The Nazis won.
They racially "rebalanced" Europe.
Modern fascists would like to do the same.
The eugenicists and racial purists were never really defeated. The holocaust shut them up for a while, but they are back on the march again in Europe.
The Nazi's covered their slaughter in a veneer of eugenics. Their murdering was not the murdering of a rampaging mob storming through Johannesburg streets looking for foreigners. These were no Tutsis burning Hutus alive in churches. They weren't Congolese rebels raping and pillaging. They weren't the equivalent of US fighters napalming villages or British colonists hunting aborigines: in Australia, South Africa and America. They weren't like the Japanese soldiers killing civilians with a bamboo through the eye in Nanjing.
With efficiency the Nazis lined up the starving children in the Lodz ghetto to be exterminated. They lined up young children in an orderly fashion and loaded them efficiently onto trains to send them into gas chambers. Eugenics and the destruction of "inferior races" was a priority.
Nemirovsky's young children had to run from the French police from hiding place to hiding place. Hunting down these two young children was important for the French police and the Nazis. They understood, as did any believer living in those times, that "bad elements" needed to be purged from the northern races. That meant killing Jews and Jewish children, Gypsies and Gypsy children, homosexuals, sexual deviants, criminals, handicapped people.
Everyone in German and European society who understood and agreed with the notion of racial and national purity - an easy idea for even the most simple and undereducated bigot to grasp - was complicit. Eugenics was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the theory in fashion all over the world. They knew that the " final solution" to purifying Europe of non-Europeans and Jews was extermination or deportation. They knew.
The BNP, for example, winning a thousand or so votes in every constituency of Britain, proposes mass deportation of "foreigners" by hook or by crook. But for the sake of racial purity, their primary objective, they would exterminate non-white Britons. Look at the faces of many of the ordinary butchers and the office boys and the primary school teachers and the soldiers and the white van men who voted BNP and you look at the living face of the Nazism of the 20s and 30s in Germany.
They understood, the French police, the British aristocracy that sympathised with Nazism, the hat doffing duffers of the low brow intelligentsia, the little men. It's a simple idea, of course. Different skin colour, religion and language "pollute". Remove the difference and everyone will get on. Ask the racists in the Arizona legislature, they'll explain. Ask Malema in South Africa, he'll tell you what should do about foreign colonisers and interlopers.
In their view, the view of the Nazis and the ordinary people who supported them, the elimination of "inferior races" was an onerous, but ultimately justified task And let us think for a bit.
They succeeded.
If the one of the prime aims of Nazism was to "re-balance" the racial profile of Northern Europe, then they did it. The Nazis eliminated 6 million Jews. They dispossessed them of everything from Austria to the Netherlands to Germany the Ukraine and Checkoslovakia, Italy Belgium and Russia. They eliminated a fair proportion of Jewish people from every country in Europe.
The property that still exists: the land and houses and flats and businesses and chairs and tables and clocks and watches and gold and china and ornaments of most of those 6 million people are in the hands of Czechs and Russians and Ukrainians and Germans and Austrians and the Dutch and Swedish and French and Italians and the rest of them.
The Jewish people no longer have so many jobs in the arts and the sciences and law and at universities. They no longer have the shops and run the businesses they did. Jewish people were replaced. And as the society becomes more cosmopolitan and other cultures and religions and creeds "encroach" on Europe we begin to see a flaring of the same emotions the right and the Nazis used to encourage in the 30s and 40s.
The final solution to racial re-balancing was a success. The Nazis did almost eliminate the Jews from Europe. The modern right and the extreme right don't openly propose a final solution again for the new brown and black skinned strangers, but they do propose many other measures which have the same objective as the "final solution" - measures aimed at preserving the pure racial and cultural identity of Europe. Measures that are the softer version of the Nazi ideal.
I can talk to young intelligent German people and they can tell me, without blushing, that they hate the Turks. That they dislike Turkish culture and that they wish the Turks would leave them alone to be true Germans together and not contaminate their culture.
We listen to the narratives of, seemingly, respectable public intellectuals against Islam and we know that they lend themselves to this modern scape-goating without shame or historical memory. For many centuries the Jewish people had to put up with the myth of Blood Libel. The modern scapegoats are the Muslims, Middle Eastern Arabs, the Turks and the north Africans and they too have to put up with new forms of victim-hood.
