Dr. Michael Bryant is a professor of History and Legal Studies at Bryant University. Dr. Jonny Hudson has a Ph.D. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Bret talks with the two of them about Jonny’s recent dissertation which applies an evolutionary lens to the Holocaust.*****Sponsors:Listening.com: Go to listening.com/DARKHORSE or use code DARKHORSE at checkout, listeners of DarkHorse get 1 whole month free.Fast Growing Trees: Healthy, happy trees delivered to your door, with 30 day Alive and Thr...
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting this morning with Dr. Michael Bryant and Dr. Johnny Hudson.
Michael Bryant is a professor of history and legal studies at Bryant University.
The overlap between his last name and the last name of the university is pure coincidence.
Dr. Johnny Hudson is a newly minted PhD in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
He also has a Bachelor's in History and a Master's degree in Holocaust Education.
Gentlemen, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks very much for having us.
So this is an episode that I am very excited to be doing.
I also have a certain amount of trepidation because I know that professionals in numerous disciplines have a tremendous amount of unease about the possibility of looking at genocides in general and the Holocaust in particular through an evolutionary lens.
I think we can say we three are all sensitive to those hazards, but believe that on balance there is a high likelihood that our ability to avert genocides will be enhanced if we understand them in this regard, and that it makes sense to engage courageously in this exploration, though ever mindful of the seriousness of the topic.
Is there anything that either of you would like to say about your trepidations on heading down this path?
So, I think I would like to give some context as to why this discussion is taking place in the first, and why it's taking place, why us three are meeting, and the context behind that, and the provenance of us two meeting.
Shall I do that now?
Well, let me introduce what, from my perspective, is the earliest thread here, and then maybe you can Let's jump in and pick up the story.
As my longtime listeners will know, when I was an undergraduate in Robert Triver's social evolution class at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the final paper that I wrote for that class was an exploration of the Holocaust as viewed with an evolutionary toolkit.
And I was particularly interested in the question of whether or not Hitler was simply a madman and that this was an outbreak of insanity that had taken over a society and resulted in the massive wave of murder and suffering that ensued.
Frankly, I didn't believe it.
It didn't make sense to me that this was simply illogical.
And I thought there might be something more to it.
And as I wrote my paper, I convinced myself that while Hitler was clearly a monster, that he could be understood as rational from the point of view of his genome.
Now, it is very important that people who are listening to this, and we know that there's a great deal of excitement that people in the public want to hear this explored, but it is important to remember what we call the naturalistic fallacy.
That to describe how something is does not have any inherent implication for how it ought to be.
So for us to explore the logic of the Holocaust does not imply that that logic is good.
And what's more, I would point out that to say that something has an evolutionary logic does not imply that it is the sole logic.
And I would just use as an analogy, which we will probably return to later in the discussion, point out that something like rape can be understood as an evolutionary strategy, but equally and maybe more so than...
The laws that a society institutes in order to make rape unthinkable are also an evolutionary strategy.
So to say something might be an evolutionary strategy is not in any way to apply that it is the evolutionary strategy, and certainly not to imply that it is good.
So my entry into this was that paper that I wrote, and it has existed as a topic more or less on the back burner ever since.
That would have been 1991, I believe.
Now, Johnny, you want to... Well, that paper is important in the reason that we're speaking in the first place.
But if I was going to talk about the provenance of you and I conversing about the Holocaust, I'd go back to 2015.
And I went on a teacher training conference to Yad Vashem in Israel.
And one of the sessions there was with a really famous Holocaust historian called Yehuda Bauer.
And people in Holocaust Studies will know that name.
He is essentially seen as the Don of Holocaust Studies.
He's just recently stepped away from official duties, I think, at the age of 98.
So he's one of the most famous living historians of the Holocaust, alive or dead.
And we were in this session together, me and 20 other teachers, And my particular area of interest is Holocaust perpetrators and human behavior.
And he said something that really interested me.
I'd always been quite underwhelmed with the field or felt that there was something missing, especially in perpetrator studies.
And when I was sat there, very unexpectedly, Yehuda Bauer said that there's different strategies for survival.
There's negative and there's positive.
And if you kill somebody, then you are essentially killing the competition.
So he was talking almost in biological terms, and I've never heard anybody in the field, especially a Holocaust historian, frame the Holocaust or human behavior in this way.
He also said that rescue, the reason that people rescued was because they would expect something in return and that we were essentially, I'm paraphrasing, I can't remember exactly how he phrased it, but we are herd animals and that we behave in a way that serves our interest.
And especially with rescue, he was saying that people give and expect some, so it's altruism, but it's reciprocal.
There's nothing outstanding about what he said scientifically that I've taken forward, but it was the fact that someone of his stature was framing the Holocaust in biological terms, and that was 2015.
And I remember me thinking, OK, so there might be something in this.
This is that piece of the jigsaw that I've been looking for.
This is going to further my understanding.
And since then, I've just started reading evolutionary biology by myself and thinking, how can this fit into Holocaust studies?
So then I started looking for literature.
that might further my understanding of this.
So Holocaust historians or Holocaust literature that references evolutionary biology or the other side as well evolutionary biology that references the Holocaust and what I've found was that looking for years and years there's some literature that kind of dips its toe in the other field or the other disciplines but no thorough application of of evolutionary biology in Holocaust studies or even genocide studies.
So there was a visible gap in the literature and to me it was just common sense that evolutionary biology be one of those lenses that is used to try and understand This event, if we're truly interested in predicting and preventing what the Holocaust was and represents, then I didn't see a reason why evolutionary biology was not in the conversation.
And then I was thinking about this for years and then it came to my PhD and I really wanted to do something with this.
I wanted to apply an evolutionary lens to the Holocaust.
But again, I couldn't see that anybody was doing this seriously or thinking in this way.
And then I came across the Joe Rogan talk with yourself, Rogan, and Jordan Peterson.
And the paper that you've just referenced, you talk about right at the beginning of that talk.
And when I heard you say that, I thought, OK, there's someone is out there willing to do this.
I've never heard anyone say that an evolutionary biologist say that they've written a paper on the Holocaust before.
So I didn't expect to reply, but I emailed.
I sent an email in your direction and then you replied.
This is four years ago now.
And ever since we've been talking, we've spoken probably a couple of dozen times now over the course of four years, and we've just been bouncing ideas off each other.
I'll talk about something about the Holocaust, and that will remind you of a concept or an aspect of evolutionary biology, and that goes the other way around as well.
So let me just interject so people understand, and forgive me if I have some part of the chronology incorrect here, but four years ago you reached out as you were embarking on, or maybe you were already somewhat down the road towards your Towards your PhD.
And we began, frankly, the nature of it is you taught me about the Holocaust, many things that I did not understand.
You showed me a lot that I wouldn't have even thought to ask about.
And I taught you evolutionary thinking in a way that you could apply it to the topics you were looking at.
And it was clear to both of us as we did this that our suspicion That there was something deep here, that this wasn't a mirage, grew quite strong over time.
I'll add one other piece that I just don't want to forget.
I believe that the reason That no exploration, you were unable to find a deep exploration.
You found scientists dipping their toe and holocaust studies folks dipping their toe in the scientific waters, but you couldn't find a thorough explanation.
I now believe I understand the reason that it didn't exist.
That there are actually two reasons.
One of them is the trepidation people have.
They do not want to do or think anything that could possibly be portrayed even as contributing to some future genocide, which I understand.
But there's also the fact that the toolkit that evolutionary biologists employ is actually not rich enough to cover this topic.
And one needs to understand that there's a flaw in it Where we evolutionists have something we call kin selection, which is well understood, but we artificially limit kin selection to close kin, and we don't understand that the very same principles that we know underlie kin selection actually continue indefinitely, and that in order to fully see this picture, you need to start thinking in terms of lineages.
And lineages are anything from an individual and all of their offspring to any individual in history and anyone who descended from them simultaneously.
So it is a fractal property that can can literally be one person before you have children.
And then it can also be Genghis Khan and Millions of people who are descended from him.
So when you start thinking in terms of that fractal, you begin to understand how it is that something like genocide could be related to an evolutionary adaptive process.
So I interrupted your story.
Do you want to pick it up?
And then I'll just mention how I reached, well, why I reached out to Michael.
So my specific, as I've mentioned, my specific research area is Holocaust perpetrators.
And the Holocaust perpetrators that I'm focusing on were stationed at a killing center in Poland called Treblinka.
And one of the leading historians in that area is Michael.
So the first time I actually reached out to Michael, I don't know if you remember this, but I was asking you where to find primary sources from.
And you kindly directed me towards Dick DeWilt.
And he's done some amazing work preserving trial judgments on because some of these perpetrators were tracked down after the war and put on trial.
And there's a massive amount of evidence that exists because of that.
So then I reached out to Michael and said, can I have some help finding primary source documents?
And then I reached out to him again and said, Will you, are you interested in being a part of this project?
And you, to my benefit and gratitude, you said yes?
So for those who are tracking the academic story, I've been your PhD advisor and Michael Bryant is a member of your committee and you have just completed your And so you have now graduated with a PhD in, is it formally Holocaust?
Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
So I have just come to know Michael in the process of you submitting your dissertation and us discussing it.
And then, of course, your dissertation defense.
And anyway, Michael, would you like to say anything about how it was to be contacted by Johnny, what you thought initially and where you are now before we get into the meat of the matter?
Yeah, I'd be happy to.
I think my mind was, even before Johnny contacted me, my mind was already, to a certain extent, open to considering these influences of evolutionary history.
On the event of the Holocaust, there was a book that came out a few years ago, written by a psychologist who's been quite active in the field of Holocaust studies.
