But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called “World War II”.

Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn’t even mind the lack of originality if they weren’t so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren’t that evil. And that’s not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he’s not only Prime Minister, he’s not only a brilliant military commander, he’s not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he’s also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he’s supposed to be the hero, but it’s not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

So it’s pretty standard “shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong” versus “evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide” stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: “Nuts!”. The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy – the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin’ play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

It continues, gloriously, for more paragraphs you should read. Here’s just one more funny taste:

I’m not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named “Enigma”, because the writers couldn’t spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means “Man of Steel” in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman “Man of Steel” and the Frenchman “de Gaulle”, whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist.

And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf.

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can’t seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany.

I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live.

6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don’t you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin’s ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin’s ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.

7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin’s great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: “natural selection”, the “survival of the fittest”. Hitler didn’t apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler’s eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.

Your Thoughts?

If religion had motivated people to die for God and King, surely reason and science had made the dying that much nastier through the innovations of gas, flame-throwers, bomber aircraft, bigger artillery and the like. I would submit that WWI offered an equal rebuke to European notions of religion and science, indeed a rebuke to all myths of Europe as someone superior to the rest of humanity.

The utopian promises held out by the New Atheists that the world can be greatly improved through the abandonment of religion and the taking up of reason and science sounds as enticing as any utopia. But like other earthly attempts at utopia, the historical record has not been pleasant. I can’t believe in the utopia of the New Atheists. Why? To borrow Bertrand Russell’s famous reply to God, not enough evidence!

WWI and WWII weren’t started, as far as I know, because we were being too rational and too committed to Enlightenment ideals of human dignity and inquiry.  And science was in no way “rebuked” simply because technology can be used for good or for evil purposes.  Science, in terms of scientific methods for attaining to truth were quite vindicated when we learned to do things like split the atom.   Science did not corrupt human hearts.  And the fact that science did not transform people into angels is irrelevant.  That’s not what science was ever meant to do.  The real question is whether critical moral philosophy and moral psychology are a better route to human education in virtues than religious authoritarianism.

By evidence of the humane influence of Enlightenment ideals of democracy and tolerance compared with the authoritarian political structures of the Middle Ages or the bloody carnage over nonsense questions of the religious wars of the Reformation, I put my money on the Enlightenment as the ideal to strive for—regardless of how badly the West has failed to embody those ideals at various points in the last century.  The Enlightenment should still be the guiding ideal and has been the source of whatever moral progress the West has known in the last 400 years.

And the New Atheists are not promising a utopia.  They are just demanding more rationality and that everyone have to give reasons for their beliefs.  They are claiming that rejecting authoritarian approaches to belief that give assent to authorities who do not provide evidence or reasons is the path towards a more enlightened investigation of the world and the key to liberty.  As long as someone can manipulate your emotions or demand your agreement without providing adequate reasons, they can send you off into unjust wars and make you do evil things with available technologies.

Will opposing this one source of human corruption magically remove all the others?  No, it won’t of course.  But since when does opposing one set of vices (authoritarian habits of thought, superstitious thinking, anti-scientific inferences, fallacies, deference to traditions for their own sake) become impermissible just because removing those vices won’t magically end all human vice?  And I’d love to hear the exact explanation as to how becoming less rational, demanding less scientific evidence and rational moral argumentation from those who try to control what we think is a better route to a better world.  I won’t even set the bar as high as “achieving a utopia” for anyone who wants to explain this to me.  I will settle for an improved state of affairs over the opposite alternative of more rationality, scientific evidence, and demands for moral justification (since all the New Atheists are claiming is that more of these things will make things better, however still imperfect, than their alternatives can).

Reason has limitations which should be respected but not exploited.  Reason itself should never be “rebuked” and its limitations are not a license for unfounded claims beyond what we can know.  The limitations of our reason are the limitations of our right to believe.  Only tyrants and religions are threatened by the demands of reason and demands for reasons.

Your Thoughts?

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked. He found the question impossible to answer.

When Orwell used the phrase “objectively fascist” during WWII to criticize pacifists, he at least had the advantage of talking about a situation in which there were actual fascists involved. Roger Simon, on the other hand, is complaining about Obama’s differing responses to the Iranian election and the Honduran coup/deposition and uses the differing responses to conclude that Obama is somehow “objectively fascist.” The abuse of the term fascist in a lot of the commentary on Iran has been extensive and annoying, but now it’s really getting out of hand. Let’s be clear about one thing: no matter what your view of events in Iran and Honduras and Obama’s responses to them may be, fascism has nothing to do with any of these things. Authoritarian regimes and ideologies today are not fascist. Authoritarian states using their coercive apparatus to repress dissidents do not thereby become fascist–they remain merely authoritarian. One would think that this is bad enough, but we in the West apparently need to misuse the word fascist to convey how upset we are. Chavismo and its derivatives are unattractive left-populist and socialist movements centered around authoritarian demagogues, but they are not therefore fascist movements. Even if it were true that Obama’s response to the Honduras coup is “objectively Chavista,” it would have nothing to do with fascism. As badly as I think he has handled the Honduras matter, I don’t think that he is “objectively Chavista,” either, but then I have little time for arguments that immediately resort to this sort of vilification and use of demon-words to smear a target.