigration and Crime found that compared to citizens in the U. S., undocumented immigrants in Texas are less than half as likely to be arrested for violent crimes or drug offenses. Undocumented Immigrants have lower felony arrest rates than both legal immigrants and native-born citizens; are less likely to commit crimes or become incarcerated.

Yet the discourse of Mexican criminals and dangerous foreigners crossing the border—requiring “building a wall”—became Donald Trump’s central policy initiative, shaping an entire political regime. Isn’t it extraordinary that this national leader convinced people in all parts of the United States to be in mortal fear of people crossing the border?

The fact that this delusional discourse of Mexican rapists gained currency—makes it easier to see how Nazism could have taken hold. An entire society can embrace and live within a delusion.

I mentioned that I often ask people to guess how many Jews there were in Germany in 1933 out of a population of 67 million—and get guesses of two million, five million, ten million, even twenty million. There were 550,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, less than 1% of the population.

Once again, perhaps a thought passes through your mind, “I don’t believe this. How could such a massive event like the Holocaust be created out of nothing? Jews must have done something. Perhaps they were too rich or too successful, whatever.”  I never heard Hitler or Goebbels or Himmler speak of Jews in these terms. Rather, there was a theory of the nature of Jews—a profound dynamic giving rise to Hitler’s hatred and will to exterminate. This dynamic revolved around what kind of people Hitler imagined Jews were; his conception or fantasy about the character of Jews.

The Nazi theory of the Jew crystallizes in the following judgment of the Cologne Labor Court, January 21, 1941, denying the claim of Jewish employees to a vacation:

The precondition for the claim to a vacation—membership of the plant community—does not exist. A Jew cannot be a member of the plant community on account of his whole racial tendency geared to forwarding personal interests and securing economic advantages.

“Forwarding personal interests.” The idea of Jews as selfish individualists incapable of assimilating into a national community. This idea was put forward  by Hitler on many occasions. “What did this idea, “unwilling to assimilate into the community” mean? Why did this presumed character trait of the Jews generate in Hitler a paroxysm of rage?

Hitler believed Jews could not devote themselves to Germany—or to any nation for that matter. This fundamental Jewish flaw, according to Hitler, was biologically given. Something in the genetic make-up of Jews prevented them from becoming part of a national community.

Nazi political theorist Fritz Reinhardt observed that Hitler had put his stamp on the word Volksgemeinschaft, making it completely clear that the “individual is nothing when not a member of a community.” Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.”

Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT OF LECTURE: "GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY."

I present a method for studying the language of political leaders to reveal the unconscious fantasies that generate destructive forms of societal behavior like war and genocide. I focus on Hitler, who conceived Germany as a body politic consisting of the German people as cells of this body. Jews were pathogenic organisms—source of a “disease within the body of the people”. Hitler claimed that Germany possessed an immune system that automatically destroyed alien or not-self cells. Jews were conceived as bacteria, virus and parasites—cells whose continued presence within the German organism would lead to its death.

The Final Solution was as a struggle to destroy Jewish pathogens, thus to save the life of the German nation. I examine the case of Donald Trump, who similarly asserted that the presence of a certain class of people within the body politic would lead to national destruction. Trump identified “Mexican rapists” as the primal danger, requiring construction of a “wall” to prevent these alien cells from entering the body politic.

hy have psychiatrists not developed a concept of collective psychopathology? Over 200 million people died in the 20th century as a result of war and genocide. One would imagine that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts would enter the arena to explore the causes and meanings of collective forms of violence and mass-destruction. There is profound resistance toward exploring pathological behavior that is “normative.” This resistance perhaps stems from our attachment to countries as sacred objects. Political mass-murder is undertaken by nations. We seem unable to face the reality that the most extreme forms of violence are performed in the name of a beloved object. If we wish to “awaken from the nightmare of history”—we need to go where human beings have not gone before by exploring the relationship between violence and love. Why are the most self-destructive forms of human behavior undertaken in the name of mother-countries?