IDEOLOGIES OF WAR, GENOCIDE AND TERROR

IDEOLOGIES OF WAR, GENOCIDE AND TERROR
A Website Sponsored by Library of Social Science
Home Warfare Genocide Terrorism The Body Politic Koenigsberg Newsletter
POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE CONCEPT OF
COLLECTIVE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

By Richard Koenigsberg

Online Publication Date: 23-Apr-2008.


Well over two-hundred million people were killed in the Twentieth Century as a result of political violence generated by nations. Episodes of mass slaughter are given names like war, genocide, democide, social annihilation, and murder by government. It seems as though the world lived through an epidemic, or malignant disease.

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski states that the Twentieth Century was dominated by the “politics of organized insanity.” Yet nowhere does one find a systematic concept of psychopathology to characterize the monumentally destructive and often bizarre events of political history. In the privacy of a Movie Theater—witnessing the carnage, absurdity and futility of battle—people often think or say to themselves, “War is insane.” But what happens when people leave the Movie Theater? Where are studies of the “war disorder?”

Freud in 1930 proposed a "pathology of cultural communities.” Chapter I of Norman O. Brown’s classic Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) is entitled “The Disease Called Man” and Chapter II “Neurosis and History.” Neurosis, Brown says, is not an occasional aberration and not just in other people. Rather, Brown proposes, neurosis is an “essential consequence of civilization or culture” and therefore is “in us, and in us all the time.”

My colleague Roger Griffin, an authority on Fascism, summarizes his conclusion about Nazi destructiveness on his website: “Since so many millions were involved in Nazism and the Holocaust, this can’t be explained in terms of madness or pathology: Something more basic had to be involved.” Why the a priori assumption that a social movement in which millions of people were involved cannot also be a form of madness or pathology?

In this paper, I discuss the concept of collective psychopathology by focusing on the case-study I know best, that of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, specifically the behavior of Hitler and Germany during the final years of the Second World War. I will show how Hitler acted to bring about the destruction of Germany. What occurred may be understood as a form of psychopathology played out upon the stage of society.

Hitler fought and suffered with his comrades in the First World War, 1914-1918, a war in which two million German men were killed and millions more maimed. In spite of the immense suffering that he and his comrades endured, Hitler refused to renounce the idea of warfare, rather glorified the death of the German soldier in battle. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that in 1914 his young volunteer regiment had received its baptism of fire. With “Fatherland love in our heart and songs on our lips,” Hitler wrote, his young regiment had gone into battle “as to a dance.” The most precious blood, he said, “sacrificed itself joyfully.”

Upon assuming power as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler immediately began fantasizing about the Second World War—that would necessitate the deaths of millions of more German men. In one of a series of conversations with Herman Rauschning in the mid-thirties, he stated that he would be prepared for the “blood sacrifice of another German generation;” that he would not hesitate to take the deaths of two or three million German soldiers on his conscience “fully aware of the heaviness of sacrifice.”

In another conversation with Rauschning, Hitler said, “We all know what world war means. We must shake off sentimentality and be hard.” He declared that one day when he took Germany to war, he would not hesitate because of the “ten million men I shall be sending to their deaths.” In planning for war, Hitler was preparing for the slaughter of German soldiers.

I am going to cite during the course of this paper an article written by psychiatrist Stuart Twemlow and psychologist George Hough published in the journal Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Looking at group dynamics from a clinical perspective, the authors develop the concept of a “psychotic fantasy of masochistic group death” and show how a leader can be both the “victim and perpetrator of a large group’s masochistic unconscious wishes and yearnings for death and martyrdom.”

Hitler declared war on September 1, 1939. Speaking before the Reichstag as Germany invaded Poland, he said nothing about world conquest or victory. Rather, he stated that in the coming war he would ask every German to do what he was prepared to do at any moment: To be ready to “lay down his life for his people and his country.”

