Hitler: figurehead?

You make a good point. To which I might add: Racism in general was rampant all over the Western World, including in the British Empire, but no country on Earth had the kind of institutionlized racial policies that the USA had. In fact the Americans invented the term "White". It was asserted that America had been founded by "White Men" of Anglo-Saxon, (Scotch-Irish-English-Dutch), origin and they were the leading cultural force in America. It was these WASPS who vehemently stood for immegration reform and enforcement on limiting the adsmission of Non-Whites into the country. I won't even start mentioning the segregation policies of the Southern States.

Do most Americans even know that it was their country's history which inspired many of the White-Supremists movements of Europe? All of the various "Nordic-Supremist"movemnents held the American example as the best proof of their beliefs: A continent overrun by superior North-Western Europeans, (of "Nordic" origin), who proceded to treat the native inhabitants like cockroaches to be exterminated and who then proceded to take the land into "Good White Hands", (White Man's Burden), to be cultivated for their benefit, by slaves imported out of Africa.

What better example could the racists White-Supremists of Europe have than US and British history?

Sorry racism had a history that by far predate 1492 so your comment is a little must in my opinion.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism


Middle Ages and RenaissanceFurther information: Limpieza de sangre
In the Middle East and North Africa region, racist opinions were expressed within the works of some of its historians and geographers[75] including Al-Muqaddasi, Al-Jahiz, Al-Masudi, Abu Rayhan Biruni, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn Qutaybah.[76] In the 14th century CE, the Tunisian Ibn Khaldun wrote:

- :"beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings." "Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated."[75][76][77]

Though the Qur'an expresses no racial prejudice, such prejudices later developed among Arabs for a variety of reasons:[73][78] their extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj (East African) and Turkic peoples;[73] and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind.[79] In response to such views, the Afro-Arab author Al-Jahiz, himself of East African descent, wrote a book entitled Superiority Of The Blacks To The Whites,[80] and explained why the Zanj were black in terms of environmental determinism in the "On the Zanj" chapter of The Essays.[81] By the 14th century, a significant number of slaves came from sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the likes of Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388–1446) writing: "It is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals."[82] According to J. Philippe Rushton, Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1,000 years could be summed up as follows:

“ Although the Qur'an stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "Zanj" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.[83] ”


13th century slave market in Yemen. Yemen officially abolished slavery in 1962. In the struggle for emancipation of slaves in the Islamic world, there was double-layered racism that favored the white slaves.[84]It should be noted that ethnic prejudice among some elite Arabs was not limited to darker-skinned black people, but was also directed towards fairer-skinned "ruddy people" (including Persians, Turks, Caucasians and Europeans), while Arabs referred to themselves as "swarthy people".[85] According to Arnold J. Toynbee: "The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue."[86]

Richard E. Nisbett has said that the question of racial superiority may go back at least a thousand years, to the time when the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Hispania, occupying most of the Iberian Peninsula for six centuries, where they founded the advanced civilization of Al-Andalus (711–1492). Al-Andalus coincided with La Convivencia, an era of religious tolerance, and with the Golden age of Jewish culture in Iberia (912, the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III – 1066, Granada massacre).[87] It was followed by a violent Reconquista under the Reyes Catolicos (Catholic Monarchs), Ferdinand V and Isabella I. The Catholic Spaniards then formulated the Cleanliness of blood doctrine. It was during this time in history that the Western concept of aristocratic "blue blood" emerged in a highly racialized and implicitly white supremacist context, as author Robert Lacey explains:

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Sangre azul, blue blood, was thus a euphemism for being a white man—Spain's own particular reminder that the refined footsteps of the aristocracy through history carry the rather less refined spoor of racism.[88]

Following the expulsion of most Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, the remaining Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming "New Christians" which were despised and discriminated by the "Old Christians". An Inquisition was carried out by members of the Dominican Order in order to weed out converts that still practiced Judaism and Islam in secret. The system and ideology of the limpieza de sangre ostracized Christian converts from society, regardless of their actual degree of sincerity in their faith.

In Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christian was only ended through a legal decree issued by the Marquis of Pombal in 1772, almost three centuries after the implementation of the racist discrimination. The limpieza de sangre doctrine was also very common in the colonization of the Americas, where it led to the racial separation of the various peoples in the colonies and created a very intricate list of nomenclature to describe one's precise race and, by consequence, one's place in society. This precise classification was described by Eduardo Galeano in the Open Veins of Latin America (1971). It included, among others terms, mestizo (50% Spaniard and 50% Native American), castizo (75% European and 25% Native American), Spaniard (87.5% European and 12.5% Native American), Mulatto (50% European and 50% African), Albarazado (43.75% Native American, 29.6875% European, and 26.5625% African), etc.

At the end of the Renaissance, the Valladolid debate (1550–1551) concerning the treatment of natives of the "New World" opposed the Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de Las Casas to another Dominican philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter argued that "Indians" were natural slaves because they had no souls, and were therefore beneath humanity. Thus, reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law. To the contrary, Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology. It was one of the many controversy concerning racism, slavery and Eurocentrism that would arise in the following centuries.

