Category Archives: Eugenics

Content warning: This article discusses ableism.

What if we could cure or eliminate all diseases? What if we could live forever?

For transhumanists, these philosophical questions are simply matters of engineering and scientific innovation. Put simply, transhumanism is a belief that human beings will evolve beyond species-typical levels of physical performance, cognitive ability, and sensory perception.

According to transhumanists, we have the potential to evolve so radically that we can become posthuman, altering ourselves so successfully using technology and pharmacology that we would no longer be recognizably human. Transhumanism is a philosophy, and its adherents carry out a variety of practices to achieve their goal, including cryonics, lifestyle changes, cybernetic augmentation, neurofeedback, gene editing, and even cognitive enhancements with smart drugs.

Real research and development into transhumanism exists. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation produces leading research in cryonics. The Carboncopies Foundation accelerates neuroscience research in the hope of cracking Whole Brain Emulation simulating the human brain and its functions in order to reverse-engineer our biological brains to create artificial brains. The SENS Research Foundation is working on developing anti-aging therapies and educating people about them. Elon Musks Neuralink aims to create a way for human brains to interface with computers.

However, as fantastical and promising their pursuits may seem, transhumanist practices and innovations could lead to negative consequences to people with disabilities, going as far as suggesting that disabilities are flaws that need to be eliminated. This attitude is reminiscent of eugenics and suggests that the problem lies with people who have disabilities instead of the systemic inequities and inaccessibility that they have to deal with.

What is transhumanism?

Although its largely still a fringe belief, the internet has increased the dissemination of transhumanist thought. The World Transhumanist Association now called Humanity+ was established in 1998. Part of its stated mission is to enable humans to be better than well: that is, to be pinnacles of health.

Humans have strived to perfect ourselves for as long as we have existed. After Darwin introduced the theory of evolution, we began to imagine evolving beyond our current state. People adopt transhumanist beliefs for many different reasons; therefore, transhumanism is difficult to define because it often means something different for everyone.

Some people join the movement because they are sick and desperately want a cure. Some want to live forever. Others are frustrated by the limitations of the human body and want to use technology to fix humanity so that we can exert more control over ourselves. For some people, called biohackers, experimenting on themselves and encouraging public participation in scientific exploration is fulfilling.

Its not all fun though. Due to the cost of getting involved, most transhumanist practices are currently a largely individual pursuit, even though transhumanism was initially conceived as a way of uplifting the human species as a whole.

Science fiction or future science?

Transhumanism relies on the radical enhancement of human faculties, with the primary aim of extending human life.

In the cognitive domain, peoples expectations that cognitive enhancement drugs would work have exceeded the effects such drugs actually have. Moreover, there is little scientific evidence that smart drugs are effective or safe for long-term use by healthy people. An alternate approach, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), involves stimulating the brain by passing magnetic pulses through it. TMS is used as a treatment for depression and has been proven to have cognitive benefits, including improvements in working memory, motor tasks, and some linguistic tasks. However, its long-term effects on cognition are unknown, and side effects include a minimal risk of seizures.

Meanwhile, in 2015, Chinese scientist He Jiankui edited the genes of three babies using CRISPR to make them resistant to HIV. CRISPR is a gene editing tool that can alter human DNA with a relatively high level of precision. Evaluating whether Jiankui succeeded and whether his actions could cause mutations that affect the babies biological functioning will be challenging. The long-term effects of embryonic gene-editing in humans are unknown, and it could turn out to be highly beneficial or harmful.

Some proposed transhumanist innovations, however, seem to be clearly harmful. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned against the use of fecal transplants, which involve transferring fecal matter from the gut of a healthy person to that of an unhealthy person, to help replenish their gut bacteria after a recurrent infection. FDA guidelines state that individuals should consult a health professional before undergoing a fecal transplant.

The FDA has also condemned the idea of transfusing a young persons plasma into an older persons body to prevent aging. Although a rejuvenating effect was found when scientists stitched younger and older mice together so they shared the same circulatory system, there is no evidence that plasma transfusions are a legitimate anti-aging strategy for humans. Side effects of plasma transfusions include allergic reactions and circulatory overload.

