Diagnosing the Dictators: C.G. Jung on Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini

A fascinating consideration by Carl Jung in 1938; it offers exquisite insight into our present political time, the psychology of Donald Trump and the Americans who support him.

CARL JUNG: DIAGNOSING THE DICTATORS

What would happen if you were to lock Hitler, Mussolini, and

Stalin in a room together and give them one loaf of bread and one

pitcher of water to last them a week? Who would get all the food

and water, or would they divide it? I doubt if they would divide it.

Hitler, being a medicine man, would probably hold himself aloof

and have nothing to do with the quarrel. He would be helpless

because he would be without his German people. Mussolini and

Stalin, being both chiefs or strong men in their own right-,- would

probably dispute possession of the food and drink and, being the

rougher and tougher, would probably get all of it. There were two

types of strong men in primitive society. One was the chief, who

was physically powerful, stronger than all his competitors,

MUSSOLINI

and the other was the medicine man who was not strong in himself

but was strong because of the power which the people projected into him.

HITLER

Thus, we had the emperor and the head of

the religious community. The emperor was the chief, physic,

strong through his possession of soldiers; the seer was the

medicine man, possessing little or no physical power but an

actual power sometimes surpassing that of the emperor because

the people agreed that he possessed magic—that is, supernatural

ability. He could, for example, assist or obstruct the way to a

happy life after death put a ban upon an individual, a community,

or a whole nation, and by excommunication, cause people great

discomfort or pain.

Now, Mussolini is a man of physical strength.

When you see him you are aware of it at once.

MUSSOLINI

His body suggests good muscles. He is the chief because

he is individually stronger than any of his competitors. And it is a

fact that Mussolini’s mentality corresponds to his classification:

he has the mind of a chief.

Stalin belongs in the same category. He is, however, not a creator.

STALIN

Lenin created; Stalin is devouring the brood. He is a

conquistador; he simply took what Lenin made, put his teeth

into it, and devoured it. He is not even creatively destructive.

Lenin was that.

LENIN

He tore down the whole structure of feudal and

bourgeois society in Russia and replaced – it with his own creation.

Stalin is destroying that. Mentally, Stalin is not so interesting as

Mussolini, who resembles him in the fundamental pattern of his

personality, and is not anything so interesting as the

medicine man, the myth—Hitler. Anybody who takes command of

one hundred and seventy million people, as Stalin has done, is

bound to be interesting, whether you like him or not. No, Stalin is

just a brute—a shrewd peasant, an instinctive powerful beast—no

doubt in that way far the most powerful of all the dictators.

He reminds one of a Siberian saber-toothed tiger with that powerful neck,

those sweeping mustaches, and that smile like a cat that

has been eating cream. I should imagine that Genghis Khan

might have been an early Stalin. I shouldn’t wonder if he makes himself Czar.

Hitler is entirely different. His body does not suggest strength.

HITLER

The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look.

I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him during the

Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer.

In 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, met with Adolf Hitler to negotiate the Sudetenland crisis, resulting in the Munich Agreement where Britain appeased Hitler by allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a move that ultimately failed to prevent World War II.

There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly

mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the

last Nurenberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed,

nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic

characteristic of Hitler is what makes him do things that seem

to us illogical, inexplicable, curious, and unreasonable. But

consider—even the nomenclature of the Nazis is plainly mystic.

Take the very name of the Nazi State. They call it the ‘Third Reich’.

Why? Because the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire,

the second was the one founded by Bismarck, and the third is

Hitler’s. Of course. But there is a deeper significance. Nobody

called Charlemagne’s kingdom the First Reich, nor Wilhelm’s the Second Reich.

Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich. Because it has a profound mystical

meaning: to every German, the expression, ‘Third Reich’ brings echoes who more

than once has indicated he is aware of his mystic calling, appears to the devotees of

the Third Reich as something more than mere man. Again, you take the

widespread revival of the cult of Wotan in the Third Reich. Who

was Wotan? God of wind.

WOTAN

The name ‘Storm of the wind’, ‘Sturmabteilung”, the name of the Nazi Storm Troopers. ’.

HITLER REVIEWS HIS STORM TROOPERS

Just as the swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving ever toward the left—

which means, in Buddhist symbolism, sinister, unfavorable, directed toward the

unconscious.