The Nazi movement was highly effective in preparing young Germans for the Holocaust that Hitler had in store for them. At age ten, members of Hitler’s youth swore that they were ready and willing to “give up their lives” for Adolf Hitler. Soldiers upon joining the army vowed that they were prepared to “offer their lives at any time.” While the SS-man famously pledged that he would be “obedient unto death.” The essence of being a Nazi, in short, was the promise to die when one was asked to do so.

As the attack against Russia began, German General von Rundstedt admonished the soldiers of the Second World War to emulate the examples of their brothers in the First World War and to die in the same way, to be as “strong, unswerving and obedient, to go happily and as a matter of course to his death." As war on the Eastern Front progressed, Goebbels was satisfied to note that German soldiers “go into battle with devotion, like congregations going into service." German soldiers did not rebel: They went like sheep to the slaughter.

Historian Michael Geyer informs us that German casualties increased as the war progressed. According to Geyer, the number of dead German soldiers amounted to 63,000 in 1940 and increased to 191,000 in 1941 in the wake of the attack on the Soviet Union. The following years saw a rapid increase in casualties: 443,000 in 1942, 449,000 in 1943, and 458,800 in 1944.

Historians agree that the tide had shifted irrevocably against the war effort in the fall of 1942 at the latest with the Battle of Stalingrad and, what’s more, that the German military and Nazi leadership were perfectly aware of this situation. One of the last entries in the war diary of General Alfred Jodl, chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, states that when the catastrophe of the winter 1941-1942 broke, it became clear to the Fuhrer that victory could no longer be achieved.

The military effort in the summer 1942 to reverse this fate failed and hence the war was lost. At Nuremberg, Jodl summed up that earlier than anyone in the world, Hitler “anticipated and knew that the war was lost.” Hitler was unwilling, however, to negotiate, preferring rather a “fight unto death.” Geyer concludes that the German machinery of destruction and annihilation went into high gear “at the very moment the war was lost.”

The nation mobilized in a total war effort and the Wehrmacht fought for three years—notwithstanding the knowledge that this effort would not make a difference in the eventual outcome of the war.

In the last four months of the war in 1945, nearly 500,000 German soldiers died per month. This was probably the most concentrated incidence of mass-slaughter in the history of the human race. It would appear that by the end of the Second World War, Hitler had actualized the fantasy he set forth in the mid-thirties—when he declared that he would not shrink from the sacrifice of millions of German men.

Articulating a sequence of stages that link group members to leaders Twemblow and Hough suggest that the momentum of a social movement derives from the fantasy of masochistic submission to a leader. The ultimate behavioral enactment of the fantasy of masochistic submission is group death. Let us briefly examine how Hitler and Goebbels acted to motivate the German people.

German soldiers were prepared for what occurred, having vowed to offer their lives at any time for Adolf Hitler. More was required to persuade the civilian population to embrace death. On September 26, 1938, Hitler spoke in an arena known as the Sportpalast after having given the Czechs an ultimatum to accept German occupation of the Sudetenland. The mob of 15,000 in the hall interrupted every sentence of Hitler’s speech with fanatic applause, shouting, cheering and chanting “Fuhrer command, we will follow!”

Joseph Goebbels delivered his most famous speech at the same Sportpalast before a packed crowd on February 18, 1943. After the defeat at Stalingrad in 1942, the seriousness of the war began to come home to the German people. Acknowledging that the Stalingrad debacle had been a great “alarm call of destiny,” Goebbels incited the audience to a high pitch of excitement, challenging Germans to carry on.

He asked the hysterical crowd whether they believed in their Fuhrer and the total victory of German arms. An ear-splitting “Ja!”—“Yes”—was the reply. Goebbels screamed, “Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we could ever imagine today?” Whereupon pandemonium broke out in the Sportpalast. “Now, volk,” Goebbels screamed, “Arise and storm, break loose.”

Michael Geyer notes that the sad progression of mass-death in the years 1943-1945—turning Europe into a vast zone of destruction—hinged on the unflagging German pursuit of war. German society, soldiers and civilians, Geyer says, fought on long after the war was effectively lost and long after it had become apparent to everyone that the war could not but end in disastrous defeat. The majority of German people stuck it out.

