Who Was the ‘Father of Racism’?
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Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816 – 1882), to use his full name and title, has been called the “father of racism,” usually by people who think he was the intellectual precursor to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. For a host of reasons, this is a silly way to think of him, but he does deserve study—both because of his influence as a thinker and for the inherent interest of what he wrote. As Gobineau recognized, many people had written about race before he did—“The idea of an original, clear-cut and permanent inequality among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely held opinions in the world.”—but he was the first to study race seriously as an important force in world history.
Gobineau was a French diplomat, journalist, novelist, Orientalist, and poet as well as a race theorist. He was a confirmed elitist, and was deeply annoyed that his birthday was Bastille Day, the commemoration of what he thought was one of the most shameful movements in French history.
Although anti-racists today try to pigeonhole Gobineau as a “racist” and nothing more, he was a man of considerable parts. He was, for example, a friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, who invited him to collaborate on a history of moral attitudes. They never completed the project, but some 80 letters remain from their correspondence. In fact, Tocqueville had a large role in Gobineau’s career. In 1849, Tocqueville became foreign minister of France, and invited Gobineau to become his private secretary. Tocqueville did not last long at the ministry, but his friend spent the next 30 years as a diplomat, deepening his understanding of the role of race. He had two postings in Iran, and held near-ambassador ranks in Athens, Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm. He was reported to be a man of great charm and an effective diplomat.
Gobineau published his major work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in four volumes, from 1853 to 1855. It did not attract much notice, and only began to influence European thinking 20 years later, after Gobineau became friends with Richard Wagner. The two men died within a few months of each other, and the Wagner/Bayreuth movement promoted Gobineau along with Wagner. The Nazis later adopted Gobineau as one of their own—thereby considerably damaging his reputation—but as we will see, it was only with considerable distortion that Gobineau could be claimed as an early National Socialist.
Gobineau begins his famous essay by explaining how he discovered the importance of race. He wanted to know why civilizations die, and found all previous explanations inadequate. Bad governments, he decided, do not kill off civilizations because bad government is everywhere: “Thank heaven they [the people] have the power of soon becoming accustomed to their sufferings.” Decadence and effeminacy are not the cause because some nations “have lived and grown fat on it.” Nor does loss of faith in a society’s gods explain collapse because some civilizations have died during times of religious fanaticism.
These studies led to what is Gobineau’s most quoted insight:
“I was gradually penetrated by the conviction that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all … Everyone must have had some inkling of this colossal truth, for everyone must have seen how certain agglomerations of men have descended on some country, and utterly transformed its way of life …” The rest of the essay is an extensive elaboration on this insight.
How Races Differ
Gobineau divided all men into three races: black, white, and yellow. Although he put whites at the top, his orderings have a strange resemblance to Philippe Rushton’s well-known findings that blacks and Asians are at the extremes on many traits, with whites somewhere in between.
Blacks, wrote Gobineau, are dull-witted and have strong, crude feelings. They do not care what they eat, since they consider all food good. The “prognathous Negro” (a phrase Gobineau liked—“prognathous” means having a jaw that juts forward) is at the same time capricious in his feelings, and “kills willingly, for the sake of killing.” Blacks are incapable of civilization: “Ages have passed without their doing anything to improve their conditions.”
Gobineau describes the yellow race as “the exact opposite” of the black:
“[H]e commits none of the strange excesses common among Negroes. His desires are feeble, his will-power rather obstinate than violent; his longing for material pleasures, though constant, is kept within bounds. A rare glutton by nature, he shows far more discrimination in his choice of food.”
The Asian has a respect for order but “he does not dream or theorize; he invents little, but can appreciate and take over what is useful to him.” Gobineau says the yellow races are the perfect middle class; one could not have better, more useful masses. However, he writes, “no civilized society could be created by them; they could not supply its nerve force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action.”
It is whites who build civilizations because of their “love of liberty” and their restless will to create and govern. They have an “extraordinary attachment to life. They know how to use it and so, it would seem, set a greater price on it …” Gobineau believed whites are more sparing of the lives of others. “When they are cruel, they are conscious of their cruelty; it is very doubtful whether such a consciousness exists in the Negro.”
