White nationalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

White nationalism is a type of racial nationalism or pan-nationalism which espouses the belief that white people are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white racial and national identity. Many of its proponents identify with the concept of a white ethnostate.

White nationalists say they seek to ensure the survival of the white race and the cultures of historically white states. They hold that white people should maintain their majority in majority-white countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost in these countries. Many white nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, immigration of nonwhites and low birth rates among whites are threatening the white race.

Analysts describe white nationalism as overlapping with white supremacism and white separatism. White nationalism is sometimes described as a euphemism for, or subset of, white supremacism, and the two have been used interchangeably by journalists and analysts. White separatism is the pursuit of a "white-only state", while supremacism is the belief that white people are superior to nonwhites and should dominate them, taking ideas from social Darwinism and Nazism. Critics argue that the term "white nationalism" is simply a "rebranding", and ideas such as white pride exist solely to provide a sanitized public face for "white supremacy", which white nationalists allegedly avoid using because of its negative connotations, and that most white nationalist groups promote racial violence.

History and usage

According to Merriam-Webster, the first documented use of the term "white nationalist" was 1951, to refer to a member of a militant group that espouses white supremacy and racial segregation. Merriam-Webster also notes usage of the two-word phrase as early as 1925. According to Dictionary.com, the term was first used in the title of a 1948 essay by South African writer and ecologist Thomas Chalmers Robertson titled Racism Comes to Power in South Africa: The Threat of White Nationalism.

According to Daryl Johnson, a former counterterrorism expert at the Department of Homeland Security, the term was used to appear more credible while also avoiding negative stereotypes about white supremacists. Modern members of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan generally favor the term and avoid self-describing as white supremacist.

Some sociologists have used white nationalism as an umbrella term for a range of white supremacist groups and ideologies, while others regard these movements as distinct. Analysis suggests that two groups largely overlap in terms of membership, ideology, and goals. Civil rights groups have described the two terms as functionally interchangeable. Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center has said "there is really no difference", and Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has said "There is no defensible distinction that can be drawn between white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism in society today." News reports will sometimes refer to a group or movement by one term or the other, or both interchangeably.

Views

White nationalists claim that culture is a product of race, and advocate for the self-preservation of white people. White nationalists seek to ensure the survival of the white race, and the cultures of historically white nations. They hold that white people should maintain their majority in mainly-white countries, maintain their dominance of its political and economic life, and that their culture should be foremost. Many white nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, mass immigration of non-whites and low birth rates among whites are threatening the white race, and some argue that it amounts to white genocide.

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington described white nationalists as arguing that the demographic shift in the United States towards non-whites would bring a new culture that is intellectually and morally inferior. White nationalists claim that this demographic shift brings affirmative action, immigrant ghettos and declining educational standards. Most American white nationalists say immigration should be restricted to people of European ancestry.

White nationalists embrace a variety of religious and non-religious beliefs, including various denominations of Christianity, generally Protestant, although some specifically overlap with white nationalist ideology (Christian Identity, for example, is a family of white supremacist denominations), Germanic neopaganism (e.g. Wotanism) and atheism.

Definitions of whiteness

Most white nationalists define white people in a restricted way. In the United States, it often—though not exclusively—implies European ancestry of non-Jewish descent. Some white nationalists draw on 19th-century racial taxonomy. White nationalist Jared Taylor has argued that Jews can be considered "white", although this is controversial within white nationalist circles. Many white nationalists oppose Israel and Zionism, while some, such as William Daniel Johnson and Taylor, have expressed support for Israel and have drawn parallels between their ideology and Zionism. Other white nationalists such as George Lincoln Rockwell exclude Jews from the definition but include Turks, who are a transcontinental ethnicity.

White nationalist definitions of race are derived from the fallacy of racial essentialism, which presumes that people can be meaningfully categorized into different races by biology or appearance. White nationalism and white supremacy view race as a hierarchy of biologically discrete groups. This has led to the use of often contradictory obsolete racial categories such as Aryanism, Nordicism, or the one-drop rule. Since the second half of the 20th century, attempts to categorize humans by race have become increasingly seen as largely pseudoscientific.

Regional movements

Australia

The White Australia policy was semi-official government policy in Australia until the mid twentieth century. It restricted non-white immigration to Australia and gave preference to British migrants over all others.

The Barton government, which won the first elections following the Federation of Australia in 1901, was formed by the Protectionist Party with the support of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The support of the Labor Party was contingent upon restricting non-white immigration, reflecting the attitudes of the Australian Workers' Union and other labor organizations at the time, upon whose support the Labor Party was founded. The first Parliament of Australia quickly moved to restrict immigration to maintain Australia's "British character", passing the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 and the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 before parliament rose for its first Christmas recess. The Immigration Restriction Act limited immigration to Australia and required a person seeking entry to Australia to write out a passage of 50 words dictated to them in any European language, not necessarily English, at the discretion of an immigration officer. Barton argued in favour of the bill: "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." The passage chosen for the test could often be very difficult, so that even if the test was given in English, a person was likely to fail. The test enabled immigration officials to exclude individuals on the basis of race without explicitly saying so. Although the test could theoretically be given to any person arriving in Australia, in practice it was given selectively on the basis of race. This test was later abolished in 1958.

Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce supported the White Australia policy, and made it an issue in his campaign for the 1925 Australian federal election.

It is necessary that we should determine what are the ideals towards which every Australian would desire to strive. I think those ideals might well be stated as being to secure our national safety, and to ensure the maintenance of our White Australia Policy to continue as an integral portion of the British Empire. We intend to keep this country white and not allow its peoples to be faced with the problems that at present are practically insoluble in many parts of the world.

At the beginning of World War II, Prime Minister John Curtin (ALP) expressed support for White Australia policy: "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."

Another (ALP) Leader of the Labor Party from 1960 to 1967 Arthur Calwell supported the White European Australia policy. This is reflected by Calwell's comments in his 1972 memoirs, Be Just and Fear Not, in which he made it clear that he maintained his view that non-European people should not be allowed to settle in Australia. He wrote:

I am proud of my white skin, just as a Chinese is proud of his yellow skin, a Japanese of his brown skin, and the Indians of their various hues from black to coffee-coloured. Anybody who is not proud of his race is not a man at all. And any man who tries to stigmatize the Australian community as racist because they want to preserve this country for the white race is doing our nation great harm ... I reject, in conscience, the idea that Australia should or ever can become a multi-racial society and survive.

He was the last leader of either the Labour or Liberal party to support it.

