Mike Ruppert and Charles Galton Darwin

Mike Ruppert and Charles Galton Darwin

Brian Salter, questionsquestions.net
31 January 2005

On August 31, 2004, Mike Ruppert gave a speech to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club to announce the publication of his book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. To support his claims that "peak oil" was the underlying factor behind 9/11 and US imperial aggression, he quoted a statement made by Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of Charles Darwin):

"the fifth revolution will come when we have spent the stores of coal and oil that have been accumulating in the earth during hundreds of millions of years. . . . It is to be hoped that before then other sources of energy will have been developed . . . But without considering the detail [here] it is obvious that there will be a very great difference in ways of life. . . . Whether a convenient substitute for the present fuels is found or not, there can be no doubt that there will have to be a great change in ways of life. This change may justly be called a revolution, but it differs from all the preceding ones in that there is no likelihood of its leading to increases of population, but even perhaps to the reverse."

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/Commonwealth.pdf

Ruppert described C. G. Darwin as "distinguished". In what way, exactly, is he "distinguished"?

1. C. G. Darwin, key biographical points on his life in the eugenics establishment:

Darwin, Sir Charles Galton KBE, FRS, DSc, MC
Newnham Grange, Cambridge
Eugenics Society Director 1939 VP 1939 Life Fellow 1930, 1937, 1957 President 1953-59 Council 1960
Personal: b. 1887; d. 1962; Tait Prof. of Physics, Edinburgh University 1923-36; Master, Christ's College, Cambridge University 1936-38; Director, National Physical Laboratory Middlesex 1939-1945; Chmn., Promising Families, a Eugenics Society committee
- son of George Howard Darwin
- grandson of Charles Darwin
- brother of Margaret Darwin who married Geoffrey Keynes (see John Maynard Keynes q.v., William Milo Keynes q.v.)
- son, Henry Galton Darwin
(Henry Galton Darwin, is an expert on international law)
Pubns:
"Positive Eugenic Policy", ER, April, p. 13-22, Galton Lecture 1939; The Next Million Years.1952 ("the essential argument is, of course, Malthus brought up to date", from a review in Around the World News of Population and Birth Control, Oct. 1952); Advisory editor, Mankind Quarterly.196X
Source: CH; ER 1957; ER Vol. 60 ASP's Hist; ER 1960; WWW; WSW 1990; Mankind Quarterly; ER Obit 1963
Eugenics and Racism:
"We welcome a new journal ... the Mankind Quarterly", from ER October 1960, p. 135; Charles Galton Darwin wrote for this vicious, racist journal while a Council member of the Eugenics Society

http://www.africa2000.com/ENDX/eug_d.htm

2. The post-WW2 crypto-eugenics movement

In the late 1950s, a leader of the British eugenics movement put forward an interesting idea. Dr. Carlos Paton Blacker had been an officer in the Eugenics Society since 1931; he had been Secretary, then General Secretary, then Director, then Chairman. His proposal to the ES was:

That the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful in the US Eugenics Society.

Open Racism Declined

Open white supremacy declined after World War II outside the American South. The idea that Aryans or Nordics should rule the world sounded too much like Hitler, and people shied away from it when they recognized it. It continued in many subtle forms which we will study later.

White supremacy declined, but did not disappear completely. In 1960, a member of the Eugenics Society, Reginald Ruggles Gates, founded a new periodical to advance racist ideas. The Advisory Council of the new journal, Mankind Quarterly, included yet another member of the Darwin family, Charles Galton Darwin. One idea advanced in the journal is the belief that anthropology, if it is understood honestly, shows that mankind is divided into four species. An early issue of the journal stated that desegregation happened because "American anthropologists were responsible for introducing equalitarianism into anthropology, ignoring the hereditary differences between races ... until the uninstructed public were gradually misled. Equality of opportunity, which everyone supports, was replaced by a doctrine of genetic and social equality, which is something quite different."

http://www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap10.html

3. C. G. Darwin and Mankind Quarterly

The Pioneer Fund, run by Harry Laughlin and then by Major General Frederick Osborn, has continued its work. And in 1960, English eugenicists launched a new journal, Mankind Quarterly.

