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Eugenics,Then and Now
CatholicExchange.com ^ | 10-07-06 | Ken Concannon

Posted on 10/07/2006 8:02:41 PM PDT by Salvation

by Ken Concannon

Other Articles by Ken Concannon
Eugenics,Then and Now
10/07/06


One of the sorriest episodes in the 230-year history of our country is the eugenics craze that swept through America in the early decades of the last century. Endorsed by the intellectual elite and our most prominent citizens, the eugenics movement was responsible for racial, class and ethnic intolerance as well as civil rights violations that would be totally unconscionable in today’s politically correct American culture.

In This Article...
They Breed Horses, Don’t They?
By Any Other Name
An Attack on People of Color

They Breed Horses, Don’t They?

Yet we rarely write about it, don’t talk about it, and, as best I can tell, Hollywood has never dramatized the horror of eugenic influence on our society when the craze was at its peak 80 years ago. My guess is the average American never heard of the eugenics movement. Why is that? I suspect it’s because eugenics, operating under a variety of names, is still very much alive and well in our society.

Eugenics was a term invented during the 19th century by an Englishman, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that much of the world’s societal problems — criminal activity, sexual promiscuity, even poverty — were inherited traits passed from one generation of unfortunates to another. Using statistical data to prove his theories, he argued that the weaker classes were reproducing themselves at faster rates than responsible citizens, and that if we didn’t do something about them their alarming fecundity would soon weaken the human race.

To stem the tide of rapidly reproducing unfortunates, Galton argued that the same techniques used to produce thoroughbred horses and efficient hunting dogs should be applied to the human race. Fortunately for the British, Galton’s eugenic theories did not fall on fertile soil in his native land, but across the Atlantic, American scientists and social reformers took Galton’s eugenics pronouncements very, very seriously.

By Any Other Name

Alarmed by the influx of non-Nordic immigrants to our shores, by rising crime rates and growing slums in American cities, many in the American “better classes” fell for the new “science” hook, line and sinker. The result was a 1924 immigration act designed to keep non-Nordic types from our shores, laws in 30 states that permitted the forced sterilization of so-called “feebleminded” unfortunates who found themselves wards of those states, the awful 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision that affirmed the constitutionality of the sterilization laws, and a stain on the American soul that has yet to disappear.

Thanks to the enthusiastic embrace of eugenics by the Nazis prior to and during World War II, very few Americans and no politicians dare refer to themselves as supporters of eugenic theory these days. But though the word is rarely spoken, eugenic by-products, ranging from the positive to the very negative, are still very much a part of our culture.

On the positive side, eugenicists were the first to look for hereditary causes for diseases like alcoholism, cancer and Huntington’s chorea. Francis Galton’s statistical methodology, including development of the bell curve, revolutionized scientific research in a variety of disciplines.

On the “jury is still out” side, eugenicists were the first to think of intelligence testing. Of course, their reason for the testing was to determine whom to sterilize. Their targets were “morons.” “Moron” was a term first employed by the eugenicist Henry Goddard to distinguish “idiots” (people so retarded they couldn’t talk) and “imbeciles” (adults who functioned at the level of a 4-year-old) from seemingly normal adults with a mental age raging from 7 to 12 years old. Eugenicists believed that “morons,” while passing for normal, were incapable of making intelligent life choices, especially on matters related to procreation.

An Attack on People of Color

On the negative side, the Buck v. Bell decision, according to Harry Bruinius in his excellent book, Better for All the World, has never been overturned. In fact, following World War II, after many states had repealed their sterilization laws, a number of lawsuits were filed by the victims of those laws. None of them succeeded, thanks to Buck v. Bell.

Still on the negative side, eugenic thinking has permeated the abortion movement from its earliest days. Planned Parenthood, founded by the raving eugenicist, Margaret Sanger, targeted black neighborhoods for her “family planning” clinics 80 years ago, and her evil empire has been doing it ever since. This is probably why African-American women account for a disproportionately large share of all abortions performed in this country, and why the focus of Planned Parenthood’s international “family planning” efforts are Third-World countries.

Inherent in this country’s concerns about overpopulation, in the growing euthanasia movement, and in the “unwanted child” rhetoric of the abortion industry, is the eugenic concept that the world would be a better place if the most unfortunate among us were not in it. That is a very unfortunate worldview.


Ken Concannon is a freelance writer from All Saints Parish in Manassas, Virginia.

(This article courtesy of the
Arlington Catholic Herald.)



TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Government
KEYWORDS: abortion; catholic; crevolist; culture; eugenics; nazis; racesupremacy; wars
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To: endthematrix

possible mutation = meaning some disease, not some hybrid pig-human monster...


