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The Racial World-view Of H.P. Lovecraft
By A.Trumbo
June 29, 2002
The purpose of these writings is to provide a genuine look into
the racial Weltanschauung of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937).
I have drawn my data from the five-volume set of "Selected
Letters" books. The Selected Letters Of H.P.Lovecraft was published
by Arkham House Publishers in 1965. The authors who compiled this
great collection - August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei -- were friends
and correspondents of Lovecraft's. The preface (Selected Letters
Volume 1) states: "We have made no alteration or changes in
the text reproduced. We present them as he (H.P.L) wrote them."
Here I present the racial intellect of Mr. Lovecraft in his own
words, written by his own hand.
Letter #9. Nov. 25, 1915 [ ] Enclose author's comments.
I can sympathize with Morton in many ways. I am not an orthodox
disciple of religion, but I deem it dangerous to tamper with any
system so manifestly beneficial to morality. Whatever may be the
faults of the church, it has never yet been surpassed or nearly
equalled as an agent for the promotion of virtue. And the same thing
applies to our present social system. It has its defects, but is
evidently a natural growth, and better fitted to preserve an approximate
civilization than any Utopian scheme conjured up over night by some
artificially thinking radical. As to races, I deem it most proper
to recognise the divisions into which nature has grouped mankind.
Science shows us the infinite superiority of the Teutonic Aryan
over all others, and it therefore becomes us to see that his ascendancy
shall remain undisputed. [H.P.L. clearly promotes Aryan preservation]
Any racial mixture can but lower the result [anti-miscegenation
sentiment]. The Teutonic race, whether in Scandinavia, other parts
of the continent, England, or America, the cream of humanity, and
its wanton and deliberate adulteration with baser material is even
more repulsive to consider than the elaborately staged racial suicide
now being conducted, wherein Germanic and Britannic Teutons are
striving to annihilate each other instead of uniting against the
Mongol-tainted Slav or menacing Oriental.
Sometimes I think of racial combinations as chemical reactions;
for instance, I believe that certain stocks have greater assimilative
powers than others. The Gallo-Basque stock with Latin [Roman] infusion,
which constitutes the bulk of the French population, is much more
receptive to alien blood than is our colder and more Teutonic stock.
[The French are more Germanic than not]
Letter #10 Dec. 6, 1915
And the more I study the question, the more firmly am I convinced
that the one supreme race is the Teuton. Observe the condition in
the British Isles. The English are wholly Teutonic, and therefore
dominant. The southern Scotch and eastern Irish are also of that
blood-they certainly surpass their fellows to the north and west.
The Welsh, who have no Teutonic blood, are of little account. Had
it not been for the Teutonic infusion at the beginning of the Dark
Ages, southern Europe would have been lost. Who were these early
French kings and heroes that founded French civilization? Teutons,
to a man! ... Who were the Normans? Teutons of the North. It is
pitiful to me to hear apostles of equity pipe out that other races
can equal this foremost of all - this successor to the Roman race
in power and virility.
Letter #15 June 4, 1916
The Providence Journal has virtually declared war on Germany, and
has well-nigh exhausted Roget's Thesaurus in looking for adjectives
wherewith to denounce th' embattled Goth; but the editor scarce
dares breathe a word against the slippery sons of Saint Patrick
who violate American neutrality just as flagrantly as any German
ever did, and who have been consistently doing so for many century.
These migrated Micks have not scrupled to use the United States
so far as they can as a weapon against their lawful King and Empire,
and the "Sinn Fein", revolt is not the only one financed
largely with American-gathered capital.
Letter #29 Dec. 23, 1917
As the general situation, it seems very encouraging just now. It
may take a second war to adjust things properly. I tremble to think
of the possibilities of the Russian collapse which may open resources
of a vast country to the enemy. If the predicted Western drive of
the Huns succeeds, the war is virtually lost. There is something
the matter with the morale of the more polished nations - they need
a little more brutality of the old Teutonic sort. No army can win
without a certain savage lust of combat, and this spirit is being
undermined with the current cant about democracy, idealism, and
all that sort of rot. The issues should be made clearer - the first
fight is not in the interests of a coming millenium of social reform;
it is for the hearth and home-for existing institutions against
a perilous invasion of an unnatural culture. Racial factors are
also united against us. For all our Roman civilization, the enemy
has a preponderance of superior blood. If all the Allied nations
were as thoroughly Teutonic as Prussia, the end would be nearer
and happier. Nothing can withstand the might of the Teuton -- he
is the logical successor of the Roman in power. Teutonic blood snatched
Britain from the Celt and made England the greatest force in all
civilization. Teutonic blood conquered the Western wilderness and
gave America an instant place amongst the great nations of the globe.
