Shocked: White Supremacy was Main Stream a Century ago

We think today of White Supremists as fringe weirdos or at least I do. But in fact, 100 years ago, this idea was mainstream. This from the book Sapiens, “According to the Nazis, Homo sapiens had already divided into several distinct races (read species, like Neanderthal as opposed to homo sapiens), each with its own unique qualities. One of these races (species), the Aryan race, had the finest qualities – rationalism, beauty, integrity, diligence. Other races, such as Jews and Blacks, were today’s Neanderthals, possessing inferior qualities. If allowed to breed and in particular to intermarry with Aryans, they would adulterate all human populations and doom the Homo sapiens species to extinction. Biologists debunked Nazi racial theory. In particular, genetic research conducted after 1945 has demonstrated that the differences between various human lineages are far smaller than Nazis postulated. But these conclusions are relatively new. Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1933, Nazi beliefs were credible. The existence of different human races, the superiority of the white race, and the need to protect and cultivate this superior race were widely held beliefs among most Western elite. Scholars in the most prestigious Western universities, using the orthodox scientific methods of the day, published studies that allegedly proved that members of the white race were more intelligent, more ethical, more skilled than Africans or Indians. Politicians in Washington, London and Canberra took it for granted that it was their job to prevent the adulteration and degeneration of the white race, by, for example, RESTRICTING IMMIGRATION FROM CHINA or even Italy to ‘Aryan’ countries such as the USA and Australia. Hitler not only dug his own grave, but that of racism in general. When he launched WWII, precisely because Nazi ideology was so extremely racist, racism became discredited in the West. The change took time. White Supremacy remained a mainstream ideology in American politics until at least the 1960s.” Then the civil rights and the sexual revolutions in the US helped us begin moving past the Nazi era.

Hitler did us a favor and started the long downward spiral of racism. Who knew?