The editor was R. Gayre of Gayre. There were two associate editors: Professor Henry E. Garrett and Professor R. Ruggles Gates.

Gates had been married to Marie Stopes, whose career in England was similar to that of Margaret Sanger in the United States. That is, Stopes was committed to eugenics, and built an alliance with feminists to promote birth control. Before they parted ways, Gates had helped Stopes to launch the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.

The lead article in the inaugural issue of Mankind Quarterly was part one of "World Population," by Sir Charles Galton Darwin. He was a grandson of the renowned biologist for whom he was named. (Numerous Darwins had promoted the work started by Charles Darwin and Francis Galton; the Eugenics Society membership list includes a bewildering array of Darwin cousins.) The article did not make any exciting new points; it was classical Malthusian doctrine that the population will soon outstrip food, unless we take preventive action now.

One of the most important ideas in the journal was stated explicitly in a book review. Mankind Quarterly was launched at a time when there was a great deal of discussion about integrating schools, ending a practice of running separate (but theoretically equal) schools for blacks and whites. Gayre of Gayre and Gates wrote a review together (of Race and Reason, by Carleton Putnam), in which they said that "separate schools are better for both races." They complained that "American anthropologists were responsible for introducing equalitarianism into anthropology, ignoring the hereditary differences between races . . . until the uninstructed public were gradually misled." Then they made a distinction: "Equality of opportunity, which everyone supports was replaced by a doctrine of social and genetic equality, which is something different."

http://www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap14.html

4. From C. G. Darwin to Mengele

Von Verschuer, who had significant connections with the infamous Dr. Mengele, has served on the editorial board of "The Mankind Quarterly," a racist journal whose continuing service to fascism can be seen through an examination of the footnotes to the current fascist bestseller, The Bell Curve. Hans Gunther, another Nazi scientist, joined the "Nordic League", a fascist political group with ties; through Roger Pearson, to "The Mankind Quarterly."

But perhaps the most salient evidence of continuity lies in the ongoing role of the Pioneer Fund. Set up in the 1930s by the textile magnate Wickliffe Draper to aid the eugenics movement, it remains today the principle funding source for racist science. Pioneer Fund moneys have been distributed to a number of Roger Pearson enterprises, including "Mankind Quarterly," and to such famous racists as Arthur Jensen, Phillipe Rushton, and William Shockley, the latter of whom actually proposed paying African-Americans to have themselves sterilized.

http://bethuneinstitute.org/documents/naziconnection.html

5. The rehabilitation of Verschuer

Even in Germany, the eugenics movement did not die out. The most offensive example of its resurgence after Hitler was the rehabilitation of Professor Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer.

In 1935, von Verschuer said that he was "responsible for ensuring that the care of genes and race, which Germany is leading worldwide, has such a strong base that it will withstand any attacks from outside." In 1937, he was Director of the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity.

Von Verschuer was Josef Mengele's mentor before the Nazi holocaust, and his collaborator during the holocaust. Mengele's horrific experiments at Auschwitz have put his name alongside those of Hitler and Eichmann. And yet, a few years after the war, von Verschuer founded the Institute of Human Genetics in Munster, where he worked educating another generation until his death in 1969. He had not turned away from his old ideas: was an adviser for the Mankind Quarterly, and a member of the American Eugenics Society.

The rehabilitation of Mengele's mentor and collaborator was not an accidental oversight. Eugenicists in America were aware of von Verschuer; several stories about him appeared in English in the Eugenical News in the 1930's. The first, a review of his book Erbpathologie, said: "Race culture, the selection of proposed cases for sterilization or marriage advice [i.e., genetic counseling] are impossible without the earnest collaboration of the entire medical profession ... In this book the author clearly outlines the duties of the physician to the nation. The word 'nation' no longer means a number of citizens living within certain boundaries, but a biological entity. This point of view also changes the obligation of the physician ... Dr. von Verschuer has successfully bridged the gap between medical practice and theoretic scientific research."

