Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Priority Doesn't Matter If You're One of Those They Got Around To Killing



The vulgar question of priority has been raised in the discussion about who among the dead from the mass murders of the Nazis are most worthy of consideration, now seventy years after the fall of the Nazi government and the public revelation of the extent of their crimes began to be revealed, the extent of which, are still not told.  This word "priority" can be used in any number of contexts and framings of discussions and what it means will be limited by those contexts and framings.   If you take the popular one when discussing the Nazis, it will be that you have to find which group to be wiped out by murder first entered the mind of Adolph Hitler.   Which would be a rather hard thing to do because, as I mentioned the other day, Hitler had little discernible moral conscience which would have made him tell the truth of his intentions or his thinking.  He was a complete liar, saying things that didn't reveal his intentions, his lies and deceptions calculated to disarm possible opponents and to gain advantage by duping them.  He did it in his formal treaties with governments, including most notably, Stalins' pact with him well past the time his many previous lies and broken agreements should have clued Stalin in that Hitler couldn't be trusted to keep an agreement for a month.  The Vatican had learned that in 1933, which accounts for why it, among putative governments, having the most vulnerability and the fewest means of defense, made some of the strongest statements condemning Hitler before and during his campaigns of mass murder. including some made during the war as the Vatican was under siege and the Catholic and Protestant churches were under attack and, as also demonstrated here, marked for extermination, as well.  But there is far more to be said about that, soon.

Who were the first people Hitler openly marked for biological elimination from the human species? In terms of action and law, it would be the disabled.  Here is what the Holocaust Museum online says about that.

On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan “master race,” called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law’s passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against people with disabilities, regularly labeling them “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden upon society.

Just a few years later, the persecution of people with disabilities escalated even further. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of “mercy death” code-named “Operation T4,” in reference to the address of the program’s Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program, most via large-scale killing operations using poison gas. (This methodology served as the precursor to the streamlined extermination methods of the “Final Solution.”) Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the war’s end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities.

The role that salesmanship played in the mass murders of the Nazis is far too little considered, as well as the role that their purposeful and gradual program of habituation to the idea of mass murder among the German population who, if they had announced their intentions to do such things during the campaign that put them in power, they certainly would have mobilized more of their opponents and never have been in the position to form the government.  Even after their election they couldn't put their entire plan into effect but they had to gradually, through eliminating their most immediate opponents without exciting those who might waver, gradually though relentlessly disempowering and eliminating their opponents, eventually terrorizing them and, all through that, propagandizing the general public.  The eugenic posters of that period were certainly aimed toward the goal of killing the disabled.  If that were not the case then the cost of their continued living, sterilized by the Nazi eugenic program, wouldn't have been emphasized. "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too."



If you wanted to go through the vulgar exercise of establishing priority as a means of assigning a ranking of the lives taken on this appalling assignment of significance you could match those legal and extra-legal means of marking the disabled for first involuntary sterilization, a program to prepare the German public for their elimination on the basis of being "useless eaters" because their lives were "unworthy of life" and the end point of that obvious plan of public propaganda, their murder in such places as the gas chamber constructed  Hadamar hospital, the corpses of the scores of victims transported to be murdered, daily, in a specially made Mercedes Benz bus, burned in the specially constructed crematorium to burn them, that could be done by looking up dates.



Of course, if you move the frame back a bit and look at the wider picture in which the Nazi eugenic-murder program developed, you would find that it was part of the wider program of eugenics which had included proposals for the identification and murder of the disabled since at least 1868 in the passage advocating Spartan style mandatory infanticide of the disabled from Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte which I posted the other day, noting it was an idea which was taken up by others, including Hitler.*  Of course it could be pointed out that Haeckel, in his ranking of races in terms of their development on a ladder, the most "like apes" on the bottom, the whitest Northern Europeans on top.  But, while speaking enthusiastically about the benefits to the survivors of their eventual and inevitable extinction, he didn't explicitly call for the legalization of their mass murder.

