Battleangel

An upcoming TV special on an American Christian Broadcasting network rehashes Goodwin’s Law, simplifies the rise of totalitarianism in Germany in the 1930s and blames it on Charles Darwin. And it has Ann Coulter in it, flaunting her general ignorance and the lackluster quality of American education by claiming she had never made the connection between Social Darwinism, “Nazism” and whatnot. Well, these are some hefty and lengthy allegations coming from someone who just recently read up on Social Darwinism.

This is funny partly because of its central mistake, namely directly blaming Darwin for the folly of Social Darwinism which is not only incorrectly interpreting Darwin’s ideas but also transplanting this incorrect interpretation to an entirely different field. It is also amusing because of the colossal can of worms that it opens, especially if you are on the side of the American Christian Right. I mean after all, who has traditionally embraced, popularized, and continues to embrace, Social Darwinism more than Christian Conservatives? All that time they were apparently not bothered by the now supposedly clear-cut roots of what later became known as Social Darwinism.

Furthermore, there are of course a great number of ideologies and threads that comes together in the rather hodgepodge movement that we now often, and incorrectly, see as a uniform, consistent or indeed full-fledged ideology. It makes just as much sense to blame Conservatives and Socialists for their respective contribution to the Nazi amalgamation. Since “Nazism” is also so obviously an offspring of Nationalism it rings a tad hollow for the world’s biggest flag-wavers to warn us of the impending doom of its derivative misconceptions about Darwinism and bringing up the Nazi scarecrow time and again.

For Americans, going after the Hitler thread is of course treading on some fairly thin ice. After all, one of the other major driving forces behind Hitler personally, and no doubt many of his senior staff, was Revanchism. After all, who decided Germany’s fate, and fueled revanchist politics more than America? By first entering WW1 unnecessarily and then imposing a horrendous and ultimately pointless peace treaty aimed at nothing more than humiliating Germany, stifling the competition. America still likes to do that to its enemies of course.

Or as the Wikipedia entry for Nazism used to note before someone changed it to be less critical of the United States and Conservatism (the blame has now been shifted to Socialism, carefully omitting any reference to the most obvious ideological inspiration and Hitler’s admiration has been toned down and will probably be a non-fact in the next revision).

According to Nazism, it is an obvious mistake to permit or encourage multilingualism and multiculturalism within a nation. Fundamental to the Nazi goal was the unification of all German-speaking peoples, “unjustly” divided into different Nation States. Hitler claimed that nations that could not defend their territory did not deserve it. Slave races he thought of as less worthy to exist than “master races”. In particular, if a master race should require room to live (Lebensraum), he thought such a race should have the right to displace the inferior indigenous races. Hitler draws parallels between Lebensraum and the American ethnic cleansing and relocation policies towards the Native Americans, which he saw as key to the success of the US. Hitler had always admired the Americans for their treatment of the Indians, and considered America to be a shining example of what Germany’s ambitions should be. Hitler often compared his Lebensraum policies to the Manifest Destiny policy of the United States, in which the ultimate destiny of the American people was to expand west and defeat the Indians.

Not to mention the many ways by which Social Darwinism has guided, and continues to guide, American foreign policy, the view of foreign peoples and the value of the lives of the “inconveniently brown.” See for instance the now classic Breckenridge Memorandum on Cuba or take a stroll through the rationale for invading the Philippines. Not to mention American Laissez-faire capitalism and its relationship to Social Darwinism where many to this day still claim that aiding the poor is encouraging laziness and vice and that the economic system itself is one where the fittest are to survive, pass on their wealth and the rest simply perish. Most are of course not aware of the actual roots of such sentiments either. Thin ice indeed.