21 posted on 10/07/2006 8:47:48 PM PDT by endthematrix (“Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.”)
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To: Salvation

Eugenics is a combination of mercantilism and darwinism.

After we got a bit smarter, we figured out that the government can't pick winning businesses, and correspondingly, cant pick winning characteristics. Not that people in government aren't well meaning or smart, just that when you assemble well meaning and smart people in a bureaucracy/heirarchy, they are not allowed to express their genius, or their preferences, rather they are bound by rules written for one situation, and applied in another situation. That is why bureaucracies ALWAYS seem to act stupidly.

Having said that, individuals and capitalists can pick winning stocks and horses. We all practice Eugenics when we pick our spouse with a view to having children that have qualities that we find attractive in our spouse!

It is the thousands of different choices we all make that create a diverse background, and then the diverse background is selected (in a horse race).

The Eugenicist would substitute expert opinion for the horse race. If that was to happen in the horse breeding business, you would get beautiful horses, but not necessarily fast horses. In the horse breeding industry the modern Nazis are represented by the breeders of Arab horses which are beautiful, but are not in the first rank of speed. The royalists are, oddly enough represented by the breeders of Morgan horses, who demand that all real Morgan horses be desended from Justin Morgan's horse.

The capitalists are represented by the Standard Bred. You run, you demonstrate you meet the standard, and your horse is "standard bred".

In business, Mercantilists try to meet approval of "experts" include process oriented people try to get Deming Awards, or Baldridge Awards. Nice, but the real Capitalists seek the rewards of the market place. Toyota and Nissan spend millions of dollars in their effort to win the Deming Award. Honda: decided that the right answer was to win in the market. Honda does just fine in the market!

The ISO 9000 folks are analogous to the 'Standard bred', setting up minimum standards for quality, that nearly everyone can meet. All ISO 9000 companies, like all standard bred horses will be competitive.


22 posted on 10/07/2006 8:51:27 PM PDT by donmeaker (If the sky don't say "Surrender Dorothy!" then my ex wife is out of town.)
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To: endthematrix

Gore would disagree with you there...

23 posted on 10/07/2006 8:52:38 PM PDT by fieldmarshaldj (Cheney X -- Destroying the Liberal Democrat Traitors By Any Means Necessary -- Ya Dig ? Sho 'Nuff.)
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To: Doctor Stochastic

Yet we are not sure even where Sparta is, and Athens, that horrible democracy, is famous all over the world.

Like most things, Plato (and Socrates) had it wrong.


24 posted on 10/07/2006 8:57:24 PM PDT by donmeaker (If the sky don't say "Surrender Dorothy!" then my ex wife is out of town.)
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KHAN!!!!!!!!!


25 posted on 10/07/2006 9:53:54 PM PDT by isom35
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To: Salvation

bump


26 posted on 10/07/2006 10:56:43 PM PDT by kenth (There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count, and those who can't.)
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To: Salvation

My mother is 78, one of the stories she often relates to me is that of how many of her college professors in the late '30s and how many of the mainstream magazines were on board with this idea until the war.


27 posted on 10/07/2006 11:52:59 PM PDT by Billyv (It is our commonality (desire for liberty) NOT our diversity that makes America great.)
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To: Salvation

Read the book "Grand illusions: the history of Planned Parenthood" by George Grant for a good history of the eugenics movement and its links to racism.


28 posted on 10/08/2006 1:25:48 AM PDT by Ban Draoi Marbh Draoi ( Gen. 12:3: a warning to all anti-semites.)
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To: Salvation
I guess I always thought that the Nazi regime and his ideas of race supremacy were Hitler's idea alone.

Hitler just gave it a bad name. See if you can get a copy of Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils. My copy doesn't show a copyright date, but it was published in the U.S. in 1927.

From the preface ("To the Reader"):

. . . the actual bulk of preliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written before the war [WW I]. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like acart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilization, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses.

Chesterton says that his notes were about 9 years old when he wrote the book. He refers to "scientific officialism and organization . . . [at] war with Christendom" and calls the phenomenon Prussianism -- of a piece with "poison gas and piracy against neutrals."

I haven't read it in years -- maybe I will again shortly. Always interesting to see a contemporary account of a controversy.

29 posted on 10/08/2006 1:41:03 AM PDT by maryz
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To: Clemenza
This was done, btw, by folks as diverse as Woodrow Wilson and Marcus Garvey,...

Marcus Garvey?

