Disease within the Body Politic

A reviewer of Nations Have the Right to Kill on Amazon.com reflected: “What does Koenigsberg’s argument about Hitler wanting to expel the ‘plague bacilli’ of European Jewry hold for radical leftists, who would like to see the bourgeoisie eliminated? I wonder how applicable his argument is to a consideration of ‘revolutionary violence’? Do the decidedly anti-human Nazis have something in common in this sense with the self-styled revolutionaries?”

I have superimposed below passages from the writings of Hitler and those of Lenin, conveying the idea of a “parasite” or “blood sucker” attacking and threatening to consume and to destroy the body politic. The metaphors contained within these statements (that occur repeatedly in the rhetoric of Hitler and Lenin) are nearly identical. Do recurring images and metaphors bound to central terms of an ideology (e. g. “the Jew” or “the state” or “the capitalist”) reveal something about the meaning of these ideologies?

Hitler was terrified by the “incipient and slowly spreading decomposition of the German nation.” He called the Jew a “ferment of decomposition” among people and in the broader sense a “dissolver of human culture.” Early in his career, he stated that the future of Germany required the annihilation of Marxism. Either the “racial tuberculosis” would thrive and Germany would die out, or it would be “cut out of the Volk body” and Germany would thrive.

Lenin declared that the way of reform was the way of delay, of procrastination, of the “painfully slow decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism.” The revolutionary way was the way of “quick amputation,” of the “direct removal of the decomposing parts.” In Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (page 45 of the online text).

Both Lenin and Hitler conceive of their nation or people in biological terms—as an actual organism containing a parasite consuming or sucking the blood of the people. The continuing presence of this deadly organism within the body politic would lead to its destruction and death unless removed.

The revolutionary objectives of Hitler and Lenin are identical: to remove or cut out or amputate the source or cause of a deadly disease within the body politic in order to prevent the national organism from decomposing or dissolving. Violent political acts thus become necessary and unavoidable: If the disease within the body of the people is not eliminated or destroyed, the nation will die.

I observed in my last post that the ideology of Nazism was constructed based on a binary: The German nation was conceived as absolutely good, whereas the Jewish enemy was conceived as absolutely destructive or evil. In order to rescue the German nation, the Jewish force of destruction had to be eliminated or removed. Hitler described the German nation as a living organism consisting of the German people as good cells. Jews were called bacteria or parasites—pathogenic cells—that had invaded the otherwise healthy organism. In order to rescue or save Germany (from death), the source of the nation’s disease—Jewish bacteria or parasites—had to be removed from within the body politic.

Lenin’s ideology of Communism revolved around a similar binary. On the one hand were the “the people,” conceived as fundamentally virtuous and healthy. On the other hand was “the state” or “the capitalist,” working toward the decomposition and destruction of peoples and nations. Lenin built the communist movement based upon his struggle to rescue the people. In order to keep the national organism from decomposing, the diseased parts of the body politic had to be amputated or removed.

Hitler’s Nazism and Lenin’s Communism possessed an identical structure. On the one hand lay a symbolic object conceived as the essence of goodness, one’s nation or “the people.” On the other lay a symbolic object conceived as the essence of evil or destructiveness. The mission of each man was to save or rescue the people by acting to destroy the element within the nation working to destroy the people; that sought to deprive them of their goodness.

Within the political domain, any and all actions believed to be necessary to achieve the objective of rescuing goodness from badness are deemed justifiable. Hitler declared, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” The philosophy of Lenin was identical: “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue the people, we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” The difference in their ideologies lay in the nature of the objects defined as the source of absolute evil or destruction.

Does the rescue fantasy that defines Nazism and Communism lie at the root of many political ideologies? Do human beings project existence into concepts or entities such as “the nation” or “the people,” and then spend their lives in a struggle to maintain or preserve the goodness or greatness of these entities?

People love and worship those good objects or entities with which they identify. These entities, however, usually are threatened by “enemies” imagined to be seeking to destroy the good object. Unfortunately, people do not love and worship the same good object. Political forms of violence occur as people struggle to destroy those entities that—they imagine—are working to destroy the entities that they worship and with which they identify. Political ideologies build upon a rescue fantasy.