The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions

Professing Hate

Sarah Gendron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000029956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

The Co-opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate is a study of the ways in which various extremist groups have appropriated education for social manipulation in order to gain political power, and, in some cases, to incite violence. It is a detailed exploration of case studies representing both a wide range of situational differences (time, place, and political orientation) and experiential similarities. To examine a broad scope of circumstances, this book explores various types of rule (from National Socialism to communism to capitalism) from around the world (Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America) and spans time periods from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the purpose of allowing these diverse situations to dialogue with one another, this study explores each country in its own right as well as in relation to others, ultimately demonstrating the extent to which they influenced one another.

Part I
Education and genocide

Unlike the other factions to be examined in this book, National Socialism – chronologically the first to occur – cannot be said to have learned from any of the other regimes. Rather, it was theory, particularly völkism, monism, and social Darwinism, that most inspired National Socialism’s gruesome project. The beginning of the first chapter of this book will examine the influence of these theories on the mind-set of the Nazis. However, if pressed to acknowledge a regime on which National Socialism modeled its genocidal policies and methods, one must signal that of the Ottoman government, which was responsible for the liquidation of almost one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1917. Hitler was, after all, thought to have invoked the plight of the Armenians in his plan to annihilate the Poles in an effort to gain Lebensraum (living space):

I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?¹

Unlike during the Armenian genocide where there was a direct military connection linking the German and Ottoman governments, National Socialist Germany and Rwanda of the 1990s seem to have little in common. Of course, at the time of the Armenian genocide there was, coincidently, an important connection between Rwanda and Germany, as Rwanda was under German control from 1894–1918. Moreover, it was colonization (first by the Germans then by the Belgians) that helped solidify the distinction between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa as racial categories. In conjunction with the privileging of one group over the others, this distinction, among other factors, would lead to genocide. Yet, what makes a comparison of National Socialist Germany and 1990s Rwanda compelling in the context of this study, besides some evidence to indicate influence, is the fact that both regimes used education as a social-structural and psychosocial tool with which to condition the masses to accept genocidal hatred. In each case, a scapegoat was identified, subjected to discriminatory educational policies, and featured in propaganda in the classroom for the ultimate goal of being slated for death.

Note

1 Louis P. Lochner, What about Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942), 1–4.

1 Education under National Socialism

Intellectual precursors to National Socialist ideology

In his seminal collection of lectures entitled Society Must Be Defended, Foucault defines the epistemological break following the Middle Ages not simply as a new way of conceiving of power but as the birth of a new way of theorizing history.¹ The concepts of race and racism also were significantly affected by this new theorization. Once understood as a tool for unification during the Middle Ages – the past was used as a means for exalting the present – in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, history performed a divisive role. Here, it was employed to produce “a binary perception and division of society and men; them and us, the unjust and the just, the masters and those who must obey them.”² This oppositional way of conceiving of the world, further buttressed by the Enlightenment’s engagement with empiricism and rationality and the burgeoning science of biological taxonomy, allowed not only for the establishment of classifications but even for the creation of hierarchies. In other words, such discourses did not simply produce distinctions between, among other things, various races. They allowed for the inevitable “splitting of a single race into a superrace and a subrace.”³ They would also give birth to subsequent unequal power dynamics that would, in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, manifest as strategically employed intellectual justifications for hate and resentment. In the case of National Socialist Germany, this would lead not only to the establishment of primary and secondary curricula tainted by the so-called “race science” but even to the creation of hard and soft science institutions of higher learning – Reichsinstituts – devoted exclusively to the “Jewish question.” Of course, this also paved the way for the invention of technology destined to “solve the problem.”

