More Ignorant Hate Over Berlin Diary

When we left off, yesterday, I'd pointed out that the book which was thrown at me, William Shirer's Berlin Diary, his diary kept from his experiences as a foreign correspondent in Europe, especially Germany, in the years of the rise of the Nazis up to the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the United States' involvement in that war too many months later.

As the point was the relation of Darwinism to the mass murders of the Nazis, though specifically, in the comments of the guy who trolls me with an obsession that has turned into a near daily attack on my character, the Holocaust, I'd noted that his own, chosen authority, Berlin Diary, a far from complete view of things, as it ends in 1941, Shirer noted what Germans thought were the motives of the Nazis.  You can see that at the Update in yesterday's post.  I could have made my case even more strongly by noting that Simel's own, alleged authority on the matter SAID THAT HE FOUND THE EUGENIC - THAT IS THE DARWINIAN - MOTIVE THE MOST PROBABLE.

The first motive is obviously absurd, since the death 
of 100,000 persons will not save much food for a nation 
of 80,000,000. Besides, there is no acute food shortage 
in Germany. The second motive is possible, though I 
doubt it. Poison gases may have been used in putting 
these unfortunates out of the way, but if so, the experi- 
mentation was only incidental. Many Germans I have 
talked to think that some new gas which disfigures the 
body has been used, and that this is the reason why the 
remains of the victims have been cremated. But I can 
get no real evidence of this. 

The third motive seems most likely to me. For years 
a group of radical Nazi sociologists who were instru- 
mental in putting through the Reich's sterilization laws 
have pressed for a national policy of eliminating the 
mentally unfit. They say they have disciples among 
many sociologists in other lands, and perhaps they have. 
Paragraph two of the form letter sent the relatives 
plainly bears the stamp of this sociological thinking: 
" In view of the nature of his serious, incurable ailment, 
his death, which saved him from a lifelong institutional 
sojourn, is to be regarded merely as a release." 

Some suggest a fourth motive. They say the Nazis 
calculate that for every three or four institutional cases, 
there must be one healthy German to look after them. 
This takes several thousand good Germans away from 
more profitable employment. If the insane are killed 
off, it is further argued by the Nazis, there will be 
plenty of hospital space for the war wounded should the 
war be prolonged and large casualties occur. 
It's a Nazi, messy business.

Far from me criticizing William Shirer's book for not noting the Darwinian connection to the murders of the Third Reich, he said he found that attributed motive the most probable of the three he said his German friends and acquaintances put forward as what led to the trial run for the Holocaust, the T-4 program.   

That policy was one that had its roots so far in Darwinism that it is found in the very book by Ernst Haeckel which Darwin endorsed in the highest of terms, Haeckel's German language elucidation of Darwinism, The History of Creation, which Darwin, himself, said was such a good representation of his thinking that if he'd known Haeckel was writing it, he wouldn't have bothered writing his own, second major book on the subject, The Descent of Man, in which Darwin, as well, endorses the idea that killing off those deemed unfit is salubrious for the surviving murderers and their descendants.  

I could also point out that the fourth motive was identical to that given by the next generation of Darwinists, such as H. G. Wells and those influenced by Darwinism, such as George Bernard Shaw whose Fabian speeches calling for mass gassing of the unfit was not entirely outside of the general line of Fabian and British thinking, a more efficient means of harrying the poor, the lame, the halt, the merely unfortunate out of an inconvenient existence. 

“A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

The comfort that English speaking people take in the absurd idea that Nazism is a strictly German language phenomenon is a lie,  Nazism, including the idea that mass murder was the way of nature and of a salubrious character, leading to both the biological advance of the survivors, the murderers and justified in some depraved form of economic utilitarianism was rampant among English speaking intellectuals at exactly the same time, finding its most popular form in Darwinism. If these people will insist on forcing me to note the depraved things their heros have said, things that put their thinking in the same line with that of such people as Himmler and Rudolf Hoess, that's not my fault.

Last night someone sent me a link to a Rawstory piece about some guy in Oklahoma who dressed up in a mock up of a Klan costume to protest "evolution" as being to blame for scientific racism and genocide - at least that's what I could gather from the piece, the guy's protest wasn't the most pellucid of messages.  The snarky presentation and the comments mocked the guy for his ignorance and superstition but, if I'd wanted to get into it, I'd have had to tell them that that guy was more accurate than they, in their college credentialed arrogance.  And I could give them chapter and verse of Darwin's own writing and that of his closest colleagues, supporting the idea of genocide against named groups, including Black People was not only beneficial but a biological imperative and a certainty.   If by "evolution" the guy had meant natural selection, that would be Darwinism, he was far more accurate than they were.   But his error, mistaking "evolution" for natural selection, that would be Darwinism, is common enough and something often, very often, made by even professional evolutionary biologists.  It's quite common among the latter day Darwinists who believe he unlocked the one, true mechanism of evolution.  Quaint as that idea should have become, by now.