Monthly Archives: July 2013

Why did Hitler Kill?

Why Did Hitler Kill?

As the Final Solution began, Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the extermination of men, women and children: “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of precious German blood, then naturally I have the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin.”

Hitler reflected that if he—as commander in chief of a great nation—was not faulted when he sent his own soldiers to die in massive numbers—why could he not also require Jews to die in massive numbers?

The Holocaust was generated based on the logic of warfare: As Hitler asked his German soldiers to be obedient unto death, so did he ask the same of the Jews.

We want as many people as possible to read this important book, which changes forever our understanding of the Holocaust—and of warfare. Therefore, we are offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com—providing your name and the name of your college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).

The Soldier’s Body Gives Rise to the Reality of the Nation

So pervasive and all-encompassing is the ideology of nationalism that we must remind ourselves—when we utter words such as France, Germany or America—that these terms refer to ideas or concepts (created by human beings) rather than to entities that exist substantially. When people say, “The individual must die so that the nation might live,” the implication is that the nation is a being with a life of its own. For some people, the preservation or continued existence of this entity—one’s nation—is deemed more significant than the preservation of actual human lives.

In war, nations come alive. Killing and dying substantiate the existence of the nation-state. The sound and fury of battle lends credence to the idea that nations are real. Warfare and battle—the production of dead and wounded soldiers—anchors belief in material reality. Human beings are sacrificed in the name of perpetuating a magical entity—the body politic.

During the First World War, soldiers’ bodies were fed into the jaws of battle under the assumption that the “lives” of nations were more significant than those of young men.

British political leader David Lloyd George stated that every nation was “profligate of its manpower” and conducted its war activities as if there were no limit to the number of young men who were fit to be “thrown into the furnace to feed the flames of war.” He described the First World War as a perpetual, driving force that “shoveled warm human hearts and bodies by the millions into the furnace.”

Just as the Aztecs believed that the hearts and blood of sacrificial victims were required to keep the sun god alive, so during the First World War millions of hearts and bodies were sacrificed to preserve the lives of nations. The First World War was a monumental potlatch—ostentatious destruction or conspicuous waste—whose purpose was to confer prestige, with each nation striving to demonstrate its greatness by throwing away the most men and materiel.
“If I can ask German soldiers to be obedient unto death, why can’t I ask the same of Jews?”

The Final Solution or Holocaust—the systematic extermination of the Jewish people—began well before the construction of death camps and gas chambers. As the German army moved east into the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942, they were followed by the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units. Approximately 1.5 million Jews were shot and killed, many of them buried in gorges mass graves that bear a striking resemblance to the trenches of the First World War.

Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the extermination of men, women and children, providing the following rationale: “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood, then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin.” This statement reveals the “logic” of the Holocaust.

Hitler understood that as commander-in-chief of a great nation, he would not be faulted if he sent his soldiers into battle—where they would die in massive numbers. Hitler knew that—as Germany’s leader—he had the “right” to sacrifice his own young men.

Then he reflected: “Why are the best my nation has to offer—the ‘pick of the German people’—being sent to die, while the worst people, Jews, are destined to survive the war?” Writing in Mein Kampf about the First World War—and his belief that while German soldiers had willingly sacrificed their lives, Jews had shirked their duty—Hitler declared: “If the best men were dying at the front, the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin.”

Hitler vowed that the Second World War would be different. Jews would not escape scot-free: they would not be exempt from the obligation to suffer and to die. They too would be required to become “obedient unto death.”

For Hitler, the logic of genocide derived from the logic of warfare. War, Hitler believed, was the occasion when a nation asks its people to die for their country. However, if a nation has the right to sacrifice its own soldiers, why should it not have the right to sacrifice others as well? In the Holocaust, Jews would join German soldiers and participate in the sacrificial ritual. Jews too would die when Germany commanded them to.

The Holocaust Victim as a Symbol of the German Soldier

Although German soldiers are usually portrayed as aggressive warriors, the reality of their experience during the Second World War—as they waged war on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union—was pathetic. The following passages are excerpts from letters written home by German soldiers (see Stephen G. Fritz, 1997)—starving, freezing, wounded and dying in places like Stalingrad:

“Food was our most difficult problem. Our eyes gleamed, like the eyes of famished wolves. Our stomachs were empty and the horizon was devoid of any hope.”

“We stood in interminable lines, to receive a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea. We had too much food in order to die, but too little in order to live.”

“The inability to bathe led to incredibly filthy conditions, which inevitably resulted in a plague of lice. We felt like livestock rather than human beings.”

“There is only anxiety, fear, and terror, a life without return along with terror without an end. The heart is overwhelmed at the unbearable thought that the smell of dead bodies is the beginning and end and ultimate sense and purpose of our being.”

“We were crowded together like sardines in the cattle car. There were moans, groans, and whimpers in that car; the smell of pus, urine, and it was cold. We lay on straw. The train waited for hours.”

