#“white” is a generic term - in this context it refers to “aryans”

[johnnypecanpie]

we’re so damn patriotic we wrap the flag around our eyes as it fucks us over again and again and again

9/11 was a tragedy. Let’s start off with that. Nothing will make it alright, or justified. When we discuss the events of history, however, providing ample focus towards the various aspects of a topic is necessary in keeping the most unbiased lense. To put it lightly — the events of 9/11 paled in comparison to those that happened before and after during the Pan-American era. The Middle East’s history, especially with conflict, goes far back — and playing the blame game is always easy. How far back do you start? With the Ottomans? Crusades? Caliphates? Romans? It’s impossible.

Certain actions, however, were taken with no pre-qualification or previous event in mind. Western interference in the Middle East during the Colonial era follows the same. British and French influence in the region following the full acquisition of British India and the Scramble for Africa was increased to the point of near complete control — especially piqued by the interest in oil reserves discovered. This land, over the course of fifty years, was divided and extracted till both empires acknowledged they had grown too large to maintain and began to slowly break apart. The first problem arises here: the intentional division of regions through containing ethnicities and religions to create conflict. Secondly, the most valuable resources of the region had been extracted — and those that hadn’t had were trapped in contracts which would keep them feeding the same to companies like British Petroleum and Total.

This leads into the second acquisition: as the Cold War continued, the strategic importance of both the resources and locations of the nations there became incredibly important to both the USSR and NATO. After many internationally influenced wars in the region, the USSR directly invaded Afghanistan in 1979. This conflict worried the United States, which trained the Muhjadeen, a local militia, to fight against the invading forces — and incorporated the idea of Jihad. It wasn’t difficult for so called religious leaders to then enter the fray and seize power for themselves. Osama Bin Laden, an anti-American terrorist, formed the Al-Qaeda out of many of the same, using Saudi wealth — which, you guessed it, was supported by the United States against the Shah of Iran, which was supported by the USSR. On 9/11, they then attacked one of the wealthiest places in the world, the World Trade Center. How did the United States retaliate? A million killed in Iraq for “weapons of mass destruction” which didn’t exist. Upwards of two trillion dollars spent on the war in Afghanistan.

Maybe every year we should have a memorial on medical discrimination against people of color because that death toll is in the hundreds of thousands each year when it doesn’t have to be. Maybe every year we should have a memorial on the tens of millions of Native Americans that were killed through evidenced and recorded biological warfare. Because it feels every damn time, like one white life is worth a thousand coloured ones. But God bless America right? We’re so damn patriotic we wrap the flag around our eyes as it fucks us over again and again and again. We’ll continue to feed this behemoth till the day it takes us down with it, but history will see us as complicit to the crime.

[brexiiton]

Aryan; contemporary usage

The word Aryan is an example of how words and concepts develop over time. In the European and American context, the term Aryan started as a scholarly concept used to describe an ancient people who spoke related languages. With time, however, Aryan referred to a racial category. The Nazi regime adopted this as a core concept in their racist ideology.

In recent decades, white supremacists across the globe have started using the word Aryan as a general label for non-Jewish, white people. The word also signifies their support for the racist beliefs and genocidal practices of Nazi Germany.

[lesbianfeminists]

There’s More Than One Way to ‘Erase’ Women

On 28th May Hungary’s Parliament signed a bill into law which ends legal recognition for transgender people. The votes of rightwing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party pushed the legislation through by a majority in the context of a pandemic in which he is ruling by decree indefinitely. The changes to Hungary’s Registry Act will restrict gender to biological sex at birth, a status determined by primary sex characteristics and chromosomes. All other forms of identification are tied to birth certificates in Hungary so these too will reflect birth sex.

Trans advocacy and human rights groups argue that it will lead to more discrimination because Hungarians are required to produce identity cards on a frequent basis. This means that they will, in effect, be ‘outing’ themselves in everyday situations which may be humiliating, at best, and dangerous at worst. The government say they are merely clarifying sex within the law; a disingenuous claim in a political context in which the traditional family is increasingly being placed at the heart of a ‘white’, Christian nation.

Julie Bindel recently argued that it was unwise of Pink News to look at Orban’s policies in relation to transgender people in isolation. They should instead be conceived of as part of a broader attack on women’s rights and the rights of minority groups.

But Bindel’s advice applies equally to those gender critical feminists, albeit small in number, who are responding positively to the news from Hungary, on the basis that Orban recognises the immutability of sex. Whilst Baroness Nicholson might see no problem in adding Hungary to her list of causes for celebration, feminists shouldn’t lose sight of a much bigger picture.

In 2013, Orban introduced a constitutional reform which enshrined the idea of ​​the family as the foundation of the nation in the Basic Law. Although abortion was legalised after the Second World War, since 2013 the Constitution has stated that “the life of the fetus must be protected from the moment of conception”. Orban has yet to move on abortion but he publically supports anti-abortion organisations and in 2017 he opened The World Congress of Families conference in Budapest. The WCF is a United States coalition is a virulently anti-abortion organisation which promotes Christian right values globally.

By 2018, he was setting out his plan for a new “cultural era” which included amending the kindergarten curriculum so that it would promote a “national identity, Christian cultural values, patriotism, attachment to homeland and family”. (5) In 2019, the government announced a series of pro-natalist measures which included a lifetime income tax exemption for mothers of four children and free IVF treatment for married heterosexual couples. These policies aim to reverse demographic decline and curb immigration, at one and the same time. Orban argues that “it’s a national interest to restore natural reproduction. Not one interest among others – but the only one. It’s a European interest too. It is the European interest”.

In essence, he subscribes to the white nationalist “demographic winter” theory, which claims that the “purity” of European civilisation is in peril due to the increasing numbers of non-white races, in general, and Muslim people, in particular. Orban’s draconian measures against migrants and refugees dovetail with this belief system.

Such policies also cast women in the role of wombs of the nation, echoing the eugenicist policies of Hitler, who also provided financial inducements to bribe Aryan women into motherhood. As Anita Komuves, a Hungarian journalist, tweeted, “Can we just simply declare that Hungary is Gilead from now on?”

Homosexuality is legal in Hungary, but same sex couples are unable to marry and registered partnerships don’t offer equivalent legal rights. Orban’s government has made the promotion of patriarchal family values so central to its cultural mission and policies that anti gay rhetoric amongst politicians has become commonplace. Last year, László Kövér, the speaker of the Hungarian parliament, compared supporters of lesbian and gay marriage and adoption to paedophiles. “Morally, there is no difference between the behaviour of a paedophile and the behaviour of someone who demands such things,” he said. (9) In 2017 the annual Pride event was attacked by violent right-wing extremists hurling faeces, acid and Molotov cocktails at the marchers and police.

