Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

8: Social Darwinism

Biology was called upon to explain inequality, particularly by those who felt themselves destined for superiority.

Eric Hobsbawm

The Copernican Principle

In his long years of reflection, it had become patent to Charles Darwin that the human being was a product of nature just like any other organism, an animal among animals, even if possibly a special one. If so, Homo sapiens had to obey the same laws of nature, the chief one being the general competition for survival, as an individual within the species and as part of a species among rival species. The struggle for life was an inevitable, constant condition of life in all circumstances and at all moments. The law of life was bellum omnium versus omnes: the war of all against all.

“Darwin encourages us to study ourselves in the same way we would study any other species,” writes Tim Lewens. “We should see the human capacities which have fascinated philosophers as the products of evolutionary processes, capacities whose functions have been modified over time, and which still bear the marks of earlier roles. These capacities have shaped our physical, biological and social environments, and they have been shaped by those environments.”¹

David Barash puts it in plainer language: “Plants that commit rape and bacteria that spoil food are following evolutionary strategies that maximize their fitness. And, clearly, in neither case do the actors know what they are doing, or why. We human beings like to think that we are different. … The world of reproducing beings seems ridden with selfishness and conflict. It is a world of individualists [i.e. egoists], each wanting to get ahead. It is a world in which everyone is set apart – mate from mate, brother from brother, parents from children. It is a world in which even love is a strategy and each of us is very, very much alone. But, like it or not, it is our world, created by the same genes that created us and all the rest of life.”² As Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, tells us, we are “just as much an animal as any other species … The forest ape that became a ground ape that became a hunting ape that became a territorial ape has become a cultural ape.”³

The pleasure positivist scientists draw from debasing the human being – they see this as putting it in its right place – is intriguing, if only because all those learned persons, being human, are appraising themselves also. This revised evaluation of the human is called ‘the Copernican principle’ or ‘the principle of mediocrity’, formulated by Stephen Hawking as follows: “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred billion galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.”

The fact that the humans in all parts of the world have up to now ranked themselves as the highest kind of being, as the lords and leaders of creation, is branded by Tim Lewens as “hubris”, a Greek word meaning ‘excessive pride’. Lewens writes: “Darwin’s view also exposes, in the eyes of many, a kind of hubris that our species has been prone to. We are not distinct from nature, we do not ride above it, and neither are we evolution’s greatest work … Darwin is sometimes portrayed as one of a series of revolutionary thinkers who have exposed the modesty of man’s position. Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, but merely one of many planets revolving around the Sun. Darwin shows that Man is not a species apart from nature or above it, but, like all species, one among many of the branches of the tree of life. Darwin shows us that our self-image needs cutting down to size. Our species is unique, but uniqueness is ubiquitous in nature.”⁴

Social Darwinism

Simultaneously the opinion was abroad of the superiority of the white ‘race’. This racist, quasi-religious feeling of superiority, associated with the conviction that the task of the white Europeans consisted in civilizing the world, was at the time an inherent factor of European culture. “What at present we find abominably racist in the texts of Gobineau, Vacher de Lapouge, Darwin, Haeckel, Buchner, Vogt, Gumplowicz, and others, was at the time the dominant opinion, so commonplace that hardly anybody thought of criticizing it, neither on the left or on the right.”⁵

“More to the point, Darwin was happy to describe races in terms of higher and lower, and he had no qualms about likening the lower human races to the higher apes. He believed that the whites were the highest of all races.” In The Descent of Man, he wrote: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”⁶

Racial superiority complexes are generally associated with the horrors of Nazism and other kinds of strutting fascism. It is little known that at the time the racially most pretentious were the Anglo-Saxons. “The superiority of the Indo-Europeans – nowadays one tends to forget this – was not only a characteristic of the blond Germans, but also of the Anglo-Saxons. At the time there was even a veritable fashion of Anglo-Saxon superiority.” (Pichot⁷) In the genealogical tree of the Indo-Germanic races as drawn by Ernst Haeckel during Darwin’s lifetime,⁸ the Anglo-Saxons occupy the top, on the same level as the High Germans, which is rather surprising, for the famous Herr Professor Haeckel was a super-nationalistic Pan-German. That some of the Anglo-Saxons were then at the peak of their colonial expansion, might be kept in mind. (And all this explains Charles Darwin’s satisfaction when the Beagle dropped anchor in Sidney: “My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.”)

