Today most people look at the eugenics movement with abhorrence (although there remain pockets of support) . Yet it was a widely accepted and popular movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which reached its conclusion when Hitler tried to efficiently effect what he perceived to be racial purity. Eugenics can be described correctly with the word enormity: a monstrous evil.
Today’s climate change activism strikes a very similar chord to eugenics. Under both there was concern about environmental degradation, overpopulation and the running out of resources. From Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist
… they wailed that society had reached a turning point; we had seen our best days.
The runaway bestseller of the 1890s was a book called Degeneration, by the German Max Nordau, which painted a picture of a society morally collapsing because of crime, immigration and urbanisation: ‘we stand in the midst of an epidemic, a sort of Black Death of degeneration and hysteria.’ An American bestseller of 1901 was Charles Wagner’s The Simple Life, which argued that people had had enough of materialism and were about to migrate back to the farm. In 1914, Britain’s Robert Tressell’s posthumous The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists called his country ‘a nation of ignorant, unintelligent, half-starved, broken-spirited degenerates’. The craze for eugenics that swept the world, embraced by the left and right with equal fervour, after 1900 and caused the passage of illiberal and cruel laws in democracies like America as well as autocracies like Germany, took as its premise the deterioration of the blood lines caused by the overbreeding of the poor and the less intelligent. A huge intellectual consensus gathered around the idea that a distant catastrophe must be averted by harsh measures today (sound familiar?).
Ridley then quotes Churchill in a memo to the Prime Minister in 1910:
The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race.
And Theodore Roosevelt:
I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.
Isaiah Berlin wrote
Disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery for people throughout the ages.
Just as critics of eugenics were treated a pariahs, so too have climate change activists tried to exclude their critics. In both, there is a kind of evil Utopian dream where the State can make and mold society along some perceived rational lines.
I expect that people in 2050 will look back at the climate change movement with the same abhorrence that we look back at the eugenics movement. Both are examples of hubris, where so-called elites of society get carried away with their own brilliance and go well beyond their levels of competence. These are intelligent people who lack wisdom. Some climate change activists are in it for the money. Some are there for convenience. Some are there for the power. Some are just plain mad. But they are collectively responsible for a monstrous evil – an enormity. The people today suffer from this hubris, just as those of the past have borne the brunt of mad and bad schemes.
The problem with ranting about eugenics (evil Nazis, etc) is that there is no default position. Try turning the question around and asking who believes in dysgenics – because that’s the current deal.
Big Jim
13 Jul 12 at 6:09 pm
AGW is not an eugenics movement; it is a misanthropic movement; it hates humanity.
cohenite
13 Jul 12 at 6:10 pm
Hate them back, Cohenite. Spare no quarter with this movement. Contempt isn’t enough.
JC
13 Jul 12 at 6:12 pm
It’s all good fun to make greenies squirm, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water (excuse the grotesque imagery in the context).
Big Jim
13 Jul 12 at 6:13 pm
Ah, catallaxy files – the home of drawing a long bow. Satisfying Godwin’s Law in the original post must be some kind of record.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 6:17 pm
AGW is a vehicle for eugenics, communism, year zero, any stinking turd from the vast grab-bag of leftist ideology.
ar
13 Jul 12 at 6:20 pm
Personally I think its all a symptom of the deeper problem – human social cultures pretty much are all incapable of dealing with population growth. Its the common thread through the ages, population growth leads to conflict, with all sorts of excuses used to justify the need to obliterate an identified enemy.
stevo
13 Jul 12 at 6:41 pm
I am afraid it is true. Climate change believers do not care if people die, in fact they would love the world population to be reduced thus lessening the burden on Gaia.
I dare say if they practiced their beliefs they would be like the religious group the ‘Shakers’ who did not breed, thus with few or no new recruits, they soon were at one with the earth.
But that is not the way of this religion, it is all the others who should die, so the Changers can inherit the earth.
The is only one solution, give them Tasmania to work as a living model, (I know California failed, but that was in the Northern Hemisphere) with no outside mainland taxpayers cash. They can sell oh let me see, carbon credits or something. And apples.
But there is one condition. They can never, ever, ever come back. And they never get a single seat in Australia’s Parliament/s. And we can send the boats and planes there.
Helen Armstrong
13 Jul 12 at 6:42 pm
(SteveC, Godwin’s law can’t apply in this case since Hitler is mentioned in the original article, on line 3, so its on-topic to mention nazis in a post. Give yourself a big slap on the back of the head and yell out Doh! … and maybe try to resist the urge to show off next time.)
stevo
13 Jul 12 at 6:43 pm
SJ, see http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/research.htm to download
Leonard, Thomas C. (2010) A short Introduction to book in progress, Excluding Inferior Workers: Eugenic Influences on Economic Reform in The Progressive Era.
Leonard,Thomas C. (2009) “American Economic Reform in the Progressive Era: Its Foundational Beliefs and Their Relationship to Eugenics” History of Political Economy 41(1): 109-141.
Leonard, Thomas C. (2005) “Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(4): 207-224.
Jim Rose
13 Jul 12 at 6:48 pm
Stevo is right, C-Man. I know you had a delicious frisson of victory as you typed that, but using Godwin’s law to shut down debate requires that you use it accurately.
Abu Chowdah
13 Jul 12 at 6:54 pm
Note I did say “Satisfying Godwin’s Law in the original post ” Perhaps I should have just pointed out the Reductio ad Hitlerum nature of the post instead.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 6:59 pm
The intellectual laziness of the OP is utterly comprehensive. A contemptible piece.
m0nty
13 Jul 12 at 7:00 pm
How do you arrive at that conclusion Helen?
