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Eugenics as Propaganda: How Words are Twisted to Preserve Egalitarianism.
In the 2001 spring issue of Mankind Quarterly pages 315-50, I reviewed
nine books on eugenics. Recently, I purchased some recent books on eugenics,
and nothing has really changed. A few authors advocate the return of the new
eugenics (genetic engineering), but most books are written as dire warnings
against its return. Of course what few of these books do is to complete the
stories that they tell. Typically they start in the late 1800s and end in the
late 1900s, while often dismissing current understandings about the
heritability of intelligence, but skipping what we have learned over the last
few decades in fields such as pharmacogenetics, genomics, behavior genetics,
and recent advances in eugenic practices (see The Baby Business by
Debora L. Spar, 2006).
I'll look at two books to tease out the various specious arguments found in
virtually all anti-eugenic books. The first book is Deadly Medicine:
Creating the Master Race, published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
2004, Susan Bachrach begins: "From 1933 to 1945,
"Biomedical language pervaded the crude, pseudoscientific Nazi propaganda
that depicted Jews as 'microbes' infecting the German 'national body' and
slandered Jewish doctors as sexual predators. A long path led from racial
hygiene before the Third Reich to Nazi racial hygiene and the Holocaust, and
the first travelers on that route could not have imagined its horrific
ending."
The objectives of anti-eugenic books are to try and show that eugenics led
directly to the Holocaustalong with the horrors of sterilization. It is
asserted that these two actions, one lasting a few years, the latter over
decades, would not have taken place without eugenics. It is true that sterilization
was one of the primary objectives of eugenics at the time, because in numerous
advanced nations, it was seen as one of the few means that society had to keep
primarily feebleminded people, often institutionalized, from having ever more
children. Once sterilized, they could be released back into society. That
dilemma remains with us todaythe permanent underclass.
With regards to the Holocaust however, the events documented in this book and
others conflate disparate events and programs under the common red herring
of eugenics. I will show how Deadly Medicine uses the language of
propaganda and tries to show a continuum from eugenics to the Holocaust. In
short, under the Third Reich, eugenics (racial hygiene), medical
experimentation on prisoners, euthanasia, extermination of inferiors, and
extermination of internal enemies were not connected but were undertaken for
different reasons, not all related to eugenics.
It is true that under the Nazi regime, biological propaganda was pervasivebut
no less so than the egalitarian propaganda that is present in the current
Western media. For example, the heritability of intelligence is rarely
mentioned when discussing President Bush's No Child Left Behind Program. Like
we do now, the media fed the masses what they felt they should be told, not the
actual facts, as they themselves knew them to be. "Pseudoscientific Nazi
propaganda" is a meaningless phrase, but the term pseudoscience is
tossed often at eugenics as if 10,000 years of animal and plant breeding didn't
actually take place, like the often-used disparaging phrase scientific
racism to describe the numerous fields of science that take heredity and
genetics into account.
The Jews were not exterminated because of racial inferiority. Bachrach quotes
Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human
Heredity, and Eugenics from 1927 to 1942 from a 1939 lecture: "I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes certainly are,
and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I
reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to
preserve the hereditary endowment of my people."
Sheila Faith Weiss also notes that Fritz Lenz, a leading exponent of eugenics
and read by Hitler, did not consider Jews inferior: "[Lenz] considered
[Jews] a 'mental race,' a people preoccupied with making money or making
revolution. But he also praised Jews as a highly intelligent people whose
presence in the world of knowledge, particularly in the sciences, was far
greater 'than expected from their numbers.' 'To deny that the Jewish race has
produced persons of outstanding genius,' Lenz asserted, 'would be
absurd.'"
The Jews were not seen as
inferior similar to other races, but as an enemy. Their success, their
international contacts, their tenacity, their cohesiveness; these were all seen
as a threat. They were exterminated for the same reason that the Soviet
Communists sent millions of people to their death for being enemies of the
State. The Holocaust would have happened if the Nazis had never adopted
eugenics. In a racialized world, it was far easier to mobilize the German
people against the Jews through numerous accusations, including biological
shortcomings with regards to their lack of morality or inability at nation
buildingbut they were not seen by antisemites at the time as being inferior in
terms of skill, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc. They were seen as enemies
of the nationas being inassimilable. In this regards they were slaughtered as
enemies of the state, again similar to how Communist regimes slaughtered
classes of people.
