Nazis, Darwin And Evolution

[lpetrich]

As to "Darwinism" and eugenics, it must be pointed out that eugenics is *artificial* selection. Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" starts out with a detailed discussion of pigeon breeding, and how pigeon fanciers had produced lots of different breeds of their birds by artificial selection. That book also ducked the subject of human evolution.

Also in the 19th cy., many people often used "race" rather indiscriminately for any well-defined population, like nationality or ethnicity. They also often didn't try very hard to distinguish genetic and cultural features.

 

[lpetrich]

There is another bit of science that the Nazis appropriated. To understand it, let us go back 2000 years, when Romans were conquering Greeks. They liked Greek culture and Greek literature, and many Romans learned the Greek language. They noticed that their languages had a lot in common, even though they were far from mutually intelligible. Was Latin descended from Greek? Did they share some common ancestor?

The next progress did not come until a few centuries ago. It was already evident that many people in southwestern Europe were speaking descendants of Latin, but with lots of sound shifts and vocabulary changes and grammatical changes, enough to be unintelligible with their original. Travelers to India made a remarkable discovery. Hindus had religious traditions that went back centuries, and their oldest religious literature, the Vedas, was written in a language, Sanskrit, that was much like Latin and Greek.

So in the fashion of French and Spanish and Italian being descended from Latin, could Latin and Greek and Sanskrit be descended from some even older language?

By the early 19th cy., the existence of this ancestral language became generally accepted. It was also the ancestor of the Germanic and Celtic and Slavic languages and also Persian, languages in a big family called "Indo-European". But in the early days of research into the ancestral Indo-European language, a lot of researchers seemed overly impressed with claims of the Vedas' great antiquity, so they reconstructed this language as being very Sanskrit-like. That turned out to be a mistake, but it wasn't apparent in the days before radiocarbon dating and archeology that was much much more than pot hunting.

As to where "Aryan" came from, it comes from a common self-designation in India, aarya, roughly "noble". It is also the source of Iran's name. So some people called the early IE speakers Aryans, even though we haven't been able to get any clue about what they called themselves.

 

[lpetrich]

Where was the homeland of the ancestral IE speakers, the "Aryans"? Hypotheses have ranged from central Europe to eastern Europe to southern Russia to Anatolia to northern India.

The central-Europe hypothesis was very flattering to German nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Why wouldn't it be? Their ancestors were the original Aryans, conquerors of Europe and South Asia.

Along with the name Aryan came an old symbol from India, the swastika, the hook-cross. So that's where the Nazis got "Aryan" and the swastika from -- early naive notions about Proto-Indo-European and a very flattering hypothesis about where its speakers lived.


Of course, that was nonsense. Among the Nazis' targets were the Roma. These people were descended from people in northern India who fled the Muslim conquests there a millennium ago. People who had better claim to the name "Aryan" than they did.


From some linguistic and archeological detective work, we now also have a good idea of who the PIE speakers were. They were the first people to domesticate horses, people who lived from eastern Ukraine to Kazakhstan some 5500 years ago.

They called this animal something like "ekwos". Latin equus sounds very similar, and Old Latin equos even more -- that is one of our sources for this reconstruction.

But that's not something that a Nazi would have wanted to believe. The Nazis believed that the Slavs are a degenerate race, to be conquered and reduced to serfdom and slavery.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

http://home.uchicago.edu/~rjr6/articles/German Darwinism--illustrated--5-5-2011.pdf

Another Robert J.Richards essay detailing the rise of Nazi objections to Darwin and evolution. Plus destroying the anti-Darwinist claims Haeckel was the bridge between Darwin and Hitler. Haeckel's anti-Semiticsm has been wildly exaggerated by the anti-Darwnists, Haeckel was suspect by the Nazis of being "a friend to the Jews".

