"The idea that Lenin and Hitler were puppets of a Jewish mastermind struck me as wildly antisemitic, a variation of familiar conspiracy theories popular among fascists. "
That's.... basically Hitler's argument against the USSR with the twist of Hitler's being part of it. Which is actually, roughly, something I had heard somewhere from a high muckety-muck movement conservative type in the... 80's? Way back there.
elm
'innocent' is doing one of the 12 labours there at the end
Fun discussion of a movie I'm almost certainly not going to watch! FWIW, I feel like the theme of "the Americans may have all the money, but they need the British (intelligence) b/c they're dumb and we English are smart" runs through Le Carre's Tinker Tailor. Not that Le Carre necessarily endorsed it, but his characters seem to think so.
“ It was Hitler, attaching such abnormal significance to filiation and physiognomy, who put an end to the casual, innocent anti- Semitism of the clubman.”
Eugenics was a pseudoscience embraced by white Europeans as a justification of colonialist abuses of other peoples. The idea of 'race' was created to justify bigotry against Jews, Roma, Asians, Africans, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. If those people were "scientifically" proven to be little better than animals, then there was no need to feel "white guilt" by treating them as such.
Many people are unaware of the anti Semitism that helped define the Eugenics movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact the Eugenics movement was born from Herbert Spencerian theories about "Social Darwinism” for purposes of “social hygiene” was all the rage amongst elites like scientists, plutocrats birthed from colonial wealth and various public policy makers who ascribed nearly every “Social Illness” like poverty, infirmity, miseducation and social deviance to genetics.
Calling it "abnormal" is to project todays morality on a society that was more than happy to enforce Jim Crow laws, tolerate lynching and starve Aboriginal kids kidnapped from parents and placed in Boarding Schools. The Kiplingesque "burden" of subjugation and denigration of non-Christians and/or non-whites was actually the Norm in Europe, Oceania and the Americas, not the "abnormal". Buchan was clearly strongly influenced by these ideas because they were considered normative thought, and socially important vehicles to breed their vision of the Übermensch, who risked being outbred by the darker skinned "animalistic" and relatively fecund masses who would never be seen as fully human.
Damn, that Gertrude Himmelfarb quote
I didn't even quote all of the bad stuff. There's a long section finding excuses for Buchan's virulent anti-Black racism (see screen shots here: https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1501962156333420556
You need to cut down the "uhhs" when you talk. Annoying, especially during a long podcast.
You need to cut down the "uhhs" when you talk. Annoying, especially during a long podcast.
"The idea that Lenin and Hitler were puppets of a Jewish mastermind struck me as wildly antisemitic, a variation of familiar conspiracy theories popular among fascists. "
That's.... basically Hitler's argument against the USSR with the twist of Hitler's being part of it. Which is actually, roughly, something I had heard somewhere from a high muckety-muck movement conservative type in the... 80's? Way back there.
elm
'innocent' is doing one of the 12 labours there at the end
Fun discussion of a movie I'm almost certainly not going to watch! FWIW, I feel like the theme of "the Americans may have all the money, but they need the British (intelligence) b/c they're dumb and we English are smart" runs through Le Carre's Tinker Tailor. Not that Le Carre necessarily endorsed it, but his characters seem to think so.
right, as I mentioned on twitter, Le Carre offers an ironic treatment of this theme.
Ah! I skipped that thread b/c it was dauntingly long. Now I feel like I didn't do the homework
“ It was Hitler, attaching such abnormal significance to filiation and physiognomy, who put an end to the casual, innocent anti- Semitism of the clubman.”
Eugenics was a pseudoscience embraced by white Europeans as a justification of colonialist abuses of other peoples. The idea of 'race' was created to justify bigotry against Jews, Roma, Asians, Africans, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. If those people were "scientifically" proven to be little better than animals, then there was no need to feel "white guilt" by treating them as such.
Many people are unaware of the anti Semitism that helped define the Eugenics movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact the Eugenics movement was born from Herbert Spencerian theories about "Social Darwinism” for purposes of “social hygiene” was all the rage amongst elites like scientists, plutocrats birthed from colonial wealth and various public policy makers who ascribed nearly every “Social Illness” like poverty, infirmity, miseducation and social deviance to genetics.
Calling it "abnormal" is to project todays morality on a society that was more than happy to enforce Jim Crow laws, tolerate lynching and starve Aboriginal kids kidnapped from parents and placed in Boarding Schools. The Kiplingesque "burden" of subjugation and denigration of non-Christians and/or non-whites was actually the Norm in Europe, Oceania and the Americas, not the "abnormal". Buchan was clearly strongly influenced by these ideas because they were considered normative thought, and socially important vehicles to breed their vision of the Übermensch, who risked being outbred by the darker skinned "animalistic" and relatively fecund masses who would never be seen as fully human.