Page 35 - The Disasters Darwinism Brought To Humanity

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D D A R W I N ' S R A C I S M A N D C O L O N I A L I S M 35
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and that they all descended from one ancestor–Adam–was so widely
accepted that the Catholic Church in particular took a clear position
against such plundering invasions. One of the best known examples of
this is the reply by the bishop of Chiapas, Bartolome de las Casas, who set
foot in the New World together with Columbus, who said that the natives
were "each a real human being," in reply to the colonists' claim that the
natives were "a species of animal." Pope Paul III cursed the savage treat-
ment of the natives in a papal bull in 1537, and declared that the natives
were real human beings with the capacity for faith. 20
But in the 19 century the situation changed. Together with the
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spread of materialist philosophy and societies' growing distant from reli-
gion, the truth that human beings were created by God began to be
denied. This, as was touched on in the preceding pages, was at the same
time the rise of racism.
With the rise of Darwinist-materialist philosophy in the 19 century,
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racism grew stronger, and this created a great support for Europe's impe-
rialist system.
James Joll, who spent long years as professor of history
at such universities as Oxford, Stanford and Harvard, in his
source book Europe Since 1870, which is still used as a text
book in universities, describes the ideological relationship
between Darwinism, imperialism, and racism.
The most profound groups of ideas inspiring the concept of
imperialism were those which can be roughly classified as
'social Darwinism', and which saw the relations between
states as a perpetual struggle for survival in which some
races were regarded as 'superior' to others in an evolu-
tionary process in which the strongest had constantly
to assert themselves.
Charles Darwin, the English naturalist whose
books On the Origin of Species, published in 1859,
and The Descent of Man, which followed in 1871,

Queen Victoria and the principal actor in
the above massacres, the Spaniard Cortes.