Ethical consequences of transhumanism

There are plenty of ethical conundrums raised by transhumanism. Depending on the availability and cost of enhancement procedures across the world, a posthuman society could be even more unequal than our current one. Currently, many transhumanists are white men based in Western countries, and some of the procedures they undergo are prohibitively expensive. For instance, Silicon Valley millionaire Serge Faguet spent 250,000 USD on biohacking, including hearing implants he doesnt need, frequent biomarker tests, oestrogen blockers to boost his testosterone, and frequent consultations with Ivy League health professionals. Although the community is large and varied, to some extent being able to pursue transhumanism to move beyond mere survival to self-driven evolution reflects a level of privilege many can only dream of.

Even if large-scale augmentation was widely available at a lower cost, there is no guarantee that most people would submit to transhumanist procedures. Some of the procedures are highly invasive, and there are well-documented security risks associated when medical data is collected by electronic devices like implants. Furthermore, in a world with rising distrust in science and governments, society could perhaps be stratified into humans and posthumans, with both sides adamant that they made the right decision. Many science fiction novels have explored the perils of similar scenarios.

A slippery slope toward eugenics

A variety of devices and therapies that make the world easier to navigate for people with disabilities already exist. Some are implanted in the body, like cochlear implants, which improve hearing for those who are hard of hearing or are deaf, and have several settings for different environments. Some, like exoskeletons, are wearable devices that assist in limb movement, either for physical rehabilitation or restoring mobility. French medical device company Wandercraft recently unveiled its latest Atalante exoskeleton, which allows people with paraplegia to walk with a more natural gait. The exoskeleton is self-balancing and remote-controlled, but due to safety regulations, it must be suspended from the ceiling during use.

It can be argued that transhumanism is simply arguing for a more extensive use of such assistive devices. However, the rhetoric of transhumanists is implicitly an ableist one. It assumes that people with disabilities are in need of fixing, and that their lives would be improved by giving them the same abilities as abled people.

Take the example of Zoltan Istvan, the leader of the Transhumanist Party in the US, who caused an uproar in 2015 when he wrote an article that many considered horrifically ableist. In sum, he argued that the government does not need to spend money on making places more accessible; this money should instead go into scientific research to enhance people with disabilities. Transhumanism also advocates for genetic or embryonic screening, so that parents can choose whether to have children with disabilities.

This view is informed by a reductive focus on competition between individuals survival of the fittest as the fundamental organizing principle of society. This focus, based on how some people interpreted fitness, was the argument that was used to justify the emergence of eugenics in the nineteenth century. However, it has been argued that a crucial component of survival is social cooperation and support, which such rhetorics ignore.

Because transhumanism focuses on correcting human flaws, the movement evokes comparisons to eugenics the pseudoscientific and racist movement to improve humans through selective breeding and other physical enhancements. Some transhumanists claim that everyone has a disability, because human beings are flawed and unsuited to our environment. Others claim that no one would ever rationally choose disability, since it hampers a persons ability to live a good life.

This argument has been frequently disputed by disability activists: it is clearly possible to both have a disability and live a good life. Some people who have disabilities do experience a lower standard of living, but that is due to systemic inequities that reduce their access to things abled people take for granted. Instead of physical or mental conditions, it is societal attitudes and the resulting barriers that are disabling, because they make the world less accessible for people with certain characteristics.

The medicalization of disability turns a structural problem the problem of an inaccessible society into an individual one. Therefore, it is more prudent to remove barriers to accessibility than to try to eliminate disability itself. For instance, one of the guiding principles for the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is respect for difference and acceptance of persons with disabilities as part of human diversity and humanity.

The ethical considerations of widespread human enhancement, particularly regarding disability and unequal access, are complex. For now, transhumanism is largely not viable. However, if the scientific evidence changes, we will need to have difficult conversations to move the philosophy beyond the realm of science fiction to something that will legitimately transform human existence for the better.

