MORAL FOLLOWERSHIP AND MODERN TYRANNY

THE FOLLOWERS OF ADOLF HITLER AND SADDAM HUSSEIN

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

of

The University of Guelph

By

TRISTAN DINEEN

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for the degree of

Master of Arts

April, 2010

© Tristan Dineen, 2010

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ABSTRACT

MORAL FOLLOWERSHIP AND MODERN TYRANNY: THE FOLLOWERS OF

ADOLF HITLER AND SADDAM HUSSEIN

Tristan Dineen Advisor: University of Guelph, 2010 Professor Fred Eidlin

This thesis is an investigation of the role of morality in motivating the followers

of 20th century tyrannies. Karl Popper argued that what interested him about modern

tyrants was that they all possessed huge followings of dedicated followers who ascribed

to the tyrant's "moral message". Like the dedicated followers of any cause they believed

that what they were supporting was morally righteous. The focus of this study is the

often neglected followers of two such 20th century tyrants - Adolf Hitler and Saddam

Hussein - and why they came to view these "evil" men as the righteous saviours of their

respective peoples and lands. Concluding that in circumstances where a segment of the

human race becomes estranged, in moral terms, from the rest of humanity, it becomes

perfectly normal for people to commit evil against those deemed to be "outsiders" in the

name of good. Such alienated moral environments facilitate a moral faith in tyranny.

Table of Contents

Introduction - 1

Chapter One: The Power of Moral Foliowership in the Modern Age - 10

Chapter Two: Morality and Evil - 19

Chapter Three: Hitler's Followers - Disciples of Tyranny - 33

Chapter Four: Saddam's Followers - Children of the Great Leader - 62

Conclusion: The Moral Environment - 92

Bibliography of Works Cited - 102

1

Moral Followership and Modern Tyranny: The Followers of Adolf Hitler and Saddam

Hussein

By Tristan Dineen

In 1963, the philosopher Karl Popper described what he believed was truly interesting

about "wicked" leaders such as Hitler and Stalin. He said that he was not overly impressed by

the dictators themselves or their "immediate helpers", but that what struck him was the fact that

"the great dictators had a very large following" (Popper, 1963: 492). While he was convinced

that many of these followers could be explained away as being "easily led by the nose" and that

the "great dictators did appeal to all sorts of fears and hopes, to prejudices and to envy, and even

to hatred," he concluded that, at the core of their appeal, was something altogether more

frightening (Ibid). Popper concluded that "their main appeal was an appeal to a kind of morality

- no doubt a dubious morality. They had a message; and they demanded sacrifices. It is sad to

see how easily an appeal to morality can be misused. But it is simply a fact that the great

dictators were always trying to convince their people that they knew the way to a higher

morality" (Ibid). This moral appeal of leaders now almost universally regarded as tyrants and

the people that embraced it are the focus of this paper for they represent a neglected aspect of the

much studied but much less understood 20th century tyrannies. The question of why ordinary

people would support a tyrannical leader such as a Hitler or Saddam Hussein out of moral

fervour and be prepared to do evil in the name of good is a question that makes many people

uncomfortable, but it presents a problem that demands an answer if we are to understand why

and how these leaders attracted such vast followings and amassed such destructive power.

2

The final days of the Third Reich produced a pandemic of suicides: not only Nazi leaders,

including Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, but also thousands of ordinary Germans. Berlin

recorded 3,881 suicides in April 1945 alone. Cyanide capsules were handed out to audience

members at the final concert of the Berlin Philharmonic, and "whole, good churchgoing

families" drowned themselves, hanged themselves, or let themselves be burned alive in their

homes (Ferguson, 2006: 581; Neocleous, 2005). It is not without reason that the historian Niall

Ferguson remarks that "Like other more recent cults, the Hitler cult ended with mass suicide,"

his followers too distraught and fearful to go on without him and the cause that he championed

(Ferguson, 2006: 582). By 2009, the Iraqi government that had entered power following the

American-led 2003 invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, had to officially ban

mass visitations to the dictator's grave because too many of its citizens were expressing nostalgia

for a man commonly demonized in the West as a "Hitler wannabe" (Turchin, 2007: 26; Pravda,

2009; Reuters, 2009). Even some American bloggers have suggested putting Saddam back into

power after Iraq turned into a nightmare scenario for the U.S. military because "He kept

everybody in line and didn't put up with any bullshit from the Shiites, Sunnis, or any other

religious fanatics", fantasizing that "With Afghanistan occupied and Iraq safely back in its 'Axis

of Evil' modus operandi, the Al Qaeda operation will become homeless and unemployed"

(Gator, 2006). Both Saddam and Hitler were brutal men, but they certainly had no shortage of

followers.

Indeed, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein were two of the most despotic, dictatorial,

murderous, and ultimately tyrannical leaders that the modern era has ever produced, with their

respective regimes bringing death, persecution and oppression to whole peoples (Worsnip,

2003). And yet, these tyrants both possessed large numbers of followers who believed in them,

3

believed in their ideas, supported them even in the darkest of times, and, perhaps most

importantly of all, obeyed them (Chirot, 1994). While both of these leaders had people who

obeyed them out of fear, or out of material self-interest (both the Nazis and Saddam's Baath

Party contributed greatly to economic development in their respective countries), they also

possessed a hard-core following of people who believed in them and obeyed them not out of

coercion or out of self-interest but for moral reasons - they literally followed their leaders

because they believed that it was righteous to do so. In the words of one Nazi youth song:

We love our Fuhrer/We honour our Fuhrer/We follow our Fuhrer/Until men we are/We believe in our Fuhrer/We live for our Fuhrer/We die for our Fuhrer/Until heroes we are (Neocleous, 2005).

In both Germany and Iraq there were many people who believed that their leader was

doing the right thing and they, by extension, were doing the right thing by supporting him. In the

words of the noted leadership scholar Manfred Kets de Vries, it is as if "the specific

psychology...of a leader can become institutionalized...so that the common people come to

support the distorted and dangerous ideology articulated by the leadership (Kets de Vries, 2004:

6)." It is this form of obedience, this moral faith in the tyrant's cause, which is the concern of this

study, for it presents a problem: if near-universally condemned regimes such as Nazi Germany

and Baathist Iraq were so bad and if their leaders were so monstrous, why were there people who

looked upon them as morally righteous? If, as Daniel Chirot argues, tyranny is by definition "the

abuse of power" to "brutalize, humiliate, rob, and kill" than the very existence of these men and

women reveals an unsettling truth: modern tyrants are not mere thugs; they have a moral

message, and, contrary to popular opinion in the West, there exist perfectly sane people willing

to believe in and act out based on that moral message (Chirot, 1994: 2). Chapter one focuses on

4

these followers and their power to affect the regimes they follow in a modern world where

leaders cannot rely on traditional ideas of privilege to legitimize their rule.

This study focuses on Iraq and Germany due to the commonality of them sharing some

form of "national socialist" ideology whereby the national grouping (Arabs or ethnic Germans)

comes to be viewed as the "chosen people" endowed with a quasi-divine mission of some kind

(Baath, 1982; Bartoletti, 2005). This is an idea, which besides inspiring the true believers, could

also permeate into the wider population through economic development, military success,

national pride and similar motivating forces. The focus of this study, however, is on the true

believers - the moralistic followers - and their reasons for holding such ideological positions.

Civil society theories such as Sheri Berman's explanation of the Nazi takeover of Germany in

terms of its appeal to a German middle class that was frustrated by traditional liberal parties that

"came to be seen as the tools of big capitalists and financial interests" fail to address the origins

of the convictions of the true believers in Nazi dogma and their sense of righteousness (Berman,

1997: 416). Manfred Kets de Vries' position that "people go along with the practices of despotic

regimes due to persuasion, coercion, and/or the expected rewards when cooperating with the

regime" does not do justice to the followers of modern leaders with the backing of modern

ideologies (Kets de Vries, 2004: 132). Another explanation is cultural, with scholars such as

Charles Taylor explaining Nazism and support for Nazism as a natural outgrowth of German

culture - that the complex of beliefs that gave rise to Nazism were already present in 19l century

Germany and may have even existed in proto-form as far back as the Reformation - taking up

Herder's argument that "Just like individuals, a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own

culture," but such gross generalizations fail to explain individual motivations (Taylor, 1994: 31;

Kershaw, 1985; Chirot, 1994). Daniel Chirot's explanation of modern support for tyranny

5

emanating from "absolutist interpretations of the world" or "tyranny of certitude" is more

accurate given the power of modern political ideologies (Chirot, 1994: 17). Chapter two will

examine the theories put forward concerning the human capacity for doing evil in the name of

morality and how Nazi and Baathist supporters were able to feel morally righteous even after

committing the most heinous of crimes.

What is that drove members of the Hitler Youth to swear "to devote all my energies and

my strength to the Savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life

for him, so help me God" (Bartoletti, 2005: 24)? What led the same youths to describe the

reservations of their parents about the Nazi regime as old fashioned, as one said of his father "a

fool who had long since been left behind" (Ibid: 24)? Naturally the application of a tyrant's

moral message applies in different ways to different people in different sections of society: a

member of the Hitler Youth might support Hitler for a different reason that Hermann Goering,

for example, and there can be no clear methodological delineation between people who truly

believe in the moral message of a leader and those who just say that they do while in reality

having more material reasons for obedience (Overy, 2001; Rempel, 1989; Kets de Vries, 2004;

Kellerman, 2008). For the purposes of this study, both can be considered to be expressing their

moral faith in their leader and in his message albeit for different reasons.

Hermann Goering was certainly a believer in Hitler's moral message: remaining

unrepentant to the end. He was described as believing that "Hitler had the answers, and in the

long run Germany would discover that he had the answers...there was no question that Adolf

Hitler was right in what he did" (Overy, 2001: 144-145). At the same time Goering was the only

Nazi official to hold high office throughout the period between 1933 to 1945 and clearly had a

6

material stake in the Nazi regime, but this does not take away from the moral dimension of his

rhetoric - insincere or not (Ibid). Julius Streicher, another leading Nazi, also had self-interested

reasons for following Hitler, but at the root of his support "was a firm conviction" that he was

doing the right thing - a conviction that persisted even at his trial at Nuremburg (Reiche, 1986:

15). These men may have been opportunists, but they were also firm believers in their cause and

their opportunism does not explain the full spectrum of their actions.

As Michael Parenti has said with regard to the seemingly contradictory situation in the

modern United States whereby corporate CEOs express the moral virtues of "rugged

individualism" while at the same time accepting huge handouts from the government: "Beliefs

are no less sincerely held because they are self-serving. Quite the contrary, it is a creed's

congruity with a favourable self-image and self-interest that makes it so compelling and so

convincing to its proponents," and therefore,

many business people, including those who have benefitted in almost every way from government contracts, subsidies, and tax laws, believe their gains are the result of their own self-reliance, efforts, and talents in a highly competitive 'private' market. They believe that the assistance business gets from the government benefits the national economy, while the assistance others get is a handout to parasites (Parenti, 2002: 280).

Self-interested "opportunism" and moral belief are not mutually exclusive concepts.

The methodological qualification for this study will rest on the simple fact of people

giving moral reasons for supporting a tyrant - insincere or not - because the mere fact that a

moral argument is made demonstrates its presence, its power, and its prevalence in society (Kets

de Vries, 2004). When Goering said that Hitler was "right" in what he did, he was expressing a

clear moral approval of Hitler's actions and of the man himself, just as the initiates of the SS did

when they chose to give the oath: "I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor,

loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and those you have named to command me, obedience unto

7

death. So help me God" (Butler, 1979: 10). Chapter three will be a case study of the Nazi

movement and the motivations of its members for devoting themselves to Hitler's moral vision.

The case of Saddam Hussein raises similar dimensions. The Arab workers who came

from all around the Middle East in the 1970s and 80s to work in Iraq were certainly treated

generously in economic terms by Saddam's government but when asked how they felt about

Saddam they would celebrate Saddam's moral stature as "the hero brother" and "the Arab

knight" who was an ideological hero to the Arab masses (Aburish, 2000: 118). Saddam's

portrayal of himself as an omnipresent father-figure led some Iraqi children to insist that their

mothers kept tea and cakes at the ready "just in case Saddam stopped by", highlighting the

impact of his moral message on the young (Sciolino, 1991: 66). Popular music videos praised

Saddam as "Our father...with him there is no fear...when he sits with us he fills the home with

light," while another popular song described him as "an inspiration to the nation, the miracle of

this age; you are the conscience of the people; you are the bread and water" (Balaghi, 2006:

116). Saddam's focus on Iraq's ancient past as a means of building a modern nation-state led to

an incident where a tour guide taking tourists around the refurbished ruins of ancient Babylon

showed them the throne room of the ancient king Nebuchadnezzar and said with obvious pride,

"This is where the leader Saddam Hussein had his throne. This is where Saddam Hussein sat,"

only to correct herself when she saw the blank look on the tourists' faces (Sciolino, 1991: 51-52).

The children who sang "with our blood, with our souls, we sacrifice for Saddam" and the woman

who, when confronted by a Western journalist, said that she "genuinely loved her leader" even

after the destruction wrought by the 1991 Gulf War, indicate that, like Hitler, Saddam had moral

appeal and that, sincerely or insincerely, people expressed moral approval of him (Kelly, 2002:

81; Pope, 2002: 292). Chapter four will focus on the moral appeal of Saddam Hussein and why

8

so many people in Iraq and around the Arab World found the Baathist belief system so

appealing.

The problem of the moral message of tyrants is therefore the focus of this study and

specifically the reasons why followers chose to believe in such a moral message. Therefore this

paper is not concerned with "types" of tyrannical regimes, such as the "totalitarian, post-

totalitarian, authoritarian, and sultanistic," definitions offered by Linz & Stepan, because the

focus is on the moral beliefs of the followers of such regimes rather than defining regimes

themselves (Linz & Stepan, 1996: xiv). The reality of this moral appeal by some of the most

brutal regimes in history, and their effectiveness, forces us to recognize that, under certain

conditions, those widely considered to be the most evil men on earth can be viewed as heroic

saviours by people who want to believe in the principles that they profess and that the most evil

deeds can be considered heroically moral acts. While the cases of Saddam's Iraq and Hitler's

Germany are sufficient for the scope of this study, many other such cases could be cited,

including Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy. Each of these cases demonstrate that if a moral

environment is constructed to facilitate the estrangement of human beings from one another and

into hostile camps and if such estrangement is celebrated as righteous, people will not hesitate to

kill or abuse those labelled as "outsiders". Whether these people fully understand or are aware

of the crimes of the regime or not, the important factor is that they believe in the regime and

believe they are following a righteous cause: following a leader who appeals to their aspirations

and, through the use of "metaphors and symbols", "give to airy nothing a local habitation and a

name" (Young, 1991: xxiv). Whether we are talking about the fervour of the Palestinian

supporters of Saddam Hussein - utterly convinced that he would save them from American and

Israeli imperialism - or the Nazi stormtroopers who viewed Hitler as the "saviour" of all that was

9

good and noble in Germany in the face of an international conspiracy, a moral environment

facilitated the emergence of destructive ideas, followers, and leaders (Chirot, 1994). This is a

study of those moralistic followers and their motives and it will demonstrate that leadership and

followership are inseparable from the moral conditions they grow up in and from the material

conditions that facilitate the moral: people ultimately follow tyrants less from being "led by the

nose" and more because they are immersed in the alienating conditions that encourage tyranny.

10

Chapter One: The Power of Moral Followership in the Modern Age

Hitler and Saddam would have been powerless without the legions of people who were

willing to follow and support them. It is this fundamental reality of authoritarian leaders relying

on a democratic base, which stands at the heart of modern tyranny. There have been many

explanations as to why people choose to follow certain causes and certain leaders but one aspect

of followership remains largely unexamined, and that is moral followership. This study is

focused on the followers of political figures, viewed almost universally as tyrants, who gave their

support because they believed they were following a moral cause. This forces us to examine

followership as a concept and how morality ties in with followership as a motivation for support

and obedience, coming to the understanding that moral followership - whereby people follow a

certain leader or cause because they believe it is righteous - is in fact a mainstay of the modern

world as followers, no longer bound by traditional ties of deference to elites, form the real power

behind modern leaders who must convince them of the Tightness of their cause. Even in regimes

we would never describe as democratic, followers have real power.

Especially since the Enlightenment, followers have taken center stage in modern politics

as popular forces gained in influence and as old hereditary forms of social stratification began to

collapse. As Daniel Chirot has pointed out, the emergence of democratic forces, beginning in

18th century Europe at the time of the French Revolution, "denied the values of established,

traditional hierarchy" and "subjected politics to sudden, irrational bouts of mass hysteria," which

modern critics on the political right have been quick to condemn (Chirot, 1994: 31; Kaplan,

2000). Francis Fukuyama likewise argued that modern leaders, including authoritarian leaders

and dictators, over the past two centuries have increasingly had "to speak the language of

11

democracy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard" (Fukuyama,

2002: 45). Barbara Kellerman has argued that since the Western Enlightenment, "different

people with less of everything have demanded greater equity from those who had more" and

while she believes that there will always be "haves and have nots," the "haves are more

vulnerable now" in the modern era as traditional forms of deference to hereditary leaders are

challenged and overturned and as elected leaders are forced to defend their actions in the public

eye (Kellerman, 2008: 25).

Even Zbigniew Brzezinski has said that the modern age, and especially the decades

following World War Two, has seen a "global political awakening" as followers have gained

increasing power and the ability to influence their leaders and superiors (Ibid, 2008). To some

this movement is viewed as heralding the "inevitable triumph" of liberal democracy, at least in a

normative if not in a physical sense, as followers refuse to submit to authoritarian regimes and

refuse to support rulers who would violate their inherent rights as human beings (Fukuyama,

2002; Galston, 1999; Sinopoli, 1993). However, even very recent history is full of contradictions

to this view. Again and again, we have seen cases of educated, intelligent, and fully normal and

sane people support leaders whom many of us would assume that no rational person would

submit to (Turchin, 2007).

This leads us to the question of why any moral person would follow such brutal leaders

as Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler for moral reasons and raises serious questions about human

morality as a result. After all, Hitler unleashed the most notorious genocide in modern history

while Saddam used poison gas on his own people, and both ruled by terror and presided over

brutal police states - and yet people believed in them and celebrated them. As has been amply

12

documented throughout human history, under certain circumstances, human beings are capable

of elevating moral values to the point of ranking them as being more important than life itself

and that leaders who espouse such moral ideals will find followers willing to kill for what they

believe in - forming the wind beneath the tyrant's wings while showing that sometimes even the

most evil deeds possess a moral foundation (Chirot, 1994; Turchin, 2007; Musallam, 1996).

Kellerman argues that, in the modern age, "Those who lack obvious sources of power,

authority and influence are not usually helpless. Many can and do find ways of being heard"

(Kellerman, 2008: 20). Unlike the peasants of Tsarist Russia and other pre-modern states, the

citizens of modern countries do not passively throw up their hands and utter remarks such as

"God is high above and the Tsar is far away," in abject acceptance of unbearable conditions as

part of the natural way of things - they fight back (Lincoln, 1983). Instead of unquestioningly

following orders and accepting their superiors' justification, 27 Israeli military pilots actively

protested against their government's bombing Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip in 2002, and

"by using clever tactics such as standing together, going public, and making their case on moral

grounds," they were able to make a real impact on Israeli policy decisions (Kellerman, 2008: 20).

As Peter M. Haas has argued, policymakers can "learn new patterns of reasoning," and,

consequently, may "pursue new state interests," based largely on the input and actions of groups

of people that are "out of power" but influence those in power through their collective actions

and through their knowledge (Haas, 1992: 2). The application of "usable information", even by

subordinate groups, can thus have a significant impact on political decision-making (Haas,

2004). The same tactics used by the Israeli pilots in 2002 were used by the student movement

that rose up in support of the Iraqi Baath Party's efforts to overthrow the military-backed

government of President Qasim in 1963 (Baath, 1982; Jaber, 1966; Devlin, 1976).

13

It is common, especially in modern popular culture, to adopt a "never follow" mantra that

condemns followership as submitting to being "one among many in a meek and mindless herd"

(Kellerman, 2008: 3; Heath & Potter, 2004). It is therefore no surprise that leaders, meaning

those in positions of power and authority within a society, frequently overshadow their

subordinates (followers) in the public psyche. As Barbara Kellerman points out, there is a

tendency in human beings to fall to the "romance of leadership" and to fixate on leaders without

acknowledging the efforts of their followers because leaders "help us order a world that

otherwise is hopelessly confusing" by giving us an authority to look to for guidance (Kellerman,

2008: 10; Chirot, 1994). This point of view fails to recognize that many people derive a great

sense of empowerment, purpose, and fulfillment from being followers of a person or cause and

that such people cannot be considered as proverbial "sheep", mindlessly following their master -

they have both reasons and justifications for doing so that are often deeply personal and very

meaningful (Kellerman, 2008; Turchin, 2007). As Heath & Potter describe at length, uniforms

have been particularly singled out in popular culture as "soul-destroying" instruments of

enforced conformity and subordination, and yet those who wear uniforms - whether they be U.S.

marines for whom the uniform represents an intense sense of "brotherhood", or students at the

elite Bishop Strachan private school in Toronto Ontario "liking" their uniforms because it

reduced the pressure to buy into the latest clothing styles and accessories - often derive an

intense source of pride and distinction, allowing them to "stand out" from the rest of society

(Heath & Potter, 2004). This was certainly the case with members of the Nazi SS, conceived of

as the "armed aristocrats" of "the new Germany," who were required to be models of physical

perfection while possessing unmixed German ancestry from at least 1800 (Butler, 1979: 22;

14

Rempel, 1989; Neocleous, 2005). The point is that followers are hardly the mindless drones that

they are often made out to be but have real motivations, and moral motivations, for following.

