Orac is the nom de blog of a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued 
Yesterday, I did a rather long post that used as its introduction an assertion by bioethicist Arthur Caplan in a review of the anti-evolution propaganda movie Expelled! that the claim that Darwinism led more or less directly to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. In my post, I concluded that I don't agree with that assertion and that likening Ben Stein's claims in the movie actually weakened his otherwise excellent article that appropriately pointed out the inherent immorality and dishonesty in the way the movie links Darwinism to the Holocaust. To my surprise, Dr. Caplan actually showed up in the comments and responded:
I stand by my claim that attributing the Holocaust to Darwinism is a gross and disgusting form of Holocaust denial. If you say that 6 million Jews died, not from racism and bigotry, but because of a plan to implement Darwinism, then you blur the ethical offense of the Holocaust and, in Stein's case, deliberately so.Holocaust denial is not just about did an event happen or not. It is crucial to know why the Holocaust happened. And we do know--racism. To imply, suggest or pronounce other causes is to deny what happened just as surely as to say no one was killed in the concentration camps. History encompasses both events and their causes.
Denial is to ignore both.Expelled is a vicious form of Holocaust denial.
As much as I respect Dr. Caplan (indeed, I've cited him before approvingly on more than one occasion) and know that he's written about the medical aspects of the Holocaust before (for example, When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics And The Holocaust), thinking about his response actually led me to conclude that I really do disagree with his conclusion more strongly than I did when I wrote yesterday's post. I don't know how much about Holocaust denial he knows. In my experience, even Holocaust scholars often don't know that much about Holocaust denial. Many find it so ridiculous that they consider it not worth their attention in much the same way that evolutionary biologists dismiss creationism and its bastard offspring "intelligent design" creationism as being beneath their notice and many physician advocates of science- and evidence-based medicine dismiss homeopathy as too ridiculous to pay any attention to. They're too busy doing their work to concern themselves with what they rightly view as pseudoscience or pseudohistory. In any event, I can sympathize with Caplan's disgust at Expelled!, but, although it causes me trepidation to disagree with as accomplished a bioethicist and scholar as Art Caplan, I just can't agree with his characterizing Ben Stein's intellectual dishonesty as a form of Holocaust denial.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate my point is to look at how those of us who take an interest in Holocaust denial actually define it. The definition is actually fairly specific and commonly accepted. Before I get to that definition, let me first point out what Holocaust denial is not. It is not Holocaust revisionism, as dearly as Holocaust deniers would like to argue that what they do is no different from what revisionist historians do and call themselves "revisionists." To call Holocaust denial "revisionism" is an intentional misnomer used by deniers to try to claim an undeserved mantle of intellectual and academic respectibility. Holocaust History Project Board Member Gord McFee in his essay Why "revisionism" isn't described well what legitimate historical revisionism entails:
On its basic level, revisionism is nothing more than than the advocacy of revision, which in itself is the act of revising, or modifying something that already exists. Applied to history, it means that historians challenge the accepted version of the causes or consequences of historical events. As such, it is an accepted and important part of historical endeavour for it serves the dual purpose of constantly re-examining the past while also improving our understanding of it. Indeed, if one accepts that history attempts to help us better understand today by better understanding how we got here, revisionism is essential.
In other words, historical revisionism is nothing more than examining new evidence or looking at historical events and putting the evidence together with new evidence in order to determine whether current understanding of historical events fits with the evidence. What distinguishes scholarly historical revisionism from Holocaust denial is that the conclusion is not foreordained. In Holocaust denial, as in all forms of denialism and many forms of crankery, the evidence is cherry-picked to support the desired conclusion. Again, McFee describes this well:
Revisionists" depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology described above, thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head. That is not to say that historians never depart from a preconceived or desired result; they often do. But in adhering rigorously to the correct methodology, they accept that the result of their investigation may not be what they envisaged at the beginning. They are prepared to adapt their theories to that reality. Indeed, they are often required to revise their conclusions based on the facts. To put it tritely, "revisionists" revise the facts based on their conclusion.
Of course, in order to understand how Holocaust denial is defined, one must understand how the Holocaust is commonly defined. This is, as you might expect, not an easy task. However, there are three or four core elements of the group of related historical events that historians call the Holocaust. Although there may be some minor variations, Andrew E. Mathis, writing the chapter Holocaust Denial, A Definition in Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia, lists these generally accepted elements of the "Final Solution of the Jewish problem" that became the Holocaust:
- The Holocaust was the intentional murder of European Jews by the Nazi government of Germany during World War II as a matter of state policy
- This mass murder employed gas chambers, among other methods, as a method of killing
- The death toll of European Jews by the end of World War II was roughly 6 million.
Yad Vashem uses a similar definition, defining Holocaust denial as:
Claims that the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis never happened; that the number of Jewish losses has been greatly exaggerated; that the Holocaust was not systematic nor a result of an official policy; or simply that the Holocaust never took place.
Michael Shermer points out in Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Bogus Notions of Our Time also points out what Holocaust deniers do not deny:
Deniers do not deny that antisemitism was rampant in Nazi Germany or that Hitler and many of the Nazi leaders hated Jews. Nor do they deny that Jews were rounded up and forced into concentration camps where, in general, they were very harshly treated and made the victims of overcrowding, disease, and forced labor.
