Francis Galton:The Inspiration Behind Eugenic Killings

Another important 19th century ideologue, who helped lay the foundations of 20th century fascism, was Francis Galton, known as the founder of the theory of "eugenics."

We have already discussed the concept of eugenics. It saw people as a species of animal and was the product of a mentality that imagined that the same rules applied to human beings as to animals. It held the belief that the human race could be developed by "breeding methods," as with dogs or cattle. According to the theory, society's sick and deformed must be prevented from multiplying, (if necessary, they should even be killed), and healthy individuals should "reproduce" as much as possible to ensure strong and healthy later generations. This policy was one that had been implemented by the warrior city-state of Sparta, and defended by Plato.

With the domination of Christianity, eugenics had found itself relegated to the dusty shelves of history. Until Darwin's The Origin of Species was published. Darwin devoted the opening chapters of his book to the subject of raising animals, drew attention to those breeders who raised more productive breeds of horses and cattle, and then proposed, later on in the book, that these methods could be applied to human beings. Ultimately, it was Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who widened the road of eugenics opened by his uncle, and who brought the subject onto the world stage by formulating it into a comprehensive program.

As we might imagine, Galton was a fierce supporter and follower of Darwin. In his autobiography Memories of My Life, he writes:

The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.24

The concepts that Galton denigrated as "dogmatic barriers" and "ancient authorities" were religious systems and beliefs. In other words, Darwin was the reason for Galton's "great turning point," giving up his beliefs, and turning to the atheism and the racism, remnants of paganism.

Other than Darwin, Galton was also influenced by another evolutionist ideologue, the French physicist Paul Broca, who proposed that human intelligence was directly related to brain size and, hence, to the size of the head. In order to allegedly "prove" this, he tore up Paris graveyards and measured hundreds of skulls. Galton united Broca's superstition about brain size-which would subsequently be proved to be utterly wrong-and Charles Darwin's "animal breeding" philosophy. The result was the theory of "eugenics," being that certain races of humanity are superior to others, and that those superior must be kept uncontaminated by those inferior.

Galton first published his ideas in 1869, in his book Hereditary Genius. It discusses a number of "geniuses" in British history and claims that they bore pure racial characteristics. (Among these "geniuses," he did not neglect to include his uncle, Charles Darwin). In accordance to his claim, Galton then suggested that the English nation possessed an inherently superior blood to other races, and that steps needed to be taken to protect that blood from contamination. These theories he considered to be applicable not just to the British, but to all races. The Canadian author Ian Taylor has this to say in his book In the Minds of Men, in which he considers the social effects of Darwinism:

He [Galton] was now left with the claim that certain races were inherently superior and that their superiority was fixed forever from the past as well as into the future… The conclusion to Galton's argument then followed that, for the sake of mankind's future, pollution of the precious superior gene pool by interbreeding with inferior stock had to be stopped at all costs.25

Galton proposed that legal measures needed to be taken to prevent "inferior races polluting the superior." In his view, marriages needed to be legally regulated. To name his racist-evolutionist theory, Galton looked to the pagan world which had once practiced the same ideology. It was Galton who coined and first used the word "eugenics," from the Greek for "good birth." Inevitably, those who believed in Darwinism, also believed in eugenics. Finally, the Eugenics Education Society was established in 1907, based at the statistics department of University College, London. In 1926, the name was simplified, and it became the "Eugenics Society."

The Eugenics Society maintained that all handicapped people should be "sterilized." Charles Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, was president of the organization between 1911 and 1928, and its most active member.

After Great Britain, eugenics began to attract supporters in the United States. Evolutionist circles there carried out a great deal of propaganda on the subject in the 1920s and 30s, and certain states passed the laws known as "Sterilization Laws." These laws allowed men and women believed to be genetically weak or sick to be sterilized.

These laws are now seen in the United States as an example of the detriment of racism. What is more, the idea is now seen as a superstition, totally at variance with the scientific facts. The recent human genome project has shown that the genetic differences between races and individuals are very small, and that it is stupid to even attempt to construct any reproduction policy based on them. Human races were created equal by God. In the Koran, God says:

Mankind! We created you from a male and female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you might come to know each other. The noblest among you in God's sight is that one of you who best performs his duty. God is All-Knowing, All-Aware. (Koran, 49:13)

The weak and genetically sick must be treated with affection and compassion, protected and nurtured, not "sterilized." But instead of this approach, revealed to us by God as a religious moral duty, the Western world, at the beginning of the 20th century, turned to eugenics, a product of paganism and the theory of evolution. And, the scale of the savagery that this pagan-evolutionary theory led to will be revealed when we consider the case of Germany.

Ernst Haeckel:The Nazis' Racist Theoretician

The last name along the path from Darwin to the Nazis that we need to consider is the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, Germany's best-known Darwinist and a fanatical supporter of eugenics.

In the history of science, Haeckel is known for his theory that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." According to this evolutionary theory, Haeckel was claiming that embryonic development repeats "evolutionary history." He thought that the stages of embryonic development repeated the adult stages of the ancestors of a species. In order to support his theory, which he developed under the influence of Darwin, Haeckel made a number of drawings of embryos, in which, it was later realized, he had made deliberate distortions, and that his theory was a forgery. Haeckel was a charlatan who used falsified evidence to make Darwinism scientifically acceptable.

Another instance of Haeckel's erroneous science is the theory of eugenics. He adopted the theory, from such names as Charles Darwin, Francis Galton and Leonard Darwin, and took it further, by suggesting a return to the Spartan model of ancient Greece: In other words, to murdering children! In his book Wonders of Life, Haeckel proposed the "destruction of abnormal new born infants" without hesitation, and claimed that it could not "rationally be classed as murder", becaise 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 turned this pseudo-science into politics, attempting to destroy whole races in the name of racial purity and the survival of the fittest...Hitler called his book Mein Kampf, "My Struggle," echoing Haeckel's translation of Darwin's phrase "the struggle for survival."29

This Darwinist influence at the root of Nazism and other fascist ideologies will be examined more closely in later sections of this book.

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