Just as Orban has sought to eliminate the notion of gender identity within the law, so too has he gone to war against what he describes as “gender ideology”. In 2018 he issued a decree revoking funding for gender studies programmes in October that year. (10) At the time, this move was welcomed by some gender critical and radical feminists on the basis that postmodern feminism in the academy has contributed to a dogmatic sex denialism which is unable to analyse the basis of female oppression. (11) But, as with the changes in relation to the legal recognition of transgender people, Orban’s reasons were anything but feminist. As one government spokesman explained: “The government’s standpoint is that people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially constructed genders rather than biological sexes.” (12) Gender studies is seen as promoting too fluid an understanding of male and female roles in the place of a fixed social order in which women’s biological destiny is to be married mothers. The decision to withdraw funding from gender studies didn’t come out of nowhere. At a party congress in December 2015, László Kövér, one of the founders of the Fidesz party, stated:

“We don’t want the gender craziness. We don’t want to make Hungary a futureless society of man-hating women, and feminine men living in dread of women, and considering families and children only as barriers to self-fulfilment… And we would like if our daughters would consider, as the highest quality of self-fulfilment, the possibility of giving birth to our grandchildren.”

Orban’s war against “gender” also led to Hungary’s National Assembly recently passing a declaration which refused to ratify the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.It was claimed that the convention promoted “gender ideology” and particular issue was taken with the section that defined gender as “socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men.” Hungarian politicians object to an understanding of gender which recognises that women’s ‘role’ can change, even improve (!), as societies change, an unwelcome thought to those wishing to uphold men’s power in the family and discourage homosexuality. As with a number of Orban’s other policy decisions, there was also a racist element to the refusal to ratify the convention. The fact that it would have afforded protections for migrant and refugee women was in direct contradiction to Hungary’s anti-immigration policies. As one far right, Hungarian blog put it:

“By refusing the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, Hungary, says ‘Yes!’ to the protection of women but ‘No!’ to gender ideology and illegal migration.”

(Women’s groups in the UK have long suspected that our government refuses to ratify the Convention as it would bind them to properly funding the VAWG sector.)

Orban’s concern about “gender” and “gender ideology” is shared by other states with a socially conservative programme for women. Some gender critical and radical feminists use this term, as well, which can be confusing when our respective analyses have so little in common. Here, it refers to a set of beliefs that conflate sex with gender and deny the material reality of sex-based oppression. This is a far cry from the definitions shared by the growing “anti gender” movements in Central and Eastern Europe.

These movements privilege biological understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman but only do so in order to insist that our biology should determine (and restrict) our lives.They want to hang on the man/woman binary because they believe that gendered roles and expectations, ones which place women below men, are determined by sex. In short, they deny that gender is a social construct. “Gender ideology”, as a term, has become something of a dustbin category, deployed variously to attack feminism, same sex marriage, reproductive rights and sex education in schools. Trump’s administration is engaged in an ongoing fight to remove the word “gender” from United Nations documents.

In this context, we need to remember that “gender” is still most frequently used as a proxy for women/sex in UN Conventions like CEDAW (The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women). The term is also increasingly – to our concern – conflated with gender identity with all the risks that this entails.

But that fact shouldn’t blind us to the main motivations of those who oppose the use of the word gender at UN level. When conservatives say they want to replace the term “gender” with “sex”, it’s invariably to oppose women’s equality with men and to enshrine patriarchal understandings of women’s place in society. Replacing the language of gender with the language of sex is, in their terms, a route to a biologically driven and restricted notion of reproduction as women’s only fate. Replacing the language of gender with the language of sex is not necessarily a feminist enterprise.

Unless we establish very clear lines between ourselves and rightwing, religious fundamentalists, we are in danger of being swallowed up and used by the most anti-women, global forces, the canniest of which offer themselves as ‘partners’ in the fight against gender ideology: witness several events hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a hugely powerful Christian Right think tank which has platformed radical feminists.

The Heritage Foundation has particular chutzpah. Whilst claiming to be an ally in the feminist fight to preserve female only spaces and sex-based rights, it opposes reproductive rights, lesbian and gay rights and any measures to counter discrimination against women, notably the Equal Rights Amendment. In fact, it blames feminists for the current state of affairs – though Ryan Anderson would never be rude enough to say so at their shared events. “Transgender theories are part of the feminist goal of a sexual revolution that eliminates the proprietary family and celebrates non-monogamous sexual experiences.”

When it’s not cynically partnering with (a small number) of radical feminists as ‘cover’, the Heritage Foundation enjoys the company of the Holy See, the universal government of the Catholic Church which operates from Vatican City State. (20) The Vatican has opposed the notion of gender since the early-2000s, arguing that males and females have intrinsic attributes which aren’t shaped by social forces. Recently, they published an educational document called “Male and female he created them”.

Woman’s Place UK has consistently stated an opposition to working with, or supporting the work of the religious right (and their female representatives). Not simply because it is strategically disastrous but because it is wrong in principle. (22) When we look at what is happening in Hungary it is well to remember that there is more than one way to ‘erase’ women. Andrea Pető, a professor at the Central European University of Budapest, commenting on the official reports that Hungary (and Poland) send to the UN CEDAW Committee, noted, “we see that they replace the concept of women with that of family, women as independent agents are slowly disappearing from public policy documents, behind the single word family.”

https://womansplaceuk.org/2020/06/18/womens-rights-under-attack-hungary/

[kemetic-dreams]

Ham, (in Hebrew חָם Hebrew pronunciation: [ˈħam]) according to the Table of Nations in the Book of Genesis, was the second son of Noah and the father of Cush, Mizraim, Phut and Canaan.

Ham's descendants are interpreted by Flavius Josephus and others as having populated Africa and adjoining parts of Asia. The Bible refers to Egypt as "the land of Ham" in Psalm 78:51; 105:23,27; 106:22; 1 Chronicles 4:40.

Etymology

Since the 17th century a number of suggestions have been made that relate the name Ham to a Hebrew word for "burnt", "black" or "hot", to the Egyptian word ḥm for "servant" or the word ḥm for "majesty" or the Egyptian word kmt for "Egypt".A 2004 review of David Goldenberg's The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2003) states that Goldenberg "argues persuasively that the biblical name Ham bears no relationship at all to the notion of blackness and as of now is of unknown etymology.