Twemblow and Hough claim that a charismatic leader can inspire his followers to actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death. Group members heroically choose to die rather than to become crushed by enemy forces closing in. The leader is like a pied piper who leads the community of the faithful precisely where they have “unconsciously directed him to lead them.”

In a speech of June 5, 1943, Goebbels declared that “Millions of German soldiers today have to be ready to die in the battlefield for their people.” On the occasion of Hitler’s 56th birthday on April 20, 1945—just before the end of the war—Goebbels stated that the German people would remain loyal to their Fuhrer no matter what: “We will never desert him, no matter how desperate and dangerous the hour. We stand with him, as he stands with us—in Germanic loyalty as we have sworn. We do not need to tell him, for he knows and must know: Fuhrer command! We will follow.”

Attempting to compel German soldiers and civilians to fight to the death, Nazi military leaders appealed to family values: If women and children withstood the terror of bombing, soldiers could not possibly show weakness. Death was talked up, Geyer says, as “the only way for soldiers to redeem themselves.” In the cruel metaphysics of the Third Reich, the only way to be a man “was to be dead.”

Geyer concludes that collective death as a deliberate gambit was “very much at the heart of the Nazi politics of self-destruction.” In its version of Stalingrad, the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps extolled the heroic death of the soldiers at Stalingrad and asked civilians to follow their example: “Their passage is like the path into a land from which there is no return. This is their call: that we all proceed into the land in which they dwell.”

The war that Hitler brought forth led to the collapse of German society. Historian Richard Bessel in his study Nazism and War (2004) reports that by the end of March, 1945, there were an estimated nineteen million Germans who were refugees. By the end of the war, one-quarter of the German population had been uprooted. The disaster reached such proportions that one could speak, Bessel says, of the “destruction of German society.

Bessel observes that the chaos and extreme violence of the Second World War turned the continent into a gigantic prison and sea of blood. If there was a distillation of Nazism, he says, it lay in the “senseless destruction of human life.” Geyer states that Goebbels and Hitler “deliberately prepared for death—their own and that of the nation.” Their strategy of ideologization and mobilization during the war served the purpose of “preparing the soldier to die.”

The end of this massive project of national self-destruction occurred only with the suicides of those who had orchestrated it. On April 30, 1945, Hitler poisoned his dog, gave a cyanide tablet to his wife Eva Braun, and then killed himself. The next day, the wife of Joseph Goebbels, Magda, crushed cyanide capsules into the mouths of her six beautiful children, killing them all. Then, Joseph and Magda Goebbels committed suicide.

This narrative of the final days of the Third Reich brings to mind another social movement that had a tragic ending, namely the mass murder-suicide of Jim Jones and his followers of the Peoples Temple on November 18, 1978 in Guyana, South America. Approximately nine hundred men, women and children perished after drinking from a metal vat of grape kool-aid mixed with poison.

I now will reveal that the article I have cited during my discussion of the mass-death that occurred at the end of the Second World War is entitled “The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death: The ‘Revolutionary Suicide’ in Jonestown.” The passages I cited do not refer to what happened during the last days of Nazi Germany, but sought to illuminate the final days of the Peoples Temple movement and mass-suicide at Jonestown.

Another article examining the Jonestown mass-suicide from a clinical psychology perspective is entitled “The Group Psychology of Mass Madness.” The authors propose the concept of “collective pathological regression within a charismatically led mass movement.” Their analysis of the leader of the Peoples Temple, Reverend Jim Jones, shows how his actions triggered the “mass madness that engulfed the inhabitants of Jonestown.”

The following terms, then, were used by mental health professionals I have cited in their analysis of the mass-suicide at Jonestown: psychotic fantasy, masochistic group death, revolutionary suicide, mass madness and collective psychological regression. We witness in the final days of the Third Reich a case of mass-slaughter on a scale that dwarfs what occurred at Jonestown. During the last year of the war, 1945, over 900 Germans died every two hours, every day, for four consecutive months.