The Nazi euthanasia program was not linked to eugenicsit was undertaken for
the same reason as it is practiced todayeconomy, compassion, plus for a nation
at war to free up beds. A nation at war, with few resources, needed to cut
costs and to free up beds for wounded soldiers. Hitler's moral system called
for an all-out war for the survival of
Euthanasia, like sterilization, is made out to be a universal evil, and yet I
have witnessed numerous people getting voluntarily sterilized, hysterectomies
performed, and recently the euthanasia of my mother. Of course it was not
called that, but after a fall and a brain clot, she was swiftly sent off to a
nursing home where she was given only morphinefood and water was withdrawn. I
got the feeling that this was a common routine in intensive care unitsbecause
everyone seemed be in sync once they were given a wink-and-a-nod to proceed.
Daniel J. Kelves noted: "After the turn of the century, eugenics
movements blossomed in the
He then noted that only in Nazi Germany did sterilization become a common
practice, and it was used whether people were in institutions or not. Being a
totalitarian state, Nazi Germany had the power of the state behind their
eugenics' program that was the envy of the
According to Gisela Bock, "Eugenics was an international movement; its
tenets, theoretical as well as practical and political, were built on five
assumptions, most of which counted as 'science' at the time." What is
amazing after reading numerous books on eugenics is how correct these
"scientific assumptions" were during this period. The only two places
that they were in error were in the lingering belief by some of Lamarckianism
versus genetic selection, and the importance of Mendelism versus a polygenic
view of how genes influence behavior and disease. The observations that were
made with regards to crime, feeblemindedness, disease, psychoticism,
alcoholism, etc. were remarkably prescient with the few scientific tools they
had. Today we know that genetics in fact does have a remarkable impact on how
people behave.
Bock's "five assumptions" are as follows: 1) Modern medicine and
social welfare was setting up the situation where the unfit were beginning to
outbreed the fit; 2) psychiatry and medicine should be used for eugenics; 3)
The unfit had features that were inherited and not due to the environment; 4)
Individualism was being supplanted by the collective good; and 5) the vision
for the future was for a world without illness, weakness, and misery. These
five assumptions are pretty clear and commendable today, with the exception of
the "collectivism versus individualism" debate that will probably be
an ongoing philosophical debate rather than a scientific one.
Bock does note that about 500 African Germans were sterilized based on race
alone. Given Hitler's attitude towards Blacks this is not surprisingthey were
held in disgust, and attitudes towards them varied dramatically from how the
Nazis viewed other minorities. But then Bock states, "Eugenic racism
targeted human beings considered inferior on eugenic grounds their emotional,
mental, social, and physical makeup for the sake of 'regeneration'; ethnic
racism targeted those considered inferior on ethnic grounds especially Jews,
but also Gypsies, blacks, and Slavs. Eugenic racism based its scientific
legitimacy on the discourse of heredity, ethnic racism on that of
descent."
This is typical of the confusing language throughout Deadly Medicine. If
the Jews were eugenically targeted even more than the African Germans, why were
they not sterilized? But how did "eugenic racism" play itself out in
Bock then states, "In the Weimar Republic, academic racial anthropology
was considered a legitimate field and not perceived as a pseudoscience. The
fact that most of the international scientific community of the time considered
German racial science a 'normal science' does not mean that it was not strongly
politicized."
Yet today there are ongoing research programs that study the lineage of
"population groups," which has become mainstream science. Race after
all is just a term used to arbitrarily categorize population groups with a
common ancestry. The strawman to deny race is when the term
"distinct" is used to define a racial group but geneticists are not
in search of distinct markers for classifying races, or for breeds of dogs for
that matter.
