May 03, 2005
The Servants of Death
Busheviks regularly sight as prime historical example both Mao and the Nazis. Mao is hailed as an inspiration for understanding the revolutionary fervor of country folk – presumably the connection is made between the Chinese Communists hatred of city folk and that of their own evangelical political machine. The Nazi’s are not only sighted for the usual reason: Joseph Geobbels’ uncanny propaganda acumen. The man who said one could make the people believe whatever you wanted them to by simply claiming they were under attack from foreign hostiles is, of course, repeatedly referred to – and not only by Donald Rumsfeld, whose main public characteristic that he seems to share with the rest of the Neocons (or, as David Neiwert prefers to call them, the “Christo-fascists) is that he doesn’t really care what we think about where he gets his ideas from or even what those ideas are. The Busheviks also openly credit Geobbels for his policy of repeating the party line over and over again until it hopefully comes true, and most sinister of all, it is the Nazi propagandist they owe for their tactic of accusing the other side of doing the very misdeeds they themselves are either already doing or soon plan to do. Even one of their lapdogs, Tucker Carlson, has commented on their boldfaced penchant for lies that it “almost crosses over from bravado to mental illness.” There has been a real sense that these folks think they can get away with just about anything no matter what. Talking about how the enemies of the administration ought to be handled, John Derbeshire looked to totalitarian fascism as his first model in a 2001 editorial: “In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people.’ The Nazi’s used the same principal, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability.’” But it didn’t end there. As if these were only proposed half-measures, Derbeshire went on to praise Imperial China’s steel fisted manor of dealing with political dissent. There “enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.” In his groundbreaking study of our potential for evil, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm examines Freud’s idea of the death drive. Fromm’s main intention is to prove that there is no evidence in any academic or other field to indicated that people are by nature destructive. Fromm’s point is that only some of us actually harbor the unnatural lust and attraction for all that is “dead, decaying, and purely mechanical”. The analogy is made between these personalities and necrophiliacs. Fromm invents the term “necrophilous character” to describe this sinister psychology. The death drive does not affect us all identically. Only a few of us actually act on these urges. The book was famous for its close examination of malignant aggression in such infamous sadists as Heinrich Himmler and Hitler. The similarities between the penchant for unlimited destruction native to these character types and those who currently rule our country are remarkable.