NAZI "NONSENSE."

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 56, Issue 72, 7 January 1936, Page 8

NAZI "NONSENSE."

THE NORDIC MYTH. MODERN RACIALISM. "Though nearly all the peoples of Europe and the immediately surrounding lands have features of face, skin, and hair that mark them off from all other peoples, except those who have spread from Europe to America, Australia and similar countries," said Professor H. J. Flcure, at a meeting of the Manchester branch of the Geographical Association, "no one people in Europe is distinct from its neighbours. To talk of a British race, a German race, or a Latin race is nonsense unless we really think we are working towards a sort of average that will describe us all in the future. There is no sign of this. Tall and short, fair and dark, longheads and broadheads, have existed side by side for ages, and they are likely to go on." Mendel's interpretation of heredity showed how this came to be, the speaker went on. They inherited the same strain many, many times in their ancestry, for if all their forbears were different each of them would have had 32,708 ancestors living about the time when America was discovered, and over 1,000,000,000 at the time of the Norman Conquest. No wonder that some ancestral traits maintained themselves generation after generation. They were not homogeneous as nations or peoples in physical inheritance, and nearly all characteristics found in Great Britain could bo matched in France, and most of them also in Germany. Some features, such as very broad'heads would be much more widespread in France and Germany than among us, and the French would include many more real brunettes.

Criticism of Churches. "The modern racialism comes, partly at least, from the failure of the churches to maintain the supply of racial motive power," Professor Fleure declared . "Men are social. They must, therefore, have such a supply and they are seeking it hi new that are very difficult for some of us to appreciate. Bolshevism, Fascism and the Nazi movement are all new religions with an attempt to create myths to draw interest. "The Nordic myth suggests that the Baltic was the cradle of much of our European civilisation—a view repudiated by every reasonable student of pro-history. It suggests that the tall fair longhead is superior to all other men. In. Sweden, his real home, lie is admittedly attractive, courteous, able, and peaceful at the present time, in many cases. In Germany his characteristics occur in only a small minority. There is not one of the Nazi leaders that is really Nordic in physique, and we are now treated to nonsense about Nordic souls in non-Nordic bodies, "No doubt we may say that the body does not determine the soul; but who shall say what is a Nordic soul? Should we base our idea on some composite picture of twenty of the best men with the requisite physical characters in Sweden, or of a group of S.S. men in Germany—if we could find enough, which I doubt. Beethoven, Leibnitz, Kant, Luther, Bismarck were all non-Nordic in the main, and Germany's debt to her non-Nordic and also to'her Jewish people is an immense one."