Glenden BrownExpelled and Holocaust Denial
I love the scienceblogs!
There’s a vigorous debate taking place about the connection between the evolution denier piece of crap film Expelled and Holocaust denial. Some folks are saying the deliberate and dishonest connection between evolutionary theory and the Holocaust amounts to a form of denialism. Other folks are saying it is profoundly and hugely dishonest and vile though it is, but does not amount to Holocaust denial.
Arthur Caplan at MSNBC writes:
The movie’s faux tale of an evolutionist led Inquisition is followed by Stein interviewing a short parade of self-avowed atheists who also are fervent Darwinians as they mock intelligent design in particular and religion in general. They also look frumpy. As an antidote we get deep, sincere ruminations mainly from some monumentally pompous thinker no one has ever heard of who is nevertheless stylishly attired and living in a gorgeous apartment in Paris. He assures what is hopefully an increasingly irritated audience that god and science can live together in peace. They can but for no reasons ever articulated by this fellow or in this film.
Then, and most culpably in terms of the downright immorality of the movie and everyone associated with it, we are presented with what will happen if we keep teaching Darwinism in our schools. The logical consequence of Darwinism is Nazi eugenics: the state directed murder of the handicapped, mentally ill, political dissidents and racial “inferiors”!No, I am not making this up. The core of the movie consists of a sequence in which Stein visits the former German psychiatric hospital at Hadamar where the mass sterilization and murder techniques were first perfected that were later to be used in the concentration camps. Then Ben heads to Dachau, the first concentration camp, where 35,000 people died. These excursions are followed by a visit to Down House, Charles Darwin’s country home outside of London where Ben looks warily at the memorabilia of Darwin’s scientific work that led him to posit the theory of evolution. Stein finishes this sequence by bravely visiting a statue of Darwin where he stares the long deceased now marbleized evil-doer down while making it clear who is directly to blame for Hitler, the sterilization of tens of thousands of German children, the death of 6 million Jews and the deaths of countless other millions of victims of Nazism and those who died fighting the Nazi regime.
This frighteningly immoral narrative is capped off with a lot of shots of the Berlin Wall, old stock footage of East German police kicking around those trying to escape through the wall to the West and some solemn blather by Ben, who calls upon each one of us to rise up in defense of freedom and knock down a few walls in order to get creationism back into the curriculum at Iowa State, Baylor, and other dens of American secular iniquity.
. . . Worse yet, while frowning at Darwin’s statute in a manly fashion, Stein makes no mention of the key factors driving Nazi ideology — racism, homophobia and hatred of the mentally ill and disabled.
To lay blame for the Holocaust upon Charles Darwin is to engage in a form of Holocaust denial that should forever make Ben Stein the subject of scorn not because of his nudnik concern that evolution somehow undermines morality but because in this contemptible movie he is willing to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end. Expelled indeed.
Orac at respectful insolence argues:
I agree with him that this dishonest constant attempt by creationists to paint Hitler as an inevitable consequence of Darwinism is a lie and inherently immoral in its intent and content, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to characterize it as “Holocaust denial.” It is true that by blaming Darwin Klinghoffer, Stein, and their ilk are in essence denying the true causes of the Holocaust, but they do not deny that the Holocaust happened or attempt to minimize the death toll, as real Holocaust deniers do. There’s a substantive difference between the two, and equating them actually weakens Caplan’s argument. Indeed, Stein and Klinghoffer would probably have preferred it if even more people had died at Hitler’s hands during the Holocaust. A higher death toll would have provided them with just that many more murdered victims that they could dishonestly place at Charles Darwin’s doorstep.
Over at the denialism blog, Mark writes:Â
So I’m left with the following observations. Stein and the makers of this film have ignored the factual inaccuracy of their claims about Hitler and the Holocaust to present a false-history of how these events happened. They have attempted to score political points against science by shifting the blame for the Holocaust from the racism of the Nazis to an English scientist.
Does this constitute Holocaust denial? It certainly is denialism - it is the promotion of false history to attack science. It also includes the denial of a specific and important facet of the history of the Holocaust - that European racism is what facilitated the Nazi campaign of extermination against the Jews. While it doesn’t minimize the number of victims, or deny the actual events like more classic Holocaust denial, what does one call it when one lies about the reason for the Holocaust? Without the specific anti-Semitic intent I’m not entirely sure this qualifies.
