Category Archives: Eugenics

From his bleached mullet and shiny outfits to satin thrones, from condoms with his face on to intimate piercings, Tiger Kings central character, Joe Exotic, is an affront to good taste. Likewise, the hot-mess sprawling narrative of addiction, sexual coercion, exploitation, theft, murder, suicide, obsession, guns and explosives. Not to mention the tragic backdrop of inexplicably gratuitous numbers of majestic, dangerous, big cats.

Aesthetically, Tiger King is a documentary of excess. Too many exotic animals in captivity, too many guns and sequins, too much desperation and methamphetamine, too many storylines, too many villains, too, too much. It is addictively engrossing as a result, its popularity during lockdown hinging on revelling in the weird horrors of tasteless, Hicksville excess. Plunged into a weird, crazy world so Other to our own, we feel normal. Witnessing the extraordinarily dangerous combination of caring for big cats, while playing with unregulated guns and explosives, while on meth, makes us feel comparatively safe. What more could we want in lockdown, while the apocalypse rages outside?

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

But this comfort, this reassurance that we are comparatively sane, normal and safe, depends upon an us and them logic that is dangerous. Taste is classed. Taste is political.

Writing about the way we stigmatise working-class celebrity, sociologistsImogen Tyler and Bruce Bennettsaw our media as a class pantomime offering community-forming attachment to a bad object. That is, these characters define what we are glad not to be, giving us the opportunity to affirm our comparative superiority through the pleasure of collective scorn.

The cast of Tiger King is depicted in the white trash archetype, a stock character with a long history going back to the US Eugenics RecordOffice who, between 1880 and 1920, attempted to demonstrate scientifically that rural poor whites were genetically defective. The rural class entered the public imagination as dirty, drunken, criminallyminded, and sexually perverse people. This was used to end welfare and introduce involuntary sterilisation and incarceration. SociologistsMatt Wray and Annalee Newitz argue the stereotype of the incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid redneck persists over a century later. This reads true of the characterisation constructed in Tiger King. While their big cat businesses may turn over huge sums, the sneering pleasure of watching their financial mismanagement reeks of the schadenfreudeof being proved right about who does and doesnt deserve wealth. This is exactly the logic of the eugenics white trash label.

The term white trash has always existed to blame those suffering social ills for their situation, suggesting it is a product of their own poor judgement and intrinsic inferiority, not structural inequality. The main characters of Tiger King are horrendous: murderous, abusive utterly reprehensible. But, beware the pleasures of disgust. Trash designates the dregs, dirt or refuse of society. That which should be disposed of.

Tiger King, Murder, Mayhem and Madness, Official Trailer

Why does this matter? Because eugenics is back. From the eugenicist views of former advisor to Downing Street, Andrew Sabisky, to herd immunity. From reassurance that coronavirus only kills the elderly or those with underlying conditions, as if underlying conditions was code for less than fully a person, to do not resuscitate orders signed against patients wishes. From certain groups being told not to go to hospital,saving beds for those with higher chances of survival, to the criminal, political, deliberate underfunding of our health service. These show our leaders strategically callous belief in the disposability of human life. Forcing doctors into a position where they must decide who lives creates the most violent discrimination. Beware comforting entertainment predicated on us and them logic which imagines them to be disposable and not us, when our government in a time of health crisis is doing exactlythe same to us.

Dr Hannah Yelin is a senior lecturer in media and culture at Oxford Brookes University

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Tiger King is popular because we love to laugh at white trash heres why thats dangerous - The Independent

CW: This essay explores anti-fatness and eugenics, and mentions death, medical genocide, and more.

Towards the end of February, many of us in america had become aware of the glaring virus we now know as COVID-19. In panic, people took to their local grocery stores and stocked up on all household essentialsmost notably, face masks, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper. While information about the effects of COVID-19 were mixed, as the virus is so new, one thing that scientists and all government officials seemed to be clear about was that face masks were ineffective against the virus. At the beginning of March, people were being instructed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to not wear face masks to prevent the spread of the virus. The U.S. Surgeon General made a public statement via Twitter demanding that everyone stop buying masks as they were ineffective against the spread of the virus. It was not clear how the very tools that were being used to protect our medical and healthcare providers from this virus were suddenly ineffective when it came time to protect those of us who were civilians. As such, many continued to buy masks in bulk, rapidly creating a shortage of face masks for the aforementioned.

Just days ago, the CDC released a public statement stating that they do, in fact, recommend that everyone wear a face mask in publicas up to 25% of people diagnosed with COVID-19 may be asymptomatic, according to the CDC.

Weeks before this discovery, I made a statement via Twitter wherein I named my distrust of the CDC, other medical officials, and the list of (contradictory) instructions they were releasing to the public in the wake of what feels like one of the most vicious pandemics we have experienced in modern history. The CDC has been at the epicenter of the war waged against my body and other bodies like mine, and this is the basis for my lack of trust in their efforts.

In March 2004, during a highly publicized news conference, the CDC published a report claiming that obesity was killing 400,000 Americans a year and that it was becoming americas number one preventable death, outnumbering tobacco. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)which, at least at the time, was the most prestigious medical journal in the nation. One of the authors of the report was the head of the CDC. Because of this, the report had the credibility it needed and would lead to egregious and violent headlines across the nation about fat people, our bodies, and the alarming rate at which we were allegedly dying from obesity.

From that moment forward, throughout the rest of that year, public officials and other media platforms used that report as evidence that obesity was the greatest threat facing the american people, and as justification for what would eventually become a forceful and strapping diet industrial complex. Thus creating The Obesity Epidemic.

However, according to J. Eric Oliver in his book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind Americas Obesity Epidemic (2006), a more intentional look at the numbers from which the CDC was using indicates that the numbers were far from accuratesomething the CDC would later admit to. The numbers were inflated. In his book, Oliver says:

the CDC researchers did not calculate the 400,000 deaths by checking to see if the weight of each person was a factor in his or her [or their] death. Rather, they estimated a figure by comparing the death rates of thin and heavy people using data that were nearly thirty years old. Although heavier people tend to die more frequently than people in mid-range weights, it is by no means clear that their weight is the cause of their higher death rates. It is far more likely that their weight is simply a proxy for other, more important factors such as their diet, exercise, or family medical history. The researchers, however, simply assumed that obesity was the primary cause of death, even though there was no clear scientific rationale for this supposition.