And Johnny, you may know of this.
James Waller.
James Waller is who I'm thinking of, wrote a really, really seminal book.
I think it's called Ordinary Evil.
Becoming Evil.
Becoming Evil.
Yeah, I think Ordinary Evil is built into the subtitle, Becoming Evil.
Published by Oxford, I think, in 2005, 2006, something like that.
He's gone through multiple editions at this point, but he has an entire chapter devoted to evolutionary biology, and one of its spin-offs, which is evolutionary psychology.
And that's really the first point when I was preparing the second edition of my War Crimes book.
I wanted to revise chapter 10 in particular, which was requested by the editors in the second edition, because they wanted something that would explore the causes, both proximate and ultimate causes, to use Steven Pinker's taxonomy, the causes of genocide and events like the Holocaust.
So I went back through this book by Waller and it was really Really impressed with the quality of his argumentation and the abundance of citations that he had to the literature.
I mean, this is something I knew very little about beyond the studies of Milgram, Stanley Milgram.
And Philip Zimbardo, which of course are quite famous in the field of social psychology.
And I have no background in psychology.
I'm a lawyer by training and an historian by training.
So this is a new field for me, and I was just really kind of electrified by it.
So even before Johnny contacted me, I think my mind had been open to the possibilities of this field of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and the light that it might be able to shed On things that were obviously horrifying, but at a certain point you tried to move beyond the horror to understand the mechanisms that might be at play in producing these god-awful events.
And I thought that the evolutionary account was profound and was worthy of engagement with.
What Johnny had said is 100% right.
There are very few scholars who actually explore this angle in their analyses.
And Johnny, you said in your defense, you were talking about the racial paradigm, which really has been regnant, has been kind of uppermost in Holocaust studies for a very long time.
Namely, that the Holocaust was really just a colossal hate crime driven by hatred, hatred of the Jews in particular.
And while I don't think that your dissertation soft peddled racism, I think it's Some readers might accuse your dissertation of maybe not giving adequate attention to racism.
I didn't see it that way.
I'd be curious to hear what you and Brett have to say about that.
Yeah, that's going to be the topic of our talk when we get into the meat of things.
But before We do.
I'd just like to say, you know, I'm very lucky to have you on board here, because there's no one, first of all, there's no one that knows the horrors of the Holocaust of the Nazi period better than you, because you're a legal historian, so you've sat there, and I've got experience of doing this, so I can, in a way, empathize, but not to the extent that you have sat through and you've read these legal documents, these trial judgments, And they're plentiful.
And when you read through these atrocities, it's basically an unending conveyor belt of horror that no decent person would ever fathom unless you read through this stuff.
So I commend you for that.
Johnny, could I interpose something very briefly?
You're 100% right, by the way.
The witness testimonies, especially from the Albeit Juden, so these are the Jews who were working in Treblinka and Sobibor and some of the other death camps, and they had no choice.
At gunpoint, they were forced to work on behalf of the SS.
So many of them survived the war, and then they came back into the courtroom to tell their stories.
And I just remember sitting in Ludwigsburg in the central office, which is the major archive for these for these trials and just reading hour after hour after hour of this testimony.
And it was it was so harrowing that I had nightmares, which I could I could talk to a shrink about ad nauseum, right?
Nightmare after nightmare, night after night, week after week, until eventually it passed away.
But what you're saying is 100% true.
This really is the stuff of nightmares.
And I think it's that emotional aspect to the subject that makes the evolutionary approach, I think, even more controversial.
If I can jump in and just say a couple things.
One, I didn't know that, Michael, and it's interesting.
I had a parallel experience in researching the Holocaust.
You know, of course, I knew what is commonly understood about it.
The thing that threw me more than anything was the fate of the Sonderkommandos who were forced to work for the SS.
There's something about There's something about those stories that just compounds the horror even further, right?
Not only to suffer the Holocaust, but to be forced into its service.
It's beyond imagining, really, and it gave me nightmares as well.
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Well yeah and I think it's important that we talk about this because it's really laying the foundations as to why we're having this conversation in the first place and as you talk about this I was just reminded me of an incident not that long ago where I it was actually well during the end of the dissertation writing and I was including a testimony of
It was an incident that a Sonderkommando, so those were the slaves that were kept in the so-called extermination area of Treblinka, and it was corroborated by two perpetrator testimonies as well.
and this there was a there was a young man apparently he was about 17 or 18 and he'd been kept in this area where the gassings had taken place we're not quite sure of what his role was but he was so traumatized by this that he attempted to take his own life and he attempted to slit his own wrists and the perpetrators found him And I remember just thinking, and I was at like a birthday party for my daughter in this, what you'd call in America, a jungle gym.
So you've got all these noises, all those different parents are having conversations lying there on my laptop, thinking about this.
And the perpetrators then drag this young man out, who's just attempted to slit his own wrists.
The deputy commandant called Kurt Franz who's one of the worst perpetrators of Treblinka like degrades this guy in front of other perpetrators and other victims and then there's a conversation in front of this victim about what should happen to him and Kurt Franz decides that he's going to be taken away and shot all the while in front of this victim who's just attempted suicide.
And the perpetrator that was tasked with doing it, August Wilhelm Meite, says, I don't have my carbine on me.
So Kurt Franz goes over to him and gives him a weapon to go and do it.
And then this victim is led away to a ditch and shot.
And I just remember there's lots of, when you're reading through lots and lots of this, sometimes for some reason, one of these atrocities just leaps out and hits you right there.
And it's, It just made me think this is a complete inversion of human decency.
And when I was there learning about this and the world around me was going on, I kind of felt like I was on a different planet to what was going on around me.
And it's stories like that, it's testimony like that, What drives you on to try and predict and prevent this kind of atrocity?
I think it's important that we lay out that's the entire reason that we're having this discussion.
Michael comes from a law background.
Is there any legal implications of this application of evolutionary biology?
If we can understand this more, Can we stop similar things from happening?
What are the universal implications of what we've seen happening during the Holocaust?
If I can add a little context there.
When you hear a story like that, your description and version of human decency is of course exactly right.
And so people who are grappling with this for the first time may wonder, well, why do you need anything beyond just the recognition that this is this is the worst of humanity, right?
Isn't that sufficient?
And what I would say is what caught my attention in the first place on this topic was that the Nazis If you took an evolutionary approach, appeared to have succeeded evolutionarily, even though they lost in the end, they succeeded evolutionarily in expanding the reach of their genes.
And so, to imagine that evolution has nothing to do with this, is to imagine that they have succeeded inadvertently, rather than because they were driven to succeed in some way that we have yet to describe.
And lastly, I would just point out to your point about the law.
The law is really most necessary to drive up the costs of rational behavior that is unacceptable.
Right?
We have penalties for robbing a bank, not because robbing a bank is insane, but because if the costs aren't driven up, it is a rational thing to do.
Doesn't mean it's a morally acceptable thing to do, ever.
But you have to drive the costs up.
So by and large, the law is about Driving up the cost of behavior that we don't want to see because that behavior does make some kind of sense.
And if genocide is of this nature, then this is exactly why we have to have this question.
What is being accomplished and how can we make it a loss rather than a gain?
If you really believe in never again, then what you need to do is make it so that those who attempt to succeed evolutionarily in this way Make reverse progress.
If you do that, you won't see more genocides.
And if you fail to do that, there'll be nothing else you can do to stop them.
And let's get into the meat, then, of what we're here to talk about.
So there's so much from the paper that's been written in collaboration with you, Brett, and you, Michael, as well.
We're just going to focus in on something foundational, which is what we've all referenced, which is Nazi racism and Nazi ideology.
So the fundamental driving force behind the Nazi period, but specifically the Holocaust and different, what is called Germanisation schemes during World War II.
Now, as somebody that's taught the Holocaust and was taught the Holocaust and the Nazi period myself in England, I was taught to think of the Nazi period in general as a race, So
You can understand the actions of the Nazis quite simply by saying they were extreme racists and they were driven by a single-minded pursuit of racial doctrines.
And that really is what most people think, that race theories translated into the persecution of victim groups, and that it was an irrational belief system that can be used to explain what happened, and there was essentially no rationality in it.
There's no rational explanation for what the Nazis did.
It's this kind of racist fantasies that drove their thoughts and actions.
And I think most people listening to this would appreciate that and would say, yeah, that was my understanding too of the Holocaust and Nazi period, vociferous racists.
And they get this from the major Holocaust and Nazi period institutions that are there to teach this period, their resources, their videos, they all suggest this.
The paradigm of race and racism can explain the Nazi period.
And there's something quite comforting there as well, because, you know, I'm not a racist.
I'm not an extreme racist.
But also, okay, how are we going to stop this?
We just need to find the extreme racists and make sure that they don't perpetrate things.
But they're nothing like me as well, so I get that comforting separation between myself and perpetrators.
And there's many things that trouble me about this, and we're going to go on to why this is untenable, but I've always thought, okay, so what do you mean when you say that somebody or something is racist?
What is a racist thought and why does that exist in a Darwinian creature?
Why would Why would an evolved being, and the prevalence of it across our world, why would this way of thinking about other humans exist if it had no benefit?
And then the other thing is that actually when you look at the actions of the Nazis, this paradigm of racism is untenable.
Today what I'd like to do is talk through five loosely defined topics and assess the Nazis' behavior as opposed to what they were saying, and I think there's that fundamental distinction there that's confused people over the years.
Too much emphasis has been put on what the Nazis are saying, this is why I'm doing this, this performative aspect of the Nazis where they're justifying Their behavior or they're trying to motivate their people to behave in a certain way and people think, OK, so that's the underlying reason.
