When I was in college I studied classical piano with Istvan Nadas who was a Hungarian concert pianist and a student of Bela Bartok. Istvan was a miraculous survivor of one of Hitler’s death camps. The stories he told me still haunt me to this day.
The commandant of the death camp liked to play Bach over the loudspeaker system while he had random inmates shot or hung, just for fun and entertainment. Nadas told me about the horror of listening to Bach while he watched his fellow inmates being machine-gunned to death in front of him. Nadas told me, “I knew every note of that music and could play it on the piano, but I also knew that if they discovered I was a concert pianist they would break all my fingers so I could never play the piano again.”
Nadas’s death camp was eventually “liberated” by the Russians. Istvan was one of only 150 survivors from a camp of thousands. He weighed 90 pounds and was suffering from dysentery and other diseases. While the Russians were transporting him on a train to what he knew would be a Russian internment camp he managed to jump out of the train as it slowed in the mountains. Under machine-gun fire he fled into the trees, was helped my local residents, and was eventually smuggled by an African American GI under a tarp in the back of a jeep through Check Point Charlie.
Nadas eventually discovered that every member of his extended family had either been gassed or otherwise tortured and exterminated by the Nazis, or shot by the Russians, with one exception: his mother, whom he eventually tracked down in Italy after the war.
One evening, after a concert at the university while I was studying piano with Nadas, which was conducted by a guest “contemporary composer” — it was just a bunch of random cacophony, very painful to listen to, but sold as legitimate music — I asked Nadas what he thought.
“It is a Himalayan dung heap,” he replied. (Nadas spoke six languages fluently, and had a way with words.) This phrase stuck in my mind, and it’s the perfect description of something so obviously stupid that it represents a pile of crap of Himalayan proportions.
The students and faculty applauded the Himalayan-dung-heap “music” because no one had the courage to point out the obvious, except for Nadas.
This is a perfect metaphor for Darwinism. Very few people in academia have the courage to point out the cacophony and illogic of Darwinian speculation.
It takes the courage of someone like Nadas, who was willing to jump off a train in the mountains under machine-gun fire, to tell the obvious truth.