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Supremacism is the belief that one's race or religion is the supreme, and that those of other distinctions are (by various arbitrary criteria) unfit for social or religious interaction, and sexual reproduction.
Current notions of "supremacy" are generally related to xenophobia, and descended from eugenics theory—where the emerging sciences of breeding and evolutionary anthropology influenced social thinking toward the direction of believing in a racial self-identity, and subsequently protectionism and exclusion of foreign influences.
The Nazis were considered an supremacist group and held that the ethnic Germans and other "Aryans" were the "master race" —superior to others. This social self-identity was resonant at the time and led to Hitler's popular rise to power, and later, to state policy ending in the holocaust. The Nazis are seen by many as an archetype of supremacism.
Supremacist groups
Religious groups
The three Abrahamic religions can each be referred to as supremacist, a characteristic not shared by eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism. Of course one must also recognize that that western society no longer openly promotes religious supremacism, the current war in Iraq being a good example. A great deal of care was made in order not to allow anti-Saddam propaganda to include an anti-Islamic focus. On the other hand, the Crusades, Islamism and the Jewish ethnocentrism all contain examples of supremacist interpretations of the respective religions philosophies.
Supremacists and Terrorist organizations
Although not specifically considered to be supremacist groups, terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and groups occasionally associated with terrorism such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization display traits often associated with supremacist groups. Examples of these traits are the spreading of Anti-Semitic propaganda and violent attacks based on race.
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