[first published June 9, 2016]
by Dr. David Pence
Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale did a great service in beginning his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning with an intellectual history of Hitler’s thought taken from a careful reading of Mein Kampf and study in the original German of his speeches. Here is a good synopsis which I will borrow from in this short essay.
Our emphasis which is not Snyder’s will be on the atheistic pedigree of Darwin, Hitler, and so-called realism in present day American foreign policy.
Adolph Hitler took Darwin seriously. Darwin’s book was called The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Hitler’s book was called My Struggle - Mein Kampf.
Hitler was not really a nationalist. He used the German nation-state as a vehicle for his master Aryan race which he sometimes called the Germanic race. He was a true globalist -- a global thinker who made the link of biology and human sociology that has eluded the more timid evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists of our own era. He understood that a man who loved his race and could lead them must secure a living space which could feed the whole population and provide for growth. He loved his race and his speeches were successful because he could communicate what the Arabs call 'Asabiyyah' – group feeling. Men will die for this elementary sensibility at the heart of religion and patriotism; and they followed Hitler, a man who could evoke that feeling. He perverted a real love that exists among men in groups.
From Timothy Snyder (NY Review of Books) on Hitler's worldview:
"Nothing can be known about the future, thought Hitler, except the limits of our planet: 'the surface area of a precisely measured space.' Ecology was scarcity, and existence meant a struggle for land. The immutable structure of life was the division of animals into species, condemned to 'inner seclusion' and an endless fight to the death. Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species. The highest races were still evolving from the lower, which meant that interbreeding was possible but sinful. Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seeking to kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain as the law of gravity. The struggle could never end, and it had no certain outcome. A race could triumph and flourish and could also be starved and extinguished."
Hitler did not see the Jews as a race. They were not like the Slavs -- an obvious race meant for work and to be dominated. They were not like the Japanese -- a superior race who were welcome to their sphere of influence in the East. The Jews were something else -- a kind of intellectual, maybe even spiritual, pestilence that infected other races so they did not think clearly about reality. Reality is biology. Reality is nature. Man is an animal who lives socially as a race. There is no loyalty to the species as a whole—that is a universalizing idea of a group who have no soil of their own. That is the Jewish infection.
There is struggle. There is war. Darwin is right, and whoever figures that out will do best. There are no guarantees. The Germans have not been elected to be superior. When they cooperate as a race, when they care for one another across class lines, they will flourish as a people. If they are limited in their vision by lack of leadership they will become bourgeois shopkeepers and lose out to a more martial race that knows how to act as a military force. There are limited resources and a finite amount of land for food. The men who recognize this and organize themselves into fighting units that can take and defend that land will survive. The race that cannot will perish, or be enslaved. The woman is meant for the home, for beauty and refinement. The men are meant to protect women and the homeland. Men will do this if they can act as one by following the right leader. This is biology, and if one looks carefully, it is history. But the great universalizers in the name of religion and now Bolshevism tell a story of the human species and not the race. They are infecting the mind with ideologies that tear man from his animal racial nature of blood and soil.
The Jews, unlike most tribes, said their God created all humanity. The Jews spoke of the Noahidic Law -- the natural law which all men could know and obey. The last of the Noahidic laws was that men must live by law in communities. Hitler saw the idea of law, even the idea of the State, as a false ideal obscuring the deeper loyalty to the race. Such ideas were attractive to slaves and less successful races. Such ideas were useful at times to superior races but they were subordinate notions. When Hitler saw the Jew on the cross, he saw a slave’s religion. To Hitler, Saint Paul spreading the universalized Judaism of Christianity was just an earlier version of Trotsky pushing international socialism.
The other Jewish notion that men should live in bounded territorial nations and be a "light unto the nations" was again to Hitler utterly unnatural. Any notion of a universal loyalty to all humans was unnatural. The race must go where it must go. There were no boundaries or walls between neighbors. That would erect a limit and like the crowd building at Babel, the race has no limit. There was no God to trust for manna in the desert. The bread was where the soil produced grain. Ukraine, not France, was the real target of the racist establishing his habitat. He needed to mollify the western front; it was in the east where he would conquer and abide.
Hitler was no more a nationalist than Lenin was. Each took the available national machinery and loyalties of his country. Lenin used Russia to carry out the ideas of Marx and Hitler used Germany to carry out the ideas of Darwin. Both men rejected the religious truth that man is a created being bound to other men by a shared humanity and common Creator. Both would eventually face nations and men of God who saw things differently. The joy today is that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are gone, and the nations of Russia and Germany seek to find their proper place among the nations. The shame is that the United States in its foreign policy seeks to surround the strongest emerging nations in an endless war of all against all. Marx is really dead but Darwin reigns everywhere.
This social Darwinism masquerades as hard-headed realism. Charles Krauthammer, the resident atheist conservative intellectual at Fox News, recently explained:
"For realists, generally conservative, history is an endless cycle of clashing power politics. The same patterns repeat. Only the names and places change. The best we can do in our own time is to defend ourselves, managing instability and avoiding catastrophe. But expect nothing permanent, no essential alteration in the course of human affairs… For realists, Sovereign nations remain in incessant pursuit of power and self-interest. The pursuit can be carried out more or less wisely. But nothing fundamentally changes."
This is naked social Darwinism and it should not be called "realism" by any man who knows history. To propose the religious goal of fraternity amidst territorially defined nations is considered "idealist." To attest we have a common destiny as men to love God and one another is scorned as hopelessly naive. The Christian realist is no pacifist. He sees arms as the last and limited option in the deeper mission to follow the will of God, to thwart the lies of the devil, and to protect and feed humanity. The way we do this is by first caring for the communities we have been given as fatherlands -- our respective nations. It is through the bonds of citizenship in the nation that men act in this dangerous world. Jesus came for all, but it was Jerusalem he wept over. This is the Biblical synthesis of the local nation and universal humanity that Hitler so despised. We cannot serve humanity if we do not have a strong and just nation. This Biblical synthesis is despised by the modern who does not understand the souls of nations. Men will die for the national bond, but we make no God of this bond because our God is Lord of all the nations. (There goes that Jewish tendency to universalize. But what can we do? God picked the Jews to carry His Name and demonstrate His Divine plan for history, we didn’t.)
This is Christian realism. We should not be so meek in offering it as an alternative to Mr. Darwin’s worldview. Hitler showed us Darwin armed. Our American Darwinists prefer killing from high in the sky with their bombings of Belgrade, Libya, and Yemen. They surround Russia and China as if we are perpetual foes, and they engage our Mideast enemies by man-less drones. They cannot terminate a war or really initiate a durable peace because they have no end in mind. In the name of modernity they rebel against Divine Providence, which has always been the guiding quest in American foreign policy. Let us seek to do the Will of our God who is just and merciful, for there are better ways to wage war and there are much better ways to make peace.
ADDENDUM: On April 20th (Hitler's birthday) in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- two high school seniors at Columbine in Colorado -- killed 13 fellow students and injured 24 others. Klebold was considered depressive and suicidal, with Eric Harris the "psychopathic mastermind." This is the shirt worn on the day of the mass slaughter.
Conducting foreign policy as Social Darwinists is a prescription for perpetual war. Raising children as evolutionary materialists is a soul-killing betrayal of the young by their elders. It leaves the weak without protection, and the strong without purpose.
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