Notorious Nazi Dr. Mengele was a Social Darwinist
An article in Haaretz says,
The Haaretz article continues,
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A diary and a revealing letter written by notorious Auschwitz death camp Dr. Josef Mengele were put on auction in the United States last month. Mengele was the SS officer who supervised the selection of prisoner transports arriving at Auschwitz and performed bizarre medical experiments on camp inmates.
The Haaretz article continues,
Unless the world adopted breeding programs like those he pursued in Auschwitz, "mankind is doomed, even without war," he writes.
Referring to morality, aesthetics and genetics, Mengele writes: "The real problem is to define when human life is worth living and when it has to be eradicated."
"There's only one truth and one true beauty ... There's no 'good' or 'bad' in nature. There's only 'appropriate' or 'inappropriate' ... Both sides receive equal chances. Nevertheless, nature provides a strainer. Things that are 'inappropriate' fall through since they lose in the struggle for survival."
Discussing the Indian caste system, Mengele notes, "Brahmans are built nicely; some of them even have blue eyes. They have small, straight noses and they're in general high quality human beings. And this is because the Brahmans used the highest caste to preserve their noble blood. They are the descendants of Nordic peoples who once conquered and ruled India."
Mengele discusses how to create an upper class: "It can only be done by selecting the best."
"Everything will end in catastrophe if natural selection is altered to the point that gifted people are overwhelmed by billions of morons," he warns, predicting that 90 percent of humans will starve due to stupidity and the remaining 10 percent will survive "like reptiles survived. The rest will die, just like the dinosaurs did ... we have to prevent the rise of the idiot masses," he writes.
"The feeble-minded person ('village idiot') was separated from farmers because of his social status and low income," he writes.
"This separation is no longer the case in the age of technology. He is now on the same level with the farmer's son who went to the city.
"We know that selection rules all nature by choosing and exterminating ... Those who were unfit had to accept the rule of more accomplished human beings, or they were pushed out or exterminated. Weaker humans were excluded from reproducing. This is the only way for human beings to exist and to maintain themselves."
He says "inferior morons" should be exterminated, adding, "We have to make sure that nature's suspended eradication will continue through human arrangements ... birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes."
Mengele goes on to advise Germany to abandon feminist ideology and control childbirth. "Biology doesn't support equal rights. Women shouldn't be working in higher positions. Women's work must depend on filling a biological quota. Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized after the fifth child."
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Labels: Darwin-to-HItler (new #2)
posted by Larry Fafarman | 2/24/2010 12:09:00 PM
11 Comments:
Hitler based his ideas not on Darwinism but on a "divine right" philosophy:
Thus, it [the folkish philosophy] by no means believes in an equality of races, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated, through this knowledge, to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe. (Hitler 1943, 383)
The first edition of Mein Kampf suggests that Hitler may once have believed in a young earth: "this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men" (p. 65; the second edition substitutes "millions" for "thousands," and chapter 11 refers to "hundreds of thousands of years" of life in another context.) Other passages further support his creationist leanings:
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. (Hitler 1943, 383)
Darwin claimed in the Origin of Species that he had discovered a "law" of nature which supposedly led to the "advancement" of all life. The law was "multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die." (end of his chapter on Instinct.)
Mengele was a good disciple of Darwin's doctrine of natural selection, as is clear from this letter. The Nazi idea was that Darwinist natural selection operates in the wild state to eliminate the "unfit" or the "weakest," and to favor the "strongest" and the "fittest," but that thanks to the moral injunctions of religions such as Judaism and Christianity, natural selection can no longer operate. Thus, as Mengele says, the Nazis held that humanity is in danger of being overrun by the "unfit" or "inferior." Notice that Mengele talks about "natural selection."
Thus the Nazis argued that "we have to make sure that nature's suspended eradication will continue through human arrangements," to directly quote
Mengele. So the Nazis "arranged" to enforce eugenics, by sterilizing the supposedly "unfit" and by actually killing young children who were held to be defective, often while pretending to be treating them medically, so that their parents wouldn't know what was going on.
Hitler sometimes claimed that he hated Jews because he held them responsible for the moral doctrine that the weak and the disabled should be helped. That was, he thought, the source of the same doctrine of helpfulness in Chistianity.
Actually, I think Hitler also hated Jews for other reasons; he was a nut, anyway. But he and other Nazis certainly developed a disciplinarian emphasis on strength, fitness, etc., and hated weakness. "Let the strongest live and the weakest die" was absorbed into Nazi doctrine.
Even when I believed in Darwinism I was aware of the powerful Darwin-derived element in Nazism. Of course, Darwin himself was nothing like a Nazi. But his notions were almost certain to foster some sort of doctrines similar to fascism and Nazism.
