How were the communists able to promote an anti-ethnocentric worldview in predominantly white countries at the same exact time as the National Socialists then?
I won't disagree that certain historic NS writings on "race" were too bogged down by ethnocentrism at times, but Soviet policy was explicitly ethnocentric as well. Perhaps much more so than Germany, arguably:
Through Joseph Stalin's theory on nationality, borders were drawn to create national homelands for various recognized ethnic groups.[4] Early republics like the Kazakh ASSR and the Turkestan ASSR in Central Asia were dissolved and split up to create new union republics.[5] With delimitation came the policy of indigenization which encouraged the de-Russification of the country and promotion of minority languages and culture.[6] This policy also affected ethnic Russians and was particularly enforced in ASSRs where indigenous people were already a minority in their own homeland, like the Buryat ASSR.[7] Language and culture flourished and ultimately institutionalized ethnicity in the state apparatus of the country.[8]
[...]
By the 1930s the mood shifted as the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin stopped enforcing indigenization and began purging non-Russians from government and intelligentsia. Thus, a period of Russification set in.[6] Russian became mandatory in all areas of non-Russian ethnicity and the Cyrillic script became compulsory for all languages of the Soviet Union.[11] The constitution stated that the ASSRs had power to enforce their own policies within their territory,[12] but in practice the ASSRs and their titular nationalities were some of the most affected by Stalin's purges and were strictly controlled by Moscow.[13] From 1937, the "bourgeois nationalists" became the "enemy of the Russian people" and indigenization was abolished.[11]
[...]
When the Soviets gained the upper hand and began recapturing territory in 1943, many minorities of the country began to be seen as German collaborators by Stalin and were accused of treason, particularly in southern Russia.[15] Between 1943 and 1945 ethnic Balkars,[16] Chechens,[17] Crimean Tatars,[18] Ingush,[17] and Kalmyks[19] were deported en masse from the region to remote parts of the country. Immediately after the deportations the Soviet government passed decrees that liquidated the Kalmyk ASSR on 27 December 1943,[19] the Crimean ASSR on 23 February 1944,[20] the Checheno-Ingush ASSR on 7 March 1944,[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republics_of_Russia#HistoryBesides national republics, oblasts, and okrugs, several hundred national districts (with populations between 10,000 and 50,000) and several thousand national townships (population 500 to 5,000) were established. In some cases this policy required voluntary or forced resettlement in both directions to create a compact population.
[...]
In the 1920s and the 1930s, the policy of national delimitation, which assigned national territories to ethnic groups and nationalities, was followed by nation-building, attempting to create a full range of national institutions within each national territory. Each officially recognized ethnic minority, however small, was granted its own national territory where it enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy, in addition to national elites.[5] A written national language was developed (if it had been lacking), national language planning was implemented, native teachers were trained, and national schools were established.
[...]
Following the introduction of the Soviet passport system in 1932, each adult citizen's ethnicity (Russian: национальность) was necessarily recorded in their passport. Where parents' nationalities differed, a citizen was able to choose which nationality to register in their passport.[37] This practice did not exist in the Russian empire and has been abolished in the Russian Federation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_delimitation_in_the_Soviet_Unionhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Republics_of_Russia.pngMap showing the ethnic republics of the Russian Federation (2008) that succeeded the national territories of Russian SFSR (pre-1990)
Map showing all the former ethnic republics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Liquidated_national_territorial_administrative_units_of_the_Russia.jpgHow Stalin Created Some of the Post-Soviet World's Worst Ethnic Conflicts
[...]
Terry Martin, director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and coauthor of "A State Of Nations: Empire And Nation-Building In The Age Of Lenin And Stalin," agrees, but adds that the Soviets created problems from the beginning by trying to draw borders too precisely along ethnic lines in places where ethnic identities were still evolving.
"If they did anything that created ethnic conflict, they created ethnic conflict by trying to draw the borders too precisely," he says. "That is, they created a lot of ethnic mobilization around borders in the 1920s as people lobbied to get one border and lobbied various people to identify with their nationality and not with another in areas where nationality was very fluid, like Central Asia. Most of the modern nationalities that we have [today] hadn't even been formed yet."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/how-stalin-created-some-of-the-post-soviet-worlds-worst-ethnic-conflicts/273649/Stalin even created the first Israel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_OblastInstead of Hitler trying to create provinces for each of the 5 or so "sub-races" that existed in Germany, Hitler's goal was to unify them into something new.
