Natural Selection as affecting Civilised Nations.—In the last and present chapters I have considered the advancement of man from a former semi-human condition to his present state as a barbarian. But some remarks on the agency of natural selection on civilised nations may be here worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W. R. Greg,230 and previously 168 by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton.231 Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. 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.
Over and over, I find those ideas stated, frankly in, not only the language of the Nazis but in the English and German eugenicists and scientific racists who preceded the Nazis, who the Nazis studied and learned from, both in theory and in practice, all of whom, if they give attribution for the origin of their thinking, will cite Charles Darwin, directly or one of the men who he cites, all of whom except Wallace, would have derived their ideas from On the Origin of Species, an attribution which all of them made for their eugenics. I, though don't see that Wallace's conception of natural selection was like that of the others named, for reasons I won't go into here.
The subsequent paragraph in the footnote, which I have analyzed several times in context, clearly isn't the one which gained the most traction in subsequent science and the popular understanding of it. They clearly didn't take Darwin's faintly bleated and constantly undermined statements about "aid which we feel compelled to give" against the urging of "hard reason" as being convincing. They obviously opted for taking seriously the future "contingent benefit" advocated in the entire rest of the book other than this paragraph, the one possible glimmer of hope, which "is more to be hoped for than expected," not counted on by them to prevent the danger Darwin scientifically warned of - without reservation or question - in the previous paragraph.
The entire history of Nazi eugenics is a direct development of the ideas in the first paragraph while rejecting the second paragraph, something which is as true of the earliest eugenics which Darwin, in contradiction of his own "aid which we feel impelled" paragraph, supported with enthusiasm and which he cited as reliable science in the same book and in subsequent letters and statements.
And it is the idea behind all eugenics from the start of it until today, in its mildest to its most extreme forms calling for genocide of the majority of the world's population on the basis of race and ethnicity, leaving the "white race" the "Aryans" the only people on Earth. Those who have been enthusiastic for Natural Selection in a political and legal application to the human species have had no problem identifying other groups for elimination apart from those named in that paragraph and in addition to the disabled, Native Australians, Tasmanians, "Red Indians" and other named and unnamed though easily imagined groups enumerated for extinction in those early scientific books Darwin cites as well as named in his own book.
And it was even before Charles Darwin wrote that, the same conclusions had been reached by thinking through Darwin's natural selection by his foremost scientific disciples, scientific giants of the time like Galton, who he cites, Greg, who he cites, Haeckel, and such figures in the law as Heinrich Fick who he corresponded with. We know that because he cites their eugenic thinking, racial classification for fitness, their statements supporting the contention that, " With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health," and the subsequent contrast of that continual salubrious slaughter to the practice of the "civilised" people of not killing off those whose lives were posed to be such an alleged peril for the future.
We also have the statement of his closest of all scientific colleagues, his own anointed "bull dog" defender and promoter, Thomas Huxley who predicted that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would lead to a result through Natural Selection.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.
Thomas Huxley: Emancipation Black and White
I have to say that it is mind blowing for someone raised in the main-stream of post-WWII American liberalism to try to get into the mindset of a society, a scientific community in which such statements could be made without the person saying such things, talking about entire groups of people, on the basis of their biological heritage, in such terms being condemned. Yet such were the men of science and the leaders of such societies that few eyelashes so much as blinked at those assertions. Implying with no subtlty that they would be wiped out by their biological superiors as a matter of scientific inevitability which was to be accepted, any attempt to raise up their position in stead of obliterating them futile, and if not that consigning them to a permanent position of inferiority. Such things were said from that generation through the generation of Karl Pearson and Alfred Ploetz, the next generation of eugenicists, through the Second World War and are still being said, though generally not as explicitly, in every generation up to today.
And that is a mild statement within the closest ring of Darwin's inner circle, he talked of the actual and intentional extermination of entire, named groups as something which would benefit the general state of the human species. I will post some of those passages as necessary but have done so in previous posts, over and over again, only to have their existence denied and their meaning twisted, not unlike Timothy McVeigh was prone to do, as I noted yesterday.
I said that in general such expressions of Darwinism haven't been stated so explicitly, I'm dealing with those who do say what they mean, explicitly, in these posts.
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I have gone over the above several times here, but it is certainly part of my experience that you can never say things too many times for the True Believers of Darwinism.
