[Market Economy Guide] The Tragedy Caused by Extreme Collectivism

The 20th century was an era stained by humanity’s madness and violence. World War II in particular was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, claiming more than 50 million lives worldwide. Germany, which started the war, brutally massacred as many as 6 million Jews through the Holocaust.

The Problem of Nazism and Fascism

Every day, countless Jews were dragged to concentration camps and unjustly put to death in gas chambers. In this unprecedented genocide and barbaric violence, there was not even the slightest trace of humanity. What on earth drove Germany to write one of the most cruel and atrocious chapters in history?

The chief culprit was Nazism. At the time, Germany was completely gripped by Nazism. Nazism refers to Germany’s National Socialism, in which racism was combined with Italy’s fascism (totalitarianism). Hitler, the Nazi Führer, openly displayed his hostility toward Jews.

“The Jew is no nomad; he is and remains only a parasite in the body of other peoples. Moreover, when he is forced to abandon the sphere of life in which he has lived, it is not by his own will, but because he has been expelled by the host nation he has exploited whenever it suited him.”

Hitler also loudly proclaimed that the German people should work together to reorder the world around the Germanic race and advance human progress.

“Only the racially superior and strong can rule the world, and it is our nation’s mission in world history to take on that task.”

Such Nazi claims are impossible to understand through ordinary common sense and logic. Yet how did the German people of that time fall for Nazism, full of self-contradiction and sophistry, and go on to mercilessly slaughter Jews? Was it because Germans were inherently savage and cruel?

The Combination of Nationalism and Totalitarianism

The answer, plainly put, is no. The inferno of World War II and the Holocaust was the result of the collective hypnosis of totalitarianism. Germany at the time was particularly captive to the closed nationalism of Nazism, leaving normal thinking paralyzed. Addicted to the exclusionary logic centered on the Germanic race, the German people divided the world into “our Germany” and “the enemy who is not us.”

The result of the German people’s intoxication with Nazi collective madness was brutal. Such unimaginable war crimes were possible because of the logic of the collective, in which the individual disappeared. In collectivism, the individual is not an independent person but merely a part that makes up the group, showing unconditional and uncritical obedience.

A representative example is Adolf Eichmann, regarded as one of the worst perpetrators of the massacre of the Jews. Eichmann, who drove millions of Jews to their deaths, was in fact not, from the outset, some unusually evil man or eccentric monster. He was simply one of the ordinary neighbors we commonly see around us. The reason such an Eichmann was transformed into a “Nazi butcher” was none other than the fact that he had become a slave to the logic of collectivism.

In fact, Eichmann said this at his trial:

“I was merely a loyal, sincere, exact, and diligent person. I regarded it as an honor to be a member of my fatherland, and I was simply an SS man and a member of the Reich Security Main Office, inspired by ideal efforts for that fatherland. I was never a coward or a traitor. Even when I examine myself according to my conscience, it is clear that I was neither a murderer nor a person who carried out mass slaughter.”

Even at the moment of his execution, Eichmann showed no sign whatsoever of guilt or remorse. As his own words put it, “I carry out the task assigned to me with a firm sense of duty”; he had merely been faithful to the role entrusted to him.

Not the Road to Freedom

This is the trap of totalitarianism: it turns even ordinary neighbors into slaves of the collective and human-faced killers. What is particularly striking is that the starting point of extreme totalitarianism such as German Nazism or Hitlerism was Marxism. Claiming to be scientific socialism, Marxism led people to regard man-made prophecy as if it were absolute logic. It also served as the prototype for the political ideology and structural characteristics of totalitarianism, making a decisive contribution to spreading totalitarianism across the world.

The first person to reveal that the deeply dangerous roots of totalitarianism lay in socialism was Hayek. In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek pointed out that German Nazism and Italian fascism were classic examples of totalitarianism: socialist attempts that beguile the public with sweet words, seize political power, and thoroughly control the economy, thereby rationalizing dictatorship and reducing the people to slaves of the collective.

And he warned that “when collectivism comes to dominate democracy, democracy will inevitably destroy itself,” and that the road through totalitarianism to socialism is not the road to freedom, but the road to dictatorship and slavery.

■ Please remember

Hayek warned that “when collectivism comes to dominate democracy, democracy will inevitably destroy itself,” and that the road through totalitarianism to socialism is not the road to freedom, but the road to dictatorship and slavery.

Sung-no Choi, President, Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: [시장경제 길라잡이] 극단적 집단주의가 초래한 비극

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2020-07-06

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=7&idx=22900