Creationist historian releasing another book about Hitler and evolution

[Questioninggeller]

Richard Weikart, a historian of Germany at California State University, Stanislaus and Discovery Institute fellow, is releasing another book about Nazi Germany/Hitler and evolution. Weikart previously appeared in the movies Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and Darwin's Deadly Legacy as well as authored From Darwin to Hitler, which was reviewed by another historian as:

This picture of the Holocaust as the outcome of a 'culture war' between religion and science leads to serious distortions on both sides. The 'Judeo-Christian' worldview is unproblematically associated here with many beliefs — such as opposition to birth control, legalized abortion, and assisted suicide — that many believing Christians and Jews would reject. And 'Darwinism' is equated with a hodgepodge of ideas about race, politics, and social issues. If all these ideas were to fall into well-deserved obsolescence, this would in no way detract from the validity of Darwin's contributions to modern biological science. Neither religion nor science is well served by this oversimplified view of their complex history.

Source

According to Weikart's CV, he has a new book called Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress through Palgrave Macmillan in August 2009. He described the book to the Modesto Bee as:

...
Weikart has been on a study leave this year and is finishing a manuscript called "Hitler's Ethic."

"It's a sequel," he said. "It shows that Hitler's ideology revolved around evolutionary ethics -- the idea that whatever promoted evolutionary progress is good and whatever hinders it is bad. That was Hitler's view; he used that to justify everything from military expansion to eugenics to exterminating races -- it all contributed to evolutionary progress."

I wonder if the Discovery Institute is planning a new campaign to help push this myth when the "Hitler's Ethic" gets released. Has anyone heard anything about this book?

 

[Questioninggeller]

Does anyone know what Richard Weikart's undergraduate degree is in? His CV lists history as the subject for his MA and PhD, but what subject his BA is in is missing despite him saying he earned a BA summa cum laude in 1980 from Texas Christian University.

 

[Lonewulf]

I really hope that they keep trying to push this meme, right into the pit that they're heading for at the bottom of their slippery slope.

The more they compare evolution to Nazi ideals, the more they discredit creationism.

 

[Oliver]

The more they compare evolution to Nazi ideals, the more they discredit creationism.

How so? It looks exactly the other way around from a born-again Idiot's POV.

 

[Cainkane1]

Darwin would have spit in hitlers face had he known how Hitler would distort his theory.

 

[joobz]

It exposes the idiot's idiocy. The majority of the population do not fall into that category. They tend to be rather moderate individuals.

creationism gains traction when you portray it as a "reasonable" counter hypothesis to evolution. It seems very reasonable and moderate to want to "teach both".


However, when you go off the deep end with, "evolution caused Hitler", you make moderates extremely uncomfortable. They'll take notice of what you say and dissmiss the drivel.

Similarly, the 9/11 truth movement seemed very reasonable when it first started. They were just asking questions and wanted more information. Most people would be ok with asking questions. It's good to better understand what's happening. However, when they started shouting "9/11 was an inside job" and "Bush is a Nazi", they exposed themselves for the nutcases they were and lost any public support the could have had.

So I say, I hope creationists continue to attempt to link evolution with hitler. It'll easily turn away the majority of moderate people and help science demonstrate why we need better science education in the classrooms.

 

[Lonewulf]

What joobz said.

 

[shadron]

Darwin would have spit in hitlers face had he known how Hitler would distort his theory.

Is there any evidence that Hitler even knew what Darwin's theory was and embraced it? I can easily imagine some of his followers did, but Hitler himself seems to have been scientificaly naive. Does, for example, Mein Kampf ever use Darwin to justify anything? I actually tried reading it once and became very frustrated very quickly.

 

[ponderingturtle]

Is there any evidence that Hitler even knew what Darwin's theory was and embraced it? I can easily imagine some of his followers did, but Hitler himself seems to have been scientificaly naive. Does, for example, Mein Kampf ever use Darwin to justify anything? I actually tried reading it once and became very frustrated very quickly.

I am not sure Hitler recorded what he thought all that much. You can point to the truely strange historical ideas that they had of Aryans coming from atlantis and then building pyramids and such.

