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?
No, it was the people who wrote the science books.
where Nazi's spoke to the masses about “avenging the blood upon the cross”?
It was the Nazis who ordered the crosses removed from the classroom.
Did they also teach that humans were the descendants of apes? Or did they teach that the Aryan race was the “highest image of the Lord”?
Hitler's worldview
The present system of teaching in schools permits the the following absurdity: at 10 a.m. the pupils attend a lesson in the catechism, at which the creation of the world is presented to them in accordance with the teachings of the Bible; and at 11 a.m. they attend a lesson in natural science, at which they are taught the theory of evolution. Yet the two doctrines are in complete contradiction. As a child, I suffered from this contradiction, and ran my head against a wall. Often I complained to one or another of my teachers against what I had been taught an hour before-and I remember that I drove them to despair.
The Christian religion tries to get out of it by explaining that one must attach a symbolic value to the images of Holy Writ. Any man who made the same claim four hundred years ago would have ended his career at the stake, with an accompaniment of Hosannas. By joining in the game of tolerance, religion has won back ground by comparison with bygone centuries.
Religion draws all the profit that can be drawn from the fact that science postulates the search for, and not the certain knowledge of; the truth. Let's compare science to a ladder. On every rung, one beholds a wider landscape. But science does not claim to know the essence of things. When science finds that it has to revise one or another notion that it had believed to be definitive, at once religion gloats and declares: "We told you so!" To say that is to forget that it's in the nature of science to behave itself thus. For if it decided to assume a dogmatic air, it would itself become a church.
When one says that God provokes the lightning, that's true in a sense; but what is certain is that God does not direct the thunderbolt, as the Church claims. The Church's explanation of natural phenomena is an abuse, for the Church has ulterior interests. True piety is the characteristic of the being who is aware of his weakness and ignorance. Whoever sees God only in an oak or in a tabernacle, instead of seeing Him everywhere, is not truly pious. He remains attached to appearances-and when the sky thunders and the lightning strikes, he trembles simply from fear of being struck as a punishment for the sin he's just committed.
A reading of the polemical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or of the conversations between Frederick II and Voltaire, inspires one with shame at our low intellectual level, especially amongst the military.
From now on, one may consider that there is no gap between the organic and inorganic worlds. Recent experiments make it possible for one to wonder what distinguishes live bodies from inanimate matter. In the face of this discovery, the Church will begin by rising in revolt, then it will continue to teach its "truths". One day finally, under the battering-ram of science, dogma will collapse. It is logical that it should be so, for the human spirit cannot remorselessly apply itself to raising the veil of mystery without peoples' one day drawing the conclusions
Confused...thought hitler believed in darwin, voodoo, phrenology, the “science” of skull structure related to intelligence, and eugenics. All pointed him to his “master race,” and final solution.
That's precisely the same line of eugenic psychiatry that was pushed at the first International Eugenics Conference (1912), the one presided by Leonard Darwin. On my FR homepage you will find many original documents where famous Darwinians preach the very same eugenic psychiatry - eg, Mott's presentation at the IEC, and a lot of american stuff. Eugenic psychiatry eventually manifested itself as Aktion T4 in Germany.
I agree completely. They cared about power and would glean any glimmer of support from any ideology they could twist to their purpose, and their purpose was absolute power. I just wonder why some insist on propping up a rather tenuous connection between evolution and Nazism and discount or completely ignore the twisted “Christianity” of the Nazis and the direct words of exhortation to Jew hatred that Jew hating “Christians” have used for thousands of years.Yup. 100%. I see a very dangerous trend in modern "conservatism"(i.e. not the real thing). You take a tenuous connection(Nazism and socialism, Nazism and darwinism) and play it for all that it's worth with people that don't know any better. That's straight out of the "useful idiots" playbook and it scares me.
Goebbels would be proud of them.
Table Talk is not a contemporaneous source or a reliable one. Any sources that talk about Hitler’s supposed embrace of evolution that can be linked to any PUBLIC pronouncements or publications that happened BEFORE the Holocaust, you know, in order to INSPIRE the Holocaust?
"You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japansese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"
Even if 100% accurate the book was published AFTER Hitler’s death and after the Holocaust. It was not contemporaneous it was posthumous.
Kind of hard to inspire the Holocaust with something not published until after the Holocaust isn’t it?
Yup. The anti-intellectualism so prevalent now among many so-called "conservatives" is truly frightening. The great conservative intellects of the past, like Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, would be horrified by many of the people who today claim to be their heirs.
It's called fundamentalism.
The book is based on notes taken on Hitler's private conversations by his most trusted advisors.
The book didn't cause the Holocaust. Hitler caused the Holocaust. The book sheds light on his justifications for it, his world view, and the origins of his world view.
Basically Hitler was a talented individual who specifically considered and rejected Christianity based on what he understood about science and nature.
Much of this understanding has roots in Darwin's work.
This should be almost self-evident. It shouldn't be controversial.
Nazism, being a subset of fascism, has its own unique attributes apart from socialism generally. However, fascism can be legitimately viewed as a form of socialism, or at the very least, originating out of socialism and strongly related to socialism.
This thesis is certainly controversial. It first occurred to me, personally, when I was in college. The more I thought about it, the less fascism seemed to be a political philosophy of the right and more of one of the left. I proposed this to my favorite politics professor in the late 1970s, and he was open-minded enough to take it seriously.
Others smarter, and with more time on their hands than I have come to similar conclusions in the years since then. The fellow most associated with the argument today that fascism is a political pathology of the left, along with socialism in all its hues, is Jonah Goldberg, who has written a book on the subject, Liberal Fascism. You might want to go look over at National Review on-line if you're unfamiliar with his book.
In that he's written a number of articles on the subject that are readily available at National Review on-line, I won't try to make weakly the arguments he makes strongly.
sitetest
Yep!, he’s admitting to being a Christian.
That is an intellectually dishonest question. By hinging the connection solely on the use of the word "evolution", you give yourself on out when presented with info that contradicts your world view.
Wasn't the NAZI practice of eugenics nothing more than an industrialized form of Darwinism put into action?.
Hitler didn't carry out the Holocaust. The people he inspired by words spoken or published by Hitler prior to the Holocaust heard all about “Blood upon the cross” not “We are all descendants of apes, but we are the SUPERIOR descendants of apes.” and they NEVER heard him reject Christianity.
The people who carried out the Holocaust were inspired to commit genocide by talk of “internationalist bankers”, “blood upon the cross”, and “mongrel race of vermin”. They were not inspired by talk about any misunderstanding of any Scientific theory.
If the question is what inspired the Nazi's to carry out the Holocaust, then is it not of primary import to look at the words Nazi leaders used to justify mass murder to the masses? Not secret notes unpublished during Hitler's lifetime, not what secrets lay deep in Hitler's heart; what words were actually used to inspire and justify the Holocaust.
Eugenics was justified in the last century due to the misapplication of Evolution to think that somehow natural selection was not at work among humans (it is); however Eugenics was practiced long before Darwin ever published.
Saying that Eugenics was dependent upon Darwin (rather than just seeking justification under its auspices) is like saying that selective breeding of dogs was dependent upon Darwin; ignoring that the principles and concepts of selective breeding were well known throughout human history. Eugenics is nothing more than selective breeding of humans, and selective breeding has been going on for many thousands of years of human history.
You seem to have some trouble with the word. The book was written contemporaneously -- i.e. Hitler's actual words were written down while he was still alive -- with Hitler.
Hitler didn't carry out the Holocaust . . .and they NEVER heard him reject Christianity.
Well, the people who did the hands on stuff certainly had that impression:
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