RE: Hitler's "Inspiration"

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim,

Couldn't agree more.

While I'm sure you are aware of the context of all of this, many of the
younger readers of the list might not be.  The Nazis were, in many ways,
a mere logical extension of a broad ideological tradition of scientific
racism.  (Stephen Jay Gould's _The Mismeasure of Man_ is a very good
introduction to the concepts.)  

As Americans formulated an ideology of white supremacism to justify
Indian extermination and removal--and African slavery--they provided the
raw data for writers like Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a diplomat and
Christian whose _Essay on the Inequality of Human Races_ in the
mid-1850s argued that there were three distinct races--white, yellow and
black--with very different potentials for civilization and progress.
There were, in turn, differences within these races.  Gobineau himself
was not especially anti-Semitic, though his followers would use his
model to justify the treatment of Jews as an inferior people.  

Among those followers were people like H.F.K. Günther, a German, and
Houston Stewart Chamberlain (an Englishmen living in Germany). Although
such ideas were regarded as rather fringe, many more held them in one
form or another than acknowledged them indiscriminately (rather like
angels, aliens, etc. today).  When World War One shook the cultural
self-confidence of western societies, the idea of racial purity and its
loss became a handy and popular explanation.

Solidarity!
Mark L.