And that's just because they're saying it.
It doesn't mean that that's actually what what they're doing.
And when you look at what they're doing as opposed to what they're saying, often those two things are completely different.
And I think before we get into it, I'd like to ask Michael, Do you see this, because you're heavily involved in Nazi and Holocaust academia, do you see this as the fundamental theoretical lens that's used to understand the Nazi period and the Holocaust?
Absolutely, yeah, and this is the prevailing The prevailing interpretation, and I also work not just in academia, but also in public education.
So I'm going to be the president of the Bornstein Education Holocaust Education Center in Providence, Rhode Island in the fall of next year.
I'm the vice president right now.
So I'm also doing public outreach.
And so I run in these circles quite widely.
And the racist paradigm is the primary way to understand The Holocaust today.
And as you rightly say, Johnny, I think that this is it's not that it's untrue.
For me, it's there is truth in this thesis, but there's another layer that we can go down into in order to to explicate the racial language.
and to illuminate the way that you did, I think quite effectively in your dissertation, why it is that these racial rationales were offered by different Nazi groups.
And I think it's important to emphasize this concept of Nazi groups.
There was no single monolithic Nazi organization.
The SS was constantly butting heads with the civilian administrators in the Baltics, for example.
Alfred Rosenberg was continuously at odds with Himmler and with other members of the SS, because they had different conceptions of how colonization should proceed in the Ostgebiete, in the eastern territories.
So ultimately, and I think you did a really good job of this in your dissertation, there's an incoherence in a lot of the racist language the Nazis use.
And ultimately, in many cases, pragmatism drove many of their definitions of what it was to be Jewish.
Or to be a Pole, or to be a Slav, or for that matter, to be a German.
And those labels were very elastic and could be stretched in order to accommodate the purposes of colonization, which under the Darwinian view is really the spreading of DNA, right?
It's the diffusion or dissemination of genes.
So, ultimately, the racist language, I think, needs to be interrogated, as you were willing to do in your dissertation.
And what I like about evolutionary theory as a perspective is that it enables us to go further down into the depth dimensions of this phenomenon in order to try to understand what exactly is going on.
Why is the racist language being deployed?
Is there a deeper motive behind it?
And I thought that you did a marvelous job of bringing that into the forefront of your discussion.
And I think this has kind of happened before as well in the historiography of the Holocaust, whereas it used to be enough just to say that these people were evil, and that you just bound out a term and then everybody just accepts that and goes home, whereas the term evil just means so many different things to so many different people.
It's just a nice abstract term where different people understand it differently.
And then that became untenable, and now it seems like that term, evil, has just been replaced by racist.
And then you think, especially if we're talking about students being taught about this, when I say racist, and my understanding of racism, and I say, oh yeah, the Nazis did this because they were racist, what that word means to those kids, God knows what that means.
So there's a complete disconnect between the interpretation of that term.
So let me just put this in context because I think it's really important people not misunderstand what I know you're going to end up saying, Johnny.
Racism is playing a powerful role in the story of the Holocaust.
But if you imagine that it is the driving force, you will again and again fail to predict behavior that took place in that context.
I mean, the most famous example, obviously, is the partnership in the Axis powers between Germany and Japan, right?
That does not sound to most people who've thought about it like a natural outgrowth of the belief that the Aryans should be taking over the world right it's pragmatic and so everybody understands that one but the point is if you if you understand that racism
is a tool of the Nazis that is being marshaled in an effort to advance some goal that is unstated and maybe even not consciously understood by the Nazis themselves, then you do a better job of predicting where you will see racism and where you will see its shocking absence.
And so that's really the point.
It's not that racism isn't there.
It's that there's something deeper that if you imagine that it is the fundamental guiding principle actually tells you when you should expect to see racism and when you should see it absent.
Yeah, I think it's best now if we move on to looking at some of the history and then applying what was said to that.
So like I said, five, if we may get onto all of these, five loosely based different topics.
And the first one that I want to talk about is Germanization.
So, Germanization, very simply defined, is the Germans trying to, and the term Lebensraum, that many of your listeners will know, is living room, and this is applied to the East of Germany, so we're talking Poland, the Baltic States and Soviet Union.
So, Germanization is essentially a program of annexing territory, so not just occupying it, annexing it.
So, essentially moving the borders of Germany, and within this area, imposing German culture, language and law in these areas.
The populations that would live there, the so-called non-German populations, and there's a real difficulty in defining what that actually means, would either be forced to assimilate if the Nazis said, OK, these people are a valuable racial stock.
So, for example, they made, just off the top of their heads, they said, OK, 10% of Polish people ...will be of valuable racial stock, and they can become German.
So you can see the problems already, but the Germans are now trying to colonize the area next door, so there's no way of telling a difference in supposed race just by looking at people, so they've got a problem there.
But they can basically pick or choose and change their ideology to match the circumstances on whatever is geopolitically So the non-German populations of that place would either be forced to assimilate or they would be removed.
Nazi racist ideology is they can just make it up as they go along.
Okay, so this is a complete contradiction, and then they'll get a race ideologue in and say, no, this is how it actually makes sense.
So the non-German populations of that place would either be forced to assimilate or they would be removed.
And they would be removed either by forced deportation or they would be encouraged or scared off, so they would flee themselves, which the Nazis were actually quite happy with that.
They called it a cost-free deportation.
Even the Einsatzgruppen expressed pleasure in the fact that a load of Jews had just run over the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union.
They didn't have to spend the bullets on killing them.
So, Germanization.
The first area, if you think about it, is Western Poland, and I think that's a really interesting case study for us to begin to talk about Nazi racial ideology and the terms that we've been talking about and the concepts that we've been talking about.
Now Himmler, Heinrich Himmler, who is the leader of the SS, is given the title very early on in the war in October, so the war begins in September, of Right Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation.
And if you remember that map that I sent you to, guys, where you can see this area of western Poland, and this is going to involve a reverse diaspora of sort, so there are ethnic Germans supposedly living in different areas like the Czech Republic, the Sudetenland, areas of
The Baltic Coast, Soviet Union, and these people had been left outside of the new borders of Germany after the Treaty of Versailles.
So the logic was, push Polish people out of this area of Western Poland and bring these people back in as a kind of reverse diaspora.
And I remember, Brett, when I first showed you this map, it had quite an impact on you as an evolutionary biologist, right?
Yes, and let me just say this is exactly what I mean by there's something wrong with imagining this level of evolutionary success happening by accident.
What you're talking about is a lineage that is trying to expand Now, this lineage does not have a deep understanding of genes or Darwinism, but it is trying to expand because its genes are driving it to desire this.
And the idea in your mind, you might think, well, why don't they just remove all of the people and replace them?
And the answer is human beings are slow to reproduce.
That's an implausible program.
So what would you expect them to do?
You would expect them to behave in a way that would cause those distantly related to flee And leave enough people in the habitat to maintain it, but that ultimately the consequence of this Germanization program...
is the expansion you know if each if Germany has a carrying capacity to use the biological term you can expand the number of people from this lineage who can live on the earth by altering the rules in these adjacent states in such a way that it becomes intolerable for certain people and they leave opening up room in under that carrying capacity for more Germans
Bringing those who are understood to be more closely related from a prior era of border drawing.
It's exactly what you would expect.
So the question is, is it exactly what you expect because of some weird roll of the dice?
Or is it exactly what you would expect because the Germans are operating, never mind what they say, but that they are operating an evolutionary program that results in them behaving in a way that does spread their genes and expand their lineage?
Yeah, and like I said, there's problems with the term non-German.
So these different areas where supposedly Germans resided outside of the borders of the 1939 area of Germany, so how are they going to tell who's German and who's not?
This is obviously, according to racial doctrine, an issue of blood, these ridiculous notions.
But what actually happens when they go in there, it's about who's still speaking German.
Are they still members of German associations?
They don't really have any time.
They don't even have any other way to measure who's German, apart from language, names as well.
So if you speak in German, if you've got a German-sounding name, OK, you're German.
You're racially German.
So you can see the confusion here.
But am I right in thinking, Brett, that's like if you're in a room of 100 people, you would use that as a proxy?
Yes, and it's an imperfect proxy.
Of course, there will be people who, you know, who are more distantly related, who, for whatever reason, have inherited cultural traditions that would make you imagine they were more closely related.
But from the point of view of how Darwinism is playing out on this geopolitical landscape, it doesn't matter that the rules that the Nazis claim they are using result in a tremendous amount of noise.
The question is the signal.
What is the net impact of using these nonsensical sounding rules and in fact, arbitrary rules to move forward through The net impact is the spreading of German genes, right?
Even though in any individual case, you may find the opposite takes place.
So again, it's and I think what you said up top is the salient point.
There's something very comforting in the idea that this is just some outbreak of virulent racism, that that's the most fundamental parameter, because it means that it's just irrational.
And the idea that there's actually a logical program unfolding through the Nazis, causing them to speak in ways that are, and I think this forever confuses the discussion, the Nazis, because they are aware of Darwin, They speak about Darwinism, and they do a poor job of it.
The Darwinism that they logically are deploying is cruddy, but their behavior reflects Darwinism itself.
So they are enacting Darwinism at a comprehensible level, but they are confusing the matter by speaking in Darwinian terms which are incorrect.
Yeah, and I'll just read you a policy This is a quote from Himmler, so this is what he said Germanization would be.
He said, in 50 to 80 years time, 20 million German settlers should be living in this vast settlement area in the east, of whom 10 million will be peasants with 8 to 10 children.
The perpetual mobile will then stand still.
If there is no more land to be distributed, then, as is always the case throughout history, new land will have to be got with a sword.
