Monthly Archives: December 2021

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics,

and propagandized for the Nazis.

Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863,

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people married only other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton's ideas were imported to the United States just as Gregor Mendel's principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenics advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man.

In a United States demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early 20th century. Elitists, utopians and so-called progressives fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: Populate the Earth with vastly more of their own socioeconomic and biological kind -- and less or none of everyone else.

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the Earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark- haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

How? By identifying so-called defective family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior -- the so-called unfit. The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics" also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalized, the main solution for eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as more marriage restrictions. California led the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first 25 years of eugenics legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women. Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate," "oversexed" or "sexually wayward." At the Sonoma State Home, some women were sterilized because of what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed, 700 on women. The state's two leading sterilization mills in 1933 were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with 363 operations. Other sterilization centers included Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "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 . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenics leader Madison Grant, calling his race-based eugenics book, "The Passing of the Great Race," his "bible."

Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic" or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler's war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.

During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

That same year, 10 years after Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions.

By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rdin. Rdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.

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.

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade a spade."

A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades,

American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.

The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND

At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."

Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.

On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, "My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmfhrer (captain) and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsfhrer (Himmler)."

Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them,

he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin's eugenic institutes.

Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.

After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity -- an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense -- to no avail. They were found guilty.

However, Mengele's boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer re- established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade "human genetics." Typical was an exchange July 25, 1946, when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, "It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany . . . I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?" Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenics luminaries and then sent various eugenics publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.

Verschuer wrote back, "Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation."

Soon, Verschuer again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists.

In the fall of 1950, the University of Mnster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.

Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including California, have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.

Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the late 20th century. Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human code through the Human Genome Project. Now, every individual can be biologically identified and classified by trait and ancestry. Yet even now, some leading voices in the genetic world are calling for a cleansing of the unwanted among us, and even a master human species.

There is understandable wariness about more ordinary forms of abuse, for example, in denying insurance or employment based on genetic tests. On Oct. 14,

the United States' first genetic anti-discrimination legislation passed the Senate by unanimous vote. Yet because genetics research is global, no single nation's law can stop the threats.

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Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

Stephen Unwin delves deep into the intellectual traditions and cultural mindset that produced the Nazis wild euthanasia of people with disabilities, and finds we have not yet put those prejudices to rest

Although eugenics was created in London and enthusiastically nurtured in America and Scandinavia, it was in Nazi Germany that it found its most appalling realisation. Indeed, the persecution, forced sterilisation and subsequent murder of as many as 275,000 useless eaters is one of the most overlooked chapters in the whole ghastly history of the Third Reich.

The Germans were much influenced by the American eugenicists, and the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin (where Josef Mengele worked before being transferred to Auschwitz). C. M. Goethe, the wealthy leader of the California Genetics movement, was delighted to learn that, within a year of Hitler coming to power, 5,000 Germans a month were being forcibly sterilised, and praised a fellow eugenicist for helping to shape the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making programme.

Similarly, the virulent American eugenicist, Harry H. Laughlin (himself epileptic), boasted that his Model Sterilisation Law had been adopted by the Nazis in their 1935 Racial Hygiene Law, while one American asylum director expressed concern that the Germans are beating us at our own game.

It was German academics, however, who really paved the way. In 1920, Karl Binding, a senior academic lawyer, and Alfred Hoche, a professor of medicine, had produced the bluntly titled polemic Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. In it, Binding declared that, in addition to the terminally ill and the seriously wounded, all incurable idiots should be killed. Such people, he insisted, are absolutely pointless and impose a terrible heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole and their death would not create even the smallest gap except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses.

Hoche, meanwhile, insisted that they were human ballast without any capacity for suffering on an intellectual level, which we only encounter way down in the animal kingdom. To show pity was illogical, he argued, for where there [is] no suffering, there can be no pity. Above all, he emphasised the cost of looking after them, contrasting the sacrifice of the dearest human good with the enormous care for existences that not only are devoid of value but even ought to be valued negatively. He also expressed a ghoulish interest in the research that such slaughter would allow.

Although demands in Weimar Germany for such drastic action were relatively rare, more common was support for sterilisation. Thus, in late 1932, the Prussian Health Council approved limited medically supervised and voluntary sterilisation designed to stop the breeding of genetic defectives, and the German Parliament permitted the same, just weeks before Hitler became Chancellor.

