Subject:   Turn Off Your TV: part 3

Turn Off Your TV--Part III 

The Making of a Fascist Society 

by L. Wolfe 


{The previous installment of this
series appeared in }New
Federalist} No. 32, dated Aug.
24, 1990.}

Some neo-Freudians did become
overt supporters of the Nazis. Of them
all, the most important was the Swiss
psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who had broken
with Freud over the latter's refusal to
see value in gnostic mysticism and what
he called Freud's fixation on the
sexual drive, the libido, as the root
of all neuroses. Ultimately, Jung came
to see in Hitler and the Hitlerian state
the proof of his theories. 
   And, more, Jung saw in Hitler the
apotheosis of Jung's own search for a
kind of pagan ``communion'' with the
Beyond, a search that began in 1915,
with Jung's colossal nervous breakdown. 
   There is a strong connection
between Jung's psychoanalytic theories,
which form one of the conceptual bases
of ``New Age'' ideology today, and his
Nazism--or, more precisely, his
fascination with Hitler. For Jung was
obsessed by the notion that the deepest
reality, the greatest truth, lay buried
in the unconscious, mystical, psychotic
aspects of Man's mind, as opposed to
the outward, rational, scientific
(Judeo-Christian) view of the world.
That was the basis for Jung's
decades-long pilgrimage through
himself, beginning with his nervous
collapse, to find stranger and more
distant ``truths.'' 
   And that was the basis for his
attitude toward Hitler: Hitler was the
prototype of Jungian man, who
surrendered his reason to his
unconscious, who welcomed divine
madness as Jung himself advised. 
   Thus, in 1934, Jung was writing of
the ``formidable phenomenon of National
Socialism,'' which the world beheld
``wide-eyed with astonishment.''
Hitler, he wrote, had ``literally set
all Germany on its feet.'' He saw this
as the rebirth of the ancient Germanic
god Wotan, celebrating his resurrection
in an age when ``the Christian God had
proved too weak to save Christendom
from fratricidal slaughter. 
   ``As an autonomous archetype Wotan
produces effects in the collective life
of a people and thereby reveals his own
nature,'' Jung raved in trying to
explain the ``formidable phenomenon''
of Hitlerism. This god of wind and rain
had transformed Germany, this wind that
``bestoweth where it listeth, and thou
hearest the sound thereof, but canst
not tell whence it cometh nor whither
it goeth... [it] seizes everything in
its path and overthrows all that is not
firmly rooted. When the wind blows, it
shakes everything without or within.'' 
   Earlier, in an essay written in
1932 (but only printed in 1934), Jung
had celebrated the ``leader [Fuehrer]
personality'' as against the
``ever-secondary, lazy masses, who
cannot take the least move in the
absence of a demagogue.'' When he
printed the essay in 1934, he specified
in a footnote: ``Since this sentence
was first written, Germany, too, has
found its Fuehrer.'' 
   In 1933, about three months after
Hitler came to power, Jung, a Swiss
national, became a minor official of
the Nazi state. Shortly after Hitler
was named chancellor of Germany, Ernst
Kretschmer had resigned as president of
the German General Society for
Psychotherapy. His successor was Jung,
and Jung's second in command at the
society was Dr. M.H. Goering, cousin to
Hermann Goering. 
   Was Jung simply taking the post
(as he later claimed) in order to save
the delicate plant of psychotherapy
from utter extinction by the Nazis?
Hardly. His first editorial in
{Zentralblatt}, the journal of the
society, declared, ``In the interest of
science, we can no longer ignore the
palpable differences, long known to
persons of insight, between the
Germanic and Jewish psychologies.
Psychology, more than any other