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 7:03 pm
So long as Heemskerk can keep making their chadonnay pinot noir I’m all for that solution.
No benefits, back to nature just as Dr. Bob ordered.
nilk
13 Jul 12 at 7:04 pm
I much prefer Eugenics to Annie Lennox’s solo work.
Infidel Tiger
13 Jul 12 at 7:04 pm
No surprises that Keynes himself was a eugenicist. No wonder the nazis embraced his general theory…
The belief of elites in their ability to shape and control society according to some master plan is the common thread that runs through eugenics and the economics of Keynes…
Skuter
13 Jul 12 at 7:05 pm
Ar, I agree on the glimate change bandwagon carrying all sorts of riff raff. I put that down to moral relativism – since there is no higher authority, they have no compunction about forcing everyone else to their way of thinking.
Or else.
And since they know best, they will educate us (or our children) until we get with the program.
nilk
13 Jul 12 at 7:06 pm
The government’s little shithouse rat, scurrying around the ramparts of the general population far from the isolated, barricaded, doomed elite, is full of self-love for his superior intellect, which will surely grant him eternal life.
Like all history’s petty functionaries of temporary, self-congratulatory ruling classes, however, he will eventually have to look in the mirror to discover, alas, that he is and always was just a shithouse rat.
Tom
13 Jul 12 at 7:12 pm
Hmmm Heemskerk. Stefano Lubiana too.
Big Jim
13 Jul 12 at 7:14 pm
Steve, by definition it isn’t possible to “satisfy” (?) Godwin’s Law in the original post.
Second, Godwin’s Law only applies to outlandish references to Hitler or Nazism. In a discussion of eugenics, such references are – and should be – part of the discussion’s fabric.
For trying to wreck the thread with your idiocy, I – personally speaking – would ban you from the blog outright.
Finally, your and Monty’s evident hurt over the post’s comparison tends to demonstrate there’s something in it. That’s because you’re both left-wing zombies who have no interest in the misery and deaths caused by the ‘climate change’ religious movement.
—————————————————
As mentioned in other contexts, both the Democrat Party’s extermination wing – Planned Parenthood – and the Quentin Bryce-backed Marie Stopes International were founded by eugenics fascists, a KKK supporter and – in the case of Stopes – a Nazi. So there is that direct, disturbing organic connectedness between mainstream leftism and historical eugenics. John Holdren – Obama’s science czar – has also argued for the implementation if fascist eugenics.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 7:15 pm
Careful, Helen. He’s a passive aggressive beta coward – in terms you might be familiar with, a shemale. He only beats up on people he can physically intimidate.
Tom
13 Jul 12 at 7:29 pm
But any of Annie’s work encourages onanism.
Pickles
13 Jul 12 at 7:33 pm
CL …
The Leftard movement can almost be described as a ‘death cult’ of sort. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood was an abdominal human being.
From birth right through to old age, the Leftards have a plan in place to rid Mother Earth of these leeching ‘parasites’ – human beings.
Abortion ensures little human are killed before becoming ‘parasites’; Euthanasia ensures old human beings can be killed the moment their ‘usefulness’ to humanity expires. Strange irony they don’t allow us to kill pedophiles?
Abraham
13 Jul 12 at 7:37 pm
The funny thing is that everyone HATES eugenics; but abundant condoms for 17 year old Congolese militia veterans is humanitarian aid work (disapproved of by no one except Monty Python-style ‘sacred spermers’.)
Big Jim
13 Jul 12 at 7:42 pm
the last outpost of eugenics was socialist sweden. Sterilized more people than any other European state except for Nazi Germany.
Sweden’s large-scale eugenics programme targeted the deviant and the mentally. From 1934 to 1975, Sweden sterilized more than 62,000 people.
until 1999, the Swedish government rejected paying compensation.
Jim Rose
13 Jul 12 at 7:54 pm
Climate Change believers indeed certainly do give off the impression that a few deaths is OK as long as it’s for the greater good. There has been plenty of overt and subvert mention of this.
Of course, scratch any climate change evangelist deep enough and you’ll find a population controller. How do you change the population size without taking lives? You can’t unless you sterilise people, leaving you back at eugenics.
Besides, any common or garden variety climate change policy usually has unexpected consequences, and those usually involve someone losing a life. The next big cold snap that hits the UK is going to take quite a few, now that fuel poverty is such a large problem.
brc
13 Jul 12 at 7:55 pm
I think that Samuel has missed the real point here. Rather than try to tie together the similarities between certain factors involved in actual eugenics and the current climate alarmism, only Jim Rose at 6:48 pm has hinted at the REAL connection – so-called ‘progressivism’ and the people, rather than the issue. Eugenics was just one of the logical answers to what was the old Progressive movement’s attitudes to the non-members of their elite. Not only in the USA of course. The USSR was onto it early on and after War Communism and the Red Terror there was a mere ‘workforce’ to go where it was told and the working class disappeared forever as a recognised class.
The more times goes on, the more parts of the modern ‘progressive’ movement seems to revert to more and more of the traits of that original grouping. I give them a half-pass on the racism of the original movement. Wilson re-segregated the military, ‘The Klansman’ was the movie of Progressivism (Birth of a Nation) and until Hitler took their views to their logical extent and thus made it unachievable anymore, who knows where it would stand today, what creeping changes there would have been. More mass-castrations, more lobotomies, more electro-convulsive therapies? I am not against ECT, just talking about the use under coercion of those days.
