Oh dear, someone has swallowed the lies and bullshit peddled by Richart Wekart of the Duplicity Institute.

Arclight time ...

Let's start with some basic facts. Wiekart spreads the garbage he does, as part of the more duplicitous well-poisoning on the part of the Duplicity Institute and its professional liars for doctrine, all performed as part of the creationist war on valid evolutionary science, a war that has been fought from the beginning with lies and bullshit on their part. Weikart's central theme consists of trying to place the blame for the Holocaust on Darwin and the theory of evolution, a piece of bullshit polemical gymnastics that no one with functioning neurons regards as anything other than a blatant exercise in lying for creationist doctrine.

Except, of course, that the holes in his fabrications are large enough to drive an entire tank battalion through. Let's start with some elementary facts. To start with, let's see if Darwin is mentioned anywhere in Mein Kampf, shall we? Along with some other key words? Here's the result of the experiment on my searchable electronic copy of Mein Kampf (Unexpurgated edition, original translation into English by James Murphy, available online at the Gutenberg Project website):

Number of occurrences of "Darwin" : ZERO

Number of occurrences of "God" : 37

Number of occurrences of "Almighty" : 6

Number of occurrences of "Creator" : 8

So already, Weikart's mendacious polemics are starting to look a little shaky, to put it mildly. But it gets better. Because Mein Kampf, and indeed several of Hitler's other outpourings, rather make a mockery of his tacky little attempt to poison the well here. Let's take a look at several appropriate passages from Mein Kampf in detail shall we? First, here's one of his monotonous anti-Jewish jibes:

Do the Schwabing [artistic quarter] decadents look upon Germany's lot to-day as 'aesthetic'? Of course, one doesn't discuss such a question with the Jews, because they are the modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God's image in His creation.

Next, a succinct and fairly chilling encapsulation of observational psychology that, despite its source (whom most people would not consider to be of reliable provenance) is actually fairly astute, and part of which describes Pharisaic religiosity to a tee:

There are many ways of becoming resigned to this unpleasant and terrible fact. Many people go about seeing nothing or, to be more correct, not wanting to see anything. This is by far the simplest and cheapest attitude to adopt. Others cover themselves in the sacred mantle of prudery, as ridiculous as it is false. They describe the whole condition of affairs as sinful and are profoundly indignant when brought face to face with a victim. They close their eyes in reverend abhorrence to this godless scourge and pray to the Almighty that He - if possible after their own death - may rain down fire and brimstone as on Sodom and Gomorrah and so once again make an out standing example of this shameless section of humanity. Finally, there are those who are well aware of the terrible results which this scourge will and must bring about, but they merely shrug their shoulders, fully convinced of their inability to undertake anything against this peril. Hence matters are allowed to take their own course.

Next, a remark following his exhortation to strive to combat syphilis (which, needless to say, he laid at the door of "Jewish controlled" prostitution - some historians have one or two interesting theses about the connection between Hitler and syphilis by the way):

But if for reasons of indolence or cowardice this fight is not fought to a finish we may imagine what conditions will be like 500 years hence. Little of God's image will be left in human nature, except to mock the Creator.

Mind you, the real killer passage is this one:

The religious teaching of the Jews is principally a collection of instructions for maintaining the Jewish blood pure and for regulating intercourse between Jews and the rest of the world: that is to say, their relation with non-Jews. But the Jewish religious teaching is not concerned with moral problems. It is rather concerned with economic problems, and very petty ones at that. In regard to the moral value of the religious teaching of the Jews there exist and always have existed quite exhaustive studies (not from the Jewish side; for whatever the Jews have written on this question has naturally always been of a tendentious character) which show up the kind of religion that the Jews have in a light that makes it look very uncanny to the Aryan mind. The Jew himself is the best example of the kind of product which this religious training evolves. His life is of this world only and his mentality is as foreign to the true spirit of Christianity as his character was foreign to the great Founder of this new creed two thousand years ago. And the Founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of His estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing their commercial interests. But at that time Christ was nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews; whereas our modern Christians enter into party politics and when elections are being held they debase themselves to beg for Jewish votes. They even enter into political intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of their own Christian nation.

