Inside the Nazi Mind - Parallels With the Christofascist Mind?

This blog has frequently noted that many of the anti-gay Christofascist organizations have modeled their anti-gay propaganda on that of the Nazi propaganda campaign against Europe's Jews.  Among the common threads are that gays/Jews are diseased, the gays/Jews are a threat to children, and that gays/Jews seek to undermine Christian society.  Likewise, gays are depicted as a small, powerful minority that weld undue influence - e.g., "the powerful homosexual lobby."  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at some of the findings of American psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed the 24 of the highest-ranking Nazis then in captivity at Nuremberg.   Among the most chilling findings was the complete lack of any sense of personal responsibility for the mass murder and denigration of other humans.   What strikes me is the parallels with today's Chritofascists - e.g., Tony Perkins, Maggie Gallagher, Bryan Fischer, the list goes on - and the Russian regime that seemingly feel that they are "doing the right thing" and/or "following orders" be they from the Bible or the Russian legislature.  Here are highlights from the piece:

Why do men commit evil? Were the kommandants who ran the Nazi death camps psychopaths? Did they have subnormal intelligence? Were they just ordinary men who made appalling decisions?

These were also the questions that a team of American psychologists and psychiatrists were directed to answer during the Nuremberg Trials that opened on November 20, 1945, six months after the war’s end.

Charges of crimes against humanity were read out against 24 of the highest-ranking Nazis then in captivity, including Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reich Security Main Office and the highest-ranking SS officer after Himmler’s death.

With so many senior Nazis held in one place at the same time, the Americans instructed a panel of psychologists to conduct exten­sive interviews and tests with the defendants. Such horrific crimes were committed surely by damaged men, men different in some fundamental way from the rest of humanity.

Among the defendants examined was Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz. Unlike the others held in Nuremberg, Höss had been intimately involved in the design and day-to-day operations of the extermination camps. 

The American asked how it was possible to kill so many people. “Technically,” answered Höss, “that wasn’t so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.” Gilbert then pressed him for an emotional response, but Höss continued in a similar tone: “At the time there were no consequences to consider. It didn’t occur to me that I would be held responsible. You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible.” Gilbert started to ask, “But what about the human—” before Höss interrupted, “That just didn’t enter into it.” After a few more questions, Höss said, “I suppose you want to know in this way if my thought and habits are normal.” “Well, what do you think?” Gilbert asked. “I am entirely normal,” said Höss. “Even while I was doing the extermination work, I led a normal family life.”

Rudolf Höss replied: “I feel less nervous now than I did.” He was then asked if he felt upset over what he had done in Auschwitz. “I thought I was doing the right thing,” said Höss. “I was obeying orders, and now, of course, I see that it was unnecessary and wrong. But I don’t know what you mean by being upset about these things because I didn’t personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination program at Auschwitz. It was Hitler who ordered it through Himmler and it was Eichmann who gave me the orders regarding transports.”

When Goldensohn asked if he was haunted by nightmares—by images of the executions, gas chambers, or burning corpses—Höss replied: “No, I have no such fantasies.”

The conclusion of the psychologists and psychiatrists at Nuremberg was clear: they both decided that though Rudolf Höss was intelligent, he was mentally ill: a psychopath, psychotic, amoral, lacking empathy.

But Rudolf flatly denied this to be the case. He declared himself to be normal.  He regretted, at most, doing something unnecessary.  Overseeing the murder of over a million people had left him unhaunted by “fantasies.”

The impression of the mental health professionals was also contradicted by two of the intelligence officers who interrogated Rudolf Höss.

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.

To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.

Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions.

Note the reference to "not thinking."  Nothing is more disturbing to the Christofascist than having to think or rebut objective reality which demonstrates that their "deeply held beliefs" are false and which would require them to accept responsibility for the harm done to others.  Are the Christofascists as bad as the Nazi regime?  No - or at least most are not.  But the same frightening refusal to think and mindless inclination to "follow orders" are certainly a part of the Christofascist make up.  Or, so I believe.

