Racial Struggle and Extermination

Abstract

Since most Darwinists included war as one form of the human struggle for existence, the cross-pollination of scientific racism (which, as we have seen, had close links to Darwinism) with the Darwinian struggle for existence would bear bitter fruit in an era of renewed European imperialism. While many Christian missionaries and liberal humanitarians hoped to imbue the natives in other parts of the world with European culture, scientific racism proclaimed the futility of such endeavors. Instead, scientific racism suggested a different path to progress. In the 1896 edition of Friedrich Hellwald’s magisterial four-volume History of Culture, Rudolf Cronau, relying on Social Darwinist arguments, dismissed the idea that the “lower races” could be elevated:

The current inequality of the races is an indubitable fact. Under equally favorable climatic and land conditions the higher race always displaces the lower, i.e., contact with the culture of the higher race is a fatal poison for the lower race and kills them. … [American Indians] naturally succumb in the struggle, its race vanishes and civilization strides across their corpses. … Therein lies once again the great doctrine, that the evolution of humanity and of the individual nations progresses, not through moral principles, but rather by dint of the right of the stronger.¹