Darwinism's Racist History Continues to be Covered Up...

E ugenics is the study and practice of selective breeding as applied to humans beings, rather than to animals.

Ota Benga, the pygmy who was captured from the Belgian Congo and who spent several years being belittled and humiliated when put on various public displays as a "typical savage," or as, "the missing link." His teeth were filed to a point which was a pygmy practice of the time, yet this was often explained as 'evidence that the African tribes are not yet fully evolved from animals.'

Eventually this man tragically took his own life.









Inspired by Darwinism and highly popular around the turn of the 19th/20th century, it has now fallen into serious disrepute having become so heavily associated with the racial supremacist policies of Nazi Germany.

The original eugenicist aim was of improving the human stock by encouraging only physically and mentally stronger human specimens to breed. Nazi Germany, of course, started to actually put this into practice, even to the degree of developing a programme of having mentally impaired children - and later adults - put to death. Nobody knows how many physically and mentally handicapped children and adults were subjected to mandatory euthanasia in the Third Reich and elsewhere, with estimates ranging from just a few thousand to perhaps 20,000 people. However, it should be understood that all the principles within eugenics were also applied by Hitler and his Nazi henchmen to "the Jewish question," as well as the Nazi desire to eliminate Poles, gypsies and effeminate men from an envisaged future Nordic super race. So, the victims of Nazi policy on eugenics should actually be seen as numbering in the millions. Advocates of eugenics sought to counter what they regarded as harmful dynamics within the human gene pool, specifically in regard to congenital physical and mental disorders and factors.

Around one hundred years ago, many of the world's leading scientists agreed with A. C. Haddon, when he wrote in his 1898 book, Study of Man, that, "on the whole, the white race has progressed beyond the black race." Of course, the whole original inspiration and motivation for these ideas were located in the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Darwin himself believed that the white races were far more evolved than the black races (he also believed that women were intellectually inferior to men). Certainly, as is well-known, Darwin came from a family who were opposed to slavery and he originally believed that all races were made in the image of God, but as his religious beliefs faded, and his naturalist enthusiasm and urges surged ahead, he appeared to have doubts. After an encounter with "savages" in Tierra del Fuego, Darwin exclaimed in his diary, "One can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures." (source: Marek Kohn's 'A Reason for Everything: natural selection and the English imagination').

Well before he came to power in 1930s Germany, the Austrian corporal had fully imbibed of the racism of Grant, coupled with Darwinian 'survival of the fittest,' and supported by Nietzsche's 'super race' teaching. Eventually Hitler had no doubts at all that - should the possibility ever arise - millions of 'impure' Europeans should be eradicated...





But even if the concept of conducting scientific experiments on black people was open to question (some, of course, did not question it at all and, revoltingly, and at a much later date than the date we are covering here, in Australia, aborigine children were sometimes taken from their homes and "adopted" for experimentation), Europeans and Americans alike believed it perfectly fine to display negroes at various fairs and 'human exhibitions.' Indeed, thousands of 'exotic' and indigenous people from all over the world were put on display in human zoos. Human zoos (also sometimes called "ethnological expositions" or, "Negro Villages") were 19th and 20th century public exhibits of humans, usually in a "natural" or "primitive" state. The usual point of the displays was to illustrate the cultural and racial differences between Europeans of Western Civilisation and non-European peoples. They were not usually intended as merely entertaining freak shows but as scientific demonstrations of racial difference; the usual approach was that the white race was much more evolved than the black race and one simply had to compare to see the difference. Again, this is simply what Charles Darwin himself had believed. Across the western world, in various fairs, zoos, and special presentations, many thousands of people stared in fascination at the "uncivilised savages" (which is how groups such as the African pygmies - a widely-used group - were frequently described).

Caught up in this whole sad episode was a pygmy man called Ota Benga; he was a Batwa pygmy from the Belgian Congo, who was first put on display at the 1904 St Louis World's Fair and later at the Bronx Zoo where Benga was labelled as the 'missing link.'

Madison Grant, a keen conservationist, racist and eugenicist, eventually became involved in the 'human zoo' experiment. Grant is most famously the author of the once-popular book The Passing of the Great Race which he wrote in 1916. The book was a most elaborate work of so-called racial hygiene, detailing an openly elitist and racist "racial history" of Europe. This book greatly encouraged Adolf Hitler who also believed in searching for a purity of Nordic race, fully agreeing with the necessity to eradicate impure racial elements from the "human breeding stock."

So, in 1906, socialite and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, who was head of the New York Zoological Society at the time, had the unfortunate Congolese pygmy Ota Benga put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City alongside apes and other animals. At the insistence of Grant, the zoo director William Hornaday had Ota Benga displayed in a cage with the chimpanzees, then later, with an orang utan. The unfortunate Pygmy was labeled 'The Missing Link.' Thousands of people viewed this spectacle and Benga himself suffered numerous jeers and taunts from the usual abusive and ignorant element which all large crowds produce, one can only hope that the poor man did not understand most of the taunts.

The whole disgraceful spectacle had many critics. Eventually there were strong protests from the city's Christian ministers, but the public were reportedly unaffected by this and continued to flock to see the hapless "missing link" from the African Congo. Benga too was mostly only too happy to oblige in his complete innocence and naievety.

There is a sad ending to this story. A later attempt to return Ota Benga to the Congo failed when his own people rejected him, blaming him for the death of a girl he planned to marry (she had died after receiving a snake bite). The Congolese people believed that this was a bad omen and it was feared that if he was left in the Congo he would have been quickly murdered. So he was returned to America. Eventually Benga went to live in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he was groomed for the American way of life, encouraged to dress in Western-style clothing and, rather patronisingly, placed in a primary school (although he was far too old for it). But he still planned for an eventual return to his homeland; unfortunately the 1914 outbreak of World War I made such a return just about impossible. Eventually Benga became depressed, and in 1916, he took his own life with a revolver.

Madison Grant's book, The Passing of the Great Race, gave great encouragement to Adolf Hitler as he was gradually developing his own racist theories. Well before he came to power in 1930s Germany, the Austrian corporal had fully imbibed of the racism of Grant, coupled with Darwinian 'survival of the fittest,' and supported by Nietzsche's 'super race' teaching. Eventually Hitler had no doubts at all that - should the possibility ever arise - millions of 'impure' Europeans should be eradicated from the gene pool, thereby making the formation of a European Nordic 'super race' entirely possible. Firmly atheistic by this point, Hitler held no moral or spiritual qualms about his intention to eventually eradicate Jews, Slavs and other "impure elements" from the European gene pool.

Today academics cover up the truly ugly history of the early Darwinists and insist on painting failed clergyman Charles Darwin as one of the greatest scientists of all time even though he was completely unqualified in his field and developed his fame mainly through plagiaristic opportunism (despite the contrary current popular opinion, there is nothing new in Darwin, all the ideas were all first outlined by other writers). But, even until the end of his life, Darwin continued to believe that the excavated fossil record would eventually prove his belief that all life upon earth evolved from one lowly, primitive single-cell form. Today, with millions of fossils now uncovered, we can state without hesitation that the now huge fossil record refutes this idea quite comprehensively. There are no gradual transitions to be found anywhere. The 'Cambrian Explosion' is the name given for the highly embarrassing (for evolutionists) fossil revelation that all life appeared in the same form at the same time.

Robin A. Brace, December, 2009.