"It is quite certain that no existing democratic
government (as of 1912) would go so far as we Eugenicists think right in the direction of
limiting the liberty of the subject for the sake of the racial qualities of
future generations." Eugenics Review February
1912 Leonard Darwin (brother of Charles)
President Teddy Roosevelt preached eugenics to a degree, but never acted on it. Several U.S. states did have eugenics laws on the books though (meaning that certain races or classes couldn't reproduce). And Britian failed by the narrowest of margins in the parliament to pass a eugenics law on the near eve of WW 1. After the war-Scandinavian nations implemented eugenics laws. BUT, Hitler, although technically "elected", once he assumed dictitorial power-implemented eugenics to the extreme-resulting in the holocaust.
Before destruction the heart of man is haughty,
Proverbs 18:12
"Forced sterilisations in Scandinavia have shocked the world. But the great founding fathers of British socialism, reports Jonathan Freedland, had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis.
Jonathan Freedland,
The Guardian,
August 30, 1997
They will be searching their souls in Stockholm tonight. And in Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen, too. All over Scandinavia, people are facing up to the stain now spreading across their snow-white self-image, as they discover that their governments spent decades executing a chilling plan to purify the Nordic race, nurturing the strong and eradicating the weak. Each day victims of forced sterilisation, now deep in middle-age, have stepped forward to tell how they were ordered to have “the chop,” to prevent them having children deemed as racially defective as themselves.
Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were rounded up behind secure fences, in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually led off for “treatment.” One man has told how he and his fellow teenage boys planned to run away rather than undergo the dreaded “cut in the crotch.” Maria Nordin, now
seeking compensation from the Swedish government,
remembers sobbing as she was pressed to sign away her rights to have a baby.
Told that she would stay locked up forever if she did not cooperate, she
relented - spending the rest of her life childless and in regret.
In Sweden the self-examination has already begun. A government minister has admitted that “what went on is barbaric and a national disgrace,” with more than 60,000 Swedish women sterilised from 1935 until as late as 1976. What has shocked most observers is that all this was committed not by some vile fascistic regime, but by a string of welfare-minded, Social Democratic governments. Indeed, the few voices of opposition came from Swedish conservatives.
But the reckoning cannot be confined to Scandinavia: Britain has some soul-searching of its own to do. What's more, as in Sweden, the culprits are not long-forgotten fire-breathers of the far right. On the contrary: eugenics is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a rollcall of British socialism’s best and brightest: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman - even, lamentably, the Manchester Guardian.
Thus George Bernard Shaw could write: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Later he mused that “the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.” The revered pacifist, disarmer and philosophical titan, Bertrand Russell, dreamed up a wheeze that would have made even Nazi Germany’s eugenicists blush. He suggested the state issue colour-coded “procreation tickets.” Those who dared breed with holders of a different-coloured ticket would face a heavy fine. That way the high-calibre gene pool of the elite would not be muddied by any proletarian or worse, foreign, muck.
From the beginning socialism regarded itself as the natural ally, even the political version, of science. Just as biologists sought to understand animals and plants, so scientific socialism would master people. According to Adrian Wooldridge, author of Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England 1860-1990, and a recognised authority on early ideas of human merit, progressives believed the only enemies of Darwin were reactionaries, the religious and the superstitious. Science, by contrast, represented progress. Crucially, these early leftists regarded science as an utterly neutral tool; something could not be scientifically right and morally wrong. In this climate, says Wooldridge, “eugenics became the political correctness of its day.” If you were modern, you believed in it."
President Teddy Roosevelt preached eugenics to a degree, but never acted on it. Several U.S. states did have eugenics laws on the books though (meaning that certain races or classes couldn't reproduce). And Britian failed by the narrowest of margins in the parliament to pass a eugenics law on the near eve of WW 1. After the war-Scandinavian nations implemented eugenics laws. BUT, Hitler, although technically "elected", once he assumed dictitorial power-implemented eugenics to the extreme-resulting in the holocaust.
Before destruction the heart of man is haughty,
Proverbs 18:12
"Forced sterilisations in Scandinavia have shocked the world. But the great founding fathers of British socialism, reports Jonathan Freedland, had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis.
Jonathan Freedland,
The Guardian,
August 30, 1997
They will be searching their souls in Stockholm tonight. And in Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen, too. All over Scandinavia, people are facing up to the stain now spreading across their snow-white self-image, as they discover that their governments spent decades executing a chilling plan to purify the Nordic race, nurturing the strong and eradicating the weak. Each day victims of forced sterilisation, now deep in middle-age, have stepped forward to tell how they were ordered to have “the chop,” to prevent them having children deemed as racially defective as themselves.
Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were rounded up behind secure fences, in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually led off for “treatment.” One man has told how he and his fellow teenage boys planned to run away rather than undergo the dreaded “cut in the crotch.” Maria Nordin, now
In Sweden the self-examination has already begun. A government minister has admitted that “what went on is barbaric and a national disgrace,” with more than 60,000 Swedish women sterilised from 1935 until as late as 1976. What has shocked most observers is that all this was committed not by some vile fascistic regime, but by a string of welfare-minded, Social Democratic governments. Indeed, the few voices of opposition came from Swedish conservatives.
But the reckoning cannot be confined to Scandinavia: Britain has some soul-searching of its own to do. What's more, as in Sweden, the culprits are not long-forgotten fire-breathers of the far right. On the contrary: eugenics is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a rollcall of British socialism’s best and brightest: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman - even, lamentably, the Manchester Guardian.
Thus George Bernard Shaw could write: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Later he mused that “the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.” The revered pacifist, disarmer and philosophical titan, Bertrand Russell, dreamed up a wheeze that would have made even Nazi Germany’s eugenicists blush. He suggested the state issue colour-coded “procreation tickets.” Those who dared breed with holders of a different-coloured ticket would face a heavy fine. That way the high-calibre gene pool of the elite would not be muddied by any proletarian or worse, foreign, muck.
From the beginning socialism regarded itself as the natural ally, even the political version, of science. Just as biologists sought to understand animals and plants, so scientific socialism would master people. According to Adrian Wooldridge, author of Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England 1860-1990, and a recognised authority on early ideas of human merit, progressives believed the only enemies of Darwin were reactionaries, the religious and the superstitious. Science, by contrast, represented progress. Crucially, these early leftists regarded science as an utterly neutral tool; something could not be scientifically right and morally wrong. In this climate, says Wooldridge, “eugenics became the political correctness of its day.” If you were modern, you believed in it."
