SMChristenson <smchris@visi.com> wrote in message

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:33:31 +0000, david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

T. H. Huxley's?
Haeckel's?
Nietzsche's?

I think the answer is:

They invented things (ideas in their case)

erroneous/ false ideas

that knuckle-dragging fools
could use badly?

could use to the erroneous ideas' logical conclusions.

SMChristenson <smchris@visi.com> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.07.05.04.44.38.603134@visi.com>...

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:33:31 +0000, david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

T. H. Huxley's?
Haeckel's?
Nietzsche's?

I'm getting sick of this thread.

So don't read it.

I think the answer is:

They invented things (ideas in their case)

erroneous/ false ideas

that knuckle-dragging fools
could use badly?

could use to the erroneous ideas' logical conclusions.

"EjP" <nospam@hackers.are.bad> wrote in message
news:cbupjl$qnj$1@info4.fnal.gov...

If you're looking for a philosophical basis for the Holocaust,
look to the anti-Semitic rantings of Martin Luther.

The Holocaust was based upon genetics, _not_ racism. Not only
were Jews victims of this madness, but also Slavic, Gypsies, Black
as well as people with heritable genetic diseases and defects both
mental and physical maladies. So again it was genetics, not racism.

-E

The Holocaust was based upon genetics, _not_ racism.

The Holocaust was based upon genetics, _not_ racism. Not only
were Jews victims of this madness, but also Slavic, Gypsies, Black
as well as people with heritable genetic diseases and defects both
mental and physical maladies. So again it was genetics, not racism.

"EjP" <nospam@hackers.are.bad> wrote in message
news:cbupjl$qnj$1@info4.fnal.gov...

david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

Nothing. The Nazi claim of racial superiority was never based
on the theory of evolution - not Darwin's version, anyway.
Rather it was based on a weird blend of Christianity, Norse
mythology, and the Theosophical ravings of Madame Blavatsky.
While the latter did claim a sort of "evolution", it
was in no way scientific and not related at all to
Darwin's theory.

T. H. Huxley's?

Nothing.

Haeckel's?

Nothing.

Nietzsche's?

Nothing. Nietzsche was an atheist. Hitler and the Nazi's were
Christian.

If you're looking for a philosophical basis for the Holocaust,
look to the anti-Semitic rantings of Martin Luther.

The Holocaust was based upon genetics, _not_ racism. Not only
were Jews victims of this madness, but also Slavic, Gypsies, Black
as well as people with heritable genetic diseases and defects both
mental and physical maladies. So again it was genetics, not racism.

-E

"EjP" <nospam@hackers.are.bad> wrote in message
news:cbupjl$qnj$1@info4.fnal.gov...

david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

Nothing. The Nazi claim of racial superiority was never based
on the theory of evolution - not Darwin's version, anyway.
Rather it was based on a weird blend of Christianity, Norse
mythology, and the Theosophical ravings of Madame Blavatsky.
While the latter did claim a sort of "evolution", it
was in no way scientific and not related at all to
Darwin's theory.

T. H. Huxley's?

Nothing.

Haeckel's?

Nothing.

Nietzsche's?

Nothing. Nietzsche was an atheist. Hitler and the Nazi's were
Christian.

If you're looking for a philosophical basis for the Holocaust,
look to the anti-Semitic rantings of Martin Luther.

The Holocaust was based upon genetics, _not_ racism. Not only
were Jews victims of this madness, but also Slavic, Gypsies, Black
as well as people with heritable genetic diseases and defects both
mental and physical maladies. So again it was genetics, not racism.

-E

In article <1gg8wbb.1u1r35in84tz9N%john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au>,
john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

Orac <orac@mac.com> wrote:

In article <cbupjl$qnj$1@info4.fnal.gov>, EjP <nospam@hackers.are.bad>
wrote:

david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

Nothing.

Not exactly.

The Nazi claim of racial superiority was never based
on the theory of evolution - not Darwin's version, anyway.

