The word “racism” created by communists for demonizing nationalism

Or, if not created, the word “racism” was at least popularized by communists in the…

Dominus ac Redemptor 1773

Or, if not created, the word “racism” was at least popularized by communists in the 1930s. Russian Jewish communist leader Leon Trotsky used it in his treatise on national socialism:

In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The qualities of the race are construed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting “economic thought” as base, National Socialism descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it appeals to zoologic materialism.

The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. In order to create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini had borrowed largely from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism itself is the fruit of union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of racism standing.

The immense poverty of National Socialist philosophy did not, of course, hinder the academic sciences from entering Hitler’s wake with all sails unfurled, once his victory was sufficiently plain. For the majority of the professorial rabble, the years of the Weimar regime were periods of riot and alarm. Historians, economists, jurists, and philosophers were lost in guesswork as to which of the contending criteria of truth was right that is, which of the camps would turn out in the end the master of the situation. The fascist dictatorship eliminates the doubts of the Fausts and the vacillations of the Hamlets of the university rostrums. Coming out of the twilight of parliamentary relativity, knowledge once again enters into the kingdom of absolutes. Einstein has been obliged to pitch his tent outside the boundaries of Germany.

On the plane of politics, racism is a vapid and bombastic variety of chauvinism in alliance with phrenology. As the ruined nobility sought solace in the gentility of its blood, so the pauperized petty bourgeoisie befuddles itself with fairy tales concerning the special superiorities of its race. Worthy of attention is the fact that the leaders of National Socialism are not native Germans but interlopers from Austria, like Hitler himself, from the former Baltic provinces of the Czar’s empire, like Rosenberg; and from colonial countries, like Hess, who is Hitler’s present alternate for the party leadership. [5] A barbarous din of nationalisms on the frontiers of civilization was required in order to instill into its “leaders” those ideas which later found response in the hearts of the most barbarous classes in Germany.

Personality and class – liberalism and Marxism – are evil. The nation – is good. But at the threshold of private property this philosophy is turned inside out. Salvation lies only in personal private property. The idea of national property is the spawn of Bolshevism. Deifying the nation, the petty bourgeois does not want to give it anything. On the contrary, he expects the nation to endow him with property and to safeguard him from the worker and the process-server. Unfortunately, the Third Reich will bestow nothing upon the petty bourgeois except new taxes.

Leon Trotsky, 1933

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm

Clearly, the proletarian internationalist Trotsky was trying to demonize all nationalism, especially in Europe, by equating it to German national socialism (and fascism). That’s what the label “racist” is for, has always been, and always will. To corroborate this I quote Samuel Francis, who reviews the book titled “Racism” by another communist from the 1930s, German Jewish Magnus Hirschfeld:

As a serious critique of the view that socially significant natural differences between the races exist, Hirschfeld’s book is a failure, and even as a polemic against some of the more politicized and unverified claims about race made a century or more ago, it is weak. The importance of the book is not so much its content, however, as what it tells us about the word “racism” and how the enemies of white racial consciousness have developed and deployed it for their own purposes.

Hirschfeld describes his own political ideals as “Pan-Humanism,” a version of political, cultural, and racial universalism. The Pauls themselves write, “we think that the readers of Racism will detect a very definite orientation to the Left. . . . [Hirschfeld] was one who fully realized that sexual reform is impossible without a preliminary economic and political revolution.”

In Racism, Hirschfeld offers what is essentially a definition of “Pan-Humanism:” “The individual, however close the ties of neighborhood, companionship, family, a common lot, language, education, and the environment of nation and country, can find only one dependable unity within which to seek a permanent spiritual kinship–that of humanity-at-large, that of the whole human race.” With one exception, he is unsparing in his denunciations of the ethnocentric loyalties of nations, races, and cultures: “Always and everywhere, except in Soviet Russia, xenophobia, xenophobia, xenophobia.” Later, he informs us, “It may be too early to speak, but perhaps the problem of nationalities and races has already been solved on one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe [i.e., Stalin’s Russia].” …

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