The Racial World-View Of H.P.Lovecraft, Vol. 2, No. 1



by A. Trumbo

September 13, 2002

In this letter, H.P. Lovecraft expresses his opinions about the Jews. On one hand he seems to praise the Jews, and on the other he slams them. His willingness to consider assimilation of Jewish blood into the Aryan gene pool proves to be more than disturbing. Perhaps he is trying to conceal his loathing while politely revealing them as the alien nation-wreckers they are. Mr. Lovecraft's ideas concerning his world view are proving to be as multi-dimensional as one of his nightmarish dreamscapes. Here's more from the mind from which the Ancient Ones descend.

[* indicates H.P.Lovecraft's original spelling as transcribed from his letters.]

Aug. 21, 1926

Whilst I am well aware that a large amount of race-stock included within the normal bounds of Jewry is excellent and quite assimilable[*] by a Nordic majority if the proportion be not excessive, I am not prepared to admit that the essentially exotic and Oriental culture-stream of the Hebraic tradition has any legitimate place in a Western and Aryan civilisation[*]. We can gradually absorb such Jewish elements as are dominantly Nordic or Mediterranean in their biological composition -- keen, gray-eyed, white skinned German Jews like the first August Belmont, or ascetic Portugese-Jewish types like those whose blood has already tinctured to a great extent the body of the Spanish people. But this absorption absolutely postulates a complete cultural surrender on their part -- an acceptance of our own Aryan point of view, loyalties, religion, and heritage. In other words, they must throw themselves wholly into the main stream and utterly forget their own individual past; else they will engender unpleasant cross-currents of taste and feeling which will continue to make them socially distasteful. We can't feel at ease -- we couldn't if we wanted to -- with persons motivated by a series of emotions founded on an utterly antipathetic and (to us) positively contemptible race-history. Nordic and Jew, culturally, can never meet on common ground because each one cordially hates what is sacred to the other. The Jew, to start with, is a humorless and emotionally overdeveloped ethical fanatic; [Not to mention a genocidal xenophobe.-A.T.] with a leaning to the grandiose and an absolute indifference to that pride and physical courage which with us is really the measure of a man. You can imagine the natural reaction of this alien minded stock to our essentially playful, power-loving, and indomitably proud fabric of unconquerable freemen. And that is not the worst. Added to this essential cultural alineage[*] of the Jew is his ignominious history for the past two thousand years. Unable to resist his conquerors, he has never made a courageous stand except when his ethical mania prompts the individual to resist spiritual encroachment, but has been content to cringe and fawn and scheme along with sickly smirk and greasily[*] rubbed palms as everybody's public door-mat. Kick him, and he

whines an excuse for having been in your way! Now to him, this means nothing: because his own tradition has pinned the its emotional approval to other things -- mostly ethical and spiritual illusions. He can placidly dodge our boot-tips and tin cans with unimpaired self-respect, because his life is modelled[*] upon a pattern which has nothing to do with our standard of value and ideals of manhood. It is the eternal East -- you see it in the Hindoo[*] fakir and Chinese coolie as well. But all this, however satisfying to him, means nothing to us. We are ourselves, and inherit our own Western standards, and cannot in any way help entertaining feelings of the utmost aversion, repugnance, and contempt toward a culture or stock which fails to fulfil our most basic ideal of what men ought to be. We can't help how wise or shrewd some Rabbi Isaachar ben Levi may be -- if he grins when we pull his entomologically [*] populous whiskers, we are moved by a basic impulse to a profound and insuperable disgust. It was thus that the Romans felt toward the cringing philosophers of the fallen Hellenistic world. Nothing is more foolish than the smug platitude of the idealistic social worker who tells us that we ought to excuse the Jew's repulsive psychology because we, by persecuting him, are in a measure responsible for it. This is damned piffle that utterly evades the real issue. We despise the Jew not only because of the stigmata which our persecution has produced, but because of the deficient stamina (from our point of view) on his part which permitted us to persecute him at all! Does anybody fancy for a moment that a Nordic race could be knocked about for two millennia by its neighbors? God! They'd either die fighting to the last man, or rise up and wipe out their would-be persecutors off the Earth!!! [If only that were true today. The old Aryan spirit that was our essential strength has nearly expired. The Judeo-feminization of the Aryan male has proven to be a mortal blow. -A.T.] Its because the Jews have allowed themselves to fill a football's role that we instinctively hate them. Note how much greater is our respect for their fellow Semites, the Arabs, who have the high heart -- shewn [*] in courage and a laughing sense of beauty -- which we emotionally understand and approve.

