David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

Iraq, Saddam Hussein (1979–2003): 300,000

Uganda (1979–86): 300,000

Kurdistan (1980s, 1990s): 300,000

Liberia (1989–97): 150,000

Iraq (1990–): 350,000

Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–95): 175,000

Somalia (1991 et seq.): 400,000

In considering Pinker’s assessment of the times in which we live, the only conclusion one can profitably draw is that such an excess of stupidity is not often to be found in nature.

Does something in the very nature of a secular society make the monstrous possible? At the very least, Hitler and Stalin would seem to offer the prosecution a good deal of space in which to maneuver.

And the defense?

Richard Dawkins accepts Stalin as a frank atheist, and so a liability of the sort that every family admits, but he is at least sympathetic to the thesis that Hitler’s religious sentiments as a Catholic were sincere. Why stop with Hitler? No doubt some members of the SS took communion after an especially arduous day in the field murdering elderly Jewish women, and with vengeful Russian armies approaching Berlin, Heinrich Himmler, who had presided over the Third Reich’s machinery of extermination and had supervised the desecration of churches and synagogues from one end of Europe to the other, confessed to an associate that he was persuaded of the existence of a Higher Power. The death of Franklin Roosevelt inspired Joseph Goebbels to similarly pious sentiments. The deathbed conversion is generally regarded as the mark of desperate insincerity. Throughout their careers, these scum acted as if no power was higher than their own. Dawkins is prepared to acknowledge the facts while denying their significance. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.

That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

One might think that in the dark panorama of wickedness, the Holocaust would above all other events give the scientific atheist pause. Hitler’s Germany was a technologically sophisticated secular society, and Nazism itself, as party propagandists never tired of stressing, was “motivated by an ethic that prided itself on being scientific.” The words are those of the historian Richard Weikart, who in his admirable treatise, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, makes clear what anyone capable of reading the German sources already knew: A sinister current of influence ran from Darwin’s theory of evolution to Hitler’s policy of extermination. A generation of German biologists had read Darwin and concluded that competition between species was reflected in human affairs by competition between races.

These observations find no echo at all in the literature of scientific atheism. Christopher Hitchens is prepared to denounce the Vatican for the ease with which it diplomatically accommodated Hitler, but about Hitler, the Holocaust, or the Nazis themselves he has nothing to say. This is an odd omission for a writer who believes that religion poisons everything, and suggests that his eye for poison in political affairs tends under conditions of polemical stress to wander irresolutely.

When it comes to the Holocaust, Sam Harris, like so many others, approaches anti-Semitism and finds it surprisingly to his taste.

So far as the persecution of the Jewish people goes, Harris is opposed, if only because everyone outside the Arab world is. No great moral effort is required to reach this judgment.

“The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages culminating in the Holocaust,” Harris writes, “makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles on themselves.”

Having rejected the suggestion as an impossibility, Harris at once proceeds to embrace it.

The Jewish people, it would appear, did bring their suffering on themselves for “their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed superiority of their religious culture— that is, for the content of their own sectarian beliefs ” (my emphasis). This is nicely in line with opinions advanced recently by the historian David Irving. “The Jews,” he has concluded, “were the authors of their own misfortune.” Recently released from an Austrian prison, where he had been incarcerated on charges of Holocaust denial, David Irving is not generally considered a figure serious men and women are eager to enlist in their cause.

Although Harris is officially committed to assigning the blame for intolerance on the intolerant, there is blame enough left over to assign some to the intoleree as well. “The ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod of intolerance to this day ” (italics added). To be a lightning rod for intolerance is a moral defect, the more so when the remedy—get rid of those divisive sectarian beliefs—lies close at hand.

If you find it difficult to imagine that after close study of the Bava Mezia, the chapter of the Talmud that deals with the law of gifts, Hermann Göring decided that it was “the ideology of Judaism” that justified Nazi policies, then you have insufficiently appreciated just how divisive Jewish beliefs must have seemed to stout Göring, a man of well-known sensitivity to the delicacy of ideological deviance.

The contrary case has all the merits of the truth. For reasons that they could not make clear, even to themselves, the men controlling the Third Reich determined that it would be a fine thing to exterminate 9 million European Jews. In the SS and the German army, they found a willing instrument to hand. Much occupied in the closing days of the war with preserving their reputation—their reputation for diabolical wickedness—members of the SS took a perverse satisfaction in assuring one another that whatever they had done, it would not be believed, and if believed, blame would be assigned to their victims. In this, they were correct. More than fifty years after the Holocaust, a great many placid, well-meaning, and well-fed men and women persist in imagining that however monstrous the Holocaust, deep down the Jewish people, if they did not encourage their destruction, invited it nonetheless. “Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.”