Gobineau believed that whites are uniquely preoccupied with honor, and are the only race that shows true physical beauty. They are also the source of all civilization: “[E]verything great, noble and fruitful in the works of man on this earth … belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe.” Gobineau claimed that even Chinese civilization arose when whites migrated east from India. For him, the category that cannot rise above the primitive stage “includes the vast majority of the pure-blooded yellow and black races.”
As was common in his time, Gobineau saw sharp differences even among national groups of the same race; he believed that the Napoleonic wars showed that the French are physically tougher than Germans and other Europeans. Seventy years later, however, the Nazis were pleased to find that Gobineau often referred to the civilizing people as “Germanic” or “Aryan.”
Although he wrote in terms that today sound harsh, Gobineau was not dismissive of any race, noting that some individual blacks are more intelligent than European peasants or even average townspeople. He even criticized anthropologists for criticizing blacks unfairly. However, in the essay, he cared only about a race’s ability to build a civilization. Individuals could be exceptions to the general rules that applied to races, but it was races, not individuals, who built and destroyed civilizations.
Gobineau could be sarcastic about anyone who doubted race differences:
“So the brain of the Huron Indian contains in an undeveloped form an intellect which is absolutely the same as that of the Englishman or the Frenchman! Why then, in the course of the ages, has he not invented printing or steam power? … [How can one explain] why his bards and sorcerers have, in some inexplicable way, neglected to become Homers and Galens.”
At least in his writing, Gobineau seems to have been an orthodox churchman. He wrote about “the hand of God” that directs human affairs, and argued that all races have the capacity to accept Christianity. This changes nothing, however, because when Eskimos, for example, convert to Christianity they are still left “eating whale-blubber.”
Gobineau wrote before Darwin, and he found it hard to reconcile racial differences with the Biblical creation. If men had been on earth for only a few thousand years and all were descended from Adam, how did they separate into such clearly distinct races? He considered the possibility that Adam was the ancestor only of whites, but finally concluded that unless we are to doubt the Biblical account, the origins of races must remain a mystery.
Somewhat paradoxically, he believed that the races existing today were the result of ancient mixtures, some of which had actually been improvements. He thought, for example, that today’s whites, whether European or Middle Eastern, were considerably different from the original white race of “Aryans” or “Germanics.” He even wrote: “Viewed abstractly, the white race has disappeared from the face of the earth.”
Although some past racial mixtures had been beneficial, he looked with horror on further mixture, which, he was convinced, would destroy whites and denature other races. He feared that miscegenation would eventually go so far that all people would resemble each other, and that “their general level will be revoltingly low.”
Sometimes he seemed to despair of human beings, wondering whether social insects like ants or bees are not happier. They live entirely by instinct, but all their instincts are good and useful to them.
Conquest and Decline
Gobineau applied his theory of racial differences to the problem with which he began the book: Why do civilizations rise and fall? Racial differences have ordained forever that only a few groups have the capacity to lift themselves from the primitive tribal stage. These dynamic Aryan groups then conquer and dominate their neighbors. This, however, is their downfall, because empire-building brings the conquering races into contact with people who do not have the same abilities, and mixture leads to degeneracy: “From the very day when the conquest is accomplished and the fusion begins, there appears a noticeable change of quality in the blood of the masters.” Gobineau even had a theory of immigration: Civilizing races build cities that attract inferiors from distant realms who then drag down that civilization.
As he often did, however, Gobineau made room for inconsistencies; some mixing can be good. He wrote that when races are pure, they stick to their original, governing principles until expansion leads to mixing. “Such change,” however, “will sometimes mean real progress, especially in the dawn of a civilization, when the governing principle is usually rigid and absolute, owing to the exclusive predominance of some single race. Later, the tinkering will become incessant …”
Gobineau thought civilization cannot be transmitted to people who cannot create it. This, he explains, is why European culture could come to the New World only in the form of massive migrations of Europeans that left the natives untouched. Gobineau believed that the Indians of Spanish America were better off than those of North America because the Spaniards left them to live as they always had. He sharply criticized Americans for meddling with both blacks and Indians. Enslavement and displacement were cruel, and any attempt to civilize non-whites would only confuse and distress them.