True, but Darwin's name was used widely, and in Nazi Germany a
perversion of his theory was applied to society at large. But it didn't
start with the Nazis by any means. In 1895, Alfred Ploetz based his
concept of "racial hygeine" (in essence social Darwinism and eugenics)
on Darwin, a concept in which the "harshness" of evolution by natural
selection would be replaced by man taking over his own evolution by
deciding which babies should live and die shortly after their birth,
with babies thought not to be fit enough euthanized. The overall concept
is that evolution through natural selection would come to be replaced by
humans "rationally" guiding their own evolution.

in effect, then, Orac, you just described Ploetz going exactly
*contrary* to Darwinian evolutionary theory.

That's why I characterized it as a perversion of Darwin. However,
another way that this sort of "selection" was justified by other racial
hygienists was that, by allowing "defectives" to live and possibly
reproduce, society was thwarting natural selection, which would
inevitably lead to the "degeneration" of the race.

For if we overtake NS, then
we are saying it will not do the job. This is a common problem with
claims like this - merely *mentioning* evolution is not enough; you have
to show that evolutionary theory was the *foundation* for the racism.

Some racial hygienists, including Ploetz, also did just that, justifying
killing "defectives" as a way to let natural selection reassert itself
against the tendency of society to save such people. Ploetz warned
against medical care for the "weak," for this would allow the weak to
survive and reproduce who otherwise, without the intervention of
doctors, would never have survived. Indeed, Ploetz saw racial hygiene as
a way of alleviating the brute force of natural selection, if only the
"negative" qualities of the race could be located and eliminated before
reproduction occurred. In this way, racial hygiene used Darwin as a
justification, while at the same time trying to replace Darwinian
natural selection with a more "humane" and "rational" selection. (The
hubris of these people, who assumed they could recognized which traits
were desirable and which were not in children, never ceases to amaze me.)

Similar points apply to Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Hans Gunther. What
they "relied" upon for their ideas was a racialist anthropology that had
almost nothing to do with evolution as Darwin proposed it, and which
went back to Blumenbach in 1800.

Again, as I said, these were perversions of Darwin's ideas.

Rather it was based on a weird blend of Christianity, Norse
mythology, and the Theosophical ravings of Madame Blavatsky.
While the latter did claim a sort of "evolution", it
was in no way scientific and not related at all to
Darwin's theory.

Agreed, the Nazi concept of evolution was not scientific and it was a
perversion of Darwin's concepts. However, it was still very cunningly
wrapped in scientific and pseudoscientific justification. I suggest that
it is doubtful that, without the concepts Darwin produced (natural
selection), that the Nazis would have been able to come up with such
seemingly compelling justifications for the concept of "protecting" the
German race from being contaminated with "inferior genes" and the
concept that races, just like individuals, also go through a Darwinian
struggle to out-compete and out-reproduce their competitors.

I disagree. All they needed was the basic xenophobia of Christian
Teutonic Europe, the hereditarian ideas of the aristocracy and even
classical eugenics as far back as you care to look, the rise of
*genetics* not evolution, and the implicit scala naturae in
pre-Darwinian evolution.

Darwinian evolutionary theory did not depend upon an understanding of
genetics

And both genetics and the scala were optional extras, pulled in to give
it cachet. Nazis used anything to support their ideas - Christianity,
anthropology, astrology, mythology, opera, and of course Nietzsche (who
felt that evolution was too important to leave to nature as Darwin
suggested it had been).

True.

None of them are the *basis* of Nazism, for it lies in social
and psychological exigencies and history. And none of them are entirely
to blame for it, either.

Straw man. I never went so far as to claim racial hygiene was the
*basis* of Naziism. (Certainly a sort of Nordic mysticism, concept of
the "volk," and paganism were more important.) I merely pointed out how
important it was to overall Nazi philosophy and how important it was in
the evolution of Nazi racial policies.

If you want my opinion, the Vienna School of
Art probably has more to do with it.

