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

Moving into the domain of nationalism, our inclination to use the language of psychopathology weakens. We hesitate, for example, to characterize a soldier’s willingness to go into battle (when his national leaders ask him to) as “masochistic submission.” We prefer to say that the soldier who goes off to war does so out of a patriotic impulse: his willingness to defend his nation (and to sacrifice his life if necessary).

The success of Hitler and Goebbels was based on their use of the language of patriotism and national honor. Of course, they did not ask Germans to “submit” to Germany. Rather, 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: 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 what the “Peoples Temple Movement” was. Therefore, when we analyze 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.

But while we are horrified by the destruction that Hitler brought about, we nevertheless empathize with concepts such as national self-sacrifice and dying to defend one’s country. This is the language of an ideology that has dominated political life throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Though recurring political violence produces massive destruction, we hesitate to use terms like psychotic fantasy and mass madness. If we use these terms to characterize our political culture, then we have to acknowledge that we ourselves are living within a psychotic fantasy; that madness permeates our world.

Love of country and willingness to sacrifice for one’s nation remain 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 20th century, we need to acknowledge the links among societal ideals, collective forms of violence—and political self-destruction.