In 1933, the new National Socialist Government passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which sanctioned the compulsory sterilisation of people suffering from nine supposedly heritable conditions: such action (the Hitler cut) was a sacrifice made by the defective for the good of all. Doctors were ordered to report all such cases and could be fined for failing to do so. As a result, as many as 400,000 adults (1% of people of child-rearing age) were sterilised, many forcibly, often with disastrous health consequences.

This action was popularised on the grounds of cost, with a poster claiming that a man suffering from a hereditary defect cost the Peoples Community 60,000 Reichsmarks during his lifetime, while school textbooks asked students to calculate the money to be saved if support was to be withdrawn: An idiot in an institution costs around four Reichsmarks a day. How much would it cost if he has to be cared for there for 40 years? Indeed, after the war, a document was found in which a Nazi statistician had worked out that 70,273 disinfections saved the Reich 885,439,980 marks over a period of 10 years and that Germany had been saved 13,492,440 kilograms of meat and wurst. This equates to an astonishing 4 billion in todays values.

The Nazis were helped by the fact that many parents of disabled children accepted these arguments. Indeed, when one sympathetic director of an asylum for backward juveniles surveyed their parents, he was appalled to discover that 73% said they would support the painless curtailment of the life of your child if experts had established that it was suffering from incurable idiocy, and that half of those who disagreed thought euthanasia would be acceptable if the parents were no longer in a position to care. This, combined with growing support from doctors, educationalists, journalists, politicians, lawyers and academics, provided fertile ground for what was to follow.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, the persecution escalated exponentially.

Hitlers top secret Euthanasia Decree stated that after the most careful assessment of their condition those suffering from illnesses deemed to be incurable may be granted a mercy death. As a leading Nazi doctor said, the idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth, must lose its life at the front in order that feeble-minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum.

Under Aktion T4 (the programme was based at a confiscated Jewish villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin), those selected were systematically assembled and transported to six converted psychiatric hospitals. Initially, lethal injections were used but soon at Hitlers personal recommendation carbon monoxide and poison gas were employed. These were often supplemented by gradual starvation as well as medical experimentation.

Appallingly, the slaughter started with children (the first, Gerhardt Kretschmar, was murdered in response to a request by his father). By early 1941, at least 5,000 children, many only a few months old, with a wide range of conditions mongolism, idiocy, cerebral palsy, and so on had been assessed, registered and killed. Their parents were asked for consent and a panel of three medical experts was convened to agree on the course of action.

Deception and social pressure were increasingly deployed, however, and such garbage children were soon placed in so-called special sections, apparently to receive medical treatment, but instead packed-off to their deaths in buses (run by a commercial company) with windows painted grey, to spare the hard-working people of the Third Reich from distressing sights. Indeed, children living near Hadamar Castle referred to these buses as murder boxes and were heard teasing each other, saying: Youre an idiot! Youll be sent to bake. Letters were dispatched to parents expressing regret that their child had died of natural causes, and inquiries were greeted with the blankest of denials.

Tens of thousands of adults with a wide range of disabilities including, of course, learning disabilities soon followed, and the accounts of these mass killings are harrowing.

The victims were made to strip naked and ushered into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms; their bodies were quickly cremated, with any valuables stolen to help finance the programme. There are appalling stories of the sense of pride and evident sadism of the perpetrators, most of whom were medical professionals (with some eager volunteers). The stench from the crematoria was such that villages near the killing centres were soon worried. Following brave protests from some family members and leading churchmen, the adult programme was officially terminated in August 1941.

Although the killing centres were mostly closed, the informal murder of the disabled sometimes called wild euthanasia continued in different but equally dreadful ways, and was caught up in the much greater genocide of the Holocaust. The techniques perfected on the disabled, especially deception and poison gas, were soon applied to these much larger populations, and about a hundred of the personnel responsible for T4 including the loathsome Christian Wirth, later Commandant at Treblinka were transferred to the extermination camps being constructed in Poland, where their expertise was valued. Brains and other organs of the murdered (many of whom are still nameless) were preserved and used for lucrative research, some not being buried until 2001.