Another article about von Verschuer appeared in the Eugenical News May/June 1936. This article specifically mentions that von Verschuer intended to use twin studies to test a racist idea (the race doctrine of Count Gobineau). Mengele's horrors at Auschwitz were twin studies. There was a follow-up article in October 1937.

http://www.emmerich1.com/EUGENICS.htm

6. The eugenics legacy of Francis Galton, "Darwin's bulldog"

From Galton's research came the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in Great Britain, which, among other things, compiled "detailed statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding." (8) Galton saw it as his mission to "improve the breeding stock" of humanity. By implication then there are less useful members of society who should be discouraged from propagating their kind, just as Darwin believed.

"I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their [lower caste] compatriots with all kindness, as long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual, and physical qualities, it is easy to believe that the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.(12)

Galton eventually reached the conclusion that it was "impossible that the natural qualities of a race may be permanently changed through the action of selection upon mere variations" and that selection individuals of the highest eugenic value "cannot even produce any great degree of artificial and temporary improvement."(10)

One of the disciples of Francis Galton was a man by the name of Karl Pearson (1857-1936). When Francis Galton died in 1911 he left the main portion of his estate to University College of London for a Chair in Eugenics. Pearson, a radical socialist, was chosen by Galton before his death to be the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at the college, which post he held for many years.

Pearson did not believe that everyone had the right to have children:

"The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage." Darwinism, Medical Progress and Parentage (London 1912).

Pearson was an advocate of social imperialism, the evolutionary concept that so-called superior races and countries should produce more of their share of offspring than those considered to be less developed, in order to maintain their political and social supremacy. He sought to integrate the new science of statistics with evolutionary theory, calling it Biometrics. Kevles noted that oftentimes Pearson's theories went against solid biological science, but Pearson turned a deaf ear to criticism of his work by other scientists.(18)

Charles P. Davenport was another disciple of Galton's. Davenport (1866-1944) grew up in Brooklyn Heights New York with ten brothers and sisters. In 1890, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences founded a Biological Laboratory at Cold Springs Harbor. Scientists documented the diversity of the natural world and attempted to reconcile it with Darwin's principles of natural selection and evolution. In 1898 Davenport became its summer director, then became an assistant professor (1899) and then professor (1901) at the University of Chicago. He met Karl Pearson and Francis Galton in London in 1902, and consequent on this meeting he became obsessed with setting up his own laboratory for the study of evolution. In 1904 he persuaded the Carnegie Institute to donate ten million dollars, an enormous sum for that day, to establish a "Station for Experimental Evolution" at the Cold Springs Harbor lab.

Like most eugenicists, Davenport was a racist, and felt that Jews were "'intermediate between the slovenly Servians and Greeks and the tidy Swedes, Germans and Bohemians.'" He further felt that the great migration to American during the early part of the 20th Century of people from Southeastern Europe would make the country's population "'darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial . . .more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.'"(19)

Davenport defended the Nazi pledge to exterminate the Jews, and endorsed the "'infinitely superior' weapon of capital punishment against Nordic and non-Nordic race polluters whose inferior genes threatened the purity of the Aryan racial gene pools of the Third Reich." (20)

Mary Harriman, the mother of future U.S. Ambassador to Russia and United Nations representative W. Averell Harriman, was an undergraduate at Cold Springs Harbor in the summer of 1905. Her family bred racehorses, and she thought that the laws of heredity used in breeding horses might be used in breeding men as well. In 1910 she was instrumental in raising money to establish a Eugenics Record Office next to Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, which became incorporated with it in 1918.

Davenport used the office to ferret out records of people in "prisons, hospitals, almshouses, and institutions for the mentally deficient, the deaf, the blind, and the insane." He labeled these people as "defectives" Davenport was so pleased with the success of the Eugenics Records Office that he wrote to Mrs. Harriman: "What a fire you have kindled! It is going to be a purifying conflagration some day!" (21)

http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number13/number13.html

7. The Club of Rome's Garrett Hardin on C. G. Darwin

Conscience Is Self-Eliminating

It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather's great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.

