Unfromme Erscheinungen

Kranichkeile unterwegs heute - die Knospen für den nächsten Frühling sind schon gebildet






Aus einer Diskussion:

Sadism and ideological murder

Erich Fromm was a German-Jewish marxist Freudian so called psychologist who wrote a lot of socialist Freudian phantasies, strictly avoiding empirical methods. So he did in his „ The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness“.
I admit being a young man I have read him with some appreciation.

Stalin was a sadist only in a very abstract way, so no real sadist, that is one who likes to make people suffer by his own hands.

Robert Conquest wrote „The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine.“
This awful killing of millions was not sadistic, it was political administrative mass murder „by the way“. The communists took away the harvest and left the farmers behind without corn, so they had no food and no seed for the coming year and the year after, and the communist party did not bother about the starving people.

But a sadist bothers: he enjoys to torture with his own hands, he is eager to see his victim suffering face to face.

The importance of childhood traumas is a psychoanalytical legend, is Freudian rubbish. Indeed, people are born with passions & perversions, partly with neuroticism and psychoticism, see Hans Jürgen Eysenck, Dimensions of Personality, Crime and Personality, etc.
It is quite important not to intermingle sadism and ideological mass murder. Ideologists as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot were much more dangerous than an army of sadists. Ideological thinking can always have terrible results, especially if ideologists enter the state maschine.
As many people tend to think in simple ways and simple systems, ideologies will always remain dangerous potentially.