As for being "politicized," science has always had individual and
collective biases. Michael Shermer explains: "In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict
double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the
subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the
data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in
peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories
unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as
contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues
are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence." (Michael Shermer, "The Political Brain,"
Following these guidelines, pseudoscience does not exist outside of palm
reading, astrology, horoscopes, and UFOs as well as the abundance of self-help
books based on assumptions and speculations. Eugenics, racial differences,
psychometrics, etc. are all firmly grounded in science, no matter the
preferential bias of any one individual or field of study.
The "Jewish Problem" was somewhat of an enigma, not unlike the
problem of terrorists today. But was it racial? Bock writes:
"Anthropologists and human geneticists, nonetheless, provided their
scientific backing to Nazi antisemitism in speeches, popular articles, and
handbooks. Otmar von Verschuer wrote on the Jewish Problem, 'racial care,' and
racial policy in his handbook Principles of Racial Hygiene. He explained
to medical students that all previous attempts to solve the Jewish Problem had failed
and that only a 'global solution' based on 'racial biology' could be
successful. Verschuer also collaborated with Nazi officials of the Research
Department for the Jewish Question, lecturing on Jews (and convincing Fischer
to join him), despite the possible risk to his scientific reputation: 'International
Jewry is perfectly aware of what side we are on; taking part or not taking part
in such a meeting will not make a difference. It is important that our racial
policyalso in the Jewish Question receive an objective scientific grounding,
which can also be accepted by wider circles.'"
Statements like these lend one to view the "Jewish Problem" as one of
assimilation, not one where the Jews were seen as "unfit." Racialism
was the norm, and there were constant comparisons made on the equality of
different races. But the "Jewish Problem" was seen in a different
light part racial, part cultural, and of a people without a nation that did not
belong.
Even when it came to racial purity, Jews were seen differently than other
races. Remember, an African Germanthe one percent rulewas sterilized. But in
Benno Muller-Hill sheds light on how Jews differed from other races in the eyes
of the Nazis, and points to conflict rather than race as the cause of the
Holocaust: "After 1933, Fischer steadily and frequently supported
antisemitism. In 1933, he had already proposed a law, similar to the
What I read in this is the hatred for the Bolshevik Jews, and their own reign
of terror. For an extreme anti-Semite like Fischer, such an outburst reveals
how it was conflict and fearnot disgust or hatred of the Jews that led to the
Holocaust. Then in a classic hypocritical accusation, Muller-Hill states:
"One aspect of antisemitism should not be overlookedthe ousting of Jews
from the field of medicine. Once in power, the Nazi regime moved quickly to
remove Jewish influence, citing its overrepresentation in the medical
profession. In
But that sounds just like affirmative action in the
Was Nazi racial hygiene real science or pseudoscience? It seems it was firmly
grounded in science, as I could not find one area of pseudoscience. Muller-Hill
claims: "In 1943, Verschuer initiated a research project in
No, it would not be considered as pseudoscience it would be classified as scientific
fraud. Today there seems to be a few cases of scientific fraud, but they
are quickly uncovered. A careful reading of Deadly Medicine then shows
that racial science was as legitimate then as it is today, though the tools and
knowledge we have to work with now has far surpassed the crude observations
used to study the unknowns of genetics then.
How is Deadly Medicine summed up?
Muller-Hill claims: "What is the bottom line? Was Nazi racial
science real science or pseudoscience? There is no doubt that science served
crime, but was it pseudoscience? There is no simple, clear answer. Racial
science under the Nazis was an amalgam of both honest, human genetics and
pseudoscience. Like most science, racial science was well funded in
I only found the one example of scientific fraud mentioned above, and no
cases of pseudoscience. A careful reading of Deadly Medicine
reveals that eugenics, euthanasia, and the Holocaust were not connected but
were carried out for different reasons. Compare the Nazi's program of racial
science with Stalin's abandonment of selective breeding for LysenkoismA
biological doctrine that maintained the possibility of inheriting
environmentally acquired characteristics. Or the renewed push for intelligent
design's reintroduction in the
Another book also published in 2004, From
With the knowledge that humans were merely the embodiment of an evolutionary
process, it was now possible for any social program to be put into action to
change society to conform to various worldviews. Weikart notes, "
Certainly many Darwinists proclaimed the death
knell for Christian, Kantian, or any other fixed system of ethics, and they
contended that moral relativism was a logical consequence of a Darwinian view
of morality. They completely rejected the natural law tradition of morality
that had been so influential in the Enlightenment." And that remains the
case today, as no one has been able to put together a coherent moral or ethical
systemthere is no moral certitude in nature. Darwinism leads ineluctably
towards the realization, that organisms are merely mechanisms for carrying
genes from one generation to the next. (Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, 1976.)
