Fascism

1. Fascism

2. Overview • Historical Roots (de Gobineau) • Italian Fascism (Rocco; Mussolini) • National Socialism (Hitler)

3. Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau • 1816-1882 • French author, diplomat, aristocrat • Father was in charge of King Louis XVIII imperial guards and early on he attended military academies

4. Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau • Became friends with de Tocqueville • With the outbreak of the 2nd French Revolution (1830) his family’s fortunes change and he leaves country • During the 2nd Republic, he is able to land, through Tocqueville, a job in the French Foreign Office • Stationed mostly in Persia, the Middle East, and Brazil

5. Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau • Following posting in Brazil he develops a theory to explain the rise and fall of civilizations • His “Essay on the Inequality of Races” becomes hugely influential in Germany and the U.S.

6. Race and Nation “The racial question overshadows all other problems of history, it holds the key to them all, and the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.”

7. Natural Inequality • Recall, liberalism is based on two key ideas: • Freedom • Equality • Recall, socialism argues that liberalism has misunderstood the connection between the two, that we can’t be free unless we’re equal

8. Natural Inequality • The fascist tradition rejects both of these approaches • Equality is impossible because we are naturally unequal • Liberty is impossible because of the inequality (that is, not everybody should be free to make decisions about his/her life)

9. Natural Inequality “Do all men possess in an equal degree an unlimited power of intellectual development? In other words, has every human race the capacity for becoming equal to every other? The question is ultimately concerned with the infinite capacity for improvement possessed by the species as a whole, and with the equality of races. I deny both points.” -- de Gobineau

10. Natural Inequality • This view of natural inequality has deep roots in western thought, going back at least to Aristotle • Indeed it co-exists within liberalism, and runs throughout the 19th century European colonial/imperial expansion For example…

11. Natural Inequality • Thomas Jefferson, could author both the Declaration of Independence and the Notes on Virginia (Query 14, pp. 264-265)

12. Natural Inequality • Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, European writers argued for a natural hierarchy • Any objective observation of nature will see a hierarchy, we all recognize the hierarchy, and it is just political ideology that denies that the natural hierarchy ends with the human species

13. Natural Inequality • Invariably the hierarchy is arranged with Europeans on top, Asians in the middle, and Africans on the bottom

14. 18th Century Natural History

15. T H E G R E A T C H A I N O F B E I N G God Angels Extraterrestrials Human Beings Mammals Reptiles Fish Plants Pond Scum

16. T H E G R E A T C H A I N O F B E I N G God Angels Extraterrestrials Possible breaks in chain Human Beings Mammals Reptiles Fish Plants Pond Scum

17. T H E G R E A T C H A I N O F B E I N G Human Beings Europeans Asians Americas South Pacific Africa “Orangs outang” Mammals Elephants Beavers

18. T H E G R E A T C H A I N O F B E I N G Europeans Caucasus Region Northern Europe Western Europe Southern Europe Asians

19. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Bridge potential gap in chain by emphasizing physical/behavioral similarities between populations presumed to be closest to the break • Emphasize the human attributes of the newly discovered great apes and the simian attributes of the newly “discovered” peoples of Africa, Australia

20. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Physical similarities between orangs outang and human beings: • 1699 Edward Tyson (1651-1708) describes a primate called a “pygmie” that had a “human face” and ears which “differ nothing from the human form”

21. 1744 William Smith (English explorer) described a primate called a “boggoe” or “mandrill” that bore “a near resemblance of a human creature, though nothing at all like an Ape.” • In the Second Discourse, Rousseau refers to a natural history text describing a “pongo” with “a human face” and which “resembles man exactly.”

22. Tyson’s “Pygmie” (1699)

23. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • On the other hand, human beings were sometimes described in terms of their animal similarities: • 1708 François Leguat compared an ape to a Hottentot and claimed that “its Face had no other Hair upon it than the Eyebrows, and in general it much resembled one of those Grotesque Faces which the Female Hottentots have at the Cape”

24. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • 1718 Daniel Beeckman wrote that his orang was “handsomer I am sure than some Hottentots that I have seen.” • Beeckman’s orang

25. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Physical similarity included reports that orangs walked like human beings

26. Chimpaneze

27. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Behavioral similarities of apes and humans • 1625 Samuel Purchas (1577-1626) reports that pongos may have a kind of religious understanding • 1774 Lord Monboddo reports that orangs outang have a sense of justice • Numerous reports that some primates could speak • L’abbé Prévost wrote that “guinous” are suspected of feigning muteness in order to escape being used as slaves

28. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Other behavioral similarities: • Prévost and Tyson report on the elegant table manners of primates introduced to European dining • Tyson said his pygmie naturally adopted a conservative view towards alcohol and nudity • Reports from 1641 through 1788 report that orangs have high degree of sexual modesty

29. Female Orang outang (1641 edition)

30. Female Orang outang (1744 edition)

31. Female Orangs Gaze averted

32. Female Orangs Gaze averted Hands covering genitals

33. Female Orangs Softer jaw line

34. Female Orangs Softer jaw line More “human” like breasts

35. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Tyson reported that when given a choice of associating with either human beings or monkeys, his pygmie preferred human beings

36. Primates, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being 1748 Benoît de Maillet writes: “If we could not say that these living creatures were men, at least they resembled them so much that it would have been unfair to consider them only as animals.” Benoît de Maillet (1656-1738)

37. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Flip side of finding the missing link by raising animals was denigrating human populations, especially Africans and specifically Hottentots • Naturalists and explorers routinely drew parallels between these people and the newly discovered great apes

38. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Physical similarities • 1696 Sir John Ovington describes Hottentots as “the very reverse of Human kind, so that if there’s any medium between a Rational Animal and a Beast, the Hotantot lays the fairest claim to that Species.” • 1718 Beeckman claimed that Hottentots “are not really unlike Monkeys or Baboons in their Gestures and Postures, especially when they sit Sunning themselves.”

39. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Beeckman goes on to add that Hottentot men have “broad flat noses, blubber lips, great heads, disagreeable features, short trifled Hair” and that “nothing can be more ugly.” • Hottentot women were “as ugly in their kind as the Men, having long flabby breasts odiously dangling down to the waist, which they can toss over their shoulders for the children to suck.”

40. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • This confirms an earlier report (1632) from English explorer Sir Thomas Herbert describing similar attributes in these women.

41. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • 1774 Oliver Goldsmith would later extend this attribute to all African women, noting that once they being childbearing their breasts “hang down to the navel; and it is customary with them, to suckle the child at their backs, by throwing the breast over the shoulder.”

42. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Behavioral similarities“As their persons are thus naturally deformed, at least to our imaginations, their minds are equally incapable of strong exertions.” -- Oliver Goldsmith (1774)

43. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Behavioral Similarities • 1753 Count Buffon writes that the Africans of Guiney “appear to be perfectly stupid, not being able to count beyond the number three, that they never think spontaneously; that they have no memory, the past and the future being equally unknown to them.” • Beeckman writes that Hottentots are “filthy animals” who “hardly deserve the name of Rational Creatures.”

44. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • On speech: • Beeckman compared Hottentot speech to the cackle of hens or turkeys • Herbert described it as “apishly sounded (with whom ‘tis thought they mix unnaturally)” and “very hard to be counterfeited” since it was voiced “like the Irish.”

45. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • African sexual practices • Contrast with orang descriptions • Herbert claimed that Hottentot women expressed gratitude by displaying their genitalia and noted that these people live communally “coupling without distinction, the name of wife or brother unknown among these incestuous Troglodites.”

46. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Prévost mentions that marriage was unknown among the Africans in Bomma • 1745 John Green describes the Africans of Teneriffe as a “rude uncivilized people” living in a society where “everyone took as many women as he pleased.”

47. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Orangs might be offspring of human/simian copulation • 1688 Olfert Dapper claimed that the orangs of the Congo were so numerous and so nearly human in appearance that “it has entered the minds of some travelers that they may be the offspring of a woman and a monkey”

48. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Leguat noted that • “Nature who does not oppose the copulation of horses with asses, may well admit that of an ape with a female animal that resembles him, especially where the latter is not restrained by any principle. An ape and a negro slave born and brought up out of the knowledge of God, have not less similitude between them than an Ass and a Mare.”

49. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Slavery and African/Primate relations • Slavery is a uniquely human institution • Africans subjugate inferior African tribes • Orangs subjugate some Africans

50. Primitives, Missing Links, and the Chain of Being • Monboddo writes: • “The great Orang Outang carries off boys and girls to make slaves of them, which not only shows him, in my apprehension to be a man, but proves that he lives in society, and must have made some progress in the arts of civil life; for we hear of no nations altogether barbarous who use slaves.”