From having spent nearly a decade delving into the cesspit of Holocaust denier websites, blogs, and discussion boards, I can with some confidence tell you that the usual key claims made by Holocaust deniers include at least two (and usually all) of the following:
- There was no policy in Nazi Germany to exterminate European Jewry and other non-Jewish racial "undesirables." There are many variants and subclaims related to this. One is that the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish question" was not extermination but rather expulsion. And, indeed, early in the war, that was the original plan before the invasion of the USSR, which placed millions of Jews into Nazi hands, far more than could be deported or transported to Madagascar (an early Nazi idea for getting rid of the Jews that was clearly impractical given British naval power) and the relative weakness of the German Navy. Another variant of this is that Hitler knew nothing about what was going on and his underlings in fact instigated mass killings of Jews without his knowledge. (This is one of David Irving's favorite gambits.) Of course, there is a a debate among Holocaust historians over whether Hitler intended to exterminate the Jews from the beginning or whether the Holocaust evolved over time from persecution and repression to genocide in response to increasing radicalization (i.e., it took on a life of its own). This is known as the functionalism versus intentionalism debate. Not surprisingly, this debate is often hijacked by Holocaust deniers to sow doubt, just as debates among biologists over the mechanism of evolution are hijacked by creationists to attack evolution itself. However, what makes functionalism different from Holocaust denial is that the end result was still that, by 1942 the Nazis had a policy of intentional mass extermination of Jews in their territories, something Holocaust deniers deny.
- There were no homicidal gas chambers. This is a very frequent denier technique (warning: link leads to a truly vile and anti-Semitic site). Indeed, there is a Holocaust denier refrain that goes, "No gas chambers, no Holocaust." This, too, is a favorite canard of David Irving. This, too has many variants. One is that the gas chambers were used for fumigation. Some were, but there were still homicidal gas chambers. Another variant is that the main causes of Jewish death were starvation and disease, caused primarily by Allied bombing of German supply lines and food shortages at the end of the war, a claim that also denies the intentionality of the Holocaust and allows deniers to blame the Allies for a large part of the death toll from the Holocaust. To Holocaust deniers, the reason that the existence of homicidal gas chambers must be denied, of course, that their existence is irrefutable evidence that there was intentionality in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. Starvation, disease, shootings, and even hangings could be rationalized as not being part of an intentional campaign of mass murder, but large gas chambers used to kill large numbers of Jews at one time are pretty hard to explain in any other way other than an intentional government policy of industrialized mass murder. Another common corollary to this claim is that the crematoria were used because of so many deaths from disease or starvation, not because the activity of gas chambers made them necessary.
- Nowhere near six million Jews died. Usually, as creationists accept microevolution but not macroevolution, Holocaust deniers will "admit" that several hundred thousand Jews died but deny that it was anywhere near the accepted estimates of five to six million. In other words, they "accept" a small claim and deny the larger and accurate claim.
There are two other elements to Holocaust denial that must be pointed out because they are virtually always present. The first is conspiracy theories. Indeed, Holocaust denial, as Andrew Mathis points out, is nothing if it isn't a huge conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories, the mother of all conspiracy theories, if you will. If you have the stomach to delve into the websites and writings of Holocaust deniers, you will very rapidly discover this element. Indeed, this is the element behind the offensive term "Holohoax," which is meant to imply that the Holocaust is nothing more than a massive hoax, designed to gain reparations, a Jewish homeland, or any other of the supposedly nefarious desires of the Jews. Moreover, a claim that often accompanies the "Holohoax" is that somehow the Jews have been able to fool historians into thinking that there was an intentional policy by Nazi Germany to exterminate European Jewry, even sometimes going so far as to claim that the documents used to convict Nazi leaders at Nuremberg were forged. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but it's true, as Jamie McCarthy so gleefully mocks in his essay The "Hoax." In fact, my favorite technique in the old days to tweak Holocaust deniers was to ask persistently and politely who, exactly, was behind this conspiracy and what the evidence was to support this contention. Again, Andrew Mathis describes the conspiracy-mongering aspect of Holocaust denial quite well:
It can thus be seen that Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theory that seeks to place Jews behind an international movement to promote a falsehood for monetary gain. In this way, Holocaust denial is no different than many other previous forms of antisemitism, which imputed to Jews monetary greed as well as a conspiratorial air. Besides the haphazard manner in which deniers have chosen to lump all Jews together, regardless of religious or political orientation, as perpetrators of this "hoax," deniers also engage in efforts at pseudoscience to try to prove their point of view regarding the Holocaust. To date, none of their efforts has made any lasting impression on Holocaust historiography. While the rational observer will conclude that this is a testament to the truth of the history of the Holocaust, for the Holocaust deniers, it is merely one more piece of evidence of a conspiracy to quash what they believe to be the "real truth" about the fate of Jews during World War II.
The second element of Holocaust denial that is always present in Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism, often neo-Nazi sympathies and more than a little measure of admiration for Hitler. Why else would anyone want to deny the Holocaust? Indeed, years ago back in the old playground on Usenet known as alt.revisionism (or, more commonly called these days, the "cesspit" because only the dumbest Holocaust deniers seem to post there anymore) Allan Matthews illustrated this nicely with a question:
Gee, you'd think that after many months of posting this at least one revisionist who isn't a neo-Nazi or anti-Semite would have come forward and said "Here I am!"But, no. It appears that there just aren't any such revisionists around.
Based on their past posting history, the few bozos who have bothered to claim that they aren't neo-Nazis or anti-Semites were, upon examination of their claims, found to be clearly lying. Of course, given the general behavior of revisionists, this lack of honesty isn't surprising in the least.
However, just in case some revisionist 'scholars' have missed my question to date, here it is again:
Where are the revisionists who aren't neo-Nazis or anti-Semites?
It's a fair question. After all, how can revisionists hope to be taken seriously if they all have such apparent biases, agendas and axes to grind?
So, then, if Holocaust revisionism is an intellectually honest endeavor, where are the revisionists who aren't neo-Nazis or anti-Semites?
He never found any, and neither did I. Neither will you, either, if you look. Anti-Semitism and at least a tendency towards neo-Nazi sympathies are part and parcel of Holocaust denial. Indeed, Holocaust denial cannot be separated from them, and Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt was spot on correct when she pointed out that "the real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again."