Yet during forty years of research, I do not recall having come across a clinical study of the mass death in Germany at the end of the Second World comparable to the ones I have cited on the Jonestown suicide. Studies of Hitler’s psychopathology are common, but rarely does one find studies addressing the pathology of the entire German society. Why do we find it easy to pathologize individuals and “cults,” but hard to conceptualize large scale social and political movements as forms of psychopathology—however bizarre and massively destructive they may be?

Because of radical Islam and suicide bombings, people have begun to look more closely at the relationship between psychopathology and politics. Paul Berman in Terrorism and Liberalism (2003) compares suicidal violence in the middle-East with the suicidal violence of the Nazis, observing that Nazis were victimizers, but also the “boldest, greatest and most sublime of death’s victims.” Just as Nazis died for Hitler and Germany, so Islamic radicals died for Bin Laden and Allah.

Addressing the issue of collective psychopathology, Berman struggles to embrace his conclusions. It is very odd, Berman writes, to think that millions or tens-of-millions of people might end up “joining a pathological political movement.” Individual madmen might step forward, this is unquestionable. But surely Berman states, “Millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies.”

Looking at the historical record, one is compelled to conclude that indeed millions of people have chosen death, and on many occasions the Jonestowns of the world have taken over entire societies. I’ve noted that over two-hundred million people died in the Twentieth Century as a result of political violence initiated by nations and ideological movements. Some of the most well-known cases of political slaughter occurred in the Soviet Union during the time of Stalin, in China under the rule of Mao, in Cambodia under the rule of Pol Pot, and of course in Germany during the Nazi period.

Where are clinical studies of these enormous cultural events that brought death and injury to millions of human beings? Why do people find it easy to speak the language of psychopathology when analyzing the case of Jonestown, yet so difficult to apply this language to episodes like the last days of Nazism—even though would occurred in Germany was far more destructive and lethal than what occurred at Jonestown?

The most obvious difference is that Peoples Temple constituted a fringe group, whereas Nazism represented a political movement growing within a major Western nation. Further, Peoples Temple consisted of a small number of people, whereas Nazism constituted a mass movement with tens-of-millions of adherents. When tens-of-millions of people embrace a social movement, we don’t ordinarily call it a cult.

Berman produces ample evidence to support his conception of political psychopathology, but still scratches his head as if befuddled. “Is the world truly a place,” Berman writes, “Where mass movements bedeck themselves in shrouds and march to the cemetery?” It is time to embrace the reality that the world indeed in such a place. During the course of the Twentieth Century, political leaders created mass-movement that had the effect of persuading people to march to the cemetery.

We’re dealing with something extraordinary, these recurring, massive episodes of political self-destruction. But typical forms of historical writing do not allow for a concept of psychopathology. Historians function primarily to report on or record what happened. The nature of the historical craft is to normalize whatever has occurred, however destructive, strange or bizarre events may seem.

I propose in this paper a concept of collective psychopathology. The fact that certain events occur frequently does not mean pathology is absent. Heart attacks and cancer occur frequently. I suggest that psychopathology is contained within the normal structures of society. What is the nature and meaning of this civilizational tendency toward violent self-destruction?

Returning to our case study, it would appear that the concept of “masochistic group death”—the phrase used by Twemblow and Hough to describe what occurred at Jonestown—is an entirely appropriate characterization of the Nazi case. Hitler stated that he would not be averse to sacrificing the lives of millions of German soldiers. Drumming up support for the war, Goebbels instructed Germans that it was their duty to die for Germany, proclaiming: “Fuhrer command! We will follow.” The German people followed Hitler and Goebbels into the valley of the death.

Nazi leaders—like Jim Jones—seduced their people to die in the name of the movement that they embodied and promoted. They asked German soldiers to be obedient unto death, that is, to drink the Kool-Aid. When told that 30,000 German officers had died in a futile effort to defend Berlin, Hitler declared, “But that’s what young men are for.”

