In the absence of evidence or solid logical arguments, Creationists have long resorted to the strategy of quote-mining, the purposeful misrepresentation of scientists’ opinions by selective or distorted quotation of their words, to buttress their claims. With the Creationists behind the movie Expelled hard at work to demonstrate that “Darwinism” was a necessary pre-condition for the Holocaust and Hitler’s primary inspiration, it was only a matter of time before historians suffered the same fate. Enter David Klinghoffer, the Discovery Institute’s hired hit-pen and journalistic hatchet job expert.
From
Look, ma! I can quote-mine historians too!
Look, ma! I can quote-mine historians too!
Klinghoffer writes:
Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler, describes how the Nazi tyrant “extract[ed] the elements of his world view” from various influences including “popular treatments of Darwinism.”
Now, if you have been involved in the Creationism-evolution skirmishes for a while, you get a sixth sense for quote mines, something just doesn’t look right to you: very short quotes, ellipses, words altered or inserted.
Fortunately, I had access to Fest’s excellent Hitler biography, so I looked. On page 201, Fest is describing Hitler’s voracious but unsophisticated reading habits, and then writes:
Fest writes:
Yet he [Hitler] went on extracting the elements of his world view from pseudoscientific secondary works: tracts on race theory, anti-Semitic pamphlets, treatises on the Teutons, on racial mysticism and eugenics, as well as popular treatments of Darwinism and the philosophy of history. JJoachim Fest, Hitler, Harcourt 2002, p. 201
This is what Klinghoffer wants to pass as this historian’s equivalent of “contributed mightily”: on par with “treatises on the Teutons”!
The rest are quote-mines too.
In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote ...
... about "social Darwinism", not Darwinism.
(FYI, rand. The source of social Darwinism was not Darwin but Herbert Spencer and the tradition of Protestant nonconformism going back to Hobbes via Malthus. Spencer's ideas of evolution were
Lamarckian. The only real connection between Darwinism and social Darwinism is the name.)
In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock ...
... mentions "Darwinism" once. On page 225.
(btw. The book is 489 pages long. You'd think that, were Hitler's policies based on Darwinism, it might merit more than one mention.)
John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography says ...
... mentions Darwin once. On page 23. Once in 1120 pages.
In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw ...
... talks about "social Darwinism", not Darwinism.
Klinghoffer desperately wants to find something in
Mein Kampf. After all, it was Hitler's road map.
So Klinghoffer quote-mines Hitler! You gotta love a guy who resorts to quote-mining
Hitler.
Here's Klinghoffer's version:
He invokes the “principles of Nature’s rule,” “her whole work of higher breeding,” in which “struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.”
Here are the actual quotes:
Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.
No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow.
Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. 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.
http://web.csustan.edu/History/Faculty/Weikart/hitlermk.htm
From the first section of Vol. 1, Chapter 11: Nation and Race.
Do I even need to point out that the tiny snippets Klinghoffer chose were pulled at random from all over the place?
So. Was Hitler a Darwin fan?
Unfortunately for Klinghoffer, the Nazis were persnickety record keepers.
To answer this question, a bit of digging into the Nazi archives is needed. Die Bcherei, the official Nazi journal, in 1935 produced a list of things not to be taught:
Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (279).
CA006.1: Hitler's views
No Darwin, hm?
One of the key roots of Hitler’s extreme anti-Semitism and subsequent programs of action are, instead, to be found in Vienna’s Catholic anti-Semitic publications.
The anti-Semitic side of his theories were easily come by in Vienna.
The Social Catholic journal, Deutsches Volksblatt, edited by Ernst Vergani, offered a constant crop of anti-Semitic stories, mixing the crudest kind of sex and anti-Semitic with popularization of the
racial theories of the nineteenth-century French writer, Count Gobineau.
The Catholic paper Das Vaterland under its highly successful editor, Vogelsang, who died in 1890, was peddling the argument that Jewish advances came only because of Christian spinelessness even before Hitler’s birth .
Hitler was a self-taught man and his system was his own, concocted piecemeal from the leavings of others, filtered at third- and fourth-hand through the cheap pamphlet and leaflet literature of Viennese politics and elaborated in the endless arguments on the Meldeannstrasse, arguments which nearly brought about his permanent exclusion from the hostel on the complaints of the other inmates.
Moreover, the section of Mein Kampf which sets out Hitler’s ideas on racial issues are couched in
historical rather than biological-mystical terms and they represent only a section of his total ideological structure.
His ideas on the primacy of race came much more from Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the German nationalists, such publicists as F. Lange and Klaus Wagner, for example.
http://bcseweb.org.uk/...hp/Main/CharlesDarwinAndAdolfHitler
Sorry, rand. Sorry, Klinghoffer.
Can't quote-mine your way to a connection between Hitler and Darwin.
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