It makes a shocking degree of sense if you imagine one lineage looking deep into the future and imagining how it is going to continue to displace other lineages as it goes.
Yeah, and this is policy and I think there's an important, and I've already mentioned it, distinction between policy and theoretical underpinnings and ideology.
So if you, for example, tell people, your colonizers, okay, we're going in this, you've got to kill these kids, you've got to take over this land, because we just want more space, and we want their resources.
That's not going to work as well as if you also add into the mix that these people are racial enemies, the potential of blood mixing is an existential crisis.
So if you add to it all these performative elements of racism as well, then you're going to get a much more effective response from your people who you're expecting to do this.
Yeah, the racism is being used to rile people up, right?
The racist language is, again, a tool of a deeper program.
And the theoretical underpinnings of Germanization can be seen very vividly in Hitler in his second book, and I'll just read this quote, because I think it gives us a good idea of that distinction between policy and underlying ideology.
Hitler said about Germanization, The ethno-nationally orientated state can under no circumstance annex the Poles with the intention of turning them into Germans one day.
Instead, it must make a decision to either sequester these racially alien elements so that the blood of one's people is not undermined again and again, or else to immediately remove them entirely and thereby assign to one's ethno-national comrades the land and territory freed as a result.
So you've got the justification involving that concept of different bloods.
Yeah, could I interpose here too?
Please.
So that's a really valuable quote that you just mentioned.
It really underscores, I think, one of the bedrock fundamental differences between what is going on with As a form of colonialism, it looks it roughly looks like colonialism.
The Germans, of course, thought of themselves as supposedly following in the footsteps of the British.
In fact, they thought the British would be very sympathetic to what they were doing.
And the Americans, yeah.
And the Americans as well.
But as scholars have pointed out, their Ein Deutschung process, the process of Germanization, is very different than Western colonialism.
And this is not to defend in any way Western colonialism.
It was bad enough in its own way.
But typically with Western colonialism, it is not Inherently genocidal.
Certainly, genocidal episodes break out from time to time in the history of Western colonialism.
But the project itself, in many cases, did not seek to evict or exterminate the indigenous peoples.
Sometimes it had that effect, and sometimes there were genocidal massacres.
But at its core, Western colonialism was not committed to that particular project.
Of course, Nazi Germanization entailed Extermination, expulsion, enslavement as a natural part of this process.
They didn't want, they don't have really a civilizing mission in the sense in which the French, for example, talk about a civilizing mission.
No, the Germans want to replace these individuals.
Yeah, can I just jump in with a quote that I think is perfect, just to back up what you're saying here.
So we have the ideology, the theoretical underpinnings, and then we have a quote from a guy called Hans Frank, who's a high-ranking Nazi official and lawyer, and he becomes chief administrator of central and southern eastern parts of Poland.
And he sends this memo to the High Commander of the Armed Forces of the Wehrmacht on October the 3rd, 1939.
So this is... so remember the war started on September the 1st, so they haven't even fully conquered Poland yet.
But this is apparently what they're saying behind the scenes is that Poland can only be administered by utilizing the country through the means of ruthless exploitation, deportation of all supplies, raw materials, machines, factory installations, which were important for the German war economy.
Poland shall be treated as a colony.
The Poles shall be the slaves of the greater German world empire.
And this reminded me exactly of a concept that you use, Brett, a transfer of resources frontier.
And there's that quote, if I'm right, perfectly conceptualizes that concept that you've used.
Perfect.
So let me just introduce the ideas so we can lean on it.
The idea is that all creatures, this has nothing to do with humans, all creatures are in an evolutionary search for frontiers.
Before you have a frontier, a population reaches some level, carrying capacity, and then it hovers there.
So an individual tends to replace itself in the next generation, but no better.
If you find a frontier, let's say that you discover a new landmass, well then your evolutionary success could go up by a thousand times.
You could create a whole new population, and so evolutionarily that's a major success.
But there's only so much land to be discovered, and so the argument that Heather and I deploy in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century is that There are multiple kinds of frontiers that produce the same effect.
You can discover new land, that's the obvious one.
You can discover a new technology, and a new technology functions as if you've discovered new land.
So, for example, if you have hunter-gatherers living on a landmass, they may have a population, you know, that is a tenth what it might be if they embraced farming.
They discover farming and then suddenly the population increases because the same amount of land can simply feed more people.
And the problem is that the technological discovery of new frontier-like phenomena is it proceeds in fits and starts.
And the problem is if you have a population that is addicted to growth because growth feels good when there's more habitat, when there's more resource than the population in question,
Can utilize times are good and so populations get addicted to that feeling of growth and then when they bump up against the carrying capacity There's a search for what's next and if there's no technological mechanism for making times good again What they do is they create a frontier where there is none by looking for populations that can't defend resources that they have So when they make war on a neighbor, it's war.
When they do so within their own borders, it's genocide.
But it's the same process.
It's the search for illegitimate growth generated by theft, a transfer of resources from one population to another.
And ultimately, that is probably the the most it's the bedrock mechanism here in what we are describing.
It's one population looking at the vulnerability of neighboring populations, looking at the vulnerability of the diaspora of Jews, and seeing the opportunity to create growth for themselves by overriding the rights of these people and exploiting them or killing them.
And that term, would you say, is synonymous with the term niche theft?
Yeah, it's one and the same.
Yeah, and so I do want to move on from Germanization eventually, but I think there's a couple of important things to say about this, and this will tie in perfectly to what you've just said.
So if we think about the ideology and the racist doctrine of the Nazis, The Jews, as everybody knows, stand at the top of this pyramid of racial enemies, of dangerous racial adversaries.
That should sound familiar to everybody.
It's not just that the Nazis are saying that Jewish blood is like metaphorically some kind of threat.
They are saying that, literally, if you cut a Jew open, what bleeds out of them, that substance, is dangerous.
And if it somehow, like, bled into a German, this is the logic that they're putting forward.
They're also saying that the First World War was lost to a fifth column element that was heavily, heavily influenced by the Jews, and that also it's the Jews' fault that these wars are going on in the first place.
The First World War, the Second World War, it's Jewish fifth columnists and Jews around the world pulling the strings behind this.
So not only are Jews dangerous in a biological sense, But they also have the power to unleash and decide world wars.
And Himmler says in a famous speech, it was given in a place in Poland called Poznan, and this is made in April 1943, when most Jews had already been murdered in the Holocaust.
And he starts this paragraph by saying, Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are a thousand.
And then he goes on to say, because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city.
What with the bombings and the burden and with the hardships of war, if the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive at the state we were in 1916 and 1917.
So this is like pure ideology and pure justification.
This isn't policy whatsoever.
This is said to an audience of people who all have blood on their hands, have all murdered, some of them, like he says, some of them have seen these mass burial pits, all of them have been implicated, and this is the justification, this is the ideology.
So what we would expect from a person like this Or from a regime like this, if they were single-mindedly following their ideology here, this racist doctrine that the Jews are kind of inferior, but almost like powerful and superior.
When the German borders shift to encompass Western Poland, then the first order of business should be getting the most dangerous people, which would be the Jews.
But the first order of business is what's called the Einsatz Aktion.
And this is an assault on the so-called intelligentsia of Poland.
So they're targeting, it's not like the Jews are completely left alone, but they're arbitrarily murdered during this period as well.
But the first order of business is to murder intelligentsia or the intellectual elite.
So this is educators, this is politicians, writers, journalists of Polish origin.
Erm, and...
They have started compiling a list of these people in the two years leading up to war.
And when the war is unleashed, they start murdering these people.
That's their primary objective.
And the kicker here is that according to Nazi racist ideology, the people most likely to be a valuable racial stock are the leaders of Polish society.
Because if you're a leader, then that kind of goes against what they call Slavonic fatalism.
So they are murdering the people first that are most likely to be a valuable racist racial stock.
So you can see that complete contradiction of, well, first of all, the programmatic nature of this is very clear.
It has an evolutionary logic to it.
OK, who's the most threatening?
Who's going to be the people that may prevent or foment resistance to this transfer of resource frontier that we're establishing?
But also the fact that, according to Nazi racial doctrine, these people, because they're leaders, are most likely to be in that 10% of valuable racist stock.
And then if somebody does resist Germanization, if they go up to someone and say, okay, you're actually a German and they resist, they'll be executed as well.
So the principles of racism are not present in this initial murder campaign.
So yes, if this was an irrational racist mania, you would expect one set of behaviors, and in fact what you see, and I know because I know all of the stuff that you explored in your dissertation, all of the other examples that just don't match that, they match a ruthless pragmatism that even causes them to violate fundamental racist doctrines when it serves them to do so.
Yeah, and just that aspect of it, that holding active leadership is an Aryan trait.
So who are you going to kill first?
What the people most aligned to you, racially, are going to be the first people.
And then what about the Jews?
Obviously they're being arbitrarily murdered, but there's no policy here.
And there's There's the aim to deport people out of this, like the map that we discussed showed.
So deport the population out and then repatriate so-called ethnic Germans in.
And what you see in these first deportations is that Jews are essentially left alone.
And who they target is unsurprisingly, after what we've been talking about, are Poles with attractive farms.
So they're going to be the first people targeted.
So what is now Germany?
And it's the beginning of a world war.
Jews are essentially left alone.
In these first deportations, the very first, they make one-eighth of the deportation population and they're essentially left alone in terms of the systemised persecution of them in what is now Germany.
If you compare that to what him was saying about why the First World War was lost, or if you go back and listen to these race ideologues during the Nuremberg Laws, these notions of blood treason and race defilement, and who should be the primary target, it completely contradicts that.