But this blood has become so extensively and tragically diluted,
that the non-German Teutons may well look with concern to their
future. The grotesque fallacy of the "Great American Melting
Pot" may yet be brought home to the people in one of the most
tear-stained pages of their history. Germany herself has set a truer
valuation on the importance of unmixed blood, but may yet come to
grief through the absorption of Slavic elements. The course of Germany
during the last half-century has been one of curiously mixed merit.
Certain scientific and philosophical developments have been marvellous,
yet they have been conjoined to a brutality and narrowness of vision
which threaten the development of civilization. The pan-Teutonic
ideal, attainable only by a complete and amicable co-operation between
Anglo-Saxon and Germanic races, has been fallaciously subordinated
to a petty pan-Germanic ideal which is bringing about the virtual
suicide of the Teutonic race, and driving the Anglo-Saxons and Germans
into equally unnatural alliances with alien races. The Saxon has
his Hindoos and Moors, and the German his Turks. Progress is at
a standstill, and everything human is lost in a mad scramble for
a material victory. Even a recurrence of the Dark Ages is not possible
- a recurrence which will leave the Teutonic race so depleted numerically
that the world's future is seriously threatened. Wilhelm, Wilhelm!
What has thou wrought?
A. TRUMBO
June 29, 2002
Author's note --
Lovecraft had a rather unbecoming tendency to judge other branches
of the Indo-Aryan racial family from a very chauvinist, Imperial,
pro-English perspective. Despite his derogatory remarks about Slavs
and Celts, if he were alive today there could be little doubt that
he would embrace the ideals of Pan-Aryanism. I would also like to
state that the many oddly spelled words and incorrect grammar are
Mr. Lovecraft's and not mine. 'When I was ten I set to work to delete
every modern word from my vocabulary, and adopted an old Walkers
Dictionary (1804) which was for some time my sole authority. All
the Queen Ann authors combined to form my literary diet.'
-- H.P. Lovecraft.
Sept. 30, 1919:
No one else in filmland can duplicate his delineation of stark,
hideous terror or fiendish malignancy. Hayakawa excels in tragical
pathos, and would soar high if he were a white man. I would not
at all be surprised if he had a dash of white blood somewhere. Both
Walthall and Hayakawa are too good for films -- they ought to be
known more widely.
...Orientals must be kept in their native East till the fall of
the white race. Sooner or later a great Japanese war will take place,
during which I think the virtual destruction of Japan will have
to be effected in the interests of European safety. The more numerous
Chinese are a menace of the still more distant future. They will
probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilisation, for their
numbers are amazing. But that is all too far ahead for consideration
today.
Jan. 23, 1920:
Eroticism belongs to a lower order of instincts, and is an animal
rather than nobly human quality. For evolved man -- the apex of
organic progress on the Earth -- what branch of reflection is more
fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively
human faculties? The primal savage or ape merely looks about his
native forest to find a mate; the exalted Aryan should lift his
eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity!!!!
Oct. 6, 1921:
............
At heart I despise the aesthete and prefer the warrior -- I am
essentially a Teuton and barbarian; a Xanthochoric Nordic from the
damp forests of Germany or Scandinavia, and kin to the giant chalk-white
conquerors of the cursed, effeminate Celts. [The common blood shared
by all Aryan peoples -- Baltic, Germanic, Slavic or Celtic -- was
not understood by Mr.Lovecraft; thus his derogatory statements made
towards the Slav and Celt.] I am a son of Odin and brother to Hengist
and Horsa...Grr...Give me a drink of hot blood with Celtic foes
skull as a beaker! Rule, Britannia...GOD SAVE THE KING!
May 18, 1922:
[Here Mr.Lovecraft comments on the filthy non-White slums of N.Y.]
...................
