by Stefano Vaj
[204] Quoted in the Nota no.18 of Informazione Diplomatica, 5th August 1938. The note continues: “To discriminate does not mean to persecute…No one will want to deny the fascist State this right, least of all the Jews, who, as is solemnly declared also in the recent manifest of the rabbis of Italy, have been, always and everywhere, the apostles of the most integral, intransigent, and from a certain point of view, admirable racism.”
[205] This position is wholly explicit. Thus Alfred Rosenberg calls his famous book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and Julius Evola does likewise when he writes The Myth of Blood (Italian: Il mito del sangue, Edizioni di Ar, 1977). Mythical in another sense, and probably in bad faith given that the author was, amongst the Italians, one of those who best knew the German sources, is on the contrary the polemical representation, basically with the aim of differentiating the “spiritualist” Italian position from the German racism en bloc as a biological racism, that is in essence neo-positivist. Truth is that Evola himself supports ideas strongly influenced by Clauss and everything else that alienates from the German realm, especially from that of the völkisch roots, while in symmetry the first editorial of Preziosi’s review, La difesa della razza [English: The Defence of the Race, T.N.], recites word for word, and clearly at that: “The concept of race is a purely biological concept.” In the literal, and in no way metaphorical, sense it is effectively difficult to imagine to what might correspond the “spiritual” race of canary birds or lizards. Another consideration is of course that racial variance based on psychological characteristics might be more interesting, especially for humans, than measuring skulls.
[206] Cfr. Adriano Romualdi, Il fascismo come fenomeno europeo, Edizioni dell’Italiano, Novara 1977, second edition, Il Settimo Sigillo, Rome 1984.
[207] It doesn’t matter much in such a perspective if the subrace in question has ever corresponded to a specific population at some time or other, or if it merely constitutes a “taxonomical” category created via the extrapolation of arbitrarily selected characteristics, an Idealtypus, as those of the ideal model of a canine race that the breeder targets, but that has never existed as such. For one among many classifications of European subraces proposed by National Socialist anthropologists, cf. Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde Europas, J.F. Lehemanns Verlag, Monaco 1926. (English edition: The Racial Elements of European History, Methuen 1927).
[208] However, the taste for “Nordic” racial characteristics, even though prevailing among the majority of the National Socialist leaders, to begin with Hitler himself (cf. his own Mein Kampf, Jaico Publishing House 2007 for an English edition), is not specific to this environment. The same preference has been found, to various degrees according to area and period, among all the populations of European origin, perhaps as a result of the recessive nature of many of these characteristics (that implies that they are only present in homozygous carriers) with respect to the allele, that can also be propagated within non-European populations, and can in a “European” stem from a mixing with these. Such a Nordic preference has been particularly important in the United States, not excluding, at least at the level of superficial physical characters such as the light pigmentation of hair and iris, the…Jewish members of American society. It is not Leni Riefenstahl (who by the way had thick black hair), but a Hollywood largely dominated by Jewish producers and directors that called a movie Gentlemen prefer blondes (USA 1953). Still in the nineties, the three Jewish protagonists (Diane Keaton, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn) in The First Wives’ Club (USA 1999), a brilliant comedy directed by a Jew, are all three blonds – or dyed blond, which, as an indication of aesthetic preference, is even more telling (it is true however that one of the protagonists turns to plastic surgery to get more tumid lips, which can hardly be considered a typically “Nordic” characteristic…).
[209] While some of the National Socialist leaders (Heydrich – although there were rumors of Jewish ancestry –, Göring, etc.) had distinctly Nordic features, one cannot understand why the fact that this was not the case in general has been the object of so much irony. Who in fact would be astonished if for example a head of State of short stature was in favour of raising the average height of the population of his country…
[210] Ernst Jünger, The Worker. Dominion and Gestalt, op. cit.