“By formulating the principle of the struggle for life and of natural selection,” writes Pichot, “Darwin has not only revolutionized biology and natural philosophy, he has also transformed political science. … The idea of applying Darwinism to the human society and politics has been immediate.”⁹ This goes to show how sudden was the impact of the Darwinian revolution, and how Darwin had brought into the open ideas which were ripening in the back of many minds. In the struggle for life, or for superiority of any kind (political, national, economical, cultural, racial) it was the natural law and therefore the inborn right of the best and brightest to win and to lord it over the others. The principle was simple, the urge generally innate, the execution in the present and the future as imperative as it had been in the past.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) led as it were a parallel life to that of Charles Darwin. He is mostly remembered for his pithy formula of the “struggle for life”, inserted by Darwin into the title of his Origin. Spencer was nonetheless a great synthetic thinker who, all by himself, tried to give thought to what the nineteenth British century, the Victorian Age, represented. “The basis for Spencer’s appeal to many of his generation was that he appeared to offer a ready-made system of belief which could substitute for conventional religious faith at a time when orthodox creeds were crumbling under the advances of modern science. Spencer’s philosophical system seemed to demonstrate that it was possible to believe in the ultimate perfection of humanity on the basis of advanced scientific conceptions such as the first law of thermodynamics and biological evolution.”¹⁰

The nineteenth century in western Europe was synonymous with the progress of humanity, and Spencer was called “the great exponent of Victorian optimism.” He was, although now overlooked, one of those figures who dedicated their life to the advent of a new era, and his voluminous writings contributed to composing the new self-view of humanity, gradually replacing the traditional Christian view. No wonder that he was accepted as a member of Huxley’s “X Club”. His First Principles of a New System of Philosophy appeared in 1862. “Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated homogeneity to a complex, differentiated heterogeneity, while being accompanied by a process of greater integration of the differentiated parts.”¹¹ This sounds Lamarckian, and, indeed, Spencer would basically remain a follower of Lamarck all his life, while grudgingly integrating natural selection into his worldview. Thus do the intricacies of human history combine in weaving the tapestries leading to the future.

The earliest and chief promoter of social Darwinism in France was the translator of The Origin of Species, Clémence Royer. In the extensive preface to her translation, published in 1862, she predicted that Darwin’s discovery would without any doubt be more important from the social standpoint that from the biological, and she launched into a vehement diatribe against the Christian religion and democracy. “The law of natural selection, applied to humanity, makes us perceive, with amazement and pain, how wrong our political and civil laws have been up to now, as has been our religious morality.” And she goes on to defend eugenics, favouring the strong and suppressing the weak. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, despite being a Frenchman, had a profound influence on the German racist thought and literature of the time. He wrote: “As soon as The Origin of Species was published, the clear-thinking minds understood that not only those ideas about history and the evolution of our societies, but the foundations of morality and politics could no longer remain what they had been until then.”¹²

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) played in Germany a role comparable in many aspects to that of Spencer in Great Britain (and Auguste Comte in France), strengthened by his stature as a university professor. He was the main propagator of Darwinism, which he interpreted as a framework for a universal philosophy based on science. Just like Comte and Spencer before him, he projected a vision which resembled a religion. He proposed to fuse the inorganic with the organic and bring them under one law, but both were still in the rudimentary phases of scientific exploration. (The cell was supposed to be nothing but a blob of plasm, and the existence of the atom was still controversial.) Science as the a-religious religion of human progress was the keynote of the nineteenth century. It would lead to the perfect society of perfected human beings, ‘supermen’ in one of several variations imagined and longed-for at the time, of which Nietzsche’s is the best known.¹³

