Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Hannibal Rising: Terrorism, Serial Murder and the Origins of Totalitarianism

In the latest installment of the Hannibal Lecter saga, Thomas Harris achieves a synergy of political and psychological ideas that has fascinated intellectuals since the rise of Nazism and Stalinism in the mid 1930s. Both the novel and the film adaptation of “Hannibal Rising” spell out the inter-relationship between early childhood trauma and subsequent “psychopathic” behavior. The first third of the story describes the horrors young Lecter endured on the eastern front at the close of World War II. For a good brief review, see, The Observer. This is a clear reference to and comparison with the deprivation suffered by many Muslims in refuge camps and in the war-torn communities of places like Somalia, Sudan, Iraq and Palestine. If a child survives such suffering, he often buries his anger deep within. The tale of Hannibal Lecter is a tale of tortured innocence and the complete disintegration of a child’s soul through brutality.

But there is much more buried in “Hannibal Rising.” The 6-year old Hannibal flees with his family to their hunting lodge deep in the dark forest. There, they think they will be safe from the brutal battles between oncoming Russians and the retreating Germans. C.G. Jung described the dark forest as symbolic of the Id, the darkest part of human consciousness and the place where nightmares dwell. Terrible things happen in that dark forest and they irrevocably shape young Hannibal’s ability to comprehend what is moral, and what is not. Obviously, there is a larger lesson here. The psychogenic nature of warfare should trouble all of us. Yet, it doesn’t. Why is that? We accept the nature and existence of murder when it is sanctioned by the State. But we are completely convinced that murder is psychopathic and immoral when it lacks society’s seal of collective approval. To be sure, there are lines to be drawn. The question is always, who will draw them?

Hannah Arendt, the brilliant and courageous author of one the greatest books ever written on the nature of evil, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” understood full well the conflict between private murder and socially sanctioned murder. She herself barely escaped the Nazis in 1941 by leaving Paris for New York. As a German Jew many of her family and friends were murdered. See, Wikipedia.org. In “Origins,” Arendt connected the dots of imperialism and racism to Nazism, Stalinism and mass murder. The hideous price of Imperialism has been a century and a half of mass psychosis. If Jung were living now, he would be writing about “Hannibal Rising” and comparing it to Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” It’s all a question of who and how one is going to die.

Avoiding the shadow, I remain

Savant