One of the more constant cliches I've had hurled at me in writing about the depravity of Darwinism is "keep digging". Which, obviously is what I have done, only the results aren't what Darwin's Defenders had hoped for. And I would recommend digging deeper to anyone who wants to argue about it, not ignoring the primary record of scientific writing and citations of it in para-scientific writing, especially as applied in law and policy. Ignorance of the history of science, in this case the history of Darwinism, is no secure basis for making any stand. Though a lot of that was like lumps of poisonous metal not needing to be mined, it was lying right there on the surface, in plain sight, ignored or merely covered with the thinnest of sheets.
The scandal of the blatant scientific antisemitism of Kevin Macdonald and John Hartung was not hidden IT WAS THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF THEIR SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS WHICH WERE REVIEWED AND ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION IN SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS IN THE LATE 20TH AND EARLY 21ST CENTURIES, even as in poplar culture "never again" became a popular statement and movies about the Holocaust were in theaters. (As an aside, I don't know if my earlier citation of Macdonalds CV had anything to do with it but you apparently can't access it from his website, anymore. I believe I copied it while available, though I have lost that. Always back-up.)
The worst aspect of the scandal wasn't that some ultraDarwinists were making racist comments, racism is an intrinsic part of Darwinism from the 1860s, in print, no doubt in the very mind of Darwin as he certainly considered his theory in terms of his own racism as he was formulating it.* The scandal is that in the post-war period, as the history of American and Canadian and other eugenics, including German eugenics, which includes the death industrial complex of the Nazis, fully informed by all of the STEM disciplines were extensively documented and written about, reviewed scientific publications didn't hesitate in the least in publishing something that could have certainly fit right in in pre-war science that informed that industry. I would bet you anything that if you put it in the correct, current Darwinian language that such a thing will happen again.
In short, they, sounding like the worst of Darwinian racists from the period up to and including as the Nazis were fomenting their biopolitics, their thanatopolitics** found that they could be published with scientific review, in scientific journals.
As I recommended last week, go read how Karl Pearson, one of the most renowned and influential scientists of his time was coming up with ingenious means, using a scale used in the first genocide of the 20th century, in East Africa, citing the war-criminal inventor of it, for promoting the exclusion, the discrimination against the very Polish and Russian Jews who a mere 14 years after their scientific study was published in Britain were being shot into trenches by the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia and elsewhere East of Germany. My guess is that the scientific establishment in Britain, American and, no doubt Germany, didn't imagine anyone concluding that those Jews, who Pearson and his co-author Margaret Moul were so concerned would develop into a parasitic (they used the term in their paper) force on British society, would be seen the same way in Germany by a biopolitical party who were quite prepared to engage in a "struggle for life" which, as all struggles for life, struggles for existence will, includes many, many deaths. We certainly have people as ready to do that here, they certainly have such people in Britain or in practically every country who would eagerly embody Karl Pearson and Charles Darwin's concept of winners in such a "struggle for life".
Clearly, science didn't learn much that it cared about from that test of time of the ideas behind it all. Clearly, a lot of people in the general society haven't, either. Most of them considered to be educated and enlightened. Some of them with excellent personal, family reasons to have dug deeper into it.
* If you doubt that Darwin was a racist read the one book which is the only one of his books which many of his most ardent admirers have opened, The Voyage of the Beagle. And they're something like intellectuals among Darwinists as most of them haven't even gone to the bother of looking even at that most popular and least scientific of his books. Go look up his descriptions of the Fuegians. As for his clear preference of inequality among people,
The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals, whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial governments. For instance, the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders,—who, although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved. At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power.
If you go on to read more of him, look at The Descent of Man to see that the racism on display in Beagle didn't lessen as he - and it should never be forgotten that he was a British aristocrat at the height of British imperialism - developed his theory of natural selection out of Malthusian depravity. I'd say the chances of a British aristocrat "discovering" that equality was beneficial was somewhat far less than fifty-fifty.
Hidden beneath his fantasy about "some chief [who] shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage" is certainly a claim that violent conflict, no doubt with death and the threat of death, would lead the survivors to a higher state by virtue of inequality expressed in violence. The intellectual granddad of Nazism and contempt for equality under law and economic justice. As I said, it didn't get better when he expressed his preferences in terms meant to be scientific, in natural selection.
** If you think that "never again" was a lesson universally learned at such great cost through the Nazi death industry, you couldn't be more wrong. Google "thanatopolitics" and look at what scholars using that word today are writing in such glib terms in academic, scholastic writing and writing that attempts to ape their language. Here, from "The Funambulist" which is apparently dedicated to the scholarly consideration of "the politics of space and bodies". "Cruel Designs: The Thantopolitics of the Death Penalty"
This notion emerges from the observation that death is “at work” and that there are therefore only two possible ways of dealing with it: acceleration or deceleration of the death process. Biopolitics therefore involves by definition its counterpart (one might say that there are the same), thanatopolitics. The administration of toxicity in the context of food production (an important part of biopolitics) or society’s infrastructure (pollution) or its risk factor (nuclear accidents), is what I include in this thanatopolitics that a given society has to organize to either administrate the acceleration or the deceleration of the death process.
Consider that as you remember how reviewed science journals and academic publishers so readily published Macdonald and Hartung's writings about the alleged scientific, Darwinian character of Jews. The article continues:
Although one can see how biopolitics cannot escape from thanatopolitics, death penalty corresponds to thanatopolitics that escapes from biopolitics, and therefore brings us back to a premodern mode of sovereignty. It would be however inaccurate to think that the conditions of the execution are also considered in the logic of the premodern era. The shift of this era toward our era was also marked by the invention of a thanato-technology in order to administrate death in a more efficient way, efficiency being one the key notion of this new mode of sovereignty. In Les corps vils: Expérimenter sur les êtres humains au XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Vile Bodies: Experimenting on Human Beings in 18th and 19th century) about which I will soon dedicate an entire article, Grégoire Chamayou introduces the genesis of the guillotine that remained the technology of the execution in France until 1981, when death penalty was abolished (my translation): . . .
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