And, if you do make the extremely disturbing and appalling journey of trying to map back Nazi thinking, back into the period before there were Nazis, back through the minds of those who became Nazis, and those who they were taught by, those who they cited in their pre-Nazi writings, the only evidence that we can have to study the origins of Nazi thinking, the explicit call for murdering the disabled was the earlier, most openly advocated and most widely accepted idea for the biologically beneficial mass murders.  As mentioned, Darwin made a similar claim to that of Haeckel and in the next generation of English speaking eugenicists and those influenced by the modern, scientific world view which it was such a part of, people such as H. G. Wells ( the student of Thomas Huxley, aka "Darwin's bulldog") George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Davenport, Lothrop Stoddard, Clarence Darrow,etc.

One particular example is rather chilling, in that he advocated the murder of the children of those he deemed "unfit" simply on the basis of their parentage.

William J. Robinson, a New York urologist and leading authority on birth control, eugenics, and marriage, wrote that the best solution would be for society to “gently chloroform” the children of the unfit or “give them a dose of potassium cyanide.” Robinson also insisted that splitting hairs about any of their “individual rights” should never be allowed to trump the preservation of the race. “It is the acme of stupidity,” he wrote, “to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual. Such individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.

When I re-read that while preparing this post, it brought to mind a particular passage from Mein Kampf.

If the power to fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends. This world belongs only to the forceful 'whole' man and not to the weak 'half ' man.

If there is a more succinct statement that divides the belief that people are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights and the mode of thinking which is behind natural selection as applied to the human species, that's it.  That is the meaning of "survival of the fittest" which no less definitive an authority than Charles Darwin equated with his theory of natural selection, as I've mentioned so often, on page 92 of the fifth edition of Origin of Species.

I am sure that, as the current extension of the defense of the mythical eugenics-free Darwin which is producing a revised and sanitized Haeckel would point out, Haeckel didn't put Jews near the bottom of that ladder.   Robert Richards, among the foremost architects of the revised Haeckel says:

And, of course, there is Haeckel’s placement of Semites in the highest branchesof his tree of human progress. In his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Haeckel depicted his theory of the evolution of the human species using his new graphic device of the stem-tree. In the first edition of the book (1868), he arranged the human groups—different species, as he regarded them—into a hierarchy of descent, with Papuans, Hottentots, and Australians (and their respective races) sitting on the bottom branches and Caucasians (with their several varieties) on the top (see fig. 1). Haeckel meant vertical position in the tree to indicate the level of progressive advance attained by the various species and races. For different reasons, perhaps, neither his nineteenth-century readers nor we would be surprised to see the Germans and GrecoRomans, among the Caucasian races, at the “pinnacle” (Spitze) of the human species.  But readers, both then and now, might wonder at the placement of the Jews and Berbers. He located them at the same highly developed level as the Germans and within the same species.

So if you wanted to look into the context in which the thinking of the Nazis originated to see which group was first marked for extinction on the basis of biological traits, it would be hard to find a group which was earlier than the one the Nazis started with, the disabled.  Nor would you find a group whose extermination is more acceptably and even enthusiastically talked about in the post-Nazi era on the basis of biological fitness, economic efficiency and a general disdain for their continued existence.  The totally accepted and acceptable talk among neo-utilitarian thinkers and clean handed academics such as Michael Tooley,  Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva and everyone's favorite, the genteel animal-rights advocate and celebrity of high-middle-brow media, Peter Singer. There is no "Never Again" when it comes to them.  Advocating their murder can get you on TV and public radio.

*  In looking at a book by the Haeckel revisionist, Robert Richards, again, the other night, I was reminded that the evidence tying Hitler's thinking to what Haeckel said was made by one of Haeckel's promoters inside the Third Reich, Heinz Brucher.