But it is hard to say what of the hodgepodge of rationals the Nazi's used that he actualy accepted.

I do not think evolution played a strong roll in his justifications toward the jews, as there seem to be many religious parts to that. His treatment of the mentaly ill and criminals with sterilization fits into it better.

 

[Lonewulf]

I am not sure Hitler recorded what he thought all that much. You can point to the truely strange historical ideas that they had of Aryans coming from atlantis and then building pyramids and such.

Hitler didn't really invent this himself, I'd add.

From the writings of Helena Blavatsky, from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race#Theosophy

"The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring from one single progenitor, (...) who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis."[15]

"Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African Negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do".[19]

"The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The 'sacred spark' is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily -- owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction -- fast dying out. Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent".[20]

 

[dudalb]

Is there any evidence that Hitler even knew what Darwin's theory was and embraced it? I can easily imagine some of his followers did, but Hitler himself seems to have been scientificaly naive. Does, for example, Mein Kampf ever use Darwin to justify anything? I actually tried reading it once and became very frustrated very quickly.

Mein Kampf does stress "Survival Of the Fittest",but in a way that totally distorts Darwin's theory. Hitler probably had a very, very, basic and superficial knowledge of Darwin's theory, but he proceeded to distort it to fit in his own warped mental world, like he did everything else.
The Nazis were heavily,heavily, into "Social Darwinism". In fact, that was there justification for genocide:They were merely ridding the world of infeiror races to make room for the more advanced species of humans.

 

[joobz]

Interestingly, "Primative darwinism" was banner in 1935. I am not certain if this included Darwin's Origin of Species, but it seems clear that Hilter didn't want alternative descriptions of what evolution means to exist in Germany.

http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/documents.htm#twelve

writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

 

[TX50]

The Nazis were heavily,heavily, into "Social Darwinism". In fact, that was there justification for genocide:They were merely ridding the world of infeiror races to make room for the more advanced species of humans.

To be fair, at that time, eugenics and "social Darwinism" was promulgated by
more than just the Nazis. In fact some of the most influential doctors,
scientists and jurists of the time supported it. Eugenics was policy in 33 US
states by the late 1920s (forced sterilisation of the feeble-minded, alcoholics
and persistent offenders). Marie Stopes in the UK was a strong proponent of
it too. Germany enacted their "prevention of hereditarily ill offspring act" in
1933, apparently inspired by a celebrated case in Virginia in 1927 ("three
generations of imbeciles are enough").

 

[blutoski]

To be fair, at that time, eugenics and "social Darwinism" was promulgated by
more than just the Nazis. In fact some of the most influential doctors,
scientists and jurists of the time supported it. Eugenics was policy in 33 US
states by the late 1920s (forced sterilisation of the feeble-minded, alcoholics
and persistent offenders). Marie Stopes in the UK was a strong proponent of
it too. Germany enacted their "prevention of hereditarily ill offspring act" in
1933, apparently inspired by a celebrated case in Virginia in 1927 ("three
generations of imbeciles are enough").

One of my 'to-do' items for retirement is to polish a manuscript I've been pecking at for about twenty years that follows the eugenics movement in Canada and the US and shows that it was born and eventually died here largely as a Protestant project.

The recent popularity of guilt-by-association that the Creationists are whipping up has a pretty good rejoinder:

If it was so persistant in Protestant US states and Canadian provinces both long before the Nazis came to power, and long after the Nazis were defeated, why is it not regarded as evidence of the evil of American Protestantanism?

The Wannsee/Nuremburg laws were drafted largely on the template of California anti-miscegenation sterilization laws that had been enforced in some form as early as 1905. The last forced sterilization of a 'genetically inferior' US citizen was in 1971. (That we know of.)

 

[plumjam]

One of my 'to-do' items for retirement is to polish a manuscript I've been pecking at for about twenty years that follows the eugenics movement in Canada and the US and shows that it was born and eventually died here largely as a Protestant project.

The recent popularity of guilt-by-association that the Creationists are whipping up has a pretty good rejoinder:

If it was so persistant in Protestant US states and Canadian provinces both long before the Nazis came to power, and long after the Nazis were defeated, why is it not regarded as evidence of the evil of American Protestantanism?

