RACIAL SUPERIORITY MYTH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 117, 20 May 1933, Page 8

RACIAL SUPERIORITY MYTH.

The Hitlerite philosophy—if we may apply that name to a boiling medley of imaginings— derives at second-hand from that fallacious book "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" (writes Mr. J. L. Garvin in the "Observer"), By queer irony its author was a born Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who renounced his own country and became the most Wagneresque of German jingoes. To make the irony more Mepliistophelian he- borrowed his ultraGerman doctrines from a Frenchman. The originator, remarkable but then almost forgotten, was Count Gobine&u. Gobineau, nearly half a ccntury before, wrote his speculative treatise on the inequality of races. Writing when the study of ethnology was at a crude stage, he idealised the Frankish element in Gallic composition. He •originated the notion of the bloml superman and of the absolute superiority of the "Nordic" race. These doctrines popularised by Houston Stewart Chamberlain have become hot gospel to the Hitlerites. To them the superiority of the "Nordic" or "Aryan" race means the peculiar superiority of the German race. What is now going on in the Keich is the self-glorification of "Germanism." is a crusade of immeasurable conceit. This inflated psychology is the real danger to and the world. It. is one cause of the persecution of flic. Jews—Jess than 1 per cent of the total population—who are accused of contaminating by their Oriental intrusion the Nordic nobility of God's, Teutons. This is the Swastika fetishism. Amidst all the' self-worshipping exaggerations of nationalism today among peoples great and small, this temporary German mania is the most egregious. The whole theory is rank humbug. We do not know who were the "Aryans." Science knows 110 such tiling as a pure race. Far back, European derivations blend elements from African and Asiatic The darker and fairer types mingle in all European societies. Identity of language does not imply unity of race. * The German people are not' in the least a Nordic creation of blond supermen. They are a mixture of Teutonic, Slav and Celtic strains. It is by 110 means quite certain that'real Teutonic blood preponderates to-day. The contrary is suggested by the more emotional, spectacular and fantastic influences in the Nazi movement.. Hcrr Hitler himself, with all his reiterating oratory, is not a typical Nor<lic man in physique or mentalitv. He is very far front looking or speaking like any of the greater men who have appeared in German history. None of the great intellectual Germans of the past would have recognised their people in these a\ ild The German people, like ourselves, are a very mixed race.