The illumination is unique and extensive, but neither superlatively
impressive nor in any sense truly artistic. At the elevated station
at 6th Ave. and 42nd St. I lost my fellow Anglo-Saxon, whose home
is far to the north in the semi-African jungles of Harlem; [Negroes
had already made a slum out of Harlem by 1922]
...Kleiner proceeded to lead us into the slums; with "Chinatown"
as an ulterior objective. My gawdwhat a filthy dump! I thought Providence
had slums, and antique Bostonium as well; but damn me if I ever
saw anything like the sprawling sty-atmosphere of N.Y.s lower East
Side. We walked -- at my suggestion -- in the middle of the street,
for contact with the denizens, spilled out of their bulging brick
kennels as if by a spawning beyond the capacity of the places, was
not by any means to be sought. At times, though, we struck peculiarly
deserted areasthese swine have instinctive swarming movements, no
doubt, which no ordinary biologist can fathom. Gawd knows what they
are -- ... -- a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect,
repellent to the eye, nose, and imagination would to heaven a kindly
gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end
the misery, and clean out the place. [H.P.L. advocates ethnic cleansing
as a legitimate means of ridding the world of human pollution. And,
in a beautiful way at that.] The streets, even in the centre, are
filthy with old papers and vegetable debris -- probably the street-cleaners
dislike to soil their white uniforms by visiting such infernos.
Feb. 10, 1923:
Anent the Fascist problem -- assuredly we approach it from radically
different directions. Galpinius and I have been discussing democracy
a lot lately, and we agree that it is a false idol -- a mere catchword
and an illusion of inferior classes, visionaries, and dying civilisations.
Life has no ultimate values, and our proximate values can be little
more than what we like to see or posses. "Right" and "Wrong"
are primitive conceptions which cannot endure the test of cold science.
Now Galpin and I maintain that, logically, man of taste should prefer
such things as favour strong and advanced men at the expense of
the herd. Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply
coarse animals -- for all that is admirable in man is the artificial
product of special breeding. We advocate the preservation of conditions
favourable to the growth of beautiful things -- imposing palaces,
beautiful cities, elegant literature, resposeful art and music,
and a physically select human type such as only luxury and a pure
racial strain can produce. Thus we oppose democracy, if only because
it would retard the development of a handsome Nordic breed. We realise
that all conceptions of justice and ethics are mere prejudices and
illusions -- there is no earthly reason why the masses should not
be kept down for the benefit of the strong, since every man is for
himself in the last analysis. We regard the rise of democratic ideas
as a sign of cultural old age and decay, and deem it a compliment
to such men as Mussolini when they are said to be "XVth century
types. We are proud to be definitely reactionary, since only a bold
repudiation of the word "liberal" pose and the progress
illusion can we get the sort of authoritative social and political
control which alone produces things which make life worth living.
We admire the old German Empire, for it was a force so strong that
it almost conquered all the combined forces of the rest of the world.
Personally, my objection to Germany in the late war was that it
formed a menace to our English Empire -- an empire so lamentably
split in 1775-83, and so regrettably by effeminate ideas of liberty.
My wish was that we English reunite into one irresistible power
and establish an (sic) hegemony of the globe in true Roman fashion.
Neither we nor Germany will ever be really strong till we have unified
imperial control.
Our modern worship of empty ideals is ludicrous. What does the
condition of the rabble matter? All we need do is to keep it as
quiet as we can. What is more important, is to perpetuate those
things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual
sense-impressions rather than vapid theories. "Equality"
is a joke -- but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss,
is a poignant reality. If (it) is for us to safeguard and preserve
the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque
walled town, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious
tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings and statuary, and colossal
organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields --
these are all there is of life: taken (sic) them away and we have
nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for. Take
them away and our poets have nothing to sing -- our dreamers have
nothing to dream about. The blood of a million men is well shed
in producing one glorious legend which thrills posterity and it
is not at all important why it was shed. A coat of arms won in a
crusade is worth a thousand slavering compliments bandied about
amongst a rabble.
Reform? Pish! We do no want reform! What would the world be without
its scarlet and purple evil! Drama is born of conflict and violence...god!
Shall we ever be such women as to prefer the blond-bearded warrior?
The one sound power in the world is the power of a hairy muscular
right arm!
Yah! How I spit upon this rotton (sic) age with its feeble comforts
and thwarted energies -- its Freuds and Wilsons, Augustines and
Heliogabali, -- rabbles and perversions! What these swine with their
scruples and problems, changes and rebellions, need, is a long draught
of blood from a foeman's skull on the battlements of a mountain
fortalice! We need fewer harps and viols, and more drums and brasses.