As much as I respect Art Caplan for his work in bioethics, given the actual definition of Holocaust denial generally agreed upon by academics, I have conclude that he's incorrect when he asserts that the vile lies in Expelled! are a form of Holocaust denial. I can fully understand why he might want to say that, but I can't agree with it. As many lies about Darwin and the Holocaust as Ben Stein and Mark Mathis pack into the movie, they accept the basic historicity of the Holocaust and do not show any signs of the anti-Semitism that accompanies Holocaust denial. Thus, I must respectfully disagree that postulating a false explanation for why the Holocaust happened is the equivalent of denying that it did, in fact, happen as history tells us. Moreover, even though it is true that the claim that Darwinism leads necessarily and inevitably to an event like the Holocaust is a foul lie, it is true that Nazi eugenics policy was based in part on a misunderstanding of Darwin's theory. I'm not sure I can go as far as saying that playing up that aspect to a ridiculous extreme and in the meantime failing to mention that it was a version of Darwin's theory twisted by the mind of Hitler and Nazi physicians that led to the Holocaust, not Darwin's theory itself, can be considered a form of Holocaust denial unless the definition of Holocaust denial is changed to accommodate it.
What's really going on with Expelled! is something that's gone on almost since the very end of World War II, when Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz from the East, and Allied forces liberated Dachau and other camps from the West: the intentional misuse of the Holocaust as a political weapon. The Expelled! producers are using the Holocaust as nothing more than a convenient weapon to advance their ideological and political agenda by linking their opponents, in this case Darwin and scientists who accept the theory of evolution, to the ideology that led the Nazis to perpetrate genocide. Not accepting the historicity and horror of the Holocaust would make it very difficult to use it as a cudgel with which to beat one's opponents into submission. What is really happening is not Holocaust denial; rather, in making Expelled! and perpetuating the claim that Darwinism led inevitably to the Holocaust, what's really happening is that Ben Stein and Mark Mathis are pissing on the mass graves of the millions of victims of the Holocaust in the name of their right wing political agenda, a particularly odious spectacle, given that Ben Stein is Jewish. They are not denying the Holocaust, nor are they exhibiting anti-Semitism or Hitler apologia. They are desecrating the memory of the dead.
Although I reluctantly must disagree with Dr. Caplan on whether the dishonest linking of Darwinism to the Holocaust constitutes a form of Holocaust denial, there is one thing that I certainly agree with him about. I agree that Ben Stein, Mark Mathis, David Klinghoffer, and the rest of the merry band of anti-evolutionists pushing the myth that the Holocaust is a direct consequence of Darwin's theory are despicable liars of the first order who will say anything to smear their opponents. The reason, of course, is that they do not have facts or science on their side; so that's all they have left.
Humanities & Social Science
Life Science
Comments
I agree with most of this, Orac, but I think what's really going on with Expelled is the Republican right coming out with a movie to rally the religious right during an election year. The content is secondary to their real intent, the political use of the issue.
I'd better point out that as far as I know the only James in my family was a great uncle who died before I was born and who was a shell-shocked, factory worker in Lynn Mass.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 9:46 AM
I realize that what you are discussing is Holocaust Revisionism, so excuse me for selecting one small point of what you write, but I am interested in this:
Is there any evidence that there was, to any extent worth mentioning, a basis in "Darwin's theory", even a misunderstanding of Darwin's theory?
I am not terribly knowledgeable about the subject, so I am ready to accept correction about this, but what little I've seen indicates that they didn't even care to mention Darwin very much at all, and there was at least as much negative as positive mention about anything "darwinian" or "pseudo-darwinian".
Posted by: TomS | April 24, 2008 9:58 AM
What distinguishes scholarly historical revisionism from Holocaust denial is that the conclusion is not foreordained. In Holocaust denial, as in all forms of denialism and many forms of crankery, the evidence is cherry-picked to support the desired conclusion.
So if Expelled is not Holocaust denial, should we consider it to be "scholarly historical revisionism", or is the above quote a false dichotomy?
To me, it is a form of denialism. It's doesn't deny the event, but it denies the reasons and in fact shifts all of the blame from the individuals responsible onto Darwin himself.
Posted by: Tophe | April 24, 2008 10:11 AM
I tend to agree. I'm reluctant to call it Holocaust denial as it lacks the goal of anti-semitism or promotion/exoneration of Nazism.
It's still despicable, and still denialism. It's Holocaust exploitation more than anything.
Posted by: MarkH | April 24, 2008 10:34 AM
If Ben Stein performed his Darwin-done-the-Holocaust, anti-evolution, designed to be persuasive "act" as a dedicated adversarial lawyer protecting his client before a jury carefully "selected" for their biases and prejudices, how would we analyze Ben's "performance?"
If Johnnie Cochran can successfully invoke the Hitler frame in a sacred court of law, should anybody be shocked or surprised when Ben, who has the best lawyer & peeyar credentials plus three decades of experience in both scamming businesses, pulls an essentially identical "stunt?"
Orac cuts to the chase; "...pushing the myth that the Holocaust is a direct consequence of Darwin's theory are despicable liars of the first order who will say anything to smear their opponents."
I would add this to Orac's phrase; "and sway the jury and the schmuckery - no holds barred."
Ben is marketing the Holocaust brand and/or the Holocaust Denial Brand, and he is doing it very skillfully & successfully.
"Let's give them the Darwin frame and have a debate," and scientists join Ben's carefully crafted debate.
Ben-the-bamboozler has scored, and we are the marks.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 24, 2008 11:14 AM
Would Ben exploit science, Darwin, & "ethics" to push his marketing agenda?
What conditions Ben's ethics or Ben's "lack of ethics?"
Do the all pervasive & causal "ethics" come from Pluto in space ships with the aliens, or do they generate spontaneously as maggots of yore.
Ben posta have "professional ethics" because he is a trained lawyer with a Yale Law degree.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 24, 2008 11:38 AM
TomS, this quote from Mein Kampf is probably the closest you can get to a tie to Darwin.
From: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter XI: Nation and Race
"In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development. ... Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health."