The Wannsee/Nuremburg laws were drafted largely on the template of California anti-miscegenation sterilization laws that had been enforced in some form as early as 1905. The last forced sterilization of a 'genetically inferior' US citizen was in 1971. (That we know of.)

Are you saying that eugenics fitted well with the ideas of Protestantism?
Or is it more that the Catholic Church was one of the few organisations at the time to come out against eugenics? ...and in those territories that which was not Catholic at the time was pretty much, by default, Protestant.

 

[Questioninggeller]

Is there any evidence that Hitler even knew what Darwin's theory was and embraced it? I can easily imagine some of his followers did, but Hitler himself seems to have been scientificaly naive. Does, for example, Mein Kampf ever use Darwin to justify anything? I actually tried reading it once and became very frustrated very quickly.

I've tried reading Mein Kampf cover-to-cover, but it is so poorly written and boring that I haven't completed. However, I have read many of his early speeches and gone through Hitler's Secret Book (found by the Allies and much shorter than his first book) and all of them contain many religious currents.

From Mein Kampf:

...
I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.
...
I thank Heaven that a portion of the memories of those days still remains with me. Woods and meadows were the battlefields on which the 'conflicts' which exist everywhere in life were decided.
...
The more the linguistic Babel corroded and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the disintegration of this Babylonian Empire, and with it the hour of freedom for my German-Austrian people.
...
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
...
Thank the Lord, Germanic democracy means just this: that any old climber or moral slacker cannot rise by devious paths to govern his national comrades, but that, by the very greatness of the responsibility to be assumed, incompetents and weaklings are frightened of.
...
The hard struggle which the Pan-Germans fought with the Catholic Church can be accounted for only by their insufficient understanding of the spiritual nature of the people.
...
Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it.
...

Many more cited here.

 

[Lonewulf]

Hah. Hitler called the average voter stupid.

I think he proved it, too, given how few people bothered to learn about the man and read his published work.

 

[blutoski]

Are you saying that eugenics fitted well with the ideas of Protestantism?
Or is it more that the Catholic Church was one of the few organisations at the time to come out against eugenics? ...and in those territories that which was not Catholic at the time was pretty much, by default, Protestant.

A bit of both. We have to be mindful that the origin of eugenics was the belief that we could improve our standard of living - and perhaps even eliminate poverty and suffering - through applied scientific knowledge. This was a good fit with the Protestant message of its day.

Many Canadians would be surprised to learn that so many people famous for being progressive were strong advocates of eugenics. I'm thinking specifically of Tommy Douglas (baptist minister who pushed for state-provided medicine) and Emily Murphy (first female magistrate who pushed for women's rights and many other types of anti-prejudicial legal reforms).

As eugenics became considered more plausible, Protestant churches recognized that it was a way for people to distinguish between churches' currency in our real world. They exaggerated the benefits of eugenics in order to highlight that the Catholics were not only technologically out of touch, but that their policies of relentless breeding could very well be the *cause* of crime, poverty, &c. They went a bit overboard.

Having said that, the major US and Canadian organized Protestant churches dropped their official support after WWII. It remains, however, a view that is highly correlated with Protestantism.

This is also a bit of a semantic argument. The Germans did not practise strict eugenics (the promotion of good genes) - they practised a mix of eugenics and dysgenics (the elimination of bad genes).

There are also many eugenics programs that remain in place today, which are arguably legitemate. For example, most US states and Canadian provinces do not allow parents and children to marry, and do not allow biological siblings to marry.

 

[Questioninggeller]

Are you saying that eugenics fitted well with the ideas of Protestantism?
Or is it more that the Catholic Church was one of the few organisations at the time to come out against eugenics? ...and in those territories that which was not Catholic at the time was pretty much, by default, Protestant.

Yes, it did. Furthermore, in Nazi Germany the Protestant sects in Nazi Germany were in favor of many euthanasia programs and they were only haulted against fellow Germans in 1941 after pressure from Catholic bishops (this was part of a long running battle between the Nazis in Germany and the Catholic church). (For more on the subject read Michael Burleigh's book "Death and Deliverance.")