Militarist ritual organizes male psychology into a defense against disturbing sexual desires.

Evidence

Theweleit’s book is a study of letters written home by young men serving in the German Freikorps after World War I. The Freikorps was an elite military unit, many of whose members subsequently became leading supporters of the Nazi party. Theweleit is concerned to show, through a close “Freudian” reading of these texts, how the emotional roots of racism and fascism can be traced to the way male psychology is organized by and into a military machine. He takes a leaf out of Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism to argue that rituals of militarism wrap the body up in a physical and emotional straightjacket and provide an institutionalized defense against disturbing sexual desires, by giving them a perverse sadistic organization. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1371

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes my No Noise / soundscape interest in how external environments wrap the body — militarism as an institutional straightjacket parallels the soundscape’s enveloping structures.