Darwinism and Nazi Ideology

Don’t Doubt It
An important historic sidebar.
By David Klinghoffer

Get ready for the great Darwin-Hitler debate. There’s already been a volley of advance attacks on a new film’s suggestion of a link between Darwinism and Nazi ideology. The movie is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening this weekend, a cheeky documentary that is not primarily about evolutionism in prewar Germany. Reviewers in Time, Scientific American, Variety, Fox News, and elsewhere have denounced the filmmakers for suggesting that Hitlerism without the contribution of Darwinism would be hard to imagine.

This movie is, in fact, about the professional ostracism visited today on American scientists who doubt that undirected natural selection can fully explain life’s development. They are academics at places like the Smithsonian Institution, Iowa State University, and Baylor University. Droll comic-actor Ben Stein stars, interviewing the researchers.

But for about ten minutes, Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship.

The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”

The standard biographies of Hitler almost all point to the influence of Darwinism on their subject. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: “The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.” What Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was its rejection of Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography says this of Hitler’s Second Book published in 1928: “An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right.”

In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw explains that “crude social-Darwinism” gave Hitler “his entire political ‘world-view.’ ” Hitler, like lots of other Europeans and Americans of his day, saw Darwinism as offering a total picture of social reality. This view called “social Darwinism” is a logical extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory and was articulated by Darwin himself.

The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin’s writing.

Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards. It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas. On a particularly delicate moral topic, for example, he wrote: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”

In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:“

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” In this desacralized picture of existence, to speak of life as possessing any kind of holiness is to introduce an alien note.

Most disturbing of all, in The Descent of Man, Darwin prophesied: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

While it must be very clearly emphasized that the gentle-souled Darwin himself never supported ill treatment of any race or group, his words inspired a movement to “scientific” racism.“

Eugenics,” breeding humans for excellence, is a word coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1865, six years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In America itself, between 1907 and 1958, in states including Indiana, California, and Washington, some 60,000 genetically “unfit” persons were legally sterilized against their will. Germany took eugenics to the point of murder, euthanizing 70,000 of the unfit.

You only have to read Mein Kampf to see the indebtedness. A shrewd manipulator of his fellow Germans’ sympathy for scientifically flavored racial theorizing, Hitler gives a Darwinian-style analysis of how the struggle for existence mandates a defense of the Aryan race.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.”

He warns against racial decline from the mixing of blood — his own spin on Darwinism — arguing that the preservation of a “creative race” is “bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right of victory of the best and stronger in this world.” He calls for “a more noble evolution.”

Other Nazi propaganda followed his lead. In a 1937 German propaganda film, Victims of the Past, the audience is shown a retarded person as the narrator intones, “In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven’t just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply.”

None of which, of course, is an argument against Darwin’s theory, narrowly defined, which could still be true as most but not all biologists believe, despite having deadly implications.

Yet it is surely of interest that, at the very heart of his message, Hitler appealed to Germans primarily as devotees of modern biological science. He could have framed his pitch in any terms he liked. He chose evolutionary terms. No one knows what he believed in his heart, if he had one. But we know what he judged would stir up fellow Nazis and ordinary citizens to commit themselves to his movement. In that, he judged correctly.

— David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History.

The Observer

Losing The W.O.T. - The Invasion of Toledo

Attacks On A Daily Basis - The Muslim Brotherhood’s “Grand Jihad” in Toledo

It might only be the shores of Lake Erie, but the Muslim Brotherhood has established an invasion beachhead in Toledo. The most recent landing by the international Islamic extremist organization was last weekend when the Muslim American Society (MAS) – the ideological arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US, identified as such by the Department of Justice in a court filing back in December – held a conference at the University of Toledo. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Department of Homeland Security recently added Toledo to the list of high-risk terrorism areas.


Among the speakers were national MAS leaders Esam Omeish and Mahdi Bray, respectively the MAS president and head of their Virginia Commission on Immigration just weeks after his appointment. According to a September 28, 2007 article in the Washington Post, Omeish was forced out when a video surfaced of Omeish preaching holy war against Israel at a December 22, 2000, Jerusalem Day rally in Washington D.C., where he said:


... you have learned the way, that you have known that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land... and we shall do everything we can to help your cause.

Here’s the video with Omeish’s remarks. (The full speech video is here; all videos courtesy of the Investigative Project.) And yet another video of Omeish shows him congratulating Palestinian terrorists for “giving up their lives for the sake of Allah.”

Upon learning of Omeish's recorded call for jihad and his endorsement of suicide bombings, Virginia legislators quickly lined up calling for his resignation from the state commission.

