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Secret Sources of the Success of the Racist Ideology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

To Understand the extraordinary fortunes of racism, it is necessary first of all to see the paradox in the success of this ideology. Racism has been condemned over and over again by the Church; it has been refuted a thousand times—and without any great difficulty—for never has a theory with scientific pretensions produced such an accumulation of inconsistencies, of manifestly arbitrary affirmations, of fantastic generalizations and of grotesque constructions. In the course of the last few years racism has been guilty of colossal crimes, crimes that must fill with indignation every soul in which there exists the slightest sentiment of justice or of charity. We are today witnessing the defeat of those temporal powers in which it is incarnate. For all that, racism still flourishes, and nothing would be more un warranted than to say that this plague is in decline.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1945

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References

1 We want to make clear that we are dealing with abuses, and that our criticism has nothing to do with the hierarchical differentiation of society, a thing altogether natural and normal.

2 Maritain, J.. Les Degrés da Savoir, p. 162Google Scholar.

3 Philosophers will recognize here the theory of the two abstractions, abslraclio formalis and abslraclio totalis. Scholastic subleties are sometimes useful to do away with gross fallacies.

4 “La race nègre et la malédiction de Cham,” Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa. 1940, p. 156 ff.

5 Benét, Stephen Vincent, Body, John Brown's, Selected Work of Stephen Vincent Benét. (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., Vol. I, p. 12, 1942.)Google Scholar

6 Polilique Etrangére, (Paris), avril 1939Google Scholar.