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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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488 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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people with him in death) has the future-oriented message
that the genocidal cure must go on. In the way that “the blood of Christ
in the Sacrament was to be replaced by the blood of the German war dead,”
103 the blood of one’s own people and of
oneself must now supplement that mythic blood bank.
The process may be
still more paradoxical: just as one reasserts immortalizing principles in
killing oneself, so may the self-genocide of the people, mainly engendered by a
leader, seek to assert the immortalization of the whole people. The
perpetrating individual or the group, that is, is cured by its own
self-destruction. Then there can be no danger of hidden infection, of
“inner Judaization.” Purification and sacrifice are absolute.
Self-destruction may well be the only logical outcome of truly committed
genocide. |
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| Medical Fundamentalism |
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If you are curing a sickness, anything is permissible.
That image of cure lends itself to the restorative myth of state violence and
to the literal enactment of that myth. Attitudes associated with modern
nationalism — the healing of the wounds of one’s own extended
biological group or family — can readily move the myth into the territory
of genocide. The myth of collective cure can then become associated with a
cosmology and even approach a biologically centered state religion. Rites and
rituals are established, which increasingly organize the meaning of life for
individual people around the struggle to cure the wounded race by assaulting
relentlessly the source of its infection. Differing nationalisms may give their
own coloration to the process — “Each country develops its own
sickness, medicine, and doctor”104
— but the genocidal reach is associated with the image of killing to cure.
We may then speak of a medical fundamentalism. In all fundamentalisms,
and they are usually religious or political, there is the sense of profound
threat to what are considered fundamental beliefs and symbols, and a
compensatory invocation of a sacred text (the Bible, the Koran, Mein
Kampf) as a literal guide to every form of action.105 History stops so that murderous therapy can be
applied. While medicine does not provide the sacred text, one can revert to
ancient practices of shamans, witch doctors, and tricksters who could be
expected to kill in order to heal. For physicians as well as charismatic
spiritual physicians, there is a release from Hippocratic restraint. George
Santayana wrote in 1915, “The Germans have been groping for four hundred
years toward a restoration of their primitive heathenism,”106 and we may say that they found the means of
doing so in their medical fundamentalism.
Susan Sontag has written that
“the concept of disease is never innocent,” and that “to
describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence.”107
Armenians were described as “a canker, a malignance which looks like a
small pimple from the outside, which, if not removed |
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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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