The philosopher Leo Strauss saw in 1950 that a new form of a logical fallacy was going to be used, the argumentum ad Hitlerum. The fallacy is that if something is like Hitler or what the Nazis did, it must be evil. Three debatably smart people both used the same fallacy within weeks of each other, so I feel a need to address it on a philosophical level.
The first use comes from Ben Stein, who is promoting the new Creationism, aka the Intelligent Design movement. His reasoning against it is that there is a straight line from Darwin to the holocaust. Thus, evolution must be wrong. The problem is that Hitler didn't believe in evolution. He was a creationist.
You can read about it in Robert Jay Lipton's, The Nazi Doctors, Christopher Hale's Himmler's Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition to Tibet, Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Atlantis: A Brief History of the Platonic Myth, or Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism. Briefly, it starts with a man named Rudbeck in the15th-century who said that Uppsala, Sweden was once the capital of Atlantis. Through the mists of time the story gets revamped into various stories until it crystallizes with a group called Theosophists, an influential group of occultists headed by Madame Blavatsky. Some of the groups split off into separate groups called the Knights of the Golden Dawn, the Ariosophists, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the final and most famous one, the Scientologists.
There's the occult version of the story and the more mainstream one in Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important book in Nazism after Mein Kampf.
The occult one is more bizarre, and that is a high hurdle to jump, but it goes like this. The Atlantean race lived on a distant star system called Aldebaran, which had blond haired, blue eyed members. They get into a fight with the "Darkness", destroying two of the four solar systems, leaving Earth and one other. The gigantic intergalactic space battle destroyed their Atlantean civilization, which went underwater. The Atlanteans migrated outward. Meanwhile, the Aryan race was sitting inside of ice that had been sent to Earth by God, waiting for the thunderbolts of heaven to free them. Out from their Iceland homes they went, until they were in Tibet. Tibet held the survivors of the Atlantean culture. The Aryans were restless imperials, hence, the Japanese earned the term "proto-Aryan" for their nationalistic fervor. In contrast, other cultures were degenerates
Below are the top articles rated and ranked by Helium members on:
The philosopher Leo Strauss saw in 1950 that a new form of a logical fallacy was going to be used, the argumentum ad Hitlerum.
Add your voice
Know something about Reflections: Current use of Strauss's argumentum ad Hitlerum fallacy?
We want to hear your view.
Write now!
Cast your vote!
Click for your side.
Featured Partner
International Campaign for Tibet (ICT)
International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) has partnered with Helium, giving you the chance to write for a cause. Br...more
hide