On the "Value" of Human Races

 Note: This is a English translation of Chapter 5 of the book "The Nordic Thought" by Hans Guenther published in 1927; seven years before the Nazis came to power & pushed their horrendous propaganda that aimed to harm Non-German peoples.  This chapter is a real eye-opener about the subjective concept of race & civilization & can only be understood by those who are truly open-minded & looking to improve themselves both body & soul.  

On the "value" of human races 

By Hans Guenther

The decision for the Nordic race (as the one that sets the direction for the selection of the German people) was made by the adherents of the Nordic idea after an examination of the value of the races represented in the German people. Of the five European races represented in Germany, the "Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes" had to describe the Nordic race, which is more or less common to all German tribes, as the most valuable. The appendix to this book, "Rassenkunde des Judentums" had to declare the influence of the Jewish spirit on the life of the German people and above all the mixing of German blood with Jewish blood, which is mainly foreign to Europe, as particularly disastrous, since the "German blood" is made up of completely different races than the "Jewish blood", which is mainly caused by the strong influence of the Near Eastern race.

The "Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes" came to its conclusions from an examination of the value of the races. However, more or less passionate voices of opponents of the racial idea have been raised against judgments that assume a "value" of races, so that it is necessary to consider what "value" actually means in relation to races.

The concept of "race" and the consideration of individual races belong first and foremost to the field of natural science. From a scientific point of view, however, evaluating phenomena is not permissible. All evaluation is based on a human stance. Because man (especially man in creative times) wants to intervene in events with his will in a formative way (man in destructive times at least in a deformative way), he must call this good, that bad, this high-value, that low-value. It has been rightly argued that from the point of view of natural science all phenomena are equally valuable or equally worthless, or better: that an evaluative consideration does not belong to natural science as such. Declaring the life of a human being to be more valuable is a human stance that does not belong to natural science as such. than the life of the fungi (bacteria) that endanger human life as pathogens. But man is not only - and for the Nordic Movement not primarily - a natural being, but a spiritual being, a being that must also see nature (and thus its own body) as a purpose for the creation and improvement of civilization.

All civilization, however, is based on the values ​​of the civilization-creating human being. Man only perfects himself in values.

As soon as the question of the culture of a people is asked, another question inevitably arises about the spiritual nature of the races represented in this people, because culture is the most comprehensive expression of a conflict between spiritual forces and their environment and among themselves.

Thus the culture and the change in culture of a people is above all an expression of the conflict between the racial souls represented in this people and their environment; indeed, the “racial studies of the German people” had to interpret the history of a people as the conflict between the respective racial dispositions of this people and their environment (p. 401). The direction of a culture is therefore always dependent on the racial soul that dominates a people, on the racial soul that has gained dominance after conflict with the other racial souls represented in the people.1) A racial change in a people will - after a certain period of time - be followed by a change in culture. Tradition and education can help to preserve the spiritual direction of the dwindling race in a people for a while. The individual racial souls within the people can also have a different voice at different times and in different environments and “spirits of the times”. But the essence of a people’s history always remains the confrontation of the people’s entire racial makeup with its environment. If a certain race disappears within a people, the direction of its culture will change.

The idea of ​​the irreplaceable value of the Nordic race for the German people also leads to the necessary decision of the adherents of the Nordic idea on the Jewish question, which has become so burning today. The accusation by some Jews that their "race" (i.e. in the case of the Jewish people, which is mainly made up of several non-European races, their racial mixture, their racially mixed people) is described as "inferior" cannot be made against the Nordic movement, since it knows that there is no standard for measuring the value of races and peoples, that every people draws its own values ​​from within. The Jews are not inferior to the Nordic movement in themselves, but only in relation to the inheritance of the German (Nordic-based) people, they are just as "inferior" as a Nordic person is and must be "inferior" to the inheritance of the (Near Eastern-based) Jewish people. The races mainly represented in the Jewish people, the Near Eastern and the Oriental, would have to be absorbed into the genetic makeup of the German people, which was already so racially confused by its European racial components - the composition of the German blood heritage would be changed by the influx of non-European blood to such an extent that ultimately nothing else could be expected but the emergence of such an inexplicable European-Asian-African racial swamp, such as the rotting Roman Empire represents as the clearest example and which is already clearly visible in certain circles of the major European cities as a warning sign.

