I don’t know how you feel right now, but I feel like the racist lunatic fringe of conspiracy theorists and kooks have somehow broken out of the asylum, found a way onto the command deck, and taken control of the great big nuclear aircraft carrier that is the USA.
This is not what I wanted to write about, today. But I was responding to a comment by Underground Secret Agent of Influence Pierce R. Butler [stderr] regarding the origin of Hitler’s racism. I tried to, respectfully and carefully, dig up a few shovelfuls of dirt but my shovel hit something that released a Lovecraftian cloud of foetid stink. I wish to explore some of it.
First off, my thesis, which I have explained well enough elsewhere [stderr] is that American pseudoscience post-Darwin, deployed in order to explain slavery, is the evil root of scientific racism worldwide. Pierce, with all good intentions, tried to also throw Lutheranism and other bullshit under the bus, but the particular strain of racism that came down to trying to support it with Psychology and IQ Tests and national racial quotas – that came from nowhere, but the US. If you have read “The Mismeasure of Man” by Stephen Jay Gould, you need to look for what he is dancing around: a massive edifice of pseudo-science, made in America, that attempted to link Darwin’s theories to justify racism. I know that sounds like a bold charge, but you really need to understand this, it is important. Even today, IQ tests are being used to decide which students are allowed into more exclusive and well-funded schools in the US. Since school funding is drawn from the local tax-base that means that good schools are schools in more affluent white neighborhoods, and the IQ tests are a subtle barrier to help keep the schools segregated. It’s all so fucking scientific /spit. What the hell else do you think is behind MAGA’s focus on destroying public education? They want to demolish it so they can replace it with entrance-controlled parochial schools that are a) segregated b) religious c) ignorant. The current focus on that axis is because the right wing has recently been noticing that they have lost control over the college admissions process, which served as a racial selection gateway for employment (“Must have a masters’ in ….” to apply for job) and is now breaking down. They’re pushing on all fronts, and they’re willing to spend vast public fortunes, but they are following a very basic republican strategy:
1) gain control over something
2) fuck it to death
3) declare that “big government” can’t do ${whatever it is that they just fucked to death}
4) replace it with something that is backdoor’d, racist, or religious – and above all expensive
5) loudly declare the problem solved
As a good summary, I recommend: [The link between american and nazi eugenics] which I think is a good starting-point. You don’t need to be a Peenemunde rocket scientist to figure out the link between eugenics and racial purification, so you can start with Shaun Williamson’s excellent summary.
The thing you need to realize is that these crazy shitbugs believe in this stuff the same way their capitalist friends believe in trickle down economics. They believe the claptrap that Madison Grant and scientific racists are shoveling. They probably believe Stephen Pinker and Yuval Harari, too. There is always a bookshelf full of thoughts from the servants of power, singing sweet music to the choir. In the course of replying to Pierce I followed some links to find a non 1st-edition copy of Grant (what, you don’t have a whole shelf of published racist lore?) which I encourage you to look at and review, [here] The parts that made my blood run cold were the products of the US education system:
Reviewer: WhiteAngloSaxonProtestant – favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite – January 3, 2025
Subject: White Anglo Saxon Protestant
This is a Good book and I’m glad I came across it, something I will buy in print and have my children read along with the Holy Bible, White people need to read and understand this and it will explain a lot, and why multicultural societies don’t work and in 2025 we need to reverse course and reimplement segregation and anti-miscegenation laws asap
As I have mentioned elsewhere, [stderr] “white anglo saxon protestant” is a racist identifier. You may as well say “elite.” In fact, “anglo saxon” was a Madison Grant-ism: it was a clever pseudo-scientific way to separate The Irish from “white people” generally. You know, the way “caucasian” was used to separate “ukrainian slavs” (who are garbage) from the descendants of those round-skulled nordics who somehow found themselves in the Caucasus. It’s absurdity. Again, I encourage you to try to make some sense out of Grant, it’s a challenge to decide if it’s risible or terrifying. Whenever I think about it, part of my mind wants to be forgiving toward those motherfuckers. Here, consider this: Darwin just identified the mechanism of genetic divergence but not the specifics of inheritance. A racist who was familiar with Mendelian inheritance could almost be forgiven for thinking that humans could be bred like cattle. In fact, they were right – you could breed humans on simple parameters like cattle being spotted or not, but the trickier things like intelligence didn’t quite work. In fact, we have a president here, in the United States, who appears to be a basic form of scientific racist. Someone who believes that because they had an uncle who was able to get into MIT, that they are not, themselves, a dumbfuck. If you had a simple understanding of Mendelian animal husbandry. But that simple understanding was good enough for Hitler, and Grant, and Spencer, and Trump.
