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Nazism And Social Darwinism

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Nazism was a product of the racial intellectual theories and principles that dominated European societies during the period of the ninetieth and twentieth centuries. Before the holocaust, European colonial powers and the United States used principles of social Darwinism to carry out inhumane acts that repressed people who did not belong to the white race. The actions and policies of these governments were primarily based on the self-interest of gaining economic and political power amoung the white race. Therefore, Nazism was not sui generis, however another example of how racial intellectualization was used to justify the horrendous actions that European and American governments committed to achieving white or Aryan political, and economic supremacy.

Social Darwinism is a social-scientific term and belief that became highly popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a way to justify racial and mental superiority with ‘factual evidence’. It branched off Charles Darwin, a famous naturalist, theory of biological evolution and struggle of existence. As Bannister argues, this version of Darwinism theorizes that humans are like animals in which they have to compete for existence, and only the fittest survive. Although, Charles Darwin did not incorporate human evolution in his book, On the Origin of Species, sociologist, Herbert Spencer created the notion of “survival of the fittest” to describe the outcome from competition between different social and
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