Below is the auspicious Buddhist Swastika

Below is the inauspicious, turned towards destruction and death, Nazi Swastika

And all these symbols together of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners

of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement that is to sweep

the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion, on and on to a destiny

which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself, can foretell—and

perhaps not even he.

But why is it that Hitler, who makes nearly every German fall down and worship him,

produces next to no impression on any foreigner? Exactly. Few foreigners respond at all, yet

apparently, every German in Germany does. It is because Hitler is the mirror of every

German’s unconscious, but of course, he mirrors nothing from a non-German. He is the

loudspeaker that magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they

can be heard by the German’s unconscious ear.

He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all

along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World

War, and the one characteristic that colors every Aryan soul is the typically German

inferiority complex—the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a

bit late to the feast. Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic. What do you mean by

magic? To understand this, you must understand what the unconscious is. It is that

part of our mental constitution over which we have little control and which is stored

with all sorts of impressions and sensations, which contains thoughts and even

conclusions of which we are not aware.

Besides the conscious impressions that we receive, there are all sorts of impressions

constantly impinging upon our sense organs of which we don’t become aware

because they are too slight to attract our conscious attention. They lie beneath the

threshold of consciousness. But all these subliminal impressions are recorded;

nothing is lost. Someone may be speaking in a faintly audible voice in the next room

while we are talking here. You pay no attention to it, but the conversation next door is

being recorded in your unconscious as surely as though the latter were a dicta-phone

record. While you sit here my unconscious is taking in quantities of impressions of

you, although I am not aware of them, and you would be surprised if I should tell you

all that I have already learned unconsciously about you in this short space of time.

Now, the secret of Hitler’s power is not that Hitler has an unconscious more

plentifully stored than yours or mine. Hitler’s secret is twofold: first, that his

unconscious has exceptional access to his consciousness, and second, that he allows

himself to be moved by it. He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of

suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source and then acts upon them.

In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us through dreams, we

have too much rationality and too much cerebrum to obey it.

This is doubtless the case with Chamberlain, but Hitler listens and obeys.

The true leader is always led. We can see it work in him. He, himself, has referred to

his Voice. His ‘Voice’ is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the

German people have projected their own selves;

that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him

powerful. Without the German people, he would not be what he seems to be now. It is

literally true when he says that whatever he is able to do is only because he has the

German people behind him or, as he sometimes says, because he is Germany.

So, with his unconscious being the receptacle of the souls of seventy-eight million

Germans, he is powerful, and with his unconscious perception of the true balance of

political forces at home and in the world, he has so far been infallible. That is why he

makes political judgments, which turn out to be right against the opinions of all his

advisers and against the opinions of all foreign observers. When this happens, it

means only that the information gathered by his unconscious, and reaching his

consciousness by means of his exceptional talent, has been more nearly correct than

that of all the others, German or foreign, who attempted to judge the situation and

who reached conclusions different from his. And, of course, it also means that having

this information at hand, he is willing to act upon it. I suppose that would apply to

the three really critical decisions he made, each of which involved the acute danger of

war: when he marched into the Rhineland in March 1936, and into Austria in March

1938, and when he mobilized and forced the Allies to abandon Czechoslovakia.

Because in each one of these cases, we know that many of Hitler’s highest military

advisers warned him against doing it since they believed the Allies would resist, and

also that if war came, Germany would be bound to lose.

HITLER, WITH HIS GENERALS

Precisely! The fact is that Hitler was able to judge his opponents better than anyone

else, and although it appeared inevitable that he would be met by force, he knew his

opponents would give in without fighting. That must have been the case, especially

when Chamberlain came to Berchtesgaden. There, for the first time, Hitler met the

elder British statesman.

CHAMBERLAIN MEETS HITLER

As Chamberlain proved later at Godesberg, he had come to tell him, among other

things, not to go too far, or Britain would fight. But Hitler’s unconscious eye, which

so far has not failed him, read so deeply the character of the British Prime Minister

that all the later ultimatums and warnings from London made no impression

whatever on his unconscious: Hitler’s unconscious knew—it didn’t guess or feel, it

knew—that Britain would not risk war. Yet Hitler’s speech in the Sports Palace, when

he announced to the world a holy oath that he would march into Czechoslovakia

October 1, with or without the permission of Britain and France, indicated for the

first and only time that Hitler the man, in his supremely critical moment, had a

fear of following Hitler, the prophet.

