Sheer insanity.
Jan. 4th, 2004 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oneirophreniaI've been watching a new series on the History Channel covering all aspects of the SS--the Waffen-SS, the Order of the Death's Head, etc.--and even though I've been morbidly fascinated with this psychotic organization for years, have read quite a few books and watched at least a hundred different documentaries analyzing their actions, history, and fate, I still cannot possibly wrap my brain around the abject insanity of the whole deal. It boggles the mind that something like the SS could ever have been created in the first place, much less allowed to flourish....There's just no understanding how everyday people could, thanks to a uniform and a handful of power, become such completely mechanical murderers. I mean, I can partially understand the psychological conditioning at work with the SS: soldiers were conditioned to swallow their horror and dismay because, well, what they were doing was supposed to be hard, but it was ultimately all supposed to be for the best (much like the current occupation of Iraq) and sacrifice was necessary in order to bring about the Grand Ideal...and besides, being given absolute authority over the lives and deaths of people you are convinced are traitors and national threats certainly does go to one's head. Yet...there seems to be more at work than just simple blind duty and hysterical delusion. I'm beginning to think that some kind of strange contagious mental pathology was released in Europe in the 1930s, some kind of catchy madness that some people were extremely susceptible to.
One thing that bugs me about a lot of what I've read and seen about the SS is this: so many sources continually ask the question of surviving ex-members, "Why, when you saw what the fuck you were doing, did you not try to do something about it?" To which I ask: do what? A lot of the SS rank-and-file were completely ordinary men who joined up because they were suckered in by SS recruiting propaganda that promised them honor, glory, and a totally bad-assed uniform...and then made them a part of a rigid, totalitarian military structure that required them to basically kill or be killed. Honestly, what could one man, or a group of men, or even a whole goddamned army of them possibly do to stand up against the crushing weight of the Reich's authority? These men weren't soldiers in the US Army, where desertion or even rebellion might be treated with a slightly more level hand--if you bucked the Reich and the psychotic bureaucracy of the SS, you vanished. Besides, the damned organization itself stressed blind obedience.
Sick thing is...in some ways, I can see the vague seeds of that same kind of mindset being promulgated in this country now, backed up not by a doctrine of racial and moral superiority but by a hysterical fear of terrorism. Fortunately, the general psychology of the United States is not one in which blind obedience can happen to the depth that the CIA could turn into another SS, but nonetheless there's the chance for trouble on the horizon. Damned human sheep.
One thing that bugs me about a lot of what I've read and seen about the SS is this: so many sources continually ask the question of surviving ex-members, "Why, when you saw what the fuck you were doing, did you not try to do something about it?" To which I ask: do what? A lot of the SS rank-and-file were completely ordinary men who joined up because they were suckered in by SS recruiting propaganda that promised them honor, glory, and a totally bad-assed uniform...and then made them a part of a rigid, totalitarian military structure that required them to basically kill or be killed. Honestly, what could one man, or a group of men, or even a whole goddamned army of them possibly do to stand up against the crushing weight of the Reich's authority? These men weren't soldiers in the US Army, where desertion or even rebellion might be treated with a slightly more level hand--if you bucked the Reich and the psychotic bureaucracy of the SS, you vanished. Besides, the damned organization itself stressed blind obedience.
Sick thing is...in some ways, I can see the vague seeds of that same kind of mindset being promulgated in this country now, backed up not by a doctrine of racial and moral superiority but by a hysterical fear of terrorism. Fortunately, the general psychology of the United States is not one in which blind obedience can happen to the depth that the CIA could turn into another SS, but nonetheless there's the chance for trouble on the horizon. Damned human sheep.