Red, black, green and gold - - the colors from the Rastafarian religion, the woolen hats in the four Ethiopian colors, the shrines in those colors found in their yards and pictures of Haile Selassie... (A move by the Left to marginalize Ethiopian Jews?)

What you will not hear from these perpetual pro-marijuana masturbaters is that this “ganga” thing is related to the anti-caucasian and racist Rasafarian religion in Jamaica.

Their ideology is that white men are devils. Marcus Garvey in the early 1900's said an African King would become the black messiah. Ras Tafari was crowned King Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and proclaimed to be their messiah in 1930.

According to the Rastafarian pagans, Ras Tafari did not die in 1975, but went to another dimension. He is called “Jah” and considered to be a god. A pagan perversion of Christian theology.

Of course all of this lunacy is centered around smoking the ganga weed.

That is partly why these feminized males will defend pot smoking, drug abuse and deviant use of their anatomy and are not safe to have around children...

A great post...

To: Sir Francis Dashwood

Without touching on their use of MJ, the rastaferians ALSO pointed Haile being the last "Lion of Judah". It is noteworthy that there's a Biblical prophecy that when the last LOJ goes down, Ethiopia turns into a desert.

And, when Haile went down, the Northern core of the country was turned into a desert by its new Communist masters.

131 posted on 11/28/2005 6:04:36 PM PST by muawiyah (u)


30 posted on 10/08/2006 1:54:17 AM PDT by Sir Francis Dashwood (LET'S ROLL!)
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To: Salvation; DBrow; maryz
Contemplate the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars of conceit dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice before pagan idols.

It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler (whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race," among other things). In effect, these genocides are a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols. The abortionists, like the National Socialists, incinerate the remains of their victims.

Aleister Crowley, who openly supported the National Socialists, was affiliated with Ordo Templi Orientis, A.A. (Order of the Silver Star) and other such occult lodges all across Germany. Crowley engaged in all manner of deviancy, homoeroticism, sadomasochism and murder. Much of the occultism in National Socialism is derived directly from there.

Crowley envisioned himself as the Great Beast (To Mega Therion), just as der Fuhrer made himself in that image. Hitler's life as a struggling, inept artist was where that association blossomed.

Crowley's creed, "Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the Law," (which is actually from Francois Rabelais) and used by Neo-Pagan nutcases without attribution for obvious politically correct reasons, is with certainty no different than the National Socialist "will to power," or their ubermensch mentality.

It is also no accident Nietzsche's "over-man" and nihilist philosophy and resulting insanity from venereal disease closely mirrors the insanity of der Fuhrer.

These occult orders, sex and drug cults still survive today, as do the Neo-pagan, Neo-Nazi groups, black supremacist Rastafarian potheads, prison gangs and other related filth.

Crowley occultism is also from where L. Ron Hubbard emerges with Scientology.

Homosexual deviancy is really a pagan practice (and a self-induced social psychosis) at war with the Judaic culture over what is written in the book of Genesis (1:27, 2:18).

This is exactly what the National Socialists were at war with... so, when someone uses the term "Gaystapo," they might not realize how close to the truth they really are. Eugenic breeding programs are a war against Genesis...

31 posted on 10/08/2006 2:11:36 AM PDT by Sir Francis Dashwood (LET'S ROLL!)
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
Contemplate the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars of conceit dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice before pagan idols.

Yes. Moloch eats his children.

Interesting post -- and now that I think of it, wouldn't Eugenics have been popular at the same time as the Spiritualism (seances, Ouija boards, etc.) was in vogue?

The more things change, . . .

32 posted on 10/08/2006 2:38:34 AM PDT by maryz
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To: maryz
...and now that I think of it, wouldn't Eugenics have been popular at the same time as the Spiritualism (seances, Ouija boards, etc.) was in vogue?

New Age, Neo-paganism...

It is no coincidence Islamic pagans hate Israel, Jews, Christians and Western Civilization. The entire basis of Western Civilization is Mosaic Law, something both the Neo-Pagan Left and the pagan Islamic thugs cannot abide and wish to destroy.

The very idea that human beings have individual rights not subject to the whims of an earthly monarch, but subject to the laws of Yahweh, is directly from Moses.

Historically, this is proven over and over again with the successive conflicts between the forces of paganism and the Judaic culture. (This includes the idolatry of cultural Marxist paganism.)

A greater number of "atheists" and "pagans" adopt the same hackneyed tenets of a faux Judaic-Christian ideal (golden calf). They also subscribe to the Judaic fetishism of "sin," but will fight to their death in denial of it. Most of them are so wrapped up in their own polemics that they have become nothing more than pathetic anti-Christians with the same false hypocritical philosophy.