[211] Alain de Benoist remarks moreover in The Worker between the Gods and Titans, op. cit., p. 43 to his “excuse”: “Since 1926-1927 Jünger stresses that ‘blood’ is not a biological but a metaphysical concept. In August 1926 he writes ‘The word race begins to become as vague in everyday use, I think, as the word tradition’”. In reality, the reason remains elusive why attributing a “metaphysical” value to the racial fact (the sense of which we have already discussed) would be more politically correct than the (after all innocent) simple recognition of the underlying biological reality. This fits however in with the tiresome litany, which also this essay reiterates, for Jünger as for Heidegger, about the many and well known criticisms, “pickles” or minor defeats they endured during the regime, along the same lines found elsewhere about Spengler, Klages, von Salomon or Schmitt, the catalogue of which might have had some meaning in the context of a process of denazification at the end of the forties, but which today is rather irrelevant for the understanding of their ideas. If such exercises were considered as valuable in a discussion of whether Leon Trotsky was or not a “communist” on basis of his much more serious conflict with Staline, then the truth is that the resistance to their ideas during the regime, sometimes on grounds that an ecologist or bioethicist today might easily subscribe to, demonstrates how, underlying the fascist regimes, was a complex cultural reality, that was anything but isolated from the ideas that ended up establishing themselves as dominant in the camp of their adversaries.
[212] As Georges A. Heuse, director of the Department of Psychology at the UNESCO and secretary of the Institut International de Biologie Humaine, remarks: “it is known that there literally does not exist a Jewish ‘race’. The Jews form a ‘hiero-ethnic’ group whose members originate essentially from the Anatolical subrace (chiefly represented by the Ashkenazy) and the southeastern subrace (chiefly represented by the Sephardics). As a result of the tendential endogamy that these practice, even though to different degrees within the individual communities, it is also plausible that one or two subraces are anthropologically in formation in the midst of the Jewish ethnic group, which explains the fact that Jews are frequently distinguishable from other ‘whites’ by their morphological traits, and without knowing anything about their religion or family origins.” (In Nouvelle Ecole, summer 1976, p. 92). On the question of the racial composition of the Jewish people, see - of good Jewish authority- Emmanuel Baron, “Les contributions de la génétique à l’étude des origines et de l’histoire du people juif,” in Krisis, no.27, November 2005.
[213] On the racial conceptions of the Third Reich, see also Gianantonio Valli, “La razza del nazionalsocialismo,” in l’Uomo libero no. 50. The existence of a Jewish component is taken into account to various extents up to the presence of a quarter of Jewish “blood,” but this basically coincides not with morphological traits or particular genetic characteristics, but with the existence of one or more grandparents that would have been members of the Jewish community and religion. In addition to the institution of “arianisation” ad honorem (introduced also in Italy with the Law no.24 of July 13th, 1939) it is also known that some halb-Jude (“half-Jews,” as Milch, the head of the Luftwaffe, was scornfully called by his political adversaries) played important public roles in the history of the Third Reich. The “race” was in such a context a political and mythical element functioning essentially as an indication of ideals and belonging.
