Influence
Gobineau's "influence on the development of racial theory has been exaggerated and his ideas have been routinely misconstrued".
Gobineau's ideas found an audience in the United States and in German-speaking areas more so than in France, becoming the inspiration for a host of racial theories, for example those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. "Gobineau was the first to theorize that race was the deciding factor in history and the precursors of Nazism repeated some of his ideas, but his principle arguments were either ignored, deformed, or taken out of context in German racial thought".
The Historian and Hitler-Biographer Joachim C. Fest describes Arthur de Gobineau, in particular his negative views on race mixing as expressed in his essay, as an eminent influence on Adolf Hitler and National socialism. In the Chapter "Vision" within his Book "Hitler" he writes that the influence of Gobineau on Hitler can be easily seen and that Gobineaus ideas were used by Hitler in simplified form for demagogic purposes: "Significantly, Hitler simplified Gobineau's elaborate doctrine until it became demagogically usable and offered a set of plausible explanations for all the discontents, anxieties, and crises of the contemporary scene." However, Professor Steven Kale has cautioned that "Gobineau’s influence on German racism has been repeatedly overstated".
Although cited by groups such as the Nazi Party, the text implicitly criticizes anti-Semitism and describes Jews in positive terms, the Jews being seen as a superbly forged race of "ancient Greek-like strength" of cohesion. Implicitly, the folk of Judah merely represented a wandering, semi-austral variation of Ur-Aryan blood-stock. Gobineau stated, "Jews... became a people that succeeded in everything it undertook, a free, strong, and intelligent people, and one which, before it lost, sword in hand, the name of an independent nation, had given as many learned men to the world as it had merchants." Philo-Judaic sentiment was intermixed with ethnological theories concerning the primally Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan archeogenetic matrix whence sprang the Jews. In these lines of speculative anthropology, the Jews were anciently (supposedly) primordially interpreted as of atypical Indo-European ethnicity: Judaic racial typology emerged from Iranid-Nordid founders, the details considered inessential, possessors of compatibly "white" "Aryan" blood being the main point. The latter-day "Hamiticized" Jewish folk came into existence from non-Afro-Asiatic Hurrian (or Horite), Jebusite, Amorite or early-Hittite, Mittani-affiliated racial nuclei, the "consensus science" of the time asserted. The blatantly, ironically almost aggressive pro-Jewish attitude of Gobineau, akin to Nietzsche in sheer admiration and lionization of the Jews as one of the "highest races", proved ideologically vertiginous to the Nazi propagandists and Procrustean thinkers -- here Gobineau unmistakably contradicted perhaps the main pillar of Nazi political ideology, the schizoid, neo-Gnostic dualism of "Jewish demonology", painfully obvious as reflective of low-grade moral-intellectual barbarism. Incompatible with Nazi ideology, the Count's fervent Judaic positivity and total dearth of anti-Semitism the Nazis could only attempt to ignore or minimize away in silence of hypocrisy.
Read more about this topic: An Essay On The Inequality Of The Human Races
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