The answer to jazz is the wild dance of the war-like conqueror!
Don't complain of the youth's high-powered motor-car unless you
can give him an horse and armour and sed him to conquer the domains
of the neighborouing kings! Modern life my gawd! I dont wonder that
literature is going to hell or chaos! What is there to write about
now? Before we have literature we must have life -- bold, colourful,
primitive, and picturesque. We must change a George V for a Richard
Coeur de Lion -- a Platagenet!.
...................
May 3, 1923:
.................
Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry -- God Save The King!
I am naturally a Nordic -- a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian
or North-German forests -- a Vikinga berserk killer -- a predatory
rover of Hengist and Horsa -- a conqueror of Celts and mongrels
and founders of Empires -- a son of the thunders and the arctic
winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras -- a drinker of
foemen's blood from new picked skulls -- a friend of the mountain
buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures -- a blond beast of eternal
snows and frozen oceans -- a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and
Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim -- a comrade of the wolves,
and rider of nightmares -- aye -- I speak truly -- for was I not
born with yellow hair and Blue eyes -- the latter not turning dark
till I was nearly two, and the former lasting till I was over five?
Ho, for the hunting and fishing in Valhalla! Who knows..? The Phillipses
come from the borderlands of Wales, that mystic Machenian land.
May there not be in them some trace of blood from some Roman prepraetor
of Britannia Secunda, whose capital was Isca Silurum with its walls,
its noble amphitheatre, its Etruscan-columned Temple of Diana, its
Pons Saturni, its tessellated pavements, its inscriptions of the
Septimii Severi, its Via Nympharum and Via Julia,...Io triumphe!
S.P.Q.R.!!...Yes, Sonny, the Mediterranean world isn't so bad when
when one goes back to Pelasgic times and takes the Graeco-Roman
races! After all, I have dark hair and eyes now, no matter what
I used to have; and it is quite as good to be a sanguinary Roman
consul as a Norse pirate. Long live the Pantheon! Vivat M. Agrippa!
By being a Roman, I can quite logically prove a good grandfather
to such as my small boys Belnapius and Alfredus ...Latins all! But
as a classical and ancient Latin, I enjoy cheese, which was a leading
feature of the Graeco-Roman diet. Therein our souls are separated
by the impassable gulf of the Dark Ages, O Francisco Borgia, Prince
of Arsenic-Sharks and Stilletto hounds!
A. TRUMBO
August 13, 2002
Chalk-white Nordicks, Imperial Romans, and Hercynian Woods, are
but a few of the topics touched upon in this Lovecraft letter. It
contains a collection of thoughts founded more on fantasy than fact,
but very interesting thoughts nonetheless. The letter does, however,
contain enough racialist diatribe to send the average lemming, or
"conventionally limited" Lovecraft fan into a pallid state
of shock. For those of you who have already attained racial enlightenment,
and are Lovecraft fans as well, our journey into the arcane depth
of Lovecraft's world -view continues.
Dec. 11, 1923.
...I do not claim to be 100% Teuton. My dark hair and eyes forbid
me that honour. ["*" indicate H.P.L.'s original spellings
and in many cases misspellings] But when I reflect on the fact that
hair and eyes are the first things to be chang'd * in a blond race
upon the least infusion of southern blood, and gold-an-blue scheme
being very unstable and liable to revert to the more primitive and
deeply hereditary brown or black scheme; I am content to survey
my ample height and pallid complexion ( bleach'd* by the deep Saxon
forests and Scandinavian snows) and pronounce myself 99.9% Teutonick
*. This supposition is borne* out by my coarse features? rough-hewn
physiognomy of a Viking warrior? by my enthusiastick* response to
warlike and imperious stimuli....
