ADL finally comes out against "Expelled"
"O, Reason not the need!"
-- King Lear in Shakespeare's play "King Lear"
"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."
-- Anti-Defamation League's denunciation of "Expelled"
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The Darwin-to-Hitler message of the "Expelled" movie was a real dilemma for the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL had previously denounced the Darwin-to-Hitler "Darwin's Deadly Legacy" TV show of the Christian fundy Coral Ridge Ministries, and the ADL has a long history of opposing criticism of Darwinism in general. But the star of "Expelled," Ben Stein, is Jewish and one of his supporters in the movie wears a yarmulke. For a brief time, ADL tried to solve the problem by erasing the article condemning "Darwin's Deadly Legacy." The ADL finally decided to bite the bullet and denounce "Expelled." IMO the reason why ADL finally came out against "Expelled" was to avoid the appearance of a double-standard in regard of the denunciation of "Darwin's Deadly Legacy." The ADL's denunciation of "Expelled" says:
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Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust
New York, NY, April 29, 2008 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.
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.
Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.(emphasis added)
The statement "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people" also appears in the ADL's denunciation of "Darwin's Deadly Legacy" as a statement by the ADL's national director Abraham Foxman. Foxman and the ADL can't show that Darwin did not influence Nazism anti-semitism at all, so they say that Hitler did not "need" Darwin to devise his plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
Also, the "complex factors" in the ADL's clause "trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry" is probably a reference to the ADL's probable belief that "Christian antisemitic ideology" is to blame for the holocaust:
The motivation was ideological. The racist-antisemitic ideology was the rational outcome of an irrational approach, an approach that was a cancer like mutation of the Christian antisemitic ideology that had sullied Christian-Jewish relations all through their two millennia of coexistence. (from a speech by Yehuda Bauer, posted on the ADL website)
Also, as I have pointed out numerous times before, a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews. It's like trying to, say, "systematically" exterminate all of the Methodists or Presbyterians in the USA -- it can't be done. It is very doubtful that the Nazis ever had a real "plan" to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The Nazis may have been insane but they weren't stupid.
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posted by Larry Fafarman | 4/30/2008 03:37:00 AM
11 Comments:
How do the ideas of natural selection apply to what the Nazis did? Wouldn't that be an application of artificial selection? Wouldn't something like farming and husbandry be more a cause of Nazism than evolution?
Manuel
Dear reader: Before you do something desperate, go read a sensible article for a change.
That's like the creme brulée of comedy. Rich, decadent, and absolutely sinfully delicious.
-- xailith
Misunderstandings about this Darwin-to-Hitler question seem to be rampant.
Certainly Darwin himself was nothing like a Nazi: he was a very rich, English free-markets, freedom-advocating Liberal. And he hated cruelty, so that he advocated restrictions on vivisection. It's certain that he would have been appalled by the Nazis.
And I wouldn't call Hitler a Darwinist, or at least a full-fledged Darwinist. I believe he thought that pure races at one time existed. That's not a Darwinist concept; and it's unclear whether or not he believed that humans descended from lower animals.
But Darwinism clearly influenced Nazi thinking, especially through eugenics. I've quoted Darwinist biologist Michael R. Rose several times on this blog, on the influence of Darwinism on the Nazis. Many historians have reached similar conclusions. The Darwinist influence on Nazi thinking, including Hitler's thinking, is so obvious that I can't see how anyone can miss it.
Here's what British novelist and essayist A.N.Wilson wrote about the Darwin-to-Nazis connection after reading The Descent of Man. (Wilson is an atheist and materialist who firmly believes in Darwinism. He's also a socialist):
"Darwin, the product of British imperialism, was surely the father, among other things, of European fascism."
The quote is easy to Google. The thoughts are very similar to those of Ben Stein, on the EXPELLED blog.
Everyone who studies the matter carefully seems to come to pretty much the same conclusion.
So, stop blaming Ben Stein. Face reality.
Wilson, by the way, is the author of such books as Against Religion(1991), and God's Funeral (1999.)
A Ben Stein blog on the Darwin-to-Hitler connection, at www.expelledthemovie.com , is entitled Darwinism:The Imperialism of Biology.
So the conclusions of Ben Stein, a conservative and a Jewish theist, are quite similar to those of A.N. Wilson, a socialist and an atheist who has written books attacking religion: and who believes in Darwinism.
Interesting, isn't it?
Anonymous (Manuel) said ...
>>>>>> How do the ideas of natural selection apply to what the Nazis did? Wouldn't that be an application of artificial selection? <<<<<<
The idea behind eugenics is that there is no natural selection in humans and so artificial selection is needed as a substitute.
>>>>>> Wouldn't something like farming and husbandry be more a cause of Nazism than evolution? <<<<<
I think that Darwinism has more of an idea of eliminating or culling the unfit as opposed to the selective breeding of husbandry.
Anonymous said,
>>>>>> Dear reader: Before you do something desperate, go read a sensible article for a change. <<<<<<
You call John Derbyshire's tirade "sensible"?
Jim Sherwood said,
>>>>>I've quoted Darwinist biologist Michael R. Rose <<<<<<
You mean "Ruse," not "Rose," right? And I think that he is more of a philosopher of science than a biologist.
>>>I think that Darwinism has more of an idea of eliminating or culling the unfit as opposed to the selective breeding of husbandry.
How do you get this? Under evolutionary theory, those who do not survive do not survive because they cannot adapt to changes in the environment (new predators, fewer trees, diminishing populations of food, etc.) -- they are not forcibly rounded up and killed.
When snakes mate, several males try to impregnate one female -- often there are balls of snakes because of the dozens of males trying to get their man-juice into the female -- but only one is successful. The "strongest" is the one who is successful while the others lose out. In human populations certain men and certain women are more desired than others. Are the best traits naturally selected? Depends what we mean by best. The smartest people are now having fewer children than people not as smart... is this contradictory to the claims of evolution? Not necessarily. The traits that allow for our survival and that may be most desirable are not necessarily the ones that are going to make humans in contemporary societies financially or socially successful. Besides, humans are too complex to be bred like race horses. Not only are eugenics programs morally reprehensible, they are based on faulty science. Evolutionary theory continues to thrive without any scientific challenge (but, of course, as any scientific theory, subject to further revisions, as has been the case with evolutionary theory) while eugenics is in the dustbin of pseudo-scientific pulp literature, joining scientific creationism and intelligent design.
Manuel
>>>>You call John Derbyshire's tirade "sensible"?
What's wrong with it? He gets the facts right, something you are unable to do.
Manuel
There are some candidates for post natal abortion.
Greetings from the taxi man.
Ronald Reagan was right -- "Evil Empire".
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