Whitewashing Darwinism's Ongoing Moral Legacy (Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter latest example)

Discovery Institute ^ | June 12, 2009 | David Klinghoffer

[GodGunsGuts]

Whitewashing Darwinism's Ongoing Moral Legacy

Is it somehow petty, offensive, exploitative, and beyond the pale to point out how the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter, who murdered a guard on Wednesday, writes about evolution in his sick manifesto? Should it be considered beneath one's dignity to quote the man and let his words speak for themselves?

James von Brunn, the suspect in question, is a white supremacist, a bitter anti-Semite, a Holocaust-denier, a wacked out conspiracy theorist, who served more than 6 years in a federal prison for attempted kidnapping. All this is fair game to report. Everyone agrees to that. But the fact that he writes of "Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool" -- that's somehow inappropriate to note in public?

That seems to be the message from the media, which has ignored the fact, and from some readers who have responded to my blog on the subject. I realize the topic is uncomfortable for all sides in the evolution debate. So let's try to step back and consider this rationally.

It's historically undeniable that Darwinian thinking forms a thread linking some of the most reprehensible social movements of the past 150 years. I and many other people, including professional historians (which I'm not), have written about this repeatedly and from many different angles. By all means check out my own most recent contributions on the theme of "Darwin's Tree of Death."

From Darwin's own musings on the logic of genocide, to his cousin Francis Galton's influential advocacy of eugenics, to the Darwin/monkey statuette on Lenin's desk, to Hitler's Mein Kampf with its evolutionary theme, to the biology textbook at the center of the Scopes trial that advocated racism and eugenics, to the modern eugenics movement right here in the U.S., to recent school shootings in which the student murderers invoked natural selection, to yesterday's tragedy at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and much more along the way -- the thread is persistent, if widely ignored.

Should it be ignored? No, it shouldn't. I will give you an analogy. Our culture is very comfortable reminding us often of atrocities committed in the name of religion -- whether it's the Crusades, the Inquisition, or 9/11. Ironically, the day of the Holocaust Museum shooting, an interesting new Jewish web magazine, Tablet, published a fascinating scholarly essay by Paula Fredriksen about how under the Nazis, some German theologians tried to fit Jesus into a Nazi mold. They drew on anti-Jewish writings widely available in Christian tradition.

Is it "beyond the pale" to point this out? No, of course not. So what's the difference? I would say it's not only appropriate to document the dark side of religion. It's necessary. The Anti-Defamation League commented on the Holocaust Museum shooting, pointing to this "reminder that words of hate matter, that we can never afford to ignore hate because words of hate can easily become acts of hate, no matter the place, no matter the age of the hatemonger."

Exactly. It's also the case that ideas have consequences and knowing those consequences can rightly prompt us to look with renewed skepticism at a given idea, whether religious or scientific. 9/11 was a good reason to go back and take a second look at Islam. Not to reject it, but to consider it critically. The Crusades are a good reason to do the same with Christianity. Not to reject it, but to think twice. That's all.

Why would the incredibly popular and influential work called Mein Kampf not be a reason to think twice about Darwinism? Not to reject it, but to get yourself properly informed and make up your own mind rather than simply go along with the prestige culture and media view.

The legacy of Mein Kampf included the murder of 6 million Jews. As Richard Weikart meticulously documents in From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler's book was part of a stream of intellectual influence that began with Darwin and continued through to Hitler. It's with us today and it played a part in the demented thinking of James von Brunn, "a peripheral but well-respected figure among American white supremacists," as the ADL notes.

If you want a good chill, Google the phrase "natural selection" as it appears on the popular neo-Nazi website Stormfront.org. Here, I've done it for you.

It doesn't negate the point to remind me that Hitler put his own wicked spin on kindly Charles Darwin's words, one that Darwin himself would absolutely repudiate. Nor that evolutionists like James von Brunn have a crude grasp of evolutionary theory. Nor that today's evolutionary scientists, unlike their fairly recent predecessors, do not truck with racism (though some certainly do truck with anti-religious agitation, reserving special venom for the God of the Hebrew Bible).

All these same things could be said about religion-based haters of today and centuries past. They too distort their tradition. Yet they emerge from it, and so, again, that's a sound reason to give a second, skeptical look to the relevant religious traditions.

What's not reasonable is to give Darwinism's social influence a special pass, forbidding any mention of it as somehow out of bounds. Very far from reasonable indeed, it's nothing less than a cover-up.

[JudgemAll]

Well, this is the crux: God did not do what is grand in the superiority of our race over other animals, yet these same folkes do not believe in an original sin, ironically.

