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The imagery used by Hitler to incite Germans to kill Jews was that of the epidemic: many Nazi propaganda films equated the Jews and germ-propagating rats or vermin. Certainly, the threat of an epidemic and the image of diseased rats helped rationalize horrific genocide to the German public. Evidently anality was involved in this preparation for genocide: killing rats and germs was depicted in Nazi language as a process of “Säuberung” (purification), of “Reinigung” (cleansing), and of purgation. Such an obsession with purity usually denotes the repression of strong anal tendencies.
Similarly, Stalinist propaganda—although it did not rest on racial theories—referred to the so-called “enemies of the people” it wanted to “exterminate” in terms of “parasites” and “vicious vipers.” Moreover, in the case of Stalin, the current word used in the thirties to designate the killing off of enemies from within the communist party itself was “purge.” The Communist party was seen as a human body that had to be purged of its internal “worms.”
This expression, “purging,” was used by the French revolutionaries of 1791 to 1793. Indeed, it is probable that the Stalinist ideologues borrowed it from the orators of the French Revolution.
Yet, unlike the modern perpetrators of mass extermination, the revolutionaries of the past did not aim at perpetrating genocides, even though they massacred quite large numbers of those they considered their enemies.
They were also much less repressed than the modern “exterminators” of peoples. Revolutionaries of the past overtly “played with excrements” in deriding their enemies. Thus, caricaturists of both the Reformation and the French Revolution