It's a general description of natural selection. However, if you read the entire section, you can see that his ideas about it differ greatly from Darwin's and he uses it to make different conclusions about its affects on nature. He actually argues that natural selection is responsible for animals remaining within their "kinds". To put it in differently, he thinks that natural selection is the barrier between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
Posted by: Curt | April 24, 2008 12:49 PM
Good post Oric. I sadly think that Caplin's statements will provide the Expelled makers with very useful fodder to reinforce their arguments and bolster their presumed possession of the moral high ground.
Posted by: jf | April 24, 2008 1:01 PM
McCarthy: "the Republican right coming out with a movie to rally the religious right during an election year. The content is secondary to their real intent, the political use of the issue."
The conspiracist mind draws connections too readily. Specifically, it consider possible consequences of an event and concludes that these must be involved in causality. If this had not been released in an election year, what overarching "reason" would you have come up with?
Maybe the primary intent is really is what it looks like: a group of creationists/IDists intended to promote their belief system.
Back to the issue of connections: While McCarthy and cee overemphasize and oversimplify connections, and McCarthy is especially egregious in attributing to Darwin himself views held by his eugenicist followers, many of those on the other side are overly defensive.
Above all, the eugenics of the late 19th to early 20th C. was an anti-dysgenic program. There was also a goal of improving humanity (sometimes to ridiculous heights - read Trotsky on selective human breeding, for example), but the driving motivation was to counteract the decline that was thought inevitable under conditions of civilization. This degeneracy discourse predates Darwin; however, the theory of natural selection provided a powerful explanation why human populations would be expected to decline. Darwinism made degeneracy fears more seemingly scientific and ironclad in logic. (We now know that this dysgenic fear is vastly overblown and the premises of traditional eugenic - particularly, the drive to reduce diversity - are utterly mistaken.) Darwin was very concerned about forces (including the absence of forms of selection) acting to degenerate human hereditary material. However, he was also a Whig, wary of excessive government intervention and he was kindly, so he did not want to end charity for the poor and care for the sick.
In addition, Darwin was a multilevel selectionist. Competition and selection was not just between individuals but between races/varieties as well as species. (Yes, "races" in the subtitle of Origins also referred to human races; Wallace thought so.) Also, Darwin and his colleagues did sometimes use inferior-superior Chain of Being rhetoric, including in regard to human races.
It is very important to point out that Darwin, Wallace, Huxley et al were NOT modern evolutionary biologists. I see a habit of refuting some racist or reactionary biodetermist view with an explanation of how it is incompatible with modern evolutionary biology and hence with Darwin. Not the same thing.
On connections and citation: Darwin, through followers and revisionists, can still be one of many influences (albeit highly distorted and misinterpreted) on Nazi thought even if he is not specifically cited by Hitler or top Nazis (actually, one of them did, but I don't want to provide a mined quote for cee). What many Europeans understood as Darwinism or evolutionary biology in the early 20th century was actually Haeckelism, which is Darwinism mixed with some other ideas - including social organicism, the idea that human societies are like organisms (the context for Nazi germ rhetoric). This, combined with selection between groups and a strife-based ethos derived from Nature's supposed struggle of all against all, is a potentially incendiary idea. (It can also be a perfectly benign one, depending on who is using it.) The inevitable and progressive nature of eliminationist struggle between groups was as important as anti-declinist eugenics in Nazi biopolitics.
There was a multiplicity of rival schools of biological thought within Nazism (holist vs mechanist, anti-Haeckelian vs Haeckelian etc.). But the fact that there was an SS Ernst Haeckel Society is pretty hard to ignore.
I do not believe that "Darwin was necessary but not sufficient" for the Holocaust. I believe that traditional Christian antisemitism deserves that designation. Rather, a grossly perverted biology derived partly from Darwinism (via Galton, Haeckel, Woltmann, Madison Grant, Lenz etc.) shaped the rationalizing ideology of Nazism and the Holocaust. A rationale is not the same thing as a cause, although it can influence the specific manner of implementation, and which kinds of specialists are overseeing the implementation. That can be seen in the biomedical and bioanthropological aspects of the implementation of the Holocaust, including the carryover of features from the handicapped euthanasia-murder program. This biopolitics had a lot of important features not derived from Darwin, including antisemitism, vitalism, teleology, and social organicism.
The Nazis took ideas from a wide variety of sources, some of them profoundly reinterpreted and redefined. There are clearly socialist ideas in Nazi ideology and practice (see Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics), yet many people are offended by the idea that Nazism had anything to do with socialism. Many Nazis followed a very weird variant of Christianity (see Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich); some Christians dismiss Nazi Christianity while some anti-theists suggest that the Nazi elite was a group of devout mainstream Catholics and Protestants. The same with biology in the service of Nazi ideology. And to recognize this is not to blame Darwin nor Darwinism for the Holocaust at all.
Sources
Patrick Bratlinger. 2003. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930.
Christopher M. Hutton. 2005. Race and the Third Reich.
Robert Proctor. books: 1988. Racial Hygiene. 1999. The Nazi War On Cancer.
G Stein. 1988. Biological science and the roots of Nazism. American Scientist 76:50-58.
Paul Weindling. 1989. Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism, 1870-1945.
Posted by: Colugo | April 24, 2008 1:02 PM
Do you really think that Hitler would talk up a Brit in the period after WWI? I'm not a great reader of his junk but I'm having a hard time imagining it.
I'm noticing that people have a hard time understanding several things, that influences can be indirect, that the existence of one cause for something doesn't negate the existence of another contributing cause, that results can happen independently of intention and can even be the opposite of what the originator intended them to be. These are especially true of looking for the causes of complex events that happened over a long period and with many people bringing them about.
Which is why it's stupid to keep playing the creation industries' game in defense of someone who has been dead 120 years. The science is there, you don't need Darwin.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 1:05 PM
The conspiracist mind draws connections too readily.
Right, like the Republican-right wouldn't think to bring out a piece of Darwin-war propaganda during an election year without its usefulness in rallying the religious-right escaping their attention. Never occur to them. Especially it would have escaped their notice that they can count on the knee-jerk response from "the left".
