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Eugenics & Depopulation Are The Means; Scientific Dictatorship Is The Goal!

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« on: August 25, 2010, 05:30:12 pm »

Below is an excerpt from an interview that Gore Vidal -- a "limousine liberal" if ever there was one -- did with Playboy Magazine.

Notice how shockingly candid he is about his anti-family/pro-eugenics views:

--------------------------------

VIDAL: ...how are we to survive on an overpopulated planet? Even if we fully exploit our food resources--including sea farming--and develop effective and equitable international systems of distribution, it still won't be possible to feed the coming generations. So there will be famine and disorder. Meanwhile, we are destroying our environment. Water, earth and air are being poisoned. Climate is being altered. Yet we go on breeding, creating an economy that demands more and more consumers to buy its products--and endless, self-destructive cycle. But though most thoughtful people are aware of what we are doing to ourselves, nothing is being done to restore the planet's ecological balance, to limit human population, to create social and political and economic institutions capable of coping with--let alone solving--such relatively manageable problems as poverty and racial injustice. Who will tell Detroit that they must abandon the fossil fuel-burning combustion engine? No one. And so the air goes bad, cancers proliferate, climate changes.

PLAYBOY:  Do you think drastic reform is likely to be effected by our present system of government?

VIDAL:  No. And I find that hard to admit, because for all of my adult life I've generally accepted what we call the democratic process. But it no longer works. Look at Congress. Last year, 81 percent of the people wanted strong gun-control legislation. But 70 percent of the Congress did not, on instructions from the National Rifle Association. Congress, President, courts are not able to keep industry from poisoning Lake Erie, or Detroit from making cars that, aside from the carbon monoxide they create, are murderous weapons. To this degree, at least, the New Left is right: The System cannot be reformed. I part company with them on how it's to be replaced. They are vague. I would like to be specific--"programmatic," to use a word they like even less than "liberal."

PLAYBOY:  And what is your program?

VIDAL:  I would like to replace our present system with an Authority--with a capital A--that would have total control over environment. And environment means not only air, earth and water but the distribution of services and products, and the limitations of births. Where the Authority would have no jurisdiction would be over the private lives of the citizens. Whatever people said, wrote, ate, drank, made love to--as long as it did no harm to others--would be allowed. This, of course, is the direct reverse of our present system. Traditionally, we have always interfered in the private lives of our citizens while allowing any entrepreneur the right to poison a river in order to make money.

PLAYBOY:  Isn't what you're proposing--a dictatorship demanding absolute control over the most vital areas of our lives and yet granting absolute social and political freedom--a contradiction in terms? Isn't it inevitable that the power of your Authority would sooner or later circumscribe the private life of every citizen?

VIDAL:  Though the Authority would, in its own sphere, be absolute, it would never be the instrument of any one man. There would be no dictator. The thing should be run like a Swiss hotel, with anonymous specialists going about their business under constant review by a council of scientists, poets, butchers, politicians, teachers--the best group one could assemble. No doubt my Venetian ancestry makes me prone to this sort of government, because the Most Serene Republic was run rather like that and no cult of personality ever disturbed those committees that managed the state with great success. It can be done.

PLAYBOY:  Would you explain what you mean when you say the Authority would be able to limit births?

VIDAL:  I mean just that. Only certain people would be allowed to have children. Nor is this the hardship that it might at first appear. Most people have no talent for bringing up children and they usually admit it--once the damage is done. Unfortunately, our tribal propaganda makes every woman think her life incomplete unless she has made a replica of herself and her loved one. But tribal propaganda can be changed. One can just as easily convince people that to bring an unwanted child into the world is a social crime as grave as murder. Through propaganda, the Japanese made it unfashionable to have big families after the War and so--alone of the Asian countries--kept their population viable.

PLAYBOY:  Your ends may be commendable, but let's discuss the means. What would happen to the citizen who didn't wish to live in your brave new world--to the devout Roman Catholic, for example, who refused to accept your population-control measures?

VIDAL:  If he didn't want to emigrate, he'd simply have to accept the Authority's restrictions. The right to unlimited breeding is not a constitutional guarantee. If education and propaganda failed, those who violated the birth-control restrictions would have to pay for their act as for any other criminal offense.

PLAYBOY:  With imprisonment?

VIDAL:  I don't believe in prisons, but there would have to be some sort of punishment. Incontinent breeding endangers the human race. That is a fact with which we now live. If we don't limit our numbers through planned breeding, they will be limited for us in the natural way: famine and war. I think it more civilized to be unnatural and voluntarily limit population.

PLAYBOY:  What would become of the family if only a few people were allowed to have children?

VIDAL:  The family is an economic unit, not a biological unit; and once the economic need for it is gone--when women are able to get jobs and support themselves--the unit ceases to have any meaning. In today's cities, it is not possible to maintain the old American idea of the family--which was, essentially, peasant; a tribal group working together to create food. For better or worse, we are now on our own, and attempts to revive the ancient family ideal...will fail. As for the children that we do want, I'd like to see them brought up communally, the way they are in certain of the Israeli kibbutzim. I suspect that eventually, the whole idea of parenthood will vanish, when children are made impersonally by laboratory insemination of ova. To forestall the usual outraged letters declaring that I am against the "normal" sexual act, consider what I'm talking about: the creation of citizens, not sexual pleasure, which will continue, as always. Further, I would favor an intelligent program of eugenics that would decide which genetic types should be continued and which allowed to die off. It's within the range of our science to create, very simply, new people physically healthier and intellectually more competent than ourselves. After all, we do it regularly in agriculture and in the breeding of livestock, so why not with the human race? According to the somber Dr. William Shockley--the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who once contravened liberal doctrine by suggesting that we should look for genetic differences among the races--our preservation, through advanced medicine, of physically and mentally weak strains is now making the race less fit with each generation.

PLAYBOY:  Your critics would charge that the utopia you propose is actually a nightmarish world reminiscent of Nazi Germany and of George Orwell's 1984. How would you answer them?

VIDAL:  Most things human go wrong. The Authority would probably be no exception. But consider the alternatives. Nuclear war to reduce population. World famine. The coming to power of military dictatorships. The crushing of individual freedom. At least the Authority would guarantee more private freedom to its citizens than they now enjoy.

PLAYBOY:  Realistically, do you see any chance of such an "enlightened" dictatorship coming to power?

VIDAL:  Dictatorship, no; enlightened, yes. Could it happen? Probably not. It takes too long to change tribal thinking. The majority will always prefer a fiery death, howling tribal slogans. A pity--but then, it is not written in the stars that this peculiar race endure forever. Now may be a good time for us to stop. However, since I believe that one must always act as though our affairs were manageable, I should like to see a Party for Human Survival started on an international scale, to try to persuade people to vote willingly for a life-enhancing as well as life-preserving system.

PLAYBOY:  Your detractors, on both right and left, would argue that the proposals you've just made reflect a characteristic Vidal trait: intellectual arrogance and a basic elitist contempt for the people and their ability to govern themselves. Do you think they have a point?

VIDAL:  I do not admire "the people," as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival--so highly developed in the individual--goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool. But then, crowds don't govern. In fact, only in America do we pretend to worship the majority, reverently listening to the herd as it Gallups this way and that. A socialist friend of mine in England, a Labor M.P., once said: "You Americans are mad on the subject of democracy. But we aren't, because we know if the people were given their head, they would bring back hanging, the birch and, of course, they'd kick the niggers out of the country. Fortunately, the Labor Party has no traffic with democracy."  I want the people to be happy, but more than that, I want them to be humane--something they are not, as everyone from Jesus to Karl Marx has had occasion to notice.

--------------------------------

Now, at this point some of you are probably wondering: when was the above interview conducted? Five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifteen, perhaps?

Try forty-plus years ago!

It's from the June 1969 issue.

The above excerpt is from pages 80-82 of that issue.

The only difference between then and now is that today's limousine liberals have learned to conceal their true eugenicist colors through the use of euphemism-saturated public relations rhetoric.
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« Reply #1 on: August 25, 2010, 05:33:51 pm »

Since the views expressed by Gore Vidal in his 1969 interview are virtually identical to the eugenicist views of both today's global elite and the minions, shills and media whores who lovingly serve them, I thought I'd respond to Vidal's key claims.

Quote
...how are we to survive on an overpopulated planet? Even if we fully exploit our food resources--including sea farming--and develop effective and equitable international systems of distribution, it still won't be possible to feed the coming generations. So there will be famine and disorder.

That is exactly what Malthusian propagandists were waxing alarmist about over two centuries ago. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now.

    "Here is a difference between the animal and the man. Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens. Both the seal and the man eat salmon, but when a seal takes a salmon there is a salmon the less, and were seals to increase past a certain point salmon must diminish; while by placing the spawn of the salmon under favorable conditions man can so increase the number of salmon as more than to make up for all he may take, and thus, no matter how much men may increase, their increase need never outrun the supply of salmon.

    "In short, while all through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the limit of subsistence is independent of the thing subsisted, with man the limit of subsistence is, within the final limits of earth, air, water, and sunshine, dependent upon man himself."

-- Henry George, Progress and Poverty, pp. 131-2


Even worse is the fact that modern-day Malthusians tend to be either members or lapdog servants of the very parasitic ruling class that -- by engineering acute poverty in Third World nations -- actually CAUSED the population explosions they incessantly whine about.

-------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Demographic transition

The Demographic transition model (DTM) is a model used to represent the process of explaining the transformation of countries from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates as part of the economic development of a country from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economy. It is based on an interpretation begun in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson of prior observed changes, or transitions, in birth and death rates in industrialized societies over the past two hundred years.

Most developed countries are beyond stage three of the model; the majority of developing countries are in stage 2 or stage 3. The model was based on the changes seen in Europe so these countries follow the DTM relatively well. Many developing countries have moved into stage 3. The major (relative) exceptions are some poor countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and some Middle Eastern countries, which are poor or affected by government policy or civil strife, notably Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Yemen and Afghanistan.

Summary of the theory

The transition involves four stages, or possibly five.

* In stage one, pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates are high and roughly in balance.

* In stage two, that of a developing country, the death rates drop rapidly due to improvements in food supply and sanitation, which increase life spans and reduce disease. These changes usually come about due to improvements in farming techniques, access to technology, basic healthcare, and education. Without a corresponding fall in birth rates this produces an imbalance, and the countries in this stage experience a large increase in population.

* In stage three, birth rates fall due to access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children's work, an increase in parental investment in the education of children and other social changes. Population growth begins to level off.

* During stage four there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below replacement level as has happened in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading to a shrinking population, a threat to many industries that rely on population growth. As the large group born during stage two ages, it creates an economic burden on the shrinking working population. Death rates may remain consistently low or increase slightly due to increases in lifestyle diseases due to low exercise levels and high obesity and an aging population in developed countries.

[Continued...]


http://www.globalissues.org/article/206/poverty-and-population-growth-lessons-from-our-own-past

Poverty and population growth: lessons from our own past

Let's try to understand why, by looking at our own demographic history. As recently as two or three generations ago, mortality rates in the United States were as high as they are now in most third world countries. Opportunities for our grandmothers to work outside the home were limited. And ours was largely an agrarian society in which every family member was needed to work on the farm. Coauthor Frances Lappé's own grandmother, for example, gave birth to nine children, raised them alone on a small farm, and saw only six survive to adulthood. Her story would not be unusual in a still fast-growing third world country today.

Faced with scarcity, poor families needed many children to help with work on the farm, and because of high infant-mortality rates, they needed many more pregnancies and births to achieve the necessary family size.

In the United States, the move to two-children families took place only after a society-wide transition that lowered infant death rates, opened opportunities to women outside the home, and transformed ours into an industrial rather than agrarian economy, so that families no longer relied on their children's labor. If we contrast Lappé's grandmother's story to a latter-day urban middle-class family, we can see that children who were once a source of needed labor are now a source of major costs, including tuition, an extra room in the house, the latest model basketball shoes, and forgone earnings for every year that a professional mom stays home with the kids.

The United States advanced through the falling-birth-rate phase of the demographic transition in response to these societal changes, well before the advent of sophisticated contraceptive technologies, even while the government remained actively hostile to birth control. (As late as 1965, selling contraceptives was still illegal in some states.)

Using our own country's experience to understand rapid population growth in the third world, where poverty is more extreme and widespread, we can now extend our hypothesis concerning the link between hunger and high fertility rates: both persist where societies deny security and opportunity to the majority of their citizens-where infant-mortality rates are high and adequate land, jobs, education, health care, and old-age security are beyond the reach of most people, and where there are few opportunities for women to work outside the home.

Without resources to secure their future, people can rely only on their own families. Thus, when poor parents have lots of children, they are making a rational calculus for survival. High birth rates reflect people's defensive reaction against enforced poverty. For those living at the margin of survival, children provide labor to augment meager family income. In Bangladesh, one study showed that even by the age of six a boy provides labor and/or income for the family. By the age of twelve, at the latest, he contributes more than he consumes.

