Posted on 05/27/2009 8:24:54 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust
by Jerry Bergman
Leading Nazis, and early 1900 influential German biologists, revealed in their writings that Darwin’s theory and publications had a major influence upon Nazi race policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed superior cattle strains. In the formulation of their racial policies, Hitler’s government relied heavily upon Darwinism, especially the elaborations by Spencer and Haeckel. As a result, a central policy of Hitler’s administration was the development and implementation of policies designed to protect the ‘superior race’. This required at the very least preventing the ‘inferior races’ from mixing with those judged superior, in order to reduce contamination of the latter’s gene pool. The ‘superior race’ belief was based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Darwin’s original ‘survival of the fittest’ theory. This philosophy culminated in the ‘final solution’, the extermination of approximately six million Jews and four million other people who belonged to what German scientists judged as ‘inferior races’...
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
“Careful, next thing you know that small facist group will start calling you a liberal,”Which group would that be?
Read his books!
“Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed superior cattle strains.”
—Yes, Hitler believed that through selective breeding that change can be produced within a ‘kind’, but he didn’t believe that speciation could occur. So his beliefs are identical to that of modern Creationists.
“Although it is no easy task to assess the conflicting motives of Hitler and his supporters, Darwinism-inspired eugenics clearly played a critical role.”
—Strange, if Darwinism played such a critical role, one would expect that maybe Hitler would have, you know, mentioned Darwin - at least ONCE - in his book, or one of his MANY speeches, or at one of his MANY meetings - or maybe just in passing (there were so many people recording his words, whether at meetings or just in casual conversations, that several books have been published using the notes, such at “Table Talk”). And yet, no evidence (AFAIK - someone correct me if I’m wrong), that he ever once in his life uttered “Darwin”. And this is from someone who borrowed from everything in culture to try to justify his ideology (even opera - Richard Wagner).
What were Hitler’s beliefs regarding nature and evolution?
First, he believed that we were created - as is:
“For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God’s Creation and God’s Will.” – Mein Kampf
As with Creationists, Hitler argued that the boundaries between species were definite, as opposed to evolutionists who argued that such boundaries were more or less arbitrary and created out of convenience:
“Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature’s rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.
Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature’s restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.”
-Contrast this with Darwin who said: “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species’– It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” and “I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other.”
And not only are their clear lines of demarcation - but those lines cannot be crossed, creatures can only “multiply their kind”:
‘Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law—one may call it an iron law of Nature—which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.’...
“The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc.”
A quote I see quite often, and used again in this article is this:
“Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if
such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.”
Read in context the “principle” he’s talking about there isn’t natural selection, but a principle against “race” or “species” mixing, he’s making an argument against miscegenation. Hitler calls miscegenation a “sin against the will of the eternal creator.”
You won’t find Darwin arguing against miscegenation or talking about “racial purity”. And the idea of “higher” and “lower” species in Darwininism is silly - all extant species are equally “evolved” and all are branches that reach the top of the evolutionary tree. No species holds a special place.
An idea that DID rank species is the old Creationist idea of “The Great Chain of Being”, which Hitler expresses here:
“This is only too natural. Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one.” You won’t find anything like this in “Origin”. This is Creationist “Chain of Being” talk.
So where did Hitler get his cruel ideas about “higher” and “lower” species and “racial purity” and rules against “miscegnation”, etc if not from Darwinism?
Actually, from pre-Darwinism Creationists such as Gobineau.
Gobineau isn’t well known today, but he was once quite popular. Chamberlain, for instance, was a loyal Gobineau follower.
Gobineau believed that there were various human races which could be ranked, and that they must remain separate, or in whatever nation they are mixing the nation and culture would deteriorate and fall. It was he who began calling the white, northern europeans “Aryans” (sound familiar?), and claimed that the Aryans were the greatest race and had the highest culture. His most famous book is “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”, from 1855. In it he wrote that the Aryans must actively wipe out, or at least separate, from the “inferior” races before civilization falls.
Here’s Hitler giving Gobinism in a nutshell:
“Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe. The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.”
Can anyone imagine Darwin saying anything like that?
Here’s more Gobineau, this will all sound familiar to anyone that’s read Hitler:
“A nation does not derive value from its position; it never has and never will. On the contrary it is the race which has always given - and always will give - to the land its moral, economic and political value... The purer a race keeps its blood, the less will its social foundations be liable to attack; for the general way of thought will remain the same.”
“The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit.”
“Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people.”
And here’s Hitler again:
“A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood, thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation in all its manifestations”.
The Nazis believed that misceganation would combine what God had created separate (the same reason Bob Jones U gave for not allowing interracial dating).
Hitler follows Gobineau to a T. What the Nazis were practicing was not Darwinism - but Gobinism.
Hitler got ideas from other influential Creationists as well - a race must rule or be ruled:
“Nations and races, like individuals have each an especial destiny: some are born to rule, and others to be ruled. And such has ever been the history of mankind. No two distinctly marked races can dwell together on equal terms.”- Josiah Nott “Types of Mankind” 1854
So Hitler was a Creationist who got his ideas primarily from other Creationists.
The above quotes were all Mein Kampf. Let’s try a source that gives more private thoughts, like Table Talk.
