If "You Think Darwin Sounds Like A Nazi, There Is A Connection"

by BurnTheShips 57 Replies latest jw friends

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips
    I didn't get that - care to explain

    Bash Jesus here-it is cool.

    Criticize Darwin, that's BLASPHEMY! He is above criticism.

    Burn

  • quietlyleaving
    quietlyleaving

    burn

    I didn't get that - care to explain

    Bash Jesus here-it is cool.

    Criticize Darwin, that's BLASPHEMY! He is above criticism.

    Burn

    LMAO

    ssshh - I think I hear HS coming

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips

    Oh oh!

  • Narkissos
    Narkissos

    Awakened07's article is excellent indeed.

    Context is the key. Any 19th- / early 20th-century writer venturing in anthropology will sound "racist" by the anachronistic application of today's standards.

    When we look at Nietzchian philosophy, with its vilification of morality and exaltation of the rapacious overman, no warping or perversion is necessary to bring it to the service of the Nazi movement.

    BTS, it sounds like you are just as familiar with Nietzsche as you can spell "Nietzschean". Take the time to read what Nietzsche actually says of historical Jews, Germans and the German anti-Semitic party (which he abhorred). Yes, Nietzsche wrote some very dangerous stuff. But it did take a lot of "warping" and "perversion" (especially through his sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, married to a prominent Anti-Semite, and "editor" of the "posthumous" Wille zur Macht), to make him suit the Nazi ideology.

    Is Nietzsche's "overman" "rapacious"? He is "a Caesar with the soul of Christ".

  • quietlyleaving
    quietlyleaving

    I knew someone was coming - thanks for that narkissos

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips

    Narkissos, I disagree that Nietzsche was so benign as you make him out to be. Ok, maybe you don't think he was that benign...

    http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/133p04papers/MKalishNietzNazi046.htm

    The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student's rag.... When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a "Master," when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him?... To judge morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts borrowed from zoology: the taming of a beast and the breeding of a specific species.-Nietzsche

    "I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."-Viktor Frankl

    Burn

  • VoidEater
    VoidEater

    It's quite a leap to lay Nazism at the Darwin's feet. It would seem the same as banishing Wagner because of the way his work was embraced and employed by Nazi Germany, or boycotting VW or Porsche for the same reasons.

    We'd then have to tar the Olympics with the same brush, since the games were an important political tool in the hands of the Nazis.

    Next we would have to reject rocketry science and technology based on the work of Von Braun - a German, no less, whose work was influential and employed by Nazi Germany following his move to the West.

    Obviously, we would have to reject everything in the Bible, seeing as how information in that book has been embraced and used by a variety of religions to pernicious ends.

    To accept this line of reasoning, we would have to first accept on the face of it that what Driscoll said is true (but we're not supposed to expect citations or support?); then we'd have to ignore all conflicting evidence (amply given). What we're left with is a straw man at best.

    Let's not blame Queen for Vanilla Ice, ok? You can take anything (Under Pressure) and pervert it (Ice Ice Baby).

  • Burger Time
    Burger Time

    burntheships said-That is not the point of the article in the original post, your post notwithstanding. The point is that Darwinism was connected with Nazi ideology, providing a rationale for why the more evolved "Aryans" could destroy "inferior" races with impunity, in their less evolved status they were not truly human, but subhuman-or to use the German word- "untermenschen". The basic idea that some human races are more evolved than others was revisited more recently in The Bell Curve.

    As I stated before almost every Nazi was expected to be vegetarian and Hitler was staunch believer in the fact that being vegitarian was one of the reasons the Aryans in Germany were the supreme race. Are you willing to claim being a strict vegetarian is an extension of Nazism? You want to discredit a scientist just because his ideals were warped by a clearly mentally unstable people? Guess we should toss that Jesus shit too since most Nazi's believed in Christ and used religion to justify many of their actions.

  • Awakened07
    Awakened07

    I have looked at your thread Awakened. And I am not convinced. It is a decent apologetic, but the facts remain.

    Burn

    Uninformed public opinion is what (as so often) remains. Where are the facts?

    If Darwin was a racist, I am more than willing to deal with it, but I haven't seen any quotes in this thread yet that - with references so that it's possible to check - show that the Nazis clearly used Darwin's ideas as a basis for their ideology.

    It is popularly inferred that the Nazis used evolutionary theory to support their übermench ideology because it fits so well with "survival of the fittest" (which were not Darwin's words), but where are the quotes and references? Not saying that such do not exist; I'd just like to see them.

    Darwin is open to criticism as far as I'm concerned, but when you say "the facts remain", I'd like to see those facts. Let's start with the quote from Origins from the first article in this thread:

    Had they actually read Origin, they likely would be shocked to learn that among Darwin's scientifically based proposals was the elimination of "the negro and Australian peoples," which he considered savage races whose continued survival was hindering the progress of civilization.

    What page number is it at? If Darwin proposed the elimination of 'the negro and Australian peoples', not taken out of context or deliberately misinterpreted, that would be a fact that remains. Not saying it doesn't - I just don't believe everything I read.

    By the way, here is a somewhat shorter article, this time addressing the exact article in the first post of this thread:

    http://www.texscience.org/reviews/darwinism-racism.htm

  • TD
    TD
    If Darwin was a racist, I am more than willing to deal with it, but I haven't seen any quotes in this thread yet that - with references so that it's possible to check - show that the Nazis clearly used Darwin's ideas as a basis for their ideology.

    --I agree.

    I'm curous about these quotes too. They seem out of character from what I've read of Darwin.

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