Canada

The Parliament of Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 to bar all Chinese from coming to Canada with the exception of diplomats, students, and those granted special permission by the Minister of Immigration. Chinese immigration to Canada had already been heavily regulated by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 which required Chinese immigrants to pay a $50 fee to enter the country (the fee was increased to one hundred dollars in 1900 and to five hundred dollars in 1903). Groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League, which had formed in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 12 August 1907 under the auspices of the Trades and Labour Council, pressured Parliament to halt Asian immigration. The Exclusion League's stated aim was "to keep Oriental immigrants out of British Columbia."

The Canadian government also attempted to restrict immigration from British India by passing an order-in-council on 8 January 1908. It prohibited immigration of persons who "in the opinion of the Minister of the Interior" did not "come from the country of their birth or citizenship by a continuous journey and or through tickets purchased before leaving their country of their birth or nationality." In practice, this applied only to ships that began their voyages in India, because the great distance usually necessitated a stopover in either Japan or Hawaii. These regulations came at a time when Canada was accepting massive numbers of immigrants (over 400,000 in 1913 alone), almost all of whom came from Europe. This piece of legislation has been called the "continuous journey regulation".

Finland

White nationalist "Awakening" conference is held annually in Finland, attracting some hundreds of white nationalists from around the globe. The event has been attended by white supremacists from around the world; Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Kevin MacDonald, representatives of the National Corps and others. Some of the founders of the influential Suomen Sisu anti-immigration organization were members of the pro-Aparheid "Friends of South Africa" organization.

In a survey conducted by Iltalehti, one-third of the voters of the far-right Finns Party, the second biggest party in parliament, thought that "the European race must be prevented from mixing with darker races, otherwise the European native population will eventually become extinct". Finns Party Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen wrote that if Finns remain naive on immigration, Finns "will not remain blue-eyed" and shared writings referring to refugees as "parasites". Toni Jalonen, at the time deputy-chair of the Finns Party Youth, posted a picture of a black family with the text "Vote for the Finns, so that Finland's future doesn't look like this".

Germany

The Thule Society developed out of the "Germanic Order" in 1918, and those who wanted to join the Order in 1917 had to sign a special "blood declaration of faith" concerning their lineage: "The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races." Heinrich Himmler, one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust, said in a speech in 1937: "The next decades do in fact not mean some struggle of foreign politics which Germany can overcome or not ... but a question of to be or not to be for the white race ..." As the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg said on 29 May 1938 on the Steckelburg in Schlüchtern: "It is however certain that all of us share the fate of Europe, and that we shall regard this common fate as an obligation, because in the end the very existence of White people depends on the unity of the European continent."

At the same time, the Nazi Party subdivided white people into groups, viewing the Nordics as the "master race" (Herrenvolk) above groups like Alpine and Mediterranean peoples. Slavic peoples, such as Russians and Poles, were considered Untermenschen (subhumans) instead of Aryan. Adolf Hitler's conception of the Aryan Herrenvolk ("Aryan master race") explicitly excluded the vast majority of Slavs, regarding the Slavs as having dangerous Jewish and Asiatic influences. The Nazis, because of this, declared Slavs to be Untermenschen. Hitler described Slavs as "a mass of born slaves who feel the need of a master". Hitler declared that because Slavs were subhumans that the Geneva Conventions were not applicable to them, and German soldiers in World War II were thus permitted to ignore the Geneva Conventions in regard to Slavs. Hitler called Slavs "a rabbit family" meaning they were intrinsically idle and disorganized. Nazi Germany's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had media speak of Slavs as primitive animals who were from the Siberian tundra who were like a "dark wave of filth".^[59][60] The Nazi notion of Slavs being inferior was part of the agenda for creating Lebensraum ("living space") for Germans and other Germanic people in Central and Eastern Europe that was initiated during World War II under Generalplan Ost, millions of Germans and other Germanic settlers would be moved into conquered territories of Eastern Europe, while the original Slavic inhabitants were to be exterminated and enslaved. Nazi Germany's ally the Independent State of Croatia rejected the common conception that Croats were primarily a Slavic people and claimed that Croats were primarily the descendants of the Germanic Goths. However the Nazi regime continued to classify Croats as "subhuman" in spite of the alliance. Roma and Sinti were also racially discriminated by the Nazis.

Hungary

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated in 2018 that "we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed: we do not want our own colour, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others." In 2022, he stated that "we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race," praising The Camp of the Saints and referring specifically to the admixture of Europeans and non-European migrants, commenting that racially mixed countries "are no longer nations." Two days later in Vienna, he clarified that he was talking about cultures and not about race. Laura Barrón-López of PBS described his ideology as white nationalist. White nationalists of the American alt-right and the European identitarian movements enthusiastically support Orbán's policies. Some have personally migrated there and collaborated with the political party Jobbik.

New Zealand

Following the example of anti-Chinese poll taxes enacted by California in 1852 and by Australian states in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, John Hall's government passed the Chinese Immigration Act 1881. This imposed a £10 tax per Chinese person entering the Colony of New Zealand, and permitted only one Chinese immigrant for every 10 tons of cargo. Richard Seddon's government increased the tax to £100 per head in 1896, and tightened the other restriction to only one Chinese immigrant for every 200 tons of cargo.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1899 prohibited the entry of immigrants who were not of British or Irish parentage and who were unable to fill out an application form in "any European language". The Immigration Restriction Amendment Act 1920 aimed to further limit Asian immigration into the Dominion of New Zealand by requiring all potential immigrants not of British or Irish parentage to apply in writing for a permit to enter the country. The Minister of Customs had the discretion to determine whether any applicant was "suitable". Prime Minister William Massey asserted that the act was "the result of a deep seated sentiment on the part of a huge majority of the people of this country that this Dominion shall be what is often called a 'white' New Zealand."

One case of a well known opponent of non-European immigration to New Zealand is that of white supremacist Lionel Terry who, after traveling widely to South Africa, British Columbia and finally New Zealand and publishing a book highly critical of capitalism and Asian immigration, shot and killed an elderly Chinese immigrant in Wellington. Terry was convicted of murder in 1905 and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life incarceration in New Zealand psychiatric institutions.

A Department of External Affairs memorandum in 1953 stated: "Our immigration is based firmly on the principle that we are and intend to remain a country of European development. It is inevitably discriminatory against Asians—indeed against all persons who are not wholly of European race and colour. Whereas we have done much to encourage immigration from Europe, we do everything to discourage it from Asia."

