Eugenics in the News

A couple of eugenics controversies have made the news recently. In an interview with The New York Times, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the following statement in response to a question about Roe v. Wade and the Hyde amendment:

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

(emphasis mine)

It has also been belatedly noticed that Obama's science czar has made some fairly controversial statements in the past.

President Obama's "science czar," John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, "compulsory sterilization," and the creation of a "Planetary Regime" that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet -- controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings. ...

Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.

To help achieve those goals, they formulate a "world government scheme" they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world's resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an "armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force" to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.

To which I would reply: how is it that so many people find any of these statements shocking or controversial in the slightest? Eugenics was a global movement a century ago. It was a major plank in the Progressive movement early on in the 20th century, which eventually spawned the fascist/national socialist movements. Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and frankly, average people of the time, would have found none of these notions controversial in the slightest. Probably the most controversial element would have been the partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization. It was generally accepted that it would be necessary to the future of mankind that undesirable populations be culled out to prevent their spoiling the gene pool. If you had read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, or knew a little bit of history, you would know all of this already. Why should it surprise people that the modern torchbearers of the Progressive movement, who even call themselves progressives for crying out loud, would articulate ideas similar to the ones they advocated not all that long ago? We should expect this behavior, not be shocked by it! Goldberg himself comments on the Ginsburg-Progressive-Eugenics connection:

Regardless, Ginsburg’s certainly right that abortion has deep roots in the historic effort to “weed out” undesired groups. For instance, Margaret Sanger, the revered feminist and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a racist eugenicist of the first order. Even more perplexing: She’s become a champion of “reproductive freedom” even though she proposed a “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” under which “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit.” (Poor blacks would have had a particularly hard time getting such licenses from Sanger.) If Ginsburg does see eugenic culling as a compelling state interest, she’d be in fine company on the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a passionate believer in such things. In 1915, Holmes wrote in the Illinois Law Review that the “starting point for an ideal for the law” should be the “coordinated human effort . . . to build a race.”

Ginsburg wasn't after any sort of shock value, she was simply stating what she saw to be a widely known, completely uncontroversial historical fact. And frankly, she was perfectly correct. It's just the fact that she bothered to say something un-PC that caused the controversy. Most people would simply leave such an idea unsaid, as it would be "impolite." The real scary part of the whole thing is how easily history is whitewashed and how easily we are brainwashed. We practically do it to ourselves! Global warming is the new eugenics. It is completely phony, has no physical basis in reality, but it serves as a useful crisis for those who would like to shape the world in they way they see fit. As they say, those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it...

Halfway Through Liberal Fascism

From Liberal Fascism:

[Woodrow] Wilson shared with other fascist leaders a firm conviction that his organic connection with "the people" was absolute and transcended the mere mechanics of democracy. "So sincerely do I believe these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America." Many Europeans recognized him as an avatar of the rising socialist World Spirit. In 1919 a young Italian socialist proclaimed, "Wilson's empire has no borders because He [sic] does not govern territories. Rather He interprets the needs, the hopes, the faith of the human spirit, which has no spatial or temporal limits." The young man's name was Benito Mussolini.

I am approximately halfway through the book, and I have to say, this was an eye-opening read. I do not care whether you are liberal, conservative, libertarian, completely apolitical or just think you are, you really ought to read this book. You may not agree with everything, especially if you happen to be a creature of the political left, but you will certainly be startled by the facts it contains. I was already familiar (and in agreement) with the basic thesis that fascism was a phenomenon of the extreme political left, not the extreme political right as so many would have you believe, so I thought I was in for a rather humdrum read. Not so. While the book can be dizzyingly fact-dense at times and occasionally borders on beating a dead horse, a great deal of it will simply leave you with your mouth hanging wide open, particularly quotes like the one above. There are some real jaw-droppers in there, some from people you only thought you knew. The intricate connections between the various political movements of populism, progressivism, nationalism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and communism, and in America's case, their claim on leaders of both Democrats and Republicans leaves the reader with an eery sense that Jonah Goldberg has thrown light on some great political tentacle emanating from some fundamental, carnal human property that animates a great deal of the political world. One can't help but come to the conclusion that this fundamental human property is a failing and is decidedly evil, perhaps even the great human evil, or at least a direct descendent. The book is not religious per se, but addresses a great deal of religious material and contains many religious overtones. Goldberg himself defines fascism to be "a religion of the state." This appears to be roughly divisible into two distinct movements: the first, and more common, is the creation of a pagan state religion with man as god, the second the elevation of the state as an all-encompasing tool of God as described by an existing religion, not completely unlike a theocracy, but not exactly the same, either. (Note that I'm not trying to provide some kind of squirmy defense of theocracy, as I'm not even slightly pro-theocracy, but the two are a bit different.) For Christians, this book should hopefully leave you with a newfound caution for politicians and political philosophies that claim God's sanction, direction, or consistency with His ideals. This is not to say that all such claims are wrong, but upon reading the book one shudders at just how many people enthusiastically embraced totalitarian acts and policies which had been wrapped in a Divine mantle by their politician-salesmen, and how similar many of these acts and policies were to those proferred by the Nazi's and other fascist regimes. It is scary, and I have no doubt it could easily happen again, and probably will. Final word: read this book. No matter who you are, it will change your thinking about politics.