Hamites is the name formerly used for some North African peoples by Eurocentric anthropologists in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races favored by white supremacists.The term was originally borrowed from the Book of Genesis, where it is used for the descendants of Ham, son of Noah.

The term was originally used in contrast to the other two proposed divisions of mankind based on the story of Noah: Semites and Japhetites. The appellation Hamitic was applied to the Berber, Cushitic, and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic language family, which, together with the Semitic branch, was thus formerly labelled "Hamito-Semitic".However, since the three Hamitic branches have not been shown to form an exclusive (monophyletic) phylogenetic unit of their own, separate from other Afroasiatic languages, linguists no longer use the term in this sense. Each of these branches is instead now regarded as an independent subgroup of the larger Afroasiatic family.

Beginning in the 19th century, scholars generally classified the Hamitic race as a subgroup of the Caucasian race, alongside the Aryan race and the Semitic – thus grouping the non-Semitic populations native to North Africa and the Horn of Africa, including the Ancient Egyptians.According to the Hamitic theory, this "Hamitic race" was superior to or more advanced than the "Negroid" populations of Sub-Saharan Africa. In its most extreme form, in the writings of C. G. Seligman, this theory asserted that virtually all significant achievements in African history were the work of "Hamites".

[secretlyatargaryen]

Fascism is a hard ideology to pin down. Unlike Marxism or liberalism, fascism is based on emotions, grievance, and identity, all of which are pretty mercurial. The best definition of fascism remains Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism, where he outlines fourteen different features fascism tends to have: It lionizes tradition, rejects modernism, rejects analysis, and stokes fear of difference and outsiders. It’s elitist and populist at the same time, and cultivates a tradition of machismo, heroism, and xenophobia. This is not exactly what Dany has been about. She’s a hard character to pin down in terms of ideology or politics. Her motivation and claim to legitimacy do come from tradition. She’s the last of the Targaryen’s so, in her eyes, that makes her queen. But, that’s not Dany’s only source of legitimacy. She also sees herself as a rightful ruler because she overturns unjust systems. Being a queen isn’t just something she was born to, in her eyes freeing slaves and killing off evil nobles is her way of earning it. Also, she’s immune to fire and has dragons. That’s not nothing. Dany, though, is explicitly non-fascist in that she overturns traditions (like slavery, or women not being able to lead Dothraki) and instead of cultivating a strong fear of outsiders, seeks to put together a diverse coalition of followers. It’s true that she had selfish motivations for doing this (she wanted the Iron Throne, after all) but toward the end of her run Daenerys had Dothraki, Unsullied, and Westerosi support. When she encountered opposition she invited them to bend the knee and join her. Instead of creating a romanticized, reactionary cult of heroism around the identity of her followers, the Khaleesi courted universalism. What’s more, Daenerys’ opponents have always been those in power. She isn’t the type who stokes fear of sedition or sabotage within her ranks. She finds others who holds power, confronts them directly, and executes them publicly in a way that would make the Robespierre proud (more on that in a moment). There’s no good real-world parallel to Dany’s politics, but she’s not a fascist. She’s more of an overzealous revolutionary, albeit one who still believes in monarchy. Which makes the Triumph of the Will and the “First they came…” references just really fucking weird. They point to a real-world array of politics and beliefs that are, if anything, antithetical to how Dany has presented herself as a political actor. Fascists don’t talk about breaking the wheel, they believe the wheel is all-consuming. [...] Toppling slave-based regimes is, in general, a pretty good use of dragon power. It’s fiery and violent, but it also gives power to people who never had it before. Fascism doesn’t do that. Fascism reinforces existing social and class roles and invites people to subjugate themselves to the needs of the nation. In many ways it’s not complex at all, and unlike Marxism, liberalism, or other ideologies, fascism has nothing constructive to add to the overall political or philosophical conversation. It merely needs defeating. Overzealous revolutionaries, even when their hands are covered in blood, maintain an inkling of their idealism and sympathy. They’re understood to have a legitimate target and legitimate goal, once upon a time. Fascists don’t, and never did. Painting Dany (and Grey Worm and the rest of her followers) as fascists flattens them and reduces them as people. It also feeds into some of the laziest conventions of modern political discussion. [...] Indicting Dany and her followers with references to fascism feeds into dangerous far-right narratives. The Khaleesi’s forces are multinational and multiethnic. The Dothraki aren’t Asian (this is a fantasy world, there is no Asia) but they’re obviously based on the real-world Mongol Empire. The Unsullied aren’t African (there is no Africa in this world) but they’re played by Black actors and are former slaves. Their race, culture, and status vis a vis Westeros still matters in the context of the fictional world. In Westeros they are still foreign and still other. Game of Thrones ended by showing an army composed of Black actors arranged like Nazi troops, and Asian actors as Triumph of the Will’s cheering section. The episode also showed us the consequences of this militarism and zeal, with Grey Worm (a Black man) executing white Lannister troops. The contrast was especially stark because the Lannisters aren’t just white; with their blonde hair and blue eyes the look like the Third Reich’s Aryan ideal. They’re also, it’s worth noting, extremely rich. Our sympathies were supposed to be with the executed Lannisters, and I wondered, watching it, if anyone thought that the inversion of power between a Black soldier and white one was, perhaps, Very Interesting. By suggesting that Dany is some kind of Fantasy Hitler, and showing Grey Worm as a ruthless executioner, Game of Thrones implies that women, people of color, former slaves, former peasants, and other members of dispossessed classes are just as likely to commit genocide as people with power are. It made the destruction of Cersei’s regime (which everyone should have been happy about) into an opportunity to tell us that rich white people can be victims, too.

Game of Thrones, Fascism, and False Equivalence

[wadeschimichanga]

You did NOT just compare using the word Jew to the n word. What the fuck is wrong with you???

Under read more cause it got longer than I wanted and because it has sensitive content to jewish people 

Okay nonny, history time on Wade’s chimichanga powered by, yours truly, a ¼ Sephardi Jewish, ¼ white, half-black latinx that has lived in America and know what is like to be foreigner no english speaker POC in a racist country  :

The word Jew has been used often enough in a disparaging manner by antisemites that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was frequently avoided altogether, and the term Hebrew was substituted instead (e.g. Young Men’s Hebrew Association). Even today some people are wary of its use, and prefer to use “Jewish”. Indeed, when used as an adjective (e.g. “Jew lawyer”) or verb (e.g. “to jew someone”), the term Jew is purely pejorative. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000):

It is widely recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and highly offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, which is unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun.

