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?
Even if your attempt at clintonian redefinition had any validity, it would be irrelevant. According to Nazi propaganda, the Jewish culture had cleverly infiltrated and taken over the institutions of Gentile society. According to Social Darwinism (either the real thing or your depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is version), that means that they had the victorious, and therefore superior, culture. The only way to avoid that unpalatable conclusion is to reject Social Darwinism -- which the Nazis, being fundamentally anti-modernist and anti-rationalist, had no real problem in doing.
Nonsense -- Social Darwinism was very much a philosophy of individual "sink or swim".No. You have *no* idea of what you're talking about. If you're smart you'll go read up on the history of social darwinism and get back to me. Otherwise feel free to continue embarrassing yourself.Even if your attempt at clintonian redefinition had any validity, it would be irrelevant. According to Nazi propaganda, the Jewish culture had cleverly infiltrated and taken over the institutions of Gentile society. According to Social Darwinism (either the real thing or your depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is version), that means that they had the victorious, and therefore superior, culture. The only way to avoid that unpalatable conclusion is to reject Social Darwinism -- which the Nazis, being fundamentally anti-modernist and anti-rationalist, had no real problem in doing.
Name five of the early exponents of Social Darwinism and describe their contributions.
ROFL!! You really are clueless, aren't you?Spencer, Malthus, Hegel and Galton were the big ones. You really have no idea how ignorant you are do you?Name five of the early exponents of Social Darwinism and describe their contributions.
Speciation or differentiation?
I seem to recall it being the latter.
I assert that Darwin did provide this rational basis.
The knee-jerk reaction of Darwinists to their critics proves the point: Darwinism is as much ideology as science.
It was more born from the 19th Century occultism, and Ariosophy and Theosophy than anything Darwin wrote
Check books they push. These people know who their friends are.
"The real issue: Macro-evolution vs Micro-evolution.": They are even using the saame playbook.
The book is a historical study, not a science based treatise. Part of the problem with quoting historical figures is it is difficult to tell when they said the quote or in what context. Here is another quote from Darwin:
"Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a more perfect creature than he is now, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who freely admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful."
That would imply to me that he didn't, himself, believe in an immortal soul since he thought the annihilation of all sentient beings "intolerable." But whether or not Darwin believed it, not believing in a human soul allows one to equate humans with animals and therefore helps to justify eugenics for humans. Evolution provides a firm foundation for many, including Richard Dawkins, for not believing in the human soul or anything supernatural, and Darwin is the single most important historical figure in advancing the theory of evolution.
I don't believe that Darwin was wrong or evil or immoral for advancing a scientific theory. He simply made observations and came up with a reasoned explanation for those observations.
Regardless that it can be argued that Mr. Stein took some liberties in exaggerating the ramifications of the Court's disallowing of ID discussions in public school science classrooms, the problem remains that the situation reflects corruption in the USSC. More specifically, the USSC has been wrongly ignoring 10th A. protected state powers since the days of FDR's dirty politics.
This post (<-click), while addressing tax issues, tells how the federal government's ongoing scandalous ignoring of 10th A. protected state powers and subsequent, out-of-control federal government spending got started when FDR established his constitutionally unauthorized New Deal programs.
And this post (<-click) gives examples of how corrupt justices then began using FDR's "license" to ignore 10th A. protected state powers to eventually stifle traditional values, both the USSC's scandalous legalization of abortion and now the suppression of the discussion of ID in public school classrooms being examples of this corruption.
So regardless what the renegade USSC majority wants everybody to believe about what can and cannot be discussed in public schools according to the Constitution, the states have the constitutional power (10th A.) to authorize public schools to lead non-mandatory (14th A.) classroom discussions on the pros and cons of evolution, creationism and ID, regardless that atheists, separatists, secular judges and the liberal media are misleading the people to think that doing such things in public schools is unconstitutional.
The bottom line is that the people need to reconnect with the Founder's intentions for the division of federal and government state powers. The people then need to get in the faces of the feds, demanding that the feds start respecting the Constitution that they have sworn to defend, particularly where now-ignored 10th A. protected state powers are concerned.
It’s a book. My copy is extremely old. I’ts entitled “Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941-1944”, published by Signet Books, 1961. See pp 98-99.