[214] Such awareness is above all manifest in the National Socialist “left”. The case of Fritz Lang is exemplary. A few weeks after Hitler’s rise to chancellor, following a reception in which Josef Goebbels declared, among the consternation of the Jewish majority present, the plans for the
cinema of the newly constituted ministry of culture and of propaganda, lauding among others Lang’s films (at the time a favourite filmmaker of the chancellor himself), the film director tells how he was convoked by the minister who proposed that he oversee the renewal of German cinema. To the question of whether the fact that he had close Jewish relatives, precisely on his mother’s side, even though he had been raised a Catholic, would not subject him to discrimination, Goebbels is alleged to have said: “We are those who decide who is Jewish”. The anecdote is probably apocryphal, but fact is that a few months later the writer of Doctor Mabuse, the Gambler, of Metropolis and of The Niebelungen, having emigrated unmolested from Germany to Hollywood, and from there reinterpreted his precedent work in a rather implausibly anti-fascist sense, chooses to be Jewish, with a choice of side similar to that of Thomas Mann, already a writer, with the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an Nonpolitical Man, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc. 1985), of what some regard as the very manifesto of the Konservative Revolution, that he “converted” after having married a Jewess. Vice-versa Lang’s wife and the screenwriter of his films, Thea von Harbou, a fervent members of the party since the beginning and still when Lang emigrated, had in the meantime dropped her husband for an Indian journalist living in Germany (with features certainly less nordic than Lang’s!) and was to continue a brilliant career in the movie industry throughout the regime, at the side of her new partner. When after the war the occupants question her about her political militancy, she tries to defend herself by declaring that she had adhered to National Socialism to manifest her support for the cause “of Gandhi and of the Indian independence.” Lang on the contrary will hold that he had been forced to emigrate because of the anti-nazi allusions supposedly contained in The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Germany 1933), adapted for the screen by... his National Socialist wife (!) and shown soon afterwards also in Germany – with an additional couple of scenes to help situating the plot of the film (in fact both written and shot in its entirety before the NSDAP came to power) during the Weimar Republic and not during the regime. In 1966, after some trouble during the McCarthy period because his proximity in the forties to the American communist party, Lang returned to Germany, to shoot his last movie, The 1000 eyes of Dr. Mabuse, the third movie with the famous character, which was prohibited in… Israel, with the pretext that the role of the protagonist is held by Gert Fröbe, already “denazified” as a member of the NSDAP (and well known by the general international public for his interpretation of Goldfinger in 007 Goldfinger, England 1964).
[215] A recurrent argument tending to demonstrate the non-centrality of the racial aspect in latu senso fascist thinking, or the existence of an irreducible “difference” between Italian fascism and National Socialism on this matter, is based on the much later and narrower emphasis of the former on its own racial programs, that were not alien to the politico-cultural influence of the latter. Moreover this is linked to historical contingencies that view the Italian “community of reference” as easier to define in a traditionally national way (language, natural borders, statutory frontiers, etc.) than is the German one (nationalism, greater – and smaller – Germanism, polycentrism, extreme historical mobility of the frontiers, especially in the east-west direction, etc.), not to mention the different local relevance of the Jewish question, where Mussolini’s government for instance plays for a while the (“Nietzschean”) assimilation card. Occasional sidings by Mussolini that appear to go in the opposite direction go anyhow back to 1921 (“We are not astonished to learn that, in what Gigione Luzzati calls the “patria adorata,” it is the Jews who are fed up with being here, and this is something that we don’t regret. If Italian Zionists – six hundred Italians! – were to leave we would be happy to facilitate this exodus,” from an article about Popoli d’Italia, today in Opera Omnia, vol. XIII, pp. 169-170). But the biopolitical, eugenic and racial concerns of Italian fascism are expressed every time it is given an opportunity, to begin with the laws against interracial intercourse inside the colonies (that of course had no German equivalent, since the Third Reich had no extra-European colony) and in the sanitary and demographic policies, as is documented for example in Rauti, Sermonti, Storia del Fascismo, vol. V, pp. 269 and following. See also Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1999. Vice-versa the particular National Socialist “racial” awareness becomes also a limit at the strategic level for the regime itself, whereas, for example, the “European” prejudice in favour of the British Empire tends to eclipse, with respect to what happened in Italy, the perception of the ultimate enemy of European fascism.
[216] Cfr. Giorgio Locchi, “Espressione politica e repressione del principio sovrumanista,” in l’Uomo libero no. 53, op. cit.
[217] Besides, with regard to the racial policy of the Reich, the constant reminding of the concentration camp system, even though evocative to the post-war anti-fascist imagination, is not particularly pertinent, given that for Germany at the time, as for other analogous experiences (the Anglo-Boer war, the concentration of Japanese Americans during the War of the Pacific, Stalin’s Gulag etc.), internment represents basically a measure of repression, a confinement and a preventive contrast with respect to communities and social groups perceived as potentially hostile, or at least anti-social, and the decision as to who to lock in does certainly not depend upon research about the anthropological characteristics of individual inmates!