You mean the school itself, or its good taste in rejecting Hitler as a
student? ;-)

In article <1gganfp.15qzr37uh5g1iN%john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au>,
john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

Orac <orac@mac.com> wrote:

In article <1gg8wbb.1u1r35in84tz9N%john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au>,
john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

Orac <orac@mac.com> wrote:

In article <cbupjl$qnj$1@info4.fnal.gov>, EjP <nospam@hackers.are.bad>
wrote:

david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the
Holocaust?

Nothing.

Not exactly.

The Nazi claim of racial superiority was never based
on the theory of evolution - not Darwin's version, anyway.

True, but Darwin's name was used widely, and in Nazi Germany a
perversion of his theory was applied to society at large. But it
didn't start with the Nazis by any means. In 1895, Alfred Ploetz
based his concept of "racial hygeine" (in essence social Darwinism
and eugenics) on Darwin, a concept in which the "harshness" of
evolution by natural selection would be replaced by man taking
over his own evolution by deciding which babies should live and
die shortly after their birth, with babies thought not to be fit
enough euthanized. The overall concept is that evolution through
natural selection would come to be replaced by humans "rationally"
guiding their own evolution.

in effect, then, Orac, you just described Ploetz going exactly
*contrary* to Darwinian evolutionary theory.

That's why I characterized it as a perversion of Darwin. However,
another way that this sort of "selection" was justified by other racial
hygienists was that, by allowing "defectives" to live and possibly
reproduce, society was thwarting natural selection, which would
inevitably lead to the "degeneration" of the race.

For if we overtake NS, then
we are saying it will not do the job. This is a common problem with
claims like this - merely *mentioning* evolution is not enough; you have
to show that evolutionary theory was the *foundation* for the racism.

Some racial hygienists, including Ploetz, also did just that, justifying
killing "defectives" as a way to let natural selection reassert itself
against the tendency of society to save such people. Ploetz warned
against medical care for the "weak," for this would allow the weak to
survive and reproduce who otherwise, without the intervention of
doctors, would never have survived. Indeed, Ploetz saw racial hygiene as
a way of alleviating the brute force of natural selection, if only the
"negative" qualities of the race could be located and eliminated before
reproduction occurred. In this way, racial hygiene used Darwin as a
justification, while at the same time trying to replace Darwinian
natural selection with a more "humane" and "rational" selection. (The
hubris of these people, who assumed they could recognized which traits
were desirable and which were not in children, never ceases to amaze me.)

But the point I am making (sans strawman you rightly note below) is that
it was not Darwin's theory of evolution that *caused* the racism. That
went back to at least Blumenbach (read Vogelin's History of the Race
Idea
<http://www.qn.net/~fwagner/ev/eric_voegelin_subject_contents_by_volumes
.html>) and even then was caused by prior commitments (largely, in my
view, to do with trade, technology, and Christianity).

Oh, there's no doubt whatsoever that the racism existed long before
Darwin, as did social Darwinism and the concept of racial hygiene.
However, Darwin's concepts provided a "rational" and "scientific" basis
(although it was not really scientific and was only rational-sounding)
for racists to JUSTIFY their racism. It's rather interesting to look at
how different groups used the concept of "social Darwinism" (which later
evolved into "racial hygiene"). People saw in Darwin's ideas what they
wanted to. For instance, in America, social Darwinists saw natural
selection as a cause for cosmic optimism, taking the view that those who
survive and reproduce are, for the most part, by definition the most
fit. In this view, Darwin had provided evidence of the superiority of
the capitalist system. For Americans who subscribed to this view,
economic competition was another facet of natural selection, both of
people and of societies.

