Arthur de Gobineau

Racism, the book, is largely devoted to a highly polemical refutation of some of the main racial ideologies and theories of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The writers whom Hirschfeld criticized, aside from his favorite target of the National Socialists themselves, were figures such as Arthur Gobineau, Vacher de la Pouge, I practice these words too, these names too, Houston Stuart Chamberlain, and others generally denounced today as pseudoscientists.

In fact, that is an inappropriate term.

Some of them were not trying to write as scientists at all, but rather as political theorists, while others are better described as pre-scientific writers on race who worked with inadequate information, concepts, methodology, and terminology.

Good news for European settlers, bad news for native Maori.

French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau begins publication of an essay on the inequality of the human races, one of the OG texts on scientific racism.

The Crimean War breaks out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire and soon involves France, the UK, and Kingdom of Sardinia.

And a 20-year-old Johannes Brahms meets Robert and Clara Schumann, setting off one of music history's great situationships.

This is, of course, not intended as a complete description, but shows that the spirit of the earlier Sufism was profoundly ethical.

Count Gobineau, however, assures us that the Sufism which he knew was both enervating and immoral.

Certainly, the later Sufi poets were inclined to overpress symbolism, and the luscious sweetness of the poetry may have been unwholesome for some, both for poets and for readers.

Still, I question whether, for properly trained readers, this evil result should follow.

Nothing almost gave more offence than this.

It seemed to be only a few degrees better than the absolute denial of the resurrection body ventured upon by the Akhbaris.

Footnote, Gobineau, pages 39, 40.

And yet the notion of a subtle, internal body, a notion which is Indian as well as Persian, has been felt even by many Westerners to be for them the only way to reconcile reason and faith.

But if France is, in the imagination, the land of revolution, it is also the birthplace of modern reaction.

Napoleon's counter-revolution, the scientific racist theories of Gobineau, the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair, the proto-fascism of Catholic action, right the way through to Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and his daughter's National Rally.

The near-revolution of May 1968, which at its peak saw French President Charles de Gaulle flee the country for the safety of a military base in Germany, was rapidly broken.

De Gaulle won his subsequent election in a landslide, and if the left eventually then won the presidency under François Mitterrand in 1981, it was Mitterrand who introduced neoliberalism to France, shattering the left, and who opened the door to the electoral breakthrough of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National.

The Aryan theory has been taken up by our nationalist press, Mesh- Menshikov.

The ideas of Gobineau, Koka- Kokachin.

The doctrine of the superiority of the Aryans is, in relation to the Semites, is of a German manufacture.

C. Ivanov.