Potemkin wrote:Indeed, the Second World War transformed the world - Nazism, and its military defeat, lanced the boil of 'scientific' racism and radical traditionalism which the Confederacy embodied.
So scientific racism as opposed to say the religious racism of the Mormons or Orthodox Judaism? Why must we tear down the statues of Confederate Generals but statutes of racist bigoted conmen like Joseph Smith and Bingham Young are fine?
But before considering the question of scientific racism, I think its helpful to consider the question of scientific sexism. So a classical so called "scientific" sexist belief is that men are hindered by biology from having babies, rather than recognising that the only reason men don't have babies is because thousands of years prejudice, of all the dead generations of bigots weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living. I must confess I do sometimes have thoughts of "scientific" sexism myself.
So scientific racism would be considering the possibility that say the Bambenga people might have a significantly measurably low intelligence than say Germans. That that intelligence difference might significantly hinder the development of their societies and that when integrated into western societies might seriously effect their ability to gain certain roles within society that require, or are highly correlated with, high intelligence (as measured), due to the huge magnifying effect of the Bell Curve on the extremes of the probability distributions.
Its important to note here that a male chauvinist pig might consider women to have an equal or even marginally higher average intelligence to men, but a significantly lower variance.
Anyway the Nazis strike me as almost the opposite of the typical "scientific" racist. Rather than attributing the incredible success levels of Germany's Jews to a higher level of inherited intelligence, the Nazis concocted some bizarre stories that argued that Jews were less intelligent than Gentile Germans. I fail to see what was remotely "scientific" about this even to the nieve observer. Similarly if the Confederates were so convinced of the Blacks lower intelligence, why did they need to exclude free Blacks them from Academic professions? It reminds me of hideous sexist bigotry of Arthur Scargill's National Union of Miners, who excluded women from mine working.