People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation.

In C. G. Darwin's words: "It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus."

The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary-but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka's term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what's the point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good — by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.

Garrett Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons (1968)

http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

8. Malthusian "overpopulation" and claims of resource scarcity as a whitewash for the British free trade system. 19th century criticism from Abraham Lincoln's economic advisor Henry Carey, against the precursor to modern neoliberalism:

Carey's next book was The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing & Commercial, published in 1851, and is notable for its repeated and fierce attacks on British economic doctrines. "The whole system," of British free trade, Carey wrote, "has for its object an increase in the number of persons that are to intervene between the producer and the consumer -- living on the product of the land and labour of others, diminishing the power of the first, and increasing the number of the last.... The impoverishing effects of the system were early obvious, and to the endeavour to account for the increasing difficulty of obtaining food where the whole action of the laws tended to increase the number of consumers of food and to diminish the number of producers, was due the invention of the Malthusian theory of population..." The American Iron and Steel Institute, among others, helped circulate The Harmony of Interests.

Carey next turned his attention to the impending crisis in the United States' southern states, publishing, in 1853, The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign. "By adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system," Carey warned, "we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people. By adopting the other, we place ourselves by the side of those whose measures tend not only to the improvement of their own subjects, but to the emancipation of the slave everywhere, whether in the British Islands, India, Italy, or America."

The object of the colonial system was that of "raising up a nation of customers," a project "fit only," says Adam Smith, "for a nation of shopkeepers." He was, however, inclined to think, that even for them it was unfit, although "extremely fit for a nation whose government was influenced by shopkeepers." As early as the period immediately following the Revolution of 1688, we find the shopkeeping influence exerted for the "discouragement" of the woolens manufacture of Ireland; and while the people of that unfortunate country were thus prevented from converting their own wool into cloth, they were by other laws prevented from making any exchanges with the fellow-subjects in other colonies, unless through the medium of English ports and English "shopkeepers."

"The manufacturers of India have been ruined, and that great country is gradually and certainly deteriorating and becoming depopulated, to the surprise of those people of England who are familiar with its vast advantages, and who do not understand the destructive character of their own system. (p. 61)

"We thus have here, first, a system that is unsound and unnatural, and second, a theory invented for the purpose of accounting for the poverty and wretchedness which are its necessary results. The miseries of Ireland are charged to over-population, although millions of acres of the richest soils of the kingdom are waiting drainage to take their place among the most productive in the world, and although the Irish are compelled to waste more labour than would pay, many times over, for all the cloth and iron they consume. The wretchedness of Scotland is charged to over-population when a large portion of the land is so tied up by entails as to forbid improvement, and almost forbid cultivation. The difficulty of obtaining food in England is ascribed to over-population, when throughout the kingdom a large portion of the land is occupied as pleasure grounds, by men whose fortunes are due to the system which has ruined Ireland and India. Over-population is the ready excuse for all the evils of a vicious system, and so will it continue to be until that system shall see its end..." (pp. 64-65)

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/B/hcarey/henryc1.htm

9. Irrationalism.

Notice, reading C. G. Darwin's quote again, how he dismisses the possibility of substitutes being found for "fossil fuel" as having no bearing on the outcome of his "revolution". This is deeply irrational. Clearly, he wants a massive change in civilization and a global depopulation REGARDLESS of the real circumstances. There is no underestimating the lengths to which the crypto-eugenics establishment would go to convince the public that a global energy and resource crisis was imminent and inevitable, since this would force the world to accept their ideas about government and redefining fundamental notions of human rights.

"the fifth revolution will come when we have spent the stores of coal and oil that have been accumulating in the earth during hundreds of millions of years. . . . It is to be hoped that before then other sources of energy will have been developed . . . But without considering the detail [here] it is obvious that there will be a very great difference in ways of life. . . . Whether a convenient substitute for the present fuels is found or not, there can be no doubt that there will have to be a great change in ways of life. This change may justly be called a revolution, but it differs from all the preceding ones in that there is no likelihood of its leading to increases of population, but even perhaps to the reverse."

