[ p. 22 ]
The symptoms of paranoia are well enough known today to be readily recognizable when they occur in individuals. But the condition is not limited to individuals. The same paranoid characteristics are sometimes exhibited by groups and, when fully established, warrant the same diagnosis. Correct diagnosis is even more important in a case of group paranoia, because the behavior of groups has greater social effects than the behavior of individuals. Paranoid groups, as we now are beginning to realize, can endanger not only the safety of their immediate neighbors but also the continued existence of civilization itself.
Though the concept is of recent origin, group paranoia is not a new or unusual condition. The “abnormality” of mobs has been known for many years to students of psychology, and history supplies numerous examples of groups and even of nations whose behavior over considerable periods of time has exhibited growing trends of a paranoid nature. The Ku Klux Klan was one such example in the history of our own country. Other more recent examples include the German American Bund, the Coughlinites, and the various “Front” organizations which [ p. 23 ] employed, and in some instances still employ, highsounding labels reeking with sham patriotism and mock piety to conceal their real purpose of gaining dictatorial power over the policies and destinies of our nation. But the clearest cases of group paranoia, in modern times at least, are the Axis countries, Germany and Japan. In the behavior of these two nations we see as through a magnifying glass all the major identifying characteristics of paranoia.
Case histories of individual paranoids usually reveal a slow, almost imperceptible, spreading of the disease over wider and wider areas of the patient’s personality. Though the causes of this spreading out are not clearly understood, it seems to be the cumulative product of the individual’s external experience interacting with certain abnormal elements of his original neuropsychic make-up.
In the case of groups, the paranoid condition seems to originate with, and radiate from, influential individuals who are either paranoid themselves or a source of paranoid attitudes and ideas of a highly “infectious” nature. Although any group of people is apt to include a few such persons, certain groups are more susceptible than others to paranoid influences, the reasons lying in their composition and collective experiences. As in individual paranoia, the treatment consists in expanding the “clear area,” which means building up the group’s resistance to infection by paranoid attitudes and ideas.
[ p. 24 ]
The time has come for the “doctors” of our body politic to recognize that nations as well as individuals can become paranoid. National paranoia exists when a nation behaves toward other nations the way paranoid individuals behave toward other individuals. For a nation to behave in a paranoid way it is not necessary that all the citizens, or even a preponderance of them, be paranoids. All that is necessary is that a majority of citizens be willing to support national policies that are paranoid. Such a nation may at first have no greater percentage of paranoid individuals than nonparanoid nations, but the willingness of its people to follow paranoid leadership is almost certain to produce a higher percentage as the years go by — unless something happens to alter the tendency.
Nations that are naturally egotistic, aggressive, and domineering succumb more readily than others to the intoxicating influence of paranoid thinking. Such an environment naturally follows the rise of paranoid individuals to positions of political and military leadership. This in turn reacts upon the whole national culture to bend it still further away from nonparanoid paths of development. Thus national paranoia engenders a vicious circle from which there can be but one avenue of escape. The circle must be broken by external force such as is now being applied by the United Nations to paranoid Germany and Japan.
[ p. 25 ]
National paranoia betrays itself in the same characteristics as individual paranoia. When we find in a nation the identical pattern of abnormal behavior that characterizes individual paranoids, we are justified in treating it as a paranoid nation. We are not only justified, we are obliged in our own self-defense so to treat it. To treat such a nation otherwise is to encourage it to become still more paranoid in its behavior.
As a psychiatrist I cannot contemplate the last 150 years of Germany’s history without being impressed by the unmistakable evidence of growing paranoid trends in its conduct toward other nations and races. Similar trends are observable in the last 100 years of Japanese history, though much complicated by racial and cultural differences. For generation after generation these two nations have consciously cultivated paranoid values and patterned their behavior more and more on paranoid lines.
