sm with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science."—*Max Nordau, "The Philosophy and Morals of War," in North American Review 169 (1889), p. 794.
*Barzun, a history teacher at Columbia University, wrote an epic book, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, in which he clearly showed that Darwinism inflamed militarism and warfare wherever it went.
"In every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power, and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens—all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, or even before, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say, science incarnate . . Race was biological, it was sociological; it was Darwinian."—*Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1958), pp. 92-95.
"Darwin, Nietzsche, and Haeckel laid the foundations for the intense German militarism that eventually led to the Great War of 1914-1918. There were others who participated in the development, of course, including many of the German generals and political leaders, all very much under the spell of the German variety of social Darwinism. General Friedrich von Bernhardi said:" ‘War gives biologically just decisions, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things . . It is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization!’ "—H.M. Morris, Long War Against God (1989), p. 74.
"During World War I, German intellectuals believed natural selection was irresistibly all-powerful (Allmacht), a law of nature impelling them to bloody struggle for domination. Their political and military textbooks promoted Darwin’s theories as the ‘scientific’ basis of a quest for world conquest, with the full backing of German scientists and professors of biology."—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 59.
"One need not read far in Hitler’s Mein Kampf to find that evolution likewise influenced him and his views on the master race, genocide, human breeding experiments, etc."—Robert Clark, Darwin: Before and After (1948), p. 115.
"[The position in Germany was that] Man must ‘conform’ to nature’s processes, no matter how ruthless. The ‘fittest’ must never stand in the way of the law of evolutionary progress. In its extreme form, that social view was used in Nazi Germany to justify sterilization and mass murder of the ‘unfit,’ ‘incompetent,’ ‘inferior races.’ "—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 412.
The undesirables had to be eliminated.
"During the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed he was carrying Darwinism forward with his doctrine that undesirable individuals (and inferior races) must be eliminated in the creation of the New Order dominated by Germany’s Master Race."—*R. Milner, Encylopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 119.
"[Hitler] stressed and singled out the idea of biological evolution as the most forceful weapon against traditional religion and he repeatedly condemned Christianity for its opposition to the teaching of evolution . . For Hitler, evolution was the hallmark of modern science and culture, and he defended its veracity as tenaciously as Haeckel."—*Daniel Gasman, Scientific Origins of Modern Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (1971), p. 188.Hitler said this:
"I regard Christianity as the most fatal, seductive lie that has ever existed."—*Adolf Hitler, quoted in *Larry Azar, Twentieth Century in Crisis (1990), p. 155."This doctrine of racial supremacy Hitler took at face value . . He accepted evolution much as we today accept Einsteinian relativity."—*Larry Azar, Twentieth Century in Crisis (1990), p. 180.
"Sixty-three million people would be slaughtered in order to obey the evolutionary doctrine that perishing is a law of nature."—*Op. cit., p. 181.
A Jewish biology professor at Purdue University, writing for the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists, said this