After publishing Hitler’s Ideology, I researched texts by Lenin, Stalin and Mao, discovering that their genocidal ideologies, like that of Hitler, grew out of organic metaphors.

Hitler explained that from a dead mechanism (the state) "there must be formed a living organism.” Stalin stated that the communist party, like every living organism, underwent a "process of metabolism:" the old and obsolete passes away, the new and growing lives and develops.”

Given these conceptions of the nation or party as an organism, several propositions followed, the first being that the nation or party was susceptible to “disease:” germs, infections, cancers, etc., may invade the body politic, causing it to become “ill.” Mao suggested that self-criticism within the party

prevents the inroads of germs and other organisms from contaminating the minds of our comrades and the body of our Party. We cannot allow political dust and germs to eat into our healthy organisms.

A second proposition contained within genocidal ideologies is that the nation’s disease originates in a certain class of people within the body politic. The German anti-Semite, Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), described Jews as carriers of decay who "pollute every national culture.” With trichinae and bacilli, one does not negotiate: They are “exterminated as quickly and thoroughly as possible.”

Hitler called Jews people suffering from a poisonous infection who professed their desire to “infest others with the same disease.” While the French revolutionary, Abbé Sieyès (1748-1836), described the “privileged class” as “some horrible disease eating the flesh on the body of some unfortunate man.” It is a “plague,” Sieyès said, for the nation that suffers from it.

A third proposition defining genocidal ideologies is that it is necessary to “remove” a certain class of people from within the national body. Cure requires “cutting out” the diseased part, just as a surgeon removes a diseased body part whose continued presence threatens the organism’s survival.

Lenin declared that the way of reform was

the way of delay, of procrastination, of the painfully slow decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism. It is the proletariat and the peasantry that suffer first and most of all from their putrefaction. The revolutionary way is the way of quick amputation, which is the least painful to the proletariat, the way of the direct removal of the decomposing parts.

Similarly, the justification of violence in the writings of the Parisian Commune: “Thus the clever and helpful surgeon with his cruel and benevolent knife cuts off the gangrened to save the body of the sick man.” While Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin’s confidant and ally (1882-1949), described the purge of the mid-thirties as the necessity of “cutting into good flesh to get rid of the bad.”

The preceding passages present a coherent fantasy, 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 within the body of the national organism.
• To cure the disease—thereby to “save the nation”—it is necessary to “remove” a certain class of people from within the body politic.

This fantasy is a fundamental source of political violence carried out in the name of racist and revolutionary ideologies. Perpetrators think of themselves—not as murderers—but as men undertaking the “necessary task” of removing a disease from within the nation.

The class of people identified as a “disease element” may be characterized as people lying within the boundaries of the nation but perceived as not belonging there. This class of people is conceived as an “alien element” within the nation” which must be “rejected”—just as any organism rejects alien entities that invade the interior of its body and endanger its health.

The “rejection of alien elements” is rooted, ultimately, in the tendency of an organism to maintain its own narcissistic integrity: integrity of its body; its psyche; and of the social unit with which it identifies.

Recall Freud’s hypothesis that the perception of one’s ego derives from perceptions relating to one’s own body (that the human ego, ultimately, is a body ego). Extending Freud’s hypothesis, I suggested that our perception of political units derive from perceptions emanating from our own bodies.

Genocide enacts an immunological fantasy.