HITLER ADDRESSING THE PEOPLE REGARDING HIS INVASION OF SUDETANLAND (CZECHOSLOVAKIA)

His Voice told him to go ahead, that everything would be all right. But his human

reason told him the dangers were vast and perhaps overwhelming. Hence, for the first

time, Hitler’s voice trembled; his breath failed. His speech lacked form and trailed off

at the end. What human being would not be afraid in such a moment? In making that

speech, which fixed the destiny of perhaps hundreds of millions of people, he was a

man doing something that he was deathly afraid of, but he forced himself to do it

because it was ordered by his voice. His Voice was correct. Now who knows but that

his Voice may continue to be correct? If it does, it will be very interesting to observe

the history of the next few years because, as he said just after his Czech victory,

Germany stands today on the threshold of her future. That means he has just begun,

and if his Voice tells him that the German people are destined to become the lords of

Europe and perhaps of the world, and if his Voice always continues to be right, then

we are in for an extremely interesting period, aren’t we? Yes, it seems that the

German people are now convinced they have found their Messiah. In a way, the

position of the Germans is remarkably like that of the Jews of old. Since their defeat

in the World War, the Germans have awaited a Messiah, a Savior.

THE SURRENDER OF THE GERMAN ARMY AT THE END OF WW I

That is characteristic of people with an inferiority complex. The Jews got their

inferiority complex from geographical and political factors. They lived in a part of the

world which was a parade ground for conquerors from both sides, and after their

return from their first exile to Babylon, when they were threatened with extinction by

the Romans, they invented the solacing idea of a Messiah who was going to bring all

the Jews together into a nation once more and save them. And the Germans got their

inferiority complex from comparable causes. They came up out of the Danube valley

too late, and founded the beginnings of their nation long after the French and the

English were well on their way to nationhood.

They got too late to the scramble for colonies and the foundation of empire. Then,

when they did get together and made a united nation, they looked around them and

saw the British, the French, and others with rich colonies and all the equipment

of grown-up nations, and they became jealous and resentful, like a younger brother

whose older brothers have taken the lion’s share of the inheritance. This was the

original source of the German inferiority complex, which has determined so much of

their political thought and action, which is certainly decisive of their whole policy

today. It is impossible, you see, to talk about Hitler without talking about his people

because Hitler is only the German people. It occurred to me that the last time I was in

America, one could make an interesting geographical analogy about Germany. In

America, I noticed that somewhere on the East Coast, there exists a certain class of

people called “poor white trash,” and I learned that they are largely descendants of

early settlers, some of them bearers of fine old English names. The ‘poor white trash’

were left behind when some of the people with energy and initiative climbed into

their covered wagons and drove West.

Then, in the Middle West, you meet the people I consider the most stable in America;

I mean psychologically, the best balanced. Yet, in some places farther west, you meet

some of the least-balanced people. Now, it seems to me that, taking Europe as a

whole and including the British Isles, you have in Ireland and Wales the equivalent of

your West Coast. The Celts possess colorful, imaginative faculties. Then, to

correspond to your sober Middle, In the West, you have the English and the French in

Europe, both of them psychologically stable peoples. But then you come to Germany,

and just beyond Germany are the Slav mujiks, the poor white trash of Europe. Now,

the mujiks are people who can’t get up in the morning but sleep all day. And the

Germans, their next-door neighbors, are people who could get up but got up too late.

Don’t you remember how the Germans, even today, represent Germany in all their

cartoons? Yes, “Sleepy Michael,” a tall, lean fellow in a nightgown and nightcap.

SLEEPY MICHAEL

That’s right, and Sleepy Michael slept through the division of the world into colonial

empires, and so the Germans got their inferiority complex, which made them want to

fight the World War, and of course, when they lost it, their feeling of inferiority grew

even worse and developed a desire for a Messiah, and so they have their Hitler. If he

is not their true Messiah, he is like one of the Old Testament prophets: His mission is

to unite his people and lead them to the Promised Land. This explains why the Nazis

have to combat every form of religion besides their own idolatrous brand. I have no

doubt but that the campaign against the Catholic and Protestant churches will be

pursued with relentless and unremitting vigor, for the very sound reason, from the

Nazi point of view, that they wish to substitute the new faith of Hitlerism. Do you

consider it possible that Hitlerism might become for Germany a permanent religion

in the future, like Mohammedanism for the Moslems? I think it highly possible.

