(Image courtesy of ABC News)
Last Saturday was a sad day for the city of Buffalo and the nation as a whole, as another act of domestic terrorism was committed in the name of hatred and fear. But this one struck me as particularly disturbing due to the age of the shooter (18) and military precision with which he conducted reconnaissance on the area and planned the attack, even conducting practice runs referred to as pre-mission “rehearsals” in the military.
Even more disturbing was the reason behind the attack – racist ideologies known as “replacement theory” and “white genocide” – which are becoming less fringe and more mainstream – laid out in a racist, antisemitic 180-page manifesto. At the most benign level, “replacement theory” suggests that Democrats are attempting to replace the white demographic with immigrants in order to secure the electorate in future elections – a theory pushed by many far-right politicians and TV commentators, including Tucker Carlson. However, most white supremacist groups have adopted a more diabolical interpretation: The white race is under existential threat of extinction due to low white birth rate coupled with high immigrant birth rate, miscegenation, and violence from racial minorities. Taken as a whole, they represent attempted genocide of the white race. Many also believe that this is the product of an international Jewish conspiracy.
This week, I had my students read an article about the attack and asked if they could think of any connections to what we’ve been learning in class about World War II and the Holocaust. One student responded that it sounds a lot like the beliefs of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Bingo! The extreme forms of “replacement theory” and “white genocide” represent Nazism repackaged for a new generation of extremists.
The common thread that connects these ideologies is the notion of a race struggle, where one race’s supremacy and even existence were under threat by an inferior race through violence, miscegenation, and international conspiracies. Hitler explained these ideas in detail in Mein Kampf, written while he was imprisoned following the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. In a distorted version of the prevalent theory that attributes the collapses of civilizations to accumulation of wealth by the few, Hitler wrote that “the mixing of blood and the resulting lowering of racial cohesion is the sole reasons why cultures perish.” To drive this point home, he stated that North America consists of mainly Germanic people who have “mixed very little with inferior people of color,” while in Central and South America, “Latin immigrants mixed with the aborigines, sometimes on a large scale.” He concluded that “the Germans of North America” who remained “racially pure” became “masters of their continent,” and “they will remain masters as long as they do not defile their blood.”
Not only did Hitler describe the supposed existential peril of miscegenation, but he claimed that these are part of an intentional Jewish conspiracy to subjugate other races and steal their culture. Hitler wrote:
“[The Jew] found his weapon in the organized Marxist masses, which avoid democracy and instead help him to subjugate and govern people dictatorially with his brutal fists. … With the help of his international contacts, he enmeshes people … who effectively resist his attacks … in a net of external enemies whom he incites to war.”
Perhaps more chilling, Hitler alleged:
“For hours, the blackhaired Jewish boy lies in wait, with satanic joy on his face, for the unsuspecting girl whom he disgraces with his blood and thereby robs her from her people. He tries by all means possible to destroy the racial foundations of the people he wants to subjugate.”1
Hitler, however, reassured his readers that “a people of pure race conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew.”
It is significant to point out that these thoughts did not originate with Hitler. Instead, Mein Kampf was an amalgamation of recycled ideas dating back decades, even centuries. The notion of Jews as a separate race was cemented by German journalist Wilhelm Marr, whose 1879 work “The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism” claimed that Jews had essentially taken over the world. His ideas were notable for a few reasons. Marr cemented the idea that Jews were not just adherents of a particular religion, but instead a separate race with certain biological characteristics. In fact, he coined the term “antisemitism” to distinguish this new racial hatred of the Jews as something different from the religious hatred that came before, known as Judenhasse. This came as the Western world was swept by a wave of Social Darwinism that grew out of Charles Darwin’s young theory of evolution.2
We can see in Marr’s ideas the themes of racial struggle and international Jewish conspiracy. These weren’t necessarily new, but they were influential. In 1895, Reichstag member Hermann Ahlwardt – author of The Desperate Battle of the Aryan Peoples With the Jews, which levied libelous attacks against government officials and expounded unfounded allegations of a Jewish conspiracy – gave a speech to the governing body, urging them to bar Jewish immigrants from entering Germany. Ahlwardt explained that there was a racial struggle between Teutons (ethnic Germans) and the Jewish race, whom he called “a race of exploiters and parasites.” Ahlwardt said:
“The crux of the matter is Jewry’s capacity for contagion and exploitation. . . . How many thousands of Germans have perished as a result of this Jewish exploitation, how many may have hanged themselves, shot themselves, drowned themselves, how many may have ended by the wayside as tramps in America or drawn their last breath in the gutter, all of them people who had worked industriously on the soil their fathers had acquired.”
The motion to bar Jewish immigration ultimately failed, but 51 of the representatives (23%) voted for it, showing that a sizable number of people courted these beliefs.