Gobineau thought that some portion of civilization could be transmitted between closely-related groups but that “the civilizations that proceed from two completely foreign races can only touch on the surface. They never coalesce …”
Gobineau is perhaps at his most eloquent when he describes how civilizations decay:
“[W]hile the blood of the civilizing race is gradually drained away by being parceled out among the peoples that are conquered or annexed, the impulse originally given to these peoples still persists. The institutions which the dead master had invented, the laws he had prescribed, the customs he had initiated—all these live after him. No doubt the customs, laws and institutions have quite forgotten the spirit that informed their youth; they survived in dishonoured old age, every day more sapless and rotten. But so long as even their shadows remain, the building stands, the body seems to have a soul, the pale ghost walks.”
“Societies perish because they are degenerate,” he wrote: “[T]he people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of the blood.” By this time, “the degenerate man, properly so called, is a different being, from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages … He is only a very distant kinsman of those he still calls his ancestors.”
In this context, Gobineau touched on the inevitable decline of the United States. He approved of the original British stock of the founders, but disliked what came later. Like the American Nordicists, he believed that “Irish, cross-bred Germans and French, and Italians of even more doubtful stock … will inevitably give birth to further ethnic chaos.” When this mix was combined with blacks, Indians, and whatever other flotsam might drift into America, “it is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such a horrible confusion but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people …” Civilization was therefore doomed in the United States even before the Civil War!
Gobineau is remarkable in his utter pessimism. He offered no political program, believing that degeneracy was inevitable. Well before Spengler, he saw civilizations almost as organic creatures, with fixed life and death cycles. No individual, not even an entire nation, could change the destiny of its race. He predicted that all people would sink to the lowest level and be “like the buffalo grazing,” with no idea of their own degeneracy: “Perhaps they will think themselves the wisest and cleverest beings that ever existed.” In what could be considered his epitaph for the species, he wrote: “What is truly sad is not death itself but the certainty of our meeting it as degraded beings.”
Besides its great, central theme of civilizational decay, the essay offers many other related observations. For example, because individuals differ as much in their abilities as races, Gobineau believed European civilization was a veneer. “The lower strata of the French people … form an abyss over which civilization is suspended,” he wrote. No other European country was any better, because so many whites were complete strangers to their own culture.
Gobineau thought Asians were different. They might not be an inventive race, but even the lower orders were immersed in and understood their civilization:
“If in China everyone or nearly everyone, has reached a certain level of knowledge, the same is the case among the Hindus. Each man, according to his caste, shares in a spirit that has lasted for ages, and knows exactly what he ought to learn, think and believe … Everyone has similar convictions on the important matters of life.”
Gobineau’s admiration for the caste system and contempt for “the lower strata of the French people” were consistent with his uncompromising elitism. He believed that no society could be stable or harmonious without hierarchy. Socialism was, for him, the most revolting denial of human differences.
The “Father of Racism”?
It is not difficult to see how uncongenial Gobineau would have been to National Socialism. To the extent that it was socialist, he would have despised it. He would also have been baffled by its optimism, its assumption that a political movement could save a nation or race. He would have warned against any form of conquest or expansion as leading inevitably to mixture and decline.
Finally, he would have disagreed on the subject of Jews. He cited them as the best refutation of the view that geography or climate influence achievement, pointing out that Jews have succeeded everywhere they have gone. He saw their dispersal from the land of Israel as a tragedy for them but a gain for others: “I repeat, it was a people capable in all that it undertook, a free people, a strong people, an intelligent people. When, with their arms still in their hands, they lost bravely the position of an independent nation, they furnished the world almost as many learned men as merchants.”
Popular Nazi portrayals of Gobineau were necessarily selective.
What drew Nazis to the essay was no doubt the same things that make the anti-racists so afraid of him. It was not that he laughed at egalitarianism and ranked the races in strict hierarchy. As Gobineau himself noted, people have always done that. As if in confirmation, a professor at the University of Tel Aviv named Benjamin Isaac even published a 560-page book in 2004 called The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Hume and Kant wrote scathingly about blacks well before Gobineau. Practically all the American founders were white supremacists, and men like Josiah Nott and Hinton Rowan Helper wrote detailed accounts of black/white racial differences.