The Jewish side occasionally claims that it is highly unfair that the racially-minded circles in the German people reject a blood community with the Jews, while they have otherwise accepted people and families of non-German origin, for example men of French origin such as Chamisso, Willibald Alexis, Geibel and Fontane, as well as the many French emigrant families, into the German blood community. A Kant probably had Scottish ancestors, a

v. Clausewitz was Polish; a Jahn may have Czech ancestors among his Bohemian ancestors, as may a Treitschke; a von Radowitz came from Hungarian nobility, etc. All of them and many others were not rejected on the basis of race.

However, a racial rejection would be completely pointless in such cases, because the men and families mentioned did not bring any blood to the German people that would have been foreign to their racial mixture; in fact, they mostly brought the Nordic blood to the German people that is considered desirable by the Nordic idea. The Nordic idea would not reject an immigration of predominantly Nordic people, especially from Sweden and Norway, if the immigrants and their children expressed their desire to become German. It is in keeping with the Nordic idea to be particularly pleased about the transition of Masurian families to Germanness, since the Masurian population is still relatively rich in Nordic blood and has already given many important people to German intellectual life.

In the case of the Jewish people, however, we are not dealing with people of Western origin, but with people from a population that

mainly includes races foreign to Europe, mostly the Near Eastern and Oriental races. Mixtures of these races would have to divert the spiritual direction of the German people in the direction in which this direction has already been diverted in the racially mixed circles of the European cities mentioned above.'

However, for the Nordic movement, the greatest danger posed by Judaism, this "wedge that Asia drove into the structure of Europe," this "thing of ferment and disturbance" (as a Jewish writer puts it), lies in the fact that the Jews, the more true they are to their own nature, the more they must try to set up a model that is particularly alien to the German people. The 19th century, or at least the second half of this century, and our present day have produced a spirit throughout the West, the "modern world," which runs directly counter to the development of the Western peoples, i.e. promotes and accelerates degeneration. According to the testimony of particularly gifted Jews, this "modern spirit" is Jewish, no matter where you look at it.1) Such an influence on the spirit of the Western peoples, which at first seems incredible, is only possible and can be explained by the power that the Jews have in the press, as described by the Jewish writer Goldstein2) and by the position of the Jews as "masters of money."1) This is how the "monstrous fact" emphasized by Goldstein has emerged: the life of the Western peoples and of the North American people is constantly influenced by an alien spirit, which the more true it is to itself, the more blood-conscious it is - and it is exemplary blood-conscious - the more passionately it works to establish an alien model.

The clear decision to follow the German example makes it easy for the Nordic Movement towards the Jews, free from all the irritable mood that is so easily associated with ethnic conflicts, to continue on the path of strengthening the German people with the same responsibility that the Zionist Movement, the Jewish ethnic movement, feels for strengthening its people. Just as the Jewish ethnic Jew, conscious of his blood, must not tolerate any aliens in his area if he wants to create civility, so the Nordic Movement must not tolerate any Jews in its area. What applies to the Jews for the renewal of German civility applies to the Germans:

What does not belong to you,

you must avoid; what disturbs your inner being,

you must not tolerate.

(Goethe)

The Nordic idea aims at the pure renewal of the Nordic-conditioned German culture and must judge, as Goethe did in “Wilhelm Meistero Waderjahren” (III, 11): precisely for the sake of our own culture, “we do not want a Jew among us; for how should we grant him a share in the highest culture, whose origin and provenance he denies?” — A Nordic-oriented German culture must be just as much the “highest culture” for the German as a Jewish culture arising from the Jewish spirit is for the Jew. All culture is based on limitation. This has gradually become clearer in the present since Nietzsche’s prophetic work “The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” (1874).

The more racial knowledge spreads among the educated youth of the German and Jewish people, the more it will contribute to clarifying and reconciling the differences between the Jews and the non-Jewish peoples, because these differences have often been driven to the point of mutual denigration by the mixing of religious and economic questions. The core of the Jewish question, however, is only accessible through ethnological and racial studies.

There are people who accuse the representatives of racial theories of stirring up hatred between nations - when, for example, nothing could unite the Germanic-speaking peoples better than the recognition of the Nordic influence they all share, and when racial studies and genetic research have nothing more to show the peoples more forcefully than the terrible counter-selection imposed on them with every war: the extermination of their best hereditary stocks. Hildebrandt is right when he shows: “It is precisely the ignorance in matters of race, the baseless phrase that fuels hatred between nations.”1)

