The idea that antagonism between races might be expressed in a future genocidal war leaving some races extinct and others to inherit the Earth had three main permutations in the late modern period. These spheres of cultural, political and military activity are not as divisible as this chapter's sections indicate, and relevant points of contact will be discernable. The first section outlines the myths of racial destiny generated from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, most centrally the Aryan myth of eradicating Judaism that would inform the policies of Nazi Germany. The second section surveys (primarily Anglophone) future-war fiction of the same period, which imagined interracial and interethnic conflicts fought with weapons so powerful they would decisively determine the outcome of wars. The final section looks at the racial and exterminatory dimensions of early aerial warfare, concluding with the rhetoric of interracial competition between Japan and America before and during World War Two, and the contemporaneous perception that another monumental war would be required to secure the rule of whites on the Asian continent.

War in Heaven

As outlined in the introduction, the propagation of Darwin's theory of evolution in the nineteenth century was co-opted to explain human development and racial difference. Social Darwinism provided a methodology and an imperative for race thinkers to argue for measures necessary to preserve the integrity of their respective races. This was deeply implicated in the colonial process, whereby the subjugation of non-white peoples could be buttressed by the scientific argument that those races were inferior deviations from white people. Holding up the superiority of the white race subjected it to renewed scrutiny, and that scrutiny turned to anxiety when the threat of degeneration within white European civilization became a clarion call for advocates of racial purification. The social and cultural historian Daniel Pick puts it succinctly: