On Thursday July 28th, National Post‘s Jonathan Kay wrote an excellent article on the links between Anders Behring Breivik’s and Adolf Hitler’s intellectual patterns. I am particularly grateful that he took the time (thanks!) to read into the whole or at least some parts of Breivik’s manifesto. Having a day job and being interested and compelled into so many things at the same time for the elaboration of this blog, I don’t have time unfortunately to read 1,500 pages+ manifestos. I strongly rely on the research of others, journalists or researchers, to be able to blog and analyse situations and cases. I intervene at « level 2 » if you will, in the process toward truthful information. I don’t have the credentials to pretend that I am an investigative journalist nor that I have those to be considered a professional and acknowledged researcher. My background is made of research in religious studies and psychology, and attempts to established myself as professional writer in philosophy and other subjects.
These caveats being made, let’s get back to the article. Kay quotes or references several passages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in which the nazi leader expresses psychopathological thoughts linking negative views on sexuality, biological illnesses, germ theory, moral decadence and racial theory on Jews and other groups. Kay compares these passages with some of Breivik’s manifesto, revealing some striking similarities: references to sexual decadence, sexually transmitted diseases, social reform needed, etc. The article continues the analysis and overall it does an excellent job at bringing up to the surface a very important element that 99,9% of the rest of the media managed to miss regarding this case, as it is almost always the case unfortunately with anything really important.
During my years of study and for a long time after that, one of my principal source of inspiration and mentor, besides Hermann Hesse, have been Wilhelm Reich. Probably one of the best psychoanalyst and psychiatrist of all time, Reich began his career as a student of Sigmund Freud. Along with Carl Gustav Jung, he definitely was one of the most brillant and promising of all of Freud’s apprentices. However, rapidly they began to have disagreements on certain theories, ideas or concepts. Reich left the group and founded his own clinic with his own practices and methods. To make a long story short, the main core of Reich’s theory of the psyche is that humans come into this world with a biological plasma (the flesh) that is intact. Just think of how the skin of a baby is perfect, beautiful, soft, fresh, flexible. Unfortunately, this biological plasma with time, due to social conditioning and control loses theses qualities and hardens. Reich calls the ending result the « muscular armor ». Think of how an adult’s skin and muscles are rigid, hard, without life, pale, etc. In turn, this biological-plasma-turned-into-a-muscular-armor keeps individuals and whole nations disconnected from their biological energy. The interruption of the natural flow of energy creates an inhability in humans to reach orgasm and biological satisfaction and relaxation, which in turn keeps them in a permanent state of frustration. The nostalgia of orgasmic realization predisposes individuals and nations to be subdued by good talkers and crowd pleasers who will sing them beautiful lies and deceptions, that have the capacity to suscitate sensory imitations of orgasmic sensations and feelings in the audience, to make them accept their totalitarian schemes and plots. When the people awaken it is too late. They have been enslaved by a monster and they can’t get out of it.
I browsed through some of Reich’s books that I have in my personal library since my days at the university. It is not easy to find the perfect quote to use in a blog, especially with a complex psychoanalytic theory, but I was lucky enough to find something that corroborates the analysis proposed by Jonathan Kay here. And before I quote this passage from The Function of the Orgasm, I have to say that I am using the French translation and that I am not used to translate from the French into English, so bear with me here if there are some mistakes. On page 191 of the French version, Reich writes:
« Maybe no other slogan of German fascism inflamed the masses as much as the ‘pulsation of German blood’ and its ‘purity’. The purity of German blood means the liberation from syphilis and from ‘Jewish contamination’. The fear of venereal diseases as a continuation of infantile sexual anxiety is deeply rooted in man. As a result, it is easy to understand why the masses acclaimed Hitler: because he promised them ‘purity of blood’. »
And this passage from The Mass Psychology of Fascism, translated from the German:
« Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so flagrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining a sexual consciousness, of preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt-feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the collapse of the authoritarian ideology. » (page 105, italics are W.R.)
Take note here that when women were finally recognized as sexual beings in the 60′, the authoritarian ideology collapsed, as Wilhelm Reich foresaw it. But the problem that we face today, is that authoritarianism and totalitarianism are coming back in full force. They are ready to enslave the world, a few notches and inches and it will be done. I have lost count of all the killers, madmen, psychopaths that we have seen in the last decades committing murders and atrocities. We can bet that they have all been created and brainwashed by the Extreme-Right to instil fear and insecurity in our heads, in the grand design of making us accept more laws, more police, more gun control, more porno body searches at the airports, more this, more that. It is not normal to see individuals going into populated areas to fire randomly at people. It doesn’t make sense, unless it is intended this way to pave the way for a fascist regime. Terrorist acts can only have one outcome: more laws and more control. You will never see a society making the decision for more Left or more rights for the citizens after a terrorist incident. Terror always encourages the agenda of the Right. Cui bono? we say in Latin. Who benefits from all this. Even groups such as the Weathermen who, supposedly, were an Extreme-Left faction, encouraged the Right in the U.S. to bring more laws and more control. This whole thing about Breivik is such a joke. He is just another Timothey McVeigh, of the Norwegian blend. I also join two other articles that bring other elements for the comprehension of this case, and a song from metal band Symphony-X that talks about these things. See as well my earlier post on Breivik’s killing rampage.
Jonathan Kay – Sex and Slaughter
George Jonas on violence in Europe
Clifford D. May on double standards