#71 Racism, Hitler and the Contemporary World
Race, Class, and Nationalism
It ought to surprise most of us just how frequently race and racism appear in our daily news. After all, there is no such thing as different ‘races’ of human beings, we are all one single race. So why does the ideology of race and racism appear almost daily in our news? I want to explore this question moving widely across history and knowledge.
I will start with race and nation. Nationalism is deeply tied up racism, almost irrevocably! Nationalism rose to a head in the recent British debate about Brexit. And the surprising thing about the debate was that those who wished with all their soul to be a separate nation-state cut across class lines.
If you asked working-class peoples why they wanted Brexit when it seemed so obvious, at least to me it did, that the larger market we belonged to, the greater our prosperity would be. The answer was always a proud statement – or some variation thereof - of how “I am British and proud of it.” I asked the question many times, and I came away with the feeling that if Kitchener had stood up from his death bed and called the British peoples to arms once more, many would have offered their lives another time. Brexit was deeply about race. No argument about prosperity would cut the ice!
What is also clear is that race and class move across the spectrum. White peoples who have ruled power politics for a couple of centuries are as nationalist and as racist as their lower-class brothers and sisters. So far so good.
Nationalism
So where has nationalism come from? It is so much around us in our everyday lives that we all assume that nationalism has been with us for eternity. This is not the case. Nationalism has arisen alongside the creation of the modern nation-state. Go back 300 or 400 years and there were no nation-states with recognised boundaries. There were Empires of varying kinds, kingdoms of varying size, sometimes the Kingdoms were part of an Empire and sometimes not. Allegiance in all cases was to a centralised figure. Boundaries varied according to the ability of the kingdom or Empire to collect taxes and to protect the people in the Empire. Outside Europe, Empires and kingdoms also existed, but often some peoples were tribal, where there was no centralised political organisation, again of varying sizes.
My point is simply that nations and nationalism were ways of organising territory that arose alongside the industrial revolution, they were an adjunct of capitalism. Nations also arose out of colonialism and the invading party wished to demark the territory they had conquered. “This bit of the world was mine,” told competing Western nations to keep out.
Nations arose in the late 18th 19th and 20th centuries, as the old Empires were broken up and as areas of the world were colonised. Old pre-industrial empires had very often absorbed people with varied religions, languages, and cultures. The old empires very often were tolerant places for people to live. Nations and Nationalism arose out of this complex. Many peoples too often had to find a new home as people of the dominant language took control of a territory. The new nations were all about conquest (in the colonies) and belonging, about identity, and a common language in the rest of the world.
Nationalism, understood as the ideology of peoples in a defined land area and very often with a common language and culture, was born out of the turmoil over two centuries from around 1750 and moved across the entire world.
Racism and Nationalism
Racism became attached to nationalism in a very simple formula. Racism was the ideology of colonialism. It was the ideology of superiority, it stated that “we are a master race and you need to learn from us, you are an inferior people”. I have written widely about racism and its development in these blogs. Racism is a multi-layered concept. Because racism has no basis in science, any situation where two peoples confront each other can be portrayed in racial terms.
Race is a multi-flexible concept, it can be applied whenever two people are different, whether that difference is skin colour or religious difference. It just needs the dominant group to use the race concept to assert their superiority. Racism is all about how one group is superior to the other, without using evidence. By this, I mean that a dominant group can assert their superiority and use a racial characteristic as the cause of their own superiority. And, because racial superiority cannot be proved scientifically, it can only be asserted verbally and followed up by organising social relations as if it was a fact.
I often use the example of Irish Colonisation as the example of the flexibility of the racial construct. There is no colour or language difference between the Irish and the English, only religion. The reason this example is so interesting is that the concept of race is not used at all to describe these relations. Yet all the characteristics of the relationships between the Catholic and Protestant populations areas if racial differences were dominant.
The Irish peoples were first invaded by the English, in the 12th century. From then on they took on the Catholic faith and integrated Catholicism within the ancient culture they came from. The Irish were invaded a second time in the 16th century. This time their old English/Catholic landlords were driven out and a new Protestant class was introduced. The Protestant immigrants collected Irish taxes for English landlords and ordered land distribution. Not surprisingly, the Protestants were a hated class.
Now move into the 20th and 21st centuries and what you find is that Catholics and Protestants treat others as if they were races. Intermarriage is deeply disliked, they live separately and talk to any Irish man or woman about the religious cleavage and you might as well be talking about racial one. They even educate their children in separate schools. The Irish language of religion might be the language of race elsewhere. In the Irish case, racial and religious differences are identical. The differences are in the island’s history.
What comes out of this brief discussion is that racism and nationalism came to be joined at the hip. To be superior to your neighbour, national identification was simply enough.
Hitler and Racism
Everybody knows that Hitler killed some 6 million Jews and a great deal of heat remains in this discussion. Not least because we face a resurgent far-right in our own time. We have seen horrific instances of anti-Semitism on the rise, as well as this itself, has become a polarising term, in part for its attachment to Israel. The issue as far as this blog is concerned is that with the knowledge we all stop asking questions about Nazism and Hitler.
It might surprise my audience if I added that Nazism intended to kill or eradicate many more people than 6 million Jews. This was just the first part of the plan. The Nazi plan was to take over large parts of Poland and move East through to Kiev and the fertile lands around the Black Sea area. The Nazi plan was to colonise so-called ‘lesser peoples’. The Nazis had reckoned they needed to displace or eradicate up to 70 million people.
Hitler did not expect to see serious opposition from the existing Western powers. He had followed for a long time the holocaust in Turkey from 1914 to 1922 when all the minority peoples had been either killed or moved. Ataturk was considered a hero for Hitler. He noted that the Western powers did not raise serious objections to this holocaust.
Equally, Hitler was well-aware of the eradication of the indigenous peoples in the Americas and especially in the USA. Again, Hitler knew there had been no serious objection to this holocaust either.
He had concluded that there would be no serious objection to the Nazi plan. There is plenty of evidence of Hitler’s awareness of all this killing. So, the question arises why did the Western powers rise up against him? Britain and the other Nations had turned away as Ataturk and the USA extinguished millions of lives. So why did we put up with mass killings in other parts of the world but not in Germany? I am not going to try to answer this question, although it is deeply relevant to racism today. It seems to me this is a question that needs much wider debate both among scholars and the wider community. Why did the UK and the USA combine forces to defeat Hitler?
I suspect the answer has little to with Hitler’s racism, despite the claims often made that this was a strong motivating force. Rather, I think it had to do with British and American ambitions to rule the world. This is of course not to diminish or dismiss the horror of Hitler and the Nazi state’s actions. It is more likely that the Western powers did not want to share world power with Germany. When we look back at history, the coming together of the USSR, USA and Britain in an alliance to defeat Hitler was a temporary affair. As soon as hostilities against Germany were complete the USA pulled apart from the USSR alliance, and the Soviet Union became the number one enemy for the next 44 years, that is until the USSR collapsed in 1989.
If we are to understand racism today in its fullness, and its complexity, understanding the war with Nazi Germany, understanding Western country’s motives and their alliances is a vital part of the racist story.
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The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible. From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.