As to the artistick* capacity of the Nordick* in general, I will
freely admit that it does not take the most obvious and characteristick*
forms. The masses of a Nordick* race are not so aesthetically responsive
as the Mediterranean masses -- though even here we have to reckon
with the acute musical sensibility of the Germans. But having made
all concessions, I now pause to inquire why artistick* capacity
is any proper measure of value for race-stock? To my simple old
mind, art is merely a more or less unsatisfactory substitute for
real life; and when we consider life and action, deeds and conquests,
governments and administrations, what race since the Romans can
compare with us? Did we not pour down out of our native forests
and reclaim a degenerate Europe where civilisation, under effete
Mediterranean dregs, was dying out? My God! The very name of France
comes from our huge yellow-bearded Franks, and in Spain they call
a gentleman a hidalgo -- hijo del goda -- son of the Goth -- the
huge blue-eyed, conquering Nordick*! Fancy a world without Clovis
-- or its Charlemagne -- the Teuton Karlomann, and the Vikings and
the Norsemen...ho for the frozen seas and the epick* of sleet and
blood, strange lands and far wonders! Greenland, Iceland, Normandy,
England, Sicily -- the world was ours, and the mountainous billows
heaved with the Cyclopean rhythm of our barbarick* chants and shouts
of mastery! Art? By Woden, were not our deeds and battles, our victories
and empires, all parts of a poem more wonderful then aught* which
Homer cou'd* strike from a Grecian lyre? Ho! Yaah! We are men! We
are big men! We are strong men, for we make men do what we want!
Let no man balk us, for our gods are big gods, and our arms and
our swords are tough! Hrrrr! The stones of towns fall down when
we come, and crows love us for the feast of dead men we give them.
The lands shake with the thump of our feet, and hills grow flat
when we stride up and down them. The floods are dry when we have
drunk them, and no beasts are left when we have killed and gorged.
By day we kill and seize, at dusk we feast and drink, by nights
we snore and dream big dreams of strange seas we shall sail, old
towns we shall burn, stout men we shall slay, wild beasts we shall
hunt, deep cups we shall drain, fat boars we shall tear limb from
limb with our hands, and gnaw with our sharp teeth. [This description
is more suitable in describing Negro behavior rather than that of
the civilized Aryan. Does the echo of Rhodesia come to mind? -A.T.]
Great Thor, but this is life! We ask no more! We know the cool of
deep woods, and the spell of their gloom and the things void of
name that lurk or may lurk in them. Bards sing them to us in the
dark with great hoarse voices when the fire burns low and we have
drunk our mead. [ H.P.L. in reality, despised the consumption of
alcohol. - A.T.] Bards sing them to us, and we hear. Great, gaunt
bards with white beards and the old scars of good fights. And they
sing things that none else have dreamed of; strange, dim, weird
things that they learn in the woods, deep woods, the thick woods.
There are no woods like our woods, no bards like our bards.
Puritanism? I am by no means dispos'd* to condemn it utterly in
the pageant of the world, for it is not life an art, and art a selection?
The Puritans unconsciously sought to do a supremely artistic thing
-- to mould all life into a dark poem; a macabre tapestry with quaint
arabesques and patterns from the plains of antique Palaestina*...antique
Palaestina* with her bearded prophets, many gated walls, and flattened
domes. The fatuous floundering of the ape and the Neanderthaler*
they rejected -- this and the graceful forms into which that floundering
had aimlessly blunder'd* -- and in place of slovenly Nature set
up a life in Gothick* design, with formal arches and precise traceries,
austere spires and three interesting little gargoyles with solemn
grimaces, call'd* the father, the son, and the holy ghost. On shifting
humanity they imposed a refreshing technique, and an aimless and
futile cosmos supply'd* artificial values which had real authority
because they were not true. Verily, the Puritans were the only really
effective diabolists and decadents the world has known; because
they hated life and scorned the platitude that it is worth living.
Can you imagine anything more magnificent than the wholesale slaughter
of the Indians -- a very epick*-- by our New-England ancestors in
the name of the lamb? But all aside from that -- these Puritans
were truly marvelous. They did not invent, but substantially developed
the colonial doorway; and incidentally created a simple standard
of life and conduct which is, no apart from some extravagant and
inessential details and a few aesthetic and intellectual fallacies
in all truth the most healthy and practical way of securing happiness
and tranquillity which we have had since the early days of Republican
Rome. I am myself very partial to it -- it is so quaint and wholesome.
