I was tempted to leave the parenthetical out of the headline, but decided against it because I'm pretty sure that, as enlightened as folks on Steemit may be, many would see the headline and assume they know what this article will be about.
A Summary for the Lazy Reader.
This post will argue (without any evidence, because I'm lazy) that:
From the perspective of Europeans alive before WW2, the idea that they were the "Master Race" was a logical conclusion to draw from the world they saw around them.
The logic of this conclusion can still be applied today. The modern variants of this concept are so subtle and insidious that they have been woven into the fabric of our Modern World in ways that most people will never notice or question.
To truly be rid of the concept of a "Master Race", humanity needs to actively dismantle, and then replace, some of the fundamental structures of the world as we know it.
Let the ranting begin.
One - Why the "Master Race" makes Sense.
This section is going to require some mental gymnastics and a fair bit of imagination for those of you who aren't Nazis, because I'm going to try and convince you that you could be one in a world where you didn't know any better.
So, imagine that you have been born to European parents in the Year of Our Lord 1900. You are 12, white, and male. Let's say you live in England. In two years, the End of Your World will begin and the cycle of that Apocalypse will finally complete itself by the time you turn 45. But you don't know that yet. So, as your first few armpit hairs begin to grow, this is what you are told about your world:
The Empire is Everything
You are a subject of the greatest territorial Empire mankind has ever forged. So vast and far-reaching are the lands that fly the Union Jack, that your schoolteachers have often said that the Sun never sets on them. These distant lands, you are told, are peopled with all manner of strange looking humans, all of whom have, after much fuss and adventure, seen the sense of bowing to the Crown. Across the Channel, the other kings of Europe have secured for themselves Empires of their own, but none so beautiful and glorious as the one you live in.
Everything good about the world you live in, so you're told, is a result of this state of affairs. You owe your past, present and future to the success of the Empire. Without it, you are told, the world you know would fall apart.
If you so choose, you can go to a public library, and find all sorts of information about the world you live in. Books upon books upon books of tales and treatises that expound for you the "Marvels of the Modern World" and how it came to be.
In the Sciences section, you will find tomes that tell of inventions and discoveries that have, in but a few short centuries, led to the heaving, groaning, ever-growing machines at the heart of the Empire's success. The Locomotive, the Steamship, the Printing Press, the Maxim Machine Gun, Penicillin, Hydraulics, Machine Tools and Clockworks. You will find the thoughts of Newton, Euler, Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Darwin as well as countless others and the commentaries of those they influenced. There is already so much, just in this part of the library, that you can never hope to learn it all in one lifetime. But the names and portraits are almost all white, male and European.
In the Geography section, you find descriptions of far off lands, many of them part of the Empire, full of savages of different sizes and colours. The pictures of these humanoid creatures that you find are so different from the world you know and the descriptions that you encounter can easily convince you that, even if they are human, they are not the same kind of human as you. While you're in this section, reading these things, your mind may wander to the dark skinned folk that you've seen here and there doing some sort of low-skill labour here and there. Your parents will have, by this point in your life, firmly entrenched in your mind a separate category of individual for these other kinds of people. Mixing with them is not allowed, and depending on where you live, you may have heard about the Zoo that used to have a few "real" savages on display back in the day. That Zoo is certainly still in living memory.
In the History section, you will encounter slavery. You will learn, quite quickly, that slaves were a central part of the functioning of Empires until your Empire, by the Grace of God, brought it to an end a few generations ago after Wilberforce and the Abolitionists finally convinced Parliament that it was a Sin to force a Man to work without wage. Most of the books in this section will speak of the World in terms of Masters and Servants, of Conquerers and Conquered, the Victors and the Vanquished. Subjugation, subordination and hierarchies are how things are because that is how they have always been.
And if you were to go into the Religion section, you will discover that there is only one. Near endless texts on Christianity and it's superiority. All other faiths are only mentioned in order to demonstrate them as false. There is One God, One Savior and One Faith worth believing in.
This is your world. And when you turn 14, it will Begin to End.
Okay, I'm done with that little picture of an English boy in 1912. That image is necessary though, for this next part of the first bit.
Here's a question: How much of a leap is it for that little boy to believe that he is by virtue of his birth alone, a member of a group of Masters?
Not much. That much, I think, is easy to see.
What is more difficult to see, is where the seed of the "Master Race" concept truly takes root. You see, it's not in the fact that different shades of people exist (that is to say, the conception of Race, and more specifically the myths of Race that were formulated and proliferated to justify and perpetuate Chattel Slavery and (post-Abolition) Segregationist thinking). It is not simply down to propaganda, either. It is, at least in my opinion, in the concept of a Master.
You see, when you think about the word Master, you find two concepts hiding inside - Excellence and Dominion.
A Master Craftsman is one thing.
The Master of the Plantation is another.
Masterful Mastery is the Mark of the Master.
Now, think about the last 300 years of human history. There is, in a sense, a case to be made, that the descendants of the Peoples of Europe forged themselves into the Masters of the World. The simplest version of this idea is two words:
"Master Race."
Makes Sense, doesn't it?
Two: How It All Falls Apart. And Gets Built Again. Same Same, But Different.
