Declaring the
'disappeared' — Chile, 2013. ≈
CHELLIS GLENDINNING
CHUQUISACA, BOLIVIA — As befits the times, I have
been studying Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi
Concentration Camps (‘concentration camps’translate as Konzentrationslager,
hence ‘KL’) and re-reading Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of
Terror in the Americas, by Nancy Caro Hollander. As a resident of Bolivia,
I’ve also had the chance to befriend Latin American activists who were jailed
and tortured, or fled, during the dictatorships of the 1970s-80s — including
one man who was among the very few to escape a massacre committed by the same
battalion that years earlier had murdered Che Guevara (“Interview
with a Revolutionary,” The Journal of Wild Culture, 27 Nov
2016), and another who fled, directly from being tortured, to the airport to
escape to Sweden, his jaw broken and blood soaking his shirt.
Comparisons between Nazi Germany and Trump’s US-in-process
abound these days. Naomi Wolfe has enlightened us with her recipe of actions
cooked up by governments aiming for hegemonic control of populace, military,
and institutions in her book, The End of America. Through the
decades, US progressives have been regaled with grapevine rumors that camps,
like those used to corral Japanese-Americans during World War II, are being
outfitted to house ‘subversives’ and ‘terrorists.’ And as Ivan Krastev writes
in The New York Times ('The Rise of the Paranoid Citizen,' 16
March 2017), “Yet the fundamental change in democratic politics is that when
political identities are based on shared conspiracy theories, people are
committed not to finding truth but to revealing secrets.” Read:
consciously-constructed, interest-based inventions or well launched unconscious
projections.
It’s true: we inhabit a topsy-turvy, post-truth world
defined by the uncertainty produced by Trump’s emotional instabilities,
postmodern media circus, and ideological maneuvers. So what’s a citizen who
harbors a long-standing assumption of personal freedom and national democracy
to do?
The transition from ‘today's more-or-less democracy’ to
outright fascism is often imagined as an overnight event — as indeed it
was on 11 September 1973 in Chile with the early-morning coup d’état that
led to President Allende’s death and the demolition of the country’s
democratic-socialist project. Historian Nancy Caro Hollander’s interviews with
survivors of such transitions in Uruguay and Argentina reveal a slower,
step-by-step process. Her interest is the evolution of theory and practice in
the psychoanalytic community, before and through the dictatorships, and her
interviewees tend to be analysts who favored the merging of human-rights
politics with psychoanalysis and made their services available to poor and
working-class communities and, as repression increased, to the tortured and
families of the disappeared. Said interviewees describe not only the strain on
their patients, but also their own inner tensions. As client loads became
weighted toward those targeted by the military, analysts came to know too much
for their own good. Decisions to stay or leave had to be made, often
instantaneously, but living under a veil of not-knowing how far things would be
taken, they themselves became subject to the tangled thinking induced by panic
and the near-total erasure of logic that denial offers.
Three Mile Island accident (1978) . . . "life under the
hair-trigger threat of the arms race." ≈
Such responses are endemic to life-and-death predicaments
infused with ambiguity. Unless one’s name appears on a death-squad list for all
to see, the psyche is vulnerable to any number of defenses. In the late-1970s,
before the movie “The China Syndrome” and the near-meltdown of Three Mile
Island reactor contributed to the detonation of anti-nuclear sentiment
crystallizing as the Nuclear Freeze effort, psychiatrist Carol Wolman applied
feminist consciousness-raising principles to life under the hair-trigger threat
of the arms race. In discussion groups she uncovered a host of psychic
mechanisms people had been using for decades to avoid thinking about nuclear
weapons: dissociation as in disconnecting one’s self from the
problem, such as “We’ll be fine. Northern California is the only region that
will escape the toxic cloud”; splitting, believing in two contradictory
things at the same time, such as thinking that US weapons are beneficial while
Soviet arms are evil incarnate; flat-out denial that an
untoward event would ever occur; a sense of grandiosity, for
instance, that one’s study group will stop the arms race; escapism into
hedonism or a flurry of activity; displacement, segueing concern
onto other social issues that seem more manageable, like donating to the school
choir. Meanwhile, in his acclaimed study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
survivors, Death in Life, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton identified
the response to the “unspeakable” — and unfeel-able — as psychic
numbing.
Given that her interviewees were eager to talk about their
experiences and vulnerabilities, Hollander uncovered similar defenses amid the
muddle of truth and lies that arise as a society embarks on the road from
relatively open to egregiously totalitarian. First off, as government
repression morphed into out-and-out fascism, so psychological disorders
mushroomed. Mental health professionals boasted packed schedules, and years
later, when interviewed, they spoke of using the same unconscious defenses as
their clients had.
Denial was extensive as patients and
practitioners alike clung to fantasies of “normality” and attempted to live as
they had before, sometimes the only bones thrown to admitting awareness of a
change being clearing out their houses of subversive material. After the coup some
Chileans sought relief by insisting that the US State Department and CIA
(clearly unmanageable entities) could not have orchestrated
it. Splitting was rampant. As an analyst in Uruguay explained:
“I continued to believe in democracy when I was living in a country that was
already totalitarian.” Dissociation abounded as well. A doctor
who was treating a Tupamaro militant discounted his own vulnerability — until
the day he himself was taken prisoner. An Argentine theater director with
training in psychoanalysis said: “I employed an instrumental dissociation in
order to go on. . . I told myself it would be all right, that I wasn’t a
guerrilla, only a playwright whose theater dealt with the human condition.” The
military came for him in 1978.
Pacifist Carl von Ossietzky: prisoner of the Nazis, winner
of the Nobel Prize.
