RE: American eugenics and Nazism

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, October 5, 2003

'War Against the Weak': Here Comes the Master Race
By DANIEL J. KEVLES

WAR AGAINST THE WEAK
Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.
By Edwin Black.
Illustrated. 550 pp. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. $27.

Eugenics -- the idea of manipulating human genes to the end of improving
individuals, groups or entire populations -- is strongly associated with
the Nazi programs of sterilization, euthanasia and genocide. But during the
first third of the 20th century, eugenics movements flourished in many
nations, including the United States. In the last few years, newspaper
articles have called attention to -- and prompted official apologies for --
state-mandated sterilizations done legally to rid society of its alleged
human trash, the ''weak'' in the title of Edwin Black's new book, notably
in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon and California.

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In support of his main thesis, Black stresses that European eugenicists
were linked with their American counterparts through international
organizations, meetings, correspondence and visits several made to the
United States, some to work at the Eugenics Record Office. German
eugenicists praised American policies, research and writings and
incorporated accounts of them into their works. In ''Mein Kampf,'' Hitler
himself praised America's sterilization laws and immigration restriction
act. Black also emphasizes that beginning in the 20's and continuing well
into the Nazi period, the Rockefeller Foundation provided sizable funds for
research at three eugenically oriented research institutes in Germany. All,
he writes, would ''make their mark in the history of medical murder.''


Response Jim C: I'll look forward to reading this book. For the record,
central in the U.S. and German Eugenics movements were members of Skull and
Bones. Even their homo-erotic rituals and initiation ceremonies (e.g.
connubial bliss and recounting sexual histories by those clearly homophobic
in orientation) were designed to have eugenics implications in terms of what
the bourgeois neoclassicals call "assortative mating." 37 of 50 States
passed eugenics laws that explicitly defined Indians as being--by definition
and nature--"feeble-minded" and candidates for sterilization. The
collections of skulls of various "races" and holding them in "The Tomb" at
Yale has its origins in the pseudo-science of the eugenics movement. The
same happened in Canada:

Alberta sterilization victims also used as guinea pigs Revelation comes as
40 victims win $4M settlement
                Marina Jimenez  National Post
                10/28/98

As many as 100 of the children at the centre of the Alberta sterilization
scandal of the late 1960s and early 1970s were also used as guinea pigs in
drug trials, the National Post has learned. The children lived at the
Provincial Training School in Red Deer. Some were wards of the province and
others were placed in the school by their parents, who did not consent to
the sterilization or medical experimentation, which included the
administration of powerful steroids and anti-psychotic drugs. Experts say
one of the drugs used, the anabolic steroid norbolethone, is illegal today.
The anti-psychotic tranquilizer haloperidol was also used. Its effect on
children is said to be akin to hitting them over the head with a sledge
hammer.

Yesterday, 40 people who were sterilized against their will reached a
settlement totalling $4-million with the government of Alberta. This brings
to 540 the number of people who have settled with the province for being
sterilized under the now-defunct Alberta Sterilization Act, which was in
effect from 1928 to 1972. The operations were ordered by Alberta's eugenics
board to prevent the mentally disabled from passing on their defects to
offspring. Lawyers say they want more money from the government for victims
who had to endure being tested with powerful drugs in addition to being
sterilized. "Invading people's rights in the form of unauthorized research
and taking advantage of people who couldn't look after themselves is the
kind of thing that courts award punitive damages for," said Jon Faulds, an
Edmonton lawyer representing 109 sterilization victims still negotiating
settlements.

And:

[NativeNews] When Poor and Native = "Feeble Minded" : Hiding in Plain Sight

[snip]

The random institutionalization of "marginal people" (which all too often
translates to Native American,
mixed-blood, African American, and poor white), the forced sterilizations in
institutions and jails, and the coerced sterilizations by government
"clinics" delivering "free health care" to marginal communities. . . all
these procedures and programs contributed in large part to the isolation,
assimilation, disappearance, and lack of
genealogical records for Abenaki, Mahican, and other Native peoples within
range of "the Perkins Project." It caused several generations to change
their names, move, hide, and refuse to be publicly identified as "Indian."
Perkins was not the only Indian hunter - the Ku Klux Klan and other
vigilantes also targeted prominent Indian families.

Kathleen Gallagher just came out with a book on the Vermont Eugenics
project,titled "Breeding Better Vermonters." But even her documentation of
this project is missing family names - Perkins chose to identify the
sterilized generically as "gypsies" and "pirates," to spare them the shame
of being identified as "Indians."


In his "Fantasies of the Master Race", Ward Churchill documents that by
1977, some 40% of Native women had been sterilized--through coercion,
deception and legally sanctioned procedures.

Jim C.


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