I don’t know. We should ask experts like Deborah Lipstadt what they think. I do know one thing for sure. It is despicable.
We’re in fairly deep water here, so bear with me.
Holocaust denial is one of the most distasteful of modern trends. It is based as often as not in anti-Semitism, racism and pure old fashioned hate. Holocaust deniers run the gamut from those who deny the Holocaust happened at all (which leaves them struggling to find 12 million dead); they base their arguments on a few cases where relatives, believing the other dead, find each other years and sometimes decades after the war’s end. Other Holocaust deniers use a more subtle, though no less vile argument; they are argue that the Holocaust’s death toll is greatly exaggerated, that the deaths were accidental and coincidental, not be design. These deniers may even argue the camps were created to protect targeted populations by removing them from war zones and the deaths that occurred there were purely the result of war time exigencies. A favorite tactic of Holocaust deniers lies in finding apparently contradictory evidence and arguing that such contradictions prove that Shoah never happened. They may cite, for instance, one survivor account that says “On June 24 there was a selection in the camp” and another account from the same camp that says the selection occurred on June 23, and use these two accounts to say, “See they can’t get their stories straight, therefore the whole thing is lies.” It ignores that both accounts could be correct (given the size of the camps selections may have occurred on multiple days) or that one survivor misremembered the date or that both misremembered the exact date; they also ignore that both accounts corroborate each other in terms of the existence of the camps, selections, general facts of life in the camps and the whole machinery of murder.
In this sense, Ben Stein and his colleagues aren’t denying the Holocaust happened. They are doing something much more insidious - they are misusing the historical facts of the Holocaust to make an anti-scientific argument. As Sam Harris wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation, events like the Holocaust are not the result of people being too reasonable.Â
April 24th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Good grief. Where’s Ferris Bueller when you need him? Bueller?… Bueller?… Bueller?
April 24th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Methinks you watch too much mass created media.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
What is with the right wing and the Nazi analogies? See this pretty good article re Godwin’s law — http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1515951,00.html.
Really, there should be some sort of penalty for being the first to play that particular card. How about for each individual reference to eugenicsfive minutes of shutting yer yap while somebody’s mom stands there and times you. Ten for each generic Hitler or Nazi, and twenty for each actual wound-reopening evocation of an actual concentration camp. Stein could wear those school boy short pants he’s so fond of.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I think when a society, or elements of a society choose to veer away from reality, it is helpful for those pathetic disfunctionaries to throw off anything that smacks of what once was. Any success in that endeavor more readily enables further removes from the distained reality which they are trying to escape.
The key element in all this craziness is: DENIAL! A coping mechanism for sure, but when carried to extremes…certifiably insane
Stien and his shorts will message us from the looney bin about it all worked out..
May 1st, 2008 at 11:12 am
Ben(jamin) Stein is under heavy artillery for ‘exaggerating’ or ‘going easy’ on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the ‘Politics-is-applied-biology’ Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of ‘agnostism’ was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany.
‘Kampf’ was a direct translation of ’struggle’ from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Seinen Kampf. His application.
Catch 22: Haeckel’s 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled for the ‘public understanding of science’ (PUS) in most biology text books until this millennium. Despite factum est that Haeckel’s crackpot raging Recapitulation/Biogenetic Law and functioning gill slits of human embryos have been at the ethical tangent race hygiene/eugenics/genocide, infanticide, and Freudian psychoanalysis (subconscious atavisms). Dawkins is the Oxford professor for PUS - and should gather the courage of Stephen Jay Gould who could feel ashamed about it.
Some edited quotes from my conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology (and underline/edit them a ‘bit’):
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf
The marriage laws were once erected not only in the Nazi Germany but also in the multicultural states of America upon the speculation that the mulatto was a relatively sterile and shortlived hybrid. The absence of blood transfusion between “white” and “colored races” was self evident (Hailer 1963, p. 52).
The first law on sterilization in US had been established in 1907 in Indiana, and 23 similar laws had been passed in 15 States and sterilization was practiced in 124 institutions in 1921 (Mattila 1996; Hietala 1985 p. 133; these were the times of IQ-tests under Gould’s scrutiny in his Mismeasure of Man 1981). By 1931 thirty states had passed sterization laws in the US (Reilly 1991, p. 87). Typically, the operations hit blacks the most in the US, poor women in the Europe, and often the victims were never even told they had been sterilized.