Paraguay

In Paraguay, the New Australian Movement founded New Australia, a white supremacist utopian socialist settlement in 1893. Its founder, William Lane, intended the settlement to be based on a "common-hold" instead of a commonwealth, life marriage, teetotalism, communism and a brotherhood of Anglophone white people and the preservation of the "colour-line". The colony was officially founded as Colonia Nueva Australia and comprised 238 adults and children.

In July 1893, the first ship left Sydney, Australia for Paraguay, where the government was keen to get white settlers, and had offered the group a large area of good land. The settlement had been described as a refuge for misfits, failures and malcontents of the left wing of Australian democracy. Notable Australian individuals who joined the colony included Mary Gilmore, Rose Summerfield and Gilbert Stephen Casey. Summerfield was the mother of León Cadogan, a noted Paraguayan ethnologist.

Due to poor management and a conflict over the prohibition of alcohol, the government of Paraguay eventually dissolved New Australia as a cooperative. Some colonists founded communes elsewhere in Paraguay but others returned to Australia or moved to England. As of 2008, around 2,000 descendants of the New Australia colonists still lived in Paraguay.

South Africa

Main article: Afrikaner nationalism

In South Africa, white nationalism was championed by the National Party starting in 1914, when it was established as a political party to represent Afrikaners after the Second Boer War by J. B. M. Hertzog in 1914. It articulated a policy promoting white "civilised labour" above African "swart gevaar," and some radical nationalist movements such as the Afrikaner Broederbond, D. F. Malan's Purified National Party, and Oswald Pirow's New Order openly sympathized with Nazi Germany. In 1948, the Reunited National Party under Malan won the South African general election against the more moderate United Party and implemented the segregationist social system known as apartheid.

The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, 1959 established homelands (sometimes pejoratively referred to as Bantustans) for ten different black African tribes. The ultimate goal of the National Party was to move all Black South Africans into one of these homelands (although they might continue to work in South Africa as "guest workers"), leaving what was left of South Africa (about 87 percent of the land area) with what would then be a White South African majority, at least on paper. As the homelands were seen by the apartheid government as embryonic independent nations, all Black South Africans were registered as citizens of the homelands, not of the nation as a whole, and were expected to exercise their political rights only in the homelands. Accordingly, the three token parliamentary seats that had been reserved for White representatives of black South Africans in Cape Province were scrapped. The other three provinces—Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Natal—had never allowed any Black representation.

Coloureds were removed from the Common Roll of Cape Province in 1953. Instead of voting for the same representatives as white South Africans, they could now only vote for four White representatives to speak for them. Later, in 1968, the Coloureds were disenfranchised altogether. In the place of the four parliamentary seats, a partially elected body was set up to advise the government in an amendment to the Separate Representation of Voters Act.

During the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, the government implemented a policy of "resettlement", to force people to move to their designated "group areas". Millions of people were forced to relocate during this period. These removals included people relocated due to slum clearance programs, labour tenants on White-owned farms, the inhabitants of the so-called "black spots", areas of Black owned land surrounded by White farms, the families of workers living in townships close to the homelands, and "surplus people" from urban areas, including thousands of people from the Western Cape (which was declared a "Coloured Labour Preference Area") who were moved to the Transkei and Ciskei homelands. The best-publicised forced removals of the 1950s occurred in Johannesburg, when 60,000 people were moved to the new township of Soweto, an abbreviation for South Western Townships.

Until 1955, Sophiatown had been one of the few urban areas where Blacks were allowed to own land, and was slowly developing into a multiracial slum. As industry in Johannesburg grew, Sophiatown became the home of a rapidly expanding black workforce, as it was convenient and close to town. It could also boast the only swimming pool for Black children in Johannesburg. As one of the oldest black settlements in Johannesburg, Sophiatown held an almost symbolic importance for the 50,000 Blacks it contained, both in terms of its sheer vibrancy and its unique culture. Despite a vigorous African National Congress protest campaign and worldwide publicity, the removal of Sophiatown began on 9 February 1955 under the Western Areas Removal Scheme. In the early hours, heavily armed police entered Sophiatown to force residents out of their homes and load their belongings onto government trucks. The residents were taken to a large tract of land, thirteen miles (21 km) from the city center, known as Meadowlands (that the government had purchased in 1953). Meadowlands became part of a new planned Black city called Soweto. The Sophiatown slum was destroyed by bulldozers, and a new White suburb named Triomf (Triumph) was built in its place. This pattern of forced removal and destruction was to repeat itself over the next few years, and was not limited to people of African descent. Forced removals from areas like Cato Manor (Mkhumbane) in Durban, and District Six in Cape Town, where 55,000 coloured and Indian people were forced to move to new townships on the Cape Flats, were carried out under the Group Areas Act 1950. Ultimately, nearly 600,000 coloured, Indian and Chinese people were moved in terms of the Group Areas Act. Some 40,000 White people were also forced to move when land was transferred from "White South Africa" into the Black homelands.

Before South Africa became a republic, politics among white South Africans was typified by the division between the chiefly Afrikaans-speaking pro-republic conservative and the largely English-speaking anti-republican liberal sentiments, with the legacy of the Boer War still constituting a political factor for sections of the white populace. Once South Africa's status as a republic was attained, Hendrik Verwoerd called for improved relations and greater accord between the two groups. He claimed that the only difference now was between those who supported apartheid and those who stood in opposition to it. The ethnic divide would no longer be between white Afrikaans-speakers and English-speakers, but rather White and Black South Africans. Most Afrikaners supported the notion of unanimity of White people to ensure their safety. Anglophone white South Africans voters were divided. Many had opposed a republic, leading to a majority "no" vote in Natal. Later, however, some of them recognized the perceived need for White unity, convinced by the growing trend of decolonization elsewhere in Africa, which left them apprehensive. Harold Macmillan's "Wind of Change" pronouncement lead the Anglophone white South African population to perceive that the British government had abandoned them. The more conservative Anglophones gave support to Verwoerd; others were troubled by the severing of ties with Britain and remained loyal to the Crown. They were acutely displeased at the choice between British and South African nationality. Although Verwoerd tried to bond these different blocs, the subsequent ballot illustrated only a minor swell of support, indicating that a great many Anglophones remained apathetic and that Verwoerd had not succeeded in uniting the White population in South Africa.

The Black Homeland Citizenship Act of 1970 was a denaturalization law passed during the apartheid era of South Africa that changed the status of the inhabitants of the Bantustans (Black homelands) so that they were no longer citizens of South Africa. The aim was to ensure that white South Africans came to make up the majority of the de jure population.