On the subject of Nazis and Darwinism, you might be interested in this statement by Michael Shermer. In the Journal of Parapsychology, Sept 2001, p.319 Shermer declaimed about "bigots (creationists) and racists (deniers) who want to cleanse our culture of non-Christians and Jews." Gee, I didn't know that!
Michael Shermer, above, is the editor of "Skeptic" magazine, and the author of the book Why People Believe Weird Things. "Weird" can mean pertaining to or suggesting the supernatural, and apparently that's how Shermer often uses the word. Intelligent design is a "weird thing," according to him. But "weird" also has connotations of something bizarre, frightening or undesirable. Nobody regards their own their beliefs as "weird" or likes to have their beliefs called weird, as far as I know.
Shermer foolishly thinks that intelligent design is necessarily creationism, and hence he is saying that ID proponents want to rid our culture of non-Christians! That in spite of the fact that many ID proponents ARE non-Christians: they include believers in Judaism and Islam, in other or non-specific forms of theism and deism etc., and even some agnostics and atheists. Nor have I heard of many actual creationists (who think that humans were specially created by God and had no lower animal ancestors), who want to cleanse our culture of non-Christians! Again: some creationists ARE non-Christians, who believe in Judaism or in Islam, etc.
Shermer seems to me to have vastly overgeneralized, distorted and paranoid ideas about anyone who disagrees with his own basic beliefs (which include scientism and Darwinism.) It impresses me that he must feel threatened and frightened, in an unrealistic manner. If so, what is that all about? And yet he's regarded as a paragon of "rationality" by some people.
Shermer made the above comment in a letter responding to a review in the Journal of Parapsychology of his "Weird Things" book by the late Marcello Truzzi, who was also a believer in scientism and Darwinism and a disbeliever in all things paranormal or psychic; but who thought that Shermer overgeneralizes and goes too far in his "weird things" rhetoric. Truzzi pointed out, for instance, that some Holocaust revisionists might really be trying to get at historical truth. It was that sort of relatively moderate and careful stance by Truzzi that set Shermer off, in his letter. So that was not just a careless, off-the-cuff remark by Shermer.
Anyway, if dogmatic Darwinists etc. are, generally and somehow, as frightened, paranoid and irrational as they appear to me to be, one thing seems certain: it's a complete waste of time to try to reason with them.
The philosophical underpinnings of the third reich were a long time coming. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and founder of the Logo-therapy school on psychology, stated that the gas chambers were created not in some government chamber in Berlin but in the Nihilistic, G-dless teachings in the universities of Germany. I've always found it surprising that people find it hard to believe that anti-G-d rhetoric had anything to do with the crimes of Germany in WWII. After all, the field of economics is full of talk about 'incentive.' That is to say, people generally act out of self interest. Belief in G-d, and hence a reward and punishment system, would seem to greatly affect one's 'incentive-outlook.' To me, Darwinism has always attempted to be a direct counter to religion. After all, it attempts [however poorly] to answer the great question: Where did we come from? What created us? I still remember clearly the day in the 5th grade when our teacher started to indoctrinate us in the beliefs of Darwin. My stomach sunk: here was a direct challenge to what other adults had taught me: the story of creation. [This is not to say that I believe ID must imply a G-d.] It has taken many years for me to shrug off that which I was taught in those early, impressionable years. Anyways, thanks for sharing some truths about Darwinism.
If the Nazi's were really Atheists or Anti-God then why did they care one wit about the jews? Why didn't they also kill all the devout Catholics as well?
I think that most of you have a good a grasp on Evolution a you do on History. By which I mean that none of you appear very informed on either.
Hmmm: "Judge 'jackass' Jones"
but I see:"Comments containing nothing but insults and/or ad hominem attacks are discouraged. "
Hmmm, Hypocrisy maybe?
Ah, such a high level of Civility. I can't wait to see your charming replies to my other comments.
Although I wasn't really expecting you to be consistent as you have already gone back on your eternal pledge against censorship.
Is accusing me of hypocrisy "civil"?
>>>Is accusing me of hypocrisy "civil"?<<<<
I would say is is both completely apt and far more civil than "Stupid fathead".
I do hope you are more polite and intellectually honest with the many, many other commentors on your blog.
1. Hitler rejected Darwinism. Not only did he famously insist 'A fox remains a fox, a goose remains a goose', he also banned all Darwin's books.
2. Mengele was attempting to practice ARTIFICIAL selection, which had been practiced for thousands of years before Darwin was born.
3. We didn't need Darwin to tell us that if you exterminate a species then it can't reproduce any more.
4. The term 'survival of the fittest' was originated to describe right-wing free market capitalism. It doesn't mean 'the strongest or most vicious will triumph'.
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