Klinghoffer: Darwin, Occultism, & Terrorism

This is about yet another post by David Klinghoffer, a “Senior Fellow” (i.e., full-blown creationist) among the neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids).

If you’re not familiar with his work, David has written a series of essays attempting to link Charles Darwin to: Hitler, and communism, and Stalin, and the Columbine shootings, and Charles Manson, and Holocaust Museum shooter, James von Brunn, and the Ft. Hood Massacre, and Mao Tse-tung, and most recently, Dr. Josef Mengele, Angel of Death and “Devotee of Darwin”.

Herewith, we present some excerpts from David’s latest article. Instead of appearing at the Discoveroid blog, this one was posted at David’s own blog at BeliefNet. The article is titled Darwin at the Mountains of Madness: Evolution & the Occult. As always, the bold font was added by us. Here we go:

Of all the regrettable cultural forces that Darwinism helped unleash, perhaps the most surprising and seemingly unlikely is its role in sparking the creation of modern occultism. Charles Darwin himself could not have been less interested in the topic. But no attempt to assess the scope of his legacy can properly leave out the muse-like role his theory played in the thinking of Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), who in turn was largely responsible for setting the agenda for modern occult interests, including the cult of Aryanism which bore its own poisonous fruit in Nazi Germany.

This is classic Klinghoffer! He briefly acknowledges that Darwin was uninterested in the occult. Nevertheless, David claims that “Darwinism helped unleash … modern occultism.” Darwin’s theory (but not the man himself) had a ” muse-like role” in the thinking of some whackjob woman, and her craziness — according to David — “was largely responsible for setting the agenda for modern occult interests, including the cult of Aryanism which bore its own poisonous fruit in Nazi Germany.”

After that breathtaking blizzard of blather, David “graciously” says:

[I]t always has to be repeated at the beginning of a discussion like this that the purpose is not to blame Darwin but merely to explore the largely unintended consequences of his idea. The disclaimer having been made …

That formalistic disclaimer doesn’t excuse anything, because what follows is the purest form of mindless creationist hatred one can find anywhere. David then launches into a discussion of the deranged career of “Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a rotund Russian fabulist of noble birth who later became an American citizen and, after years in India, died in London.”

Wikipedia has an article on her: Helena Blavatsky. She was a founder of Theosophy and the Theosophical Society. They say:

Her writings connecting esoteric spiritual knowledge with new science may be considered to be the first instance of what is now called New Age thinking, “the hippy movement of the last quarter of the twentieth century”.

[…]

Throughout much of Blavatsky’s public life, her work drew harsh criticism from some of the learned authorities of her day, who accused her of being a charlatan, an impostor, and a fraud.

[…]

Since her death, Blavatsky’s work has shown its influence in the works of dictators, political leaders, new religion leaders, writers, musicians, and other public figures. Blavatsky argued that humanity had descended from a series of “Root Races”, naming the fifth root race (out of seven) the Aryan Race. She thought that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis …

[…]

She regularly contrasts “Aryan” with “Semitic” culture, to the detriment of the latter, asserting that Semitic peoples are an offshoot of Aryans who have become “degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality.

So that’s Madame Blavatsky. If you’re sane and familiar with Darwin’s work, you’ll see nothing that even remotely connects his thinking with her ravings. But Klinghoffer somehow sees Madame Blavatsky as Darwin’s intellectual love-child. Let’s return to David’s article and read on:

Things like the sunken continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, lost civilizations seeded by wandering white-skinned wise men of old, the “sixth sense” — such themes of contemporary esotericism go back to Blavatsky’s popularizing treatment of them. Not that she invented Atlantis, for example, but the modern esoteric fascination with such matters can be traced back to her influence. She claimed to have learned secret wisdom on a visit to the mountain kingdom of Tibet that she likely never, in fact, took, in a lamasery from the Great White Brotherhood of Masters, or Mahatmas.

Again, the sane can find no hint of Darwin there. So why is David writing about this crazy lady? Watch, as David deploys his Discoveroid talents to skillfully connects the dots:

What’s interesting about her writing is that she was obsessed with Darwin and mentions him by name frequently — sometimes to argue against him, just as often to claim that evolution was well known long ago to bearers of her secret knowledge.

[…]

Her personal seal, printed on her book covers, is topped by the swastika, an ancient Indian symbol of good fortune that she also helped to bring to public attention and admiration. Her concept was that the people of Atlantis mostly perished, but some survived and linked up with Aryans who were in Tibet at the time, passing along secret knowledge.

It sounds ridiculous but people took it seriously at the time because of the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-Darwinian and pseudo-scholarly gloss that’s everywhere in her work. … The occult Thule Society, with its cult of Aryanism, inherited some of Blavatsky’s vision. Thule in turn connects to Hitler by way of member Dietrich Eckhart, credited as the “spiritual founder” of the Nazi party, to whom Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf on its final page.

So you see, dear reader, the intellectual connection that goes straight from Darwin to Hitler. It’s just so obvious!

This is getting too long, so now we’ll go right to the conclusion of David’s brilliant essay:

By decapitating — so he thought — any rational case for belief in a divine or any other designer, Darwin created a gaping wound at the center of the Western soul. Something had to come along and fill that hole and it had to be, so to speak, Darwin-shaped. It had to speak in evolutionary terms, about races and competition. Madame Blavatsky happened to be the person who came up with an influential modern Darwinian myth that filled that role, disastrously.

There you are — the world according to Klinghoffer. It’s no wonder that David is so honored by his Discoveroid puppet masters in Seattle.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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