Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

The Science of Nazi Extermination

Nasser Behnegar, Asst. Professor of Politics at Boston College, reviews this book: Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction by Goetz Aly and Susan Heim. The review is a powerful explanation of the role of modern social science in the development of the Nazi policy of extermination. The annihiliation of minorities, especially the handicapped and Jews, is simply an economic problem to be solved to insure the emergence of the ’rational’ society.

Reason unanchored from it’s classical and Biblical roots becomes the most savage tyranny in the history of man. The modern administrative state becomes the place where scientific experts (bureaucrats) routinely murder human beings for the sake of progress in a world beyond good and evil. A good and sobering critique of modern utopia.

What’s your major?

Discussions - 7 Comments

"Reason unanchored from it’s classical and Biblical roots becomes the most savage tyranny in the history of man."
I would add that Reason (rationality) that does not recognize its own irrational roots, leads to tyrrany. Paranoia: Rationality in the service of the irrational

"Reason unanchored from it’s classical and Biblical roots becomes the most savage tyranny in the history of man".

A very fine string of words; of greater value than rubies or gold.

G.M.

Try Zymund Baumann’s "Modernity and the Holocaust" for a powerful study that the Holocaust was rooted in the science, technology, industry, beaucracy, and intellectual presuppositions of modernity. Do not forget that Nazism and the Holocaust occurred in the most Enlightened, educated, scientific, and cultural nation in Europe and arguably the West. In the absence of God, morality becomes defined by the powerful.

Check out the recent related article --

by Rebecca Messall, Human Life Review -- The Long Road of Eugenics: From Rockefeller to Roe v. Wade

Great post, Mickey. I saw the headline but did not read the review until you called attention to it. Of course, the murder of human beings is going on right now in abortion clinics across America and, increasingly, in states where assisted suicide is permitted.

In Holland, doctors are killing "defective" babies at their discretion! That country is reeling from too much toleration of "cultures" that differ from the West and may turn against it. May it include the increasing euthanasia in the country.

You are dead on right about the state unmoored from faith and reason being the most dangerous of all. Our method at present is to sanction private persons to do the killing, but unchecked the state will socialize this activity like it does everything else.

Apparently, Europe is unwilling and unable to repress Nazi symbols today because they are an expression of "free speech." I suppose that the post-modern, relativist Europeans have admitted that all views, including those of the Nazis, are welcome at the table. They are increasingly unable to make moral judgments about the objective content of symbols or speech and thus unable to say anything is inherently bad. I guess in the absence of those moral judgments, they can substitute power for making distinctions. Wait, that might lead to more fascist, Nazi regimes.

Science is a tool. God provides the morality to use them.

Why did the Holocaust occur? - Because they forgot God.

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