Eugenics

"What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the übermensch (Superman): a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes." - Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra



"to breed out feeble constitutions and petty and ignoble instincts, and to breed in those which are vigorous, noble and social." – Francis Galton on The goal of eugenics Sir

Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture"

In the 1920s, while eugenics in Europe is still in the realms of scientific theory, in the United States of America it has long since been put into practice. The state of North Dakota had banned marriage for alcoholics, the insane, and those suffering from tuberculosis, as early Eugenics which was practiced in the United States which provided much of the inspiration for the later racial hygiene programs in Nazi German.

In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead. Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.

"…. (The state) must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure… It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so. And conversely it must be considered reprehensible: to withhold healthy children from the nation. Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.”  - Mein Kampf, Hitler



Above is Bergen-Belsen (or Belsen) a Nazi concentration camp in northwestern Germany.

Comments

Popular Posts