Primo Levi observes (1986) that in many of its painful and absurd aspects the concentration world was “only a version, an adaptation of German military procedure,” the army of prisoners an “inglorious copy of the army proper or, more accurately, its caricature.” Leon Poliakov (1979) notes that Jewish victims in the camps were required to behave like soldiers, performing standard military rituals: “Dressed in rags, the slaves had to march at parade step and with a martial air when going off to work; while other slaves played military marches. Crippled by disease, their feet running with sores, the prisoners were forced to make their beds with geometric precision.”

The Nazis glorified their willingness to surrender absolutely to Hitler and Germany. Sacrificial submission was conceived as honor, loyalty and faithfulness. Upon the death of a German soldier in the Second World War, newspaper obituaries announced the name of the soldier, stating that he had died “For the Fuehrer, the German people, and the fatherland.”

German soldiers had given over their bodies entirely to the nation-state. Jews also were required to do so. However, no one would say that the death of a Jew was honorable and noble. The Holocaust depicted submission to a nation—suffering and death—without sugar coating. The Holocaust enacts the abject fate of a body that has been given over to—taken over by—the nation-state.

German soldiers in the First and Second World Wars entered battle at the behest of Germany, often dying a brutal, ugly death. However, in spite of bodily mutilation and death, soldiers’ actions were described as noble and beautiful. The Holocaust enacted a perverse version of “dying for the country”—depicting the horrific consequences of submission to the nation-state.

Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: THE HOLOCAUST

Chapter I: The Logic of the Holocaust

Introduction
Jewish Disease within the German Body Politic
Devotion to Germany
Jewish Individualism as Negation of the German Community
Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?
Jews Too Shall Die

Chapter II: The Sacrificial Meaning of the Holocaust

Introduction
Worshipping Germany
Jewish Destructiveness
War as a Sacrificial Ritual
The Duty to Lay Down One’s Life
Soldiers as Sacrificial Victims
The Right to Destroy Millions of Men
Die for Germany-or be Killed

PART TWO: WAR

Chapter III: As the Soldier Dies, So the Nation Comes Alive

Introduction
Obfuscation in the Depiction of Warfare
The Magnitude of Destruction and Futility of the First World War
What Was Going On?
Reification of the Nation-State
Willingness to Die as Declaration of Devotion
As the Soldier Dies, so The Nation Comes Alive

Chapter IV: Virility and Slaughter

Introduction
The First World War as Perpetual Slaughter
Doctrine of the “Offensive at All Costs”
The Battle of the Somme
Virility-The Battle of Verdun
The Sacred Ideal
Virility and Slaughter

Chapter V: Aztec Warfare, Western Warfare

Aztec Warfare
The First World War
Why the Perpetual Slaughter?
The Body and Blood of the Soldier Gives Rise to the Reality of the Nation
War as Potlatch
Warfare as Truth
The Nation-State Kills Its Own Soldiers

PART THREE: THE LOGIC OF WAR AND GENOCIDE

Chapter VI: Dying for the Country

Introduction
Why Did Hitler Wage War?
Identity of Self and Nation
Aryan Willingness for Self-Sacrifice
Hitler’s Experience of the First World War
Willingness to Die for One’s Country
Why do the Best Human Beings Die in War While the Worst Survive?
Jewish “Shirkers”
As German Soldiers Die, So Must Jews
Sacrificial Death Stripped of Honor

Chapter VII: The Logic of Mass Murder

Introduction
The First World War
Hitler and the First World War
The Euthanasia Program
Obedience (Unto Death)
Hitler Goes to War
The Explanation
Conclusion
Bibliography

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Morpheus introduces The Matrix to Neo: “You’ve felt your entire life that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
Don’t many of us have a similar feeling each day as we witness a strange, bizarre world presented to us as “reality”? Is it sufficient to “critique” this world? Perhaps more radical inquiry is called for.
In The Dream of Culture, renowned anthropologist Howard Stein interrogates the shared fantasy in which we are immersed: the dream we call reality.
We urge you to read this exciting, groundbreaking book.

Culture as a Dream

This book attempts to unravel a paradox: namely, that human beings, for most of our lives, and human culture, for most of its history, strive to keep emotionally and intellectually asleep while priding ourselves on being wide awake. Just as the work of dreaming is to safeguard sleep, much of the work of culture is likewise to keep us from thinking, feeling, or knowing too much during waking hours.

Much of culture is not “like” dreaming, in the sense of poetic license’s love of fantastic simile. Nor is it mere analogy. It is day’s counterpart to night. In culture, ours is the tragic conceit to dream that we are not dreaming and to make wakefulness the most heinous sin. Dreaming together is our sensing together—consensus—in cultural groups. Culture is our dreaming while we are wide awake.