What was true of the Nazi's use of Darwin's Natural Selection is as true of the English language neo-Nazis such as William Pierce, the man who is widely considered the most influential of the post-war neo-Nazis, the one whose calls for antisemitic and racist violence has produced the most victims and whose following, informal and organized among our most toxic haters is as great as ever. You can see that for yourself with word searches, online, keeping in mind my warning of yesterday.
Before giving it, remember, this was published the same year, the same month that Pierce was publishing The Turner Diaries in its first edition as a book, it had been serialized in the National Alliance tabloid, ATTACK! earlier in the decade. When he talks about the "doctrine of the
Alliance" that certainly, beyond any shadow of a doubt, includes the contents of The Turner Diaries. Just as with so many of the original Nazis, Pierce was quite willing to present his propaganda in a more widely acceptable and a more explicit form. It is clear that The Turner Diaries were what he imagined as his dream future in raw language.
The following excerpts William L. Pierce: Evolution and Conservative Beliefs; National Alliance BULLETIN, May 1978 Note: The piece is illustrated, in the original publication, with a portrait of Charles Darwin, you can see it online, as you will.
Since the “Who We Are” series began appearing in NV, the National Office has been receiving complaints from subscribers who are unhappy because the account of man’s origins given there doesn’t jibe with the Jewish account in the Book of Genesis.
Some readers have sent curt notes, such as, “You evidently don’t believe in the Bible. Don’t you know that evolution is the work of Satan? Cancel my subscription immediately!”
Others have been more patient, explaining either that (a) the first White people were placed on earth via flying saucer somewhere around 7,000 years ago, or that (b) the Creation occurred as described in Genesis, but Adam and Eve were Whites, not Jews, and that the people of the Old Testament eventually migrated to northern Europe and were the ancestors of the European race.
Complaints were definitely in the minority, with most readers indicating an approval of the race-history article, but there was no intention of offending any of our readers’ religious sensibilities with the “Who We Are” series. On the other hand, the Alliance never hesitates to print the truth — even when the truth conflicts with cherished myths. The racial history and prehistory in “Who We Are” are in accord with the presently known facts, whereas the account in the Old Testament and subsequent migrations form Eden to Scandinavia are not.
But the objections to presenting the facts of biological evolution, and our insistence on doing so, go deeper than a quibble over Jewish mythology. Evolution is not just a scientific concept which helps us understand race history; it is an idea which is absolutely fundamental to our whole way of thinking. The doctrine of the Alliance is based solidly on the evolutionary concept...
From what else Pierce has said, it is clear that when he talks about "evolution" he means Darwinian natural selection and the associated ideas derived from it, by Darwin and those who adopted it from the first years of its currency in the wider world.
... For the last thousand years in Europe, in particular, there has been a static view of the creative process. The Christian religion, just like the Jewish and Moslem religions, regards the creation of the world, not as an ongoing process, but as something completed. Both the material and the spiritual worlds were finished long ago. In particular, God is finished, already a perfect being — hence, incapable of improvement or change. And man, of course, has also been viewed as an unchanging creature, with a fixed relationship to the unchanging Creator.
A century ago Charles Darwin shattered forever this static view of the world — although many people didn’t realize it at the time, and many apparently still don’t. Darwin, of course, was not the first man to see the world as an evolving reality rather than as a static reality. And his work was flawed in several respects: He made some errors, and he failed to understand the mechanics of evolution. (The explanation of that — at least, as far as biological evolution is concerned — we owe to Johann Mendel and his successors in the fields of genetics.) Nevertheless, Darwin did overturn the old, static worldview, and he replaced it with the evolutionary view. That is the greatest revolution in human thought which has ever taken place.
The statement that Charles Darwin's books were a definitive change in the view of reality was claimed by virtually every conventional Darwinist from Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, the entire line of eugenicists, and is asserted today by such conventional ultra-Darwinists as Daniel Dennett, Richard Darwkins and is, in fact, one of the most widely held articles of faith in the educated class in the Western world and beyond. It was also noted by critics of Darwinism who, in the decades preceding the rise of the Nazis, warned of the consequences of it. In noting Mendel (Pierce fails to mention he was a Catholic Priest working with the support of his abbot and bishop at the time of his experiments**) he adopts the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the rather quaint notion of genetics popularly current in the 1970s, a concept of genetics which is still prevalent but inadequate, going on forty years later.
