Replies

Eugenics is too complicated to be treated with a knee-jerk reaction, because it is not one idea, but several.

1) Selective breeding. People have been selectively breeding animals for a very long time, producing truly amazing diversity while at the same time creating some problems with inbreeding. Dogs are an excellent example of both. Any number of breeds are specialized to do amazing things, but pure bred dogs suffer from many systemic problems not found in mutts. Yet not all mixes are good, either. Lots of variables.

Selective breeding in humans has also been done, with amazing results. The leader of an idealistic commune in NY State bred his followers just based on his opinions of who was smart and who was strong. In three generations this small group of people produced over 60 national leaders in any number of sciences and the arts. But had they continued to a fourth generation, they might have had a genetic collapse due to inbreeding.

2) Genetics. While even today we are only taking baby steps with the study of genetics, Eugenics pioneered some basic ideas by comparing the lives of identical twins separated at birth, as far back as the 1920s. Sharing the identical genome, it really started up the “nature vs. nurture” argument that continues today (even though we know both are very important.)

3) Genetically transmitted terrible diseases, from Tay-Sachs, hemophilia, sickle cell, and dozens or hundreds more might be eliminated forever by using *caution* when reproducing. How many people might choose to not marry if they knew any children they had would be crippled and die young? Or if they truly love each other, to just adopt instead of making their own children? This is eugenics as well, giving people a choice not to harm their offspring.

Yet at the same time, leaders of the French medical establishment in the government poisoned every French hemophiliac with HIV-tainted blood, murdering every hemophiliac in France to eliminate the disease.

4) Eugenics has of course been used in horrific ways out of racial hatred. Not just the Nazis used eugenics against those they hated; but Americans tried to wipe out many blacks by not telling them that the horrible disease pellagra was easy to treat and cure by eating brewer’s yeast, supplements which were provided to white children living side-by-side with the black children.

Americans also created the infamous Tuskegee experiment, allowing black men to suffer and die of syphilis when a cure was known, so they could “study” the progress of a disease observed for centuries.

Many Indian tribes were wiped out through forced integration, making it near impossible for them to maintain their racial integrity until there was no tribe left.

5) Forced sterilization of undesirables was done around the world, from Sweden to Australia, and in most of the western world. While such programs were designed to, and did, eliminate most of the mentally deficient, they quickly turned into programs to eliminate undesirable families and the poor.

This meshed perfectly with the industrial genocide of the 20th Century, in Turkey against the Armenians, in Mexico against the Yaqui Indians, the general persecution of indigenous peoples in the Americas, in Asia and Europe as well.

6) Abortion is the great eugenics program today, and is applauded by those who see it as the elimination of “unwanted” people from society. Though by this twisted logic, in just a few generations, abortion should die off, because all the “unwanted” people and their genetic lines will be gone.