May 2010 Print

A contribution to the reflection on the Year of Darwin

PART 1

Norbert Clasen

National Socialism and its crimes undoubtedly constituted a phenomenon without historical precedent. Nevertheless, this inhuman ideology and these crimes did not simply fall from the sky; they have significant roots in the cultural and scientific landscape of Western Europe and America of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The fact is that eugenics and “racial hygiene” represented an essential foundation of the ideology of National Socialism; they were widespread in Western culture and had enthusiastic supporters, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. From this background National Socialism drew its “scientific” language, through which it formulated its “biological” anti-Semitism. Together with Social Darwinism, eugenics eventually served to justify the war.

Pope Pius XI denounced modern racist anti-Semitism on February 25, 1928, by a decree. One of the few formal condemnations of eugenics in all its forms was the Encyclical Casti Connubii, written in 1930 by Pope Pius XI. The admonitions of the Church against the spirit of the times were not heard.

Pope Pius XII, in his first encyclical in October 1939, condemned racism, calling it a “pernicious error,” in which “the law of human solidarity and charity” is forgotten,

which is dictated and imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men, to whatever people they belong, and by the redeeming Sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ on the Altar of the Cross to His heavenly Father on behalf of sinful mankind. In fact, the first page of the Scripture, with magnificent simplicity, tells us how God, as a culmination to His creative work, made man to His own image and likeness (cf. Genesis 1:26-7); and the same Scripture tells us that He enriched man with supernatural gifts and privileges, and destined him to an eternal and ineffable happiness. It shows us besides how other men took their origin from the first couple, and then goes on, in unsurpassed vividness of language, to recount their division into different groups and their dispersion to various parts of the world. Even when they abandoned their Creator, God did not cease to regard them as His children, who, according to His merciful plan, should one day be reunited once more in His friendship (cf. Genesis 12:3).

The Apostle of the Gentiles later on makes himself the herald of this truth which associates men as brothers in one great family, when he proclaims to the Greek world that God hath made of one, all mankind, to dwell upon the whole face of the earth, determining appointed times, and the limits of their habitation, that they should seek God (Acts 17:26-7).

A marvelous vision, which makes us see the human race in the unity of one common origin in God, “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all” (Eph. 4:6); in the unity of nature which in every man is equally composed of material body and spiritual, immortal soul; in the unity of the immediate end and mission in the world; in the unity of dwelling place, the earth, of whose resources all men can by natural right avail themselves, to sustain and develop life; in the unity of the supernatural end, God Himself, to Whom all should tend; in the unity of means to secure that end.

It is the same Apostle who portrays for us mankind in the unity of its relations with the Son of God, image of the invisible God, in Whom all things have been created: In Him were all things created (Col. 1:16); in the unity of its ransom, effected for all by Christ, Who, through His Holy and most bitter passion, restored the original friendship with God which had been broken, making Himself the Mediator between God and men: “For there is one God, and one Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (I Tim. 2:5). (Summi Pontificatus, 35-9.)

The Doctrine of the Church against the Mainstream Ideas of the Time

Although Nazism was unique, it nevertheless had a background which is not confined to the geographical borders of Germany and the 20th century. An attempt to understand the persecution of the Jews, therefore, should, on the one hand, not overlook the uniqueness of this event. On the other hand, it should take into account a long-term historical development as well. It is an absolutely ahistorical approach when German history is transformed into an antichamber of Auschwitz (Goldhagen), or the murder of Jews is interpreted as a catastrophe without precedent and without reason, as if the executioners and their actions, their means and ideology, were not a part of their century and the civilization of Europe and the Western world.

Interestingly enough, compared with the rest of Europe, Germany at the beginning of the 20th century seemed to be a kind of island of the blessed for European Jews. France, for example, had its anti-Semitic outbursts during the Dreyfus Affair; there were numerous pogroms in Czarist Russia, in the Ukraine, and in Bohemia. In the following, therefore, it will be explained how far and how deep National Socialism, with its ideology, its violence, and its massacres, is rooted in modern Western history.

Social Darwinist Racial Theories and Concepts in the 19th Century

Hannah Arendt, an influential German Jewish political theorist who lived from 1906-1975, described European imperialism as a major step in the genesis of Nazism and the colonial rule of the 19th century as a first synthesis of massacres and violence, whose perfect form were the subsequent Nazi camps.¹ From about the second half of the 19th century in Western scholarly circles there were many debates about the “extinction of the lower races.” For example, at the meeting of the Anthropological Society of London in 1864, among other things, the cofounder of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, declared the “extinction of inferior and intellectually less developed populations,” an inevitable consequence of a natural law.² According to the Social Darwinist Thomas Bendyshe it was not only the right of Americans to eradicate the red-skins, but they might have to be given credit for it, because “they have acted as an instrument of Providence, because they started the extermination and defended its law.”³ The elaboration of a supposedly “scientific theory of race” had preceded this some years earlier. The foundations came from Count Gobineau in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, which inspired the story of Aryanism and insisted on the supremacy of the Aryan race.⁴ In Anglo-Saxon countries historians like Oxford professor Freeman and Harvard professor Herbert Baxter Adams highlighted especially the “Aryan-Teutonic” origin of the “Anglo-Saxon race.”

