One of the first things you discover when you take a deep dive into history is how much of what you thought you knew turns out to be half true at best and complete bunk at worst.
This is, I think, particularly true when we speak of popular notions of history in the US. At least it’s prevalent enough to be a standing joke reflected in Pop culture.
Or maybe it’s because most people get their notions of history from Pop Culture.
That last line was delivered by an actor portraying Robert E. Lee.
What this illustrates is that much of what people take for history is a confused morass of received tradition, legend, myth and narratives designed to serve political and cultural agendas. Wading through the mire to get to the factual bottom is a hard row to hoe and most people simply don’t have the time and energy to spare, or the inclination to do so.
This seems as true of events of 74 years ago as it does for those of 160 years ago.
I was recently involved in a group discussion regarding anti-Semitism, white supremacy and Nazism in which it was stated categorically that the Nazi’s anti-Semitism had nothing whatever to do with White Supremacy or whiteness.
That is an assertion which, as the chart reproduced at the top indicates, is hugely uninformed.
The confusion seems rooted in an ill digested awareness that the Nazis adhered to a racist theory of Aryanism. A form of racism whose primary focus was Europe. Apparently this has led to the misconception that the Nazis’ racist Aryanism had no connection to White Supremacy.
This is, as a matter of history and ideology, not so. What it is, is an example of an anachronistic reading of the past. That is, reading backwards into the past from the present day rather than reading from the past forward into the present.
The simplest way to understand this is to recognize that white supremacy as a theory and ideology predated Aryanism. Nazi Aryanism presents as a variation of and innovation on white supremacy, in much the same way that Nazism itself was an innovative variation of Fascism.
The emergence of White Supremacy as a distinct, articulated system of ideas is usually cited as beginning with the so-called “scientific” racism of the 17th century. These speculations can only be described as scientific in the loosest aspirational sense, as they relied entirely on subjective observations rather than sound biology. For example; a major dispute among such theorists was whether the various “races” shared a common human ancestry or whether they each had a separate and distinct genesis.
In the 19th century the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species became a resource for much race theory, despite Darwin’s own conclusions being at odds with the belief in biologically distinct races. In part this was due to the fact that “race” was not used with the specificity it was later to acquire.
Charles Darwin's influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species did not discuss human origins. The extended wording on the title page, which adds by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, uses the general term "races" as an alternative for "varieties" and does not carry the modern connotation of human races. The first use in the book refers to "the several races, for instance, of the cabbage" and proceeds to a discussion of "the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants".[52
Moreover, Darwin was dismissive of the whole idea that “races” constituted distinct species.
In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin examined the question of "Arguments in favour of, and opposed to, ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species" and reported no racial distinctions that would indicate that human races are discrete species:
It may be doubted whether any character can be named, which is distinctive of a race and is constant ... they graduate into each other, and ... it is hardly possible to discover clear, distinctive characters between them ... As it is improbable that the numerous, and unimportant, points of resemblance, between the several races of man, in bodily structure and mental faculties (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who had these same characters.[51][53]
Nevertheless, race theorists cherry picked Darwin’s findings to buttress their own racist constructs.
In 1853 a work appeared that was to prove a seminal text in the development of Aryanism; Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.
Gobineau's writings were quickly praised by white supremacist, pro-slavery Americans like Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, who translated his book into English but omitted around 1,000 pages of the original book, including those parts that negatively described Americans as a racially mixed population. Inspiring a social movement in Germany named Gobinism,[1] his works were also influential on prominent anti-Semites such as Richard Wagner, Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Romanian politician professor A. C. Cuza, and leaders of the Nazi Party, who later edited and re-published his work.
Here we find the direct historical link between the Nazi’s later racist Aryanism and White Supremacy. A link which leads directly to a foundational work of the Nazi’s racist Anti-Semitism, the above cited Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the 19th Century.
In February 1896, the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann, a leading völkisch activist who was later to publish Mein Kampf commissioned Chamberlain to write a book that was intended to summarize all of the achievements of the 19th century.[77] In October 1899 Chamberlain published his most famous work, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, in German. The Foundations are a pseudo-scientific "racial history" of humanity from the emergence of the first civilizations in the ancient Near East to the year 1800, and argued that all of the "foundations" of the great 19th century which saw huge economic, scientific and technological advances in the West were the work of the "Aryan race".[78] Die Grundlagen was only the first volume of an intended three-volume history of the West with the second and third volumes taking up the story of the West in the 19th century and the looming war for world domination in the coming 20th century between the Aryans on one side vs. the Jews, blacks and Asians on the other side.[79]
Chamberlain never completed the last two volumes but the first proved more than sufficient. It was the taproot for the racist anti-Semitism that produced the Nazi genocide.