Let's see some more examples shall we? Later on, when waxing lyrical about the Volk, we have this:

To undermine the existence of human culture by exterminating its founders and custodians would be an execrable crime in the eyes of those who believe that the folk-idea lies at the basis of human existence. Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.

Here is Hitler's version of 'charity begins at home' which provides us with some more insights:

How devoid of ideals and how ignoble is the whole contemporary system! The fact that the churches join in committing this sin against the image of God, even though they continue to emphasize the dignity of that image, is quite in keeping with their present activities. They talk about the Spirit, but they allow man, as the embodiment of the Spirit, to degenerate to the proletarian level. Then they look on with amazement when they realize how small is the influence of the Christian Faith in their own country and how depraved and ungodly is this riff-raff which is physically degenerate and therefore morally degenerate also. To balance this state of affairs they try to convert the Hottentots and the Zulus and the Kaffirs and to bestow on them the blessings of the Church. While our European people, God be praised and thanked, are left to become the victims of moral depravity, the pious missionary goes out to Central Africa and establishes missionary stations for negroes. Finally, sound and healthy - though primitive and backward - people will be transformed, under the name of our 'higher civilization', into a motley of lazy and brutalized mongrels.

An insight into the old maxim (courtesy of Seneca the Younger) that religion is considered true by the simple, false by the wise, and useful by the leaders, is also thoughtfully provided:

Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example. Clerical celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own ranks but progressively from the masses of the people. Yet there are not many who recognize the significance of celibacy in this relation. But therein lies the cause of the inexhaustible vigour which characterizes that ancient institution. For by thus unceasingly recruiting the ecclesiastical dignitaries from the lower classes of the people, the Church is enabled not only to maintain the contact of instinctive understanding with the masses of the population but also to assure itself of always being able to draw upon that fund of energy which is present in this form only among the popular masses. Hence the surprising youthfulness of that gigantic organism, its mental flexibility and its iron will-power.

Once again, the vision of destiny rears its head again (along with the usual lament about Mammon, which of course Hitler identifies with nauseating predictability as being "Jewish" in origin):

It may be that money has become the one power that governs life to-day. Yet a time will come when men will again bow to higher gods. Much that we have to-day owes its existence to the desire for money and property; but there is very little among all this which would leave the world poorer by its lack.

On the subject of conflict with left-wing opponents:

In 1919-20 and also in 1921 I attended some of the bourgeois meetings. Invariably I had the same feeling towards these as towards the compulsory dose of castor oil in my boyhood days. It just had to be taken because it was good for one: but it certainly tasted unpleasant. If it were possible to tie ropes round the German people and forcibly drag them to these bourgeois meetings, keeping them there behind barred doors and allowing nobody to escape until the meeting closed, then this procedure might prove successful in the course of a few hundred years. For my own part, I must frankly admit that, under such circumstances, I could not find life worth living; and indeed I should no longer wish to be a German. But, thank God, all this is impossible. And so it is not surprising that the sane and unspoilt masses shun these 'bourgeois mass meetings' as the devil shuns holy water.

Then, we have this, in which a crude diatribe on the crude and familiar Hitlerian theme of sexual corruption of young Aryan girls by 'inferior races' is followed by language that seems straight out of the apologetics playbook:

Look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood. Bear in mind the fact that this poisonous contamination can be eliminated from the national body only after centuries, or perhaps never. Think further of how the process of racial decomposition is debasing and in some cases even destroying the fundamental Aryan qualities of our German people, so that our cultural creativeness as a nation is gradually becoming impotent and we are running the danger, at least in our great cities, of falling to the level where Southern Italy is to-day. This pestilential adulteration of the blood, of which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is being systematically practised by the Jew to-day. Systematically these negroid parasites in our national body corrupt our innocent fair-haired girls and thus destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.