The academic scholarship on followers is often very limited when it comes to analyzing

such motivations and their moral implications. Various scholars have identified different types

of followers: from the passive to the active to the fanatical, without explaining why these

different types of followers act as they do. Abraham Zaleznik in this "strategic management"

thesis focused on various types of "subordinates": "impulsive subordinates," who adopt a

rebellious stance towards authority but are also creative and constructive in their working efforts;

"compulsive subordinates," who seek to influence those in authority through "passive means"

because they do not want to be seen as blatantly power-hungry; "masochistic subordinates," who

literally "want to be in pain" and submit to those in authority in every way and even seek to

invite criticism on themselves; and "withdrawn subordinates," who do not care about their

working performance, see the world in a negative light, and would generally prefer to remain in

the background as much as possible (Kellerman, 2008: 77; Zaleznik, 1977). Zaleznik offers no

explanation in this model as to why "subordinates" act as they do, leaving their motivations,

including potential moral motivations, unclear. This gives a very incomplete picture to say the

least.

Robert Kelly in his book The Power of Follower ship, describes a similar spectrum of

followers from the assertive to the passive: "alienated followers" think freely and critically and

are quick to challenge authority but prefer to act alone and rarely engage in group activities;

"exemplary followers" are actively engaged in group efforts and perform well in every aspect of

the tasks assigned to them and commonly display initiative in going beyond what is expected of

15

them, as certain Nazis did when they followed the mantra of "working towards the Fuhrer"

(Kershaw, 1985: 143); "conformist followers" defer to leaders in all things and are not

independent thinkers, but are fully engaged in group efforts as directed; "passive followers"

literally let leaders "think for them" and require constant supervision as a result - showing no

initiative and not really participating in anything unless they are supervised by a superior;

"pragmatist followers" are very "middle of the road" in their attitude toward authority and while

they can be critical of those in authority they more often tow-the-line and are careful not to go

too far in their criticism (Kellerman, 2008: 81-82; Kelly, 1992). In this spectrum, Kelly does not

examine whether the motivations of followers - whether "alienated", "exemplary", "conformist",

"passive" etc. - might have something to do with an individual's moral commitment or not, in

fact he does not ask why followers behave as they do at all.

Ira Chaleff, in The Courageous Follower, categorizes followers somewhat differently but

on a similar scale: "implementers" are the mainstay of large organizations and are depended on

by superiors to "implement" ideas and to get work done - being trustworthy and reliable enough

to carry out orders and instructions; "partners" are fully supportive of their leaders but are

willing to offer criticism and to challenge their decisions if they feel it is necessary;

"individualists" tell their leaders what they think without apology and are generally marginalized

within large organizations for their "rebellious" attitudes; "resources" are generally quite passive

and are content to do an "honest day's work" but never really go beyond what is expected of

them and only do the minimum required (Kellerman, 2008: 83; Chaleff, 2001). Like Kelly,

Chaleff does not focus on the moral motivations, or any particular motivations, for being a

"good" or "bad" follower of a particular organization or cause.

16

Barbara Kellerman describes a similar range of followers but with more focus on the

political realm rather than the business realm. "Isolates" are detached from wider society and do

not really care about leaders or know much about them; their apathy serves to strengthen the

status quo and those leaders who are already in power. "Bystanders" observe but do not

participate; in fact, they make the deliberate decision to stand aside and to defer to the judgement

of their leaders - thus granting them tacit support in whatever they do. "Participants" are

somewhat active in society and invest some of their time and effort in groups and causes they

believe in and try to have an impact - they either clearly support or clearly oppose leaders in

power. "Activists" feel strongly about leaders and causes and are respectively strongly

supportive or strongly opposed - working hard to either help or hinder those in power. "Die-

hards" are the most dedicated followers and are literally willing to die for their cause which

defines their lives and how they see themselves. They are either deeply devoted to leaders in

power or are fanatically opposed to them (Kellerman, 2008: 92).

In her study, Kellerman argues that the German people, by and large, under the Nazis

were simply passive "bystanders" who stood by and let acquiesced to the crimes being

committed in their name, that they were mesmerized by Hitler and gripped with a kind of "herd

mentality" (Ibid). She cites one American journalist who said, after witnessing the crowd's

reaction to one of Hitler's speeches, "if he [Hitler] had remained in sight for more than a few

moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement," one of Hitler's

followers who described him as a "virtuoso on the keyboard of the mass psyche", and another

who described how, after hearing Hitler speak, his "critical faculty was swept away" (Ibid). This

is not the concern of this study. While Kellerman's categorization of followers is more

applicable to the scope of this study than Zaleznik's or Kelly's, due to its focus on political

17

followers in contrast to subordinates in a business context, it too largely fails to take into account

the motivations of the different categories of followers and the moral implications of their

behaviour choices. In short, it fails to explain why certain people chose to support Hitler in the

name of moral righteousness.

Manfred Kets de Vries distinguishes himself from the other scholars mentioned here

because goes further and actually examines the motivations of different categories of followers

while taking seriously the idea that followers can be motivated to follow evil leaders for moral

reasons. He concludes that there are really only two categories of followers: the first category is

made up of people who believe that they "have found both their calling and their messiah" in

supporting their chosen leader(s), and actively support their superiors with great enthusiasm; the

second category is made up, on one hand, of "coerced" followers who simply follow leaders to

avoid punishment, and "opportunists" who have seen how much the "in-crowd" can profit from

access to power and support leaders and regimes in the name of self-gain. Both offer support out

of "convenience" but still can sometimes prove to be very loyal and effective in their support

(Kets de Vries, 2004: 132).

This study is not about the second category of followers that Kets de Vries mentions, to

which I would add those Germans and Iraqis who supported the respective regimes of Hitler and

Saddam because they brought about economic growth and national strength. As one early Nazi

described how following the Nazis gaining power in 1933, "People were once more laughing and

singing in Germany; they were happy and had once more a sense of secure existence," not only

in economic terms but in terms of national identity as well: they again had confidence in

Germany (Lowrie, 1959: 90). Likewise this study is not concerned with those Iraqis who, living

18

in a land devastated by war and civil strife, long for Saddam Hussein because "Under Saddam, a

ministry was a ministry," which "functioned" and "served the people" (Brown, 2008). Simply

supporting a leader because he or she makes the trains run on time or because he or she gets the

economy back on track cannot explain the sense of moral righteousness that many Nazis and

Baathists felt concerning their respective causes and leaders. It does not explain the motivations

of the Stormtroopers who sang:

Ring, thou Bell of Revolution! Ring and call the fighting warriors/Call the graybeards, call the young men/Call the sleepers from their couches/Call the young girls from their chambers/Call the mothers from their cradles. Let the air be shrill with warning, with warning of dire vengeance! Call the dead from mouldering grave vaults with a thunderous cry for vengeance/Vengeance! Vengeance! Germany Awake (Neocleous, 2005: 107).

As has been previously mentioned, this study will focus particularly on the first category of

followers that Kets de Vries describes, namely those who follow leaders for moral reasons or

least express their loyalty in moral terms: as one Nazi said, after hearing Hitler speak, "I had

found myself, my leader, and my cause" (Kellerman, 2008: 99). For these reasons, this essay

will primarily focus on his conception of foliowership: focusing on those people for whom Hitler

and Saddam embodied "their calling and their messiah" (Kets de Vries, 2004: 132).

The people who did this were not the submissive and tradition-bound peasants of

yesteryear, but choice-making modern citizens convinced that what they were doing was right:

they offered these leaders their dedication rather than their deference. Though often

overshadowed by the leaders they empowered, these men and women facilitated everything they

did: expressing a moral faith in their leader which drove them to action.

19

Chapter Two: Morality and Evil

As Kets de Vries makes clear, leadership and followership are intensely moralistic

concepts (Kets de Vries, 2004). Followers, just as leaders, often have intensely personal reasons

for adopting the kind of stance they take. According to Rudolph Giuliani, "Leadership does not

simply happen...It can be taught," and "learned" and depends largely on context, on culture, and

on the character of the leader's followers - who they are, what their aspirations are etc. (Cited in

Kellerman, 2008: 13). As Kellerman argues, horrible events like the Holocaust were only made

possible because the orders of the Nazi elite were obeyed "directly and indirectly, by millions of

apparently ordinary Germans" (Ibid: 15). Needless to say, the capacity of ordinary people to

obey the homicidal orders of their political masters and their moral status as followers of such

masters has generated intense curiosity in the decades since World War Two and many

explanations have been put forward in an effort to understand their seemingly irrational

behaviour. In short, how could people do evil while believing that they were doing good? Many

explanations have been put forward concerning the motivations that inspire people to commit

evil deeds - from fear and coercion, to immersion within a bureaucratic infrastructure with

assigned roles, economic deprivation and desperation, and even human nature - but none of them

adequately explains what motivates a human being to make a moral choice to follow the tyrant in

question. As Claudia Koonz has described, "The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron," and

followers of Hitler often followed "severe ethical maxims," derived from "broad philosophical

concepts" (Koonz, 2003: 1). The follower who supports a tyrant because he or she legitimately

believes it is the right thing to do will then separate those people considered worthy of moral

consideration from "outsiders" unworthy of such consideration - allowing them to commit

20

seemingly unthinkable crimes with a clear conscience (Ibid). This estrangement facilitates the

phenomenon of moral evil.

The moral aspect of followership is neglected not only in the actual literature on

followership in general but in the literature on followers of tyrants in particular. Erich Fromm

argued that the people who followed Hitler came from a society where they had been "socially

adjusted" to take pleasure in obedience and subordination to an all-powerful "father-figure", thus

relieving themselves of the burdens of moral responsibility and transferring them to the leader

(Kellerman, 2008: 15-16; Fromm, 1941). Hannah Arendt, in her famous "banality of evil"

thesis, argued that, far from the "subhuman beasts, the insatiable sadists, of popular

imagination," the Nazis and their followers were "ordinary, normal people, fundamentally

similar to you and us" (Miale & Selzer, 1975: 3; Kellerman, 2008; Heath & Potter, 2004). She

pointed out that Adolf Eichmann was merely a bureaucrat who "could not bear to watch Jews

being murdered" but carried out his orders anyway because "he would have had a bad

conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do" (Miale & Selzer, 1975: 6).

This argument seemed to be confirmed when Stanley Milgram carried out a series of

experiments in the early 1960s, finding that, when under pressure from an authority figure, the

majority of people studied (65%) would obey orders to the point of shocking someone to death

(Miale & Selzer, 1975; Kellerman, 2008; Heath & Potter, 2004). Likewise he found that when

people were not under immediate pressure from an authority figure their level of obedience

"dropped sharply" and no one shocked anyone to death, leading Milgram to argue that such

results could only be explained "by the transformation of behaviour that comes through

obedience to orders" whereby, echoing Fromm, "the subject performs the action" but he or she

21

"allows the authority to define its morality" (Miale & Selzer, 1975: 9). Douglas Kelly, the

American psychiatrist and criminologist who supervised leading Nazi prisoners during the

Nuremburg trials, pointed out that none of them "were sufficiently deviant to require custodial

care according to the laws of our country," and that they were essentially sane - lending support

to Milgram's thesis that "obedience rather than aggression" (or obedience that facilitated

aggression) is what made the crimes of the Nazis possible (Ibid: 13).

This argument seemed to be further confirmed when Philip Zimbardo, in 1971, engaged

in his infamous "prison experiment" at Stanford University and witnessed that within days

ordinary college students would become either "brutal guards" or "weak and dependent

prisoners" depending on the institutional roles they were given during the experiment

(Kellerman, 2008: 17-18). Kellerman concludes that "from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib" there

have been "certain social settings" which have served to "contaminate both superiors and their

subordinates" and facilitated inhuman acts of cruelty in the process (Ibid: 18). However, people

such as Adolf Eichmann - who followed Hitler and committed evil deeds in his name not

because of any real ideological or moral commitment but because he did as he was told within an

institutional framework - are not the focus of this study. The fact, as Michael Parenti pointed

out, that "Bureaucracy can be used to administer a national health program or run a death camp,"

does not explain the actions of those individuals who truly believed that what they were doing

was correct from a moral standpoint and who were not "just following orders" (Parenti, 2002:

262). Followers who view their cause (or leader) as morally righteous are certainly not acting

out of "banality", but through choice and Milgram and Arendt fail to explain these people and

their motivations.

22

Others have bypassed the question of moral foliowership by blaming human nature.

Many of people who have found the "banality of evil" argument to be difficult to accept have

opted for the simpler argument that some people, perhaps even the entire human race, are just

inherently "evil" and thus prone to wickedness (Popper, 1963). The noted war correspondent

Chris Hedges argued that in every society, "There are always people willing to commit

unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege" a "god-like

empowerment over other human lives", arguing that something evil in human nature drives

people to commit cruel deeds (Hedges, 2003: 88). Niall Ferguson, author of the monumental

history of twentieth century conflict - The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the

Descent of the West - argues that the twentieth century has been defined by ongoing warfare

fuelled by nationalist claims of exclusive ethnic control over territory and totalitarian ideologies

and that "as long...as men plot the destruction of their fellow-men," which he insists is a natural

instinct and can only be controlled via certain political and legal arrangements, "as long as we

dread and yet also somehow yearn to see our great metropolises laid waste - this war will recur,

defying the frontiers of chronology" (Ferguson, 2006: lxxi).

Robert Kaplan argues that men simply "like to fight" and, taking a position similar to that

of Thomas Hobbes, argues that our selfish natures and capacity for brutality means that

"Institutionalizing war-crimes tribunals will have as much effect on future war crimes as Geneva

Conventions have had on the Iraqi and Serbian militaries" (Kaplan, 2000: 100). Likewise,

Michael Ignatieff remarked, after witnessing the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland in the

early 1990s, that "liberal civilization - the rule of laws not men, of argument in the place of

force, of compromise in place of violence - runs deeply against the human grain and is only

achieved and sustained by the most unremitting struggle against human nature," and that "liberal

23

virtues" such as "tolerance, compromise" and "reason" had to be defended "by force" (Ignatieff,

1993: 188).

Nevertheless, as Miale and Selzer argue, such points of view based on a supposedly

"evil" human nature "probably tell us more about the people who hold them, and the societies

which institutionalized them, than they do about human nature itself (Miale & Selzer, 1975: 4).

The actions of Hitler's followers, some of whom did act out of sadism, should not, by extension,

criminalize the entire human race as a race of genetically pre-disposed barbarians. It is true that

the actions of some Nazis, like the commandant of a Belgian Gestapo interrogation center who

greeted new arrivals with the words "this is hell, and I am the devil", can only be described as

sadistic (Wright, 1989: 186). However, this does not explain the motivations behind people like

the German factory worker who, after being "politically reborn" through Hitler, enthused that

"my father's lifelong yearning for a German socialism was tenable...here was my joyous

acknowledgment, a bright enthusiasm, a pure faith in Adolf Hitler and Germany" (Abel, 1938:

212). Such moral feelings need more explanation than appeals to some undefined innate "evil"

within human nature.

People who are capable of killing other human beings for moral reasons, and this is

especially true with regard to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, are typically viewed with

repugnance by those who do not share their belief system. Human morality in all cultures

around the world does share certain themes and it would appear that there is such a thing as

universal human morality. As Steven Pinker argues, human beings "share a distinction between

right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription

of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the

24

community; shame; and taboos" (Pinker, 2008: 6; Turchin, 2007; Morris, 1969). He goes on to

argue that these "universals" are not considered to be a matter of private preference but of public

morality and are held to be objective and universally applicable: one can easily say, "I don't like

brussel sprouts, but I don't care if you eat them," but no one would say, "I don't like killing, but I

don't care if you murder someone" (Pinker, 2008: 2; Joyce, 2006; Wilson, 2003). Certain

actions and, unsurprisingly, those things most damaging to human empathy and to the

functioning solidarity of the community, are also those actions that have been universally

criminalized in various ways. Even in the mid-191 century in his writings on chivalry, the

English historian John Batty could describe an event which would be universally acclaimed

today: "Again, how common, unhappily, is such an occurrence as this! Suddenly a person falls

into the water - it may be a child - who must be drowned if help comes not immediately to

extricate it. A passer-by - maybe a young man - without a moment's consideration, not thinking

of his fine clothes, jumps into the water in order to save the child's life" (Batty, 2004: 83-84;

Staub, 1992). We all are elated when we here such stories, for they reinforce our confidence,

which is so often undermined, in our common humanity.

It follows that, for ordinary people, killing another human being is not an easy thing.

One study that was done recently presented people across five continents with two moral

dilemmas: on one hand, you have a situation where the individual sees a trolley hurtling toward

five men, he can switch the trolley to another track to save them but if he does so he will kill one

man standing on that track, the vast majority of people were in agreement that in such a situation

the right thing to do was to kill one person to save five. However, for the second example of a

moral dilemma things were different: in this case the trolley was also hurtling toward five men,

but in this case in order to save them the individual would have to throw the only heavy object

25

within reach, a fat man, in front of the trolley and thus kill him in order to save the others. In

both cases the individual is asked whether it would be moral to kill one to save five. In the first

case, the response was overwhelmingly in favour of doing so but in the second case the

overwhelming majority of people would refuse to physically throw the fat man in front of the

trolley in order to save the five men (Pinker, 2008: 4). This survey was done on five continents

and regardless of demographics, religion, age, culture, language etc. people almost universally

agreed to kill one man to save five in the instance where the individual would only have to

switch the trolley onto another track and thus have no physical contact with the victim, whereas

they overwhelmingly refused when they would have to physically throw the fat man in front of

the trolley (Pinker, 2008: 4; Gintis et al, 2008; Turchin, 2007; Joyce, 2006; Wilson, 2003).

This reveals something very striking about human beings, that for the vast majority of us,

beyond certain psychopaths and other mentally damaged individuals, we cannot directly kill

another human being. We need to be distanced from the victim of our actions in some way and

this need for psychological estrangement or alienation from "the other" speaks volumes about

human conceptions of morality. There has never been a single war between human beings, or a

single genocide or incidence of mass killing where the killers did not try to distance themselves,

physically or psychologically, from their victims (Turchin, 2007; Kaplan, 2000; Ferguson, 2006;

Winter, 1996; Morris, 1969). In his analysis of modern terrorist organizations, Marc Sageman

describes how most of their recruits are,

romantic young people...with a dream of changing the world...The romance is easiest to maintain during strikes on distant, depersonalized enemies, like the Americans overseas of the Israelis behind their new barriers. But as attacks move into the terrorists' own neighbourhoods (as they did in Iraq), and as the victims include recognizable kinsmen or fellow citizens, the romance fades...the dream will no longer be attractive to young people (Sageman, 2006).

26

So how does a tyrant continue to motivate his followers to commit evil deeds in the name of a

higher morality?

This leads us back to Milgram's idea of moral authority being transferred to an authority

figure in order for the individual to distance themselves from their own heinous actions.

However, Milgram's experiments were carried out on a very personal level and fail to explain

how an entire society would do something like demonize an ethnic minority or treat the

followers of a certain religion as sub-human. This brings us to the role of symbolism in human

affairs. When German schoolchildren in the 1930s were constantly told that they were members

of the Herrenrasse (Master Race) and that "Jews were the source of our misfortune" and had "no

business being among us true Germans" a symbolic demarcation was being made between good

and evil, right and wrong, clean and unclean (Bartoletti, 2005: 42; Pinker, 2008; Turchin, 2007;

Edelman, 1964). It was the same thing in Tsarist Russia where even high-ranking members of

the ruling elite, including Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II on multiple occasions, demonized

Jews as "economic exploiters" and "Christ-killers" who had no business among "real" Russians

to the point of being forcibly expelled from Moscow and victimized by murderous pogroms

throughout the country (Lincoln, 1983). In examining this pervasive phenomenon we gain a

greater understanding as to why people would commit evil and support evil in the name of

perceived moral righteousness - a moral righteousness which places some concept or ideal

higher than human life itself (Pinker, 2008; Anderson, 2006).

Desmond Morris, even in 1969, highlighted this process, saying that "The key error of

assuming that a member of another group must possess certain special inherited character traits

typical of his group, is constantly arising. If he wears a different uniform, speaks a different

27

language, or follows a different religion, it is illogically assumed that he also has a biologically

different personality" (Morris, 1969: 127). In fact, and in total contrast to such assumptions,

when scientist Richard Lewontin did a ground-breaking study on genetic variation among

different human "races" and ethnic groups in the 1970s, he found that 85% of the variation

among human beings is between individuals and "is shared across all populations and races"

while there was only a 7% variation between ethnic groups within a single race (Germans and

Italians among Caucasians for example) and only 8% between races (Wells, 2006: 21). As

subsequent research has further confirmed, Lewontin concluded that human beings "rather than

belonging to discrete subspecies... are part of one big extended family," scientific evidence that

destroys many nationalist arguments entirely on an empirical level (Ibid).

