Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "Did Darwin cause Hitler? (The Eugenics Debate)" video.

  1. Have your read Elazar Barkan's 1992: "The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars" ? Interesting book which covers much of the same ground. It may be a bit Marxian though. 3 decades since I read it. I thought it a good book but I've never seen anyone else cite it. This issue of race is what clearly demarks Fascism from Communism. Facists wanted to build their politics on national identity. Due to pre-existing empire building, need for nationalism, and moral grandstanding of middle classes (Eugenics) - race - became key to national identity. In contrast, the communist vision was internationalist. That did not stop communists doing race crimes - but it stopped communists developing an ideology which justified such crimes. Racism was a facet of German Fascism; not the main driver. The Great Depression was a bigger factor in putting the Nazis in power & the threat from Soviet communism.
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  2. Modern Eugenics is called "climate crisis"; it's basically anti- all humanity now.
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  3. One point. The Jim Crow Laws - against black people in the USA. Began in the 1890s and stopped in the 1930s. (no new Jim Crow Laws after the 1930s) So this kind of racism didn't take off until social Darwinist ideas had got underway later in the nineteenth century; more than 3 decades after Darwin published his key book.
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  4. I think families with 3 and more kids should be especially rewarded because we're now facing a population crash. The reproduction rate in, for example, Japan, is now down to 1.2 per woman. For a sustainable population it needs to be at least 2.
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