Yes.
Just to re-emphasize the point, if you imagine that what's driving is an underlying evolutionary logic to expand a lineage, then this isn't a contradiction.
If you imagine that this is driven by irrational racism, then it is one.
And so, we should always look for the explanation that does not create paradoxes.
And in this case, the lesson again and again is That imagining that this is an abhorrent but adaptive set of behaviors succeeds in not only explaining the behavior we see, but predicting it.
This is exactly what you would expect.
If we could go back to the beginning of war, on September the 1st 1939, and we were tasked with, say we didn't know everything that we've just spoken about, we said okay we've got to predict the behavior of the Nazis in this territory that we're about to take over, and then you've got somebody that's coming with the understanding that we've spoken about, the Nazi
period it was a race racist endeavor and you can understand this through the paradigm of race and then you've got an evolutionary biologist and ecologist looking at this who's going to be better in predicting what they're going to do next yeah i think it's i think it's clear as long as we are liberated to use the toolkit and you know the irony is that of course when one attempts to raise this in evolutionary circles
There's every bit as much trepidation as one gets trying to raise this in historical circles or in perpetrator studies.
And I hope that people who are listening this far into the conversation are beginning to see why that is likely to be an obstacle to preventing future genocides and wars, and why it is not only valuable that we explore this, but necessary.
The important thing is that we do it well, that we don't allow ourselves to talk ourselves into an interpretation that isn't right.
But to the extent that this interpretation is clearly a natural fit, that's telling us something.
And Michael, I know that you were reading Patrick Montague's book on Chelmno recently, and I think the last thing to say on Germanisation, because there's other stuff I want to get onto too, is that one of the first order of businesses for the SS was to murder ostensibly disabled Poles in psychiatric institutions in this newly conquered territory.
Now the euthanasia program, the so-called, which needs to be used in inverted commas because it was just a form of murder.
Scholars had said, Henry Friedlander is probably the most prominent, that there was an underlying racist logic behind the murder of disabled people and he's written one of the most famous books on Nazi euthanasia.
But when you think about why they would go into Polish psychiatric institutions, and one of the first things is that they're murdering... There's going to be no threat of these people having children with ethnically German women.
And what's your opinion on that?
Yeah, I know the Friedlander book, of course, it's the Origins of Nazi Genocide.
It's really a keystone work.
And I disagree with Henry's take here on On T4, as it's also called, I prefer calling it T4 than euthanasia, but I think it was driven really by crass utilitarian sorts of considerations.
The phrase that Brad and you have used, was it transfer, resource transfer, is how I, from day one, when I began working on this in my dissertation back in 1999, I came to that recognition.
I thought of Nazi anti-Semitism as being something separate from the campaign against the mentally disabled.
I really looked upon the mentally disabled mass murder through T4 as being driven by a desire to To save resources.
And it's a resource scarcity mentality that really goes back to World War I. And there's a longer history here that we probably don't have time to get into, but it has a lot to do with the privations of World War I and the resentment in professional circles of the mentally handicapped for supposedly absorbing scarce resources at a time when resources were needed to defend the fatherland from its enemies.
Yeah, well there's a research project that began, if we're talking about the substantive evidence to back up what you're saying, there's a research program that began in the early 2000s, led by a medical historian called Mike Arazzo.
And she was given access to a massive cache of documents that became available.
So it was about 30,000 or so victim files of T4 gas chambers from January 1940 to August 1941.
And they were, this is obviously tied in to the fall of communism, The fact that these documents became available and they were found in the Ministry of State Security in Berlin.
And what that team did is they painstakingly looked through these documents and they compared who survived and who was murdered.
Now the T4 program ended around August 1941 because the German people, it's often said that the German churches put an end to this.
There were a few sermons from German Protestants saying this is disgraceful.
In the end there were six sites in Germany, one in Austria, that there were active gas chambers and this is in some ways as a precursor to the Holocaust in one sense because of the technology was moved across.
And what they found, and they were surprised by this, is that so-called ability to work was an overwhelming determiner in who was chosen to be murdered or not.
And one case study within this is an asylum in Uxbring.
And there were 1,800 patients that were transported to T4 gas chambers from this institution.
And they said that 70% of the victims were classified as unable to learn.
Amongst the survivors, only 5% were classified as unable to learn.
And this is really indicative of the other sites where this happened.
This was the common theme that they found.
They found that The fundamental difference between the two groups was that the victim group, 54%, did not work at all, half of them because they were children.
In the survivor group, by contrast, all adults worked, only two children, 4% of the entire group, did not work.
And this is what you see repeated again and again and again.
And I watched a presentation recently from some peers of mine, some educators, some teachers, and in no way or in no point was utilitarian logic expressed in their presentation.
It was all about race theoretical thinking and the underlying aspects of racism.
And none of this was mentioned whatsoever.
And I, just whilst we're on this topic...
I sent you a picture of, because we're talking about quite broad patterns and quite broad theoretical implications, I sometimes feel that it's necessary for us to focus in on individual cases, and I'd like to do two of them now.
And whilst we're talking about euthanasia, if you see I sent you that picture of Gunther, He was a so-called research child at a euthanasia institute and he was sent to Heidelberg University.
We could talk about this for the entirety of the time we've got.
The massive scandal of the medical establishment in Germany Major, major medical establishments did the most horrendous things during the Nazi period.
There were two children.
There was Gunther, who you can see in the photo, and there was his older brother, Walter, who were received as research children.
And there's a famous Nazi perpetrator called Karl Schneider, and he subjected these boys to a variety of different tests, and one of them was work therapy.
And they observed these two children, and they said about Walter, That he acts quite dexterously and is industrious and enthusiastic.
So that is the older child and he seems to be better at these tasks.
They are given a task of tying a bundle with their hands and then with a machine.
And then Gunther, the boy from the photograph, on the other hand, can only barely tie the bundle by hand.
With the machine he's only able to crank it and the older brother survives and Gunther is murdered at a place called Eichberg by lethal injection right at the end of the war on the 28th of December.
Now this is only an individual case but this is the This is the human example of these broader patterns that we can see.
And if we're talking about Germanization as well, on the ground, this selection of who was supposedly German or Aryan or not, and the illogical nature of it, there's a case of two sisters that both applied to be workers in Germany.
And one of them is refused German nationality and the other one, although they're sisters, is granted German nationality.
Based on how she looks, but nevertheless, they both go to Germany and they're working as maid servants in Germany.
Now, the woman is not granted German, it's not nationality, it's like a racial distinction.
An SS man gets her pregnant.
She has a child with this SS man.
So, she is still Racially a Pole, her sister is a German and the child is also classified as German.
So she is now a different racial distinction between her sister and now her child and can have contact with neither of them.
So when we're talking about these broader patterns and the illogical nature of them, you can also see in countless examples on the ground as well.
Yeah, and as all of your examples are, it is perfectly easily explained as a matter of pragmatism at a lineage level.
It is effectively impossible to reconcile to some simplistic racist notion that we are supposed to imagine has simply overtaken the Nazis.
Yeah, and I think if we can talk about two more topics that are important, one of which is forced labour.
I know me and you have talked about forced labour quite a bit, Brett, because there's a horrifying rationality behind forced labour during the Holocaust, and a lot of victims were kept alive and they weren't murdered, so they could be used as slaves.
And at its zenith, forced labor was something that the Nazis always introduced in the territories that they either occupied or annexed.
And at its zenith, about a million Jewish people were being used as slave laborers across Europe.
And they're being kept alive.
In some cases they're being moved from forced labor camp to forced labor camp.
And it would be also The people that you would assume, if you're thinking about this from Nazi racial doctrine, it's the strongest people, the people that are most likely to foment some kind of resistance to the Nazi.
to the Nazi system that are kept alive and then it's the people less valuable in terms of slave labor that are killed.
So children are murdered and the strongest people are kept alive.
Yeah, this is one of the things that struck me all those years ago when I was doing my initial exploration of this topic was Slave labor doesn't quite capture what's going on here.
It's a question of taking people who are physically capable of assisting the Nazis, forcing them into a position to do it, and then effectively Utilizing the energy that remains stored on them and, you know, driving them to a slow death.
So these things are so horrifying that it's hard to even keep them in the mind.
But if you think about this in Darwinian terms, carrying capacity is a matter of how many resources a given landmass can, how many people it can support, how many resources it produces, and to the extent that the resources that have been consumed are physically stored on people, that there's this way that the Nazis are burning those resources off and using it to fuel the Nazi war machine.
And again, that does not sound like madness.
It sounds diabolical, but at an energetic level, It is not, we are fools to pretend it can't be understood.
I'm actually working with a survivor who seems to think that the Nazis put quite a lot of effort into calculating just how many calories could keep their slave laborers alive.
Obviously, many, many people died of starvation and of exhaustion whilst they were being used as slaves, but there was a thought behind, okay, we can just scrape by by giving them this amount of calories and you're not spending much on a watery broth that has potato peels at the bottom of it, but you're trying to make this as economic, like you have no human decency or compassion whatsoever.
And you're trying to get the maximum amount of return as you possibly can economically.
And also, if you undefeat people, then there's going to be less chance that they try and resist or run away or form any kind of resistance.
So you give people like maybe a piece of bread that's got like sawdust in it and some substance that you call coffee which is just like murky water and then maybe some broth and they have just enough energy to go out and these people were um contracted out to private enterprises as well like siemens go go onto the siemens website now and type in forced labor i'd encourage your you know the listeners now to go and do that
it's fascinating how they make these apologies and i don't think very well um but the the value of their labor compared to the cost of the calories that is being put in it's incredibly lucrative incredibly profitable to like keep these people alive and use them as slaves
But if we're talking about a single-minded pursuit of ideological racism, I don't know how forced labour really makes sense, because especially when we're talking about the forced labourers that were kept alive in Germany, Berlin.
