War of the worldviews: science as a political tool
By Steven Tucker, Mercator.
Is science as objective as we might like to think? Not necessarily. As I discovered when writing my new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets, the scope for deliberate misuse of science for political ends is large indeed.
The Nazis and Soviets are indelibly associated in the public mind with all kinds of often rather unpleasant forms of pseudoscience, from bogus fascist concepts about human genetics which led to the mechanised murder of six million, to equally fake Marxist notions about plant genetics whose misguided agricultural application starved millions more.
But, as I show, there were also far, far weirder such ideas abroad in the 20th century’s twin worst dictatorships too, albeit much less well-known. Was homosexuality a transmissible disease? Were stars a fake concept? Was chemistry inherently Communist? The answer to these questions was, of course, ‘no’.
But under totalitarian rule, this fact was frequently irrelevant. What really mattered was what the answer to these questions was politically, not factually: and the official answer to each of the above was often thought to be ‘yes’. To disagree could easily be considered a crime not only against science, but, far worse, also against the State.
People in the West today tend to look back on such absurdist horrors as mere cautionary tales of the past, like lurid tales about medieval witch-burnings or the beheading of heretics. They couldn’t happen over here anew today, in our own contemporary advanced liberal Western democracies like the United States, Great Britain and Australia, could they? I’m afraid, as my book conclusively demonstrates, they already have – and here are just a few recent examples.
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