A young man joins a criminal gang. The gang's leader watches him for weeks, then assigns him a job: he is to participate in a beating. Maybe a killing. The young man hesitates. The leader offers no alternative. "Once you've gone this far with us," the leader says, in some version or another, "you have to go all the way."
That sentence is the lock. The young man does the act. From that moment on, the gang owns him. Not because the gang threatens him afterward — though it might — but because the outside world now does. He has crossed a line he cannot uncross. The laws of society no longer protect him; they hunt him. His only safety is now inside the gang. The gang has not coerced him into loyalty; the gang has made disloyalty unaffordable. He stays because there is nowhere else to go.
This is the strategy of criminalization at the level any reader of crime novels recognizes. Joost Meerloo's chapter takes the same mechanism and shows it operating at state scale, with industrial-scale crimes and cadres numbering in the tens of thousands instead of dozens. Meerloo quotes Hitler's instruction to his SS in a single brutal line:
"Let them kill and murder," was the device. "Once they have gone so far with me, they must go on to the end."1
That is the operating principle of the strategy of criminalization at state scale. The dictator binds his cadre by making them complicit in crimes they cannot walk away from. The cadre cannot defect because defection would leave them exposed to the laws of decent society — the same laws their crimes have placed them outside of. The bond between the dictator and the cadre is not loyalty, in any noble sense. It is co-conspiracy. They have to stick together because, as Meerloo writes, "the downfall of the system would bring about the downfall of the entire gang, both leaders and followers."2
This page maps the technique: how it works, why it produces the most reliable form of cadre loyalty available to a regime, what specific operational signatures it produces, and why understanding it is essential to understanding how regimes that everyone (including the cadre) recognizes as monstrous can persist for decades.
The strategy of criminalization is not one move. It is three moves running together:
Operation 1: Permission to act on lower passions. The regime tells the cadre, explicitly or implicitly, that the moral constraints civilization has placed on them are removed. The aggression they have been suppressing for a lifetime is now sanctioned. The hatreds they have been ashamed of are now patriotic. The desires for revenge they have been carrying are now duties. Meerloo's framing:
The citizen (and party member) is encouraged to betray his friends and parents, something the angry, frustrated baby in him has often wanted to do. He may live out in action his deeply repressed aggressions and desires for revenge. He no longer has to suppress or reject some of his own primitive impulses.3
This is the seductive front end of the technique. The cadre is offered something he wanted and could not have. The price is unspecified at this stage; the gift is delivered first.
Operation 2: Ready-made justifications. As the cadre begins to act, the regime supplies the moral cover. Catchwords like "historical necessity." Race-superiority doctrines. Nationalist mythologies that frame the violence as protective rather than aggressive. Meerloo's diagnosis:
The system assumes the full burden of his guilt and hands him a ready-made list of thousands of justifications and exculpations for the release of his sadistic impulses. Flowery catchwords, such as "historical necessity," help the individual to rationalize immorality and evil into morality and good.4
The cadre member, performing the violence, has the language available to tell himself he is doing good. Not just permitted to do this; required to do this; doing it for reasons larger than himself. The justifications are not there to convince observers — they are there to allow the cadre to act without his conscience destroying him in real time.
Operation 3: The lock-in through accumulating crime. This is the operation that makes the strategy work where other coercion techniques fail. As the crimes accumulate, each one binds the cadre tighter to the regime, because each one extends the gap between the cadre and the rest of moral society. By the time the cadre is six months in, the question "should I leave?" is no longer simply about the cost of leaving the regime; it is about facing the world outside, which now wants him punished for what he has done. He cannot return. The regime is his only refuge.
Each new act of torture and crime makes new bonds of fidelity and unscrupulous obedience, especially within the leading gang. In the end, driven by crime and guilt, the ruling members have to stick it out together because the downfall of the system would bring about the downfall of the entire gang, both leaders and followers.5
The three operations together produce a cadre that is loyal in a way regular soldiers cannot be loyal: not because they believe in the cause, not because they fear punishment, but because the regime is now the only place on earth where they are not hunted. This is the specific genius — and the specific horror — of the strategy of criminalization. It produces durable loyalty by destroying the loyalist's options.
