Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Well I watched about half of the abominable D. James Kennedy special about Darwin and Hitler last night, about as much as I could stomach. It was every bit as bad as I imagined, perhaps even worse. The dishonesty absolutely leapt off the screen. At one point they present noted paleontological scholar Ann Coulter claiming that "all animal phyla" appeared in the Cambrian "in the blink of an eye" - yes, she actually said that. Apparently in Coulter's world, 70 or 80 million years is "the blink of an eye".
Most galling, I thought, was that they invoked Hitler's book Mein Kampf as being laced with evolution, but in fact that book clearly shows that Hitler was a creationist (or at least that he used creationist arguments for his position). The full text of the book is available online and it's not hard to find the evidence of this. To wit:
Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God's handiwork to be debased. For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.
He explicitly says that we are made in the image of God (well, some of us, of course, by his reasoning):
And, further, they ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.
He endorses the common creationist argument about change being fixed within a "kind":
Walking about in the garden of Nature, most men have the self-conceit to think that they know everything; yet almost all are blind to one of the outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work. This principle may be called the inner isolation which characterizes each and every living species on this earth.Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law--one may call it an iron law of Nature--which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.
And to top it off, he says that humans did not evolve from apes:
From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.
All of this, of course, is completely ignored by Kennedy and the others making this idiotic argument. Because it's inconvenient and it contradicts their hypothesis. So they do the same thing with historical evidence that they do with scientific evidence, distort it and ignore all contrary evidence in order to make reality appear to be something other than it is.
Daniel Morgan has a post with links to all of the previous posts on this subject here and at other blogs.
Comments
I belive you meant to say Mein Kampf "clearly shows that [Hitler] was a creationist"?
Posted by: Bobz | August 28, 2006 10:08 AM
Ed, you made a typo in the second paragraph. You wrote:
"but in fact that book clearly shows that Darwin was a creationist..."
where I am pretty sure you meant Hitler instead of Darwin ;-). Correct it quickly before some creationist quote-mines it!
Posted by: Alejandro | August 28, 2006 10:10 AM
Some more telling bits, for any fence-sitters or honest Creationists reading:
...
...
Hitler's eugenic ideas are based on animal husbandry, not evolution:
Eugenicists, Hitler included, consistently express the idea that Darwinian evolution (i.e. the agentless process of Natural Selection) is incapable of producing anything but degeneration and thus an outside agent -- a.k.a. an "Intelligent Designer" -- is needed to create, fix, or maintain a level of superiority. Eugenics is an anti-Darwinian (or at the very least, counter-Darwinian) concept.
What's depressing is that even if a TV show was made explaining all this and showing the pure bizarro-world nature of the Darwin=Hitler position, no TV station would air it -- yet two stations in my relatively Godless state of Washington (a Christian one and a "secular" one on Sunday morning) aired that Kennedy abomination.
Posted by: jpf | August 28, 2006 12:31 PM
Great work on those quotes from Mein Kampf. Thanks for the link. The thing that always saddens me is that shows like this only further the cause for the sorts of persons who will never bother to research it out for themselves -- the types who would refuse to believe Hitler was not an atheist, despite evidence piled in front of them contrariwise.
Posted by: Daniel Morgan | August 28, 2006 12:32 PM
I did, of course, intend to say that Hitler was a creationist, not Darwin. I corrected the text.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | August 28, 2006 12:44 PM
There was an article in the March/April issue of Archeaology Magazine that dealt with the Ahnenerbe's archeaology corps. It seems that Himmler basically informed them that the idea of human evolution, at least, was anathema to the Reich, because it implied that their fictional 'Aryan' race shared common ancestry with other, 'inferior' races, such a Semitic peoples.
The abstract is at http://www.archaeology.org/0603/abstracts/nazis.html
Regretably, I don't have the actual text describing the above stand: I no longer posess the issue.
Posted by: Chuckles | August 28, 2006 3:55 PM
Mein Kampf should be required reading in grade school for exactly this reason.
Posted by: Adam Ierymenko | August 28, 2006 8:45 PM
Chuckles, I have access to an on-line version of that article, so I could e-mail it to you (or anyone else who wants to read). I think you may be remembering wrongly, though; just skimming the article and searching it for "evolution" only gets me this:
Posted by: Skemono | August 29, 2006 12:40 AM
One of those quotes is my translation from Picker's German of his 'Hitlers Tischgespraeche' , rather than from Mein Kampf.
Posted by: Steven Carr | August 29, 2006 1:19 AM
Here is the original German that I translated from :-
From Hitler's Tischgespraeche for the night of the 25th to 26th 1942 'Woher nehmen wir das Recht zu glauben, der Mensch sei nicht von Uranfaengen das gewesen , was er heute ist? Der Blick in die Natur zeigt uns, dass im Bereich der Pflanzen und Tiere Veraenderungen und Weiterbildungen vorkommen. Aber nirgends zeigt sich innherhalb einer Gattung eine Entwicklung von der Weite des Sprungs, den der Mensch gemacht haben muesste, sollte er sich aus einem affenartigen Zustand zu dem, was er ist, fortgebildet haben.'
Posted by: Steven Carr | August 29, 2006 1:27 AM
That last quote is the one I zeroed in on and immediately searched Mein Kampf for the context. It's important that you identify its real source.
I believe this is an English translation? It claims to be "private,off the record, informal conversations" of Hitler's. Before you quote it you need to establish who was recording these conversations and whether we can trust this secondhand source. Or just leave that quote off entirely.
Posted by: Noumenon | September 11, 2007 7:46 AM
Paging the self-correcting nature of the blogosphere!
Posted by: Noumenon | September 25, 2007 3:01 AM