Page 38 - Fascism: The Bloody Ideology Of Darwinsim

38 FASCISM: THE BLOODY IDEOLOGY OF DARWINISM

races such as Africans, Asians and Turks, and were permitted to enslave them.
2) Darwinism provided a justification for bloodshed: As we have seen,
Darwin proposed that a deadly "struggle for survival" takes place in nature. He
claimed that this principle applied to both societies and to individuals, that it
was a struggle to the death, and that it was quite natural for different races to
try to eliminate others for its own sake. In short, Darwin described an arena
where the only rule was violence and conflict, thus replacing the concepts of
peace, cooperation, self-sacrifice, that had spread to
Europe with the advent of Christianity. Darwinism
thus resurrected the notion of the "arena," an exhibition
of violence devised in the pagan world (the Roman
Empire).
3) Darwinism brought the concept of eugenics
back into Western thought: The concept of
maintaining racial supremacy through breeding,
known as eugenics, which the Spartans had
implemented, and which Plato defended by the
words, "Our warrior-athletes must be vigilant like
watch-dogs," re-emerged in the Western world with
Darwinism. Darwin devoted whole chapters in The
Origin of Species to discussing the "improvement of
animal races," and maintained, in The Descent of Man,
that human beings were a species of animal. Some
time later, Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, was to take
his uncle's claims a step further, and put forward the
The American historian
Paul Crook's book modern theory of eugenics. (Nazi Germany would be
'Darwinism, War and the first state to implement eugenics as official policy).
History'
As we have seen, Darwin's theory seems to be a
concept that concerns only the science of biology, but it
actually formed the basis for a totally new political
outlook. Within a very short time, this new attitude was redefined as "Social
Darwinism." And as many historians have come to accept, Social Darwinism
became the ideological basis of fascism and Nazism.
The effect of Darwinism's portrayal of war and conflict as necessary has
been analyzed in great detail in Paul Crook's Cambridge University
publication Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from
'The Origin of Species' to the First World War. Crook has made it clear that by