United States

Main article: White nationalism in the United States

Poster for The Birth of a Nation (1915)

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103) provided the first rules to be followed by the United States government in granting national citizenship. This law limited naturalization to immigrants who were "free white persons" of "good moral character." In 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that free blacks descended from slaves could not hold United States citizenship even if they had been born in the country.

Major changes to this racial requirement for US citizenship did not occur until the years following the American Civil War. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed to grant birthright citizenship to black people born in the US, but it specifically excluded untaxed Indians, because they were separate nations. However, citizenship for other non-whites born in the US was not settled until 1898 with United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, which concluded with an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This racial definition of American citizenship has had consequences for perceptions of American identity.

Following the defeat of the Confederate States of America and the abolition of slavery in the United States at the end of the American Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was founded as an insurgent group with the goal of maintaining the Southern racial system throughout the Reconstruction Era. Although the first incarnation of the KKK was focused on maintaining the Antebellum South, its second incarnation in the 1915-1940s period was much more oriented towards white nationalism and American nativism. The second KKK was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915 and, starting in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of recruiting. The organization grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration, its membership grew most rapidly in cities and spread out of the South to the Midwest and West. The second KKK called for strict morality and better enforcement of prohibition. Its rhetoric promoted anti-Catholicism and nativism. Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South.

Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928.

The second KKK was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4 to 5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It faded away in the 1940s.

Starting in the 1960s, white nationalism grew in the US as the conservative movement developed in mainstream society. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had opened entry to the US to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, and as a result it would significantly, and unintentionally, alter the demographic mix in the US.

A movement calling for white separatism emerged in the 1980s. During the 1980s the United States also saw an increase in the number of esoteric subcultures within white nationalism. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, these movements cover a wide variety of mutually influencing groups of a radically ethnocentric character which have emerged, especially in the English-speaking world, since World War II. These loose networks use a variety of mystical, occult or religious approaches in a defensive affirmation of white identity against modernity, liberalism, immigration, multiracialism, and multiculturalism. Some are neo-fascist, neo-Nazi or Third Positionist; others are politicised around some form of white ethnic nationalism or identity politics, and a few have national anarchist tendencies.

In the 2010s, the alt-right, a broad term covering many different far-right ideologies and groups in the United States, some of which endorse white nationalism, gained traction as an alternative to mainstream conservatism in its national politics.

In 2016, the American National Election Studies survey conducted during Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency found that 38% of Americans expressed "strong feelings of white solidarity", 28% "strong feelings of white identity", 27% that whites suffer from discrimination in American society, while 6% agree with all these propositions.

In 2020, it was reported that white nationalist groups leaving flyers, stickers, banners and posters in public places more than doubled from 1,214 in 2018 to 2,713 in 2019.

According to journalist David D. Kirkpatrick, as of mid-2024, scholars of the far right estimate that 100,000 Americans "actively participate in organized white nationalist groups".

Criticism

Numerous individuals and organizations have argued that ideas such as white pride and white nationalism exist merely to provide a sanitized public face for white supremacy. Kofi Buenor Hadjor argues that black nationalism is a response to racial discrimination, while white nationalism is the expression of white supremacy. Other critics have described white nationalism as a "... somewhat paranoid ideology" based upon the publication of pseudo-academic studies.

Carol M. Swain argues that the unstated goal of white nationalism is to appeal to a larger audience, and that most white nationalist groups promote white separatism and racial violence. Opponents accuse white nationalists of hatred, racial bigotry, and destructive identity politics. White supremacist groups have a history of perpetrating hate crimes, particularly against people of Jewish and African descent. Examples include the lynching of black people by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Some critics argue that white nationalists—while posturing as civil rights groups advocating the interests of their racial group—frequently draw on the nativist traditions of the KKK and the National Front. Critics have noted the anti-semitic rhetoric used by some white nationalists, as highlighted by the promotion of conspiracy theories such as Zionist Occupation Government.

Master–slave morality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality 

Master–slave morality (German: Herren- und Sklavenmoral) is a central theme of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, particularly in the first essay of his book On the Genealogy of Morality.

Nietzsche argues that there are two fundamental types of morality: "master morality" and "slave morality", which correspond, respectively, to the dichotomies of "good/bad" and "good/evil". In master morality, "good" is a self-designation of the aristocratic classes; it is synonymous with nobility and everything powerful and life-affirming. "Bad" has no condemnatory implication, merely referring to the "common" or the "low" and the qualities and values associated with them, in contradistinction to the warrior ethos of the ruling nobility. In slave morality, the meaning of "good" is made the antithesis of the original aristocratic "good", which itself is relabeled "evil". This inversion of values develops out of the ressentiment the weak feel toward the powerful.

For Nietzsche, a morality is inseparable from the culture that values it, meaning that each culture's language, codes, practices, narratives, and institutions are informed by the struggle between these two moral structures.

Master morality

Nietzsche defined master morality as the morality of the dominant, aristocratic warrior-rulers, especially in ancient societies. He criticizes the view (which he identifies with contemporary British ideology) that good is everything that is helpful, and bad is everything that is harmful. He writes that in the prehistoric state "the value or non-value of an action was derived from its consequences" but that ultimately "[t]here are no moral phenomena at all, only moral interpretations of phenomena." According to Nietzsche, in its original meaning, good meant noble, strong, and powerful, while the "bad" is the weak, cowardly, timid, and petty.

For Nietzsche, the essence of master morality is nobility, that is, the qualities typical of and suitable to the dominant warrior-aristocrats. Other qualities that are often valued in master morality are open-mindedness, courage, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and an accurate sense of one's self-worth. Master morality begins in the "noble man", with a spontaneous idea of the good; then the idea of bad develops as what is not good. "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself', it knows itself to be that which first accords honour to things; it is value-creating." In other words, the masters value as inherently good all those qualities which, when possessed by them, increase their power or feeling of power, and as bad all those qualities which, if possessed by them, would reduce their power. The nobles define the good based on whether the existence of that quality within them helps the further development of his personal excellence.

In short, master morality identifies "good" with "powerful", to the point that even enemies were considered "good" if they were powerful (and a noble man knows he needs enemies and rivals in order to become stronger). For instance, Nietzsche argues that in the Iliad, both the Trojan heroes and the Greek heroes considered each other as "good", even though they were fighting on opposite sides.

While the nobles did feel there existed mutual obligations among peers (fellow aristocrats), they did not have a concept of "evil" per se: if one of their own acted outside that boundary, they were perceived to be mad (possibly a madness caused by the gods, as is often the case in the Greek mythos), rather than worthy of moral blame: the other members could imprison or kill him as a matter of self-preservation, but was not held responsible for his action.

