eugenics belongs to the left, not the right

7/29/2019 Eugenics Belongs To The Left, Not The Right

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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
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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
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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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eugenics belongs to the left, not the right

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