Nevertheless, the alienation described by Morris does constantly arise in normative

terms; to hear the media talk collectively of Muslims following 2001 is blatant confirmation of

this - a mixture of callous disregard and hyper-sensitivity depending on the channel (Hedges,

2003; Johnstone, 2002; Parenti, 2006). It becomes easier to understand why people would

follow leaders like Hitler and believe their propaganda about the Jews and other minorities when

we look at modern parallel examples. The tendency by the West to treat Muslims in general,

whether out of spite or sympathy, "as having a tendency to violence, anger, antimodernism, and

close-mindedness," is certainly not helping in the supposed battle to "win hearts and minds" in

the struggle against Islamic extremism, which has been touted so frequently by the White House

and Westminster (Hedges, 2003: 47; Turchin, 2007; Sageman, 2006). Such generalizations of

different groups, who in many cases are incredibly diverse and may be linked by only a single

factor, are inevitably flawed: "Even as superficial assessments of acquired national characters

these generalizations are gross over-simplifications, but they are taken much further: for many

28

people they are accepted as inborn traits of the out-groups concerned. It is really believed that in

some way the 'breeds' have come to differ, that there was been some genetic change; but this is

nothing more than the illogical wishful thinking of the in-grouping tendency" (Morris, 1969:

127; Wells, 2006; Turchin, 2007).

Such sweeping characterizations of ethnic minorities as outsiders, parasites, and

otherwise subversive to the dominant group in society are in large part responsible for the

murderous process of state-formation that was described previously as nationalists turned on

their own neighbours in an effort to "cleanse" the nation of undesirable elements not in

conformity with the national vision (Roberts, 1975; Overy, 2001; Taylor, 1994). While the

national/cultural generalizations that Morris describes, such as "Germans are said to be

laboriously, obsessively methodical," or "British to be stiff and retiring," or "Italians to be

excitedly emotional," may seem playful, they highlight what can be described as a cancerous

way of thinking that degrades our common humanity (Morris, 1969: 127; Ferguson, 2006;

Popper, 1963; Turchin, 2007). Indeed, such distinctions have the impact in moral terms of

making other people out to be something less than human, allowing people to commit evil deeds

toward others without considering them to be evil because when they hurt them they feel they are

hurting an abstraction, not a human being (Pinker, 2008; Hedges, 2003). As Michael Parenti

points out, "The very act of bonding in tribal solidarity places an implicit boundary around one's

group. By claiming a special link to one segment of humanity, we set ourselves apart from the

rest. With brotherhood comes 'otherhood'" (Parenti, 2006: 92; Turchin, 2007).

Nationalism emphasizes unity but bases that unity upon skin colour, language, ethnicity

and other such external factors and employs this unity as a means of excluding those considered

29

to be outsiders (Popper, 1963). Nationalism is bound by the principle of one nation, one people

and its symbols of solidarity exist on that basis, often at the expense of others. Hence, Pierre

Trudeau commented that "in a neighboring country, Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, the

Hun, the Red Scourge, the Yellow Peril, and Senator McCarthy have all provided glue for the

American Way of Life," by unifying them against a common enemy, real or imagined - a

tradition carried on by George W. Bush and others in the so-called "War on Terror" (Trudeau,

1968: 194; Turchin, 2007). While this notion of a "common enemy", put forward most notably

by Turchin as a driving force in human history, is not the focus of this study, it does point to the

set of forces that conspire to build a "moral climate" where evil deeds against other human

beings can be justified, not merely out of survival but because they are actually viewed as moral

actions (Parenti, 2006). For a 12l century crusader, killing a fellow Christian was viewed as

murder whereas killing a Muslim "infidel" was a glorious thing indeed (Turchin, 2007; Pinker,

2008). This goes far in explaining why a member of Hitler's SS (and to a lesser extent Saddam's

Republican Guard), confident in the rightness of his cause and in his own supposed "racial

superiority", would think nothing of gunning down defenceless prisoners of war for daring to

stand in his way (Butler, 1979; Manvell, 1969; Rempel, 1989; Hedges, 2003).

On this basis nationalism clearly denies the greater unity of humanity and in some

extreme cases may even deny humanity even exists beyond the citizenry and ethnicity of the

nation in question - what Benedict Anderson refers to as the "imagined community," which is

both "inherently limited and sovereign" in moral terms as well as in geographical space

(Anderson, 2006: 6). Peter Turchin, in studying humanity's impressive capacity for symbolic

thinking, concludes that such things as religion, ritual, clothing, ornamentation (including such

things as flags and national symbols), behaviour, and dialect developed as a means of

30

consolidating group identity in the face of external threats, or, in his words, a "way for humans to

distinguish between those with whom to cooperate and those who should be killed on the spot"

and nationalism is, without a doubt, the highest evolution of this process (Turchin, 2007: 133;

Ferguson, 2006; Morris, 1969; Edelman, 1964). The Nazis were experts at fostering this kind of

symbolic demarcation between groups. As Eric Reiche has described, "marching songs, frequent

and well-publicized meetings and street demonstrations, and an effective use of symbols and

ceremonies, such as consecrating the new SA flags by touching them to the 'blood flag' of

November 1923, had a definite role in shaping the SA," as a moral as well as a political force

that was standing up to "alien" forces in German society such as the Jews and the "Reds"

(Reiche, 1986: 71). Human beings thus cease to be viewed as human and it can be moral to

commit murder against a member of a rival tribe for example, while consolidating political and

cultural authority in the hands of the guardians of this symbolism (Harman, 2008).

Needless to say, such generalizations have enormous power. In the eyes of many

Americans, the events of September 2001 did not just condemn Al-Qaeda and religious

extremists in their eyes but Arabs, Muslims and the Islamic religion in general (Turchin, 2007;

Hedges, 2003; Parenti, 2006). When German soldiers in World War I, faced with protracted

partisan resistance, committed a series of massacres in occupied Belgium the Allied propaganda

machine evoked the symbol of "poor little Belgium" and argued that the German soldiers

committed the atrocities not because they were soldiers or occupiers in a foreign country facing

armed resistance, but because "they were Germans" as if they were possessed by some sort of

genetic brutality (Winter, 1996). Likewise, to this day many commentators argue that the

Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War committed atrocities not because they were under siege

from all sides, not because they were trying to consolidate their power in the face of

31

overwhelming odds and with no friends to turn to, and not because their enemies were using

extremely brutal tactics against them, but because they were "communists" and because there

was something inherently brutal about their ideology (Parenti, 1997; Ferguson, 2006; Chirot,

1994). In each of these cases, stereotypes motivated human beings to hate Muslims, hate

Germans, and hate communists to the point of being prepared to kill them while reinforcing the

public's obedience to those who spread such propaganda - all on moral grounds.

This form of mass alienation that segregates a group of people from the rest of humanity

and either raises them or degrades them in symbolic terms certainly has the potential, in the

minds of its adherents, of justifying unspeakable atrocities against the outsider; this is captured

precisely in the words of Japanese Lieutenant-Colonel Tanaka Ryukichi as he participated in

what was to be known as the "Rape of Nanking": "Frankly speaking, you and I have

diametrically different views of the Chinese. You may be dealing with them as human beings,

but I regard them as swirie. We can do anything to such creatures" (Ferguson, 2006: 477). An

estimated 200,000 Chinese were massacred by Japanese troops in this particular incident in

December 1937. Likewise, the reactionary organizers of anti-Jewish pogroms in Tsarist Russia

in the late 19th and early 20l centuries referred to Jews in similar terms, as "enemies" as

"vermin" who must "be destroyed" - with some even calling for a "crusade against the hated

race" (Lincoln, 1982). Thousands of Jews would perish in the years between 1890 and 1914;

tens of thousands would be driven from their homes; and tens of thousands would flee Russia

entirely. It is not without reasons that W. Bruce Lincoln describes Tsarist Russia as "the most

anti-Semitic society before Nazi Germany" (Ibid). There can be no doubt that the American

perpetrators of the inhuman torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu-Ghraib prison in recent years were

motivated by similar feelings of brutal alienation. Turchin's previously quoted study of

32

symbolism also reveals how Hitler and Stalin were able to condemn "millions of humans who

were in the wrong category - the wrong race, the wrong class, or the wrong place - to death"

(Chirot, 1994: 71). All that is needed is the alienating mental leap that strips the humanity of a

subject and replaces it with the mantle of the "foreign", the "alien", or the "subversive". These

examples should give the reader an idea as to how a person in Germany or Iraq could be

motivated by a leader like Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler to commit or to accept evil deeds

against people considered to be "non-humans", and to do so on moral grounds: in short, evil in

the name of good.

33

Chapter Three: Hitler's Followers - Disciples of Tyranny

The word "tyrant" is one of the most frequently misinterpreted and misapplied terms in

the English language - a word beloved of politicians, interest groups, and commentators seeking

to demonize their opponents as evil, power-hungry, monstrosities. In the original Greek,

"tyrannos" was a word used with regard to any leader who brought about significant change in

the ancient customs of a city-state or kingdom - a leader who broke with tradition and forged a

new path. As Arlene Saxonhouse of the University of Michigan points out, "tyranny" in the

Greek context was not necessarily evil and could "indicate a creativity and a freedom to

transcend the limits inherited from the past.. .a freedom to break away from what was old and

limiting" (Saxonhouse, 1988: 1261). This certainly was the sentiment expressed by Heinrich

Klotz, leader of the Nazi movement in Nuremburg, in 1923 when he described "the sudden

awakening that was taking place among the German people" as they began to embrace Hitler's

moral message (Reiche, 1986: 43). However, tyranny has thus come down to us in a strictly

negative sense. For example, Daniel Chirot's definition of modern tyranny as simply "the abuse

of power" has been utilized by modern conservatives to demonize any non-conservative

politician simply because he or she is not conservative enough and is thereby "abusing" their

power (Chirot, 1994: 2; Kets de Vries, 2004). Thus tyranny is a difficult word; it is used here

only because, for all its problems, it seems to be one of the few words capable of adequately

describing the populist authoritarian leaders throughout the 20th century who succeeded in

inspiring millions of followers through their destructive, yet appealing, moral message (Popper,

1963).

34

It would be a surprise for the average layperson to learn that dictatorial leaders we would

generally hold to be immoral tyrants, for all their power, still felt the need to appeal to a moral

message just as our present leaders do (Parenti, 2002). Joseph Stalin justified the brutal

elimination of "class enemies" as being a necessary step in the creation of a "socialist paradise"

through the economic development and urbanization of Russia (Chirot, 1994; Parenti, 1997;

Ferguson, 2006). Even Idi Amin justified his seemingly pathological violence in Uganda by

arguing that it was the only way to hold the country together at a time of inter-tribal strife and

economic crisis (Chirot, 1994). None of these leaders, often cited as mere thugs and tyrants,

would have been able to succeed without the moral message that they preached and used to

attract mass followings. Such was the control that they were able to exert, that not one of these

leaders was overthrown by his own people, something that would be impossible for such brutal

leaders unless they were viewed as legitimate by much of the population in the countries they

ruled. Unlike ancient tyrants, these modern tyrants harnessed the power of the masses through a

mass ideology that "claims to explain everything perfectly. This sense of certitude can justify

the worst horrors in the name of sanctity, purity, and the general improvement of life for the

multitudes" (Chirot, 1994: 118). While modern tyrants, like their ancient counterparts, inflicted

terrible suffering, but unlike their ancient forebears they and their millions of supporters fully

believed that they had a moral imperative to inflict such suffering in the name of a higher good

(Popper, 1963; Kaplan, 2000; Ferguson, 2006). First among these tyrants in both effectiveness

and notoriety is Adolf Hitler, to whom "most Germans were grateful...early in his rule for

bringing back what they considered normality - order and strength.. .This has posed a problem

for historians who cannot believe that such an evil man was loved. But he was" (Chirot, 1994:

161; Heath & Potter, 2004). His appeal to moral themes of purity, solidarity, and strength won

35

the support of a diverse cross-section of the German population in a way that has never been

equalled since. This was a population that was in many ways already willing to embrace his

moral message due to a toxic combination of material conditions and moral beliefs aimed at

keeping the German Volk "pure" in the face of outsiders - an alienation that would result in the

most notorious genocide in modern history and one of its most terrifying political movements

(Ferguson, 2006; Parenti, 1997).

As has been made clear in previous chapters, the popular image of Nazi Germany is one

of brainwashed pawns following an all-powerful leader as he hypnotizes them through mass

rallies, through radio broadcasts, and constant displays of military power. As Ian Kershaw

makes clear, following 1945, many German historians were desperate to counter the general

consensus among their Anglo-American counterparts who argued that Nazism was the natural

"culmination of centuries of German cultural and political misdevelopment reaching back to

Luther and beyond" (Kershaw, 1985: 7). Friedrich Meinecke, for example, argued that Nazism

represented "a sort of parasitic sub-growth," which he traces all the way back to French

Revolution, and which was swept to power in the aftermath of the First World War amid "a

collapse of moral and religious values, the dominance of materialism, the growth of barbarism,

and a corruption of politics as Machiavellianism and demagogy" (Ibid: 7). Gerhard Ritter found

it "unbearable" that "the will of a single mad man" - the "demon" Hitler - had driven Germany

into the Second World War by deceiving his people, though his own studies do not paint such a

black and white image (Kershaw, 1985: 7; Ritter, 1959). Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, in

their critique of the modern counter-culture that emerged in the 1960s and has continued in

various forms to this day, emphasize the pathological obsession of post-war youth with rebellion

against government and organized society in general as being largely in reaction to the horrors of

36

Nazism and the fear that Western society in general was growing equally totalitarian: "Suddenly,

the idea that the whole culture might be a system of ideology began to seem more plausible.

After all, the Germans had been completely brainwashed by the Nazis. Why not us? And if we

were the victims of total brainwashing, how would we know" (Heath & Potter, 2004: 28)? This

sense of paranoia in Western popular culture, evident in how many films have been released over

the years with the Nazis as the bad guys, and a clamouring among historians, particularly

German historians, to emphasize their "moral detestation" of Nazism has led to the persistence of

"brainwashing" myths (Ibid).

As has been demonstrated, this popular idea is a myth that has probably persisted for so

long out of wishful thinking: that the German people did not consciously want the Nazis in

power but were somehow hypnotized against their will. Gerhard Ritter described Hitler's rise to

power in terms that hardly sound unique: "The masses who rallied to him did not at all believe

that they were helping a dictator to seize power; they had supported a man of the people who had

their confidence and from whom they expected the fulfillment of their wishes - of a thousand

vast hopes" (Ritter, 1959: 83-84). Ritter could have been describing Barack Obama with words

like that. A Nazi youth who maintained his moral faith in Hitler despite living in a household

hostile to it can hardly be described as brainwashed:

Already when I was with the Stahlhelm (a right-wing paramilitary group), there was trouble with my parents and brothers. My parents and one brother were with the Center Party and four other brothers were with the Reichsbanner (a left-wing paramilitary group). Since I was a drum major for the Stahlhelm, and later for the NSDAP (the Nazi Party), and one of my brothers was a drum major for the Reichsbanner, the black-white-and-red insignia were leaning in one corner of my parents' home and the black-red-and-gold ones in another corner. Yet my brown shirt and his Reichsbanner jacket hung peacefully side by side in the closet. With such contrasting political views, it was not always peaceful at home. Sometimes physical clashes were unavoidable because I was not about to give up my Nazi membership since I believed Hitler to be Germany's salvation (Merkl, 1980: 94).

That Hitler was "Germany's salvation" was the fervently held belief of many Germans. The

reality that millions of Germans "rallied" to Hitler because they believed that he could fulfill

37

their aspirations, and because he had a moral message that they could believe in, makes

statements like Lucy Dawidowicz's that Nazism is "the essence of evil, the daemon let loose in

society, Cain in corporate embodiment" and Karl Jasper's that "Nazism is a warning," and "To

forget it is guilt", decidedly unhelpful (Kershaw, 1985: 17).

Zevedei Barbu argued that Germany faced a "unique" situation "of stress and insecurity"

after World War I and that what Hitler and the Nazis offered was "the quickest and the most

radical way of relief from a situation of stress and insecurity (Barbu, 1959: 85; Ferguson, 2006).

In 1933, Germany's old institutions were either gone (i.e. the monarchy) or lacking in legitimacy

(the parliament and mainstream political parties) and the population was suffering and hungry

for change that would restore Germany to a position of strength and this was exactly what Hitler

offered. Consider the appeal that a political message like this might have for an alienated

population that had recently suffered defeat in the First World War, humiliation at the Treaty of

Versailles, and a downward spiral of economic and political chaos:

The "Chains of Versailles," he said, will be cast off as soon as Germany is regenerated from within, as soon as the will of the people becomes assured, and thus permits a strong and definite leadership. The German people must put an end to the reign of numerous parties, must seize power from the November Criminals, and place it in the hands of a national leadership; then Germany will be so great that the victorious powers of Versailles will be obliged to give her 'right to life' (Lebensrecht) without a struggle. Germany must be strong, so as to be indispensible to other countries; then she will not lack allies (Ritter, 1959: 83-84).

With a forceful and benevolent message such as this, Hitler had the German people eating out of

his hand by 1933: he had effectively taken all the confidence and respect that Germans had had

for the old regime and invested it in himself as the supreme leader and embodiment of the new

German Reich and his ambitions only grew to more terrifying heights thereafter. In an editorial

in the liberal newspaper Vossiche Zeitung in July 1932, a columnist lamented how the German

38

youth in particular were swayed by Hitler's moral message and how, for them, he came to

embody the moral virtues they already believed in:

[From the youth group tradition in Germany]...there came the idea of a leader...and of a Bund of many like-minded youth groups...and of regional ethnic culture (Volkstum)...a whole new life-style grew thus grew from this new sense of life...however, political radicalization got hold of them by tying itself to all their favourite ideas. The idea of the leader became the promotion of the dictatorship of an unstable Austrian, the warm affection for the people became ice-cold anti-Semitism, the sticking together of the youth group turned into a vicious struggle against those who dare to disagree with them (Merkl, 1980: 17).

Three days after this editorial was published, the Nazis would win their highest number of votes

in a free election (Merkl, 1980). All this emerged out of a situation of political anarchy and

social dislocation with the German people searching for meaning and a would-be-tyrant being

only too happy to offer himself up as that longed for source of meaning to an entire nation and a

new generation that had lost faith in traditional politics (Barbu, 1959; Kershaw, 1985; Merkl,

1980; Rempel, 1989).

Though some Germans viewed Nazism simply as a way of restoring national pride and

economic prosperity, for many people the movement and its leader meant far more than a chance

at national restoration. Robert H. Lowrie cites one former Nazi describing how, following the

Nazis gaining power in 1933, "People were once more laughing and singing in Germany; they

were happy and had once more a sense of secure existence," not only in economic terms but in

terms of national identity as well: they again had confidence in Germany" (Lowrie, 1959: 90).

The implications of this were not only economic and political but also moral, with millions of

Germans following the new moral creed that Nazism offered and the messiah that Hitler himself

represented to these converted masses (Kets de Vries, 2004). Lowrie argues that, as a result of

this revitalization of the collective identity of the German people and the sense of solidarity it

created, "National Socialism had an immense number of harmless, uncritical, decent, and even

39

idealistic fellow-travellers," who supported it because of the empowering feeling that it gave

them as individuals and as members of a larger identity with a moral calling in life (Lo wrie,

1959: 90; Chirot, 1994; Bartoletti, 2005; Ferguson, 2006).

Stephen H. Roberts, in his aptly titled book The House that Hitler Built, gives an

excellent description of such moral sentiments in the slogans of the Nazi movement; showing in

particular how slogans with a common theme of "rebirth" of the national community resonated

with Germans in the 1930s: '"Germany reborn, Germany between night and day, Deutschland

erwache!' To an outsider they are simply trite admonitions monotonously repeated; to the

Germans they were forever inspiring, and almost divinely revealed. 'Red Banners up!' the

Horst-Wessel-lied aroused them as the Marseillaise did the France of '93, and Germany

awakened to the tramp of marching feet" (Roberts, 1975: 39). Through this new religion Hitler

sought to unify the German people through "Folkic as opposed to trade union organization, and

later widened his organized to take in all sections - whether proletarian or even aristocratic -

who were ready to place patriotic over class interests...This benevolent inclusiveness...gained

more and more adherents," as Hitler's moral message won more and more converts (Roberts,

1975: 44; Merkl, 1980; Fischer, 1983; Reiche, 1986; Muhlberger, 1991; Ferguson, 2006; Kirk,

2007).

Barbara Kellerman describes how Hitler's followers have often be obscured in history by

their larger-than-life leader: "Leaders enable us to perceive and to process, which is why in this

particular drama, the drama of Nazi Germany, the formidable fuehrer, more than sixty years after

his death, [remains] front and center" (Kellerman, 2008: 99). But, as has been previously

mentioned and as Kellerman insists, Hitler could never have even remotely approached the

40

heights of power if he could not inspire the moral aspirations of people like Kurt Luedeck, an

early Nazi who described his experience at a Nazi rally as, "an exaltation that could only be

likened to a religious conversion...I had found myself, my leader, and my cause" (Ibid: 99).

Walther Buch, the Nazi Party leader in Nuremburg and devoted follower of Hitler, was known

for taking "every opportunity" to talk to people about "the man who had been sent to the German

people by the grace of God," and transmitted a "mood of true fervour and belief (Reiche, 1986:

26). Goering hailed his political master as "the beloved leader of the German freedom-

movement" and he, Himmler, Hess and other Nazi leaders "anticipated his every wish and whim,

hanging on his every word," while expressing "passion for the man and his movement at every

turn" and were "true believers" in every sense of the word (Kellerman, 2008: 101; Kershaw,

1985). Albert Speer, "a cultured and handsome architect" joined the Nazi Party the first time he

heard Hitler speak - remarking that Hitler could project the message that he "cared for each of

us...that he even loved us" and was going to lead Germany to a great future (Kellerman, 2008:

101). Joseph Goebbels, himself a doctor of literature and philosophy, remarked how "Hitler is

great...Hitler is brilliant...I love him," going so far as to kill himself, his wife, and his children in

1945 rather than live in a world without Hitler and without National Socialism (Ibid: 101).

