Ernst Haeckel, Alfred Ploetz

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel:

(February 16, 1834 – August 9, 1919),[1] also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology

Alfred Ploetz:

(August 22, 1860 – March 20, 1940) was a German physician, biologist, eugenicist known for coining the term racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene) and promoting the concept in Germany. Rassenhygiene is a form of eugenics.

Alfred Ploetz introduces the term Racial Hygiene, from Hadding Scott’s National-Socialist Worldview:

Alfred Ploetz’ 1895 work, Die Tuechtigkeit Unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (“The Competence of Our Race and the Preservation of the Weak”), is credited by Robert Proctor as the book that started the racial hygiene movement in Germany.

From Ploetz’ introduction:

Peoples and races are just organic life-forms, determined like beasts and plants through their component parts – cells here, men there – for which their environment is a complex of favorable or unfavorable conditions. And just as we have, by the combination of favorable conditions, created a hygiene for man, which, based ultimately on the life of his cells, teaches him how he may maintain health as long as possible and postpone death, so is it high time, based on the vital functions of men, to attempt the founding of a hygiene of the races and of all mankind, which teaches how an organic collectivity of men may keep itself as vigorous as possible and postpone its perishing as long as possible.

Discussion returns to Fritz Lenz, with selections from Robert Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, published in 1988.

Lenz co-authored a two-volume textbook with Eugen Fischer and Erwin Baur, Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Outline of human genetics and racial hygiene), published in 1921. Proctor describes this work as:

a monument of scholarship and careful argumentation. The book strongly influenced German biomedical thinking and provided scientific legitimacy for many of the views that came to be favored in the Nazi era.

Referring to Lenz:

He repeatedly poked fun at Soviet attempts to “politicize” genetics by identifying the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics with socialist or proletarian science. Science, according to Lenz, was value free, and politics must not play a role in its development. Science, however, could and should inform the practice of politics. In 1930, in his celebration of Ploetz’s seventieth birthday, Lenz wrote:

Ploetz recognized as unsatisfactory from the very beginning the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism – a doctrine which, biologically speaking, derived from the principle of the omnipotence of the environment. The recognition that not all evil is determined by the environment, and that the roots of most evil lie instead in hereditary defects, became the motivating force in racial hygiene.

The concluding chapter of the 1927 edition of Lenz’s textbook is titled “The Inheritance of Particular Talents” and begins with series of questions:

Why is it that many persons are able, many others stupid, and the majority mediocre? Why are some people cheerful and others gloomy; some industrious and others slothful; some unselfish and others selfish?

Proctor recounts how Lenz attributed negro cruelty to a child-like lack of human sympathy and self-restraint, believed the Mongol greatly exceeded the Nordic man in mental development (“memory is stronger than intellect”, more a capacity “for imitation than for invention”), and distinguished the Alpine and Mediterranean races from the Nordic.

his most extraordinary remarks, however, are those concerning the jews, whom he classifies (along with Greeks and Armenians) as belonging to the “Near Eastern race”. Much of what he says about jews represents an attempt to explain, in biological terms, jewish desires to assimilate to German culture.

According to Lenz, jews can be recognized at once by their appearance, though the mental particulars of this race are even more distinctive than the physical. (He refers to the jews as “a mental race.”) Lenz imagines himself able “to recognize the literary work of a jew (scientific writing included) by the way in which the thoughts are developed and by the method of expression,” and then proceeds to list a wide range of examples for this thesis.

Many jews, Lenz reports, in the process of adapting to essentially alien surroundings, have tried to imitate the customs and appearances of their hosts in order to blend in and appear less conspicuous. He considers this a typical case of “animal mimicry,” commonly observed “wherever a living creature gains advantages in the struggle for existence by acquiring a resemblance to some other organism.” It is for this reason, he argues, that jews are not just shrewd and alert, not just diligent and persevering, but possess as well an unusual sense of empathy – an ability to put themselves in the place of others and to induce others to accept their guidance. The Near Easterner in general, and the jew in particular, has been selected not for the control and exploitation of nature, but for the control and exploitation of other men.

As contemporary stupidity requires, Proctor imagines that such ideas are purely imaginary. Today we’re not supposed to notice that jews are distinct from the rest of us, even as jews openly discuss such distinctions themselves.

Jews have distinguished between yiddishe kopf (which I mistakenly called “judishe kopf” in the podcast) and goyishe kopf long before White scientists began writing textbooks about race and racial differences.

Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer, historian, Orientalist and anthropologist Raphael Patai published The Jewish Mind in 1977. In the foreword Patai describes this as an outgrowth of his previous book, The Myth of the Jewish Race. In the introduction to that book he describes what is now the jewish view of race and racial science:

The systematic extermination of 6 million jews by Nazi Germany and its satellites was the culmination of the notion that the jews were a race, with distinct inherited physical and mental characteristics, alien to the Gentile population in whose midst they lived, and overtly or secretly inimical to it. Modern European racial anti-semitism, which in the years of World War II led to the largest genocide ever perpetrated, is a special sub-variety of a generic phenomenon known as “racism”, which was characterized by Ashley Montagu as “a malfunctioning of the mind which endangers human relations, a disease due to the infection of the mind by false ideas concerning the status of other groups of human beings.”

The most frightening thing about racism was, and is, that once its virus lodges in the mind it dims perception to the degree of making all persons appear not primarily as individual human beings but as members of a race. If an individual is perceived as belonging to a different race, he is stereo-typed as an alien, almost like a creature from another galaxy in modern science fiction, and as such an enemy whose capture, enslavement, immobilization, or murder lies in “our” interest. To the diseased racist mind there is, therefore, no such thing as mankind; there are only disparate races which, whenver they encounter one another, are destined to enter into a deadly struggle whose foreordained outcome is the victory of the master race.

Reflecting typical jewish double-think, Patai begins “Jewish Mind” as if it is in no way whatsoever related to his pronouncements on “diseased racist minds”:

Were we to set the peoples of the world in a series ranging from those who had the least exposure to outside influences to those who had the most, the jews would undoubtedly rank highest in the variety, intensity, and duration of such exposure. More than that, the difference in this respect between the jews and the Gentiles is not merely quantitative but also qualitative. This, in effect, places the jewish people in a category sui generis [[of its own kind/genus]]. Thus history has supplied a profound justification for the taxonomical dichotomy of mankind into jews and Gentiles which has been a fundamental feature of the jewish world view ever since antiquity, when the Bible put the prophetic words about Israel into the mouth of the pagan seer Balaam: “Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.”

Patai came to my attention because he refers to Lenz:

Lenz’s attitude to the “jewish race” was unsympathetic but correct.

Despite his nationalistic conceit, Lenz was a serious scholar whose work represented the best that German science produced until his time in genetics.

Patai’s description of this archetypical race scientist plainly contradicts his own boogeyman-like pathologization and demonization of race science.

Lenz even goes so far in his presentation of the similarity between jews and Germans that he attributes to it the “frequent outbreaks of enmity between Germans and jews” (read: the frequent anti-semitic attacks by Germans against jews); it is “the similarity in their respective gifts which leads to a strong competition like that which has again and again led the ruling groups of the Teutons into conflict with one another, each striving to establish power over the others.”

Compared to the White scientists I’ve been discussing for the past several installments, who thought and wrote forthrightly about race in the decades leading up to World War II, Patai is indeed like a creature from another galaxy. His jewish mind can’t help but try to supplant Lenz’s more objective view with one biased entirely in favor of jews, illustrating some of the techniques jews use to “induce others to accept their guidance”.

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