Luigi Zoja, Jonathan Hunt (Translator) - Paranoia - The Madness That Makes History-Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group (2017)

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PARANOIA
Luigi Zoja presents an insightful analysis of the use and misuse of paranoia
throughout history and in contemporary society. Zoja combines history with
depth psychology, contemporary politics and tragic literature, resulting in a clear
and balanced analysis presented with rare clarity.The devastating impact of paranoia
on societies is explored in detail.
Focusing on the contagious aspects of paranoia and its infectious, self-replicating
dynamics, Zoja takes such diverse examples as Ajax and George W. Bush, Cain
and the American Holocaust, Hitler, Stalin and Othello to illustrate his argument.
He reconstructs the emblematic arguments that paranoia has promoted in Western
history and examines how the power of the modern media and mass communication
has affected how it spreads. Paranoia clearly examines how leaders lose control of
their influence, how the collective unconscious acquires an autonomous life and
how seductive its effects can be – more so than any political, religious or ideological
discourse.
This gripping study will be essential reading for depth and analytical psychologists,
and academics and students of history, cultural studies, psychology, classical studies,
literary studies, anthropology and sociology.
Luigi Zoja is an analytical psychologist in private practice in Milan who lectures

internationally. He is a former training analyst of the C. G. Jung Institut, Zurich, past
president of CIPA (Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica) and former president of
IAAP (International Association of Analytical Psychology). He has taught at the
University of Insubria and at Beijing Normal University, and his previous books
have been published in multiple languages.
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‘Zoja’s sweep of history shows how leaders have capitalized on tendencies toward
paranoia to mobilize against targeted groups throughout history and well into our
own time.This is an intellectual tour de force that brings together both psychological,
cultural and sociological factors that have resulted in aggression against subgroups
within societies and aggression against societies close to or far from home.’
– Cynthia Epstein, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Sociology,
Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA
‘A great book, blazing new trails...A new look at the phenomenon of paranoia –
this time as a motive for action, personal as well as collective; a factor capable of
determining the course of biographies but also of history. In our times of the world
falling out of joint, ambient fears seeking in vain the place to cast their anchors, and
so the collective and personal paranoia exuberant and in full swing, Zoja’s study
acquires exceptional topicality. A truly eye-opening study!’
– Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology,
University of Leeds, UK
‘Lemkin, a Polish jurist, coined the word “genocide” around 1943. Some 70 years
afterwards, Zoja is engaging with the demanding endeavour of continuing the work
of Lemkin in exploring the real meaning of the genocidal process and the genocidal
mind. Paranoia…represents a masterpiece for the world of genocide experts. With
rigorous historical analysis, this book presents the effect of “paranoia” on masses
and how paranoia has been wielded by different ideologies to create a “just war”
doctrine.’
– Enzo Maria Le Fevre Cervini,Vice-Chair,
Budapest Centre for the International Prevention
of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, Hungary
‘Zoja has written a path-breaking book which not only looks at paranoia as a
clinical category but also as a social and cultural phenomenon of great historical
consequence…It is also written in an extremely accessible and lucid style. A
wonderfully provocative read.’
– Paul Ginsborg, Professor of Contemporary European History,
University of Florence, Italy
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PARANOIA
The Madness that Makes History
Luigi Zoja
TRANSLATED BY JONATHAN HUNT

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First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 L. Zoja
The right of L. Zoja to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
English translation © Jonathan Hunt, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Zoja, Luigi, author.
Title: Paranoia: the madness that makes history / Luigi Zoja.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016040966| ISBN 9781138673540 (hardback: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138673663 (ebk: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315561783 (ebook)
Subjects: | MESH: Paranoid Disorders – history | History of Medicine |
Medicine in Literature | Political Systems – history
Classification: LCC RC520 | NLM WM 11.1 | DDC 616.89/7–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040966
ISBN: 978-1-138-67354-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-67366-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-56178-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Out of House Publishing
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CONTENTS
The madness of Ajax 1
1 What is paranoia? Individual (clinical) paranoia 9

Collective (historico-cultural) paranoia 19
2 The beginnings: myth and history 42

Cain’s envy 42
The enemy in the Aeneid 43
The development of the relationship between paranoia and politics 45
Columbus’s delusion 47
A voice crying in the wilderness: Brother Antonio Montesinos 49
The cross and interest 50
Paranoid law 52
3 European nationalism: from cultural renaissance to paranoia 57

Supervising and mistrusting 57
The pride and suspicion of nations 58
The fantasies underlying national law 61
The imaginary race 65
The place of the Jews 69
The Dreyfus Affair 69
4 Naive persecutors 73
The special nature of America 73
The Black Legend 74
The empty continent 75
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vi Contents
‘American exceptionalism’ 77
Moby Dick 77
Founding principles and purity 78
The separation of the continents and manifest destiny 80
War of conquest 81
Spain and Catholicism 82
The ‘newspaper war’ 84
The United States lands in Asia 85
The white man’s burden 88
5 Darkness over Europe 91

Great is war 91
Boredom and waiting 92
Pandarus’ arrow and the first casualty 93
Suspicion grows 94
Pre-emptive mobilization 98
Do railway timetables determine the slaughter? 101
The politics of Creon 102
Uncontrollable feelings 104
More voices crying in the wilderness 106
The role of the mass media 107
Suspicions, exaggerations, rumours 110
The sufferings of Belgium 114
Italian paranoia 115
The novelty of atrocities and of the intercontinental
dimension 116
The silence after the gunfire 117
6 Freud, Keynes and the bamboozled man 122

An American messiah 122
The fourteen-point dogma 124
The peace negotiations 125
Wilson’s self-deceptions 126
The paranoid atmosphere of the negotiations 127
The offence 129
Arrogance 130
The seeds of new paranoia 131
7 Siegfried 134
The illuminating explanation 134
The legitimization of paranoid nationalist ‘law’ 135
The disappearance of multinational coexistence 136
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Contents vii
The stab in the back 138

Waiting for more darkness 141
8 The granite foundation and the hour of idiocy 144

Hitler’s revelations 144
The role of Vienna 145
Mein Kampf 146
The apparition of the Jew 148
Other ‘logical’ steps in Mein Kampf 150
From theoretician to head of state 151
Impatience prevails 152
The choices of death 155
All obstacles are swept away 156
‘Who talks about the massacre of the Armenians today?’ 159
War at last 161
Definitive omnipotence 165
Absurd calculations 168
Self-burial 169
The need for an enemy 171
Delusion to the end 173
‘Total war’ 174
The final revelation and the abyss 175
The shadow of Nero 177
9 The man of steel and the final product 183

Stalin: a name with many meanings 183
Character 184
Radical mistrust 186
Allusion and the creation of a self-contained reality 188
Lenin’s heritage 189
The gulag 190
Yakov and Nadya 191
The diagnosis of paranoia 192
Some daily habits 193
Similarities and differences with respect to Hitler 193
‘Inversion of causes’: the leader’s mind as the origin of society 197
The massacres 198
The twentieth-anniversary speech 206
The ‘denationalizations’ and the ideology that lay behind them 207
Unpreparedness for war 208
Counter-attack and the conclusion of the conflict 211
Suspicion hits the Jews 213
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viii Contents
Stalin’s death 215

The paradoxes of paranoid totalitarianism 216
Final questions 219
10 Fire that feeds fire 227

War crimes and Allied double standards 227
Collective paranoia and forms of government 228
Airborne warfare as total war 229
Poetry and romantic enthusiasm in the air war 230
The first bombs of the Second World War 231
The three phases of Allied bombing 231
Douhet’s predictions are proved wrong 233
The bombing of Germany 234
The bombing of Italy 235
11 Further and further west 239

War against an inferior race 239
War between different races, total war 240
The erroneous calculation of pre-emptive attack 242
The impossibility of isolation 243
Fear of encirclement 243
A strategy founded on haste 244
Suspicion and the missed opportunity 245
Towards the atomic bomb 246
Contagious fanaticism 247
The range of options continues to narrow 248
Hiroshima 248
The diary of Michihiko Hachiya 249
The withdrawal of projections and meeting the enemy 251
More elation 252
Nagasaki 252
Rationalizations 253
Secrecy 253
Later justifications 255
The Tokyo Trials 259
The reawakening of Ajax 259
Dr Hachiya’s farewell 261
12 A plan for the twenty-first century? 266

Paranoia and the new century 266
The Cold War 267
The disappearance of the Soviet enemy 268
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newgenprepdf
Contents ix
The appearance of the Islamic enemy 269

Paranoia takes the form of a government document 270
The war caused by suspicion 271
The responsibility of those who disseminate paranoid messages 272
The contagiousness of paranoia 274
The impact on civilian life 276
13 Inconclusive thoughts 278

Understanding evil 278
Paranoia and psychopathy again 280
Individual, mass and leader 282
Three generations of mass media 283
‘The Giant’ 284
Dictators 285
Giving back medals 286
Eighty per cent? 288
The abandonment of morality among intellectuals and
among the populace 292
Why modern life offers paranoia new spaces 294
The relationship with the -isms 296
Paranoid return 299
Clandestine revolutionary groups 300
The continuity between limited attacks and genocides 302
Acceptance of responsibility and denial 304
Who won? 305
Disarmament and historiography 307
Poems and anthems 309
Monuments 310
Open contradictions 312
Some examples of everyday paranoia 313
Indifference and Europe 314
Iago’s whisper 318
Bibliography 325
Index 340
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1
THE MADNESS OF AJAX
Even a worthless man can triumph with the help of the gods; I am sure that
I can achieve glory without them.1
At the beginning of the play, the irreparable has already happened.

Ajax knows that the end is near, and believes that it will be his triumph. With
matchless strength and courage, his arm has done a warrior’s duty. It has slaughtered
the enemy. Why shouldn’t the destruction of the enemy be his triumph? His arm
followed his mind, his mind followed suspicion. From that moment on, he cast aside
facts and reason.
Ajax is interested in one thing, and one thing alone: being acknowledged to be
the strongest. And since he is interested only in one thing, since his life revolves
around that one thing, his life is solitary. His thoughts are solitary.2 But an absence
of people and interests is contrary to the nature of the psyche, which reacts by fill-
ing the void. The presences which are rejected in reality gradually re-emerge in
the mind. Rejected as realities, they reappear as nightmares and obsessions. They
become suspicion. In this guise, the thing that the person had wanted to deny makes
its triumphant return. Ajax’s mental life is smouldering suspicion, on the point of
exploding.
But what to us in the modern age are only mental images were once apparitions
of the gods. And the gods did not like this strong but obstinate, fair-minded but
naive man. His sense of being in the right was too simple. When the gods wish to
destroy a man, they begin by making him lose his sense of proportion. Ajax doesn’t
seem to need the gods. He refuses their help.
A man who finds himself in this condition – alone on earth, and in heaven too –
runs a serious risk. Human reason must bow to superior powers. Omnipotence is
not a human quality. If the mind is absolute, unrestrained by men and gods, lacking
any limitation or anchor, it can lose itself.
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2 The madness of Ajax
At the beginning of Sophocles’ play, the gods have made Ajax’s mind fly off, free
of all restraint, like the strong, proud, solitary bird (aietós or aetós, the eagle) that Zeus
had named him after, according to Pindar.3
Pindar loved Ajax – how he loved him! And we can understand this, because
the feelings of the classical world are so remote from us, and at the same time
so near. Homer, Pindar and Sophocles are creators of that heroic world, but
they are also heroes and characters in that world. Odysseus and Ajax are super-
imposed on one another, but so are Homer, Pindar and Sophocles. We cannot
have images of the characters without our images of the authors. Pindar fights
against Homer just as Ajax crosses swords with Hector. Pindar’s verses con-
stantly attack Homer, reproaching him for bestowing fame on Odysseus and
denigrating Ajax.4
Ajax is a solid, straightforward, simple character. He would not have suited the
manifold subtleties of an epic poem. In the reciprocal flow of emotions between
Homer and Odysseus, the author and the character, the latter embodies complexity,
variability, adaptation. ‘Where cunning men are needed’, Odysseus says, even out-
side the Odyssey, ‘I am such a man.’5 That was how the tradition described him. He
was the protagonist of a long poem characterized by constant changes of style and
content. He could not be merely masculine and warlike like Ajax: he had to have a
feminine side too. He is favoured by Athene, the goddess of intelligence, a faculty he
himself possesses in the highest degree, and which consists above all in having many
different thoughts – not being obsessed by a single one. He is complex and rather
perverse, like the gods themselves. He respects and fears them precisely because he
understands them.
That is how the Odyssey came into being.
It would have been impossible to write an epic poem about Ajax, just as it is
impossible to write a symphony using only one tune. Ajax could never be the sub-
ject of an epic, but only of a tragedy, which is characterized by unity of time, place
and action:6 a story which is solid, like the hero himself; short and intense. That is
how probably the greatest of all tragedians came to devote what was probably the
first of all his tragedies (c. 445 bc) to Ajax.
In his first play, Sophocles depicts in a single work the greatness and impossibility
of tragic thought.
Tragic thought and paranoid thought are incompatible. They are opposites. The
aim of tragedy was not just to entertain, but to educate, to teach people that life
is contradictory: man desires goodness but fosters evil; the human will counts for
nothing, because it doesn’t know what it really wants.
Ajax goes astray not because he makes a particular mistake but because, in suc-
cumbing to paranoia, he becomes obsessed with a single idea, and deaf to human
complexity. From the moment that fixed idea is revealed to him, he believes that he
has understood what is most important in life.
And yet he becomes himself – a real character, with a personality – the first time
he makes a choice rather than performing a duty. The moment is inevitably a fleet-
ing one, because the choice he makes is to die.
3
In order to create this tragic character, Sophocles magnified Ajax’s strength and
arrogance to titanic proportions.7 Pindar should have reproached Sophocles, rather
than Homer: in Homer, Ajax is never arrogant towards the gods.
Sophocles’ Ajax begins on the battlefield, with the Greeks besieging Troy. The
first characters we see are not Ajax himself, but Athene and Odysseus. Odysseus
tells the goddess that the army’s animals have been slaughtered. Cattle and sheep
are afloat in a sea of blood. The slaughter is said to have been perpetrated by Ajax.
Athene calmly takes control of the situation.
After Achilles’ death, it had been necessary to decide which of the Greeks should
be given his weapons. The choice had immediately been narrowed down to Ajax
and Odysseus. The jury, dominated by Agamemnon and Menelaus, always allies of
Odysseus, had naturally preferred the latter. So Athene had awarded victory to the
most intelligent man, not to the strongest.8 Yet again, Ajax’s solitary position had
told against him. But solitude foments suspicion, and suspicion magnifies the num-
ber and importance of one’s enemies. And suspicion feeds itself. In order to survive
in isolation, one has to rely on fighting strength, of which Achilles’ weapons were
the supreme symbol. Ajax’s mind gradually came to the conclusion that there was
no alternative. Achilles’ weapons were no longer a prize, a possibility; they were a
necessity. Weapons are everything. And weapons are won by other weapons.
Ajax emerged from his tent in the night with his sword, to kill all three of
them – Odysseus, Agamemnon and Menelaus. It was essential that he do it at once.
For paranoia is convinced that it has many enemies. In addition, it has an inanimate
enemy – time. Once it has conceived its central idea, paranoia wants to go straight
into action. Just as it can’t bear a void in thought, so it can’t bear a void in time. It
can brook no delay.
So how come his three enemies are alive and the animals dead? Athene had
put false images into Ajax’s mind. She had, as she puts it, entangled him in a net of
delusion and death.9
Ajax’s mental landscape, emptied of its usual solitary habits, needed human
images. The goddess Athene had supplied some. But the images she had supplied
were fictitious. Ajax had killed the animals instead of his enemies. His trap was the
self-deception of those who are over-reliant on solitude and suspicion.
Athene says to Odysseus, with a smile, ‘Isn’t laughing at one’s enemies the sweet-
est kind of laughter?’10 Paranoia makes a person ridiculous. But the perspective can
also be reversed: other people’s laughter reawakens dormant paranoia. Any man
is liable to grow anxious if others laugh at him and he doesn’t know why they
are laughing. Laughter infects the rest of the group, just as aggression does. Often
laughter is aggression under another guise. When suspicion sees enemies, the most
terrible of them is the one armed not with a sword, but with laughter. But does sus-
picion discover friends, or does it create them? Centuries later, Dante expressed a sim-
ilar persecutory fear: ‘So that the Jew among you does not laugh.’11 The Christian’s
error attracts the Jew’s scorn, before it attracts divine punishment.
An inability to laugh is the oldest symptom of paranoia. An ability to laugh is
the most instinctive defence against this evil: significantly, it is a traditional defence
4
of the Jews, a people who have often been the victims of paranoid attacks. As
Shakespeare wrote, ‘The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.’12
The ancient Greek playwright sought to strike a balance, by alternating sorrow,
sublimated in the sad wisdom of tragedy, with conflict, sublimated in the liberating
laughter of comedy. Tragedy and comedy mingled together. Kómos, the word from
which comedy is derived, denoted a group (originally made up of drunken youths
who roamed the streets at night) infected by collective enthusiasm.The balance of com-
edy turns destructive derision into wise, benevolent laughter.
But in Sophocles’ Ajax laughter cannot be redeemed by laughter. We, the audi-
ence, know that Ajax’s mind is ridiculous – lacking introspection, curiosity and
feminine sensibility. It is essentially empty. Since natural law requires that a void be
filled, his mind senses that something is coming, an unknown novelty, which his
mind is cautious about but believes in, because it needs it. While it waits for this
novelty to come, its anxiety grows. Eventually the simple-minded man reaches a
point where the mere fact of having an enemy will, paradoxically, make him feel
more at peace; or rather, more at war, because by this stage there is no difference
between the two as far as he is concerned. The important thing is that he should
no longer have to live in uncertainty, no longer have to make the appalling effort of
trying to understand. The simplifying mechanism of paranoid logic will be able to
work smoothly; the presence of an enemy explains everything. The suspicion that
there has been a conspiracy has become a conviction.
Athene calls Ajax, urging him to come out of his tent: ‘Ajax, my friend, this is
the second time I have called you. […] But tell me, have you stained your sword
with the blood of Argive warriors?’
‘I am proud of it; I won’t deny it. […] They can’t sneer at Ajax any more. […]
Let them try to take away my weapons, now that they are dead.’
‘What about the son of Laertes? What have you done to him?’
‘He is my welcome guest, inside there, in chains.’
‘What do you intend to do to him?’
‘First, give him a whipping. Let him die with his back bloodied.’
Then Ajax goes back into his tent.13 Athene hadn’t been interested in talking to
him; she had just wanted Odysseus to hear what he said.The scene ends with a brief
dialogue between Odysseus and the goddess, not about Ajax, but about the destiny
of every human being.
Ajax seemed to have lived a righteous life. And yet in an instant his life is shat-
tered by the gods. We are shadows, obliterated by a brief gesture. Never be proud
because of what you are! In weeping over my enemy’s fate, Odysseus acknowledges,
I weep over my own fate.14
The night is over. Light returns to the beach, and to the shores of the mind.
Tecmessa, Ajax’s mistress, has heard about the slaughter of the animals, but doesn’t
know whose animals they were. The chorus, consisting of Ajax’s sailors, does know
whose they were, but doesn’t know who killed them. Tecmessa and the sailors
exchange information, and each acquires the knowledge they lacked. Now the
tragic truth is complete.
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Seeing all the blood, and bits of animals cut to pieces, Ajax asks what has
happened, and Tecmessa tells him. His honour as a warrior now lies in pieces too.
It has covered itself in ridicule. The strongest arm has raised its sword against goats
and lambs. It’s an unbearable situation. ‘See how the wave of a deadly tempest swirls
around me, overwhelms me. […] Kill me here, among these animals.’15 The most
unbearable thing is the thought of his enemies laughing at him.
His reawakening from paranoia does not happen until after the slaughter:
consequently, waking up doesn’t set him free, but locks him away in an everlasting
prison of remorse.
Ajax asks Tecmessa to bring him his son. He speaks gently to him, saying he
hopes he will have his father’s qualities, but be luckier than he has been. Tecmessa
speaks to Ajax, reminding him of the pleasures of having a family, and of the things
in life that are certain, such as love. All these things are fostered by their relationship
and exist within their relationship: if he were to die, she and the boy would be left
with nothing but sorrow and shame. These, however, are human words, spoken by
someone who lives in human complexity and among human beings. That kind of
talk is doubly alien to Ajax.
For in the first place he doesn’t live among human beings; he lives in solitude,
engulfed in suspicion and obsessed with a single idea. Someone who lives among
human beings lives among the collective duties that constitute a link between
human beings: shared values such as respect for the family. But someone who lives
in suspicion doesn’t live among human beings; he lives among enemies. And his
only duty towards those enemies is to defeat them.
Moreover, Ajax denies himself all the psychic qualities that we call feminine;
he can’t understand a woman, he can’t elicit any emotions from his mind except
warlike ones. Sophocles’ narrative expresses this situation through clear symbols. As
often happened in Mycenaean society,Tecmessa had been taken captive in war, later
becoming Ajax’s mistress and the mother of his son. But Ajax still treats her like a
slave. He gives her orders. He finds some comfort in her, but has no conception
of holding a dialogue with her; perhaps he would consider it dishonourable. Just
as his relationship with this woman is the result of an act of force, so his relation-
ship with the more feminine aspects of his own personality is a matter of force and
domination. Those aspects must be subordinate to the male will, the only will that
is allowed to manifest itself. Ajax isn’t interested in a feminine will that seeks ties;
in aesthetics or love, meetings or rituals: he isn’t interested in what, according to
Pericles, the Greeks had created in order to banish sorrow from life.16
After so much suffering, the tragedy seems to be purified.17 Ajax surprises us.
He speaks wisely to himself. We must respect the feelings of the family, he says, and
do what is right for it. All things are relative. A storm is followed by calm, night by
day, summer by autumn. Similarly, we must imagine that an enemy can become a
friend, and a friend an enemy.
Ajax had wanted more than anything else to receive Achilles’ weapons as a gift
from the Greeks, his own people. Instead, he received his last gift from an enemy,
Hector. This is significant and symbolic; Ajax’s mind opens up to something and
6
receives a gift only through a relationship of enmity, not through one of friendship
or love. After an honourable duel, Hector is given Ajax’s belt and gives him his own
sword.18 Ajax says he will bury it on the beach, in a hidden place. It is shameful to
receive gifts from enemies, he says. But we who listen to his words are not so sure
of this.
With these words the play arouses mixed, ambivalent feelings in the audience.
True to its vocation, tragic irony expresses itself in language which is open to con-
trasting interpretations.
Ajax no longer speaks of death and blood. Is he making his peace with destiny?
Does he mean that he feels at peace with himself? Has he abandoned the idea of
committing suicide? His words are allusive and ambiguous. Tragedy often uses such
language in order to keep us in suspense. But in this case there is a deeper reason.
Ajax’s madness is the madness of solitude and suspicion. In order to understand it,
we must behave in the same way as it behaves, picking up hints and admitting that
we are excluded from it; entering into the logic of its allusions, ambiguities and
indirect references, rather than trying to follow its explicit argument.
It is possible that humanity has seeped into Ajax, and made him look more
kindly on his family, his noble enemy Hector and his allies and friends Odysseus,
Agamemnon, and Menelaus: it is natural for emotions to alternate, like the seasons.
A person who feels only a single emotion is unnaturally isolated: if he returns to the
society of human beings, he will again experience the alternation of anger and love.
But his words might also be those of a man who has given himself up irrevo-
cably to suspicion and death: for, since the truth was revealed, Ajax’s most deadly
enemy has been Ajax himself. In his simple, straightforward world, one must have
an enemy to annihilate. And now that his colossal, ludicrous error has been revealed
for what it is, a sense of shame and honour demand that the perpetrator of the
error himself be annihilated. A man must ‘either live gloriously’, says Ajax, ‘or die
gloriously; that is a brave man’s duty.’19 It is up to us to decide whether this man is a
man, since the laws that make him live or die concern him alone, not a community
or an emotional tie.
Soon the tragedy makes it clear to us that the sword’s hilt must be fixed in the
beach so that something – not a man, but the shore, the earth, the nature to whom
we return when we die – can hold it firmly while Ajax runs onto it to impale him-
self. The sword’s hilt must be buried so that the sword’s owner can be buried. Now
we know that the preceding eulogy of the alternation of things was a eulogy of
finiteness and of death. Ajax is alone with his own death and sees only short-lived
things around him.
As the hero walks off down the beach, a messenger arrives. He reminds us
that the transience of things can be positive. The seer Calchas has announced that
Athene’s wrath, changeable like all the emotions of the gods, will pursue Ajax only
for one day. If he remains alive today, tomorrow he will be free.
Today the goddess is still angry with Ajax for offending the gods. When Ajax
had set out for Troy, his father had urged him: ‘Aspire to win with your lance, my
son, but always to win with the help of the gods.’ And he had replied, ‘Father, even a
7
worthless man can triumph with the help of the gods; I am sure I can achieve glory
without them.’ And when Athene had come to encourage him during a battle, he
had said: ‘Give your help to the other Argives, goddess; the enemy will not get
through where I stand.’20 Such thoughts go beyond human measure, and can’t be
accepted by a god.21
The end comes very quickly. Before day turns to night, Ajax fixes the sword,
and with it his destiny, into the beach. He says farewell to the beaches and the
natural world around him: but not to his fellow men. He asks the gods to ensure
that his brother Teucer finds his body, and that Agamemnon and Menelaus are
punished. Then he kills himself. Suspicion, solitude and an obsession with a single
aim, military glory, have made Ajax’s mind monotonous; even as he dies, he is still
wishing death on others.
Hector had tried to set life against death. Hector was the most human character
in the harsh world of epic. He was strong with the sword, but had feelings when
he held a sword. Alone among the warriors of the Iliad, he fought not for glory, but
to protect the city of Troy, its women and children, from the slaughter the Greeks
would bring. He doesn’t survive, but his feelings do, for he has defeated solitude and
the suspicion that goes hand in hand with it. Hector’s sword, then, is a great sym-
bol. Ajax, however, plunges the hilt of his sword into the earth and its blade into his
chest; he makes reverse use of the sword. The reversal of symbolic processes is a tragic
recurrence in paranoiacs of every age: in minds armed with suspicion the creativ-
ity of symbols becomes destructiveness; a life-giving process becomes a deadly one.
History provides more evidence of this than psychiatry.
Ajax regains his honour but kills himself: he renounces the attention of others,
which he had perhaps been unconsciously seeking when he had so desperately
sought admiration. In the duel described in the Iliad, Ajax and Hector are linked by
their destiny, which is to die. Hector will die because he is included in the com-
munity of the Trojans, who are destined to be defeated and slaughtered. Ajax will
die because he has excluded himself from the community of the Greeks, who are
destined to be victorious.
The gifts that they had exchanged become accessories to death. Hector’s sword,
which had kept Trojan children alive by defending them, brings death to Ajax. And
Achilles strips the belt of the invincible Ajax from the body of the defeated Hector.
He uses it to tie the Trojan hero to his chariot, turn him into a triumphal animal
and drag him along at the gallop, torturing him to death.22
There are still a few more scenes before the end of the play. Teucer, Ajax’s half-
brother, appears and organizes the sacred rites of burial.Tecmessa cries out in despair
over the body of the man she had loved. We too feel pity, and almost love, for this
man who was so unable to love. What if, instead of defying the gods, he had tried
to embrace men? But perhaps no one had ever embraced him, even symbolically.
Teucer dreads taking the news to Ajax’s father, Telamon: ‘He is a man who is inca-
pable of smiling even when he is happy.’23 We begin to get a sense of what a grim
family this mighty giant had grown up in, and what a frost of the emotions had fed
his suspicion, turning him into an emotional dwarf.
8
Agamemnon recalls that it is mental, not physical, strength that makes a man.24
With his brother Menelaus he tries to prevent the sacred burial of the man who had
wanted to kill them. Let the dogs and birds tear him to pieces!
At this point, Odysseus, Ajax’s most uncompromising adversary, intervenes.
Odysseus knows that death awaits them all. In the face of death, the rites of burial
are a last, fragile redemption. With unexpected kindness, he argues that these rites
should not be denied him, and persuades the other two Greeks not to offend the
dead man, and death itself.
Notes
1 Sophocles, Ajax, 767–9.
2 Sophocles, Ajax, 614.
3 Pindar, Isthmian Odes,VI, 49–64.
4 Pindar, Nemean Odes,VII, 20–30;VIII 24 ff.; Isthmian Odes, IV, 35 ff.;VI, 49 ff.
5 Sophocles, Philoctetes, 1049.
6 Aristotle, Poetics, 7, 18.
7 Pohlenz 1947: Chapter 12.
8 Kerényi 1958: 335.
9 To the modern reader, Athene is an ancient symbol of the way the mind works. And
the first rule of the mind is that its empty spaces must not remain empty. Like physical
nature, psychic nature eschews a void. Unoccupied spaces become sponges that absorb
images from the unconscious. Even the mind at rest, when we are asleep, is filled with
images. We call them dreams. Of course, these mental needs have always been known.
But today we choose to ignore them. We do not try to understand psychic activities; we
try to organize them productively. We increasingly eliminate fantasy and meditation –
activities where the ‘empty’ mind allows itself to be filled – for fear of encountering
problematic images of our inner world.We prevent the formation of mental voids, by the
use of objects – television, videogames, magazines – that provide a never-ending supply
of stereotyped, prefabricated figures from the outside world. In this way they fend off the
inner figures and the intense emotions associated with them.We do not want to live.We
want to watch, and listen to, things that imitate life. We avoid living in the first person.
11 Dante, Paradiso, 5, 81.
12 Shakespeare, Othello, I, 3, 207–8: ‘The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief;
/ he robs himself that spends a bootless grief.’
16 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, II, 38, 1.
17 Sophocles, Ajax, 646 ff.
18 Iliad,VII, 206–310.
22 Sophocles, Ajax, 1131: the version of the story told by Sophocles is crueller than that
recounted in Book XXII of the Iliad.
24 Sophocles, Ajax, 1250 ff.
9
1
WHAT IS PARANOIA?
Individual (clinical) paranoia
The careful consideration of psychic factors is of importance in restoring not

merely the individual’s balance, but society’s as well; otherwise the destructive
tendencies easily gain the upper hand.1
There may not actually be an enemy! […] It is not the enemy that is essential
to war and that forces wars upon us, but the imagination.2
The word paranoia comes from ancient Greek: nóos means ‘thought’; para- means
‘going beyond’. In theory, the term simply denotes a mind that goes beyond the usual
field of thought.3 In practice, however, even in ancient Greek it indicated a delu-
sional manner of thinking. But the concept was not as well known as it is today. It
was nineteenth-century German psychiatry that brought it into modern discourse.
In politics the word paranoia is often used to criticize an opponent, though prob-
ably few of the people who use it could actually explain what it means. Only rarely
has the term been used self-critically. It was sometimes used in that way in Italy in
1968, during student debates.When things were getting out of hand, the cry would
sometimes go up: ‘Compagni, non andiamo in paranoia’ (Comrades, let’s not lapse
into paranoia!). The exhortation did not always restore order, but with its hint of
self-criticism it spread a veil of harmony over proceedings.Yet nobody ever shouted
back: ‘Comrade, what does paranoia actually mean?’
Definitions
Psychopathology has classified this disorder in a fairly uniform way. The following
are some of the best known formulas.
According to the American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, paranoia is:
10
10 What is paranoia?
1. a psychotic disorder characterized by systematized delusions, especially of per-

secution or grandeur, in the absence of other personality disorders;
2. an extreme, irrational distrust of others.4
Another important American work stresses that ‘In paranoia the delusional
system is well systematized and logical.’5
Bleuler’s Textbook states that
outside of the delusional system and everything that refers to it, [the
paranoiac’s] logic and train of ideas are sound according to our means of
investigation. […] The diagnosis of paranoia is not always at all easy in prac-
tice. The patients know which of their ideas are considered morbid by others
and can conceal or weaken them so that they can be defended.6
According to another classic treatise, that of Jaspers,
[The paranoiac’s] complete power of differentiation, severe criticism, and

excellent capacity for thought do not prevent him from being convinced of
his delusional ideas. […] He does not lack the power of differentiation neces-
sary to distinguish between the different sources of our knowledge but he
invokes his source, be it supernatural or natural.7
French psychiatry uses similar terms: ‘This type of delusional personality is char-

acterized by the clarity and order of its psychic life, […] and by the systematic and
‘reasoning’ structure of the delusional imagination.’8
Unfortunately paranoia is the ‘Cinderella of psychiatry’, according to another
textbook, which goes on: ‘Since the paranoiac is motivated solely by a desire to
confirm all of his suspicions, his intellective capacities, which are usually normal or
above normal, cannot be taken as a guarantee of good, realistic judgements.’9
Already in 1895 – even before he had founded psychoanalysis – Freud defined
paranoia as
[1] […] the misuse of a psychic mechanism which is very commonly

employed in normal life: the mechanism of transposition or projection.
Every time an internal change takes place, we are given the choice of
attributing it either to an internal cause or to an external one. If something
keeps us from accepting the internal origin, we naturally seize on an exter-
nal one. In the second place, we are accustomed to seeing that our internal
states are noticed by other people (from the mimic expression of feelings).
This gives rise to the normal delusion of attention and to normal projection.
These are all normal things as long as we preserve an awareness of our inter-
nal change. But if we forget about that and are only left with the part of the
syllogism that leads outwards, then we have paranoia, with its overestimation
of what people know about us and what people have done to us. What do
11
What is paranoia? 11
people know about us which we ourselves do not know and cannot admit?
This is a misuse of the mechanism of projection for the purposes of defence.10
Each definition, deriving from very different schools of psychiatry, sends us

back, as remorselessly as paranoia itself, to the oldest one, which the French were
already using in the early nineteenth century: folie raisonnante or folie lucide. Every
discussion of paranoia reminds us that the condition belongs to two systems of
thought simultaneously: that of reason and that of delusion. Paranoia is infinitely
more difficult to identify than other mental disorders because it is able to disguise itself, both
within the personality of the paranoiac, who as a whole is far from mad, and among the
individuals around him. What we see is the tip of an iceberg of unreason on which
any ship of reason can founder.
Mental disorders are not solid blocks of madness. They are, rather, ‘delusional
styles’ which range, in infinite gradations, from normality to madness. This conti-
guity, however, is particularly worrying in paranoia. Not only does it not oppose
reason; it pretends to cooperate with reason. Between mentally ill and sane people
there is no leap, but continuity. But even in the madman’s mind, thought usually
slides from ‘normality’ into delusion only by degrees, and this transition can be
particularly imperceptible in the paranoiac. The observer often thinks he is in a
comforting safety zone when in reality that is not the case.
More than any other mental disorder, paranoia seems not to be ascribable to
organic causes.This means on the one hand that organic treatment is unlikely to be
effective, and on the other that its origin, being psychological, is very hard to iden-
tify, for each psychic life is variable just as each individual existence is different from
all others.
Lastly, paranoia manifests itself later than other mental disorders. The paranoiac,
being fragile, if he is unable to face a vital problem, moves it away in time. For as
long as he can, he slides it forward, into the future. When he should finally accept
that his life is not going to change, he pushes his disorder outwards, inventing
obstacles and hostilities or blowing them up out of all proportion. Often, therefore,
paranoia manifests itself only at the age of forty or more: in people with a career,
who may show some signs of suspiciousness, which however are generally looked
upon positively as useful caution. What is wrong with a middle-aged insurance
agent being able to give us a detailed list of the risks we run? Or with a doctor
with years of experience fearing invisible diseases and recommending that we have
a long series of tests done? Their mistrust does not strike us as pathological thought,
but as a form of professionalism. Their paranoia is integrated into life.
Grandmother’s coffee pot
In some cases the deformation of thought manifests itself particularly late in life. An
example is provided by an elderly woman.
A forty-year-old woman, with plenty of problems of her own, looked after
her grandmother affectionately. Her grandmother was a widow, lived in a remote
12
village and over time tended to cut herself off. To ensure that she had daily assis-
tance, her granddaughter would visit her and arrange for girls to live with her. But
as soon as the granddaughter returned to the city, each girl, however well-meaning,
would fall foul of the old woman’s mistrust.
Trying to create a relationship, and also to break the silence of that tiny, isolated
flat in the hills, the girl would see an espresso coffee pot in the dresser and say, ‘What
a lovely coffee pot!’ The grandmother would start to get suspicious: she likes that
coffee pot too much; she might steal it. So she would hide it. A few days would pass.
Finally the grandmother would fancy a coffee. And being set in her ways, like all
old people, she would look for the coffee pot in the dresser; the paranoid trait in the
grandmother’s temperament was secondary and sporadic, but her being suspicious
and hiding the coffee pot were also recent and unimportant events, the kind that are
most easily forgotten by old people. At this point, however, the paranoid personality
would reappear, finding confirmations in the very conditions that she herself had
created. ‘The coffee pot has gone: therefore it has been stolen.’
In a sense, there had indeed been a theft: the coffee pot had been taken away by
the ‘dishonest’ part of the grandmother, the part that mainly deceived itself. But she,
being unaware of this component of her personality, refused to listen to reason: the
granddaughter must find her another girl, because this one was a thief.
Hypotheses about causes
Psychiatry supposes that most people who slip into paranoia are apparently well
adjusted but internally fragile. Their fragility may be the result of an early child-
hood characterized by emotional coldness or conflict: we will come across both
of these elements in the lives of Hitler and Stalin. Many individuals would react to
such sufferings in a compensatory manner, developing cold, rigid mental processes
of formal logic, often detached from reality.
According to Melanie Klein, during the first year of life the mind moves
from a schizo-paranoid position to a depressive one. Whereas in the early months it
expresses anger or cries quite freely, towards the second half of the year the child
begins to restrain itself. This theory says that the child stops projecting all its aggres-
sion: it turns part of it back towards itself, internally constructing the basis of the
future feelings of guilt – but also of responsibility – which every adult has to cope
with.These are, however, psychological positions, not rigidly predetermined phases.
That on the one hand means that this evolution (the transition to the depressive
position) may not be successful. On the other hand, the idea of positions is similar
to that of archetypes, on which we are basing ourselves: they are not phases that
one gets over in an absolute sense, but psychological potentials to which particular
situations may lead back, even in the adult. As far as our theme is concerned, vio-
lent circumstances, similar to those that were intolerable in early childhood, can
reactivate schizo-paranoid attitudes. When that happens, the individual becomes
aggressive, and, since he has difficulty in taking responsibility personally, he proj-
ects all evil on to others.
13
This theory anticipates the theme that we will continue to come across: a para-
noid potential is present in every ordinary person, in every phase of their existence,
in whatever society they find themselves.11 And the environment has the power to
ignite it. It is precisely this danger that is the subject of this book: ‘Monsters do exist,
but they are too few to be really dangerous; ordinary people are more dangerous.’12
The ubiquity of paranoia

We generally feel mental illnesses to be something different and alarming. Towards
those who suffer from them we may feel compassion, but also difference and mis-
trust. By contrast, on our first encounter with paranoia, we may feel it to be a
continuation of our normal way of thinking – more precisely, of our need for
explanations. Paranoia, in a diluted form, is bought and sold every day, in the street,
not in psychiatric institutions. It is not an absolutely different way of thinking.
Every typical mental process is potentially present in us. The temptation to reject
our responsibilities and attribute evil to others is no exception. An inner voice sug-
gests that this is in our own interest. However weak, however hidden, it exists in
everyone.13
We will be considering paranoia, then, not as an illness, but as a possibility pres-
ent in everyone: like an archetype, in Carl Gustav Jung’s sense. It has given such
figures as Ajax and Othello to myth, and such people as Hitler and Stalin to history.
But this psychological trait can appear on any day, in any person. It is the little Hitler
inside us.
The paranoiac usually possesses intelligence, and always ‘critical sense’. He may
even create satire. But because his original problem is the lack of self-esteem, his
criticism goes in only one direction, and is inflexible. It may deviate towards sarcasm
and, later, towards hatred; but not in the direction of self-irony, for he is afraid that
by self-criticizing himself he would destroy himself. He cannot review his posi-
tions, because he would fall into nothingness. So he is incapable of forgiveness: that
would imply freedom, and he does not accept that, either for others or for himself.14
Bleuler gives the following description: the ambitious, but insecure and untal-
ented, young man spends his life dreaming of a successful career.15 As the years
pass, he should realize that his possibilities of success are receding. His inner fragil-
ity does not allow him to look inside himself and accept his personal inadequa-
cies. Meanwhile, the compensatory exercise of logic, which he has cultivated since
childhood, encourages him to project these obstacles outwards and construct the
‘reasons’ for their operation. In this way, he increasingly interprets the behaviour of
others through the filter of mistrust.The paranoiac’s mind classifies details with ever
greater precision. Often we do not recognize him as such, but as an obsessive. He
knows countless details; he worries over them. We admire his competence: ‘God
is in the detail’, says an old adage. But we do not always notice the risks it con-
ceals: ‘the Devil is in the detail’, another maxim reminds us.
If questioned, the paranoiac can supply detailed information, if he thinks he can
convince his interlocutor. Often, however, he will merely allude: he ‘knows the
14
truth’, he hints. But he also knows that others may misunderstand him, and does
not expose himself unnecessarily. Little by little he loses his feelings, as he refines
himself as a machine, until he constructs a rationally plausible system, centred on
a conspiracy against him organized by a growing coalition of enemies, which has
therefore been called a ‘paranoid pseudo-community’.16
Characteristics
It will be useful at this point to summarize the characteristic traits of paranoia.
A person suffering from a severe case of paranoia constructs a conspiracy theory
because in this way his suffering seems to acquire meaning, and at the same time
it compensates for certain underlying weaknesses. In the first place, solitude, which,
circularly, is both cause and consequence of suspiciousness, is dispelled by the fan-
tasy of being at the centre of everyone’s interest (delusion of reference). In the sec-
ond place, a feeling of personal insignificance, long denied, finds an apparently definitive
solution in an opposite fantasy of grandeur: precisely because the number of people
who are aware of his value is constantly growing, they must also gang up on him,
out of jealousy, to prevent his merits from being recognized. So this typical case is
supplemented with the most common ‘lateral’ components of paranoia: megaloma-
nia and envy, which are attributed to rivals but in fact belong to the paranoiac.
The paranoiac is invariably pervaded by suspicion. This suspicion is not necessar-
ily unfounded, but it is excessive and distorted. The person suspected may indeed
be an adversary, but that does not mean he is plotting to destroy the person who
suspects. In suspicion the presence of enemies, and their number, tends to increase
even in the absence of motives. In the most serious forms they are perceived every-
where: so the individual comes to the encirclement syndrome and the conviction of
being the victim of a conspiracy. And if the paranoiac has suffered an injustice, he
responds with disproportionality: his response is exaggerated because he is convinced
that the injustice is only the beginning of a persecution.
Every form of paranoia is a logical construct based around a delusional nucleus
and a falsified basic assumption. It is possible to discuss with a paranoiac the logical
part of his thought, but the central nucleus, even if clearly false, remains indisputable
and uncorrectable. It precedes logic. It does not belong to rationality, but to vitality.
It is a condition that the individual demands in order to live. He can live without
logic – many do – but he cannot renounce life. He possesses an immediate truth
which does not require justification, but which in its turn justifies everything.
A particular but common variety of falsification of the basic assumption is the
inversion of causes. As we saw earlier, out of paranoid suspiciousness the grandmother
hid the coffee pot. But that had absurdly provided her with proof that somebody
else had stolen it; the disappearance, a consequence of her suspicion, had become its
cause. In serious cases this inversion stabilizes and becomes a permanent circularity.
Instead of disproving the suspicion, the contrary evidence foments it in a vicious circle.
Thus paranoid interpretation proceeds by accumulation: anything that might
contradict it encounters an inverted logic and becomes confirmation. This activates
15
another characteristic of this disorder – autotrophy: once set in train, paranoia is

self-nourishing.
Persecutory projection is another crucial characteristic: it consists in attributing the
paranoiac’s destructiveness to his adversary.17 This ostensibly justifies an attack; at the
same time it alleviates feelings of guilt if the paranoid does attack.
During this phase, the delusional individual is likely to keep his interpretations
to himself. This is another characteristic of the paranoiac: the almost ‘religious’
secrecy with which he surrounds his convictions, his ‘faith’. A variant of secrecy is,
as we have seen, and, as we will see again later in Stalin, allusion, or innuendo (from
the Latin verb innuere, which means ‘to hint’, even without speaking). Allusion pre-
serves ambiguity and leaves all interpretations open. Paranoid allusion, however,
does merely ‘say without saying’; it contains a threat and a challenge. ‘Among those
who are listening to me’, it implies, ‘is my enemy. He knows I am talking about
him and that I will fight him.’ In his solitude, the paranoiac unconsciously seeks
individuals like him. And, with this speech, he flushes them out: any of his listeners
who is hyper-suspicious like him will be convinced that the allusion is aimed at
him, even if no relationship links him to the paranoiac who utters it.The delusional
individual has thus found someone like him.
As we saw in the case of Ajax, the true paranoiac seems to have received inter-
pretative enlightenment: the explanations that he gives himself take on the qualities
of a faith.18 The delusional idea is truth because it has the same quality as religious
revelation.19 And the revealed truth of a religion cannot be changed, for changing
it would not be correction but heresy.
Let us take a simple but devastating example. In Mein Kampf Hitler claims that
racial interbreeding leads to sterility and disease.20 There was no evidence for this,
and he makes no attempt to prove it. (Today we know that, on the contrary, insuffi-
cient genetic mixing within a population can lead to pathologies.) But Mein Kampf
proceeds, chapter by chapter, obsessively, with an analysis of historical and political
events which always presupposes this ‘truth’. Hitler needed such a granite basic
assumption. It contains his conscious creed, but at the same time his most insuper-
able unconscious fear: like many paranoiacs, Hitler had a phobia of contamination.
Diversity was almost intolerable to him (as is shown by his minimalist relationship
with women, the other sex). Paranoid phobia has to expel diversity, and possibly
annihilate it.
Of course, precisely because there is continuity between ordinary and paranoid
mental processes, true enlightenment, too, can be accompanied by persecutory
traits. In A Confession, written in 1879, Tolstoy summarizes the inner change that
had troubled him after the age of fifty, gradually transforming him into a fundamen-
talist but anticlerical Christian, a precursor of communism and environmentalism.
In the depths of this crisis, when he could see no point of arrival, he was tormented
by a genuine existential paranoia. Until he succeeded in formulating his new creed
and identifying with it completely, he could see no meaning in his life; it seemed
to him – as he says in the fourth chapter of the book – like a sadistic practical joke
played by some hidden, perverted enemy.
16
All the symptoms of paranoia have a relationship of reciprocal dependency and

can nourish each other, closing the vicious circle ever more tightly. Secrecy may be
the consequence of the suspicion that someone has evil intentions. Suspicion and
secrecy in their turn cause another common characteristic: the meticulous obses-
siveness with which the paranoiac plans the defeat of his enemies. These destructive
plans are automatically projected on to an adversary, who is assumed to be plotting.
This leads to the need to destroy him, to attack first, so as to pre-empt his intentions.
In the paranoiac’s mind pre-emptive attack is the tactic that will make it possible to
catch the adversary unprepared, but at the same time it is also anticipated justice. If
two people are already facing each other, weapons in hand, even the non-paranoid
person will think of attacking before the other. But paranoia can look much fur-
ther into the future. Taking its conviction to an extreme, it can even resort to pre-
emptive infanticide. The suppression of the male child who might become king is
in fact a founding story in both pagan and monotheistic mythology: Uranus thrusts
the newborn babies back into their mother, Chronos swallows them, Herod carries
out the Massacre of the Innocents.
The paranoiac may pretend to be infinitely patient in waiting for the right
moment to attack his ‘enemy’. But when he moves into action, his patience, which
a naive observer may have mistaken for moderation, turns into an equally exagger-
ated impatience, as if he wished to gain compensation for the wait. Paranoid haste is
a consequence of excessive suspicion and unconscious projection, both long sup-
pressed. Once this threshold has been crossed, aggression explodes very quickly.21
Another image which suggests paranoid acceleration is that of the inclined plane.
The paranoiac’s path knows where it wants to lead to: it has, in every sense, an
inclination. Even though the paranoiac may walk along it slowly, he reaches a point
where the slope is too steep: he can’t stop, and plunges downwards, increasingly out
of control.
The paranoiac’s mental processes are dominated by rigidity. His inner world is
petrified. His identity is entirely dependent on the outside world. This also leads to
fragility: he can’t yield one step to his adversaries; otherwise he would feel as if he
didn’t exist.
Basing itself on erroneous premises, paranoia is primal self-deception. Between
its conviction, unshakeable since the dawn of consciousness, and its later insane
actions there is an absurd consistency. As long as its formal consequentiality survives,
paranoia strolls calmly along the streets of everyday life. But one day, suddenly, the
model son, attentive to social conventions and his parents’ expectations, kills them, so
that they won’t suffer when they find out that he has lied to them about passing his
exams and graduating. The faultless employee, who fears losing his job, shoots his
boss and kills himself, to avoid getting the sack.
Paranoia is, so to speak, more anti-psychological than any other mental disorder,
for it is the only kind of functioning thought that really eliminates self-criticism.
Paranoid thought is both logical and impossible, consistent and contradictory,
humane and inhumane. It is a tragic mask, but one which does not cover the face
of a hero, but that of a deeply insecure individual, who even deceives himself. This
17
affinity suggests that in order to understand its processes we should examine the
characters of tragedy as well as the psychiatry textbooks.
Among paranoiacs who are forced to make choices, which their simplified
thought would prefer to avoid, there is often a tragic hesitation, which proves fatal.
A description of this state is provided by Creon. In Sophocles’ Antigone, the mythi-
cal King of Thebes projects first on to the guards, then on to the seer Teiresias a
greed which is in fact entirely his own. Thus he convinces himself that they are
lying, and that they have been paid to lie. He cannot accept the truth that they tell
him. So he gets rid of their truth by denying it, and gets rid of his own vice by
attributing it to them.
However, events gradually force him. ‘Yielding is terrible’, he admits, honestly:22
it would oblige him to admit his own lack of self-criticism, his pointless destruc-
tiveness, his existential solitude. The ‘Creon syndrome’ is hesitation which takes
one to the brink of madness. It is not usually resolved in favour of the truth, unless
circumstances leave no other choice. And even in that case, the paranoiac may still
prefer departure from the scene, in death or definitive madness. Creon is not a
complete paranoiac like Ajax. He lives between two contiguous worlds. His syn-
drome – hesitating between a reasonableness which brings him back to reality and
a paranoid interpretation which leads to isolation – is tragically human, for nearly
everyone will recognize some similar experience in themselves.
We will come across paralysing doubt again at the decisive crossroads of modern
history. In July 1914 the European powers have to decide whether to persist with
diplomacy or start the First World War. In Solzhenitsyn’s description, Tsar Nicholas
is a weak character, constantly tormented by a naive form of anxiety about the
suffering that war would bring.23 He is unsure whether it is better to continue to
negotiate with his cousin Wilhelm, the Emperor of Germany, or to mobilize the
army, as his ministers and the military want him to do. Left to himself, the Tsar keeps
exchanging telegrams with Berlin, until the pressure pushes him to a point where
the plane is too steeply inclined and there is way of no turning back. Solzhenitsyn’s
Nicholas is, in a sense, an anti-Creon, who, if in doubt, is inclined to listen to both
the other person and himself. So he embodies the human being’s dual potential: a
sense of responsibility, but also, unfortunately, the mistrust which makes him project
guilt on to his adversary; the desire to make the former triumph, and the weakness
that eventually makes him yield to the latter – because it is so much easier.
Cultural and moral aspects

The difficult thing about mental disorders is not defining them, but understanding
them. In order to understand them it is necessary to identify with them and feel
that they could be ours too. I have quoted the definitions of the best textbooks
on psychopathology, but in a couple of generations they may appear out of date.
Psychiatry’s descriptions of paranoia seem to me predominantly negative – pictures
painted by an observer who is alarmed by the disorder and has given up trying
to understand. Since it is not an illness that responds to chemical laws that remain
18
unchanged over time but seems to be a psychological response to difficult circum-

stances, I will try to examine its relationship to history. Although mental disorders
are not necessarily the product of a certain society, their descriptions are. This rela-
tivity is particularly important for paranoia, which finds nourishment in particular
historical conditions and manifests itself in a distortion of the individual’s relation-
ship with others. But, as we see, most psychiatric definitions of paranoia, unfortu-
nately, are situated outside history.
The world is a mystery that needs explaining. Since God’s eye stopped scrutiniz-
ing it on our behalf, it has become necessary to ask ourselves questions and advance
hypotheses which used to be superfluous.The causal links constantly created by the
paranoiac are, initially, a justifiable response to a justifiable need to understand.24
Only gradually do they lose a sense of proportion and become dogmas, truths
bestowed by the God they replace. At that point the privatized divine voice starts to
be a chapter not of theology, but of psychiatry.
From this perspective, paranoia is also an irrational, and non-integrable, residue
of the positivist and psychoanalytical revolutions. Carried away by their own suc-
cess, those approaches have claimed to be able to see and explain everything, even
that which is invisible, and even when explaining is reductive (that is, when it limits
the meaning of events, instead of expanding it). Many cognitive revolutions have
worked like a drug, on which people become dependent. Our mental processes
continue to use it. People who make excessive use of causal explanations and can-
not do without them are often paranoid.
Real paranoia suffers from an incorrigible evaluative and interpretative lack of
proportion. From this distorted base it projects its emotional tangles out of the
individual. In particular, highly disciplined or puritanical people, who have been
brought up not to show their inner conflicts even to themselves, start, once they
have passed a certain threshold, to turn their inner antagonisms into fantasies, which
in turn they take for objective arguments, dumping their responsibilities outside.
But the moment we speak of responsibility, not lack of responsibility, as we usu-
ally do with illnesses, we must acknowledge that we are sliding out of psychiatric
explanations and entrusting ourselves to moral ones. I will return to this point in
the last chapter.
Like slander, to which it is structurally related on the moral level, paranoia has
visible effects, especially over time. It carries enormous, concrete responsibilities.
Its development brings to light not so much an illness that needs treating but an
immorality that needs correcting. Slander is a particularly heinous kind of lie, which
aims to smear and attack. It belongs more directly to the category of moral problems,
because the slanderer is usually aware that he is lying; and the Judaeo-Christian tradi-
tion condemns it with particular severity (cf. Leviticus 19:16).25 Paranoia, however,
is a lie that the individual believes, and with which he tragically deceives himself.
Paranoid reasoning may even contain many elements of truth. But it lies essentially
about human nature, because it denies the adversary the quality of being a man, with
the purpose of reducing him to a culprit. It is not interested in anything else.
19
According to a well-known Italian saying, la menzogna ha le gambe corte: a lie

has short legs – that is, it has difficulty in travelling far. Like the liar, the paranoiac
is afraid that waiting will expose his deception. Time is his adversary. For short
periods, it may even provide him with confirmation. Sooner or later, however, it
confronts him with the facts and proves him wrong.
Collective (historico-cultural) paranoia

Madness is a rare thing in individuals, but in groups, parties, peoples and ages
it is the rule.26
The prince must be suspicious of everything.27
Paranoid infection in society

Collective paranoia is, unfortunately, a process which has analogies with modern popular
culture. Unlike, for example, the popular culture of the Middle Ages, today’s mass
consumerism does not encourage self-suspicion and feelings of guilt, but the exact
opposite: let’s enjoy all the consumer goods the modern age puts at our disposal, it
suggests. It implies that we have a right to do so, because our conscience is clear.
It is incapable of grief, because it is not prepared to give anything up. Modernity,
strong in economics and technology, here reveals its moral weakness. Its doubts are
not deeply and patiently thought through. So they will not be eliminated, but only
repressed.
Doubting, however, is a universal human need. At the first concrete opportunity
suspicion will reappear; but, because of a lack of training in self-criticism, it will inevitably be
projected on to others. And at this point it will find a helper in the greatest modern social
adhesive: the mass media, which are populist by nature and do not encourage an inner
analysis that leads to an acceptance of responsibility, but impel people to seek culprits
outside.
In history, mass mental contagion has often worked as a gigantic multiplier of
paranoid attitudes.
The intention of pre-emptively eliminating an enemy recurs constantly in
National Socialism.28 Absurd disproportionality produces avalanches of evils which
swell of their own accord (which are endowed, that is, with autotrophy): the Geneva
Conventions allow an occupying authority to maintain order with martial pun-
ishments, but the Nazis execute an increasingly large number of people for every
German killed. Hatred, terror and paranoia advance progressively both in them
and in the oppressed population. Even Nazism, however, did not conjure up the
disproportion of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre – where ten hostages were executed
for every German soldier killed – out of nothing. The Europeans had often used
such methods to terrorize both African slaves and the indigenous peoples of other
continents. The colonial powers used them, and so did the Americans in the con-
quest of the West. To speed up the elimination of the Yuki Indians of California, in
20
1859 240 men, women and children were massacred in reprisal for the killing of
one horse.29 The presupposition behind this capacity for exterminating different
populations without any apparent feelings of guilt is, indeed, putting them on a
balance for weighing not other human beings, but goods or animals. Hitler and the
Nazis consciously followed these examples, though they did not always succeed in
matching them.30
As we shall see both in the chapter on the First World War and in that on Hitler,
a phobia of encirclement was a crucial factor in twentieth-century German militarism.
But it was equally important in the deportation of the Armenians by the Ottoman
Empire, which led to their genocide.
During the nineteenth century, social Darwinian theories of the selection of
peoples (the erroneous foundation of an insidiously growing collective paranoia in
white people, a prelude to Hitlerism and Stalinism) proclaimed that the ‘inferior’
races were destined to disappear. But by the very fact of proclaiming this, they were
already setting in train a ‘negative selection’ (consisting of colonizations, expropria-
tions, expulsions and massacres) which, significantly, favoured that disappearance: in
short, the historical violence derived from the initial dogma, but, circularly, in the
end also served to demonstrate its truth.
Thus we see that an inversion of causes dominates political paranoia even more
than individual paranoia. Offered to the masses and later given back by them, it
becomes circularity. The collective dimension amplifies it and transforms it into
continual catastrophe.
In 1938, many German academics begin to gain advantage from the exclusion of
the Jews, who until then had occupied senior university posts. They soon convince
themselves that the Jews are a foreign body and express their support for ‘Aryan
science’.31 Then the circularity influences military events.
In September and October 1939, German troops complete their conquest
of Poland. Hitler follows the reports on their advance attentively and visits the
occupied territories in person. He has no difficulty in convincing himself that
the poverty and chaos in which the people live – consequences of the occupa-
tion – are in fact proof of their inferiority: they become, that is, the cause of
the expropriations and repressions that he orders to be carried out.32 Goebbels
sees films shot in the ghettos, where the plight of the Jews is even worse than
that of ordinary Poles. He takes them as confirmation of the Jews’ unimaginable
degeneracy.33 So he inserts many parts of these films into the racist propaganda
film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), along with other fanciful information.34
They provide, from above, the erroneous basic assumptions on which a collective
paranoia can be built: the Jews, though comprising only 1 per cent of the world
population, allegedly control 47 per cent of gambling, 82 per cent of organized
robberies and 98 per cent of prostitution (which, as we shall see, was a fixation
of the asexual Hitler).
Stalin, who learns many tricks from Hitler, is not inferior to him in this
respect: both dictators will launch the most sensational operations with an obses-
sive secrecy.
21
During the Second World War, Hitler’s second-in-command, Rudolf Hess, makes
a secret flight to Great Britain, under the illusion that he can persuade the British to
enter into an alliance. But for the ultra-suspicious Soviet dictator the alliance is not
a possible result of that journey. No, it is the cause of it: an Anglo-German alliance
has already been made behind his back, and Hess’s flight is both proof of this and
the result of it. Stalin distrusts the British and, paradoxically (perhaps partly because
he is affected by a similar pathology), trusts Hitler more. When the British secret
services inform him that Hitler is preparing to attack him, his erroneous convic-
tions are absurdly confirmed. It is the British who have hostile intentions towards him,
and the proof of this is that they are trying to disinform him.This personal paranoia leads
to one of the most well-known historical events: the unbelievable military unpre-
paredness of one of the most heavily armed countries of all time, the Soviet Union.
With similar ‘lucid madness’, the armed groups of the 1970s and 1980s justify
murder. They know the mass media are their interlocutors: the media can amplify
paranoia or restore reasonableness. So they shoot journalists. The right-wing jour-
nalist, because he is right-wing; but also that other one, who is not right-wing,
because ‘he hides behind the labels “democratic” and “left-wing”, using them to
create confusion in the masses, to infiltrate them’:35 paranoia has already decided
that everyone around it is an enemy. This will be discussed in the chapter of final
thoughts. This way of reasoning remains surprisingly similar to that of Stalin.36
Transcending geography and decades, absurd consistency survives intact as a closed
mental system, incapable in every sense of understanding, because in its basic dogmas
it already exhausts all possibilities in the abstract.
It is typical of criminal behaviour to find itself ‘needing’ to massacre more people
than it had foreseen. On the individual level Crime and Punishment provides an
excellent description: Raskolnikov has planned to kill the female usurer, but is
forced to kill an unexpected visitor too, another woman. At first sight one might
think something similar happened with Hitler and Stalin, who, once they have
begun their massacres, can’t stop. But Hitler and Stalin are not just criminals, they
are also paranoiacs. They don’t even have the ‘Raskolnikov attenuating circum-
stance’. Their massacres are something they have calculated from the beginning.
They are not unexpected consequences (subsequent crimes, because once you have
shed blood it is hard to stop): they are pre-emptive crimes.
The origin of the paranoid impulse

Ever since its animal origins, psychic activity has had to harbour mistrust and
suspicion.
The roe deer darts back into the undergrowth from the clearing as soon as a
shadow crosses its field of vision. Nine times out of ten it is a branch moved by the
wind, not a carnivore. But nature really wants the animal to over-react: those nine
unnecessary retreats are its safety reserve. If it makes a mistake nine times by retreat-
ing when it is not necessary, the only cost is a little agitation; if it makes a mistake
once by not retreating when it is necessary, it pays with its life.
22
Paranoia may be a continuation of an animal function in our mind. But in the

human being it also becomes an attempt to distance ourselves from evil by attrib-
uting it to an enemy. There are countless ‘cultural accessories’ that we may add to
instinct: arguments that ‘prove’ the necessity of destroying him pre-emptively, pro-
paganda that presents him as non-human, and so on.
As the mind has progressed towards its present state in the course of evolution,
it has tried to create links between the perceptions, stimuli and images that form in
it. So the mental associations have gradually evolved into explanations, causal links.
The mind has responded to stimuli less and less with automatic reactions, more
and more with conscious and, at least seemingly, rational responses. Paranoia builds
up from an initial suspicious instinct through a rather elaborate series of mental
concatenations. This does not mean that such thoughts, even if they are shared by
a majority, constitute truth; for centuries, for example, it was widely suspected that
certain women really were ‘witches’.
The main thing that distinguishes the paranoid violence of the masses from
individual paranoia is the fact that reciprocal confirmation obliterates people’s per-
ception of crime and feelings of guilt. ‘Collective passion is an infinitely more pow-
erful impulse towards crime and falsehood than any individual passion. In this case
the harmful impulses, far from neutralizing each other, raise each other to the nth
degree. The pressure is almost irresistible, except in the case of real saints.’37
The condition of the human being in a pre-modern society is not very differ-
ent from that of the wild animal, which has to be suspicious in order to survive.
The survival instinct prompts man to mistrust nature, which is certainly stronger
than him. Even when civilization gradually forms like a new layer on the surface of
nature, ‘the law of the jungle’, where the stronger individual always wins, continues
for a long time to prevail over constitutional law. Even when this constitutional law
becomes generalized, it may only be a system that allows the stronger individual to
prevail over the weaker by ‘legal’ means.
Man, then, emerges from the state of nature via a series of stages which do not
require him to abandon suspicion, but merely to diversify and refine it.
In the first phase he gradually has to transfer his mistrust, formerly directed at
stronger animals and at nature, to other men; the human being becomes one of the
few animals that kills members of its own species. The traveller leans on his staff.
But he peers far into the distance to avoid meeting the traveller who leans on his
spear. Like the roe deer, he keeps to the edge of the clearing. Unlike the roe deer,
however, he does not rely solely on instinct, which would take him, with one back-
ward leap, into the undergrowth. He does not merely react. He also makes advance
calculations in order to avoid routes which carry the highest risk of dangerous
encounters. Preventing danger takes up an increasing amount of space in the evolu-
tion of his mind.
In the second phase, in complex civilizations, organized and supported by count-
less laws, the risk of being killed in the street decreases. But new threats emerge,
which are not linked to mere physical strength: the threats of being excluded,
exploited or tricked on the social, economic or cultural level. On the one hand,
23
protected by the simplest laws protecting physical safety, man has to learn to be
trustful, not to go out into the street carrying weapons. On the other hand, however,
he has to develop a mistrust made up of increasingly complex preventive strategies.
The new travellers run new risks because of the very complexity which regulates
economic and social life, the supply of transport, food and care. Today the laws on
contracts and traffic, the fire prevention procedures, the clauses of an insurance
policy, the instructions for a medicine, the list of the ingredients of a food product,
can be so lengthy that they seem like breeding grounds of the unexpected and the
incomprehensible. Rules formulated in order to prevent dangers seem themselves
to become indeterminate dangers.
The present-day urban condition distorts the instincts

One of psychology’s tasks should be reminding us that man is a social animal. Our
psyche has an innate need to take an interest in other people, to establish ties. If
we are separated from others (a condition encouraged by present-day individual-
ism and facilitated by technology), this instinct leads the mind still to concern
itself with them, but in the form of fantasies, which are detached from reality, and
hence far more uncontrollable and dangerous; which contain not judgements, but
prejudices.38
An isolated individual is artificial. But the prevalent condition of populations
today is itself artificial. Our body has been produced by natural evolution to live in
small groups.The human nervous system has not had time to adapt to urban life. In
smaller communities it can more easily enter into resonance with the enthusiasms
or fears of others, thus fulfilling a social function. Cultural evolution, however, has
produced large, anonymous, unnatural concentrations of individuals which, while
inhibiting trust and cooperation, can also multiply the destructive impulses.
The fact of being part of the ‘us’ group and building fantasies about the ‘oth-
ers’ group authorizes, as is indicated by the collective psychology described by Le
Bon, Freud, Jung, Canetti and Weil, aggressive attitudes, masked by the anonymity
of the crowd, which lead to a lack of natural inhibitions. One of the tasks of neu-
rophysiology will be that of describing which neurons run wild in these immense
unnatural masses, or in the virtual reproductions of them which technology is rap-
idly perfecting.
Paranoia may be mild but widespread

The real individual forms of delusional paranoia are rarer than other psychiatric
illnesses. Their frequency is generally considered to be less than 0.03 per cent.39
This may partly explain the insufficient attention that they receive. Collective and
historical delusion, on the other hand, may have received little attention for the
opposite reason: because, as Nietzsche said, it is so common as to be the norm.
While individual, clinical paranoia has a fairly constant and rather negligible pres-
ence in society, then, things are far more complex where collective (non-clinical)
24
paranoia is concerned: in some particular historical circumstances, the paranoid

possession of the masses is not the exception but the rule.
In addition to linking separate phases – sometimes very different ones – in an
individual’s life, paranoia can unite a whole community which has been through
extreme experiences. Unprecedented collective traumas, shattering society’s exis-
tence as well as the individual’s, can make a shared process of grief and readjustment
impossible. In extreme cases, the psyche never gets over its anxiety about death and
freezes in the natural instinct of responding to destruction with comparable aggres-
sion. In his study of victims of the atomic bombings, Robert Jay Lifton has called
this ineradicable state survivor paranoia.40
Thus, both the clinical definitions of paranoia and the studies of its epidemiol-
ogy contribute to the underestimation of its importance that we are concerned
with here.
The psychiatry textbooks have nothing to say about this truth described by
tragedy: if the circumstances are favourable, Iago can convince Othello, thus trans-
forming a generous hero, as Shakespeare has shown in exemplary manner, into a
paranoid monster. Certain historical situations, of which we will be examining
some classic cases, have precisely this characteristic; the over-emotional collective
climate, the condensing of the masses and the clamour of the mass media, with the
inevitable lowering of the intelligence level that they produce, can be Iago’s mega-
phone. Under such conditions, the treacherous counsellor’s voice gets the better of
the individual’s rational ego; and, in a vicious circle, his excitement in turn infects
those around him.
Psychopathy
There is, moreover, a link between two pathologies which has not been suffi-
ciently explored.The circumstances that arouse mass paranoias can also reawaken in
groups a collective psychopathy – in other words, a loss not only of logic, but also of
moral principles. The adversary is dehumanized, treated in turn as a single mass and
attacked collectively: an attitude which is always unjust, even when some members
of that group are rightly considered guilty. For centuries this radical negative pro-
jection was applied to colonized peoples, without arousing many feelings of guilt;
in the nineteenth century it spread in Europe too, later flowering completely in the
twentieth century.
On occasions like the pogrom and the so-called ‘total war’, the critical sense
is completely lost. In the crowd, people egg each other on, destroying everything
that is imagined to be an enemy. The aggressive projection is complete, both in the
sense that it involves everyone and in the sense that it rejects its own destructiveness,
attributing it to the opposing group. In extreme cases, everyone becomes paranoid
and everyone becomes psychopathic: such circumstances have been called – again
by Lifton, a specialist in the most tragic collective psychopathologies of recent
times – atrocity-producing situations.41
25
When the Ottomans entered the First World War on Germany’s side, Enver
Pasha, a brave but egocentric and impetuous military leader, launched a risky attack
on the Russians. They repelled the attack, inflicting heavy losses. The Turkish com-
manders then began to explain the defeat as the work of encirclement and a conspiracy.
Advancing northwards into the Caucasus, they had found themselves surrounded –
the sea to the east and west; the tsarist army to the north, and in the south the
Armenians, who were Ottoman subjects but suspected of supporting the Russians.
There was no changing geography, but the Turkish nationalists convinced them-
selves that it was becoming urgent to ‘shift’ – or ‘eliminate’; by what means, was of
secondary importance – the Christian minority which had lived for centuries in
their empire, despite the pogroms, and were now behind the army. In April and May
1915 the Ottoman government issued extremely harsh deportation orders against
the Armenians. In fact the people responsible for carrying out those orders were not
supplied with the wherewithal for doing so, apart from the weapons with which
they were equipped. They lacked means of transport, food, shelter and assistance
of any kind. It is unlikely that the authorities did not have extermination in mind.
However, unlike the Nazis, who at the Wannsee Conference planned the complete
elimination of the Jews, the intention was not formally expressed. Officers, ordinary
soldiers and collaborators of various ethnic groups contributed to the massacre in
disorderly fashion.The extermination of the Jews flowed from the collective conscious-
ness of the Nazi bureaucracy and from its pre-emptive plans (whose pathological
motivation was unconscious); that of the Armenians arose to a greater extent from
the collective unconscious. The two developments of paranoia and the two kinds of
responsibility were distinct, but the final result was not all that different.
Paranoia and mass communication

The intermingling of politico-cultural paranoias in the twentieth century is increas-
ingly attributable to the spread of the mass media, which, while bringing more truths
to more people, also facilitated the spread of ‘collective psychic infections’.This danger
was already foreseen by Baudelaire, who wrote that ‘the newspaper exudes crime.’42
The modern means of communication are channels for paranoia. Once entrusted
to the multiplicative power of the mass medium, the fact of being hated, instead of
becoming an occasion for self-criticism, may be presented as evidence that it is right
to hate: here the inversion of causes acquires continental dimensions and apocalyptic
effects. Mass movements can be manipulated in such a way as to transform this absur-
dity into a belief.Two of the most celebrated slogans in the twentieth century remind
us of this. ‘Many enemies, much honour’, said one fascist formula. ‘Being attacked by
the enemy is not a bad thing; it is a good thing’, proclaimed Mao Zedong.43 Even
Pericles, a master of direct communication in public, had stated that the hatred felt for
the Athenians should be appreciated, because it was proof of their power.44
The nationalisms of the late eighteenth century and the whole of the nine-
teenth century, social Darwinism, eugenetics and the racism of the second half of
26
the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, weakened society’s moral
resources, replacing them with individual or group egotism.45 These ‘inhibitors of
humanity’ become official doctrine in fascist states. But in communist countries,
too, an ideology which originated as a form of radical solidarity led to radical
inhumanity.
A similar distortion can insinuate itself into liberal societies, as well, without
anyone really condemning it: during the Second World War American propaganda
depicted the Japanese as animals (usually monkeys), urging that they be killed like
animals too.46 So it is only natural that Life, the most prestigious American illus-
trated magazine, should have published, on 22 May 1944, a photograph of an attrac-
tive blonde girl writing to her fiancé to thank him for sending her the skull of a
Japanese soldier; a skull which now has pride of place on her desk, where she smiles
at it.The Auschwitz SS were not the only ones who collected gruesome human rel-
ics. Here we are far way away from Nazism and the battlefields: we are in Phoenix,
Arizona, at the heart of the white middle class least affected by the war, and the
protagonist is a woman. And yet the bacillus of irrational hatred has landed on this
desk too: with such lightness and, one might almost say, aesthetic sensibility, that
it takes quite an effort to perceive the underlying rage. In theory, contemplating a
skull on a desk might resemble the meditations on human transience characteris-
tic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.47 In reality it is the exact opposite.
Those old thoughts helped people to introject death, to achieve awareness of the
fact that it concerns us personally. Here, by contrast, the warlike, racist rage tries to
project it as far away as possible. Compared to the woman who observes it, death is
other; in particular, the dead man is other, and it is obvious that he deserved to die.
Compassion is replaced by splitting.
The inseparability of delusion from lucid reasoning makes the paranoid indi-
vidual harder to recognize than any other mental patient. Something very similar
happens in society as a whole: collective paranoia is almost impossible to identify in
a mass of people who silently harbour it.This hypothesis itself seems like a paranoid
fantasy, but in fact it is absolutely reasonable. The man who, immersed in a crowd,
shouts out, demanding the death of a minority, is the same man who a short time
ago was helping his children with their homework. The crowd, in which everyone
is stirred up by the others’ aggression, feels that it is possible to divert the tragedy of
the human condition: we do not necessarily have to die, death can be transferred on
to the enemy. ‘The enemy is there, ready to their hand. […] It is always the enemy
who started it. Even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning
it.’48 Even in the present-day ‘atomized crowd’, which feels collective emotions
not because it comes together in the public square but because it receives identi-
cal exciting images via the screens, the paranoiac thinks he can correct his solitude
and find countless confirmations of his need for pre-emptive attack: preceding the
‘enemy’ attack means avoiding death by inflicting it on the enemy. Paranoid haste
becomes a Todableiter, a ‘para-death’.49 We know that paranoia cannot tolerate the
void: the excited crowd eliminates it both from time, by attacking at once, and from
space, by gathering to reassure itself.
27
The ‘normalization’ of paranoia occurs in two directions. While an incorrigible

paranoid delusion can prosper, once fully formed, within mental processes which
are reasonable and considered sane by all, those same all, if they maintain their sup-
port for one another, can cultivate collective paranoia without considering it to be
such.The only necessary condition is inserting the primal and incorrigible delusion
into a system of collective reasoning whose successive stages respect formal logic.
Inevitably, that is facilitated by totalitarian ideologies.
In one particularly significant year, 1942, Simone Weil wrote: ‘an unjust will
common to a whole nation [is] not in any way superior to the unjust will of a
man. […] If a single collective passion takes hold of an entire country, the entire
country is unanimous in the crime.’50
It is clear that what is called a ‘collective passion’ here corresponds for the most
part to the mass paranoia that we are discussing. Nazism created in Germany a situ-
ation similar to that described by Simone Weil, who adds, ‘When a country is in the
grip of a collective passion, any particular will is likely to be closer to justice and
reason than the general will, or rather than what constitutes its caricature.’51
For the psychic economy, to appeal to paranoia is to invest capital in wild specu-
lation. It is possible to get a quick and disproportionately high return from a small
investment: it may require an ability to calculate, but not real intelligence. This
‘disproportionate return’ is even higher in the case of collective paranoia: the crowd
tends to have a psychology similar to that of a herd of animals, much more than the
individual person resembles the individual animal. In immediate collective reactions
the return of paranoia increases even more, whereas that of reasonableness decreases.
The paranoid human crowd tends to grow of its own accord, carrying with it any-
one it meets, like an avalanche hurtling down a slope.52
Thanks to a perverted combination of progress in armaments and in the media,
the modern world has given psychopathic and paranoid politicians more and more
opportunities for creating irreversible situations. It is a question of shedding the first
blood and making it known that one has done so: from that moment onwards, for
a certain length of time, these perverted leaders will be able to count on a paranoid
return in society.
We have noted that the initial moment of individual paranoia is a reaction of
alarm which is also observable in animals. Mass paranoia is not very different: the
excited and alarmed herd can communicate its emotion to all its members, instantly
and without words. However, for a group of human beings to reach the point of
committing what we now call ‘crimes against humanity’, any instinctive and ‘natu-
ral’ origin will have to be combined into a system of thought and then be dissemi-
nated by the mass media.
The group throws itself uniformly into aggression or flight (the difference
need not concern us for the moment); the contagion is psychic, but it occurs
even without words. The clearest example of this affinity with animal behaviour
is the stampede, the disorderly flight of a crowd, with serious results, such as people
being trampled to death. This English word returned to Europe from the United
States (it is now used not only in English but in German too), where it was a loan
28
from colonial Spanish: significantly, estampida originally referred only to a herd of

animals, whereas today it has been extended to people too.
In modern society, communication is channelled into the mass media and
filtered through the institutions which preside over them. This filter, which ought
to remove impurity of thought, in fact often adds to it. Having suspicions, imagin-
ing conspiracies, and highlighting or even inventing a destructiveness which under-
lies certain events, are all constant functions of the mass media.
Only with the passing of time does reason tend to prevail.Time levels out slopes
that are too steeply inclined. Freud has written, ‘in the long run there is no human
institution that can escape the influence of a well-founded critical vision.’53 As we
shall see, however, it can take a tragically long time for that to happen, during which
unreason has plenty of opportunities for carrying out massacres, which in turn are
potential food for new paranoias. Freud himself was excited about the beginning
of the First World War. Even in him, the ‘critical vision’ came to the fore again only
after heavy losses.
Paranoia, the psychopathological basis of many slanders, disseminates not only
explanations, which may be disproved by events, but a style of thought which leaves
its mark on time. A leading American political commentator, who will be quoted
again below, has warned, ‘the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would
have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men
with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more
or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.’54
Collective crimes
The greatest waves of collective paranoia can go through three stages, which are
closely interwoven with each other.55
1. Collective aggression of a local nature, or at least geographically and ethnically

restricted to certain communities. In relatively recent times it has come to be
denoted by the Russian term pogrom, which has also been used retroactively
to describe massacres that took place in antiquity. Another expression for the
same concept is ethnic riot. These definitions presuppose that the community
is divided into at least two sections belonging to different ethnic groups or
religions, and that the aggression, even if promoted by policies and ideologies
which spread hatred, is in some way ‘spontaneous’.
2. The collective expulsion, usually accompanied by violence and massacres, of an
entire population or ethnic group, which may also take the more organized
form of deportation. It has become customary to describe this phenomenon,
with reference to the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, by the
term ethnic cleansing, which is itself derived from the Nazi concept of völkische
Flurbereinigung.56 Being a vast operation with complex organizational aspects,
even though it may be fostered by an underlying collective hatred in society it
always needs some authority to lead it. Precisely because of its multifariousness,
29
and the fact that its classification is recent, this type of collective crime as yet
lacks satisfactory historical and judicial definitions.57
3. The complete extermination of a population or ethnic group. This was called
genocide by Raphael Lemkin in 1943, and it entered international legislation
with the Convention for the Prevention of Genocide, adopted by the United
Nations in 1948. Genocide has been divided into subcategories, according to
the aims it is trying to achieve: (i) eliminating a real or imaginary danger; (ii)
terrorizing an enemy, again real or imaginary; (iii) acquiring certain possessions;
and (iv) putting a theory, conviction or faith into practice.58 This subdivision
is not exclusively historical or judicial. It also relates to psychopathology. With
the exception of the third category, it assigns an essential role to unconscious
motivations and collective paranoia. That another people is an enemy may be
an imaginary fact; but if the result is a concrete programme of extermination,
that imagination will have absurdly real consequences. Moreover, point (iv)
confirms what Solzhenitsyn and Glover have stressed: that in the twentieth
century ideology is at least as powerful a multiplier of massacres as technology.
Even more than the first two kinds of collective crime, genocide needs political
and military authorities to organize it. Generally they use propaganda based on
hatred, but do not go so far as to declare openly that their purpose is the annihi-
lation of an entire population. That would be something against which both the
animal impulses and the properly human ones rebel; not even the Nazis dared to
do it. Today the concept of genocide is so central to such fields as historiogra-
phy, politics and international law that it has generated important subcategories,
which are themselves considered to be new definitions of crimes against human-
ity. Communist regimes like that of Mao, and particularly those of Stalin and Pol
Pot, practised a form of extermination based on class membership, which has been
called classicide.59 By analogy the term biocide has also been coined to indicate the
annihilation of entire species of animals following phenomena linked to that same
Eurocentrism that led to the elimination of the indigenous peoples of certain
geographical areas.60
These classifications, and the interest that the international community has
shown in them, concern the twentieth century. Only in the course of the past few
generations have human beings systematically carried out and ideologically justified
such collective acts of madness. During the same period attempts have also been
made to study and prevent them: a fact which remains predominantly theoretical,
whereas the horrors are real.
The many perspectives from which these crimes have been described agree that
it is easy to move on from one stage to another, whether this was planned or the
transition was not among the original intentions. In short, what Norman Cohn
has called a ‘warrant for genocide’ is already latent in the first two phases of per-
secution: during events of the first or second group, atrocities not planned by the
authorities begin to occur as a result of collective possession, and are tolerated or
even encouraged. Hence there is an imperceptible slide from the first to the second,
30
or from the second to the third level of persecution, without it being clear when
this change began or who ordered it. It is significant, in this connection, that the
deadly forms of ethnic riot (that is, of crimes of the first category) are classified as
proto-genocide or ‘intimation of genocide’.61 Then in ethnic cleansing (a crime
of the second type), an increasing number of humiliations, rapes and murders are
inflicted on the deported population so that there is a gradual slide towards outright
genocide. Some scholars note that even here, in most of the historical cases, it is
impossible to draw a clear dividing line, in that genocide appears rather to be the
extreme, often unplanned but inevitable, aspect of ethnic cleansing.62 Other authors
prefer a broad, all-embracing concept of ethnic cleansing, which covers genocides
proper, class cleansing (the elimination of social classes in communist regimes), the
various forms of murderous cleansing, etc.63
From our point of view, the difficulty of containing the violence within only
one of the three categories, and of clearly separating the categories from each other
as concepts, corresponds to the fluidity and contagiousness of collective paranoia.
More than the individual variety, group paranoia is closely interwoven with
psychopathic forms of behaviour. It disrupts civilized coexistence to deliver a cruel
blow to a scapegoat. However, the act, being a ritual confirmed by the whole group,
is not felt to be wicked. If we extend our clinical categories to historical events,
we note with horror that almost the whole of eastern central Europe suffered from
paranoid pandemics during the first half of the twentieth century, and has continued
to – though in a more subterranean manner – during the Cold War and its inter-
minable aftermath.
It is no coincidence that the same word – persecution – is used to indicate
both the syndrome of individual paranoia and the most tragic consequence of
collective paranoia. Anyone who feels they are being persecuted will try to react
by eliminating their ‘persecutor’ in time. The conscious motive is preventing their
own destruction; the unconscious one is eliminating the feeling of persecution by
attributing the intention to someone else (creating a Todableiter in Canetti’s sense).
Such extreme, devastating projection requires a profound lack of awareness. But in
the mob unleashed by demagogy, the presence of others, instead of promoting self-
criticism, reinforces and completes the obscuring of consciousness.
Paranoid climates
In certain times and places the persecutory potential within each individual is acti-
vated in the whole population, creating an entire paranoid environment. This ‘stormy
disturbance of the collective psyche’ can move in the most unpredictable direc-
tions: the only certain thing will be the persistence of the suspicion.
As will be described later in the chapter on ‘naive persecutors’, in the late
nineteenth century the sinking of the American cruiser Maine was blamed on the
Spanish.The ensuing war raised the United States to the status of an intercontinen-
tal power and expelled Spain from it in the space of a few weeks; but interpretations
of the ship’s disaster would continue for almost a century, until an enquiry by the
31
American navy established that the Maine had most likely exploded because of a
mistake made by its crew.
The First World War is said to have broken out in reprisal for the assassination
of the heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, Franz Ferdinand. But in fact,
after initial relative agreement that a crime had been committed against Austria, the
reciprocal suspicion of all the great powers continued to grow and the decisions
slipped out of their rulers’ control.This will be discussed in the chapter on the First
World War. Since Franz Ferdinand was opposed by conservative circles in his coun-
try, rumours that some people in Vienna knew about the assassination in advance
and did nothing to stop it have never died down.
Lastly, as we shall see in the chapter on the bombing raids, during the Tokyo
tribunal on Japanese war crimes (1946–8) the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal stated
not only that the United States had committed an unprecedented international
crime themselves but that they were as responsible as the Japanese for causing the
war. Pal was silenced, and his writings banned. But in 2000 the American historian
Robert B. Stinnett published a study showing that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been
warned in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but had preferred to let
it take place, because he wanted to bring the United States into the war.64
In November 1963 a precision rifle cut short the life of President Kennedy.
The world was still under shock when his assassin was killed; then it was the turn
of the assassin’s assassin, and so on. This event has produced the largest number
of conspiracy theories ever recorded by history. Although conspiracy theories are
characteristic of the American right, these ‘revelations’ have the peculiarity of com-
ing mainly from the left.
Over the next few years, in Italy and Federal Germany, many members of youth
movements lost confidence in the possibility of reforming the state from within and
enlisted in the so-called ‘armed struggle’. This radical mistrust, justified on the basis
of abstract syllogisms (as will be explained in the chapter of concluding thoughts),
was felt particularly keenly in Germany. A year before the French protests broke
out, on 2 June 1967, the student Ohnesorg was killed by a bullet fired by police
during a demonstration. An enquiry had concluded that it was an accident. All the
indications, however, suggested the opposite. The young man had been shot in the
head by police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras, a man with neo-fascist connections: he
was a refugee from the eastern territories, the son of a policeman who had been
killed during the war, and at the age of seventeen had himself been wounded while
participating in the final Nazi resistance against the Soviets. Moreover, he was a
skilled marksman, who spent a considerable part of his salary on practising in a
firing range. In 1968, one of the most prominent student leaders, Rudi Dutschke,
was also seriously wounded by pistol shots. So the conviction formed that there was
a conspiracy of the bourgeois capitalist state to eliminate the movement by violent
means. Many young people of the far left in Germany (and soon in other countries
too) decided it was necessary for them to take up arms too.
In 2009, a scholar studying the Berlin Wall in the archives of the former East
Germany came across a file on Kurras: from 1955 onwards, the marksman had
32
received a regular salary from the Stasi, the secret service of Communist Germany.65
There is nothing in the documents to suggest that those ‘bosses’ ordered the killing
of Ohnesorg, but the discovery instantly spawned theories of a communist con-
spiracy, just as the conviction that there had been a capitalist conspiracy had spread
previously, without any evidence.
Although collective delusion has been sadly frequent, studies of it have been
surprisingly rare. Erich Fromm’s classic The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness exam-
ines not collective National Socialist paranoia but the narcissistic personality of
Adolf Hitler. In so doing, this historic work confines psychoanalysis to a dialogue
with itself. Many cold fathers like Alois Hitler, and hyper-protective mothers like
Klara Pölzl, can produce a narcissistic son. But the mass paranoia that linked that
narcissistic son to millions of other minds is a unique event.
A complete paranoia requires fantasy substitutions. We have seen these in Ajax,
when he mistakes animals for his enemies. For the crowd, an illusory exchange is
even more essential, and again exposes the paradox: because of reciprocal psychic
infection, the self-deception of many seems easier than that of the individual. As for
individual clinical paranoia, for collective, extra-clinical paranoia the original sin is
an inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy conviction. But the lack of
distinction takes a double form: the lack of distinction between the thought of the
individuals who make up the crowd and that of the leader replicates the lack of
distinction between normal thought and delusion in the mind of the leader. It is
hearing, or seeing, a revelation. Once again, paranoia is a lack of autonomy: exter-
nally from the people surrounding the individual, internally from the individual’s
own ghosts. For a crucial role, not only in clinical paranoia but also in collective
paranoia, is played by rumours.
Rumours
In Italian, the relative lexical poverty of the language makes it necessary to translate
as voci (in the sense of unverifiable information of uncertain provenance) what in
English are rumours, in French rumeurs and in German Gerüchte. But this apparent
poverty in fact turns out to be an enrichment, because it establishes a direct rela-
tionship between extra-clinical and clinical paranoia; for a psychotic’s hallucina-
tions almost always come in the form of voci (in the sense of English voices, French
voix, German Stimmen). Both the psychiatrically sick individual and the politically
sick crowd allow themselves to be guided by ‘voices’ that narrate ‘events’, which
eventually become their revelation. Only rarely do their hallucinations take the
form of visions. Particularly significant is the passage in Mein Kampf where Hitler
describes the distressing ‘voices’ (Gerüchte) that changed his life.66 After a British
attack, in which gas had been used, he had been taken to the hospital in Pasewalk.
He had temporarily lost his sight, and he was completely focused on listening to
the voci (in the double sense of rumours and human voices) that entered the ward.
The armistice, the Kaiser’s abdication, the chaos, the advent of the republic and
the news that the country was falling into Bolshevik hands: the individual pieces
33
of information sometimes supplemented, sometimes contradicted each other. But

their sum total was tragic. For the first time since his mother’s death, Adolf Hitler
wept; if the war and the empire were both lost, he thought, millions of his comrades
had died in vain.
If the individual hears ‘voices’, psychiatry may consider him to be mad. But
the crowd, too, suffers from hallucinations – almost always auditory ones – and
believes them; this is particularly common in wartime, when, as is well known, the
authorities often keep important news from the citizens. On a very large scale, these
voices confirm that paranoia arises from a universal need for truth and explanations.
They may be opposed to reality, or in profound syntony with it, or they may even
go beyond it. They are a troubled marriage between truth and fantasy, and, as in
every couple, what is constant is the everyday relationship, while love often turns
into hostility, before manifesting itself as harmony again.The collective ‘voices’ cor-
respond to an excessive production of explanations, and hence to an activation of
the paranoid part of the psyche, but on the part of the whole population; that is to say, not
of a single sick mind, but of the great majority, which will later return to normal
thought. It is highly significant that rumours have played a crucial role in all ‘spon-
taneous’ ethnic massacres.67
The mystery of the psyche never completely finishes revealing itself. There are
cases where paranoia regains its original function. It brings salvation to those who
follow it and perdition to reasonable people, who do not allow themselves to be
infected by its fantasies unless there is some evidence. In 1940, a year before the
Nazis began secretly issuing orders to eliminate Jews, which were superimposed on
expulsion orders,68 and two years before the ‘final solution’ was decided upon at
Wannsee, a rumour spread among European Jews that the news that they were to be
deported actually showed that they were to be exterminated.69
Among the Allies, early in the Second World War, it was said that Japanese pilots
were locked in their cockpits so that they could not bail out.The reports were base-
less, but they too anticipated something real – the certain death of the kamikazes.
And there were so many legends about Hitler’s secret weapons that when reports
of the first V1 and V2 rockets emerged, the Allied high command thought they
were the usual exaggerations; popular rumours, which drew on the collective fan-
tasy, were in some respects ‘better informed’ than the chiefs of staff, who relied on
sophisticated espionage services.
Already during the First World War, uncontrolled rumours had acquired such
influence that governments had set up special departments responsible for spreading
stories to cause panic in the enemy front line. In July 1945, the Moral Operations
Branch – the service responsible for ‘demoralizing’ the enemy – of the American
Office of Strategic Services spread a rumour among the Japanese that their country
was going to suffer a terrible tragedy in early August. The rumour was supported
by a fantasy numerology – ‘evidence’ linked to the significance of certain numbers.
It was an involuntary prophecy; the construction of the atomic bombs was still a
complete secret, and not even the Moral Operations Branch knew that two bombs
of this type would devastate Japan on 6 and 9 August.70
34
Finally, it should be mentioned that among those who were inside New York’s
Twin Towers during the attacks of 11 September 2001 there were two contrasting
reactions. The more rational trusted the advice they were given to keep calm and
wait for orders to evacuate. The more mistrustful disobeyed and rushed down the
stairs. It was almost exclusively the latter who came out alive.71
Modern premises for the spread of paranoia

The following chapters will examine some developments of collective paranoia
in history. As the discussion comes closer to our times, factors which did not exist
before and which favour mass paranoia come into play. We will proceed in chrono-
logical order, adopting a mainly psychoanalytical point of view. It will not be pos-
sible to explore all the other perspectives, though we will try to keep them in view.
From the point of view of secularization, the weakening of religion has accus-
tomed the common man to being more rational. At the same time, however, it has
given him a new task which many are unable to perform: reconstructing the causes
of what was once accepted as a matter of faith. This is particularly true of disasters.
They were formerly seen as the will – or punishment – of God. Present-day man,
however, has learned that there is such a thing as a right to justice; so he wants to
know the cause, or the person, responsible for the evils that afflict him. A quest
which heightens suspicion.
From the philosophical point of view, the Enlightenment, scientism and
positivism (including the psychologies which tend not to respect mystery, such
as the more orthodox forms of Freudian psychoanalysis) accustom the new pos-
sessors of knowledge – scientists, intellectuals – to take responsibility for explaining
everything.
From the political point of view, the formal extension of democracy attributes to
the whole population a new right to know and to be persuaded of what is asked of
them. Formerly the masses were given orders. Today the authorities need to excite
it and manipulate it in order to be able to persuade it: this is the process we call
populism. The absolute power of the ancien régime had no need to form an alliance
with paranoia. Modern power, however, is tempted by the paranoid style, which
helps to mobilize the masses.
From the communicative point of view, as the communications media spread
and become mass phenomena (mass media: newspapers, radio, television), for the
most part they have to follow the laws of large numbers. Their diffusion, which
was once the medium for communication, becomes its aim (in accordance with
McLuhan’s law, the medium is the message). They have to make people listen to
them, sell themselves to millions of consumers; and this increasingly differentiates
them from the products of culture. In most cases, paranoid information (that is,
information which is seemingly logical, but in fact based on destructive suspicion)
helps their diffusion more than critical information. Sloterdijk is certainly right
when he says that in the postmodern world the crowd that pours into the public
squares, as described by Canetti, has been replaced by a ‘molecular mass’ made up of
35
isolated people.72 But with regard to our present concern, collective paranoia, the
substance is not very different, and is perhaps even more tragic. Since 1947, the year
of its decolonization, the formerly British India has periodically been devastated by
reciprocal pogroms between Hindus and Muslims. In previous decades information
travelled slowly in the immense country. By the time rumours of a massacre had
reached the crowd in another locality, reasonable minds and the authorities were in
a position to deal with the risks of psychic infection. Now that television is received
all over the country, however, paranoid contagion is instantaneous: in real time the
enraged crowd pours out on to the street, even if the television has broadcast news
of violence not in order to encourage it but to condemn it.73
From the ethical point of view, the disunited (molecular), post-religious, post-
political, individualistic, consumeristic crowd of today lives in a moral vacuum.
But moral responsibility is not an abstract and historically relative idea which can
be eliminated on command. It is a primal, archetypal, inevitable experience of the
psyche. Being impossible to experience directly, because of a lack of conscious
values, it is projected. Responsibility, being denied, reappears in the negative, as evil
perpetrated by others. So when things are going badly, the predominant impatience
and irresponsibility increase the temptation to find culprits at once, to unmask a
conspiracy.
From the socio-economic point of view, the triumphant advance of the tertiary
sector has created new activities which thrive on paranoia. An ever-growing sector
of the ‘society of victims and compensation’ in which we live provides immate-
rial products whose saleability increases as the paranoid style is confused with the
common style: lawyers in civil cases, insurers, ombudsmen and populist preachers,
all feed on it and nurture it in their turn. Even part of the national health system
may be unconsciously complicit in ‘victimism’. Like many well-intentioned docu-
ments, the Constitution of the Italian Republic ‘safeguards health as a fundamental
right’.74 With an almost unprecedented leap in logic – which makes us suspect
that God has been introjected by the secular law – it has proclaimed not a right to
therapy, but a right to be healthy. In this way a person who is ill is encouraged to
feel that he is a victim of injustice not when he lacks treatment, but when he lacks
health.Thus paranoia completes its cycle. Spread in society by the modern cultural
and technological multipliers, it returns to the private sphere, while still remaining
collective paranoia; and it is not recognized as such because it is practised by too
many people.
The lack of interest in collective paranoia

‘Even the errors of healthy people are in many cases practically uncorrectable, but
that is usually because of a communality of error, as a result of which the person
feels safe. The basis of the conviction is not insight, but the feeling “we all”.’75 The
error which psychopathology calls delusion is an individual event. The error of the
paranoia of an entire crowd, however, does not receive that definition. Only one of
the major psychiatry textbooks devotes a few paragraphs to this subject:
36
Any human endeavor that encourages outlets for blaming, for an adversary
view of life, or for seeing oneself as the suffering victim can attract individuals
of a paranoid predisposition, providing them with rationalized outlets for their
pent-up frustrations and aspirations. Some of these individuals may become
leaders of religious or political movements. They may then be regarded as
charismatic and above reproach or understanding; their psychological prob-
lems are overlooked and they are sanctioned as special humans. Paranoid
reactions have been defined as a group of illnesses for only a little over a
century. Only in the last forty years have scholars and psychiatrists begun to
discuss the possibilities of their role in global politics, mass movements, and
large-scale violence and suffering. Mankind has had to distinguish – probably
more often than has been acknowledged – between the paranoid psychotic
and the truly inspired leader.76
The slide from normal thought to paranoid thought, and from individual
paranoia to mass paranoia, is often started by figures of particular social success.
The best-adapted paranoid attitudes, the ‘best-reasoning’ madnesses, are not only
difficult to classify as mental disorders. They are often admired and imitated. They
are the object of a seemingly positive psychic contagion. Megalomania, already
frequent in paranoiacs, is here circularly reinforced by the crowd on which the
leader confers it.77 In strong contrast with the other psychic pathologies, these
figures’ lives do not seem to be failures, but success stories, tales of a particularly
successful mechanism of defence from evil. ‘Evil is other people’, the successful
paranoid teaches the crowd, more Sartrian than Sartre himself.78
For the crowd that follows him, the paranoid leader is not just the leader of a sect
or political group. He is, more profoundly, a master of psychic defences. He teaches a
new mental make-up to ordinary people who do not have it. Each member of the
delusional group regains a temporary balance by attributing his own imbalance to
another group, or to an individual who represents a synthesis of otherness. Though
based on false premises, this inverted psychotherapy – the lack of research on which
is disastrous, given its consequences – may continue for some time: for as long as
it has an enemy to attack and until its excesses arouse reactions strong enough to
overwhelm it.
So in addition to a natural function of preventing danger, the activation of
mistrust has another purpose for groups: growing, it develops into collective para-
noia and makes possible both the expulsion of the evil and the restoration of
balance within the community. Nothing of the kind can be said of the other
disorders described in the psychiatry textbooks.They owe their renown to the fact
that they are seemingly more frequent, but especially to their remaining under the
control of the psychiatric institutions, because their genesis and treatment remain
individual. What I have called collective, extra-clinical paranoia arises and spreads
within social dynamics.
Schizophrenia has a tragic cost, because it affects nearly 1 per cent of the popu-
lation, who are increasingly excluded from a society in which everyone has to be
37
productive and functional. Oral disorders, such as bulimia and anorexia, are increas-
ing with the growth of consumerism and a concern with acquisitiveness and outer
appearance. But they flow through history; they do not change its course. Paranoia,
by contrast, would be justified in saying: ‘I am history’.
Psychiatry and the psychoanalytical schools have a precise responsibility in this
situation. Jealous of their role, they hide away in a private territory which involves
specialization and separation, and where research focuses almost entirely on the
individual, with his or her pathology. But the real human being is individual and
collective behaviour, correct and pathological functioning.
One of the most widely used textbooks states:
Paranoid thinking is not in and of itself pathological. […] The paranoid-

schizoid position is a basic mode of organizing experience that persists in the
human psyche throughout the life cycle. […] This mode is readily accessible in
all kinds of group experiences, such as political conventions, sporting events,
and institutional dynamics. At certain historical junctures entire cultures have
been pervaded by paranoid thinking, as in the ‘witch hunts’ of the McCarthy
era in this country.79
It would be interesting to ask the victims of McCarthyism, who were as numer-

ous as their persecutors were, if they agreed that the number of people affected
exempts paranoia from being a pathology.
The same textbook goes on to say: ‘The paranoid personality disorder […] is
a distinct pathological entity that is independent of cultural factors and is not a transient
state growing out of the nexus of group dynamics.’80
The author excludes the more alarming forms of paranoia from his area of
study for the sake of definitional formalism. For a paranoid disorder to constitute a
‘pathological entity’, in his opinion, not only must four of the seven criteria listed
by the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the statistical gos-
pel of official American psychiatry, be present, but it must also be independent of
the pressure of society and groups.81
If a delusional point of view has already established itself as a norm, psychiatry
hesitates to classify it as a disorder, even though it is far more dangerous than an
ordinary mental illness. Psychopathology here risks adopting a ‘Darwinian’ crite-
rion, so to speak, because it respects a style of thinking that becomes dominant in
reality even though it is unjust, irrational and mentally unhealthy. As a result, col-
lective paranoia falls into the category of nameless events. Unresearched events, too,
because, being covered neither by psychopathology nor by history and the politi-
cal sciences, it does not constitute a specific field of study. It urgently needs to be
rescued from this anonymity.
Of the seven criteria for a paranoid disorder listed by the DSM, perhaps only
the seventh does not apply to Adolf Hitler: ‘Has recurrent suspicions, without jus-
tification, regarding fidelity of spouse or sexual partner’, not least because sexual
partners occupied very little space in his life. It is obvious, however, that his disorder
38
was strongly dependent on historico-cultural factors and developed in connection

with the dynamics of the society in which he lived. In his few islands of private life,
Hitler’s behaviour seems to have been predictable, straightforward and, for the most
part, devoid of aggressive or persecutory traits; behaviour, that is, forming part of
the ‘banality of evil’ described by Hannah Arendt. According to Gabbard’s criteria,
however, Hitler’s paranoid disorder, being linked to cultural and collective factors,
should not be described as such, even though it cost millions of deaths.
Psychopathology should not concern itself only with ‘pathological entities’
already defined by its textbooks. ‘Pathological entities’ are not entities which exist a
priori, but working hypotheses: they are pragmatic creations of the textbooks which,
as such, can be changed. It is well known, for example, that, in the face of growing
criticism, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality
from the list of pathologies classified in DSM II (the second version of the textbook,
first published in 1968). And the textbooks are sometimes forced to admit that their
very definitions can create exclusion and pathology. It must be added, however,
that, conversely, exclusion from the textbooks can encourage political pathologies.
Psychiatric classification is partly a consequence of the reality that we observe, but it
partly precedes it and constitutes its cause, through social processes. This circularity
is far more evident with paranoia than with other mental disorders because, unlike
them, paranoia ‘circulates’ in society, receiving new impulses from it.
An anorexic woman will have difficulty in making the people around her
anorexic, even if she is an extremely persuasive speaker. Like most mental disorders,
anorexia is like a stone lying on flat terrain: it will not carry other stones with it
unless you keep pushing it, and even then it will usually move only the stone clos-
est to it. A paranoiac who is also a skilful preacher, however, will have a very good
chance of attracting followers. Collective paranoia, as was mentioned above, is like a
small stone at the top of a steep bank of rubble: if you kick it there is a good chance
of starting an avalanche. In a sense, the paranoid leader moves the whole population
on to the inclined plane. To put it another way, paranoia is the only mental disorder
that possesses autotrophy – an autonomous ability to multiply and infect. Only para-
noia has a circular relationship with history. It is the cause and at the same time the
consequence of mass events. It is the only illness capable of making history.
Paranoia has caused too much bloodshed to be left to the psychiatrists.The psy-
chiatrist can stop the mad hand that grasps the knife, but not the hands of Hitler,
Stalin and the masses who followed them; it cannot do so, precisely because the
masses followed them. The psychiatry textbooks have convinced us to open the
gates and come out of the small paddock where mental illnesses are treated.
The paranoia classified as clinical makes an individual and those close to him or
her suffer grievously. But the paranoia outside the gates, mingled with everyday
life, scattered in every part of society, has exterminated more human masses than
the plague epidemics, and has humiliated and mentally annihilated more people
than the wrath of God. Perhaps it is the true wrath of God, which chooses the
most unreasonable and stubborn of men as its enforcers.
39
Notes
1 Jung 1954: 222.
2 Hillman 2004: 25.
3 This difference has been given an original reinterpretation by Hampsey 2004, who
distinguishes paranoidic, a state of fear and delusion, from paranoic, a more general con-
dition of the mind – creative, expansive, capable of visions and of ranging beyond the
habitual.
4 See the 2002 edition, s.v. Paranoia.
5 Day and Semrad 1978: 245.
6 Bleuler 1934: 520 and 527.
7 Jaspers 1913: 214.
8 Ey et al. 1960: 129.
9 Palermo 2004: 37.
10 Freud 1895, Draft H 40, Paranoia.
11 A great philosopher has said, ‘Every individual may discover in himself the elements of
persecution mania’ (Russell 1930: 105–6).
12 Levi 1976b: 198.
13 The relatively few studies on the presence of paranoiac thoughts in the normal
population suggest that they may be as frequent as obsessive thoughts, or as anxious
symptoms. See Freeman et al. 2005.
14 See Canetti 1960: Chapter 7: ‘The Power of Forgiveness’.
15 Bleuler 1934: Part 2, Chapter 3, IIIb.
16 Cameron 1959.
17 According to Canetti, the paranoiac in any case needs to expel the destructiveness that
he has inside him (1972a: 115–16). Klein’s theory would say that he remains in the
schizo-paranoid position of early childhood.
18 Hillman proposes to radically correct ‘that notion of revelation and delusion which
separates them and […] assume instead that all delusion is revelatory, all revelation
delusional’ (1985: 306).
19 See Mariani 2005.
20 Hitler 1925: 311.
21 Konrad Lorenz, in his early studies of the aggressive instinct (1963), used a ‘hydraulic
model’, likening it to water held back by a dyke and suddenly released. The excess and
speed of the paranoid response, however, make the ‘fire model’ more appropriate to our
case: a pilot flame was already alight and, at the right moment, ignites the whole load of
fuel. See Mentzos 1993: 34.
22 Sophocles 1991b: 165.
23 Solzhenitsyn 1971. The book is described as a novel, but Solzhenitsyn worked exten-
sively on the archives available at the time, both in his home country and in exile, in
order to produce a historically documented work.
24 See Hillman 1975: 238.
25 In this connection Hitler again provides us with an extreme example of paranoid
projection and circularity. In Mein Kampf, after devoting entire chapters to slandering
the Jews, he states that inventing falsehoods for the purpose of slander is one of the
traditional characteristics of Judaism (1925: 253). In Hitler it is very hard to identify the
borderline between a falsehood invented in bad faith and a falsehood based on a real
conviction. See Chapter 8 (of this book) for the concept of pseudologia phantastica.
26 Nietzsche 1886: aphorism no. 156.
27 Balzac 1999: maxim no. 276.
28 See for instance Hillman 2004: 25: ‘Mind you now: there may not actually be an enemy!
All along we are speaking of the idea of an enemy, a phantom enemy. It is not the enemy
that is essential to war and that forces wars upon us, but the imagination.’
29 See Kiernan 2007: 355–6.
40
30 See Plumelle-Uribe 2001: Parts I and II. For the direct influence on Hitler (the recon-
structions of which are imprecise but reliable) that the genocides of the past, especially
the extermination of the indigenous North American peoples, see below, Chapter 4,
note 21, and Chapter 8.
31 See Kershaw 2000: 132–3; and the diaries of Klemperer 1995, for 12 July 1938.
32 See Kershaw 2000: 244 ff.
33 Kershaw 2000: 244 ff. Kershaw describes conditions in the Polish ghettos as ‘almost
genocidal’ (p. 249).
34 See Hippler 1940.
35 Brigata XXVIII Marzo 1996. See also Tobagi 2009: 131, who discusses the communiqué
in which the killing of his father, a well-known political commentator and president of
the Order of Journalists of Lombardy was announced.
36 This seems to confirm a well-known formula of Rossana Rossanda: a ‘family album’
links the armed bands to old-style Stalinist communism (Rossanda 1978: 1). Extracts
from her article are reproduced on many internet websites and in various books, includ-
ing Zavoli 1992: 78.
37 Weil 1957: 28.
38 Zoja 2009b.
39 Grover et al. 2006.
40 Lifton 1967: Chapter 12.
41 Lifton 1973: 146–7.
42 ‘Everything in this world exudes crime: the newspapers, the walls and the face of man’
(Baudelaire 1859–66: 88).
43 Mao Zedong, Little Red Book, 26 May 1939.
44 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, II, 63; V, 95.
45 Glover 1999: Part 1, Chapters 4 and 5.
46 Dower 1986: Chapter 11B.
47 On this theme, see Klibansky et al. 1964.
48 Canetti 1960: 87.
49 Canetti 1960: 87.
50 Weil 1957: 26 and 28.
51 Weil 1957: 29.
52 It is interesting that this metaphor for the unstoppable collective mental process was
used to describe the beginning of the First World War, both by the German chancellor,
Bethmann-Hollweg, and by Hitler: ‘The stone has started rolling’, exclaimed the future
Führer, not fearfully but exuding enthusiasm, ‘and cannot be stopped’ (1925: 174).
53 Cf. Hofstadter 1965: 4.
54 Hoftstadter 1965: 4 (my italics).
55 A historico-political classification of these phenomena concerns our theme from several
points of view, but it now constitutes such a wide field of study that we can only refer to
it indirectly.To gather information on it, I used the following texts: Chalk and Jonassohn
1990; Sémelin 2005; Bouda 2008; Gellately and Kiernan 2003; Bartov and Mack 2001;
Bensoussan 2006; Kiernan 2007; Levene and Roberts 1999; Lifton and Markusen 1988.
56 Kiernan 2007: 440.
57 Brandes et al. 2010: 693 ff.
58 Chalk and Jonassohn 1990: 29ff.
59 Mann, Michael 2005: 17 and 321 ff.
60 Coates 1999: 164.
61 Both definitions appear in Horowitz 2001: Chapter 11.
62 Chirot and McCauley 2006: Chapter 1.
63 Mann, Michael 2005, especially Chapters 1 and 2.
64 Stinnett 2000.
65 Ulrich 2009: 49–51.
66 See Hitler 1925: 221–4; Kershaw 1998: 3; Fest 1973: part 1, Chapter 5.
41
67 See Horowitz 2001: Chapter 3.

