Additionally Noted

Louis N Proyect - 8/24/2005

1. Kautsky was an enthusiastic follower of Darwin and Spencer before he ever came across Marx. In 1881, he wrote an article for Die Neue Zeit titled "The Indian Question" that asserted that the reason the Europeans defeated the Indians is that they were technologically backward. Plekhanov's "Fun­damental Problems of Marxism" also exhibits much of the same mechanis­tic concept of historical change. In the chapter "Productive Forces and Geography," he makes the case that the Indians of North America remained at a low stage of development because they lacked domesticated animals. These questions are not just of theoretical interest since failure to under­stand them correctly led to divisions between the Sandinistas and the Miskitos, who were regarded as not up to the same cultural level as the Pacific Coast Spanish-speaking majority.

2. In voice-over narration for Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," Morgan Freeman explains that Homo Sapiens had earned the right to rule earth because it had developed a resistance to disease over the millennia. It struck me that this ending inverted what had happened in the New World, when the invading European exterminated the indigenous peoples with smallpox, measles and other diseases that they had not developed a resistance to.

In looking at H.G. Wells's novel, you discover that this was something very much on the mind of the author. In chapter one, he writes:

"And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

"And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

As a member in good standing of the Fabian Society, Wells was susceptible to the social Darwinism that leader Beatrice Webb fostered. She was strongly influenced by Herbert Spencer and came to believe that human progress was determined very much by genetics.

It was only a small step from such a belief to the "science" of eugenics. It was a step that H.G. Wells took enthusiastically and that influenced a number of his novels including "War of the Worlds". As David Levy and Sandra Peart pointed out in an article that appeared in the March 26, 2002 Reason Magazine (a libertarian publication), H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" tells the story of a future Earth where humanity has evolved into two separate "races." "Descendants of the working class have become subterranean, ape-like, night creatures who live by eating the decadent descendants of the old upper class. This evolutionary nightmare reflected Victorian ideas about race and hierarchy, and about the undesirable direction that evolution might take if the better sort of people didn't intervene."

Wells was very impressed with the work of Francis Galton, a pioneer in eugenics. While Galton entertained ideas about promoting a better human being à la Nazi science, Wells was more concerned about the dangers of mixed breeding. Here is what he had to say about the black/white intermarriage: "The mating of two quite healthy persons may result in disease. I am told it does so in the case of interbreeding of healthy white men and healthy black women about the Tanganyka region; the half-breed children are ugly, sickly, and rarely live."

Levy and Peart describe the odd affinity that Wells had for Stalin:

Wells was nothing if not energetic. Late in his life, his discussion with Joseph Stalin about the good society was published with comments by G. B. Shaw, J. M. Keynes and others. Unlike Stalin, who trusted that the Party would bring progress, Wells believed in the Scientific Elite. "Now," he told Stalin in 1934, 'there is a superabundance of technical intellectuals, and their mentality has changed very sharply. The skilled man, who would formerly never listen to revolutionary talk, is now greatly interested in it. Recently I was dining with the Royal Society, our great English scientific society. The President's speech was a speech for social planning and scientific control. To-day, the man at the head of the Royal Society holds revolutionary views, and insists on the scientific reorganisation of human society."