The Oxford historian John Seeley based his book The Expansion of England (1890) on the idea that the Anglo-Saxons and their empire embodied Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, a thesis which a liberal politician like Lord Rosebery, the head of Liberal Party, endorsed without restraint in a lecture at the “Imperial Institute” in 1898.⁵

The historian Cramb from London wrote in his book The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (1900) that among the peoples of the superior Aryan-Teutonic race the first place belonged to the British after a biological selection process because it had the best blood of the Teutonic race. England alone represented humanity, “the ideal and goal of a race.”⁶

In 1901, the mathematician and eugenicist Charles Pearson published National Life from the Standpoint of Science, which was widely spread in a short time in the British Empire and the United States. It maintains the existence of an ongoing struggle between the races. All progress is based on the principle of survival of the fittest race. Only the natural method of a cruel but effective selection among the nations and races would lead to a progress:

The path of human progress is littered with rotting bones of ancient nations, everywhere we can see the traces left behind by inferior races, the sacrifice of those who did not find the narrow path to perfection. But these dead nations and races are in reality the steps by which mankind has risen to a higher intellectual level of contemporary life.⁷

The discourse of the British naturalists had its counterpart in France, where the rise of Social Darwinism had a considerable influence on anthropology. So Edmund Perrier wrote in 1888:

The spread of the human race on earth is due to its superiority, in the same way as the animals disappear in the presence of man, that privileged being, likewise disappear the savage in the presence of Europeans, before the civilization could seize him.

As regrettable as this fact may be from a moral standpoint, it seems that civilization all over the world spread more through the destruction of the barbarians than through their subjection to its laws.⁸

An extensive literature in all major Western languages tried to prove scientifically the law of the “disastrous” effects of civilization on the “savage.” “Every losing people,” wrote, for example, the Frenchman M. Marestang in 1892 in the Revue Scientifique, “which comes in contact with a superior people is doomed.”⁹

In 1909, E. Caillot drew the same assessment: “There is an inexorable law of nature, against which there is no remedy and which has been confirmed by history countless times: the stronger devours the weaker. Thus, the Polynesian race was unable to climb the ladder of progress. At her death, mankind does not lose anything.”¹⁰

Darwin also in his time shared dominant notions of “inferior races” as living fossils. In his notebook E, we can read in December 1838 an entry that would fit in Mein Kampf:

When two races of men meet, they act just as two species of animals: they fight, and one eats the other, they transmit diseases to each other, until the fatal battle; unless one has a better physical organization or the better instincts, she carries off the victory.¹¹

In Descent of Man (1871) Darwin described the death of natives in the British colonies as an inevitable consequence of their encounter with civilization. This confirms at the same time the theory of natural selection.¹²

A few years after the release of Descent of Man the Austrian economist and lawyer Ludwig Gumplowicz praised the Boers because they “considered the people of the jungle and the Hottentots as beings that we must eradicate like the beasts of the forest.”¹³ In his book, The Racial Struggle: Sociological Studies (published in 1883) he called for a “necessary naturalization and biologization of society, which would legitimize the merciless clash of different human races.”¹⁴

Justification for Racial and Social Imperialism and Colonial Rule

A particularly fertile terrain of Social Darwinism, racism, and the theory of natural selection, could be found at the turn of the century in America. Thus, the rise of the United States to a world power was interpreted by eugenicist J. K. Hosmer as confirmation of the mission of the Anglo-Saxon culture. His colleague Joshua Strong announced a new era that should be the “decisive battle between the races,” the natural consequence of American hegemony.¹⁵

One of the leading Social Darwinists among the politicians was the American President Theodore Roosevelt, who in his book The Winning of the West saw the Anglo-Saxons as a branch of the Nordic race and interpreted the conquest of the American West as a continuation of the expansion of the Germanic tribes and celebrated the “completion of the historical power of racial development.” His compatriot, the eugenicist Madison Grant, who was venerated by the Nazis, propagated a biological determinism in which “natural selection” should be replaced by an artificial breeding selection. According to Grant (The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History, 1916) the extermination of the Indians was the model because it showed that an effective policy of extermination of the weak, incapable of civilization, makes it finally possible to get rid of these undesirables, “who populate our prisons, our hospitals, and our asylums.”¹⁶