 

[DrZoidberg]

In recent years, we have had some people such as Richard Weikart and Dinesh D'Souza writing books to blame Darwin and evolution for being the basis of Hitler's holocaust. Weikart's book is "From Darwin To Hitler". Feeding lurid lies to the creationist true believers. Some years ago, I ran across an odd little item about the status of evolution to Nazis Scientists. I had saved it to a hard disk and have just found it again on an old hard disk of mine. Did Nazi scientists think evolution was true and an inspiration for national Socialism? Emphatically no.
-------

Evolution Under Attack By Nazis in Germany
Source:The Science News-letter Volume 39 Number 4
Jan 25 1941, Page 54
Published by: Society for Science & the Public
JSTOR URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/3918195

Evolution Under Attack By Nazis In Germany

"Evolution is under violent attack in Germany, primatily
because Darwinian teachings deviate from the Nazi "party line"
states states Dr. Otto Haas of the American Museum of Natural
History. (Science, Jan. 10) Dr. Haas cites a German
"semi-scientific" publication entitle Natur und Kultur, in
which ten different authors make violent attacks on evolution,
especially with regard to the origin of man from apelike
ancestors.
Dr. Haas calls particular attention "to a fact most striking to
a scientific reader: nowhere are the conclusions derived from
the results of research; on the contrary, the former are tested
as to whether or not they agree with the nationalist socialist
racial theory ('Rassenlerhe'). If they do not they have to be
rejected...Its no less striking to see that the adversaries of
evolution reproach its advocates, alleging that the latter made
them politically suspect".
One author, H. Weinert, rejects all these arguments as
"pseudoscientfic objections against the descent of the human
descent", but even he apparently tries to bolster up his
scientific argument with an appeal the party line, "asserting
that, should the origin of man be questioned, the adversaries
of national socialist 'racial hygiene' tendencies should
cite the uncertainty of science.

Science News Letter, January 25, 1941
-----

Because of the crap of Weikart and D'Souza peddle , I think this little item needs to be spread around a bit.

There is also Heather Pringle's "The Master Plan - Himmler's Scholars And The Holocaust". Himmler, head of the SS started a 'scientific' organization, the Ahnenerbe to prove Nazi racial theories scientifically. When one of Himmler's favorite scientists wrote an article taking evolution as true, Himmler gave him a sharp dressing down. Evolution, the idea that man evolved from monkey's was not acceptable to National Socialism. Himmler, head of his Ahnenerbe, banned writings supporting evolution. Himmler and national Socialism's official scientific organization were officially creationists.

The rancid little idea that Darwin can be blamed for the Holocaust is still an article of faith to many anti-evolutionists and creationists.

I later tried to track down more about this letter I am posting here, but found nothing. Some place in Germany, there is probably a dust collection of microfiches with copies of Natur Und Kultur insome dusty stacks, but I had no luck finding out how to access to any of that.

That's like saying that Niels Bohr is responsible for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

But keep in mind that Charles Darwin was himself a social Darwinist. He himself held beliefs that were pretty Nazi. Charles Darwin was also a Lamarckian. So he was wrong about stuff. He's not the grand pope of atheism. He's also the route of what became Freudianism and later psychoanalis and the psychological revovolution. That's a good thing. He was also the inspiration of Nietzsches thought. Who incidentally also was a source of Nazi thought, even though Nietzsche wasn't to blame. They just didn't understand what Nietzsche was saying.

So I'm pretty cool with the idea that Darwin's thought was partly responsible for the holocaust.

But do you know what was even more responsible for the holocaust? Christianity. Christianity teaches intolerance of thought and hatred of Jews. It's nice that Christians today often are more liberal about their faith. But that's because they're deviating from core doctrine. Christian thought is all you need to get a totalitarian police state going. Genocide on an industrial scale happened before the Nazis. What makes the Nazis special is access to modern machinery.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The people who put the Nazis in power - and let them stay in power - embraced Darwinism. Nuff said.

Actually, what turned the Nazis genocidal was when they became a mass movement and had to appeal to a Christian majority. Nazi ideology sprung from the Thule society. The Thule society had no problem with Jews. They assumed white supremacy. So there was no need to kill non-whites. They believed nature would see to it that they would perish anyway. After the Beer Hall Putch the rhetoric switched in order to appeal to Christians. Hitler needed the movement to grow so he could be released from jail. That's why the anti-Jewish rhetoric started.