But not alone in Puritanism is the Nordic's beneficent influence
to be found. Who else could, after the decay of Rome, have revived
the aesthetic of strength which in antique days reared to the heavens
the colonnades of the Capitolium, the dome of Vesta, the splendours*
of the Palantine, the walls of the Colisseum, the balconies of the
Septizonium, the altitudes of the Pantheon, the colossi and arches
of conquering despots, and countless other stone and marble ecstasies
of ebullient domination? True, we have never equalled* those breathless
marvels, for we own ourselves no match for the world-overtopping
ROMAN CITIZEN; but alone of all races we have revived?our master-achievement
ENGLAND -- that that resistless sway which gave them birth, and
have enabled the modern world to share in that delirium of artistic
excitement and surging pride which must fill'd* every true ROMAN
when, looking back from some crest in the road at sunset , he saw
limned in flame the gold the domes and columns, vast, prodigious,
multitudinous and induplicable, of earth's supreme apotheosis of
dominion -- THE IMPERIAL CITY.
"Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hae tibi erunt
artes: pacisque imponere marem,
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos."
So, Sonny, your old Grandpa is pretty well satisfied to be a Nordick*,
chalk white from the Hercynian wood and the Polar mists, and stout
arm'd* to wield the mace, the broadsword, and the javelin. Nordics
can buy dark foreign slaves cheap in the market-place -- sharp,
clever little Greeks and Alexandrians who will decorate our walls
and chisel our friezes well enough when tickled with the lash of
a Nordic overseer. Our province is to found the cities and conquer
the wilderness and people the waste lands -- that, and to assemble
and drive the slaves, who tell us stories and sing us songs and
paint us pretty pictures. WE ARE THE MASTERS.
September 13, 2002
In this letter, H.P. Lovecraft expresses his opinions about the
Jews. On one hand he seems to praise the Jews, and on the other
he slams them. His willingness to consider assimilation of Jewish
blood into the Aryan gene pool proves to be more than disturbing.
Perhaps he is trying to conceal his loathing while politely revealing
them as the alien nation-wreckers they are. Mr. Lovecraft's ideas
concerning his world view are proving to be as multi-dimensional
as one of his nightmarish dreamscapes. Here's more from the mind
from which the Ancient Ones descend.
[* indicates H.P.Lovecraft's original spelling as transcribed from
his letters.]
Aug. 21, 1926
Whilst I am well aware that a large amount of race-stock included
within the normal bounds of Jewry is excellent and quite assimilable[*]
by a Nordic majority if the proportion be not excessive, I am not
prepared to admit that the essentially exotic and Oriental culture-stream
of the Hebraic tradition has any legitimate place in a Western and
Aryan civilisation[*]. We can gradually absorb such Jewish elements
as are dominantly Nordic or Mediterranean in their biological composition
-- keen, gray-eyed, white skinned German Jews like the first August
Belmont, or ascetic Portugese-Jewish types like those whose blood
has already tinctured to a great extent the body of the Spanish
people. But this absorption absolutely postulates a complete cultural
surrender on their part -- an acceptance of our own Aryan point
of view, loyalties, religion, and heritage. In other words, they
must throw themselves wholly into the main stream and utterly forget
their own individual past; else they will engender unpleasant cross-currents
of taste and feeling which will continue to make them socially distasteful.
We can't feel at ease -- we couldn't if we wanted to -- with persons
motivated by a series of emotions founded on an utterly antipathetic
and (to us) positively contemptible race-history. Nordic and Jew,
culturally, can never meet on common ground because each one cordially
hates what is sacred to the other. The Jew, to start with, is a
humorless and emotionally overdeveloped ethical fanatic; [Not to
mention a genocidal xenophobe.-A.T.] with a leaning to the grandiose
and an absolute indifference to that pride and physical courage
which with us is really the measure of a man. You can imagine the
natural reaction of this alien minded stock to our essentially playful,
power-loving, and indomitably proud fabric of unconquerable freemen.
And that is not the worst. Added to this essential cultural alineage[*]
of the Jew is his ignominious history for the past two thousand
years. Unable to resist his conquerors, he has never made a courageous
stand except when his ethical mania prompts the individual to resist
spiritual encroachment, but has been content to cringe and fawn
and scheme along with sickly smirk and greasily[*] rubbed palms
as everybody's public door-mat. Kick him, and he
whines an excuse for having been in your way! Now to him, this
means nothing: because his own tradition has pinned the its emotional
approval to other things -- mostly ethical and spiritual illusions.
He can placidly dodge our boot-tips and tin cans with unimpaired
self-respect, because his life is modelled[*] upon a pattern which
has nothing to do with our standard of value and ideals of manhood.
