August 12, 2019

The Link between Today's Leftists and Yesterday's Nazis

By Alexander Nussbaum

August eight just came and went.  Supposedly, now the date has significance to neo-Nazis.  H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and "Heil Hitler" is HH, or "88."  The number has long been used as a neo-Nazi symbol.

The link to August 8 is tenuous.  Nevertheless, there is a leftist meme started on MSNBC that President Trump ordered the U.S. flag to be raised on August 8, following is lowering in response to last week's shootings, as a message to his neo-Nazi supporters.  Despite Trump's support of Israel and Jews, or rather in part because of it, "progressives" regularly call Trump a Nazi-supporter.

MSNBC's security analyst Malcom Nance says, "These people feel that ... Donald Trump is giving them subliminal orders in their head."

Let us examine who the allies of the Nazis have been.  In a single day, June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler went from being a socialist in good standing admired by every leftist to what leftist call those who disagree with them.  "Nazi" has become a progressive code for evil to be applied by leftists to Republicans, Zionists, capitalists, whoever opposes any of their agenda.  But pre– Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, socialists admired both regimes.

Do not cry for Hitler.  The Left's allies, Muslims, consider Hitler "a very great man," so it's only a matter of time until Hitler is restored in the liberal leftist pantheon.

A Living Link between Nazism and Communism

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) had an impressive career.  He was one of the fathers of statistics, having invented the formula for correlation still used today, as well as inventing chi-square and p-values, all not only still used and taught in every undergraduate statistics course, but central to empirical research.

I had long been interested in the history of statistics, and I wrote a magazine article on the invention of same.  I was familiar with the statistical accomplishments of Karl Pearson, but only while doing research for that article did I learn of some of his other "accomplishments."  He was simultaneously a communist and a Nazi.  Pearson was born Carl with a C; he changed the spelling of his first name in honor of his idol.  Pearson had a couple of impressive "doubles."  A devoted socialist, he founded a radical socialist club in England while also receiving a medal from the Nazi government.  Amazingly, Pearson influenced both Hitler and Einstein.  In addition to writing about eliminating inferior races, he came up with a proto-theory of relativity.

I found Pearson's status as a "link" so intriguing that I wrote a long manuscript about him.  In continuously adding to the manuscript, I realized that perhaps the problem is that Pearson was hardly unique in embracing both Hitler and Stalin.  Before 1941, it was a standard combination.

Pearson's Socialism and a Nazi Medal

Pearson was a social Darwinist, dedicated to proving that Darwinism supported communism.  Pearson's ideal collectivist state was, in his words, "an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade routes and for the sources of raw material and food supply."

Pearson's writings sought to put the inferiority of Jews (the "parasitic race," as he called them) on a sound scientific basis, and this was not overlooked by Nazi Germany.  In 1932, after Hitler's takeover, Pearson was presented Germany's prestigious Rudolf Virchow medal from the Berlin Anthropological Society by Erwin Baur and Eugen Fischer, co-authors of the book that outlined the racial theories of Hitler.

Pearson said the following at his retirement dinner in 1934: "The climax culminated in Galton [Pearson's mentor and invented of eugenics]'s preaching of eugenics and his foundation of the eugenics professorship.  Did I say culmination?  No, that lies rather in the future perhaps with Reichskanzler Hitler and his proposals to regenerate the German people. In Germany a vast experiment is in hand and some of you may live to see its results."  Six million Jews did not. 

Socialism and Nazi-Style Eugenics Go Hand in Hand

Eugenics, the belief that inferior races and inferior individuals must be prohibited from reproducing if not outright exterminated, was once part and parcel of socialism.  Before World War II, a who's who of leading eugenicists was also a who's who of leading socialists and communists.  The aforementioned Karl Pearson, Margaret Sanger, William Beveridge, JBS Haldane, and G.B. Shaw are only a few of the names.  Haldane was a brilliant biologist and statistician, who made huge contributions to evolutionary biology.  In addition to being a eugenicist, he was a spy for the Soviet Union and supported the crackpot communist biology of Lysenko and its murderous legacy.  George Bernard Shaw, who supported Stalin and Hilter, prophetically advocated that "inferior people" be eliminated by a "lethal chamber."

The Guardian, that most stylish extreme leftist anti-American and anti-Israel British newspaper, had an interesting article back on February 17, 2012, by Jonathan Freedland: "Eugenics: The Skeleton that Rattles Loudest in the Left's Closet."  "Socialism's one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history.  But the truth is far more unpalatable," writes the author, because "what could be more socialist than planning[.] ... If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies?"

What Went Wrong for Eugenics?

Eugenicists made one tremendous mistake, a mistake of such magnitude that it rightly relegates them to the status of pariahs.  This is a mistake that is the very basis of socialist thought: the horrendous notion that the state owns the individual — that the state has a right to determine who breeds, how people live, what should be their priorities, that the state should have its dirty, stealing hands anywhere near the economic system.

Pearson was a genius on a level unimaginable to ordinary minds and a key contributor to statistics, a basis of Western science and progress.  Yet he was a Nazi and a communist, an advocate of all forms of genocidal fascism.  In other words, he had the political sophistication of today's anti-Trump demonstrator.