Ben Stein's Next Step

Ben Stein is not completely nuts (at least, not yet). There were doctors (using what they thought was science) in the death-camp administrations. On the other hand, Mr. Stein should know that people claiming to speak for a system of ideas don't always represent it.

Of course, if we are going to oppose the branch of science that Nazi doctors were most likely to cite, we must oppose the germ theory of disease:

Consider this quote by Hitler:

For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don't be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don't think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst. Speech delivered by Hitler in Salzburg, 7 or 8 August 1920. (NSDAP meeting)

Hmmm. Here Hitler is likening the Jew to a disease, to a "racial tuberculosis" even. Who originated the germ theory of disease? Louis Pasteur! So why doesn't Stein blame the Holocaust on Louis Pasteur instead of Darwin?

By this reasoning, we must go beyond mere animal rights or even vegetable rights. It's obviously time for bacterial rights. To quote from Blood Music by Greg Bear:

Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things—microbes, bacteria, the peasants of nature—not counting for much except in the bulk of their numbers and the accumulation of their tiny lives. They do not perceive deeply, nor do they suffer. A hundred trillion, dying, would not begin to have the same importance as a single human death.

Within the ranks of all creatures, small as microbes or great as humans, there is an equality of “elan,” just as the branches of a tall tree, gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal the bulk of the trunk.

We believe in this as firmly as the kings of France believed in their hierarchy. Which of our generations will come to disagree?

Forget about the “Holocaust on a plate.” It's time to oppose the Holocaust in abscesses.