It's always a bad idea to underestimate the intelligence of these people or their guile or their sincerity. Or the fact that they've got an enormous amount of money.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 1:10 PM
Make that: their guile or their insincerity...
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 1:12 PM
@Anthony McCarthy: Do you really think that Hitler would talk up a Brit in the period after WWI? I'm not a great reader of his junk but I'm having a hard time imagining it.
Hitler loved us Brits. He was anxious for Britain not to get into the war at first because he had so much regard for the British character (and IIRC our admittedly isolationist policies).
Besides, we invented concentration camps, during the Boer war.
Posted by: Despard | April 24, 2008 1:15 PM
I am not an expert on history, Hitler or Nazi philosophies, but....
From Nazi villains in American movies, I gathered that the general goal was to return Germany to a mythic past of "racial purity" by resurrecting a mythic archetype blond, blue-eyed mythic with straight teeth, and weeding out all peoples not fitting that mode. (Like, dark-haired Hitler?) In means, they applied 1000-year-old principles of animal husbandry (which Darwin in 1871 wrote would be an inhumane and stupid thing to do) and in goal they were trying to "undo" "history" -- which is a basic concept not based on Darwinian evolution or its successors.
Please criticize away, as you should given my award-winning scholarship. :)
Also, I heard that Hitler loved the woo.
Posted by: rpenner | April 24, 2008 1:23 PM
It boggles my mind that anyone can think that the natural conclusion of Darwin's publication "Origin of the Species" is Hitler's particular brand of insanity. Hitler's ultimate goal was to achieve racial purity -- a concept diametrically opposed to what Darwin was talking about. Darwinian evolution doesn't encourage the idea of a holocaust. On the contrary, it tells us that quest for racial purity is futile.
Hitler was led by ancient principles of animal husbandry -- encourage the traits you want by preventing individuals with undesirable traits from breeding, while selectively breeding those with desirable traits. (Funny Ben Stein mentioned the Holocaust but didn't bring up Hitler's Aryan breeding programs. This supports the idea that Ben Stein et al are perfectly aware that the argument is ridiculous, and are just using the Holocaust because it gets attention.) His objective was essentially to isolate the desirable genes from the undesirable ones and then allow the Aryan race to grow.
But what Darwin found was that if you isolate a specific set of genes, you don't get racial purity. At first you do, but over time that line changes, *evolves*, and, most damning of all for Hitler's plan, *diversifies*.
So if, as Ben Stein alleges, Hitler based his plan on Darwin's theory of natural selection, then the ultimate irony is that Darwin's theory reveals a fundamental flaw in the concept.
Posted by: Calli Arcale | April 24, 2008 1:58 PM
I don't think I would call it denialism either. I'm not a big fan of using labels to attempt to resonate hatred by either people I agree with or don't. I would say it's a blatant attempt to exploit the holocaust for unrelated reasons. And it is unrelated. It offends me.
BTW...I'm a Canadian and not a student of the holocaust, but I /think/ that here the holocaust refers to all the victims of the concentration camps, not just the jewish ones. I may be mistaken.
Posted by: BAllanJ | April 24, 2008 2:02 PM
Stein is not denying the What or How of the Holocaust, but rather denying the Why and putting in its place his strawman "Darwinism." If its not a *NEW* form of Holocaust denial, what would it be? He's still denying a rather fundamental part of this nightmare, just not the part you usually think people would deny. Has anyone really done this before, saying 'Yes it happened, yes it was six million, yes they used gas chambers, yes Hitler did it, but not becausu he saw the Jews as dirty infectious parasites but because (insert bullshit)' ?
Posted by: Beth | April 24, 2008 2:06 PM
Ben Stein and the rest of the Expelled crew are using denialism, just not Holocaust denial. As Orac and others have pointed out, they are trivializing the murder of millions to score political points. The denialism they are using is the denial of christian history.
In the stark argument that creationist use against the theory of evolution, they have to be on the side of goodness while the followers of Darwin have to be the beasts, fitting in their mind's eye because of evolutionist's acceptance of humans being a part of nature. Therefore, against all evidence, evolution is responsible for racism (Just ignore the idea of "The Sin Of Ham".) and anti-semitism (Just ignore centuries of belief in blood libel.) The one thing the Expelled crew and Holocaust deniers have in common is the absolute need to whitewash the past of their fore-bearers.
As for rpenner's questions, in a lot of ways the, the ideas of the use of eugenics and techniques from farm breeding comes from Himmler. He came from a agricultural background and had dreams of setting up a culture of farmer-soldiers in Poland, western Russia and The Ukraine.
Posted by: Janine | April 24, 2008 2:17 PM
Notice that everyone keeps talking about The Origins of Species when it's mostly in his later work that the troublsome quotes are found. I'm sorry, but he didn't stop writing in 1859 and the opposition knows that. I'm afraid you will not be able to avoid dealing with the passages they are bringing up that way.
Despard, I haven't looked at M. K. since I was in college but I don't recall Hitler being very generous to the English during that period. Look to my antagonist, Colugo's post to see that a lot of the German influence of Darwin would have come though his colleague Haeckel, I think he might have been one of Darwin's translators, though I'm not entirely certain of that.
Colugo, since Darwin cites Haeckel and Galton in his late work, and there was a close collegeial relationship between him and both of them, indeed, it's impossible to name someone closer professionally to Darwin than Galton I don't think the assertion that they perverted his work is credible. There is a minor Haeckel appology effort that I read about a while back, you might want to look into that.