The ‘progressives’ of today exhibit many of the traits of the old Progressives, their elitism, their devaluing to nothing of the inferior ‘little people’ (we are now getting – full-blast – the “poor education, the poor things”), bogans and everything else used to define voters and others who just won’t do what their betters tell them is good for them.
Climate alarmism, for some reason brings out the stark reality of their connections to all the worst of the old elitism of Progressives. I swear that Lewandowsky seems closer and closer to joining Clive Hamilton in openly canvassing what should, be done to actually remove the power of the non-believers to interfere, and that includes, of course, removing them from the democratic process.
As for the spurious Godwin’s Law, what rubbish it is. Any gratuitous relativism in any argument is a loser but to try and use that to exclude study and comparisons with Hitler or Stalin is stupid, as this true link with eugenics of the Progressive era and attitudes of today shows.
M Ryutin
13 Jul 12 at 7:55 pm
SteveC:
Simple, you appalling buffoon. Take a look at the AGW-inspired ‘biofuels’ rort. They climbed into bed with special-interest industrialists trawling for massive ‘green’ subsidies and cheerfully started turning the US corn crop (the cheapest available bulk food source on the planet) into automotive fuel.
The FAO and World Bank were horrified. This cast somewhere between 50,000,000 and 250,000,000 human beings back into the ‘extreme poverty’ category, which meant that a lot of them then starved to death.
However, they were ‘only little brown and black people’, so the racist-bastard AGW believers don’t give a rats arse. Seen any of them or the greenfilth protesting about the diversion of the food of the global poorest of the poor into providing fashionable fuel for smug inner-city greenfilth?
No?
Neither have I.
IIRC it was FAO who said one tank of biodiesel for some fat greasy German Green used enough food to lift an average family in the ‘extreme poverty’ bracket into the ‘poverty’ bracket for an entire year, something like a 50% increase in the food they got.
But no-one in the AGW cult cares – racist ideologues don’t. They are merely ‘little brown and black people’ to those vermin.
Mk50 of Brisbane
13 Jul 12 at 7:57 pm
Sweden? The land of ‘gender neutral’? Where men are told to sit down to pee? Clearly they sterilized the wrong people.
Gab
13 Jul 12 at 7:58 pm
As for the so-called Godwin’s Law, it isn’t a law (ie: it hasn’t been proven) and second just because Mike Godwin makes an observation doesn’t mean that one should not discuss Hitler and the Nazis.
Further, the reference to Hitler in the blog is apt since it is a discussion on eugenics which he embraced. Any book on eugenics will mention Hitler – that doesn’t make them wrong.
As for being ‘contemptible’ according to Monty, the piece is merely an observation that a world-wide fad in the past was widely accepted and is now (rightly) disowned. While one shouldn’t assume that history will repeat itself, the contrary assertion that any comparison is false is also invalid. We should learn from history, and we should be on guard against movements that sacrifice the present for some unknowable future. The one thing we do know – all previous assertions that the world is coming to an end have proved false. I know the world will end – in about 5000 million years when the supply of hydrogen in the Sun has been mostly depleted and it moves to fusing helium and higher elements. The world may end before then (or life may end before then) but we cannot know that. There is a minor probability that an asteroid of sufficient mass could collide with the Earth and destroy all life. But M0nty and his ilk continue to be depressive and pessimistic about the future. I tend to optimism.
Samuel J
13 Jul 12 at 8:01 pm
SteveC, for your education:
Gab
13 Jul 12 at 8:01 pm
M Ryutin: I agree that Jim’s comments on the progressive movement are quite apt. I think it comes down to hubris.
Samuel J
13 Jul 12 at 8:05 pm
Except, CL this thread isn’t a discussion of eugenics at all, is it?. It’s a discussion of climate change activists, based on an outlandish comparison with eugenics, with a dash of Nazi references thrown in for good measure.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:06 pm
If we didn’t satisfy Godwin’s law at the very beginning, you certainly did your best with that piece of crap.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:14 pm
SteveC – please stop crapping on about Godwin. If you cannot make a substantive contribution then don’t waste our time.
Sinclair Davidson
13 Jul 12 at 8:16 pm
These sorts of movements are more beneficial than you would think. Most of the democractic freedoms we enjoy in this era are actually inherited immunities from evils past. Like any organism we must endure for a time that which makes our descendents stronger and cannier. Accepting that which goes against our pride, that we’re merely the higher rung not the ladders pinnacle.
I hope these losers try something absolutely diabolical, it will destroy them and be only vindication of us.
Simon
13 Jul 12 at 8:17 pm
Jeez. hasn’t Steve gone vewwy vewwy quiet on the subject of AGW believers:
I wonder why the silence?
Mk50 of Brisbane
13 Jul 12 at 8:20 pm
No SteveC, the comparison of eugenics and the clilmate change movement is not outlandish. The same elites trying to poison society and like leaches suck the blood from the economy. I am finding the activists more and more contemptible. I used to think they were well meaning but wrong. Now their behaviour is much more sinister. It is contemptible to impose a carbon tax which cannot achieve its objectives. It is contemptible to push for projects under the Green banner which actually harm the environment: biofuels and wind power being the classic two examples. It is both contemptible and hubris to claim to be able to predict and control the climate.
Samuel J
13 Jul 12 at 8:20 pm
Bio-fuels.
Thank you, Mark.
Is there a death toll for that appalling scam?
I think it’s in the tens of thousands.