Population investigators tell us that the benefit children provide to their parents in most third world countries cannot be measured just by hours of labor or extra income. The intangibles are just as important. Bigger families carry more weight in community affairs. With no reliable channels for advancement in sight, parents may hope that the next child will be the one clever or lucky enough to get an education and land a city job despite the odds. In many countries, income from one such job in the city can support a whole family in the countryside.

And impoverished parents know that without children to care for them in old age, they will have nothing. They also realize that none of these possible benefits will be theirs unless they have many children, since hunger and lack of health care will kill many of their offspring before they reach adulthood.

[Continued...]

-------------------------------------

So, if "overpopulation" is not the real cause of world poverty and environmental degradation, then what is?

One of the primary causes is the horribly corrupt and parasitic process whereby international bankers extract countless billions in usurious interest from developing economies each year in exchange for the nothing out of which they create the so-called "money" they loan:

-------------------------------------

“The Third World War has already started -- a silent war, not for that reason any less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying there are children, instead of millions of wounded there are millions of unemployed; instead of destruction of bridges there is the tearing down of factories, schools, hospitals, and entire economies….It is a war over the foreign debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam.”

-- Luis Ignacio Silva, as quoted on page 238 of A Fate Worse Than Debt by Susan George






http://globalgulag.freesmfhosting.com/index.php/topic,379.msg1266.html#msg1266 (When Money Eats The World)

-------------------------------------

But outlawing fractional reserve banking and allowing countries to issue their own paper money debt-free and interest-free to fund the production and repair of public goods everyone can see and benefit from (roads & bridges, maglev rail, etc.) would be to put the criminals who head the IMF and World Bank out of business, and we all know NWO minions aren't about to call for that.

Another primary cause is the anti-labor/pro-land speculation tax system that nearly all governments impose on their respective populations:

-------------------------------------

"This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour -- nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times....People began to say, perhaps naturally, if this is what State absentation comes to, let us have some State intervention.

"But the State had intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly, -- the landlord's monopoly of economic rent, -- thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into the factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all actually occupied, was all legally occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labour market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus." [Emphasis original]

-- Albert Jay Nock, Free Speech and Plain Language, pp. 320-1


"It is incontrovertible, I think, that the rapidly-increasing destruction of the Amazon rain forest...is directly attributable to the fact that the Amazon basin is the only part of Brazil where free or cheap land is available, and this, in turn, is attributable to the fact that nearly four-fifths of Brazil's arable acreage is covered by sprawling latifundios, half of which are held by speculators who produce nothing. Were the artificial scarcity of available land in the rest of Brazil corrected, as the Georgist remedy would unquestionably do, pressure on the Amazon basin would obviously cease."

-- Robert V. Andelson, Commons Without Tragedy, p. 32




http://globalgulag.freesmfhosting.com/index.php/topic,333.0.html (Answers to common objections)

-------------------------------------

But you'll never hear NWO minions call for a reversal of that trend, either, because that would mean eliminating economic free-riding by overprivileged, politically-connected absentee landlords and slumlords.

All we'll get are the usual top-down, Nazi-style control measures that merely concentrate that much more political and economic power into the parasitic hands of the very criminal, psychopathic plutocrats who caused this mess in the first place.

On issue after issue after issue, these plutocrats create a problem -- e.g., "terrorism" (via false flag ops), a financial collapse (via derivatives), widespread disease (via bioterrorism and contaminated food supplies), mass stupidity (via compulsory schooling, chemical lobotomization and TV-based mind control, etc., etc., -- then add insult to injury by posing as our saviors from the very problem they themselves created!



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« Reply #2 on: August 25, 2010, 05:39:02 pm »

http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html

The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics

By Edwin Black
History News Network
11-24-03

Mr. Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust and the just released War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, from which the following article is drawn.

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century’s first decades, California’s eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims.

Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of “race and blood” in his 1902 racial epistle “Blood of a Nation,” in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation’s social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations–which functioned as part of a closely-knit network–published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.

Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people only married other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton’s ideas were imported into the United States just as Gregor Mendel’s principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenic advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man.

In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called “progressives” fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton’s eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind–and less or none of everyone else.

[Continued...]
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« Reply #3 on: August 25, 2010, 05:39:54 pm »

http://www.prisonplanet.com/msnbc-in-cover-up-of-manifestly-provable-population-control-plan.html

MSNBC In Cover-Up Of Manifestly Provable Population Control Plan

Agenda to reduce global population by at least 80 per cent is not a “conspiracy theory,” it’s a publicly admitted goal of the elite



Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, June 16, 2010

As part of his obsessive drive to smear anti-big government activists as insanely paranoid and dangerous radicals, Chris Matthews and his guest, establishment neo-lib David Corn, previewed tonight’s “Rise of the New Right” hit piece by claiming that the elite’s agenda to enact dictatorial population control measures was a “conspiracy theory”.

As we have documented on numerous occasions, while Matthews points fingers at his political adversaries for preparing to engage in violence, the only real violence we’re witnessing out on the streets is being committed by Obama supporters, MSNBC thugs and other leftists who refuse to tolerate free speech that counters their propaganda.

However, MSNBC’s goal is not just to demonize the Tea Party and anti-big government activists as dangerous radicals as an avenue through which to sick the police state on them and crush their free speech, they’re also desperate to prevent Americans from lending any credence to what people like Alex Jones have to say by acting as gatekeepers to prevent such information from becoming mainstream.

A perfect example of an issue that Matthews and his ilk want to sideline is the manifestly provable fact that elitists have for decades publicly stated their desire to reduce global population by around 80 per cent and as much as 99 per cent.

During MSNBC’s Hardball show on Tuesday, Corn characterized the notion that “there is a planetary elite that literally has a secret plan to kill 80 to 99 percent of the population,” as a conspiracy theory.

Watch the clip.

       

Corn’s role in covering-up the depopulation agenda is unsurprising given his habitual tactic of trying to discredit anyone who exposes government criminality and corruption. One critic labeled Corn as someone who serves, “As a Neo-Con-lite version of someone who dismisses those who have investigated the crimes of the U.S. government,” in reference to how he tried to undermine the work of the late Gary Webb, an award-winning investigative journalist who exposed the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade.

Despite Corn’s claims to the contrary, the global elite have been forthright, public, and unashamedly enthusiastic about their open intention to cull at least 80 per cent of humanity in the name of saving the planet.

There are still large numbers of people amongst the general public, in academia, and especially those who work for the corporate media, who are still in denial about the on-the-record stated agenda for global population reduction, as well as the consequences of this program that we already see unfolding.

We have compiled a compendium of evidence to prove that the elite have been obsessed with eugenics and its modern day incarnation, population control, for well over 100 years and that goal of global population reduction is still in full force to this day.

The World’s Elite Are Discussing Population Reduction

During a recent TED conference, an organization which is sponsored by one of the largest toxic waste polluters on the planet, Gates told the audience that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions to almost zero.

Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”

Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates is referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.

Gates’ eugenicist zeal is shared by his fellow Bilderberg elitists, many of whom have advocated draconian policies of population control in their own public speeches and writings. Indeed, the Rockefeller family funded eugenics research in Germany through the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin and Munich. The Rockefeller Foundation praised Hitler’s sterilization program in Nazi Germany. David Rockefeller attended the first Bilderberg meeting in 1954 and is now the head of Bilderberg’s “steering committee”.

A joint World Health Organization-Rockefeller inoculation program against tetanus in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines in the early 1990’s was in fact a covert trial on using vaccines to medically abort women’s babies.

“Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization, became suspicious of the motives behind the WHO program and decided to test numerous vials of the vaccine and found them to contain human Chorionic Gonadotrophin, or hCG,” writes historian F. William Engdahl in his article, Bill Gates And Neo-Eugenics: Vaccines To Reduce Population. “That was a curious component for a vaccine designed to protect people against lock-jaw arising from infection with rusty nail wounds or other contact with certain bacteria found in soil. The tetanus disease was indeed, also rather rare. It was also curious because hCG was a natural hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. However, when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier, it stimulated formation of antibodies against hCG, rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy, a form of concealed abortion. Similar reports of vaccines laced with hCG hormones came from the Philippines and Nicaragua.”

Gates recently announced that he would be funding a sterilization program that would use sharp blasts of ultrasound directed against a man’s scrotum to render him infertile for six months. “The foundation has funded a new “sweat-triggered vaccine delivery” program based on nanoparticles penetrating human skin. The technology is described as a way to “…develop nanoparticles that penetrate the skin through hair follicles and burst upon contact with human sweat to release vaccines,” writes health researcher Mike Adams.

As was reported last year by the London Times, a “secret billionaire club” meeting in early May 2009 which took place in New York and was attended by David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Bill Gates and others was focused around “how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population”.

We questioned establishment media spin which portrayed the attendees as kind-hearted and concerned philanthropists by pointing out that Ted Turner has publicly advocated shocking population reduction programs that would cull the human population by a staggering 95%. He has also called for a Communist-style one child policy to be mandated by governments in the west. In China, the one child policy is enforced by means of taxes on each subsequent child, allied to an intimidation program which includes secret police and “family planning” authorities kidnapping pregnant women from their homes and performing forced abortions.

Of course, Turner completely fails to follow his own rules on how everyone else should live their lives, having five children and owning no less than 2 million acres of land.

In the third world, Turner has contributed literally billions to population reduction, namely through United Nations programs, leading the way for the likes of Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet (Gates’ father has long been a leading board member of Planned Parenthood and a top eugenicist).

The notion that these elitists merely want to slow population growth in order to improve health is a complete misnomer. Slowing the growth of the world’s population while also improving its health are two irreconcilable concepts to the elite. Stabilizing world population is a natural byproduct of higher living standards, as has been proven by the stabilization of the white population in the west. Elitists like David Rockefeller have no interest in “slowing the growth of world population” by natural methods, their agenda is firmly rooted in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is all about “culling” the surplus population via draconian methods.

David Rockefeller’s legacy is not derived from a well-meaning “philanthropic” urge to improve health in third world countries, it is born out of a Malthusian drive to eliminate the poor and those deemed racially inferior, using the justification of social Darwinism.

As is documented in Alex Jones’ seminal film Endgame, Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller, exported eugenics to Germany from its origins in Britain by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich’s ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top German eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their “expertise” in the post-war world.

As Dr. Len Horowitz writes,

    “In the 1950s, the Rockefellers reorganized the U.S. eugenics movement in their own family offices, with spinoff population-control and abortion groups. The Eugenics Society changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology, its current name.”

    “The Rockefeller Foundation had long financed the eugenics movement in England, apparently repaying Britain for the fact that British capital and an Englishman-partner had started old John D. Rockefeller out in his Oil Trust. In the 1960s, the Eugenics Society of England adopted what they called Crypto-eugenics, stating in their official reports that they would do eugenics through means and instruments not labeled as eugenics.”

    “With support from the Rockefellers, the Eugenics Society (England) set up a sub-committee called the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which for 12 years had no other address than the Eugenics Society. This, then, is the private, international apparatus which has set the world up for a global holocaust, under the UN flag.”

In the latter half of the 20th century, eugenics merely changed its face to become known as “population control”. This was crystallized in National Security Study Memorandum 200, a 1974 geopolitical strategy document prepared by Rockefeller’s intimate friend and fellow Bilderberg member Henry Kissinger, which targeted thirteen countries for massive population reduction by means of creating food scarcity, sterilization and war.


Henry Kissinger: In the now declassified 1974 document, National
Security Memorandum 200, Kissinger outlines the plan to use food
scarcity as a weapon in order to achieve population reduction in
lesser-developed countries.


The document, declassified in 1989, identified 13 countries that were of special interest to U.S. geopolitical objectives and outlined why population growth, and particularly that of young people who were seen as a revolutionary threat to U.S. corporations, was a potential roadblock to achieving these objectives. The countries named were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

The study outlined how civil disturbances affecting the “smooth flow of needed materials” would be less likely to occur “under conditions of slow or zero population growth.”

“Development of a worldwide political and popular commitment to population stabilization is fundamental to any effective strategy. This requires the support and commitment of key LDC leaders. This will only take place if they clearly see the negative impact of unrestricted population growth and believe it is possible to deal with this question through governmental action,” states the document.

The document called for integrating “family planning” (otherwise known as abortion) with routine health services for the purposes of “curbing the numbers of LDC people,” (lesser-developed countries).

The report shockingly outlines how withholding food could be used as a means of punishment for lesser-developed countries who do not act to reduce their population, essentially using food as a weapon for a political agenda by creating mass starvation in under-developed countries.

“The allocation of scarce PL480 (food) resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production,” states the document.

Later in the document, the idea of enforcing “mandatory programs” by using food as “an instrument of national power” is presented.

The document states that the program will be administered through the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), thereby “avoiding the danger that some LDC leaders will see developed-country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.”

As Jean Guilfoyle writes,

    “NSSM 200 was a statement composed after the fact. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. had worked diligently behind the scenes to advance the population-control agenda at the United Nations, contributing the initial funding of $1 million.

    "A Department of State telegram, dated July 1969, reported the support of John D. Rockefeller III, among others, for the appointment of Rafael Salas of the Philippines as senior officer to co-ordinate and administer the UN population program. The administrator of the UN Development Program reported confidentially that he preferred someone such as Salas who had the 'advantage of color, religion (Catholic) and conviction.'"