Slave morality

According to Nietzsche, masters create morality; slaves respond to master morality with their slave morality. Unlike master morality, which is sentiment, slave morality is based on ressentiment—devaluing what the master values and what the slave does not have. As master morality originates in the strong, slave morality originates in the weak. Because slave morality is a reaction to oppression, it vilifies its oppressors. Slave morality is the inverse of master morality. As such, it is characterized by pessimism and cynicism. Slave morality is created in opposition to what master morality values as good; it starts by defining everything the master values as "evil" and defines "good" as the lack of "evil".

Slave morality does not aim at exerting one's will by strength, but by careful subversion (ultimately leading to the transvaluation of all ancient values which Nietzsche identified with the Judeo-Christian religion). It does not seek to transcend the masters, but to make them slaves as well. Nietzsche sees this as a contradiction. Since the rich, famous and powerful are few compared to the masses of the poor and weak, the weak gain power by corrupting the strong into believing that the causes of slavery are evil, as are the qualities the weak originally could not choose because of their weakness. By saying humility is voluntary, slave morality avoids admitting that their humility was in the beginning forced upon them by a master. Biblical principles of humility and pity are the result of universalizing the plight of the slave onto all humankind, and thus enslaving the masters as well. "The democratic movement is the heir to Christianity"—the political manifestation of slave morality because of its obsession with freedom and equality.

Unlike master morality, they see evil as deliberately chosen, employing the concept of free will (which Nietzsche denies) so as to assign them moral blame.; Nietzsche sees the concepts of heaven and hell as tied to slave morality, claiming that slaves, unable to satisfy their thirst for revenge in their real world, engage in a revenge fantasy, imagining an afterlife in which the “good people” (the slaves) will be rewarded, while the “evil people” (the masters) will be punished.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claims that the essence of slave morality is utility: kindness was seen by the slaves as good in themselves, since it helped reduce their suffering, whereas for the masters such qualities were seen as wholly neutral, since the true mark of whether someone was "good" (worthy of praise) was their degree of wealth, fame and power, not how kind they were. In later works, such as the Genealogy of Morality and The Antichrist, he doesn't refer anymore to utility in relation to slave morality (which he also refers to as "Tschandala-morality" and "ressentiment morality"), describing it simply as that type of morality which sees the harmless man as the ideal man (as opposed to Master Morality which sees the powerful man as the ideal man).

Historical context

According to Nietzsche, the struggle between master and slave moralities recurs historically. He noted that ancient Greek and Roman societies were grounded in master morality. The Homeric hero is the strong-willed man, and the classical roots of the Iliad and Odyssey exemplified Nietzsche's master morality. He calls the heroes "men of a noble culture", giving a substantive example of master morality. Historically, master morality was defeated, as Christianity's slave morality spread throughout the Roman Empire.

After the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, Judea completely lost its independence to Rome, and after the defeat of the Bar-Kokhba revolt in 136 AD it ceased to exist as a national state of Jewish people. The struggle between the polytheistic culture of Rome (master, strong) and newly developed Christian monotheism in former Judea and surrounding territories in the Middle East (slave, weak) lasted continuously until 323, when Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion. Nietzsche condemns the triumph of slave morality in the West, saying that the democratic movement is the "collective degeneration of man". He claims that the nascent democratic movement of his time was essentially slavish and weak. Weakness conquered strength, slave conquered master, re-sentiment conquered sentiment. This ressentiment Nietzsche calls "priestly vindictiveness", based on the jealous weak seeking to enslave the strong and thus erode the basis for power by pulling the powerful down. Such movements were, according to Nietzsche, inspired by "the most intelligent revenge" of the weak.

...the Jews achieved that miracle of inversion of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination - their prophets fused "rich", "godless", "evil", "violent", "sensual" into one, and were the first to coin the word "world" as a term of infamy. It is this inversion of values (with which is involved the employment of the word for "poor" as a synonym for "holy" and "friend") that the significance of the Jewish people resides: With them, there begins the slave revolt in morals.

Master race

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_race 

Arno Breker's 1939 neoclassical sculpture Die Partei (The Party), which flanked one of the entrances to the Albert Speer-designed Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The sculpture emphasizes what the Nazis considered to be desirable Nordic racial characteristics.

The master race (German: Herrenrasse [ˈhɛʁənˌʁasə]) is a pseudoscientific concept in Nazi ideology, in which the putative Aryan race is deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy. Members were referred to as master humans (Herrenmenschen [ˈhɛʁənˌmɛnʃn̩]).

The Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg believed that the "Nordic race" was descended from Proto-Indo-Europeans, who he thought had pre-historically dwelt on the North German Plain and it was not impossible that the Nordic race ultimately originated on the lost island of Atlantis. The Nazis declared that the Aryans were superior to all other races, and believed they were entitled to expand territorially. The actual policy that was implemented by the Nazis resulted in the Aryan certificate. This document, which was required by law for all citizens of the Reich, was the "Lesser Aryan certificate" (Kleiner Ariernachweis) and could be obtained through an Ahnenpass, which required the owner to trace their lineage through baptism, birth certificates, or certified proof thereof that all grandparents were of "Aryan descent".

The Slavs, Roma, and Jews were defined as being racially inferior and non-Aryan "Untermenschen", and were thus considered a danger to the Aryan or Germanic master race. According to the Nazi secret Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population was to be removed from Central Europe through expulsion, enslavement, starvation, and extermination, except for a small percentage who were deemed to be non-Slavic descendants of Germanic settlers, and thus suitable for Germanisation.

Historical background

The 18th century saw the first scientific attempts to establish a racial divide between "masters" and "slaves", or the belief that a nation's ruling class is biologically superior to its ruled subjects. In his book History of the Ancient Government of France, published posthumously in 1727, Henri de Boulainvilliers attempted to prove that in France, the nobility represented the descendants of the old Frankish ruling class. In contrast, the majority of the population descended from the subject Gauls. As a result, two qualitatively different races faced off, and the only way to abolish the Franks' superiority was to destroy their civilization. Classical liberal theorists such as Volney and Sieyès refuted this theory by demonstrating that the French nobility was primarily composed of nouveaux riches from all over the country. Thus, the concept of a racially pure Frankish lineage was false.

