Photo by Chris Meyer
Patrick Brantlinger, Rudy Professor of English at
IU Bloomington
“Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it.”
—George Santayana,
American poet and philosopher in Reason in
Common Sense (1906) Author William L. Shirer
used Santayana’s words as epigraph for
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959)
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Patrick Brantlinger’s new book, Dark Vanishings:
Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930,
is not about current events, but it is difficult, indeed,
to keep from thinking about today’s new frontiers
of genomics and proteomics or of a global climate in which
one group is hell-bent on eradicating another.
In Dark Vanishings (Cornell University Press),
Brantlinger, the Rudy Professor of English at IU Bloomington,
looks at the commonly held 19th-century belief that all
“primitive” or “savage” races
around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction,
and defines the stereotype of the “self-exterminating
savage.” Closely related to the idea of “the
noble savage,” who embodied the romantic notion
of man unencumbered by civilization, the primitive or
savage races came to be seen as genetically and socially
inferior, usually by European interlopers in the guise
of imperialists.
After 1859, Charles Darwin’s “survival through
natural selection” theory had become widely accepted,
and some social scientists were applying it to society.
Thus, Brantlinger explained in an interview about his
book, “‘savage customs,’ such as warfare,
cannibalism and human sacrifice, were often viewed as
the main cause of the demise of savage ‘races.’”
Social Darwinism also opportunistically enabled the spread
of imperialism. At its most basic, imperialism is defined
as the process in which the dominant political and economic
interests of one nation expropriate for their own benefit
the land, labor, raw material and markets of another people.
Using savagery and the lower level of cultural evolution
as proof of inferior evolution, proponents of imperialism
generally supported the idea that colonized peoples were
biologically inferior.
In Dark Vanishings, Brantlinger analyzes the Irish
Famine in the context of ideas and theories about primitive
races in North America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.
He shows that by the end of the 19th century, especially
through the influence of the eugenics movement, extinction
discourse was ironically applied to the “great white
race” in various apocalyptic ways.
“The Irish peasantry,” he said, “from
the Elizabethan period forward, were often compared to
‘savages’ elsewhere in the world—except
that they did not even have the ‘excuse’ of
savage customs for their ignorance (or superstition: read,
illiteracy and Catholicism), their poverty, their alleged
overpopulation and their starvation. The famine was an
example of mass extinction close to home, among a people
of European race, Celtic, which seemed analogous to the
extinctions of primitive, or non-Western races around
the world under the impact of imperialism.”
According to Brantlinger, after Darwin, social Darwinists
and “eugenicists” started to worry about the
degeneration and possible extinction of “the great
white race.” Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin,
coined the term “well-born” and founded the
eugenics movement, the idea that the population could
be improved by controlled breeding for desirable, inherited
characteristics. Galton thought that biological inheritance
of leadership qualities had determined the social status
of the British ruling class.
“Especially through the eugenics movement,’
said Brantlinger, “the discourse about the extinction
of so-called primitive races came home to roost in many
ironic and often horrific ways, sterilization of the so-called
‘unfit,’ for instance.”
American eugenicists, many of whom privately supported
the idea of euthanasia and genocide, popularized legally
mandated sterilization of the socially inadequate in the
early 20th century. The “socially inadequate”
included those in institutions or those maintained wholly
or in part at public expense. Also defined as “socially
inadequate” were the feeble-minded, insane, criminalistic,
epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed
and dependent, such as orphans, tramps, the homeless and
paupers.
By 1914, when the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law was
published, 12 states had already written such laws, including
Indiana, which became the first to enact it by sterilizing
a “degenerate” in 1907.
Brantlinger continues his look at the self-exterminating
savage stereotype through the pre-World War II years.
With the rise of fascism and Nazism, and with the gradual
renewal of aboriginal populations in some parts of the
world, by the 1930s the idea of “fatal impact”
began to unravel, as did also various more general forms
of race-based thinking and of social Darwinsim.
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