I saw an unfortunate/fortunate juxtaposition of documentaries on my mother’s TV yesterday. The first was about the mysterious disappearance of the Neanderthals, the second about the ways science was used to justify racism in the 20th century. It showed how social darwinism led up to the Nazi death camps, that they were not an abberation in European thinking. The British were responsible for the deaths of 30 million Indian people during the Raj from famine. I’ve never heard of this before! That is more than Stalin was responible for! They forced the population to grow cash crops that failed under El Nino and then refused to feed them with the food stocked up in port. Instead they forced them to march to labour camps, and claimed they were dying out because of natural selection! This was all bureaucratised. Sound familiar? And then Shark Island in Namibia where the Germans prototyped their method of death camp, it is now used as a camp site! But there are skulls littering the area; those that weren’t sold to museum collections to help demonstrate the ‘inferiority’ of the Black races. Why haven’t I heard of this before. Of course the Americans and Germans were sharing their Eugenic practices freely before the war, thousands were sterilised in the States, and in Germany even the short sighted were gassed before the war. There is skepticism regarding Shark Island as I found on Wikipedia:
“Despite wide-spread statements, a claimed “Herero genocide” or even “Herero and Nama genocide” during and after the Herero Wars of 1904 has never been seriously proven and was neither recognized by Germany nor the United Nations. However, the allegations live on as a kind of “urban legend” based on a British propaganda book of [[World War I], called the Blue Book. A reprint of this remarkable example of anti-german hate propaganda from 1918 has been published in a second edition in 2001.”
But they would have to claim complete fabrication to explain the images I saw on the programme (BBC4). What the hell is wrong with people? Especially those in power. Why can’t they tell right from wrong? And these crimes were perpetrated by Liberals, trying to change society according to their vision. It seems that as soon as Europe decided God is dead the first victim was our fellow-man. I suppose we can guess what happened to the Neanderthals.