Ruppert is also vehemently dismissive of potential technological advances and insists that we must start making "tough decisions" about population reduction immediately, on worst case assumptions about energy. Why?

"Ruppert also wants to inform us that because of 'peak oil', 'population reduction' is a necessity, the only question we have to decide, he told us all at the 911 Inquiry in San Francisco, is whether we want to do it 'nice or nasty'. When I asked him at the organized Q&A session afterwards, how does one do 'population reduction' nice, I expected the same answer he had written about earlier: about how he advocated 'the immediate convening of political/economic/spiritual/& scientific leaders from all nations . . . [to come up with] immediate steps to arrive at a crash program . . . to arrive at the best possible and most ethical program of population reduction' ... But he cleaned that up a little by San Franciso (after critics pointed out what they thought of the nations' political and economic leaders), and this time, Ruppert indicated that he 'didn't have any plan except that everyone in the world has to decide together'."

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze25x9n/id24.html

(note: an earlier commentary on Ruppert's C. G. Darwin quote can be found at David McGowan's site, http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr70.html)

Postscript: John Ruskin, T. H. Huxley, evolutionary degeneration, entropy, the heat death of the universe, and the New World Order

excerpt from The Vital Science—Biology and the Literary Imagination,1860-1900 by Peter Morton.

On 4 and 11 February 1884, John Ruskin gave two public lectures in London on a strange theme: the alarming deterioration in the English weather which he claimed to have observed over the previous twenty years, and the psychological effect of this depressing change on one sensitive individual - himself. Exercising his rhetorical gifts with the usual skill, Ruskin conjures up the mournful picture of a sun quenched by heavy, vilely coloured clouds and polluted air, and of an earth whose inhabitants are pinched and feeble from a lack of radiant energy. . . . His real fear and outrage is of something deeper: a more catastrophic and permanent snuffing-out of heat and light. By a wild leap of thought he turns his ire on to a book 'by a very foolish and very lugubrious author', Balfour Stewart's Conservation of Energy (1872). Stewart, following his mentor William Thomson, offers his reader the prospect of a very distant but certain future when all the energy flows of the universe have equalised; when all the stars have formed from gas-clouds and have radiated away their heat so that all creation is an evenly heated inert mass and all life necessarily extinct. For Ruskin the bad weather and this vision of universal heat-death form some strange mental amalgam, provoking him into a decisive judgement on his personal intellectual history:

"I will tell you this much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now, no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or could have been written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was rounded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of nature, all spring and summer long. . . That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round. . . month by month the darkness gains upon the day." (The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, 137-8)

...for Ruskin, personally experiencing a garden gone to seed was so alarming in its cosmic suggestiveness as to require an immediate public statement. But even for saner writers the same image, when transformed into an impersonal metaphor, was a favourite device for making concrete a group of connected biological abstractions. It was used thus quite consciously by writers as diverse as Mill, Hardy, Gissing and, above all, by T.H. Huxley. As Oma Stanley has shown in detail, the young Huxley tended romantically to personify nature and to come perilously close to a teleological reading of it. . . . ten years after Ruskin's Storm Cloud lectures Huxley may be discovered in his 'Prolegomena' (1894) to his Romanes Lecture of 1893 seeking a metaphorical structure which describes possible responses to the inevitable decay of the universe towards maximum disorder. (The concept of entropy was first presented by Clausius in the mid-1860s.) . . . the parable of the weeded garden - that is to say, a carefully maintained artificiality carved from a wilderness to which it will rapidly revert unless attention is unremitting - is a vivid expression not so much of Huxley's belief that man should combat the natural order but, rather, of his fear of degeneration transformed into a homely image.

(end excerpt)

Ruskin was a co-founder of the "Round Table" group of British Imperial revivalists around Cecil Rhodes and Lord Alfred Milner. T.H. Huxley is credited with founding eugenics. His student, H. G. Wells, would become an enthusiastic promoter of eugenics and a theorist of anglo-american "New World Order".

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