Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Your Provocative Ideas For Tuesday

1.  Yes, I did intend to point out that the wildly popular with many atheists Richard Dawkins was setting up a line of reasoning which could be used to call for the prevention of the births of atheists.   He's the one who is always inventing "genetic bases" for all kinds of behavioral and psychological "things", even "things" such as religious belief which are artificial categories invented within human culture, not actual "things" like the pigmentation of eyes or skin.

2.  Yes, I did intend to provoke thinking about THE FACT that freedom to choose abortion for genetic factors has mostly resulted in the abortion of girls, the purported beneficiaries of a right to abortion, arguably a decrease in the cumulative rights of women in the most serious of all expressions of it, as well as in more general expressions.  I don't see how those horrific paradoxes can avoid being addressed in the world-wide campaign of rights of women, though in cultures where women are not routinely seen as preventable through abortion, it seems to be, paradoxically, unmentionable.

3.  Yes, I do encourage you and everyone to consider that by the mere act of regarding human life in terms of utilitarian value measured by "happiness" you legitimate people looking at your children, your families, YOU in the same terms.

4. It was the stated goal of eugenicists and eugenics organizations to progressively eliminate the "bottom 10%" of the population, including statements purported to be idealistic quests for the general happiness and good of humanity by some of the most highly regarded social thinkers and scientists.   Only, once that " bottom 10%" (the product of imagination and arbitrary definition) was eliminated, there would be a new "bottom 10%" which would very likely include some of those who had approved of the removal of the previous "bottom 10%".  Eventually most of you would be part of that "bottom 10%" whose removal would be deemed a virtuous desideratum, blessed by science and this malignant and nightmarish form of promotion of "the general good of society".   Once that form of instrumental thinking has been that well established, you'll find yourself hard pressed to stop it.  In fact it is already established and thoroughly embedded* as you can read in the comment threads of a number of allegedly liberal online mags and blogs and, certainly, in explicitly right-wing ones.

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction of the excellent book,  War Against the Weak, by  Edwin Black:

Voices haunt the pages of every book. This particular book, however, speaks for the never-born, for those whose questions have never been heard—for those who never existed.

Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. 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.

To perpetuate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined with almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological rationales for persecution. Employing a hazy amalgam of guesswork, gossip, falsified information and polysyllabic academic arrogance, the eugenics movement slowly constructed a national bureaucratic and juridical infrastructure to cleanse America of its “unfit.” Specious intelligence tests, colloquially known as IQ tests, were invented to justify incarceration of a group labeled “feebleminded.” Often the so-called feebleminded were just shy, too good-natured to be taken seriously, or simply spoke the wrong language or were the wrong color. Mandatory sterilization laws were enacted in some twenty-seven states to prevent targeted individuals from reproducing more of their kind. Marriage prohibition laws proliferated throughout the country to stop race mixing. Collusive litigation was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sanctified eugenics and its tactics.

The goal was to immediately sterilize fourteen million people in the United States and millions more worldwide—the “lower tenth”—and then continuously eradicate the remaining lowest tenth until only a pure Nordic super race remained. Ultimately, some 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized and the total is probably much higher. No one knows how many marriages were thwarted by state felony statutes. Although much of the persecution was simply racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, eugenics wore the mantle of respectable science to mask its true character.

The victims of eugenics were poor urban dwellers and rural “white trash” from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified. Eugenics contaminated many otherwise worthy social, medical and educational causes from the birth control movement to the development of psychology to urban sanitation. Psychologists persecuted their patients. Teachers stigmatized their students. Charitable associations clamored to send those in need of help to lethal chambers they hoped would be constructed. Immigration assistance bureaus connived to send the most needy to sterilization mills. Leaders of the ophthalmology profession conducted a long and chilling political campaign to round up and coercively sterilize every relative of every American with a vision problem. All of this churned throughout America years before the Third Reich rose in Germany.

*  I would point out that it should be alien to traditional American liberalism which was based in the removal of people from those habits of viewing people as economic value and as beings with intrinsic and inalienable rights which individuals, societies and governments had a moral obligation to respect.  It was, though, more native to English thinking, formed through the class system and poor law.  Class, though BBC costume drama may cover it up, is based exactly in the distribution of rights as if those were not an absolute and inalienable possession of each person on an equal basis.  It was the classification of people in terms of an assumed possession of rights as certainly as the Hindu caste system is. Only it is so culturally embedded and habitual that its actual nature is not recognized even as its enforcement is performed by even those who are disadvantaged by it.   As I have come to conclude, the model and trial version of The Holocaust is found most explicitly in the English caste system, the Poor Law and the death camps that were the work house system.  It is hard to look at the activities of the infamous criminal, the mastermind economist of the T-4 program( of which the Hadamar psychiatric hosptial - murder center was merely one part) Viktor Brack,  and not be able to find exact parallels in the British work houses and associated programs and in the published words of even many British (and other English language) authors as respectable as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.

Dear Reichsführer, among 10's of millions of Jews in Europe, there are, I figure, at least 2-3 millions of men and women who are fit enough to work. Considering the extraordinary difficulties the labor problem presents us with, I hold the view that those 2-3 millions should be specially selected and preserved. This can however only be done if at the same time they are rendered incapable to propagate. About a year ago I reported to you that agents of mine have completed the experiments necessary for this purpose. I would like to recall these facts once more. Sterilization, as normally performed on persons with hereditary diseases is here out of the question, because it takes too long and is too expensive. Castration by X-ray however is not only relatively cheap, but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time. I think that at this time it is already irrelevant whether the people in question become aware of having been castrated after some weeks or months, once they feel the effects. Should you, Reichsführer, decide to choose this way in the interest of the preservation of labor, then Reichsleiter Bouhler would be prepared to place all physicians and other personnel needed for this work at your disposal. Likewise he requested me to inform you that then I would have to order the apparatus so urgently needed with the greatest speed. Heil Hitler! Yours, Viktor Brack.
Letter written to Heinrich Himmler (23 June 1942)

That, dear readers, is an expression of utilitarian value and biological fitness and a program of economic expediency on how to wring the last part of value from those lives that would make an economist marvel at the calculation of cost benefit.   Which is no way to look at human beings if you want to prevent the proven results of such thinking.

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