Skeptic magazine reader A. E. Dabbs calls attention to the fact that it appears the grand calendar makers have screwed up by giving February 29 days this year when, according to the formula designed to keep our calendar in synch with the Earth's not-so-perfectly-rounded number revolutions about the sun, we were suppose to skip it this year. I checked my 2000 calendar and, sure enough there it is, Feb. 29. Here is Dabbs' note:
"Has anyone heard about preparations regarding the fact that this year is not a leap year? All the calendars I have seen so far (store bought as well as computer generated) mark February as having 29 days this year disregarding the fact that this century is divisible by 400. Would anyone out there like to bet me that America will not end up honoring this correction to the Julian Calendar System? My theory surrounding the fact that America will not be calendar friendly is reinforced by this country not being present for the last overlooking of a leap year (1600, Jamestown being founded in 1602). Other than this is the fact that even the latest Windows program considers this year a leap year. Windows could be reprogramed, but our little digital devices (watches, palm tops, etc.) will probably have to be replaced.
--A. E. Dabbs
In the early 1990s Bradley Smith initiated an advertising campaign by placing ads in college cat gas chambers and crematoria were part of the killing process, and that the Nazis intended to exterminate European Jewry. For the past couple of years Smith has been living in Mexico and largely dropped out of the Holocaust revisionist movement, but he's back and now placing "ads" (if you can call them that) in college newspapers. The ad is actually a long already-published insert for which he pays an insert fee. In the following post Gary Bennett, at Boise State University, applies the comparisons I make between evolution deniers and Holocaust deniers in an effective counter-campaign. He makes an excellent point about freedom of speech and notes the role of the Christian religion in promulgating anti-Semitism throughout the past several centuries. I will call your attention to Gary's comment about the "Gott mit uns" belt buckles worn by the Nazi SS. I chased this down last year and, near as I can tell, this was what was on World War One German soldier's belt buckles, not on Nazi SS belt buckles. If someone knows otherwise please let me know.
Holocaust Denial at Boise State University
To: Evolutionists Everywhere
From: Gary L. Bennett
Ever since I read Michael Shermer's book "Why People Believe Weird Things" I've been looking for a chance to point out to Idaho's creationists the fallacy of their approach. In November, the Boise State University student newspaper, "The Arbiter", distributed a publication ("The Revisionist") that challenges the historical evidence for the Holocaust. This sparked an immediate uproar in Boise. On 22 December (after waiting for Boise's alternative newspaper to publish my article) I submitted the following article to The Idaho Statesman (Idaho's largest newspaper) which they published on 22 January 2000 (obviously without the source notes and without the italicized phrases). Feel free to circulate or publish this wherever you think it would help. I think Shermer is on to something!
Frankly, it should not have been surprising that the editor of BSU's student newspaper would allow distribution of a publication ("The Revisionist") that challenges the historical evidence of the Holocaust. This incident is just one more example of the failure to educate students and to give them a capability of making moral judgments.
For Erica Hill, Arbiter editor-in-chief, to hide behind the First Amendment is the oldest excuse for sloppy editorial judgment. Not distributing "The Revisionist" would not have abridged anyone's freedom of speech.
When I was in college in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, it was common for student editors to publish some offbeat articles, usually with some profanity or leftist views, possibly as a way to prove to themselves they were really free. Faculty and students took this in stride. But denying the Holocaust is another matter -- that is a lie of the worst kind.
Certainly Idaho's political climate contributes to the kind of thinking that leads to Holocaust denial. Aside from the "Aryan Nations" compound in northern Idaho, there are fundamentalists preaching hatred against gays, pro-choice people and secular humanists. Can anti-Semitism be next?
Idaho's senior representative has said Idaho is inhospitable to "warm weather races". Furthermore, she once hired a Holocaust denier, whom she later had to fire when the publicity got too hot for even her off-planet views.
Putting more religion into public schools isn't going to cure the problem because at the heart of biblical literalism is anti-Semitism bred in the false belief that the Jews killed their savior (Matthew 27:25). Martin Luther asked, "What shall we Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews? "I will give my faithful advice: First, that one should set fire to their synagogues." Then that one should also break down and destroy their houses. "That one should drive them out of the country".
Adolf Hitler, who was baptized, clearly followed Martin Luther's advice. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote "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".
Soldiers in Hitler's Wehrmacht wore belt buckles inscribed with the following "Gott mit uns" ("God is with us").
Somewhere in history fundamentalists seem to have forgotten that Jesus was a Jew.
On the other side, the Left, with its social constructivism and post-modern psychobabble, offers no solution either. Cultural relativism, like theocracy, just paves the way for totalitarianism. There is a disturbing parallel in the tactics of those who deny the Holocaust and those who deny the theory of evolution. Born-again Christian Michael Shermer, who has debated Holocaust deniers and creationists, has written
"1. Holocaust deniers find errors in the scholarship of historians and then imply that therefore their conclusions are wrong, as if historians never make mistakes. Evolution deniers (a more appropriate title than creationists) find errors in science and imply that all of science is wrong, as if scientists never make mistakes.
