Nazi claims of “Aryan” superiority are the outcome of and inferiority complex, Paul Radin, professor of anthropology at the University of California, asserts in his book, “The Racial Myth,” which will be issued tomorrow by Whitlesey House.
Dr. Radin holds that the Northern races, which are the last to be civilized, invented the legend of their greatness as a compensation for their shortcomings. The California scholar’s thesis is that no race is essentially superior to any other race, and he adduces detailed evidence to that effect.
The claims of some German writers that Dante, Voltaire and other great personages were of German origin are likewise blasted by Dr. Radin, who endeavors to show that all the peoples of the earth had their share in the up-building of modern culture.
CRISES DETERMINE TRAITS
“Racial” characteristics are not German, French, English, etc., but simply inevitable aspects of the economic order which produces them, Dr. Radin maintains. Certain political and social crises determine traits of races and peoples. Certain historical and geographical considerations, the anthropologist holds, will make the Russians, Americans and Jews leaders in the coming struggle for power.
Hitler’s Third Reich is on the verge of dissolution because of its “realistic and destructive romanticism,” writes Dr. Radin. “There is not a single one of its injunctions and precepts that is not palpably and ludicrously wrong. There never was an Aryan race; the Germans are not, to any extent, Nordic; the old system of law in which they have taken refuge for their new code was not to any appreciable degree Germanic; the small businessman class which they wish to resurrect and reenforce is unmistakably dead, and so on ad infinitum.
JEWS’ PART SIGNIFICANT
“This atmosphere of the madhouse cannot possible represent the mood of 65,000,000 people who have always been known for their middle-of-the-road sanity; it cannot represent the permanent mood of madmen. The only conceivable interpretation is that the semblance of madness, this intensification of the old Teutonic virtue, the berserker rage, conceals something else–the last wild attempt to stave off the impending transformation of an economic system. That it should assume such crude forms is the most significant indication of its transistorizes and its inherent weakness.”
As for the position of the Jews in the modern world, Dr. Radin points out that their significant part in European affairs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “seems to many so amazing that there has been an inclination to seek for its explanation in terms of superior ability. Attempts have even been made to account for this ability on the theory that they were a pure race. The racial question can be easily disposed of. They are one of the most mixed races in history.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