When Darwin died Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton were put in charge of his funeral by the Darwin circle. I don't think you get to assert that he was remote from it. Especially seeing that Leonard Darwin was his successor in the British Eugenics Society.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 2:28 PM
Almost precisely my point. Darwin-Hitler pseudohistory doesn't fit into the current definition of Holocaust denial as accepted by historians who study this issue. Consequently, the definition would have to be changed to accommodate it if Stein's and Mathis' crapfest is to be considered Holocaust denial. If Caplan had argued that it should be considered a new form of Holocaust denial rather than saying that it is a form of Holocaust denial, I might have agreed with him. As it is, though, Stein's historical fart doesn't have key elements to it that would allow us to properly categorize it as Holocaust denial.
Posted by: Orac | April 24, 2008 2:31 PM
That is because it really is a denial of the bad parts of christian history.
Posted by: Janine | April 24, 2008 2:35 PM
I think assuming Ben Stein's participation in the movie was anything except him doing another right-wing propaganda job for pay is thinking about it too hard. The guy has no interest in evolution or genocide, he's a high priced ideological harlot.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 2:41 PM
No, Arthur Caplan is right.
I get the same thing with certain kinds of HIV deniers-- Oh sure, they accept the fact that HIV causes AIDS and its a terrible, world wide pandemic. But they have a vast conspiracy set up in their minds involving illegal 'monkey' trading and evil white men in hidden laboratories creating HIV from scratch to kill black people.
Those people deny 100% of the history of HIV, and 99% of the science-- they just accept that HIV causes AIDS. I call them HIV deniers just like the people who think AIDS is a sham.
EXPELLED is the same thing. They ignore the real history of antisemitism and invent a pseudohistory of the holocaust.
It might be better to call these people HIV/Holocaust conspiracy theorists, but calling them HIV/Holocaust deniers instead is entirely appropriate.
Posted by: ERV | April 24, 2008 2:44 PM
Should we email Ben and ask him what kind of denialism it is?
(sarcasm on) I'm sure he'd give us an honest answer. (sarcasm off)
Posted by: Tophe | April 24, 2008 2:51 PM
Many miss the point that the individuals who participated in the huge production that resulted in "The Holocaust," acted primarily on a benefit/cost system. Like I mentioned yesterday, my fellow Jews were seperated immedietly after coming out of the cattle cars into slave laborer quarters or showers...crematoriums. Why? It was based on who was fit to serve the needs of those superior to them. The "order" the Nazis established was for the benefit of the state personified in The Fueher and yes, it had racist components. But the practical nature of the enterprise was geographic domination through war that required resources.
We can argue all day long how Darwin's conclusions on man's place in the universe, and those who placed those conclusions in practice through eugenics or Darwinian ethics, lead to Hitler's final solution. The plain truth when it is all striped down is to how the moral (or really immoral) decision was made. It is my opinion, as a Jew that believes in a personal God who created the universe and man, that the extreme conclusions of skepticism had lead to the ultimate end, nihilism. Darwin's world view is a point on that road. People may stop at any point along that road but many continue to the point of ideologues and when political power and economy are at the ideologue's disposal, atrocities occur.
The knowledge of that fact of history is what causes many to have a visceral reaction to those ideologues prepared to dismiss others' points of view, especially in a free society like ours in The United States.
It is interesting that Charles Darwin himself, proclaiming himself a slow converter to agnosticism, ended the portion of his autobiography with a paragraph discussing skepticism. It ends, "My father used to quote an unanswerable argument, by which an old lady, a Mrs Barlow, who suspected him of unorthodoxy, hoped to convert him: 'Doctor, I know that sugar is sweet in my mouth, and I know that my redeemer liveth.'"
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/cd_relig.htm
I believe that if the ideologues seen in EXPELLED, like Richard Dawkins and many on this board, had a small amount of the humility Charles Darwin displayed in the close of that part of his autobiography, the great divide we see between the two great competing world views would be less contentious.
Once again, I challenge those who believe there is a wall between scientific discovery and social, economic and ethical implications read Alfred Nobel's struggle and meditate on reversing such a simplistic conclusion.
Posted by: cee | April 24, 2008 2:52 PM
Oh and to those on this board, and the effete elitist Mr. Dawkins, another quote regarding "the beginning" by Charles Darwin (just after he speculated that belief in God could be like a monkey's instinctive fear of snakes):
"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/cd_relig.htm
Oh my. He stepped to the edge and retreated. Oh that so many elitist intellectuals since his time of polite society would do the same!
So to those who KNOW how the first cell came to being, or how the first self-replicating, self-correcting information containing molecule came to being, I challenge you to address the quality of evidence for your theory compared to the evidence of those who still are open to the possibility of a creator. I think Mrs. Barlow (see above) answered that controversy quite nicely.
Posted by: cee | April 24, 2008 3:20 PM
In context, the quote about the old lady is in a chapter where Darwin reflects on the decrease of such overt religiosity in his lifetime: "Nothing is more remarkable than the spread of scepticism or rationalism during the latter half of my life." It's an amusing anecdote, not an endorsement.
Posted by: windy | April 24, 2008 3:30 PM
I hope you'll reconsider such reflexive dismissal of that idea, Colugo. There were obviously some deep pockets behind the marketing effort of the movie, and it doesn't look as though they were too concerned about making a profit (propaganda flicks are rarely money makers anyway). The idea that it is intended to generate antipathy for secularists among the religious right, in a year where the Democrats' electoral prospects are better than they ever have been in recent history, is by no means an implausible conspiracy theory.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | April 24, 2008 3:38 PM
Um, windy....what is "sweet." Can you describe me what "sweet" is? "Objectify" the sensation described as "sweet." ARGUE "sweet." However you want to pose it...Analyze, "sweet."
Please try to expand your mind a little. Try tolerance of others. Darwin showed his tolerance with the quote from Mrs. Barlow and his stopping at a place along that road to nihilism.
Where have you stopped, windy?
Posted by: cee | April 24, 2008 3:50 PM
So about how much of the Third Reich do you think accepted the "extreme conclusions of skepticism"? Hitler was by all evidence a Roman Catholic. Other members of the Reich who were not Christian, e.g. Heinrich Himmler, were absorbed in all sorts of occult and paranormal nonsense. The notion of "the purity of Aryan blood" is certainly not a notion that can withstand even the slightest application of scientific scrutiny. So, as a wise-man once said, "show me the money".