So it's more accurate to blame Christianity for the holocaust. Especially Catholicism.

 

[Learner]

That's like saying that Niels Bohr is responsible for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

But keep in mind that Charles Darwin was himself a social Darwinist. He himself held beliefs that were pretty Nazi. Charles Darwin was also a Lamarckian. So he was wrong about stuff. He's not the grand pope of atheism. He's also the route of what became Freudianism and later psychoanalis and the psychological revovolution. That's a good thing. He was also the inspiration of Nietzsches thought. Who incidentally also was a source of Nazi thought, even though Nietzsche wasn't to blame. They just didn't understand what Nietzsche was saying.


So I'm pretty cool with the idea that Darwin's thought was partly responsible for the holocaust.

But do you know what was even more responsible for the holocaust? Christianity. "Christianity teaches intolerance of thought and hatred of Jews." It's nice that Christians today often are more liberal about their faith. But that's because they're deviating from core doctrine. Christian thought is all you need to get a totalitarian police state going. Genocide on an industrial scale happened before the Nazis. What makes the Nazis special is access to modern machinery.

And ... just like saying Jesus is responsible for those being so un-Jesus-like under the guise of Christianity.

(with you on Darwin)

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

There is another bit of science that the Nazis appropriated. To understand it, let us go back 2000 years, when Romans were conquering Greeks. They liked Greek culture and Greek literature, and many Romans learned the Greek language. They noticed that their languages had a lot in common, even though they were far from mutually intelligible. Was Latin descended from Greek? Did they share some common ancestor?

The next progress did not come until a few centuries ago. It was already evident that many people in southwestern Europe were speaking descendants of Latin, but with lots of sound shifts and vocabulary changes and grammatical changes, enough to be unintelligible with their original. Travelers to India made a remarkable discovery. Hindus had religious traditions that went back centuries, and their oldest religious literature, the Vedas, was written in a language, Sanskrit, that was much like Latin and Greek.

So in the fashion of French and Spanish and Italian being descended from Latin, could Latin and Greek and Sanskrit be descended from some even older language?

By the early 19th cy., the existence of this ancestral language became generally accepted. It was also the ancestor of the Germanic and Celtic and Slavic languages and also Persian, languages in a big family called "Indo-European". But in the early days of research into the ancestral Indo-European language, a lot of researchers seemed overly impressed with claims of the Vedas' great antiquity, so they reconstructed this language as being very Sanskrit-like. That turned out to be a mistake, but it wasn't apparent in the days before radiocarbon dating and archeology that was much much more than pot hunting.

As to where "Aryan" came from, it comes from a common self-designation in India, aarya, roughly "noble". It is also the source of Iran's name. So some people called the early IE speakers Aryans, even though we haven't been able to get any clue about what they called themselves.

Johann Fitche noted than many European languages were based in large part on Latin. But German was not. German was then a superior language. And Germans had a superior culture because of that. part of the 'intellectual' movement to justify German ultranationalism, that was a basis for later German racist theories that eventually gave us The Nazis, genocides and labelling non-Germans as human vermin, untermenschen.

 

[DrZoidberg]

That's like saying that Niels Bohr is responsible for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

But keep in mind that Charles Darwin was himself a social Darwinist. He himself held beliefs that were pretty Nazi. Charles Darwin was also a Lamarckian. So he was wrong about stuff. He's not the grand pope of atheism. He's also the route of what became Freudianism and later psychoanalis and the psychological revovolution. That's a good thing. He was also the inspiration of Nietzsches thought. Who incidentally also was a source of Nazi thought, even though Nietzsche wasn't to blame. They just didn't understand what Nietzsche was saying.


So I'm pretty cool with the idea that Darwin's thought was partly responsible for the holocaust.

But do you know what was even more responsible for the holocaust? Christianity. "Christianity teaches intolerance of thought and hatred of Jews." It's nice that Christians today often are more liberal about their faith. But that's because they're deviating from core doctrine. Christian thought is all you need to get a totalitarian police state going. Genocide on an industrial scale happened before the Nazis. What makes the Nazis special is access to modern machinery.

