When someone tells you who they are, you’d better believe them. When the Nazis called themselves ‘National Socialists’, they meant it. This is, of course, a highly uncomfortable fact for the modern left to admit, so they resort to dodges like claiming that ‘the Nazis didn’t really mean that’ and ‘but Nazis were racist’.
With regard to the first, they really did mean it. You just have to understand what Nazis meant by ‘socialism’. Theirs was a state of collective control of the means of production and a planned economy – the essentials of socialism – but predicated entirely on race. The Nazis were race socialists.
Anyone tempted to argue that socialism and racism are mutually exclusive has never paid attention to the history of socialism. The founders of socialism were, as it happened, very, very, racist. Long before the Nazis blended racism, anti-Semitism and socialism, Marx and Engels were at it with gusto. So were all the other leading socialists.
Let us begin with a few examples illustrating the influence of the racial thinking of the time on British socialist politicians. At the 1900 party congress of the Social Democratic Federation, the first Marxist party in the Britain, founded in 1881, one of its leading member, John Spargo, took the floor and according to the party newspaper Justice, declared that “blacks” were far better suited for life in Africa than whites.
Spargo said Africa was the black man’s country. The blacks were adapted to the peculiar conditions of the country, and they multiplied far more rapidly than the whites.
Party founder and chairman H M Hyndman not only agreed but went even further:
The negro’s brain was not constructed like that of the white man. Its convolutions were different. […] We had to accept the general racial physiological facts as we found them.
In the newspaper of the Social Democratic Federation, Justice, other leading Marxists such as Scottish socialist James Leatham echoed the racist rallying-cry.
It seems that the inferior races cannot skip any of the rungs in the ladder of evolution; that they cannot accept a ready-made civilization imported by the white man. The negro is somewhat of an exception to this rule; but even the negro would appear to turn out an ill-conditioned brute in a large number of cases, or why the intense aversion with which he is regarded in the United States?
Closer to the Marxist home, Edward Aveling, leading Marxist and for 14 years the partner of Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, expounded his ‘scientific racism’.
In an article titled “The Ape-Men,” he […] pointed out “that the length of the skull in the anthropoid ape is intermediate between its length in the negro, and in the microcephali” […] In this hierarchy, “Australians” (indigenous aborigines) and “Negroes” ranked lowest in terms of cranial size and brain volume, while contemporary Parisians ranked highest.
Even the most famous and most ‘progressive’ socialists were blatantly racist.
In 1901, H G Wells had described how he envisaged the development of the future socialist world society – “the New Republic” or “the world state” as he called it. According to Wells, this society would improve its population through planned eugenic programmes. And when it came to “the inferior races,” these, including “the black” and “the yellow man”, would partly disappear with the establishment of the world state. The Jews, he claimed, would vanish once capitalism and the possibilities for “social parasitism” were eliminated.
“And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.”
Wells’s fellow Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw was just as keen to get the ‘humane’ gas chambers up and running. Shaw was also a huge fan of proto-Nazi thinker Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who espoused the virtue of the ‘Aryan’ race and the perniciousness of Jews, in his Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.
In his review in Fabian News, Shaw wrote: “This very notable book should be read by all good Fabians.” In its treatment of a wide range of topics, the book was “a magnificent manifesto” that illuminated “man’s unbounded inner freedom and infinity” and his struggle against “all the powers of darkness” […]
As we know today, Chamberlain’s book was highly prized among German National Socialists. They most certainly didn’t read Fabian News, but they most certainly did follow Shaw’s recommendation and made the themes of this “magnificent manifesto” subjects for “political and sociological discussions” – and for something more than simply discussions, as well.
As for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves, racism was at the very heart of their ‘theory of history’.
They racialized skin-colour groups, ethnicities, nations and social classes, while endowing them with innate superior and inferior character traits.
Their numerous horrendous comments on Slavs, ‘Negroes’, Bedouins, Jews, Chinese and many others are well known, but the logic behind these comments has not been sufficiently examined.
Mostly because the left simply cannot admit that their great heroes were garbage human beings whose revolting ideas are at the root of the worst calamities in human history.
Overall, Marx and Engels valued the European races more than non-Europeans. Tellingly, Engels attributed the defeats of the Asian empires to the superior ‘enterprise of the European race’ […]
Marx and Engels reserved particularly negative comments for black-skinned people, who, the latter suggested in so many words, stood a degree closer to animals than the rest of humanity.
The racism of National Socialism wasn’t a bug in socialist thought, it was a feature. Anyone who doubts this only needs consider how readily open anti-Semitism has been embraced by the contemporary left.
