UNESCO's objective of challenging "the myth of race" by distinguishing it from "the biological fact of race" (10) sought to create distance from the nineteenth-century imperialist nationalist view encapsulated in Victorian Tory politician Benjamin Disraeli's espoused doctrine that "all is race." The belief that humans could be categorized as belonging to one of three biologically constituted and unchanging groups--Caucasoid, Negroid, and MoNGOloid--and that cultural, social, and individual characteristics were hierarchically reflective of these "racial types," was such a deeply held view in European and North American societies that it had provided legitimacy for Western nation-building, imperial domination, and the
racial extermination policies of the Third Reich.
As the above remark attests, though, Sobran wasn't really interested in determining whether "the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate" or if Nazi Germany, "bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on
racial extermination." What bothered him were the methods in which he believed Jews "use" the memory of the Holocaust to further nefarious political ends, invoking the suffering of their ancestors as a warrant to inflict suffering on others.
A more secularized Europe was a reaction to wartime religious excesses, even as that same "rhetoric of the holy war and holy nation" coupled with apocalyptic ideas to "metastasize" into "Fascism, Nazism, and
racial extermination." So too was the Russian Revolution a religious civil war, the Bolshevik cause as messianic and millenarian in vision as it was antireligious in doctrine.
Readers learn that the many roles he assumed and the organizations he controlled, including police and intelligence, control of German society,
racial extermination and settlement policies, and the Waffen-SS, were not as disparate as they once appeared but rather were all interrelated.