No mere accident of history brings these two countries together as allies. Following parallel “paths to glory” as they have been doing for many decades, they were bound sooner or later in a shrinking world to make common cause against the nonparanoid nations.
Centering our attention upon Germany, we readily recognize all the paranoid characteristics identified in Chapter 2.
[ p. 26 ]
Suspicion. This characteristic has been one of the cornerstones of recent German policy. Upon it the Nazis have based their most effective propaganda. Hitler and his gangsters rose to power in Germany by whipping up fears and distrust among their own countrymen. Jews, communists, and democrats were repeatedly pilloried as objects of suspicion. Later, the Nazis whetted the nation’s appetite for war with trumped-up fears of their neighbors — Russia, France, Great Britain, and even little Czechoslovakia and Poland. They thundered so loudly and long about the dangers of “encirclement” and “Bolshevism” that they convinced even themselves.
So successful was their appeal to suspicion at home that they felt encouraged to use the same tactics with neighboring nations. By fanning the flames of mutual suspicion, the Nazis succeeded at Munich in dividing the western democracies from their natural allies, the Russians. After the outbreak of war they continued with decreasing success to foment distrust among their enemies. In this nefarious enterprise they largely failed, in spite of much assistance given them by disloyal malcontents in our own country and Great Britain. Suspicion proved to be one of the characteristics not generally shared by the democracies. Nevertheless, the Nazis continued to project their own suspicions upon other people and to assume that these other people were moved by the same irrational fears as they themselves.
[ p. 27 ]
This German trait also takes the form of self-reference. Again and again the German people have shown remarkable ingenuity in misinterpreting events in ways that lent seeming justification to their own evil designs. Thus they held themselves blameless for all the steps leading up to the war, including the annexation of Austria; the partition and seizure of Czechoslovakia; the attacks on Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands; and the invasion of Russia. To the Germans’ usual way of thinking, all the world is leagued in perpetual conspiracy against them.
The key principle of Nazi aggression appears to be : Put everything into the initial effort. Strike down your enemies and loot them. Strike them down one by one and rob them. As long as Hitler could go on doing this, the Nazis kept going — National Socialism thrived and waxed strong. But when there were no more nations to be looted, no more subject peoples to be exploited, the going began to get tough, and Himmler was called in to keep the German people in line.
Hitler has gone about this business cold-bloodedly. The Nazis have figured out that each country can be robbed of approximately what it formerly spent on its annual budget — its appropriation for both civil and military expenditures. This sum the Nazis assess as the cost of the armies of occupation. This is a form of reparations based on “capacity to pay [ p. 28 ] — and to pay at the point of a bayonet, with the victorious enemy forces on hand to collect.” This is a scheme of levying tribute which puts to shame the old technique of trying to collect after the war was over and the victors had gone home.
Egotism. A second paranoid characteristic of the German people is their inordinate conceit. Probably no other nation in history has had so high an opinion of its own superlative importance. “We are a conceited people,” said Bismarck. “We become irritable if we cannot be boasting, and we think highly of a government that makes us look important to the outside world.”
This attitude of boastfulness is unquestionably related to their late arrival on the stage of civilization and world politics. The Germans remained semibarbaric and disunited for centuries after the peoples of western Europe had achieved an advanced state of culture and of national unity. Thus throughout much of their past the German people have been plagued by feelings of inadequacy, and as in the case of many individuals afflicted with inferiority complexes, their rampant egotism is partly compensatory.
This paranoid trend has culminated in the infamous dogma of racial superiority. For more than a hundred years the Germans have been persuading themselves that they are a “chosen race” whose mission it is to rule the world. Their teachers and politicians have labored incessantly to convince the [ p. 29 ] people that they represent the highest moral and intellectual values of humanity, that they are the flower of European civilization. “The good God,” said Kaiser Wilhelm, “would not have given himself so much trouble over our German country if he had not reserved a great destiny for us. We are the salt of the earth. . . . God has made us for the civilizing of the world.” In the Kaiser’s day it was German Kultur that was to civilize the world. Under the Nazis only people of Aryan blood can hope to share in civilization. Thus has the German trend into paranoia grown from generation to generation.