———————————————
It’s not crap, Steve. Marie Stopes was a Nazi and a eugenics extremist. She even disinherited her own son because his wife was diagnosed with myopia.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 8:25 pm
Well said Samuel J.
It’s also contemptible that these same AGW true-believers will steal the food from the poorest people on Earth to make fuel so they can inflate their egos and coo that they are ‘saving the planet’.
While they ignore their victims starving to death… because they are not white.
Mk50 of Brisbane
13 Jul 12 at 8:27 pm
Not in me it doesn’t *shudder*
Carpe Jugulum
13 Jul 12 at 8:27 pm
Good link Gab,
interesting reading further down:
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:29 pm
Apologies Sinc, you and I obviously disagree on the value of this post:
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:31 pm
Or, if you’re Clive Hamilton, someone channeling his self-confessed foul-mouthed murderer, “Jacob”. See today’s ● Friday 13th Special: Is It Dr Clive Hamilton or Mr Jacob Hamilton? at Media Watch Dog.
Cold-Hands
13 Jul 12 at 8:32 pm
SteveC – don’t apologise. Argue. Make a fist. Invoking Godwin is trying to win on points. Win on a knock-out, if you can.
Sinclair Davidson
13 Jul 12 at 8:34 pm
All true, dickhead.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 8:34 pm
For the benefit of Steve I’ll post it again; how do you interpret these attitudes?
And M. Ryutin, despite your thoughtful analysis, I don’t think you have considered the thought processes or world view on display in the AGW movement [see link].
We are not talking about selective breeding, or breeding out of defects, however defined, but extinction.
cohenite
13 Jul 12 at 8:36 pm
- Letter from Marie Stopes to Adolf Hitler, August 1939.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 8:37 pm
So, Steve, capitalism is to blame for biofuels, not greenfilth pressure on governments to provide massive taxpayer subsidies to ‘save the world’ through ‘renewable energy’.
Riiiiight.
You really are a shill: as intellectually deep as a carpark puddle and as possessed of humanity of an amoeba, aren’t you?
So you are perfectly happy for lots of ‘little brown and black people’ to starve.
Classy.
Mk50 of Brisbane
13 Jul 12 at 8:39 pm
The Chinese are the latter day eugenicists, I don’t think Godwin came up, one way or another, when they formulated the one child policy. And this is their Century.
Big Jim
13 Jul 12 at 8:39 pm
Yes CL, I’ve seen that before. So that is your evidence Stopes was a Nazi?
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:40 pm
Yes. A love note to Adolf Hitler is proof she was a Nazi.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 8:43 pm
CL, can you explain your theory of the connectedness from Quentin Bryce to eugenics. I saw your post on the other thread a while back and suggested you were playing a game of “six degrees of separation”, but you didn’t reply.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:44 pm
Big Jim, the Frankenstein society that the Chinese have created for themselves will keep China busy.
Seriously, an ageing population where the male to female ratio is so out of kilter is a danger for the rulers. Think Kenya in 2009 after that child-man Assange lit the bonfire.
Token
13 Jul 12 at 8:46 pm
Token, I agree some of the unintended consequences are problematic, but it’s hard to weigh these against the benefits. It’s not as if the one-man-one-woman nuclear family model is holding up in the West. Dozens of social experiments with far more dubious aims have scuppered any return to that.
Big Jim
13 Jul 12 at 8:53 pm
Steve, as I’ve told you before – don’t try to interrogate me or run me around answering your bogus questions. You’re not cognitively equipped to successfully pull it off.
We’ll just agree that I’m right and you’re wrong.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 8:53 pm
Thank you Mark – I’ve been pointing this out for years and have been roundly abused for having the gall to do so.
Misallocating resources has consequences.
There is not a single death on this planet that can yet be attributed to catastrophic human induced climate change.
However, there are literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths that can be directly attributed to staggeringly stupid climate change mitigation ‘initiatives’, ‘programs’, ‘policies’, etc, etc, etc.
Hang your heads in shame, you disgusting, sanctimonious hypocrites.
Rabz
13 Jul 12 at 8:54 pm
No Capitalism is to blame for the actions described in Guatemala. In the same way food crops have been replaced by in the past by coffee and cocoa to satisfy demand in the western world.
Read the second link to see how biofuel crops can work.
Having said all that, I’m yet to be convinced that there is any net CO2 emissions benefit from ethanol based fuel.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:55 pm
I hope you’re not on a jury any time soon.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:56 pm
And that is the right approach to free speech, and something the Left never get or seek to stifle.
Abu Chowdah
13 Jul 12 at 8:56 pm
No we’ll just agree that you won’t substantiate your bogus claim.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 8:59 pm
Bio-fuels are beloved by cranks such as Newt Gingrich and Steve C.
Say no more.
Infidel Tiger
13 Jul 12 at 9:02 pm
A jury would accept that a booklet of especially written love poems to Adolf Hitler, composed by a woman who believed in eradicating the weak and the frail, for “the creation of a New and Irradiated Race” – and presented in Berlin for the edification of the Hitler Youth – was a Nazi.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 9:08 pm
From Wikipedia:
Samuel J
13 Jul 12 at 9:10 pm
Spot on Rabz. The Greens are complete misanthropes. Today on the Contrarians on Sky News, the panellists were discussing Labor’s lover’s tiff with the Greens and preferencing them last. One of the arguments put up by van oscillator was that the Greens were nowhere near as extremist as the racist One Nation party and therefore presumably they shouldn’t be put last. Chris Kenny vaguely alluded to Green misanthropy through their opposition to all immigrants except asylum seekers but their unwavering support for biofuels would have been a much better example as would have been support from at least large sections of the Greens for the anti-Semitic BDS movement. How people can’t see that the Greens, in particular the new generation, are far more dangerous extremists than One Nation ever were is beyond me.