See the article here:

Can we evolve on our own terms? - Varsity

DetailsBy Jenna KunzeJanuary 21, 2022

The controversial Theodore Roosevelt statue was quietly removed from its decades-long perch in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City Wednesday night by museum contractors.

The planned removal was completed around 1 a.m. Thursday morning, when a crane removed the bronze portion of the statue, museum spokesperson Scott Rohan wrote in an email to Native News Online. The remaining base of the statue will be removed throughout the week, and the restoration of the plaza will continue through the spring.

The statue, which depicts racial hierarchy, with Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by a Native American man and an African-American man on either side below him, will be stored in New York as it is prepared for shipping, Rohan said. It is slated to be repurposed in a contextualized exhibit at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Mendora, North Dakota.

The New York Department of Transportation required that the statues removal happen at night for safety reasons and to minimize disruption to traffic and pedestrians, Rohan wrote. These are the designated hours for this type of work.

But that hasnt historically been the case for statue removals. In April 2018, the city and the Museum of the City of New York removed a public statue of J. Marion Sims from 5th Avenue and East 103rd St. in East Harlem, during daylight hours as spectators watched and cheered. Sims was a 19th century surgeon who experimented on enslaved women, without anesthesia. He was also known as the father of gynecology.

This past November, New York City removed its Thomas Jefferson statue from City Hall, because of the former presidents history of owning slaves. According to reports at the time, work crews spent hours moving the statue, also during daytime hours.

The fate of the so-called "Equestrian Statue" has been in limbo since June 2020, when the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis begat nationwide protests against racism. But Indigenous, African American, and other people living in the City have long objected to the statue, for the racial hierarchy the statue portrays and for the land allotment system Roosevelt championed, at the cost of displacing Natives of more than 230 million acres of their land.

Roosevelt is also remembered for his support of eugenics, and his public address in 1886 where he said: I dont go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are. And I shouldnt like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.

Of African Americans, Roosevelt wrote, As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites.

In response to last years protests, the City of New York, which owns the building and property housing the American Museum of Natural History and the steps where the statue sits, agreed to take it down. Mayor Bill de Blasio backed the decision, saying the problematic statue explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.

Native Americans in North Dakota are wary of receiving it. United Tribes Technical College President Leander McDonald (Spirit Lake Tribe) previously told Native News Online that using the statue to portray the true history of Roosevelt could be educational.

If they're going to have something there that provides an accurate history of this president and how he felt towards tribal and Black people, then maybe theres an educational opportunity for the public, he said. If thats truly going to happen.

The truth about Indian Boarding Schools

This month, were asking our readers to help us raise $10,000 to fund our year-long journalism initiative called The Indian Boarding School Project: A Dark Chapter in History. Our mission is to shine a light on the dark era of forced assimilation of native American children by the U.S. government and churches. Youll be able to read stories each week and join us for Livestream events to understand what the Indian Boarding School era has meant to Native Americans and what it still means today.

This news will be provided free for everyone to read, but it is not free to produce. Thats why were asking you to make a donation this month to help support our efforts. Any contribution of any amount big or small gives us a better, stronger future and allows us to remain a force for change.Donate to Native News Online today and support independent Indigenous journalism. Thank you.

About The Author

Staff Writer

Jenna Kunze is a reporter for Native News Online and Tribal Business News. Her bylines have appeared in The Arctic Sounder, High Country News, Indian Country Today, Smithsonian Magazine and Anchorage Daily News. In 2020, she was one of 16 U.S. journalists selected by the Pulitzer Center to report on the effects of climate change in the Alaskan Arctic region. Prior to that, she served as lead reporter at the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, Alaska. Kunze is based in New York.

Visit link:

Teddy Roosevelt Statue Removed from American Museum of Natural History--In the Middle of the Night - nativenewsonline.net

First Nations people please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.

In early January, the prime minister and minister for Indigenous Australians announced their government would build a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Precinct. The precinct will be known as Ngurra, a word meaning home, a place of belonging, inclusion.

