Eugenics, Racism and Fascism, Socialism, Communism, Etc.

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Jun 26 07:47:45 PDT 2001


At 09:52 AM 6/26/01 -0400, Leo c. wrote:
>under fascism. There is a need for perspective here. Stalinist USSR and
>Stalinist satellite regimes in Eastern Europe were marked by anti-Semitic
>purges, and such treatment of national minorities as epitomized by the
>deaths of millions of Ukrainians. Maoist China has not a much better record
>with respect to the treatment of Chinese national minorities; Tibet is only
>the tip of the iceberg. And so on. I assume we need no recitation of the
>racism of fascism.

I beg to differ. Soviet Russia, while not free of anti-Semitism, was a *vast* improvement over the previous regimes and their rabidly anti-semitic clergy (both orthodox and catholic) and segments of the intelligentsia. That can be, inter alia, demonstrated by the fact that Jewish population of Poland often saw the Red Army, entering the country under the provisions of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement as their saviours.

What is more, the governments of Warsaw-Pact countries pursoued policies supporting ethnic minority rights. That should not be confused with their policies to crush counter-revolution, which was often disguised as local nationalism or 'minority rights.' For example, Ukrainian, Latvian or Luithuanian nationalists were Nazi allies, who often acted as Hitler's willing executioners.

The same can be said of the China-Tibet relations - Tibetan theocracy hides under the veil of "national liberation." Thus, Chinese policies in the region are a response to Tibetan theocracy and its reactionary policies rather than an expression of their allegedly "racist" policies. In other words, the Chinese persecute the Tibetans because the Tibetans support the theocratic regime of the Dalai Lama, rather than because their see Tibetans as "racially inferior."

Ethnic divisions played a relatively minor role in Eastern European politics, as compared to class, religious and cultural differences. That can be demonstrated, among other, by the fact that many progressively-minded Jews of the 19th and early 20th centuries (including Karl Marx) often saw discarding their religious-cultural baggage as "the solution" to being fully integrated to the mainstream society. Such integration would not be possible, if the differences were perceived in racial rather than social-cultural terms (the latter, btw, being the cornerstone of nazi ideology).

IMHO, an attempt to portray Eastern European (or Chinese) experience as driven by "racism" is a thinly veiled US-centrism that sees world conflict throught the lenses of the US experience and labels them accordingly. I amy also add that the perception of "moral inferiority" of a group of people (defined by their skin color, nationality, class, etc.) is an effect rather than the cause of that group economic exploitation or political repression. In other words, a social group is economically exploited (or politically subordinated) and that leads to rationalizations in the form of perceiving that group as "morally inferior" in this or another way, rather than the other way around: that groups being perceived as "inferior" and that perception leading to economic or political exploitation. Being determines consciousness, not the other way around.

wojtek



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