In other words, the CDC contrived this number from an estimation after reviewing data that was thirty years old. It was never a calculated number concluded from their own intense research; it was a scientific guess made with hopes to punish fat people for our bodies. And it worked. As Oliver names, fat people do tend to die at higher rates than our thin counterparts, but it isnt because of our weight. We tend to die at higher rates than thin people because doctors misdiagnose us, or refuse to treat us, due to our fatness.

A year after they published the report, in April 2005, the CDC released another reportalso through JAMAwherein they not only offered a much smaller number of deaths per year due to obesityless than 26,000, to be exactbut also claimed that moderately overweight people live longer than people at a normal weight. But the damage had already been done. Around the world, people were using the CDCs original numbers as fuel for the war waged on fat people. And I would wager that the damage is still being done. No one is dying from being obese. Full stop. Fat people are dying because of a medical industrial complex committed to seeing our fatness as death; we are dying because we lack proper resourceslike housing and employmentthat would provide us with money, healthcare, and a roof to protect us; fat Black people in particular are dying, I argue, because of an inherently anti-Black system of policing that sees us as deadly beasts that need to be put down.

What is happening to fat people, the societal and systemic bias and marginalization we have to navigate, is in large part due to the one CDC report heard around the world. And to this day, the CDC continues to refer to obesity as an epidemic, and have even gone as far as to say that fat people are at higher risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.

Some may argue that the CDC originally claimed that masks were ineffective as a way to retain the already-small supply of masks for healthcare providers and medical officials. Others may argue that the CDC made this claim due to ever-developing research around the virus. I am arguing, however, that the CDC made the claim that masks are ineffective because the CDCs sole purpose is to provide scientific legitimation of the U.S. as a eugenicist project through medical genocide. As outlined in this essay, the CDC has a history of releasing deadly information and later backtracking on it when the damage has already been done.

Choosing to tell the public that supplies that could benefit everyone is ineffective, rather than calling for more supplies to be createdin the midst of a global pandemic, no lessis eugenics. Making the conscious decision to tell the general public that something is ineffective when you have not done all of the necessary research, especially when medical officials are using the very same equipment, is medical and scientific genocide.

Scientists, researchers, and medical professionals can make mistakes. They are human, after all. As a fat person whose daily reality has in large part been warped by the violent report the CDC released over ten years ago, however, I am not convinced that any of this is a mistake. This feels far too intentional and far too familiar. In the midst of a very real pandemic, the CDC is handling it precisely the same as they did a false pandemic which they helped to create. For this reason, along with the fact that theyve been radio silent about the way COVID-19 has impacted Black communities especially, I have very little trust in the CDC, as I have no room in my politic for anti-fat science, eugenics, or medical genocide. I hope we choose to make a collective push for a more ethical research organization to lead on these issues soon. Lest we wait for thousands of more lives to be lost due to the CDCs incompetence.

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We are Witnessing The CDC's Violent Eugenicist History in Real-Time - Wear Your Voice

Dennis WardFace to Face More than 100 Indigenous women in Canada have come forward with stories of forced or coerced sterilization and lawyer Alisa Lombard says its nothing new in Canada, nor is it illegal.

I think that the practice of forced sterilization is symptomatic of a colonial hangover. And I think it has a lot to do with eugenics of course, these old ideas that some people should have children and others are not fit to, Lombard told Face to Face. Eugenics was a widely accepted theory not so long ago. It was a theory that was attempted to be brought into legislation in Saskatchewan and only failed by one vote.

It was, in fact, brought into legislation in Alberta and British Columbia.

Lombard is a partner with Saskatchewan based, Semanganis Worme Lombard and is heading up a proposed class action lawsuit representing Indigenous women who have been forced or coerced into sterilization.

Forced sterilization is a procedure more commonly known as getting your tubes tied, but without the proper and informed consent of the woman involved.

Those women, and potentially many more are hoping to have their day in court in an effort to prevent the practice of forced sterilizations from continuing, to find accountability through investigation and receive some form of reparation.

Lombard feels forced sterilization is just one more indication of systemic racism within the healthcare sector.

According to Lombard, those in positions of authority feel they should make decisions make life changing, body altering decisions on behalf of those who they think wont.

The practice, and the efforts to stop it have garnered international attention.

Lombard presented to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva, Switzerland.

The UN Committee issued a number of recommendations to the Canadian government, including investigating the practice, punishing those who perform it and providing reparations to those who have undergone the procedure.

In our clients view, whatever Canada has done is wholly inadequate and really not measured to the seriousness of the violations that are at stake here, said Lombard.

The United Nations Committee Against Torture unequivocally called for sterilization or sterilization without consent a form of torture and cruel and degrading treatment and so its our clients position that such terrible treatment, such egregious treatment requires some responses that are measured to the harms.

The practice of forced sterilization was also mentioned numerous time in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

In the report, the commissioners wrote, the forced sterilization of women represents directed state violence against Indigenous women, and contributes to the dehumanization and objectification of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.

The final report pointed to forced sterilization as one of Canadas genocidal acts of conduct, something Lombard agrees with.

According to Lombard, the theft of an Indigenous womans ability to give birth and the ability to pass on rights and title, culture and language says to her the life of Indigenous women, children and families simply arent worth protecting.

Lombard said the goals of the proposed class action lawsuit are to ensure no woman is subjected to forced sterilization but there is, of course, a desire for reparations.

This practice has destroyed families, has destroyed marriages, has caused siblings to wonder why they dont have more siblings, has affected the self concept of our clients as women, as Indigenous women, as life givers in their nation. And so, although there is no amount of money that can truly compensate them for the pain that they endured, and that they continue to endure both mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually, a form of reparation is necessary, said Lombard.

dward@aptn.ca

@denniswardnews

Excerpt from:

Forced sterilization a symptom of colonial hangover says lawyer - APTN News

As we are seeing now during the coronavirus pandemic, a combination of accidental and intentional failures exposed disabled inmates in institutions to the worst effects of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more 670,000 Americans and more than 50 million people worldwide. The lessons that could have been learned from the experiences a century ago are as forgotten as the people themselves; people who were trapped inside places like the Massachusetts School when the first sick patient was carted out and died in a small infirmary in September 1918.

State schools for the so-called feeble-minded were originally devised as small experimental settings. The goal of early reformers was to provide free education for people with cognitive and developmental disabilities. It was a radical notion. Opened in 1848, the Massachusetts School was the first public institution of its kind in America, and by 1918, there were roughly two dozen like it elsewhere in the country. But by then, much had changed.

In an effort to improve the health of the pupils, institutions began moving out of cities in the late 1800s. Superintendents, most of whom were physicians, not educators, had begun to recognize the benefits of fresh air and exercise, and at their urging, states spent lavishly, purchasing enormous parcels of land on which two- and three-story buildings could be situated at a distance from one another. With additional room came growth, and eventually these institutions housed permanent custodial populations in separate buildings from pupils.

Designed by famed architect William Preston the designer of the very first bungalow the Massachusetts School was one of the finest examples of disability accessible architecture in the world. The school moved from South Boston to Waltham in the late 1880s, and the campus featured state-of-the-art amenities like steam heat, electric light, and water-closets. Pupils slept in large ward rooms, divided by gender, with ample space between the beds.

However, as was the case elsewhere, the funding that states were willing to put into the institutions did not keep pace with needs as the institutions continued to grow. That growth was fueled by misapplications of science, medicine, and testing much of it false which were used to demonize people with disabilities. Institutions were packed with people deemed undesirable. Chronic overcrowding became the norm. The beds were pushed together. Then people slept on floors, in hallways, and in dining halls. Families were discouraged from visiting.

By 1918, with the Massachusetts School leading the way, state schools for the feeble-minded were no longer small or experimental. They housed tens of thousands of people, young and old. People who failed IQ tests or came from poor families. People with cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. Most of them undesirable and all of them in the institution for life.

With the outbreak of World War I, staffing at institutions dropped precipitously. The Massachusetts School had 124 vacancies. The superintendent, Walter Fernald, even sent residents of the institution to serve in the Army to reduce the number of inmates. When the viral outbreak hit, he was not even there. He was out of state, caring for his adult son who was sick with the flu, and would ultimately die.

With doctors still uncertain about even the most fundamental aspects of transmission, infection, and treatment, the disease arrived at the school on September 17 and swept through the crowded wards. Over the next six weeks, patients who were already vulnerable, succumbed, one after another. While the infection rate is estimated to have been 25 percent of the general population, 778 of the 1,600 inmates at the Massachusetts School fell ill.

In one building alone, only 15 of the 189 inmates came through without having caught the flu. Five people were responsible for caring for all of them. With an ailing and diminished staff, the institution turned to the inmates to act as nurses for one another. When the outbreak was done, more than 88 inmates had died, 5.5 percent of the population of the school and more than eight times the mortality rate in the rest of Waltham. Communal bathrooms, crowded and shared living conditions, linked ventilation, and understaffing had hastened the viruss spread and devastated the school.

The Massachusetts School was not alone. The mortality rate at the Wisconsin Home for the Feeble-minded in Chippewa Falls, Wis., was between 4 and 10 percent. There are two reasons for the lack of precision in the data. Like the new coronavirus, little was actually known about fundamental aspects of the disease, and also, nobody cared much to measure its impact on the types of people locked inside.

The same is true today. This week, more than a month into the outbreak in the United States, the CDC was still considering whether or not to keep a separate tally of institutional deaths, even though the same conditions from a century ago have ensured that facilities today are just as dangerous.

In the wake of the 1918 pandemic, institutions weighed what to do. Like many of his colleagues, the superintendent of the Wisconsin School, A.L. Beier, obfuscated what had happened by praising the efforts of the employees in heroic language, rather than as the victims of underfunding and poor planning that they were. Then he downplayed the deaths, and tried to move on.

Looking back in 1920 on deaths at the institution over the previous two years he casually wrote, The mortality rate is somewhat higher than any previous biennial death rate, but if the deaths that were due to influenza were excluded, the rate compares favorably with that of the preceding biennial period. In 1918, deaths from influenza and related respiratory illnesses accounted for more than half the deaths at the institution.

The only change Beier suggested was the construction of a modest quarantine space that could double as a welcome and receiving area for future inmates and their families when there wasnt a quarantine in effect.

Elsewhere there was a similar agreement to look forward rather than make changes to institutional settings. Americans moved forward by looking upon people with disabilities with growing resentment. Eugenics paved the way. Many people felt that healthy young men had gone off to die in the war, depriving America of a generation of their healthy offspring. What we were left with was a degenerate stock of people who were unwanted.

While Fernald was, in the years following the war, avowedly opposed to eugenics, others were not. Their ideas would ultimately make their way into Congress in the form of anti-immigrant laws, then to the Supreme Court and the infamous Buck v. Bell decision that allowed for the sterilization of people with disabilities. Later, it led to genocide in the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, epidemics continued at institutions until the late 1960s, when disability rights activists began pushing for deinstitutionalization and the creation of Centers for Independent Living. When Nobel Laureate John Enders wanted to test the first successful measles vaccine in 1960, he ran the trial at the Massachusetts School (then re-named the Walter E. Fernald State School) because it was one of the last places in Massachusetts with outbreaks.

Former residents describe the same era as one in which there were consistent lockdowns for yellow jaundice a phrase for hepatitis which ran through the wards. Little was done because leaders refused to accept that institutions could be modified or funded in ways that would end the constant threat of outbreaks. Those modifications included moving away from the use of large buildings, reducing patient populations, increasing staffing, coordinating with state oversight agencies, and creating day-to-day mechanisms for accountability to families. A minority of experienced people suggested something radical that society refused to accept: no long-term care institutions of any kind.

