Propaganda as religion in national socialism.

In the light of the insights on the psychotic mass-formation phenomenon furnished by Melanie Klein and Wilfred R. Bion, the authors address the question of the rhetorical strategies successfully employed by the National Socialists to induce a suspension of the faculty of (critical) judgment in the addressees of their political propaganda. They draw largely upon Goebbels' notorious Sportpalastrede (sport stadium speech) after Stalingrad to demonstrate that (and how) Nazi propaganda makes use of central elements of religious discourse. This takes place not least via the appeal to a myth of primal origin achieved via the projective actualization of infantile feelings of omnipotence. Unlike religion, which aims at balance and stabilization of the ego, the National Socialist myth sets out to engineer a state of ecstatic regression involving a collective loss of the faculty of judgment.