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Though not much in vogue currently, the fascistic systems of Hitler, Mussolini, and others almost conquered the world a generation ago. There are even now neo-Nazi movements which bear watching, as well as various dictatorships of similar character around the world; not to mention the “new left” student movement which strangely resembles the early days of Nazism.

In any case, all such ideologies, built up as they are on the concepts of racism and statist totalitarian aggression and control, are direct products of the Darwinian doctrines of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosophical father of these systems, was an ardent evolutionist, as were his spiritual children, Hitler and Mussolini.

From the ‘preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’ (i.e., Darwin’s subtitle to Origin of Species), it was a short step to the preservation of favoured individuals, classes or nations—and from their preservation to their glorification. Social Darwinism has often been understood in this sense: as a philosophy, exalting competition, power and violence over convention, ethics and religion. Thus it has become a portmanteau of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and dictatorship, of the cults of the hero, the superman, and the master race .recent expressions of this philosophy, such as (Hitler’s) Mein Kampf are, unhappily, too familiar to require exposition here. And it is by an obvious process of analogy and deduction that they are said to derive from Darwinism. Nietzsche predicted that this would be the consequence if the Darwinian theory gained general acceptance.

Fascism is generally held to be a right-wing movement and Communism a left-wing. Both, however, are the variants of the same species, evolutionistic, totalitarian collectivism. In any case, it is clear that the basic rationale of Communism, just as that of Fascism, is the dogma of materialistic evolution.

In an age of social Darwinism, the combination of the ideas of struggle, of historical evolution, and of progress proved irresistible. The Marxists became merely a sect in the larger church . In urging these lessons, Marx and Engels set the pattern of all subsequent Marxist polemics by using what may be called the evolutionist’s double standard: when you do it, it’s wrong, because you are the past; when we do it, it’s right, for we are the future. The mood—borrowed from science—is that of a mighty ruthlessness. History like nature, is tough.

It is well known that not only the early Communists, such as Marx and Engels, were atheistic evolutionists but also that all the leaders of Communism since have been the same. Though they have fluctuated between Darwinian and Lamarckian biology in their application of evolutionary mechanisms to communist theory, they have never varied in their commitment to evolution itself.