The risk that we will come out of todays pandemic without being open to enacting substantive change is as high as it was in 1918. One difference may be that large numbers of disabled people live outside institutions and are fighting present-day eugenic impulses to cast them aside as undeserving of equipment they need to survive in the interest of saving the coronavirus victims who have been deemed more viable in the long-term.

If we emerge from this crisis without a commitment to dramatically transforming these mindsets, which allow us to segregate and victimize our most vulnerable citizens, we will continue to sacrifice them in every emergency we face. The warning signs come from the fact that the circumstances we see today are so distinctly similar to those of a century ago, howling at us past and present to recognize what does not, and what has not worked.

Alex Green is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and teaches disability history at Gann Academy.

Link:

Just like the coronavirus, the 1918 flu pandemic ravaged group living facilities - The Boston Globe

Pedestrians walk near the Charging Bull statue of Wall Street on March 12, 2020 in New York City. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 2,352.60 points, a decrease of almost 10 percent and the largest since 1987. Photo: John Minchillo/AP/Shutterstock

The economy must be a hungry god. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, believes grandparents will sacrifice themselves for it. At the Federalist, a writer wondered if social distancing had gone a bit too far, had denied the god his rightful due. It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die, he admitted. Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly. Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things, a conservative Christian journal, decried the demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost. Society requires triage, Reno suggested, not as a last resort, but as a preemptive measure. Some people are too expensive to save.

Within the conservative Establishment, the economy has other willing priests. Economist Stephen Moore recently told the Washington Post that public-health officials, while vital, had perhaps become too rigid. You cant have a policy that says were going to save every human life at any cost, no matter how many trillions of dollars youre talking about, he said. Were going to have to make some difficult tradeoffs, Larry Kudlow, the director of President Trumps National Economic Council, warned on Fox. Some even offered themselves up as tribute. Jesse Kelly, a professional Twitter user and occasional pundit, said he would happily die to save his beloved country from another Great Depression.

But no one is asking Jesse Kelly to die. Theyre asking it of your grandparents, and of your neighbor with cancer; they ask it of me and of you, too, if your body is flawed or simply unlucky. The views expressed by Patrick and Reno and Moore, and by the Federalists various agitprop artists, are eugenics. They separate human life into categories. In one box, there are people worth saving. In the other, there are people we ought to let die. Believing this makes them eugenicists. What they contemplate is not quite mass murder, but a sort of planned, negligent homicide. Patrick doesnt want to build gas chambers. He just wants to let nature take its course. The fit will survive the cull.

Conservatives are inordinately fond of calling people eugenicists. For years, theyve applied the label to the pro-choice movement. The reasoning tends to gallop. Abortion is murder, ergo, parents who terminate a pregnancy because of fetal defects or disability participate in a eugenicist exercise. In this way, conservatives turn people with disabilities into useful props. The conservative can point at a child, turn on the tears, and scold you for wanting to murder him in the womb. Its a cheap trick, notable mostly for shock value. I am not as sick as some, and not as handy an object lesson. Nevertheless, I have long understood that my value to the right ended when I left my mothers body. For many conservatives, a fetus is the ultimate blank slate. Its value is determined by others; it cannot contradict them, or put forward its own ideas. It cant ask to be treated a particular way or stray from Gods light. Best of all, it requires nothing from anyone but a womb. People, by contrast, are cumbersome. They make demands, have wills of their own. And alas for the priests of small government, people are expensive, especially if they need regular medical care.

What we see in the conservative movement is not tension. People like Reno or Patrick have no intellectual discrepancy to resolve; their anti-abortion instincts are not at war with their fiscal convictions. We see instead the truth revealed. These men dont serve the economy, whatever that means. They serve power. Their economic arguments are smokescreens for something much uglier, which is apparent under even the most casual scrutiny.

A countrys economy and its people are inseparable. The United States cant lose several million people in one go without feeling the loss. Even if one makes the amoral calculation that the elderly and sick are unproductive and therefore worthless to the economy, the novel coronavirus is not that selective. The elderly arent the only people with reason to fear the virus, and neither are people who were already sick. Over half of New York Citys hospitalized coronavirus patients are under 44 years old. Often the young dead lack any known preexisting conditions. If President Trump and Republican officials listen to Stephen Moore and not public-health experts, they could sacrifice their children and grandchildren alongside their own parents. Its also not true that shutdowns must consign us to misery the federal government could mitigate the economic losses of local shutdowns if it chose to.

But the arguments from the eugenicist right are useful to us anyway. The fact that they think the elderly and the sick are acceptable offerings is something we should remember long after the pandemic is over. They tell us their obsession with market forces was not about human flourishing, productivity, and abundance, but about something else. Supply-side economics gave them a way to intellectualize their own amorality. Markets care nothing for ethics. They arent governed by justice and they dont feel mercy.

What todays eugenicists are unwilling to admit is that there is one, less deadly way to rescue the economy from this pandemic. Its redistribution, not just of resources but of power. The government will have to massively expand its tiny welfare state, and grant workers rights they do not currently have. It has the financial capacity to do so, but the project would force it to reconsider its priorities, which the conservative movement cannot tolerate. As they wring their hands on Fox, and repeat into the camera that the cure cannot be worse than the disease, they arent referring to shutdowns but to social welfare and to labor rights. They find a mass die-off of the sick and the elderly more palatable than basic social democracy.

We owe Donald Trump this much. He makes explicit some tendencies that the movements veneer once obscured. The rationalizations and pretexts are all so familiar. Conservatives dont hate poor people; they just want to control government spending. They arent racist; they just think immigration threatens American jobs. They dont value the fetus more than the person who carries it; they just believe life starts at conception. It was all a lie. The truth was always obvious to some of us, but now it ought to be visible to everyone else. Matters will become even clearer in weeks to come, as states contemplate the rationing of health-care resources. Alabama guidelines, originally written in 2009, suggest that conditions like metastasized cancer, AIDS, severe mental retardation, advanced dementia, and severe burns may disqualify patients from being placed on a ventilator if hospitals are overwhelmed. The Third Reich fell decades ago, but the idea it was built upon did not die. Some life is still unworthy of life. For todays eugenicists, the coronavirus isnt a calamity. Its the means to an end.

