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Eugenics Is Not Right Wing
by Ian Thorpe
March 17, 2013.
Following Conservative Howard Flights breaking of the unofficial rule that no
one in politics should ever speak the truth about anything, Dave Osler at the far left
Liberal Conspiracy blog wrote, in an article titled Eugenics and the Tory
(Conservative) Right:
"It seems that Flight is just the latest supporter of the traditional class-based
Eugenics that has been a singularly ugly undercurrent in British intellectual life at
least since 1798, the year in which an anonymous pamphlet entitled 'An Essay on the
Principle of Population' first saw the light of day."
Liberal Conspiracy, known for it's readiness to brand any dissenting voice a
Eugenics: The Hiddeen Agenda
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/11/25/eugenics-and-the-tory-right/http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/11/25/eugenics-and-the-tory-right/http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/11/25/eugenics-and-the-tory-right/http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/11/25/eugenics-and-the-tory-right/ -
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racist, bigot, genocidist or right wing nut job is probably the most illiberal British
political blog, an organ of the extreme left's lunatic fringe whose conviction that they
are right about everything protects them against attacks by Star Wars type weapons.
Osler does the blogs noble tradition of ignorance, stupidity, uninformed bigotry and
support for pseudo science proud by showing he does not understand the difference
between eugenics and family planning. (Hitler's Final Solution was not eugenics, it
was genocide)
Where did that ugly undercurrent of class based eugenics come from? you might
well ask. There was no Conservative party in 1798, just a bunch of people nicknamed
Tories who supported the King, the Empire and the Church of England, they had
never heard of class politics. In fact the notion of Eugenics (literally young gene - not
an idea the traditionally inbred aristocracy who ran the show in 1798 ever embraced
with great enthusiasm) had not around long enough for traditionalists to have any
truck with it. No, the idea of Eugenics came from the left. While Volta in Austria and
Galvani in Italy were planting the seeds of the Frankenstein myth with their argument
about the relationship between electricity and life, British political thinkers were
toying with the idea that physical and mental defects were due to hereditary factors
and could be eradicated by preventing imbeciles and cripples from breeding. Both the
electricians and the eugenicists were aiming in the right direction but not right on
target.
Look back to the early decades of the Twentieth Century and we find such
luminary socialists as Virginia Woolfe, Marie Stopes,Marga ret Sanger, HG Wells,
George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and the left's leading couple Beatrice
and Sidney Webb, all social progressives from the Leftie pantheon (look them up if
you don't want to take my word),shared a common belief the state had not just the
right but the duty to forcibly sterilise large sections of the population.
The Fabian society, a left wing talking shop formed by the more disconnected
intellectuals of the UK Labour Party has always been at the forefront of authoritarian
socialism and one of its leading intellectuals Harold Laski was also a member of the
British Eugenics Society and even penpals with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Laskihttp://www.eugenics-watch.com/briteugen/eug_l.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Laskihttp://www.eugenics-watch.com/briteugen/eug_l.html -
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who once wrote to his British friend that he had "delivered a decision upholding the
constitutionality of a state law for sterilising imbeciles the other day and felt that I
was getting near to the first principle of real reform".
Laski certainly didnt object. In fact, as
Dennis Sewell recounts his bookThe Political
Gene support for eugenics was largely contained
within the left wing metropolitan intellectuals
who by the 1930s had infiltrated and hijacked the
UK Labour Party, founded by and for the men and
women who worked in factories, shipyards, docks,
in construction, on the railways and the land.
These trendy left wing intellectuals desperately
wished to improve the lot of people in the lower strata of society but had no
understanding of the lives and attitudes of people who lived in working class
communities. The left wing intellectuals were in fact more elitist than the
Conservatives.
Although eugenics is often and unfairly branded with a racism label and some of
the policies of 1930s socialism had strong racist undertones, the bulk of the 65,000
forced sterilisations in the US were against white country folk. A boy who smiled was
likely to be sterilised for being an idiot, but any hillbilly could be victimised.
Deliverance, as Sewell writes, was just a movie, while the brutality visited upon the
people of Americas rural heartlands by well intentioned reformers and "progressive
liberals" was real, and has left a long trail of agony leading to the present day.