"2. Holocaust deniers are fond of quoting, usually out of context, leading Nazis, Jews, and Holocaust scholars to make it sound like they are supporting Holocaust deniers' claims. Evolution deniers are fond of quoting leading scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Ernst Mayr out of context and implying that they are cagily denying the reality of evolution.
"3. Holocaust deniers contend that genuine and honest debate between Holocaust scholars means they themselves doubt the Holocaust or cannot get their stories straight. Evolution deniers argue that genuine and honest debate between scientists means even they doubt evolution or cannot get their science straight."
I believe the beginnings of a solution may be found in Carl Sagan's observation that "In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness".
--Martin Luther quote from The Great Thoughts Compiled by George Seldes (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985). The quote is taken just as presented in this book.
--Adolf Hitler quote from Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and translated by Ralph Manheim, Sentry Edition (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and The Riverside Press, Cambridge, undated).
--Information on Hitler's army from "Hitler Was Not an Atheist" by John Patrick
Michael Murphy in Free Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring 1999.
--Michael Shermer quote from Why People Believe Weird Things, Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer (W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1997).
--Carl Sagan quote from The Demon-Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (Random House, New York, 1995).
Copyright 2000 Nando Media
Copyright 2000 Associated Press
By Jean Christensen
HONOLULU (January 20, 2000 4:16 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - In 1925, a 23-year-old college student from New York City set sail for American Samoa to observe the transition from childhood to adulthood among members of a primitive culture.
Margaret Mead hoped to test theories taking hold among Western social scientists about the inherent turbulence of adolescence.
What she concluded after visiting the Manu'an Islands 2,300 miles south of Hawaii was that teenage girls and boys there were free of the hang-ups of their Western counterparts and that sexual promiscuity was common.
"Samoans laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity to a long absent wife or mistress, believe explicitly that one love will quickly cure another," Mead wrote in the best-selling "Coming of Age in Samoa."
Those conclusions long have been scoffed at by American Samoans. And now a conservative academic think tank promises to keep the debate going by naming Mead's 1928 treatise the worst nonfiction book of the past 100 years.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute of Wilmington, Del., criticized Mead's methods as scandalously sloppy and her findings as patently false.
"So amusing did the natives find the white women's prurient questions that they told her the wildest tales - and she believed them!" the 46-year-old nonprofit institute wrote recently.
Mead's book joined Beatrice and Sidney Webb's "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?" (1935) and Alfred Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) atop the institute's list of the 20th century's 50 worst nonfiction books originally published in English.
"The books on the worst list are still very popular on college campuses nationwide in spite of subsequent scholarship that has demonstrated the flaws in their conclusions," said Winfield J.C. Myers, one of three editors who made the selections.
Scholarly criticism of Mead, who died in 1978, isn't new.
In 1983, Derek Freeman, an anthropologist at the Australian National University at Canberra, attacked Mead's Samoa work. "Her account of the sexual behavior of Samoans is a mind-boggling contradiction," he wrote in "Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth."
Freeman said Mead was inexperienced in fieldwork and stayed only six months in the territory - hardly long enough to draw such sweeping conclusions about Samoan society.
He also said Mead was duped by her teenage subjects and ignored evidence that did not support her hypothesis in order to please her mentor, Columbia University professor Franz Boas, a pioneer of the cultural school of anthropology.
In 1996, Martin Orans, an anthropologist at the University of California at Riverside, argued in his book "Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and Samoa" that Mead's field records do not support her claims, which are so grandiose that they could not be empirically tested.
But others in academia defend Mead.
Lowell Holmes, former chairman of anthropology at Wichita State University, retraced Mead's steps in the 1950s and disagreed with Freeman's criticism in his own 1987 book, "Quest for the Real Samoa."
Although critical of Mead's findings, Holmes said Freeman's critique stemmed from ideological differences. He also said he found no evidence that she was trying desperately to satisfy Boas by concluding that the storm and stress of adolescence were products of nurture rather than nature.
American Samoa-born Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, an assistant professor of Pacific literature at the University of Hawaii, said Mead has been victimized by "the dissemination of idle rumor faintly disguised as scholarship by certain organs of popular media."
She said "Coming of Age in Samoa" was an important challenge to the growing chorus of social scientists in the early 20th century who believed that biology - not culture - was the main determining factor for human behavior and intelligence.
The biology argument provided intellectual support for eugenics, the pseudoscience of human breeding that aimed to produce a superior race, Sinavaiana-Gabbard said.
Myers countered: "Obviously, eugenics is a great evil," but "you don't answer sloppy scholarship with sloppy scholarship."