> [moderator's note: I really really don't want to post this, but
> it's certainly on-topic, and Robert's pretty insistent, so here
> goes. Let's not get bogged down in big arguments about the values
> of eugenics if possible; those threads are always nasty, and
> worse, pointless. - JAH]
>
RKS:
I didn't think I was THAT insistent.  Anyway, a claification on the Darwin
connection that I made to another group may prempt the protest that Hitler's
Eugenics was not based on Darwin's theories.

The introduction to the piece was rethought to read:
"Eugenic policies took root in European countries including Germany and
England as well as the USA and Australia (The white Australia policy) and
stem in part from Darwin's evolution theories or from corruptions of those
theories.  Neo-Lamarkian ideas also played a part in forming ideas of racial
inferiority and it was up to governments to act upon that 'science', or at
least that is how it seems to have gone.

Having just read 'Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial
Inferiority 1859-1900' by John S Haller, Jr., a book which dwelled more
heavily on scientific ideas in the USA, there were plenty of academic texts
for a racist to draw upon to justify notions of inferiority and the problems
of mixing blood (the general view was that pure white and pure black had
their pluses and minuses, but crosses languished and were more vulnerable to
disease etc).

Mixing of the blood and subsequent degeneration of the race was a
preoccupation of Hitler's and the Nazi party (National Socialist Worker's
Party).  In the following excerpt, from Mein Kampf, Hitler outlines his
notion of evolution in his flowery prose, drawn largely from the writings of
philosophers and of Heroic Opera (Wagner was his favourite).

This translation of page 121, Chapter 4 'Munich', of the first book 'A
Reckoning' of Mein Kampf is by Ralph Manheim."

and the reply to the Darwin question (including the question) follows:-

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mikey Brass" 
To: 
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2004 11:40 PM
Subject: Re: [evol-psych] Aldolf Hitlers warped View on Evolution


> At 11:02 08/02/2004, Robert Karl Stonjek wrote:
>
> >Eugenic policies took root in European countries including Germany and
> >England as well as the USA and Australia (The white Australia policy) and
> >stem in part from Darwin's evolution theories
>
> Was it really from a corruption of the theory of natural selection or was
> it from a corrupted form of Spencer's theory of cultural evolution (the
two
> are sometimes confused) ? I thought it was the latter.
>
> ===========
> Best, Mikey Brass
> MA in Archaeology student
> "The Antiquity of Man" http://www.antiquityofman.com
> Book: "The Antiquity of Man: Artifactual, fossil and gene records
explored"

RKS:
I gave a general introduction to eugenic policies mentioning Darwin, but
went on only to mention 'evolution' with regard to Hitler.  His ideas were
of an evolution of sorts, where nature 'selects' the fittest to survive by
weeding out the weak.  Hitler makes the observation that in nature, more are
born than are needed for the maintenance of populations.

He also points out that 'compassionate' politics reverses this by preserving
the weak and limiting birth, in his view the reverse of the nature.

His pronouncement on the mixing of blood may be spencerian (social
Darwinism) but his ideas of evolution come from the writing of the French
man of letters Joseph Arthur de Gobineau.  In a modern introduction to his
book "Mademoiselle Irnois and Other Stories" we read:
"The simplest way to characterize Gobineau is by the prefix anti. He was
antirepublican, anticolonialist, antiprogressive, and antievolutionist in
the century of democratization, imperialist expansion, technical progress,
and Darwinism. As a student, he was judged impertinent and expelled from
school. As a writer, he offended even some of his strongest supporters
(Tocqueville, for one) with the somber anti-Christian determinism of Essai
sur l'inégalité des races humaines , irked such veteran orientalists as
Botta, Pott, and Mohl with his eccentric explanation of the cuneiforms, and
ranted in vain against evolutionists as entrenched as Lyell, Oppert, and
even Darwin. But he felt an equal contempt for the "so outrageously ignorant
and inept" good Catholics."

and further on we read

"It is true that after 1890 awkward attempts by the Gobineau Vereinigung (a
group of Gobinolators headed by Ludwig Schemann) to salvage his reputation
in Germany succeeded in making La Renaissance and Nouvelles asiatiques
better known. And when Wilhelm II mounted the throne in 1890, German
neo-Nationalists and expansionists exhumed the Essai from thirty-five years
of obscurity and claimed to find in it a theoretical justification for their
will to power. But Gobineau was dead by then and, alas, could not protest
the astonishing twists given his ideas. It is also true that around the turn
of the century, when anti-Semitism grew in Western Europe, it found an
excuse in Gobineau's sentimental and mythical vision of the original Aryans,
even though that vision had as many practical implications for its author as
the Golden Age might have had for Ovid. Indeed, Gobineau twice referred to
his projection of the distant future as a "divination."

This Book is available Online at
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2w1004x8/

The connection to de Gobineau can be found in 'Health, Race and German
Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945' by Paul
Weindling, Cambridge 1993 (cited in 'Hitler's Scientists: Science, war and
the Devil's Pact' by John Cornwell, Viking, 2003).

The Mein Kampf excerpt represents the culmination of his ideas drawn from
several sources.  It is not, at least at first, obvious as to the flaw in
his logic.  If natural selection works by selecting the fittest from an over
abundant stock of new born examples, how can it be right to reverse this by
reducing the number of newborn and preserving even the unfittest?  Little
wonder that Francis Galton and others ran with the 'natural' form that
became eugenics.

Others, such as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and his American disciple John
Fiske (1842-1901) asked about the mixing of blood and subsequent outcomes of
the black-white mix.  They determined that there were noble qualities in
both black and white, with white being better suited to cerebral pursuits
and the black better at labouring and strength related pursuits.  But the
'hybrid', they believed, though more intelligent than the pure black, was
generally weaker and less adapted, and a burden to both black and white
societies.  Thus they thought the cross 'weakened the blood'.

This was very much Hitler's thinking with regard to the 'Aryan' race that
should be kept pure.  The Teutonic Aryan mythology was drawn from a number
of sources including de Gobineau and Wagner's Operas.

Nowhere else in Mein Kampf does Hitler point out his 'evolutionary' thinking
as clearly as in the passage quoted, but he does go on and on and on about
'blood' - the mixing of it, degrading of it etc etc etc.

Kind Regards,
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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