“In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race.”
– Edwin Black, “War against the Weak”
“Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution”: Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference, 1921.
In June 2012 the world’s first (officially) genetically modified humans were created. The disclosure came after a series of experiments that resulted in 30 healthy babies being born, two of which were tested and found to contain genes from three “parents.” The Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey carried out an experimental program over a three year period. Fifteen of the children were born to women who had problems conceiving. It was reported that: “Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive. Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults –two women and one man.” [1]
Eugenics, from the Greek eugenēs meaning “well-born” and from eu- + -genēs meaning “born,” is the applied science and/or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population. [2]This includes the discouragement of reproduction by those considered to have genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by those who are believed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).
Later known as Social Darwinism, the origins of this pseudo-science began through interpretations of Mendelian inheritance, and the theories of Frederick August Weismann, a 19th century German evolutionary biologist. It was viewed as a science in the late 19th and early 20th century and extremely popular with the scientific and cultural Elite, including the aristocracy. Two of Charles Darwin’s friends who enthusiastically embraced eugenics, were Thomas Huxley, president of the Royal Society, and Darwin’s cousin, the polymath Francis Galton who was the first to coin the phrase “eugenics” in 1883. He went on to found the Eugenics Movement, which was fervently embraced in the United States and later Germany.
Despite the revulsion that eugenics conjures in our minds today it had widespread acceptance across America and was legally practiced in many states. It was only when the seal of approval was given by the Nazi Third Reich and the subsequent revelations of the holocaust that academia began to distance themselves from the field – at least, officially. The social applications of Nazi eugenics were no different to the American model which had been set in place by decades of population control advocacy. Nonetheless, science would prove it to be strong on belief but very weak on fact which also allowed it to seemingly fade into obscurity.
Thomas Henry Huxley (left) and Francis Galton (right)
The early 20th century was rife with social problems all of which played on the fears of the Establishment and their latent designs to isolate and enhance their inherited status. Galton’s eugenics became a disturbing expression of racist ideology that comprehensively infected the intelligentsia. The intent, according to author Edwin Black, was to: “… populate the Earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind — and less or none of everyone else.” Spearheaded by a cross-section of industrialists and academics a mass purging of what were deemed: “so-called defective family trees” were targeted and subjected to: “… lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior — the so-called unfit. The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.” [3] [4]
The notions of race and observable physical features as criteria for degenerate or superior traits and therefore definitive indicators of mental and emotional capacity, are inherently flawed. Knowledge gleaned from human genome sequence variation research shows that differences between human groups are more to do with the fluctuation, adaptation and merging of genetic variation and genetic drift than with anything remotely as simplistic as the science of race and “racial hygiene.” Heritable changes in gene activity which are not caused by the DNA sequence is the relatively new field of epigenetics, a science which has shown just how complex the journey of inherited truly is, where changes can occur in an isolated individual or over a several generations with our environment playing a key role. As Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts observes: “One of the great ironies of the present moment in the U.S. is the resurgence of race-based biological and genetic determinism at a time when scientific research is exploding myths about the biological basis of race. For example, research has shown that genetic variation within a group is much greater than variation among ‘races’ and that geographic proximity is a much better marker for genetic similarity than skin color.” [5]
“New-Genics”
That is not to say that certain predispositions, strengths or weaknesses cannot occur in different families or races just as certain talents and skills seem to arise. The complexity of influence as to why Ethiopia and Somalia produce world-class long distance runners and Russia the greatest chess players cannot be reduced down to simplistic notions such as purifying the genetic bloodline. Nevertheless, eugenics naturally appeals to authoritarian personalities that operate through a binary interpretation of reality, often encompassing a romantic idealism of society and nature. A strong tradition exists between the two, whether it is the German Volk taken on and subverted by the Nazis or some within the Deep Ecology movement that see biodiversity, population reduction and immigration as inseparable to the survival of the human species. The wish to keep Nature and race pure combined with the merging of external threats seems to become more attractive when economic stability is threatened. The fear of difference is heightened, where scapegoats can offer a vessel to which the shallow and stupid can pour in their innumerable insecurities.
Immigration has sub-connection to the ideas of eugenics and imperialism in that its creation is directly linked to the mind-set that sees certain races and peoples as inferior. Indeed, in the case of certain Jewish sects like Chabad Lubavitch or the white nationalism of the WASP Establishment, supremacy is a natural disposition. Though regulated immigration may be a logical and necessary step, since much of the present mess has been produced by Western neo-imperialsm, there is also a camouflaged bigotry hitching a ride on a resurgence of nationalism. Some of these protests against immigrants are drawn from xenophobic fear, often drawn from an uneasy fusion of nationalism which harbours confused assumptions about the despoliation of the gene pool as well as a chosen ignorance of what leads to mass immigration. Cultural and ecological purity can reinforce each other increasing underlying prejudice based on spurious science.