To Western eyes, especially during the 19th century, Africa was seen as a place of “primitive” and “wild” mankind which drew the attention of scientists, writers, and politicians. In 1863, the British explorer William Winwood Reade published the travel narrative Savage Africa, which closed with a chapter that was devoted to the “redemption” of that continent. Under colonial rule of the European countries the Africans would transform their continent into a kind of garden. However, it is possible that they would be finally destroyed in the process. “We have to face it with tranquility. It but illustrates the beneficent law of nature that the weak have to be swallowed up by the strong.”¹⁷

The debate over the “extinction of inferior races,” which were considered doomed in order to make place for Western civilization, was characteristic of the entire second half of the 19th century. Ultimately, it justified imperialist conquest and colonization. Their theoretical concepts also influenced deeply the political language of the era. For example, in 1898 the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury divided the world into two categories: living and dying nations; two years later, Emperor Wilhelm II, in a vehement speech, called upon the German soldiers, who were leaving for China in order to fight the Boxer Rebellion, to destroy their enemies like the Huns. Such prose was quite in line with the usual imperialist rhetoric and practices applied by the colonial powers.¹⁸ Thus, during the conquest of the Philippines in 1898, the soldiers were asked by their general: “I don’t want to see any prisoners. I wish you to kill them and burn down their huts.”¹⁹ Ultimately, this was the “inevitable” war among the races, whether against the “yellow peril,” the “Slav flood,” or simply the whites against the colored races.

Colonialism and Colonial Wars

The disastrous consequence of colonialism was primarily the decline of certain populations; it can be described in some cases only as genocide. Thus, the population count of what is now Sri Lanka before colonization was about four to ten million. By 1920 it had fallen to about one million. In the Congo, where King Leopold II had begun exploiting the copper mines, things had assumed the form of destruction through labor; the population fell by half from 1880 to 1920, from 20 to 10 million. In Sudan, the drop from 1882 to 1903 was 75 percent; in Tahiti and New Caledonia even 90 percent. According to reliable estimates, the number of victims of Europe’s conquests in Asia and Africa during the second half of the 19th century was anywhere from 50 to 60 million. The Germans had delivered their contribution; the German colonial wars in South Africa in the early 20th century may be considered extermination campaigns. The German General von Trotha later justified the extermination of the Herero as a racial struggle which had been led against a decaying, even dying people. In this struggle, he said, they had focused more on Darwinian law than on international right. There were debates in the Reichstag (Parliament), where, in contrast to the Social Democrats and the Center Party (the Catholic party), the National Socialists openly supported the destruction of the insurgent “savages.” This shows that terms like “race war,” “extermination,” and “subhuman” were perfectly well known in Germany before World War I as a result of its colonial policy.²⁰

The Nazis kept this in their memories during that period: in 1941, shortly before the start of the “war of extermination” against the Soviet Union, there were two films about the colonial period in the German cinemas, Carl Peters and Ohm Krüger; their importance was underscored by Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who was present at the premiere at the Berlin UFA-Palast.²¹

The war in Ethiopia by the Italian Fascists was the last colonial conquest; it was a kind of bridge between the European imperialism of the 19th century and the Nazi war for the German “Lebensraum [living space] in the East.” In June 1936, Mussolini had given the order to start a “systematic policy of terror and extermination against the rebels and their allies.” Between 1935 and 1939, the Ethiopian opposition was broken by a war in which chemical weapons were used. The Italians dreamed of an Ethiopia without the Ethiopians, which would be occupied by Italians and kept under conditions of apartheid. Several historians saw this colonial war of Italian Fascism as a kind of genocide.²²

The description of the negative side of colonialism does not intend to deny the positive aspects of this historical phenomenon, especially the blessed work of the Catholic missions. We are dealing here with the roots of a false ideology which had in the Catholic Church its greatest ideological enemy.

 

(To be continued.)

This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Kirchliche Umschau. Translated by Angelus Press. Norbert Clasen is president of Initiativkreis Eichstätt, a group dedicated to promoting the traditional Latin Mass.

 

 

¹ Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Munich 1986), pp. 273-626.

² Enzo Traverso, Modernity and Violence (Cologne, 2003), p. 58.

³   Ibid., p. 59.

⁴ Hanns Joachim W. Koch, Social Darwinism (Munich, 1973), p. 115.

⁵   Ibid., pp.116-118.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Traverso, Modernity and Violence, pp. 61-64.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Jean-Claude Guillebaud, The Principle of Man: End of a Western Utopia? (Munich, 2004), p. 333.

¹⁵ Traverso, Modernity and Violence, pp. 65-67.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 69-78.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid..