It Is A Good Question To Ask. How Would Hitler's Ideas Be Accepted Today?

Reblogged from The American Catholic.

I have always enjoyed the interesting historical and cultural questions that are asked and then thought through at The American Catholic Blog. This post is no different.

Some teaser quotes:

Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by.

Adolph Hitler, December 18, 1940

Surveying our contemporary world, it is easy to reach the assumption that Adolph Hitler was simply born a century too early.  Many of the ideas he embraced have become completely mainstream, especially in Europe.  His view of eugenics for example, which he summarized in his look at Sparta in the book he wrote after Mein Kampf and which remained unpublished during his life:

Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.

After becoming dictator of Germany, Hitler implemented his beliefs in his T4 program which killed the mentally ill and all others who, through mental or physical defect, failed to measure up to Hitler’s master race dreams.  “Life unworthy of life”, the German phrase is “Lebensunwertes Leben”, was the verbiage that substituted for the simple term, murder, which accurately described the brutal reality.  Realizing that this policy would be controversial, Hitler did it as much in secret as possible, although critics, especially Bishop Von Galen, the aptly nicknamed Lion of Munster, did speak out.  Go here to read Von Galen’s take down of this murder of the innocents.

Now, Hitler’s policy is being given a trendy new repackaging in the erst-while Libertarian UK branch of Wired magazine, by “transhumanist”, and atheist, writer Zoltan Istvan

More here.

Transhumanism is becoming quite a popular buzzword of late. While the supporters of it talk of it's humaneness and forward thinking, remember, there is nothing new under under the sun. Eugenics has always been part of the human experience, it just has gotten more advanced by technology. Science can vastly improve our lives. It can also lead to the most destructive of methods in destroying mankind, by little steps or by huge leaps.

But it is always in the way that words are used to couch their argument. They always tip their hands in the words they use.

Sheesh, as if ISIS, ebola, and the border crisis were not enough.