This is also the case in the case of the differences between the Jewish people and the non-Jewish peoples. The more knowledge of racial phenomena, the more knowledge of the laws of inheritance, the more objective the attitude when discussing differences. Zionism has recognized this and is teaching Jewish-ethnic youth at the same time that any adaptation of the Jew to a non-Jewish environment is nothing but "disgraceful, everyday self-denial and self-humiliation."2) The racial idea must impress the same upon the Germans: that any adaptation of a German to the Jewish spirit is disgraceful self-denial. From this insight, the racial idea must come to reject the "modern spirit," which is Jewish-influenced "no matter how one looks at it." The Jewish side has already understood this here and there. The Nordic movement has already been described by Jews as "asemitic" in order to distinguish it from the "anti-Semitic" movements for which the "racial question" consists of nothing other than the "Jewish question". The Nordic idea is first and foremost an idea for the increase of the Nordic blood of all German tribes and can only become an idea against other races and peoples if they do not want to allow an increase in Nordic blood and the peaceful creation of the preconditions for this.

A solution to the Jewish question as envisaged by Hildebrandt: symbiosis, spiritual community, no marriage between Jews and non-Jews" - such a community would only be conceivable if both parts, the Jewish and the non-Jewish, were guaranteed the free development of their own spirit. The Jewish people, however, have "the most powerful means of power - monetary economy, banking, press and extensive association organizations,"*) with which they can penetrate the non-Jewish peoples in a profound way with their spirit, which is alien to these peoples. The non-Jewish peoples lack these means and they are probably not at all appropriate to them, so that these peoples are constantly confronted with the Jewish spirit at best by a defense against alien spirits, but not by a renewal of their own. Until the non-Jewish peoples have first overcome the "modern spirit" and then renewed their own spirit, the "spiritual community" proposed by Hildebrandt is not conceivable at all. Community

can only be based on the joy of mutual free growth, only on the joy of engaging with a spirit that can be completely itself. The solution proposed by Hildebrandt becomes conceivable when the Jewish people have recognized the Nordic people as the elite model for the German people through action.

“Become what you are" - this saying, born of the Nordic spirit, by the very same Hellenic poet Pindarus, who called his fellow countrymen the "blond Danaans" (in the 9th Nemean Ode), is a guideline for the development of great cultures. Where a culture wants to develop and assert itself and fulfill itself, it must work, must call that which enhances it "valuable", that which hinders it "inferior" or "worthless". Everything alien to the species must be of lesser value to it in relation to itself than that which is native to the species. Thus, to a Jewish culture, as sought by the Zionists, the non-Jewish must appear “inferior”, to a non-Jewish culture the Jewish must appear “inferior”

If a culture looks into its own life, it must evaluate again for the sake of improvement, hold the creative within itself in high esteem, value the less creative as inferior, consider that which strengthens its direction valuable and that which pushes it away from it worthless. Thus the question of culture raises the question of racial value, because cultures are an expression of the spiritual nature and the spiritual nature of man is determined by race.

It is therefore wrong when Fetscher, in his booklet “Principles of Racial Hygiene” (1924), describes the discussion of whether this or that race is “more valuable” not as a “scientific task, but merely a question of value judgment, of personal attitude.” However, as shown above, this discussion cannot be a scientific task, even though natural science has a lot to contribute to this discussion. However, racially determined phenomena extend far beyond the area whose intellectual understanding is the task of natural science.

It was Gobineau who gave the first example that the significance of race for the life of nations should be investigated in the field of history as well as in that of nature. Racial forces must be reckoned with in the entire field of the evaluative sciences, especially historical research. The discussion of the value of races belongs to the evaluative sciences, but as a scientific discussion it is, or at least should be, removed from any "personal attitude". It is by no means a "personal" matter, but one of the first concerns of a people and its leaders, or should be one of the first concerns, to watch over the (racially determined) direction of the common culture with all seriousness and with all the help offered by natural science (the theory of heredity, genetic health research, racial research). The Nordic idea does not arise from a "personal attitude", such as a childlike liking for blond hair and blue eyes, but from the consideration of the historical rules of the life of peoples in general and the life of the peoples of the Indo-European language in particular. History is by its nature an evaluative science, and the "attitude" of the Nordic idea is a consequence of its racial view of history and its knowledge of hereditary health - with regard to the possibilities of a renewal of German life.

Fetscher has overlooked the fact that his own book is riddled with value judgements, because research into hereditary health (racial hygiene) is a judgmental science that uses scientific insights. Natural science can only ever say what is; never what should be. The theory of hereditary health speaks clearly enough of "higher" and "inferior" genetic traits, but can never derive such an evaluation from nature, but only from human stance from the standpoint of civilization. Genetics that promote morality are simply of “higher value” than those that inhibit morality. The Nordic idea takes the same standpoint of morality as genetic health research (and as Fetscher himself, without realizing it) in order to understand its evaluations.