For many, the fight against abortion was not a fight against a culture of death; it was a crusade to keep women in their place. The fetus does matter more than the womans preferences or well-being because the fetus is going to be one of three things: a laborer, a fellow tyrant, or an incubator like its mother. Society thus reproduces itself from generation to generation, its hierarchy intact. And why not let the coronavirus cull the herd? The sick and the elderly are inefficient workers, which means theyre of limited use. The same values abandon incarcerated people and detained immigrants along with the sick and elderly to die. They arent productive. They might need things.

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Eugenics Isnt Going to Get Us Out of This Mess - New York Magazine

By Thomas Scripps 26 March 2020

Last Sunday, the London Times reported on a private event held at the end of February at which leading Conservative government advisor Dominic Cummings explained the UKs coronavirus response. Those present summarised his position as herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad. A senior Conservative source described his view as let old people die.

The Prime Ministers Office denies Cummings made such comments, which align closely with the fascistic conceptions taking root in the Conservative Party and its periphery.

Last month, Cummings was responsible for eugenicist Andrew Sabisky being hired as a special government advisor. Both Sabisky and Cummings share the view that intelligence is overwhelmingly genetically determined, and that much educational effort is therefore wasted.

One of their leading defenders in the press and an advocate of progressive eugenics, Toby Young, was the governments first choice to lead the Office for Students, a national regulatory body. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made social Darwinist statements himself, and last year a Tory parliamentary candidate said that a group of people living on social security need putting down.

Innumerable posts on social media have drawn the connection between this reactionary ideology and the governments criminally delayed and negligent response to the pandemic in Britain. The phrase #boristhebutcher was the top trending hashtag on Twitter in the UK a week ago. Many of those criticising the governments disastrous original policy of herd immunityallowing the virus to spread through the majority of the population relatively quicklyhave described it as a eugenic experiment.

The dominant concern motivating the policy was to minimise any interruption to the profit-making of the major corporations. And when this proved impracticalwith growing public anger as scientists predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths if the herd immunity plans continuedthe government, including Cummings, shifted policy towards a massive 350 billion corporate credit handout. Nevertheless, while not all those initially advocating a herd immunity strategy advocate eugenics, the strategy and eugenics find fertile soil in the increasingly sociopathic demands of contemporary capitalism.

This was clearly demonstrated by events at University College London (UCL) at the end of February. Just as the Covid-19 virus was developing into a global threat, the university released its Investigation into the London Conference on Intelligence and Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL. Both reports whitewash a eugenics conference hosted by one of the universitys own professors, and the historical inquiry falsifies the history and contemporary influence of the ideology.

In December 2017, the London Student revealed that honorary UCL lecturer James Thompson had been hosting a secretive annual London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) on the universitys campus for four years. The LCI was attended by a collection of pseudo-scientist fascists, white supremacists and eugenicistssome in academic positionspresenting topics such as Admixture in the Americas, The Welfare Trait: How state benefits affect personality, and Evolutionary indicators for explaining cross-country differences in cognitive ability.

Following protests by students and academics, UCL agreed to conduct an investigation, but one designed to prevent any reckoning with what had occurred. The university refused to answer questions from journalists, and Thompson was allowed to move quietly into retirement. The findings of the investigation were initially withheld, which UCL justified by launching another inquiry into the institutions involvement in the development of eugenic ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Now that both reports have been released, the UCLs position is clear. The investigation into the LCI explains that Thompson, when booking university facilities for the conference, did not tick the box indicating that the meeting might be considered controversial and that The remainder of the section of the room booking form asking for event details, including its title, attendees and entry requirements, etc. was not filled in.

In two astounding paragraphs, the report states:

What remains controversial is not the nature of these meetings, which were private events which a member of UCLs honorary faculty is entitled to organise, this being one of the perks of such an honorary position which is usually part of a quid pro quo where honorary status brings advantages to the University in terms of contributions to its educational or research activities [emphasis added].

[Thompsons failure to flag the meeting as controversial] deprived UCL of the opportunity of taking appropriate action to mitigate the risk of reputational damage. A correct answer would be to acknowledge the controversial nature of the topic and speakers, and to note that the organiser hoped the private nature of the meeting would mitigate any potential negative impact [emphasis added].

No mention is made of the fascist white supremacists Emil Kirkegaard, Richard Lynn or Edward Dutton, to name a few, who attended the LCI, despite their work being referenced in the appendices.

The separate Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL makes only fleeting references to the LCI. Its findings and recommendations were considered so inadequate that the majoritynine of the 16 membersof the inquirys own committee refused to sign the chairs main report.

One of the members of this group, professor of the history of biology Joe Cain, explained, I tried really hard to get the London Conference on Intelligence on to the agenda of that committee, but I met with a brick wall. We absolutely should have talked about itbut we just didnt. He said the committee had made no attempt to assess whether eugenicist ideas had influenced teaching at the university. Stating that the fact is we didnt look, he added, Im sure students would let us know if the sort of crazy eugenics you see in the LCI meetings were being taught, but eugenics can also be much more subtle than that.

The inquiry was also criticised for what a dissenting member of the committee, in an anonymous comment to the Guardian, called a tendentious focus on race. The main report admits that commission members disagreed on the meaning and role of race in eugenics. The anonymous member continued, I have no issue with addressing racism, but the fact is that the early eugenicists at UCL were far more focused on targeting people based on things like poverty or disability.

These are incisive comments. The report includes references to disabled and low-income groups, but is focussed on race, as per [its] terms of reference. It leans on the reactionary assumption that eugenic ideology is fundamentally bound up with whiteness and that it originates from racism married to science. The threat of eugenics is to be solved, in part, through efforts to decolonise the curricula in all departments and the opening of a number of paid posts in relevant UCL Centres such as the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

This is a fundamental distortion of the history of eugenics and its pernicious role in contemporary politics.

