David Klinghoffer

So was Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) secretly a fundamentalist Christian, a mad man, or just plain ignorant? The great novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) was, in his own telling, a “furious” critic of Darwinian theory. He based the judgment not on religion, to which biographer Brian Boyd writes that he was “profoundly indifferent,” but on decades of his scientific study of butterflies, including at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History. Of course, this was all before the culture-wide sclerosis of Darwinian orthodoxy set in.

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

In the week since Expelled came out in theaters, I’ve been startled not so much by the juvenile name-calling directed at me for defending the movie (“self-hating Jew,” “Hitler sympathizer,” “Jewish Uncle Tom,” “hired hit-pen and journalistic hatchet job expert,” etc.). That’s something that publicly admitted Darwin-doubters quickly get accustomed to.

Much more surprising is the sheer flat-out lying done by critics bent on denouncing the movie’s controversial linking of Darwinism and Hitlerism.

Now, I happen to think that the Darwin-Hitler link is pretty darn well established, as I’ve argued on National Review Online, Jewcy, and in this space. The major Hitler biographers agree with me that Hitler in Mein Kampf and elsewhere used transparently Darwinian arguments to motivate fellow Jew-haters to actuate the Final Solution.

I don’t care if somebody insists on disagreeing with my interpretation of the relevant texts — though frankly that would be hard to do if your powers of reading comprehension rise above sixth-grade level. Just please don’t lie in your representation of what I’ve written.

In an illuminating irony, not one but two theatrical documentaries open today that trace the genealogy of the Holocaust back to earlier literary texts. One is Expelled, in which Ben Stein touches upon the use Hitler made of Darwinism. The other documentary is Constantine’s Sword, based on the bestselling book of the same name, by James Carroll.
Carroll tells the history of the Christian churches from the perspective of their countenancing of anti-Semitism. As Carroll argues, it all goes back to “the Jews hatred we so easily detect in the New Testament, and that would flower in anti-Jewish violence.”

Now which of these films do think has been savaged in the liberal press, and which has gotten raves? Clearly, to blame Christianity for Auschwitz is an industry standard in the mainstream media, while considering the role that Darwinism played is simply forbidden.

In previous posts this week, I’ve demonstrated Hitler’s debt to Darwin. The extermination of a supposedly inferior people for purposes of advancing racial hygiene is an idea with roots in Darwin’s Descent of Man. I said yesterday that the only major element in Nazism with no blatant reference point in Darwin’s literary corpus is the hatred of Jews in particular.

Today on the Jewish hipster website Jewcy, however, I uncover the deeper Darwinian logic of Hitler’s Jew-hating obsession. Not, I emphasize, that Darwin himself ever said a word against the Jews.

Finally, a writer known to me personally to be a smart and honest guy, no ignoramus nor a propagandist, attacks the Hitler-Darwin thesis in Expelled.

Ronald Bailey, who used to write book reviews for me at National Review, comments on the movie in the libertarian magazine Reason. He complains that linking Darwinism with Nazism is the “most egregious part of the film.” He harrumphs that the Expelled filmmakers “overlook the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion.”

OK, but when Muslims today commit mass slaughter in the name of their religion, or when Christians once did so, it becomes reasonable on that basis to ask probing questions about the truth of Islam or Christianity. For that matter, it’s fair to question my own faith, Judaism, for the Hebrew Bible’s countenancing of Joshua’s bloody war against the natives of Canaan.

It would be ridiculous to say that any of this adds up to a slam-dunk argument for rejecting Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Similarly, Hitler’s appropriation of Darwinian language in Mein Kampf is by itself no case for rejecting Darwinism.

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

It has become the main angle of attack against Expelled to express outrage at the film’s linking of Darwinism with Hitlerism. We need to look today at what Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf.

Thus, London’s Guardian newspaper publishes a hit piece on Expelled by Adam Rutherford of Nature magazine. He hasn’t seen the movie but believes gentlemen like P.Z. Myers who “indicate that Expelled suggests the Holocaust was a direct result of Darwinian thought.” That’s not what the film suggests, but never mind. Rutherford dismisses the “absurdity” of the “reductio ad Hitlerum” as “specious and simplistic.”

What Expelled has to say about the Darwin-Hitler connection is more along the lines of something a far more distinguished writer had to say in the very same newspaper just a month ago.

John Gray, political philosopher at the London School of Economics, wrote an essay in the Guardian. In passing, he noted how,

Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarized Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism.

Which is entirely correct.

The key chapter in Mein Kampf is Chapter XI, “Nation and Race,” where Hitler discusses the imperative to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace.