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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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484 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
GENOOCIDE |
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to the holiness of his calling”; and that another
writer held forth the vision that “physicians could be the true savior of
the human race.”81 We have seen this
visionary medical materialism associated with various occult ideas, as in the
case of Rudolf Hess and Johann S., who was in part a follower of Hess (see
pages 129-30). When Dr. S. plunged into personal purification via war, in
response to impending defeat and other disillusionments with the Nazi movement,
he was, so to speak, attempting to purify his purification, to find the
simplest (or most pure) expression of life-death confrontation. The purifying
impulse, once established, may not easily give way and, when its violence falls
into disrepute, can lend itself to alternate forms of killing.
The goal
of Nazi purification, like that of primitive peoples, was to “create one
single, symbolically consistent universe.”82 Both sought qualities of “wholeness and
completeness” as well as “physical perfection,” but the Nazis
were much more extreme than any primitives in their literalism and in their
deadly application of medical materialism and high technology to a totalistic
spiritual goal.
For the Nazis were much less at home in their skins
than were primitive peoples: as a modern movement seeking by their purification
procedures to restore a past of perfect harmony that never was, the
Nazis’ actions inevitably were compensatory and more desperate. Starting
from modern forms of collective dislocation and of fragmentation of the self,
their purification was bound to fail. It is simply not possible to create, from
a modern psychic vantage point, a “primitive, undifferentiated
universe” within which a Führer principle becomes the source
of all judgments about life, death, and killing. Indeed, one suspects that the
very impossibility of the project takes it from mere victimization to genocide.
For, just as in primitive cultures, “witchcraft … is found in a
non-structure,”83 so in modern cultures
can genocide be found in the non-achievable ideal of total medical-hygienic
purification.
Purification tends to be associated with sacrificial
victims, whether in primitive or contemporary religious or secular terms.
Genocide can be understood as a quest to make sacrificial victims out of an
entire people.
The practice of human sacrifice was pursued not just to
appease the gods but to engage in a mutually sustaining exchange of life power.
The Aztecs of Mexico, for instance, as late as the fifteenth century and just
before the Spanish conquests, pursued as their sacred duty a course of endless
warfare in order to obtain prisoners to offer in sacrifice “to preserve
the universe from the daily threat of annihilation.”84 But for the gods to provide this service, they in turn had
to be nourished by man, “kept alive by life itself, by the magic substance
that is found in the blood of man, … ‘the precious liquid’
… with which the gods are fed.” As in the case of the Nazis, in a
very different context, the mass sacrificial killing became part of a vast
revitalization project bound up with “national |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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Page 484 |
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