What Hitler and Aids have in common

Warning: Video contains graphic sexual images. A couple, in the throes of passion, rip each other's clothes off, and with unbridled lust, they plunge into bed together. We have not seen the man's face and, suddenly, as he climaxes, he lifts his face to the camera and it is Adolf Hitler, grinning with triumph. This is the video just released in Germany, created for an Aids awareness organisation by the Hamburg advertising agency, Das Committee.
 
Aids organisations across Europe are up in arms, criticising the campaign on the grounds that it can only further stigmatise Aids sufferers. But giving Aids the face of Hitler is not just a shock tactic, it is a brilliant metaphor for the silent, creeping spread of a disease that is destroying whole populations in Africa and Asia and mortally infecting huge numbers of men and women in Europe and the US.

It is a modern-day plague, but a plague that we have the knowledge and means to control. It is therefore even more curious that it is spreading and not contracting.
 
When Hitler rose to power, he personified an omnipotent ideal who had ultimate power and promised his followers, like other tyrants, a paradisiacal return to a pure state in which there would be no strife, no deprivation, and racial supremacy that ensured no enemies. The state would, seemingly, take care of all its members as a perfect mother would take care of her children.

This ideal, cloaked in the guise of purity and love, gave rise to the mass exterminations of those who were "other" and a threat to the ideology.
 
There is a striking similarity in the mentality that lies behind much of the spread of Aids now. At its most extreme, French radio reported a recent phenomenon of sex parties in which healthy people come together with Aids carriers for sex. No one knows who is infected and who is not so the excitement is in the game of Russian roulette.

The person who takes part in unprotected sex knows he or she is taking a risk and defies the odds. It is a mentality that transcends the need for protection, that defies death while courting it, and that expresses contempt for vulnerability and weakness.

The sexual intercourse that may be mistaken for love is in fact imbued with a disregard and hatred of the "other" and oneself. If some of the sexual partners are caught in the crossfire of unprotected sex, they become martyrs to the cause ­ at least at an unconscious level. They have sacrificed their life in the service of an omnipotent god who will honour their fight against weakness in death.
 
Followers of a tyrannical regime are required to subjugate their will to their leader in order to safeguard the total power of the regime. The regime promises a return to the perfect world of infancy, being at one with the world - at the cost of the individual. Ultimately, it is a death wish that negates the frustrations and pain of reality, much like a moth attracted to a flame.

The appeal of having unprotected sex is the excitement of killing consciousness and embracing omnipotence. Hitler also offered this appeal, ultimately leading his country into a dance with death. ·