Nevertheless, in spite of their boastful assertions of superiority and their disparagement of everything non-German, they crave the admiration of the whole world. This German trait has been well described by Lord Vansittart (Lessons of My Life, pp. 94-95) as “the passion for notice, for attention from others.” “Nothing has irritated the Germans . . . more,” he writes, “than lack of the notice due to their exaggerated pretensions.” The explanation with which they soothe their injured pride when they feel themselves insuflSciently appreciated is that they are not “understood.” This, according to Dr. Richard M. Brickner (Is Germany Incurable, p. 170), is another of the German paranoid symptoms. “Failure to understand him is one of the most frequent reproaches with which the individual paranoid harasses his family and friends.” The Nazis exploited the status anxiety [ p. 30 ] of the German people for all it was worth in their rise to power.
Envy and Jealousy. Another trait of the German character that the Nazis knew how to exploit was their century-old discontent with their portion of the earth’s surface and with the natural resources which fate had allotted to them. Their demand for Lebensraum has grown louder and fiercer with the years. With increasing envy they eyed their neighbors’ possessions and worked themselves into more and more of a lather of indignation over the imagined injustice of their position.
In themselves, envy and jealousy do not always indicate paranoia. In the ordinary manifestations they are quite normal characteristics of quite normal people. But in the extreme forms which they take in the German national character they are unmistakably paranoid in trend. For they have become fixed obsessions of such intensity that the German people can no longer be trusted to keep their hands off their neighbors. As our former ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, has said: “These Germans, even those who are considered liberal, seem never to think about the rights of smaller nations. . . . No German ever seems to think seizure of other people’s territory is wrong.”
Desire to Dominate. One of the German characteristics that has survived all the political changes of the past hundred years is the will to power. In the [ p. 31 ] judgment of Wallace R. Deuel, this urge to empire has been the most dynamic element in European politics since the downfall of Napoleon. The Germans have made no secret of their ambitions. Before the whole world they call themselves Herrenvolk — master, or ruling race. They firmly believe themselves not only qualified but entitled to lord it over the other peoples of the earth. Deutschland über alles is the motto which exactly describes their national ambition.
That the German people possess considerable ability as leaders is a fact no one will deny. But as rulers they know only one way of gaining obedience — the way of brute force. They have almost no qualifications for self-government, either as governors or as governed. Some writers, commenting on the lack of democratic elements in German society, have attempted to explain it on the supposition that the country lost most of its liberal minds through emigration to America. This has no doubt been one factor in the situation, but a more significant cause has been the preponderant influence of autocratic ideals of government. The ease with which the Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic demonstrates the German preference for rule by force — the corollary of their paranoid desire to domineer over other peoples by the same means.
Irrationality. To find proof of the irrationality of the German mind one has only to read a few pages [ p. 32 ] of Mein Kampf or listen to a Nazi propaganda broadcast. Even the most uninformed observer cannot have failed to notice how Germany’s leaders and spokesmen all tend to “short-circuit” their logic and jump to conclusions not warranted by a rational interpretation of the facts. Without the blinking of an eye they can justify their own atrocities against Jews and innocent children while condemning the routine bombings of their own cities by the enemy.
Right, say the Nazis, is what serves the German nation. Their own ideas of justice are completely dominated by national self-interest, and yet they grant to no one else the same right to put self-interest first. “One rule for us, another for the rest of the world” accurately states the German point of view.
Their irrationality also shows itself in a nearly complete lack of humor. They take everything about themselves very seriously. One of the keenest recollections I have of my student days in Germany is the amusing spectacle of children marching to and from school in stiff ranks. To one accustomed to the natural freedom of American, youth such solemn goingson verged upon the ludicrous. But to the Germans it was all a very serious business. Small wonder that a people so conditioned from infancy on should be lacking in the wholesome ability to laugh at their own pompous nonsense. They have neither the sense of humor nor the spirit of sportsmanship that we Americans regard as normal.