The antithesis of the heroic Aryan race with its vital, creative life-improving qualities was the "Jewish race", whom Chamberlain presented as the inverse of the Aryan. Every positive quality the Aryans had, the Jews had the exact opposing negative quality.[90] The American historian Geoffrey Field wrote:
To each negative "Semitic" trait Chamberlain counter-posed a Teutonic virtue. Kantian moral freedom took the place of political liberty and egalitarianism. Irresponsible Jewish capitalism was sharply distinguished from the vague ideal of Teutonic industrialism, a romantic vision of an advanced technological society which had somehow managed to retain the Volksgemeinschaft, cooperation and hierarchy of the medieval guilds. The alternative to Marxism was "ethical socialism", such as that described by Thomas More, "one of the most exquisite scholars ever produced by a Teutonic people, of an absolutely aristocratic, refined nature". In the rigidly elitist, disciplined society of Utopia with its strong aura of Christian humanism, Chamberlain found an approximation of his own nostalgic, communal ideal. "The gulf separating More from Marx," he wrote, "is not the progress of time, but the contrast between Teuton and Jew."[91]
Chamberlain announced in The Foundations that "all the wars" in history were "so peculiarly connected with Jewish financial operations".[92] Chamberlain warned that the aim of the Jew was "to put his foot upon the neck of all nations of the world and be Lord and possessor of the whole earth".[93] As part of their plans to destroy Aryan civilization, Chamberlain wrote: "Consider, with what mastery they use the law of blood to extend their power."[93] Chamberlain wrote that Jewish women were encouraged to marry Gentiles while Jewish men were not, so the male line "remained spotless ... thousands of side-branches are cut off and employed to infect Indo-Europeans with Jewish blood."[93]
In short, Chamberlain, building on the Aryanism of de Gobineau and the existing theories of White Supremacy, pre-figured all the major tropes of Nazi ideology.
The Franco-Israeli historian Saul Friedländer described The Foundations – with its theory of two "pure" races left in the world, namely the German and Jewish locked into a war for world domination which could only end with the complete victory of one over the other – as one of the key texts of "redemptive anti-semitism".[56] Because Chamberlain viewed Jews as a race, not a religion, Chamberlain argued the conversion of Jews was not a "solution" to the "Jewish Question", stating Jewish converts to Christianity were still Jews.[98] In taking this stance, Chamberlain was going beyond his hero Wagner. The Dutch journalist Ian Buruma wrote:
“Wagner himself, like Luther, still believed that a Jew could, as he put it with his customary charm, "annihilate" his Jewishness by repudiating his ancestry, converting and worshiping at the shrine of Bayreuth. So in theory a Jew could be a German…But to the mystical chauvinists, like Chamberlain, who took a tribal view of Germanness, even radical, Wagnerian assimilation could never be enough: the Jew was an alien virus to be purged from the national bloodstream. The more a Jew took on the habits and thoughts of his gentile compatriots, the more he was to be feared.[99]”
Chamberlain did not advocate the extermination of Jews in The Foundations, indeed despite his determination to blame all of the world's problems on the Jews, Chamberlain never proposed a solution to this perceived problem.[100] Instead Chamberlain made the cryptic statement that after reading his book, his readers would know best about how to devise a "solution" to the "Jewish Question".[100]
In this last Chamberlain was prescient, as his most famous and perhaps most avid reader proved to be Adolf Hitler.
In 1923 Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler in Bayreuth, and in September he sat in his wheelchair next to Hitler during the völkisch "German Day" paramilitary parade. In September 1923 he wrote a grateful and highly admiring open letter to the NSDAP leader[159]. Chamberlain, paralysed and despondent after Germany's losses in World War I, wrote to Hitler after his first visit in September 1923:
“Most respected and dear Hitler, ... It is hardly surprising that a man like that can give peace to a poor suffering spirit! Especially when he is dedicated to the service of the fatherland. My faith in Germandom has not wavered for a moment, though my hopes were—I confess—at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler—that is proof of her vitality ... that the magnificent Ludendorff openly supports you and your movement: What wonderful confirmation! I can now go untroubled to sleep ... May God protect you![218]”
Chamberlain's letter—which made him into the first celebrity to endorse the NSDAP—caused a media sensation in Germany and led Hitler to rejoice "like a child" at the news.[219] When Hitler staged the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, Chamberlain wrote an essay for the Völkischer Beobachter entitled "God Wills It!" calling on all Germans who love Germany to join the putsch.[220][45] After the failure of the Munich Putsch, Chamberlain wrote: "We are deeply affected by this tragic fate, Jew and Jesuit can now triumph again!".[220]
As should be apparent from all the above, far from being separate and discreet ideologies, White Supremacy and Aryan Supremacy are inextricably entwined vines of the same poisonous, racist growth.
Nor is this malignant kinship purely ideological. It extends to outright alliance. As early as 1940 the Nazi German American Bund hosted a rally with the Ku Klux Klan at their Camp Nordland in Andover, NJ.
This is a convergence that did not end with the onset of WWII. It only went underground. In 1946 the Columbians, the first post war Nazi organization in the US, chose Atlanta as its home base in hopes of capitalizing on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan that had been underway since the fall of 1945.
Their shared White Supremacism and anti-Semitism notwithstanding, the competition for new members led to strained relations between the two groups, despite the Klan’s previous connections to the German American Bund.
A good overview of these events can be found in Stetson Kennedy’s The Klan Unmasked.
Following the collapse of the Columbians, the Nazi-Klan connection once again receded into the shadows only to re-emerge in 1958 when
former Klan Kleagle J.B Stoner and neo-Nazi Edward R, Fields founded the National States Rights Party.
The impact and influence of the Nazi-Klan connection became apparent with the onset of the Civil Rights Movement. when Jews and Jewish institutions as well as African Americans became the targets of terrorist attacks. Most notably the Atlanta Temple Bombing but throughout the south as well, as documented in Jack Nelson’s Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews.
With so extensive a history of convergence and connivance, it can hardly be surprising that in 1979 it was an alliance of Klansmen and Nazis who carried out the bloody Greensboro Massacre. Likewise we shouldn’t be shocked to see present day White Supremacists staging spectacles such as this.
So what’s the point of establishing the ideological consanguinity of White Supremacy and Nazism?
I think the answer is clear. Aside from the benefits of accuracy, in order to combat either effectively one must combat both. Because at bottom they are both variations of the same thing: Racism.
The Nazis and White Supremacists understand this, even if some of us don’t.