These examples were not the simple result of charismatic "hypnotism": the sustained nature of

the intense devotion that Goebbels, Speer and others showed toward their leader cannot be

explained without the understanding that they really did believe strongly in Hitler's moral creed.

Millions of ordinary Germans were inspired by Hitler's moral message. Members of the

Hitler Youth swore to devote all their energies "to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler," to

the point of sacrificing their lives, as many of them would in World War II (Bartoletti, 2005: 24;

Rempel, 1989). Upon witnessing a Nazi parade as a young girl, Melita Maschmann said "I

41

wanted to hurl myself into this current...I wanted to belong to these people for whom it was a

matter of life and death" and when her parents refused to let her join the Hitler Youth she called

them "out of date" and "terribly old fashioned" (Bartoletti, 2005: 19). Alfons Heck, another

Hitler Youth member, described how for a chance to go to the Nuremburg Rallies "I would have

promised to enter a monastery" and that he "belonged to Adolf Hitler, body and soul" (Ibid: 77).

A factory worker, who joined the SA in 1923, described how he had come to reject the Marxist

idea that "all human beings were equal" and that in Nazism he found "a bright enthusiasm, a

pure faith in Adolf Hitler and Germany (Abel, 1938: 209)." A middle class youth, who joined the

SA in 1929, described how they had all raised their hands "in allegiance to Germany and Adolf

Hitler. Now I felt as though I were a National Socialist, for I had taken the oath...all should

(Ibid: 268)." A former soldier, who would later join the SS, described how "I was a National

Socialist before there was a name for the idea" and saw in Hitler that "the leader is coming, gun

in hand! And everything else falls away" (Ibid: 244).

However, as Ian Kershaw and Daniel Chirot point out, Hitler did not emerge out of blue

and in many ways was the culmination of long-term aspirations among the ranks of the European

political right. Not only in Germany, but in countries such as France, Italy and Spain, the ideal

of the "heroic leader" was upheld by right-wing forces. As Kershaw describes it, these forces,

which included the Italian fascists most notably, believed that "The rebirth of the nation was

promised through the subordination to a 'great leader' who would invoke the values of a 'heroic'

(and mythical) past," and who would be "a man of destiny, born not elected to leadership, not

bound by conventional rules and laws," whose followers were to be "devoted and dutiful, loyal

and obedient" (Kellerman, 2008: 100; Kershaw, 1985; Chirot, 1994). In Kellerman's words, the

"cult" of Hitler in Germany was the result of two things: "Hitler's desire to be a heroic leader

42

and his disciples' desire for a heroic leader" (Kellerman, 2008: 100). Julius Streicher openly

said that in Hitler he had found the "strong man" who would unify the country through his

fearless and heroic leadership, whereas ordinary SA men described him as Germany's "saviour"

(Reiche, 1986: 19; Merkl, 1980). As Ian Kershaw emphasizes: "The person, ideology, and

function of Hitler have to be located in and related to," the socio-economic and political

developments within modern German society and that the Nazi movement "cannot...be solely

attributed to the uniqueness of its leader" (Kershaw, 1985: 41).

Chirot describes the roots of this belief as extending from the desire by right-wing forces

to cling to elements of "folk" tradition in a rapidly changing and volatile industrial age where

traditional society was being uprooted and destroyed at an astounding rate. Chirot argues how

"Alienation, lack of roots, inauthenticity, these were some of the key words used to express the

pervasive sense among intellectuals that modern industrial society was unnatural and inhuman,

and that it was necessary to find something better," that would replace this dislocation with a

sense of certitude and communal solidarity (Chirot, 1994: 32; Ferguson, 2006; Turchin, 2007).

On the political left this desire for community generally manifested itself through the various

strains of Marxism, while on the political right "the sense of alienation and uprootedness made

intellectuals favour greater attachment to traditional communal bonds and unity with the original,

unsullied 'folk' of their native lands" (Ibid). Kershaw agrees, stating that the Nazi moral

hierarchy did indeed elevate "the Volk over the state" and, despite having unique characteristics

of its own, largely fit into the pattern of right-wing "radical anti-socialist" and "national -

integrationist" movements across Europe (Kershaw, 1985: 40). Thus, the emergence of a distinct

"Volkisch" (which roughly translates as "folkic") movement in Germany, of which the Nazis

were a branch, was part of a wider European phenomenon (Chirot, 1994).

43

Carter Findley and John Rothney in the 5 edition of the textbook Twentieth Century

World point out that what motivated many people to support movements such as the Nazi Party

was this sense of wanting something "real": "The contrast between the artificial and the real

sums up fascism's revolt against modernity, while capitalists and socialists argued about what

should become of 'economic man', fascists held up the ideal of 'heroic man', strong and cruel,

joyful believer in the destiny of his nation or race" (Findley & Rothney, 2002: 124; Sternhell,

1994; Adamson, 1995; Fogu, 1996; Valli, 2000). All of these things were clearly expressed in a

1922 announcement by the Nuremburg branch of the NSDAP:

There in the [Bavarian] capital, Adolf Hitler, a fearless man of the people, has shown what a determined will and an open challenge can achieve. We, the people of Nuremburg and Franconia, do not want to stay behind. We unite into a National Socialist community of fighters and throw the gauntlet into the face of the alien race [the Jews] (Reiche, 1986: 19).

In Pinker's conception of moral "ranking" describing earlier, the followers of the various

branches of this reactionary creed throughout Europe were evidently placing the concepts of

exclusive "fellowship" and "purity" over and above any other moral virtue, including the

preservation of human life (Pinker, 2008).

Heinrich Himmler's address to members of the SS just prior to the Nazi invasion of the

Soviet Union in 1941 also included all of these elements, stressing that "It is a heavy blessing

that, for the first time in a thousand years, fate has given us this Fuhrer...This is an ideological

battle and a struggle of races. Here in this struggle stands National Socialism: an ideology based

on the value of our Germanic Nordic blood. Here stands the world as we conceived it...a happy

beautiful world full of culture; this is what Germany is like" (Butler, 1979: 72-73). Concerning

the Russians he had this to say:

On the other side stand a population of 180 million, a mixture of races, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that one can shoot them down without pity or compassion. These animals...torture and ill-

44

treat every prisoner from our side...These people have been welded by the Jews into one religion, one ideology, that is called Bolshevism for the task: now we have Russia, half of Asia, a part of Europe, now we will overwhelm Germany and the whole world (Butler, 1979: 73).

To further reinforce the "us and them" message of German "morality" and Russian "barbarism",

Himmler harkened back to a mythical past:

When you, my men, fight in the east, you are carrying on the same struggle, against the same sub-humanity, the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of Huns, another time - one thousand years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I - under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of Tartars, and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banners of Bolshevism (Ibid: 73).

While it did not accurately reflect the ancient past that Himmler glorified, his speech represented

a culmination of a long-standing system of moral beliefs that Hitler and his disciples put into

action - differentiating "us" and "them" in distinctly moral terms, which millions of people

believed in firmly and which inspired many of them to kill "outsiders" in the name of "purity"

(Chirot, 1994; Hedges, 2003; Ferguson, 2006; Turchin, 2007; Pinker, 2008).

In 1925, the noted Italian historian and political theorist Benedetto Croce wrote that,

"Neither individuals nor peoples can live without a myth of their past, present, and future

potentialities, and when there is no tradition near at hand they search for one in remote times and

places or in records of the whole human race, which speaks to us in universal history" (Chirot,

1994: 393; Kaplan, 2000; Hedges, 2003; Ferguson, 2006). The political myth has been an

institution in the organization and legitimization of the political community since ancient times.

The problem of getting citizens to accept their place in society and getting them to obey its

leaders and institutions is a life and death question for a state, and states that fail to adequately

deal with this problem are doomed to upheaval, unrest, and run a real risk of outright collapse.

The moral foundation upon which we build our governments and institutions is appealed to

continually by modern politicians seeking to justify actions that could be interpreted as morally

45

questionable (Parenti, 2002; Zinn, 2005). Often harsh realities are thus concealed behind a mask

of moral rectitude in the name of the greater good. To listen to Himmler appeal to a mythical

racialized version of German history to justify Hitler's decision to attack the USSR and the

motivations for a number of Nazism's ordinary adherents, it becomes evident Hitler's moral

appeal largely stemmed from his promise to, not only restore, but extend and popularize the

moral vision that many Germans already possessed concerning their country and its place in the

world (Abel, 1938; Chirot, 1994; Overy, 2001; Ferguson, 2006).

One German worker, before joining the Nazis, grew disillusioned with socialism, asking

"where was the hallowed love of Fatherland, where was the holy sacrifice of the soldiers at the

front? Where was the faith in Germany? Marxism had no use for such things" (Abel, 1938: 208).

Upon hearing a speech by Goebbels, which exposed him to Hitler's moral message, the worker

remarked how "I felt as though he were addressing me personally," and that "My father's dream

of a German socialism," in which patriotism would not be sacrificed in the name of working

class struggle, "was tenable" - he was an instant convert (Ibid: 212). His story was hardly

unique: of the respondents to Theodore Abel's 1938 survey of rank and file Nazis and their

reasons for joining the movement, seven were with the communist KPD between 1919 and 1922,

seven with the KSPD, and twelve with the socialist SPD, whereas from 1922-1924 ten were with

socialist paramilitary groups like the Red Front or Red Hundreds and fourteen were with socialist

trade unions (Merkl, 1980). When surveyed, these men offered similar moral reasons for

renouncing their previous allegiances and embracing Hitler: they wanted a "German socialism,"

which honoured "traditional" German values such as loyalty to the family, military discipline,

and religiosity (Chirot, 1994; Merkl, 1980; Abel, 1938).

46

A former farm worker and ex-soldier was disgusted by the breakdown of the "strong

Germany" that he knew in 1918-1919 and how all sense of social cohesion had been lost as the

"scum of the metropolis...completely plundered the supply rooms" at his barracks while the

soldiers stood by and did nothing (Ibid: 223). He longed for the solidarity he had known at the

front between men of "all classes of the population" and was "firmly convinced that we had to

defend our native land" in World War I - going on to blame the "Jewish problem" for his

nation's misfortune, an impure embodiment of "wickedness and evil" (Ibid: 226). When he

joined the SA and marched through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to herald Hitler's political

triumph in 1933, he felt that "We have helped to win the Third Reich. We have washed away

the shame of 1918...Someday we will go down in history as the first champions and prophets of a

new, better age," in which Germany, and Hitler would lead the world with both national pride

and purity restored and ultimately extended to new heights (Abel, 1938: 243).

In these cases, and in others, the individuals in question stressed how they had grown up

in patriotic German households and had been raised to believe in the sacred nature of their

country and their duty to defend it - a moral message that Hitler appeared to embody and expand

upon (Abel, 1938; Merkl, 1980). Likewise, most converts to the Nazi cause from left-wing

organizations such as the Reichsflagge and the Red Hundreds had a religious upbringing and a

middle class background (Merkl, 1980). One ex-communist and son of a furniture factory

owner, left the left-wing Red Hundreds to join the Nazis after he and his comrades tried to break

up a Nazi rally and were driven off. His description of the event and its aftermath form a classic

account of religious and moral conversion:

That day I saw for the first Volkisch Hundreds with a blood-red swastika banner and a picture of Hitler with pine branches around it. Their courage and flair cast a spell on me...I began to read Volkisch literature and particular

47

Theodor Fritsch's 'Handbook on the Jewish Question.' Then I joined the Volkisch Hundreds and thus the wonderful and bitter years began in my life which I would never have wanted to miss (Merkl, 1980: 91).

This man would come to view the Nazi cause as a "fight of the old Germanic tribes against the

Jewish and 'inferior races'," and would ultimately join the SS (Ibid: 91). A commercial

apprentice born in 1911 and convinced by "all kinds of rabble" to join the communist KPD was

later convinced by his nationalist father to join a right-wing paramilitary group and later joined

the NSDAP itself- rejecting socialism because "they taught us to think, but never to make a

serious commitment" (Ibid: 89). A teacher's son, born in 1895, served in World War I and

joined the Freikorps after the war but "impoverishment" would later cause him to join the KPD

in which he "had important functions as an organizer and propaganda supervisor," but left in

1929 after he "could no longer agree with the orders from the Soviet Union" (Ibid). He went on

to attend "every rally" held by other political parties, becoming more and more dissatisfied until

he attended an NSDAP rally and felt that "old fighting spirit" that he had felt during the war

years and which motivated him to join the Nazis, turn against his former KPD comrades, and

work to clear out "the red pig sty" (Ibid: 89). In these cases and in many others, the individual

returned, in many ways, to the moral creed of Deutschland uber alles that they had learned while

growing up, though it was now being shaped in Hitler's image (Kellerman, 2008; Kershaw,

1985; KetsdeVries, 2004).

There is nothing new about this. In Plato's The Republic, the building of a good society

is compared to the telling of a specific type of story. Plato states that, "Children cannot

distinguish between what is allegory and what isn't, and opinions formed at that age are usually

difficult to eradicate or change; we should therefore surely regard it as of the utmost importance

that the first stories they hear shall aim at encouraging the highest excellence of character" (Lee,

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2003: 70). In the interest of promoting excellence and justice in the citizen, it becomes necessary

to shield them against corrupting influences. As Socrates says to Adeimantus: "My dear

Adeimantus, you and I are not engaged in writing stories but on founding a state. And the

founders of a state, though they must know the type of story the poet must produce, and reject

any that do not conform to that type, need not write them themselves" (Ibid: 71). In a normative

sense the citizen of the state must be told what it is that should be, accept it as the ultimate truth

and as being self-evidently good: "So the good is not the cause of everything, but only of states

of well-being and not of evil" (Ibid). Given such a strong moral foundation, regardless of the

reality of things, the state and the ideals that it upholds will be accepted and followed by the

citizen who has been indoctrinated from a young age with a certain conception of what it means

to lead a good life within a good society. When many Germans were heard to say of Hitler, as

early as 1923, that "he is a man of the good old days before the war," this was not simply a

yearning for better economic times but a desire to rebuild a moral vision that firmly believed in

and which they felt their nation had lost touch with (Abel, 1938: 265; Kershaw, 1985; Chirot,

1994; Ferguson, 2006; Bessel, 1990).

In his Discourses, Machiavelli stresses how easy it is for opportunistic political leaders to

persuade the masses to adopt their proposals and policies by making them look "like sure things,

even though concealed within them disaster lies at hand" (Walker, 1998: 238; Kaplan, 2000;

Morgenthau, 1948). Machiavelli concludes "that there is no easier way of bringing disaster on a

republic in which the populace has authority, than to engage it in undertakings which appear

bold, for, if the populace is of any account, it is bound to be taken up; nor will those who are of a

different opinion be able to do anything to stop it" (Walker, 1998: 241). The political elite can

manipulate the people to a certain course of action by appealing to "sure things" such as

49

nationalism, idealism, religious values, military glory and all manner of other things in order to

persuade the population (Morgenthau, 1948). Those who disagree can easily be marginalized as

"unpatriotic" or even traitorous in the most extreme cases. Hitler appealed to all of these things

and his audience was overwhelmingly receptive, not because of conscious manipulation or

underhanded tricks, but because they already believed that much of what he said was moral.

Many minor officials and former soldiers after Germany's 1918 defeat were embittered by the

fall of "their Kaiser and empire" but at the same time resentful toward Imperial Germany's class

stratification - finding satisfaction in the "fellowship of field grey," which they had known as

soldiers and various Volkisch ideas surrounding "traditional" folk culture and national solidarity

(Merkl, 1980: 103). Hence one former soldier's account that he "always was a National

Socialist" even before the term had been invented and that he had joined the army in World War

I "with a warm heart, to secure my Kaiser and my Fatherland," joining the paramilitary group

Stahlhelm and later the Nazi SS after the war because they embodied values he had long

supported (Abel, 1938: 251).

One middle class youth who was too young to participate in World War I, nevertheless

grew uncomfortable when he saw how the symbols of Imperial Germany, which he had been

taught to believe in "were suddenly disappearing" and wondered "why we could no longer hoist

our flag...was the banner forbidden now because we had lost our fight beneath it" (Ibid: 263)? He

joined the Nazi SA and swore allegiance "to Germany and Adolf Hitler" because they captured

his nostalgia for the past and offered a way to build a future in accordance with the traditions he

had been raised to believe in (Abel, 1938: 268; Overy, 2001; Kershaw, 1985; Bessel, 1990). He

and many other middle class youths joined the Nazis to fight against "the spirit of Marxism,"

which they saw as infecting the moral vision they held of a "strong" Germany (Reiche, 1986).

50

The political myth that gave Hitler the immense power that he was to wield in his

political career was largely born out of militant German nationalism and a widespread desire for

revenge over that country's humiliating defeat in World War One - with Hitler and other right-

wing populist leaders claiming to "stand for Germany's liberation" from destructive and alien

outside forces (Reiche, 1986; Merkl, 1980; Bessel, 1990). Daniel Chirot explains the rise of the

Nazis by stating that, "A wide spectrum of German opinion swung to the belief that they were

the only political group able to save Germany from ruin.. .The catastrophe of the First World

War, and then the disorders and limited opportunities for escape in the 1920s confirmed their

belief that the old system was too bourgeois, that capitalism and parliamentary niceties led to

failure, not success" (Chirot, 1994: 79). In this environment, Hitler emerged because his

"speeches and proposed program for action were consistent. It was the fault of the Jews, the

Marxists, and the French. The great German people were being ruined by their enemies, and it

was necessary to mobilize for combat to rid the nation of these forces," in the name of national

and moral purity and strength (Chirot, 1994: 81; Pinker, 2008). Indeed, Chirot points out that

there was nothing terribly unusual about Nazi views and cites:

The most influential political writer in Germany in the early 1920s was Oswald Spengler whose biting contempt for liberal democracy ascribed Germany's miseries to softness and lack of will...he called for a return to military discipline and centralization, a "Prussian Socialism," that would reject both liberalism and Marxist materialism. This was a revolt against the Enlightenment, not simply a political program for the solution of temporary problems (Chirot, 1994: 81).

In a sermon in September 1923, chaplain J Roth of Munich "called on God to lead the German

people into battle and to victory, portrayed Christ as the bearer of the sword, [and] claimed that

militarism was in the blood of the German people" (Reiche, 1986: 41). He said, "This place

shall be the cradle in which the young German Hercules stretches his limbs. With an iron broom

he will clean the German house and slay the alien dragon" (Ibid: 41). This anti-democratic, anti-

51

liberal, anti-marxist, and militaristic form of German nationalism was gaining incredible sway in

the 1920s and Nazism was its logical conclusion in many ways.

Political myths tend to explain the world in very black and white terms that are easy for

people to understand; indeed, this is what gives them much of their power and moral authority.

The myth that carried the Nazis to power and kept them there was no exception. Chirot explains

that, "Race, rather than class or ideology was the master concept that explained everything.. .this

ability to simplify and find a common thread running through everything gave Hitler an

ideological consistency and force which were at the heart of his personal charisma. Those open

to his ideas, but uncertain and confused by the march of events, would hear him and feel a

sudden flash of insight that reordered their world" (Chirot, 1994: 81-82; Kershaw, 1985; Rempel,

1989; Bartoletti, 2005; Abel, 1938). This was certainly a common experience of the vast

majority of the six hundred followers of Hitler that Theodore Abel interviewed in the 1930s, who

underwent a kind of "moral awakening" and sense of empowerment when exposed to his ideas.

As we have seen, the background of many of his early followers also reveals much about

the moral appeal of Hitler's message and this is most applicable to the war generation of which

Hitler himself was a part. In the words of Peter H. Merkl, World War I had resulted in "the

miseducation of a whole generation toward solving its problems in a militant, authoritarian

manner" (Merkl, 1980: 15). World War I marked a "turning point" in German history and

political development - where official propaganda portrayed the Germans as a "people of

warriors" fighting against the "green-grocers' states" of the West, a militant message that was

embraced by a generation of soldiers that brought it home with them after the bitter defeat of

1918 and proceeded to make their mark on German society (Merkl, 1980: 13; Reiche, 1986).

52

One Nazi stormtrooper described an experience common among former soldiers who longed for

the camaraderie they had known in the war years:

My old world broke asunder in my experiences. The world of the trenches instead opened itself to me. Had I once been a loner, here 1 found brothers. Germany's sons stood shoulder to shoulder in heated battles aiming their rifles at the common enemy. We lay together in the bunkers, exchanging our life stories, sharing our possessions. We got to understand one another...In battle we tended each other's wounds. Who would question authentic German-ness (volkstum), or how much education you had, or whether you were a Protestant or a Catholic? (Merkl, 1980: 113)

All manner of German men, including many Jews, fought together and died together in the

trenches of the First World War. This shared experience would leave a mark on the war

generation and form the foundation for an entire moral creed. For such men, "who had been

soldiers in body and soul, a great deal collapsed," in 1918 and their efforts to recapture what they

had lost led to an epidemic of paramilitary formations on the streets of Germany in the 1920s

(Merkl, 1980: 112; Reiche, 1986; Abel, 1938). Their desire to recapture the "classless"

camaraderie of the war years would lead many of them to ultimately join the NSDAP or one of

its paramilitary formations. One former member of the more traditionally conservative

paramilitary group Stahlhelm said "there was a very different revolutionary spirit among these

young [Nazi] people as compared to the Stahlhelm," embracing the Nazi cause because it

embodied a moral vision he already possessed (Merkl, 1980: 93-94). For such men, the last lines

of the SA song "And when the hand grenade explodes, the heart beats in our breasts with joy,"

was more than a call of violence, but a call to righteousness (Reiche, 1986: 71).

