Eliminating the Evil Enemy

by Richard Koenigsberg

Why is the idea of “the nation” so powerful? Why does this entity exert such a profound gravitational pull? Why do nations always have “enemies”?

Nationalism is an ideology revolving around worship of “the country.” People claim that they live within a secular society, but this is not the case. Underlying everything, encompassing all is this sacred object, one’s nation. John Lennon suggested that people “imagine there’s no country.” Apparently we don’t have this kind of imagination.

Alongside the idea of the country is the idea of the enemy. Nations want enemies. They need enemies. Without an enemy, national life seems puerile and meaningless. After the fall of Communism, there was Jerry Springer, O. J. Simpson and Princess Di. September 11 rescued Americans from this empty world, producing a new evil enemy against which the nation could do battle. When there is an enemy, people need a leader (to protect them against the enemy). Nations come into being insofar as there are enemies to fear and do battle against. Paranoia is the source of national unity.

My research on Nazism illuminates what is happening now. Is nationalism one thing or many things? Based on thirty years of research, I’ve discovered that—far from being an anomaly—Nazism constitutes a crystallization or pure culture of the ideology of nationalism. Hitler swallowed this ideology hook line and sinker—and carried it through to an extreme, bizarre conclusion.

What is the underlying dream that supports and generates the idea of the nation? It is the fantasy of unity or union or oneness. This is the fantasy that spurred Lincoln to initiate the Civil War. This is the fantasy that compels China to insist that Taiwan must return to the Motherland. The dream of nationalism is that citizens shalt be united to constitute a single, omnipotent body (politic). Belief in the existence of an evil enemy gives rise to the idea of national unity. People come together to do battle against the enemy. Many shalt become one.

Hitler’s aspiration was to unite the German people to create a single, indestructible body. See: Hitler’s Body and the Body Politic. In the face of forces working toward fragmentation, Hitler insisted that the German people had to be brought to a “unity of spirit and will.” The precondition for relieving the distress in Germany, Hitler said, was restoration of the “consciousness of belonging together.” To bring men nearer to each other, they had to be thrown into the “great melting pot,” the nation, so that they could be “purified and welded to one another.” Hitler’s dream of Nazism was to melt or weld each and every German into a single body—with the Fuehrer as head of this body.

The other side of the coin of Hitler’s dream of national unity was his fantasy of national disintegration. Hitler observed that political divisiveness was causing the will and life-struggle of the German people to be “split into forty or fifty sections.” To achieve national unity, therefore, it was necessary to eliminate political organizations that worked toward “disunion and disintegration.” Hitler was determined to create a body politic as “hard as iron”—to unify the German people so that the nation never again could “break into pieces.”

Hitler took Germany’s defeat in the First World War personally. He was traumatized. It seemed to Hitler as if Germany, Western civilization, indeed the entire world was falling apart. “Only rarely do the life of peoples,” Hitler declared, suffer such convulsions that the “deepest foundation of the social order” are shaken. Hitler believed that nations and peoples were in the midst of a struggle revolving around the “maintenance or annihilation of the whole inherited human order of civilization.”

Attempting to comprehend Germany’s collapse and the breakdown of civilization, Hitler identified “the Jew” as the cause. From this paranoid insight, all else followed. The Jew became the evil enemy whose presence within the world would lead to the death of Germany and destruction of civilization. In order to rescue Germany and civilization, Jews had to be eliminated from the face of the earth. Jews were identified as a force operating in opposition to German unity. Nazism and the Final Solution grew out of a rescue fantasy.

The ideology of nationalism is constructed based on a binary. On the one hand is one’s own country, conceived as absolutely good. On the other hand is the enemy, conceived as absolutely evil. Absolute goodness is imagined to be threatened by absolute evil. In order to rescue goodness from evil, the source of evil (the enemy) has to be destroyed. Collective forms of violence grow out of a myth or fantasy projected into reality.

In the name of rescuing the good object from the bad object, any and all actions deemed necessary to achieve this objective are considered justifiable. Hitler declared, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” Think of any case of political violence that you have studied or can imagine. Does the statement by Hitler above apply? As I’ve suggested, Hitler and Nazism represent a paradigm rather than an anomaly.

Why did Hitler and the Nazis experience Jews as a mortal threat? There were 550,000 Jews in Germany in 1933 out of a population of sixty-six million, far less than 1% of the population. Jews constituted no threat to Germany. The Jews, however, contained a profound symbolic meaning for Hitler and other Nazis. In order to understand the Final Solution, we must decipher this symbolic meaning. What was the nature of the Jewish “force” that Hitler imagined was threatening to cause the destruction of Germany?

Nazism was an instantiation of the ideology of nationalism, revealing the narrative or template that defines this ideology. Perhaps history “has to happen in a certain way” (see Howard Stein). Perhaps historical phenomena represent the projection and acting out of shared fantasies. The central fantasy of nationalism is that of a good country threatened by an evil enemy. Collective forms of violence seek to protect goodness against badness.

We imagine that collective acts of violence grow out of events occurring in the external world; that violence is a dependent variable. But what if it works the other way around? Perhaps certain forms of historical action occur by virtue of our desire to engage in—to bring into being—violent political events. We engage in acts of violence in order to generate national unity; acts of violence mobilize the nation in a struggle against the enemy. Enemies and the struggle against them give rise to nations.

The case of Hitler and the Final Solution demonstrates how the idea of threat that requires profound forms of violence can be constructed out of a fantasy. Jews posed no threat to the German nation and people. Yet Hitler and other Nazis believed otherwise. They imagined that the existence of Jews would lead to the destruction of nations and civilizations. Jews symbolized that which had to be destroyed if Germany was to survive.

Himmler once said that he wanted to see to it that the concept of the Jew was destroyed. What was the nature of the Jewish idea or concept? The Jew represented an idea within Hitler that Hitler believed he had to destroy. The Jew, we may speculate, symbolized Hitler’s own desire to destroy—to separate or escape from—Germany: Hitler’s ambivalence toward his own nation; his wish to be free of the power that Germany exerted upon him. The enemy symbolizes anger or hostility projected outward: our recognition that our own nation is not entirely good; our desire to escape from its hegemonic power.

We hesitate to say this. We want our nation to be good and lovable. We want to rescue it from evil. We fear becoming lonely and bereft—a man (or woman) without a country. We desperately want our own nation to be good, but know that it is not. We cannot abandon our belief in absolute goodness. So we project our doubt or skepticism onto an enemy. If only ________ could be destroyed or eliminated, then the nation could return to its state of absolute goodness.

Why do we need enemies? Why do we find it difficult to imagine existence in a state of separation from the nation?