Genocide as an Immunological Fantasy

I suggested in last week’s edition of the IOWGT Newsletter that leaders of political revolutions—such as Lenin and Hitler—often depict the “enemy of the people” in organic or biological terms. Hitler repeatedly wrote and spoke about the Jew as a “parasite in the body” that was “sucking the blood out of the people’s pores.” Lenin depicted the state as a “parasite on the body of society” that was “choking its vital pores;” and described kulaks/capitalists as leeches that were “sucking the blood of the people.”

What we observe in each of these cases is an ideology articulated as a binary. On the one hand is the healthy body or good object, one’s own nation or people. On the other is a second object—a destructive organism attached to the healthy body or good object. This “parasite on the body of the people” is the source of a disease acting to deplete the nation’s energy and cause it to suffer. The continued presence of this disease element would lead to the death or demise of the national organism. The elimination or destruction of this parasite on the body of the people, on the other hand, would allow the nation to regain its health and strength—and to flourish.

Genocidal violence often grows out of this organic conception—belief that the enemy is the source of a disease. Hitler called Jewish Bolshevism a “racial tuberculosis” that had to be “cut out of the Volk body;” while Lenin conceived of revolution in terms of the “amputation” of the “putrid parts of the national organism.” In each instance, terroristic violence is conceived as good and justifiable. In the absence of violent efforts to remove the destructive organism attached to the body politic, the nation would be consumed and destroyed by this organism. Revolutionary violence is a drastic activity undertaken to eliminate the source of the nation’s disease—thus saving the life of the body politic.

Why are ideologies that advocate violence often expressed in terms of organic or biological metaphors? Are the metaphors that political leaders use to convey their ideology meaningful? Please write to me at rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net and share your ideas.

In my first book, reissued as Hitler’s Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy and History, I set forth a method for discovering the latent meaning of ideologies. This method (“Analysis of Metaphor”) consists of identifying recurring images and metaphors bound to the central terms or symbolic objects that define an ideology (e.g., “the Jew” or “the people”). Images and metaphors that occur repeatedly in the rhetoric of political leaders constitute the royal road toward uncovering the underlying fantasies upon which an ideology has been constructed—its latent meaning.

The following is a summary of the central propositions that defined Hitler’s ideology—and that led to the Final Solution: (1) The German nation is an actual body politic or national organism consisting of the German people as the (healthy) cells of this organism. (2) Present within the national organism are alien or destructive cells—variously described as bacteria, viruses and parasites—that are the source of Germany’s disease. (3) In order to cure the disease from which the German people are suffering, it is necessary to eliminate or remove or destroy these pathogenic cells.

Genocide (the Holocaust) represented the acting out of an immunological fantasy: destroying bad cells—the source or cause of Germany’s disease—in order to rescue the nation. Hitler’s mission revolved around his fantasy that he could save the life of Germany by removing or eliminating Jews from within the body politic. He sought to destroy bacteria, parasites and viruses that were sapping the strength and destroying the health of the people. If these pathogenic organisms were not removed from within the body politic, Germany would die.

From the beginning, the idea of the Jew as the source of a disease—and the wish to eliminate the Jew—lay at the heart of National Socialism. Hitler’s Official Programme, written by Gottfried Feder and published in 1927 declared, “Anti-Semitism is the emotional foundation of our movement.” The anti-Semite “recognizes the carrier of the national plague-germ and demands the expulsion of the Jew from our state.”

Tracing the evolving perception of the Jew, C. C. Aronsfeld in his Text of the Holocaust (1985) reports that after the Reichstag election in 1930, Count Reventlow called the Jew “a tape-worm in the human organism which it is our duty to exterminate.” A German medical journal in June 1935 explained that just as weak people were liable to succumb to tuberculosis more easily than strong ones, so only “racially weak people would fall victim to the bacilli of Jewish infection.” In a speech before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, Hitler explained that the anti-Jewish policy he had inaugurated in National Socialist Germany reflected his endeavor to make the German people “immune against this infection.” Measures enacted by National Socialism, Hitler said, were designed to enable the German people to avoid “close relationship with the carriers of this poisonous bacillus.”

The actualization and climax of this rhetoric was the Final Solution. As the killing process unfolded, Hitler proclaimed (in February 1942) that the “discovery of the Jewish virus” was one of the "greatest revolutions the world has seen." The struggle in which the Nazis were engaged, Hitler said, was similar to the one "waged by Pasteur and Koch in the last century. How many diseases must owe their origins to the Jewish virus? Only when we have eliminated the Jews will we regain our health.”

In his seminal essay, “The Jewish Parasite,” Alex Bein suggests that Nazi ideology spread and took hold as a consequence of the repeated use of certain words and images that led to “belief in the reality of a fantasy.” In language, Bein explains, thoughts and conceptions are mirrored. Nazism crept into the flesh and blood of the masses by means of “single words, turns of phrase and stock expressions” which, imposed upon the people a million times over in continuous reiteration, were “mechanically and unconsciously absorbed by them.”

The presentation of Jews as “corroding and poisonous parasites,” as vermin, as bacteria and bacilli, everywhere infesting and striving to “destroy the body of the German people as a whole” and each individual German with a “demonic power” paralyzed to a large extent any internal resistance on the part of the masses. Lagarde’s metaphor, Bein observes, of the Jews as “bacilli not to be negotiated with but to be exterminated” could, in the atmosphere of Bio-Mythology, become a horrible reality.

Moreover, Bein theorizes, it may well have been that the image of the Jew presented by the Nazis contributed to the method of extermination. Killing the Jews in gas chambers was but the “logical consequence of their final identification with parasites, cankers, bacilli and vermin.” Once the Jews were really so regarded, Bein suggests, it was not only imperative to exterminate them, it was also quite obvious that in the process the “same means we use against bacilli and vermin was to be employed: poison gas.”

Nazi ideology, then, contained a perception of reality defined by a particular fantasy that was projected into the external world. The Final Solution followed as a consequence of the Nazi’s perception of reality—their ideological fantasy: Jews were depicted as bacteria or virus, the source of a “disease within the body politic” that had to be removed if the nation was to survive. Hitler was “Doctor of the People” who had diagnosed Germany’s disease, and prescribed the cure. The cure that Hitler prescribed and carried out was destruction of Jewish bacteria. Jews needed to be eliminated or removed from within the body politic—as any living organism acts to remove “not-self” cells. Genocide represented the acting out of an immunological fantasy.

What was the meaning of this fantasy? Why was Nazi ideology conveyed in terms of organic metaphors? Did Hitler and his henchmen simply “use” these metaphors in order to dehumanize Jews—thus making it easier to kill them? Or did Hitler and the Nazis actually experience Jews in this way? What was the nature of the virulent disease that elicited such profound anxiety and generated such radical forms of behavior?