Reviewer: xx – favorite – September 4, 2024 Subject: Obsolete Manual – Justification of Bigotry
A “must read” for all young people before they are able think for themselves. Teach them young, before they understand the science that contradicts the misinformation in this book. This is the sort of things taught by the Nazis when this book was written.
This book is nothing more than justification for uneducated people to treat supposedly inferior people as something less than human.
Well said.
Then:
Reviewer: xx – favorite – April 9, 2014 (edited) Subject: Mandatory Reading
This book should be mandatory reading for all white people–especially those of school age, and double especially, by those attending Marxist indoctrination centers in colleges and universities. What’s that you say? “Racist”? Why, because the information doesn’t agree with your (whether you realize it or not) Jewish Marxist world view, which is based on lies and falsehoods, especially the doctrine of so-called “racial equality”, of which only exists in a FANTASY WORLD.
Death to political correctness, i.e., Marxist mind control!
The mind blows. I don’t have a term for this mode of thinking (help me out, friends!) in which “if you disagree with X, you must therefore be Y.” i.e.: if you don’t like Nazi bullshit, you’re therefore a jew and a marxist? Is it not possible to be non-jewish, non-marxist, non-nazi? Does the opposed view always apply? I think that’s one of the biggest cognitive errors I see, today, in American thought, it’s that if you reject X you must therefore accept Y. I don’t feel like the education system has done its job, but then I’m hardly the last person to feel that way! This is all basic thinky stuff and Americans have demonstrated that they are not too good at that. We are probably all still mind blown.
My original intent was to write a piece either about AI (surprise! shock!) or nuclear weapons policy. I don’t know if you have noticed, but that big bozo Trump tends to blurt out whatever secrets he stumbles across in his bathroom. Some of the pieces that come from that are cause for despair in non-nationalist sane people. Do you remember how the whole world was living in a state of naive optimism regarding the climate crisis? Now, they are also living in a state of naive optimism about nuclear strategy. I feel like I should probably say something about that. Because “I told you so” will be too late. Maybe I should just post AI art of boobs. But whenever I try to prompt the AIs all I get is horrible dystopia; maybe it’s what’s in my head?
wouldn’t that be some variant of a false dichotomy? If subject isn’t group A, it must be group B (while ignoring those may not be real groups, or the existence of other groups, etc.)
Anyways… yeah, I’ve been avoiding the news since the election, and just trying to survive my work, play some computergames, and see if I can ever finish this damned commuter bike build…
lochaber@#1:
wouldn’t that be some variant of a false dichotomy?
Yes, I think maybe. It’s like an aggressive variant, in which I frame you in whatever side of the false dichotomy is convenient to me. i.e.: if you don’t support me owning a pickup truck, you’re probably a soy-based vegan.
It’s particularly annoying because the either/or is really limited. In the previous example, I have no right at all to assume you’re a vegan, or in fact anything about your diet. You could complain that you, in fact, only eat pasta, but I’ve already laid out my point and moved on, it’s pointless to argue.
I get this a lot on Instagram. If I say anything remotely critical about the “defense” budget, then I get the usual “if you don’t like it you’re a communist!” No, no, my chelovek, I am a whole different kind of fish – but it’s pointless to try to explain that to someone who does not know that difference between a social democrat, an anarchist, and a marxist.
We recently saw that technique used massively, in which Kamala Harris was tarred as a “radical socialist who favors open borders” when in fact she was trying to get attention to the fact that none of that was true, and she had tried to actually do something positive. I don’t know what a person with a working brain should do in that situation. In the community we come from (atheo-skepticism, ok?) it considered a job well done to point out that your opponent is lying shamelessly. In current american politics, that is just an invitation for a screeching poo-flinging session. I apologize to the chimpanzees.
Yeah, I think it’s maybe a bit of overly simplistic tribalism as well – I remember noticing it a lot during the Obama years, where people would claim he was a “extremist Muslim homosexual secularist etc.”, and not paying attention to some of those descriptions being mutually exclusive. Best I figure is they are all descriptions of groups they don’t like, and are therefore equivalent, or something?
I think it’s similar to the extremes of toxic masculinity popping up all over the place, where some men intentionally avoid using recycling bins or reusable bags, because they might be perceived as “gay” – and I think PZ mentioned the anecdotes of guys avoiding really basic hygiene, because touching their own but is “gay”, and now we’ve got numerous right wing social dipshits claiming that having non-procreational sex with women, going down on women, or bringing a woman to orgasm is “gay” (I was going to say if you are a man, but I guess it works out either way?…)
I can’t imagine how miserable these people must be…, and I’m very glad I ended up here in the SF Bay Area, where things are (generally) a bit more reasonable…
i definitely tend to classify all conservatives as nazis these days, which is an example of the same thinking. of course there are important distinctions between different strains of world-ruining worthless fuckstains that need to get their asses royally beat. i shouldn’t dehumanize jerry coyne to call him a nazi just because he does his best to help nazis take over everything in sight… not being snide on purpose, just hard for me to get through the thought without raging out. i do think i’m being overly reductive to lump all regressives as nazis, but i just don’t care at the moment. they’re winning, right? they don’t also get to win me giving a shit about their micro-identities within the nazi spectrum.
The republicans generally and Trump specifically “love the uneducated”. And they mean to have more and more uneducated people in this country that can be persuaded to vote for them.
As I have put it: If you are riding in a car, and you look around, and everyone around you has oversized footwear and a red rubber nose, you just might be riding in the clown car. And if, having realized this, you continue to ride in the clown car, then I feel justified in calling you a clown.
I’m not so sure we can just blame America — there is good long history of European weirdos pontificating about their intrinsic superiority. Americans were just the very best at putting theory into practice. Hitler was quite enthused about the idea of concentration camps that were popularized by both the American Indian reservation system and the British in the Boer War.
Of course Trump claims to love the uneducated. He wants “uneducated” to be a class rather than a situation, to be promoted not corrected.
@4 GAS: I’m with you. Shades of the gun-humpers dismissing calls for regulation because one of us said “assault rifle” instead of “sparkling assault-style rifle.” Fuck ’em.
You know the world is fucked up when someone says the SF Bay area is the sanest part of the US and you believe them.
As a no-longer-secret Agent of Influence, I gotta say: your post asserted –
– so I felt the field lay open to point out the other (and deeper) roots of AH’s bigotry.
I’ve seen in Hitler biographies that he apparently picked up, or at least learned the vocabulary of, his anti-semitism from Vienna tabloids – but I don’t know how much those cited pseudo-science (regarding intelligence or anything else) as compared to simply reciting hateful cultural tropes. (No doubt they accused Jews of inordinate cunning and trickery, which would create difficulties in denigrating their brainpower, but why expect more consistency from them than from any other racists?)
It might also bear mentioning that, according to at least one source I’ve read*, much of US anti-semitism originated in the late 1800s “Gilded Age”, when factory/railroad owners in particular identified a cohort of Jews (particularly those fleeing pogroms and other violence in Central/Eastern Europe) organizing workers in pesky labor unions and pushed hard, including by made-to-order “science”, to restrict immigration/promote deportation thereof.
Hitler’s own propaganda threw everything it could find against the Jews, using sources ranging from Russia (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) to the US (Madison Grant, Henry Ford, et alia). He particularly preferred medical analogies in his speeches, comparing leftists, “undesirable” ethnicities and sexualities, or other targets du jour, to syphilis, tuberculosis, and suchlike health fears of the time more often than other framings (and offering himself as the new Pasteur or, especially, Robert Koch).
*I had thought this came from Melvin Konner’s very erudite and readable, if dated**, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, but have not managed to find it there.
**Hrrmm – Konner has published a second edition (2002), but I don’t have that one.
NB: I have not yet had time to read the links recommended by our esteemed host, so may well stand in need of correction by same.
That mode of thinking feels to me like it has the same root fallacy as bigotry. In either case they select a group for quality A. So far a bit simple but not wrong. But then they diverge into pure fantasy and decide that people in the group also have qualities X, Y, and Z. And they do not have qualities M or N.
Most of the time there’s no real explanation for why any of this should be true. It’s just repeated. You’re supposed to hear the story enough to think of it as a given. To think that the burden of proof is on the side trying to disprove it rather than the side telling wild stories. And this generally works. When arguing against racism I think it’s more common to argue that people in group A are not Y than it is to ask the racist to justify that correlation in the first place.
Oh, and Marcus, your instagram people are a slightly higher class of scumbag than some of the ones I run into online. When I lay out any sort of reasonable disagreement with them they just leave a comment whose entirety is “Pedo!” and disappear back up their own arse.