To tighten further the connection between the National Socialists and Haeckel, Brucher focused on a passage from the Naturlische Schopfungsgeschichte that reads:   The difference in rationality between a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, a Darwin and that of the lwer natural men – a Veda, a Kaffer, an Australian and a Papuan is much greater than the graduated difference between the rationality of these latter and that of the intelligent vertebrates, for instance, the higher apes.”  Brucher then cited a quite similar remark by Hitler in his Nuremberg speech of 1933.   Through his several citations, he made Haeckel historically responsible, at least in part, for Hitler's racial attitudes.
 \
Robert Richards:  The Tragic Sense of Life p 505

Richards then makes a rather slippery and, if you've read the background, unconvincing argument attacking what Brucher said.  To do that he has to attack others who concluded the same thing from reading what Haeckel said and comparing it to what the Nazis said, such as Stephen Jay Gould, and historians of the thinking of the Nazis such as Daniel Gasman and Richard Weikart.  But for my purpose here, that Brucher said it - and he was one of myriads of Nazis who cited Haeckel and Darwin in support of their classification of people in terms of "fitness" - it only matters that they consciously found support for their ideas and applied science in Haeckel, whose ideas in that very book had been most forcefully promoted by Charles Darwin as a milestone in the understanding of his theory of Natural Selection.

Apart from pretty well dispelling the current line in online discourse that since Haeckel's name appears on a list of books to be taken off of library shelves that means the Nazis weren't Darwinists, in the words of a prominent Nazi scientist, it proves that others, Nazis during the Third Reich and anti-Nazis studying it have noted that connection.

I generally find that the more you know, the more you do a deep checking of what Richards says, it is pretty clear that his campaign of Darwinist-Hackel apologetics is far more interested in maintaining the the post-war cover up and a lot less interested in the truth.  I might have more to say about that later this week.

Note:  I'm going to limit my postings on this topic to less than one a day, though the temptation to address every phony ploy of the Knights of St. Darwin is great since just about everything they've ever come up with can be refuted.   Other than the continual cover-up of the Darwin industry, there is no way to reshuffle the cards left by Darwin, Haeckel, etc. to make them mean anything but what they mean.  After seventy years of lying about it, I don't see that they've ever come up with anything that stands a rigorous look at the primary evidence.  That doesn't mean the profitable and ideologically motivated PR campaign will end any time soon, it just means that it has the burden of lying about what the primary documents say.  I feel a moral obligation to add as much to that burden as it is possible for me to do.   In the current campaign to refinish Haeckel's unvarnished version of Darwinism, that campaign reaches about as low as can be imagined.

Update:  Hate Mail

I would challenge anyone to find a prominent 19th or early 20th century German clergyman who advocated the total extermination of all Jews on the basis of their ethnicity and anyone who you might ferret out who wasn't openly condemned by more prominent Christian clergy. In many of the things I have read from Haeckel and the line of those who followed his call to murder all of the disabled, including Hitler, they railed against the opposition of the Christian clergy.

It's certainly not something you can attribute to the Catholic church which welcomed and had no problem elevating converts who had been Jews, among those including St. Edith Stein, who was murdered by the Nazis on the basis of her being Jewish.  Jews who converted or who would be classified as Jews by the Nazis have risen to the top of the Catholic hierarchy, such as Cardinal Lustiger the Archbisop of Paris and Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York, two of the most prominent archdiocese of the church.

This list  of Jewish Catholics which I found this morning while considering your complaint  is fascinating and I hope to look into it.  I was rather startled to see some of the names which couldn't be more relevant to this discussion such as Fritz Lang, the director and Erich von Stroheim who, as I noted last week, played an evil German doctor in a movie of American anti-Nazi agitprop.  If the list is accurate, all of them would have been classified as Jewish and murdered by the Nazis on the basis of their biological heritage, not their religion.

And I am certain what can be said for Catholics can be said for many other denominations.


