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"War Against the Weak", "The Unfit", and "American Eugenics"
War
Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
by Edwin Black, 2003.
The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea by Elof Axel Carlson, 2001.
American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism by
Nancy Ordover, 2003.
A review of three recent books on eugenics by Matt Nuenke, October, 2003.
POSTSCRIPT FEBRUARY 2005
I just finished an article entitled "Talent, Character, and the Dimensions of National Culture" by Gerhard Meisenberg, Ross University—Mankind Quarterly, Winter 2004. He had a short comment on eugenics that also shows how distorted the movement has been portrayed:
"The observation that in our time this value system is associated with high IQ
at the level of whole national populations suggests that historically, the
Enlightenment was triggered by rising intelligence among the culturally creative
sections of the European population. Since IQ tests were unknown before the
opening years of the 20th century and time machines are not yet in common use,
there is no direct test for this hypothesis. However, the pervasive progress in
science, technology and social complexity from the 17th century onward provides
additional circumstantial evidence for the conjecture that the Age of
Enlightenment was a time of rising intelligence. There can be no progress
without rising intelligence.
"In philosophy, the Age of Enlightenment paved the way for the utilitarian ethic
of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. During the 19th century, the utilitarian
maxim demanding the pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number
became a leading influence on political and social thought. It inspired the
abolitionist movement during the mid-19th century and the socialist movement
during the late and early 20th centuries; and it produced the eugenics movements
in the decades after Darwin.
"All these social reform movements were based on the same utilitarian ethic.
They all shared the rationalist approach of attempting to maximize human
welfare, and they all were universalist. They were not egalitarian in the sense
of believing in equal ability or character. However, they were universalist in
the sense that they valued every person's welfare alike. They were ethical
egalitarians. Abolitionists valued the slave's welfare as highly as the
master's, socialists valued the laborer's welfare as highly as the capitalist's,
and eugenicists went to the extreme of valuing the welfare of future generations
as highly as the welfare of those living now."
---
POSTSCRIPT JULY 2004
I came across an article (July, 2004) written by Richard
Koenigsberg (do a Google search on his name for several sites he is involved
in), entitled "Dying for One's Country: The Logic of War and Genocide." His
research is far more extensive than mine with regards to the Holocaust and its
links with eugenics, and I found this article to be a valuable addition to
refuting Black's claim (critique following this postscript) that eugenics
and/or White supremacy had anything to do with the Holocaust. Here is a
summation of Koenigsberg's article.
Much of Hitler's attitudes towards the nation-state, war, community and
obligation came from his participation in the First World War, where 6,000 men
died every day. Contrast that with the 3,000 that died in one day in the U.S. on
9/11, but not day after day for four years. Miraculously Hitler fought
heroically, survived, and did it without complaint for his nation; the same that
we have always expected of our own soldiers.
And like our own returning veterans, there is a great distaste for shirkers and
deserters with deserters seen as deserving the death penalty. With Hitler
however, he came to loath those who would not fight for their country. When he
left the hospital after losing his eyesight from poisonous gas for a period of
time, "He claimed that 'nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a
clerk.'" In his mind, the Jews were traitors to the nation. This festered in his
mind for the next twenty-five years leading up to the World War Two—an
insatiable hatred for shirkers, and Jews were easily stereotyped as such and
deserving of punishment—the supreme punishment.
Today we can see a great deal of similarity between Hitler's militaristic
ideology and that of the United States. We are willing to kill thousands upon
thousands of men, women, and children as part of our war on terrorism, and claim
it is just collateral damage. We are willing to set off World War Three against
a two-bit dictator, Saddam Hussein, because we felt endangered and a preemptive
attack was thus justifiable. This is in contrast to Hitler's preemptive attack
against the Soviet Union that was busily slaughtering millions of its own
people, and was only separated from Germany by Poland, it was equal in strength
to Germany, and the Soviets declared openly that there objective was world
domination in the name of Communism. The similarities and the differences are so
glaring that the only way the connection has not been made between Germany's
invasion of the Soviet Union versus the United States' invasion of Iraq has to
do with the ongoing demonization of anything connected with Hitler. In addition
"Hitler glorified war and the death of the German soldier in battle." I don't
know about death, but our present government, Democrats and Republicans alike,
seem to have embraced a desire to use the American war machine over and over
again.
However, I digress. Koenigsberg's article shows clearly that the Jews were
slaughtered because in Hitler's mind, if Germans were to be slaughtered, then
the Jews would likewise have to die. Not because they were inferior, but because
they must suffer the same as the German soldier—war and genocide were the same
parts of warfare. Hitler was the archetypical patriot: he led an ascetic life,
devoted to his people, willing to sacrifice all for Germany's survival, and
willing to die as any other soldier. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin all hid
safely in the background while others died for them. If Hitler had a severe
fault, it was his blindness to the consequences of war itself.
The Nazi state stressed communitarianism over bourgeois individualism, just like
Communism and increasingly in the Western socialist states where free markets
are criticized, and global obligations to every form of suffering is seen as a
mandatory obligation. The only difference is one of drawing the boundary for the
perceived community: will it be the family, the town, the nation, people of the
world, all living organism, or Gaia—all things living and dead.
Hitler wrongly saw in the Jews a materialistic individualism. He failed to see
that they were not prepared to die for Germany because Germany was not theirs.
They were Jews, and as such, they had a similar devotion to their own people as
Hitler had towards his. National Socialism was in fact a mirror image of Jewish
tribalism .
Still, Hitler was prepared to kill anyone that was not part of his vision, and
the Jews, Gypsies, and others had to die because the best Germans were dying by
the thousands. It had nothing to do with eugenics and what is called White or
Aryan supremacy anymore than Americans feel that their nation is the supreme
democracy and must lead other nations towards our divine will.
Koenigsberg states, "According to Hitler's theory propounded in Mein Kampf,
what was unique about the Aryan was his willingness to abandon self-interest and
transcend egoism in the name of surrendering to the community. What was 'most
strongly developed in the Aryan,' Hitler said, was the 'self-sacrificing will to
give one's personal labor and if necessary one's own life for others.' The Aryan
was 'not greatest in his mental abilities as such,' but rather in the 'extent of
his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community.' The
Aryan according to Hitler willingly 'subordinates his own ego to the life of the
community' and 'if the hour demands it' even sacrifices himself."
"The Jew by contrast, Hitler said, represented the 'mightiest counterpart to the
Aryan.' Whereas the Aryan willingly sacrificed himself for the community, in the
Jewish people the 'will to self-sacrifice does not go beyond the individual's
naked instinct of self-preservation.' The Jew lacked completely, Hitler
believed, the 'most essential requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic
attitude.' The Jew's 'absolute absence of all sense of sacrifice' expressed
itself as 'cowardice.'"
We know now of course that devotion and self-sacrifice can come and go in any
race, nation, religion, etc., depending on the group's level of tribalism and/or
indoctrination at the time. Nations have swung back and forth between
communitarianism and individualism, between peace and barbarity, depending on
who is holding the puppet strings.
Though eugenics was introduced late into Germany, eugenics and attitudes of
genetic superiority had nothing to do with Hitler's slaughter of "vermin" where
he found them: Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc. Koenigsberg sums up how other humans
could be sacrificed on the alter of one's God:
"Thus a conundrum arose that would preoccupy Hitler throughout his life: Why in
war do the best human beings die while the worst survive? Our ordinary
expectation is that if we perform in accordance with morality or virtue, we will
be rewarded; whereas if we act immorally, we will be punished. Yet Hitler
discovered that what occurs in war acts in opposition to what we feel should
occur. In war, those who adhere to societal norms by enthusiastically performing
their duty are killed. While those who behave immorally by evading their
responsibility to society survive. Hitler was alarmed and agitated by the
profound unfairness or injustice of this state of affairs."
A feeling of injustice led Hitler to kill the shirkers and deserters, not any
perceived differences in genetic quality as was understood at the time. The
Final Solution was payback time for hatred towards the cowardly that he had
nurtured since World War One. Nurture, not nature, worked its magic on Hitler as
love of Germany, and hatred of all those who could not sacrifice for the common
good, overtook his very being. Had he had a better understanding of "the other,"
he would have understood that the Jews and the Slavs (if not the Gypsies) could
be allies under the right conditions. Nevertheless, like the Communists, he
embraced uncompromising Total War. The death of individuals was irrelevant.
John Glad, a Jewish eugenics' advocate, has also written a
short rebuttal of Black's assertions. See note [6] for the complete text.
---
War Against the Weak, like so many books by the Left, is really about the
continuing war against the strong. Black tries to link eugenics with everything
evil, and especially with the Holocaust. However, his contradictions, overt
omissions, and slanted text show more about his own political agenda than
anything to do with the history of eugenics. Nowhere in this book does he seem
to be able to link the similarities between Nazi Germany of the past and Israel
today when it comes to displacing other people (the Palestinians) for the
expansion of the Jewish nation. But first, let me get out of the way all of the
"Nordic super race" nonsense he scatters throughout the book:
"Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they
were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they
died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by
state bureaucrats. In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was
fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this
pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite
universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a
racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a
superior Nordic race."
Black makes it sound like eugenics was a conspiratorial plot like the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, where the Jews were said to be
plotting a take-over of the world. Nonsense, eugenics had many faces and many
advocates from Marxists to outright racists with little interest in eugenics. It
fact, it was no movement at all when one compares the different players and
objectives—they were all over the ideological map which he goes on to show
throughout his book (as well as the second book I will be reviewing—The
Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea).
"Specious intelligence tests, colloquially known as IQ tests, were invented to
justify incarceration of a group labeled 'feebleminded.'"
Wrong—intelligence tests were first devised in France by Alfred Binet, and had
nothing to do with eugenics.
"The goal was to immediately sterilize fourteen million people in the United
States and millions more worldwide—the 'lower tenth'—and then continuously
eradicate the remaining lowest tenth until only a pure Nordic super race
remained. Ultimately, some 60,000 [later he states 70,000] Americans were
coercively sterilized and the total is probably much higher."
Now isn't it odd that if the eugenics' movement was devised to create a pure
Nordic super race, worldwide, that other nations that were not
Nordic also joined in the eugenics movement? In addition, isn't it even odder
that he makes no mention of what races were eventually sterilized in the United
States? It seems to me if eugenics was all about creating a Nordic super race,
then other races would have been sterilized in much higher numbers in proportion
to their numbers than so-called Nordics/Anglo-Saxons. I have never seen any kind
of breakdown by race, because the evidence would show that Whites were as likely
to come under the scalpel as Blacks, Indians, or Jews. This contradiction alone
makes the primary assertion of this book absurd. Black clearly had access to the
numbers sterilized by race—why not publish them? (Maybe too few Jews were
sterilized percentage wise, so his whole Nordic supremacy argument would be
falsified by just one group's under-count.)
"The victims of eugenics were poor urban dwellers and rural 'white trash' from
New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews,
Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the
mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic
ideal the eugenics movement glorified."
What? No rural 'white trash' with 'blond and blue-eyed Nordic' features? How
about all those Irish that I know (like my wife) with their Viking-like red
hair, blue eyes and freckles—isn't that Nordic enough? Hitler seemed to think
so. And yet the Irish were as unwelcome as any other immigrant group at the
time.
"As I explored the history of eugenics, however, I soon discovered that the Nazi
principle of Nordic superiority was not hatched in the Third Reich but on Long
Island decades earlier—and then actively transplanted to Germany…."
"The intent was to create a new and superior mankind. The movement was called
eugenics. It was conceived at the onset of the twentieth century and implemented
by America's wealthiest, most powerful and most learned men against the nation's
most vulnerable and helpless. Eugenicists sought to methodically terminate all
the racial and ethnic groups, and social classes, they disliked or feared. It
was nothing less than America's legalized campaign to breed a super race—and not
just any super race. Eugenicists wanted a purely Germanic and Nordic super race,
enjoying biological dominion over all others…. Decades after a eugenics campaign
of mass sterilization and involuntary incarceration of 'defectives' was
institutionalized in the United States, the American effort to create a super
Nordic race came to the attention of Adolf Hitler…."
"But they did give birth to a burning desire to understand how the most
powerful, intelligent, scholarly and respectable individuals and organizations
in America came to mount a war against the weakest Americans to create a super
race…."
"Defective humans were not just those carrying obvious diseases or handicaps,
but those whose lineages strayed from the Germanic, Nordic and/or white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal…."
"Indeed, the eugenicists would push further, attempting a constantly upward
genetic spiral in their insatiable quest for the super race…."
"In 1914, Dr. Kellogg organized the First Race Betterment Conference in Battle
Creek, Michigan. The conference's purpose was to lay the foundations for the
creation of a super race, amid an atmosphere of lavish banquets, stirring calls
to biological action, and scientific grandiloquence…."
"Madison Grant was internationally known for his bestseller, The Passing of
the Great Race, which promoted Nordic whites as the superior race…."
"They would be prohibited from marrying and forcibly sterilized.
Eventually—perhaps within several generation—only the white Nordics would
remain. When their work was done at home, American eugenicists hoped to do the
same for Europe, and indeed for every other continent, until the superior race
of their Nordic dreams became a global reality…."
Does Black really believe that once every race other than the Nordic race was
sterilized in Europe, that eugenicists could just go into other countries, like
India or China, and just start sterilizing all non-Nordics? That would be the
entire nation! Black suffers from some kind of conspiratorial delusions as I
will show later.
"He was simply a racist. Plecker's passion was for keeping the white race pure
from any possible mixture with Black, American Indian or Asian blood. The only
real goal of bureaucratic registration was to prevent racially mixed marriages
and social mixing—to biologically barricade the white race in Virginia."
Black spends a whole chapter on Plecker, an ineffective player in the
anti-miscegenation movement, that had little to do with eugenics. But does Black
want us to believe that other races do not try to prevent race mixing: Hindu
Asian caste system, Koreans, Black nationalists, Arab tribes, etc? Or how about
Black's own race: "The new Zionism has grown in part only out of the internal
impulsions of Judaism itself, out of the enthusiasm of modern educated Jews for
their history and martyrology, out of the awakened consciousness of their
racial qualities, out of their ambition to save the ancient blood, in
view of the farthest possible future, and to add to the achievements of their
forefathers the achievements of their posterity." (Max Nordau and Gustav
Gottheil in Zionism and Anti-Semitism; from The Unfit by Carlson.)
"As such, even the [Anglo-Saxon Club's] constitution proclaimed its desire 'for
the supremacy of the white race in the United States of America, without racial
prejudice or hatred.' This was the powerful redefining nature of eugenics—in
action."
"Pure whites could only marry pure whites. All other race combinations would be
allowed to intermarry freely." And now in America, we have Jews promoting racial
mixing while they preach to their own kin not to marry outside their race. I
guess Jews must have been the real masterminds behind eugenics (MacDonald
2002b).
"By 1912, America's negative eugenics had been purveyed to likeminded social
engineers throughout Europe, especially in Germany and the Scandinavian nations,
where theories of Nordic superiority were well received. Hence the First
International Congress of Eugenics attracted several hundred delegates and
speakers from the United States, Norway, Belgium, Germany, England,
France, Italy, Japan, and Spain." How did they persuade the last four
nations into thinking they were Nordic? What a trick! Moreover, they did it
again later:
"During the congress Davenport orchestrated the renaming and broadening of the
International Eugenics Committee into a Permanent International Commission on
Eugenics. This renamed entity would sanction all eugenic organizations in
'cooperating' member countries, which now included Belgium, Czechoslovakia,
Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the
Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil,
Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico,
Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Germany
was not included because it refused to sit on the same panel with its World War
I enemies Belgium and France. Germany was also struggling under the punitive
terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which made international eugenic cooperation
difficult….To keep the eugenic directorate truly elite, commission rules
permitted no more than three representatives of each cooperating country to be
empanelled. Davenport and Laughlin sat at the apex of this group. All
commission members were dedicated to the American-espoused belief in Nordic
supremacy, a sentiment which was also growing in Germany…."
"Ironically, while Ploetz believed in German national eugenics and harbored
strong anti-Semitic sentiments, he included the Jews among Germany's most
valuable biological assets. After returning to Germany, Ploetz in 1904 helped
found the journal Archiv fiir Rassen- and Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of
Race Science and Social Biology), and the next year he organized the Society
for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene) to promote eugenic
research. Both entities functioned as the principal clearinghouses for German
eugenics for years to come. Understandably, Ploetz emerged as Germany's leading
race theorist and was often described as 'the founder of eugenics as a science
in Germany….' With Nordic superiority as the centerpiece of American eugenics,
Davenport quickly established good personal and professional relations with
German race hygienists."
As even Black unintentionally shows throughout his book, the Jews were murdered
not because of eugenics (thought to be an inferior race) but because they were
seen as extremely dangerous to the Nazis because the Jews were perceived as
being highly intelligent (which they were/are) and the most dangerous race in
terms of power—internationally and internally. On the other hand, races like the
Gypsies were killed because they were thieves and seen as worthless; the Jews
were competitors in racial warfare.