A comprehensive outline of what is contained in the National Security Memorandum document can be read at: http://www.theinterim.com/july98/20nssm.html

Evidence of the actual consequences of this program can be found with the link between vaccines and sterilization, as well as other diseases such as cancer, in both the west and the third world.

In the following video clips, women of the Akha tribe who live predominately in Thailand, describe how they miscarried shortly after taking vaccines when they were eight months pregnant. The videos below highlight the efforts of supporters of the Akha tribe to get answers from the University of Oregon and the United Nations, who provided funding for the vaccination and sterilization programs.

       

       

       

       

Further evidence of the link between vaccinations, birth control, cancer and other diseases can be researched here.

In the 21st century, the eugenics movement has changed its stripes once again, manifesting itself through the global carbon tax agenda and the notion that having too many children or enjoying a reasonably high standard of living is destroying the planet through global warming, creating the pretext for further regulation and control over every facet of our lives.

As we have tirelessly documented, the elite’s drive for population control is not based around a benign philanthropic urge to improve living standards, it is firmly routed in eugenics, racial hygiene and fascist thinking.

According to the The London Times report, the secret billionaire cabal, with its interest in population reduction, has been dubbed ‘The Good Club’ by insiders. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyone who takes the time to properly research the origins of the “population control” movement will come to understand that the Rockefeller-Turner-Gates agenda for drastic population reduction, which is now clearly manifesting itself through real environmental crises like chemtrails, genetically modified food, tainted vaccines and other skyrocketing diseases such as cancer, has its origins in the age-old malevolent elitist agenda to cull the human “chattel” as one would do to rodents or any other species deemed a nuisance by the central planning authorities.

Sterilization And Eugenics Returns In Popular Culture

We are now seeing the return of last century’s eugenicist movement through the popular promotion of sterilization as a method of birth control.

A popular women’s magazine in the UK recently featured an article entitled, Young, Single and Sterilized, in which women in their 20’s discussed why they had undergone an operation to prevent them from ever having children. The article is little more than PR for a “women’s charity” called Marie Stopes International, an organization that carries out abortions and sterilizations and was founded by a Nazi eugenicist who advocated compulsory sterilization of non-whites and “those of bad character”.

In the article, sterilization is lauded as an “excellent method of birth control” by Dr. Patricia Lohr of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

The article includes an advertisement that encourages women to seek “more information about sterilization” by contacting Marie Stopes International. We read that, “Over the past year, a quarter of the women who booked a sterilization consultation with women’s charity Marie Stopes were aged 30 or under.”

Marie Stopes was a feminist who opened the first birth control clinic in Britain in 1921 as well as being Nazi sympathizer and a eugenicist who advocated that non-whites and the poor be sterilized.

Stopes, a racist and an anti-Semite, campaigned for selective breeding to achieve racial purity, a passion she shared with Adolf Hitler in adoring letters and poems that she sent the leader of the Third Reich.

Stopes also attended the Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935, while calling for the “compulsory sterilization of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character.” Stopes acted on her appalling theories by concentrating her abortion clinics in poor areas so as to reduce the birth rate of the lower classes.

Stopes left most of her estate to the Eugenics Society, an organization that shared her passion for racial purity and still exists today under the new name The Galton Institute. The society has included members such as Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the evolutionist), Julian Huxley and Margaret Sanger.


Marie Stopes, the Nazi and pioneering eugenicist
who sent love letters to Hitler, honored recently by
the Royal Mail.


Ominously, The Galton Institute website promotes its support and funding initiative for “the practical delivery of family planning facilities, especially in developing countries.” In other words, the same organization that once advocated sterilizing black people to achieve racial purity in the same vein as the Nazis is now bankrolling abortions of black babies in the third world.

While the issue of abortion is an entirely different argument, most would agree that no matter how extreme it sounds, a woman has the right to sterilize herself if she so chooses, just as a man has the right to a vasectomy.

But when a magazine aimed primarily at young women all but encourages girls as young as 20 to have their fallopian tubes tied in order to prevent the “irritation” of children entering their lives and then advertises an organization founded by a Nazi eugenicist that can perform the operation, something has to be amiss.

Even more shocking than this is the fact that the majority of people in the UK routinely express their support for society’s “undesirables” to be forcibly sterilized by the state, harking back to a time when such a thing was commonplace right up to the 1970’s in some areas of America and Europe.

As we highlighted at the time, respondents to a Daily Mail article about Royal Mail honoring Marie Stopes by using her image on a commemorative stamp were not disgusted at Royal Mail for paying homage to a racist Nazi eugenicist, but were merely keen to express their full agreement that those deemed not to be of pure genetic stock or of the approved character should be forcibly sterilized and prevented from having children.

“A lot of people should be sterilized, IMO. It’s still true today,” wrote one.

“Just imagine what a stable, well-ordered society we’d have if compulsory sterilisation had been adopted years ago for the socially undesirable,” states another respondent, calling for a “satellite-carried sterilisation ray” to be installed in space to zap the undesirables.

Shockingly, another compares sterilization and genocide of those deemed inferior to the breeding and culling of farmyard animals, and says that such a move is necessary to fight overpopulation and global warming. Here is the comment in full from “Karen” in Wales;

    We breed farm animals to produce the best possible stock and kill them when they have fulfilled their purpose. We inter-breed pedigree animals to produce extremes that leave them open to ill-health and early death. It is only religion that says humans are not animals. The reality is that we are simply intelligent, mammalian primates.

    The world population of humans has increased from 2 billion to 6.5 billion in the last 50 years. This planet can support 2 billion humans comfortably. 6.5 billion humans use too many resources and leads to global warming, climate change and a very uncertain future for all of us – humans and all other life sharing this planet with us.

    Marie Stopes believed in population control and in breeding the best possible humans. So did Hitler. Neither of the aims are bad in themselves. It is how they are achieved that is the problem. The fact that we still remember Marie Stopes is an achievement in itself.

The nature of these comments is so fundamentally sick and twisted that one is tempted to dismiss them as a joke – but these people are deadly serious. Presumably they would also agree with China’s one child policy, which is routinely enforced by intimidation as young pregnant women are grabbed off the streets by state goons and taken to hospitals where forced abortions are carried out.

Now with popular women’s magazines advising women in their 20’s where they can go to be sterilized and ensure a lifetime of partying and carefree sex, it’s no surprise that experts predict that by 2010 one in four western women will be child free for life.

The yearning to have children is the most beautiful, natural and innate emotion either a man or a woman can possibly experience. That is not to say that it’s always wrong for some people not to have children – extreme circumstances can justify such a decision. But to have yourself sterilized because you find children to be an “irritant” and want to live a life free of responsibility or consequences is an awful message to send to young women, especially in the sex-saturated entertainment culture that we are now forced to endure.

Furthermore, the outright promotion of Marie Stopes International as ‘the place to go’ to get sterilized if you’re under 30 is stomach-churning considering the fact that the origins of this organization can be found in Nazi ideology, racist and backward early 20th century eugenics and a long-standing agenda to cull the population of undesirables, an abhorrent belief still held by elites across the planet today.

Genocidal Population Reduction Programs Embraced By Academia

One such individual who embraces the notion that humans are a virus that should be wiped out en masse for the good of mother earth is Dr. Eric R. Pianka, an American biologist based at the University of Texas in Austin.


Dr Erik Pianka, the American biologist who
advocated the mass genocide of 90% of the
human race and was applauded by his peers.


During a speech to the Texas Academy of Science in March 2006, Pianka advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the world’s population through the airborne ebola virus. The reaction from scores of top scientists and professors in attendance was not one of shock or revulsion – they stood and applauded Pianka’s call for mass genocide.

Pianka’s speech was ordered to be kept off the record before it began as cameras were turned away and hundreds of students, scientists and professors sat in attendance.

Saying the public was not ready to hear the information presented, Pianka began by exclaiming, “We’re no better than bacteria!”, as he jumped into a doomsday malthusian rant about overpopulation destroying the earth.

Standing in front of a slide of human skulls, Pianka gleefully advocated airborne ebola as his preferred method of exterminating the necessary 90% of humans, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period. Ebola victims suffer the most tortuous deaths imaginable as the virus kills by liquefying the internal organs. The body literally dissolves as the victim writhes in pain bleeding from every orifice.



Pianka then cited the Peak Oil fraud as another reason to initiate global genocide. “And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.”

Later, the scientist welcomed the potential devastation of the avian flu virus and spoke glowingly of China’s enforced one child policy, before zestfully commenting, “We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth.”

At the end of Pianka’s speech the audience erupted not to a chorus of boos and hisses but to a raucous reception of applause and cheers as audience members clambered to get close to the scientist to ask him follow up questions. Pianka was later presented with a distinguished scientist award by the Academy. Pianka is no crackpot. He has given lectures to prestigious universities worldwide.

Indeed, the notion that the earth’s population needs to be drastically reduced is a belief shared almost unanimously by academics across the western hemisphere.

In 2002, The Melbourne Age reported on newly uncovered documents detailing Nobel Peace Prize winning microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet’s plan to help the Australian government develop biological weapons for use against Indonesia and other “overpopulated” countries of South-East Asia.

From the article;

    Sir Macfarlane recommended in a secret report in 1947 that biological and chemical weapons should be developed to target food crops and spread infectious diseases. His key advisory role on biological warfare was uncovered by Canberra historian Philip Dorling in the National Archives in 1998.

    “Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions,” Sir Macfarlane said.

    The Victorian-born immunologist, who headed the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1960. He died in 1985 but his theories on immunity and “clonal selection” provided the basis for modern biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Controversy surrounding the comments of another darling of scientific academia, geneticist James Watson, who told a Sunday Times newspaper interviewer that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites, should come as no surprise to those who are aware of Watson’s role in pushing the dark pseudo-science of eugenics.

Watson told the interviewer that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

Watson was the Head of the Human Genome Project until 1992 and is best known for his contribution to the discovery of DNA, an achievement that won him the Nobel Peace prize in 1962.

But what most people are unaware of is the fact that Watson has played an integral role in advancing the legitimacy of the eugenics/population reduction movement for decades.

Watson is a strong proponent of genetic screening, a test to determine whether a couple is at increased risk of having a baby with a hereditary genetic disorder.

Since such screening obviously increases the rate of abortions of babies considered “imperfect,” many have slammed its introduction as nothing more than a camouflage for eugenics or “voluntary eugenics” as British philosophy professor Philip Kitcher labeled it.

Watson’s advocacy of genetic engineering stretched to his call for the “really stupid” bottom 10% of people to be “cured”.

Watson even urged woman to be given carte blanche to abort babies should tests determine that they are likely to be homosexual, despite the vast body of evidence indicating homosexuality is a result of environment rather than genetic code.

The geneticist has gone so far as to promote the idea of creating a kind of Nazi super-race, where the attractive and physically strong are genetically manufactured under laboratory conditions.

“People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great,” said Watson.

Dr. Erik Pianka’s doomsday warning of the population bomb, for which he presented no evidence whatsoever, is complete pseudo-science. Populations in developed countries are declining and only in third world countries are they expanding dramatically. Industrialization itself levels out population trends and aside from this, world population models routinely show that the earth’s population will level out at 9 billion in 2050 and slowly decline after that. “The population of the most developed countries will remain virtually unchanged at 1.2 billion until 2050,” states a United Nations report. Conservation International’s own study revealed that 46% of the earth’s surface was an untouched wilderness, that is land areas not including sea.

Think about the magnitude of Pianka’s statements. He wants to kill nine out of every ten members of your family and he wants to kill them in one of the most painful and agonizing ways imaginable.

If Pianka, or ‘The Lizard Man’ as he likes to be called, is so vehement in embracing the necessity of culling the human population will he step forward to be the first one in line? Will he sacrifice his children for the so-called greater good of the planet? We somehow doubt it.

Will the students and other top academics who so enthusiastically greeted his ideas go home and kill themselves for the cause if it is so righteous?

It was noted how Pianka presented his argument with the kind of glee that you would see in a demented serial killer before dispatching his victim. This is an attitude we have encountered again and again. To discuss killing 90% of the world’s population via a horrific plague is sick enough within itself but you would at least expect its advocates to be serious and sober in their approach to the subject. The opposite seems to be the case, where the subject is aired in a context of lighthearted lip-smacking and hand-rubbing as if the individual was about to sink his teeth into a juicy T-bone steak.

This window gives us a clear view of exactly why these deranged bastards encompass this ideology. They love death and their lives are motivated by dark influences very different to you or I.

Throughout history, elites have invented justifications for barbaric practices as a cover for their true agenda of absolute power and control over populations.

More Examples Of Population Reduction & Eugenics

From 1932 until 1972, the Tuskegee Study Group (pictured below) deliberately infected poor black communities in Alabama with syphilis without their consent and withheld treatment as the diseased rampaged through the town killing families.

In 1951 the Israeli government used US government provided technology to irradiate 100,000 Jewish children in a mass atomic experiment with an entire generation of Sephardi youths used as guinea pigs. 6,000 died immediately after the experiments and the rest suffered for the rest of their lives with debilitating illnesses and cancer.