He was already struggling in a war where everyone was attacking him on all sides, so he really had nothing to lose by openly promoting something more similar to what we promote now.
Hitler was not a biologist, so I do not blame him for not having a sufficient understanding to precisely express the ideology which he intuitively felt.
Here is Walter Gross attempting to clarify the official stance of the party regarding racial matters in 1939, from
Der deutsche Rassengedanke und die Welt. This was just as the party was trying to distance itself from Nordicism.
Germany goes here in 1933 and introduces a completely new concept into law and international law, namely a classification of people according to their descent from a racial point of view. In practice, we were treading Judaism, and quite exclusively Judaism, because we did not have a foreign race problem of a different kind in Germany to a significant extent at that time, nor did we have any contact with foreign breeds outside our borders, which would be significantly impaired by the German racial laws. First of all, it is a conflict between us and Judaism. But for reasons that matter here, we deliberately did not speak of Jews but of non-Aryans in the first legal measures (such as the law on the restoration of the professional civil service) and thus put the whole problem on a much broader basis than, for example, the conflict between Jews and Germans.
[...]
But a very serious situation arises from the fact that now other peoples and states feel directly attacked and defamed in their honor and dignity as a nation, namely as a non-Aryan nation, by the German racial rule and the segregation from the racial alien. I do not want to count all the peoples and countries with whom there have been serious debates for this reason. It is appropriate to point out that, for example, the whole world of the Far East was for a long time under the impression that the German in his new National Socialist conception described it as non-Aryan, and that he considered the non-Aryans as an inferior rabble. So: The German distinguishes us as inferior, secondary people and himself as the actual bearer of culture. Suffice it to say that such a conception could understandably cause infinite excitement and hatred against this new Nazi Germany among proud, self-confident, reverent national peoples, such as Japan. We have had the same phenomenon in India, for example, and we have experienced it in many Near Eastern peoples.
All this manifested itself in two ways. Once in a mood-based bias against the Third Reich, against Germanness in general.
[...]
sooner or later this government was forced by its own people to ask Berlin now, so to speak, what is actually going on about it: Whether their people are actually regarded and treated as second-class people and semi-savages because of their race and discord? This has indeed led to diplomatic steps in Berlin at a time when any tension of any kind on this globe, if it was not absolutely inevitable, has been annoying, unpleasant and actually unbearable.
[...]
What could we do about this tendency to see in the German racial idea a fundamental defamation of people of other races? We could do nothing but repeatedly present the German racial idea in its actual form with calm and superiority and make it clear to people that the essence of racial knowledge is not the evaluation or even the devaluation of other groups of people in this world, but nothing more than the cool, yes I would like to say scientific, statement, that there are different groups of people in this world and that there is primarily no talk of an evaluation at all, that the statement: You are of a different race towards us--first contains no more and no less value judgment than the objective observation of a person who walks through the forest and says: "It is not only trees in the forest, but this and this is an oak tree." -- This is not an insult or a value judgment.
[...]
We are sometimes there--that I must also pronounce--disturbed by clumsiness over even stupidity in our own country, when somewhere a wild fool produced his ideas of race, or that if we had just made it painstakingly clear to some people that we respect and honor them and that we completely concede to them his peculiarity on the basis of his bloody and racial internal legality, with one fool in his leaflet or book wrote that this people was racially inferior, that they were under cow and donkey, that their qualities were wickedness and uncleanliness, and what do I know. With such stupid derailments, not only foreign-race peoples in distant parts of the world, but even neighboring peoples in Europe, often even historically, fatefully determined friends of National Socialist Germany, have sometimes been irritated and alienated to the blood. I say openly that the two great peoples and powers who first began with us the political-organizational struggle against all the forces of decay and decline in the world, namely Italy and Japan, have shown an infinitely strong reserve against the German racial idea for years, out of misunderstanding, but unfortunately also partly as a result of the nonsense of individual irresponsible people in our own people, because they believed that the content of this German racial idea was an immediate degradation and defamation of their own national and cultural values.
[...]
