Organic Metaphors and Revolutionary Violence

In the November 2, 2009, issue of the IOWGT Newsletter, I wrote about “Genocide as an Immunological Fantasy,” summarizing my findings on the rhetoric that led to the Holocaust. Hitler and other Nazi leaders conceived of Jews as the source of a “disease” within the body politic whose continued presence would lead to the death of the nation. Jews, in the mind of Hitler and other Nazi ideologues, constituted alien or “not-self” cells within the German body politic. Genocide was undertaken within the framework of an immunological fantasy: To eliminate or destroy disease-generating microorganisms in order to “save the nation” (see my online publication, “Genocide as Immunology: The Psychosomatic Source of Culture”).

My thanks to Dr. Patricia Campion, Associate Professor of Sociology at Saint Leo University in Florida, who found my presentation intriguing and wondered if I found a similar pattern or structure underlying other genocides or revolutionary movements (I hope readers of this Newsletter will continue to write to me—conveying your ideas and insights—at rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net).

After the publication of Hitler’s Ideology—(Google preview,
ordering information)—the first book to present the Holocaust as an outgrowth of the Nazi fantasy of the Jew as a disease within the body politic—I turned to a study of Lenin to see if it was possible to uncover the roots of another Twentieth Century ideology that led to mass-death and immense suffering. I read through the Collected Works of Lenin at Columbia University (45 substantial volumes). Did Lenin’s ideology (the foundation of Soviet Communism)—like that of Hitler—possess a relatively simple and coherent “deep structure”?

I planned to write a companion to Hitler’s Ideology entitled Lenin’s Ideology, but ended up reporting my findings in a slim volume recently reissued as The Nation: A Study in Ideology and Fantasy. (Google preview, information on ordering).

In my ongoing research, I continue to pose the question: Do ideologies that generate mass-murder possess a common structure? Of course, each episode of revolutionary violence grows out of a unique cultural milieu and historical moment. However: Is it possible that a similar template or “hidden narrative” lies at the root of each instantiation?

Various political ideologies claim that eliminating a particular race or class of people from within the national body will produce positive or beneficial results; that removing a particular group will lead to improvement in the nation or people’s health. Ideologies differ in terms of the nature of the class of people that is conceived to be responsible for damaging the health of the people and causing them to suffer, e.g., the ruling class, the Jew, the capitalist, the landlord, the intelligentsia, the communist, the infidel, the terrorist, etc. Are these terms fungible, that is to say, interchangeable?

In A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Read the Introduction) Eric Weitz observes that historians tend to be “averse to large-scale generalizations.” Historians favor, rather, the “detailed study of a particular place and time,” seeking to “render the nuance that comes with knowledge of language and culture.” This stance is consistent with postmodernism that favors “mini-narratives,” stories that explain small practices and local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts.

Weitz seeks to move beyond immersion in the history of a particular people—beyond individual cases and national frames. Promising to be “faithful to the historian’s propensity for detail, nuance, and contingency,” Weitz presents a comparative theory of genocide, developing a global model to account for this phenomenon.

Weitz finds that political leaders who initiate genocidal movements often are animated by “powerful visions of the future,” seeking to create “utopias in the here and now.” Political violence is directed toward races and classes of people who—for whatever reason—are conceived as contradicting or acting to negate the utopian vision put forth by the revolutionary leader. Races and classes of people are targeted—and murdered—because they are perceived as impediments toward actualizing the ideal of a pure or perfect society.

Weitz’s model is consistent with my view that political violence grows out of the struggle to maintain “goodness” in the face of the threat of “badness” or evil. Particular races or classes of people are imagined to be intent upon destroying the good object: one’s own nation or people. In order to maintain one’s nation or people—to preserve its goodness and purity—the evil race or class of people must be eliminated or destroyed. Weitz also finds—as I have—that political leaders who advocate revolutionary violence often present their ideas and arguments within the framework of organic metaphors—defining certain classes of people as useless, destructive and expendable.

Weitz cites Abbé Sieyès, one of the French Revolution’s chief theorists and author of the 1789 pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?, the manifesto that helped transform the Estates-General into the National Assembly in June 1789. Sieyès inverted the ideology that defended aristocratic privilege, endowing commoners (“the people”) with all the noble traits, and the aristocracy with all the nefarious traits. The nobility was depicted as a “horrible parasite eating the flesh of an unfortunate man” and nobles as “vegetable parasites which can only live on the sap of the plants that they impoverish and blight.” Were nobles to be included in national life, the social body of the nation would be completely sapped of its vitality. Asking what the appropriate place for a privileged class was in society, Sieyès wrote, would be like “deciding on the appropriate place in the body of a sick man for a malignant tumor that torments him and drains his strength.” One must “neutralize” the privileged class so that the “health and order of the organs” can be restored.

In Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (Google preview), Tricia Starks conveys the biological metaphors that defined the Soviet revolution. Revolutionary rhetoric, Starks observes, took the form of the binaries of pure/polluted and healthy/diseased. Seeking utopian purity, communism framed its ideology in terms of hygienic metaphors and the “language of purification.” In his attacks against the bourgeois, kulaks (rich peasants) and the priesthood, Lenin compared these classes to “diseases, parasites, or vermin.” He called for attacks on the “parasites that suck the blood of the working people.” In a tirade delivered in 1917, Lenin referred to the rich and the idlers as “hopelessly decayed and atrophied limbs,” this “contagion, this plague, this ulcer that socialism has inherited from capitalism.”

Lenin insisted that the people take collective action to “clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas, of bugs—the rich.” In his speech, Starks says, he described the bourgeoisie variously as “filth”, “rot”, “infection”, and even “crippled limbs”, connecting capitalism to disease and degeneracy. Extending the metaphor of parasites and disease to his political opponents in his article “The Itch” (1918), Lenin portrayed unacceptable political thought as “scabies” (a contagious skin infection caused by the human itch mite), and presented cleansing as the solution: “Put yourself in a steam bath and get rid of the itch.”

Starks concludes that Lenin portrayed capitalism as a “disease plaguing the entire world” and that dread of this infection saturated Soviet propaganda in the 1920s. Ideological deviation was medicalized as a perversity that endangered both the individual and the entire social body. Sick party members—if they could not be rehabilitated or reeducated—would have to be “excised” before they endangered the party body. The primary method used to accomplish this was the purge, or ochistka (literally “cleansing”). Purging the party of those subject to “illnesses” allowed the party to remain pure and inviolate.

Weitz observes that Stalin’s penchant for biological metaphors was greater even than Lenin’s, evoking some of the “worst horrors of the Twentieth Century.” Stalin (like Lenin) depicted kulaks as “bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires.” As Hitler described Germany as an organism, so Stalin described the Communist party as “a living organism.” Cadres who did not take up the struggle against the opposition “drive sores into the inside of the party organism,” and the party “falls ill.” As in every organism “metabolism takes place: old, obsolete stuff falls off; new, growing things flourish and develop.”

If obsolete parts of the organism do not die a natural death, more drastic measures are necessary. Rather than wait for the “slow decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism,” Lenin advocated “quick amputation, direct removal of decomposing parts.” Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin’s close confidant and trusted ally, described the purge of the mid-1930s in terms of the necessity of “cutting into good flesh in order to get rid of the bad,” a justification of violence not unlike what appeared in the writings of the Paris Commune during the French Revolution: “Thus, the clever and helpful surgeon with his cruel and benevolent knife cuts of the gangrened limb in order to save the body of the sick man.” And as we have previously observed, Hitler declared that the future of Germany required that the “racial tuberculosis” of Jewish Marxism be “annihilated,” i.e., “cut out of the Volk body.”

The images and metaphors presented in the passages above convey a coherent fantasy that may lie at the heart of revolutionary movements that give rise to mass-murder. In this fantasy, the nation or people (or party) is conceived as a living organism suffering from a disease that could prove to be fatal. The source of this disease is a particular class of people embedded within the national or people’s body. This class of people is responsible for the suffering of the nation or people.

Embedded within a good or healthy body is a second organism, e.g., a parasite—that is acting to ruin the health of the nation or people. In order to restore the strength and health of the nation or people, the secondary, alien organism—attached to the body politic—must be “removed:” excised, extirpated or destroyed. Political leaders who perpetuate mass-murder in the name of their ideologies think of themselves not as murderers, but as men who undertake the “necessary” task of removing the source of the nation’s disease.

Given the recurrence of organic metaphors within revolutionary leaders’ rhetoric (I’ve presented only a minute portion of the evidence here—see my online publications “Ideology, Perception and Genocide: How Fantasy Generates History” and “The Nation’s Disease”), we now may turn to explaining the presence of such metaphors. I am indebted to Mike Sobocinski, who wrote to me presenting one way of understanding this tendency of revolutionary ideologues to present their arguments within the framework of organic metaphors.

Sobocinski says that the use of organic metaphors allows the “redefinition” of some parts of society as an “out-group within the in-group or dominant culture.” Labeling group members as bacteria or parasites—the source of a disease—works to dehumanize the other, thus justifying violence. Organic metaphors within political rhetoric function to “solidify the in-group/out-group distinction between persecutors and their victims,” allowing the “overcoming of individual conscience and collective norms” that previously would have limited actions against targeted classes of people. Metaphors of disease function to “remove negative sanctions,” allowing for more extreme forms of violence.

This perspective does not attempt to account for the desire to commit acts of violence against the targeted group—and does not conceive that the metaphors contain within themselves the reasons for violent acts. Rather, given the (unexplained) desire to perform acts of political violence, Sobocinski sees metaphors as facilitating the capacity and willingness of people to perform such acts. According to this view, political leaders who wish to initiate acts of violence “employ” these metaphors (in a more or less conscious way) in order to facilitate the process of scapegoating. Dehumanizing organic rhetoric is merely a useful tool.

Is this all there is to it? Or is a deeper dynamic at play? Please tell me what you think by writing to me at rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net. I’d like to hear from you.