They racially "rebalanced" Europe.
Modern fascists would like to do the same.
Children in the Lodz ghetto being sent to extermination
The Nazi's covered their slaughter in a veneer of eugenics. Their murdering was not the murdering of a rampaging mob storming through Johannesburg streets looking for foreigners. These were no Tutsis burning Hutus alive in churches. They weren't Congolese rebels raping and pillaging. They weren't the equivalent of US fighters napalming villages or British colonists hunting aborigines: in Australia, South Africa and America. They weren't like the Japanese soldiers killing civilians with a bamboo through the eye in Nanjing.
With efficiency the Nazis lined up the starving children in the Lodz ghetto to be exterminated. They lined up young children in an orderly fashion and loaded them efficiently onto trains to send them into gas chambers. Eugenics and the destruction of "inferior races" was a priority.
Nemirovsky's young children had to run from the French police from hiding place to hiding place. Hunting down these two young children was important for the French police and the Nazis. They understood, as did any believer living in those times, that "bad elements" needed to be purged from the northern races. That meant killing Jews and Jewish children, Gypsies and Gypsy children, homosexuals, sexual deviants, criminals, handicapped people.
Everyone in German and European society who understood and agreed with the notion of racial and national purity - an easy idea for even the most simple and undereducated bigot to grasp - was complicit. Eugenics was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the theory in fashion all over the world. They knew that the " final solution" to purifying Europe of non-Europeans and Jews was extermination or deportation. They knew.
The BNP, for example, winning a thousand or so votes in every constituency of Britain, proposes mass deportation of "foreigners" by hook or by crook. But for the sake of racial purity, their primary objective, they would exterminate non-white Britons. Look at the faces of many of the ordinary butchers and the office boys and the primary school teachers and the soldiers and the white van men who voted BNP and you look at the living face of the Nazism of the 20s and 30s in Germany.
They understood, the French police, the British aristocracy that sympathised with Nazism, the hat doffing duffers of the low brow intelligentsia, the little men. It's a simple idea, of course. Different skin colour, religion and language "pollute". Remove the difference and everyone will get on. Ask the racists in the Arizona legislature, they'll explain. Ask Malema in South Africa, he'll tell you what should do about foreign colonisers and interlopers.
In their view, the view of the Nazis and the ordinary people who supported them, the elimination of "inferior races" was an onerous, but ultimately justified task And let us think for a bit.
They succeeded.
If the one of the prime aims of Nazism was to "re-balance" the racial profile of Northern Europe, then they did it. The Nazis eliminated 6 million Jews. They dispossessed them of everything from Austria to the Netherlands to Germany the Ukraine and Checkoslovakia, Italy Belgium and Russia. They eliminated a fair proportion of Jewish people from every country in Europe.
The property that still exists: the land and houses and flats and businesses and chairs and tables and clocks and watches and gold and china and ornaments of most of those 6 million people are in the hands of Czechs and Russians and Ukrainians and Germans and Austrians and the Dutch and Swedish and French and Italians and the rest of them.
The Jewish people no longer have so many jobs in the arts and the sciences and law and at universities. They no longer have the shops and run the businesses they did. Jewish people were replaced. And as the society becomes more cosmopolitan and other cultures and religions and creeds "encroach" on Europe we begin to see a flaring of the same emotions the right and the Nazis used to encourage in the 30s and 40s.
The final solution to racial re-balancing was a success. The Nazis did almost eliminate the Jews from Europe. The modern right and the extreme right don't openly propose a final solution again for the new brown and black skinned strangers, but they do propose many other measures which have the same objective as the "final solution" - measures aimed at preserving the pure racial and cultural identity of Europe. Measures that are the softer version of the Nazi ideal.
I can talk to young intelligent German people and they can tell me, without blushing, that they hate the Turks. That they dislike Turkish culture and that they wish the Turks would leave them alone to be true Germans together and not contaminate their culture.
We listen to the narratives of, seemingly, respectable public intellectuals against Islam and we know that they lend themselves to this modern scape-goating without shame or historical memory. For many centuries the Jewish people had to put up with the myth of Blood Libel. The modern scapegoats are the Muslims, Middle Eastern Arabs, the Turks and the north Africans and they too have to put up with new forms of victim-hood.
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