Another proponent of extreme antsemitism was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote the popular book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), which focused on racial struggle and purity of blood. Chamberlain related miscegenation to dog breeding in the sense that a little bit can be beneficial and make the race stronger, but too much would ruin the race. He also insinuated that the downfall of Rome was in part due to racial mixing. “Marius and Sulla had … by the freeing of the slaves, brought into the nation perfect floods of African and Asiatic blood, thus transforming Rome into . . . the trystring place of all the mongrels of the world.”3
With these beliefs rampant, it is no wonder that young Adolf Hitler, a vagabond recently rejected from art school in early 1900s Vienna, was able to so easily adopt antisemitism as a scapegoat for his ills – a scapegoat that became larger after Germany’s defeat in the Great War. Yet Hitler was to take it to the next level; what should be done about this existential threat that Jews posed to the Aryan race? For one, Germany was too small, and thus needed to seek Lebensraum (“living space”) in the east. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that France was just a “rear-guard action” and Germany needed to look to “Russia and its border states.” Aside from the obvious reason there was more space and strategic resources in that direction, the vast majority of Europe’s Jews lived to the east of Germany, thanks to a series of expulsions from Western Europe during the Middle Ages.4
Furthermore, Hitler himself implemented much of what he accused the Jews of doing. He warned that Jews would subjugate people and rule “dictatorially with his brutal fists,” only to do just that to the German people. He accused the Jews of international conspiracies only to make an alliance with Italy and Japan to wage aggressive war against the world, brutalizing and massacring millions of innocent civilians along the way. He accused the Jews of attempting the destruction of the German people and the Aryan race, only to systematically murder two-thirds of Europe’s Jews.
The similarity between the ideology that drove Hitler to attempt the total annihilation of the Jews and the ideology that motivated Payton Gendron to drive three and a half hours to murder African Americans is not hard to see. Gendron’s 180-page manifesto puts on full display the anxieties of a racial struggle and an international Jewish conspiracy. Gendron also classifies his victims as “replacers” – a reference to “replacement theory” – in a similar ilk that Hitler classified his victims as “Marxists,” tapping into the fear of Communism that was prevalent in Western Europe and other parts of the world at the time.5 It is significant to note that “classification” is the first of the ten stages of genocide.
Gendron’s manifesto also mentions a 14-word slogan which has been adopted by most white supremacist groups. According to the Anti-Defamation League, that slogan is “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Here again we plainly see the anxiety of an existential threat to the white race and its future – a threat grave and powerful enough to radicalize a teenager to commit horrific acts of violence.6
As much as Tucker Carlson would like to blame Gendron’s violence and manifesto on mental illness and the meandering thoughts of a “diseased mind” in order to absolve himself of culpability for the spread of related ideas, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Yes, Gendron was obviously a troubled individual, evidenced by the fact that he once killed a cat. However, he expresses apprehension at the thought of massacring children, providing evidence of some type of conscience. Compare this to the actions of Adam Lanza, who, for no apparent reason, murdered 20 children at Sandy Hook elementary school before taking his own life. Furthermore, the effort he took to research his targets, the manner in which he did painstaking military-quality reconnaissance of his target – including prior visits to the store itself to retrieve floor plans and observe the security guards, – the stock-piling of ammunition, and the rehearsal practice runs do not suggest this was an action committed solely due to mental illness. This was not random killing for the purpose of killing. This was a carefully planned, ideologically-motivated, military-style act of terrorism with the purpose of destroying a specific group of people – not the first, and unfortunately, probably not the last of its kind. Furthermore, it is not out of bounds to say that the most devout adherents of this type of ideology – just like the fanatical Nazis of Hitlers era – want one thing: the destruction or elimination of those races that threaten them. The shooter’s manifesto even stated that the mass killing of Jews would be justified.
So what can we do to stop it? We need to change the discourse to argumentation based on high-quality factual evidence from credible sources. For one, make sure that all information you share online is credible and accurate. Crash Course Navigating Digital Information is a great series based on a Stanford History Education Group’s (SHEG) Civic Online Reasoning curriculum that the common person can use to learn tricks about navigating the digital information sphere we spend so much time on. But most importantly, we need to believe in a respectful existence for all. We need to listen to each other and engage in discourse with the objective of understanding one another. Daryl Davis, an African American musician from Boston who has convinced numerous members of the KKK to leave the organization, provides a powerful example of the effectiveness of this approach (I highly recommend watching his TED talk). As a teacher, I am in a unique position to teach students to examine the world with a critical eye, compose fact and evidence based arguments, and most of all, respect and accept all people. That is something I wouldn’t trade for the world.
Footnotes:
- This sounds eerily similar, albeit rhetorically more extreme, to the often-repeated line about immigrants coming across the border to commit crimes and rape women.
- This Darwin’s theory elevated race consciousness, and not always in a negative light. Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization tells the history of different races and extols their virtues in a positive light. He used the idea of “race” similar to the way we use the idea “ethnic group.”
- This quote was taken from the Seventh Edition of Sources of the Western Tradition: Volume II (2008, Houghton Mifflin). If it was Chamberlain’s purpose to insinuate that Rome was weakened or collapsed due to this miscegenation, it was not a very strong argument, since Roman civilization lasted another half-millennium before collapsing in the west.
- Most of these Jews lived in an area of the former Russian Empire known as the Pale of Settlement. In place from the 1790s until the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917, the Pale of Settlement was the only place that Jews were allowed to live in the Russian Empire.
- Context is important here. Even at this point, Communism had long been a boogyman of Western nations. The Industrial Revolution had brought the idea to the forefront of Western society in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the fear of Communism through the labor movement was prevalent. When the Tsars were overthrown in Russia and a civil war broke out, the United States sent soldiers into Russia to assist the White forces who were attempting to suppress the Bolsheviks. Following the end of World War I, economic chaos bred revolutionary movements in European countries, many of them Communist in nature. This was especially prominent in Germany. All of this made the classification of the Jews as “Marxist” particularly dangerous.
- Hitler was 18 when he was rejected from art school for the first time in Vienna.
History in Focus 