Some Recent Genetic Studies . . . & Hitler

2,195 words

Consider the following recent discoveries made by various scientific studies:

• Human physical and personality traits are about 50 percent heritable, that is, are determined by ancestry and genes, according to some 50 years of studies of twins.[1]
• Europeans exist as an identifiable genetic cluster distinct and distinguishable from other continental macro-races.[2] The ethno-racial background of an individual can be identified through any number of indicators (gene test, teeth, saliva . . .) and indeed genetic tests have become highly fashionable among individuals and celebrities looking to rediscover their roots.[3] At least one gene coding for increased empathy has been found to be much more prevalent among Europeans and East Asians than among Sub-Saharan Africans.[4]
• The nations of Europe, including the Germans, form identifiable genetic sub-clusters, being in effect intra-continental sub-races only somewhat blurred on the edges.[5] Northwestern Europe – including the French, Anglo-Celtic, and Germanic nations – in turn forms an identifiable cluster of clusters.
• In the words of Jewish publications: “Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal” and “Ashkenazi Jews descend from 350 people, study finds.”[6] Indeed, medical organizations have long advised Ashkenazi Jews on how to prevent congenital diseases (especially neurological ones) caused by their inbreeding.[7] The State of Israel recently announced it will consider whether to use genetic testing to determine whether someone is racially Jewish before granting Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.[8]
• Survivors of the Ice Age have left a genetic imprint, particularly in northern Europe. In the words of one scientific publication: “Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans.”[9]
• An invading people known as the Yamnaya (who are almost certainly the Indo-European conquerors, also traditionally known as “Aryans,” who gave Europe most of her languages) have also left a genetic imprint, particularly in northwestern Europe and Germany.[10]

It is apparent that the last 50 years of scientific studies show that there was a significant degree of truth to many of the racial ideas of the early twentieth century. Like any science, these ideas were of course not always correct – science only progresses through trial and error – but they were if anything more correct than the current blank-slatist theories dominant in Western social sciences and mass media.

There may have been inevitable imprecision and errors in Madison Grant’s ideas on “Nordics” or Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s on “Aryans.” They however did raise real issues, that were and continue to be worth exploring, and that are grounded in real genetic and historical phenomena. This is evident from the recent studies showing Ice Age and Indo-European genes in northwestern and/or central Europe, and in the enduring interest in the so-called Hajnal Line (indicating an area corresponding to northwestern Europe within which, mysteriously and no doubt due to a complex mix of genetic and historical factors, populations are uniquely individualistic and altruistic . . .). These issues then were not simply a figment of the early theorists’ imagination. Nor can the early theories be entirely reduced, as mainstream historiography now suggests, to northwest European or German narcissism, or to opportunistic theories justifying their political domination of other groups.

Indeed, we must recall that the early racial scientists had to work without our advanced genetic testing (the Nobel Prize winner James Watson, recently denounced and ostracized for innocuously remarking upon racial differences, had yet to discover the double helix) or a century of twin studies. In retrospect, one is struck not so much by what the early theorists got wrong, but by how much they got right.

What does all this have to do with Adolf Hitler, you ask? Everything. The reason is that National Socialism was – as both Hitler and the mainstream scholarship emphasize – an essentially racial ideology and political faith, inspired by Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory on the origins of humanity and indeed of all life by natural selection. The mainstream historians however, in their overwhelmingly majority, will simply dismiss both Hitler’s and the early twentieth century’s racial ideas, that is evolutionary thinking applied to humans, as mere “pseudoscience.” Indeed, if this were so, this would make Hitler perhaps the greatest, most futile criminal of human history.

But the mainstream historians, overwhelmingly, do not critically engage with the evolutionary science of the day and are apparently ignorant of the recent genetic discoveries and confirmations concerning heritability, race, Europeans, Jews, etc. This is a critical and indeed fatal omission. For the mainstream scholarship on Hitler, National Socialism, and the Third Reich is often of great value. Countless historians have combed through archives in Germany and elsewhere to produce often exhaustive studies of this or that aspect of this historical period. The work is often honest enough, insightful, and nuanced in the detail. But the big picture is almost invariably skewed and one-sided: With rare exceptions, the German Führer must be caricatured, demonized, and treated in a much more biased way than other world leaders of comparable brutality and historical significance.[11] One can certainly take an anti-Hitler position for any number of reasons (one could never fault a Polish or Russian comrade for doing so), but one cannot make an honest assessment of the German leader without serious engagement with the evolutionary science which inspired the core doctrines of National Socialism.