In 1855, French count Arthur de Gobineau published his infamous work An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Expanding upon Boulainvilliers' use of ethnography to defend the Ancien Régime against the Third Estate's claims, Gobineau divides the human species into three major groups: white, yellow and black, claiming that "history springs only from contact with the white races". He considers the Aryan race to be the pinnacle of human development, serving as the basis of all European aristocracies. However, inevitable miscegenation led to the "downfall of civilizations".

Gobineau's influence was minimal at first. In his letters to Alexis de Tocqueville, he complained that his book was getting little attention in France and was only having an impact in the United States. Despite his friendship with Gobineau Tocqueville who rejected the book, explaining that it was in accordance with the interests of slave owners in the Southern states. However, in the 1880s, the book gained popularity in Germany thanks to Cosima Wagner's efforts. In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Germanophile Englishman and Cosima Wagner's son-in-law, published The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Expanding on Gobineau's earlier theories, he argued that the Teutonic peoples had a profound influence on Western civilization. Chamberlain classified all European peoples, including Germans, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins, as the "Aryan race", which was built on ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. He saw the Nordic or Teutonic peoples as the leaders of the Aryan race, and essentially all races.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the concept of Übermensch, which translates to "Overman" or "Superman". In his 1883 book Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None), he proposed the idea of the Übermensch as a goal for humanity. However, Nietzsche never developed the concept based on race. Instead, the Übermensch "seems to be the ideal aim of spiritual development more than a biological goal". Nazism distorted the concept's real meaning to suit its "master race" ideology.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was believed that Indo-Europeans (generally referred to as Aryans) were the highest branch of humanity due to their technological advancement. This reasoning was simultaneously linked with Nordicism, which claimed that the "Nordic race" was the "purest" form of the Aryan race. Today, this view is regarded as a form of scientific racism. It contradicts the belief in racial equality by advocating the view that one race is superior to all other races.

Eugenics

Eugenics came to play a prominent role in this racial thought as a way to improve and maintain the purity of the Aryan master race. Many thinkers in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s adhered to Eugenics, such as Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Madison Grant, Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling, and Sidney Webb.

In 1908, the Louisiana State Fair hosted the first "Better Babies" competition. Babies were judged based on livestock standards such as height, weight, unblemished skin, well-formed fingers, lack of excess fat, and cooperative behavior. The intent was to establish child-breeding health standards. Beginning in 1920, at the Kansas State Fair, a "Fitter Family" contest, sponsored by the American Eugenics Society's Committee on Popular Education, required family members to submit an "Abridged Records of Family Traits" and then undergo physical and psychological examinations to determine their "fitness", or eugenic health. Contests received letter grades, and the winners—almost always white and of Western and Northern European descent—were awarded trophies. Some years later, beginning in 1935, contestants in the Miss America contest were required to be "of the white race" and to submit a detailed account of their ancestry; those with backgrounds connected to the Pilgrims' arrival on the Mayflower or the American Revolutionary War had an advantage.

The Nazis took this concept to an extreme by establishing a program to systematically genetically enhance the Nordic Aryans themselves through a program of Nazi eugenics, based on the eugenics laws of the US state of California, to create a super race.

Hierarchy

The modern concept of the master race is generally derived from a 19th-century racial theory, which posited a hierarchy of races that was based on darkness of skin colour. This 19th-century concept was initially developed by Count Joseph Arthur De Gobineau. Gobineau's basic concept, as further refined and developed in Nazism, placed black Indigenous Australians and Equatorial Africans at the bottom of the hierarchy, while white Northern and Western Europeans (which consisted of Germans, Swedes, Icelanders, Norwegians, Danes, British, Irish, Dutch, Belgian and Northern French) were placed at its top; olive skinned white Southern Europeans (who consisted of Southern French, Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, Romanians, and Greeks, i.e., those who were called the Mediterranean race, were regarded as another sub-race of the Caucasian race) and placed in its upper middle ranks; and the Semitic and Hamitic races (supposed sub-races of the Caucasian race) were placed in its lower-middle ranks (because the Jews were Semites, the Nazis believed their cleverness made them extremely dangerous – they had their own plan for Jewish world domination, a conspiracy which needed to be opposed by all thoughtful Aryans). Slavs such as Poles and Russians were not considered Aryans; and neither were the members of the Mongoloid race (including its offshoots such as Malayans, American Indians) and mixed-race people such as Eurasians, the bronze Mestizos, Mulattos, Afro-Asians, and Zambos were placed in its lower middle ranks. However, the Japanese were considered honorary Aryans.

German warning in Nazi-occupied Poland 1939 – "No entrance for Poles!"

In their attempt to scientifically prove the racial inferiority of Slavs, German (and Austrian) racial scientists were forced to gloss over their findings which consistently proved that Early Slavs were dolicocephalic and fair haired, i.e., "Nordic", while the South Slavic "Dinaric" sub-race was often viewed favourable. Nazis used the term "Slavic race", and considered Slavs to be non-Aryan. The concept of a Slavic "Untermensch" accompanied their political goals, and it was particularly aimed at Poles and Russians. Germany's immediate goal was Drang nach Osten or expansion into the East, which was the first phase in its ultimate plan to conquer Europe, and Ukraine's "chernozem" (black earth) soil was regarded as a particularly desirable zone for colonization by the "Herrenvolk" ("master people").

In relation to the Nazis' belief in racial purity, author and historian Lucy Dawidowicz wrote:

In the hierarchy of Nazi racism, the "Aryans" were the superior race, destined to rule the world after the destruction of their racial arch-foe, the Jews. The lesser races over whom the Germans would rule included the Slavs – Poles, Russians, Ukrainians. ... Hitler's racial policy with regard to the Slavs, to the extent that it was formulated, was "depopulation." The Slavs were to be prevented from procreating, except to provide the necessary continuing supply of slave laborers."

"Master race" in the United States

Origins and context

In the United States, the concept of 'master race' arose within the context of master–slave race relations in the slavery-based society of historical America – particularly in the South in the mid-19th century. It was based upon both the experience of slavery and the pseudo-scientific justifications for racial slavery, but also on the relations between whites in the South and North, particularly during the American Civil War.

First occurrences

Benjamin W. Leigh, representing Virginia in the United States Senate, said in a speech of January 19, 1836:

There has been in Virginia as earnest a desire to abolish slavery as exists any where at this day. It commenced with the Revolution, and many of our ablest and most influential men were active in recommending it, and in devising plans for the accomplishment of it. The Legislature encouraged and facilitated emancipation by the owners, and many slaves were so emancipated. The leaning of the courts of justice was always in favorem libertatis. This disposition continued until the impracticability of effecting a general emancipation, without incalculable mischief to the master race, and danger of utter destruction to the other, and the evils consequent on partial emancipations, became too obvious to the Legislature, and to the great majority of the people, to be longer disregarded.

