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How Hitler's Darwinian pursuit of "evolutionary progress" inspired almost every major feature of Nazi policy -- including the genocide of the Jews
Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
by Richard Weikart
Most people assume that Adolph Hitler was a power-
hungry opportunist who simply ignored morality whenever it
got in his way. According to this view, any time Hitler
spoke or wrote about morality, he was merely using it as a
political tool to manipulate the masses. But in Hitler's
Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Richard
Weikart demonstrates that Hitler's immorality was not the
result of ignoring or rejecting ethics, but rather came
from embracing a coherent -- albeit pernicious -- ethic of
improving the human race through "evolutionary progress."
Directly inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution, this
ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of
Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improved human
heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia,
racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial
extermination. By embracing this particular brand of
ethics, Hitler perpetrated much greater evil than he would
have had he been merely opportunistic or amoral.
(continued from above)
In Hitler's Ethic, you'll discover:
- How Hitler's ethic was essentially an evolutionary one
that exalted biological progress above all other moral
considerations
- His belief that humans were subject to immutable
evolutionary laws -- the most important of which was the
struggle for existence, which alone determined what was
morally proper
- How Hitler -- like many biologists, anthropologists and
eugenicists of his day -- believed that socially
beneficial moral characteristics such as diligence,
thrift and honesty were biologically innate, and that
exterminating inferior races therefore would improve
human morality
- Hitler's repeated stress, throughout his career, on the
importance of conforming to the laws of nature,
especially the Darwinian struggle for existence
- How, in Hitler's view, this eternal law of struggle
produced all the good in the world
- Hitler's conviction, shared with other social Darwinists,
that humans are essentially unequal and thus need not be
treated equally
- Why Hitler believed that the "Aryan" race was the most
highly evolved form of humanity -- and that whatever
benefited it in the struggle of existence would drive
human evolution to ever greater heights
- How Hitler thought that health, vitality, and expansion
of the Aryan race would lead not only to biological
improvement, but to higher culture and even greater
morality -- and that this could only be accomplished,
however, by bringing death to competing races
- How this twisted Darwinian vision enabled him to justify
all sorts of atrocities, as long as they were directed
against those deemed biologically inferior
- How Hitler's vision of evolutionary ethics made him
contemptuous of anyone defending human rights -- which he
believed would only foster the unfit
- How, in Hitler's ethic, the end -- evolutionary advance -
justified the means; nothing was taboo
- The parallels between Hitler's ethic and utilitarianism
- Hitler and abortion: how he opposed it only for healthy
Aryans -- but encouraged, even required it for those who
might produce "inferior" offspring, and for Jews and
other "inferior" races
- How Darwinism contributed to the development of anti-
Semitic ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
-- transforming it from a religious and social prejudice
to a secular racial theory
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