Establishing the racialist

FILM ARTHUR GOBINEAU was one the nrst to try to place racialism on a scienunc Dasis. nis majo. work, the on the Inequality of the Human Races, which make up the bulk of this ents for Nazi and was used as a textbook Gobineau an who verishe bourgeois family which its assumed His career of the social climber wanted to of a dipembark on but he was barred und elitists made. From such were snobs Gobineau which brought into the streets. He under the and witnessed of 1848 and 1871; he hated them.

works are an apology for as well as racial snobbery Drawing on the origin of languages, on developments anthropology, ethnology and other infant sçiences, tried to Races were determined by innate and qualitained.

believed originated from one disturbed by doubts. low "races' evolved was obscure; environmental and 'cosmic types.

Italians than the Germans the Swiss'. 'In Art during the perlod of Nazi rule Invariably expressed racialist Ideology in one form or another. Top: The Aryan race as depicted in Nazi sculpture. Above: Quite typical were such scenes involving Jews as this one taken from the film 'Jud Süss'. erate as a result of intermixture with other races. It was fighting a losing battle with its last redoubt in Germany and N Europe.

'In this last area', he says, 'are the last remnants of the Aryan element, doubtless very distorted, eroded and withered, but still not completely vanquished.' Outside stood nothing but decadence, a human flotsam of cross-breds, of yellow men (apathetic, gluttonous, prone to obesity) and blacks (animal, dull mental, faculties, violent).

This was the basic idea upon which the Nazis seized for their conception of the superior Aryan race and the justification for enslaving - and if necessary exterminating-all inferior races. For this is the ultimate horror of racialism.

It is true that Gobineau did not directly preach such a programme; in fact he believed that the development of modern civilization would lead to inevitable degeneration.

A situation would be reached, he suggested, which would result the triumph of mediocrity in all fields.

'Everyone will share the sad heritage in equal measure :. •• men will all resemble each other. Their size, features and bodily habits will be the same. They will have the same amount of physical strength, the same instinctive urges and abilities; and their general level will be revoltingly Gobineau felt man could not calculate the number of centuries which would separate him from obliteration. His own guess was about 4,000 years of inevitable degeneration and decline.

It is easy to dismiss Gobineau's writings as fanatical nonsense were it not that the Nazi regime took him as an honoured precursor and that racialist and fascist groups today adhere to doctrines which are even more Fourth International OUT NOW • Bolivia 0 Lukacs • The struggle for power What the Nazis did, as they formulated their ideology, was to say. that the process which Gobineau regarded as inevitable could be reversed.

They set out to reverse it as part of the process of saving German capitalism.

The Ayran master race was to dominate the world. The inferior peoples were made to be ruled and enslaved or, it they were superiluous or dangerous, consigned in millions to the gas chambers.

The unpleasant fact is that racialism today is much . more virulent and dangerous than it was in Gobineau's day, although it rests on the same foundation of fantasy, pseudo-science and prejudice.

In open or concealed forms it remains central to rightist thinking, a basic defence of the established order and intended as a barrier to the assumption of power by the working class.

TOMORROW:

"THE FRENCH RIGHT