Hitler and Goebbels said the first place that has to be Judenfrei, free of Jews, is Berlin.
However, in practice, they're bringing Jewish forced labourers into Berlin all the way through the beginning of the Holocaust.
So whilst the Holocaust is raging in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, The number of Jewish forced laborers in Berlin is at an all-time high, and they don't actually remove Jewish forced laborers from the German capital until 1943.
And this is, remember, in ideological terms, this is what's actually happening, this is behavior, this is what the Nazis are actually doing.
But in ideological terms, Hitler refers to Jews as the racial tuberculosis of the nation.
So you can see again what were this mismatch between the noise that the Nazis are making and then what they're actually doing.
Hey Johnny, there was an official within the Reich's Ministry for the Occupied Territories, it was under Alfred Rosenberg, The official was named, I think it was Schubert.
I'm blanking on his first name.
It might have been Hans.
His last name was Schubert.
Very high-ranking official, and he actually wrote a memorandum, and we still have access to this memorandum today, in which he basically pointed out the fundamental contradiction within the Nazis' own ideological premises.
In which they talk about racism and yet at the same time they cannot do without this reservoir of labor provided by these, by the Untermenschen, right?
By the supposed racial inferiors.
And his point is that if you, you couldn't have it both ways.
You couldn't have a racially homogeneous, you know, German state that was purged away from all of its supposed racial contaminants.
On the one hand, And have a functioning society on the other.
You had to choose one or the other.
You couldn't have both of them.
And I think the Nazis came to appreciate that contradiction over time.
Actually, Johnny, I don't want to upend your flow, but I know there are a couple other examples that make this point just beautifully.
Should we move on to international cooperation?
Yeah, let's do that.
Yeah.
You've already mentioned the cooperation with the Japanese during World War II, which everybody knows about.
And I think I've had quite a lot of people say to me, like, how does that make sense?
And it's true, but we kind of leave it alone.
How does that make sense?
Because they're non-Europeans.
How can you square those circles?
And it's because the Japanese became geo-strategically important to them.
So then they were able to make terms up like Aryans of the East.
And there's this theoretical maneuvering, there's this malleability to Nazi racial doctrine, which is one of its greatest strengths.
So we can just make it up as we go along.
You know, there's obvious contradictions, and you can almost feel these race ideologues being presented with another challenge.
They're there, and then somebody says, OK, we've got to fit the Japanese into the system now, and they're like, oh, God, how are we going to do this?
OK, well, this is how.
They're busy at work thinking of the next fantasy that will allow them to just do whatever they want at any given moment.
Conveniently, on the day that Germany declared war on the US, Hitler says that the Japanese...
So he has never regarded the Japanese as inferior to ourselves.
They belong to ancient civilizations and I admit freely their past history is superior to our own.
And I just thought that that was quite poignant because it was on the 13th of December 1941 that that statement would come along at the exact time that that geostrategic partnership was valuable.
And if you think about what the evolutionary logic predicts here, the European Jews are surely much more closely related to the Aryans than are the Japanese, but the Japanese are geographically remote.
So from the point of view of this lineage expanding over uh land masses the idea is actually the cost of partnering with the japanese is low even though they are genetically remote because the land masses that are targeted by the aryans it's going to be a long time before they get to japan
so um the logic is pretty clear and it results in uh the you know paradoxical statement by hitler um that clearly doesn't you know does not reflect a racism against the japanese even though you would expect that if this was just some spasm of irrationality yeah Yeah, and I like the example as well, like when we're talking about international cooperation, there's like, it's like, take your pick.
There's so many different examples you could use, but a quite topical one is Mohammed Amin Haji Al-Husseini, who Well, he was a Palestinian nationalist and fancied himself as a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic leader.
Actually, many of the things that you can hear being screamed at university campuses in America and England now actually come straight from the ideology that he fomented in the 1920s.
This idea that Arab states should become involved in the local conflict between Zionists and Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine at the time was something that he really campaigned on and he was very successful on.
This idea that there's a Zionist entity.
He said that the Israeli flag, this is after the establishment of the Strait of Israel, he said that the two blue lines are the Euphrates and the Nile.
So this idea of this malevolent Zionist entity that is trying to overtake, trying to take over the world really started with Al Husseini and many of the ideas of, well, most of the ideas of the PLO at the moment, trying to take over the world, really started with al-Husseini.
And many of the ideas, well, most of the ideas of the PLO at the moment, you can find their root in this man, this religious and political leader that started his career in the 1920s as a very young man.
And he had like a 60-year political career.
He fled from place to place, mainly because of his opposition to the British.
And during World War II, he became valuable to the Nazis because of the influence they had in the Muslim world.
So he himself said, I've got influence over 400 million Muslims.
And Hitler had said, awkwardly, in 1937, that Arabs are, quote, half apes who ought to be whipped.
However, when this guy becomes geostrategically useful, As lineage selection would predict, there's an ideological shift to try and incorporate this guy within the racist doctrine of the Nazis.
So they did it before with the Japanese.
How are they going to do it now with al-Husseini?
And what they do is they send him to a race assessor.
So there's a physician called... By this time, al-Husseini has fled to Germany.
He's tried to foment an anti-British revolt in Iraq in 1941.
He's proclaimed jihad on the British and now he's fled to Italy and then to Germany.
And requested a meeting with Himmler and Hitler.
Well, Hitler first, and then he met with Himmler several times.
But what they did early on to try and fit him into this racist doctrine of theirs was get him racially assessed.
And it is as absurd as you might be thinking.
So a physician called Dr. Pierre Trumpf gives this guy a physical examination for six hours.
To try and find some reason.
So you can imagine these race assessors have just been told, right, OK, so that thing you did with the Japanese, can you now do it with the Arabs?
It's like, yeah, get Dr. Shrumpf in.
I'm sure he'll find out a way.
So after a six hour examination, The doctor concluded that Al Husseini was no mere Arab, but a Circassian, thus a Caucasian, and hence an Aryan.
And how he got to this justification was that an Arab could never have kept up the battle against the British and Jews, but would have sold out to them.
Al Hussein's steadfastness proved he was an Aryan, and since he was an Aryan, he would be a faithful ally for Nazi Germany.
Well, that's convenient, isn't it?
I mean, it's preposterous.
I must say, of all of the things that you brought to my attention, in some ways this is the most poignant of them, because the absurdity of it is so obvious that it
It effectively mocks anybody who wants to chalk the entire episode up to a spasm of racism, because obviously the point is they're willing to suspend any level of racism for pragmatism, and the question is, well, what are they being pragmatic about?
What is really driving it?
You've got pictures of Al Husseini, he meets with Himmler, Several times.
And there's this picture that they both have after this dinner and it's gifted to Al Husseini.
Himmler's wrote something nice on the back of it.
You can just imagine this dinner that they're having.
Himmler's sat there with Al Husseini.
Is he not thinking, What am I doing sat here with Al Husseini?
According to his beliefs, how can you make that fit?
But they did somewhere because it was important to them.
And Al Husseini goes on to do absolutely dreadful things during World War II.
He's convinced that if Jewish people are released from countries like Hungary that they'll eventually make their way to Palestine.
So he blocks the release of Jewish people into any territory apart from Poland.
He's saying, oh, and he knows about the Holocaust.
This is like 1944.
This is July 1944 when he does this to the Hungarian Jews.
And he's known for over a year what's happening to the Jews of Europe.
So he's saying, well, maybe just Maybe traffic them into Poland.
So he's leading them straight to their deaths.
And he releases a message in 1944 that says, Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights.
Kill the Jews wherever you find them.
This pleases God, history and religion.
This saves your honor.
God is with you.
And he also helps to establish a Waffen-SS, majority Muslim, um like balkan muslim division during world war ii and he's releasing constant releasing propaganda messages as well so you can and there's that shared enmity between the british and the zionists that is obviously behind that partnership and then one final one
uh is the the jewish fins that i know we've spoken about brett before yeah let's talk about the jewish fins so there were a couple of conflicts during world war ii the The first one was called the Winter War and this was essentially when the Soviet Union tried to invade Finland and this ended with Finland having to cede about 9% of its territory.
And then when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Finland collaborated with the Nazis mainly to try and get these areas that they'd ceded back.
Now in Finland, Jews had equal civil rights and they were represented in the military.
So what you have is Nazis, the Wehrmacht but also the Waffen-SS, fighting alongside Finnish Jews and you would have thought from a race theoretical perspective there's Pretty much no more egregious violation of Nazi racial doctrine that you could think of than being brother in arms with Jewish people.
But they were, and there's instances, there's quite a lot of testimony of some of the Finnish Jews.
The Nazis did try and persuade the Finnish government to deport their Jews on a couple of occasions.
Himmler even went there in 1942 and the Finnish government said no.
There was only a small number of Jews, we're talking about 2,000.
There were some German and Austrian refugees, and the Finnish government, they did agree to deport eight Austrian refugee Jews, of which only one survived.
And interestingly, even up until the year 2000, the Finnish government was apologizing for the deportation of these seven Jews.
It's quite interesting.
Just to think about the difference in Finnish society to like the rest of Europe really.
But they were fighting side by side and there was actually even three Jews that were awarded the Iron Cross.
There's a guy called Captain Salman Klass who led a Finnish unit that rescued a German unit that was under bombardment of the Soviets and completely rescued that unit.
