The original Heinberg thread and Jeff's post based on it have both moved on, and I don't want to derail Dream's End's current thread explaining "veritas." However, the Shambhala/Inner Asia/Nazis/eugenics complex seems worthy of further exploration, so I'd like to continue it here, starting with some stuff I also put in my blog comments.
Dream's End had posted something about Nazi expeditions to Tibet, and I had this reaction:
This thread has gotten me thinking about Roy Chapman Andrews. As a dinosaur-crazy kid, I was fascinated by Andrews' account of discovering dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. But in recent years, I was disillusioned to learn that the real impetus for his expecditions in the 1920's was a racist one -- the hope of proving that humans had originated in Inner Asia and not in Africa -- and that the dinosaur eggs were merely a by-product.
Here are a few quotes I just dug up on him and his boss at the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Their mixture of racism, eugenics, a search for Asian origins, and sponsorship by the uber-wealthy seems indistinguishable from the Nazi interest of a decade later:
Dream's End had posted something about Nazi expeditions to Tibet, and I had this reaction:
This thread has gotten me thinking about Roy Chapman Andrews. As a dinosaur-crazy kid, I was fascinated by Andrews' account of discovering dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. But in recent years, I was disillusioned to learn that the real impetus for his expecditions in the 1920's was a racist one -- the hope of proving that humans had originated in Inner Asia and not in Africa -- and that the dinosaur eggs were merely a by-product.
Here are a few quotes I just dug up on him and his boss at the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Their mixture of racism, eugenics, a search for Asian origins, and sponsorship by the uber-wealthy seems indistinguishable from the Nazi interest of a decade later:
Quote:
In 1908, Henry Fairfield Osborn became the President of the American Museum of Natural History. He is most responsible for the Museums over twenty-year span of global exploration and collecting activities. Andrews and Osborn were both big thinkers with bountiful ambition and egos. Their association was profitable for them both.
Andrews ambition continued to drive him back to the Orient. He was able to use Osborns theories to convince him to sponsor large expeditions in China and Mongolia. Osborn contended that central Asia had been the locus for the evolution and radiation of mammals including modern man. Others at the time felt that Africa was more likely but Osborn has been well documented as a racist and any thought of black Africa as the origin of modern man was anathema to him. Osborn was also a believer in eugenics - a popular movement in some circles in the early 20th century that advocated, among other things, sterilization of lesser individuals to help breed out inferior peoples for the betterment of the world.
With Osborns beliefs in mind, Andrews conceived of what became the famous Central Asiatic Expeditions to China and Mongolia. Osborn agreed to partial funding from the Museum and made Andrews responsible to raise the additional funds. This is where Andrews salesmanship and self confidence really paid off. Having inserted himself into New York society, he gained audiences with some of the most powerful people in America. Not only did he meet them, he got committed funding from the likes of J. P. Morgan, Sidney Colgate, Cleveland Dodge, J. D. Rockefeller, and many others. Once he had money from the most important people, the society hangers-on followed suit not to be left out.
Quote:
Osborn lamented what he saw as a decline in the human race . . .
"The rise of primitive and of uncivilized man is subject to the same laws as those which prevail throughout the animal kingdom, until human civilization steps in and interferes with the natural orders of things. Thus when man begins to specialize and human races begin to intermingle, Nature loses control. It appears that the finest races of man, like the finest races of lower animals, arose when Nature had full control, and that civilized man is upsetting the divine order of human origin and progress. . . . In America the original pioneer stock is dying out; the foreign element is in the ascendency. . . . Purity of race is today found in but one nation the Scandinavian; but Scandinavia has been seriously bled by emigration."
. . . and he proposed a solution.
"
Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer this must be the keynote of our future. This was the guiding principle which underlay all the discussions of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921."