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | April 24, 2008 3:52 PM
Please try to expand your mind a little. Try tolerance of others. Darwin showed his tolerance with the quote from Mrs. Barlow and his stopping at a place along that road to nihilism.
You are quite stupid. Fine, I tolerate that. Don't ever change.
Posted by: windy | April 24, 2008 4:01 PM
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi elite were gnostics...Hitler believed he was messiah, on a mission from God. He did not believe in orthodox Christianity.
When one comes to the conclusion that, as Darwin speculated, "A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones." the sky's the limit! So I feel it is best to institute a program to rid the society of undesirables based on a particular assessment of race, defect and utility.....let's go for it.
That is where skepticism leads. I believe some call it "moral relativism." The world view, ideology, is the key and I suppose the distractions you would rather dwell on are easier to blame it all on.
Hitler also had a funny looking mustache...perhaps that explains his ideology?
Posted by: cee | April 24, 2008 4:08 PM
Ah, windy....another compassionate and kind response from a poster here. Keep it up, EXPELLED showed people the anger and hatred as well.
Posted by: cee | April 24, 2008 4:11 PM
I'll take that into consideration, Tyler. The idea that this is really about the election strikes not so much as implausible as superfluous and less parsimonious than the simpler explanation. (And perhaps this is indicative of my being poorly attuned to the Red State zeitgeist, but I don't see Expelled as helping the GOP. Maybe I'm wrong.)
McCarthy: "Darwin cites Haeckel and Galton in his late work, and there was a close collegeial relationship between him and both of them"
But that does not mean that Darwin's and their ideas are identical either. Rather, Galton and Haeckel were part of a lineage of evolutionary thought applied to social affairs that leads to Pearson, Davenport, Laughlin, Lenz, Carrel etc.
To clarify, I called Nazi biopolitics "a grossly perverted biology derived partly from Darwinism." Certainly Galton and Haeckel revised Darwin's ideas. Darwin and his colleagues had agreements and disagreements. Again, you are not entirely wrong even as you oversimplify. There is a tendency to characterize Darwin and Wallace as being more line with today's liberal sensibilities than they actually were, and to suggest that Haeckel was more of an intellectual renegade than he was. (SJ Gould is partly responsible for these somewhat skewed views.)
A troubling fact is that the applications of biology to social affairs made by Social Darwinists, eugenicists, and scientific racists are only pseudoscience by today's standards. To people of that time, these approaches were simply part of science - unfortunately reflected in medical and biology textbooks of the era.
You asked about criticism of eugenics by Darwinists. Raymond Pearl, a student of Karl Pearson, published an article critical of eugenics 'The Biology of Superiority,' in 1927. Pearl's role in the movement is complex, however. (I keep emphasizing complexity and nuance, while you, cee and lot of other people on both sides keep insisting on simplifying.)
Also see Alfred Wallace, 'Human Selection' in The Electic Magazine p. 547, 1890. (Available on Google Books). You might be able to harvest some quotes to help you bash Darwin, but maybe it will provide a more complex picture of the views of that era.
Posted by: Colugo | April 24, 2008 4:12 PM
I'm sorry, but by "show me the money" I meant "present actual evidence", not "recycle specious claims grounded in nothing but gut feelings." For instance, you are obviously conflating "heterodox Christianity" (Hitler's explicit belief in which you have not substantiated) with secularism or skepticism.
Hitler very clearly believed in a personal god.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | April 24, 2008 4:17 PM
Aside: One could argue that Social Darwinism, eugenics, scientific racism was also pseudoscience by an idealization of the scientific standards of the late 19th - early 20th C too, but the important thing is that scientists of that era generally didn't think that was the case.
It's like arguing whether Mormons are really Christians, or if Social Democrats are really socialists - descriptive vs idealized/prescriptive labels.
Posted by: Colugo | April 24, 2008 4:18 PM
When Dr. Caplan uses Holocaust denial the way he does it makes his ideas are difficult to conceptualize. He may be right technically and I don't disagree with the idea he is trying to present. It is just that the mental gymnastics required to understand his point of view are not very elagant and as a result it is not as useful as it could be. Smart or stupid you only get one vote politically. If Dr. Caplan is unclear to someone as smart as Orac the impact of his outrage is lost.
Ben Stein's great opus is easy for the true believers to understand. Even though it is a bunch of lies, it will have more impact with his target audience. Micheal Shermer reported that when he attended a showing of Expelled with a religious group, it was well received. I think we all could use a viewing of "Flock of Dodos" and take the message to heart.
Posted by: DavidCT | April 24, 2008 4:45 PM
Colugo, Darwin had disagreements with most of his closest associates on matters of natural selection, even Thomas Huxley, that doesn't impeach those associates as close and often most trusted colleagues of Darwin. Galton's statements that Darwin was an inspriation of his eugenics, along with at least one letter from Charles Darwin to Galton I've seen enthusiastically praising Hereditary Genius, can't be refuted by people who never knew Darwin or were associated with him. You would have to have a contemporary refutation by someone as closely associated with Darwin to do it, I've looked and haven't found that kind of authoritative refutation of Galton.
And then there is Leonard Darwin who also cited his father's inspiration for his eugenics career, I seem to recall it was the bulk of L. Darwin's "science". You would also need as close an associate to Charles Darwin, that would probably be another one of his children, to refute Leonard Darwin.
I'll remind you that both Galton and L. Darwin had sources of information no one alive today has, they talked to Charles Darwin off-record. He is likely to have told them things he never wrote or published. Charles Darwin was famous for avoiding public disputes, he avoided them. He was almost certainly more candid in conversations with his own family than he would have been for publication. I don't see how anyone in 2008 can be taken as more authoritative than these two eugenicists.
