Page 39 - Romanticism: A Weapon of Satan

Romantic Nationalism

37

religious festivals. Everything - the colours of the uniforms and flags,
the placement of the spectators, the nocturnal hour, the use of
spotlights and floodlights, the sense of timing - was precisely
calculated. The film-clips depict people intoxicating themselves,
chanting themselves into a state of rapture and ecstasy using the
mantra 'Sieg Heil!' and doting on the Führer as if he were a deity. The
faces of the crowd are stamped with a mindless beatitude… It is not
a question of persuasive rhetoric. In fact, Hitler's rhetoric is quite
unpersuasive. More often than not, it is banal, childish, repetitious,
devoid of substance. But his delivery has a venomous energy, a
rhythmic pulse to it as hypnotic as a drumbeat; and this, combined
with the contagion of mass emotion, with the pressure of thousands
of people packed together in a confined area… produces a mass
hysteria… What one witnesses at Hitler's rallies is an 'alteration of
consciousness' such as psychologists generally associate with a
mystical experience. 11

More precisely, the Nazi meetings were mass-hypnosis sessions,
which completely robbed people of their reasoning faculties, and put
them under the spell of romanticism. Triggering the Second World
War, this romantic hysteria cost the lives of 55 million people.
Nazism is merely one example of the destructive consequences of