The beetles --- and the mass extinctions planned for WWII

All I really know about God is that He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles - all 350,000 species of them.

As it happens, so do I.

And I like to think that scientist Henry Dawson also did too.

If so , then he was very much alone.

Plenticide

For Science in his lifetime was a murderous science of biological and material reduction : plenticide  , delivered wholesale.

The era of modernity (from the 1870s to the 1960s) was as much plenticidal as our own postmodern era is supportive of "the plenitude of being".

In theory, we are now an age seeking the widest possible plentitude of biodiversity.

And by that , I mean a fully postmodern neo-Plenitude that encompasses genetic diversity as well as species diversity and and habitat diversity.

Because while today we tend to focus on the human-caused mass extinctions of non-human species and non-human habitats , we mustn't forget that the era of Modernity didn't just stop there.

Some of Man's most insane handiwork was in the intended mass extinctions of strains of his own species.

Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin , the Rwandan Hutu and the Serbian nationalists all remind us that intended mass extinctions of human strains has never really stopped.

But the best known examples of intended mass extinctions were during WWII, at the apogee of Modernity.

The Nazis were hellbent on killing all of the Jews, all of the Romas and all of the Handicapped.

In absolute numbers, the greatest Nazi killings were intended to be the Slavs.

So one can well ask , why then aren't they also on my list ?

But their deaths was just good old fashioned mass terror murder on the Mongol invasion scale -  intending to result in the deaths of about one Slav in three.

By contrast, the Jews, Romas and Handicapped were to be all killed --- deliberately rendered totally and permanently extinct, all in name of the newly fashioned biological sciences and of medicine.

It was all part of Progress.

The crazy idea that almost all of that era's scientists had was that Evolution would be speeded along to new heights, if we humans only drastically trimmed the choices Natural Selection would be allowed make when the environment changed.

Back then ,we actually thought we could always provide the correct answers to exam questions as yet unwritten !

Hitler and the Beetle Question 

Even God seems to have had less hubris.

Even He doesn't seem certain what lies ahead for the beetles.

So He provided lots of them , to ensure that at least of them would survive what ever His earthquakes and other species could throw at them.

And why not ?

Who really enjoys watching movies they already knows the ending of ?

All those darn beetle species underfoot.

And how neat and tidy Auschwitz was supposed to make all things.

I wonder just how long before Hitler would have set out after all those useless beetles ...