Similarly, even though the causes of homosexuality have generally been accepted to stem from environmental and hormonal changes in the foetus and infant life, this hasn’t stopped some gay scientists from trying to locate a “gay gene” in an attempt to afford a stronger legal foundation for gay rights based on the illogicality of a sexual orientation that is biologically predetermined. Eugenics author Nancy Ordover believes that not only is such gay gene-searching scientifically flawed it creates a backlash that reinforces the legitimacy of eugenics within more conservative anti-immigration practices and theories of collective intelligence. She quotes George Mosse describing racism as a “scavenger ideology” “… that posits the differences between race and peoples as immutable.” Ordover sees eugenics in the same light: “… exploiting and reinforcing anxieties over race, gender, sexuality and class and bringing them into service of nationalism, white supremacy and heterosexism – not for the first time, but under a new phraseology.” [6]
Though not all calls for curbs on immigration can be linked to such thinking by any means. For instance, there are compelling studies to suggest that multiculturalism and diversity is not always what its cracked up to be due, in part, to the unnatural socio-economic policies enforced upon foreign populations. (See: The Diversity Illusion from a UK perspective). Conversely, there are many groups who use it as a means to inject their ill-informed beliefs regarding race and culture. What results is a Gordian knot of confused thinking which is gaining ground. If immigration is questioned the reflex from the more conservative or republican voters is to cheer accordingly, while those on the left will leap to the defence of those pushing for an open gates policy on immigration as a matter of principle, which is neither practical or sensible. A medium must be found between the two poles which is the last thing the eugenicist mind would like, since the vast majority of humanity is surplus to requirements and any culling of the excess population is desirable whether for ecological and/ or genetic reasons. It is the Elite psychopaths vs. ordinary people that define the real issues at stake and being a genetic minority, a more fertile ground for the propagation of their genetic dominance is an underlying objective.
U.S. eugenics poster advocating for the removal of genetic “defectives” such as the insane, “feeble-minded” and criminals, and supporting the selective breeding of “high-grade” individuals, c. 1926
Wir stehen nicht allein: “We do not stand alone”. Nazi propaganda poster from 1936, supporting Nazi Germany’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (their compulsory sterilization law). The couple is in front of a map of Germany, surrounded by the flags of nations, including the United States, which had enacted (to the left) or were considering (bottom and to the right) similar legislation. (wikipedia)
Eugenics and anti-immigration started off as strong partners and still are in the minds of the Establishment, though perhaps for different reasons for the average man in the street who has good reason to view present immigration quotas as wildly unrealistic. The Immigration Restriction League was an American organisation that was the first to officially align itself to eugenics in 1894. A product of an initiative by Founded in Harvard University graduates, their principles included the prohibition of “inferior” races from entering America and interfering with what they saw as a racial purity of an American Anglo-Saxon racial stock. This meant that sexual relationships with those whom they considered less evolved (using strictly Dawinist purview) and those whom were therefore “uncivilised” was deemed a great threat to the white American race. By the turn of the 19th Century America was set to embrace eugenics with a passion.
Many socialists and members of the American Progressive Movement jumped aboard the eugenics train relieved to find a seemingly scientific basis for their romantic (though fascistic) ideo logy. For some, there was a slight hitch with this initial enthusiasm when they realised the Nazi Third Reich was riding along with them in the same carriage. It was 1930’s America and its sterilization program that would inspire Hitler to take this experimentation further, with the help of US industrialists. Later as we have seen, US intelligence would mop up the mess and incorporate the Nazi intelligentsia into what would become the National Security State. American eugenicist Madison Grant coined the term “Nordic race” as a generic racial stock descriptor for the pinnacle of eugenic advancement and later appropriated as yet another Teutonic ideal by the Reich. During the 1920s–30s, this blonde, blue-eyed, Nordic ideal gained ground and the German Society for Racial Hygiene was founded in 1905. Public health became integrated with eugenic principles leading to the implementation of selective breeding and compulsory sterilization.