Now with this double barrier -- alienage[*] of primitive impulse, and contempt arising from the historic consequences of this alienage[*] -- is it to be supposed for a moment that any communal rapport can exist betwixt elements symbolising[*] or representing the opposed Aryan and Hebraic types? Only a cloud-gazing ass of an idealist could possibly envisage such a circumstance. Aryans, as Aryans, will always feel a deep-seated and uneasy dislike toward Jews, as Jews; and the introduction of a large Jewish element into the social, intellectual, aesthetic life of a community can only result in the maintenance of two separate streams without contact. People who have heard different songs crooned over their cradles will sing different songs when their time of singing comes. And this, we must note very carefully, applies to the best type of Jews as well as to their hopeless riff-raff. Fine learning -- even fine race stock -- there may be; but as long as a cultural group looks back to sources utterly loathsome to our own aesthetic scheme, we will always detest them. So I say, whilst it is eminently desirable to salvage good Jewish race stock by very gradual absorption into the Aryan and dominating body; it is absolutely necessary that this salvaging be accompanied by a total effacement of the newcomers' traditions. They must suffer a complete intellectual and aesthetic amnesia, and join us as Aryans when they do join. As for the Semitic culture -- it is not for us to say one word either for or against it in an absolute sense. We do not feel its impulses, and can never know its essence. Certainly, it has produced a powerful set of ideas and standards, and who are we to say that these are any less important, intrinsically, than our own? As with Chinese culture, whose absolute greatness we freely acknowledge, [The Chinese appetite for human fetuses voids any acknowledgement of greatness.-A.T.] we may say that Jewish culture is doubtless highly excellent in its proper place. [Like the toilet?-A.T.] But that place is not among us, for those points of view which are eminently harmonious when working with other Hebraic ideas, become utterly discordant, hostile, and injurious when brought in contact with points of view whose source and direction are wholly distinct and opposite. Semitism has never done anything save harm us when forced upon us or adopted by accident. It gave us puling hypocrisies of the Christian doctrine -- us, who by every law of Nature are virile, warlike, and beauty loving pagans and Northern polytheists! We, who should shout our laughter to Odin and Thor, are constrained to bend like Eastern slaves over sickly twilight alters to a crucified consumptive. Faugh[*]! It sickens my blond Teuton soul!! And our last wave of Hebraic imitation -- the Puritan movement -- produced such ugliness as a New-England chronicler blushes on the record. Good gawd! To think that my own maternal great-grandfather's Christian name was Jeremiah! But fortunately, Christian ritual and practice among the most civilised types have been gradually purged, by sheer racial influence, of their more incongruous and objectionable Eastern features. What, then, shall we do with our Jews? Absorb a few as Aryans -- well and good -- it has been done to some slight extant without ill effect. But anyone knows this is posible[*] only in a drop-in-the-bucket extent; for most Jews hold like mules to their beliefs, and most are racially unfit for amalgamation anyhow. What of this alien majority? Well-as with the negro,[*] there is only one thing we can do as an immediate expedient to save ourselves; Keep them out of our national and racial life. With the negro [*] the fight is wholly biological, whilst with the Jew it is mainly spiritual; but the principle is the same. We are Aryans, and only our future as a self-respecting stock lies in our resistance to anything like an Alexandrian mental hybridisation[*]. Let us preserve and glory in our own inherited Western life and impulses and standards, and let us resist to the death any attempt at fastening to our body of national custom any feeling or feature aside from that which we legitimately derive from the tall, fair Aryans who begat[*] us and who founded our English civilisation and Anglo-American nation. If A certain number of outlanders desire to dwell separately among us, it may be politic to let them -- at least, for a time. But let us swear by the living God, as we respect ourselves as free Northern white men, that they shall lay not a hand on our institutions, and inject not an ideal of theirs into the massed inheritance which is ours. To the Jew we must say, "live your own life, here or elsewhere; but remember that you live among Aryans, who are not to be disturbed." When the interloper seeks a voice in our councils, and subtly endeavours to mould the national feeling in accordance with his own standards -- among which latter is a cynical disregard of our sentiments and cherished loyalties, visible in bolshevistic[*] Trotskys and iconoclastic Ben Hechts -- there is only one possible answer from the unemasculated sons of the honest roast-beef Englishmen and rawboned Yankees who made this nation; and that answer is just this -- "You go to Hell."...

And of course the New York Mongoloid problem is beyond calm mention. The city is befouled and accursed -- I come away from it with a sense of having been tainted by contact, and long for some solvent oblivion to wash out!...How in Heaven's name sensitive and self-respecting white men can continue to live in the stew of Asiatic filth which the region has become -- with marks and reminders of the locust plague on every hand -- is absolutely beyond me. In fact, I'm jolly well certain that they won't continue. New York will become a vast trading-mart for long distance white commuters -- and for the nameless spawn. When, at length, the power of the latter rises to dangerous heights of rivalry, I can see nothing short of rivalry, I can see nothing short of war or separation from the union. There is here a grave and mighty problem beside which the negro[*] problem is a jest -- for in this case we have to deal not with childlike half-gorillas, but with yellow, soulless enemies whose repulsive carcasses house dangerous mental machines warped culturelessly[*] in the single direction of material gain by stealth at any cost. I hope the end will be warfare -- but not till such a time as our own minds are fully freed of humanitarian hindrances of the Syrian superstition imposed upon us by Constantinus. Then let us show our physical power as men and Aryans, and conduct a scientific wholesale deportation from which there will be neither flinching nor retreating.

So that is that. There are two Jew problems in America today -- one national and cultural, and to be met by a firm resistance to all those vitiating ideas which parasitic subject-races engender; and another local and biological -- The New York Mongoloid problem, to be met God only knows how, but with force rather than intellect. The dominantly Aryan blooded Jew of high type is better assimilated. The powerfully intellectual fundamental Hebrew is better socially segregated..

And such a lecture to be started by a mere account of a momentary tiff! Well -- that's what having lived in New York for two years does to one! I couldn't have felt it that way (even tho' my abstract views were the same ) in 1923 or before, and even now it will probably wear off in a year or so more--especially since in New England we have our own local curses. ( tho' they don't clutter up all the landscape so!) in the form of Simian Portugese, unspeakable Southern Italians, and jabbering French-Canadians. Broadly speaking, our curse is Latin just as yours is Semitic-Mongoloid, the Mississippian's African, the Pittsburgher's Slavonic, the Arizonians Mexican, and the Californian's Chino-Japanese. And so, to quote from a discouragingly Hebraic work of literature -- Amen!!

A. TRUMBO