As if this catalogue of cruelty and murder wasnt bad enough, many of those responsible never met justice and, where they did, the punishments tended to be lenient: 57% of those who faced trials were found not guilty, compared with just 24% of those accused of crimes against the Jews. Of those convicted, less than 2% received life sentences, compared with 11% for genocide. Only seven individuals were sentenced to death, and several went on to have distinguished medical careers.

This is partly a reflection of the status accorded to disabled people by the Allies, but it is also because their general intentions were acceptable not just in pre-Nazi Germany, but in the homelands of the judges. As the disabled actress and artist Liz Crow puts it, the Nuremberg prosecutors were confused about whether killing disabled people was a public service. The prevailing attitudes about disabled people, that they were inferior, pitiable and burdensome, defined their judgement.

We must be careful not to draw simplistic parallels between the grotesque cruelties of the Third Reich and the very real, but much more nuanced, injustices faced by disabled people today. However, certain lessons can be drawn.

The first is the way that this barbarism was supported by lawyers, university professors, and other respected professionals. We can too easily dismiss eugenics as pseudo-science, but that is not how it seemed at the time, with many people including a large number of progressives wanting to straighten out Kants crooked timbers of humanity and improve the health, happiness and prosperity of the race. In other words, the animus behind this campaign wasnt confined to Nazi Germany, but was evident in advanced societies around the world between the two wars.

Furthermore, 1945 didnt discredit eugenics, and many of its core beliefs endured. Indeed, the much-celebrated William Beveridge, the founder of Britains welfare state, was a committed eugenicist.

The long-stay hospitals, which were the destiny of so many people in post-war Britain and America, treated learning disability as a medical issue and were often appallingly badly managed resulting in dehumanising, regimented and squalid living conditions. While the worst of these places were eventually closed down in the 1970s and 1980s, hardly a week goes by without new accounts of neglect, abuse and cruelty. The dreadful roll-call of places such as Winterbourne View, Muckamore Abbey, Whorlton Hall and so many others, should make us consider whether we have moved beyond the mentality that enabled the catastrophe of T4. The appalling catalogue of bullying and violence around the learning disabled suggests we live in a society which all too readily devalues the disabled and regards them as fair game.

Appallingly, such attitudes are not confined to the poorly educated and can be found in professional and academic circles.

One example might be the philosopher Peter Singers statement in 1979 that killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all. This was based on his views on the relative capacities of animals. Another example is the geneticist Richard Dawkins who in 2020 tweeted: Its one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. Its quite another to conclude that it wouldnt work in practice. Of course, it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses. Why on earth wouldnt it work for humans? The fact that the breeding of physical characteristics in animals and plants is quite different from ensuring intellectual capacity in human beings is one objection; another is that eugenics has been tried and made absolutely no difference. It is astonishing that such eminent figures should be spreading such pernicious nonsense.

We also have to recognise just how deeply rooted is the popular prejudice against learning disabled people, not just among a handful of look at me intellectuals. The fact that parents internalised the views of their childs worthlessness demonstrates just how pervasive such attitudes can be. And acknowledging that the thinking behind T4 enjoyed popular support should give us pause. After all, this was an advanced society with an enviable reputation for medicine, science and social care with a population who had absorbed a culture of contempt to such an extent that it allowed these things to happen.

The fact that the programme of murder was carried out by medical professionals from nurses and junior doctors right up to the most senior academics and experienced physicians of the time, and in hospitals and other medical settings offers us the second lesson.

We rightly praise the NHS and entrust our bodies to the expert care of its staff, but medical professionals are no more immune to prejudice, often unconscious, than the rest of us. The fact that the learning disabled have suffered disproportionately during the Coronavirus pandemic for reasons entirely unconnected to their condition should make us question medicines hierarchy of values. Especially worrying was the National Institute for Care Excellences early triage advice which identified learning disabilities as an underlying health condition. This was quickly changed when it was pointed out that a learning disability is not an illness, but it is troubling that it was issued in the first place. Even more concerning was the fact that Do Not Resuscitate notices were slapped on learning disabled residents of care homes without consent being sought.

Thus, in thinking about T4, we need to explore the extent to which our own medical professionals sometimes regard the learning disabled as in some sense lesser.

Thirdly, we should examine how a cost-benefit analysis was used to vindicate the murders. For, although irrational hatred no doubt fuelled this assault, it was given social and political justification by the calculation which set expenditure on such people against their productivity and concluded that they were a net loss.