There was a woman who was also awarded the Iron Cross called Dina Polyakov, who was a nursing assistant who behaved in an exemplary way and apparently saved many German lives, and she was awarded the Iron Cross.
And then there's a guy called Captain Leo Skernick, And he was in the medical corps and he evacuated a field hospital that had 600 German Wehrmacht, but also Waffen SS soldiers in it.
So he was awarded the Iron Cross.
None of these Finnish Jews actually accepted this honor.
And to add a little bit of humor into what's not normally a very humorous topic, Leo Skernick said, my good friend, do you think I can take that kind of decoration?
Tell your German colleagues that I wipe my ass with it.
They were brothers in arms.
And there's another guy called Leo Jacobson who says, and remember this thing that I said about the Jews being the supposed fifth element that have the power to unleash and decide world wars.
He said, He said that through my hands passed top secret documents which I stored away in the safe.
So there's, on every kind of measure that you could imagine, there's collaboration and These people are fighting tooth and nail, and their brother's in arms, and they're being awarded.
Most people would be surprised by this, because they've been taught what we've all been taught, and what I used to teach as a teacher, that you understand the Nazi system through race, through racism.
But if you start to think of it in the way that we've been proposing, this actually makes sense.
This is a form of mutualism.
Yeah, 100%.
And in fact, you would expect the kinds of highly unusual circumstances that occur in war would create this sort of phenomenon where people who were fighting and the way in which they were fighting is affecting their likelihood of surviving the conflict.
Would find common cause across lines that you would imagine they would be unable to bridge.
I mean in fact Obviously in some sense.
This is what explains the alignment in the Allied powers between the US and the Soviets right a seemingly unbridgeable gap that is temporarily bridged because of the necessity to do so and We understand that alliance perfectly well, right?
We talk about it in terms of, you know, this greater evil that needed to be defeated.
But I find the story of the Jewish Finns remarkable because it is both intuitive and so little known, right?
Isn't it interesting that this is not a famous fact of history?
Well, the Finns aren't too interested in shouting this from the rooftops.
Well, I'm glad that you've surfaced it, though, because it really does crystallize the challenge that exists for us to understand this, not in cartoonish terms that make us feel better, but in realistic terms that allow us to understand what it's really made of and how we might prevent it in the future, because that really is the ultimate question.
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of when you see those pictures of there's a crocodile and then the birds are cleaning the teeth of the crocodile, although that's interspecific and not intraspecific like this one.
No, I think the analogy is exactly right, and I've never quite been sure why we draw the important distinction between inter- and intra-specific mutualism that we do, because it's the same logic that explains it.
As a final example then, before we conclude, a really poignant but incredibly dark and repellent aspect of the Holocaust is the sexual behaviour of the German Wehrmacht but also SS during World War II.
I think this is an important example to include because it's so misunderstood even by leading Holocaust scholars who seem to believe that Nazi racist doctrine was so powerful
that the Wehrmacht and SS practiced a kind of self-restraint when it came to their sexual interactions with so-called racially incompatible people.
And I'm kind of interested to speak to Michael about what is your understanding about how the Nazis behaved in this realm during World War II?
MICHAEL GERMAN: Yeah.
They behaved the way that you would expect them to behave.
I mean, they had rules.
Of course, the Nuremberg rules were extended to occupied Europe, as you know.
So in theory, they were not supposed to have sexual relations with the inferior races, certainly not with Jews.
And they weren't supposed to have them with Poles either.
But as we know, that was not That was not followed.
I mean, it was that rule was uttered in the breach more than anything else.
I mean, they had brothels that they that they that they consorted with or had truck with.
You mentioned the book by Montague a little earlier on Kelmno.
And he actually talks about the extent to which at the Kelmno death camp, there was a There were efforts to bring both Jewish and Polish women into the mansion that was used for the murder of the Jews of the Wartegau.
And then many of these women were ultimately killed later, especially the Jewish women.
But nonetheless, their Jewishness certainly did not prevent even the killers working in the death camps from having sexual relations with them.
Yeah.
You know, it's good to hear a historian of the Holocaust and the Nazi period realize that because I've, you know, a major Holocaust historian who I won't mention but has got a complete misunderstanding of this and thinks that Jewish women who felt that they might be sexually violated when they were sent to the East, they had a complete misunderstanding of the Nazi system.
So they were essentially not going to be violated in a sexual way.
But I think it's that historian that completely misunderstands the Nazi system as being too taken by this racial paradigm that we're talking about.
So the Wehrmacht judges during World War II conducted investigations on the behavior of their troops.
And one interesting thing is that comparatively, light sentences are given, like, if a sentence is given at all.
One is to troops that have violated the racial code in the East rather than the West.
But in the West, These people, according to Nazi racial doctrine, are less racially threatening, but you get harsher punishment in the East.
And then what they find is that the prevalence of contact or sexual violence is such That instead of punishing their troops, they set up so-called hygiene facilities where German troops can disinfect their genitals after contact with so-called members of an alien race.
So that's like Poles, Soviets, but also including Jews as well.
And then to, and Michael just referenced this as well, and then to try and control this in March 1942, the Army High Command sets up mandated, medically monitored brothels
And these, obviously, the forced prostitution that's going on in these brothels, they're not going to Germany and taking people that are of comparable racial stock, so to say.
It's just like local women, Jews, are just brought into this.
So, again, it's just a complete contradiction of Nazi racial doctrine.
You would have thought, even after all the examples that I've already given, this should be such an egregious, this should be such a dangerous practice.
If you're going by the letter of the law and you're a true believer, a fanatical Nazi, This is an incredibly dangerous thing to do because the term is miscegenation and blood treason and blood defilement.
These are all well-established terms since the Nuremberg laws in 1935.
So this is the Wehrmacht, but what you would expect, like this is the Wehrmacht, okay, so they're not so highly indoctrinated.
What you would expect, viewing the Nazi system and the Nazi period through an orthodox lens, is that the SS, these highly indoctrinated soldiers, Would even find the very idea of having sexual contact with a racial alien, they would find that repellent.
They wouldn't even need to practice restraint in that situation.
But again, what we see is that senior judges of the SS and police courts in Poland and the so-called occupied eastern territories investigated the issue of undesirable sexual intercourse.
In a meeting in May 1943, so nearly two years into the occupation of the Soviet Union, and what they find was they estimate that at least 50% of the SS have breached the so-called ban on undesirable sexual intercourse with ethnically alien women.
This is including Jews, of course.
So what they do to address what should be the most egregious egregious violation of their ideological system is they go to him and they suggest that he should repeal the ban because this is too many people to punish this
um and you've got all of you've got many many uh witness testimony of like michael said what the ss would do and this would be in concentration camps it would be even in killing centers uh if we
If they were stationed somewhere in a killing field, they would take Jewish women, they would impregnate them, and then they would have them killed, or they would kill them themselves.
And it, again, is another example.
When you cross-reference it with everything else that we've spoken about, it again makes that point.
They're acting like Darwinian creatures and like we would expect them to act.
And the fact that they're SS and supposedly highly indoctrinated and whatever that means, it's not influencing their behavior.
In any way that we wouldn't predict as people that are viewing this through an evolutionary lens.
Yeah, it's... I think one of the things that obscures this Is that we don't really talk about the profound and pervasive dishonesty of the Nazis, because frankly, on the list of crimes being dishonest doesn't even rank.
But there was an awful lot of dishonesty about what they were doing, right down to what they planned to do.
Um, to obscure their crimes from the world, which largely was unsuccessful because they were overrun too quickly at the end.
So we do have a tremendous amount of evidence about what they did, but not because they were comfortable with it.
Um, but in any case, one of the things that I, in hearing you speak about it, Johnny, I'm just struck by the fact that one of the things that the Nazis were clearly dishonest about was their own racism, which existed.
But as you point out, to the extent that their rhetoric about inferior people was really a match for their beliefs, then, uh,
raping Jewish women would have been akin to bestiality and yet that's not how they behaved because they didn't believe it themselves and maybe if we if we thought in terms of not taking every appalling utterance as a reflection of their their actual underlying belief system, we would see this more clearly.
Sometimes when they said vile things, they were lying.
And that's confusing to somebody who wants to just simply see it as a direct report from their inner beings.
But, you know, of course they were lying.
Yeah, I think you make an interesting point.
Because one thing that me and you have been careful to say, because we know the kind of reaction that this conversation might have is immoral but not illogical.
And I think that kind of crystallizes the take that we have on this.
And that's immoral from where we're sitting.
Obviously, this is immoral.
It's disgusting.
It's horrendous.
It's appalling.
We want to stop it.
That's why we're having this conversation.
But their behavior is also immoral from where they're standing as well, which is a little bit confusing, but it is.
According to the principles, the morality that they've set forth, that they've established, their behavior even violates their own morals.
It does and I think actually this is another place where it's important to think in terms of lineage because lineage is a very long-term phenomenon and so the way if I step back from this entire picture I understand that these were people involved in the most despicable crimes imaginable But even in their own minds, this is a finite process.
They are hoping to steal all of this territory, to displace the people who held it, and then to go back to living as if it never happened.
And so, you know, in some sense, yes, they are in deep violation, even of their own moral standards, as best as we can understand them.
But they are taking a temporary detour.
And, you know, if that sounds like excuse making, It's not.
This is the opposite.
This is a very human thing to do.
And this is exactly why we have to understand what it is if we are to prevent it.
This is, you know, human beings often depart from their own moral standards temporarily because something is too irresistible for them to stop themselves.
So if you don't want more of this behavior, you know, in many ways the Nazis, um, I don't know exactly why their uniquely German obsession with documenting things, that they couldn't suspend that.
