Monday, March 31, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
We have been looking at how various groups view Jews, Judaism, and Israel as a threat to themselves - a threat that drives a pathological desire to annihilate them entirely.
What about the most Jew-hating group of all, the Nazis?
Everyone knows the Nazis were antisemites. But most people don't realize exactly how Nazi philosophy came up with the idea of Jews as uniquely evil and deserving of destruction. Even in the twisted mindset of the Nazis, there is a type of bizarre logic that justifies genocide.
The Nazi view of Jews as a unique, existential threat drew heavily from Social Darwinism, a discredited 19th-century set of ideas that misapplied Charles Darwin’s biological theory of natural selection to human societies and policies. According to those who espoused it, human society follows the same evolutionary principles as biology: competition, survival of the fittest, and natural selection. Social Darwinists claimed that certain individuals, classes, or races were inherently superior to others due to their "evolutionary fitness," and that these differences justified social inequalities. The Nazis distorted these ideas through pseudoscience, viewing Jews not just as sub-human (Untermensch), a term they also applied to Slavs and Roma, but as a uniquely dangerous force requiring total annihilation.
If that is so, then why should the Nazis care about Jews? If they are socially inferior, shouldn’t they go extinct on their own under Social Darwinism’s rules? Why the obsessive need to annihilate Jews entirely, leaving nothing left?
The reason is obvious: if Social Darwinism applies "survival of the fittest" to social groups, then Jews, who have survived the worst that mankind can throw at them, must be the fittest of all. This idea did not sit well with antisemites.
To counter this, early Nazi theorists made up two theories, one biological and one philosophical. Biologically, they portrayed Jews as a parasitic exception to Social Darwinism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler labeled Jews a ‘parasite’ or ‘parasitic race,’ thriving by exploiting their hosts rather than competing naturally.
Based on the idea of the parasite and influence from antisemitic literature, Nazis explained Jewish survival as a form of bloodsucking, especially through usury.
The other more philosophical theory, promoted by Nazi ideologues like Arno Schickedanz, was that while most people on the planet belonged to races, Jews were uniquely the Gegenrasse - the "anti-race," an antithesis of the Aryan race, a destructive force that existed to undermine Aryan civilization. His friend Alfred Rosenberg argued that while most people belonged to races, Jews were a ‘ferment of decomposition,’ existing to undermine Aryan civilization through their culture, science, and ethics. According to this theory, Jewish culture, Jewish science, and Jewish "slave morality" like compassion and the inherent value of every human, were all designed to destroy the Aryan philosophy of a superior race.
They must all be uprooted, physically, culturally, and spiritually, and replaced with the Nazi vision of Aryan supremacy
The Nazis claimed Jews were uniquely dangerous because Jews were said to have operated as a global, coordinated force. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Nazis heavily promoted, alleged Jews controlled finance, politics, and media worldwide. This conspiracy made Jews an existential threat - unlike "subhuman" Slavs or Roma, who were seen as localized problems, Jews were believed to “infect” Aryans on a global scale.
Other antisemitic philosophies targeted specific aspects of Jewishness—Christian supersessionism attacks Jewish religion, Muslim supersessionism targets Jewish nationhood, and Social Justice supersessionism focuses on Israel’s statehood, all seeking to destroy and replace those elements. Nazi ideology, however, was uniquely annihilationist, targeting every aspect of Jewish existence: their ethnicity, religion, culture, and physical presence, aiming to erase all traces while replacing them with Aryan supremacy. This sickening logic reveals the annihilationist core of antisemitism, helping us understand how other, seemingly more normal, liberal, intellectual, or Westernized groups adopt similar impulses, whether on the Right or Left.
It is inaccurate to think of Nazis as comic book villains or perfect ideals of Hollywood evil. They spent a great deal of effort to build a pseudo-intellectual edifice for their racist and annihilationist theories. Ignoring their theories means allowing their more modern descendants, like the Christian Identity movement or today’s Nazi-inspired white supremacists, to attract new members using these same hateful arguments. The lesson from Nazism isn’t just that man can become unimaginably evil, but that man can intellectualize becoming unimaginably evil.
Right or Left, there is no end to how the human mind can justify the most heinous crimes.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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