“From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.” - Table Talk. (Self explanatory I think)
“A skull is dug up by chance, and everybody exclaims ‘That’s what our ancestors were like.’ Who knows if the so-called Neanderthal man wasn’t really an ape? What I can say, in any case, is that it wasn’t our ancestors who lived there in prehistoric times.”
“Who’s that little Bolshevik professor who claims to triumph over creation? People like that, we’ll break them. Whether we rely on the catechism or on philosophy, we have possibilities in reserve, whilst they, with their purely materialistic conceptions, can only devour one another.”
The name Hitler was looking for there is “Oparin”. He came up with a hypothesis for abiogenesis very similar to what Urey and Miller came up with. The idea of a materialistic beginning of life outraged Hitler. This perhaps gives us an idea of what he may have thought of Darwin (that is, if he ever DID think of Darwin, who, for all we know, Hitler never did think of).
I could bring up many other Creationist sources for Hitler’s ideology (Martin Luther’s “The Jews and their Lies”), but I think this is enough for one post.
I’ll end this with some thoughts that actually ARE from Darwin:
“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.” - Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man
“Read his books!”
As someone who’s read all his books (and articles, and many of his published articles in journals), I’d like a source as well. :-)
The clearest “source” is his book “Wonderful Life”
Hitler was a full-on evolutionist, and he had a seething hatred for Christianity. Indeed, he planned on destroying Christianity at the first opportunity. Surely you know all this?
What I know from Hitler are from his book, his many speeches, and the many notes taken from his personal chats.
All of it has him repeatedly arguing for the “iron law of Nature” that places “definite limits” on how much a species can change and only allows species to “multiply after their kind”. Of people who believes in materialistic origins of life he says “we’ll break them”.
Every bit of Hitler’s ideology on the subject sounds loud and clear like those of many pre-Darwinian Creationists, especially Gobineau. And most of it would still fit right in place in any modern Creationist article.
Many of Hitler quotes I used (and I could dig up more) if quoted here with no citation would have received a round of “amen”s from the Creationists.
If you have sources on his thoughts that I missed, I’d love to see them.
If you have sources on his thoughts that I missed, I’d love to see them.
That's somewhat surreal.
I realize Hitler quoted scripture to the masses in Nuremberg, but even the most braindead, misled, misguided person alive today would get that he wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a Christian.
But then again I see people driving cars around here with Obama stickers on one side of their bumpers with pro-life stickers on the other side.
More proof that in the liberal world, up is down, down is up.
Careful, next thing you know that small facist group will start calling you a liberal
Ummm, evolution is plainly the liberal position.
And that’s easily apparent with rabid hissy fit matthews on your side of the aisle not to mention:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/03/americans_overwhelmingly_suppo.html
Headline: “Americans Overwhelmingly Support Teaching Scientific Challenges to Darwinian Evolution, Zogby Poll Shows” From March 2006.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=719
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Free Republic Poll on Evolution
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1706571/posts?page=63#63
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Creationism makes a comeback in US
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1856224/posts
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Teaching creation and evolution in schools
Solid research reveals American beliefs
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v13/i2/teaching.asp
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Survey Finds Support Is Strong For Teaching 2 Origin Theories
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07E4D9143BF932A25750C0A9669C8B63
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Public Divided on Origins of Life
http://people-press.org/report/254/religion-a-strength-and-weakness-for-both-parties
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Americans Believe in Jesus, Poll Says (creation poll results included)
http://derekgulbranson.com/2005/01/17/americans-believe-in-jesus/
So if there’s a “small fascist group” on FR, it’s the evo-liberals posting nonsensical lies that would make Josef Goebbels proud indeed. Repeat the lie often enough eh?
It's like being called a racist by Al Sharpton.
I’m not sure what part is surreal.
I never claimed he was a “Christian” - he may have thought himself as a Christian - but that doesn’t mean anyone else has to think so. Many don’t consider the Pope the Christian.
But what is clear - from his book, his speeches, and the piles of papers we have recording just about everything he said out loud - that he believed that the God of the Bible created life on earth as is, that speciation is impossible, and that change can only occur within rigidly defined “kinds”. It’s also clear that he hated materialistic ideas for the origin of life.
If anyone is trying to claim that “down is up” it’s in trying to call someone with THOSE beliefs a “full-on evolutionist”. How’s that for surrealism.
Go for it.
Another liberal misinterpretation of history to dis Christianity.
Another stunning defense of evolution.
How scientific. It’s sure to convince the undecided with all that evidence, mountains of it.
And there you have it, the surreal part.
Hitler had no inkling of the God of the Bible. He detested the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.
It's not that hard to grasp.
He exploited Christianity because he unerstood the Christain tradition of Germans but CLEARLY his idea of God was a norse, aryan socio/psychopath.
Check out Dr. Mickey’s posting history.
Is that a riot or what! (LOL!)
It is. Over two years of mindless, knee jerk, creation hating blather.
If evos have mountains of evidence to support the ToE so that anyone with half a brain ought to come to the same conclusion as they do, then one fails to understand why they resort to such juvenile tactics in their efforts to attack creationism or Christianity.
Let me guess, it’s because creationists do to, so there, nyah!
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