Hitler and Goebbels promoted national suicide and eventually committed suicide themselves. They too drank the kool-aid. With the suicides of Hitler, Goebbels, Hitler’s wife, Goebbel’s wife, and Goebbel’s children, the Nazi movement reached its climax. Hitler’s death was the “final solution.” Germany had lived through a twelve-year nightmare. When Hitler died and the war ended, the German people finally began to awaken from the fantasy of self-destruction that they had shared.

Still, something in us rebels against the term masochistic group death—equating what occurred at the end of World War II to what happened to Jim Jones followers—the mass-suicide in Guyana. Why do we hesitate to conceive of Nazi Germany as a vast, pathological cult? Perhaps the reason we shrink back is because Nazism is a subset of a wider cult in which all of us participate: the cult of the nation.

Nazism represented perhaps the most profound, extreme instantiation of the ideology of nationalism. Hitler declared to his people, “We want to have no other God, only Germany.” Nazism revolved around worshipping and being devoted to the German nation. Everything that Hitler did, he did in the name of Germany.

When we move into the domain of nationalism, our inclination to use the language of psychopathology weakens. We hesitate, for example, to use the term “masochistic submission” to describe a soldier’s willingness to go into battle when his nation and its leaders ask him to do so. We prefer to say that the soldier who goes off to war is demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice his life in order to defend his nation.

The success of Hitler and Goebbels was based on their use of the language of nationalism. Of course they did not ask German soldiers and civilians to masochistically submit to them and to die. They asked soldiers and civilians to sacrifice their lives in the name of defending their country. Death in warfare was positioned as it always has been: as a beautiful, praiseworthy and noble act.

As long as we view death on the battlefield as noble, it is difficult to view warfare through the lens of psychopathology. We do not empathize with Jim Jones and have barely a clue as to what the “Peoples Temple Movement” was. Therefore, when we analyze Jim Jones and his movement—the mass deaths that occurred at Jonestown—we have no trouble using terms like psychotic fantasy, mass-madness and masochistic group death.

We are horrified by the destruction that Hitler brought about. Nevertheless, we do empathize with concepts such as national self-sacrifice and dying to defend one’s country. This is the language of nationalism; an ideology that dominated political life throughout the Twentieth Century and continues to do so. Though the consequences of warfare may be massive destruction, we hesitate to use terms like psychotic fantasy and mass madness. If we use these terms to characterize warfare, then we have to acknowledge that we ourselves are living within a psychotic fantasy or mass-madness.

Love of country and willingness to sacrifice for one’s nation remains among civilization’s highest ideals. Yet it was precisely these ideals that generated destruction and self-destruction in Nazi Germany. Warfare is not separate from civilization’s highest ideals. If we wish to diagnose the disease that gave rise to the epidemic of mass-murder in the Twentieth Century, it is necessary to acknowledge this link between destruction and society’s ideals.

What is the nature of the disease that is contained within human social life? In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt argues that Adolf Eichmann—who planned and organized the murder of millions of Jews—was not a pathological murder. Arendt accepts Eichmann’s claim that he was an ordinary man who simply was blindly following orders.

Well, perhaps this tendency or desire to blindly follow orders—to submit to leaders and the groups they represent—lies at the heart of the pathology of human social existence. The Nazis enacted an extreme form of the tendency to submit to a national group with their ideology that revolved around obedience unto death. Obedience unto death was for Nazis the highest virtue. Therefore, the highest ideal of Nazism and its pathology were one and the same.

Hitler declared to the German people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Nazism meant self-negation in the name of the glorification of Germany. Masochistic submission constituted the highest ideal—an extreme manifestation of love of country. The ideal—willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation—was coterminous with the disease.

At the heart of Nazi ideology were the ideals of respect for leaders, honor, loyalty, and a sense of duty, qualities that most of us consider virtues. The phrase, “Hitler command, we will follow” epitomizes the Nazis’ devotion to these ideals of honor, loyalty, and duty. The Nazis’ espousal of these virtues led to the group death that we have discussed in this paper. Germany’s sacred ideals and its disease were one and the same. Willingness to sacrifice for Germany became abject submission and suicidal self-destruction.