Gobineau differed from these men in his careful attempt to trace how race unfolds in history. He got many things wrong—some comically so by today’s standards—but his clear understanding of inherent racial differences and their importance in all human outcomes makes him not the father of racism but the founder of race realism.
(Posted on December 28, 2007)
Comments
Arthur de Gobineau appears to have been one of those rare people in history who not only saw things with a stark clarity, as they really are, but also predicted accurately things which he said would happen many years hence.
It is easy to see why the racial liberals hate Gobineau and have dubbed him “Father of Racism.” His statements about the various races are unemotional and on-the-money accurate. You can see the traits he describes in people of the three races even today. But of course the very idea of races, let alone inherent differences among them, is anathema to the leftists.
Posted by Wayne Engle at 7:34 PM on December 28
Darwin was also a favorite of the National Socialists. Yet, the left never agnowleges this.
Posted by BadMonkey at 11:20 PM on December 28
It’s amazing that a subject that formerly received such intelligent and educated attention has been wiped off of the intellectual map by—by whom? By what? Exactly how did it happen? I’ve heard that Franz Boaz said, “Let there be racial equality,” and it was so, and Boaz looked upon his work and was well satisfied.
I guess I have to start reading Kevin MacDonald’s works (instead of just hearing about them) to begin to get at least one of the handles (I assume there must be more than just one) on how this happened.
There’s almost no comments posted to this fascinating article—I assume that is because even many readers like myself who took some few history courses never even heard of this fascinating gentleman!
I assume college history departments still have courses in “intellectual history.” Nothing could be a more important topic for such a course than the change in the consciousness of the world’s most dynamic race from a belief that races differed inherently and dramatically to a belief that races do not differ substantially at all, and the very dramatic changes in our race and society that this change in belief has permitted.
I wonder if this is a theme that is ever studied in today’s courses in “intellectual history,” and if some distorted vestige of white racial pride lingers in what I presume must be the prideful celebration by such courses of the multi-culti, integrationist horrors that this change in belief has brought us.
Posted by H. Dumpty at 6:45 AM on December 29
“He thought, for example, that today’s whites, whether European or Middle Eastern, were considerably different from the original white race of “Aryans” or “Germanics.””
For ##!”#”#”# sake, middle eastern or north african people are not white. They are semites and descend from people who’s evolutionary path diverged from whites for over 20 000 years ago. While the minds of protowhites where forged in the brutal environment of an ice age tundra where those too feeble and clueless died young, they on the other hand spent their ice age time as pastoral herders in a comfortable and quite lush temperate climate.
There are no origial aryans left because they have evolved over the last 3500 years. You can find their straight-down descendants around the baltic and the north sea coasts.
Posted by Information Insurgent at 9:00 AM on December 29
Before those in power PERVERTED our language and dictionary the definition of RACIST was one who felt their race was above another WITHOUT PROOF …. WITHOUT PROOF are the key words here.
How much more PROOF does the world need?
Posted by BOXXER at 10:55 AM on December 29
Interesting read. For a more modern perspective, one may read
“Understanding Human History” by Michael Hart.
I think Gobineau underestimates East Asians, and I disagree with
the notion that Asians don’t show physical beauty.
His opposition to miscegenation seems odd too, but given the era
he wrote in, understandable. One could imagine that if he held
white behavior in such high esteem, that he’d see that mixing
a certain amount of Black or White into Asian could create a new
breed without the deficiencies of the parent.
Perhaps the best thing for Africa would be if their future Chinese overlords have a policy of Sinification of Africa. China
has a surplus of men, while I know that Asian man/African woman
pairings are sparse in the USA, Chinese wealth might change that
proposition in Africa.
Posted by at 3:36 PM on December 29
I know I am not a racist…but I hate people who think they are going to push me around just because I am white…so what does that make me….someone who refuses to cater to any person because they are either male or some other color…call me independent and smart!!
