I’ve been writing about societal slaughter in recent issues of the LSS Newsletter: how millions of people have died in wars and episodes of genocide. But what about the other side of the coin: What is all this dying and killing for? What is the nature of that dynamic that generates slaughter?
I study Hitler—not as an idiosyncratic personality, but as a vehicle toward understanding and revealing the template for societal slaughter. In terms of the ideology Hitler put forth, he was not unusual. What Hitler did was to embrace and promote certain very popular, conventional political ideas—and carry them to a bizarre fulfillment.
John Kennedy (1961) exhorted the American people: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” This is a classic expression of nationalistic ideology: one should be less concerned with the fulfillment of one’s own needs and aspirations, and more concerned with fulfilling the “needs” of one’s country. Nationalism and self-renunciation—sacrifice—go hand in hand.
Hitler explained to the German people: “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” This is a radical expression of the nationalistic ideology contained in JFK’s words. The nation is more significant than the individual. Indeed, according to Hitler, the individual is nothing compared to the nation. Nazism took this proposition—the insignificance of the individual in relationship to one’s nation—and carried it to an extreme conclusion.
The nation, according to Nazi ideology, should become the exclusive object of devotion. Hitler asserted, “We do not want to have any other God, only Germany.” Hitler was a fanatic preacher, whipping up excitement: imploring people to devote their lives to the same god to which he himself had devoted his life.
Hitler proclaimed:
Our future is Germany. Our today is Germany. And our past is Germany. Let us take a vow this morning, at every hour, in each day, to think of Germany, of the nation, of our German people. You cannot be unfaithful to something that has given sense and meaning to your whole existence.
At the core of Nazism was the idea of faith: faith in the German nation and people, and faith in Hitler as the perfect representative or embodiment of Germany.
The terms “obedience” and “obedience to authority”—often used in relation to the Nazi case—are highly misleading, suggesting the mechanical following of orders. Rather, at the core of Nazism was love of Germany and faith in Hitler, which led people to want to carry out orders that the leader issued.
Hitler explained: “Our love towards our people will never falter, and our faith in this Germany of ours is imperishable.” He called Deutschland ueber Alles (“Germany above all”) a profession of faith, which today “fills millions with a greater strength, with that faith which is mightier than any earthly might.” Nationalism for Hitler meant willingness to act with a “boundless, all embracing love for the Volk and, if necessary, to die for it.”
We prefer not to acknowledge the truth of Nazism: that the massive brutality and destruction that this movement generated grew out of love of country, and faith in the leader. To understand Nazism, one must begin by recognizing that one cannot separate these three variables: love, faith and mass murder.
All forms of nationalistic ideology rest upon the identification of the individual with his nation. In order for nationalism to work, one must be willing to connect one’s personal aspirations with the aspirations put forth by one’s nation. One’s personal life has to become bound to national life.
At the core of Nazism was the assertion that there could be no separation between self and nation. Hitler asked the German people to embrace this intimate bond—to acknowledge their profound closeness—dependence—upon Germany:
Our Nation is not just an idea in which you have no part; you yourself support the nation; to it you belong; you cannot separate yourself from it; your life is bound up with the life of your whole people; the nation is not merely the root of your strength, it is the root of your very life.
If I had to crystalize Nazi ideology after studying it for 40 years (see Hitler’s Ideology), I would use two words: “no separation”: thou shalt not be separate from one’s country. Thou shalt not acknowledge the possibility of separation. Hitler was in a rage against separateness.
The idea of Germany, for Hitler, was everything. He refused to contemplate that there could be anything other than Germany. What’s more, he insisted that everyone embrace Germany, proclaiming:
No one person is excepted from the crisis of the Reich. This Volk is but yourselves. There may not be a single person who excludes himself from this joint obligation.
Hitler claimed that one’s Volk and one’s self were one and the same. No one could be “excepted” from the obligation to devote one’s life to Germany. One had to overcome “bourgeois privatism” in order to “unconditionally equate the individual fate and fate of the nation.”
Hitler’s mission as a leader was to get everyone to share his love for and devotion to Germany: to seduce the people to share his passion. He sought national unity: the people as one, united and sharing a common emotion. Nothing was as thrilling to Hitler as the Nuremberg rallies.
Although Hitler felt that he had fulfilled his dream—of uniting the German people under the banner of National Socialism—he often had doubt. Perhaps there were some people who did not share his enthusiasm: who refused to join in.