The ideology developed out of a social Darwinist response to the threat of socialism. It gained a significant following in ruling circles in response to intensifying class and inter-imperialist antagonisms, expressed in fears of national deterioration. Eugenics was used to justify inequality and poverty, carry out sterilisations of the disabled and mentally ill, prove national and racial superiority, and, especially in the United States, promote anti-immigration laws. The ideology found its fullest and most devastating expression in the policies of Nazi Germany.

Despite the fact that UCLs report includes a quote from Karl Pearson, a eugenicist professor at the university in the early 20th century, lauding Reichskanzler Hitler, none of this history is explored or raised in warning. To do so would invite questions the ruling class and its institutions are not prepared to answer about links between the persistence of social inequality and national tensions, the revival of fascism and the growing influence of a network of race scientists, eugenicists and social Darwinists amongst the ruling elite.

The universitys actions are proof that this reactionary ideology can be seriously confronted and opposed only from a socialist perspective. The life-threatening actions of the Tory government of Johnson and Cummings in regard to the Covid-19 crisis are proof of the urgent necessity to build that opposition.

The author also recommends:

Sabisky eugenics scandal exposes fascist core of UK Tories [22 February 2020]

UK sociologist Noah Carl and the cultivation of the far right in academia [20 June 2019]

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Johnson's herd immunity strategy and the London Conference on Intelligence whitewash: Britain's ruling class and eugenics - World Socialist Web Site

In February 2020, 10 Downing Street became embroiled in scandal as shocking comments made by ministerial aid, Andrew Sabinsky, resurfaced. Sabinsky had previously espoused very real racial differences in intelligence, and promoted enforced sterilisation to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass. While Andrew Sabinsky resigned amid the controversy, his appointment to the position calls into question wider concerns about the influence of neo-eugenic views in mainstream thought. Andrew Sabinsky was evidently not mainstream; indeed, he was categorically a misfit and weirdo under Cummings controversial recruitment policy. Sabinskys statements, quite rightly, provoked public outrage and stimulated fears that the government could be platforming those with eugenic views. However, the reaction to Sabinsky highlights a disjuncture between fact and reality in the narrative of eugenics, which requires closer scrutiny. Its often taught that eugenics, as part of popular culture, died along with extreme forms of fascism in the aftermath of WWII, and when it bubbles back to the surface through cases such as Sabinskys, we are rightly shocked at how such ideas have come to play in todays society. Yet both moderate and extreme eugenic ideas were prevalent throughout the 20th century, and continue to hold court in academia and politics. Part of the difficulty in recognising neo-eugenic thought comes from the fact that after the 1940s, academics and politicians fiercely sought to disassociate themselves with the term eugenics. However, if we reframe it as the notion of engineering individuals, groups or societies through inheritance, its possible to unpick the role which eugenic ideas unwittingly play today, which may help shed light onto how a man with such disturbing views was welcomed into Downing Street.

Eugenics itself was invented and popularised by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, who coined the term, defined as the science of improving stock, in 1883. Galton was obsessed with statistics, and believed it possible to apply mathematical analysis to almost everything. In 1908, he created a Beauty Map of Britain by visiting the nations towns with a homemade clicker in his pocket and recording every time he saw a beautiful or unattractive woman. By his scientific reasoning, Aberdeen was the ugliest town, while London was the most attractive. Galton was also the first to argue that inheritance was governed by statistics, and was particularly focused on the heritability of talent or intelligence. By studying the ancestry of men of genius, Galton observed that the majority came from a select group of noteworthy families, and thus concluded that intelligence was inherited. Its worth noting that Galtons definition of genius revolved around distinguished men (such as musicians, novelists, scientists, and artists) who Galton deemed worthy of such a title the desirability of their traits was a reflection of Galtons own upper-middle class, intellectual background. Galtons proto-eugenic thought centered around methods for encouraging those from noteworthy families to breed, proposing to raise the present miserably low standard of the human race by breeding the best with the best. As Darwinian ideas about natural selection began to grip the Victorian imagination, Galton also began to fear that human interference prevented survival of the fittest from applying to human societies, and promote the idea that inheritance could be controlled by human action instead.

While Galtons eugenic thought was somewhat moderate in comparison with later mutations of his theories, his legacy was far-reaching and multifaceted. He advocated the idea that human traits were measurable; and through quantifying heritability and making it the subject of scientific study, he endorsed the idea that societies could control their destinies through manipulating inheritance. His ideas were attractive due to their ability to promote and protect existing social hierarchies among class and race lines, effectively giving people power over nature it was thought that eugenics could cure all societys ills, from criminality to alcoholism to feeble mindedness, and to birth a better, wealthier, more intelligent population.

Galton was not overtly political himself indeed, his main aim was for eugenics to gain academic credibility, and he founded the Eugenics Education Society with this in mind. However, by the turn of the 20th century, the EES had gained momentum and transformed into a political lobbying group. By the 1920s, eugenic policies had been adopted by groups across the political spectrum a fact conveniently forgotten by British history. The Fabian Society and the socialist Left advocated eugenic policies: George Bernard Shaw, for example, said that the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man, and William Beveridge, renowned architect of the Welfare State, argued that those with general defects should be denied civil freedom and fatherhood.

While extreme eugenic policy promptly left the British political mainstream in the aftermath of WWII, the same cannot be said of other countries worldwide. The Canadian province of Alberta, for instance, practiced legal eugenic sterilisation up until 1972, relying on a four-person Eugenics Board to approve the sterilisation of those living in state institutions. North Carolina, Oregon and Georgia over the border also practiced enforced sterilisation until well into the 20th century. In the U.S. and Canada, sterilisation policies were historically directed at the mentally defected, a flimsy and unscientific category which left sterilisation down to the whims of doctors or members of the Eugenics Board, in the case of Alberta. Elsewhere, eugenic policy fell down racial lines. In Australia, Aboriginal peoples were the target of child-removal practices in order to control the ethnicity of future generations under the White Australia policy. Back in the U.S., a 2013 report revealed that between 2006 and 2010 up to 150 Latina and African-American women in state prisons had been sterilised without consent. Across time and space, eugenic policies have been used by those in power as a weapon and tool to reinforce the existing social hierarchy.