Among the many influential movements that informed the spirit of National Socialist education, the most prominent were arguably völkish nationalism, monism, and social Darwinism, all of which focused on human classification and were important currents in nineteenth-century thought, even among progressives. Völkism, first conceived in the 1700s by scholar and preacher Johann Gottfried Herder,⁴ stresses an imagined organic bond between an individual and his or her society, typically conceived of as a nation or race, and that society’s relationship to a “transcendental essence,” whether “nature,” “cosmos,” or “mythos.”⁵ Neoromantic in quality, German völkism was in some senses a reaction to a person’s alienation in the modern world. The nineteenth century in particular brought with it great progress and promise with science and technology. But with that advancement came the angst associated with industrialization and rationalization, instilling in people a desire for nature, emotion, community, and roots.

However, unlike Romanticism, which privileged the individual experience in the universe, völkism’s principal emphasis was on the communal experience. As Daniel Gasman contends, “The Volk … allowed the individual to belong to something greater than himself. It gave to him a sense of identity with a cosmic significance.”⁶ However, this is not to say that völkism tended to promote unity or equality for all beings, nor for all humans for that matter. Völkism’s emphasis on common biological heritage and geographical territory, blut und boden, more often than not was aligned with extremist national sentiment. It also paired well with the so-called “race sciences” in vogue from the mid-eighteenth century on that sought to classify and evaluate human attributes, with the Nordic race typically at the top of the hierarchy. In his expertly documented Hitler’s Professors (1999), Max Weinreich describes the relationships between race and nationality that are implicit in völkism:

In Nazi definition, a folk consists of several race components. The German folk, for example, is said to be predominantly Nordic… . The Norwegian folk possesses more Nordic components and therefore ranks even higher than the German in hierarchy. The English folk is said to consist of practically the same components as the Germans, only in different proportions. Consequently, both Norwegians and the English are cognate to the German folk… . Finally, the Jews are essentially a counter-race (Gengenrasse); they are alien in species (artfremd), since they are a mixture of the Near-Eastern (vorderasiatisch) and Oriental races, with some other minor admixtures.⁷

Biologist Georges Cuvier’s work on race typifies this pseudo-scientific thread: “the White race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilized people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, course and activity.” “The Negro race,” on the other hand, “is evidently approximate … to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.”⁸ Perhaps more influential in Germany, however, was Count Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of the Human Races (1915), which purported to demonstrate that the superior Aryan race was threatened with contamination from intermixing with other inferior races.

Like völkism, monism can be described as a belief in community, but one that was ultimately more comprehensive in its reach. It emphasized “the basic unity of the universe, a unity that was achieved by viewing all natural phenomena as the operation of one fundamental, universal substance combining ‘matter’ and ‘spirit.’ ”⁹ In spite of the apparent difference in scope, leading German monists embraced the blood and soil message of völkism when it came to the question of nationality. As one of their political tracts states, despite their conceptualization of the “unity of the universe,” the nation would be defined as a “community based upon race, spiritual and mental characteristics, language, history, and homeland.”¹⁰ Additionally, monists sought justification and legitimacy for their beliefs by aligning themselves with science. Made up of intellectuals, many of whom were scientists, the Monistic Alliance saw its principal contribution as one of identifying the social and political implications of scientific ideas and then transmitting them in a comprehensible manner to the völk. In the words of Ernst Haeckel, biologist and founder of the Monistic Alliance, science ought not to be the purview of only the “learned savants and philosophers” but rather should be “the possession of all.”¹¹ To achieve this aim, the monists encouraged school reform in the way of increased science instruction and secularization. But as Gasman reasons, while this type of reform seemed to be like that of other “progressively inclined thinkers” of the day, “lurking” beneath it was “a theory of education … which actively sought to undermine the entire humanistic tradition” of what was at the time a liberal-arts-dominated education. He considered it an “immense waste of time” to have a “thorough knowledge” of classics, the history of foreign nations, and languages.¹² The science in question for the monists was Darwinism.

Richard Hofstadter has shown that in its inception, social Darwinism – with its emphasis on individual competition – resonated primarily with laissez faire politics and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Education and genocide
• Part II Education, liberation, and oppression: education under communist rule
• Part III Education and big money