Yet the original sin directly implies the sort of bestiality that might have occurred and which have yielded our current conditions of sinful affinity to horrible experiments and masturbate fantasy type “dream behaviors” undertaken by experimentist scientists (eg. Dr. Mengele and other dictators never get to undergo what their “dreams” and ambitions to others impose). Those things indeed, God did not do it, which is the more salient point they always avoid, because they do it and they are the fetishist “fleshists” who swim in such saltless salts of mediocrity.

They fail to comprehend, in their blinding sins and barbarity, that it is the saltiness in the other that is valuable, and they do not have faith that whatever saltlessness lugage there is, it gets either digested or reconditioned. It’s not what comes in that matters in terms of “education”, but what edifying substance that comes out - be it work output as part of a team or personal conclusions to add to the libraries out there.

The missing link searchers conveniently fail to look for the greater picture of a missing solution to a puzzle they obviously do not want to figure since their search is based in a belief in Darwin instead of questioning the whole ethics issue surrounding genocide via abortion and stem cell “research”.

Isn’t it strange they then believe like astrologers that it is birth that matters more than conception time? While it is clear that the NT and science implicate the conception by the Holy Spirit or under certain special and unique conditions as paramount to determining the “future” success or failure or grandness of a being.

The cynical illiteracy, manipulation and hypocrisy of today’s sinful world has lead to such blindness and denial, all the while confering them to confined “disciplined” searches, missing forests for the tree.

[count-your-change]

Then Hitler was a Christian in his views?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[mnehring]

Then Hitler was a Christian in his views?

Hitler was an occultist member of the Thule society which used mythology and the occult to basically create their own religion. They believed in a creation story based on twisting of Norse and Germanic mythology.

[goodusername]

“Then Hitler was a Christian in his views?”

—He seems to have thought himself as a Christian of some sort, but he had unorthodox ideas to say the least. He seemed to have a high regard for Jesus (claims he was an Aryan - which coming from Hitler was meant to be a compliment, I guess) but had very low regard for Paul. If someone doesn’t consider him Christian, I certainly wouldn’t blame them, and wouldn’t argue against them.

By “Creationist” I simply meant that Hitler believed that species or kinds (as he put it) were created by God essentially as we find them today, and that species have definite limits beyond which they can’t change. He was also rabidly anti-evolution and anti-abiogenesis; the idea of a materialist origins of life enraged him.

[ElectricStrawberry]

Pretty lame, even for your standards.

Tie your opponents to Nazis...check.
Tie your opponents to Commies....check.

Tie your opponents to every nutcase with a gun that goes and shoots someone....check.

This isn’t even about “evolution” and he isn’t even an “evolutionist”.....but don’t let that stop your nonsense.

[Caramelgal]

James von Brunn, the suspect in question, is a white supremacist, a bitter anti-Semite, a Holocaust-denier, a wacked out conspiracy theorist,..

Well at least that much I agree with.

Skimming through von Brunn’s vile screed, one can easily see that the man was so hateful toward mankind and Jews in particular that he desperately grasps at anything he can to make his case. He interweaves a very warped revisionist history with wacko conspiracy theories to grasp at any straw he can, including TOE to come up with support for his rabid and highly paranoid anti-Semitism.

He writes:

As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels.

This is not a defense of classical evolutionary biology but a bastardization and condemnation of it. No credible modern evolutionary biologist believes that human races/ethnic groups are a separate species lower on the evolutionary scales from Whites.

von Brunn further writes:

Marx stated there is no God therefore man is not accountable for his acts to some divine Judge. Man is without soul or free-will therefore without significant individual value. He is an evolutionary animal dependent upon his mind (Reason) for salvation. Marx believed Man's destiny is determined solely by his environment (Marx, apparently, never learned of his nemesis, Gregor Johann Mendel (1822- 1884), after whom Mendelism is named — the study of all things Genetic). In nature everything is evolving because everything is determined by its opposite: ergo, the thesis synthesizes with the antithesis thus becoming a new and different thesis — this process repeats itself ad infinitum. In society, therefore, conflict (Dialectical Materialism) is inevitable, essential and continuous until the entire structure (State) collapses.

It should be noted that in this case von Brunn on one hand criticizes Marx, who he hates as a Jew and a Communist and Atheist for believing man is an evolutionary animal and on the other references Mendel’s work on genetics. But Mendel never spoke to eugenics in the manner that von Brunn claims.

von Brunn never mentions Darwin in his “manifesto” but he does attack Liberals, Jews, Communists, Jews, Marxists, Jews, the Illuminati, Jews, Freemasonry, Jews, Papists, Jews, the Federal Reserve and most of all, Jews.