Although the ideas of these once prominent people have been overtaken by the enormous expansion of the sciences, and have faded into the background of our awareness together with their authors, their contributions to the foundations of our world are considerable. Comte’s positivism is still alive in contemporary thought; Spencer defined the social sciences; Royer helped detaching our world from the medieval world; and Haeckel is still discussed for his ‘recapitulation theory’ which says that the growth of an organism (ontogeny) repeats the evolutionary development of its kind or species (phylogeny). But, as mentioned before, Haeckel was “a polemical German-nationalistic chauvinist,” for whose attitude the following quotation from the beginning of the Great War may suffice: “One fully-trained German warrior has a higher intellectual and moral life-value than hundreds of the crude nature-people whom England, France, Russia and Italy put up against him.”¹⁴

Practicing Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism set the tone in the worsening tensions between the European nations in the last decades of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. Haeckel’s voice was but a typical one among many in every sizable nation. Darwinism equipped each government to whatever it claimed – territory, markets, science, technical innovation, cultural superiority – with a ‘scientific’ justification. For the struggle for life was the law of the world; the victor proved he was the best and therefore entitled to the spoils. “All the warmongers of that time – and there were many – made Darwinism and its social applications their own … One should recall how much, and in what ways, Darwinism had an impact on the biology at the end of the nineteenth century. Struggle, rivalry and natural superiority had become universal explanations, and this in all domains.”¹⁵

The following quotes belong to a mentality from a former era – except when one translates them into a present context. (For, as Vacher de Lapouge asked,

how can the world change if humanity does not?) In his Principles of Sociology, Herbert Spencer wrote: “We have to recognize that the struggle for life among the societies has been the instrument of their evolution. … The basis of social cooperation is the combined effort for attack and defense; it is from this kind of cooperation that all other kinds ensue. It is no doubt impossible to legitimize the horrors caused by this universal antagonism which, starting with the chronic wars between small groups ten thousand years ago, has led to the big battles between great nations. However, one must recognize that, without these horrors, the world would still only be inhabited by men of the weaker type, seeking shelter in caves and living from raw food. … The inter-social struggle for life has been an indispensable condition for the evolution of the societies. … We recognize that we are indebted to war for the formation of the great societies and the development of their organizations.”

Ernest Renan, the great historian and expert in near-Eastern cultures, especially known for his Vie de Jésus (1863, life of Jesus), was also a social Darwinian, to which testify the following words of his. “If the foolishness, the negligence, the laziness and the lack of foresight of the nations did not cause them to fight each other, if would be difficult to say to what degree of debasement the human species would descent. Seen in this way, war is one of the conditions of progress, the whiplash which prevents a nation to fall asleep by forcing the mediocre mass of its citizens, satisfied with themselves, to wake up from their apathy. The day humanity would become a big Roman empire, living in peace and not having any enemies at its borders anymore, would be the day when its morals and its intellect would run the greatest danger.”

In conclusion, these are the words of an early critic of social Darwinism, Jacques Novicow, who wrote in 1910: “Darwinism has profited from the archaic instincts of brutality, so deeply ingrained in the brains of the traditionalists, the conformists and the ignoramuses of whom still consists, unfortunately, the immense majority of the human race. When the Darwinian theories came in fashion, Marshall von Moltke [the epitome of Prussian militarism] could write with a glimmer of scientific justification that war, in other words collective homicide, ‘was in agreement with the order of things established by God’, because this ‘order established by God’ corresponded to perfection with the formulation of the ‘laws of nature’ as used by the positivists and Darwinians.”¹⁶