"By the time Hitler's concept of Aryan superiority emerged, his politics had
completely fused into a biological and eugenic mindset. When Hitler used the
term master race, he meant just that, a biological 'master race.' America
crusaded for a biologically superior race, which would gradually wipe away the
existence of all inferior strains. Hitler would crusade for a master race to
quickly dominate all others. In Hitler's view, eugenically inferior groups, such
as Poles and Russians, would be permitted to exist but were destined to serve
Germany's master race. Hitler demonized the Jewish community as social,
political and racial poison, that is, a biological menace. He vowed that the
Jewish community would be neutralized, dismantled and removed from Europe…."
Yes, the Jews needed to be removed from Europe because they were superior to the
Aryan racial plan. Hitler knew how powerful they were, he felt their wrath from
around the globe, and as the Jews (and Anglophiles) pushed the West into war
with Germany, as well as being perceived as the brains behind
Bolshevism—Hitler's (and Germans) primary fear was from the Communist East.
"During the Reich's first ten years, eugenicists across America welcomed
Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and
effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilizing hundreds
of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society."
Black again conflates German eugenics with Germany's annihilation of political
enemies during Hitler's Third Reich. They were not connected, and with several
missions undertaken for race betterment, another to make room for wounded
soldiers, and yet another for political purges and destruction of the enemy.
Black labels them as all eugenic when clearly most of the efforts in disposing
of enemies and invalids alike had to do with the war effort, not eugenics. In
fact, unlike the American's negative eugenics' movement, the Germans also
had a positive eugenics' program:
"Hitler's master race would be more than just chiseled blond and blue-eyed
Nordics. Special breeding facilities were established to mass-produce perfect
Aryan babies. They would all be closer to super men and women: taller, stronger
and in many ways disease-resistant."
The German eugenics' program did want to eliminate disease, just like the
American eugenics' program that focused on degeneracy, but they also wanted to
breed a super-race. What is odd to me, is that the Nazis seemed to be more
influenced by looks (height, hair color, blue eyes, etc.) rather than on
intelligence. Today, the eugenics' programs are almost singularly focused on
intelligence, because intelligence is seen as a human trait that is universally
desired. Few people want their children to be stupid rather than intelligent.
"But while openly eschewing eugenics with statements and memos, Rockefeller in
fact turned to eugenicists and race scientists throughout the biological
sciences to achieve the goal of creating a superior race." Just how were they
going to do that without a positive eugenics' program? Getting rid of defectives
does not simultaneously produce a super-race. Black never seems to understand
the difference between breeding and weeding—they are different approaches that
try to achieve different ends.
"America's retreat from eugenics was precipitated by the convergence of two
forces: Hitler's ascent in Germany and the climactic exit of the pseudoscience's
founding fathers from Cold Spring Harbor. But it was not a moment of truth that
finally convinced the Carnegie Institution and the eugenic establishment to turn
away from their quest for a superior Nordic race…."
"With Holmes' decision in hand, Carnegie's Cold Spring Harbor enterprise had
unleashed a national campaign to reinforce long dormant state laws, enact new
ones and dramatically increase the number of sterilizations across America.
Sterilizations multiplied, marriage restrictions were broadened. Hundreds of
thousands were never born. Untold numbers never married. The intent had been to
stop the reproduction of targeted non-Nordic groups and others considered unfit.
It continued into the 1970s, probably even later…."
"As early as December of 1942, the Nazi plan was obvious. In a highly publicized
warning simultaneously broadcast in more than twenty-three languages the world
over, the Allies announced that the Nazis were exterminating five million Jews
and murdering millions of other national peoples in a plan to perpetrate a
master race…."
"Reed added defiantly that the AES should cast off any guilt about the
Holocaust. 'My final point,' Reed declared, 'is concerned with the allocation of
guilt for the murder of the Jews. Was this crime really abetted by the eugenics
ideal? One should remember that the Jews and other minorities have been murdered
for thousands of years and I suspect that motives have been similar on all
occasions, namely robbery with murder as the method of choice in disposing of
the dispossessed individuals.... I do not wish to make Charles Davenport my
scapegoat for this, as seems to be the fashion these days. As far as I can see,
the motives behind the liquidation of the Jews were not eugenic, not genocide
... but just plain homicidal robbery….'"
"Yet humanity should also be wary of a world where people are once again defined
and divided by their genetic identities. If that happens, science-based
discrimination and the desire for a master race may resurrect.
This time it would be different. In the twenty-first century it will not be
race, religion or nationality, but economics that determines which among us will
dominate and thrive. Globalization and market forces will replace racist
ideology and group prejudice to fashion mankind's coming genetic class destiny.
If there is a new war against the weak it will not be about color, but about
money. National emblems would BOW to corporate logos."
Spoken like a true Marxist, Black is firmly entrenched in the delirium that race
doesn't matter—only class. Yet, all around us, what do we see, but diversity,
multiculturalism, and racial preferences—all in the name of group identities:
my racial group against your racial group. These are not based on economics but
on race, gender and abilities—class is nowhere to be found in the undercurrent
of hostilities. Latinos threaten to retake the southwest United States.
Islamists declare that they will bury us via our open borders and our decadency,
while we declare all Islamists to be inherently evil—no need for an analysis of
cause here. The essence of Arabs and/or Islamists is just plain pure evil
(except for the few that want peace on the West's terms). Race, not class, is
the salient factor in coalitions forming against one another.
Black could not be more incorrect, the world is all about race and genetic
differences (the disabled form another victimhood group based on genetics or
misfortune). The clashes are all around us—in the Balkans, throughout Latin
America, Africa, the Middle East's tribalism, South Asia, everywhere. The
conflicts are based on racial rivalries (see my review of World on Fire),
not economics. Economic arguments are used in the battle for power, but the
battle lines are always drawn between the haves of one race against the
have-nots of another race. Race, ethnicity, religion, tribalism—these are what
sets human groups apart.
The above quotes are just a sample of how Black tries to canalize eugenics with
White supremacy, but the evidence he provides shows how eugenics had a multitude
of goals and defenders, and how it was forced eventually into abeyance by
academic Marxists (Franz Boas) and the defeat of Nazism. After all, they who win
the wars write the history. While Germany lost the war, it only allowed Stalin
to hide the fact that Soviet Communism was responsible for the deaths of 60
million of its own people, while the Holocaust was responsible for only 6
million. Then ask yourself, how many movies have you seen on the Holocaust, and
how many have you seen about the Soviet death machine—the Red Terror? The only
movie I am aware of that shows Communist atrocities as its main theme was The
Killing Fields. That's it—one movie about tiny Cambodia for over 100 million
people slaughtered during the 20th century (Rummel 1997).
Therefore, Black's intent in this book is not to explain eugenics, but to attack
Caucasians for their "racialism." That is, it is all right for Jews to celebrate
their essence, but not Whites. We must never be allowed to probe into the very
nature of race and genetics—even in our own defense. This book is just another
hateful screed attacking the West.
What was eugenics all about, at least in the United States? Humans are
followers, and when told what moral system to embrace, what dogma to believe in,
they will dutifully obey. One-hundred years ago, our morality was focused on
degeneracy—masturbation, epilepsy, prostitution, alcoholism, pauperism,
tuberculosis, and a host of other sins that needed to be stamped out. Today, we
have a host of new sins to be attacked: smoking, driving SUV's, not recycling,
capitalism, globalization, ethnic pride (if your White, otherwise it is
laudable), drugs, land mines, toxic waste, etc. As moral animals, even if the
morals do keep changing according to what our elite tell us to believe, we will
always be on one crusade or another to stamp out the impure. Black then gives us
a look at those absurd moral outrages that we held so dear 100 years ago, and
tries to link this morality with eugenics.
Chapter by Chapter, a quick review of the portrayal of the characters let's us
look back and yes, shake our heads at the ignorance of the times. However, fifty
years from now, future generations will look back on us and shake their heads at
how we held so long and so tenaciously to the dogma that there are no
differences in average intelligence between races. Modern pseudoscience by
social scientists, politicians, the courts, and group identity advocates were
able to suppress what should have been obvious to all in a multicultural world
where we interact so closely with different races—we are genetically different
in many ways, and not just, in how we look.
Another lesson we can learn from the early eugenicists is to understand how to
use statistics, and not rely on anecdotal presumptions of causation. Theories
should be tested multiple times under varying methods, and most importantly, do
not assume genetic causes when an environmental cause is more valid—and vice
versa. Some of the early eugenicists' major mistakes were to always assume that
if a person was poor, sickly, promiscuous, alcoholic, or feebleminded, that it
was due to genes alone. Today, we make just the opposite mistake. Social
Science, educational research, etc. denies the implications of genetics and
assumes that outcomes are always due to the environment. For example, when
children fail educationally, the schools are always blamed, never the children.
If inner city schools fail because of the preponderance of low intelligent
minorities, genes are never considered as a contributing cause. Just like 100
years ago, the Left proceeds with all research on the base assumption that
everyone is equal, and any differences must be due to the environment. So one
thing that we can learn from early eugenics is that we must be careful to never
assume just a genetic or an environmental causation. They are intermingled, but
they can be separated out and apportioned accordingly when it comes to
behavioral traits, disease, intelligence, religiosity, ethnocentrism, and even
sexuality. The shared environment is now being displaced more and more by an
understanding of genetic effects. One hundred years ago, just the opposite
stance was taken.
INTRODUCTION
Black states, "Nazi eugenics quickly outpaced American eugenics in both velocity
and ferocity. In the 1930s, Germany assumed the lead in the international
movement. Hitler's eugenics was backed by brutal decrees, custom-designed IBM
data processing machines, eugenical courts, mass sterilization mills,
concentration camps, and virulent biological anti-Semitism—all of which enjoyed
the open approval of leading American eugenicists and their institutions. The
cheering quieted, but only reluctantly, when the United States entered the war
in December of 1941. Then, out of sight of the world, Germany's eugenic warriors
operated extermination centers. Eventually, Germany's eugenic madness led to the
Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation
of all Europe."
The above has been the lie, the dogma, and the simplistic analysis of the new
moralizing gods of diversity, multiculturalism and immigration. If
everything that happened during World War Two can be linked to genetics and
racial differences, then the Left can use it as a weapon against scientific
efforts to unravel human genetic differences. The fact is that the Holocaust had
nothing to due with eugenics—it was born out of the need for total war. Eugenics
practiced before and during the war was aimed at Germans, and both negative and
positive eugenics were promoted. After the war started, Germany found itself
with new Jewish refugees, as well as Slavs. The Nazis needed both slave labor
and a means of destroying what they saw as potential partisans behind enemy
lines, and they chose to annihilate them—just as Stalin did to people under his
domain. It had nothing to do with eugenics, and everything to do with warfare,
where one people try to destroy another.
Up until the war, Hitler repeatedly stated that he planned to relocate the Jews
to Madagascar, not kill them. But the war radically altered his options, and in
the end, it was easier to kill the Jews either directly or to work them to death
as slave laborers, again just as was done in the Soviet Union. Biology was not
the issue, but competing groups.
Black continues, "I began by saying this book speaks for the never-born. It also
speaks for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who attempted to flee
the Hitler regime only to be denied visas to enter the United States because of
the Carnegie Institution's openly racist anti-immigrant activism. Moreover,
these pages demonstrate how millions were murdered in Europe precisely because
they found themselves labeled lesser forms of life, unworthy of existence…."
Several comments: first, does Black consider abortion as a heinous crime because
of the millions "never-born?" He laments eugenics, but isn't abortion similar to
steriliztion for the child, whether it is the mother or society that decides it
shall not breath life? I am also pro-choice, but since Jews are by far more
pro-choice than pro-life, he should at least be consistent with his objections
of "life not lived."
Second, immigration can be opposed on many grounds besides disliking other
races. I have taken the liberty of appending an article about immigration into
Israel that could easily reflect concerns during the debates leading up to the
1924 immigration laws in the United States.[1] Black attempts to show that
opposition against open immigration was based on stereotyping of immigrants from
other countries. In fact, just like today, the debate about immigration includes
considerations about unemployment, terrorism or political agitation by
immigrants from certain countries, citizens concerned about their own kin being
allowed in, the assimilability of current and future immigrants, crime,
overpopulating the cities, etc. The same concerns exist today, with a consistent
majority of Americans wanting a reduction in immigration, while the politicians
ignore what the public wants, and instead yield to the special interest groups
who benefit from large numbers of immigrants being let into the country. (I will
cover immigration again in a review of chapter 10.)
CHAPTER 1: Mountain Sweeps
Black's first chapter is a few pages that discuss the hillbillies of
Appalachia, how they were rounded up, and systematically sterilized for
feeblemindedness. He says nothing about Blacks or Indians or other racial
misfits. These were Whites, stuck in poverty with little hope of making a better
life. Remember Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, where we were once again shown
these hillbillies, along with poor Blacks, and their destitution? It does
appear, that no matter what society does for some groups, they will persist as
part of a systemic underclass, generation after generation.
CHAPTER 2: Evolutions
"Eventually, the Judeo-Christian world codified the principle that all human
life should be valued. A measure of our turbulent civilization and even of our
humanity has always been how well people have adhered to that precept. Indeed,
as societies became more enlightened, they extended respect for life to an
ever-widening circle of people, including the less fortunate and the less
strong."
"Racism, group hatred, xenophobia and enmity toward one's neighbors have existed
in almost every culture throughout history. But it took millennia for these
deeply personal, almost tribal hostilities to migrate into the safe harbor of
scientific thought, thus rationalizing destructive actions against the despised
or unwanted."
In this short chapter, Black warns us that science is responsible for our moral
failings—that if it were not for science, we would not have had eugenics.
However, throughout the book, he calls eugenics pseudoscience. So, what
is it, is science the danger he makes it out to be, or is it only naïve science
or pseudoscience that is a danger? Today, genetics and eugenics are firmly
grounded in science, while the social sciences have slipped into pseudoscience,
refusing to consider the nature side of human behavior. As a result, the radical
environmentalists are being left behind, without answers and without hope for
the hillbillies, the black underclass, and all the other people who are not
equipped for a technological society. They have lost the scientific battle for
nurture, so they now turn to historical revisionism to make their case.
CHAPTER 3: America's National Biology
"Everything Galtonian eugenics hoped to accomplish with good matrimonial
choices, American eugenicists preferred to achieve with draconian preventive
measures designed to delete millions of potential citizens deemed unfit.
American eugenicists were convinced they could forcibly reshape humanity in
their own image. Their outlook was only possible because American eugenicists
believed the unfit were essentially subhuman, not worthy of developing as
members of society. The unfit were diseased, something akin to a genetic
infection. This infection was to be quarantined and then eliminated. Their
method of choice was selective breeding—spaying and cutting away the
undesirable, while carefully mating and grooming the prized stock."
For Black, everything that had to do with eugenics points to White supremacism.
There were a handful of Whites obsessed with race during the 1800s, who were
vocal about the superiority of the Nordic race, but certainly no more than those
who were writing about the superior Jewish racial essence. So to take selective
quotes, and attribute them to a whole movement, is false. Those who made up the
eugenics movement, especially during the 1800s, included socialists,
progressives, religious moralists, Lamarckian evolutionists, Marxists. However,
the biology of heredity was not the only driving force behind eugenics, it was
also believed that environmental causes also needed to be prevented from being
passed on from generation to generation. If your family was unfit, it would pass
that environment onto the children no matter what society could do. It was
better therefore that they be eliminated because it would reduce the number of
unfit later on before they overwhelmed society.
Remember, most people did not believe in evolution, and virtually no one
understood heredity during the 1800s, and yet Black wants us to believe that
genetics was driving eugenics. That is simply false. From reading this book and
others, it seems to me that the main driving force for eugenics was a belief
that for what ever reason, it was immoral to live a decadent life. This was a
moral crusade, not a racial one, though there were some people concerned with
race. Nevertheless, race was not the compelling impetus behind eugenics. That is
why in the United States, only negative eugenics caught on. It was not
about breeding a "super race," it was all about the immorality of the unfit that
had to be stamped out.
Even today, the United States is far more religious than other European
countries. One has to wonder, were those who first came to America from Europe
for religious reasons more religious on average genetically? We now know that
religiosity is highly genetic (but the religion you adopt is highly
environmental—adopted usually from one's parents). Maybe we are just a highly
religious nation of tight-asses? As like all religious fanatics, we were willing
to sterilize the immoral ones. As is pointed out in The Unfit, one of the
first reasons used to castrate and sterilize people was because they
masturbated! Turn-of-the-century eugenics was perverse, but not
because of genetics or race, but because of rampant social moralism. The unfit
were contaminating society with their drunkenness, promiscuity, disease,
shiftlessness, etc. Not much has changed, now we berate drunk drivers, White
privilege, drug addicts, institutionalized racism, intolerance, gentrification,
terrorists, and a host of new villains. Same morality—new targets.
CHAPTER 4: Hunting the Unfit
In this chapter, Black discusses the opening, funding, and organizational goals
of the new Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Springs Harbor and
specifically the Eugenics Record Office there, in 1904. The two main advocates
were Davenport and George Laughlin. It was the beginning of Mendelism, the
belief that single genes were responsible for the unfit, and that unfit traits
would skip generations so they had to be located in family genealogies and
rooted out. Black seems to be especially annoyed that Davenport was zealous in
his efforts, a trait we usually admire unless they are found in our enemies.
