Abstract: Love of country and willingness to sacrifice for one’s nation remain among civilization’s highest ideals. Yet it was precisely these ideals that generated destruction and self-destruction in Nazi Germany. Warfare is not separate from civilization’s highest ideals.
If we wish to diagnose the disease that gave rise to the epidemic of mass murder in the 20th century, we need to acknowledge the links among societal ideals, collective forms of violence—and political self-destruction. |
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Something in us rebels against using the term “masochistic group death” to describe the Nazi case--equating what occurred at the end of World War II to what happened to Jim Jones’ followers. Why do we hesitate to conceive of Nazi Germany as a vast, pathological cult? Perhaps because Nazism is a subset of a wider cult in which we all participate: the cult of the nation.
Nazism revolved around worshipping the German nation. Hitler declared to his people, “We want to have no other God, only Germany.” Everything Hitler did, he did in the name of his nation and its people. Nazism represented an extreme instantiation of the ideology of nationalism.
As we move into the domain of nationalism, our inclination to use the language of psychopathology weakens. We hesitate, for example, to characterize a soldier’s willingness to go into battle (when national leaders ask him to do so) as “masochistic submission.” We prefer to say that soldiers who go to war do so out of a patriotic impulse: willingness to defend one's nation and to sacrifice one's life if necessary.
The success of Hitler and Goebbels was based on their use of the language of patriotism and national honor. Naturally, they did not ask Germans to “submit” to the German nation. When they asked warriors to become "obedient unto death," they were asking them to die in the name of Germany.
Obedience was honorable because this form of behavior was done for the sake of the German nation. A phrase like "submission to Germany" would be unthinkable. Soldiers and civilians were asked to sacrifice their lives in the name of defending their country. Death in warfare was positioned as it always has been: as a praiseworthy and noble deed.
As long as we view death on the battlefield as noble, it's difficult to view warfare through the lens of psychopathology. We do not empathize with Jim Jones and have barely a clue what the “Peoples Temple Movement” was about. Therefore, when we analyze Jones and his movement—the mass deaths that occurred at Jonestown—we have no trouble using terms like psychotic fantasy, mass madness and masochistic group death.
But while we are horrified by the destruction that Hitler brought about, we nevertheless empathize with concepts such as national self-sacrifice and dying to defend one’s country. This is the language of an ideology that has dominated political life throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Though recurring political violence produces massive destruction, we hesitate to use terms like psychotic fantasy and mass madness. If we use these terms to characterize our political cultures, then we have to acknowledge that we have been living within a psychotic fantasy; that madness permeates our normal cultural world.
Love of country and willingness to sacrifice for one’s nation remain among civilization’s highest ideals. Yet it was precisely these ideals that generated destruction and self-destruction in Nazi Germany. Warfare is not separate from civilization’s highest ideals. If we wish to diagnose the disease that gave rise to the epidemic of mass murder in the 20th century, we need to acknowledge the links among societal ideals, collective forms of violence—and political self-destruction.
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