clearly none of nazi race science was 'scientific' in an objective sense. but their hierarchy was clearly a continuation of deeply embedded assumptions about white people being the best – an attitude that came from THE AGE OF EUROPEAN EMPIRES. which is exactly my fucking point. the nazi death cult's bizarre taxonomies and hierarchies from 'pure aryan' downwards came, after all, from a gradient of supposed 'purity'. aryans were the best because they were THE MOST WHITE.
from mein kampf:
‘The last visible trace of the former master people is often seen in the lighter skin colour which its blood left behind in the subjugated race ...’ (p. 265).
tell me again it wasn't about 'whiteness', though.
jews were never considered as part of the 'white' ethnicity and have consistently been othered by racists throughout modern history. hitler in mein kampf LITERALLY insisted that jews were not a religious group but a separate race. the nazis did NOT think of them as part of the white race (as misbegotten as their own notions might have been). why the hell do you think nazi propaganda and cartoons went to such lengths to stress the physical differences between aryans and jews if 'jews were white'? all that talk of 'race-parasites', 'germs', and so on – you know, foreign bodies? odd way to talk about white people isn't it? jesus christ use your head.
‘Race, however, does not lie in the language, but exclusively in the blood, which no one knows better than the Jew’ (p. 283) [...] ‘He poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own’ (p. 272)
this is a stupid digression. you need to think again about the long implications of racial thinking in modern european history. declaring that europe is 'colour-blind' and things like 'white passing' don't happen here, is just hilarious. explain that concept to a mixed-race person or a jew in 18th or 19th century france or the netherlands. it was incredibly important for (newly) bourgeois non-whites to pass as white and to become 'acceptably' european during this time. did you miss the dreyfus affair? lmao.
both the economic systems of colonial/post-colonial europe AND plantation/post-emancipation USA, inasmuch as they can even be considered as separate things, are deeply implicated with race. your emphasis on 'recent history being more important' is totally misguided. it's the same capitalist engine that brings in people from the periphery for the purposes of economic exploitation, thus ensuring their social inferiority. migrant workers and their communities have the exact same social relation to the dominant culture as slaves or colonial subjects. it is primarily economic and always has been.
this uneasy proximity of an often-times racist capitalism to the birth and rise of liberal democracies is the WHOLE REASON why BLM's message cuts through to so many western nations today. you are going so far out of your way to miss this basic point when you talk about the 'cultural differences' between the USA and, say, belgium. you're really going to talk about the cultural differences between belgians and americans and not, er, the fact that both countries in their modern histories had huge slave-plantation systems using african labour? hahaha oh my god.
Last edited by uziq (2021-06-17 17:01:13)