Although anti-Semitism has a long European history, related to Christianism (anti-Judaism), racism itself is frequently described as a modern phenomenon. In the view of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the first formulation of racism emerged in the Early Modern period as the "discourse of race struggle", a historical and political discourse, which Foucault opposed to the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty.[89] Foucault thus argued that the first appearance of racism as a social discourse (as opposed to simple xenophobia, which some might argue has existed in all places and times) may be found during the 1688 Glorious Revolution in Great Britain, in Edward Coke or John Lilburne's work.

However, this "discourse of race struggle", as interpreted by Foucault, must be distinguished from the 19th century biological racism, also known as "race science" or "scientific racism". Indeed, this early modern discourse has many points of difference with modern racism. First of all, in this "discourse of race struggle", "race" is not considered a biological notion — which would divide humanity into distinct biological groups — but as a historical notion. Moreover, this discourse is opposed to the sovereign's discourse: it is used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a mean of struggle against the monarchy. This discourse, which first appeared in Great Britain, was then carried on in France by people such as Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then, during the 1789 French Revolution, Sieyès, and afterward Augustin Thierry and Cournot. Boulainvilliers, which created the matrix of such racist discourse in medieval France, conceived the "race" as something closer to the sense of "nation", that is, in his times, the "people".

He conceived France as divided between various nations — the unified nation-state is, of course, here an anachronism — which themselves formed different "races". Boulainvilliers opposed the absolute monarchy, who tried to bypass the aristocracy by establishing a direct relationship to the Third Estate. Thus, he created this theory of the French aristocrats as being the descendants of foreign invaders, whom he called the "Franks", while the Third Estate constituted according to him the autochthonous, vanquished Gallo-Romans, who were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as a consequence of the right of conquest. Early modern racism was opposed to nationalism and the nation-state: the Comte de Montlosier, in exile during the French Revolution, who borrowed Boulainvilliers' discourse on the "Nordic race" as being the French aristocracy that invaded the plebeian "Gauls", thus showed his despise for the Third Estate calling it "this new people born of slaves... mixture of all races and of all times".

While 19th century racism became closely intertwined with nationalism, leading to the ethnic nationalist discourse that identified the "race" to the "folk", leading to such movements as pan-Germanism, Zionism, pan-Turkism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Slavism, medieval racism precisely divided the nation into various non-biological "races", which were thought as the consequences of historical conquests and social conflicts. Michel Foucault traced the genealogy of modern racism to this medieval "historical and political discourse of race struggle". According to him, it divided itself in the 19th century according to two rival lines: on one hand, it was incorporated by racists, biologists and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" (e.g. Nazism). On the other hand, Marxists also seized this discourse founded on the assumption of a political struggle that provided the real engine of history and continued to act underneath the apparent peace. Thus, Marxists transformed the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian. In The Will to Knowledge (1976), Foucault analyzed another opponent of the "race struggle" discourse: Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, which opposed the concepts of "blood heredity", prevalent in the 19th century racist discourse.

One might even extrapolate and say that collectively the German people were "ingrates," since it was many a German-Jewish scientist that assisted Germany in being reknown for its scientific acumen in the 19th century.

In my own opinion, I have heard it said more than once that the German Jews were "more German than Germans," in that they exemplified the qualities that Germans valued. If that is true, perhaps the German people collectively did not want to compete with Jews for their own culture? Perhaps, we saw the old story of kicking over the chess board when one sees that one is losing?

Indeed. And some others were Catholics, others Evangelicals.
Do you think that science in 19th century was a religious thing?

And now you are one of those ingrates, Foofie. You live content with and protect by your silence these small holocausts that go on around the world, the ones perpetrated by successive US governments.

You chastise those you think guilty of failing to speak out for the Jews and yet you fail to speak out for the Vietnamese, the Nicaraguans, the Greeks, the Iranians, the Afghans, the Guatemalans, the Cambodians, the Laotians, the ... .

The people of the US care about the Jews/Israel because they are a geo-political asset. After WWII, the US took in all manner of Nazi war criminal but very few Jews. Why do you think that was?

Sorry, but I think your reply is bit off topic. The subject here is "Hitler: figurehead?"
Hitler was a man of the 19th & 2oth ceturies. If we are going to drift over to the subject of racism in general, who knows how back in history we can go.
The jusbject of discussion of this thread is Hitler.

"One might even extrapolate and say that collectively the German people were "ingrates," since it was many a German-Jewish scientist that assisted Germany in being reknown for its scientific acumen in the 19th century.
In my own opinion, I have heard it said more than once that the German Jews were "more German than Germans," in that they exemplified the qualities that Germans valued. If that is true, perhaps the German people collectively did not want to compete with Jews for their own culture? Perhaps, we saw the old story of kicking over the chess board when one sees that one is losing?"

This is an example of racist hate speach. It seems the only goup of people it is Ok to spew hatred at are the Germans.