[ p. 33 ]
The irrationality of the Germans further appears in their retroactive falsification of history. This trait has become in recent years one of the identifying marks of the paranoid German mentality. Under the influence of Nazi propaganda, the Germans have built up a view of history which bears only the vaguest resemblance to actual facts. Although much of this falsification began as deliberate distortion, it ended with implicit acceptance even by the leaders themselves. The German people from Hitler down believe the Nazi lie that Germany was never defeated in World War I, but was betrayed by Jews and liberals. In the same manner they are able to explain away their own responsibility for the present war, shifting the blame to the Poles, to the British, and indeed to everyone but themselves. They are clever at alibis, as are all paranoids.
Persecution Complex. Germany has long suflPered from a severe persecution complex. The vulnerability of her central location, the lateness of her origin as a united nation, and her lack of a colonial empire have all combined to produce the conviction in Germany that she has been denied a square deal. Selfpity, as we have seen, is one of the distinguishing characteristics of paranoia. It is also one of the leading traits in the German character. And as kindness and sympathy prove of no avail in dealing with paranoid individuals, so the policy of appeasement and compromise have proved useless in dealing with [ p. 34 ] paranoid Germany. The more they were appeased the more they demanded.
Individuals suffering from paranoia frequently become so obsessed with their notions of persecution that they strike out viciously at those whom they imagine to be their persecutors. At this point they frequently resort to acts of criminal violence which sooner or later bring down upon them the sort of concerted action which they began by imagining. This, too, has its parallel in German history. Under the notion of persecution Germany has twice entered upon a career of violent aggression which ended by arousing other nations to take concerted action against it. •
Megalomania. Coupled with the idea of persecution is the further paranoid idea of destiny. Other nations have prated of “manifest destiny,” “white man’s burden,” etc. But none have acted so fanatically upon the belief in a national destiny as Germany has done in the past hundred years. The words written by the French historian Taine are just as true today as they were nearly three quarters of a century ago. “The Germans,” he said, “believe themselves the chosen people, a privileged and superior race . . . called from on high to dominate Europe. That is what they call ‘the historic mission of Germany.’ ” That this does not exaggerate the truth is proved in the following words spoken by Kaiser Wilhelm to the German people: “Remember that you are the [ p. 35 ] chosen people! The spirit of the Lord has descended upon me because I am Emperor of the Germans! I am the instrument of the Most High. I am His sword, His representative!”
Under the paranoid leadership of Hitler and his Nazi gangsters, Germany has sunk even deeper into megalomania. Its soldiers and civilians alike are thoroughly indoctrinated with the conviction that under their Fuehrer’s guidance they are destined to achieve great deeds to save the world from Bolshevism, to inaugurate a new world order. So deeply rooted is this idea of destiny that it remains unshaken in spite of all the defeats Germany has suffered in recent months.
Because of this megalomaniac idea, the Germans regard themselves as above right and wrong — a law unto themselves. They possess no sense of guilt for the numerous atrocities and widespread suffering they have caused. Under the combined notions of persecution and destiny they have plunged the entire world into an inferno of war the like of which has never been seen before. And all without a grain of remorse!
Delusions. The German trend into paranoia has not stopped short of the final stage — delusions of grandeur. That they are the “master race” has long been the Germans’ chief article of faith. Their delusions reached new levels in the Nazi belief in German invincibility — a belief which grew from victory [ p. 36 ] to victory until they met their match at Stalingrad and El Alamein.