Laughlin was equally fanatical, a deeply religious college professor turned
pastor, one gets the feeling that for him, eugenics was one long sermon against
evil. Nevertheless, between the two of them, Davenport and Laughlin, the process
of finding those families that carried the evils of the day would be found, by
finding their bad ancestors. In terms of what we know today, it would result in
a meaningless mass of data, useless in the end. Today, no eugenicist would
embrace any aspect of the old eugenics—it was based on flimsy anecdotal
sociology and medicine. But that was true of virtually every aspect of science
100 years ago—scientific use of statistics was in its infancy and there was far
more speculation and theorizing than there was verification and proofs. But it
was all that was available. To single out eugenics as flawed, when the same
charges could be leveled at medicine, psychiatry, psychology, political science,
economics, or social science, is clearly unfair.
Black laments: "Davenport's scientific conclusion was already set in his mind;
now he craved the justifying data. Even with the data, making eugenics a
practical and governing doctrine would not be easy. American demographics were
rapidly transforming. Political realities were shifting. Davenport well
understood that as more immigrants filed into America's overcrowded political
arena, they would vote and wield power. Race politics would grow harder and
harder to legislate. It mattered not. Davenport was determined to prevail
against the majority—a majority he neither trusted nor respected."
Wow, it sounds just like the neoconservatives surrounding President Bush—they
don't trust the majority, they will crush Iraq no matter what lies they have to
fabricate, and the end justifies the means. It seems human nature does not
change that much, even though science has become far more sophisticated.
Black actually does provide evidence that looking at "tribes" is sometimes
necessary: "Mary Drange-Graebe was assigned to Chicago where she worked with the
Juvenile Psychopathic Institute under Dr. William Healy. After four months in
Chicago, she was reassigned to track down the so-called Ishmael clan of nomadic
criminals and vagabonds in and around Indianapolis. The tribe of racially mixed
white gypsies, Islamic blacks and American Indians had been described years
earlier in the study The Tribe of Ishmael: a Study in Social Degeneration,
as a prime example of genetic criminality. This book had become a
fundamental text for all eugenics. Now the ERO considered the book, written a
generation earlier, as 'too advanced for the times.' So Drange-Graebe would
resume tracing the family lineages of the infamous Ishmaelites. Within months,
she had assembled 77 pages of family pedigrees and 873 pages of individual
descriptions."
Was it unfair to look at a tribe of Gypsies, to determine if they were in fact
just a criminal underclass that would never change? The evidence is still the
same today, Gypsies both in Europe and in the United States have an interesting
history, and one that makes them incapable of mixing amicably with other races
or changing into productive members of society. Based on both culture and genes,
they are of average low intelligence, extremely xenophobic, and hostile to
outsiders (MacDonald 2002b).
So where was the positive eugenic program that Davenport and Laughlin would
undertake to breed the Nordic super-race that Black contends was behind
eugenics? "But Laughlin and his fellow breeders envisioned eugenical measures
beyond mere sterilization. To multiply the genetically desired bloodlines, they
suggested polygamy and systematic mating." That's it—a footnote to negative
eugenics.
CHAPTER 5: Legitimizing Raceology
Black discusses both sterilization and intelligence testing in this chapter, and
then returns to sterilization again in the next chapter. By skipping around,
especially in terms of time periods, he selects anecdotes and particular people
to try to link eugenics with Nordic supremacism, as if they were one and the
same. He starts out by discussing the very earliest cases of castration and
sterilization of penal system inmates to cure masturbation, a condition that was
believed to lead to all kinds of disease and mental conditions. This was widely
held among doctors, and had nothing to do with eugenics. (In The Unfit,
the bizarre beliefs about masturbation are discussed in much greater detail, and
without the bias that Black carries into every aspect of his White supremacist
theories.)
Black then discusses intelligence testing: "In the same textbook, Davenport
insisted that if immigration from southeastern Europe continued, America would
'rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more
attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault,
murder, rape and sex-immorality.' He added a scholarly note about Jews: 'There
is no question that, taken as a whole, the horde of Jews that are now coming to
us from Russia and the extreme southeast of Europe, with their intense
individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest, represent the
opposite extreme from the early English and the more recent Scandinavian
immigration with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement
by the sweat of the brow, and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and
the love of country….'"
"Predictably, Goddard's version of the Binet test showed that 40 percent of
immigrants tested as feebleminded. Moreover, he wrote, '60 percent of the
[Jewish immigrants] classify as morons.' In reporting his results in the
Journal of Delinquency, Goddard further argued that an improved test would
reveal even greater numbers of feebleminded immigrants. 'We cannot escape
feeling,' wrote Goddard, 'that this method is too lenient ... too low for
prospective American citizens.' He explained, 'It should be noted that the
immigration of recent years is of a decidedly different character from the
earlier immigration. It is no longer representative of the respective races. It
is admitted on all sides that we are now getting the poorest of each race.'"
This issue of intelligence testing after World War I, and Goddard's findings,
have been used by Marxists for 80 years now to ridicule all intelligence
testing. By quoting selectively, they try to show that it was the races that
were deemed unfit—from Eastern Europe—but the story is more complicated than
that. There was a general feeling that immigration should be reduced and to that
end it was asserted that:
— The new immigrants were less intelligent than before, because it was the poor
and less educated of the whole group who were coming to America.
— Many of these new immigrants were communists, socialists, and/or anarchists
and were therefore potentially politically troublesome.
— The races from Eastern Europe were less intelligent on average than races from
Northern Europe.
Note that all of the above arguments are still being discussed with regards to
immigration, only with different participants involved. However, the assertion
that Eastern Europeans were all morons was quickly dispelled—even Goddard
realized that the tests were poorly constructed and that they were flawed. In
the end, the intelligence of the immigrants had virtually nothing to do with
immigration restrictions. The biggest factors were a shortage of jobs for
Americans and potential labor unrest from Eastern European political radicals.
John Ashcroft and William Kristol could easily relate to these concerns today.
Black is careful to never go beyond the earlier intelligence tests because he
would have to admit that in 1995, the American Psychological Association
convened a task force that concluded that intelligence tests are meaningful,
unbiased, and predominantly due to heredity (Intelligence: Knowns and
Unknowns). The APA was not willing to assert racial differences are
due to our genes however—that will take more fortitude considering the
explosiveness of that evidence.
CHAPTER 6: The United States of Sterilization
In 1927 the Supreme Court decided, in Buck v. Bell, that sterilization
was a legal means of preventing generation after generation of the unfit from
propagating:
"Then [Chief Justice] Holmes wrote the words that would reverberate forever. 'It
is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate
offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can
prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle
that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the
Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.'"
Of course, many would like to make the case that generation after generation of
low intelligent families is not a reality, plus the Buck case was further
complicated by the fact that Carrie Buck was raped or seduced by a member of the
family she was being cared for, and her daughter from that mating may have been
more intelligent than would have been the case than if she had married and had
children with a man more near her own intelligence. However, remember, just
being allowed to be raped or seduced in 1927 was as bad as being feebleminded.
It was bad science, throwing the feebleminded in with masturbators along with
those with epilepsy. Nevertheless, that was the morality of the times, and
sterilization was justified as much on environmental determinism as it was
genetic determinism. Almost any excuse was good enough to sterilize the
degenerates. It was a sin to be unfit, the cause of that unfitness need not
necessarily be
genetic or environmental. In either case, the sinfulness was to be
terminated.
Black points out that "In Davenport's mind, Mendel's laws hovered as the sacred
oracle of American eugenics, the rigid determiner of everything tall and short,
bright and dim, right and wrong, strong and weak." That is true of those
eugenicists who were genetic determinists of the simplest sort, but science was
inherently simplistic then, as our science today will seem simplistic to those
who live 100 years from now. But there were many perspectives with regards to
eugenics' sinfulness at the time. It was a slow progression from
environmentalism, to simplistic genetics, to genocide in the name of military
conquest, by the Communists as well as the Nazis. Eugenics was just one part of
the social puzzle at any one time, it was not the only program or agenda driving
public policy.
CHAPTER 7: Birth Control
Black quotes Lothrop Stoddard: "Just as we isolate bacterial invasions and
starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of their food-supply, so
we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat ... [which will]
as with all organisms, eventually limit ... its influence." That pretty much
sums up how the Palestinians are being walled off and isolated in Israel's West
Bank and Gaza Strip. I wonder if Black also equates Israel with trying to breed
a super race of Jews? He certainly does a lot of bending of the truth to link
all eugenics with Nordic supremacism.
This chapter deals with sterilization, but Black completely skips the very
beginning of the story. In the late 1800s, as told in the book The Unfit,
sterilization and castration began with an effort to treat masturbation.
Masturbation was seen as a terrible offense, and a behavioral problem that led
to a host of other diseases and conditions that must be controlled for the sake
of the individual. It had nothing to do with eugenics, or stopping "the spread"
of people who masturbated, for whatever reasons.
In telling the whole story, and not distorting the facts and the linkages,
The Unfit shows how different movements and programs incorporated eugenics
in different forms, and it also shows how much of what Black attributes to
racism or eugenics was really a part of a host of other problems faced by
society. That is, there were multiple philosophies, imagined pending
catastrophes, etc. Eugenics just floated along with the rest of the cultural
changes, and it was supported by conservatives, liberals, Marxists, socialists,
progressives, the clergy, etc.
Therefore, it is not surprising that in a society that regularly recommended
castration or sterilization for the problem of masturbation, that sterilization
was also seen as being useful for eliminating defectives. The world was a very
different place a hundred years ago, where individuals were sterilized to make
the world better. In today's world, we are less selective than they were then.
Now we just bomb entire countries until the country in question suites our
agenda. Much simpler really, we don't need to look at individuals. We just judge
the entire nation as needing to be sterilized through death or changed to our
liking. Yes, eugenics sure was different, but it was no less rational than what
we are doing today. It was just sidetracked by the Left for political purposes.
CHAPTER 8: Blinded
Black states "Why did blindness prevention rise to the top of the eugenic agenda
in the 1920s? Because mass sterilization, sequestration, birth control and
scientific classifications of the mentally defective, socially unfit and
racially inferior were just the leading edge of the war against the weak.
Eugenic crusaders were keen to launch the next offensive: outlawing marriage to
stymie procreation by those deemed inferior. To set a medicolegal precedent
that could be broadly applied to all defectives, eugenicists rallied behind the
obviously appealing issue of blindness. Who could argue with a campaign to
prevent blindness?"
"Eugenicists, however, carefully added a key adjective to their cause:
hereditary. Therefore, their drive was not to reduce blindness arising from
accident or illness, but to prevent the far less common problem of 'hereditary
blindness.' How? By banning marriage for individuals who were blind, or anyone
with even a single case of blindness in his or her family. According to the
plan, such individuals could also be forcibly sterilized and segregated—even if
they were already married. If eugenicists could successfully lobby for
legislation to prevent hereditary blindness by prohibiting suspect marriages,
the concept of marriage restriction could then be broadened to include all
categories of the unfit. Marriage could then be denied to a wide group of
undesirables, from the feebleminded and epileptic to paupers and the socially
inadequate."
Interesting conspiracy theory, but Black contradicts himself later on. This
chapter is really all about one person, Lucien Howe, who devoted his whole life
to the prevention of blindness. Was he some mad eugenicist, trying to use
blindness to sterilize the masses? Of course not, he was interested in
preventing blindness, and using eugenics later on in his career was just one
more way of reaching his goal—even if it was overstated by him as an advocate.
Black goes on, "Lucien Howe was a legendary champion in the cause of better
vision. He is credited with helping preserve the eyesight of generations of
Americans. A late nineteenth-century pioneer in ophthalmology, he had founded
the Buffalo Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1876. He also aided thousands by insisting
that newborns' eyes be bathed with silver nitrate drops to fight neonatal
infection; in 1890, this practice became law in New York State under a statute
sometimes dubbed 'The Howe Law….' As though his statistics and projections were
authentic, Howe railed, 'It is unjust to the blind to allow them to be brought
into existence simply to lead miserable lives.... The longer we delay action to
prevent this blindness, the more difficult the problem becomes.' His plan? Give
blind people and their families the option of being isolated or sterilized. 'A
large part, if not all, of this misery and expense,' promised Howe, 'could be
gradually eradicated by sequestration or by sterilization, if the transmitter of
the defect preferred the later.' Howe suggested that authorities wait to
discover a blind person, and then go back and get the rest of his family."
It is clear that Howe wanted to prevent all blindness, and hereditary blindness
was not embraced by him until well into his campaign over many decades. It was
just one more tool to prevent blindness, and the eugenicists used it as well for
their own agenda. Again, that is no different from today when organizations,
individuals, and factions use each other to further their own programs. Nothing
has really changed; Howe was not some mad fanatic. He just wanted to prevent
blindness, in a world where the blind suffered far more than they do now. What
he was trying to do was admirable, not some satanic plot as Black likes to
portray.
CHAPTER 9: Mongrelization
This is another chapter that is not about eugenics, but about one man's campaign
against miscegenation in Virginia. Ashby Plecker was determined to prevent the
pollution of the White race—he was obsessed with racial purity—just like
Orthodox Jews are today. He may have been a fanatic, he may have been a bit
insane, but he had little to do with eugenics. He was one man, who tried to stop
race mixing, and he failed miserably. Love was just too strong in many cases for
him to prevent the unholy union between races.
But why attack this one man for what is practiced throughout the world even
today, especially among Semitic and Asian Indian (Hindu and Muslim) races, where
marriages are still arranged, and marrying for love into another tribe is
considered worthy of death for the offending son or daughter? Black had one goal
in mind when writing this book, to disparage all Whites, while defending all
other races. But even he admits throughout the book, that the story of eugenics
is a complicated one. One that he is unable to treat in an objective way.
CHAPTER 10: Origins
Like today, immigration is a huge problem and getting worse, as politicians
pander to newcomers while flouting the wishes of the majority of voters. Black
admits this in his book, and yet, to him, opposition to immigration was all
about the unfit.
"Eugenicists viewed continued immigration as an unending source of debasement of
America's biological quality. Sterilizing thousands of the nation's socially
inadequate was seen as a mere exercise, that is, fighting 'against a rising
tide,' unless eugenicists could also erect an international barrier to stop
continuing waves of the unfit. Therefore the campaign to keep defective
immigrants out of the country was considered equally important to the crusade to
cleanse America of its genetic undesirables. This meant injecting eugenic
principles into the immigration process itself—both in the U.S. and abroad…."
Then he goes on to admit that "The threat of Bolshevism worried the government
and the average man. The Red Scare in the summer of 1919 pitted one ism
against another. Marxism, communism, Bolshevism, and socialism sprang into the
American consciousness, contending with capitalism. Race riots against
African-Americans and mob violence against anarchistic Italians and perceived
political rabble-rousers ignited throughout the nation. A man named J. Edgar
Hoover was installed to investigate subversives, mainly foreign-born. As the
twenties roared, they also growled and groaned about immigration. Along with the
most recent huddled masses came widespread vexation about the future of American
society. Legitimate social fears, ethnic combat and economic turmoil stimulated
a plethora of restrictive reforms, some sensible, some extreme"
Were these "rabble-rousers" all feebleminded? Of course not—the battle over
limiting immigration at the beginning of the last century was very similar to
the debate today. What groups will gain, who will lose, who's job will be lost,
are they terrorists, will more people ruin the environment, will they be able to
assimilate, etc? Same issue, same questions, same animosities.
As Black himself explains it, politicians never change: "In the second half of
1926, the quota champion himself, Albert Johnson, came up for reelection. By now
the immigrants in his district had come together in opposition to further
restrictions. He began to equivocate. In August of 1926, Johnson gave a campaign
speech opposing the 'national origins' provisions because too many foreign
elements would vote for repeal anyway. At one point he publicly declared in a
conciliatory tone, 'If the national origins amendment ... is going to breed bad
feeling in the United States ... and result in friction at home, you may rest
assured it will not be put into effect.' He added that his own 'inside
information' was that the quotas would never be instituted. Disheartened
eugenicists sadly concluded that Johnson and his allies had completely succumbed
to the influence of foreign groups."
The fact is, any argument about the "feeblemindedness" of the new immigrants is
nonsense. During the immigration debates, any indication that the new immigrants
"were all morons" was recognized early on as the results of bad intelligence
tests. What eugenicists did want however was the testing of all new immigrants,
to make sure we were not taking "defectives." Is this concern any different from
the concern we had when Castro opened up the prisons in Cuba, and flooded
Florida with mental and criminal defectives? The United States screamed "foul!"
Moreover, today, we watch for terrorists from the Middle East. So was it so
unreasonable for us to ask then, as we do now, "Who are these immigrants that we
are allowing to enter our country?"
Black moans, "The best and worst of the nation's feelings about immigration were
exploited by the eugenicists. They capitalized on the country's immigration
stresses, as well as America's entrenched racism and pervasive postwar racial
anxiety. Seizing the moment, the men of the Carnegie Institution injected a
biological means test into the very center of the immigration morass, dragging
yet another field of social policy into the sphere of eugenics."
How the tables have turned! Black does not like it when an advocacy group
"exploits" a "nation's feelings." Yet, that is exactly what the Jewish lobby did
for the next forty years, culminating in the 1964 immigration act. As a group,
they were singularly responsible for opening up our borders in order to dilute
the evil Anglo-Saxon majority. Now they revel in the Anglo-Saxon's eventual
shrinkage to minority status by the year 2050 (MacDonald 2002a). Of course, once
the flood gates were opened, many other groups started supporting open
immigration, including unions, immigration lawyers, the welfare industry,
educators, big business, agriculture, the politicians hoping to win immigrant
votes, etc. All while the American voters by an overwhelming majority want
immigration reduced, for the same reasons that existed in 1924—jobs,
assimilation, and the environment, etc.