As we have documented, members of the elite are quite open in their feverish lust to commit mass murder and ethnic cleansing. In the foreword to his biography If I Were An Animal, Prince Philip, another closet Nazi, wrote, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

This is just one of many on the record statements where Prince Philip has advocated his desire to “cull” the surplus human population. In another speech, he even lambasted the fact that lives were saved in Sri Lanka through Malaria treatments because it meant there were three times as many mouths to feed.

One of the most chilling admissions of the elitists’ deadly intent to forcibly commit genocide to reduce global population came from the lips of the late Jacques Cousteau, the sainted environmental icon. In an interview with the UNESCO Courier for November 1991 the famed oceanographer said:

“The damage people cause to the planet is a function of demographics — it is equal to the degree of development. One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangaladeshes. The damage is directly linked to consumption. Our society is turning toward more and needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer….”

“This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”

It is important to stress that this essay merely scratches the surface of both the stated goals of global population reduction from elitists and insiders, along with concrete examples of these programs being carried out. We could not possibly list them all in one article because this would take a book the length of an encyclopedia.

Further information is covered in Alex Jones’s Endgame, a pertinent segment from which can be viewed below.

       

Listed below is a compendium of quotes from elitists who have time and again expressed their intent to see humanity culled by 80 per cent or more. Some come from the progenitors of the eugenicist movement and others from elitists and organizations who are still very much active and in positions of influence.

[Continued...]
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« Reply #4 on: August 25, 2010, 05:47:05 pm »

The "overpopulation" myth is the Malthusian myth.

It is therefore a must that anyone who desires to defeat the modern-day Malthusian movement be thoroughly familiar with the writings and philosophy of the original anti-Malthusian, Henry George:

----------------------------------------

http://schalkenbach.org/library/henry-george/p+p/pp021.html

Progress and Poverty

Book II: Population and Subsistence

Chapter 1: The Malthusian Theory, Its Genesis and Support

Behind the theory we have been considering lies a theory we have yet to consider. The current doctrine as to the derivation and law of wages finds its strongest support in a doctrine as generally accepted -- the doctrine to which Malthus has given his name -- that population naturally tends to increase faster than subsistence. These two doctrines, fitting in with each other, frame the answer which the current political economy gives to the great problem we are endeavoring to solve.

In what has preceded, the current doctrine that wages are determined by the ratio between capital and laborers has, I think, been shown to be so utterly baseless as to excite surprise as to how it could so generally and so long obtain. It is not to be wondered at that such a theory should have arisen in a state of society where the great body of laborers seem to depend for employment and wages upon a separate class of capitalists, nor yet that under these conditions it should have maintained itself among the masses of men, who rarely take the trouble to separate the real from the apparent. But it is surprising that a theory which on examination appears to be so groundless could have been successively accepted by so many acute thinkers as have during the present century devoted their powers to the elucidation and development of the science of political economy.

The explanation of this otherwise unaccountable fact is to be found in the general acceptance of the Malthusian theory. The current theory of wages has never been fairly put upon its trial, because, backed by the Malthusian theory, it has seemed in the minds of political economists a self-evident truth. These two theories mutually blend with, strengthen, and defend each other, while they both derive additional support from a principle brought prominently forward in the discussions of the theory of rent -- viz., that past a certain point the application of capital and labor to land yields a diminishing return. Together they give such an explanation of the phenomena presented in a highly organized and advancing society as seems to fit all the facts, and which has thus prevented closer investigation.

Which of these two theories is entitled to historical precedence it is hard to say. The theory of population was not formulated in such a way as to give it the standing of a scientific dogma until after that had been done for the theory of wages. But they naturally spring up and grow with each other, and were both held in a form more or less crude long prior to any attempt to construct a system of political economy. It is evident, from several passages, that though he never fully developed it, the Malthusian theory was in rudimentary form prescrit in the mind of Adam Smith, and to this, it seems to me, must be largely due the misdirection which on the subject of wages his speculations took. But, however this may be, so closely are the two theories connected, so completely do they complement each other, that Buckle, reviewing the history of the development of political economy in his "Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the Eighteenth Century," attributes mainly to Malthus the honor of "decisively proving" the current theory of wages by advancing the current theory of the pressure of population upon subsistence. He says in his "History of Civilization in England," Vol. 3, Chap. 5:

    "Scarcely had the Eighteenth Century passed away when it was decisively proved that the reward of labor depends solely on two things; namely, the magnitude of that national fund out of which all labor is paid, and the number of laborers among whom the fund is to be divided. This vast step in our knowledge is due, mainly, though not entirely, to Malthus, whose work on population, besides marking an epoch in the history of speculative thought, has already produced considerable practical results, and will probably give rise to others more considerable still. It was published in 1798; so that Adam Smith, who died in 1790, missed what to him would have been the intense pleasure of seeing how, in it, his own views were expanded rather than corrected. Indeed, it is certain that without Smith there would have been no Malthus; that is, unless Smith had laid the foundation, Malthus could not have raised the superstructure."

The famous doctrine which ever since its enunciation has so powerfully influenced thought, not alone in the province of political economy, but in regions of even higher speculation, was formulated by Malthus in the proposition that, as shown by the growth of the North American colonies, the natural tendency of population is to double itself at least every twenty-five years, thus increasing in a geometrical ratio, while the subsistence that can be obtained from land "under circumstances the most favorable to human industry could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio, or by an addition every twenty-five years of a quantity equal to what it at present produces." "The necessary effects of these two different rates of increase, when brought together," Mr. Malthus naïvely goes on to say, "will be very striking." And thus (Chap. I) he brings them together:

    "Let us call the population of this island eleven millions; and suppose the present produce equal to the easy support of such a number. In the first twenty-five years the population would be twenty-two millions, and the food being also doubled, the means of subsistence would be equal to this increase. In the next twenty-five years the population would be forty-four millions, and the means of subsistence only equal to the support of thirty-three millions. In the next period the population would be equal to eighty-eight millions, and the means of subsistence just equal to the support of half that number. And at the conclusion of the first century, the population would be a hundred and seventy-six millions, and the means of subsistence only equal to the support of fifty-five millions; leaving a population of a hundred and twenty-one millions totally unprovided for.

    "Taking the whole earth instead of this island, emigration would of course be excluded; and supposing the present population equal to a thousand millions, the human species would increase as the numbers 11 21 41 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and subsistence as 11 21 3, 4, 5, 6, 71 8, 9. In two centuries the population would be to the means of subsistence as 256 to 9; in three centuries, 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable."

Such a result is of course prevented by the physical fact that no more people can exist than can find subsistence, and hence Malthus' conclusion is, that this tendency of population to indefinite increase must be held back either by moral restraint upon the reproductive faculty, or by the various causes which increase mortality, which he resolves into vice and misery. Such causes as prevent propagation he styles the preventive check; such causes as increase mortality he styles the positive check. This is the famous Malthusian doctrine, as promulgated by Malthus himself in the "Essay on Population."

It is not worth while to dwell upon the fallacy involved in the assumption of geometrical and arithmetical rates of increase, a play upon proportions which hardly rises to the dignity of that in the familiar puzzle of the hare and the tortoise, in which the hare is made to chase the tortoise through all eternity without coming up with him. For this assumption is not necessary to the Malthusian doctrine, or at least is expressly repudiated by some of those who fully accept that doctrine; as, for instance, John Stuart Mill, who speaks of it as "an unlucky attempt to give precision to things which do not admit of it, which every person capable of reasoning must see is wholly superfluous to the argument." The essence of the Malthusian doctrine is, that population tends to increase faster than the power of providing food, and whether this difference be stated as a geometrical ratio for population and an arithmetical ratio for subsistence, as by Malthus; or as a constant ratio for population and a diminishing ratio for subsistence, as by Mill, is only a matter of statement. The vital point, on which both agree, is, to use the words of Malthus, "that there is a natural tendency and constant effort in population to increase beyond the means of subsistence."

The Malthusian doctrine, as at present held, may be thus stated in its strongest and least objectionable form:

That population, constantly tending to increase, must, when unrestrained, ultimately press against the limits of subsistence, not as against a fixed, but as against an elastic barrier, which makes the procurement of subsistence progressively more and more difficult. And thus, wherever reproduction has had time to assert its power, and is unchecked by prudence, there must exist that degree of want which will keep population within the bounds of subsistence.

Although in reality not more repugnant to the sense of harmonious adaptation by creative beneficence and wisdom than the complacent no-theory which throws the responsibility for poverty and its concomitants upon the inscrutable decrees of Providence, without attempting to trace them, this theory, in avowedly making vice and suffering the necessary results of a natural instinct with which are linked the purest and sweetest affections, comes rudely in collision with ideas deeply rooted in the human mind, and it was, as soon as formally promulgated, fought with a bitterness in which zeal was often more manifest than logic. But it has triumphantly withstood the ordeal, and in spite of the refutations of the Godwins, the denunciations of the Cobbetts, and all the shafts that argument, sarcasm, ridicule, and sentiment could direct against it, today it stands in the world of thought as an accepted truth, which compels the recognition even of those who would fain disbelieve it.

The causes of its triumph, the sources of its strength, are not obscure. Seemingly backed by an indisputable arithmetical truth -- that a continuously increasing population must eventually exceed the capacity of the earth to furnish food or even standing room, the Malthusian theory is supported by analogies in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, where life everywhere beats wastefully against the barriers that hold its different species in check -- analogies to which the course of modern thought, in leveling distinctions between different forms of life, has given a greater and greater weight; and it is apparently corroborated by many obvious facts, such as the prevalence of poverty, vice, and misery amid dense populations; the general effect of material progress in increasing population without relieving pauperism; the rapid growth of numbers in newly settled countries and the evident retardation of increase in more densely settled countries by the mortality among the class condemned to want.

The Malthusian theory furnishes a general principle which accounts for these and similar facts, and accounts for them in a way which harmonizes with the doctrine that wages are drawn from capital, and with all the principles that are deduced from it. According to the current doctrine of wages, wages fall as increase in the number of laborers necessitates a more minute division of capital; according to the Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. It requires but the identification of capital with subsistence, and number of laborers with population, an identification made in the current treatises on political economy, where the terms are often converted, to make the two propositions as identical formally as they are substantially. And thus it is, as stated by Buckle in the passage previously quoted, that the theory of population advanced by Malthus has appeared to prove decisively the theory of wages advanced by Smith.

Ricardo, who a few years subsequent to the publication of the "Essay on Population" corrected the mistake into which Smith had fallen as to the nature and cause of rent, furnished the Malthusian theory an additional support by calling attention to the fact that rent would increase as the necessities of increasing population forced cultivation to less and less productive lands, or to less and less productive points on the same lands, thus explaining the rise of rent. In this way was formed a triple combination, by which the Malthusian theory has been buttressed on both sides -- the previously received doctrine of wages and the subsequently received doctrine of rent exhibiting in this view but special examples of the operation of the general principle to which the name of Malthus has been attached -- the fall in wages and the rise in rents which come with increasing population being but modes in which the pressure of population upon subsistence shows itself.

Thus taking its place in the very framework of political economy (for the science as currently accepted has undergone no material change or improvement since the time of Ricardo, though in some minor points it has been cleared and illustrated), the Malthusian theory, though repugnant to sentiments before alluded to, is not repugnant to other ideas which, in older countries at least, generally prevail among the working classes; but, on the contrary, like the theory of wages by which it is supported and in turn supports, it harmonizes with them. To the mechanic or operative the cause of low wages and of the inability to get employment is obviously the competition caused by the pressure of numbers, and in the squalid abodes of poverty what seems clearer than that there are too many people?

But the great cause of the triumph of this theory is, that, instead of menacing any vested right or antagonizing any powerful interest, it is eminently soothing and reassuring to the classes who, wielding the power of wealth, largely dominate thought. At a time when old supports were falling away, it came to the rescue of the special privileges by which a few monopolize so much of the good things of this world, proclaiming a natural cause for the want and misery which, if attributed to political institutions, must condemn every government under which they exist. The "Essay on Population" was avowedly a reply to William Godwin's "Inquiry concerning Political justice," a work asserting the principle of human equality; and its purpose was to justify existing inequality by shifting the responsibility for it from human institutions to the laws of the Creator. There was nothing new in this, for Wallace, nearly forty years before, had brought forward the danger of excessive multiplication as the answer to the demands of justice for an equal distribution of wealth; but the circumstances of the times were such as to make the same idea, when brought forward by Malthus, peculiarly grateful to a powerful class, in whom an intense fear of any questioning of the existing state of things had been generated by the outburst of the French Revolution.

