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A reviewer of Nations Have the Right to Kill on Amazon.com reflected: “What does Koenigsberg’s argument about Hitler wanting to expel the ‘plague bacilli’ of European Jewry hold for radical leftists, who would like to see the bourgeoisie eliminated? I wonder how applicable his argument is to a consideration of ‘revolutionary violence’? Do the decidedly anti-human Nazis have something in common with the self-styled revolutionaries?”
Below are passages from the writings of Hitler and Lenin revolving around the image of the enemy as a “parasite” or “blood sucker” attacking and threatening to destroy the body politic. Metaphors contained within these statements (that occur repeatedly in the rhetoric of both Hitler and Lenin) are nearly identical.
Hitler viewed the Jewish enemy in terms nearly identical to how Lenin viewed the capitalist enemy. Do recurring metaphors bound to central terms of an ideology (e. g. “the Jew” or “the capitalist”) reveal the meaning of these ideologies?
Vladimir Lenin: “The bureaucracy is a parasite on the body of society, a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores…The state is a parasitic organism.” In The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution
Adolf Hitler: “The Jew was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples….The Jews are a people under whose parasitism the whole of honest humanity is suffering.” In Mein Kampf
Vladimir Lenin: “These leaches (the Kulaks) have sucked the blood of the working people. These spiders have grown fat at the expense of peasants.” From “Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight!”
Adolf Hitler: “The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the peoples pores…The Jew is a true blood sucker that attaches himself to the body of the unhappy people.” In Mein Kampf
Hitler was terrified by the “incipient and slowly spreading decomposition of the German nation,” calling Jews a “ferment of decomposition” among people and a “dissolver of human culture.” Early in his career, he stated that the future of Germany required the annihilation of Marxism. Either the “racial tuberculosis” would thrive and Germany would die out, or it would be “cut out of the Volk body” and Germany would thrive.
Lenin declared that the way of reform was the way of delay or procrastination of the “painfully slow decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism.” The revolutionary way was the way of “quick amputation, of the direct removal of the decomposing parts.” In Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (page 45 of the online text).
Both Lenin and Hitler conceived of their nations or people in biological terms—as an organism containing a parasite consuming or sucking the blood of the people or national organism. The continuing presence of this deadly organism within the body politic would lead to its destruction and death unless removed.
The revolutionary objectives of Hitler and Lenin are identical: to remove or cut out or amputate the source or cause a deadly disease within the body politic to prevent the national organism from decomposing or dissolving. Violent political acts become necessary and unavoidable: If the disease within the body of the people is not eliminated or destroyed, the nation will die.
The ideology of Nazism was constructed based on a binary: The German nation was conceived as absolutely good, whereas the Jewish enemy was conceived as absolutely evil. To rescue the German nation, the Jewish force of destruction had to be eliminated or removed.
Hitler described the German nation as a living organism consisting of the German people as good cells. Jews were called bacteria or parasites—pathogenic cells—that had invaded the otherwise healthy organism. To rescue or save Germany (from death), the source of the nation’s disease—Jewish bacteria or parasites—had to be removed from within the body politic.
Lenin’s ideology of Communism revolved around a similar binary. On the one hand were the “the people,” conceived as virtuous and healthy. On the other hand was “the capitalist,” working toward the decomposition and destruction of peoples and nations. Lenin built the communist movement based upon a struggle to "rescue" the people. To keep the national organism from decomposing, diseased parts of the body politic—capitalists or kulaks—had to be amputated or removed.
Hitler’s Nazism and Lenin’s Communism possessed an identical structure. On the one hand lay a symbolic object conceived as the essence of goodness, one’s nation or “the people.” On the other lay a symbolic object conceived as the essence of evil or destructiveness, the Jew in the case of Nazism and the capitalist in the case of Lenin. The mission of each man was to save or rescue the people by acting to destroy the element within the nation working to destroy the people; the element that sought to deprive the people of its goodness.
Any and all actions necessary to achieve the objective of rescuing goodness from badness was deemed justifiable. Hitler declared, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” Lenin stated: “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue the people, we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” The difference in their ideologies lay in the nature of the object defined as the source of absolute evil or destruction, Jews in the case of Hitler, capitalists in the case of Lenin.
Does this rescue fantasy that defined Nazism and Communism lie at the root of many political ideologies? Do people project human existence into concepts or entities such as “the nation” or “the people,” then spend their lives in a struggle to maintain or preserve the goodness or greatness of these entities?
People love and worship those good objects or entities with which they identify. These entities, however, may be threatened by “enemies” imagined to be seeking to destroy the good object. Unfortunately, people do not love and worship the same good object. Political forms of violence occur as people struggle to destroy those entities that—they imagine—are working to destroy the entities that they worship and with which they identify. Political ideologies build upon a rescue fantasy. |