History: Created or Discovered?

When it comes to history there is a modern tendency to create it rather than research it. This despite the huge resource that is the internet, which can lead to primary sources previously available only to researchers travelling to the source or to those wealthy enough to afford a huge library. Yet the tendency to make history out the way you prefer it to have been is a rising characteristic that fits right into a valueless, truthless, relativistic mindset, a rising trend in our world. But if one wants to actually have the facts before making a personal decision, the hard, annoying work of finding them rather than creating them is required.

One of the best posts I have read in some time is now up over at Vox Day's blog. Day responds to a critic who claims the Pope was complicit with NAZIs, an onerous charge, one worth looking into - and Day responds. Because I strongly recommend that it be read over there, I won't repeat it here.

The tendency to rationalize a false history is a big step into irrationality. If one believes one's own fables, what then? It was, in fact, fables and rationalizations that drove the engines of the great 20th century tyrannical mass murderers. Living inside fables is living in a fantasy world. It need not happen, and those of us who are fact-based must guard against the influence of those who are not.

Another issue, one that the Atheist community also takes seriously, is their assertion that the eugenics program of the NAZIs did not come from any association with the science of evolution. This is necessary for the Atheist community to continue their pretense of having a superior morality, one driven by evolution (another fact-free assertion).

If history is created by rationalization, it is just another fiction. In order to come to grips with actual facts, one must do the hard work of finding them, questioning them, and accepting those that are incorrigibly valid. But this is a pursuit of truth regardless of what the truth might be; it is diametrically opposed to creating a fiction to fit one's agenda.

The question of the link between Darwinism - Evolution by Natural Selection - and the totalitarian regimes of the NAZIs as well as those of the Soviets is documented for those who wish to know the facts. There are three books that I can recommend that are scholarly works by historians, which are fully annotated and documented, and address this very issue.

First is "Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution", by Himmelfarb.

Next is "The Origins of NAZI Genocide", by Friedlander.

And, "From Darwin to Hitler", by Weikart.

There are other books on the subject that I do not have and have not read.

These three books refer to multitudes of documents that one could check if one felt the need.

The fiction of Darwinian egalitarianism is easily broken. Natural selection of the fittest is a direct assertion of inequalities, inherited both individually and as a group. The already endemic racism of the 1800's was bolstered by the science that supported it: Darwinian evolution. Eugenics was a child science of Darwinian evolution; it explored ways to make the race better at first, then it moved into ways to prevent the inferior races from expanding too rapidly, and then it explored how to eliminate them. The natural inequality of men was considered fact. Because there was no longer any set of values (God was Dead), evolving a better race became the only virtue; not pursuing it, the only vice.

For the documentation supporting this, read the books, and go to the sources. But don't make up fantasy histories - it is not good for your mental health.