| Arthur de Gobineau
When Gobineau returned to France in the later years of the July Monarchy, he made his living writing serialized fiction (romans-feuilletons) and contributing to reactionary periodicals. He struck up a friendship, and had voluminous correspondence with, Alexis de Tocqueville, who brought him into the foreign ministry while he was foreign minister during the Second Republic.[1] Gobineau was a successful diplomat for the French Second Empire. Initially he was posted to Persia, before working in Brazil and other countries.
He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three races - "black", "white", and "yellow" - were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. He classified the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and North Africa as racially mixed.
Gobineau also questioned the belief that the black and yellow races belong to the same human family as the white race and share a common ancestor. He was a devout Catholic and assumed the Bible to be an accurate account of human history, so he did not doubt that the Bible speaks of Adam as the progenitor of the white race, but doubted that the colored races were descendants of Adam[3][4], since ".. nothing proves that at the first redaction of the Adamite genealogies the colored races were considered as forming part of the species"[5].
Gobineau believed the white race was superior to the other races in the creation of civilized culture and maintaining ordered government. However, he also thought that the development of civilization in other periods was different than in his own and speculated that other races might have superior qualities in those civilization periods than in his own. Nonetheless, he believed European civilization represented the best of what remained of ancient civilizations and held the most superior attributes capable for continued survival. His primary thesis in regards to this theory was that European civilizational flowering from Greece to Rome and Germanic to contemporary sprang from, and corresponded to, the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan". Gobineau originally wrote that, given the past trajectory of civilization in Europe, white race miscegenation was inevitable and would result in growing chaos. He attributed much of the economic turmoil in France to pollution of races. Later on in his life, with the spread of British and American civilization and the growth of Germany, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.
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Hitler and Nazism borrowed much of Gobineau's ideology, though Gobineau himself was not particularly anti-Semitic.
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Talk about selective exegesis. And this guy was a progenitor to one of the darkest times of human history. A devout European Catholic who believed in the Bible...and the blessed Mother Mary...
Yeah...gotta love the institutional chuuuuuuuuurch...yeah...
Heh. I just have two words: "Azusa Street"
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