Now, as then, the Malthusian doctrine parries the demand for reform, and shelters selfishness from question and from conscience by the interposition of an inevitable necessity. It furnishes a philosophy by which Dives as he feasts can shut out the image of Lazarus who faints with hunger at his door; by which wealth may complacently button up its pocket when poverty asks an alms, and the rich Christian bend on Sundays in a nicely upholstered pew to implore the good gifts of the All Father without any feeling of responsibility for the squalid misery that is festering but a square away. For poverty, want, and starvation are by this theory not chargeable either to individual greed or to social maladjustments; they are the inevitable results of universal laws, with which, if it were not impious, it were as hopeless to quarrel as with the law of gravitation. In this view, he who in the midst of want has accumulated wealth, has but fenced in a little oasis from the driving sand which else would have overwhelmed it. He has gained for himself, but has hurt nobody. And even if the rich were literally to obey the injunctions of Christ and divide their wealth among the poor, nothing would be gained. Population would be increased, only to press again upon the limits of subsistence or capital, and the equality that would be produced would be but the equality of common misery. And thus reforms which would interfere with the interests of any powerful class are discouraged as hopeless. As the moral law forbids any forestalling of the methods by which the natural law gets rid of surplus population and thus holds in check a tendency to increase potent enough to pack the surface of the globe with human beings as sardines are packed in a box, nothing can really be done, either by individual or by combined effort, to extirpate poverty, save to trust to the efficacy of education and preach the necessity of prudence.

A theory that, falling in with the habits of thought of the poorer classes, thus justifies the greed of the rich and the selfishness of the powerful, will spread quickly and strike its roots deep. This has been the case with the theory advanced by Malthus.

[Continued...]

----------------------------------------

Here's an interesting clip of woman reading Progress and Poverty aloud while sunbathing. (Sorry, guys, but it's G-rated.  Wink)

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New Eugenics and the Rise of the Global Scientific Dictatorship
The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom, Part 3

by Andrew Gavin Marshall



Global Research
July 5, 2010

This is the third and final part of the series, "The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom."

Part 1: The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order
Part 2: Revolution and Repression in America

Introduction

We are in the midst of the most explosive development in all of human history. Humanity is experiencing a simultaneously opposing and conflicting geopolitical transition, the likes of which has never before been anticipated or experienced. Historically, the story of humanity has been the struggle between the free-thinking individual and structures of power controlled by elites that seek to dominate land, resources and people. The greatest threat to elites at any time – historically and presently – is an awakened, critically thinking and politically stimulated populace. This threat has manifested itself throughout history, in different places and at different times. Ideas of freedom, democracy, civil and human rights, liberty and equality have emerged in reaction and opposition to power structures and elite systems of control.

The greatest triumphs of the human mind – whether in art, science or thought – have arisen out of and challenged great systems of power and control. The greatest of human misery and tragedy has arisen out of the power structures and systems that elites always seek to construct and manage. War, genocide, persecution and human degradation are directly the result of decisions made by those who control the apparatus of power, whether the power manifests itself as intellectual, ecclesiastical, spiritual, militaristic, or scientific. The most malevolent and ruthless power is that over the free human mind: if one controls how one thinks, they control the individual itself. The greatest human achievements are where individuals have broken free the shackles that bind the mind and let loose the inherent and undeniable power that lies in each and every individual on this small little planet.

Currently, our world is at the greatest crossroads our species has ever experienced. We are in the midst of the first truly global political awakening, in which for the first time in all of human history, all of mankind is politically awakened and stirring; in which whether inadvertently or intentionally, people are thinking and acting in political terms. This awakening is most evident in the developing world, having been made through personal experience to be acutely aware of the great disparities, disrespect, and domination inherent in global power structures. The awakening is spreading increasingly to the west itself, as the majority of the people living in the western developed nations are thrown into poverty and degradation. The awakening will be forced upon all people all over the world. Nothing, no development, ever in human history, has posed such a monumental threat to elite power structures.

This awakening is largely driven by the Technological Revolution, which through technology and electronics, in particular mass media and the internet, have made it so that people across the world are able to become aware of global issues and gain access to information from around the world. The Technological Revolution, thus, has fostered an Information Revolution which has, in turn, fed the global political awakening.

Simultaneously, the Technological Revolution has led to another unique and unprecedented development in human history, and one that is diametrically opposed, yet directly related to the global political awakening. For the first time in human history, free humanity is faced with the dominating threat of a truly global elite, who have at their hands the technology to impose a truly global system of control: a global scientific dictatorship. The great danger is that through the exponential growth in scientific techniques, elites will use these great new powers to control and dominate all of humanity in such a way that has never before been experienced.

Through all of human history, tyrants have used coercive force and terror to control populations. With the Technological Revolution, elites increasingly have the ability to control the very biology and psychology of the individual to a point where it may not be necessary to impose a system of terror, but rather where the control is implemented on a much deeper, psychological, subliminal and individual biological manner. While terror can prevent people from opposing power for a while, the scientific dictatorship can create a personal psycho-social condition in which the individual comes to love his or her own slavery; in which, like a mentally inferior pet, they are made to love their leaders and accept their servitude.

So we are presented with a situation in which humanity is faced with both the greatest threat and the greatest hope that we have ever collectively experienced in our short human history. This essay, the third part in the series, “The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom,” examines the ideas behind the global scientific dictatorship, and how it may manifest itself presently and in the future, with a particular focus on the emergence of ‘new eugenics’ as a system of mass control.

Free humanity faces the most monumental decision we have ever been presented with: do we feed and fuel the global political awakening into a true human psycho-social revolution of the mind, creating a new global political economy which empowers and liberates all of humanity; or... do we fall silently into a ‘brave new world’ of a global scientific oppression, the likes of which have never before been experienced, and whose dominance would never be more difficult to challenge and overcome?

We can either find a true freedom, or descend into a deep despotism. We are not powerless before this great ideational beast. We have, at our very fingertips the ability to use technology to our benefit and to re-shape the world so that it benefits the people of the world and not simply the powerful. It must be freedom for all or freedom for none.

What is the ‘Scientific Dictatorship’?

In 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote his dystopian novel, “Brave New World,” in which he looked at the emergence of the scientific dictatorships of the future. In his 1958 essay, “Brave New World Revisited,” Huxley examined how far the world had come in that short period since his book was published, and where the world was heading. Huxley wrote that:

    In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.

Huxley explained that, “The future dictator’s subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engineers,” and he quotes one “advocate of this new science” as saying that, “The challenge of social engineering in our time is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of social engineers.” Thus, proclaims Huxley, “The twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.”

In 1952, Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, historian, mathematician, and social critic wrote the book, “The Impact of Science on Society,” in which he warned and examined how science, and the technological revolution, was changing and would come to change society. In his book, Russell explained that:

    I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically speaking, not a very advanced study... This study is immensely useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science, founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education’. Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the Press, the cinema and the radio play an increasing part.

    What is essential in mass psychology is the art of persuasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler’s with a speech of (say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

    This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship.

Russell went on to analyze the question of whether a ‘scientific dictatorship’ is more stable than a democracy, on which he postulated:

    Apart from the danger of war, I see no reason why such a regime should be unstable. After all, most civilised and semi-civilised countries known to history have had a large class of slaves or serfs completely subordinate to their owners. There is nothing in human nature that makes the persistence of such a system impossible. And the whole development of scientific technique has made it easier than it used to be to maintain a despotic rule of a minority. When the government controls the distribution of food, its power is absolute so long as it can count on the police and the armed forces. And their loyalty can be secured by giving them some of the privileges of the governing class. I do not see how any internal movement of revolt can ever bring freedom to the oppressed in a modern scientific dictatorship.

Drawing on the concept popularized by Aldous Huxley – of people loving their servitude – Bertrand Russell explained that under a scientific dictatorship:

    It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished... Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

Russell explained that, “The completeness of the resulting control over opinion depends in various ways upon scientific technique. Where all children go to school, and all schools are controlled by the government, the authorities can close the minds of the young to everything contrary to official orthodoxy.” Russell later proclaimed in his book that, “a scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government.” He elaborated:

    Unless there is a world government which secures universal birth control, there must be from time to time great wars, in which the penalty of defeat is widespread death by starvation. That is exactly the present state of the world, and some may hold that there is no reason why it should not continue for centuries. I do not myself believe that this is possible. The two great wars that we have experienced have lowered the level of civilization in many parts of the world, and the next is pretty sure to achieve much more in this direction. Unless, at some stage, one power or group of powers emerges victorious and proceeds to establish a single government of the world with a monopoly of armed force, it is clear that the level of civilization must continually decline until scientific warfare becomes impossible – that is until science is extinct.

Russell explains that eugenics plays a central feature in the construction of any world government scientific dictatorship, stating that, “Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.”

In a 1962 speech at UC Berkeley, Aldous Huxley spoke about the real world becoming the ‘Brave New World’ nightmare he envisaged. Huxley spoke primarily of the ‘Ultimate Revolution’ that focuses on ‘behavioural controls’ of people. Huxley said of the ‘Ultimate Revolution’:

    In the past, we can say, that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. There’s been the political revolution, the economic revolution . . . the religious revolution. All these aimed as I say not directly at the human being but at his surroundings, so by modifying his surroundings you did achieve – at one remove – an effect upon the human being.

    Today, we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ‘Ultimate Revolution’ – the ‘Final Revolution’ – where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time, but this has generally been of a violent nature. The techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial, and people have employed them with more-or-less ingenuity, sometimes with utmost crudity, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired with a process of trial and error – finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonments, constraints of various kinds . . .

    If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent. It’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely, it can function for a fairly long time; but sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion, an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.

    Well it seems to me the nature of the Ultimate Revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: that we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques, which will enable the controlling oligarchy – who have always existed and will presumably always exist – to get people to love their servitude. This is the ultimate in malevolent revolution...

    There seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of Ultimate Control, this method of control, by which people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy; the enjoyment of servitude . . .

    I am inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future – and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world – will be probably a good deal nearer to the Brave New World pattern than to the 1984 pattern. They will be a good deal nearer, not because of any humanitarian qualms in the scientific dictators, but simply because the ‘brave new world’ pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other. That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they are living – the state of servitude – if you can do this, then you are likely to have a much more stable, a much more lasting society; much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs, and firing squads and concentration camps.

In 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the nation in which he warned of the dangers to democracy posed by the military-industrial complex: the interconnected web of industry, the military, and politics creating the conditions for constant war. In that same speech, Eisenhower warned America and the world of another important change in society:

    Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

    The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

    Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

In 1970, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote about “the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society,” in the “technetronic revolution”; explaining:

    Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits.

New Eugenics

Many sciences and large social movements are directed by the same foundations and money that financed the eugenics movement in the early 20th century. The Rockefeller foundations, Ford, Carnegie, Mellon, Harriman, and Morgan money that flowed into eugenics led directly to ‘scientific racism,’ and ultimately the Holocaust in World War II. Following the Holocaust, Hitler had discredited the eugenics movement he admired so much in America. So the movement branched off into forming several other social engineering projects: population control, genetics, and environmentalism. The same foundations that laid the foundations for eugenic ideology – the belief in a biological superiority and right to rule (justifying their power) – then laid the foundations for these and other new social and scientific movements.

Major environmental and conservation organizations were founded with Rockefeller and Ford Foundation money, which then continued to be central sources of funding to this day; while the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was founded in 1961 by Sir Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s brother, who was also the President of the British Eugenics Society. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands became the organization’s first president. Prince Bernhard also happened to be one of the founders of the elite global think tank, the Bilderberg Group, which he co-founded in 1954; and he was previous to that, a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer. Sir Julian Huxley also happened to be the first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). In 1946, Huxley wrote a paper titled, “UNESCO: It’s Purpose and its Philosophy.” In it, he wrote that the general focus of UNESCO:

    is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purpose. This is opportune, since this is the first time in history that the scaffolding and the mechanisms for world unification have become available, and also the first time that man has had the means (in the shape of scientific discovery and its applications) of laying a world-wide foundation for the minimum physical welfare of the entire human species...

    At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for Unesco to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable...

    Still another and quite different type of borderline subject is that of eugenics. It has been on the borderline between the scientific and the unscientific, constantly in danger of becoming a pseudo- science based on preconceived political ideas or on assumptions of racial or class superiority and inferiority. It is, however, essential that eugenics should be brought entirely within the borders of science, for, as already indicated, in the not very remote future the problem of improving the average quality of human beings is likely to become urgent; and this can only be accomplished by applying the findings of a truly scientific eugenics...

    It is worth pointing out that the applications of science at once bring us up against social problems of various sorts. Some of these are direct and obvious. Thus the application of genetics in eugenics immediately raises the question of values- what qualities should we desire to encourage in the human beings of the future?

On page 6 of the UNESCO document, Sir Julian Huxley wrote that, “in order to carry out its work, an organisation such as Unesco needs not only a set of general aims and objects for itself, but also a working philosophy, a working hypothesis concerning human existence and its aims and objects, which will dictate, or at least indicate, a definite line of approach to its problems.” While much of the language of equality and education sounds good and benevolent, it is based upon a particular view of humanity as an irrational, emotionally driven organism which needs to be controlled. Thus, the ‘principle of equality’ becomes “The Fact of Inequality”:

    Finally we come to a difficult problem-that of discovering how we can reconcile our principle of human equality with the biological fact of human inequality... The democratic principle of equality, which is also Unesco’s, is a principle of equality of opportunity-that human beings should be equal before the law, should have equal opportunities for education, for making a living, for freedom of expression and movement and thought. The biological absence of equality, on the other hand, concerns the natural endowments of man and the fact of genetic difference in regard to them.

