Brayton admits Darwin-Hitler link

While condemning a TV program that links Darwin to Hitler, Ed "It's My Way or the Highway" Brayton himself admitted that there is such a link! Ed admits on his blog that Hitler used "scientific language" to support Nazi policies:

Even if one does not take the position that Christianity is to blame for Hitler (and that is my position), the fact that Hitler repeatedly and explicitly justified his plans by reference to Christian history and theology proves, at the very least, that Hitler used whatever ideological means he had at his disposal to defend and justify his actions. And that clearly undermines the argument that Darwinism led to Hitler and supports instead the idea that Hitler simply used scientific language when speaking to one audience and religious language when speaking to another.(emphasis added)

In another post, Brayton argues that Hitler was really a creationist. But even assuming that Hitler was a creationist, that does not mean that Darwinism or Social Darwinism did not influence the social policies of the Nazis. And if Hitler publicly used Darwinism or Social Darwinism to help gain support for his social policies, does it really matter whether or not he personally believed in Darwinism?

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, argued that linking Darwin to Hitler "trivializes" the holocaust because "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people." Whether or not Hitler "needed" Darwin has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether Hitler used Darwin. Perhaps if Hitler had been told that he didn't really "need" Darwin in order to plan the holocaust, Hitler might have impatiently answered like an exasperated King Lear, "O', reason not the need!"

I think that the reason for strong kneejerk Jewish support of Darwinism is that many Jews think that teaching or even mentioning criticism of Darwinism in public schools violates or threatens the separation of church and state. For example, the ADL applauded the Darwinist Kitzmiller v. Dover decision, and Judge John E. Jones III, the judge who decided the case, gave a speech to the ADL. In the Supreme Court case of Edwards v. Aguillard(1987), the ADL and the American Jewish Congress et al. filed separate amicus briefs opposing equal time for creation science and evolution in the public schools. In another equal-time case, McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education(1982), a district-court case which was not appealed, three Jewish organizations were listed among the organizational plaintiffs (Christian denominations were also represented but only by individual plaintiffs, including local bishops of some denominations). The ADL and the American Jewish Congress filed separate amicus briefs in the appeal of the Selman v. Cobb County (2005) evolution-disclaimer textbook sticker case. I think that the Darwinists are afraid that exposing the Darwinism-Nazism link would erode Jewish opposition to the teaching or mention of criticisms of Darwinism in the public schools.

In a bizarre twist, Jeffrey Selman, the lead plaintiff in the Selman v Cobb County textbook sticker case, associated criticism and skepticism of Darwinism -- as opposed to Darwinism itself -- with the holocaust. An article in the Cleveland Jewish News said,

When a federal judge in Georgia ruled last week that a local school board's decision to put a small sticker on its science textbooks labeling evolution "a theory, not a fact" was unconstitutional, Jeffrey Selman said it was primarily an American issue.

Still, he said, he could not help but view it through the lens of his Jewishness.

"Look what happened in Germany," said Selman, one of a group of parents that sued the Cobb County school board to have the stickers removed.

"The German Jews said, 'We're Germans. We'll be fine.' The next thing you know, they were opening the oven doors for us."

In response to Jeffrey Selman's preceding remarks, John West of the Discovery Institute said,

. . . .it is simply Orwellian for defenders of Darwin to try to suggest that criticism of Darwin's theory can in any way be tied to the Holocaust -- especially when critics of Darwin were some of the most vocal opponents of the sort of eugenics policies championed by the Nazis and leading American defenders of Darwin's theory!

Among the "most vocal opponents" of Social Darwinism was William Jennings Bryan, the famous prosecutor in the Scopes monkey trial of 1925.

A comment on Uncommon Descent quoted the following astute observation:

"Some assert that Hitler got his antisemitism from the church -- as if the church ever taught that the blond-haired blue-eyed Aryans were the master race and needed to get rid of the Jews to preserve their racial purity."

I am not arguing that Darwinism should be scrapped just because of its influence on Nazism. I am just arguing that history should be studied objectively, letting the chips fall where they may.