In black culture, The term has also been used as boss, irrespective of actual religious background, and in the Caribbean to denote any rich white. And this show once again why it is an anti-Semitic term, because there is black, latinx and asians jewish people out there, it’s not something for “white people to feel victimized” because the anti-semitism comes since ancient rome, and got a lot worse with time. 

In the context of the Industrial Revolution, following the Jewish Emancipation, Jewish people rapidly urbanized and experienced a period of greater social mobility. With the decreasing role of religion in public life tempering religious antisemitism, a combination of growing nationalism, the rise of eugenics, and resentment at the socio-economic success of the Jewish people led to the newer, and more virulent, racist antisemitism. In the early 19th century, a number of laws enabling emancipation of the Jewish people were enacted in Western European countries. The old laws restricting them to ghettos, as well as the many laws that limited their property rights, rights of worship and occupation, were rescinded. Despite this, traditional discrimination and hostility to Jewish people on religious grounds persisted and was supplemented by racial antisemitism, encouraged by the work of racial theorists such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and particularly his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race of 1853–5. Nationalist agendas based on ethnicity, known as ethnonationalism, usually excluded the Jewish people from the national community as an alien race. Allied to this were theories of Social Darwinism, which stressed a putative conflict between higher and lower races of human beings. Such theories, usually posited by northern Europeans, advocated the superiority of white Aryans to Semitic Jewish people.

The Nazism led Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, who came to power on 30 January 1933 shortly afterwards instituted repressive legislation which denied the Jewish people basic civil rights. They used to paint the word “Jude"(German form of “jew”) in the walls of business owned by jewish or in houses of jewish families as form of induce fear in them. Later in Concentration Camps, nazi used to mark them with the word, as a derogatory slur. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws prohibited sexual relations and marriages between “Aryans” and Jewish people as Rassenschande (“race disgrace”) and stripped all German Jewish, even quarter- and half-Jewish, of their citizenship, (their official title became “subjects of the state”). It instituted a pogrom on the night of 9–10 November 1938, dubbed Kristallnacht, in which Jewish persons were killed, their property destroyed and their synagogues torched.  Antisemitic laws, agitation and propaganda were extended to German-occupied Europe in the wake of conquest, often building on local antisemitic traditions. In the east the Third Reich forced Jewish people into ghettos in Warsaw, Kraków, Lvov, Lublin and Radom. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 a campaign of mass murder, conducted by the Einsatzgruppen, culminated from 1942 to 1945 in systematic genocide: the Holocaust. Eleven million Jewish were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and some six million were eventually killed. In current america, the word jew is the favorite word from white supremacists and neo nazi groups to refere to jewish people.

 The word is part of what is denominated as New antisemitism which is the concept that a new form of antisemitism has developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, emanating simultaneously from the far left, Islamism, and the far right, and that it tends to manifest itself as opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. The concept generally posits that much of what is purported to be criticism of Israel by various individuals and world bodies, is, in fact, tantamount to demonization, and that, together with an alleged international resurgence of attacks on Jewish people and Jewish symbols, and an increased acceptance of antisemitic beliefs in public discourse, such demonization represents an evolution in the appearance of antisemitic beliefs.

So what I am saying is that you are being extremely anti-semitic by coming into my ask box and posting that. This isn’t a competition of who suffered more, because like i said, there are black Jewish people. Jewish people are a marginalized group, and using the word “j*w” with them by you being a non-jewish is like using the N-Word to a black person, or calling latinx people cucaracha or calling an Japanse person a “jap”. 

[feelingbluepolitics]

Highly recommended.

"'We have to start seeing white nationalism as a coherent ideology — with ideologues, with writings and literature, with symbols, with music, with culture — in order to combat it effectively.'"

Another article is awkward now for having spoken too soon, since it speculates the onset of the death of white supremacist ideology which is clearly premature. It also addresses the global alliance, but misunderstands it as an act of desperation rather than an advance movement for the international far-right popularism, of Brexit and trump and others. It's still a very interesting article.

Here's some analysis mixed with plausible speculation.

The term "alt right" has become embedded in current American politics, but perhaps without many people fully realizing how and why it came into currency. It's often used simply in the sense of those who are "hard right" conservatives, or, more conservative than the typical conservative Republicon. But that description misses the core.

"The term 'Alt Right' originated with extremists but increasingly has found its way into the mainstream media.   Alt Right is short for 'alternative right.'  This vague term actually encompasses a range of people on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy."

In fact, the world of white supremacists appears to collect masses of insider memes and references, and gives some effort toward sliding some of them into American culture at large.

Remember the "white power" OK symbol that was purportedly introduced as a joke, but the trick was that it wasn't really a joke? Whether it's stealing a green frog Pepe or repurposing a common hand signal, there's a clear theme of white supremacists planting reconditioned references.

A number of people now are taking issue with the term "lone wolves" to describe the white supremacist shooters. People are pointing out that they are not lone wolves, but rather are tightly connected within their online communities.

Without even accuracy in its favor, it's worth wondering how the term "lone wolf" gained common parlance and a place in nearly every article written about mass shootings.

It's almost sickly romantized imagery -- and remember, on-going recruitment and radicalization are always an agenda and goal for the alt right.

If we referred to these people as violent shrinking violets, cranks, misfits, outsiders, freaks, or deviants, it would be more accurate than lone wolves. And what's in a name? A lot of imagery and associations. (Although plenty on the Right are now proud Deplorables. These are generally the types of people who embrace the worst.)

The white nationalists pull together now from various sources, such as the KKK, but Nazis are a main feeder stream. Neo-Nazi reverence for Nazi symbols, history, and references is evident.

The mythology of the Nazi German Werwolf is interesting in this context. As the Nazis were LOSING, since they LOST, a last-ditch plan or propaganda vision or both was devised.

Werwolf referred to a Nazi resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany.  Originally conceived as disciplined commando units, that fell apart to become single operators striking where and as they could.

"Werwolf originally had about five thousand members recruited from the SS and the Hitler Youth. These recruits were specially trained in guerrilla tactics...Werwolf was converted into a terrorist organisation in the last few weeks of the war."

Goebbels gave a speech known as "the 'Werwolf speech', in which he urged every German to fight to the death."

They would mingle, but always with the readiness to enact a violent resistance where they could. That was part of the aspect of terrorism that was fairly effective.

On another note, however, there was supposed to be no official insurgency plan, because acknowledgement that Nazi leaders could face defeat was traitorous.

