Eugenics: The War of Capitalism and Socialism Against Humanity

Eugenics is generally associated with Socialism, particularly National Socialism as it was the guiding science applied by the Third Reich. In fact, the Holocaust was not primarily based on race, that was an effect not a cause, rather the cause was the pursuit of a false science, which is promoted even more strongly today than earlier in the 20th century. It has only gone underground. Rudolph Hess, the deputy Führer of the third Reich put it, "National Socialism is nothing other than applied biology." The Nazi's were not just convinced that they were pursuing science, but that they were assisting evolution with the "science" of eugenics. Hitler, however, did not come up with this out of the blue, he was inspired, as he says in Mein Kampf, by the laws already on the books in over 30 American States (put in place during the Free Market Roaring 20's) to force those considered "feeble-minded", or whose family had birth defects or children with low test scores to be forcibly sterilized. Like the money which would eventually be donated to Germany to fund Joseph Mengele, the angel of death, the funding and political pressure for forced sterilization laws were funded by wealthy Capitalists, the Rockefeller foundation and Carnegie Mellon.Most people today are under the impression that Eugenics died with Hitler, but this is not the case. It is alive and well, funded by the Capitalist system and pushed by Socialist philosophy. To understand why that is we have to look at exactly what Eugenics is, and how it started.The first step in that process is to trace the roots of the founding of Eugenics, and that starts with Thomas Robert Malthus.Malthus was a clergyman and a professor of history who wrote An Essay on Population (1798) where he predicated, based purely on arithmetic that the world's population will double every 25 years while food can never catch up. As such misery will increase and disease will take its toll. For Malthus, this is a good thing and should be assisted:

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular diseases.

He adds in the Essay on Population:

It does not ... by any means seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt; but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps longevity are in a degree transmissible.... As the human race, however, could not be improved in this way without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable that an attention to breed should ever become general.

Apart from being unconcerned with human beings, Malthus was a capitalist philosopher advocating a solution to capitalist problems. Thus the population buzz instigated by Malthus comes to present an economic problem. It also has political realities which come to bear on our subject, namely the control of resources. Kissinger advocated a depopulation of Africa so that the US and Europe could maintain control of Africa's resources, even by using food as a weapon in his Nixon era memorandum NSM 200.Malthus' theories had a huge impact on Charles Darwin, an admirer of Malthus, who attempted to explain by a natural and biological model the scientific application of Malthus' economic thought. Irrespective of one's thinking on what constitutes "Darwinism" today or its truth or fantasy, (one can theoretically hold to it without support Eugenics) Darwin's aim was to show, as a member of the nobility, why those who were on top of the British Empire were in fact the strongest and the best and deserved their position. Essentially, Malthus highlighted an economic problem and Darwin wanted to find the economic cause. His work in Origin of Species produced one main doctrine to keep track of: Survival of the Fittest—that evolution comes about through struggle, and nature selects the most fit. In a lesser known work by Darwin, Descent of Man, which is virtually never read, he argues for what will become Eugenic teaching in the future:

Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids towards this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not consanguineous marriages [marriages between close relatives] are injurious to man.

Darwin's teaching, with the assistance of Thomas Huxley (Grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley), was spread quickly as "science" all over England, Europe and the United States, and later via Communism to Russia and China. Its influence reached many spheres. Karl Marx explained that his philosophy would be impossible if it were not for the vehicle of Darwinian Science. We'll return to Marx and communism later. It also influenced Darwin's half-cousin Sir Francis Galton, the founder of the science of Statistics. Galton, who was also influenced by Malthus, saw a way to make a science applying Malthus' economic thinking, and his half-cousin's teaching on biology as a new social science, namely Eugenics (From the Greek ευ, good; γενες, race, type, or clan from which today we derive the word "gene").For Galton, applying Darwin, it is obvious that human beings pass on certain traits to the next generation. So if this can be done with animals, why can we not breed humans? Therefore heredity could be manipulated by forced mating (breeding) in order to produce superior human beings. For Galton, this will come in three stages, first., he writes:

If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties.

The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind; and even the best of these, so far as we know them, seem unequal to their work. The average culture of mankind is become so much higher than it was, and the branches of knowledge and history so various and extended, that few are capable even of comprehending the exigencies of our modern civilization; much less of fulfilling them. We are living in a sort of intellectual anarchy, for the want of master minds. The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised, and also to be differentiated. We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists. The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old. The foremost minds of the present day seem to stagger and halt under an intellectual load too heavy for their powers. No one, I think, can doubt, from the facts and analogies I have brought forward, that, if talented men were mated with talented women, of the same mental and physical characters as themselves, generation after generation, we might produce a highly-bred human race, with no more tendency to revert to meaner ancestral types than is shown by our long-established breeds of race-horses and fox-hounds.