CHAPTER 11: Britain's Crusade
Why Black discusses eugenics in Britain is not obvious. Maybe it was because
England is where Francis Galton first proposed the breeding of the most fit
(positive eugenics) during the same time that Charles Darwin was advancing the
theory of evolution—long before the eugenics movement was established in the
United States. As Black points out, negative eugenics did eventually make its
way to England, but was opposed and never really found a home there. As for
negative eugenics, he could have looked at the Scandinavian countries where much
higher percentages of the people were sterilized, for many years after the
Second World War.
CHAPTER 12: Eugenic Imperialism
"After purifying America from within, and preventing defective strains from
reaching U.S. shores, they planned to eliminate undesirables from the rest of
the planet. In 1911, the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association,
in conjunction with the Carnegie Institution, began work upon its Report of
the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off
the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population. The last of eighteen
points was entitled 'International Co-operation.' Its intent was unmistakable:
the ERO would undertake studies 'looking toward the possible application of the
sterilization of defectives in foreign countries, together with records of any
such operations....' The American eugenics movement intended to turn its sights
on 'the extent and nature of the problem of the socially inadequate in foreign
countries.' This would be accomplished by incessant international congresses,
federations and scientific exchanges."
So again, Black has provided in this short chapter, a reflection on American
might. Today, we are still setting the international agenda: Black laments our
global eugenics, but he sees no problem with our invasion of Iraq to "spread
democracy" through lethal force. So America is still doing what it does best,
spreading its moral agenda (whatever is current) around the world.
CHAPTER 13: Eugenicide
"In 1905, the British eugenicist and birth control advocate H. G. Wells
published A Modern Utopia. 'There would be no killing, no lethal
chambers,' he wrote. Another birth control advocate, the socialist writer Eden
Paul, differed with Wells and declared that society must protect itself from
'begetters of anti-social stocks which would injure generations to come. If it
[society] reject the lethal chamber, what other alternative can the socialist
state devise?'"
The above is only one of two places in War Against the Weak where Black
mentions socialist' eugenics. Even though socialists were as involved in
eugenics as any other group, Black conveniently only focuses on a very narrow
slice of eugenicists, those that he can link to the Holocaust through his
twisted logic.
In this short chapter, he tries to set the stage for connecting eugenics to the
Holocaust, via linking eugenics with euthanasia. The problem is, euthanasia can
and has been used for many different purposes: infanticide (Hrdy 1999),
mercy killing, death with dignity, stopping plagues, and in the future it may be
needed because medical science will make it possible to sustain life almost
indefinitely. At some point, the plug must be pulled—that's euthanasia.
Euthanasia for the purpose of eugenics is not very attractive. In fact, Hitler
was forced to stop a euthanasia program to make room for war casualties—Germans
would not allow it. However, Black fails to mention that mass euthanasia was
only used during peacetime by Communist regimes—to liquidate certain classes of
people (Sixty million under Stalin alone). Of course, they usually used a
slightly different method than the eugenicists were discussing, they killed
people by slave labor, unfed, until they starved to death to maximize their
return on human slaughter. This is Black's vision of the good life—Marxism.
CHAPTER 14: Rasse and Blut
Black now turns to German eugenics, where he attempts to link eugenics with the
Holocaust, and yet he fails miserably. An accurate reading of what he presents,
clearly shows that eugenics and anti-Semitism were only loosely linked in a
bizarre way—Nazism saw Jews as competitors for supremacy, not as an inferior
race.
"Ploetz believed that a better understanding of heredity could help the state
identify and encourage the best specimens of the German race. Ironically, while
Ploetz believed in German national eugenics and harbored strong anti-Semitic
sentiments, he included the Jews among Germany's most valuable biological
assets. After returning to Germany, Ploetz in 1904 helped found the journal
Archiv fiir Rassen- and Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of Race Science and
Social Biology), and the next year he organized the Society for Racial
Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene) to promote eugenic research.
Both entities functioned as the principal clearinghouses for German eugenics for
years to come. Understandably, Ploetz emerged as Germany's leading race theorist
and was often described as 'the founder of eugenics as a science in Germany.'"
This same theme is played out repeatedly when it comes to the Jews and
anti-Semitism. While on the one hand Jews were hated, they are begrudgingly
respected for their high intelligence and success. Of course, these were cruder
times, and people generally threw ad hominem arguments and slurs around rather
loosely. That was the culture. Overall however, the Nazis did not include the
Jews in their eugenic program. The Jews were simply a powerful and competing
race that had to be destroyed in order to win.
Even Black concurs that, "When Hitler used the term master race, he meant
just that, a biological 'master race.' America crusaded for a biologically
superior race, which would gradually wipe away the existence of all inferior
strains. Hitler would crusade for a master race to quickly dominate all others.
In Hitler's view, eugenically inferior groups, such as Poles and Russians, would
be permitted to exist but were destined to serve Germany's master race. Hitler
demonized the Jewish community as social, political and racial poison, that is,
a biological menace. He vowed that the Jewish community would be neutralized,
dismantled and removed from Europe."
Yes, the Jews would be neutralized because they were a danger, not because they
were thought to be inferior. Black actually seems to acknowledge this fact, but
perhaps he hopes no one will notice the subtle difference. Also, contrary to
what Black states, and even as he admits but then continuously flip-flops on the
issue, the American eugenics' program was negative only, while Hitler's was both
positive and negative. He started with sterilizing the unfit, and later wanted
to breed a more fit Aryan race—but it was hardly started and the war ended.
Black just seems hopelessly confused about cause and effect, timing, and real
motivations. The Holocaust came about primarily because the German army found
itself with millions of Jews in its conquered territories, and they were a
danger—a real and sustainable enemy that could not be pacified. These were
partisans held together by race, and could not be allowed the freedom to fight
back. Other races or nations could be pacified by setting up puppet
governments—like the Vichy government in France.
Black also quotes what he assumes is pseudoscience that is actually in keeping
with modern genetics, "Repeating standard American eugenic notions on
hybridization, Hitler observed, 'Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the
same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means:
the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not
as high as the higher one.... Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for
a higher breeding of all life.'" This is a well-established fact in breeding
programs. One can argue about any "will of Nature," but that is subjective. I
can't imagine a breeder not breeding the best stock to improve the breed. And
most parents are concerned about who their children will marry—and they want
them to marry up, not down.
CHAPTER 15: Hitler's Eugenic Reich
This chapter is hardly different from the previous. Black goes to great lengths
to find a connection between eugenics and anti-Semitism: "Unqualified German
racial references to Jews gradually became commonplace in American publications
as well. For example, in the April 1924 issue of Eugenical News, an
article reviewing a new German 'racial pride' book published by Lehmanns
mentioned, 'In an appendix the Jews are considered, their history and their role
in Germany.' A German article on consanguineous marriages [inbreeding]
summarized in the November 1925 issue of Eugenical News stated, 'Their
evil consequences ... are pointed out [and] ... are commoner among Jews and
royalty than elsewhere in the population.' A December 1927 summary of a German
article reported, 'The social biology and social hygiene of the Jew is treated
by the distinguished anthropologist, Wissenberg of Ukrania. This has largely to
do with the vital statistics of the Jews in Odessa and Elizabethgrad, with
special relation of the Jews to acute infection.' In April of 1929, a
Eugenical News book review entitled 'Noses and Ears' informed readers, 'The
straight nose of Gentiles seems to dominate over the convex nose of Jews.' No
explanation was necessary or offered for these out-of-context references to
Jews. That Jews were eugenically undesirable was a given in German eugenics, and
many American eugenicists adopted that view as well."
"Eugenically undesirable?" Is that Black's way of saying everyone hates Jews,
but they don't really consider Jews as unfit or inferior? Was there anything
wrong with discussing Jews? In fact, inbreeding and hybridization, racial
differences in disease, are current subjects in genetics, and as for noses—get
over it! If this is all that Black could find, it proves to me that aside from
mud-slinging propaganda, the eugenics movement in Germany did not find Jews
inferior to Germans. In fact, Germans felt routinely humiliated by the success
of Jews in general, and that was one of the major causes of anti-Semitism.
Black states that, "Nine categories of defectives were identified for
sterilization [by the Nazis]. At the top of the list were the feebleminded,
followed by those afflicted by schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington's
chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body deformities, deafness and, of course,
hereditary blindness. Alcoholism, the ninth category, was listed as optional to
avoid confusion with ordinary drunkenness. The Reich announced that 400,000
Germans would immediately be subjected to the procedure, beginning January 1,
1934." What? No Jews?
Black continues, "JAMA, in another 1933 issue, continued its tradition of
repeating Nazi Judeophobia and National Socialist doctrine as ordinary medical
news. For example, in its coverage of the German Congress of Internal Medicine
in Wiesbaden, JAMA reported that the congress chairman 'brought out the
following significant ideas:... A foreign invasion, more particularly from the
East, constitutes a menace to the German race. It is an imperative necessity
that this menace be now suppressed and eliminated.... Racial problems and
questions dealing with hereditary biology must receive special consideration.'
The article continued, 'Eugenics and the influences of heredity must be the
preferred topics [at future medical meetings],' and then warned of 'the severity
of the measures to be adopted for the preservation of the German race and German
culture.'"
What the Germans, and many other countries were afraid of, was Bolshevism, and
the impending slaughter that would follow in its wake. Germans were well aware
of millions dying in Soviet Russia, and the desire the Communists had for global
expansion. Also, Jews were perceived to be behind Bolshevism.
As Black admits, the Germans had much to fear from the power of Jewish
influence: "With each passing day, the world was flooded with more Jewish
refugees, more noisy anti-Nazi boycotts and protest marches against any
scientific or commercial exchanges with Germany, more public demands to isolate
the Reich, and more shocking headlines documenting Nazi atrocities and
anti-Jewish legislation. Still, none of this gave pause to America's
eugenicists. Correspondence on joint research flowed freely across the Atlantic.
American eugenicists, and their many organizations and committees, from New York
to California and all points in between, maintained and multiplied their
contacts with every echelon of official and semiofficial German eugenics. As the
Reich descended into greater depths of depraved mistreatment and impoverishment
of Jews, as well as territorial threats against its neighbors, these contacts
seemed all the more insulated from the human tragedy unfolding within Europe.
Eager and cooperative letters, reports, telegrams and memoranda did not number
in the hundreds, but in the thousands of pages per month."
What we are witnessing here is the escalation of hate between Jews and Nazis.
Was it due then to eugenics, or to the escalation of fear and hatred? Up until
the start of the war, the Jews were not treated any worse than the Palestinians
are in Israel today. What Black is admitting here is not only did the Jews
appear to be a threat to Nazi Germany, they were indeed a threat in reality as
they mobilized the world against the Third Reich—long before the Holocaust
started. I don’t' mean to minimize what the Nazis did, but I am submitting that
the Holocaust was independent of eugenics. The Jews were the main enemies of the
Third Reich in the eyes of Germans. The Jews helped Hitler solidify his nation
behind him based on fear.
The truly unfit, in the eyes of the Nazis, were handled differently than the
Jews, "There was room in the issue to discuss other minorities as well. One
article discussed the question of sterilizing some six hundred 'negroid children
in the Rhine and Ruhr districts—Germany's legacy from the presence of French
colonial troops there during the war.' In a salute to the Fuhrer, another
article clearly suggested that Hitler's eugenics would soon be applied across
all of Europe. 'This State Cause does not only concern Germany but all European
peoples. But may we be the first to thank this one man, Adolf Hitler, and
to follow him on the way towards a biological salvation of humanity.'"
The eugenicist Eugen Fischer stated while in Germany, "The Jew is such an alien
and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This
is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as
Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to
fight. But I reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in
order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people."
Repeatedly, even Black supports the obvious—eugenics did not include Jews in the
category of inferior race. Jews were considered a threat because they were felt
to be superior—especially in intelligence.
And again, back to Black's attempt to link euthanasia with eugenics, he states
just the opposite: "On September 1, 1939, Germany launched its blitzkrieg
against Poland, beginning Word War II. The Reich needed hospital beds, and had
to ration its wartime resources. Now the medical men of German eugenics would
graduate from sterilization to organized euthanasia. Lenz helped draft
euthanasia guidelines whereby a patient could be killed 'by medical measures of
which he remains unaware.' The continued existence of those classed defective
could no longer be justified in Hitler's war-strapped Reich. Beginning in 1940,
thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other
custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were
eventually killed. Psychiatrists, steeped in eugenics, selected the victims
after a momentary review of their records, jotted their destinies with a pen
stroke, and then personally supervised the exterminations." Because they needed
the beds for war casualties! Euthanasia had nothing to do with eugenics—contrary
to what Black stated earlier.
Black repeatedly tries to link eugenics with the Holocaust, and fails, "As
Hitler's divisions smashed through Europe, his eugenic ideal would be enforced
not only against those in Germany, but also against those in conquered or
dominated countries. In country after country, Hitler rounded up the defective
Jews and other sub-humans, systematically—making one region after another
judenrein—Jew free. As Hess insisted, 'National Socialism is nothing but
applied biology.'"
Yes, National Socialism may have been nothing but applied biology, but Black
provides no evidence that the Jews were eliminated because they were perceived
to be "defective." Black has a habit of mixing up statements that just do not go
together. What happened before the war cannot be mixed in with what happened
after the war started. Hitler had always planned to relocate the Jews to
Madagascar or some other country after the Nazis won the war. Things didn't turn
out as he planned, and he turned to annihilating Jewish partisans, not Jewish
defectives.
Black states in his acknowledgements, "Where do I begin to express gratitude,
when so many people in so many places have lent so many hands to advance the
cause of this years-long project? More than fifty researchers in fifteen cities
in four countries, assisted by scores of archivists and librarians at more than
one hundred institutions, combined to ingather and organize some 50,000
documents, together with hundreds of pages of translation, as well as to review
hundreds of books and journals, all to collectively tear away the thickets of
mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world."
What is truly amazing is that Black, after all of this research, fails to find
anything more than an occasional innuendo to connect eugenics, with euthanasia,
with concentration camps, and genocide. They occurred at different times, under
different directives, for different purposes. When you read between the lines,
much of what Black presents shows clearly that the Holocaust had nothing to do
with eugenics, though the Holocaust did eventually deter eugenics, slow it down,
but never could stop it. To produce better offspring is an innate human desire.
Thousands of years of arranged marriages have shown us that—as well as the
desire of women to select males that are as fit as they can attract. That is
eugenics in its natural state. Now we have better tools to help us select fitter
children.
CHAPTER 16: Buchenwald
In this short chapter, Black slips into one of the most egregious examples of
Jewish apologia I have ever come across:
"Many found Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen and the many lives he led incomprehensible.
How could he alternately function as a gifted psychiatrist and as a murderous
man of medicine? At the time, none understood that Katzen-Ellenbogen viewed
humanity with multiple standards. He was an American eugenicist. Nor was he just
any eugenicist. Katzen-Ellenbogen was a founding member of the Eugenics Research
Association and the chief eugenicist of New Jersey under then Governor Woodrow
Wilson."
"Viewing humanity through a eugenic prism, Katzen-Ellenbogen was capable of
exhibiting great compassion toward those he saw as superior, and great cruelty
toward those he considered genetically unfit. In Buchenwald, the French, with
their Mediterranean and African hybridization, were eugenically among the
lowest. They were not really worthy of life. At the same time, in
Katzen-Ellenbogen's view, those of Nordic or Aryan descent were treasured—to be
helped and even saved. It all followed classic eugenic thought. But in
Buchenwald, it was the difference between life and death."
"How did one of America's pioneer eugenicists wend his way from New Jersey to
Buchenwald's notorious Little Camp? The story begins in late nineteenth-century
Poland. Katzen-Ellenbogen was the name of a famous line of Polish and Czech
rabbis going back centuries. However, as the doctor's life was built, he—or
perhaps his immediate branch of the family—obscured any connection with a Jewish
heritage. Like many European Jews who had drifted from tradition, he spelled his
last name numerous ways, hyphenated and unhyphenated, and sometimes even signed
his name 'Edwin K. Ellenbogen.' He was probably born as Edwin Wiadyslaw
Katzen-Ellenbogen in approximately 1882, in Stanislawow, in Austrian-occupied
Poland."
This bizarre reflection on a single Jew at Buchenwald, a prisoner no less, seems
to be a standard refrain when Jews are bashing Whites (Anglos, Aryans, Nordics
or your generic European—depending on the mission at hand). I have seen it so
many times and every time I just cannot believe it. If a Jew does something evil
or bad, then the Jew must not really be a Jew. Maybe Hitler really wasn't an
Aryan? Or Clarence Thomas really isn't Black? Jews seem to switch conveniently
to being a race or a religion, depending on how they want to be perceived by
others. I have no explanation why Black would devote a chapter to
Katzen-Ellenbogen, except to make the point that if any Jew believes in
eugenics, then they really aren't a Jew at all. This argument is similar to the
one used by Blacks: "Blacks can't be racist because only an oppressor can be a
racist, so only Whites are racists." This is par for Anglophobic Jews and their
need to lump all Whites together for every evil found in the world.
