Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life . . .
Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species, 1st edition 1859*
There is a challenge to name a Holocaust survivor who has similar views to mine, Off the top of my head I could name Henry Friedlander, the survivor of Auschwitz who came to the United States, obtained his education and became an historian of the Holocaust and who disagreed that it should be considered exclusively as the Nazis campaign to murder all Jews. Controversially but, if you read his evidence and thinking, he came to the same conclusion that I did that that campaign of murder cannot be honestly or safely held apart from the entire range of Nazi genocides and the pre-Nazi thinking by the class of people in regard to supposedly salubrious murder by the actual people who formed Nazism in 1919 and who took it up in the next twenty-six years. I would include those who continue it past the war and up till today. Today's white supremacists and neo-Nazis are still citing Darwin and if not him some understanding of natural selection. When the Sociobiology Study Group published their declaration that warned that it was a revival of pre-war eugenics in 1976, they were absolutely right. Up till then most of what was said in that line could be found in the writings of the likes of the neo-Nazi William L. Pierce. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology made it not only respectable but part of the indoctrination of the college credentialed.
I wasn't planning on writing about this and cannot find Friedlander's book "The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia To The Final Solution" but there is a short paper online From Euthanasia To The Final Solution, which I would not be surprised if he prepared as a lecture outlining his book. In it he proves quite conclusively that the industrial murder of Jews and Roma cannot be separated from the T4 program that preceded the death camps and which not only provided a model of murder to size up from, the death camps imported those who had murdered the disabled as technical experts in how to do it. It is quite harrowing to see how easily the medical professionals who became mass murderers of first disabled people in institutions, starting with infants and children up to the age of three and then, with Hitler's direct instruction, older children and adults and, having gained that experience, had no problem murdering Jews, Roma and others in the death camps. I believe it is in the paper that the ever downward spiral into sadism, amoral depravity and even what some Nazis considered crime in the staffs of the death camps, it was wondered if the medical men so hardened and corrupted would be able to administer the more acceptable form of murder "the good death" "euthanasia" in Germany, itself.
In so far as my challenger, your problem with me isn't your claim that I don't claim the "centrality" of the murders of Jews by the Nazis, I think your problem is that I don't practice pretending those were the only genocide victims of the Nazis who matter. That vulgar practice is, as I've pointed out, the adoption of the classification of people on a scale of value that is something which the Nazis practiced as few others have, something which they gained directly from the theory of natural selection, Darwinism, not in my words, in their own words, in their scientific claims, in their popularization of science. It is a cruel irony that some supposed scholars of this topic and some of those who use it politically practice the same kind of thinking that led the Nazis to murder to start with. After studying the literature and primary source material, I'm not shocked at that as natural selection was made the primary framing under which people think about biology. I think that this type of genteel Nazified thinking will always arise as long as Darwinism is the enforced way to think about these things.
It is a habit of thought that German Darwinists shared with those in Britain, Canada, the United States and elsewhere, it was a habit of thought that Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed from the bench of the Supreme Court in the infamous Buck v. Bell case in which he used laws requiring the mandatory vaccination of school children as a legal excuse to sterilize people he, in his patrician, Boston Brahmin disdain for those he considered inferior to himself. As I've pointed out before, that fact is something the defending lawyers at the Nuremberg Trials were able to point out to the presiding judge, Francis Biddle who had been Holmes' personal secretary and confidant for many years.
It is ironic to students of the down-side of Darwinism that Holmes was an enthusiastic fan of Darwin, who certainly read The Descent of Man. He must have known that Darwin was something of an anti-vaxxer who complained that smallpox vaccination kept alive too many members of the underclass who went on to have children, children who would have died if vaccination wasn't invented as a boon to humanity. Darwin's son Leonard also railed against mandatory vaccination when he stood for election to Parliament, luckily, he lost. My research has led me to believe that the Darwin-Wedgewood family weren't against smallpox vaccination on the basis of danger to health, I haven't found an instance of one of them suffering from small pox, they opposed it because it kept too many people in the underclass alive. I could go and have on and on giving examples of Darwinist in the period up to the war and beyond beyond who have come up with the most depraved of claims based in claims of inequality that are the basis of natural selection as well as claims about the benefits to the survivors that come with the deaths, especially killings, of human beings named and unnamed, individually and in groups. I've never found that anywhere in the Gospels and Epistles.
* That, in a single sentence is the basis of eugenics and its most infamous form, Nazi genocide. That is the view of life which Darwin presented as a form of grandeur and which is still presented as such. This is from the passage that even cold Darwinist scientists wanting to wax poetic will pluck out of the book (which most of them haven't ever read) skating over what it really means and what it has really meant in application in real life. Rudolph Hess said that "Nazism is nothing but applied biology."
Update: I've pointed out to him before that Torquemada was from a prominent family of conversos, that lying asshole knows about as much about the Spanish Inquisition as he does the topic of Riemann Xi function. I doubt he knows more than he learned from that Monty Python episode.
The Atlantic has an extensive article on white supremacy and eugenics in the US during the previous century, the interaction with fascism, and its more recent resurgence (it never went away.) A taste of the article.
ReplyDelete"The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe."
My apologies for not having a live link. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-nationalism/583258/
The parts of the article on the political movement, legislation and the courts were particularly enlightening.
I haven't read the article yet, there were a large number of important figures in American eugenics who had an enormous influence in both North America and Europe, Lothrop Stoddard, Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe, and many others. One of my problems with the story about the Nazi genocides as told in the 1960s through today in the United States, the line that wants to make the murder of Jews somehow more significant than the murders of others, is that it also separates German eugenics from the American and other countries already existing eugenics movements and governmental programs which not only influenced Nazis from a distance, they were actively collaborating with the Nazis. Charles Davenport was in direct contact and working with Nazi eugenicists up to America's entry into the war, the book mentioned above which Hitler and his cronies were reading in prison mentions American eugenic programs, as I recall it names a number of those in that list, including Paul Popenoe who, after the war, transformed himself into a popular marriage councellor (he had a long-running column in one of the big womens' magazines) and one of his foremost aids and associates was none other than James Dobson of "Focus on the Family".
DeleteWhen neo-eugenics started to be pushed, first by the likes of William Schockley and Arthur Jensen, then the Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, a lot of their scientific supporters, such as Francis Crick really showed that there had never been a real break between the pre-war eugenicists and the post-war ones who were just waiting their chance to restart the thing. My conclusion is that as long as Darwinism is the required framing of thinking about biology that eugenics will always arise because it is intrinsic in the theory of natural selection and, once revived, it will quickly turn to thoughts of eliminating entire populations from the future of life, eventually by murder.