Fully one third of the Nazi contributors to Theodore Abel's study were members of some

sort of right-wing paramilitary organization in the early 1920s, made up of ex-soldiers and

originally formed, sometimes by big business interests (the Stahlhelm, one of the largest post­

war groups, was founded by a manufacturer of soda water; the Organization Consul, responsible

for hundreds of political assassinations, was run by a clique of Nuremburg businessmen), to

53

crush the militant socialist movement following World War I and which never lost their

"counter-revolutionary character" functioning as a "bulwark of conservatism" in Weimar

Germany (Abel, 1938; Reiche, 1986; Parenti, 1997). Groups like the Bismarck-Bund, Wiking-

Bund, Jungdutscher-Orden, Wehr-Wolf, and others, were led by former army officers and were

intended to "inculcate the spirit of nationalism and racial superiority" among their members and

had a major impact on their moral development, particularly with regard to the youth (Abel,

1938: 51; Chirot, 1994; Kershaw, 1985; Overy, 2001). Leading Nazis such as Edmund Heines,

Rudolf Hoess (the infamous commandant of Auschwitz), and Martin Bormann all emerged from

movements such as these, as did one third of those stormtroopers who were politically active

from 1919 to 1921 (Merkl, 1980; Fischer, 1983). These groups of ex-soldiers, from the Freikorp

units of volunteer soldiers to the Stahlhelm to the SA, brought "a whole ideology of what it

meant to be a front-line soldier fighting in the trenches" that was both nationalistic and

undemocratic while remaining deeply hostile toward the Weimar Republic (Merkl, 1980: 15).

They possessed their own moral message, one which Hitler was to take command of by the

1930s. In fact the Nazi expansion beyond Bavaria largely depended on them winning "converts"

from other right-wing and left-wing paramilitary organizations (Merkl, 1980; Reiche, 1986;

Fischer, 1983).

The NSDAP's claims that it was a "party of youth" were not exaggerated; in fact, youths

were the main target of paramilitary recruitment efforts and moral message (Merkl, 1980). An

article in the August 11, 1921 issue of the right-wing newspaper Volkischer Beobachter in

Nuremburg heroically portrayed the Nazi SA as a moral force that "shall rise in the hearts of our

young followers the unrelenting will for action, hammering and burning into them the thought

that history does not make men, but that men make history" (Reiche, 1986: 23). Groups like the

54

Reichsflagge, originally only open to veterans, were soon made open not only to "all veterans,

but to all upright German men," and their demographic base and presence within the wider

population broadened accordingly (Ibid: 22). This reveals that not only ex-soldiers were

attracted to the Volkisch ideology and moral message. Out of the 600 SA members active in

Nuremburg from 1922 to 1923, the majority of them were not ex-servicemen but young men:

one-fifth of them were under the age of 21 and two-fifths were between the ages of 21 and 30 -

many of whom would have been too young to have served in the war (Reiche, 1986; Merkl,

1980). One such young man who joined the paramilitary youth movement known as "The Hawk

and the Eagle," in 1921 found that it was run by the German poet Wilhelm Kotzde and that its

"basic precepts related to national defence, race, and nationalism, and the absolute rejection of

the poisons of civilization and the proprieties of a society infected by the virus of alien thought"

(Abel, 1938:51).

Once again, the moral focus on "purity" described by Pinker is evident here. The youth

went on to describe how prominent German historians often gave the group lectures on "racial

superiority" and that their "conversion to National Socialism was a matter of course, as we found

it to be the only thing right for us" (Abel, 1938: 51). Professor Willibal Hentschal built his own

nationalist movement based on agricultural students aimed at protecting "the German clod

against aliens from the east," and following the mantra that "loyalty to the soil is tantamount to

biological wisdom," once again emphasizing the theme of purity (Abel, 1938: 51; Pinker, 2008).

Julius Streicher, originally a member of the German Young Liberal Association and an ex-

military officer, spoke for many when he "held the Jews responsible for Germany's defeat and

social ills," going so far as to say that "my anti-Semitic views are for me like a religious faith...a

matter of conscience," labelling the Jews as the "alien race" that needed to be removed (Reiche,

55

1986: 15; Overy, 2001). Streicher's moral faith in anti-Semitism led him to join and

subsequently abandon several right-wing groups like Volkisch German Defence and Fighting

League because he judged them to be "not sufficiently anti-Semitic." He ultimately joined the

NSDAP because the organization he had previously been involved with had been "overly

cautious" in its anti-Semitism (Reiche, 1986: 15). Hitler's strength came from his ability to unite

these various organizations, and attract the moral allegiance of people like Streicher, to the point

where the nationalist youth mentioned earlier in this paragraph equated nationalism with "the

ideas of Adolf Hitler" that he was willing to die for to protect (Abel, 1938: 51; Kershaw, 1985).

Streicher himself had frequently called for a "strong man", capable of "uniting the warring

Volkisch factions" under one banner and in Hitler he found this "strong man" that so many

people on the European right-wing had long dreamed of (Reiche, 1986: 19; Kershaw, 1985)

Michael H. Kater, in his study of the Nazi Party in demographic terms, noted the broad

appeal of these ideas and moral vision in Weimar Germany. The Nazi Party itself was founded

by Anton Drexler in 1919 and its founding members were mostly workers in Munich railway

workshops and, in fact, the party attracted large numbers of workers from 1920 to 1922 in cities

as diverse as Dortmund, Gottingen and Bremen (Kater, 1983). The moral vision that was

presented to these workers was much like the ones described above: dividing society between the

"workers" who possessed "unadulterated German blood and who toiled, with his brain or his

hand, to make an honest living" and the "Jews" who were the "enemies" of the worker - the

"Jewish banker or petty dealer who was thought to live unproductively by collecting interest on

the money he had craftily garnered from honest German folk" (Ibid: 21). The majority of

German working people were unsatisfied with this moral vision, which did not address their real

political grievances and rejected Nazi anti-Semitism, which sought to turn their attentions away

56

from their real needs and away from the rich industrialists whom they viewed as the real threat to

their material wellbeing as opposed to some Jewish conspiracy (Kater, 1983; Parenti, 1997).

As described earlier, those workers who did join the Nazis were usually "ardent

nationalists" who disapproved of the "internationalist" nature of socialism, as did that one

worker whom Abel interviewed, and "skilled" workers "well-established in their occupations"

and afraid of "falling back into a more impoverished and much more class-conscious proletariat"

(Kater, 1983: 23; Abel, 1938). Anti-Semitism appealed to many of them. One 26 year old

worker joined the SA in 1927 after "having lost his job with a Jewish toy manufacturer" and his

bitterness, combined with his acceptance of the Nazi moral message, ensured that even 18 years

later, after the fall of Nazism in 1945 and its "defeat and discrediting," the former stormtrooper

"still claimed that he had been unjustly dismissed and that he had hated Jews ever since"

(Reiche, 1986: 71). Whereas some workers, like a 26 year old unemployed machinist did, join

the NSDAP "for the prospects of jobs," some workers clearly were receptive to the Nazi moral

message (Ibid: 71).

In one example, a worker and former member of the communist KPD joined the SA in

1930 only to be challenged by his fellow workers for his Nazi views. This was his response:

He started to whistle the Internationale and I began to sing the Horst-Wessel Song...a fellow worker held his shovel under my nose and said he'd bash in my Nazi mouth...I still told him, he too would see the light some day and march with the SA...[a month later] he came with me to a Party meeting and became a stormtrooper himself. When the others on the construction site found out, another four men joined the SA (Merkl, 1980: 90).

If anything this example indicates the diversity of appeal that the Nazis had. One unemployed

worker during the Great Depression in 1932 indicates in his diary how the NSDAP and its

meetings were a source of moral inspiration as well as an escape from everyday drudgery:

57

Two days of this week have already passed. This morning I went to the employment office. No luck - no job! Slowly I leave this building which calls itself employment office and offers no employment. With hate in my heart against those who have brought us this dignified and beautiful "stamping" [of one's unemployment booklet]. Party meeting this evening (Reiche, 1986: 106).

He described how the meeting "provided the only relief from this monotonous existence," and

how the moral message that he heard gave him hope for a better future in which his pride and

Germany's pride would be restored (Ibid: 106). By 1932, over 80% of the members in some SA

units were made up of such unemployed workers.

More likely to join the NSDAP, and find Hitler's moral message appealing, were the

lower-middle class made up of merchants and farmers in particular. Their "family owned"

enterprises threatened by modern industry, they readily accepted Nazi propaganda and pictured

the alien "Jew" as the "instigator" of the system of factories and chain stores which now

threatened their way of life (Kater, 1983; Abel, 1938; Reiche, 1986; Chirot, 1994). An 18 year

old butcher describes how he joined the SA because "all his friends were already members,"

indicating the movement's popularity in lower-middle class circles (Reiche, 1986: 70). Walther

Steinbeck, a Nuremburg businessman and former naval officer who was to be the first SA

commander in that city, was one such merchant (Reiche, 1986). There were also lower

bureaucrats and officials who were loyal to a state that was now weakened and broken after

World War One and who idealized the "old, stable, monarchic" order and viewed the Nazis as a

"patriotic bulwark" of nationalist "virtue" in the face of anti-establishment threats such as

socialism and communism (Kater, 1983). Many students, such as the one Abel interviewed,

were also "emotionally attached" to the old order, and believed, as did many soldiers, that it had

been "stabbed in the back" by Marxist traitors in 1918 and who came to combine anti-Semitism

with a highly idealized view of Germany's past which Himmler was to articulate so fervently in

1941 (Kater, 1983; Abel, 1938; Chirot, 1994; Butler, 1979). As Abel's young student

58

discovered, many of Germany's cultural and academic elites were also sympathetic to Hitler's

message: longing to "turn back the clock" and re-instate the old imperial order with its "proved

system of economic stability of social privilege" (Kater, 1983: 28; Parenti, 1997). Art

impresario Ernst Hanfstaengl, publisher Julius Echmann, university professor Karl Alexander

von Muller and others, including representatives of aristocracy and heavy industry, would all

come to embrace Nazism (Ibid). While many of these groups had an economic stake in "turning

back the clock", they also had a profound belief that it was morally the right thing to do - further

evidence that moral ideas and material interests are not mutually exclusive (Parenti, 2002).

Such diversity had been evident from very early on in the Volkisch movement, even

before the Nazis were raised to a dominant position. In the German Day celebrations held in

Nuremburg on the first and second of September 1923, "virtually every Volkisch and

paramilitary organization participated, and nearly everyone of importance in the movement

attended," including "Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and Oskar of Prussia, the Duke of Coburg and

General Ludendorff' who stood alongside "Oberland leader Dr Weber, Heiss of the

Reichsflagge.. .Hitler and others," while two companies of Bavarian state police acted "as colour

guards" (Reiche, 1986: 40). However, the German Day celebrations also aroused a considerable

amount of popular support among ordinary people. The Nazis somewhat melodramatically

described how "It was like a joyful cry of hundreds of thousands of despairing, intimidated,

downtrodden, and desperate people, who perceived a ray of hope of the liberation from

servitude" (Ibid: 43). Even if this was exaggerated, clearly many people did see the Volkisch

movement (of which the Nazis comprised only a very small part in 1923) as a liberating force

and welcomed the German Day celebrations in which that force displayed its power.

59

The diversity of the Nazi movement, and the various right-wing Volkisch movements that

preceded it, is very effectively described in Detlef Muhlberger's book Hitler's Followers:

Studies in the Sociology of the Nazi Movement. Examining a series of regions in Germany in the

1920s and early 1930s, Muhlberger argues that the Nazi Party, traditionally viewed as a "petty-

bourgeois" party, in fact relied on the support of a broad section of the German population and

adapted to the demographic conditions of the regions where it operated. For example, in the

industrial Ruhr region, "the NSDAP was clearly neither a 'bourgeois party' nor a

Mittelstandsbeuregung ("petty-bourgeois party")," and relied heavily on support from the

working classes (Muhlberger, 1991: 31; Kater, 1983, Reiche, 1986). In fact, as Muhlberger

explains, party statistics actually misrepresented such support: "...the Nazi Party did mobilize

considerable lower-class support by 1930, but found it much more difficult to retain it over time,

giving rise to a significant understatement in the Partei-statistik of the worker element active in

the party...the Nazi Party was clearly even more of a Volkspartei from 1928 to 1930 than the

Nazis claimed on the basis of their own data (Muhlberger, 1991: 82; Kater, 1983).

Tim Kirk has described how the Nazi Party reflected prevailing attitudes and collective

aspirations (and demographic trends) in 1930s Germany, pointing out that "The hierarchy of the

Nazi Party reflected the conventional hierarchies of German society. The middle classes were

even more heavily represented in the leadership than in the party as a whole, while the

proportion of members from the lower classes was greater in the S A, and particularly among

rank-and-file stormtroopers" (Kirk, 2007: 24; Reiche, 1986). While the Nazis were able to take

advantage of the dissatisfaction of mainstream middle class voters with traditional conservative

political parties - as Kirk, Berman, and others have pointed out - this information demonstrates

even further that normal people, average people, heeded Hitler's message and believed in the

60

sense of national community that the Nazis were striving to create (Roberts, 1975; Kershaw,

1985; Kirk, 2007; Berman, 1997). This broad constituency of ex-soldiers, workers, merchants,

trades people, former communists, aristocrats, middle class professionals and others reveals what

writers have described as a movement, like Faust, with "two souls" - one seeking to uphold

tradition and the other seeking radical change - with Hitler embodying "the good old days" of

pre-war Imperial Germany idealized by many aristocrats and bourgeois interests and the "step

aside, you old ones" mentality of many stormtroopers and working class supporters of the

movement who sought real social change in German society while seeking to retain the

traditional moral virtues of German nationalism (Abel, 1938; Merkl, 1980; Reiche, 1986; Chirot,

1994; Kershaw, 1985).

Hitler said in 1925 that "what we need...are not one or two hundred daring conspirators,

but hundreds of thousands of fanatical fighters for our Weltanshlaung," and well before 1933, he

had achieved his goal: millions of Germans, of all backgrounds, were devoted, to varying

degrees, to his moral creed (Reiche, 1986: 63; Ferguson, 2006; Roberts, 1975; Merkl, 1980;

Kater, 1983; Muhlberger, 1991). Claiming to embody moral virtues such as "purity" and

"strength", the message that Hitler and the Nazis projected to the German people was embraced

by large numbers of people who felt loyalty to the "Volkisch" traditions of Germany while

desiring a better future. Underlying this moral creed was a desire to protect the "purity" of the

German national character against those defined as alien "outsiders", from the Jews to the Reds

to the French and Russians (Chirot, 1994; Turchin, 2007; Pinker, 2008). Such Germans were

convinced of the Tightness of their cause and embraced Hitler as their "saviour" and "messiah"

and many of them were more than willing to fight and if need be die in his name - seeing it as

the right thing to do (Kets de Vries, 2004; Merkl, 1980).

61

This chapter concludes with an excerpt from a sermon delivered by a Protestant pastor

and member of the NSDAP in August 1926 as he blessed the flags of the SA, describing them as

"symbols of Germany's holiest sentiments":

And so I consecrate these flags as an expression of our ideals of true Germandom and Christianity, as the banner under which all loyal [Germans] will rally, [and I dedicate them] for the fight against all forces of destruction and for the victory in a new, free, and united Germany (Reiche, 1986: 62).

For the believers, that was what Nazism and Hitler embodied. Hitler was the product of a

movement and moral message which sought to rally the "pure" Volk against an "impure"

outsider and his power was based on the moral prejudices of his followers: thus facilitating the

exclusion and slaughter of those elements within German society considered to be unworthy of

moral consideration (Ferguson, 2006).

62

Chapter Four: Saddam's Followers - Children of "The Great Leader"

Like Hitler, Saddam Hussein did not emerge from nowhere. He and his followers were

the product of a moral tradition that was very well established in the Arab world by the time he

came to power in Iraq in 1979. On the eve of the invasion, which toppled his 35 year old regime

in 2003, scholar Jerrold Post described Saddam as the contemporary West saw him: as a "major

threat to the region and to Western society," who has "doggedly pursued the development of

weapons of mass destruction, despite UN sanctions imposed at the conclusion of the Gulf

Crisis," leading to his common characterisation as "the madman of the Middle East" (Post, 2003:

335; Turchin, 2007). However, he admits that such a description does not do justice to the "great

struggler" who has explained his brutality as dictator of Iraq as being necessary in order to

achieve "subjective immunity" from foreign powers and their influence in the Middle East (Post,

2003: 335-336).

Patrick Worsnip has likewise described Saddam as the "head of one of the world's most

ruthless police states", who managed to hold onto power and outlast foes as diverse as the

Ayatollah Khomeini and George Bush Senior through cunning and sheer ruthlessness -

promoting his "kith and kin from Tikrit" in order to keep power through a combination of "fear

and privilege" (Worsnip, 2003: 65; Bengio, 2000). From the child spies of the Al-Talaia (the

vanguard), charged with spying on their parents, to the mass murder of the Kurds in the 1980s, to

Saddam's blatant aggression against Iran and Kuwait, to his use of chemical weapons, to the

brutality of his secret police, the Muktabarat, and the "undemocratic" nature of his regime, most

commentators were convinced that Saddam had virtually no popular support - only a population

that, out of "exhaustion, ignorance and, above all, fear", had been cowed or deceived into

63

submission by an evil man and his cronies (Pope, 2002: 289-290; Roberts, 2002; Kelly, 2002;

Karsh, 2002; Newton & Scharf, 2008; Bengio, 2000; Trevelyan, 2003; Post, 2003). When they

heard George W. Bush proclaim in his infamous "mission accomplished" speech in May 2003,

many believed the American president's words that "Decades of lies and intimidation could not

make the Iraqi people love their oppressors or desire their own enslavement," and the general

consensus was, now that Saddam and his coercive apparatus was gone, that now there could be a

flowering of democracy and a government "of, by, and for the Iraqi people" (BBC, 2003;

Newton & Scharf, 2008). This illusion would be shattered by insurgency, civil war, and

sectarian strife which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, and where, among the millions

of displaced refugees, it became common to hear, not only nostalgia, but also moral approval for

the same Saddam Hussein whom the West had commonly described as a kind of "Hitler

wannabe" (Turchin, 2007: 26). The coercive apparatus was gone, but ordinary people still were

heard to say, "Saddam was a good president, God bless him...He defended Iraq from its enemies.

He was a great leader. All the people were faithful to him, and he was friends with lots of

countries," or "During the reign of Saddam, it was different...An Iraqi had pride. Wherever he

went, people respected Iraqis" (Brown, 2008). No secret police were waiting to strike these men

down and they were under no coercion, yet their moral approval of Saddam is marked.

Evidently Saddam's reign was secured through more than coercion; he had a moral message and

people believed in it: like Hitler he was defending the "purity" of his people against "unclean"

outsiders. Evidently some Iraqis did in fact "love their oppressors", as did many non-Iraqis as

we shall see.

Prior to 1919, there was no such country as Iraq: its future land mass divided between

three provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Iraq came into existence as a British protectorate while

64

European armies occupied much of the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I and the

defeat of the Ottomans. The result was that Western colonialism was imposed upon the region

for the first time in the modern age. As John F. Devlin describes, the Arab peoples faced a new

reality which was imposed upon them by powerful outside forces: "Foreign troops garrisoned

their land; really important decisions were made by advisors, high commissioners, or these

gentlemen's superiors in London or Paris," while political activity "was severely restricted"

(Devlin, 1976: 2; Jaber, 1966; Chirot, 1994; Baath, 1982; Sciolino, 1991). It was this

environment of enforced domination by foreign powers that would fuel the development of Arab

nationalism and by extension the Baath movement that would ultimately see Saddam Hussein

take power in Iraq.

Even in Ottoman times relatively small scale movements of Arab nationalists existed,

many of them Western educated, who condemned the "backwardness" of the Arab peoples in

economic, political and cultural terms to the centuries of domination they had experienced at the

hands of the Ottoman Turks (Devlin, 1976; Baath, 1982; Jaber, 1966). Those of them who

viewed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 as their moment to build a modern Arab

state free from external control were dashed when King Faysal I of Jordan attempted to occupy

Damascus but was defeated by the French, dealing a "cruel blow to the aspirations of Arab

nationalists," while "severely damaging the reputations of the European states as fair,

trustworthy, and sincere guardians and promoters of Arab independence," which many Arabs

had hoped would follow the Allied victory in World War I (Devlin, 1976: 2; Jaber, 1966;

McCarthy, 2001). However, this defeat would also encourage a further intellectual development

within the Arab nationalist movement: the idea of Pan-Arab solidarity and the Pan-Arab state.

Many concluded, in the aftermath of Faysal's disastrous attempt to carve out an independent

65

state in Syria, that "Arab unity, a worthy and natural cause in its own right, was essential if they

were to become strong enough to shake off foreign control," and to stand against the great

powers of the world that seemed bent on imposing their will even more perniciously than the

Ottomans had (Devlin, 1976: 2; McCarthy, 2001; Baath, 1982). Arab independence movements

in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere - all of which had grown up independently of one

another - became increasingly interconnected as news and people (particularly Western-trained

teachers from Lebanon and Syria traveling to Iraq) travelled around the Arab world and as

"contacts grew stronger, experiences were exchanged, comparisons made, similarities noted," so

that the educated classes in Arab society increasingly were of the view that "the Arabs were one

community and should form one polity" (Devlin, 1976: 3; Jaber, 1966; Baath, 1982; Chirot,

1994; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989).