The work of culture is also the work of dreams. “Reality” is far more elusive than we dare admit. We weave our tenuous net over anxiety’s abyss with the substance of dreaming. To say this is not to stretch some metaphor or take literary license. People in groups, awake, do with their shared symbolic and ritual materials, their technology and their environment what we each do while asleep: wish what we may dare and disguise our wishes; contrive our forbidden victories and stage our defeats; attempt to master what we have found overwhelming.

If night dreaming takes place on a screen upon which are projected our unconscious wishes, fantasies, and feelings, our day dreaming is constructed and projected upon a screen we objectify and call “culture” or “society.” We project these “hopes and fears of all the years”—as the tender Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” so yearningly sings—upon and into the social symbols and institutions of politics, religion, law, cosmology, economics, and so on.

Culture as a Symbolic Object

We construe culture as an independent, self-standing entity beyond ourselves—a symbolic object to which we imagine we belong. We transfer feelings from our earliest mothering figures, families and memories to groups—in which we try to capture safety and security—to make us again feel at one with our parental nurturers and protectors.

In “culture shock” and “future shock,” the loss of culture—which represents a catastrophic crisis of identity—is experienced as object-loss. Culture (or group) is represented as a fantasized maternal object with which tribalists feel themselves to be inextricably tied and upon which they feel themselves to be wholly dependent.

We want as many people as possible to read this exciting, groundbreaking book. Therefore, we are offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com—providing your name and the name of your college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).

Culture is experienced as a “dual unity” whose “body” the tribalist does not distinguish from his/her very selfhood. It is little wonder that tribalists and anthropologists alike commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in their conceptualizations of culture: one truly experiences his/her group to be “superorganic”—transcending the self yet part of the (symbiotic) self.

In this formulation, loss of culture is the fantasized loss of an environment that mirrors and embodies the “goodness” upon which one depends. “Culture”—experienced as an entity—is one member of a class of symbolic objects whose psychic function is to represent and perpetuate object relations that have been disrupted by death or other forms of loss. The subject of culture shock is the experience of estrangement from—loss and “death” of—culture, as though it were an object, or object representation.

Culture as Shared Fantasy

How may we account for these collective representations that give rise to various forms of reality? Richard Koenigsberg suggests that cultural ideas, beliefs and values may be viewed as an “institutionalization and social embodiment of primal human phantasies.” He proposes that we carefully comb the cultural texts for primary process imagery embedded in official culture, for those parapraxes and metaphors that make their incursion into ordinary language. For instance, in his content analysis of Hitler’s ideology as expressed in published works, speeches, and secret writings, Koenigsberg states as his methodological premise that “the frequency with which a given idea or association appears reflects the centrality of such an element within the framework of [the] belief system.”

Culture as Projection

In The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.” Extending this formulation, I argue that just as the ego uses the body as a battlefield upon which to play out, displace, and project dangers and wishes too great to incorporate into itself, the ego likewise uses society and nature as a surface upon which to project and represent itself. In Life against Death, Norman O. Brown wrote that “Human culture is a set of projections of the repressed unconscious. Like the transference, human culture exists in order to project the infantile complexes onto concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered.”

We want as many people as possible to read this exciting, groundbreaking book. Therefore, we are offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com—providing your name and the name of your college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).

Free copy of "The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism"

EXCERPTS

Faith in the Nation

The idea of the nation is a fundamental “assumption” that defines the manner in which modern man perceives, and experiences, social reality. Just as people in earlier historical periods possessed an absolute faith in the reality of God, so do people in contemporary cultures possess an absolute faith in the reality of the nation.

In a democratic culture, people differ regarding the stance taken in relation to the nation: the country may be “loved” or hated; perceived to be “healthy” or sick; “strong” or weak. But whatever stance is adopted, people are united by their absolute faith in the reality of this entity, and their belief that this entity constitutes a fundamental determinant of the nature, and of the quality, of their daily lives.

The Difference Between Nationalism and Christianity

A central distinction between the religion of nationalism and Christian religion is that while the Christian worships an object that is “invisible,” the nationalist worships an object which can be “perceived.” Johann Fichte describes the nation as a thing “in whose soul heaven and earth, visible and invisible meet and mingle, and thus, and only thus, create a true and enduring heaven.” It is the capacity to combine “visible and invisible” that is a fundamental source of the power of the ideology of nationalism. Unlike God, the nation possesses “referents” in the real world: there does, indeed, exist a body of territory; there are human beings who reside within this territory; there are governing institutions which “represent” it.

But the nation is much more than these “referents” in the external world: it is conceived of and related to as a single, integral entity. Thus, a primary function of these referents in the external world is to provide a “material base” upon which the phantasy of an omnipotent object may be projected. By citing the existence of a body of territory, millions of “people,” governing institutions, etc., the nationalist persuades himself that the omnipotent object he worships is “real;” that it exists as a part of the external world.