It is the eternal East -- you see it in the Hindoo[*] fakir and
Chinese coolie as well. But all this, however satisfying to him,
means nothing to us. We are ourselves, and inherit our own Western
standards, and cannot in any way help entertaining feelings of the
utmost aversion, repugnance, and contempt toward a culture or stock
which fails to fulfil our most basic ideal of what men ought to
be. We can't help how wise or shrewd some Rabbi Isaachar ben Levi
may be -- if he grins when we pull his entomologically [*] populous
whiskers, we are moved by a basic impulse to a profound and insuperable
disgust. It was thus that the Romans felt toward the cringing philosophers
of the fallen Hellenistic world. Nothing is more foolish than the
smug platitude of the idealistic social worker who tells us that
we ought to excuse the Jew's repulsive psychology because we, by
persecuting him, are in a measure responsible for it. This is damned
piffle that utterly evades the real issue. We despise the Jew not
only because of the stigmata which our persecution has produced,
but because of the deficient stamina (from our point of view) on
his part which permitted us to persecute him at all! Does anybody
fancy for a moment that a Nordic race could be knocked about for
two millennia by its neighbors? God! They'd either die fighting
to the last man, or rise up and wipe out their would-be persecutors
off the Earth!!! [If only that were true today. The old Aryan spirit
that was our essential strength has nearly expired. The Judeo-feminization
of the Aryan male has proven to be a mortal blow. -A.T.] Its because
the Jews have allowed themselves to fill a football's role that
we instinctively hate them. Note how much greater is our respect
for their fellow Semites, the Arabs, who have the high heart --
shewn [*] in courage and a laughing sense of beauty -- which we
emotionally understand and approve.
Now with this double barrier -- alienage[*] of primitive impulse,
and contempt arising from the historic consequences of this alienage[*]
-- is it to be supposed for a moment that any communal rapport can
exist betwixt elements symbolising[*] or representing the opposed
Aryan and Hebraic types? Only a cloud-gazing ass of an idealist
could possibly envisage such a circumstance. Aryans, as Aryans,
will always feel a deep-seated and uneasy dislike toward Jews, as
Jews; and the introduction of a large Jewish element into the social,
intellectual, aesthetic life of a community can only result in the
maintenance of two separate streams without contact. People who
have heard different songs crooned over their cradles will sing
different songs when their time of singing comes. And this, we must
note very carefully, applies to the best type of Jews as well as
to their hopeless riff-raff. Fine learning -- even fine race stock
-- there may be; but as long as a cultural group looks back to sources
utterly loathsome to our own aesthetic scheme, we will always detest
them. So I say, whilst it is eminently desirable to salvage good
Jewish race stock by very gradual absorption into the Aryan and
dominating body; it is absolutely necessary that this salvaging
be accompanied by a total effacement of the newcomers' traditions.
They must suffer a complete intellectual and aesthetic amnesia,
and join us as Aryans when they do join. As for the Semitic culture
-- it is not for us to say one word either for or against it in
an absolute sense. We do not feel its impulses, and can never know
its essence. Certainly, it has produced a powerful set of ideas
and standards, and who are we to say that these are any less important,
intrinsically, than our own? As with Chinese culture, whose absolute
greatness we freely acknowledge, [The Chinese appetite for human
fetuses voids any acknowledgement of greatness.-A.T.] we may say
that Jewish culture is doubtless highly excellent in its proper
place. [Like the toilet?-A.T.] But that place is not among us, for
those points of view which are eminently harmonious when working
with other Hebraic ideas, become utterly discordant, hostile, and
injurious when brought in contact with points of view whose source
and direction are wholly distinct and opposite. Semitism has never
done anything save harm us when forced upon us or adopted by accident.
