Ethics

Mirabel, John Aaron D.

BSM 2-1

Root Causes of the Racist Culture of Nazism

1. Development of the Biological Racism Culture in Nazi Ideology

The core of Nazi Ideology was racial and biological totalitarian and imperialistic that
claimed to explain everything about the world and how it functions. The idea viewed the
world as divided into races – the superior and the inferior. The Aryan race was called the
superior race which the Nazis attributed all positive developments in humanity such as in
arts, science, and technology; other races of humanity fit into this racial hierarchy with
various rungs. For instance, the Latin, French, and Italian races were one rung below the
Aryan race, these races were said to be the ones who could appreciate culture but neither
create the culture, arts, or sciences. Within this ideology, Jews were viewed as a kind of
anti-race or an inhuman race which were some sort of creature that existed in human
form, and as a result, Jews were, by nature, evil and destructive.

The idea was drawn from earlier beliefs and generalized this together into one
cohesive ideology that set out to explain everything based on the following areas:

a. Christian Anti-Judaism

Christian Anti-Judaism was essentially a strike on Jewish beliefs, they were accused
of rejecting and killing the Messiah – the God had sent, accused of blinding
themselves to the truth, and thereof, being in league with the devil. Jews were
accused of engaging in evil practices such as the charge that they killed Christian
children, as the purpose of their blood as rituals, the so-called Blood Libel. Those
brutal treatments and often murderous practices left the Jews to convert to other
beliefs as opposed to their previous culture to repudiate the accusations that are
merely stereotyped. In particular, many Jews were converted to Christianity as
supposedly, it would solve the problem, yet this Anti-Judaism left an imprint on
European society and its view of the Jews yielding to Nazis to use it as a good
advantage in gaining tacit or active support in Germany, and all of Europe.

b. Philology, Anthropology, and Other Modern Sciences

Christian belief and the new modern secular humanism shared a conviction that all
human beings are potentially equal, whether because they are created in God’s image
or because all are born equal. Scholars in the new fields of Philology, Anthropology,
and Biology demonstrate the supposed inequality of people; many of these scientific
pioneers argued that the differences between languages, people, and cultures pointed
to the superiority of some over others. Specifically, Indo-European languages were
placed as the most developed and superior language family, in addition, European
 cultures were defined as more developed and advanced than other cultures. This field
of sciences seemed to provide a scientific underpinning for the racist theories that
Nazi theorists and supporters later seized on these ideas to provide scientific evidence
to support them. The superiority yields to the Aryan race to have a natural right to
rule, and their ideologies were later developed into Antisemitism policies.

c. Social Darwinism

In contrast to Darwin’s theory of evolutionary development through natural selection,

Sociologist and Physiologist – Herbert Spencer argued that humans were ordered and
based on struggles and the concept of survival of the fittest. He claimed that the
strong must rule, and the weak must submit. The Social Darwinism theory became
widely accepted by the mid-1800s, and thus the existence of racism that is
scientifically based. Moreover, this also results in not only people with dark skin as
inferior, but also dividing white people into races that is, white races and the Aryan
race; such that white races are superior to black and yellow, and the Aryans are the
superior among white races. These were likely seen by some Nazi racial theorists
embracing human and racial evolution. They not only taught that humans had evolved
from primates, but they believed the Aryan race had evolved to a higher level than
other races because of the harsh climatic conditions that influenced natural selection.
They also claimed that Darwinism underpinned specific elements of Nazi racial
ideology, including racial inequality, the necessity of the racial struggle for existence,
and collectivism.

d. Genetics and Eugenics

The scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of racial improvement and planned
breeding grew into genetics and heredity in the early 1880s. Francis Galton had this
ideology that society should promote the propagation of certain desirable traits, for
instance, to eliminate certain diseases. Positive eugenics advocated encouraging
procreation between people with desirable traits, while negative eugenics advocated
limiting or preventing procreation between people with undesirable traits. These will
later seize upon by Nazis who used these ideas as part of the basis to subjugate,
persecute, or even destroy various kinds of people.