Posted by lydia at 10:32 PM on December 29
When Gobineau writes the lower strata of the french are as an abyss, this explains to me why other races could lift the whites, but it also introduces more problems than it solves. Overall things were better IMO when whites had their own societies. We can only hope to revert to pure white societies and have white janitors. Now who will volunteer to be the janitor?
Posted by Lars at 10:48 PM on December 29
Remember that he was writing when these views were socially tolerable. He was an intellectual; and a promulgator of all of the idiotic theorizing that comes with those types of people. If he were living today he would probably be a women’s studies professor. We should stick to the modern genetic and psychometric science for our intellectual base, and cut loose from these mystic social-theorists.
Posted by at 5:53 AM on December 30
Re. …”a policy of Sinification of Africa. China
has a surplus of men, while I know that Asian man/African woman
pairings are sparse in the USA, Chinese wealth might change that
proposition in Africa.”
Posted by at 3:36 PM
One can already see that mixture in the Caribbean, in places like Jamaica and Cuba where there was a significant immigration of Chinese laborers(evidently males only). An example of this is the (Cuban) former lover of the BNP ballerina.
(I believe that most of the Chinese in Jamaica were killed or diven out in rioting there that happened after independence. I was told this by a former Jamaican policeman whom I knew, and I’ve read of it too. So there may not be many Chinese or their descendents left there today. There was also a large and significant Jewish community in Jamaica, at one time, now virtually all gone. Evidentally, independence was not good for these non-black minorities! While Independence Day is celebrated enthusiastically in former colonies from Jamaica to Uganda, for many it was actually a disaster and a curse.)
Posted by browser at 8:54 AM on December 30
“He thought, for example, that today’s whites, whether European or Middle Eastern, were considerably different from the original white race of “Aryans” or “Germanics.””
For #!”#”# sake, middle eastern or north african people are not white. They are semites…..
There are no origial aryans left … You can find their straight-down descendants around the baltic and the north sea coasts.
Posted by Information Insurgent
……………………………………….
Gobineau (whom I have read) was not referring to North Africans or necessarily to what we think of today as “Middle Easterners” (when we really mean the Near East, not Middle East). Gobineau was posted as a diplomat in Persia, now called Iran. To my recollection, he had no experience with North Africa. Iranians (taking their name from “Aryans”) are not Semites; they are Indo-Europeans. [Nietsche’s Zarathustra was such a character, an ancient Aryan, no doubt inspired by Gobineau.]
You and Gobineau have no quarrel. His postulate was that the present descendents of long-ago conquerors are so diluted from the original stock (inter-mixed with the conquered) as to be merely a dim memory of their ancient ancestors, though they still retain the names and the language. Look at Mexico. Look at India. Look at the Dominican Republic.
The same will be said of France in another two centuries, if it continues on its present course of Africanization and mongrelization. The inhabitants of that place may still call themselves “French”, but they won’t be anything like what we historically know as Frenchmen. I understand that all French history books start (or at least once did) with the opening sentence: ” Nos ancêtres, les gaulois” — Our ancestors, the Gauls….. This must be bizarre in a classroom filled with Algerians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Lebanese, Romanians, Armenians, and all the many other nationalities that France has absorbed in the past half century. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there has been pressure to have the sentence changed. To have to study about St. Louis of France, the Crusader King, must be very “offensive” to a Moslem from Lebanon.) [As an aside, this is what Lindbergh’s plane, “The Spirit of St. Louis” was alluding to. He was not referring to the city, as most Americans would assume. He was referring to the spirit of the warrior king.]
Gobineau would be appalled at this racial mix. He maintained that America would see nothing new (through its melting pot) that Europe had not already seen many times before. He was referring to the intermingling of European types in the 1800s (much less non-European races), and was even against mixing types from the different parts of France. I recall he was quite critical of the French even then and - though a Frenchman - was full of praise and admiration for the English (as they THEN were, of course), praising the English sense of tradition, stability, and value of individual merit; he also had high praise for the Germans. He felt his own people, the French, were too flighty and fickle, obsessed with trying novel notions and having little respect for tradition. He drew a line through the middle of France, at about the Loire River, and contended that all progress and creativity in modern France came from north of that line, and virtually nothing from south of it, the descendents of the original Franks having trickled down to almost none among the local population.
