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Introduction
Darwin legitimized violence by claiming that
humans are, in essence, animals struggling for life. |
Most people think the theory of evolution was first proposed by Charles
Darwin, and rests on scientific evidence, observations and experiments.
However, in the same way that Darwin was not its originator neither does
the theory rest on scientific proof. The theory consists of an adaptation
to nature of an ancient dogma called materialist philosophy. Although
it is backed up by no scientific evidence, the theory is blindly supported
in the name of materialist philosophy.
This fanaticism has resulted in many of disasters. That is because together
with the spread of Darwinism and the materialist philosophy it supports,
the answer to the question 'What is a human being?' has changed. People
who used to answer: 'Human beings were created by God and have to live
according to the morality He teaches' have now begun to think that 'Man
came into being by chance, and is an animal who developed with the fight
for survival.' There is a heavy price to pay for this great deception.
Violent ideologies such as racism, fascism and communism, and many other
cruel world views based on conflict have all drawn strength from this
deception.
This article will examine this disaster Darwinism has brought to the
world and reveal its connection with terrorism, one of the most important
global problems of our time.
The Darwinist Misconception: 'Life is conflict'
Darwin set out with one basic premise when developing his theory: 'The
development of living things depends on the fight for survival. The strong
win the struggle. The weak are condemned to defeat and oblivion.'
According to Darwin, there was a ruthless struggle for survival and eternal
conflict in nature. The strong always overcome the weak, and this enables
development to take place. The subtitle he gave to his book The Origin
of Species, "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life",
encapsulates that view.
Furthermore, Darwin proposed that the 'fight for survival' also applied
between human races. According to that claim, 'favored races' were victorious
in the struggle. Favored races, in Darwin's view, were white Europeans.
African or Asian races had lagged behind in the struggle for survival.
Darwin went further, and suggested that these races would soon lose the
'struggle for survival' entirely, and thus disappear:
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. [1]
The Indian anthropologist Lalita Vidyarthi explains how Darwin's theory
of evolution imposed racism on the social sciences:
His (Darwin's) theory of
the survival of the fittest was
warmly welcomed by the social scientists of the day, and they believed
mankind had achieved various levels of evolution culminating in the
white man's civilization. By the second half of the nineteenth century
racism was accepted as fact by the vast majority of Western scientists.
[2]
Darwin's Source of Inspiration: Malthus's Theory of Ruthlessness
Darwin was influenced by the social theories
of Malthus, who defined ruthlessness as a law of nature. |
Darwin's source of inspiration on this subject was the British economist
Thomas Malthus's book An Essay on the Principle of Population.
Left to their own devices, Malthus calculated that the human population
increased rapidly. In his view, the main influences that kept populations
under control were disasters such as war, famine and disease. In short,
according to this brutal claim, some people had to die for others to live.
Existence came to mean 'permanent war.'
In the 19th century, Malthus's ideas were widely accepted.
European upper class intellectuals in particular supported his cruel ideas.
In an article titled 'The Nazis' Secret Scientific Agenda', the
importance 19th century attached Europe attached to Malthus's
views on population is described in this way:
In the opening half of the nineteenth century, throughout
Europe, members of the ruling classes gathered to discuss the newly
discovered "Population problem" and to devise ways of implementing
the Malthusian mandate, to increase the mortality rate of the poor:
"Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should
encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower,
crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.
In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and
particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations,"
and so forth and so on. [3]
As a result of this cruel policy, the weak, and those who lost the struggle
for survival would be eliminated, and as a result the rapid rise in population
would be balanced out. This so-called 'oppression of the poor' policy
was actually carried out in 19th century Britain. An industrial
order was set up in which children of eight and nine were made to work
sixteen hours a day in the coal mines and thousands died from the terrible
conditions. The 'struggle for survival' demanded by Malthus's theory led
to millions of Britons leading lives full of suffering.
Influenced by these ideas, Darwin applied this concept of conflict to
all of nature, and proposed that the strong and the fittest emerged victorious
from this war of existence. Moreover, he claimed that the so-called struggle
for survival was a justified an unchangeable law of nature. On the other
hand, he invited people to abandon their religious beliefs by denying
creation, and thus aimed at all ethical values that could prove an obstacle
to the ruthlessness of the 'struggle for survival.'
The dissemination of these untrue ideas that led individuals to ruthlessness
and cruelty, cost humanity a heavy price in the 20thcentury.