Our aim is the dictatorship of the whole people, the community. I began to win men to the idea of an eternal national and social ideal—to subordinate one’s own interests to the interest of the whole society. There are, nevertheless, a few incurables who had never understood the happiness of belonging to this great, inspiring community.
Those who did not share Hitler’s enthusiasm—who did not understand the happiness of belonging to the “great, inspiring community”—were the “incurables.” Those who refused to join in were the “disease within the body of the people”: people who refused to love Germany and to join in expressing their devotion.
Loyalty and faith in one’s nation is accompanied by the idea that some human beings are not loyal and do not possess adequate faith. Love of country is not separate from the idea of disloyalty. There are numerous examples of political movements focused on hounding those who are identified as disloyal—not giving full support to the nation and its government.
Those accused of being disloyal to their nation may be called traitors or internal enemies or terrorists. We in the US are quite familiar with how dissenters can be condemned in this way. Nazi Germany was quantitatively, but not qualitatively, different from many other nationalistic cultures.
In Nazi Germany everyone was required to embrace and to love the German nation, and to make enormous sacrifices in her name. Hitler did not allow for the existence of a private sphere—a place within society where people were not obligated to love and devote themselves to the nation.
And this is where violence comes into being. Political violence was directed toward those who were perceived as being insufficiently devoted to Germany. Hitler declared:
“We are fanatic in our love for our people. We can go as loyally as a dog with those who share our sincerity, but we will pursue with fanatic hatred the man who believes that he can play tricks with this love of ours.”
Hitler’s hatred was directed toward those who—he imagined—did not love Germany enough: refused to embrace her “goodness” and the national purpose. Nazi rage was directed toward those who—it seemed—had doubts about Hitler’s capacity to bring about the resurrection of Germany. Perhaps the ideology of Nazism—radical nationalism—might be summed up in the following phrase: “You will love your country—or we will bash your head in.”
Social-science expertise has been missing from current discussions of
government-led spying on private citizens and the proper role of government in
general. Ideologies, which is to say gut reactions, have corrupted the public
debate; but there is nevertheless a role for sociological analysis of these
phenomena.
Social science in its modern form started as a mostly European effort to explain
the origins of the horrible totalitarianism that engulfed Europe, and to deduce
the structure of institutions that would prevent it from arising again. The
Nazi, Soviet, and Fascist systems were all characterized by total State-control
of all aspects of life, including the most private aspects of life. Whether the
ostensible purpose was re-casting human nature into the ‘new Soviet man’ or an
embodiment of the German ‘volk’, they quickly evolved into an apparatus for
murdering large numbers of their citizenry. Of course the prospective victims
had to be identified before they could be murdered. For this purpose a State
apparatus of domestic spying and information-gathering was devised. Primitive by
today’s standards, the forced wearing of Jewish stars and the forced confessions
by purported enemies of the State were crudely effective in generating large
numbers of victims. Social scientists asked ‘How did this happen? What can be
done to prevent its recurrence?’
The essential answer to the first question, distilled from reams of scholarship,
is: De-legitimization of private life. All the social space traditionally
separating individuals from the State was systematically removed. Private
enterprise was abolished. All universities and schools in Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union were taken over by government, run by political appointees, and
staffed exclusively by those who would do their bidding. The same for the media,
the churches (co-opted in Germany, eliminated in the Soviet Union), youth groups
(Hitler Youth, Young Pioneers), and welfare organizations. All intermediary
organizations that had previously functioned autonomously were either taken over
by government, co-opted, intimidated into conformity, or forced out of
existence. The sequence from privacy-deflation to total State control to mass
murder progressed in roughly 15 years in the Soviet Union. In Nazi Germany, with
more intensive propaganda and ‘education’, this sequence took only five years.
From this historical record, social scientists deduced that properly functioning
democracies require lively intermediary organizations — churches, labor unions,
4-H clubs, PTAs, bowling clubs, whatever. Re-reading Tocqueville and Madison,
social scientists re-discovered with these sages a high regard for such humble
institutions (not that there were bowling clubs in Madison’s day, but you get
the idea). The Austrian School (Hayek et al) added private enterprise to this
list of freedom-enhancing entities. And from Vienna also came Lazarsfeld who
posited ‘cross-pressures’ — conflicting loyalties — as the essential
building-blocks of democracy. His big idea was that a healthy democracy needed
unpredictability, where a person’s ethnicity, race, religion, education, or
social class did not necessarily determine his voting preferences or consumer
choices.
