Friday, June 11, 2021

Nazism In English Before There Were Nazis In German

OH FOR PETE'S SAKE do you have to have it spelled out to you AGAIN that the eminent British scientist Karl Pearson, on the basis of his entirely conventional reading of Darwin and those who Darwin cited as reliably understanding his theory of natural selection was spouting Nazism before there were Nazis, get a load of this:

What I have said about bad stock seems to me to hold for the lower races of man.  How many centuries, how many thousands of years have the Kaffir and the Negro held large districts of Africa undisturbed by the white man?  Yet their inter-tribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the least comparable to the Aryan.  Educated and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock.  History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.

That was from the book National Life From The Standpoint of Science, in 1901, when Karl Pearson was one of the noted champions of Darwinism in science, which he repeatedly noted was one of the controlling ideas in his work.  The Nazi party wouldn't come into being for eighteen more years, I believe Hitler was 12 at the time, I don't know how old Rudolf Hess was, off hand, the man who said that Nazism was nothing but applied biology in 1934.   Here is a response to speeches given in praise of Karl Pearson the year after his retirement, the same year Hess made that declaration in Germany, at a dinner his former students gave in his honor at the University College London.

Then Weldon succeeded Ray Lankester and brought new inspiration, but alas, left us too soon for Oxford!  I sent the word "Biometry" to Oxford.  The Royal Society Council having passed a resolution that mathematics and biology should not be mixed,  Biometrika was founded with Galton as consultant and  Weldon and myself as joint editors.  Buccaneer expeditions into many fields followed;  fights took place on many seas, but whether we had right or wrong, whether we  lost or won, we did produce some effect.  The climax culminating in Galton's preaching of Eugenics and his foundation of the Eugenics Professorship.  Did I say "culmination"?  No, that lies rather in the future, perhaps with Reichskanzler (sic) Hitler and his proposals to regenerate the German people.  In Germany a vast experiment is in hand, and some of you may live to see its results.  If it fails it will not be for want of enthusiasm, but rather because the Germans are only just starting the study of mathematical statistics in the modern sense.

It is clear from his entire speech that he saw the Nazi eugenics laws, which included the most infamous of the race laws and, included in the "vast experiment in hand" proposals for the murder of people seen as unfit and plans for driving out or expelling Jews from Germany, not to mention the conquest of other parts of Europe for German expansion, that he saw that as a "culmination" of the work in applied Darwinism which was eugenics.   If I had seen this before I saw Leonard Darwin's April, 1939 article in which he tied his father to the same Nazi eugenics I might not have found that as shocking as I did when I saw that.  It's clear that one of the foremost experts in Darwinism of his time made that connection in the applied, as perhaps distinguished from the more theoretical branch of natural selection which eugenics was.  Though as I proved there is no real difference as from the start of it, Darwin advocated his theory of natural selection be applied not only to animal husbandry but to the human population, seeing the human population in the same terms as animals kept for use under animal husbandry and the meat industry.  I have more than amply proven in the past that Pearson's thinking in eugenics as well as Galton's was entirely based on Darwin's theory of natural selection, as both of them repeatedly said over many decades.  He is the inspiration of it all, as HIS own words repeatedly accepted and endorsed.

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