We gradually begin to understand why people hesitate to use the language of psychopathology in relationship to political movements. The ideology of nationalism is within each one of us. Each of us believes—on some level—that it is good to love one’s country and to be willing to sacrifice one’s life if the situation demands. How can one say that this universally acclaimed virtue is the source of psychopathology?

Hitler participated in the First World War and witnessed the death and dismemberment of hundreds of his comrades. He knew war was awful, but could not say it was awful. In Mein Kampf, he declared that it would be a “sin to complain” about the death of so many German soldiers because, after all, were they not dying for Germany? Something within each of us says that it is not a bad thing to submit to one’s nation, however destructive. Something within each of us says that it is good to be willing to die for one’s country.

Masochism describes the psychic tendency to place oneself into a situation that may result in physical and/or psychological damage. The job of a soldier—more than any other—may lead to severe and permanent physical and/or mental damage. Yet we don’t call soldiers masochists. The ideology of nationalism forbids us to speak in these terms. The soldier’s willingness to sacrifice his life lies at the core of an ideology that most of us share.

The ideology of nationalism is embraced by many people in the contemporary world. Most of us feel we are members of a national community. We say that we love our country. How can one speak of masochistic submission in the same breath as love of country? Within the framework of the cult of nationalism, it is not appropriate to say this: that a willingness to die for one’s country—or to send people to their deaths—represents a form of psychopathology.

Perhaps Hitler was trying to tell us something: To compel us to consider the possibility that contained within the ideology of nationalism is a severe form of psychopathology. Hitler conveyed the extremely destructive consequences of love of country and obedience to authority: What can occur when human beings give over their bodies to a nation-state.

One may claim that willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation is a noble, beautiful ideal. The case of Hitler and Nazism forces us to question this claim. Over fifty-million people died in the Second World War. Nearly nine-million Germans lost their lives. As if this were not enough, Hitler required that Jews too forfeit their lives.

The monumental destructiveness of the Twentieth Century—continuing into the Twenty First—grows out of the human attachment to ideals conceived as greater or more significant than actual human beings. People are willing to submit to these ideologies that are imagined to be greater than the self: to sacrifice their lives; to die and kill for them.

Human beings die and kill in the name of political doctrines like Communism, nations like Germany, or Gods like Allah. Attachment to ideologies conceived as absolutes—and the willingness to commit violent acts for the sake of these ideologies—constitutes a significant dimension of the historical process. History, as Ernest Becker might say, reflect a series or sequence of competing immortality ideologies.

The attachment to omnipotent ideologies structures the course of “normal” political history. Wars, revolution, acts of genocide and acts of terror seek to glorify, promote and propagate an ideology with which the individual identifies. Within the domain of political struggles for sacred ideologies, anything and everything is permitted. These sacred ideologies act to release human beings from moral structures and strictures that govern other dimensions of societal existence.

Within this sacred realm—the struggle between competing ideologies conceived as absolutes—there is no space for the language of psychopathology. This is a domain into which psychiatry cannot enter. Most people buy in to this fantasy of a domain that is “beyond good and evil;” beyond the human. The sphere of history is felt to contain something that transcends ordinary human life. Therefore, standards used to judge other spheres of existence are not applicable in this realm.

I suggest that we abandon this fantasy of a separate domain of existence not governed by ordinary laws of society. What occurs in politics and history is not privileged. We may judge what occurs in this domain according to the same standards and values that we use to judge what occurs in other spheres of existence. Why should there be a “social anxiety disorder”—shyness conceived as a form of pathology—and no war disorder or genocidal disorder?

When nations wage war or commit acts of genocide, it is as if human beings have gone berserk. People become hysterical and engage in extreme forms of behavior: murder, torture, etc. I read of a case of an SS-man standing at the entrance to a death camp. A Jewish mother with her baby was coming into the camp. The baby smiled at the SS-man. The mother released the baby from her arms and handed him to the SS-man, thinking the baby would be protected. The SS-man grasped the baby by the ankle and smashed his head against a stone wall.