Breeding a Superman

Looking back on the amazing story of discoveries, controversies, search, dedication, endurance, obstinacy, intelligence and invention, we find that the impulse at the core of the biological sciences, as of all science, was the aspiration to find out the truth of things, the reality behind the appearances of which the world of the humans consists. The myth of creationism could no longer be upheld as infallible truth against reason and its discoveries in geology, paleontology, anatomy and the global exploratory excursions of the naturalists, all fitting within the intuition behind the chain of being and Linnaeus classification. These facts of life, in their turn, matched with the general experience of the law of life which was the law of the strongest, “the survival of the fittest,” effective among all organisms and among the humans as far as memory could look back. The law of the strongest was ostensibly also the law of the best, of positive physical and mental characteristics running in families and races, and dominant of equally inheritable negative characteristics. Always there were strong and there were weak, noble and ignoble, winners and losers, conquerors and conquered, healthy and unhealthy, intelligent and dull, well-shaped and deformed. In some societies such categories and sub-categories were even fixed by laws allegedly issued by some Divine Authority.

Eugenics, the ‘science’ of breeding better animals and humans, was an application of social Darwinism, referable to Charles Darwin himself, who wrote in his Descent of Man: “The surgeon may harden himself when performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound [a questionable statement]; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body and mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.”¹⁷

These words could have been written by a fully fledged eugenicist. Still Darwin’s epigones maintain that he recognized the principle of eugenics but refrained from advocating its implementation. It is true that such an equivocal attitude was typical for the inveterate hedger that Darwin was, shunning controversy and even more so when after 1859 the criticisms came in and he kept revising the Origin of Species. He proclaimed natural selection but included Lamarckism in his considerations, e.g. writing about “the effects of the increased use and disuse of parts, which I have always maintained to be highly important.” (“Use and disuse of parts” is a signal concept of Lamarckism.) As to evolutionary progress, about which he had doubts, he also writes: “As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.”¹⁸ He brought down the human being among the animals, but concluded the Origin with a much-quoted phrase about “the grandeur” of his view of life. And in spite of his enormous struggle to become an agnostic, he brought back a “Creator” in the subsequent editions of his major opus. One can fully understand his vacillating position in the trying historical circumstances; but the sophistry of many of his disciples, when buttressing their statements with quotes from Darwin’s “nebulous” doctrine, is often annoying.

The pseudo-scientific doctrines of social Darwinism and eugenics have had dire consequences in real life. The former justified the attitudes of peoples and nations which would lead to the First World War; the latter was the ‘science’ which justified the maiming, sequestration and extermination of thousands and even millions of human beings. This, of course, was something Darwin could not so much as have imagined, and for which he was as little responsible as Friedrich Nietzsche was for Nazism. It is also important to correct the common opinion that all this started with him. In previous chapters we have seen that evolution was in the air, and that Darwinism became the flag under which evolution conquered the thought and self-view of humanity because so many different theories could assemble under it. Proof of this is that Alfred Wallace, basing himself on the same ideas, reached the same conclusions. But also swimming in the same intellectual waters were Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and many others now less well remembered.

The father of eugenics is generally considered to have been Francis Galton (1822-1911), a relative of Charles Darwin. He published a first sketch of his theory of “eugenics” in 1865 and a full elaboration of it in 1869, in a book titled Hereditary Genius. He coined the word itself from the Greek ‘eu-genès’ which means ‘well-born’. One of his definitions of eugenics was “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”¹⁹ This abstract, innocent sounding words need some clarification. In practice eugenics was much more than “study,” it was an implementation, often by law, of measures supposedly based on science to uphold and promote the purity of the human race and to counteract anything that might contribute to its degradation. ‘Positive eugenics’ consisted in the encouragement of the reproduction of males and females of good stock; ‘negative eugenics’ was intended to prevent the reproduction of males and females who were thought to be of defective stock.

If this sounds suspiciously like the breeding of animals, the suspicion is to the point. Galton himself wrote: “A man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”²⁰ Edwin Black, in his book War on the Weak – Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, writes that the advocates of eugenics were primarily plant and animal breeders (besides the biological scientists and medical doctors). He quotes some of their enunciations: “The principles of heredity are the same in man and hogs and sun-flowers. – Every race-horse, every straight-backed bull, every premium pig tells us what we can do and what we must do for man. – The result of suppressing the poorest and breeding from the best would be the same for men as for cattle and sheep.”²¹

The problem lay in the fact that eugenics was not a real science. What was true for the study of evolution as a whole, was also true for its applications: social Darwinism and eugenics could not be a real science as long as the mechanism of heredity remained unknown. Degenerated traits – to be blocked by negative eugenic measures – were supposed to be alcoholism, sexual perversion, blindness, criminality, cretinism, and feeble-mindedness in its many aspects, for which the term “moron” became fashionable. It is obvious that these specifications were much more inspired by social and moralistic norms than by science.