CHAPTER 17: Auschwitz
Black desperately tries to link eugenics with the Holocaust by discussing the
infamous Josef Mengele, The Angel of Death. When I started to read this chapter,
I braced myself. I really do not like to read about torture or brutality. When
reading several books about Communist atrocities, I often had to scan over the
material on human torture; I've learned how brutal humans can be and I do not
need to be saturated with the gory details.
To my surprise, there is relatively little gore in this chapter. Mengele as it
turned out was just an extremely conscientious, dedicated doctor, the way he is
portrayed by Black. As part of the ongoing eugenics program, he used
concentration camp prisoners for his studies, some quite horrendous. But it had
nothing to do with the Holocaust, and everything to do with using prisoners for
research.
Again, Black tends to provide more evidence that the Germans did not classify
Jews as inferior, but rather as a threat. Contrast this with the Nazis
extermination of Gypsies, who were eliminated because they were truly an unfit
race that survived by begging, stealing, and conning others (and they are still
living as bottom-feeding parasites—see MacDonald, 2002b).
Black notes, "In 1924, at about the time Hitler staged his Beer Hall Putsch in
Munich, Verschuer lectured that fighting the Jews was integral to Germany's
eugenic battle. He was speaking on race hygiene to a nationalist student
training camp when the question of Jewish inferiority came up. 'The German,
Volkisebe struggle,' he told the students, 'is primarily directed against
the Jews, because alien Jewish penetration is a special threat to the German
race.'" The meaning of course is that the Jews were more successful and more
intelligent on average than Germans, and wherever they insinuated themselves
into society, they tended to dominate. That is, Jews were singled out because
they were "too fit." Germans could not compete against them in business,
medicine, law, and a host of other fields where the high Jewish intellect
humiliated and frustrated the Germans.
Back to Mengele, Black notes that, "By June of 1940, when Germany was advancing
on Western Europe, Mengele could no longer wait to enter the battle. He joined
the Waffen SS and was assigned to the Genealogical Section of the SS Race and
Settlement Office in occupied Poland. He undoubtedly benefited from Verschuer's
March 1940 letter of recommendation averring that Mengele was accomplished,
reliable and trustworthy. At the SS Race and Settlement Office, his mission was
to seek out Polish candidates for Germanization. He would perform the racial and
eugenic examinations. Eventually, in 1941, he was transferred to the Medical
Corps of the Waffen SS, and then to the elite Viking unit operating in the
Ukraine, where he rendered medical assistance under intense battlefield
conditions. He was awarded two Iron Crosses and two combat medic awards. The
next year, 1942, as the Final Solution was taking shape, Verschuer arranged for
Mengele to transfer back to the SS Race and Settlement Office, this time to its
Main Office in Berlin."
"By 1942, an aging Fischer was preparing to retire from the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. His
replacement was a major source of debate within eugenic and Nazi Party circles.
By this time, Hitler's war against the Jews had escalated from oppressive
disenfranchisement to systematic slaughter."
"Fischer had emerged as a major advocate of 'a total solution to the Jewish
question.' His view was that 'Bolshevist Jews' constituted a dangerous and
inferior subspecies. At a key March 1941 conference on the solution to the
Jewish problem held in Frankfurt, Fischer had been the honored guest. It was at
this meeting that Nazi science extremists set forth ideas on eliminating Jews
en masse. A leading idea that emerged was the gradual extinction
(Volkstod)
of the Jewish people by systematically concentrating them in large labor
camps to be located in Poland. Later, Fischer specified that such labor must be
unpaid slave labor lest any 'improvement in living standards ... lead to an
increase in the birth rate.'"
Black notes that Polish children that looked German were adopted into the German
fold. Hardly an action that would have been taken if race purity was an issue.
Also, he states that Fischer felt the Jews were an inferior subspecies—but he
offers no quote to back it up. Most of the evidence produced even by Black is
that the Jews were perceived as a threat, not as inferiors like Gypsies or
Negroes. Clearly then, the Jewish question was one of conquest and banishment in
time of war, not part of the German eugenics' program. The Germans were at war
with the Jewish Bolshevists—at least this was the propaganda used by the Nazis.
By 1939, Jewish influence in Bolshevism was declining.
Black also has some absurd positions on eugenic practices: "Twins were valued
for a second eugenic reason: Nature itself could be outmaneuvered if desirable
individuals could be biologically enabled to spawn twins—or even better,
triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets. In other words, a world of never-ending
multiple births was the best assurance that the planned super race would remain
super."
Wrong again. Twins were then and remain today the most effective research tool
for determining heritability versus environmental causation. Around the world,
research on twins is being used to determine a host of behavior genetic traits.
I have never heard of using twins as a means of producing a "super race." Twins,
because they share the womb for limited resources from the mother, are on
average underweight, have lower intelligence, along with other health problems.
Does that sound like what eugenicists would want by the promotion of twinning
births?
Black says of Mengele, "That look—Mengele's glare—was the Nazi vision wedded to
a fanatical science whose soul had been emptied, its moral compass cracked; a
science backed not merely by iron dogma but by men wielding machine guns and
pellets of Zyklon B." Earlier, Black disparages judging people in a manner he
feels is justified in the case of Mengele: "Crime analysis moved race and ethnic
hatred into the realm of heredity. Throughout the latter 1800s, crime was
increasingly viewed as a group phenomenon, and indeed an inherited family trait.
Criminologists and social scientists widely believed in the recently identified
'criminal type,' typified by 'beady eyes' and certain
phrenological shapes. The notion of a 'born criminal' became popularized."
So does Black believe in "born criminals?" He belittles identifying intentions
by one's looks, but feels free to pass judgment on Mengele's glare, and sees
clearly that it is caused by "the Nazi vision." Apparently, anyone with a "Nazi
vision" can be identified by some maniacal "glare."
CHAPTERS 18, 19, 20 and 21—Newgenics
The last four chapters move on to current issues in eugenics, neoeugenics,
newgenics, genetic engineering, etc. Nothing very informative or interesting, so
I will just highlight a couple of interesting points I came across.
Black asserts, "By 1943, humanity needed a new word for the Third Reich's
collective atrocities. The enormity, of Nazi butchery of whole peoples by
physical extermination, cultural obliteration, biological deracination and
negative eugenics defied all previous human language. Nothing like it on so
sweeping a scale had ever occurred in history."
He seems to be unaware that Stalin had been slaughtering millions of his own
people for many years before the Holocaust, but since it was so well hidden by
primarily his own kin in the Western media, especially Duranty ("Some, like New
York Times Soviet correspondent Walter Duranty, who systematically refused to
report Soviet atrocities during the 1930s while praising Stalin"), that it could
continue unabated. The totality of Communist genocide didn't become known until
the fall of Communism, when the archives were opened: the tally stands currently
at about 100 million people slaughtered by those who believed that humans could
be molded into new citizens, to take their place in a utopian world—on the backs
of the dead. Black continues with this book in his desire to dismiss genetics,
so that humans can be shaped by the elite to believe, think and behave as they
are told by the state.
Black does seem to understand that dysgenics is also possible for those who have
no caring for the unfortunates that are born to serve the selfish needs of the
unfit:
"A deaf lesbian couple in the Washington, D.C., area sought sperm from a deaf
man determined to produce a deaf baby because they felt better equipped to
parent such a child. A child was indeed born and the couple rejoiced when an
audiology test showed that the baby was deaf. A dwarf couple reportedly wants to
design a dwarf child. A Texas couple reportedly wants to engineer a baby who
will grow up to be a large football player. One West Coast sperm bank caters
exclusively to Americans who desire Scandinavian sperm from select and screened
Nordics."
"All of us want to improve the quality of our children's futures. But now the
options for purely cosmetic improvements are endless. A commercialized,
globalized genetic industry will find a way and a jurisdiction. It will be an
international challenge to successfully regulate such genetic tampering and the
permutations possible because few can keep up with the moment-to-moment
technology."
And I submit that any attempt to regulate eugenics in the future will fail. The
more it is regulated, the more it will be available to the elite only. Those
with the resources will find a way to enhance the fitness of their children.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
In The Unfit by Carlson, a more realistic history of eugenics is
presented and one that includes the different forces that drove it. There is
little bashing of "White supremacists," though he also, like Black, ignores all
of the evidence developed over the last twenty years that proves that
intelligence and behavioral traits are genetic in varying degrees.
Carlson starts with a chronology that shows how distorted Black's War on The
Weak reads:
"THIS CHRONOLOGY PROVIDES A TIME LINE for the history of the idea of unfit
people from the publication of Onania [masturbation or coitus
interruptus] in 1710 to the revelation of the Nazi death camps in 1945. Not
all people mentioned were malicious. Many had no notion their ideas would be
used to justify vicious programs. Still others were self-deceived and did not
think through the implications of their biases. As one can see from following
the time line, there is no chain of causality. For a variety of different
reasons, people were classified as unfit, and different, often contradictory,
responses were made to claims that these degenerate or unfortunate groups
existed and that something should be done for or to them. This is a
selection of some of the major (and minor) players in this story to give a sense
of what thinking was like among educated classes in two and a half centuries of
biological theories of human inferiority:
1710: Publication of the anonymous Onania, or the Heinous Sin of
Self-Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences in Both Sexes leads to the
idea of onanism as a cause of degeneracy in the self-abuser and progeny.
1758: Publication of Samuel Tissot's Onania, or a Treatise upon the Disorders
Produced by Masturbation shifts masturbation to a medical problem and makes
masturbatory degeneracy a theme of medical school teaching until the end of the
19th century.
1798: Thomas Robert Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principles of
Population, blaming the poor for their misfortunes.
1837: The Elizabethan Poor Laws are largely abandoned. Charles Dickens writes
Oliver Twist to describe the consequences.
1850: Herbert Spencer publishes Social Statics, the founding document
that led to what was later called Social Darwinism.
1853: Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, publishes The Inequality of Human
Races, launching scientific racism, which considers races biologically
inferior or superior, with Teutons (Nordic or Aryan) as the prized race.
1857: Benedict Morel's Degenerance is published. It argues that
degeneracy caused by unfavorable environments leading to progressively worsening
heredity is self-extinguishing within five generations.
1859: Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species.
1866: Gregor Mendel's paper on patterns of inheritance in pea plants is
published.
1867: Richard Dugdale extends Elisha Harris's study of a criminal family and
publishes The Jukes. Michigan marriage act is passed, making it a crime
for idiots, the insane, uncured syphilitics, and people with uncured cases of
gonorrhea to marry or live together.
1869: Francis Galton founds the eugenics movement (not yet by that name)
with publication of Hereditary Genius and stresses what would be later
called positive eugenics.
1872-1892: Emile Zola publishes the Rougon-Macquart series of 20 novels
exploring hereditary pathology in two families.
1879: Wilhelm Marr publishes The Victory of Jewry over Germany
and establishes modern anti-Semitism.
1880s: Oscar McCulloch studies the Tribe of Ishmael, publicizing
it as a socially degenerate collection of families. His views are popularized by
essays of David Starr Jordan, then active in Indiana.
1880-1890: August Weismann proposes the theory of the germ plasm; he
disproves Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Defective germ plasm becomes a medical and social problem.
1883: Galton gives eugenics its name. Frank Hamilton ligates the vas
deferens as a treatment for masturbation. Joseph Howe publishes Excessive
Venery, Masturbation, and Continence and offers many surgical and medical
approaches to treat masturbation.
1892: Henry D. Chapin argues that vagabonds, tramps, and criminals should
be isolated from society. Edward S. Morse condemns congenital criminals and
paupers, citing Weismann's germ plasm theory for believing that the unfit have
an impaired heredity.
1893: F.E. Daniel recommends sterilization of the unfit as being humane.
1894: Reginald Harrison performs vasectomy for reducing enlarged prostate
gland. Martha Clark argues mandatory segregation for life of paupers and repeat
criminals.
1895: Charles Dana criticizes Max Nordau's Degeneration. He claims that
degeneracy is self-eliminating and is not an enduring problem.
1896: Czarist forgery called Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
is released and becomes an international bestseller. It is adopted by Henry
Ford's Dearborn Independent in 1920 and published by Gerald L.K. Smith as
The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.
1897: Michigan sterilization law fails after passing one house.
1898: F. Hoyt Pilcher castrates 58 retarded boys. Martin Barr advocates
sterilization of the unfit; he castrates 2 males and 2 females.
Everett Flood castrates 24 epileptics and persistent masturbators.
1899: A.J. Ochsner urges vasectomies for prisoners and other degenerates. Harry
Clay Sharp performs first vasectomy to treat masturbation in prisoner in
Jeffersonville, Indiana.
1900: Mendel's paper is rediscovered.
1901: David Starr Jordan publishes The Blood of a Nation and extols
eugenics.
1903: The American Breeder's Association is founded. It creates a committee on
eugenics in 1909. In Great Britain, Robert Rentoul proposes sterilization of
unfit by vasectomy.
1904: Alfred Ploetz names Race Hygiene (Rassenhygeine) as an extension of
Virchow's public hygiene movement. He founds the German Society for Racial
Hygiene.
1906: Governor Samuel Pennypacker of Pennsylvania vetoes compulsory
sterilization law for feebleminded as a criminal and dangerous act.
1907: Indiana passes first state compulsory sterilization law. Harry
Sharp sterilizes by vasectomy 200 to 500 young men.
1913: Mrs. E.H. Harriman provides funds to establish a building and salaries for
the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.
1914-1940: Harry Laughlin serves as Superintendent of the Eugenics Record
Office at Cold Spring Harbor. With Charles Davenport, Director of Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory, he becomes the leading promoter of the American eugenic
movement.
1916: Madison Grant publishes The Passing of the Great Race. He advocates
restrictive immigration laws to prevent dilution of the Anglo-Saxon heritage of
the United States.
1920: Euthanasia is promoted in Germany by publication of Karl Binding and
Alfred Hoche's The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value.
1921: Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz publish Human
Genetics (English edition in 1931), which is read and admired by
Adolf Hitler while he is under house arrest after failed putsch. German genetics
shifts as new Nazi party endorses race hygiene as its goal.
1924: Johnson Act restricting immigration to ethnic composition of United States
in 1890 census becomes law. Harry Laughlin serves as expert witness for
the Johnson Committee and provides evidence for the inferiority of southern and
eastern Europeans.
1927: Buck v. Bell upholds Virginia's sterilization law by 8-1
vote. Harry Laughlin provided the model eugenic law for the state of Virginia.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., argues "three generations of imbeciles are
enough."
1933: Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. His Nazi party advocates a
program of harassment of Jews and eventually the establishment of a 'Jew-free'
Germany. He advocates a widespread state eugenic program favoring the Aryan race
and purging it of its alleged inferior strains.
1933-1935: Hitler enacts by decree Enabling Laws that bar marriage of
Jews to non-Jews, classify Jews as a biological race, and promote sterilization
of the unfit through decisions of eugenic courts.
1939: A secret order, initiated by Hitler with the onset of World War II on
September 1, permits Nazi doctors to kill Germany's mentally retarded, deformed,
and psychotic through designated centers. Program is stopped after rising
protests create a war morale problem in Germany.
1942: Reinhard Heydrich chairs and Adolf Eichmann serves as secretary for a
conference on the Final Solution ordered by Goering, Himmler, and Hitler. Death
camps are advocated with massive removal of Jews from occupied territories. All
activities are disguised with use of a coded language and information passed
along a strict chain of command.
1942-1945: Six million Jews are killed primarily by gassing followed by
cremation in death camps. Several million Poles, Russians, and smaller numbers
of Gypsies, political opponents, and homosexuals are also killed. The event is
given its historical name, the Holocaust."
Notice how Carlson's history shows how eugenics came in after, and/or along with
many other practices and ideas. Many of them like degeneracy had as much basis
in what was deemed sinful as much as it was biological. There were multiple
paths, opinions, programs, and numerous changes in thought over the above time
span. Black on the other hand lumps all of eugenics and its corollary practices
into one Anglophobic tirade. War Against the Weak is about hate—Black's
own hatred of Caucasians.
Carlson states, "Readers of this book may feel uncomfortable, as I certainly
did, when they realize that there is a lot of mythology associated with the
origins of the eugenics movement. It is often portrayed as a philosophy of the
successful and well-to-do, conservative, and elitist class in which the unfit
are the exploitable, repressed, and victimized classes whose failings were
largely attributed to innate factors. The story is far more complex, and
eugenicists and their predecessors cannot be classified in such simple terms. It
is, indeed, embarrassing to see many strange bedfellows in the development of
the idea of unfit people, and it should give us pause if we believe that the
Holocaust could have been predicted from its earliest roots."
I think it is obvious that most of the material written about eugenics, the
Holocaust, intelligence testing, sterilizing people, etc. are really just meant
to deter a modern understanding of human behavior by claiming that any such
understanding or research is dangerous, because in the past "bad things
happened." Over the last thirty years, science has been demolishing the
Marxist/egalitarian radical environmentalist paradigm—and they are now left with
no research to counter what we know about gene-nature interactions. The only
recourse is to talk about the past, trying to use fear so that people will shun
future possibilities.
