Certain drugs companies test their new products on the citizens of countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and South America, and during the course of these experiments, moral and professional laws are violated. In 1996, a 10-year-old girl weighing only 18.5 kg (40 pounds) and living in the Nigerian city of Kano suffered terrible pain due to meningitis. A world-famous American drug company was testing an antibiotic—which had not yet been licensed—on children in a camp it had set up. The drug being tested was of great importance to the company: stock exchanges estimated that if the Food and Drug Authority granted permission for the drug to be used, it would bring the company some $1 billion a year. The firm was unable to find test subjects in America, and so had come to Kano.
The firm's doctors began giving the girl an experimental daily dose of 56 mg of this drug. On the third day the girl died. Investigations by the Washington Post showed that drugs testing for profit was becoming increasingly widespread in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and South America. In order to circumvent the American FDA's strict rules, some American firms were cooperating with doctors in these countries, and tens of thousands of Third World country citizens were being used as guinea pigs in experiments. Although a spokesman for the firm in question stated that the experiments had received the necessary permission, experts stated that the meningitis experiment in Nigeria incident was incompatible with medical ethics and regulations in a number of regards. For example, although experiments of this kind should last at least a year, the one in Nigeria lasted only six weeks. Meningitis sufferers in America were generally given quick-acting drugs intravenously, but the Nigerian girl was given by mouth a drug that had never been tested on children. Again, in the event of negative affects in tests of this kind, the drug should immediately be stopped and another drug administered. But the drug company continued to give the little girl the same drug until she died.
The drug in question never received permission to be used with children. In America, it was restricted in adult use on the grounds that it led to kidney disorders and deaths, and was completely prohibited in Europe. This shows just how dangerous it actually was.1
Darwin's Body Snatchers
Following the publication of The Origin of Species, various enthusiastic Darwinists began looking for the “missing link” in the so-called human evolution. Racist evolutionists believed that the native aboriginal peoples of Australia were one of the primitive stages of human evolution. In order to prove this misconception, they began stealing corpses from Aborigines' graves and selling them to American and European museums. Shocking information appeared in the Australian weekly The Bulletin in 1991, under the byline of David Monaghan.2 He worked on the story for 18 months, carried out research in London, and produced a documentary called “Darwin's Body-Snatchers,” screened in England on 8 October 1990. Some of the information Monaghan provided was along the following lines:
• US evolutionists were also strongly involved in this flourishing “industry” of gathering specimens of “subhumans.” The Smithsonian Institution in Washington holds the remains of 15,000 individuals of various races. [These collected samples, of course, were by no means human beings of an inferior race, as claimed, but humans of different ethnic origin and races with different physiological structures.]
• Along with museum curators from around the world, some of the top names in British science were involved in this large-scale grave-robbing trade.3 These included anatomist Sir Richard Owen, anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, and Charles Darwin himself. Darwin wrote asking for Tasmanian skulls when only four full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines were left alive, provided his request would not “upset” their feelings. Museums were not only interested in bones, but in fresh skins as well. These would provide interesting evolutionary displays when stuffed.
• Pickled Aboriginal brains were also in demand, to try to prove that they were inferior to those of whites.
• There is no doubt from written evidence that many of the “fresh” specimens were obtained by simply going out and killing the Aboriginal people.
• Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney for 20 years from 1874, was particularly heavily involved. He published a museum booklet which appeared to include Aborigines under the designation of “Australian animals.” It also gave instructions not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug up bullet wounds in freshly killed “specimens.” Many freelance collectors worked under his guidance. Four weeks after he had requested skulls of Bungee (Russell River) blacks, a keen young science student sent him two, announcing that they, the last of their tribe, had just been shot.4
• A German evolutionist, Amalie Dietrich came to Australia asking station owners for Aborigines to be shot for specimens, particularly skin for stuffing and mounting for her museum employers.5
Another study documenting this maltreatment and slaughter inflicted on the Aborigines is the bookAborigines in White Australia: A Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigine 1697–1973 edited by Sharman Stone, Parliamentary Secretary to the Australian Minister for Environment and Heritage. Apart from a few comments by the editor, this book consists of such documents as parliamentary records, examination reports, letters to editors and anthropological reports.
In the book, Stone constructs the following relationship between Darwin's theory and the slaughter of the Aborigines:
In 1859 Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species popularized the notion of biological (and therefore social) evolution. Scholars began to discuss civilization as a unilinear process with races able to ascend or descend a graduated scale. The European was the “fittest to survive.” [The Aboriginal] was doomed to die out according to a “natural law,” like the dodo and the dinosaur. This theory, supported by the facts at hand continued to be quoted until well into the twentieth century when it was noticed that the dark-skinned race was multiplying. Until that time it could be used to justify neglect and murder. 6
As the book's editor makes clear, some European Darwinists portrayed the deaths of Aborigines as proof that this race was condemned to disappear as a consequence of “natural law.” In the 20th century, however, it was realized that these alleged proofs were invalid. The Aborigines had died not because of any laws of nature, but from the maltreatment they'd received. Also, of course, when the numbers of dark skinned people were observed to be increasing, it was realized that these Darwinist claims were untrue.
The replies given by a police officer to an investigation carried out by the Royal Commission in 1861 help clarify how racist basis and the maltreatment of the Aborigines were regarded as perfectly natural at the time. The officer was asked:
“And if we did not punish the blacks, they would look upon it as a confession of weakness?”
“Yes, that is exactly my opinion.”
“It is a question as to which is the strongest race—if we submit to them they would despise us for it?”
“Yes.” 7
According to Stone's account, a news report from 1880 said:
Nothing that we can do will alter the inscrutable and withal immutable laws which direct our progress on this globe. By these laws the native races of Australia were doomed on the advent of the white man, and the only thing left for us to do is to assist in carrying them out with as little cruelty as possible. We must rule the blacks by fear.8
These lines again reveal the ruthlessness at the heart of the Social Darwinist perspective. These people were regarded as a species of animal, but were treated in a way nobody would treat an animal, simply because their skin was of a darker color and because they possessed certain different physical characteristics—yet another proof of the cruelty of Social Darwinists. A letter to a newspaper also dated 1880 described the oppression of the Aborigines:
This, in plain language, is how we deal with the aborigines: On occupying new territory the aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there. Their lives and their property, the nets, canoes ... are held by the Europeans as being at their absolute disposal. Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of white men. The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet... [those] who fancied the amusement have murdered, ravished, and robbed the blacks without let or hindrance. Not only have they been unchecked, but the Government of the colony has been always at hand to save them from the consequences of their crime.9
What has been recounted here is only a tiny part of Social Darwinism's dark face, but is enough to suggest the full scale of the disasters that atheism and Darwinism wreaked on humanity.
1. Joe Stephens, “The Body Hunters:As Drug Testing Spreads, Profits and Lives Hang in Balance,”Washington Post, December 17, 2000.
2. David Monaghan, “The Body-Snatchers,” The Bulletin, November 12, 1991, pp. 30-38.
3. Ibid., p. 33.
4. Ibid., p. 34.
5. Ibid., p. 33.
6. Sharman Stone, Aborigines in White Australia: A Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigine 1697–1973, Melbourne: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974.
7. Ibid., p. 83.
8. Ibid., p. 96.
9. Ibid., p. 93.
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