Stronger still than morals and social standards was the age-old instinct behind the pitiless eugenic customs and laws in ancient societies. The healthy, strong and harmoniously built (among the own people) have always been admired and favoured, as they still are in our own time. Plato made eugenics one of the pillars of his Republic. Infanticide of the physically defective and superfluous has always been a widespread practice, and in Sparta, the classical example of authoritarian states, an obligation. “The Twelve Tables of the Roman Law, established early in the formation of the Roman Republic, stated in the fourth table that deformed children must be put to death. In addition, patriarchs in Roman society were given the right to ‘discard’ infants at their discretion.”²² These examples are taken only from Western history in relatively recent times.

The aforementioned may have reminded the reader of Nazi Germany and its genocidal extermination of the ‘degenerated’, animal-like Jews and Gypsies. It should now be clear, however, that the cradle of the doctrine of eugenics was not Germany but Britain. Pichot writes that in the first decades of the twentieth century “most of the geneticists and biologists” (including all scientists we have encountered thus far) supported eugenics, to the point of turning it into a religion. Galton had already written “Eugenics has become a faith. It must become a religious belief.” Julian Huxley will write in 1936: “Once all the consequences of evolutionary biology will be found out, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future.” And Julian Huxley, president to be of UNESCO, “will write in 1941, at the moment that the Nazis in their experimental gas chambers killed the mentally ill while the whole world was watching, that eugenics was an integral part of the religion of the future.” Pichot comments wryly: “At the time humanism was simply not what it is today.”²³

“Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor …”

Volumes have been written about all the prominent scientists who were active eugenicists, also in France, where a militant and racist nationalism will find its voice during the years of the nation-splitting Dreyfus Affair, and lead to collaboration with Hitler under the Vichy regime. Still, the following statement by Edwin Black will no doubt come as a surprise to many: “The Nazi principle of Nordic superiority was not hatched in the Third Reich but on Long Island decades earlier.”²⁴ Long Island is part of New York State in the United States of America. “Eugenics was conceived at the onset of the twentieth century and implemented by America’s wealthiest, most powerful and most learned men against the nation’s most vulnerable and helpless. Eugenicists sought to methodically terminate all the racial and ethnic groups, and social classes, they disliked or feared. It was nothing less than America’s legalized campaign to breed a super race – and not just any super race. Eugenicists wanted a purely Germanic and Nordic super race, enjoying biological dominion over all others.”²⁵

The formation of the eugenic thought in Britain must be seen against the background of the industrial revolution which caused a sudden increase of the plebeian population, Marx’ ‘proletariat’, in the towns. The living conditions of these poor people were appalling; illness (tuberculosis), alcoholism and illiteracy were rife among them. Thus was created a divide between the well-to-do and healthy on the one hand, and the poor and ‘degenerate’ on the other, all ranked within the typical and distinct British framework of class consciousness, which one finds back in the eugenic thought. Ronald Fisher, for instance, the mathematical evolutionist, is characterized by Edward Larson as having had “a stunning facility for mathematics and a brooding preoccupation with breeding better Britons,”²⁶ at a time that the British Union Jack ruled the oceans and considerable parts of the continents.

