Thursday, December 18, 2008



Is racism the ultimate evil?

From the way Leftists talk, one would certainly get the impression that racism is the ultimate evil. In the 2008 Presidential campaign, an amazing number of utterances by Obama foes were twisted out of all recognition in an attempt to portray them as racist.

I would argue that things like dishonesty, lack of reality contact and emotionalism are far more detrimental to overall human welfare but, judging by their own most usual method of argument, Leftists are quite comfortable with such phenomena.

Leftists normally justify their paranoia about racism by referring to Hitler. They say that Hitler's treatment of the Jews shows just how evil racism is. But Jews are not a race! It is only your religious heritage that makes you a Jew. Judging by the number of blue-eyed Jews around, Jews are in fact quite mixed racially.

So Hitler's deeds cannot be put down to racism. They could however be seen as an example of religious bigotry and are thus yet another example of how destructive religious bigotry can be. And who are the main religious bigots today? Muslims and Leftists. The furious hatred that Leftists pour out on Christianity is quite virulent religious bigotry. So, as in other ways, it is Leftists, not racists who are Hitler's real heirs.

Even the well-known claim by Hitler that Germans are a Herrenvolk can only be portrayed as racist by mistranslation. It is commonly translated as "master race" but that is not what it means at all. The German word for race is Rasse and if Hitler had meant "Master race", he would have said Herrenrasse. But he didn't. Volk means "people" and is related to the English word "folk". So Hitler was quite clearly referring to a "Master people", not a master race.

And note that in the old Communist East Germany, they used Volk a lot. East German products used all to bear the brand "VEB", which stands for Volkseigenebetrieb, or "people's own enterprise". So were the Communist East Germans racist? Were they portraying their products as coming from the East German race? I think the answer is obvious to anybody but a Leftist intellectual.

Ultimately, the Jews were simply convenient to Hitler -- a group on whom all problems could traditionally be blamed: A scapegoat. His treatment of them was politically useful, not an outcome of racism. He treated many groups harshly, including clearly religious groups. One instance of that was Jehovah's Witnesses, then known in Germany as Ernste Bibelforscher. Because they refused to be conscripted into Germany's armed forces, they too went to the concentration camps.

I have said more about these matters on DISSECTING LEFTISM recently.

Update:

Trying to be accurate has its perils. I gather that some have seen what I said above as a defence of Hitler. Nothing I said above does that. I said that Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat, which is far and away the most common summary of his actions. By noting that his savagery extended to all sorts of groups, I think I have in fact shown that he was worse than a racist. The entire nation of Britain was racist in the 19th century. They thought that to be born British was to be born superior. Yet they did nothing remotely resembling what Hitler did. They in fact made a Jew their Prime Minister.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

While the term Jew has become used as a term for a religion, it hs also a generic term for the Israeli people. It was originally a slang for the people of the tribe of Judah, which makes up most of the nation of Israel. There is a small portion that is of the tribe of Benjamin, but all the others were scattered.

As for Hitler being a racists, he was a staunch evolutionist and believed that the "Jews" were a less evolved species that needed to be wiped out.

To add my opinion, I really hate it when people throw around racist. They think only white people can be a racist. I'm a white male and when I went to college in Texas, I was prejudiced against because of it. I was in the vast minority, but when I opened my mouth to say something about it, I was ridiculed and told I don't know what I'm talking about.

Anonymous said...

Very well said JJR. Leftists, most of whom are jews, are always quick to call Hitler a racist because he killed so many of their people. And, as you so eloquently point out, Hitler's killing rampage had nothing to do with race.

Isn't it odd though, how those same leftist jews never mention Stalin, who killed "far more" of their people than did Hitler! Hmmm, i wonder why that is.

Anonymous said...

Don't forge the Volkswagon!

Anonymous said...

"Don't forge the Volkswagon!"

By this defintion a volkswagan is a race car.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous at 4:13am, no, I'll stick to the three named from dictionary.com. The ones you so blythuly entered do not hvae to be Jews to be marxists etc. etal.