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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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485 |
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| Genocide |
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identity and collective zeal” in political matters and
“fanaticism … [and] tireless dynamism” in military combat.85
But the historical differences are
important: for the Aztecs, the mass killing was always carried out in ritual
fashion as an extension of a long-standing ideology and ethos; while for the
Nazis, the killing was carried out through technology and was an unprecedented
historical step. Nazi genocide was kept secret, except from the SS inner
élite, while Aztec sacrificial killing was open and celebrated.
For the Nazis as for the Aztecs, “human sacrifice was ’an
alchemy by which life was made out of death.’” The therapeutic
component in both was strong: for the Nazis, therapy to the Aryan race; and for
the Aztecs, to gods whose weakened or ailing state, or displeasure at not
having been sufficiently nourished, had led to disasters and other untoward
events (“The prescription to cure such supernatural ailments was
inevitably more sacrifice, requiring new victories to obtain
captives”).86 In both cases, whatever
the more-than-natural imagery, the therapy was ultimately for the life power of
one’s own group.
Both groups killed and went on killing in the
face of increasing evidence that the killing itself interfered with the
survival of the state: with the conduct of the war, in the case of the Nazis;
and with the entire social and economic existence of an exhausted empire, in
the case of the Aztecs. Both had to continue “killing” death. For it
was as true of the Nazi as of the Aztec that each “could insist on
offering blood in return for life until his whole religion became an emotional
bulwark around the specter of death.”87
The Nazi perversion of primal human psychological forces was prefigured
by Joseph de Maistre, an early-nineteenth-century Catholic reactionary, who was
to influence the later development of European fascism: |
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from maggots up to man, the universal law is the
violent destruction of human beings. The whole earth, continually steeped in
blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be
sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite. until the
consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.88 |
| In order to extinguish evil and kill death, that is, we
require not just violence but violence without end — some form of
genocide.89 |
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| Götterdämmerung and Self-Genocide
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As it becomes total — that is, genocidal — the
violent cure draws upon all facets of the perpetrators’ culture.
The Nazis drew upon powerful German cultural impulses toward a unified,
fully merged polity, society, and person. The individual self was no longer to
be haunted by its own fear of disintegration, or by conflicts |
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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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