68 See Kershaw 2000: Chapter 10.
69 See Fussell 1989: 64.
70 See Fussell 1989: 63–4.
71 See Zoja 2002.
72 Sloterdijk 2000: Chapter 1.
73 Personal communication from Sudhir Kakar, the author who has analysed the inter-
ethnic massacres in India (cf. Kakar 1996).
74 Constitution of the Italian Republic, art. 32.
75 Jaspers 1913: 443.
76 Nicholi 1978: 251.
77 Developing Hitler’s analysis, Canetti asserts that paranoia has two faces: persecution and
megalomania (1972a: 117).
78 Jean-Paul Sartre’s celebrated play Huis clos ends with the words ‘Hell is other people.’
79 Gabbard 2000: 401.
80 Gabbard 2000: 401 (my italics).
81 Gabbard 2000: 401–2 and Table 14.1.
42
2
THE BEGINNINGS
Myth and history
Many individuals, and many peoples, may come to feel, more or less
consciously, that ‘every foreigner is an enemy’. Usually this conviction
remains deep down in the mind, like a latent infection; it manifests itself
only in occasional uncoordinated acts, and does not give rise to a system of
thought. But when that does happen – when unexpressed dogma becomes
the major premise of a syllogism – the concentration camp is at the end of
the chain.1
Cain’s envy
The history of the paranoid style is coterminous with the history of the human
race. We come across it at the beginning of the Scriptures.
The Lord is pleased with Abel’s offerings, but not with Cain’s. The modern
mentality, after millennia of Christian morality, finds it hard to understand this
biblical God, who is as irrational as the gods of the ancient Greeks. But the Bible
stories taught people who had not been brought up with the idea of free will to
accept life’s unpredictability.
This patient relationship with the will of heaven – or, to invert the map of the
world in a psychological dimension, with individual destiny – seems unknown to
Cain.Visual representations of the episode show the smoke of his offerings, unlike that
of Abel’s, not rising up to God. And Cain, instead of examining his own conscience
and asking himself whether he has done anything wrong, becomes angry:2 he finds
an external responsibility. It is here, rather than in homicidal aggression, that his real
problem lies. He gives himself neither the time nor the opportunity to understand.
Cain seems to have felt, with the unshakeable conviction of someone opening
their eyes to a revealed truth, that the Lord and Abel have plotted against him. The
only response is to strike first – without asking for explanations, which would alarm
43
The beginnings: myth and history 43
his enemy. Long before he kills, he is already in error. A mental error which we can
make every day but which can end in fratricide. Cain’s original sin is not murder,
but paranoia. Thousands of years before becoming a psychiatric problem, paranoia
is already a moral problem.
His envious style derives from suspicion. The ‘revelation’ of an agreement
between God and Abel becomes a reason for attacking his brother. The killing
of Abel does not come about in a moment of anger; it is planned in solitude and
secrecy. Just as Ajax had crept out of his tent, alone, to murder the Atreids. Cain and
Ajax are the mythical metaphors for suspicion, its Jewish and Greek background.
Like Ajax, Cain will feel that he has missed his target, and fall into despair.
What alternatives did he have? To let himself be humiliated? Attack God Himself?
Paranoia’s path is always blocked: its attack is absurd, but all other solutions seem
impossible. Ajax was utterly alone and chose suicide. Cain, however, has above him
a God who won’t let him kill himself or be killed: the Lord brands him with the
‘mark of Cain’, which will make him recognizable and prevent others from taking
his life.3 His sentence is different. Expiation is not dying, but continuing to live with
the awareness of his error.
The paranoid attitude makes a split and a projection: evil is violently cut off from
the self and attributed to the adversary. But the evil should be redeemed. The projec-
tion must be brought back to the individual. To the classical mentality, which is clear
and tragic, redemption is recognizing the evil as one’s own, then accepting responsibil-
ity for it and its price, by self-sacrifice. Ajax knows this simple wisdom. To him, too,
paranoid error was a moral error, to be expiated by suicide, which restored honour.
This escape route is barred by the one God of the Jewish and Christian tradition,
who places an absolute taboo on life. Life belongs to God. Man is contiguous to
God, an extension of Him. The ultimate tribunal is in heaven. This makes impos-
sible the radical acceptance of responsibility contained in self-murder, the redemp-
tion which the classical world could achieve. Despite its loving intention, the
Christianization of the Graeco-Roman world reopens a path for paranoia. Radical
responsibilities can be forgiven, but no longer completely expiated. If they end up
becoming unbearable, they will be projected again.
A further step will be taken by Protestantism: the need for purity (Puritanism)
impels one to drive evil even further away from the self. In its quest for the absolute,
Protestantism attacks imperfect figures. It eliminates images from churches and saints
from the sacred texts – everything that recalls the ambiguous pagan myths. But in so
doing it also eliminates symbols, the compositions that keep ‘together’ (syn-) good and
evil, as happens with the people of this earth. In the Puritan perfecting of monothe-
ism, to be just is more and more necessary, but also less and less real, less human.
The enemy in the Aeneid

Where do the roots of the paranoid West lie?
For a long time, down through history, relations between states, and the assigna-
tion of power within each society, are far from following any formal logic, and are
44
44 The beginnings: myth and history
based on tradition or on mere respect for force. Waging war against one’s neigh-
bours or trying to seize power is customary. This implies a significant difference
from modern wars and massacres; no rational justifications are sought to affirm the
necessity of conflict.4 Sometimes it expands into total war and extermination, but
usually peoples stop at defeating and subjugating their enemy. Primitive peoples and
non-European empires give war a ritualistic, symbolic value linked to the personal-
ity of their leader.
The historians of the classical West – Thucydides and Livy, Polybius and
Tacitus – speak of political and military necessities, not clashes between good and
evil. One exterminated, on the assumption that one was doing what the others
would have done if they had been in our position.
Similarly, in epic poetry war does not imply such a ruthless psychological conflict
as that of armed struggle. The Iliad describes the Greeks and their Trojan enemies
with equal admiration and affection. The Aeneid, however, already begins to dis-
tinguish between Aeneas, the pure hero, and Turnus, the impure enemy. Indirectly,
Virgil’s poem makes a first Puritan division.
The European mind takes its first, hesitant steps towards rationality. It starts to
describe its world not, as before, with the language of myth, but with that of justice.
This is a new advance but also a new reason for anxiety. Anyone who is not in the
right feels threatened with moral death, previously only a remote risk. So he projects
moral death on to the enemy. The enemy must not merely be killed, but also hated.
Attributing to him the quality not just of an enemy but also of moral evil responds
to two new needs: in the external world, the new need not only to be victorious
but to be in the right is clothed in rationality; within the psyche, anxiety about
morally dying is kept under control.
The pollen of paranoia begins to spread over battlefields, dehumanizing
conflict. Virgil does not call it that, of course; he uses the mythical language of
Roman religion. The Erinyes were very ancient Greek deities, probably remnants
of a previous matriarchal order. Personifications of ferocious justice, expressions
of the remorse of those who had committed a crime, they shocked with their
black appearance, waving snakes. Their equivalents in Rome were the Furies,
the goddess Furina and the god Furor. Their names are derived from their dark
colour (furvus); they are primordial forms of destructiveness and psychic evil.
In not dissimilar terms, Jung’s psychology has called this repressed part of the
personality the ‘shadow’.
In the Iliad the Erinyes do not concern themselves with human beings. They
intervene only to silence Achilles’ horse, which, having the gift of speech, might
distract the hero from the fight.5 The Furies, by contrast, participate in the action of
the Aeneid so actively as to terrorize an entire population. Book VII is dominated
by their hatred, an irresistibly infectious psychic quality.
Juno aims to destroy Aeneas and the Trojans. In order to carry out her plan she
abandons the attempt to convince the other celestial gods and appeals to those of
the underworld, who preside over destruction and death. Flectere si nequeo superos,
Acheronta movebo: ‘If I cannot persuade the supernal gods, I will move the infernal
45
ones’, she declares.6 So vividly does Juno’s choice illustrate the dark human impulses
that Freud chose her for the frontispiece of his Interpretation of Dreams.
So Juno communicates her plan and her hatred to the Fury Aletto. The latter,
in turn, contaminates with her rage the queen of the Latini, Amata. Finally, Amata
storms through the city, poisoning the Latin women with thoughts of death.
Hatred’s chain of command is red-hot, right to the final link. The repressed, dark
side of society, whose bright values are male, is unconsciously associated with the
female. Aletto visits Turnus in a dream and urges him to fight at once. Aware of his
own warlike masculinity, the young man mocks her. At this the Fury attacks him,
cutting his mind to shreds and turning him into a puppet filled with a yearning for
death.7 This is one of the earliest symbolic descriptions of delusion taking over con-
sciousness. Then the paranoia is communicated to the whole army and possesses it.
Reason reels, like a bush borne down by the hurricane of hatred that sweeps across
Latium. For hundreds of lines the Aeneid is filled with bestial shrieks, poisonous
snakes and torches that burn people to death. Hurled with superhuman strength, all
this instantly enters the hearts of men, turning them into beasts.
The Roman Furies have preserved the irresistible autonomy of the Greek
Erinyes; but unlike them, they are only destructive. They seem to have lost any
connection with justice.The remorse represented by the Erinyes, though expressed
in terrible forms, was a distorted moral function. The Fury, by contrast, is injus-
tice, even when moderate: destructive intoxication now as an end in itself, not
as punishment for a crime. A transition surprisingly similar to that of paranoia,
which begins by demanding a restoration of justice but ends up expressing only
destructiveness.
The development of the relationship between paranoia

and politics
The birth of democratic institutions is also, paradoxically, the birth of paranoid
institutions.When Athens handed control over to the people, she also granted them
the power of ostracism. For the first time, everyone had the freedom to express
themselves and aspire to office. But the whole populace was also given the task of
thinking and the freedom to be suspicious. Anyone who suspected that someone
might misuse power had the right to send them pre-emptively into exile for ten years.
In a secret ballot the names of the persons who were to be exiled were written on
shards (ostrakà, hence the term ‘ostracism’). Thus mistrust was accorded a juridical
role. Fantasies about possible facts (not the facts) and explanations of the future (not
the present) acquired legal value.8
A psychologically similar institution would survive in France until the
Revolution. With a lettre du cachet, the King could send a citizen to prison or into
exile without any court having pronounced sentence or any authority having car-
ried out investigations into the matter. The suspicion that someone might become
an enemy was sufficient for them to be considered an enemy. This pre-emptive
measure encouraged continual court intrigues aimed at getting rid of adversaries.
46
In the European imagination, the year 1000 is associated with legends of cata-
clysms and the end of the world. It is difficult today to reconstruct the state of
mind of the populations of that time, keeping it distinct from rulers’ manipulations
and later accretions. But there must have been a sense of guilt in the collective
unconscious. This relationship with responsibility, however, seems the opposite of
the paranoid one. The prevailing attitude was depressive, each person feeling that the
guilt was their own; that is to say, the individual worked through the moral implica-
tions without necessarily attributing them to an enemy.
Out of this collective self-analysis there would gradually arise a new world.
The meditative world of the High Middle Ages would give way to a more active
Christianity, which evangelized eastern Europe, created communications and
expanded its own curiosity.9
These results may indeed themselves be proof that a depressive attitude prevailed
over the paranoid one. As has been mentioned, in its formal rationality paranoia
often seeks immediate results; over time, however, its initial haste has to pay a price
for the error concealed in its premise. The depressive attitude, by contrast, involves
an acceptance of responsibility, even to an excessive degree, and an inner process-
ing of it, of which there may be for a long time no visible outer effects. Unlike the
paranoid attitude, however, it can lead to ripening over time.
In the Middle Ages, behaviour towards those who were considered conveyors
of evil could be extremely simple: the primacy of theology overcame all doubts. In
1209 the Albigensian Crusade took the city of Béziers. In the ensuing massacre, the
Crusaders asked the pope’s representative, Armand Amaury, how they were to tell
the heretics from the Catholics. ‘Tuez-les tous’, Amaury replied; ‘Dieu reconnaîtra
les siens’ (Kill them all; God will recognize his own.)
Gradually, however, rationality demanded a say in things. New forms of knowl-
edge developed outside theology. The universities were created. Scholasticism
aimed to make Christianity a truth not only of faith but also of reason.This implied
an attempt to define more rationally who was faithless and guilty, so that one could
differentiate oneself from them.
A foundational phase in the history of European paranoia is the fourteenth
century. In partial conjunction with certain catastrophic events – wars, famines,
epidemics of the plague – society was rocked by monstrous waves of suspicion. In
a single day, 14 February 1349 (St Valentine’s Day), 2,000 Jews were burned alive in
Strasbourg alone. Many prejudices hitherto directed at minorities – Muslims, Jews,
lepers, women regarded as witches – were generalized, systematized and merged
with attempts to find a reason for the calamities.10 The marriage between politics
and paranoia began. Unlike what had happened in previous persecutions, the group
that acted as the scapegoat was not only accused – or no longer accused – of wicked
rituals which had caused the disaster, but of seemingly more concrete, rational acts.
They were accused, for example, of poisoning the public water supply. The ancient
ritual of the scapegoat started to give way to modern conspiracy theories.
These ‘conspiracies’ were reconstructed through inquiries which showed a sur-
prising – but only apparent – aspect of legal procedure and proto-scientific analysis.
47
The plague, for example, was not called a scourge of God but, centuries ahead of its
time, an epydemie, as in modern medicine.11 The investigations were complex and
detailed. Indeed, as with the Nazi archives in the twentieth century, the documents’
very meticulousness today becomes an act of self-accusation, which enables us to
reconstruct the crime committed by the investigators. The slander was no less false
than in earlier times. In fact, the attack on the minority, judged to be guilty even
before the investigations were carried out, was even more complete and violent.
But prejudice and persecution were rationalized, and arm in arm with paranoia,
they set off towards the modern world.
Columbus’s delusion
In the transitional period between antiquity and the modern age, nothing shook
the history and mind of man so much as the discovery of his unknown half. The
year 1492 was the watershed, and the throne of Castille and Aragon were the altar
on which the ritual was performed.
When Columbus first landed in the New World, he held a model ceremony,
which served as a pre-emptive justification for future massacres. The multiplication of
theological and political debates had produced an embryonic form of international
law. So the rationalization of suspicion required that, if there was a conflict, one
should be able to justify it from the outset, and put oneself in the right.
The admiral brought ashore flags and swords. But he knew that he had to defend
the Spanish kings from the legal point of view as well: it must be guaranteed that,
if armed force had to be used, the blame would fall on the victims. His ritual was a
bridge between the religious mentality of the Middle Ages and the juridical men-
tality of the modern world. He dictated to Rodrigo de Escobedo, the expedition’s
notary, a formula stating that he took possession of the land by divine right and in
the name of the Catholic kings. As witnesses to this act, with such immense juridi-
cal implications, he cited the members of his expedition who were present, not the
assembled indigenous people, to whom the land belonged.12
In the same year, the kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim state in western
Europe, was defeated by the Catholic armies, and its representatives set sail for
Africa. Still in 1492, the first modern act of ethnic-religious cleansing took place,
rationally organized and supported by judicial measures: the Jews, too, were
expelled from Spain or forced to convert. Lastly, in the same year, also in Spain, by
order of the Catholic sovereigns, Antonio de Nebrija published the first grammar
of a national language, Castilian. Thus the main cultural sword for battles among
modern peoples was forged. Over the next few centuries, a wealth of studies on
European national languages would set about honing its blade. The rationalization
of the world advanced, through the construction of clear, distinct archives capable
of marking out the categories of ‘us’ and ‘others’.
The discovery of the new hemisphere was of such immense significance that it
filled every mental corner of those involved. Just as he held authority over the ships
that had been placed at his disposal, so Columbus wanted to remain the admiral of
48
his own mind. But he was unable to do so. He dimly perceived that both the size
and the nature of the new lands were beyond his comprehension, and he struggled
with himself not to be overwhelmed by the evidence.
Edmund O’Gorman has analysed the successive stages of self-deception that
brought Columbus to the verge of madness.13 For dogmatic mentalities like his,
the only continents that existed must be those that were already known, for the
Scriptures said that the good news had already been heard all over the world.14 So
Columbus had to renounce either the revealed truth that he had been brought up
to believe in, or the evidence that he saw in front of him. As if captured by paranoia,
he persisted in his false basic assumption, gradually constructing a series of fantasy
substitutions.
The first time he met the indigenous people, Columbus described them in
idyllic terms.They are of noble character, he wrote to the sovereigns.They are only
too eager to become Christians.15 His relations with the local chieftains, whom he
formally recognized, were good. Before returning to Europe, he left a garrison of
thirty-nine men on Haiti (then known as Española).16
He arrived in the new lands for the second time on 27 November 1493. Barely
a year had passed, but everything had changed. The thirty-nine Spaniards had been
killed by the natives for raping their women. In an instant the course of the ensuing
centuries was determined. Relations between the indigenous people and the white
men had already moved on from curiosity to persecution. Persecution, unlike peace,
is self-nurturing. Christian feeling was like a transient arrow. Racism, however, was
an oak that rose to the sky and would put down deep roots throughout the second
millennium of the Christian era.
The European version of the history of America had only just begun but, as
in the Bible, paranoia had already written the first of a long series of chapters,
which included gang rape, total war and genocide. On his first voyage of discovery
Columbus had turned the thirty-nine men left on Haiti into the first colonists. It
was a foretaste of the plan of the Spanish Conquista. The immigrants were male; the
demographic growth of the new society depended on the rape of Indian women,
the extermination of their men, forced concubinage and the birth of illegitimate
children. For centuries this would prevent the formation of a stable society in Latin
America, unlike what would happen in the British colonies to the north.
From his second voyage onwards, Columbus’s descriptions of the Indians are
characterized by distrust. Projection and suspicion make their appearance. Now he
encourages violence against the natives. He asks Spain for dogs of war to unleash
on them. According to some estimates, on the Spaniards’ arrival in 1492 there were
1.1 million Tainos living on Haiti; according to others, as many as 8 million.17 By
1507, their number had dwindled to 60,000. By 1520, only 1,000. A few years later
they died out.18
On his four transatlantic voyages, Columbus was tormented by a growing con-
tradiction. He had to keep faith with the optimistic programme with which he
had seduced the kings of Spain, but also carry out conquests and maintain order by
violence. He had to claim that he had reached Asia, as he still believed he had, but
49
describe lands unknown to maps. Columbus became incomprehensible to himself.

He projected the otherness that he had in himself on to others. All his relations,
both with the indigenous peoples and with the court, were now based on suspicion,
until, in 1500, he was dismissed.
While Vespucci’s maps were already describing a new continent, called America,
Columbus died alone and resentful, persisting like a misunderstood hero in his
original certainty of having reached Asia from the west.
Dogma was everything in Columbus’s life. He wanted to gain the kings new
subjects, converted to Christianity. Unlike the conquistadors who would come after
him, he did not primarily seek material advantages, even though he let his men lust
after gold and women. This insistence on conversion, as Messianic and totalitar-
ian as that of St Paul, but lacking his dialectic, lends support to the theory that the
Columbuses were converted Jews, who may, as often happens, have embraced their
new religion in a particularly rigid manner, seeking stability after their dramatic
change of faith.
In human conflict, a disparity of forces has always encouraged wolf-like aggres-
sion. As in the wolf of the fable, so in the unconscious of the stronger individual the
decision to attack tends to be taken from the outset. Since the spread of Christianity,
however, and even more so since people had begun to discuss international law,
it had become necessary to find formal reasons for attacking the weaker party.
This task was delegated to a paranoid interpretation which authorized pre-emptive
attack: in effect, it received an impulse from the very legal system that should have
prevented it.
In the ancient fable, too, the wolf never doubts that he can devour the lamb. But
he has to pay a modest price: he has to justify his act – that is, to ‘make it just’. So
he resorts first to victimization, then to formal logic and, finally, to paranoia, the
only thing which, since it consists of absolute certainties, can put a final end to the
dialogue. ‘You’re muddying my water’, he says at first.
‘That’s not possible: I’m drinking from the same brook, but downstream
from you.’
‘But a year ago you slandered me!’
‘No, Mr Wolf: a year ago I hadn’t even been born.’
‘If it wasn’t you, it was definitely your brother.’
Wolfish paranoia does not merely heap fantasy wrongs on to the shoulders of
the weaker; it considers them primal crimes, transforming its own aggression into a
consequence of the harm it has attributed to them.
A voice crying in the wilderness: Brother Antonio Montesinos

The scale of the naval and military task which the Catholic kings faced with the
Conquista was immense. It had no precedent in human history. Yet within a few
decades the Spanish conquered most of North and South America, leaving the
remnants to Portugal, England and France. But the philosophical, juridical and cul-
tural task presented by the encounter with the New World was so vast that it
50
has never been resolved down the centuries. Were the indigenous peoples human
beings, on the same level as the Europeans? Why had the Lord not made the Gospel
reach them? By what right would the new lands be subject to the crown of Castille
and Aragon? By what means would the new peoples be made Christian?
To the modern observer, events were determined by power relationships. For the
people of the time, that was not the case. Or at least, that was not the only factor. An
obsessive concern with legality and procedural correctness pervaded the ecclesiastical
authorities and the court. The overwhelming Catholic need for absolution and the
moral consistency of some churchmen made Spain the only empire in history to have
questioned its own right to ‘conquest’. And it was not a later revision but a debate
which split the country from the very first day of colonization.
The flame of the fire was kindled in the Dominican monastery of Española.19
On Sunday, 4 December 1511, Brother Antonio Montesinos began his sermon
by recalling the divine voice that had cried in the wilderness (Matthew 3:3).
Then he pointed at the Spanish noblemen who had come to mass and delivered
the most violent sermon in the history of the Church: ‘You are, you live and
die, in mortal sin’, he said, because of the appalling treatment they had inflicted
on the natives.
Among the congregation was Bartolomé de Las Casas, then a lukewarm priest
who had not yet become a Dominican. He was deeply impressed and was con-
verted to the Indios’ cause. He would spend his life defending them, in writings
which contain a good many exaggerations.
But Diego Columbus, son of the discoverer and an admiral by inheritance, and
other adventurers and royal envoys who were present, shouted their disapproval.
Summoning the friars’ superior, they demanded a recantation, for Montesinos’
words called into question, after all the services they had rendered to the Crown
and the Church, their right to dominion over the land and over the naturales, as the
indigenous peoples were called.
The following Sunday, Montesinos climbed up into the pulpit again for his
‘recantation’. The friars, he announced, had made a joint decision. They would
refuse to hear the confessions of Spanish colonists or grant them absolution, as was
the normal practice with brigands. Not a word of God until they changed their
lives. Let them write to Madrid if they wished. The Dominicans too served God
and the King.
The cross and interest

The dispute crossed to Spain, where it spread like wildfire. Two factors continually
seemed to tip the balance in favour of the rights of the indigenous peoples: the
superior intelligence and moral strength of their supporters and the naive but tor-
mented consciences of the sovereigns. As early as 1495 Queen Isabella had been
absolutely furious about a ‘gift’ from Columbus. The navigator had brought her as
a tribute from America several hundred naturales. The sovereign had immediately
ordered that the survivors be taken back to their homeland.20
51
After Montesinos had paid a visit to Spain, and under the growing influence of
Las Casas, the rights of the indigenous peoples were codified in the Laws of Burgos
(1512). These were accompanied by the Requerimento, a legally binding document
which the Spanish were obliged to make known to the indigenous peoples when
they arrived in new lands and intended to take possession of them. We will see
shortly, however, that this procedure was based on mistrust and did not provide the
natives with any real guarantees.
The University of Salamanca was becoming the cultural driving force of Spain
and the model for new centres of knowledge in Latin America (the universities of
Santo Domingo, Lima and Mexico). The ideas of Father Francisco de Vitoria, an
early propagator of international law and natural law, seemed to hold sway.21 The
main focus of the debate was not – contrary to what some superficial accounts
have claimed – the question of whether the natives were human beings and had a
soul; few had dared to doubt this, and the Papal Bull Sublimis Deus, promulgated in
1537, had come down decisively on the side of the indigenous peoples. The main
point at issue was a different one. According to Vitoria, they also had a natural right
to their country. The lands of Spanish America were not extensions of Spain. They
were separate kingdoms, temporarily administered by the Spanish crown in a good
cause, in order to educate and Christianize the natives. It should not be forgotten
that the sixteenth century was also the century of the Protestant Reformation. The
trauma of Christian division encouraged in Latin America the theory of ‘compen-
sation’: the discovery of America, the greatest event in Creation since the birth of
Christ, had been guided by Providence to compensate for Luther’s schism.22
In 1542, the pressure exerted by Las Casas led to the Leyes Nuevas, or ‘new laws’.
The conquistadores were no longer known by that name, but were called descubridores.
The word conquista was abolished; the penetration of the new lands could only
be peaceful. The Valladolid Debate (1550–1), between the conservative imperial-
ist theories of the Dominican Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the radical libertarian
ideas of his fellow Dominican, Las Casas, led officially to the victory of the latter
ideas. Another well-known theologian, Brother Bartolomé de Carranza, a pupil of
Vitoria, contributed to the triumph of Las Casas’ theories. Carranza even went so
far as to predict that Spain would renounce its dominion over the American lands
and the native peoples within two decades.23
On 13 July 1573, Philip II published the Ordenanzas de Nuevos Descubrimientos
y Poblaciones. These norms seem to culminate in an early form of universal human
rights. The pactismo promoted by Las Casas and Vitoria was triumphant. Not even
the pope could impose obedience on a foreign king; in order to be subject to Spain,
native peoples must freely sign agreements.24
But what really happened in practice? The indigenous peoples were dying at
an exponential rate. Like the Tainos on the islands, a few decades after Columbus’s
discovery several populations on the mainland had already died out. During the
course of the sixteenth century as much as 98 per cent of the population disap-
peared in entire regions of Central America. In Latin America as a whole, if the
indigenous population at the time of the conquest is set at 100, it is estimated that
52
between 1492 and 1633 it dropped to 11.9; in other words, it lost 88.1 per cent of
its inhabitants.25
Equally swift was the rise in the number of crown envoys and colonists. The
crucial fact is that their wealth, power and control of the territory increased – again,
exponentially. Meanwhile the friars’ torches, like all blazes of intellectual move-
ments, burned out.
Once the Aztec empire had been defeated, its administration was reorganized,
already after 1530, according to radically new criteria. Almost all the original
documents were destroyed in the Conquista. The indigenous peoples (re)wrote (in
Náhuatl, but using the Latin alphabet, and from a Hispanocentric point of view) the
Titulos primordiales and the codes, which were legally necessary for access to the land
and psychologically necessary for the survival of a collective identity.26
This ‘cleansing’ of the origins is a first great falsification of the formally sanc-
tioned history. Under the political and economic pressure of the institutions that
dominated the continent, the Dominicans and Franciscans fell into discredit and
were replaced by the docile secular clergy and by state functionaries. Carranza’s fate
is significant. In 1559 the Inquisition put him on trial. He was acquitted only in
1576, barely in time for his death.
In the second half of the century, in Lima, the viceroy Toledo carried out a radi-
cal territorial reform of what was left of the Incan empire, actually accusing the
religious orders of a separatist conspiracy.27
What swords were unable to do was done by disease. Measles, smallpox and
typhus had arrived with the ships from Europe. Most of the colonists had anti-
bodies and were not seriously affected by them, but the indigenous peoples had
no defences and dropped like flies; according to a chronicler of the period, the
Franciscan Motolinia, the epidemic of 1545–8 alone wiped out 60–80 per cent
of the population of Central Mexico.28 In the absence of medical knowledge, this
death rate enabled the conquistadors to perform a literally providential exercise in
the inversion of causes: the slaughter had not been caused by an infection brought by
the Europeans; it was a punishment sent by Providence, because the natives were
idolaters and barbarians.
Paranoid law
As usually happens in enterprises of this kind, and as we have seen in the case
of Columbus’s first voyage, among the immigrants the unscrupulous adventur-
ers were prevailing over the idealists. A corresponding psychological process was
taking place within the colonists’ personalities. Real situations determined the
law, not the other way round. The new white ruling class was less and less pre-
pared to accept responsibility or be self-critical, and more and more paranoically
inclined to seek a scapegoat in the friars’ idealism or the ‘natural’ inferiority of
the indigenous people. The latter, overwhelmed by the need to survive or even
by ‘identification with the aggressor’, tragically helped to confirm these opin-
ions: the drawing up of the Titulos primordiales was a collective introjection of the
53
colonists’ paranoia, and in its turn created the false premise which every persecu-
tory process needs in order to develop.
The Requerimiento itself, the crucial text which one had to read out when taking
possession of new territories, epitomizes this perversion.
Following the model set by Columbus on the day of the discovery, in 1512 Juan
Lopez de Palacios Rubios had drafted the legal document that was to accompany
the encounter with new lands and new peoples. In effect it granted the kings of
Spain authority over those lands and peoples, not after the negotiation of an agree-
ment, but pre-emptively. Though formally a declaration of trust, the Requerimiento
was a product of mistrust. In fact, it was a warning:
On behalf of the King of Castille and Léon […] we inform you […] that our
Lord God created heaven, earth and the human race […]. The human race
has been scattered all over the earth and divided into kingdoms. […] God
entrusted authority over all this to a man named Peter, […] and installed him
in Rome. Men obeyed him […] and they did the same with Peter’s successors.
One of these pontiffs has given the said King the lands here present, with all
that they contain, as is shown by documents which you may view if you wish.
The inhabitants of other lands have already submitted […] of their own
free will, and, without conditions or rewards, have become Christians. […]
You are required to do the same […].You will keep your wives, your children,
your freedom and your property. […] We do not oblige you to convert, […]
as almost everyone has done hitherto. But if you do not make this act of
submission, or if you maliciously delay making it, we will enter your lands by
force, wage war against you […], enslave you, your women and your children,
and sell you or dispose of you as Their Majesties command, and take your
property and do the greatest possible damage to them; and we hereby declare
that the resulting destruction and death will not be the responsibility of Their
Majesties, nor of the soldiers who accompany us, but yours alone.
We request that this warning be certified in writing by the notary here
present, and that everyone present bear witness to it.29
The Requerimiento was to be read out, audibly, and in a comprehensible language,

on arrival in any new land. Conditions which were impossible to satisfy, since in
most cases it would not be known where the main human settlements were, what
language was spoken there, or who the legitimate representatives were.
More than the legal aspect of the document, what interests us here is the para-
noid aspect. In the first place, the Requerimiento is an expression of absurd consis-
tency: it imposes conditions whose realization is both compulsory and impossible at
the same time. The text starts, like paranoia, from false but unshakeable premises. The
papal bull of 1493 had drawn an ideal dividing line on the earth between Spain and
Portugal. Since the new lands were to the west of that line, they were Spanish. (The
king of France, it is said, had sarcastically asked to be shown Adam’s last will and
testament, on which the bull was supposed to be based.)
54
Moreover, the Requerimiento enters relations with the new interlocutors not
through dialogue, but through suspicion. The adversary’s position is not deduced
from facts but pre-emptively imagined by the compiler, who makes no provi-
sion for the opposite party to express its own views, present a contrary argument
or make other choices. The text of the Requerimiento seethes with barely con-
tainable haste and already prepares a radical projection of blame and a pre-emptive
attack: things are so arranged that, whatever happens, the victim will be responsible
for the sacrifice he makes. The conflict is not only with the adversary, whose
destruction is anticipated; it is also, and even more tragically, the inner conflict of
the paranoiac, between his simplistic good faith and the evil that he has within him
but does not recognize.
The obsessiveness of the details evokes the void of feelings that is hidden behind
the formal logic: what does it matter if the donation to the kings of Castille is
recorded in a written document, given that the donation was made without the
indigenous people’s knowledge? What does the presence of a notary and witnesses
to the Requerimiento matter, if their presence, too, was not negotiated by both
parties, but extorted by just one of them?
The style reproduces the structure of the wolf ’s speech to the lamb, which
here becomes a premise for the genocide of the native peoples. The passages are
interlinked, but their legitimacy derives from an initial assertion whose accuracy is
neither proved nor provable, for it is a primal revelation: where is the proof that
God conferred universal jurisdiction, including that over the Americas, on the pope
of Rome? Today even a Catholic believer would demand such proof.
The Requerimiento seems to us an absurd, formalistic reply to the doubts which
tormented Spanish theology and philosophy. But precisely because profound
doubts were met with a superficial answer, it was not possible to placate the age-
old Catholic tendency towards autoparanoia – that is, towards feeling self-doubt and
confessing those doubts.That tendency survived the passing centuries, and probably
prevented – despite the Inquisition, the extreme social injustices and the lack of
respect for every kind of right – the spread in Spanish dominions of heteroparanoid
mental models such as social Darwinism, eugenetics and formal racism, which put
down roots further north.
When drawing up legal procedures, the paranoid spirit always reveals a dark
fear of facing up to another dimension, a real adversary. So it attempts, with formal
pretexts, to create a closed, self-sufficient system. Absurdly, grotesquely, wolfishly –
to our eyes, for we know that the adversary will be annihilated in any case – the
attempt is made to ensure that, for as long as the enemy lives, he will be linked to
the paranoid individual by cooperation. His destruction is far from being limited to
a political, social or military function: the paranoid power also endows it with a
profound symbolic mission and an unconscious psychotherapeutic purpose.
Although the paranoiac seems immoral to us, he is not indifferent or amoral, like
the psychopath. His obsessive quest for justice reveals a desperate need to win the
battle of responsibility, at the cost of mechanizing it to such an extent as to empty
it of all meaning.
55
A constant feature of the paranoiac is a profound sense of solitude. If he hates,

and kills, it is partly because he is seeking a relationship. Unable to build one
with emotion, he creates a perverted, upside-down form of one. But it is still a
relationship, however unconscious it may be. So the victim must cooperate as
actively as possible.
The paranoid model is timeless, archetypal. Its need for relationship and cooper-
ation reappears in a wide variety of circumstances. At their trials, witches and untori
(‘spreaders of the plague’) must ‘spontaneously’ confess.The inhabitants of the lands
where the conquistadors disembarked must ‘spontaneously’ convert. Stalin’s trials
require the defendant to play an active part in constructing the slanders that will
destroy them. The Nazis force Jewish organizations to draw up lists of people to be
sent to the death camps, and inside the camps they choose teams of inmates to look
after the workings of the crematoria. At their trials of opponents, the Nazis do not
require the victims to accept the logic behind the verdict, but they do demand that
they make a financial contribution to the cost of their own execution. Anyone who
goes today to visit Plötensee Prison, on the outskirts of Berlin, now transformed
into a memorial, will find the execution expenses meticulously itemized in a bill,
which was sent to the family and even included the cost of the postage stamp.
Beyond the tragic irony of these procedures, we note a subtle despair in the
paranoiac. His mind rests on a primordial fracture and an irreparable infantile inse-
curity; he tries to reconstruct artificially, by any means available to him, the unity
he has never had and the confirmation he has never received.
Notes
1 Levi 1997a: preface.
2 Genesis 4:6–7.
3 See Genesis 4:15.
4 See Pagden 2001.
5 See Homer, Iliad, XIX, 418.
6 Virgil, Aeneid,VII, 312.
7 Virgil, Aeneid,VII, 415–66.
8 See Zoja 2003: Chapter 5.
9 See Duby 1967.
10 See Ginzburg 1986; Girard 1982; Cohn 1967; Nirenberg 1996.
11 See Girard 1982: 16.
12 See Columbus 2000: 11 October 1492.
13 See O’Gorman 1958.
14 See Romans 10:18.
15 Columbus 2000: 12 (but dated 11) October 1492.
16 Columbus 2000: 2 January 1493.
17 See O’Gorman 1958.
18 See Bénot 2003.
19 The information that follows is drawn mainly from Thomas 2003: Chapter 4.
20 See Bénot 2003: 61.
21 See Pereña 1992.
22 See Frost 1992.
23 See Urban 1993.
56
24 See Levaggi 1993.
25 See Cook 1999; Mann, Charles 2005: Chapter 1.
26 See Florescano 1992.
27 See Abril Castelló 1993.
28 See Cook 1999: 309.
29 See Palacios Rubios 1512.
57
3
EUROPEAN NATIONALISM
From cultural renaissance to paranoia
To a wise man any land is suitable. A noble soul’s native land is the world.1
I am a man of necessity, and a Frenchman only by chance.2
The path of the new culture leads / from humanity / to bestiality / through
nationality.3
Supervising and mistrusting

One of the most famous works of Michel Foucault (1975) describes the genesis of
the modern prison system. That process is an important indication for our subject.
Deviations within a society are defined institutionally and entrusted to paranoid control.
In accordance with democratic and Enlightenment ideas, the nineteenth century
brought radical change. Public executions and torture were banned, and there was a
concern with re-educating the condemned criminal.This could have restricted one
traditional expression of collective paranoia: hitherto popular cohesion had been
created by choosing a symbol of evil to be slaughtered in public as a scapegoat. In
fact, however, the new ideas intensified the authorities’ interference not only with
prisoners, but with all those under their power.
Formerly a convict had been locked up in a dark dungeon and then practically
ignored. The model for the new imprisonment was provided by Jeremy Bentham’s
Panopticon. Numerous cells fanned out from a central tower, from which a single
guard could keep watch over the whole complex. The cells were open towards the
centre but closed on the sides. The prisoners could not see each other but could
always be seen by the guard. Bentham imagined equipping the new construction
with listening tubes running from each cell to the guard, who could thus also con-
tinually listen to all the inmates. Such a building would serve not only for segregat-
ing criminals, but also for mental patients, whom psychiatry was just beginning to
58
58 European nationalism
classify, workers on the new production lines, and other such classes of people; it
was a model of total surveillance for a power which presented itself as totalitarian
and wished to organize all its citizens’ activities and have complete control over
them. The new society planned buildings over-organized on the basis of mistrust.
The re-education of the convict and the attention paid to the mental patient and
the manual worker were humanitarian novelties, but were paid for by infiltration
of a paranoid nature.
The pride and suspicion of nations

Outside individual societies, in relations between states, paranoia increased
significantly.
In order to give his soldiers dreams of glory, Napoleon had reminded them
that they carried a marshal’s baton in their knapsacks. In reality, the baggage that
the French armies transported around Europe contained something more impor-
tant: the culture with which they had been enlisted. And along with it, nationalism.
They spread the idea of the constitutional state, the voice of the citizens, but also an
identity that was increasingly distinguished along ethnic lines.
The rights of individuals proclaimed by the French and American revolutions did
not always serve the power of the rulers. Indeed, the latter, including Napoleon
himself, were tempted to override them. The rights of nations, on the other hand,
once they had been rendered sacrosanct, constituted a resource for their leaders,
rather than an obligation. European nationalism was the continental and epochal
version of paranoid return.
National rights were unlikely to take the form of an authoritative document
valid for everyone, such as the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. They
did not limit the rulers’ power; on the contrary, they enhanced it by providing
them with new ways of manipulating the masses. In France, from the Revolution
to the present day, individual rights have encountered several interruptions.
Nationalism has not.
Before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment had begun to debate the
right of nations to be recognized as such and to govern themselves. Paradoxically,
however, it was Romanticism – the counterweight of Enlightenment culture – that
completed this juridical idea, giving it aesthetic form and accelerating its evolution.
German Romanticism presented itself as an alternative to the Enlightenment.
It brought about equilibrium by balancing the excesses of Enlightenment ratio-
nalism with intense feelings. But German nationalism, which was nurtured
by Romanticism, adopted and accentuated the aggression of French national-
ism. Schiller and Beethoven’s disappointment with the new order introduced by
Napoleon was the noble avant-garde of an ignoble path, which was destined to
slide down an inclined plane and become paranoid. At first it was an understand-
able reaction to French occupation. It was the confirmation of a national idea
which had originated in France, and, at the same time, its adversary: it ignited
a German nationalism that appealed to eternal rights, though in fact there was
59
European nationalism 59
no precedent for a national, unified German state. The cultural clash between the
Enlightenment and Romanticism enriched Europe immeasurably; the nationalistic
conflict between France and Germany completely devastated it. The brighter the
lights of reason shone, the darker became the shadows. The shadow of these great
cultural movements was destructive nationalism.
Cultural movements are passed on from one country to another as conscious
content but also by unconscious ‘psychic infection’. It is the same contagion of
collective emotions that occurs when a crowd gathers, but on a much larger scale.
The idea of the rights of man is exciting and can be passed on to new peoples,
after the people that developed it. It does not bring conflict between nations but
common ground: despite having fought against Napoleon, after the Napoleonic
wars most European countries permanently adopted the idea of the rights of man
which had been exported by France. The rights of peoples, which are the basis
of nationalism, are equally exciting and equally capable of being passed on by
psychic contagion. But the result is not a pleasant sight. The ideal spreads not by
identification but by contrast. The rights of man say: ‘we are all equal, we have the
same rights’.The rights of peoples say: ‘every people has the right not only to self-
government, but also to be recognized as a distinct, and therefore different, people’.
And if one persists in asking: ‘why are you different?’, sooner or later every people
will reply: ‘because we are superior’.
This creates the attitude which the psychoanalyst Erikson and human ethology
call ‘pseudospeciation’.4 Animals have an unerring ability to classify any animal they
meet. They can tell whether it belongs to the same species. Animals of a different
species are unlikely to be accepted into a pack, let alone mate with members of it.
And if mating does occur, it does not lead to pregnancy, proof that it is not intended
by nature (the exception that proves the rule is the mule, which is born from two
different species, but is itself sterile). By contrast, membership of the same species is
defined by ‘interfertility’ – that is, the possibility of mating and generating within it.
For a human being, cultural differences are the most obvious things he perceives
in a stranger. In humans, most of the body is covered with clothes, which vary
greatly from one country to another, and even from one social group to another;
so we do not notice that a stranger’s physical form is almost identical to our own.
Moreover, among human beings the sense of smell is by far the least developed
of the senses, indeed it is regarded as something animalesque; so it is considered
unseemly to get so close to a stranger that one can smell them.
In short, a dog meets an unknown dog, sniffs it and realizes that it is a dog, albeit
of a very different breed; we, however, stop at appearances; from this point of view,
civilization has distorted and confused our senses and instincts. Our sense of sight
might suggest that an African dressed in a coloured tunic does not belong to the
human species, because of his skin and his clothes. Our hearing is even more radi-
cal. A dog barks in response to the barking of another dog, even if it belongs to a
different breed. A man, however, is unable to respond to a different language, and
instinctively considers it an insurmountable difference, almost as if it were a genetic
one, as if someone who speaks a different language did not belong to the human
60
race. Following these perceptions of difference, we soon lose our inhibitions about
harming the other person. We may even go so far as to kill him or her, just as we
do with animals. For, with the permission of most churches, we kill animals and
use them as objects, simply because they all belong to species different from the
human one.
Under the unconscious influence of ‘pseudospeciation’, there appear among
human beings conventions, or even laws, which are the clearest example of collec-
tive paranoia: for example, copulation with people of a different ‘race’ may be for-
bidden as a crime. Deceived by strong cultural differences, we may unconsciously
feel such an act to be monstrous, like sexual union between a human and an ani-
mal. But in fact there is nothing unnatural about it at all: the genetic make-up of
the most different human races is extremely similar. Copulation between them is
absolutely natural and fertile, as is proved by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of
mixed-blood individuals.
It is hard to judge how far this sense of otherness is characteristic of the
Europeans, whom colonization has brought into contact with very different cul-
tures, which they have humiliated. Not enough research has been done yet, for
example, on the direct relations – that is, relations not mediated by the European
conquistadors – between the communities of former African slaves and the native
peoples of America. After the European discovery, in the northern part of South
America and in the Caribbean large groups of cimarrones – as fugitive African slaves
were called – fled to the interior of the continent, coming into contact with the
indigenous populations. In this way, they in turn formed autonomous societies, and
even states. According to some researchers the cimarrones and indigenous peoples
traded freely with one another but made few mixed marriages, living alongside
each other, for the most part peaceably.5 Other studies, however, argue that there
was such a variety of situations that it is impossible to generalize.6 Unfortunately,
the historiography of European aggression against other continents exists in so
far as it involves the Europeans; so we have little research on the direct relations
between African Americans and the indigenous peoples of America, even though
those relations, like European colonization, have existed for half a millennium.
The idea of the nation as we know it today belongs to Europe and the mod-
ern world. Previously there were multinational empires or states – constitutional
states – governed by a king, who had received the kingdom from other kings
or from a god, not from a national consensus. The king was interested in having
loyal subjects, not citizens belonging to a homogeneous nationality. From Europe
the modern idea of the nation spread throughout the world. This exportation of
nationalism created a new sense of brotherhood within individual countries, but
new occasions for war between peoples.The founders of Israel successfully achieved
a redemption from persecution which took on the appearance of a nationalist
refoundation, even though 2,000 years had passed since anything comparable to
the modern state of Israel had existed. One of the consequences of this success was
the rise of Palestinian nationalism, even though no Arab state of Palestine had ever
existed. Opposition to French colonialism led to an invincible Algerian nationalism,
61
though no independent state of Algeria had ever existed in the past. Sukarno made
a national myth of the struggle to give freedom to Dutch-ruled Indonesia, yet
not only the political union of the archipelago but the very idea of Indonesia had
originated with Dutch colonialism.
Today we know that is what happened because in the late twentieth century
many historians studied the ways in which nationalism distorted mentality. But
already in 1882 Ernest Renan had written: ‘Forgetting, and I would say historical
error too, are an essential factor in the creation of a nation. […] The essence of a
nation lies in the fact that all individuals have many things in common, and also that
everyone has forgotten many things.’7
All new nations appeal to ‘historical rights’; their justification, however, lies in
a future that will have to be created through politics, rather than in a past that is
delivered by history.
Nationalism often replaces reality with imagination, not only when its ideals are
lost over time, but from the beginning. This aggressive fantasy has the unconscious
function of identifying an enemy and placing the burden of all responsibility on
him. So it repeats, on a large scale, the processes of the scapegoat and of paranoia.
Certainly, at its origin there is almost always a real act of violence that was suffered.
But the response to it is more violence, and in the end the main difference is that
the original injustice might have seemed an exception, whereas reproducing it by
reactions makes it the norm.
Besides, this mistrustful and aggressive view of the relationship between peoples
is not one possible reading of history. It corresponds to the very origin of history.
Herodotus, the first historian, traces the rivalry between the Phoenicians and the
Greeks, and later between Asia and Europe, and later still between East and West,
back to an original offence and the ensuing reprisals. The seed of discord was sown
by the Phoenicians, who carried off some women of Argos, including Io, the King’s
daughter. Later the Greeks carried off Europa, daughter of the king of Tyre, and
then Medea, daughter of the king of Cochis. The chain of reprisals culminated in
the abduction of Helen.8 Each abduction helped the tree of offended collective
honour to grow but itself referred back to an earlier abduction. Through a series of
rebounds, the offences to the group would produce the Trojan War, then the Persian
wars: in short, the majority of ‘normal’ conflicts.
The Westerner has become accustomed to the idea that decolonization is fol-
lowed not by democracy but by violence, and it often gives him a feeling of mis-
trustful superiority. In these degenerations, however, we can see the consequence of
one of Europe’s most problematic legacies to the world: nationalism.
The fantasies underlying national law

It would of course be reductive to consider these aspects alone. Nationalism is not
simply an intolerant reaction to a difficulty, what we might call ‘a historical and col-
lective neurosis’. It is an extremely complex cultural movement. Especially in the
formative phase, the excitement it spreads has great creative potential. It foments
62
an awareness of a common culture and history (or it invents them; but the result is
similar). It bestows a new sense of identity and promotes psychic maturation. It fer-
tilizes minds, which produce literary or artistic masterpieces of national inspiration.
In a sense, the founder of modern German nationalism was Johann Gottfried
Herder (1744–1803). Herder, a former pupil of Kant, envisaged a literary
Renaissance. If he cited Tacitus – who had described the Germans as invincible
and free, contrasting them with the Romans – he did so in order to promote a
cultural movement, certainly not an aggressive nationalism like that which would
later devastate Europe. A Protestant pastor, influenced by pietism, he believed that
love for the national language was the first step in a Christian love for all human-
ity; nothing seems more remote from him than a persecutory, paranoid attitude.
Goethe, the Grimm brothers and Humboldt were others who participated in the
rediscovery of the linguistic and cultural heritage. In the new space that they
opened up, however, nationalism would eventually prevail over culture, the forces
of hatred over those of love.
The most authoritative studies indicate that often it is not the existence of a
nation that leads to nationalism; rather, the flowering of nationalism, by spread-
ing rapidly to various circles, convinces people that the nation is something pre-
existent, and in so doing creates it.9 So we begin to see that it is no coincidence if
nationalism and collective paranoia often appear hand in hand; both freely practise
the inversion of causes.
Authors and, in a sense, literature itself, were once largely cosmopolitan;10 often
multilingual, they could decide which language to use as the occasion arose. From
the Renaissance onwards, the rapid growth of printing – and of a bourgeoisie that
could understand books and read them – made it possible to agree on a common
history and language. This history and this language were often not rediscovered
but simply invented by the pages that were printed.There were not only books that
reproduced pre-existing national cultures on paper. There were often ‘imaginary
communities’ that began to live by reproducing in society national themes popular-
ized by books.11 The power and questionable morality of the media are not modern
creations; they already existed in the first few centuries of printing.
Books dictated some versions of the past rather than others, and favoured a
common language rather than dialects or languages understood by too few people
to create a publishing market (in those centuries any European who could write
was almost always bi- or trilingual).The common language was often merely a tool,
at least initially. Literary use and the impulse provided by Romantic intellectuals
made it the prevalent national language. It was a stream whose waters rose, until
by the late nineteenth century it had become a mighty river. In 1874, the writer
Jan Neruda noted that only fifty years earlier ‘the best German in the world’ had
been spoken in Prague, but that in less than two generations, under the influence
of a nationalism that was still more poetic than political, the great city had turned
to speaking Czech.12
The rise of a national bourgeoisie was both the cause and the result of the
emergence of a common culture. Its growing social and economic role prevailed
63
over the diminishing, quietist role of the aristocracy and ruling classes. The lat-
ter mainly used international languages distinct from the local ones, like Latin
or French, and were vertically detached from the bourgeoisie and the common
people, but transversely linked to the ruling families and nobles of other countries.
The Viennese court spoke Italian in the seventeenth century, French in the eigh-
teenth. Only later did it yield to the pressure of prevalent usage in the capital and
adopt German.13
Nationalism grows out of a commonplace: since time immemorial there has
been a people, which lacks a state. The people finally achieves awareness. The first
steps in this direction are peaceful and cultured. Linguists rediscover local languages
and compile grammars of them. Fairy tales and myths are collected. Little by little
the nation’s demography, history and geography are reconstructed. Places, events
and the people must coincide to form, in the horizon of the times, a ‘primal acqui-
sition’ of territories and rights, which still has moral value today.
There is a flowering of poetry, music and painting that repeats the theme of
reawakening. In reality the reawakening itself is a sort of ‘primal revelation’ in the
minds of some intellectuals. Almost always, studies carried out after the phase of
initial excitement come to the conclusion that several peoples have a claim to the
same lands, partly because there is unlikely to be an absolute historical horizon, and
every precedent refers back to another one, as a Balkan author has observed; and
partly because in the past it was more common for various peoples to live mingled
together, and the criterion of ethnic membership might not be a territorial one.
‘Nationalism is first and foremost a paranoia. A collective and individual paranoia’.14
A typical case was the Ottoman Empire, where the basic unit was the millet,
Turkish for ‘religious group’, similar to Arabic millah (religious confession). For many
administrative and legal purposes, subjects were divided not into geographical but
into religious communities;15 these enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy and,
accordingly, had to provide certain social services within the group. Membership
of the millet depended not on living in a particular province, but on being subject
to various religious authorities, such as the patriarch or the great rabbi of Istanbul.
For centuries, therefore, the official classifications identified various different com-
munities without assigning them to particular territories. Even in the twenty-first
century the difficulty of resolving many Balkan conflicts derives from age-old feel-
ings of belonging to indefinable places. Nowadays, partly because of the weakening
of religious ties, geographical separation prevails over confessional separation. As a
result, various peoples, increasingly estranged from each other by nationalism, lay
claim in good faith to the same territory. The beneficiary of all this is paranoia.
As Renan suggested, and as modern historical research often confirms, ‘primal
acquisition’ or similar foundational motifs are not a historical fact but a psycho-
logical event. It corresponds to the intuition by which a nation’s founders ‘decide’
that it is time to create its culture. As with all revelations, there is often something
euphorical about this moment. Once the unproven but incontrovertible premise
has been established, the successive stages follow on logically and can accelerate
unrelentingly. So the process of nationalist rebirth has other subterranean affinities
64
with the process of paranoia: it is based on an interpretation which becomes granite

truth even when it is arbitrary.
Nationalism as a cultural movement may do no more than construct theories,
art and literature. As a political movement, however, it produces war.Traditional war
served the honour of a king or of notables. With nationalism, however, its function
is to move borders, so as to include unjustly separated ‘blood brothers’. Often the
liberation is highly debatable and generates other conflicts. In order to confront
them irreversibly – another paranoid trait – the nation can slide on to an inclined
plane: step by step, but implacably, it begins to contemplate the possibility of driving
out entire populations (ethnic cleansing), and eventually genocide.
During the nineteenth century the rise of mass conscription and people’s armies
was, circularly, another consequence, but also another cause, of nationalisms.16 Until
about 1880, cultural movements were predominant in European nationalisms.17
But towards the end of the century the liberal and intellectual component that had
characterized the foundational phase declined, and aggressive populism spread.18
In general, the most persecutory elements prevailed, because they made the move-
ment grow more quickly than moderate ones did; emotion has a far higher speed
of ‘collective contagion’ than argument.
The new right to information and the new media of communication ensured
that the masses were informed of these developments. Consequently, nationalism
had a previously unknown impact and paranoid return. The existence of this poten-
tial in every individual, and its ability to use normal mental paradigms and so blend
in with the norm, meant that paranoia could act as a multiplier of nationalism and,
circularly, nationalism as a multiplier of paranoia, without paranoia being recog-
nized as such.
This monstrosity is not something occasional, as its excesses, such as Nazism,
might suggest. Unfortunately, it is the prevalent outcome of nationalist culture. ‘A
monster, that is what a nation is. We should all fear it. It is a dreadful thing. How
could such a thing have honour, or a word that it can keep?’19
The seemingly definitive borders of European states, and the homogenization of
the populations within them, had been fixed by the middle of the twentieth century.
The costs of those delimitations and homogenizations were the costs of nationalism.
They included, in an intricate web of connections, two world wars, ethnic cleans-
ing, genocide and that form of disguised nationalist violence into which Stalinist
communism degenerated. Each new act of aggression claimed finally to exact just
revenge for a previous one, but in fact caused new injustices. So no conflict could
be considered a really self-contained episode. Each one bore the responsibility of
causing conflicts and denied itself the right to be called a ‘just war’.
New nations – especially those resulting from the breakdown of empires, such
as the former Spanish colonies in the early nineteenth century and the European
states that formed in the early twentieth – are often invented by international trea-
ties and nationalist rhetoric. They are artificial and random, like the idea of a native
land according to Montesquieu’s definition. But when they slide onto the inclined
plane of paranoia, they become inevitable and millenniarian, like the empire
65
dreamed of by Hitler. Willing to die for the sake of arbitrarily created but allegedly
sacred borders.The surprising fact is that often, as in the former Spanish colonies of
South America, frontiers do not, as nationalist ideology claims, separate languages,
religions, or different races: the great differences (racial, social, cultural) are within
countries. The libertador Bolívar died alone and in despair, having commented that
trying to build Latin America was like ploughing the sea. One of the most pointless
South American wars set Paraguay against Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil; it ended
in 1870, after the deaths of 80 per cent of Paraguay’s adult male population, chiefly
indigenous people who did not know what those different nations were, because
they could hardly speak any Spanish.20
Like the first globalization – unwittingly produced by the Spanish galleons
which sailed round the world in the sixteenth century – the second, from the mid-
nineteenth century to the First World War, and including the belle époque, the last
explorations and the explosion of trade, suddenly made the world small and finite,
putting very different peoples in direct contact with one another. In so doing, it
spawned prejudices and racisms which would grow to maturity in the twentieth
century. Like the Japanese, many Chinese believed that the world outside China
comprised a few islands. The impact of globalization and European colonialism,
fomented by the collapse of their ancient empire, was devastating and fuelled a
nationalism that would seek its revenge in the twenty-first century.
Of course, the national conflicts were not a single, isolated phenomenon. Many
wars of religion were like genocides. And communism too ended up applying the
devastating model of national wars to class struggle, and that of inverted ethnic
cleansing to internationalism.The war of religion is ancient, but its history is mainly
concentrated in the expansive phases of the Christian and Islamic monotheisms.
Class conflict too is relative, as well as being recent: social mobility makes it flexible
and permeable. The permanent existence of a paranoid attitude is, rather, a preva-
lent characteristic of modern nationalist and racist conflict. Class confrontation can
be gradually channelled towards tolerant, civilized forms of mediation, as we have
seen in the Scandinavian countries. Nationalist conflict, on the other hand, seeks
unconscious emotions rather than economic objectives. Of course many calcula-
tions are intermingled with it, but until it is compelled to come to terms with the
relativity of history it essentially belongs to the absolute world of myths.
The imaginary race
Like nationalism, racism initially appeared in cultural garb. Debate was conducted
among scholars and there was talk of ‘scientific racism’. But soon the French aris-
tocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau published his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
(1853–5), which became celebrated outside France too. The theory of the origin
of species expounded by Charles Darwin (1859) was gradually expropriated to
denote, in the name of science, unconscious forms of envy, paranoid mistrust and
destructive instincts. A few years earlier Herbert Spencer had begun to disseminate
the concept of the ‘survival of the fittest’. With him came new ideals of laissez-faire,
66
a radical form of free economic initiative. Humankind, it was argued, was first and
foremost an animal species, and as such did not follow the theological laws of God,
but the scientific laws of nature. So it was time men obeyed the commandments of
nature rather than Judaeo-Christian ones. Solidarity with the weakest – and there-
fore their survival – preserved genetic defects rather than the ‘fittest’, synonymous
with the strongest. It was detrimental to evolution and progress.
Following the path beaten by Darwin and Spencer, Francis Galton promoted
studies on heredity.21 This approach went further than Darwin – who had limited
his research to animals and physical attributes – and asserted that intelligence,
too, was an innate characteristic. Galton, a cousin of Darwin, suggested making
a selection, or ‘positive eugenetics’, of the higher human qualities. This would
be achieved through a combination of planned marriages between people with
particular talents – especially intellectual ones – and selective immigration (it is
interesting to note that the Jews were included among the acceptable ‘races’).22
Given the complexity of this programme and its violent intrusion into private life,
Galton saw no other solution than to entrust it to the state. Of course, these ideas
would take several generations to verify. But even without such verification, to the
author and to other theorists ideologically close to him, they already constituted
an indisputable foundation.
So at the root of Galton’s eugenetics we find some important characteristics
with which our study of paranoia has familiarized us.23 In the first place, a false
and unverified but unshakeable assumption disseminated with religious fervour.
Mingled with this, an anxiety about contamination – which we will meet again in
Hitler – and a need to separate what is positive from what is negative. The founder
of eugenetics was convinced that the construction of a better human being could
be achieved by cross-breeding positive genetic traits; he was unconcerned (just as
Hitler was unconcerned) about the possibility that an excess of endogamy might
reinforce latent negative traits, as it is usually found to do. This scientist’s interests,
and also his character, exhibit several elements of mechanicity and dehumaniza-
tion typical of the paranoiac: he thought everything should become measurable,
and human beings interested him particularly when he could classify them (we are
chiefly indebted to him for the discovery of fingerprints) and give them numbers.
Lastly, for Galton knowledge principally consisted in closely examining the data
in our possession so that we can foresee and prevent the evils that nature would
leave at liberty.
All social policies and legislation (which significantly began to germinate during
that period) attempted to alleviate the cruelty of nature. Among primordial humans,
people who had no teeth died, because they could not feed themselves. In civil
societies, people who have no teeth are supplied with false teeth; that is, an attempt
is made to re-establish principled parity, a right of all people to eat. For the new
ideology, however, this choice would keep parasitical individuals alive and reduce
the amount of food available to healthy society.
This led to the emergence of a new school of thought, soon called ‘social
Darwinism’, which applied the natural laws discovered by Darwin to human
67
society. It linked together transversely the natural sciences, philosophy, economics

and politics, whose distortions reinforced one another.This ‘Darwinism’ was a stone
that rolled downwards until it became the pseudoscience called eugenetics.24
With the multiplication of international trade, social Darwinism took the
economic form of the free market: the stronger, in commercial terms, were free
to annihilate the weaker. At the same time, social Darwinian principles authorized
colonialism to plunder the last non-Western countries to be left independent.
The educated classes of the developed countries did not conceal the fact that a
selection was being made that was both ethnic (that is, cultural) and racial (that
is, biological). The two concepts were not clearly distinguished; indeed, they were
used almost as synonyms.25 People mistrusted their inferiors too much to get
close enough to them to understand whether they differed from them geneti-
cally or culturally: they took it for granted that the former implied the latter.
Everyone believed in the cage of heredity, and therefore in insurmountable differ-
ences decided at birth: zoologists such as Ernst Haeckel, philosophers such as Carl
Gustav Carus, but also criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso, an enlightened
Jew, the American feminist Victoria Woodhull, and, in his own way, even Friedrich
Engels (as we shall see in the next chapter). People believed unhesitatingly in a
science resulting from a combination of statistics, biology and anthropology, whose
dogma was replacing that of religion. And science took account in particular of
the recently discovered laws of evolution. Just as in previous centuries no one had
felt guilty if they exterminated in the name of the faith, so now the same could be
done in the name of science.
During this period it was commonplace to believe that in the near future only
the ‘Aryan’ (or ‘white’ or ‘European’) race would survive. Similarly, within the supe-
rior races themselves selection would have to continue, in order to remove those
with hereditary defects: the physically and mentally ill, but also lazy people, those
tending to perversion and the ignorant.This assessment was baseless, for it treated as
genetic defects states such as being ignorant or unemployed, which could be altered
by education or social measures; but now it tended to become an indisputable basic
dogma, deriving from a ‘scientific’ conviction.
So false premises formed which proceeded with lethal consequentiality. In the
unconscious of this ‘scientific’ ideology mistrust and negative projections thrived.
The human race was believed to be healthier the more interbreeding was avoided.
So union with ethnically or racially different people was felt to be not only an indi-
vidual mistake, but also contrary to the interests of the human species. This excess
of anxiety was reinforced by the multiplication of contacts with distant peoples
and by the feelings of guilt produced by their subjugation (hurriedly rationalized
in the name of progress as inevitable competitive selection). Such a psychological
alteration, if unrecognized, would lead in individuals to a weakening of the ego. But
being a symptom that affected almost the entire population, precisely because it was
shared by everyone it lost its quality of being a pathology and became a new creed,
which is in fact also a primal legacy of the collective unconscious. It echoes certain
prescriptions of the Bible: in Leviticus (19:19) God orders Moses not to interbreed
68
different animals, not to sow two different types of wheat in the same field, and not
to wear clothes woven from different kinds of thread.26
Anyone who exhorted others to help people who were unsuccessful was pro-
posing a dangerous ‘negative’ or ‘regressive selection’, and was presumed to have a
kind of hereditary defect himself.Towards the end of the century, these affirmations
became psychological ‘truths’ with Le Bon (1896, 1899), and philosophical truths
with Nietzsche: ‘Too many people come into the world; the state was invented for
the superfluous. […] Look at them, these superfluous people! They are always ill;
they spew out their bile and call it a newspaper.’27
The delusion of nationalist mistrust, which would reach its peak in the twentieth
century, contained a tragic paradox. From the ideological point of view, the most
destructive nationalism of all times – that of Hitlerian Germany – was strongly
influenced by the Frenchman Gobineau and the Germanized Briton Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, who was himself indebted to Galton and other British
‘neo-Darwinian extremisms’.28 From the practical point of view, the horrendous
experiments carried out by Dr Mengele in Buchenwald and Auschwitz were the
continuation of research begun years before with American funds from such sources
as the prestigious Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.29
From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the conviction of the
superiority of the people known as Aryans, Europeans or Caucasians was at its
zenith. As often happens with the diffusion among the masses of important recent
discoveries, Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species convinced people, but also
exhilarated them. In Europe there were exhibitions of colonial samples. Plants,
animals and ‘savages’ were put on display in a single ‘exotic space’.30 This suggested
a visual confirmation of the stages of evolution down to the white man – who,
however, remained outside the fence, looking in. Since this spatial separation and
this temporal destiny were decreed by a law of nature, the European crowd did not
grieve for the savages’ disappearance. Rather, it bustled along to see them while
there was still time.
In the United States, the new doctrines unconsciously served to alleviate feel-
ings of guilt about the genocide of native Americans and the oppression of blacks.
Social Darwinism was transformed into eugenetics, and this infiltrated politics. But
it is difficult to plan genetic purity in a country made up of immigrants. When,
towards the end of the nineteenth century, immigration from southern Europe
overtook that from the north, there were attempts to limit the number of people
coming in by means of quotas and eugenetic filters; there were fears of an excess
of immigrants of inferior ‘race’ and Catholic religion (sometimes the two condi-
tions were regarded as synonymous, even though there was no demonstrable link
between them). There was talk of a risk of ‘racial suicide’.31 Twenty-three states of
the Union passed laws making sterilization compulsory, for various reasons. So the
negative side of Galton’s ideas gradually developed: ‘negative eugenetics’, which no
longer merely promoted good genetic features, but also took steps to eliminate bad
ones.These laws would remain in force for several decades in the twentieth century,
and would be praised by the German National Socialist Party and by Hitler himself,
69
whose ‘negative eugenetics’ would take on epochal dimensions. His Mein Kampf
expresses a certain respect for the North Americans; he considers them genetically
superior to the Latin Americans because, unlike the latter, they have avoided racial
intermixture.32
In the new century the social Darwinian mentality was not limited to fascist
countries; the liberal ones would keep them alive, especially in the colonial world.
On 2 July 1931, Paul Raynaud, the French minister of the colonies, would open the
sumptuous Colonial Exhibition with these words:
Colonization is an essential phenomenon, for it is in the nature of things that

peoples that have reached a higher level of evolution [note: not of culture, but
actually of evolution, in the social Darwinian sense] should lean down towards
those that are at a lower level in order to raise them up to their own […].
Colonization is the greatest event in history.33
The place of the Jews

If the relationship between the West and that lower step of evolution that was
the colonial world was clear, a new problem began to arise in the Western coun-
tries: and it was here that intolerance and paranoia would explode.The relationship
between the Christian majority and the Jewish minority, characterized by separa-
tion and mistrust, but hitherto restricted mainly to the social and religious fields,
began to be viewed from the new ‘scientific’ perspective.
During the nineteenth century, the Jews had successfully fought for social and
legal emancipation throughout most of Europe and had been accepted into the
United States. They were predominantly favourable to assimilation and tended not
to describe themselves as a minority. In this condition, they seemed well on the
way to losing the role of ‘scapegoat’ that Europe had given them for centuries. But
paranoia, which played at hiding away in the collective unconscious and fed on the
new media of communication, could not allow itself to be left without a mount –
that is, to lose its ancient warhorse of anti-Semitism.
The Dreyfus Affair
When conditions were so predisposed, the Dreyfus Affair broke out.
After its humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 and the
social upheavals that had ensued, France was seeking a new equilibrium. The
French Jewish community had achieved assimilation, economic success and a
certain political influence. Conservative circles, however, opposed its advance in
the armed forces.
In late September 1894, a cleaning woman in the German embassy in Paris
found among the rubbish a letter addressed to the German military attaché, and
handed it over to the information service of the French army. It was handwritten
and contained top-secret information about French weapons.
70
The preliminary inquiry immediately directed its suspicions at the artillery cap-
tain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish and had a German name. The first grapho-
logical examination was inconclusive. A second one, however, indicated that the
letter had been written by Dreyfus. The procedure of the inquiry was constantly
vitiated by the fact that the investigators, rather than making their own assess-
ments, accepted the ready-made opinions that they were given. On 20 December,
Lieutenant Colonel Henry, on behalf of the army’s information service, presented
his conclusion: Dreyfus was definitely guilty. On 22 December, the Council of War,
which had been unofficially handed a slanderous secret dossier about the accused,
pronounced a unanimous verdict of guilty. The sentence was demotion and depor-
tation for life. There was a great outcry in the press and public opinion seemed to
have no doubts about Dreyfus’s guilt.
The fantasy substitution and projection of paranoia had won. Dreyfus had been
found guilty because he had been thought to be guilty from the beginning; his
humiliation created a scapegoat which the country needed in order to reunify itself.
In January 1895, the demotion was solemnly carried out in the main courtyard
of the military school. Dreyfus’s stripes were torn off, his sword broken. Descriptions
of the ritual circulated all over France. The former captain was interned in Guyana,
in the fortress of Devil’s Island.
In spring 1898, Lieutenant Colonel Picquart, who had been appointed director
of the military information service after Dreyfus’s condemnation, discovered some
correspondence between the German military attaché and a Major Esterhazy. The
latter was a French official, a descendant of a family of Hungarian aristocrats. He led
an expensive life and was heavily in debt. On comparing the handwriting, Picquart
became convinced that the letter which had given rise to the Dreyfus Affair had
been written by Esterhazy.When he informed his superiors of this, however, he was
expelled from the information service and then moved further and further away,
eventually being transferred to North Africa.
Meanwhile, Dreyfus’s brother and wife had been trying to bring about a revision
of the trial, and their efforts began to produce results. In addition to many intel-
lectuals, some journalists and politicians were favouring a new inquiry. Like Father
Montesinos four centuries earlier, Émile Zola, already a well-known writer, climbed
up into his pulpit, now called a newspaper. He denounced the slanderers and the
masses that had passively followed them. His article, published in ‘L’Aurore’ on 13
January 1898 under the unambiguous title ‘J’accuse’, listed the people responsible
without hesitation. Zola was convicted of libel, and further charges were brought
against him, so he fled to London to avoid arrest. Esterhazy was acquitted; Picquart
survived a duel with Henry, and was then arrested.
In August of the same year there was a dramatic development. Henry confessed
to slandering Dreyfus and composing a fake letter to incriminate him. He was
arrested and committed suicide.
In 1899, the Court of Cassation finally annulled the verdict of 1894. Returning
to France for the retrial, Dreyfus was again found guilty, but with the sentence
reduced to ten years because of attenuating circumstances. By now the conflict
71
among politicians and in the press had become uncontrollable. France was no lon-
ger one country, but two, irremediably divided, the dreyfusards and the antidreyfu-
sards. An amnesty was the only solution. All sides agreed in supporting it, including
the Dreyfus family and almost all the dreyfusards.
So the defendant’s freedom was bartered for his admission of guilt. In a sense, the
paranoiacs had won. The delusion, which had grown luxuriantly from false
premises, had imposed the fantasy substitution according to which Dreyfus was
guilty; all that could now be done was to attenuate the consequences of the pre-
judgement, by excusing him from serving his sentence. Even the anti-paranoiacs
ended up accepting the paranoid mental process as normal. It was able to fuel
itself thanks to the new sounding board provided by the bad press.34
Zola, having returned to France in 1899, died suddenly three years later,
suffocated by a blocked chimney. Not until 1906 was Alfred Dreyfus completely
rehabilitated. In the same year, the deputies approved the moving of Zola’s remains
from the cemetery of Montmartre to the Panthéon. Owing to objections and
delays, the ceremony did not take place until 1908. Dreyfus himself was present.
Louis-Anthelme Grégori, an extreme right-wing journalist, the son of poor Italian
immigrants, like Zola, fired two shots at him from point-blank range, but only suc-
ceeded in wounding him. Within a few weeks Grégori was acquitted.
Several more years passed before the German secret services themselves
confirmed Dreyfus’s complete innocence.
Notes
1 Democritus, fragment 247.
2 Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, Pensées, 10.
3 Franz Grillparzer, Epigramme, 1849.
4 We will return to this concept (below, Chapter 8) when we examine Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
5 Personal communication of Professor Zayda Sierra, Department of Anthropology of the
University of Antioquia, Colombia.
6 See Thornton 1999.
7 Renan 1882: Chapter 1.
8 See Herodotus, Histories, I, 1–3.
9 See Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Hobsbawm 1990;
Geary 2002; Michel 1995; Pfaff 1993. See also the entries ‘Nationalité’ and ‘Origines et
renaissances nationales’ in Kott and Michonneau 2006.
10 See Dahl 1927: 182 ff.
11 See Anderson 1991.
12 Quoted by Michel 1995: 51.
13 See Michel 1995: 32
14 Kiš 1973.
15 See for example Kiernan 2007: Chapter 10.
16 See Bastian 2000: 44–61.
17 See Hobsbawm 1987: Chapter 6.
19 Jung 1939: 184.
20 See Capdevilla 2007; Halperin Donghi 1967: Chapter 4.
21 See Galton 1869.
22 See Mosse 1978: 74.
72
23 See Galton 1907.
24 See especially Mosse 1978; Black 2003.
25 Even a classical anti-nationalist essay begins by calling Germany and its culture a ‘race’.
See Rolland 1916.
26 Recent studies have confirmed that this was also the conviction of Jefferson, one of
the loftiest minds among the founding fathers of the United States. That did not stop
him having seven children with a slave woman. What was exceptional for the times,
however, was the fact that he did not paranoically deny his paternity but had his illegiti-
mate children brought up in relatively comfortable conditions. See Gordon-Reed 2008.
27 Nietzsche 1881–4: 55 and 56.
28 See Mosse 1964: Chapter 5; Fest 1973: Part 1, Chapter 3, and Part 3, Chapter 1.
29 See Black 2003: 7.
30 See Bancel et al. 2002.
31 Black 2003: 22–3.
32 See Hitler 1925: 313.
33 Raynaud 1931.
34 Drouin 2006 is an encyclopedia on the affaire and contains no fewer than 1,128 biblio-
graphical references. Reinach 2006, written shortly after the event by one of the central
figures in the affair, is the classic text on the subject and is very complete; in the new
edition it consists of 2,414 pages. There are also a Société d’Histoire de l’Affaire Dreyfus
(www.sihad.com) and countless internet websites.
73
4
NAIVE PERSECUTORS
Naive persecutors do not know what they are doing. They have too good a
conscience to knowingly deceive their readers.1
The manufacturers of inevitability believed deeply in their own product.2
The special nature of America

In Europe it is rare to find a clear division between institutions flooded with light
and paranoia hiding in their shadows. European history is long and encompasses
many peoples: immense waves of persecution rebound off each other, forming
indistinct mishmashes of cruelty and civilized creations.
By contrast, a persecutory feeling ensconced itself in the origins of the United
States, and entirely in good faith. The progressive, optimistic, loyal myth which
accompanied the nation’s foundation has preserved two sides, as happens with ide-
als: though life-giving as a fantasy, it can be deadly in practice. It distinguishes itself
clearly from evil, splitting it and projecting it far away, onto different societies. In
this way, it can develop into an extreme unawareness of the evil which, humanly,
resides in it; and, particularly strong, a tendency to suspicion.
David E. Stannard has described the centuries of American colonization as
one long, albeit not always conscious and systematic, genocide.3 If we include the
number of people who died in epidemics that were not intentionally caused, but
imported and then exploited by the conquistadors, in the century following the
discovery alone colonization allegedly caused ten times as many victims as the Nazi
genocide, even though the modern genocidal weapons did not exist and the victims
were scattered over immense, almost inaccessible areas. In the Americas as a whole,
by 1630 probably only 10–12 per cent of the original population still survived; by
1700 less than 10 per cent.4
74
74 Naive persecutors
The destruction of native populations and cultures began in what is now Latin
America, but it was not as radical there as in North America. In Central America and
Peru, Spain had come up against great civilizations. Despite clashes of devastating
intolerance, some elements of them had survived and been accepted; for example,
indigenous people from ruling or noble families were accorded a certain role and a
certain respect – naturally, on condition that they remained an aristocracy ‘auxiliary’
to the European one. If they appealed to an autonomous pre-colonial authority they
were exterminated; even though nearly three centuries had passed since the arrival
of Columbus, José Gabriel Condorcanqui was torn apart by four horses for present-
ing himself as a descendant of the Incas, under the name of Túpac Amaru.
The Spanish and Portuguese formed societies that were essentially mestizo.
Their colonies had been created before the British ones, but the hybridization
deriving from illegitimate births and the confusion of mutually contradictory cul-
tures not only caused serious backwardness (in economic development and literacy,
for example), but slowed the emergence of national feelings. In Latin America, the
formation of societies and of local states came about in different ways, at different
times; research into the subject is still incomplete.
In British North America, the events are concentrated in the past two centu-
ries and are well known. The nationalism of the United States begins – already
fairly mature, though not extended to the whole population – with the War of
Independence, and continues uninterruptedly, in advance of the European variety.
The Black Legend
For a long time, hardly any of the great narratives of Spanish colonialization, writ-
ten by conquistadors, travellers and friars, were translated into English. The great
exception was Bartolomé de Las Casas. As was mentioned above, this priest had
been the great defender of the indigenous peoples and had described the misdeeds
of the Spanish colonizers. To the British it had been natural to translate and dis-
seminate with defamatory intent not the whole of his oeuvre but the passages that
emphasized their cruelty.
Great Britain not only won the naval war against Spain, it won the propaganda war
too. It created a radical mistrust of, and prejudice towards, its rival. The story of the
Spanish conquest was described in such dark and sombre tones that it is still known
today as the Black Legend5 – the same colour, significantly, as the Furies.6 Even the
eighteenth-century French Enlightenment adopted the story and fomented it, being
not so much interested in truthful accounts as in defeating an obstacle to modernity
in Spanish politics; it is a sobering paradox that the first truly modern European
culture thus contributes to a process of obscurantism and political paranoia.
The Black Legend survived down the centuries and passed directly from the sub-
jects of the British colonies to the future citizens of the United States of America.
The emergence of two different Americas, which are still deeply separate today, was
partly the result not only of economic history, but also of this historic prejudice of
the anglophone continent against the Latin one.
75
Naive persecutors 75
Unlike the land frontier of the United States, which as it moved westwards
purified what it had swallowed up, the Spanish line of conquest had formed a
ring of sea, which had closed a few years after Columbus’s arrival and had brought
the immense area that lay within it under the dominion of the kings of Castille
and Aragon. This inner area, however, not only had not been purified; it was not
even known. Moreover, the immigrants, unlike the founders of the United States,
had not arrived from Europe as complete families. The conquistadors were males
and warriors. Inevitably, they founded a culture of conquest.7 The conquistadors,
having eliminated the indigenous males, formed de-facto families with the sur-
viving women. Chaos, sin and violence were endemic. Thus, a society is formed
that introjects the harsh criticisms of the priests. It knows it has evil within it; it
cultivates down the centuries a self-image that precisely reflects the prejudice of
the Black Legend. As a result, Latin America has preserved a low opinion of itself
down to the present day.
So, the United States inherited a mistrust of the indigenous peoples and Spanish
America from their British origins. The Puritans felt that they were a people apart
(a sentiment still known today as American exceptionalism), as direct custodians of
the divine Word; they distrusted those who obeyed complex ecclesiastical hierarchies.
They had left Europe rejecting both the Church of Rome and the Church of England,
both irremediably politicized and hierarchical.Their communities wanted to practise
direct democracy, rejecting superfluous pleasures and power games. Accordingly, to
preserve their purity, they did not want to mingle with the native Americans; they
wanted to maintain a frontier that would separate them from the indigenous people
and push it ever further west. This dual separation – internally from evil, externally
from different human groups – led to a permanent sense of mistrust.
The empty continent

One might expect that a crucial factor in deciding whether or not to immigrate
into a land would be knowing whether it contained vast unpopulated, farmable
lands. For millions of Europeans tormented by hunger this would have been
important information. But things did not go exactly like that. Estimates of
the number of indigenous people present on the territory when the Europeans
arrived in North America, instead of being a cause of colonization, were often
a consequence of it. Vague calculations were made, which tended to take earlier
estimates and modify them downwards, to correct supposed ‘inaccuracies’. Thus
a dual judicial purpose was served: on the one hand the extent of the genocide
that was gradually taking place was minimized, on the other an attempt was
made to prove that the land had originally been inhabited by nomads scattered
over huge empty surfaces, so that colonization had been, according to the pre-
vailing criteria, legitimate. The manipulation was not necessarily conscious, but
it achieved its aim.
Traditionally accepted calculations held that at the time of the discovery the
population of the whole of New England was only 25,000 indigenes. It was thought
76
that, though not exactly nomadic, they moved about frequently. The celebrated
anthropologist Kroeber limited the pre-Columbian population of the whole
continent north of Mexico to 1 million.8 The objection that many of the native
Americans, especially in the eastern territories, were farmers, so that they perma-
nently owned land, was resolved by positing a mixed economy of agriculturalist-
hunters. By Kroeber’s calculations the native Americans left more than 99 per cent
of the land unused. These estimates made it possible to state ‘legally’ that the
colonists had settled in a vacuum domicilium.9
The image of savages lacking a civilization and even a society, who roamed
about singly and lived almost like animals, corresponded to the Western preju-
dices expressed by social Darwinism. According to this fantasy, prevalent in the
second half of the nineteenth century, behind European civilization lay chaos,
not a different kind of society (whereas today zoology tells us that even groups
of monkeys or wolves form communities with complex rules). Even progressive
authors were convinced of this: Engels proposed a fantasy of this kind as a recon-
struction of the origins of the family, private property and the state (1884).
In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, the first trenchant
criticism of the massacre that was being perpetrated.10 Even this text, however, was
based on an unshakeable nationalism and acknowledged native Americans as having
only a right to occupation of territory, not a right of sovereignty, which was the
prerogative of the American state.11 The author was quite clear in her mind that she
was defending inferior peoples: ‘Of the fairness of holding that ultimate sovereignty
belonged to the civilized discoverer, as against the savage barbarian, there is no man-
ner nor ground of doubt.’12
Not until the twentieth century did the United States grant citizenship to the
native Americans who had always inhabited the territory (the Indian Citizenship
Act, 1924). And only in even more recent times were new calculations made of
the number of aboriginals present in the various periods. In the second half of
the twentieth century, when scholars researched the subject more thoroughly, the
figures made a leap: almost suddenly, estimates of the pre-Columbian population
became several dozen times higher than the traditional ones. Evident in all this is
the rise of a new mentality, not in the Indian reservations but in universities and
among American politicians. (Kennedy’s presidency began in 1960.) These calcu-
lations were greeted with suspicion and fiercely contested by conservatives. Their
fantasies about the native Americans had long been mistaken for reality, becoming
dogma. The false premise of the largely empty land, with indigenous people roam-
ing about in it at random, had authorized the nationalist rhetoric of a civilization
that had arisen out of a conquering of savage nature; it had fomented contempt,
partly in numerical terms, for the barbarians; and, not least, it had prevented
a possible charge of genocide, which was recognized by the United Nations
in 1948 ‘only’ as an international crime, largely as a result of American pres-
sure. It has in fact been estimated that the native population amounted to about
7–10 million before colonialization and had fallen to a mere 250,000 by the end
of the nineteenth century.13
77
‘American exceptionalism’
The exceptionality of the national destinies – American exceptionalism – and
the divine privilege accorded to them are a continuation of the culture that the
Founding Fathers carried with them in the hold on their first voyage. Anyone
who thinks that the alliance between the United States and Israel is the result of
recent international politics should remember that even before Independence, the
American colonists were convinced that they had a destiny that had been assigned
to them by God, as it had been to the Jews in the Bible.14
The colonists had left behind them the old world with its injustices and
recognized Providence as the sole authority. They did not trust anyone else. It is worth
dwelling on this point. What was called, after the wave of McCarthyism, ‘the para-
noid style in American politics’ does not concern only recent times, nor only the
radical right.15 It goes back to the origins. Righteousness is the dark side of a politi-
cal origin indisputably more guileless and honest than European Realpolitik. If in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the United States promotes meritorious
international institutions from which it later backs away suspiciously, we should not
be surprised: it is not a middle-term political calculation, it is a reservation which
not even the centuries can alter.
This divine pact, always taken for granted by the dominant culture, favours
brave choices. But in everyday politics we meet human beings, not the biblical
God. In the face of power games which may be banal and predictable, someone
who is accustomed to considering himself just can feel horribly betrayed and
fall into an almost irremediable mistrust. Although the United States’ political
institutions are solidly democratic, offended Puritan pride imbues them with a
potential for aggression, intolerance and mistrust that continues down the cen-
turies. In themselves, the norms for immigrating into the United States are a
historic example of democracy. And yet, Form I-94 W (introduced on 29 May
1991), which has to be filled in by anyone wishing to enter the country still asks,
at points B and C: ‘Are you requesting entry in order to take part in criminal or
immoral activities? […] Are you involved in spying or sabotage; or in terrorist
activities; or genocide?’
Moby Dick
It is no coincidence that in America Homer is called Melville and his Odyssey Moby
Dick. Unlike the flexible Odysseus, who sometimes kills and sometimes spares his
enemy, according to the circumstances, Ahab – the sailor for whom the goal is not
Ithaca but an evil force that must be annihilated – hates without any margins of
redemption: he believes in one truth, revenge. Everything else comes as a conse-
quence, and is an acceptable price. And the price of war to the death includes the
death of Ahab himself.
In the ancient world it was human beings who were persecuted by the gods,
as Odysseus was by Poseidon. A man was heroic when he did not accept his
78
persecution as an inevitable destiny and managed to survive it. A man was a

man. The god, irrational and persecutory, was the uncontainable force of the
unconscious, which in every darkness attacks man, but despite which one man-
ages to live.
With Moby Dick, everything changes, precisely because man has received illu-
mination from the Enlightenment; and the roles can be reversed. Repeating the
history of the world in his individual experience, the man, after having been the
whale’s victim, becomes its persecutor; and the monster, the all-powerful sea god, is
the one who is persecuted.The struggle is total; the evil that has to be fought against
has definitively infected the character of the fighter. The human consciousness has
appropriated the persecutory quality of the unconscious, which now dominates
it from within, making it, in its turn, absurd. Ahab bids this world a Shakespearian
farewell. He has no alternative, and he knows it. Everything was already decided
‘a billion years before this ocean rolled. […] I’, says Ahab, ‘am the Fates’ lieu-
tenant; I act under orders.’16 There will be no peace until he plunges, with the
unconscious, into the unconscious, returning to the unconscious. Consciousness,
contaminated by paranoia, has become self-destructive, lost the will to live; it has
disintegrated as consciousness.
Founding principles and purity

The Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776) presupposes a drastic alternative
between trust in God and radical mistrust of different societies (which it suspects of
conspiracy). So it develops a central argument: the sequence of abuses committed
by the king of Great Britain invariably ‘evinces a design to reduce [the colonists]
under absolute Despotism’.To the present-day observer this interpretation seems to
be letting itself be carried away by preconceived emotions. The abuses had undeni-
ably taken place. But they were a normal and to a large extent ‘legitimate’ part of
the discretion that the sovereign applied in the exercise of his functions, especially
in the colonies. It did not necessarily imply a malicious design with regard to the
colonists. And the despotism that the King applied to them was not necessarily
absolute, or any harsher than that adopted in other colonial enterprises.The interests
of the thirteen American colonies and Great Britain had become too different and
they had to separate: that is the point.
In the years following independence there was a heated debate about the
Constitution of the United States of America. One cannot help noticing that in the
letters and articles of that time the most passionate emotions are already expressed
in a ‘paranoid style’.17
From the beginnings of North American democracy, Puritan idealism recom-
mended distrusting the relationships of international politics (commercial relations
were left freer). In particular, the relationship with Europe was considered to be a
contaminating influence.
When the founding president, Washington, stepped down, his main exhortation
was to revolt
79
against the insidious wiles of foreign influence […]. Europe has a set of pri-
mary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. […] Why, by
interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace
and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or
caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any
portion of the foreign world.18
While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries several European wars alter
the map without shifting populations and generate multi-ethnic states, the gradual
formation of the United States is from the outset a coherent effort to create a coun-
try homogeneous in race and culture. As the word reminds us, the Puritan mentality
prefers not to mix differences. The immigrant is assimilated as soon and as com-
pletely as possible. It is debated whether African Americans are people or property.19
The native Americans exist only as enemies. The Declaration of Independence
itself, a milestone in the evolution of the rights of man, names them only in per-
secutory form: they are ‘merciless Savages’, it says, whom the king of Great Britain
encourages to massacre the colonists.
The homogeneous national state is completed during the nineteenth century.
The frontier rolls westward. It scythes the earth, eliminating all nature and natives
not integrated into the colonists’ civilization: it is an immense anticipation of the
gentrification line which, pursuing similar purificatory criteria, will demarcate the
middle-class districts of American cities: a continually shifting line, because it is
constantly restoring and reclaiming disused districts, but one that is always exact
and sharp.
The line is destined to reach the Pacific coast. It includes what is acceptably pure.
The psychological shadow is pushed further and further back, just as in walking
we move our material shadow and do not reach it. Because of the disparity of
forces between conquerors and conquered, however, the story proceeds too quickly.
Rather than doing a complete clean-up, the gentrification frontier (I don’t claim
that the term exists; I have coined it by analogy) is content to make invisible the
otherness that it absorbs: indigenous tribes are confined to reservations, Mexicans
and African Americans to slums.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the prudent observer realized that space was
running out. The advance towards the setting sun was approaching the Pacific
coast, so that it would no longer be possible to move the natives westward. So
the Secretariat of State suggested stopping the deportations and choosing between
the two remaining possibilities: assimilation or extermination.20 Through count-
less debates the idea of assimilation prevailed, but it did so in economic and cul-
tural conditions which were by now so adverse as to make the difference between
the two solutions pretty marginal. There was no longer any need for soldiers like
Sheridan, for whom the only good Indian was a dead Indian. The baton passed
to educationalists like Richard Henry Pratt, whose aim was to transport that vio-
lence onto the psychological level. Assimilating meant ‘killing the Indian to save
the man’.21
80
The twentieth century began. President Theodore Roosevelt brought the preju-
dices of the frontier into the new century: ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only
good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like
to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.’22
Not long afterwards one of the greatest exponents of racism, now mainly known
as a dictator, would write admiringly that North America had been able to attain
a high level of civilization because it was made up for the most part of immigrants
of Germanic stock, who had not mingled either with the native Americans or with
the descendants of the slaves, whereas Latin America stagnated in poverty because
it had practised mixed marriages.23 The ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’ seems
itself to have been partly inspired by the historical extermination of the American
Indians24 and by the open debates in which their elimination had been discussed
by the press.25
The separation of the continents and manifest destiny

While within the United States native Americans were being obliterated, the coun-
try’s international politics also pursued purity. The ‘Monroe doctrine’ (first enun-
ciated on 2 December 1823) is usually summarized in the formula: ‘America for
the Americans’. President Monroe repeated Washington’s message, but more loudly,
so that the European governments would hear too. In the second paragraph of
the document destiny is mentioned for the first time among the agents of politics.
Americans may take no interest in Europe, but they would react strongly if the
Europeans were to intervene in the two Americas (considered to be a single sphere
of private interest, even though New York is at least twice as far from Terra del
Fuego as it is from London).
The term America stands on the quicksands of ambiguity.The word ‘Americans’
usually means citizens of the United States. But when these documents refer to
America, they mean the whole double continent. Even if only from a negative
perspective, Monroe cannot avoid taking an interest in European politics: the
Spanish and Portuguese are warned not to intervene in their former colonies in
Latin America. It will be the government of the United States that decides who
can intervene and who cannot. If not their actions, American politicians’ thoughts
begin to travel beyond their borders.
By the middle of the century the United States’ demographic and economic
development was already galloping. Expansive interests pushed westward and also
southward – that is, towards Mexico, which, after independence from Spain, in 1836,
was an immense country, with vast and little-exploited resources. Its extent and its
population were at that time almost equivalent to those of the United States.26
The obstacles to an invasion were mainly psychological. The United States had
originated by rebelling against the power logics of the European dynasties: so they
had a primal inhibition about conquering new lands by military means. They pre-
ferred to buy them if it was possible. Moreover, Mexico had fought a war of libera-
tion from Spain, taking the United States as its model and receiving its admiration.
81
In general, democrats were favourable to geographical expansion, because they

believed in progress in a unitary sense: that of democracy would advance in con-
junction with the economic, technological and civilizing.
John L. O’Sullivan was a leading intellectual in this progressive current. As a
journalist he fought for the rights of women, workers and religious minorities. In
1839 he published, under the title The Great Nation of Futurity, the manifesto of
expansionism and ‘manifest destiny’: ‘[the] facts demonstrate at once our discon-
nected position as regards any other nation.’27
This purism was in line with that of the founders and of Washington. But it was
not based on the ‘facts’, as O’Sullivan – who did not even take the trouble to list
them – claimed, but on a subjective dogma, which is presented as the interpreta-
tive foundation of the facts themselves: ‘our national birth was the beginning of a
new history […] our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. It is so
destined, because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny.’28
O’Sullivan has begun with a premise that he does not prove. He dispenses visions
like a prophet who has received illumination. From this, like a paranoid thinker, he
derives the other steps by resorting to circular argument: the United States is des-
tined to be the great country of the future because the basic principles of its origins
(that is, his fantasy about the past, the basic O’Sullivanian dogma) decides its destiny
(that is, the future). Such a tautology could mean anything and therefore not mean
anything. In any case it would describe only a temporal link, not a moral justifica-
tion. And yet this bluntest of truisms was the ideological sword of later conquests.
The conclusion it tries to reach is in fact its point of departure: the conquest of
supposedly less civilized peoples, their territories and their wealth.
O’Sullivan’s reasoning expresses contempt not only for other countries, but for
most of human history, which is now ‘other’. Indeed, for all the past:
What friend of human liberty, civilization and refinement, can cast his view
over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity and not
deplore that they ever existed? […] Our annals describe no scenes of horrid
carnage [evidently for him the extermination of the indigenous peoples does
not count] […] We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons
of avoidance of nearly all their examples.29
Rejection of the past obliges O’Sullivan’s discourse to describe the future as a

revelation of divine intentions: ‘The nation of many nations is destined to manifest
to mankind the excellence of divine principles […] For this blessed mission to the
nations of the world […] America has been chosen.’30
War of conquest
Mexico at that time included the whole of Texas and all the present West of
the United States. In this climate of futuristic optimism, encroaching beyond
the borders was ceasing to be taboo. Lending a hand to ‘manifest destiny’, many
82
Americans began to immigrate into Texas.Then they proclaimed its independence

from within. Finally, they requested and were granted annexation to the United
States (1845). Texas in effect entered a phase of economic progress. The concept
of progress was flexible: to foster it with cheap labour, slavery, forbidden under
Mexican law, was introduced.
By this stage, incidents on the frontier between the United States and Mexico
were commonplace; they mainly comprised American raids into the territory of
its southern neighbour.31 So diplomatic disputes multiplied, providing pretexts
for supporters of war and imperial expansion. Finally, in the years 1846–8 the
Americans invaded Mexico and occupied its capital.
‘Manifest destiny’ fundamentalists began to call for the annexation of its entire
territory to the United States. Popular enthusiasm seemed to know no bounds and
infected even the greatest national poet, Walt Whitman. In the name of a similar
fervour, in distant Europe Friedrich Engels applauded the American conquest in
the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, standard-bearer of the progressive press:
Or is it a misfortune that magnificent California has been taken away from

the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it? That the energetic
Yankees […] have in a few years concentrated on the most remote coast of
the Pacific Ocean a dense population and widespread trade […]. The ‘inde-
pendence’ of some Spanish Californians and Texans will probably be affected;
here and there ‘justice’ and other moral principles may have been violated; but
what does that matter compared to historical events of worldwide import?32
Like O’Sullivan, Engels could not resist one of the great temptations of his time: the
diagnosis of the future on the basis of dogmas that subsumed into scientific progress
the crushing of the weakest by the strongest.
After the United States’ overwhelming victory, the problem still remained of
the Mexican population. The theories of nascent social Darwinism anticipated that
inferior peoples would thin out of their own accord, owing to inherent genetic and
cultural weaknesses. But the majority of Americans, true to their ideals of purity,
abhorred the idea of living in the same country with millions of Indios and Latins;
so Mexico was prevented from being wiped off the map, paradoxically, by racial
prejudice and the old anxiety about contamination.33
At this point, Mexico was compelled ‘only’ to cede half of its territory. The fear
of contamination and the need to make the cession formally consensual, and there-
fore harder to reverse, was very strong even in the American governors.The United
States paid the sum of $15 million for a cession which in Europe would have been
regarded simply as a military conquest.
Spain and Catholicism

In the nineteenth century, American nationalism combined with the rise of violent
anti-Catholic movements.34 Samuel F. B. Morse, already famous as a painter and
83
as the inventor of the telegraph, published to great fanfares his Foreign Conspiracy
against the Liberties of the United States (1835).The book told of a plot hatched by the
Jesuits and the Austrian emperor, who dreamed of gaining the throne of the United
States. The following year saw the publication of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures, a
story which described horrible orgies that took place in Catholic monasteries. By
the time it emerged that the author was a pathological liar and a thief, and had a
long history of mental and legal problems, it was too late. The book had insinuated
itself among the unproven prejudices that were hard to erase from the collective
unconscious and had become, very probably, the most widely read American text
before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
As we saw in the last chapter, during the nineteenth century traditional preju-
dices against southern Europe were magnified by a new fact: immigration from
Catholic countries was becoming greater than that from Protestant ones and alter-
ing the religious proportions of the American population. It was suspected that the
pope wished gradually to take control of the land of new liberty.
The origin and archetype of the evils that the United States perceived in Latin
America was Spain: monarchical, Catholic and corrupt. In 1898, Spain truly seemed
to be the last non-modern country in Europe, and, in unmodern fashion, was intent
on massacring the rebels of its last real colony, Cuba. It was then that the Spanish
general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau (soon dubbed ‘the butcher’ by the American
press) invented what were probably the first concentration camps (reconcentrados)
of the modern era.35 In an attempt to keep the island under control, Weyler ‘con-
centrated’ in particular places the scattered groups of the population among which
there might be rebels. The organization was totally improvised, mortality from star-
vation and disease very high. The newspapers of the United States magnified every
report, forgetting about their own native peoples: they had been ‘concentrated’ in
the reservations.
For seemingly idealistic reasons, American public opinion was soon favourable
to an alliance with the rebels; it seemed like the last fight against monarchy and
colonialism. The world of politics and business, however, was divided. Only gradu-
ally did it let itself be drawn in by expansionist arguments. President McKinley,
choosing a middle path, sent the cruiser Maine, one of the finest warships of its day,
to Cuba to protect American interests.
On 15 February 1898, the Maine exploded while at anchor in Havana harbour.
Nobody was expecting this tragedy. By the time it happened, however, public opin-
ion in the United States had been prepared for hatred not only by an unrelenting
sensationalist campaign by Hearst’s New York Journal, Pulitzer’s World and all the so-
called yellow press (the sensational popular press, which was proving as influential
as trash television would be a hundred years later), but by centuries of prejudice.36
Given the utter disproportion of the forces in the field, the idea that Spain had
sunk the Maine as a pretext for declaring war on America was as plausible as that
of the lamb biting the wolf. But the majority of American politicians and public
opinion could no longer afford this elementary consideration; they were no longer
prepared to renounce war, even though by this stage the Spanish were ready to
84
negotiate the cession of Cuba without fighting. The dominant slogan was: war to
liberate Cuba. But of its two parts, the one the masses’ unconscious thought of was
war, not liberation.
The ‘newspaper war’
On 16 February, the Journal’s headline screamed: ‘The Warship Maine Was Split in
Two by an Enemy’s Secret Infernal Machine’. Without waiting for war, it already
referred to Spain as ‘the enemy’; without waiting for investigations into the causes
of the explosion, it attributed it to ‘secret’ weapons and to an ‘infernal’ intent. To
confirm that the newspaper did not need information, because it had revelations,
half the page was occupied by a drawing which illustrated the ‘infernal machine’
that had supposedly been placed under the Maine’s hull.
As the days went by, the tone of the headlines continued to rise and even the
more objective press began to get carried away. On 18 February, Associated Press
was forced to issue a communiqué warning against the many ‘sensational rumors’
that were now being put about by the dailies.
On 21 March, an American inquiry concluded that the Maine had been sunk
by a mine. On 22 March, a Spanish inquiry arrived at the different conclusion that
the ship had suffered an internal explosion; although it listed several credible pieces
of evidence – the impossibility of approaching the ship, the absence of dead fish
and of a rising column of water, which should have accompanied an explosion that
had taken place outside the hull, in the sea – the American press dismissed it out of
hand. The heavenward rise of hysteria seemed to be never-ending.
McKinley, a cautious and unaggressive person, was mobilizing troops but hesi-
tated to declare war.The front pages of the newspapers, inebriated by the constantly
rising number of copies sold and by the perception of having more power than the
president, dreamed of revolts of the people and the two chambers against him. On
12 April, the Examiner carried the headline: ‘Americans Look to Congress to Save
the Nation’s Honor’, stressing that McKinley had proved unable to defend it.
With the American armed forces already prepared, on 23 April Spain sent a dec-
laration of war. That of the United States was approved on the 25th, but backdated
to the 21st, to render ‘legitimate’ the naval blockade, which had already begun on
that date. We may note that it is typical of paranoia to ‘anticipate’ an enemy attack
which it senses is imminent, and the theme of encirclement as a component of
military paranoia is one that we will meet again later. Prudence would lead one to
postpone a declaration of war, to make it easier to put the blame on one’s adversary;
here the two parties competed to be the first to communicate it.
The Examiner could finally headline: ‘The Triumph of New Journalism’. Many
would remember the Spanish–American War as ‘the newspaper war’. Apart from
the headlines, an important role in creating the climate of paranoid aggression was
played by illustrations. Photography existed, but lacked agility, and journalism had
not yet given itself minimum codes of objectivity. For the most part they were
drawings which, as we have seen in the case of the ‘infernal machine’, left plenty
85
of room for fantasy and slander. Draughtsmen who had never been to Cuba had
depicted children of the recontrados dying of starvation, arousing strong emotions in
the reader.
An illustrator whom Hearst had actually sent to the island was the celebrated
Frederic Remington, whose paintings have canonized the epic of the West. Arriving
in Cuba, when the conflict between Spain and the United States had not yet bro-
ken out, he is said to have complained to his publisher because he did not see a
real war. Hearst is said to have replied: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the
war’. (Later the most fanciful minds would actually suggest that the Maine exploded
because of a mine laid by Hearst himself.)
Long ahead of time, Remington also had the intuition of offering the reader,
mingled with aggressive indignation, a bit of that soft porn which, in the next
century, would guarantee sales for many publications. He depicted Spanish func-
tionaries stripping some American women naked, under the pretext of a frontier
check, before they would allow them to disembark in Cuba.
The rock-solid prejudice of the Black Legend combined with absurd consistency
and autotrophy: in a circular process, the US government was asked for a naval
blockade of Cuba, but the consequences of the blockade were blamed on Spain.
This was the first war constructed by the mass media, and they revelled in their
success. Their triumph determined the history of the media and inaugurated long
ahead of its time what is now called in America the ‘postfactual society’.37 When
debate about the necessity of war ends because war has been declared, the fantasy
exchange of paranoia is complete. In our case, one question had been forgotten: was
there any Spanish responsibility at all in the sinking of the Maine? The problem had
been reduced to whether, and in what way, to respond to the Spanish attack. It was
taken for granted that an attack had taken place.
The war between the two intercontinental powers lasted only ten weeks. Not
only did the lamb not have time to attack the wolf; it couldn’t even stand up. In
Cuba the Spanish army numbered about 200,000 men, a not inconsiderable figure.
Yet it was so badly organized that of the American soldiers who were sent there
only 379 died in combat – that is, less than 0.15 per cent (perhaps the lowest
wartime casualty rate in history).38 If the numbers of dead in other statistics are
somewhat higher, the combativeness of the Spanish has nothing to do with it;
higher than the number of Americans killed in battle was that of those who died
through disease or accidents, in particular by poisoning due to an immense military
consignment of rotten meat.39
The United States lands in Asia

At sea the main clash occurred in the Philippines.
Not even the more sensationalist press had shown an interest in that distant
Spanish colony. The American navy knew that the Eastern Spanish fleet was at
anchor in Manila. It was so decrepit that not only would it have been no match
for the modern American ships; it would barely have been capable of crossing the
86
Pacific. And yet the American command began to fear that it would set sail for
California, and sent their fleet against it. Thus, the Philippines, which lay outside
the theatre of war, were involved as a result of an unreasonable suspicion and the pre-
emptive move that was its logical consequence. This waste of intelligence and blood
would cost the Asiatic islands a long subjection to the United States.
Admiral George Dewey entered the Bay of Manila, where what remained of the
Spanish ships that had ruled the oceans for centuries were anchored. The Spanish
had not even managed to prepare the most logical defence – mining the approaches
to the gulf. Even the artillery was ill matched: the American cannons had a far
greater range. Dewey approached as near as he needed for firing but in practice
remained out of range for the Spanish. He sank their fleet without effort or loss,
even allowing his sailors a break for lunch. Not only did he not lose a single ship;
he didn’t lose a single man. Those who have claimed that the military doctrine of
overwhelming force, whereby you go into battle only when you possess clearly
superior forces, was introduced into the American armed forces by General Colin
Powell should reflect on this precedent.
After the battle, the American fleet, hitherto completely unknown among the
naval powers, found itself in control of a sizeable colony but without having a single
soldier on dry land. Dewey was a prisoner of his own victory. It was at this point
that, fearing he would be attacked from the land, the United States made its second
pre-emptive move. It sent infantry forces to Dewey’s assistance. Thus America also
landed in the Philippines, where it had never intended to go.
The Spanish were urged to accept a surrender on all fronts, but the Cuban
patriots, to help whom America had gone to war, were not invited to the table at
which it was signed. With the exception of a few intellectuals, there were no pro-
tests. Public opinion, which had originally mobilized to liberate the Cubans, had
forgotten them and became interested only in the war. This short memory and this
moral betrayal were due in large part to the new protagonist that had dominated
the stage: the populist press – the new mass medium.
At this point the United States found itself in control of all the remains of the
Spanish colonial empire. But while it had planned to land in Cuba and Puerto
Rico, no one had thought about the faraway Philippines.
Without it being a political plan (as was confirmed by later historical
research), motivated only by the need to pre-empt the Spanish moves, the
United States occupied the Asian archipelago by land and sea. It had discovered
the secondary advantages of paranoia, at least for the stronger party; what des-
tiny could be more manifest?
Forgetting that the premise of it all had been anti-colonial solidarity, expansion-
ists now demanded the annexation of Puerto Rico and Cuba. But what about the
Philippines? The archipelago was in Asia, and to annex it would be to go against the
‘Monroe doctrine’, which permitted taking control of the two American islands.
As has been mentioned, McKinley was a sensible man. He could not lightly
contradict the ‘Monroe doctrine’, the pillar of American foreign policy, nor could
he lightly refuse such a large and now freely available morsel. The story of how he
87
arrived at the decision to keep the Philippines is said to have been recounted by
McKinley himself to a group of priests who were visiting the White House.
The president was distraught: to give the Philippines back to the Spanish would
have been dishonourable, but granting the islands self-government – of which
they were presumed to be incapable, not having a white population – might cause
even worse problems than a Spanish administration. Previously McKinley had not
thought that the Philippine archipelago should be incorporated among the United
States’ possessions. But the fact that it had fallen into the nation’s lap like a divine
gift was disconcerting for McKinley, who, after consulting many politicians to no
avail, couldn’t sleep at night.Wandering around the presidential rooms he fell on his
knees, yielding to the temptation to pray to God to enlighten him. And, although
the president confessed that he couldn’t remember how, enlighten him God did.
It was a responsibility: the Filipinos needed to be supported, Christianized, civi-
lized, educated. McKinley finally went to bed and slept the most restful of slum-
bers.40 On God’s altar, destiny had been married to duty. ‘Duty determines destiny’,
the president is said to have exclaimed, enriching in his turn the contribution of
‘circular literature’. As Hofstadter comments, ‘The manufacturers of inevitability
believed deeply in their own product.’41
Historians’ reconstructions confirm that the Filipinos did not receive the same
enlightenment from God. They did not possess even the semblance of an army, but
they wanted to be rid of foreign masters. Their resistance was desperate. It took the
Americans three years to gain control of the remote archipelago, which had been
dominated for centuries by a decayed European force that the Americans had anni-
hilated in ten weeks.
Historiography does not possess complete documentation of the clash. It was
at any rate, rather than a war, a massacre; only halfway through the conflict an
American general returning home estimated that a sixth of the population of
Luzon – the main island, where Manila is situated – had died in clashes or in disas-
ters deriving from them.42
By extension of the concept of clinical paranoia, I have adopted the term
historico-cultural paranoia for a collective conviction based on wrong premises.
In 1976, Hyman Rickover, an admiral in the US Navy, carried out an inquiry into
the sinking of the Maine.43 He concluded that there was no evidence of sabotage
and stated that the most likely cause of the explosion in the ship was internal spon-
taneous combustion. Essentially the Spanish explanation was confirmed and the
American one rejected. In this ending there is something consoling and disturbing
at the same time. Paranoia can be like an avalanche that feeds itself as it falls; but
time can straighten up, if not the injustice, at least the inclined plane down which
it ran. Spain had lost the war and its colonies seventy-eight years before Rickover’s
inquiry, a fact that remained irreversible, like the deaths of the soldiers. But it was
acknowledged that the American government had behaved like ‘naive persecu-
tors’. The process would be repeated in the twenty-first century, when troops sent
by George W. Bush would attack Iraq to punish it for possessing weapons of mass
destruction which would never be found.
88
The white man’s burden

There is, however, another aspect of the collective prejudice inherent in those
events. It is more insidious than military hysteria, for it wears an aesthetic garb and
cannot be demolished by a specialists’ inquiry, nor swept away with the dust of time,
as happened with the articles of the yellow press and as happens today with almost
all television programmes.
At the end of the Spanish–American War, on 12 February 1899, the popu-
lar monthly periodical McClure’s Magazine published the poem ‘The White Man’s
Burden’ by one of the most famous poets of all time, Rudyard Kipling. The subtitle
was ‘The United States and the Philippine Islands’.The white man, says the poem, will
incur criticism, while he sheds tears and blood; but he must carry, even by force, even
against his own will, civilization to coloured peoples. The poem’s invocation shows
surprising similarities with the advice given by God to President McKinley: for their
own good, one must make the sacrifice of governing benighted peoples.
Take up the White Man’s burden, Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man’s burden, In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit, And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden, The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to naught.
Take up the White Man’s burden, No tawdry rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper, The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man’s burden And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
‘Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?’
Take up the White Man’s burden,Ye dare not stoop to less—

Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your gods and you.
89
Take up the White Man’s burden, Have done with childish days—

The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!44
Notes
1 Girard 1982: 23.
2 Hofstadter 1965: 178.
3 See Stannard 1992.
4 See above, Chapter 3; Stannard 1992: Appendix 1; Cook 1999.
5 See Gibson 1966 and 1968; Halperin Donghi 1967.
6 See above, Chapter 3.
7 See Foster 1960; Fabregat 1999.
8 See Kroeber 1939.
9 See Jennings 1975: Chapter 2; Stannard 1992: Appendix 1.
10 See Jackson 1881. It should be noted that it was a woman who awakened public opin-
ion to cruelty to native Americans, just as the denunciation of the treatment of African
Americans began with Harriet Beecher Stowe and her Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
11 See Jackson 1881: 10.
12 Jackson 1881: 10.
13 See Stannard 1992: Appendix 1; Wilson 1998: 20 and 283.
14 See Stephanson 1995: Chapter 1. For the expression ‘American exceptionalism’, see
Lipset 1997.
15 See Hofstadter 1965.
16 Melville 1851: 666.
17 One only has to scan the titles of the official documents from a short period contained
in Bailyn 1993: Philadelphiensis, ‘Diabolical Plots and Secrets Machinations to Destroy
Your Liberties, 19 December 1787’; Hugh Leddlie to John Lamb, 15 January 1788
(Beware, Beware, Beware, for I Apprehend a Dreadful Snare); Anon., ‘The Federalists’
Conspiracy Detected: The Most Odious System of Tyranny That Was Ever Projected […].
A Crime of the Blackest Dye’, Centinel, 12 and 23 January 1788; Publius, ‘Federal
Tyranny: The Incoherent Dreams of a Delirious Jealousy’, The Federalist, 46, 29 January
1788; Anon., ‘A Conspiracy Detected to Obliterate Debts Owed to the Public’, Centinel,
26 February 1788; and so on.
18 Washington 1796.
19 See Publius, ‘Are Slaves Property or Persons?’, The Federalist, 54, 12 February 1788, in
Bailyn 1993: II.
20 See Wilson 1998: 289.
21 Quoted in Wilson 1998: 311–12.
22 Quoted in Stannard 1992: 389.
23 See Hitler 1925: 313–14.
24 See Kiernan 2007: 422.
25 See Kiernan 2007: 329 ff.
26 See Vázquez 1997; Schumacher 1994.
27 See O’Sullivan 1839: 426.
28 O’Sullivan 1839: 426.
29 O’Sullivan 1839: 426–7.
30 O’Sullivan 1839: 427 and 430.
31 See Cantú 1996. The text lists and discusses 286 violations of Mexican sovereignty by
the United States.
32 Engels 1849: 367–8.
33 See Ruiz 1994.
34 See Hofstadter 1965: Chapter 1.
90
35 See Deriu 2005: s.v. Campi.