Skuter
13 Jul 12 at 9:10 pm
The national Socialists deeply admired Stopes ‘work’. She was a bog-standard ‘scientific socialist’ of the era and was most certainly a left-wing activist. In 1935 Stopes was invited to attend and speak to the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin.
Which was not run by the Buddhists and which was one of the forums in which the National Socialist eugenicists ‘obtained a great triumph’ due to ‘international support’ for ‘racial hygiene’.
Reference: The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, Stefan Kühl, pp.32-36 has a good general description of that Conference. Stopes paper has never been found AFAIK, she was extremely quiet about this event postwar (funny that) and never discussed it.
She is damned by the conference report which summarises her contribution as follows: “Marie Stopes demanded that scientifically trained minds examine the prerequisites for human conception and give directions for regulating them from the point of view of breeding up the human stock.”
This is T4.
The main speaker at the Conference noted that: “From the synthesis of the work of all these men, the Führer of the German nation, Adolf Hitler, capably assisted by Interior Minister Dr. Frick, and advised by the anthropologists, eugenicists, and social philosophers of the nation, has been able to draw forth a far-reaching racial policy of evolving and improving the population, which promises to become epochal in racial history. It presents an example which other nations and races must follow if they do not wish their racial quality, their racial performance, and their prospects for survival to be cast into the lower ranks.”
That convener was American, a friend/colleague of Stopes and Sanger (and many other western eugenicists).
“Tiergartenstraße 4″, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten gave its name to the resulting murder program which the 1935 Conference formed one of the justifications for (it provided the international justification). T4 was run by the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege (Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care). Between 1939 and 1945 they murdered somewhere between 200,000-275,000. At least 60,000 were children.
Forced sterilisations – specifically and vocally supported by Stopes since 1910, started in 1933. The person who ties the sterilisation programs and T4 to socialist eugenics activists like Stopes is Wilhelm Frick, of the Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte), who was the central convener of the 1935 Conference.
The best photo EVER of Frick is here.
It still brings a cheery smile to many a German face today.
Stopes probably mourned the bastards execution.
Mk50 of Brisbane
13 Jul 12 at 9:13 pm
Godwin’s law applies especially toSamuelJ’s post is an inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one’s opponent) with Nazis.SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 9:22 pm
Now, a couple of other British eugenicists who attended the 1935 Berlin Conference came away uneasy. They mentioned this shortly after the Conference and re-examined some of their views.
During the war some of them even grew alarmed at reports out of Switzerland, Hungary and Italy re national Socialist racial cleansing policies, and recanted such of their views as expressed at the Conference which they thought might have been used to support what they were hearing. Postwar, such persons (there were a few) were at least able to recant and condemn their previous views with some honesty, and that is to their partial credit.
Stopes is not known to have ever done this AFAIK beyond some pro-forma ‘wasn’t Hitler just awful’ comments.
So far as is known, she never recanted any of her views on eugenics and ‘racial hygiene’ whereby government should determine that ‘imbeciles’, ‘mentally unfit’ and ‘inferior races’ present in the UK and USA such as ‘niggers’ should be forcibly sterilised so as to ‘improve the human race’.
marie Stopes was a vile excuse for a human being – like most socialists.
Mk50 of Brisbane
13 Jul 12 at 9:25 pm
CL, sending a book to Hitler containing love poems is not the same as “a booklet of especially written love poems to Adolf Hitler,”
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 9:41 pm
SteveC, Godwin’s law is basically a leftwing device to stop discussions when it becomes clear that analogies with the Nazis gets uncomfortably close for lefties.
Now Kimberly, your blow-sex doll, is calling you from the bedroom. Recall, you had ‘her” programed to “call” you at certain hours?
Like
“hey big boy it’s time”.
JC
13 Jul 12 at 9:42 pm
‘course.
JC
13 Jul 12 at 9:43 pm
Well done SteveC, by insisting on litigating the dead issue of Godwin’s Law, you once again prove you are too much of a lightweight to sustain an argument.
I do hope that all the bludgeoning with the light of the truth is actually getting through, as it would be a shame for you to squander this million dollar education you are being provided.
Token
13 Jul 12 at 9:48 pm
This place is much more convivial when the topic is ‘free speech’.
Big Jim
13 Jul 12 at 9:55 pm
What a nonsense distinction. Can you think of a single good justification to send a genocidal dictator a book of love poems you stupid fucking idiot?
Fisky
13 Jul 12 at 10:10 pm
Fisk
the Fisk Doctrine must contain a special article allowing for putting to sleep the steveC’s of the left. It must be humane though and he should be allowed his plastic doll to go with him.
JC
13 Jul 12 at 10:15 pm
He is the stupidest idiot in the world. Where do these people come from FFS?
Fisky
13 Jul 12 at 10:24 pm
It wasn’t just “a” book.
It was Love Songs for Young Lovers.
Author: Marie Carmichael Stopes.
C.L.
13 Jul 12 at 10:32 pm
I’d put to a bad batch as the recent one’s have been pretty bad. But they’re really all just as homer stupid.
JC
13 Jul 12 at 10:37 pm
Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Chavez has cancer
Fucking great.
Infidel Tiger
13 Jul 12 at 10:39 pm
You think we have problems with the driftwood?
