Where I'll Let This Rest For Now

Just as the distinction between English and German eugenics is a convenient lie, the absolute distinction between what constituted democracy and dictatorship in the period relevant to this discussion is, as well, a convenient lie.   In the case of English and American democracy, as examples, that distinction certainly depended on who you were in those societies.   It makes all the difference in the world whether or not your experience in a putative democracy includes total disenfranchisement, whether because you are a woman or a member of the racial, ethnic or other groups which were excluded, by law or by extra-legal means, from voting or participating in government.  It made all the difference if the the laws of the country, state or municipality were adopted explicitly for the reasons of exploiting or discriminating against you.  If you were a black man or woman living under the burdens of disenfranchisement, legal, economic and social discrimination, a reign of terror by lynch mob, the police or the ability of someone to attack or murder you with impunity, life in the United States carried with it many if not all of the anti-democratic features of life Nazi Germany or the other dictatorships.  In the United States, during that period, you could know that your children were likely to be destroyed by the government and that they or you could be, against your will, sterilized to prevent you from having children.   And the same was at least if not often more true if you were American natives who were at an even greater risk of being murdered or sterilized into extinction well into the past century.   That the Nazis were learning from the state governments which made that program of extinction an exercise of the government is absolute proof that for those people targeted, it was not much different from what the Nazis did.  I would not be against someone observing that today's mass incarceration with its destruction of social and family life, with its ability to disenfranchise large numbers of black men and members of other minority groups was a de-facto extension of those earlier, post-Civil War, progressive era methods of legal and biological control, containment and decimation.

We like to think that we are different from the people who did such monumentally evil things but we can only maintain that illusion by lying about the history of what happened, why it happened, etc.  The Nazis were not a singular aberration, their thinking shares a great deal in common with thinking which is believed to be its opposite, Marxism.   It's not uncommon for people to make a distinction between the horrible dictatorship of Hitler and the horrible dictatorship of Stalin on the basis of their alleged goals and ideas - as if either of them could be trusted to tell the truth about those.  And they're not the only choice of despots to choose from.  You can choose the post-war fascists and the American government which supported and in many cases installed them or the various Marxist despots, including, it must be pointed out, such accomplished mass killers as Mao and Pol Pot, and that choice has been made, continually.  Not least of which I can point out by the United States and most other putative democratic governments in the world.  It really boils down to which body of slaves, which pile of corpses you're ready to buy.  That is the dialectic which so much of the common, conventional thinking on these things participates in.

The day, the moment while I was reading about one of Stalin's mass killings that I realized that for a person murdered by Stalin's goons were as murdered and as dead as anyone murdered by Hitler's goons and that the murders were as wrong and that THAT FACT WAS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ASPECT OF THEIR REIGNS, the blinders that led me along the straight line of  political analysis fell off.  I don't think I really had any understanding of politics, of public life, until that happened.

I have concentrated on the roots of the biological, scientific violence done against so many different groups in the period when Darwinism was the predominant means of thinking which led to that scientific violence, concentrating on the words of Darwin, on the inventor of eugenics and Haeckel's proto-Nazism, gradually expanding the scope to include the post-Darwin-Haeckel-Galton era which brings us up to the Nazis and beyond.   I have, largely, not relied on current scholarship, though a lot of the things I have pointed out aren't unknown to real scholars of these issues and that period.  I have begun, just this week, to look at the work of Thomas C. Leonard of Princeton  who, though I believe we don't share a lot of political and economic opinions, has read and studied that literature far more extensively than I could and who has many important observations about it.   I do not agree with a some of it but he is worth reading.   I will point out that I think his contention that Darwinism is a neutral force, identifying those with what are considered opposites in terms of economics and politics makes the mistake of thinking those two sides of the coin are, in fact, different in their most basic of assumptions.   I would reject that analysis because they begin by using the methodology of science to consider people, societies, governments as having the same qualities as physical objects and forces, the scientific conceit that its chosen subject matter, the thing which can be successfully studied in physics and chemistry account for everything.

I have started with Leonard's paper Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of  Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought, which gives some insight into how the post-war eugenics-free Charles Darwin was constructed.   I don't think Leonard would agree with my conclusions but haven't read enough of his writing to know that yet.   I do think that the identification of Darwin as both the inspiration of eugenics and its earliest, most influential supporter is unshakable That he was, as well, the earliest and most influential supporter of the proto-Nazi thinking of Ernst Haeckel is, as well, unshakable because both arguments were made from the primary source material in the words of Darwin, Galton and Haeckel.   I would also point out that if Malthus in the last year of his life may have not supported the New Poor Law doesn't change the fact that his earlier writing informed the thinking of those who wrote and adopted an obvious moral atrocity as an alleged "reform", something which would increasingly be done as the people doing such things took science as their alleged framing instead of traditional morality.   That the use of religion by those who did evil in its name is the primary weapon used indiscriminately against religion should make it clear that those who cite the same evil uses of science in indiscriminate attacks against science are at least as justified.  Though science being commonly, and erroneously, believed to be a unified body of knowledge, the charge may be easier to make stick.  I think the more rational case to be made is that the error of equating science with materialism is the real root of that evil, any science which treats people as physical objects, physical resources, pathological tissue in the body of humanity, that's where the real science of evil originates.