Let's be clear about something here - evil has a way of convincing you that it isn't. Put another way: the greatest villains are those who can convince you that they're heroes. This is important going forward with this meandering mess of an article.
By now, dear reader, you should have a vague sense of how the Myth of a Master Race came to be accepted by so many in the world before the World Wars. It is a matter of fact that most of the planet had, by the beginning of the 20th Century, been brought under the heel of White Men (many of whom were cousins) in some fashion or another, and had been turned into a machine that made the White Man wealthy. To those who lived then, it was the 'way of things'; ordained by God, won by Gun, driven by Gold.
And then the World Wars happened. Everything changed. The Old World Order ended, a New One rose in its place. Now, this period is where things get a little more tricky to understand, but this is also where the World of Today was truly born. Every World is built on the rubble of the World that came before. Remember that.
As Europe crashed and burned the first time, a very important thing happened to the minds of those who survived... They suffered the privations they had wrought on those they had subjugated. Suddenly Kings and Emperors were not so fine and beautiful. If a Young Man came back from the front, he returned broken - betrayed by his Masters.
In the wake of "The Great War", monarchies crumbled. But the Myth of Race survived. As did the Empires. Sure, there were many territorial losses for the Central Powers, but the winners gained much. Territory changed hands, and some monarchs lost their crowns, but the White Man was still calling the shots around most of the world, and wherever they couldn't be in charge, they had a very heavy hand on the scales of power and justice. Because the bombs hadn't dropped on Home... yet.
"Look at What Our Masters Made Us Do."
This was a big part of why, when the fever-dream of the 20s crashed hard into the Hangover of the 30s, Hitler's ideas found fertile ground in the minds of his countrymen. Living memory was all it took, to remind folks of the Good Ol' Days. Bad Masters were to blame for the whole thing going crater-shaped. Hitler's whole shtick and spiel boiled down to - "Jews are the Masters but they shouldn't be; Aryans aren't the Masters but they should; I should be the Master of the Masters see; because I once had a thought that I could, so I should."
People often look at the Third Reich as the Zenith of the Master Race as a concept in the world, but upon closer inspection, you'll start to see it more as the Swansong. A nasty, evil, awful Swansong.
If World War One was about the Tyranny of the Master, then World War Two was about the Tyranny of Race.
We all know how it turned out, so we'll skip to the Bold Quotey Bit.
"Look at what we did to Other Races"
1946 was not a good year... For anyone. It was a shitshow of shitshows. Europe had blown itself into bankruptcy and the US had become the biggest swinging dick in the geopolitical room. And like all swinging dicks, it found that it was feeling a little insecure thanks to the other swinging dick in the room... the USSR. Both of them agreed, however, that the Old World Empires were ending, and so the question was "What will take their place?". Stalin favored a territorial empire with a radically different rule-set, while Roosevelt saw the value in an economic empire that could change its rules whenever enough people felt like it.
"Any man can be a master and every race is essential to us all."
It took a loooong time to really catch on, and some might say that it still hasn't caught on as much as it should have by now.
That's because the truth is, if you look at the world today there is a race that still has dominion over significant chunks of the world. There is a race still that enjoys a higher standard of living than many others. There is a group of humans, that can decide the fate of all the rest, almost on a whim. There is still, by the thinking of that 12 year old boy in 1912, still a "Master Race". Because they never gave anyone else a shot. At least not in the last few hundred years.
Earlier, I mentioned that the word "Master" is what really lodges in peoples' brains and that it was connected to two common understandings of the word - Excellence and Dominion.
This is how you can convince young white men to carry tiki-torches through the streets of a US Town, and how you can convince young not-white men that flying a plane into a building is a worthy cause.
Evil Has a Way of Convincing You That It Isn't.
Three: No Masters, No World.
If you've made it this far, you may think I have a solution to the many and varied problems I have pointed out. I don't really. Just more problems. I know, I'm an asshole.
As the heading and summary have already suggested, the end of this article is not pretty. Or funny. Or even pretty funny.
It's rough.
We have to face facts, we live in a world largely conceived by, and built for, white people. The Global Financial System favours "Developed Economies" which are (surprise!) White Economies. This is not news, and it shouldn't be controversial... It is fairly self-evident. It's also symptomatic.
The problem, really, as you may have guessed... Is the existence of Masters.
The word "Master" invokes two ideas - Excellence and Dominion.
Excellence is essential and good. A Master Craftsman is a boon to all who have the privilege of his work.
Dominion is obviously where the problem has always been. It also sits at the heart of how the World as we know it is structured. Sovereignty requires dominion, legally speaking.
For Humanity to rid itself forever of the blight that is the concept of a "Master Race" and all that it entails, it is not enough to simply embrace racial diversity and champion different tones of skin... We must defy, at every turn, those who seek dominion over others. We must make it unpalatable, unprofitable and unsustainable for the violent to dominate the gentle. Power should be a dirty word.
For Humanity to Survive on Mothership Earth, the Meek Must Be at the Helm.
or, in other words ...
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit the Earth (because they're the only ones who can be trusted with it.)
Peace, Love and a Little Madness
Nomad.