Death to the Non-Believers: Terroristic Violence and the Meaning of the Holocaust
Date posted: April 25, 2011 | by Richard Koenigsberg | Comments
I became attracted to Ruth Stein’s work based on the fact that I’ve been studying a form of radical fundamentalism throughout my life, namely the ideology of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. The object of worship for Hitler was his beloved nation. Hitler declared to his people: “We do not want to have any other God, only Germany” and stated that Deutschland uber Alles (“Germany above all”) was a profession of faith that “fills millions with a greater strength”—with a faith that is “mightier than any earthly might.” Hitler was a profound devotee of his religion: a preacher who sought to persuade the German people to worship as he did.
Long before I was aware of Islamic fundamentalism, the phrase “Death to the non-believers” often passed through my brain as I tried to comprehend the meaning of the Final Solution. It gradually became evident that for Hitler and many Nazis, Jews symbolized a people that did not worship the nation enough; did not embrace the Nazi religion; had doubts about the value of sacrificing one’s life for Germany.
Hitler said, “We are fanatic in our love for our people. We can go as loyally as a dog with those who share our sincerity, but will pursue with fanatical hatred the man who believes that he can play tricks with this love of ours.” Hitler’s hatred was directed toward those whom he believed mocked his love for Germany: refused to share his devotion. Jews were conceived as if infidels: a people who refused to embrace the one true faith; to worship Hitler and Germany. The Holocaust constituted a form of religious terrorism: death to the non-believers.
It doesn’t matter what the Jews were or what they actually did. In Hitler’s mind and according to his ideology, they had to be eliminated—because of what they symbolized or represented. Jews were conceived as non-believers: a people who lacked faith in Hitler and Germany; doubted the eventual triumph of Nazism; and were skeptical about the value of sacrifice.
As a political movement, Islamic fundamentalism (whatever the former President may have said) cannot be compared with Nazism. However—as I studied Ruth Stein’s writings and the utterances of Bin Laden—it became evident that as a structure of thought, Hitler’s ideology and that of Bin Laden had much in common. My focus here is radical belief systems or fanatic ideologies—how these generate group violence.
“In our religion,” Bin Laden declared, “We believe that Allah has created us for the purpose of worshipping him.” As Hitler professed absolute faith in Germany, so does Bin Laden profess absolute faith in Allah. What’s more, just as Hitler becomes enraged when he imagines that some do not worship Germany as he does, so does Bin Laden become enraged contemplating the idea of people who do not believe in Allah.
Bin Laden claims that the Quran urges Moslems to “fight for the cause of Allah” and to “kill pagans wherever they are found.” When believers meet unbelievers, they should “smite their neck and fight those who believe not in Allah.” Bin Laden’s rage—his desire to kill—grows out of his wish to punish or destroy infidels—those who do not worship the God that he worships.
Jihad, according to this ideology, is undertaken as a religious obligation. Bin Laden states that Allah has “ordered us to make holy wars” and to fight to see to it that “His word is the highest and uppermost and that of the unbelievers the lowermost.” Bin Laden claims that Allah has “ordered us to make holy wars.” No Moslem may say that he does not want to do jihad in the cause of God because, after all, “Is there any other way to repel the infidels?”
Terroristic violence, in short, grows out of a belief system claiming it is necessary to destroy or punish non-believers. God, Bin Laden says, has ordered Moslems to “carry out jihad and to kill and to fight.” If believers are willing to fight and to kill, then God will “punish non-believers with your hands, help you to victory over them, and heal the hearts of the believers.”
Holy war, as Ruth Stein puts it, is a “deadly ritual that seeks to annihilate or dominate the other in God’s name.” Terroristic violence is undertaken as a demonstration of the omnipotence of one’s God; in order to persuade others of the power of one’s ideal; and to punish those who refuse to worship the one, true God.
Terroristic violence seeks to compel the Other to submit to the God to which one has oneself submitted. The terrorist seeks to transform Others into sacrificial victims (as the suicide bombers themselves are sacrificial victims). Violent acts are undertaken in the name Allah—in order to demonstrate the depth of one’s devotion and punish those who are insufficiently devoted.
Similarly, the Holocaust was a form of terroristic violence: manifestation of a Holy War whose purpose was to demonstrate the power of Germany and punish those whom (Hitler imagined) did not embrace Nazism and worship the nation as he did. By undertaking the Final Solution, Hitler and the Nazis sought to convey the following idea: “You too must submit—sacrifice your life—to the object to which we have submitted and sacrificed our lives. Just as we have compelled to become obedient unto death, so too must you. You are not exempt from the obligation to die for Germany.”
Genocide was a massive performance or enactment undertaken by Hitler and the Nazis, seeking to persuade others that the German nation was omnipotent (by virtue of its capacity to accomplish even such a radical form of action). It was as if Hitler was saying: “This is what happens to those who doubt the power of Germany and will of the Fuhrer: Death to the non-believers.”