Before Mendel's theory of inheritance was rediscovered, and even while evolution
was just beginning, the moralists were well ahead of science in getting rid of
the unfit:
"Those who contributed to degeneracy theory in the 19th century were often
professional people—charity leaders, sociologists, physicians, and prison
reformers. They were often advocates of public hygiene; they fought for slum
prevention through changes in building codes; they became friends of the new
labor movement, champions of public education, providers of public libraries,
creators of visiting nurse associations, promoters of public bath houses, and
founders of settlement houses. Many of them were what today would be called
liberals in their political philosophy."
"Throughout the 19th century, social philosophers who sought ways to address the
failings of society relied on science for its theories of the causes of human
failure and for its technology to prevent or remedy the social pathology of the
times. This was considered an advance over asking the local government,
organized religion, or the families of the unfortunates to handle a problem of
gargantuan proportions. In prior centuries, these three traditional approaches
had often been relied on, but they failed to solve the on-going problem of
dealing with at least 10% of the population who could not support themselves or
their families. It was hoped that science would be the savior of society."
It seems not much has changed since then. We are still perplexed with what to do
with the unreachable wretches that stay on welfare or beg in the streets. Of
course, today we are far wealthier and most people will tolerate high taxes so
that these unfortunates can be taken care of, or at least hidden away. But
numerous social programs, promoted by the social scientists, Marxists, and
religious do-gooders, have failed to alter the outcomes of the underclass.
But how far back do we have to go to find a practice of genocide based on
biological unfitness? It seems the Jews first established these standards of the
unfit and the essence of biology in the Talmud. Carlson describes three
standards of unfit people in biblical times. First, in Deuteronomy 21:18-21.1,
with regards to a "rebellious disobedient son," scholars infer that the son was
born with these traits—they are genetic.
The second group of unfit people in the Jewish religion are mamzer, or
bastards. "There is an implication that it is not just how a child is brought up
[that makes them unfit], but what paternal biological stock the child comes from
that matters." Jewish religion preaches that Jews have a different essence
in their blood from other races, and only the Jews are free of bad seed (genes)
and therefore pure (never unfit). Still today, many orthodox Jews hold shiva,
or seven days of mourning for the dead, when one of the tribe marries a non-Jew
(miscegenation). Black condemns this when Whites object, but has no objections
when practiced by Jews for thousands of years.
The third category of unfit is almost identical to the way early eugenicists
viewed the unfit. As Carlson describes it:
"A third category of unfit people in ancient times were the Amalekites. They
lived in Ashdod, the most important of the five towns that constituted the
Philistines in the southwest of Palestine, or what is called, since the creation
of the state of Israel, the Gaza Strip, about 7 kilometers (3 miles) east of the
Mediterranean and about 40 kilometers (18 miles) north of Gaza. They were at the
time of the Exodus from Egypt a Bedouin tribe that harassed the fleeing Jews in
their journey across the Sinai desert."
"The Amalekites were perceived as a degenerate people with evil habits, who
should not only be shunned but exterminated, including their wives and children,
and even their cattle. In talmudic interpretation, the Amalekites were believed
to have been created evil, but their extermination was never to be complete
because they had intermarried with other tribes as well as with Jews, and their
seed (hereditary nature) was mixed in undetectable ways. The presence of
Amalekite heredity is inferred when particularly evil people arise, such as
Haman in the book of Esther or, in more recent times, King Ferdinand of Spain in
the 15th century, or Hitler in the 20th century."
"The Amalekites may be thought of as a model for racism or even genocide. In
this interpretation, the racist often attributes inhuman practices to the
offending race, such as the Amalekites with blood in their mouths and
abominations between their teeth. These might be examples of their violating
dietary laws, Jews being prohibited from eating meat that has not been drained
of its blood and Jews being prohibited from eating specified animals or animal
parts. The abomination may be more repulsive to the sexual mores of that era,
especially if blood as a vital fluid is equated with semen as a vital fluid. In
that case, the Amalekites practiced sodomy (fellatio)."
"Even if one acknowledges the source of God's wrath, the slaying of those weak
and infirm Jews least able to defend themselves, it is difficult for
contemporary readers of Exodus to imagine why the children and future
descendants of the Amalekites, no matter how many centuries pass, should be
considered as evil in the eyes of the Jews as they were at the time of their
original crimes. An inference may be made that the culture is corrupting, and
children raised in it are necessarily going to practice the abominations of the
parents. This should not apply to infants or very young children, yet there is
no sparing of even these children. Nor are there any careful protections of
legal rights as in the determination of the rebellious and disobedient son; the
Amalekites are perceived evil as a class, and their death is laid down as a
commandment. The miscegenation of the Amalekites may have rendered that
commandment moot, but nevertheless it might be interpreted as a warning that
unspeakably evil people will occasionally appear because they were not
destroyed at the appropriate time, and Jews cannot take their freedom or
safety as a people for granted. Scapegoating the Amalekites in this
interpretation is analogous to 19th-century ideas of atavisms."
So everything that Black accuses early eugenicists of doing, based on a belief
that "bad seed" could crop up in future generations if not found and destroyed,
had its origins in the Jewish religion! The Old Testament or Talmud, was a book
of racial supremacy, genocide, and purity of blood. One must ask then why it is
so hard to fathom that prior to the genetic revolution in the last few decades,
the belief for thousands of years was that "bad seed" was carried by certain
people, and must be destroyed? This was not White supremacy, this was the Jewish
understanding of human nature as described by a supposed supreme being, and also
found its way into some Christian thinking. (Judaism and Christianity are so
different, it is hard to imagine that Christianity also accepts the Old
Testament along with the New Testament.)
Carlson describes the full history of eugenics, and what led up to it, "long
before Francis Galton introduced the term eugenics, there was a growing concern
during the 18th and 19th centuries that degeneracy was a major problem. The
degeneracy might be physiological (caused by masturbation, occupational
exposure, or alcoholism), moral (leading to innate criminality), mental
(resulting in feeblemindedness or insanity), or economic (in which the pauper
lacked the ability to rise out of poverty)…. Many physicians attributed the high
criminality among illegitimate children to their 'vicious upbringing' and the
family environment in which they were raised. In 1836 in Paris, one-third of the
births were illegitimate, most of them from working-class women. Foundlings were
abandoned in larger numbers during the winter months when the mothers could not
feed their children. Those abandoned as infants often died in hospitals, but
many were shipped out of Paris to the provinces where they were raised by
farmers. The privileged classes often looked upon the less fortunate classes as
victims of their own moral failings. They were considered by them to be 'branded
with the marks of vice and destitution' and 'reduced by sheer besottedness to a
life of savagery.' Their lives inspired 'disgust and horror.'"
When we look at the history of how society looked at the destitute or unfit, two
sides have always been at odds: those who think we should help them and those
who want to remove support so that they will improve their own lot in life.
"Mrs. E.C. Bolles also championed the new charity movement. She deplored a
clergyman's 'exhortation to his flock to devote a tenth of their income to the
poor.' If this were put into practice she admitted, 'the increase of pauperism
would soon be appalling....' She attributed the causes of pauperism in the
cities to 'excessive immigration of the worst elements of the Old World,'
crowded tenements, the fertility of the lower classes, 'drunkenness, indolence,
ignorance, and inefficiency.' Although she did not have any practical remedy to
suggest, she wished that 'if criminals, paupers, idiots, and incurables were
prevented from self-multiplication the next generation of benevolent workers
would meet with less discouragement.' In the meantime, she suggested direct
personal influence through 'volunteer visiting' and advocacy of kindergarten
classes and industrial schools to improve the skills of the children-of
paupers."
Today, we are no closer to a solution for the underclass. All social programs
have failed, but of course, they can never be refuted, because they always blame
a lack of resources or effort for the many programs that have been tried and
fail. The eugenics movement was not new, it was just given a new name to fight
degeneracy. Today, one could embrace libertarianism—where everyone is on their
own without handouts from the government. Or one could embrace radical
environmentalism, and preach the new gospel of quotas, affirmative action,
multiculturalism, diversity, and group identity—with hatred always directed at
White males. It seems that the desire to eliminate the unfit during the
eugenics' movement has turned into a desire to eliminate all White males in
preference to for the so-called oppressed.
"The perception of the failures in American society shifted from one of pity and
charity to one of fear, disgust, and rejection in less than one generation.
Every generation has some citizens who blame the environment for the
predicament of its unfortunates and other citizens who feel these are people who
are victims of their own failings. What made the last quarter of the
19th century so different was the rapid growth of science with theories to
support both views and the increasing sympathy of intelligent people to reject
the views of the environmentalists."
Moreover, just as suddenly, after the Second World War, people turned against
science and embraced radical environmentalism. What Carlson doesn't explain is
that societies do not change by their own will; they are led by the elite who
dictates the current morality. We are now still hung-over from our
over-indulgence in environmental determinism, and it continues with the
indoctrination of the public by Marxists in academia, the liberal media,
government (the managerial state), and the millions of people who make their
living by getting government aid to help the unfit. There are those who are now
fighting back to try and get a balance between nature and nurture, but the
pendulum of public opinion is a slow one.
Carlson does a superb job of explaining "social Darwinism" or what should be
called "social Spencerism." Marxists like to throw the term "social Darwinism"
or "survival of the fittest" around as if it had a biological basis. However,
the term "survival of the fittest" predated Darwin and was proposed by Spencer
as a philosophical principle, not a scientific one (1852). Spencer felt humans
were malleable and would become fitted to circumstances. The weak would die out,
so there should be no sympathy for the weak. It was similar to an upside down
form of Marxism, where the weak would die out naturally rather than be oppressed
by the bourgeoisie. Marxists killed the oppressors, Spencerism would just let
the oppressed die out on their own. Like Marxism, it had no connection to any
scientific principle, and it found no home. People used bits and pieces of his
philosophy, but never the whole. "Social Darwinism" was "dead on arrival."
Marxists still attempt to link it however to eugenics, genetics, and race as a
means of derision, since that is the only tool they have left to fend off the
genetic juggernaut.
When the Left attacks the old eugenics, they portray horror at state coercive
sterilization. However, since many people today choose not to have children,
sterilization should not be seen as such an oppressive act by the state—states
also send their own people off to war to die. Eugenics took hold in a moral
system that was far different than today:
"Daniel's more limited vision was to 'substitute castration as a penalty for all
sexual crimes or misdemeanors, including confirmed masturbation.' Returning
again to his dread of habitual masturbation as the cause of degeneracy, Daniel
urged the legalization of castration; it would be 'an advisable hygienic measure
in habitual masturbation, whether the practice be cause or effect, by arresting
the wasting of vital force by seminal losses, and consequent impairment of
physical health.' Reflecting on the mood of his times, Daniel noted: 'Is it not
a remarkable civilization that will break a criminal's neck, but will respect
his testicles?' Among the permissible reasons for castration, Daniel included
'rape, sodomy, bestiality, pederasty, and habitual masturbation.' Enactment of
such a law was more than beneficial to the degenerate: 'This we owe to
ourselves, if we would not merit reproach; to posterity, if we would secure to
future generations the full fruits of sanitation in the practice of the great
science of preventive medicine.'" OUCH! Now that was a moralistic society!
The Left also likes to take aim at the rich philanthropists, who funded
eugenics. However, these 20th century magnate-philanthropists, such as the
Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg
Foundation, Pew Memorial Trust, etc. were merely giving money to the latest
flavor-of-the-month fad. Today, they give millions to people-of-color in the
name of pseudoscientific feel-good movements like diversity, multiculturalism,
affirmative action and immigration. These were times with a different set of
moral standards: "The year 1914 was very productive for Laughlin. He gave his
first speech on eugenics to the National Conference on Race Betterment, held in
Battle Creek, Michigan, and sponsored by the Kellogg family, enthusiasts for
health food, exercise, and eugenics. The Kellogg brothers had developed their
health movement, from fitness centers to corn flakes, as a response to the
dangers of masturbation and other practices leading to degeneration. W.K.
Kellogg handled the business end of the enterprise and his brother, J.H.
Kellogg, a physician, handled the research and scholarship. At the conference,
thirteen scholars were invited to give speeches."
Now, were the Kellogg's White supremacists or again just naïve philanthropists?
Black shows his bias: "In 1914, Dr. Kellogg organized the First Race Betterment
Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan. The conference's purpose was to lay the
foundations for the creation of a super race…." Clearly, the Kelloggs were no
different than philanthropists of today, giving money to whatever is morally
popular. They were more interested in their own status than in the programs
themselves, just like today's philanthropists.[4]
Fifty years from now, I hope we will be discussing the outrageous race traitors
like Bill Gates, who will give millions of dollars to educate middle class
minorities, but not poor Whites from Appalachia. Philanthropy will probably
always be with us, but the morality that directs its efforts keeps changing.
Today, philanthropy is all about helping minorities while screaming Anglophobic
diatribes at anyone who questions the right of Whites to their own survival.
When we look at the past, we see the same struggles, just different sets of
indoctrinated followers trying to make the world a better place—or at least get
credit for seeming to try.
Carlson takes a more balanced stance when explaining the attitude towards
immigrants: "The public sympathy for restrictive immigration increased yearly
through the first two decades of the 20th century. Americans who could trace
their ancestry to the 18th century looked with distrust at the new Americans
speaking strange languages, practicing alien religions, and allegedly clinging
to their ancestral customs. They were accused of not entering the melting pot;
of living in self-imposed ghettoes; of importing the foreign ideologies of
Marxism and Anarchism; of agitating laborers to join labor unions; and of
ruthlessly replacing American workers by taking low wages no native-born
American could possibly accept."
"The anti-immigration movement found support in Congress from Representative
Albert Johnson of the state of Washington. He came to Congress in 1912 on
a campaign against the evils of foreigners. He started out as a printer and
journalist, rising to the editorship of the Seattle Times. He feared
Japanese immigration in the Pacific coast states, and he identified foreigners
with subversion after the Industrial Workers of the World tried to organize the
lumber mills in the Northwest. In 1919 Johnson succeeded in getting immigration
slowed down to 355,000 per year. The 1910 census was used and 3% of each
national origin in that census was permitted entry."
"Johnson chaired the Congressional Committee on Immigration and scheduled
hearings for a more restrictive law that would effectively reduce to a trickle
those immigrants who came from the eastern and southern nations of Europe.
Laughlin was delighted in 1921 to be asked to serve as an 'expert witness' for
the hearings that Johnson proposed. He hoped to amass an overwhelming amount of
evidence to confirm the inferiority of the Russians, Poles, Italians, and
smaller nationalities found among these two regions of Europe that sent so many
of their impoverished and unhappy citizens to the New World. Laughlin believed
the immigrants and their children would outnumber the native-born in commitments
to mental institutions, illnesses recorded at public hospitals, arrests and
convictions for crimes, and failures in the public school systems. Where the
data did not fit his preconceived notions, he tried to explain it away, and
occasionally he omitted it or used a system of classification favorable to his
views. Thus, when immigrant Jews did better than the native-born in the public
schools he no longer listed them as a separate category and instead tucked them
in among the larger majorities of non-Jews for a nationality-by-nationality
listing."
Carlson's description is far more honest than Black's. Black portrayed the
eugenicists as responsible for curtailing immigration, based on innate
inferiority, promoted by Laughlin. However, the real debate had many components,
and the assertion that races from Eastern and Southern Europe were inferior
compared to "Nordics" was no more than a footnote—and was rejected. Just as the
debates on immigration today, there are concerns about disease, the environment,
dependency, terrorists, and the least equipped (selective migration), etc.
coming to the United States. To portray all those who oppose open immigration as
White supremacists or racists is just simply dishonest—though I see no reason
why an argument in favor of nations being made up of homogenous people should
not be accepted as a valid preference.
Carlson is also more honest about the Holocaust, and how it came about.
"One of the undesired consequences of intermarriage is described by the phrase
'... the holy race has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands' (Ezra 9:2).
The term 'holy race' in the Revised Standard Version is translated as 'holy
seed' in both the King James Bible and in Judah Slotski's Daniel, Ezra, and
Nehemiah.
The term 'mixed itself' is translated as 'mingled' in Slotski's version and it
is rendered as 'become contaminated' in the Anchor Bible. Post-Holocaust
translators would probably use the phrase 'holy people' rather than identify the
Jews as a race or seed (with its implications of being a genetic stock).
Whatever the original meaning of the passage, it implies a different reason from
the practical concerns of Ezra and Nehemiah that assimilation will lead to a
gradual loss of faith. No one can fault the desire of a religion to survive,
but if a religion defines its people as holy or set apart or as being a
special seed, it thereby excludes other people, and the potential for
resentment, disapproval, and bigotry may arise [and can easily lead to
anti-Semitism]. More likely, the bigotry arising from unrelated causes,
especially economic competition, may seek its justification through this
interpretation of God's covenant with the Jewish people."
What happened in Germany, with the emancipation of Jews, was an expectation that
the Jews would assimilate with the Germans and become fully Germanized. Instead,
the Jews used their new freedom to dominate the economy, but refused to
assimilate biologically and in many ways culturally with Germans. The Jews
continued to see themselves as a distinct race and one superior to all others:
"Anti-Semitism became widespread in Germany after 1870 [following emancipation],
but it was in the early 20th century that a worldwide anti-Semitic movement
began. Jews were becoming more successful in commerce, politics, the arts, and
the sciences as their opportunities to become full-fledged citizens in their
host countries increased. They were frequently seen by envious non-Jews as being
unfair competitors in England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, or the United
States. In this form of anti-Semitism, Jews were seen as clannish, driven by a
monomania for wealth and power, manipulative, and conspiratorial." (See
Lindemann's Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, 1997.)
