Abstract
In both Early America and Nazi Germany, each nation-state constructed a hierarchical social structure, using ‘race’ as the primary organizing principle for society and based on a racial worldview founded on notions of racial ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’. In both cases, specific historical and cultural contexts nourished ideas of racial ‘difference’, promoted racial ideologies (linked with territorial expansion), and offered up racial worldviews supporting the alleged ‘superiority’ of the ‘white’/‘Aryan’ races and their ‘right’ and ‘duty’ to subjugate ‘inferior’ ‘natives’ in the new ‘living space’ of the ‘American West’ and the ‘Nazi East’. A race-centred worldview, in both cases, gained increased power and influence from specific political developments. In pre-Civil War Early America, the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian political elites (mostly politicians from the south and west who benefited from territorial expansion as well as the extension of slavery) occupied the White House and directed the course of American continental imperialism. In Germany, the Nazi ascension to power in 1933 guaranteed that a race-centred worldview (as expressed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf) would be a driving force behind the empire-building and ‘racial cleansing’ at the heart of the Nazi agenda. The Early American ‘western empire’ and the Nazi-German ‘eastern empire’ involved the ‘racial remaking’ of ‘living space’, both in the metropole and in the colonial territories. Thanks to this process of racial ‘othering’, both ‘ordinary’ Americans and ‘ordinary’ Germans developed a deep-seated sense of belonging to a ‘superior’ and privileged collective, feelings that would render most of them ‘indifferent’ to the fate of allegedly ‘inferior’ peoples.
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Notes
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© 2011 Carroll P. Kakel, III
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Kakel, C.P. (2011). Racial ‘Othering’: ‘Manufacturing Difference’. In: The American West and the Nazi East. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307063_3
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