Since the 1970s, American and Western European societies have tolerated and even
encouraged a progressive tribalization of their societies. Race, ethnicity, and
sexual-identity have become increasingly salient in the distribution of
government largesse, and consequently in the determination of political and
consumer choices. Both public and private universities rely increasingly on
government funding, and thus take their orders from the State, in research
priorities, curricula, staffing, and extra-curricular activities. With some
exceptions and counter-trends, the period since the 1970s has witnessed a
progressive weakening of the autonomous mediating organizations that
sociologists identified as essential to the working of democracy.
Separately, the growth of the Internet has deflated the private sphere, at first
due in large part to the apparently voluntary choices of Internet users
themselves. Only a few years ago the fad of the moment was 24/7 live webcams
turned on oneself for the world to see. Now security cameras that do the same
thing outdoors are all-pervasive. The collective mantra, highly promoted by the
giant Internet companies, is ‘If you have nothing to hide, why be concerned?’
This is the tradeoff for ‘serving you better’. Mobile phones with geo-tracking
are surely a great improvement in the quality of life, as is the proliferation
of answers to life’s unanswered questions, and the blessings of instant
communication. In return for all that, what does the loss of privacy matter?
I always doubted the business model of Internet-tracking. It never seemed
plausible to me that a teen-ager with zits who happens to be in a drugstore is
any more likely to buy zit-off after getting zapped with an ad on his
geo-tracked mobile at that moment than if he weren’t zapped. The whole business
of click-tracking, Web-tracking, and the like never made commercial sense to me.
It was always hype — good for securing VC funding and not much else. But
investors in these large-scale personal-data-gathering companies were not
stupid. Behind our backs, these companies were getting paid by governments to
sell users’ data. Their business model was not based on the supposed commercial
utility of precise ad-targeting, but on secret NSA demands for indiscriminate
personal data. Governments, under the banner of fighting terror, and shielded
from Congressional or public scrutiny, have unlimited taxpayer funds to finance
these transactions.
With the Snowden revelations, we now have a better understanding of the extent
of Internet and telecom surveillance. Of course, this cannot have been a
complete surprise. Nevertheless the near-universal scale of the surveillance,
plus the technological capacity to sort and search the data, make for a real
game-changer. As one security expert said in a recent interview —
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/They_have_destroyed_the_system_.html?cid=37227298
> The most shocking aspects of Edward Snowden’s courageous revelations is the scale
> of surveillance. Every one of us involved in this field, I think it’s fair to
> say, has not been surprised by what is possible but had assumed perhaps out of
> hope or fear that they were limited in what they did and were proportionate, and
> that although we didn’t believe they would just stick to terrorism they would
> not try to reach for everything.
>
> But every single document, speech and slideshow shows that a bunch of juvenile
> lunatics have taken over the asylum and are drunk and exuberant on their
> capabilities to spy on everything all the time and that is what they want to do.
> They have lost every sort of moral compass and respect for civic values.
>
> The problem is that many European countries, notably Britain but not exclusively
> Britain, have been complicit in these activities as a result of favours, trade
> or encouragement. Basically the NSA has, over years with Britain’s assistance,
> essentially tried to subvert companies and governments into a surveillance
> empire which is almost a supranational enterprise of their own.
The question is, to what end? As we know in sociology, not everything is what it
seems. Just as the indiscriminate sweeping-up of personal data lacked a
plausible commercial basis, though it still made business sense if the data were
sold to government spy agencies, it is likewise implausible that all that data
has much utility in fighting terror. What then is it good for?
I think that question has yet to be answered; that the answer will depend on
what use the new owners of that data make of it. The meaning of the massive loss
of privacy that has occurred is immanent, it will emerge as further events
unfold. As far as I am aware, the central-conspiracy model does not fit the
case. What we have is a set of disparate elements that as yet have not coalesced
into any coherent order. Among these elements are the increasing tribalization
of society, de-legitimizing of autonomous intermediary organizations, and
deflation of the private sphere. These are exactly the conditions that gave rise
to the totalitarian horrors of the mid-20th century. It does not appear that any
current Western leader has it in him to become another Hitler or Stalin. But the
elements are there, awaiting a moment — perhaps another terrorist attack or
financial crisis — that will call forth a charismatic savior.
Yet one must be especially careful with historical analogies to avoid the
‘generals-fighting-the-last-war’ syndrome. Things are very different now,
compared with analogous conditions 80 years ago. The greatly expanded human
freedom, communication, and educational prospects empowered by the Internet may
overwhelm the efforts of governments to use it as an instrument of State
control. This will be a titanic struggle, with the outcome still unclear. And
that’s where I’ll leave it for now, pending further sociological inquiry into
what-all this may portend.