This is a beautiful essay and it reaches conclusions that also apply to state-terrorism: that is, acts of violence perpetrated by states against their (or other) citizens, which are justified by the State’s defense of the Nation. In many a speech by the most ardent patriotic politicians–say, George W., Simon Peres, Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez–the love of country that they profess and that they wish to instill in their followers has as its corollaries the oppression of those who would not share such a love… sometimes that oppression is expressed in their actual elimination; other times, in the increasing marginalization of their rights and livelihoods…
Beautifully written essay.
However, I have some reservations about the psychologically profiling two individuals (Hitler and Osama) who have never been properly psychoanalyzed. I understand that investigative profilers do it all the time, to relatively good effects, but they rarely extrapolate their assumptions toward larger social phenomena like mass terrorism and genocide.
Again, though, beautifully written read.
It has long been a tradition in American pop culture to superimpose the images of a variety of “national enemies” and compound them into the image of one big evil so that it could constitute a world composed of one good, virtuous and chosen nation, i.e., Americans, versus enormous allies of all kinds of bad. Thus, all enemies “surrounding” Americans, whatever different cause each of them may represents, are “connected” through the “axis of evil.”
How many history documentary films try to find evidence that Hitler was not a true Christian but a secretive Satan worshipper? How many “pop” historians are keeping silent on the fact that Nazis enjoyed stronger support among Protestant Germans than among Catholics? For many Protestant Americans, Hitler should be anti-Christ and it is undesirable and unimaginable that many Nazi party members were devout Christians, in their own way like Christians in other countries.
The leftist, secularist Afghan regime during the Cold War was labeled as “repressive” by American press because it denied the religious freedom of its Muslim people by trying to force them to send their daughters to elementary school without hijabs on their heads. Nowadays, very few Americans seriously bother to distinguish third-world nationalists, socialists, Muslim fundamentalists, and sometimes even social democrats, from one another. To add Nazism to the list might sound like a mild innovation, but it is not entirely new.
Koenigsberg’s idea of bundling Hitler and Bin Laden together does not challenge but perfectly and beautifully complies with the long popular American tradition and desire of seeking connections between one evil and another. According to Gordon Allport, a social psychologist, it is not surprising that people respond to various sources of perceived threats by simplifying and classifying them into one simple category. Members of any in-group tend to ignore subtle or even conspicuous differences between out-groups. I am not suggesting that intellectual efforts to find some common features shared by multiple “evils” and bundle them into one category are of no practical use. Quite contrary, such simplification serves many important functions. Most of all, it can economize the cognitive process of in-group members.
American voters don’t have to bother to think too deep whether to send their troops to Iraq or not because it suffices to know that both Hussein and Bin Laden are just Muslims who are bad somehow. To remember that Hussein’s regime was one of the most secularist-oriented ones in the Middle East can only hamper national unity and dampen soldiers’ morale. More practically, if the common features perceptively shared by two enemies truly reflect the real aspects of them, finding such commonality can provide important clues to policy makers.
Then, what common features did Koenigsberg find out, which might contribute to a policy coping with the new contemporary problems of Muslim terrorism? Although he enumerated several common features between two evils, they could converge into one point: the quest of “purity,” i.e., intolerance of any heterogeneous—ethnically or religiously—elements within the community. However, according to Jonathan Haidt, the moral rage against the heterogeneous elements within a community and the urge to “purify” a community are not eccentric.
Rather than limited to Nazism and Muslim fundamentalism, the ideology of purification is a common factor—although with some differing degree—in many “conservative” ideologies. How many Americans seriously believe that being Christian is a crucial factor for being an American citizen? Samuel Huntington, the legendary guru in American political science, in his famous book “Who Are We?”, warned his readers of the threats upon the American national identity posed by atheists and non-English speakers.
Koenigsberg makes some good sense in finding something common to both Hitler and Bin Laden through a discourse analysis. However, what he has found is not a monopoly patent of only two psyches. If we need a historical lesson from Hitler and Nazism to understand and cope with a new threat of religious terrorism, it should be searched not in the ego or libido of Adolf and Osama but in the social soil that nurtured their ideas into a socio-political trend.
For example, both the Weimar Republic and post-cold-war Arab societies are characterized by wide-spread inequality and economic deprivation and popular sense of national humility. A privileged class has long monopolized the wealth from oil in many Arab countries, and their regimes have long been supported by the “Westerners.” An ordinary third-world, state- and secularist-oriented nationalism was a formidable challenge to such regimes, but was successfully suppressed. In a similar way that Nazism grew out of the Depression and seized power by the help or, at least, connivance of the established class in the Weimar Republic who chose right-wing radicalists rather than even moderate social democrats, the countries from which the terrorist groups recruit their members are those that have long been ruled by most conservative and traditional, and most pro-Western regimes.
“If our solution to Muslim fundamentalism is to let the wealth monopolized by privileged class in the Arab traditional regimes be distributed to the commoners and stop their oil dollars flowing into American economy and being used to purchase the Treasury bonds,” someone might ask, “what’s the use of defeating Muslim fundamentalism for American national interest?” Well, it is hard to answer.