forastero
Posts: 458
Joined: Oct. 2011
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| Quote (Kristine @ Nov. 03 2011,13:48) | | Quote (JohnW @ Nov. 03 2011,13:26) | | Quote (forastero @ Nov. 03 2011,10:39) | | Quote (Quack @ Nov. 03 2011,04:45) | All right, all that remains is for you to explain how it really was, what really happened. That's all I want to know.
BTW, have you ever read Origins? |
You mean origins of Darwin's so called "Favored Races" that compared black slaves to apes and justified their exploitation with his evolutionary replacement theory ? |
Answer of "No, I haven't" duly noted. |
Quite. But if forastero wants to read about Darwin's opinions on slavery, start here.
Though I am not counting on it, somebody may actually learn something. |
In The Origin of Species, By the Preservation of Favoured Races, Darwin writes: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man”
Darwin continues: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaafhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his meanest allies will be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd edition, New York, A L. Burt Co., 1874, p. 17
In 1870 Max Muller, an evolutionist anthropologist from the Anthropological Review of London, had divided human races into seven categories. Aborigines appeared at the bottom, and the Aryan race, that of the white Europeans, at the top.
H. K. Rusden, a famous Social Darwinist, had this to say about the aborigines in 1876: "The survival of the fittest means that might is right. And we thus invoke and remorselessly fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races… and we appropriate their patrimony coolly".32
And in 1890 the Vice-President of the Royal Society of Tasmania, James Barnard, wrote: "the process of extermination is an axiom of the law of evolution and survival of the fittest." There was therefore, he concluded, no reason to suppose that "there had been any culpable neglect" in the murder and dispossession of the Aboriginal Australian.
The policies aimed at aborigines did not end with massacres. In a frenzied attempt to to find the "missing link", many members of the race were treated like experimental animals. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. held the remains of 15,000 people of various races. 10,000 Australian aborigines were sent by ship to the British Museum with the aim of seeing whether or not they were the "missing link" in the transition from animals to human beings. Museums were not just interested in bones, at the same time they kept brains belonging to aborigines and sold them at high prices. There is also proof that Australian aborigines were killed to be used as specimens. The facts below bear witness to this ruthlessness: A death-bed memoir from Korah Wills, who became mayor of Bowen, Queensland in 1866, graphically describes how he killed and dismembered a local tribesman in 1865 to provide a scientific specimen.
Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney for 20 years from 1874, was particularly heavily involved. He published a museum booklet which appeared to include Aborigines under the designation of "Australian animals". It also gave instructions not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug up bullet wounds in freshly killed "specimens".
A German evolutionist, Amalie Dietrich (nicknamed the 'Angel of Black Death') came to Australia asking station owners for Aborigines to be shot for specimens, particularly skin for stuffing and mounting for her museum employers. Although evicted from at least one property, she shortly returned home with her specimens.
A New South Wales missionary was a horrified witness to the slaughter by mounted police of a group of dozens of Aboriginal men, women and children. Forty-five heads were then boiled down and the 10 best skulls were packed off for overseas.35 All in a frenzied attempt to prove the widespread belief that they were the 'missing link'.
Along with museum curators from around the world, Monaghan says, some of the top names in British science were involved in this large-scale grave-robbing trade.3 These included anatomist Sir Richard Owen, anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, and Charles Darwin himself. Darwin wrote asking for Tasmanian skulls when only four full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines were left alive, provided his request would not 'upset' their feelings. Museums were not only interested in bones, but in fresh skins as well. These would provide interesting evolutionary displays when stuffed.
The extermination of the aborigines continued in the 20th century. Among the methods employed in this extermination was the forcible removal of aborigine children from their families. A news story by Alan Thornhill, which appeared in the 28 April 1997 edition of the Philadelphia Daily News, recounted this method used against the aborigines in this way: "keep state welfare agents from taking them away. "The welfare just grabbed you when they found you," one of the stolen children reported, many years later. "Our people would hide us, paint us with charcoal." "I was taken to Moola Bulla," said one cattler worker who was stolen as a child. "We were about 5 or 6 years old." His tale was one of thousands heard by Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission during its heart-wrenching inquiry into the "stolen generation." From 1910 until the 1970s, some 100,000 aboriginal children were taken from their parents... Light-skinned aboriginal children were seized and handed out to white families for adoption. Dark-skinned children were put in orphanages.36
Even now, the pain is so great that most stories were printed anonymously in the commission's final report, "Bringing Them Home." The commission says the actions of the authorities at that time amounted to genocide as the United Nations defines it. The government has refused to follow the inquiry's recommendation that a tribunal be set up to assess compensation payments for the stolen children.
Darwin gave the following account of Tasmania's Black War:[27] "All the aboriginals have been removed to an island in Bass's Straits, so that Van Diemen's Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population. This most cruel step seems to have been quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks; but which sooner or later must have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt that this train of evil and its consequences, originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen."
But it wasnt just Darwin's survival of the fittest that led to the genocide and slavery of Amerindians, Jews, Gypsies, and Africans etc... The Darwin family including Galton, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Hitler etc also hated and feared the idea of race mixing and thus much of their anti slavery talk preferred eugenics and or genocide over slavery
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