Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Good Lord, Not That Lie That The Nazis Banned Haeckel Again!

In my opinion, Robert J. Richards of the University of Chicago, who I have read, is one of the most dishonest supposed scholars who writes in favor of the post-war Darwin myth, the lie in which he had nothing to do with the eugenics which, in indisputable fact, Darwin supported throughout the entire period after he first published his theory of natural selection.  Darwin supported what his own sons called "eugenics" after his cousin Francis Galton named the science he created out of natural selection, he supported Galton's eugenics as cited science.  Darwin supported what Galton said were his earliest eugenic writings and cited them positively in his own work, especially The Descent of Man.  He supported his own son's, George Darwin's early eugenic proposal published in that earliest source of of eugenic propaganda, Macmillan's magazine, for the involuntary dissolution of marriages if one of the couple were diagnosed with a mental illness, certainly one of the first proposed legal applications of natural selection and its logical product, eugenics, I'd guess the first one of those to be published.

If I put up links to support those points, the entire text would be red.

Most relevant in terms of Robert Richard's plaster St. Darwin propaganda, Darwin supported Ernst Heckel's eugenic and scientific-racist claims as science, lending them the kind of support that only Charles Darwin could give.  Those claims by Haeckel were made in Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation) a book which I believe Darwin praised beyond all of the contemporary works of science that he endorsed.  Darwin endorsed, accepted and also promoted, in the Descent of Man, in letters, etc.  the idea Haeckel introduced into the science of natural selection, the explicit claim that the extinction of named human ethnic groups would have a very healthy effect on those "superior" specimens that murdered them.  The kind of thing that most honest scholars of Ernst Haeckel will note marks him as one of the intellectual fathers of what would become, the very year of Haeckel's death, Nazism.  What has led some, such as Stephen Jay Gould to call Haeckel a proto-Nazi.

I suspect Robert Richards found that he couldn't get past Darwin's lavish endorsement of eugenics in Haeckel's work, up to and including what would become typical of Nazi ideology,  so Richards mounted a campaign to erect a phony Ernst Haeckel divorced from his proto-Nazi scientific claims and teachings, one which the Nazis rejected.  It worked so well for the focus of his style of revisionism, Darwin, why couldn't you peddle a de-Nazified Haeckel, as well?   It is one of the most blatantly dishonest things I've seen from recent decades, though it's hardly the only blatantly dishonest thing I've seen coming from men of science and academia who erected the post-war St. Darwin, the conventional allowable point of view within English language academic writing on this topic is chock full of lies that can be seen to be lies if one does that most basic of scholarly activities, reading the primary sources, especially the books and letters of Darwin, Haeckel, Galton, etc.  instead of relying on the frequently lying secondary, tertiary and more often cited sources in this area, the contribution of Darwinism to the Nazi genocides.  You have to go to the original sources as the secondary literature is so often dishonest in this area, especially that published after World War II.  Before the war I have not found any credible (or even less than credible) sources who make those dishonest claims.

One example of that which has been spread is the claim that the Nazis banned Haeckel's books when they were published and republished all through the Nazi period, many of the scientific figures in Nazism and those who had had a scientific education were students of Haeckel or specifically cited Haeckel's work as influencing their thinking.  Considering the number of those in the Nazi scientific establishment who had gone to The University of Jena, a place where Haeckel worked and where his influence and that of Darwinism was probably strongest*, it would be hard for that to not be true.  And Nazi publications published articles praising Ernst Haeckel in the most telling of terms.  Or, as I wrote in an update to a piece on this very topic of Haeckel revisionism flowing from Robert Richards:

Still gassing on about the alleged Nazi banning of all mention of Darwin and Haeckel?  I really don't have time to go looking to see if I can find it online but it would seem rather odd if they did, considering this from four years after the alleged banning of their books.

The official Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, published a tribute to Ernst Haeckel on the twentieth anniversary of Haeckel's death in August 1939. The article was entitled, "Um die Abstammung des Menschen: Zum 20. Jahrestage Ernst Haeckels" ("On the Descent of Man: For the Twentieth Anniversary of Ernst Haeckel['s death]"). The title and the article clearly avowed belief in human evolution and praised Haeckel for his evolutionary ideas.

