Paris, November 1934

BERNERI, Camillo. "The Racist Delirium"

BERNERI, Camillo (Lodi, Italie 20-5-1897-assassiné par les communistes le 5-5-1937).racisme et antiracismeBERNERI, Camillo (Lodi, Italie 20/5/1897 - Barcelone, Espagne 595/1937)

Fascism, the triumph of the irrational, has taken the most discredited myths of pre-scientific ethnology to its bosom. One of the theorists of Hitlerism (assuming that it can be regarded as a body of doctrine), Ernest Krieck, in his book National Political Education (page 17), proclaims the need to subject science to National Socialist politics, thereby giving science the kiss of death.
“The age of ‘pure reason’, of ‘science for the sake of science’, of ‘disinterested science’, is over. Any science that has an active contribution to make towards a broad objective becomes political, and thus, like politics, has its principles and its accomplishments alike, imbued with racism, nationalism and National Socialism.”
On 11 May 1933, while carrying out sentence passed on 20,000 impounded books in Berlin, Goebbels announced : “Intellectualism has had its day.” [1]
It is absolutely plain from the racist delirium (an out-and-out collective psychosis) that Hitlerism represents a great eclipse of German intellect and culture. On 25 March 1933, Goering, the then Reich minister of the Interior, told foreign press representatives : “Plainly, anti-semitism is part of the official program of the National Socialist Party and the manner in which the latter has moulded its storm troops makes it plain that today every member of the storm troops looks at Professor Einstein with a feeling of racial superiority.”

[1In 2007, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, a member of the Sarkozy government, declared to the National Assembly : " “France is a country that thinks. There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you : Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.” Quoted by Elaine Sciolino, "New Leaders Say Pensive French Think Too Much ", New York Times, July 22, 2007. Sarkozy himself also pretends not to be an intellectual. Note by Ronald Creagh