Preventing Neo-Nazi Cult Violence in Our Schools
It is often easier to shoot the messenger than to do what is needed to
confront the horror of the message. This is one way of understanding
the current round of criticism aimed by some commentators at the media
and entertainment industries in the wake of Littleton. Are we too quick
to rush and scapegoat our media and entertainment stars, too ready to
place blame on everyone from news reporters from Kosovo to the makers
of shoot them up computer games such as Doom and pop Gothic singers such
as Marilyn Manson? Are we thereby avoiding confronting the horror of
the history of the Nazi war of extermination against the Jews and other
alleged victimizers of the German people? Is the price we are paying
for our exclusive focus on such easy targets of opportunity as the media,
to neglect a meaningful opportunity to confront and prevent virulent
Neo-Nazi cult mediated forms of violence in our schools?
At least one story on the two school killers in Littleton (New
York Times A17, April 23, 1999) mentions in passing that a
Jewish student confronted the killer "Nazism thing." While
there is no guarantee that a confrontation of the "Nazism thing" by
school authorities would have been effective in preventing the horror,
the sad fact remains that it seems to have been left up to a student
to do so. Through a variety of educational programs, we can be respectful
of freedom of speech while institutionally confronting such dangerous
cult ideology often symptomatic of either madness or badness or both.
Such programs can encourage even psychologically unsophisticated
students to remove the blinkers of group think and think for themselves
when confronted by appeals to group vanity, us versus them thinking,
and "cats and dogs," categorical and dogmatic attitudes.
Unless identified and critically analyzed, such group think habits
of thought and feeling fan the flames of prejudice, group hatred,
and restrict effective interpersonal problem solving and negotiation
by destroying the needed freedom to be creative, curious, empathic
while considering each problem afresh.
The current round of media bashing holds the media responsible for the
killers' lack of empathy for their victims. However, even if the media
were as free of violence as its critics would like, it is still unlikely
that the killers would have had empathy for others. The element of self-hatred
in these killers' attitudes should not be underestimated in our understandable
focus on the aggression they directed at their victims. It is difficult
to be empathic or show understanding and respect for others, when you
so deeply hate yourself as to identify with one of the world's great "losers."
Beneath their thin veneer of superiority, it is clear that the killers
regarded themselves as "losers" being put down by their targets,
conventionally regarded as "winners." Today, there is in our
competitive society a tendency to see all too much of life as a competition
with "losers" and "winners." These killers are said
to have identified with Adolph Hitler, himself a very destructive and
suicidal "loser." The attack occurred (apparently by design)
on April 20, Adolph Hitler's birthday and he seems to have been a cult
figure for these killers. In view of the persistence and proliferation
in both Europe and the United States of cult like fringe groups catering
to adolescents and young adults which use the Nazis and Adolph Hitler
as an inspiration, the killers use of Adolph Hitler's birthday as their
chosen date for murder should not be discounted as representing merely
an isolated incidental artifact of their own peculiarities.
In the rush to judgment of the media and entertainment industry it is
easy to overlook the significant role of how cult like glorification
of Hitler and the "Nazi thing," when ignored, enables predators
to proceed in a self-righteous fashion. In addition to intense competition
predicated on "winning" being coupled with vanity and "losing" being
intertwined with humiliation, there is also a remarkable ignorance of
history among American adolescents. The resulting cauldron of competition
is all too easily stoked and the vacuum of knowledge all too easily filled
by this life's "losers'" transformation of the historically
evil yet often-inept Hitler into a tragic hero whose birthday is to be
celebrated via murder.
In the absence of a critical understanding of Hitler's history, the inept
features of Hitler's self-destructive obsession with destroying the Jews
are forgotten. Among the cultists, it is rarely recognized that by being
committed to the destruction of the European Jewry, even at the clear
cost of diverting massive military resources, Hitler eventually increased
the likelihood and hastened his defeat in World War II. Rather, in their
historical glorification of a very destructive "loser," Hitler,
this life's "losers" find a way to rationalize their rage with
those they envy and to convert their feelings of inferiority into a doomed
yet murderous group identity. Their group identity allows them to temporarily
maintain the illusion of superiority towards those they envy. Alas, illusions
of superiority are only of fleeting comfort in the face of social reality
to this life's "losers." When illusions of superiority come
to be all too inevitably threatened by social reality, already rationalized
murderous rage is all too easily enacted.
In writing the above, I am well aware that I have a particular sensitivity
to the need to confront the "Nazi thing" given my own family's
history in Poland during World War II. As Jews in the Lodz ghetto, they
were involved in underground resistance to the Nazi extermination program
during the 1939-1945 period, which is today termed the Shoah. As a psychoanalyst
and forensic psychiatrist, however, I am concerned that we may be overlooking
an early, preventable, warning sign of madness, badness, or both; the
glorification of Hitler and the "Nazi thing" when we all too
conveniently blame the media. Freedom of speech need not suffer when
we recognize and confront cult ideology with the real history of the
Shoah taught in our schools in an age appropriate manner. We should not,
by our avoidance of horror, leave the door open to misuses of this shadow
of twentieth century history by the destructive self-hating "loser" of
today.
Harold J. Burztajn, M.D.