Hitler’s “religion” is the nearest to Mohammedanism: realistic, earthy, promising the

maximum of rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhalla into which worthy

Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like Mohammedanism, it

teaches the virtue of the sword. Hitler’s first idea was to make his people powerful

because the spirit of the Aryan German deserves to be supported by might, muscle,

and steel. Of course, it is not a spiritual religion in the sense in which we ordinarily

use the term. But remember that in the early days of Christianity, it was the church

that made the claim to total power, both spiritual and temporal!

Today, the church no longer makes this claim, but the claim has been taken over by

the totalitarian states, which demand not only temporal but spiritual power.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that the “religious” character of Hitlerism is also

emphasized by the fact that German communities throughout the world, far from the

political power of Berlin, have adopted Hitlerism. Look at the South American

German communities, notably in Chile. It is a great mistake to think that a dictator

becomes so on account of personal reasons, such as that he had a strong resistance to

his father. Millions of men resisted their fathers just as strongly as, say, Mussolini or

Hitler or Stalin, but who never became dictators or anything like dictators. The law to

remember about dictators is: “It is the persecuted one who persecutes.” The dictators

must have suffered from circumstances calculated to bring about dictatorship.

Mussolini came at the moment when the country was in chaos, the workmen out of

hand, and a threat of Bolshevism was terrifying the people. Hitler came when the

economic crisis had reduced the standard of living in Germany and increased

unemployment to an intolerable level after the great inflation of the currency, which,

although stabilization had come, had impoverished the whole middle class. Both

Hitler and Mussolini received their power from the people and their power cannot be

withdrawn. It is interesting that both Hitler and Mussolini based their power chiefly

upon the lower middle class, workers, and farmers. But to go on with the

circumstances under which dictators come to power: Stalin came when the death of

Lenin, the unique creator of Bolshevism had left the party and the people leaderless

and the country uncertain of its future.

THE DEATH OF LENIN

Thus, the dictators are made from human material, which suffers from overwhelming

needs. The three dictators in Europe differ from one another tremendously, but it is

not so much they who differ as it is their people. Compare the way the German

people think and feel about Hitler with the way the Italians think and feel about

Mussolini. The Germans are highly impressionable. They go to extremes and are

always a bit unbalanced. They are cosmopolitan, world citizens; easily lose their

national identity; they like to imitate other nations. Every German man would like to

dress like an English gentleman. Not Hitler. He always has dressed in his own way,

and nobody could ever accuse him of trying to look as if he got his clothes on Savile

Row. Precisely. Because Hitler is saying to his Germans, “Now, bei Gott, you have got

to start being Germans!” The Germans are extraordinarily sensitive to new ideas. When they hear one that appeals to them, they are likely to swallow it uncritically and,

for a time, be completely dominated by it. Still, after a while, they are equally likely to

throw it violently away and adopt a newer idea, quite probably contradicting the first

one entirely. This is the way they have run their political life. Italians are more stable.

Their minds do not roll and wallow and leap and plunge through all the extravagant

ecstasies that are the daily exercise of the German mind. So you find in Italy a spirit of

balance that is lacking in Germany. When the Fascists took power in Italy, Mussolini

did not even remove the king. Mussolini worked not with ecstasy of spirit but with a

hammer in his hand, beating Italy into the shape he wanted it, much as his

blacksmith father used to make horseshoes. This Mussolini-Italian balance of

temperament is borne out by the Fascist treatment of the Jews. At first, they did not

persecute the Jews at all, and even now, when, for various reasons, they have begun an

anti-Semitic campaign, it has kept a certain proportion. I suppose the chief reason

why Mussolini went in for anti-Semitism at all was that he became convinced that

world Jewry was probably an incorrigible and effective force against Fascism—Leon

Blum in France, especially, I think—

LEON BLUM: André Léon Blum was a French socialist politician and three-time Prime Minister of France.

and also, Mussolini wished to make his ties with Hitler more solid. So you see, while

Hitler is a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a

myth, Mussolini is a man, and therefore everything in Fascist Italy has a more human

shape than it has in Nazi Germany, where things are run by revelation. Hitler as a

man scarcely exists. At any rate, he disappears behind his role. Mussolini, on the

contrary, never disappears behind his role. His role disappears behind Mussolini.

