Posted on 05/01/2008 3:09:53 PM PDT by sitetest
It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?"
I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.
Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" -- something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.
Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.
Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."
Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"
No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.
Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species - not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.
More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."
It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to - oh, I don't know - Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.
One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:
"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."
Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."
Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.
Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book -- "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.
In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by - guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?
Darwinism was corrupted into Social Darwinsim, which became on the foundations of Aryanism.Max Müller is often identified as the first writer to speak of an Aryan “race” in English. In his Lectures on the Science of Language in 1861. He was a critic of Darwin.
Herbert Spencer's Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857) was released two years before the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species
Klinghoffer and Stein: "just get the house up, we'll add the foundations later."
Galileo got in trouble from the elites for pointing the microscope at the sky, and now researchers like Behe get in trouble from the elites by applying information theory to microbiology. Just remember, tools are domain specific. You can't go out and just use them on anything or it might rattle some elitist cage.Behe doesn't understand information theory. Computer scientists have posted very systematic refutations of his pap. Google "good math bad math behe".
people on this forum keep ignoring that Plato’s republic SPECIFICALLY states that eugenics are a benefit to the state. Plato was FAR wider read than Darwin. Eugenics is older than Christ.
Again, breeding, Socrates not Darwin. Keep trying. Hitler NEVER mentioned Darwin.Nazism was inherently a *syncretic* ideology. Catholic blood libel, social darwinism, Italian fascism, vulgar nihilism(i.e. a vulgar interpretation of Nietzsche). Trying to pass the ideological hot potato is stupid.
Nothing can explain Hitler's genocidal madness.NO! Hitler is the product of historical forces. He combined the thought of his era, eugenics, racism, collectivism and the will to power in a very logical way. If Hitler hadn't existed some other demagogue would have taken his place.His insanity defies explanation, IMHO.
people on this forum keep ignoring that Plato’s republic SPECIFICALLY states that eugenics are a benefit to the state. Plato was FAR wider read than Darwin. Eugenics is older than Christ.Social darwinism is older than darwinism. Social darwinism as a modern ideology started with Malthus. But that doesn't change the fact that Hitler *did* use darwinian language, "natural selection" and what not. Hitler appropriated from a huge range of disparate disciplines, including Christianity.
But Darwin provided it a rational basis.No. Actually read up on Social Darwinism and get back to me. The basis came from Malthus.
——Hitler appropriated from a huge range of disparate disciplines, including Christianity.——
That is exactly correct.
Main Entry: 3race
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French, generation, from Old Italian razza
Date: 1580
1: a breeding stock of animals
2 a: a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock b: a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics
3 a: an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also : a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group b: breed c: a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits
While it is true that selective breeding existed before Darwin's Origin of Species, Darwinism introduced a framework by which selective breeding could be applied to humans. In his book "From Darwin to Hitler" Richard Weikart lists six key reasons why he believed Darwinism led to the Holocaust"
1. Darwin argued that humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the “anthropocentric” view that humans are unique and special.
2. Darwin denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including reason, morality, aesthetics, and even religion, originated through completely natural processes.
3. Darwin and other Darwinists recognized that if morality was the product of mindless evolution, then there is no objective, fixed morality and thus no objective human rights. Darwin stated in his Autobiography that one “can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.”
4. Since evolution requires variation, Darwin and other early Darwinists believed in human inequality. Haeckel emphasized inequality to such as extent that he even classified human races as twelve distinct species and claimed that the lowest humans were closer to primates than to the highest humans.
5. Darwin and most Darwinists believe that humans are locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence. Darwin claimed in The Descent of Man that because of this struggle, “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
6. Darwinism overturned the Judeo-Christian view of death as an enemy, construing it instead as a beneficial engine of progress. Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”
Selective breeding of animals does not include any of the above, and thus Darwinism added something new to the mix.
One thing that I find interesting in these debates is the outrage of many Darwinists at the idea of tying in Darwinism to the Holocaust. It implies to me that deep down, the outraged Darwinists really do believe in an absolute morality, one that is above mankind and not simply one of the products of mindless evolution and therefore MINDLESS itself. Short of that, the Holocaust is also simply the epiphenomenon that resulted from chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. After all, in the Athiest worldview there is no Free Will and thus Hitler and his minions could not have done anything else.....right?
As I said, Jew hatred was sold to the Germans with “blood upon the cross”, “international bankers”, and “mongrel blood”. They didn't try to convince them that they were the descendants of apes.
There seems to be an awful lot of ateheists, judging by the number of arguments that Darwinism created Hitler.
While it is true that selective breeding existed before Darwin's Origin of Species, Darwinism introduced a framework by which selective breeding could be applied to humans. In his book "From Darwin to Hitler" Richard Weikart lists six key reasons why he believed Darwinism led to the Holocaust"No. Humans as animals was popularized by Malthus before darwin. Naturalism was hardly unique to Darwin. The "will to power"(no fixed morality) was popularized by Nietzsche.
If people actually read up on Nazism instead of grinding ideological axes against Darwinism you'd find that Nietzsche, specifically the vulgarized version of his philosophy espoused by his sister, was responsible for the Nazi's shall we say "peculiar" view of things.
I am confident that Darwin NEVER made this statement. your author is writing a polemic and not a science based tretise
It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with out conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a First Cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty."--Charles Darwin
btt
The Nazis, of course, rejected Social Darwinism in order to preserve their anti-Semitic agenda.
Nazis claimed that the Jews had taken over all sorts of economic, political, etc institutions. According to the tenets of Social Darwinism, a group that manages to take over a civilization has proven itself to be superior, and therefore deserving of rulership. Obviously, the Nazis were not willing to accept the conclusion that Jews ought to be running things, and therefore rejected Social Darwinism in favor of pre-scientific Teutonic Paganism.
Irrelevant. Social Darwinist philosophy says that if you're a sharper con-man or a sleazier weasel, then you win the game of life and your suckers lose. Ergo, anyone who believed both Nazi propaganda and Social Darwinism had no alternative but to conclude that the Jews deserved to take over because they had proven their superiority by their very success at (according to the propaganda claims) having done so.This is a fundamental misunderstanding of social darwinism. You're thinking of social darwinism in the modern American conservative sense. Social darwinism in the beginning of the 20th century was natural selection of *societies* and *culture*. Hitler believed that Jewish culture was parasitic and prevented the "strong" cultures(i.e. Aryan culture) from achieving their natural supremacy among the other cultures of the world.The Nazis, of course, rejected Social Darwinism in order to preserve their anti-Semitic agenda.
In short you're assuming that social darwinism of that era was individualist. It wasn't.
I've already demonstrated that Naziism and Social Darwinism are incompatible.
Why on earth should I pay attention to gibberish?You're getting modern "social darwinism" and what the idea meant at the time confused.I've already demonstrated that Naziism and Social Darwinism are incompatible.
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