Volkischer Beobachter was the official Nazi newspaper overseen by the Nazi head of propaganda, the vehemently anti-Christian, Alfred Rosenberg.   "Abstammung des Menschen" is, of course, the title that Victor Carus gave to his translation of Darwin's second major book on evolution, The Descent of Man, the book in which he said that if he had seen Ernst Haeckel's book, Naturlischer Schopfungsgeschichte before he'd gotten very far into the writing of Descent of Man, he probably wouldn't have finished his book because he was in pretty much complete agreement with everything Haeckel had said. 

*  It was a short post, for my posts on this topic, so I'll just re-post my piece of September 20, 2017

I am delighted to hear that you uphold the doctrine of the Modification of Species, and defend my views. The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.

Charles Darwin, letter to William Thierry Preyer, March 31, 1868

This part of your imposing investigations being free from arbitrary opinions (which it is impossible to avoid in any treatise on the origin of mankind) is sure, I think, to extend and to confirm Darwinism in the scientific world. Besides Jena there is no University in Germany where your theory is so openly confessed and publicly taught by so many professors. Häckel, Gegenbaur, Dohrn, Strasburger, W. Müller, myself: we are true Darwinians, in our lectures and writings

William Preyer,  letter to C. Darwin  April 27, 1871

Try an experiment, google "University of Jena hotbed of Nazi ideology" and see how many times the words come up. 

As to the current,  apparently blog-based myth that the Nazis banned Darwinism, that is totally contradicted by the fact that most of Ernst Haeckel's works - including those which Darwin, himself, said represented his thinking, most notably Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte  - were still being published in Nazi Germany right up to the end of the Nazi period.  Such eminent Nazi academics as Karl Astel, the Darwinist geneticist and rector at the University of Jena - just about all of the biologists, anthropologists, etc. in Germany who held their positions all during the Nazi period were Darwinists - was one of the founders of the Ernst Haeckel Society during the war, in 1941.  He and the co-founder of the society, Gerhard Heberer (both a conventional Darwinian biologist and an SS officer)  invited high placed Nazis to be honorary members of it.  One of those, Nazi Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, wrote to Martin Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg to get their approval, which they gave. 

That myth is a blatant lie which depends on the obscurity, in English, of the disproof of it but that barrier is going to be less useful to telling those as that disproof is translated and publicized in English.  It also depends on the ignorance of historical and text-based scholarship by people who, somehow, get college credentials without ever learning how those work.  And, surprisingly, not all of them seem to come from the STEM subjects.  Though those who should know better might just be telling convenient lies.

Update:  Looking at my notes, I forgot one of the most obvious proofs that the Nazis didn't ban Haeckel or his books, in 1939 the Nazi Ministry of Education funded the renovation of the previously somewhat neglected Haeckel Haus, the primary house-museum and archive dedicated to the elevation of Ernst Haeckel as a figure in science and culture.  Its director at the time, Victor Franz, was effusive in his thanks to the Nazi Ministry for reviving the reputation and position of Ernst Haeckel at the time.  

I have seen things claimed on atheist and science blogs online that I don't think came from Robert Richards distortion and outright lies about his guy, Haeckel, but a lot of it obviously originated in his hagiographic biography, A Tragic Sense of Life.  If you want to see the evidence of the proto-Nazi quality of Haeckel's Darwinism, all you have to do is read the books I've cited here, The History of Creation (translated into English by one of Darwin's closest associates, Ray Lankester)  The Riddle of Life (translated by one of the early Brit professional atheists, Joseph McCabe) and many of his other writings most of which are either available in the original German or in accurate English translation by his and Darwin's admirers.   The distortions of Richards' version of Haeckel and, even more so, that current on atheist-sciency blogs, are obvious as are his advocating ideas which the Nazis later took up and put into practice in their genocides.  I've seen some claim that Haeckel was the one to introduce the idea of infanticide of the disabled into mainstream German scientific discourse, it's certainly one of the things which the Nazis practiced, as is Haeckel's advocacy for murdering the disabled of all ages. 

17 comments:

  1. It's clear U.S. eugenics laws informed the Nazis on " how to do it," and equally clear we flushed that history down the memory hole the moment we entered the war.