 

Russia: The Rest of the Story Behind the Anti-Gay Laws

In the early 1930's, Germany's economy was a disaster with soaring inflation and economic instability.  Circumstances that helped set the stage for Hitler's rise to power and the scapegoating of the Jews to distract public attention from the failings of the government.  In today's Russia we see a similar picture: government corruption (Putin and his cronies are thought to be looting the country), a flagging economy, decreases in life expectancy and birthrate.  Someone needs to be blamed and something is needed to distract the attention of the public that ultimately it is Putin and his government who are to blame.  Hence, just as Germany enacted the Nuremberg Laws,  we have seen Russia enacting anti-gay laws to target a minority for the foes of Russian society.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the perils of being a business owner in Putin's Russia (where opposition to Putin's regime can lead to charges of "economic crimes") and some of Putin's efforts to save his own ass and retain power.  Here are excerpts:

A business owner in Russia has a better chance of ending up in the penal colony system once known as the gulag than a common burglar does.  

More than 110,000 people are serving time for what Russia calls “economic crimes,” out of a population of about three million self-employed people and owners of small and medium-size businesses. An additional 2,500 are in jails awaiting trial for this class of crimes that includes fraud, but can also include embezzlement, counterfeiting and tax evasion.

But with the Russian economy languishing, President Vladimir V. Putin has devised a plan for turning things around: offer amnesty to some of the imprisoned business people. 

The amnesty is needed, he said, because the government had “overreacted” to the threat of organized crime and the inequities of privatization and over-prosecuted entrepreneurs during Mr. Putin’s first 12 years in power as president and prime minister. 

Russia’s economy does need help. In the first quarter, growth fell to a rate of 1.6 percent because oil prices are level. And in that economic climate, few Russians seem willing to risk opening a new business that might create jobs and tax revenue for the government. 

In 2010, the police investigated a total of 276,435 “economic crimes,” according to the Russian prosecutor general’s office, whose statistics show burglary and robbery are prosecuted less than economic crimes. 

So many Russian business owners are doing time that support groups have sprung up in Moscow for their families known as “The 159 Society.” It takes its name from the article on fraud in the criminal code. Rus Sidyashchaya, or Russia Behind Bars, organizes weekly dinners for the wives of imprisoned businessmen. 

Russia’s infamous penal colonies, rural camps swirled in barbed wire, appear today much as they did when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” in the 1960s. But at least one of every 10 prisoners today is a white-collar convict.

One of those Mr. Titov championed was Ruslan V. Tyelkov, whose short arc from businessman to inmate illustrates both the entrepreneurial spirit that still simmers in Russia and the risks.  . . . In 2010, Mr. Tyelkov spent the equivalent of $31,000 for 25,000 yards of Chinese-made leopard-print fabric suitable for chairs and sofas. “It’s very popular here, not only for furniture but cloths, wallpaper, sheets, shoes, bags, everything.” 

With no warning, the police arrived at his warehouses and removed every roll on six flatbed trucks, handing it over to a competitor, ostensibly for storage, though it was later sold. Then they arrested Mr. Tyelkov, who spent a year in pretrial detention. 

The crime? The police said they suspected copyright infringement of the leopard design. “It was funny at first,” recalled Mr. Tyelkov of his initial meeting with the police. “I asked, ‘Who owns the copyright, a leopard?’ ”  Mr. Titov’s later investigation confirmed the police had colluded with a competitor to seize the merchandise under the pretext of a criminal case, so it could be sold for a profit. 

In Russia, the police benefit from arrests. They profit by soliciting a bribe from a rival to remove competition, by taking money from the family for release, or by selling seized goods. Promotion depends on an informal quota of arrests. Police officers who seize businesses became common enough to have earned the nickname “werewolves in epaulets.”  

Yes, it sounds like what Hitler and his SA did in the 1930's.  Businesses could be destroyed and fortunes lost based on the whims of Nazi officials and cronies.   Putin and his regime govern in a similar mode and if Putin was serious about improving Russia, he'd be dealing with the widespread corruption.  Instead he's persecuting gays.  It speaks volumes about the man and none of it is good.  As for the rest of the world, we don't seem to ever learn from history.