The two Christian denominations look on with indifference at the profanation and destruction of a noble and unique creature who was given to the world as a gift of God's grace. For the future of the world, however, it does not matter which of the two triumphs over the other, the Catholic or the Protestant. But it does matter whether Aryan humanity survives or perishes. And yet the two Christian denominations are not contending against the destroyer of Aryan humanity but are trying to destroy one another. 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.

More rhetoric in the same vein (on the subject of asserting a powerful German nationhood and a call to arms against the Versailles Treaty):

Then, from the child's story-book to the last newspaper in the country, and every theatre and cinema, every pillar where placards are posted and every free space on the hoardings should be utilized in the service of this one great mission, until the faint-hearted cry, "Lord, deliver us," which our patriotic associations send up to Heaven to-day would be transformed into an ardent prayer: "Almighty God, bless our arms when the hour comes. Be just, as Thou hast always been just. Judge now if we deserve our freedom. Lord, bless our struggle."

This little discourse on Lebensraum is also illuminating:

Against all this we, National Socialists, must stick firmly to the aim that we have set for our foreign policy; namely, that the German people must be assured the territorial area which is necessary for it to exist on this earth. And only for such action as is undertaken to secure those ends can it be lawful in the eyes of God and our German posterity to allow the blood of our people to be shed once again. Before God, because we are sent into this world with the commission to struggle for our daily bread, as creatures to whom nothing is donated and who must be able to win and hold their position as lords of the earth only through their own intelligence and courage.

So already, we're looking at a work that is replete with religious, and specifically Christian, references, of a sort that simply would not appear in any genuine 'atheist polemic'. But the wholly sleazy attempt to present Hitler as an 'atheist' dies a particularly painful death, when one realises that the Nazis signed a Concordat with the Catholic Church in 1933. However, the ties between Nazism and the Catholic Church run deeper - in Germany at that time, there existed a specifically Catholic political party, known as the Centre Party, which was the second-largest political party in Germany at that time, and which gave support to the Enabling Act of 1933, the act that provided Hitler with the dictatorial powers he needed to pursue the Nazi Party programme. Indeed, one of Hitler's principal lieutenants in the early days of the Nazi movement, namely Franz von Papen, came from a Centre Party background. Only after von Papen (a figure with a very colourful history, incidentally - Airey Neave devotes considerable space to this in his chapter on von Papen in his book on the Nuremberg Trials) was installed as Chancellor of Germany in 1932, and the Centre Party refused to support him in that office, did von Papen leave the Centre Party and begin his move toward full-blown association with Nazism. Meanwhile, Heinrich Brüning, the leader of the Centre Party, engaged in negotiations with Gregor Strasser, a then prominent Nazi politician, in an attempt to maintain some degree of Catholic influence over the ascendant Nazi Party. However, what none of the relevant figures could have known, was that Hitler had no intention of being a conventional politician once he obtained power.

Now the diligent will know that I've cited elsewhere, that Hitler was an arch-cynic, and he was certainly a reprobate of the most thoroughgoing order. But, he most certainly believed in a god of some sort, most certainly culled much of the fuel for that belief from contemporary christian culture, and made frequent use of christian imagery in his political and polemical utterances. As I have stated in previous posts elsewhere, his own particular species of theism was a peculiar one (though by no means unique) in that he considered that he was, in some sense, the next divinely ordained saviour. Again, a delusion that is not unique to him, but what of course was unique was the single-minded ruthlessness with which he pursued that vision.

However, possibly the killer thrusts against the assertions that [1]Hitler was an atheist, and [2] extracted his ideological vision from anything arising from Darwin, centre upon three well-documented facts. First, the documented output of his public speeches. Samples thereof including an extract from one delivered on March 5th, 1922, at the Reichstag:

While the regime is determined to carry through the political and moral purging of our public life, it is creating and ensuring the prerequisites for a really deep inner religiosity. Benefits of a personal nature, which might arise from compromise with atheistic organisations, could outweigh the results which become apparent through the destruction of general basic religious-ethical values. The national regime seeks in both Christian confessions the factors most important for the maintenance of our folkdom.... The national regime will concede and safeguard to the Christian confessions the influence due them, in school and education. It is concerned with the sincere cooperation of church and state. The struggle against a materialistic philosophy for the creation of a true folk community serves the interests of the German nation as well as our Christian belief.

