My verse today attempts to address the ‘conspiraocracy’ that we continue to endure within the MAGA faction of the Republican Party. This faction, because it is a Trump driven group, and due to the fact that no other association of more reasonable Republicans have the required courage to oppose this faction, effectively makes the entirety of this political party to act primarily out of conspiracy theories. The irrationality of their actions can not be mistaken at this time. They are irrefutable irrational actors who state the wildest of notions with ease and with an odd and unsettling sincerity. This collection of people devoid of the ability to grasp fact from fiction can’t be expected to have the knowhow to govern in any meaningful way. And that continues to be the case, proven over and over again with each proceeding day in the US House where they hold a slim majority. The actual beliefs of the MAGA Republican can’t really be determined as of an actual belief or as only as a political device in my mind. But one must assume from the posts we read that a certain portion of these people actually buy into the conspiracy theory fully, especially if it serves a certain purpose to vilify opponents and used as a justification for a sense of victimization for themselves. Here is my verse.
A word search on X today of ‘conspiracy theories’ yielded these results:
A word search on Truth Social today of ‘conspiracy theories’ yielded these unsurprisingly results. If some of these posts are from foreign sources is not considered. The use of such to sow disorder is clearly understandable.
I wanted to address the use of conspiracy theory in the formation of the 1930s German Nazi Party briefly. Below are two sources. I did not read the paper, only showing the abstract to make the point.
Wikipedia
For Hitler, the start of World War II on 1 September 1939 confirmed the idea that there had been a Jewish conspiracy against Germany all along, even though Germany started the war by invading Poland. Historian Jeffrey Herf writes that "According to Hitler's paranoid logic, the Jews had launched the war so that the Nazis would be compelled to wage a war of retaliation against the Jews of Europe."
The Nazi Conspiracy Theory: German Fantasies and Jewish Power in the Third Reich
Brendan Fay
APR 2019
Abstract
Scholars have long recognised the role that propaganda played in bringing the Nazi regime to power and sustaining its rule over the period 1933 − 45. While sound intelligence and data were essential to waging war effectively and accurately measuring public support for the regime’s policies, misinformation played no less important a role in demonising the Party’s enemies and steeling the public’s resolve to support the war effort. This article analyses one such aspect of Nazi misinformation — the conspiracy theory — and argues that Nazi conspiratorial thinking was central to bringing the regime into office, consolidating power, and radicalising policy over the course of the Third Reich.
I had read that certain journalists and others were commenting on the apparent mental health of the German Nazi leaders as being disturbed. I couldn’t find the quote I was looking for but I found an interest in this paper on the psychology of Nazi Rudolf Hess as it was described once he was in custody in Great Britain. I find a similarity in this man to others who are rabid Trump MAGA supporters today in the general disorder which we may be witnessing. The parallels seem too similar not to be considered.
Daniel Pick
Psychoanalysis History 2009
A discussion of the treatment and interpretation of the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, after his arrival in Britain in 1941.
The psychology of Fascism produced in the 1940s was not of course necessarily written through a Freudian lens, as we will see shortly in the case of Hess. Before the Nuremberg trials were under way, some consideration was given to a request that the defendants be shot in the chest rather than in the head in order for subsequent brain autopsies to be undertaken. In the end of course the chosen method of execution was hanging, as the firing squad, it was thought, might be seen as a more honourable mode of killing.
Hess came to Britain with a complex back-story. Speculation about his mental state had existed in Nazi circles before the war – some rumours had circulated about his sexuality, or lack of sexual drive, as also about his hypochondria, preoccupation with fringe doctors and occult ideas. None of Hess’s ‘peculiarities’ were unique, of course, but the ensemble of characteristics made him something of a talking-point. In 1941, some commentators on both the German and British sides would come to regard Hess as having psychotic features (even if for juridical purposes he was, at the end of the day, declared fit to stand trial at Nuremberg). It suited Hitler to use ‘mental illness’ as an explanation for Hess’s flight although again there were differing opinions about how best to present the motives for his departure.
When Hess produced architectural plans for the ideal house of the future, his watchers suspected a manic attempt at reparation. Hess meanwhile claimed to feel no guilt or responsibility; he said he remembered nothing, and anyway attributed ‘bad’ actions inside Nazi Germany to the sinister hypnosis of gentiles by Jews.
Dicks attempted at one or two points to make certain interpretations to Hess about his own guilt and defences against guilt, for instance, in relation to his anti-Semitism. The Jews’ fate, Hess insisted, was brought down upon them by their own malign psychological powers – they had literally hypnotized the Germans into maltreating them. Even when he was confronted with what occurred in concentration camps, Hess insisted the guards must have been unconsciously transfixed by the Jewish inmates to act so improperly, and were thus not responsible. It was, in Dicks’s view, a question of Hess’s unconscious defensive organization resisting the truth. He told Hess that his explanations were a transparent effort at ‘rationalizing’ and thus avoiding the unbearable guilt he felt. Hess denied this.
But at this point an emotion is noted: Hess produced an effect in the group, ‘an awkward tense feeling’ (Rees et al. 1947, pp. 28–9). Here the focus shifted from the visual to the affective, and thereby to questions about unconscious communication between and within people. They considered the way Hess sought to maintain stern and rigid boundaries between good and bad, gentile and Jew, and apparently remained as committed as ever to the Nazi system. He was seen, for all his bizarre features and idiosyncratic form of madness, as an exemplary Nazi. That is to say, he was viewed as in thrall to a cruel and merciless superego, seeking, through his political affiliation, to appease, serve and ingratiate himself with an implacable master, whilst locating all the abjection in the reviled object – the Jew.
This is all very creepy to research and to contemplate. It is my opinion that the disorder we see each day in this wide array of conspiracy theory acceptance poses a threat to the nation. Not only is it highly dysfunctional, it’s much more.
95th posting, September 21, 2023