Monday, November 12, 2018

Creation Moment 11/12/2018 - Darwin at the Roots of Euthanasia

"Charles Darwin published his ‘survival of the fittest’ theory in his Origin of Species in 1859, and applied it to human beings in his Descent of Man in 1871. His cousin, Francis Galton, expanded this in his Hereditary Genius of 1869 by proposing that the proportion of the ‘fittest’ in any population could and should be increased by arranged marriages of suitably gifted people. He coined the term ‘eugenics’ (from Greek εὐγενής eugenes 'well-born' from εὖ eu, 'good, well' and γένος genos, 'race, stock, kin') for this concept in 1883.


By the 1930s, Darwinism had become enormously popular in Germany, largely through the writings and doctored images of Ernst Haeckel, and Adolf Hitler enthusiastically began applying its precepts in a program of population purification. Beginning in 1934, the first phase of this was the forced sterilization of the ‘unfit’ (those diagnosed as feeble-minded, or with schizophrenia, epilepsy, blindness, etc.)—“up to 400,000” all told. Then from 1939 Hitler superseded this by approving a much more effective population purgation, namely the killing of those considered to be ‘unworthy’ of existence. The first victims were not chosen on the basis of Jewishness, but were the ‘evolutionarily unfit’ Germans of any ancestry.

Chronologically, the Nazi’s first organized killings were of children, and this later expanded into the genocide of the Holocaust. The purpose was twofold:
  1. To prevent those with hereditary defects and diseases passing them on to future offspring.
  2. To reduce the burden on the strong and healthy (the German Volk) in having to support their incapacitated kinsmen, deemed ‘useless eaters’ (unnütze Esser) by the Nazis.
This was Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ by the outright elimination of the unfit, euphemistically known as ‘social Darwinism’ in the West, but called ‘child euthanasia’ (German: Kinder-Euthanasie) by the Nazis. It involved the systematic murder of mentally and physically disabled children and young people in at least 30 killing stations, “misleadingly labelled Kinderfachabteilungen (‘special children’s wards’),” within existing medical facilities in four different countries.

This WW2 child euthanasia in Vienna made news headlines in Western countries in 2018 with the release of the findings of two researchers who inculpate the involvement of Dr. Hans Asperger, after whom the medical condition Asperger’s syndrome is named." CMI
.... for I will not justify the wicked. Exodus 23:7