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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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| Page
470 |
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| THE. PSYCHOLOGY OF
GENOCIDE |
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my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for
granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.”
Then his equally enthusiastic soldiering and apparent willingness to risk his
life for that “release.” Then his survivor formulation of the times
as “inwardly sick and rotten,” yet “moving toward a great
metamorphosis.” His subsequent vision and social action can be understood
as an effort to re-create “that awesome moment [at the beginning of the
First World War] to cleanse it of all impurities, and preserve it, so that this
time the goal of 1914 would be reached: to endow Germany with a political
foundation fitted to the scale of the times.”18
There seem to have been definite
parallels in Turkish historical experience prior to their mass murder of
Armenians in 1915. Within the Ottoman empire, throughout the latter part of the
nineteenth century, there was an atmosphere of progressive “decay and
disintegration,” along with a continuous if losing struggle for spiritual
and political unification. The Turks also experienced humiliating forms of
failed regeneration in their disastrous military enterprises during the 1912
Balkan war (ignominious defeat at the hands of their former slaves and wards,
the Greeks and the Bulgarians) and their abortive Russian campaign in 1915 as a
German ally. Vahakn N. Dadrian observes that the Turks moved closer to genocide
as their perception of their situation proceeded “from the condition of
mere strain, to that of crisis, to a precipitate crisis, and eventually to the
cataclysm of war.”19
The stage
of sickness, then, includes the experience of collective loss and death
immersion the promise of redemptive revitalization, including total merging of
self with a mystical collectivity; the absolute failure of that promise,
followed by newly intensified experience of collective death imagery and death
equivalents; leading in turn to a hunger for a “cure” commensurate in
its totality with the “sickness.” |
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| The Vision of Total
Cure |
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| There develops a collective desperation for cure. But
whatever vision is to qualify as a cure must hold out the promise of shared
vitality and renewed confidence in collective immortality. In our century, any
such vision is likely to be bound up with a sense of nation, with what we call
“nationalism.” The national comes to combine spiritual and biological
connectedness, to provide a blending of the immortal cultural and racial
substance of any particular group. One may thus speak of a “national
organism” in terms both of general biological continuity and of viewing
one’s society as similar to a biological organism with “needs for its
proper development.” Those needs become “supreme values” that
take precedence over everything else because, unless they are pursued, the
organism will die.20 |
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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 470 |
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