I was tempted to leave the parenthetical out of the headline, but decided against it because I'm pretty sure that, as enlightened as folks on Steemit may be, many would see the headline and assume they know what this article will be about.
This post will argue (without any evidence, because I'm lazy) that:
Annotator's note: The "without any evidence" disclaimer is self-deprecating but shouldn't be taken literally — most of what follows is historically defensible, with some important exceptions noted throughout.
This section is going to require some mental gymnastics and a fair bit of imagination for those of you who aren't DefinitionNational Socialists (NSDAP)Members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which governed Germany 1933–1945 under Adolf Hitler. The term "Nazi" derives from the German pronunciation of "National." They promoted Aryan racial supremacy, antisemitism, and violent expansionism. → Holocaust Encyclopedia, because I'm going to try and convince you that you could be one in a world where you didn't know any better.
So, imagine that you have been born to European parents in the Year of Our Lord 1900. You are 12, white, and male. Let's say you live in England. In two years, the End of Your World will begin and the cycle of that Apocalypse will finally complete itself by the time you turn 45. But you don't know that yet. So, as your first few armpit hairs begin to grow, this is what you are told about your world:
You are a subject of the greatest territorial Historical contextThe British Empire, c. 1900At its territorial peak around 1920, the British Empire covered approximately 24% of the Earth's land surface — around 35.5 million km². In 1900 it already encompassed India, large parts of Africa, Australia, Canada, and numerous other territories. → Wikipedia mankind has ever forged. So vast and far-reaching are the lands that fly the SymbolThe Union Flag (Union Jack)The national flag of the United Kingdom, combining the crosses of St. George (England), St. Andrew (Scotland), and St. Patrick (Ireland). Its display across colonial territories was a deliberate symbol of sovereignty and ownership. , that your schoolteachers have often said that the Sun never sets on them. These distant lands, you are told, are peopled with all manner of strange looking humans, all of whom have, after much fuss and adventure, seen the sense of bowing to the Crown.
Everything good about the world you live in, so you're told, is a result of this state of affairs. You owe your past, present and future to the success of the Empire. Without it, you are told, the world you know would fall apart.
If you so choose, you can go to a public library, and find all sorts of information about the world you live in. Books upon books upon books of tales and treatises that expound for you the "Marvels of the Modern World" and how it came to be.
In the Sciences section, you will find tomes that tell of inventions and discoveries that have, in but a few short centuries, led to the heaving, groaning, ever-growing machines at the heart of the Empire's success. The Locomotive, the Steamship, the Printing Press, the Technology of empireThe Maxim Gun (invented 1884)The world's first self-powered machine gun, invented by Hiram Stevens Maxim. Widely deployed by British colonial forces, it was decisive in such massacres as the Battle of Omdurman (1898), where 10,000–12,000 Sudanese were killed in a single morning. Writer Hilaire Belloc captured the colonial calculus: "We have got the Maxim gun, and they have not." → Wikipedia, Penicillin, Hydraulics, Machine Tools and Clockworks. You will find the thoughts of Newton, Euler, Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Darwin as well as countless others and the commentaries of those they influenced. There is already so much, just in this part of the library, that you can never hope to learn it all in one lifetime. But the names and portraits are almost all white, male and European.
In the Geography section, you find descriptions of far off lands, many of them part of the Empire, full of savages of different sizes and colours. The pictures of these humanoid creatures that you find are so different from the world you know and the descriptions that you encounter can easily convince you that, even if they are human, they are not the same kind of human as you. While you're in this section, reading these things, your mind may wander to the dark skinned folk that you've seen here and there doing some sort of low-skill labour here and there.
In the History section, you will encounter slavery. You will learn, quite quickly, that slaves were a central part of the functioning of Empires until your Empire, by the Grace of God, brought it to an end a few generations ago after Historical figureWilliam Wilberforce (1759–1833)British MP and abolitionist who led the parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the trade within the British Empire; the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 freed enslaved people in most British territories. Crucially, British slaveholders were compensated; the enslaved were not. → Wikipedia finally convinced Parliament that it was a Sin to force a Man to work without wage. Most of the books in this section will speak of the World in terms of Masters and Servants, of Conquerers and Conquered, the Victors and the Vanquished. Subjugation, subordination and hierarchies are how things are because that is how they have always been.
And if you were to go into the Religion section, you will discover that there is only one. Near endless texts on Christianity and its superiority. All other faiths are only mentioned in order to demonstrate them as false. There is One God, One Savior and One Faith worth believing in.
This is your world. And when you turn 14, it will Begin to End.