Meerloo's most chilling case study is the Nazi doctors who began their careers under the Hippocratic Oath and ended them slaughtering thousands of patients to determine "the statistical limits of human endurance":
The highly learned and polished Nazi doctors who started their professional life with the Hippocratic oath, promising to be the helping healer of man, but who later in cold blood inflicted the most horrible tortures on their concentration-camp victims (Mitscherlich). They slaughtered innocents by the thousands in order to discover the statistical limits of human endurance. They infected other thousands as guinea pigs because the Fuhrer wanted it so. They had lost their personal standards and ethics completely and justified all their crimes through the Führers will.6
Read each phrase. Highly learned and polished. These are not unsophisticated brutes. They have medical degrees, research records, professional reputations. Started their professional life with the Hippocratic oath. They began with the most explicit moral commitment any profession requires. Lost their personal standards and ethics completely. The moral framework they began their careers with did not slow the criminalization process. It dissolved.
The Mitscherlich citation is to Alexander Mitscherlich's documentation of the Nuremberg medical trials — a primary source on how a profession built around healing can be systematically inverted into a profession of industrial-scale killing. The mechanism Meerloo identifies operates on people who should have been the most resistant — physicians with explicit ethical commitments, working in a tradition with two thousand years of moral elaboration. They were not resistant. The strategy of criminalization, applied with sufficient regime backing, runs through professional ethics as if those ethics were not there.
The implication is not that the Hippocratic oath is worthless. The implication is that no individual ethical commitment, however serious, can survive without an institutional environment that holds it up. The Nazi medical apparatus removed the institutional environment and provided an alternative one — race-superiority doctrine, Führer-will sanction, ready-made language for the violence — and the individual oaths failed within a few years. The defense was never the oath; the defense was always the institution that kept the oath enforceable.
The strategy of criminalization requires a specific preparatory step Meerloo calls deculturation: the systematic removal of the cultural inhibitions that would otherwise prevent the cadre from acting. Civilization, in the classical sense, is the accumulated set of inhibitions that distinguishes adult social behavior from infantile or animal behavior. The strategy of criminalization can only operate on a cadre that has been at least partially stripped of these inhibitions. Meerloo's anchor quote:
As one of Hitler's gangmen said, "When I hear the word 'civilization,' I prepare my gun."7
The line is operational. Civilization is the enemy of the strategy of criminalization, because civilization carries the inhibitions the strategy needs removed. So the cadre is taught explicitly to despise the word, to react with hostility to its invocation, to associate it with weakness and decadence. The deculturation has to happen before the killing can begin in earnest.
Meerloo's broader description:
The process of systematic criminalization requires a deculturation of the people. Show them blood and bloody scapegoats, and a thousand years of acculturation fall away from them. This implies imbuing the people with hysteria, arousing the masses, homogenizing the emotions. All this tends to awaken the brute Neanderthal psyche in man.8
Several things to notice. A thousand years of acculturation fall away from them. The inhibitions civilization installed are not deeply rooted; they are top-layer installations that can be peeled back relatively quickly under the right pressure. Hysteria, arousing the masses, homogenizing the emotions. The deculturation is not done by argument; it is done by emotional homogenization that bypasses the argumentative mind. The brute Neanderthal psyche in man. What the inhibitions were holding down was not nothing; it was a more primitive psyche that emerges intact when the inhibitions are removed.
The brute psyche is not invented by the regime. It is exposed by the regime. This is the uncomfortable anthropology underneath the technique: the inhibitions do not transform the brute psyche, they only conceal it. Removed, the underlying material is there to be deployed.
The strategy of criminalization produces a cadre that cannot be turned by ordinary defection-incentive offers, and a regime that cannot be reformed from within because reform would expose the crimes. Meerloo's diagnosis:
Once a man has taken the first step and rejected the laws of society and joined the criminal gang, he is at war with the outside world and its moral evaluations. From that point on, the gang can blackmail him and subdue him.9
The cadre member is now permanently exposed. Defection means facing the laws he has placed himself outside of. Even partial defection — leaking information, slowing his cooperation, dragging his feet — risks regime discovery and elimination. The cadre is locked in not just by the regime's authority over him but by the outside world's knowledge of what he has done.