And ... just like saying Jesus is responsible for those being so un-Jesus-like under the guise of Christianity.

(with you on Darwin)

Absolutely. I agree. But the reason I brought it up is because this critique of Darwin, and linking it to the holocaust, often comes from Christians. Christians who live in very windy glass houses.

You may wish to look up something called "pogroms". Murdering Jews was a popular past time among Christians way before Darwin came along. It was Christianity that turned Nazism genocidal. Not Darwin. Sure, Darwin didn't help. But in Darwins model of the world, the master race won't need any help. Nature will sort it out. The Eugenics movement didn't start out genocidal. It was more geared toward helping people and avoiding them to be burdened by handicapped off-spring, they might struggle to look after.

Don't underestimate the power of the Christian command for intolerance. The first commandment is about religious freedom and freedom of thought. Or rather the lack of it. The Jewish covenent with God is a deal. The Jews promise not to worship any other God and God will have their backs. That puts it on the Jewish community to stamp out any attempts to worship the wrong Gods. It's this way of thinking that made it's way into Christianity and took over European thought for 2000 years. Christianity primed Europeans for totalitarian thought. And challenged in the Enlightenment. As far as I know there's no other group of religions that are intolerant to this extreme degree.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

In recent years, we have had some people such as Richard Weikart and Dinesh D'Souza writing books to blame Darwin and evolution for being the basis of Hitler's holocaust. Weikart's book is "From Darwin To Hitler". Feeding lurid lies to the creationist true believers. Some years ago, I ran across an odd little item about the status of evolution to Nazis Scientists. I had saved it to a hard disk and have just found it again on an old hard disk of mine. Did Nazi scientists think evolution was true and an inspiration for national Socialism? Emphatically no.
-------

Evolution Under Attack By Nazis in Germany
Source:The Science News-letter Volume 39 Number 4
Jan 25 1941, Page 54
Published by: Society for Science & the Public
JSTOR URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/3918195

Evolution Under Attack By Nazis In Germany

"Evolution is under violent attack in Germany, primatily
because Darwinian teachings deviate from the Nazi "party line"
states states Dr. Otto Haas of the American Museum of Natural
History. (Science, Jan. 10) Dr. Haas cites a German
"semi-scientific" publication entitle Natur und Kultur, in
which ten different authors make violent attacks on evolution,
especially with regard to the origin of man from apelike
ancestors.
Dr. Haas calls particular attention "to a fact most striking to
a scientific reader: nowhere are the conclusions derived from
the results of research; on the contrary, the former are tested
as to whether or not they agree with the nationalist socialist
racial theory ('Rassenlerhe'). If they do not they have to be
rejected...Its no less striking to see that the adversaries of
evolution reproach its advocates, alleging that the latter made
them politically suspect".
One author, H. Weinert, rejects all these arguments as
"pseudoscientfic objections against the descent of the human
descent", but even he apparently tries to bolster up his
scientific argument with an appeal the party line, "asserting
that, should the origin of man be questioned, the adversaries
of national socialist 'racial hygiene' tendencies should
cite the uncertainty of science.

Science News Letter, January 25, 1941
-----

Because of the crap of Weikart and D'Souza peddle , I think this little item needs to be spread around a bit.

There is also Heather Pringle's "The Master Plan - Himmler's Scholars And The Holocaust". Himmler, head of the SS started a 'scientific' organization, the Ahnenerbe to prove Nazi racial theories scientifically. When one of Himmler's favorite scientists wrote an article taking evolution as true, Himmler gave him a sharp dressing down. Evolution, the idea that man evolved from monkey's was not acceptable to National Socialism. Himmler, head of his Ahnenerbe, banned writings supporting evolution. Himmler and national Socialism's official scientific organization were officially creationists.

The rancid little idea that Darwin can be blamed for the Holocaust is still an article of faith to many anti-evolutionists and creationists.

I later tried to track down more about this letter I am posting here, but found nothing. Some place in Germany, there is probably a dust collection of microfiches with copies of Natur Und Kultur insome dusty stacks, but I had no luck finding out how to access to any of that.

