Supremacism is the belief that a certain group of people is superior to, and should have authority over, all others.
National
Indian supremacism
In
Asia, Indians in Ancient India considered all foreigners
. The
Islam scholar
Al-Biruni wrote that the Indians called foreigners impure.
[ The First Spring: The Golden Age of India by Abraham Eraly p. 313] A few centuries later, Dubois observes that "
Hinduism look upon Europeans as barbarians totally ignorant of all principles of honour and good breeding... In the eyes of a Hindu, a Pariah (
Dalit) and a European are on the same level."
The Chinese also considered the Europeans repulsive, ghost-like creatures, and they even considered them devils. Chinese writers also referred to foreigners as barbarians.
[ The Haunting Past: Politics, Economics and Race in Caribbean Life by Alvin O. Thompson p. 210]
Russian chauvinism
Sinocentrism
Racial
White supremacism
Centuries of European colonialism in the Americas,
Asia, Africa and
Oceania were justified by
Eurocentrism attitudes as well as sometimes by
White supremacy attitudes.
[Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey Miles White, Lisa Yoneyama, Perilous memories: the Asia-Pacific War(s), p. 303, 2001.]
During the 19th century, "The White Man's Burden", the phrase which refers to the thought that whites have the obligation to make the societies of the other peoples more 'civilized', was widely used to justify colonial policies as a noble enterprise.[: Notes that Rudyard Kipling's new poem, "The White Man's Burden", "is regarded as the strongest argument yet published in favor of expansion."] Historian Thomas Carlyle, best known for his historical account of the French Revolution, , argued that western policies were justified on the grounds that they provided the greatest benefit to "inferior" native peoples.
According to William Nicholls, religious antisemitism can be distinguished from racial antisemitism which is based on racial or ethnic group grounds. "The dividing line was the possibility of effective conversion ... a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon baptism." However, with racial antisemitism, "Now the assimilated Jew was still a Jew, even after baptism ... . From the Enlightenment onward, it is no longer possible to draw clear lines of distinction between religious and racial forms of hostility towards Jews... Once Jews have been emancipated and secular thinking makes its appearance, without leaving behind the old Christian hostility towards Jews, the new term antisemitism becomes almost unavoidable, even before explicitly racist doctrines appear."[Nichols, William: Christian Antisemitism, A History of Hate (1993) p. 314.]
One of the first typologies which was used to classify various human races was invented by Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), a theoretician of eugenics, who published L'Aryen et son rôle social (1899 – "The Aryan and his social role") in 1899. In his book, he divides humanity into various, Racial hierarchy, starting with the highest race which is the "Aryan white race, dolichocephalic", and ending with the lowest race which is the "brachycephalic", "mediocre and inert" race, that race is best represented by , Catholic Church peasants".[See Pierre-André Taguieff, La couleur et le sang – Doctrines racistes à la française ("Colour and Blood – Racist doctrines à la française"), Paris, Mille et une nuits, 2002, 203 pages, and La Force du préjugé – Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles, Tel Gallimard, La Découverte, 1987, 644 pages]
United States
White Americans who participated in the Atlantic slave trade believed and justified their economic exploitation of African Americans by creating a scientific theory of white superiority and black inferiority.
, who was a believer of scientific racism and enslaver of over 600 African Americans (regarded as property under the Articles of Confederation),
wrote that blacks were "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind."
[Paul Finkelman (November 12, 2012). "The Monster of Monticello". The New York Times. Retrieved January 8, 2022.]
A justification for the conquest of American Indian tribes emanated from their dehumanized perception as the "merciless Indian savages", as described in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Before the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Confederate States of America was founded with a constitution that contained clauses which restricted the government's ability to limit or interfere with the institution of "negro" slavery.[: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."] In the 1861 Cornerstone Speech, Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens declared that one of the Confederacy's foundational tenets was White Supremacy over African American slaves.[: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."] Following the war, a hate group, known as the Ku Klux Klan, was founded in the American South, after the end of the American Civil War. Its purpose has been to maintain White, Protestant supremacy in the US after the Reconstruction period, which it did so through violence and intimidation.[Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, Perennial (HarperCollins), 1989, pp. 425–426.]
