Encyclopedia

Nordicism

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Nordicism

 

a variety of racism; a pseudoscientific theory based on the assertion that the northern (Nordic), or Aryan, race is superior to other human races.

The French sociologists J. A. Gobineau and G. Lapouge are considered the founders of Nordicism. Apologists for nordicism equate the northern race and the “Germanic,” asserting that the latter constitutes the “highest” race, to which humanity owes all the achievements of civilization. Nordicism was used as a weapon by the “theorists” of German fascism, who made it the official ideology of Hitlerite Germany.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive
"Crosscurrents: Registers of Nordicism, Community, and Culture in Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs." Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 (1997): 355-70.
(236) His strident Nordicism echoed many of the themes regularly sounded in the racial politics of Harry Laughlin and Madison Grant.
Even as he was disputing Draper's methods, Osborn was promising to introduce him to Lindbergh, a man who had also voiced his concerns about the destruction of the "White race" through its "dilution by foreign races." (470) On one hand, Osborn clearly found the overt "Nordicism" and anti-Semitism of Laughlin, Grant, and Draper unacceptable, yet he maintained close contacts with each of them.
What is less obvious is that despite this stereotyping - and it was not restricted to African Americans and Jews - Fitzgerald felt differently about two vicious forms of racism that existed during his lifetime, Nordicism and lynching.
In contrast, he soon was to indicate his opposition to Nordicism, a contemporaneous theory of racial superiority.
When Tom Buchanan talks about "The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard," he is referring to Nordicism. "It's a fine book and everybody ought to read it," he says.
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