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To: DittoJed2
Again, separating the two. You are dealing with folks who were 80 years apart here so they weren't necessarily all that connected. Hitler got his plausible rhetoric in part from Darwin but more from his followers such as Huxley. He may even have gotten some of it way back with Lamarck, though the language he uses in Mein Kampf sounds remarkably Darwinian.

The problem with that line of argument, IMO, is that Hitler also believed things that were very different indeed from evolution. Some might say he believed in a strange form of creationism!:

In conjunction with his racial ideology and antisemitism, Hitler often spoke of an "historic" or "higher mission" of the Aryan race and its elite core, the German people. The Aryans, according to Hitler, were once rulers of the earth, the highest race of mankind, endowed with the highest degree of spiritual qualities and the only ones capable of producing a higher civilization.19 Aryans were, in essence, god-men on earth, but through blood poisoning lost their ruling position. However, as its "higher mission," the German people were destined to regain this position for the Aryan race. To do so, Germany must restructure its political and social foundations and create a state whose function was to promote the Aryan culturecreating "spiritual elements" that exist in the blood of the German race. If this were done, racially and thus spiritually pure human beings could be produced, ensuring Aryan world domination.20

But if this Aryan destiny were to be fulfilled, Hitler believed, one major obstacle would have to be dealt with-the Jew. The Jew was the poisoner of the blood (soul) of the Aryan race, thus inhibiting its spiritual growth and endangering its divine destiny. Since Hitler saw all Jewish actions as racially and thus spiritually motivated, it became his divine mission to create an Aryan spiritual movement to combat the Jewish race.21 Hitler believed that his Nazi party, founded as a spiritual movement, would successfully rise to German political dominance since it was based in his mind on eternally true ideals rooted in the very soul of the Aryan race.22 Once in power, the Nazi movement could then create a state that would foster the historic destiny of the Aryan race. And the first task of this Aryan state would be to eliminate the Jewish threat.23 This is why Hitler's political career both began and ended with a warning against the Jewish danger.
-- Hitler's Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources by Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles

Thus Hitler believed that the Aryan race had originally existed in a state of grace - of perfection - to which they must claw their way back. (You could almost call them "fallen angels".) But it's the powerful evil force - the Jews, in his case - that prevents the Aryans from returning to that Godlike state.

IMO that has startling echoes of the story of Adam & Eve.

The paper, BTW, goes on to argue that Nazi ideology owes a lot to the occult beliefs of Madame Blavatsky called "Theosophy". It's interesting reading, to say the least. The paper describes some of the details of the History of Man, according to the Theosophists:

Each root race is seen by Blavatsky as being constituted differently in a physical and spiritual sense. In the earliest times man was purely spirit. Then at some point in time, this spirit entered and animated physical matter.39 Man thus evolved, in Blavatsky's cosmology, from the ethereal to the material. The original spirituality of man can be seen, according to Blavatsky, in the fact that mankind once was endowed with psychic powers, which she attributed to the so-called "Cyclopean eye."40 With the "Cyclopean eye" man had "spiritual sight," the ability to perceive subtle realities of the spiritual world, and thus could "see" into the future and read minds. Blavatsky felt that as man evolved materially and intellectually this "Third Eye" atrophied to what is now the pineal gland and man mostly lost his psychic powers.41 But, stated Blavatsky, mankind is destined to regain these abilities. That Hitler was well versed in these racial peculiarities is demonstrated in one of Herman Rauschning's conversations with Hitler:
The pursuit of the "random path of the intelligence," we learned, was the real defection of man from his divine mission. To have "magic insight" was apparently Hitler's idea of the goal of human progress. He himself felt that he already had the rudiments of this gift. He attributed to it his success and his future eminence. A savant of Munich ... had also written some curious stuff about the prehistoric world ... about forms of perception and supernatural powers. There was the eye of Cyclops, or median eye, the organ of magic perception of the Infinite, now reduced to a rudimentary pineal gland. Speculations of this sort fascinated Hitler, and he would sometimes be entirely wrapped up in them. He saw his own remarkable career as a confirmation of hidden powers. He saw himself as chosen for superhuman tasks, as the prophet of the rebirth of man in a new form.42

72 posted on 08/26/2003 4:55:07 PM PDT by jennyp (http://crevo.bestmessageboard.com)
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To: jennyp
Again, separating the two. You are dealing with folks who were 80 years apart here so they weren't necessarily all that connected. Hitler got his plausible rhetoric in part from Darwin but more from his followers such as Huxley. He may even have gotten some of it way back with Lamarck, though the language he uses in Mein Kampf sounds remarkably Darwinian.

