Library of Social Science, Publishers is seeking submissions for an edited
collection: Paranoid Fantasy & Enemy Creation: Hitler, Goebbels, and World
War
The Anthology will consist of twelve papers, each of approximately 3,000
words in length.
Editor,
<http://clicks.skem1.com/trkr/?c=4694&g=745&u=a96d1aee85260e65947e06e6beae74
37&p=3051fe5dae4771ad403eb07e5908bc3b&t=1> Richard A. Koenigsberg,
<http://clicks.skem1.com/trkr/?c=4694&g=745&u=606273ff932e55b6914cc4a5818c13
c3&p=3051fe5dae4771ad403eb07e5908bc3b&t=1> Library of Social Science
Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts should be 300-400 words, and should identify the theoretical
grounding for the essay or piece. Please also include a brief biography (100
words).
Deadline for abstracts:
May 14, 2012
Send abstracts to:
<mailto:oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com>
oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com
Notification of acceptance:
June 11, 2012
Accepted papers will be due:
October 15, 2012
World War II and the Final Solution
Declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941, Hitler stated that
it was the "eternal Jew" that stood behind Roosevelt. In April 1942, Hitler
declared that a brain trust made up of Jews had driven Roosevelt into war,
against America's better interests. The influence of the Jew, Hitler
claimed, explained what at first seemed incomprehensible: the alliance
between Western democracies-Jewish capitalism-and the Soviet Union.
In November 1941, Goebbels stated that "every Jew is our enemy, whether he
scrapes out a parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg, or blows the
trumpets of war in New York or Washington." Goebbels declared in June 1943
that Jews were behind Roosevelt, behind Churchill and, hidden in the
Kremlin, the "real bearers of Bolshevism." The "international Jew"-building
bridges between the United States, Great Britain and Soviet Union-was the
"mortar" that held the coalition together.
On this rhetoric, the Nazis generated a World War that killed over 50
million people. A fantasy or ideology with no foundation in reality
generated monumentally destructive historical events.
After the Second World War, two lines of research evolved: one focusing on
the conventional narrative of warfare, the other on an extraordinary event
that came to be called the Holocaust. Jeffrey Herf
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674027388/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ide
ofwargente-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0674027388
> documents that Hitler and Goebbels did not consider the Final Solution and
World War II distinct events. Rather, the Nazis conceived of war and
genocide as fronts of one apocalyptic battle: a struggle to remove Jews from
the face of the earth. As the Nazis implemented the Final Solution, they
simultaneously waged a "war of annihilation" in the Soviet Union in order to
"exterminate" Jewish Bolsheviks.
A standard text used by mental health professionals to classify mental
disorders-The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM)-defines delusion as a "belief held with great conviction in spite of
having little empirical support." An individual may be diagnosed as deluded
or paranoid when he holds firmly to a belief that is "utterly unwarranted by
the evidence." However, the DSM introduces a caveat: a belief cannot be
considered paranoid if it is "ordinarily accepted by other members of a
person's culture or subculture." By definition-according to psychiatric
diagnosis-Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazis were not paranoid.
Nonetheless, Daniel Goldhagen
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679772685/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ide
ofwargente-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0679772685
> states that upon reading anti-Semitic texts, one would be hard-pressed to
conclude that they were anything but the product of the "collective scribes
of an insane asylum." Based on extensive research on mass murder, Johan van
der Dennen
<http://rechten.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/Algemeen/overigepublicaties/2005e
nouder/EVIL_GEN/EVIL_GEN.pdf> observes that though it is hard to imagine
that normal people embrace ideas equivalent to the delusional systems of the
insane, historical evidence suggests that entire societies have been
persuaded to accept the most "absurd calumnies about minority groups."
Psychiatrist Anthony Storr states that the portrayal of various groups as
enemies emanates from a fantasy comparable to "paranoid delusions found in
psychotic subjects."
Despite their paranoid belief system, Hitler and Goebbels were not
psychotic. Looking beyond their world, it becomes evident that many elements
of Nazis ideology (e.g., the identification of a single class of people as
the source of evil in the world) are quite common or ordinary. Indeed,
paranoid logic is a central dimension of many political ideologies.
The Continuing Influence of Paranoia in Enemy Creation
This volume seeks contributions on how ideologies of enmity can be
constructed on ideas and fantasies with little or no foundation in reality.
How can we understand the fact that delusive systems of belief frequently
are embraced within societies-giving rise to systematic forms of violence
and destruction to which we give names like war, genocide and terrorism?
This anthology will explore the dynamics of enemy creation: how fantasies
construct reality. How does belief in the power of an omnipotent enemy
generate political ideology-and history?
Questions to consider include but are not limited to:
* The symbolic meaning of the Jew
* Metaphors of biology and disease in Nazi ideology
* The relationship between war and genocide
* The enemy as a force that destroys one's nation
* The enemy as heretic or non-believer
* How paranoid ideas take hold within society
* Methods employed by leaders to convey their ideas
* Metaphors of the enemy
* The significance of "rescue fantasies" in political ideology
* The enemy within one's body
* Political ideology and binary systems of thought
* What one seeks to "kill off" in killing enemies
We would especially like to include in this volume:
* Case studies of enemy creation.
* Papers employing discourse or metaphor analysis: How does rhetoric
embody the idea of the enemy?
* The relationship between the psyche and ideology: How do fantasies
support cultural ideas?
* The relationship between psyche and history: How do fantasies and
ideologies give rise to societal institutions and historical actions?
