Free Not in God's Name by Jonathan Sacks Page B

Mengele, the notorious medical superintendent at Auschwitz, had doctorates in anthropology and medicine and was an assistant professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genetics.
    There was little or no resistance to the Nazi programme on the part of the German intelligentsia. Academics were among its most zealous supporters, dismissing Jewish colleagues and banning their books without demur. Judges implemented the Nuremberg Laws, depriving Jews of all human rights, without protest. According to Ingo Mueller, even the Supreme Court showed an ‘obsessive determination to prosecute all Jews’. 7 Doctors ran the sterilisation and euthanasia programmes. In Auschwitz ‘the killing programme was led by doctors from beginning to end’. 8 Half of all German physicians joined the Nazi Physicians’ League. 9
    More than half the participants in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference that decided on the ‘Final Solution’, the complete extermination of Europe’s Jews, carried the title ‘Doctor’, either as medical men or as academics with doctorates, 10 and 41 per cent of the SS Officer Corps were university educated, as opposed to 2 per cent in the population as a whole. 11 In 1927 Julian Benda, in a famous book,
Le Trahison des Clercs
, spoke of how public discourse had turned into ‘the intellectual organisation of political hatreds’. This will be, he said, ‘one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity’. 12
    Almost no one is immune to dualism once it takes hold of a culture.
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    Nazism as constructed by Hitler was a perfect pathological dualism. The children of light were the German nation, more specifically the Aryan race. The children of darkness were the Jews.They were the force of evil, the destroyers of Germany, the defilers of its racial purity, corrupters of its culture and underminers of its morale. Despite the fact that they were less than 1 per cent of the population of Germany, they were said to control its banks, its media and its fate: to be in secret conspiracy to manipulate the world.
    As part of the logic of human sociality, the internal cohesion of a group is in direct proportion to the degree of threat it perceives from the outside. It follows that anyone who wants to unite a nation, especially one that has been deeply fractured, must demonise an adversary or, if necessary, invent an enemy. For the Turks it was the Armenians. For the Serbs it was the Muslims. For Stalin it was the bourgeoisie or the counter-revolutionaries. For Pol Pot it was the capitalists and intellectuals. For Hitler it was Christian Europe’s eternal Other, the Jews.
    To remoralise a nation, leaders often revive memories of former glory. Vamik Volkan, who has applied concepts of splitting and projection to international conflict, emphasises the corollary: the
chosen trauma
, an event that ‘has caused a large group to face drastic common losses, to feel helpless and victimized by another group and to share a humiliating injury’. In Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic revived memories of the defeat of the Serbs by the Muslims in the Battle of Kosovo six hundred years earlier, in 1389. More recently Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and ISIS focused on the Crusades and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire by the West. For Hitler it was the defeat of Germany in the First World War and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. For all this – the war itself, Germany’s defeat and its subsequent economic travails – Hitler blamed the Jews.
    Once you can identify an enemy, reactivate a chosen trauma and unite all factions in fear and hate of a common threat, you activate the most primitive part of the brain, the amygdala with its instant and overwhelming defensive reactions, and render a culture susceptible to a pure and powerful dualism in which youare the innocent party and violence becomes both a justified revenge and the necessary protection of your group. The