The Anti-Defamation League[Duke, David. Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question. Aware Journalism, 2007.] Kevin B. MacDonald, known for his theory of Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy", has also been accused of being "antisemitic" and a "white supremacist" in his writings on the subject by the ADL
Nazi Germany
From 1933 to 1945,
Nazi Germany, under the rule of
Adolf Hitler, promoted the belief in the existence of a superior,
Aryan race Herrenvolk, or
master race. The
Nazi propaganda advocated the belief that
Germanic peoples, whom they called "Aryans", were a master race or a
Herrenvolk whose members were superior to the
Jews,
Slavs, and
Romani people, so-called "gypsies". Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on
Miscegenation, which he believed had destroyed the purity of the
Nordic race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a large and strong following in Germany, emphasized the belief in the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan and
.
[Blamires, Cyprian; Jackson, Paul. World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia: Volume 1. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc, 2006. p. 62.]
Black supremacism
Cornel West, an African-American philosopher, writes that
Black supremacy religious views arose in America as a part of black Muslim theology in response to white supremacy.
[Cornel West, Race Matters, Beacon Press, 1993, p. 99: "The basic aim of black Muslim theologywith its distinct black supremacist account of the origins of white peoplewas to counter white supremacy."]
Hutu supremacism
Arab supremacism
In
Africa, black Southern
allege that they are being subjected to a racist form of
Arab supremacy, which they equate with the historic white supremacism of
South Africa's
apartheid.
The alleged
genocide and
ethnic cleansing in the ongoing War in Darfur has been described as an example of
Arab racism.
For example, in their analysis of the sources of the conflict, Julie Flint and Alex de Waal say that
Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of
Libya, sponsored "Arab supremacism" across the
Sahara during the 1970s. Gaddafi supported the "
Islamic Legion" and the Sudanese opposition "National Front, including the Muslim Brothers and the Ansar, the Umma Party's military wing." Gaddafi tried to use such forces to annex
Chad from 1979 to 1981. Gaddafi supported the Sudanese government's war in the South during the early 1980s, and in return, he was allowed to use the Darfur region as a "back door to Chad". As a result, the first signs of an "Arab racist political platform" appeared in Darfur in the early 1980s.
[Flint and de Waal, Darfur: A New History of a Long War, rev. ed. (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), pp. 47–49.]
Religious
Christianity
Academics Carol Lansing and Edward D. English argue that Christian supremacism was a motivation for the
Crusades in the
Holy Land, as well as a motivation for crusades against Muslims and pagans throughout Europe.
[Carol Lansing; Edward D. English, A companion to the medieval world, Vol. 7, John Wiley and Sons, 2009, p. 457, ] The
blood libel is a widespread European conspiracy theory which led to centuries of
pogroms and massacres of European Jewish minorities because it alleged that Jews required the pure blood of a Christian child in order to make
matzah for
Passover. Thomas of Cantimpré writes of the
blood curse which the Jews put upon themselves and all of their generations at the court of
Pontius Pilate where Jesus was sentenced to death: "A very learned Jew, who in our day has been converted to the (Christian) faith, informs us that one enjoying the reputation of a prophet among them, toward the close of his life, made the following prediction: 'Be assured that relief from this secret ailment, to which you are exposed, can only be obtained through Christian blood ("solo sanguine Christiano")."
[Albert Ehrman, "The Origins of the Ritual Murder Accusation and Blood Libel", Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Spring 1976): 86] The Atlantic slave trade has also been partially attributed to Christian supremacism.
[Mary E. Hunt, Diann L. Neu, New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views, SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2010, p. 122, ] The Ku Klux Klan has been described as a
White supremacy Christian organization, as are many other white supremacist groups, such as the Posse Comitatus and the Christian Identity and Positive Christianity movements.