    There are instances of biological inequality which are so gross that they cannot be reconciled at all with the principle of equal opportunity. Thus low-grade mental defectives cannot be offered equality of educational opportunity, nor are the insane equal with the sane before the law or in respect of most freedoms. However, the full implications of the fact of human inequality have not often been drawn and certainly need to be brought out here, as they are very relevant to Unesco’s task.

Many of these “genetic inequalities” revolve around the idea of intellectual superiority: the idea that there is no equality among the intellectually inferior and superior. That inequality is derived from human biology – from genetics; it is a “human fact.” It just so happens that elites who propagate this ideology, also happen to view the masses as intellectually inferior; thus, there can be no social equality in a world with a technological intellectual elite. So eugenics must be employed, as the UENSCO paper explains, to address the issues of raising human welfare to a manageable level; that the time will come where elites will need to address the whole of humanity as a single force, and with a single voice. Eugenics is about the social organization and control of humanity. Ultimately, eugenics is about the engineering of inequality. In genetics, elites found a way to take discrimination down to the DNA.

Genetics as Eugenics

Award-winning author and researcher, Edwin Black, wrote an authoritative history of eugenics in his book, “War Against the Weak,” in which he explained that, “the incremental effort to transform eugenics into human genetics forged an entire worldwide infrastructure,” with the founding of the Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen in 1938, led by Tage Kemp, a Rockefeller Foundation eugenicist, and was financed with money from the Rockefeller Foundation. While not abandoning the eugenics goals, the new re-branded eugenics movement “claimed to be eradicating poverty and saving the environment.”

In a 2001 issue of Science Magazine, Garland Allen, a scientific historian, wrote about genetics as a modern form of eugenics. He began by citing a 1998 article in Time Magazine which proclaimed that, “Personality, temperament, even life choices. New studies show it's mostly in your genes.” Garland explains the implications:

    Coat-tailing on major advances in genetic biotechnology, these articles portray genetics as the new "magic bullet" of biomedical science that will solve many of our recurrent social problems. The implication is that these problems are largely a result of the defective biology of individuals or even racial or ethnic groups. If aggressive or violent behavior is in the genes, so the argument goes, then the solution lies in biomedical intervention--gene therapy in the distant future and pharmacotherapy (replacing the products of defective genes with drug substitutes) in the immediate future.

    By promoting such claims, are we heading toward a new version of eugenics? Are we getting carried away with the false promise of a technological fix for problems that really lie in the structure of our society? My answer to these questions is "yes," but with some important qualifications that derive from the different historical and social contexts of the early 1900s and the present...

    The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, geographer, statistician, and first cousin of Charles Darwin. It meant to him "truly- or well-born," and referred to a plan to encourage the "best people" in society to have more children (positive eugenics) and to discourage or prevent the "worst elements" of society from having many, if any, children (negative eugenics). Eugenics became solidified into a movement in various countries throughout the world in the first three decades of the 20th century, but nowhere more solidly than in the United States and, after World War I, in Germany.

While genetic traits such as eye colour and the like were proven to be hereditary, “eugenicists were more interested in the inheritance of social behaviors, intelligence, and personality.” Further:

    American eugenicists also strove to disseminate the results of eugenic research to the public and to lawmakers. They supported the idea of positive eugenics (encouraging the ‘best’ to become better), but focused most of their energies on negative eugenics (to encourage the ‘worst’ to become fewer). Eugenicists wrote hundreds of articles for popular magazines, published dozens of books for the general (and some for the scientific) reader, prepared exhibits for schools and state fairs, made films, and wrote sermons and novels.

American eugenicists, fully backed by the financial support of the major American philanthropic fortunes, passed eugenics legislation in over 27 states across the United States, often in the form of forced sterilizations for the mentally ‘inferior’, so that, “By the 1960s, when most of these laws were beginning to be repealed, more than 60,000 people had been sterilized for eugenic purposes.” As Garland Allen wrote:

    For the wealthy benefactors that supported eugenics, such as the Carnegie, Rockefeller, Harriman, and Kellogg philanthropies, eugenics provided a means of social control in a period of unprecedented upheaval and violence. It was these same economic elites and their business interests who introduced scientific management and organizational control into the industrial sector...

    (In 1994) we saw the resurrection of claims that there are genetic differences in intelligence between races, leading to different socio-economic status. Claims about the genetic basis for criminality, manic depression, risk-taking, alcoholism, homosexuality, and a host of other behaviors have also been rampant in scientific and especially popular literature. Much of the evidence for such claims is as controversial today as in the past.

    We seem to be increasingly unwilling to accept what we view as imperfection in ourselves and others. As health care costs skyrocket, we are coming to accept a bottom-line, cost-benefit analysis of human life. This mind-set has serious implications for reproductive decisions. If a health maintenance organization (HMO) requires in utero screening, and refuses to cover the birth or care of a purportedly "defective" child, how close is this to eugenics? If gene or drug therapy is substituted for improving our workplace or school environments, our diets and our exercise practices, how close is this to eugenics? Significant social changes are expensive, however. If eugenics means making reproductive decisions primarily on the basis of social cost, then we are well on that road.

Genetics unleash an unprecedented power into human hands: the power of unnatural creation and the manipulation of biology. We do not yet fully understand nor comprehend the implications of genetic manipulation in our food, plants, animals, and in humans, themselves. What is clear is that we are changing the very biology of our environment and ourselves in it. While there are many clear and obvious benefits to genetic technology, such as the ability to enhance ailing senses (sight, hearing, etc.) and cure diseases, the positive must be examined and discussed with the negative repercussions of genetic manipulation so as to better direct the uses of this powerful technology.

Debates on issues such as stem-cell research and genetic manipulation often focus on a science versus religion aspect, where science seeks to benevolently cure mankind of its ailments and religion seeks to preserve the sanctity of ‘creation’. This is an irrational and narrow manner to conduct a real debate on this monumental issue, painting the issue as black and white, which it most certainly is not. Science can be used for good as well as bad, and human history, most especially that of the 20th century, is nothing if not evidence for that fact. Incredible scientific ingenuity went into the creation of great weapons; the manipulation of the atom to kill millions in an instant, or the manufacturing of biological and chemical weapons. The problem with the interaction of science and power is that with such great power comes the temptation to use and abuse it. If the ability to create a weapon like an atom bomb seems possible, most certainly there are those who seek to make it probable. Where there is temptation, there is human weakness.

So while genetics can be used for benevolent purposes and for the betterment of humankind, so too can it be used to effectively create a biological caste system, where in time it would be feasible to see a break in the human race, where as human advancement technologies become increasingly available, their use is reserved to the elite so that there comes a time where there is a biological separation in the human species. Oliver Curry, an evolutionary theorist from the London School of Economics, predicted that “the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000” and that, “The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures.” Such was the plot of H.G. Wells’ classic book, “The Time Machine,” who was himself, a prominent eugenicist at the turn of the 20th century. While this would be a long time from now, its potential results from the decisions we make today.

Population Control as Eugenics

Not only was the field of genetics born of eugenics, and heavily financed by the same monied-interests that seek social control; but so too was the field of population control. In environmental literature and rhetoric, one concept that has emerged over the years as playing a significant part is that of population control. Population is seen as an environmental issue because the larger the population, the more resources it consumes and land it occupies. In this concept, the more people there are the worse the environment becomes. Thus, programs aimed at controlling population growth are often framed in an environmentalist lens. There is also a distinctly radical element in this field, which views population growth not simply as an environmental concern, but which frames people, in general, as a virus that must be eradicated if the earth is to survive.

However, in the view of elites, population control is more about controlling the people than saving the environment. Elites have always been drawn to population studies that have, in many areas, helped construct their worldview. Concerns about population growth really took hold with Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century. In 1798, Malthus wrote a “theory on the nature of poverty,” and he “called for population control by moral restraint,” citing charity as a promotion of “generation-to-generation poverty and simply made no sense in the natural scheme of human progress.” Thus, the idea of ‘charity’ became immoral. The eugenics movement attached itself to Malthus’ theory regarding the “rejection of the value of helping the poor.”

The ideas of Malthus, and later Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin were remolded into branding an elite ideology of “Social Darwinism”, which was “the notion that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually destined to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural act.” This theory simply justified the immense wealth, power and domination of a small elite over the rest of humanity, as that elite saw themselves as the only truly intelligent beings worthy of holding such power and privilege.

Francis Galton later coined the term “eugenics” to describe this emerging field. His followers believed that the ‘genetically unfit’ “would have to be wiped away,” using tactics such as, “segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia – and ultimately extermination.” The actual science of eugenics was lacking extensive evidence, and ultimately Galton “hoped to recast eugenics as a religious doctrine,” which was “to be taken on faith without proof.”

As the quest to re-brand “eugenics” was under way, a 1943 edition of Eugenical News published an article titled “Eugenics After the War,” which cited Charles Davenport, a major founder and progenitor of eugenics, in his vision of “a new mankind of biological castes with master races in control and slave races serving them.” A 1946 article in Eugenical News stated that, “Population, genetics, [and] psychology, are the three sciences to which the eugenicist must look for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy of eugenics and to develop and defend practical eugenics proposals.”

In the post-war period, emerging in the 1950s and going into the 1960s, the European colonies were retracting as nations of the ‘Third World’ were gaining political independence. This reinforced support for population control in many circles, as “For those who benefited most from the global status quo, population control measures were a far more palatable alternative to ending Third World poverty or promoting genuine economic development.”

In 1952, “John D. Rockefeller 3rd convened a group of scientists to discuss the implications of the dramatic demographic change. They met in Williamsburg, Virginia, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, and after two and a half days agreed on the need for a new institution that could provide solid science to guide governments and individuals in addressing population questions.” That new institution was to become the Population Council. Six of the Council’s ten founding members were eugenicists.

According to the Population Council’s website, it “did not itself espouse any form of population policy. Instead, through grants to individuals and institutions, it invested in strengthening the indigenous capacity of countries and regions to conduct population research and to develop their own policies. The Council also funded seminal work in U.S. universities and further developed its own in-house research expertise in biomedicine, public health, and social science.”

In 2008, Matthew Connelly, a professor at Columbia University, wrote a book called, “Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population,” in which he critically analyzes the history of the population control movement. He documents the rise of the field through the eugenics movement:

    In 1927 a Rockefeller-funded study of contraception sought "some simple measure which will be available for the wife of the slum-dweller, the peasant, or the coolie, though dull of mind." In 1935 one representative told India's Council of State that population control was a necessity for the masses, adding that "it is not what they want, but what is good for them." The problem with the natives was that "they are born too much and they don't die enough," a public-health official in French Indochina stated in 1936.

Connelly’s general thesis was “how some people have long tried to redesign world population by reducing the fertility of other’s.” Further:

    Connelly examines population control as a global transnational movement because its main advocates and practitioners aimed to reduce world population through global governance and often viewed national governments as a means to this end. Fatal Misconceptions is therefore an intricate account of networks of influential individuals, international organizations, NGOs, and national governments.

As one review in the Economist pointed out, “Much of the evil done in the name of slowing population growth had its roots in an uneasy coalition between feminists, humanitarians and environmentalists, who wished to help the unwillingly fecund, and the racists, eugenicists and militarists who wished to see particular patterns of reproduction, regardless of the desires of those involved.” The Economist further wrote:

    As the world population soared, the population controllers came to believe they were fighting a war, and there would be collateral damage. Millions of intra-uterine contraceptive devices were exported to poor countries although they were known to cause infections and sterility. "Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things," said a participant at a conference on the devices organised in 1962 by the Population Council, a research institute founded by John D. Rockefeller, "particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilising but not lethal." In 1969 Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank, said he was reluctant to finance health care "unless it was very strictly related to population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the death rate, and thereby to the population explosion."

A review in the New York Review of Books pointed out that this movement coincided a great deal with the feminist movement in advancing women’s reproductive rights. However, “these benefits were seen by many US family planning officials as secondary to the goal of reducing the absolute numbers of people in developing countries. The urgency of what came to be known as the ‘population control movement’ contributed to a climate of coercion and led to a number of serious human rights abuses, especially in Asian countries.” Dominic Lawson, writing a review of Connelly’s book for The Sunday Times, explained that:

    the population-control movement was bankrolled by America's biggest private fortunes - the Ford family foundation, John D Rockefeller III, and Clarence **** (of Procter & ****). These gentlemen shared not just extreme wealth but a common anxiety: the well-to-do and clever (people like them, obviously) were now having much smaller families than their ancestors, but the great unwashed - Chinamen! Indians! Negroes! - were reproducing themselves in an irresponsible manner. What they feared was a kind of Darwinism in reverse - the survival of the unfittest.

As the New Scientist reported, while contraceptives and women’s fertility rights were being expanded, “For much of the past half-century, population control came first and human rights had to be sacrificed.” Further, the New Scientist wrote that Connelly “lays bare the dark secrets of an authoritarian neo-Malthusian ethos that created an international population agenda built around control.” One such horrific notion was “the official policies that made it acceptable to hand out food aid to famine victims only if the women agreed to be sterilized.” In a sad irony, this seemingly progressive movement for women’s rights actually had the effect of resulting in a humanitarian disaster, disproportionately affecting women of the developing world.

