Nazism is, inherently, at its very core a racist ideology based in very specific ideas of biology, those which were predominant in German science in the period of Nazisms' forming and foundation, which was thoroughly based on Darwin's theory of natural selection. The thinking of Darwin and the mainstream of his scientific colleagues who he endorsed as his true followers and the next generation of totally accepted, conventional Darwinists permeates Nazi ideology from the time of that 1919 letter of Hitler I posted a couple of weeks back through to the end and in the post-war period in such influential Nazis as William L. Pierce. Pierce, being an American instead of a German, is far more willing to use the name of the Brit, Darwin, but the ideas of Darwin permeate all of Nazi theory and even in its popular-scientific presentations.
Rereading the paper I linked to yesterday evening Goldhagen—His Critics and His Contribution by Yisrael Gutman, there's lots of talk about how racism was a part of the "modern antisemitism" which generated the Nazis and their Shoah (a term which is better in every way than "Holocaust") but Gutman, like almost all Western scholars, is reluctant to state in plain terms what that modern form of racism consisted of, it consisted of racism, a putrid gem that found its most dangerous place, in the setting of Darwinian natural selection.
I think I know why Gutman doesn't state what becomes obvious to anyone who looks at the primary literature of Nazism - in the pre-war period, during the war and its continuation in the post-war period - that it is, as I said, first and foremost a biological, a Darwinian ideology, it is because it is forbidden to point out that history because no one is to say about Darwin what virtually everyone did before the crimes of the Nazis were revealed to the wider world. No one of any stature who I have found in the pre-war period ever divorced Darwin and Darwinism from eugenics and no one who has ever studied the history of eugenics could claim that the American and Canadian forms of it, the British exposition of it, were not a part of the Nazis ideology and their propaganda promotion of eugenics.
It is rather stunning how, in the post-war period, especially in English language academia and media, what was universally admitted to before the war, that Darwinism and eugenics were parts of the same thing, became denied and a forbidden reality, the statement of which could destroy an academic career. That was the common received wisdom that my generation were taught and it was taught, in no small part, by people who knew it was a whopper of a lie as they said it, people who had been educated before the war and even people who had read Darwin and those he cited as reliable scientists. In the time I have been studying and writing on the topic, I've challenged people, over and over again to come up with anyone of any scientific or academic stature in the pre-war period who denied that Darwinism and eugenics were inseparable, who denied that eugenics is founded in the theory of natural selection and am still waiting for the first example of that.
Only one time does Gutman use the word "Darwin" and it is attached to the prefix that is always used to distance Darwin from the inevitable consequences of believing his theory of natural selection, "Social Darwinism" that biological inheritance carries immutable traits that comprise the discourse of racist classification. I'm going to give you that entire paragraph, which is long, to show you how even as that weasel word "Social Darwinism" is used, it describes exactly what the theory of natural selection is founded in.
Since the new European Jew had adopted the language, culture, and behavioral patterns of the population at large, his opponents needed markers that would transfer his ostensibly objectionable essence from overt manifestations to subliminal, inscrutable ones rooted in biology. Furthermore, one could argue in making the distinction that anti-Jewish racism, unlike the “emotional racism” of the past, rests on the scholarly foundation of Social Darwinism.
Um, I can't let that pass. That "scholarly foundation of Social Darwinism" is, actually, a scientific foundation of Social Darwinism. Charles Darwin, himself, admitted that Natural Selection and Spencer's classic definition of "Social Darwinism" "Survival of the Fittest" were exactly the same thing, quoting his co-inventor of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace encouraging him to clear that up. "Social Darwinism" IS Darwinism, on that we have the best possible authority, Charles Darwin, himself. *
Therefore, if the erstwhile anti-Semitism ordered the Jews to abandon their singularity and be like everyone else, the modern anti-Semitic theory argued that a Jew remains a Jew after he effects his social integration even if he goes so far as to abandon his faith.
Indeed, for that we can cite the ultimate authority to make that claim, Adolph Hitler in that 1919 letter. You can read it at the link, I don't want to post it any more than I have.
Indeed, Jews who no longer look Jewish and abandon the traditional behavior patterns are much more menacing than overt Jews who remain cloistered in their compatriots’ society. The “Jewish problem,” formerly rooted in the Jews’ intransigent refusal to abandon their singular traits, was reincarnated as the “Jewish problem” of those who had immersed themselves in society at large. In other words, it ballooned from an internal Jewish problem to a national and universal one. Above all, while a Jew could solve the erstwhile problem of “differentness” by repudiating his origin and religion, the problem of the Jews as a racial entity defied all solutions. Such a solution must lead to the removal of the Jews from the national territory, and, where a continental or global solution is being sought, the solutions should by right be much more radical and severe.
I will point out, again, that the Nazis in their original plan of deporting all Jews somewhere else (something they never did much to enact) they were repeating claims made by the eminent British scientist and Darwin's scientific grandson, Karl Pearson, who said exactly the same things, specifically about the Polish and Russian Jews the Nazis began to slaughter fourteen years after Pearson published his disgusting scientific paper in 1925. I can't get over how that isn't considered to be a major issue, that non-Nazi science so casually published such material in reviewed journals and how, gradually, such stuff arose again in the 1970s on till today.
The study of the Nazi genocides will never progress to adequate understanding and, the foremost reason that it is not only an important but vital study to make, THE PREVENTION OF FUTURE MASS SLAUGHTERS. That vital scholarly study will never be effective until it admits that Darwin's theory of natural selection is the central concept that turned old-line racism into modern genocide. At least the Nazi variety of that.
The Marxist versions of genocide are founded in other but related ideas. The Marxist materialism that is the reason they can turn human populations into "masses" to use like natural resources and dispose of like those, as well, is also an intrinsic aspect of natural selection. On that we have the authority of Darwin's named, most lauded, warmly endorsed German colleague, Ernst Haeckel. It turns out that you can't understand any of it unless you understand the effect that turning people into objects available for use and disposal plays in mass murder inevitably has when theory meets the real world. The first act of Darwinian natural selection is based in the economic utility of organisms, including people. That idea permeates Darwin's thinking, from his original spark of inspiration in Malthus's economic depravity, to his equation of all of nature to the commercial raising of animals on farms to his comparison of those objects for breeding and slaughter to human beings, or, rather, us to them.
* Not only did Darwin, in the 5th edition he prepared of his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, make it impossible to honestly distance Darwinism from "Social Darwinism" he intrinsically tied it to the act of human beings selecting organisms on the basis of "fitness" to be kept for breeding or selected for slaughtering. He certainly knew how Spencer presented "Survival of the Fittest" in terms of human sociological ideology as he did that.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection, we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.
Well, eighty years after he published the idea, the Nazis (as Republicans in Indiana and other eugenicists elsewhere before them) were ready to make those "feeble efforts" according to their ability.
Someday I will go into the Indiana eugenics law and how the Democrat, Thomas R. Marshall, Wilson's Vice President ("What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar") tried to scuttle it, alas with only limited success.
No comments:
Post a Comment