For if the early twentieth century’s racial science, however flawed, was more accurate than the blank-slatist ideas that have become culturally hegemonic in the West since 1945, then there would need to be a radical and far more nuanced reassessment of Hitler. Indeed, it is now documented that many of the founding fathers of the blank-slatist consensus, namely Franz Boas, Theodor Adorno, and Stephen J. Gould, were ethnically-motivated and politically-motivated pseudoscientific fraudsters.[12]

The continued ethnically-motivated character of much of the reigning orthodoxy is not in doubt. Jewish publications freely discuss the genetic characteristics of Jews. Meanwhile the German writer Thilo Sarrazin was widely defamed a few years ago by Jewish organizations (making it onto innumerable “Top Anti-Semites” lists, with enormous associated costs to his reputation) for discussing this same issue in a morally neutral way. This can only be explained in terms of ethnically-motivated hypocrisy and sophistry. And this is only one example among innumerable others which could, with truly nauseating frequency, be cited.

If the evolutionary science of the early twentieth century, however imperfect, was more accurate than the social science of today, a moral reassessment of Hitler would be inevitable notwithstanding his real brutality. Politics is, at best, the world of amoral raison d’état and Realpolitik, not of individual morality. The mainstream historians concede as much: Most do not condone the burning alive of hundreds of thousands of German men, women and children through firebombing, the ethnic cleansing of 9 million German civilians in East Prussia, Silesia, and the Sudetenland, or the rape of 2 million German women by the Red hordes, among many other atrocities and questionable doctrines (supposed defense of “Polish sovereignty,” “unconditional surrender,” the Yalta Agreement . . .).

No, the historians plead these were unfortunately necessary measures, understandable reprisals, or regrettable collateral damage in the war against Hitler. They consider that these crimes, unlike Hitler’s, are ultimately excusable in the context of the overarching moral imperative of destroying the absolute evil of “Nazism.” They adhere, openly or not, to an ends-justifies-the-means morality. Certainly, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and you couldn’t destroy “Nazism” without raping a couple million German women and girls.

But by the same token, if Hitler’s racial ideas, at the center of his doctrine, were not quite as “pseudoscientific” as the mainstream claims, what does that mean for the moral significance of his undeniably often brutal means?[13] As Raymond Aron wrote on deceit, but one could say the same of violence and political amorality in general: “Deceit in the service a great endeavor is easily excused, and sometimes even inspires admiration.”[14]

National Socialism was a sincere attempt to systematically apply the evolutionary science of the day to public policy. This was remarkably successful in certain respects (above all in the astonishing rise in the German birthrate) and catastrophic in others. This was inevitable, National Socialism was by its own account a kind of fanatical civil religion. This had the advantages and disadvantages of all religious revolutions: The society’s culture, values, and behavior were indeed radically transformed in line with the new faith (a successful religion can be considered a kind of cultural programming), but this also necessarily meant inflexibility and dogmatism.

The result? Where German National Socialism was right, it was brilliantly successful. Where it was wrong, it was disastrous, in the end fatally so. Above all, Hitler fixed what was still an infant and imperfect racial science into a semi-fixed (because sometimes vague in its implications) political doctrine. The spirits of science (skepticism) and of religion (faith) are in truly radical opposition, combining them being thus supremely difficult, like the would-be philosoper-king’s almost impossible ambition of uniting thought and action. The achievement of any degree of success in this task may perhaps be considered the supreme work of art.

