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The
desire to further advance and aid evolution...
The moral antecedents to Nazi rule do not rest in Mein Kampf, but in
three factors that had major influence on Hitler's
life and even the manner in which he died
First,
social Darwinism of the German academies almost a century before Hitler's rise to power.
Secondly,
Adolph Hitler's self delusion that he was the new
Christian messiah
Thirdly, the control of satanic forces over
his mind brought about through his occult
practices.
Adolph Hitler and Darwinism
When Darwin's "Origin of the Species" was first published in 1859, it took the German intellectual establishment by storm and captured the minds of German thinkers in ways that few other ideas did. It would cause a cataclysmic cultural shift that paved the way for Hitler.
To German intellectuals, Darwin's theory posited not only biological scheme that described the development of organisms, but also supplied the key that could unlock the mystery about creating a better society. From the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century, Darwinism would become the dominant interpretive paradigm in most other disciplines as well including history, and anthropology.
Racism formed the basis of Hitler's world view. Hitler believed that the Aryan race, the fundamental element of the German nation, was superior to all the other races and had to rule them. He dreamed that the Aryan race would found a world empire that would last 1,000 years.
The scientific support Hitler found for these racist theories was Darwin's theory of evolution.
Hitler's most important public relations officer, the racist German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, was strongly affected by Darwin's theory of evolution and based his racist views on Darwinism. He used to say, "Nations can only develop by violent competition like Darwin's survival of the fittest," He thought: "The yellow races have no understanding of artistic ability and political freedom. It is the destiny of the black races to serve the whites and to be the target of the whites' loathing for all
eternity.
While Hitler was developing his theories he drew inspiration, like Treitschke, from Darwin and particularly Darwin's idea of the fight for survival. The title of his notorious book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") was inspired by the idea of this fight for survival. Just like Darwin, Hitler gave non-European races the status of monkeys, and said, "Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes."
Hitler thought that human beings were highly developed animals and instead of allowing natural forces and chance, in a word coincidence, to control evolution, it was necessary to take the management of it into his own hands to develop the human race. And this was the ultimate aim of the Nazi movement. In order to
realize this aim, the first step was to separate, to isolate, the inferior races from the Aryan race.
At this point the Nazis moved to the implementation of Darwinism, and took as their example the "theory of eugenics" which itself had its origins in Darwinism.
In Darwinian theory, death functions as the engine of evolutionary progress. Weaker organisms are eliminated while stronger organisms survive. Natural selection is construed as a positive good ordained by nature, and the traditional ideas about suffering, dying and death undergo change and revision.
A moral relativism arose that redefined the killing of "undesirables" as socially desirable. Since societies and nations also function by natural selection, that killing of the weak could be justified as aiding social progress. Life was no longer held sacred.
Science trumps religion in the Darwinian moral vision, thus any policy that sanctions the killing of innocents also carried the authoritative imprimatur of science. Programs promoting abortion, infanticide, euthanasia (and the concentration camps that came later) always followed this moral logic in one way or another.
The Darwinian ethic contrasts sharply with the Judeo/Christian moral vision that sees death as an enemy that must be destroyed. Death is defined not as primeval force intrinsic to nature but as an aberration -- something that entered the world after it was already created. The Genesis narrative reads that death entered the world only after "God rested." Death is neither created by God nor "natural" to nature.
Instead, death entered the world through the rebellion of man and thus cannot be construed as a social good. This view imposes the moral obligation that the strong must bear the burdens of the weak rather than kill them. Life is held sacred.
In theological terms, Darwinian natural selection posits a secularized Manichean dualism where nature functions as an authoritative god from which both life and death flow. There is no fixed moral distinction between life and death in the Darwinian vision, and the moral value given to life and death is determined solely by arbitrary, socially conditioned, criteria.
Social Darwinism did not arise in a cultural vacuum. Other factors contributed to the Darwinian ascendancy that served to affirm its claim as the key to understanding social progress.
Chief among them was a cult of progress that dominated most of Europe at the time. Many thinkers shared a belief in the inevitable march of progress drawn from a generalized positivism not yet challenged by the carnage of WWI. Second, Malthusian ideas (as a populations increase, natural resources decrease) also contributed. Natural selection fit Malthusian doctrine hand in glove and provided a strong sense of moral justification when the genocidal ideas were put into practice, particularly against non-Germans. Third, the radical materialism of Nietzsche and others defined the transcendent out of existence thus muting the moral reproof of Darwinian relativism intrinsic to the Judeo/Christian tradition.
Darwinism was able to assimilate these currents and give them a coherent and concrete unity under the rubric of objective science.
