The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Read Online Free PDF Page B

human activity. Racial theorists claimed that not only colour and physiognomy but also intelligence, aptitude, characterand even morals and criminality were passed on in the blood from generation to generation. This was another central paradox of the modern era. Even as the hereditary principle ceased to govern the allocation of office and ownership, so it gained ground as a presumed determinant of capability and conduct. Men ceased to be able to inherit their father’s jobs; in some countries during the twentieth century they even ceased to be able to inherit their estates. But they could inherit their traits, as legacies of their parents’ racial origins.
    The crucial normative question, however, was how far the manifest ability of the different races to interbreed ought to be tolerated. To some, ‘miscegenation’ seemed simply to be inevitable. A number of thinkers even came to regard it as desirable – that, at any rate, was a strong implication of early anthropological theories about ‘exogamy’, as well as the developing understanding of hereditary illness and the somewhat exaggerated perils of cousin-marriage. However, an increasingly frequent reaction to the phenomenon was condemnation. In his
History of Jamaica
(1774), for example, Edward Long found ‘the Europeans [there]… too easily led aside to give a loose to every kind of sensual delight: on this account some black or yellow
quasheba
is sought for, by whom a tawney [
sic
] breed is produced’. Arthur, comte de Gobineau, in his
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1853–55), echoed Linnaeus in identifying three archetypal races, of which the Aryan (white) was supreme and, as usual, responsible for all the great achievements of history. But Gobineau introducedanew idea: that the decline of a civilization tended to come when its Aryan blood had been diluted by intermarriage. He, too, regarded the fusion of the intellectually superior white race and more emotional dark and yellow races as inevitable, since the former was essentially masculine, the latter essentiallyfeminine. Yet that did not make miscegenation any less repellent to him: ‘The more this product reproduces itself and crosses its blood, the more the confusion increases. It reaches infinity, when the people is too numerous for any equilibrium to have a chance of being established… Such a people is merely an awful example of racial anarchy.’
    In its most extreme forms, hostility to ‘racial anarchy’ produced discrimination, segregation, persecution, expulsion and, ultimately, attempted annihilation. For many years it seemed to be incumbenton historians to deny the existence of such a continuum of racial discrimination and to treat one particular event – the National Socialist ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ – as
sui generis
, a unique ‘Holocaust’, without precedent or parallel. A central hypothesis of this present book, however, is that German anti-Semitism in the mid-twentieth century was an extreme case of a general (though by no means universal) phenomenon. In claiming that Jews were systematically trying to ‘pollute the blood’ of the German
Volk
, Hitler and the other National Socialist ideologues were, as we shall see, saying nothing novel. Nor was it unique that such ideas became the basis not just for segregation and expulsion but ultimately for systematic genocide. The principal distinguishing feature of what became known as the Holocaust was not its goal of racial annihilation but the fact that it was carried out by a regime which had at its disposal all the resources of an industrialized economy and an educated society.
    This is not to say that all the perpetrators of the Holocaust were actuated by fears of miscegenation, though there is compelling evidence that this was indeed a strong motivation among many leading Nazis. Many of those who actively contributed towards genocide were motivated by crude material greed. Others were little more