Weikart states, "Darwinian inegalitarianism became so pervasive by the
early twentieth century that it even infiltrated the ranks of socialists and
other political radicals. In fact, the earliest leaders in the eugenics
movementForel, Ploetz, Schallmayer, Ehrenfels, Grotjahn, Max von Gruber, and
Woltmann, among otherstilted decidedly toward the Left politically."
Racialism was so prevalent during the age of Darwinism, it was just
assumed by many of the elite that it would be natural to exterminate the lower
races. Again however, antisemitism was different: "Though anti-Semitism
has dominated the attention of many scholars examining German racismfor
obvious reasonswe can see that ideas about racial extermination were not
necessarily connected to anti-Semitism. More often than not when social
Darwinists and eugenicists spoke about inferior races, they meant non-European
races, especially American Indians, Australian aborigines, blacks, and East
Asians. Though some of the social Darwinists and eugenicists I have discussed
were anti-Semitic in varying degreessome rabidly sovery few of them ever
referred to the extermination of Jews. On the other hand, some social
Darwinists even opposed anti-Semitism, and some German and Austrian Jews
(Gumplowicz, for example) justified racial struggle and racial extermination,
just as other German thinkers did. Of course, there were some anti-Semitic
thinkers advocating elimination of the Jews, and even a few radical
anti-Semites advocating extermination, as Daniel Goldhagen has reminded us
(while overstating his case). But the notion of racial extermination was much
more widespread in forms not associated with anti-Semitism, especially among
the educated elites."
What Darwinism allowed Hitler to do then was to establish an alternative
moralityone based solely on the advancement of the German people. There was no
slippery slope from Darwinism or eugenics to the Holocaust: "Undoubtedly
Hitler was immoral [nor] a mere opportunist. Rather he was a principled
politician with a well-defined worldview that he pursued relentlessly. it is
clear from Hitler's writings and speeches that he was not amoral at all. On the
contrary, he was highly moralistic and consistently applied his vision of
morality to policy decisions, including waging war and genocide. It may be difficult
for us to grasp this, but in Hitler's worldview war and genocide were not only
morally justifiable, but morally praiseworthy. Hitler was ultimately so
dangerous, then, precisely because his policies and decisions were based on
coherent, but pernicious, ethical ideas.
Hitler embraced an evolutionary ethic that made Darwinian fitness and health
the only criteria for moral standards. The Darwinian struggle for existence,
especially the struggle between different races, became the sole arbiter for
morality."
This is the elephant in the room that modern ethicists refuse to
recognize: humanitarianism is a choice, not a logical system based on some
social good. We are all now free to envision and promote the type of world we
would like to live in, and the eugenic vision swept through most modern nations
for over sixty years. To Hitler, morality was a social construction. Weikart
explains: "Hitler, like many other evolutionists we have examined in this
work, evaded complete nihilism and moral relativism by adopting a form of
evolutionary ethics. He believed that human morality was a product of
evolutionary development, representing the highest stage of evolution ever yet
reached. Like so many of his contemporaries, his view of evolution was imbued
with the notion of progress, and he considered morality one of the greatest
evolutionary advances. Of course, given his own belief that morality does not
exist apart from the human psyche, Hitler had no objective, scientific basis
for decreeing that human morality represented a 'higher' or 'better' stage of
evolution, for he had no objective criteria to determine what is 'higher' or
'better.' Hitler was not alone in this error, for many of his predecessors and
contemporaries upheld the same view of evolutionary progress, while denying any
basis for judging developments as better or worse."