On 26th February, 1925, he uttered this:

It will at any rate be my supreme task to see to it that in the newly awakened NSDAP, the adherents of both Confessions can live peacefully together side by side in order that they may take their stand in the common fight against the power which is the mortal foe of any true Christianity.

On 27th october, 1928, in Passau, he uttered this:

We are a people of different religions, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.

On 15th February,1933, in Stuttgart, he uttered this:

And now Staatspräsident Bolz says that Christianity and the Catholic faith are threatened by us. And to that charge I can answer: In the first place it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany. I do not merely talk of Christianity, no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties which destroy Christianity. If many wish today to take threatened Christianity under their protection, where, I would ask, was Christianity for them in these fourteen years when they went arm in arm with atheism? No, never and at no time was greater internal damage done to Christianity than in these fourteen years when a party, theoretically Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government.

On 26th April, 1933, during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican concordat:

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.

On 24th October, 1933, in Berlin, he uttered this:

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

On 6th September, 1938, in Nuremberg, we have this:

National Socialism is not a cult-movement—a movement for worship; it is exclusively a 'volkic' political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship.... We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else—in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will—not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord... Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.

Second, we have the rules contained in Die Bücherei, the list of banned books circulated across Nazi Germany, instructing Party officials to remove from, and destroy, copies of various works in libraries, etc, which is documented in more detail here.

Guidelines from Die Bücherei 2:6 (1935), p. 279

6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel).

This translates as:

6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

Oops. Bit difficult to claim Nazism was a product of evolutionary theory, when the Nazis ordered the works of Darwin to be burned ...

Third, we have this exquisite passage from Mein Kampf, covering Hitler's limited understanding of biology, which, far from being an exposition of any evolutionary understanding, is in fact far closer to the creationist "kinds" nonsense peddled by various creationists in more recent times, viz:

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.

A little later, this is followed by:

Deviations from this law take place only in exceptional circumstances. This happens especially under the compulsion of captivity, or when some other obstacle makes procreative intercourse impossible between individuals of the same species. But then Nature abhors such intercourse with all her might; and her protest is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that the hybrid is either sterile or the fecundity of its descendants is limited. In most cases hybrids and their progeny are denied the ordinary powers of resistance to disease or the natural means of defence against outer attack.

I'll leave aside for one moment that the scientific literature destroys this naive view wholesale, documenting not only that hybridisation in the wild is a naturally occurring phenomenon (indeed, I'm aware of half a dozen naturally occurring hybrids amongst Centropyge dwarf angelfishes alone), but that hybridisation followed by assortative mating is a documented means of generating new species, a means that has furthermore been replicated in the laboratory, and demonstrated thereby to WORK. (Oh wait, I provided a detailed exposition of a paper devoted to this very topic here!). Instead, I'll note that once again, we have a large body of observational data refuting the "Hitler was an atheist" assertion, along with Weikart's lies about Nazism purportedly being a product of "Darwinism".

However, if you want a particularly worrying insight into the underpinnings of Nazism, then we have to turn to the real underpinnings of Hitler's racial theories, which lie in a most interesting and highly entertaining source. Namely one Lanz von Liebenfels, who, in 1905, launched a periodical known as The Ostara, a luridly, floridly, efflorescently turgid and slimy publication whose essential view was racist and anti-Semitic, but which included some of the warped "theories" of Lanz von Liebenfels as described in much greater detail in his earlier work. That work rejoices in the wonderfully Pythonesque title of:

Theozoology, Or The Account Of The Sodomite Apelings And The Divine Electron

It's worth looking at this work in more detail, courtesy of this web page, which also provides those who can stomach this weird gibberish with a freely available downloadable copy of said work. Here's how this work is described:

Lanz von Liebenfels, the famous German racial-occult theorist and publisher of "Ostara" wrote this pamphlet in 1904 and this English translation appeared in 2004, published by a group called Europa House. When one looks it up in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarkes The Occult Roots of Nazism, a seminal work on the subject, we find the work discussed in detail on p. 94 - 98 where Clarke provided his own translations of passages from the text. Cognates of these two passages can be found, albeit in different translation, in the present pamphlet. So I think we can surmise that this is an authentic translation of the German original.