The evidences of German paranoid trends go back at least as far as Frederick the Great. This great militarist megalomaniac has been for 100 years the favorite hero of the German people. Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Hitler have followed in Frederick’s footsteps with only minor additions of their own. The same trends appear in most of the literature and philosophy popular in Germany during the last 150 years. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Treitschke, and Houston Chamberlain are among the leaders of thought who have contributed to the evolution of present-day paranoid Germany.
(That much of the foregoing diagnosis applies also to Japan is evidenced by an article in a recent number of Fuji, one of Japan’s most popular periodicals. The writer, Tsuji Sato, is a member of the Research Institute for National Spiritual Culture. “Since Imperial Japan, with its absolute Emperor and people, is mankind’s highest embodiment of truth, wherever it pursues its path there is no power on earth to resist it. On this conviction is based the indestructibility of Japan.”)
The savagery and thoroughness with which the Axis nations have mistreated prisoners and civilians [ p. 37 ] alike are not to be lightly dismissed as mere incidents of war. They were deliberately planned as part of the campaign to strike terror into the hearts of the Axis enemies. It would be a mistake to hold only the leaders responsible for the atrocities. Whole nations are implicated. The German people have rarely protested against any of the crimes committed by their leaders. Few of the German churches have so much as voiced a word of sympathy for the innocent victims.
These atrocities are the inevitable result of two hundred years of militarism and miseducation. For generations German children have been schooled in hate. Today German youth is unmoved by the knowledge or sight of suffering Poles or Jews. The majority of them are largely without pity. They have been taught ruthlessness toward all people and everything that does not immediately contribute to German success.
Captain Paasche, a nonparanoid German, published a book in 1919 entitled The Lost Africa. The Captain did some plain talking in this book. In fact, he told the Germans that they had become an “outlaw nation,” that they were a generation of “butchers,” and he went on to say that the world would not fellowship the German people until they had become “human.” This book had scarcely come off the press when a group of Nazis marched out to the Captain’s farm and shot him down in cold blood.
[ p. 38 ]
For generations Germany has been giving preference to paranoid standard-bearers, and these individuals have increasingly dominated politics, society, science, and education. These paranoids have rewritten the history taught to German youth, and the whole German culture in peace and in war has been permeated with this type of thinking and reasoning.
Paranoid trends have come to dominate home, church, school, legislature, and even the courts. Everything in German culture has fallen under the blight of this type of leadership. No wonder the mystic medicine man, Hitler, was able to spring up and thrive in such a rich paranoid soil as was represented by prewar Germany.
There has never been any such thing as political equality or social fraternity in Germany. The Germans, like the Japanese, simply do not know anything about the freedom and liberty of the democracies. They have never had a chance to experience them.
In Germany it has been increasingly hard for the nonparanoid Germans, those who are liberty-loving and democratic in convictions, to make any headway. Too many of those who sympathize with them have left Germany for other parts of the world. The real democrats and lovers of liberty are isolated. They are alone. They are a hopeless minority, especially when it comes to making themselves heard or their influence felt. Vansittart estimates that “good Germans” [ p. 39 ] are outaumbered at least three to one. And many Germans are sadistic as well as paranoid. There is still a strain, and many of their philosophers have recognized and admitted it, of barbarous cruelty lingering in the German blood. Much of Nazi pageantry represents both a sadistic nature and a paranoid melodramatic trend.
It was probably an uncontrollable paranoid projection that led Hitler treacherously to attack Russia; he was confident she was prepared to attack him. Of course, this paranoid suspicion may, after all, be his undoing. Today it appears that his greatest mistake was his unprovoked assault upon his eastern neighbor.
The world, particulary the British and Americans, thought Hitler was bluffing about invading Poland, but any psychiatrist could have told them he was not bluffing. Get this straight: Paranoids never bluff, and this is true of both the individual and the group. True, they may at first cleverly withhold some of their demands. They may be willing to trade, but they always are willing to fight for what they cannot get by peaceful methods.
Hitler said with all apparent sincerity — at least so he impressed Chamberlain — “Sudetenland is all that Germany wants.” Then when Chamberlain gave in to him, the crafty dictator presently came back to say, “But that is not enough now. Germany must have more.”