Mahdi Bray, on the other hand, had to jet to Toledo from Egypt, where he had appeared earlier in the week at a rally defending jailed members of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood. An article on the Muslim Brotherhood website hails Mahdi Bray as “A Strong Voice for Human Rights.”On May 15, 2004, Bray also bestowed terrorist leader Abdurahman Alamoudi with a MAS Freedom Foundation award in abstentia as he was awaiting trial on terrorism charges (which he would later be convicted of and sentenced to 20 years in prison). Bray called him an “outstanding American Muslim who has courageously stood in defense of freedom and justice,” and vowed, “I don't care what they say, we're gonna continue to work with him, and the other detainees, Abdelrahim, and we are gonna continue to fight back. Let our people go! Let our people go!”

Bray’s enthusiasm for Abdurahman Alamoudi goes back many years, in fact. At an October 2000 rally in Lafayette Park across from the White House, Bray can be seen standing beside Alamoudi enthusiastically cheering his friend and compatriot (who again is currently serving 20 years in prison on terrorism charges), as he cheers the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations.

As can be expected, the local dead-tree media showed up at the MAS conference and wrote a glowing report, “Muslims’ roots in America branch out,” describing MAS as “a charitable, religious, social, cultural, and educational nonprofit organization.” No mention was made by the Toledo Blade of the recent controversies surrounding Omeish or Bray, or the terrorist connections and Muslim Brotherhood origins of the MAS, which were covered in an extensive investigation of the organization by the Chicago Tribune in 2004. They also could have consulted the meticulously documented MAS dossier prepared by the Investigative Project on Terrorism to provide at least a thin measure of background on the group to their readers.Had the Toledo Blade bothered to conduct actual research, they also would have discovered that the organization of yet another speaker at the MAS Toledo conference, Dawud Walid, state director for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Michigan affiliate, had been named as unindicted co-conspirator this past summer in a federal terror financing trial. During that same trial, the DOJ entered into evidence and FBI agent Lara Burns testified concerning documentation proving that MAS had been founded and controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But in the event that the dead-tree media had asked too many questions, or stumbled accidentally upon any one of these scandalous background and activities of Esam Omeish, Mahdi Bray, or the MAS itself, no doubt Mahdi Bray would have been sent forth to attack the paper and the reporter as “Islamophobic,” and steadfastly deny even the most readily provable claims.Such was the case following a Dallas Morning News article by terrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross following the 7/7 London suicide bombings, who noted that MAS had published in their March 2002 edition of their American Muslim magazine a fatwa authorizing suicide bombings, and that their membership study curriculum features a number of Muslim Brotherhood works and well-known jihadist tracts advocating for terrorism and violence.Mahdi Bray responded by denying both charges, essentially accusing Gartenstein-Ross of lying, as expressed in a follow-up editorial in the same paper. He categorically denied the claims about the suicide bombing fatwa:

Additionally, Mr. Ross asserts that a fatwa (religious opinion) in our March 2002 American Muslim magazine supports suicide bombing. There is absolutely no such fatwa in the March 2002 edition of the American Muslim magazine.

As I pointed out in an article last May here at FrontPage Magazine, “Cover-up and Deny,” while MAS had removed the fatwa in question from the magazine’s website (which read exactly how Gartenstein-Ross represented), the fatwa could still be found in various Internet archive sites not controlled by MAS. Bray's public denial was intentionally fabricated to conceal his organization's institutional extremism.In response to the terrorist-inciting jihadist tracts in the MAS membership curriculum, MAS responded by having all of their chapters remove the curriculum from their respective websites in a deliberate effort to conceal from the public their radical agenda. Once again, unfortunately, MAS could not remove the evidence from the Internet archive, which contains a copy of the curriculum as printed in the April 2001 edition of MAS’s American Muslim magazine. The entire MAS membership reading list can be found in the second-part of my response to Bray’s false denials, “Cover-Up and Deny, Part 2.”The story of the MAS conference in Toledo earlier this month is a tale of an organization that readily demonstrates its extremist roots when it believes no one is looking, and its officials, who are prepared to flagrantly lie to conceal the true nature of their covert agenda. The plans for the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in North America were also revealed this past summer when a document was made public outlining their goals to wage a “grand jihad” to undermine our systems and values to replace them with a strict fundamentalist version of Islam. The document outlines the true agenda of the MAS and its allied organizations:

The Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood's name for itself] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Undeterred, Mahdi Bray yet again tried to spin this revelation about his group’s role in the “grand jihad” in America and dismiss its importance for understanding their aims and objectives.The people of Toledo, however, cannot afford to ignore what’s at work in their community, especially in light of Mahdi Bray’s appearance in town just a few months ago. With three Toledo area residents already facing terrorism charges, can the citizens of the Glass City afford to remain ignorant about the Muslim American Society, Esam Omeish, Mahdi Bray, and their intent to wage their “grand jihad” in northwestern Ohio? As evidenced by the recent MAS conference, the grand jihad may already be well underway.