36 Front pages, extracts and illustrations from the dailies of the time, as well as a lot of
information about chronology, can be consulted on the website http://historicalthink-
ingmatters.org/spanishamericanwar (accessed 13 December 2016).
37 See Manjoo 2008.
39 See Morris 1982. The statistics confirm that 90 per cent of deaths were due to ‘disease’
and that only 10 per cent occurred in the field. See www.spanamwar.com/casualties.
htm (accessed 11 November 2016).
40 See Zinn 1980: 216–17.
41 See Hofstadter 1965: Chapter 5, ‘Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny’.
42 See Zinn 1980: 217–19.
43 See Rickover 1976.
44 Kipling 1987: 126–9.
91
5
DARKNESS OVER EUROPE
All the governments and most of the masses are peace-loving, but things have
got out of control and the stone has started rolling.1
Now you, Count, are a military man – how can anyone halt the machinery
of mobilization once it has picked up speed?2
Great is war
What were the causes of the First World War, the ‘Great War’ that, including the
genocide of the Armenians, killed about 15 million people and indirectly caused
at least another 20 million deaths through famine and disease, including the
‘Spanish’ flu?
Or perhaps we should ask: what were the causes of the modern Thirty Years’
War (the phrase is, I think, Claudel’s), the Long War of the Short Century, the
second instalment of which caused another 40 million direct casualties (includ-
ing the genocide of the Jews) and an incalculable number of indirect victims (the
1943 Bengal famine alone resulted in 3.5–3.8 million deaths), and drained away
half a century of history, with a total number of deaths ranging from 60 million to
80–90 million? Or we could go further: what were the causes of the ‘war of the
world’, as Niall Ferguson has called it,3 which, if we add to the European war the
other conflicts – ‘only’ concerning decolonization and therefore soon forgotten
by the Europeans – and the ‘internal genocides’ of the Soviet Union under Stalin,
China under Mao and Cambodia under Pol Pot, continued almost throughout the
entire century and obliterated between 167 and 188 million lives?4
The Napoleonic campaigns which had swept across Europe, and the ensuing
nationalist conflicts, such as the Franco-Prussian War, had been unprecedented
events. Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century (which, if we call the twentieth
the ‘short century’, would be a ‘long century’, for its stability continued until 1914)5
92
92 Darkness over Europe
only 5.5 million people died in war around the world.6 Indeed, at the end of the
nineteenth century it was calculated that since the beginning of human history, the
number of people killed in all wars had been only 6.86 million.7 But after the sum-
mer of 1914 things would never be the same again. ‘Men’, a historian said, ‘have lost
in war the control they had over their own history.’8
Many historians have considered the First and Second World Wars as a single
European civil war. Others link this civil war to later conflicts – the Cold War and
the massacres of decolonialization. Paradoxically, despite countless studies, there is
no common, or at any rate widely accepted, interpretation of the origin of all ori-
gins, the causes of the First World War. However, it may be stated with certainty that
paranoia played an important part.
It seemed, at least in Europe, that the world was going through a phase of
prosperity, peace and extraordinary cultural enrichment. Viewed retrospectively,
that age has been considered the paradise lost of liberal society. Until the catastro-
phe happened, people circulated in Europe without passports; this fact made a great
impression on Borges, a visitor from distant Argentina.
Boredom and waiting

Peace can seem long and even a little boring, until the time comes when we look
back on it nostalgically. The twentieth century taught us to fear being infected by
violence, but at the time intellectuals seemed chiefly concerned with the conta-
gion of ennui – boredom.9 And yet the attentive observer should have recognized
a potential of suspicion and destructiveness, hidden beneath the celebrations of
progress that every country held.
Remembering those years later, many would say they had noticed ‘a sense of
waiting’. Unwittingly, Europe was waiting for the first casualty. The first casualty
spreads an all-embracing contagion, a sense of menace that affects everyone.10 His
death sows the seeds of paranoia in the masses. The first casualty means everything.
He no longer belongs to himself; everyone fills him with meaning. By contrast,
the first life saved by peace, even millions of lives saved by peace, can mean noth-
ing, because no one invokes them. Until he sees death at the gallop, a man it takes
for granted that life is the normal state, so he doesn’t bother about it. Only in the
trenches, when it is too late to go home, does he realize that life is not a matter
of course; just as we realize that we were once healthy people when being sent to
hospital removes us from that category.
Peace, and life going on in the usual way, are silence and anonymity.War, and the
death that follows it, make a noise and have a name: they are ancient divinities, Fury
and Fame. Mass communication favours the alliance between them and increases
this asymmetry between peace and war. The mass media, which have irrupted into
modernity, pay lip service to peace and life, but are the antithesis of their silence and
anonymity; they are structurally closer to war and death, which they formally abhor,
for they live on Fame and Fury. Anyone who wants war possesses, in the form of the
modern media, new disseminators and multipliers of emotions, which peace and
93
Darkness over Europe 93
silence still lack. Evil has always had an advantage, an asymmetrical strength, in compari-
son to goodness.11 The impulses to peace are not accompanied by strong emotions.
The destructive impulses, by contrast, are exhilarating, especially in a crowd, which
dilutes responsibility and heightens emotions.
In his memoirs, Stefan Zweig describes an episode from the spring of 1914,
when there were still only few people who thought a war would break out.12 He
was in France, in a cinema in Tours. The newsreel was running across the screen.
After a sports event the news bulletin moved on to the Kaiser’s visit to the emperor
of Austria-Hungary. Old Franz Josef was walking towards a train, stooping slightly
and hesitant.The audience laughed indulgently.Then the door of a carriage opened
to reveal the Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Suddenly there was uproar in the well-bred audi-
ence (going to the cinema was quite an expensive pastime in those days). Even the
children shouted, without knowing why. It lasted only a moment, but it revealed
to Zweig how much hatred had been built up by propaganda. The bourgeoisie of
Tours didn’t know who that man was, but they knew, with unshakeable certainty,
that he was evil and hateful. A moment later they were laughing good-naturedly at
other pictures.
Pandarus’ arrow and the first casualty

In the Iliad, the Greeks and Trojans manage, with great difficulty, to halt the war and
agree on a truce.13 But, almost surreptitiously, Pandarus fires an arrow and a few
moments later the conflict starts again. He is the shining model for the unobtrusive
but ambitious paranoiacs concealed in many corners of society; he has hardly done
anything but he has determined almost everything. He has not created anything
but he has destroyed everything. Without any real leader having taken the decision,
everyone has picked up their weapons and blood has started to flow again. Paranoid
return may also be called Pandarus return.
The first deaths are the result of Pandarus’ arrow and always serve as an ampli-
fier. Instead of inspiring the horror that we would expect in the normal citizen,
they evoke even in him the reaction of the pack infected by an animalesque emo-
tion: our first casualties must not be men who ‘died in vain’! We will meet this
conviction later in an absurd letter from Hitler to Mussolini.
A first death is then followed by countless deaths, which there is all the more
reason to describe as pointless and avoidable.With every first death, with every sub-
sequent death, a family goes into mourning and goes over to the side of nationalism
and paranoia; the ‘Pandarus return’ is quickly collected. Bricks become debris. The
problem comes later, when one has to extract bricks from the physical and mental
debris.
Whatever the conscious intentions, an unconscious collective fantasy was wait-
ing for the first deaths. In 1914, this ghost started moving, as if to keep a promise
made to them when they were still alive.
On 28 June 1914, people in Sarajevo were waiting for the visit of Franz
Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. For the Serbs it was a day of
94
national mourning, the anniversary of the defeat of Kosovo, which resulted in their
subjection to the Turks – a time when resentment was closer to the surface. Some
youthful members of the Black Hand (Crna Ruka, also known as Unity or Death, a
Serbian group trained to carry out acts of terrorism against Austria) were in Bosnia
(then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) – in Sarajevo, to be precise. They were
convinced that the visit was a deliberate attack on Serbian honour. At first they hit
the wrong target: instead of Franz Ferdinand they wounded two officers. Just when
the plan seemed to have failed, Gavrilo Princip saw the future emperor passing in
front of him, and killed him. Princip was nineteen and a naive reader of Nietzsche.
He didn’t know he had made Franz Ferdinand into the ‘first casualty’ and moved
the first pebble of a landslide in which Europe would hurtle down for decades. He
didn’t know he had performed the act of Pandarus.
All over the continent there was debate, but not yet discord. At the beginning
of the century assassination attempts, especially by anarchists, were quite common.
Even the press of the countries that later fought against Austria condemned the
terrorist. The emperor is said to have been secretly relieved by Franz Ferdinand’s
death.14 And many of his subjects felt the same, especially among the Hungarians
and the conservatives: now the Austro-Hungarian Empire would not pass into
the hands of that hothead. Karl Kraus mentions this fact at the beginning of his
play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1919).15 The Austrian citizen Adolf Hitler also
hated the ‘Slavophile’ future emperor. The Slavs of the empire may have been less
pleased: one of the dead man’s plans which were considered imprudent was that
of transforming the dual crown of Austria-Hungary into a triple monarchy, thus
finally putting the Slavs on the same level as the Austrians and Hungarians.16 As in
recent times, however, the terrorists wanted to eliminate not absolute enemies but
possible intermediaries – those who wanted to build bridges between the opposing
sides, cutting out the extremists.
Of course Austria would have demanded satisfaction from Serbia for what had
happened, for it was known that the members of Black Hand trained in Serbian
territory. But the European powers were accustomed to defusing crises after some
conventional tough talking.
Suspicion grows
In 1914, Germany, the country which more than any other at that time focused
its politics on aggressive rearmament, had no interest in entering an extended war.
The Triple Alliance, made up of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, as a whole
had land forces decidedly smaller than those of the Triple Entente (France, Great
Britain and Russia), especially considering that in the event of a conflict Italy would
be reluctant to help the Germans and Austrians: as events later confirmed, it had
more interests in common with the Entente. The projections said that Germany
was becoming the greatest power in Europe, and that thanks to rearmament its
army now surpassed that of France. By building its new fleet, in accordance with
the plans of Admiral Tirpitz, Germany would be able to achieve near-parity at sea
95
with Great Britain. The project, however, was progressing slowly and the British
fleet was still more than twice the size of Germany’s. Given that the Austrians were
infinitely weaker on the seas than the French and Russians, the naval inferiority of
the Central Powers was even greater than their terrestrial one. Germany could be
isolated from the world by a maritime blockade, and that, in a protracted war, would
be decisive: which is what happened in reality.
As we know, the fear of encirclement readily blends with paranoia.17 Here it also
had a basis in fact. The alliance’s inferiority in terms of land forces continued to
grow: with its immense population Russia could turn millions of reservists into
active soldiers.18 The nightmare of war on two fronts haunted the German gener-
als. Their plans for preventing it were becoming a basic paranoid dogma. Today some
historical studies confirm that the Entente was encircling Germany militarily, but
that does not mean that an attack was imminent.19
The British foreign minister, Lord Grey, later interpreted the outbreak of
war as a consequence of the race to rearmament which had by now taken on
an inexorable life of its own. The ‘arms race’ is not an anthropomorphic figure
corresponding to human intentions. It is the modern expression of the ancient
god of war, a collective obsession that unleashes the Furies, as it has been viv-
idly described by James Hillman.20 This subterranean obsession now inspired the
conscious thoughts of the military commanders and, even more seriously, the
unconscious thoughts of a large number of politicians and ordinary people; even
many of those who were honestly convinced that they wanted peace were sliding towards
an unconscious expectancy, which considered war inevitable. This preparation for war is,
unfortunately, intimately linked to preparation for paranoid thought: the attitude
that leads to all-out war and that which leads to collective paranoia are structured
in a broadly similar manner.
Like paranoia, war (and the arms race, its latent preparatory form), once it has
taken the first step, tends to go on right to the last step – even if that last step con-
sists in the destruction of the individual who seemingly decides to take it. In other
words, the paranoid personality and the traditional warlike personality proceed with
the same absurd consistency imbued with autotrophy. Whether or not the individual
in whom this personality is embodied dies is only of secondary importance. As
was mentioned above with regard to individual pathology, what matters to him,
whether he is a leader or an individual, is respect for the absurd consistency with
which the paranoid – or warlike – programme develops to the end. Unless he pos-
sesses great cultural openness, deep moral integrity and a differentiated personality,
the military leader becomes paranoid and cannot stop, even when it seems clear to
the external observer that it is very much in his interest to do so. Of course we will
be told that what prevents the warrior from stopping is honour. In reality, it is very
hard to find a clear line where honour’s moral quality ends and its psychopatho-
logical quality begins. What prevents him from stopping is the circular structure of his
mental processes; and in the vicious circle conclusions become, in their turn, premises.
Almost always, the two things are superimposed on one another and coexist. What
changes is above all the perspective of the observer.
96
Among the German military there were dreams of a pre-emptive attack. Time
did not alter the considerable superiority of their adversaries. There was a strong
temptation to break out of the cage: by taking the initiative with lightning
speed and taking maximum advantage of the undoubted discipline, organization
and dedication of their troops, the German military commanders thought they
could compensate for their numerical inferiority. To avoid being besieged by the
Russians on one side and the French on the other, the plans envisaged a first
rapid and massive attack westwards: if this were done, it was supposed that France
could be beaten in a few weeks, and that the troops could then be moved towards
Russia. However, there was a complication: breaking through the defences the
French had built along the border might take a long time. The extreme hypothe-
sis, or Schlieffen Plan, from the name of the former chief of staff who had devised
it, therefore involved circumventing those defences by going through Belgium,
militarily a very weak country.
The self-deception of the German generals contained some distinctly paranoid
features. The granite basic premise was avoiding encirclement. Therefore – these
are the subsequent ‘logical’ steps – France would have to be defeated first, since
that country could be reached much more quickly than Russia. But in order to
do that, the suggestion was that the sovereignty of Belgium be violated. And this
risked bringing a declaration of war from countries that might otherwise have
remained neutral, such as Great Britain. So, imperceptibly, the plans for prevent-
ing encirclement ran the risk of causing it. Little by little, seemingly logical steps
turned the whole argument into an absurdity, which went against the military’s
own calculations.
In August, when war broke out, there was talk of a Septemberprogramm: on the
western front the war must be over by the end of September. A result, extreme and
very hard to achieve, became the basic assumption for all other hypotheses. Haste was
pushing the Prussian generals to the edge of the precipice. In 1870, Moltke the
Elder had overturned the European military hierarchy by defeating France with
unexpected speed, and was considered the greatest genius in German military his-
tory. But now his warning was being forgotten: that the next European conflict
would degenerate into a Seven Years’ War, if not a new Thirty Years’ War.21 The
Schlieffen Plan was supposed to remain an emergency option, to be used in the
most feared hypothesis – to respond to an encirclement that was already taking
place. But it had been cultivated so obsessively that it had become the initial dogma.
Long before the conflict broke out, the military’s minds were focused in that direc-
tion, as if they were faced with an inevitable enemy plot.
The eastern theatre of war needed more time, because of the great distances of
the Russian Empire. However, fortunately for the German generals, the mobiliza-
tion of the immense potential of the Russian army was much slower. Telegraph
lines, normal by this time in other countries, were few and far between; in order to
communicate with one another generals often had to resort to dispatch riders. And
if the written orders had to pass via the lower ranks, the country’s poverty claimed
another tribute: many soldiers could not read.
97
Everyone, both the allies of the Entente and the Central Empires, knew their
Clausewitz as a priest knows the Gospel. And this Aristotle of military philosophy
prescribed the rapid, decisive surprise attack.22 Inevitably, the high commands of
the Entente understood that Germany was making these calculations and had some
information about its plans; and they in turn – the British with less conviction, the
French with more – formulated hypotheses of pre-emptive attacks, to pre-empt the
possible German pre-emptive attack.
Events would show that all these pre-emptive calculations, like those of a
paranoiac, were unfounded. Every rapid attack proved useless.
After the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, governments and foreign ministries
started frantically negotiating with each other in an attempt to ease the tensions
between Austria and Serbia. Meanwhile, the population – and the ‘public opin-
ion’ expressed by the newspapers – did not seem overly alarmed. In the collective
unconscious, however, the wheels of paranoia had started turning.
The Austro-Hungarian citizen Stefan Zweig travelled to Belgium on holi-
day.23 The beach, near Ostende, was packed with Germans. The writer had an
uncomfortable feeling when he saw some soldiers walking across it. They were
transporting machine guns on small dog-carts. A passer-by stroked one of the
dogs, and the officer told him to desist with excessive vigour, as if he had offended
the dignity of the army.
The conversation between Zweig and the group of Belgian artists who were
friends of his – but possible enemies by virtue of their nationality – was intense.
What are these soldiers doing among the beach umbrellas? If there’s a war, they
say the Germans will try to come through Belgium. The writer turned to look at
the thousands of German tourists crowding the seashore and said he was sure they
wouldn’t. Since the other man persisted in his point of view, he pointed to a lamp
post and said that if he was wrong he deserved to be hung right there.
Zweig was too sensitive, too reasonable, too unparanoid to foresee which way
the world was sliding. But his unconscious had formulated a horribly prophetic
joke. For him, a non-observant, cosmopolitan, multilingual Jew, ‘faith’ meant the
culture and literature of the German language. And that very religion betrayed him
and killed him. After the disillusionment of the First World War, Zweig was already
safe in Brazil when the second broke out. He committed suicide in 1942 – not, like
Benjamin, to avoid falling into the Nazis’ hands, but because he had been betrayed
for a second time, irremediably, by German boots again marching on Belgian soil.
The paranoid thinking continued its work. Tragic ambivalence – which, as we
shall see, tormented the main competitors – preserved an appearance of rationality.
In reality, no one succeeded in making a rational decision. By now the protagonists’
egos were powerless before the omnipotence of paranoia, and were sliding into the
‘Creon syndrome’.
On 2 July 1914, the Austrian emperor sent the German emperor a long let-
ter discussing the international situation.24 No doubt he was expressing the views
of Austro-Hungarian political and military leaders. But his melancholy and pes-
simistic words also reflect the personality of the elderly Franz Josef: he begins by
98
expressing his conviction – which was not without foundation – of the existence of
a ‘well-organized plot’ (‘ein wohlorganisiertes “Komplott”’), traceable to Belgrade,
and ends by stressing the need to break the strands of the net – another image of
encirclement – which the enemies of Austria-Hungary want to pull over his head.
In every person, intuition is a quality. In politicians patience usually is too. In
soldiers, by contrast, a more frequent quality is speed of action. In a crisis like that
created by the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, the politicians’ intu-
ition loses credit as each day brings more confusion; while the military’s impatience
is mistaken for intuition. As the crisis grew in complexity, the role of the military
became ever more dominant.
None of the countries had yet taken any steps towards mobilization. The lack
of solutions corresponded, however, in Vienna’s eyes, to a lack of compensation for
the serious attack it had suffered; it was also a slap in the face for national prestige,
which raised the number of aggressive voices.
In every country, the pro-war vanguards increasingly claimed to represent the
whole nation. It was hard to dissent. Peace and reason were more likely to remain
voices of individuals, which did not add up to a crowd. Sometimes the mass media
would lead the landslide down the slope, at other times they would let themselves
be led. Only when it was too late, when the war was over and emotions had cooled,
did people realize that the desire for peace had not been restricted to a minority.
What happened was an aggregation and regression of individual intelligence in
the crowd, where the mind functions at incredibly low levels. One of the most
authoritative observers would say, ‘If you choose one hundred of the most intel-
ligent people in the world and get them all together, they’re a stupid mob.’25
Pre-emptive mobilization
On 23 July, the first step was taken across the thin ice: an ultimatum with very harsh
conditions was delivered by Austria-Hungary to Serbia. It interfered peremptorily
in the country’s internal affairs, demanding the punishment of the plotters, but also
strong guarantees for the future through works of public information and repres-
sion of anti-Austrian extremism. On the one hand, many of the demands were
objectively justified. On the other, getting an adversary with his back to the wall
and not allowing him to save face risks making him feel encircled, thereby exclud-
ing reasonableness from the discussion and delivering him up to hatred.
The Vienna government had unconsciously allowed itself to be led by para-
noia: a premise which is the exact opposite of a good calculation, for over time
it solidifies the very phantoms that it most fears. Behind the scenes, Germany
and Russia poured oil on the fire by guaranteeing their support to Austria and
Serbia respectively.
On 25 July Serbia replied, effectively accepting all the conditions, except
the demand that the Austrian police take an active part in the investigations.
Compared with the acceptance of greater humiliations, that reservation might
have seemed a minor matter, but it certainly helped to arouse other persecutory
99
suspicions. It made Vienna think its police were being prevented from investigat-
ing because they would have found trails that led to responsibilities high up in
the Serbian government. In any case, the Serbians had ordered mobilization three
hours before delivering their reply.26
The chief of staff of the Serbian army was nearing the end of a spa holiday in
Austria. On his way home, the Hungarians stopped him; Emperor Franz Josef found
this unacceptable and ordered that he be set free, putting a special train at his dis-
posal.27 This gesture might have been the beginning of a series of anti-paranoid acts
and defused the crisis. But it remained isolated at the top. Neither the military nor
the masses were in a position to appreciate it.
The second step across an increasingly fragile surface followed soon afterwards.
Talk of mobilization began in Russia. Of course, in such a situation the declared
intention is that one does not find oneself at a disadvantage, if actual mobilization
proves necessary. In this way, however, real mobilization has already begun, and
from the psychological point of view, the paranoid retreat forwards, to ‘pre-empt
the adversary’, has wrested control away from the politicians, who will not be
able to get it back.
The monarchs and traditional politicians of the two strongest countries –
Germany and Russia – had historical reasons for not believing in their mutual
hostility: throughout most of the nineteenth century they had had many exchanges.
The Baltic was for the most part a lake of German culture, German was spoken at
the Tsar’s court along with French, and the two crowns adopted a common policy,
hostile to liberalism and Polish nationalism.28 But at the end of the century things
had changed.The cosmopolitanism of the rulers was being overridden by the mod-
ern right wing, composed of aggressive populism and ultranationalist mass media
which spread hatred for the neighbouring empire. And with the mass media’s rapid
diffusion of news, public opinion became increasingly important.
On the morning of 28 July the Kaiser read the Serbian reply to the ultima-
tum and wrote at the bottom that the crisis was now resolved. At midday Austria
declared war on Serbia, but without ordering general mobilization. On 29 July
Russia took more steps to mobilize its reservists. The Austro-Hungarians shelled
Belgrade across the Danube (the Hungarian border extended much further south
than it does today, coming close to the Serbian capital).
Many still thought that events could be limited to a thunderous reprisal and,
most important, be restricted to the Balkans.That same day, the Kaiser’s brother was
in England taking part in a regatta. He paid a courtesy visit to his cousin, George
V, who apparently assured him that he had no intention of going to war. The Tsar
favoured the mediation of the court of The Hague, the Kaiser his own mediation
between Russia and Austria. Nicholas was growing anxious, as the situation was
getting out of his control; he would have liked to take all the proposals seriously
and postpone mobilization. The military, the politicians and something in the Tsar
himself did not let him.
Solzhenitsyn has left an imaginary but psychologically very convincing recon-
struction of those few moments which decided the fate of the world.29 The Tsar is
100
tormented by problems of conscience; but his problems of image are on a higher

level still. He cannot betray what he thinks the people and his ministers expect
of him.30 The foreign minister Sazonov wants him to sign the mobilization order.
Nicholas himself would prefer a partial mobilization, because he doesn’t want to
lose the trust of Emperor Wilhelm, his cousin and friend, with whom he is nego-
tiating. He learns to his horror that no plans exist for only partly mobilizing the
immense Russian army: it is all or nothing. He rails against the military leaders. At
this point, however, he is forced to take another step; since there is a risk of war,
he agrees to give orders to the army. And, not being able to order only a partial
mobilization, he puts his signature to a general one. In any case, they reassure him,
his signature is only a preliminary precaution; the signatures of three ministers and
the approval of the Senate would be needed for the procedure to be set in motion.
The next morning the Tsar is relieved to read a message from the German
ambassador. Emperor Wilhelm assures him that he will use his influence to persuade
Austria to soften its tone with Serbia – provided, of course, that Russia does not
raise its own tone by ordering mass mobilization at this critical moment. Nicholas
embarks on an increasingly frantic exchange of telegrams with the Kaiser, until he
learns that his own minister of war has already issued the order for mobilization and
his own foreign minister has already informed France and Great Britain. All without
informing him. But what about the approval of the ministers and the Senate? That
had been obtained while he was engaged in his discussions, as a precaution, since it
was necessary to act quickly. The Tsar becomes increasingly hesitant: so he can’t trust
his own men? Trying not to be overwhelmed by mistrust, he projects his hopes onto
Berlin; but his exchange of messages with Wilhelm is so rapid that the telegrams
now overlap one another. The sentences that arrive are meaningless, for they reply
not to the last text he had sent, but to the previous one. This incomprehensibility
means that the Tsar’s suspicion, a short time previously projected onto his ministers
and generals, is now directed at his German cousin and his entire people.The event
is rolling; now it moves forward of its own accord. There is nothing more to be
done; Nicholas realizes that, after all, the fact of letting things go, simply not doing
anything, finally gives him relief.
On 31 July, while the German chancellor was urging his Austrian counterpart
not to move against Russia, his chief of staff, General Moltke the Younger, was
advising the Austrian chief of staff to mobilize. At this point Austria mobilized. By
now the general feeling everywhere was that decisions were up to the military.
Haste had prevailed over the idea of taking things slowly.
Today, a reprisal is carried out with missiles, which are always trained on their
target. In those days the army had to be sent to the front; and the conviction was
that, if you arrived late, you risked losing the first overwhelming impetus, which
according to the military textbooks was crucial. In case of doubt, the overriding
criterion was to mobilize and send troops to the front even when the prospect of
war was still remote. Clausewitz had unwittingly instilled paranoia into Europe
under the guise of military theory. For many, too, this calculation was strengthened
by an arrogant sense of national honour.
101
Without any human will really guiding it, the autotrophy of paranoia moved
forward: the very thing that was least desirable – a clash of masses of troops on a
scale never seen in history – was making itself inevitable of its own accord. Huge
numbers of men were already militarily trained, but in peacetime for the most part
stayed at home: 6 million in Russia, 5 million in German and France, 3 million in
Austria-Hungary.31 These four contenders alone had to send to the front, as quickly
as possible, a mass corresponding to forty times the population of Rome. A colossal
task, which stretched the simple railway networks of the time to breaking point.
Do railway timetables determine the slaughter?

A great British historian has written that the war broke out because of the rigidity
of railway timetables, which in turn was linked to the rigidity of military plans.32
Plans were conditioned by the experiences of the previous century and envisaged
short wars of rapid movement concentrated in local theatres. What was about to
arrive was a general conflict, with fronts that remained almost stationary for more
than four years; nobody was prepared for this. The only clear aim, at the begin-
ning, was that of Austria-Hungary, which wanted to deal Serbia a punitive blow.
However, the Austrians hesitated to mobilize against their Balkan neighbour. Their
trains, insufficient for the army in any case, would have had to run south; if the
Russians attacked in the meantime, they would have to move them north-east. So
they held back on mobilization for a long time, and stuck to firing shells across the
river. On the Russian side, the original intention was to mobilize in order to deter
Austria, but the military imposed its will on that of the hesitant Tsar; mobilizing on
the Austro-Hungarian frontier alone would have meant taking trains away from the
German border, leaving them exposed on the very front they feared most. So peace
gave way to total mobilization, thereby eliminating the possibility of that limited
conflict that everyone was counting on.
Taylor’s explanation has been criticized as reductive. Yet even leaving aside the
trains, the rigidity that he stressed is significant in itself. The lack of flexibility in the
plans and the railway system was the external equivalent of the paranoid convictions
that were gaining the upper hand. So those convictions obtained confirmation from
‘objective’ circumstances and felt authorized to side with military thought, rejecting
the flexibility of the ideal politician. The continental slaughter that was about to
befall Europe was anticipated by the erroneousness of the fundamental convictions of the
military of all the countries involved. The high commands started from premises imag-
ined by them, but false (manoeuvre warfare, therefore importance of attacking first,
therefore limited theatre, therefore short duration). The conclusions they draw are
logical steps but are more disastrous and bloody than any previous ones in human
history, because they are rigid, hasty applications of those erroneous premises.
Particular responsibility lies with the German generals. Their plans were based
on mobility, because they started from the assumption that war on two fronts was
unsustainable. In reality they carried on such a war for more than four years and
were a hair’s breadth away from success: they failed because they exhausted their
102
resources (while the Allies gained the almost infinite resources of America). The
internal front collapsed, but not the external military front, which had not retreated,
indeed, at the time of the armistice it was still occupying captured enemy territory.
So the self-fuelling of the fury of war corresponded to that of paranoia. If you keep
crying wolf, sooner or later the wolf will really appear.
Once the illusion of swift, decisive action faded on both sides, another of
Clausewitz’s principles was also proved false – that there is continuity between
politics and war. Sucked into the interminable slaughter, which engaged all the
country’s resources, politicians could no longer think that warfare was the continu-
ation of political activity by other means. They had slipped onto a plane that was
too steeply inclined, and could not get back on their feet – that is, return to politics.
The politics of Creon

While the crisis was leading to war, at the two extremes of society many intel-
lectuals and working-class movements found themselves increasingly isolated in
reasonableness (which, from our point of view, we may call ‘anti-paranoia’). From
London, Lord Rothschild tried to use his network of relationships to establish a
dialogue. On 31 July he wrote to The Times, which was inciting the British to war,
urging more prudence. The editor considered his initiative a ‘dirty Jewish-German
trick’ and intensified the newspaper’s aggressiveness.33 A peace demonstration by
German workers had mustered half a million people. The French socialists tried to
follow a similar line, but on that same day, 31 July, Jean Jaurès, the party leader, was
assassinated by a nationalist.
When, as we saw in Solzhenitsyn’s reconstruction, the Tsar, a prisoner of tragic
oscillation, was still telegraphing to his cousin Wilhelm II, the Kaiser had already
committed himself to supporting Austria; so Germany too ordered general mobili-
zation. France did the same. But it was already 1 August when Prince Lichnowsky,
the German ambassador in London, telegraphed to Berlin that Great Britain might
still stay out of the conflict if France was not attacked. The Kaiser ended up resem-
bling his cousin in his anxiety. The Tsar and the German emperor became the
psychically most fragile links in the chain that was imprisoning Europe. They fell
into the ‘Creon syndrome’, and like Creon, were not able to resolve it by showing
flexibility at the right moment. Deciding and bending would have been the same
thing; what prevailed, instead, was the inflexibility of collective emotion and the
inability to make a personal stand.
The Kaiser, at this point, turned to his chief of staff and told him he wanted to
fight only against Russia. Moltke was a melancholy and in a sense resigned man,
quite different from his uncle, the hero of the war of 1870. He replied that the
‘Schlieffen Plan’ had already been set in motion. The Kaiser gave orders to stop the
troops that were advancing westwards and whose first objective was to take control
of the railway junction of Luxemburg. He telegraphed to London, undertaking to
respect France if Great Britain would give guarantees in its turn. In his memoirs
Moltke confessed to retiring in order to hide an attack of nerves.The Kaiser’s order
103
did not arrive in time: the 16th German Division had already moved and was occu-
pying the railway junction in Luxemburg, but only half an hour later received the
counter-order to withdraw. A non-committal reply arrived from London, where-
upon the Kaiser, contradicting himself again, handed the initiative back to Moltke.34
We know by now that paranoia is closely related to the ancient pagan gods,
and, like them, loves to play cruel tricks on men who lose their smile. The small
Luxemburg centre, just over the border, was violated by invasion twice in the space
of a few hours. The place that earned this strange accolade was called Troisvierges.
We will come across it again.
The invasion resumed at dawn on 2 August. On 3 August, Germany declared war
on France. After Luxemburg, it violated Belgium. The Germans sent the Belgian
government an ultimatum, demanding that it let their troops pass through but
promising respect for Belgian sovereignty and reparations for any damage caused.
Predictably, the ultimatum was rejected.The most organized army in the world was
launching its longest-studied plan in a delirium of ambivalences. The Greek tradi-
tions had already taught us that every man should take account of the ambivalence
he harbours within him, even when he pretends to be decisive. The times, and par-
ticularly the military high commands, reduced man to a machine; but the natural
need to see the different aspects of a problem continued to manifest itself indirectly,
through slips and contradictions at the highest levels.
The documentation available to us today reveals that both Moltke and the prime
minister, Bethmann-Hollweg, were doubtful about the outcome of the war and
felt guilty because they were contributing to its initiation.35 The latter declared to
the Reichstag that Germany was making a mistake that ought to be rectified. On
4 August he informed the governments of Luxemburg and Belgium that the state
of war obliged him to disregard their legitimate protests.36 Among the many costs,
paranoia was producing that of absurd consistency.You imposed yourself by force, you
violated neutrality, but at the same time you struggled to avoid putting yourself in
the wrong. Bethmann-Hollweg’s sadness and pessimism sound remarkably similar
to those of Lord Grey, who remarked to a friend on 3 August, as he later recalled
in his memoirs: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them
lit again in our lifetime.’37 In the analysis of August 1914, many studies have been
devoted to the hysterical aggression of public opinion; the melancholy in govern-
ment circles, however, has gone almost unnoticed. It is as if two collective uncon-
sciousnesses existed: each had a European, transnational dimension, but they did
not communicate with each other, leaving a minority of informed people and the
paranoid masses irremediably separate.
Taken up emphatically by all the mass media, the invasion of Belgium immedi-
ately became the favourite theme of Allied propaganda. Even Lord Grey and British
public opinion, hitherto less compromised than that in any other country, accepted
the ‘inevitable’. Great Britain declared war. With their indecisive but increasingly
hasty moves, the German authorities had ended up realizing the nightmare they
had wanted to avoid: to the east, to the west and now also at sea, Germany was
encircled. The wolf, too often invoked, had actually appeared.
104
Uncontrollable feelings
In the first volume of his autobiography, Elias Canetti recalls an episode which
reveals a collective hatred in Austria similar to that described by Zweig in France.38
On 1 August, the day when war was breaking out, he was in the park of Baden,
near Vienna. An open-air orchestra played the Austrian national anthem, then began
the German one. The writer – another cosmopolitan, multilingual Jew – was nine
years old and had lived for a long time in England. He knew the tune as ‘God Save
the King’ (the European royal families lived in a citadel all of their own and, as well
as having in common the same blood, shared emblems, music and other things
besides). So he started singing it in loudly with the English words, and his brothers,
three and five years old respectively, joined in. The crowd turned on the children
and started hitting them. It took all the strength of their mother, screaming in
Viennese dialect, to get them safely away.
A young Austrian man, by contrast, had left his country for political reasons.39
Vienna and the German-speaking Austrians seemed to him destined for ruin as a
people and disappearance as a state, having been corrupted by cohabitation and
mingling of blood with Slavs and Jews. Living in Munich had been a rebirth for
him. On 1 August 1914 he was in Odeonsplatz in the Bavarian capital. In a famous
photograph it is still possible to see his ecstatic face and even his moustache among
the oceanic crowd.‘Even today I am not ashamed to state that, overcome by a storm
of enthusiasm, I fell on my knees and thanked heaven with all my heart for bestow-
ing on me the gift of being able to live at this time’, he wrote, unwittingly identify-
ing with an American president and with all those who do not believe in God but
bow down in worship before him when he ‘confirms’ their ravings.40
It is an interesting coincidence that, a short time afterwards, his future enemy
Winston Churchill expressed a very similar state of mind. Instead of feeling blessed
by heaven, however, he at least confessed to being disturbed: ‘I think a curse should
rest on me – because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of
thousands every moment – and yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second of it.’41 By
this stage the Fury possesses everyone. The difference lies in the fact that Churchill
is aware of the danger of being possessed by a destructive frenzy, analyses it and tries
to distance himself from it. He also knows that his hands will be stained with blood,
and that this is a human perversion (‘I enjoy it’). He recognizes the evil; he does not
try to justify it and project it paranoiacally onto his adversary, as Hitler does.
Similar to the unexpected revelations that we find in Britain, Austria and
Germany is Marc Bloch’s memory from France, tinged with self-irony at the tragic
frivolity of his own thoughts:
[After the events of 31 July] I watched the sun rise and in a low voice repeated
to myself these words, in themselves completely insignificant [en eux-mêmes
parfaitement insignifiants], but which seemed to me laden with ominous
hidden meaning: Here is the dawn of August 1914. […] The scene that Paris
presented me with in the first days of mobilization remain one of the most
beautiful memories that the war has left me.42
105
Even Ludwig Wittgenstein, who taught at the University of Cambridge and

could have obtained exemption from military service because of a hernia, rushed
off to enlist in the Austrian army.43 The naive euphoria of what has been called ‘the
August [1914] community’ spread through all the nations without distinction at the
beginning of the First World War.44 Even Sigmund Freud, whose prudent, apoliti-
cal orientation is well known, declares his enthusiasm. In Zweig’s descriptions, the
spontaneous brotherhood of all Austro-Hungarian subjects cancels out differences
of class or language (it should not be forgotten that the Habsburg Empire was a
great multinational entity) at a stroke.45
Like a flash of inspiration, the sudden sense of belonging seems to give life
new meaning and consign everyday worries to insignificance. This revelation,
however, crushes all other values, such as international solidarity and pacifism
in Christians and socialists, and appears tragically related to the unshakeable
dogma that forms the basis of paranoia: there is an absolute enemy. It is particu-
larly interesting to note how Hitler emphasizes this aspect of the beginning of
the war. Not only does he describe himself as ‘reborn’, but he also states that
the people has finally had a ‘prophetic vision of its own future’.46 In part this
is a projection of Hitler’s own visionary temperament; in part, however, it is an
accurate description.
As we know, children immediately imitate adults who start fighting. In their
turn, the adults fight like children and with the children. It is a regression to the
state of the pack; in uncertain times, human beings discover the certainty of instinct,
and imitate animals. The weight of responsibility, already heavy in everyday life,
becomes unbearable. Submerging individuality in the fanfares of mobilization
communicates enthusiasm and recklessness; it makes people light, instinctive and
immoral. At the same time we seem to come into contact with an altruistic (or at
least inter-ethnic and inter-class) side of this fervour. Like the destructive side, this
mutual embracing appears in a flash. But the passing of time soon makes the two
impulses different: while the aggressive urge tends to last longer and to multiply, the
gentle feeling of brotherhood survives only for a few moments. The master who
has embraced the slave returns home well aware of his rank. Freud soon – already
in 1915 – repents of his enthusiasm. And the press has to delicately advise women
to control these spontaneous embraces, because there is an embarrassing increase
in illegitimate births.47
Ernst Lissauer was a not unimportant German poet. To Zweig’s horror, the out-
break of war inspired him to write ‘Haßgesang gegen England’ (1914), an anti-
British ‘song of hatred’ which enjoyed immense popularity; all the newspapers
published it, and it won him some major honours. After the war, Lissauer went
straight from fame to oblivion.With the advent of Hitler he ended his days in exile,
because he was a Jew.
In reply to a manifesto in which a group of German intellectuals had claimed
that culture was on their side, scholars in Oxford and Cambridge declared that
German culture was non-existent and announced the final liberation of culture
from ‘the age of German footnotes’.48
106
Even more serious than this propaganda among adults was the deliberate manip-
ulation of children. In the belligerent countries, the production of toys shifted to the
theme ‘war’. For years, postcards, illustrated albums and private and public games
would teach children to hate and slaughter.49
More voices crying in the wilderness

Already on 8 August 1914 the Economist hazarded the statement that the war
which had just broken out was ‘perhaps the greatest tragedy in human history’.
The nineteenth century had produced new theories, which aimed to make
politics less emotional, more rational, directed at the common interest and at
improving workers’ standard of living. In the midst of the mass enthusiasm for
war, however, the internationalist working-class movements were soon contami-
nated by the virus of nationalism. Already on 4 August 1914 the German Social
Democrat Party – the largest workers’ organization in the world – voted en masse
in favour of war credits. Its programmes of international justice and brotherhood
derived from four decades of debates and social improvements; they were in fact a
hard-won product, not a bacillus that quickly spread collective psychic infections
and hatred. These reasonable, unheroic aims were thrown overboard in a flash.
With that vote the German working-class movement committed suicide and its
press was offered, like an auxiliary troop, to the propaganda of slaughter. Only two
members of parliament voted against the financing of the war: Rosa Luxemburg
and Karl Liebknecht. Both these survivors of a world in love with justice were
murdered in the disorder that followed the end of the war. The Austrian Socialist
Party, for its part, had already broken up a few years earlier, when the Czechs had
founded a new one on an ethnic basis; the war broke out in 1914, but was pre-
ceded by a long, slow rise of mutual mistrust.50
Once the conflict had begun, only a few writers continued to argue in favour
of reasonableness and to think in an anti-paranoid way. On 19 September 1914,
Stefan Zweig published in the Berliner Tagblatt an article of an ambivalent nature: An
die Freunde in Fremdland. He expressed sadness and distress at no longer being able
to meet his many French, Belgian and British friends, but also the impossibility
of being individual in his emotions: in wartime, a collective sense of belonging –
nationality – comes to the fore. On 22 and 23 September, one of the most distin-
guished of these friends, Romain Rolland, replied to him in a Swiss newspaper, the
Journal de Genève, with an article which would later be published in book form and
become a classic: ‘Au-dessus de la mêlée’. In it he says, among other things: ‘So
love for one’s country cannot flourish except in hatred for other countries and
in the slaughter of those who devote themselves to their defence? There is in this
proposition a ferocious absurdity and a certain Neronian dilettantism that disgusts
me – disgusts me to the depths of my being.’51
The solitude of the writer, who by profession addresses a reader without know-
ing his reply, was particularly burdensome in the autumn when relations between
human beings withered. At this point the dialogue between the two underwent a
107
transformation, passing from printed words to words written in private, with a pen.
Zweig wrote Rolland, who was still in Switzerland, where he was about to begin
his humanitarian work for the wounded and prisoners of war, a long personal let-
ter (6 October 1914). He began by apologizing for writing to him in German, just
when they were searching for common ground (the two friends were multilingual
and Zweig had hitherto written in French). In wartime a letter sent to a neutral
country is automatically suspect, and may be opened by the censors; if they discov-
ered that he was writing in French, an enemy language, the author would become
suspect himself and could get into serious trouble. With painful awareness, Zweig
analysed the bloody and philo-paranoid direction that the French newspapers had
now taken. He asked Rolland to join him in a fight against hysteria, which encour-
ages only the humiliation and slaughter of adversaries (in their correspondence
the two men tried to avoid the term ‘enemy’ and tended to describe themselves as
‘Europeans’). Romain Rolland replied to Zweig on 10 October 1914, noting in
his turn exaggerations, rumours and paranoid false information in the German-
language press; and he suggested that they continue to point out to each other these
poisonous contributions from the newspapers, whatever their provenance, and to
fight to denounce them to public opinion.52
So began an intense correspondence between the two, which would be ended
only by death. Rolland was at the headquarters of the International Red Cross,
in Geneva, and was responsible for locating the first civilian prisoners of war. The
world was not remotely prepared even for the flood of military prisoners, so nobody
thought about the civilian ones. Zweig was the first to be recruited by his French
friend. But such recruitments would never form an army. They were individuals
who might be added to individuals: the total would still produce individuals. They
did not comprise a mass, so they did not multiply by mass psychic contagion.
Rainer Maria Rilke had a house in Paris. Since he was a citizen of an enemy
country, Austria, his manuscripts and correspondence were put up for auction. Only
part of it was saved, by Gide.53 After the war, Rilke found himself stateless; he was
an Austrian from Prague, but his home town was no longer in Austria and he no
longer existed in the documents. Poets seemed to have become useless, with no
place in the world any more.
The role of the mass media

Peace is a potentially stable condition, so its base is level. War, however – and its
psychological correlate, paranoia – is an inclined surface, where even someone who
does not move will slide down.
As long as political power remained very centralized and only personal ties, such
as the blood relationship between European rulers, survived, it was easy for the rep-
resentatives of the different countries to be offended, but it was also easier to back
down, agreeing on an official version where nobody lost face.
With the advent of greater democracy and the mass media, this path was gradu-
ally blocked. So what had happened in the United States in the Spanish–American
108
War was repeated in many other countries. Backing down in the face of the prospect
of war became increasingly difficult: it was opposed by the populist mass media,
which appealed to excitable readers with a limited temporal horizon. Anyone who
spoke of the moral and material costs of the conflict was liable to be accused of
intellectualism, defeatism and lack of courage or dignity.
The newspapers and the cinema discovered the function of concealing the very thing
that they ought to have been revealing. The arrival of the mass medium certainly wid-
ened public debate and popular awareness, stemming the abuses that rulers can
commit when there is a lack of information. But it also increased the number
of ‘successful paranoiacs’, who while shouting about national honour were really
thinking of their own careers.
The new Huns invaded the mind, and were called newspapers. In an age when
the study of the mass media was still as far away as the moon, Karl Kraus would
accuse them of profiting from the conflict, and, circularly, fomenting it, ‘dipping
their pens in blood and their swords in ink’.54 Just as gathering individuals into
a crowd brings its intelligence down to the lowest level of its components, so
multiplying the written word in the daily press restricts the collective discourse
to the populist lowest common denominator, and the temporal horizon to that
of its periodicity: the day. In this battlefield the British were ‘ahead’, because
their yellow press was already developed, whereas the Central European empires
struggled to break away from intellectualistic and pedantic traditions. The war-
time propaganda of a British press baron, Lord Northcliffe, fascinated Hitler, who
described it as ‘brilliant’.55
It has been calculated that the number of poems written in Germany in August
1914 to exalt the war was half a million.56 According to other sources, it was 50,000
a day – that is, no fewer than 1.5 million. In Great Britain, 300 volumes of war
poetry were published.57 A stream of paper which has not fed the history of lit-
erature but that of psychopathology. The great novelty of the First World War is
therefore the mobilization of propaganda. This, combined with mass conscription
and technological progress, began the massive industrialization of the conflict. The
industrial dimension of war requires that it be total and unscrupulous, for it is cir-
cularly bound to the dissemination of equally unscrupulous and all-embracing pro-
pagandistic commonplaces. Today we are well aware of the intimate link between
the mass market and manipulation of the public. It applies both in war and in peace,
but it was the First World War that made it structural. The concept of total war,
which we are accustomed to trace back to Nazism and Goebbels’ infamous speech
of 18 February 1943, really entered circulation in the press of the cradle of the
Enlightenment, France, as early as 1917.58 In a sense, a war that can hate footnotes
is already total, even if that word is not used yet.
War brings death not only at the front but also behind the lines. The problem
was particularly acute in Austria-Hungary: the empire was made up of twenty eth-
nic groups, many of which, such as the Serbs, the Romanians and the Italians, might
feel linked to an ‘enemy’ country (the kingdoms of Serbia, Romania and Italy) more
than to their official fatherland. False rumours of executions were initially denied
109
by the Austrians.59 Soon, however, the landslide down the inclined plane ensured
that death sentences really were handed down; on the eastern front it was feared
that the population contained hidden spies who manoeuvred behind the army’s
back. Suspicion became hysteria, and there were summary executions. At that point
pictures were disseminated as a warning. Cesare Battisti too was executed as a
traitor. He had used his position as a parliamentarian in Vienna to study Austrian
military maps and then had crossed into Italy.60 The photograph of his execution
was circulated round the empire. But it arrived in Italy too and was reprinted in
large numbers, to prove Austria’s barbarity, whereupon Austria prohibited the cir-
culation of the photo that she herself had disseminated. Karl Kraus notes that in
the photograph the executioner and a number of those present cluster round to be
photographed with the corpse.61 (The execution took place in Trento, and many of
them are probably Italians.) This episode is an example of the dependence on the
mass media of which Kraus was one of the first great scholars; and he reproduced
the photograph on the cover of his Die letzten Tage der Menschheit. So the image
had originated in Austria, passed into Italy and returned to Austria; as unstable and
oscillating as the governments, it had flown over the fronts twice, giving opposite
messages but uniting them in the certainty of death.62
The crowd smiling around the ‘scapegoat-corpse’ of an ‘executed’ individual
would pervade the century and often be photographed. Once emotions had cooled,
of course, many would try to destroy the pictures. That would not prevent their
circulating in sufficient numbers for instructive publications to be compiled, but for
contrasting reasons to those that had motivated the photographers in the first place.
In the Southern United States photographs of lynchings would even have a certain
diffusion as postcards.63
Blatant lies, the use of prohibited weapons, violence against the civilian popu-
lation – all this would be perfected in the Second World War, but it had already
started in the First. Even advertisements for a wide variety of commercial products,
greetings cards and, as we have seen, toys were distorted with the aim of fomenting
hatred. The political and military authorities, as the war proceeded, justified every
method adopted. They fuelled their own fanaticism by speaking of a necessary
war to end all wars, and in so doing burnt their bridges behind them. Each new
conscription, which throws huge masses of adolescents into the slaughter, is always
the last. Each new public loan, which scrapes the bottom of the barrel of savings, is
always the last, so even previous savings will not have ‘died in vain’. It is always the
final push: the fronts are stationary, but the final push will at last tip the balance in
our favour.
What is demanded is increasingly mad, but for as long as the collective paranoia
lasts, it links up by absurd consistency with previous madnesses and redeems them. The
dogma according to which the only aim is victory, and not compromise, gives war
indisputable primacy over peace; by so doing it justifies all subsequent mental steps.
Why fight and die? Because there has already been a lot of fighting and a lot of kill-
ing. It is the same trick that was used by Ulysses. Precisely because we have fought for so
long to take Troy, we must fight on; it would be shameful to go home empty-handed.64
110
Suspicions, exaggerations, rumours

Belgium was a scene of propagandist conflict before it became a theatre of war.
Once occupied, the country became a ‘seedbed’ of the daily violence that would
fill Europe with atrocities during the Second World War. Adhering to Bethmann-
Hollweg’s scruples, the Germans at first tried to preserve a relationship with the
citizenry. But they were the enforcers of an occupation which was illegal in every
respect, and were surrounded by the veiled hostility of the civilians.
Allied propaganda played on Belgium’s sufferings with exaggerations and cli-
chés. Old photographs of pogroms that had taken place in Russia were reprinted
and passed off as evidence of atrocities committed by the Germans on their inva-
sion of the country.65 An Allied illustration represented Belgium as a naked little
girl crying and wearing a German helmet, thus hinting at paedophile violence
by the occupier.66 Although rape was not committed on a large scale as in other
conflicts (mainly through lack of opportunity: the fronts were essentially stuck
in the countryside, and at the front there were only men), fantasy drawings were
circulated among the allies showing German soldiers raping defenceless women.67
Symmetrically, on the German side the rejection of these attempts to heap blame
on them would continue even after the war, taking the form of a paranoid denial
that would sow the seeds of Nazism.
Relations between the population and the occupiers deteriorated rapidly.
An inexorable slide into paranoia began. Thus bloomed the tentacular plant that
would overrun all the fronts of the war, as impossible to uproot as a continental
ivy: ‘rumour’.
Bloch, commenting on the phenomenon in the First World War, claims that
rumours arise where men originating from different groups come together. They
also represent an unconscious, genuine popular retaliation against the manipulations
of the press and the superciliousness of the high commands. ‘Any piece of informa-
tion may be true’, said the credo of the French troops, ‘except one that is printed.’68
Loneliness and the terror of death encouraged men to talk to those around them.
Indeed, because of the closeness of the trenches, to exchange a few phrases even
with an enemy soldier. In the anonymity and immorality of the slaughter, this is
an unconscious reappearance of the Judaeo-Christian commandment to love one’s
neighbour.69 Despite draconian punishments and the obligation to shoot at each
other, ordinary soldiers often communicated verbally with their enemies, without
hatred, and the gunners of one side might actually ritualize their shots, so that their
adversaries were forewarned and would return the favour by letting them know
what the rhythm of their shelling would be, in a tacit agreement that avoided sur-
prises. A new, almost human situation, which began to dissipate the paranoia. A new
peak of absurdity had been reached: a silent message of solidarity was entrusted to
the thunder of the field gun.
The high commands, at this, ordered surprise bombardments and unpredictable
night raids. The raids had to go beyond the barbed wire, into the enemy trenches.
Ostensibly their purpose was to collect information or objects whose usefulness
111
was incomprehensible to the soldier. The English poet Edmund Blunden received
the order to bring back samples of German soldiers’ underwear.70 In order to do
this, of course, he needed access to German corpses.The true aim of the raid in fact
seems to have been that of restoring a sense of permanent persecution. They were
trying to mobilize the night itself, to keep up the tension of the mortal conflict even
in silence, when no one was shooting, when men slept. On the subject of corpses,
Fussell71 tells the story of another piece of false information. The Germans, sur-
rounded by the naval blockade, increasingly lacked every kind of material. So they
used the bodies of dead horses as a source of fat. On occupying a German trench,
the British found written instructions on how to do this. But because the German
word for ‘animal carcase’ is Kadaver, a ‘rumour’ spread among the British troops
that Germany had a monstrous plan to recycle dead soldiers. The false assumption
of paranoia – the enemy is different and always inhuman – is made true by a simple
linguistic presumption which is also false. It should be noted, by the way, that this fantasy
unconsciously anticipated the horrendous manipulations of corpses by the Nazis.
The Russian press, unreliable enough in peacetime, proved particularly ready
to pick up and then disseminate oral accounts; here too rumours became information,
once promoted by the authoritativeness of printed paper. ‘Reports’ of German
atrocities were lurid. One of the most fanciful alleged that when even slightly
wounded Russian soldiers were captured, they were subjected to surgical opera-
tions in which some of their tendons were secretly cut, to prevent them being able
to take up arms again one day. The writer of the article does not ask himself where
the Germans found the armies of surgeons necessary for this purpose; his aim is to
spread the story that they carry out secret operations, and incidentally to drop a hint
to the Russian soldiers: make sure you don’t get taken prisoner!72
Even lecturers in medicine contributed to the animalization of the enemy by
explaining that he was genetically different. According to some French publications,
which offered news which they passed off as scientific, normal men would have
died of suffocation in the trenches of the Germans (who were not normal, and
not even men), because their bodies produced excretions that were bestial in both
quality and quantity.73
Under the lash of the mass media and propaganda, which were mainly con-
cerned with stirring up hatred, paranoid thought ranged from violent minority
groups to the majority of the population, and from military circles to civilian ones.
Independent thinkers were a minority in the trenches, but at least in those holes
in the mud they could still express their feelings and have a sense that they were
understood. On returning home from the opposing fronts, however, the writers
Erich Maria Remarque in Germany and Robert Graves in Britain felt an equal,
distressing sense of alienation: their parents didn’t understand them any more; they
spoke the same stupid, ferocious rhetoric as the newspapers.74
Because of memories of the 1870 campaign and orders from the high command,
which was anxious to forestall dangers, fear of snipers spread among the Germans
who had penetrated into Belgium. In reality there was no real organized guerilla
warfare against the invaders. Clashes with the Belgian army were limited. In the
112
growing panic created by the military communiqués, however, the Germans devel-
oped the tendency to shoot readily at invisible and in part non-existent adversaries.
This led to accidental killings among the German troops themselves. The blue-on-
blue or friendly fire incident, now common because of the extreme technologiza-
tion of weaponry, was rare at that time. It was natural, therefore, to explain it by
supposing that the fire had come from enemy rifles concealed in the shadows – that
is, by creating other rumours. This made the occupying forces even more ready to
shoot in the dark and, circularly, increased the number of unexplained deaths; this
increased the rumours, and so on. The tragic practice began of shelling or razing to
the ground civilian houses from which hostile shots were thought to have come. In
another unexplained incident, the historic university library of Louvain went up in
flames, a fact that Allied propaganda attributed to a precise anti-cultural intention
of the Germans.
Marc Bloch drew attention to the often vital role of ‘false news’ in war and
peace, with observations that are still relevant today.75 When he states that a false
piece of news is the mirror in which the ‘collective consciousness’ contemplates its own features,
we may simply replace collective conscience with collective unconscious, using a concept
that has long since passed from psychoanalysis into everyday language. In their
unconscious, the occupiers knew they were committing the first of what would
be a series of contraventions of the right of peoples. But, under the pressure of the
official interpretations, they could not admit it even to themselves; this, as we know,
is the typical situation that unleashes paranoid defences and, in its need to destroy
the imagined enemy, inflates the use of the trigger. Stories circulated among the
German soldiers of Belgian arsonists, murderers of wounded soldiers, snipers hiding
behind every corner, women and priests who lured men into deadly traps.The story
was taken up by the press and came back from Germany to the front to revital-
ize, with a semblance of authoritativeness, the very sources that had created it. The
erroneous basic assumption – ‘the Belgians are treacherous and murderous’ – was
confirmed by the transition from oral to printed culture, which transformed false-
hood into truth. Once again, the circular motion of paranoia emerged triumphant.
The mechanism by which a false piece of news is disseminated, Bloch writes,
cannot be reproduced experimentally by psychologists in a laboratory. It spreads
only if it corresponds to pre-existing collective expectations and to intense emo-
tions. In the examples Bloch has left us we find both things. Collective emotionalism
is provided, of course, by the war: ‘Kommt der Krieg ins Land, dann gibt es Lügen
wie Sand’ (when war comes to the land, lies are as common as grains of sand), says
a German proverb.The expectation, from the psychological point of view, is typical
of the moralistic upbringing of the ordinary German citizen, of whom the troop is
made up: his profound unease, caused by the illegal and anti-heroic occupation of
a small country, is alleviated if the enemy is underhand and criminal, and therefore
more in the wrong than the occupation itself. There is no need to think of compli-
cated plots by the German authorities, which in any case, as we have seen, engaged
in continual improvisation; they only exploited beliefs that were already present, in
the belief that they helped to increase the soldiers’ willingness to fight.
113
The vicious and paranoid circle had already begun to rotate when the declara-
tions of war were still on the way. A rumour had instantly spread that French planes
had bombed Nuremberg. Bloch thinks it likely that a French civilian aircraft did
indeed fly over the city on 1 August 1914, but rules out any possibility of its having
dropped bombs.76 Anxiety about the imminent conflict and the extreme novelty
of the appearance of aeroplanes (never before used in war because they had been
invented only eight years earlier) had magnified the event and created the legend.
The German authorities had not created anything; they had merely exploited the
supposed event by not denying that it had happened. Two days later it was men-
tioned in their declaration of war on France, though not as a crucial factor.
Bloch cites two other examples of rumours that could have come straight out
of a textbook on paranoid pathology, so derivative are they from a pre-existing
erroneous conviction of being spied on.77 The French capture a German soldier,
who, when asked for his particulars, says he is a resident of Bremen. The convic-
tion spreads among the French troops, who have a limited knowledge of geog-
raphy and of German, that the prisoner said Braisne, a nearby French town. On
hearing this, everyone nods knowingly: so the enemy soldier had been living as
a fake shopkeeper only a short distance away, in Braisne! The rumour that the
Germans, even before the war began, had filled the area with spies was thus con-
firmed beyond all doubt.
The walls of many Belgian houses have external holes for fixing scaffolding in
the event of maintenance work. Nothing comparable, however, is to be found in
German villages. The occupying troops that file along the streets, after reading that
the Belgians had deployed countless snipers even before the invasion, immediately
become convinced that the holes are proof of a defence entrusted to civilians who
fire out of the shadows, and therefore contrary to the rules of war, and organized
even before the beginning of the conflict. In this way they manage to project
onto the Belgians the illegality of their own military conduct. Many buildings are
demolished in reprisal.
Stories circulate among the British and French soldiers that the Kaiser’s troops
have crucified enemy prisoners, cut off hands or carried out other acts of sadism on
Belgian children, and raped nuns.78 And the British authorities, too, indulged in that
form of lying which consists in not denying a false piece of news. On 29 September
1914, the Evening Standard published an account clothed in poetic licence: the
English archers of the historic battle of Agincourt had returned as ghosts to kill the
German enemy.Within a few days rumours had turned them into angels. Not even
the author of the piece could deny the news. The war had just begun and the leg-
end was already an absolute certainty; moreover, neither the clergy nor the military
command had any interest in challenging it.79
The paranoid fear of being surrounded actually found inverted expression in a
collective fantasy of what we might call ‘good encirclement’. Already in late August
1914, a rumour spread among the British and French that the Russians, in their tens
of thousands, were landing in Scotland to support them by coming down south, or
alternatively, in Marseille, so that they could march north to their assistance.80
114
In the 1930s and 1940s, historiography began to mitigate the accusations of

German atrocities in Belgium, in part precisely because new studies were highlight-
ing the importance of ‘rumours’ in the war. But not long afterwards this research
was forgotten; attention was captured by the Second World War, where the crimes
proved more incredible than the imaginary creations. Even the first reports of the
Nazi extermination camps were often not believed by the Allies, precisely because
the exaggerations about Belgium had spread scepticism and the need to have very
solid evidence.81
Only in the twenty-first century did two Irish historians publish a new, more
systematic study, which might disentangle the occupation of Belgium from the
legend.82 In a sense, it was the beginning of the atrocities that pervaded the century.
Although they were constantly exaggerated, the crimes did take place: the paranoia
of the occupying troops killed 6,500 civilians, according to Horne and Kramer,
5,500 according to Ferguson.83 Belgium, which the European powers had assured
of its neutrality, emerged from the Great War with 44,000 dead.84
The sufferings of Belgium

These comments on Belgian sufferings would not be complete without two final
considerations, which touch the sensitive nerve of double standards in the respect-
ing of international law.
The first concerns the relationship between the victim country and its saviours.
The territory and coast of Belgium were essential for both sides in the war. Recent
historiography has revealed that the British plans, too, envisaged violating Belgium’s neu-
trality, at least with their fleet.85 Germany’s mistake, it might be argued cynically
at this point, was not that of perpetrating an international crime, but that of act-
ing first, motivated by haste. In the light of this, the new world order created by
the 1919 peace treaty is also tinged with bitter irony. It attributed responsibility
for starting the war to Germany. In its turn, the central element in that guilt was
the violation of Belgium. Germany’s crime against a small country was undoubt-
edly committed. But the tragic irony of the peace treaty derives from the fact that
another large country had a plan for committing the same criminal aggression; it
did not have the time or opportunity to carry it out, so it ended up being lauded
as Belgium’s saviour.
The second consideration also touches on differing standards of legality, but
concerns the victim country. The Belgian crown, which in Europe reigned over a
peaceful country, and had had the merit of really trying to avert the war, had long
possessed, as the King’s personal property, a single but immense African colony: the
Congo. The colonial exploitation of its mineral and agricultural wealth (the pro-
duction of caoutchouc) forced the indigenous people into compulsory labour
(put more bluntly: slavery) in extremely harsh conditions. Anyone who refused
was punished by having their hands cut off, their villages burned down or being
killed. According to some calculations, between the beginning of colonialization
(around 1880) and the First World War, the Congo lost half its inhabitants; since
115
no census was made of the Congolese population, estimates vary between 3 and
15 million deaths.86 The slaughter was vehemently denounced from the beginning
of the twentieth century, but with the First World War it faded from the news, and
the sovereign of Belgium moved over to the side of the victims. The sufferings of
Belgium became an indisputable basic dogma in the interpretation of the European
war, which extent and duration had transformed into a paranoid interpretation, and
which, with the rebounding to and fro of accusations, would continue to roll down
the inclined plane until the abyss of the Second World War. By contrast, the slaugh-
ter of the Congolese, which some have called ‘genocide’, came partially back into
public awareness only at the end of the twentieth century, following studies such as
that of Adam Hochschild.87 The African country was not at war, so the victims were
all civilians. The number of dead was probably at least a thousand times that of the
Belgian civilians killed by the Germans, but it remained a colonial, distant event,
extraneous to matters discussed by civilized peoples. No reparatory treaty compen-
sated for that slaughter of Hitlerian proportions, nor were the people responsible
for it put on trial.
Italian paranoia
Italy, in the spring of 1915, was still on the balcony watching. As children used to
be taught at school, at least in the present writer’s childhood, the treaty of the Triple
Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy committed the three powers to enter-
ing a war only if one of them had been attacked. Articles 4 and 5 of the treaty added
the obligation to assist even if one of the other signatories had been merely threat-
ened, but it is impossible to think of Serbia seriously threatening Austria unless one
inverted the roles of the lamb and the wolf. The Italian education system was less
careful to teach that the treaty, signed by Italy in 1882, then again in 1887, 1891,
1902 and 1912, committed each signatory, in the first line of the first article, never
to make war on the others, nor to join any alliance hostile to them. Another fact
overlooked by school textbooks is that the treaty was secret.
For not participating in a war which it had given an undertaking not to
participate in, Italy, still through secret negotiations, requested compensation.
Had Austria annexed parts of Serbia, the matter would have been covered by
a specific clause of the treaty. At the beginning of the war, however, the Italian
request was seen as a piece of blackmail, which exploited the vulnerable position
Austria found itself in, being already engaged on several fronts. The compensa-
tion requested for Austrian territorial gains at the expense of Serbia (gains which
were possible but had not yet been made) was in any case disproportionate, and
did not concern part of the Austrian annexations: it consisted of Trentino (the
majority of whose population, according to Gasperi, would have preferred to
remain Austrian), the free city of Trieste, and several islands in the Adriatic. Only
very slowly did Austria soften, under the constant pressure of Germany, which
was more pragmatic and, of course, more willing to give away what did not
belong to it.
116
This delay was fatal, because in the meantime Italy had conducted other secret
negotiations, in London. The Entente had no interests in the Adriatic, and so was
quite happy to promise Italy everything it wanted. When the Germans finally
extracted from Austria the concessions that Rome had requested, the Italians were
no longer interested, because they had been promised more and had signed the
Pacts of London (26 April 1915), again in secret. So preoccupied with secrecy was
the Italian delegation that it requested that the agreement be kept secret from the
Serbs too, an unrealistic request, partly because under that agreement the Serbs
became allies of the Entente powers, and partly because Italy’s new borders would
necessarily be theirs too. After the armistice between the Germans and the Russians,
in 1918, the latter, who had learned about the content of the agreement from the
Serbians, no longer kept it secret. The knowledge of the Pacts of London increased
even more the resentment of the Germans and Austrians, fomenting the other
slope of the paranoia. As well as all the regions of Austria inhabited by Italian ethnic
groups, Rome had been promised the annexation of lands inhabited by German,
Slovenian, Croatian, Albanian and Greek-speaking populations, and, in less binding
clauses, even by Turks and Africans.
Although the majority of the population and most parliamentarians were against
the war, the interventionist minority in Italy organized a series of increasingly noisy
demonstrations. In a crescendo of emotions and increasingly peremptory demands,
the atmosphere began to grow intoxicating: the new crowds rushed into the piaz-
zas, sliding down into that form of hysteria from which it is impossible to climb
back up. So the country was brought into the war. The propaganda of the time,
and later many school textbooks, claimed that it was the last Risorgimento war to
liberate Italian populations.The pacts concluded before Italy entered the war reveal,
however, an imperialistic aim: the subjugation of peoples of other nationalities.
By the time the Pacts of London were signed, Austria was prepared to cede the
Italian-speaking territories without any war, with a mere signature and without the
moral price of violating a treaty that had been signed many times. But nationalist
paranoia succeeded in paying for them with a number of deaths higher than the
entire population of Trento and Trieste, the regions it wanted to ‘liberate’. Despite
the clear initial superiority of its army, Italy remained virtually stuck in the trenches
for most of the war, making a substantial contribution to the ‘pointless slaughter’.
The novelty of atrocities and of the intercontinental dimension

The conflict had begun with relatively new crimes, especially concerning Belgium.
Over the years, however, what might have provided an opportunity for reflec-
tion was used as propaganda and contributed to an escalation of paranoid aggres-
siveness. Atrocities almost without precedent in human history were introduced.
The first use of chemical gas was, like reprisals on civilians, a grim accolade of the
German army.
The war also had an Asian front. This is generally considered to be of minor
importance; yet it was here that the first genocide of the twentieth century took
117
place. Germany has sometimes been said to bear indirect responsibility for the mas-
sacre of the Armenians in 1915, partly because senior German officers assisted the
troops of the allied Ottoman Empire, and partly because, breaking with the multi-
ethnic tradition of their country, the Young Turks were building a racist nationalism
that jumbled together Nietzsche, Herder and minor German thinkers.88
In this theatre the conflict was chiefly one between two empires and two impe-
rialisms: the Ottoman and the British. And here it was the Allies who were over-
hasty. When the young government of Istanbul entered the war on the side of
Austria and Germany, they decided to deal it a mortal blow at once. So they did
not attack its long frontiers but poured Australians and New Zealanders from the
antipodes of the earth, and of life (the youngest was fourteen years old), directly
onto the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, along the coast of the pen-
insula of Gallipoli, so that they could advance immediately on the Turkish capital.
Instead, the expeditionary force had to dig trenches in the sand for them to die in
one by one. Even in 2005 paranoia still hovered over the region: work on a coastal
road aroused protests against the Turks by the Australians, who consider sacred the
land where so many of them shed their blood.
The presence of colonial troops, mainly Indian for the British and African for
the French, combined the violence of war with that of racism, which would later
reach its peak in the Second World War. Among the Germans a rumour – not with-
out foundation – spread that the Senegalese massacred anyone who gave themselves
up; propaganda exploited it, prompting brutalities from the opposing army. The
practice of killing soldiers who surrendered became widespread on both sides, and
was tolerated and even encouraged by officers. The British and Germans carried
out the first aerial bombing raids on non-military buildings.89
All scruples about slaughtering civilians were lost; the naval blockade of Germany,
continued by the Allies even after the end of hostilities to force Germany to accept
their conditions, caused between 700,000 and 800,000 victims, almost all of whom,
of course, not only were not military personnel but were the weakest members of
the population.90 This massacre alone, therefore, caused a number of civilian casual-
ties a hundred times that of the Belgian civilians killed by the Germans – the inter-
national crime for which the Allies said they wanted to punish Germany. Gradually,
since the beginning of the conflict, the Allies had managed to make their economic
and military superiority tell. Equally gradually, however, they had lost their moral
superiority. Letting ourselves be infected by the evil that we are combating means
exactly that: not only falling into a psychic disorder, but plunging all together into
the psychiatric and moral pathology of paranoia.
The silence after the gunfire

On 1 August 1917, on the third anniversary of the beginning of the horror, Giacomo
Della Chiesa, pope under the name of Benedict XV, cried in the wilderness, pub-
lishing one of the few courageous documents in the 2,000-year history of the
Roman Church. His ‘Letter to the Heads of State’ of the warring nations proposed
118
stopping the ‘pointless slaughter’ on all fronts and holding negotiations based on a
general agreement to refrain from annexing enemy territories. He received no reply,
even from Catholic heads of state. But he did receive the epithets französischer Papst
(French pope), from the representative of German high command, Ludendorff, and
pape boche (Boche pope), from the French prime minister, Clemenceau.
In theory, an armistice could have replaced the war in a flash. Despite the num-
ber of states at war and the difficulties of communication, it would have been
possible for a few plenipotentiaries to meet in a neutral place at any time. But
reasonableness cannot replace paranoia in command. Even at the moment agreed
for the final cessation of hostilities – 11 o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh
month of 1918 – many soldiers were still emptying their magazines and killing; the
future US president, Harry Truman, serving in an artillery unit, was trying out a
new field gun that ensured more powerful shots; and on an American ship carry-
ing troops to the European front there were cries of protest because they were no
longer going to face death.91
Soldiers took home new souvenirs: photographs of the enemies they had killed.92
Certainly, necrophilia has always left its footprints where a war has passed through.
But the wide diffusion that such images had on this occasion cannot be attributed
only to the progress of photography. The pictures circulated in vast numbers, and
evidently without shame, almost like postcards. Many showed skulls, bones and
half-decayed corpses intentionally arranged in particular poses. Some were actually
made into postcards, accompanied by disparaging, racist captions: the use of ‘Hun’
or ‘Boche’ prevailed over that of ‘German’.
The darkness of the mind had taken advantage of the war years to penetrate
everywhere; and it would last for decades afterwards.
When the war ended, many sites congealed into emblems. Few places express
the absurdity of the world like Verdun. For the possession of this town where
20,000 people had lived, 800,000 men died. As on the rest of the western front,
soldiers fought for four years to push forward a front that refused to budge. Both
armies lost. The victors were the front itself and pointless death. In this dispropor-
tion between the living and the dead, not even the identities of the fallen could
survive. Thus, in the ossuary of Douaumont, near Verdun, there are still 150,000
unknown bodies. In fact, of about 1.4 million French soldiers killed, not even half
were identified, and only 240,000 bodies were returned to their families.93 But
whereas in the war of 1870 the French and German dead had often been buried
together, the First World War introduced an apartheid of corpses. Since the corpses
are buried outside towns, inside the towns monuments to the dead are raised,
which impose themselves on the living; but, being anonymous, the corpses are
removed from the cult of families and assigned to that of politics.
The inflation of war memorials and the sacralization of the unknown dead
soldier is a modern invention that burst into the collective imagination at the end
of the First World War.94 It attempts to restore meaning to a meaningless conflict,
and sacrality to the profane and profaned world. A figure whose likeness we can-
not reproduce and whose name we cannot say, abstracted from time and history,
119
entrusted to immortality and the absolute, the unknown soldier tries to arrest the
fall of heaven in a society that is becoming secularized. But can he do it? The new
object of veneration is no longer on high, like a deity. It is underground, like Hades.
Silently, it continues to exist, mingled with worms in the battlefields. It survives in
the negative: not in life, but in war and death.
Nevertheless, most of the information we continue to receive – as children, at
school; as adults, when watching a screen, reading or visiting monuments, museums
and historical sites – still corresponds to the rhetoric of glorious battles, and cites
them tirelessly as an example.
Notes
1 Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, German prime minister, 30 July 1914.
2 The Tsar to the German ambassador, Count Pourtales, 1 August 1914, in Solzhenitsyn
1971: 733.
3 See Ferguson 2006.
4 See Berghan 2004; Bairoch 1997: Part 3, Chapter 24; Ferguson 1999 and 2006;
Hobsbawm 1994; Hirschfeld et al. 2003; Barth and Bedürftig 2000.
5 See Hobsbawm 1994.
6 See Bairoch 1997: Part 3, Chapter 24.
7 See Vincent 1892: s.v. War.
8 Furet 1995: 65.
9 See Steiner 1971: Chapter 1.
10 See Canetti 1960: 166–70.
11 See Zoja 2009a: Chapter 7.
12 See Zweig 1942: 222–3.
13 See Homer, Iliad, IV, 81 ff.
14 See Gilbert 1994: 32–3; Davies 1996: Chapter 10.
15 See Kraus 1919: I, 1: ‘He was not loved.’
16 See May 1951: epilogo; Gilbert 1994: Chapter 2; Kann 1974: Chapter 8.
17 See Canetti 1960: Il sopravvissuto.
18 See Ferguson 1999: Table 7.13.
19 See Ferguson 1999: Chapter 4.
20 See Hillman 2004.
21 See Mommsen 2004.
22 See, in addition to the texts already cited, Glover 1999: Chapter 21; Tuchman
1962: Chapters 1–7.
23 See Zweig 1942: 230–4.
24 The documents concerning the outbreak of the First World War can be found on var-
ious internet websites. See, in particular, https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/I,_1._
Handschreiben_Kaiser_und_K%C3%B6nig_Franz_Josephs_an_Kaiser_Wilhelm,_2._
Juli_1914 (accessed 13 December 2016).
25 Jung 1939: 183.
26 See Gilbert 1994: 39.
27 See Gilbert 1994: 39; Stevenson 2005: 72.
28 See Stevenson 2005: 27.
29 See Solzhenitsyn 1971: 579–92.
30 See for instance the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter: Solzhenitsyn 1971: 733.
31 See Ferguson 1999: Table 10.
32 See Taylor 1969.
33 Cited in Ferguson 1999: 195.
34 See Tuchman 1962: 94–7.
120

36 His actual words were: ‘über den berechtigten Protest […] hinwegzusetzen’. Cited in
Hirschfeld et al. 2003: s.v. Luxemburg.
37 Ferguson 1999: 177.
38 See Canetti 1977: 125.
39 Hitler 1925: 179: ‘I had left Austria primarily for political reasons […]. I didn’t want to
fight for the Habsburg state, but I was ready to die for my people.’ Hitler thinks it right
to refuse his loyalty to his country, Austria, which has bastardized blood, but he is ready
to lay down his life in Germany, because he considers that country solidly, genetically
Germanic. The obsession with racial purity, impossible to find in his own country; the
revelation (the illusion of having found that purity in Munich and in Germany); the
unshakeable basic dogma (on the presupposition of which all thoughts are simplified): in
the young Hitler all the features of paranoia are already flourishing and mature.
40 Hitler 1925: 177.
41 Cited in Ferguson 1999: Chapter 7.
42 Bloch 1969: 119.
43 See Gilbert 1994: Chapter 3.
44 Leed 1979: 56–7.
45 See Zweig 1942: Chapter 9, ‘The First Hours of the War of 1914’.
46 Hitler 1925: 177.
47 See Leed 1979.
48 The age of German footnotes is on the wane: cited in Ferguson 1999: 233.
49 See Hirschfeld et al. 2003, s.v. Kinderspielzeug; Hamann 2004; ‘Les Traces d’une guerre’,
Le Monde, 19 October 2008, 14–18.
50 See Hamann 1996: Chapter 9; Kann 1974: Chapter 8.
51 Rolland 1916: 33.
52 See Rolland and Zweig 1987.
53 See Bauer 1970: 77.
54 Text read by Karl Kraus on 19 November 1914 and then published in Die Fakel, 404,
1914; now in Kraus 1987.
55 Cited in Ferguson 1999: Chapter 8.
56 See Bastian 2000: Chapter 4.
58 See Hirschfeld et al. 2003, s.v. Totaler Krieg.
59 See for example the imperial-royal announcement of 27 October 1914, in Hamann
2004: 102.
60 See Hamann 2004: 102; Thompson 2008: 98.
61 See Kraus 1919: IV, 29. According to Kraus the number of death sentences was some-
where between 11,400 and 36,000.
62 See Holzer 2006.
63 See Allen et al. 2000.
64 See Homer, Iliad, II, 299.
65 See Ferguson 1999: 232.
66 See Hamann 2004.
67 See Hamann 2004.
68 Cited in Bloch 1921: 112.
69 See Zoja 2009b: Chapter 3.
70 See Blunden 1928: Chapter 16.
71 See Fussell 1975: Chapter 4.
72 See Solzhenitsyn 1971: Chapter 7 (a collage chapter of extracts from the Russian press
of the day, with no indication of sources).
73 See Bensoussan 2006: 61–2.
74 See Glover 1999: 214.
121
75 See Bloch 1921; Bloch 1949: Chapters 2 and 3; and also Bloch 1933, on a case of col-
lective terror from 1789.
76 See Bloch 1921: 104 note; Bloch 2006: 307 note.
77 See Bloch 1921.
78 See Fussell 1975: Chapters 4 and 9.
80 See Bloch 1921.
81 See Fussell 1975: Chapter 9; Power 2002: 69.
82 See Horne and Kramer 2001.
84 See Gilbert 1994: 651.
86 Causarano et al. 2004 estimates 12 million dead, Bensoussan 2006 11 million.
87 See Hochschild 1998.
88 See Brunetau 2004: Chapter 2.
89 See Stevenson 2005: Chapter 16.
90 See Glover 1999: Chapter 10; Gilbert 1994: introduction.
92 See Ferguson 1999: Figures 13–18.
93 See Bensoussan 2006: 55.
94 See Mosse 1990.
122
6
FREUD, KEYNES AND THE
BAMBOOZLED MAN
The judgement of history on […] President Wilson […] will depend on what
he does next. If he […] sits at a table with our enemies alone, after exposing
himself to all their attempts to influence him, without even having listened to
German representatives […], there may be serious consequences.1
I do not know how to avoid the conclusion that a man who […] is so sure
of a special personal intimacy with the Almighty is unfitted for relations with
ordinary children of men. […] Wilson repeatedly declared that mere facts
had no significance for him […] He, therefore, lacked motive to reduce his
ignorance by learning facts. Nothing mattered except noble intentions. […]
Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played
great roles at all times in the history of mankind.2
An American messiah
The mental tangle of paranoia seeks a simplification on which to construct its
thought. Mass thought, however, does not develop a personal truth; it receives the
annunciation from a leader.
Contravening the principles of George Washington, according to whom the
Americans should not dirty their hands with Europe, like a god descending from
Olympus, like a reverse Columbus returning centuries later to discover it,Woodrow
Wilson, president of the United States, offered himself to the war-weary Old
Continent as a messenger bringing higher values.
His father, Joseph Wilson, had been an amiable, unworldly Presbyterian pastor;
in the American Civil War his sympathies lay with the pro-slavery Confederation.
Woodrow was born in 1856 in Virginia, among plantations and slave colonies. He
grew up in the provincial, conservative South. Later, however, he became president
of Princeton University, a beacon of Enlightenment thought, and distinguished
123
Freud, Keynes and the bamboozled man 123
himself as a politician endowed with optimistic charm.3 Woodrow Wilson was a

basically honest, straightforward person; so he had the necessary presuppositions not
only for presenting himself as a prophet, but for believing he was one.
A book by Freud and Bullitt – a well-read, cosmopolitan American diplomat,
who had worked with Wilson during the Versailles negotiations until their dramatic
falling out – argues that the American president, deep down, lacked a real masculine
personality, because he had never broken free of his submissiveness to, and identifi-
cation with, his father.4
As soon as he became president, Wilson told the British ambassador that he
would teach Latin America how to elect good politicians. His optimism often took
the form of megalomania and of real erroneous assumptions. A sense of superiority
authorized him to treat the whole continent south of the United States like an
immature youth. Wilson was clearly convinced that he was possessed of a primal
revelation: not metaphorically, as is common in politicians, but literally. Proceeding
along this path, he came to assign himself the role of a Moses, following whose lead-
ership Europe too would be able to reach the promised land of democracy. But in
the course of the work, unfortunately, the roles were reversed and instead of leading,
he ended up being led by European cynicism. His lack of self-criticism with regard to
his own dogmas was probably a continuation of a blindness that had enabled him
to preserve his own childhood and the figure of his father in the idealized rooms
of memory. Granite prejudice, the precondition for all paranoia, in Wilson took the
particular form of positive delusion. He was so firmly convinced of the validity of his
ideals that he thought they could be realized and imposed on his allies.When it was
clear that this was not the case, Wilson reacted with denial and flight from reality.
Europe was exhausted, because of the material wounds of war and those of the
psychic illness that we are discussing.
Wilson had a remedy for psychic disorders: promising one thing and its opposite.
The overwhelming victory of the just, and a just, non-punitive peace. The satisfac-
tion of the principle of nationality, and perfect harmony among the nations. It was
the erroneous premise that enabled him not to emerge from paranoia. Being a con-
quistador in reverse returning from America to the east, he was guided by a warlike
delusion inverted into harmony. Just what the masses were looking for, as it was the
compensation for what they had been submerged by: deluded for four years by evil,
they received the illusion of goodness. It was something that European politicians,
inevitably, agreed to: a simplistic idea that promised everything but which, since the
bill was made out to the American president, cost them nothing.
On 8 January 1918, a few months after the United States entered the war,Wilson
read his commitment to the assembled American chambers. The incredibly naive,
moralistic preamble contained these words: ‘We entered this war because violations
of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own
people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secure once for all
against their recurrence.’5 The speech continued with the historic Fourteen Points,
which will be discussed below. The great advantage, and the honesty, of the text lay
in the fact that it set out, in a public and seemingly complete speech, all the criteria
124
124 Freud, Keynes and the bamboozled man
for a lasting peace, anchoring them to firm, non-negotiable principles. Its weakness
lay in the fact that it was so vague as to be ambiguous.
A year later, when he arrived in Paris for the peace negotiations, Wilson had
still gone no further than those abstract dogmas, nor prepared the tools for put-
ting them into practice. According to Freud and Bullitt, this very fact is a sign of
his identification with his father, whom he could not and would not go beyond:6
Reverend Joseph Wilson had been a passionate preacher of principles from the
pulpit, without any experience of the measures necessary to carry them into real
life. His son, who never managed to transcend this model, ended up treating his
own programme in the same way. As a preacher he could be inspiring, but he
had never thought seriously about the application of his ideals. Unfortunately
he was responsible not for a sermon, but for restoring order in the world after
a world war.
The fourteen-point dogma
The first of the Fourteen Points called for public peace negotiations. The second,
freedom of navigation. The third, freedom of trade. The fourth, reduction of arma-
ments to the lowest point consistent with self-defence. The fifth, a resolution of
colonial disputes that took account of the interests of the populations concerned.
From the sixth to the twelfth, the points listed the various European territorial dis-
putes, to be resolved by the creation of borders that corresponded to the different
national groups. Particular attention was therefore devoted to the two multinational
states. The Ottoman Empire was asked to guarantee the autonomous development
of the different nationalities. As for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was a com-
mitment to safeguard and preserve it; it, in turn, would have to guarantee the auton-
omous development of its populations. The thirteenth point asked that Poland be
recreated as an independent state with access to the sea. The final one asked for the
foundation of an association of nations to oversee the coexistence of large and small
countries alike.
On the 11 February 1918, on the following 17 September, and on other occa-
sions, Wilson added new documents to the Fourteen Points, to complete the basis
of negotiations: the rejection of territorial annexations, of requests for punitive
damages and of the inclusion of other points or non-public agreements.
The only commitment to be honoured was the resurrection of Poland. It is
worth noting that Wilson’s insistence on granting the country direct access to the
sea suggested that Wilson himself had little faith in his own principles of global
freedom of trade and navigation (points 2 and 3): and rightly so, for the world, after
the free market of the belle époque, was entering an age of strong nationalistic protec-
tionism. Moreover, if in the drawing of borders the need for access to the sea (which
created a ‘corridor’ belonging to Poland in a territory inhabited by Germans) had
precedence, then it contradicted another principle – the principle that every people
had the right to live in its own state, which the Fourteen Points themselves declared
to be sacred. Thus the conflict of nationalities reopened.
125
As the ancient Greeks tried in vain to teach us, human intentions are nothing,
and reality belongs to tragedy. It was the ‘Polish corridor’ that gave Hitler a not-
unfounded pretext for conflict with Poland, becoming the Sarajevo that ignited the
Second World War.
The peace negotiations

In the meantime, five peace conferences formalized the end of the First World War;
the victors negotiated as a cohesive unit, but imposed their conditions on each indi-
vidual vanquished country separately.The peace treaty with Germany was signed in
Versailles, that with Austria in Saint-Germain, that with Hungary in Trianon, that
with Turkey in Sèvres and that with Bulgaria in Neuilly. Naturally, the negotiations
at Versailles were the centre of them all.
As deputy to the chancellor of the exchequer for economic questions, the
British delegation at Versailles included one of the geniuses who left their mark on
the twentieth century. John Maynard Keynes participated in the peace negotiations
and tried to introduce reasonableness to them. Like Bullitt, when he realized the
uselessness of his efforts, he resigned. At that point he wrote a devastating critique of
the rush towards another abyss on which Europe was starting out. His book aroused
enormous interest even among non-specialist readers.7
From the outset the peace negotiations lacked the basic precondition for every
negotiation, namely the presence of the negotiators, for Germany and the other
defeated countries were excluded. As if that were not enough, the Soviet Union
was not invited either, even though most of the territorial and economic questions
affected it. The greatest revolution in history had transformed the largest country
in the world from a tsarist empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but
the victors, reluctant to accord it recognition, tried to act as if it had not happened.
The Allied governments, in principle supporters of free competition, had succeeded
in checking Germany’s progress towards the role of leading European economic
power. But before they could breathe a sigh of relief, another country had started
arousing their paranoid anxieties: Communist Russia was marching rapidly towards
industrialization and proposing a new model of society, which destabilized the
bourgeois model.
The allies set about satisfying their appetites, deceiving Wilson as to their respect
for his cast-iron principles. This manipulation proved relatively easy, partly because
Wilson didn’t want to see it (lest he lose, according to Freud and Bullitt, the approval
of his inner father), and partly because his knowledge of European geography and
ethnic groups was that of a nineteenth-century provincial Southerner – that is to
say, virtually non-existent. Thus he agreed to new borders which included millions
of German-speaking citizens in Czechoslovakia and hundreds of thousands more
in Italy, France, Belgium, Poland and Lithuania.When he realized that his ignorance
had been taken advantage of, he didn’t feel able to go back on the commitments
that had been extorted from him, but slipped into a mistrust manifested by fits of bad
temper and stuck to his own principles at the price of a false consistency.
126
Wilson’s self-deceptions
A significant example of how he had absorbed the anti-Semitic principles of
Christian Southerners is his estimate of the Jewish population: he was already pres-
ident when, in 1916, he claimed that the total number of Jews in the world was
more than 100 million (it was about 15 million at that time). He backed down only
when he was shown an official publication.8
According to Keynes, who proved as good a psychologist as Freud, ‘it was harder
to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him; for the
former involved his belief in and respect for himself.’9 Wilson would have liked to
curb the greed of the Europeans, who breached his principles, but that would have
meant acknowledging that no one took those principles seriously, and he would no
longer have been able to play the part of arbiter-prophet to which he had devoted
himself. He would have liked his principles to be respected with regard to the
losers too, for whom, having identified with Christ, he may have unconsciously
felt more sympathy than he did for the victors; one of the episodes that had left a
mark on his childhood had been witnessing, together with his father, the return of
the Confederate hero, General Robert E. Lee, defeated but dignified.10 And yet as
soon as he mentioned the rights of the defeated someone would insinuate that he
was behaving in a pro-German manner. Taking the lid off the secret container of
a paranoia reveals countless psychologically very significant links; but it is useless
to mention them to the person concerned. Hints and insinuations are expressive
weapons of the paranoiac, which he does not allow to be used by others; and the
fact that Wilson was a ‘positive’ paranoiac made these allusions even more intoler-
able. Any criticism caused panic, inner turmoil, in him. It risked being the preamble
to self-criticism, something he was incapable of.
Wilson had been aware as early as 1917 of most of the punitive peace condi-
tions that the Allies intended to impose on the Central Empires. He had repressed
them, however, to preserve the pacifist illusion which enabled him to proclaim his
Fourteen Points in 1918 and arrive in Versailles in 1919 considering them the sole
basis for negotiations: self-deception, which replaces self-criticism, was necessary in
order to keep his fantasized firmness, and therefore his own false premises, inflexibly
firm. It is significant that, starting from a clinical perspective, and therefore one theo-
retically opposed to that of Keynes, Freud and Bullitt come to virtually identical
conclusions about the president’s flight from reality.
This paranoid curve in Wilson’s behaviour is confirmed by Freud’s assessment
that he unconsciously identified with Christ and felt that he was the victim of a
conspiracy against goodness analogous to the one that had ended in the crucifixion
of Jesus. The American president had come to renounce masculine methods and
adopt a feminine kind of behaviour towards the Allies: lacking practical, virile argu-
ments, he tried to convince them with seductiveness, concessions and appeals to the
beauty of ideals.11
Not having broken free of his father, in this unconscious identification Wilson
tried to square the circle: Christ comes in the name of the Father and professes
total submission to Him, but still imposes his new ideals on the world. Drawing
127
on unpublished material, the historian Paul Roazen has shown that, contrary to
the widespread belief that the book about Wilson was mainly written by Bullitt,
while the founder of psychoanalysis contributed little more than his signature, the
interpretations contained in it were written by Freud.12 Bullitt did no more than
acquiesce in them. In fact, he made a negative contribution to the text, by omitting
part of the master’s argument. In that missing section Freud suggests that Christ
represents an ideal synthesis between innovative masculinity and accommodating
femininity, which eschews aggression and embraces sacrifice. Bullitt had a very low
opinion of Wilson, just like Freud, but he was establishing himself in America as
a politician and didn’t want to alienate the Christian electorate. So he postponed
the publication of this book until 1967 and deleted the Freudian passages which
interpreted the role of Jesus in too psychoanalytical a manner.
Both men, Bullitt and Freud, feared that the damage of the punitive peace,
combined with the failure to keep Wilson’s idealistic promises, would arouse
paranoid reactions in Germany – as indeed it did. In addition, Freud, as Gore
Vidal has observed, held a grudge against Wilson for breaking up his country,
Austria-Hungary, and thereby going back on a formal promise contained in the
Fourteen Points.
The paranoid atmosphere of the negotiations

In Versailles the main themes were not discussed in the crowded plenary sessions of
all the victorious countries, but in a restricted group comprising the so-called ‘Big
Four’: the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy. The fact that they were
restricted and private contradicted Wilson’s basic principles: from the beginning it
caused mistrust among the Allies themselves and weakened political support for the
negotiations. Public opinion took it for granted at any rate that the leader was the
person who was contributing a moral as well as an economic heritage to the nego-
tiations, namely Wilson. In reality, the only politician with true stature and control
of the situation was the Frenchman Clemenceau.
From our perspective, the linguistic aspect of the talks is particularly interest-
ing.13 In the meetings of the ‘Big Four’ the working languages were English and
French. However, two of the participants, Wilson and Lloyd George, had the same
mother tongue but did not speak the other official language. As anyone who has
taken part in an international conference knows, this fomented understanding and
reduced suspicion between the two men. The British and American delegations,
while the interpreter was officially translating what they had said, continued to
talk among themselves unofficially, further improving the climate between them
but arousing mistrust in the other delegations. Of the other two members of the
Big Four, Orlando knew only French, so he could not speak directly with anyone
except Clemenceau, nor could he speak his own mother tongue. Clemenceau, as
well as being the host of the conference, was also the only one who was fluent in
two languages. His personality, too, was dominant. He was the fulcrum of negotia-
tions and the most self-confident person there.
128
If we try to reconstruct the states of mind of these meetings – more important

than the formal content that we read in the proceedings – we get a sense of how
far they anticipate the subsequent international positions of the four countries: the
close relationship between the Americans and the British, which will be a dominant
feature of the twentieth century; Italy’s gradual self-exclusion, based on inferiority
complexes and provincialism reinforcing each other circularly; and a France that
succeeds in making sure that it keeps a role, despite the fact that the power relation-
ships are changing significantly to its disadvantage. Each man had an interest only in
playing himself to the end: Wilson, the missionary; Lloyd George, the theoretically
more detached democrat; Orlando, the capricious man with whom one seemingly
makes peace but after whose self-exclusion everyone breathes a sigh of relief; lastly,
Clemenceau, the statesman and strategist who eventually imposes on everyone his
‘Carthaginian peace’, in which Carthage razed to the ground was Germany. None
of them, Keynes states without indulgence, had the least interest in the real prob-
lem – the political and economic abyss towards which Europe was heading.
Setting a new precedent, the commission in charge of reparation for damage
caused during the war demanded from Germany unrealistic deliveries of materials
(ships, coal, steel, etc.) and financial transfers which, including interest and penalties
for the almost inevitable delays, could have meant the continuation of the famines
and epidemics that were already decimating the German population, leaving it in
debt not merely for decades but for generations. In the meantime, the country’s sov-
ereignty would in effect be suspended and transferred to a commission located out-
side Germany, made up of non-German members, who barely knew the country,
and who would collectively have more power than that possessed by the Kaiser.14
It should not be forgotten that the excessive centralization of power in the hands
of the emperor was considered to be one of the anti-democratic characteristics that
had drawn that country into an adventurist, aggressive policy. Under the pretext of
ensuring freedom of trade, even the authority that regulated navigation on German
rivers would be moved out of Germany.
The fertilizer of the persecutory feelings which had now been sown, and which
would shortly come to bloom in Nazism, lay in Articles 231 and 232. The former
stated that all damage caused during the war, without distinction, was the respon-
sibility of Germany and her allies. The latter acknowledged that Germany’s real
resources made it impossible for her to repay them, but went on to say that ‘nev-
ertheless’ the Allies demanded, and Germany undertook to give, compensation for
all civilian damage resulting from her aggression. The war was over, but projection of
responsibilities and absurd consistency still flourished.
As MacMillan notes, the German reparations were revised many times; in the
end they remained heavy, but not as impossible as those which Keynes had dis-
cussed.15 Apart from the economic damage, however, the psychological damage
had already been done. The application of swingeing economic sanctions was per-
ceived as an indirect way of continuing the destruction of Germany even after the
armistice. The feeling of having been got at by underhand methods took root in the
defeated countries, and with it mistrust on an unprecedented scale, for it went beyond
129
the war itself and directly concerned the peace treaty. Hitler would only have to
exploit the paranoid return which accumulated from this humiliation.
The offence
In a celebrated lecture given at the University of Munich just after the war, Max
Weber warned against continuing to insist on who was to ‘blame’ for the war, rather
than agreeing once and for all on the payment of indemnities; for, in the long run,
a nation will forgive its interests being harmed, but will not forgive its hon-
our being offended, especially if this is done with sanctimonious arrogance.
Each new document that comes to light decades later revives the undignified
clamour, the hatred and the rage, instead of allowing the war, once it is over,
to be buried, at least morally speaking.16
With tragic foresight, Weber was drawing attention to a grave danger connected
with mass psychology: if you do not bear in mind the infectiousness of paranoia,
you risk deluding yourself that a war is over, when in fact the seeds of the next one
are being sown.
Keynes’s essay too cites a question of honour (in terms closer to our present
theme: a psychological problem of collective self-respect), warning against the mis-
understandings that might lead to a second world war. As has been noted, at the
time of the armistice Germany was economically exhausted but militarily still in a
favourable, indeed seemingly winning position.While the Allies had not penetrated
its territory, German troops occupied a vast area of enemy land both in the east and
in the Balkans, and a smaller one on the western front. Despite its internal dissolu-
tion, Austria-Hungary too had held the fronts: most of the territories ‘conquered in
victorious war’ by the Italians were in fact occupied after the armistice.17 The pre-
liminaries to the ceasefire had been handled by Wilson himself, who had demanded
the acceptance of all his Fourteen Points and the later amendments. After exchang-
ing with Germany a solemn commitment that the negotiations would be limited to
applying those principles, Wilson called on his allies to take part as well.
The negotiations lasted more than six months and tortured Wilson’s principles
to death; when the final draft lay on the table, they were unrecognizable. A few
examples will suffice. Austria-Hungary, which according to the tenth point was to
survive, was portioned out between seven countries. In contradiction not just of
one of the principles, but of the underlying principle of the peace treaty – the self-
determination of peoples – the new Austrian republic was forbidden to unite with
Germany or Hungary; that is, it was prohibited from giving up its independence – an
innovation with few precedents. As was mentioned earlier, one of the amendments
stated that there must be no annexations; in the final text, however, the territory of
Romania was more than doubled, whereas that of Hungary became less than half
its previous size. As for the size of the payments, Keynes calculated that the repara-
tions demanded for Belgium alone exceeded the total value of Belgium’s wealth.
130
The German delegation protested, pointing out that almost the entire treaty
contradicted Wilson’s undertakings: if Germany had known when it had discussed
the armistice that those were the conditions, it would never have laid down arms,
or at least would not have withdrawn spontaneously from the enemy territory
that it still occupied. According to Keynes, this failure to respect the undertakings
that had been made was an international violation as serious as Germany’s inva-
sion of Belgium.18 The protest was of no avail. Germany had already demobilized,
in Austria-Hungary the different nationalities had gone their separate ways, and
now it was the Allies who held the former Central Empires hostage. By this point,
however, it had become impossible to disarm paranoia, which would gradually have to follow
that of the armies. By contrast, some of its corollaries – the indisputable certainties,
the suspicion, the tendency to secrecy, the self-deception, the projection and false
consistency – had been strengthened in all parts of Europe.
On his return to the United States, Wilson encountered difficulties he had
not expected in convincing his compatriots. Above all, he found it increasingly
difficult to keep up the dual pretence, with public opinion and with himself.19
In a speech delivered on 17 September 1919 he said of Versailles: ‘An illumina-
tion of profound understanding of human affairs shines upon the deliberations of
that conference […]. […] I do not believe that there is any body of men […] that
can defeat this great enterprise, which is the enterprise of divine mercy.’ On 24
September he was still struggling with delusion, for he said, ‘That treaty is a unique
document. It is the most remarkable document, I venture to say, in human history.
[…] Every thought of aggrandizement, of territorial or political aggrandizement,
on the part of the great powers was brushed aside, brushed aside by their own rep-
resentatives.’ The next day he still felt able to affirm: ‘They did not claim a single
piece of territory.’20 Then he had a nervous breakdown.
Arrogance
Benito Mussolini had received finance for his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, from
various Italian industrialists and from the French government. Bringing Italy into
the war through an aggressive campaign was his great personal success. He boasted
that he had succeeded in doing so even though the majority of Italians were against
it, and his contempt for democracy was conclusively strengthened by this.21
At the end of the war the Italian government was determined to participate in
the peace conference along with the other great powers. The Italian demands no
longer had free passage, owing to two facts which had not been not foreseen in
1915, when the secret London agreements had been made: the presence on the
Adriatic no longer of Serbia alone, but of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes; and the superimposition on all partial agreements of Wilson’s Fourteen
Points, which regulated disputes with general criteria that were the same for every-
one (and which, we may note in passing, aimed to put an end to secret treaties).
The head of government, Orlando and his minister Sonnino insisted on the
old agreements – at the meeting of the Big Four, Orlando at one point started
131
crying like a baby – then they left Paris in a huff, before finally going back again,
thus achieving the considerable feat of being thought insufferable not only by their
enemies but also by their allies. There was a hysterical campaign in Italy, and false
reports appeared in the press about Italians being brutalized by Slovenians.22
The seeds of new paranoia

After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires, in which
many nationalities had been united, their place was taken by smaller states. These
states were equally multinational; according to estimates, the population of
Czechoslovakia included between 25 and 45 per cent of minorities, those of Poland
and Romania at least 25 per cent.23 But they had been born of the nationalist ide-
ology and therefore, unlike the old empires, were in structural ideological conflict
with other nationalities, both internally and with regard to their borders. The pres-
ence of more than 3 million Germans in Bohemia was one of the just arguments
on the basis of which Hitler embarked on his monstrous injustices.
In eastern central Europe, nationalities and religions were not distributed
uniformly but in patchwork fashion, and the balances between them had been
established over the centuries. To call borders into question was to take the lid off
Pandora’s box; it required a familiarity with history which to the provincial Wilson
was as remote as another planet. In the masses, paranoid attitudes were multiplied.
In the multinational empires it was normal for each group to have rivalries and
tensions with the others. The positions, however, were fairly clear: the different
ethnic groups referred to the imperial government and competed with each other
to appear as the best group. Now, however, only one group could consider itself
the chosen one, and, distrusting the minorities, felt a new fear grow: that of internal
encirclement. Often, as a matter of fact, this was geographically justified: the 3 mil-
lion people who made up the huge German minority in Czechoslovakia were
distributed all around the Czechs. In the event of an appeal to citizens’ loyalty, they
would look not towards the capital, Prague, but further afield, to the paranoid proc-
lamations emanating from Berlin. Symmetrically, this symptom caused another, also
of paranoid origin, in the majority – the conviction that the true solution to the
problem was the pre-emptive expulsion of all minorities.
Looking back over the twentieth century and the second millennium, the
‘Millennium Issue’ of the Economist (23 December 1999) called the Treaty of
Versailles ‘the final crime’.
Poland, President Wilson’s only real creation, in the Second World War suffered
unprecedented atrocities and witnessed another slaughter of Wilsonian principles.
The number of Polish civilians killed in the years 1939–45 was between 6 million
and 7 million (estimates of course vary, owing to the partial nature of the docu-
mentation and the significant variations in the borders in 1919, 1939 and 1945). Of
these, about 3 million were Jews. If the Shoah cost 6 million victims, this country
alone provided as many as all the other countries put together. Poland had the
highest percentage of Jews in its population in the world, chiefly because of earlier
132
persecutions and expulsions of Jews from tsarist Russia. The main extermination
camps were built by the Nazis on Polish territory.24
In the Second World War, as in the First, the atrocities did not end with the fight-
ing. Of more than 14 million Germans driven eastwards in 1945, the majority lived
in regions of Germany which suddenly became Poland; and between 2 million and
2.5 million died during the expulsion.25 In the partition of Poland that had been
agreed between the Nazis and the Soviet Union in 1939, the eastern half of the
country had been assigned to the latter. It was given to Stalin anew by the Allies in
1945, again without consulting the Poles, so that room had to be made for millions
of Poles who were fleeing westwards in their turn. Never in history had half the
territory of a large country been moved and more than 17 per cent of its popula-
tion exterminated in such a short time.
In his book on the ‘parallel lives’ of Hitler and Stalin, Bullock notes how two
regimes theoretically opposed to one another can unite when it is a question of
torturing the same victim. He forgets, however, to mention that the Allies were
equally guilty of that torture, at least by omission.26 Having begun with an act of
courage in defence of Poland, the Second World War ended with an incredible act
of cowardice: the Allies celebrated victory with Stalin, one of the tyrants who had
invaded that country.
Notes
1 Weber 1919a.
2 Freud, Preface to Freud and Bullitt 1967.
3 See Auchincloss 2000.
4 See Freud and Bullitt 1967: Chapter 24. The book is not included in the edition of
Freud’s works and is little known, despite the importance of the authors and of the
themes it covers, because, for reasons that will be mentioned below, it was published
when the events to which it referred were already half a century old.
5 The text can be consulted on the website http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/
wilson14.asp (accessed 13 December 2016).
6 See Freud and Bullit 1967: Chapter 2.
7 See Keynes 1920. Some arguments reappear, in revised form, in the second section of
Keynes 1931.
8 See Freud and Bullitt 1967: 133.
9 See Keynes 1920: 50.
10 See Heckscher 1991; Auchincloss 2000.
11 See Freud and Bullitt 1967: Chapter 24.
12 See Roazen 2005.
13 See MacMillan 2001: 54–6; Keynes 1920: 27–8.
14 See Keynes 1920: 201.
15 See MacMillan 2001: Chapter 30.
16 Weber 1919b: 105–6.
17 Real bodies of fallen soldiers were transported into these territories so that ‘fake war
cemeteries’ could be constructed (Milani 1965: 17).
18 See Keynes 1920: Chapter 4.
19 See Auchincloss 2000: 111 ff.; Freud and Bullitt 1967: Chapter 23.
20 The speeches are quoted in Freud and Bullitt 1967: Chapter 24.
21 See Mack Smith 1997: Chapter 8.
133
22 See MacMillan 2001: Chapter 22.

