The Nazi Heresy, Round Two

[arendt]

The Nazi Heresy, Round Two
by arendt

There is much wisdom in the article by Mr. Levy that is the subject of
another DU thread:

The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4758170&mesg_id=4758170

But, I must agree with other posters that there is too much psychological
terminology in Mr. Levy's article.

So, I would like to point people at an equally obscure and equally
esoteric source for this material: Morris Berman's 1989 book,
"Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History
of the West". Here, you will find too many words like "eschatology".
(Have I ever been easy on the groundlings?)

In this book, Berman traces the common thread underlying all
religious and secular heresies in the Western world: the repression
of the body by the mind in the name of religion. This theory is increasingly
gaining traction as neuroscientists have shown that strong spiritual feelings
activate the same brain centers as strong sexual feelings. (See
Pascal Boyer, "Religion Explained - the Evolutionary Origins of
Religious Thought").

One of the stereotypes of fundies is their glassy-eyed stare, their
rigid self-repression, and the constant stream of sexual deviancy
that marks instances of the loss of that self-control. Hello, Swaggert,
Ashcroft, J.D. Watts, etc.

Well, guess what, this kind of stuff happened in Germany too; and Mr. Levy is
onto something when he talks about group behavior (or as Berman calls
it, a transpersonal component). The rest of this post is a bunch of
excerpts from Berman's chapter on what he calls the Nazi heresy.

----

"That the real story of Naziism was a somatic one was recognized by
only one writer, the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich, in the book
'The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Reich saw the rise of Fascism in
Germany as a rechanneled response of repressed sexual energy, and
undoubtedly this was a part of the story...The actual situation was much
larger than this, and a few writers, such as Carl Jung, were much closer to
truth when they argued that what was going on was an ecstatic phenomenon,
the return of repressed mystical/heretical tendencies that had been buried by
official Christendom for centuries."

"...the same desire for transcendence, and a secularized form of ascent, was
fully at work in this drama...The Nazis deliberately cultivated a transpersonal
dimension, and this was the source of their popularity. In short, they accurately
perceived a fundamental human need; something to which...competing
political parties remained curiously blind."

"The political climate that made Adolf Hitler possible antedated the Weimar
period by at least thirty years, and had its roots in a conglomeration of ideas
and beliefs that in the context of a secular and scientific culture would have
to be regarded as a kind of detritus of confused occult and heretical notions.
A 'steamy subculture of Ariosophy' pervaded Germany and Austria at this time,
a 'netherworld of fantasy' woven togehter with a certain set of myths and symbols
and adhered to by an odd assortment of sects and cults."

"(the Ariosophanists) codified a set of racial and marraige laws that 'bear an
uncanny resemblance to the Nuremberg racial laws of the 1930s and the
Nazi vision of the future'. Much of the Arisosophanist vision of a future state
controlled by a racially pure elite did, in fact, come to fruition in 1935 with the
establishment of the SS."

"Hitler's views had been the stuff of right-wing extremism in Germany for fifty
years prior to 1918, and at least in his non-occult interests Hitler echoed certain
kinds of traditional values...we are not really talking about the history of ideas,
but of non-political grievances that showed up in politics. All of this had a
psychic dimension; it reflected the primary experience of many Germans, and
thus the intellectual analysis of these ideas gives us only a fraction of the story.
The context, in any event, is clear enough: industrialization hit Germany with a
speed not paralleled in other countries, resulting in severe dislocation and
alienation and a longing for an earlier, bucolic, and simpler age. In fact, the
'romantic rebellion' against modernity, against city life, alienation, and bureaucracy
was in full swing by the late nineteenth century."

"The presence of a 'Jewish enemy' enabled millions of Germans to reconstitute
reality...the eventual extermination of the Jews was an exercise in magic...Karl
Brachter adds:

'Hitler's fanatical hatred of the Jews...cannot be measured by political and
pragmatic gauges. The fact that an entire nation followed him and furnished
a legion of executioners does demonstrate, that we are confronted not with
the inexplicable dynamics of one man, but with a terrible disease..."

"Hitler was able to present this cosmology in a popular apocalyptic format,
such that, for a populace in search of emotional security and Meaning with
a capital M, it was absorbed at a primitive level. Hitler's 1922 speech, "The
Agitators of Truth" is a classic example of this, hammering home five basic
points that Hitler was to reiterate again and again...

POLITICAL STATEMENT ................................COSMOLOGICAL TRANSLATION

1. Germany is in danger of imminent ...........1. End of being (ontological destruction)
collapse and annihilation.

2. The cause of this is a world Jewish..........2. Demonology (identification of
conspiracy.....................................................the devil)

3. Resistance is necessary via the Volk. .....3. Call for eschatological war.

4. Only National Socialism is capable .........4. Identification of the agents of
of mounting such a resistance.........................God

5. This will usher in a new Reich, .................5. Salvation, redemption, the
characterized by blood improvement ................new Jerusalem.
and economic improvement.

------

Just substitute globalization for industrialization, born-again for Ariosophy,
liberal for Jew, and Fundamentalist wacko for Volk, and it sounds real up-to-
date. And very scary.

arendt