Jacques
(I only go to Club Troppo to see if Fyodor has commented, btw)
Gab
13 Jul 12 at 10:40 pm
You think we have problems with the driftwood?
Jacques
(I only go to Club Troppo to see if Fyodor has commented, btw)
Gab
13 Jul 12 at 10:41 pm
You think we have problems with the driftwood?
Jacques
(I only go to Club Troppo to see if Fyodor has commented, btw)
Gab
13 Jul 12 at 10:42 pm
Sucked in, you pompous parasites!
Rabz
13 Jul 12 at 10:47 pm
First Robert Zubrin has a book out Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism that is precisely on point.
He brings up the British Eugenics leader Julian Huxley and points out his influential role in setting up UNESCO. I would go further because I still read repeated references to Huxley and his views on how to change culture. In that respect here is a link to the Ecological Systems Theory that both Australia and New Zealand have been basing education reforms on for at least 10 years.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/courses/3615/Readings/BronfenbrennerModelofDevelopment.pdf
That’s not grounded in actual research mind you. Students become the research. If you look on page 3 it admits this is a theory developed to support desired social policies and programs. In this case the economy reorganized around sustainability principles and citizens with a mindset that will tolerate such intervensionism and fostered dependency.
All eugenics does not have to be physical. These days it is the psychosocial realm where we see deliberate interventions and manipulation. We are allowed to exist as long as we can be socially engineered via education.
Robin
13 Jul 12 at 10:48 pm
Worldwide fad, what rot, don’t back away from your stupidity now Samuel. Nazism is not hula hoops.
You are trying to equate climate change with a discredited pseudoscience that was used as justification for murdering millions of innocents in a world war. Sycophants like Mk50 follow up by claiming that Ohio cornfields are the new instruments of globalised genocide. It is too silly for words.
SteveC is right that this is a classic case of reductio ad hitlerum. Hitler wore pants, are you going to call for a moratorium on pants too?
m0nty
13 Jul 12 at 11:27 pm
That Matt Ridley is a great man – superb on climate change. He taught me in his first book, The Red Queen, that sex is really just a way of trying to outsmart parasites. Funny how the macro often mirrors the micro.
The Moronic Lodge
13 Jul 12 at 11:31 pm
And supported by pioneering progressive and women’s rights activist, Marie Stopes. The Left: they just aren’t hygenic people.
Fisky
13 Jul 12 at 11:38 pm
Yes, climate change activism is a discredited pseudoscience.
Samuel J
13 Jul 12 at 11:42 pm
And m0nty can’t resist chiming in to try to squelch debate either.
Something about this post must really have hit home with them. They wouldn’t be running around waving their arms in the air yelling “Shut up shut up shut UP!!” otherwise.
The Left will always telegraph who and what they fear, if you but listen to them.
sdog
13 Jul 12 at 11:47 pm
Wow… really Marie Stopes actually sent love poems to Adolf? Fme
JC
13 Jul 12 at 11:48 pm
For publicity. Did you read the note she sent with the book?
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 11:50 pm
CL brought up Stopes being a nazi in the first place. I’m still curious why he did, and how Quentin Bryce is linked to either eugenics or Nazism.
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 11:55 pm
And the note excuses this lunatic from sending the book of love poems, SteveC?
JC
13 Jul 12 at 11:55 pm
Actually, I may have worked it out. How Quentin Bryce is linked to Nazis
SteveC
13 Jul 12 at 11:58 pm
I knew something I read in the last week was trying to put Eugenics in a good light. I was surprised and It took me a few minutes to locate the reference. It indicates eugenics is alive and well and very much a part of this Student Wellbeing and human wellbeing focus being promoted globally more and more as an alternative to a focus on economic growth.
It’s from a book called Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet that I wrote about recently. In Chapter 3 “Early Attempts to Shape Bodies and Minds” it exalts Galton and is saddened by how when the “obviously self-serving racial and class interests embraced eugenics, its reputation as an objective scientific endeavor plummeted.” (p. 40)
It then goes on in the section on reshaping minds to propose using memes to “favor, annihilate, or refashion genes.”(p 48)
Memes are the “units of information that, once mastered, condition-indeed constitute!-the way we think and that can be passed along from one person to another.” (p 47)
I would say eugenics is alive and well and a formal basis for the global education movement currently being pushed by UNESCO and UNEP. It’s the basis for the real definition of Quality Learning being pushed internationally through the accreditation process.
And it all ties into this sustainable bureaucratic managed Green Economy that seems to be determined to shut down the human ingenuity that has brought us so far. The ingenuity that makes natural resources of value in the first place.
Robin
14 Jul 12 at 12:02 am
Fme, Hitchs Bro slams her and the organization.
Stopes sounds like an absolute fucking loon.
JC
14 Jul 12 at 12:03 am
No, but it doesn’t make her a Nazi.
SteveC
14 Jul 12 at 12:07 am
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1054749/Royal-Mail-honours-family-planning-pioneer-Marie-Stopes–sparks-outrage-eugenics-links.html#ixzz20Vm6heqk
JC
14 Jul 12 at 12:08 am
The point is that eugenics wasn’t considered discredited at the time. It was a popular idea with mainstream intellectuals. You lefties really have no sense of history.
Dangph
14 Jul 12 at 12:08 am
Lol
JC
14 Jul 12 at 12:08 am
The post is about the historical connections between eugenics movements of yore and moral attitudes today. The perduring sway of eugenics as a mentality is easy to demonstrate, which is why I cited the Democrat Party’s beloved Planned Parenthood – founded by a eugenics fanatic who associated with the Ku Klux Klan – and Marie Stopes, founder of the eponymous abortion conglomerate, a mentally deranged eugenics fanatic, race hygiene advocate and Nazi.