23 See Ferguson 2006; Davies 1996; Michel 1991; Hobsbawm 1994.
24 See Davies 1996; Hobsbawn 1994; Mazower 1998; Hilberg 1961–85.
25 See Müller and Überschär 1994: Chapter 8, and the tables of the archives of the
Federal Republic of Germany cited there; Ferguson 2006: Chapter 16; Naimark
1995: introduction.
26 See Bullock 1991: Chapter 15.
134
7
SIEGFRIED
I said, Germany has enemies within its own walls.1

The German army [was] stabbed in the back by the civilian population.2
The illuminating explanation

Within Germany, the idea that defeat was the result of a conspiracy had no evidence
to back it up but explained everything. Its simplicity was destined for great public
success, in the catastrophe and the disorientation in which the country found itself
after the abdication of the Kaiser and the Treaty of Versailles. Such a simple, func-
tional idea poisoned the new Weimar Republic in its cradle. The rebirth of democ-
racy and peace, by contrast, required commitment, sacrifice and reasoning – mental
processes that could not excite or infect the masses so quickly.
It should be added that the Allies had contributed in every way to spread
suspicion among the defeated. Often paranoia corresponds to an unshakeable
conviction that there is a plot, even when the facts indicate otherwise. In the
case of the Treaty of Versailles, unfortunately, the very worst theories had proved
true: indeed, the collapse of the Central Empires came to be far more radical
than even the pessimists had imagined at the time of the armistice. As a result,
the worst paranoiacs could proclaim that they had been right. Their over-excited argu-
ments struck a chord with ordinary citizens. As a result, the group of permanent
delusionals, in itself small, was swelled by vast masses who had been converted to
the persecutory mentality.
The defeated countries – that is, those that were directly affected – had been
excluded from the peace negotiations and could get information about them only
from what filtered through the press or from leaks and rumours – channels, as we
know, more suited to spreading paranoia than to transmitting reliable information.
In the treaties, moreover, the defeated countries were required to sign a document
135
Siegfried 135
that obliterated their countries both militarily and economically; this was the view
not only of people with persecution complexes, but also of the most competent
representative of the British delegation, Keynes. It was an absurd conclusion: the
Germans and Austro-Hungarians had laid down their arms because they were war-
weary and prepared to make peace, not because they had been defeated militarily.
That was also the opinion of an enemy general, Sir Frederick Maurice. So who had
surreptitiously planned this deception?
The legitimization of paranoid nationalist ‘law’

The paranoia, which ought to have died down with the coming of peace, did not
affect the defeated alone, but exploded in new forms throughout Europe. Wilson’s
Fourteen Points had provided nationalist ideologies with dynamite, rendering any
demand they might make just and possible. At the same time, they had sown the
seed of the tribe of the betrayed. Before Wilson, the utopian nationalists had only
been dreamers. With the Fourteen Points they all became potential paranoiacs.
They could count on an absolute international law, sanctioned as a principle by the
peace treaties. Any failure to respect that law meant – in their eyes – that there had
been an equally absolute betrayal.
Wilson had committed himself, but had then left the application of his points to
others. With some foundation it could be argued that he was the betrayer, starting
from the moment he subcontracted his ideals. As Keynes and Weber had proph-
esied, and as Freud and Bullitt would conclude, a long series of evils can be traced
back to the treaties with which the First World War ended – even the Balkan wars
with which the twentieth century ended and the Middle Eastern ones with which
the twenty-first century began.
Even in the immediate aftermath, however, the consequences were disastrous,
liberating the most intransigent part of the nationalist movements and unleash-
ing them in competition among themselves. Nationalism now enters a new
phase, shedding its Romantic and aesthetic components and merging with social
Darwinism, under the guise of false science. Its radical component, now part of
everyday language, is racism. Even Freud and Bullitt criticize the borders fixed by
Wilson, because as well as not corresponding to linguistic divisions, they did not
respect those of blood.3
The defeated countries, both in Mitteleuropa (the Central Empires) and in the
Middle East (the Ottoman Empire), seethed with new hatred for the cynicism of
the victorious ones; the Ottomans too had not really been defeated militarily, but
had merely lost control of their Arab provinces, because the latter had believed the
Allies’ promises of independence (whereas in reality they would simply pass from
Turkish domination to British and French).
Like Germany, on 30 October 1918, the Ottoman Empire had accepted an
armistice with vague clauses. In November, as soon as its soldiers lay down their
arms, British, French and Italian troops occupied key parts of Turkish territory. This
contradicted both the current idea of armistice and the promises of the British
136
136 Siegfried
admiral Calthorpe, who was evidently no better at ensuring respect for the under-
takings that had been given than Wilson was.4
The disappearance of multinational coexistence

In the short period that followed, the Istanbul monarchy was swept away. With it
various anachronisms disappeared, but so did traditions of tolerance and multi-
ethnicity. Hitherto the highest political and military posts had remained in
the hands of the Turkish majority, but the backbone of Ottoman business was
Greek and Jewish. In the Ottoman Empire multiplicity had been pervasive. The
Westerners’ arrogance, however, handed victory to the nationalism of the Young
Turks. We owe to this many of the misunderstandings that flourish today between
Europe and Turkey.
The persistence of bitterness towards the enemy even after the signing of a
peace treaty is almost inevitable in wars of all ages. But after the armistice of 1918
the novelty of total, paranoid war expressed itself in its survival as war within the
defeated countries, in the name of a form of national purification which was rapidly becom-
ing racial. The ‘Carthaginian’ peaces of the First World War erased the identities of
two old multinational states: the remains of the Habsburg Empire passed from
Mitteleuropeanism to German and Hungarian nationalism; at the meeting point
between Europe and Asia there was a slide from Ottomanism to Turkism. As a result,
rich and complex cultures which had existed for centuries were lost and replaced
by a for the most part purely imaginary nation and a race, which was also imagined
to be something identical to the nation, a scientific entity. In psychological terms,
differentiated, practical thought gave way to simplified, paranoid thought.
The historian of psychoanalysis Henry Ellenberger has suggested that the
Austro-Hungarian Empire may have disappeared not because it was too old but
because it was too new – a model, albeit one with many flaws, of coexistence
between peoples; an attempt to achieve that European integration of which the
first few steps have been taken only recently, and with difficulty, nearly 100 years
later; and an example of artistic success promoted by cosmopolitanism and by the
meeting between civilizations.5 As Franz Werfel wrote, with the disappearance of
multinational Austria, German-language culture was reduced to a national event;
it lost the universality of Vienna and moved over to the opposite, Prussian pole; it
abandoned an old aesthetic vocation for an obsession with inflexible efficiency,
which would later coagulate into Nazi militarism.6
An insidious element of this propensity for looking north and repudiating the
south was the attraction of the blond, pure ‘Aryan race’, together with the rejection
of racial mixtures with darker-skinned peoples, and therefore of that contamination
with which the Habsburg Empire had ‘paid’ for the southward shift of its borders.
As we have seen, Adolf Hitler, already obsessed by purity of blood and suspicious of
diversity, had in 1913 left multinational Austria for mono-racial Germany (though
he would have to wait until 1932 for the grant of citizenship).The ethnic and artis-
tic interchanges of Vienna were intolerable to him.
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Siegfried 137
Early twentieth-century Vienna was, in this sense too, a century ahead of its
time: a melting pot for trials of the ‘immigration revolution’ that would character-
ize Europe from the end of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-
first. The flowering of a new society, the extent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and the freedom of movement within it, meant a continual increase in ‘minorities’,
both because of the arrival of new immigrants and because an increasing number of
schools taught the minority languages and there was an increasing pride in belong-
ing to a particular ethnic group, whereas earlier it had been something one did not
mention. The old Habsburg Empire was doing rehearsals for present-day globaliza-
tion a century in advance.
The reverse aspect of this worldwide variety experienced at home was the lack
of colonies. Austria-Hungary was the only European power that had not embarked
on the subjugation of peoples overseas. There were still, of course, inequalities
among the peoples that made up the empire, and this strengthened the various
nationalisms, but such differences were trivial compared with the infinite racial
distance which, in the colonial empires, separated African or Asian possessions from
the associated metropolises.
Not very differently from the Habsburg Empire, which was a continuation of
the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nation, the Ottoman Empire was an
updated version of the Islamic universal caliphate; their expansion had come about
slowly, by territorial continuity, not through conquests of colonies in completely
different worlds.
Between the second half of the nineteenth century and 1910 the number of
Viennese Jews had quadrupled, coming to constitute 8.5 per cent of the popula-
tion;7 in no other European city were they so numerous. Moreover, although there
remained large groups of poor eastern Jews, the well-assimilated ones excelled and
were becoming the majority in the most respectable professions: doctors, lawyers,
university professors.
In the same half-century, the number of Czechs in Vienna increased tenfold,
coming to form 20 per cent of the population.8 The phenomenon was completely
new for a European city. The German-speaking Austrians (a distinction which was
becoming important only now: previously one had simply been Austrian), who in
the country as a whole were about 35.7 per cent, risked becoming a minority even
in the capital.9 In Austria’s other big city, Prague, they had decreased in number
from 20 per cent to a tiny percentage.
As a consequence of these demographic changes, right-wing populist move-
ments arose. In this respect too Vienna anticipated tendencies which would later
dominate the whole of Europe: the mayor, Lueger, gained popularity with the
masses by attributing the inevitable growing pains to the Jews. The right-wing
parties relied on social Darwinist ideologues, who recommended putting a stop
to the ‘negative selection’ of the population. They supported the racist ideas of
the Frenchman Gobineau and the British-born (naturalized German) Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, who had formulated them during the twenty years he
had lived in Vienna.
138
138 Siegfried
Currents of thought popular at the time held that, just as the history of religions
had moved on from polytheism to monotheism, a more advanced concept of the
state must move on from ‘polynationalism’ to ‘mononationalism’. Ethnic monothe-
ism was, so to speak, a sort of new secular creed, in the name of which the intolerances of the
old wars of religion were reawakened. Like all paranoid dynamics, this slide of collec-
tive consciousness implies a psychic weakness, but also a final attempt to maintain
some sort of equilibrium.The paranoiac feels the possibility of psychic collapse and
defends himself against it by progressively simplifying his mental horizon, which is
thus reduced to the dogma of absolute purity. On the collective level, the equivalent
of this defence is the further transition from nationalism to racism.
Adolf Hitler’s ideological development followed the same course. In Fest’s biog-
raphy of the dictator, the section devoted to the Viennese period has a significant
title, borrowed from Mein Kampf: ‘Das granitene Fundament’.10 From this granite
foundation, made of racist prejudices, the future dictator would derive every sig-
nificant decision with absurd consistency and complete fidelity, often against his own
interests. In doing so, he would remain impermeable to any revision based on reality. In
1942, for example, although he should have been concerning himself with very
different matters, since he was at war with the rest of the world, he found time to
lament that in Vienna in 1914, of 1,800 employees of the imperial court only 120
had been German-speaking, the rest being Czechs. From the archives, which sur-
vived two world wars, we know that in fact 75.8 per cent of ministerial employees
were German-speaking and only 10.8 per cent Czech-speaking;11 so not only had
the Czechs not taken over the court bureaucracy, but, given that their percentage of
the total population was far higher, they were under-represented both in the empire
as a whole and in the city administration.
The stab in the back

That humiliation of the defeated which the cynicism of the victors had devised at
Versailles began to be perceived as the logical conclusion of hostile plans conceived
in the distant past but assembled much more recently, in the very heart of the
defeated empires. So the losers were being gradually transformed into victims.
However, for the interpretations of the fundamentalist right to sway the masses,
neither its paranoid theories nor its false figures were sufficient: there was a need for
powerful symbols, which would stir equally powerful emotions.
Anyone who had attended a German school – indeed, even an illiterate who had
only listened to stories by the fireside – knew the myth of Siegfried. After killing
the dragon, the hero of the Niebelung cycle had become invincible when he had
been bathed in the monster’s blood, as Achilles had been in the waters of the Styx.
But, just as Achilles had remained vulnerable in the heel that his mother had not
immersed in the river, so a small part of Siegfried’s body had remained outside the
miraculous bath: a point in his back, on which a leaf had rested. His wife Cremilde
knew this and had charged Hagen, the hero’s faithful friend, with the task of pro-
tecting his back. But the myth is not a Hollywood story that guarantees a happy
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Siegfried 139
ending. Hagen, secretly in love with Cremilde, inserted his blade at the one point
where death could enter Siegfried.
The first step towards the most devastating mass paranoia in human history was
almost a matter of chance. In the early autumn of 1918 the war was nearing its end.
The German situation had quickly become unsustainable; the United States was
pouring its immense economic, technological and military resources into Europe,
whereas Germany was exhausting its own. The Kaiser’s soldiers, traditionally well
disciplined, were surrendering in droves; in the last three months of the war the
Allies captured a quarter of the German army present on the field and half of its
artillery.12 In Germany there was a spate of strikes and calls for peace and revolu-
tion. The two leaders of the armed forces, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, urged the
Kaiser to find a political solution to the war. Most of the public, however, were not
able to follow the rapid succession of events, because in Germany the press cen-
sored itself (even the Social Democratic Party did the same). The information that
might make people think the front was collapsing did not reach the man in the
street. Consequently, the news of the armistice was a surprise to almost everyone.
At that moment of confusion, an apparently plausible reply came from a phrase
used by a British general, published in a German-language Swiss newspaper: the
army had not been defeated at the front but stabbed in the back by events that had
happened in Germany.
After the Treaty of Versailles, the constituent assembly of the new Weimar
Republic set up a commission of inquiry into various aspects of the war. Paul
Ludwig von Hindenburg, soon to be reborn as a nationalist politician, was sum-
moned for interview on the 18 November 1919. Instead of recalling the unsustain-
ability of the military situation before the armistice, the field marshal preferred to
quote General Maurice’s remark, which many had not heard of. Speaking allusively,
like Iago, Hindenburg said that there was no need even to mention the evidence,
since everyone understood what had happened. ‘The German army’, he said, ‘was
stabbed in the back. Where the responsibility lies is clearly proven. If proof were still
needed, it lies in this declaration by a British general and in the utter surprise that
our enemies felt at their victory.’13
The following year Hindenburg published his memoirs. This time he did not
just quote Maurice’s words. Drawing on the evocative force of myth, he wrote
that the army had collapsed, like Siegfried stabbed by the treacherous Hagen.14
Subjected to revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence, the most devastat-
ing inflation in history, and the chaos of society and values, the new republic was
trying to understand who she was.15 In order to do this, she needed to know whose
daughter she was. According to the evil press, the womb from which she was born
was treachery and the bastard girl’s father was a Hagen in modern dress. More
reasonable explanations would not have had such an impact or boosted sales so
easily. But German society was the daughter of an intensely Romantic nineteenth
century, and was unconsciously exposed to mythological or sentimental points of
view; so the Dolchstoßlegende, the theory or legend of the ‘stab in the back’, came to
dominate the mass media.
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140 Siegfried
As a result, instead of concerning itself with its problematic future reconstruc-

tion, Germany focused more and more on the wrongs it had suffered, forgetting
Shakespeare’s warning: ‘To mourn a mischief that is past and gone / Is the next way
to draw new mischief on.’16
On 6 April, the National Socialist Völkischer Beobachter called the Versailles
agreements ‘the syphilis peace’ – an infection which, born of a brief lust, gradually
kills the body and mind of the healthy individual.17 Matthias Erzberger, the mild
centrist politician who had signed the armistice (Hindenburg and the military
commanders, whose task that should have been, had preferred to sit on the fence),
was killed by nationalists in 1921. Since the 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of Hitler,
Erzberger may be considered both the last victim of the First World War and the
‘first casualty’ of the Second. Once again, an unwitting assassin had performed the
deed of Pandarus.
The Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, son of a family of workers, was the first
elected president of the Weimar Republic.18 He was attacked on all sides as a mem-
ber of the Siegfried-slaying conspiracy, because he had taken part in a strike against
the war in 1918; he defended himself by bringing a long series of court cases for
slander. In 1924 the editor of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte accused Ebert’s entire
party of having played a part in the back-stabbing. The next year, at the end of the
umpteenth court case, a German tribunal acquitted the Social Democratic Party of
the charge of having participated in the conspiracy.There was no longer any discussion of
whether the theory of the conspiracy had any basis in fact or was slander; the most
one could hope for was an acknowledgement that one had not taken part in it.
Ebert, who had already lost two sons in the war, died in 1925 at the age of only
fifty-four, from a banal case of appendicitis. In his concern not to be absent from the
trial, he had kept putting off the operation. In the same year the first edition of Mein
Kampf was published. In Chapter 7, Hitler argued that, while shaking the hand that
the Kaiser had held out to them for the sake of national unity, the Marxists were
reaching for the dagger with their other hand.19 In the same lines he added that it
had been the news of the armistice that had induced him to enter politics. In these
explanations the nouns ‘Marxists’ and ‘Jews’ alternate as if they were synonyms.
Once the delusional basic assumption has been constructed, proof is superfluous.
Taking to an extreme the fantasy exchange of which paranoia is capable, the author
of Mein Kampf attributed to his imaginary enemies the very thing that he was
doing: it is part of Jewish tradition, he writes, to fabricate slanders.20
In 1933, after the Nationalist Socialists had seized power, the formula Dolchstoß
von Judentum und Marxismus (stab in the back of Judaism and Marxism), became
state doctrine and a subject that had to be taught at school. The compound word
Dolchstoßlegende was erased from dictionaries.21 The ‘stab in the back’ (Dolchstoß) was
officially transformed into a historical fact, and words like ‘legend’ or ‘theory’ could
no longer be associated with it.
After the fall of Nazism, Victor Klemperer, in a philological essay, described
the language it had created as a wholesale poisoning of the collective psychol-
ogy.22 From a perspective opposite to that of the Völkischer Beobachter, Klemperer
141
Siegfried 141
too spoke of an infection which little by little had killed the whole body. This
gradual process had become both the consequence and the cause of a mass
paranoid contagion.
Waiting for more darkness

In European history, the balance between the art of politics and the art of war had
been both a rite and a psychological intuition: leaving your adversary a chance of
surrendering without losing face. After the First World War that was no longer pos-
sible. It was no longer possible to imagine a Europe in which the rulers declared
and then waged war on each other, then returned to peace, celebrating alliances and
intermarriages. That world, hypocritical but to some extent still chivalrous, came to
an end in the blood and mire of the trenches. Too many people had gone too far
to be able to preserve any flexibility, decency, humanity, to exercise self-criticism or
show some degree of remorse.Though convinced that they were more realistic than
their predecessors, most politicians of the day quivered with inflexible wounded
pride. So began the world of total war and absolute rigidity. A world which had
admittedly been seen before but which had not previously constituted the only
rule in conflicts. The world of paranoid procedure, previously reserved for wars of
religion or silent colonial genocides. Now it established itself in European relations.
Its scenario contemplated one choice alone: the destruction of the adversary.
Todorov is right in saying that evil increased in the twentieth century; not
because the human being became more wicked, but because relations between
people became permanently depersonalized.23 From a functional point of view,
relations continue to exist, but in a greater psychological void: an empty space
which is often filled by fantasies tinged with paranoia.
For the first time an American army had fought in Europe. Traditionally,
American institutions are certainly no more inhuman than European ones, and
their origins are more democratic. But the military institutions have some dis-
tinctive characteristics. The wars against the Native American peoples were not
clashes between monarchies which at some point made peace then started fighting
again after a while; they were wars of annihilation. Even in conflicts similar to the
European ones, such as the Civil War, the US Army aimed at the complete subjuga-
tion of the enemy. In 1918, when they had only recently entered the First World
War, the Americans already found themselves at loggerheads with their allies over
this point: General John Pershing wanted to fight on until the unconditional sur-
render of Germany was achieved, whereas to the exhausted Europeans it seemed
enough that the Germans were crumbling on all fronts. The difference between
the two ‘war cultures’ mainly derived from the fact that the Americans had never
had – and would continue not to have – the front in their own country. They had
less knowledge, and more fantasies, about war. Show business (Hollywood, the free
market of fantasies) would help to widen this disparity between the United States
and Europe, creating a continual experience of artificial images of war. The collec-
tive American imagination thus satisfies the universal need for heroes with fictitious
142
142 Siegfried
figures, whereas it has little experience of the profound depressions that an intimate
acquaintance with war leaves among civilians.
Historians have discussed many elements of continuity between the First and the
Second World War. In the interval between the two conflicts, most propaganda did
not lay down arms, and the feeling of uninterrupted mobilization was strongly felt
by the populations. I have already suggested that a permanent collective paranoia
was established during the First World War. Despite the almost universal need for
peace, it continued – now latent, now manifest – in the 1920s and 1930s and dur-
ing the Second World War, continuing into the Cold War. There is reason to ask
ourselves whether the so-called clash of civilizations that is being discussed at the
beginning of the twenty-first century is not a new manifestation of it.
We are picking through important historical episodes in search of collective para-
noia.This selection acquires particular significance at the point we have now reached.
In the fuse that had set off the First World War, the accumulation of paranoid
components was very significant, and it can help us trace the origin of their dif-
fusion during the course of the century. For the Second World War and the fascist
regimes, the psychic contagion is even plainer. It is clear in the origins of the Jewish
genocide, an expression of absolute crime but also of absolute political paranoia.
Without attempting to cover all these fields, on which a vast number of studies
exist, we cannot avoid devoting ourselves to the pinnacle of this persecutory delu-
sion: Adolf Hitler.
Another immense field of research would be the post-Bolshevik communist
movement. Starting from an ideal of brotherhood, which constituted a secular
modernization of Judaeo-Christian morality, it degenerated into cyclopean mas-
sacres, comparable to fascist-like violence applied to the class struggle, and therefore
unleashed mainly within the country. So we will also dwell on the other absolute
paranoiac, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin.
This concentration on the figures of the two tyrants might suggest that we are
re-examining from a psychopathological perspective the concept of totalitarian-
ism introduced by Hannah Arendt. In reality, if totalitarian societies can deliver
themselves up to the paranoia of a leader, democratic society too may be tempted
to entrust itself to a paranoid political discourse. Fortunately, that happens in an
occasional and non-permanent manner. Nevertheless, it is this that the psychologi-
cal and social sciences should study carefully in the future. The liberal democracies
seem to have won the battle of globalization.The risk is precisely that the citizens of
the West, perceiving clearly how alien and mad the mental processes of Hitler and
Stalin were, will think their own countries are perfectly safe. They are not.
Notes
1 Mann 1918.
2 Sir Frederick Maurice, British General, interview in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17
December 1918.
3 See Freud and Bullitt 1967: 133.
4 See Finkel 2005: Chapter 16.
143
Siegfried 143
5 See Ellenberger 1970: Chapter 5.

6 See Werfel 1937.
7 See Fest 1973: Part 2.
8 See Hamann 1996: Chapter 9.
10 See Fest 1973: Part 3. This will be discussed in the next chapter.
13 Quoted in Hirschfeld et al. 2003: s.v. Dolchstoßlegende (my italics).
14 See Hirschfeld et al. 2003: s.v. Dolchstoßlegende.
15 In addition to most of the texts cited above, see also Laqueur 1974.
16 Shakespeare, Othello, I, 3, 203–4.
17 See Fest 1973.
18 See Mühlhausen 2006. The fact that the first real biography of Ebert was not published
until the twenty-first century is indicative of how much the years of his presidency have
been repressed by the German collective conscience.
19 See Hitler 1925: 225. See also Christian Zentner in Hitler 1974: 70 and 192 note.
20 See Hitler 1974: 253.
21 See Hirschfeld et al. 2003: s.v. Dolchstoßlegende.
22 See Klemperer 1957. The title of Klemperer’s book, LTI, stands for Lingua Tertii Imperii,
a Latin translation of ‘language of the Third Reich’.
23 See Todorov 1991: Epilogue.
144
8
THE GRANITE FOUNDATION
AND THE HOUR OF IDIOCY
The ultimate aim of the whole educational and pedagogical process of the
National state must be to inculcate racial awareness and racial sensibility
instinctively and rationally into the hearts and minds of the young people
who are entrusted to its care.1
In his morbid mistrust – finally of more or less everyone – Hitler ended by
dealing with all state business himself2
The deadliest kind of anti-semitism […] has little to do with real conflicts
of interest between living people or even with racial prejudice as such. At its
heart lies the belief that Jews – all Jews everywhere – form a conspiratorial
body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind.3
Hitler’s revelations
The importance of revelations in the life of Adolf Hitler is impossible to overstate.
His ability to extract them from his unconscious and convey them rhetorically to
the masses fascinated Jung, who said of him in a well-known interview: ‘He is like
a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from
a mysterious source and then acts upon them. […] The true leader is always led.’4
That same quality which leads us to consider him paranoid, when absorbed by
the crowd and confirmed by ephemeral successes led to his being considered a
prophet. But when did he ‘discover’ that the Jews were the cause of all evils?5
All the theories that attributed Hitler’s anti-Semitism to personal resentment have
so far proved false. It is not true that it was a Jewish professor who refused him admis-
sion to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, nor that he caught syphilis from a Jewish
prostitute. It is even more false that he considered Eduard Bloch, the family doctor,
responsible for his mother’s death; he still felt grateful to him when he was a dictator.6
145
The granite foundation and the hour of idiocy 145
In Linz, as a very young man, Hitler began to feel the attraction of the extreme
right. But that nationalism was small-scale and provincial, like the town itself. Blame
for all evils was put on the Czechs, not the Jews, who were few and well-assimilated;
indeed, Adolf sent Dr Bloch postcards, and even his watercolours.7 His political
development and his anti-Semitism flowered later, in Vienna.
The role of Vienna

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the rate of population growth in
the Austrian capital was four times that of London or Paris. The city was different
from metropolises like those, which simply included a lower layer of immigrants.
Vienna combined late nineteenth-century globalization, belle époque cosmopoli-
tanism and in particular the multiculturalism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As
we have already seen, here ethnic groups were not minorities, but protagonists. In half a
century, the number of Czechs had risen from 2 to 20 per cent of the city’s popula-
tion. But if we include those who had been resident even longer, and who were
invisible to statistics because they were assimilated or because they declared that
their mother tongue was German, then their number reached almost 1 million out
of a total of 2 million.8 The Czechs had their own newspapers, their own banks,
their own schools. In response, this prompted a proliferation of German nationalist
groups, which launched aggressive campaigns.
Today, documentaries and history books have familiarized us with photographs
of Jewish shops which, in 1930s Germany, used to be covered with graffiti such as
Kauft nicht bei den Juden! (Don’t buy from Jews!) We consider them an invention of
Nazism. But they are not. Already in early twentieth-century Vienna, shop windows
were daubed with phrases urging people not to buy from Jews and Czechs. The
young Hitler certainly saw them; and he did not forget them.
The second city, Prague, was also multilingual, but the German-speaking popu-
lation was diminishing (from 18 per cent in 1880 to 7.5 per cent in 19009) under
the pressure of Czech nationalism; so German-speaking shopkeepers might find
their shop windows daubed with the slogan ‘Don’t buy from the Germans!’10 In
many respects, Austria and its capital experienced in the early 1900s not only the
multiculturalism and waves of immigrants that have characterized the beginning
of the twenty-first century, but also the populist movements that reject them, their
paranoid intolerance and their ignorance. Just as happens today, it was forgotten that
immigration and multi-ethnicity – the novelties that were feared – were inevitable
consequences of the economic development that everyone wanted.
Nothing comparable was happening in other European cities; with some foun-
dation it could be argued that if Hitler had passed directly from Linz to Munich,
without that five-year stay in Vienna, he would not have suffered such a profound
loss of his identity. Perhaps he would not have become such a fanatical racist and the
Shoah and the Second World War would not have taken place.
The Jewish community was particularly prominent in Vienna. It had grown
from 2 per cent in 1860 to 10 per cent in 1880, before diminishing a little; it still
146
146 The granite foundation and the hour of idiocy
comprised nearly 200,000 people,11 or twice the number of Jews resident in the
whole of France at that time.They were certainly not a homogeneous group. Many
came from the eastern parts of the empire, notably Galicia or even Russia. These
people were pious traditionalists who caught the eye with their clothing and hair-
styles. Even though most of them lived in conditions of great poverty, they proudly
rejected assimilation. The Jews originating from Vienna, or at least Austria, on the
other hand, were integrated, indeed they had already reached top positions in the
fields of finance, the sciences and culture. About half the pupils in secondary schools
were Jewish, and in the universities the percentage was even higher. In the legal
profession, already in 1889 the Jews constituted the majority.
Hitler was certainly impressed by this success. He couldn’t get it out of his mind;
he felt an enduring envy for it. He would continue to reproach the Jews with living
off the ‘Germans’ and depriving them of opportunities and economic resources. It
is surprising that these are the same arguments as populist propaganda uses today
against immigrants. Like the present-day populist, the early twentieth-century anti-
Semite seemed unaware that the Jews’ enterprise did not take away wealth but
bring it. As presented by Hitler, these arguments were particularly contradictory.
For him, the law that governed the world was social Darwinism;12 if he praised the
rise of Germany in every field during the past century, he should also have admired
the success of the Jews and acknowledge that ‘Darwinian’ selection proved how
strong and able they were. But this idea never occurred to him. Jews in positions of
power did not contribute to the strength of the German economy and culture, but
conspired to their detriment. And how had they reached those positions? Through
international conspiracies against the national forces.The argument chased its own tail;
the explanation was circular.
Mein Kampf
Hitler’s only real book is Mein Kampf.13 Written in the first person in autobio-
graphical form, it has had every line of its text dissected in an attempt to understand
how the quintessence of cruelty can grow out of the family of a provincial clerk.
But the strictly psychoanalytic reconstructions have feet of clay, for Hitler gives us
private information only after adapting it to the political purpose that the text was
intended to serve. Everything, even the descriptions of his schooldays, is thread used
to weave the ideological fabric of absolute nationalism and anti-Semitism.
In the book Hitler describes the five years he spent in Vienna as ‘the saddest
of [my] life’.14 When he took the entrance exam for the Academy of Fine Arts he
was convinced that he was an exceptional draughtsman. Rejection was a ‘negative
revelation’, which caught him completely unprepared. Evidently his certainty that
he would be accepted was detached from reality; the all-powerful capacity for self-
delusion with which he would later devastate Europe is already encapsulated in this
episode. He requested a meeting with the rector, who, probably in order to calm the
agitated young man down, said he was absolutely convinced that the right career
for him was not painting, but architecture. This news too fell on Hitler’s head like
147
an unexpected revelation, though this time a positive one. As happens with certain
mentally disturbed individuals, within a few days he had convinced himself that he
was predestined for a future as an architect, and he began to develop an inflexible,
iron will in pursuing this very plan.15 A trace of this mania has remained in some
grand, never realized town-planning projects and in the facility with which he del-
egated powers of government to the young architect Speer, to whom he was linked
by an almost symbiotic trust.
Mein Kampf and other writings by Hitler show undoubted evidence of lucidity,
‘political realism’ and a capacity for formal reasoning and synthesis. But the con-
clusion which all the passages reach does not derive from such characteristics; it is
already provided by an original prejudice and often openly contradicts them.
To Hitler, all Slavs were irremediably inept and untrustworthy. But ‘of all the
Slavs the Czech is the most dangerous.’Why? ‘Because he’s a worker. He has a sense
of discipline, he’s orderly.’ But how come, if he is a Slav? ‘He’s more Mongol than
Slav.’ A play of empty words has produced an inversion of causes, which makes the
most western of the Slavic peoples oriental, indeed Asiatic. When the sums do not
add up it is sufficient to make race – which according to Hitlerian ideology causes
national characters – derive from the character itself; at that point the contradiction
becomes confirmation. Of course you must mistrust a Czech; for ‘beneath the top
layer of a certain loyalty, he knows how to hide his plans.’ The Czechs are ‘a foreign
body in the midst of the German people.’ In short, even when you are dealing
with trustworthy people, Hitler knows, by primal revelation, that it is necessary to
be distrustful. The positive qualities of the Czechs – who for centuries have been
Slavs but also Austrians – do not enable them to do their work well and be excel-
lent citizens; they enable Hitler to understand that they are concealing some negative
qualities. The Czechs are condemned; absurd consistency is preserved.16
Nazi rumours would constantly copy similar false syllogisms (paralogisms) from
the Hitlerian prototype. For Himmler too, the key positions in Russia are occupied
by the usual Jews. But when, in late 1942, he has to explain how the Soviet Army
is so strong, he suddenly says that clearly their commanders have ancient Germanic
roots (which he had never mentioned before).17
In an ordinary mental process it is possible to know which is the first step and
which are the following ones. A normal argument will say: the weather was bad,
therefore the harvest was poor, therefore the price of wheat rose. In paranoid ideas,
however, as we have seen, a circularity is established. The delusion feeds itself, and
it becomes very difficult to reconstruct what the first step was. The paranoiac will
say: a plot by speculators had the price of wheat raised, using the pretext of the bad
weather. Usually, in a bad season the harvest is poor and this in itself makes prices
rise. But the temporal and causal succession of events is irrelevant for someone
who starts from the dogma of the hidden enemy. A racist campaign may attribute
all the troubles of the economy to the Jews. The latter will be forced to flee and
to sell their possessions, transforming their value into gold, which is easier to take
with you. At this point the racist cries out: the Jews are fleeing because they’ve
stolen our gold! The racist argument confuses the order of events. His arguments
148
lack consequentiality, being produced not by observation of the facts, but by a pre-
existing unconscious need. It is this that makes them almost ineradicable. Racism
is always paranoid, and there are no preventive medicines against paranoia; it is already
convinced that is the prevention of preventions.
For Hitler’s thought, genetics is everything; in this sense his thought should be
based on an absolute materialist positivism. But sometimes he speaks of the spirit
of peoples as if it were not a metaphor but a real structure of which society is com-
posed. Sometimes he engages in battles to impose the German language. At other
times, however, he criticizes the non-rigorous racism of those who attach too little
importance to the German language. He admires Mayor Lueger because he is a
self-professed anti-Semite. But the latter includes among his programmes the
teaching of German to the minorities and the obligation to speak it. Hitler opposes
this. For his inflexible thought, the Czechs and Jews will always remain genetically
different. If they learned German, society would become full of enemies who were
difficult to recognize; here is a foretaste of that paranoid anxiety of contamination
that would progress so far as to introduce a symbol which it was compulsory for
‘different’ people to wear – for Jews, the yellow star. The forced imposition of a
language and culture from above – a typical nationalist programme of that time –
is counter-productive, in Hitler’s view: he does not consider it a ‘Germanization’
but the precise opposite, a ‘de-Germanization’. Culture is a superficial layer; only
race is deep and immutable. The only reality that can be Germanized is the soil.18
Moreover, even ‘a German Christendom is a contradiction in terms. Either you are
German or you are Christian.’ Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, feminine and
treacherous.19 These rigid premises ultimately led towards a single aim: territorial
conquest, with the deportation or extermination of the resident populations.
The Vienna years formed in Hitler ‘an image of the world and a Weltanschauung
that became the granite foundation of […] [my] action’, and to which he subse-
quently had ‘little to add and nothing to change’.20 Those years opened his eyes to
the two great dangers of the world: Marxism and Judaism.21
The apparition of the Jew

The event that Hitler describes as crucial was an ‘apparition’ (Erscheinung22) that
occurred while he was wandering around Leopoldstadt, the central Jewish quarter
of Vienna. He saw a strange figure, wearing a kaftan and with long black curls: no
doubt an orthodox Jew belonging to one of the communities that had come from
eastern Europe.The question spontaneously arose in Hitler: ‘Is this man too a Jew?’
He compared him with his recollections. The Jews in Linz were different (liter-
ally, ‘did not have similar appearances’): there were few of them and they dressed
unobtrusively. A second question formed in Hitler: ‘Is this man a German too?’23
Starting from the appearance, his thought arbitrarily tried to deduce an essence.
A human being does not perceive another human being with the sense of
smell or with all the senses, as animals do. He mainly uses sight and abstract ideas.
The enormous complexity of cultures, with their countless differences, has been
149
superimposed on instinct. Culture has become a second nature; so, when another
human being dresses and speaks in incomprehensible ways, he becomes alien to us,
as if he belonged not merely to another race, but to another species. As was men-
tioned earlier, this is a transition which specialists have called ‘pseudo-speciation’.24
But if the other person does not belong to our species – the human species – then,
our instinct tells us, he can be suppressed, as we habitually suppress members of
other species – animals – almost without any feelings of guilt. This is the extreme
point of arrival of racism. Such was the confusional state in which the young petit-
bourgeois Austrian found himself while he eyed the orthodox eastern Jew, who
seemed so different.
It was here that Hitler began to slide down the inclined plane. Seized by a fever-
ish agitation, he went around the city, getting hold of anything that could provide
him with information about Judaism. He seemed, he says, to see Jews everywhere.25
But the pamphlets he bought did not give him an answer. They started from a
racial pre-judgement that was taken for granted, not offering any convincing proof.
Reasoning told him that they did not prove anything. Indeed, it was not difficult for
Hitler to perceive their falsity, and he suffered what he calls a ‘relapse’, in his fear of
committing ‘an injustice’.26 In Hitler’s life this was perhaps the only moment when
the ‘granite foundation’ was shaken. He fell into the Creon syndrome and realized
that he had ambivalent feelings, like most human beings.
There is no need to assume that this description is a later embellishment,
invented in order to highlight moral scrupulousness. It is possible that this is what
really happened. Why should laceration manifest itself in the ancient Greek king,
and not in Hitler? It constitutes the most human trait of the paranoid mind; which,
unfortunately, usually resolves its indecision by choosing hatred.
Hitler’s substantial negativity is revealed in this episode. While the anti-Semitic
writings convinced him of the opposite of what they argued, according to his
account it was the Jewish writings that persuaded him of the Jews’ pervertedness.
He avidly read Zionist texts too, and noticed that the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie
distanced itself from, while less educated Jews more readily adhered to it. These
differences in views were taken by Hitler as an example not of democratic plurality,
but of the exact opposite.27 In reality upper-class Jews were not very interested in
Zionism, because it was secondary, or even an obstacle, with respect to their cos-
mopolitan values. But Hitler, projecting on to them the ‘granite foundation’ of his
nationalist racism, thought that this was not possible; in his opinion the educated
Jews concealed (as we have seen he thought the Czechs did) their Zionist sympa-
thies. So they tried to pass unnoticed as a national group, so as better to accomplish
their plans of domination. Once they have started down this slope, the Hitlerian
syllogisms roll on unstoppably. If the poor Jews, for their part, wallow in filth or
sexual promiscuity, that is due, in Hitler’s opinion, to moral filth. And the fact that
many Jewish girls from the east fall into prostitution, and the hygienic deficiencies
of the families that come from there, are not a consequence of their extreme social
exclusion; they imply, on the contrary, a cause (origin) that cannot be redeemed, a
genetic inferiority. We have only reached the second chapter of the monumental
150
Mein Kampf, but the distortion of Hitler’s mental processes is already perfectly clear.
The book would circulate all over the world, and yet many heads of state would
sign agreements with Hitler as if they didn’t know that they were striking pacts
with a madman.
Other ‘logical’ steps in Mein Kampf

Hitler certainly suffered from deep-seated sexual phobias. It is astonishing how many
pages of the tenth chapter of his book, entitled Ursachen des Zusammenbruches (osten-
sibly about the political and military factors that led to Germany’s defeat in 1918), are
devoted to syphilis. Since these discussions always turn out to be linked to Judaism,
there have been many conjectures about homosexual encounters or venereal diseases
contracted from Jews. But there is no proof of these things.This obsession was always
crucial to his later actions; it must be admitted, however, that it cannot be traced back
to any precise causes, so one is tempted to call it, simply, ‘primary paranoia’.
Hitler rightly judges that, because of its extreme dynamism, its multiculturalism
and immigration,Vienna is a good place for acquiring an understanding of the social
question and an unequalled workshop for the production of new culture.28 But it
does not occur to him that the Marxism and social democracy that are widespread
in the capital might be a consequence of the social problems, let alone a possible way
of solving them and a product of that culture. In his view they are, on the con-
trary, the origin of the evils; they are tools of Judaism in its plans for power.Viennese
cultural production is, in its turn, degenerate; it bears all the hallmarks of Jewish
perversion (ugliness, filth and obscenity), which wants to disseminate it in order
to denationalize and weaken the people. Like socialism, Jewish culture is infected
by internationality. The epitome of all this is the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bas-
tard mixture, an ‘apparent state’, a ‘mummy in state form’.29 The reasoning of Mein
Kampf, insistent and often glittering with effective metaphors, is constantly vitiated
not only by paralogisms and inversions of cause, but by erroneous presuppositions.
They are particularly evident in the crucial chapter devoted to racial ideology.30
Hitler starts from an old belief, widespread already in the nineteenth century and
based not on evidence but solely on a ‘phobia of the different’ which injects para-
noid prejudices. He supposes that cross-breeding is unnatural and weakens living
organisms, and that, by contrast, unions within the same race fortify it. At the time
when Hitler’s thought took shape, many explained the decadence of the strong
peoples of antiquity (Spartans, Romans) by the fact that they had not succeeded in
preserving purity of blood.31 These were late Romantic racist theories, not based
on real historical sources.
In reality, later studies have shown that populations that are not sufficiently open
or numerous, in which the same genetic characteristics are always combined, are
less fertile and more subject to disease, so that nature in fact favours a certain
degree of exogamy. In its obsession with proving the opposite, Mein Kampf radi-
cally falsifies the argument. Differences exist, it says, in so far as they have mean-
ing for nature. Each case of cross-breeding corresponds to a loss of quality in the
151
superior race. Different species,32 like the mouse and the cat, do not mate but fight
each other.33 Why does he speak of ‘species’? Before the reader’s eyes, Hitler has
suddenly changed the concepts. Even paranoid political theories are racist, not specie-
sist. Among animals, different species do not mate, but different breeds do; crosses
between dog breeds, which are far more diverse than human ‘breeds’, not only are
fertile, but often generate puppies more resistant to disease than those deriving from
a union within the same breed. Hitler has left us, in a book printed in millions of
copies, a prototype of the error which later scholars would call pseudo-speciation.
Even when they do not describe moments when Hitler’s basic ideas are formed,
the pages of Mein Kampf continue to possess the tone of the ‘revelation’. Even in
his youth he waited in silent agitation for any news from the war fronts; only from
there, he affirms, do we learn the truth about the destiny of peoples. So he scoured
the newspapers to learn all he could about the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese
War.34 Finally, the heavens opened and down came the thunder of the World War.
Since 1912, Hitler had been living in Munich, where he was much happier
than he had been in Vienna, because the city was inhabited almost exclusively by
Germans. In June 1914, on the news of the killing of Franz Ferdinand, heir to
the throne of Austria (who, as we have seen, was favourable to further recogni-
tion of the multi-ethnicity of the state through its transformation into the Austro-
Hungarian and Slavic Empire35), Hitler at first was worried. Since he had ardently
wished for the death of Franz Ferdinand, he identified with the motives of the
person who had killed him and feared that the archduke had been assassinated by a
German internationalist like him. But when he learned the truth of the matter, fear
gave way to deep satisfaction: the archduke, ‘friend of the Slavs, fell under the blows
of a fanatical Slav’. Now he adds, using an image to which we are accustomed by
now, ‘the stone has started rolling and can no longer be stopped’.36 When war is at
last declared, this satisfaction is replaced by illumination and ecstasy:
Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overcome by a storm of enthusiasm,
I fell on my knees and thanked heaven with all my heart for having given me
the gift of being able to live at this time. […] I had left Austria primarily for
political reasons. […] I didn’t want to fight for the Habsburg monarchy, […]
but I was ready to die at any moment for my people and for the Reich.37
(Historians, however, tell us that Hitler moved from Vienna to Munich partly
because he had not turned up when he had been summoned for military service in
Austria and the authorities were looking for him.38)
From theoretician to head of state

With a rapid rise, in January 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany. From that
moment, what we know about him is chiefly linked to official events. Traces of his
‘revealed certainties’ have to be sought indirectly, but they are still frequent and
numerous.
152
Even before entering government, Hitler was obsessed by the fact that Germany
lacked many raw materials and saw the solution to this problem in territorial
annexations to the east.39 He thought the country would not be ready for a war of
conquest until the mid-1940s.
As for internal reforms of society and the state, Hitler’s ideas were expressed
early and clearly. His speech to the Gauleiters on 2 February 1934 already leaves
no room for doubt: ‘blind obedience’, unity in the Party and the institutions, so
that the people, identifying with them, would be similarly unified. ‘No superflu-
ous argument!’ And again: ‘we must carry on only one struggle at a time […] the
people cannot understand and carry on twelve struggles simultaneously. We must
give them only one task, so that they can concentrate on that.’40 This is the strategy
that carried Hitler to success and that reveals his intuition for mass communica-
tion: a single message, clear, comprehensible even to an idiot, even if it is absurd, and
devoid of hesitation. ‘The first Führer was chosen by destiny. The second must have
behind him a community that is sworn to loyalty. One must not choose someone
who already has an institutional power behind him’ (here Hitler tries to preserve,
and to consign to eternity, the exceptional, unexpected and violent conditions of
his swift rise, conditions which he evidently considered essential to the mystic
union between people and leader); ‘Only one man can be Führer. Such an organi-
zation, with this toughness and strength, will last for ever.’41
With radical consistency, and irresponsibility, Hitler projects on to the institu-
tions and the people that simplification which he had first carried out in himself: a
freezing of the mental dynamics, a reduction to unity (one thought, one will, one
struggle), and an absolute exclusion of alternatives (a leader who is born and dies
with the movement, disconnected from everything else and if possible sexless). His
argument seemingly has great temporal range; it allows Hitler to think and plan
even what will happen after his death, for all eternity. But is it really an eagle’s eye
view, over immense distances? Or is it not a petrified time, a cosmic egoism that
projects its own ego onto the whole world? Is it not perhaps the continuation of a
magnified present, of the image he sees in the mirror?
Impatience prevails
‘Hitler’s impatience and determination to act manifested itself for the first time con-
cretely in the secret meeting of 5 November 1937’: these are the opening words of
a chapter of Fest’s biography of Hitler.42 The Hossbach Protokoll, so-called from the
name of the colonel who drafted it, is the official record of that meeting. The par-
ticipants were Hitler; the foreign minister, Neurath; the minister of war, Blomberg;
the head of the army, Fritsch; the head of the navy, Raeder; and the head of the air
force, Göring.43 The text was written by Hossbach five days after the meeting, so it
does not contain any direct speech, though it is probably fairly accurate.
The Hossbach Protocol or Memorandum provides information about eco-
nomic and military plans, but above all about an internal slippage in the Führer’s
personality.The meeting was supposed to be a fairly specific one that would merely
153
discuss how to share out raw materials between the navy and the air force, but it
turned into a monologue about the destiny of Germany. Hitler gave a passionate
four-hour speech, stating that a subject of such importance would have concerned
the whole government in other countries; the same reasons, however, induced him
to keep it private and secret. In the event of his death, the content also constituted his last
will and testament.
The goal of German policy, the document says, is to safeguard the people and its
growth. Here Hitler is evidently referring both to economic and to politico-military
expansion. Consistently with his radical concept of race, he regards the Germans as
a single entity possessing unitary drives. This, he goes on, poses a problem of space.
Only if that need for space is met will it be possible to find a solution. Achieving
such a result might take anything from one to three generations. In the meantime,
Hitler says, it is imperative to keep alive the historico-political dynamic – the state
of exhilaration that his relationship with the masses arouses. For ideal visions hold
up only in so far as they are translated into continuous mobilization; here we see
again, in an extreme form, his obsession with preserving the initiative and the indel-
ible memory – a truly mystical experience – that the war had given him.
After examining the associated practical difficulties, the document states: ‘The
solution of the problem could only be achieved through force’ (‘Zur Lösung der
deutschen Frage könne es nur den Weg der Gewalt geben’), ‘and that was never
without risk’.44 And later: ‘Should the Führer still be alive, it is his irrevocable decision
to solve the German problem of space by 1943 or 1945 at the latest.’45
The speech embodies with particular effectiveness lucid madness, absurd consistency
and other salient features of paranoia. Individual affirmations (the insufficiency of
raw materials, and the need for industrial development) are correct, but the conclu-
sion (the absolute necessity of annexing territories to the east) is erroneous. Despite
an economic, psychological and geographical catastrophe without precedent in his-
tory, the German Federal Republic, which, until reunification in 1989, had a surface
area reduced to less than half that of Germany in 1918, within a few years it had
not only resumed its position as the third greatest industrial power in the world
but accepted on this reduced surface a quantity of immigration which also had
few parallels in history, precisely in order to cope with that development. Linking
prosperity inexorably to the surface area belongs to a false logic (or paranoid geo-
politics) characteristic of tyrants who ‘look at themselves’ in the map of the world
as if in a mirror.
On the one hand, Hitler went on in the speech, Germany must make its prepa-
rations; on the other hand, the world is waiting for it to strike and making its own
preparations; so it is not possible to wait too long. (Note that Hitler does all he can
to impress those present with his firm decisions, but ambivalence and absurd consis-
tency keep emerging from his speech of their own accord.) Should France find itself
in a condition of weakness because it is involved in a war or beset by serious social
problems, action could be taken before that date. It will be a question of occupying
Austria and the Czech territory with lightning attacks. At any rate, Hitler says he is
convinced that the British will not mobilize against Germany, and that in that case
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France will not dare to do so alone. Circularly, his arguments come to a conclusion
which is in fact the initial assumption: it is necessary to take action as soon as possible!
Why is it necessary to go to war by 1943–5? Because by that time German rear-
mament will be ‘almost [annähernd] complete’. Why not wait until it is complete?
Because at that stage the weapons will be modern, and if one waited they would
become less modern. Moreover, ‘special weapons’ (i.e. secret ones) are being pre-
pared, and if one waited too long, they could not be kept hidden any more! During
the meeting various rearmament projects were decided on, including a naval one,
to counter the overwhelming British superiority. In practice, however, these pro-
grammes committed Germany for many years, contradicting once again the desire,
which had only just been expressed, to defeat the enemy at the earliest opportunity.
The crucial criteria were by now haste, secrecy and tautology: not the consid-
eration of objective facts. Hitler seems to be addressing children, not an immense
military apparatus, which has in any case the task of modernizing its weapons and
keeping the new ones secret. As if he wanted to contradict radically the plans for
eternity announced in 1934, he twists every argument to prove that everything
must be accomplished by the fateful period of 1943–5. Time flows until that day,
then it stops. The plans go as far as that date; beyond it there is a void. Behind this
absurd attitude we imagine what is almost a premonition: in 1943, Hitler’s life will
irrevocably enter a funnel, and in 1945 it will stop. It was as if, unconsciously, some-
thing in him had already decided that.
Neurath, Blomberg and Fritsch became alarmed and warned against the risks
of a war against France and Great Britain. Hitler, however, played them down. He
was convinced that the two powers would be engaged in a conflict with Italy for
control over the Mediterranean (here is another paranoid self-deception, deriving
from the false social Darwinian premise which Hitler applied rigidly even to cul-
tures with a different mentality).The debate dragged on, almost becoming a quarrel.
Then, formally at least, the meeting ended.
The minister of war, Blomberg, was a widower and wanted, with some embar-
rassment, to marry an attractive lady with a past. Despite everything, Hitler had
served as a witness at the wedding. A few days later, however, the police archives
produced some indecent photographs of the lady and a file which, on this basis, clas-
sified her as a prostitute. Meanwhile, other police files and false witnesses appeared
accusing Fritsch of homosexuality.
As is well known, National Socialism took a tough line on these kinds of immo-
rality. Hitler replaced Fritsch. As for Blomberg, he not only dismissed him but
abolished the post of minister of war, taking the corresponding powers on himself.
Then he completed the operation by sacking or pensioning off dozens of generals
and appointing the loyal Ribbentrop foreign minister in place of Neurath.
In the previous years the dictatorship had carefully annihilated the German left.
Now, in a few days, it had got rid of the traditional right too.
With it disappeared the last government cabinet, the last possibility of debate
and of contact with non-delusional viewpoints. From that time on, until his death,
Hitler would decide on his own.46 After the meeting recorded in the Hossbach
155
Memorandum, Hitlerian time underwent an unprecedented compression. On it,

his greatest biographer comments, the usual historical interpretations need to be
supplemented by psychological observations.47
The choices of death

What had happened to the Führer? Why had he suddenly transferred his hatred for
the enemy on to his collaborators too?
We sense an anguished rebounding back and forth between claustrophobia and
claustrophilia. A character who has never had and never will have a place of his own,
the image he has of his own country oscillates between that of a land suffocated by
its neighbours and one that dominates the world. In the same way, his life is reduced
to the two extremes of being surrounded by admirers and long periods spent in
inaccessible hideaways. With the growth of mistrust, the closed world will gain the
upper hand over the open one.
We see in him the mortal indecision of the paranoiac, transposed on to a dimen-
sion so large as to transfix Europe and the world. Hitler had, until that moment,
made a contribution to the material recovery of Germany, and he wanted to go
down in history with a series of increasingly spectacular successes. Part of him
understood perfectly well that any great plan required a long time span. But another
part – an inner guide, a nameless frenzy – drove him increasingly towards immedi-
ate action. Since he could neither understand nor control it, he ended up resolving
the conflict by lending it seemingly rational arguments. Haste disguises itself as a
false necessary premise; that is, it passes from being the consequence of an irrational
drive to being the pseudo-rational cause of the rest. What follow are formal stages
that complete it. In the dictator, the Creon syndrome takes on the most tragic
aspect: part of him knows that one could yield to ‘reason’; the other feels that doing
this would cause him to tumble into the void, into a psychic state that he does not
know and that he wants to avoid at all costs. Like Creon, he is unable to wait; he
unconsciously prefers to run towards it rather than lose control of circumstances
and the people around him even for a second.
Even at the time of his participation in the First World War, Hitler had a ten-
dency to downplay, or even deny, suffering and death.48 This on the one hand
contributed to his reputation as a brave person and on the other made it easier for
him to make others suffer.
No normal perception, however, can be denied completely and indefinitely.
Hitler was a solitary being like Ajax, and had been traumatized since childhood. He
was the son of a father, Alois, who, like Telamon – Ajax’s father – had never smiled.
He suffered from countless psychosomatic ailments, and was a chronic insomniac.
Under the growing stress of often reckless political decisions, he began to feel anxi-
eties about death. Like an embarrassing uninvited presence, they barged into the
debate of 5 November 1937. It was as if one person’s irrational terrors had pushed
their way on to the world stage, filling it with real fears. An inner world had burst
the dams of individuality, pouring out; and those terrors had become everyone’s.
156
On the one hand, in a radically ‘altruistic’ manner, Hitler lives for ‘his people’.
On the other hand, this people never seems to be important in itself, but only in
so far as it gives him the gratification of success; what might happen after his death
is suddenly reduced to a non-event. As a result, his anxiety about not having time
explodes.49 In that same year, 1937, when his protégé Speer showed him the models
of the great architectural projects he had commissioned, Hitler sighed, ‘If only my
health were good!’ Bystanders were under the constant impression that his doctors
were diagnosing fatal illnesses in him, and he used the effect of this threat to impose
restlessness and haste on his associates, especially in military activity.50 The haste is
rationalized by arguing that only he can guarantee Germany its rightful reward.
This inner pressure overwhelms history and drives it forward.
Early in 1938, with rapid acceleration, the annexation of Austria (Anschluss) was
accomplished. The party leaders and the military hesitated, but were overridden
by Hitler. The Führer himself had planned it as a gradual action, but he in turn
had been overridden by the British refusal to help Austria in the face of the threat
from Hitler, then by the concessions of the Austrian government, and lastly by
the foreign press, which took the annexation practically as a fait accompli.51 After
the event, Hitler gave the impression that everything had gone according to his
plans, and, with a typical mental distortion, he probably really thought they had;
this strengthened – in him, and, by reflection, in the masses – the superstitious
conviction that the faster his initiatives were, the more they achieved success and
corresponded to a destiny. It has been noted that Hitler suffered from an extreme
form of pseudologia phantastica,52 a mental deformation in which the individual not
only invents all kinds of falsehood but actually comes to believe that they are true.
All obstacles are swept away

A few months later (5 and 29 May 1938), the chief of staff, General Ludwig Beck,
wrote in his memoirs: the military preparation of Germany would take many more
years; in the present conditions a war against the Allies would be fought in condi-
tions of even more significant inferiority than in the First World War. Beck shared
the objective of eliminating the Treaty of Versailles, but he was a pre-Nazi officer,
well-educated and cosmopolitan. He went on to note that differences on cultural,
religious and racial matters had already created a gulf between the Germans and
their adversaries, accumulating hatred towards Germany. According to Beck, any
conflict that broke out would not depend on the first rapid successes or failures,
but would be extensive in time and space, becoming a European and probably a
world war. With this expansion Germany was bound to be destroyed, given the
disproportion between the resources that would be deployed. In short: the general
foresaw exactly what later happened. He was a realistic and anti-paranoid chief of
staff, convinced of the need to improve the armed forces, but also of the fact that it
was essential to avoid using them.
In July 1938, Beck drafted a memorandum for the German generals. As well as
mentioning the inadequacy of the western defensive lines, the popular opposition
157
to the war (which was indeed strong, after the tragic experience of 1914–18) and
the risk of an extensive conflict, he proposed that they make a genuine conscien-
tious objection, or, as it has also been called, a ‘general strike of the generals’. Only
secondarily, he points out, do they owe obedience to the political and military
authorities; at crucial moments, they owe even more to their consciences. Before
circulating the text, Beck sought followers for his idea, starting with Brauchitsch,
who had succeeded Fritsch as head of the army.
On 4 August Brauchitsch called a meeting of the generals and had them read
Beck’s memorandum. It made a strong impact.The majority, including Brauchitsch,
declared themselves in agreement. But here the discussion came up against a dark
side of the psyche. Someone would have to organize this agreement and present
Hitler with the fait accompli: the military leaders opposed his aggressive policies,
based on continual ultimatums. Organizing opposition to the standing head of
government, however, has something of the conspiracy about it, and generals brought
up in accordance with the Prussian tradition were the least suited to putting it into
practice. Brauchitsch, a very different character from Beck, did not organize a ‘strike
of the generals’, which was to remain a fantasy. On the contrary, shortly afterwards
he gave Hitler a copy of the memorandum. On 18 August, seeing that Hitler con-
tinued to threaten war, Beck put into practice his appeal to conscience in the only
way that seemed possible to him: he resigned as chief of staff. He had found himself
at one of the silent crossroads where history can be decided. By a few centimetres,
in turning a corner, events took the wrong path.
Hitler (we do not know to what extent for tactical reasons) tried to refuse his
resignation, until a compromise was reached: he would accept the resignation but,
to avoid alarming the country at a critical moment, Beck would agree to its not
being made public.53 Making it public would have generated a lot of rumours. The
population would have asked itself, ‘What is the disagreement between the gov-
ernment and the armed forces?’ Fantasies would have run wild, undermining the
myth of solidity with which Hitler wanted to surround himself. Instead, nothing
happened. We have seen that with the growth of the mass media there is a corre-
sponding growth in the possibility of spreading collective paranoia. Here we have
proof e contrario.
However, Franz Halder, Beck’s successor as head of the armed forces, the com-
mander of the military region of Berlin, General von Witzleben, and a consid-
erable number of military top brass and cultural figures carried Beck’s ideas on
in a less abstract and naively fair-minded way. If Hitler ordered the invasion of
Czechoslovakia, they had a plan to arrest him.The details were ready:54 the occupa-
tion of the radio, even the opening of the gates of the Chancellery and the legal
formulas for bringing the dictator before a military tribunal. A variant of the plan
actually involved a psychiatric commission which – long in advance of the obvious
conclusions presented in the present book – would declare him mentally ill.55
This time there really was a conspiracy. Emissaries of the opposition contacted
the British government in London. They asked it to state clearly its intention to
defend Czechoslovakia militarily against a German attack, in the belief that that
158
would be enough to dissuade Hitler (and, as we have seen, they were right: Hitler
continued to bluff, convinced that Great Britain would not do anything). If he
did try to attack nonetheless, they undertook to stop him with a military revolt.56
Back in April, Hitler had drawn up plans of attack characterized by extreme
haste: Czechoslovakia was half the size of Italy, with significant mountain chains
and formidable military defences, and yet according to his plans the main objectives
were to be achieved in only four days.57
Not only a large number of generals, but the majority of the population too
were against a conflict: the Great War was still very close and its sufferings had not
been forgotten. Moreover, the number of Sudeten Germans – German-speaking
Czechs – who were to be absorbed did indeed run into the millions, but they had
never been subjects of Germany, but of Austria. Did it make sense to risk so much
for them?
The British guarantee – to be combined with a French one – of the territorial
integrity of Czechoslovakia would never come. Events seemed to be characterized
by a paranoid atmosphere which now flew across borders. The British govern-
ment consulted the French, and both yielded to a suspicious inspiration that was
blossoming in their countries too. They did not doubt the information emanat-
ing from the anti-Hitlerian generals, the seriousness of the plan or the strength of
the forces that wished to carry it out. On the contrary. They left the requests and
the leaked information they had received unanswered, in what we might call an
excess of suspicion. The British did not trust the German generals: traditionally their
interests lie in the east, they thought, so why should they make an alliance with us
westerners? The choice seemed to be ‘between Hitler and the Prussians’, and Hitler
might be more favourably disposed towards the West. The French seemed even
more suspicious: ‘Who guarantees that Germany will not then turn communist?’
said the French Chief of Staff Gamelin to the British Prime Minister, Chamberlain.
The head of the government, Daladier, even quoted Napoleon: ‘The Cossacks will
dominate Europe.’58
It was late September 1938. In Berlin the plotting generals were still ready.
Hitler had sent Czechoslovakia an ultimatum: when it expired he would occupy
the Sudetenland, with or without an agreement. But Hitler did not go to the
Chancellery to order the troops to invade. Unexpectedly, at the last moment he flew
to Munich to discuss a compromise with Mussolini, Daladier and Chamberlain. He
would return with the documents signed by everyone, even by the Czechs: he had
obtained the annexation he wanted without firing a shot.
Hitler, and Mussolini, who had proposed the compromise, were at the height of
their popularity: they were the men who had achieved the rectification of unjust
boundaries without bloodshed. In the face of this enthusiasm, many in the dem-
ocratic countries, too, began to reassess the fascist states: they were regimes that
eliminated chaos by inspiring not fear, but respect.
History had missed another crossroads which could have saved it from war. The
French and British, who in 1919 had supported the creation of Czechoslovakia and
promised to defend it, had not lifted a finger. The Czechs themselves had signed
159
the compromise by which Hitler’s demands were met. Only the anti-Hitlerians
had remained consistent: ready to take up arms – obviously not for the sake of the
borders decided at Versailles but to rid themselves of a madman who was threaten-
ing the world and leading Germany towards the precipice. At the crucial moment,
however, the sword had been taken out of their scabbard. At this point, the suspicion
grew among them that Germany would not welcome them as liberators from a
tyrant but as saboteurs of a fatherland on which Hitler was conferring one success
after another. The paranoiac’s bluffs seemed effective, and were admired even by
the enemy. The German opponents disbanded in confusion; from this moment on
they would never again succeed in forming a united front and taking the initiative.
The generals lived in a circle that claimed to serve its people but had little
knowledge of that people. Moreover, they did not feel in step with the times,
because they were not paranoid enough. Implicitly, they ended up accepting the
Hitlerian delusion as normality. At this point, the leader of the armed forces and
of the attempted conspiracy, Halder himself, urged them to follow the infallible
Führer. Hitler became ever more convinced that social Darwinism was the only cri-
terion that mattered: the Czechs were weak now, so in the selection of peoples they
were destined to disappear. Once this was ‘understood’, they might as well disap-
pear at once. Only a short time had passed since the annexation of the Sudetenland
when Hitler, ignoring the undertakings he had given, eliminated what was left of
the Czechoslovakian state by occupying it.
In the spring of 1939 the slope became steeper. Hitler took a childlike delight in
the thrill of the slide. His biographies describe him as someone rolling down ever
more quickly, as if, instead of deciding, he let himself be pulled by force of gravity.59
The propaganda said that the Führer’s genius lay in being able to wait; now he was
no longer able to do that.
During the last summer of peace, Hitler secretly ordered a report into the
possibility of eliminating mentally handicapped German citizens. The specialists’
response to this plan of radical eugenetics was positive. Keeping everything strictly
secret, and without passing a law, Hitler signed a secret decree which put the policy
into practice.60 By now all the frontiers of barbarity were being crossed: the regime
had lost even the appearance of legality; it had cast aside the most elementary
institutional procedures and now carried out its crimes like a criminal, in the dark.
‘Who talks about the massacre of the Armenians today?’

On 22 August 1939, in Obersalzberg, Hitler prepared the military commanders for
the two great events which were now imminent: agreement between Germany and
the Soviet Union and war.61 He explained that circumstances obliged him to attack
in the east several years earlier than planned; but the western enemies were only ‘lit-
tle worms’ – he had met them in Munich. There were only three statesmen in the
world: Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler himself. At that moment everything depended
on him; never, in the whole of history, had so much political capacity and so much
power been concentrated in one man. And that was the moment, for nobody could
160
know whether he would still be alive in a few years’ time. The messianic identi-
fication could not have been more complete. The all-powerful compensation for
insecurity characteristic of the paranoiac – which Hitler admits in Mein Kampf to
having suffered from in his youth – reaches a peak never touched before: the order
of the world is at stake, and everything depends on his presence on earth. After issu-
ing his instructions for the war, Hitler would deliver to the leaders of the army one
of his most violent speeches:
Our strength consists in our speed and our brutality. Genghis Khan drove
millions of women and children to death, consciously and with a light heart.
History remembers him only as a great founder of states. […] [I have given
orders,] for the moment only on the eastern front, for men, women and chil-
dren of Polish race and language62 to be killed without compassion or pity. […]
Who talks about the massacre of the Armenians today?
At the Nuremberg Trial for Nazi war crimes this transcription of the speech
was not accepted as evidence. For most of his criminal orders, Hitler did not use
a written text.63 One of those present jotted down his words and later redrafted
them. The meeting of 22 August 1939, however, was so delicate that note-taking
was expressly forbidden.64 So there are several different versions of what Hitler said
on that occasion.65 Nevertheless, for our point of view, which is psychological and
not historical, they contain its essence.
Hitler’s rhetorical question concerns a dilemma that is as relevant today as it
was when it was asked: ‘Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?’
(Who talks about the extermination of the Armenians today?) By psychic conta-
gion, a collective crime can be created fairly quickly through paranoid infection.
But if that is so (and history shows that it is), it means that the masses can also
gradually accept a second mental distortion: the moral void of psychopathy, which
merges with collective paranoia. And that also leads to a ‘counter-infection’ – the
facility with which one forgets. This unconscious concord may perhaps explain
why most people are not interested in remembering genocides. If the genocides
are not in front of their eyes, people remain indifferent to them; often, in some way,
they know that the majority might be complicit in them.66
If nobody talks about it – is the implicit conclusion that Hitler wants to extend
to his listeners – then any massacre can be carried out. If we reply today too that
nobody talks about that genocide any more, then his provocative remark was not just
another piece of paranoid reasoning, but a cynical and accurate diagnosis. Hitler was right.
In his will, signed on 29 April 1945, a few hours before he died, the dictator
acknowledges that his predictions about the war had been wrong, but he boasts that
he had been right in his anti-Semitic paranoia, being still utterly convinced that the
world would be grateful to him for taking the solution of the Jewish problem so
far.67 Hitler’s question about the Armenians is therefore still relevant and concerns
us all. Whether or not those were his exact words, it remains one of the few real
things that he has bequeathed to us.
161
War at last
The Second World War and the Nazi genocide are immense events, on which there
is a vast literature. We will merely select a few aspects, where paranoia seems par-
ticularly significant.
At Versailles, a border between Germany and Poland had been fixed which,
as well as not coinciding with the ethnic division, was irrational, because it cut
Germany in two. Hitler, who after his annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia
had undertaken not to advance any other territorial claims, in fact threatened the
Poles and the Allies, with increasing hysteria, during the summer of 1939. In late
August, the Nazis and Soviets surprised the world by signing a pact of coopera-
tion and mutual non-aggression, containing a secret agreement on dividing up the
countries which geography had foolishly placed between the two colossi. At the
beginning of September, Hitler invaded Poland.
Unlike in the case of Czechoslovakia, this time the Führer’s demands did not
lead to a compromise. So the German troops advanced, but did not occupy only
certain positions that had been agreed upon in advance; they frontally attacked the
whole country with a plan of invasion. Poland was considered a much stronger
country than Czechoslovakia from a military point of view; two decades earlier it
had caused the nascent Soviet Union serious difficulties. Hitler remained convinced
that France and Great Britain would not intervene on this occasion either; the
only difference was that the army’s task was a little more difficult, because it had to
conquer a large country as quickly as possible, so as to present the Allies with a fait
accompli. This time the decision he had made was even more reckless: buoyed by
his previous success, he knew he could rely on the support of the military and the
greater part of public opinion.
He was a gambler who kept raising the stakes. His written orders, though fanati-
cal, hint at the possibility of things not going according to plan; Hitler senses this,
but does not contemplate it as an alternative. He is in more and more of a hurry, and
consequently always goes for the highest stake, in a vicious circle of self-incitement.
The granite dogma that underlies his behaviour is still social Darwinism, and presup-
poses the following line of reasoning: if Germany passes the increasingly difficult
tests that he leads her through like a crazed pilot, it will have passed the greatest
‘natural selection’ of peoples and proved that it is a chosen race. If, on the other
hand, it crashes, it will not have proved that it is superior, but it will still have con-
tributed to the elimination of the undeserving.68 Come what may, the survival of
the dogma is more important than the survival of Germany.
Shortly after launching the attack on Poland, on 3 September 1939, Hitler wrote
the following lines to one of the few people he respected, Benito Mussolini:
Duce, Thank you, first of all, for your final attempt to reach a compromise.
[…] [However,] for two days German troops have been advancing rapidly
into Poland. It would have been impossible to allow the sacrifice of the blood
that has been shed in consequence to be devalued by diplomatic intrigue. […]
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I doubt that such a swift [military] success would have been possible in one or
two years’ time. England and France would have rearmed their ally to such a
point that the now crucial superiority of the German Wehrmacht would no
longer have been so manifest.69
Hitler’s constant objective now is to destroy his adversary. His mind is perma-
nently dominated by the vision of an enemy, and his speed of action by haste to
attack first, preventing the enemy from anticipating him (or becoming too well
armed, with the supposed intention of attacking him sooner or later). In pursuit
of this aim he deploys all the forces of paranoia, with circular argument as a front-
line weapon: the Anglo-French-Polish threat has caused his attack. At this point
the attack has put at his service the first dead men, who oblige him to continue, to
prevent them being ‘devalued by intrigue’ (‘durch Ränke […] entwerten zu lassen’).
Ostensibly, the haste of the attack is the consequence of a military assessment.
In reality, it is now the initial presumption behind any decision Hitler makes, and
the military argument is only a cover for it constructed a posteriori.The rearmament
of Germany is proceeding on a far more massive scale than that of Poland, so with
time Germany’s advantage should increase, not diminish. As for France and Britain,
he is convinced that they will not intervene. Why, then, this haste? The strategic
picture painted for Mussolini lacks all logic, and Hitler should know that better
than anyone.Two years later, despite having in the meantime dispersed the German
armed forces towards no fewer than three cardinal points (north into Norway and
Denmark, west into France, Belgium and Holland, and south into the Balkans),
he would attack the Soviet Union, an adversary ten times more formidable than
Poland in resources, armed forces and population; and he would do so in the con-
viction that he could defeat it in a few months.
In only a month, Poland disappeared, the western part swallowed up by the
Reich, the eastern part, in accordance with the agreement, by the Soviets. The
Allies, who had finally respected a commitment they had taken by going to war to
defend the Poles, in 1945, after winning that war, would leave Stalin his part of the
booty almost without raising any objections. In a sense, the Second World War was
the first ‘moral’, or, in the language we are using here, anti-paranoid war: a response
to an aggression condemned by international law (the invasion of Belgium in the
First World War was also illegitimate, but took place after the conflict had already
begun). When the war was over, however, at the Nuremberg Trial one of the two
criminals would sit in the dock, the other on the side of the judges.The fact that the
Soviet regime assumed this role without difficulty may also confirm one of Hitler’s
cynical but truthful affirmations: in the end what matters is who wins, not who is
on the side of justice at the beginning of the war.70
To all appearances Hitler seemed to realize that he could not raise the stakes
indefinitely, so he offered peace to the western powers (6 October 1939), who,
however, by this point had learned not to be trusting and rejected his offer.
They had good reason to do so. Contrary to his expectations, the Führer found
himself at war on the western front with France, which had fortified its frontier by
163
building the Maginot Line. The French had no real plans for an offensive, so they
didn’t attack.The Germans, too, had hoped that things would not go beyond a bluff,
and moreover they feared the Maginot Line. Consequently there was one of those
strange, silent periods of waiting with no real combat, within a gigantic conflict,
which the French call drôle de guerre (phoney war). The possibility of circumventing
the border fortifications by crossing further north, through neutral countries, had
been a crisis of conscience for the Germans in 1914, but had then been adopted;
for Hitler it was a matter of course. Here is an extract from the military instructions
that he issued on 9 October 1939:
2. A long wait will only lead to Belgium, and perhaps the Netherlands too,
abandoning their neutrality in favour of the western powers. […] It will
undermine confidence in the final victory of Germany and will not help to
bring Italy to our side as a military ally.
3. For the continuation of military operations I therefore give the following
orders: a) on the northern wing of the western front an offensive opera-
tion through Luxemburg-Belgian and Dutch territory is to be prepared.This
attack must be carried out as powerfully and as soon as possible.71
Each of the steps in the argument corresponds in itself to a logic – obviously

a military logic and an unscrupulous one. But what determines them, though not
openly stated, is the underlying dogma: both with respect to individuals and with
respect to states, Hitler fears encirclement, is suspicious of everyone and lets himself
be led by the impulse to attack everyone pre-emptively. From the military point of
view, invading tiny Luxemburg has a minimal cost and can breach the flank of the
French defence. But can this point be isolated from the political situation world-
wide? The cost, in terms of hatred for Germany in other countries, may be dispro-
portionately high, as Beck had anticipated.
The dictator thinks of the alliance with Italy only in social Darwinian terms: it
is a step dictated by the granite dogma of the survival of the fittest. But not everyone
is guided by these criteria alone. If Mussolini adheres to social Darwinism, Italian
public opinion will not agree and will make the alliance weak.
By isolating individual cases one can always argue that it is better to pre-empt
a potential adversary, or even a neutral party, by attacking before he can get round
to doing so. And yet by generalizing the argument one arrives at an idea which is
madness even from the military point of view – that it is in one’s interests to make war
on an ever-increasing number of countries, indeed on the whole world: which is
the road to certain defeat. We have met an old acquaintance again: the argument
which is made up of logical steps but which is absurd in its entirety, because it is
based on a paranoid fantasy.
On the Franco-German front the phoney, unfought war continued; not
because Hitler had had second thoughts but because he was too preoccupied
with his pre-emptive paranoia. During this period of waiting, the instruction
of 1 March 1940 ordered the invasion of Norway and Denmark to ‘prevent’
164
(vorbeugen) British ‘usurpations’ (Übergriffe) of those territories.72 It established,

this time, that the use of force was to be kept at the lowest possible levels, giving
the impression that it was a ‘peaceful’ invasion (this is emphasized in the original
text), to protect their neutrality.73
In May 1940, the attack on the western front was finally launched. Even though
this time they were invading not only Belgium and Luxemburg but also the
Netherlands, and even though they were initially outnumbered by the French,74
after a mere six weeks the German troops compelled France to accept an armi-
stice. The time it had taken was that same period of a month and a half that the
Germans had wrongly thought it would take them to reach Paris in the First
World War. The result was shattering: it won Hitler a reputation not just as a strat-
egist but as a visionary, a leader privy to prophetic inspirations. The attack, which
might have got bogged down for years as in the First World War, benefited from
speed and surprise (the positive aspects of haste and secrecy), resulting in com-
plete success. Did the visionary really possess the right visions? The German high
command, which had plotted against the dictator, were reduced to an even more
respectful obedience. The man in the street, who had welcomed the beginning of
the war with far less enthusiasm than in 1914, changed his mind. The excitement
spread from the paranoid leader to the masses, who magnified it still further. The
circular development rose to the stars: not only in Germany, but in every part of
Europe under its domination it was now difficult to distinguish mere opportunists
from those who enthusiastically sided with the Fascists and Nazis.75
Meanwhile the dark wing of paranoid suspicion came down over Belgium
again. This time, however, it was the British who had delusions. Unable to account
for the precision of the Stuka dive-bombers, they believed the rumours that many
Belgian peasants were collaborating with the Nazis; they were reported to have cut
the grass in the shape of arrows in order to guide them. As they retreated towards
the English Channel, the British soldiers carried out summary executions of civil-
ians, such as these unfortunate farmers.76 In London, the most incredible stories
circulated: German soldiers were parachuting into the English countryside and
then disguising themselves as priests; and Hitler had a secret weapon which would
swoop down on them from the sky, a flying Panzer.7577
The collapse of the French front has been debated for generations. Without
going into the military aspects, we may merely note that it also corresponds to a
mass psychological infection. While Hitler was witnessing the confirmation of his
principles, many parts of Europe were converting to a ‘myth’ of a social Darwinian
kind. Activated in the collective imagination by the mass media, who reported on
Hitler’s successes, which were in any case demonstrated by the more banal maps, the
myth of German superiority fuelled itself, just as happens in paranoid processes.The
plant had very weak roots, but the climate it had encountered had made it grow
quickly (significantly, haste was both the container and the content of this mental-
ity). Unconsciously, the two masses, that of the victors and that of the defeated, had
contributed to a prophecy’s ‘self-fulfilment’.
165
The British government, however, had a different relationship with haste and
did not start, as Hitler did, from the granite presupposition of a racial kinship
which was destined to bring the British and Germans together. So it rejected
another offer of peace. Accordingly, on 16 July 1940 Hitler ordered that prepara-
tions be made for an invasion of Britain, with a pre-emptive aim: ‘to prevent its
territory being used as a base for waging war on Germany, and possibly to occupy
it in its entirety.’78 An enterprise which would have required years merely for the
completion of its first step, the building of a fleet, for the British had overwhelm-
ing superiority at sea; so the plan was by its very nature incompatible with haste,
and was simply shelved.
Hitler here embodies another central trait of paranoia, denial. Since he cannot
annihilate his major adversary, Great Britain, immediately, he abandons his campaign
against it halfway through. Only two weeks later, on 31 July 1940, his urge to
attack dictates to him a strategic argument which is the complete opposite of his
previous one.
Definitive omnipotence
Britain’s hope is Russia and America. If hope in Russia is removed, America is
removed too, for the removal of Russia strengthens Japan’s position in Eastern
Asia enormously.
Russia is Britain and America’s East Asian rapier against Japan. […]
Russia is the factor on which Britain is counting most of all. […]
But if Russia is shattered, Britain’s last hope is eliminated. […]
Conclusion: in the course of this conflict Russia must be crushed. In
spring 1941.79
Here is another series of nonsensical syllogisms. And a new, immense absurdity: not

being able to defeat the main enemy, Hitler decides, on the basis of ‘logical’ argu-
ments, to attack a second, even more invincible adversary.
By cultural tradition the British not only mistrusted Communist Russia but
feared a closer rapprochement between it and the Germans. This consideration had
even more force for the Americans. Moreover, after the fruitless contacts between
the British and the German opposition, the Soviet Union and Germany had signed
the notorious agreement for the partition of Poland and the Baltic and had begun
more intense commercial exchanges than ever before.80 There were diplomatic
contacts and a rich tradition of cooperation between the United States and Great
Britain, but these two countries were not at all in agreement with the Russians.
Rigidly contrasting Germany, as Hitler did, with a triangle comprising the Soviet
Union, the United States and Great Britain seems a new version, on a world scale,
of the fantasies of conspiracy and encirclement underlying the paranoid mental-
ity; in the summer of 1940 the three powers were still far from having planned an
alliance between them. As often happens in psychopathology, it will be the paranoiac
166
himself who causes his own ruin, by transforming his fantasies about supposed enemy
alliances into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The text quoted above reveals once again a false presupposition. Hitler’s reason-
ing starts from racist prejudice. Russia is seen as a mere pawn in the game of the
Anglo-Americans, whom he, by contrast, respects as a ‘race’. Russia in itself does
not exist, since it is made up of ‘inferior’ Slavs. Hitler’s mental arguments con-
sider what effect the elimination of Russia will have on the Anglo-Americans, not
whether he will succeed in eliminating her: that is taken for granted.
In autumn 1940, Hitler’s omnipotence allows itself an apparent retreat. The dic-
tator seems to consider various options, through a typical hidden step in the reason-
ing of paranoia: unconfessed indecision. He has won, but the war has not stopped.
He does not know whether to seek a new equilibrium, by shuffling his alliances,
or continue to keep the military initiative, while raising the stakes. He attempts
to persuade Spain and France, now his vassal, to enter the war, then tries to plan
a partition of Eurasia with the Soviets. The corresponding meetings with Franco,
Pétain and Molotov are disappointing: they too appear to draw back in the face of
his fanatical personality. With a penultimate leap, Hitler decides to play the extreme
option: attack on the Soviet Union.81
The orders for the invasion – Operation Barbarossa – stress first of all the need
for swift action (the italics are in the original).82 But the attack, prepared for the
spring of 1941, was unusually late. Hitler first had to organize the invasions of
Greece and Yugoslavia, to help Mussolini. Fascism had finally entered the war on
his side; it imitated him by launching attacks but, instead of giving him help, ended
up needing it.
It is significant that, after apparently weighing up all the options carefully and
taking a granite decision which set Europe on fire, Hitler still justified it with a
baseless circular argument. The war with Russia, he explained to the commander
of the armed forces, Halder, is inevitable now (February 1941). For if he eliminated
Great Britain before attacking the Soviets, he would never be able to persuade
the Germans to mobilize against them.83 Suddenly contradicting the line he had
followed until then – that the primary objective was to force Great Britain to
withdraw from the conflict – Hitler now claims to be pleased that Britain has not
surrendered yet.
The absurd consistency and the inversion of the cause could not be clearer. Contrary
to the most elementary demagogic and strategic principle (expounded, as we have
seen, by Hitler himself in his speech of 2 February 1938 and applied by him with
limited Blitzkrieg campaigns, for example against Austria and Czechoslovakia), he
now affirms that the best way of waging war is to attack several adversaries simul-
taneously; the absolute urgency of the attack, presented as the conclusion of the
argument, is in fact its point of departure, which is arrived at by a falsified logic.The
world slides down into the bottomless pit by obeying Hitler’s paralogisms (paranoid
syllogisms), only thinly disguised as political and strategic doctrine.
The campaigns in southern Europe had been only a short breathing space. If
Hitler looked eastwards, everything reignited his paranoia. In the play of mistrust
167
between two monsters, it may actually be true that this time Hitler was right to
fear a Soviet attack and to pre-empt it. Stalin was constantly anticipating him in the
occupation of eastern Europe and the Balkans.84 Using force and threats, he had
had vast areas of Romania ceded to him. He had done the same with Finland, after
attacking it. After the eastern half of Poland, he had invaded and annexed Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania. Hitler had reasons for hating the Soviet dictator with an envi-
ous hatred; unlike Germany, he was pocketing all this booty almost without fighting.
Some historians have also pointed out that while some of these annexations had
been the subject of secret agreements under the notorious Nazi–Soviet agreement
(known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact), others contravened it.85 Stalin, then, on
the one hand, was not abiding by the terms of their agreement and, on the other,
was moving his lines closer and closer to Germany; so the Führer became absolutely
convinced that the only possibility was to pre-empt him – that is, to attack first.
The beginning of Operation Barbarossa saw the greatest clash of military masses
in history and, once again, one of the most spectacular advances. It has been attrib-
uted on the one hand to the enthusiasm and professionalism of the German mili-
tary, and on the other to the unpreparedness of Stalin, often described as the most
serious strategic error of the century. In the game of suspicion and highest risk
played by the two dictators, Hitler seemed to have won an overwhelming victory.
In 1941 – that is, only in the six first months of the war – Germany captured about
3 million of the incredible number of about 5–5.7 million prisoners taken in the
whole conflict.86
From the outset, the unimaginable advance went hand in hand with unimagi-
nable brutality. In the first few weeks of the war alone, the German Army may
have executed as many as 600,000 prisoners.87 In his monumental study of the
extermination of the Jews, Hilberg notes that the spotlight shone on it risks leaving
other similarly incomparable crimes in the shadow: at least 40 per cent of the huge
number of Russian prisoners did not return home. The conflict in eastern Europe
was quite different from that on the other fronts. It was more than a total war. It was
a war of absolute intolerances.88 Paradoxically, in this slaughter the only argument
in Hitler’s favour had been provided by Stalin: because of his mistrust, the Soviet
Union had not signed the Geneva Convention on the protection of prisoners.
Of course, it would be a little too simplistic to blame this immense extermina-
tion, of Jews and Slavs, on Hitler alone. The cultural premises had been created
throughout the West, and throughout the earlier centuries. Precedents matter in
history, when one seeks existing models and explanations. As we have seen, they
mattered a lot to Hitler. He was well aware of the fact that North America had
been populated by constantly moving the frontier by force and exterminating or
subjugating the native peoples.89 With typical ruthlessness, he tried to transport that
brutality into Europe and concentrate it in a single action. Today we say that the
differences between human beings are so relative that they can be considered to
be not simply a single species but a single race, merely endowed with a different
quantitative distribution of certain characteristics (such as skin pigmentation). In
the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, however, it was normal to speak
168
of white, black, red and yellow races. In his concepts, Hitler, in typical paranoid
fashion, makes the divisions (of race and, as we have seen, even of species) infinitely
more numerous and deep: he speaks of Polish, Russian and Czech ‘races’. Seeing
two irreconcilable worlds as menacingly close is also a typically paranoid trait, and
not by any means a Hitlerian novelty; another famous Austrian – the Chancellor
Metternich – is said to have quipped, ‘Asia begins at the Landstraße’ (that is, in the
third Bezirk, a fairly central district of Vienna).
As tends to happen with ‘successful paranoiacs’, in the enthusiasm created by ter-
ritorial conquests that doubled the size of Germany in a few weeks, Hitler’s omnipo-
tence was self-intensifying. His aggressive projections now knew no bounds. The
advance made it possible to start the project of moving 30 million Slavs eastwards,
to make room for German colonists. The high percentage of Jews present in Poland,
Ukraine and Russia also led to an acceleration of the plans for their annihilation, while
the extermination of Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped began. All
these aims were interwoven into a great industrial rationalization of murder.
Absurd calculations
With the successes of the war, a bellicose enthusiasm had taken hold not only of
Germany but also of the anti-communists of western Europe and much of east-
ern Europe, which historically feared Russia. From our point of view, the masses
received from the leader a psychic infection facilitated by absolute control of the
media and by the favourable military circumstances. But was this the revelation of
a war won at lightning speed, which proved German superiority, or had its unde-
niable audacity, combined with particular favourable circumstances, created false
basic assumptions?
In 1939, at the beginning of the war, Germany occupied third place in the world,
after the United States and Great Britain, in the production of industrial goods.90
The British, who in peacetime produced about the same number of military aircraft
as Germany, by 1941 were already making twice as many.91 When Hitler attacked
the Soviet Union, the latter not only had a gross domestic product roughly equal to
that of Germany and the possibility of enlisting an infinitely higher number of sol-
diers (with the reserves it could reach 12 million); even initially, of the two armies
that faced each other the Soviets had a significant numerical superiority, especially as
Germany’s forces were dispersed on several fronts. Some 2,500 (or 2,700) German
aircraft were opposed by 8,000–9,000 (or 10,000) Russian ones; 3,600 (or 3,332)
German tanks faced 14,000–15,000 (or 12,000) Russian ones. The number of sol-
diers deployed in the field on each side was initially comparable.92
Naturally, Hitler presented the attack to the public as an action that was neces-
sary in order to pre-empt a Soviet attack about which there was reliable infor-
mation: during the conflict, practising pseudologia phantastica as usual, he came to
convince himself that this was true. For his strategy, he again relied on the Blitzkrieg.
But here, once again, there was a self-deception: even though they had to cover the
immense Russian distances, only a fifth of the German divisions were motorized.
169
Eighty per cent of them had to make do with 625,000 carthorses.93 In fact, in
his old age Ernst Jünger would comment ironically that in the remarkably swift
campaign to conquer France he had never met the enemy; his unit always lagged
behind because it was transported by horses.94
The spectacular initial success was mainly due to surprise and to an advantage
unintentionally provided by Stalin. The Soviet dictator had directed his suspicion not
only at the enemy, but even more at his own military; as we will see in the next chap-
ter, by carrying out continual ‘purges’ of officers he didn’t trust he had decapitated
the senior ranks of the army. Only gradually was the Soviet Union able to mobilize
its immense resources and also to receive significant assistance from Britain and the
United States.
Hitler conquered a vast territory. But when the Russian winter came, freezing
the front, he had not yet brought about the Soviet surrender; this, like the British
surrender, was not something inevitable, but only one of Hitler’s ‘logical’ steps,
deriving from the false assumption of racial superiority. In his omnipotence Hitler
had underestimated the strength and determination of the British. But far more
serious was his underestimation of all Slavs. Such contempt did he hold them in
that he was convinced that the immense Soviet army would crumble after the first
German victories. Instead, although the Wehrmacht’s successes were even greater
than expected, the Red Army continued to retreat, reorganize and grow. Between
22 June (the beginning of the attack) and 1 December, the German troops received
only 100,000 men in reinforcement, the Soviets 3,241,000, and 100,000 more con-
tinued to arrive every two weeks.95 The Red Army not only replaced the dead
and wounded, and those taken prisoner; it was constantly building up its strength.
Obsessive haste was a primal pathology in Hitler, present in him long before he
came to power. In a perverse way, his mind had created another self-fulfilling proph-
ecy: now it became necessary to win immediately, to risk everything immediately.
By July 1941, the figures already showed that Operation Barbarossa had not suc-
ceeded;96 on 11 August the German chief of staff, Halder, noted in his diary that
Russia had been seriously underestimated. Time was flowing against Hitler. The
ability to distort it in his mind was the weapon with which he defended himself
against reality. Sometimes he accelerated it frenetically, at other times he froze it,
denying the passing of time which made victory ever more remote, ever less pos-
sible. At the same time he would launch into flights of fancy, planning roads and
railways on Russian territory and, on the model of the Roman Empire, colonies
of German soldier-farmers.97 During another three and a half years, passing over
millions of corpses, Hitler hid the truth from himself and from his subjects; the self-
deception into which paranoia hardens tried to become worldwide, like the war
itself. In reality, not having won, by the winter of 1941–2 Hitler had already lost.
Self-burial
That winter also marked a turning point in the psychology of the Nazi ruling
group. Hitler, Goebbels, and, following them, all the others, lied to each other
170
more and more systematically. The dictator had predicted that the Russian cam-
paign would last four months. The minister of propaganda did not entirely agree;
according to him it would be even shorter: in fact, it would be little more than a
triumphal procession of the German troops.98 Since what happened was precisely
the opposite, the leaders began to falsify reality radically, even in their internal
reports.99 In the meantime, their community isolated itself increasingly from the
world, unconsciously careful not to have encounters with truth that might under-
mine it. Hitler, who had loved mass meetings and propaganda visits, began to avoid
them. In this atmosphere of generalized mistrust the paranoia gradually turned
towards the inside of the Reich. This led to the calling of the Wannsee Conference
on the ‘Jewish problem’.
When, on 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the United States, globalizing the
conflict, Hitler and Mussolini immediately declared war on the American power.
Even though the widening of the conflict to America completed the encirclement
of the Axis and rendered its material disadvantage insuperable (Japan was still far
from becoming an industrial power, its production being ten times lower than that
of the United States), all testimonies agree that Hitler was enthusiastic. In his radi-
cal excess of mistrust, he already counted the United States among the enemy, so he
convinced himself that the novelty was, in practice, that he had a new ally, Japan,
not a new adversary.
The United States alone accounted for 42 per cent of the world’s manufacturing
output.100 For most of the conflict Germany succeeded in replacing its losses and,
in some sectors, accumulating new weaponry; but its production bore no compari-
son to that of the Allies. Great Britain, and especially the United States, multiplied
it indefinitely. Before the war, the Americans had a total fleet of about 11 million
tons; in 1944 alone they made 16 million. In 1940 they produced 2,141 warplanes;
by 1944 the figure was 96,318.101 In the supply of raw materials the difference was
even more dramatic: for the whole duration of the conflict the Allies had access to
something like 1,000 million metric tons of crude oil, the Germany–Italy–Japan
axis only to 50 million.102 More glaring still was the disparity in the Pacific: the
American production of crude oil was 222 times that of Japan.103 Even if we ignored
the economy – which is always crucial in prolonged wars – and focused on strictly
military data, the disproportion was still insuperable. In North Africa, Rommel’s
troops initially had only a quarter, later as few as a tenth or a fifteenth, the number
of tanks that were available to the Allies; in the major battles they were immobilized
anyway by lack of petrol.104 To return to the Pacific, things were no different. The
front moved not on a continental platform, but on a series of islands; the decisive
conflict was therefore that between aircraft carriers, a combination of navy and air
force. During the war, the Japanese produced 14, the Americans 104.105
There is another aspect to consider. The main crucial indicators that we are dis-
cussing – national production, population, natural resources – are not the product of
recent research; they were already known at the time. The present writer has been
able to check many of the figures contained in recent books on the Second World
War against one of the most popular Italian publications of all time, the Calendario
171
atlante (Atlas Calendar), published annually, even in wartime, by De Agostini. The

exact figures for military production were of course secret, but their potential could
be reconstructed through the basic data (the ‘fundamentals’, in present-day eco-
nomic terminology). In the presence of this elementary information, it makes no
sense to claim that the Germany–Italy–Japan axis was, at one or more points in the
conflict, a hair’s breadth away from victory.
Italy entered the war by mistake in every sense, and got out of it as soon as pos-
sible. Japan entered it because of outdated codes of honour, and continued because
of self-destructive aestheticism. Paranoia drove Hitler into the very kind of conflict
on two fronts that was anathema to German strategy.The tyrant went to war against
the fundamentals of the economy, demography and geography – in short, against
reality. A vast array of studies have analysed the Second World War from the political
and military perspectives. But studies are still lacking on the question of pathol-
ogy. It would require an analysis not of the isolated personality of Hitler and his
disorders, evident from childhood onwards, but of their interaction with the mass
psychopathologies which pervaded the twentieth century. A persecutory incapacity
for self-criticism had already prospered in the nineteenth century and had touched
unprecedented peaks with the First World War, but in Germany it had been made
permanent by the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler’s rise to power. In many respects it
is not politics, economics or pure military strategy but the perspective of paranoia
that enables us to sense why Hitler did not try seriously to settle for his initial suc-
cesses, ending the conflict, but instead tried to widen it.
To some extent, every war arouses a paranoid mentality. Hitler’s mind, however,
was already functioning through paranoia beforehand, in peacetime. It is natural,
therefore, that from the beginning of his government he should have constantly
organized himself with a view to war (unlike most of the other leaders, who
thought of it only as an extreme possibility). This long preparation is one of the
reasons for his initial successes.
Although he frequently resorted to bluffing, Hitler cannot be considered merely
a liar and an extreme propagandist.That would indeed be one of the possibilities for
a normal politician. Hitler, however, was a pseudologue and an absolute paranoiac.
Without doubts or self-criticism, until his suicide in the bunker he convinced him-
self of the false premises on which he based his action, staking his life and the lives
of tens of millions of people on utter falsehoods. Each time, the omnipotence of
his thought authorized him to put delusion in the place of reality. He had assured
Mussolini that he had had to attack Poland in 1939 because a year or two later the
German army might not have succeeded in crushing it; but in 1940 and 1941 he
declared war on practically the whole world. It is not enough, then, to say that he
had lied to Mussolini; he lied, and continued to lie, first and foremost to himself.
The need for an enemy

