Again. One Of The Biggest Superstitions Held Among the Secular Intellectual Class and Many Nonintellectual Mid-Brows

Apparently what always happens when these issues are discussed on a factual basis has happened, I have been accused of having anti-Darwin cooties.   Some comparison of what I said with the words of someone named Jessica Duggar, someone I'd never heard of before, research keeping me from knowledge of that all important topic of study,  American "reality" TV.   I anticipated something like that which is why I said,  "And, though it will inevitably be a matter of making the most precise and subtle distinctions, which will inevitably be misunderstood, both unintentionally and intentionally, that is inescapable."

Being a bit of an old hand at the dirty dealing of ideologues, right and "left" , I know exactly how those proud to claim the title "reality community" will attack anyone who talks about these issues and it is not on the basis of evidence, the historical record.  And it will not be based on what the main figures involved said, including what their greatest of great heroes, Charles Darwin, really presented as having the reliability of science.

It is as hard a fact as any in science that Charles Darwin supported and promoted the first links in the chain of causation that led to the Holocaust, those in the writings and works of Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel and lesser figures who are only excluded from that chain by the most blatant of lies.  He did that in some of his most popular books, The Descent of Man and in later editions of On the Origin of Species in which he, himself, equated Natural Selection with Spencerian "survival of the fittest" in exactly those terms.  Everything in eugenics, including Nazi eugenics flows from that explicit act of the man and it was understood as being causal even by those who knew Charles Darwin better than anyone who never met the man or was intimately associated with him.

No, I was not the one who made the causal link between Charles Darwin  and the Nazi program of epic mass murder.    That connection was made years before I was born.  Among many others,  one figure stands out as absolutely qualified to make that connection, Charles Darwin's son, a man he raised, who knew him as intimately as a child knows their own, beloved father, Leonard Darwin.  I have written about his own words, in 1939, six years after the adoption of the eugenics laws, the first in Germany, by the Nazis, and within weeks of the official opening of the mass murder program which began with the murders of the "unfit".   He had made the same link several other times in previous decades,  his claims supported by things his brother Francis (named after Galton) and George wrote and presumably by the many other children and grand children of Charles Darwin who knew the man and who were involved in eugenics.  Their actions speak as loudly and almost as frankly as words.

Given the history of eugenics in the United States, which the Nazis explicitly and publicly took as a model (they documented its activities in far more detail than the American programs did, themselves), what American eugenicists claimed about both the scientific and historical basis of their science was accepted by them.   Considering the nationalistic Germanic vainglory that was intrinsic to Nazism, it is remarkable how much use they made of American eugenics programs in their public propaganda for it.

The poster lists, by flag and by name, countries which had already established government eugenics programs and countries where eugenics laws were under consideration.  I don't know the extent to which others of those served as models for the Nazis, but there is a massive record of them learning how to do things from the United States.  They certainly noticed that one of the main features of American and other already up and running eugenics programs was that specific and named ethnic groups were explicitly marked for forced and involuntary sterilizations and so for genocide.

Since they were typical members of the German intellectual class, the Nazis who promoted eugenics and designed the Nazi eugenics laws read and understood what the American and other eugenicists said about their science.   Having read some of the eugenic literature, that was the second unbreakable chain  which unites the Holocaust, eugenics in Germany and elsewhere, its foundation in natural selection without which eugenics would not have been invented.  We have absolute proof of that because the inventor of eugenics, Charles Darwin's close colleague and cousin, a man who he read and cited as science, Francis Galton made that attribution with absolute explicitness in his memoir.  That record of attribution of eugenics to Charles Darwin, through his theory of Natural Selection pervades all of the literature of the eugenics movement which discusses the history of their movement.  It is the explicitly stated basis of the entire theory of eugenics.  The only  way to pretend that Charles Darwin was not part of it is to insist on a transparent and obvious lie, but it is just that lie which is an article of the faith of almost all English speaking people who believe they are good "liberals" or leftists who were educated in the post-war period.   It is a sad thing when an educated class enforces the repetition of a lie that even the Nazis didn't believe.

That those in the anti-abortion movement and those who want to impose creationism on American biology classrooms don't go along with that lie doesn't make the lie true.  No matter how much those folks are considered to have cooties, that doesn't change the historical record, the words of Charles Darwin and all others involved in the period before the Nazis deciding to take natural selection into their own hands.

As much as you might hate it, the Nazis were doing what was was explicitly presented in The Descent of Man as the inevitable positive alternative to total disaster.  The book continually and with what Darwin presented as scientific citation presented the killing of those deputed to be biologically inferior by those who were presented as biologically superior as a means of progressive improvement in the human population.  The Nazi's crime is doing exactly what was the basis of more genteel expressions of eugenics as practiced by English speaking doctors in Vermont and California, Virginia and Alberta, making sure that "inferior" people not would have children.  In fact the Nazis were doing exactly what Charles Darwin presented as being the way of nature, the superior killed off the inferior, the inferior were cut off from the future, the survivors (somehow) were improved and they would comprise the new and improved future.  That horrific application of natural selection will always be a danger because as Darwin presented it, actions like those are supposed to be a lesser evil than allowing the "inferior" to have children and that is a disaster because such people will be alive, living, eating and living lives.  It was English language speaking eugenicists, including Leonard Darwin who contemplated mass killing in gas chambers as a solution to having those inferior alive and eating and having families.  Leonard Darwin's soft handed discouragement of it presents it as not likely being effective, not as a crime and a moral atrocity.  I'm sure the Nazis must have read that and figured they, as Germans,  could manage things more efficiently than a genteel English gentleman imagined.

I have come to the conclusion that the most common use of Charles Darwin in the general culture and certainly by those who lie about his writing and his place in both intellectual and actual history is motivated by his usefulness in the promotion of atheism, his refutation of the story of creation in the early chapters of Genesis.  That is his actual political use by his greatest admirers, of whom I doubt more than 2% have ever read anything he wrote more challenging that The Voyage of the Beagle and I doubt even 5% of them have read that much.  Their Charles Darwin is a creation of BBC costume dramas and the post-war folklore of propaganda that was created to shield the man from his own words and the  words of those who have something in common which none of them do, they knew the man, in person, even as personally as a son knows his own father.

As I began at the top of the page, I knew what was coming when I started looking into this topic.  I knew that anyone looking into it will be attacked and how.  Anyone who does needs to make sure they're covered by citations of primary material, from those who are the subject of it.  In order to do that with links here, I'd have to present this post in red, since, literally, everything I've said on this topic is based on what the primary historical record, the words of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, .... Paul Popone,  Leonard Darwin, Wilhelm Schallmeyer, Alfred Ploetz, etc. said.  That includes the directest links to Adoph Hitler as he was writing his most influential book, Mein Kampf, what informed his thinking and those who were influenced by that book.   Anyone who has missed that documentation can find a lot of it in the posts indexed here.  Not that I expect anyone who watches a lot of "reality" TV will take the time to check my citations for accuracy.