[R. Scott Appleby, The ambivalence of the sacred: religion, violence, and reconciliation, Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict series, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, p. 103, ]
Islam
Academics Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ian Lague, and Joshua Cone note that, while the
Quran and other Islamic scriptures express tolerant beliefs, such as Al-Baqara 256 "there is no compulsion in religion",
there have also been numerous instances of Muslim or Islamic supremacism.
[Joshua Cohen, Ian Lague, Khaled Abou El Fadl, The place of tolerance in Islam, Beacon Press, 2002, p. 23, ] Examples of how supremacists have interpreted Islam include the history of slavery in the Muslim world,
Caliphate,
, the early-20th-century
pan-Islamism promoted by Abdul Hamid II,
[Gareth Jenkins, Political Islam in Turkey: running west, heading east?, Macmillan, 2008, p. 59, ] the
jizya and supremacy of
Sharia law, such as rules of marriage in Muslim countries being imposed on non-Muslims.
[Malise Ruthven, Islam: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, 1997, Macmillan, 2008 p. 117, ]
While non-violent proselytism of Islam (Dawah) is not Islamic supremacism, forced conversion to Islam is Islamic supremacism.
Numerous massacres and ethnic cleansing of Jews, Christians and non-Muslims[Roumani, Maurice. The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, 1977, pp. 26–27.] Decrees ordering the destruction of were enacted during the Middle Ages in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.[Bat Ye'or, The Dhimmi, 1985, p. 61] While there were antisemitic incidents before the 20th century, antisemitism increased after the Arab–Israeli conflict. Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Palestinian exodus, the creation of the State of Israel and Israeli victories during the wars of 1956 and Six-Day War were a severe humiliation to Israel's opponentsprimarily Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.[Lewis (1986), p. 204.] However, by the mid-1970s the vast majority of Jews had left Muslim-majority countries, moving primarily to Israel, France, and the United States.
Judaism
Ilan Pappé, an
expatriate Israeli historian, writes that the
First Aliyah to Israel "established a society based on Jewish supremacy" within "settlement-cooperatives" that were Jewish owned and operated.
, a professor of
Arab studies, holds that "Jewish supremacism" has always been a "dominating principle" in religious and secular
Zionism.
[David Hirsch, Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections , The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism Working Paper Series; discussion of Joseph Massad's "The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle", Interventions, Vol. 5, No. 3, 440–451, 2003.][According to Joseph Massad's "Response to the Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report" on his Columbia University web site during a 2002 rally he said "Israeli Jews will continue to feel threatened if they persist in supporting Jewish supremacy." Massad says others have misquoted him as saying Israel was a "Jewish supremacist and racist state." See for example David Horowitz, The professors: the 101 most dangerous academics in America, Regnery Publishing, 271, 2006]
Since the 1990s,
In 2002, Joseph Massad said that Israel imposes a "Jewish supremacist system of discrimination" on Palestinian citizens of Israel, and that this has been normalized within the discourse on how to end the conflict, with various parties arguing that "it is pragmatic for Palestinians to accept to live in a Jewish supremacist state as third class citizens".
In the aftermath of the 2022 Israeli legislative election, the winning right-wing coalition included an alliance known as Religious Zionist Party, which was described by Jewish-American columnist David E. Rosenberg as a political party "driven by Jewish supremacy and anti-Arab racism".
Sexual
Male supremacism
Feminism argue that in
patriarchy, male supremacism is upheld through a variety of cultural, political, religious, sexual, and interpersonal systems and relations.
[Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female power and male dominance: on the origins of sexual inequality, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 6–8, 113–114, 174, 182. ] Since the 19th century there have been a number of feminist movements opposed to male supremacism, usually aimed at achieving equal legal rights and protections for women in all cultural, political and interpersonal relations.
Social cleansing
Political cleansing
See also
Notes