The Oxford English Dictionary records that William J. Grayson used the phrase "master race" in his poem The Hireling and the Slave (1855):

For these great ends hath Heaven’s supreme command
Brought the black savage from his native land,
Trains for each purpose his barbarian mind,
By slavery tamed, enlightened, and refined;
Instructs him, from a master-race, to draw
Wise modes of polity and forms of law,
Imbues his soul with faith, his heart with love,
Shapes all his life by dictates from above

where the phrase denotes the relation between the white masters and negro slaves.

By 1860 Virginian author George Fitzhugh was using the "challenging phrase 'master race', which soon came to mean considerably more than the ordinary master-slave relationship". Fitzhugh, along with a number of southern writers, used the term to differentiate Southerners from Northerners, based on the dichotomy that Southerners were supposedly descendants of Normans / Cavaliers whereas Northerners were descendants of Anglo-Saxons / Puritans.

Uses of the concept

In 1861, the Southern press bragged that Northern soldiers would "encounter a master race" and knowledge of this fact would cause Northern soldiers' "knees to tremble". The Richmond Whig in 1862 proclaimed that "the master race of this continent is found in the southern states", and in 1863 the Richmond Examiner stated that "there are slave races born to serve, master races born to govern".

In the works of John H. Van Evrie, a Northern supporter of the Confederacy, the term was interchangeable with white supremacy, notably in White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, Or, Negroes a Subordinate Race and (so-called) slavery its normal condition (1861). In Subgeneation: the theory of the normal relations of the races; an answer to miscegenation (1864) Van Evrie created the words "subgen" to describe what he considered to be the "inferior races" and "subgeneation" to describe the ‘normal’ relation of such inferior races to whites, something which he considered to be the "very corner-stone of democracy"; but these words never entered the dictionary.

The racial term Untermensch originates from the title of Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925). An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "coloured" peoples to white civilization, with his most famous book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. Alfred Rosenberg was the leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard. As the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies. Referring to Russian communists, Rosenbeg wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" ["...den Lothrop Stoddard als 'Untermenschen' bezeichnete."]

Nordicism

Main article: Nordic race

The origins of the Nazi version of the master race theory were in the 19th-century racial theories of Count Joseph Arthur De Gobineau, who argued that cultures degenerated when distinct races mixed. It was believed at this time that the peoples of Southern Europe were racially mixed with the non-European Moors from across the Mediterranean Sea, while the peoples of Northern Europe and Western Europe remained pure. Proponents of the Nordicism further argued that Nordic peoples had developed an innate toughness and determination due to the harsh, challenging climate in which they evolved.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the earliest proponents of a theory presenting a hierarchical racial model of history, attributing civilisational primacy to the "white races" who gained their sensitivity and intelligence by refinement in the rigorous north.

The highest civilisation and culture, apart from the Ancient Indians and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is because necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilisation.

Despite this, he was adamantly against differing treatment of races, was fervently anti-slavery, supporting the abolitionist movement in the United States. He describes the treatment of "[our] innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into [the slave master's] devilish clutches" as "belonging to the blackest pages of mankind's criminal record".

Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer, stated that Hitler carried a copy of Schopenhauer's book The World as Will and Representation with him wherever he went throughout World War I.

Werner Goldberg, who was part Jewish but blond and blue-eyed, was used in Nazi recruitment posters as "The Ideal German Soldier."

The postulated superiority of these people was said to make them born leaders, or a "master race". Other authors included Guido von List, his associate Lanz von Liebenfels, and the British-born German racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, all of whom felt that the white race in general, and Germanic peoples in particular, were superior to others, given the purification of both the white race and the German people from the other races which were "polluting" them, a new millenarian age of Aryan god-men would arrive.

Nazi policy stressed the superiority of the Germanic "Übermenschen" ("superhuman") Nordic race, a sub-race of the white Caucasian race European population defined by anthropometric models of racial difference. The Nordic race was said to comprise only of the Germanic peoples: Scandinavians and the rest of the Nordic countries (Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, and Faroese), ethnic Germans (including Austrians, Banat Swabians, as well as Sudeten, Baltic and Volga Germans), Alemannic Swiss, Liechtensteiners, Luxembourgers, the Dutch, Flemings, Afrikaners, Frisians and the English.

The Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen. The fact that Germans were not purely Nordic was acknowledged by Günther in his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes ("Racial Science of the German People") from 1922, in which he described the German people as being made up of all five of his European racial categories: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic. Most official Nazi comments on the Nordic race were based on Günther's works, and Alfred Rosenberg presented Günther with a medal for his work in anthropology.

Although the physical ideal of these racial theorists was typically the tall, fair-haired, and light-eyed Nordic individual, such theorists accepted the fact that a considerable variety of hair and eye colour existed within the racial categories they recognised. For example, Adolf Hitler and many Nazi officials had dark hair and were still considered members of the Aryan race under Nazi racial doctrine, because the determination of an individual's racial type depended on a preponderance of many characteristics in an individual rather than on just one defining feature.

Hitler and Himmler planned to use the SS as the basis for the racial "regeneration" of Europe following the final victory of Nazism. The SS was to be a racial elite chosen on the basis of "pure" Nordic qualities.

Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936) was an Italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century, best known for his opposition to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity of ancient Mediterranean peoples. His concept of the Mediterranean race became important to the modelling of racial difference in the early twentieth century.

Aryanism and Nazism

Main articles: Aryanism, Aryan race, Nazi racial theories, and Racial policy of Nazi Germany

See also: Aryanization and The Myth of the Twentieth Century

The term Aryan is derived from the Sanskrit word (ā́rya), which is derived from arya, the original Indo-Iranian autonym. Also, the word Iran (from Middle Persian Ērān, "the Ērs") is the Persian word for [the land/place of] the Aryans.

Following the ideas of Gobineau and others, the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg determined that these people, who, he claimed, were originally from Atlantis, were a dynamic warrior people who dwelt in northern climates on the North German Plain in prehistoric times, from which they migrated southeast by riding their chariots, eventually reaching Ukraine, Iran, and then India. They were supposed to be the ancestors of the ancient Germanic tribes, who shared their warrior values. Rosenberg opposed Christianity because to him, it was an alien Semitic slave-morality which was inappropriate for the warrior Aryan master race and in its place, he supported a melange of aspects of Hindu Vedic and Zoroastrian teachings (both of these religions were organised by Aryans), along with pre-Christian European Odinistic paganism, which he also considered distinctively Aryan in character.