Hospitals became killing centers so that by 1939 for example, over 70,000 Germans already perished in the Nazi eugenics program with the full approval and concrete aid of the German medical establishment. The penetration of the Darwinian social ethic ran so deep that the entire Judeo/Christian moral tradition was overthrown. Diabolical crackpots like Joseph Mengele actually believed their experiments would help the human race.
After Auschwitz and the Gulags, it shouldn't be difficult to recognize the speciousness of the claim that totalitarian ideologies are in any way "scientific." The millions killed in the name of Nazism and Marxism alone should evoke some humility toward the limits of science, and reveal the transparency of attempts to confer authority where in fact none exists. In pre-war Germany however, the faith that secular ideology could improve human society towered as high as Babel and would not waver until the bombs rained down on Berlin.
In due course the Darwinian moral logic would be applied to nations. Germany saw itself as the most educated and cultivated in Europe, and by the light of social Darwinism the German advancement served as proof of German supremacy. These racist ideas would fuel German aggression first as colonial occupiers (Germany was notoriously brutal towards the populations they subjugated), and later as European conquerors. The seeds of Hitler's Aryan supremacy and lebensraum were sown here.
By the time Hitler rose to power, social Darwinism was firmly entrenched in German culture. Hitler was able to direct the machinery of state towards genocide without any appreciable public resistance because the moral barriers against this evil were overturned long before he came to power. Germans could already justify killing their own. Killing others would prove even easier to justify.
Why did Hitler single out the Jews? Finding an answer is difficult because the historical evidence is scarce. Anti-Semitism was always present among Darwinian social engineers but usually at the fringes. Popular anti-Semitism was more prevalent and there is some evidence Hitler drew from these populist writings.
Darwinism did not produce the Holocaust, but without it the social and scientific underpinnings would not have existed that justified genocide as morally beneficent by Hitler and his followers. Darwinism turned Judeo/Christian morality on its head. By elevating death as progress and jettisoning any notion that life is inherently sacred, the moral foundation for unprecedented barbarism was laid.
In Germany the first person to be influenced by and to spread eugenics was the famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a close friend and supporter of Darwin. He suggested that newly-born handicapped children should be killed forthwith and that this would speed up the evolution of society. He went even further, claiming that lepers and people with cancer and mental illnesses should be painlessly killed, or else these people would be a burden on society and would slow down evolution.
Haeckel died in 1919. But his ideas were inherited by the Nazis. Shortly after Hitler came to power an official eugenics
program was initiated. Hitler summed up the new policy in these sentences:
"In the popular state, the education of the mind and the body will play an important role, but human selection is just as important.
The state has the responsibility of declaring as unfit for reproductive purposes anyone who is obviously ill or genetically
unsound, and must carry through with this responsibility ruthlessly without respect to understanding or lack of understanding on the part of anyone.
Stopping reproduction of the bodily degenerate or psychically ill for a period of only 600 years would lead
to an improvement in human health which can hardly be envisaged today."
As a necessity of this policy of Hitler's, the mentally ill, the disabled, the blind from birth, and those with genetic diseases in German society, were rounded up in special
"sterilization centers." These people were regarded as parasites harmful to the purity and evolutionary progress of the German race. A while later in fact, these people who were removed from society began to be killed by secret order of Hitler.
These murders were presented as being perfectly reasonable and those who were accepted as genetically inferior were described as "unprofitable" and obstacle to the development of the nation. Hitler said. "It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on."
The author of the book Darwin: Before and After, Robert Clarke, concluded,
Adolf Hitler: "was captivated by evolutionary teaching
probably since the time he was a boy. Hitler reasoned
that a higher race would always conquer a lower." The political philosophy of Nazi Germany took shape under the influence of these ideas of Hitler's.
Research:
[1] Alaeddin Şenel, Irk ve Irkılık Dşncesi (The Idea of Race and Racism), Ankara:Bilim ve Sanat Yayınları, 1993, pp.62-6
[2] Carl Cohen, "Communism, Fascism and Democracy", Random House, New York, 1972
[3] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Menchen: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1993, p. 44, 447-448; cited by A.E. Wilder Smith, "Man's Origin, Man's Destiny: A Critical Survey of the Principles of Evolution and Christianity", The Word For Today Publishing 1993, p. 163, 164
[4] Theodore D. Hall, The Scientific Background of the Nazi "Race Purification" Program, http://www.trufax.org/avoid/nazi.html
[5] Robert Clark, "Darwin: Before and After", Grand Rapids International Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 1958. p.115
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