Transcendental Knowledge Systems, Power and Consciousness as Cruelty

            Padfield observes that the Hindu concept of caste duty and the imperative to act to better one's own Karma through disinterested service 

is the key to the picture of Himmler, by nature a squeamish man, forcing  himself silently to watch an extermination at Auschwitz. Performance of duty detached from passion was indeed what he continually sought from his staff at the death camps. [1]

Himmler's need to read the Bhagavad Gita to bolster his courage to watch atrocities, undismayed by sorrow, detached from any hint of sorrow or pity, in a disinterested manner, involves the use of a knowledge system, in this case a Hindu religious text that justifies the caste system, as a tool to generate emotional abstraction from the occurrence of atrocity. The knowledge system justifies the use of unconscionable power; it creates an irreality, indeed a kind of schitzophenic "doubling', in Robert J. Lifton's word, that separates the natural conscience of a man from his actions. Himmler's biography records that he couldn't kill a deer because of its beautiful eyes and he despised Goering and other top level Nazis who enjoyed hunting. He said that "nature is wonderfully beautiful and every creature has a right to live"- but yet he could order the murder of 11 million people.[2] This psychological doubling depends upon rationalizations, that is, it requires of system of knowledge and a socializing apparatus to justify it. That system was the Hindu system, as well as the Hitlerian vision of the German Reich. Christianity no doubt played a part also, with its glorification of  suffering and death, which had been dear to the Germans for centuries and reflected in its art. Killing Jews, Indians or Africans was necessary for the glory of Christ and the civilization that loved him, revered him, offered him incense, prayer and their lives.

             The transcendental impulse in the Christian world view has an apocalyptic and transgressive element. It sees the world as a place of sin that is set on imminent destruction in recompense. The transgressive element in Christianity combines the most "sacred" and the most abhorrent: one is supposed to eat the flesh of the dead god to achieve transcendence. The crucifixion and apocalyptic imagery of Christianity teaches the necessity of cruel and violent redressal of sin in order that heavenly redemption might be achieved: sadistic, cannibalistic and transcendental luminous imagery are combined in disturbing and powerful images. The combination of being able to create fear of total apocalypse or damnation at the same time as an ultimate, nearly unrealizable hope is offered if one eats the flesh of the dead god is certainly one of the most powerful forms of mind control ever created. In any case it lead to the creation of an institution that all but ruled the western world for 1800 years. The Nazis admired this and used Catholicism as a model or organization, even if they did later renounce the Church. As Robert Westrich has observed: 

Like His fellow Catholics, Goebbels and Himmler, [Hitler] had an intuitive sense fro the importance of outward forms, for dogma, hierarchy and organization, which were used to powerful effect in the Nazi movement. The party created its own "messiah", Bible, martyrs and dogma in imitation of the Catholic Church, just as Himmler would look to the Jesuit order for his inspiration for the S.S. elite.[3]

            Brought up a Catholic Himmler wrote in an early diary that he would "adhere to the Catholic Church even if I should be expelled from it."[4] This appears to be true despite his later renunciations. His concern with racial purity and the elimination of wrong thinking individuals resembles nothing so much as Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. The transference of the idea into Nazi ideology that Jews, homosexuals, socialists, gypsies and other outsiders, miscreants and "racially impure" persons must be sacrificed for the glory of the Reich, god, science or the state is certainly not a German invention,  rather there is a long history to this racism. It has its origins in Christianity and European Civilizationism; the belief that only European civilization is legitimate.

            This Christian concern with apocalyptic punishment of outsiders and those conceived to be aberrant combined with the Hindu concern with caste and the view of human suffering as the result of Karma was a fatal combination that helped create the death camps, the Nazi doctors and the crematoria.[5]

             The idea of 'creative destruction' or Holy War or Holy Terror that is involved here is not merely a psychopathic adventure of which only Nazi's or psychopaths from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Daumer, the recently murdered killer of 17 boys, are capable. The case of Daumer indicates more that he was imitating the American mythology of power and not merely perverting it. He made a religion of consumption, eating some of his victims,  just as the American cult of excessive consumption has cannibalized peoples. Daumer also saw his cannibalistic acts as a means to  power and made an altar for his victim's skeletons that literalized the doctrine of transubstantiation. He spoke of wanting to sit and look at his victim's bones to enjoy the remembrance of his power over them. This resembles the drive for trophy collecting that the English and other European colonialists practiced, bringing home pieces of Africa, animal skins, elephant tusks, masks from Papua or collecting the art or the bones of Native Americans, dug up at archeological sites without permission of still existing tribes. Indeed, the cult of curiosities, travelling circuses parading Indians and animals, ceully treated, museum collecting or great expositions is not without relation to colonial exploitation, conquest and murder of both men and cultures.

            Daumer also saw himself as a kind of scientist. He collected and stored his victims like specimens, lovingly preserved. His father was a chemist who encouraged dissection. He said that he killed and devoured the boys because he loved them and wanted total power over them. [6] He ate parts of his victims not because he was hungry but because he wanted to possess and "own them" in the most intimate way possible. America visited a similar grotesque on the Vietnamese, whom they claimed to care for, wanted to liberate and possess. In the process the US killed four million of them.[7]

            The feeling of achieving transcendent power through murder or manipulation and coercion that such psychopathic serial murderers have described is clearly something that is also likely, perhaps more likely, to occur with large states, religions and institutions. With psychopathic cult leaders, such a David Koresh, Jim Jones and others there is no conscience concerning their actions. As Madeleine Tobias, basing herself on many comparative studies, has observed, "psychopaths see those around them as objects, targets or opportunities, not as people. They do not have friends, they have victims or accomplices".[8] The essential component of the psychopathic murderer is consciencelessness, the belief in themselves as the ultimate moral arbiter and thus their chosen end justifies any means. This is also true of many political states, whose level of abstract, nationalistic or corporate removal from consciousness of the actual effects of their actions tends to produce injustices and atrocities. [9] The "godlike rush of power over life and death" spoken of by one serial killer can also be seen acting through institutions.[10] The power over life and death is something Christ is supposed to have granted to the Catholic Church, for instance, and this was used to justify the Inquisition. [11]The level of abstraction achieved in a bureaucratic state from the consequences of action facilitates atrocities because the murders are committed by an abstract 'system' and the individuals in power can use this fact to hide their culpability: Murder becomes a duty to the state.[12]  In our society, the fact of the US having the largest prison population in the world, extreme poverty in the ghettos and Reservations is excused on the grounds that freedom is wealth and that the miracle of the free market will 'trickle down'. Of course it never does. When 55,000 children were killed in Iraq in 4 days in 1991, American soldiers referred to the people they were killing as "cockroaches" and a military songbook used by American soldiers records the song "phantom flyers in the sky, Persian-pukes prepare to die, rolling in with snake and nape, Allah creates but we cremate". [13]

            Systems of knowledge/power appear to require atrocity to prove their power. The benefits that a state or religion want to accrue to "us" seems to require a "them" who must be eliminated. When there is no "them" that threatens, one has to be created. Once a state had committed an atrocity, it does not speak of it, as the U.S. covered up Hiroshima and Nagasaki for many years. It speaks only of its beneficence, it's manifest destiny or its exceptionalism. This ideology of "them versus us" is built into the structure of systems of knowledge and power, be these Nazi, Christian, Hindu, Capitalist or Marxist.

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