Update 2:  Still gassing on about the alleged Nazi banning of all mention of Darwin and Haeckel?  I really don't have time to go looking to see if I can find it online but it would seem rather odd if they did, considering this from four years after the alleged banning of their books.

The official Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, published a tribute to Ernst Haeckel on the twentieth anniversary of Haeckel's death in August 1939. The article was entitled, "Um die Abstammung des Menschen: Zum 20. Jahrestage Ernst Haeckels" ("On the Descent of Man: For the Twentieth Anniversary of Ernst Haeckel['s death]"). The title and the article clearly avowed belief in human evolution and praised Haeckel for his evolutionary ideas.

Volkischer Beobachter was the official Nazi newspaper overseen by the Nazi head of propaganda, the vehemently anti-Christian, Alfred Rosenberg.   "Abstammung des Menschen" is, of course, the title that Victor Carus gave to his translation of Darwin's second major book on evolution, The Descent of Man, the book in which he said that if he had seen Ernst Haeckel's book, Naturlischer Schopfungsgeschichte before he'd gotten very far into the writing of Descent of Man, he probably wouldn't have finished his book because he was in pretty much complete agreement with everything Haeckel had said.


I am just about certain that the translation of Carus - which Darwin knew of and, as I recall, approved, was still the standard translation of the book in German.

13 comments:

  1. I submit the names of Ernst Biberstein, a Protestant pastor who was a member of the Nazi Party. In June 1942 he took command of Einsatzgruppe C. He personally took part in mass murders and was sentenced to death for war crimes after the war. That was commuted to a life sentence. But he was released and resumed work as a pastor.
    For Catholics, a notorious example was the priest, Philipp Häuser. He was an enthusiastic Nazi and went so far as to compare Hitler to Christ. He was also sentenced after the war.
    You might be interested in "Hitler's Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism" by Father Kevin P. Spicer, CSC. Häuser is featured prominently.

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    1. Have you read these things or is it like your knowledge of what Robert Richards has written, based on that favorite of Darwin fan club methods, of not reading it?

      I will certainly look into these things. You do know that CSC means Congregation of the Holy Cross, don't you? In other words, this would appear to be a book of historical confession by a Catholic Priest who, among other things, is a faculty member at Notre Dame.

      At the same time these priests and this one Lutheran were doing that they were violating the official line of the Vatican, as laid out by both Pope Pius XI and XII. And at the same time there were many Catholic lay people, nuns, brothers, priests, bishops, Cardinals and the Pope who were hiding Jews and others being hunted by the SS, being given false documentation so they could pass as non-Jews, being hidden. etc. It's especially true in Poland where the, mostly Catholic, population had a higher percentage of those who aided Jews than in The Netherlands, in fact Pols have the largest number of people named as Righteous Among the Nations, including many Catholic nuns, priests, etc.

      It would have been relatively easy for a Catholic priest to violate the orders from the Vatican during the war as the Church was under attack and there was little possibility for the Vatican to enforce discipline.

      Of course, everything about what the Einsatzgruppen did is a violation of the teachings of Jesus and his earliest followers, the entire history of Christian moral teaching, the explicit teachings of the two Popes in office during the Nazi period, many bishops inside Germany, etc. And there were hundreds of others who were resisting the Nazis and working with the resistance. I have even read something speculating that it's possible Pius XII was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, as the Lutheran Pastor - of the real Lutheran Church - Dietrich Bonhoffer was.

      Of course, that doesn't interest you.

      How do you like the point about the official Nazi newspaper posting an article praising Haeckel using the unmistakable title of Darwin's second most important book to do so? In 1939, the month before the war started, four months after Charles Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, published that article I mentioned to you, it's available online in facsimile noting his father's role in German eugenics in the period when the Nazis turned things in the right direction, as he put it. I've posted the link to it several times.

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    2. Fine. I submit the names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, prominent Lutheran pastor well known in his life and after his death for his writings on theology and ecclesiology, and his vocal opposition to Hitler and his eugenics program. Bonhoeffer was arrested, imprisoned, taken to a concentration camp, and finally hanged just before the Reich collapsed for his alleged involvement in a plot to kill Hitler.

