Negro as polluters of the “Aryan” blood. This paranoic concept, with its emphasis on the
“poisoning of the national body,” had a wide appeal. The Jew especially, in Hitler’s mythol-
ogy, provided a target for the projection of sexual, anti-sexual, and anti-capitalist sentiments,
since the Jew was pictured simultaneously as seducer, castrator, and Shylock.
The left erred badly when it tried to refute Nazi propaganda by asserting that Hitler
was a reactionary, used by big business to serve its interests. While objectively true, this
missed the essential point of how Hitler was uniting the contradictions in the people. Much
of his propaganda called into play revolutionary sentiments in the form of diffuse protests
against the capitalist “bosses” who ran things. At the same time, the fear of international
revolutionary change—the sense of chaos it invoked, the threat to nationalist pride was
mobilized by attacks on “swinish” Bolsheviks who would subvert the German nation. The
very term “national socialism” expressed this unity of contradictions, appealing to national-
istic feelings and to the yearning for socialism. For Hitler did not require people to think
through the facts seriously; he would take care of everything for them.
Reich had a keen eye—and ear—for Hitler’s use of sexual imagery and feeling in
his propaganda techniques. The emphasis on soldiers marching, on uniforms, on mass can-
dlelight meetings, the sexually toned imagery of Hitler’s speeches, his rhythmic, hypnotic
oratory—all helped to whip people into an emotional frenzy. One has only to see the faces
of people listening to Hitler (conveyed so vividly in the documentary films of Leni
Riefenstahl) to realize the kind of orgiastic satisfaction the Germans could allow themselves
in their devotion to the Fuhrer. This intense libidinal excitation, combined with a sense of
moral righteousness, was strikingly similar to the atmosphere at religious revival meetings.
As part of his analysis of Hitler’s mass-psychological appeal, Reich devoted a short
chapter to the symbolism of the swastika. Studying the design itself and the history of the
symbol, Reich concluded that the swastika was a schematic but unmistakable representation
of two intertwined bodies^12.
Faced with the cleverness of Hitler’s appeal to the emotions, Reich was all the more
appalled at the ineffectiveness ofCommunist propaganda. He recalled with horror one par-
ticular Communist meeting,attended by about 20,000 industrial and white-collar workers.
Shortly before, there had been some fatalities in clashes with the Nazis, so the crowd’s mood
had risen to the boiling point.Everyone waited tensely for the main speech. Then the
Communist leader, Ernst Thalmann, killed the mood totally by devoting his talk to a com-
plex analysis ofthe government’s budget.
Reich believed that the only political answer to the distorted “sex-politics” of Hitler
was his own positive sex-politics. One did not answer Hitler’s use of the Jews as scapegoats
by pointing out the intellectual fallacies ofhis argument or its function as a diversion from
other issues. One countered by directly dealing with the people’s sexual longings. Reich’s
position was based on his conviction that “the average individual will affirm the sex-eco-
nomic regulation of sexual life if he is made to understand it Sex-economy gives the politi-
cal answer to the chaos which was created by the conflict between compulsive morality and
sexual libertinism.”^13
160 Myron SharafFury On Earth