Earlier in the week, attention was drawn to an organisation of which Quentin Bryce is patron (disgracefully). I linked to its newsletter, which promotes and financially spruiks for Marie Stopes International – a global killer of non-white children (especially)founded by a notorious racist and Nazi.
As regards Planned Parenthood, the historical parallellism of this infamously minority-targeting organisation being so institutionally connected to the Democrat Party (which used to lynch black people more openly) cannot pass unnoticed by any morally sane person.
C.L.
14 Jul 12 at 12:11 am
Yes, I did. She was an advocate of “racial purity” who sent a book of love poems to Adolf Hitler. In other words, she was a Nazi.
Fisky
14 Jul 12 at 12:13 am
Calling for racial purity, attending Nazi seminars, and sending love poems to Adolf Hitler.
SteveC: she’s not a Nazi at all!
Fisky
14 Jul 12 at 12:14 am
Steve, out of curosity – do you support global conglomerates Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International and their extermination of unborn non-whites around the world?
Because my guess is that you do.
C.L.
14 Jul 12 at 12:14 am
Naaa. she was no nazi. it’s all a minor misunderstanding, that’s all.
JC
14 Jul 12 at 12:16 am
She also called Jews a “curse”.
So an intellectual anti-semite, sterilisation-advocate, Hitler-love-poem-sender, and Nazi-conference-attender is not a Nazi after all!
Thanks SteveC, you really are a gem.
Fisky
14 Jul 12 at 12:22 am
Anyone read Hitler’s return letter. this is what I found..
Hi Mare:
How’s it hanging. I gotta tell you these Jews are seriously giving me a hard time and Heinrich is trying to figure out what to do with them. Listen, we have a big party meet up in a coupla months time and was wondering if you’d like to come as a guest of course, not member or any of that stuff.
Anyways Mare, love the poems
Seeya , your friend Adolf.
JC
14 Jul 12 at 12:23 am
The more I read about Marie Stopes, the more I view her as a nasty piece of work. She should be despised not honoured. She was clearly a racist, anti-Semite and eugenicist. There is no evidence presented that she opposed Nazism, but strong circumstantial evidence that she supported it. Given that her views lined up with National Socialism, it is not inappropriate to regard her as a Nazi sympathizer.
Samuel J
14 Jul 12 at 12:27 am
LOL.
God, that made me laugh.
C.L.
14 Jul 12 at 12:28 am
Nothing Nazi about that, no sir!
wreckage
14 Jul 12 at 12:32 am
It’s not necessarily scientifically invalidated even now; it’s just unfashionable (and of lesser importance it’s also ethically and morally repugnant, but that rarely stops the self-styled intellectual betters of this or any other nation).
wreckage
14 Jul 12 at 12:37 am
CL, I hadn’t even heard of Marie Stopes International before you raised it. But I am continually amazed by the ability of many here to draw illogical conclusions from the available evidence.
“How do you know she is witch? Because she looks like one!”
SteveC
14 Jul 12 at 12:43 am
Interesting end to JC’s quoted article:
SteveC
14 Jul 12 at 12:49 am
OK, so a eugenicist and a megalomaniac. Fine, whatevs.
wreckage
14 Jul 12 at 12:50 am
Yep SteveC. the son’s account is more credible than her own actions. She hated the Nazis. Hated them. In fact she hated them so much, she despised them Jews, attended full blown scientific conferences in Nazi Germany and sent Hitler love poems and letters.
Yep. I can see eggsactly how much she hated them.
You denialist.
JC
14 Jul 12 at 1:04 am
So the main problem I am hearing is the GG is patron of an organisation that makes donations to a different organisation that provides abortion clinics, and takes its name from a scientist who was a eugenicist in the early 20th century. From my reading of CL’s posts, I imagine the abortion clinics are the major objection.
SteveC
14 Jul 12 at 1:17 am
Please, no one take away Steve’s shovel. This is too much fun to watch.
sdog
14 Jul 12 at 1:19 am
No, you’re lying. It should read:
That’s what an honest person would have written instead of someone like you who has a relationship with plastic sex-doll- Kimberly.
JC
14 Jul 12 at 1:22 am
Earlier in the week, attention was drawn to an organisation of which Quentin Bryce is patron (disgracefully), Women’s Plans Foundation. I linked to its newsletter, which promotes and finances Marie Stopes International – a global killer of non-white children (especially) founded by a notorious racist and Nazi.
So we know that Quentin Bryce approves of Marie Stopes International.
Still no answer.
But given the flapping about it’s reasonable to conclude that, yes, Steve supports Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International.
C.L.
14 Jul 12 at 1:52 am
Yeah, Steve thinks megalomania is a defense against Nazism.
!
You really have to wonder if the eugenicists had a point, though. SteveC is the stupidest person on this blog and it would be absolutely inhumane if he were allowed to breed. I can’t see it myself. In a just world, he would be banned from reproducing.
Fisky
14 Jul 12 at 3:29 am
Yeah, Steve thinks megalomania is a defense against Nazism.
!
You really have to wonder if the eugenicists had a point, though. SteveC is the stupidest person on this blog and it would be absolutely inhumane if he were allowed to breed. I can’t see it myself. In a just world, he would be banned from reproducing.