You know, there's an awful lot of material that we have because they were meticulous about keeping track.
But it does allow us to map their genocide better than we can similar episodes, and In so doing, we can understand what the thought process looks like instantaneously.
And to imagine that this is who they planned to be forever, I think, provides us too much comfort.
Right?
This is something that they did temporarily and they intended to move beyond it and to deny that it ever happened.
And maybe that's another thing that we have to mention is that denialism was built into their program from the get-go.
Yeah.
And in order to understand what they were trying to do, and I think Germanization is a key term, because in Holocaust historiography and understanding of the Nazi period from 1939 to 1945, there's three competing concepts.
There's World War II, there's Germanization, and then there's the Holocaust.
Maybe World War II is a broad concept, and then there's Germanization and the Holocaust.
And I see the Holocaust as a part of Germanization, and that would take another podcast.
I'd be happy to talk about why I think that.
But part of Germanization was a scheme that we haven't really touched upon called General Pan Ost, and Michael will know what I'm talking about now.
And the Nazis predicted in the Soviet sphere that in the next 10 to 20 years, 10 or like 20 to 30 million Soviets would starve to death to free up those resources. 10 or like 20 to 30 million Soviets would starve And then those people would be replaced by German settlers who, like with that Himmler quote, would have many, many children.
And if you understand the potential payoff of what Hitler was trying to achieve, it seems less of a gamble.
Johnny, you refer to General Plan East.
One of the reasons why...
It's something that's obviously known among the Conocenti, the people who do this for a living, are certainly aware of it, but I think the general public probably doesn't know much about it, in part because the documentation really didn't survive.
Brett, you're 100% right that the Nazis were meticulous record keepers, but they were also involved in burning records at the end of the war, and they burned millions of documents, and they burned, we believe, almost all of the copies of the documentation.
related to General Plan East.
Most of what we know about the plan was reconstructed after the war, based on testimony by people who were involved in the planning circles of the SS.
And there were some other documents, too, that referred to General Plan East that did survive the end of the war.
But it was a calculated plan, like Johnny said, to eventually seize the resources, especially the foodstuffs in Eastern Europe, appropriate that to the Germans and to consign to starvation, then as many as 30 million, perhaps more of the native population of that area.
Wow.
That's, I mean, it is of course exactly as you would predict if you look at this in Darwinian terms.
I think the contrast between meticulous record keepers and ambitious record burners also fits this as well.
Right?
This was not a haphazard operation at all, but it wasn't something that they intended to champion in its aftermath.
So, if we're thinking about The potential benefits of thinking about this way, about the Nazi period, the impact that it might have on perpetrator studies, Holocaust studies, but also beyond as well.
What are you thinking, Michael, about the possible applications of thinking about this way, about the Nazi period?
We talked a little bit about this during your defense of your dissertation.
I mean, for me, this perspective is pretty fresh.
I mean, there's very little in Holocaust studies, at least from what I can tell, that has really, in recent decades, has really revolutionized the field.
There have been certain developments that have been really consequential.
I think Chris Browning's work You know, looking at the ordinary perpetrators has been, you know, it was obviously really transformative.
And there have been various phases of research that have been significant within the field.
But I look at this as being an entirely different way to think about the Holocaust, by looking at a different level.
And I just want to emphasize what Brett has already said, and that you've also indicated, Johnny.
That none of us is in any way denying the existence of racism within the Holocaust.
It's definitely there, right?
I mean, the racism is, without a question, a presence, a seminal, a powerful presence within Nazi policy.
But I think that what you are doing, Johnny, and what other evolutionary Scholars who are willing to apply this evolutionary lens are urging is that we try to understand this as being a product of universal processes that are bred into us genetically as a species.
I think this is a really important point, because if this is true, then the Holocaust is not this extraordinarily exotic, one-off event.
I remember years ago, one of the leading textbooks in German history back in the 1960s had a chapter on the Holocaust.
It was called, Germany Goes Berserk.
An event that is so exceptional that it could never happen again.
And it represents a complete break with all human behavior everywhere.
And Brett, as you've said, this is kind of a naive way of thinking about the Holocaust.
It's comforting to be able to distance ourselves from the lunatics who are going berserk and committing these terrible, terrible crimes.
But what Johnny is doing, and I think Brett, what you were doing also, was inviting us to look at this In a way that reveals a real capacity within us for extraordinarily destructive behavior.
And if we can understand the mechanisms of that, then we can take steps to try to prevent such events from happening in the future.
There are strategies, I think, that are entailed in this analysis that we might be able to adopt.
Well, if I can For my part, I will finish on an analogy which I know is profoundly uncomfortable, but I think entails many of the correct lessons here.
The relationship between rape and evolution is straightforward.
For many years, for decades, evolutionary biology Though I think every evolutionary biologist was aware of their relationship, did not talk about it because there was fear of being understood as justifying it.
But if we actually allow ourselves to look at the question, rape is a mechanism by which some individuals spread their genes.
It's an evolutionary adaptation.
Penalties that cause rape not to be productive are also an evolutionary strategy, and they are the reason that rape is relatively rare.
Without those prohibitions, it would be more common.
But more to the point, when rape is understood to be a rational but despicable act, Such that everyone is raised to understand how deeply wrong it is.
It actually creates the best obstacle to its spread that can exist, which is people find it abhorrent.
And when people find it abhorrent, in the case of rape, boys Are raised not to think of it as an option.
They're raised to think of it as disgusting.
And if you are raised to think of it as disgusting, that is a tremendous bar to engaging in it.
So the hope is that there is such a process here as well.
And that if we can, instead of pretending that genocide is madness, If we can understand that it is despicable but comprehensible, and that it is our obligation to make it disgusting so that it cannot arise when economic conditions or whatever else would set it in motion, then we can in fact prevent it.
And the point is we have to be good at that process.
We have to be better at it than we are at preventing rape, because rape is obviously not a non-issue.
It's just a greatly reduced issue because of the partial success we have had against it.
And in both cases, I would say, as much as it may seem counterintuitive, understanding the underlying logic is the key to making it extremely rare or nonexistent.
Brett, you can answer this question maybe better than anyone here.
Didn't Thomas Henry Huxley sort of address this issue that had been raised by the social Darwinists in the 1870s or 80s?
And didn't Huxley basically say that so much of human culture is is an effort to overcome a lot of our genetic baggage that might lead in these really destructive and inhumane directions.
So culture intervenes in order to create norms that deter us from going down this road and committing these acts, which, yeah, might have been at some point in our genetic history adaptive in a certain context, but are no longer adaptive.
They're maladaptive.
Well, I would rephrase that slightly.
And the problem with Huxley and Freud and many others who have dabbled in this area is that they didn't have a high enough quality evolutionary understanding, nobody did at the time, to phrase this properly.
And that we're beginning to get to a place where we can understand The evolutionary interaction of human culture with genes so that we can actually have something beyond a cartoonish understanding of these things.
But when you say that these things were adaptive and they are no longer adaptive, I would alter that.
I would say the key question as to whether or not we are going to see these patterns in the future or not is whether or not we can render them maladaptive.
To the extent that they may be obscured behind false stories of what causes them, then populations can still get ahead by engaging in them.
To the extent that what is actually unfolding is well understood and disincentivized, is penalized, then we can drive them from the face of the earth, which is what we morally are obligated to do.
So, shying away from it is exactly the wrong instinct, in my opinion.
It's a good argument for international law.
Absolutely.
And when it comes to wars of this nature and genocides of this nature and hybrids, as is the case with the Nazis, international understanding and cooperation to drive up the costs to any population that would behave this way is essential.
Yeah, and Michael, obviously, as you're a lawyer, there are teams, committees of people in very, very influential bodies internationally that sit around and talk about how can we prevent atrocities, crimes, how can we prevent genocides from happening.
And I bet, well I know, none of them are evolutionary biologists or ecologists.
But would you see a place for, like say we've got a team of people that are sat around talking about this, why not have an evolutionary biologist or an ecologist as part of one of those genocide prevention teams?
There would seem to be a natural implication if we were to take this approach seriously, the evolutionary approach seriously, and its application to atrocity, to genocide.
Yeah, I think so.
All right, well maybe that's the right place to end this discussion.
Go ahead, Johnny.
I'd just like to say that this is just kind of the beginning of the thesis that we've fleshed out.
There's a lot more to talk about when we're coming to this.
We haven't really even applied the evolutionary lens to the Holocaust or Treblinka as we did in the paper.
And if people are interested...
Then I'd love to be able to do that, because I've got all this archival research and all these conversations that me and you have had over the course of four years, and I'd love to be able to present this to the public, but I suppose it depends on whether they want to hear it or not.
I think wise people are going to be very interested to see this explored, and I would point out that, as you say, there's a tremendous amount in your dissertation that we did not explore here today.
The amount that you have unearthed with respect to Treblinka is staggering, but also the degree to which this suggests a way of analyzing all of the genocides for which we have information.
If the thesis is correct, then this type of analysis actually will reveal things about all of those other cases as well.
In looking at those many data points, we are in a much better position to back out what would the rules be that would drive people away from this behavior rather than towards it.
Because otherwise, the certainty that we will see more genocides, I mean, how many have we seen since the phrase never again was coined, right?
Whatever we're doing is not working, and this is an obvious pathway down which many tools that we've had no access to lie.
So I think there's going to be lots of interest in this, and I look forward to hearing what comes back.
All right.
Michael Bryant, Johnny Hudson, it has been a real pleasure.
Well, pleasure is probably the wrong word, but personally, it has been very rewarding to interact with both of you on this topic.
I hold you both in extremely high regard and I'm heartened that you were willing to participate in this.