      And Karl Barth, founder with Bonhoeffer of the Confessing Church Movement, another Lutheran pastor and theologian who vocally opposed the Nazis (as, indeed, did the entire Confessing Church movement).

      What the hell is this supposed to prove, anyway? Tit for tat is all I get out of it.

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    1. You mean your good buddy's comment? 1. Neither of the men named were prominent clergymen, 2. I don't see any evidence that they weren't condemned by more prominent churchmen, if they knew their identities. So, unless Skeptic Tank has more information to satisfy those two conditions, he's got nothin'

      And, in case you are as ignorant about that as you are about all else, I noted that the book he mentions is written by a Catholic priest who works at a Catholic university, from what I can see, online.

      Now, now many confessional books have been written about the role of Darwinism in the Third Reich's mass murder by champions of Charles Darwin? I mean from after the war, not from before the war when so many of them were cheering for the Nazi eugenic laws and practices?

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    2. Yes, the book that detailed the antisemitism of Nazi priests was written by a Catholic priest. I chose it specifically so that you couldn't claim that it was written by an anti-Catholic. Spicer also edited a book called Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2007). Maybe you might read some of his work. It doesn't really fit with your cartoon version of history. But then again, he's a real historian, and you are a hick piano teacher.

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    3. 1. I never discounted the role that antisemitism played in the Holocaust, however the nature of antisemitism before Darwinism was quite different. The fact is that Jews could always become Catholics and even members of the clergy and hierarchy, there is no possible way to not see that there is all the difference in the world between that and the Nazi's antisemitism which was based on the unchanging ethnic heritage of Jews and those designated as Jews by the Nazis. What was different was that and their total acceptance of the pure Darwinism, straight from ol' Chuck himself, that the elimination of those of lesser "fitness" would be biologically beneficial for the survivors and their offspring. He said that, unmistakably, in The Descent of Man, the book which the Volkischer Beobachter so unmistakably referenced in its memorial article praising Ernst Haeckel, just as Darwin had in that same book just under seventy years earlier.

      Are you going to admit that your line on that was all wet? I've noticed that tends to happen when you take information from atheist websites, they're really bad at fact checking and they have a tendency to not figure that there's any price to be paid for stretching the truth, even past the breaking point.

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    4. 2."Cartoon" you say that as your tag-team buddy is Steve Simels? The man who has never had a serious thought in his head except in the form of color forms that he doesn't quite know how to put together?

      You have not been able to sustain a single one of your claims made here, least anyone doubt the truth of that, I invite them to review last Saturday's comments.

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    5. "But then again, he's a real historian, and you are a hick piano teacher."

      Hmmm. Ad hominem. Obviously ran out of anything intelligent to say.

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    6. It was when he implied I lived on the coast that really got me pissed. I'm a proud inlander hick. It would offend him mightily to hear my Oxford county accent I thought those words in as I kicked his ass. I've been told I sound remarkably like Joe Perham.

      https://youtu.be/wzeYBCBbJ1U?t=23

      Except when I'm speaking in a foreign language, then I sound like I'm from somewhere eles.

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    7. OK. They aren't prominent enough for you. I see. And any candidate can't have been criticized ny any higher up? Interesting criteria. Do they have to be left-handed and published their work in a month with an R?
      Maybe you should read about Jozef Tiso. He was a very prominent clergyman, a professor of theology. He became the dictator of Slovakia where he participated in rounding up Jews and sending them to Auschwitz. Oh wait, he was criticized by people in the church. So he doesn't count. According to your little game, this criterion ensures that no one counts.
      Yes. Ignore the Nazis banning Darwin and Haeckel. Dismiss the work of a priest historian.
      By the way RMJ, someone who pretends to be so learned should know the difference between ad hominem and an insult. It was in response to the steady stream of insults from your little friend. By the way, your latest attempt at a career is as an English teacher. Is it beyond your competence to teach Sparky to write concisely and intelligibly?

