sexual reform when the waves of the Mongolian tide are lapping around his neck". As a racialist, von Ehrenfels characterized the Japanese military victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1905) as an Asian victory against the white peoples of the Christian West, a cultural failure which indicated "the absolute necessity of a radical, sexual reform for the continued existence of the Western races of man... [The matter of White racial survival] has been raised from the level of discussion to the level of a scientifically proven fact". Sublimated antisemitism In Sex, Masculinity, and the 'Yellow Peril': Christian von Ehrenfels' Program for a Revision of the European Sexual Order, 1902–1910 (2002), the historian Edward Ross Dickinson said that von Ehrenfels always used metaphors of deadly water to express Yellow Peril racism — a flood of Chinese people upon the West; a Chinese torrent of mud drowning Europe; the Japanese are a polluting liquid — because white Europeans would be unaware and unresponsive to the demographic threat until the waves of Asians reached their necks. As a man of his time, von Ehrenfels likely suffered the same sexual anxieties about his masculinity that were suffered by his right-wing contemporaries, whose racialist works the historian Klaus Theweleit examined, and noted that only von Ehrenfels psychologically projected his sexual self-doubt into Yellow Peril racism, rather than the usual cultural hatreds of Judeo-Bolshevism, then the variety of anti-Semitism popular in Germany during the early 20th century. Theweleit also noted that, during the European interwar period (1918–1939), the racialist works of the Freikorps mercenaries featured deadly-water metaphors when the only available peacetime enemies were the "Jews" and the "communists", whose cultural and political existence threatened the manichean worldview of right-wing Europeans. As such, the psychologically insecure Freikorps fetishized masculinity and were keen to prove themselves "hard men" through the political violence of terrorism against Jews and communists; thus, the deadly-water defense mechanism against the adult emotional intimacy (romantic love, eroticism, sexual intercourse) and consequent domesticity that naturally occur between men and women. Xenophobia and racism Germany and Russia From 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm used Yellow Peril ideology to portray Imperial Germany as defender of the West against conquest from the East. In pursuing Weltpolitik policies meant to establish Germany as the dominant empire, the Kaiser manipulated his own government officials, public opinion, and other monarchs. In a letter to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Kaiser said: "It