The paranoiac affirms his own superiority (which in Hitler’s case was imagined
as ‘natural’, racial) but simultaneously clings almost in desperation to his imagined
172
enemy, in a perverted reversal. He knows that without him he does not exist.
Obsessively, in his speeches, even when he is discussing other matters, Hitler states
his intention of destroying the Jewish race.106 What would happen, what would
he talk about, if that people really did no longer exist? No man can live without
a truth that makes him live and a beacon that shows him the way: for Hitler the
illumination had been his vision of the orthodox Jew in Leopoldstadt. The intoler-
ant person, who did not accept difference, had sensed, been compelled to admit, the
existence of the different person and at that point could no longer drive difference
away from himself. In persecuting him, difference also opened the way to his self-
destruction. The absurd consistency and inversion of causes characteristic of paranoia
not only bind the war to the Jews, who are accused of being the main cause of it,
whereas in fact they are the primary victims of it; they also bind their persecutors
to it indissolubly. Thomas Mann, in his propaganda broadcasts against the dictator-
ship, had pointed out that the Nazis cannot ‘go to hell on their own, they will take
the Jews with them. They cannot be without the Jews. It is a deeply felt sense of
shared destiny.’107
As we have seen, despite its absolute hatred for the Jews the regime did not
see their extermination as the only option. In the system of Nazi thought many
hypotheses were formulated, which, though unrealistic, preserved an appearance of
rationality.
First of all, they had been pushed towards emigration by all kinds of harass-
ment. When it became clear that, despite the oppression, most Jews seemed set
on staying, instead of deducing from this that they considered themselves truly
German and were attached to their country, the Nazis took it as a new ‘reason’ for
regarding them as parasites who were conspiring to infect the healthy body of the
nation from within. Although it claimed to be based on an absolutely clear policy,
the leader’s anti-Semitism included the most classic paranoid symptoms – it could
suddenly switch from indecision to uncontainable haste. The war, paradoxically,
simplified matters, for it excluded some of the alternatives, such as expulsion to
distant countries (Madagascar and Palestine had been considered). Killing them all
would have been senseless, given the serious shortage of manpower in Germany.
It was therefore proposed that 2 or 3 million be left alive so that they could work
in the war economy. This revived, however, the phobia of a genetic contamination of
the Aryan population. So a special medical commission was appointed to prepare a
secret report on the possibilities of sterilizing this enormous mass of people, with-
out announcing the plan officially.108
Also kept secret were the thirty transcripts of the minutes of theWannseekonferenz
(20 January 1942), where the so-called ‘final solution’ was decided on. In those
documents we read:
II: preparation of the final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish problem in

Europe […].
III. Instead of emigration […] [the Führer has decided on the] evacuation
of the Jews to the east […].Those capable of working will be assigned to road
173
building, in the execution of which the majority will certainly disappear by

natural diminution.The remaining group will have to be treated [behandelt] in
the appropriate manner, for it will undoubtedly comprise the strongest indi-
viduals; for they will be the result of natural selection. This group, if released,
might lead to a new flowering of the Jews.109
All the steps in the argument preserve a certain logic: they are guided by ‘lucid
madness’. Only their ‘Darwinian’ premises are completely false, and Darwin would
never have dreamed of giving them his approval. The Nazis, however, believed in
them implicitly, even at the cost of causing harm to themselves. As we have seen,
they conducted the war in conditions of structural weakness, denied only by the
omnipotence of paranoia, and they were not able to replace soldiers lost at the front.
Despite this, in the immense occupied zone which lay between Germany and the
Russian front, Hitler organized as a priority a systematic round-up and slaughter of
the Jewish populations. The declared aim was the ‘elimination of Judaeo-Bolshevik
intellectuals (Intelligenz)’.110 It began with the men, but soon the women, too, were
drawn into the mass. In addition to the millions of Polish Jews there were 5 million
Soviet Jews, almost all of whom lived in the western regions, the ones reached by
the Wehrmacht.111 The corresponding task was colossal; according to the Wannsee
Conference there were about 11 million Jews in Europe. As if that were not
enough, their number was increased by broadening the definition of ‘Jew’: unlike
the German racial laws, in these recently conquered areas it was sufficient to have
one Jewish parent to be considered a Jew.
Publications and popularization have accustomed us to thinking of the Jewish
genocide as an operation carried out in the extermination camps. Almost half the
victims, however, died in other ways.112 About 1.3 million Jews were shot in the
immediate vicinity of the round-ups by the Ordnungspolizei deployed on the heels
of the advancing army.113 Later, mobile gas chambers were also used. These units
were not made up of special or politicized squads, nor of ordinary recruits; they were
men of the reserve, of a fairly advanced age, and untrained. As will be explained in
the penultimate chapter, many reacted with anguish, confusion and psychosomatic
disorders.
To crown all the secrecy, not only did Hitler not participate in the Wannsee
Conference; we do not even know if he was informed about the debate.114
Delusion to the end
During the war, Hitler took an increasing number of men away from the front to
deal with his ‘paranoid front’. In the order of 1 March 1942, he declared, ‘The Jews,
the freemasons and the ideological opponents of National Socialism allied to them
are the originators of the war that is currently being waged against the Reich. The
coordinated struggle against these forces is part of the war effort.’ He therefore
gave orders that libraries, archives and cultural institutions of every kind should be
searched to find ‘relevant material [evidently presumed to be hidden] and confiscate
174
it for the ideological purposes of the National Socialist Party and for subsequent
scientific research in the Universities.’115
As was mentioned above, in North Africa Rommel lacked both spare parts and
petrol. He did not, however, lack a secret unit, described in documents which have
emerged only in this century: an autonomous Einsatzkommando, under the com-
mand of the SS officer Walther Rauff (the SS corps, it should be remembered, was
not answerable to military tribunals), who had gained experience with mobile gas
chambers in eastern Europe.116 In Hitler’s omnipotent prediction, Rommel was to
annihilate the British in Egypt.Then, after crossing the Suez Canal, he was to move
north through Palestine to reach the most ancient nucleus of Judaism.
The nonsensicality of these orders only begins to regain some sense as a corol-
lary of the paranoid premises. Rommel, then, could not use these troops because
they had to deal immediately with the extermination of the Jews. The final solution
could not wait for the finale: it had to be transformed into a primary and initial task.
It is worth noting how this type of delusion, in constantly making new demands,
contradicts itself profoundly. As the documents prove, the authorities attempted
to keep strict secrecy about the genocide. Haste to carry out summary executions,
however, led to vast operations in the open, and dotted eastern Europe with com-
mon graves which on the fall of Nazism would be transformed into evidence
against them. In the annihilation camps, the principle of secrecy should have been
respected, because, in the event of an evacuation, the plans foresaw the annihilation
of the camp itself. But here too the principle entered into collision with other char-
acteristics of the delusion: pseudological self-deception and megalomania, consequent on
his granite faith in final victory, led Hitler continually to underestimate the defeats
on the eastern front. Consequently, many extermination camps were captured by
the Soviets before their evacuation and self-destruction had been carried out.
As often happens in clinical cases too, paranoia, which had initially worked in
Hitler’s favour, making him a determined gambler, over time turned against him, for
it imposed too many contrasting demands on him.
‘Total war’
On 18 February 1943, the dictator allowed Goebbels to announce total war – that
is, the inevitable destruction of the Germany he professed to love so much. The
minister of propaganda addressed the crowd in the Berlin Sportpalast with these
words: ‘I ask you: do you want total war? Do you want, if necessary, a more total
and radical war than we could possibly imagine today?’117 The crowd replied mas-
ochistically, delegating its own paranoid potential to the leader who embodied it.118
For the hidden face of total war is total defeat and unconditional surrender. This
programme tallied with a necrophilic propensity present in Hitler’s enemies and
made the last years of war, if possible, even more cruel. For it found its equivalent
both in the American tradition of fighting only in conditions of complete suprem-
acy over the enemy and in the cruelty of Stalin; so it ended up removing the Allies’
last reservations, predisposing them, in their turn, to total war.
175
In the self-destructive proclamation of 18 February 1943, the granite foun-

dation of ‘scientific’ racism reveals itself again, in indirect fashion. In rhetorical
form, Goebbels asked his audience ten questions about their willingness to fight
an extreme war – always, however, naming as the adversary Great Britain, which
Nazism recognized genetically as its racial equal, and never Russia, which it con-
sidered inferior. (Confirmation of this racial prejudice comes from the treatment
of prisoners: while about half the Soviets who surrendered did not return home,
the British who surrendered to the Germans were among the most fortunate of all
prisoners of war, with a mortality rate of only one in twenty-nine.119) In reality, total
war was being proclaimed against the Soviet Union, because it was from there that
the counter-attack that would overturn the conflict was coming.
Shortly afterwards, in a flash of realism, Goebbels commented, ‘This hour of idi-
ocy! If I had said to the people, jump off the third floor of the Columbushaus, they
would have done that too.’120
On 8 November 1943, Hitler gave a speech over the radio in which he mingled
his ‘scientific’ ideas of racial selection with surprisingly religious tones. The divine
plans (Vorsehung, literally ‘Providence’), he said, concerned men, but even more,
peoples. If a nation does not pass the tests set by this superior will, it means that
it obeys the law of nature according to which only the fittest survives. And if my
own people, Hitler concluded, were to fail these tests, I would not shed a tear for
it; it would not have deserved anything different.121 ‘Lucid madness’ has foreseen
everything. Either the German people is the fittest, and in that case it deserves to
crush the others. Or – and here doubt begins to creep into the granite certainties,
but is immediately resolved with tautology – it is no longer the fittest, and therefore
it deserves to be crushed.
The masses did not have the opportunity to listen to anything else; so millions
of ears listened to this too.
The final revelation and the abyss

It has often been said that, at the peak of tyranny, Stalin proved to be more sus-
picious than Hitler. The great majority of the Soviet dictator’s political and mili-
tary associates had short lives. The Führer, by contrast, was convinced that he was,
in effect, unassailable; until the last year of his life he did not carry out any great
‘purges’ among his own people.
On 20 July 1944, when a bomb exploded under his table practically without
hurting him, Hitler expressed something close to relief. He knew, he said, that
there was a conspiracy. Now at least it had been discovered.122 At the same time, the
event was still a revelation; the powerful explosive had only torn his trousers: destiny
wanted him alive. It was almost inconceivable that, under the iron control of the
Nazi state apparatus, an opposition to the dictatorship had survived; at first it was
thought that those responsible might be only the workers responsible for the hut
where Hitler had held his meeting. The opposition had indeed been thinned down
so much that its leader, the Count von Stauffenberg, had had to take responsibility
176
for transporting, setting and detonating the bomb himself. What is more, having
been seriously crippled in war, he had had to do it with the only hand – indeed, the
only three fingers – he still had.
Once again, the opposition were not good conspirators; in order to be so, they
would have had to constitute the ‘counterface’ of the dictator whom they wanted to
kill. They would have had to hate him with a paranoid, absolute hatred. In a sense,
today we have easier access to such ferocious feelings. Today, images of paranoia visit
us every day; it is not hard to imagine a so-called suicide bomber with a bomb in his bag
suddenly embracing the tyrant and blowing himself up with him. Stauffenberg had
accepted that he might have to die and it is unlikely that he would have lacked the
courage to do so. However, having been brought up in too different an ethic and
aesthetic (in the military tradition suicide is available to the losers, not to those who
want to win), he did not have the imagination for it. History had missed another
turning point by a hair’s breadth.
The final result of the conflict was decided from the outset, but its manner was
not. It was a war that could not be sustained over time, and in Hitler’s place any
other person would already have tried to end it in the winter of 1941–2. The tra-
dition of European wars left the door open to short and not too bloody conflicts.
After the assassination attempt of 1944, however, Hitler developed a Stalinian sus-
piciousness. In the last period of the war he tried to accelerate the operations of
genocide. The surrender of German soldiers was regarded as treachery. To discour-
age it still further, laws were passed which held members of their families guilty of
desertion too (Sippenhaft).123 As the front drew nearer, anyone found in a house that
displayed a white flag to avoid being shot at by the Allies was condemned to the
firing squad by the Nazis. It was partly because of these orders that of the millions
of Germans who died in six years of conflict, at least half lost their lives in the last
ten months alone. When the German air force had been annihilated and the skies
were completely in Allied hands, a couple of aircraft of the Reich, which by chance
managed to take off, were sent to attack German cities guilty of having surrendered.
Since the notorious speech of February 1943, Hitler had left public appearances
to Goebbels. This decision accelerated his psychological decay.124 In the final phase
of the war he shut himself off completely. Thus Hitler passed from a paranoia that
reinforced itself circularly, rebounding back and forth between him and the masses,
to a paranoia that nourished itself in his artificial isolation.
The dictator needed others, so that he could attack them or persuade them. The
paranoid disposition, in a sense, did not enable him to be on familiar terms with
himself, because paranoia does not allow real forms of self-criticism, nor of inner
dialogue. Not being able to have a dialogue with himself, once he had turned in on
himself, he ended up talking more and more with ghosts.
As if a sarcastic destiny wanted to conclude the two world wars in a single image,
in late 1944 a German military column passed – as in August 1914, but in the oppo-
site direction – the tiny village of Troisvierges, in Luxemburg. Captain Herbert Rink
was returning to Germany with his two remaining tanks. He passed with astonish-
ment through two rows of villagers with flowers in their hands. Like the Germans
177
thirty years earlier, the Luxemburgers had made a mistake: having received informa-
tion that the Americans were coming, they had turned out to cheer the liberators.
Fortunately Captain Rink was in too much of a hurry to deal with them.125
The shadow of Nero

On 19 March 1945, forty days before killing himself, Hitler issued an order that
has gone down in history as the Nero Decree (Nerobefehl).126 Since the enemy
was approaching from both east and west and penetrating deeper and deeper into
Germany, he gave instructions that they should meet scorched earth. According to
Hitler’s plans, the self-destruction was to be even more radical than what the Germans
had done in the occupied countries, and therefore include everything, even private
houses and works of art.127 By this stage, however, the means to carry out the orders
were lacking, and the will to do so was also lacking in those who were supposed to
carry them out. In a passage from his memoirs, confirmed by General Guderian,128
Speer describes the reasons given by Hitler, which took to its extreme conclusions
the apocalyptic picture he had predicted in his speech of 8 November 1943:
There is no […] need to worry about saving what is necessary for the German
people to survive. On the contrary, it is much better that we ourselves destroy
everything. […] Our people has shown that it is the weakest; the future
belongs exclusively to the people of the east, which is the strongest. In any
case, those who survive will be the worst, for the best have fallen.129
Once again, the paranoiac seems to be more knowledgeable, because he is more

capable of self-deception. Since it no longer suits him, he has overturned the prin-
ciple of natural selection, the lynchpin of the Wannsee orders: it is not the best, he
says this time, who survive hardships, but the worst, so they might as well be elimi-
nated if they are Germans. Since his construction is collapsing, Hitler abandons the
people without remorse. What is important to him is not to save Germany but to
save the ‘granite foundation’ of his own thoughts – the social Darwinian principle.
The Aryans do not necessarily win. It is the strongest who necessarily win. In so
doing, Hitler also tried to keep alive, in the negative, his own omnipotence, offering
the world an end that had never been seen in history.
Ten days before the end, Morell, his personal doctor, whom the Nazi lead-
ers considered a charlatan and whom at the same time they feared because of
the absolute authority that he had over him, was accused by Hitler of trying to
poison him.130 On 23 April 1945, a telegram from Göring reached the bunker in
Berlin: on the basis of previous orders, it said, if the Führer did not contact him
immediately he was to be considered untraceable and he, Göring, assumed com-
mand of the Reich.131 Hitler, who a moment before had been apathetic and had
already announced his intention of killing himself, took an infusion of energy from
this; he suddenly started shouting that he had always known that Göring was a
traitor and that he wanted to destroy him. But what was the sense in this return of
178
vitality, even his artless secretary asked.132 He was a man who rediscovered himself
in the radicalization of mistrust. Never had such unlimited power been entrusted
to such a limited mind. In dictating his testament, on 29 April 1945, Hitler noted
that the Jewish ‘conspirators’ (Verschwörer) had paid for their ‘guilt’ (Schuld), albeit by
‘humane means’.133 The ‘humaneness’ seems to refer to the fact that the process of
annihilation was industrialized: it spared the victims long suffering and spared the
executioners emotional traumas.
On the anniversary of the day when that paranoia had exploded in the void,
the architect Albert Speer – the most intelligent of Hitler’s accomplices, the only
one who was not paranoid and capable of self-criticism – rendered meditative by
two decades of imprisonment, noted in his diary that the collective paranoia had
been evident until the very last day, even in the Berlin bunker from which Hitler
would not emerge alive.134 Until his death, everyone continued to be infected by
his fanaticism and to speak of a victorious conflict. When the Red Army had Berlin
in its grasp, plans were still being made for civilians to hide in the woods, so that
they could later attack the victors from behind, on bicycles. Or build fleets of four-
engined jet bombers that would attack America by surprise, forcing it to surrender.
With indestructible absurd consistency, everyone, even when the whole structure
was collapsing around them, continued to plan the final victory. According to Speer,
at those moments, in Hitler, unlike in the onlookers, two lines of thought coexisted
without ever touching. The first maintained a military consistency and dispensed
lessons in strategy to everyone, with a view to reversing the fortunes of war.The sec-
ond, by contrast, followed social Darwinian criteria and regarded the war as lost but
remained true to Hitler’s ‘sense of history’ and the aesthetics of the great scenarios
of Wagner: it prepared, therefore, an unrepeatable, fiery ‘Neronian’ ending. ‘Perhaps’,
Speer admits, ‘he no longer had any relationship with reality; but he still had one
with history.’135
The Valkyries, the Germanic equivalent of the Furies, possessed Hitler, then, in
his final moments.Their ancient myth was to come true: on the battlefields, accord-
ing to the story, the Valkyries do not appear to all warriors but only to those who
are about to die.
Hitler held out the prospect of a ‘thousand-year Reich’. In the face of this enor-
mity of time, why not leave at least part of its realization to later generations?
Common sense tells anyone that in short periods it is far easier to destroy than to
create. Hitler spoke of a ‘thousand-year Reich’, but he could not wait a thousand
days or even a thousand minutes. He did not have time for time; and, with violence,
he obliterated time. The twelve years of his rule were no more than an hour, the
hour of idiocy.
Notes
1 Adolf Hitler, from the preface to the Nazi Ahnenpass, a personal document attesting Aryan
ancestry.
2 Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Memoirs, 1953: 265.
3 Cohn 2005: xii.
4 Jung 1939: 166.
179
5 Compare, for example, the epigraph from Norman Cohn quoted at the head of this
chapter.
6 See Hamann 1996: Chapter 10; Kershaw 1998: Chapter 2; Fest 1973: Part 1, Chapters 2
and 3.
11 So said the data. But the assimilated Jews are likely to have been far more numerous
than the statistics indicated; many gave up their religious allegiance, either because they
were non-believers or because they wanted to make mixed marriages; and as far as their
linguistic identity was concerned, almost all of them spoke German.
12 Or ‘the aristocratic principle of nature’, which favours the multiplication of the success-
ful and the extinction of the unsuccessful: Hitler 1925: 69.
13 See Hitler 1925. Paradoxically, although this book is one of the most widely quoted
in the world, until January 2016 it was very difficult to get hold of a copy of the text.
Several translations were available, but not the German original, because its publication
was banned in Germany. Since the present book was written before that date, the source
used was a clandestine but accurate copy of the German original. My references here are
to Hitler 1974, which contains some extracts with commentary. The complete German
text can be downloaded from numerous internet websites, which reproduce the edi-
tion published by Eher in Munich in 1936. The correspondence between the material
published on the internet and the original can easily be verified, since the individual
passages, the page numbers, the list of contents and the analytical index in the various
websites coincide both with each other and with the text edited by Zentner.
14 Hitler 1925: 20.
15 See Hitler 1925: 18–20.
16 See Hamann 1996: 464.
17 See Longerich 2008: 272–3.
18 See Hitler 1925: 428–30.
19 Cited in Rauschning 1940: 50–1. Most of Hitler’s biographers have drawn on this tran-
scription of conversations with Hitler. It is now thought to contain many inventions. But
the psychological profile of Hitler that it presents is particularly consistent. Moreover,
it includes character traits and political programmes which were not yet in the public
domain when the text was published in 1940.
20 Hitler 1925: 21 (my italics).
21 See Hitler 1925: 20.
22 See Hitler 1925: 59.
23 Hitler 1925: 59. It should be borne in mind that Hitler uses the word Deutscher in the
sense of the essence or hypostasis of Germanness, without distinguishing between citi-
zens of Germany and Austria, and without specifying whether it refers to a ‘race’ or, as
would be more correct, to a linguistic and cultural distinction.
24 The use of the term goes back to the psychoanalyst and anthropologist Erik H. Erikson.
See Erikson 1968: Chapters 1 and 8. The idea was then taken up by Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a
specialist in human ethology; see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1984: I and IV.
25 See Hitler 1925: Chapter 2. On this episode see also Hamann 1996: Chapter 10; Fest
1973: Part 1, Chapters 2 and 3; Bullock 1991: Chapter 2; Kershaw 1998: Chapter 2.
26 Hitler 1925: 60.
27 See Hitler 1925: Chapter 2.
28 See Hitler 1925: 23, 74 ff.
29 Hitler 1925: 14, 155.
30 See Hitler 1925: Chapter 11, ‘Volk und Rasse’.
31 Such as Richard Walther Darré and Hans Friedrich Karl Günter. See Kiernan
2007: Chapter 11; Mosse 1978: Parts 1 and 2.
32 In German Arten: see Hitler 1925: 311.
33 See Hitler 1925: 312.
180
34 See Hitler 1925: 173.

36 Hitler 1925: 174.
37 Hitler 1925: 177–8. The reich to which Hitler refers is the Second German Empire.
38 See Kershaw 1998: Chapter 2; Fest 1973: Part 1, Chapter 4.
39 See Ferguson 2006: Chapter 8; Kershaw 2000: Chapters 1 and 8.
40 Quoted in Fest 1973: 650.
41 Quoted Fest 1973: 649; see also Kershaw 1998: Chapter 12.
42 Fest 1973: 770 (my italics).
43 See Kershaw 2000: Chapter 1; Fest 1973: Part 6, Chapter 3; Davies 1996: Chapter 11.
The minutes of that meeting, in the transcription of the State Department of the USA
(17 October 1945), form document 386-PS, enclosed with the official records of the
Nuremberg Trials (see Müller-Ballin 1995: 55–60); it was cited at the Nuremberg Trial
both by the prosecution, as evidence that the Nazi war of aggression was part of a pre-
meditated plan, and by the defence, as evidence that the plans were different, and that
therefore the war that broke out was not a planned war.
44 Document 386-PS, in Müller-Ballin 1995: 57.
45 Document 386-PS, in Müller-Ballin 1995: 58.
48 See Dorpat 2002: 79 ff.
49 See Dorpat 2002: 266; Fest 1973: 818; Kershaw 2000: Chapter 1.
50 See Fest 2005: 79–80.
52 See Jung 1945: 23.
53 See Kershaw 2000: 103–4; Bullock 1991: Chapter 14.
54 See Hofer 1957: Chapter 8 and Document 186; Fest 1973: Part 6, Chapter 3.
55 See Fest 1973: 801.
56 See Document 187, in Hofer 1957; Fest 1973: Part 6, Chapter 3.
57 See Document 115, in Hofer 1957.
58 Cited in Document 115, in Hofer 1957.
59 See Fest 1973: Part 6, Chapter 4; Kershaw 2000: Chapter 6.
61 See Kershaw 2000: Chapter 5; Fest 1973: Part 6, Chapter 4. Both historians give great
prominence to the meeting of August 1939, but they do not enlarge on Hitler’s refer-
ence to the Armenian genocide.
62 Note that this is one of the few occasions when Hitler takes the trouble to distinguish
between the two concepts.
63 His mania for secrecy is also revealed in these little details. It should be noted that as
his career progressed, Hitler reduced his personal correspondence to a minimum, and,
eventually, he also wrote less and less by hand. Consequently the number of significant
writings that are definitely in his hand is not great. See Maser 1973 (a study of his cor-
respondence and his notes), especially Chapters 3 and 4.
64 See Kershaw 2000: 207.
65 Today historical research seems to have found sufficiently reliable copies of Hitler’s
speech, which was first published in the United States as early as 1942. A summary of
the question is given by Albrecht 2007. The text of the speech is contained in docu-
ment 193, in Akten der deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918–1945, 1956. The Friedrich
Ebert Stiftung makes it possible to consult this documentation on its website, http://
library.fes.de. In view of the links between paranoia and nationalism which have already
been discussed, it is interesting to note that most of the writings that still attempt to
disprove the authenticity of this speech by Hitler are the work of Turkish nationalist
groups, which have an interest in eliminating any parallel between the extermination
of the Armenians (which was in their opinion exaggerated or invented by an Armenian
181
propaganda plan, to discredit them) and the extermination of the Jews ordered by
Hitler, on which there is now a huge body of historical work.
66 We will return to this question in the penultimate chapter.
67 See Hitler’s political testament in Maser 1973: 213–15. The originals of these doc-
uments can be consulted on the website http://wess.li.byu.edu, section NS-Archiv.
Hitler’s testament ends with an exhortation to continue the fight against Judaism; the
actual war is lost, but the war against Judaism, given the wholesale application of various
techniques of extermination, can only be declared nearly won.
68 See the quotation in Rauschning 1940: 11: ‘We will never capitulate.We might perhaps
sink. But we would carry a whole world with us.’
69 Document 133, in Hofer 1957.
70 ‘Die Welt glaubt nur an den Erfolg’ [the world believes only in success]: speech deliv-
ered at Obersalzberg, 22 August 1939.
71 Document 134, in Hofer 1957 (my italics).
73 There are grounds for believing that the Hitlerian oxymoron of a peaceful military inva-
sion, a contradiction in terms, derived from an unresolved ambivalence. One of his para-
noid dogmas wanted the destruction of every obstacle, but another ‘granite’ principle, that
of social Darwinism, considered the Scandinavians a ‘superior race’, like the Germanic one.
74 See Kershaw 2000: 297; Hobsbawm 1994: 44; Davies 2006: 77; Bullock 1991: 702.
75 In this climate it was not too difficult to form new divisions of pro-German legion-
aries and Waffen SS outside Germany. By the end of the war, out of thirty-eight
divisions of the latter, only thirteen were made up of Germans, whereas twenty-five
were made up of a wide variety of nationalities; see Davies 2006: Appendix no. 3;
Longerich 2008: 621–36.
77 Information contained in a video shown in the Second World War Museum in
London.
80 See Ferguson 2006: Chapter 12 and Table 12.1.
81 See Kershaw 2000: Chapter 7; Fest 1973: Part 7, Chapter 1.
85 See Ferguson 2006: Chapter 12; below, Chapter 8.
86 For the lower figures see Yakovlev 2000: Chapter 7; for the higher ones, Kershaw
2000: Chapter 9; Hilberg 1961–85: I, 352–3.
88 See Hastings 2004.
90 See Keegan 1989: Chapter 10.
91 See Ellis 1990: Prologue.
92 The former figures refer to Kershaw 2000: Chapter 9; the latter to Ellis 1990: Table 2.
All this, with slight variations, is confirmed by Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 32; and
by Ferguson 2006: Chapter 12.
93 See Kershaw 2000: Chapter 9; Ferguson 2006: Chapter 12.
94 Cited in Pfaff 2004: 113.
95 See Ellis 1990: 77.
98 See the diary entry for 16 June 1941, in Goebbels 1992: IV, 1601.
99 See Fest 1973: Part 7, Chapter 2; Kershaw 2000: Chapter 9.
182

102 See Ellis 1990: Table 50.
103 See Ellis 1990: Table 22.
104 See Ellis 1990: Chapter 5.
105 See Smith 2004.
106 See for example the Sportpalastsrede of 12 February 1943 or the testament of 29
April 1945.
107 From Mann 1987.
108 See the secret reports of Dr Viktor Brack, 28 March 1941 and 23 June 1942, which
can be consulted on the EuroDocs websites (http://www.ns-archiv.de/medizin/
kastration/viktor-brack.php) and http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu (accessed 11
November 2016).
110 See Hilberg 1961–85: I, 301; Fest 1973: Part 7, Chapter 2.
111 See Hilberg 1961–85: I, Chapter 7.
112 See Hilberg 1961–85: II, 1377, Table B/I.
113 See Hilberg 1961–85: I, Chapter 7; Ehrenburg and Grossman 1947.
114 The text of the Wannsee Conference is known from only one of the thirty copies that
were published, the sixteenth. See Mendelsohn 1982: 3–17; http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/
index.php/Wannsee-Protokoll (accessed 11 November 2016).
116 See Mallmann and Cüppers 2006.
117 The speech can be read in many internet websites, such as http://www.1000dokumente.
de/ index.html?c=dokument_ de&dokument=0200_ goe&object=translation&st=&l
=de (accessed 13 December 2016) or (in English) http://research.calvin.edu/german-
propaganda-archive/goeb36.htm (accessed 13 December 2016).
118 See Mentzos 1993: 143–8.
119 See Ferguson 2006: 551–2.
120 Cited in Der Spiegel, available at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46209381.
html (accessed 13 December 2016).
121 See Deutsches Historisches Museum and Stiftung Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv 2001:
Recording 11: Rundfunkübertragung aus dem Münchner Löwenbräukeller mit der
Ansprache von Adolf Hitler.
122 See Fest 1973: Part 8, Chapter 1.
123 See Document 148c, in Hofer 1957.
125 See Hastings 2004: Chapter 1.
126 Document 150b, in Hofer 1957.
128 See Document 150c, in Hofer 1957.
129 See Speer 1969: Chapter 29.
130 See Dorpat 2002: 255.
131 See Speer 1969: Chapter 32.
132 See Junge 2002.
133 See Maser 1973.
134 See Speer 1975, entry of 28 April 1965.
135 See Speer 1975, entry of 28 April 1965.
183
9
THE MAN OF STEEL AND
THE FINAL PRODUCT
[Stalin’s terror] was the application of the principle of total war to all
times. […]
In systems of absolute power […] paranoia is [the] logical end-product.1
Paranoiac tendencies joined with Marxism in transforming the Russian
scene.2
Stalin: a name with many meanings

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born in 1878 (or 1879) in Gori, a town in
Georgia, which had only recently come under the Tsar’s control. About his life
before he came to power we know very little, partly because his family was very
poor, and partly because the information was later concealed and modified to fit in
with the official image. He was called Soso as a child, and when he was a young
revolutionary went by many pseudonyms: especially Koba, after the inflexible hero
of The Patricide, by Alexander Kazbegi, a popular novel about the Georgians’ resis-
tance to Russian conquest.
But when did he adopt the nickname Stalin, which in Russian means ‘man of
steel’? By the time he did this, he was already sure of three things.
First of all, in changing from a Georgian name to a Russian one, he had decided
to complete the fiction according to which he had transcended his origins: after
having worshipped the heroes of the Georgian struggle against Russification, he
became a representative of Soviet Russian imperialism. In reality his roots had not
been transcended, they had petrified. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili never com-
pletely managed to get rid of his Georgian accent; in official speeches his voice
would drop in passages where it might be more noticeable.3 But, as with all para-
noiacs, denying reality was a matter of course for him; he had chosen not to be
Georgian, therefore he was not Georgian.
184
184 The man of steel and the final product
Second, in declaring himself to be ‘made of steel’, he must have decided that

inflexibility was, and must remain, the centre of his character. Already as a child he
had loved that metal. A description of his childhood mentions a game. Soso would
ride on a schoolmate’s back shouting ‘Ya Stal! Ya stal!’ (I am steel).4 It is not only the
present writer who associates this preference with the rigidity of a mental disorder;
the same was done long ago by his daughter Svetlana, who in 1967 abandoned her
father’s surname in favour of her mother’s – as Soviet law allowed – because she
‘could no longer tolerate the name of Stalin […], its sharp metallic sound.’5
The third thing that Iosif Dzhugashvili must have decided, when he took the
name Stalin, was that, just as in childhood and adolescence, so in adulthood too it
was essential to act a part. Of course, both in the tsarist empire and in the Soviet
Union it was normal to have a nickname; indeed, among revolutionaries living in
hiding it was actually imposed as a rule, to confuse the police. But the nickname
Stalin was destined to become world-famous and remain his name until he died.
It was something rooted in his nature. It could never have been replaced by sim-
ple honorific titles or adulatory labels, like ‘The Führer’ for Hitler or ‘The Great
Helmsman’ for Mao. It indicated the quality which really mattered to him – his
alter ego, the mask under which he wished to make himself known. In Stalin’s
mind, the mask was an essential reality. To him, other people, too, always concealed
their true identities; they too were secrets to be unmasked.
Character
His father, a violent man and an alcoholic, had soon abandoned his family. In the
absence of any real alternatives, his mother, Ekaterina Dzhugashvili, enrolled her
son in the seminar school of his home town, run by Russian orthodox priests (dou-
bly alien to him, a Georgian and irreligious from an early age). There Soso quickly
mastered the school subjects, except the religious ones; in particular, he learned
to defend himself from control and to trust only himself, to be suspicious and to
oppose discipline. It is interesting to note that his mother, too, was an inflexible
woman. Soso remained her only child (three brothers had died young), and he must
have been strongly influenced by her. Ekaterina was traditional-minded, religious
and demanding, both towards herself and towards others. As to her morality, how-
ever, doubts have been raised; it has been insinuated that Iosif was not the son of her
husband, Vissarion, and that he had turned to drink as a refuge from his jealousy.6
Although we will never know how much truth there is in all this, we must be aware
that in the environment in which Stalin grew up malicious gossip and mistrust were
prevalent; rumours were the main medium for spreading news, and the little boy
must have been profoundly marked by it. Ekaterina lived a long life. That her ideas
remained as rigid as steel to the end is revealed by an anecdote. A year before her
death in 1937, at the last of her rare meetings with her son, she was still reproaching
him with having chosen politics and not entered the priesthood.7
Small, and deformed as a result of a childhood accident, Stalin never succeeded
in acquiring the charisma and hypnotic magnetism of Lenin, Mussolini or Hitler.8
185
The man of steel and the final product 185
However, he did acquire at an early age a character with more stable qualities,
particularly compared to the two founders of Fascism. Unfortunately, the scarcity
of information about his childhood was later overlaid with an official image based
on impenetrability, vagueness and the low frequency of public statements. This
has sometimes forced historians to replace reconstructions with interpretations.
The important Stalinian biography by Tucker (1973), for instance, often resorts to
psychoanalysis.
The information available indicates that as a boy Iosif Dzhugashvili lacked empa-
thy.9 Nobody ever saw him cry. Even more surprising, for some who remember
him, was the fact that he never laughed – a lack of humour was considered almost
inconceivable in a Georgian.10 Various witnesses have spoken of his constant jok-
ing during political meetings (especially at dinners garnished with wine, vodka and
feigned cordiality), but none of the stories even hints at self-irony, the guarantee of
a true sense of humour. His ‘witticisms’ were generally coarse and slyly aggressive.
At banquets they were used to provoke reactions in a fellow-diner and to ‘elicit’ his
real thoughts, which Stalin, projecting his own mentality on to his interlocutors,
believed were always hidden. At the same time, taking advantage of the Russian tol-
erance for alcohol and of continual toasts, he tried to oblige his table companions
to get drunk, so as to liberate the most primitive emotions.11 In a complete breach
with accepted behaviour, he would sing bawdy songs in the presence of women;12
in all circumstances, he tried to shock people.
Stalin himself probably pretended to be drunk more often than he really was.
The more experienced banqueters took countermeasures; they even took the risk
of having themselves served coloured water instead of wine. Wrapped in the thick
embrace of smoke and alcohol, the merry company is almost touching in its lone-
liness. With feigned generosity, each person brings bottles to the banquet; then, for
reasons that we can guess, drinks only from those that he himself brought.13 The
banquet-competition, where there were apparently prizes for those who drank
the most and behaved the worst, seemed to flourish at times that really required the
greatest responsibility. Over the years such competitions would become increasingly
popular, sometimes turning into assemblies of retching drunkards.14 According to a
psychiatrist who studied Stalin’s personality, he said, ‘Man’s greatest entertainment is
to eliminate his enemy, and then drink a jug of good Georgian wine.’15
At the height of the war against Nazism, Stalin laughed in Milovan Djilas’
face and told him he was ‘a real German’, just because he was drinking a beer.16
In a meeting after the war, he rolled about laughing, shouting at him: ‘Djilas is
an anti-Semite!’17 The topics, and the circumstances, were so delicate that they
should not have been funny, but his cynical quips knew no bounds. Describing
the condition of some Germans taken prisoner by the Red Army, he told Djilas
the following story.18 One of their men was taking a number of Germans who
had surrendered to a camp. On the way, he killed them all, except one. When he
arrived, they asked him why. He replied, ‘I carried out orders to kill them all, down
to the last man.’ To Stalin it was all very funny, but the cruelty was particularly so. It
is hard not only to tell whether he was joking or describing things that had really
186
happened but also to understand to what extent he expected his cynical jokes
to become reality. What mattered to him was supremacy imposed by force. The
rest was appearance that fades away; as the Russian psychiatrist mentioned earlier
noted, only his hatred for the enemy and his death were real and definitive for
him.19 Djilas, who thinks he knew him well, does not hesitate to describe him as
‘the greatest criminal in history’.20
Stalin did not think that reality was a given. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, he distrusted
what others considered to be reality. It was something that formed in his mind little
by little and had to be ‘realized’ little by little. Here too there is a strong similarity
to Hitler. The difference lies in the time scale. For Hitler, the mental construction
must be turned into reality at a stroke, for Stalin gradually and silently.
His particular sense of humour came to materialize into a taste for the most hor-
rific quips and scenes. He insisted on having the last moments in his victims’ lives
described to him. He wanted to be told what Zinoviev had said before he died and
enjoyed it so much that he asked for an encore.21 In the repeat, the actors spiced
the desperate pleas of the man as he was being slaughtered with prayers to the God
of Israel (Zinoviev was a Jew); at that point Stalin interrupted the performance,
because he was choking with laughter.
His sarcasm could also affect official policy. After his ultimatum to Finland (arro-
gance in dealing with a smaller country seems to be another lesson learned from
Hitler), the representatives of that country told him that in order to cede part of the
national territory to him they would have to request the approval of five-sixths of
their parliament.22 At this, Stalin, evidently referring to his methods of persuasion,
said he had no doubt that 99 per cent of the Finns would give their approval.23
Radical mistrust
Anyone who first engages in forbidden revolutionary activities and then consoli-
dates a successful revolution must be suspicious. What distinguishes simple mistrust
from pathological suspicion is the fact of allowing oneself to be convinced by the
proofs of reality. The normal individual gradually lowers his defences and becomes
trusting again; the paranoiac, by contrast, is impenetrable by the facts. Even when
he was not reacting violently, Stalin was incapable of accepting any criticism, and
would overturn it, interpreting it as a machination or sabotage against him;24 so,
instead of coming to a conclusion that took account of the contrasting opinions
that had been expressed to him, laid the basis for a new wave of paranoid suspicions.
As a young revolutionary Iosif Dzhugashvili was arrested and sent to Siberia
several times; but he always succeeded in escaping these confinements to internal
exile, with a dexterity which led to his being suspected, especially by Trotsky, of
collusion with the tsarist police. Much has been written on this subject. No definite
evidence has ever emerged. However, another truth, particularly important for our
perspective, has been proved: both in childhood and in the seminary, and in his
early political activity, Iosif Dzhugashvili’s life grew in a daily mixture of secrecy
and informing. Many opponents of the regime who were sent into internal exile
187
necessarily played a double or even triple game, promising to supply information to

the Okhrana, the tsarist police. The system worked rather chaotically: many evaded
it by trickery, and for Dzhugashvili this too was an excellent education. The docu-
ments of the Okhrana show that attempts were made to make use of him but also
confirm that he remained an inflexible Marxist.25
In the years of clandestine struggle, Iosif Dzhugashvili-Koba distinguished
himself for his courage and combativeness. The police marked him out as a dan-
gerous and implacable individual. He always unhesitatingly chose radical solu-
tions. When, within the Social Democratic Party, the Bolsheviks broke away from
the more moderate Mensheviks, Koba immediately joined the former, led by
Lenin.26 He would pay for this twice over: with isolation, for in Georgia the
Mensheviks were a clear majority, and with self-humiliation. He had fought for
the formation of an autonomous Georgian party, but the official line favoured
one party for the whole of the tsarist empire. So Koba gave way and published
a recantation. For a proud, rigid character like his, the effort must have been
traumatic. He would learn that it is better to pretend, not to show one’s most
important convictions until one is sure of being able to impose them; to remain
flexible, waiting to see which way the wind blows.27 One of Stalin’s great abilities
was that of feigning to be in the middle before taking a position. Having suffered
greatly from this experience, he would learn to invert it into an instrument of his
revenge: he would not only impose his sudden victories on his enemies, he would
force them into self-humiliation. On coming to power, in the 1920s, he would
have each individual copy of that recantation traced, so that every sign of it could
be destroyed. For Stalin, the suffering caused by that episode was not (as it was in
fact) an inner trauma, which one could get over by moving on to new phases of
inner life; for the paranoiac, every problem is always external and always materializes.
Even though he had written it himself, the recantation was now an independent
object, an enemy made of paper, to be burnt.
In Stalin, the solitude of the paranoiac reaches its insuperable peak. Under the
icy blasts of his mistrust almost all his travelling companions eventually fall dead.
The storm is not content with eliminating them from life; it also eliminates every
surviving trace of them. The texts previously published, the official photographs
in circulation disappear, to be replaced by new versions which deny from the very
origins the role, and almost the existence, of the disgraced ‘companion’. It would be
too easy to explain these interventions simply as a manipulation of public opinion;
Stalin is not merely carrying out a propaganda operation, he is doing it for himself
too. It is not enough that the enemy has disappeared; he cannot bear even to see his
name or his picture. He needs to deny to himself that that person ever existed and
had an influence on his life.The paranoiac’s fantasy must replace reality; not only in
the world of the imagination, but in reality itself.
When theoretical, ‘scientific’ and historical texts were published, Stalin inter-
vened to impose flattering content, including eulogies of his modesty.28 His ideas
were brilliant, and indebted only to those of Lenin.29 At this point one gains the
impression that even Stalin’s Lenin is an invention, a steel dogma, as is the brilliant
188
Stalin who rigidly follows him; Lenin is transformed into a premise created a poste-
riori to justify all the Stalinian follies and cruelties.
Of course we must not in our turn suspect that Stalin was insincere in his admi-
ration of Lenin. Certainly he idealized him in his youth, finding in him the teacher
and the father that he had lacked. Equally certainly, this faith – an exceptional,
unique revelation in Iosif Dzhugashvili’s life – continued to manifest itself later, but
as an abstract reference, an iron dogma now detached from Lenin’s person. For the
real man in whom it was embodied he always had more ambivalent feelings. At
the root of paranoid constructions, as we have seen, there is often a secret element
of envy; it is likely that Stalin, while striving to mimic Lenin, suffered increasingly
from the fact that the latter was a charismatic leader and a respected ideologue, who
did not need to impose himself brutally on his companions. Lenin convinced peo-
ple; he communicated enthusiasm, he was an inspiring public speaker. Stalin was a
poor speaker, but he did know how to hint; by hinting, he could insinuate, and by
insinuating he could impose his authority through fear.
Allusion and the creation of a self-contained reality

It was not just an occasional method reserved for his enemies. It was his way of
arguing, which required his interlocutors’ adherence to every passage of his speech,
even those that were unexpressed, because the whole constituted a rigid, non-
negotiable argument. A manner already well delineated in his first articles of 1905.
Stalin was in the habit of adding to his statements the formula ‘kak izvestno’ (as is
well known), even if the reader or listener was coming across it for the first time.
‘Ne sluchayno’ (it is no coincidence) is another important parenthetical insertion.
The metallic mind knows in advance the rigid transitions that connect events to
one another;30 his thought is objective and indisputable. He reserves the greatest
contempt for personal factors, of psychology and temperament, as lacking solidity.
Through the regime’s loudspeakers the message reaches all ears; by the mere fact
of being linked together by this stock phrase, those things are transformed into a
suffused collective paranoia.
It has often been said that Stalin did not invent the ‘communist’ massacre, but
perfected the path of Lenin. For the apprentice Stalin, who followed on his heels,
it must have been at any rate significant that in 1918, in a mere two months, Lenin
had already ordered three times as many killings as had been carried out by the
tsars in the previous century.31 To attain the authority of the envied Lenin, however,
Stalin would have to resort ever more frequently to deceit and to tyrannical institu-
tions. This compulsion certainly undermined his self-esteem, which meant that he
could not admit it; it had to be denied and projected on to some person ‘respon-
sible’.With the same iron, inexorable progression as Adolf Schicklgruber (known to
posterity as Adolf Hitler)32, Iosif Dzhugashvili (known as Stalin) always created his
own ‘reality’ and then hoisted it on to the shoulders of the country and the world.
But while for Hitler’s propaganda the enemy was another nation or ethnic group,
and therefore quite clearly identified, for Stalin’s propaganda he was everywhere,
189
in the heart of the country, the same town, the same block of flats. In your fam-
ily. Everywhere, it was taught, there were plotters and spies. By the late 1930s, the
country was endemically infected by this suspicion; war descended on it almost as
a relief, for it made the enemy distant and visible again.33
Lenin’s heritage
However, the secret doubt about himself, the suspicion that he had turned into an
individual who was too asocial for socialism, must have occurred to Stalin at least
at one crucial point. After years in which he had slowly but surely marched towards
power, his master Lenin’s ‘testament’ suddenly blocked his path.
Let us pause to consider this document. It is an incomparable irony of history, or
at least of the history that we are narrating, that the immense political career of the
most suspicious man in the world is framed between two documents around which
a conflict broke out precisely because of their secrecy. The first is what is known
as ‘Lenin’s Testament’; the second is Nikita Krushchev’s ‘report’ to the Twentieth
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The ‘Testament’ was a letter written by Lenin when he was critically ill, to be
made public at the Party Congress.34 It contained recommendations for institu-
tional reform and a succinct evaluation of six leaders. In particular it said that Stalin
had accumulated too much power as secretary of the party and expressed the fear
that in the future he would not know how to use it with the necessary caution.
A postscript clearly added the recommendation that Stalin be replaced with a per-
son who was more tolerant, more loyal, less capricious and more attentive to his
companions.
However, four months passed between Lenin’s death and the opening of the
congress. Stalin worked silently to get an even larger number of delegates on his
side than those he already controlled. Moreover, he ensured that the ‘Testament’ was
not publicized at the plenary congress, but only to the individual delegations. Its
reproduction, in whole or in part, was forbidden. Thus Stalin in effect achieved the
objective of secrecy and forced everyone to play only on his terrain – that of mystery,
of discourse conducted in a low voice, because it could cost lives. Because of its
importance, the document soon filtered abroad, and as early as 1925 the New York
Times published the complete text. But in the Soviet Union secrecy had won. Not
only did the congress not do anything about it, but the ‘Testament’ never reached
public opinion; in fact it disappeared from political discourse for decades. One
of Stalin’s great victims – and later one of his great accusers – the writer Varlam
Shalamov, was condemned to three years in the gulag in 1929 for trying to dissem-
inate it. For him it was the first in a long series of sentences.
As may be imagined, over time a new form of popular rumour developed in
Soviet society, which we might call the collective rebound of paranoia. Incited by an
impulse which came down from above day after day, the masses made suspicion
its daily mental activity, in its turn imagining conspiracies behind even the most
normal events. After Lenin’s death there were lurid rumours that the beloved leader
190
had been murdered on Stalin’s orders.The tyrant’s great rival,Trotsky, was one of its
propagators.35 But it was true that the death of Lenin, which should have blocked
his path, opened the door towards absolute power for Stalin.
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, had at first preserved a certain public influ-
ence, sometimes daring to contradict Stalin. But little by little her attitude softened.
This submission can be explained.36 Stalin announced that if Krupskaya continued
to annoy him, he would publicly declare that Lenin’s widow was not her, but
another, more docile old Bolshevik woman. How was that possible? Stalin had
simply said: ‘The Party can do anything.’
In 1939, Krupskaya celebrated her birthday, as usual, with a few friends. She
received delivery of a big cake, with the words ‘Happy Birthday from Stalin’ on top.
Soon afterwards, she died. Predictably, rumours spread that the cake had been poi-
soned. But Stalin had sent his former comrade a cake on all her previous birthdays,
without any ill effects; and in 1939 too, all the other guests who had eaten it had
been fine.37
The gulag
An interesting indicator of Stalin’s different states of mind is the work camps, the
gulags. In 1928 a mere 28,000 people were interned there. Only three years later,
with Stalin’s regime now well established, there were already 2 million internees.38
By the mid-1930s their population was approximately 2.4 million (to which should
be added half a million inmates in ordinary prisons).39 In 1939, the Soviet Union
was not yet at war but invaded and annexed vast territories of central Europe;
Stalin had about 1 million people from the Baltic countries, Poland and Romania
deported as a preventive measure, since he rightly considered them not well dis-
posed towards Soviet power. From 1941, during the first part of the conflict with
the Nazis, the population of the gulags decreased, partly because many succeeded
in exchanging imprisonment for the front and partly because the mortality rate
increased and in 1942 reached 25 per cent (which makes it possible to calculate that
up to half a million people a year died of hardship in the gulags).40 To these ‘natural’
deaths should be added the death sentences.
In the ensuing war years the number rose again. The Red Army made great
advances.Vast territories which had previously been conquered by the Nazis were
taken back. However, Stalin distrusted the whole population that had survived their occu-
pation and sent them to the gulags in droves. At the end of the war, the total again
exceeded the old figure of 2.4 million prisoners, to which should be added about
3 million foreigners (2 million Germans and 1 million other allies of the Axis) who
had been taken prisoner and similarly assigned to forced labour. Between 1945 and
1948 slave workers comprised between 16 and 18 per cent of the workforce of
the whole country.41 In the late 1940s it is estimated that between 12 million and
14 million people were imprisoned in the gulags.42 In 1953, on the tyrant’s death,
a secret Soviet memorandum confirmed the figure of 12 million.43 Alexander
Solzhenitsyn has written: ‘Little attempt was made to conceal their purpose: the
191
[prisoners] were to be done to death. These were, undisguisedly, murder camps;

but in the gulag tradition murder was protracted, so that the doomed would suffer
longer and put a little work in before they died.’44
Inevitably, the gulag occupied an important place in collective psychology.
Everyone knew of its existence, but few could have explained its function in a clear
and consistent manner. It seemed to exist in order to guarantee a climate of vague
menace, a deterrent for all opposition, but it had little to do with a clear and inflex-
ible application of law.
In the memoirs of the writer Shalamov there is a significant episode. One day,
during his detention in the gulag, he is removed for interrogation, which stops
when he is asked to give his particulars and state his profession: ‘I’m a lawyer’, he
replies. He and other men are transported on lorries, with a temperature as low as
60 degrees below zero, stopping in various camps, to pick up other prisoners. Some
already know they are going to be shot. But where are they going? And what is the
purpose of the operation? Suddenly, the men bumping along on the lorries realize
something: all those who have been selected had studied law. It is impossible to
understand any more than that; they can only guess that this is sufficient reason for
being killed. Then, equally abruptly, without warning, they are all ‘liberated’ (that is,
they return to the previous regime of twelve hours’ forced labour a day in unbear-
able climatic conditions). A well-informed man explains: there has been a coun-
termand: the official who began the operation has just been arrested.45 Probably
he will be shot.
Yakov and Nadya
Yakov, born from Iosif Dzhugashvili’s first marriage, was a sensitive, nervous, taci-
turn young man. His father despised him.When he came to live in Moscow, Stalin’s
irritation increased, probably because in the capital Yakov visibly represented that
lost Georgian identity that his father had tried to erase in himself.46 In 1928 or
1929, the young man shot himself with a pistol, but without succeeding in kill-
ing himself. His father is said to have commented, ‘He can’t even shoot straight.’47
His stepmother, Nadya Allilueva, however, was reportedly shocked; according to
Medvedev, it was probably then that she began to fantasize about doing the same.48
Having enlisted in the Red Army at the outbreak of war,Yakov was taken pris-
oner during the first days of the Nazi attack. According to his daughter Svetlana,
Stalin took the matter as a personal affront. The German command proposed an
exchange of prisoners, but he kept this news secret. To a foreign correspondent
who knew the whole story and was interviewing him about the captured soldiers,
he said: ‘There are no Russian prisoners in Hitler’s camps – only traitors, who we
will deal with later.’ The journalist persisted and asked him about Yakov. Stalin said
bluntly, ‘I have no son called Yakov.’ In the prisoner-of-war camp at Sachsenhausen,
near Berlin, this interview was broadcast over the radio. In despair, Yakov walked
towards the fence and, making as if to climb up, shouted to the sentry to shoot.This
time the suicide could not fail.49
192
Nadezhda (Nadya) Allilueva Stalina, unlike his first wife, had married Stalin
partly because she shared his ideals. But in the rooms of the Kremlin her combat-
iveness and commitment had given way to depression. On the fifteenth anniversary
of the Revolution, Nadya gave her husband his first great disappointment since
he had come to power. On 7 November 1932, during a celebration, she offended
him in public. According to some sources, he had been drinking and was court-
ing another woman. It is interesting to note that there are many opinions about
Stalin’s infidelities, various hints but little evidence;50 Nadya, however, living with
a man who was suspicion personified, suspected in her turn that he was having an
affair behind her back. She returned to the Kremlin and wrote him a letter full of
reproaches. Then she pointed a pistol at her heart and pulled the trigger.51
At the funeral ceremony, Stalin went up to the open coffin only for a moment.
Pushing it away with a gesture, he said in a loud voice, ‘She left me like an enemy!’52
Then he moved away. Afterwards, although Nadya was buried in Moscow, he never
visited her grave.
According to their daughter, Svetlana, Stalin never got over this episode. He
became even more solitary, distrustful and unemotional; he had only brief encoun-
ters with women (none of his alleged illegitimate children was recognized) and
met only three of his eight grandchildren.53 He considered Nadya’s death – and the
content of her last letter – the result of manoeuvres against him. Inevitably another
version of the story circulated, according to which Stalin himself killed her.54 These
stories claim that he strangled her, but Stalin was not a strong man, was much older
than his wife, and, above all, had only one good arm. But for the collective imagina-
tion, inflated by rumours, no story could be ruled out. Stalin came to have only one
inflexible reaction: denial of any responsibility for his wife’s death. At first he did
show some remorse. But it is unlikely to have been deeply felt. He is reported to
have said to Molotov: ‘Maybe I should have taken her to the cinema more often.’55
He showed her brother a drawer containing stacks of banknotes which he had
accumulated: ‘She could go wherever she wanted, buy whatever she wanted.’56 In
order to deny his own responsibility, Stalin was evidently prepared to use the least
Marxist of arguments. As happens when the personality is dominated by a delusion
of persecution, this feeble critical self-questioning was soon replaced by an iron
conviction that he had been wronged. Another brother-in-law tried to comfort
him by blaming Nadya for cruelly abandoning two children. Stalin retorted angrily,
‘Children be blowed! They’d already forgotten her after a few days. It’s my life she’s
ruined!’57 In Stalin’s logic, the important thing is always to understand what lies
behind things. Nadya is dead, but, as in the case of Yakov, one must never stop at
appearances. It is him, Stalin, that they had wronged; the real victim is him.
The diagnosis of paranoia

Iosif Dzhugashvili’s paranoia was diagnosed clearly by the greatest authority of the
time. Today we usually associate the Russian neuropsychiatry of the day chiefly
with the name of Pavlov. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, however,
193
Vladimir Bekhterev was even more famous, though he was later erased from the
collective memory through Stalin’s intervention. It was said, among psychiatrists
and neurologists, that only two people knew the mystery of the human brain: God
and Bekhterev. In December 1927, in Moscow, the theories he expounded at a
conference on neuropathology attracted the attention of foreign delegates, and that
of Stalin himself, who asked to see him. After a private meeting with the dictator,
Bekhterev confessed to his assistant that he was extremely worried because the
leader of the country suffered from a serious case of paranoia. The distinguished
clinician did not even get home from the conference; he died of an ‘illness’ in the
hotel where he was staying.58 As was to become habitual, Bekhterev disappeared
not only from Moscow, but from the pages of periodicals, from medical publications
and from encyclopaedias. Not only was his name no longer printed; existing works
in which it appeared were replaced.
Some daily habits
Unlike most tyrants, Stalin did not engage in mass meetings, nor in the media
exploitation of a magnetism that he did not possess. At the cost of whatever falsi-
fication it took, he promoted the cult of his own personality, while pretending to
be of a reserved disposition, and to some extent really being so.59 Significantly, he
preferred to work at night. Convinced that the world was a mystery that was hard
to explain, he offered a corresponding image of himself. In each of his secondary
residences there had to be two exits. Each had to have several bedrooms. For each
bed a full set of bedlinen had to be available; as a rule, Stalin preferred to make the
bed himself. The reading lamp must not be fixed to the wall, because before going
to bed he would pick it up and inspect the space under the bed.60
When he travelled to his native Georgia, he usually arranged for five trains to
depart; he would board one of them himself and have doubles board the others.61
Despite the immense distances of the Soviet Union, he only once in his life took
a plane, to fly to Tehran, for his first meeting with Churchill and Roosevelt (the
subsequent ones were organized practically ‘at home’ for him, in Yalta and Potsdam).
And in this case too he had taken extreme precautions: an escort of twenty-seven
planes flew around his own. But even if there had been hundreds of them, they
could not have avoided the air pockets, which terrified him.62 For decades Stalin
had been accustomed to moulding his land and controlling it; with the air that was
not possible.
Similarities and differences with respect to Hitler

Provocatively, but sincerely, Amis has said that Stalin only trusted one person in
his life: Adolf Hitler.63 Ferguson makes the same affirmation, but attributing its
paternity to Solzhenitsyn.64 According to Souvarine, ‘Mussolini started by imitating
Lenin, Hitler continued by imitating Mussolini and Stalin, and the latter in turn
copied his two rivals, especially in their worst features.’65 Exactly like Hitler, Stalin
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had had an apparently protective but unaffectionate mother and a violent, even less
affectionate father, who was a drunkard and beat his wife and son. The fathers of
the two tyrants may have indirectly contributed to the two boys’ ‘education’ even
more than the mothers; from childhood, violence entered them like a parasite of the
mind and was used to conceal insecurity, fear and lack of warmth.Turning to others
to destroy them is the last, unconscious form of relationship that is left for someone
who is incapable of real relationships.
Another thing the two dictators had in common was a difficult relationship with
their origins. In order to personify the quintessence of the German, Hitler had to
gloss over the fact that he came from the Austrian provinces. In order to embody the
pan-Russian leader, Stalin tried to erase his Georgian origins. But in speech the for-
mer only had to correct his dialectal accent, whereas the latter had to make the conti-
nental leap from a Caucasian language to an Indo-European one. As for pathologies, it
has been pointed out that narcissism, antisociality and paranoia were a profound link
between Hitler and Stalin.66 Hitler, however, reportedly also had a strong borderline
component, with limit-states close to madness, extreme mood swings and a self-
destructive tendency. All this was lacking in the Soviet dictator. His paranoia was pure.
Unlike Hitler, Iosif Dzhugashvili ruled a multinational state, and his leadership
in the party itself had long been uncertain. Consequently, the work of the political
police was a far more essential prop for his power.67 With Hitler, criminals were
recruited immediately, from the beginnings of the party, and he left the apparatus
of repression to them, showing an almost total lack of interest in it. Stalin recruited
criminals mainly during the 1920s, as he eliminated his adversaries in the party.
And he continued to take a direct interest in repression. Even Hitler realized that
the Georgian dictator was devouring his own base of subjects and described his
behaviour as a ‘mental illness’. Unfortunately, this correct diagnosis only fostered
the mental illness of the Führer, who, as Goebbels reported, became increasingly
convinced that it was necessary to destroy Stalin.68
Stalin’s particular paranoia induced him to make choices which were the exact
opposite of those made by Hitler. Not more humane, but more rational over time;
he did not gamble too much, nor did he stake everything on short-term calcula-
tions. But they were still policies conducive to his individual power, whose effects
on the future evolution of the country were devastating. Subsequent Soviet leaders
inherited from him an empire that was already travelling down a dead-end road.
While Hitler had Ajax’s haste, Stalin cultivated his absurd solitude.While the former
inherited the Greek hero’s excessive trust in the sword, the latter replicated his mis-
trust in others.
As we have seen, Hitler had affirmed that his strength lay in speed and brutal-
ity; in so doing he irremediably gave precedence to military results over political
ones, and to short-term aims over long-term ones. Stalin could have affirmed that
his own strength lay in brutality and unpredictability. Thus, so as not to risk betray-
ing his own intentions, he insisted on most of his plans remaining secret, thereby
increasing the irrationality and oscillations of a state body, a politics and an econ-
omy that were already extremely difficult to coordinate.
195
Stalin was able to wait as long as necessary, provided that the realization of his
calculations was accomplished. This does not mean that he lacked paranoid haste.
But, while Hitler’s haste could come into play as soon the aim to be achieved
was decided on, in Stalin it was given free rein only when all the material condi-
tions for the achievability of the aim were present. In the phase when action was
carried out, haste was not only permissible but necessary. At that point his calcu-
lation was similar to Hitler’s: things accomplished by surprise are more likely to
become irreversible. His deportations of entire populations to another continent,
for example, could be sudden, and people would have only a few moments to
collect their belongings.
In what sense were material conditions central to Stalin’s personality? The main
thing that the iron presupposition of his paranoia had preserved from Marxist theory
was materialism. Driven to the extreme, however, it came to mean only an obsessive
attention to power relationships. The values had long fallen by the wayside. In this
sense, Stalin was a less obvious but more professional paranoiac than Hitler. He had
had only one original revelation. It was necessary to carry out the Russian mission
without trusting other countries, the party’s mission without trusting other groups,
his personal mission without trusting his party comrades.
Hitler’s massacres took place over a relatively short period and ended up in
meticulous archives later opened by the Federal Republic of Germany, which had
been founded on a rejection of Nazism. Stalin’s massacres, however, are less well
known, not only because they are more spread out over time and space but also
because they were subjected to the cult of secrecy orchestrated by the leader, to the
disorder of the system and to the responsibility of successors who were not partic-
ularly interested in opening the archives.
According to Davies, a harsh critic of ‘real socialism’, the number of people
killed by Soviet violence was about 54 million.69 This figure is moderate compared
to other estimates (especially those of Medvedev and Conquest) and concerns the
period 1917–53; it therefore relates to massacres most of which weigh on Stalin’s
conscience.The total includes a ‘mere’ million prisoners of war who died because of
the harshness of their living conditions; all the others – that is, no less than 53 mil-
lion – are internal victims, that is, citizens of the Soviet Union.
Hobsbawm casts a less negative eye on the Soviet experiment.70 Without com-
menting, he reports that in 1937, when the census was suddenly cancelled, it could
be estimated that the population of the USSR was 164 million. That is 16.7 mil-
lion less than the demographic predictions made by the Five-Year Plan for 1933–8.
The conclusion he reaches is simple. In only four years, from 1933 to 1937, 10 per
cent of the population of that vast country had been lost. At that rate, most of the
Soviet citizens could have disappeared during the Stalin decades; but his policies
of extermination were concentrated in the 1930s and 1940s. Even according to
this calculation, then, the massacres attributable to Stalin are colossal, and, at least
quantitatively, even more massive than those of Hitler. Thus we see that different
authors, with different political sympathies and using different methods, come to
broadly similar conclusions.
196
In a sense, just as paranoia ‘explains’ the residual action of the tyrant which pol-
itics can no longer explain, so it represents the absolute weapon with which the
dictator crushes his enemies when traditional weapons do not succeed in doing so
completely. By magnifying this dark impulse of the psyche out of all proportion, the
totalitarian leader makes himself incomprehensible to the non-paranoid adversary
and succeeds, for a relative time, in confusing him and holding him in his power. At
the same time, by psychically infecting his masses he makes himself exemplary in
their eyes.
As we have seen with Hitler, Stalin too succeeds in contaminating the masses
with his imaginary reality. For a certain time, this ‘positive’ side of paranoia deceives
the average citizen and even intellectuals. An anecdote tells of two acquaintances
who meet in the streets of Moscow during the Great Terror and sigh: ‘If only Stalin
knew!’They were not two ordinary gullible citizens, but two of the greatest Russian
writers of the time, Boris Pasternak and Ilya Ehrenburg.71
Hitler, with few minorities in Germany and having physically annihilated the
opposition, projected his paranoia outside the country. By contrast, Stalin, operat-
ing in a multi-ethnic empire and having difficulty in prevailing over other political
movements and other personalities in the party, turned it on the interior of the
Soviet Union. For both men, any victory over the enemy could not last; it was the
result of a rigid, sick psychological need, irreconcilable with any success that was
achieved. The paranoid tyrant feels alive only if he continues to raise the stakes.
Hitler, by doing so, sowed the seeds of his own military defeat. Stalin sowed the
irreducible mistrust of the oppressed nationalities and economic paralysis. The dis-
integration of the Soviet Union, not being the result of a lost war, would only have
been more gradual; by the beginning of the Second World War that country had
one bureaucrat for every two workers.72 Spying on millions of people drained away
oceans of manual labourers. But the country also supported itself on an infinite
number of personalized fictions.The elderly Gorky, who oscillated between oppor-
tunistic compromise and criticism, was one of the regime’s treasures. To keep him
onside, the edition of Pravda that he received was a unique copy, printed specially
for him; reports on arrests, for example, were replaced by articles on crab fishing.73
Spying on each other at a distance conditioned Hitler and Stalin. As in the aver-
age honest citizen there is always some hidden immorality (the shadow, in Jung’s
psychology), so in the unconscious of the criminal paranoiac there can be repressed
feelings of benevolence. If we accept this far from unreasonable hypothesis, we must
also suppose that in monsters the ‘other’ is often, though unconsciously, admired
and emulated. Scholars such as Bullock, Snyder, Ferguson and Furet have noted
similarities between the two leaders, and consequently between the two totalitarian
states.74 A theoretical foundation for such connections might be found in the con-
cept of totalitarianism, under which Hannah Arendt has brought together systems
which are ideologically very different from one another. Of the two regimes, allies
from 1939 to 1941, one emerged from the world war destroyed, the other on the
side of the victors. Consequently, for obvious historical reasons, for several decades
the links between them were not emphasized. Everyone knows, for example, that
197
entrances to Nazi camps bore the incredible motto ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (Work makes
you free), but few remember that even earlier, on the gates of camps belonging
to the gulag, there was the motto ‘Trudom domoy’ (By work one goes home).75
Many know Hitler’s cynical remark about the Armenian genocide mentioned in the
previous chapter. But Stalin would say something very similar about his own vic-
tims: ‘Who will remember all this rabble in ten or twenty years? No one. […] Who
remembers the names of the Boyars eliminated by Ivan the Terrible? No one. […]
What matters to people is knowing that he eliminated his enemies. In the end, they
all got what they deserved.’76
In 1986, Ernst Nolte stirred up a huge debate among historians by asking
the questions, ‘Wasn’t the “gulag archipelago” presaged by Auschwitz? Wasn’t the
Bolsheviks’ “class extermination” the logical and factual prius of the National
Socialists’ “race extermination”?’77 Since then many have debated the question
whether Nazism invented the horror independently or whether it was partly stimu-
lated to do so by the Bolshevik horror, which had begun earlier. Stalin had opened
the road of deportation and class extermination, because that corresponded to a
class-based ideology that had come to power for the first time. But Solzhenitsyn
had already pointed out, before Nolte, that the Soviet dictator had significantly
preceded Hitler in the deportation and extermination of nationalities, too, which
he initiated in 1937.78
Chronologically speaking, Stalin’s ‘totalitarian work’ and ‘paranoid prophy-
laxis’ began almost a decade before those of Hitler. But, although he had greater
experience, the Soviet dictator was still prepared to follow an example set by the
Nazi dictator. On 30 June 1934, Hitler disbanded the Sturmabteilungen (SA) –
his old travelling companions, unpresentable now that the regime was estab-
lished – by having them murdered in the ‘night of the long knives’. On hearing
the news, Stalin is said to have exclaimed, ‘Molodets, kak on zdorovo eto sdelal!’
(‘What a fine fellow, what an excellent job he made of that!’) Stalin watched
Hitler’s moves very carefully, and the comments he made about him were sur-
prisingly sincere.79 At the end of the most deadly war of all times, that between
the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, he expressed one sincere regret: not at the
mountains of corpses, but because ‘together with the Germans we would have
been invincible!’80
‘Inversion of causes’: the leader’s mind as the origin of society

Not believing in loyalty, feelings or conditions, but only in power relationships,
Stalin altered them in his favour in the most irreversible way: by eliminating his
adversaries. No one was more consistent than him in doing this: of the 1827 del-
egates of the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(1934), only thirty-seven still survived at the Eighteenth Congress (1939) – a mere 2
per cent.81 It has been noted that after such actions on such a scale the party was no
longer a party; it was being transformed into something radically new.82 How could
it have been the same, if 98 per cent of those who represented it had disappeared?
198
And did their violent elimination not mean that the criminal who had taken over
the party hated it and in practice wanted to destroy it?
As we have seen, Stalin took to its ultimate conclusions a paranoid rage already
present in Lenin and in most of the revolutionaries but in doing so separated it
increasingly from reality. The source of truth is no longer the facts, but ‘the party’.
But what is the party? No longer – this is the novelty – a group of men united
by a common political aim but an idea, continually changeable and yet inflexi-
ble, conceived by the leader’s mind. Only this mental reality must correspond to a
definitive revelation and to an iron truth. In this sense the party becomes syntonic
with an absurd consistency, which is individual and self-fuelled but presents itself as
collective. This paranoid trait, taken by Stalin to its extreme consequences, contains
continual inversions of causes. The working model of this mental perversion is not
substantially different from the opposite one that we have seen in the psychic con-
tortions of Hitler and in the racist extreme right wing. As far as the development of
the country is concerned, for example, the affirmation of the party is not, as Marxist
theory would have it, the point of arrival of an industrialized economy; it will be its
point of departure. And not because material conditions really make it possible, but
because in this way one awaits the mind of the leader.
The silent hand of Stalin has made another inversion of the causal process. The party
should be the great novelty that expresses the political guidelines of a society which
is also new. Instead, before our very eyes, as in the most ancient absolute empires,
the tyrant is the point of departure. Political representatives are not important. Not
only can one completely do without 98 per cent of them; but the remaining 2 per
cent must be too busy asking themselves ‘How come I survived?’ to participate in
truly political decisions. In a very few years, the party is no longer a party but a
stable of servants, a curious destiny for a movement that had wanted to abolish ser-
vitude for ever from the human condition.
Stalin’s inversion of causes is manifested in an extreme form in the explanation
of suicides. When a persecuted person cannot take any more and kills himself, this
does not mean that his torture has been excessive; on the contrary, it is an admis-
sion of guilt. The victim knows he is guilty and adopts a deceitful way of avoiding
punishment.83
The massacres
The kulaks
It is often debated whether the immensity of Stalin’s massacres makes it possible
to call them ‘genocide’. Lemkin, to whom we owe this concept, would have been
favourable.84 Yakovlev prefers the word ‘democide’;85 Brunetau speaks of ‘genocidal
policies in Soviet Russia’ (‘politiques génocidaires en Russie soviétique’);86 Michael
Mann, as was mentioned above, uses the idea of ‘classicide’;87 finally, another appli-
cable expression is that of ‘ethnocide’.88 The basis of the homicidal rage is a cluster
of classist and, in theory, anti-nationalist prejudices (intended to make impossible
the rebirth of bourgeois mentalities or peasant-landowners, and of distinct national
199
cultures). The new regime wanted the industrialization of Russia; even before
achieving this in the economy, it was already implementing it in murder.
The historian of genocide Brunetau describes as a policy of a ‘genocidal nature’
the elimination of the kulaki (peasant-landowners, miniscule particles of capitalism)
in 1929–32.89 This was the first great Stalinian massacre, which accompanied forced
collectivization. Let us examine the characteristics of that action.
On 27 December 1929, in Pravda, Stalin announced the objective of ‘eliminating
the kulaki as a class’. The word kulak existed, but there was no specific definition.90
What did exist was a Bolshevik prejudice according to which the peasant who was
not a labourer could be said to belong to a ‘petit bourgeoisie’.91 And behind this
was an ideology: the contempt for peasant life already expressed in the Communist
Party manifesto. But from the point of view of collective paranoia, there was above
all a need to point out conspirators to the masses, trying to infect their psyche with
propaganda; so efforts were made to create the concept ‘kulak = enemy’. Whenever
the kulaki were mentioned, everyone had to nod their heads, showing that they
knew very well who these parasites were. In reality, as with other Stalinian enter-
prises, there was no attempt to find out in advance how many kulaki there were
(theoretically a simple calculation, since the category was in the process of being
created), but the number of kulaki who were to be expropriated and deported was
predetermined.
Suspicious thought does not seek the truth but confirmation of the initial
dogma. The lists of kulaki were drawn up with this criterion. Each locality is pre-
emptively assigned a quota of enemies who must exist and must be discovered. In the
home village of the writer Bykov there were no peasant capitalists; there was only
poverty. But since ‘dekulakization’ was compulsory, the local activists chose three to
deport: a peasant considered to be an owner of animals, because his cow had had a
calf; another whose mare had given birth to a foal; and a third who could belong to
the category of the employer with employees, because a relative had come to help
him with the harvest.92 With invincible demonstrative tools like these it was always
possible to discover the enemy.
The definition of the kulak, then, was created in order to dekulakize, rather than
dekulakization being invented because the kulaki had been identified.93 The idea,
the product of ideological preconception and not of knowledge on the ground, is
both rigid and vague at the same time. For greater precision the useful category of
subkulaki is created: ‘by kulak is meant the possessor of certain political tendencies
which are discernible with particular frequency in the subkulaki, both men and
women’.94 Tautology and circularity here reach near-perfection. In order to define
the kulaki one uses the subkulaki, who are in turn a derivation of the concept of
kulaki. It would not be surprising to see communism explained as being the oppo-
site of anti-communism.
The circular argument is impenetrable to external reality but may contain every-
thing within it and nourish itself. Thus, any peasant, on the basis of any whim, may
be cast for ever into the infernal category. ‘If a man had a brick house in a row of
log cabins, or two stories in a row of one-storey houses – there was your kulak. Get
200
ready, you bastard, you’ve got sixty minutes!’95 In principle, you become a kulak on
the basis of an economic assessment: a peasant who grows rich can become one.
But the same economic measure is no longer valid for getting out of it: an impov-
erished kulak does not cease to be a kulak. Defining kulaks seems to be necessary
not for identifying the properties to be requisitioned but for fixing on a scapegoat.
Identifying evil is indispensable to those who govern through mass paranoia. From
time to time the regime was forced to admit that there were food shortages; the
creation of this category now made it possible to blame someone for them.96
The orders that affect the kulaki are carried out by an impersonal apparatus,
eager to ingratiate itself with power, free (though officially it is applying the law) to
exercise its own discretion97 and indoctrinated by a persecutory propaganda which
(as in the pogroms, their antecedent in the age of the tsars) dehumanizes victims,
making their deportation or killing easier; they are described as animals, towards
which feelings of guilt would be inappropriate.98 We would expect the animaliza-
tion of the enemy – a logical step almost indispensable for eliminating him without
feelings of guilt and an invitation to ‘pseudospeciation’ – to be an invention of
National Socialist racism. But it had been flourishing in the Soviet Union since
1920. Stalin did not invent it; he merely copied it from Lenin.99
The whole campaign against the kulaki contains an excess of sadism as an end in
itself. We have described as paranoid that collective aggression which political and
economic motives or normal psychological dynamics are not sufficient to justify.
This deep residue is a potential of the psyche, which activates and nourishes itself
in mass contagion.
Of course, the mental pathology does not exclude a certain amount of rational
and ‘military’ calculation: the psychological perversion is functional to a purpose
that is to be achieved, at least in the short term. Given the conditions in which
deportations were carried out, it was inevitable that some of these ‘enemies’ would
die during transfer (the ‘drop’ was about 15 to 20 per cent, but was higher among
children, assuring the authorities that there would be a second, ‘natural’ drop in the
next generation).100 When the deportees reached their new homes, the mortality
rate decreased a little, stabilizing between 10 and 13 per cent.101 Creeping silently
along, even the accursed Stalinian categories come to an irreversible inclined plane
and approach the absolute categories of Nazism. For Hitlerism, if you are born
among the Jews or Gypsies you are irredeemable, because you suffer from a genetic
defect; after sparing some of them, from 1941–2 the Nazis decide that it is inevi-
table to kill Jewish children too. For Stalinism, if you are born among the kulaki
(and, little by little, among national minorities, among groups which are culturally
or economically suspect, and so on), then you suffer from a social defect which
becomes essentially irreparable.102 So the children of kulaki are not given work.
The kulaki are deported sometimes with their children, sometimes without. In the
latter case, the children may be sent to institutions where they will be ‘educated’ as
agents of repression; but often they are simply abandoned. As a result, whole armies
of minors roam the towns and countryside in search of food. Following atavistic
instincts they try to form groups to gain strength and beg or steal together.
201
With yet another inversion of logic, this result is not seen as a consequence of
the violence they have suffered but as proof that their class identity is an incurable
pathology: not only the kulaki, but their children and their children’s children are
and remain asocial. Stalin decides that children too can be used for exemplary pun-
ishments. Accordingly, with steely logic, on 7 April 1935, he passes a law lowering
the age for the death penalty to twelve.103 Many French intellectuals will protest,
but in vain; paranoia is always right. In a private conversation, Stalin will explain to
the writer Romain Rolland that the purpose of the measure is not repressive but
educational: his greatest concern is preventing evil.
Famine in Ukraine and elsewhere

In the early 1930s, the famine caused by the orders issued by Stalin in Ukraine,
and known as Holodomor, cost a number of deaths estimated at between 3.5 and
10 million. The most commonly accepted figure is around 5 million, almost half
of which were children; a huge number, similar to that of the Jewish genocide,
but reached in a shorter time and in one country. Estimates are difficult because
of the lack of data, the intentional manipulation of censuses and also because,
understandably after this experience, millions of Ukrainian Soviets would no
longer declare themselves to be such but would try to pass themselves off as
Russians. Even if we accept the conservative figure of 5 million victims,104 18.8
per cent of the population of Ukraine would have disappeared. Of course in the
more educated classes, which inspired the greatest mistrust in Stalin, the mortality
rate was much higher. The figures are far from precise, but 80 per cent of writers
probably disappeared.105
In Ukraine, it came to the point where trains no longer carried out deporta-
tions but simply moved dying people so that they did not block the city streets;106
while local transport, to save time, already took to the communal graves, along with
the dead, the living who had reached an irreversible state of malnutrition.107 Even
when the famine was over, the survivors continued to die for reasons that were its
sequel and consequence. Anyone who, in any form, talked about the food shortage
was reported to the courts, which condemned them to punishments ranging from
five years in the gulag to execution by firing squad (sentences less dissimilar than
might seem to be the case: surviving five years in the gulag was not within every-
one’s capabilities).108 The famine, officially, did not exist. Indeed the Soviet Union,
trying to develop its foreign trade, continued to export considerable amounts of wheat.109
An unexpected problem was presented by those who had survived by eating the
weakest individuals; it was realized that there was no law against cannibalism. The
cult of secrecy, however, suggested that it was inadvisable for cannibals to be left in a
position where they could describe their experiences in a courtroom. So they were
handed over to the police, who eliminated them without disturbing the judges.110
On this occasion too, infant mortality was particularly high. In the 1970 census,
in the whole Soviet Union there were 12.4 million people who had been born in
1929–31, but only 8.4 million born in 1932–4. Since no particular birth control
202
had been introduced at that time, the only possible deduction is that at least 3 mil-
lion newborn babies died in those three years.111
Since most of the land was already collectivized, the reason of economic policy
is not sufficient to explain the strict confiscations of harvests, which led to millions
of people dying simply of hunger. As in other nations of the Soviet Union, a cul-
tural rebirth of Ukraine had been tolerated in the preceding years. But, according to
the majority of historians, Stalin looked with growing suspicion on its potential for
nationalism. Consequently, he tried to denationalize the country by butchering its
peasant class, the backbone of its traditions.112 According to Khrushchev, Stalin had
intended to deport all the inhabitants of Ukraine, but, despite the cull that had already
been made, their number remained such as to make the operation impossible.113
Power possessed a revealed truth and could accuse the peasants of hiding the har-
vests in the first place. Since it practised the inversion of causes, that dogma was not
contradicted even by the sight of the peasants dying of hunger and eating anything
they could lay hands on; if they dug in the snow with their bare hands to feed on
acorns, this did not prove that they had nothing to eat, but simply that ‘they will do
anything to avoid working’.114 Also significant is the fact that people who did not
seem visibly exhausted by hunger were not a cause of relief for the authorities; on
the contrary, they aroused suspicion and were immediately subjected to searches.115
So the authorities expected the population to be seriously malnourished; and this
makes it even more difficult to believe that they were acting in good faith. And if
the data showed that the Soviet Union produced less wheat than the old-fashioned
tsarist Russia, it did not mean that it was practising a failed economic policy, but
simply that the data had been falsified.116
In order to project only mistrust and hatred onto the disinherited people whom
Marxism had wanted to redeem, it was necessary to ignore them in every sense –
repress both humanity and knowledge in oneself; and indeed, from 1928 to 1953,
the year of his death – a quarter of a century – Stalin never visited the countryside of
the Soviet Union.117 The prison of Lubyanka was the heart of a repressive apparatus
to which Stalin devoted most of his work; but he never visited even Lubyanka.118
The maintenance of paranoid revelation over time required a concurrence of pseu-
dological self-deception and denial. Nevertheless, however perverted his mental
mechanism, with millions of dead, it is impossible that Stalin was not aware of the
real condition of the countryside. Nor is it arguable that he did not vent his cruelty
on Ukraine in a particular and intentional manner; Ukrainians were not allowed
to move to Russia, nor could wheat be transported from Russia to Ukraine. The
frontier between the two nations, which should not have existed, was barred by
troops, and such a decision could have been taken only by the supreme leader.119
We are accustomed to hearing about the famine in Ukraine, because that coun-
try is in Europe. But genocidal policies were applied in other Soviet republics too.
It happened in Kazakhstan. Since most of the population was nomadic and its life
devoted to animal rearing, the corollary of those policies was an even more radical
zoocide and a partly successful attempt at ethnocide; the authorities tried, that is, to
destroy both the nomadic civilization and their means of sustenance. The number
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of Kazakhs who died of starvation has been estimated at about 1.45 million, or
about 38 per cent of the population.120 They lost over 90 per cent of their sheep,
which dwindled in number from almost 22 million to 1.7 million.121
The Terror and the show trials

Even a tyrant as dedicated to maximum secrecy as Stalin ends up, precisely because
of his immense power, leaving many traces of his perversion. Given the unreli-
ability of what was printed officially, Stalin’s letters become particularly interest-
ing, especially those addressed to the loyal Vyacheslav Molotov.122 The Stalin who
emerges from them is not only a hard worker who concerns himself with every
political, economic and military problem but also a ruthless individual who does
not use a single line to discuss personal matters nor a single adjective that shows
any humanity. The only ‘psychological’ question that interests him is discovering
conspiracies.123 The only personal attention, even with Molotov, is veined with
vaguely menacing allusions. Why has a certain ‘enemy’ not yet been eliminated?124
Why has another not yet confessed?125 And even: why is Molotov himself going on
holiday now, of all times? Is he running away?126 In his handwritten letters Stalin
constantly underlines certain words. The underlinings do not reveal much that is
new. They insist on paranoid motifs that we know well by now: ‘greatest severity’,
‘greatest speed’, and so on.
This attitude reveals the dictator’s permanent state of anxiety from the late 1920s
to the late 1930s. But in 1937 both the mistrust and the brutality make a leap of
such Cyclopic proportions as to compel historians to inquire even today into their
real reasons. At the beginning of the year, the National Commission of Statistics was
about to make public the latest census of the Soviet population.127 In an atypical
manner with respect to his prudence, Stalin yielded to self-satisfaction. He pro-
claimed officially that the population of the country was growing every year by
3 million inhabitants, equivalent to the population of Finland, and that at the end
of the Five-Year Plan (1938) it should reach 180 million. Even less prudently, the
commission was in the meantime collecting the real data, and according to the
real figures the number of inhabitants was between 16 and 30 million short of that
estimate (for reasons that are easy to guess, particularly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan).
The problem was not impossible to solve, however. The Kremlin declared that
the statistical experts had conspired to discredit the glorious Five-Year Plan.128
Naturally it was necessary to postpone the 1937 Census and execute the mem-
bers of the National Commission of Statistics by firing squad. The new statisticians
proved more flexible; they understood that, before knowing the data that are to be
published, it is important to know what the authorities expect will be published.
At any rate, after an ‘adjusted’ census, in 1939, no further censuses were held for
twenty years, until 1959.
With the spring of 1937 came the start of the greatest wave of repression in
human history.129 In the blinking of an eye, from 1936 to 1937, the number of offi-
cial death sentences alone rose from 1,000 to 350,000.130 The flow into the gulags
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was such that the organization of the forced labour on which they were based
almost collapsed; in 1938 only 71 per cent of the production plan was realized, the
worst result in the whole decade.131
All the peaks of paranoid thought seem to be reached together. Absurd consis-
tency: for years it had been said that Trotsky had no following, and undoubtedly
those years had been used to eliminate meticulously not only Trotsky himself but
also his followers. But now it was suddenly announced that there were Trotskyites
everywhere.132 Also triumphant was the inversion of consequentiality. The presence of
enemies was denounced, who were soon inexorably discovered. But the authori-
ties did not wait for the result of the inquiries; orders were immediately sent to
the various localities in the country which anticipated the number of ‘traitors’ that
were to be arrested.133 By now the inversion was taken as normal. It would be a
waste of time to wait for someone to confess in order to classify him as a traitor;
he is immediately considered to be one, therefore he will later have to admit that
he is. The political consistency of the operation becomes increasingly elusive as we
grasp a psychopathological consistency. Orders whereby numbers decided upon
in advance, before trial, were condemned to death were not an absolute novelty.
Though in a less systematic manner, they had already been issued previously both
by Stalin134 and by Lenin. Now, however, the passing of these orders along the
change of command undergoes a new acceleration, which confirms how the per-
secution spreads like a psychic infection; those responsible for each area compete to
exceed the quota of death sentences assigned to them by the leader.135
Throughout 1937 and 1938, the Great Terror (two words which had never
before been written together with capital letters) continued.136 In 1939, it ended,
in an unexpected and unexplained manner, just as it had begun. As was mentioned
above, even today no one has succeeded in clarifying the reasons for it. As in the
early 1930s, the number of victims was very high; Robert Conquest, the historian
who has done most research on this phase, puts the number of dead at many mil-
lions.137 Analysing the breakdown of the types of victim, we see a persecutory pol-
icy different from that of the preceding years. The former persecution had singled
out social classes which had survived the past, whereas the new one mainly targeted
the emerging classes and party members. But in order to catch them, a very wide
net was cast, so that legions of tiny, apolitical fish were caught in it too.138 Previously
the persecution had affected the countryside; now it was the towns that were perse-
cuted. Unlike in the previous phase, this time for the most part it destroyed people
who felt secure, because they had not been classified as enemies and had not broken
any law.139 One has the impression that the despot, despite his increasingly uncondi-
tional power, always felt the siege of his ‘enemies’ drawing closer and closer.
The other great novelty of the late 1930s is the widespread use of courts and of
self-accusations extorted from victims; not only do the latter not defend themselves,
they make a spectacular contribution to the regime’s propaganda. Often, however,
even this tide ends up becoming so gigantic (Solzhenitsyn speaks of ‘torrents’), so
excessive, as to endanger its own credibility.We have already noted that the persecu-
tory mechanism, if taken to excess, risks being counterproductive. To what extent
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could the onlooker believe the self-accusations of an accused who had said the
exact opposite the day before?
And yet, in the absence of other sources of information, a considerable propor-
tion of the public were taken in. Many convinced themselves that a new collec-
tive morality had been created: by confessing that they had done wrong, even bad
people returned to order, thereby providing confirmation for the system’s self-
descriptions. Especially younger people, who had not known the ‘old man’, might
believe that a ‘new man’ had really been created; Roy Medvedev, later one of the
most implacable critics of Stalinism, recalls that at the age of twelve or thirteen he
was truly convinced of it.140
Apart from this ‘media’ function, it appears at any rate that ‘courtroom drama’
was something to which Stalin attached great personal importance. He was not
interested in the conclusion alone; he wanted the details, and had a secret obser-
vatory constructed, from which he could watch the ‘trial’ without being seen.141
Concerning this delight that he took in witnessing his rivals’ downfall there were
many rumours and, once again, many exaggerations. It was said that, at least at the
beginning of the first show trial, on 19 August 1936, the dictator had already left the
capital for his holidays. At the darkened window, invisible to the public, there was
to be only someone from his restricted circle, whose job it would be to tell him all
the details.142 There was also another story, which attempted to explain the docility
and cooperativeness of the people in the dock: thanks to the particular lighting of
the courtroom, the accused were replaced with doubles without the public notic-
ing. According to Medvedev, however, the accused were made cooperative by a
suitable combination of psychotropic drugs and torture, but in particular by the
forlorn hope of not dying alone and despised if they rendered one final service to
the party.143
Though deeply hidden and denied, somewhere in Stalin’s personality there
must have existed a human need for reconciliation, for a return to the womb of
a community of ideas and affections (originally implicit in the word ‘comrade’,
which for him had been drained of meaning). For this reason, probably, on the one
hand he could not face being present at such show trials, on the other he felt a
need to know that the victim really was upset, wept, begged for forgiveness for the
wrongs he had committed; these were probably ‘therapeutic’ experiences for him,
partly because they seemed to absolve him of his monstrous wrongs and partly
because he needed to experience ‘warm’ emotions, which had been unknown
to him since childhood. His rigidities, however, enabled him to experience them
only vicariously. All this was necessary to him and could be indirectly supplied
only by the real passion of a real person. Because of the same need to project the
deepest emotions onto another, Stalin seems to have taken a personal interest in all
the major investigations, and even prescribed to the police the kinds of interroga-
tion and torture that they were to use.144
The show trial was, admittedly, a performance, but at the same time it was a
‘reality’ created by the tyrant’s mind, which prevailed over the true, pre-existing
reality. The circularity and inversion of the mental processes typical of paranoia had
206
thoroughly contaminated the courtrooms. The soon-to-be-condemned criminals

would confess to crimes which both they and their accusers knew had never been
committed; then, imploringly, they would add: ‘Comrades of the Cheka [the state
counterespionage agency], Comrade Stalin, if you can, forgive me!’145 The inver-
sion of logic is complete; it is as if the victim had harmed his executioners, not
vice versa.
Stalin suffered, then, from extreme forms of splitting.The most perverted aspects
of his personality were denied; his paranoid anxiety was constantly searching for
adversaries in whom he could vicariously ‘punish’ the criminal inside himself. All
this, however, would not distinguish him from any other paranoiac. Stalin’s refine-
ment lies in having created a grandiose cathartic ritual which could function as
both public propaganda and private therapy.146 In society, he would rid himself of
a supposed adversary. But within his shadowy personality, he tried to rid himself
of inner ‘enemies’. By eliminating ‘traitors’, was he trying to eliminate the secret
informer of the tsarist police that he himself may formerly have been? Or was he
trying to erase the responsibility of being – as Trotsky had once said, incurring his
wrath – ‘the gravedigger’ who was burying the revolution and pushing the commu-
nist utopia down a plane too steeply inclined for it to be able to climb up again?147
Iosif Dzhugashvili got rid of the evil inside him on the one hand by inventing
an evil person and having him eliminated, and on the other by creating a new,
barbarous evil and having it acted out by a consummate man of the theatre – the
public prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky. For Stalin, the ‘procedural therapy’ was thus
complete: evil was driven out twice over, vicariously.
The twentieth-anniversary speech
The year 1937 also brought the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution.
Stalin felt that he was at the height of his power. Unusually, he delivered a relatively
lucid speech to the members of the Politburo, discussing historical subjects as well
as future plans.148 The old Russia, he explained, was now integrated economically,
politically and culturally into a unitary state. There was equality among its different
peoples. But ‘among these equal nations it is the Russian nation that is the most
Soviet and the most revolutionary’. Stalin never explained what this peremptory
sentence meant. (To us, however, it explains what inspired George Orwell to write
Animal Farm, the most celebrated critique of communism of all time.The pigs carry
out the revolution, liberating the animals from the tyranny of man, but immediately
create the sibylline slogan: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals [i.e. the pigs] are
more equal than others.’149)
Identifying with this immense power, Stalin had warmed up as the speech went
on. Anyone who weakened that power would be considered an enemy of the peo-
ple and destroyed, along with his clan. There have always been traitors: Stalin gave
a long list of them. They were people who had plotted or acted in collusion with
foreign invaders. But now the Soviet Union has achieved strength and solidity and
will annihilate anyone – even a member of the party, even an old Bolshevik – who
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tries to weaken it, in reality or even in thought. Even in thought: paranoia wants to

control that too, and the paranoiac wants to intimidate any listener who still thinks.
Here Dzhugashvili paused for breath, proposing a toast: not to the Soviet Union,
but to the destruction of traitors, which was evidently closer to his heart. Then he
spoke about enemies, adorning them with Homeric epithets: Lenin was the eagle,
they were hens. Let the bird of prey swoop down on the chickens and scatter them.
Certainly, leaders should be good orators and I am a mediocre one, he added with
realism, but, after all, what do leaders matter? They come and go. Only the people
remains; only the people is immortal.
The violence of the speech was quite explicit; who it was aimed at was less
clear. It contained all the ‘best’ Stalin, with his exquisitely vague allusions. Everyone
present could recognize themselves in the character who was now in a position of
authority but whose destiny came and went, like a gust of wind. Even the hidden
traitor who was ruining the Soviet Union was actually present, he was close, he was
among the highest authorities. He was closer than Stalin thought, for – if events are
judges – it was Stalin himself.
The ‘denationalizations’ and the ideology that lay behind them

The fascisms were sweeping across Europe. It is interesting to note that the Stalinian
deportations also tended towards a nationalist extremism and corresponded to
those of the right-wing extremisms, though inverting them as in a mirror: they
did not try to reinforce nationalities but to denationalize. The Russian nation was
the only one never to be targeted as such. The border populations were the first
to be deported, towards remote places, in the middle of the immense country.150
All 171,000 Koreans were moved from the Far East to the Kazakh steppes. Since
Stalin had swallowed up half of Poland, it was not possible to transport all the Poles;
however, of 1.5 million deportees, only 613,000 would return. Although proof
of actual plans in this direction are lacking, there is a striking symmetry between
Stalin’s policy and the Nazi design of reducing Poland to a country of slaves, by
depriving it of its educated classes. Hitler’s plan involved, after the German occupa-
tion, stopping education at mid-secondary-school level; Stalin began by removing
the intellectuals, the middle classes and, to annihilate the army, all the officers. Both
operations represented the first phase of what, from Raphael Lemkin onwards, was
called genocide.151 A few years later, Lemkin himself affirmed that the category of
genocide applied to Stalin’s policies.152
Stalin’s suspicion caused massacres that were increasingly difficult to explain by
mere political calculation. The rigid ideological presupposition of his reasoning
can be reconstructed only in part. Stalin’s prejudice may have been influenced
by the social Darwinian culture; that is, it may, once again, have had an ideologi-
cal origin parallel to that of Nazi prejudice. It was taken for granted that cer-
tain national or social groups were constitutionally incapable of cooperating with
Soviet society – defective by their very nature; so it was necessary to strike at their
children too.153 The dictator intervened to condemn the theories of Mendel and
208
rehabilitate Lamarck, whom biology considered no longer tenable.154 According to

Lamarckism, not only genetic characteristics but also those gradually acquired by
education could be transmitted in a hereditary manner; in the dictator’s judgement,
this flexibility was more consonant with communism than the rigid ‘fascist’ heredi-
tary theory of Mendelian genetics. With this theoretical presupposition, the totali-
tarian options remained comfortably open: you could send an entire population
to the work camps in the Arctic for a long ‘re-education’, at the end of which its
new social sense would survive in the generations to come; alternatively, you could
exterminate all the adults together with the children without too many regrets,
considering that their unsocial aptitudes would in any case be reproduced among
the children. In practice, the two solutions alternated.
From the first pages of this book we have imagined that paranoid violence
is a prosthesis that fills a void in psychic experience. However, in its intention-
ally ambiguous multiformity, Stalin’s plan had a unified purpose, which was partly
achieved: it aimed to bring about the psychological extermination of certain groups.
To ‘ex-terminate’ means to take beyond natural limits or boundaries, to a condi-
tion that is no longer bearable. This corresponds to suppressing a national iden-
tity, without necessarily killing the whole population. In the Stalinian perspective,
the survivors are presumed to be not merely denationalized but also ‘re-educated’,
that is, psychologically ‘emptied’, willing to be absorbed into a new ethnic group
and a new ideology. Underlying this practice we see a nineteenth-century Marxist
dogma, which the twentieth century proved to be false (or at least overstated);
nationalism was deemed to be a transitory, bourgeois stage, which modernization
would make increasingly less important.155
Unpreparedness for war
How was it that the most suspicious man in history allowed himself to be caught
off guard by Hitler’s attack on 22 June 1941? With the gradual emergence of docu-
ments from the Soviet archives, various studies have claimed that Stalin was neither
materially nor psychologically unprepared for war; he distrusted Hitler and was
himself preparing to attack Germany. If that was the case, in the game of paranoia,
and of the ‘pre-emptive attacks’ that it inspires, the Führer simply got there first. It
was the most spectacular case in which his impulsive temperament and his readiness
to gamble brought him a temporary triumph.
From the military point of view, Stalin would have been caught in a phase of
preparation which, because of his mistrust of the leaders of his own army, and the
enormous size and chronic disorganization of the Soviet Union, must have been
much longer than that of Germany. With the pact between Hitler and Stalin of
August 1939 and the partition of the intermediate countries, largely the result of
further aggression by Stalin, the Soviet borders had moved significantly westwards.
According to this reconstruction, when the Red Army was attacked by Operation
Barbarossa, it had already dismantled most of its old defensive lines but had not yet
finished constructing the new ones, further west.
209
A historically controversial but psychologically interesting interpretation has

been proposed by Constantine Pleshakov.156 He points out that the new military
installations that Stalin wanted to build ran very close to the new frontier, which
would have made no sense for a defensive line, because a violent surprise attack
could have reached and breached it at once, rendering it useless. Such a line would
have made sense, however, as the basis for a surprise attack, because it made it possible
to penetrate immediately into enemy territory. According to this reconstruction,
Stalin was planning to attack Germany in 1942. Hitler, however, penetrated into
the Soviet Union a year earlier, and his divisions succeeded in destroying the enemy
when they were still unprepared; they surrounded a large number of Soviets and
took them prisoner precisely because they were organizing military positions close
to the border, without any safety cushions enabling them to absorb a first impact
and regroup (something which the large spaces of the Soviet Union would have
made possible).
At any rate, most historians agree that Stalin was preparing for war with Germany
but still needed a long time before he could be ready.157
If he really was moving the fortified lines further west, Stalin had chosen not
to exploit one of Russia’s great advantages: the immensity of its territory, which
would have enabled him to keep the military structures in places inaccessible to the
enemy. One result was that the Germans swooped on the Russian air force in a few
minutes and destroyed most of it while it was still on the ground.
Furthermore, mistrust had led Stalin to carry out what were nothing less than
massacres among his high commands. Compared with the armed forces of 1935, in
the period immediately preceding the German attack he had eliminated three of
the five marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, eight of the nine fleet
admirals and admirals Grade 1, fifty of the fifty-seven corps commanders, 154 of the
186 divisional commanders, sixteen of the sixteen army commissars, twenty-five
of the twenty-eight corps commissars and fifty-eight of the sixty-four divisional
commissars.158
Depending on their level, the training of new senior military officers would have
taken from ten to twenty years.159 No general had ever so radically decapitated an
enemy army; Stalin had done it to his own army. Hitler could not have chosen a
better ally.
Finally, a further reason for unpreparedness was the rigidity of Dzhugashvili’s ideo-
logical premises. He firmly believed in revolutionary anti-capitalism. This often led
him to underestimate Hitler as an enemy, for he was still a product of the 1918–19
revolutions, and a twin of Mussolini, a dictator formed on the left-wing barricades.
For Stalin, the real enemies remained the liberal democracies. Inverting even useful
information into paranoia, he dismissed the messages with which Churchill tried
to warn him about Hitler as ‘capitalist propaganda’. A month before the launch-
ing of Operation Barbarossa, Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland on a solitary
flight which historians have been unable to explain completely to this day. Stalin,
by contrast, immediately found an interpretation: it was ‘proof ’ that the British and
Germans were secretly striking an agreement. And at whose expense, if not that of
210
Communist Russia? In reality, all that can be said with certainty about Hess, Hitler’s
deputy in the National Socialist Party, is that he was mentally disturbed. Although
the prevalent view is that he wanted to reach some sort of agreement between
Great Britain and Germany, decades of historical research have not succeeded in
proving either that he had had contacts with the British or that his venture had
been ordered by Hitler.
In a sense, the closer the day of the German attack came, the more Stalin’s para-
noia, with paradoxical effects, banished it from his imagination. According to some
historians, he received eighty-four warnings of the coming attack,160 according to
others over a hundred.161 The most telling actually came through the embassies.
On 7 May, Count von Schulenburg, Germany’s representative in the Soviet Union,
invited (some say to breakfast, some to lunch, some to dinner) Dekanov, the Soviet
ambassador in Berlin, who had returned to Moscow for a short visit. Taking a deci-
sion which certainly had few precedents in diplomatic history, he revealed to him
that Germany was going to attack, even specifying the date: 22 June, as later proved
to be the case. Schulenburg was an old Bismarckian. Like the conspirators who later
tried to kill Hitler, whom he joined and together with whom he was condemned
to death, he believed that it was worth paying any price to save his country. His
words fell on deaf ears. When told about the conversation, Stalin commented sar-
castically to the Politburo: ‘We note that disinformation has now reached ambas-
sadorial level.’162 The dictator had eliminated from his espionage services anyone
who sent him information that did not correspond to what was already in his mind.
Despite this, Richard Sorge (a German communist, the most celebrated spy in the
Second World War) sent him, from Japan, advance warning of the German attack;
but Stalin did not hesitate to dismiss this report too.
The leader, then, was impermeable, not because of a lack of suspicions but
because he had too many. The more information accumulated, the more this accu-
mulation ‘proved’ that they were trying to trick him. Not being able to vent his
anger on other countries’ hierarchies, Stalin vented it on his own: a few days before
the attack he had another 300 officers arrested, right up to the highest ranks.163 It
was the completion of the operation that his unconscious (being self-destructive,
as it often is in paranoiacs) had begun long ago, eliminating those who helped him
and assisting the enemy.
There were increasingly frequent reports of German planes flying over Soviet
territory to take final photographs of objectives to be attacked. Stalin gave his air
force strict orders not to respond: these too were provocations, probably organized
by the German generals without the knowledge of Hitler, or the untrustworthy
Ribbentrop. Iosif Vissarionovich felt that he did not have complete control of the
country, and, by projection, he believed that Hitler was in a similar situation. (In fact
it was not until 1944 that a real opposition to the Führer managed to organize itself.)
Movements of German ships were also reported, but according to Stalin this
was yet another provocation, indeed a provocation by the British (whom he preferred
as conspirators), so he ordered the person who had reported it to be punished
immediately.164
211
There were only a few hours to go before the Apocalypse. A German soldier
deserted, going over to the Russians with the latest details of the attack: his reward
was to be shot at once.165 During the last night two more of Hitler’s soldiers crossed
the lines, probably communists who had survived the repression. It had no effect.
The news that reached Stalin reinforced his incredulity. But the Soviet political and
military intermediaries themselves were too accustomed to his mistrust and to the
punishments that ensued from it, so they found any possible excuse to pour scorn
on this information and not contradict him.166 Paradoxically, in such a grave situa-
tion their actions were motivated more by fear of Stalin, the beloved leader, than by fear of
Hitler, the deadly enemy.
When, on the morning of 22 June, news of the attack started coming in on
every side, Stalin’s reaction was still one of denial.167 Even when the ambassador Von
Schulenburg asked him for an urgent appointment, he did not believe that he was
about to hand him the declaration of war; he expected, rather, a series of requests,
to support which Hitler had tried to intimidate him with a bit of sabre-rattling.168
Paradoxically, someone who already lives in mistrust and plans evil every
day may not understand it when it really appears. As we have seen, on the news
of the assassination of the hereditary prince of Austria, which would cause the
outbreak of the First World War, Hitler was mistaken: he thought it had been a
German hypernationalist like him, because he himself would have liked to kill
Franz Ferdinand. Stalin, too, reasoned by identifying excessively with the enemy.
So now he thought that the German upper echelons were plotting against Hitler –
the twin whom he unconsciously admired – and provoking him. The guns were
thundering from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, but he still hesitated to order the
counter-attack right along the front. Only slowly, torpidly, did he emerge from this
paralysis. He did not emerge, properly speaking, from a real depression, but from
a sort of mute astonishment. Depression, as it is commonly understood, involves
doubts about oneself, feelings of guilt and self-accusations – that is, albeit in the
form of psychopathology, it expresses self-criticism, something the paranoiac is
constitutionally incapable of.169
Counter-attack and the conclusion of the conflict