science, contains a personal factor,
ignorance of which falsifies the
results of theory and practice.'' 
   The next year, in 1934 in
{Zentralblatt}, he published a
programmatic denunciation of
``subversive'' Semitism. To the Aryan
unconscious (the collective, or racial,
unconscious of the German people, as he
phrased it), Jung attributed ``the
potential energy and creative seeds of
a future still awaiting fulfillment,
.. [of] the still youthful Germanic
peoples.'' 
   All this was written in the first
two years of the Nazi regime. Perhaps
Jung had not yet understood the nature
of the beast, of the regime he served? 
   Not true. In 1938, fully five
years after Hitler's accession to
power, Jung was able to write with wild
enthusiasm of Hitler as a
``visionary,'' an historical phenomenon
belonging to the type of the ``truly
inspired shaman or medicine man,'' the
loudspeaker of the German soul, whose
power was ``magical rather than
political,'' a ``spiritual vessel.'' 
   In his interview with American
newspaperman H.R. Knickerbocker in
October 1938, a month after Hitler had
extorted from the West the Munich Pact,
Jung said that ``Hitler belongs in the
category of the truly mystic medicine
man.... The outstanding characteristic
of his physiognomy is its dreamy look.
I was especially struck by that when I
saw pictures taken of him in the
Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in
his eyes the look of a seer.... He is
the loudspeaker which magnifies the
inaudible whispers of the German soul
until they can be heard by the German's
conscious ear. He is the first man to
tell every German what he has been
thinking and feeling all along in his
unconscious about German fate,
especially since the defeat in the
World War, and the one characteristic
which colors every German soul is the
typically German inferiority complex,
the complex of the younger brother, of
the one who is always a bit late to the
feast. Hitler's power is not political,
it is magic.'' 
   Hitler's secret was that he
allowed himself to be moved by his own
unconscious, said Jung. He was like a
man who listens intently to whispered
suggestions from a mysterious voice and
``then acts upon them. In our case,
even if occasionally our unconscious
does reach us through dreams, we have
too much rationality, too much
cerebrum, to obey it--but Hitler
listens and obeys. The true leader is
always led.'' This, of course, is the
significance of Hitler's own,
oft-quoted remark, ``I go the way
Providence dictates with the confidence
of a sleepwalker.''   
   Jung predicted to Knickerbocker
that England and France would not honor
their Munich guarantees to the Czechs,
since no nation keeps its word. Then
why, Knickerbocker asked, expect Hitler
to keep his word? Hitler was different,
Jung insisted. ``Because Hitler is the
nation.'' This was exactly what Nazi
Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess used to
scream at the Nazi Nuremberg rallies. 
   And still, after the war began,
Jung remained an enthusiast. As France
surrendered to Germany in June
1940--the date, the summer solstice,
did not pass unnoticed by Jung and
other Nazi mystics--Jung cried
ecstatically, ``It is the dawning of
the Age of Aquarius!'' 
   Even much later in the war, when
Jung had come to realize that his
future required him to dissociate
himself from Hitler's particular brand
of magic, Jung was still certain that
Hitler represented Germany in the
profoundest possible, mythic and
mystical way. In answer to queries from
American agents as to whether Hitler
could be overthrown internal to
Germany, Jung shook his head
impatiently. Never could Hitler be
overthrown by other Germans; he was
Germany. He was the ``collective
[racial] unconscious of the German
people.'' 

