Propaganda: Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed

Now I have come to the movie that actually got me inspired to do a blog about propaganda. It was "Expelled: No intelligence allowed". In this movie, an attempt is made to blame the Holocaust on scientists, and to link Hitler to Charles Darwin. The movie is a propaganda piece supporting right wing Christian fundamentalists in their attack on science and evolution.

In the movie, allegations are made that scientists, liberals, and Charles Darwin inspired Hitler to kill the Jews. The movie makers tried to hide their Christian fundamentalist bias by hiring a Jew, Ben Stein, to narrate the film. He also appears in many promotional interviews for the film, arguing for the movie's premise. Ben obviously believes in the message of the film, although he seems to actually be more interested in the Darwin-Hitler connection than in Intelligent Design. Consequently, the film does get severely off track by going into in the Nazi connection and does very little to promote Intelligent Design.

The resulting mishmash of propaganda is quite confusing. I'm sure the right wing Christians would rather not get into the Hitler connection, since it's pretty obvious when you think about it, that racism, not evolution, was Hitler's inspiration. And right wing southern Christian fundamentalists are vulnerable themselves on racism charges. Actually, it could more easily be argued that Hitler got his inspiration for both killing the Jews, and for selective breeding of the German race, directly from the Christian slave owners of the southern USA.

So I suppose the Christian backers of the movie were keeping their fingers crossed that by using Ben Stein, they would avoid this criticism. And to a large extent, it has worked as I have not seen too many reviewers connecting the dots back to southern slavery, Christianity, and the Nazi holocaust. Because "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones", it only makes sense to hire the guy next door to throw the stones for you.

I was outraged when this movie first came out, and played in a local theater for a month. So who actually funded this movie? It's not explicitly stated, but obviously the southern Baptists, Fundamental Christians or Evangelicals had a hand in this. And if they are behind it, I am going to make a case that they are hypocrites for blaming scientists for the very racism they supported originally.

From the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention interview with Logan Craft (executive producer of Expelled):

www.sbtexan.com/default.asp

TEXAN: How did Ben Stein come to be involved in the film?

CRAFT: Well, John (Sullivan, producer of Expelled) had a real insight, we believe, into the necessity to have a person, first of all, who wasn’t overtly Christian or overtly religious…

The movie was directed by Nathan Frankowski, who was also second unit director on the TV movie "The Path to 9/11", which was a right wing propaganda piece designed to blame Bill Clinton for the attacks of 9/11. Of course, the right wing Conservatives are allied with the Christian fundamentalists against liberals and scientists.

Reviews of the movie "Expelled" have been overwhelmingly negative. The most positive review was not surprisingly on a Christian fundamentalist website, "Christianity Today". But even this review calls the connection between Hitler and Darwin "tangential". The non Christian fundamentalist reviewers have stronger words such as vile and disgusting.

Perversely, the song "Imagine" by John Lennon was used without permission. Lennon was murdered by a born-again Christian, although Ben Stein has stated that science leads people to commit murder.

Refuting the Arguments of the Movie

One of Hitler's pet projects was to improve the German race through selectively breeding and killing Jews. It is pointed out that Hitler mentioned Darwinian evolution in his writings. But Hitler was a madman, and used a lot of other excuses such as "Doing the work of the Lord". Most people try to ignore Hitler's insane rantings and look at the real cause of the problems of war and genocide.

Just to set the record straight, what Hitler was doing was not Darwinism, it was selective breeding. Selective breeding pre-dates Darwinism, and has no direct connection to the theory of evolution, which is based on natural selection. American slave owners were using selective breeding to improve slaves long before Darwin's theory.

Another difference between Darwinian evolution and Hitler's insane ideas was the Nazis insistence on racial purity. In Darwinian evolution, mixed races theoretically survive as well or better than pure races, mainly because of the more diverse gene pool, and less inbreeding. Theories of Aryan racial purity (and superiority) were promoted by Creationists in the southern US, not by Darwinians. "Bob Jones University", a well known southern Christian fundamentalist school only dropped their racial purity policy in the year 2000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University#Dropping_the_no-interracial-dating_rule_.282000.29

On another argument, Ben Stein suggests that science has led to atheism, which in turn leads to evilness, and finally to war crimes and the holocaust. This of course is based on the view that atheists or scientists are more evil than religious people, which is an argument that makes sense only to religious fundamentalists. Ben Stein does not mind using this argument, but the facts show that Southern Baptists supported evils such as slavery and racial superiority and racial purity.

Ben Stein has stated that it is Darwinists who claim that some races are superior. This assertion is entirely false, but it seems that the Bible claims that Jews are the chosen people of God. And Christian exremists also believe this part of the bible.

There is another argument in the movie, that scientists who believe in "Intelligent Design" are shunned by the scientific community. The movie takes only one side of each of these claims, making it seem like some kind of massive persecution is taking places, but the real facts suggest only a few isolated complaints. Wikipedia has details on the complete cases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled

All these complaints are based on the assumption that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory about the origin of species. But Intelligent Design is not scientific, and a decision on this matter was handed down recently in Dover Pennsylvania by a court of law. You can read about the case here. Again, Ben Stein says he doesn't care what the law says - apparently he feels the law doesn't matter, but the need to tell the truth apparently indermined the Intelligent Design case much more in the court than in the movie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District