There is a final phase in the clash between the Nazi empire and the Soviet empire
that we must address. On the western front and on the eastern one two differ-
ent wars were fought.170 Paradoxical as it may seem, after the horrors to which
the history of Nazism has accustomed us, in fighting the Anglo-Americans the
Wehrmacht for the most part respected the Geneva Convention: in contravention
of the fundamental lines of German policy established at Wannsee, captured Anglo-
American soldiers were usually sent to normal prisoner-of-war camps, even if they
were Jewish.
The eastern front, however, was not in Europe. Perhaps it was not even in Asia,
but in the flames of hell. After the Stalingrad ‘pocket’, the tide had completely
turned in 1943. Now it was the Wehrmacht that was in retreat, and the Red Army
212
that was advancing; it would stop only at Berlin. Millions of people killed by the
Nazis, the inhumane conditions of imprisonment and the roundups of Jews and
suspects had to be avenged. The Red Army had contracted a mass paranoid infec-
tion, which was further encouraged by propaganda.
This, unfortunately, greatly prolonged a war whose outcome was already cer-
tain. Though fighting in conditions of growing inferiority, the Germans retreated
only very slowly and hardly ever chose to surrender, knowing that the Geneva
Convention for the protection of prisoners of war (which the Soviets had not
signed and which therefore, with sadistic satisfaction, the Nazis had not applied to
them) now lived in another solar system.
AtYalta the overall design of the post-war picture had been sketched.This included
a vast shift of borders to the detriment of Germany, mainly to make room for the
millions of Poles who had fled or been driven from their homes in 1939, when
the eastern half of their country had been invaded by the Soviets. To carry out the
operation, however, it was no longer sufficient to move the borders, as had formerly
been done at the end of a war. To cut off the problem of the minorities at the base,
the populations would be moved too. After 1945, about 15–16 million Germans
were driven out, expelled, deported from territories they had inhabited for centuries.
Between 2 million and 2.5 million people did not survive the ‘shift’.171 It was the
largest involuntary migration in human history, as well as the first and greatest case
of what today is called ‘ethnic cleansing’ and considered a crime against humanity.172
Stalin had already acquired experience in the field by carrying out immense plans
of ethnic cleansing within the Soviet Union. Now it was a question of carrying out
another one, which would be even larger but external, in other countries.
Such a vast and unprecedented operation was almost impossible to plan but
gradually began of its own accord. The political and military authorities of the
victorious countries ended up simply overseeing and channelling it. The engine
that drove it autonomously was collective paranoia. When, in its westward advance,
the Red Army had moved right across Poland and entered Germany, something
new happened. The merciless brutality of the fighting was supplemented by an
extreme brutality towards the civilian population.173 Most German males were
under arms and were retreating with the front. The women needed convincing
too. Thus occurred the greatest episode of collective rape recorded by history.174 As
often happens with paranoiacs, after his initial successes, due to extreme speed and
ruthlessness, Hitler had set in motion a process that realized the very thing he feared
most: racial bastardization. An incalculable number of children that would be born
in late 1945 and early 1946 were the offspring of Soviets.175
But it was not only the Germans who resisted to the last drop of blood, con-
scious that the option of surrendering did not exist. While the Italians and the
other allies of the Axis – Romanians, Hungarians and Slovaks – went their own
ways, an assortment of what were technically Soviet nationalities remained with the
Wehrmacht to the last: Latvians, Ukrainians and even Russians under the command
of General Vlasov. Most of them had entered the war on the wrong side for a just
reason: to get rid of Stalin. Now they could no longer rely on anything, and they
213
resisted to the death, or retreated as far as possible so as to ‘slip’ into the western
front, in the hope of being captured by the Allies; thus the Cossacks who had fought
on the German side succeeded in giving themselves up to the British who were
occupying Austria. His Majesty’s troops took them prisoner, only to hand them
back to Stalin. Near Lienz, in the Tyrol, there was absolute carnage, because many
Cossacks resisted the British, while others committed mass suicide. To the Allies’
surprise, many of the forced labourers that the Germans had taken from the east
bitterly resisted repatriation to the Soviet Union.176 Even French prisoners of war
did not want to be liberated by the advancing Red Army, preferring to follow the
Germans, even though they had subjected them to forced labour.177
After dividing up eastern Europe with Hitler, at Yalta Stalin had started dividing
up the world with the Allies.The latter had promised to hand over all Soviet citizens
to him. Stalin considered soldiers of the Red Army who had fallen into the hands
of the Germans and were still alive not as prisoners of war, but as traitors. He was
entitled to do this under Order 270 of the Military Code, signed by him: anyone
who surrendered, even in the most desperate situation, automatically became a
deserter. As such, not only could he be condemned to death, but, to make the order
more convincing, his entire family could be arrested and deported or punished in
other ways.178 Those who had been forcibly confined to work camps, or had simply
worked in areas occupied by the Germans, were suspect because of that very fact;
many were killed immediately (on the grounds that they had not fought to the
death and had not joined the bands of partisans), but most were sent to the gulags,
which accordingly registered millions of new arrivals with the end of the war,
reaching possibly their highest ever population.179
Suspicion hits the Jews

The Livre noir, edited by Ehrenburg and Grossman, which was to be the first, pow-
erful study of the extermination of the Soviet Jews by the Nazis, was ready for the
press in 1947. Its publication, however, was forbidden, even though it had been
twice revised by the censors and contained a foreword by Grossman paying ful-
some compliments to Stalin.180 Courtroom justice may be slow, but cultural justice
is even slower. Not only did Grossman die unknown, to be discovered as a writer
only several decades later, but the Russian original of the Livre noir appeared only in
1993, in a limited edition printed not in Russia but in Lithuania, a country which
had in the meantime become independent again.
To encourage the Red Army to be vengeful as the final advance against the
Nazis was being prepared, Stalin had ordered that thousands of bodies of Jews who
had been killed be exhumed and lined up along the side of the road travelled by
the troops and that the soldiers be told that they were Soviet citizens, not Jews.
Discussing the exceptional nature of what would later be called the Holocaust, or
Shoah, was considered a political crime. Stalin, who had been Hitler’s forerunner,
then his imitator and finally his ally, after Hitler’s death anticipated what would be
a characteristic of the neo-Nazis: denial of the Jewish extermination.
214
Jealousy and envy, which we know are present in paranoiacs, had not spared
Stalin on this occasion either. After the victory over Nazism, the dictator looked
with growing suspicion on anything that emphasized the fact that the Jews had
been the first and most radical victims of the Third Reich. According to Stalin’s
guidelines, none of the protagonists was authorized to downplay the importance of
the true victor of the struggle against the fascisms: the Soviet Union. There was to
be no primogeniture.
Not allowing ethnic or national identities to be emphasized was a logical con-
sequence of communist internationalism. For a long time Stalin’s policies were
notable for their caution in accusing Jews qua Jews; that might paradoxically have
confirmed Nazi allegations of their excessive influence in the Soviet Union. Later,
however, Stalin showed increasing mistrust of them.
As soon as the war against Hitler began, a Jewish anti-fascist committee had
been formed in the Soviet Union, with the aim of inciting Jews all round the world
to fight against Nazism; in particular it was hoped that it would facilitate, through
the American Jews, an alliance with, and assistance from, the United States. Such
exchanges, however, being made between cultural figures, were not only interna-
tional but cosmopolitan, a quality which is suspect, as we know, to dictators, and to
Stalin in particular. In the late 1940s and the beginning of the following decade the
committee was gradually eliminated, with the arrest of its members and a growing
number of Jewish figures. The trials led to death sentences or decades of intern-
ment, while the witch-hunt spread to the satellite countries of eastern Europe.
Little is known even today about what happened next. Already in the spring
of 1952 the number of Jews confined to the gulags increased significantly.181 In
early 1953, a ‘conspiracy of doctors’ was revealed, causing a great sensation; nine
important specialists, six of them Jews, who had been treating some senior Soviet
figures, had been accused of plotting to kill them and had already ‘confessed’. The
revelations increased and mingled with accusations of nationalism, cosmopolitanism
and Zionism.182 We will never really know whether, as many have suggested, those
revelations were the start of an anti-Semitic campaign, linked to a new ‘great purge’.
Nor will we ever know whether Stalin was consciously inspired by the case of
Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth I’s Portuguese Jewish doctor, who was hung, drawn
and quartered in 1594 for allegedly trying to kill her. It is not essential to know
whether an insane man set eyes on a myth and decided to appropriate it, for it is
often the myth that singles out a madman and decides to make use of him. Nor is
it even necessary to know how far the myth corresponds to historical truth; some
have suggested that Lopez was indeed guilty, and of course it is not inconceivable
that one of Stalin’s doctors really did plot against him. The myth works regardless.
The stories of Lopez’s conspiracy probably contributed much to the character of
Shylock, one of the most powerful figures in Shakespeare’s plays. Just as Lopez and
other converted Jews were suspected of having remained Israelites in private, doc-
tors or intellectuals were suspected by Stalin of not having ‘converted’ sufficiently
to their new Soviet identity and of having remained, deep down, cosmopolitan,
bourgeois Jewish intellectuals.
215
Stalin’s death
Paradoxically, a crucial factor in Stalin’s death was not a medical operation but the
omission of one. Because of Stalin’s tendency to reserve all the most important
decisions for himself, moreover, no procedure existed for replacing him in the event
of illness, nor of deciding on his treatment or declaring him of unsound mind.
In the night between 28 February and 1 March 1953, the Georgian dictator
had severe heart problems, which left him paralysed and almost unconscious. All
the next day the guards did not see him leave his bedroom, but they did not take
any action, for fear of punishment. Only towards evening, with the justification
that the mail had arrived, did they dare to knock on the door. Iosif Vissarinovich
Dzhugashvili lay gasping on the floor, wallowing in his own urine. At last Beria
and Malenkov were called. It was the early hours of 2 March before they reached
the dacha, and later still before a doctor was called. But all the people who had
treated Stalin’s circulatory problems (he had never stopped drinking and had only
recently given up tobacco, after smoking heavily for half a century183) were in jail.
His new doctors’ hands trembled at the serious clinical situation, but even more
at the responsibility. More time passed; eventually a second opinion was requested
from Lubyanka prison, where the best specialists in the country were being held.184
At that time, certain techniques already existed for removing various kinds of
blood clot, but they were risky. The doctors were in an agony of indecision. The
patient’s condition was clearly critical, but if, as seemed very likely, he died after an
operation, they would be suspected of having killed him. If, on the other hand, they
did not operate, it would be thought that they had wanted to let him die. Even the
clinical choice ended up being determined by suspicion. In the general fear, inac-
tion prevailed. Infecting everyone, paranoia yet again proved a paranoiac’s downfall.
Beria, the cruel and debauched chief of police, was one of the favourites for
the succession. As Khrushchev later recounted, he stayed beside Stalin for a long
time, now cursing him, now kneeling down and kissing his hands; but always with-
out calling the doctors.185 Then, without waiting for him to die, he rushed to the
Kremlin, followed soon afterwards by Khrushchev and Malenkov, to ‘tidy up’ those
of the leader’s documents which were thought to be urgent. This led to the disap-
pearance of a large number of papers which Stalin kept in his desk to blackmail
anyone – mainly evidence, going back a long way, about the many people who had
played a double game.
Finally, in the late evening of 5 March 1953, Stalin died. With his propensity
for euphoria, Beria convinced himself that his dilatory handling of the situation
had accelerated the dictator’s death, taking him to the top; so he boasted to the
assembled members of the Politburo that he had liberated them.186
The group began to relax and launched a joint administration. Rather than elect-
ing Beria leader, they preferred to send him before a firing squad; in those circum-
stances, the matter did not cause much of a stir.Then the repressive apparatus softened.
The population of the camps, which, as we have seen, was 12 million, two and a half
times that of Switzerland, quickly diminished;187 the atrocities of the previous decades
216
evidently depended more on Stalin’s personality than on the system. Khrushchev

came to power and showed himself – at least compared to his predecessor – open
to dialogue, both internally and internationally. After only three years, in 1956, he
denounced the tyrant’s massacres.Apart from the dramatic revelation of Stalin’s crimes,
his report to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union contained an observation
that is interesting for our present concerns. It had been Stalin who had invented the
concept of ‘enemy of the people’, adaptable to the whole country – that is, paradoxi-
cally, to the entire people.This tautology devoid of content, used as the foundation of
his repressions, had made it possible to eliminate anyone without the need to prove
anything. A granite hypostasis had imprisoned three decades and a country as vast as
a continent, blending politics and psychopathology.
The paradoxes of paranoid totalitarianism

Paranoia is contrary to normal human thought and to reason. By doing things to
excess, it encounters limits. If its tendency to denial still prevails, it goes beyond
them. At that point it participates in a process of self-annihilation; we have seen this
in Hitler’s last, absurd command, the Nero Decree.
Stalin’s incomplete project of unleashing another stream of terror, which was
probably being prepared in early 1953, left too many people, in high places, with
the suspicion that they might be among the eliminable. For many historical reasons,
but also because of this paradoxical effect, Stalin was probably already moribund
some time before he died physically. Whatever new repression he was planning, he
would have had more difficulty in guiding it. Previously, in the ‘golden age’ of his
terror, it had only taken a ‘government decree’ (ukaz) and an appropriate media
campaign for hordes of informers to rise up, at all levels of society, ready to cry
out: yes, it’s true, this crime has existed for a long time, I can report many cases of it!
The American historian Goldhagen has accused the majority of Germans of
being Nazism’s ‘willing executioners’. This phenomenon, however, belongs not to
a specific political regime but to every society in which the leaders have succeeded
in promoting mass paranoia. Fortunately, mass paranoia seems to have physiological
cycles and does not succeed in lasting for ever anywhere.
The Stalinian system of a constant stream of reciprocal accusations, as a way of
controlling society in a totalitarian manner, required penetration at all levels and
came to institutionalize permanent suspicion in it. The notorious Article 58 had
instilled suspicion in every corner of the Soviet Union, while in the judicial system
the contribution of the public prosecutor Vyshinsky had been crucial.
Solzhenitsyn said:
[the] great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide sweeping

58 […] summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its
sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation. […] There is no step,
thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be pun-
ished by the heavy hand of Article 58.188
217
The judicial apparatus could apply it to everything that was suspectable, and there-
fore to everything – by extension, by analogy, by the moral conviction of the judge,
when proof was lacking.
[In 1937] Vyshinsky […] pointed out in a report […] that it is never possible
for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then
proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had
not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial
could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. […] Thence arose the
most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute evidence […]
The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find
them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his
office, basing his conclusions […] on his own […] moral forces.189
Once the objective evidence of guilt was replaced by the moral strength of the
investigating magistrate, the latter made the mental process of paranoia the founda-
tion of the inquiry, giving it both logical and psychological precedence over the
judicial process. What matters at this point in all those who cooperate voluntarily
with the leader is a primal revelation of what is just, syntonic with that of the leader.
The other steps in the judicial process are manipulable accordingly.The circularity of
paranoia is also assured: the moral conviction of the judge, which ought to be the
result of the trial, becomes its point of departure.
According to Glover, Stalin is the perfect example of the tyrant announced
already by Aristotle.190 He governed by ensuring that his hierarchs did not trust
each other, and he, in turn, trusted no one. As was mentioned above, this systematic
paranoid mistrust had an equivalent in the police and judicial apparatus. This is the
characteristic of Stalin’s regime which concerns our theme and which differentiates
it, to some extent, from that of Hitler. Hitler’s treatment of his hierarchs is more
‘collective’, that of his enemies apparently more decisive; things appear clearer: if
you are an enemy, you know you are, and you know, or can guess, what is going to
happen to you. With Stalin, everything is more complex. At first sight less cruel, he
can turn out to be secretly more sadistic. He destroys you slowly. Before taking over
your body, he gains possession of your mind.
This subtle supplementary cruelty leads us to paranoia again, for it is the per-
verted fruit of an iron basic conviction. Paradoxically, it derives from the very fact that
the underlying ideology is more generous than that of the Nazis. For it preserves
a residue of Marxist social doctrine: all men are equal and must cooperate equally,
without individual indulgences or flexibilities.The perversion of this premise lies in
the fact that the common good is established by only one of the two parties – the
political or judicial authorities – while the other plays the part of its unconscious
counterweight: it is evil, the scapegoat.
Before degrading and humiliating you, the regime makes you act out your self-
degradation and self-humiliation. It makes you carry out the performance and wit-
ness it so as to strip you of even the last vestige of an identity that a victim can
218
have: hatred of his aggressor. For even more than your executioner, you will have
to hate his most zealous helper, you yourself.
The malevolent Nazi society described by Goldhagen is subsumed, then, in the
internal microcosm of the Stalinian subject. The procedure is sealed in every sense.
After torturing you for a long time both psychically and physically, without ever
informing you of your rights (the Soviet Code was rather enlightened and would
have provided wide-ranging guarantees for the person under investigation), the
judge could ask you not only to sign the manipulated transcript of the interrogation
but also to sign at the bottom of Article 206: with an excess of paranoid caution,
this promised you a second sentence if you revealed to anyone the methods by which
the hearing had been carried out.191
Why? Of course we immediately think of the propagandistic use that could
have been made of the self-accusations and confessions that were extorted. But that
argument is weak. A power that subjugated even its most determined adversaries in
this way had long since subjugated the mass media; it could slander without restric-
tion, it could have what it wanted published in any case.
The quest for this perverted cooperation is so vast, complex and, in its turn,
unprecedented, that we cannot explain it with political reasons alone. Tyrannical
politics eliminates its enemy. Here, however, the tyrant does not merely eliminate
him. He asks him for help, as if to clear up an anxious doubt, to fill a void and an
insecurity that – in every sense – belong to the infancy of paranoia and express
themselves in an ineffaceable residue of moral formalism.
Along with this gleam of morality, the Stalinian show trial can express a supple-
mentary cruelty: this is not, properly speaking, a contradiction, for what it des-
perately manifests is in fact an unresolved ambivalence. The entire construction is
pervaded by an irreconcilable dualism between a moral presupposition and immoral
consequences, between an ideal of life and a reality of death. It is suspended on a
bridge and cannot reach the other bank. The Creon syndrome has frozen: his mor-
tal hesitation is no longer oscillation, but empty immobility.
In this, too, Hitler was different. National Socialism (for Hitler is practically
identical to National Socialism, and this simplifies comprehension) had crossed its
bridge. It had left most of society on this side (supporting the economic apparatus
and, to some extent, the scientific, university and ecclesiastical ones) and had gone
across to the other side, to a ‘social Darwinian morality’.
Stalinian radical communism, on the other hand, proclaims the rebirth of the whole
of society, which implies the death of the whole of the previous one. Its oscillation
between promising life and dealing death is therefore not only degeneration, but absurd
consistency with an inhumanly iron conviction. Because of this rigid scheme of renewal,
every personal tie or social role is subjected to the suspicion of being a continuation of the
pre-existent.There exist residues of the preceding world which, because of an error, did
not die.Their death is not a personal matter but the elimination of that error.
In Nazism, part of society, presumed to be the majority and good, must crush
the sick part. In Stalinist communism the whole new community corresponds to
the good.
219
In order to survive, Stalin’s regime invited people to sign a Faustian pact

and betray the previous values in which everyone had believed.192 Friends were
encouraged to betray their friends, children to inform on their parents (an aber-
ration that would be perfected by the Cultural Revolution),193 intellectuals to be
disloyal to themselves.
With Stalin it is not easy to tell how far he was really convinced that a person
was his enemy and how far this was invented by his propaganda to eliminate adver-
saries. It is likely that the answer to this complex question is the simplest one, sug-
gested by Khrushchev already in 1956: Stalin uttered monstrosities and put them
into practice because he believed them. According to his successor, therefore, he
was ‘in good faith’; according to psychopathology that would mean that he suffered
from pseudologia phantastica, like his unwitting Nazi twin. At any rate, this personal
tragedy was so great as to become the tragedy of the whole Soviet Union and of
the hundreds of millions of people who, in the world, look on it as a beacon that lit
the path towards a world of justice, whereas in reality it was returning to a darkness
that had been unknown for centuries; under the tyranny of the tsars a person under
investigation had the right not to inform against a close relative, and, if he showed
repentance, was often pardoned.194
Final questions
Even after the clear-out by his successors, some papers were left in the drawer in
Stalin’s desk.195 The oldest was a letter from Lenin, urging him to apologize to
Krupskaya and reproaching him for the brutality with which he had treated her.
The most recent was written by Tito, and it too contained an ultimatum: if he
didn’t stop sending hitmen to kill him, Tito wrote, he himself would hire an assas-
sin to eliminate him, Stalin. Yet another was Bucharin’s last message before being
executed: ‘Koba, why do you need me to die?’
It is interesting to reflect on the reasons why, among the huge number of letters
that had passed through his hands, Stalin kept these particular ones.They were obvi-
ously letters written by people who were important to him, on important subjects,
but also – probably – which he had never replied to. They were lying in his drawer
because, absurdly, something in him would have liked to reply, but he had remained
paralysed like Creon. Or were they precious, definitive documents, entrusted to
eternity because to him the reply was already clear and implicit? An indirect sugges-
tion comes from Robert Conquest, the greatest historian of the Stalinian terror.196
Although he had first-hand experience of the Soviet world, having been a journal-
ist on the Ukrainian front during the Second World War and later a British liaison
officer in Bulgaria, Conquest had at first written only novels and poetry (and as
such was mentioned in the Yearbook of the Soviet Encyclopaedia). Only gradually
did he begin to take an interest in the Stalinian massacres. One day he was struck by
a reply from Szamuely, an extremely well-informed Hungarian dissident who had
fled to London. Conquest asked him why Stalin had annihilated all his most senior
military officers. I understand, he said, why he had Marshal Tukhachevsky shot.197
220
But why Marshal Yekorov too? ‘Why not?’ was the answer. The explanation was so
illuminating that Conquest thenceforth made his researches into Stalinism the main
activity of his life. Perhaps for us too this is the key to the dictator. Stalin’s reply to
Bucharin’s question ‘Why do you want me to die?’ was probably ‘Why not?’
Roy Medvedev, too, tried to sum up his passionate research into Stalinism in a
question.198 Given the history of pre-Soviet Russia on the one hand and Marxist
doctrine on the other, he asked, would any other successor of Lenin have become
as cruel as Stalin? And, if the conclusion were yes, should Iosif Dzhugashvili at least
be given credit for achieving the modernization of a backward country in a very
short time?
According to Medvedev, such an argument risks relativizing the greatest mas-
sacres in history and accepting the annihilation of human dignity. Medvedev
opposed this consequentialism: Lenin was not the inevitable outcome of the
revolution, nor was Stalin the only possibility, given Lenin. But his argument
remains linked to the political and historical perspective. The socio-political
theories are indeed premises from which consequences (though not necessar-
ily the ones that were predicted) emerge. The preceding historical conditions
are also premises which produce consequences, though these too are variable.
Considering these objective circumstances in particular one is tempted to think
that any other leader would have ended up behaving like Stalin. But the perspec-
tive changes if we introduce the variable of psychopathology. The historical and
economic circumstances would probably have led another ruler, too, to clash with
the peasants; only Stalin, however, was completely paranoid and behaved in a paranoid
manner both against the ‘kulaki’ and against Ukraine, producing massacres which no
socio-political objective could justify and which, as Medvedev rightly points out,
were also very concrete obstacles to the social cohesion and economic progress
of the Soviet Union – to such an extent that, we may add today, they laid the
foundations, several decades beforehand, for its collapse.
Notes
1 Hobsbawm 1994: 392.
2 Riasanovsky 1984: 163.
3 See Tucker 1973: Chapter 13. His daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (see Alliluyeva 1967), sev-
eral times stresses that her relationship with her country of origin was transmitted to her
by her mother; her father denied it, and only certain unbreakable habits could reveal it.
4 See Souvarine 1935: 37.
5 Alliluyeva 1969: Part 1, Chapter 7 (my italics).
6 Even for the childhood of Iosif Dzhugashvili we have little documentary evidence and
are chiefly reliant on unconfirmed theories. His life is wrapped in paranoia from the
moment of conception to that of death. The historical studies speak of a natural father
but indicate different people. See for example Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 1; Service
2004: Chapter 2.
7 See Medvedev 2003; Pilgrim 1986. The biographies cited here are mainly based on the
account by Stalin’s daughter (see Alliluyeva 1967), written immediately after her flight to
the United States.
8 See Jung 1939.
221
9 The primary sources for this information are summarized particularly in Service
2004: Chapters 2 and 3; and Tucker 1973: Chapter 3.
10 See Tucker 1973: Chapter 3.
11 See Alliluyeva 1969: Chapter 17.
12 See Medvedev 1971: Part 3, Chapter 9.
13 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 46.
15 Ljass 2008.
16 Cited in Djilas 1962: 111.
17 Cited in Djilas 1962: 154.
18 Cited in Djilas 1962: Chapter 1.
19 See Ljass 2008.
20 Djilas 1962: 187.
21 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 17; Medvedev 1971: Part 2, Chapter 5; Conquest
1968: 146.
23 A very similar dialogue had already been described by one of the earliest historians.
Confident in its overwhelming superiority, ancient Athens had demanded complete
surrender from the inhabitants of the island of Melos, who had rejected the demand as
unjust. Athens had of course won the ensuing military battle, but Melos had won the
battle of memory. In the history of the Athenian democracy, the dialogue between the
two parts constitutes a mark of disgrace which still lives on thousands of years later. See
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War,V, 84 ff.
24 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 12; Bullock 1991: Chapter 10; Souvarine
1935: Chapters 10 and 11; Conquest 1968: Part 2; Service 2004: Part 3; Medvedev
1971: Chapter 9; Stalin 1995. It is interesting to note that even Service 2004: Part 1,
Chapter 1, who is perhaps the most benevolent of Stalin’s biographers, and who in
the foreword to his book declares that he wants to show that his personality was more
complex than that of the monster described by most scholars, has no doubts about
the pathological traits of his character, which he describes as a ‘gross personality
disorder’.
26 At the Second Party Congress, held in July and August 1903 in Brussels and London. See
Service 2004: Chapter 5.
27 See Conquest 1968: Introduction.
28 See Medvedev 1971: Chapter 15; Amis 2002: 240.
29 Souvarine (1935: Chapter 1) stresses this inconstancy. The exposition of theoretical
Marxist thought always refers back to Marx or other classical texts, or to the history of
the proletariat down the centuries. There is none of this in Stalin’s writings, where only
Lenin appears as a source. Was Stalin a Marxist?
30 See Conquest 1968: 56. Conquest rightly emphasizes that it is a strictly paranoid for-
mula, which makes it possible to attribute any different idea to a conspiracy.
32 Schicklgruber was the original surname of Hitler’s father, who decided to change it to
the more elegant-sounding Hitler before his son was born; Adolf was apparently very
happy about this decision.
34 “Lenin’s Testament” can be read on various websites. I used the following one: http://
sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/lenin-testament.asp. See also the extracts from original
documents given in the appendix to Stalin 1995.
36 See Conquest 1968: Chapter 4; Medvedev 1971: Part 2, Chapter 6; Medvedev 1979:
Chapter 5.
222
39 See Figes 2007: Chapter 3. The figures provided by Western historians seem conser-
vative. Solzhenitsyn (1973–80: II, 451) had estimated (with an assessment that seems
exaggerated) that at least 15 million peasants had already been deported or annihilated
by 1932. To this should be added the more specifically political purges of the following
years, the deportations of ethnic groups in the 1930s, and so on.
40 See Figes 2007: Chapter 6.
41 See Figes 2007: Chapter 7.
42 See Bullock 1991: 1053.
43 See Bullock 1991: 1064; Conquest 1968: 486.
44 See Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: II, Part 5, Chapter 1.
45 See Shalamov 1994.
47 Cited in Alliluyeva 1967: 101.
48 See Medvedev 1979: 82 ff.
49 See Alliluyeva 1969: Part 3, Chapter 17. Yakov’s indirect suicide by trying to escape is
confirmed by the Sachsenhausen archives discovered by the Allies after the war; see
‘Historical Notes: The Death of Stalin’s Son’, Time, 1 March, available at www.time.
com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941216,00.html (accessed 14 December 2016).
50 Contradictions on this question emerge from a comparison not only between different
authors but also between different passages by the same historian: Sebag Montefiore
2003, for example, states in Chapter 27 (p. 259) that everyone who knew Stalin insisted
that he was no womanizer but elsewhere considers reports that he had more than one
illegitimate child to be almost certainly true (Sebag Montefiore 2003: 25 and footnote).
51 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 9; Service 2004: Chapter 26; Souvarine
1935: Chapters 10 and 11; Bullock 1991: Chapter 10; Medvedev 1971: Chapter 4.
52 Cited in Medvedev 1971: Chapter 4.
53 See Medvedev 1971: Chapter 4.
54 See Tucker 1973: Chapter 9; Service 2004: Chapter 26; Souvarine 1935: Chapters 10
and 11; the latter is the only historian to declare himself convinced that the rumour is
true, not on the basis of any evidence but arguing that in the case of Stalin the worst
suspicion always turns out to be correct.
55 See Service 2004: Chapter 26; Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 8.
56 See Medvedev 1971: Part 1, Chapter 4; Medvedev 1979: Chapter 4.
57 See Service 2004: Chapter 26.
58 See Bullock 1991: Chapter 6; Medvedev 1971: Part 3, Chapter 9; Lerner and Witztum
2005.
59 Service 2004 devoted to this subject Chapter 23 of his book, The Cult of Impersonality.
61 See Davies 1996: 960.
62 See Amis 2002: 205–6.
63 See Amis 2002: 197.
64 Ferguson 2006: 428.
65 Souvarine 1935: 808.
66 See Cancrini 2006: 223–8.
67 See for example Medvedev 1971: Part 3, Chapter 11; Conquest 1968: Introduction.
68 See Goebbels 1992: III, note of 10 July 1937; Kershaw 2000: 44.
69 See Davies 1996: Appendix 2.
71 Cited in Amis 2002: 213.
73 See Amis 2002: 228.
74 See Bullock 1991; Snyder 2010; Ferguson 2006: Chapter 12; Furet 1995: Chapter 7.
75 See Davies 2006: 330.
76 Cited in Naimark 2010: 30–1.
77 See Nolte 1986.
223
78 Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: II, 498: ‘His [Mao’s] sovereign brother Hitler’s experiment in
the extirpation of Jews and Gypsies came late, when the Second World War had already
begun, but Father Stalin had given thought to the problem earlier.’ Solzhenitsyn does
not make the comparison between the two tyrants with the caution of the British
historian Bullock, but with the passion of the Russian author: Stalin’s victims ‘who
had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happi-
ness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on
the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more blood-
thirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the
self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it
[…] – no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler’ (Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: II, 33).
79 See Ferguson 2006: Chapter 12; Service 2004: Chapter 30. The witness who reported
the phrase was Anastas Mikoyan.
80 Cited in Amis 2002: 193.
81 See Hobsbawm 1994: 458; Conquest 1968: 446. In the Secret Report of 1956
Krushchev opened the revelations by saying that ninety-eight of the 139 members of
the Central Committee had been shot, mainly in 1937–8. See Internet Modern History
Sourcebook, available at http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/MOD/1956khrushchev-
secret1.html (accessed 13 December 2016).
82 See Conquest 1968.
83 See Naimark 2010: Chapter 2.
84 See Weiss-Wendt 2005.
85 See Yakovlev 2000: Chapter 1.
87 Mann, Michael 2005: 17 and 321–2.
88 An expression originally coined by Jaulin and Malaurie, and today developed by
Stavenhagen, but usually reserved for the annihilation of tribal cultures.
90 Medvedev 1971: Part 1, Chapter 3, contains an excursus on the use of the term in
earlier Russian Marxism; the attitude was one of oscillating tolerance. Only with Stalin
was there a leap into paranoid extremism.
91 See Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: II, 452–3.
93 See Conquest 1986: Chapter 6; Tucker 1990: Chapter 8; Brunetau 2004: Chapter 3;
Souvarine 1935: Chapter 10; Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: II, Part 6, Chapter 2.
94 Cited in Conquest 1986: Chapter 6.
95 Cited in Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: II, 458.
96 See Conquest 1986: Epilogue.
97 See Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: II, 463: ‘drunken kolkhoz bosses went around the poverty-
stricken village at Easter demanding money for vodka from those peasants who still
farmed their own holdings. “Give, or we’ll dekulakize you. We’ll deport you.” They
could, too.’ These abuses continued to occur even years after official dekulakization.
99 See Mann, Michael 2005: 322.
100 Solzenitsyn 1973–80: II, 464: ‘Since Herod was no more, only the [Stalinist] Vanguard
Doctrine has shown us how to destroy utterly – down to the very babes. Hitler was
a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him famous,
whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.’
102 See Conquest 1986: Chapter 15.
103 See Conquest 1968: xxvii; Applebaum 2003: Chapter 15.
104 See Conquest 1986: Chapter 16. Even higher figures are given by Brunetau
2004: Chapter 3; Davies 1996; Dreyfus and Lew 2000.
224

108 See Applebaum 2003: Appendix.According to Conquest (1968: Epilogue), of those arrested
in the Terror of the years 1937–8, only 10 per cent of those sent to the gulag survived.
111 See Medvedev 1979: Chapter 4; Medvedev 1971: Part 1, Chapter 3.
112 See Service 2004: Chapter 29; Conquest 1986: Chapter 2; Tucker 1990: Chapter 18;
Bullock 1991: Chapter 10; Brunetau 2004: Chapter 3.
113 See Amis 2002: 208.
114 Cited in Conquest 1986: Chapter 12.
116 See Conquest 1986: Epilogue.
117 See Bullock 1991: 405.
119 See Conquest 1986: Chapter 18; Service 2004: Chapter 31.
120 See Naimark 2010: 75–6.
121 See Conquest 1986: Chapter 9. In general, it is interesting to note that zoocide
accompanies genocidal policies with equally consistent inflexibility; in the period of
February–March 1930 alone almost a quarter of the animals in the Soviet Union dis-
appeared and in the whole period of collectivization (1928–33) about half; see Tucker
1990: Chapter 8.
122 See Stalin 1995.
123 See Tucker 1995 for a psychological profile.
124 See Stalin 1995: Letter 50.
127 See Souvarine 1935: Chapter 11; Hobsbawm 1994: Chapter 13; Conquest 1968:
Epilogue.
128 See Pravda, 27 July 1938.
129 See Conquest 1986; Service 2004: Chapter 31;Tucker 1990: Chapters 17–19; Souvarine
1935: Chapter 11; Naimark 2010: Chapter 6.
131 See Werth 2009: Chapter 4.
132 See Souvarine 1935: Chapter 11.
133 For example, administrative order (prikaz) n. 00447 (30 July 1937), which lists all-
embracing and generic reasons for arrest: precise and binding from the outset, by con-
trast, is the number of people who were to be deported to forced labour (193,000) and
to be shot (75,950). The ‘sentences’ had to be passed by a troika of local politicians, of
course with no right of defence or appeal. See Conquest 1968: Introduction; Service
2004: Chapter 31.
134 See, for example, Stalin 1995: 200–1, n. 57.
135 See Naimark 2010: 109–10.
136 Compare the epigraph from Hobsbawm quoted at the beginning of this chapter
(1994: 392).
137 See Conquest 1968: Epilogue. The text lists these approximate figures: (1) arrests in
1937 and 1938: 7 million; (2) executed by firing squad: 1 million; (3) died in the
camps: 2 million; (4) imprisoned: 1 million; (5) died in the camps by the end of 1938
(arrested people who had survived plus people already in the camps in 1936): 8 mil-
lion, of which about 10 per cent survived (so there would be a final total of another
7 million dead).
138 See Werth 2009. The original title of this book, L’Ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs, derives
from one of these paradoxical episodes. An old woman goes to the cemetery every day
to sell flowers. Obviously it is important to her to know how many flowers to take, so
she asks the gravedigger how many graves he has dug for the next day. The gravedigger,
225
talkative because he drowns his fear in alcohol, tells her that no flowers are needed for
tomorrow; many bodies will come, but they will be disposed of in the dark, in com-
munal graves. The flower-seller does not consider the news a state secret and naively
repeats it; in so doing, however, she talks about people who have been executed so she
in her turn is shot for ‘spreading subversive information’.
139 Compare in particular Conquest 1968 and 1986; Medvedev 1979: Chapters 4 and 5.
141 See Medvedev 1971: Part 2, Chapter 5. On this detail too, reports differ; see the
next note.
142 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: 194.
143 See Medvedev 1971. Medvedev has collected eye-witness accounts (including that of
Ehrenburg, who witnessed the trial of Bucharin, whose childhood friend he had been);
too many among the public knew the accused well, so it is not realistic to think that
they were replaced.
145 Cited Medvedev 1971: 376.
146 In confirmation of this hypothesis see also Tucker 1990: Chapter 18.
147 Cited in Tucker 1973: Chapter 12, from the accounts of Isaac Deutscher, Victor Serge
and Trotsky himself.
148 Stalin did not authorize its publication. The text of his declarations is known to us
from notes taken by General Raphael P. Khmelnitsky. Unfortunately, as happens with
many indirect documents, there are different versions of it, which appear in Tucker
(1990: Chapter 18) and Service (2004: Chapter 29). For the passages to which I refer,
however, the two studies are identical.
149 Orwell 1972: 115.
150 See Ferguson 2006: Table 6.2; Brunetau 2004: Chapter 3.
151 See Power 2002: Chapter 4.
152 See Anon. 1953; Weiss-Wendt 2005; Elder 2005; Serbyn 2009.
153 See Ferguson 2006: 212 ff.; Werth 1997.
154 See Glover 1999: Chapter 29.
155 See, for example, the epigraph by Riasanovsky quoted at the beginning of this chapter
(Riasanovsky 1984: 163).
156 See Pleshakov 2005.
157 See Service 2004: Chapter 36; Davies 2006: 95 ff.; Tucker 1990: Chapter 22; Bullock
1991: Chapter 16.
158 See Conquest 1968: 450.
161 See Snyder 2010: 165.
162 See Ferguson 2006: Chapter 12; Tucker 1990: Chapter 22; Sebag Montefiore 2003:
Chapter 31; Medvedev 1979: Part 4, Chapter 12.
166 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapters 31 and 32.
167 See Service 2004: Chapter 36; Tucker 1990: Chapter 22; Bullock 1991: Chapter 16;
Sebag Montefiore 2004: Chapter 32.
168 See Bullock 1991: 788.
169 According to Tucker 1990: Chapter 22, this was the only time that Stalin had a doubt
in his whole life. According to Amis 2002: 173, Stalin was forced, as he had not been for
years, to ‘re-enter’ reality.
170 See Hastings 2004.
171 See Naimark 2001: introduction; Müller and Überschär 1994: Chapter 8; de Zayas 1986.
172 See Naimark 1995 and 2001.
226
173 See Beevor 2002; Hastings 2004: Chapter 10; Müller and Überschär 1994; Ferguson
2006: Chapter 16; Mazower 1998: Chapter 7; Franzen 2001.
176 See Ferguson 2006: Chapters 13 and 16; Davies 2006: Part 3.The main source of infor-
mation on the Lienz episode is Tolstoy 1977: Chapters 9 and 10.
177 See Beevor 2002: 118.
178 See Davies 2006: Part 4.
179 See Werth 1997: Chapters 12 and 13; Applebaum 2003; as well as the figures cited by
Bullock 1991.
180 See Ehrenburg and Grossman 1947: Foreword.
181 It was noticed immediately by an observer who had known the gulag for decades and
from the inside. See Štajner 1971: 425 ff.
182 See Service 2004: Chapter 53; Marie 1993; Furet 1995: Chapter 12; Snyder
2010: Chapter 11; Amis 2002: 214 ff.
185 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 58; Glover 1999: Chapter 25.
187 See Bullock 1991: Chapter 19; Conquest 1968: epilogue.
188 Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: I, 79.
189 Solzhenitsyn 1973–80, I: 128.
190 See Glover 1999: Chapters 25 and 29.
191 See Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: I, 177.
193 Because of the vastness of the theme, the present scarcity of documents and the great
difference of culture with respect to the West, I do not deal with Mao’s communism
here. But his too was a renewal pervaded by paranoia and, like Stalin’s, did not envisage
the possibility of keeping alive inferior groups but only death or conversion.
194 See Solzhenitsyn 1973–80: I, 135 (note), 163.
195 See Sebag Montefiore 2003: Chapter 58; Tucker 1990: Chapter 18.
196 See Conquest 1968: introduction.
197 See Conquest 1968: Chapter 7. Tukhachevsky came from a noble family and had
gained great popularity which might have overshadowed Stalin. Any one of these rea-
sons would have been enough to get him shot. But in 1937 he had also been com-
promised by documents that purported to prove that he had links with the Nazis. This
false documentation was the work of the German secret services and had been bought
in Prague by the Russian secret services, who had paid for it with counterfeit German
marks. Such were the times: mistrust and falsification were not the conclusion but the
very point of departure of a complex operation like this. Although none of it, not even
the banknotes, was genuine, the conclusion was nevertheless a man’s death.
198 See Medvedev 1971: Conclusion, and Medvedev 1979: Conclusion.
227
10
FIRE THAT FEEDS FIRE
What has happened to cities is paradoxical. Originally conceived of as ref-

uges, citadels, oases of safety, protection and peace, they are now, in their
modern form, increasingly associated with danger, terror and panic.1
Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves, or hurt the enemy,
except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among the exceptions are
the massacre of vanquished foes, and non-combatants, male and female.2
If the only way of achieving victory is to destroy, kill, devastate, and spread
ruin and terror, then let all those things be done […]. Burning villages,
destroying works of art, and making people terrified of oneself […] is condu-
cive to the supreme objective.3
War crimes and Allied double standards

German politics placed itself on the ‘inclined plane’ with the First World War and
slid down it into the Second. Paranoia remained alive in collective feelings. It passed
not only from one war to the next but also from one side to the other.
The governments of the United States and Great Britain were united in the
view that the air raids on non-military targets carried out by the Germans in the
Spanish Civil War and by the Japanese in their campaign against China were war
crimes. They often used this argument in their official proclamations and in pro-
paganda. They had not yet foreseen that they themselves, during the Second World
War, would strike the civilian population, and on a much wider scale; when they
realized this, they placed restrictions not on the inhumanity of the attacks but on
the information that could be made public.4 At the end of the Second World War,
Admiral Dönitz was supreme commander of the German navy. When Hitler com-
mitted suicide, he appointed him his successor in his will. Dönitz was among the
228
228 Fire that feeds fire
accused at the Nuremberg Trials. He was one of those most responsible for the Nazi
total war; it seemed likely that he, like the other defendants, would be condemned
to death. In fact, he got off with ‘only’ ten years’ imprisonment, because he presented
a letter from Admiral Chester William Nimitz, in which the commander of the
American Pacific fleet declared that his submarines had followed the same ‘terror-
ist’ criteria as had been used by Dönitz.5 After the war, Henry L. Stimson, who had
been the United States secretary of war, actually wrote that his country had entered
the First World War because it considered the German submarine attacks a crime,
but then, in the Second, had adopted the same methods.6 General Curtis LeMay, the
commander of American air operations in the Pacific, stated frankly that if Japan had
won the war, he and his team would have had to be tried for war crimes.7
Collective paranoia and forms of government

It is not the aim of the present discussion to make direct political or historical evalua-
tions. In the dichotomy democracy–totalitarianism, or in the triangle communism–
fascism–liberal capitalism we are looking for a mental disorder, collective paranoia,
a psychic infection which in turn influences politics and history.
As we predicted, in the historical fascisms and communisms paranoia feeds itself
and can become prevalent. In democratic societies it does not possess the same
autotrophy. So it tends to remain a minority phenomenon, and latent. However,
even here it can become a majority phenomenon in at least two cases: where there
are conditions of real or imagined emergency (McCarthyism, 9/11), or by direct
contagion from a paranoid enemy (‘total’ wars, whether warm or cold).8
In the military events of ‘total war’ we find continual confirmations of its infec-
tiousness. Generous or peaceful attitudes do not reproduce by psychic contagion;
hatred and cruelty do.The democratic states, which anti-fascist rhetoric invites us to
admire, often allowed their military forces to indulge in monstrous behaviour simi-
lar to that of Hitler’s soldiers. This observation confirms the hypothesis that there
is paranoid potential in the ordinary psyche, both individual and collective. Mass
paranoia seems almost independent of traditions, constitutional states and demo-
cratic institutions that have existed for centuries.
For Goebbels, the reaction to his request for total war marked the hour of idiocy.
This idiocy was a consequence of the radical identification of the masses with the
‘nation’, and of the national shadow (in the Jungian sense) with the enemy. Other
peoples, especially the oldest democracies, did not experience psychic perversions
such as Nazism.Their nationalism did not have any acute phases but was spread over
several centuries and, through colonization, over several continents.Yet no group is
exempt from intoxication simply because it has spread it over long periods (or vast
spaces). Perhaps some countries did not have an hour of idiocy but did have ‘cen-
turies of idiocy’. In a sense, the whole history of the West is an excess, a mosaic of
gradual encroachments imposed both on nature and on minority peoples. However,
its model has been adopted all over the world, and no one notices it any more.
229
Fire that feeds fire 229
Airborne warfare as total war

The Italian general Giulio Douhet proclaimed himself a prophet of a new warlike
deity: future conflicts would be won by dominating the air.9 Technological innova-
tions favoured total war, which included the sky, just as they favoured mass paranoia
over the combatants’ old codes of honour. Douhet wrote his treatise during a year
he spent in a military prison (1916), where he had been locked up for criticizing
the way the commander of the armed forces, Cadorna, was conducting the war.The
Italian defeat at Caporetto proved that he had been prophetic, and he was set free.
Douhet’s central theses are woven from fine paranoid thread. He argues that boost-
ing traditional terrestrial fire power reinforces a defensive attitude.10 But, he goes on,
linking his view of the future to the classical theory of Clausewitz, a defensive attitude
is a losing one; anticipating Hitler’s belief, he claims that victory can be achieved only
by all-out attack.The real new offensive weapon is the aeroplane.11 Only the air force
makes it possible to strike quickly, pre-empting the enemy’s moves and destroying him
at the root. It is essential to forestall your adversaries, destroy them not with a series of
actions but with a single concentrated, total, devastating attack.
Douhet illustrates his argument with an example. When a rabid dog threatens
a village, the villagers do not each stand outside the door of their house with a
stick, waiting for him. They band together, seek him out and kill him.12 Douhet
has expressed in symbolic form the delusion that burns beneath his cold reasoning.
From the point of view of the new military technologies, his arguments are cor-
rect. But the fact that he takes a diseased animal rather than a human being as his
example is significant. In order to plan coldly the destruction of normal, unarmed
human beings, it is necessary to dehumanize them first: comparing them to rabid
dogs is therefore an excellent starting point. As we have seen both in Mein Kampf
and in the Soviet massacres, and as we shall see again in the next chapter, the ani-
malization of the enemy is a feature common to all the total wars of the twentieth
century. Douhet’s theory is indeed logical; but at the same time it is symbolic. He
bestializes the enemy, speaking now of dogs, now of birds whose eggs must be
destroyed in the nest:
[In traditional warfare] there was even a legal distinction between belligerents
and non-belligerents […]. [In airborne warfare,] given the certainty of destruc-
tion, it will not matter much if the occasional bomb misses its target. […]
The total destruction of the chosen objective has not only a material but
a moral effect. […] In order to destroy such targets it is necessary to use
three kinds of bomb: explosive, incendiary and poisonous, deploying them
in appropriate proportions. The explosive bombs serve to produce the initial
destruction, the incendiary ones to start fires, the poisonous ones to ensure
that nobody puts the fires out. The toxicity of the poison must be such as to
last for a long time […]. If you want to eradicate a species of birds completely
and quickly, it is not sufficient to shoot all the birds you see flying in the air […].
The nests and eggs still remain.13
230
In effect, this modern Herod is talking about a general infanticide; as in the Wild
West when it was said that in order to eliminate lice you have to crush their eggs
too, so that Indians needed to be killed when they were still children.14
For Douhet, the air is almost everything, the land almost nothing. This prefer-
ence is often a method of the paranoid mind, which, unable to bear the constraints
imposed by everyday reality (symbolically: the land), wants to place itself above
that reality, and also above the enemy and moral conventions. It wants to fly on the
wings of syllogisms which are rational in themselves but originate from an erro-
neous assumption of superiority (which includes superiority to all rules). Under the
semblance of military technology, Douhet was laying a number of foundations for
total war and its crimes, which would dominate the century.
His theories had not yet been verified in practice, but they were disseminated
in all countries; one enthusiast who offered these ideas a bridge between the two
world wars was the tsarist air ace Alexander Seversky.15 The British air officer Arthur
Harris, too, was an early and radical ‘Douhettian’, the only one to apply the Italian
general’s ideas in their entirety.16 As we shall see, when he became head of Bomber
Command, Harris would take the bombing of civilian areas to their extreme con-
sequences. But already in the early 1920, in Iraq, he had the idea of converting all
available British civil aircraft into military ones. In this way he created an asym-
metrical and highly mobile force, capable of terrorizing the Arab tribes from above,
at the price of beginning to blur the distinction between military targets and the
ordinary population.17
In 1937, these ideas were applied for the first time on a massive scale by Wolfram
von Richthofen, cousin of the more justly famous Manfred, when his Condor
Legion obliterated Guernica from the air. Total air warfare was tested successfully
in a corner of Europe, against a small Basque town, with a massacre which already
embodied all the characteristics of an attack on an unarmed population.
Poetry and romantic enthusiasm in the air war

Douhet’s prophecies also influenced the ideas of an ambitious former corporal of
the Bersaglieri, Benito Mussolini, and the writings of his bloodthirsty pair of poets,
Gabriele D’Annunzio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (L’aeropoema del Golfo della
Spezia, 1935). The invention of the aeroplane had ignited an early globalization.
After the first experiments in America, the Wright brothers came to exhibit their
skills in sceptical France. They were imitated by the Austrian designer Igo Etrich.
His flying machine, the Taube, was bought by the Italians, who assembled the first
airborne fleet from planes of a wide variety of nationalities. In 1911, Italy fought
against the Ottoman Empire in North Africa. Piloting a Taube (which, by an irony
of fate, means ‘dove’), Sublieutenant Gaviotti took one grenade out of his pocket
and another three out of a box. He tossed them down; he did not know where they
would land, but he had carried out the first bombing raid. D’Annunzio wrote a
poem extolling this bold entry into the new continent of war crimes. Newspapers
all round the world discussed the historic event.18
231
It was thought that the progress of bombing raids and the rapid dissemination
of news via the mass media would terrorize the population. Once frightened, the
population would become ungovernable for the ruling authorities. The first part of
the prediction was accurate; the second was not.
The first bombs of the Second World War

As we have seen, Hitler began the war against Great Britain without following a real
strategy. At first, rather than bombing raids there were clashes between the British
and German air forces. The attitude of both commands was still non-paranoid;
they feared an escalation of the conflict that would be disastrous for all concerned.
During this phase, the Germans had more aircraft but had not succeeded in pressing
home their advantage. Great Britain was already redressing the balance. Moreover,
it was preparing an autonomous aviation corps specifically designed for bombing,
which Germany lacked.19
On 25 August 1940, a dozen German aircraft, probably heading for other objec-
tives, bombed the dock area of London. Churchill, who had prepared a plan for
bombing Berlin in 1918 but had not been able to put it into effect because the First
World War had ended, on 26 August 1940 sent eighty-one British aircraft to attack
the German capital. At that point Hitler drew up plans for systematic bombing
raids.20 Now on both sides it was a question of reprisal, and they intentionally began
to target the civilian population.
Sinking irrevocably into psychopathological rather than strategic motives, Hitler
thus laid the foundations for that air war which he was bound to lose, given the
overwhelming numerical superiority soon attained by the Allies.21 In the land war,
Hitler imposed his initiatives on the enemy until the winter of 1941–2, gambling
with a daring and a success that impressed the masses. He was probably surprised by
it himself, but, being accustomed to denying reality, he convinced himself in hind-
sight that he had had prophetic visions.22 Through pseudologia phantastica, Hitler’s
aggressiveness fomented his omnipotent ideas in a vicious circle. In the air war,
however, he lost the initiative from the outset, showing all his psychic frailty. But for
a while he could continue to bluff: terrestrial successes are visible on the map, aerial
ones less so. The Führer’s moves were impulsive: they did not include planning
for future years; they were inspired by paranoid haste, and based on a false premise of
German superiority. Hitler allowed the air war to escalate partly because he still had
short-term objectives and could not conceive of total defeat.23
The three phases of Allied bombing

On the part of Great Britain and the United States, the increasingly heavy bombing
can be divided into three phases.
The first lasted until the summer of 1941. In the air war against the Nazis, Great
Britain was practically alone. The task of the British commanders was to hit mili-
tary targets. Being still far from having mastery of the skies, the British decided to
232
stop daytime bombing, in which too many aircraft were lost, and stick to nocturnal
bombing raids.
The second phase extended from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944.
America entered the war, and Allied air superiority was ever-increasing. The offi-
cial myth of airborne warfare – the false paranoid premise, derived from omnipotent
aerocentric fantasies, which Douhet had transformed into military theory – was
that the new technology, if rationally applied, could do anything and would
shorten the conflict. Curiously, that myth was supported both by Nazi and by Allied
propaganda, even though the facts proved the opposite: the war became longer and longer.
On both sides, common logic had been replaced by rigid reasoning, on which
evidence had little effect.
Initially, the Americans claimed that from an altitude of 20,000 feet their B17
bomber could hit a target 25 feet in diameter (in metric terms, a target of 6–8
metres from 6 kilometres).24 In reality, the proportion of bombs that fell less than
eight kilometres from the target was, according to some sources, only a third;25 accord-
ing to others, only a tenth.26 The myth of German precision, too, was a false Nazi
dogma, the mirror image of its paranoia. In its first attack on London the Luftwaffe
dropped 500 tons of bombs, but only 6 per cent hit their target, although the British
capital is one of the largest cities in the world.27
Almost as stunning as this ineffectiveness is the fact that the Allied commands
tried to keep this data hidden from public opinion. Such information is crucial to
deciding whether the conduct of a war is ‘just’ or criminal. But the Anglo-Americans
did as Hitler or Stalin would have done. They manipulated the citizens in order to
gain their complicity in a form of new offensive that was considered a crime by the
international laws of war: the direct air attack on the civilian population.
As the war progressed, the Allied command partly accepted that precision
bombing was not possible. At the start of the second phase of air attacks, Allied
public opinion began to be informed about the massacres of civilians. There was
a certain amount of debate. The dilemma was simple: either you abandoned the
false premise of precision, officially authorizing what was already happening – the
indiscriminate bombing of a vast area – or you stopped blanket bombing to focus
on precise objectives, such as factories of military significance. The second option
involved abandoning the indiscriminate use of air superiority in order to maintain
moral superiority, the most certain advantage in the face of Nazism.
The first alternative won the day: area bombing – the non-selective bombing
of an entire area, also known as carpet bombing – which was already in fact hap-
pening, became official doctrine. Curiously, it was also called ‘morale bombing’, in
the sense derived from Douhet: that is, as a means of annihilating the morale of
the enemy population. In theory the possibility of targeted bombing raids was also
contemplated, but precisely because the war was increasingly total, it skipped the
intermediate stages ever more quickly, feeding itself with paranoid evolution and
fusing with the option of indiscriminate bombing.
The basic reasoning stood on an inclined plane and slipped inexorably down-
wards. Striking at the production of the enemy arms industry meant bombing
233
munitions factories. But soon this came to include those of vehicles, the industries
of metal, rubber, transport, chemicals, textiles, footwear (the armed forces were their
main customers now), and so on; even the paper industry, since the press was in the
hands of the Nazi apparatus. At this point, the people who worked in the factories
were a military target too. As were, of course, the houses where they lived with their
families. There was no such thing as a ‘civilian’ any more. You might as well bomb
wherever you could. In 1917, the United States had considered Germany criminal
because it attacked any ship that cooperated with the enemy; Woodrow Wilson had
declared that he was making war on Germany for this reason.28 And yet from 1941
to 1945 the United States not only carried out indiscriminate attacks by sea; over
German-occupied France their air force attacked without distinguishing French
targets from German ones.29
The main opponent of area bombing was Bishop George Bell. A Christian radi-
cal (‘God above nation’ was one of his slogans), in the past Bell had in vain exhorted
Great Britain to oppose Nazism more energetically. Despite having spoken both
in churches and in the House of Lords, on expressing his opposition to indiscrim-
inate bombing he found himself even more isolated. Everyone expected Bell to
become Archbishop of Canterbury. Historians are unanimous in acknowledging that
his campaign against the bombing of civilians cost him that promotion. ‘The Allies
stand for something greater than power’, he declared.30 But George Bell’s voice was
a barely audible bleat; as we know by now, within collective paranoia the very voices
that most deserve to be listened to are reduced to the level of cries in the wilderness.
The third phase of the bombing started in summer 1944. By the time of the
Normandy landings (6 June 1944), the Allies dominated the skies (12,000 planes
against only 300 German planes,31 and in the last year of the war the advantage
continued to increase). This now made ‘safe’ flights in broad daylight possible.
Bombsights had improved, too, and it would really have been possible to aim at
military targets. But priority continued to be given to bombing city centres; that
is, since the men were at the front, bombing women, old men and children. The
objective was also described as ‘dehousing Germany’. By the end of the war, about
a quarter of all houses had been destroyed and another quarter damaged. In the
landscape of ruins that ran across Germany from one border to the other, about
50 million people roamed about. The German armies were coming home; for-
eigners interned in concentration camps or used for forced labour were leaving;
evacuees and people who had been bombed out were searching for a home that
no longer existed;32 while refugees from the eastern provinces accumulated, having
been driven out by the Red Army or having fled on its arrival: two-thirds of the
country were on the move.33
Douhet’s predictions are proved wrong

Historians agree in attributing disproportionately poor military results to this
bombing of cities. Churchill himself had predicted that it would be pointless.34
Apart from the material cost for the victims and the moral cost for the aggressors,
234
it has often been suggested that, with more selective use, the same bombing might
have been more effective.35 For despite the catastrophe on all fronts, German arms
production continued to increase and actually reached its peak in autumn 1944. By
that time the land war had been practically won by the Allies. The air forces, how-
ever, where the Anglo-Americans’ superiority over Germany was even more over-
whelming, seemed to be increasingly far from bringing Nazism to its knees. So two
of Douhet’s basic tenets had been spectacularly disproved by events: that air power
was the decisive factor, and that, consequently, new wars would be short. But it was
too late to admit it. Discussion of the matter was avoided, except among specialists.
In Great Britain the bombers had cost the largest portion of wartime expenditure,
the highest percentage of casualties and, not least, a considerable part of the ‘moral
capital’ of a country which had entered the war to defend international law and
which, by tradition, was fairly observant of conventions in defence of civilians.
If German arms production continued to increase for nine-tenths of the war
while raw materials and labour were disappearing, this means that the factories were
never seriously damaged. The highest level of loss in production barely reached 3.8
per cent. An attack on oil reserves, for example, would certainly have accelerated
the Nazi collapse, but it remained a secondary objective.36 Harris’s objective was
towns and civilians.37
Even more concordant are negative assessments of the hoped-for ‘psychological
effect’, since in this, as in any other air war, the population did not rebel against its
government because of the bombing;38 this is the third decisive disproof of Douhet’s
theories. On the contrary, the air attacks offered the Nazis, the Italian Fascists and
the Japanese military one of their few opportunities to speak sincerely: Axis propa-
ganda affirmed that these were deliberate attacks on the civilian population – that is,
‘war crimes’. In this way it tried to persuade the countries in question to resist even
when it no longer made any sense to do so, thus pointlessly prolonging the war.
The bombing of Germany

Arthur Harris was commander-in-chief of Bomber Command. ‘Bomber Harris’
was a man of iron consistency and monstrous severity even with his own men.
Bomber Command was the Allied sector with the highest mortality rate. In 1943,
it was calculated that only 33 per cent of air crew were alive after the first batch of
thirty flights, and only 16 per cent after the second. Harris was also inflexible with
the British exchequer: he absorbed, on his own, one-third of all war expenditure.39
In the United States, inflexibility towards German civilians was represented by
the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. It has been claimed that his plans
too, when they became known in Germany, provided Goebbels with arguments for
insisting on total war and pointlessly prolonging the conflict.40 In Bertolt Brecht’s
diary, a cutting from an American newspaper was found in which Morgenthau,
after the success of the bombing of Hamburg, calculated the cost per inhabitant of
the destruction of German cities and, finding it reasonable, proposed that treasury
bonds be issued to finance the elimination of Berlin.
235
Hamburg, being in the north, was the easiest German metropolis to reach from
Britain. The first air raid, perhaps the most devastating in history, took place on
28 July 1943. It was unusually warm, which facilitated the task of the incendiary
bombs.41 In a short time, individual fires merged together. The flames rose to 2,000
metres in height, while the smoke reached 7–8 kilometres. The immense chimney
sucked the air from the ground like a pump; people who had taken refuge in cellars
were suffocated, those in the streets were burnt to death. The temperature reached
1,000 degrees and the winds hurricane force.42
The Allied command centres, searching for new weapons, had discovered only
gradually that the cheapest and most devastating way of destroying a city was the
oldest one. As any boy scout should know, fire, if it succeeds in crossing a certain
threshold, feeds itself. For this reason the strategic lines focused the bombing ever
more resolutely not on the industrial peripheries, but on the city centres.The older
a building is, the smaller will be the amount of cement used in it and the greater
the amount of wood. The medieval city centres of the German cities were mainly
built in this way. Consequently, in a kind of return to the Middle Ages, the number
of small incendiary devices in the bays of Allied bombers increased at the expense
of more modern and powerful bombs.
Naturally, particular attention was paid to Berlin – an offensive lasting from
August 1943 to March 1944, carried out by no fewer than 10,813 planes. Its inhab-
itants received 8 kilos of bombs each, just like those of Hamburg. But, being rela-
tively modern and containing green areas, the capital did not burn well.43
While houses can be rebuilt and people are reborn in their children (about
600,000 German citizens died as a direct result of bombing, not a particularly high
figure for the whole war), art disappears for ever. When the war was practically
over, in the night between the 13 and 14 February 1945, Dresden was annihilated.
The ‘Florence of the north’ contained no real military targets but, in addition to
the inhabitants, a huge number of refugees fleeing from the eastern front and one
of the largest concentrations of art in the world. Its destruction by fire has been
fixed for ever in the diary of Viktor Klemperer.The great philologist describes it as a
night of meetings with Dutch or Russian prisoners of war roaming about together
with Germans, passing through areas reserved for Aryans which he, as a Jew, had not
been able to enter for years.44 In a few hours, the air raid on Dresden caused fifty
times more casualties than the bombing of Guernica.
The ideal targets for incendiary attacks were the medieval towns. Intricate con-
structions of old, seasoned wood like Würzburg, which on 17 March 1945, in the
blinking of an eye at the end of the war, received 300,000 incendiary bombs and
vanished in seventeen minutes. Hating life, paranoia particularly hates the tree and
its derivates.
The bombing of Italy

It is usually thought that the Allied bombing of Italy was less heavy than that of
Germany because it was a less formidable enemy and had a smaller arms industry.
236
This conviction is correct, but incomplete. The bombing of Italy was not com-
parable to that of Germany. However, one only has to read Bomber Command’s
report on Milan, dated 15 July 1943, to see that the lesser destruction was not a
consequence of a more humanitarian attitude.45 The report subdivides the city into
five areas, distinguished by type of construction, density of population and so on.
The criterion adopted for choosing targets is solely that of vulnerability; the oth-
ers – the presence of factories, historic buildings, civilians – are irrelevant. The city
centre is to be preferred because the houses are more closely packed. Pilots are also
informed that the building materials are different from the German ones and might
prove less inflammable.
The air raids came in August and were significant; on 25 July, Mussolini had been
eliminated politically and the Allies concentrated their drive on the weaker enemy,
to drive him off the field. But, containing little wood, the Italian cities proved unin-
teresting to Bomber Command.
The armistice with Italy was signed on 8 September 1943. Fascism and Mussolini
immediately came back into play, with Nazi assistance, and pointlessly prolonged
the massacre for more than a year and a half.The Allies would have had good reason
to resume and extend the area bombing of Italian towns that were under Nazi and
Fascist control. By now the operation had been greatly simplified: they had landed
in southern Italy; they could take off from its airports and reach the northern towns
immediately, without meeting a heavy anti-aircraft defence, as they did when they
flew from Britain to Germany. Moreover, the Allied production of bombers was
now proceeding at such a rate as to more than compensate for losses. The German
and Italian city centres, however, were not replaced, so time widened the dispar-
ity: on the one hand, the potential for bombing increased, on the other the number
of potential targets diminished.
The bombing of Italian cities, however, remained sporadic. Apart from political
considerations, one criterion that led to this was certainly that of investment. The
yield – the ratio of the number of bombs used to the destruction caused – was higher
in Germany. Italy must be grateful to its medieval and Renaissance architects not only
for creating many masterpieces but also for using materials other than wood.
In his moral analysis of the twentieth century, Glover includes ‘military drift’
among the reasons why the bombing became ever more indiscriminate. Initially, the
Allied air command mainly provided technical advice to politicians in formulating
the objectives of the war. With the passing of time, the need to bomb increasingly
took on a life of its own, and Harris’s role grew in stature. As happens with many
institutions, Bomber Command had become an entity in itself, which could not be
set aside even when it had achieved its purpose. The assembly line had started up,
and it was hard to stop it. So the annihilation of German city centres increased in
intensity at the end of the war, when its use no longer made any sense in military
terms.46 The investments had been colossal, and it was necessary to show that they
had not been in vain.47
Forgetting its original aims, once it has crossed a certain threshold, destruc-
tive force follows the law of the inclined plane and feeds itself, just as collective
237
paranoia grows of its own accord. In a sense, like the world of the extermina-
tion camps and that of the gulag, Bomber Command took on a life of its own.
Though remaining far from the psychological intoxications of Hitler and Stalin,
in the two oldest democracies of the West paranoia dominated one of the hearts
of the state and maintained itself thanks to a silent pact of self-deception with
the population; one study showed that 90 per cent of Britons did not want
to be given more information about the bombing.48 A well-known American
author wrote:
When we began to smash up Berlin, people said that it was an ugly city and
that its buildings were no great loss.We have, to be sure, had to be treated, like
the Germans, with a certain amount of indoctrination to arrive at this point
of indifference. We have had to be convinced, as they are, that the enemy are
not really people.49
Paranoid impatience had dug its caves under the apparent functionality of
modern military thought. Despite the infinite range of weapons now available,
the Allied air commands had focused their efforts and expenditure on the old-
est one. Like our ancestors half a million years ago, they had been dazzled by the
revelation of fire: it unleashes a force which, after crossing a certain threshold,
feeds itself.
The idea of burning city centres to the ground had been launched by a few
technicians, then had spread among the military and lastly been accepted by Allied
public opinion as a result of autotrophy. Both the destructive fury of fire and that
of the bomber commands had propagated themselves with a movement similar to
that of paranoia.
Notes
1 Deriu 2005: 94.
2 Lincoln 2013: letter to James C. Conkling, 26 August 1863.
3 Giulio Douhet, in La Gazzetta del Popolo, 2 September 1914, quoted in Patricelli 2007: 45.
4 See Dower 1986: 38 ff.; Hastings 2007: 326–7. ‘From 1937 to 1939 they condemned as a
crime against humanity the bombing of civilians, which their own air forces would later
carry out daily from 1942 to 1945.
5 See Speer 1969: Chapter 34. For documentation on the Nuremberg Trials, see for exam-
ple http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/ (accessed 11 November 2016).
6 See Speer 1969: Chapter 35; Stimson 1947a: 179–89, now in Mettraux 2008: 617–25. For
the growing inhumanity of the methods of warfare used and the almost identical nature of
conduct on the two sides, see in particular Mettraux 2008: 625. The same point is made
by Hastings 2004: introduction.
7 See Smith 2004: 78.
8 A politician like Silvio Berlusconi has lived in constant psychological contact with com-
munism. It does not matter much whether this presence of communism is real or only
imagined by him. Since communism had certain inherent persecutory features, by psychic
contagion Berlusconi himself was to express a constant concern about being persecuted.
From the psychological point of view, for him the Iron Curtain and the dramatic duel
between capitalism and communism are still relevant today.
238
9 See Douhet 1921–32.

10 See Douhet 1921–32: Chapters 2 and 3.
11 See Douhet 1921–32: Chapters 4 and 5.
12 See Douhet 1921–32: 27.
13 Douhet 1921–32: 18, 28–9 and 45.
14 See Stannard 1992: 215–16; Wilson 1998: 273.
15 See Seversky 1942.
16 See Müller 2004: 111–24.
17 See Probert 2001: Chapter 3.
18 See Patricelli 2007: Prologue.
19 See Probert 2001: Chapter 1.
20 See Friedrich 2002: 74.
21 In addition to the historical studies previously cited, see Hastings 1979.
22 Almost visual proof is provided by the celebrated film of the signing of the French
Armistice: the dictator slaps his thigh, exults and almost leaps forward. Like a child that
has just received a big, unexpected present, he still seems surprised and ecstatic about his
own success.
23 See Hastings 1979: 223; Friedrich 2002; Ferguson 2006: Chapter 16; Glover 1999:
Chapter 11.
28 See Wilson 1917.
29 The bombing raids preparatory to the invasion of Normandy in 1944 alone killed twice
as many French people as the number of Germans killed by bombs in the whole of
1942; see Friedrich 2002: 125–6.
30 Cited in Hastings 1979: 177. See also Davies 2006: 922–3; Friedrich 2002: 99.
32 See for example the epigraph to this chapter from Marco Deriu, Dizionario critico delle
nuove guerre (2005) (translated by Jonathan Hunt from the original Italian edition).
33 See Springer 2005.
34 See Hastings 1979: 48.
35 See Speer 1969: Chapters 20–2, 24 and notes. The affirmations of Speer, who had been
in charge of German arms production, are largely confirmed both by historians of the
Royal Air Force (see Probert 2001: 331–2), and by the descriptions in the US Strategic
Bombing Survey (see Fussell 1989: Chapter 2).
38 That is, concerning the so-called attack on enemy morale: see Hastings 1979: Chapter 7.
39 See Glover 1999: Chapter 11; Fussell 1989: Chapter 4; Friedrich 2002: 91; Hastings
2007: 282.
40 See Beschloss 2002.
42 See Friedrich 2002: 112–18; Nossack 1976; Sebald 2001: Chapter 2.
43 See Friedrich 2002: 115–17.
44 See Klemperer 1995: notes of 23–4 February 1945.
45 See Rastelli 2000: 63 ff. See also Hastings 2004: 344 ff.
46 In 1944 the average number of people killed by bombing every day was 127; in 1945
that figure rose to 1,023; see Friedrich 2002: 168.
47 See in this connection the analysis of Hastings, one of the Allied historians most inclined
to justify the bombing raids; see Hastings 2007: Chapter 12.
49 Wilson 1948: 35.
239
11
FURTHER AND FURTHER WEST
You are infinitely superior to this inhuman foe against whom you are pitted.
Your enemy is of a curious race – a cross between a human being and an
ape. […] We have to go on to the end if civilisation is to survive. We must
exterminate these Japanese.1
If any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegal
in warfare, then, in the Pacific War, this decision to use the atom bomb is
the only near approach to the directives of the […] Nazi leaders during the
second World War.2
War against an inferior race

In Europe, the Second World War was an intensified continuation of the First. In the
Pacific, however, a different conflict was fought. The first of the two quotes above
confirms this. For the United States and its allies (Blamey, its author, was Australian),
it was, in a sense, the continuation of the frontier clashes, the Indian wars, the war
between the races, which, in the unconscious of a population, often mobilizes a
paranoid mistrust and a genocidal impulse. Today this seems almost incredible. But
during the war everyone was more or less in agreement. The American admiral
William F. Halsey had said: ‘The only good Jap is a Jap who’s been dead six months.
When we get to Tokyo, […] we’ll have a little celebration where Tokyo was.’3 He
never passed up a chance of calling the Japanese ‘stupid animals’ or ‘monkeys’.4
The westward-moving frontier had been a constant feature of American history.
When the war against Japan started, the outer perimeter of the United States had
reached Hawaii (which indeed was included in it after the war, becoming the fifti-
eth state of the Union). With the fighting, that frontier drew closer to the Japanese
archipelago, island by island.
240
240 Further and further west
The Japanese, unlike the Italians and the Germans, were described as a race that
were not only different but incompatible with civilization, and even with humanity.5
Significantly, during the war, Americans of Japanese origin, unlike those of German
or Italian origin, were confined to concentration camps en masse, just like the Indians
on the reservations; they bore not a personal but a ‘genetic’ responsibility, and their
internment was a preventive measure. The Japanese skull sent to the female clerk in
Phoenix from the Pacific and the custom of collecting human remains after a battle
had direct precedents.6 An official institution such as the Army Medical Museum, in
Washington, collected ‘Indian’ skulls; in the second half of the nineteenth century it
received 2,000 of them from soldiers stationed in frontier areas.7
During the conquest of the West, scalping – slicing a portion of skin with all
the hair off a defeated enemy’s head – was customary; it was practised both by the
indigenous peoples and by the whites. By removing parts of an enemy’s body you
dehumanize him; you imply that he is like an animal, whose remains are a trophy
and can become part of the furniture. In the war in the Pacific, the list of parts of
the anatomy became particularly long: the Americans removed hands, eyes, skulls,
scalps, gold teeth and other things from dead Japanese, and sometimes from living
ones too.8 Bones were made into ornaments; a paper knife made from the bones of
a Japanese soldier was sent as a gift to President Roosevelt (who refused it).9
Whereas Allied propaganda on the European front spoke chiefly of Nazism and
Fascism, without attacking all Germans or Italians, that in the Pacific used the pejo-
rative term ‘Japs’.10 Whereas the propaganda poster in Europe depicted the Nazi-
Fascist leader or the person of Hitler or Mussolini, that in the Pacific showed the
‘Jap’, with very marked racial features; a caricature that intentionally confused the
human figure with that of a monkey.11
War between different races, total war

The Japanese barely understood the concept of the prisoner of war, for in their
military ethics you fought to the death; to the kill the enemy was to pay him an –
admittedly paradoxical – form of respect. On the other hand, they treated anyone
who surrendered with extreme contempt. Why? In the Pacific, for every Allied
soldier killed, four were taken prisoner. By contrast, for every Japanese captured,
forty had been killed. So the Allies were 160 times more likely to be taken prisoner
than the Japanese! This remarkably high figure seems, incidentally, to disprove the
commonplace that the Japanese killed anyone who surrendered.12 They themselves,
however, fought to the death. It is a little less easy to explain why. Undoubtedly they
had been educated in obedience and self-sacrifice far more than the Westerners had.
But a certain role must have been played by paranoid propaganda and the rumours
that circulated, according to which the Allies were exceptionally cruel: 84 per cent
of the Japanese who were taken prisoner were convinced that they would be killed
after surrendering.13
In the war in the Pacific, the slogans used by the United States were also a
continuation of the frontier war. So the American troops ended up being not
241
Further and further west 241
relatively disciplined, as they were on the European front, but brutal, as they
had been in the Far West. It was normal to kill prisoners, the wounded, patients
in hospital, survivors in lifeboats.14 As was mentioned in Chapter 7, and at the
beginning of Chapter 10, the United States had entered the First World War to
punish Germany, which had extended the attacks of its submarines to all ships,
even merchant ships, bound for Great Britain. In his War Message to Congress,
Woodrow Wilson had stated this very clearly: ‘I was for a little while unable
to believe that such things would in fact be done by any government that had
hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations. […] The present
German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind.’15
But in the Second World War American military leaders too would declare war
on humanity; they would consider it normal to sink any ship heading for Japan,
even hospital ships.16
Rear Admiral Robert Carney stated frankly: ‘We ran afoul of Japanese hospital
ships, some were sunk, some couldn’t be identified, some were adjacent to proper
military targets and suffered as a result’; in short, he believed that they were sunk
regardless. But in any case:
It would seem to be an unnecessary refinement to worry too much over

these incidents. The Japanese hospital ships have undoubtedly been used for
illegal purposes and they are caring for Nips which we failed to kill in the
first attempt. Every one who is restored to duty potentially costs the life of
many of our people.17
Like Herod with the children that might become adults, the rear admiral takes his
precautions with the wounded and with invalids who might recover. For Carney,
attacking hospital ships is a necessary pre-emptive defence. He is commander of the
Third Fleet, but he has studied strategy in the fables of Phaedrus. The wolf says to
the lamb: ‘I’m going to eat you because you have undoubtedly wronged me. And
even if you haven’t, you might wrong me in the future, so you deserve to be torn
to pieces anyway.’ The wrongs committed by the hospital ships might be the origin
of the circular argument, or they might be its conclusion, whichever you please; just
don’t let them waste his time, because Carney has already made up his mind to kill
the patients being treated on them.
In anticipation of the end of the war, a distinction was made between the ‘good
German’ and the Nazi. In the Pacific, however, the racist stereotypes of the previous
century were still current; just as it used to be said that the only good Indian was a
dead Indian, so the same thing was now being said of the Japanese.
Even among American military chaplains, 40 per cent were convinced that it
was legitimate to kill Japanese who had been captured, and one of the psycholo-
gists’ tasks was to find ways of banishing feelings of guilt in soldiers who had killed
defenceless prisoners.18 An investigation in 1943 showed that half of the American
soldiers, taking their orders literally, were convinced that it would be necessary to
kill all the Japanese to achieve peace.19
242
The news media reported statements by public figures which obviously did not
constitute an actual programme but impressed simpler minds. According to Elliott
Roosevelt, the president’s son, about half of the Japanese needed to be extermi-
nated; according to Admiral Halsey, most of them; according to the president of the
commission for military personnel, every one of them.20 No one had ever wished
a genocide even on Nazi Germany. Rebounding backwards and forwards, paranoia
magnifies information; arriving in Japan as rumours, these menacing American fan-
tasies were blown up still further. It seems impossible to imagine anything more
exaggerated. But it was possible: in Japan a rumour circulated that the Allies would
transform the country into an international park, after exterminating all the inhab-
itants except 5,000 beautiful girls, who would act as tourist guides.21
The erroneous calculation of pre-emptive attack

What perverse logic led the Japanese to attack the strongest country in the world,
and half of the rest of the planet at the same time? Japan was undoubtedly expanding
and possessed fairly modern armaments. But it was still a medium-sized power and
bore no comparison to Germany, let alone to the United States. Even at the begin-
ning of the war the American economy was ten times the size of Japan’s.22 And the
United States still possessed enormous potential; at the end of the war its national
product was about half that of the world.23 Japan went to war with the United States,
but at the same time with the British Empire and with every country in between,
such as Thailand, French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia. Certainly, Britain was a
long way off, but in Asia it had troops in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore; the
Indian empire alone enlisted more than 2.5 million soldiers against Japan.24
Moreover, when they attacked the United States, the Japanese were already
engaged in a seemingly never-ending war against China, which was certainly not
a modern adversary but had such a vast population and territory that after ten
years Japan had occupied only a small part of it. Despite all the new fronts, the
Chinese one alone continued to commit more than half the Japanese soldiers.25
In short, Japan continued to make war on China with its right hand, while with
its left hand it confronted simultaneously the greatest power in the world, the rest
of Asia, Oceania and the colonial empires. One reason for this delusion of aggres-
siveness was the militarist inflation of the rulers, but another was the delusion of
encirclement.26
Not everything was paranoid fantasy. In the twentieth century Japan colonized
several countries on the Asian continent (Korea, Formosa, Manchuria, and part
of China), which propaganda presented as its natural extensions, but it was very
conscious of being an archipelago. For centuries it had taken pride in the feeling
of not only difference but also separateness from the world. This feeling of being
‘apart’ in every sense was very different from the Western one. Separateness inevi-
tably implied what we call today prejudice and racism, albeit different from that of
Europe and America. For a long time Japan had desired neither new wealth nor
progress but only stability.
243
The impossibility of isolation

In 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, of the US Navy, had appeared in Tokyo
Bay.27 Displaying the cannon of his four huge warships, he had delivered a series
of demands to the Japanese which were an unconscious repetition of the Spanish
Requerimiento. In this way he had won the first war of the Pacific without fir-
ing a shot. When Perry arrived there, Japan had rejected all relations with the
world for two and a half centuries. Shipbuilding was forbidden.28 The semi-feudal
government possessed only weapons for dealing with internal problems: a few
centuries-old arquebuses, but for the rest they had gone back to the sword. It was
inevitable that the Japanese should give Perry everything he wanted and open up
to international trade.
Since then, everything had been transformed. Japan had copied the Westerners,
and in less than a century seemed not far from catching up with them. The tech-
nological progress had been enormous. As far as imperial policies were concerned,
it had copied American westward expansion and European penetration into Africa,
sending troops and colonies on to the Asian continent. But it could not do much
against geography: it remained an archipelago. Now it also depended on navigation,
for it lacked natural resources, especially oil. Its entire external policy was based on
the fear of naval encirclement.The United States opposed its new conquests and, in
July 1941, put an embargo on Japanese oil supplies.29
Fear of encirclement
On 16 November of the same year, the American secretary of state, Cordell Hull,
demanded the withdrawal of all Japanese forces from China and Indo-China,
freezing Japanese property in the United States with a note that was interpreted
as an ultimatum.30 At this point, as we have seen in various situations, absolute haste
gripped the military. The imperial navy pointed out that, even when the ships
were not in action, they consumed 400 tons of fuel per hour.Without new sources
of supply, reserves would barely be sufficient for six months; so the sooner war
broke out the better. This apparent logic denied one substantial fact: about a third
of Japanese imports, including oil, came from the United States.31 Absurd, proud
consistency impelled them to strike the enemy they most depended on, putting
a noose around their own necks. It was necessary to start the war quickly. But it
would be necessary to finish it even more quickly; the resources for a prolonged
war were lacking.
The encirclement by the American fleet was indeed happening; the Japanese
military command’s delusion consisted not in having imagined it but in the fantasy
that it could be broken by military action. If the Japanese command could not
obtain sufficient raw materials on the continent, by making war on China, how
could it imagine that it would obtain them by multiplying its enemies? Paranoia
blinded the military not only with omnipotence – which is often a consequence of
paranoia – but also because of their code of honour, which made their reasoning
244
rigid. The head of the armed forces, Tojo, not only was certain of winning but
argued that if it did not fight, Japan would be subjugated within two or three
years (so he saw American policy as tantamount to a conspiracy against his country),
whereas if it fought, it would have a better chance, and more lasting prospects.32
A strategy founded on haste

Japan attacked indiscriminately on all fronts without having any real strategy for
long-term conquests.33 In so doing, it took the misfortune of paranoid leaders to
an extreme. The advance was so rapid that it caught the very commanders who
had ordered it unprepared, especially as far as supplies were concerned. Its success
was based on a rigid scheme: the simple, endless repetition of attacks. For obvious
geographical and economic reasons, the aim of the war could not be to conquer
the whole of the British Empire and the United States but only to reach a stage
where it was possible to negotiate their recognition of some of their conquests.
Nevertheless, the war began without any real plan, and politics remained hostage
to the military caste. Its apparent strength corresponded to a real weakness, not
only strategic (the vast extent of the occupied territories made them indefensible
in the long term), but also psychological. The rules of honour, sacred for the
military caste, involved a deep rigidity, opposed to the flexibility necessary for
reaching some compromise with the enemy and getting out of the war as soon
as possible.
Japanese self-sufficiency combined with development is an impracticable ideal,
as was shown by the 2011 tsunami and the fragility of its nuclear power stations.
The only way of ensuring that the country had the necessary energy resources
would have been, even at that time, dialogue and commercial calculation. Deftly
interwoven with economic and technological development, even given the lack of
raw materials, these could have brought Japan to a prosperity never seen before in
human history; as actually happened after 1945, when the country went down that
route and soon became the second largest economy in the world, after the United
States, and even superior to that country in per-capita productivity. When the war
in the Pacific broke out, this reasonable vision was impeded by a mental distortion
which formed the basis of foreign policy. Japan was imagined to have an unmatched
‘spirit’. This superiority was the granite underlying assumption of its international
expansion, but also, in a vicious circle, the aim it hoped to achieve and the means of
guaranteeing it; even Nazi Germany was apprehensive of what the Japanese might
do in the event of victory.34
Things were made infinitely worse by the clumsy and dishonourable way in
which the attack was handled. The American government was supposed to receive,
just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, an ultimatum and, immediately afterwards, a
declaration of war. But only the former arrived, when the bombs had already started
falling. Through an excess of secrecy and mistrust, the Japanese embassy in Washington
had already deactivated all the lines that received coded messages, except one. And
the staff was reduced to a minimum. When the declaration of war was finally ready,
245
the Japanese ambassador Nomura had to telephone Hull to apologize for being late
for their historic appointment.35
We have already seen how the paranoid leader can, with his lightning aggression,
surprise his adversaries and achieve remarkable successes, which in the short term
make him seem invincible and multiply the delusion of the masses that follow him.
That is what happened to Hitler. But the Japanese armed forces left the world even
more astonished. Instead of carrying out ‘lightning attacks’ (Blitzkrieg) on one front
at a time, like the German ones, they broke through on all fronts simultaneously.
While they were sinking the American ships in Pearl Harbor they were landing in
Hong Kong and Malaysia, then they drove the Americans out of the Philippines,
conquered Indonesia, Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar) and the Pacific islands,
even reaching the Aleutines, the natural continuation of America’s Alaska.
The surprise could not have been more complete. Singapore may be taken as an
example.The island was fortified, and military experts considered it almost impreg-
nable. The Japanese, however, came not from the sea but from the opposite side,
where the channel that separates the city from the continent is not wide. Nobody
was expecting them to arrive from that direction because, coming down from the
north, they would first have to travel right across Malaysia, which had few roads
and was covered with forest. How had they done it? Each Japanese division had
supplied its soldiers with a secret weapon: 6,000 bicycles.36 The soldiers had ped-
alled as much as twenty hours a day, and when they arrived many could hardly
walk. But they had been preceded by paranoid rumours: the rustle of thousands of
pedals had been mistaken for a distant rumble of tanks. Even though they could be
mown down from the fortifications as they landed, the waves of Japanese were not
stopped. Like Hong Kong before it, Singapore resisted only for a few days. In order
to take a fortified island starting from exposed positions, military theory holds that
you need a force several times greater than the defending one. Here the opposite
happened: there were just over 30,000 cyclists, whereas the garrison of Singapore
contained about 100,000 defenders, as well as powerful artillery.37 Once the city
had been taken, the Japanese commanders demanded that the British delegation
responsible for the surrender should raise the Union Jack along with the white flag.
The photographs were shown all around Asia and the world. The greatest imperial
empire was surrendering to an army of non-white men. In the Asian and African
imagination this meant that the sun had set on European domination; even though
the Japanese went on to lose the war, this perception would not change.
Suspicion and the missed opportunity

Singapore became a synonym for one of the most incredible defeats in history.38 In
the countries liberated from European colonialism enthusiasm touched the skies.
The brutality of the Japanese ‘liberators’ soon changed most people’s minds, but
no people in Asia reverted to its former passive acceptance of Western domination.
Japanese propaganda tried to make the most of the opportunity by recruiting
local armies to drive out the Europeans – especially the British – once and for all.
246
Even in countries which could not share this experience of liberation, for they had
long been Japanese colonies, there were masses of volunteers: more than 700,000
Koreans between 1939 and 1941, 425,000 Taiwanese in 1942.
But could the Japanese commanders trust these former slaves of the colonizers
who rushed to swell their ranks? Could they suddenly shake off the mistrust, the
insular mentality and fear of encirclement that had existed for centuries? For deep
psychological reasons Japan was inclined not to give these new allies too much
leeway. The new Burma Independence Army received 200,000 volunteers, but the
Japanese restricted it to only 4,000 men.39 They were equally niggardly with the
Indian National Army, the first nucleus of a potential Indian force which they could
have turned against the British. So the opportunity was missed. The countries they
had conquered, instead of becoming impetuous landslides that grew with each new
victory, turned into a morass which increasingly restricted the freedom of action of
the Japanese themselves.
Towards the atomic bomb

The seeds of the paranoia in the United States which led to the atomic bomb were
sown on similar ground. The question has often been asked: would the United
States have used this weapon against a European country? As early as 5 May 1943
the Military Policy Committee decided that the bomb would be dropped on Japan,
not on Germany. Underlying the decision was a consideration not of strategy –
the official policy was still based on the principle ‘Europe First’: that is, Germany
remained the first enemy that needed to be defeated – but of secrecy. Should a bomb
fail to explode, it was judged that the Germans would have been able to recover
part of it and, since they were quite well advanced in research on nuclear fission,
study it to their advantage.40
After the explosions, it was said that the massacre had prevented a continuation
of the war which would have cost even more lives. If we reread the arguments that
were advanced in favour of dropping the atomic bomb, however, we cannot but ask
ourselves whether it was used as a lesser evil (though still with a view to causing a
massacre) or partly because it would cause a massacre. As was mentioned above, the
racist stereotypes preceded the atrocities and continued to live a life of their own.41
After total war had filled the Pacific with horrors, by inverting the cause the atroci-
ties committed by the two sides were retroactively taken as confirmation of those
initial prejudices.The atrocity was for the most part a consequence of racism but now
became useful as a premise that justified it.
The amount of money and the number of technicians and places of production
invested in the ‘Manhattan Project’, which was to produce the atomic bomb, were
such as only the United States could provide at that time. Previously, however, its
government had been singularly unparanoid; it had observed the fascist regimes
disapprovingly from afar but had not participated in the arms race to any great
extent. Einstein wrote several letters to Roosevelt urging him to beat Hitler in the
race to the atomic bomb; and perhaps it was one of the few cases where learning
247
has succeeded in getting politics to listen.Towards the end of the Second World War,
with the sudden death of Roosevelt, the American vice-president, Harry Truman,
was catapulted into the presidency. On 12 April 1945, he found himself holding in
his hand, almost ready for use, the most powerful ‘thing’ in human history, and yet
he knew nothing about it; the secrecy had been such that only the absolute head of
state, but not his deputy, had been informed about it.
In a sense,Truman had a shock and never completely got over it. As well as being
unprepared for handling the atomic bomb, the new president, who was expected
in Europe by the other victors to discuss the end of the war, had no experience of
international politics. He tried to neutralize these two shortcomings by delaying his
meeting with Churchill and Stalin till the time of the first, highly secret atomic test
in the New Mexico desert.
Contagious fanaticism
On 15 July 1945, Germany had just surrendered. Truman was at the Potsdam
Conference when he was informed that the results of the experimental explosion
had exceeded all expectations. The report of Thomas Farrell, deputy command-
ing general and chief of field operations of the Project Manhattan, is particularly
interesting for our theme: the explosion, he says, was ‘followed almost immediately
by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us
feel we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces previously
reserved for the Almighty’.42 Rather than a military leader, the general sounded like
a prophet announcing that he had spoken with God. Infected through psychic con-
tagion, Truman too fell into Farrell’s rapture, alternating with moments of doubt
and depression.
On 18 July, he wrote to his wife that Stalin had undertaken to enter the war
against Japan on 15 August; he was very relieved because this meant that the war
would end a year earlier than expected. He seemed convinced, then, that Japan’s
surrender was within reach. This made it possible to suspend the use of the bomb.
On 25 July, however,Truman noted in his diary that he had decided that the atomic
bomb would be used but that he had given Stimson orders that only military targets
were to be bombed, not women and children.43
Here is another situation where haste dominates the mind, and which is strik-
ing for an absurd consistency of aims and an inversion of causality. The Americans had
worked feverishly on making an atomic bomb partly for fear that Hitler would
succeed in making it first and partly so that they would have a weapon that would
make it possible to shorten the war. But now that Germany had capitulated, the
opposite anxiety insinuated itself. The end of the war might come before the atomic bomb
had made it possible to end it with a show of force.
The president’s profound oscillations concerned not only his mood – swinging
between elation and depression – but the whole of American policy. Adhering to
the official line, Truman had insisted that Stalin participate in the efforts to end the
war as soon as possible, by attacking Japan. But that would have meant him having
248
to cope with the demands of an emboldened Stalin sitting among the victors.
Using the bomb before the Russians moved against the Japanese would achieve two
things: give the Americans alone the credit for Japan’s surrender, and at the same
time intimidate the Soviet dictator. That was why it was essential to work very fast.
On the ship that carried him back to the United States, the president’s excitement
became uncontainable. He talked about the supposedly top-secret new weapon
both with journalists and with members of the crew.
The range of options continues to narrow

Several scientists who worked on the construction of the first atomic bomb, in the
Manhattan Project, said they favoured a demonstrative attack on a harmless target,
in desert areas or in the Pacific, rather than on a city.44 The effect on Japan, whom
the Americans wanted to induce to surrender, would not be very different from that
of bombing an inhabited area. And the message sent to the Soviet Union (which
was expected to be the new adversary in the cold war which would follow the ‘hot’
one) would be the same. Even the head of the army, General Marshall, expressed
similar moral doubts.45
But the idea of a ‘demonstrative attack’ was never seriously considered. Like
Friar Montesinos’ sermon, Benedict XV’s letter or George Bell’s sermons, it spoke a
language that was solitary and incomprehensible, because it was incompatible with the
predominant collective paranoia. The military commanders’ preferred target remained
‘a vital war plant’ (with all the flexibility of this definition) ‘employing a large num-
ber of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses’.46 Hiroshima had a big
army base, but in 1945 that definition could apply to any place in Japan; already in
1944, 80 per cent of national production went towards military uses.47 As events
would prove, the American high command attached the greatest importance to the
study of the effects of the new weapon on a large civilian population; and this too,
unfortunately, was a crucial factor.
Niels Bohr had escaped from Nazi-occupied Denmark. His discoveries, along
with Einstein’s, had laid the basis for the atomic bomb, and he was willing to work
with the Allies if it meant preventing Hitler from constructing one first. Having
taken this position, he wrote to both Churchill and Roosevelt, proposing inter-
national controls over the new weapon. In 1944, he managed to have a personal
meeting with both of them. When the two heads of state met, they examined the
physicist’s proposals, but did nothing about them. The proposals did, however, have
an indirect result: mistrust. From the minutes of the meeting, we know that instruc-
tions were issued that Bohr’s activities be investigated and that it be ensured that he did not
tell anyone about his discoveries, especially the Soviets.48
Hiroshima
Aioi Bridge has an unmistakable T-shaped plan, visible even from high altitude.
In the middle of Hiroshima, before it reaches the sea, the O ta river splits into two
249
branches, the Kyobashi and Motoyasu rivers. A few metres upstream the arms of the
T still connect the two banks of the O ta, while the central leg links the bridge to
the island that is created by their separation.
On 6 August 1945, the weather in Hiroshima was very warm and the sky was
clear. The air-raid alarm was about to go off; but there were only three American
bombers. While two of them remained at an observation distance, from an altitude
of 9,600 metres Enola Gay identified the bridge and dropped the atomic bomb.
At 8.15, after a fall of 43 seconds, the bomb exploded about 600 metres above
Shima Hospital, slightly south-west of the intended target. One ten-thousandth
of a second later, the ball of fire reached 28 metres in diameter and a temperature
of 300,000 degrees. One second after the explosion, its diameter was 280 metres,
while on the ground the heat reached 3,000–4,000 degrees.49 The buildings were
obliterated. Only the large chamber of commerce, situated almost in the hypocentre
of the explosion, survived, losing only its roof.Within a radius of the first kilometre
the luminosity was such that stones were bleached, preserving on their surface only
the shadows of people between them and that light, who were instantaneously
dissolved into nothing. Windowpanes shattered as far as 27 kilometres away, firing
millions of splinters into survivors’ bodies. At the end of the year the authorities
calculated that the number of people killed by the explosion, burns and radiation
was 140,000.50
The diary of Michihiko Hachiya

Hiroshima Communications Hospital stood about a kilometre and a half from the
hypocentre. Its director had gone home after a sleepless night shift. Dr Michihiko
Hachiya saw the brightest flash of lightning he had ever seen, followed by the deep-
est silence he had ever heard. He ran towards the hospital, while his house folded
up into a little pile of beams. He noticed that he, like the people around him, was
completely naked, and covered with blood from more than a hundred wounds.That
night, after finishing his work as a doctor, he picked up a pen and for almost two
months practised a second profession too: that of witness.51
Elias Canetti has written: ‘Almost every page of this diary is thought-provoking.
[…] If there is any sense in considering which form of literature is indispensable
today – indispensable to a thinking and seeing person – it is this form.’52
Dr Hachiya is an extraordinarily scrupulous doctor. He works to the point of
exhaustion, which is imposed on him by two duties. He never judges; he has the
more difficult task of understanding. And he observes his own symptoms. He seeks
truth in the collapse of everything – salvation for the body, but also for his own soul.53
‘Is misfortune what people have most in common? […] In the case of Hiroshima it
is the most concentrated catastrophe that has ever befallen humankind.’54
Since he identifies profoundly with what he observes, Hachiya’s diary, too, is
characterized by a concentration which has few precedents. Following in the foot-
steps of this doctor, and in a sense anticipating both Primo Levi and Elias Canetti,
Kenzaburo O e wrote that it was through the catastrophe of Hiroshima that he
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discovered the complete sense of dignity.55 The director of the Communications

Hospital shows unfailing professionality, without ever lapsing into pedantry, and
deep humanity, never slipping into sentimentalism.
If people become most human when they are in the depths of unhappiness,
Hachiya had the blessing of humanity in misfortune; and, wisely, he never recrimi-
nates. On the contrary, he is grateful, and expresses an almost comically Japanese
humility. Running along the street he stumbles over a head with no body; and he
stops for a moment, apologizing loudly to the dead man (6 August 1945). He is
touched by the fact that someone has come to see if he is still alive and tells him he
shouldn’t have bothered (8 August). He feels sorry for the men who were scorched by
the blast but even more for the women who were burnt, who, in addition to the pain,
feel shame for their naked bodies (14 August). Before carrying out a post-mortem he
bows to thank the dead (26 August) for helping him to understand why people die.
Another universal characteristic makes this Japanese diary deeply moving for
Westerners too.Without planning it, without quoting Aristotle, Michihiko Hachiya
places his pages in the container of classical tragedy: unity of time, place and action
are scrupulously respected. His thoughts are not invectives against fate or the
enemy but reflections on the vanity of an existence for which, nonetheless, it is not
futile to fight: ‘what a weak, fragile thing man is before the forces of destruction!’
(11 August). The writer avoids personal complaints because he is not an author but
only a notary of the catastrophe. And, of course, he lets the witnesses do most of the
talking. As in ancient tragedy, the horrendous scenes are not seen and described by
him but reported by others, who announce them like Greek messengers; they have
seen for themselves or heard them described by others.
During the first few days they are mainly descriptions of victims. Dr Tabuchi
recalls them as swarming ants. Their skin had peeled away and hung from their
bodies like rags from a scarecrow (7 August). Mr Katsutani says that many had lost
their eyes, mouth, nose, ears, their whole face; several parents would not be able
to recognize their children by their face but only by their voice. When he crossed
the bridge, there was a corpse leaning against the parapet, still sitting on its bicycle
(7 August). If Hachiya happens to describe directly, he does so in order to show
us that the opposites of life still coexist: existence and death, horror and beauty.
A young woman patient in his hospital is burnt all over her body but raises intact
from the mass of blood and pus a beautiful face. She smiles at him. Clinging to this
contemplation, Hachiya continues to be cheered by the sight of the ‘beautiful girl’
(11, 14 and 28 August).
If Japan is half-ruined, Hiroshima suffers psychological annihilation too. In the
absence of trustworthy news media, everyone relies on rumours. Hachiya’s hospital
is full of them. On 11 August, an (accurate) report circulates that the Soviet Union
has broken its pact with dying Japan and declared war on it. Now the encirclement
is complete. Later, the same day, it is said that the secret weapon that hit Hiroshima
has annihilated Nagasaki too. (This too is true.)
The third rumour of the day, however, is absurd but is believed more than the
others. Japan too possessed the mysterious weapon and had not used it, partly in
251
order to keep it secret and partly owing to rejection of the horror;56 now, how-
ever, a squadron of trans-Pacific bombers is attacking and destroying the cities of
California. Hitler, depressed and now close to suicide, before the end had had a
flash of paranoid vitality, deciding to punish Göring and his treacherous henchmen.
In a similar way the entire Communications Hospital emerged from its apathetic
resignation; at the false news sick people cheered, sang and joked. Its poor dying
patients had certainly not lived on evil like Hitler. But that need to split responsibili-
ties (and therefore punishments) and project them onto others, which we call paranoia,
becomes extreme precisely at extreme moments, when a capacity for moral evalua-
tion is necessary; the unconscious psyche makes it explode unpredictably, to defend
from despair both the perverted and the normal; both the individual and the group.
On 12 August, a true report arrived: the bomb that had hit Hiroshima was
atomic. On 13 August, another absurd rumour, evidently the result of an attempt
to quantify the incalculable power of the new weapon: Hiroshima would remain
uninhabitable for seventy-five years!
The withdrawal of projections and meeting the enemy