Vile neo-Nazis like von Brunn like to invoke words like “Natural Selection” and “Survival of the Fittest” but it is very clear that they know nothing about TOE, genetics, history or science. And neither does David Klinghoffer.

The Left tries to paint von Brunn as a Right Wing extremist; the Right tries to paint him as a Left Wing extremist. Creationists are blaming the Darwinists and a few anti-defamation groups blame it on fundamentalist Christianity; meanwhile the government is blaming home grown hate groups - whatever definition fits at any particular moment but unfortunately like von Brunn that could include anti-tax “Tea Bag” protesters, military vets and 2nd amendment supporters. Of course someone like von Brunn would not likely be welcomed among any those groups but that doesn’t stop the association.

In truth von Brunn is a bit of all of those things and none of those things. He and other neo-Nazi’s are their own animal and tend to be all over the spectrum of political philosophy and religion and no one in their right mind wants to embrace him as one of their own. The neo-Nazi’s pick and choose whatever they think bolsters their hatred of anyone who isn’t of their “pure race” ideology and blame a vast conspiracy perpetrated by Jews and Blacks, Communists, Liberals, Papists, etc. for their own personal failures in life.

It should be noted that like his “hero” Hitler, von Brunn was also a failure as an artist. So perhaps we need to blame art critics and art gallery owners for his actions and the Holocaust as much as we should Darwin.

Better yet, a suggestion for everyone on all sides of the political spectrum; instead of finger pointing and laying blame and making excuses for his actions, we should all condemn his brand of racism and anti-Semitism and anti-American values. Call him for what he is – a deeply mentally disturbed, hate filled vile excuse for a human being.

As he is still in critical condition but expected to live, my hope is that he will live long enough to go to trial, be convicted for the murder of the security guard Stephen T. Johns and sentenced for the remaining years of his miserable life to a federal prison and put among the general population, where while being repeatedly “butt loved” by someone other than of his own pure race; he can really learn something about “survival of the fittest”.

[mnehring]

He was also rabidly anti-evolution and anti-abiogenesis; the idea of a materialist origins of life enraged him.

Exactly, he had a twisted belief that god(s) created different orders of men, with some orders destine to be gods themselves, and others whose purpose was to serve the others. This was a twisted version of several religions and occult beliefs including twisting of Christianity. Like Stalin, he pretty much had all evolutionary science teaching shut down.

[OldNavyVet]

I’m still waiting for GGG to respond to my observation that a new species has evolved in the “Swine Flu” virus.

REf .. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2269597/posts?page=45#45

[count-your-change]

In other words, a hodge-podge of insanity.

[count-your-change]

There was so much garbage, some professed for propaganda, other just general nuttiness. Yeah, their religion of the insane.

[gundog]

Darwin was an empiricist. Social Darwinism is a twisted attempt to justify sometimes horrific beliefs. It is not based in science, or Darwinism. You will never debunk evolution by going after Darwin’s character or personality. Try a different approach.

[itsahoot]

When you want to make a serious argument, let me know.

Serious argument with you.=You are right, everyone else is wrong.

[itsahoot]

So Paleontology turned this Muslim into a killer?

Well Muslims believe Jews are decedents of apes, draw your own conclusion I guess.

[itsahoot]

What evidence is there of that? He was married to a Christian, had his children go to church,

Obama is a Christian too. Go figure.

[OldNavyVet]

“Creationists are the definition of sanity”

Wrong!

Per Webster:

sanity 1. the condition of being sane; soundness of mind; mental health 2. soundness of judgment

sane 1. having a normnal, healthy mind; able to make sound, rational judgments

rational 1. of, based on, or derived from reasoning [rational powers] 2. able to reason; reasoning; in posession of one’s reason 3. showing reason; not foolish or silly; sensible [a rational argument]

creationism a. Theol. 1. the doctrine that God creates a new soul for every human being born; opposed to TRADUCIANISM 2. the doctrine that ascribes the origin of matter, species, etc. to acts of creation by God

traducianism 1. the theological doctrine that the soul is inherited from the parents: opposed to creationism.

O.E.D.

[itsahoot]

Hitler believed that through selective breeding that a “kind” could change somewhat and improve, but that speciation was not possible.

I hear that politicians sometimes lie in order to gain favor with the electorate. I don't know for a fact that, that, is true, I leave that to the reader.

[Pistolshot]

This isn’t even about “evolution” and he isn’t even an “evolutionist”.....but don’t let that stop your nonsense.

And the Admins will continue to let this kind of crap go on and on and on.

[goodusername]

I’m not just relying on public speeches and his book, but on the stenographers that followed him around during his last days that recorded private convos and such as well. In fact it’s in those notes that he’s even more anti-evolution.

[Dog Gone]

Well, don’t hold your breath.