The general situation in the USA was quite different. There the industrial revolution had only an indirect effect. The direct occasion of the eugenic movement in the USA were the “eighteen million refugees and opportunity-seeking immigrants who arrived between 1890 and 1920: German Lutherans, Irish Catholics, Russian Jews, Slavonic Orthodox.” They were uprooted, poor, spoke incomprehensible tongues, had suffered, looked dirty, were ill. “They did not mix or melt; for the most part they remained insoluble.” It was with them in mind that Charles Davenport, chief USA eugenicist, wrote: “Can we build a wall high enough around this country so as to keep out these cheaper races, or will it be a feeble dam leaving it to our descendants to abandon the country to the blacks, browns and yellows, and seek asylum in New Zealand?”²⁷ This tone and tune were quite different from the famous lines by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” graven on a tablet in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

White, Caucasian, Protestant, Nordic, long-skulled (brachycephalic), blonde, blue-eyed – America’s first eugenic propagandists believed that Germanics and Nordics comprised the supreme race, and that was what they wanted to preserve and promote. Race mixing was considered race degeneration, “mongrelization,” corruption necessarily ending in race suicide. From Oscar McCulloch’s Blood of a Nation (1902) onwards the purity of the blood (again a rather unscientific idea) became sacred. Every drop of inferior blood in a person’s veins made him descend lower and lower in the racial scale. “The vast fortunes of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Harriman financed unprecedented eugenic research and lobbying organizations that developed international reach. … Eugenics rocketed through academia, becoming an institution virtually overnight. By 1914 some forty-four major institutions offered eugenic instruction. Within a decade that number would swell to hundreds. … The state of Indiana became the first jurisdiction in the world to legislate forced sterilization of its mentally impaired patients, poorhouse residents and prisoners. The practice would crisscross the United States,”²⁸ and rapidly spread through the entire world.

For “Eugenics targeted all mankind, so of course its scope was global. American eugenic evangelists spawned similar movements and practices throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. Forced sterilization laws and regiments took root on every continent. Each local American eugenic ordinance or statute was promoted internationally as yet another precedent to be emulated by the international movement. A tightly-knit network of mainstream medical and eugenical journals, international meetings and conferences [^1912 London, 1921 and 1931 New York] kept the generals and soldiers of eugenics up to date and armed their nation’s next legislative opportunity.”²⁹

The main target of the supremacist white Americans, far superior to all those strange and suspect people who came to live on what they considered their soil, were of course the dark-skinned people, the Negroes, now called Blacks or African-Americans. “The cross between a white man and an [American-] Indian is an Indian, the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro.” American-Indians there were few and they lived mainly on reservations; African-American there were many and you found them not only in the South but more and more everywhere. Racists – the whole Western way of thinking was Eurocentric and to a high degree racist in those heydays of colonialism – placed the Negro not much higher than the primates in the tree of life; to eugenicists he was a nuisance and a threat, comparable to what the Jews were to the Germans.

Charles Davenport wrote as follows: “We have in this country the grave problem of the negro, a race whose mental development is, on the average, far below the average of the Caucasian. Is there a prospect that we may through the education of the individual produce an improved race so that we may hope at last that the negro mind shall be as teachable, as elastic, as original, and as fruitful as the Caucasian? Or must future generations, indefinitely, start from the same low plane and yield the same meager results? We do not know; we have no data. Prevailing ‘opinion’ says we must face the later alternative. If this were so, it would be better to export the black race at once.”³⁰ (At one time Hitler gave his consent for negotiations to export the German Jews to the island of Madagascar.)

“Despite their virulent racism, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs claimed they harboured no ill will toward the Negroes,” writes Black. “Why? Because now it was [not racism but] just science – eugenic science. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs could boast: ‘That “one drop of negro blood makes the negro” is no longer a theory based on race pride or colour prejudice, but a logically induced, scientific fact.’ … This was a powerful redefinition of eugenics in action.”³¹ It is touching to place all this within the perspective we have thanks to our hindsight. What is narrated here happened less than one hundred years ago. Eugenics reached its zenith in the world in the 1930s. How many of us have ever heard that “from 1907 [Indiana] till 1960 more than 100,000 Americans were sterilized in more than 30 states”?³² (About the 6 million Jews and the half a million Roma we have heard, although doubt has been sown in the minds of many by fanatic Holocaust-deniers.) The March on Selma took place in 1965, two years after the assassination of President John Kennedy and at the time of the Apollo space programme. – At the time of writing the USA has a Black President, Barack Obama.

