| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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a modern, much more deadly stress on health and hygiene
— for the Nazis, racial hygiene. Mary Douglas has shown that concern with
pollution, whether we call it magical or religious, has to do with symbolic
systems dealing with the “relation of order to disorder, being to
non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.”73 In primitive purification rituals combating
defilement, “uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a
pattern is to be maintained.”74 And the
ultimate issue is death: “Just as the focus of all pollution symbolism is
the body, the final problem to which the perspective of pollution leads is
bodily disintegration.”75
Pollution imagery is associated with many
forms of victimization involving class and caste as well as color and race. The
traditional Japanese group of outcasts bear the name “Eta,” whose
literal meaning is “full of pollution,” “full of filth,” or
“abundant defilement.” The word itself is taboo, as if threatening
the speaker with some of the disturbing taint of the outcast group itself. As
in the case of many such victimized groups, the Eta have long been associated
with despised and defiling occupations, including those connected with
slaughter of animals and with handling human waste, animal skins, and corpses
— that is, those “centered … around blood, death, and dirt.76
Jews have also been frequently
associated with death and defilement, but in ways even more dangerous to others
accusations of being well poisoners and plague spreaders of practicing
necromancy and in ceremonial drinking of blood or ritual murder of Christian
children as sacrifices for a black mass. Jews have also over the course of
their history been confined to the same defiling professions in which the Eta
engage, as well as forced to associate with money or “usury,” the
term meaning “lending money with interest” but conveying a sense of
dishonesty, ugliness, and taboo very close to defilement. The symbolism of
money as “filthy lucre,” “evil excrescence,” and also
“immortal stuff” (mystical and magical) suggests its relation both to
feces and death on the one hand and to an immortalizing mode on the other. But
by becoming bound up with what was generally perceived as an illegitimate and
tainted mode of immortality, the Jews became further vulnerable to
victimization. German Jews could be viewed as élite victims as in the
case of Gerson von Bleichroder, the banker to Bismarck and the “German
Rothschild.” Both respected and reviled, he became an arch example for the
anti-Semites of the 1870s who saw in him "Jewish power [that] had become a
mortal menace to German life.”77 Having,
by means of earlier victimization, relegated the Jews to this defiled,
death-tainted immortality system, the victimizers came to feel nonetheless
“out-immortalized” by them. Hence, subsequent German cruelties could
be seen as revictimization of the Jews, still in connection with purification.
Nazi genocide can, in fact, be understood as a fierce purification
procedure. But purifying principles were subsumed to the modern principle of
“medical materialism”: that of invoking bodily hygienic explanations
for spiritual and psychological matters. The classical retrospective example
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