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The French aristocrats Arthur de Gobineau and Georges Vacher questioned universal equality from a historical perspective. Gobineau identified a correlation between the growth and vitality of cultures and the races that founded them. Both men argued that ancient civilizations like Persia and India gradually crumbled as the original white populations intermarried with captive or neighboring non-white tribes.
The National Socialists viewed Marxism as the political descendant of revolutionary France. It leveled humanity off to a “faceless mass” by destroying society’s more talented, productive elements.^According to Der Schulungsbrief, “Marxism is a radicalized variant of liberalism strongly rooted in the brutality of the French Revolution."^The journal Volk und Reich (Nation and Realm) wrote, “The Bolshevik revolution regards itself as the legitimate successor to the French."’*
Brutality was indeed an element common to both France’s Reign of Terror and Bolshevik Russia. The first Soviet dictator, Nicolai Lenin, became the only member of the original Politburo, the governing council, to die a natural death. Stalin proclaimed a “war on terror” in December 1934, personally writing a new law imposing a death sentence for “acts of terrorism” and leading to massive executions for several years. In 1937, the Soviet state carried out 353,074 death sentences, the following year 328,618.^^^ Houston Steward Chamberlain described Russia’s Bolshevik regime as under “the influence of the French revolutionary ideal, which in the course of a century, turned decent people into half-beasts filled with envy and loathing."^
