NAZI “NONSENSE”

Thames Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 19606, 11 January 1936, Page 4

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. Fleure, 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 op.” 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 32,768 ancestors living about the time when America was discovered, and over 1,000,000 at the time of tt£ 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 the characteristics found in Great Britain could be matched in Prance, 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 in new directions that are very difficult for some of us to appreciate. Bolshevism, Fascism, and the Nazi momevent 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 pre-his-tory. It suggests that the tall, fair longhead is superior to all other men. In Sweden, his real home, he is admittedly attractive, courteous, able and peaceful at the present time, in many cases. In Germany his charactenistics occur in only a small minority. These is not one of the Nazi leaders that is really Nordic in physique, and we are 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 jve base our idesa on some composite pict:u*e 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 to the main, and Germany’s debt to her non-Nordic and also to her Jewish people is an immense one.”