In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 forbade sexual relations and marriage between an "Aryan" and a "non-Aryan" in order to maintain the purity of the Aryan race. Such relations became a punishable crime which was known as Rassenschande or "racial shame". The League of German Girls was particularly required to instruct girls to avoid Rassenschande because according to Nazism, maintaining racial purity was particularly important for young females. Aryans found guilty of this crime could face incarceration in a concentration camp, while non-Aryans could even face the death penalty. The Nazis recognized the Germanic people as the master race, and several policies were implemented in order to improve and maintain the Germanic-Nordic ubermenschen Aryan "master race," including the practice of eugenics. In order to eliminate "defective" citizens and rid the country of the intellectually disabled or those who were born with genetic deficiencies, as well as those who were deemed racially inferior, the T-4 Euthanasia Program was administered by Karl Brandt, one of Hitler's personal physicians. Additionally, a program of compulsory sterilisation was also implemented and as a result of it, forced operations were performed on hundreds of thousands of individuals. Many of these policies are generally seen as being related to what eventually became known as the Holocaust.

The Nazis also undertook measures to increase the number of Nordics in Germany. The Lebensborn program was only open to German women who fit the Nordic profile. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Nazis took young Nordic-looking Polish children who were classified as being descended from ethnic German settlers in order to determine whether or not they were "racially valuable". If that were the case, the young children were taken back to these Lebensborn houses so they could be raised as Germans.

In Nazi Germany, the Aryan certificate was an official document which certified that its owner was an Aryan. Aryan certificates could also be obtained by citizens of other countries. In its section which is titled Racial Tenet (Rassegrundsatz), the Aryan certificate states:

In line with national socialist thinking which does full justice to all other peoples, there is never the expression of superior or inferior, but alien racial admixtures.

For the "Greater Aryan certificate" Germans had to prove that as far back as January 1, 1800 "none of their paternal nor their maternal ancestors had Jewish or coloured blood". SS officers had to prove this reaching back to 1750.

During a speech he made in 1936, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels said:

Today arises in young and old, high and low, poor and rich, the will that the German nation must again be a world people. All of us are convinced of it: we must participate in the ruling of the world. We must become a master race, and therefore we must educate our people to be a master race. This must begin with the smallest child, who must be educated in this master-ethic.

In 1943, Reichskommissar for Ukraine Erich Koch reminded Germans:

We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.

Yamato and Japan

Main article: An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus

During the Meiji era, a sense of superiority over other Asians existed in the Japanese society, with discrimination being enacted against racial minorities such as the Ryūkyū and Ainu peoples. In July 1943, promotion of Yamato racial superiority was further affirmed by the Japanese government with the publishing of An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus.

Mediterranean race

Main article: Mediterranean race

See also: Culture of Italy, Culture of Greece, Culture of Portugal, Culture of Spain, and Mediterraneanism

The claim that the Mediterranean race was responsible for the most important of ancient Western civilisations was a problem for the promoters of Nordic superiority. According to Giuseppe Sergi, the Mediterranean race was the "greatest race of the world" and was singularly responsible for the most accomplished civilisations of ancient times, including those of Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The Mediterranean race was also a major influence to the outside world in the modern era: during the 16th century, Spain and Portugal established the first global empires in Western history, placing both nations on the highest level of political and economic powers in Europe.

Charles Gabriel Seligman also stated that "it must, I think, be recognised that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievements to its credit than any other race, since it is responsible for by far the greater part of Mediterranean civilisation, certainly before 1000 BC (and probably much later), and so shaped not only the Aegean cultures, but those of Western as well as the greater part of Eastern Mediterranean lands, while the culture of their near relatives, the Hamitic pre-dynastic Egyptians, formed the basis of that of Egypt."

The Nazis explained this by claiming that the original Latins and Greeks were Indo-European Nordic tribes which had migrated into Italy and Greece, during the Iron Age era. The Nazis also claimed that the Spanish and Portuguese Empires were examples of Nordic power since, at the time, their governments were run by the descendants of the Germanic Visigoths who invaded Spain and Portugal fifteen centuries earlier. However, they did admit that the masses of people who lived during the flowering of these four civilizations were Mediterranean. This led to Germans of all European races to be classified as Aryans.

Cultural influences

Aryan master race ideology was common throughout the educated intellectual community and literate strata of the Western world until the post-World War II era. Such theories were commonplace in early-20th century fantasy literature.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the original Buck Rogers stories and newspaper cartoons, Buck Rogers, in his adventures in the 25th century that takes place on Earth, depicts him fighting for Aryan-Americans from the liberated zone around Niagara, New York, against the Red Mongol Empire, a Chinese empire of the future which rules most of North America.

In the 1930s, both educational and storybooks for children in Germany taught their readers about the master race. In the Sun Koh science fiction series, the protagonist Koh says things like "My forefathers were Aryan", and in a story about Atlantis, he says, "If our Atlantis once again rises out of the sea, then we will get from there the blond, steel-hard men with the pure blood and will create with them the master race, which will finally rule the earth." The German writer Michael Ende, who was born in 1929 and grew up reading such books, wrote his classic novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver in the 1950s, as a way of opposing the Nazi propaganda he was taught as a child. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writer Julia Voss wrote a book on Jim Button, uncovering Ende's many references to Nazi symbols in that book. Voss shows how Ende upends the Nazi belief that Atlantis was the original home of the Aryan race by creating his own submerged city and making it rise, but not to restore Aryan master-race rule over the Earth, rather it becomes a multi-racial paradise with Jim Button, who is black and a descendant of the Magi Caspar, as its king.

In the 1948 film Rope by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the central characters, Brandon Shaw, is a firm believer in the master race ideology.

In the Doctor Who series, the Doctor's frequent enemies, the Daleks, consider themselves a master race which must purge the universe of all other life forms; Terry Nation explicitly modeled them on the Nazis. In the 2009 special "The End of Time", when the Master transforms the entire human race into copies of himself, he claims that there is no human race, but only "the Master race".

In the Harry Potter series, while the parallels were not originally intentional, there is much similarity between Lord Voldemort's "pureblood" ideology and the master race ideology of the Nazis, with wizards being "pure" and anyone with Muggle (non-wizard) blood being considered "half-blood" or "mudblood", a word used and treated the same way a racial slur would be in the real world (Neo-Nazis call non-white people mud people).