The Ngurra precinct will encompass a new National Resting Place. The Resting Place will serve as a site for the care of Ancestral Remains returning from collections in Australia and around the globe whose cultural groups are unknown and are unable to make the journey home to Country.

The National Resting Place will be unique in the world, incorporating aspects of a memorial, repository, educational facility and research institute, but transcending all of these. For Indigenous people, it will provide an Indigenous-centred place to visit, care for and honour Ancestors.

The National Resting Place will also provide an opportunity for non-Indigenous Australians to reflect on the history and impact of their knowledge systems, laws, moral standards and practices in relation to Indigenous peoples.

The Ngurra Precinct has the potential to be transformative in assisting our nation to discover a new perspective on what it means to be Australian.

As Ken Wyatt is the first Indigenous person to occupy the position of minister for Indigenous Australians, this is a significant legacy of his tenure. The National Resting Place is also a culmination of the work by generations of Indigenous peoples to stop the theft of bodies and advocate for the repatriation of thousands of remains stored in institutions around the world so they can be returned home.

Why a national resting place for ancestral remains?

Over a period spanning more than 200 years, Indigenous remains were collected as trophies of empire, in the interest of science and anthropology, and as curios of a supposedly dying race. Thousands of Ancestral Remains were exhumed without the consent of their descendants, in practices that went against the laws and moral codes for the treatment of deceased Europeans.

Historical reasoning for the collection of Ancestral Remains in Australia include:

Discovery

From 1770 onwards, the collection of Aboriginal remains was informed by ideas aligned with science and discovery. The collection and classification of people, plants and animals that occurred on expeditions of scientific discovery and empire expansion contributed to ideas of European superiority.

Imperialism

Aboriginal bodies also became trophies of empire. Leaders of First Nations resistance, such as the Pemulwuy and Yagan, were beheaded and their heads were sent to the United Kingdom. First Nations peoples Ancestral Remains were displayed by some frontier families on mantlepieces or used as cranial sugar bowls and ashtrays. The perception of Ancestral Remains as rare also contributed to their appeal to collectors and their market value in auction houses, where they were viewed as commodities.

Racial science

The increase in collecting First Nations peoples remains from the 1850s was also propelled by the rise in racial science. Overseas interest in Ancestral Remains stemmed largely from notions of a hierarchy of race, which perceived Indigenous Australians to be at or near the bottom of the racial order.

This mindset continued to cause harm throughout the 20th century. Despite growing condemnation of racial science, collecting of Ancestral Remains continued after the second world war.

The post-war era

In the wake of the second world war, atrocities committed in the name of science and eugenics reverberated throughout scientific institutions. Collections of Ancestral Remains had been carefully classified before. But after the war, they were bundled together in crates and boxes. This contributed to a further loss of the provenance and records of Ancestral Remains.

The DNA era

From around the late 1980s, Aboriginal remains held in collections were defended on the grounds they were of scientific interest. Breakthroughs in dating technologies offered the possibility of extracting scientific information about human evolution over longer timeframes, and the human genome project sought to provide a complete genetic blueprint of humanity.

Where earlier interest in Ancestral Remains sought to prove theories of evolution and racial hierarchy, scientists from the late 20th century argued their research would prove beneficial for the entire human race.

A key debate emerged in this period between some scientists and Indigenous people, who asserted their right to bury their ancestors.

Decolonisation and recognition

By the 1970s, Aboriginal people were organising locally and nationally for land and a rightful place in the political life of the nation.

Independent Aboriginal organisations such as the since-disbanded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA) were critical in advocating for the return of Ancestral Remains.

Calls for repatriation posed significant provocations to the history, role and purpose of collecting institutions. This led to the development of protocols and policies guiding repatriation in the 1980s.

The return of Ancestral Remains is now widespread, with many repatriations negotiated with community and family of origin. However, many remains are yet to find their way home. The precise number of Ancestral Remains in institutional and private collections has been difficult to determine.