This is why regimes that have run the strategy of criminalization at scale tend to require violent collapse rather than gradual reform. The cadre has too much to lose from any transition that includes accountability. Even the leadership, late in the regime's life, often understands the regime is failing — but cannot let it fall, because the fall would destroy them. The famous Nazi continued to fight to the end not because he believed in the Reich; he fought because the alternative was capture and trial. The criminalization had become his only safety.
Meerloo's broader observation about the dictator: "Driven by crime and guilt, the ruling members have to stick it out together because the downfall of the system would bring about the downfall of the entire gang."5 This is the structural reason totalitarian regimes are hard to reform peacefully and tend to require external collapse or military defeat. Internal reform paths require some of the criminals to imagine surviving the reform; the strategy of criminalization is designed to make them not imagine that.
Meerloo's chapter pushes the analysis one layer deeper than mere lock-in mechanics. The strategy of criminalization, he argues, taps into an ancient psychological structure he calls the magic of killing:
The weak and emotionally sick in any society kill out of fear, in order to borrow, in a magic way, their dead victims' strength and happiness — as well as, of course, their material possessions. The killing of millions in the Nazi gas ovens was part of this ancient mythology of murder. Perhaps the members of the master race thought that slaughtering the Jews would ensure that the Germans would endure pain for as many centuries as had their victims! It is part of an old primitive myth that through killing one fortifies and prolongs one's own life.10
This is the deepest level of the technique. The regime is not just permitting violence and locking the cadre in through complicity; the regime is also offering the cadre a primitive mythology in which the violence will transfer the victim's life-force to the killer. The killing is not waste; it is exchange. The killer takes something from the killed. This is ancient psychology — Frazer's Golden Bough documents versions across cultures — and it operates at the level of unconscious imagery rather than conscious belief. The cadre member does not, on his rational surface, believe that killing a Jew will lengthen his own life. But the unconscious machinery the regime is engaging is operating at a level where this is exactly what is being promised.
The technical claim is striking: industrial-scale state killing is not, even in the Nazi case, the cold bureaucratic operation it sometimes appears. It is partly a primitive ritual whose participants are partly believing — at unconscious levels — that they are participating in a life-extension exchange. The bureaucracy and the magic are running in parallel. Both are required for the operation to function at scale.
Diagnostic markers for environments where criminalization-as-strategy is operating:
Recipe ingredients to scan for:
Defensive sequence for institutions trying to resist:
Convergence: The strategy of criminalization is documentable across regimes — Nazi Germany (the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the medical establishment), Stalin's secret police (NKVD officers participating in the purges), the Khmer Rouge cadre, the Rwandan génocidaires. The pattern is regime-neutral and ideology-neutral; what varies is the specific permission language and the specific scapegoat population. The structural mechanism is consistent.
Tension with rational-actor models: Standard models of authoritarian rule treat cadres as rational actors choosing between staying and defecting based on expected utility. The strategy of criminalization breaks this framing because the criminalized cadre member's expected utility of defection is permanently negative — defection equals capture and trial. The cadre is not making the rational choice to stay; the cadre has been engineered into a position where staying is the only option. Models that miss this engineered constraint underpredict cadre loyalty in late-stage regimes.
Tension with redemption narratives: Western culture has redemption narratives in which guilty individuals find their way back to moral standing through repentance and restitution. The strategy of criminalization is engineered to break these narratives — the regime's whole point is that the cadre cannot redeem themselves while the regime stands. This is uncomfortable for liberal political theory, which has tended to assume that even the worst actors can be reasoned with or rehabilitated. The strategy of criminalization produces actors for whom this assumption is, in practice, false — not because they are uniquely evil but because they are uniquely locked in.
Meerloo's primary direct source for this concept is his observation of Nazi cadre behavior during the occupation and the Nuremberg trial documentation. The Mitscherlich citation anchors the medical-doctor case empirically. The implicit interlocutors are: (1) those who treat totalitarian violence as ideological commitment ("they really believed it") — Meerloo argues the violence is in part lock-in mechanics that operate independently of belief; (2) those who treat it as obedience to authority ("they were just following orders") — Meerloo argues the obedience is structurally produced by criminalization, not freely given; (3) those who treat the violence as expression of underlying national or racial character ("German barbarism" or similar) — Meerloo argues the technique is regime-neutral and applicable to any population given the right preparation. The convergence between these three implicit positions, which Meerloo holds simultaneously, is that the strategy of criminalization explains both why the cadre stays loyal (lock-in) and why the cadre commits the violence (deculturation + permission + magic-of-killing). Neither factor alone is sufficient; together they produce the outcomes the regime needs.