In Britain, too, eugenic ideas continued to preside throughout the previous century, although more in the scientific than political sphere. Advances in IVF technology, allowing parents and doctors to screen for diseases, select sex and check characteristics, must be regarded as an extension of eugenic thought: indeed, certain sperm-banks already allow parents to select based on physical traits. The U.K. government recently helped fund the Francis Crick Institute, which was recently given the go-ahead to run with the new, controversial gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9. While the ethics of gene-editing have been hotly debated by the scientific community (in 2016, 150 scientists and academics released a letter to Washington calling for the end of gene-editing), the fact remains that influential researchers still support neo-eugenic ideas through their work. Professor Julian Savulescu, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, recently said that when it comes to screening out personality flaws such as potential alcoholism, psychopathy and disposition to violence, you could argue that people have a moral obligation to select ethically better children. Just as we see that Galtons definitions of beauty and genius are, in hindsight, deeply skewed, we must recognise that the definition of personality flaws is subjective and cannot be a foundation for social or scientific policy.

Intelligence testing must also be viewed as a eugenic legacy which continues to hold scientific and political prominence today. IQ testing was developed alongside the eugenics movement in the early 1900s by Binet. Ironically, Binet thought that IQ tests were inadequate measures for intelligence, and astutely pointed to the tests inability to properly measure creativity or emotional intelligence. Nevertheless, the test was adopted as a scientific and objective measure of intelligence by eugenicists, which could be used to justify policies such as segregation and sterilisation. Crucially, those who fell below the mark were often of lower socio-economic status, or from ethnic minorities. This correlation itself has continually been used to advocate a link between race and intelligence. In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published their controversial book The Bell Curve, which argued that certain races are more intelligent than others, and in 2002 Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen released IQ and the Wealth of Nations, which pinned the global socio-economic hierarchy on ethnic differences in cognitive abilities.

It seems that these ideas are only a few steps back from mainstream politics. Dominic Cummings recently made comments about genes impacting IQ. Even more worryingly, his comments were backed by Timothy Bates, Professor at Edinburgh University, who said that this reflects mainstream science. Moreover, the U.K. governments initial herd immunity response to the coronavirus pandemic, advocated by the Chief Scientific Officer and again endorsed by Cummings, was widely criticised on ethical grounds: many argued it echoed eugenic survival of the fittest notions and would lead to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of societys most vulnerable. In the U.S., inheritance has long been used as racial political rhetoric, which has formally transcended into the White House through the Trump administration. Trump is well-known to be obsessed with having the right genes and with the criminality of immigrants. His key adviser, Michael Anton, wrote in 2016 that diversity is not our strength; its a source of weakness, tension, and disunion.

Eugenic undercurrents have clearly continued to ripple through Western thought throughout the 20th and 21st centuries; and while it is shocking to see them surface in mainstream politics, we should not be surprised. Instead, we must remain alert and recognise neo-eugenic thought whether disguised as scientific progress, immigration policy, or intelligence streaming in schools for what it is. Political policy is driven by science, and too often we take science as fact without questioning internal biases or methodologies. Moreover, we rely on our scientific community not only to inform politics, but to be informed about the history of their discipline. As the history of eugenics shows, politics and science are interdependent.

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The Resurgence Of Eugenics Into Mainstream Politics - The Organization for World Peace

Protesters demanding political intervention to keep Terri Schiavo on life support. Photo: Matt May/Getty Images

You dont have to know much political history to become deeply unsettled by the recent public muttering by selected conservative voices that the benefits of reopening the economy might justify the otherwise avoidable deaths of a lot of unproductive old and sick folk who could succumb to the coronavirus pandemic. As my colleague Sarah Jones argued compellingly:

The views expressed by [Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan] Patrick and [First Things editor Rusty] Reno and [Trump adviser Stephen] Moore separate human life into categories. In one box, there are people worth saving. In the other, there are people we ought to let die What they contemplate is not quite mass murder, but a sort of planned negligent homicide. Patrick doesnt want to build gas chambers. He just wants to let nature take its course. The fit will survive the cull.

And here history is instructive. Eugenics, as a form of human culling, was a pseudoscientific movement that gained lethal strength in the early 20th century and became official state doctrine in various regimes where murdering or starving useless eaters was regarded as essential to the public welfare or even to the health and welfare of the human species. Horror of human culling was deeply bred into the generations of Americans and Europeans who sought to identify civilization itself with the rejection of mass homicide. That this horror might be fading is disturbing enough. But that the idea is posting a comeback among American conservatives is particularly shocking, since not that very long ago that political tribe habitually accused liberals of an openness to euthanasia as a byproduct of legalized abortion.

Remember Terri Schiavo, whose cause embroiled the country during the spring of 2005? She was the severely brain-damaged Florida woman whose agonized husband became embroiled in a legal battle with her parents as he sought to terminate life support, which he felt certain she would have wished. That legal battle became intensely political as Terri Schiavo was adopted as a sort of mascot by the anti-abortion movement as evidence of its claim that the indifference to life exhibited by legalized abortion would eventually lead to euthanasia. Florida governor Jeb Bush spearheaded a state government intervention in her case in 2003 to force reinsertion of a feeding tube, and later Jebs brother signed emergency legislation, enacted during a remarkable March 2005 special session of the Republican-controlled Congress, to assert federal jurisdiction over Schiavos fate. She was finally allowed a dignified death when federal courts refused to overrule a local judges decision to let the poor woman go.

Wheres that Republican Party as some of its opinion leaders express equanimity about tolerating, if not encouraging, mass death in the cause of giving the economy a nice lift prior to the 2020 elections? Whos the Party of Death (a common epithet for Democrats among anti-abortion activists) now?

Its particularly striking that there are elements of the very anti-abortion movement that fought to keep Schiavo alive that are expressing pleasure over the net effect of the coronavirus, since it has allowed some GOP lawmakers to halt abortions as a byproduct of elective surgery bans:

Texas Republican congressional candidate Kathaleen Wall thanked Governor Greg Abbott for signing an executive order last week that deemed abortions medically unnecessary, with Wall claiming the coronavirus may now save more lives than it will take.

