"Let me put it bluntly: By today’s standards, Howard was a racist and a White supremacist — and so was Conan.
...
Howard infused all of his fiction with White racial themes and attitudes, but normally these are implicit in his stories, rather than explicit. However, in the last year of his life, he deliberately and explicitly injected open, self-conscious White racialism into his Conan tales.
One way he did this was by redefining the Picts as non-White. Historically, the Picts were a White folk who lived in Britain. Howard knew that the historical Picts were White. Nonetheless, for the sole purpose of sharpening the racial dialectic of his fiction, he recast them as non-White. In a remarkable sentence in “Beyond the Black River,” he explains to the reader that
>“The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such.” (p. 51) (3)
And a few pages later:
>Beyond the river the primitive still reigned in shadowy forests, brush-thatched huts where hung the grinning skulls of men, and mud-walled enclosures where fires flickered and drums rumbled, and spears were whetted in the hands of dark, silent men with tangled black hair and the eyes of serpents. Those eyes often glared through the bushes at the fort across the river. Once dark-skinned men had built their huts where that fort stood; yes, and their huts had risen where now stood the fields and log-cabins of fair-haired settlers… (p. 54)
In “The Black Stranger” he further describes them as,
>…darked-skinned men of short stature, with thickly-muscled chests and arms. They wore beaded buckskin loin-cloths, and an eagle’s feather was thrust into each black mane. They were painted in hideous designs… (p. 104)
After defining the Picts as non-White, he then has Conan say,
>“A white man doesn’t leave white men, even his enemies, to be butchered by Picts.” (p. 159)
Later, another character reinforces the message, commenting on Conan to a third character,
>“These barbarians live by their own code of honor, and Conan would never desert men of his own complection [sic] to be slaughtered by people of another race.” (p. 159)
The story “The Man-Eaters of Zomboula” concerns cannibalistic Negroes who are snatching people off the streets at night, to butcher and eat them. When Conan spots three huge Blacks carrying off a slender, pale-skinned female, he does what any red-blooded Aryan barbarian would do: He slaughters them with gusto.
>“Black dog of hell!” Conan drove his sword between the dusky shoulders with such vengeful fury that the broad blade stood out half its length from the black breast. (p. 185)
The city of Zamboula itself is described as a racial sinkhole:
>…this accursed city which the Stygians built and the Hyrkanians rule — where white, brown, and black folk mingle together to produce hybrids of unholy hues and breeds – who can tell who is man and who is a demon in disguise? (p. 178)
Nor is Conan’s distaste for race-mixing merely theoretical. In the final Conan yarn, “Red Nails,” he explains to the flaxen-haired female pirate Valeria why he left the mercenary company in which he had previously been employed:
>The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don’t like black women. And that’s the only kind that came to the camp at Sukhmet — rings in their noses and their teeth filed – bah! (p. 214)
Although it was not published until 1967 (31 years after Howard’s death), “The Vale of Lost Women” is a classic Conan story — and it, too, is explicitly racialist. At one point, Livia, the White heroine, berates Conan:
>“You care naught that a man of your own color has been foully done to death by these black dogs — that a white woman is their slave!” (p. 307)
After some incidental back and forth, Conan responds:
>“You said that I was a barbarian,” he said harshly, “and that is true, Crom be thanked…. But I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man…” (p. 308)
Conan goes on to kill Livia’s Black captor, and to then save her from a monstrous supernatural demon, which Conan terms “a devil from the Outer Dark” and whom the primitive Negroes worship as a savage god.
But it was in a story about another character, not Conan, that Howard gave his clearest and most unambiguous statement of racial belief. His hero Solomon Kane was a Puritan adventurer, many of whose blood-splashed tales are set in sub-Saharan Africa. This locale allows full play for Howard’s depiction of White racial idealism. The following sentence is from a passage entitled “The White-Skinned Conqueror,” from the short story “Wings in the Night” (1932):
>Kane stood, an unconscious statue of triumph — the ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade, and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over it all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth, whether he be clad in wolf-hide and horned helmet, or boots and doublet — whether he bear in his hand battle-axe or rapier — whether he be called Dorian, Saxon or Englishman — whether his name be Jason, Hengist or Solomon Kane. (4)
Here, at the moment of ultimate victory, the personal details and characteristics of the Howardian hero melt away, and he becomes one with all of the Aryan heroes who have preceded him (and also with those who are yet to be born). This mystical sublimation of the individual into the collective soul of the Race is what some have termed “Aryan Internity” — “internity” being the endless continuity of the racial soul through the blood, just as “eternity” is endless continuity through time and “infinity” is endless continuity through space.
In a little-known book that he published in 1881, Dawn (Morgenroethe), Friedrich Nietzsche comments that of all of their many mythological heroes, the ancient Greeks admired Odysseus the most. This is because he was able to “master all contingencies,” that is, whatever man, Nature, or the Gods threw at him, Odysseus was always triumphant. (5)
And so it is with Howard’s Conan: He is a master of all contingencies; he defeats all opponents, natural and supernatural alike. And he always gets the girl. Is there a healthy Aryan man anywhere who would not like to be Conan if he could?"
Source: https://nationalvanguard.org/2024/01/robert-howards-conan/