It might surprise readers to learn that the science of eugenics (and it is a
science)was developed not by "right wing nut jobs" but Darwinists whose
hyperactive God complex led them to believe nature could not be trusted to manage
natural selection alone and needed a helping hand from scientists) was developed by
a Briton, Francis Galton and an American, Charles Davenport. Though the forced
sterilisation program in the USA is mentioned above the most extensive experiment
in eugenics was conducted in politically correct, socialist Sweden with forced
The Hidden Agenda: Item 1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/14/political-gene-darwin-reviewhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/14/political-gene-darwin-reviewhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/14/political-gene-darwin-reviewhttp://c/work/Web%20Projects/content/scribd/eugenics/a%20href=%22http://www.scribd.com/doc/120495780/Intellectuals-Have-Always-despised-The-Masseshttp://c/work/Web%20Projects/content/scribd/eugenics/a%20href=%22http://www.scribd.com/doc/120495780/Intellectuals-Have-Always-despised-The-Masseshttp://c/work/Web%20Projects/content/scribd/eugenics/a%20href=%22http://www.scribd.com/doc/120495780/Intellectuals-Have-Always-despised-The-Masseshttp://galton.org/eugenicist.htmlhttp://www.dnaftb.org/14/bio.htmlhttp://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/64/4/379.fullhttp://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/64/4/379.fullhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/14/political-gene-darwin-reviewhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/14/political-gene-darwin-reviewhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/14/political-gene-darwin-reviewhttp://c/work/Web%20Projects/content/scribd/eugenics/a%20href=%22http://www.scribd.com/doc/120495780/Intellectuals-Have-Always-despised-The-Masseshttp://c/work/Web%20Projects/content/scribd/eugenics/a%20href=%22http://www.scribd.com/doc/120495780/Intellectuals-Have-Always-despised-The-Masseshttp://c/work/Web%20Projects/content/scribd/eugenics/a%20href=%22http://www.scribd.com/doc/120495780/Intellectuals-Have-Always-despised-The-Masseshttp://galton.org/eugenicist.htmlhttp://www.dnaftb.org/14/bio.htmlhttp://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/64/4/379.fullhttp://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/64/4/379.full -
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sterilisations only being ended by law in 1975.
Taken at face value, eugenics is not a bad idea,
eradicating a gene that causes congenital defects or
makes a person susceptible to hereditary diseases
is a laudable intention. But as with all such
scientific developments, once established it is open
to abuse. Politicians were quick to see the
opportunities to eradicate not just those destined to
be a burden on society throughout their lives but
troublesome minorities, mavericks, habitual
dissidents, blacks, jews, homosexuals, artists and
anyone who the establishment did not like the look
of. Science was ever fascism's whore of course and
once politicians in Germany and elsewhere saw the possible advantages of racial
purity there was no shortage of scientists ready to help them achieve it.
To understand why eugenics was not Right-wing one only has to look at the
Scopes Trial, historically seen as a battle between modernism and fundamentalist
forebears of today's Religious Right. Sewell , again, explains it is remembered
entirely falsely. Supposedly heroic teacher John Thomas Scopes was just a football
coach with "no special commitment to his pupils, and was not planning on staying in
Dayton very long" and "probably never really taught his class about evolution".
The trial itself was described by contemporary commentators as a cynical
contrivance, a plot hatched by local businessmen to make Dayton famous, and a
response to an advert by eugenicists hoping to challenge the anti-evolution Butler
Act.
That Act was not some reactionary and archaic ruling, having only been signed
into law by the Governor on March 23, less than two months previously, passed by
overwhelming margins by both houses.
Sewell comments: "These margins reflected the Butler Acts enormous popularity
among the people of Tennessee. In 1925, the nationwide eugenics campaign was at its
Science giving nature a helping
hand
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height. In the rural areas of Tennessee folk may not have had a sophisticated grasp of
Darwinian science, but they knew the eugenicists who preached Darwinism in the
cities despised country people, called them imbeciles and defectives and would
sterilise them if they got the chance. They knew they despised God and the Bible too.
Now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. But
America was a democracy, and that meant that simple people, if they made their
views plain, could fight."
While not persuading me to move one millimetre toward creationism it does put
into perspective the deification of science.
Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, portrayed
as a reactionary and idiot in the Spencer Tracey
film glorifying Scopes, has been described as the
most radical and socially progressive man to ever
stand for the American presidency, and saw the
trial as a contrivance on the part of a middle-
class elite to cheat the ordinary citizens of
Tennessee out of a law that they very much
wanted. Here we see the left's contempt for
democracy and the will of the majority most
recently displayed when after a political activist
Appeal Court Judge in California overturned a democratic vote to repeal a law
permitting same sex marriage. "Progressives, who have the effrontery to describe
themselves as Democrats, were saying that in cases where the popular vote produces
the wrong answer to a question, central government must step in and "do what is
right."
Obviously to anyone who understands the concept of a democratic society a
majority in a popular vote can never produce the wrong answer. To call for
government or the courts to overturn such a decision is a call for tyranny. But what
else can we expect from people sympathetic to the tyranny of eugenics.
It is not just in the USA that such a contemptuous attitude towards poor and
The Scopes Trial
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uneducated people is blindingly obvious among the new elitists of the intellectual
left. Eugenics and Fabian Socialism shows that many leading British socialists in the
1930s supported if not forced then certainly coerced stetilization. Though the Labour
Party has now dropped its official support foe Eugenics as social engineering, the
Fabian Society still exists and still supports eugenics, though not as noisily as in the
past.
In his bookThe Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the
Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (review - Google Books) Professor John Carey
comments on the elitism and intellectual snobbery of leading left wing academics and
writers from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century.
Professor Carey's thesis proposes that modernism was born out of snobbish
revulsion to the spread of literacy and popular culture. Modernism, he says, is less a
cultural movement motivated by certain aesthetic and spiritual imperatives than a
closing of ranks by social cabal. Its chief ambition is to exclude as many people as
possible from the enjoyment and understanding of culture so the self-appointed
elitists of culture may enjoy their own superiority unhindered by the press of common
folk. Or, put more simply: If a lot of people like it we must dismiss it as crap. In this
sense, modernism is fundamentally "antidemocratic." "Intellectuals could not, of
course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy," Professor Carey explains.
"But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to
understand - and this is what they did.
The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European
intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture." Hence the aesthetic experiments
of writers like Mallarme, T S Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were undertaken
not for any compelling aesthetic or spiritual reason but simply as an exercise in
obscurantism. Literature is not unique but special in holding the ability to educate and
entertain simultaneously. People who have followed Bernard Cornwell's "Sharpe"
series will have learned a lot about Wellington's Iberian Campaign against Napoleon
Boneparte's French Empire and a good deal about nineteenth century military
technology. Likewise the books of John Steinbeck give us a vivid picture of
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1050282http://books.google.com/books/about/The_intellectuals_and_the_masses.html?id=a7eaAAAAIAAJhttp://books.google.com/books/about/The_intellectuals_and_the_masses.html?id=a7eaAAAAIAAJhttp://www.jstor.org/pss/1050282http://books.google.com/books/about/The_intellectuals_and_the_masses.html?id=a7eaAAAAIAAJhttp://books.google.com/books/about/The_intellectuals_and_the_masses.html?id=a7eaAAAAIAAJ -
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California in and just after the Great depression but deliver the message in a much
more engaging narrative that some weighty social history written by the type of
person who would sneer at Steinbeck's populism.
A progressive, Left-wing middle-class elite, as most of the eugenicists were right
up until the Second World War, was entirely comfortable with eugenics not just as a
philosophical idea but as a social policy to be implemented with enthusiasm. After
WW2 eugenics became discredited and, surprise, associated with conservatives. The
left are nothing if not hypocritical and had conveniently forgotten Hitler's political
party was the National Socialists and that the other nations to have pursued eugenics
as a policy were Soviet Russia under Stalin and Communist China under Mao Tse
Tung.
Now when online writers and commentators encounter "progressives" shouting
"Eugenics" at any mention of the idea that we should perhaps discourage the
unemployed and the underclass from producing children by making the benefits
system less generous, do not be intimidated by their assumptions of intellectual or
moral superiority. It is they, the left as they like to style their authoritarian politics,
who have traditionally supported eugenics and not for the entirely supportable reason
of economic pressures but for the unsupportable and illiberal reason of advancing a
political agenda that involves eliminating certain social groups from the population.
Curtailing benefits is not in any way related to eugenics, it is simply a common sense
attitude to persuading people to take responsibility for their own lives.
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