Courtesy of DarwinCentral.org
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?
Courtesy of DarwinCentral.org
That’s a German Army belt buckle. the motto goes back to the Kaisers. They wore a variant in WW I. You can bet the SS belt buckle [Adolf’s personal guard] doesn’t mention God [” Meine Ehre Heisst True”].
One big source of Nazi hatred for the Jews which never seems to get mentioned is that the Nazi’s were anti-capitalist.
Holy cow, what ignorance!
Naziism explicitly appealed to primitivism and pre-Christian pagan Teutonicism (though it was not averse to exploiting the strong veins of Christian anti-Semitism going back at least as far as Martin Luther). It was expressly opposed to modern concepts of "Jewish science".
Hitler was not a RELIGIOUSLY based anti-Semite. His references and epithets for the Jews in ‘Mein Kampf’ are biological. He was a Social Darwinist, saw states, peoples and cultures as social organisms, and viewed history as a biological struggle between the various ‘species’.
Hitler didn’t act alone. If we are to learn anything from the Nazi atrocity we need to assign responsibility.
What or who the devil are these “cdesign proponentists” you so desperately hate/are afraid of/know nothing about/don't want to know anything about? (choose one or all)
Here's a link to another piece by Mr. Klinghoffer that more directly shows some of the ties to Darwinism upon which Hitler drew:
This article by Mr. Klinghoffer also sheds some light:
http://www.jewcy.com/post/there_connection_between_hitler_and_darwin
I encourage you to take the time to read these. It makes Mr. Derbyshire's criticisms seem a little over-the-top and shrill.
sitetest
I would cite the entire scientific-intellectual culture of the late-19th and early- 20th centuries as evidence. There are daisy-chains of ideas and organizations running freely from Darwinism to Nazism, and to other evil ideologies. A notable one was the "birth control" movement, whose adherents openly advocated that Darwinian ideas should be applied to improving the purity and vigor of the human species. The state, believers argued, should sterilize ugly, malformed, and unintelligent people. They considered the matter urgent, because social-welfare groups and Christian charities were feeding the poor and indigent, allowing them to reproduce instead of dying out—bringing down the human race by diluting it with imbeciles. As I recall, this was originally the Nazi program, before they began actually killing people. But with a materialist view of human beings like that, you can imagine how it could get to killing fairly quickly.
The journal of the Birth Control League, founded by contraceptive "evangelist" Margaret Sanger, was an influential exponent of this view. The journal's contributors in the 1930s included Nazi scientists and theorists, among many others.
The Birth Control League was later renamed Planned Parenthood.
The use of the belt buckle as evidence against Stein is intellectually weak and misplaced.
Your critique is wide of the mark.
As Klinghoffer writes:
“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.”
Did you bother to read the actual article?
sitetest
After he's already proven himself to be so intellectually vacuous that he makes Rosanne Barr look like Albert Einstein, why on earth would you expect anybody to go read more of his twaddle?
Prove it.
I have pinged dread78645. He has a slide show you might be interested in. Can you provide me with a link to back up your statement?
“After he's already proven himself to be so intellectually vacuous that he makes Rosanne Barr look like Albert Einstein,...”
So say you.
I'd love it if folks actually read what he wrote and RESPONDED TO WHAT HE WROTE rather than condemned him for being on the wrong side of an argument, in their view.
sitetest
Neither Darwinian theory nor auto mechanics makes any claim to answer the question of how life originates.
Here's a tip: When you're trying to cover up someone's stupidity, you're supposed to, well, cover it up. That means that when you quote him, you leave out the parts where he makes bonehead errors.
And has made Hitler's Death Camps and Stalin's buthery look like Scout Jamborees.
God, this guy is so frikin stupid that he puts mutually exclusive statements in adjacent paragraphs....
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