Behavioral-mechanics: Menticide: The Coined Concept and Its Architecture — Menticide and the strategy of criminalization are paired techniques operating on different populations. Menticide produces compliant victims through psychiatric pressure; criminalization produces compliant cadres through complicity binding. The two techniques, deployed together, give the regime durable control over both the victimized population (broken inward) and the enforcing cadre (locked in by their own crimes against the broken). The insight neither page generates alone: the regime needs both — menticide alone would produce broken victims but no reliable enforcer class, and criminalization alone would produce a locked-in cadre but no controlled population to enforce against. The synergy is what makes mature totalitarian systems durable; reform-resistant and externally-collapse-requiring. Trying to reform such a regime by addressing only one of the techniques (e.g., releasing the menticide victims, or offering amnesty to the cadre) tends to fail because the other technique's structure remains intact. Total reform requires dismantling both, which usually requires regime collapse.
Behavioral-mechanics: Apostatic Crime and Physiognomic Insubordination — Criminalization-as-strategy and apostatic-crime are paired mechanisms operating on the same population. The strategy of criminalization binds those inside the regime through complicity in regime crimes; the apostatic crime binds those outside the regime through total-coverage criminalization that makes refusal-to-confess punishable. Together they produce the structural pattern that defines mature totalitarianism: insiders cannot leave (lock-in), outsiders cannot resist (apostatic-crime liability). Every position in the system has been criminalized, just by different mechanisms. The insight neither page generates alone: the regime's total architecture is two-tiered — one criminalization for those it needs to act, another for those it needs to comply. Citizens who try to occupy the middle (neither active enforcer nor compliant subject) are squeezed by both: the cadre side wants them committed through complicity; the apostatic side wants them committed through public submission. The middle position is structurally untenable in fully-developed Totalitaria, which is why the system tends to absorb everyone over time.
Cross-domain handshake to history: Propaganda and Mass Persuasion Hub — The strategy of criminalization is the dark complement to engineered consent. Where Bernays-style consent engineering works on populations through appeals to their interests and instincts (instinct of curiosity, instinct of pugnacity, instinct of self-display), criminalization works on cadres through appeals to their permitted-aggressions and locked-in self-interest. Both are engineering operations on populations; the difference is that consent-engineering can be reformed by changing the appeals (Bernays himself reportedly horrified at his techniques' application by Goebbels), whereas criminalization-engineering cannot be reformed without the regime falling. Without holding both, the analyst misses why some authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to information warfare and counter-propaganda (those operating primarily through consent-engineering) while others are not (those that have moved into criminalization-as-strategy and have locked their cadres in beyond the reach of message-level intervention). The propaganda toolkit becomes ineffective once the regime has criminalized its enforcers; you cannot persuade the SS to defect by sending them Allied broadcasts, because their loyalty is no longer about belief.
The Sharpest Implication
The most uncomfortable consequence of the strategy of criminalization is that it tells you something specific about how mature authoritarian regimes end. They do not end through reform, because the cadre cannot afford reform. They do not end through internal coup, because the leadership cannot afford to be deposed. They do not end through cadre defection, because the cadre is locked in. They end through external defeat (the Reich falling to the Allies; Khmer Rouge falling to Vietnam) or through systemic collapse so complete that the criminalization no longer matters because the system can no longer punish anyone (Soviet collapse). This means that any society that allows a regime to fully implement the strategy of criminalization on its enforcer class is committing to one of two endings: external violent overthrow, or persistence-until-collapse measured in decades. There is no peaceful gradual reform path once the criminalization is mature, because the structure of the regime is engineered specifically to prevent that path. The implication for citizens of any state showing early-stage criminalization markers is that the window for prevention is now, not later. Once the lock-in is complete, the only remaining options are bad ones.
Generative Questions