Incidentally, solely the Basque language survives in Europe as a pre-Aryan remnant from before the Aryan, Celtic, and Roman conquests. But linguistic analysis suggests that the Aryan language was IMPOSED upon the Scandinavians (early Germans of the Baltic region) as a conqueror’s language, not their own, and that they fled to (what is now) Sweden to escape the turmoil on the continent. This, of course, is speculation, not certainty. The inhabitants of The British Isles, prior to the Celtic invasion, were probably also speaking a pre-Aryan language or languages, possibly somewhat akin to Basque. This was something touched on, here on Amren, only several months ago.
I bought Gobineau’s book (now lost), a compilation of his writings, many years ago, an edition printed in Switzerland — as it was even then (like all his works) banned in France. This was clearly stated inside the cover, in red — that its sale or possession was illegal in France. I suppose Gobineau has been completely outlawed there since 1945. While he is deliberately forgotten and made a non-person in his own country, he is remembered abroad. We aren’t too much better really; we have done the same with Ezra Pound … known abroad as the American Shakespeare, but suppressed and forgotten here.
Posted by ghw at 12:00 PM on December 30
Gobineau seems as if he thinks race determines society. Wilmont Robertson, in his work ‘The disspossessed majority’ seems to hint that it’s not race, but racial-consciousness that influences the rise and fall of nations. I know I’ve called Robertson an apologist for the status quo. Seemed like he spent a lot of time asserting in a back handed way how all the minority special interests groups are a reasonable thing. It doesn’t take a lot of moral effort to say, ‘gee, those whites should have their own special interest groups too’, when making such a claim is irrelevant because whites don’t have these influential groups, for all practicle purposes.
Posted by LHathaway at 4:35 PM on December 30
Intelligent planners will cull from this thinker and others like him, the time proven ideas, while not discarding what appear to be his mistakes. Times change the perception.
Only those doomed to repeat other’s mistakes discard all previous knowledges.
Posted by Whiteplight at 4:49 PM on December 30
I remember reading somewhere that when the chinese were imported to make some railway or the other in some place or the other in africa (probably Tanzania, but I read it long ago). They boasted that even though they were there for 10 years - they left behind not one mixed race child.
Chinese look upon africans (justifiably imo) as barbarians.
While there may be isolated incidents of race mixing between those two races, it will be a very slow and reluctant procedure from the E.Asian point of view.
Posted by TheGreatBeyond at 5:53 PM on December 30
An insightful man whom I must agree with on the issue of the inevitable decline of civilizations.
However his elitist beliefs about the “cross bred” Irish and Germans and so forth is so far from the truth.
The French and English have to be some of the most “cross bred” Europeans around. I believe haplogroup testing has proven this.
I am English-German. Both sides were I guess what Gobineau would have considered lesser stock peasantry, but my how history (and my family) has proven him wrong.
The elite in the West still hold these same repugnant views about those outside of their families to this day. How ignorant and selfish to blame one’s success on genetics when you are born with the resources to education and economic capital to attain that success.
De Gobineau is no different than the majority of the politicians who govern Western countries today.
Posted by at 8:31 PM on December 30
“De Gobineau is no different than the majority of the politicians who govern Western countries today.”
Posted by at 8:31 PM
That has to be one of the most colossal mis-statements I have ever seen here. Would that we had even one politician half-way as racially aware as Gobineau!
Posted by voter at 10:17 PM on December 30
” But linguistic analysis suggests that the Aryan language was IMPOSED upon the Scandinavians (early Germans of the Baltic region) as a conqueror’s language, not their own, and that they fled to (what is now) Sweden to escape the turmoil on the continent. This, of course, is speculation, not certainty.”
I know that historicans speculate that long ago the language of scandianvia was finnish - but I dont think the change came about as a result of conquest. There werent anything to conquest in the classical sense. Scandinavia 3000 years ago was a sparsely populated wasteland filled with bears and wolfs. A more mundane explanation would be that the germanic speaking coast people - farmers and fishers - simply absorbed and displaced the finnish speaking hunters and trappers by growing their population faster than them over the centuries. IIRC theres some evidence of cultural melding - the two sunpulling horses Skuggfaxe and Rimfaxe of norse religion are possible remnants of the old pre indo european sun worshipping religion melded into the new god based religion. Skade and Skand are two other semigods that could be remains of a pre indo european religion. All IMHO of course.
Posted by Information Insurgent at 1:07 AM on December 31
“He was an intellectual; and a promulgator of all of the idiotic theorizing that comes with those types of people. If he were living today he would probably be a women’s studies professor.”
I was thinking the exact same thing, Nazi or not. He sounds a lot like the top racialists today. The difference being that here Gobineau is promoting the white race instead of the Hispanic, Black, or Asian race or whatever is prevelant now.
Posted by at 8:35 AM on December 31
“We aren’t too much better really; we have done the same with Ezra Pound … known abroad as the American Shakespeare, but suppressed and forgotten here.”
Just try writing a thesis on Pound in any American University, and see what kind of mark you get! You may flunk the entire course, and you’ll probably be sent for counselling.
Posted by at 10:48 AM on December 31
I have several Chinese friends in the import business. For better or ill, Chinese do not look at African people as barbarians, they look at them as animals, and have told me so. From where I stand, Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups seem to be the most racist people on earth.
Posted by Joel at 10:39 PM on December 31
“Chinese do not look at African people as barbarians, they look at them as animals, and have told me so.”
Inhabitants of the Celestial Kingdom have traditionally looked upon Westerners as “barbarians”, possessing gadgets but lacking in “virtue”. Black Africans are something else, something worse, having neither gadgets nor virtue. Thus, Westerners occupy the middle ground between savagery and virtue, in the Chinese view of things.
“From where I stand, Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups seem to be the most racist people on earth.”
Posted by Joel
They are just more racially self-aware, that’s all. And unashamedly so …. something that we have been taught to feel guilty about, while they have not. The Western scare-word - “racist” - has not reached them to intimidate them into self-censorship as it does here with such effectiveness.
Posted by browser at 12:17 PM on January 1
“For better or ill, Chinese do not look at African people as barbarians, they look at them as animals, and have told me so. From where I stand, Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups seem to be the most racist people on earth.”
Well, look at this from the Blacks’ standpoint. Since Asians tend to be of smaller stature and bulk compared to the Africans, they are looked upon as PREY to be attacked and consumed. Chinese understand this and react accordingly for reasons of self-preservation.
Posted by at 12:19 PM on January 1
“Since Asians tend to be of smaller stature and bulk compared to the Africans, they are looked upon as PREY to be attacked and consumed. Chinese understand this and react accordingly for reasons of self-preservation. “
Posted by at 12:19 PM
………………………………………….
You probably didn’t intend it to be taken literally when writing the above, but there is much truth in your remark about the Chinese being “attacked and consumed, as prey.”
I had, some years ago, a remarkable book written by a French naval physician under the alias of “Dr. Jacobus”. It was an amazing piece of anthropological observation from a world now vanished. This doctor had traveled and served around the world, in the mid-to-late 1800’s, and wrote about his many varied experiences among many peoples.
He had served in New Caledonia — a large French island near Australia, rich in nickel and chrome deposits, which was also a French penal colony. [The crew of the American ship, “Cutter”, had been eaten by the islanders in 1849. In the subsequent outrage over this, the island was occupied by the French navy and made a possession of France in 1853 by Napoleon III, who turned it into a penal colony on the pattern of Australia, and sent 22,000 French convicts.]
I recall him saying that the Chinese coolies who worked in the mines there and in Australia were terrified of the Melanesians and Aborigines (then still cannibals) because Chinese flesh was greatly admired by them …. for culinary purposes, I mean. I don’t know whether it was myth or fact, but it allegedly had something to do with the lack of salt in the Chinese diet which made their meat sweeter or more tender. It seems that Europeans were less desired by comparison because salt (plus rum and gin) had made their meat tougher. And yes, a number of Chinese coolies had disappeared.
Posted by ghw at 8:18 PM on January 1