Page 53 - Fascism: The Bloody Ideology Of Darwinsim

The Origin Of The Fascist Mentality 53

born infants" without hesitation, and claimed that it could not "rationally be
classed as murder", beca›se these children were not yet conscious. 26
Haeckel wanted all the sick and deformed, who may be an obstacle to
the so-called evolution of society, not just children, to be eliminated as a
requirement of the "laws of evolution." He opposed treatment for the sick,
claiming that this obstructed the workings of natural selection. He complained
that "Hundreds of thousands of incurables—lunatics, lepers, people with
cancer etc—are artificially kept alive in our modern communities…without the
slightest profit to themselves or the general body." He further recommended
that a commission should be set up to decide the fate of individuals. Upon the
decision of the commission the "'redemption from evil' should be
accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison." 27
This barbarism, upon which Haeckel built his theory, was to be put into
practice in Nazi Germany. Shortly after coming to power, the Nazis instituted
an official policy of eugenics. The mentally ill, the deformed, the blind from
birth, and those with genetic diseases, were gathered up in "sterilization
centers." These people were regarded as parasites that spoiled the purity of the
German race and its evolutionary progress. Some time after being separated
from society, they were eventually killed under special orders from Hitler.
It is a well known fact, pronounced by many historians who have
studied the subject, that Ernst Haeckel's ideas, and the Darwinist ideology in
general, were the ideological basis of Nazism. In his book The Scientific Origins
of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist
League, the American historian Daniel Gasman presents extensive proof of this.
According to Gasman, Haeckel "became one of Germany's major idealists for
racism, nationalism and imperialism." 28 Haeckel left Nazism an organizational
and an ideological legacy. On the one hand he developed the theory of
eugenics and racism, and on the other he founded the "Monist League," an
atheist association, and this played a major role in the effect the Nazis had on
the educated section of society.
Cambridge historian and London Times journalist Ben Macintyre
explains the Darwinist thought that Haeckel left as his legacy to the Nazis:
The German embryologist Haeckel and his Monist League told the
world, and in particular, Germany, that the whole history of nations is
explicable by means of natural selection: Hitler and his twisted theories