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?
If this is a double-post, my apologies. I searched for the title but didn’t find it.
I’m pinging a few of the folks from this thread who might have an interest here:
“A Blood Libel on Our Civilization. Can I expell Expelled?”
My apologies in advance if you really didn’t want to be pinged to this thread.
How about, don’t blame anyone for Hitler but Hitler.
I have posted this challenge numerous times and have yet to see a single example.
The quotes of Nazi leaders, and Hitler, talking about “avenging the blood upon the cross”, “doing the Lord's work”, “internationalist bankers”, “and mongrel races” are quite easy to find.
If we are talking about what motivated Nazi's to hate and kill Jews, is not the language that the leadership used upon the masses to whip up Jew hatred of primary importance? How could Evolution through natural selection possibly be a motivation for the Holocaust if it was never sold to the German people under that banner?
Hasn't there been enough historic revisionism about Hitler to gag a maggot? Must “cdesign proponentists” wallow in their lack of credibility by engaging in Historic revisionism as well as shoddy theology masquerading as Science?
Yes, because as we all know, Genesis was a revisionist text drafted by the apostle Paul.
Just go see it.
It's a well made, profound movie....fast paced.
The message is not convoluted....it's clear as a bell.
Wow, ID is Fundamentalist Protestant Christian. I guess that's why it's part of Calvinist doctrine, "TULIPID" right?
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.
I’ll have a quote for you as soon as you provide a quote for us from the Beast herself which says that Saul Alinsky, or Karl Marx have influenced her current thinking. Yours is a Joe Palooka request, if I may use a historical reference.
No reason to read past the first blatant lie.
Hitler never mentioned Darwin, but he mentioned Christianity and Catholocism frequently as sources of his beliefs.
“The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.”
- Adolf Hitler (Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler’s Table-Talk, p. 51)
I wonder if he read the NT account of Stephen.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Read the article, go the original article on-line, and read a couple of the articles at the links. Mr. Klinghoffer makes a reasonable case that Hitler was a eugenicist (in fact, that's a truism). Eugenicism certainly took its cues from Darwin.
Thus, that Hitler engaged in a “crude Darwinism” (Mr. Klinhoffer's term) should not be terribly controversial. He was far from the only person of the first half of the 20th century to do so.
The bigger questions are:
1. Was Hitler's use of Darwinism a legitimate explication of Darwin?
2. Did Mr. Stein suggest that Hitler's use of Darwinism was legitimate?
sitetest
Hitler believed Christ was the product of a rape of Mary by a Roman soldier. Want to tell me how that squares with Christianity? He was at best a pagan, and possibly a Deist. Personally, I think he was an atheist.
Well, I will blame the devil too.
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....
2. Did Mr. Stein suggest that Hitler's use of Darwinism was legitimate?
If we're going to examine the connection between Hitler and Darwin's theories, wouldn't it be appropriate to include an examination of the actual outcome of Hitler's philosophy and actions weighed against those theories? Hitler's own actions and nature resulted in his removal from the human gene pool.
Is this where Lucas got "In a galaxy far, far away"?
Now of course we learned from the liberals during the Michael Moore 911 documentary that one should not judge or criticize a documentary without first seeing it. So I look forward to liberals applying that same standard to Expelled. We also know coutesy of the Jerimiah Wright school of thought that unless someone has seen an entire DVD one does not haave to right to comment on it...unless of course your taking the liberal side.
Those who deny Hitler as a Christian will invariably find the recorded table talk conversations of Hitler from 1941 to 1944 as incontrovertible evidence that he could not have been a Christian. The source usually comes from the English translation edition by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, with an introduction by H.R. Trevor-Roper.
The table talk has Hitler saying such things such as: “Christianity is an invention of sick brains...,” “The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.”
But those that argue against Hitler’s Christianity fail to see that Christianity comes in many forms, two of which consist as: a belief system held by Christians, and organized religion. It was the latter, organized Christianity, that Hitler spoke against (just as many Christians do today). Not once does Hitler denounce his own Christianity nor does he speak against Jesus. On the contrary, the Table-Talk has Hitler speaking admirably about Jesus. But the problems with using Hitler’s table talk conversations as evidence for Hitler’s apostasy are manyfold:
1) The reliability of the source (hearsay and editing by the anti-Catholic, Bormann)
2) The Table-Talk reflects thoughts that do not occur in Hitler’s other private or public conversations.
3) Nowhere does Hitler denounce Jesus or his Christianity.
4) The Table-Talk does not concur with Hitler’s actions for “positive” Christianity.
Not one of Hitler’s table talk conversations were recorded or captured by audio, film, or broadcast on radio. According to H.R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler refused to admit any mechanical recorder into his room.
Did you bother to read the actual article?
Do you bother to comprehend what you read? Darwin proposed a theory of Natural Selection. Evolution is about how species evolve. He drew upon experienced with breeding and field observations of animal. The origin of life is another matter studied as the science of Abiogenesis. That is not the field of Evolution. ID'ers are idiots for confusing Darwin's ideas with creationism.
Gott Mit Uns is the traditional motto for the German Army, it goes back way before the third reich. It was also the saying only used by the Wehrmacht in WWII which was the less political of the military branches. The SS used “Mein ehre heisst true” and the hitler youth used “Blut und Ehre”.
Anyone that thinks Hitler was in any way tied to Christianity is ignorant of his background. He was tied up into occultism, nature worship, and paganism. He viewed Christianity as a religion forced upon the Aryan people to help weaken them and eventually wanted to purge Christianity out of the German Volk.
The documentary “The Occult History of the SS” does a good job exposing what the Nazis were all about. Shockingly, the very early founders of the Nazi party had much more in common in the religion department with your average smelly hippy environmentalist than anyone else the the USA today.
"Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. 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
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