Okay, I'm done with that little picture of an English boy in 1912. That image is necessary though, for this next part of the first bit.
Here's a question: How much of a leap is it for that little boy to believe that he is by virtue of his birth alone, a member of a group of Masters? Not much. That much, I think, is easy to see.
What is more difficult to see, is where the seed of the "Master Race" concept truly takes root. You see, it's not in the fact that different shades of people exist (that is to say, the conception of Race, and more specifically the myths of Scientific status"Race" as a social constructModern genetics has conclusively established that "race" is not a biologically meaningful category. Human genetic variation does not cluster into the discrete groups that racial ideology assumes. The concept of biological races was invented in the 17th–19th centuries to justify colonialism and slavery, and persists as a social and political reality despite having no scientific basis. → Wikipedia: Scientific Racism that were formulated and proliferated to justify and perpetuate DefinitionChattel SlaveryA form of slavery in which people are treated as personal property that can be bought, sold, and inherited. The transatlantic chattel slave trade operated from the 16th to 19th centuries, forcibly transporting an estimated 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. Racial ideology largely developed after the trade began — as justification rather than cause. → Wikipedia and (post-Abolition) Segregationist thinking). It is not simply down to propaganda, either. It is, at least in my opinion, in the concept of a Master.
You see, when you think about the word Master, you find two concepts hiding inside — Excellence and Dominion.
A Master Craftsman is one thing.
The Master of the Plantation is another.
Masterful Mastery is the Mark of the Master.
Now, think about the last 300 years of human history. There is, in a sense, a case to be made, that the descendants of the Peoples of Europe forged themselves into the Masters of the World. The simplest version of this idea is two words: "Master Race." Makes Sense, doesn't it?
Let's be clear about something here — evil has a way of convincing you that it isn't. Put another way: the greatest villains are those who can convince you that they're heroes. This is important going forward with this meandering mess of an article.
By now, dear reader, you should have a vague sense of how the Myth of a Master Race came to be accepted by so many in the world before the World Wars. It is a matter of fact that most of the planet had, by the beginning of the 20th Century, been brought under the heel of White Men (many of whom were cousins) in some fashion or another, and had been turned into a machine that made the White Man wealthy. To those who lived then, it was the 'way of things'; ordained by God, won by Gun, driven by Gold.
And then the World Wars happened. Everything changed. The Old World Order ended, a New One rose in its place.
As Europe crashed and burned the first time, a very important thing happened to the minds of those who survived... They suffered the privations they had wrought on those they had subjugated. Suddenly Kings and Emperors were not so fine and beautiful. If a Young Man came back from the front, he returned broken — betrayed by his Masters. In the wake of "The Great War", monarchies crumbled. But the Myth of Race survived. As did the Empires.
This was a big part of why, when the fever-dream of the 20s crashed hard into the Hangover of the 30s, Historical contextRise of National SocialismHitler's appeal in the late 1920s–30s drew on the "stab-in-the-back" myth (that Germany was betrayed by Jews and socialists, not defeated militarily in WW1), the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and a pre-existing culture of racial antisemitism running deep in European thought since the Middle Ages. → Anne Frank House found fertile ground in the minds of his countrymen.
Living memory was all it took, to remind folks of the Good Ol' Days. Bad Masters were to blame for the whole thing going crater-shaped. Hitler's whole shtick and spiel boiled down to —
People often look at the Third Reich as the Zenith of the Master Race as a concept in the world, but upon closer inspection, you'll start to see it more as the Swansong. A nasty, evil, awful Swansong.
If World War One was about the Tyranny of the Master, then World War Two was about the Tyranny of Race.
1946 was not a good year... For anyone. It was a shitshow of shitshows. Europe had blown itself into bankruptcy and the US had become the biggest swinging dick in the geopolitical room. And like all swinging dicks, it found that it was feeling a little insecure thanks to the other swinging dick in the room... the USSR. Both of them agreed, however, that the Old World Empires were ending, and so the question was "What will take their place?".
"Any man can be a master and every race is essential to us all."
It took a loooong time to really catch on, and some might say that it still hasn't caught on as much as it should have by now.
That's because the truth is, if you look at the world today there is a race that still has dominion over significant chunks of the world. There is a race still that enjoys a higher standard of living than many others. There is a group of humans, that can decide the fate of all the rest, almost on a whim. There is still, by the thinking of that 12 year old boy in 1912, still a "Master Race". Because they never gave anyone else a shot. At least not in the last few hundred years.
Earlier, I mentioned that the word "Master" is what really lodges in peoples' brains and that it was connected to two common understandings of the word — Excellence and Dominion.