The "political instability, social change, and intense feelings of nationalism" that Kamel

Jaber described as "plaguing" the Arab world in the 1960s and which he saw as "rising to the

challenge of an advancing Western culture" and attempting to build "an identity" and "social and

political institutions and ideologies," which were distinctly Arab and able to stand up to "the

pressure to conform to Western standards", had in fact existed for decades by that time (Jaber,

1966: 8; Baath, 1982; McCarthy, 2001; Chirot, 1994). Long before the state of Israel was

founded in 1948, Arab nationalists were already protesting against the Balfour Declaration and

other efforts by European powers to set up a Jewish homeland in Palestine, with one

commentator saying in 1937 how "this is thieving in Western style; for criminals in the West do

not operate except in broad daylight, and within the sight and hearing of the government and the

public...such is the theft of Palestine" (Baath, 1982: 10). Baathism, according to the words of

one of its founders Michel Aflaq, aimed to build an authentically Arab national community with

66

the strength and vibrancy to stand against external threats and make its mark upon the world:

"Our attachment to the spirit of the nation and its heritage will increase our drive, strengthen our

forward march, and ensure our orientation...truly sensing our needs, we shall not be susceptible

to the assumption of artificial ideas or imitating others" (Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989: 88;

Baath, 1982). Aflaq, a Western-educated Syrian, was strongly influenced by his homeland - the

site of Faysal's ill-fated bid for power in 1918 - as John F. Devlin describes:

External forces had divided it; individually, its parts were weak; collectively, they formed a logical and historical unity. By extension the concept applied to the entire Arab world; wipe out the unnatural divisions imposed by external powers and the Arabs would regain the power, prestige, and glory they had enjoyed for centuries. Such was the dream, talked about in coffee houses, written of in pamphlets and books, spoken of in lectures (Devlin, 1976: 3).

Progress "towards comfort and happiness", thus depended on achieving an overarching unity

which would safeguard and empower the Arab world against its historic oppressors (Baath,

1982).

With few differences, this moral message presented by the first Baath ("awakening")

Arab nationalists in the 1930s would be the same as the message delivered by Saddam during the

Gulf War and beyond:

The life-blood stirred within the body of the Arab Nation, between the Atlantic and the Arab Gulf, after a period of stagnation lasting four centuries. ..four hundred years of isolation from the rest of the world which was proceeding along the path of achievement; four hundred years of stagnation and decay under Ottoman rule...this Arab awakening...in the course of our civilization has confirmed our nation's ability to surmount all difficulties and setbacks with constant renewal and rejuvenation (Baath, 1982: 10).

The resistance of the Arabs against colonialism and the resistance of the Iraqis against the

American coalition in 1991 and beyond were thus cast as part of the grand struggle for a new era

where the united Arab peoples would be free to develop themselves without foreign interference.

Saddam portrayed himself as a personification of this moral message. In a speech in 1980,

Saddam said:

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Saddam Hussein was born in the Muhafaza of Salah al-Din but he is not (only) a son of the Muhafaza or Salah al-Din because he is a son of the province of Arbil, of Sulaimaniya, he is a son of Anbar, a son of the Tigris and Euphrates, a son of Barada, and of Jordan, and of the Nile, of Damascus and Amman, Cairo and Casablanca, and a son of every Iraqi city and a son of the Iraqi people, of the Iraqi soul and of the Iraqi air and of the Arab homeland of the Arab nation (Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989: 105).

Saddam thus makes himself out to be a champion of the entire Arab World and a champion of a

shared identity linking together a universal Arab community, basing his appeal on the desire of

Arabs for strength, authenticity, unity, and togetherness in the face of any and all challenges

(Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989; Berindranath, 1979; Post, 2003; Devlin, 1976; Baath, 1982;

Aburish, 2000; Holmes, 2003; Worsnip, 2003). As the Iraqi Baath Party itself described in 1982,

early Arab nationalists were forced to "unify the Arab peoples," in the face of "imperialist

conspiracies," and this appeal for unity in the face of external threats was the foundation of the

moral message that Saddam would ultimately come to stand on (Baath, 1982; Chirot, 1994). The

militant nature of this message was evident: one Baathist manifesto stated that "Economy,

politics and everyday life must all be direct towards leading the Arab struggle toward the

battlefields," and that struggle formed, "a vital pre-requisite for the liberation, unity and

renaissance of the Arab nation" (Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989: 103; Baath, 1982; Sciolino,

1990; Aburish, 2000; Balaghi, 2006; Chirot, 1994). The authentic and unified Arab nation could

only be forged by the defeat of the real or perceived external threats seeking to suppress it: hence

the Baath's hostility toward Israel, its war with Iran, and ultimately its fatal confrontation with

the United States.

The rise of the Baath Party, first in Syria and then in Iraq, closely parallels the ending of

outright European colonial domination in the Middle East and the rise of the Western-backed

state of Israel as a regional power at the expense of its Arab neighbours. As Peter Sluglett

argues, "The expansion of the Baath into a mass political organization dates from the end of the

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Second World War, and more particularly from the defeat of the Arab armies in Palestine,"

which, like the German experience in the First World War, destroyed the confidence of many

Arabs in the political status quo (Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1987: 88; Devlin, 1976; Chirot,

1994; Jaber, 1966; Baath, 1982). The Baath Party, which dispatched volunteers from Syria and

Iraq to support the Arab cause in Palestine - even passing a resolution for the conscription of its

own members as part of the war effort - condemned the "weakness" of the Arab governments in

their failed efforts to defeat the new Jewish state (Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976). A similar crisis of

confidence rocked the Arab world and further empowered the Baath in 1967 when Israel crushed

the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War - inducing Arabs to "search for new

ways and methods," after defeat had "exposed the weaknesses of the various systems" already in

place that had proven themselves unable to withstand "Zionist aggression" (Baath, 1982). Faced

with the power of Israel, foreign intervention, and the encroachment of modernity upon

traditional societies, Baathist ideology provided Arabs in Iraq and elsewhere with a sense of

belonging and overarching sense of community. Sluglett states that, "Perhaps the most

distinctive feature of Baathism...was its pan-Arab ideology, and its belief that the individual

Arab states were all part of a single Arab nation, as expressed in the slogan 'one Arab nation

with an eternal mission'" (Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1987: 88; Baath, 1982; Jaber, 1966;

Berindranath, 1979).

As Dewan Berindranath describes, the moral message of Pan-Arabism had real force in

Iraq following the Baathist seizure of power in the 1960s. He describes that there was a sense,

now that the colonial period had ended in the Middle East, that "Political subjugation under alien

rulers had resulted in an all-round impoverishment of the masses manifesting itself in economic

backwardness as well as cultural and economic poverty," all of which had to be overcome in a

69

new beginning or "re-awakening" (Berindranath, 1979: 4; Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976; Devlin,

1991). A Baathist student forum in Damascus in 1935 thus concluded: "We do not aspire to

freedom in order to live in social anarchy like nomads, or to go back to the darkness of the

Middle Ages...We seek independence and freedom...because they are the rightful heritage of

every human being, and because they are the means to unleash our talents and our energies"

(Baath, 1982: 13). In defiance of "the challenges and designs of foreign conspiracies," they were

determined "to fulfill, on this stretch of land that is our country, the destiny of every human

being - the destiny of humanity at large" (Ibid: 13). The slogan of the Baath Party, as conceived

by its founder, Michel Aflaq, was "One Arab Nation with an eternal mission," with the party

dealing with local issues in the "supreme Arab interest" - liberating Arab lands from foreign

domination and building a united Arab socialist state operating in the public interest (Ibid). In

the words of the Baath Party's constitution: "The Arabs are one nation which has an inalienable

right to live as one single state and freely direct its potentialities" (Baath, 1982: 18; Devlin, 1976;

Devlin, 1991; Jaber, 1966).

The Baathist leadership of Iraq in the 1970s, under President Al-Bakr, fully believed that

their regime in Iraq was the model for such a Pan-Arab re-birth and argued that "Iraq is thus

privileged to become a model for the success of revolution in the entire Arab homeland. This

privilege entails a great responsibility in making the revolution a strong success because on that

will depend the future of the movement in the whole Arab homeland" (Berindranath, 1979: 3;

Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1991). This sense of Arab unity based on shared language and culture

would manifest itself in government policy:

Any citizen of an Arab country, including those whose rulers are following politicians hostile to the revolutionary Government, can enter Iraq without a visa, or any type of prior permission. Sufficient for him would be to provide a

70

satisfactory proof of being an Arab national. While in Iraq any Arab national belonging to any Arab country is entitled to exactly the same rights and privileges as enjoyed by the Iraqis...while in Baghdad, it becomes difficult for a foreigner to be able to distinguish among Arabs working together in various offices and establishments and hailing from different countries of the Arab World (Berindranath, 1979: 11-12).

The Baathist government also pursued land reform, nationalized the oil industry and brought the

benefits and the burdens of modern society to peoples that had never before been exposed to

them (Baath, 1982; Moss-Helms, 1984; Worsnip, 2003; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989;

Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1987). Indeed, at this time there was a widespread sense that "The

Arab Nation is embarking on a new birth, a renaissance, a comprehensive transformation which

will affect every aspect of life" (Baath, 1982: 13). Saddam expanded Al-Bakr's efforts following

his 1979 seizure of power and continued the rapid economic development, which saw Iraq's

GDP quadruple in the space often years (Musallam, 1996; Worsnip, 2003). As Patrick Worsnip

describes: "Saddam built a modern infrastructure, an efficient health system and good schools,"

while making great strides in eliminating pervasive diseases, empowering women (who were

given legal parity with men and allowed to engage in professions from doctor to fighter pilot),

combating old tribal prejudices (like honour killings), and effectively engaging in cultural as well

as economic transformation (Worsnip, 2003: 57; Musallam, 1996; Moss-Helms, 1984; Parenti,

2002; Parenti, 2006). The Baath Party, operating as the "elite vanguard" was indeed

"revolutionizing" whole societies (Devlin, 1976; Baath, 1982). In the words of Article VI of the

Baath Constitution:

The Arab Baath Party is a transforming party; it believes that its chief aims of resurrecting Arab nationalism and building socialism can only be achieved by transformation and struggle...Hence the Party decides in favour of...the transformation of the present rotten situation, a transformation which is to include all sectors of life - intellectual, economic, social and political (Devlin, 1976: 27).

Traditional society was being overturned, but its replacement was not a carbon copy of Western

modernism but something distinctly Arab in character (Sciolino, 1991).

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The diverse base of support that existed for such transformation was evident from very

early on. The first Baath Party congress in 1940 included conservatives, socialists, monarchists

and republicans united only by the desire for "Arab unity above all" (Devlin, 1976). Under the

conditions of Western imperialism, Arabs of all political stripes increasingly viewed the division

of the Arab world into separate states and their exploitation by outside powers as "the primary

cause of the region's political, social, and economic backwardness" (Devlin, 1976: 28; Baath,

1982). Thus, from the beginning the Baath was marked by both a progressive spirit and a

nostalgia for the "folk" traditions of the Arab peoples and of a (highly idealized) Arab history

(Sciolino, 1991; Aburish, 2000; Worsnip, 2003; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989). Hence

Aflaq's argument that Baathism represented a "new religion" that would do for the modern Arab

world what Islam had done millennia before:

Today we give the name 'patriot' or 'nationalist' to certain persons of the nation (ummah)...meaning by it those persons who have faith in their country's cause...so in the past the Muslim was the Arab, with faith in the new religion because he combined the qualities necessary to understand that this religion represented a bold move Arabism toward unity, power, and upward progress...the power of Islam...has revived in our days under a new form, that of Arab nationalism (Devlin, 1976: 25).

Thus, "Nationalism would take the place of Islam as the focus of belief for Arabs," leading them

into a new age of progress and modernity (Ibid: 25).

It is worth noting that this moral message did not possess the same strongly exclusionary

and racial Puritanism possessed by the German Volkisch tradition and allowed for a much greater

degree of diversity. While some scholars, like Daniel Chirot, have condemned Baathism as an

"elite fantasy" believed in by only a tiny fraction of the populations of Iraq and Syria - such

assumptions are as baseless as the long-standing (and now decisively debunked) contention that

the Nazi Party consisted mainly of lower middle class hooligans (Muhlberger, 1991; Kater,

1983; Reiche, 1986; Kershaw, 1985; Merkl, 1980; Abel, 1938; Worsnip, 2003; Aburish, 2000;

72

Chirot, 1994). The declaration given on Sunday April 7, 1947 at the founding conference of the

Arab Baath Socialist Party in Iraq states that:

Humanity is a single whole with a mutual interest, sharing its values and its culture. The Arabs draw on world culture and contribute to it, and stretch a hand of friendship to other nations, and cooperate with them in creating just systems which guarantee peace and prosperity and moral and spiritual advancement to all the peoples of the world (Baath, 1982: 18).

To the founders of the Party, this progressive and internationalist part of the Baath moral

message fits in seamlessly with its anti-imperialism aspect: "Imperialism and everything

associated with it are criminal acts which the Arabs will fight in every possible way. They will

also try, within their material and moral resources, to help all the nations which are fighting to

achieve their freedom" (Ibid: 18). Thus the Baathist moral message shares much in common

with similar messages of popular empowerment and solidarity of the oppressed which spread

across the Third World in the final years of European colonialism (Chirot, 1994).

Contrary to Chirot's portrayal of the Baathist movement as "elitist" (and certainly its

founding members like Aflaq were Western-educated professionals), the movement could never

have succeeded in Iraq if it did not have popular support. As the Party itself described in 1982:

"The birth of the Arab Baath Socialist Party in Iraq was a response to the deep national feelings

among the masses," and there is evidence for this (Baath, 1982: 24). In the 1952 student uprising

against the reigning monarchy, "the Party was able to achieve great influence in the uprising

through its active membership among the students, the intellectuals, and other sections of the

general public. It did this through its propaganda, through calls to the struggle, and through

actual participation" (Ibid: 24). Likewise in 1953 when Iraqi oil workers went on strike against

the Basra Oil Company, the Baath successfully called on students in colleges and higher

institutions to strike in support: "Students of all political persuasions showed a total support to

73

this call issues by their socialist comrades," indicating that the Party and its moral message had a

strong following among educated people, which, though a minority, can hardly be labelled as

"elites" (Baath, 1982: 25; Devlin, 1976; Devlin, 1991; Jaber, 1966).

The Party also reached out to Iraqi workers in its propaganda with significant success:

Our toiling masses, whether they be workers, students, or peasants, are today facing the stooges of imperialism with a will. They stand today as one body in the face of those who exploit the people and deprive them of their freedom. The day will come when the will of the Arab people will destroy all these tyrannical forces, in order to raise high and glorious the banner of freedom, socialism, and Arab unity (Baath, 1982: 25).

The Party's support for the Basra oil workers in 1953 spilled over into neighbouring Saudi

Arabia where the Baath supported a strike by Aramco oil workers (Ibid). By opposing the

monarchy, opposing the pro-American Baghdad Pact military alliance and the monarchy's track

record of rigged and stolen elections, the Iraq Baath Party developed a solid base of support and

the ability to "arouse public fury and enthusiasm in all parts of Iraq during the tripartite

aggression against Egypt following the nationalization of the Suez Canal," by President Nasser

of Egypt - helping to initiate major demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes in protest of the

monarchy's tolerance for the Anglo-French-Israeli coalition which had invaded Egypt in 1956

(Baath, 1982: 28; Devlin, 1976; Jaber, 1966; Farouk-Sluglert & Sluglett, 1987). This success,

met with heavy repression by the Iraqi state, indicates that many Iraqis apparently believed in the

Baathist message of Arab unity and anti-imperialism and cared enough to put themselves in

harm's way. Many Baathists were killed in street demonstrations during the 1956 general strike

or driven underground by police repression, which only increased the cause's appeal in the eyes

of many - here was movement which backed up its words with deeds and which was untainted

by scandal or corruption (Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976). As one man, Hajj Abdullah, said before

joining the Party in 1956: "Why do the sons of this district walk with such dignity and

74

manliness? All the members of the Baath display this same manliness which he now sees in the

eyes of those stationed behind the barricades". Unyielding in the face of police repression, he

said: "I can't stand it any longer. I want to join your ranks and become a Baathist" (Baath, 1982:

33-34)!

One student who came to Baghdad from a remote province in 1956 was motivated to join

the Baathist cause when he found that it was full of students - progressive-minded people like

himself- drawn from all over the country and often coming from humble backgrounds, fighting

for a cause they all believed in:

We came to Baghdad from various cities, villages, and remote corners of Iraq. We came with dreams and ideals and far-reaching plans. We had suffered poverty and starvation and feudal tyranny in our remote mud-villages, and we came to the big city of Baghdad in order to discover the roots and causes of it all, and to have imprinted on our imagination a lasting picture of our backwardness. We came to know the wide gap which separated us from the advance of human civilization in the second half of the twentieth century, and to realize that those nations suffering from backwardness and imperialist domination had entered the stage of dynamic action, the stage of a concerted tenacious struggle for a total transformation, and against the forces of reaction and total immobility (Baath, 1982: 30).

By 1956, the Party was firmly established in Baghdad, Mosul, Hilla, Karbala, and in other Iraq

cities, provoking a backlash which saw hundreds of Baathists imprisoned, dismissed from their

jobs, or barred from their places of education - spurring a donation drive from Baath supporters

in the working class districts of Baghdad and other cities (Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976; Farouk-

Sluglett & Sluglett, 1987).

The popular agitation of the Party continued after the fall of the monarchy in 1958 and

the seizure of power by the Free Officer's Movement of President Qasim, who continued the

monarchy's crackdown on the Baath Movement, which forced the Baath to build a still broader

base of support in order to survive among the workers, peasants and students (Baath, 1982;

75

Devlin, 1976; Devlin, 1991; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1987). One Baathist leaflet circulated in

1960 appealed to the Party to look to the working classes:

The working classes are attempting to lay down the foundations of trade-union organization on sound progressive principles which well serve the interests of the workers, and secure the advantages they have reaped. But they are facing abnormal circumstances and pernicious concepts which aim at undermining the advantages gained by the workers, putting an end to trade-union organization, and depriving the workers of their legitimate rights. In view of this, it is necessary for us to mobilize all our potentialities among the working classes in order to go through the battle which will decide the destiny of trade-union organization, and we should do this armed with courage and alertness (Baath, 1982: 37).

In a campaign largely overlooked by scholars, the Baath Party was not only able to support a

strike by drivers facing increased gas prices but actually mobilize large numbers of workers and

students against the Qasim government when it attempted to use force against the strikers (Baath,

1982; Devlin, 1976). Evidently the Party did possess a broader base of support than is

commonly acknowledged today - revealed in the Qasim government's concern, not over militant

Baathist conspirators, but over the pervasive influence of Baathist student groups over Iraqi

young people (Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976; Jaber, 1966). The Baathist cause grew, in the words

of one young supporter, because of its "resistance without fear, without hesitation, and without

any thought for personal gain or loss," against the repressive Qasim government and against

foreign imperialism while standing strongly for a better progressive future for the people of Iraq

(Baath, 1982: 38; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1987). In the words of John F. Devlin, "The Iraqi

Revolution grew out of a profound malaise on the part of younger, politically conscious elements

in the way the country had been run for years" (Devlin, 1976: 119). They wanted something

better and turned to the Baath moral message of Arab unity as the answer (Farouk-Sluglett &

Sluglett, 1989).

Like under the monarchy, many Baathist supporters gave their lives for their cause in the

face of the Qasim government's crackdown on dissent, which resulting in them gaining notoriety

76

not unlike the present-day reformers in Iran who are willing to brave bullets in the name of their

moral cause. When Baath supporters were killed in demonstrations in 1962, the Baath combined

its other all moral message of anti-imperialism and Arab unity with populist issues of local

concern:

...on this day the true nature of the present regime becomes clear to us, and we recognize the extent of its criminal actions against the people and their national movements...A clear witness of all this is the regime's fierce confrontation with the students and the masses of our people who declared their support for the drivers' strike...[the government] is arresting without trial thousands of our youth, and throwing into dark prisons thousands of others...Qasim's rule has left the country open to the exploitation of large-scale monopolies and the tyranny of the oil companies. It is exposing our people to exploitation, unemployment, rising prices and poverty (Baath, 1982: 38-40).

The December 1962 student strike organized by the Baath Party was indeed "fierce and violent"

with many students dying at the hands of the police - some of them dying defiantly shouting the

word "Baath" (resurrection) (Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976). In a similar story, an eye witness

described how one mortally wounded Baathist defiantly swam the Euphrates while under fire

from the police:

I saw him reach the other side of the river, and then stand up and look at us. He then raised his fist in the air, went back a few steps, tottered and fell, not to rise again. The drops of his blood were intermixed with the waters of the Euphrates, and perhaps found their way to the fields tilled and tended by the people of Iraq (Baath, 1982: 45).

The poem of another Baath supporter decried the sectarian infighting within Iraq and called on

the Baath Party to lead the country into a great future: "I have come to believe, through my

doubts and astonishment/That these millions do not belong to the Arab Nation/I am confined in

my belief, but for a flash of light in the dark night/Oh torch of the Baath, dispel our darkness"

(Ibid: 44)! Baath prisoners of the Qasim regime were heard to say that "Iron will wear away

before we do" (Ibid: 45)! The defiant actions of Baathist supporters in the face of persecution

and their dedication to their cause and moral message allowed them to expand their base of

support - especially among the progressively minded, urban, and educated elements within Iraqi

77

society that wanted to break out of traditional modes of life and build a great and modern society

(Baath, 1982; Aburish, 2000; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1987; Devlin, 1976; Jaber, 1966;

Worsnip, 2003). The students who supported the Baath against the monarchy and against Qasim

would likewise support the Party when it faced political persecution once again in 1963 (Baath,

1982).

