Why We Fight Darwinism
One photo can do the work of
saying “Ideas Have Consequences”
a hundred times, or a thousand times
A chilling anniversary passes this month. Daniel Darling wrote about it for World Magazine. But the opening photo, with a caption of what it is about, is all he really needed to say. What happened 50 years ago must not be forgotten. It underscores why at Creation-Evolution Headlines fight so hard to overthrow the Darwinian worldview.
An ignominious anniversary (World Magazine Opinion Page, 9 January 2025). Daniel Darling begins with this subtitle. “Fifty years ago, the Khmer Rouge began a systematic campaign of Marxist-inspired murder.” Below that he shows a photo. We don’t want to reproduce it here. We want you to go read his article after staring at the picture for a few moments.
The Khmer Rouge promised a classless, agrarian society and sought to establish this utopia through a brutal campaign of torture, mass starvation, and forced labor. They emptied out the cities, demanding that men, women, and children flee, even the sick and the lame, into the countrysides. They slaughtered anyone considered elite, including teachers, scholars, historians, even those who wore glasses or expressed compassion for others.
Their radical version of Marxism taught that cities were corrupt, intellectuals were evil, religion was subversive, and that family loyalties must give way to loyalty to the ruling party, the Angkar. In true communist fashion, money, private property, and religion were abolished. There was no freedom of speech, freedom of worship, or freedom of assembly. Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians were put to death. The slaughter was systematic, where people were tortured into false confessions and sent to the rural communities where they were either forced into labor or executed. These places became known as “The Killing Fields.”
Fifty years was not that long ago. Pol Pot learned his radical Marxism in Paris, France, then exported it to Cambodia. The utter ruthlessness of the Khmer Rouge is hard to imagine. What happened to his conscience? How could he and his comrades murder masses of people, force them out of cities, and let them starve in the fields?
The worst concentration camp, Tuol Sleng, was a converted high-school, controlled by a special, lethal branch of the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of men, women, and children met their deaths there. One survivor, a doctor in Phnom Penh who was forced to the labor camps, said this: “In the eye of communism, a human being has no value until he served the political party … we don’t have the right to talk or even laugh.”
Compare this to the famous lines of America’s Declaration of Independence that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
What a difference a worldview can make. Jesus came humbly in poverty, was laid in a manger, and taught people to love one another. But the Khmer Rouge treated human beings like dirt. One of Pol Pot’s core principles was to create “state atheism” in his homeland. This rationalized his genocide. This was also a core principle of Karl Marx, and of all communists since. Marx considered Darwin’s theory the “scientific justification” for his views.
Although evidence is lacking that Pol Pot studied Darwinism specifically, there is no alternative for an atheist. Evolution is part of the package deal of Marxism, which (as Dr John Wise has explained), is an outgrowth of the Hegelian Dialectic. To get rid of Hegel’s concept of “Spirit,” Marx inverted it, dubbing it “dialectical materialism.”
Materialism and atheism are part and parcel of the communism that has turned, and continues to turn, many countries into brutal hell holes today. Look what it did to Venezuela, Cuba, China, and North Korea. If people are mere pawns of the State, they have no intrinsic value.
Stare at the picture again. A man uses a palm branch to clean a skull, with thousands of skulls behind him stacked like cord wood, their eye sockets staring out and seeming to ask, “Why?” The photo caption says that “A man cleans a skull near a mass grave at the Chaung Ek torture camp run by the Khmer Rouge.” So many were tortured before they were killed, too.
Every skull was inhabited by a human being with a mind, aspirations, hopes, and yes—human rights. All were cut down brutally for the ideology of Marxism and the false utopian ideology of Pol Pot. Scientists and educated people became enemies of the regime by definition. Wearing glasses was enough reason to get murdered. Many were struck with hoes from behind for a fast kill. Many more starved to death in the fields, forced to serve the Regime.
The Khmer Rouge communists murdered 20% of the population, Darling says—up to two million people.
This is why we fight evolutionism and scientific materialism. Ideas have consequences.
Now read the final four paragraphs of Daniel Darling’s essay.
Additional recommended reading: “The Nigerian Experiment” by Amanda Witt in Salvo Magazine. Witt draws a stark contrast about what happens in a Darwinian-worldview country vs a Christian-worldview country, with actual experience from what happened in Nigeria.