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What Gobineau was actually looking for in politics was the definition and creation of an “elite” to replace the aristocracy. Instead of princes, he proposed a “race of princes,” the Aryans, who he said were in danger of being submerged by the lower non-Aryan classes through democracy.
the new race-aristocracy actually began to effect the “inevitable” decay of mankind in a supreme effort to destroy it.
WHILE THE SEEDS of German race-thinking were planted during the Napoleonic wars, the beginnings of the later English development appeared during the French Revolution and may be traced back to the man who violently denounced it as the “most astonishing [crisis] that has hitherto happened in the world”—to Edmund Burke.
British Conservatives felt not a little uncomfortable when it came to the “rights of men.” According to opinions widely held by nineteenth-century Tories, inequality belonged to the English national character.
attacks on the old feudal classes. This has been possible because the English gentry, from the seventeenth century on and in ever-increasing numbers, had assimilated the higher ranks of the bourgeoisie,
But even slavery, though actually established on a strict racial basis, did not make the slave-holding peoples race-conscious before the nineteenth century.
Polygenism explains why “East is East and West is West; And never the twain shall meet,” and helped much to prevent intermarriage in the colonies and to promote discrimination against individuals of mixed origin.
Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England.
Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic “survival of the fittest,” and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new “science” of eugenics.
Eugenics promised to overcome the troublesome uncertainties of the survival doctrine according to which it was impossible either to predict who would turn out to be the fittest or to provide the means for the nations to develop everlasting fitness.
To transform the whole nation into a natural aristocracy from which choice exemplars would develop into geniuses and supermen, was one of the many “ideas” produced by frustrated liberal intellectuals in their dreams of replacing the old governing classes by a new “elite” through nonpolitical means.
English as it was for German race-thinking that it originated among middle-class writers and not the nobility,
Even Froude, whose admiration for the Boers, the first white people to be converted clearly to the tribal philosophy of racism, might appear suspect, opposed too many rights for South Africa because “self-government in South Africa meant the government of the natives by the European colonists and that is not self-government.”
could act as though the War of Independence had not been a war between two nations, but the English form of eighteenth-century civil war, in which he belatedly sided with the Republicans.
Because English colonists had spread all over the earth, it happened that the most dangerous concept of nationalism, the idea of “national mission,” was especially strong in England.
In themselves, they were not more harmful than, for example, Auguste Comte in France when he expressed the hope for a united, organized, regenerated humanity under the leadership—présidence—of France.
What separates them definitely from later racists is that none of them was ever seriously concerned with discrimination against other peoples as lower races, if only for the reason that the countries they were talking about, Canada and Australia, were almost empty and had no serious population problem.
the colonial deadweight which we do not govern”—wanted to extend British imperial power to Asia and, indeed, forcefully strengthened the position of Great Britain in the only colony with a grave population and cultural problem. It was Benjamin Disraeli who made the Queen of England the Empress of India;
The policy introduced by Disraeli signified the establishment of an exclusive caste in a foreign country whose only function was rule and not colonization.
There is an abyss between the men of brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds and active bestiality which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge.
if the “scramble for Africa” and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences.
The administrator who ruled by reports3 and decrees in more hostile secrecy than any oriental despot grew out of a tradition of military discipline in the midst of ruthless and lawless men;
Bureaucracy was the organization of the great game of expansion in which every area was considered a stepping-stone to further involvements and every people an instrument for further conquest.
Lord Cromer, who in Egypt changed from an ordinary British charge d’affaires into an imperialist bureaucrat, would no more have dreamed of combining administration with massacre (“administrative massacres” as Carthill bluntly put it forty years later), than the race fanatics of South Africa thought of organizing massacres for the purpose of establishing a circumscribed, rational political community
Trade stations were characteristic of Asia where for centuries Europeans had shown no ambition for permanent rule or intentions of conquest, decimation of the native population, and permanent settlement.
oddly enough never—after the decline of the Egyptian Empire and the destruction of Carthage—achieved authentic independence and reliable political organization.
the significance of the Cape of Good Hope had depended upon India, the center of colonial wealth; any nation that established trade stations there needed a maritime station on the Cape, which was then abandoned when trade in India was liquidated.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company defeated Portugal, Holland, and France and won a trade monopoly in India;
fertility and sparseness of population, the main prerequisites for definite settlement, were lacking, and a single effort to settle 5,000 unemployed Englishmen at the beginning of the nineteenth century proved a failure. Not only did the streams of emigrants from the British Isles consistently avoid South Africa throughout the nineteenth century, but South Africa is the only dominion from which a steady stream of emigrants has gone back to England in recent times.
The Boers are descended from Dutch settlers who in the middle of the seventeenth century were stationed at the Cape to provide fresh vegetables and meat for ships on their voyage to India.
Large families, isolated from each other by broad spaces of wilderness, were forced into a kind of clan organization and only the ever-present threat of a common foe, the black tribes which by far outnumbered the white settlers, deterred these clans from active war against each other.
Slavery, however, is a very inadequate word to describe what actually happened. First of all, slavery, though it domesticated a certain part of the savage population, never got hold of all of them,
King Tchaka, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century united the Zulu tribes in an extraordinarily disciplined and warlike organization, established neither a people nor a nation of Zulus. He only succeeded in exterminating more than one million members of weaker tribes.
The Boers were the first European group to become completely alienated from the pride which Western man felt in living in a world created and fabricated by himself.18 They treated the natives as raw material and lived on them as one might live on the fruits of wild trees.
Racism as a ruling device was used in this society of whites and blacks before imperialism exploited it as a major political idea.
It was and remains a desperate reaction to desperate living conditions which was inarticulate and inconsequential as long as it was left alone.
their later attempts (after 1834) to abolish slavery, and above all their efforts to impose fixed boundaries upon landed property—provoked the stagnant Boer society into violent reactions.
Their fantastic treks, which threw the British administration into consternation, showed clearly that they had transformed themselves into a tribe and had lost the European’s feeling for a territory, a patria of his own. They behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also roamed the Dark Continent for centuries—feeling
Early British rule in South Africa, with its missionaries, soldiers, and explorers, did not realize that the Boers’ attitudes had some basis in reality.
European supremacy—in which they, after all, were as interested as the Boers—could hardly be maintained except through racism because the permanent European settlement was so hopelessly outnumbered;
The abundance of natives, of cheap labor, was the first and perhaps most important difference between this gold rush and others of its type.
From the very beginning “a hundred or so Jewish merchants who have gathered like eagles over their prey”35 actually acted as middlemen through whom European capital was invested in the gold mining and diamond industries.
Boers wrongly believed to be “the culmination of the British Government’s lengthy quest for a united South Africa,” while it was actually prompted mainly by investment interests.
is also significant that it was precisely the mob element among the Jewish people who turned into financiers. It is true that the discovery of gold mines in South Africa had coincided with the first modern pogroms in Russia, so that a trickle of Jewish emigrants went to South Africa.
Long before the Nazis consciously built up an antisemitic movement in South Africa, the race issue had invaded the conflict between the uitlander and the Boers in the form of antisemitism,46 which is all the more noteworthy since the importance of Jews in the South African gold and diamond economy did not survive the turn of the century.
the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrific price.
The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.
Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.
they cannot and will not make common cause with the only other group which slowly and gradually is being won away from race society: the black workers who are becoming more and more aware of their humanity under the impact of regular labor and urban life.
They did not need Nazism in order to be born and they influenced Nazism only in an indirect way.
