Running Interference for Darwin

Evolution News features a piece by David Klinghoffer today on Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."

I think everyone knew the indignation and spin from the pro-evolution camp would be fierce when this film was released. However:

Much more surprising is the sheer flat-out lying done by critics bent on denouncing the movie’s controversial linking of Darwinism and Hitlerism.

Now, I happen to think that the Darwin-Hitler link is pretty darn well established, as I’ve argued on National Review Online, Jewcy, and in this space. The major Hitler biographers agree with me that Hitler in Mein Kampf and elsewhere used transparently Darwinian arguments to motivate fellow Jew-haters to actuate the Final Solution.

I don’t care if somebody insists on disagreeing with my interpretation of the relevant texts – though frankly that would be hard to do if your powers of reading comprehension rise above sixth-grade level. Just please don’t lie in your representation of what I’ve written.

I frequently find myself, when dealing with liberals of almost any bent, going back and forth in wondering whether some are simply ignorant, or simply liars and con artists. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell, given the sorry state of academics and media in America today.

Even a little bit of information and intellectual honesty should quickly prove that Klinghoffer's correlation is pretty obvious. Yet facts such as these, (from Klinghoffer's piece at National Review Online) remain below the radar of some:

The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”

The standard biographies of Hitler almost all point to the influence of Darwinism on their subject. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: “The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.” What Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was its rejection of Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography says this of Hitler’s Second Book published in 1928: “An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right.”

In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw explains that “crude social-Darwinism” gave Hitler “his entire political ‘world-view.’ ” Hitler, like lots of other Europeans and Americans of his day, saw Darwinism as offering a total picture of social reality. This view called “social Darwinism” is a logical extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory and was articulated by Darwin himself.

When we replace the Christian worldview of objective truth with the relativism of evolution theory, the logical moral conclusions mirror the biological contentions: survival of the strongest, with right-and-wrong becoming a plaything to be molded by the hands of the strongest.

Klinghoffer's NRO piece points out this "natural" conclusion from Darwin's Descent of Man:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.

Hitler's "solution" didn't come about overnight. Those ideas and plans had been brewing for 70 years or more. And they were quite logical extensions of the implications of Darwinian evolution.

We don't have to like those conclusions. But the harmony between the aforementioned ideas and actions is impossible to mistake...for the intellectually honest, that is.