Another interesting video from these folks.
[video=youtube_share;OP7ZzV4Z338]https://youtu.be/OP7ZzV4Z338[/video]
I shouldn’t be, but sometimes I’m amazed that everyone doesn’t know this stuff. It’s the kind of thing that belongs in every history book along with slavery and WWII so it never happens again.
Everyone wants to see Sanger as some kind of hero, but in reality she was just another statist / socialist that was 100% good with deciding who lives, who dies and who gets forcibly sterilized by the state. She a less successful version of Hitler and Stalin.
Just as Hitler used a interpretation of Darwin’s survival of the fittest to justify his horrors, Sanger used her interpretations of evolution to “build a better race” and doesn’t that sound awfully familiar.
I can see her doing a belly rub slow dance with Der Fuhrer.
Yes, this should be in History books and yes, we should be teaching History, Civic’s and Government in our Public Schools.
Worst of all, they were practicing selective breeding along blood lines with no real understanding of genetics. So they were excluding out people who were completely healthy but didn’t satisfy visual qualifiers while maintaining people who carried high risks of genetic defects simply because they satisfied visual qualifiers.
It was literally as insane as saying everyone 6 foot or above is superior and shall be maintained while everyone shorter than 6 foot shall be excluded from reproducing. They understood almost nothing but went ahead and tried to literally decide the fate of every person in the world that they could access or influence.
Even if one practiced eugenics based upon a modern understanding of genetics, rather than the “dog breeding” method used in the 1930s through the 1970s by the US government, it would still be one of the most grievous violations of individual liberty that one can engage in. You are literally deciding who is allowed to reproduce.
I think genetic screening and birth control should be available to any adult who requests it, that way people understand what they “might” pass on to their children when they are ready, but no government or any other person in an official capacity should have any say in what those people decide. And if that means the mentally disabled and incompetent are allowed to breed, well that wouldn’t be anything new and we have Sanger herself as proof. Even though the world would have probably been much better off if her parents were forcibly sterilized, even if it might have meant millions of innocent lives might have been saved, I don’t think any government anywhere should have that kind of power to make those kinds of decisions for it’s citizens.
Instead of being used as a successful defense at Nuremberg, Sanger and her followers should have simply been put on trial with the rest of the nazis and judged accordingly. Many German nazis were put to death simply for promoting such ideas, I don’t see the distinction between theirs and ours.
Because our quasi-fascist regime won and theirs didn’t. “Victors’ justice” was a big thing… look at how the Soviets treated any German they could lay hands on after raping, pillaging and burning, not necessarily in that order, their way to push the front line back across Eastern and Central Europe.
All the more reason, instead of letting nazis skate because “well Sanger and you guys did it too, that is where we learned it”, we should have just processed them all (ours and theirs) right to the hangman’s noose because it’s all the same evil.
True, my point was that we see it as “Right Vs Wrong” while the Nuremberg Tribunal saw it as “settling scores for the winners to have their pound of loser’s flesh.” MacArthur had some choice things to say about the tribunals he had to run in Japan too, IIRC, finding them repulsive from a military tradition POV of “the nation as a whole bore the responsibility, it paid with its people’s lives and it cities reduced to ash and rubble, it’s done.” (Admittedly, he did indulge in Victor’s Justice himself with Homma and Yamashita… the latter, refusing to even consider exculpatory evidence that after Yamashita ordered his forces out and Manila an “open city,” his Navy archrival Iwabuchi moved in and said “if you won’t hold this place to the last man we will.” The Rape of Manila was 100% an Imperial Japanese Navy show… Worth noting that Iwabuchi had already proven himself “less than honorable” in Japanese eyes for refusing to go down with the ship as captain of the Kirishima at Savo Island, and that Japanese interservice rivalries went even to the point of assassinating each other’s officers.)
Hitler took some of his ideas from the Eugenics movement/concepts in the US. It was not racial per se, but to reduce the % of “imbeciles” in the population, those populations they deemed full of “imbeciles” which of course was anyone not a social elite, so poor Irish, Italians, blacks, etc. Also:
Which also ties in with the Wilsonian ideology he used as his foundation.
