Posted by
vikingmother on Monday, May 07, 2007 4:58:19 PM
Enter any one of the three terms in my title
EUGENICS,
GALTON (actually Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin), or NAZIS
to get lots of sites and lots of blogs & debates.
Briefly, here's how those three terms connect up:
In the mid 19th Century, Victorian "supergenius" Sir Francis Galton read his cousin Charles Darwin's then-new writings on evolution. He then developed his own offshoot from Darwin's ideas. Essentially, he wanted to hypercharge the human race's "natural selection" process to bring about the survival of the fittest humans---faster.
Galton wanted the "superior" people to have more kids---the "inferior" to be discouraged from having kids...This is an oversimplification, but not by much. (Search under his name to find online libraries with his writings on marriage, eugenics available to read).
He, formerly with Quaker influenced Christian beliefs, transferred his faith to his semi science - semi philosophy of eugenics. He spent much of the rest of his life preaching & teaching eugenics. Eugenics was his word for the philosophy of being "well born".
Maybe some of you found an old award for a "Fitter Family" in some great grandparent's artifacts. Some of our ancestors might have gone to the local 1920's county fair, and gotten an award not only for their prize cow, but for their prize "litter" of strong, healthy kids.
Early 20th century Eugenics was a popular pseudoscience (more a semi religion). In its early mild version, even some popular persons such as Teddy Roosevelt, the young pre World War II Winston Churchill, and Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes subscribed to its main ideas.
Sound familiar?
Eugenics - marrying the "right" person who can breed smart, healthy kids, was a "moral imperative" taught in some US & English textbooks Some societies and high born persons worked to propagate a "better bred human race".
And this "moral imperative" to breed a better human race was picked up by an Austrian in the 1920's - Adolf Hitler, who quickly pushed Eugenics to its logical conclusion.
Thus, the Nazis thought it a "moral imperative" to do their Nuremburg laws, their forced sterilization of German disabled, their mass murders of "undesirables" like Jews, gypsies, etc. etc. and their breedcow "Lebensborn" programs where young "racially pure" girls, women were bred to have kids out of wedlock in both Germany & other countries. They also siezed Nordic looking kids from Poland, elsewhere for German adoption. (See an AOL story on one such child today May 7.)
So...some Nazis felt no remorse after their mass murders & other actions most of us call crimes. They thought they were fulfilling their eugenic "moral" obligation to help their race evolve quickly to a higher level. (I was little when Nazi murderer Adolf Eichmann was caught. He seemed quite pleased with his part in murdering millions.)
Some of us watch the genetics and embryonic stem cell versus adult style stem cell debates closely...We don't want any versions of the "eugenics" ideology to return.