Social Darwinists in Germany, whose ideas coalesced into racial hygiene,
thanks largely to the work of Alfred Ploetz, took a different view,
emphasizing the fear of racial "degeneration" through a failure of
natural selection caused by society. In this view, modern medicine and
conveniences were, generation after generation, making people "less
fit," through medical treatments that saved the lives of those who would
otherwise have died at a young age and never reproduced, and through
modern technological conveniences. Racial hygiene didn't fall into a
strictly left-right political influence at first, either. Socialists
embraced different aspects of it at first, particularly the fact of
evolution. However, as time went on, and the right became more
influential, they, as others, saw what they wanted to see in Darwin,.
The Nazis enthusiastically took the aspects of Darwin and its twisted
descendent, racial hygiene, that fit with their overall philosophy, such
as the struggle for existence and the survival and propagation of the
fittest through this struggle, the "degeneration of the race" due to
modern society thwarting natural selection and allowing "life unworthy
of life" (as they called the mentally retarded and ill those with severe
birth defects) to live and even reproduce. They also fused Nordic
mysticism to these perversions of Darwinian concepts and added to them
the fear of "contamination" of "pure" Aryan blood with the blood of
inferior races as another cause for racial "degeneration."

The rest, unfortunately, is history.

The pieces may have existed before Darwin, but Darwinism provided a
nice, neat umbrella to allow scientific racists to tie them all together
into a seemingly logical, rational, and "scientific" whole.

In article <1ggckq4.1lm8wi8nn7zweN%john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au>,
john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

Orac <orac@mac.com> wrote:

The rest, unfortunately, is history.

And the history is false. IMO there never was a "social Darwinism" for
everything that is ascribed to that name existed before Darwin and in no
way really relied upon it (a point made, I believe, by the Marxists
after Marx - they misrepresented Malthus to make the same point).

The pieces may have existed before Darwin, but Darwinism provided a
nice, neat umbrella to allow scientific racists to tie them all together
into a seemingly logical, rational, and "scientific" whole.

"Social Darwinism" did not coalesce into "racial hygiene" - racialist
ideas and the idea of purity of origins go back to the Romans. If
anything, racial hygiene coalesced into pre-Darwinian social
"Darwinism".

I think you're confusing racialist ideas with a more specific concept,
that of racial hygiene. They are not the same thing. Of course racialist
ideas and concepts of racial "purity" are very, very old, but they are
not the same thing as racial hygiene, although without a doubt they
influenced racial hygiene. Indeed, racial hygiene, when it was
originally proposed, did not assume that any one race was "superior" or
"inferior" to any other race. That came later as the German right wing
and particularly the Nazis assimilated the concepts of racial hygiene
and added them to their justifications for Aryan supremacy.

Racialists transferred scientific knowledge concerning heredity and
breeding, new knowledge of genetics, Charles Darwin's theories about the
fight for existence, natural selection and the "survival of the fittest"
from plant and animal life to humans and human society (Social
Darwinism). Social Darwinism/racial hygiene in connection with its
utopias of human breeding and its selection tendencies to wipe out the
supposedly inferior or "erblich belastet" (hereditarily burdened) was a
gross abuse of science that, as much as we might like to deny it, a
constitutive ingredient of National Socialist ideology.

But worse than that, so far as I can tell there has been
only *one* "social Darwinian" and that is William Graham Sumner. Spencer
was not one, and there was never a tradition of it. As Robert Bannister
said in his unduly ignored book, "social Darwinian" is a label of abuse
applied solely to those one opposes, and it has been tailored to suit
the prejudices of the critics.

All you seem to be saying here is that social Darwinism has different
meanings to different people and that it is often used as a convenient
attack label. This is so obvious that it is almost impossible to argue
with. "Social Darwinism" is a rather malleable concept and label.
However, you could say the same thing about the label of "fascist,"
which is often used as an all-purpose political slur against anyone
significantly to the right of center, or any other number of
political/social labels. Indeed, in another post I pointed out how
people saw in Darwin what they wanted to see and gave examples. Funny
how people still see in Darwin what they want to see, many decades later.

Bannister, Robert C. 1988. Social Darwinism: science and myth in
Anglo-American social thought, American civilization. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press. Original edition, 1979.

My suggestion: Proctor, Robert N. 1988. Racial hygiene: Medicine under
the Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.