I find it a chore to listen to Dennis Prager these days. Not because Dennis has changed, but I have changed.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager struggled to define “racism”: “You believe that race has intrinsic qualities, usually negative. The Nazis believed that Jews were born with bad qualities, inferior qualities. That Jews were inferior. They had a racist anti-Semitism.”
“In today’s world, there aren’t many racists. How many people believe it is inherent to having that skin color?”
“Are any stereotypes accurate? For example, are Asians, from the perspective of the American driver, worse drivers?”
“It is racist to believe that inherent to being Asian is a certain type of driving.”
This racist belief is obviously true. It is inherent to East Asians to be, on average, more cautious than whites who are in turn more cautious than blacks.
Dennis says that “recent African immigrants have crime rates no different from any other group.”
Here’s the news from Switzerland: “From this [2010] study it became clear that crime rate is highly correlated on the country of origin of the various migrant groups. Thus, immigrants from Germany, France and Austria had a significantly lower crime rate than Swiss citizens (60% to 80%), while immigrants from Angola, Nigeria and Algeria had a crime rate of above 600% of that of Swiss population.”
Dennis: “I do believe that certain cultures are superior to others.”
“It’s not easy to be a racist. You have to be actively stupid.”
“Racism is really evil. You shouldn’t cheapen the phrase.”
Luke: Yes, the Nazis called Jews untermenschen aka rats, parasites or vermin, but the Nazis thought of Jews as inferior morally, not inferior in intelligence and achievement. The Nazis resented the Jews for their high participation rate in satire (mocking traditional German values and practices and racial solidarity) and for promoting alien ideologies such as communism and in particular Russian Bolshevism.
Richard Lynn writes in his book Eugenics:
Hitler did not regard the Jews as genetically inferior. No one could have reached such a conclusion in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s because it was a matter of common knowledge and observation that the Jews were exceptionally talented. Jews were prominent in business, the professions, and intellectual life. Although they constituted only approximately 1 percent of the population, Jews won 10 out of 32 Nobel Prizes awarded to German citizens between 1905 and 1931 and were thus overrepresented among this highly elite group by a factor of approximately 30 (Gordon, 1984). Anyone who asserted that the Jews were genetically inferior and hence eugenically undesirable would have forfeited all credibility, and Hitler certainly did not do so. Hitler (1943) was indisputably anti-Semitic, and this anti-Semitism was based on his views, set out in Mein Kampf, that the Jews had exceptionally high abilities and were consequently a threat to the German, or as he called them “Aryan” peoples, who included the British and the Scandinavians. Hitler believed that the Jews and the Aryans were the two most talented races and that they were in competition to secure world supremacy. Thus, , he wrote in Mein Kampf that the Jews are “the mightiest counterpart to the Aryan” (p. 64). He feared that the outcome of the struggle between these two peoples might easily be “the final victory of this little nation” (p. 300). This was the reason that Hitler was determined to destroy the Jews. He believed that if he could achieve this, the Aryans would remain as the unchallenged master race. The correct understanding of Hitler’s views on the Jews has been summarized by MacDonald (1998): “Hitler believed that races, including the Jews, are in a struggle for world domination, and he had a very great respect for the ability of Jews to carry on their struggle” (p. 146). The frequent assertion that Hitler exterminated the Jews on eugenic grounds is a misunderstanding of his position.
“They hated Jews because Jews was seen by the Nazis as the worst race in the world.”
That was just what the Nazis told to the masses of brainwashed and uneducated German people whom they wanted to manipulate.
But in fact the Nazis hated Jews because they considered them as superior to them and thus threatening their plans for world domination.
The Nazi propaganda said “they are inferior”, but they were thinking “they are superior and thus threatening our plans for world domination.”
The Nazis believed, that it was “Jewish conspiracy” which caused the German defeat in WW1. They considered Jews as very influential.
According to Hitler, Jews had to be eliminated because they were considered as dangerous for his planned “German World Domination”.
“The Nazis believed, that it was ‘Jewish conspiracy’ which caused the German defeat in WW1. They considered Jews as very influential. I don’t think so. Jews were just a scapegoat… Everybody knew it was the Emperor and the Army that lost the war.”
Indeed – Germans (including also Austria) lost WW1 due to their own indolence.
But they blamed the Jews (who were just 1% of entire population of Germany – even though a very influential one percent) for their defeat, because it was very self-justifying to blame someone else for their own failures, especially if they could blame someone as influential as Jews.
In other words – by blaming the Jews, Germans were healing their own deeply rooted inferiority complexes.
One of those deep German inferiority complexes was their strong belief that they were a superior peoples and a world’s leading nation, which was contradicted by brutal reality, in which Germany did not have as much colonies and as much “living space” as other great powers.
Particularly British and French Empires were the source of German inferiority complexes. But also the USA and the huge Russian Empire.
German people believed that Russians did not deserve their territorially huge empire, because they “were unable to manage it properly”. Germans claimed, that Germans could allegedly manage each square mile of territory more efficiently than Slavic (including Russian) and Jewish people.
This is why the “Lebensraum” plan during WW2 included the deportation of “badly organized” Russians from European Russia to Asia.
So German anti-Semitism was about healing their complexes and explaining the cognitive dissonance they were experiencing between their own excessive belief concerning their self-importance (i.e. most Germans falsely believed that they were “special” and “superior” to others) and the reality (in which Germany did not have such an important position as selfish and excessively nationalistically proud German people wanted).
As the result of their excessive pride, looking down on others and silly beliefs, Germans started another WW, lost it, and got humiliated again.
German jealousness towards Britain, France and Russia and their bigger empires, was also among the factors leading to WW1.
This is only such a psychological approach to the causes of the initial rise and the subsequent collapse of Nazi Germany, of course.
From the political and military perspective, those events were much more complex.