[ p. 40 ]
The German cult of war has borne its fruits in a people almost wholly devoid of honor, truth, and mercy. They know but one standard of right — the glorification of the German Reich.
The individual paranoid is curable only in proportion to the presence of the “clear area” in his mental make-up. When his delusions are well systematized, he is hopeless. If Germany is paranoid in her present-day trends, is she curable? For some time I have claimed that Germany is curable, that there are enough nonparanoid Germans who are sound psychologically to save Germany, if they can be liberated and placed in charge of her educational and political systems. I have been teaching this for four or five years, and now Dr. Brickner in his book Is Germany Incurable? agrees with me that Germany is curable.
But these nonparanoid Germans, these non-Nazis who love liberty and crave freedom, must have strong military protection while they train a new generation of Germans to grow up in the love of liberty and peace. Nothing less than the complete destruction of German militarism and the liquidation of the paranoid ruling clique will put Germany on the road to sane recovery. This must be followed by a program of re-education in which the nonparanoid “clear area” will be given ample opportunity to expand. [ p. 41 ] Germany can regain her health only as her ingrown nationalism is replaced by loyalty to a larger whole.
Nations as well as individuals can become paranoid. Germany and Japan now exhibit all of the leading characteristics of paranoia.
Group or national paranoia is a “social infection” which spreads from outstanding paranoids to the susceptible elements in the general population.
National paranoia exists when a nation behaves toward other nations in the way paranoid individuals behave toward other individuals. Nations that are naturally egotistic, aggressive, and domineering, succumb more readily than others to the intoxicating influence of paranoid thinking.
For more than a hundred years Germany and Japan have consciously cultivated paranoid values and patterned their behavior more and more on paranoid lines.
Paranoid suspicion is the outstanding trait of German psychology. The Nazis are inordinately suspicious of the Jews and all other peoples — they trust nobody.
The Germans are so filled with suspicion that they tend to infect other nations. The Germans are victims of self-reference — everything that happens in all the wide world is directed against them. They have an “encirclement” mania.
[ p. 42 ]
The Germans are conceited. Their rampant egotism fosters their ridiculous ideas of racial superiority. They believe that they are the “chosen people” destined to rule the world.
And yet underneath all these boastful and vainglorious pretensions, the Germans suffer from feelings of national inferiority and ardently crave the admiration of other peoples.
The Germans are anxious about their “status,” and they are envious and jealous of the prosperity and achievements of other nations. Lebensraum is a fixed delusion of the German mind.
The Germans believe in force — they crave to dominate. Brute force is the only method they employ in dominating the conquered peoples. They regard themselves as being the “ruling race.”
The Germans are notoriously irrational, being strangers to logic. Right, they say, is what serves the German people. They are devoid of humor — they take everything concerning themselves seriously. They are expert in falsifying history.
True to the paranoid trend, Germany suffers from a persecution complex. And as kindness and sympathy prove useless in dealing with paranoids, so compromise and appeasement proved of no avail in dealing with Germany.
The Germans believe they are destined to dominate the world. This megalomania reached its height in Hitler. Military defeat has not changed Germany.
[ p. 43 ]
And the Germans entertain paranoid delusions of grandeur — they have regarded themselves as the master race for more than a hundred years. The Japanese hold the same delusions respecting their racial superiority and national destiny.
The brutality of the German “cult of vrar” is shown in their ruthless and terrorizing treatment of war prisoners and the subjugated peoples. Leadership in Germany is in the hands of the paranoids. Remember: paranoids do not just bluff — they mean business.
German children have been schooled in hate and brutality. They are utterly lacking in sympathy and pity. Home, church, school, and courts have become paranoid in their philosophy.
But paranoid Germany can be cured if her libertyloving citizens can be given complete control of German schools and political institutions.