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Hitler's ideology of nationalism was conventional. Hitler embraced this ordinary ideology--and took it to a radical extreme, revealing its psychopathology. In the world of politics, there is no distinction between what is normative and what is pathological.
Hitler's ideology constitutes a paradigm for thinking about political violence. Germany was conceived as an absolutely good object; Jews the absolutely evil enemy. Hitler's political objective was to destroy the evil enemy--to rescue the absolutely good object.
The essence of what political leaders do is to identify evil enemies. Leaders are experts in "knowing where evil" is and conveying their "insights" to the populace. Jews were defined by Hitler as Germany's primal enemy. Acting on his belief that Jews were evil, he performed the ideology of nationalism--carrying it through to a radical, horrific extreme.
The enemy of a society or nation is the other side of the coin of goodness and order. Enemies are classes of people imagined to be causing the breakdown of society; acting to destroy the sacred object or ideal. Collective violence seek to rescue the sacred object or ideal by destroying enemies.
Hitler’s objective was to save the life of the German nation by destroying the Jewish "force of disintegration." Jews were imagined to be acting to cause Germany to fragment; fall apart. Hitler’s mission was to bring humpty-dumpty back together again: to unify the German people and destroy the force of disunity: two sides of the same coin.
Hysterical anxiety lies at the heart of political cultures. The sacred object or ideal seems to be threatened by a group or class of people acting to destroy this ideal or object. Indeed, the sacred object is defined in opposition to the enemy. Political violence is a dialectic between the good object and the evil or destructive object.
Violence proceeds based on ideas or objects to which members of a society are attached. These ideas or objects are love-objects. People kill and die for the love objects with which they identify.
The opposite of attachment to political love objects is the private sphere: personal love objects.
Pornography is an escape from or defense against politics.
Totalitarians societies insist that there can be no such thing as a private sphere. The public sphere must encompass everything. No space is allowed for individuals who do not wish to participate. "You will be a Nazi or we will bash your head in."
The leader specializes in conveying “paranoid insights.” He knows the truth: where evil--the enemy--resides. To know where evil is to know who--what class of people--must be destroyed to rescue the sacred object.
To rescue a nation or a god, any and all actions are deemed justifiable. This is why war, genocide and terrorism are ruthless and brutal: because the ideal in the name of which war is waged is conceived as an absolute.
What is it that needs to be rescued? Why the hysteria? What is being saved when a nation is being saved? Hitler said, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.”
The case of the Holocaust is illuminating because Jews posed no actual threat to the German people. Some people find this difficult to believe--because they remain attached to the delusion of "rationality." Whatever the Jews may have been in actuality, Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler believed they constituted a mortal threat. This psychotic belief lay at the heart of Nazi Germany. It generated the Holocaust and a World War.
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