That's like saying that Niels Bohr is responsible for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

But keep in mind that Charles Darwin was himself a social Darwinist. He himself held beliefs that were pretty Nazi. Charles Darwin was also a Lamarckian. So he was wrong about stuff. He's not the grand pope of atheism. He's also the route of what became Freudianism and later psychoanalis and the psychological revovolution. That's a good thing. He was also the inspiration of Nietzsches thought. Who incidentally also was a source of Nazi thought, even though Nietzsche wasn't to blame. They just didn't understand what Nietzsche was saying.

So I'm pretty cool with the idea that Darwin's thought was partly responsible for the holocaust.

But do you know what was even more responsible for the holocaust? Christianity. Christianity teaches intolerance of thought and hatred of Jews. It's nice that Christians today often are more liberal about their faith. But that's because they're deviating from core doctrine. Christian thought is all you need to get a totalitarian police state going. Genocide on an industrial scale happened before the Nazis. What makes the Nazis special is access to modern machinery.

Charles Darwin was never a social Darwinist. His book "Descent Of Man" pointed out mankinds success was based on mutual cooperation. Darwin himself hated Slavery and was a member of the English anti-slavery movement.

https://orbitermag.com/how-darwin-felt-about-slavery/

There is absolutely no sign at all that Darwin was a social Darwinist at all. Anti-evolutionists based that claim on the fact Darwin knew Herbert Spencer, but Darwin never spoke approvingly of any of Spencer's more radical later ideas. Darwin died in 1882, Spencer in 1902. the rise of social Darwinism was diametrically opposed by Darwin's emphasis on mutual cooperation.

Further more, Spencer's political ideas were somewhat contradictory and often far more humane, even radical, than his reputation is reputed to be as far as Social Darwinism is concerned.

 

[Lion IRC]

The people who put the Nazis in power - and let them stay in power - embraced Darwinism. Nuff said.

Actually, what turned the Nazis genocidal was when they became a mass movement and had to appeal to a Christian majority. Nazi ideology sprung from the Thule society. The Thule society had no problem with Jews. They assumed white supremacy. So there was no need to kill non-whites. They believed nature would see to it that they would perish anyway. After the Beer Hall Putch the rhetoric switched in order to appeal to Christians. Hitler needed the movement to grow so he could be released from jail. That's why the anti-Jewish rhetoric started.

So it's more accurate to blame Christianity for the holocaust. Especially Catholicism.

Nope. Hitlers Concordat with the Holy See (July 1933) was a Nazi con job.

The Nazis started violating the agreement within days of signing it.

They introduced sterilization laws which offended Pius XI. They banned the Catholic Youth League. They executed Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action in Germany. The Gestapo was forcefully intruding and violating the seal of Confessional to gather intelligence on Catholics. Catholic publications were being banned and shut down across the country. Why? Because of their support for Hitler?
Catholic priests and nuns in their thousands were being arrested.

Read Pius XI encyclical "Mit Brennender Sorge" which accused the regime of sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church" Pius XII described Nazism as arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ. (Which it was/is)

The only blame the Catholic Church has for Hitler was when it granted the dispensation which enabled the consanguineous marriage of his parents Klara Pözl and Alois Schicklgruber.

Any reading of Mein Kampf will unambiguously render Hitler as being a man who, like Darwin (and like a whole array of German philosophers,) viewed life and the world as a jungle where survival of the strongest was the only mandate one needed to justify predation.

As to "Darwinism" and eugenics, it must be pointed out that eugenics is *artificial* selection.

There is nothing 'artificial' about in-group / out-group natural selection. Many species deliberately cull the weak.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Nope. Hitlers Concordat with the Holy See (July 1933) was a Nazi con job.

The Nazis started violating the agreement within days of signing it.

They introduced sterilization laws which offended Pius XI. They banned the Catholic Youth League. They executed Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action in Germany. The Gestapo was forcefully intruding and violating the seal of Confessional to gather intelligence on Catholics. Catholic publications were being banned and shut down across the country. Why? Because of their support for Hitler?
Catholic priests and nuns in their thousands were being arrested.