There is some legitimacy in criticizing any attempt to prove that humans would
be better off if we were more intelligent, or even if we became healthier. But
there is a great deal of empirical data that correlates higher intelligence
with many of life's preferable outcomes. (See Linda Gottfredson's articles
posted on the Internet.) Some of course might argue that it would be better if
humans became less intelligent to the degree that they could no longer produce
weapons to kill each other. It seems that many idealists on the left do have a
vision of humans returning to cave dwelling and turning our backs on modern
technology. Still, eugenics has always been based on two foundations: the
science of human biological change and the desire for certain human attributes
such as freedom from disease and feeblemindedness.
Weikart elaborates, with some contradiction it seems, how Hitler differentiated
the Jews from others: "Hitler contrasted his vision of altruistic Germans,
the highest exemplars of human morality, with the Jew as the epitome of
immorality. He continually accused the Jews of greed, deceit, sexual deviance,
and other immoral deeds, thereby justifying his view of them as an inferior
race. Thus inferiority did not just mean physical and mental inferiority, but
moral inferiority (remember that all three of these were biologically based, in
Hitler's view). Indeed, when discussing the racial inferiority of the Jews,
Hitler stressed their alleged moral defects far more than their physical or
mental traits. In fact, the only reason the Jews were a threat to
Again and again, the real cause of the Holocaust seems to be very similar to
why we are under attack from the Islamic world. The West is viewed as immoral
and godless while the real reason for the hate is the failure in achievement by
many Muslims leading to humiliation. The Jews were simply hated because they
were more successful than the average German, and they were therefore a threat.
It would hardly have been prudent for the Nazi Party to admit to German
inferiority in terms of intelligence to Jews, so other Jewish attributes such
as clannishness had to be attacked. Again, there was no connect between
Darwinism, eugenics, euthanasia, or viewing the Jews as unfit that led to the
Holocaust it was racial competition.
This book is one of the better books on eugenics because it fully explores just
how societies went from Darwinism to eugenics. It is well worth reading for
that purpose alone. But Weikart never really addresses the problems with the
moral relativism he unravels in the book. He admits: "This study is
important, not only because it shows the intersection of Darwinian biology and
ethics in the past, especially the way that Darwinism influenced thinking about
the value of human life, but also because
these debates are still with us today. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology are making similar
claims about the implications of Darwinism for ethics and morality.
Often these scientists and philosophers seem oblivious to the many earlier attempts
to wed Darwinism to ethics. Also, many bioethicists today are articulating positions quite similar to the views
of the figures in this study. Peter Singer and James Rachels, for
example, are contemporary philosophers who argue that Darwinism has effectively
undermined the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the sanctity of human life, thereby
making involuntary euthanasia permissible in some circumstances, such as in the
case of a severely handicapped infant."
Weikart as far as I can tell does not try to refute the problems with trying to
put together an ethical system. Moral concerns for family, kin, and nation over
other unrelated people's has been shown to be not only an innate tendency in
humans and animals, but it has a strong philosophical position that at least
allows an emotional attachment for one's race over other races. Frank Salter
has eloquently laid out such a position based on genetic relatedness in his
book On Genetic Interests, 2003.
Weikart concludes: "Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but
without Darwinism, especially in its social Darwinist and eugenics
permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the
necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their
collaborators that one of the world's greatest atrocities was really morally
praiseworthy. Darwinism or at least some naturalistic interpretations of
Darwinism succeeded in turning morality on its head."
This seems like a rather absurd assumption considering how many millions of
people have died over the last 100 years based on all kinds of ideologies: The
Armenians in Turkey, the Kulaks and Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, Communist
China's numerous purges, the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, and now Sunnis
against Shiites in Iraq and the intended destruction of Israel by Iran's
President Ahmadi nejad. None of these hostilities and genocides needed any
"scientific underpinning.
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