Developments in science and other fields impacted Europeans’ beliefs and attitudes
toward Jews and later yield the emergence of Antisemitism which viewed the Jews as an
evil and destructive race. The introduction of the newness of Nazis’ ideology brought to
this world explains how the world functions and how it ought to function which is mainly
based on the abovementioned ideas that coalesce into one distinct worldview and turn
this into an engine in policymaking. The Nazi worldview was used as the basis in
policymaking from 1933 to 1945 which compromises on many issues except for the
Jews. Thus, whatever policy was decided upon, Jews have always been affected. The
Nazis’ innovation was not in their ideas but rather based on the aforementioned
ideologies which lay in molding these ideas into a comprehensive worldview that was the
basis for policymaking of a modern, scientifically, technologically, and educationally
 advanced country. And it was from this worldview, the Final Solution ultimately
emerged.

2. What moral standards/ values does this biological racism violate/ undermine? Can
these standards prove that such cultures are immoral and must be stopped?

The emergence of Nazism with its leader, Adolf Hitler changed Europe and led to the
greatest destruction for the Jewish – the Holocaust. Antisemitism was the foundation of
the Nazis’ ideology, in particular, it was written in the infamous book Mein Kampf (My
Struggle) which Hitler called the Jewish people a noxious bacillus that lives as a parasite
in the body of other nations. Furthermore, antisemitism is very deterministic in the said
book as it was stated by Hitler that “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task
will be the annihilation of the Jews.” As Hitler was later given the right to govern without
the consent of parliament, he effectively established the Nazi dictatorship in Germany
and on the 15th of September 1935, the Nazis passed a series of notoriously racist laws
which stripped Jews of their German citizenship, removing all of their political rights and
legally institutionalized their persecution. Many Jews attempted to flee the country but
their options of where to go were very limited as their image at that time was disputable.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland – officially the beginning of World

War II. In the wake of German military expansion, a campaign of mass murder was
carried out on the Jewish population and purposedly occupied by the German Army.
German military and police units were instructed to carry out a war of annihilation on the
Jews and rounded up Jewish men, women, children, and elderly to mass graves and shot
them to death – murdering roughly 2 million Jews within just a few years. Nazis did not
end there; they also control the Jewish population by separating them from the rest of the
society and forced Jews into ghettos – small areas of cities and towns that were walled
off. This later yielded to the alike wildfire spread of disease in the ghetto, as well as
rampant starvation. In January 1942, Nazi leadership and representatives from various
government ministries met to coordinate their efforts in annihilating Jews known as the
Final Solution, and thus deportations to the death camps became the Nazi regime’s
primary tactic of mass murder. Jews were sent in cattle cars to places like Belzec,
Sobibor, and Treblinka, they were forced into chambers as were told were showers and
gassed them to death.

Holocaust is not the only moral standard that this biological racism violates. For
instance, because of the overcrowded population in Germany, there exists a policy during
World War II known as T4 or euthanasia program for which they murdered some 200,000
or more mentally handicapped and some physically handicapped Germans. Even though
most of them were Aryans, from a Nazi point of view, they were defective Aryans who
did not contribute to society.

The aforementioned standard of this culture definitely proves that there exist
immoral practices that must be stopped at all costs. The ideology of Nazis is one of the
most immoral standard practices that ever happened in the world. The exchange of life
 because of a given race, or disability was deterministic as an unethical approach as they
were treated as a mere means.

3. Moral Responsibility: What do you think can be done in order to prevent (or at least
try to prevent) such injustice from happening again?

Be rational in figuring out certain things and autonomously decide which principles
will govern the situation. Always stand for humanity’s sake and remember that gender,
biological preferences, age, or other physical qualities of a person do not affect nor
depend on their actions, behavior, and beliefs. Respects everyone’s humanity. Reject and
fight against immorality while treating everyone as not a mere means.