Animal Lovers

If the leading role of the USA in the eugenics movement surprises, the connections between American capitalism and Nazism in this field will also be novel information. “The Carnegie Institution, through its Cold Spring Harbour complex [in Long Island], enthusiastically propagandized for the Nazi regime and even distributed anti-Semitic Nazi Party films to American high schools. … And there were the links between the Rockefeller Foundation’s massive financial grants and the German scientific establishment that began the eugenic programs that were finished by Mengele in Auschwitz.” No, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were not the only Hitler fans.

The feeling of superiority was deeply ingrained in the Germanic people, who considered that dominating the world was their birthright. As to eugenics, the following words of the famous Herr Professor Haeckel, from his book Die Lebenswunder (the marvel of life, 1904), is one example chosen from many: “The killing of newborn misshapen children can therefore not be considered to be murder, as is still the case in our modern law books. On the contrary, we must approve of it and see it as an effective and useful measure as well for those concerned as for society. … Hundreds of thousands of incurably ill persons are artificially kept alive in our modern nations, without this being of any use for themselves or for the community.”³³

All what we have read before, and much more, has been literally put into practice in many countries, in spite of sometimes being controversial in some cases, but especially in Nazi Germany and its conquered territories, where eugenics was the stringent law. Hitler’s infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 are a direct application of the teachings of the American eugenicists, with the only difference that to the American “degenerates” were now joined by the Jews and the Gypsies. Thousands of physically and mentally handicapped were killed in newly invented gas chambers and with other methods which afterwards will be used in the extermination camps.

Once again, the criminal and in this case often bestial acts of an army of perpetrators (“Hitler’s willing executioners”) were justified by science. The racist and eugenic writings of the German medical specialists and biologists were taught in the army, the youth movements and the schools, of course in addition to Hitler’s version of ‘Darwinism’ from Mein Kampf. The following quotations are from three men involved in the execution of the eugenic and extermination policies. Arthur Ostermann (1932): “Science is now able to establish the hereditary future of a person with a total certainty.” Eugen Fischer (1933): “At present we now enough about the study of human heredity, and with a sufficient certitude.” Otmar von Verschuer (1933): The bases for the application of the genetic measures are sufficiently assured.” The medical experiments by the SS doctors in their camps makes gruesome reading.

“Man has become great through perpetual struggle. In perpetual peace his greatness must decline,” wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. In a speech to 10,000 young army lieutenants, his new generation of fanatical supporters, he said: “The whole universe seems to be dominated by this thought alone: that an eternal selection takes place in which the stronger keeps the right to remain alive and the weaker succumbs.” In one of his ‘table talks’ late at night he said to the people of his intimate circle: “War is always, war is everywhere. There is no beginning to it, there is no peace, ever. War is life. War is in every contest, war is the primeval state.” And: “The Jew: he poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.”³⁴ And when Germany in the winter months of 1945 will be crushed by the armies of the Allies, closing in from the West and from the East, he will give ‘the Nero Order’ to totally destroy any place that had to be abandoned to the enemy. He will also command what was left of the civilian population to leave their homes and walk away in the snow before the invaders, because they had proved to be not superior people but weaklings, and were therefore unworthy of him.

As André Pichot remarked: humanism then was not what it is today. ‘Humanism’ should be human, and in the course of history, as well as in our own time, it has proved to be many things which are the exact opposite of what the dictionaries, the philosophers and the holy men tell us that is human. In any anthology of the inhumanity of humans these words of Heinrich Himmler, founder and commander of the SS, Hitler’s Black Order of the Death’s Head, should be included, lest we forget: “We will never be brutal or heartless when it isn’t necessary. We Germans, the only people in the world with a decent attitude towards animals, will also have a decent attitude towards these human animals,” by whom he meant the Jews.³⁵