And that is why Hitler killed the Jews—by their own Jewish supremacism, they
declared that Germans were inferior and unworthy for biological assimilation.
The Nazis said fine, "then we will likewise declare ourselves a super race, and
destroy you before you destroy us." The Holocaust was tit-for-tat.
Carlson continues: "Max Nordau, the acid-tongued critic of modern European
culture, chose Zionism as the best response to anti-Semitism in his adopted
country, France. He co-authored with Gustav Gottheil Zionism and
Anti-Semitism and gave his reasons for wanting a country where Jews could
establish their own nation. 'The new Zionism has grown in part only out of the
internal impulsions of Judaism itself, out of the enthusiasm of modern educated
Jews for their history and martyrology, out of the awakened consciousness of
their racial qualities, out of their ambition to save the ancient blood, in view
of the farthest possible future, and to add to the achievements of their
forefathers the achievements of their posterity.' The combination of nationalism
throughout Europe and the growing anti-Semitism that accompanied it were the
reasons Nordau gave for his own interest in the Zionist movement. Nordau's
vision was idiosyncratic. He wanted a Zionism without mysticism; he repudiated
the Reform movement, in which Jews assimilated in their adopted countries; but
most of all he saw a Jewish state as one founded on a racial theory of the
Jewish people."
The Holocaust therefore was not about eugenics when it came to the Jews; it was
born out of fear and hatred for a people that was attacking Germany via
Bolshevism in the East, the Jewish financiers in the West, and the Jews within
the Reich. The homosexuals, Gypsies, unfit Germans, etc., were eliminated as
part of the unfit. The Jews were eliminated as the enemy. Himmler wrote, "Jews
are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated. All Jews
within our grasp are to be destroyed without exception, now, during the war. If
we do not succeed in destroying the biological substance of the Jews, the Jews
will someday destroy the German people." It was fear of Jewish power that led to
the Holocaust, not eugenics.
Carlson concludes with short descriptions of eugenics' movements including
diagrams that show the relationships between individuals, moral values,
political agendas, etc. It is clear from these that in War Against the Weak,
Black flat-out fabricated his premise: Eugenics and America's Campaign to
Create a Master Race. Following are the summations of three summaries by
Carlson:
"THE RISE OF NEGATIVE EUGENICS
Negative eugenics seeks to cull humanity of its alleged defective members by
restricting them from breeding. It has its earliest origins in degeneracy
theory. Malthus and Spencer both accepted this model as an accurate depiction of
the human condition; both thought of keeping the species healthy. Darwin was
influenced by Malthus, but his views were limited primarily to one aspect of a
theory of natural selection leading to evolutionary change. Darwin played little
direct role in the movement called Social Darwinism, which is really a
nonevolutionary theory of degeneracy championed by Spencer just before the
appearance of the Darwin-Wallace papers. Malthus's views on degeneracy were
extended by Morel, whose book on degeneracy influenced Lombroso's views,
especially on criminals and degenerates. Morel and Lombroso influenced Nordau,
who did not have a major role in the application of degeneracy theory to social
policy. Nordau's influence was on classifying degenerate types, especially in
the arts and popular culture. This may have influenced Nazi ideology, such as
the infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibit in Munich. Lombroso's views were
influential on Ochsner, who in turn influenced Sharp to begin the vasectomies of
alleged degenerates as a eugenic measure. Social Darwinism influenced Davenport
and Laughlin, who played major roles in the two accomplishments of the American
eugenics movement—compulsory sterilization laws and restrictive immigration. If
this assessment is correct, the roots of eugenics arose about 1700 (the first
degeneracy theories based on onanism), gathered momentum about 1800 (when
Malthus promoted his theory on the causes of misery and vice), and culminated in
the first third of the 20th century as an international movement modeled on the
efforts of the American eugenic programs of compulsory sterilization and
restrictive immigration policy based on alleged eugenic deficiencies."
"THE RISE OF POSITIVE EUGENICS
Darwin's theory of natural selection leading to new species had a powerful
influence on Galton. Galton was also influenced by the idea of progress, which
stemmed from the Enlightenment philosophy of Condorcet. Galton coined the term
"eugenics" and stressed its importance for improving the human species by
selection for genius and eminence. His views influenced the psychological
theories of Terman. Muller was influenced by Galton's idealism and proposed a
voluntary program he called germinal choice. Graham sought to apply Muller's
ideas by establishing a bank for genius sperm in the Repository for Germinal
Choice. No widespread use of positive eugenics has occurred through any of these
conscious efforts, but Osborn has argued that prosperity and opportunities to
men and women lead to an unconscious differential reproduction with positive
eugenic outcomes."
"THE AMERICAN EUGENICS MOVEMENT
What can be called the American eugenics movement (or old-line eugenics) had its
origins about the 1870s with the introduction of Social Darwinism and degeneracy
theory into American social thought. Dugdale's study of the Jukes influenced
Jordan and McCulloch, who were also influenced by the parasitism theory
developed by Lankester. Weismann's theory of the germ plasm led to the idea of
fixed behavioral traits, and Davenport and Laughlin used these in promoting
restrictive immigration laws and compulsory sterilization. Jordan influenced
both father and son in the Holmes family, and the son supported compulsory
sterilization on constitutional grounds. The movement lasted through the 1930s
and then went into
Carlson is no Richard Lynn of course (see Eugenics: A Reassessment.
Westport: Praeger Press, 2000). Like Black, he is an egalitarian and a
Marxist—denying any difference between races in intelligence or behavioral
traits. He does this a few places in the book by using very old data and/or
studies, without mentioning new research over the last few decades.
Finally, a few notes on a book that is even more pathetic and hateful than
Black's book. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of
Nationalism by Nancy Ordover should be shocking to anyone who is scientific,
but I have gotten used to Marxist propaganda. I have come to expect most books
from the Left to be moral ad hominem attacks against Anglo males, and
Ordover's book is no exception. I will only comment on it because it
almost reads like a parody.
She begins, "In the interest of full disclosure, let me pause here and place
myself in this tangle of social Darwinist affronts. I am Jewish and I am queer.
I see my peoples among those dubiously honored as eugenic castoffs at both the
entrance and exit of the twentieth century. Declarations of the limited
cognitive abilities of Jewish immigrants—indeed of all immigrants from southern
and eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia—garnered the men who made them a
respectability that drew strength from and reinforced their offensive against
the native poor and the racialized in the early decades of this century.
Likewise, escalating attacks on lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered
people seem to have coincided nicely with a flurry of scientific data
proclaiming the genetic basis of homosexuality as the 1990s drew to an end. I
cannot deny that a sense of my own history and my own future impelled me to
embark on this project."
In one paragraph she manages to mangle concepts by equating "social Darwinism"
or "social Spencerism" with eugenics as discussed above by Carlson, and she lies
about Jews being thought to have low intelligence. As stated above, the exact
opposite was noted to be the case, and Jews were prevented from overwhelming Ivy
League universities by using quotas in favor of Anglos. The Left uses the same
lies over and over again, because they have no new data. Anglophobia is the last
moral message they have to mobilize their minions into action.
Throughout the book, she ignores time-periods and motives, and mixes up birth
control with eugenics. Every effort to control population growth is seen as a
plot by eugenicists against the underclass—driven by desires for white
supremacy. She claims that, "Eugenics is hydralike in strategy and ideology: one
tentacle entwined with nationalism, another extending toward reform-oriented
liberalism, others to blatant homophobia, racism, misogyny, and white supremacy.
Multiple identities and a shared demonization has meant that the consequences of
eugenics for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people are now, and
have always been, bound up with those for immigrants, people of color, and the
poor. The liberal determinist rapture that has greeted this latest attempt to
'rebiologize sexual orientation' is not limited to technology's promise to
prevent homosexuality or expel homophobia. It is part of a larger and longer
hope that science alone can make fast work of inequity and poverty."
What is so contradictory about the Left's position, is that they will make
claims like the above, while their comrades will state flatly that eugenics is
dead—it no longer exists. Of course it never really went away, it just slowly
evolved into better and better science. Like intelligence testing, the Left
cannot suppress the research, so they must suppress Whites who are behind its
nefarious purposes. (Of course, eugenics is practiced by many races and nations.
No one group has a monopoly on improving their own kin's chances in future
generations.)
When she gets to homosexuality, there is no pleasing her no matter if you take
an environmental, genetic or mixed perspective. Any view at all is homophobic
and eugenic. However, what does homosexuality traditionally have to do with
eugenics? Until recently, homosexuals had few children—having children only when
a married partner covered up their sexual preference. Therefore, homophobia, as
far as I can see, is a matter of morality for the religious, and/or disgust for
those who find it repulsive. A eugenics perspective is neutral. Homosexual genes
cannot increase in a population where homosexuals have fewer children than
heterosexuals; homosexuals pay taxes but don't cost society money in welfare or
paying for educating the children they don't have, and overall are not a drag on
the economic wealth of a nation. They are rather neutral. My wife told me last
night that a gay couple she knows has adopted two Black children, and are
thinking of adopting more. In general, for society as a whole, gays provide far
more resources than they take from the collective pool—at least until the cost
of AIDS came along. Still, they are not really a concern to modern eugenicists,
who are interested primarily in average intelligence.
Ordover takes the absurd position that when it comes to queerness, science
should just disappear! "The warm reception that greeted these hereditarian
hypotheses (Ewald and Cochran's germ theory has not garnered the same kind of
reception) raises two issues: What is it about causation theories that is
so appealing to mainstream institutions and heterosexual America? What
is it about the research that has so many in the queer community looking to it
for deliverance? Mainstream media and its predominantly straight consumers look
for a good story; if it holds an unspoken promise of curatives, so much the
better. More than that, a focus on what causes queerness eclipses the larger
question: who wants to know and why? Significant segments of the gay community,
on the other hand, hold that causation theories can be honed into a strategic
tool and integrated into a larger legal and political struggle. For many, there
may also be personal attachment to biological explanations, a comfort in being
able to tell straight family and friends that 'we were born that way.' The
stakes are clearly different, but there is a commonality here. Genetic promises
have been embraced without interrogation by a community and a larger society
eager to accept any quick-fix explanations (and consequent solutions) that
modern science had to offer. Whether the hope was for an antidote for
homosexuality or homophobia, this embrace typifies the science-as-savior prism
that has greeted so many determinist enterprises."
This is of course nonsense. Science is about discovery, and in many instances
exploration and discovery are not really linked to any benefit to society. It is
often understood that the more we know, the more we will be able to achieve. But
certainly, we don't study gravity, black holes, and dark matter in hopes of an
"antidote for" anything in particular. Science is revealing of facts, and like
many on the Left, they have turned to rejecting science altogether, because they
can see where it is leading—a return to a more balanced recognition that we are
a product of both nature and nurture.
It is more Marxist deconstructionism: "Despite this book's focus on the
bankruptcy and perils of biological models, what follows is in no way an
endorsement of socialization arguments, but rather a call for queers to
opt out of nature versus nurture arguments altogether."
Finally, what she thinks is a good rebuttal to eugenics, turns out to be a
slam-dunk for the Right:
"While I was still in the early stages of my research, a friend gave me Charles
Boston's send-up of sterilization statutes and it has remained tacked up over my
desk ever since. It offered a little comic relief, as I immersed myself deeper
and deeper in the less than uplifting story of this country's eugenics past.
More than that, it served as a reminder of the historical continuity of dissent.
The necessary longevity of that challenge is itself a warning on the tenacity of
eugenics:
'Whereas inordinate individual wealth is damaging to society, and undesirable
civic tendencies are transmissible by heredity, it is hereby enacted that each
society for the improvement of the poor shall call in two philosophic anarchists
and one socialist, who shall determine whether any person who shall have
acquired inordinate wealth is by reason of the over development of his
acquisitive greed a menace to the peace and welfare of the community, and if
they so determine, they may cause to be performed upon him an operation for
sterilization to prevent procreation, provided, in no event shall anarchists and
socialist receive more than $3.00 for their consultation fee.'—Charles A.
Boston, 'A Protest against Laws Authorizing the Sterilization of Criminals and
Imbeciles.'"
Ordover misses the hilarity of the above. First, fascists do in fact embrace
controlling unionism, the underclass, and the capitalists. National Socialism
was meant to be egalitarian for the German people, so control of "greed" was an
essential component of the philosophy, if not the actual practice, like all
political systems.
Second, the Holocaust for the Jews was in fact a means of eliminating
"inordinate individual wealth" or "greed," as the Jews were not only perceived
to be greedy, but they in fact did have an inordinate amount of the wealth in
Germany during the beginning of Third Reich. Moreover, it is the same in the
United States. Most of the wealth is not in the hands of "greedy" Anglos; it is
in the hands of "greedy" Jews and East Asians (on average). According to Jewish
sources,[2,3] the Jews have far more wealth, power, prestige and influence than
Whites; and East Asians are between Whites and Jews in terms of wealth. This is
all in accordance with a biological explanation of wealth distribution (Lynn,
Richard and Tatu Vanhanen. IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Praeger, 2002.).
So is Odover expressing a true desire to sterilize Jews—as the quintessential
carriers of the "greedy" genes?
Conclusion and Back on Black (Comedy Channel pun).
It has been historical revisionism to link eugenics with the Holocaust.
It diverted attention away from Jewish-gentile conflict, and allowed a
simplistic picture of National Socialism: "The Jews were killed just like the
Gypsies and homosexuals—they were all lumped in together as being unfit."
But a more thorough understanding of World War Two reveals that the
Holocaust—that is the killing of the Jews—was all about group warfare. Through
an acceleration of hate, fear and disgust, the human emotions that drive
warfare, both the Nazis and the Jews escalated the campaigns against each other,
feeding off each other's fear. The Holocaust was a result then of warfare, not
eugenics.
The genocide of an enemy has been a human behavioral trait for thousands of
years—there was nothing unique in the Holocaust except for its post-war use as a
tool for indoctrinating Whites and setting the stage for Anglophobia.[5] The
Marxists won the battle against the Nazis, primarily with the mobilization and
the help of Anglo-Saxon solidarity in America and England, but the tables were
turned on the victors. The Marxists in the West would use the war to
indoctrinate us into submitting to an egalitarian morality that does not allow
our own institutions to even consider racial differences without being labeled
as scientific racists. The linking of eugenics directly to the Holocaust is one
of many tools that suppress scientific progress in behavioral genetics, and
Marxists are feeling the heat coming from the Human Genome Project—it is only a
matter of years before we identify intelligence and human behavioral genes.
Radical environmentalism will be dead, and the false gods exposed.
Like the early eugenics, today again, the end justifies the means. In
institutions, corporations, academia, government, and the media, science is
dispensed with as agendas are set by morality. Reading several recent books on
the history of affirmative action, diversity, immigration, multiculturalism, and
group identity politics, it is apparent that all of these movements reflect the
eugenics' movement of 100 years ago. Agendas are set by moral platitudes, and
are completely devoid of human behavioral or human cognition considerations. For
example, even though all of the authors were critical of the agendas, many were
unaware of scientific progress in how humans think. For example, if disgust and
hate are reacted upon in older brain modules even before these signals reach the
modern prefrontal cortex, how can people be taught to ignore them? They have no
higher order control of the feelings towards reckless drivers, homosexuals, or
swaggering Blacks walking down the street. Zap—straight from our vision system
to a reptilian response system. So we just lie and rationalize about our true
feelings.
Another omission was the belief in group identity and its simplistic acceptance
of reified group differences, but the cause of the differences remained
undefined. If two groups are different, and we need to celebrate differences and
understanding, where do theses differences come from? If they are genetic, they
will persist until different groups intermarry. If they are cultural, they will
be hard to sustain without the groups themselves putting up rigid barriers to
prevent assimilation. None of these issues are discussed within these
egalitarian movements—because they are primarily Anglophobic in nature. The
purpose is to take from one group for the benefit of another—from Whites to all
people of color, the disabled, and non-heterosexuals.
One of the Left's favorite defenses against the observation that there are real
genetic differences between races with regards to intelligence and behavioral
traits, is to point out that the differences are greater within races than
between races. But they also fail to accept then that they must hold true that
there are far greater differences within any racial/ethnic group than there is
between racial/ethnic groups. This completely nullifies all of the discussions
about how different ethnic groups behave, what they value, etc. These cultural
or value systems vary far more between individuals than they do between groups.
That is, the philosophical underpinnings of identity politics have been
overturned by their own Marxist apologists in trying to undermine genetic causes
of human nature.
To give an example of how Black has selectively tried to link eugenics to the
Holocaust, let me imagine a future world war, one that may be brewing in the
Middle East as I write. After millions have died, both in battle and genocide
against warring races, the victors, the East Asians, declare that it was open
immigration in the West that set the stage for racial conflict. The new
moralizing gods will dictate that races must be kept separate, and that only
commerce between different nations shall be allowed. The new dogma will be such
that any interaction between races is immoral and dangerous. The new philosopher
gods will link immigration and race-mixing with genocide, and declare it to be
an evil that must be extinguished.
They will provide numerous examples of how immigration issues all over the globe
were linked to terrorism, the escalation of racial hatred, and eventual warfare.
