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Race and Genetics – Part 5

An ongoing review of race science, the focus in this installment continuing on Fritz Lenz and characteristic mental traits, including the jewish fondness for Lamarckism and the Nordic fondness for objectivity.

Excerpts taken once again from science historian Robert N. Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis:

Most curious of all, perhaps is Lenz’s belief that the tendency toward “Lamarckism” is a genetically selected racial characteristic. The jew, Lenz writes, has a peculiar fondness for Lamarckism, the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Hand in hand with this, “there usually goes a dislike of Darwinism, of the doctine that the origin of species has been affected by the ‘cruel’ process of natural selection, not by way of the ‘peaceful’ inheritance of acquired characteristics.” Lenz’s explanation of the jewish inclination toward Lamarckism is remarkable:

The jewish inclination toward Lamarckism is obviously an expression of the wish that there should be no unbridgeable racial distinctions. For instance, it is extremely characteristic that Kammerer, who was himself both a jew and a Lamarckian, should write that “the denial of the racial importance of acquired characteristics favors race hatred.” I am personally acquainted with jews of high mental attainments who feel themselves to belong to the German people and to German civilization, and to whom, therefore, it is a great tragedy of their lives that they should be looked upon as aliens. If acquired characters could be inherited, then, by living in a Teutonic environment and by adopting a Teutonic culture, the jews could become transformed into genuine Teutons. This enables us to understand why the Lamarckian doctrine should make so strong an appeal to the jews, whose fate it is to exist everywhere among the Gentiles as a sharply differentiated minority. But this, of course, can make no difference to the fact that the Lamarckian doctrine is an illusion … jews do not transform themselves into Germans by writing books on Goethe.

More accurately, jews regard themselves as distinct from all others, and wish that those others do not. The attempt to pathologize opponents, especially in terms of “denial” and “hate” is characteristically jewish. Jews wish only that nobody notice that they do not wish to become Teutons, or anything else, because then they would no longer be jews.

Also from jewish ethnographer Raphael Patai’s The Jewish Mind:

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

Lenz offers an ingenious explanation for the jewish fondness for Lamarckism.

This bit from Proctor, quoted last week, bears repeating:

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 outhers and to induce others to accept their guidance.

Likewise this bit from Patai’s “The Myth of the Jewish Race”:

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.

In other words, the notion that jews are distinct from Whites is bad for jews, because it leads to Whites realizing that jews are bad for Whites, which is bad for jews.

More from Proctor on Lenz’s evaluation of Nordic mental characteristics:

Lenz is confident that in most respects the mental powers of Nordic man exceed those of other races. He cites Fischer’s observations that the mentality of the Nordic includes industry, vigorous imagination, intelligence, foresight, organizing ability, artistic capacity, individualism, a willingness to obey orders, one-sidedness, an inclination toward meditation and flights of fancy, dislike for steady and quiet work, and devotion to plan or idea. To this Lenz adds the qualities of self-control, self-respect, respect for life and property, desire to know the unknown, a certain wander instinct, and fondness for the sea. According to Lenz, the Nordic mind strives above all else for clarity; Nordic idealism represents a “healthy realism,” a sense of the actual and the essential. He also maintains that the deficiency of historical and geographical knowledge one finds among the British and the Americans is typically Nordic: the Nordic has less a sense of particular occurences than of law and principle. This in turn he links with the Nordic’s individualism and also his natural tendency toward Protestantism over Catholicism. Selection has aided the Nordic – his cold northern climes have selected for intelligence and mastery of techniques. The same climate that among the the Mongols selected for freedom from wants and capacity to endure has selected in the Nordic a love of order and of cleanliness; a love of sport, of danger, and of war; and a certain need for distance or detachment from other men and things (what Lenz calls Nietzsche’s “pathos of distance”). Hence “objectivity is a Nordic racial trait.”

Such pronouncements may sound strange to the modern ear. Yet Lenz did in fact consider his science of race to be a neutral and objective science – indeed, he often warns against the dangers of “mixing values with science.” For Lenz, human racial variation is simply a fact that science is called on to analyze; the purpose of constructing a racial typology is not to rank the various races in any moral sense:

No race can be regarded as either “higher” or “lower” than another, because all such estimates of value imply the application of some standard of value other than that of race per se.

At several point Lenz takes pains to convince his reader that he is not an anti-semite. He suggests that “contrary to the opinion of the ‘anti-semite’,” the jews have played a constructive role in history: the jew tears down, but generally with the aim of building up.

Here is a fundamental distinction in mentality. In spite of the objective ideals of high-minded Whites, including race scientists like Lenz, the struggle amongst groups extends even into science – with jews ultimately tearing down the science of race specifically because they regard it as bad for jews.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

 
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Race and Genetics – Part 4

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”.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

 
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