The Role of Darwinism in Preparing the Ground for World
War I
As Darwinism dominated European culture, the effects of the 'struggle
for survival' began to emerge. Colonialist European nations in particular
began to portray the nations they colonized as 'evolutionary backward
nations' and looked to Darwinism for justification.
The bloodiest political effect of Darwinism was the outbreak of World
War I in 1914.
In his book Europe Since 1870, the well-known British professor
of history James Joll explains that one of the factors that prepared the
ground for World War I was the belief in Darwinism of European rulers
at the time. For instance, the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, Franz
Baron Conrad von Hoetzendorff, wrote in his post-war memoirs:
Philanthropic religions, moral teachings and philosophical
doctrines may certainly sometimes serve to weaken mankind's struggle
for existence in its crudest form, but they will never succeed in
removing it as a driving motive of the world… It is in accordance
with this great principle that the catastrophe of the world war came
about as the result of the motive forces in the lives of states and
peoples, like a thunderstorm which must by its nature discharge itself.
[4]
The leaders of Europe on the eve of World War
I were mislead by the Social Darwinist dogma. They thought that war
was a biological necessity. |
It is not hard to understand why Conrad, with that ideological
foundation, should have encouraged the Austro-Hungarian Empire to declare
war. Such ideas at the time were not limited to the military. Kurt Riezler,
the personal assistant and confidant of the German chancellor Theobald
von Bethmann-Hollweg, wrote in 1914: 'Eternal and absolute enmity is fundamentally
inherent in relations between peoples; and the hostility which we observe
everywhere… is not the result of a perversion of human nature but
is the essence of the world and the source of life itself.' [5]
Friedrich von Bernardi, a World War I general, made a
similar connection between war and the laws of war in nature. "War"
declared Bernhardi "is a biological necessity"; it "is
as necessary as the struggle of the elements of nature"; it "gives
a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature
of things." [6]
As we have seen, World War I broke out because of European thinkers,
generals and administrators who saw warfare, bloodshed and suffering as
a kind of 'development', and thought they were an unchanging 'law of nature',
The ideological root that dragged all of that generation to destruction
was nothing else than Darwin's concepts of the 'struggle for survival'
and 'favored races'.
World War I left behind it 8 million dead, hundreds of ruined cities,
and millions of wounded, crippled, homeless and unemployed.
The basic cause of World War II, which broke out 21 years later and left
55 million dead behind it, was also based on Darwinism.
The Fruit of 'The Law of the Jungle': Fascism
As Darwinism fed racism in the 19th century, it formed the
basis of an ideology that would develop and drown the world in blood in
the 20thcentury: Nazism.
Both the race theory and the war hysteria of
the Nazis were inspired from Darwinism. |
A strong Darwinist influence can be seen in Nazi ideologues. When one
examines this theory, which was given shape by Adolf Hitler and Alfred
Rosenberg, one comes across such concepts as 'natural selection', 'selected
mating', and 'the struggle for survival between the races', which are
repeated dozens of time in The Origin of Species. When calling
his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler was inspired by the Darwinist
struggle for survival and the principle that victory went to the fittest.
He particularly talks about the struggle between the races:
'History would culminate in a new millennial empire
of unparalleled splendor, based on a new racial hierarchy ordained
by nature herself.'[7]
In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler proclaimed that "a
higher race subjects to itself a lower race… a right which we see in nature
and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right."
That the Nazis were influenced by Darwinism is a fact that many historians
accept. The historian Hickman describes Darwinism's influence on Hitler
as follows:
(Hitler) was a firm believer and preacher of evolution.
Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his psychosis, it is
certain that [the concept of struggle was important because] … his book,
Mein Kampf, clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas,
particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and
the extermination of the weak to produce a better society. [8]
Hitler, who emerged with these views, dragged the world to violence that
had never before been seen. Many ethnic and political groups, and especially
the Jews, were exposed to terrible cruelty and slaughter in the Nazi concentration
camps. World War II, which began with the Nazi invasion, cost 55 million
lives. What lay behind the greatest tragedy in world history was Darwinism's
concept of the 'struggle for survival'.
The Bloody Alliance: Darwinism and Communism
The dialectical materialism of Marx defined
violence as a constructive force that helped human progress. |
While fascists are found on the right wing of Social Darwinism, the left
wing is occupied by communists. Communists have always been among the
fiercest defenders of Darwin's theory.
