Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
countries like the United States and Great Britain reluctant
to accept many Jewish refugees from Germany before the
outbreak of the war, and it was hard for them to believe
the first accounts of “the final solution” that appeared in
1942–1943. But the horrible truth revealed by the liberation
of the death camps in 1945 could not be evaded. The resulting
shock and mortification did more to discredit racism—at
least in its blatant ideological forms—than had any
previous historical event. As a consequence of the Allied
victory over the Nazis in World War II, according to the
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, “the rug was
pulled out from under all claims to legitimacy that did not
at least rhetorically embrace the universalistic spirit of the
political Enlightenment.” 48 What the Nazis had done was
so indefensible that later neo-Nazis would deny that the
Holocaust had taken place rather than try to justify it.
The eugenics movement, which had enjoyed scientific
respectability in the United States and Britain before the
war, did not survive the revelations of what the Nazis had
done in its name. Not all eugenicists had been racists or
even social conservatives, but the whole notion of using the
state to improve the human gene pool was under a dark
cloud for several decades after the war. The empirical genetic
science of 1950 was not very different from that in
1940, when the possibility that there were innate differences
between races, and that crossing them might have
deleterious consequences, was still a respectable hypothesis.
But in 1950 most prominent geneticists and physical
anthropologists endorsed all or part of the UNESCO statement
declaring that science gave no support to the notion
that human groups differed in “their innate capacity for
128