(Dr. Kallen is one of the most brilliant thinkers in the academic world of the United States. A student of, and greatly influenced by, the great William James, he carried on the philosophy of Pragmatism, founded by James, after the death of that philosopher. Dr. Kallen, who was for a long time on the staff of Harvard University, is now teaching at the New School for Social Research. He has been active in the generally Jewish and specifically Zionist movements in the United States.)
The Germany of Hitler is in the grip of a collective paranoia.
Paranoia is a mental disease made up of two basic delusions. One is a delusion of grandeur; the other is a delusion of persecution, coupled with a homicidal mania. The delusions arise in individuals as compensations for, and escapes from, certain very deeply-lying inferiorities and repressions. The paranoic who announces that he is Napoleon Bonaparte or Julius Caesar is usually found to have suffered from such inferiorities and repressions since childhood. That he is not recognized in his true glory he declares is due to some specific or general enemy who is engaged in a conspiracy against him and has designs on his life. To save himself and reveal his glory, he must destroy the enemy.
These basic delusions of the paranoic act as nuclei about which are assembled and arranged all kinds of fancies and facts. The whole crystallizes into a tough and very resistent system which can rarely be resolved back to sanity.
When such systems of delusion are generalized, so that they cease to be personal, and can be shared by great masses of people, they acquire the weight and power of a religious cult. They twist and bend common sense, science, business, religion and art into conformity with themselves. They declare their creators to be the utter paragons of civilization, and they announce a ruthless war against all that oppose them.
“CONSOLATION AND ESCAPE”
This is the present state of the German mind. Hitler and his gang were voted into power by a majority of the German people because they gave again voice to systematic delusions in which great masses of Germans found consolation and escape from feelings of deficiency and from repressions which had ruled their minds long before the Treaty of Versailles. These delusions may be summed up as follows: There exists a race of men which is the paragon of humankind. The Germans are the supreme incarnation of this race. It is necessarily and forever victorious in war, masterful in religion, successful in business, and overruling in art. Everything in the world which is good, or true or beautiful is the creation of this Aryan-German race.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world not only does not acknowledge this paramountcy of the Germanic genius; it is not even aware that it exists. Why? Because its manifestation in glory is always being obscured and prevented by enemies.
In war, the infallible Germanic military genius meets not the victory that belongs to it, but defeat.
In business it is bested by its inferiors; in the sciences and in the arts its glory is dimmed by the contamination of alien and inferior blood.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
So, if the Aryan-German is continually failing, the failure is not due to any weakness in itself, nor to any superiority in its rivals such as the French or English or Italians or Slavs. Its failure is due to an enemy within who poisons the blood, dims the glory and snatches the victory. This enemy is identified with the Jew.
Now the Jews of Germany constitute less than one per cent of a total population of over sixty million, and so far as an intransigeant devotion to “the Fatherland” is concerned, they have out-Germaned the most jingoistic of Germans. Why, then, the paranoic fixation on the Jew and not the Englishman or the Frenchman, as the object of the delusion of persecution? This is due partly to the historic anti-Semitism of the German tradition, largely to the paranoic psychosis itself. The latter makes it impossible to admit that the actual victors in battle, the Allies, especially the French, have any strength or virtue in them whatsoever.
ENRICHERS ARE “ROBBERS”
The German psychosis rationalizes the German defeat and failure
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
