June 14th, 2007 RWA
The Memorial to the Victims of Communism worldwide finally received its formal dedication on June 12. The President gave an impassioned speech reminding us that we still have lessons to learn from this great tragedy of the 20th century, about the lives lost in the name of ideology and the need to fight evil whenever it raises it head. It is truly tragic that there are still many who continue to fail to recognize this fact, just as they did during the Cold War. But there is still yet another lesson to be learned here. While the left no longer applauds the murders committed by communism, it continues to either ignore or excuse them. The right, meanwhile, while correctly recognizing the sheer amorality of communism and the inevitable misery it has caused, has completely overlooked that science was one of communism’s greatest victims. Although the Ukranian famine was a deliberate act of genocide, agriculture and biology in the entire Soviet Union was set back years thanks to Stalin’s embrace of the anti-evolutionary ideas of Trofim Lysenko. Not only did starvation occur in the Soviet Union and beyond, as Lysenko’s unworkable ideas spread to Mao’s China, but scientists who dared to speak out and criticize Lysenkoism found themselves shipped to the gulags, where they met either hard labor or death. Scientists in the West who had formerly embraced communism, such as Herman Muller and JBS Haldane, both giants in biology, suddenly spurned it (although Haldane remained a committed Marxist), and although the anti-anti-communism mentality would resurface once Lysenkoism was no longer state doctrine, as long as it was in place, the Soviet Union recieved no respect from the Western scientific community.
History is now repeating itself, right here in America, not only among the useful dupes of the left who excuse or deny the very real danger of Islamic fundamentalism, but among the useless idiots of the right who deny the equally hard facts of biological evolution. With the creationists pressing for the dumbing-down of the scientific community, how will the United States be able to compete in the rapidly emerging biotechnology industries? With a Gallup poll indicating most Republicans reject evolution, how does the party expect to gain the respect of the scientific community or any intelligent voter, for that matter? If these trends go on, there may very well be a tragedy of Stalinist proportions.
Addendum:
Welcome NRO readers! And thank you, Derb! For further information on the Soviet suppression of science, just Google the names of Lev Landau, Pyotr Kapitsa, or Andrei Sakharov, or pick up a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitshyn’s The First Circle, which is based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison camps where scientists and engineers were specially assigned to. If you can stand PDF files, I also recommend this excellent piece by physicist William Happer, which in addition to providing a good, detailed history of the Lysenko affair, draws lessons to be learned in the politicization of science in other areas. Happer, it should be noted, has first hand experience of this sort of thing, having been dismissed from his DOE post in 1993 by Mr.Assault on Reason himself, Al Gore, when he dared question some of Gore’s rasher claims about ozone depletion.
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