Mendelism outweighed recapitulation (embryos climbing up their evolutionary tree through fish-, amphibian- and reptilian stages), but that merely smoothened the way for the brutal 1930’s biolegislation - that quickly penetrated practically all Western countries. The laws were copied from country to country. The A-B-O blood groups, haemophilia, eye colours etc. were found to be inherited in a Mendelian fashion by 1910. So also the complex traits and social (mis)behaviour such as alcoholism, schizophrenia, manic depression, criminality, rebelliousness, artistic sense, pauperism, racial differences, inherited scholarship (and its converse, feeble-mindedness) were all thought to be determined by one or two genes. Mendelism was “experimental” and quantitative, and its exaggeration outweighed the more cautious biometry operating on smaller variations, not discontinuous leaps. Its advocates boldly claimed that these problems could be done away within a few generations through selection, persisted (although most biologists must have known that defective genes could not be eliminated, even with the most intense forced sterilizations and marriage restrictions due to recessive genes and synergism. Nevertheless, these laws were held until 1970’s and were typically changed only when the abortion legislation were released (1973).
So the American laws were pioneering endeavours. In Europe Denmark passed the first sterilization legislation in Europe (1929). Denmark was followed by Switzerland, Germany that had felt to the hands of Hitler and Gobineu, and other Nordic countries: Norway (1934), Sweden (1935), Finland (1935), and Iceland (1938 ) (Haller 1963, pp 21-57; 135-9; Proctor 1988, p. 97; Reilly 1991, p. 109). Seldom is it mentioned in the popular media, that the first outright race biological institution in the world was not established in Germany but in 1921 in Uppsala, Sweden (Hietala 1985, pp. 109). (I am not aware of the ethymology of the ‘Up’ of the ancient city from Plinius’ Ultima Thule, however.) In 1907 the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany had changed its name to the Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, and in 1910 Swedish Society for Eugenics (Sällskap för Rashygien) had become its first foreign affiliate (Proctor 1988, p. 17). Today, Swedish state church is definitely the most liberal in the face of the world.
Hitler’s formulation of the differences between the human races was affected by the brilliant sky-blue eyed Ernst Haeckel (Gasman 1971, p. xxii), praised and raised by Darwin. At the top of the unilinear progression were usually the “Nordics”, a tall race of blue-eyed blonds. Haeckel’s position on the ‘Judenfrage’ was assimilation and Expelled-command from their university chairs, not yet an open elimination. But was it different only in degree, rather than kind?
In 1917 the immigration of “defective” groups was forbidden even in the United States by a law. In 1921 the European immigration was diminished to 3% based on the 1910 census. Eventually, in the strategical year of 1924 the finest hour of eugenics had come and the fatal law was passed by Congress. It diminished immigration to 2% of the foreign-born from each country based on the 1890 census in order to preserve the “nordic” balance in population, and was hold through World War II until 1965 (Hietala 1985, p. 132).
Richard Lewontin writes:“The leading American idealogue of the innate mental inferiority of the working class was, however, H.H. Goddard, a pioneer of the mental testing movement, the discoverer of the Kallikak family,
and the administrant of IQ-tests to immigrants that found 83 % of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, and 87% of the the Russians to be feebleminded.†(1977, p. 13.) Regarding us Finns, Finnish emmigrants put the cross on the box reserved for the “yellow” group (Kemiläinen 1993, p. 1930), until 1965.
Germany was the most scientifically and culturally advanced nation of the world upon opening the riddles at the close of the nineteenth century. And she went Full Monty.
Today, developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and dont’s. In England, they are fertilizing human embryos for research purposes and pipetting chimera embryos of humans and monkeys, ‘legally’. The legislation should not distract individual researchers from their personal awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. The lesson is that a law is no substitute for morals and that dissidents should not be intimidated.
I am suspicious over the burial of the Kampf (Struggle). The idea of competition is innate in the modern society. It is the the opposite view in a 180 degree angle to the Judaeo-Christian ideal of agapee (contra epithumia, eros, filia & storge) (ahava in Hebrew), that I personally cheriss. The latter sees free giving, altruism, benevolence and self sacrificing love as the beginning, motivation, and sustainer of the reality.
pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm