You are right, they called it Rassenlehre instead, apparently Race Theorie in English, which gave it the veneer of science and was rather fashionable at the time. (West) German Education puts (put post 1968) huge emphasis on discussing / teaching the origins of the Nazi race ideology. Can’t find anything in English to describe it.
Brigitte Hamman’s book Hitler’s Vienna is a very good dissection of the ideological becoming of Hitler. The horrible truth of it is, that Hitler was a product of librual cosmopolitan Vienna a hot bed of progressive thinking (it’s not a coincidence that Jewish Freud and Wittgenstein and many other great thinkers of the era were from Vienna.
The parallels with today and trumps rise from, what feels like the ashes of the Civil Rights Movement, are uncanny. Hitler, it seems, was another one of those little white man, whose hurt feelings about the “unjustified” success of humans he deemed below himself, were compensated by setting the world on fire.
It doesn’t matter if he’s doing for the lulz, because the result is still the same, aligning himself with white supremacist. I’m tired of “FOR THE LULZ” being some sort of excuse for shitty behavior and now shitty policy. He needs to take responsibility for his words, works, and actions.
Ah, how silly of me to forget that the website mentioned above is a verified source of fake news, just like Naked Capitalism and others of their ilk. Nevertheless, your friendly demeanour makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and I am looking forward to more of your intelligent and well-substantiated replies, with sources cited and all that.
I guess that’s the question I mean to ask: was there a German word for “racist” which carried the same inherently negative connotations as the contemporary English word for same, and if so did the Nazis self-identify with that word?
In English it’s usually the “-ist” part that is the sticking point. People may openly support gender-based discriminatory policies but still rarely cop to being “sexist.”
I’m really struggling to understand this line of questioning, I’m afraid. What matters, stated intent or real consequences? And why would we expect the language used then to be the same as what and how we use words now, especially in a different country and context? What @nojaboja refers to in the German (rassentheorie or race theory in the English) was not unique in anyway to Germany, and had wide support in the US - even if they weren’t precisely the same or employed in the same way (the Germans admired Jim Crow structures in the south, for example). Much race theory was developed in general Euro-centric discourses, and at the highest levels was implemented in policy (at the local, state, and national, even one could argue, international level).
As for your mention of the KKK, they don’t use racist because they are trying to not look so bad - the 60s, 20s, and 1860s incarnation would have used more openly white supremacist language, because it was more than acceptable, it was celebrated and supported via public policy. But their aims are still racist in intent and if they can implement them, in action. I think that’s what is key to understand. At the end of the day, does it matter if they state that they are sexist or racist, if the things they do and support have racist and sexist outcomes? I’m not sure it does, frankly.
the question does not make really sense, all “-isms” (same in German with ‘-ismus’) are typically formed to criticise an ideology. afaik the word racism (Rassismus in German) was first used after the racist ideology was more or less defined (e.g. by the Völkische Bewegung in Germany) to have an umbrella term to point out the excesses.
The latter, obviously. I just find the language people use to mask their actions interesting.
If the worst of the diehard racists still refuse to use the word to describe themselves then it implies that even they realize on some level that their views are abhorrent. Which in a way makes them even worse people, not better.
A lot of what they’ve been doing seems to be testing how much they can trust the [heavily militarized] police and police-like forces (DHS, for one) to follow their commands against the lawful orders of other branches of government. They seem to be succeeding in getting the DHS to disobey the hold ordered by the judiciaryas reported by the guardian. We may even see the US Marshals (which are under the justice department) deployed against DHS if they continue to disobey (quoting the court order):
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that to assure compliance with the Court’s order, the Court directs service of this Order upon the United States Marshal for the Eastern District of New York, and further directs the United States Marshal Service to take those actions deemed necessary to enforce the provisions and prohibitions set forth in this Order.
The language might not be the same, but the language used to describe certain people, most notably Jews, was unmistakable. They tend towards positives in public, positives that placed “Aryans” on a higher social plane than other people. There really wasn’t much ambiguity in what they believed regarding race. The language isn’t the same as what we’d use today, but it was certainly true that they believed in and enforced a hierarchy of races.
I think that modern racists mask their language to win people over, much more than the nazis ever had to do. “Identitarian” sounds much nicers than white supremacist. So so white nationalist or Eurocentric.
To emphasise: Although the Nazis might not have used “racist” to describe themselves, they used racist language proudly and loudly e.g. describing sections of the population as Untermenschen i.e. subhuman.
I think in this case (as probably in most cases) the label “racist” is of less relevance then the overall use of language.
In that case, we walk down the line of presidential succession until we find someone who’s still available. The Vice President is next in line, followed by the Speaker of the House. Once the vacancy in the Presidency is filled, the vacancies lower in the line of succession are filled by nomination and confirmation as when Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon after Nixon’s resignation and nominated Nelson Rockefeller as VP.
The United States has never had to go below the level of VP, but often fictional governments have. For example, the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series had an equivalent of this line of succession; Laura Roslin was Secretary of Education, but since all the officials above her perished (she was 43rd in line!) she became President. [I don’t consider this to be a spoiler; it happens in the pilot episode. It’s as much a spoiler as saying the Cylons attacked the Twelve Colonies.]
If the President and Vice President both need to be at an event (like the State of the Union) one person high in the line of succession is deliberately absent.
When you read what some of them wrote, you realise that they were consistent in holding to the doctrines of National Socialism, but clearly they didn’t “believe” them; they knew they were false. Which makes it worse in a way. No excuses for the German generals who complained one moment that the Russians were a rabble of subhuman Untermenschen, and the next that they had superior weapons and trained soldiers, and that Germany must step up its game against them.
The lower ranks, it seems, really did buy into the propaganda, and there are accounts of their shock and disbelief on being made captive - some of them seemed to think that if they ordered their guards to release them, they would.
I never thought that trying to understand this behaviour and these attitudes would be so relevant, but we seem to be seeing them all from Trump and his circle.