Read Pius XI encyclical "Mit Brennender Sorge" which accused the regime of sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church" Pius XII described Nazism as arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ. (Which it was/is)

The only blame the Catholic Church has for Hitler was when it granted the dispensation which enabled the consanguineous marriage of his parents Klara Pözl and Alois Schicklgruber.

Any reading of Mein Kampf will unambiguously render Hitler as being a man who, like Darwin (and like a whole array of German philosophers,) viewed life and the world as a jungle where survival of the strongest was the only mandate one needed to justify predation.

As to "Darwinism" and eugenics, it must be pointed out that eugenics is *artificial* selection.

There is nothing 'artificial' about in-group / out-group natural selection. Many species deliberately cull the weak.

This world as a jungle was very much with us long before Hitler. For example, Prussia's land grab over territory controlled by Austria that occasion a fierce war with Austria. Hitler idolized Frederich the Great who
started that war. Right of conquest was an old idea that long predated Darwin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drang_nach_Osten

Drang Nach Osten, Drive to the East, was a German ideas of conquering Poland and Ukraine et al, and Germanizing those lands. It was a policing that started to be implemented when Germany in WWI defeated Russia. And was later picked up by Hitler. and of course we had the earlier German land grabs with the Teutonic knights and Teutonic brotherhood of the sword which Hitler admired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutonic_Knights_in_popular_culture

....During World War II, Nazi propaganda and ideology made frequent use of the Teutonic Knights' imagery, as the Nazis sought to depict the Knights' actions as a forerunner of the Nazi conquests for Lebensraum. Heinrich Himmler tried to idealize the SS as a 20th-century incarnation of the medieval knights. The modern Order, however, was banned in the Third Reich in 1938, due to long-standing belief of both Hitler and Himmler that Catholic military-religious orders were untrustworthy and politically suspect as subordinates of the Vatican, and representatives of its policy.^[4]
...
Instead we got the SS.

Don't blame Darwin for what was old German habit predating Darwin by many years

 

[Bomb#20]

People who embrace Darwinism voted in a party which supports Darwinism.
QED

Um, entirely apart from the dubiousness of your notions of who embraced Darwinism, the Germans didn't vote in the Nazis. Hitler lost the election. He became chancellor by parliamentary horse trading, sort of like Robert Menzies' minority government in Australia.

Hitler gave them what they wanted, and what they thought was scientifically rational - the master race. The uberman. Übermensch

Nietzsche would have applauded them.

Nietzsche despised German nationalism and antisemitism.

As for the Übermensch, in Nietzsche's writings the overman is always an individual. The notion of a race of overmen would have been an absurdity to him.

 

[lpetrich]

Here's a hint about Friedrich Nietzsche: he admired Napoleon.

He also didn't hate Jews. His sister did, however.

 

[SLD]

My understanding was that the Holocaust was primarily caused by a Eugenics movement, that arose from our new understanding of genetics. So based on that I think you could make a link with Darwin, but to say Darwin was to blame is a bit silly. The human race being a bunch of psychopathic dickheads is to blame.

Eugenics

Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by “breeding out” disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population

It had nothing to do with Darwin. Racialist thought in Germany goes way back to pre-revolutionary France.
See Hannah Arendt's essay Racialism Before Race. On to the nationalist reaction in Germany after Napoleon's defeat of the Germanys. Count Gobineau's books were later influential and Gobineau was pre-Darwin. Gobineaus did not like Darwin or evolution. Hitler was influence by Madison Grant's book, "The Passing Of The Great White Race". Grant's book was not based on evolution. Nordicism was not based on Darwin or evolution. Germany's official Nordic racism peddler Hans Gunther "Der Rassenpapst" The race pope write several books, available in English on the net. No mention of Darwin or evolution. Germany even had book burnings of Darwin's books because Darwin was judged un-Germanic.

Right. Antisemitism was rampant in late 19th century politics in Austria when Hitler was growing up. He just took it a step further. If you want to see the real reason, read Mein Kampf. Over and over again he cites religion and in particular, Martin Luther.

