The parade of white supremacists in DC this weekend got me wondering. Every society throughout history has had its prejudices, chauvinism and bigotry -but do others have (or have had) their version of white supremacy? In other words not just “We don’t like those people over there” or “We’d like to take over their lands” but “We are the best people that ever existed and therefore by rights we should be running things?”
It’s the second part that I am really wondering about. Many, possibly most, societies convince themselves of the first. Conquerors throughout history have plundered other lands for economic gain or power. But are there groups in other societies besides the US or Europe that believe they have the right to rule others because they are the apex of humanity?
IOW do other countries have Black supremacists? Chinese supremacists? Canadian supremacists? Or is that just an American thing?
Edit: I am mostly interested in current groups. The Roman empire or the 16th century British empire may have had those views but are there organized groups today who do?
And Imperial Japan who believed they were superior to their neighboring countries people. They didn’t just take over lands, but practiced subjugation of what they considered inferior people.
I believe the official line from the Japanese government at the time was that they were superior to all non-Japanese humans (there might have been a hierarchy of those groups, but all were below Japanese). Their neighboring countries were just more convenient to get at.
Americans didn’t invent white supremacy. Europeans did. The notion started after the discovery of the Americas, propaganda to justify the black slave trade. That spread northward from the Portuguese and Spanish, the first colonizers, to the UK and Germany, the leading scientific countries, as they sought to justify their imperialistic control of the world. As soon as anthropology cohered into something resembling a science, the white “race” was immediately placed on top of all the other “races,” with the black “race” almost always at the bottom. This lead to the eugenics movement and eventually to Hitler.
I’ll expand on the important things others have already said. Pretty much every culture to walk the earth has had some variation of a core belief that they were the best, the chosen, the favored, the most important. And pretty much every culture has had fanatics who perverted that into some variation of supremacy which justified whatever they did to the “Others.”
And that’s not even touching religious supremacy, which has lifted its obnoxious head pretty much everywhere at every moment including today.
Americans have had many variations of supremacy. Immigrants, from Germans to Irish to Italians to Polish to Chinese to Mexican to Somali to Haitian, have in turn been marginalized, segregated, persecuted, repressed, and resented. None of them have been treated as badly as the non-immigrants, the Native Americans we perpetrated genocide on. Of course chattel slavery produced a special reaction that is in many ways different from the histories of other countries.
This universal, one that metastasizes in so many ways, appears to be fundamental to human societies, although that’s hotly argued across a number of sciences. Life ain’t Star Trek.
Yes, racism in Imperial Japan was omni-directional; everyone was inferior to the Japanese, it wasn’t aimed at specific groups of people. John Dower’s War Without Mercy is still a very good go to on the subject.
There was some fluff that the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was “Asia for the Asians” to try to capitalize on anti-colonial sentiment in territory Japan occupied during WWII, but the reality was Japan was just replacing European colonial powers. And was far, far worse. There’s a colloquialism in Indonesian to the effect of “4 years of Japan was worse than 500 years of the Dutch”.
There was a time when the Chinese were so full of themselves they were convinced that western bullets would not harm them. (They were wrong.) Being half Chinese, when I learned of this belief, I was not surprised.
Thanks for the replies all. Hitler certainly qualifies (although he was white, and I was looking more for non-white examples). Imperial Japan also seems to qualify. China’s an interesting example, because a quest for global power for its own sake may be hard to distinguish from the notion that “we deserve to be in charge because we are superior” to an outside observer. I will accept the word of those of you who know China better than I do.
Hutu supremacism (“Hutu Power”) in Rwanda is a classic and tragic example of what you’re talking about. The ideology that ethnic Hutu were naturally superior to, and natural masters of, Tutsi and Twa people was a key factor in the 1994 genocide.
Which ironically was a backlash against racial ‘Tutsi supremacism’ which was promulgated by colonial Europeans, who changed a somewhat flexible class system into an inflexible caste system with the Tutsi “on top” (that is to say in the middle, still well below said Europeans).