We have to consider that Hitler in general was “too racist”: He tended to overestimate both the degree to which an individual or people’s qualities were due to genetic factors and the amount of genetic difference between European peoples. This had tragic results, arguably resulting in millions of deaths and ultimately in the Third Reich’s defeat through failure to build sufficient constructive relationships and alliances with fellow Europeans.[15]

Hitler, that armed prophet of the German nation, believed himself ordained by Providence to redeem his people and found a new faith for all time. Whatever his sincerity, history decided otherwise. Of course, had the West not made war against Hitler or had he achieved a swift victory in the East, the course of things would have been immeasurably different. We can only speculate whether a victorious Third Reich’s pan-German chauvinism might  have eventually ceded to a degree of European common-feeling: Germany’s lavishly-funded evolutionary scientists, the pan-European blood-comradeship and brotherhood of that fledgling elite which was the Waffen-SS, and the objective continental interests of German and European big business would have certainly militated in that direction. But these are but idle musings, the stuff of speculative novels rather than history . . .

Notes

1. Tinca Polderman et al., “Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies,” Nature Genetics, May 18, 2015.

2. “Global Genetic Distances Map,” published on JayMan’s Blog, May 4, 2014.

3. Julie Walker, “The Science of Knowing Who We Really Are: More ancestry testing leads people to discover a mixed bag of racial roots,” The Root, June 1, 2014.

4. Peter Frost, “A Genetic Marker for Empathy?,” The Unz Review, August 22, 2015.

5. “A Different Kind of Gene Mapping: Comparing Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe: The Return!,” 23andMeBlog, September 3, 2008.

6. Jon Entine, “Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal,” The Forward, May 4, 2012. Andrew Tobin, “Ashkenazi Jews descend from 350 people, study finds,” Times of Israel, September 10, 2014.

7. I strongly suspect this higher propensity for brain defects is related to many of their well-known “personality quirks.” Victor Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases, “Ashkenazi Jewish Genetic Diseases,” Jewish Virtual Library.

8. Ian McGonigle and Lauren Herman, “Genetic citizenship: DNA testing and the Israeli Law of Return,” Journal of Law and the Biosciences, May 8, 2015.

9. Ramus Kragh Jakobsen, “Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans,” ScienceNordic November 19, 2014.

10. According to Nature: “Yamnaya ancestry survives in the genomes of modern Europeans, with northerners such as Norwegians, Scots and Lithuanians maintaining the strongest link. The geographical extent of the Yamnaya migration is not clear, but the researchers note that the eastern migrants could have completely replaced existing populations, at least in what is now Germany.” Ewen Callaway, “Steppe migration rekindles debate on language origin,” Nature, February 18, 2015.

11. Such as Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon, for instance, to not speak of other twentieth-century dictators and war leaders with millions of deaths on their conscience. See R. H. S. Stolfi, Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2011). Reviewed by Greg Johnson.

12. In particular, Franz Boas made the bizarre claim that environment (such as living in the United States . . .) determined skull shape despite his data showing no such effect. Stephen J. Gould claimed that nineteenth-century anthropologist Samuel George Morton falsified skull measurements out of ethnic bias to show Europeans had larger brain size and Africans smaller; later re-measurement found that Morton’s skull data was in fact accurate. These were even reported by the New York Times, albeit under dismally unevocative headlines. Nicholas Wade, “A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race,” New York Times, October 8, 2002 and “Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim,” New York Times, June 13, 2011. As ever, it is easier to assert an ethnically motivated lie than to prove a truth in good faith! See also Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (First Books, 2002).

13. And, I stress, none of the Allied leaders – whether Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, or Franklin Roosevelt – can claim to be free of such brutality, all being involved in various degrees of mass murder, typically in the millions, of their own subjects and/or of enemy civilians.

14. “La tromperie au service d’une grande œuvre se pardonne aisément, inspire même parfois l’admiration [. . .].” I am referring here to Odyssean as opposed to Talmudic deceit. Raymond Aron, De Gaulle, Israël et les Juifs (Plon, 1968), 24 and reproduced in Raymond Aron, Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine (Paris: Tallandier, 2007), 70.

15. The Third Reich’s allies – Italy, Japan, and a few Central European lesser states – were absolutely puny compared to its enemies, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America. The potentialities of alliance with Poland (recall the Hitler-Piłsudski pact!), France, Spain, Ukraine, or indeed anti-communist Russians were never realized, and for this Hitler must be considered significantly responsible. See Dominique Venner, “Hitler’s Failure,” North American New Right, September 23, 2015.