Wall, who advanced from the 22nd Congressional District Republican primary earlier this month, has posted several articles discussing pregnancy and coronavirus and touting President Donald Trumps ability to put partisan politics aside as he fights the COVID-19 pandemic. But Walls March 24 Facebook post claiming coronavirus will save more lives this week than it takes created exactly that type of partisan fighting between pro-choice and anti-abortion residents.

Im not calling Republicans generally eugenicists or fans of euthanasia. But it is a sign of the cult of personality into which this party and its ideological allies have succumbed that the desire to lift Trump to reelection on the wings of economic recovery is so powerful, pro-life values be damned. And conservatives who do know their history need to shout down the Evangelists of GDP ber alles with special determination.

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Remember the Party of Terri Schiavo? - New York Magazine

As COVID-19 terrifyingly escalates in the United States, another deadly contagion -- economic eugenics -- is spreading rampantly. Unlike the novel coronavirus, this brain-wasting scourge is self-inflicted by the political right.

The malignancy of economic eugenics has manifested itself globally for centuries. One of its most virulent strains occurred in Nazi Germany during World War II. The latest infestation values the economy over human life and advocates sacrificing senior citizens for economic ends.

Ironically, some of its advocates, like Fox News Glenn Beck, falsely accused Obamacare of devaluing life" by promoting elderly "death panels. Are these eugenicists volunteering at or donating to hospitals, food banks, police, or fire departments?

Today, seniors are expendable, tomorrow its the physically handicapped, the developmentally disabled, and others deemed to be drains on the economy.

Connie Kline,

Willoughby Hills

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Will economic eugenics - sacrificing our seniors to coronavirus for the sake of the economy - be next? - cleveland.com

MOLOCH. Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

We are entering a new, dark phase in American history. The President of the United States lied and prevaricated and did nothing to get this nation ready for a pandemic that his own advisers had told him was coming. He has now made it clear that he intends to deliberately and with full knowledge of what he is doing sacrifice the lives of a minimum of around 5% of the population in order to get the economy going.

It is important to remember that this president is a billionaire businessman and that his businesses are shut down in this crisis. Hes losing money himself. Given that he consistently acts in his own interests rather than the interests of the American people and of America, that is an important fact to know.

The presidents media has swung into action, promoting this plan to sacrifice the lives of large numbers of Americans on the altar of the economic Baals.

The president refused to get this country ready for the virus Ive read that America was the slowest Western nation to ramp up testing. It is plainly obvious that we are deficient in our response about medical equipment and plans for dealing with this crisis. President Trumps lies have cost American lives. As the leader of the free world, he has cost lives everywhere.

That same president who betrayed us with his lies and prevarications is now saying that he will open the economy back up, even though he knows full well that many people will die who would not if he did otherwise. He has not considered or even tried to find ways of dealing with this crisis that do not involve killing lots of Americans. His only response so far has been a 1929 response of market stimulus. This has only worked in a marginal fashion because we are dealing with a 2020 problem.

I dont think he has the brains or the personal emotional commitment to the people of this country to dig in and search for new ways of dealing with a crisis of this kind. He has never, in all his time in office, come up with a way of dealing with anything that was not jingoistic and trending toward making himself a dictator.

Ive been saying this for a while. Ill say it again. He is a monster. I believe that he is probably a psychopath.

He has made it as clear as he possibly can that he does not care if the people he governs live or die. That means you, my friend.

Thats hard to grasp for a lot of people. Me, not so much. Ive seen dont-care-if-the-people-I-govern-live-or-die up close and personal. Ive also seen voters turn around and vote for the same people who bankrupted their state, shut down the homes for the disabled, fired the teachers, closed many of the schools, and refused to build storm shelters in the schools after children were killed in a killer tornado.

Whats new about Trump is the scale of the harm he is wreaking. I read an article about an Episcopal priest who had begun speaking out against Trump. He was surprised that, rather than answer what he was saying, Trump supporters just attacked him personally. Thats what people do when they cant answer with facts and they wont stop believing lies. Its a symptom of the sickness. This priest went on to speculate that maybe Trump is Gods punishment on America.

All I can say is that if he is Gods punishment on America, hes doing his job right well.

As I said, Trumps toady press is working overtime to sell Trumps followers on accepting their own deaths at the hands of their president. I dont know if his followers are buying it or not. Are people really so besotted with this monstrous man that they will consent to die on the altar of the stock market?

I guess were going to find out.

In the meantime, I want to make clear that what these people have been advocating is a form of eugenics and euthanasia. They have said right out in public that older Americans should be willing to die to save the economy. Theyve couched this in terms of the old folks love for their grandchildren and defending this nation in a time of war.

Those are lies.

The people selling this anathema are all very wealthy people who are protecting their personal fortunes. They know what Trump is, and they dont care. They are protecting their cushy jobs which have made them rich and powerful by doing what they do, which is to lie and propagandize for this evil man.

Trump is a billionaire whose personal fortune is suffering. What part does that play in his decision making?

None of these people are offering their own lives.

They want other people to die for their money so that they can continue to enjoy their vast fortune, power and privilege.

Pro life is and always has been something they use. They use it to get well-meaning and good people to act against their own best interest by blindly electing and putting in power whoever will bear the pro life label. They dont respect human life themselves. They do not care about the sanctity of human life. The evidence is right there in front of all of us in their eager propagandizing for the deaths of so many Americans.

They are selling eugenics and euthanasia-by-virus to the people who will die. What they are doing is unimaginably monstrous.

I prayed about what I should say this morning. The words prayer for life came into my mind. I googled Prayer for Life and this prayer, from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops came up.

Lets pray for life my friends.

Father and maker of all,you adorn all creationwith splendor and beauty,and fashion human livesin your image and likeness.Awaken in every heartreverence for the work of your hands,and renew among your peoplea readiness to nurture and sustainyour precious gift of life.

Grant this through our LordJesus Christ, your Son,who lives and reigns with you inthe unity of the Holy Spirit,God forever and ever.Amen

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Trump and His Press are Pushing Eugenics and Euthanasia-by-Virus on a Mass Scale. Pray for Life. - Patheos