© Jack Cashill
Courtesy of WND.com - April 24, 2008

Darwin critics know Ernst Haeckel as the German philosopher whose faked embryo drawings helped generations of clueless students accept Darwinism--“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and all that.

But there is still another problem with Haeckel, a darker one than mere fraud. Critics of the Ben Stein film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, apparently do not know this.

If they had, they would not have savaged Stein for daring to connect Adolph Hitler to Charles Darwin . In Scientific American, for instance, editor John Rennie describes this connection as “heavy-handed.” In Reuters, Frank Scheck calls it “truly offensive.”

It reality, it is neither. If anything, Stein and the makers of Expelled understate this historically irrefutable link, and the key to understanding it is Haeckel.

Born in Potsdam in 1834, Haeckel read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in the summer it was first published in German, 1860, and fell immediately under its sway. He could see straight off that Darwin offered a useful exit strategy from a God-dominated cosmos.

Once liberated, Haeckel created his own secular religion called “Monism.” Not lacking for confidence, he imagined Monism as nothing less than a unified, naturalistic understanding of the entire universe.

“The modern science of evolution has shown that there never was any such creation,” claims Haeckel of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “but that the universe is eternal and the law of substance all-ruling.”

In his 1971 book, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, Dr. Daniel Gasman of John Jay College shows the “decisive” role that Haeckel played in the development of the German “Volkish” movement, a revival of pre-Christian German culture and spiritualism that found its eventual ecological outlet in the Holocaust.

As it happens, many of the most influential Volkish spokesmen were tied in with either Haeckel or his Monist followers. These were the semi-respectable zanies that found common cause in National Socialism, and they were problem enough.

But it was in the field of eugenics and racial science that Haeckel had the most direct and lethal impact. Germany’s leading advocates of racial anthropology and eugenics, notes Gasman, “were deeply and consciously indebted to Haeckel for many, if not for most, of their ideas.”

Otto Ammon, (1842-1916), a Haeckel disciple, went public with what many Darwinists prefer to keep private, and that is the oddly spiritual nature of the Darwinian experience.

“In obvious imitation of Haeckel,” writes Gasman, “Ammon taught that Darwinism had to become  Germany’s new religion. It had to be accepted as a complete Weltanschauung and its ideas had to be encouraged in every facet of life.”

Haeckel’s co-editor at the leading Darwinian joumal Kosmos, Ernst Krause, introduced still another unhinged idea, one that proved to have serious geo-political consequences.

It was Krause who transformed Germans into “Aryans.” In his two influential books, he labored to trace the origin of his imagined Aryan race back to classical Greece and to show the natural fitness of this race of people over time.

When the Nazis came to power, their narrow reading of just who was and who wasn’t an Aryan might have even seemed comic were it not so catastrophic.

Still, for all their grandiosity, Haeckel and his colleagues worked within the then respectable pale of Germany’s scientific establishment.

Beyond that pale, feeding on their ideas and their respectability, was a rogue class of theorists who propagandized for the creation of a racially pure Germany and often got scarily specific as to how that might occur.

One such theorist was a popular author by the name of Willibald Hentschel. Among his more ambitious plans was to create a breeding colony for pure Nordics.

One imagines a kind of Club Med where contraception and blond jokes are strictly verboten. Here, through scientific methods of procreation, Hentschel hoped to spawn an Aryan elite. The cities, meanwhile, would be left to rot at the hands of the biologically unfit.

In one of his few specific references to Haeckel, Hitler spoke of their shared opposition to Christianity. Both resented the faith because it competed with what Gasman calls “a holy conception of nature.”

Haeckel had, in fact, inspired Hitler and Hitler’s Germany with Darwin’s cosmology, the story of the world as told by nature. For Haeckel and Hitler both, Gasman writes, “The great defect of modern Western society was that man was in constant violation of nature.”

Given this perspective, it should not surprise that Nazi and proto-Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as pollutants: poisoning wells, drinking blood, spreading disease, and, ultimately, defiling the Aryan race.

In his own inhuman way, Hitler set out to address this violation of the Aryan ecosphere. In this regards, he was merely the first, and most lethal, of a long line of activists who would stand the “Great Chain of Being” on its head by putting “nature” ahead of man and man ahead of God. (Indeed, the term “eco-Nazi” is not without its historical roots.)

Haeckel too has blood on his hands. As Gasman observes, Haeckel was “one of the most vociferous opponents of the Jews” and arguably the first to assess the “Jewish problem” as one of biology.

Having subjected Jews to “scientific” analysis, Haeckel came to the unhappy conclusion that their perceived shortcomings were inborn and resistant to change.

To be fair to Haeckel, he never proposed anything like a final solution. Indeed, his plan was to absorb the Jewish population through coerced assimilation so that it would be swallowed by the much larger “Aryan” gene pool.

To be fair to Darwin, the future National Socialists knew him largely as interpreted by Haeckel. It’s just that in posing “Judaism” as a scientific and technical problem in a godless world, Haeckel invited others to suggest technical solutions, and history records that they did just that.

Other totalitarians have taken their cue from Darwin and his most influential fan, Karl Marx. Upon the publication of On the Origin of Species, Marx wrote to collaborator, Friedrich Engels, “Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

Perhaps in the sequel, Ben Stein might turn his attention to the road from Darwin to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. That will really give the critics something to chomp on.

Who is Jack Cashill?