See generally,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werwolf

The whole bit, being gauzy, would be ripe for Alt Right homage and repurposing.

It is striking, how these current white nationalist shooters are linked to their online boards with unity of beliefs and purpose, but in real life are mostly hidden, as if living underground, until they are ready to make their move.

Whether Nazi Werwolf and neo-Nazi so-called "lone wolves" have any intended connection whatsoever, it's worth contemplating for this reason:

"'We have to start seeing white nationalism as a coherent ideology — with ideologues, with writings and literature, with symbols, with music, with culture — in order to combat it effectively.'"

We react to each new shooting as the shocking event it is, with some level of recognition of the escalating trends. We categorize them by cities in a state, or by weaponry used, or by time frames, or by where the victims were when the shooting began. We can't help doing all that, because we are grappling to understand.

And just as with the Werwolf, it may be hard sometimes to see which acts may be tied to these white nationalists of today, and which result from some other inchoate evil. The manifestos, in the hands of developing experts, apparently provide plenty of indications.

But if we start seeing these mass murders as guerilla contributions to a coherent ideology, we may be able to devise more effective ways to combat it, including a more clear understanding of potential shooters.

[wwwnewunificationchurchcom]

(via The Prophetic Context of the Trumpist Policy: National Racism at the Level of an Institutionalized Agenda: a Review of White Supremacy; and a Vision of What Will Now Come to Pass)

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BOBBY AZARIAN, RAW STORY

– COMMENTARY

27 AUG 2018 AT 13:34 ET

“While the exaggerator-in-chief is well known for his habitual lying, the most common psychological diagnosis he’s been given by experts in the field is narcissistic personality disorder.

While any diagnosis should require a full mental examination before accepted as clinical truth, the mountains of behavioral evidence for Trump’s narcissism arguably provides more justification for the label than any standard clinical test. At this point, the claim can hardly be debated, and even staunch supporters would admit that Trump thinks he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. It takes a special kind of narcissist to shamelessly compare their book to The Bible in front an audience full of conservatives. His narcissism knows few limits, and it’s hard to imagine even the man himself denying such an obvious fact,,”

A National Policy of Institutionalized Racism:

First Written of in Sacred Literature, Began in Ancient Egypt, paralleled in Caste Structure of India

Many medically trained race hygienists argued that the surest way to improve the general level of national health was to

upgrade the bodily constitution of all individuals in society – a task to be accomplished by means of an energetic eugenics program.

In addition to the ‘social question’, and the German medical tradition, there was a third influence that greatly shaped the early development of the movement: the “selectionist” variety of social Darwinism, popularized by Germany’s most outspoken biologist, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), and later legitimated by the scientific writings of the Freiburg embryologist August Weismann (1834-1914).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Charles  Darwin ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin’s work in Germany, and developed the influential recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny. The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (‘Kunstformen der Natur’). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote ‘Die Welträtsel’ (1895–1899), the genesis for the term “world riddle” (Welträtsel). Haeckel’s political beliefs were influenced by his affinity for the German Romantic movement, coupled with his acceptance of a form of Lamarckism. Rather than being a strict Darwinian, Haeckel believed that the characteristics of an organism were acquired through interactions with the environment and that ontogeny reflected phylogeny. He believed the social sciences to be instances of “applied biology”, and that phrase was picked up and used in Volkisch philosophy. In 1905, Haeckel founded a group called the Deutscher Monistenbund to promote his religious and political beliefs. This group lasted until 1933 and included such notable members as Wilhelm Ostwald, Georg von Arco, Helene Stöcker and Walter Arthur Berendsohn. Haeckel believed that human races evolved independently, and in parallel with each other. Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian (Aryan) was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.

August Weismann August Friedrich Leopold Weismann (17 January 1834 – 5 November 1914) was a German evolutionary biologist. Ernst Mayr ranked him the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century, after Charles Darwin. Weismann became the Director of the Zoological Institute and the first Professor of Zoology at Freiburg. His main contribution was the germ plasm theory, at one time also known as ‘Weismannism’, according to which (in a multicellular organism) inheritance only takes place by means of the germ cells – the gametes such as egg cells and sperm cells. Other cells of the body – somatic cells – do not function as agents of heredity.

Haeckel went far beyond Darwin in his attempt to flesh out the larger philosophical and social meaning of the evolutionary theory.Although, like Darwin, he believed in the

inheritance

of

acquired characteristics

, Haeckel always stressed Darwin’s

selection principle

as the most important engine of forward directed organic change; indeed, for Haeckel, Darwinism was

synonymous

with

selection

.Weismann, who came to reject the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics through his work on heredity, afforded Darwin’s principle of natural selection an even greater role in organic and social evolution than did the author of the ‘Origin of Species’ himself.His famous mechanism of heredity, ‘

the continuity of the germ plasm

‘, first articulated in 1883, challenged the basic tenets of the more optimistic first-generation social Darwinists who assumed that new characteristics acquired by an organism as a result of environmental change would be transmitted to future generations.As one German social Darwinist and eugenicist expressed it,

‘It was Weismann’s teaching regarding the separation of the germ plasm from the soma, the hereditary stuff from the body of the individual, that first allowed us to recognize the importance of Darwin’s principle of selection. Only then did we comprehend that it is impossible to improve our progeny’s condition by means of physical and mental training. Apart from the direct manipulation of the nucleus, only selection can preserve and improve the race.‘

Indeed, for those who accepted Weismann’s views with respect to both heredity and the ‘all-supremacy’ of

selection

, eugenics was the only practical strategy to ensure

racial progress

and avert

racial decline

.If the ideas of Haeckel and Weismann encouraged many contemporaries to view

natural selection

as the sole agent of all organic and social progress, the writings of the two biologists also emphasized that progress was not inevitable.Under certain conditions the ‘

unfit

‘ might prosper, thereby posing a challenge to further evolutionary development.This ‘selectionist’ perspective and language provided Germany’s future

eugenicists

with novel tools of analysis that enabled them to come to grips with the ‘social question’ by transforming it into a scientific problem: the

asocial

individuals created by industrialization became for them the biologically and medically

unfit

.The only way to

eliminate

this group from the population was through a policy of “

‘rational selection,’

or

race hygiene

.

The Untouchables and The Land of Goshen.

“….When a narcissist’s self-esteem or self-worth is badly injured, their whole identity begins to fall apart, and they often respond with what is referred to as “

narcissistic rage

.”

When this happens, the lashing out, bullying, threats, and erratic behaviors rise to new levels. Rather than accepting the blame one deserves for their own actions, narcissists tell themselves that others are responsible, and that they deserve to be punished. They often become obsessed with revenge, which comes in many forms, such as verbal or even physical abuse.

Modern technology like social media provides the narcissist with the perfect medium for attacking perceived enemies, and Donald Trump has certainly taken advantage of it.

But his threats have gone beyond personal enemies. When the possibility of impeachment became a reality for the president, his instinct was to tell the world on national television that if such a thing were to happen, it would cause the economy to crash.

“I think everybody would be poor,” he

told Fox News

last Wednesday, trying to strike fear into the hearts of all Americans.

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History of Racism Research Paper

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Abstract

Initially seen by historians as a theory of difference, racism is now usually seen as an ideology with an integral relationship to domination or exclusion. The most conspicuous forms of modern racism – white supremacy and antisemitism – have been studied separately. A general or comparative history could be based on a definition of racism as an ideology sanctioning the domination or exclusion of one ethnic group by another on the basis of difference believed to be hereditary and unalterable. Racism can, thus, be distinguished from xenophobia and religious intolerance. It emerged in the late medieval and early modern periods in conceptions of Jewishness as ancestry rather than belief and of blackness as a curse condemning Africans to servitude. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment provided foundations for naturalistic racism. The struggle over slavery and the accelerated expansion of Europe into Africa and Asia brought color-coded racism to full consciousness in the nineteenth century. European antisemitic racism emerged in the context of modernity and the emancipation of the Jews. Racism climaxed during the twentieth century in the segregation of blacks in the American South and in South Africa, and in the genocidal assault on European Jewry.

Outline

Introduction

Historiography of Racism

Toward a Definition of Racism for Historical Purposes

The Emergence of Racism

The Rise of Modern Racism

The Climax: Racism in the Twentieth Century

The End of Racism?

Bibliography

Introduction

Initially viewed by historians as a theory of difference, racism is now usually seen as an ideology with an integral relationship to domination or exclusion. The most conspicuous forms of modern racism – white supremacy and antisemitism – have been studied separately. A general or comparative history could be based on a definition of racism as an ideology sanctioning the domination or exclusion of one ethnic group by another on the basis of difference believed to be hereditary and unalterable. Racism can, thus, be distinguished from xenophobia and religious intolerance. It emerges in the late medieval and early modern periods in conceptions of Jewishness as ancestry rather than belief and of blackness as a curse condemning Africans to servitude. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment provided foundations for naturalistic racism. The struggle over slavery and the accelerated expansion of Europe into Africa and Asia brought color-coded racism to full consciousness in the nineteenth century. European antisemitic racism emerged in the context of modernity and the emancipation of the Jews. Racism climaxed during the twentieth century in the segregation of blacks in the American South and in South Africa and in the genocidal assault on European Jewry.

In common usage the term racism is often employed in a loose and unreflective way to describe the hostile or negative feelings of one ethnic group or historical collectivity toward another and the actions resulting from such attitudes. But historians and social scientists normally require a more precise and limited definition, although they may disagree on what it should be. It is useful, therefore, to review the historiographic discourse on the meaning of racism before attempting a brief survey of what contemporary historians might accept as its principal manifestations.

Historiography of Racism

The term racism was coined in the 1930s mainly in reference to the theories on which the Nazis based their persecution of the Jews. The first historian to focus directly on the subject was Barzun. His book Race: A Study in Superstition (originally published in 1937 and reprinted in 1965) set two important precedents for most future historians of racism: it presumed that claims of the innate inferiority of one ‘race’ to another were false or at least unproven, and its main concern was with the history of ideas rather than with the social and political applications of prejudiced beliefs and attitudes. Barzun’s concern with the intellectual origins of Nazi antisemitism was shared by the many scholars who wrote on the subject after World War II in response to what the Holocaust had revealed about the horrifying consequences of racist ideas. A notable example was Poliakov’s Le Myth Aryen, translated into English as The Aryan Myth (1974). But disagreements developed on whether biological racism was continuous with earlier antisemitic attitudes that were, ostensibly at least, based on religion or whether it was a radical new departure, a sine qua non for something like the Holocaust.

In the immediate postwar decades, the term racism was also applied with increasing frequency to the relationships between whites or Europeans and people of color, especially Africans or those of African descent, in colonial, postcolonial, and former slave societies. The rising concern with black-white relations in the US, South Africa, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) in Great Britain, beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, gave rise to an enormous literature on the origins and development of white supremacy as an ideology. Historians of ideas did most of the early work, but gradually the emphasis shifted somewhat from the racist ideas themselves to the patterns or racial discrimination and domination for which they served as a rationale. Many historians of black-white relations used the term casually and without reflecting on its exact meaning. Most imprecisely, it could mean anything that whites did or thought that worked to the disadvantage of blacks.

There have been relatively few attempts to write general histories of racism, which encompass both the antisemitic and color-coded varieties. For the most part, the two historiographies have not addressed each other, and the definitions employed have sometimes been incompatible. Some historians of antisemitic racism have found the term applicable only if the aim was the elimination of the stigmatized group. Some historians of white supremacy, on the contrary, would limit the term to ideologies associated with patterns of domination or hierarchical differentiation. The first attempt at a comprehensive history of American racism, Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963) traced consciousness of race to the ancient world. Its treatment of specifically American manifestations cast its net quite wide to include representation and treatment of American Indians and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, including Jews, as well as blacks. But most subsequent work on the history of American racism has been group-specific and has concentrated most heavily on attitudes toward African Americans. Mosse’s general history of European racism, on the other hand, pays most of its attention to the growth of antisemitism between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust (Mosse, 1978). But there appear to be only two significant attempts to cover Western attitudes toward race comprehensively: Hannaford’s Race: The History of an Idea in the West (1996) and Geiss’ Geschichte des Rassismus (1988). Hannaford’s study, as its title indicates, is strictly an intellectual history and considers race as a concept more than racism as an ideology. It argues strenuously that no clear concept of race existed before the seventeenth century, thus raising the issue of whether anything that existed before the invention of race in the modern sense can be legitimately labeled racism. Geiss, on the contrary, sees racism as anticipated in most respects by the ethnocentrism or xenophobia that developed in the ancient world, as reflected, for example, in the Old Testament.