If today we can speak with the Japanese in this field in a completely clear and unbiased way: you are like this and we are different, we are deeply different in nature, -- then this will never give us a single hint of cause for friction and explosions, we will precisely out of respect for otherness from the outset remove the possibility from the outset, which can give a dilution, mixing and blurring of these natural boundaries between us, and in the end there remains the deep respect for the culture of a very nation that has become a strong, proud and great nation out of completely different bloody foundations and completely different historical conditions and is thus somewhere closely related to ourselves, which, of course, we possess and must preserve other styles and other forms from our inner racial law and racial content.
Exactly the same thing, as you know, has occupied us for a long time in the position on fascism and Italy. All the greater is our concern that the Italian people have now lost all sensitivity to the racial idea of Germany not only in this area, but are even the first other people to have established their own racial idea, which is directly related to ours, and has thus moved into the common front in the struggle for the racial idea.
I would say Gross's apparent ethnocentrism may be arising from a failure to fully pry apart nationality, ethnicity, and "race". Particularly in the last 2 paragraphs. In reality, racially, the Japanese are deeply similar to Germans (which is why they were Aryans allied with Germany). In terms of ethnicity, obviously they are different, but this is irrelevant for political matters. In terms of nationality, culture, and the corresponding "national idea" which Japan must base their nationalism on--their history and culture are very different from Germany's, so they must have a distinct "national idea". This interpretation is more obvious in the final paragraph about Italians. Italians are, ethnically, not too distantly-related from Germans, yet they have an entirely different "racial idea" than Germany.
If Gross was around today, perhaps he would have worded things more precisely. But the core of what he is saying is that (1) different "peoples" exist, (2) different "peoples" are not inferior to Germans simply for being different (i.e. anti-ethnocentrism), and (3) non-Aryans are inferior (i.e. Jews, specifically, and exclusively in the case of Germany. Not "Rhineland bastards", but exclusively Jews). Logically, Aryans and non-Aryans must be qualitatively similar to each other within each category, regardless of differences in ethnicity or nationality.
In A. James Gregor's article on NS and race, he explains similarly:
In effect this last phase of National Socialist race theory was a complete rejection of Guenther's Nordicism.
[...]
We are told that "the races distinguish themselves not through their characteristics; for the same characteristics can be found in different races…For example a Mediterranean can be as courageous as a Nordic, an Alpine as musical as a Dinaric, an East Balt as cunning as a Nordic. On the other hand not all Mediterraneans are courageous, nor all Nordics. But when a Mediterranean is courageous he is courageous in a 'Mediterranean fashion' as a Nordic would be courageous in a 'Nordic fashion'."[102]
Here is an entirely different racism, an entirely different Nordicism than that of Guenther and his followers. Here there was no question of general inferiority - it was a question of maintaining an ideal as an archetype for an entire civilization. Germany had a Nordic archetype; its art form was Nordic; its literature and philosophy, its music and institutions were inspired by Nordic ideals. Each German was bequeathed this patrimony from the original racial elements, now inextricably mixed into the German Nation, among which the Nordic predominated. It was not a question of intrinsic worth, national and racial superiority and inferiority tearing asunder the peoples of Europe. There is no transcendental standard by which to evaluate racial differences.[103] A people characteristically Mongolian treasures a Mongolian heritage and ideal, a Mediterranean people a Mediterranean one.[104]
But to Hitler, "Nordics", "Alpines", etc. are not truly races. Aryan is a race. The so-called racial classifications made by academics are just ancient ethnic groups or nationalities whose mixture gave rise to the modern nationalities. The grand task is understanding the traits which have been inherited by a modern nationality and promoting the noble ones. Germany, Italy, and Japan were formed from different historic mixtures, and it was not possible to judge whether one of those mixtures was better than the other, since they all had positive and negative traits.
Today, we know now the racial process which likely gave rise to noble traits in the first place (selection for a farming lifestyle) and on this basis we can see the underlying noble characteristics in Germany, Italy, and Japan are not so different after all.
Although I'm sure plenty of white nationalists would argue that Hitler was simply slandering Eastern Europeans for propagandistic purposes, since they were warring against him
The term Underman was originally used to describe the quality of individuals/nations which had succumbed to Communism (National Socialists did not coin the term). However, National Socialists consistently used this definition. In the image below, note that this type of anti-Communist/anti-Underman propaganda was translated into multiple Slavic languages (for nations allied with Germany). The fact that Communism's hold was strongest on Slavic nations may have been a coincidence, or, as we would assert, due to Turanism...
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