While I had hoped to be able to put this aside as a daily topic, a persistent drizzle of comments keeps insisting that I'm trying to cover up the "Christian" motivation of the Holocaust, talking about "2000 years of Christian anti-semitism" as the motive for the Nazis in murdering six-million Jews. Of course that's a common narrative use to which those Jews murdered by the Nazis is put among those whose actual motive is hostility against Christianity, not in trying to understand the actual thinking of the Nazis that led them to murder six-million Jews in their obvious attempt to murder all of those they could. But that narrative begins by a shallow view of the history and that thinking which can't be isolated from the many other groups they targeted for death. They certainly would have murdered every Roma person if they could have, every disabled person, it was the explicit message of Hitler to the troops he sent to take Poland to murder all of the Pols and a common estimate for the number of Pols he did murder is Two and a half million, many of them Christians, many of them Catholics with whom the common narrative has it, Hitler is supposed to have shared a religion, Catholic priests were one of the groups highest on the list of those to murder.
One of the things which is most obvious about the Nazis is the complete lack of truth in what they said, even signed as legal documents and treaties. They lied to the German people about many of their intentions in order to gain office in 1933, they lied constantly while in office about their intentions. While it is no surprise that politicians and military officers lie, the Nazis made great us of lying throughout their history.
A consequence of that history of lying is that you can't take them at their word about anything. But one thing is certain, their consciously taken actions tell the truth of their intentions and reveal their motivations. There is nothing in the actions of the Nazis that are compatible with the teachings of Jesus or the earliest Christians. Every part of the teachings of Jesus were violated by the Nazis. You can read the Gospels, the Acts, the epistles and you won't find much of anything that you could derive the conduct of the Nazis from. And once you have undertaken that exercise, you can go through The History of Creation by Haeckel and The Descent of Man by Darwin and look for concurrence between the scientific statements of Haeckel and Darwin and the actions of the Nazis in their murder of the disabled and of groups held to be of less fittness whose offspring would mix with the fit and bring down the quality of the human population. If you take the one book on the topic of evolution and its related fields which Hitler is known to have read and consulted, The Foundation of Heredity and Racial Hygiene, you will find that it is, as well, a development of the ideas that Darwin and Haeckel were proposing one generation earlier.
The post in which I analyzed Darwins' often quote mined "aid we feel impelled to give" clause gave the paragraph that precedes it in The Descent of Man
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Which, even with the "aid" paragraph is certainly consistent with the program of involuntary sterilization that was adopted in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, as RMJ pointed out. But if you ignore your 'FEELINGS' to give aid, it is a scientific argument for courageously following "hard reason," as Darwin put it in the "aid" passage, and do what he said the "savages" did and eliminate the "weak in body or mind", which is, of course, exactly what the Nazis believed they were doing. Having read lots of the British social thinking in the past ten years, I can imagine quite a few of them making that sacrifice of their feelings and getting a particularly vicious thrill of scrupulosity in going withe what their hard reasoning would inform them would produce a pantomime of a better future.*
You can go through both Haeckel and Darwin and find that they were quick to identify racial and ethnic groups which they found to be "weak in body or mind" as compared to the Northern Europeans, the upper classes of which they both, clearly, held to "exhibit a vigorous state of health". If Britian had followed the clear advice of this passage, instead of the grudging and glacially slow abandonment of the poor law, the British death camps that the work houses were, they would have left the poor to fend for themselves, likely, as they were told to believe, reinvigorating the survivors. And that is if they hadn't taken the route that so many of their intellectuals, such intellectual lights of culture as D. H. Lawrence, Virgina Wolfe, George Bernard Shaw, toyed with in the first decades of the 20th century, of gassing them to death. But you don't have to take my word for that, read the links I provided when I wrote about it before. .
The British upper class in the first decade of the 20th century, those held its most responsible members can sound remarkably like the Nazis did two decades later. For example, this from a 1910 letter that Winston Churchill sent to Asquith
The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.
I believe everything I've read of Churchill on the topic concentrates on people with disability, not on race, though Churchill was flagrant racist who believed, fully, in the inequality of races and their scientific ranking, And he was was hardly alone in writing such passages that presage the Nazis. One of the brightest lights of British socialism, Sidney Webb, was certainly not above appealing to ethnic and antisemitic bigotry in promoting eugenics. He said this in the Fabian Tract 131
In Great Britain at this moment, when half or perhaps two-thirds, of all the married people are regulating their families, children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and the Polish, Russian and German Jews, on the one hand, and to the thriftless and irresponsible – largely the casual laborers and the other denizens of the one-roomed tenements of our great cities – on the other. Twenty-five percent of our parents, as professor Karl Pearson keeps warning us, is producing 50 per cent of the next generation. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews. Finally there are signs that even these races are becoming influenced [to limit the size of their families] The ultimate future of these Islands may be the Chinese!