Anti-Senitism in European history can be very easily explained:

After Pagan Rome fell to the Barbarians, it rapidly bacame Christianized.
The Christian Roman Empire was ruled over by "Christian Princes" this meant that every ruler in Europe had to prove himself a good Christian in order to legitimize his right to rule. There was little or no democracy. All laws were based upon Christian Authority. At onr time the entire continent of Europe was ruled over by Chatholic rulers. Almost all the land and wealth of Europe was under the control of the Chatholic Church. Since Jews were not Christian, it was impossible for them to be given licences by Christian princes. The mere fact that a subject was not a Christian meant that they did not recognize the authority of the Christian government.

Christian rulers thought it impossible to understand why a Jew would refuse to accept "The sacrafice made for him by the Christ". Jews were given the chance to convert. If they chose not to convert, they were considered seditious and held in suspicion. Is this so hard to comprehend? They deliberatley excluded themselves from "Christian Europe".

As money lenders and bankers they were resented as "usererss" by early Christian authority. Modern Anti-Semitism also has roots the Anti-Capitalism in Europe of the 19th century.

Capitalism eventually prevailed, helped along by both the American & French Revolutions, and today we are blessed to live in modern, free capitalist societies. In America there is a law seperating "Church & State" for good reason.

Throughout European history Jews were abused and mistreated as scapegoats, as we all know.

Today it seems the Germans are in this position

actually, its perfectly fine to get off topic. the really long topics usually do so, and i hope to have one of those.

You chastise those you think guilty of failing to speak out for the Jews and yet you fail to speak out for the Vietnamese, the Nicaraguans, the Greeks, the Iranians, the Afghans, the Guatemalans, the Cambodians, the Laotians, the ... .

In fact you have stated on more than one occasion that the only people you care about are Americans. You have more or less said that what happens to others makes no difference to you.

Many of your compatriots say the same things with their silence.

That is fine with me. It is the interaction between intellects that makes such forums interesting. I, for one, believe in keeping it civil. You will never catch me lowering myself to hatefull speach against any particular group in an attempt to prove a point. Human history is the result of human thinking and human behavior, and nothing more. All respect.

The reason I even mentioned White Supremasism in America and among some British colonial leaders, was to intimate the fact that many of the rasicist salons of 19th century Europe, which had big influence upon Hitler and his sidekicks like Gregor Strassor, were very much influenced by the events which took place in the British colonies and in the United States of America during the time of slavery and the indian wars of the 19th century. I felt you had missed my point.

i probably did.

It is utter bullshit to suggest that the Germans, or anybody else in Europe, needed the example of the British or the Americans to become racists--they already were. What a load crappy apologetics.

Neither Hitler nor Strasser were influenced by any 'salons'.

Actually, I know a little bit about 19th century salons ... could you name some of those "many rasicist" you wrote about above?

What's your source for this nonsense?

What is the source of your information on this point, Walter ?





David

Well, literature about the salons, original sources from and about the salons. Exhibitions about the salons.
(Actually, Jews were the driving force for most salons - there have some good exhibitions about it recently, in Paris and Berlin.)

Hitler's and Strasser's biographies.

I have no idea. What I do believe is that German Jews having the access to education were able to use their collective curiosity about the world of science. German Jews being Reformed Jews were also able to function in a more secular manner, allowing them to function in a manner that the Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe could not that readily, in my opinion.

Your "indeed" above was affirming my comment about "collective ingratitude" I should assume?

Easy question. At that time the value of Jews to America was not part of the popular culture. Many Americans might have still believed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a factual document, rather than a forgery.

But, you continue to believe that you can "assign" to me specific guilt over certain events that you deem reflective of some association with the U.S. You really do not have the moral/ethical authority to do that. In my opinion, you seem to have annointed yourself with a role as the conscience of ordinary citizens? Until I see some rationale for this role, I can only believe you are acting in a manner that I choose to ignore. You see, I know nothing about you. Your age, your education, your background, your ethnicity. I have every reason to question whether you should have the authority to be intrusive in the manner you are.

Perhaps, Germany has earned a negative opinion from Jews? That is not hate speech; that is cause and effect.

Let us not forget that Germany found itself fighting the western powers in two world wars in the 20th century. Entire generations of men in some countries were practically wiped out by this desire to rise above mediocrity.

Would it be "hate speech" to say Germany suffered from delusions of grandeur in the 20th century?

When it comes to hate speech and Germans, it would be more realistic to talk to a non-Jew, since while the Germans were fighting Allied armies, they were also fighting a war of genocide against their own Jewish citizens and effecting a very concerted effort to bring Jews to extinction. That must have been because Germany was experiencing a hiatus from their civilized past, and as a respite were enjoying a bit of barbaric behavior? That is not hate speech; that is just history that is documented.

You shouldn't forget that not only Germany was taking part in WWI, in which more than 120,000 Jews died as patriotic German soldiers (as well as a significant number of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian army) ...