An understanding of the evolutionary nature of reality makes us radicals. We see that tendencies — which may be deeply buried beneath surface appearances now — can, nevertheless, have profound effects on the way things develop in the long run. In evils which may seem small and tolerable to the conservative we recognize the potential for great damage, if their effects are allowed to accumulate long enough.
Again, the claim that an understanding of the supposed evolutionary (Darwinist) nature of reality allows them to see things that other people can't. Ironically, Natural Selection's most common assertion is that it is an oracle with which to see what can't be seen. That belief combined with sociological methods and statistical analysis is the very basis of formal eugenics as founded by Galton and practiced from then on. It is the central claim of Haeckel's elucidation of Natural Selection, the correspondence between what Pierce says in this article and what Haeckl said in books starting in the 1860s and into the 20th century is disturbingly obvious.
The "evils which may seem small and tolerable" in which they "recognize the potential for great damage, if their effects are allowed to accumulate long enough" are exactly what Charles Darwin was talking about in the paragraph above. They are the alleged dysgenic effects of allowing the "weak members to propagate their kind." He specified a list which could roughly correspond to those first sterilized, then murdered in the Nazi T4 trial run of mass genocide. As noted, others who adopted these ideas included other groups, including those who Darwin, Haeckel, etc. specifically named as due to become extinct as a result of their inferiority and, explicitly, in losing a violent struggle with their superiors.
The conservative would like to patch things up superficially, to alleviate the immediate and obvious symptoms of the social and political and racial problems around him. With a static view of the world, he believes that things swept under the carpet will stay under the carpet.
We, with our evolutionary view of the world, know that treating the symptoms of a disease is not enough. We know that the world is dynamic, and that the causes of a disease will continue festering under the surface until we go after its roots and tear them up...
"Until we go after its roots and tear them up," See: The Turner Diaries and the crimes of those inspired by it.
... That is why the conservative, for example, has always been willing to settle for racial segregation as a goal, while we have not. More generally, it is why the conservative turns away from difficult questions with harsh and unpleasant answers; he does not see the necessity of doing unpleasant things now in order that life may be on a higher plane in the future. It is why even the racially conscious conservative finds it so difficult to make sacrifices. He sees only the men and women around him, with all their imperfections, and he says to himself, “I should sacrifice myself for them?“
What Pierce meant by the "harsh and unpleasant answers" which the conservative, segregationists, he was distinguishing his movement from and critisizing as namby-pamby, was mass murder on a global scale, plain and unvarnished**. He, as Darwin and a long line of Darwinist eugenicists blame their imagined disaster on the "unfit" living long enough to have children, the foremost danger to that are such ideas they deem to be evil delusions, such as the equality of people, equal inherent rights to life and freedom, and, especially, the radical social and economic justice of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions.
It is disturbing how much of this neo-Nazism, stated in cleaned up language, mirrors so much of the conventional and, later, a popular and commonly conceived of exposition of Darwinism.
I made a mistake in an earlier post I put up last week, the opposite of Nazism isn't mere egalitarian democracy, it is the prerequisite belief that people are equal and that there is a moral obligation to treat them equally. The opposites of Nazism are do unto others that which you would have done to you, love the stranger among you as you love your fellow countryman and treat them as an equal, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, the radical requirement of giving past the point of it hurting (read that last sentence from Pierce) and, espcially, that which you do to the least among you, you to unto me. The Jewish conception of God who so associates with the least among us that what we do to them, we do to God is the most radical possible opposite to Nazism that has ever been formulated.
* The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the 169noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.
Every single time I re-read that passage, in the context of Darwin's earlier passage and other relevant statements of science in the same book, its sheer hypocrisy expands. Given that, it is no wonder none of those many men of science took it seriously. I will give it a full treatment, later in this series, I will just ask you to read it carefully and note, in contrast to the unmitigated and rigorous statements of science in the previous paragraph given in the post, Darwin continually discredited and undermined his pose of calling for "aid which we feel compelled to give". It is no wonder that practically the entire line of scientists chose to not take it seriously as they expounded and applied the content of the previous paragraph.
** The Catholic church has, from its inception, rejected eugenics and its associated ideologies.
Note: I was sent home with a cold so I could complete this post. I won't entertain any brawling due to it, I'm going to bed.
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