Conspiritualists amp up their victimhood-fetish by comparing anti-vaxxers to Jim Crow-era African Americans and Jews under the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson questions vaccines, bangs the CRT red-scare propaganda drum, and swoons over Hungarian fascist Viktor Orban.ulian compares Fox News’s idealizing coverage of Orban to how they treat another famous Hungarian, boogeyman of the far-right, George Soros. He also tells the tragic tale of Trofim Lysenko—Stalin’s “barefoot scientist,” to illustrate how pseudoscience actually flourishes (to everyone’s detriment) under real totalitarianism.Show NotesThe Soviet Era’s Deadliest Scientist Is Regaining Popularity in RussiaUnder fascism, a generation of scientific knowledge was lost in SpainHungarian scientists are on edge as country is poised to force out top universitySay it with statues: Brick-and-mortar revisionism in Orban’s HungaryOrban shocks the world again: He admits to being a Nazi pilot, calling him a knight and a hero
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
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Bear with me now, because we're going to go back in time to illustrate the fate of science under the very because we're going to go back in time to illustrate the fate of science under the very The End
We're listening to an oratio composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1949.
It's called The Song of the Forests.
It's famous for lyrics that refer to Stalin as the Great Gardener.
Having already been denounced by the Communist Party for his decadently over-formal compositions, Dmitry was careful to toe the party line on simple and accessible music this time.
The piece anticipates the success of the campaign instituted under Stalin by a man referred to as the Barefoot Scientist.
He was at the time director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics and his name was Trofim Lysenko.
And he had exhorted the entire peasant population of Siberia to plant millions of acorns as close together as they could.
In this way he believed he could turn the Siberian desert into a lush forest that would become hospitable to fruit trees and feed the nation.
Lysenko believed that plants were naturally self-sacrificing and that planting them close together would result in the weaker ones dying in service of the survival of the strongest.
This reflected his rejection of the mainstream biological science of genetics.
Rather than believing that plants had fixed characteristics, he applied a more ideological, Marxist principle that said not only would plants change in response to their environment, but they would then pass on those changes to future generations.
Even at that time, this was an outdated form of what is called Lamarckianism.
It's turned out to be almost partially correct to some extent in the emerging field of epigenetics, but not in any of the ways our barefoot scientist predicted.
He also believed he could turn Russia's vast barren interior into a farmland that would sustain the nation, using his various pseudoscientific methods.
Stalin was betting everything on Lysenko.
Because earlier attempts at collectivist farming, with the government seizing the peasants' individual pieces of land, had failed so dismally.
Lysenko's wishful thinking would be charming if it didn't have such deadly consequences.
He believed, for example, that cuckoos were born from birds like warblers being fed big hairy caterpillars, ignoring the observation that cuckoos are in fact brood parasite interlopers with no actual relation to the parents or siblings of that nest or species.
Though his ideas ran counter to Darwin and Mendel, Lysenko was enshrined as a great hero under Stalin and had a special song that was played for him whenever he would give public addresses.
Farmers were forced at his orders to plant seeds very close together.
Wheat, rye, potato, beets, all the crops planted according to his instructions, failed.
He played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Russians.
Worse still, his ideas were then exported to the communist regime in China, where at least 30 million people died of starvation.
Scientists who criticized Lysenko from within the Soviet Union were rounded up by the secret police.
The lucky ones in that group of over 3,000 scientists just lost their jobs.
Others were jailed or sent to psychiatric institutions.
The least fortunate We're executed.
Now Lysenko eventually fell out of favor and died in 1976 without much fanfare, but his popularity is rising again.
As often happens with outdated and disproven ideas, when some new discovery sounds enough like them, certain people will want to revive the ghost of pseudoscience past.
So too with epigenetics and Lisenko's alternative ideas about environment-changing gene expression in plants.
It's still untrue, by the way.
We've got the death count to prove it.
As reported in Sam Kean's 2017 article in The Atlantic, Lysenko's new defenders also, and I quote, accuse the science of genetics of serving the interests of American imperialism and acting against the interests of Russia.
Science, after all, is a major component of Western culture, and because the barefoot peasant Lysenko stood up to Western science, the reasoning seems to go, he must be a true Russian hero.
Indeed, nostalgia for the Soviet era and its anti-Western strongmen is common in Russia today.
A 2017 poll found that 47% of Russians approved of Joseph Stalin's character and managerial skills.
And riding on the coattails of Stalin's popularity are several of his lackeys, including Lusenko." The country of Spain also endured an assault on science during the 36-year rule of fascism under Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975, What you just heard is from a song composed for and about him titled El Generalissimo.
Franco dismantled the central agency in Spain that advanced the sciences and replaced it with one of his own, designed to make science compatible with conservative Catholic values.
In his own words, to restore the classical and Christian unity of the sciences that was destroyed in the 18th century.
So he wanted to roll back time to before the Enlightenment.
Opus Dei, the work of God, was the name of the Catholic institution Al Generalissimo drew inspiration from, and he used it to justify his undemocratic rule, saying, we do not believe in government through the voting booth.
The Spanish national will has never been freely expressed through the ballot box.
Spain has no foolish dreams.
During a period known as the White Terror, Communists, Protestants, intellectuals, and scientists were imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
Universities had purging committees set up to identify anyone teaching scientific ideas at odds with a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Scientists and academics fled the country or faced an awful fate during these purges.
Just as with Russia, Spain suffered enormous setbacks in scientific advancements because of this fundamentalist authoritarian tyranny.