On 15 August it was learned that there was to be a great announcement. Rumours
whispered that it would reveal an enemy landing on Japanese soil. Instead, clus-
tered around the few radios, subjects listened to the most unexpected thing: the
Emperor’s voice, which no one had ever heard in public, announced the surrender,
asking the people to ‘bear the unbearable’. ‘The one word – surrender – had pro-
duced a greater shock than the bombing of our city’, the doctor comments. Now,
splitting and projecting the evil on to the enemy is no longer possible. As a loyal
subject, Hachiya completely introjects the Emperor’s voice and obeys his order. In
this prototype of the honest, loyal citizen we see the origins of a new kind of sim-
plification of thought, which would dominate the Japanese attitude to events in the
ensuing decades. Once again, Pal would be one of the few to point it out. During a
visit to the Hiroshima memorial in 1952, he read an inscription that promised not
to repeat the mistake and commented that it was wrong that the Japanese should
apologize; they had not dropped the bomb.57 As we have seen, a frequent corollary
of paranoia is the inversion of causes.
In accepting the surrender, Hachiya shifts his aggression onto the proud military
commanders who had wanted the war and lied about the possibilities of victory
(1 September). He prepares an article discussing medical aspects of the condition
of people who had been burned or affected by radiation and rejects the report that
the city will remain uninhabitable for seventy-five years (note of 9 September, pub-
lished on 12 September). His exhausting work in the hospital continues; time is sus-
pended in expectation of the radical novelty: the arrival of Allied occupation troops.
When they arrive, Hachiya listens carefully, in the effort to find out and learn,
just as he does with his pencil. Once again, to him doctor and witness are the same
thing; and healing bodies of wounds and minds of paranoia is a single task. When
the Americans arrive, none of the catastrophic events that had been feared really
252
happens. The occupiers are civilized. Indeed, ‘These men impressed me as citizens
of a great country’ (29 September).
More elation
William L. Laurence was a brilliant scientific journalist on the New York Times
and was chosen by the American government as press attaché for the Manhattan
Project. When he heard that an experimental explosion of the atomic bomb in the
New Mexico desert was planned, his reaction was the exact opposite of the pro-
posal of a demonstrative attack which had been fruitlessly supported by the project’s
members: why waste a bomb that was ready to be dropped on Japan? Allowed to
witness the secret experiment, Laurence later wrote that he had an experience
similar to the explosion on the internal level too.
It came as the affirmative answer to the until then unanswered ques-

tion: ‘Will it work?’ […] The hills said yes and the mountains chimed in yes.
It was as if the earth had spoken and the suddenly iridescent clouds and sky
had joined in one affirmative answer. Atomic energy – yes. […] One felt as
though one were present at the moment of creation when God said: ‘Let
there be light.’ […] The big boom came about 100 seconds after the great
flash – the first cry of a newborn world. […] Prometheus had broken his
bonds and brought a new fire down to earth.58
The journalist was to have written a ‘running commentary’ on the dropping of the
bomb on Hiroshima. As if he had introjected part of the weapon’s immense power,
Laurence described his exhilaration at this unique privilege. Owing to a mishap, he
was not in fact able to take part but by now excitement had become permanent
in him.
He touched the bomb. He described it as a mystical experience. It was not
like kissing a religious relic; no, the ‘thing’ was a living deity. To be put in charge
of the press communiqués of such an event was literally to become an angel, the
announcer who brings the divine word to the world.
Nagasaki
Laurence was finally allowed to take part in the dropping of the second atomic
bomb on Nagasaki. He wrote that he had had a visionary experience on the plane,
an experience of confusion with the deity. ‘While I was writing, there was a strange
interference from destiny.’ It is still dark and Laurence thinks of the Japanese city
below him, in the darkness: ‘men, women and children […] like a calf fattened for
sacrifice.’The Japanese animal had different faces. Disguising it as a monkey made it
a brute; depicting it as a calf was the logical premise for leading it to the slaughter.
The city, Laurence reflects, had gone to bed after a day’s work, ‘night after night,
week after week, year after year. And I am here. I am destiny. I know. They don’t
253
know. But I know that this is their last night on earth.’ As far as compassion for the
unwitting civilian victims is concerned, ‘you feel […] that it doesn’t concern you.
This event, this destiny was decided a long time ago, by forces infinitely greater than
human ones.’59 Laurence had had a vision of a manifest destiny: a convenient enlight-
enment to receive when you belong to the stronger group, but you do not want to
pay the moral price. The murder of a human mass was no longer the responsibility
of human beings, but a ‘higher’ law, like the law of ‘natural’ selection which autho-
rized Hitler to eliminate weaker individuals.
The journalist’s report was published only a month after the destruction of
Nagasaki, and with a few cuts. These included the final section where he spoke of
the ‘new continent of atomic energy […]. Promised Land of wealth, health and
happiness for the human race.’
Laurence shows all the hallmarks of psychic inflation,60 in the specific form of
paranoid exhilaration. He has had an absolute revelation. From this derive equally granitic
certainties, which can be followed indifferently in any direction, always returning,
circularly, to confirm that point of departure. The message rises omnipotent on God’s
wing, becoming a biblical imperative.
Rationalizations
The political authorities that Laurence represented expressed themselves in
a very similar manner. After the bombing of Nagasaki, President Truman
announced: ‘Having found the bomb we have used it.’61 Like a revelation, an illumi-
nation or a divine commandment, the bomb is almost a pre-existent thing. It is not
made but discovered, like the law of ‘natural’ selection; it is something, therefore, to
which one can resort without full responsibility. Not an object that one possesses
but a thing that possesses us, as if it were the will of Providence.
As well as omnipotence, the methods of the atomic bombings recall other para-
noid components of the political class that decided to carry them out: an extreme
projection of aggressiveness and an obvious disproportion in the means used. It chose
to use this weapon of incalculable power against the civilian population of a coun-
try which, even if it had seriously violated international norms, was still an enemy
whose few still functioning aircraft now lacked any fuel or tried to fly using a distil-
late of pine resin,62 while in barracks soldiers trained for combat with wooden bul-
lets and bamboo spears.63 Since Japan was practically devoid of any air defence and
most of the houses were made of wood and paper, compared to air operations over
Germany burning entire Japanese cities was child’s play. Tokyo was in fact torched
for the last time the day after the announcement of the surrender.64
Secrecy
After the dropping of the bomb the scientists felt less and less bound by their com-
mitment to secrecy. Reasonably, many of them started to criticize the fact that not
only did mystery surround the construction of the weapon, but its consequences too
254
were now kept secret. A month after the dropping of the atomic bombs and the sur-
render, the whole of southern Japan remained off limits even to Allied war corre-
spondents. One of the greatest American journalists, George Weller, landed secretly
at Nagasaki. There he passed himself off as a colonel and wrote a series of reports.
General MacArthur intercepted and destroyed the originals of his articles, which
were published only sixty years later, when his son Anthony Weller discovered cop-
ies of them which the author had lost.65
A similar fate befell the visual material on the atomic bombings. For pictures
show the truth in an even more immediate way than writing.
The first photographs appeared in Life in 1952, the first film in 1970.66 The
secrecy continued, going so far as to prohibit, from 1945 to 1952 – that is, in
the years of the American occupation of Japan – even the publication of medical
research on the illnesses deriving from the explosions.67
This encouraged the imagination, which was working in the dark. The collec-
tive unconscious was hypnotized simultaneously by the horror and by the fascina-
tion of this great subject; it could not take its eyes off it. In all languages, when
the simple word ‘atomic’ is spoken, even today the implication and the fear are
activated: one does not think of productive uses – ‘atomic power’ or an ‘atomic
power station’ – but of the implication ‘atomic bomb’, for it already lives in the
mind, just below the level of consciousness. Unwittingly, our way of speaking still
preserves features of the omnipotent, allusive vocabulary which surrounded the
weapon from the beginning: even Stimson, in his diary, avoided calling it by its
own name and wrote ‘the thing’, ‘the dire’, ‘the dreadful’, ‘the diabolical’, and other
similar expressions.68
In November 1945, Life published some pictures (television was not yet wide-
spread) of the consequences of a sudden atomic attack. The following year, many
former members of the Manhattan Project, concerned because several coun-
tries now had access to the technology for making atomic weapons, formed the
Federation of American Scientists. The group’s aims were noble – the peaceful use
of atomic technology, and international controls – but the power of the underly-
ing fantasy also worked in the scientists’ minds, and eventually came to spread the
opposite of a peaceful message: paranoia. The Federation of American Scientists’
main document, besides describing in detail a New York annihilated by an atomic
attack, insinuated the doubt that such weapons might now be assembled in any
place, in any basement, even under the apartment block where you live.69
A year after the first explosion, in August 1946, John Hersey published a
fifty-one-page article in the New Yorker describing its consequences for the first
time: ‘Hiroshima: A Noiseless Flash’. Since silence had been imposed on the mas-
sacre until then, the subtitle might be read as having a double meaning. The taboo
had been broken by one of the most prestigious magazines in the world.70
The growing panic among the public began to infect the political spheres, but
with another type of fear. Was the purely military justification given by President
Truman for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sufficient? Within the United
States, many people protested that they had not been properly informed. On the
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international level, the United States was looked on with paranoid suspicion: what
will they do, now that they’re the only ones who possess this absolute weapon?
At this point, James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, and for-
merly in charge of the scientific administration of the Manhattan Project, makes
his entrance. A first-rate chemist, his relationship with scientific research had been
complicated by moral conflicts. In the past, an explosion in his laboratory had killed
three co-workers. Conant had blamed himself. But shortly afterwards, during the
First World War, he had worked energetically on the production of chemical weap-
ons. He seems to have overcome the problem of responsibility through mecha-
nisms of splitting and projection.71 The distinguished scientist had built himself
some granite rigidities: when the end is just, science must not fall into doubts but
only serve in the search for means. He wrote to Stimson asking him for a retrospec-
tive official justification to silence moral objections. The result was the article ‘The
Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb’, published in Harper’s Magazine, another highly
respected publication.72
Later justifications
It is worth devoting a few lines to this mid-twentieth-century political document,
because it set the terms for the Cold War arms race and indirectly continues to
influence the debate on nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century too.
In it, Stimson recalls that the American race towards the atomic bomb had begun
in September 1941, before the Americans entered the war. The first experiment on
nuclear fission had been carried out in Germany in 1938. Throughout the war, the
former secretary for war points out, being the first to make and use the bomb was
the United States’ objective. In March 1945 he discussed the Manhattan Project
with President Roosevelt, who died soon afterwards. Stimson gives an account of
their conversation by publishing an extract from his diary.
He mentions two themes, both linked not to international politics but to
the suspicion-poisoned atmosphere that already surrounded the work. First of all,
there were rumours that the Project, even though four Nobel Prize winners were
working on it, was going to prove a very expensive ‘lemon’ for the United States.
Second, among the initiates a sharp division was emerging between two schools
of thought: one group, if the Project achieved its aim, wanted to keep it secret; the
other wanted to make the new discovery freely available and place it under inter-
national control.
The following month, Stimson discussed with the newly appointed President
Truman a crucial nine-point memorandum.The fifth point states that, since human
progress is a technological fact, not a moral one, the new weapon might annihilate
civilization. The final point has an organizational purpose: it recommends the for-
mation of an interim committee, to guide the bomb through the final stages. But all
the other seven points concern secrecy.The United States is the only country that knows
the technologies for producing the bomb, but information will inevitably filter
out; it is possible that work on its construction is already secretly going on in other
256
countries. With unintentional irony, a footnote to the article explains that these
countries were indicated in the memorandum, but reasons of international diplo-
macy made it inadvisable to publish their names.73 In short, it had been decided to
open the doors by publishing these top-secret notes, but secrecy had already begun
to assert itself again, transforming the declared transparency into transparent allusion.
The memorandum is dated 25 April 1945: on that day Nazi-Fascism disappeared
from Italy, while in Germany the eastern and western fronts met up, as Americans
and Soviets embraced on a bailey bridge linking the two banks of the Elbe. Hitler
had already loaded the gun with which he would shoot himself. Stimson’s article
could have been more specific: the now ‘enemy’ country which was secretly build-
ing the atomic bomb was not Germany but the very same Soviet Union that the
Americans were embracing.
In June, Stimson reports, the interim committee had advised President Truman:
1. to use the atomic bomb against Japan as soon as possible;

2. to use it against military installations surrounded by houses and other buildings;
3. to give no prior warning of the bombing.
Haste and the desire to cause maximum destruction are clearly the criteria that
guide these choices.
At this point, Stimson mentions another memorandum that he had drawn up
and that had been approved by Truman on 2 July, and outlines the reasoning that
guided him in compiling it.74 The Japanese navy, he writes, ‘had practically ceased
to exist’ and all that was left of the air force was the kamikazes (suicide pilots, whose
deployment had made a great impression but had, we know, been fairly insignificant
from a strategic point of view).75 However, the army can still call on about 5 million
soldiers. Since Japan shows no sign of surrendering, in order to achieve victory it
will be necessary to invade the archipelago.
According to military predictions, he adds, a landing on Kyushu, the southern-
most island of Japan, will be not be achieved until 1 November 1945. By the spring
of 1946 it should be possible to invade Honsu, the main island. The fighting as a
whole might end by late 1946 at the earliest. To fight the 5 million Japanese at least
the same number of American soldiers will be needed. It is predicted that at least
1 million of them will be killed, not to mention the fact that, he adds, the number
of deaths among the Japanese will be far higher.
To avoid a massacre considered to be possible in the future, pre-emptive reason-
ing decides to carry out a real one immediately. It is false from the military point
of view and unacceptable from the moral point of view, yet this is the argument
that has justified the use of the atomic bomb in the past, so he does not rule out
the possibility that it will be advantageous to use the bomb in the future. Morally
real deaths and merely imagined deaths cannot be put on the same level, especially
by someone who has an interest in legitimizing the use of the new weapon. Nor
can soldiers who die in combat be considered equivalent to civilians massacred by
breaching the international conventions of war.
257
Justifying a massacre as prevention of other massacres has been a pretext for

collective crimes in all ages: Cromwell did the same in Ireland in the seventeenth
century.76 As we have seen, Hitler and Stalin used broadly similar excuses for com-
mitting the most serious actions. Even the first genocide of the twentieth century,
that of the Armenians, began in order to pre-empt the possibility of Ottoman sol-
diers being attacked from the rear and encircled by an Armenian revolt.
In a sense, however, Stimson’s manipulation is even more disturbing. In the larg-
est democracy in the world, a democratically elected politician, in deciding to carry
out a massacre, states that he is saving lives. Is he merely a hypocrite, like many politi-
cians, or has the necessity of seducing by means of the mass media turned him into
a pseudological and paranoid individual? To put it another way, is it possible that,
in striving to respect an absurd consistency, Stimson now believes his own ‘preventive
psychopathology’? At this point he has, at any rate, a diseased relationship with his
responsibility and his decisions. Perhaps he is grappling with an unresolved problem
of conscience; he is trying to convince himself, in particular, that the use of atomic
weapons is necessary and moral.
It should be noted that the public debate about ‘deaths saved’ appears after the
dropping of the atomic bombs. Moreover, the figure in the estimate tends to grow
suspiciously: initially it is a quarter of a million, then half a million and finally
1 million.The higher the number of these dead who were still alive grew, the more
moral the decision to use the atomic bomb appeared in retrospect. In reality, even
before the dropping of the two atomic bombs estimates had been made of the
number of possible deaths in the event of it being necessary to invade Japan with
troops.They were kept secret, however, partly because they were lower by an aston-
ishing amount: they ranged from 20,000 (one-fiftieth of that million) to 63,000
(one-fifteenth).77 So it would have been more difficult to use them to justify an
atomic massacre.
Stimson’s article was written in 1947. In reality, on 1 July 1946, the Pacific War
Strategic Bombing Survey78 (a strategic report compiled by a commission made up
of over 1,000 experts and appointed by the secretary for war, Stimson himself) had
concluded that the war would certainly have ended in 1945, probably by October,
even without the atomic bomb, without a threat of invasion and even without the Soviet
Union entering the war.79 As we have seen, Japan had hardly any armaments left, and
its population was living on an average of only 1,680 calories a day, a ration simi-
lar to that of the Nazi concentration camps.80 If the war had ended by October,
however, the American invasion, planned for November, not only would not have
caused millions of deaths but would not even have begun. It is difficult to avoid
the impression that this story of deaths saved was the real lemon that the former
minister is throwing at the world. He makes us turn our eyes towards them, so that
we don’t look at the real dead.81
To impress the reader with an apocalyptic scenario, Stimson pretends to believe
that, in order to bring about Japan’s surrender, it would be necessary to conquer
all its islands; or, as the racist phrase current among the Allies, and quoted in this
chapter, ran, kill all the Japanese. In fact, the Americans had long since deciphered
258
Japan’s messages in secret code and knew that the country was trying to surrender
via its Moscow embassy.82 When the atomic bombs were dropped, these negotia-
tions had already been going on for three months;83 but the government pretended
not to know this, because the scientists had not yet finished the atomic bomb. It was
essential to finish it quickly, not in order to end the war early, but on the contrary because
there was a risk of the war ending too soon, before they could use the bomb, which was
supposedly needed in order to finish it.
The objection that unconditional surrender had been demanded of Japan is
immaterial. The Japanese council of war was divided: three members were in favour
of unconditional surrender, the others asked for some conditions.84 This split in the
council, which derived from the Japanese tradition of deciding unanimously rather
than by a majority, was evident already in May; but the paralysis still persisted in
August, after the two atomic explosions.The only real condition for the Japanese was
that the emperor should not be abolished. And the Americans, from what Stimson
himself says, were not only willing, but eager to grant it, because a constitutional
monarchy seemed to them the best guarantee of a transition to democracy, rather
than to communism.85 Given the impasse in the council of war, it was decided to
consult the Emperor, who supported the surrender. The idea that the use of the
atomic bombs was the decisive factor in inducing Japan to surrender is very far from
the truth.The decisive factor was the presence of the unapproachable emperor, who
traditionally did not participate in political activity; that is, a dramatic breach, not on
the military front, but with Japanese traditions. As Dr Hachiya had said (15 August),
hearing the Emperor’s voice on the radio had been a shock greater than that of the
atomic explosion. The crucial innovation was not a military but a cultural one.
Stimson, then, had not provided proof of the necessity of the atomic bombs,
but only of the fact that he had already decided in favour of their use; he pre-
tended to arrive circumspectly at a conclusion that he had already taken from
the outset, on the basis of inaccurate but rigid assumptions. In so doing he did
not carry conviction but succeeded in promoting the continuation of the para-
noid climate. The Survey, the concluding report of a wide-ranging research project
directed by Stimson himself, spectacularly contradicts his affirmations, but this fact
did not attract much attention, for it remained a specialized document, while the
piece published in Harper’s Magazine and signed by Stimson would enjoy a wide
circulation. The article is mediagenic and philo-paranoid, the Survey reasonable
and anti-paranoid. In trying to salvage something from an impossible situation, the
preliminary notes to the edition of the Survey now on the Internet says, at point
4: ‘The USSB reports do not [italics in the original] state or even suggest that the
use of the atomic bomb against Japan was unwise. On the contrary, a careful analysis
of the USSB’s findings supports the wisdom of using the bombs.’ For further infor-
mation, the note refers the reader to another retrospectively written document
entitled How the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Reports Endorsed the Use of the
Atomic Bombs. This attempts to justify Secretary Stimson’s decision to carry out the
atomic massacre on the grounds that during the war he would not have been suf-
ficiently informed of how close Japan was to surrendering, but, even more, it ends
259
up contradicting the Stimson who wrote the article. For by that time, the secretary
knew everything; the Survey had been delivered to him a year earlier.
Over the years, the controversy surrounding the use of the atomic bomb would
flare up again. During the Korean War, in 1950, it became particularly important
for the American government to take a strong line. So Truman was able to repeat
frequently that he had never had any regrets about using atomic bombs against
Japan, and he hinted at the possibility of using them again. In so doing he left behind
him a trail of unsolicited affirmations of moral certainty. On the personal level, the
American president has left a picture containing persecutory and hypo-maniacal
traits; on the historical level we may wonder how far this line taken by his govern-
ment has contributed to the subsequent proliferation of atomic weapons in several
countries.
In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an
exhibition of a critical nature which was being organized at the National Air and
Space Museum in Washington was censured by both chambers of the American
Congress and cancelled after an outcry and the mobilization of politicians to defend
the use of the atomic bomb. It was replaced by a simple exhibition of the B29 Enola
Gay and of a few technical aspects of a bombing deemed ‘necessary’, since it was
based on granite certainties. Thus, half a century after the slaughter, denial, splitting
and projection remained the official voices. August 1945 meant heroic missions by
airmen, not the massacre of civilians; not Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Tokyo Trials
The Tokyo Trials, which lasted two and a half years, from 1946 to 1948, prosecuted
those mainly responsible for the Japanese aggression on capital charges, as had hap-
pened in Europe with the Nazi leaders in the Nuremberg Trials. Under the fifth
count of the indictment, the Japanese were charged with ‘conspiring with Germany
and Italy to secure the domination of the world by the waging of […] illegal wars
against any opposing countries’.86 The targets of the Japanese attacks, however, had
not been Western nations alone. Accordingly, Asian judges too were included in the
jury. The Indian judge Radhabinod Pal argued that the Americans were at least as
responsible as the Japanese for causing the war and that they had committed war
crimes themselves by bombing vast numbers of civilians. As far as the charge of
conspiracy was concerned, he commented, ‘conspiracy is an inchoate act […]. It
involves an intent to commit a further act. […] Manifestly, there is grave danger
where conviction and punishment can be based purely on intent.’87 Like the jour-
nalistic articles and medical studies on the consequences of the atomic bombings,
the publication of his judgement was banned until 1952.
The reawakening of Ajax

We have repeatedly had cause to reflect on the fact that time, by abstracting us
from the urgency of the emotions, sooner or later restores some kind of justice
260
to reasonable thought. But we have also noticed that in more recent times
the progress of technology has increasingly skewed this natural equilibrium.
Because of the immense and irreversible consequences of the new inventions
that are constantly being made, there is a risk that we will see this justice arrive
too late. The construction of the atomic bomb is a good example of this, for it
gradually slipped out of the hands of educated, scrupulous scientists into the
hasty ones of cynical politicians and ended up being used in a way that was in
every sense destructive.
Many of the participants in the Manhattan Project – scientists, but also politi-
cians and military men – had had doubts. But in its realization they had worked
as a group, which was made particularly cohesive by the state of war and the race
against time. Those who remained on the outside and who had expressed objec-
tions – Niels Bohr, or the Nobel Prize winner Isidor Isaac Rabi – ended up as
individual objectors lacking the benefits of the multiplying effect provided by the mass media
in association with collective paranoia. Those who were on the inside, even if they were
people of great scientific and moral intelligence, could not perceive that the group
was moving compactly, blocking the moral conscience that starts from individual doubts – a
phenomenon for which the reading of Freud, Jung and Canetti ought by now to
have prepared us. In a sense, this compactness moved with the whole of American
society down the inclined plane of war. For it grew in brutality at the end, precisely
when it was least necessary.
After the events of August 1945, the fighting had ended, and that compact-
ness no longer existed. Several of the scientists broke away from that una-
nimity, though always one by one. It was like the reawakening of Ajax. Now
their conscience had been enlightened. Like Ajax, they saw the results of the
slaughter and felt their own useless moral reawakening. The most celebrated
case, because of the tragic complexity of the figure concerned, remains that
of Robert Oppenheimer. The director of the Manhattan Project continued to
defend his decision to take part in it. At the same time, however, he started to
use highly emotive symbolic language; he said he felt he had blood on his hands
and had ‘known sin’.
Naturally, the number of conscience-stricken people was higher among the
scientists than among the politicians. Whereas the former reined in the absolute
aggressiveness they had projected onto the enemy in wartime and began to intro-
ject the gigantic responsibilities of the bomb, the latter closed ranks, reinforcing
the acritical premise of being in the right, and including the scientists themselves
in their projections of the ‘enemy’. Gradually, Oppenheimer was surrounded
by the solitude of Ajax, the blood of Macbeth and the suspicion of Othello.88
Meanwhile, the Soviets too had come into possession of the new weapons, and
in the United States the witch-hunt against ‘un-American activities’ began. It was
‘discovered’ that Robert Oppenheimer had had Marxist sympathies, and that his
brother Frank, who had worked with him on the Project, had been a member of
the American Communist Party. The secret services had always known this, but,
during the war, while the Oppenheimers were working on the atomic bomb and
261
Stalin was an ally, there was no sense in raking up such matters. Now that the
scientist had become a critic, and the Soviets had replaced the Nazis and Japanese
as enemies, those matters took on a different aspect. Robert Oppenheimer died
misunderstood and tormented, though a few streets were named after him around
the world.
Dr Hachiya’s farewell
In the final pages of his diary, Dr Hachiya almost gives us a glimpse of a serenity
that augurs well for the future. Perhaps it was an early step on the road of that anti-
paranoid progress towards recovery which Japanese society may have completed
after the war. Curiously, however, paranoia reappeared there on the opposite front,
that of the relaxed invaders who set foot in Japan in 1945.
On 30 September, Hachiya wrote the final entry in his diary, recording a con-
versation he had had with an American officer. The foreigner asked him: ‘What are
your thoughts regarding the bombing?’
‘I am a Buddhist’, the doctor replied, ‘and since childhood have been taught to
be resigned in the face of adversity. I have lost my home and my wealth and I was
wounded, but, disregarding this, I consider it fortunate my wife and I are alive.’
‘I can’t share your feelings’, the foreigner replied sternly. ‘If I were you, I’d sue
the country.’
The officer stayed a while longer, gazing out of the window. Then he and his
party left.
‘“Sue the country! Sue the country!” I repeated, over and over, to myself ’,
Hachiya recalls. ‘But no matter how many times I repeated it, and however hard
I thought, the statement was altogether incomprehensible.’
In the generations following 1945, the United States and Japan have continued
to converge. The old Japanese Empire has become Westernized, not only in its
economy but also in everyday life and even in its most deep-rooted customs. It has
been observed that one of the ways in which the two countries remain distant from
one another, however, is in their degree of litigiousness. The American legal system
tends to encourage demands for financial compensation for damages of private
or public origin. It is an important form of equity, which many other countries
neglect. But this aspect of justice has its dark side. It offers encouragement to the
projection of responsibilities and to suspicion; in short, as a generalized culture, it
encourages paranoia.
In 2007, the number of lawyers in the United States was about 941,000, equiva-
lent to one for every 290 American citizens. During the same period, the number of
lawyers in Japan was about 20,000, one for every 6,300 inhabitants. In the Japanese
legal system, however, a reform is under way to encourage greater adherence to
the constitutional state and detachment from the archaic systems of obligations
of Confucian origin, not formalized by law. The change will require a significant
increase in the number of lawyers and judges, making the country more like the
United States in this respect too.89
262
Notes
1 General Thomas Blamey, 25 December 1942, in Dower 1986: 71.
2 Radhabinod Pal, at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, 1948; in Minear 1972: 100–1.
3 Dower 1986: 79.
4 Dower 1986: 85 and 125.
5 The concept of ‘race’, central in fascist ideologies, was used at the time imprecisely
but frequently in the democratic countries too. In the article cited below (n. 112), the
American Secretary for War refers to the Japanese as a nation when he treats them as
an entity to be respected and with which the United States will cooperate again in the
future, whereas he uses the term ‘race’ when he stresses their irreconcilable difference
and barbarity (Stimson 1947b: 102–3). This semantic oscillation survives even today in
Spanish; the day when a certain national group is celebrated is called El día de la raza,
which may be translated either more specifically as ‘the day of the ethnic group’ or more
broadly as ‘the day of race’.
6 See Ferguson 2006: 546–7; Hastings 2007: 8; and see above, Chapter 1.
8 See Dower 1986: 64–5.
9 See Dower 1986: 64–5.
10 For several decades after the war, American children would call each other ‘Jap!’ as an
insult.
11 See Dower 1986: Chapter 2 and Figs. 1–14.
12 Ferguson 2006: 538. The Japanese, consistently with their premises, treated prisoners
very harshly: the mortality rate among Anglo-Americans captured on the Pacific front
was 27 per cent (see Dower 1986: 48). Ferguson 2006: 496 ff. and Table 14 gives per-
centages which are slightly lower, but not comparable to those of Dower, because they
were arrived at using non-homogeneous criteria). By contrast, Allied prisoners of the
Nazi–Fascists in Europe received a treatment that may seem surprising, given that only
4 per cent died. It should be noted that the inhumane treatment of Anglo-American
prisoners by the Japanese was among the charges at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, which
passed judgment on twenty-eight senior Japanese officials, condemning most of them
to death or life imprisonment. Among the Japanese imprisoned by the Soviets, however,
the death rate was far higher than among the Allied prisoners of the Japanese. Yet this
was not discussed at the Tokyo Trials; the Soviet Union was represented not by arraigned
defendants but by a judge who had gained his experience by presiding over the Stalinian
show trials. See Dower 2000: 470 ff.
13 See Dower 1986: 68.
14 See Ferguson 2006: 545; Dower 1986: 52 ff.
15 Wilson 1917: 1 and 2.
17 Cited Hastings 2007: 172.
19 See Dower 1986: 53. The genocide scholars Chirot and McCauley draw attention to
an interesting aspect of these surveys carried out during the war among American sol-
diers: of those who fought against the Japanese, 42 per cent were of the opinion that
the entire population of Japan needed to be eliminated; among those sent to Europe,
the percentage rose to 61 per cent, while among those who were still being trained in
the United States it was as high as 67 per cent. See Chirot and McCauley 2006: 216.
This seems to correspond to the fact that the less you know your enemy the more your
attitude towards him is moulded by collective paranoia. That this is indeed the case has
been confirmed, also in the United States, by the fearful reaction to the September 11
attacks: the panic and the substantially paranoid rumours about new attacks was greater
in the internal states of the country and less intense in the states located along the two
coasts, which were objectively more likely to be attacked but which were more used to
263
having relations with other countries and contained a higher proportion of immigrants,
both Islamic and non-Islamic.
20 See Dower 1986: 55. It must be said that, despite the appearance of ferocious racism,
Halsey did not maintain an attitude of splitting and denial of responsibility like most
American commanders. After the war, when some began to question the view that the
use of the atomic bomb had been the only possible option, he acknowledged that when
Hiroshima had been bombed Japan had been trying to negotiate its surrender. But
according to Halsey the scientists had manufactured their ‘toy’ and wanted to try it out.
See Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 93.
21 See Dower 1986: 61.
22 See United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946: 10.
23 See Harrison 2000.
26 The interesting document (dating from 1943), produced by a commission that
expounded the reasons for the war, in making accusations against the United States and
Great Britain spoke of the ‘villainous character of the encirclement ring’; see Dower
1986: 60.
27 See Jansen 2000: Chapter 9; Feifer 2006.
28 See Feifer 2006: Chapter 15.
30 See Jansen 2000: 639 ff.
31 See Ferguson 2006: 487 ff.
32 See Ferguson 2006: 489 ff.
33 See Dower 1986: 59; Ferguson 2006: Chapter 14.
35 See Jansen 2000: 641.
36 See Bayly and Harper 2005: 116; Ferguson 2006: 493.
37 See Dower 1986: 36; according to Bayly and Harper 2005: 131, there were about 85,000
defenders after the evacuation of the Europeans. Hastings 2007: 7, gives a lower figure,
but still twice that of the Japanese forces.
38 See Bayly and Harper 2005: Chapter 2.
39 See Ferguson 2006: 500–1; Bayly and Harper 2005: 170 ff.
40 See the inscription in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
41 See Dower 1986: Chapter 3.
42 Cited in Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 153.
43 See Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 148–50.
44 See Document 16, in National Security Archive, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World
War II: A Collection of Primary Sources, ed. William Burr, available at www.gwu.edu/
~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm (accessed 10 November 2016).
45 See Document 11, National Security Archive, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World
War II.
46 See Document 12, National Security Archive, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World
War II.
47 See the inscription in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
48 See Glover 1999: 111.
49 See Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation 2009: Chapter 1.
50 See inscription in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
51 See Hachiya 1955.
52 Canetti 1972b: 148.
53 See Canetti 1972b: 152–3: ‘The honesty and sincerity of this diary is beyond all doubt.
The writer is a person of high moral culture.’
54 Canetti 1972b: 149.
55 See O e 1965: Chapter 4.
264
56 Further discussion of the questions that arise here would take us beyond the scope
of the present discussion. As was mentioned earlier, given the rapid scientific progress
achieved by Japan it is possible that research into atomic weapons had been carried out
there. Perhaps it was stopped by one of the emperor’s few political interventions; see
Nakamura 1999: v–vi. In his foreword to the new edition of Radhabinod Pal’s judg-
ment on Japanese war crimes, Nakamura, a professor at Dokky University, notes that
Pal’s densely argued text (1,200 pages in the original typescript and nearly 800 in the
printed edition) was initially censored by the victors, even though they had appointed
him as a judge for the Tokyo Trials. Eventually the ban on the document was lifted, but
it remained difficult to get hold of and was published only half a century later, in Japan.
Unlike what happened in Europe, and particularly in Germany, the version of events
that circulated among the public was largely an official one, which involved a limited
admission of historical responsibility, balanced moreover by the tacit agreement to move
on and not discuss the causes of the war with the former enemies. In his report for the
Tokyo Trials, Pal acquitted all the Japanese defendants of the charges brought against
them (though many of them were in fact sentenced to death) and raised the question
of whether the American use of the atomic bomb could in principle be considered an
international war crime. For my own part, I searched for the Dissenting Judgement for a
long time in second-hand book auctions on the Internet and in American institutions.
I finally managed to obtain an electronic copy through Fabrizio Petri, of the Italian
Foreign Ministry, and Fabrizio Durante, of the Italian embassy in Japan. I would like to
thank them both here.
57 See Nakamura 1999: v.
58 Laurence 1947: 3–11; see Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 14 ff.
59 Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 14 ff.
60 See Jung 1916–28: 141–2.
61 Cited in Laurence 1947, and in Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 14 ff.
63 See Hachiya 1955: entry for 14 September 1945.
65 See Weller 2006.
66 See Mitchell 1996.
67 See inscription in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum; Dower 1995: ix.
68 See Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 119.
69 See Boyer 1996: 25–6.
70 See Hersey 1946.
71 See Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 96 ff.
72 See Stimson 1947b. The unreliability of the article has often been pointed out, albeit
from perspectives different from our present one. See Sayle 1995, published for the fifti-
eth anniversary of Hiroshima.
73 See Stimson 1947b: 99 note.
74 See Stimson 1947b: 102.
76 See Clifton 1999: 120.
77 See Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 179–80. The two authors’ survey also points out that the
highest estimates had been made by politicians, whereas those provided by senior mili-
tary officials – that is, by real experts – were significantly lower; General Marshall seems
to have approved an estimate of 46,000 possible deaths.
78 United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946.
81 In writing the document that would provide the framework for future atomic policy,
Stimson is careful to forget the conclusions of the immense body (the United States
Strategic Bombing Survey) that he himself had appointed to study the subject. He
265
argues as if he didn’t have a map in his Secretary for War’s office or even an abacus to
help him count the units. In listing the positions of the 5 million Japanese soldiers (a
figure which at the end of the war proved to be fairly accurate), Stimson points out that
most of them were deployed overseas; the number on Japanese soil was a little less than
2 million. We may also reasonably presume that, being the only ones that had not been
transported to the front, they were certainly not crack troops but reserves. Because of
the naval blockade that was now in place, and which is also mentioned by Stimson, the
3 million-plus Japanese soldiers stationed overseas were completely cut off. Not only
could they not defend Japan; they were receiving neither munitions nor food. What
remained of the Japanese armies in southern Asia had long ceased to receive supplies,
lived from hand to mouth on what they could loot and even killed themselves on the
cheap, with a single grenade for an entire group (see Bayly and Harper 2005: Chapter 7).
Since the invasion would have attacked Japan’s four islands one at a time, the Americans
would have faced about a quarter of those 2 million soldiers each time – about half
a million. Stimson’s calculation – 5 million enemy soldiers – is already reduced to a
tenth: 500,000.
82 See United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946: 26; Sherwin 1996.
85 See Stimson 1947b: 104.
86 Cited in Pal 1948: 6.
87 Giudice Radhabinod Pal, declaration at the Tokyo Trials, cited Pal 1948: 571.
88 See McMillan 2005.
89 See Hashimoto 2007. Hashimoto teaches political sciences in the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville.
266
12
A PLAN FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY?
I know not if ’tis true,

Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
will do as if for surety.1
Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.2
Paranoia and the new century

We have followed paranoia’s trail of blood. It already existed when our history
began. It seems to have neither beginning nor end, as if its historical essence repli-
cated its psychological essence. It is changeless.
Paranoia is disguised as life – in its seeming normality, the way it merges with
everyday life – but it is not life. It never bends, never moves, is never healed. It puts
on an act, the better to strike anyone who lowers their guard.
If it has travelled from the beaches of Troy to our own front door, from Homer’s
night to the page torn out of the calendar yesterday, then we must acknowledge that
it is primordial and almost invincible. How and when did we enter the twenty-first
century? The answer is obvious: not on 1 January 2000, but on 11 September 2001.
The date gave psychologists an unaccustomed opportunity to discuss paranoia.3
More relevant to our theme than the Islamic integralists’ attack itself are the
announcements by which it was accompanied. Every terrorist proclamation spouts
paranoia. It starts from an underlying assumption, which it does not prove but offers
as a revelation. This is followed by megalomania, obsessiveness, rigidity. Impatience.
Delusion of reference. Inability not merely to come to terms, but even to enter into
dialogue. Radical suspicion of any interlocutor.
American politics has for the most part responded with equal inflexibility. But
before we go on we must take a step backwards.
267
A plan for the twenty-first century? 267
The Cold War
The Cold War could have been for the United States a relatively normal experience
of the enemy but without the costs in blood and extreme paranoia which are typi-
cal of fought wars. It was not.
When the Second World War ended, America was still at the height of mobiliza-
tion and equipped for several more years of war. Reconverting the economy and
the armed forces was an immense task. But even more difficult was reconverting the
collective psychology. For the mass media and politicians it was easier to continue to
project evil into the distance. It is a form of moralism that guarantees very simple con-
sent. so the Fascist Axis, the enemy of the Hot War, was replaced by the Soviet Union,
the adversary of the Cold War. In 1948, it came into possession of nuclear weapons.
Nevertheless, no country, in any epoch of human history, had enjoyed such
overwhelming superiority as that of the United States after the war. As was men-
tioned above, it produced about half of the total world income. Sizeable portions
of that wealth were used to give aid to impoverished countries, including former
enemies. But for the more nationalist groups in American society no ‘psychological
brake’ on the traditional conflict between good and evil was acceptable.The United
States was a giant marching swiftly towards justice, but someone was trying to steal
the road from beneath its feet; the enemy’s existence was the ground it needed to
continue this march.
Resistance to accepting a more peaceful phase of history found external help in
the Iron Curtain and the Korean War.Within the country, splitting and the extreme
projection of evil were favoured by the House Un-American Activities Committee
and by Senator McCarthy’s campaigns against communism.
Never had the activity of an elected politician expressed itself so clearly in the
form of paranoid delusion. The intuition of a plot within the United States, which
was constantly alluded to but whose existence was never proved, enabled McCarthy, with
a circular argument, to denounce every difficulty of American life as a consequence
of a conspiracy that was never discovered only because it was constantly increasing in
size and therefore had a growing number of accomplices, who kept it secret.
A few lines from one of his speeches are enough to enable us to assess this
pathology:
How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men
high in this Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must
be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as
to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of
infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever
deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. […] What can be made of
this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of
defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. If Marshall were merely
stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would
serve this country’s interest.4
268
268 A plan for the twenty-first century?
We have seen that paranoid attitudes are very subject to an inclined plane over
which their creators themselves lose control. Within a few years McCarthy had
become so alone, and feared, that he had excluded himself from the political scene.
(It should be noted that, although his absolutist vision was typical of the Puritan
tradition, McCarthy himself was a Catholic.) The unconscious had been like a pro-
ducer staging a performance of the Ajax syndrome. Among the heroes of the Iliad,
Ajax was the puritan; he is the only one concerning whom there are no stories of
love affairs or boozing with friends. McCarthy had inspired awe, not affection. The
paranoiac is successful because he communicates fear. Once a certain threshold has
been crossed, however, the ever-increasing number of people he has threatened can
unite against him.
International relations seemed to enter a period of détente, under the dual
impulse of de-Stalinization and the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Although the
latter’s assassination rekindled fantasies of conspiracy (this time in left-wing circles
more than in conservative ones), a more self-critical attitude and reflection on
national responsibilities seemed to prevail in America; one of the most significant
songs attacked anti-communist paranoia (Bob Dylan, ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid
Blues’). In the 1970s, the Vietnam War was lost. Its heritage was material and moral
ruin. The extent of self-criticism was unprecedented for the United States.
The disappearance of the Soviet enemy

An equally unprecedented opportunity was later presented to America with the
détente promoted by Gorbachev in the 1980s and the subsequent collapse of
Communist Europe (1989). This opportunity, unfortunately, lasted only for a short
time, as if the human psyche were in any case subject to rather rigid models, in both
collective and individual behaviour. It requires an adversary, and when a material
one is lacking, it sets about acquiring a fantasy one. In the tradition, the enemy of
the good is the Devil, a word which in its Greek root means ‘he who divides, who
creates contrasts’ (from the Greek diaballein, ‘to throw across’, hence ‘to separate’).
What has happened? On the one side stands one of the strong, foundational
qualities of American political culture. Abhorring European authoritarianism, it
has been linked since its origins to the idea that for every power there must be a
counter-power, which limits and checks it; this is the principle known as check and
balance. Within the United States this mechanism has functioned uninterruptedly
since Independence. In international politics, however, it was rudely interrupted by
the fall of the Berlin Wall. America suddenly found itself unbalanced, in danger of
toppling forward for lack of enemies.
Because of the new situation, enormous resources ceased to be invested in
arms and became available for civilian uses. A new phase of affluence seemed to
be beginning. Unemployment fell to the lowest levels for many years and crime
decreased year by year.
But surprisingly, during the same period the press sounded the alarm about sup-
posed new risks for the economy, hypothetical new epidemics and so on. According
269
to opinion polls, two-thirds of the population of the USA imagined that crime was
on the increase, even though the contrary was true.5 There was a growth in apoca-
lyptic Christian movements, which saw hidden plots against the faith everywhere.6
The well-known televangelist Pat Robertson even denounced all the programmes
for a new world order in the previous two centuries as attempts to destroy Christianity;
the most recent, according to Robertson, was the political project of George Bush
Sr.7 Paranoia always looks farther than what it sees, always beyond the limits – of
national borders, but also of temporal ones.
In a sense, because of its recent, pioneering origins, American culture, at least
in the popular forms, seems to ‘need’ enemies more than other cultures do. Even
today the Second Amendment to the Constitution still states that is the right of
every adult citizen to own and bear arms. Apart from all practical considerations,
this right – which originated so that a popular militia could be raised at short notice
to counter an enemy attack but which survives today in the most difficult country
to attack in the world – remains deeply symbolic.
The appearance of the Islamic enemy

Islamic terrorism and the aggressive programmes of the administration of George
Bush Jr. made it possible to enter the new millennium filling the enemy-gap of
the previous decade. As if it had a will of its own, history did its best to con-
firm the conspiracy theories. A conspirator is, by definition, a faceless person.
It is logical, therefore, that Bush’s declaration immediately after the attack of 11
September 2001 should begin like this: ‘Freedom itself was attacked this morning
by a faceless coward.’
The premises for the American ‘response’ to Islamic terrorism come, how-
ever, from historical seeds that we have discussed earlier, and were already in place
before 11 September 2001. Some of its main features had been anticipated by the
Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In a single, powerful page, dated 3 June 1997, the PNAC called for American
foreign policy to take on a radically new role. It pointed out that for the first time
in history the United States could gain an exclusive hold on world power. Given
this unprecedented opportunity, it urged the country to make an unprecedented
response, with significant increases in military expenditure and active intervention
in the world.
The manifesto was signed by politicians and intellectuals who might be described
as right-wing radicals; the only reference in the document to other political groups
is the preamble, which severely criticizes the vacuous, empty policy of American
conservatives.
Until 11 September 2001, the PNAC was rarely mentioned in public, though
many of its signatories had in the meantime occupied key posts in the government
of George W. Bush. The group was waiting for someone to open the door for it.
Islamic terrorism obliged. From being a simple theoretical manifesto, thanks to a
welcome psychic infection, the PNAC could be turned into an imperialistic policy.
270
Paranoia takes the form of a government document

Once those premises had been absorbed and consolidated, the official response
to the terrorist attack was summed up in the document entitled The Strategy for
National Security of the United States of America.8
‘America is at war’ are the first words of the letter with which Bush accompa-
nied the document.
We know that the paranoiac often achieves a paradoxical effect. Seeing only
enemies, for some time he finds many ‘friends’ (or, to be more precise, unconscious
collaborators): these may be dormant paranoiacs who are ‘reawoken’ and converted
to his mistrust, or latent adversaries who, infected by his hostility, become active
enemies. He communicates an atmosphere of confrontation, making it more real.
Unlike the PNAC’s Statement of Principles, which was a private opinion of the
group of signatories, the Strategy for National Security has become a programmatic
manifesto of the American government. It comprises nine chapters in the first edi-
tion and eleven in the second.
It will be useful to examine some of its affirmations, for it is such a serious
programme that its pathology will leave its mark on American foreign policy, and
therefore on international relations too, for a long time, even if subsequent presi-
dencies, such as that of Obama, try to follow a new course. It constitutes the oppo-
site of what Foucault recommended in his preface to Anti-Oedipus: ‘Free political
action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.’9 The preamble of the first edition,
published in September 2002, already stresses that the real dangers for America are
not potential rivals but rogue states and terrorist groups. The document supposes
(without providing proof) that their main aim is to get their hands on dangerous
technologies. (It does not talk of attacks on America but of the invisible preparation,
imagined to be already in course, of such attacks.) The United States must act before
the preparatory phase can be completed. The aim is therefore to defeat not the enemy
but his plans (‘to defeat our enemies’ plans’), even though those plans are neither
known nor knowable. It is necessary, that is, to pre-empt the enemy (‘prevent the
spread of weapons of mass destruction’).
The verb ‘to prevent’ recurs copiously in both editions of the document.The title
of the third chapter is ‘Strengthen Alliances to Defeat Global Terrorism and Work to
Prevent Attacks against Us and Our Friends’. The title of the fifth is ‘Prevent Our
Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of Mass
Destruction’.
So the document re-examines the concept of legitimate defence in relations
between states. Specialists in international law, it says, generally consider a pre-
emptive (no longer merely ‘preventive’) attack legitimate only if there is a visible
threat, which usually means a mobilization of armed forces that are approaching the
frontiers. But terrorist movements and rogue states do not use such means. Their
attack materializes suddenly, out of nothing. It is therefore necessary to extend the idea
of legitimate defence between states, to adapt it to this new situation. The implica-
tion is that even Hitler’s Blitzkrieg was a predictable pachyderm by comparison.
271
Despite its length, the document rarely goes into detail. It remains generic in
delicate passages like this one, which alter the foundations of international law.
However absurd a legality based on subjective convictions may seem, one of its aims
was to confer advance legitimacy on future pre-emptive military actions; the only pre-
condition is that one presume subjectively that the enemy is preparing an attack. The
Strategy for National Security of the United States of America, in the formulations
of 17 September 2002 and 16 March 2006, is in more than one respect the twenty-
first century’s Requerimiento. The text possesses the wolf-like psychology of the old
Spanish announcement: it mistrusts both real enemies and lambs and creates the
‘right’ by which it will subsequently be able to attack them at any time.
What are its characteristics?
First of all, the centrality of suspicion. Belief in the existence of a hidden plot.
Which, being hidden, is never demonstrable. But the fact that it is hidden makes
it even more dangerous. Once its existence has been accepted because of its very
indemonstrability, it justifies circularly the rest of the argument and legitimizes the
pre-emptive punishment that is to be inflicted on it. Thus we encounter a lack of flex-
ibility. Then, obsessiveness in reaffirming its own conviction. The unshakeable certainty
of being in the right. Constant allusiveness, which oscillates between truth, instru-
mental exaggeration and fantasy. On the one hand, the persecutory style hopes that
its menacing hints will be more frightening; on the other hand, it lives in constant
fear of revealing its hand too much: it attributes hidden intentions to others but
hides its own. The very terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘rogue state’ seem vague tautologies
but fulfil the function of always hinting at plots and mysterious activities which
cannot be indicated in any other way.
We may note in passing that even the Nazi attack on the Jews was, in this sense,
more objective. Its premises were delusional, but it did to some extent define the
enemy. At least in theory, the representatives of the Jewish communities could try
to refute accusations, request international assistance, urge their members to emi-
grate. Present-day populism, with the exception of passing allusions to rogue states,
describes the main enemy only as a terrorist. A terrorist is unlikely to enter a debate
by affirming that he is one. The enemy is no longer human. The paranoid attack
can modulate into infinite variations because it is based on unpredictable fantasy
substitutions. It is not an attack on what is different, which would be open to debate.
It is a tautological attack on evil, which compels even those who do not agree to keep
silent or pretend to agree in principle.
The war caused by suspicion

The administration of George W. Bush had at its disposal the most extensive and
sophisticated espionage services of all time. Despite this, in 2003 his departments,
influencing each other with paranoid expectations, dragged the United States into
a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to eliminate weapons of mass destruction
which it did not possess. Even in rational working groups people influence each
other; as in the case of crowds, the larger such groups are, the lower the level
272
of intelligence becomes, and the higher the level of paranoia. At the beginning
of 2004, the American inspectors in Iraq (the Iraq Survey Group) declared that
they had not found any weapons of mass destruction. The head of the CIA then
explained, in a press conference held on 5 February 2004, the reasons why such
weapons were thought to exist; among these was the fact that the United Nations
inspectors had not found any either but had not eliminated the suspicion that they
might exist.
The second edition of the Strategy for National Security of the United States
of America (March 2006) underwent some modifications, since it was necessary to
take account of some significant failures. In particular, the very fact that no weapons
of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. Surprisingly, however, instead of being
self-critical, it draws conclusions which confirm the persecutory and circular style
already followed: ‘First, our intelligence must improve; Second, there will always be
some uncertainty about the status of hidden programs.’10 And how could there be
certainty, if they are hidden? The circularity of the argument is breathtaking.
The country which has most influence on the balance of power in the world
has thus created an alarming precedent, by imposing, unilaterally and with a
style resembling that of the most serious form of psychopathology, a change to
the international norms which had sustained world peace since the Peace of
Westphalia. The right to attack another country in the absence of any proven
and visible threat is the right to attack any country at any time, on the basis of
rivalry, conflict of interest, suspicion or subjective and persecutory motivations. It
is a position not unlike that taken by Japan in the attack on the United States of
December 1941; hence it would require nothing less than a revision of American
historiography, which considers the attack on Pearl Harbor as the prototype of
criminal acts of war.
This concept of legitimate defence between nations eliminates an important cri-
terion of international law and replaces it not with another criterion but with the
right to suspicion; thus it establishes the subjectivity of paranoia (the interpretation of
the danger is left to the unilateral judgement of the party concerned) as a means of
resolving international disagreements. In the face of this subversion of the mental
order it is, so to speak, almost of secondary importance that the invasion of Iraq or
similar enterprises subvert the juridical or military order of the world.
The conviction of being protected by an abstract moral justification, which cov-
ers the absence of support from other people, is disturbing in its omnipotence. Ajax,
too, lacks the protection of gods or friends, and in order to break out of his solitude
replaces it with the delusion of being the victim of injustice.
The responsibility of those who disseminate paranoid

messages
In Chapters 7 and 8 we saw how, in the fragile Weimar Republic, German nation-
alism paved the way for the Second World War with alarmist conspiracy theories.
Paranoia always feeds on poor information.
273
One of the sources which nourished Hitler’s paranoia was The Protocols of the
Elders of Sion, fabricated by the Okhrana (the tsarist secret police), which went
through several editions in Russia from 1903 to 1907.11 According to Hitler, it did
not matter whether the protocols were forged or genuine;12 the history of the pre-
vious century proved them to be true. For the dictator, the Jews had no way out: if
the text was genuine, it condemned them. If it was fake, its truth was confirmed by
reality in any case: movements which accused them were rising up everywhere, so
they must have done something wrong. Similarly, the documents of the Strategy for
National Security of the United States of America issued by the George W. Bush
administration could justify any attack on countries that came under suspicion.
With two options: if the conspiracy was discovered, the attack was justified as pre-
vention (or rather, pre-emption); if it was not discovered (as happened in Iraq), that
did not mean that it had not existed, and the attack remained justified as a precaution.
Suspicious logic exhausts all the alternatives: if it is known that a country is prepar-
ing an attack, this justifies an attack on it; if it is not known, it justifies the suspicion,
which in turn justifies an attack. The Strategy for National Security of September
2001 raised paranoia to the level of a criterion of evaluation in international rela-
tions. In addition to the immense material damage of wars, the paranoid interpre-
tation, as we have observed in a wide variety of circumstances, causes long-lasting
damage to the collective psychology.
Adolf Hitler, as we have seen, was also one of the representatives of German
nationalist populism who – partly falsifying statistics and partly reporting them
accurately, but in both cases fomenting ethnic conflict – claimed that Vienna was
being de-Germanized.The arguments used by the American right are obviously less
delusional; however, they are still tendentious, and dangerously promote paranoia.
One of the leading intellectuals by whose ideas the neo-conservatives are inspired is
Samuel Huntington, internationally renowned for popularizing the concept of the
‘clash of civilizations’. In another catastrophist treatise, Huntington predicted the
de-Americanization (or to be more precise, de-Anglicization) of the United States
as a result of immigration and the higher birth rate of Latin Americans.13
The risk is that these analyses again awaken the paranoid potential that sleeps
even in the most normal human being. For they tempt him with a suspicious logic
that exhausts all the alternatives. There are only two possibilities: either the growing
minority group is made up of bad people, in which case it must be repelled pre-
emptively, as one repels evil; or the evil is a matter of contamination, in which case
it corresponds to a loss of purity (in Spanish: casticismo) in the hitherto dominant
group. In order to prevent it, in any case, the method is always the same: expelling
the new arrivals. Once mistrust and aggression have been activated, all prophecies
are self-fulfilling. Hitler, giving a decisive impulse to anti-Semitism and making
it slide down a steeply inclined plane, could say that history ‘proved’ that it was
heading towards the clash between Jews and Aryans foreseen by the Protocols.
But the American anti-immigration groups too, fanning the flames of mistrust
towards Hispanics, could sooner or later ‘prove’ that Huntington’s direst prophe-
cies were correct.
274
The United States, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is a far more
solid democracy than Weimar Germany, and its mass media, though very commer-
cialized, respect ethical standards. It should be pointed out, however, that the sup-
port sought by President Bush through all the years following 11 September 2001
was mainly based on fear. As far as disinformation, or at least poor information, is
concerned, we might mention the fact that the American states to which Bush
owed his re-election in 2004 are all distant from New York, and indeed from the
two coasts (that is, from the places where it has been reasonably suggested that new
terrorist attacks might occur); that the popular international author Oriana Fallaci,
a resident of New York, commented on the attacks, writing that they had caused
more than 10,000 deaths (the actual number was about 2,900); and that, for months
after 11 September, the main fear spread by the mass media in the United States was
that of letters poisoned with anthrax (which did indeed exist but caused very little
harm; it was soon discovered that they had been sent out not by Islamists but by an
extreme right-wing organization).
The patriotic support given to Bush by the news media, and even by usually
critical authors such as Michael Walzer, suffered from a haste caused by fear, poten-
tially syntonic with paranoia.14 The real problem is not avoiding a military clash but
avoiding the ‘cultural’ clash that the attacks of 11 September 2001 provocatively
brought to light. The most important battles in the Indian wars were won by the
United States in less than one day. But a balanced discussion of ‘ethnocide’,15 and of
what has been called the ‘American genocide’16 of the indigenous peoples, began
only a century after the end of those phenomena.
The contagiousness of paranoia

The hidden face of the unreasonable fears of the West (and particularly of the
United States) is the lack of reasonable fear among Islamic fundamentalists. Here
there is a real incompatibility of cultures. The ‘martyrs’ who are prepared to blow
themselves up without any apparent human hesitation, and without any fear of
death, are a mass transformed, in every sense, into ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
The adherents of the last form of Native American resistance to the United States,
the Ghost Dance religious movement, let themselves be killed, believing themselves
immortal; the main difference is that they had no explosives and that today their
movement is the subject of anthropological studies, not military ones.
Islamic terrorists are for the moment a military power which is impossible to
disarm because the weapon is the lives of each one of them. The only way of ren-
dering it harmless would be to kill them all in advance: pre-emptive genocide.This
impossibility lies at the root of the West’s terror, which degenerates into a psychic
pandemic exploited by politicians. In order to view the problem in its own terms
we have to take a step backwards, returning to a concept used mainly during the
Cold War.
Generally, we speak of ‘terror’ when fear becomes an overwhelming emotion
which is not limited to the moment of the attack. Extending fear in time – by
275
psychic infection – to the whole population was the aim of the airborne warfare
proposed by Douhet. It was during the Cold War, however, the American military
commanders started to use the verb to de-ter (repel by means of terror) and the noun
de-terrence, to indicate how the weaponry of the two blocks, which was capable of
destroying the world several times over if it were unleashed, caused reciprocal terror
by its very existence, pre-emptively discouraging any attack.
This reasoning, however, presupposes a certain unity of culture between adver-
saries and, hence, a similarity of emotions, as was still possible between the United
States and the Soviet Union; in particular, a generalized terror of death. All that
disappears in the face of masses impatient to become martyrs. Many in America
have described Al Qaeda as being undeterrable: an enemy that cannot be terrorized
and thereby discouraged. And this not only because it is not possible to identify its
adherents or know where they are but because their destruction is something they
take for granted from the outset, and often actively seek. How else can they become
martyrs?
So the ‘war on terrorism’ is, even at its origin, a contradiction in terms, inca-
pable of achieving its main objective. Why bring it on, then, by pre-emptive
attack? Because, in a sense correctly, this strategy (an extremist strategy, because it
is psychically infected by terrorism) aims to strike ever closer to the origin: to cut
the poisonous tree down, not at the level of its trunk, but at the roots. The crucial
root, however, is not military, nor is it political or religious. It is the metastasis of
cultural differences into contagious collective paranoia; a significant number of
those who, because of a simple unproven suspicion, spent long periods of deten-
tion in the American base of Guantanamo (transformed into an extra-territorial
prison for suspected terrorists), afterwards did actually join terrorist organizations
like Al Qaeda.
A group like that of radical Islamism, whose adherents deliberately choose their
own destruction in the illusion of destroying evil (the Great Satan: the United
States; the Little Satan: Israel), is paranoid according to the principal currently
accepted psychiatric definitions.
A group that responds to such an enemy by accepting the war that he has
declared – and setting out to destroy it totally and pre-emptively because it can-
not de-terrorize it, that is, subdue it in any other way – itself falls, however, under
the paranoid infection. It does not understand that the psychological threat is even
greater than the military one and seems to let itself be infected by its style.The years
of Bush’s presidency, culminating in re-election, were the epochal and – through
American predominance over international politics – global victory of a ‘soft’ para-
noid style. It is so widespread and indirect as to seem invisible. Paranoia is among
us: even though it is so in a different way than in the twentieth century, when Hitler
and Stalin had guaranteed the triumph of the ‘hard’ version.
With the ending of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first,
paranoia has escaped from clinical discourse and is rarely pointed out as a danger
because it has pervasively infiltrated everyday speech. In an unconscious and indi-
rect way, it has corrupted many ideas of politics and justice.
276
In the past few decades it has often eluded control in America and has infected
Europe too. With the money that it costs, we could combat the most serious prob-
lems of Planet Earth. The military expenditure, and in particular the fact that the
United States alone spends almost half of the world total, are the subject of con-
tinual debate. Fortunately, military investment is the prototype of the investment of
which only a fraction is actually used.
The impact on civilian life

Far more concrete are the costs of legal proceedings, which, although they corre-
spond to the principle that justice be done to conflicts, everyone would like to see
reduced because, as a whole, they remain a zero-sum game.
In 1987, the United States was already spending an exorbitant 2.45 per cent
of its gross national product on legal disputes. The European countries followed,
with about 0.5 per cent, but everywhere the general tendency was towards an
increase.17 Today, ‘justice’ tends to be a question of solving the problems not of dis-
advantaged social groups but of victims, a category which is defined by new, poten-
tially paranoid concepts and with which an increasing number of people identify.
Consequently, the burden of compensation is transferred from the state or from
advantaged groups to the victims’ antithesis, the guilty parties or killers, and calcula-
tion of the compensation is transferred from the political to the judicial sphere. In
France, although the percentage of lawyers in the total population was not even
a sixth that in the United States, a body called the Institut National d’Aide aux
Victims (INAVEM) was formed in 1986.18 It provides detailed information and
assistance to this category of people, which was previously dispersed (that is, not yet
transformed into a market) but which today tends to absorb both the social concept
of diversity and the philosophico-theological concept of suffering, which are harder
to express in economic terms.
According to many sociologists, such pressure groups are destined to assume in
the twenty-first century the role that the trade unions had in the twentieth. But
whereas trade-union justice was the result of bargaining, victim justice tends to cite
the violation of an indisputable right or the suffering of an injustice. Thus, unlike
the trade union, the victim withdraws from the social contract, appealing to a pri-
mal, transcendent condition. Media coverage of this topic is not that of a political
debate in which the public participates but that of a display of suffering with false
revelations, which the public simply witnesses.
Sentimentality channels distress into the supposed route of a crusade. In this
way it steers the masses towards an unreal comparison between justice and injus-
tice, whereas the few societies that have taken responsibility for improvement have
done so by the daily, laborious comparison of rights with other rights. At the same
time, media commercialization makes a stereotype of the concept of the victim,
dramatizing it and diluting it, and thereby reducing it to insignificance. There have
been countless theories, for example, about who killed Princess Diana and her
lover; it is taken for granted that, being a heroine, she belongs to the category
277
of the victim, and no consideration is given to the fact that a couple who drive
through a city centre at 200 kilometres an hour might be chiefly victims of their
own complacency.
So the West has reached the antipodes of the ancient Greek tragedy from which
we started. That world taught that where there is suffering there is destiny, not a
victim and someone else who is to blame for the victim’s suffering. Destiny always
comes: it does not respect our rules, and we do not know its rules. Destiny is the
opposite of the avoidable accident. In order to resist it, we can reawaken tragic
identification and compassion, but not the law courts.
Notes
2 Foucault 1972: xiii.
3 See Zoja 2002.
4 McCarthy 1951. The reference in the final sentence to is General George C. Marshall,
the main target of McCarthy’s invective.
5 See Glassner 1999, especially Chapters 2 and 3.
6 See Adams 2004.
7 See Robertson 1991.
8 See National Security Council 2002 and 2006. Under the Obama administration the
documents were finally revised.
9 Foucault 1977: xiii.
10 See National Security Council 2006: 23 and 24.
11 See Cohn 1967; De Michelis 2001.
12 See Hitler 1925: 337.
13 See Huntington 2005.
14 See Walzer 2002; Pinto 2002.
15 The term was coined by the Chilean Rodolfo Stavenhagen.
16 See Stannard 1992.
17 See Lipset 1997: Table 1.
18 See www.inavem.org (accessed 11 November 2016); and the various articles in
Prieur 2004.
278
13
INCONCLUSIVE THOUGHTS
Paranoid delusions, […] do not depend on belief – they appear to be true a

priori and have no need of belief in order to lead an effective, and valid exis-
tence. In the cases we are discussing the question is still open whether belief
or criticism will triumph. This alternative is not found in genuine insanity.1
An almost magic formula was discovered for reconciling the masses to the
existent state of government and society.2
What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic
fears: […] the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensi-
tivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are
their next of kin… Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the
irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know
they touch on a darkness inside me.3
Understanding evil
In the culminating passage of the Gospel, Christ asks that his persecutors be for-
given, ‘for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23:34). These words concern us.
Paranoia is also known as the ‘persecution syndrome’, and paranoiacs’ lack of aware-
ness has devastated the world. Can we forgive their crimes, hidden in every corner
of history, just because they did not know what they were doing? Before forgiving,
we would like to understand. Forgiveness is an individual dilemma. Making an
effort to understand paranoia – not to be complicit in it – is a task for us all.
Everyone, Freud said, is mobilized by the word ‘psychology’. Everyone knows
that it concerns the mind. If it were aeronautical engineering, they would leave it
to people who deal with planes. Since it concerns the mind, every mind wants to
join in the discussion.We feel a genuine curiosity about psychic disorders: ‘Can you
explain to me how a schizophrenic feels?’ we ask the psychiatrist. With paranoia,
279
Inconclusive thoughts 279
things are particularly complicated. Many people recognize in it thoughts or feel-

ings that they themselves have had but are embarrassed to talk about.
We feel that poisoning by paranoia – however low the dose, however latent –
may concern us all. So we try to change the subject and make it clear that, yes, we
might have felt paranoia, but it’s all in the past now. And what about collective para-
noia? That’s a thing of the past, too: it concerns other peoples or other times. We
try to get rid of our embarrassment by projecting the pathology into the distance,
but projection, as has been pointed out, is itself a first step towards paranoia. Every
denial has a double face: on the one hand it is potentially complicit in the evil, on
the other it shows that we feel its presence and try to defend ourselves.
‘There is such a thing’, Primo Levi wrote, ‘as the contagion of evil; one inhu-
man person dehumanizes others; each crime radiates, transplants itself around
itself, corrupts consciences and surrounds itself with accomplices.’4 The foregoing
chapters, too, have spoken of psychic infection. I have intentionally used a concept
from psychopathology and described as ‘collective paranoia’ the process whereby
a society or group denies all responsibility, projecting all guilt on to ‘enemies’.
With this perspective, I hope I have provided reconstructions that will be accept-
able to most people, rather than morally or politically debatable opinions. As we
come to drawing some final conclusions, however, it must be admitted that col-
lective paranoia is not so much a clinical category as a psychopathological equiva-
lent of what Levi calls ‘evil’. It has the same capacity for mutilating the living
flesh of history.
The twentieth century deserves to be called the ‘century of evil’. In its great-
est representatives, Hitler and Stalin, paranoid pathology and moral evil are almost
indistinguishable. However, the Western democracies – the only ones that struc-
turally incorporated some means of opposing them – also showed that they pos-
sessed tools that were necessary but not sufficient. Their programmes of justice and
humanity were betrayed, without the mass of the population reacting, and almost
without its noticing.The lofty proclamations on which the new world order was to
be based (in 1917 Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the conclusion of the First
World War; the 1941 Atlantic Charter as a programme for concluding the Second
World War; and the Charter of the United Nations signed in San Francisco in 1945
as the platform for future international cooperation) remained little more than
empty propaganda. The rights that these documents enunciate were for the most
part replaced by economic and military might.
The contagion of evil can occur in any historical epoch. Modernity brings
more awareness to bear against it but also provides it with more means of spreading.
It transmits itself as collective paranoia, a dark sky that envelops the nights of the
world. In no human event is this so visible as in the First World War. Countless times
it has been described as the first industrial war, which annihilated tens of millions
of lives. Here, however, I have tried to show how the First World War destroyed not
only physical but also psychic life; it threw hundreds of millions of minds into the
void.The few who remained reasonable – Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Bertrand
Russell, even the Pope, who possessed powerful means of communication –
survived only as isolated minds.
280
280 Inconclusive thoughts
Only today, a century later, can a sufficient awareness of this be achieved.5 For
decades a literally mad, nationalist identification continued to prevail in Europe. On
16 April 1933, Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig: ‘Dear esteemed friend, […] Get
used to the fact that the 40 million who listen to Goebbels are remote from making
any distinctions between you and Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig,Tucholsky and me.
Our life’s work – in the terrestrial sense – has been for nothing.’6 It is collective paranoia
that makes the First and Second World Wars a single, uninterrupted European war.
One of the aims of this book is to provide some assistance, not so much to
psychopathology as to morality, while at the same time avoiding crusades and mor-
alisms. Although it would be unrealistic to suggest a therapy for such a complex
problem, it may be useful to evoke a shame and a problem of conscience, since everyone,
to some extent, has at least once made a contribution to this evil entity.
In the summer of 1914, the lamps went out all over Europe. Not much light has
returned. Certainly, the hot wars and the Cold War have taught us some important les-
sons, but the mass market and commercialization have served to obscure consciences.
Humankind had known even longer dark periods, but that was before the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Kantian ethics, the rights of man. As an aid to
understanding the immense destructiveness that has radiated out from the West into
the world, psychopathology has as much to teach us as economics and international
politics. As long as we continue to say that today’s insecurity is due to globalization, or
the end of the Cold War, no one will feel responsible for it. No one is ashamed of it.
By contrast, reminding people that we are all carriers of a psychopathology wounds
our self-image, our self-esteem (in the most common sense of the term). Shame is a
very simple feeling and, if it is not manipulated from above, restores a simple justice in
social relations: it corresponds to an instinctive self-criticism for having disturbed the
rules – mores, whence ‘morality’ – of society. This potential for self-criticism, which
does not require any particular intellectual training, is inherent in us from birth.
The hope – not an impossible one – is that this shame may be the antithesis of
evil infection: if not a direct ‘contagion of goodness’, which unfortunately is not as
infectious as evil, at least a step towards greater awareness. How simple life would be
if crimes were always conscious choices. Evil is mainly contagion, psychic infection.
It may be an unconscious lack of moral conscience.
For centuries, Christian theology speculated about the Antichrist. Ultra-
conservative thought is now trying to reawaken his ghost and frighten us by sug-
gesting that modernity is the twilight age of the world. But evil is not so much
modernity as mistrust and the immense negative projections that have accompanied
its undoubted advances.
We wanted to take Christ, science and the arts out into the world. We accom-
panied them with colonialism, religious and racial wars, genocide and ethnocide.
Paranoia and psychopathy again

As was mentioned in the first chapter, psychiatric treatises define psychopathy as a
lack of moral sense. Paranoia, at least in its collective forms, leads people to commit
281
the worst crimes; but it is something different. Paranoia is convinced that it has
a fundamental moral function; it attributes a central role to responsibility, which,
however, it projects on to others. Psychopathy, on the other hand, lacks a sense
of responsibility. Paranoia needs ideas, and it also needs a distorted interpretative
picture, which through it becomes a rigid basic assumption. That is not the case
with psychopathy. Paranoia has a very significant collective aspect, because soci-
ety can be infected by it. Psychopathy remains predominantly individual. The link
between the two is different, and very insidious: by unleashing aggressive impulses
in the masses, paranoia favours psychopaths, and often selects them, giving them roles
of power.
There is a Cherokee folk tale about two wolves. An old man says to a little
boy: there are two wolves inside you, locked in mortal combat. One is kind, gen-
erous, calm, humble and honest. The other is full of bitterness, aggression, pride,
superciliousness and egoism. ‘Which one will win?’ asks the little boy in alarm. ‘The
one you feed’, replies the adult.
If we take the folk tale as a framework for our distinction, the psychopath is a
person who feeds the evil wolf. The paranoiac, by contrast, is incapable of feeling
the inner conflict between the two; for him the only wolves are external ones.
As has been pointed out more than once above, suspecting and not exposing
oneself to danger is, within reasonable limits, a useful tool of survival. Equally, as far
as psychopathy is concerned, we will say that a reasonable capacity for compromise
with the rules is useful and acceptable; often, instead of choosing the good, it is nec-
essary to adapt to the lesser evil or even actively to choose it. In this sense a capacity
for committing acts that are against the rules is common to all human beings; for
example, a particular creativity in lying may be used for a good purpose, to deceive
evil people (as it always has been towards tyrannical power).
The normal individual may even behave like a psychopath in extreme cir-
cumstances, but as soon as he returns to normal conditions he regains his moral
equilibrium and is anguished at the evil he has committed. Analysing the interro-
gations and statements of Stalin’s victims, Robert Conquest reports that, after the
endless repetition of both physical and psychic tortures, the percentage of people
who ‘confessed’ could be as high as 99 per cent.7 And those who confessed often
betrayed, or even slandered, relatives and friends. Such weakness is human. But pro-
longed contact with essentially psychopathic people (their torturers) did not cause
these victims a real ‘psychic infection’, but only a brief and instrumental suspension
of the moral functions; the psychopathy of the torturer did not infect the person
interrogated. Indeed, it often strengthened his ethical sense.
By contrast, most of Hitler and Stalin’s ‘normal’ subjects – especially if they held
public office – since they were subjected to daily paranoid propaganda, ended up
being convinced of the accusations they heard and were willing to hate the Jews
or the ‘class enemy’. Paranoia, therefore, is far more contagious than psychopathy.
Consequently, even in the ocean of horrors that we have crossed in these pages,
I remain relatively optimistic. If entire societies, and for long periods, seem to us
to have ‘chosen evil’, it is not literally a choice in favour of moral evil. Still less do
282
I believe that the Germans or Russians are ‘constitutionally’ more evil peoples than
others. An adherence to paranoia – which is a psychic evil – almost always carries
moral evils with it, but it is not the same thing.
Once they cease to be immersed in the altered masses, criminal propaganda and
distorted education, most people return to reason. In particular historical circum-
stances, Fascism and Nazism succeeded, in Italy and Germany, in coming to power
through elections (winning at least a relative majority of votes). After the war, once
the psychological intoxication had passed and the related criminal propagandas
had been banned, the neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis were reduced to unequivocally
minority groups, comprising the more unstable and ignorant individuals.
Individual, mass and leader

This chapter opened with a quotation from Jung. The pure paranoiac, he suggests,
is an extreme case, not very common in everyday reality. The real clinical paranoiac
knows no doubt, nor any problem of faith; his truth is an a priori, which has always
existed. But this is rarely the case with public agitators, ‘successful paranoiacs’. They
have achieved success by choosing between different options, and, at least in part,
they were aware of this. They have suffered from what I have called the ‘Creon
syndrome’: should one yield to reasonableness or persist in ferocious mistrust? Like
Creon, they have ended up preferring paranoia to humanity, thus completing, in
every sense, the tragedy of their and our history.
In these real and terrible people – who possess real and terrible power – the
fact that they have made a choice, and chosen obstinacy, inseparably links the moral
problem to the clinical one. The pure psychopathology is an extreme case which
would escape this responsibility.The most formidable and most real psychic pathol-
ogies are moral cases.
A major challenge in the coming years, therefore, will be that of maintaining,
amid the indifference of the masses and the anaesthesia of consumerism, a capac-
ity for indignation. This should have two directions: an impulse towards rectifying
wrongs committed by others, but at the same time shame for our own transgres-
sions. Ultimately, the mobilization of credible moral feelings arises in the solitude of
the individual conscience; and it mistrusts crusades aimed at the masses, propagated
by media multipliers.
Although individual paranoia often originates from a just passion (or from
a passion for justice), it is rationalized and is soon no longer recognized as pas-
sion: historical reconstructions have told us that as far as Stalin is concerned, his
just rebellion against the humiliations he had suffered in the seminary prompted
his transformation into a calculating cynic and a cold paranoiac. Mass paranoia
is a question not of passions but of enthusiasms. Real passion is capable of long-
term planning and great self-discipline. To all appearances, and for limited peri-
ods, the leader’s paranoia may differ from that of most of his followers and seem
more far-sighted. Justifiably to some extent, Hitler wanted to erase the Treaty
of Versailles. For years he carried this plan forward with ferocious consistency.
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With the first successes his enthusiasm became circularly linked to that of the
masses, fuelling paranoia on both sides. With the passing of time, as we have
seen, Hitler was less and less guided by a plan; he improvised, letting himself be
led by haste. Officially it was the leader – the Führer – who led the masses. In
reality it was the lack of a personal horizon and the ephemeral enthusiasms of
the masses that led the leader.
All people need enthusiasms, moments of strong positive adherence to some-
thing that seems a vision of the future.This, however, does not transform that emo-
tion into a plan, let alone make it possible or humane.
War almost always excites. Only some wars, however, correspond to a plan, and
almost all are inhumane. Every enthusiasm ought to be verified over time, but the
essence of war is haste. Peace, by contrast, does not excite. It has no paranoid cor-
relate; it does not reawaken a simple, proud Ajax nor a mistrustful and bloodthirsty
Iago. War is sickness. Peace is like health. We feel when we are ill; when we are
healthy we do not feel anything. This, however, is not a sufficient reason for despis-
ing health; many neglect it, and then weep with regret when it is too late. In the
same way, peace is not a condition that can be taken for granted, something natural
that does not require any effort; it is, as Spinoza said, a virtue to be practised. Indeed,
for the human race collective paranoia and its correlates of violence and intolerance
are relatively ‘natural’ conditions.8
The letter from Joseph Roth to Zweig quoted earlier refers both to the silence
of peace and to the perverted relationship between the leader/prompter and the
paranoid potential of the masses whom he addresses.
Certainly, in other epochs, too, history has faced a crossroads like that between
General Beck and Adolf Hitler. But in the confrontation between a delusional
leader and the head of his army it was not so certain that the leader would prevail.
The novelty in modern Europe, with its technology and its formal democracy, is
that Hitler was able to involve an entire pyramid of paranoia: the party and over
40 million listeners. An interview with Beck on the radio would have left the same
impression that a scientist, theologian or philosopher occasionally makes on us: no
one tells them they are wrong, but even those who have understood what they
said forget about them after a few days. The paranoid leader, however, is unlikely to
be forgotten. I have met some old people, sincere anti-Fascists, who remembered
exactly certain speeches of Hitler and Mussolini, and often where they were when
they had heard them in their childhood. People remember over time the content
of the proclamation (partly because it is usually very simple), but particularly the
irrational emotion that it aimed to arouse and did in fact leave in a wide variety of
listeners.
Three generations of mass media

After the success of the American yellow press, the second great triumph of
media manipulation was the use of the wireless by the Nazis and Fascists and,
almost contemporaneously, by the communists. Today, a third frontier has been
284
reached: now it no longer stands in front of us but, with persecutory inge-

nuity, surrounds us. The visual medium speaks to us at home from the televi-
sion, on public transport and in waiting rooms through special screens, in the
street through advertising but also in the seeming independence of graffiti.
Even without the ‘hard’ destructiveness of totalitarianism, the mass medium
spreads the new ‘soft’ paranoid culture. Following a logic of its own, which
is accepted as normal because it indeed prevails as the norm, it administers
messages that already contain their own complete interpretation (sometimes
simplified, sometimes complicated by superfluous suspicions) and, continuing
the tradition of the populist newspaper and radio, tries to spice them up with
prefabricated emotions.
The aim not only of advertising but also of television programmes usually cor-
responds to a clear, standardized format. Such semantic clarity seems comfortably
anti-paranoid; the only aim of this advert is to sell you that chocolate bar; the
only aim of this programme is to make you laugh. If, suddenly, the aim is lacking,
the audience’s mind gets a violent jolt, as if someone had punched it. The psychic
process suddenly becomes ‘intransitive’. The standard meanings can no longer be
projected. What can this message mean? Our foolish grin is undercut by paranoid
suspicion.
‘The Giant’
In Providence, Rhode Island, in the late 1980s, skateboarders used to fill entire
districts with stickers and graffiti extolling their groups. Shepard Fairey, a stu-
dent who worked in a skateboarding shop, wondered what would happen if an
image was disseminated that did not correspond to a group and did not mean
anything. He drew a simple wide, stupid face: André the Giant. Accompanied by
the word ‘obey’, this face was put on stickers, which Fairey posted around the
streets of Providence, mixing them with other cards and notes. The most incred-
ible interpretations formed among skateboarders. Everyone was talking about
it. The imaginative young man made other stickers, sending them to friends in
New York and other places. Soon the giant became famous.9 Fairey interpreted
the reactions as ‘paranoid conservative’ mental processes. However, he admit-
ted having also met ‘[paranoid] alternative’ young people, absolutely convinced
that the Giant was fascist propaganda. Courted by interviews, he declared that it
had been an ‘experiment in phenomenology’ and cited Heidegger as a source.
Shepard Fairey first created a graphics studio, then a series of gadgets featuring the
Giant, which are now sold on the Web or even through museums of modern art.
As anyone who searches for news on the Internet will be aware, Shepard Fairey
is now one of the best-known street artists in the world; he has founded a multi-
media multinational of suspicion, which has made him rich and famous. He has
taught us that in order to achieve media success it is not even necessary to have
paranoid content; it is enough to have the style. Allusion and suspicion help spread
a message anyway, even if it is empty.
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Dictators
As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Perhaps
we should add: ideology makes the mind rigid, and absolute ideology makes it
absolutely rigid. It is mental form that can make an ideology particularly per-
secutory. Not only its content. For whereas National Socialism is unjust already
at its origin, a potentially juster ideology like communism, once it is applied to
the leader’s mind, and then by the leader’s mind, came to consequences that were
not merely criminal – any old-fashioned despot was already capable of that – but
genocidal; paraphrasing Marx and Engels’ Manifesto we might say that communism
forged one of the diseases that would bring death to itself.
In addition to the circular relationship between paranoia and the interpretative
rigidity of ideology, there is a circular relationship between tyranny and paranoia.
They are linked both because paranoia often helps usurpers to emerge and because
absolute power in turn reawakens a predisposition to paranoia in the leader. The
psychopathological perspective that we are discussing is therefore complementary
to historical analysis.
Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao. The lesser objective destructiveness of the first
of these has contributed to what we might call a ‘white legend’ of ‘Italiani brava
gente’ (‘all Italians are essentially good-hearted’). This uncritical predisposition of
Italians to absolve themselves has been challenged by historical studies.10 Was Italian
Fascism constitutionally less destructive than German Nazism? Certainly Mussolini
had fewer technological, economic and social means of destruction. This had its
consequences, but that is not the point. Certainly Mussolini displayed a tempera-
ment that was omnipotent, self-centred, often frivolous and mendacious. But it was
not essentially paranoid. His delusion was not necessarily more healthy. It was not,
however, an autotrophic force which fed itself incessantly. Mussolini’s bourgeoisifica-
tion, his apparent satiety and his military unpreparedness when he was in power are
probably in part related to this; the dictator was sitting comfortably in his armchair
not on the inclined plane that underlies every paranoia.
However, our study has taught us another thing about Mussolini. He was well
aware of what I have called paranoid return and Pandarus return. When he abandoned
socialist neutralism to support Italy’s entry into war against Austria, Mussolini knew
that most parliamentary deputies and most of the population were against him. He
succeeded in propagating a psychic infection until the first casualties occurred; at
that point it no longer mattered who was in the minority and who in the majority,
because everyone wanted to participate. Mussolini took this as confirmation of the
idea that, for important decisions, it is possible to disregard society, parliament and
its majorities.
Like Homer, who had described Pandarus’ ‘intervention’, Mussolini knew that
a war is like a fire. The person who does not want it and the person who wants to
pour petrol on the flames are not fighting on equal terms. The former has to be
vigilant every day and every minute; if he succeeds in avoiding a fire, what he will
have produced will be a non-event. The latter has an easier life: all it takes is for his
286
petrol to reach one little flame, just once. The event (whether glorious or murder-
ous is immaterial here) will have been produced, irreversible, immense, for ever.
A comparison between communist dictatorships here would be too difficult,
both because of the great differences between them and because we do not have
sufficient documentation. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were, however, encouraged in
their crimes by a strong paranoid component. Castro was simply a dictator: mania-
cal, manipulative and other things, but not paranoid.
If we ask ourselves why the Argentinian dictatorship silently massacred about
30,000 people, a far greater number than that of Brazil, which has a much larger
population, we will discover that the military rulers of Buenos Aires were possessed
by a particular paranoid obsession. In other South American countries the generals
who came to power by coup d’état were convinced that they were carrying out a
repression, followed by a subsequent operation for restoring order. The Argentinian
repression was largely pre-emptive; from the outset they had a list of citizens who
were to be killed, as a prophylaxis, so that they would not infect the people with
their ideas: about 20,000, plus a certain number of members of their families.11 The
30,000 who actually ‘disappeared’, therefore, were not the consequence of the unplan-
nable ferocity of the struggle, but correspond fairly realistically to an initial plan.
These clues suggest that paranoid infection is encouraged more by permanent
concentration of power in the hands of one or more leaders than by the ideology
which the dictatorship formally adopts. Perhaps one day it will be possible to say
how important a part the infection of paranoia between communist leaders and
their subjects played in the failure of communist regimes. The writings of Marx
and Engels contain an early attention to mass dynamics but do not seem to have
foreseen this possibility.
Giving back medals
The concept of heroism has always had delicate edges, but today it has become as
thin as a razor. Walking along a blade takes a great sense of balance, and there is a
risk of deep, bloody wounds. One side of the blade is the traditional one: by iden-
tifying with heroism one regresses towards deep emotions. As in a dream, the ego is
nullified, while action tends towards omnipotence. A state which the classical world
described as divine possession and which is described in myths. En-thusiasm means
literally ‘having the god inside one’. Since ancient times this propensity has been
exploited by military leaders, who tried to transform each subject into an Achilles –
that is, a killing machine.
The other side of the blade, down which anyone who cannot keep their balance
will slide, is the more modern one of paranoia. If it is not resolved instantaneously,
modern war immediately tends to become total, partly because the economic and
technological processes on which it feeds are also totalizing and partly because it is
an element of global competition.12 Modern states add ideology to war – totalitar-
ian states directly, democratic ones by marketing the product ‘the just war’. Every
soldier must be transformed into a fanatic whose priority is killing: ostensibly
287
because there is nothing chivalrous about the enemy: he is absolute evil, and if you
do not kill him he will kill you; in reality because if every soldier is made paranoid,
the military investment brings a greater return.
As we have seen in Ferguson, Hastings and Ellis, many British and American
historians today stress that the Germans fought the two world wars much better
than their adversaries. Although they started from a condition of inferiority, they
achieved great success. Their ‘return’ was always superior. During the First World
War their initial inferiority increased, but they succeeded in counterbalancing this
for a long time by increasing their ‘yield’. In the Second World War their disadvan-
tage became even more significant, and yet for years it was corrected by increasingly
superior performances in comparison to those of the Allies. One of the questions
raised by these historians is, why did the war end in 1945 and not earlier?
This observation enables us to re-examine the psychology of ‘heroism’ in the
world wars. Except in some individual cases, it is the result of falsification, both on
the part of the Soviets and on the part of the Anglo-Americans.This, however, con-
fronts us with a dilemma. No one wants to run the risk of celebrating Nazism, even
indirectly. But any true celebration of ‘heroism’ should praise the military abilities
of the Germans, not those of the victors. How was it that, when subjected to the
worst tyranny of all times, they fought even better than they had done in the First
World War, under a substantially constitutional monarchy?
Narrative prejudice considers courage a personal quality of the individual-hero.
But this, especially in modern wars, is the rarest of extreme cases, teetering on
the razor’s edge. The combination of aggression and technique that decides many
battles is, by contrast, a regression to the group psyche, which involves renounc-
ing individual consciousness. Today this quality essentially corresponds to being
possessed by collective paranoia and not to individual possession on the part of a
mythical hero. The study of German military training tells us that it was better and
tended to make the soldier a ‘total combatant’ already in the First World War.13 The
Germans entered the Second World War much less strongly motivated than in July
1914. But after Hitler’s first surprising political and military successes, they started
to slide down the inclined plane of paranoid simplifications. Under the clamour of
Nazi propaganda, disillusioned with civilian life after the collapse of the Weimar
Republic, they adhered to total war and regressed to the persecutory climate more
profoundly than the Allies; after all, they had been trained to renounce the indi-
vidual ego even in civilian life.
Since their news media were completely manipulated by the regime, this should
also have been true of the Soviets. But the soldiers of their multi-ethnic empire
were, as was pointed out above, less united in their ideological fanaticism; but not
necessarily because they had a greater critical sense than the Germans. Paranoia
permanently tainted the society of the Soviet Union, but mainly on the inside;
it was mistrust between individuals, but also between professions, ‘classes’, ethnic
groups.14 In conclusion, German military efficiency in the two world wars is rooted
in the dark areas of the modern collective psychic disorder rather than in traditional
heroism.
288
The hero was absorbed and corrupted first by the transformation of national-
ism into populism and totalitarianism, then by the transmission of these through the
media. Heroism tried to preserve a presupposition of conscious moral quality but is
increasingly remote from it. The hero’s solidarity with the civilian life that he aspires
to defend has become tenuous; it is not wives and children that benefit from his sacri-
fice but the power that gives him orders and the propaganda that invests in his blood.
Moreover, in contradiction with every heroic tradition, the anti-heroic massacres that
the ‘hero’ carries out among civilians have become very flagrant and direct.
The last combatant who, instead of laying down the last bomb, throws it at the
enemy to die with them is for the most part unaware and paranoid; like Creon,
he has let hatred win his inner battles. The search for heroic emotion or for cor-
responding symbols is too ancient to be completely superseded.15 It is increasingly
difficult, however, for it to be satisfied by a massified and technological process like
that of modern war. The mass paranoia of total wars is also the final perversion of a
need for heroic struggle which no longer finds adequate symbolic expressions and
falls into a vicious circle, metastasizing the original combativeness into hatred as an
end in itself.
The dangerous overlap between hero and paranoiac means that we need to
revise our concept of heroism and also, unless agreement can be reached on a
psychologically reliable definition of it, abolish the ambiguous rituals in which it
is celebrated.
Eighty per cent?
Stanley Milgram’s study is probably the most widely cited in the history of aca-
demic psychology; even though – partly because of the frankness with which it
describes how violent the ordinary citizen can be – Milgram did not have a par-
ticularly successful university career.16
His experiment, and others like it, have no direction relation to paranoia. It
demonstrates, rather, most normal people’s willingness to follow rigid rules and partici-
pate in violent activities. These two presuppositions, however, are also the bases of the
collective paranoia which we are examining. Milgram’s rigid and uncritical ‘obe-
dience’ could therefore be an external behavioural manifestation of the paranoid
potential that we have discussed on the internal, fantasy level.
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram gathered some volunteers for an experiment
at Yale University. The people recruited were told that they would be participating
in a study on memory and learning. Whenever a person in another room gave the
wrong answer they were to send him electric shocks of increasing voltage (from 15
to 450 volts – that is, from moderate to very high). The subject of the experiment,
however, was the volunteers themselves. The ‘victim’, visible through a glass screen,
did not really receive any electric shocks but had been told to show signs of increas-
ing distress with the increase in the feigned shocks. So the volunteers believed they
really were ‘inflicting pain’.The buttons corresponding to the different voltages had
labels indicating their gravity.
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The experiment involved forty male volunteers aged between twenty and fifty,
almost of them from a nearby town. It was made clear to the participants that they
could stop any time they wanted, without any consequences (they would even
keep the payment they had been promised for participating). And yet most of them
continued, simply because they were told to do so by their ‘instructor’ from a pres-
tigious university. Most of them were visibly upset when they caused the ‘electric
shocks’, but none of them stopped before 300 volts; thirty-five went beyond that
(85 per cent), and twenty-six of them (65 per cent) actually went on to ‘administer’
the highest shock, of 450 volts.
Less well known is another aspect of the experiment.17 Before conducting it,
Milgram interviewed 110 people from three different groups (forty middle-class
adults, thirty-one university students and thirty-nine psychiatrists), explaining to
them how it would work. Then he asked them some questions. The first was: how
would you behave if you were invited to take part in the experiment? Predictably,
they all said that at some stage they would stop obeying the order to increase the
voltage. The second question was: how do you think 100 average Americans, cho-
sen at random, would behave? Indicate what percentage would go on to administer
the maximum shock.The average answer was 1.1 per cent, and nobody went higher
than 3 per cent. Almost everyone predicted that the subjects would rebel against
the experiment as the voltage rose. The people interviewed, then, made completely
erroneous predictions.
This preliminary investigation confirms an optimistic prejudice which is very
widespread and particularly dangerous. The average person thinks he possesses a
sense of justice that will essentially prevent him from doing wrong. He is also con-
vinced that average people like him have a moral conscience and that this guides
their actions. The people interviewed thought that the participants in the experi-
ment would refuse to ‘administer shocks’ of too high a voltage, but, as we have
seen, this was not the case. It should be noted that even the psychiatrists, the whole
aim of whose profession is to unmask people’s self-deceptions, got their predic-
tions completely wrong, with the same percentage of error as the students and the
middle-class adults. The study, then, had two astonishing results.
In the first place, we ordinary citizens are far more prepared than we think we
are to obey violent orders, even if we think them unjust.
In the second place, we think the common sense of justice is enough to prevent
us from obeying a violent authority; we realize that the majority of people are pas-
sive executors only when it is too late and the violence has already occurred (as it
did occur, spectacularly, with Nazism).
Everyone knows that the average human being overestimates the moral motiva-
tions of his actions. Milgram’s study confirms this dramatically, but adds that we
are also wrong to attribute such morality to others. We ‘normal’ people are lazily
convinced that conscience prevents most people from doing wrong, but that is not
the case.
Milgram’s experiments caused great controversy. One of the consequences was
that they were double-checked on various occasions, giving even more alarming
290
results. David Rosenhan repeated them at Princeton University: the percentage of

people who obeyed to the end was as high as 80 per cent. In 1970, it was the turn of
the Max Planck Institute in Munich: the figure rose to 85 per cent. In short, only a
minority, no greater than 20 per cent of the population (of any sample) seems to pos-
sess enough antibodies not to be infected by a conformity that I have called paranoid.
Many studies have been devoted to the relatively small number of people who, during
the dark years of the Nazi-Fascist regime, risked their freedom and their lives to help
the Jews. In her well-known book, Eva Fogelman gives a long analysis of this kind of
personality, as if it were a distinct identity or an inverted clinical peculiarity.18 This too
is in fact alarming. There might be nothing peculiar about that minority, except for
the fact that circumstances have revealed it to be a minority; such ‘statistical rarity’ is
unfortunately a fact that can be repeated anywhere and at any time.
Let us now turn our attention to the violent episode studied by the historian
Christopher Browning. In 1942, after a rapid Nazi advance, Battalion 101 of the
German reserve military police (known as the Ordnungspolizei) had been sent
behind the eastern front. This vast occupied area of Poland and the Soviet Union
contained large Jewish communities. In some cities they were actually the majority
of the population; it should not be forgotten that tsarist Russia had driven many
into the west, while the Nazi advance had caused an exodus towards the east.
The majority of European Jews were concentrated in this enormous area, which
one historian has called ‘Bloodland’.19 At first, the reserve police were assigned to
rounding up and killing adult males, but soon the orders included women and
children too. The Jewish population were surrounded, then shot immediately. Only
gradually did the reservists’ mission become one of capturing them and conveying
them to concentration camps.20
As has already been pointed out, only rigid adherence to the paranoid prem-
ises of the racial war could have induced the German high command, already
engaged in the largest military confrontation in history, to assign a vast armed
force to this task. Rigid ideology was, once again, the platform for a mental altera-
tion of all the state institutions and led to what I have called absurd consistency. The
Ordnungspolizei had numbered 244,000 men even before the attack on Russia
and was constantly recruiting more.21 By 1942, the auxiliary units alone contained
300,000 men.22 Moreover, the massacre for which they were used was such that
it paralysed activities essential to the war in which Germany was engaged: even
the Jewish prisoners who had at first been used in supplying munitions for the
Wehrmacht were now being shot. Several authorities complained that the orders
were against the Germans’ own interests.23 The men used for these missions were
relatively old and not very highly educated.
The battalion analysed by Browning comprised about 500 people. Its com-
mander was Major Trapp.This fifty-three-year-old police officer was shocked when
he had to explain the orders he had received to his men. He ended his speech with
a concession unusual in the military: elderly members who did not feel up to the
job could ask to be exempted. Of a company of about 150 men, only a dozen
dropped out.24
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When the action began, others felt ill and asked to be allowed to back out. Some
were sick or fainted. Some, however, tried to carry on regardless. For the most part,
as happens in situations of this kind, people got used to it. Some who had not had
any reservations at the beginning were shocked at the brutality; but others, who had
shown signs of unease, learned to hide them or even got over them. It is interest-
ing to note that those who dropped out tended to say ‘I couldn’t do it’, not ‘I had
a problem of conscience.’ People colluded in changing the subject quickly, and the
officers passed around increasing amounts of alcohol.
Various archival documents testify that, in a sense, even the Nazi hierarchies
showed ‘understanding’ for those who felt an inner conflict.They expressed solidar-
ity for them, provided that their behaviour continued to be labelled as pathological.
In various places on the immense eastern front, soldiers were able to obtain exemp-
tion from taking part in the executions without suffering any consequences.25 With
rigid racist consistency, however, this did not result in pity for the victims but only for
the executioners; these sentimental Germans were treated fairly indulgently, and the
shooting was delegated to auxiliary militias of other nationalities.26
Attempting an overall count of the whole of Battalion 101, Browning calculates
that those who participated in the massacres were at least 80 per cent of its mem-
bers, more likely 90 per cent. These are approximate estimates, of course; in the
post-war reconstructions, for example, many said they had deliberately missed or
adopted other expedients for not shedding all that blood. It is not possible, in any
case, to determine how many told the truth and how many, accused of war crimes
after the war, were only trying to minimize their own role.
In order to understand this alarmingly high rate of participation, Browning
refers to the behavioural psychologist Milgram and notes the similarities with the
percentages indicated by his experiments.27 Of course, in comparing the two situa-
tions he also points out the significant differences between them: Battalion 101 was
at war and was immersed in the propaganda of ‘total war’; the men selected at Yale
were living in peaceful and prosperous conditions; on the other hand, the latter had
been told that their ‘victims’ would not suffer permanent damage, whereas the sol-
diers of the battalion knew that they were killing. Browning, like Milgram, studies
obedience to violent orders. What is of interest to us is how the conformity of the
majority was stronger than any moral conviction of the individual. In both cases,
the conscience had given way to an impersonal ‘paranoid’ frenzy. The participants
feel bad but go on. Questioned afterwards, they recall that they felt bad and find it
hard to explain why they went on. Evidently there is a collective psychic contagion
linking the two situations; it can occur either in war or in peace, in a situation that
favours a loss of identity and individual responsibility. Group paranoia does not
turn people into psychopaths; but it does cause a ‘psychopathic suspension’ of the
primacy that morality should preserve within the personality.
Other factors can combine circularly with these situations. In Vietnam the
Americans suspected the Viet Cong of hiding among the population. Accordingly
it became customary to include civilian casualties in the total of ‘enemy killed’. In
the most well-known case, hundreds of innocent people were massacred at My Lai;
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the ability to kill them infected the company, becoming an obligation to kill them.
Moreover, their excitement grew with the extermination, partly because a soldier’s
chances of getting promotion (we are still talking about the American army, not
the Nazi one) increased, the higher his body count, the number of ‘enemy’ killed,
including women and children.28
Returning to Browning, we may note that other aspects of the atrocity he studied
show similarities with the experiment carried out in the Yale laboratory. Milgram’s
subjects were males aged between twenty and fifty. So were Major Trapp’s sol-
diers. The populations selected were not small and were certainly not chosen from
among people with a particularly aggressive upbringing: the Yale group was taken
from people of every class in the community of New Haven in Connecticut – a
town near the university – one of the most liberal places in the United States. The
members of Battalion 101 were mostly working-class and lower-middle-class citi-
zens of Hamburg, the German city with the strongest ‘left-wing’ traditions, where
Nazism had penetrated least deeply; moreover, because of their age, most of them
had had no previous experience of war and had not been indoctrinated by National
Socialism since childhood.
The abandonment of morality among intellectuals and

among the populace
A paranoid potential exists not only in certain individuals but in the collective
unconscious of groups, whether large or small.29 Particular historical circum-
stances can give it a voice: the unexpected humiliation of France by tiny Prussia
is the fertile soil on which the tree of hatred for Dreyfus grew; the unexpected
surrender of Germany in 1918 was that from which the legend of the stab in
the back developed. The fact that paranoia can become a majority phenom-
enon when activating circumstances occur is also shown by the men of letters
who were excited by the beginning of the First World War and by the scientists
who collaborated in making the first atomic bomb; many cheered as if it was a
sporting victory when the wireless announced that the bomb had hit its target
and Hiroshima had been turned to ashes.30 Groups made up of men of science
have greater than average awareness but are equally exposed to collective psychic
contagion; so they oscillate between mass conformity and individual reasonable-
ness. Benda described intellectuals’ submissiveness to power as the ‘betrayal of
the intellectuals’;31 and Lifton has coined the phrase ‘retirement syndrome’ for
the belated repentances of many retired American politicians.32 This definition,
which seems to have been constructed retrospectively, in reality proved prophetic.
The artificer of the Vietnam War, McNamara, published in 1995 a book in which
he concludes that, although it had followed premises which had appeared to
be just (but which, I would add, contained paranoid elements), America had
undoubtedly been wrong.33 A year before the attack on the Twin Towers, another
artificer of American imperialist policy noted that it had gone too far and would
have serious repercussions.34
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An intellectual training can help in understanding violent processes when one

has been along the road and looks back, but it gives no preliminary certainty that one
has chosen the best road.35 Though not, strictly speaking, uncritical executors, men
of culture too end up being in thrall to power – not only, in a more literal sense,
the power of authority but the blind power of the prevailing collective excitement.
When intellectuals regain their critical sense, they are spat out by the powerful like
cherry pips. And, while they redeem themselves, another perversion arises from
the reasons why they were discarded. Just as the German who cannot massacre is
granted exemption on the grounds that he is suffering from a nervous condition,
so as not to taint the troop’s image of unity, so Oppenheimer, when he expresses
too many moral scruples about the use of the atomic bomb, is dismissed for ‘funda-
mental character defects’. It should be noted that the scientist was already labelled a
philo-communist and America was entering the dark age of McCarthyism: calling
him a traitor would not have been a big step – for many he already was one. But
the more paranoid it is, the more power avoids confronting directly those it has
decided to eliminate; it hints and, astonishing us with its absurd consistency, confronts
its adversary by hiding behind psychiatry.
Sensing that paranoia can easily become a majority phenomenon in any country,
Joseph Roth wrote in 1937:
The Third Reich’s anti-Semitism is one of its most effective means of propa-
ganda. It satisfies perfectly the bestial instinct of each plebeian [even] outside
the Third Reich, who […] cannot hate the domestic version only because the
law prevents him from doing so, and who hurls himself with tenfold energy
against that element which receives little or no protection from the law.36
Roth had been struck by the 40 million people who listened to Goebbels and
noted that support for Hitler fed itself.37 If we remove small children, the deaf and
people who had no radio, we may suppose that those listeners constituted at least
two-thirds of the German population.
In other words, when the circumstances and laws favour it, the people’s womb
gives birth to the mob. (Roth uses this term with the implications of irrationality
and destructiveness with which Hannah Arendt would later popularize it.38) The
metamorphosis of the people into the mob, then, is a collective external process corre-
sponding to a personal and inner slipping from the ordinary mind to the paranoid
one. One of the tasks of the public powers should be maintaining the dignity of the
people among its citizens. It is not. Not only the immense commercial media but
the ruling powers themselves yield to the temptation of swamping the public with
communicative content (in the press and on TV) which has no moral or temporal
depth. Blotting out horizons that lie further back in time and the responsibility that
arises from them, informational fast food every day transforms the people into a
mob and exposes it to the contagion of paranoid commonplaces.
In circumstances of which only a few examples have been given in this book,
in the psyche the voice of the mistrustful prompter becomes the loudest voice; in
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a single process of autotrophy, it can prevail both in the individual and in the group,
becoming an expression of ‘normality’. In general, the larger the group, the more
its diffusion is entrusted not to personal communication but to a collective medium,
though not a mass medium in every sense; yesterday it was fascist and commu-
nist parades, now it is the solitary but uniform terminals of the television and the
Internet. Number only serves to accelerate propagation.
Nature has equipped us with mechanisms which limit destructiveness. Milgram’s
subjects were disturbed by the screams and struggles of their supposed victims; some
variants of the experiment have proved beyond doubt that the visibility and physi-
cal proximity of the people being ‘tortured’ was the main obstacle to the adminis-
tering of stronger shocks.The reservists of Battalion 101 were particularly inhibited
in the case of victims who spoke German in an accent that was familiar to them;
and they were even more inhibited if they knew them personally. The closer it
is, the more a person’s presence causes empathy.39 The medium, however, espe-
cially the mass medium, is impersonal; no human contact ‘pierces’ the newspaper
page or the screen.
Once certain thresholds have been crossed, empathy – that is, the impulse to
share other people’s emotions which the human being possesses as a social animal –
is broken.40 In the crowded situations that modern life has multiplied – queues in
offices, being squashed up together on public transport – it is easy for resentment
to be generated, which can be reciprocally transmitted (as must also have happened
in pre-civilized groups), and which tries to vent itself on a scapegoat; and people
often absorb aggression by empathy. It is different with suffering. Other people’s pain
reaches us only in part, for it is censored by many taboos. Serious illness and death,
even of people close to us, no longer occur at home; they are considered indecorous
and obscene.41 And we learn of sufferings that are hard to comprehend – massacres
in Darfur or Rwanda – through cold media. We unlearn the empathy of suffering,
while we preserve that of aggression.
Why modern life offers paranoia new spaces

