HITLER IS AT EVERY BEARS GAME

Whether you notice it or not out there watching a Bears game, you're still living in the shadow of Adolph Hitler. And you don't have to be Jewish to feel its chill.

Hitler was raised an Austrian Catholic, lived a German atheist, and died a drugged delusional for whom deity may or may not have had a place. But one post-mortem can be dared: The closest to a god in his world was Charles Darwin. Once we start with that assumption, we end up with a frightening theology.

Darwin's theory of evolution has swept the Western world of thought for a century. With each new neuo-biological discovery, science is finding new ways of re-explaining old teachings. To put it simply -- you and I are the product of our evolved genes, not of any divine gods. If we put that principle into practice, science should in time be able to manipulate specific genes to achieve specific results.

So far so good, as in the case of heroic medical research into genetic engineering.

However, step back just a few years to the 1920s. Prominent leaders from Henry Ford and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the United States to Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Hitler in Germany were speaking of the state, "genetically purifying and perfecting the human species." They included lofty ambitions such as ridding society of misfits and breeding superior strains like Aryans.

Lets put it this way. They were proposing speeding up evolution.

As the eventual head of the Gestapo and the SS, Himmler summed it up this way: "Nazism is all about applied biology....!" And apply it they did during the Nazi reign 1933 to its blazing gotterdammerung in the Berlin ashes of 1945. Seen this way, Darwin had unknowingly found his most ambitious apostle in Hitler. To the great glory of the Aryan Third Reich and to the great destruction of 6 million genetic and ethnic "misfits."

Not to press this model too far, most of us have already witnessed hints of it in our everyday life. Only here it's been nice-ified as in the case of football coaches taunting their squads with "whatever it takes" and euthanasia believers assisting "dying with dignity." But when you slice it all down to the bone, what you find is the very same survival-of-the-fittest that has ruled the jungles and the playing fields and the Panzer Divisions and now the evolutionary biology labs.

Hitler's ugly gospel of survivalism was of course an aberration. Or was it........?