Modern man believes that he lives in a rational world and that his central preoccupation is reality. Existing coextensively with this “profane” world, however, is this “sacred object,” the nation. The nation may be viewed as a sacred object that merges with, “saturates” our day to day reality, a sacred object that “accompanies us” as we move through our daily activities.

Because we believe The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism is an important book—and wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com—providing your name and the name of your college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).

While modem man finds it difficult to place God in the center of his life, insofar as his “manifestations” are not readily observable, he has no trouble “believing in” the nation: its manifestations are all around him. The Christian deity falls before the empirical spirit: “What is the evidence for the existence of God?” One rarely, however, hears the question: “What is the evidence for the existence of the nation?”

The Genocidal Phantasy

What we encounter is a coherent phantasy, which may be summarized as follows: the nation is a living organism; this organism is suffering from a “disease,” the source of which is a particular class of people lying within the body of this organism. In order to cure the disease, and thereby to “save the nation,” it may be necessary to “remove” this class of people from within the body of the nation.

This phantasy is a fundamental source of acts of destruction, and particularly mass-destruction, which are carried out in the name of racist and revolutionary ideologies: the perpetrators of mass-destruction think of themselves, not as murderers, but as men who have undertaken the “necessary task” of removing a disease element from within the body of the nation.

The class of people identified as a “disease element,” then, may be characterized as a class of people which lies within the boundaries of the nation, but which is perceived, simultaneously, as not belonging there. This class of people, in short, is perceived as an alien element within the body of the nation, an element that must be “rejected,” just as any organism rejects alien elements that invade the interior of its body, and which endanger its health.

Famous Personalities and the National Community

The national community is rooted in that “world” of events, issues and personalities that are “brought to us” by the mass-media of communication. And it is the shared attachment to this world among the citizens of a nation that generates the sense of a national community.

“Famous personalities” come to play, in the Gesellschaft society, the role that had been played by “neighbors” in the Gemeinschaft society, i.e., they come to constitute our fundamental “secondary relationships.” Thus, the development of a national community embodies a transformation in the nature of the individual’s connection to the community: where once the individual’s connection to the community had been defined in terms of relationships with people present in the immediate physical environment, now this connection is defined in terms of relationships with people not present in the immediate physical environment.

Because we believe The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism is an important book—and wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com—providing your name and the name of your college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).

The development of the modern nation-state is dependent upon acceptance of the proposition that one’s own fate and destiny is intimately linked with the fate and destiny of the nation. What occurs in the case of totalitarian thinkers is that this idea is carried to its logical extreme. These men embrace the notion that the fate of the individual and of the nation are entirely bound together; that there is no such thing as a private sphere in which men pursue goals unrelated to the state. At the heart of the totalitarian idea lies the denial of a sphere of reality that is separate from the state. The totalitarian believes that the community is everything: that human activities are meaningful and worthwhile only when performed in the name of the state.

The omnipotent nation-state functions to permit people who reside within it to recover a sense of omnipotence. The extent to which the nation is actually used to gratify this need varies from individual to individual. For most people in contemporary societies there exists a relative “balance” between a devotion to the collectivity and the pursuit of private aspirations.

What occurs in the case of totalitarian thinkers, however, is that this “balance” is upset: the wish to serve the collectivity becomes the central goal in life, and individualized, personal aspirations are pushed into the background. Men such as these find it particularly difficult to renounce the dream of omnipotence. They find the idea of a small, “bourgeois” life in which each individual pursues his own modest aspirations, to be intolerable.

For these men the only life worth living is a “big” life. And they strive to create a sense of “bigness” in their lives by identifying with omnipotent collectivities and by pursuing grandiose aspirations in relation to these collectivities. A fundamental source of the human desire to create a “great human community” lies in the refusal to abandon the dream of omnipotence. In the name of the perpetuation of this dream, some men will “sacrifice” their freedom, individuality, and humanity.

Because we believe The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism is an important book—and wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com—providing your name and the name of your college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).
 

The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism

Table of Contents

I. The Country, the Mother and Infantile Narcissism

  1. Introduction
  2. The Country as Suffering Mother
  3. The Country as Omnipotent Mother
  4. The Country as a Projection of Infantile Narcissism

II. The Country as a Living Organism

  1. Racism and Revolution as a Wish to Eliminate the “Disease” from Within the Body of the Nation
  2. The Disease Within the Nation as a Projection of Malignant Internal Objects

III. Revolution as a Struggle against Passivity

  1. The Struggle Against Passivity: Hitler
  2. The Struggle Against Passivity: Lenin
  3. The Struggle Against Passivity: Aurobindo

IV. The Social Psychology of Nationalism

  1. The “National Community”
  2. Totalitarianism
  3. The Renunciation of Personal Gratification in the Name of a Devotion to the Collectivity