Theoretical Paper: Some Remarks on Mass Murders, Social Darwinism and Mysticism in the 20th Century

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 Introduction

Obviously, neither massacres (El-Kenz, 2005) nor the vocabulary and discourse of enmity and purity of the in-group, in opposition to a polluted or dehumanized “Other” (Douglas, 2002), are uncommon phenomena in world history. It is well known that in some periods, such as that of the Catholic Reconquista in Spain, otherness has been defined in terms of criteria of ancestry and blood relations (Poliakov, 1966-1971; Héritier, 1996-1999).

Thus, modernity did not invent “mysticism of nature and myths of redemption” (Traverso, 2003; Hinton, 2002:9-10), that went so strongly hand-in-hand with 20th-century mass murders, but rather inherited them. Still, the ideologies and praxis of war in the 19th and 20th centuries, which also benefited from new means of communication, scientific resources and technical skills, brought about considerable changes in the language and praxis of enmity. New concepts and new coercive methods against “enemy” groups, understood as biological entities (Rouzeau & Becker, 2003), were elaborated through doctrinal “prophecies” (Bénichou, 1977) and modern wars, particularly the colonial wars and World War I (Reimann, 2000) which was one of the first “total wars” in history. Biological categories have been much more widely used than before, and, more importantly, they have been politically and scientifically legitimized. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, the emergence and spread of social-Darwinism brought unprecedented scientific backing to these categories. This facilitated interpretation of old mystical frameworks of blood purity, meta-historical missions, and conceptions of human groups as organically bounded brotherhoods, as constitutive natural and scientific truths. In spite of its irrevocable specificity, the Holocaust itself can be apprehended through the single framework of an entirely new worldview that was mystical, millenarian and scientific all at once. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, “Modern civilization was not the Holocaust’s sufficient condition; it was, however, most certainly its necessary condition. […] It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust thinkable.” (Bauman, 2002:111).

This article will review the findings of certain scholars concerning the link between social-Darwinism and mass-murders. I will underline how the mystical and biological redefinition of language and vocabulary played a decisive role in the construction of enmity and “enemy groups” and also, consequently, in the legitimization of massacres, related to war conditions or not, throughout the 20th century. Language is not understood as an autonomous category here; instead, it is a part of a wide range of symbolic and visual tools for communication (cartoons, films, depictions of physical or olfactory “specificities”). All of these tools for communication can be used as vehicles of symbolic violence [1] against a designated or constructed enemy group.

As Victor Klemperer observed, not only does language name objects and feelings, but through its own transformations in a given historical context and power relations, it also creates new cognitive categories which are accepted as meaningful, such as the concept of “dejudification” in Nazi Germany (Klemperer, 2000). A radically transformed language can name, classify or declassify ethnic, racial and political groups as enemies, it can qualify or disqualify them, and it can legitimize new forms of coercion against them as scientifically, morally and legally obligatory acts (Steiner, 1967; Edelmann, 1988). It “naturalizes” the newly elaborated warlike categories and has them recognized as natural ones. Moreover, a language is not just a set of words and concepts: it is also scansion, intonations and gestures (Tchokhotine, 1992). The ways in which words are pronounced and articulated matter as much as their content. Finally, as Nazi discourse has demonstrated, linguistic chaos (i.e. the repetition of a small number of words in a deliberately chaotic discursive order) can create a sense of extreme fear and extreme hope, a feeling of “being in the final stage of war” between good and evil, the outcome of which will depend solely on individuals’ consenting to sacrifice themselves (Haffner, 2002; Klemperer, 2000).

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