About Social Darwinism, you do know that Spenser preceeded Darwin and, though I don't have my copy of The Descent of Man, I believe Darwin calls Spenser something like "our best philospher" in it. Though I'd like to get my copy before I make a fast committment to that point.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 5:11 PM
My (personal, amateur, uncredentialed) viewpoint is that the term "Holocaust" should be applied to all the (non-combat) slaughter conducted by the Nazis and their European allies for ideological reasons. This encompasses the murders of leftists, gays, Romany (Gypsy) peoples, those with mental or physical infirmities, religious sects (particularly Jehovah's Witnesses), etc, etc.
In particular, it applies to the attempted extermination of Slavs. The lowest estimate I've found for the number of non-Jewish Polish civilians killed by the Germans is well over a million; in Poland itself the figure 3 million seems to be widely held (matching the estimate of 3 million murdered Jewish Poles). Add in a couple of million or so Soviet POWs deliberately starved after their capture, and the total of non-Jewish fatalities approaches that of the Jews.
In more heated moments, particularly when considering the political exploitation of Hitler's genocide by the state of Israel, I've been known to claim that the equation of "Holocaust = 6,000,000 Jews" is in itself a form of Holocaust denial.
Rather surprisingly, I've only found two books (The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell by Bohdan Wytwycky, and A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis by Michael Berenbaum (ed), dealing with this "big picture". (Recommendations for further reading would be more than welcome.)
There is very little attention given to the Holocaust in its entirety. Almost all research and writing is focused on the subset I suggest might be more properly called the Shoah.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | April 24, 2008 5:12 PM
cee wrote:
The problem with Hitler and the Nazis doesn't appear to have been that they were too rationally skeptical. Nor were they pessimistic nihilists. On the contrary, they were highly emotional optimists who believed in divine destiny, the march of history, the purity of the national character, racial progress, and the ultimate creation of Utopia -- all done to fulfill the will and character of their Creator. They came out of 19th century Romanticism -- enthusiasts who relied heavily on intuition and feelings, the stirrings within the blood.
Nothing is more relative than religious belief. What people "choose" to have faith in, and how they see and interpret "God," goes all over the board -- and with no way to check it against a non-relative and neutrally-located God. The belief that this worthless world is nothing more than a test, or waystation on the way to a better one, is nihilistic. The belief that God has a plan he wants you to implement is dangerous. The belief that all people have been divided by God into the saved and the damned -- and the damned deserve their damnation -- is not necessarily conducive to brotherly harmony and mutual respect.
With God, all things are permitted. It's the exclamation point on any position you want, and says "Don't argue with this!" It's far easier to point out specific empirical problems with pseudoscience, than it is to argue that someone who thinks they understand God doesn't -- but you do. Faith is relativism, with every side having a different "objective" God setting things in unquestionable stone. Don't kid yourself that religion is any kind of solution.
Posted by: Sastra | April 24, 2008 5:31 PM
Oh boy, Sastra, your conclusions are very radical.
I refer you to this article:
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0020.html
"Nietzsche welcomed the death of God as a necessary precondition for the fruition of human greatness. But his older Russian contemporary, the great novelist Foodor Dostoevsky, like John Donne before him, was appalled by the consequences that the victory of science over religion were likely to bring with it. If God was dead, he said (through the mouth of one of his characters, Ivan Karamazov), then everything was permitted.
"At this point in the story, we run into another fascinating paradox. While it was in becoming 'modest' that the human mind seemed to have grown to superhuman proportions, it soon forgot, in the headiness of its accomplishments, the respect for its own limits that had made the gigantic accomplishments of reason possible in the first place. Now the idea spread that reason in the form of science had shown that it, not God, was omnipotent and was on its way to usurping the divine attribute of omniscience as well."
Posted by: cee | April 24, 2008 5:59 PM
Found it. Our great philosopher, Herbert Spencer, has recently explained his views on the moral sense. He says (46. Letter to Mr. Mill in Bain's 'Mental and Moral Science,' 1868, p. 722.), "I believe that the experiences of utility organised and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications,.... Descent of Man 1874, 2nd Edition
So Darwin was mighty impressed with the inventor of "Social Darwinism", apparently in the idea of an upward spiral too, though I'm too busy to read the whole, long winded thing. You would need Charles Darwin, himself after 1874, I'm afraid to negate this link to Social Darwinism.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 24, 2008 6:09 PM
McCarthy: Your argument rests on the premise that Darwin lacked candor and was even disingenuous on the topic of eugenics. But that is unprovable, unless we find a journal entry by a confidante that reveals something different than what Darwin wrote in his own books, papers, journals, and letters.
I could probably do even better than you on finding quotes by Darwin praising Spencer, Galton, and Haeckel. Those three were brilliant and they made significant intellectual contributions, along with some very noxious ideas. It's a very troubled legacy. I could make a similar observation about Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, St. Augustine...
In the case of Galton and Haeckel I believe that they do bear some indirect (not direct) historical responsibility for the Holocaust. An anthropologist once told me that anthropologists honor their ancestors by ritually crucifying them. I think that's a good idea for a number of fields, whether biology or theology.
Incidentally, Spencer, a feminist and anti-imperialist, is a more complex and in some ways sympathetic figure than he is often made out to be.
But bad ideas - some which look a lot like forms of "Social Darwinism" - can come from a lot of different sources. Friedrich Engels, two opinion pieces (The Magyar Struggle and Democratic Pan-Slavism) published in 1849 (10 years before The Origin of Species) in which Hegel is cited:
"in history nothing is achieved without violence and implacable ruthlessness"
"Then there will be a struggle, an "inexorable life-and-death struggle", against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror -- not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!"
"...the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names."
"The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."
Posted by: Colugo | April 24, 2008 6:24 PM
cee - do you not recognize how ridiculous it is to be using that source (the catholic website)as support for your argument?
Sastra's conclusions are not radical, they are logical.
Posted by: CanadianChick | April 24, 2008 6:26 PM