To make this link, they will conveniently ignore economic differences between
the West and the Middle East, they will gloss over the opportunistic
involvement they had in promoting the war so that East Asians could rise up on
top out of the ashes, the need for oil will be ignored, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict will not be mentioned, nor will the involvement of a now extinct Jewish
race (The Jews were annihilated after a small nuclear war exchange started by
Israel killed over 500 million Muslims—the Beijing War Tribunal found all Jews
culpable and sentenced to death by East Asian peace keeping forces now globally
placed). Again, those who win the wars write the history.
---
NOTES
[1] Who's a Jew in Israel? Anyone but an Arab?
The Pennsylvania Gazette: Mar/Apr Gazetteer item
Copyright 1999 The Pennsylvania Gazette Last modified 2/17/99
../www.upenn.edu/gazette/0399/0399gaz2.html%26nbsp;%26nbsp;%26nbsp;%26nbsp;%26nbsp;%26nbsp;%209/16/2003
In recent years, the question of "Who is a Jew?" has plagued Israeli Jews, as
Orthodox rabbis have attempted to deny the legitimacy of Reform and Conservative
Judaism. But according to Dr. Ian Lustick, professor and chair of political
science, the question takes on a whole new dimension when one looks at the
recent waves of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union.
Though the silence on the subject has been deafening, he says, most new arrivals
to Israel are not Jews "by virtually anyone's definition" of the word. And the
implications for Israeli society—and the local Arab population—are profound. The
current conundrum began innocently enough in 1970, when Israel amended its Law
of Return to allow non-Jewish relatives of Jewish immigrants into the country as
citizens. The rationale, says Lustick, "was a humanitarian one—the reunification
of families." But the world was a different place then. Nobody imagined that
hundreds of thousands of immigrants would be arriving each year from Russia and
the other former Soviet republics. As a result, he says, by defining as a
"relative" anyone with a Jewish grandparent, an increasingly large proportion of
those immigrants have turned out to be gentiles. "Millions of people in the
former Soviet Union can present themselves as eligible because, through
intermarriage, they have one, probably dead, grandparent who had a Jewish
mother," says Lustick. "And all of these folks, whether they ever saw the inside
of a synagogue or ever thought of themselves as Jewish—or whether they're in
fact proud to be Christian—are legally entitled to all the benefits of
immigration status in Israel." Since 1989, at least 300,000 of the roughly
750,000 new immigrants from the former Soviet Union have not been considered
Jewish by themselves or anybody else, notes Lustick, who presented his findings
at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association last
September in a paper titled "Israel as a 'Non-Arab' State: The Political
Implications of Mass Immigrations of Non-Jews." In recent years, he adds, even
official annual statistics show "clear majorities who are gentiles." That does
not take into account the "very substantial" number of immigrants who entered
the country with forged documents or whose credentials as Jews could be disputed
under Israel's strict rules for determining Jewishness. Given that the Soviet
and post-Soviet immigrants now amount to nearly 20 percent of Israeli citizens,
he says, Israel's dominant majority is already "better described not as 'Jewish'
but as 'non-Arab."' Strangely enough, both the Left and the Right—for very
different reasons—are tacitly supporting that situation, or at least making no
effort to change the Law of Return. The Right, says Lustick, resists any
tinkering with the law because it views such actions as "emblematic of a
post-Zionist rejection of Israel's Zionist vocation." Furthermore, in the early
1990s, the right-wing government of Yitzhak Shamir (who once justified his
opposition to territorial compromise by proclaiming that "big immigration
requires Israel be big as well"), was "so enthusiastic about the fact that these
were not Arabs that they didn't care that much whether they were Jewish."
Meanwhile, notes Lustick, the "seculars on the Left" have viewed any changes to
the law that might tighten up the definition of Jewishness as "playing into the
hands of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis," whom the Left criticizes as racist for
using stringent, blood-linked criteria. There is another element at work: the
sizeable bureaucracy whose very existence depends on finding and helping
potential immigrants in the former Soviet Union to immigrate to Israel. Given
the very attractive benefits of immigrant status in Israel, especially compared
to the economically distressed former Soviet Union, it is no surprise that the
bureaucracy continues to find eligible candidates. In addition, there are the
hundreds of thousands of "guest workers" who were brought in during the
intifada from places like the Philippines, Romania, South America, and
Thailand to perform the jobs that the Palestinians weren't taking. They never
left, and while they may not be citizens yet, they do live in Israel. "The face
of the country is changing dramatically," says Lustick. "When the census was
taken in 1995, they did not ask anymore: 'Are you Jewish?' 'Are you Christian?'
'What is your ethnic national background?"' It wasn't just that the
census-takers could not agree on what they would consider a truthful answer; it
was also "too sensitive to report just how many people were not Jewish in the
country—but who were being counted in a majority that was not Arab." And when it
comes to polling on such sensitive issues as withdrawal from the West Bank or
the creation of a Palestinian state, the numbers are getting seriously skewed.
Because of the significant proportion of non-Arab non-Jews in polling surveys,
one leading Israeli pollster told Lustick that the "Jewish majorities" who were
sometimes reported as being in favor of one option or another were not really
"Jewish majorities" but "non-Arab majorities." But, the pollster added, if he
were to spell that out publicly, he "would have to seek political asylum in the
United States." "When I share this work with other people, even well-informed
observers, their jaws drop," says Lustick, who notes that the few politicians
who have dared raise the issue have been "shouted down, ignored, or told that
this is not an issue which ought to be discussed publicly." But the problem is
not going away quietly, and since conversion to Judaism under Israel's Orthodox
establishment is now a "very long, arduous, and selective process," as Lustick
notes, another approach has been advanced by some of the more "fundamentalist
and ultranationalist Jewish groups." It involves a one-time "mass-conversion
ceremony"—one that could, "in one fell swoop, turn hundreds of thousands of
non-Jewish immigrants into Jews." It would be "followed by a tight closing of
the door to more such arrivals." Israel's current confusion is hardly unique,
points out Lustick: "There's always been a debate in every nationalist movement
over whether national identity is an unchangeable essence, or whether membership
in the national community can expand or contract depending on opportunities and
circumstances." A more interesting way of looking at the current situation, he
argues, "is that Zionism is an ideology, and like all successful ideologies it
contains some answers to people's problems for a particular period. And for the
crisis of European Jewry, especially in the late 19th and first half of the 20th
century, Zionism really was a brilliant answer to the Jewish problem—even if it
was not a very convenient answer for Arabs." But the world changes faster than
ideologies change, and an ideology such as Zionism—the product of a particular
place and time—will inevitably lag behind the changing world around it. As a
result, he says, "it's not surprising that life, which is organic and bubbling,
can find ways to manipulate these old ideologies for its own purposes."
[2] Maisel, L. Sandy and Ira N. Forman, Eds. Jews in American Politics.
Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
[3] Silbiger, Steven. The Jewish Phenomenon: Seven Keys to the Enduring
Wealth of a People. Longstreet Press, 2000.
[4] Jobling, Ian. "Competitive Altruism and White Self-Destruction (Part I)" in
American Renaissance, October, 2003.
[5] It Takes a Village [SCIENCE 26 SEPTEMBER 2003, PG. 1842]
Prehistoric people launched into organized warfare almost from the moment they
first settled down, suggest new findings from ancient Mexican villages.
Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, archaeologists at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, used new data from Mexico to test earlier claims by UM anthropologist
Raymond Kelly. In his 2000 book, Warless Societies and the Origin of War,
Kelly argued that organized warfare—as opposed to mutual raiding—was rare among
hunter-gatherer societies, but that it increased as societies became more
complex.
The team used radiocarbon dating of burned timbers to trace the history of
warfare in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley. The battles that Spanish explorers witnessed
there in the 16th century had been raging for several thousand years, the team
reports in a paper published online last week in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
At the 3600-year-old village of San Jose Mogote, for example, they found a
house that was burned down 3500 years ago and a partially burnt defensive wooden
palisade dated to around 3200 years. Evidence in other villages also points to
chronic warfare. In one, the victors erected a wooden rack to display the skulls
of 61 enemy soldiers slain in a battle about 2000 years ago.
Harvard University archaeologist Steven LeBlanc praises the study as "one of the
best worked out cases in the world of how warfare and social complexity evolved
in lock step." But he questions the researchers' distinction between warfare and
tribal raids, noting that the latter were "just as real, deadly, and pervasive
for noncomplex societies."
[6]
History, Eugenics, And The Jews
Posted 5/13/2004
By John Glad
The September 12, 2003 issue of The Jewish Press
carried an article by Edwin Black tarring the American eugenics movement with
the brush of National Socialism and genocide.
In Israel itself many eugenic measures have become widely accepted. There are
now more fertility clinics per capita there than in any other country in the
world. Surrogacy was legalized in 1996. In vitro fertilization and embryo
transfer are preferred by some rabbis as a form of fertility treatment that does
not violate the literal halachic precepts against adultery. And, although human
reproductive cloning is currently not permitted because the technology is not
yet considered safe, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel sees no inherent religious
interdiction in reproductive cloning as a form of treatment for infertility.
Eugenics is popularly presented as the ideology of the Holocaust and is an
object of intense vilification, leading the Jewish philosopher and Zionist Leo
Strauss to coin the maxim "reductio ad Hitlerum": Hitler believed in eugenics, X
believes in eugenics, therefore X is a Nazi.
The central argument of the eugenics movement is that there is a negative
correlation between IQ and fertility. That is, intelligent people are not having
enough children to replace themselves. In all surveys this trend has continued
to this very day, notably among the Jews, a high-IQ group whose "Total Fertility
Rate" is below replacement.
According to the National Jewish Population Survey, Jews in America entered into
a precipitous decline in numbers in the decade 1990-2000, reflecting a pattern
typical of high-IQ groups. Half of Jewish women age 30-34 have no children, and
nearly half of American Jews are 45 or older. The current Jewish rejection of
the eugenics movement is actually a denial of what is empirically evident in
modern human populations. For the Jews — and not just the Jews — such a position
is no less than suicidal.
While the eugenics movement in the early 20th century was indeed a largely WASP
phenomenon, Jews played a modest but active role in the movement. In 1916 Rabbi
Max Reichler published an article entitled "Jewish Eugenics," in which he
attempted to demonstrate that Jewish religious customs were eugenic in thrust. A
decade and a half later Ellsworth Huntington, in his book Tomorrow's Children,
which was published in conjunction with the directors of the American Eugenics
Society, echoed Reichler's arguments, praising the Jews as being of uniquely
superior stock and explaining their achievements by a systematic adherence to
the basic principles of Jewish religious law, which he also viewed as being
fundamentally eugenic in nature.
In the Weimar Republic, many Jewish socialists actively campaigned for eugenics, using the
Socialist newspaper Vorwarts as their chief tribune. Max Levien, head of the
first Munich Soviet, and Julius Moses, a member of the German Socialist Party,
believed strongly in eugenics. A partial list of prominent German-Jewish
eugenicists would include the geneticists Richard Goldschmidt, Heinrich Poll,
and Curt Stern, the statistician Wilhelm Weinberg (coauthor of the
Hardy-Weinberg Law), the mathematician Felix Bernstein, and the physicians
Alfred Blaschko, Benno Chajes, Magnus Hirschfeld, Georg Lowenstein, Max Marcuse,
Max Hirsch, and Albert Moll.
The German League for Improvement of the People and the Study of Heriditary was
even attacked by the Nazi publisher Julius F. Lehmann as targeted subversion on
the part of Berlin Jews. Lowenstein was a member of an underground resisting the
National Socialist government, and Chajes, Goldschmidt, Hirschfeld, and Poll
emigrated.
The most prominent American eugenicist of Jewish extraction was the Nobel Prize
laureate Herman Muller. When Moses Harman, the revolutionary anarchist editor of
the American Journal of Eugenics, died in 1910, Emma Goldman's magazine Mother
Earth took over distribution. In 1933 the eugenicist and University of California professor of zoology Samuel Jackson Holmes noted the significant number
of Jews in the eugenics movement and praised their "native endowment of brains,"
while at the same time lamenting the racial bias suffered by the Jews, which
caused many of their intellectuals to be wary of non-egalitarian worldviews. The
American Eugenics Society itself counted Rabbi Louis Mann as one of its
directors in 1935.
In September 1939 the most prominent American and British eugenicists published
"Social Biology and Population Improvement" in the journal Nature. In the
document which came to be popularly known as The Eugenics Manifesto, the authors
firmly denounced Hitler's racism, decrying "economic and political conditions
which foster antagonism between different peoples, nations and `races,`" and
calling for "a removal of race prejudices and of the unscientific doctrine that
good or bad genes are the monopoly of particular peoples or of persons with
features."
I wanted to verify claims such as those made by Edwin Black, and so I performed
a random search of 100 books dealing with German history during the Weimar and
Nazi periods and which contained subject indexes; 96 of them do not show any
mention of eugenics, and the mentions in the four that do are cursory. Clearly
eugenics was not the ideological driving force behind National Socialism, but
rather an afterthought.
In Germany, the National Socialist
government took control of scientific institutions and funded a number of chairs
of "Racial Hygiene" in the universities, so that eugenicists abruptly found
themselves face to face with the temptation to leave behind the pack of
daydreaming social reformers and begin to implement eugenic reform.
One geneticist who became an ideologue of Nazi crimes was Otto von Verschuer.
His essay, "The Racial Biology of Jews," appeared in 1938. The article purports
to treat physical differences between Central-European Jews and Germans.
Verschuer points out the astonishing phenomenon that an ethnic group could
preserve itself for two thousand years without a territory. He then goes on,
quite correctly, to point out that the differences he describes are not
absolutely applicable to either group, but are a matter of relative frequency
within the two groups. Taking a great deal of trouble to impart a scientific
tone to the text, including such characteristics as, for example, fingerprints,
blood types, or vulnerability to specific diseases, all of which pose fully
legitimate questions for the physical anthropologist, he nevertheless presents a
pathological document of ethnic hatred disguised as science. The Jews, we learn
from Verschuer, have hooked noses, fleshy lips, ruddy light yellow, dull-colored
skin, and kinky hair. They have a slinking gait and a "racial scent."
There are three basic charges associated in public opinion with eugenics under
National Socialism. Let us examine them in order:
a) The July 1933 sterilization law. A bill was drafted in 1932 by the Prussian
Governmental Council — before Hitler's accession to power — to lay the
groundwork for selective sterilization in cases of heritable diseases. Although
sterilization had been discussed for 20 years, the legislation took the leading
German eugenicists by surprise, who were critical of it as counterproductive and
inefficient with regard to genetic improvement. In addition, they feared a
loosening of sexual mores.
On July 14, 1933, the legislation was passed by the German parliament, entering
into force in 1934, but now it permitted sterilization against the wishes of the
individual concerned, specifically for the surgical sterilization of persons
whose offspring would have a high probability of suffering from physical or
mental illness, of hereditary feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive
syndrome, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness,
deafness, or severe physical defects, as well as severe alcoholism. No mention
was made of race. Eugenic considerations did not play a significant role in the
debate. Rather, German legislators misguidedly saw sterilization as a cheap
alternative to welfare.
b) The September 1939 national euthanasia program. The debate over euthanasia
was launched by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche's 1920 book Legalizing the
Destruction of Life Not Worth Living. The authors, a lawyer and a physician,
made a strictly economic argument. While there may have been some peripheral
eugenic argument to be made with regard to the sterilization legislation, the
euthanasia question had nothing whatsoever to do with eugenics, since persons
who were already institutionally segregated and in many cases sterilized could
not possibly have had any procreation.
To their credit, German eugenicists vehemently attacked euthanasia proposals. In
1926 the eugenicist Karl H. Bauer, for example, stated that if selection were
used as a principle for killing people, "then we all have to die"; the
eugenicist Hans Luxenburger in 1931 called for "the unconditional respect of the
life of a human individual"; and in 1933 the eugenicist Lothar Loeffler argued
not only against euthanasia, but also against eugenically indicated pregnancies.
Hitler, however, regarded the institutionalized as "useless eaters." When, in
September 1939, he issued a secret order initiating a national euthanasia
program he did so strictly to free up as many as 800,000 hospital beds for
expected war casualties.
c) The persecution of Jews and gypsies and their mass murder toward the end of
the war. It is true that Hitler, partly under the influence of a manual on human
heredity written by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, supported
eugenics, but he did not hate the Jews because he had been taught by eugenicists
to classify them as intellectually inferior. On the contrary, he regarded them
as powerful competitors of the Aryan race he proposed to champion. The Jews were
blamed for Germany's defeat in World War I and for the humiliations of the
Versailles treaty.
It is not accurate to regard the eugenics movement as the ideological engine of
the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it is equally undeniable that there were German
eugenicists who allowed themselves to be co-opted by the regime and that they
created a climate of legitimization of policies of hatred for other ethnic
groups. But this was not the driving force behind National Socialism that it is
popularly made out to be. Rather, it was an argument that could be conveniently
twisted by the Nazi government over the explicit objections of the movement's
leaders.
An enormous, albeit fully understandable, confusion has taken place. Meanwhile
the Jews are disappearing.
John Glad, a retired professor of the University of Maryland, is the former
director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars and is the chief translator of The
Black Book on the German Slaughter of Jews (Holocaust Library, 1980).
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