From this website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/02/5/l_025_01.html
Darwin and Malthus: "The year was 1838. In England, the Industrial Revolution was under way, but it had made rich only the owners of production, not the workers. In increasingly crowded cities, ordinary people struggled for their daily existence. Some of the poor rioted. The Poor Laws were under attack: Welfare to the needy would only increase their dependence and encourage the breeding of still more hungry mouths to feed, said critics. It was in this pivotal year that Darwin, back from his voyage on the Beagle and trying to understand the forces that drove the origin of new species, read the works of Thomas Malthus, a parson and social economist.
In opposition to the utopian thinkers of the day, Malthus believed that unless people exercised restraint in the number of children they had, the inevitable shortfall of food in the face of spiraling population growth would doom mankind to a ceaseless struggle for existence. Out of that unforgiving battle, some would survive and many would not, as famine, disease, and war put a ceiling on the growth in population. These ideas galvanized Darwin's thinking about the struggles for survival in the wild, where restraint is unknown. Before reading Malthus, Darwin had thought that living things reproduced just enough individuals to keep populations stable. But now he came to realize that, as in human society, populations bred beyond their means, leaving survivors and losers in the effort to exist.
Immediately, Darwin saw that the variation he had observed in wild populations would produce some individuals that were slightly better equipped to thrive and reproduce under the particular conditions at the time. Those individuals would tend to leave more offspring than their fellows, and over many generations their traits would come to dominate the population. "The result of this would be the formation of new species," he wrote later. "Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work."
That theory, of course, was none other than natural selection, the driving force of evolution. Though scholars have debated just how influential Malthus was in Darwin's thinking, there can be no doubt that his view of the struggle in society enabled Darwin to appreciate the significance of the struggle in the wild."
Darwin incorporated Malthus's ideas and expanded on them. I agree with you that Nietzsche had a heavy influence on Hitler and Nietzsche's ideas provided firm support for the attempted creation of the ubermensch.
I also agree with others that Hitler was not an Athiest. The roots of the Nazi party can be found in the Thule Gesellschaft an occult oriented organization: From wikipedia:
"The Thule Society (German: Thule-Gesellschaft), originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum 'Study Group for Germanic Antiquity', was a German occultist and völkisch group in Munich, named after a mythical northern country from Greek legend. The Society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which was later transformed by Adolf Hitler into the Nazi Party. "There is no evidence that Hitler ever attended the Thule Society,"[1] in spite of the allegations about his occult initiation in Nazi-occult literature."
Hitler believed in the supernatural and the best explanation I have heard of his beliefs is that he believed in the Manichaen struggle between the two opposing powers of good and evil, only he believed, like Nietzsche that power was good, and weakness, in the form of compassion, forgiveness, kindness, was evil. I guess the best way to put it is he worshipped Satan.
Sorry for the long post Ketsu, but I find this subject matter verrrrry interesting. This is it for me on this thread, thanks all for the debate and good night!
All the conversations were TRANSCRIBED, in shorthand, by personnel trained in that skill, and the notes typed up by Bormann’s staff.
I knew a Court Reporter who used that method of dictation, and it was considered perfectly acceptable.
Adolf Hitler was baptized into the Catholic faith in his native Austria. At one point, I believe he was either an altar boy, or attended a Catholic school. That having been said, Hitler did not consider himself a Catholic as an adult.
No problem at all. I think people don’t appreciate how important it is to study the evil as well as the good.
"Good mercy, some of you folks twist yourselves into pretzels about this movie.Just go see it.
It's a well made, profound movie....fast paced.
The message is not convoluted....it's clear as a bell."
Historians. Even the ones not interested in Hitler's Christianity, do not use Hitler's Table Talk as an authoritative source. It is inconsistant with all of the other sources, and contains things not mentioned anywhere else. It is, however, very consistant with Bormann's stated views and the policies Bormann pushed for. Bormann is known to have edited these writings. It is, in other words, thought to be Bormann putting words in Hitler's mouth.
1961 isn’t “old” for a book.
Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable. The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance,etc., of the individual specimens.
But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice. Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest.
And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development. If the process were different, all further and higher development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best, if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken.
Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health. No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow."
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Eugenics, and its bloody conclusions, are Darwin's spawn, not Christ's.
The Nazis, in their foolish hatred, viewed the Jews as inferior to the “German race.”
Please don’t make me repeat this.
Your grade: A- for effort. F for the integrity of your argument.
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