I saw the Duce and the Padrone together.

MUSSOLINI AND HITLER TOGETHER

In Berlin, the time Mussolini paid his formal visit, I had the good luck to be placed

only a few yards away from them and could study them well. It was entertaining to

see Mussolini’s expression when they put on the goose step. If I had not seen it, I

should have fallen into the popular delusion that his adoption of the German goose

step for the Italian army was in imitation of Hitler. And that would have disappointed

me, because I had discerned in Mussolini’s conduct a certain style, a certain format of

an original man with good taste in certain matters.

MUSSOLINI ADOPTS THE GOOSE STEP

I mean, for example, that it was good taste of the Duce to keep the King. And his

choice of title, “Duce”—not Doge as in old Venice, nor Duca, but Duce, the plain

Italian word for leader—was original and, in my opinion, showed good taste.

Now, as I observed Mussolini watching the first goose step he had ever seen, I could

see him enjoying it with the zest of a small boy at a circus. But he enjoyed, even

more, the stunt when the cavalry comes, and the mounted drummer gallops ahead

and takes his place on one side of the street while the band takes its place on the

other. The drummer must gallop around the band and up to the front to take his

station there, and this he does without touching the reins, guiding his horse only by

the pressure of the knees since both hands are busy with the drums. On this

occasion, it was done magnificently, and it pleased Mussolini so much that he broke

out laughing and clapped his hands. When he got back to Rome afterwards, he

introduced the goose step, and I am convinced he did it solely for his own aesthetic

enjoyment. It really is a most impressive step. In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler

made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding, of wood covered with cloth, an

automaton with a mask, like a robot, or a mask of a robot. During the whole

performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking.

He showed no human sign. His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded

purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be the double of a

real person and that Hitler, the man, might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix,

deliberately hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.

HITLER SALUTING HIS TROOPS

What an amazing difference there is between Hitler and Mussolini! I couldn’t help

liking– Mussolini. His bodily energy and elasticity are warm, human, and contagious.

You have the – homey feeling with Mussolini of being with a human being. With

Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man because

there is nobody there. He is not a man but a collective. He is not an individual; he is a

whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you

talk intimately with a nation? You can no more explain Hitler by the personal

approach than you can explain a great work of art by examining the personality of the

artist. The great work of art is a product of the time, of the whole world in which the

artist is living, and of the millions of people who surround him, and of the thousands

of currents of thought and the myriad streams of activity that flow around him.

Thus, it would be easier for Mussolini, who is only a man,

to find a successor than for Hitler. With good luck, I should think Mussolini might

find someone to take his place, but I don’t see how Hitler can. What if Hitler were

to marry? He cannot marry. If he married, it would not be Hitler marrying. He would

cease to be Hitler. But it is incredible that he should ever do so. I shouldn’t wonder if

it may be shown that he has sacrificed his sex life entirely to the Cause. This is not an

unusual thing, especially for the type of medicine-man leader, although it is much less

usual in the type of the chief. Mussolini and Stalin seem to lead entirely normal sex

lives. Hitler’s real passion, of course, is. Germany. You could say that he has a

tremendous mother complex, which means that he will be under the domination

either of a woman or of an idea. The idea is always female. The mind is female

because the head and the brain are creative; hence, it is like a womb, female. The

unconscious of a man is always represented by a woman; that of a woman is always

by a man.

How important a role does what we call personal ambition play in the makeup of the

three dictators? I should say that it plays a very minor role in Hitler. I don’t think

Hitler has personal ambition beyond that of the average man. Mussolini has more

than average personal ambition, but it is not sufficient to explain his force. He also

feels that he coincides with the national need. Hitler does not rule Germany. He is

simply the exponent of the trend of things. This makes him uncanny and

psychologically fascinating. Mussolini rules Italy to a certain extent, but for the

rest he is an instrument of the Italian people. With Stalin, it is different. His

characteristic is overwhelming personal ambition. He does not identify himself with

Russia. He rules Russia is like any Czar. Remember, he is a Georgian anyway. But how

do you explain Stalin’s having taken the course he has? It seems to me that Stalin, far

from being uninteresting, is also enigmatic. Here, you have a person who spent the

greater part of his life as a revolutionist Bolshevik. His cobbler father and pious

mother sent him to a theological school. In his early years, he became a revolutionary,

and from then on, for the next twenty-five years, he did nothing but fight the Czar

and the Czar’s police. He was put into a dozen jails and broke out of all of them. Now,

how do you explain that a man who had fought the Czar’s tyranny all his life should

suddenly become a kind of Czar himself?