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    8. Your sources must not include the comment that, not only Pius XII but the man who would succeed him not only criticized Tiso but constantly ordered him not to transport Jews to their death and he defied them. Nor that he was arrested, tried and hanged for what he did after his regime fell. What the hell do you think the Pope was supposed to do, send in the Swiss Guard to arrest him? So,.yeah, of course he doesn't fulfill the conditions of my challenge. Wait, you know where Slovakia is, don't you? Or didn't you bother to look at a map? Or do you think the Pope has the kind of control of Catholics that the traditional English establishment asserted in its anti-Catholic propaganda, the legacy of which was brought into Anglo-American atheism by Brit-atheists? Or, let me guess, you figure that Tiso was going to be stopped by the Pope excommunicating him, as if that were going to do anything to stop him. It would have been as futile a gesture as excommunicating Hitler would have been, they'd probably have both gotten a cynical laugh out of it.

      Other than that book and that one Lutheran you mentioned, Septic, I've known about everything you've thrown at me, obviously more than you've been able to speed google or glean from atheist sources.

      It's a rather hilarious way to ban someone by praising them in your official newspaper. Oh, and did you miss the part of my post where YOUR CHOSEN EXPERT ROBERT RICHARDS tries to debunk the prominent Nazi publishing about the influence of Haeckel (and, since he never lost a chance to point out his close association with Darwin, ol' Chuck) on the thinking of the Nazis, including Hitler? Something which modern scholars have noticed since Hitler had such a way of making the same points that Haeckel made? Quite often in that book translated as History of Creation which, if you'd bother to read the introductory remarks of Darwin to The Descent of Man, aka , Die Abstammung des Menschen find that Darwin endorsed, as well?

      All of that information is available online and more is going to be posted online, in accurate versions that you liars won't be able to lie about. The seventy year lie of the eugenics free Charles Darwin, the Darwin who his own son and loads of other people associated with German eugenics and, inescapably for that, the Nazi regime before the war is ending. You and your fellow liars will find it increasingly hard to maintain the lie. There is increasing mention of it in books written by mainstream academics, published by academic presses. I wouldn't be surprised if Robert Richards massive lies about the nature of Ernst Haeckel won't be the last ditch effort in the campaign, an effort that will be shown to be a lie by anyone who does what you and Sims and the rest of your side has never done, read Darwin and Hackle and Galton and Gregg and the rest of Darwin's glowing citations in The Descent of Man, also know by the name they mentioned in the official Nazi newspaper, Die Abtammung des Menschen

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  3. Uh, Simels, I'm not posting that last comment. While I know that an intelligent comment is beyond your accustomed working and thinking habits, I'm done posting your stupidest stuff unless it's as an example of what an ass you are.

    Skeptic didn't produce an example of what I challenged you guys to produce.

    I can name several prominent scientists who worked for the Nazis, many of them directly involved with the death camps and coming up with excuses for murdering Jews and others who were never sanctioned by the universities they worked in or by science, in general. In at least one case, Konrad Lorenz, he was given the Nobel Prize in Physiology after he was a Nazi scientist. I haven't looked but I wonder if used any Nazi physiological information gained from the death camps in any of his work. Even the most viciously antisemitic of them, such as Fritz Lenz, worked on as a scientist after the war, as he was an active Holocaust denier. For contrast, look at the reaction, within the Catholic Church when Benedict XVI indirectly and, I would bet unwittingly, included a Holocaust denier who was part of a schismatic sect in a possible reconciliation. And he was never a high up member of the Nazi's scientific establishment.

    I could mention atheists in the Nazi inner circle, Bormann, Rosenberg, Himmler.... I won't wait up nights for an atheist to write a confessional volume about atheism in the Third Reich's inner circle.

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