Collections continue to be revealed, with recent information coming to light about Ancestral Remains in India and Russia, along with unknown numbers held in private collections around the world. Recent research commissioned by AIATSIS, and yet to be published, counted tens of thousand of remains awaiting return from public institutions in Australia and the world.

Ngurras National Resting Place will serve as an initial landing place for Ancestral Remains on their journey home. The National Resting Place will support community-led research to achieve the identification and repatriation of these remains, aiding their return to Country where possible.

Removed Ancestral Remains are powerful reminders of the historical dehumanisation, objectification and commodification of Indigenous peoples. The National Resting Place will enable this story to be more fully understood.

The story of the ideas and practices that informed the stealing of Indigenous bodies, as well as the long struggle by First Nations peoples to bring their Ancestors home, will finally gain national recognition through the Ngurra precinct.

Heidi Norman, professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney and Anne Maree Payne, Lecturer, Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges, University of Technology Sydney.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Originally posted here:

Ancestral Remains of Australias First Nations Will Now Have a National Resting Place - The Wire

Breadcrumb Trail Links

A New York Times investigation found some non-invasive prenatal tests to be wrong up to 85 per cent of the time

Author of the article:

Publishing date:

The New Years baby story is a news standard, an endearing report about the couple who planned a quiet New Years Eve at home but instead delivered a baby at 12:05 a.m. on January 1st. In smaller cities and towns, local merchants often provide gifts to the New Years baby.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

So it was a bit jarring to see The New York Times Jan. 1 feature about non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT). It was about babies who had never been born. An NYT investigation found the non-invasive tests to be wildly inaccurate wrong up to 85 per cent of the time which often leads to abortions. Its a tale of two doleful phenomena: the widespread return of eugenics and the financial corruption of medicine.

Eugenics was a respectable, even fashionable, cause in progressive circles in the 1920s and 1930s. When I studied economics at Cambridge, I came to learn that the giants of the departments history John Maynard Keynes most prominent among them advocated for eugenics.

Closer to home, Tommy Douglas voted the greatest Canadian of all time in 2004 wrote his masters thesis on The Problems of the Subnormal Family in 1933. He advocated medical licences prior to marriage to prevent those with intellectual disabilities from being permitted to breed.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Eugenics was a respectable cause in the 1920s and 1930s

The Nazi medical horrors put eugenics in a bad odour for a few generations. As premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, Douglas declined to implement the policies that he had advocated years earlier.

In recent decades, eugenics has made a comeback in polite society due to two changes, one legal and one technological. Easy access to abortion and pre-natal testing for genetic abnormalities have made it possible for eugenics to be applied in utero .

Children with Down syndrome were the primary target, as the chromosomal anomaly is relatively easy to detect. Screening for Down syndrome has been very successful. In 2017, Iceland declared itself to be free of Down syndrome children, as nearly 100 per cent of them are now aborted after testing.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

In many countries, a majority of Down syndrome pregnancies are aborted. In the United States the abortion rate for Down syndrome is 67 per cent (1995-2011); in France its 77 per cent (2015); and Denmark, 98 per cent (2015).

In Canada , public health does not keep figures, but reports that despite the trend in delayed childbearing and advanced maternal age at delivery in the last several decades, rates of Down syndrome in Canada have not increased proportionately. This is due to increased use of prenatal diagnostic procedures followed by terminations of Down syndrome pregnancies.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

The NYT story looked at non-invasive prenatal testing for five other abnormalities and found startlingly high false positive rates, with 81 to 93 per cent of the tests giving wrong results.

Why would doctors prescribe tests for very rare conditions with sky-high false positive rates, when the likely consequence is catastrophic?

There is a financial incentive.

Its a little like running mammograms on kids, Mary Norton, an obstetrician and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, told the NYT. The chance of breast cancer is so low, so why are you doing it? I think its purely a marketing thing.

Successful marketing at that.

Why would doctors prescribe these tests?