SLD

 

[lpetrich]

Any reading of Mein Kampf will unambiguously render Hitler as being a man who, like Darwin (and like a whole array of German philosophers,) viewed life and the world as a jungle where survival of the strongest was the only mandate one needed to justify predation.

Point out, word for word, where both Hitler and Darwin endorsed a "might makes right" ethic. For Darwin, you may stick to "Origin of Species".

This seems to me like projection of villainy.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

It had nothing to do with Darwin. Racialist thought in Germany goes way back to pre-revolutionary France.
See Hannah Arendt's essay Racialism Before Race. On to the nationalist reaction in Germany after Napoleon's defeat of the Germanys. Count Gobineau's books were later influential and Gobineau was pre-Darwin. Gobineaus did not like Darwin or evolution. Hitler was influence by Madison Grant's book, "The Passing Of The Great White Race". Grant's book was not based on evolution. Nordicism was not based on Darwin or evolution. Germany's official Nordic racism peddler Hans Gunther "Der Rassenpapst" The race pope write several books, available in English on the net. No mention of Darwin or evolution. Germany even had book burnings of Darwin's books because Darwin was judged un-Germanic.

Right. Antisemitism was rampant in late 19th century politics in Austria when Hitler was growing up. He just took it a step further. If you want to see the real reason, read Mein Kampf. Over and over again he cites religion and in particular, Martin Luther.

SLD

Hitler, in Mein Kampf tells us he became an anti-semite as a young man in Vienna, listening to virulient anti-Semites. No Darwin there at all. Google for Karl Lueger.

Lueger was known for his antisemitic rhetoric and referred to himself as an admirer of Edouard Drumont, who founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. Decades later, Adolf Hitler, an inhabitant of Vienna from 1907 to 1913, saw him as an inspiration for his own views on Jews. Though not an explicit pan-Germanist, Lueger advocated racist policies against non-German speaking minorities in Austria-Hungary and in 1887 voted for a bill proposed by his long-time opponent Georg von Schönerer to restrict the immigration of Russian and Romanian Jews.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Any reading of Mein Kampf will unambiguously render Hitler as being a man who, like Darwin (and like a whole array of German philosophers,) viewed life and the world as a jungle where survival of the strongest was the only mandate one needed to justify predation.

Point out, word for word, where both Hitler and Darwin endorsed a "might makes right" ethic. For Darwin, you may stick to "Origin of Species".

This seems to me like projection of villainy.

You will not find that in Darwin's "Descent Of Man" either. This organized campaign of hate mongering against Darwin has all the scholarship of Qanon garbage.

 

[Bomb#20]

The people who put the Nazis in power - and let them stay in power - embraced Darwinism. Nuff said.

You think this through the filters of hindsight, knowing as you do that Darwinism triumphed: all your life it's been the conventional wisdom among scientifically literate people. But what you say makes no sense in historical context. Nazism arose during "The Eclipse of Darwinism". In that period the conventional wisdom among scientifically literate people was that, yes, okay, Darwin had made a solid case for the fact that species had evolved from earlier species, but Darwin's theory -- that it had happened due to natural selection -- was either totally wrong or was just a minor piece of the puzzle. The prevailing views, the views that were in a position to influence the Nazis and the people who put them in power, would have been versions of directed evolution: either God, or a life force, or a natural progressive principle, or internal laws of development, or what have you, was driving life to evolve in some preordained direction. Until R.A. Fisher published his mathematical work in 1930, it was even widely believed that Mendel's laws of genetics refuted Darwin.

So the people you claim embraced Darwinism embraced whatever it was they embraced at a time when Darwin had hardly any influence.

 

[Lion IRC]

Any reading of Mein Kampf will unambiguously render Hitler as being a man who, like Darwin (and like a whole array of German philosophers,) viewed life and the world as a jungle where survival of the strongest was the only mandate one needed to justify predation.

Point out, word for word, where both Hitler and Darwin endorsed a "might makes right" ethic. For Darwin, you may stick to "Origin of Species".

This seems to me like projection of villainy.

There's no 'ethics' in natural selection.

/me waves goodbye to the Strawman.