Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War

VIII. Anti-Semitism and Racism

vIIi Anti-Semitism and Racism 1. The Role of Racism Nazism is frequently regarded as primarily a theory of racism. German chauvinism claims for the Germans a lofty ancestry. They are the scions of the Nordic-Aryan master race, which includes all those who have contributed to the development of human civilization. The Nordic is tall, slim, with fair hair and blue eyes; he is wise, a gallant fighter, heroic, ready to sacrifice, and animated by “Faustic” ardor. The rest of mankind are trash, little better than apes. For, says Hitler, “the gulf which separates the lowest so-called human beings from our most noble races is broader than the gulf between the lowest men and the highest apes.”* It is obvious that this noble race has a fair claim to world hegemony. In this shape the Nordic myth serves the national vanity. But political nationalism has nothing in common with chauvinistic self-praise and conceit. The German nationalists do not strive for world domination because they are of noble descent. The German racists do not deny that what they are saying of the Germans could be said, with better justification, of the Swedes or Norwegians. Nevertheless, they would call these Scandinavians lunatics if they ventured to adopt the policies which they recommend for their own German nation. For the Scandinavians lack both of the conditions which underlie German aggressivism : high population figures and a strategically advantageous geographical position. The idiomatic congeniality of the Indo-European languages was once explained on the hypothesis of a common descent of all these * Speech at the party meeting at Nuremberg, September 3, 1933. Frankfurter Zeitung, September 4, 1933. L4875.indb 191 L4875.indb 191 1/10/11 12:32:23 PM 1/10/11 12:32:23 PM 192  german nazism peoples. This Aryan hypothesis was scientifically disproved long ago. The Aryan race is an illusion. Scientific anthropology does not recognize this fable.* The first Mosaic book tells us that Noah is the ancestor of all men living today. Noah had three sons. From one of them, Shem, stem the old Hebrews, the people whom Moses delivered from Egyptian slavery . Judaism teaches that all persons embracing the Jewish religion are the scions of this people. It is impossible to prove this statement; no attempt has ever been made to prove it. There are no historical documents reporting the immigration of Jews from Palestine to Central or Eastern Europe; on the other hand, there are documents available concerning the conversion of European non-Jews to Judaism. Nevertheless , this ancestry hypothesis is widely accepted as an unshakable dogma. The Jews maintain it because it forms an essential teaching of their religion; others because it can justify a policy of discrimination against Jews. The Jews are called Asiatic strangers because, according to this hypothesis, they immigrated into Europe only some 1800 years ago. This explains also the use of the term Semites to signify people professing the Jewish religion and their offspring. The term Semitic languages is used in philology to signify the family of languages to which Hebrew, the idiom of the Old Testament, belongs. It is a fact, of course, that Hebrew is the religious language of Judaism, as Latin is of Catholicism and Arabic of Islam. For more than a hundred years anthropologists have studied the bodily features of various races. The undisputed outcome of these scientific investigations is that the peoples of white skin, Europeans and non-European descendants of emigrated European ancestors, represent a mixture of various bodily characteristics. Men have tried to explain this fact as the result of intermarriage between the members of pure primitive stocks. Whatever the truth of this, it is certain that there are today no pure stocks within the class or race of white-skinned people. Further efforts have been made to coördinate certain bodily features—racial characteristics—with certain mental and moral characteristics . All these endeavors have also failed. Finally people have tried, especially in Germany, to discover the physical characteristics of an alleged Jewish or Semitic race as distin- * Houzé, L’Aryen et l’Anthroposociologie (Brussels, 1906), pp. 3 ff.; Hertz, Rasse und Kultur (3d ed. Leipzig, 1925), pp. 102 ff. L4875.indb 192 L4875.indb 192 1/10/11 12:32:23 PM 1/10/11 12:32:23 PM anti-semitism and racism  193 guished from the characteristics of European non-Jews. These quests, too, have failed completely...