That is not remarkable. It is because you always become the thing you fight the most.

What undermined the armed forces of Rome? Christianity did. Because when the

Romans conquered the Near East; they were conquered by its religion. When you

fight a thing, you have to get very close to it, and it is likely to infect you. You must

know Czarism very well in order to defeat it. Then, when you have driven out the

Czar, you become a Czar yourself, just as a wild animal hunter may become bestial. I

know of one fellow who, after many years of big-game hunting in a proper sporting

manner, had to be arrested because he took a machine gun to the animals. The man

had become as blood-lustful as the panthers and lions he killed. Stalin fought so

much against the Czar’smbloody oppression that he is now doing exactly the same as

the Czar. In my opinion, there is no difference at all now between Stalin and Ivan

the Terrible.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

But what about the fact reported by many, and observed by myself, that the standard

of living in the Soviet Union has risen considerably and is still rising from the low

point of the famine of 1933? Of course. Stalin can be a good administrator at the

same time that he is a Czar. It would be a miracle if anybody could keep a country as

naturally rich as Russia from being prosperous. But Stalin is not very original, and

it is such bad taste for him to go about turning himself into a Czar so crudely, in front

of everybody, without any concealment at all! It is really proletarian! But you still

have not explained to me how Stalin, the loyal Communist party man, the

underground worker for what was then a highly altruistic ideal, should have changed

into a power-grabber. In my opinion, the change came about in Stalin during the 1918

revolution. Up to that time, he had labored, unselfishly perhaps, for the good of the

Cause and probably had never thought of personal power for himself, for the very

good reason that there never appeared to be the shadow of a chance that he could

even aspire to anything like personal power. The question didn’t exist for him. But

during the revolution, Stalin saw for the first time how you acquire power. I am sure he

said to himself with astonishment, “But it is so easy!” He must have watched Lenin

and the others reach the full rank of complete power and have said to himself, “So

that is how it is done! Well, I can go them one better. All you have to do is to do away

with the fellow in front of you.” He would certainly have done away with Lenin if

Lenin had lived. Nothing could have stopped him, as nothing has stopped him now.

Naturally, he wants his country to prosper. The more prosperous and greater his

country is, the greater he is. But he cannot devote his full energies to promoting the

welfare of his country so long as his personal drive for power is not satisfied. But

surely he’s got the fullest power now. Yes, but he’s got to keep it. He is surrounded by

a pack of wolves. He must keep forever on the alert. I must say that I think we owe

him a debt of gratitude! Why? For the wonderful example he has given the whole

world of the axiomatic truth that Communism always leads to dictatorship. But now

let us leave this aside and let me tell you what my therapy is.

As a physician, I have not only to analyze and diagnose but to recommend treatment.

We have been talking nearly all the while about Hitler and the Germans because they

are so incomparably the most important of the dictator phenomena at the moment. It

is for this, then, that I must propose a therapy. It is extremely difficult to deal with

this type of phenomenon. It is excessively dangerous. I mean the type of case of a man

acting under compulsion. Now, when I have a patient acting under the command of a

higher power, a power within him, such as Hitler’s Voice, I dare not tell him to

disobey his Voice. He won’t do it if I do tell him. He will even act more determinedly

than if I did not tell him. All I can do is attempt, by interpreting the Voice, to induce

the patient to behave in a way that will be less harmful to himself and to society than

if he obeyed the Voice immediately without interpretation. So I say, in this situation,

the only way to save Democracy in the West—and by the West, I mean America too—

is not to try to stop Hitler. You may try to divert him, but to stop him will be

impossible without a Great Catastrophe for all. His ‘Voice tells him to unite the