In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote his widely influential book, ‘The Population Bomb,’ “in which he predicted that global overpopulation would cause massive famines as early as the 1970s.” In his book, he refers to mankind as a “cancer” upon the world:

    A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies - often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparent brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance to survive.

The American political elite fully embraced this population paradigm of viewing the world and relations with the rest of the world. President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying, “I’m not going to **** away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems,” while his successor, Richard Nixon, was quoted as saying, “population control is a must ... population control must go hand in hand with aid.” Robert McNamara, President of the World Bank and former Secretary of Defense in the Johnson administration, said that he opposed World Bank programs financing health care “unless it was very strictly related to population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the death rate, and thereby to the population explosion.”

Ehrlich was also influential in tracking India’s rapid population growth into the 1970s. The rapid population growth in India was attributed at the time to the result of the public health system the British had set up under the colonial government, as well as the fact that, as a means to maintaining a relationship of dependence with Britain, the British had discouraged industrialization in India. As famine was around the corner in India, President “Johnson used food aid to pressure the Indian government to meet its family planning targets,” and “By the early 1970s, Bangladesh was spending one third of its entire health budget on family planning and India was spending 60 percent.” Further:

    Between the 1960s and 1980s, millions of people in India and other Asian countries were sterilized or had IUDs (intrauterine devices), as well as other contraceptives, inserted in unhygienic conditions. Numerous cases of uterine perforation, excessive bleeding, infections, and even death were reported.

The Population Council knowingly sent un-sterile IUDs to India, and in the 1970s, nearly half a million women in forty-two developing countries were treated with defective IUDs that “heightened the risk of infection and uterine perforation,” after the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had “quietly bought up thousands of the devices at a discount for distribution overseas.” Then sterilization was introduced as a means for “keeping the quotas” on population control in India, as “sterilization was made a condition for receiving land allocations and water for irrigation, as well as electricity, rickshaw licenses, and medical care.” A Swedish diplomat touring a Swedish/World Bank population program at the time was quoted as saying, “Obviously the stories... on how young and unmarried men are more or less dragged to the sterilization premises are true in far too many cases.”

In 1967, the UN Fund for Population Activities was created, and in 1971, “The General Assembly acknowledged that UNFPA [United Nations Population Fund] should play a leading role within the UN system in promoting population programmes.” In 1970, Nixon created the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, known as the Rockefeller Commission, for its chairman, John D. Rockefeller 3rd. In 1972, the final report was delivered to Nixon.

Among the members of the Commission (besides Rockefeller) were David E. Bell, Vice President of the Ford Foundation, and Bernard Berelson, President of the Population Council. Among the conclusions were that, “Population growth is one of the major factors affecting the demand for resources and the deterioration of the environment in the United States. The further we look into the future, the more important population becomes,” and that, “From an environmental and resource point of view, there are no advantages from further growth.” Further, the report warned:

    The American future cannot be isolated from what is happening in the rest of the world. There are serious problems right now in the distribution of resources, income, and wealth, among countries. World population growth is going to make these problems worse before they get better. The United States needs to undertake much greater efforts to understand these problems and develop international policies to deal with them.

In 1974, National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200 was issued under the direction of US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, otherwise known as “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” Among the issues laid out in the memorandum was that, “Growing populations will have a serious impact on the need for food especially in the poorest, fastest growing LDCs [Lesser Developed Countries],” and “The most serious consequence for the short and middle term is the possibility of massive famines in certain parts of the world, especially the poorest regions.” Further, “rapid population growth presses on a fragile environment in ways that threaten longer-term food production.” The report plainly stated that, “there is a major risk of severe damage to world economic, political, and ecological systems and, as these systems begin to fail, to our humanitarian values.”

The memorandum lays out key policy recommendations for dealing with the “crisis” of overpopulation. They stated that “our aim should be for the world to achieve a replacement level of fertility, (a two-child family on the average), by about the year 2000,” and that this strategy “will require vigorous efforts by interested countries, U.N. agencies and other international bodies to make it effective [and] U.S. leadership is essential.” They suggested a concentration on specific countries: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

They recommended the “Integration of population factors and population programs into country development planning,” as well as “Increased assistance for family planning services, information and technology,” and “Creating conditions conducive to fertility decline.” The memorandum even specifically mentioned that, “We must take care that our activities should not give the appearance to the LDCs [Lesser Developed Countries] of an industrialized country policy directed against the LDCs.” Essentially, NSSM 200 made population control a key strategy in US foreign policy, specifically related to aid and development. In other words, it was eugenics as foreign policy.

In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, declared martial law. Her son Sanjay was appointed as the nation’s chief population controller. Sanjay “proceeded to flatten slums and then tell the residents that they could get a new house if they would agree to be sterilized. Government officials were given sterilization quotas. Within a year, six million Indian men and two million women were sterilized. At least 2,000 Indians died as a result of botched sterilization operations.” However, the following year there was an election, and Indira Gandhi’s government was thrown out of power, with that issue playing a major factor.

Next, however, China became the major focus of the population control movement, which “offered technical assistance to China's "one child" policy of 1978-83, even helping to pay for computers that allowed Chinese officials to track "birth permits," the official means by which the government banned families from having more than one child and required the aborting of additional children.” Further:

    Even China's draconian population programs received some support in the 1980s from the US-funded International Planned Parenthood Federation and the UN Population Fund. Before China launched its infamous "One Child Policy," concerns were being raised about its "voluntary" family planning program. In 1981, Chinese and American newspapers reported that "vehicles transporting Cantonese women to hospitals for abortions were 'filled with wailing noises.' Some pregnant women were reportedly 'handcuffed, tied with ropes or placed in pig's baskets.'"

    After 1983, coercion became official Chinese policy. "All women with one child were to be inserted with a stainless-steel, tamper-resistant IUD, all parents with two or more children were to be sterilized, and all unauthorized pregnancies aborted," according to the One Child Policy. During this time, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the UN Population Fund continued to support China's nongovernmental Family Planning Association, even though some of its top officials also worked for the government.

The UN was not a passive participant in population control measures, as it actively supported these harsh programs, and in many cases, rewarded governments for their vicious tactics in reducing population growth:

    In 1983, Xinzhong Qian and Indira Gandhi were awarded the first United Nations Population Award to recognize and reward their accomplishments in limiting the population growth in China and India in the previous decade. During the 1970s, officials in these countries had launched extremely ambitious population programs that were supposed to improve the quality of the population and halt its growth. The measures used were harsh. For example, slum clearance resulting in the eradication of whole urban neighbourhoods and the widespread sterilization of their inhabitants was an important part of India’s ‘Emergency’ campaign. In Delhi, hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes in events that resulted in numerous clashes, arrests, and deaths, while a total of eight million sterilizations were recorded in India in 1976.

Horrifically, “between the 1960s and 1980s, millions of people in India and other Asian countries were sterilized or had IUDs, as well as other contraceptives, inserted in unhygienic conditions. Numerous cases of uterine perforation, excessive bleeding, infections, and even death were reported, but these programs made little effort to treat these conditions, or even determine their frequency, so we don't know precisely how common they were.”

In the late 1980s, revelations in Brazil uncovered the NSSM 200 in Brazil since its implementation in 1975 under the Ford Presidency. An official government investigation was launched, and it was discovered that, “an estimated 44% of all Brazilian women aged between 14 and 55 had been permanently sterilized.” Further, the programs of sterilization, undertaken by a number of international organizations, were coordinated under the guidance of USAID.

At the UN’s 1994 World Population Conference in Cairo, Third World delegates to the conference emphasized the need for development policies as opposed to demographic policies; that the focus must be on development, not population. This was essentially a setback for the radical population control movement; however, it wasn’t one they couldn’t work around. There was still a great deal of support among Western elites and co-opted developing world elites for the aims of population control. As Connelly articulated:

    It appealed to the rich and powerful because, with the spread of emancipatory movements and the integration of markets, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory. That’s why opponents were correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished history of imperialism.

It was around this point that the population control movement, while continuing on its overall aims of curbing population growth of Third World nations, began to further merge itself with the environmental movement. While always working alongside the environmental movement, this period saw the emergence of a more integrated approach to policy agendas.

Environmentalism as Eugenics

Michael Barker extensively covered the connection between the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in funding the environmental movement in the academic journal, Capitalism Nature Socialism. As Barker noted, following World War II, the public became increasingly concerned with the environment as the “chemical-industrial complex” grew at an astounding rate. Since Rockefeller interests were heavily involved in the chemical industry, the rising trend in environmental thought and concern had to quickly be controlled and steered in a direction favourable to elite interests.

Two important organizations in shaping the environmental movement were the Conservation Foundation and Resources for the Future, which largely relied upon Rockefeller and Ford Foundation funding, and both conservation organizations had interestingly helped to “launch an explicitly pro-corporate approach to resource conservation.” Laurance Rockefeller served as a trustee of the Conservation Foundation, and donated $50,000 yearly throughout the 50s and 60s. Further, the Conservation Foundation was founded by Fairfield Osborn, whose cousin, Frederick Osborn, became another prominent voice in conservation. Frederick Osborn was also working with the Rockefeller’s Population Council and was President of the American Eugenics Society.

In 1952, the Ford Foundation created the organization Resources for the Future (RFF), (the same year that the Rockefellers created the Population Council), and the original founders were also “John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s chief advisors on conservation matters.” Laurance Rockefeller joined the board of the RFF in 1958, and the RFF got $500,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1970. The Ford Foundation would also go on to create the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. McGeorge Bundy, who was President of the Ford Foundation from 1966 until 1979, once stated that, “everything the foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the world safe for capitalism’.”

[Continued…]
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« Reply #6 on: August 25, 2010, 05:54:53 pm »

From Pilikia at Prison Planet Forum:

First the history... this is a report from a meeting held in Massachusetts in 1914... you will read this and recognize that the Eugenicists' agenda is still alive and well. Think about it. This is a blueprint for everything that has happened in the past 96 years. You see it continues today - these are some dedicated psychopaths.

This organization was founded by the Harriman, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Families.




Eugenics Record Office.

BULLETIN No. 10A:

Report of the Committee to Study
and to Report on the Best Practical Means of
Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm
in the American Population.


I. THE SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE'S WORK, by HARRY H. LAUGHLIN,
Secretary of the Committee,
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York, February, 1914.

This document has been scanned and prepared for publication in Adobe Acrobat format by the staff of the National Information Resource on Ethics and Human Genetics. The digitization was performed with funding from Georgetown University's subgrant through National Human Genome Research Institute's Centers of Excellence in ELSI Research (CEER) award to Duke University under grant number 06-SC-NIH-1027, Robert Cook-Deegan, Principal Investigator.
 
 
National Information Resource on Ethics and Human Genetic
The Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057-1212
202-687-3885, 888-GEN-ETHX, FAX: 202-687-6770
http://bioethics.georgetown.edu/nirehg/




INTRODUCTION.

The investigation reported in this series of studies was initiated at the second meeting of the Research Committees of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association at Palmer, Mass., May 2 and 3, 1911, Dr. W. N. Bullard presiding. At this meeting the following resolution was unanimously adopted:

Resolved, That the Chair appoint a committee commissioned to study and report on the best practical means for cutting off the defective germ-plasm in the American population.

Whereupon Dr. Bullard, after consultation, named the following members: Dr. W. H. Mitchell, Hathorne, Mass., Chairman; Bleecker Van Wagenen, Alstead Center, N. H.; Dr. Everett Flood, Palmer, Mass.; Dr. W. H. Carmalt, New Haven, Conn.; H. H. Laughlin, Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Later in the day the Chairman, Dr. Mitchell, designated Mr. Laughlin Secretary.

On July 15, 1911, the committee met with Mr. Van Wagenen at the City Club, 55 West 44th Street, New York City. Dr. Mitchell, on account of other engaging duties, resigned the chairmanship of the committee; whereupon, on motion of Dr. Carmalt, Mr. Van Wagenen was unanimously chosen Chairman. The committee met from time to time under the leadership of Mr. Van Wagenen, and outlined the investigation. It was decided to make the study as comprehensive and as thorough as possible, and to this end the aid of an expert advisory committee was deemed essential.

The following named experts were duly invited and accepted membership on the committee as indicated: Medicine, L. F. Barker; physiology, W. B. Cannon; surgery,
Alexis Carrel; biology, Herbert J. Webber; thremmatology, Raymond Pearl; anthropology, Alex. F. Chamberlain; psychiatry, Stewart Paton; psychology, H. H. Goddard; woman’s viewpoint, Mrs. Caroline B. Alexander; criminology, Warren W. Foster; sociology, Franklin H. Giddings; economics, James A. Field; statistics, O. P. Austin; immigration, R. DeC. Ward; law, James M. Beck and Louis Marshall; history, James J. Walsh; public affairs, Irving Fisher; international
cooperation, E. E. Southard.

The work of gathering and analyzing data began in the summer of 1911, and the Chairman, Mr. Van Wagenen, presented before the First International Eugenics Congress, which met in London, July 24 to 30, 1912, a preliminary report of the investigation.