The Baathist movement, already having suffered persecution under the monarchy and

under Qasim, would endure yet another round when the short-lived Baathist government set up

in 1963 was overthrown. Saddam himself recounts being arrested and tortured along with many

of his comrades but argued that "the Baath had such vitality to enable it to overcome its plight

with courage and valour...They (the government) had forgotten the history of this party, which

had lived and grown and became hardened through the successive battles which it had waged

against reaction and dictatorship in the past" (Baath, 1982: 53). Baathist prisoners would

proudly say under interrogation that they were "fighting members of the Arab Baath Socialist

Party" (Ibid: 54). As Christine Moss-Helms has described, the Baath Party was (and indeed still

is in other parts of the Arab World) organized around the principles of discipline and secrecy and

had to "struggle throughout the 1950s and 1960s to attain recognition and to expand its

following," against often hostile governments and rival parties (Moss-Helms, 1984: 83). This

experience of Baathists as underground fighters - secretive and conspiratorial, but counting on

mass support - would characterize the movement for years to come and play a significant role in

shaping Saddam's government by the 1980s (Devlin, 1991; Moss-Helms, 1984; Farouk-Sluglett

& Sluglett, 1989).

78

Three months after the 1962 student strike began, in February 1963, the Qasim

government itself would be toppled by a combination of popular Baathist "revolutionary squads"

and mutinous sections of the military: "the army and the people" carrying out the action in "one

concerted effort" (Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976; Devlin, 1991). An announcement by the Party in

the aftermath of the February coup proclaimed: "Free men of Iraq, students, peasants, workers,

this is your revolution - support it, God is with us, and glory will be for the Arabs" (Devlin,

1976: 231)! An eye-witness in Mosul later that year described how the Baath was mobilizing the

support of the people: "From the top of the gallows with which the tyrants meant to put an end to

our people's freedom and their aspirations for a dignified life, a Baathist fighter called for the

glory of his party, and repeated its immortal slogan: 'one Arab Nation with an eternal mission'"

(Baath, 1982: 44). When the Iraqi Baathist movement returned to power in 1968 its popular

message similarly focused on the theme of progressive struggle in the face of the oppressive

forces threatening the Arab people:

Our proud and noble people...a group of your faithful sons, with a strong belief in God and in the aspirations of the Arab Nation, decided to carry out the revolution of 17 July 1968, to take over power and put an end to the corrupt rule represented in a clique of opportunists, illiterates, spies, suspect Zionists, and agents who have no commitment whatsoever to this country...They turned the country into feudal estates and milked it to serve their own private purposes, without any heed to the masses of the people and their interests (Baath, 1982: 46).

While both of these revolutions - 1963 and 1968 - were carried out by a minority of the

population with support from elements of the army and in this sense could be declared "elitist",

as Chirot claims, in both cases the Baath made it clear through its own words and message that it

was acting "for the people" and basing its moral message on winning their support (Chirot, 1994;

Aburish, 2000; Kellerman, 2008; Kets de Vries, 2004).

79

Hence the poem by the Iraqi poet Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri praising Saddam's

predecessor, Ahmad Hassan Al-Bakr, in 1968, which praises him for facilitating the aspirations

of ordinary Iraqis:

Long live the Revolution, and blessed be this festive day/May the throngs around you attain the fullness of glory! Oh you who have created a new April bedecked with roses/You who have made Spring resplendent with your bright faces and your efforts/Greetings to Al-Bakr our proud leader, whose footsteps pave the way for proud men (Al-Jawahiri, 1968; Baath, 1982: 46).

Another poem, by Shafiq Al-Kamali, also from 1968, makes a similar statement:

We have achieved deeds which made the world resplendent...Blessed be Baghdad as a city of glory. Blessed by the great Baath led by men whose paths are the paths of glory (Al-Kamali, 1968; Baath, 1982: 47).

Abd Al-Razzaq-Abd Al-Wahid also glorified Al-Bakr as a champion of a popular movement and

struggle for progressive change in the Arab world:

Oh Ahmad, father of great resolutions and achievements... Your glory is that you have been born a leader...Our high-minded principles dictate that rebels honour their revolutions; Beliefs and principles are not subject to barter; Our course, devoted leader, is a different course (Al-Wahid, 1968; Baath, 1982: 47).

Khalil Al-Khouri celebrated Al-Bakr through a very clear appeal to the Baathist moral message

of Arab "awakening":

Your voice was like triumphal arches/And Iraq/And its millions/And those others who love it, were crossing/And thirty generations/To the echo of your voice, were being resurrected (Al-Khouri, 1968; Baath, 1982: 48).

Evidently this moral message aroused considerable support among Iraqis. One journalist

reported how in the aftermath of the 1968 revolution, "I was moving in the midst of trilling cries

of joy, and songs and chanting, in the streets of the city which refused to sleep on that first

evening in June" (Anon, 1968; Baath, 1982: 48). In the words of another commentator, the

Baath had "faced up to all the challenges which arose, to imperialist interests, imperialism,

Zionism and reaction, and was an example for progressive revolutionary movements in the world

(Anon, 1968; Baath, 1982: 55)." The Baath goal of a "new Arab developed and perfected,"

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which had inspired so many people in Iraq with its progressive ideal, would now be a matter of

state policy (Devlin, 1976: 24; Sciolino, 1991).

Following his seizure of power in 1979, Saddam Hussein - who had long been Al-Bakr's

second-in-command - would extend and in many ways personalize the Baath moral message of

Arab unity, anti-imperialism, and modernization while striving to bring his country to the status

of Arab "superpower" (Sciolino, 1991; Devlin, 1991; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989; Worsnip,

2003; Horwitz, 2002; Kelly, 2002). The glorification of past Arab greatness was stepped up to

new heights: "Over and over, he [Saddam] reminded the Iraqi people of their ancient greatness

and called upon them to restore it...School children and university students alike were steeped in

Mesopotamian history, and even educated Iraqis living abroad declared their firm belief that their

land was the cradle of civilization" (Sciolino, 1991: 40; Musallam, 1996). The modern

accomplishments of the Iraqi state were compared with the triumphs of past civilizations, as a

quote from a book published by the Iraqi Interior Ministry reveals:

From the arid lands of the North, to the permanently watered tree plantations of the South, Iraqi civilization has spread its wings like the divine King of Nimrod which we see here, offering the pomegranate of everlasting love. The palm trees of Basra remember that they were once worshipped as the tree of life...It is the flow of water which makes the most extreme form of modernization possible (Sciolino, 1991: 52).

Similar kinds of propaganda were used during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, during which the

Iraqi people showed incredible loyalty to Saddam's regime, viewing the war as "the only way to

repel the Persian invaders who threatened to install and Iranian-style Islamic republic on Iraqi

land" (Ibid: 120). This indicates that the Baath moral message still retained considerable force

when put up against a competing message (Moss-Helms, 1984; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989;

Musallam, 1996). Iraq's tactical victory in the war was portrayed as an "Arab victory" over a

traditional enemy and one which, in spite of the war's costs, inspired renewed support for

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Saddam and the Baath Party and its moral message (Musallam, 1996; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett,

1989). As Musallam Ali Musallam has said, with the exception of Iraq's restive Kurdish

population, the Iraqi achievement of "building domestic communal solidarity is one few

neighbouring countries could match," and the nostalgia of living in a country where citizens

"chose to see themselves as Arab-Iraqis rather than in terms of their religious affiliation," would

be echoed by refugees fleeing the sectarian bloodshed of a post-Saddam Iraq after 2003

(Musallam, 1996: 79; Brown, 2008; Pravda, 2009).

Hugh Pope complained just prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, how

"ordinary Iraqis can't be expected to have a real answer to the oft-repeated questions about Iraq,"

namely "do Iraqis want to rise up against Saddam Hussein," and blamed this on a combination of

"exhaustion, ignorance and, above all, fear," essentially saying that in a harsh police state like

Iraq there was no way to tell whether Iraqis truly supported their leader or not (Pope, 2002: 289-

290). However, a study by Christine Moss-Helms in the 1980s - prior to the wholesale

destruction of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War - reveals that Saddam and the Baath Party did possess

legitimate support and that the Baath moral message was resonating among key elements of the

Iraqi population. Moss Helms discusses the methods of the Baath Party in building and

maintaining popular support. She describes that in the early 1980s, less than 1% of the Iraqi

population had full membership in the Baath Party while 10.7%, or about 1.5 million out of 14

million, were active supporters of the Baath (Moss-Helms, 1984: 87; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett,

1989). This was a much smaller percentage of support than what was enjoyed by the Nazis but

the figure is somewhat misleading. As Moss-Helms cites: "During interviews in the summer of

1981...many Iraqis who were aged forty or over said that they were not Baathists, but readily and

with some pride added that their sons and daughters were members or sympathizers of the party"

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(Moss-Helms, 1984: 96). The party, in an effort to build its support base in a diverse population,

targeted young people, engaged in literacy programs, gave women equal rights, and spread their

ideology while, in many cases, creating improvements in living standards - all of which fed into

the Baath message of progressive modernization (Moss-Helms, 1984; Balaghi, 2006). Indeed,

the fact that Iraq, prior to the Gulf War, was unquestionably the most powerful country in the

Arab world and possessed the highest standard of living in the Arab world confirmed the Baath

moral message still further in the eyes of many (Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett, 1989; Parenti, 2002;

Musallam, 1996; Worsnip, 2003; Balaghi, 2006). Thus economic development and military

victory were both cast in moral terms and celebrated as such.

Much has been said of Saddam's "cult of personality", mostly in terms of its function as a

control mechanism, but given how the Iraqi leader's propaganda machine actually functioned it

unquestionably had a moral function as well, which, in effect, was to portray Saddam as the

living embodiment of the Baath moral message. As Elaine Sciolino has described, the Baath

Party's aim was to create "a new Arab man," and to "revitalize Arab culture and Arab

greatness," by bringing together Arabs of all religious backgrounds and unifying the Arab world

under one banner (Sciolino, 1991: 47; Devlin, 1991; Devlin, 1976; Jaber, 1966; Baath, 1982;

Chirot, 1994). However, Saddam effectively "transcended the Party by presenting himself as a

great historical leader in direct contact with his people, a sort of republican sheik," and the

embodiment of the "revitalized" Arab culture and historical greatness for which the Baath Party

had been striving for decades - he was effectively the culmination of their struggle (Sciolino,

1991: 120; Devlin, 1991; Kelly, 2002; Musallam, 1996; Balaghi, 2006). Tony Horwitz's

description of the proliferation of images of Saddam around Baghdad suggests this:

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Saddam's face perched on the dashboards of taxis, on the walls of every shop and every office, on clock faces, on ash trays, on calendars, on billboards at every major intersection - often four pictures to an intersection. Some of the portraits covered entire building fronts...Saddam appeared in innumerable guises; in military fatigues festooned with medals, in Bedouin garb a top a charging steed, in pilgrim's robes praying at Mecca, in a double-breasted suit and aviator sunglasses, looking cool and sophisticated. The idea seemed to be that Saddam was all things to all people: omniscient, all-powerful, and inevitable. Like God (Horwitz, 2002: 151).

Certainly it was common for Western observers to chuckle at the sight of the montage of images

of Saddam shown every night on Iraqi television:

Saddam was shown wearing his black beret while dancing with the Bedouin, puffing on his cigar; in his Arab headgear...shaking hands with Baghdadis in the streets; wearing camouflage while surveying a military parade; and kissing little girls who joyfully danced for him (Balaghi, 2006: 116).

However, like Saddam's ambitious building project in the 1980s to rebuild ancient Babylon, his

persistent use of imagery aimed at creating "a visual manifestation of a revolutionary

civilization...an experiential alternative to Western civilization and to an Iraqi past that was

disconnected from his Baathist regime" (Balaghi, 2006: 121; Karsh & Rautsi, 1991). As early as

1974, Saddam declared that "The man of Iraq is a now a new man...This is our achievement...the

source of our confidence that the future belongs to us," and he strove to portray himself in this

light (Karsh & Rautsi, 1991: 123-124; Balaghi, 2006; Sciolino, 1991; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett,

1989).

While, as was explained in a previous chapter, some people have attempted to explain

Hitler's appeal to the German masses as being a matter of charismatic hypnotism, it is impossible

to say the same of Saddam. Unlike other Arab nationalist leaders such as Nasser and Aflaq,

Saddam was "not a great orator," and his speeches were "short and rare," consisting of rather

grandiose and elitist language that was not readily accessible to ordinary people" (Musallam,

1996: 43-44). Thus it could be said that he depended on the appeal of an already existing Baath

moral message even more so than Hitler depended on an already existing Volkisch moral

message (Chirot, 1994). He succeeded in portraying himself as an Arab hero largely because he

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was able to portray himself as an embodiment of the Baath moral message of Arab

empowerment, economic modernization, and cultural awakening. As a two page statement in the

London Times by the Iraqi government in 1980 described it:

...the question is now pertinently asked, with a leader like this man [Saddam], the wealth of oil resources and a forceful people like the Iraqis, will she repeat her former glories and [will] the name of Saddam Hussein link up with that of Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Al-Mansur and Harun Al-Rashid? To be sure, they have not really achieved half of what he has already done at the helm of the Baath Arab Socialist Party, [and] he is still only 44 (Karsh & Rautsi, 1991: 124).

Likewise, during the Gulf War, Saddam continuously appealed to the two crucial aspects of the

Baath moral message which had been present from the start - namely anti-colonialism and Arab

unity:

Throughout the Kuwaiti crisis he [Saddam] made excessive use of the standard anti-colonialist argument, accusing the West of preventing the emergence of a unified Arab state in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, by carving the region into many small states, so as to keep it divided and weak (Ibid: 270).

In this regard he echoed the sentiment of many in the Arab world when he said to a visiting

American Senator, just prior to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990: "Why is it that we are treated

this way in the Western media? The Arabs listen everyday to the insults against them. Why have

you allowed yourselves to be under the influence of Zionists and Zionist lobbies to this extent?

We want peace but we do not want to surrender" (Musallam, 1996: 59). He echoed this same

sentiment at his own trial years later:

The Americans came to Iraq under a lie. To remain in Iraq for the duration they want, they produced this theatrical piece of trial. The Americans and the Zionists want to executive Saddam Hussein, and they will be smaller than a bedbug if they do not see him executed. My people ask me, and I am ethically bound to call them to fight and keep fighting...these testimonies...are meant to disparage the march of twenty-five years. During that time, we built a great Iraq with our tears. This march is being disparaged. Therefore, the people are being disparaged. I do not believe that any true Iraqi...accepts this (Newton & Scharf, 2008: 121).

On one occasion in his trial he chanted in the courtroom: "Long live Iraq! Long live the Arab

Nation! Down with the traitors! Down with Bush" (Ibid: 131)! Thus Saddam, contrary to popular

images of an amoral tyrant, continued to express a moral message that he evidently believed in

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right up to his final days - a moral message that continues to resonate among certain elements of

the Iraqi population and in the Arab world as a whole and beyond.

During the Gulf War Time Magazine and other Western newspapers were shocked by the

seemingly irrational support that the Palestinian people were giving to Saddam. As one Time

article (unsubtly titled "The Palestinians Back Another Loser") states, "By siding with Saddam,

they [the Palestinians] lost sympathy and support among the allies, both Western and Arab, and

handed Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir [of Israel] a propaganda windfall" (Hull, Hamad &

MacLeod, 1991). Western observers shook their heads sadly at this and remarked that "as long

as the Palestinians cling to illusions, they will never be capable of turning their dream of

statehood into reality" (Ibid). However, as early as 1979 at the Baghdad Summit of the Arab

League, organized by Saddam to oppose Egypt's signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel

(indeed Egypt was suspended from the League and sanctions were imposed on it), Saddam

spearheaded the push for Palestinian rights and endorsed the "Arab Nation's struggle to liberate

the occupied areas" (Balaghi, 2006: 75).

Indeed Saddam was to build his leadership role in the Arab world by the showing

strength to global powers with a history of imperialism while stressing the need for Arab unity

against a common enemy in the state of Israel. As the leader of the strongest state in the Arab

world, many Palestinians believed him when he said that Iraq "Is preparing itself in the

economic, social, intellectual and military fields for the liberation of Jerusalem and all the lands

of Palestine... Jerusalem is ours" (Ibid: 76). Saddam would repeat this message at an Islamic

Conference meeting in Baghdad on the eve of the Gulf War in 1990, making it clear that "We

will strike at [the Israelis] with all the arms in our possession if they attack Iraq or the

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Arabs...Palestine has been stolen...[we must] recover the usurped rights in Palestine and free

Jerusalem from Zionist captivity" (Cited in Bard, 2010; Baghdad, 1990). This message was

reinforced by further sabre-rattling claims that Iraq was prepared to strike Israel if "the common

enemy" struck at any Arab state: "I swear to God we will let our fire eat half of Israel if it tries to

wage anything against Iraq," or "the Arabs" (Cited in Bard, 2010; Reuters, 1990). This

provoked calls from the Arab press for Arab states to support Saddam in creating "a unified

military Arab force," without which "we will not be able to confront the Zionist ambitions

supported by U.S. aid" (Cited in Bard, 2010; Al-Dustur, 1990). Saddam's use of Scud missiles

against Israel in the 1991 Gulf War, his assistance to the families of slain Palestinian resistance

fighters, and his ongoing to defiance to the demands of world powers showed that he was willing

to back up his words with deeds (Assadi, 2003; Bard, 2010; Laing, 2003; Silver & Ghazali,

2003; Ephron, 2003; Balaghi, 2006). Thus the appeal of the Baath moral message espoused by

Saddam - and originally intended as an internationalist system of belief- extended well beyond

Iraq's borders. Its anti-imperialist message appealed not only to Palestinians in the occupied

territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip but also to ordinary people across the Middle East

and throughout the Third World (Balaghi, 2006; Devlin, 1991; Moss-Helms, 1984).

Western journalists were understandably surprised at the comments made by Palestinians

about Saddam's performance in the 1991 Gulf War. Even as his forces were being destroyed

and driven out of Kuwait in what amounted to a one-sided slaughter, people in the Arab section

of Jerusalem were saying that "Every Palestinian knows that Saddam will emerge

victorious...You see, he's got a secret weapon" (Hull, Hamad & MacLeod, 1991). Others were

heard to say, "Maybe he lost the battle, but that doesn't mean he lost the war...We haven't had a

leader like Saddam since Saladin" (Ibid). Still others declared, "After he [Saddam] rebuilds Iraq,

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he will try to liberate Palestine again" (Ibid). Even when they accepted that Saddam had lost the

war many Palestinians refused to watch the news, with one man declaring "I can't stand the

humiliation" (Ibid). The destruction wrought by Iraqi Scud missiles against major Israeli cities

like Tel Aviv and Haifa led to wild stories of how Iraq was reducing whole regions of Israel to

rubble, had wrecked its military infrastructure and demolished the Dimona nuclear complex,

sending many cheering Palestinians into the streets and onto the rooftops of West Bank cities

like Ramallah (Hull, Hamad & MacLeod, 1991; Bard, 2010; Assadi, 2003; Worsnip, 2003).

Before the war even began, in Jenin in August 1990, thousands of Palestinians marched through

the streets chanting "Saddam, you hero, attack Israel with chemical weapons" (Cited in Bard,

2010; Associated Press, 1990). In 2003 just prior to the American invasion of Iraq, Palestinians

likewise marched and chanted "Oh Saddam, oh Saddam. Bomb, bomb Tel Aviv" (Assadi,

2003).

This support extended to the Palestinian leadership. The Palestinian Liberation

Organization which, along with Libya, was the only member of the Arab League to support

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, described the invasion as a positive step toward "the liberation of

Palestine" (Cited in Bard, 2010; Mideast Mirror, 1990). The PLO Executive Committee likewise

declared that "The Palestinian people stand firmly by Iraq's side" (Bard, 2010). Yasser Arafat

reacted to the Gulf War by appealing to the same moral message of Arab unity against

imperialism long espoused by Saddam: "We can only be in the trench hostile to Zionism and its

imperialist allies who are today mobilizing their tanks, planes, and all their advanced and

sophisticated war machine against our Arab nation" (Bard, 2010; Sawt al-Shab, 1990). He went

on to praise Saddam's struggle against "American dictatorship," and described Iraq as "the

defender of the Arab nation, of Muslims and of free men everywhere" (Cited in Bard, 2010;

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Agence France-Presse, 1991). Even after the war and Saddam's defeat, Arafat continued to

appeal to the Baathist moral message: "I would like to take this opportunity to renew to your

Excellency the great pride that we take in the ties of fraternity and common destiny binding us"

(Cited in Bard, 2010; Iraq Radio, 1991). He concluded by saying, "Let us work together until we

achieve victory and regain liberated Jerusalem" (Ibid).

Just as Saddam's military actions in 1991 provoked a strong sense of moral approval

from Palestinians who were far beyond the reach of his coercive state apparatus, Saddam's arrest

by the Americans in December 2003 evoked similar statements damning the foreign imperialists

while praising Saddam for standing up to them. One taxi driver in Ramallah called the day of

Saddam's capture "a black day in history...I am saying so not because Saddam is an Arab, but

because he is the only man who said 'no' to American injustice in the Middle East" (Assadi,

2003). A porter in East Jerusalem similarly said that "Saddam was the only one who said no to

the Americans...All the others bowed down before them. What if he was a dictator? All the Arab

leaders are dictators" (Silver & Ghazali, 2003). A cook described how "Saddam was the best.