It gave us puling hypocrisies of the Christian doctrine -- us, who
by every law of Nature are virile, warlike, and beauty loving pagans
and Northern polytheists! We, who should shout our laughter to Odin
and Thor, are constrained to bend like Eastern slaves over sickly
twilight alters to a crucified consumptive. Faugh[*]! It sickens
my blond Teuton soul!! And our last wave of Hebraic imitation --
the Puritan movement -- produced such ugliness as a New-England
chronicler blushes on the record. Good gawd! To think that my own
maternal great-grandfather's Christian name was Jeremiah! But fortunately,
Christian ritual and practice among the most civilised types have
been gradually purged, by sheer racial influence, of their more
incongruous and objectionable Eastern features. What, then, shall
we do with our Jews? Absorb a few as Aryans -- well and good --
it has been done to some slight extant without ill effect. But anyone
knows this is posible[*] only in a drop-in-the-bucket extent; for
most Jews hold like mules to their beliefs, and most are racially
unfit for amalgamation anyhow. What of this alien majority? Well-as
with the negro,[*] there is only one thing we can do as an immediate
expedient to save ourselves; Keep them out of our national and racial
life. With the negro [*] the fight is wholly biological, whilst
with the Jew it is mainly spiritual; but the principle is the same.
We are Aryans, and only our future as a self-respecting stock lies
in our resistance to anything like an Alexandrian mental hybridisation[*].
Let us preserve and glory in our own inherited Western life and
impulses and standards, and let us resist to the death any attempt
at fastening to our body of national custom any feeling or feature
aside from that which we legitimately derive from the tall, fair
Aryans who begat[*] us and who founded our English civilisation
and Anglo-American nation. If A certain number of outlanders desire
to dwell separately among us, it may be politic to let them -- at
least, for a time. But let us swear by the living God, as we respect
ourselves as free Northern white men, that they shall lay not a
hand on our institutions, and inject not an ideal of theirs into
the massed inheritance which is ours. To the Jew we must say, "live
your own life, here or elsewhere; but remember that you live among
Aryans, who are not to be disturbed." When the interloper seeks
a voice in our councils, and subtly endeavours to mould the national
feeling in accordance with his own standards -- among which latter
is a cynical disregard of our sentiments and cherished loyalties,
visible in bolshevistic[*] Trotskys and iconoclastic Ben Hechts
-- there is only one possible answer from the unemasculated sons
of the honest roast-beef Englishmen and rawboned Yankees who made
this nation; and that answer is just this -- "You go to Hell."...
And of course the New York Mongoloid problem is beyond calm mention.
The city is befouled and accursed -- I come away from it with a
sense of having been tainted by contact, and long for some solvent
oblivion to wash out!...How in Heaven's name sensitive and self-respecting
white men can continue to live in the stew of Asiatic filth which
the region has become -- with marks and reminders of the locust
plague on every hand -- is absolutely beyond me. In fact, I'm jolly
well certain that they won't continue. New York will become a vast
trading-mart for long distance white commuters -- and for the nameless
spawn. When, at length, the power of the latter rises to dangerous
heights of rivalry, I can see nothing short of rivalry, I can see
nothing short of war or separation from the union. There is here
a grave and mighty problem beside which the negro[*] problem is
a jest -- for in this case we have to deal not with childlike half-gorillas,
but with yellow, soulless enemies whose repulsive carcasses house
dangerous mental machines warped culturelessly[*] in the single
direction of material gain by stealth at any cost. I hope the end
will be warfare -- but not till such a time as our own minds are
fully freed of humanitarian hindrances of the Syrian superstition
imposed upon us by Constantinus. Then let us show our physical power
as men and Aryans, and conduct a scientific wholesale deportation
from which there will be neither flinching nor retreating.
So that is that. There are two Jew problems in America today --
one national and cultural, and to be met by a firm resistance to
all those vitiating ideas which parasitic subject-races engender;
and another local and biological -- The New York Mongoloid problem,
to be met God only knows how, but with force rather than intellect.
The dominantly Aryan blooded Jew of high type is better assimilated.
The powerfully intellectual fundamental Hebrew is better socially
segregated..
And such a lecture to be started by a mere account of a momentary
tiff! Well -- that's what having lived in New York for two years
does to one! I couldn't have felt it that way (even tho' my abstract
views were the same ) in 1923 or before, and even now it will probably
wear off in a year or so more--especially since in New England we
have our own local curses. ( tho' they don't clutter up all the
landscape so!) in the form of Simian Portugese, unspeakable Southern
Italians, and jabbering French-Canadians. Broadly speaking, our
curse is Latin just as yours is Semitic-Mongoloid, the Mississippian's
African, the Pittsburgher's Slavonic, the Arizonians Mexican, and
the Californian's Chino-Japanese. And so, to quote from a discouragingly
Hebraic work of literature -- Amen!!
A. TRUMBO
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