   Mass Media
 
   The Nazis and their organized
supporters represented only a
{minority} of the German population,
even when in power. What about the rest
of the people, whom our television
documentaries called the ``good
Germans,'' who acquiesced to the Hitler
state? How were they made to go along? 
   That was accomplished through mass
terrorization, through both the actual
use of jackboot terror and the {implied
threat} to use it. It is very possible
that the same powers which placed Hitler
in power could have done so, by a
``putsch,'' without a popular election
victory. I say that they {chose} not to
do it that way, because the
psychological considerations required
for the Hitler state to take hold
demanded that the initial choice of the
Nazis appear to be a free one. This
heightened the anxiety of the ``good
Germans,'' since they appeared to
have brought the terrible state of
affairs on themselves. As many
Freudians and neo-Freudians who have
analyzed the Nazi experiment have
remarked, this led the majority of
Germans to doubt their own judgment,
making them more susceptible to
brainwashing. 
   The structure of the Nazi Party
and the Fuehrer state provided
organized vehicles for Freudian mass
brainwashing. But the principle vehicle
was {mass media}. In fact, the Nazis
more or less invented {mass media}--the
means for the universal or near
universal dissemination of
``information'' simultaneously, in this
case controlled through the state. 
   There were three basic insitutions
of mass media.                            
   The {print media,} which featured
the coordinated control of information
disseminated through the press; all
information was created and passed
through the Information Ministry, under
Josef Goebbels. The coverage was
orchestrated so as not to appear to be
identical, with various papers given
particular aspects of a story. But the
point is that all the news was managed
from the top, including even foreign
coverage of German events. Nearly every
German could be reached with the
message desired in this fashion. 
   {Film} became a universal mass
medium as well, with cinemas established
in every town, with feature films that
carried brainwashing images of Nazi
culture. Such films were often
carefully crafted to have the greatest
psychological effect, with the Leni
Riefenstahl epics such as {Triumph of
Will} being the most notorious. Those
films and newsreels carefully produced,
allowed audiences to become
participants in the mass experience of
rallies and other events. They provided
a bond, as we have described, between
the leader and masses and the
individual in the mass and his neighbor
in other parts of Germany: They
provided a universal brainwashing
experience, and were consciously
produced to create such a desired
effect. Audiences in cinemas routinely
joined in Nazi anthems and salutes, at
the instigation of the images on the
screen. In addition, the films provided
the {feinbild} or the pictures of the
enemies against which the Nazis were to
deploy their mobs. As more than one
brainwasher has commented, the Germans
were the first to be subjected to the
overt use of film for propaganda and
the experiment was an enormous
``success.'' 
   But the most universal of the mass
media was {radio}. As soon as they came
to power, the Nazis ordered the
production and mass dissemination of
cheap radio receivers. By the end of
their first year in power, nearly every
German household had one; in addition,
loudspeakers, hooked to radio receivers
and amplifiers, were installed in town
squares and other locations throughout
Germany. 
   For the first time in history, an
event could be heard by nearly every
person in a single country, as it was
happening. This is the mass audience
that foreshadows our television
experience. The concept behind it was
the same as we have described in
discussing Freud's {Mass Psychology}:
individuals participating in the mass
phenomena are susceptible to
suggestion, to losing their moral
conscience--they become overwhelmed by
the mass experience. 
   Coming across the radio, into
millions of homes and thousands of
plazas is the voice of one man, the
Fuehrer. That fact--that all or
nearly all Germans were hearing his
voice at the same moment--gave an
enhanced power to the message; it
created an air of ``all powerfulness.''
Many commentators have remarked about
the hypnotic quality of Hitler's voice,
how it seemed to mesmerize his
audience, whether live or on radio or
seen in the film. The neo-Freudians
would remark that it was not only the
quality of the voice, but the sense on
the part of the listener of being part
of a mass experience, that contributed
to this effect. 

   Careful Orchestration
 
   Hitler's speeches were some of the
first mass media events in history.
They were as carefully prepared and
orchestrated as any modern television
event; they are comparable to the kind
of preparation and buildup, given a
media extravaganza such as the
Superbowl. In fact, one might say that
such people who prepared such mass
media events learned their lessons from
the Nazis, as we shall later explain. 
   The speeches were preceded by
widespread advertising in the print
media and radio, with a buildup of
anticipation and excitement. As the
moment of the speech approached, the
announcers described the frenzy and
excitement of the crowd. Hitler's
entrance into the hall was carefully
described, also to build tension and
excitement. When the speech began,
Hitler usually spoke in low and mellow
tones, easing his audience into his
message. His sentences were simple and
usually short. Words were carefully
chosen, so as not to be beyond the
simplest of listeners. His tone and
excitement in voice rose as the speech
progressed, eventually shouting his
message to his audience. It ended with
the crowd roaring its approval, all of
which was broadcast without comment. As
the Fuehrer left the hall, the
commentator would carefully describe
the scene, with the emphasis on what
the crowd was doing. 
   But it did not come naturally
for Hitler. He carefully rehearsed
everything, down to the most minute
gestures and eye movements, using
photographs to modify his style
for maximum effect. Like a television
star, he went over details of the
staging of his entrances, the location
of the podium, the lighting, etc.
with his ``stage managers'' such
as Goebbels. 
   When brainwashers spoke to Germans
after the war, as part of efforts to
``psychoanalyze'' the Nazi experience,
they found few remembered any specific
content in Hitler's speeches. Almost
all could remember being part of the
experience, if they were in attendance,
and most remembered the ``excitement''
in listening to them on the radio. The
words ``hypnotic'' and ``mesmerizing''
were the most used to describe the
Fuehrer's voice. Even some people who
professed to have disagreed with the
Nazis grudgingly claimed that Hitler
was a ``a spellbinding speaker.'' 
   The brainwashers concluded from
all this that {mass media} events had
caused people to {suspend their belief
in reality}, that they had in fact been
willing to accept uncritically things
being said, which they might have
rejected, if they had heard them
in another context. 
   Ironically, the Nazis were working
on the next level of mass media
technology--television--when the war
broke out. Had the war and its
production demands not intervened, it
is fairly certain that by no later than
the mid-1940s every German would have
had a television set! 
   The {mass media} hold of Hitler on
the population continued through the
end of the war; other Nazi leaders,
Goebbels in particular, were said to
have had a similar effect. But no one
could overwhelm reality like the
Fuehrer, or, rather, {the Fuehrer's
mass media events}. Only as the Nazi
state collapsed in military defeat and
chaos, did this process break down.