The NYT reported that one large test maker, Natera, performed more than 400,000 screenings for just one abnormality in 2020 the equivalent of testing roughly 10 per cent of pregnant women in America.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Americas medical-industrial complex provides built-in incentives for excessive use of unreliable tests. In other countries financial incentives might be lesser, but the phenomenon remains. Where the medical system does not encourage NIPT, individual parents can seek the tests on their own. The eugenic purpose remains the same even if pursued and paid for differently.

The simplest prenatal test is for gender. Being male or female is not a disorder, but even that can be put to eugenic purposes. Its been more than 30 years since Amartya Sens landmark article on the 100 million missing women, missing largely due to sex-selected abortion and infanticide. Testing technology has only grown more widespread since.

Abortion for gender reasons is widely denounced, but is rarely done by mistake. Eugenic abortion for disabilities is not denounced. But when done by mistake the horror is all the more grave.

National Post

The big issues are far from settled. Sign up for the NP Comment newsletter,NP Platformed.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notificationsyou will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.

See the rest here:

Raymond J. de Souza: The tragedy of eugenics and the babies not born - National Post

In the 1966 Harry Harrison novel "Make Room! Make Room!" concerns about population control were the driver of the plot and the storytellers were various people in New York City when the world has reached a population of 7 billion. You have probably never heard of the novel, but you likely have heard of the movie version, "Soylent Green", starring the incomparable Charlton Heston.

Population was a big concern throughout the 20th century. Until the mid-point, the solution embraced by progressives was eugenics - weeding out those deemed less fit and letting evolution take over from there. A decade after the New York Times called it settled science and popular leaders such as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had advocated sterilization of those considered genetic defects and turned it into law, the Germans elected Adolf Hitler, who was a big proponent of creating a master race, and it went out of fashion, only to be brought back as...birth control.(1)

In the novel, the world of 1999 had 7 billion people. Water is rationed and when "soylent" (soy and lentil) "steaks" - go on sale, there is a riot. Looting is common. When the dystopian science fiction was turned into a film, the situation was even more bleak, because pop culture scientists like Paul Ehrlich and later his spiritual brother John Holdren made it bleak. The year was changed to 2022. And soylent green was no longer what the poor had to eat in the past - vegetarian food - it was people. It was horrifying. And it was a success catering to those who worried about a new Ice Age and mass starvation.

It's 2022. Welcome to the future. Yet we were not eating people. We can thank science for that. And yet another slap to the face to old environmentalists and closet eugenicists who continue their war to keep affordable food and energy out of the hands of the developing world.

What went right?

In the late 1970s the Population Bomb was still considered real, just like some people still believe oil comes from dinosaurs - it's even weirdly still called "fossil fuels"(2) - but the electricity that powers their Tesla doesn't come from fossil fuels at all. The Ehrlichs and Holdren even wrote "Ecoscience", where they once again hinted that mandatory birth control might be needed, along with the centralized world government to implement it.(3)

By 1980, though worries about population would continue, the boom and bust of food and famine began to level out. We now have crops that grow using less water, less energy, and less land than ever before. Food is plentiful and it is so affordable a $120 billion industry has grown up around making it a "values" issue for coastal elites. Like Sneetches who have stars, they can proclaim they are better than the right of us because they buy a special label.

Instead of mass starvation, food became so plentiful besity began to climb but that is a better problem than starvation. It outrages aging lefties who front for expensive organic food inside Mother Jones when I note that for the first time in the history of planet earth the poorest people can afford to get fat, but it is true, and it is a wonderful twist that rich progressives have to complain about the poor being fed too much rather than them being born, like they did 100 years ago.

The reason for the success was chemistry and biology. Chemistry began to replace old pesticides like copper sulfate, which due to resistance needs to be used in high quantities (now really only used in organic food, where yield is unimportant because cost is unimportant. and maybe they believe it is not a chemical) and GMOs began to make staple crops like corn so affordable we can even use it for boondoggles like government-mandated ethanol.

That legacy of scientific success in the face of dystopian media claims helped when it really mattered recently. Chemistry and biology teamed up to make the COVID-19 vaccines that have saved countless lives. The same chemistry and biology that activist groups denied for decades. Who led the world in vaccine denial before SARS-CoV-2? Rich white people, the same groups who think organic food is more nutritious and that their electricity comes from the sun.