After regaling myself with research into the vagaries of the
human psyche in jeopardy, to enhance my understanding of the process of
escalation toward sadistic fascism I turned to Nazi Germany and its creation of
the death camps. I mentioned my investigation to a friend, a Guatemalan
anthropologist who grew up during the genocides and massacres of the
1970s-’80s. One might guess that, given his background, he would bitterly blurt
out that the government absolutely knew from the get-go that
its ultimate goal was to gas millions of criminals, social ‘deviants,’ and
racially ‘unacceptables.’ Such a belief is exactly the kind of public
misconception that Wachsmann corrects as he weaves together the subjective
experience of the military, the police, the detainees inside the camps, and the
populace outside them into a single, painstakingly researched narrative. In
fact (and I use that word because Wachsmann is a thorough historian of Nazism
with three books before KL under his belt), the devolution
into death factories where dead bodies were produced as if candy bars on
assembly lines was not imagined from the get-go. The journey
to that end was a years-long, labyrinthine process fueled by the chaotic
decentralization of the early camps: a seat-of-the-pants experimentation that
led to constantly changing goals and techniques, political pressures that sometimes
grew and sometimes waned, and the capture of absolute power by the supreme
sadist Adolph Hitler. At one point, in 1933-35, state officials, legal
authorities and even some SS commanders demanded and gained a downsizing of the
camps by thousands of releases — and a popular push to shut the camps down
entirely emerged. It was only scrapped due to the insistence and political pull
of SS honcho/police commander Heinrich Himmler.
At first the camps were a hodge-podge of state prisons,
existing workhouses, vacant hotels, and even pubs run by whoever was available
among the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Schutzstaffel (SS), and the police. A
potpourri of structures and rules existed, and treatment has been reported as
relatively bearable, with inmates often released. The earliest targets were
political resisters — communists, nationalists, and social democrats — as
well as criminals, “beggars and vagabonds”, particularly as the 1934 Olympics
in Berlin approached. But perhaps we could say that “the hand writing was on
the wall.”
The first wave of violence — kicking and punching — erupted
in 1933. The hands-on perpetrators, the guards, were often the poor and
working-class men who felt wronged by society and whose anger had been fanned
by instruction that inmates represented the very ‘scum,’‘swine,’ and ‘cancer’ that
threatened Germany purity. Leaders were typically those humiliated by German
defeat in World War I, then radicalized in paramilitary struggles against the
reformist, social democratic Weimar Republic. Occasional outbursts of cruelty
developed into institutional deployment of truncheons, whips, hoses,
force-feedings, sexual abuse, perverse medical experiments, and sporadic
individual and group killings. Devolution into outright obliteration was not
far behind.
Surprisingly to me, the Nazis actually cared about public
image — at least in the beginning. When prominent pacifist Carl von Ossietzky
was imprisoned in 1933, held up as a trophy prisoner and openly abused, an
international campaign to award him the Nobel Peace Prize was mounted. Feeling
the pressure, in 1936 the government moved him out of prison into a hospital.
He won the Nobel.
A thousand people lay down on the sidewalk in Santiago,
Chile during a commemorative action, 40 years after Pinochet took power. ≈
Yet, as Hitler solidified his grip within Germany, and as he
steered war strategy toward brazen confrontations, conquering most of Europe by
1941, foreign opinion mattered less and less. All prisoner releases were banned
and able inmates worked to death in the ‘Annihilation Work’ program. SS
higher-ups and guards felt the license to unleash a pandemonium of sadism.
Increasingly, Jews became the preferred scapegoat. That so many resisters of
Nazism were Jews was seen as verification of a link between them and the
‘deviance’ of ‘Jewish Bolshevism.’ As Wachsmann puts it, “Radical anti-Semitism
was part of the Camp SS code, a wild mix of traditional prejudice, racial
mania, perverse fantasies, and political paranoia.” Upon arrival guards began
to either send them directly from the train to the gas chambers or categorize
them to accentuate inferior status by requiring the six-sided star badge.
Anti-semitic ritual humiliation, maltreatment, and violence proliferated. 1941
was the year the KL stepped over the line, from killing the disabled and infirm
because they were useless to slaughtering thousands of Soviet POWs. Calculated
extermination of the Jewish population followed.
We might ask: how is such history relevant to this moment?
Hollander and Wachsmann both highlight the prominence of ambiguity,
uncertainty, and disorientation that reigns for victims and perpetrators as
circumstances unfold. Given our current situation, we might do well to recall
the old saw so popular during the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s: if a frog
is thrown into boiling water, it will jump out; but if the frog is placed in
cold water that is brought gradually to a boil, it won’t notice and will be cooked
unknowingly.
If we can apply lessons learned from similar or metaphoric
predicaments of the past, we might just become driven less by the vicissitudes
of disorientation and fear and more grounded in reality. Albeit, without a
crystal ball, the most crucial question remains as unanswered as it did for
people of the past. How much can President Trump and his accomplices achieve on
this express flight to dismantling democratic balances, uninhibited
industrialization, hyper-militarism, social-service demolition, economic
austerity, and license to murder the planet? One of Hollander’s points is that
when we break out of our numbing and reject our helplessness by actively
mobilizing the Resistance, we become less fearful, more resilient to future
difficulties, and more alive. ũ
CHELLIS
GLENDINNING is a writer and psychotherapist specializing in trauma
recovery. She is the author of seven books, including the award-winning Off
the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva:
A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. A US citizen, she lives in
Chuquisaca, Bolivia. chellisglendinning.org
_____
De THE JOURNAL OF WILD CULTURE, 09/08/2017
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