Or, to put it another way, Malthus discovers an economic problem: overpopulation and scarcity of resources. This is in fact false as there is no scarcity of resources but a scarcity of access based on a faulty economic system. Nevertheless, Darwin discovers the biological "science" that explains why there is overpopulation, i.e. some people do not evolve smart enough to be as wealthy as the British nobility, and Galton comes around with the social science which predicates how to solve the problem. The ideas were in place, but needed money to be spread around, as they quickly would be by both Socialism and Capitalism. In England, the Royal Society was eugenic in nature. In America the Eugenics Record office was founded to research heredity in order to determine who should be forcibly sterilized.As I noted, Hitler did not wake up one day and say "Eureka! Courts of genetic purity! Get these Jews and Slavs out of the master race gene pool". For that matter neither did Stalin or Mao. Rather, they were students of the false science perpetuated by the best and brightest and funded by wealthy capitalists like Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Carnegie and others. In Britain, the Royal Society for scientific studies had for some time invested a great deal of time and energy into the study of eugenics, and keeping records on the population to determine who might be feeble-minded. In Britain alone, we can count among the adherents of Eugenics and its application (i.e. forced sterilization) economist John Maynard Keynes (who served as the director for the British Eugenics society), Fabian socialists, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, author H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill, Kings Edward VIII and George VI, and lastly Queen Elizabeth II. Keynes, the Capitalist, called Eugenics "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists[!]." ("Opening remarks: The Galton Lecture". Eugenics Review 38 (1): 39–40.) This was in 1946, after the Nazi's practice of Eugenics was well-known and the Nuremberg trials were coming to a conclusion.In the United States, Eugenics went into practice at the beginning of the 1900s. Connecticut, my home state, became the first to enact some type of Eugenic legislation and was quickly followed. They enacted a law in 1896 forbidding marriage to anyone considered to be "feeble-minded", a catch phrase for Eugenicists to describe anyone without high enough test scores or enough good looks. Charles Davenport, a scientist considered the "Father of the American Eugenics movement", received funding from Carnegie to found the Station for Experimental Evolution, which he later renamed simply "The Carnegie department of genetics." Davenport wrote numerous scientific papers advocating government intervention to manage the human stock. He was elected to the National Academy of the Sciences in 1912, and his work Heredity in relation to Eugenics was used as a textbook in universities until World Ward II. Apart from that, Davenport was also involved in the study of Biometrics (which we will get to later) that was also pioneered by Galton. Davenport became the darling of the Eugenics movement, and secured funding for many projects including the Eugenics Records Office, which was designed to examine genetic records from hundreds of thousands of American families, even by grave robbing, to determine who had genetic stocks fit enough to breed. The ivory tower eugenics researchers then plotted whom among hundreds of thousands of families would be removed from history by positive law. With the "cutting edge research" of Davenport and the main institutes for science, Indiana became the first state of 30 states to pass involuntary eugenics laws which would require forced sterilization on any that the state eugenics board would deem "feeble-minded". To most of us this sounds like something out of 1984, but this is precisely what happened, in 1907! Not only that, the Supreme Court upheld the Virginia forced sterilization law in 1927 in Buck v. Bell, where Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for an 8-1 majority:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.

How could this happen in the United States? Massive funding from entrepreneurs, combined with the ideology of Darwinian socialism. This was the established science, held by doctors, wealthy donors, and government. The Virginia law was crafted by Harry Laughlin, the superintendent for Davenport's Eugenic Records Office. Laughlin was given high praise by German doctors, and the Third Reich offered him an honorary doctorate from Heidleburg University in 1936. All in all not a bad day's work I suppose.Returning to the Third Reich, in 1924 Hitler explicitly cited American eugenics laws as the inspiration for the government he would create:

There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State.

Hitler avidly read Madison Grant's (no relation) work "The Passing of the Great Race", and even wrote him a fan letter. In that text, Grant wrote:

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever-increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever-widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

This book was not only highly inspirational to Hitler, but to many in the American scientific establishment. Grant, along with Davenport, Laughlin, and of course Margaret Sanger (about whom more will be written in part 2) were highly respected. Their laws reigned supreme in a majority of states and were even held up by the Supreme Court (Buck vs. Bell). Furthermore Nazi scientists at the Nuremberg trials used Justice Holmes opinion in Buck v. Bell as a defense. The Third Reich's eugenics laws were modeled very closely off of the Virginia law, and received funding for Eugenics research from Rockefeller and Carnegie-Mellon, not to mention that IBM provided tremendous funding and its key card technology as a tracking system for concentration camp inmates as they were experimented on and murdered for science. The first computers were a capitalist venture to test a tracking system on innocent people in Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz.National Socialism's bloody footprints were created from a triangle of the Malthusian nightmare, Darwinian Evolution, and Galton's (eventually Hitler's) solution for the problem combined with big money from big business. We need not forget that Rockefeller, IBM and Carnegie, of whom wonderful things are written of in textbooks, were self-made men and successful entrepreneurs who used their money to fund Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer and Josef Mengele (the angel of death who worked in Auschwitz), both of whom escaped prosecution at Nuremberg because the Allies jumped over each other to see who could pony up more money to buy more Nazi scientists. The truth is Eugenics did not die with Hitler, even though it has fallen into disrepute, rather it is alive and well and the base idea for all government, all business funding, and our current economic woes, though it operates on a new name: Transhumanism.