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But, back to our history of photography, invariably when inventors and scientists are mentioned as with any historical figures some can be more problematic than others. Some of these individuals held and disseminated views that would be today considered hateful, others held views considered reprehensible even then. One such figure which we mentioned was Ernst Haeckel; zoologist, biologist, philosopher, eugenicist and proponent of scientific racism… yeah. His contributions to the science of biology and in particular zoology is undeniable and he spent a large portion of his career advocating for free speech and the right to teach evolutionary theories. But in the same breath he included the right to apply this same theory to the nascent social sciences and was a proponent of Social Darwinism. These very same ideas would be foundational to the politics of the Nazi party, though Haeckel was apparently not enough of an anti-Semite for them. He ranked the Semitic “races” too highly, and his ideals of free speech were incompatible with Hitler’s vision of Germany, and so his books were among the first to be burned. None of which he would personally see as he died in 1919.
These views in Germany did not appear in a vacuum, the German Empire was a young country with Bismarck having unified disparate polities into a unified political entity in 1871. Such a new entity required a national myth, a unifying history of a people distinct and unique in the world. There was a search for Germanic heroes and ancestors that these distinct people descended from, mythic personae like Sigurd from the Rings of Nibelung were represented as the progenitors of the German people. Many would take this romanticism movement and try to define it and describe it in a scientific fashion as Germany was becoming a world leader in various scientific fields. And so a search to prove the superiority of the German "race" would take on scientific language and produce theories that even by the standard of the day would be considered pseudoscience. For none of their experiments yielded any conclusive proof that humans could in fact be separated in distinct "races" from physical and intellectual traits.
Following a lost war a verbose con man would blame enemies within and without for the defeat, playing into the feelings of humiliation and using the economic hardships as a way to incite an entire Nation to take arms against its own minorities and launch itself in a great colonial war. In Hitler’s view this mythical Aryan “race” could only claim superiority if it came out victorious from a great struggle. Essentially Social Darwinism, only the strongest “race” could survive and thus inherit the earth. The Nazi plan for the East was to create an agrarian space rich enough to make Germany self-sufficient in food and raw materials. The locals would either be killed or enslaved as was most efficient and native European Jews would be deported to the far east, a plan inspired by the United States of America’s expansion westward.
American history is mired with problematic racial issues, from the treatment of Natives to the issues of slavery and segregation. Just like Imperial Germany, the United States created National myths of its own creation; the pilgrims happily sharing a meal with the Natives being chief among them. This story hides the bloody path the settlers carved through New England all the way to the West Coast. As the US industrialized in the mid to late 19th century and it too became a scientific powerhouse, the same trends among the privileged classes to justify their “racial” superiority with science took hold. Eugenics became the subject of discussion of industrialists such as Henry Ford, leading some of them to support Far-Right groups and fascists in America. The War and the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime made Eugenics a taboo subject, yet its concepts remained in the American political landscape. Even today, “The Great Replacement Theory” is at the forefront of the political discourse, the idea that there are enemies within the society that “weaken” it, that those who are powerless are the source of the hardships of those who are real “Americans”. Of course, none of these have any scientific merit and as scientists we feel compelled to call them out. For those who want to keep politics out of science, are being political and want the silence of those who would call them out. Refusing to speak out against hate and its pseudoscientific justifications is to passively acquiesce to them. There is but one human race, and no lesser people live beyond our borders.
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