Posted by
Rich on Sunday, June 22, 2008 12:40:17 PM
Below are excerpts from an excellent article by Michael Coren from Canada's National Post titled, "Socialists made eugenics fashionable".
"An
exhibition of the history of those scientific ideas that gave a grimy
intellectual veneer to the Nazi genocide opened recently at the
Canadian War Museum
in Ottawa. The collection centres on eugenics, the notion that humanity
can be improved and perfected by selective breeding and the elimination
of individuals and groups considered to be undesirable. Entitled Deadly
Medicine: Creating the Master Race, it reveals how it was not
thoughtless right-wing thugs as much as writers and scientists, the
intellectual elite, who led the movement.
Playwright George
Bernard Shaw, English social democrat leader Sydney Webb and, in
Canada, Tommy Douglas were just three influential socialists who
called, for example, for the mass sterilization of the handicapped. In
his Master's thesis The Problems of the Subnormal Family, the now
revered Douglas argued that the mentally and even physically disabled
should be sterilized and sent to camps so as not to "infect" the rest
of the population.
The most vociferous and outspoken of the
socialist eugenicists was the novelist H. G. Wells, author of The Time
Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man.
In the
United States socialist writer Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned
Parenthood and the mother of the abortion movement, called for a
radical eugenics approach as early as the first years of the 20th
century. She wrote of the need for "a stern and rigid policy of
sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny
is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable
traits may be transmitted to offspring. It is a vicious cycle;
ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only
one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop
bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or
intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents
cannot provide for them. Herein lies the key of civilization."
For more visit
www.michaelcoren.com.