The fight for science is often in opposition to activist groups and their supporters, who make their money being against things. We have been fighting for you since 2007 and for the last 15 years I have joked in talks I give that "'your food is safe' is a terrible call to action" and it is. We are billions in revenue behind groups like Greenpeace and Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Working Group, whose primary source of funding is suing governments and companies using shoddy epidemiology, mouse studies, or other observational claims and then settling for big paydays.

But having a terrible call to action, being proud of progress, does not mean it's the wrong thing to do. It only means we can't own the yachts that NRDC lawyers do. Supporting science is something we are instead proud to do, and will continue to do, so I hope you can make it possible with a donation.

NOTE:

(1) Reproductive choice is a great concept of course, but it can't be a shock that Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, was also a eugenicist. She pivoted from optimizing the genetics of white people to preventing births in minorities. It was only in 2020 that Planned Parenthood finally acknowledged that, while they do positive work now, their endorsement of abortion always looked a little queasy to those who saw it was mostly white people endorsing abortions for people of color. Prior to that, they had told everyone she was simply misunderstood (anyone who read her book Woman and the New Race must have loved being told they were stupid) and their political allies inside places like Time magazine did their best to claim she was not an institutional racist at all.

(2) Oil comes from microbes.Why the dinosaur business? Modern journalists are educated by Google - odd since they reflexively also claim to be anti-corporate - and Sinclair Oil sponsored a great deal of paleontology the same way Exxon Foundation and Gates Foundation sponsor lots of science now. Their logo was a dinosaur. So somewhere along the line someone claimed that the two must be correlated and it's been part of pop culture ever since. It's ridiculously wrong.

(3) Everyone now recognizes that is codespeak for racism but until the 2000s Holdren still had so much cachet in progressive circles President Obama made him his "Science Czar" - that they love Russian terminology so much was always odd.

More:

2022 Is The Year 'Soylent Green' Took Place - Here's How Food Science Saved The World Instead - Science 2.0

S. E. Williams |

On New Years Eve California Governor Gavin Newsom announced another important action in the states ongoing effort to redress historical wrongs.

This time the focus is on the victims of the states participation in the national Eugenics movement which resulted in the forced sterilization of thousands of Americans. In short, Eugenics is the pseudo-scientific belief once the law in America that sought to sanction the theory of racial superiority by using a reckless unscientific theory wrapped in a thin veneer of classism and racism and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The forced sterilizations encoded in Californias Eugenics laws are believed to have resulted in the sterilization of about 20,000 people who lived in state-run hospitals, homes and institutions. California would go on to lead the nation with more forced sterilizations than any other state.

Californias Eugenics laws, officially enacted in 1909, were finally repealed until 1979.

It was later discovered, however, that forced or coerced sterilizations continued to be performed on people in custody at state prisons or other correctional facilities under the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Legislation finally ended the practice by CDCR 18 years later on January 1, 2015.

A dark chapter in state history

California is committed to confronting this dark chapter in the states past and addressing the impacts of this shameful history still being felt by Californians today, said Governor Newsom in a press statement.

The newly announced program will compensate survivors with funding included in the states 2021-22 budget package.

About $4.5 million will be split evenly among all eligible individuals who apply and another $2 million is earmarked for administration and outreach for the program. In addition, $1 million will be used to establish markers or plaques at designated sites that acknowledge the wrongful sterilization of thousands of vulnerable people.

According to state officials, it is believed an estimated 600 survivors of forced sterilization are still alive today and eligible for this long overdue compensation.

How to apply

As of January 1, 2022 survivors of the state sponsored sterilization program can apply for compensation through the California Forced or Involuntary Sterilization Compensation Program. The effort is being administered by the California Victim Compensation Board (CalVCB).

Survivors are encouraged to visit http://www.victims.ca.gov/fiscp or reach out to CalVCB at 800-777-9229 or fiscp@victims.ca.gov to obtain an application. Survivors can also send a letter to P.O. Box 591, Sacramento, CA 95812-0591. Applications will be accepted from Jan. 1, 2022 through Dec. 31, 2023.

The application process is confidential

Applying is completely confidential. Compensation paid to the claimant or claimants trust will not impact a survivors Medicaid or Social Security status or benefits. Also, it will not be considered income for state tax purposes or for community property, child support, restitution or a money judgment.

While we can never fully make amends for what theyve endured, said Newsom. [T]he state will do all it can to ensure survivors of wrongful sterilization receive compensation.

From 1909 through 1979, under state Eugenics laws, thousands of people who lived in California state-run hospitals, homes and institutions were sterilized. Those laws were repealed in 1979. However, it was later found that forced or coerced sterilizations continued to be performed on people in custody at state prisons or other correctional facilities under the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Here is the original post:

California Will Compensate Survivors of Eugenics Forced Sterilizations - Black Voice News

When the coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns first took over the world nearly two years ago it birthed a multitude of oddities, from awkward enforced weekly Zoom quizzes to gifting health workers non-refundable clapping from our front doorsteps. But while the majority of us became sourdough bread specialists, the most deranged reactions came from celebrities, who took to social media to accidentally advocate for eugenics (Vanessa Hudgens) or cry about a delay to their album release (Dua Lipa). But the prize for the most cringe post of the early pandemic era belongs to, of course, the Gal Gadot-led Imagine video.

Spearheaded by the Wonder Woman actress and Bridesmaids Kristen Wiig and featuring a smorgasbord of stars Jamie Dornan, Natalie Portman, Ashley Benson, Kaia Gerber, Cara Delevingne, Zo Kravitz those benevolent millionaires each hoped to cheer the world with an awkwardly-sung line of the John Lennon song from the comfort of their Selling Sunset-style homes. Naturally, the video was slammed across social media; now, almost 2 years later, Gal has finally admitted that the video might have been a mistake.

Speaking to InStyle, after recently parodying the video during her acceptance speech at the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards, Gal said: I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, "Listen, I want to do this thing." The pandemic was in Europe and Israel before it came [to the US] in the same way. I was seeing where everything was headed. But [the video] was premature. It wasn't the right timing, and it wasn't the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don't hit the bull's-eye, right?

In truth, looking back since Gal posted it on Instagram in March 2020, the cursed video has only aged worse to the extent that, in a way, its almost swung back round to camp. In a little intro Gal sighs as if she hasnt seen another human soul in months, when in fact shes in day six of quarantine. She then says the past less-than-a-week-of-isolation has got her feeling philosophical. The deep mind-blowing philosophical realisation? The virus affects everyone. Between Sia over-singing the hell out of her two lines to Mark Ruffalos struggle to figure out his selfie camera angles, the video is essentially the equivalent of those 1 like = 1 prayer posts your aunt still shares on Facebook.

Though the intention behind the video may have been sincere, watching the ridiculously rich act like the pandemic had put us all in the exact same situation and that the only things they had to contribute were vibes and positive energy felt in pretty poor taste. Especially when other celebs, like our queen Britney, were offering struggling fans money. As i-D editor Risn Lanigan wrote at the time: Rather than rushing to push content into the world which doesnt actually help anyone, it might first be best to take some time and consider how your platform, and your millions of dollars of income, could be put to better use.

Follow i-D onInstagramandTikTokfor more news.

Here is the original post:

Gal Gadot officially regrets the cursed Imagine video - i-D

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

Byline Times is funded by its subscribers. Receive our monthly print edition and help to support fearless, independent journalism.

New to Byline Times? Find out more about us

A new type of newspaper independent, fearless, outside the system. Fund a better media.

Dont miss a story

Our leading investigations include Brexit, Empire & the culture war, Russian interference, Coronavirus, cronyism and far right radicalisation. We also introduce new voices of colour in Our Lives Matter.

Read the original post:

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

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.

View original post here:

Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

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.

Continued here:

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