This is how you can convince young white men to carry Contemporary referenceCharlottesville, Virginia — August 2017The "Unite the Right" rally. Individuals from at least 35 US states marched through Charlottesville carrying tiki torches, chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and Soil" (a Nazi slogan). One counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was killed when a neo-Nazi drove a car into the crowd. It was the largest gathering of white supremacists in a generation. → PBS Frontline, and how you can convince young not-white men that flying a plane into a building is a worthy cause.
If you've made it this far, you may think I have a solution to the many and varied problems I have pointed out. I don't really. Just more problems. I know, I'm an asshole.
We have to face facts, we live in a world largely conceived by, and built for, white people. The Structural contextThe Bretton Woods System & its legacyAfter WW2, the global financial system was designed at Bretton Woods (1944) primarily by the US and UK. The US dollar became the world reserve currency; the IMF and World Bank were structured to favour "developed" (predominantly Western) economies. Critics argue this created structural dependency relationships that replicated colonial extraction through financial means. → Wikipedia favours "Developed Economies" which are (surprise!) White Economies. This is not news, and it shouldn't be controversial... It is fairly self-evident. It's also symptomatic.
The problem, really, as you may have guessed... Is the existence of Masters.
Excellence is essential and good. A Master Craftsman is a boon to all who have the privilege of his work.
Dominion is obviously where the problem has always been. It also sits at the heart of how the World as we know it is structured. Legal conceptSovereigntyIn international law, sovereignty means the exclusive right of a state to govern its territory without external interference. The Westphalian system (from 1648) established this as the basis of international order. The essay correctly identifies that the concept is inherently dominion-based — which is why decolonisation was contested: sovereignty transferred, but the structures built within it often did not.
For Humanity to rid itself forever of the blight that is the concept of a "Master Race" and all that it entails, it is not enough to simply embrace racial diversity and champion different tones of skin... We must defy, at every turn, those who seek dominion over others. We must make it unpalatable, unprofitable and unsustainable for the violent to dominate the gentle. Power should be a dirty word.
For Humanity to Survive on Mothership Earth, the Meek Must Be at the Helm.
or, in other words…
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit the Earth (because they're the only ones who can be trusted with it.)
The ideology's origins, development, and institutionalisation — from the Atlantic slave trade to the moment this essay was written in 2018
Key Premise: The essay correctly identifies that the "Master Race" concept was legible to a 1900 Englishman — but the ideology runs centuries deeper. White supremacy was not a product of European confidence. It was a product of European anxiety about justification: the need to explain why one group of humans could enslave, colonise, and kill another without moral consequence.
The concept of biological "race" as we understand it barely existed before the 1600s. Slavery existed throughout the ancient world, but was not primarily organised by skin colour — it followed the logic of conquest and debt. This changed with the transatlantic slave trade, which created an economic system requiring moral cover. Racial ideology emerged largely to justify the trade after it was already running, not before.
In 1684, French physician François Bernier published one of the first attempts to classify humanity by physical characteristics. By the late 18th century, German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had produced his five-race taxonomy — introducing the term "Caucasian" — ranking white skin the highest. These were not neutral scientific observations; they were ideological frameworks dressed as science.
From the 17th to mid-20th century, "scientific racism" was the dominant paradigm shaping international relations and racial policy. Thinkers like Arthur de Gobineau (whose 1853 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races was enormously influential in Germany), Samuel Morton (skull measurements), and Houston Stewart Chamberlain provided pseudoscientific cover for racial hierarchy.
Social Darwinism — the misapplication of Darwin's evolutionary ideas to human societies — gave this a new vocabulary. Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" was used to argue that white European dominance was natural, inevitable, and even beneficial. Darwin himself was a committed abolitionist, and his work was consistently distorted by those who used it to justify racial hierarchy.
By the time the essay's imaginary 12-year-old was born in 1900, scientific racism was not fringe thought — it was the consensus of most European and American institutions, universities, and governments. The essay is right to treat this as background noise rather than propaganda: it was simply the water the boy swam in.
Historian George M. Fredrickson identifies three regimes that gave white supremacy its most complete political and legal expression: Nazi Germany (1933–1945), Jim Crow America (1870s–1960s), and apartheid South Africa (1948–1994). All three shared key features: legal prohibitions on interracial marriage, social segregation, exclusion from political participation, and restricted economic opportunity.