Fisky
14 Jul 12 at 3:29 am
What an amazing thread. One of the more intellectually lazy practices of the blogger-sphere is the automatic chatting of “Godwin! Godwin!” whenever Nazism is mentioned. To then proceed to argue that it is ‘illogical’ to conclude that Marie Stopes was a Nazi, broadly conceived, even though she had racist and eugenicist beliefs that fit hand in glove with Nazism is incredible.
You are trying to equate climate change with a discredited pseudoscience that was used as justification for murdering millions of innocents in a world war.
Typical confused leftist twaddle. SamuelJ doesn’t “equate” climate change activism with the eugenics movement (not Nazism), he says they are, in many respects, analogous. If you don’t understand the difference, please refrain from making any similar or identical accusations.
dover_beach
14 Jul 12 at 4:21 am
So what actual substantive links did Samuel J make between climate change science and eugenicism?
This is a stupid argument. I could equally say Nazism is analogous to globalised capitalism because they are both about claiming natural resources in foreign countries (i.e. liebensraum) and exploiting them. It is a childish game.
Ah yes, the eternal cry of the conspiracy theorist. “They’re trying to feed me hemlock, I must be as great as Socrates!” Complete bollocks written by privileged old white men who have never known true suffering.
Market-based economic theory is also an evil Utopian dream where the State can make and mold society along some perceived rational lines. Every “ism” is, pretty much. Including libertarianism. They are all horrible, and we have to choose the least worst elements of them all and somehow make them work. Hysterical bullshit like Samuel’s piece does not help matters one iota.
m0nty
14 Jul 12 at 9:27 am
I think a safe abortion is a much better outcome than an unsafe abortion. A better outcome still is cheap widely available contraception. To the extent that Marie Stopes International provides those outcomes then I support those activities, yes.
Though your statement would more accurately read “support Marie Stopes International and their provision of safe abortions around the world”
SteveC
14 Jul 12 at 9:31 am
Steve and monty, cretins both, but worse, defending the Green anti-humanism.
Greens and Nazis; a done thing.
And look, the home grown variety.
Steve and monty; smug dickheads, defending the indefensible.
cohenite
14 Jul 12 at 9:38 am
Please return to the 1935 Berlin Eugenics Conference for incontrovertible proof that Stopes was an active and supportive National Socialist sympathiser at the very least.
This Conference was deliberately intended to validate the National Socialist racial hygiene policies which commenced in 1933 with compulsory sterilisation of undesirables. These policies met rapturous applause from Stopes and her fellow socialist eugenicists.
The 1935 Conference was very clearly intended and advertised as a ‘way ahead’ conference, to determine the ‘best’ ways to use the ‘science of eugenics’ to ‘improve the human race’.
Frick regarded the 1935 Conference as the basis of T4.
let me repeat that sentence in all its horror. Frick regarded the 1935 Conference as the basis of T4.
So with one very small change, I believe CL has nailed it:
What SteveC and Monty are doing is stating support for the continued postwar ‘work’ of this evil piece of crap Marie Stopes. Her work in eugenics never stopped, and still has not. He devotees are still out there murdering babies and sterilising ‘undesirable human beings’.
Funny how the ‘undesirable human beings’ are nearly all black and brown people, isn’t it?
And Australian socialists still support them.
How like the National Socialists you truly are, under the skin.
Mk50 of Brisbane
14 Jul 12 at 9:45 am
He didn’t reference climate change science; he referenced CC activism . And no, you couldn’t, because capitalism isn’t distinctive of Nazism but racialism and eugenics are.
dover_beach
14 Jul 12 at 9:50 am
db, you are correct to state that SamuelJ did not equate CC activism to the Eugenics movement, but rathrer to draw the analogy. But why pick Eugenics as an analogy? Primarily because it is morally abhorred today. One of the extreme outcomes being extermination of people.
So not surprsingly that’s where this thread went. CL, unsurprisingly, started up on abortion again, ably supported by Mk50.
Helen expressed most clearly the link that Samuel was too coy to state explicitly :
SteveC
14 Jul 12 at 10:17 am
Hi SteveC, I was working away from the comp most of today and have just picked up your q, however it is most ably answered by Mk50, Samuel, Gab and others.
I have a question for you though. And I am most interested in your answer, as it would pertain to you, personally. It is a difficult question and my own thoughts towards it have changed over time.
If you were pregnant (or your stable relationship partner) was pregnant and tests showed it was a down syndrome baby, what would you do?
For years I thought that I would abort, but my thinking has changed in more recent times, especially after reading a report by a fantastic lady doctor (and I cannot think who or where) who said that more babies were killed by the test than discovered by the test. That we are killing babies who are healthy, viable and at no risk for the condition which the tests test for.
So it is not just a test and if it is a down syndrome (or whatever) make The Choice. Most of these tests are made on women who are heading towards the latter of their reproductive life. These women are made to feel it is ‘responsible’ to have these tests, when in fact it might really be more ‘responsible’ to bear the baby and accept the joy that comes with that, regardless of how ‘perfect’ or not baby may be viewed by others.
I believe this testing itself is eugenics.
And taking food producing land out of production and growing biofuels instead of food so some rich green death hippy can feel good about driving their car around (or flying air miles) while some goddamned poor African who drives an ox at best and will only ever see planes flying over him starves to death is also eugenics.
The rich will always be able to pay for food, it is the poor who die in the carbon crusade. And the rich green death hippies don’t give a shit. In fact they might even feel some pleasure at the thought.
Goodnight.
Helen Armstrong
14 Jul 12 at 7:37 pm
But apart from that, what do you have against environmentalism?
wreckage
14 Jul 12 at 8:04 pm