Further Reflection on the US Eugenics Movement
When those that believe they are gods walk among us
With calls for Nuremberg trials for those who led the coerced gene therapy interventions, discrimination against those who refused such therapies, and lockdowns with their ensuing harms, it seems timely to review again this dark moment for humanity. This hidden piece of US history connects monied elites, research institutes ( in particular institutes in California), US statutes, and a Supreme Court case to those original trials. This history would become part of the defendants’ defense at the Nuremberg Trials.
This history was the Eugenics Movement, a pseudo science that promised the world a selected clean healthy people who would not overburden it with the feeble-minded and their endless needs. This selected stock would be achieved by the ‘State’ sterilizing those deemed inferior ‘human livestock.’ But the origin of Eugenics did not emanate from the State. It came from fanatical visionaries, who believing themselves superior and the gods that walked among us, worked tirelessly to see their vision of selected breeding come true. A review of the significant parties to the movement and the timeline reveal a pattern in many ways similar to the Covid narrative: a societal health problem identified; a solution offered that is based on a ‘new scientific discovery’ cloaked with a ‘progressive/utopian aura;’ financial and public support offered by the wealthy and Intelligentsia; and the implementation of the solution by forward-thinking public officials convinced they were acting heroically. And finally like the Covid narrative, legal and medical soldiers carried out the orders to strip away traditional safeguards of body autonomy.
The following is a brief timeline of the Eugenics Movement. (It is by no means comprehensive and, like the Covid narrative, many things overlapped in their timeframe.)
A scientific discovery from the mid-1800s fueled a belief that it could solve the problems of desperate poverty and crime in the slums of England and US. The discovery was the heredity theories developed by Gregor Mendel in his famous pea experiments. Borrowing principals from the experiments, Franci Galton (Charle’s Darwin’s cousin) developed the Eugenics theory which held that human’s evolution and development could be controlled through ‘rational breeding.’
The theory found a home amongst US wealthy progressives and Intelligentsia who were dismayed at the growing immigration from poor countries fueling immense poverty. These included poor Jews and Catholics from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. Thus place of origin, religion and poverty became scientific markers of inferiority; hence, the need to reduce their numbers. In the minds of the progressive, it was their deep responsibility to protect and promote the future of civilization. The culling of the poor to change the genetic development of society soon became the solution over traditional programs aimed at helping the poor. (Under Eugenics, programs to help the poor only perpetuated the problem of improper breeding.)
By the early 1900s, adherents included the Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation and top academics in universities. Some enthusiasts called for death chambers but discarded them as too extreme. In the end, medical sterilization was settled upon as well as the development of widespread availability of birth control for the undesirables. The latter is the tie in to Margaret Sanger.
Public officials were persuaded that Eugenics would lead to a preservation of scarce resources and the betterment of society. Its theories would go on to persuade civil rights leaders, such as Hellen Keller, and W.E.B. DuBois, who believe its theories could uplift Black Americans. DuBois later abandoned his conclusion after viewing the depravity of the Third Reich’s concentration camps following the end of the World War II. Helen Keller’s would go on to support a physician charged with criminal conduct for withholding medical intervention of a baby born with presumed genetic defects.
To carry out a national plan of Eugenics, a collaboration amongst public officials, medical professionals and legal establishment was created. The US Supreme Court case, Buck v. Bell, was the culmination of their actions. That decision upheld the state’s right to sterilize a resident on the basis that they were imbeciles, and in fact it was the moral duty to do so for the public collective good.
Buck v. Bell relied upon the Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision of 1905 that enforced a state’s right to levy a criminal fine for refusing the smallpox vaccination. As revered jurist Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes opined:
“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
He did so finding: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
Judge Holmes implied that it was a patriotic duty to become sterilized if you were feeble-minded. For if‘the State’ could call upon its citizens for sacrifice - such as a draft which sent off men to war - it certainly could expect a lesser sacrifice of sterilization to be made.
Public awareness and widespread acceptance of Eugenics theories were created by magazines and at state fairs where ‘Better Baby’ and ‘Fitter Family’ contests were held. At the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933-34 the ‘Pedigree of Man’ exhibit explained to the World how progress could be made by creating better humans.
Early on scientists criticized the theory of Eugenics as pseudoscience. This included one of its early proponents, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a biologist and zoologist. Morgan rejected the theories through his study of fruit flies and the establishment of the chromosome theory of heredity. He came to believe that social conditions, and not inherited genetic traits, were the cause of undesirable traits. He would not only publicly disavow the theories, but called for them to be removed from the public legal sphere.
Opposition came from religious leaders and their followers. This is particularly true of the Catholic faith which argued that every individual had value. Notably, the one dissenting vote in Buck v. Bell was from a jurist of the Catholic faith.
The theories of the Eugenics Movement spread to countries in South America and Europe. In Germany research institutes sought to bring the theories to fruition. Starting in 1922, the Rockefeller foundation would become a financial backer to various institutes including where Dr. Mengele worked before heading the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
Hitler became an early admirer praising the theories in ‘Mein Kampf.’ His writings (1925-1926) foreshadowed the later reasoning of the Supreme Court Buck v. Bell decision in 1927: "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole."
Adherents of the Eugenics Movement were described as having a code of ethics much like religious dogma and in fact its originator, Galton, called for it be to treated as such. Ironically the due process afforded those who opposed their sterilization arguably bore much resemblance to the dark days of the Inquisition. The due process afforded was nothing more than sham procedures paving the way to the inevitable conclusion. The belief in culling imbeciles spread to other groups in the US deemed undesirable. These would include those convicted of crimes and juveniles too young to understand what they were being forced to sacrifice.
If there are trials to hold those accountable for the Covid narrative come to be, in light of history, one needs to ask ‘what is the purpose?’ The Nuremberg Trials did little to stop the continuing bloodshed of the 20th century. And in fact by their mechanism, perhaps they facilitated the ‘new world order’ that is the cause of current horror and anguish. To move forward, perhaps it is time to move backwards, before the time of the materialistic reductionism offered by 19th century philosophy and science. Perhaps it is the time to reignite the spiritual aspect of our humanity. Victor Frankl wrote in “Man’s Search for Meaning” (recounting his survival in the concentration camps and his resulting theory of Logos Therapy) about the experience of being shaved with not a hair left on the body. “[W]e really had nothing now except our bare bodies…all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.” And yet there was a desire to live and for Frankel, a search for meaning in existence. If naked souls understood that their lives still had meaning, if only for themselves, who is it for others to say they did not?
Yet that is the mantra of those who see themselves as gods. It is the gods and they alone, who know who and what human value is. It is a material reductionist belief, where only material world (matter) is truly real and the essence of humanity plays no part.
To end this essay I am including another passage from Frankel’s book. He relays a conversation with a female prisoner who knew death was upon her. Despite her impending death, she was was joyful recounting how in her former life she was spoiled, with no spirituality. But her fate in the death camp established spirituality - a belief in eternal life as she stood with eternal death of the body. She pointed to a tree outside her hut and said: “[t]his tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness….I often talk to this tree.” When a surprised Frankel asked if the tree responded, she replied. “Yes. It said to me, I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.” So whatever lies ahead we must remember the divinity that touches us all and act accordingly. It is within the divinity that we cannot be erased.
Sources:
https://www.academia.edu/17690769/Thirteen_Ways_of_Looking_at_Buck_V_Bell?email_work_card=title
https://www.catholicleague.org/eugenics-rockefeller-and-roe-v-wade/
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/200/
https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/w-e-b-du-bois-the-negro-and-the-warsaw-ghetto
https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/eugenics-movement-in-the-united-states/sources/1626
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/better-babies-contests-pushed-infant-health-also-played-eugenics-movement-180971288/
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/reduc-body.html