Page 135 - Fascism: The Bloody Ideology Of Darwinsim

Fascism, Racism And Darwinism 135

content to the notion of the fittest, so that the species or races which did
survive were those morally entitled to do so.

The doctrine of natural selection could, therefore, very easily become
associated with another train of thought developed by the French
writer, Count Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, who published an Essay on the
Inequality of Human Races in 1853. Gobineau insisted that the most
important factor in development was race; and that those races which
remained superior were those which kept their racial purity intact. Of
these, according to Gobineau, it was the Aryan race which had survived
best… It was... Houston Stewart Chamberlain who contributed to
carrying some of these ideas a stage further… Hitler himself admired
the author [Chamberlain] sufficiently to visit him on his deathbed in
1927. 80

Earlier chapters of this book described how the evolutionist German
biologist Ernst Haeckel was one of the most important of Nazism's spiritual
fathers. Haeckel brought Darwin's theory to Germany, and formulated it as a
program ready for the Nazis. From racists such as Arthur Gobineau and
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hitler adopted a politically-oriented racism,
and a biological approach from Haeckel. Careful examination will reveal that
these racists all derived their inspiration from Darwinism.
Indeed, a deep Darwinian influence can be found among all Nazi
ideologues. When we examine the Nazi theory, which was given form by
Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, we see in it concepts such as "natural selection,"
"selective mating," and "the struggle for survival between the races," all
repeated dozens of times in Darwin's The Origin of Species. As also mentioned
earlier, the name of Hitler's book Mein Kampf was inspired by Darwin's
principle that life was a constant struggle for survival, and those who emerged
victorious survived. In the book, Hitler talked of the struggle between the
races, and maintained that "History would culminate in a new millennial
empire of unparalleled splendor, based on a new racial hierarchy ordained by
nature herself." 81
In the Nuremberg party rally in 1933, he proclaimed that ''higher race
subjects to itself a lower race …a right which we see in nature and which can
be regarded as the sole conceivable right." 82
That Nazism was influenced by Darwinism is accepted by almost all
historians who are expert in the period. Peter Chrisp expresses it this way in
his The Rise of Fascism:
Charles Darwin's theory that humans had evolved from apes was