When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species in 1859, the countdown to World War I began. His ideas, and those of his successors, contributed greatly to the great conflagration that we call the Great War. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection encouraged unwarranted chauvinism by the great European powers, especially Germany. Western European nations like Germany prided themselves on their supposed biological, moral, cultural and social superiority to other “races”. This idea in the superiority of the white German “race” would lead not only to World War I but also to terrible genocides in Southwest Africa in 1904. The genocide in Southwest Africa was a systematic racial extermination campaign masterminded by Lothar von Trotha. The German colonizers inflicted a terrible holocaust on the Herero native peoples of what is now Namibia. This proved to be a prelude to the racially motivated war that would break out ten years later (World War I).
The German social thinkers and military leaders who held to Social Darwinism and the idea of social natural selection believed that war was the mechanism by which natural selection was carried out. The ‘beasts’ of human population would die and leave the noble, superior peoples to control the world. German theorists obviously believed that theirs’ was the greatest population on the face of the planet and that therefore, war must be used as a means to end: namely, natural selection and the weeding out of ‘unfit’ people. War for the sake of war was the maxim of early Twentieth Century German commanders and political leaders.
Social Darwinism, the idea that there are some people further along in the process of social evolution and that they have a duty to advance the natural selection of humanity, laid the kind of chauvinistic foundation that made World War I, not only possible, but inevitable. As I point out in my soon-to-be-released book World War I: The Unraveling of the World, “A superiority complex had been formed and nurtured in Western civilization and when it grew to full maturity, war was practically inevitable.”¹ When one civilization believes that their superiority is not supported by dogma or creed, but by science, a catastrophe cannot be far down the road.
Indeed, the German high command on the eve of the Great War fervently believed that their position as the greatest race on the face of Earth was not a philosophical conviction but a biological fact. Scientists like Ernst Haeckel where supportive of the German army’s philosophy of an ethnic cleansing via continental war. Essentially, what had started as a biological hypothesis with Darwin in 1859, remained a biological hypothesis until 1914 and beyond. Adolf Hitler, the offspring of the German Social Darwinist elite thinkers, would take the theories of his predecessors and translate them into violent, unspeakable action.
¹To read this quote in context, see my blogpost titled “The Unraveling: A Preview”.
Note: This post is part of a series of blogpost on the First World War, leading up to the release of “World War I: The Unraveling of the World” by Jace Bower in the Fall of 2014. To see other posts in this series, type “Unraveling” in the search bar located in the top right corner of this page.