I will remind you that this was the thinking of the British left, the Fabian socialists, not the Conservatives or even the right wing of the Liberal Party. Read the whole thing, it is full of the most incredibly revealing junk-science and even more revealing about the nature of Fabian socialism, the kind of socialism which gave socialism a bad name.
The provenance of Webb's scientific expert in such matters couldn't be clearer, Karl Pearson was one of the leading figures in British science, probably Francis Galton's most renowned student, his chosen biographer, whose Darwinist credentials could only have been stronger if they'd been conferred by Charles Darwin, himself. You can get a good feel for his thinking from reading his pamphlet, The Problem of Practical Eugenics, which begins with this on the title page
The Darwinian revelation shows that humanity can no longer be considered static. We know it to be kinetic, the races of which it is composed being in a perpetual state of change. The judgement of history on the sagacity and achievements of statesmen will turn henceforth on the measure of their contributions to the racial progress of their nations in the generations which succeed them.
Pearson begins the body of his text:
I shall try to indicate what appears to me the pivot for all practical eugenic action. In the first lecture I laid stress on the great importance of Natural Selection – the selective deathrate – as tending to human efficency. I pointed out to you that various factors of our modern life were suspending its action, and that our chief hope for national efficiency in the future must lie in selective birthrate. The whole trend of legislation and social action has been to disregard parentage and to emphisise environment. Before we could express an opinion on this trend, we had to get some idea of the relative importance of heredity and of environment in producing desirable characteristics in the general population. In the case of man there is only one method of approaching the problem of inheritance, which, it seems to me, at present can have any application to the treatment of mankind in the mass, or any bearing on the great social reforms. You cannot study the latent gametic properties of the individual by ascertaining the qualities of his offspring under varying circumstances, as in the breeding pen.
"I laid stress on the great importance of Natural Selection – the selective deathrate – as tending to human efficiency," If that definition of natural selection gives you the chills, it's only because you haven't already considered the meaning of the theory, which is all about the deaths of those who are called "unfit". As I've pointed out, Charles Darwin, himself, equated natural selection with the Sperncerian slogan "survival of the fittest". You don't get survival without someone dying. And I have pointed out that Darwin, himself, asserted that the deaths of the "weaker members" of a population would, somehow, as a result, exhibit a "vigorous state of health".
You should plug through Pearson's tedious pamphlet, written in the scientific style also so beloved of the revolting Fabian saints, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. This one of Pearson's dwells at enormous length on the tragedy that child labor laws made children of an age when work in factories and mines was banned, completely under the age of 10 and half time before 14 of decreased economic value, attributing the decline in birth rates which Webb based his pamphlet on to that change in the law. Supporters of Planned Parenthood might note what he said about the increased knowledge of contraception at the same time but he doesn't think that could be why people started having fewer children. That a eugenicist is basing his arguments for sterilizing people on a declining birth rate is bizarre, especially considering it is being done by one of the most eminent figures in the history of statistical mathematics.
While reading what in Britain was considered wild radicals, in the years Hitler still dreamed of being a famous artist and the depravity of German science was still under the framing of the Kaiser, keep in mind what I pointed out about British intellectuals openly musing about the great benefits to society by killing their various preferred underclasses by gas, some, such as H. G. Wells, were quite explicit about who would "have to go".
And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?
Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.
As you can see in my earlier post linked to above, Wells didn't hope the Jews - who he stereotypes in one of the most vicious ways I've ever read - would die out but disappear through intermarrying with Gentiles and, so, be gone as a distinct population. Something he eagerly anticipates. His comment about his hope that some of their moral heritage would never die is useful only in so far as it proves he knew absolutely nothing about that moral tradition even as he said that.
I don't, for a second believe the Webbs and Pearson were unaware of what their fellow Fabians such as Wells and Shaw who were even more famous than they were were saying about gassing people they deemed unfit or their "having to go". I don't see that they kicked them out of the movement or tried to disassociate their revolting, shooty, upperclass "socialism" from those voices. If someone can show me where they did or if someone in the Brit-left of that period ever told them they were wrong to say things like that, I'd like to see it, with citations and links if possible.
So, what was it that kept Britain from adopting eugenics laws such as many American states had? It was largely due to G. K. Chesterton who some think was the major force for the defeat of the "Feeble-Minded Control Bill" of 1912. Chesterton's opposition to eugenics was consistent with his Catholicism, the Catholic Church was the strongest institution which opposed eugenics from just about the beginning of it. The Labour Party, as well, opposed it, though I haven't, yet, read much of their literature from that period. I will try to write more on that in the future.
* To be fair, there were plenty of Americans who were as cold bloodled and self-righteously scrupulous in their pursuit of a better future for those who were left able to have children after their scientific cull. As history shows, it was here where the Germans learned so much about how to put eugenics into practice, it was Americans in Vermont, in California, on many other states who targeted racial groups for extinction through philanthropically supported, forced, coerced, or unknowingly performed sterilization.
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