[218] As is known, while all that really concerned Soviet “totalitarianism” was attaining the objectives of their five-year plans, fascist regimes are undeniably among the first to adopt ecological measures, for example regarding pollution or the protection of wildlife, despite their strong urge to modernise and industrialise their respective countries. Other matters that receive major political priority are mass prophylaxis, body care and education on matters of nutrition (the “duty to be healthy”), the modification of the natural environment (for example by means of drainage), the urban landscape, the balance between countryside and towns, the improvement of agricultural practices, etc. This while the United States (and in fact some European countries) mucked around for thirteen years with the Prohibition, a moralist project and “noble experiment” that would only be abolished once it had created the greatest criminal organisation in modern history and increased the burden of alcoholism nationwide. Whatever one may think of it, during the Third Reich the diffusion and above all the social visibility of alcohol and drug dependency crumbled in a matter of months. Precisely because the regime is not primarily concerned with the substances people might consume (that is, with the “the sin”), it concentrates on citizen mobilisation and individual responsibility to the community for possible anti-social attitudes – irrespective of their immediate cause or pretext, and if necessary by sending those affected to re-education facilities to learn that it is work (the transforming action on the world) that makes free: “Arbeit macht frei.”
[219] See The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Schribner’s Sons, New York 1923-1926, vol.21, p. 163.
[220] Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society. A Historical Appraisal, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1972, p. 43.
[221] Michael F. Guyer, Being Well Born. An Introduction to Heredity and Eugenics, Bobbs-Merril Co., Indianapolis 1926, preface.
[222] Edwin G. Conklin, “The Future of America. A Biological Forecast,” in Harper’s Magazine, April 1928, pp. 529-539.
[223] Quoted in Horatio H. Newman, Evolution, Genetics and Eugenics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1921, p. 441.
[224] Charles B. Davenport Papers, Department of Genetics, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York 1913.
[225] William McDougall, Is America Safe for Democracy? Charles Schribner’s Sons, New York 1921; see also Ethics and Some Modern World Problems, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York 1924.
[226] In the egalitarian worldview, as we know, this sort of argument is no longer officially acceptable – exce
pt amongst American and Israeli extreme rightwingers – precisely because the Fascist hope indicates the “blasphemous” and “Faustian” risk, inherent in any kind of intervention, of ending up wanting to collectively decide, on the basis of a belonging and a program, what it wants to be and what it wants to make of itself, ceasing thereby to be the tool of an impersonal and universal will turned toward the end of history, and becoming on the contrary the engine of a (possible) regeneration of history itself. Furthermore, attention should be drawn to those ideas here described that remain latent in the American (and European) collective unconscious, especially with respect to the “democratic patriotism” once more fashionable today, and to the intolerance of “differences” that these express at the political, social, cultural and religious level.
[227] Reported in Teaching School Bulletin, February 1914.
[228] Irving Fischer, “What I Think About Eugenics,” in A Brief Bibliography of Eugenics, Eugenics Society of the USA, 1915, p. 5.
[229] Ernest A. Hooton, The American Criminal. An Anthropological Study, Harvard University Press. Cambridge1939, pp. 307-309.
[230] Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit., p. 121.
[231] Alexander Graham Bell, “A Few Thoughts Concerning Eugenics,” in National Geographic, February 1908.
[232] Cf. Caleb W. Saleeby, The Progress of Eugenics, Funk & Wagnalls, New York 1914, p. 89.
[233] Harry H. Laughlin [alias], „Scope of the Committee’s Work,” Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York 1914.
[234] Cf. Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilisation in the United States, Psycopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, Chicago 1922.
[235] Cf. Jacob H. Landman, Human Sterilisation. The History of Sterilisation Movement, MacMillan Co, New York 1932, p. 259.
[236] In fact it does not appear to matter to the majority of present-day American intellectuals if it is possible today to know more about how heredity works, whether it might be possible to enact a legislation that would be less naïve and demagogical, or technically more efficient, given that, as we have seen, the temptations to which the above-mentioned “good intentions” expose man are from now on considered intolerable.