German people and to lead them toward a better future, a bigger place on the earth, a

position of glory and richness. You cannot stop him from trying to do that. You can

only hope to influence the direction of his expansion. I say let him go East. Turn his

attention away from the West, or rather, encourage him to keep it turned away. Let

him go to Russia. That is the logical cure for Hitler. I don’t think Germany will be

satisfied with a bit of Africa, big or small. Germany looks at Britain and France with

their magnificent colonial empires, and even at Italy with her Libya and Ethiopia, and

thinks of her own size, seventy-eight million Germans as against forty-five million

British in the British Isles and forty-two million French and forty-two million

Italians, and she is bound to think that she ought to have a place in the world not

merely as large as that occupied by any one of the other three Western Great Powers

but much larger. How is she going to get that in the West without destroying one or

more of the nations that now occupy the West? There is only one field in which she

can operate, and that is Russia. And what will happen to Germany when she tries

accounts with Russia? Ah, that’s her own business. Our interest in it is simply that it

will save the West. Nobody has ever bitten into Russia without regretting it. It’s not

very palatable food. It might take the Germans a hundred years to finish that meal.

Meanwhile, we should be safe, and by we, I mean all of Western civilization.

Instinct should tell the Western statesmen not to touch Germany in her present

mood. She is much too dangerous. Stalin’s instinct was correct when it told him to let

the Western nations have a war and destroy one another while he waited to pick the

bones. That would have saved the Soviet Union. I don’t believe he ever would have

entered the war on the side of Czechoslovakia and France unless it were at the very

end to profit from the exhaustion of both sides. So I say, studying Germany as I

would a patient and Europe as I would a patient’s family and neighbors, let her go

into Russia. There is plenty of land there—one-sixth of the surface of the earth. It

wouldn’t matter to Russia if somebody took a bite, and as I said, nobody has ever

prospered who did.

How to save your democratic U.S.A.? It must, of course, be saved else we all go under.

You must keep away from the craze and avoid the infection. Keep your army and navy

large, but save them. If war comes, wait. America must keep big armed forces to help

keep the world at peace or to decide the war if it comes. You are the last resort of

Western democracy. But how is the peace of Western Europe going to be preserved

by letting Germany “go East,” as you put it, since England and France have now

formally guaranteed the frontiers of the new rump state of Czechoslovakia? Won’t

there then be war anyway if Germany attempts to incorporate the rump state into her

administrative system? England and France will not honor their new guarantee to

Czechoslovakia any more than France honored her previous pledge to

Czechoslovakia. No nation – keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm following

what? Fate, perhaps. A nation has no honor; it has no word to keep. That is the reason

why, in the old days, they tried to have kings who possessed personal honor and a

word. Don’t you know that if you choose one hundred of the most intelligent people

in the world and get them all together, they are a stupid mob?

STORMING THE CAPITAL ON JANUARY 6, 2021

Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence of an alligator.

Haven’t you noticed that at a dinner party, the more people you invite, the more

stupid the conversation? In a crowd, the qualities that everybody possesses multiply,

pile up, and become the dominant characteristics of the whole crowd. Not

everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts, the basic primitive

caveman suggestibility, the suspicions, and vicious traits of the savage. The result is

that when you get a nation of many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a

lizard or a crocodile, or a wolf. Its statesmen cannot have a higher morality than the

animal-like mass morality of the nation, although individual statesmen of the

democratic states may attempt to behave a little better.

For Hitler, however, more than for any other statesman in the modern world,

it would be impossible to expect that he should keep the word of Germany against her

interest in any international bargain, agreement, or treaty. Because Hitler is himself

the nation. That, incidentally, is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private

conversation—because he is speaking with seventy-eight million voices. That’s what

a nation is: a monster. Everybody ought to fear a nation. It is a horrible thing. How

can such a thing have honor or a word? That’s why I am for small nations. Small

nations mean small catastrophes. Big nations mean big catastrophes.

At this point, the Interviewer, H.R. Knickerbocker, relates the following:

The telephone rang. In the stillness of the study and a windless day without, I could hear a patient cry that a hurricane in his bedroom was about to sweep him off his feet. “Lie down on the floor, and you will be safe,” advised the doctor (Carl Jung). It is the same advice the sage physician now gives to Europe and America as the high wind of Dictatorship rages at the foundations of Democracy.

- Carl Jung interview with H.R. Knickerbocker

in Cosmopolitan [1938] See: C.G. Jung Speaks;

Pages 115-135

You might want to read another post regarding what Carl Jung wrote about Hitler at the end of WWII in 1945: