Do medical breakthroughs combined with prejudice against disabled people mean we’re on the verge of a new era of eugenics? Could we be heading for a society where anyone not considered perfect will be prevented from being born? Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal II
The burden of sterilisation fell heavily on India’s poor echoing the history of eugenics. ibid.
Scientists have had some limited success editing genes in mice … Gene editing has huge potential. ibid.
The phrase Problem Families was used by the Eugenics Society in the 1950s … In 2006 Tony Blair said problem families were a menace to society. ibid.
Scientists have had some limited success editing genes in mice … Gene editing has huge potential. ibid.
This false narrative of perfection. ibid.
This is page 26 of the Evening Standard on Monday 23rd February 2009: ‘Dozens of parents have complained to the BBC that a disabled television presenter is scaring their children. Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, Cerrie Burnell reporting, BBC 2021
‘We were made to feel superfluous to the world. You know, and that’s a very hard message.’ ibid. early interview of resident disabled woman
‘They didn’t want disabled people – they wanted us to be perfect.’ ibid. disabled woman
How is it possible these attitudes still exist in the 21st century? ibid.
With nowhere else to go, the workhouses started filling with sick and disabled people. ibid.
Feeble-minded: ‘An umbrella term for all sorts of disabilities.’ ibid. historian
In 1913 The Mental Deficiency Act gave authorities sweeping new powers to institutionalise people against their will. The effects of this policy to segregate and confine people that didn’t fit is still being felt today. ibid.
‘Once they have been born, defectives are happier and more useful in these institutions than when at large. If carefully trained, they can be taught simple routine tasks. It would have been better by far for them and for the rest of the community if they had never been born.’ ibid. 1930s Eugenics film
Ideas about eugenics grew in popularity across the world during the 1930s. But it was in Germany that they were taken to their most extreme conclusion. Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazi regime carried out the mass sterilisation of up to 400,000 disabled people with all kinds of impairments. Over a quarter of a million more were murdered. The discoveries of these horrors ended Britain’s public support for eugenics, but it didn’t end the authorities still trying to control the lives of disabled people. ibid.
Efforts to rehabilitate disabled people had begun after the First World War with wounded servicemen. ibid.
[Dr] Guttman had a brilliantly simple idea: to use competitive sports to give disabled people the chance to succeed. ibid.
It took one man who was living in a residential home in Hampshire to change the rules – Paul Hunt … ‘I am proposing the formation of a consumer group to put forward nationally the views of actual and potential successors of the workhouse.’ ibid.
A new era in the history of racism. Europeans started mistaking military superiority for intellectual and even biological superiority. That’s when things turned nasty. No-one had to pretend any more. Exterminate All the Brutes s1e3: Killing at a Distance or … How I Thoroughly Enjoyed the Outing ***** Sky Documentaries 2021
Baden-Powell writes to his mother: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed the outing. Except for want of a fight. Which I fear will preclude our getting any medals or decoration. ibid.
Lord Salisbury, Albert Hall 4th May 1898: ‘One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying. The weak nations become increasingly weaker and the strong, stronger. It was in the nature of things that the living nations would fraudulently encroach on the territory of the dying. ibid.
The Germans did not think that as a higher race they had any need to abide by treaties they made with the natives. As in north America, the German plans for immigration presupposed that the natives were to be relieved of all land of any value. When the Hereros resisted … every Herero found within the German borders with or without weapons was to be shot … 80,000 Hereros died in the desert. ibid.
Eugenics: The over-infatuation with genetic impurity, an impressive amount of energy put into the classification of people. A pathological obsession for the concept of race that scientifically doesn’t exist. ibid.
The Myth of Pristine Wilderness: a land with no people does not exist. The idea that America was virgin land, a wilderness inhabited by non-people called savages, is a myth. Only through killing and displacement does it become uninhabited. Before the arrival of the British, north America was a continent of villages, of nations, of confederations, of nations. Exterminate All the Brutes IV: The Bright Colours of Fascism
138,770. The Navy Seal team members who carried out the assassination of Osama bin Laden on May 2nd 2011 were reporting in real time to President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other officials in the sealed Situation Room. Following the operation, the New York Daily News commented, ‘Along with the unseen pictures of Osama bin Laden’s corpse and questions about what Pakistan knew, intelligence officials’ reasons for dubbing the Al Qaeda boss ‘Geronimo’ remain one of the biggest mysteries of the Black Ops mission’. ibid.