The essay's focus on Nazism as the "Zenith" of the Master Race concept is reasonable as a rhetorical choice, but worth complicating: the Jim Crow system operated for nearly a century, and apartheid South Africa survived for nearly five decades after the Holocaust ended. White supremacy as state policy was not uniquely German, nor was its end in 1945.
After 1945, scientific racism became professionally untenable. UNESCO's 1950 and 1951 "Statement on Race" formally rejected the scientific basis for racial hierarchy. But the underlying power structures did not simply dissolve. Decolonisation was often nominal: economic systems, legal frameworks, and physical infrastructures remained shaped by colonial logic. The Bretton Woods financial system (1944), designed largely by the US and UK, entrenched "developed economy" advantages that still operate.
In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s–60s dismantled formal legal segregation, but researchers consistently found that white supremacist ideology persisted in subtler forms — in housing policy, policing, education funding, and wealth distribution. Sociologist Howard Winant described the mid-1970s as the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the US — meaning it became a minority view rather than a majority one, not that it ended.
By the time this essay was written in September 2018, the ideology had been visibly re-energised. The previous year had seen the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally — the largest gathering of white supremacists in a generation, ending in murder. The author's tiki-torch reference was current events, not history.
The author wrote in September 2018. In the years since, the trends they identified have developed — not faded.
Context: The essay was written one year after Charlottesville (2017) and in the same month as the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting (October 2018). The author's reference to tiki-torch marchers was not a historical metaphor — it was a description of last year's news.
The month after this essay was published, a white supremacist killed 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. The killer believed Jews were orchestrating white replacement through immigration. His manifesto cited online communities that had been radicalising young white men for years.
2018 saw 50 deaths from domestic extremists in the US, with the majority linked specifically to white supremacy — making it the fourth-deadliest year for domestic extremist violence since 1970. The Anti-Defamation League recorded a 182% increase in white supremacist propaganda distribution compared to 2017.
In March 2019, a white supremacist killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — livestreaming the attack. He had published a manifesto citing Charlottesville and the Pittsburgh killer as inspiration, and described Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity." The attack inspired copycat violence in El Paso, Texas (2019, 23 killed) and elsewhere.
In October 2020, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a formal threat assessment declaring white supremacist extremists the "most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland" — noting that 2019 had been the most lethal year for domestic violent extremism since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. This was a significant institutional acknowledgement that the threat the author describes had not faded.
The January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol — in which a mob attempted to overturn the results of a democratic election — included multiple individuals with documented ties to white supremacist and far-right extremist groups. Researchers noted that the event marked a transition from the white power movement's historically defensive posture to one of attempted political capture.
The essay's claim that white dominance persists globally has found continued empirical support — but the political expression of that dominance has also become more organised and internationally connected. Far-right parties with explicit or implicit white nationalist appeals made electoral gains across Europe in the years following 2018: in Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Europol found that right-wing extremist arrests on the continent nearly doubled between 2016 and 2017, and the trend continued. Researchers at the Boston Review observed that white nationalism had become "transnational" — with figures, manifestos, and memes crossing borders in ways that made individual national movements part of a global network rather than isolated phenomena.
The author's claim in point two — that modern white supremacy is woven into the fabric of the world in ways "most people will never notice or question" — found new resonance in the years after the essay, as research into online radicalisation matured. Between 2018 and 2019, there was a 120% increase in the distribution of white supremacist propaganda across the United States, much of it through platforms like 4chan, Telegram, and Discord.
The Southern Poverty Law Center documented a 50% growth in active white nationalist groups in the US between 2022 and 2023 — reaching a historic high. The pattern the essay identifies — where mainstream-seeming grievances (immigration, cultural change, economic displacement) are used to introduce more radical racial ideology — is precisely what researchers call the "gateway" effect of the online far right.
The essay's core thesis — that "Master Race" ideology was a logical conclusion from within a particular historical context, that it didn't end with WW2, and that dismantling it requires structural change, not just changed attitudes — has been broadly validated by subsequent research and events.
The essay is somewhat more optimistic about the post-WW2 liberal international order than events warranted. The author implies that the US-led system represented a genuine turn toward "any man can be a master" universalism. Critics across the political spectrum have argued this was always a selective universalism: one that maintained racial hierarchies through economic rather than military means, that supported colonialism where convenient, and that was vulnerable to being captured by the very forces it claimed to oppose.
Written in 2018 with the tiki-torch marchers as the emblematic image of resurgent white supremacy, the essay could not have anticipated Christchurch, January 6, or the SPLC's documented historic-high growth in white nationalist groups through 2023. The author's conclusion — "the Meek must be at the Helm" — reads as both more urgent and more distant than it did when written.