   A Society Driven Insane
 
   This is a picture of a society,
driven {deliberately insane}. It is all
the more cruel for this was done to a
great people, chosen as victims because
they were great and the carriers of the
traditions of the Renaissance through
such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Schiller, List, von Humboldt. An evil
science, Freudian social psychology,
was deployed against them, by a sick
oligarchy. 
   During the war, Bruno Bettelheim,
a neo-Freudian, published a
psychological analysis of the Nazi
period at the behest of the network of
brainwashers associated with the
Tavistock Institute. Himself a
concentration camp inmate in 1938-39,
Bettelheim describes how under extreme
doubt and terror, the individual will
regress to an increasingly more
infantile state. In that condition, the
inmates of the camps started to mirror
the personalities and mannerisms of
their oppressors, the SS guards. In a
widely circulated version of that work,
{The Informed Heart}, he indicates that
life outside the concentration camps
mirrored the psychological
disintegration taking place inside: All
German citizens were becoming more
infantile, less able to act as
reasoning adults. 
   ``While the good child may be seen
and not heard,'' writes Bettelheim,
``the `good German' had to be unseen
and also dumb .... It is one thing to
behave like a child because one is a
child: dependent, lacking in foresight
and understanding, taken care of by
bigger, older, and wiser adults, forced
by them to behave, but occasionally
able to defy them and get away with it.
Most important of all, feeling certain
that in time, as one would reach
adulthood oneself, all this would be
righted. It is quite another thing to
be an adult and have to force oneself
to assume childish behavior, and for
all time to come....'' 
   ``It was not just coercion by
others into helpless dependency,''
continues Bettelheim. ``It was also the
clean splitting of the personality.
Man's anxiety, his wish to protect
life, forced him to relinquish what was
ultimately his best chance of survival:
his ability to react and make
appropriate decisions. But giving this
up, he was no longer a man, but a
child. Knowing that for survival, he
should decide and act, and trying to
survive by not reacting--these in their
combination overpowered the individual
to such a degree that he was eventually
shorn of all self-respect and all
feelings of independence.'' 
   In this way the multi-level
experiment in Freudian mass
brainwashing worked its evil on the
German population. In the end, the
Nazis, themselves a group of gnostic
psychotics, went predictably out of
control and the experiment had to be
destroyed; in the interim the Freudian
mobs unleashed by the process had
destroyed much of Europe. And when it
was over, those who had imposed this
horror in the world, attempted through
mass media to blame their {victims} for
the crimes committed. The Germans, whom
the oligarchy through their Nazi tools,
had tortured in mass brainwashing were
told that they were {collectively
guilty} for all that had happened. The
oligarchy tried a handful of the
psychotic Nazis, and in so doing put
the whole German nation, one of the
greatest peoples on the earth, wrongly
in dock at Nuremberg. And while they
intoned that it must ``never happen
again,'' they and their brainwashers
were already studying where the
experiment had gone wrong. They were
preparing to do far worse, using a
newly developed tool--television--as
their more advanced mass brainwashing
mechanism to organize a new form of
fascist state without the Nazi
superstructure. 
   That's all for now. We'll pick up
this thread of a fascist state without
the Nazi superstructure in the next
part of this series, and show you the
kind of society that your brainwashers
plan for you. But for the moment, I
want you to think back to the two
images with which we started this
section: the Nazi state, and in
particular, the Nazi rallies, with the
frenzied crowds, cheering their
Fuehrer, and the millions more
listening, glued to their radios. Now
reflect on what we have told you about
this, how they were really carefully
stage-managed {mass media events}. 
   Now think about the ``Desert
Storm'' rallies, and the similarities
between the two events: at their roots
both are {organized, mass media
brainwashing events}. 
   Do you realize that you have been
manipulated? You don't, do you? That is
how well the more than 40-year
brainwashing of the American population
by television has worked. 
   {I am indebted to Molly
Hammett Kronberg for the section on
Jungian psychology and Hitler, and for
discussion on the Nazi movement
overall.} 
-- 
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com