Edwin Black, author of War and Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003) provides clear evidence that American corporate philanthropy elevated this pseudo-science to a degree that allowed the institutionalisation of race politics to become national policy. The Harriman railroad fortune, our friends at the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution – in combination with systematic academic fraud – were all enthusiastically involved. This led to the imposition of eugenics legislation in 27 states, mandated as lawful and constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The notion of “race and blood” became popularised by Stanford University President David Starr Jordan in his 1902 treatise Blood of a Nation in which he claimed that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood. Inspired by Starr Jordan and many others rising up to push forward the eugenics agenda two years later a laboratory was created at Cold Spring Harbour on Long Island. The Carnegie Institution was busy creating a vast stockpile of index cards on ordinary Americans while floating ideas as to how they could instigate methods by which they could remove “… families bloodlines and whole peoples.” Legislatures, social services and associations became hot-beds of pressure from eugenics advocates. Meanwhile, over in New York many charities and organisations such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration was busy rooting out Italian, Jewish and other immigrants across many states in various cities with a view to deportation, confinement or forced sterilisation. All of this was paid for by the Harriman Railroad fortune company.
A map from a Swedish royal commission report displays the U.S. states that had implemented sterilization legislation by 1929. (wikipedia)
Black discovered that the families identified: “so-called defective family trees and subject[ed] them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs,” along with the sporadic practice of “doctor-organized euthanasia”. [7] This was inflicted on predominantly “… poor people, brown-haired white people, African-Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern Europeans, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.” Black alerts us to the little known fact that “60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized – legally and extra-legally” with the tacit support of America’s most progressive figures.[8]
By the end of the 1920s eugenics was entrenched in the Establishment and seen as the answer to the perceived immigration and social deterioration of Anglo-Saxon “pure stock”. Even the US Supreme Court took on the eugenics cause. 1927 was the year when Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” [9]Black’s research confirmed that: “This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’ words in their own defense.” Such statements were to play a crucial part in the thought processes of Adolf Hitler for whom the world of eugenics had been thoroughly digested prior to the completion of Mein Kampf in 1924.
He wrote:
“There is today one state in which at least a weak beginning toward a better conception is noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union, in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigration on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view which is peculiar to the folkish state concept. The folkish state divides its inhabitants into three classes: citizens, subjects, and foreigners.” [10]
This brings us back to a form of National Socialism which, as mentioned previously seems to dominate the fabric of politics in the United States and Europe – minus the regalia. Rather than Germany being the cause of such ponerology it was in fact, within the United States that eugenics was allowed to run free to later emerge as Nazi fuelled mind control experiments under Dr. Ewan McGregor and the CIA. Germany was not only supported by US corporations but by a distinctly American class of eugenicists later supporting the Third Reich and their allopathic medical paradigm involving drugs, surgery and radiation.
The Warburg family’s German chemical company I.G. Farben had extremely close ties to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. So much so that one could almost see them as one financial entity operating wholly in the Nazi interest. It was for this reason that the business continued throughout the war despite Roosevelt’s legal attempts to try and stop the stop the Standard-I.G. Farben cartel from supplying, assisting and profiting from the enemy war machine. I.G. Farben would expand its operations during the war using slave labour from concentration camps to extract gasoline from coal. No prosecutions were ever brought to bear against any of the participants.
While John D. Rockefeller’s vast wealth was used to promote psychiatric genetics in the US, medical teaching was comprehensively reorganized in Germany via the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity, based in Munich. Chosen by the family to act as Chief Executive for these institutions Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin took on the role with assistants Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, Otmar Verschuer and the soon to be notorious Dr. Josef Mengele.
I.G. Farbenindustrie AG | Created December 25, 1925-1952 (liquidation started) 31 October 2012 (liquidation accomplished) (wikipedia)
Rudin had long been interested in racial hygiene and Social Darwinism from his brother-in-law Alfred Ploetz. By 1932 Rudin had secured his position as head of the International Eugenics Movement with the seal of approval from British Eugenicists. A year later, Rudin’s career had taken a stratospheric leap forward upon his appointment by Hitler and the Task Force of Heredity Experts formed by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. It was in July of that year that the sterilization law came into being thanks to Rockefeller funding and the existing American model of race laws.
In 1936, the half-Jewish Dr. Franz Kallmann immigrated to the United States increasingly worried for his safety. Once there, he established the Medical Genetics Department of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Like so many often German-Jewish, Nazi psychiatrists, psychologists and scientists, the seeds of German and American Nazism became mixed and implanted in the pre-war political framework, which would only increase by the end of the 1940s.
