Accompanying these illustrations is an extensive text by Sam Keen, contributing editor to Psychology Today . Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them.
Propaganda precedes technology.
But the reader who retains the ability to think rationally will see through Keen's pop psychology. By studying the logic of paranoia, we can see why certain archetypes of the enemy must necessarily recur, no matter what the historical circumstances. Paranoia involves a complex of mental, emotional, and social mechanisms by which a person or a people claim righteousness and purity, and attribute hostility and evil to the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible. It is not difficult to see the roots of the Nazi sadism in the normal methods of German child rearing.