This relationship between Darwinism and communism goes right back to
the founders of both these 'isms.' Marx and Engels, the founders of communism,
read Darwin's The Origin of Species as soon as it came out, and
were amazed at is 'dialectical materialist' attitude. The correspondence
between Marx and Engels showed that they saw Darwin's theory as 'containing
the basis in natural history for communism'. In his book The Dialectics
of Nature, which he wrote under the influence of Darwin, Engels was
full of praise for Darwin, and tried to make his own contribution to the
theory in the chapter 'The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from
Ape to Man.'
Russian communists who followed in the footsteps of Marx
and Engels, such as Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, all agreed with
Darwin's theory of evolution. Plekhanov, who is considered as the founder
of Russian communism, regarded marxism as 'Darwinism in its application
to social science'. [9]
Trotsky said, 'Darwin's discovery is the highest
triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter.' [10]
'Darwinist education' had a major role in the formation
of communist cadres. For instance, historians note the fact that Stalin
was religious in his youth, but became an atheist because of Darwin's
books. [11]
Mao, who established communist rule in China and killed
millions of people, openly stated that 'Chinese socialism is founded
upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.' [12]
The Harvard University historian James Reeve Pusey goes
into great detail regarding Darwinism's effect on Mao and Chinese communism
in his research book China and Charles Darwin. [13]
In short, there is an unbreakable link between the theory of evolution
and communism. The theory claims that living things are the product of
blind chance, and provides a so-called scientific support for atheism.
Communism, an atheist ideology, is for that reason firmly tied to Darwinism.
Moreover, the theory of evolution proposes that development in nature
is possible thanks to conflict (in other words 'the struggle for survival')
and supports the concept of 'dialectics' which is fundamental to communism.
If we think of the communist concept of 'dialectical conflict', which
killed some 120 million people throughout the 20thcentury,
as a 'killing machine' then we can better understand the dimension of
the disaster that Darwinism visited on our planet.
Darwinism and Terrorism
As we have so far seen, Darwinism is at the root of various ideologies
of violence that spelled disaster to mankind in the 20thcentury.
However, as well as these ideologies, Darwinism also defines an 'ethical
understanding' and 'method' that could influence various world views.
The fundamental concept behind this understanding and method is 'fighting
those who are not one of us'.
We can explain this in the following way: There are different beliefs,
worldviews and philosophies in the world. These can look at each other
in one of two ways:
1) They can respect the existence of those who are not one of them and
try to establish dialogue with them, employing a humane method.
2) They can choose to fight others, and to try to secure an advantage
by damaging them, in other words, behave like a wild animal.
The horror we call terrorism is nothing other than a statement of the
second view.
The faith in the legitimacy of terror comes
from materialist ideologies, not Theistic faiths. |
When we consider the difference between these two approaches, we can
see that the idea of "man as a fighting animal" which
Darwinism has subconsciously imposed on people is particularly influential.
Individuals and groups who choose the way of conflict may never have heard
of Darwinism and the principles of that ideology. But in the final analysis,
they agree with a view whose philosophical basis rests on Darwinism. What
leads them to believe in the rightness of violence is such Darwinism-based
slogans as;
'In this world, only the strong survive',
'Big fish swallow the little ones',
'War is a virtue',
and 'Man advances by waging war'.
Take Darwinism away, and these are nothing but empty slogans.
Actually, when Darwinism is taken away, no philosophy of 'conflict'
remains. The three monotheistic religions that most people in the
world believe in, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all oppose violence.
All three religions wish to bring peace and harmony to the world, and
oppose innocent people being killed and suffering cruelty and torture.
Conflict and violence violate the morality that God has set out for man,
and are abnormal and undesired concepts. However, Darwinism sees and portrays
conflict and violence as natural, justified and correct concepts that
have to exist.
For this reason, if some people commit terrorism using the concepts and
symbols of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the name of those religions,
you can be sure that those people are not Muslims, Christians or Jews.
They are in fact Social Darwinists. They hide under a cloak of religion,
but they are not genuine believers. Even if they claim to be serving religion,
they are actually enemies of religion and believers. That is because they
are ruthlessly committing a crime that religion forbids, and in such a
way as to blacken religion in peoples' eyes.
For this reason, the root of the terrorism that plagues our world is
not in any of the monotheistic religions, but is in atheism, and the expression
of atheism in our times: 'Darwinism' and 'materialism'.
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