Now, while most disabled people are quite capable of working, and many are eager to do so, a minority are not. Indeed, people like my profoundly learning disabled son Joey will never hold down a job or pay tax, and will require frankly expensive care throughout his life. As a parent, I have often been made aware of the costs incurred and am reliably informed that the first question asked when local authorities (under dreadful financial pressures of their own) consider an application for support is financial. But T4 shows in the most vivid way imaginable that the moment an individuals fundamental rights are subjected to a simple cost-benefit analysis, is the moment the gates of hell open wide.

The final lesson that can be drawn, however, is more positive, more energising and more creative, albeit tinged with tragedy and dreadful pain. It can be found in the extraordinarily courageous opposition that took shape and, astonishingly, managed to stop the adult programme. This was partly possible because (unlike the Jewish or Romany experience) it wasnt entire families that were destined for slaughter. But the opposition provided by a handful of brave and fiercely determined relatives with a few influential and largely Catholic churchmen, is a remarkable story of courage and principle which is not widely known.

Today, we still see families heroically battling against the many injustices that they face. These range from the endless bureaucratic tedium of fighting local authorities for basic support, to the powerful crusades for justice led by the grieving families of too many disabled people who have died entirely preventable deaths, often in the hands of badly trained and managed health and care staff. The fact that mothers like Sara Ryan, whose son Connor Sparrowhawk drowned in a bath in an NHS assessment and treatment unit in 2013, were vilified and blamed by the authorities, shows that the days of gaslighting are hardly behind us. What these committed campaigners also show, however, is just how powerful the familys voice can be, especially when allied with the lived experience of the learning disabled themselves.

From Antigone onwards, whenever the authorities are confronted by the passionate rage of real families suffering genuine injustice, they do, eventually, have to acknowledge their shortcomings and face up to the consequences.

What is required to ensure that T4 can never be repeated? And how will we know when its lessons have been learned and we can put its dreadful example behind us? I suspect that three things are required.

The first is cultural: above all, the understanding that having a disabled family member especially one with learning disabilities isnt the worst thing imaginable, and that learning disabled people are valued human beings who have so much to offer the world. But healthcare professionals still talk about the risks of having a child with Downs Syndrome, and hateful terms such as idiot, imbecile, retard and moron remain in common parlance.

Language and representation needs to change radically if the disabled especially (though not exclusively) those like my son who find it difficult to speak up for themselves are to be granted the dignity, respect and affection that they so manifestly deserve.

Then, we need to stop assessing people by their productivity and earning ability, and start to create a new sense of community and belonging. That will require a reshaping of our entire system of values, wherein we stop regarding intellectual achievement as the single most important quality a human being can have.

From Plato to this day, philosophers have struggled with the problem of idiocy, with a deep anxiety about whether people with limited rational capacity, certainly those lacking speech, can be admitted into the category of the human. In my experience, however, learning disabilities provide a powerful alienation effect, turning the assumptions of classical thought on its head and insisting that the best definition of a human being is the product of two human parents, and nothing to do with intellectual ability, speech or rational powers. In other words, as Hamlet put it, we need to learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy and the time has come to rethink some of our most cherished prejudices.

Finally, we need to develop nothing less than a new social contract, to ensure that our fellow humans, whatever their frailties and differences, are not just protected but are given the best that society can offer them.

The moment an individuals fundamental rights are subjected to a simple cost-benefit analysis is the moment the gates of hell open wide

The extraordinary achievements of modern medicine mean that far more disabled infants survive and such advances are to be welcomed. But, if we are to help people have a decent and happy life, we have to develop a new understanding of our shared experiences and responsibilities. Profound disabilities can be found in any family, class, educational background and ethnicity, and need to be accepted as fundamental: as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson shrewdly observed, what we call disability is perhaps the essential characteristic of being human.

The renewed interest in the enormous challenge of social care is largely dominated by concern for the elderly, but at least half of the recipients of care are, in fact, working age adults with disabilities. Families still provide the vast majority of unpaid support, with an incalculable impact on mental and physical health, let alone prosperity and quality of life.

And so what is needed, I increasingly think, is a re-articulation of societys fundamental duties to those people whose physical or intellectual impairments limit their ability to make a full economic contribution. No longer can they be seen as a burden that others are expected to carry. Instead, we must recognise that they are our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our daughters and sons. We are they and they are us. And this new social contract should be built on as firm legal foundations as a childs right to an education, an adults access to medicine, or a citizens rights to legal protection.

As weve seen, the human rights of disabled people still have to be fought for and protected. But this struggle is also a cultural one, in the way that disabilities are represented and described in the media, education and everyday life. We rightly celebrate the achievements of talented and remarkable disabled people, but that too re-emphasises the old metrics by which others fail.

We need a new way of celebrating, championing and supporting those who dont win the races that the so-called meritocracy is so eager to set. We have a long way to go before our fundamental duties to the so-called losers are unquestioned: when everyone, whatever their condition, whatever their limitations, however profound their impairments, is granted full human dignity, in all settings and at all stages in life. And when we finally do, we may be able to say that we are free of the dreadful mindset that led to this publicly endorsed, legally enabled and professionally delivered programme of mass murder.

The challenge is clear, but who is prepared to take the lead?

This article was first published in the November 2021 print edition of Byline Times

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'Life Unworthy of Life': The Lessons of T4 Byline Times - Byline Times

Harvard University professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson takes a break from searching for insects in the Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord, Mass., in 1998. Wilson died on Sunday at the age of 92. Thomas James Hurst/AP hide caption

Harvard University professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson takes a break from searching for insects in the Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord, Mass., in 1998. Wilson died on Sunday at the age of 92.

Pioneering biologist, environmental activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson has died. He was 92.

The influential and sometimes controversial Harvard professor first made his name studying ants he was often known as "the ant man." But he later broadened his scope to the intersection between human behavior and genetics, creating the field of sociobiology in the process. He died on Sunday in Burlington, Mass., the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation said in an announcement on its website.

"His impact extends to every facet of society," the foundation's chairman, David J. Prend, said in a statement. "He was a true visionary with a unique ability to inspire and galvanize. He articulated, perhaps better than anyone, what it means to be human."

Paula J. Ehrlich, the foundation's CEO and president, described Wilson as a "relentless synthesizer of ideas" whose "courageous scientific focus and poetic voice transformed our way of understanding ourselves and our planet."

As an entomologist whose early career came at a time when scientists were gaining a deeper understanding of genetic mechanisms, such as DNA, Wilson studied how ant behavior evolved through natural selection.

He first gained wide notoriety for his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in which he expounded on evidence that human behavior was influenced by genetics.

Wilson argued that our genes guided our social behaviors everything from warfare to altruism. That idea prompted a sharp backlash from fellow academics and activists who equated biological determinism with the eugenics movement of the early 20th century and Nazi Germany.

But his ideas outlasted the critics and eventually became widely accepted, not only in academia but among the general public.

Wilson later capitalized on his fame to take up the cause of biodiversity and environmentalism. Among other things, he advocated for setting aside half of the Earth as wilderness.

Speaking to NPR in 2016, he said the fate of the planet "is in the hands of the people, of countries, particularly our own, that have the ability to change things."

Fellow biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted: "Sad news of death of Ed Wilson. Great entomologist, ecologist, greatest myrmecologist, invented sociobiology, pioneer of island biogeography, genial humanist & biophiliac."

But such was his influence that musician Paul Simon also tweeted his sadness at Wilson's passing calling him "a great scientist" and "dear friend."

"Ed was an intellectual giant and a gentle, humble, compassionate man," Simon said.

Wilson authored more than 30 books and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Among his numerous scientific prizes were the U.S. National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize.

Wilson is survived by his daughter, Catherine. No cause was given for his death.

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EO Wilson, who pioneered the field of sociobiology, has died at age 92 - NPR

Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, heads of state, and other billionaire power brokers (psychopaths) fly in in their private jets with full motorcades to places like Davos to determine the fate of us, the little people. At their last WEF meeting in Dubai, in November, they determined that by 2030, the little people will own nothing and be happy. These people are individually the most prolific polluters on the planet, yet they want the rest of us to reduce our collective impact on the environment or carbon footprint.

The magnitude of this hypocrisy is breath taking.

Remember Al Carbon Credit Gore? The zinc miner with a private jet, multiple mansions, and a fleet of gas guzzling cars. Hypocrite!

