Next big story: Arnold is the product of Nazi eugenics.
[Can't take credit, heard it elsewhere. Can't remember who]
Apple-Pie Eugenics
War Against the Weak
http://www.pfm.org/BPtemplate.cfm?Section=BreakPoint_Home&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=10517 BreakPoint with Charles Colson
October 2, 2003
See if you can guess the source of this quote. It is better for all the world
[if] society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind
Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
If you think that this quote came from a Nazi document, youre wrong. Its from Oliver Wendell Holmess 1927 majority opinion in Buck v. Bell that upheld a Virginia law mandating the sterilization of the feebleminded.
Twenty years later, Holmess words were thrown back in our face by Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg trials. You see, while the Nazis worst crimes may have ended at Auschwitz, they began on Long Island .
Thats the conclusion of a new book, War against the Weak: Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race written by Edwin Black, who contends that American corporate philanthropies helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele.
Eugenics, which literally means good birth, originally referred to the use of selective breeding to improve the human race. Of course, what was meant by improve reflected the racism and bigotry of the eugenicists. Blacks, Jews, Eastern and Southern Europeans, the retarded, and even people with brown hair were the targets of the improvers.
Thus, between 1900 and the mid-sixties, hundreds of thousands of Americans
were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Black compares it to ethnic cleansing, and hes right.
The tools of American eugenics included forcible sterilization, commitment to mental institutions, prohibitions against marriage, and even dissolution of already existing marriages. One Michigan legislator went so far as to introduce a bill calling for the electrocution of severely retarded infants.
Eventually, American eugenics, with help from the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, Margaret Sanger, and others, found its way to Germany. While Nazi eugenics quickly outpaced American eugenics in both velocity and ferocity, Black writes, the connection between the two was never lost. As one American eugenicist told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Germans are beating us at our own game.
The Holocaust and other crimes of the Third Reich made eugenics a bad word, and the American connection was quickly swept under the rug. But the attempt to play God never really stopped.
Today it takes the form of human genomic science and corporate globalization. Instead of racist declarations, we have polished PR campaigns that hold out the promises of biotech: miracle cures and ever-increasing life expectancies.
While the word eugenics is never used, thats what it is. We are intent on eliminating imperfection from the gene pool. Even today, children whose deformities are discovered in utero are rarely permitted to be born. And as genetic technology improves, the list of those whom Black calls the never-born will continue to expand.
If the abolition of man is to be stopped, this story must be told. Christians need to pull the truth about eugenics out from underneath the rug and hold it up as a reminder of where playing God leads us. Six decades of denial is enough.