This behavior would not be characterized as a disorder according to current psychiatric practice—because it was socially acceptable within the cultural context in which it occurred. Violent, bizarre acts like this one occurred on a daily basis within Nazi culture. By gentleman’s agreement, psychiatrists have agreed that only individuals can suffer from psychopathology—not entire societies.

What is the nature of the political domain that makes it immune from ordinary standards of judgment? Why do we hesitate to speak the language of psychopathology in relationship to this domain? We’ve noted the magnitude of destruction that has occurred within the sphere of politics. The cost of this shared psychopathology in suffering and death probably exceeds the suffering and death caused by individual psychological disorders. What prevents us from addressing the causes of this pathology? I wish to offer the following speculations.

Perhaps human beings have created the sphere of political history precisely to establish a domain in which people are released from ordinary laws and forms of human behavior. Within this privileged place, strange and crazy things occur without people calling them strange and crazy. Within this split-off dimension of human existence, killing, torture, bombing, etc.—are rendered normal.

The discipline of history exists to record behavior in this privileged domain, waving judgment. Massive acts of destruction and self-destruction occur, yet are not considered abnormal or pathological. Within this sphere, we allow pathological forms of behavior to occur and simultaneously agree not to call these forms of behavior pathological.

“History” constitutes a place at which the massive acting out of fantasies can occur. People collectively release their anger, violence, self-destructiveness and despair—knowing that behavior in this realm will not be condemned or labeled pathological. The political sphere allows the enactment of severe psychopathology while at the same time denying that psychopathology is occurring.

Everything that occurs within this dimension is by definition normal. The craft of history normalizes the pathological. When Jeffrey Dahmers was charged with seventeen gruesome murders, people called him a psychopathic killer and assumed he was suffering from a mental disorder. This seemed a natural way to think about what occurred. Within the political domain, leaders murder tens-of-thousands of people. It seems just as natural not to call these men psychopathic murderers or brand them as mentally ill.

Within the historical process, human beings shoot one another, blow each other up, torture one another other, drop bombs on cities and murder tens-of-thousands of people. These acts or forms of behavior come to be experienced as if normal. Events are reported in newspapers and recorded in history books. By virtue of having been reported and recorded, these forms of behavior are rendered normal. They become the stuff of ordinary life. “Well yes, killing and torture and bombings occur. Sure, it’s crazy, but that’s the way things are.”

How dare one claim that the normal constitutes a form of pathology? A character in a James Joyce novel famously spoke about the “nightmare of history.” We live within this nightmare. We’ve grown accustomed to it. Since we partake of or participate in the pathology, we are paralyzed: unable to call a spade a spade.

The nature of the pathology that infuses the historical process is that of a pathology that we are unable or unwilling to recognize it as pathology. What is happening stares us in the face—we can’t help but notice what is always going on—but simultaneously we hesitate to say that we know. The mechanism of denial is contained within the concept of history itself, which functions to portray extreme forms of abnormality as a forms of normality.

One might even say that this is why human beings have created or invented this privileged sphere: to provide an outlet for our insanity. We allow things to occur in this domain that we do not allow to occur anywhere else. When a single individual is killed in a large city like New York, people are up in arms. Everyone makes a fuss. Why has this happened? This should not have happened. How can we prevent it from happening again? When ten or a hundred people are killed in warfare, people barely take notice. War is a place where large numbers of deaths are supposed to occur.

A concept of collective psychopathology emerges at the moment we begin to disengage from the shared nightmare; to separate from the cult in which we all participate. To the extent that we identify with the pathology, we don’t experience it as abnormal. Once we perceive or recognize that we are living within a pathological domain—that we are in the pathology and the pathology is within us—then we can begin to separate from it. At the moment of separation, this is when diagnosis begins.

http://www.ideologiesofwar.com/old/docs/rk_collective.htm