The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

[50] himself fully with a personified nation. In this way, state imperialism reproduces itself in family imperialism.
In this connection, it is interesting to see what Goebbels writes (in DIE VERFLUCHTEN HAKENKREUZLER) in
answer to the question whether the Jews are humans:
If somebody hits your mother in the face with a whip, are you going to say, thank you? Is he human? He is not human, he is a
beast! How many worse things has the Jew done to our mother Germany [italics mine, W.R.] and is he still doing! He has spoiled
our race, he has undermined our morality and has sapped our strength . . . The Jew is the personified demon of decay . . . he begins
his criminal butchery of the nations.
One cannot properly judge the effect of such sentences on the unconscious emotional life of the mass reader
unless one knows the significance of the idea of castration as punishment for sexual wishes; the sexpsychological
background of the phantasies of ritual murders and of antisemitism in general; and the magnitude
of the sexual guilt feelings and the sexual anxiety of the reactionary individual. Here are the psychological roots
of National Socialist antisemitism. Could this be called "just obfuscation of the masses"? True, it is obfuscation
also. But the fact should not be overlooked that fascism, ideologically, is the revolt of a deathly sick society, sick
sexually as well as economically. It is the revolt against the painful and forceful tendencies of revolutionary
thinking in the direction of sexual as well as economic freedom. The very thought of this freedom makes the
reactionary individual tremble with fear. The establishment of economic freedom of the working people goes
hand in hand with the dissolution of the old institutions, especially the sexual ones, a process of which the
reactionary individual is afraid. Specifically, the fear of "sexual freedom"—which in reactionary thinking is
represented as "sexual chaos"—checks the longing for freedom from economic exploitation. This will be so as
long, but only as long, as this idea of the sexual chaos prevails. It can continue to prevail only as long as [51]
these decisive problems remain unclarified in the masses. This is why sex-economy belongs in the center of any
endeavor to regulate social conditions in general. The more extensive and the deeper the reactionary structure
formation of the masses, the more decisive is the sex-economic work on the education of the masses in social
responsibility.
In this interplay between economic and structural facts, the authoritarian family stands out as the most important
place where reactionary thinking of any kind is reproduced: it is the factory of reactionary ideology and structure.
The "preservation of the family," that is, of the reactionary family with many children, is therefore the primordial
cultural tenet of reactionary politics. This is what hides behind the slogan of the "protection of the state, of culture
and of civilization."
In a proclamation before the Presidential election in 1932 (Adolf Hitler: Mein Programm) we read the
following:
Woman, by nature and by fate, is the life companion of man. They are not only life companions but also work companions. Just as
the economic development over thousands of years changed the fields of work for the man, so it did for the woman. But higher than
the compulsion of working together is the duty to preserve the race. In this, the most noble mission of the sexes, lie their individual
and unalterable differences which Providence in its eternal wisdom gave them. The highest task, therefore, is that of making possible
for the two life and work companions the founding of a family. The final destruction of the family would mean the end of any higher
form of humanity. No matter how far the woman's field of activity may be extended, the ultimate goal of a truly organic and logical
development must always be the formation of the family. It is the smallest but most valuable unit in the whole structure of the state.
Work honors the woman as it does the man. But the child raises the woman to nobility.
In the same proclamation, under the heading, "Preservation of the peasantry means preservation of the German
nation," Hitler stated:
[52] In the preservation and maintenance of a healthy peasantry I see the best protection against social ills as well as against the
racial degeneration of our nation.
In this connection, one has to remember the traditional family fixation among the peasantry. Hitler goes on to