Climate change, election fraud, immigration, the supply chain, The Green New Deal, social justice, CRT, digital currency, the response to COVID, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, socialized medicine, sexual orientation, race, and the demonization of religion are all connected. They are using these tools to divide us and coerce us into their idea of utopia, The Great Reset. They are working diligently to concentrate the majority of the wealth at the very top, drastically reduce our standard of living, and gain complete digital control us by virtue of individual implanted digital ID, ushered in as a trojan horse called a vaccine passport or health pass. Once in place, if you step out of line you will be cut off. Eugenics and population reduction is also on the agenda.

Has anyone seen the footage of the worldwide protests on the network or cable news over the last 20+ weeks? Me neither. They are happening. Wheres the coverage.

This will end badly unless we unite and stand up! Do not comply. Do your research.

TODD R. BRITTON,

Alpena

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The magnitude of hypocrisy is breathtaking | News, Sports, Jobs - Alpena News

Vasectomy is unnatural. It estranges a man from himself. Its internal logic leads inexorably to abortion, population control, and eugenics.

How do you convince a man to get sterilized?

For Datta Pai, the answer was spectacle. Indias midcentury population boom inspired Pai and the rest of the nations public-health clerisy to launch a sterilization campaign. Pai, an abortionist in Bombay, deplored people pollution and advocated population control. He felt a mass-sterilization campaign would restrict Indias population growth, particularly among the nations fecund working class. Pai scoured the railway stations of Bombay and the Indian hinterlands, finding hordes of working men to cajole, convince, and sterilize.

While Bombayites were initially sold on the procedure by Pais impassioned advocacy, many men declined to attend their vasectomy appointments. Interviews with the absconders revealed what a 1974 report called emotional barriers to the procedure among the middle and lower class people whom [Pai] sought to reach.

To reassure would-be patients, Pai brought motivatorsmen who had been vasectomized and were from the same social class as Pais prospectsto the Bombay junction. He set up a surgery station in a railway car, where men gathered by the dozens to go under the knife. Within a matter of years, Pais streamlined operation propelled Bombays annual vasectomy rate from 360 procedures per year to nearly 280,000.

Pai learned his lesson from Bombay and brought his traveling circus to the Indian hinterlands. There, he set up vasectomy camps, which, according to the same report,

had a carnival-like atmosphere with movies, lotteries, and other activities meant to obscure the programs medical purpose. The majority of those undergoing vasectomy at such camps were poor, illiterate farmers.

If using carnival games to lure illiterate peasants into mutilating their reproductive organs seems immoral, Pai later admitted there could be a certain amount of misring out of enthusiasm.

The Washington Post seems to share that enthusiasm. On Sunday, the Post ran a piece profiling the men who have gotten sterilized, not for bread and circuses like 20th-century Indian bumpkins, but instead as act[s] of love.

The first man in the Posts profile recalled, with some satisfaction, the day of his vasectomy. After he heard local doctors were offering discounts on the procedure during World Vasectomy Day, the man immediately signed up to get snipped. His wife had experienced unpleasant side effects from contraceptives, he said, so he wanted to man up and get sterilized.

The procedure was a total relief, almost like the covid shotlike Im safe now, he told the Post.

It wasnt just a workaday flop-and-chop, of course: the man also went under the knife to support abortion rights.

Ive seen the miracle of life, he said. But Ive also seen kids who are born into poverty and misery and dont have a fair shot.

His implication is the same as Datta Pais: The underclass breeds too much. Its childrens lives are meaningless. The miracle of life is not to be found among the poor and miserable. Eight generations of trailer trash are enough.

The rest of thePost piece is agitprop for sterilizationvasectomies are said to promote family planning, to empower men to be responsible, to make a better man, each justification designed to normalize a bastard procedure whose administration was traditionally entrusted to veterinarians and war criminals.

Doctors who perform vasectomies say they wantmen to be open and comfortable talking about the procedure instead of recoiling in horror at the idea, a urologist named Doug Stein told the Post. He lamented that stigma still attached to a procedure that represents the ultimate way to be a good man.

The stigma remains because a vasectomy is unnatural. It estranges a man from himself. Its internal logic leads inexorably to abortion, population control, and eugenics. The Posts piece gestures at this, but will not say it explicitly.

At least Datta Pai had the courage of his convictions.

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Getting Sterilized to Own the Cons - The American Conservative