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The race theory is German fascism’s theoretical axis. In fascist ideology the economic programme of the so-called twenty-five points figures solely as an expedient intended ‘to improve the Germanic race genetically and to protect it against racial interbreeding’ which, according to the National Socialists, always entails the decline of the ‘higher race’. Indeed, it is their contention that even the decline of a culture is to be traced back to miscegenation. Hence, ‘keeping the blood and the race pure’ is a nation’s noblest task, in the fulfilment of which one must be prepared to make any sacrifice. In Germany and the German-occupied countries, no means were spared in putting this theory into practice in the form of the persecution of the Jews.
The race theory proceeds from the presupposition that the exclusive mating of every animal with its own species is an ‘iron law’ in nature. Only exceptional circumstances, such as captivity, are capable of causing a violation of this law and of leading to racial interbreeding. When this occurs, however, nature revenges itself and uses every means at its disposal to oppose such infringements, either by making the bastard sterile or by limiting the fertility of later offspring. In every crossbreeding of two living creatures of different ‘levels’, the offspring will of necessity represent something intermediate.
But nature aims at a higher breeding of life; hence bastardization is contrary to the will of nature. Natural selection also takes place in the daily struggle for survival, in which the weaker, i.e., racially inferior, perish. This is consistent with the ‘will of nature’, for every improvement and higher breeding would cease if the weak, who are in the no majority, could crowd out the strong, who are in the minority. Hence, nature subjects the weaker specimens to more severe conditions of life as a means of limiting their number; on the other hand, it does not allow the rest to multiply indiscriminately; they are subjected to a ruthless selection on the basis of energy and health.
The National Socialist went on to apply this supposed law in nature to peoples. Their line of reasoning was something as follows: Historical experience teaches that the ‘intermixing of Aryan blood’ with ‘inferior’ peoples always results in the degeneration of the founders of civilization. The level of the superior race is lowered, followed by physical and mental retrogression; this marks the beginning of a progressive ‘decline’.
The North American continent would remain strong, Hitler states, ‘as long as he [the German inhabitant] does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood that is to say, as long as he does not interbreed with non-Germanic peoples.
‘To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.’ These views are unmistakably mystical; nature’ regulates’ and’ wills’ ‘according to reason’. They are the logical culmination of biological metaphysics.
According to Hitler, humanity is to be divided into three races: the founders of civilization, the upholders of civilization and the destroyers of civilization. Only the Aryan race is considered as the founder of civilization, for it built the ‘foundation and walls of human creation’. The Asian peoples, the Japanese18 and the Chinese, for example, merely took over the Aryan civilization and translated it into their own form. Thus, they are upholders of civilization.
The Jewish race, however, is a destroyer of civilization. The existence of ‘inferior human beings’ is the chief prerequisite for the establishment of a higher civilization. Man’s first civilization rested upon the use of inferior human races. In olden times it was the vanquished who were made to pull the plow, which only much later was pulled by the horse. As conqueror, the Aryan subjugated the inferior masses and regulated their activity in accordance with Aryan needs to compass Aryan ends. However, as soon as the subjugated peoples began to learn the language and to adopt the customs of the ‘masters’, and the clear-cut demarcation between master and slave was obliterated, the Aryan relinquished the purity of his blood and lost ‘his sojourn in paradise’. Through this, he also lost his cultural genius. We are not forgetting that Adolf Hitler represents the flowering of civilization.
Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood.
[op. cit. 296]
An objective and technical refutation of this basic idea is out of the question here. It borrows an argument from Darwin’s hypothesis of natural selection, some elements of which are as reactionary as his proof of the origin of species from lower organisms is revolutionary. Moreover, this idea conceals the imperialist function of fascist ideology. For if the Aryans are the sole founders of civilization, then, by virtue of their divine destiny, they can lay claim to world dominion. And, in fact, one of Hitler’s principal claims was the expansion of the borders of the German empire, especially ‘towards the East’, i.e., into Soviet Russian territory. Thus, we can see that the glorification of an imperialist war lay wholly within the compass of this ideology.
. . . The aim for which we were fighting the War was the loftiest, the most overpowering, that man can conceive: it was the freedom and independence of our nation, the security of our future food supply, and — our national honour.
Here we are solely interested in the irrational origin of these ideologies, which, objectively viewed, were in conformity with the interests of German imperialism; most of all we are interested in the contradictions and incongruities existing in the race theory. Race theorists who refer to a biological law in support of their theory overlook the fact that racial breeding of animals is an artefact. It is not a question whether dog and cat have an’ instinctive aversion’ to interbreeding, but whether collie and greyhound, German and Slav, have the same aversion.
Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have a meaning only to a numbskull. We do not want to enter into the other absurdities here - as if racial circumscription and not its opposite, promiscuous mating within the same species, were the rule in nature.
In the present examination we are not concerned with the rational content of the race theory, a theory that, instead of proceeding from facts to valuations, proceeded from valuations to a distortion of the facts. Nor will arguments be of any use against a fascist who is narcissistically convinced of the supreme superiority of his Teutonism, if only because he operates with irrational feelings and not with arguments. Hence, it would be hopeless to try to prove to a fascist that black people and Italians are not racially ‘inferior’ to the Teutons. He feels himself to be ‘superior’, and that’s the end of it.
The race theory can be refuted only by exposing its irrational functions, of which there are essentially two: that of giving expression to certain unconscious and emotional currents prevalent in the nationalistically disposed man and of concealing certain psychic tendencies. Only the latter function will be discussed here. We are especially interested in the fact that Hitler speaks of ‘incest’ when an Aryan interbreeds with a non-Aryan, whereas it is usually sexual intercourse among those who are related by blood that is designated as incest.
How are such stupidities to be explained in a ‘theory’ that presumed to be the basis of a new world, a ‘third Reich’? When we bear in mind that in the final analysis the irrational, emotional basis of such a hypothesis owes its existence to definite existential factors; when we free ourselves of the notion that the discovery of such irrational sources of views of life, which have come into being on a rational basis, means a shifting of the question into the sphere of metaphysics, then we open the way to the source of metaphysics itself. We comprehend not only the historical conditions under which metaphysical thinking arises, but also its material substance. Let the results speak for themselves.