Briefly, Theozoology is a work of biblical exegesis, in keeping with Lanzs background as a Cistercian monk (defrocked in 1899). Lanz displays an impressive familiarity with a range of Biblical and apocryphal texts, as well as the Talmud, the Church Fathers, Koran, and even medieval Arthurian romances, to advance his thesis that many Hebrew and Greek words translated as "wood, water, stones, wind, etc." are actually euphemisms for various, what one might call cryptozoological creatures, "sodomite" apelings, mer-people and birdmen. He postulates that these creatures are the second Adamites, who God created from dust in Genesis 2, and are distinct from the true humans who God created in his own image in Genesis 1. The latter have the "Gotter-Elecktron" or Divine Electron and are pure Aryans; the only reason that "lower" or "dark" races came into being is through acts of bestiality with the non-human creatures created in Genesis 2. Pictures of these creatures in their true form (including dinosaurs) are displayed as an appendix at the end of the text.

The dramatic high point of the book comes with Lanzs radical re-interpretation of the Crucifixion. In Lanz's narrative Christ was held down and brutally raped by hordes of these creatures in revenge from spreading the gospel of the Aryans divine origins.

The program for action at the end makes heady reading. Lanz informs us that the last pure bred monster died out in the 900s and the only trace of them is in the non-Aryan half-breeds known as colored races. He proposes physical separation of the divine and cthonic races and the death penalty for anyone who would make the ultimate sin of mixing Holy Blood with that of the subhumans; the purity of which is supposedly the central tenet of the original teachings of Christ. He notes that women are more prone to do this than men. He also advocates a vigorous sterilization, eugenical and, in some case, euthanasia program for the upliftment of the Aryan race.

Now Lanz von Liebenfels was writing this in 1904, and he took his cues with respect to metaphysics not from Darwin, but from Theosophists such as Madame Blavatsky. Indeed, it was Blavatsky's writings on "root races" that were incorporated in modified form into The Ostara. Moreover, Lanz von Liebenfels entertained some seriously insane ideas in his Theozoology, including the idea that the "Aryan" races were descended from "electric supermen" and that their destiny was to return to this state. I don't recall Darwin making much mention of "electric supermen" in The Origin Of Species.

Oh, by the way, here's a little something that was dropped into my lap fairly recently. Hitler's artistic dabblings have also been documented at length, but one part thereof that was unknown to me until fiarly recently, was this painting by Hitler. The work in question? The above work is none other than Mother Mary with the Holy Child Jesus Christ, oil on canvas, 1913. That's right - Hitler painted at least one piece of Catholic iconography.

Meanwhile, it is also apposite to introduce one Julius Streicher here, who was one of the most hard-core proponents of the "Master Race" theory after Hitler himself, and whose sordid career is discussed at length in Nuremberg by Airey Neave (Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 0 340 18128 1) and deals with Streicher's pseudo-scientific utterances on the subject, which were repeated in less crude form elsewhere by other Nazi propagandists. Neave personally served the indictment of the International Military Tribunal upon Goering, Hess and the other top Nazis, and was an integral part of the British prosecution team at Nuremberg, gathering evidence upon such matters as the involvement of Krupps in slave labour, the concentration camp programme, and indicted criminal organisations such as the Gestapo. Here is what Neave has to say about Streicher on pages 93-94 of Nuremberg:

In 1945, Streicher seemed less horrible than the shaven Gauleiter marching with his Brownshirts over the tramlines of Nuremberg. Before his fall, the citizens did not show their disapproval of his character in public. They stood obediently at the Nazi salute. in 1945 he looked older, less sadistic. It was not till he looked up at me, and his little eyes caught mine that I realised the heartless savagery of this man. No amount of pleas for compassion, no logic, no reason would have swayed him. I again thought of a mediaeval torturer bared to the waist, pitiless and enjoying the smell of burning flesh.