Toward a Definition of Racism for Historical Purposes

Somewhere between the view that race is a peculiar modern idea without much historical precedent and the notion that it is simply an extension of the ancient phenomena of ethnocentrism and xenophobia may lie a working definition that is neither too broad for historical specificity or too narrow to cover more than the limited span of Western history during which a racism based on scientific theories of human variation was widely accepted. If racism is defined as an ideology rather than as a theory, links can be established between belief and practice that the history of ideas may obscure. But ideologies have content, and it is necessary to distinguish racist ideologies from other belief systems that emphasize human differences and can be used as rationalizations of inequality. The classic sociological distinction between racism and ethnocentrism is helpful, but not perhaps in the usual sense, in which the key variable is whether differences are described in cultural or physical terms. It is actually quite difficult in specific historical cases to say whether appearance or ‘culture’ is the source of the salient differences, because culture can be reified and essentialized to the point where it has the same deterministic effect as skin color. But it would stretch the concept of racism much too far to make it cover the pride and loyalty that may result from ethnic identity. Such group-centeredness may engender prejudice and discrimination against those outside the group, but two additional elements would seem to be required before the categorization of racism is justified. One is a belief that the differences between the ethnic groups involved are permanent and ineradicable. If conversion or assimilation is genuinely on offer, we have religious or cultural intolerance but not racism. The second is the social side of the ideology – its linkage to patterns of domination or exclusion. To attempt a short formulation, we might say that racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.

The Emergence of Racism

Historians who can accept this middle-of-the-road definition can agree with the scholars who have examined conceptions of human diversity in classical antiquity and the early Middle Ages without finding clear evidence of color prejudice or racism. Neither the classical conception that one becomes civilized through being able to engage in politics nor the Christian belief that everyone regardless of color or ancestry is a potential convert with a soul to be saved could readily sustain a racist view of the world. The period between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries is much more problematic. The literal demonization of the Jews in the late Middle Ages, the belief that they were in league with the devil and plotting the destruction of Christianity, could lead unsophisticated folk to believe that they were outside the bounds of humanity, even though church authorities persisted in advocating their conversion. Folk antisemitism resulted in massacres and expulsions of Jews in virtually every country in Western Europe. A degree of elite or official sanction for such attitudes came in sixteenth century Spain when Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendants became the victims of a pattern of discrimination and exclusion. When purity of blood, or limpieza de sangre, became a qualification for certain offices and honors it signified that what people could accomplish or achieve no longer depended on what they did but on who they were. Precedents for the notion that blood will tell could be found in the inheritability of royal or noble status but the designation of an entire ethnic group as incapable of a reliable conversion to Christianity constituted, at the very least, a transitional stage between religious bigotry and biological racism.

The period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the time when Europeans were coming into increasing contact with people of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas and were making judgments about them as they traded with them, fought with them over territory, or enslaved them. A belief that all these non-Europeans were children of God with souls that missionaries could save did not prevent a brutal expropriation of their land and labor, but it did inhibit the articulation of a racial justification for how they were being treated. When Africans were carried by force to the New World to labor on plantations, slave traders and slave owners sometimes invoked an obscure passage in the book of Genesis to explain the color of their human property. Ham had committed a sin against his father Noah that resulted in a divine curse on his descendents to be ‘servants unto servants.’ When Africans were enslaved, first by Arabs, and then by Europeans, it became convenient to believe that the punishment of God had included a blackening of the skin. But the passage had other possible meanings, and no orthodox religious authorities ever endorsed the interpretation of the curse popular among slaveholders, because they feared that it would impede conversion of blacks to Christianity. The standard and official justification for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens and that enslavement made heaven accessible to them.

An implicit racism became evident, however, when converted slaves were kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry. As with the doctrine of purity of blood in Spain, descent rather than performance became the basis for determining the qualifications for membership in a community that was still theoretically based on a shared Christian faith. Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons. Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior.

The Rise of Modern Racism

A modern naturalistic form of racism could not be articulated fully until the Enlightenment. A secular or scientific theory of race required a new way of looking at human diversity, one that moved the subject away from the Bible, with its insistence on the essential unity and homogeneity of the human race and its collective elevation above the animal kingdom. Eighteenth-century ethnologists began to think of human beings as part of the natural world and subdivided them into three to five races, usually considered as varieties or subspecies. Most eighteenth-century ethnological theorists believed that whiteness was the original color of humanity and that blackness or brownness resulted from a process of degeneration caused by climate and conditions of life. Although the white or Caucasian race was generally considered more beautiful and civilized than the Mongolian and especially the Negro, the belief that human beings constituted a single species with a common origin remained dominant. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, an increasing number of ethnologists asserted that the races were separately created and constituted distinct species. As debates over the morality of slavery and the slave trade erupted in Western Europe and the US in the wake of democratic revolutions and the rise of humanitarian movements, some of the most militant defenders of black bondage adopted these polygenetic arguments as a justification for enslaving Africans and holding them in permanent servitude. But the fact that polygenesis seemed to conflict with scripture limited the usage of this extreme version of scientific racism. Many defenders of slavery in the American South, where evangelical religion enforced biblical literalism, reverted to the Curse on Ham or made the degeneracy hypothesis of Enlightenment ethnology into an argument for the permanent or irreversible divergence of the races from their common origin.

The nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism – all of which contributed to the growth and intensification of ideological racism in Europe and in the US. Although the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettoes, which seemed a logical consequence of the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, received most of its support from religious or secular believers in an essential human equality, the consequences of these reforms was to intensify rather than diminish racism. Race relations became less paternalistic and more competitive. Poor or working class whites in the US, for example, feared competition with emancipated blacks for work, land, and social status. Middle-class (especially lower middle class) Germans viewed the increasing involvement of Jews in finance, commerce, the professions, journalism, and the arts during the late nineteenth century as a potential threat to their own economic security, social status, and traditional values. Of course, it was the legacy of inherited stereotypes about ‘the Other,’ in addition to the immediate economic and social circumstances, that gave edge and intensity to these feelings of insecurity and hostility. The idiom of Darwinism, with its emphasis on ‘the struggle for existence’ and concern for ‘the survival of the fittest’ was conducive to the development of a new and more credible scientific racism in an era that increasingly viewed race relations as an arena for conflict rather than as a stable hierarchy.