Meanwhile, during 1943 Dr. Joseph Mengele’s responsibility had increased having been made medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s “Gypsy (Romani) camp,” where I.G. Farben had recently built its huge coal to gasoline factory with easy access to camp inmates. Otmar Verschuer, now director of Rockefeller’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, managed to secure funds from the German Research Council for Mengele to conduct experiments on prison camp inmates. Research on twins was and always is a key component of genetic research. Mengele’s victims had a high quota of twins amongst them who were subjected to some of the most systematic horror ever devised in the name of science. The doctor would scan the new prisoner arrivals with other SS physicians where it was determined who would be retained for work, possible experimentation or who would be killed. “He would wade through the incoming prisoners shouting Zwillinge heraus! (Twins out!),Zwillinge heraustreten! (Twins step forward!) with – according to an assistant he recruited – “such a face that I would think he’s mad”.[11]
Mengele’s experiments are renowned for their sadistic brutality. Survivors tell of his apparent kindness towards children offering them chocolate and befriending them with soothing words and fatherly smiles, yet: “He would also kill them without hesitation, sometimes administering injections to the children or shooting them himself, and would dissect them immediately afterwards. On one evening alone he killed 14 twins.” [12] “Once Mengele’s assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Roma twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then injected chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each piece of the twins’ bodies.” [13]
Former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Racial Hygiene, at the Free University of Berlin, as it is today.
There were experimental blood transfusions, removal of organs and limbs, sometimes without anaesthetic; women were sterilized; injections into eyes were carried out to see if eye colour could be manipulated; men were castrated; shock treatment was carried out and vivisection on pregnant women. Thousands were murdered and “scientific data” sent to Verschuer and the Rockefeller group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In truth, science played no part in Mengele’s butchery only the opportunity of a sadistic psychopath to indulge his bloodlust, a microcosm of so many within the Reich itself. And what is more, Rockefeller funding helped to make it all possible.
Dr. Franz Kallmann became director of the Rockefeller’s American Eugenics Society (AES) in 1952 and from 1954 to 1965, and assisted in the creation the American Society of Human Genetics which would later lead to the “Human Genome Project.” Dr. Otmar Verschuer was also a member of the AES until his death in 1969 having successfully made the transition from Nazi eugenicist to genetic researcher after the war, as did so many of his colleagues.
The drive for eugenics research, while perhaps not harbouring the extremes of psychopathic savagery witnessed during the War is nonetheless alive and well under the auspices of many foundations and organisations like the Rockefeller’s American Eugenics Society (closely affiliated to the Population Council) which changed its name in 1972 to: “Society for the Study of Social Biology” and then again in 2012 to: “Society of Biodemography and Social Biology (SBSB) in a bid to distance itself from its Social Darwinist past.
In 1968 the leader of the AES Frederick Osborn wrote: “Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under another name than eugenics.” Thus, the movement as a whole has been trying to disassociate themselves from the events of history ever since but their perception regarding “racial hygiene” remains exactly the same. [14]
See also: James Corbett’s video series on Big Oil. Part 2 has extensive research on eugenics:
Notes
[1] ‘World’s first GM babies born’ The Daily Mail, June 27, 2012.
[2] Eugenics: Unified Medical Language System (Psychological Index Terms) National Library of Medicine, 26 Sep. 2010.
[3] ‘Eugenics and the Nazis: The California Connection’ by Edwin Black, The San Francisco Chronicle, 2003.
[4] Ibid.
[5] ‘Everyday Eugenics’ By Betsy Hartmann, ZSpace September 22, 2006.
[6] p.207; American Eugenics Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism By Nancy Ordover, Published by Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition, 2003.
[7] ‘We Must Keep Eugenics Away From Genetics’ By Edwin Black, newsday.com, October 15, 2003.
[8] op. cit. Black.
[9] 274 U.S. 200, at 207, Justia.com U.S. Supreme Court Center.
[10] p.361; Mein Kampf By Adolph Hitler 1925 / Elite Minds, Incorporated; original official NSDAP english translation edition 1940 edition (14 April 2009).
[11] ‘What Made This Man? Mengele’ The New York Times. July 21, 1985.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Bülow, Louis. ‘Josef Mengele, Angel of Death’ | http://www.auschwitz.dk/Mengele.htm
[14] http://www.usc.edu/dept/gero/sssb/|‘Everyday Eugenics’ By Betsy Hartmann Zmag, 2006.
For a more esoteric overview of depopulation and eugenics see: Mark Passio – The Unholy Feminine – Neo-Feminism & The Satanic Epi-Eugenics Agenda
INFRAKSHUN 