Studies in mass conformity: Hitler, Freud, the USSR and China

---

See the Lev Navrozov Archive By Lev Navrozov SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.

Under absolutism, such as dictatorship, the power holders impose on the population certain obligatory beliefs to which the population should conform. Thus, the population in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia or in post 1949 China was to believe that they were living under true democracy, while the population in the English-speaking countries were living under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or of the Jewish plutocracy, as Hitler put it. A Chinese can be a Òperformance artist,Ó eating the flesh of stillborn babies, but he cannot say that the form of government in China is dictatorship, not true democracy.

This is obvious and as old as history. In Plato's Òideal state,Ó the people had to pretend that they were born by the Earth.

But in 1859 John Stuart Mill argued that conformities may be not imposed by an omnipotent tyrant but created spontaneously by citizens themselves, and yet be more absurd, intolerant, and vindictive with respect to nonconformists than conformities imposed by omnipotent tyrants.

No Italian or French government imposed Marxism on the population. Yet, at one time, one-third of Italian voters and one quarter of French voters were extreme Marxists (ÒCommunistsÓ).

Here is one example showing how strong spontaneous conformities may be. In the Russia of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, not all poets were to write political poetry, as it was under Stalin, when the poet whom Stalin called Òthe best poet of the Soviet eraÓ wrote:

With your proletarian fingers
Squeeze the world's senile throat!

Poets who wrote about nature and love were called Òlyrical.Ó So Soviet Òlyrical poetsÓ were sent as delegates to a congress of poetry in France. But as soon as they began to recite their poetry about nature and love, the French and Italian poets jumped onto the stage and drove the Soviet poets off with shouts: ÒTraitors! Fascists! Imposters!Ó

Then the French and Italian poets recited the REAL Soviet poetryÑabout the proletarian fingers squeezing the world's senile throat.

Another interesting example of a spontaneous conformity is ÒFreudian psychoanalysis.Ó Leading world and American psychiatrists agree with me today (in letters, not publicly!) that Freud was either psychiatrically sick or so mentally retarded that his stupidity cannot be differentiated from insanity. The conformity began to go out of fashion in the 1970s and was gone several years ago in the 1970s and was gone several years ago. But when it was at its zenith, millions of Westerners regarded Freud as the greatest scientist who had ever lived, and when an American psychiatrist expressed in the 1950s his skepticism concerning Freud, his colleagues had him fired, drove him to suicide, and said that he committed it because he could not bear his guilt. What guilt?

At first Freud contended that all children had sexual relations with their parents (incest), but are ashamed to confess it to a Freudian ÒpsychoanalystÓ and hence become sick from an unbearable sense of unconfessed guilt. But Freud's idiotic (insane) invention was dangerous to him: too many ÒpatientsÓ would deny that they sleep or ever slept with their parents. Then Freud modified his invention. All children WANTED between ages 2 and 3 to have sexual relations with their parents, but forgot it, and Freud or his ÒpsychoanalystÓ was to help them to recall their sexual desire between ages 2 and 3, confess it, and thus get rid of their sense of guilt that made them sick.

You see, that psychiatrist whom the conformists drove to suicide longed between ages 2 and 3 to possess his mother sexually and his sense of unconfessed guilt drove him to suicide.

Freud, a clinically insane or mentally retarded Austrian, was spontaneously transformed into a scientist of genius, who permeated Western and especially American culture more deeply than Marx ever permeated Soviet culture.

When we came to New York in 1972 and I began to publish in ÒCommentary,Ó an American psychiatrist came to us to invite me to deliver at an American psychiatric conference a lecture about the government-instigated abuses of Soviet psychiatry. I asked him, ÒWhat about Freud?Ó Surely millions of people had been abused by Freudians. Surely this is the biggest case of malpractice in the history of medicine. The psychiatrist agreed, and the two of us made a mincemeat of the Austrian charlatan.

Then I said: ÒI have an idea! In my lecture at your conference I will speak not only about the government-instigated abuses of Soviet psychiatry, but also about the spontaneous abuses of ÒpsychoanalysisÓ!

He stood up and rushed out of our apartment and to the elevator. The last I saw of him was his frightened face through the latticed window of the elevator. The Freudian conformity was not as strong as it was decades earlier. Still, he was as frightened as though I had said that I would come to his conference and shoot its chairman.

It is only spontaneous conformities, discovered by John Stuart Mill, that can explain some societal behavior.

From 1947 to 1962 the spontaneous conformity in the United States was that Soviet Russia was going to attack the United States. This was absurd because of Mutual Assured Destruction. No matter how devastating the Soviet nuclear attack can be, the U.S. means of nuclear retaliation (such as submarines deep underwater) that no nuclear power could destroy would have destroyed Soviet Russia.

But whoever said what I have said above would be considered un-American, unpatriotic, treasonous.

In the 1970s the Soviet rulers began to develop post-nuclear superweapons able to circumvent Mutual Assured Destruction, but now the spontaneous conformity was that the Soviet rulers craved peace, and whenever I mentioned the Soviet development of post-nuclear superweapons (which Yeltsin opened to international inspection in 1992) I was a warmonger for the conformist Òmajority of the American people.Ó

When we arrived in New York in 1972, the owner of a big building corporation whom we had met as a tourist in Russia invited my wife and me to a small intimate evening party, the only other guests being a famous journalist and a prominent spokesman for McGovern. Soon after I began speaking about the Soviet development of post-nuclear superweapons, the journalist and the political leader moved their chairs together at some distance from the table, to suggest that they were the mass audience, and began chanting in a chorus of two: ÒFascist! Fascist! Fascist!Ó

Even more universal in the West is the conformity whereby no one has been noticing the Chinese rulers' development of post-nuclear weapons in seven fields since 1986. In the past several years as the development of nano weapons has become especially intense in China, this conformity in the West has been total. To mention what was still called occasionally in the 1990s the ÒChina threatÓ is ill-mannered, unfashionable, harmful. As for nonconformists like myself, all good Westerners, and especially Americans, all patriots, all decent and well-bred ladies and gentlemen must chant in chorus: ÒFascist! Fascist! Fascist!Ó until a nonconformist will understand how outrageous he is and join the conformity.

* * * * *

For more information about Drexler's Foresight Institute and its lobbying in Congress, see www.foresight.org

To learn more about the Chris Phoenix report, suggesting a Ònano Manhattan Project,Ó go to crnano.org.

For information about the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, Inc., including how you can help, please e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net.

The link to my book online is www.levnavrozov.com. You can also request our webmaster@levnavrozov.com to send you by e-mail my outline of my book.

It is my pleasant duty to express gratitude to the Rev. Alan Freed, a Lutheran pastor by occupation before his retirement and a thinker by vocation, for his help in the writing of this column.