With the end of the nineteenth century we encountered the mass media and dis-
cussed their capacity for fostering simplified, paranoid styles of expression. Their
political, economic and social influence was obvious in the historical episodes that
were examined.
With the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-first, the phenom-
enon known as globalization unifies many forms of life even of peoples who live
far away from each other. Only the economic differences, both between different
countries and within individual countries, increase.We would expect this to attenu-
ate the reciprocal mistrust between the West and the rest of the world. It does not.
Europe used to be curious about the remote difference of colonial peoples, whereas
now it is alarmed by the diversity which those same peoples, as immigrants, cause
to appear close (in a sense justifiably, for it is not between the pages of a book, but in
everyday reality). The rich world thus has a new reason for being suspicious.
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Modernity, however, is also made up of new immaterial processes that mobilize

the paranoid part of the psyche.
What we call Western culture is characterized by the spread, first among edu-
cated people, but gradually throughout the whole of society, of two convictions:
1. The existence in each individual of an inner world, a personal psychological

dimension and, as its corollary, the right to make use of it, to explore it and
appeal to it as a source of knowledge. This idea is the final stage in a developed
conception of humanism: the human being is a microcosm.
2. The affirmation of the existential condition of the human being – of every human
being; that is, the recognition of the individual’s separateness (or solitude), even
if that individual is religious. The human being has noticed that he is not
included in the totality and embrace of God – a condition which became
generalized in twentieth-century philosophy but had been anticipated in the
nineteenth century by Kierkegaard. In other words, the importance acquired
by the inner microcosm has a price: the weakening of organic inclusion within
an outer cosmos.
The paranoiac might be a ‘dinosaur’, a survivor from the pre-modern world, who
is unable to adapt to the new condition – to the two psychological novelties I have
described. To the inevitable presence of a certain percentage of clinical paranoiacs,
which concerns all epochs, our times may have added structural difficulties that
‘inflame’ the paranoid potential of normal individuals. Everyone lives in the new
age of the ‘death of God’ and in the new realm of psychology. But a large propor-
tion of us are not aware of this, and many are unable to make the corresponding
existential leap. Among the latter are some who are unable to interrogate their
inner dimension or who are constitutionally incapable of self-criticism and have to
continue to project all responsibility into the outer macrocosm, from which they
cannot isolate themselves.
Here a serious question arises, which remains unanswered: as modernization
and globalization become increasingly aggressive, ubiquitous and irreversible, and
change becomes increasingly rapid, and therefore destabilizing, and reaches the
remotest valleys, might the number of these excluded individuals (who use the new
objects but are unable to experience the new inner condition) continue to increase,
until they are no longer a minority but the majority?
The paranoid psyche is a fragile space, unable to trust itself or form a separate
entity. The ‘inner microcosm’, ‘existential solitude’, are not suited to it. It has par-
ticular difficulty in living as a ‘separate thing’, in a secularized society indifferent
to metaphysics. The paranoiac cannot be separated; he needs the other without
knowing it; he is the survivor from the original condition of the human being,
who is a social animal. If he has lost this ‘other’, because modernity dilutes solidar-
ity, he at least needs another whom he can suspect, envy and, finally, hate. Without
being aware of it, he recreates in the negative the positive link he has lost. At the
same time, he is convinced that he is a normal person, for whom the materialistic,
296
secular world is normal. In other words, he is unaware of being unhistorical. (This,

paradoxically, makes him, in a sense, normal; being unaware of many of one’s own
problems and one’s own historical situation is the norm in all ages.)
But this repudiation of interiority, this need for increasingly radical and increas-
ingly simple projections, is also one of the reasons why populism, the noisy accou-
trement of the mob, is spreading throughout the West. Its aggressive and intolerant
forms are not only a rejection of immigrants, of the complexity of the multi-ethnic
world which globalization brings; they are first and foremost a rejection of inner
complexity, which is in turn a consequence of the secularization and psychologiza-
tion of the times.
In extreme cases and crises, nostalgia for a metaphysics and denial of the inner
world combine and explode; when the compression becomes unsustainable, strong
images of the inner world ‘spurt out’ in assertive, convincing, indisputable forms.
With a double, instantaneous benefit: tortured, unaccepted interiority has found an
outlet, and the need to belong to a macrocosm, the need for values and ties to share,
is satisfied by a ‘revelation’ experienced as outer reality.
In a sense, this already happened in the past with the mystic’s visions. But the
mystic’s visions were harmonious with the surrounding culture and he could
keep them to himself or disseminate them. The modern paranoiac, by contrast, is
unaware that his visions announce a nostalgia for metaphysics and the desperate
search for ties, a private, ‘heroic’ revolt against the solitude of the modern condition.
The visions of the angry, lost populist, being unconscious and pathological, pres-
ent themselves only in negative forms. Rightly, he is mistrustful of whether he can
communicate them. In the solitude of his mind, his imagination is populated with
enemies contrary to his truth. This mental exercise has an important and, in itself,
legitimate function: it asks for a restitution of higher values, of transcendence and
justice, to set against the greyness of a world whose only purpose is the satisfaction
of consumer needs. Although it began as a personal quarrel and its logic is absurd,
the paranoiac’s attack is felt as a struggle between good and evil. For him, the mis-
sion is more important than everyday life. But the price for the recognition of this
importance is the renunciation of reality. It is the cost of the unequal exchange
between objective facts and subjective revelations.
The relationship with the -isms

The spread of politico-social doctrines in the modern age offered hope of renewal
to the whole population. In the past, great changes had for the most part followed
dynastic or military events.With the expanded production of books and periodicals,
real masses participated in new ideas for the first time. The new doctrines, however,
also provided containers suited to collective paranoia. Of the various movements
which spread in the West, one in particular obtained permanent citizenship: nation-
alism. During the eighteenth century the Enlightenment had reached the educated
classes. In the following century Romanticism gained a somewhat wider social
and geographical diffusion, though still limited to circumscribed groups. From the
297
mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, communism penetrated slowly into

Europe, then into the places reached by European colonization; but ultimately it
would prove to have spread less than nationalism, both in the intellectual classes and
among the populace.
Only nationalism – which is a product of Romanticism, the Enlightenment,
social ideas and other factors – seems to have come to stay. It has penetrated mod-
erately into almost all social classes and all countries. In the West it is not particularly
visible in the twenty-first century, but is always potentially present. Some groups
and some countries call themselves socialist or communist, but when attempts are
made to elicit a response corresponding to the social solidarity that should unite
them, this is slow to arrive; like peace, it is not so much a given as an active qual-
ity, which implies constant willpower and has a high cost. National solidarity, by
contrast, appears much more quickly, and is largely a ‘passive’ event, a psychic infec-
tion, often with paranoid elements. Nationalism is not so much a form of culture
as a latent collective emotion, which feels authorized to manifest itself at certain
times; real paranoia, as Kiš and Pamuk have reminded us. The post-heroic West of
the twenty-first century finds corresponding opportunities in the sporting achieve-
ments of the national team, or even when one of ‘our’ multinationals defeats a
foreign one in an economic duel.
Unlike Romanticism, the Enlightenment and Marxism, nationalism commu-
nicates itself almost spontaneously to the masses. Sometimes showing a football
match on television is enough to mobilize large groups and make them willing
to kill in the impunity of the crowd. The continuity between nationalist violence
and sport is also clear when the relationship between them is inverted. In 1978,
the Argentinian dictatorship was in serious difficulty, both internally and interna-
tionally, because of constant revelations about its abuses. But the country won the
World Cup, and the media immediately rediscovered that it was their duty to cover
the triumph. The military junta was doubly reinforced by this. The banality of evil
is chiefly indirect complicity. Sport, television and the press can be the trays on
which it is served up every day.
Nationalism has been described by its historians Hobsbawm and Gellner as the
greatest gravedigger in the world. Our theme has led to one conclusion: the psy-
chological space occupied by collective paranoia is the same one in which national-
ism resides, at least in its aggressive forms. With media diffusion, nationalism lost its
cultured, Romantic origins and became populism. With a false scientific extension,
it was reborn in the guise of social Darwinism and racism. In Europe during the
First World War these currents slid together down the sides of a funnel; when they
emerged, they turned into fascisms, and the democratic populace mutated into a
paranoid mob.
Communism too, as was mentioned earlier, has often been seen as a transposi-
tion of national struggles into a conflict between classes. The classes, however, live
interwoven within the same society and on the same territory. Clashes between
them can be paranoid and even genocidal. But they occur over limited periods of
time and prove bloody mainly if they are steered in that direction from above. The
298
communist regimes manifested mass pathologies chiefly to the extent that they
were disguised nationalisms. Russia itself, after three-quarters of a century of com-
munist doctrine, went straight into a ‘soft’ version of fascism.
The human being is a social animal in all senses. Joining together in a group
facilitates the unleashing of primordial aggressions, but at the same time being a
permanent part of a group limits aggression towards other members. The few black
slaves who took advantage of the War of Secession to change their status wanted
to escape the owners with whom they had lived rather than take revenge on them;
the same happened with those in ancient Rome who tried to join Spartacus. The
battalions of Nazi police who operated behind the eastern front gradually got used
to their task; but they tried to disobey their officers by any subterfuge possible
when the execution orders concerned Jews who had worked for them as cooks or
in similar jobs. Harming someone who has nourished us is particularly alien to our
instinct.42 Propaganda quite easily persuades people to project hatred onto a stranger
but has less chance of changing existing feelings towards someone we know.
Ultimately, the clash between two layers of the same society remains particularly
that exceptional event which we call revolution. It may involve mass prejudices,
stereotypes and paranoid projections, but the functioning of that society (espe-
cially if it is a modern, complex one) requires that sooner or later there be a return
to a certain degree of cooperation: the ‘other’ is not definitively other; he is also
part of ‘us’. Nationalism, by contrast, is antecedent to the class struggle and, as it
decays culturally and spreads along different channels such as racism, lends those
channels hatred turned into language and contempt transformed into a collective
value. National conflicts – and their extreme version, racial conflicts – may con-
tinue for centuries, especially when there is little communication between the two
groups; the European colonization of Africa, especially the northern part, has been
described as genocide ‘spread out’ over time, rather than acute genocide. The ‘social
instinct’ that opposed the elimination of the Native Americans was weak, because
the natives were not part of the whites’ society and were rarely known to them as
people. Almost everything that was said about them was stereotype, prejudice, even
animalization.
Also deriving from a presumption of racial superiority but less well known
because they are distant and spread out over the centuries, are the massacres of
entire populations for which the colonial empires were responsible by omission
or poor administration. In India, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century
alone, between 12.2 million and 29.3 million people died;43 although famines
were common, there was a failure to stockpile adequate emergency supplies
because agricultural production had to nourish Great Britain. We know that the
food rations in Nazi camps were intentionally insufficient because, consistently
with the premises of social Darwinism, they were intended to contribute to the
elimination of the weakest. And yet in India the British colonial administra-
tion came to provide, for heavy manual labour, rations smaller than those of the
concentration camp of Buchenwald in 1944–5, the period when Nazi Germany
was poorest.44
299
It is fairly easy to experience for ourselves the potential for racism that is latent
in all of us. If I spend an hour on a bus or train where half of the other passengers
have a different physical appearance and/or speak another language, I feel different.
If anyone asks me when I get off, I will immediately be able to reply: ‘there were
a lot of Chinese’ or ‘a lot of Africans’, even though I spent the whole time reading
the newspaper. But if the people were all of the same nationality as me, I will say
dubiously, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t notice.’ And I didn’t notice because, without being
aware of it, I felt integrated. Even if I’m a poor Italian, I can imagine being a rich
Italian; more and more, that corresponds to what the mass media hold up to me
as an ideal. It’s harder for me to imagine being African or Chinese. I don’t identify
with them. But that is exactly the presupposition necessary for being extraneous to
their suffering, then indifferent to their being slaughtered, and finally participating
in their massacre. Extraneity is a first step down the inclined plane.
Here a coincidence should be noted.We have seen that a constant feature of false
paranoid reasoning is circularity: instead of formulating a real thought, it thinks
it is advancing at the very time when it is retracing its steps. It expresses itself in
tautologies; it repeats what it said at the outset, merely changing the formulation.
Well, the concept of nationalism is for the most part as elusive and circular as the
paranoid idea. Historians, despite having written about it extensively, have not been
able to agree on a definition. It proves impossible to determine whether the crucial
factor in forming a nation is language, religion, culture or racial characteristics.
Consequently, sooner or later the safest of the possible definitions is adopted: a
nation is that group of individuals which recognizes itself as such.
But, we may ask, is it the nation that sooner or later wants to found a state, or is
it the state that sooner or later wants to be a nation? Both things can happen, replies
the historian. The circularity is complete in either case. From the point of view of
the definition, the nation is both the subject and the object of the description of
itself. From the point of view of historical events, the nation is both the national
group that wants to become a judicial entity, and the already existing state that also
wants to describe itself as a nation. Something very similar happens with racism,
nationalism’s big, uglier brother: we know it throws the world into turmoil, but we
do not know what it is. Even racists cannot define it. Now that we have developed
a genetics of which a few scientific questions could be asked, racism presents itself
as scientific; it prefers to return to false appeals to tradition, or hides and survives in
the cruel joke against a foreigner.
Paranoid return
Perhaps more than other ideas, nationalism and racism make it possible to profit
from what I have called paranoid return.
In the surge of paranoia that spread through Germany at the beginning of the
First World War, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were isolated, stigmatized as intolerant
revolutionaries and finally killed; in reality they were two people who remained
true to ideals of peace and progress which until a short time earlier had been shared
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by most of the country, or at least of its largest party, that of the socialists. Mussolini,
by contrast, after leading the socialists who opposed the war, moved abruptly over
into the opposite camp; he had sensed that with interventionism it was easier to
create the irreversibility of the inclined plane. Italy’s entry into the war was actu-
ally decided by only three people – the king; the prime minister, Salandra; and
the foreign minister, Sonnino – without consulting parliament. The socialists were
defeated precisely to the extent that, during the first half of the twentieth century,
they remained the true pacifists. Peace has to be constructed by everyone and day
after day. Guaranteeing peace requires far more than three people. For war, it might
be enough to have one single paranoiac, who, after shooting Pandarus’ arrow, wan-
ders off to bed.
Paranoid return reawakens the suspicion concealed in the deepest layers of every
personality, and manipulates it. Shakespeare’s Othello explains convincingly how this
can be done in the individual; but because the intelligence of people united into a
group tends to fall into line with that of the most straightforward, instinctive indi-
viduals, reawakening this temptation in the masses is paradoxically easier than in the
individual, and gives a higher return. Without the need to carry it into the streets,
the populist medium of communication reaches every member of the masses at
home and stimulates the paranoid area of his mind.
Clandestine revolutionary groups
A limited but striking example of paranoid return is that of relatively small organiza-
tions like the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) and the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red
Army Group). They found particular space in an Italy and a Germany that had yet
to come to terms with their dictatorships and their disastrous defeats in the Second
World War.
The Red Brigades took off after the bombing of Piazza Fontana in Milan, in
December 1969. The future ‘armed party’ interpreted that attack, in a sense jus-
tifiably, as an act of war on the part of the most reactionary powers of the state.
Preformed by ideology, concepts such as ‘state’, ‘war’ and ‘power’, used by the
Red Brigades, are nevertheless particularly abstract and dogmatic. On the one
hand they lend themselves to being as rigid as the paranoid premises. On the
other, as in paranoid arguments, they are adapted to mean everything and noth-
ing. They make it possible to explain too many things. With the Red Brigades the
circular argument merges with an action in a circular development, which will
close round on itself. In this self-nourishment, the ideological response to Piazza
Fontana generates the exclusion which it claims to oppose and declares the war
of which it feels it is a victim.
A paranoid component is already evident in the first step towards clandestinity.
The choice of armed struggle is justified by the impossibility of bringing about
meaningful social change. At a distance of a few decades, this affirmation seems
much more linked to persecutory premises than to reality. It has been rightly
pointed out that the 1970s were probably the decade of the twentieth century in
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which Italy saw the largest concentration of social transformations (the introduc-
tion of the rights of divorce and abortion, the generalization of access to university
and to the health system, the role of the trade unions, etc).45 It was that decade that
saw the rise and fall of the armed struggle, whose phases are marked by develop-
ments significant for the theme of paranoia.
The first is the Red Brigades’ assumption that the state could be brought down
by arms, not changed with reforms. This false premise derived, obviously, not from
the surrounding world, which found itself in that dilemma for the first time, but
from the inner one in which a pre-existent ‘revelation’ was liberated.
In the second stage, with the development of the Red Brigades’ actions and
its communiqués, the media became its unconscious collaborators: circularly, they
received indications and fostered allusions of infinite variety. Suspicious interpreta-
tions prevailed, however. It seems hard to imagine a clandestine group, without great
political or economic support, robbing all Italy of its peace of mind. Journalists were
Ajax’s megaphone: they could not rest content with what was visible; there must
be hidden powers behind events.46 Indirectly, unintentionally, the Red Brigades’
paranoia contaminated the news media, and the media in turn infected the public.
For the Italian Red Brigades, the downturn came with the apparent victory won
through the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. On the one hand, it reinforced the paranoid
illusions of the most extreme elements, deepening the divisions within the group
irreparably.47 On the other, the long interrogations of the prisoner refamiliarized
the interrogators with a human complexity which their ideological assumptions
had tried to deny;48 and so there reappeared, in the more sensitive individuals,
psychological fractures which had survived the denial. In order to hide from them-
selves the exile from the world to which they had condemned themselves, in their
messages the Red Brigades made an orgiastic use of unprovable basic assumptions.
The arguments of all nine communiqués concerning the Moro kidnapping (from
16 March to 5 May 1978) centred on a particular hypothesis: the existence of an
imperialist state of multinationals, which in the Red Brigades’ vision was now
replacing the old nation-states.49 In the mechanized mind of the group’s militancy,
the concept took on a life of its own and solid reality.
By psychic contagion, this granite presupposition became the basis of the argu-
ments adopted by other revolutionary organizations too. On 28 March 1980, the
Brigata XXVIII Marzo announced: ‘the instruments of Marxist analysis have
enabled us to identify and eliminate such a figure as Walter Tobagi, who occu-
pied a leading role in the political process of structural reorganization, the aim of
which was the total subjection of the press to the imperialist state of multinationals
(ISM).’50 In other words, the imperialist state of multinationals was no longer an
abstract model, something that no one had ever seen but which could be useful
for creating explanations (like the Marxist concept of capital). No, it was a concrete
organization, like the CIA, in which many people worked, so those people had to
be attacked. So concrete was it, indeed, that it was now written in capital letters as
an acronym. Taking another ‘logical’ step, the leaflets included the ISM in the list of
real organizations in which real people worked: ‘imperialist state of multinationals,
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IMF, EEC’, ran another document.51 The unreal basic assumption had produced
something real: Tobagi died a real death on a pavement in Milan because he ‘occu-
pied a leading role’ in an imaginary organization, the ISM.
As we have already seen with regard to various historical situations, in this phase
the Red Brigades’ frenzy nourished itself because of its unexpected success. For they
played a role chiefly through the voice of the media; and they were constantly
discussed mainly through a process of paranoid autotrophy. This excited them, but
contributed further to their detachment from reality. If the second phase had spread
the language of paranoia, the third seemed to collect a paranoid return.
In the final phase, the organization irremediably concretized its own fantasies
and the blind alley from which it could not escape. ‘All paranoid groups with a
totalizing ideology which contemplates violence are dangerous, but those with a
utopian egalitarian ideology are particularly dangerous.’52 Dreaming of a utopian
society of equals, they encounter an increasing number of differences, an increasing
number of different people, so, consistent with their rigid basic assumption, they are
obliged to eliminate them. Egalitarianism, abstract and dogmatic, also enters into a
short circuit with paranoia, reinforcing it; circularly, it acts as both its consequence and
its cause.The need for equality brings out a greater rigidity and a paradoxical differ-
ence with respect to the far right, for which the different person may be inferior,
but tolerated. As in the final stages of the worst real wars, in this phase violence
metastasizes, even though it is clear that it cannot achieve its aims.The organization
slides down an ever more steeply inclined plane, increasingly detached from reality.
The continuity between limited attacks and genocides

In multi-ethnic states, the paranoid return is particularly visible and shakes the
very internal structure of the county. Groups of hotheads, or intolerant people
in positions of power, succeed in upsetting old balances, as happened in the tsar-
ist pogroms and with the Armenian genocide. In other countries, like the United
States, the multi-ethnic composition resulting from immigration was rapidly fused
into national unity; it was not necessary to impose assimilation by violent means
because the immigrants themselves wanted to learn the language and asked to be
integrated. Here, however, the paranoid discourse that united everyone was part
of an ethnic cleansing of the continent, which eliminated its internal frontiers and
reduced the native peoples almost to extinction, in order to build a strong nation-
alism which made it possible to fight all external wars from positions of military
strength and ‘justice’. In the twentieth century, too, the United States initiated wars
for little reason; then, when the reasons became even weaker, the commitment to
war increased because ‘we can’t abandon our soldiers’, or ‘we can’t allow our guys
to have died in vain’. Starting from premises of ‘granite’ (hence indisputable and
potentially paranoid) nationalism, the necessity of a war, which had been doubtful
from the beginning, is proved by appeal to the fact that the war is already in course
and has led to people being killed. The fact that war causes death, instead of being
a good reason for not waging war, becomes a reason for waging it. War is justified
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by the fact that the country is at war, just as the paranoiac justifies the perseverance
of his aggression by reformulating without any significant changes the aggressive
premises that unleashed it.
Historical research has shown that the slide from nationalism into ‘ethnic cleans-
ing’ and then into genocide is an uncontrollable form of collective paranoia.53 It
is evident in the deportation of the Armenians and in their massacre. The main
aggravating circumstance in collective paranoia, which may cause partial perse-
cutions to slide into genocide, is war. War is, psychologically speaking, aggression,
haste and projection: consequently, it contains various psychological conditions which
are in profound syntony with that of paranoia. Its core remains for the most part
pathological and unconscious, even when it receives rational justifications. When
it reaches the top of the inclined plane, war nourishes itself like paranoia, and the
initial motivation is forgotten. For persecution tends to intensify both when a war
is going well for the persecutors and when it is disastrous for them.
Like the historical studies, psychology also tells us that ethnic cleansing can
escape the control of the governments that have promoted or tolerated it and slide
towards genocide. The ethnic cleansing may in turn derive from occasional per-
secutions which have slipped out of the control of those who initiated them, and
those occasional persecutions may derive from ‘simple’ collective prejudice, which
may ultimately have arisen out of ordinary nationalism. A single chain made up of
imperceptible links can lead from national pride, stirred by an open-hearted poet,
to absolute crime.
The Turks began the deportation and massacre of the Armenians in the face of a
real advance of the Russians, which ignited in them a typical ‘paranoia of encircle-
ment’. It is debatable whether the Armenian people behind them endangered the
existence of the Ottoman Empire, but from the point of view of the present dis-
cussion it makes no difference. The military command became convinced of it; for
them it was a ‘psychological reality’.54 However, they did not change this genocidal
strategy even when Russia had been defeated and withdrew from the war; as we
know, collective psychic infections can flare up rapidly but are slow to recede.
In the Second World War, the Nazis began their systematic massacres of Jews on
the eastern front when they were advancing with astonishing speed. However, the
extermination turned into an industrialized process in the following years, when
they were ruinously losing the war. It reached its peak in the last period of the
conflict, in a phase when the collapse of the Third Reich was certain and it was
clear even to the most fanatical that not only did it bring Germany no benefit, but
it would constitute a huge obstacle to its future rebirth. Hitler made it the point of
pride in his testament.
Stalin carried out genocidal deportations both when he was being crushed by
the advance of the Wehrmacht and when the Red Army had re-established a deci-
sive superiority. The Allies decided on massive bombings of the civilian population
of their enemies in the initial phases of the war, when they were on the defensive
and were still choosing a strategy, but they continued it, even using atomic bombs,
when they had already won.
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The events of which humankind should be most ashamed use military consid-
erations as a pretext then continue to slide further and further down of their own
accord, even when the initial reasons have been turned on their head. Collective
paranoid thought, then, reveals an autonomous psychic dynamic; it waits silently,
even for centuries, for the opportunity to explode behind apparent rationalizations.
Each country has its own history and its own collective unconscious which decide
on this highly delicate subject. Czechoslovakia had barely emptied its cellars of the
blood shed by Hitler and Stalin when it divided in civilized fashion into the Czech
Republic and the Slovak Republic. In the same way Quebec might one day break
away from the rest of Canada, or Belgium split into Flanders and Wallonia. But
separation between Israel and Palestine cannot even be discussed without arousing
persecutory feelings, nor can the separation of Chechnya from Russia, nor that of
the Basque countries from now peaceful Spain.
Acceptance of responsibility and denial

Individual paranoia is the unconscious attempt to cure a defective psychic equilib-
rium by projecting responsibility onto an adversary and denying him human quali-
ties. Something similar happens between peoples: relations between countries based
on a self-perception of superiority always require a certain amount of madness and
dehumanization of the ‘others’. Even though they razed Carthage and Jerusalem
to the ground, the Romans could fight fairly against their adversaries when they
felt they were as human as them; but they crucified the slaves who had rebelled
with Spartacus. The British and French fought each other as equals in America,
but in conflicts with the native peoples they massacred women and children. Such
situations presuppose a perception of the other as different for such long periods
(for example, centuries of colonialism and slavery) as to leave the awareness of his
humanity beyond every horizon.
This projection of difference should be classed as collective paranoia, but for centuries it
was considered normal. Such mental attitudes were so common and so prolonged
that so-called denial does not surprise us. If one people has despised another in a
paranoid manner for hundreds of years, it is possible that it will massacre that other
people in the way that is normal with animals; and one day it might deny having
committed such a ‘crime against humanity’, because the humanity of the victims
had never entered its collective conscience. Something of the kind happened in
relations between the Europeans and the peoples of other continents.
Most typically linked to ideology were the forms of denial in the Old World.
Official Turkish policy long denied that the massacre of the Armenians (1915)
had taken place; the Russians falsely attributed to the Germans the extermina-
tion of Polish officers (in Katyn, in 1940). Then, with the advances in historical
research, admissions of responsibility appeared; and national honour, both Turkish
and Russian, not only did not suffer, but benefited from them.
Historical denial has, for the collective imagination, a function not very different
from that of individual pathological ‘denial’: it is a psychic trench, perceived as the
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last, indispensable line of defence. In reality it is nothing of the kind; but often it is
necessary to go through the ordeal right to the end and not have any alternatives
in order to make a leap into the void, out of and away from paranoia; as happens
to Creon in the Antigone, who becomes rigid and returns to reason only after the
death of his son. Denial too fits the psychopathology in too many respects to be analysable
only with historiographical criteria.
A real novelty of the twentieth century might be the fact that the Federal
Republic of Germany (unlike the defunct East Germany or German Democratic
Republic and unlike Austria, Italy and Japan) has promoted self-criticism insti-
tutionally, by making the repudiation of Nazism and of expansionist policies the
foundation of its constitution; so that it may be considered the first ‘post-national’
state. Law and culture combined to prevent denial, which is a continuation of
nationalist paranoia.
History comes and goes, sometimes more paranoid, sometimes less so. It would
be naive to think there are irreversible improvements in the relations between peo-
ples. Enver Pasha, the former Ottoman minister of war, was condemned to death in
Turkey after the First World War for his part in the Armenian genocide; but he died
free and in exile. Then, as if in obedience to Hitler’s question,55 time cleaned up
his image, until in 1993, when Turkey was modernizing and opening to Europe,56
his remains were repatriated and buried in the heroes’ cemetery on the Hill of
Freedom (Abide-i hürriyet).57 It would be wrong, however, not to acknowledge that,
after the two world wars and the Cold War, the twentieth century in Europe ended
with openings, pacifications and dialogues almost without precedent in human
history. The First World War began near a bridge in Sarajevo, where the heir to the
throne of Austria was killed. One of the consequences of the war was the forma-
tion of Yugoslavia, which named it after the assassin: Princip Bridge. But in the last
decade of the century Bosnia broke away from the Yugoslav Federation, and the old
construction reverted to the name of Bridge of the Latins.
Given the gregarious nature of human beings, it is impossible to remove every
trace of localism and nationalism – that is, of identification with a ‘we’ made up
of the sum of many ‘I’s. But given the unpredictability of the paranoid dynamic,
which may lead without any real interruption from a simple prejudice of superi-
ority to genocide, we cannot afford to distinguish between a ‘hard’, unacceptable
nationalism and a ‘soft’ version, which we reserve for folklore and football matches.
Nationalism should be considered an evil in itself. In the long run, human beings
have never been satisfied with football alone, and have always wanted to bring
bloodshed, too, on to the field.
Who won?
Even though it has never existed as an organized ideology, much less a coherent
one, in the concrete, visible results social Darwinism seems to have won. It was suc-
cessful in the Old World and still is in places where the West imposed its presence
by force: the Americas, Australia, Africa, the Indian subcontinent.
306
Different peoples which had coexisted for centuries or millennia were sepa-
rated in the last century by massacres or deportations of millions of people. Hitler
wanted minorities to disappear so that the Germans would not be contaminated
by living with other ethnic groups. As he pointed out stubbornly in his testament,
he succeeded in eliminating most of the Jews who lived in central eastern Europe,
to whom Europe itself is indebted for a large part of the cultural achievements of
the early twentieth century. At the same time he brought about the separation he
had wanted for the Germans too; but, as often happens to the paranoid leader (and
as Hitler had predicted in his speech of 8 November 1943), in an inverted form, to
their detriment.58
The parts of Yiddish culture that were eradicated were particularly the lan-
guage (which had a strong Germanic component) and the literature, whereas,
owing to its greater internationality, the music survived more easily. The end of
the Second World War enabled Stalin to shift his borders into the heart of Europe,
driving out people on a scale unprecedented in the history of human migration.
Large areas populated by millions of ‘Germans’ had existed outside Germany and
Austria, in various countries, and they had enriched them much as the Jews had
done with the countries where they had lived. In Riga, Latvia, where some of the
major works of Kant were published, in 1967, 43 per cent of the population was
German-speaking and only 23.5 per cent Latvian-speaking;59 in Hungary there
were nearly 2 million people of German language and culture until the First
World War;60 in Czechoslovakia in 1930 there were 3.2 million ‘Germans’, about a
quarter of the population, and they formed a linguistic group which had produced
Rilke and Kafka.61
Stalin, too, won in a paradoxical way. His deportations partly destroyed the cul-
tural heritages of ancient ethnic groups, but for a certain time the tyrant uncon-
sciously succeeded in reviving and extending his greatest enemy, the tsarist empire.
Then his delusion too achieved inverted effects: with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
satellite countries turned their backs, and the Soviet Union stiffened into a new
Russia, an expression of ‘soft’ fascism but ‘hard’ capitalism, where the social injus-
tices are among the most glaring in the world.
The nemesis of the paranoiac not only marked the deaths of Hitler and Stalin
but has been paid over time by all their subjects; their attacks on entire peoples have
impoverished the whole continent. The ethnic cleansing of Europe had already
begun earlier, with the rise of nationalism, and had rolled down an ever more
steeply inclined plane; with the two madmen it simply opened up, becoming an
abyss. The expulsion of people who spoke a different language intensified with the
end of the two world wars.62 It is presumed that making a country ethnically pure
avoids many conflicts. Experience seems to show, however, that it often moves it
onto an inclined plane. Significantly, the only country excluded from this madness,
Switzerland, is the one that has achieved the greatest prosperity.
Even the cult of national identity has separated the peoples of the Mediterranean
to a degree that not even fascism or the Turkish ethnic slaughterers would have
dreamed of. For thousands of years, before withdrawing to Greece and Israel, the
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Greeks and Jews had lived all around its coasts. After the Graeco-Turkish war of
1919–22, agreement was reached on an exchange of populations: the 1.5 million
Greeks who had to leave places where they had lived for thousands of years cor-
responded to about 30 per cent of the Greek population that had to find room
for them. On the southern coast of the Mediterranean, too, ‘cleansing’ has pre-
vailed over fertile complexity. With the independence of the formerly colonized
countries and the rise of Arab nationalism, French, Italian and Spanish people resi-
dent there returned to Europe, while the Jews fled to Israel. Even the greatest
Greek poetry of the century, that of Constantine Cavafy, was written not in Greece,
but in Alexandria, Egypt. Today, anyone who is born on the southern coast of the
Mediterranean is almost certain to speak only Arabic, to encounter almost exclu-
sively the Islamic religion, and, from the economic point of view, to be destined
for poverty.
In this sense too paranoia is a catastrophe that wins autonomously, by force of
gravity. At the end of every war people try to sign agreements, proclaiming that
peace and reason have returned, but often the ‘lucid madness’ has literally gained
ground, separating peoples and teaching them reciprocal mistrust in times to come.
New generations are born, and the material damage is repaired, but the cultural
richness produced by variety is lost for ever. From this point of view, paranoia
reveals itself as a substance that survives, and sometimes spreads, under appearances
which our mental laziness finds it convenient to consider more peaceful.
Disarmament and historiography

The processes of rearmament and paranoia have always strengthened each other.
Rearmament, nominally carried out in order to restore the balance of one’s armed
forces with those of a neighbouring country, in reality also fuels the rearmament
of the adversary, which in turn retroacts on our country, inducing us to rearm
even more. The arms race, therefore, possesses autotrophy just as paranoia does. Only
initially and to a limited extent does it feed on rationality; when it has acquired a
certain dynamic it advances of its own accord. Unfortunately, the extreme expres-
sion of this process appears precisely where the balance is most delicate and where
the highest degree of cool-headedness is necessary: in nuclear rearmament.
A vital instrument for the survival of humanity was created with the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. The public has received information about its existence
but has been kept less well informed about the failure to respect it. Not only have
new countries been added to the ‘exclusive club’ of possessors of nuclear weap-
ons, but the promoters of the treaty themselves (the countries that already had
these absolute weapons), despite having undertaken to eliminate their bombs in a
sequential and mutually balanced manner, have kept their promise only in part.The
non-proliferation treaty was the typical Cold War agreement, intended to reduce
paranoid tension between the two blocs. Today the Soviet Union no longer exists,
and this had led to a lack of interest in the norms of the treaty. But there are new
medium-sized and small powers that possess nuclear weapons.
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The disarmament provided for in this and similar treaties is not impossible, but
only difficult, to achieve. Unfortunately, it hardly ever figures as a priority in elec-
tion campaigns. Nuclear weapons involve too many economic, political and mili-
tary interests. The mere process of safely destroying old stocks of them is extremely
expensive.
There are, however, forms of disarmament that cost much less and which in
other ages have been initiated.They do not concern the chiefs of staff of the armed
forces or the political leaders, but ordinary people and everyday life.
Despite the explicit or latent nationalistic climate that led to the First World
War, by the beginning of the twentieth century French and German history
teachers were conscious of the particular responsibility of their discipline. They
tried to hold international meetings to exchange ideas. The last one was held in
June 1914, the month when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand set
Europe rolling into a catastrophe which has not yet finished.63 With the war, the
historians of the two countries were no longer able to meet, and German school
textbooks were rewritten to accuse France. (The French ones did not need to
be, since they blamed Germany for a possible war even before it broke out.) But
as soon as the pointless slaughter stopped, contact between them resumed. Jules
Isaac, the son of a family of Alsatian Jews who had opted for France when Alsace
had been annexed to the Second Reich (1870), promoted meetings between
Christians and Jews. In the 1930s he organized a Conférence Internationale
pour l’Enseignement de l’Histoire (International Conference for the Teaching
of History).64 The German and French participants succeeded in producing and
having published in their respective countries a common declaration that listed
thirty-nine highly delicate historical theses on which they had reached agree-
ment. The year in which this happened is even more extraordinary and shows
that paranoia is not inevitable: it was 1935, and in Germany Hitler had been in
power since January 1933. The historians had understood what psychiatrists have
still not considered carefully enough: if everyone starts from their own rigid basic
premises, even historiography risks being transformed into a territory affected by
psychiatric disorders.
If it was possible to work on the disarmament of school textbooks in National
Socialist Berlin in 1935, why does this not happen in Europeanist Brussels in the
twenty-first century? In 1972, during a temporary thaw in the so-called Cold War,
a combined German and Polish commission was created whose task was to provide
guidance so that school textbooks on history and geography in Federal Germany
and Poland would not contradict each other.65 After the end of the Communist
regimes, a commission of German and Czechoslovakian historians was activated to
produce a common reconstruction of events concerning relations between the two
countries.66 But the work was immediately multiplied. Czechoslovakia split into
the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Because of the changes in borders
occasioned by various treaties and by the world wars, neighbouring countries were
also involved in the studies: Poland, Hungary and Austria, of which Czechoslovakia
had been part until the Great War.
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The European Union is made up of twenty-eight countries which have fought

against each other, conquered each other and separated from each other over the
centuries. This reality cannot be erased; it should, however, make people reflect and
set up at least a European research institute on nationalism in the member nations,
to study the paranoid nationalist falsehoods spread by the mass media, as Zweig
and Rolland did in isolation almost a century ago. It is a moral task that must be
approached without illusions; bodies of this kind do not guarantee popularity; on
the contrary, they meet with resistance. They would not cost much, however, and
they would form the basis for an indispensable educational function, if Europe is
not to be simply a set of economic agreements and bureaucratic institutions.
Poems and anthems

Among the poems traditionally included in German schoolbooks was Aufruf, by
Theodor Körner, a nationalist poet who was quoted by Goebbels in his speech on
‘total war’:
Frisch auf, mein Volk! Die Flammenzeichen rauchen.

Du sollst den Stahl in Feindes Herzen tauchen.
[…]
Der Hütte Schutt verflucht die Räuberbrut,
Die Schande deiner Töchter schreit um Rache,
Die Meuchelmord der Söhne schreit nach Blut.67
A number of school textbooks still publish this poem today in Germany, but for-
tunately only as a warning, as an example of a process that led from over-sentimental
Romanticism to Nazism, without people’s feet ever meeting a horizontal plane
on which they can stand securely. This transformation has made it possible for a
German composition to be chosen as the European hymn: Schiller’s Ode to Joy, set
to music by Beethoven.
The countries of the Union still have their national anthems. But if most of
them derive from wars fought between the same nations, and exalt those wars,
are these anthems compatible with a European Union? A journey through the
European national anthems is a virtual tour that teaches us more about Europe than
many trips with the best guidebooks in our pocket.68 The smaller countries praise
their skies and rolling hills (the Vatican does not have even those). The larger ones
glower fiercely. The refrain of ‘The Marseillaise’, which should be moving not only
for the French, since a modern concept of the state and of liberty is disseminated
throughout Europe to its melody, says even today, Qu’un sang impur / Abreuve
nos sillons!’69 This anthem is the threshold of democracy. But isn’t the notion of
impure blood the doorway into racism? The text continues as follows, in Körnerian
fashion: ‘Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras / Égorger vos fils et vos compagnes!’70
The tradition of national anthems is European. Until recent times, it was
unknown to the countries of other continents (except perhaps Japan, which gave
310
itself a European modernization), so that they have had to fall into line hurriedly,
because they risked being passed over in silence at the Olympics. These countries
have learned nationalism from the West. Paranoia exists potentially in all peoples
precisely because they are human; but it is the West which, by linking it to various
‘cultural’ expressions and sending it everywhere on the budget flight of democratic
debate and the mass media, transforms it into a coherent unit.The anthems do their
best to concentrate all this fury into a few verses.
Monuments
Most of the sculptures that adorn public squares, even in countries with artistic
traditions such as Italy, could disappear without the history of sculpture even
noticing. Sculpture has undisputed primacy over the other arts, and certainly over
painting, as was acknowledged by Michelangelo, who practised both. Like psy-
choanalysis among the disciplines of the mind, so sculpture among the figurative
arts possesses depth, the third dimension. But surprisingly, this is lacking in monu-
ments; especially in a country like Italy, where nationalism and Fascism made
them act, along with a plethora of unspontaneous publications, as ‘partly mass’
means of communication, before the rise of the real mass media.71 Monuments,
particularly those dedicated to military events, and most of all those devoted to
the fallen, are a kitschy statement of the obvious. Forgetful of their original raison
d’être (‘monument’, from the Latin monere, to warn of the vacuity of earthly pas-
sions), they command paranoid projections of evil on to the enemy, even when
they do not name him.
They feed on the same infantile, criminal enthusiasm that produced the wave of
heroic poems at the beginning of the Great War; and even if there were millions of
them, as there are of the poems, they too would remain aesthetic nonentities.
Nothing is sacred a priori except – in religions of the Book – the word. Some
statues are sculptures that betray the word ‘monument’ and at the same time illus-
trate ‘sacrifices’ that betray the meaning of the word ‘sacred’ (sacri-ficio from sacrum
facere, ‘to make sacred’).They recall a death which can never become sacred like that
of the Old or New Testaments, for the person who suffered it did not choose it, and
the person who witnessed it did not understand its meaning. It is death transformed
into an event which is not exemplary but useful, for it gives rise to a ‘collective
return’ with respect to another people; a supposed credit exploited ad infinitum
by the rulers. It is a subspecies, falsely historicized, of paranoid return. Unlike those
poems, of whose aesthetic one soon grows ashamed, but to conceal which it is suf-
ficient not to open certain books, the large objects are made of bronze or stone and
continue to inhabit the squares.
By contrast, the principal monument which the First World War deserves has
yet to be built. There is no memorial to the football match which, after exchang-
ing greetings, cigarettes and glasses, German and British troops played on the no
man’s land between the trenches at Christmas 1914.72 Fortunately, Europe and the
West are not completely foolish. The Second World War did not generate an orgy
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of monuments like the First, but, after almost a century, no one has yet found the
money to celebrate the most glorious match in the history of football.
The Federal Republic of Germany is particularly ‘lucky’. It has agreed to inherit
an unprecedented collective sense of guilt for unprecedented crimes. It expresses
itself in ‘depressive’ rather than triumphalistic monuments, a historical counter-
weight to the attitude of Nazism. The memorial in Berlin which commemo-
rates the genocide of the Jews in Europe (significantly situated at the intersection
between a street named after Ebert and another street named after Hannah Arendt)
is an immense construction inspired not by glory but by repentance. It evokes para-
noia, but in the opposite way to traditional monuments. It consists of big blocks of
cement, and the visitor, walking along the narrow spaces between them, sees only
strips of sky above him; soon he feels lost, alone, distraught. Persecuted, like the
victims of the dictatorship.
Other typical monuments with a ‘reverse’ function – inspiring shame rather than
self-satisfaction – are the Stolpersteine by the artist Günter Demnig: street paving
stones, measuring 10 centimetres square, financed not only by local councils but also
by ordinary citizens (for the first two years they were laid in streets on a private ini-
tiative, without any official permission), which have been placed in various German
cities to commemorate individual victims of Nazi persecution. Germany is also the
first country to erect monuments to its deserters, commemorating the soldiers who
had abandoned their Nazi uniform in the Second World War. Peoples, Adolf Hitler
had written, thinking of Versailles, are annihilated when as well as suffering military
defeat ‘they pay the price for their decadence, cowardice and lack of principle: in
short, for their unworthiness’.73 Like his other paranoid dogmas, this Hitlerian basic
assumption contains a certain amount of truth, but that truth is turned on its head.
Germany was presented with the bill for unworthiness on an unprecedented scale,
but it has created a new identity for itself in a way that is equally unprecedented.
Hitler presupposed that courage and character corresponded to the use of force
and war. The tenacity of the new culture that has generated these memorials has
manifested itself in their rejection of those things. Nationalism has received critical
revisions, particularly in the new relationship between France and Germany, which
has been made the foundation of Europe. As if to expiate the mass media’s responsi-
bility for the world wars, these two countries have created what is perhaps the only
anti-paranoid medium existing today: the bilingual television channel Arte, which
is, significantly, one of the finest television channels in the world.
Let me try to sum up what I have said. The communication of collective events
always carries a responsibility, whether it be for spreading the knowledge of con-
temporary ones (through the mass media, but also through simple rumours) or for
evoking past ones (through history books, but also by means of monuments, muse-
ums, etc.). As well as the informative message, it is also possible to communicate
paranoia (whether consciously or not makes little difference). The quality of life
that we will have in the future depends, perhaps even more than on technological
or economic progress, on the relationship between communication and paranoia.
Everyone wants to avoid the bacillus of the bubonic plague or of HIV. To defend
312
ourselves from that of paranoia the rule is a simple one: the communication of pres-
ent events and the commemoration of past ones should prompt people to reflect
on their own responsibilities, not on those of others. Even alluding to the respon-
sibilities of others without indicating a precise scapegoat is philo-paranoid. It can
impede communication even more than a direct attack: an aggressive criticism can
be answered; an allusion cannot, if it is imprecise and its target unclear.
One of the limitations that resulted in the radical impetus of the 1970s peter-
ing out was precisely the frequent recourse that was made to excessively vague and
therefore insufficiently adult allusions. One of the most famous media events was a
debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault shown in November 1971
on Dutch television. The French academic lost the debate, along with his temper,
when he started to argue that in Western society universities, and other institutions,
were manipulated by hidden powers, which he did not name, merely repeating: ‘on
sait’ (it is known). Who knows what was known, and when?
As well as the vacuous traditional monuments which occupy city squares as glo-
riously as cars do car parks, in my movements around the city I often pass an ‘alter-
native monument’ dedicated to two anti-Fascist students killed in spring 1975.74
The plaque would constitute one of the few dignified corrections to official modes
of commemoration if it did not itself include, immortalized in bronze, a generic,
violent allusion typical of those years: ‘Pagherete caro, pagherete tutto’ (You will
pay dearly, you will pay for everything). Who will pay for what, and why, is not stated;
the bas-relief expresses only hatred.
Open contradictions
It is impossible to argue with paranoia. In confronting paranoia we cannot rely on
logic, reasonableness, common sense. As its definition has shown, the arguments it
uses are in themselves logical steps; but they start from an erroneous premise which
has the power of a religious revelation and is therefore not susceptible of discus-
sion. Ideally one would undermine that dogmatic base but it is fixed in perpetuity.
By virtue of its original structure, paranoia is anti-psychology. Consequently, it is
anti-psychological to enter into negotiations on its own ground. But although it is
hopeless to negotiate with the individual clinical paranoiac, we have undertaken the
task of treating paranoia as potentially present in the minds of everyone. Collective
psychology is, among other things, the result of education. Education does not
change the incorrigible paranoiac, like Hitler or Stalin, but it can help to ensure that
a partly paranoid personality does not prevail in the average citizen.
As has been mentioned several times above, the media have a historical respon-
sibility here. The mass media, by bringing together enormous masses of listen-
ers, recreate what has been called the ‘virtual city square’: a misleading expression
because, in the city square, albeit at his own risk, the citizen could still reply. The
classical media work in one direction only: they sell – sell themselves – to the buyer,
listener or viewer but do not allow them to reply. Only time will tell if the Internet,
by making two-way communication possible, will really enable the majority of the
313
population to emerge from that minority condition to which television and the
press have tended to consign it.
It is very difficult to create Praxiteles’ Aphrodite or Botticelli’s Venus, whereas it
is very easy to sell sexualized images of the female body; the former were displayed
in public – there really was a city square; the latter are for private consumption, and
therefore constitute ‘pornography’, even when they have names such as ‘illustrated
news’ or ‘television variety show’.75 In the same way, it is hard to provide real news
about international finance or national politics; any simplification which takes a
paranoid short-cut is more saleable. Instead of stimulating the inner area where
sexual desire resides (the instinct of moving closer), the mass medium stimulates the
public in the recesses of mistrust (the instinct of moving away). What he sells could
fairly be called porno-paranoia.
Some examples of everyday paranoia

The twenty-first century has brought China to the attention even of news media
that cover few international issues. Given the speed of its development, China
should become the leading power in the world not by the end of the century but
in its early decades. It will be the foremost power from the economic point of view,
and part of its wealth will be spent on bringing its institutions, including its armed
forces, up to a corresponding level. In a sense, few complex problems are as clear
as this.
And yet the populist or simply mass media do not treat it like this. Headlines
rarely mention Chinese development. They are far more likely to cite ‘the Chinese
unknown’, ‘the Chinese danger’, ‘the Chinese threat’, ‘overwhelming Chinese superior-
ity’. That is the first step towards paranoid simplification. For a West that sees the
free market as one of its foundations, there should be nothing more normal than
a country trying to win economic battles. Historically, cases of Western domina-
tion in the world – Spanish, French, British, American – are relatively recent and
short-lived novelties, initially exported with warships. Unlike these cases, Chinese
primacy in the world is being established chiefly in trade, and it will be simply a
return to the past: for centuries, during our Middle Ages and the beginning of the
modern era, China was the foremost country in the world, not only in popula-
tion but also in the economic and cultural sense. None of our nations was crushed
by this predominance; unlike Western countries, in the fifteenth century China,
though still possessed of overwhelming maritime superiority, did not export it in
order to colonize other continents.
In summer 2005, an attack by Islamic extremists hit London. The press and tele-
vision discussed it at length, because the attacks were felt to be an indication of the
vulnerability of urban centres throughout the West. The ensuing debate, however,
focused on the need for tighter controls on immigration, especially from Islamic
countries, and for controlling the activities of extremist minorities in Europe.
The media carried other news too, which did not give rise to so much discussion,
but would have merited it. In the first place, the attackers were second-generation
314
immigrants – British citizens born in Britain, their parents being Pakistanis who
had moved to Great Britain decades earlier. Controls on immigration, therefore,
would have been more useful back then. In the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury, however, the main priority was economic development, fostered by the cheap
labour provided by immigrants. (In prosperous Switzerland, which had a particu-
larly high percentage of immigrants, Max Frisch had prophesied the future para-
noia: ‘How unfortunate we are!’ he had commented ironically. ‘We asked for labour,
and we got people!’)
Second, because of those attacks we discovered that Great Britain has controls
not only on immigration but also on everyday life; already in July 2005 every inhab-
itant of London was filmed on average 300 times a day by CCTV. The installation
of CCTV was already spreading rapidly, but because of the new security prob-
lems the authorities decided to speed it up even further. Thus the country often
admired as a paradigm of civil liberties was rushing with astonishing speed towards
Bentham’s Panopticon or Orwell’s Big Brother.There was a constitutional state, but
experiments were being made in the direction of the ‘paranoid state’. The attacks
had been exceptionally violent but were not in themselves a novelty. In order to
announce the absolute novelty – blanket video surveillance – the media needed the
relative one: the attacks.
In confirmation of this extension of surveillance, other technologies have
extended the surveillance of every citizen to an extent unimaginable for the citi-
zens themselves. Investigating the question of privacy, a leader of the German Green
Party asked Deutsche Telekom which data from his mobile phone were kept in its
archive. After an appeal to the law courts, the young politician eventually discovered
that in six months Deutsche Telekom had identified and recorded his exact position
35,831 times.76
Indifference and Europe
Dictatorships seem to descend from above. That is how most Third World tyran-
nies appear in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. But
what we have been considering is the synergy between political crime that descends
from above and the fanaticism that corresponds to it below.When this circuit closes,
crime spreads on all levels of society. It makes it, in every sense, totalitarian. What
distinguishes this kind of society is not a political orientation, as is shown by the fact
that it may manifest itself in either ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ dictatorships. Even the
Western democracies, as we have seen, do not possess absolute cultural antibodies
for these infections, which can arise in any psyche. What defends them today from
the risk of dictatorship seems to be, rather, a ‘business dictatorship’.The economy is
so central to European and American life that few people want to be disturbed in
their business dealings, so they make themselves impervious to collective emotions.
The European Union is a phase without precedent in history; never before
has there been such an anti-heroic, reasonable construction, based on the primacy
of the economy. The European Union, however, precisely because it is so secular
315
and peaceable, has begun to encounter growing opposition both on the far right
and on the far left. These opponents feel, and to a considerable extent are, more
dignified than the pro-Europeans, because they do not, at least theoretically, place
the shopping list at the top of their priorities. At the same time, Europe’s adversar-
ies had nothing much to offer apart from an unconscious modern version of the
Ribbentrop–Molotov pact: an alliance between opposite political extremes, whose
aim is to prevent the first real international structure and, we might almost say, the
first anti-paranoid epoch that there has ever been in Europe. In their simple, emo-
tive, mistrustful arguments, the anti-Europeans show the symptoms of nostalgia for
total conflicts.
How unheroic Europe is! How lacking in values! Aesthetically irritating, like
a slightly overweight diner who lingers at the table, burping softly, after all the
dishes have been served.This irritation, an understandable and common feeling, was
already widespread in summer 1914. We are indebted to various historical events –
not least two world wars – and the general diffusion of this satiety if such irritation
with Brussels does not succeed in channelling itself, as in July and August 1914,
towards a city square full of flowers, flags and fanfares.
Since people cannot always be sitting watching a screen and need to remember
what it was like to live in society and in history, attempts are made to bring art
and the theatre back into public squares, and ancient battles (preferably violent and
bloody ones) are faithfully re-enacted in fields.The centenary of the First World War,
too, should be not only an occasion for academic conferences and blood-curdling
re-enactments but an opportunity to understand the latest consequences of enthusiasms
that are felt to be life-giving. For the flower-filled squares of summer 1914 were the
prelude to Auschwitz, and those poignant round-dances, in which nobody seemed
evil, were dress rehearsals for acquiescence in genocide.
Notes
1 Jung 1916: 283.
2 Arendt 1951: 96.
3 Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Lecture, 2006. Available at https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_
prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (accessed 14 December 2016).
4 Levi 1976a.
5 It is well summarized in Hochschild 2011. In reality, as some reviewers, such as Motion
2011, have pointed out, Great Britain was not divided; only isolated individuals opposed
the war.
6 Roth 2003: 27.
8 See Eco 2005.
9 See www.obeygiant.com.
10 See Del Boca 2005.
11 See Timerman 1981: 65–6; Mántaras 2005: Chapters 7–9. Definitions of who consti-
tuted an ‘opponent’ to be eliminated were fairly loose, with the result that the people in
charge of applying them could to some extent interpret them in such as way as to direct
them against personal enemies.
316
13 See Geyer 2004.
14 As was mentioned in Chapter 10, a regression to collective paranoia against the enemy
was achieved by the regime in the final phases of the Second World War. See Zoja
2010: Chapter 4.
15 See Mentzos 1993: 62–8.
16 See Milgram 1963 and 1974.
17 See Milgram 1974: Chapter 3.
18 See Fogelman 1994. The subject is dealt with in Chapter 5, ‘The Rescuer Self ’.
19 See Snyder 2010.
20 See Hilberg 1961–85: I, Chapter 7.
21 See Browning 1992: Chapter 2.
23 See Browning 1992: Chapter 3; Hilberg 1961–85: I, 357–8.
25 See Klee et al. 1988: 73, 78 and 86.
26 See Hilberg 1961–85: I, Chapter 7, and II, Chapter 10; see also Document 62, in Hofer
1957; Brunetau 2004: appendices (especially Himmler’s speech of 6 October 1943);
Junge 2002.
28 See Lifton 1973: Chapter 2.
29 Compare the epigraph from Orhan Pamuk at the beginning of this chapter. (‘Acceptance
Speech to the Nobel Foundation’, 2006, available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_
prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (accessed 11 November 2016).
30 See Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 30–1.
31 See Benda 1927.
32 See Lifton and Mitchell 1995: 192.
33 See McNamara and VanDeMark 1995.
34 See Johnson 2000. In his warnings Johnson explicitly names Bin Laden.
35 See the classic, Štajner 1971. It should be noted that both Hitler and Stalin possessed
many books and were, in their way, learned people. The first is estimated to have had a
personal library of 16,000 volumes (see Ryback 2008), the latter one of at least 20,000.
36 Manuscript, The Leo Baeck Institute, New York, in Roth 2003: 105 (my italics).
37 See Roth 2003: 105.
38 See Arendt 1951: Part 1, Chapter 4. See also the epigraph from Arendt at the beginning
of this chapter.
39 See Zoja 2009b: Chapter 1.
40 One of the paradoxes of the Internet is the fact that it makes possible a huge increase in
human relations but at the cost of turning them into something devoid of emotion: a
group of friends ceases to be a group and no longer allows a circulation of friendship.
What is known as the ‘Dunbar number’, from the name of the anthropologist who anal-
ysed the problem, has been calculated: the normal human being is supposedly capable of
maintaining relations with 150 people. See Dunbar 2010. But Lévi-Strauss had already
pointed out that, according to anthropologists, in order to remain functional the simplest
human groups include from forty to 250 people; when they fall below that threshold
they disappear; when they rise above it they split up. See Lévi-Strauss 1983: Chapter 22.
41 See Ariès 1975.
42 See Browning 1992: 147 ff.
43 See Davies 2002: Table P 1.
44 See Davies 2002: Table 1.3.
45 See Beebe Tarantelli 1999.
46 Many commentators would later call this attitude ‘dietrologia’: an insistence on always
looking behind (dietro in Italian) events for some hidden agency.
47 See Wievorka 1988: Part 3: Chapter 4.
48 See Bocca 1985.
317
49 The documents of the Red Brigades and of other revolutionary organizations of those
years are published in Progretto Memoria 1996. For the communiqués on the Moro
kidnapping, see 1996: 111–29.
50 Brigata XXVIII Marzo 1980: 397.
51 Brigate Rosse 1978: 60.
52 Beebe Tarantelli 1999: 62.
53 As was pointed out in Chapter 2, some authors tend to use the concept of ‘ethnic cleans-
ing’ in a very general sense, referring to other forms of collective violence as subspecies
of it. See in particular Mann, Michael 2005. See also Naimark 1995 and 2010; Glover
1999; Nirenberg 1996; Levene and Roberts 1999; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Sémelin
2005; Bouda 2008; Gellately and Kiernan 2003; Bart,ov and Mack 2001; Bensoussan
2006; Kiernan 2007; Lifton and Markusen 1988; Chirot and McCauley 2006.
54 Chirot and McCauley 2006: 5.
55 ‘Who remembers the massacre of the Armenians today?’: see above, Chapter 8.
56 It should be noted that the important study by the Turkish historian Taner Akçam
appeared in 1999. But the author had already published research on the subject in
Germany, where he had taken refuge after being persecuted and imprisoned by the
Turkish authorities.
57 See Brandes et al. 2010: 223–4.
59 See Brandes et al. 2010: 126.
62 See the entry ‘Nettoyage ethnique’ (ethnic cleansing) in Kott and Michonneau 2006.
63 See Bendick 2004.
64 See Bendick 2004.
67 ‘Awake, my people! The beacons are smoking. / You must plunge steel into the enemy’s
heart. / […] / Your houses’ rubble curses the robber band, / Your daughters’ shame cries
out for revenge, / Your sons’ murder cries out for blood.’
68 See www.national-anthems.net.
69 ‘May impure blood / quench the thirst of the furrows in our fields.’
70 ‘They come to cut the throats of your sons / and companions in your arms.’
71 See Janz 2004.
72 See Weintraub 2002; Jürgs 2003.
73 Hitler 1925: 250.
74 The monument to Giannino Zibecchi and ClaudioVaralli in Piazza Santo Stefano, Milan.
75 See Zoja 2007.
76 See Cohen 2011; Biermann 2011.
318
IAGO’S WHISPER
Any true tragedy dramatizes the mortal proximity between good and evil.
But a tragic masterpiece does even more: it fuses them, shows them as unity.
Shakespeare confuses, to the point of making them inseparable, not only the
two principles, but the two central characters: Othello and Iago. Before it was
devalued by modernity, which has reduced it to a sign, a label, the symbol1 was
an object which would be broken so that one day its parts could be put back
together again. When two friends went their separate ways, they would break a
coin. Only someone who possessed the other half could be recognized as heir to
the bond in the future.
The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice (1604) is the story of Iago’s infection, seduc-
tion and possession of Othello. It is the story of the two halves of the world – good
and evil – searching for each other. A story of listening and of its power: that of
transmitting evil. A story of contamination through narrative, and so the inversion of
the salvific power of the word.
And certainly, without wishing to humiliate Othello (like Eliot, who considered
him fatuous, or Bloom, who described him as sexually impotent), it is the story of
Iago’s genius and triumph.
Iago immediately declares his envy for Cassio, who has been preferred to him as
the Moor’s lieutenant, and his jealousy of Othello, who may have seduced his wife,
Emilia.2 He does not know if this is true, but ‘will do as if for surety’.3 He hates
Othello, the Moor.4 Iago is a machine for the production of evil. He is the inflation
of evil. If at the end Iago is defeated, it is only because of a crisis of overproduc-
tion: his harvest is excessive and goes much further than the sowing.
And what about goodness? Can the drama exist without goodness? Goodness
appears but, as Martha Nussbaum would say, in order to act out its own tragic
fragility. Goodness, represented by Othello, does exist. But it exists in order to be
contaminated by evil, represented by Iago, so that Othello himself can break the
319
goodness personified by Desdemona with his own hands. Desdemona herself is a

fragile goodness, complementary to that extremely tenuous goodness expressed by
Othello. Desdemona, at the beginning a distinct character, fades into a pretext for
constructing the unity Othello–Iago. And the fusion of Othello–Iago into unity
occurs in the melting pot of evil, made incandescent by the flame of paranoia.
Seduction dominates the play. Seduction is not evil in itself. It is deep, total
identification, the apparent fusion of two souls into one, and reciprocal knowledge
in this depth.
When the story begins, we learn that, just as Dido had fallen in love with
Aeneas while listening to the story of his adventures, so Desdemona has already
been seduced by the tales of his adventures that Othello would tell to her father,
Brabantio.5 The listening and seduction are indirect. Odysseus, too, had narrated his
travels to King Alcinous; in narrating to him he had won his daughter, Nausicaa.
Such are the requirements of tragedy and epic which, being narration, deposit a
story in the love affairs; and, narrating a patriarchal world, convey it to the woman-
child through the ears of the fathers.
Desdemona, according to Girard, does not love Othello but a mimetic image
formed behind the door, from where she listened to him narrating to her father
Brabantio.6 But what does ‘not loving’ mean? Is it possible to love a person without
becoming passionate about a symbol, an image, a story, without therefore betray-
ing, to some extent, the human being? In the play, this universal event is only more
explicit. Shakespeare wants to prepare the listener for a very simple fact: Desdemona
is capable of betraying, but without degrading herself. Soon afterwards, she will
betray her father to give herself to Othello. Desdemona will become an instrument,
but is introduced as a true tragic figure: absolutely capable of betrayal, and also
absolutely capable of faithfulness.
What does paranoia want in the tragedy of Othello? Paranoia wants to dominate
the stage, like the Furies, who represented this madness in the Aeneid. Like every
true madness, it wants to be unique. It will invade the stage and fuse the two people
Othello–Iago into unity. It has been pointed out that Verdi too, at the end of his
Otello, expresses this mental confusion through sounds, as if he were trying to make
paranoia the protagonist of a music.
But why does the ‘madness in a hurry’ move forward so slowly? Why does para-
noia announce itself at the beginning but triumph only at the end? The evil genius
stands tall in the play, but only against the immense infantry of naivety, which
seems to reign both in the opening scenes in Venice and in the subsequent ones
on Cyprus. Seemingly, Iago allows himself infinite patience, for the true paranoiac
already possesses an eternal truth and therefore lives outside time. He must calculate.
At the height of falsehood, he even grants himself the pleasure of making a eulogy
of patience.7
Iago begins to instil in Othello doubt about Desdemona’s fidelity. But in order
to instil it more effectively, he has to throw out provocations, then withdraw them,
almost apologizing; it is the eternal difference between vulgar advertising and the
seductive variety. He has to take one step forward, one to the side, one backwards;
320
320 Iago’s whisper
like every true seducer, Iago does not walk, he dances. He cannot go straight to his
goal because the goal is complex, indeed contorted.
He would never be satisfied with the death of Othello. He must first slaughter
Desdemona’s respectability, then that of the Moor; he wants to taste the humiliation
and the civil death of husband and wife. Only then will the moment come of physi-
cal death, which – so his perfectionism in evil wishes – Othello will consciously
give to her, and she will consciously receive as a wedding gift from him. Iago will
not dye his hands blood red, something fit for journeymen of evil; he is committed
to colouring his conscience completely black.
As we have seen with the historical geniuses of paranoia, obsessive, perfec-
tionist, slow, ultra-cautious planning can coexist with haste. The paranoiac’s
painstaking, sometimes even painfully slow progress is never patience, never wis-
dom; it is restrained haste. As soon as that haste comes to a free side route, it spurts
out, with such pressure that its jet becomes a blade and can kill. Iago is seething
with haste. When he confesses to himself – or to the naive Roderigo – his plans
of hatred, Shakespeare’s elegant rhymed verse breaks up, twists in a frenzied
rhythm, in drumming, unrelenting prose, animated by the need to enter a mind
and fix something inside it. In a flash, Iago passes from the musical instrument
to the hammer.
We know it already. Iago is modern. His values are communicating and persuad-
ing; they are not the content of communication and persuasion, but their power.
Though so modern, Iago is also adaptable to any age; he could equally well be
a protagonist of modern fashion weeks or a character in Aeschylus who prefers
appearance to essence.8 ‘Men’, says Iago, ‘should be what they seem.’9
What does this allusion mean? Is it a eulogy of honesty or of falsehood? Does
the allusion bring us closer to truth, or push us further away? Everything is relative.
As Othello listens to Iago, everything becomes more uncertain for him. As he listens
to him, men are no longer what they seem. They are something different. They are
not necessarily worse, but they are inevitably false.
The Moor, the solid soldier, not accustomed to dancing, not accustomed to leap-
ing – perhaps not even to walking, but only to marching – discovers to his dismay
that on either side of every path there is the immensity of the earth. For the first
time in his life he takes a step sideways: not onto quicksands but only onto the grass
that frames the path. ‘I prithee speak to me as to thy thinkings’, he says to Iago. And
Iago, who has always inhabited the byways, replies, ‘Good my lord, […] I am not
bound to that all slaves are free to. […] I confess it is my nature’s plague / To spy
into abuses, and oft my jealousy / Shapes faults that are not.’10
There it is: the negative route. Leaving the main path, we meet not new acquain-
tances but new doubts; the path of suspicion goes in every direction, turns into a
network of highways. The next steps are those towards jealousy, envy, voyeurism,
Schadenfreude, the projection of evil. It is the road towards modernity. The human
being is more alone, less capable of affection. This does not mean that his need for
others dies; but with the death of warmth and pity, with the death of the positive
road of communication, he seeks them in the only way left to him, via the negative
321
road. He seeks them in suspicion, in the persecutory interpretation of what others

do, and, if that is not enough, in hatred.
‘O beware, my lord, of jealousy.’11 With these words, Iago has inoculated Othello
with that quality which he has just admitted to having himself: jealousy. The infec-
tion has been transmitted, the differences dissolve into unity. Paranoia is squeez-
ing the two personalities into one. There is, it suggests, only one real solution to
jealousy: knowing that you have been betrayed, and that you don’t love the person
who betrays. Converted by a cynical, secular revelation, Othello feels the medieval
pavement crumble beneath his feet.
Treading the new path, the Moor himself walks on too hastily. Doubt has slipped
into suspicion, and suspicion immediately into certainty. Othello sums up the situ-
ation very well: to be once in doubt is to leap into a new knowledge, a new faith.12
It is a new, paradoxical certainty. Iago has infected him with the paranoid style, with
paranoid rigidity and with paranoid haste. But he has not communicated to him his
peerless handling of paranoia: ‘Leave it to time’, the genius of insinuation exhorts
him, knowing full well that Othello will do the exact opposite.13
Othello runs wild. And here, on the one hand, Iago triumphs completely, but
on the other he begins to lose control of his victim. Othello wants proof. If there
is proof, he will kill the betrayer; if there is none, he will kill the slanderer. But
Iago rebels against this simplification, with which Othello tries desperately to make
people definable again, so that they are what they seem, good or wicked. Since he
is insinuating, he wants Othello to stay insinuated: permanently contaminated by
his doubts.
Iago resorts to the blackmail of honesty: Othello has begged him to be hon-
est: does he now hold that honesty against him, who has pronounced it? Then
‘to be direct and honest is not safe!’14 The new man no longer has any certainties.
Not even negative ones: Iago does not promise Othello the proof of Desdemona’s
unfaithfulness that he asked for, but only ‘strong circumstances’.15
The new man into whom the Moor, sprinkled with Iago’s words, is transformed,
wants to know new truths; or, simply, to know completely what he had formerly
accepted as dogma. But, like Oedipus, when he has learned the most intimate truths,
he plunges into anguish, cannot bear the sight of them, puts out his own eyes.
Being direct and honest is not safe. It is safer to creep in suspicion. Reasoning in
this way, Iago tries to buy Othello’s loyalty again.The price paid by the Moor is the
transformation of his old, limited but clear virtue into a fatuous modern neurosis.
Like Ajax, Othello had from the outset appeared too straightforward, incapable
of relationships, monopolized by the soldier’s artless virtue; but brave and loyal.
The infallible prompter teaches him that the lack of relationship is not difficulty,
but necessity: you, Othello, are right not to trust your wife, who is certainly – even
though the proof is not visible – being unfaithful to you. But for my part I, Iago,
must not trust you either, for when I tell you this secret, you threaten me, too, with
your anger. ‘It is not safe!’ ‘From hence’, he adds, ‘I’ll have no friend.’16
Rejecting certainties, opening the gates not only of curiosity but also of per-
manent doubt, the new man has entered an inverted Eden where he is gnawed by
322
an obsession with safety. Iago is this man. Othello has no alternatives: he must bury
his pre-modern identity and enter the garden of doubt with him, once and for all.
Accident, illness, even misfortune, are soon to be expelled from the range of possible
destinies, to be considered injustices committed, to our detriment, by others, by our
non-friends: they are now plots.The world changes. One must be practical. On the
coats of arms of the new world, Othello recalls, hearts are replaced by hands. Once
it was the heart that extended its hand; now the hand controls the heart: ‘The hearts
of old gave hands; / But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.’17
The modern reader, too, flees from the symbol that was in Shakespeare’s heart
and is seized by this reductionistic infection. A leading critic agonizes over Othello
and Desdemona’s coitus.18 Did it happen or didn’t it? But isn’t a modern reader
(or spectator, if he sees Othello in the theatre) like Bloom a victim of Othello’s
infection himself? Hasn’t he allowed his observant gaze to be contaminated by the
perversion he is observing? Hasn’t he fallen into the trap of obsessive interpreta-
tion which imprisons the mentality – now no longer two mentalities but one – of
Othello and Iago?
Even if the tragedy had established that a sex act did take place, it would not
reveal it on the stage: not out of puritanism, but because it would be reduced from
the status of symbol – total meaning – to a single meaning. Amorous passion is a
symbol of the quest for a totality, which may indeed be centred on the sex act but
is certainly not limited to that. Amorous passion, here distorted into jealous pas-
sion, seeks the sex act but expands irrespective of it. Just as the gods ordained the
passion of Paris and Helen so that the Trojan War could take place, and the Trojan
War so that its story could be told,19 so Shakespeare – or, simply, the spirit of trag-
edy – ordained the passion of Othello and Desdemona so that it could overflow
into jealousy, and jealousy into tragic death whose story could be told. Paranoia is
also nostalgia for total symbols and their inexpressibility. But, unaware of being so,
it reduces them to rigid explanations. Both Othello and Harold Bloom have been
infected by it.
Towards the end of the play it becomes clear that suspicion is a movement
directly contrary to individuality: it is total tragedy which chains people into a
group. Suspicion is felt to be personal, indeed solitary. But it makes people col-
lective. No character lives his life directly any more. Roderigo would like to win
Desdemona, but pleads tearfully with Iago to intercede for him. Cassio wants to
regain Othello’s respect, but does not dare approach him and request’s Desdemona’s
intercession. And Iago needs Othello as Achilles needs Hector. It is not enough for
him to kill his rival; he must triumph over his corpse.
Iago inaugurates war on the man of obsolete faiths, whom the modern man of
suspicion must defeat utterly. No one will be able to exist here and now any more;
the person least capable of doing so is Othello himself, who, consumed by haste,
rushes from the present towards a future which he both fears and desires, for he
is convinced that it will confirm his suspicions. And Othello exists only in so far
as he is observed by others, who – now he is paranoically sure – look upon him
with scorn.20
323
In this all-out duel between initially opposite personalities, which is in reality

a war on the rejected part of ourselves, the ancient seed of Cain, whose tallest oak
is total war, blooms again. Mistrust will win because it desires the easiest thing –
the death of the adversary – in the easiest way: by accepting suspicion, instead of
accepting that people are what they seem. In this frenzy of masculine aggression,
the feminine is a concession to aesthetics, to enable us to digest the indigestible.
The honest but cynical Emilia and the delicate but determined Desdemona are
not essential. Desdemona exists mainly as a function: as an object in the discourse
between Iago and Othello. The only moment when she ceases to be uncondition-
ally open-minded and becomes real and human comes too late. ‘Kill me tomorrow;
let me live tonight’, she begs.21 But Othello is no longer capable of waiting. The
only thing that preoccupies him is pursuing obsessively what he believes are rules,
whereas in fact they are metallic steps of paranoia. Desdemona must be killed. But
there is in Othello a pre-modern presupposition which has not been eliminated: in
order that neither she nor her murderer be contaminated, his bride must be killed
after she has prayed.22
The Othello–Iago unity is the only real subject and has acted out its real
theme: the triumph of paranoia. This, in turn, is not only fiction, it is also history.
In this Venice and Cyprus, part historical and part fabulous, we again meet the
Black Legend again, one of the most paranoid prejudices we have met in these
pages. Even for the great Shakespeare, the English preconception of the age held
good: evil came from Spain. The hero of wickedness could not be called, as would
have been logical in Venice, Giacomo, but the Spanish equivalent, Iago.23
Reader, now the curtain falls. Othello has killed himself in remorse. For his infa-
mous slanders, Iago has been arrested.We do not know what his fate will be.We do
not know if he will be killed, nor do we feel able to express a preference. It is not
our task to mete out justice; we have learned that it is too dangerous to have your
hands on a culprit and feel that justice is on your side.
We do have another and more difficult task. Within ourselves, we must keep
saying no to suspicion and allusion. For they are the real temptation, the only one
that is constantly reborn. It is the evil that runs through each of us and the whole
of history. For his part, he will keep tempting us, every day. For our part, we must
say no to Iago.
Notes
1 From the ancient Greek syn-ballein, ‘to throw together’, in the sense of depending on each
other in an essential manner.
2 See Shakespeare, Othello, I, 1.
3 Shakespeare, Othello, I, 3, 372.
4 Shakespeare, Othello, I, 1, 368.
6 See Girard 1990: Chapter 21.
7 See Shakespeare, Othello, II, 3, 335 ff.
8 See Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 788.
9 See Shakespeare, Othello, III, 3, 127.
324
10 Shakespeare, Othello, III, 3, 134–6 and 147–9.

11 Shakespeare, Othello, III, 3, 167.
12 Shakespeare, Othello, III, 3, 181–2.
18 See Bloom 1998: 457 ff.
19 See Homer, Odyssey,VIII, 579–80.
20 See Shakespeare, Othello, IV, 2, 52–4.
21 Shakespeare, Othello,V, 2, 81.
22 See Shakespeare, Othello,V, 2, 25–32.
23 See Burgess 1970: Chapter 17.
325
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340
INDEX
11 September 2001 attacks 34, 269, 274 259; Manhattan Project 246–7, 248, 252,
253–4, 255, 260; Nagasaki 252–3, 259; see
absurd consistency 16, 21, 53, 95, 103, 178, also nuclear weapons
198, 204, 290 atrocities 24–5, 29; First World War 110,
absurd disproportionality 19–20, 21 114, 116–17; Second World War 131–2,
Aeneid (Virgil) 44–5, 319 246; see also massacres
African Americans 60, 79 Aufruf (Körner) 309
Agamemnon 3, 6, 7, 8 Austria 31, 62, 94, 116, 129, 136–7, 145–6,
aggression 16, 24, 28, 49, 294, 298 150, 156; First World War 94, 95, 97,
air raids 227, 229; see also bombing raids 98–9, 100, 101, 104, 115
Ajax 1–3, 4–8, 32, 43, 268, 272 Austro-Hungarian Empire 93–4, 97–8, 105,
Algeria 60–1 124, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136–7, 145, 150;
allusion 15, 284, 312, 323 First World War 31, 99, 101, 108–9
American exceptionalism 75, 77 autotrophy 15, 19, 38, 95, 228, 237,
American propaganda 26 293–4
André the Giant 284 Aztec empire 51–2
animalization 26, 111, 200, 229, 240, 298
anti-Semitism 69, 144, 146, 149, 160; Battalion 101 massacre (1942) 290–1,
Dreyfus Affair 69–71, 292 292, 294
area bombing 232–3 Battisti, Cesare 109
Arendt, Hannah 38, 142, 196, 293 Beck, Ludwig 156–7, 163, 283
Argentina 286, 297 Bekhterev,Vladimir 193
armed groups 21, 31, 300, 301–2 Belgium 114–15, 129; First World War 96,
Armenian massacre (1915) 20, 25, 117, 257, 97, 103, 110, 113, 114; Second World War
303, 304 110, 164
armistice 32–3, 102, 116, 118, 128–9, 130, Bell, George 233
134, 135–6, 139 Benedict XV 117–18, 279
arms race 95, 246, 255, 307 Bentham, Jeremy 57
Aryans 67, 68, 136, 177, 235, 273 Black Legend 74, 75
Athene 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 Bleuler, Eugen 10, 13
atomic bombs 33, 193, 253–4, 255–6, 257, Bloch, Marc 104–5, 110, 112, 113
260–1, 292, 303; Hiroshima 249, 250, Bohr, Niels 248, 260
341
Index 341
bombing raids 31, 227, 230–1, 303; civilian conspiracy 14, 35, 46–7, 134
population 227, 231, 232–3, 234, 235, conspiracy theories 31, 32, 46–7
303; First World War 117; Hiroshima 249, constitutional states 58, 60, 228
250, 259; Nagasaki 252–3, 259; Second contamination 15, 66, 82, 136, 148, 150
World War 231–4, 235–7 Creon syndrome 17, 97, 102, 149, 155, 218,
borders, European 124, 125, 131, 135, 161 282, 305
Brigate Rosse, Italy see Red Brigades criminals 57, 58
Browning, Christopher 290, 291, 292 Cuba 83–5
Brunetau, Bernard 198, 199 cultural movements 59, 62, 63
Bullitt, William C. 123, 124, 125, 126, Czechoslovakia 125, 131, 157–9, 161, 304,
127, 135 306, 308
Bullock, Alan 132 Czechs 131, 137, 138, 145, 147
Bush, George W. 87, 269, 270, 271, 273,
274, 275 danger prevention 22–3, 36
D’Annunzio, Gabriele 230
Cain 42–3 Declaration of Independence (United
Canetti, Elias 104, 249 States, 1776) 78, 79
Carney, Robert 241 delusion 10, 11, 14, 15, 26, 35, 45
carpet bombing see area bombing democratic institutions 45, 228
Carranza, Bartolomé de 51, 52 denial 216, 279, 304–5
childhood 12–13 deportations 28, 148, 306; Armenians 20,
China 65, 91, 242, 313 25, 303; Stalin 195, 197, 200, 207, 303,
Chomsky, Noam 312 306; see also ethnic cleansing
Churchill, Winston S. 104, 209, 231, 233 dictatorships 285–6, 314
civilian population 109, 212, 227; bombing disarmament 308
raids 227, 231, 232–3, 234, 235, 303 disasters 34
clash of civilizations 142, 273 disproportionality 14, 19
Clemenceau, Georges 127, 128 dogmas 18, 49, 67, 109
Cold War 30, 142, 267, 275, 280, 308 Dönitz, Admiral 227–8
collective aggression 28, 30, 200 doubts 17, 19, 54
collective consciousness 25, 30, 112, 138 Douhet, Giulio 229–30, 232, 234, 275
collective crimes 28–30, 160, 257 Dreyfus Affair 69–71, 292
collective expulsion 28–9, 30, 306 Dzhugashvili, Iosif Vissarionovich see
collective paranoia 19–28, 32, 34–8, 228, Stalin, Joseph
279–83, 291, 303, 304; collective crimes
28–30, 160, 257; rumours 33–4, 35 Ebert, Friedrich 140
collective unconscious 25, 46, 67, 69, 97, Einstein, Albert 246, 248
112, 292 encirclement 14, 20, 84, 131; First World
colonization 47–9, 60–1, 65, 67, 69, 73–4, War 25, 95, 96, 98, 113, 303; Second
298; Spanish Conquista 48, 49, 50, 51, World War 163, 165, 170, 242, 243
52–4, 55, 74, 75; United States 75–6, 77 Engels, Friedrich 76, 82, 286
Columbus, Christopher 47–9 Enlightenment 34, 57, 58, 59, 78, 296, 297
comedy 4 enthusiasms 105, 282, 283, 315
communicative perspective 34–5 Erinyes 44, 45
communism 65, 285, 296–7 Erzberger, Matthias 140
communist regimes 26, 29, 286, 297–8, 308 ethical perspective 35
Conant, James Bryant 255 ethnic cleansing 28, 30, 33, 47, 212,
concentration camps 83, 233, 240, 257; see 303, 306
also extermination camps ethnic riot 28, 30
Confession, A (Tolstoy, 1879) 15 eugenetics 25, 54, 66, 67, 68–9, 159
conflict 44, 47, 49, 61, 64, 65, 91–2, 298 Europe 24, 30, 73, 123, 276, 294, 297, 305,
Congo, Belgian 114–15 306; borders 124, 125, 131, 135, 161;
Conquest, Robert 195, 204, 219–20, 281 nationalism 58–9, 60, 63, 64; Second
conquistadors see Spanish Conquista World War 239, 240; war 91–2, 141
342
342 Index
European Union 309, 314–15 globalization 65, 137, 142, 280, 294,

extermination 25, 29, 38, 44, 67; of Jews 25, 295, 296
80, 142, 167, 168, 172–3, 174, 213, 303; Glover, Jonathan 29, 217, 236
see also massacres Goebbels, Joseph 20, 169–70, 174, 175, 194,
extermination camps 114, 132, 174, 196–7, 228, 234
257, 298 Göring, Hermann 152, 177
grandmother’s coffee pot 11–12, 14
Fairey, Shepard 284 Great Britain 74, 78, 108, 128, 165, 168,
fantasy substitutions 32, 48, 70, 71 227; bombing raids 231–3, 234, 235;
Fascism 166, 207, 214, 236, 282, 285 Czechoslovakia 158; First World War 94,
fascist states 26, 158 95, 102, 103, 104, 113, 127; immigrants
Fest, Joachim 138, 152 313–14; Poland 161, 162; Second World
final solution 25, 172–3, 174 War 164, 165, 170, 175
Finland 186 group paranoia see collective paranoia
first casualty 92, 93 Guernica 230
First World War 31, 91, 92, 95–103, 104–9, guilt 12, 15, 22, 24, 46, 67
110–19, 142, 279, 308, 315; Armenian gulags, Soviet Union 190–1, 197, 203–4,
massacre 20, 25, 117, 257, 303; armistice 208, 213, 215
32–3, 102, 116, 118, 128–9, 130, 134,
135–6, 139; atrocities 110, 114, 116–17; Hachiya, Michihiko 249–50, 251–2,
encirclement 25, 95, 96, 98, 113, 303; 258, 261
Hitler 32–3, 104, 105, 211; mobilization Harris, Arthur 230, 234, 236
98, 99–100, 101, 105; peace negotiations hate 25–6
124, 125, 126, 127–8, 129–31, 134–5; Hector 2, 5, 6, 7, 322
propaganda 103, 105–6, 108, 110, 111, Herder, Johann Gottfried 62
112, 117; rumours 33, 110–14, 117 Herodotus 61
Foucault, Michel 57, 312 heroism 286, 287–8
Fourteen Points (Wilson, 1918) 124, 126, Hess, Rudolf 21, 209, 210
127, 129, 135 Hindenburg, Paul Ludwig von 139
France 45, 58, 127, 128, 276, 292, 311; Hiroshima, Japan 248–51, 259, 292
Czechoslovakia 158; Dreyfus Affair Hitler, Adolf 37–8, 131, 142, 144–5, 151–6,
69–71, 292; First World War 94, 95, 96, 159–65, 169–70, 171, 174, 175–6, 177–8,
102, 103, 104, 113, 308; Poland 161, 162; 282–3; anti-Semitism 144, 160; bombing
Second World War 162–3, 164 raids 231; contamination 15, 136, 148,
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 31, 93–4, 151 150; Czechoslovakia 157–9; eugenetics
Freud, Sigmund 10–11, 28, 105, 123, 124, 68–9, 159; final solution 173, 174;
125, 126, 127, 135, 278 First World War 32–3, 104, 105, 211;
Fromm, Erich 32 Hossbach Protocol 153–5; Jews 142, 144,
Furies 44, 45 146, 148, 149, 150, 160, 172, 178, 273,
303, 306; massacres 21, 160, 195, 306;
Gabbard, Glen O. 38 Mein Kampf 15, 32–3, 69, 140, 146–7,
Galton, Francis 66, 68 148, 149–51; Nero Decree 177, 216;
genocide 29, 30, 73–4, 75, 76, 91, 116–17, Operation Barbarossa 166, 167, 168–9,
160, 298, 303; see also extermination; 170, 208, 209; Poland 20, 125, 161–2,
massacres 207; racism 80, 138, 150, 166, 168, 175;
Germany 99, 106, 116, 129, 135, 227, social Darwinism 146, 159, 161, 164, 177,
292, 305, 311; armed groups 31–2; 178, 218; Soviet Union 162, 166
conspiracy 134, 139, 140; eugenetics Hobsbawm, Eric J. 195, 297
159; First World War 94–6, 98, 101–3, Homer 2, 3, 285
104, 110, 111–13, 114, 139, 287, 308; Hossbach Protocol (1937) 152–5
nationalism 58–9, 62, 136, 272; peace human mind 1–2, 295
negotiations 125, 129–30; rearmament human race 42, 59–60, 67–8, 283
154, 162; reparations 128–9; see also Hungary 129, 306
Hitler, Adolf; Nazi Germany Huntington, Samuel 273
34
Index 343
Iago 24, 318–23 Khrushchev, Nikita 202, 215, 216, 219

ideology 26, 199, 217, 285, 286, 300, 304; Klein, Melanie 12
rigid 285, 290 Klemperer,Victor 140–1, 235
Iliad (Homer) 7, 44, 93, 268 Kraus, Karl 94, 108, 109
immigrants 83, 145, 296, 302; Austria 145, Kroeber, Alfred L. 76
150; Germany 153; Great Britain 313–14; kulaki, Soviet Union 199–201
Spanish Conquista 48, 52, 75; United Kurras, Karl-Heinz 31–2
States 68, 77, 79, 80, 83, 273, 302
Incan empire 52 language 59–60, 62–3
inclined plane 16, 38, 58, 64–5, 299 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 50, 51, 74
India 35, 298 Latin America 48, 49–52, 65, 73–4, 80, 83
indigenous people 47, 48, 50–3, 55, 60, laughter 3–4
73–6; see also Native Americans Laurence, William L. 252–3
individual paranoia 9–11, 12–19, 22, 23, 27, legitimate defence 270–1, 272
30, 32, 36, 282, 304 Lemkin, Raphael 29, 198, 207
individual rights 58, 59 Lenin,Vladimir Ilyich 187–8, 189–90,
interbreeding 67–8, 80 204, 220
international law 47, 49, 51, 114, 162, 232, lies 18–19
234; legitimate defence 270–1, 272 Lifton, Robert Jay 24, 292
intolerance 69, 74, 138, 283 Lissauer, Ernst 105
inversion of causes 20, 25, 62, 198, 202, 204, Lloyd George, David 127, 128
246, 251 Lopez, Roderigo 214
Iraq 87, 230, 271, 272 Luxemburg 299–300; First World War 102,
Islamic terrorism 269–70, 274, 275 103; Second World War 163, 164, 176–7
ISM (imperialist state of
multinationals) 301–2 McCarthy, Joseph 37, 77, 267, 268
Israel 60, 77 McKinley, William: Cuba 83, 84;
Italy 9, 35, 128, 130, 163, 230, 300–1, 310; Philippines 86–7
bombing raids 235–6; First World War madness 11
109, 115, 116; peace negotiations 127, Maine (American cruiser) 30–1, 83,
130–1; Second World War 171, 300 84, 85, 87
Manhattan Project (United States) 246–7,
Jackson, Helen Hunt 76 248, 252, 253–4, 255, 260
Japan 26, 243, 251–2, 253, 257–9, 261; Marxism 150, 297
atomic bombs 246, 248, 250–1, 256; massacres 19–20, 21, 29, 33, 35, 46, 160,
China 242; Pacific War 31, 170, 171, 298, 304; Armenians 20, 25, 117, 257,
228, 239–41, 242, 243–6, 256, 259, 303; Battalion 101, 290–1, 292, 294; My
272; rumours 33, 240, 242; Tokyo Trials Lai 291–2; Nazi Germany 21, 160, 195,
31, 259 290–1, 292, 294, 298, 306; Soviet Union
Jews 3–4, 20, 25, 33, 46, 66, 69, 131–2, 273, 21, 195, 198–9, 207–8, 209, 219–20
306; Austria 137, 145–6; Battalion 101 mass destruction, weapons of 87, 271, 272
massacre 290–1, 292, 294; extermination mass media 19, 25, 27, 28, 34–5, 92–3, 98,
of 25, 80, 142, 167, 168, 172–3, 174, 283–4, 294, 311–13; armed groups 21,
213, 303; Hitler 142, 144, 146, 148, 149, 301; bombing raids 230–1; language
150, 160, 172, 178, 273, 303, 306; Nazi 62; Spanish-American War 84–5; war
Germany 25, 55, 168, 172–3, 200, 213, 107, 108
271, 303; scapegoats 46, 69, 70; Wannsee mass paranoia see collective paranoia
Conference 25, 170, 172–3 Mediterranean 306–7
Juno 44–5 Medvedev, Roy 191, 205, 220
megalomania 36, 266
Kazakhstan 202–3 Mein Kampf (Hitler, 1925) 15, 32–3, 69,
Kennedy, John F. 31, 268 140, 146–7, 148, 149–51
Keynes, John Maynard 125, 126, 128, 129, memorials 118–19, 311, 312
130, 135 mental disorders 11, 13, 17–18, 36–7, 38
34
344 Index
mental illnesses 13, 38, 57–8 obsessiveness 15, 16

Mexico 80, 81–2 Odysseus 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 77, 319
Milgram, Stanley 288, 289 Operation Barbarossa 166, 167, 168–9, 170,
Milgram experiment 288–90, 291, 208–9, 210–11
292, 294 Oppenheimer, Robert 193, 260–1
mistrust 22–3, 31, 36, 45, 67, 68, 75, oral disorders 37
77, 186 Orlando 127, 128, 130–1
mobilization, First World War 98, 99–100, O’Sullivan, John L. 81
101, 105 Othello 24, 300, 318–23
Moby Dick (Melville, 1851) 77, 78 Ottoman Empire 20, 25, 63, 117, 124, 131,
modernity 19, 279, 280, 295 135–6, 137, 303
Monk, Maria 83
Monroe doctrine 80, 86 Pacific War 31, 170, 171, 228, 239–46, 256,
Montesinos, Antonio 50, 51 257, 259, 272
monuments 310–11, 312 Pacts of London (1915) 116, 130
morale bombing see area bombing Pal, Radhabinod 31, 251, 259
Morgenthau, Henry 234 Palestine 60
Morse, Samuel F. B. 82–3 paranoia 2–5, 9–14, 16–18, 22, 26–8,
multinational empires 60, 105, 131, 136 37, 38, 266, 278–82, 307, 312;
Mussolini, Benito 130, 158, 163, 170, 230, see also collective paranoia; individual
236, 285, 300 paranoia
My Lai massacre,Vietnam 291–2 paranoiacs 7, 10, 11, 13–14, 18–19, 26,
36, 38, 54–5, 171–2, 281, 295–6;
Nagasaki, Japan 252–3, 259 characteristics 14–15, 16–17; successful
Napoleon Bonaparte 58 108, 168, 282
national anthems 309–10 paranoid attitudes 19, 36, 43, 46, 62, 65,
nationalism 25–6, 60–5, 106, 208, 228, 131, 268
296–7, 298, 299, 305; ethnic cleansing paranoid environment 30–2
303; Europe 58–9, 60, 63, 64; German paranoid fantasy 25, 163
58–9, 62, 136, 272; mass media 309; paranoid haste 16, 26, 46, 155, 231
racism 135, 136, 299; United States 74, paranoid impulse 22–3
76; war 60, 63, 302 paranoid interpretation 14–15, 17, 49,
nationalist conflicts 65, 91 115, 273
National Socialism, Germany see Nazism paranoid leaders 36, 38, 95, 245, 283
nations 58, 60, 62, 228, 299 paranoid return 27, 58, 64, 93, 128–9,
Native Americans 60, 68, 75–6, 79–80, 141, 285–6, 299, 300, 302
240, 274, 298 paranoid style 28, 34, 35, 42–3, 294
Nazi Germany 27, 68, 148, 154–5, 161, paranoid thought 2, 16–17, 36, 97, 136,
165, 174, 175, 287; bombing raids 232–3, 147–8, 299, 304; First World War 95,
234–5, 236; extermination camps 114, 111–12; Soviet Union 198, 204
132, 174, 196–7, 257, 298; Jews 25, 55, paranoid violence 22, 26, 208
168, 172–3, 200, 213, 271, 303; massacres pathological entities 37, 38
21, 160, 195, 290–1, 292, 294, 298, 306; peace 92–3, 98, 101, 107, 283, 300
Operation Barbarossa 166, 167, 168–9, peace negotiations, First World War
170, 208–9, 210–11; propaganda 20, 159, 124, 125, 126, 127–8, 129–31,
170, 188, 232, 281, 287; see also Germany; 134–5
Hitler, Adolf peace treaties 125, 135; see also Treaty of
Nazism 19, 20, 110, 128, 154, 218, 282, 285 Versailles
negative selection 20, 137 Pearl Harbor 31, 244, 245, 272
Nero Decree (Hitler, 1945) 177, 216 Perry, Matthew C. 243
newspaper war 84–5 persecution 14, 15, 29–30, 46, 48, 73,
Nicholas II, Tsar 17, 99–100, 102 77–8, 303
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 307–8 Philippines 85–7
nuclear weapons 255, 267, 307–8; see also philosophical perspective 34
atomic bombs Pindar 2, 3
345
Index 345
PNAC (Project for the New American rumours 32–4, 35; First World War 33,
Century) 269 110–14, 117; Second World War 33,
pogroms 24, 25, 28 147, 164, 240, 242
Poland 20, 124, 125, 131–2, 161–2, Russia 99, 298, 306; First World War 94,
207, 212 95, 96, 98, 99–100, 101, 102; see also
political perspective 34 Soviet Union
Prague, Austria 62, 137, 145
pre-emptive attack 15, 16, 19, 21, 49, 96, scapegoats 30, 52, 57, 61, 217–18, 294, 312;
97, 163; Strategy for National Security Jews 46, 69, 70; kulaki 200
270, 271 schizophrenia 36–7
prison system 57, 58 Schlieffen Plan 96, 100
projection 11, 24, 30, 43, 279 Schulenburg, Count von 210, 211
propaganda 22, 29, 93, 142, 146, 282, 298; scientific ideology 67
Black Legend 74; First World War 103, Second World War 109, 114, 142, 161–5,
105–6, 108, 110, 111, 112, 117; Italy 116; 168–78, 211–13, 303; atrocities 131–2,
Nazi Germany 20, 159, 170, 188, 232, 246; Battalion 101 massacre 290–1,
281, 287; Second World War 26, 232, 234, 292, 294; bombing raids 231–4, 235–7;
240; Soviet Union 187, 188–9, 199, 200, encirclement 163, 165, 170, 242, 243;
204, 206, 212, 219, 281 Operation Barbarossa 166, 167, 168–9,
Protestantism 43 170, 208–9, 210–11; Pacific War 31,
Protocols of the Elders of Sion, The 273 170, 171, 228, 239–46, 256, 257, 259,
pseudologia phantastica 156, 168, 219, 231 272; Poland 20, 125, 131–2, 161–2;
pseudospeciation 59–60, 148–9, 151, 200 propaganda 26, 232, 234, 240; rumours
psychiatric classification 37, 38 33, 147, 164, 240, 242
psychiatry 11, 12, 17, 24, 35–6, 37, 38, 57–8 secrecy 15, 16, 21
psychic infection 35, 59, 168, 228, 274–5, secularization 34
279, 280 selection 20, 66, 67
psychopathology 9, 29, 35, 37, 38, 272, 279, self-criticism 19, 25, 280
280, 282 self-deception 16–17, 18–19, 32
psychopaths 54, 281, 291 self-fulfilling prophecy 164, 166,
psychopathy 24–5, 280, 281 169, 273
Serbia 93–4, 99; First World War 97,
racism 25–6, 48, 65–6, 117, 137–8, 147–8, 98–9, 115
150–1, 297; Hitler 80, 138, 150, 166, 168, show trials, Soviet Union 55, 204–6,
175; nationalism 135, 136, 299 214, 217–18
rationality 14, 44, 46, 97, 172, 307 Siegfried, myth of 138–9
rearmament 94–5, 154, 162, 307 Singapore 245
reason 1, 11, 18–19, 26, 98 slander 18, 47, 55
Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse, Italy) 300, Sloterdijk, Peter 34–5
301, 302 social Darwinism 20, 25–6, 54, 66–7, 68,
religion, wars of 65, 138, 141 69, 76, 82, 297, 305; Hitler 146, 159,
reparations 128–9 161, 164, 177, 178, 218; Mussolini 163;
Requerimiento, Spanish Conquista Nazism 298
51, 53–4 socio-economic perspective 35
responsibility 12, 13, 18, 25, 35, 46, 61, Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr Isaevic 17, 29, 99,
281, 295 190–1, 197, 216
Richthofen, Wolfram von 230 Sophocles 2, 3, 4, 5
rights of man 58, 59 South America 286
rigid ideology 285, 290 Soviet Jews 213, 214
Rilke, Rainer Maria 107 Soviet Union 21, 168, 196, 201–7, 215–20,
Rolland, Romain 106–7, 201, 279, 309 268, 287, 306; Cold War 267, 275; gulags
Romania 129, 131 190–1, 197, 203–4, 208, 213, 215; kulaki
Romanticism 58, 59, 296, 297 199–201; massacres 21, 195, 198–9,
Rommel, Erwin 170, 174 207–8, 209, 219–20; Operation
Roth, Joseph 280, 293 Barbarossa 166, 167, 168, 169, 208–9,
346
346 Index
Soviet Union (cont.) Tokyo Trials (1946-8) 31, 259

210–11; Poland 132, 162, 207, 212; totalitarianism 142, 196, 284
propaganda 187, 188–9, 199, 200, 204, total war 24, 44, 108, 141, 174, 228,
206, 212, 219, 281; Second World War 229, 288
165, 175, 211–13; show trials 55, tragedy 2, 4, 6
204–6, 214, 217–18; Soviet Jews 213, Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice,
214; suspicion 175, 188–9, 216–17; The (Shakespeare, 1604) 24,
Ukraine 201, 202; see also Russia; 300, 318–23
Stalin, Joseph Treaty of Versailles (1919) 114, 129, 131,
Spain 47, 50–1, 74, 83–5, 86 134, 138, 139, 140, 161
Spanish-American War 84–6, 87, 88 Truman, Harry 118, 247–8, 253, 255,
Spanish Conquista 48, 49, 50, 51, 52–3, 55, 256, 259
73; Black Legend 74, 75; Requerimiento tyrants 142, 153, 196, 218, 285
51, 53–4
Speer, Albert 156, 177, 178 Ukraine 201, 202
Spencer, Herbert 65–6 United States 74, 78–81, 82–3, 128,
spies 113 141–2, 267–9, 274, 276; atomic bombs
Stalin, Joseph 20, 142, 183–8, 192–5, 246–7, 248, 252–3, 255–6, 258–9, 260–1;
196, 197–8, 203, 206–7, 213–14, 215, bombing raids 227, 232, 234; Cold War
216; deportations 195, 197, 200, 207, 267, 275; colonization 75–6, 77; Cuba
303, 306; Finland 186; gulags 190, 197, 83–5, 86; First World War 127, 139,
208; Jews 213, 214; kulaki 199, 200–1; 141, 233, 241; Hiroshima 249, 259, 292;
Lenin’s Testament 189; massacres 21, 195, immigrants 68, 77, 79, 80, 83, 273, 302;
198, 207–8, 209, 219–20; Operation Iraq 271, 272; Islamic terrorism 269–70;
Barbarossa 167, 169, 208, 209, 210–11; Japan 26, 170, 240, 241–2, 243, 256,
Poland 132, 162, 207; Second World War 257–9, 261, 272; Manhattan Project
174, 185; show trials 55, 205; suspicion 246–7, 248, 252, 253–4, 255, 260;
175, 186, 188–9; Ukraine 201, 202 Mexico 81–2; Nagasaki 252–3, 259;
Stalin,Yakov (son) 191 nationalism 74, 76; Native Americans
Stalina, Nadezhda (Nadya) Allilueva (wife) 60, 68, 75–6, 79–80, 141, 240, 274, 298;
191, 192 Pacific War 31, 170, 228, 239–43, 246,
stampede 27–8 256, 257, 272; Philippines 85–7; Second
Stannard, David E. 73 World War 31, 165, 170, 174, 233, 241;
Stimson, Henry L. 228, 247, 254, 255–6, Strategy for National Security 270–1,
257, 258–9 272, 273; war 141–2, 302
Stolpersteine (Demnig) 311 unknown soldier 118–19
Strategy for National Security of the
United States of America 270–1, Verdun, France 118
272, 273 victim justice 276–7
successful paranoiacs 108, 168, 282 Vienna, Austria 136–7, 145–6
surveillance 314 Vietnam War 268, 291–2
survival instinct 21, 22–3, 24 Virgil 44
survival of the fittest 22, 65–6
suspicion 3, 7, 14, 16, 19, 21–3, 92, 284, 323; Wannsee Conference 25, 33, 170,
Ajax 1, 5, 6; Soviet Union 175, 186, 172–3
216–17; see also conspiracy; rumours war 9, 44, 65, 91–3, 95, 107–8,
suspicious logic 273 283, 286–7, 300, 302–3; nationalism
syllogisms 31, 147, 149, 166, 230 60, 63, 302
symbolic processes, reversal of 7 war crimes 227–8
war poetry 108
terrorists 94, 271, 274, 275, 313–14 Weber, Max 129, 135
Testament, Lenin’s 189 Weil, Simone 27
Titulos primordiales, Spanish Conquista Weimar Republic, Germany 134, 139–40,
52–3 272, 287
347
Index 347
White Man’s Burden, The (Kipling, Yalta conference 212, 213

1899) 88–9
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 93, 99, 100, 102–3, 128 Zola, Émile 70, 71
Wilson,Woodrow 122–4, 125, 126, 127, 128, Zweig, Stefan 93, 97, 105, 106–7,
129, 130, 135, 233, 241 279, 309
348

Luigi Zoja, Jonathan Hunt (Translator) - Paranoia - The Madness That Makes History-Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group (2017)

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i

Luigi Zoja is an analytical psychologist in private practice in Milan who lectures

TRANSLATED BY JONATHAN HUNT

The madness of Ajax 1

1 What is paranoia? Individual (clinical) paranoia 9

2 The beginnings: myth and history 42

3 European nationalism: from cultural renaissance to paranoia 57

5 Darkness over Europe 91

6 Freud, Keynes and the bamboozled man 122

The stab in the back 138

8 The granite foundation and the hour of idiocy 144

9 The man of steel and the final product 183

Stalin’s death 215

10 Fire that feeds fire 227

11 Further and further west 239

12 A plan for the twenty-first century? 266

The appearance of the Islamic enemy 269

13 Inconclusive thoughts 278

Iago’s whisper 318

THE MADNESS OF AJAX

At the beginning of the play, the irreparable has already happened.

2 The madness of Ajax

The madness of Ajax 3

4 The madness of Ajax

The madness of Ajax 5

6 The madness of Ajax

The madness of Ajax 7

8 The madness of Ajax

The careful consideration of psychic factors is of importance in restoring not

1. a psychotic disorder characterized by systematized delusions, especially of per-

According to another classic treatise, that of Jaspers,

[The paranoiac’s] complete power of differentiation, severe criticism, and

French psychiatry uses similar terms: ‘This type of delusional personality is char-

[1] […] the misuse of a psychic mechanism which is very commonly

Each definition, deriving from very different schools of psychiatry, sends us

The ubiquity of paranoia

another characteristic of this disorder – autotrophy: once set in train, paranoia is

All the symptoms of paranoia have a relationship of reciprocal dependency and

Cultural and moral aspects

unchanged over time but seems to be a psychological response to difficult circum-

According to a well-known Italian saying, la menzogna ha le gambe corte: a lie

Collective (historico-cultural) paranoia

Paranoid infection in society

The origin of the paranoid impulse

Paranoia may be a continuation of an animal function in our mind. But in the

The present-day urban condition distorts the instincts

Paranoia may be mild but widespread

paranoia is concerned: in some particular historical circumstances, the paranoid

Paranoia and mass communication

The ‘normalization’ of paranoia occurs in two directions. While an incorrigible

from colonial Spanish: significantly, estampida originally referred only to a herd of

1. Collective aggression of a local nature, or at least geographically and ethnically

of information sometimes supplemented, sometimes contradicted each other. But

Modern premises for the spread of paranoia

The lack of interest in collective paranoia

Paranoid thinking is not in and of itself pathological. […] The paranoid-

It would be interesting to ask the victims of McCarthyism, who were as numer-

was strongly dependent on historico-cultural factors and developed in connection

67 See Horowitz 2001: Chapter 3.

The beginnings: myth and history 43

The enemy in the Aeneid

44 The beginnings: myth and history

The beginnings: myth and history 45