Another excerpt from Bergman's book on why the Nazi fascist-socialist regime was Darwinian in its leitmotif and philosophy. German 'science' and quackademia had promote the 'truism' of the Darwinian model – a theology based on rhetoric, non-science, racism and supremacism – as the foundation of science and indeed the only way to understand the world at large.
Highlights are mine.
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Furthermore, the belief that evolution can be directed by scientists to produce a ‘superior race’ was thecentral leitmotif of Nazism and many other sources existed from which Nazism drew:
‘ … its ideological fire-water. But in that concatenation of ideas and nightmares which made up the … social policies of the Nazi state, and to a considerable extent its military and diplomatic policies as well, can be most clearly comprehended in the light of its vast racial program.’ 22
The Nazi view on Darwinian evolution and race was consequently a major part of the fatal combination of ideas and events which produced the holocaust and World War II:
‘One of the central planks in Nazi theory and doctrine was …evolutionary theory [and] … that all biology had evolved … upward, and that … less evolved types … should be actively eradicated [and] … that natural selection could and should be actively aided, and therefore [the Nazis] instituted political measures to eradicate … Jews, and … blacks, whom they considered as “underdeveloped”.’ 23
Terms such as ‘superior race’, ‘lower human types’, ‘pollution of the race’, and the word evolution itself (Entwicklung) were often used by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. His race views were not from fringe science as often claimed but rather Hitler’s views were:
‘ … straightforward German social Darwinism of a type widely known and accepted throughout Germany and which, more importantly, was considered by most Germans, scientists included, to be scientifically true. More recent scholarship on national socialism and Hitler has begun to realize that … [their application of Darwin’s theory] was the specific characteristic of Nazism. National socialist “biopolicy,” … [was] a policy based on a mystical-biological belief in radical inequality, a monistic, antitranscendent moral nihilism based on the eternal struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest as the law of nature, and the consequent use of state power for a public policy of natural selection….’ 24
The philosophy that humans can control and even use Darwinism to produce a ‘higher level’ of human is repeatedly mentioned in the writings and speeches of prominent Nazis.25 Accomplishing the Darwinian goal for the world required ruthlessly eliminating the less fit by open barbarian behavior:
‘The basic outline of German social Darwinism [was] … man was merely a part of nature with no special transcendent qualities or special humanness. On the other hand, the Germans were members of a biologically superior community … politics was merely the straightforward application of the laws of biology. In essence, Haeckel and his fellow social Darwinists advanced the ideas that were to become the core assumptions of national socialism …. The business of the corporate state was eugenics or artificial selection ….’ 18
Hitler once even stated that we Nazis ‘ … are barbarians! We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title [for, by it,] we shall rejuvenate the world ….’26 Hitler, as an evolutionist,‘consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution’.27
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Link to online excerpt