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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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486 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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over competing alternatives; no longer subject to the
German “torn condition.” Rather, it was to become part of “a
monolithic unit, bound together by blood and fate.”90 In applying that communal cure, the Nazis
created something on the order of “racial time” as an ultimate
dimension in which took place the cosmic struggle for Aryan health and against
Jewish infection — ultimate, because it allegedly determined the outcome
of events in conventional historical time (the First World War, Weimar, etc.)
In its primal nature and timelessness, “racial time” was a vulgarized
counterpart of what Eliade has called “mythic time,”91 and connected every act of mass murder to a
vision of mystical unity.
The violent cure must draw, however
selectively, upon existing intellectual tradition. The Nazis found that
tradition in Nietzsche, whom they interpreted as advocating war as therapy for
weakness and the cultivation of “that deep impersonal hatred, that
cold-blooded murderousness coupled with a good conscience, that communal,
organizing zest in the destruction of the enemy” as a path to collective
health.92* Above all, Nietzsche’s vision
was one of all-consuming illness and cure. The condition, he declared, was
“not … sickness but sickliness,” by which he meant
perpetual weakness and concern with morality.93 Nietzsche went on to declare that “one is
healthy when … one feels that the ‘bite’ of conscience is like a
dog biting on a stone — when one is ashamed of one’s remorse,”
and one can attribute “more health of soul” to a criminal who
“does not slander his deed after it is done” than to the sinner who
“abase[s] himself before the cross.”94
To be sure the Nazis said nothing of
Nietzsche’s repeated mocking of German chauvinism ( German had become an
argument. Deutschland, Deutschland über alles a principle; the
Teutons … the ‘moral world order’ in history)95 of anti-Semitism, and of “the
morality of races and classes.” What mattered was that Nietzsche could
bring to a vision of cure what he himself called “the magic power of
extremes” and his declaration, that “we have to be
destroyers.”96
That one-sided
Nietzschean vision was more important to the Nazis than any formal
psychological system They did sponsor scientific-psychological work claiming to
demonstrate the role of the Jew as the “anti-type,” so constructed
biologically and sociologically as to have a disintegrative effect on the
larger German community.97 And they had some
sympathy for Jungian psychology, particularly at the time of Jung’s
collaboration with Nazi psychiatry and his insistence on distinctions between
the Aryan and the Jewish unconscious.98 But
more fundamentally the Nazis rejected introspective psychology because, as
Rosenberg insisted, “the Nordic soul is not contemplative and … does
not lose itself |
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* Nietzsche had nothing to
do with the nation- and race-centered “German ideology” long
prominent in German intellectual life, and specifically important to the
development of Nazi ideology. Such towering independent cultural visionaries
who have made militant metaphorical calls for killing in the name of healing
are probably necessary to genocidal movements for legitimizing their own
literal application of that principle. |
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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 486 |
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