For years before 1940 he had been in some disgrace. He was not deterred. He continued his cunning appeal to the illiterate and superstitious. He opposed progress in medical science and aroused suspicion and hatred against Jewish doctors. In 1934 he founded a new periodical. This was Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden (German National Health from Blood and Earth). It lasted twenty months.

Streicher wrote articles attacking Koch, Ehrlich and Wasserman. He accused Wasserman of inventing the test for syphilis by a blood reaction. The Jews needed the blood of Christians for their rituals! The most fantastic article appeared in the New Year of 1935. This was called 'alien albumen':

It is established for all eternity: alien albumen is the sperm of a man of alien race. One single cohabitation of a Jew with an Aryan woman is sufficient to poison her blood forever. Never will she be able to bear purely Aryan children even when married to an Aryan ... Now we know why the Jew uses every artifice of seduction in order to ravish German girls at as early an age as possible, while the Jewish doctor rapes his patients under an anaesthetic. He wants the German girl and the German woman to absorb the alien sperm of a Jew.

He then attacked vaccination, claiming that the products of 'sick animals' were introduced into the bloodstream of unsuspecting Aryans. The Nazi medical authorities while supporting him in 'his fight against the cross-breeding of races and racial degeneration' did not approve of 'all race-political and race-hygienic conceptions and theories advanced by Party Member Streicher'.

No more was heard of Streicher's anti-vaccination movement but as late as 1939, he addressed university professors at Nuremberg about a special divining rod to determine whether a person was Jew or Aryan. All purely Aryan blood belonged 'to the gold-platinum group, all Jewish blood to the tin-lead group'.

There were no doubt many Germans who doubted Streicher's sanity after reading this rubbish, with its evil humour, its appeal to the lowest.

Not one mention of Darwin occurs in all of this. How bizarre ... or not, if one is paying attention to reality instead of propagandising for a doctrine.

Oh, and finally, just to ram this message home once and for all, I'll also quote for you the words of PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who wrote this op-ed piece in his blog with respect to this nasty and venomous little canard:

I have to make this really, really simple for the "Hitler was an evolutionist" dimwits.

There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin's insight.

If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations.

It isn't razzle-dazzle genius. Any idiot can figure that one out — and many idiots have. Farmers have known it for millennia, when they set aside particularly fruitful seed stock or especially robust farm animals for breeding, and eat the rest. Nazis used this elementary logic when they decided to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Eugenicists used it when they wanted to argue for shifting the distribution of certain properties in a population.

It ain't "Darwinism". It's self-evident, obvious, selbstverständlich, apparent, évidente, transparent. The KKK knows it, farmers know it, dog and horse breeders know it, the Nazis knew it, they didn't need Darwin to spell it out for them. Blaming that on Darwin is awesomely stupid.

Darwin's real contribution, the one that had everyone smacking themselves in the forehead and wondering why they didn't think of it first, was the realization that the natural environment does the killing — that natural selection shapes heredity. The idea of culling populations is not only so easy that a hate-mongering cretin can think of it, but that weather, bacteria, viruses, parasites, predators, etc. have been doing it for eons, with no intelligence required, and that mindless microorganisms have been far greater agents of hereditary change than the worst the Nazis ever accomplished; does Charles Darwin also get the blame for that? Darwin realized that the environment has consequences and can shape the generation-by-generation passage of hereditary traits in populations, and that examination of the natural world reveals that it has been doing exactly that. He realized that ubiquitous forces that are so simple we take them for granted have been quietly and slowly sculpting our heredity since the beginning of life on earth.

When clueless creationists argue that Darwin led to Hitler, or worse, throw away buckets of money making elaborate propaganda films arguing such nonsense, it's worse than inane. It's as if they have completely missed the point of the idea they are damning.

And with that final nail in the coffin, I think it's time to bring this Arclight outing to an end ...