Twenty Six years ago my wife was pregnant and we went in for a “Check-up”. Both of us Active Duty and everything appeared normal to me, but the Doctor was upset and he told “Us” being me and my 19 year old Wife that there was a high possibility that my Son would be born with birth defects.
He laid it all out there and in as unbiased away as possible suggested an abortion in a noncommital way and hit the exit.
26 years later my Kids wrapping up his MBA from OU and doing just fine. Academics are easy for him and he has been in the gifted and talented program since first grade and graduated with two semesters of College credits. He took a break to be a Nurse and went back to school when covid hit, now he’s on another path.
I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t drive my Wife down to planned parenthood?
Congrats to you and your son. I have to wonder what that doctor was basing his diagnosis on.
Was he looking at two young parents in the military, thinking you wouldn’t be able to raise a son? Or did he see something real.
In the '80’s I knew a pregnant woman in the Navy that was recently married.
One of the career women in medical recommended she get an abortion, instead of trying to be an enlisted mother.
She decided to get discharged instead, her husband was recently discharged and working.
Our Eugenics program, especially under Sanger was absolutely race based.
The targets were anyone that they didn’t feel lived up to Nordic ideals, minorities, which was blacks, Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities. With added racism, black women took the major share of the “program” but it was not race based per se from all I have read.
OK, I’m confused.
You note that the program targeted anyone who was not the “nordic ideal” but you don’t think the program was race based?
Either I’m reading it wrong or you wrote it wrong. And just to be clear we are talking about the US eugenics program which included things like the Tuskegee study where black men were used as lab rats.
I think he’s saying race was a component, even a big one but not the only factor, much like Nazism sought to exterminate all it considered “undesirable” whether with or without Nordic/“Aryan” features and genes.
Will, how’d I do?
I had heard most of it, but thought their take was in a clear and concise package.
One that was new to me(don’t recall the time, but towards the end) was “soldiers” being on their shit list.
Yeah, that was new to me too, but not surprising. The woman was legitimately insane and saw entire classes of people as expendable.
It’s difficult for Modern people to get a grasp on how “Society” looked at Immigrants at the time. These people came by the Boatload and didn’t get off the boat with the best of hygene. So they were an easy target for disdane and snide comments.
The ones that found jobs stayed and the guys who didn’t moved toward the frontier. So the waves of Scots, Irish and Germans were “Forced” by economy to move further West with every generation.
But the Folks within “Society” on the East Coast kind of created an echo chamber of opinion on how to “Deal” with these problems. Remember at the time if someone might need child labor, the State might take your kids and put them to work.
It was a mess you moved West to get away from these nightmares.
Edit to add;
There were also a lot of organizations that were anti Immigrant, the Klan (Certainly they weren’t the only ones) although noted for their actions in the Jim Crow South were avid anti Catholic, so much so we didn’t get a Catholic POTUS until 1960.
Pretty much they wanted the Mayflower Folks to be running the show and all these stinky immigrants keep getting in the way and having babies.
The Slums in Major Cities were nightmares of disease and filth with little way out.
I meant specific to black women. It was “race based” in that it targeted anyone or race, that didn’t live up to their Nordic ideals both visually and or mentally, which included white people, the handicapped (not race for example) and “imbeciles” (also not race based) and so forth. It was not as race based as it was anything not up to Nordic ideals.
Whether Sanger focused on race vs some of those other things, I can’t say. Much of what I have read does not paint her as an avowed eugenicist, as much as she was focused on women’s reproductive Rights and got involved with hard core eugenics types as and end to a means. As usual, writing is often ether painting her the personification of evil, or apologetic as to her motives and such. Per usual, truth seems to fall some place in the middle.
MLK praised Sanger several times, so he didn’t view her a racist simply trying to exterminate black people obviously.
I think hers is a complicated legacy.
I believe I missed that chapter. I know there was a lot of child labor, but through conscription? (Not the right word but I think you understand.)