    Anti-semitism was real in Europe, but it's become a convenient dodge for excusing ourselves from any connection to the atrocities of the holocaust. Donne was right: no man is an island, and none of us are wholly innocent, especially as nations.

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    1. That piece I wrote the other day about the difference in how theology has dealt with the fact of the Shoah as opposed to just about every other field, taking on an incredibly disproportionate blame for something which was, in every way, a violation of The Law, The Prophets, The Gospel, the Epistles, even the largest part of even medieval and early-modern religious writing and which was, in fact, motivated, planned and carried out on the basis of science and technology, theorized in biological science and the would-be science of such things as linguistics is one of those things I wrote that feels to me like a breakthrough in my understanding. It is one of the hugest of ironies, the hugest of academic-intellectual lies that the very things which created the Shoah are given a total and complete pass while the thing which the Nazis wanted to wipe out due to its Jewishness, including Christianity, has taken the fall for it.

      Of course it's a moral as well as intellectual necessity that theology addresses the Shoah, but those moral and intellectual necessities are certainly stronger in science and more general academic-intellectual culture because the very ideas the Nazis created the Shoah from are still current and flourishing within science, etc. The current situation discredits the one force which has addressed the immorality of those ideas while encouraging those fields which maintain those ideas, it is a guarantee it will happen again, if not to the groups the Nazis selected (selection being the act of Darwinism) then others so chosen.

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  2. Contemporary 21st century Eugenics -- a movement that has attracted devotees numbering in the mid-two figures on the East Coast alone!!!

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    1. I'm not surprised that you're that ignorant. If you were in Germany in 1933 you'd be telling people how you and satire were going to laugh Hitler into the dustbin of history.

      You're not only a liar, you are entirely ignorant.

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  3. So -- in 2018 Eugenics is the sensation that's sweeping the nation?

    A grateful people thank you for your vigilance, Sparky!

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    1. Have you ever heard the names, Trump, Bannon, Miller, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, . . .

      If you want to go on proving you're everything I've accused you and your idiot college-credentialed play-left of being, I'm not only powerless to stop you, I'd encourage you to keep providing examples of it.

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  4. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-warns-evangelicals-of-violence-if-gop-loses-in-the-midterms/ar-BBMA2Fc?ocid=ob-fb-enus-280



    Obviously, atheism is the main threat to our noble democracy.

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    1. Yeah, anyone can see what faithful Christians they are.

      That racket is a racket, it's not religion. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them, like Jim Jones were actually atheists. Do you really believe Jay Sekulow is telling the truth about what he believes?

      I'm writing a post on that meeting. It will appear in the next few days

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  5. "Have you ever heard the names, Trump, Bannon, Miller, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, . . ."

    All of them anti-choice, BTW, which kinda sinks your idiot point.

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    1. The Nazis made it illegal for Aryans to have abortions.

      You fathead, a. eugenics comes in a number of different forms, all having the goal of eliminating people from the human future. Those take their earliest forms in the kinds of economic and social inequality that Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, the fucking Fabians, Karl Pearson. . . the Nazis advocated and practiced. b. ALL OF IT WAS BASED ON BEING ANTI-CHOICE EXCEPT FOR CHOICE FOR THEIR FAVORED ELITES. I have noted that it is one of the larger ironies of today that the official anti-evolution side, the Republican-fascists are the greatest advocates of Darwinian economics and social policy. Excluding people from targeted ethnic groups was one of the most potent features of actual eugenics, everything from the exclusion of people (such as Karl Pearson's advocacy of excluding Polish and Russian Jews from Britain, a policy which the American eugenicists, such as Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin etc. had far more success in implimenting, one of the reasons that the St. Louis was turned back so the Jews on it died).

      Dopey, you don't now this issue, just as you don't know anything much else. I'm not singling you out, most of the idiots with degrees like those at Eschaton only know dribblings in the lying, ideology based secondary, tertiary, etc. junk scholarship on this issue tells them. No one who educates themselves on this issue could possibly have the common received position of the English speaking, college-credentialed set because literally everything about the primary documentation refutes that. I was as ignorant as you are - well, as the typical ignorant college-credentialed English speaker is - till I fact checked that lying myth. I do think I have actually supported every single thing I said about it.

