Re: Social Darwinism; was: So Long Judge Moore, We'll Miss You

> > I've never argued that Darwin and Hitler said the same exact thing.
> > They didn't. There are transitional links that must be acknowledged.
> > Darwin promoted charity. Nietzsche, building on Darwin in almost all
> > aspects except this, promoted jungle law, in which the Lion has NO
> > REMORSE for preying on the weaker organism in his ecosphere.
> 
> Well, lions don't have any remorse. They shouldn't, as remorse might 
> make them less efficient predators. 

Which was entirely the reasoning of Nietzsche and Hitler.

"Christianity should not be beautified and embellished: it has waged
deadly war against this higher type of man, it has placed under a ban
all the basic instincts of this type [the will to power], and out of
these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One,—the strong man
as the typically reprehensible man, the "reprobate." Christianity has
sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made
an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to
preserve itself."

"Christianity is a rebellion of everything that crawls on the ground
against that which has height. The 'equality of souls before God,'
this falsehood, this pretext for the rancor of all the base-minded,
this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern
idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society—is
Christian dynamite."

-Nietzsche, THE ANTICHRIST (1888)

"Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic
cultivation of the human failure.

I dream of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he
lives and dies for the preservation of the species. It's our duty to
encourage that idea: let the man who distinguishes himself in the
service of the Species be thought worthy of the highest honours."

-Hitler, TABLE TALK

Neither Nietzsche nor Hitler would make these statements without
presuming the fundamental principle of natural selection of Darwin at
the root.

> Darwin is not responsible for what those who came after him did with his 
> work.

Darwin is responsible for his own dangerous mistakes.

>  Nietzsche and Hitler, to the extent that they drew on his 
> writings and discoveries (and in the case of Hitler, at least, I would 
> argue that very little came directly from Darwin other than via 
> Nietzsche), seem to have advocated or actually performed actions that 
> Darwin would have abhorred.

Perhaps. But Darwin was an important building block in the Nazi
project.