Did Darwin Support Genocide?

“While the 'Beagle' was anchored off Patagonia for much of 1833 he rode inland and came face to face with the Spanish policy towards indigenous peoples defending their lands against expropriation. General Manuel de Rosas, a cattle rancher who served as Governor of Buenos Aires, and later Dictator of Argentina (and who, later again, retired to Swaythling in Hampshire) was engaged on what Darwin recognised at the time as a mission 'to exterminate the Indians'.

Some 112 women and children and men were 'nearly all taken or killed, very few escaped. The soldiers pursue and sabre every man. Like wild animals however they fight to the last instant. The reason was to be made plain. 'This is a dark picture; but how much more shocking is the unquestionable fact that all the women who appear above 20 years old are massacred in cold blood. I ventured to hint that this appeared rather inhuman. He answered me, 'What can be done, they breed so'.'

It is the sadly familiar language of genocide. To the perpetrators, Darwin noticed, the killing was reasonable and even moral in the larger scheme of things. Civilisation decreed the sacrifice of barbarians who stood in its way. The shooters were the shock troops of progress, productivity and profit.

'If this warfare is successful, that is if all the Indians are butchered, a grand extent of country will be available for the production of cattle, and the valleys ... will be most productive of corn. The country will be in the hands of white Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians.'”

That’s from a talk by Dr Tony Barta, a historian from La Trobe University suggestisting that Charles Darwin himself seemed to have accepted that genocide was a necessity of the time. Listen to the talk.