They just slap a new label on it hoping nobody will notice - - they replace the idea of "avoiding sin" with "morals."

Morality and all of its associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.

Today, "morals" are a religious pagan philosophy of esoteric hobgoblins. Transfiguration is a pantheon of fantasies as the medium of infinitization. Others get derision for having an unwavering Judaic belief in Yahweh or Yeshua, although their critics and enemies will evangelize insertion of phantasmagoric fetishisms into secular law.

Mosaic Law (of which the Ten Commandments is just a part) is the foundation of Western Civilization. Genesis is the primary focus of the Declaration of Independence, from where our Constitutional rights are derived. The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our judicial system.

Moses wrote Genesis. This is why such people will jump up and down screaming when the Ten Commandments are displayed or the Creationist idea of monogamy from the book of Genesis is introduced.

The latter (Genesis) also ruins the illogical and non-biological arguments of homosexual monogamy. In a secular sense, homosexuality is an idolatry of perversion. It is in no way an anatomical function of the human organism, but a phantasmagoric creation from within the mentally disturbed human mind, a social psychosis, naked and on full exhibitionist display.

This is the whole crux (pun intended) of their attack on creationism - - they are really frustrated by Genesis, but cannot destroy the axiomatic state of procreant human biology, it does not fit their religious agenda.

Homosexual monogamy advocates seek ceremonious sanctification of their anatomical perversions and esoteric absolution for their guilt-ridden, impoverished egos.

Neither of those will satisfy their universal dissatisfaction with mortality or connect them to something eternal. With pantheons of fantasies as their medium of infinitization, they still have nothing in them of reality, any more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream.

Many will seek ceremonious sanctification and esoteric absolution in some type of marriage rite, but that still fails to give them a connection to the eternal in both a religious and temporal, procreant sense - - the union does not produce offspring.

Dissatisfaction with inevitable mortality only feeds the impoverishment of the ego further. Homosexuals really hate human life; their whole desire is rooted in the destruction of it...

33 posted on 10/08/2006 4:07:23 AM PDT by Sir Francis Dashwood (LET'S ROLL!)
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To: Salvation
Pinged from Terri OCTOBER Dailies

8mm

34 posted on 10/08/2006 4:07:37 AM PDT by 8mmMauser (Jezu ufam Tobie...Jesus I trust in Thee)
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To: Clemenza

In the past, Eugenics enthusiasts tried to ban marriage for people they deemed "inferior". Alexander Graham Bell lobbied for marriage bans for deaf people, for example.

It is my impression that Eugenics, while in some cases is used as a way to strengthen the society, actually encouraged women to rid themselves and society of "undesirable" children, typically by aborting their pregnancies.

Throughout history, societies have tried to eliminate the weak. In was not unusual for weak or deformed newborns to be killed after birth. Later, abortion was legalized and it became okay to abort children who would be born with diseases or deformities.


35 posted on 10/08/2006 4:43:07 AM PDT by sunvalley
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To: Salvation
American Eugenicists and the Nazis

Madison Grant

36 posted on 10/08/2006 5:49:33 AM PDT by Tribune7
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To: Salvation

We have reverse eugenics today....we pay the weakest among us to reproduce...


37 posted on 10/08/2006 8:01:51 AM PDT by There You Go Again
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To: Salvation; 69ConvertibleFirebird; Alexander Rubin; An American In Dairyland; Antoninus; ...
Moral Absolutes Ping!

Freepmail wagglebee or little jeremiah to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.

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[ Add keyword moral absolutes to flag FR articles to this ping list ]


38 posted on 10/08/2006 9:28:09 AM PDT by wagglebee ("We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." -- President Bush, 1/20/05)
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To: Salvation
One of the sorriest episodes in the 230-year history of our country is the eugenics craze that swept through America in the early decades of the last century. Endorsed by the intellectual elite and our most prominent citizens, the eugenics movement was responsible for racial, class and ethnic intolerance as well as civil rights violations that would be totally unconscionable in today’s politically correct American culture.

Actually, the eugenics movement is alive today and as powerful as ever.

39 posted on 10/08/2006 9:30:01 AM PDT by wagglebee ("We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." -- President Bush, 1/20/05)
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To: DBrow

She lost it after WW II when she proposed camps for stupid people, where they'd need to get sterilized to leave.

**
Hmmm...I knew the other stuff about Sanger, but I had never heard this one. Well, now there is a Sanger idea that I can endorse. I say we round up Democrats and send them to a Sanger camp.


40 posted on 10/08/2006 10:39:41 AM PDT by Bigg Red (Never trust Democrats with national security.)
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