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    2. I am pressed for time so I should have continued that second paragraph to note that eugenics was entirely compatible with being anti-choice in the most radical way. Karl Pearson documented that his idol, Francis Galton and Charles Darwin opposed the use of contraception. As I've pointed out in his correspondence with G. A. Gaskell, Darwin explicitly rejected Gaskell's proposal of coerced contraception as a less inhumane alternative to Darwin's violent, deadly "struggle for life". In doing so, in that correspondence, Darwin favored imperial conquest and extermination, Brits replacing those groups to be wiped out as a positive boon for the future of the human species and the world. If Charles Darwin were alive in April 1939, as his son Leonard was writing an encomium to Nazi eugenics in the Eugenics Review, he'd have signed onto it because they did exactly what he advocated. Though, given Disraeli's position in Brit political history and repute, he'd have had misgivings about any sufficiently European Jews being included. I have no doubt he'd have little problem with their targeting any sufficently "Asian".

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  6. Listening to BBC World Service, they had a story about Germany and Namibia. Seems in 1904 Germans committed what is now considered the first act of genocide, slaughtering Namibians for reasons I didn't pay close attention to. But this slaughter led to a heavy trade in human body parts; German "racial anthropologists" wanted brains and skulls, specifically (I think this was in "The Mismeasure of Man," but it's been too long since I read that), to study and find "proof" the Namibians were an "inferior race."

    Pretty much the way the Nazis treated Jews within their borders a mere thirty years later. Coincidence? I think not. And you can't really say there was any anti-semitism involved in Namibia.

    It was probably an easy sell, the persecution of Jews. Easy propaganda. It was also clearly a "scientific" effort, to "prove" the superiority of "Aryans." That idea had deep roots in a separate plant, and Jews in Germany were closer than Africans in Namibia, and as easy as homosexuals, gypsies, and the infirm, to demonize.

    History just refuses to stay simple and monolithic.

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    1. I've written about that genocide, it's the one in which Eugen Fischer, one of the three authors of the biology text Hitler used while he wrote Mein Kampf, played the role that one of his students would later play, Mengele.

      The ideological claim of some Jewish intellectuals that the Nazi's murder of Jews was different and the not too subtle claim that to talk about it in relation to their other genocidal programs, against the disabled, the Roma, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, was wrong, at least, claimed to be, itself, an act of antisemitism, even Holocaust denial, in some extreme cases, was ironic, not least because they practice exactly the same kind of classification of people by race and ethnicity,on Darwinian human valuation that the Nazis based their genocides on. As I pointed out, they even classified the disabled Germans they murdered as "USELESS eaters".

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  7. Ah yes. Contemporary Republicans don’t claim pro-choice Liberals are eugenicists.

    Got it, schmucko.

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    1. A. while no eugenicists are liberals in the traditional American meaning of "liberal" (what I call "real liberals") there are lots of eugenicists who are liberal in the European meaning of the word, which is often called "neo-liberalism".

      B. Republicans are fucking liars, idiot, they'll say anything, why you're a lot more like them than you'd ever want anyone to notice.

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  8. "It is one of the hugest of ironies, the hugest of academic-intellectual lies that the very things which created the Shoah are given a total and complete pass while the thing which the Nazis wanted to wipe out due to its Jewishness, including Christianity, has taken the fall for it. "

    Ah, yes. The Nazis wanted to wipe out Jews because the Jews were Christians. Who doesn't know that?

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    1. Your ignorance of the stated intention of the Nazis is typical. They were explicit about their post-war plans to destroy Christianity was known from at least the time that the allies captured their documents. While you were reading comic books, I was reading things like the OSS report of July 6, 1945, The Nazi Master Plan Annex 4. The Persecution of the Christian Churches. It's posted by Cornel (the copy I'd read was posted by Rutgers, maybe if you'd studied hard enough to go to a state school instead of Kornflake Kollege, they'd have encouraged you to read adult stuff)

      http://hydrastg.library.cornell.edu/fedora/objects/nur:00773/datastreams/pdf/content

      That you don't know anything about the Nazi persecution of anyone but Jews is not surprising, I don't find you know much about the persecution of the Jews, either. Hollywood hasn't gone into the topic in any depth. Even the deepest Hollywood movies on the topic are of minimal informative value.

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