Kill anything that moves. Take no prisoners. In California, hunting Indians was both legal and profitable. $5 a head, 50 cents a scalp. In 1849 the American government paid more than a million dollars to Indian hunters. ibid.
Make America Great again, he said. When exactly was it great? I mean really great? And for whom? ibid.
In the beginning, the slaves had to clean the cotton with their bare hands. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney would change everything. But Cotton also destroyed the soil, while using slaves’ bodies like a commodity became the most lucrative enterprise around. More profitable than all lands, banks, railroads, factories and gold products put together. Slaves were used as collateral for mortgage, a newly developed tool of commerce. ibid.
By 1890, disarmed, held in concentration camps, their children taken away half-starved, the Lakota and Dakota survivors found a new resistance: ghost dancing. ibid.
Wounded Knee Massacre: East Indians killed: 300; Survivors: 51 (4 men, 47 women), Army casualties: 25 dead. ibid.
Frank Baum: The pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends on the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better in order to protect our civilisation follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the Earth. The fact is, the Native Americans are still here, and this is still their home … The real fight remains the fight for self-determination and restitution. ibid.
As writer James Baldwin says, ‘There is scarcely any hope for the American dream. Because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence will wreck it.’ ibid.
Lost souls on a pile of human confusion. The absence of any trace of empathy and genuine humanity is unbearable. The nightmare is buried deep in our consciousness. So deep that we do not recognise its ghosts. ibid.
The limits of superiority: privilege makes you vulnerable, and panic blended with ignorance and bigotry creates anger. Limitless and blinding anger. Everyone else becomes the enemy. The fortress becomes a prison. Everyone else looking in at you. ibid.
So educated Europeans today know how children die when the whip of debt and bombs whistle over poor countries. It is not knowledge that is lacking … Imperialism is a biologically necessary process that according to the laws of nature leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. ibid.
This knowledge is a fundamental prerequisite. That is why the narrator can tell his story as he does in Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness. He has no need to count the crimes Kurt committed. He has no need to describe them. He has no need to produce evidence. For no-one doubted it. ibid.
Certain American Progressives and British Fabian Socialists are very lucky that Adolf Hitler was a plagiarist, and that he did not cite their work on eugenics when writing Mein Kampf. Otherwise, history would remember them differently. A E Samaan
Mary Donald was one of the victims. In 1946 when Mary was only 10 years old the sheriff brought her to Lynchburg only with her brother and sister. Her mother was already there. Mary had no idea why she had been taken to the colony. When she arrived she was frightened and confused. Secret History s3e5: The Lynchburg Story, Channel 4 1994
At the Lynchburg colony Mary was 1 or 1,700 inmates. Some were epileptic, mentally retarded or severely disabled. Most however like Mary had been committed using the spurious diagnosis of feeble mindedness. ibid.
What Mary and the inmates did not know was that they were to be sexually sterilised as part of a systematic program of social engineering. ibid.
Lynchburg Va Feb 21 (AP): More than 4,000 men, women and children were sterilized in a 50-year program … ibid. newspaper article
Grave concerns over the legality and the ethics of a state-run program began to be voiced. ibid.
Churchill was born on 30th November 1874 to Conservative politician Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill and American socialite Jennie Jerome. A child of aristocracy he was born at Blenheim Palace. Times in Focus: Eugenics, Youtube 47.39, 2023
In May 1904 he crossed the floor to sit with the Liberals. ibid.
He was in favour of the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum to which this country had long adhered. ibid.
Churchill was impressed by the Theory of Eugenics and was interested in the idea of sterilizing the unfit. The Eugenics movement in educated circles was somewhat en vogue between the turn of the century and the First World War. ibid.
The idea of positive and negative Eugenics was given as a solution; incentives should be given to the middle classes to have more children, and measures taken to prevent the unfit from procreating. ibid.
In 1910 he was in favour of the confinement, segregation and sterilization of a class of persons contemporarily described as the feeble-minded. ibid.
‘The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life’. ibid. Churchill, letter to cousin