Monday, August 24, 2020

Eugenics and You Part 1

                                                                


Eugenics and You Part 1

Junious Ricardo Stanton

 

“Eugenics is the philosophy and social movement that argues it is possible to improve the human race and society by encouraging reproduction by people or populations with “desirable” traits (termed “positive” eugenics) and discouraging reproduction by people with “undesirable” qualities (termed “negative” eugenics).” What is Eugenics https://pged.org/history-eugenics-and-genetics/

 

Eugenics was a philosophy and movement by Europeans that called for the elimination of society’s “undesirables” via sterilization, birth control and in extreme cases mass murder. Adolf Hitler was a eugenicist as were people like John D. Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, John Harvey Kellogg, Herbert Hoover, John Maynard Keynes and surprisingly W.E.B. Dubois.

In the early twentieth century the eugenics movement blossomed in the United States having been imported from England where it was championed by Francis Galton a cousin of Charles Darwin. The notion was based upon class and race, Galton looked the British upper crust and concluded their position and success were hereditary and the result of breeding. To his mind it would benefit English society if certain traits were cultivated via breeding and birth while undesirable traits were eliminated via birth control methods such as sterilization!

The English eugenics movement, championed by Galton, promoted eugenics through selective breeding for positive traits. In contrast, the eugenics movement in the US quickly focused on eliminating negative traits. Not surprisingly, ‘undesirable’ traits were concentrated in poor, uneducated, and minority populations. In an attempt to prevent these groups from propagating, eugenicists helped drive legislation for their forced sterilization (Norrgard 2008). The first state to enact a sterilization law was Indiana in 1907, quickly followed by California and 28 other states by 1931 (Lombardo n.d.). These laws resulted in the forced sterilization of over 64,000 people in the United States (Lombardo n.d.). At first, sterilization efforts focused on the disabled but later grew to include people whose only ‘crime’ was poverty. These sterilization programs found legal support in the Supreme Court. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the state of Virginia sought to sterilize Carrie Buck for promiscuity as evidenced by her giving birth to a baby out of wedlock (some suggest she was raped). In ruling against Buck, Supreme Court Justice Wendell Holmes opined, ‘It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles is enough’ (Black 2003). This decision legitimized the various sterilization laws in the United States. In particular, California’s program was so robust that the Nazi’s turned to California for advice in perfecting their efforts. Hitler proudly admitted to following the laws of several American states that allowed for the prevention of reproduction of the ‘unfit’” America’s Hidden History: The Eugenics Movement by Teryn Bouche and Laura Rivard https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444/

The global eugenics movement looked to the United States because the US pushed and popularized the notion and backed it with funds from extremely wealthy patrons, “Less stingy than Mr. Force, wealthy families of the old ‘robber barons’ financially supported eugenics in the early years of this century. Mrs. E. H. Harriman, widow of the railroad king, was an early supporter of eugenics; so was the Rockefeller Foundation at the direction of the senior John D. Rockefeller, the oil baron. A whole flock of Rockefeller foundations, as well as individual family members, eventually gave huge sums to eugenics projects. The 1930 membership list of the American Eugenics Society included Vincent Astor, Bernard Baruch, George Eastman, Thomas Lamont, John D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Margaret Sanger.” Eugenics and the Power Elite Mary Meehan https://www.meehanreports.com/elite.html Nazi Germany under Hitler, and the oppressive apartheid regimes of Rhodesia, South Africa and Mozambique all based their systems on American socio-political structure and eugenics.

Eugenics is alive and well in twenty-first century U.S.A.. Next week I will show you how eugenics is embedded in much of what is currently going on in this country and the future plans of the movement so we can be prepared and not get snookered by the propaganda and lies.

 

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