The growth of nationalism, especially romantic cultural nationalism, encouraged the growth of a more mystical variant of racist thought. When it could be assumed that one had to be of German ancestry to participate in the German Volkgeist, Jews could be discriminated against or excluded just as effectively as if their deficiencies were clearly defined as genetic or biological. For most of the nineteenth century the question of whether German Jews could or should be converted to Christianity was an open one. Beginning in the late 1870s and early 1880s, however, the coiners of the term ‘antisemitism’ made explicit what some cultural nationalists had previously implied – that to be Jewish was not simply to adhere to a set of religious beliefs or cultural practices but meant belonging to a race that was the antithesis of the race to which true Germans belonged. The latter was variously designated as Teutonic, Aryan, Nordic, or simply Germanic. In Great Britain and the US romantic nationalism took the form of a veneration for Anglo-Saxon ancestors and legacies that could turn racist, as it did for a time in the US, when confronted with large-scale immigration from eastern and southern Europe. In France, an ethnocentric cultural nationalism fed the fury against the Jews that surfaced in the Dreyfus affair at the turn of century. It did not triumph against the universalistic civic nationalism inherited from the revolutionary past, but it did make antisemitic racism a strain of right-wing French thought that would resurface during the 1930s and especially under the German occupation.

The climax of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century ‘scramble for Africa’ and parts of Asia and the Pacific represented an assertion of the competitive ethnic nationalism that existed among European nations (and which, as a result of the Spanish-American War came to include the US). A belief that different races, subraces, or racial mixtures inhabited each nation led some, especially the Germans and the English, to suppose that the quality of each nation’s racial stock was being tested for its fitness. But imperialism also required the massive subjugation and colonial domination of non-European populations. An ideology proclaiming that whites were superior to ‘lesser breeds’ and responsible for ruling over them and tutoring them in the rudiments of civilization was a prime rationale for this new burst of European expansionism, even if it was not a cause of it. The relation of racism to imperialism is more problematic than one might suppose, however, because the most consistent and extreme racists were often anti-imperialists. They believed that nothing useful could be done with people whose inferiority was so profound and permanent that they were incapable of being civilized. For them the taming or domestication of such savages was not worth the trouble. Within colonies that attracted substantial numbers of European settlers, such as French Algeria or some of the British colonies of South and East Africa, a more extreme and explicit racism than the one usually professed by government officials or missionaries could be found in the discourse of white colonists about their ‘native’ servants or farm laborers.

The Climax: Racism in the Twentieth Century

The climax of the history of racism came in the twentieth century in the rise and fall of what might be called overtly racist regimes. In the American South, the passage of racial segregation laws and restrictions on black voting rights reduced African Americans to lower caste status, despite the Constitutional Amendments that had made them equal citizens. Extreme racist propaganda, which represented black males as ravening beasts lusting after white women, served to rationalize the practice of lynching. These extralegal executions increasingly were reserved for blacks accused of offenses against the color line, and they became more brutal and sadistic as time went on; by the early twentieth century victims were likely to be tortured to death rather than simply being killed. A key feature of the racist regime maintained by state law in the South was a fear of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage, which led to efforts to prevent the conjugal union of whites with those with any known or discernable African ancestry. The effort to guarantee ‘race purity’ in the American South anticipated aspects of the official Nazi persecution of Jews in the 1930s. The Nuremberg laws of 1935 prohibited intermarriage or sexual relations between Jews and Gentiles, and the propaganda surrounding the legislation emphasized the sexual threat that predatory Jewish males presented to German womanhood and the purity of German blood. Racist ideology was eventually of course carried to a more extreme point in Nazi Germany than in the American South of the Jim Crow era. Individual blacks had been hanged or burned to death by the lynch mobs to serve as examples to insure that the mass of southern African Americans would scrupulously respect the color line. But it took Hitler and the Nazis to attempt the extermination of an entire ethnic group on the basis of a racist ideology.

Hitler, it has been said, gave racism a bad name. The moral revulsion of people throughout the world against what the Nazis did, reinforced by scientific studies undermining racist genetics (or eugenics), served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable and influential in the US and Europe before World War II. But explicit racism also came under devastating attack from the new nations resulting from the decolonization of Africa and Asia and their representatives in the United Nations. The Civil Rights movement in the US, which succeeded in outlawing legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s, was the beneficiary of revulsion against the Holocaust as a logical outcome of racism. But it also drew crucial support from the growing sense that national interests were threatened when blacks in the US were mistreated and abused. In the competition with the Soviet Union for ‘the hearts and minds’ of independent Africans and Asians, Jim Crow and the ideology that sustained it became a national embarrassment with possible strategic consequences.

The one overtly racist regime that survived World War II and the Cold War was the South African, which did not in fact come to fruition until the advent of Apartheid in 1948. The laws passed banning all marriage and sexual relations between different ‘population groups’ and requiring separate residential areas for people of mixed race (‘Coloreds’), as well as for Africans, signified the same obsession with ‘race purity’ that characterized the other racist regimes. However, the climate of world opinion in the wake of the Holocaust induced apologists for apartheid to avoid straightforward biological racism and rest their case for ‘separate development’ mainly on cultural rather than physical differences. The extent to which Afrikaner nationalism was inspired by nineteenth-century European cultural nationalism also contributed to this avoidance of a pseudoscientific rationale. No better example can be found of how a ‘cultural essentialism’ based on nationality can do the work of a racism based squarely on skin color or other physical characteristics. The South African government also tried to accommodate itself to the age of decolonization. It offered a dubious independence to the overcrowded ‘homelands,’ from which African migrants went forth to work for limited periods in the mines and factories of the nine-tenths of the country reserved for a white minority that constituted less than a sixth of the total population.

The End of Racism?

The defeat of Nazi Germany, the desegregation of the American South in the 1960s, and the establishment of majority rule in South Africa suggest that regimes based on biological racism or its cultural essentialist equivalent are a thing of the past. But racism does not require the full and explicit support of the state and the law. Nor does it require an ideology centered on the concept of biological inequality. Discrimination by institutions and individuals against those perceived as racially different can long persist and even flourish under the illusion of nonracism, as historians of Brazil have discovered recently. The use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences as a justification for hostility and discrimination against newcomers from the Third World in several European countries has led to allegations of a new ‘cultural racism.’ Similarly, those sympathetic to the plight of poor African Americans and Latinos in the US have described as ‘racist’ the view of some whites that many denizens of the ghettos and barrios can be written off as incurably infected by cultural pathologies. From the historian’s perspective such recent examples of cultural determinism are not in fact unprecedented. They rather represent a reversion to the way that the differences between ethnoracial groups could be made to seem indelible and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific or naturalistic conception of race in the eighteenth century.

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Taguieff, P., 1997. Le Racisme. Flammarion, Paris.

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Sociology Research Paper

Racism Research Paper