Establishing the

ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU (1816-1882) was one of the first to try to place racialism on a scientific basis. His major work, the 'Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races', extracts from which make up the bulk of this volume, provided vital ingredients for Nazi racial doctrines and was used as a textbook.

Gobineau himself came from an impoverished bourgeois family which had attached its fortunes to the French monarchy and assumed the noble particle 'de' to which it was not entitled. Arthur added the phoney title of 'Count' for good measure.

His career was that of the social climber who wanted to create an effect both as a literary man and in the career of a diplomat. Influence enabled him to embark on this, but he was barred from the ambassadorship to which he aspired.

From such stuff were snobs and élitists made.

Gobineau abhorred revolutions the streets. He lived People which brought the into shadow of 1789 and witnessed the events of 1848 and 1871; he hated them.

His political works are an apology for well as racial snobbery Drawing on the origin languages, developments anthropology, ethnology and other infant sciences, tried to Races were determined innate and tained.

believed originated from one disturbed by low 'races' evolved was obscure: of environmental and 'cosmic types.

Italians Art during the period 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, (apeste and blacks ma di 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 it 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 development of modern civilization would lead to inevitable degeneration.

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

'Everyone will share the sad heritage in equal measure . • • men will all resemble each other. Iheir 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 Fourth International • Bolivia I oLukacs Revolution and counter-revatution 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, if they were superfluous 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 foundatior 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 Fourth International Volume 7 No. 2. Winter 1071 * EDITORIAL the Internationas Committee and the struggle for power BOLIVIA:

La political itinerary Marxist theory and class consciousn Stalinism, riberalism and British History