Antisemitism and the Nazi Worldview: a Guide for the Perplexed
While most people know the Nazis hated Jews, few people understand just how integral Jew-hate was to the Nazi philosophy. This leads into many of the misconceptions about Nazis and the holocaust that regularly pop up, so it bears discussing what Nazis believed about racism and the Jews.
The Nazi conception of "race" was much narrower and "scientific" than we think of it today. The Nazi conception of race was that humans were split into subgroups with distinct traits, that set them apart from each other and gave them advantages in a great and bloody contest of the races. These races pattern on better to ethnicities, nationalities, or even language groups, than race as we think of it today, which is why it would make sense in a Nazi framework to talk about an Irish race, or a Polish race, for example. And of course in the Nazi mind, these races were a real biological reality, and not a social and cultural construct, and the strength and purity of a fit race might be lost through race mixing.
And of course races were differently fit or unfit, superior or inferior, and through the races warring against each other in a battle of the fittest, the superior race would rise above the rest, and subjugate the earth. Hitler came of age in a time of scarcity, war, and famine, and he believed there was no way to feed the entirety of the human race, so eliminating the lesser races through this perpetual struggle of races against each other was the only way for humanity to survive. It was all very Darwinian except that it completely misunderstood how the Darwinian model of evolution actually works, since the unit of selection was the nonexistent race, not the individual.
This struggle of the races was in Hitler and the Nazis' conception not only natural and necessary, but good. Conquest and the slaughter of inferior races was good. The state of the world with nation states and silly notions like laws, and morals, this was bad and unnatural. Humanity, or the strongest race, needed to do away with this system, or humans would all perish of starvation in a degenerate race-mixed scrum. The Nazis were heros, looking to save humanity from this foul unnatural state it had been tricked into adopting.
Tricked by the machinations of one race. One race had broken away from the others, and learned how to hack the system, to survive over under the rule of other races, when it should have been destroyed as a weaker lesser race. This race figured out how to lie and cheat, and live off other races as a parasite, while controlling them from within with fake, unnatural, vile concepts of laws, ethics, notions of justice and compassion, human rights, and international cooperation. And also with money. That race was the Jews.
In the Nazi mind, other races might be lesser, weaker, worthy only of a slow starvation under Nazi rule, but Jews, Jews were unique, special. Weak but cunning, only the Jews had figured out how to subvert and pervert the noble struggle of the races. The Jews were not only especially hated in the Nazi mind but they also served an explanatory purpose. The Jews were the reason humans were not in what the Nazis viewed as a state of nature, and the reason that the areas hadn't eliminated all the other races and taken over the world already. And anything that went wrong for the Nazis was of course caused by Jewish manipulation. The Jews had to be stripped of their unnatural power and control, and eliminated quickly, to keep them from continuing to undermine the strongest race, the Aryan Germans.
Early on, there was some discussion about how this was to be done. The mass slaughter of Jews under this philosophy might have been inevitable but it wasn't obviously inevitable to all Nazis. The important thing was to reduce the Jews to a state of nature, to take away their unnatural control, and leave them in the position of any other lesser race. This is where ideas, like sending all the Jews to Madagascar, to "build their own state" but really to inevidably die in the wilderness, came from. If Jews were separated from their stronger hosts, the logic went, they would just be one more weaker race and they would die just the same. This was also why so many Nazis took a special delight in simply denying captive Jews the means of survival, leaving them to starve, freeze, and die of disease in a state of nature, without the resources they had parasitically leached out of their host races.
But that process took too long. There were simply too many Jews, and too many (to the Nazi mind) Jewish controlled enemies. As Germany and the Axis' began to lose the war, and then as that loss became increasingly only a matter of time, the Nazis ramped up their efforts to kill Jews, by bullet and by gas, because if they could kill enough Jews, surely that Jewish control over their enemies would break and the Aryans among those enemies what recognize their racial interest, and join with the Germans, giving them victory. Instead the resources poured into the wholesale murder of Jews were resources stripped from the Nazi war machine, hastening the Allied victory.
Antisemitism wasn't simply one more bigotry for the Nazis to tack onto their general racism. It was foundational to the Nazi conception of how the world functioned. It was the explanitory mechanism in the Nazis' conspiratorial framework. And with this philosophy at the core of Nazism, the Holocaust became not only inevitable, but the highest calling of the Nazis, their sacrifice for humanity, or at least what was left of humanity after the strongest race had triumphed over all the others. Very little about Nazism is unique. Their militarism, their glorification of violence and struggle, their racial pseudo-Darwinianism, certainly their conspiratorial antisemitism, all had plenty of precident long before they came on the scene. It was their particularly potent combination of these existing elements that made them Nazis. And in this combination, it was the Jew-hate which held everything together and which provided the energizing force.
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thinking about gorgug and the thistlesprings. thinking about how wilma & digby have gone their whole life trying to raise gorgug as a sweet, non-violent kind if guy. how they were so fixated to prove their families wrong that they didn't realise it wasn't healthy for their son. that they've been loving gorgug despite his rage for so long that they haven't even considered to love him with it, because of it.
thinking about lydia barkrock who's been continuously raging for 20 years, and how her rage is so special and noble. thinking about ragh who's grown up with a barbarian half-orc parent. the fact that despite all he's been through, he was never ashamed of his rage.
thinking about autistic gorgug, who's been masking his rage for all his life, being in porter's class where he's told that if he isn't boiling angry all the time he's useless. how he sees all the kids around him having no issue engaging with their rage. if he ever thinks, "why am i the only person who is struggling with this?" or "fig's not even a barbarian why can she do it and i still can't fucking get it?" or "what does everybody want from me and can they just please fucking agree instead of pulling me in 5 different directions at once all of the time??"
wondering if gorgug ever sees the barkrocks together and feels that quiet jealousy bubbling. if he reprimands himself instantly because it's not fair and ragh deserves this and his own parents aren't bad people, they're just.. different. maybe a little too wrapped up in their families' prejudice to allow them to be even the littlest bit of right.
thinking about lydia barkrock looking at this kid who's never been taught that it's okay to feel his feelings, all of them. wondering if she sees ragh's struggle with his identity mirrored in gorgug. does she feel guilty, for not noticing her son was so afraid to be who he is? does she wish she would have been more there, more open, more supportive? does she ever look at gorgug biting down his rage and think "don't do this, kid, don't go down that path, look at how much damage it did to my son"? does she consider talking to the thistlesprings about it? does she know about their parenting?
thinking about gorgug and ragh, having support in the aspect of their life they didn't really need– gorgug in his sexuality, ragh in his rage. do they bond, over this? do they joke about swapping parents sometimes? do they support each other in the ways their parents couldn't do for them?
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