All the other Arab leaders were collaborators and traitors, including ours. He was the only one

who fought the whole world" (Ibid). A barber remarked "We Palestinians like Saddam because

he's the only Arab leader who managed to scare Israel and the United States. He made Israelis

hide in shelters and cover their faces with gas masks" (Ephron, 2003). A woman in Gaza

insisted that "Saddam is a real man and all of us are with him," for the same reasons (Assadi,

2003). A young law student argued that "Saddam was a symbol of grandeur and represented the

hopes of all Arabs," effectively saying that Saddam had succeeded in personifying the Baath

message of Arab "awakening" (Laing, 2003). Another man in Gaza tore his eyes away from the

coverage of Saddam's capture, saying "I love him so much, I can't stand watching it" (Ibid). In

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the West Bank town of Al-Amari, a resident similarly grieved: "He is a brave man. I swear by

God, this is a big loss" (Ephron, 2003). Another woman described how she had "watched

television for three hours and cried" (Ibid). All this appeared to confirm Said Aburish's point

that Saddam's popularity depending primarily on his ability to stand up to "imperialist" forces:

"From day one, Saddam's prominence and his position in terms of the Arab street has depended

on the fact that he's the man who stood up to the West, in particular the United States...That

hasn't changed to this day" (Ibid).

Saddam's anti-imperialist moral message has won him support from beyond the Middle

East and the Arab world. In 1991, local Muslims in the Indian state of Kerala renamed their

village "Saddam Beach" to "affirm their solidarity with the Iraqi leader," and even as late as

2006 villagers insisted that they would only vote for political candidates who speak out "against

America and in support of Saddam" (Rediff, 2006). A local candidate for the Left Democratic

Front party, Muhammad Kutty, responded positively to this, saying that "This is a unique village,

which is the finest example of how even ordinary people are against the imperialistic policies of

the US administration, and how the Indian government has been blindly supporting it" (Ibid).

The village was previously known as "Tipou Sultan Breach" in honour of an 18th century Indian

monarch who fought against British imperialism and Saddam seemed to be his 20th century

equivalent according to the villagers who have adorned the place with Iraqi flags and posters of

their hero (Rediff, 2006; The Hindu, 2003). The village economy, like many in Kerala, was

dependent largely on the income that migrant workers in Iraq and the Gulf States send home and

was ruined by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the villagers expressed their economic

outrage in profoundly moralistic terms (Rediff, 2006; Thomas, 2003; The Hindu, 2003).

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Mohammed Bashir, the head of the "Saddam Hussein Voluntary Trust," in Saddam

Beach described how "We named the trust after Saddam Hussein because is our role-model. He

is our anti-American hero" (Rediff, 2006). He re-iterated that "The villagers have decided that

we will vote only for those who speak against America and in support of Saddam Hussein"

(Ibid). When Saddam was captured in December 2003, Bashir said: "We have been praying for

Saddam ever since the first Gulf War. We will now boycott all American products because our

beloved leader has been captured by the US forces...We will march to the beach picking up all

the US products we can gather from our houses and toss them into the sea," while also

boycotting US and British made goods of all types (Thomas, 2003). Also in 2003 fishermen in

the village built a boat called "Iraq" with its own motto that "Every Bush will be Ploughed

Someday" (Rediff, 2006). One fisherman remarked that "They may have succeeded in capturing

Mr Hussein. But he will live in our hearts forever" (The Hindu, 2003). Many young people in

the village responded to Saddam's arrest by shaving their heads and carving Saddam's name into

walls and trees (Ibid). The village even sells Saddam related memorabilia and holds Saddam

related social events in order to keep his memory alive.

In conclusion, it is impossible to deny that Saddam Hussein did have a moral message

and that this message was instrumental in building the base of support that he enjoyed both

inside and outside of Iraq. While one might question the sincerity of Iraqis living in Saddam's

police state in 2002 when they said that they felt "solidarity with their leader," it becomes much

more difficult to question the sincerity of those people who have nothing to fear from coercion

yet still express their wholehearted support for a man commonly viewed as a tyrannical despot

(Pope, 2002). When Iraqi refugees fleeing from the sectarian carnage of a post-Saddam Iraq

describe Saddam as a "good president" who "defended Iraq from its enemies" and ensured that

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"wherever he went, people respected Iraqis," compared to the current American-backed

government which doesn't "care about Iraqis...It's all about your ethnic background, your

religion," they are not only longing for Saddam but for the moral message he claimed to embody

and one which had strong roots in the Arab world (Brown, 2008). From the First World War to

the Gulf War and to this day, Arabs have been fighting against external intervention and to

develop their own distinct place in the modern world. By capturing this moral message of

indigenous resistance against an external imperialist threat by outsiders, Saddam and his state

became the center of the aspirations for millions of people.

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Conclusion: The Moral Environment

In the modern age we have watched again and again as any sense of universal human

morality is trampled on by sectarian mass murder. In the words of Niall Ferguson, our "capacity

to treat other human beings as members of an inferior and indeed malignant species - as mere

vermin - was one of the crucial reasons why twentieth-century conflict was so violent. Only

make this mental leap, and warfare ceases to be a formalized encounter between uniformed

armies. It becomes a war of annihilation, in which everyone on the other side - men, women,

children, the elderly - can legitimately be killed" (Ferguson, 2006: 480). Indeed, if Robert

Kaplan is correct, the 21st century is poised to enter into a similar pattern of conflict on a more

de-centralized but no less violent scale as "cultures, rather than states, fight," in an environment

of increased resource scarcity and increased ethnic tensions (Kaplan, 2000: 47). In both

situations, certain conditions have to be met before the kind of "moral environment" that allows

ordinary soldiers like Ferguson's Lieutenant-Colonel Tanaka Ryukichi to feel morally righteous

in treating the Chinese like "swine" (Ferguson, 2006: 477; Pinker, 2008; Turchin, 2007;

Edelman, 1964). This has to be understood if we are to grasp how many of Hitler's followers,

even those that knew the extent of Nazi crimes, persisted in viewing their cause and their leader

as being morally right. The regimes of both Hitler and Saddam were underpinned by a moral

message that was fixated on the struggle of a "chosen" people (Germans and Arabs respectively)

against an alien enemy bent on the destruction of the "chosen" people and the susceptibility of

people to such ideas indicates the exploitability of human morality in general and particularly

when it comes to ideas of purity and sanctity (Pinker, 2008; Harman, 2008; Turchin, 2007;

Chirot, 1994; Neocleous, 2005). Far from being natural, the particular moral environments that

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existed in Germany and Iraq were the product of specific conditions that facilitated the

estrangement and ultimate demonization and destruction of "the other".

As David Sloan Wilson describes it, morality is generally "founded upon the idea of

common welfare," which manifests itself in such moral rules as the Ten Commandments and the

Golden Rule which are "manifestly adaptive at the level of whole groups," providing a focus for

trust and solidarity for entire societies, making them more likely to prosper as people interact

according to shared norms (Wilson, 2003: 1). Thus material conditions are, in Tara Smith's

words, the "root and reward" of morality (Smith, 2000: 1). In the words of Martin Nowak:

"Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization," and therefore

"genomes, cells, multicellular organisms, social insects, and human society are all based on

cooperation," and are the product of an evolutionary process that stresses "group selection"

rather than individual selection when judging who is "fittest" in a Darwinian sense - morality in

human beings is simply an outgrowth of this process (Nowak, 2006: 1; Turchin, 2007; Gintis et

al, 2008).

According to Richard Joyce, humanity has been shaped by nature to be a species that

"morally judges," and that this capacity for moral judgement is what allows societies to function

by developing a shared sense of what is good and what is bad:

Saying that we naturally make moral judgements may mean that we are designed to have particular moral attitudes toward particular kinds of things (for example, finding incest and patricide morally offensive), or it may mean that we have a proclivity to find something-or-other morally offensive (morally praiseworthy etc.) where the content is determined by contingent environmental and cultural factors (Joyce, 2006).

Dudley young similarly describes this capacity for moral judgement as the basis for human

culture and mythology:

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We cannot refuse this call because Mother Nature...Unlocked the instinctual primal codes by which when we were apes used to navigate the seas of desire. A good myth or poem stands in for these codes, addresses our appetitive anarchies, and offers safe conduct to some life-enhancing energy by giving it a name; and a bad one does the opposite...But in the absence of an authoritative myth or poem, the lights simply go out and the soul is closed down: no name, no game (Young, 1991: xxiii).

As Steven Pinker argues, there are indeed universal moral traits (including an aversion to incest

and murder), but the cultural context shapes how these universal moral traits are expressed and

how they are ranked in terms of importance (Pinker, 2008). Thus conservatives, socialists,

anarchists, and liberals all display some desire for a "communitarian morality" of shared

understanding and would even agree on universal moral traits as Pinker describes but their ideas

of what the ideal "community" should be differ widely (Selznick, 1987; Pinker, 2008). At any

rate there is a broad consensus in the literature that "Because of our nature as moral beings,

humans take pleasure in acting ethically and are pained when acting unethically," making moral

decisions and judgements a crucial part of the human condition which inevitably leads to us

labelling, in the course of our lives, some people as allies and some people as enemies (Gintis et

al, 2008; Deutsch, 1990; Turchin, 2007).

Moral ideas of "the common welfare" arising from human evolution seem to be a far cry

from the Holocaust, which continues to shock human sensibilities: "the Nazis' obsession with

eliminating the Jews as a people, the murder of six million in factories of death, and the great

brutality with which victims, who in no way provoked the perpetrators, were treated" (Staub,

1992; Heath & Potter, 2004). As Ervin Staub pointedly asks after surveying the extent and

cruelty of twentieth century genocide, "How can human beings kill multitudes of men and

women, children and old people? How does the motivation arise for this in the face of the

powerful prohibition against murder that most of us are taught" (Staub, 1992)? The shocking

brutality displayed by human beings, throughout the 20th Century in particular, has led many

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intelligent people to believe that human nature must be inherently evil in some way: in Karl

Popper's words "we are clever, perhaps too clever, but we are also wicked; and this mixture of

cleverness and wickedness lies at the root of our troubles" (Popper, 1963: 491). Francis

Fukuyama was tempted to point to the apparent violence of our primate relatives as evidence for

his thesis that men were inherently violent and that the world would be a more peaceful place if

women ruled (Fukuyama, 1998). In his article "Women and the Evolution of World Politics",

Fukuyama cites an incident in Gombe National Park whereby chimpanzees effectively were

observed to be engaged in what amounted to a murderous turf war as proof that human beings,

particularly males, were inherently violent.

Nevertheless, as Staub points out, while "Aggression, violence, torture, and the

mistreatment of human beings are all around us...kindness, helpfulness, generosity and love also

abound," and there is considerable evidence to refute the claim that "evil" human nature is to

blame for masses of people following tyrannical leaders down a road of unspeakable cruelty

(Staub, 1992: 4; Harman, 2008). In a rebuttal to Fukuyama's article, R. Brian Ferguson pointed

out something which really cuts to the heart of what facilitates moral cruelty: the oppression and

degradation of a living being by outside pressures. He said "The famous incident at Gombe that

Fukuyama refers to occurred only after major human-induced changes, most important of which

was the researchers' artificial provisioning of bananas. Other reported instances of "chimp wars"

also took place in stressful situations" (Ferguson, 1999: 125-126). In other words the

chimpanzee turf war was in reality an immensely unnatural event spawned by outside meddling

to the point where the chimpanzees formed factions and proceeded to kill one another. Ferguson

goes on to cite the primatologist Margaret Power as saying "Virtually everywhere that they were

studied by naturalistic methods, undisturbed wild chimpanzees live peacefully in nonaggressive,

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non-hierarchical groups" (Ibid: 126). This appears to indicate that if chimps, normally peaceful

creatures, are put under pressure from an alien source they will react in decidedly alien ways to

the point of viewing one another as alien members of a hostile faction who deserve only to be

killed - does this not sound familiar?

Thus, the ability to commit evil in the name of doing good does not appear to be naturally

occurring. There is no real evidence to suggest that primates are somehow inherently murderous

or sadistic: tests have shown that Rhesus monkeys even prefer to go hungry rather than pull a

chain that would bring them food but also deliver a painful shock to another monkey (Pinker,

2008). In the case of Gombe, something happened that was quite out of the ordinary with regard

to chimps but a disturbingly ordinary occurrence for human beings: Effectively the chimps

adopted a crude "alternate identity" in reaction to external pressures whereby they came to view

their counter-parts not as fellow chimpanzees but as alien enemies (Turchin, 2007). This is

certainly in line with the human experience. Hunter-gatherer societies, those that still exist, are

actually very peaceful and visiting anthropologists have often reported that their existence "felt

far more natural" than "our crazy world of office work, traffic, and urban alienation" (Wells,

2006: 143; Harman, 2008; Morris, 1969).

The development of organized violence offers further insight into the development of the

kinds of moral forces that motivated people to support Hitler and Saddam. As Staub points out,

war and genocide, whereby either an external force or an internal sub-group is viewed as the

enemy, can only emerge under certain conditions that allow for such destruction demarcations to

be made (Staub, 1992). War only began when there was something to fight over, and until

farmlands, settlements, cities, borders and trade routes developed there was nothing there that

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could trigger war (Harman, 2008; Turchin, 2007). Jared Diamond, the author of the book Guns,

Germs, and Steel, has actually described the development of agriculture as being "the worst

mistake in human history" because in process of concentrating people into villages, cities,

nations and empires, it introduced disease epidemics, social stratification, disastrous famines,

and, perhaps most importantly, organized violence and warfare on a large scale (Finkel, 2009:

104; Harman, 2008; Morris, 1969). By contrast, hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza of

East Africa do not engage in warfare, their population is not dense enough to be threatened by a

disease epidemic, and they are not vulnerable to famine because they do not raise or depend on

crops and livestock - to the extent that agricultural peoples have taken refuge from famines with

their hunter-gatherer neighbours in the past (Finkel, 2009). To the hunter-gatherer, the land is

his source of food, "all that's required is a bit of stalking and a well-shot arrow" if they want

meat, or a natural bee-hive if they want honey, or a tree if they want fruit - they don't have to

wait for months before crops can be harvested or domestic animals butchered and thus they have

no need to defend their food source from outsiders (Ibid: 104). Such a way of life does not

encourage inter-communal violence - in the case of the Hadza feuding parties simply separate

into different camps and go their own way.

The large-scale violence that was to become so common among human beings in the

aftermath of the development of agriculture was almost entirely due to conditions within

organized and hierarchical societies that facilitated it (Harman, 2008). Peter Turchin's thesis that

human empires form along cultural and ethnic divides due to the fact that clashing cultures create

the kinds of pressure necessary to force symbolically demarcated societies in a frontier region to

adopt an increasingly militant identity and orientation towards the alien "other" across the

frontier is reinforced by dozens of historical examples from the growth of a German warrior

98

culture on the frontiers of the Roman Empire in reaction to Roman pressure to the growth of a

militant Russian identity in the face of Tatar raids and invasions (Turchin, 2007). However he

also points out that away from the frontier regions no such exclusive "us vrs them" identities

truly form because no external pressure exists to make them form (Ibid).

It has been argued that a similar identity existed in Germany (initially out of resentment

to more advanced European powers and later in reaction to the catastrophe of WWI and

Versailles), and to a lesser extent in Iraq (in reaction to European and later American

imperialism), and effectively facilitated the rise of those leaders (in this case Hitler and Saddam)

who played to it and viewed Germans and Iraqis respectively as "chosen people" amid a hostile

world (Chirot, 1994; Kershaw, 1985; Bartoletti, 2005; Ferguson, 2006; Worsnip, 2003; Baath,

1982). In Germany in particular, the stereotypical portrayal of the "proletarian woman" by the

proto-Nazi Freikorps as a monster bent on corrupting "pure" German values is very telling:

The description of the proletarian woman as a monster....a fantastic being who swears, shrieks, spits, scratches, farts, bites, pounces, tears to shreds; who is slovenly, wind-whipped, hissing-red, indecent; who whores around, slaps its naked thighs, and can't get enough of laughing at these men (Neocleous, 2005: 76).

The Jew, in Hitler's eyes, was largely a blank screen onto which could be projected all the real

and perceived threats to the "purity" of the German nation:

It possesses superhuman powers enabling it to drive the world to perdition and yet is also a subhuman cause of degeneration, disease and disintegration: 'the anti-man, the creature of another god...a creature outside nature and alien to nature (Ibid: 74).

The demonization of the "other" in moral terms thus stems from the material realties faced by the

societies that conceive of and act out on such stereotypes (Harman, 2008; Turchin, 2007).

This was certainly the case with the Nazis who, according to Peter H. Merkl, "could

hardly have mounted a plausible campaign to rationalize their own existence" without a "left-

99

wing enemy to clash with" in the form of socialist paramilitary groups like the Reichsbanner and

the Iron Front along with the communist KPD (Merkl, 1980: 88). Merkl describes how "The

Nazi campaign to 'conquer Berlin' is the classic example of the strategic value of having a red

enemy to overcome (Ibid)." In itself, this does not explain the appeal of Hitler and Saddam, but it

does contribute to the explanation of why so many of their followers were able to cast their

support in moral terms: fighting for the moral virtues of "purity" and "strength" in the face of an

"alien" enemy (Pinker, 2008). In Hitler's words in Mein Kampf, "We have to teach the Marxists

that National Socialism is the future master of the street, just as it shall be the future master of

the state (Reiche, 1986: 71)." A similar thing could be said of the Baathists in their life and death

struggle as activists and insurgents against no less than three different Iraqi regimes over the

course of the 1950s and 60s (Baath, 1982; Devlin, 1976; Moss-Helms, 1984).

Clearly mass murder, tyrannical leaders, and moral motivations to commit murder and

violence against outsiders do not come out of thin air. Consider Jane S. Jaquette's comment that

"Wars start not in biology - instinctual male aggression - but in realpolitik - a state's need to

defend itself from outside threats. War does not come naturally to humans. Men must be trained

to fight and kill others, and all people must be taught patriotism. States go to great lengths to

demonize their enemies (Jaquette, 1999: 128)." Whether it happens on a large or small scale, the

human being must first view his or her victim(s) as no longer human if he or she wishes to kill

them and this inevitably requires the use of created labels and artificial identities - in short it

requires the propagation of a moral message.

As Katha Pollitt argues "If war is so appealing to male genes, why has every major

modern war required a draft? Why does today's army recruit by touting its vocational fringe

100

benefits (Pollitt, 1999: 124)?" The short answer is that killing others is a learned ability and it

can only be learned through the process of alienating oneself from other human beings and

adopting an artificial identity that is hostile to them. While anti-Semitic rhetoric was certainly

there in Germany before the Nazis took power, its influence was limited and its power to

persecute Jews was curtailed due to lack of mass support (Ferguson, 2006). The Germans in the

early 1930s did not naturally hate Jews, the Jews of Germany were in fact so highly integrated

into mainstream German society that they were essentially indistinguishable from other

Germans, it took a systematic campaign of demonization, ghettoization, and segregation (forcing

Jews to wear yellow stars etc.) before the Nazis convinced the majority of Germans that the Jews

were not only not real Germans but not real human beings (Ibid). Only then did extermination

begin: an extermination that would have been impossible when the Nazis first came to power in

1933 (Ferguson, 2006; Bartoletti, 2005; Parenti, 1997; Kershaw, 1985). Mainstream German

society had to be taught that to hate and exclude Jews was somehow moral.

While Popper makes the claim that human beings "are good, perhaps a little too good, but

we are also a little stupid; and that it is this mixtures of goodness and stupidity which lies at the

root of our troubles," and that the main flaw that causes us to follower tyrannical leaders rests

with our propensity to be "led by the nose" easily, an argument Milgram and Arendt support to

an extent, I argue that it is more complicated (Popper, 1963: 491). Being susceptible to being

"led by the nose", as Daniel Chirot argues, requires human beings to be culturally "ready" to be

"led by the nose" and that manipulation of human "stupidity" can only occur when there is fertile

ground to facilitate it (Chirot, 1994; Kershaw, 1985; Ferguson, 2006; Barbu, 1959). If killing

and demonizing other human beings requires us to be estranged from them - for us to be torn

away from any universal conception of morality - than clearly this must be facilitated on a

101

societal level: society and popular culture must actually celebrate such moral estrangement and

alienation. Such an environment would be capable of producing legions of followers for any

leader advocating such ideas as the immersion of human beings in the environment influences

their thoughts and actions (Edelman, 1964; Heath & Potter, 2004; Kellerman, 2008). These men

and women will often be perfectly willing to kill, or at least acquiesce to killing, in the name of

their cause, placing their conception of morality - whether it is centered on "the nation", "the

race", or "the leader" - over and above human life, in many cases viewing their victims as

inhuman beasts (Ferguson, 2006; Kershaw, 1985; Turchin, 2007; Pinker, 2008; Kaplan, 2000).

Universal ideas of morality can be subverted. The evil described in this study is not

naturally occurring. The hard truth, driven home again and again throughout the twentieth

century, is that people can commit terrible evil and at the same time be acting "morally" and

Hitler's and Saddam's followers, so essential to modern leaders, were examples of this

(Kellerman, 2008; Kets de Vries, 2004). In both cases, a "moral environment" existed whereby

both leaders were virtually guaranteed to have followers who would cast their support in moral

terms. If it can be said that there is a "dark side" to human nature and human morality it almost

certainly can be found in the exploitability of both: people have to be immersed in the moral

conditions that give rise to tyrants in order to view tyranny as a moral force and tragedy

inevitably follows when they are. Thus I agree with Ervin Staub that "We must understand the

psychological, cultural, and societal roots of genocide and mass killing if we are to stop such

human destructiveness. As cultures, societies, and individual human beings we must learn how

to live together in harmony and resist influences that turn us against each other," and allow

people to be swayed by the moral messages of tyrants (Staub, 1992: 4; Chirot, 1994). In short,

we are fighting against alienation.

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