Saturday, March 16, 2019

The Never-Ending Troll

I suppose if you've got to have someone accusing you of antisemitism it's better to have an especially stupid pathological liar make that accusation than someone who thinking people might mistake as credible.  Of course, if he's making the accusation to especially stupid people whose minds are stuck in the common received wisdom of pop culture c. 1965, it might stick but I take comfort in knowing: 

a. I don't care what the untellectuals of the unlightenment think they think ("thinking" for them meaning matching statements to their pre-existing repertoire which is rote learned and repetitiously repeated,) 

b. It's a waste of time to continue to continue giving quotes and factually based, cited evidence to refute what they say because they either won't take it in or they'll just continue lying about it.  As I said the other day, they're really not different in method from the Trump supporters, they just started out in a different place which they, also, have not moved from. 

c.  While I know they love to believe that Krugmann or this or that real media figure pays attention to them, they are deluding themselves.  No one who has a real life of the mind bothers paying attention to them anymore.  Most of the most active members of the commenting community such as those who, in the ever receding and distant past organized "Eschacon" didn't stay with it much past the 2008 election.  Not that many ever did. 

The fact is that Nazism was, from its origin, an anti-Christian,  Nazi-self-identified scientifically based ideology, based explicitly and organized entirely around a not at all uncommon contemporary understanding of Darwinism, natural selection, the classification of human beings on the basis of fitness and the benefits to the survivors of murdering entire classes of human beings.  That view of Darwinism was hardly limited to German speaking people but was ubiquitous among those in Britain, the United States, etc. wherever eugenics in all of its forms arose.   That is something that you can find in the scientific literature of Darwinism starting as early as the early writings of Francis Galton and Thomas Huxley and, especially, Ernst Haeckel before Darwin did it, himself, in The Descent of Man in 1871, citing all three of those authors expounding proto-Nazi thinking without any possible doubt.  I've documented that exhaustively, beyond any honest refutation for the past eleven years.  It isn't something that was unknown before, it has been commented on since the rise of Nazism as an ideology, its presence in the pre-Nazi thinking of German scientists and military officers, some of whom formed Nazism, is documented by Vernon Kellogg in the years immediately preceding the beginning of the Nazi party.   I've documented that, that idiotic liar has never documented anything and the idiots who frequent his home-blog don't care for the reasons I posted above. 

I've also addressed the entirely different character and nature of anti-Jewish history in the Christian churches.  I've never denied that, no one honestly could.   But Nazism was the creation of a mixture of 19th century pseudo-scientific ethnology based in the then contemporary linguistic theory given its genocidal motives and potentials directly from the theory of natural selection.  

Note:  The objection that I pointed out that the Anti-Defamation League calling the Shoah a "tragedy" when it was no tragedy but a massive crime reminded me of something that I had to go back to check the videos (you can hear it here with English translation).   When he was on trial in Israel,  Eichmann, trying to excuse his role in the genocide of Jews and others used the same language, trying to distance himself from his own role in killing millions by putting it in the language of "tragedy".  "Tragedy" is a weasel word that allows people to blame their own choices on outside forces, that is exactly how Eichmann used it in his own defense.   It is interesting how he began by saying that if the Nazis had been explicit in the extent of their intentions in regard to disposing of the Jews, they never would have been successful in the election of 1932.     Apparently Eichmann believed that the German people would never have accepted that, which is telling. The Nazis didn't, of course, win a majority in that terrible election, even with their cover up of their intentions.  As an aside, I think anyone who believes that America's problems will be solved if only another "third party" is formed should consider the role that fractured, multi-party politics played in bringing the Nazis to power even as the Greens and others have enabled Republican-fascism here.  

It also shows that the Nazis plan was to take power and to, step by step, reveal and implement their master plan.   The role of terror and propaganda in that is clear from what they did as soon as they took power, gradually introducing a graded series of ever more immoral and evil measures.   

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And I should mention that I've read this paper by Emily Wollmuth as cited in refutation of my research on the connection between Darwinism and Nazism.   While I did find some value to some of the things said in the paper, any paper on this topic which cites only two works by Charles Darwin, the 2nd Edition of On the Origin of Species (not even the 5th in which Darwin made his most explicit connection to his theory of natural selection and Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest") and The Voyage of the Beagle without citing the most relevant major work of Darwin for the study of the topic, The Descent of Man, cannot be considered in any way adequate on even a basic level.   

As well as ignoring the most relevant work by Darwin on the topic she failed to consult the major authors cited by Darwin in The Descent of Man,  Francis Galton's earliest works constructing eugenics and, most of all, Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, no, not even in the English language translation made during Darwin's lifetime by one of his closest inner circle, E. Ray Lankester, The History of Creation, with which Darwin cited when he asserted the inequality of people based on ethnicity and other biological traits and, most relevantly, the benefits to the survivors of the deaths, even the killing of those deemed biologically inferior, through everything from infanticide and abortion to what would now be called genocide.  

She, as well, has no citation of the one biological work which Hitler and his fellow Nazi inmates in prison were definitely reading as he ranted out Mein Kampf, Menschliche Erblichkeitslehrer und Rassenhygiene by Baur, Fischer and Lenz.   I strongly suspect from the citations in the paper that the author doesn't read German which is a fatal defect for anyone who wants to write on this topic as there are important documents which haven't been translated and others which have been translated badly, even, especially if you're citing them from papers instead of from the works, themselves, ideologically. 

No paper on the stated topic, "Darwinian Evolutionary Theory and Constructions of Race in Nazi Germany: A Literary and Cultural Analysis of Darwin’s Works and Nazi Rhetoric" which failed to consult those and many other works I could list could possibly come to anything like a "definitive" judgement on the matter.  In fairness, Ms. Wollmuth didn't make such a claim for her paper.  If I'd been her professor, knowing what I've learned FROM READING THE PRIMARY SOURCES I'd have sent her back to do more research before accepting the paper as even an undergraduate assignment.  Perhaps her professor didn't know the literature, either, so few do. 

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