The problem with that line of argument, IMO, is that Hitler also believed things that were very different indeed from evolution. Some might say he believed in a strange form of creationism!:

I already stated that Hitler could have been a theistic evolutionist, but the case can not be made with any credibility that his "theos" was the biblical God, nor was the Nazi god Jesus:

According to Spielvogel: "From 1935 to 1939 Nazi policy toward the churches was conducted along three separate avenues simultaneously: an attempt to gain administrative control so that the Protestant and Catholic churches could be brought under the authority of the stat; the wagig of an ideological struggle to replace Christianity with a new cult in the hearts and minds of all Germans; and a campaign of terrorism and intimidation designed to gradually reduce the Christian churches to extinction." (Jackson J. Spielvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany:A History, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 113)

Regarding Hitler's social Darwinism: 'struggle is the father of all ting.' Hitler perceived struggle not as the essence of all nature, thus postulating a crude Darwinism, but ALSO as the central principle for both individuals and nations, thus exalting a crass Social Darwinism. In a 1928 speech at Kulmbach, he stated: "The idea of struggle is as old as life itself, for life is only preserved because other living things perish through struggle....I this struggle, the stronger, the more able win, while the less able, the weak lose. Struggle is the father of all things....As it is with the individual so it is in the destiny of nations. Only by struggle are the strong able to raise themselves above the weak. And every people that loses out in this eternally shifting struggle has, according to the laws of nature, received its just dessert. A Weltanschauung that denies the idea of struggle is contrary to nature and will lead a people that is guided by it to destruction." (ibid., 138)


Again, while the idea to be the agent of natural selection wouldn't have come from, where would the idea of struggle and of inferiority of certain races have come from?

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. (Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", 2nd edition, New York, A L. Burt Co., 1874, p. 178)


Likewise, Darwin's close friend Professor Adam Sedgwick was one of the people who saw what dangers the theory of evolution would give rise to in the future. He remarked, after reading and digesting The Origin of Species, that "if this book were to find general public acceptance, it would bring with it a brutalization of the human race such as it had never seen before." (A. E. Wilder-Smith, "Man's Origin Man's Destiny", The Word for Today Publishing, 1993, p.166).

IMO that (the gods quote)has startling echoes of the story of Adam & Eve.

Except if you remember the story, Adam and Eve were told they would be as gods by Satan. They weren't gods. They were humans. Hitler didn't get this ideology from the Bible. As to his philosophy being influenced by Blavatsky, it very well may have. I have no problem with that.
76 posted on 08/26/2003 7:14:37 PM PDT by DittoJed2 (Romans 1:20)
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To: jennyp
Give it up Jenny, the woman totally fails to understand of what you speak, she just cannot relate to it.

evolution is evil incarnate, the devils work as far as she is concerned because it has the audacity to show that the bible cannot be taken literally. OMG not that!!

Considering that the literalist are a very small minority, evolution does not actually effect that many peoples belief structure, but those that it does are VERY loud, and VERY hard headed. Kind of like punching a brick wall, you won't get through, and your hand will hurt.

Ignore her, she is another fanatic who is clueless because her fanaticism blinds her to all other possibilities.

Sad, but true.

This is why I never take ANY fanatical fundamentalist seriously, because they CANNOT be reasoned with, they are blind to all else but their belief structure and will attack ANYTHING that might somehow threaten it.
78 posted on 08/26/2003 10:08:45 PM PDT by Aric2000 (If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance god)
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