It is the purpose of the committee to investigate all phases of the problem of cutting off the supply of defectives, and to publish from time to time data which will, we trust, aid the student of social affairs in weighing any particular phase of the problem that may present itself.

The committee will therefore study the facts in reference to the numbers of and the rate and manner of increase of the socially inadequate.

It will strive to analyze the factors of heredity and environment in the production of the social unfitness observed. It will report first-hand facts concerning the drag that these classes entail upon the general welfare, and will review the first-hand studies in human heredity that have been made by careful study of the problem. And finally the committee will point out what appears as a result of study to be “the best practical means,” so far as the innate traits are a factor, of purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of these anti-social classes.

The first series of studies will be devoted to a study of sterilization as a eugenical agency.

THE FIELD OF STUDY

The specific problems, then, now before this committee may be classified as follows:

1. Medicine: Standards and methods for determining the type of degenerates proposed for eugenical segregation or sterilization. The relation of sterilization to the spread of venereal diseases. Sterilization as a therapeutic agent. The classification and determination of human defects.

2. Physiology: Comparative effects of the various forms of sterilization on normal and the different types of abnormal individuals, both male and female, at different ages, in respect to nutrition, growth, temperament, primary sex organs, secondary sexual characteristics, voice and physiological reactions.

3. Surgery: Technical and popular description of the various methods employed in sterilizing both males and females. Seriousness and difficulty of the operations. Preparation and convalescence. Possibility of restoring the procreatory function in sterilized persons.

4. Biology:
The origin of defective strains within the human population. Processes of contaminating normal strains with defective traits. The inheritance of defective traits and the manner of their combination into various legal types of the socially unfit. The comparative influence of modern and ancient social conditions on the selective elimination of defectives. The probable outcome of the present tendencies if unchecked.

5. Thremmatology:
Efficacy of sterilization of hereditary degenerates to raise the average of the race. Comparison between the essential principles of eugenics and of plant and animal breeding, application of these principles in consonance with the highest social and moral ideals. Criteria for the identification of persons possessing defective germ-plasms. The consideration of persons of mixed worth and defect. Relative thremmatological effect of sterilizing all persons with defective germ-plasms, and of sterilizing only degenerates. Measure of the relative thremmatological value of sterilization on different scales and at different rates.

6. Anthropology
: History of sterilization and asexualization among ancient and modern nations and tribes. Motives, voluntary factors, etc. Effect upon tribal and national growth.

7. Psychiatry: Classification of the various types of the insane with especial reference to the hereditary factor. Standards and tests for diagnosis.

8. Psychology: Standards and tests for determining the types of mental degenerates and defectives proposed for sterilization. Effects of the various forms of sterilization on both males and females in mental processes, industry, habits of life, and sex instincts.

9. Morals and Ethics: Eugenics and democracy. The attitude of the various churches toward the proposal to sterilize persons known to possess defective germ-plasms. The ethical, moral, and ontological aspects of sterilization. Eugenical limitations of marriages by the ministry.
 
10. Woman’s Viewpoint: Relative responsibilities and burdens of men and women within the socially unfit classes in rearing children. Sterilization as a punitive, humane, and eugenic measure; and as an agency for social prophylaxis. Woman’s view of the rights of parentage of individuals liable to beget socially unfit offspring or who are unable to provide the environment necessary to the normal development of offspring. The attitude of society toward such individuals.

11. Criminology: Role of heredity in crime. Standards and tests for determining the criminal types proposed to sterilize. What constitutes a confirmed criminal? Consideration of the justice of the operation in the case of redeemable delinquents.

12. Sociology: Relative rights and duties of the race and the individual whom society proposes to sterilize. Part the sterilized individual takes in the social fabric and the attitude of society toward such individuals. Estimate of the relative proportion of the socially unfit committed to institutional care to those living in the population at large. Method of reaching defective and potential parents of defectives not in institutions. Relation of sterilized individuals to the social
evil, and the spread of venereal diseases. Estimate of the present social handicap of defectives on the American and other peoples. Relative roles of heredity and environment in producing defectives. Relative rights of control of society and the individual over germ-plasm.

Presentation of special problems connected with the
elimination of each of the several following classes of the socially unfit:


(a) the feeble-minded class,
(b) the pauper class,
(c) the inebriate class,
(d) the criminalistic class,
(e) the epileptic class,
(f) the insane class,
(g) the asthenic or physically weak class,
(h) those predisposed to specific diseases or the diathetic class,
(i) the physically deformed,
(j) those with defective sense organs, or the cacæsthetic class.

13. Political Economy: Measure of the economic handicap of the presence of defectives. Their relation to national, industrial, military, and intellectual efficiency and to national perpetuity. Relation of sterilization on different scales to future population, and to the relative extent of the defective classes. Relation of sterilization to immigration.

14. Statistics
: Data relative to the past, present and probable future cost of maintaining defectives; their number and classification; their rate of increase—absolutely, and compared to the rate of increase of the better strains. The age of persons committed to State custody.
Rate of commitment. Length of commitment.

15. Law: Examination of existing sterilization laws with the view to determining whether the constitutional personal guarantees are sufficiently safeguarded. Do the committees and commissions authorized to enforce the several sterilization laws constitute special courts? Can the decisions of such commissions and committees reverse or modify court decrees? Is sterilization in any of the laws held a punitive remedy? If so, can it be considered as a second punishment
for one offense, or as cruel or unusual punishment? Is the State taking any retaliatory measures toward a certain class of offenders in authorizing the operation? Can the sterilization of degenerates, or especially of criminals, be legitimately effected through the exercise of police
functions? Flexibility of the common law in adapting itself to new social problems. Legal aspect of sterilization in states practicing it without the express authorization of the law. Do existing laws permit any other surgical operation than sterilization? If so, legal bearing?

Do existing laws authorize sterilization as a punitive, a reformatory, a therapeutic, or a eugenic measure? Sterilization and inheritance of property. Framing a model law permitting the sterilization of persons known to have defective germ-plasms, establishing criterion therefore,
and providing for effective execution. Digest of litigation bearing upon or growing out of the operation. Examination of those laws on commitment to state institutions.

16. History: Account of the origin, development and relative numbers of the socially unfit within the great nations of history. Attitude of society toward this class. War and defectives. Elimination of the best blood in relation to national decline. Genius and national greatness.
 
17. Public Affairs
: Sterilization in relation to the general welfare. The conservation policy and sterilization. Political expediency of the proposed remedy. Weighing and balancing of the facts and arguments presented by the consideration of the several aspects of the problems with the view to practical application.

18. International Co-operation:
A review of the studies looking toward the possible application of the sterilization of defectives in foreign countries, together with records of any such operations from eugenical motives; foreign laws, customs and attitudes in reference to eugenical sterilization. The extent and nature of the problem of the socially inadequate in foreign countries.

To complete this series of studies is a huge task, and the committee will be satisfied if it can present under each of the given headings a few of the many pertinent facts for consideration by the public.

From the beginning of these studies the committee has, at frequent intervals, had the advantage of consultation with Dr. Charles B. Davenport, the resident director of the Eugenics Record Office, and to him for his many valuable suggestions the committee is greatly indebted.

HARRY H. LAUGHLIN, Secretary,
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island.
December 1, 1913.
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« Reply #7 on: August 25, 2010, 05:56:04 pm »

CHAPTER I.

THE PROBLEM.

Human progress demands sincere and purposeful social endeavor in all fields promising social or racial betterment. As society becomes more complex and scientific discovery moves apace, the field of profitable social endeavor widens rapidly; but it is still clear that no one agency alone can effect a regeneration of humanity. In order to move forward, humanity and civilization will always require the best efforts of education, religion, philanthropy, agriculture, commerce, industry, social justice, law and order, medicine, technology, and pure science; no one of these can carry the whole burden of progress, although the decay of any one of them would cause a general deterioration to set in.

Organization in society exists for the purpose of correlating and directing along profitable lines all of these agencies. Eugenics, which Davenport defines as “the improvement of the human race by better breeding,” is one of these agencies of social betterment, which in its practical application would greatly promote human welfare, but which if neglected would cause racial, and consequently social, degeneration.

Eugenics, then, is the warp in the fabric of national efficiency and perpetuity. As an art it is as old as mankind; as a science it is just now taking definite form. Whenever the principles governing an art are definitely determined and made to guide humanity, progress in the particular field so affected is rapid.

Modern family history studies have amply demonstrated that heredity plays an important part in social adequacy; and the studies of this committee are tentatively based upon this fact. Since this is true, it then behooves society, in the interests of social and racial progress, to devise means for promoting fit and fertile matings among the better classes, and to prevent the reproduction of defectives.

Since heredity is the fundamental factor of racial fortune, and is therefore the primary agency in the application of eugenical principles, it is thought proper in these studies to present a brief outline of the basic phenomena of natural inheritance.


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From a careful perusal of this diagram one learns that in so far as the bodily  aspect  and  the method  of  inheritance  of  a  trait  are concerned there are two kinds of traits, namely, (1)  dominant traits, and (2) recessive traits. The following pedigrees illustrate  how each of these types is inherited:



There are many thousand human traits; in the Trait Book (Bulletin No. 6, Eugenics Record Office) Dr. C. B. Davenport lists 2,500 human characteristics—mental and physical; normal and pathological; defective and sterling. But it must not be assumed that these characteristics are unit traits in the Mendelian sense; doubtless most of them are hereditary complexes which resolve into their elements, permitting new conditions in hereditary transmission. A given individual is a fortuitous mosaic of the unit traits of his ancestors. The foregoing diagram and charts show how these traits are segregated, sorted, and recombined. The location of independent units of heredity and the determination of the manner of their inheritance constitute one of the most important branches of eugenical study.
Eugenics is a long-time investment, and will appeal only to far-sighted patriots
,
(Notice the psyop from 1913!:  if you supported exterminating the undesirables, you were a 'far-sighted patriot'!)

but, due to the infinite possibilities of recombination, it should produce royal returns in both positive and negative directions.

The studies of this committee are limited to the negative side of the problem, namely, the uprooting of inborn defectiveness, rather than to the positive or constructive agencies of mate-selection and fecundity, among the more talented classes. Its task therefore is vastly less difficult than that which confronts the student of the constructive agencies, for, if a person possesses hereditary traits which render that particular individual unable to cope with his social environment, such person’s line of descent should be cut off—a relatively simple process. But for the determination and consummation of wise matings among the upper levels in a highly organized society, the highest degree of scientific knowledge and of social endeavor, in addition to a much longer period of time, are required.

THE SOCIALLY INADEQUATE IN THE AMERICAN POPULATION

The accompanying table, which the committee has compiled from the census reports, shows the extent and growth of institution population in the United States. Fig. No. 4.



In this table the epileptics are included with the other classes; specialized institutions for this type of defectives are for the most part of recent origin. Dr. David F. Weeks (Nov. 3, 1913) reported for the State of New Jersey 443 epileptics at the Skillman Village, 426 in other institutions, 62 in schools, 880 others at large—a total of 1,811 who are registered at the State Village for Epileptics. He estimates that approximately 7 per cent. of the institution population of the United States are epileptics.


THE SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE’S WORK.

It is hoped that in future censuses data will be secured for measur-ing the movement of the anti-social varieties of our population. In applying any program for reducing the supply of defectives it is essen-tial that such data be constantly at hand, else how can the efficacy of the agencies applied be judged? It should be possible, at regular intervals, to construct tables similar to the above for each of the classes and sub-classes described in Chapter II of this study.

Besides these individuals in institutions at one time constituting .914 per cent. of our total population, there are several times this num-ber of persons now living who have never been committed to the State’s custody, for the population of institutions is constantly shifting. Be-sides these there are those of equally meagre natural endowments and equally anti-social in conduct who, due to the caprice of fortune, have never been taken in custody by the State.

Just above this class there is a great aggregation of the individuals on the border-line between usefulness and social unfitness, who are so interwoven in kinship with the still more socially inadequate families that they are wholly unfitted for parenthood, because they cannot pro-duce offspring with even mediocre natural endowments. If they mate with a higher level, they contaminate it; if they mate with the still lower levels, they bolster them up a little only to aid them to continue their own unworthy kind. They constitute a breeding stock of social unfitness.

For the purposes of eugenical study and in working out a policy of elimination, it seems fair to estimate the anti-social varieties of the American people at 10 per cent. of the total population; but even this is arbitrary. No matter in what stage of racial progress a people may be, it will always be desirable in the interests of still further advance-ment to cut off the lowest levels, and to encourage high fecundity among the more gifted.

According to the last census (1910) .914 per cent. of the total population, or 841,244 persons, were inmates of institutions for the anti-social and the unfortunate classes in the United States. The institution population is constantly shifting, and the inmates and patients, as a rule, remain under custodial care but a few years. Of the total number of living persons, then, a much larger percentage have been legally committed to the State’s custody after having been duly declared inadequate in one or another phase of the normally expected social reactions. Besides these persons who have been committed to institutions, there are many others of equally unworthy personality and hereditary qualities who have, through the caprice of circumstance, never been committed to institutions. In addition to these unfit persons there are many parents who, in many cases, may themselves be normal, but who produce defective offspring.

This great mass of humanity is not only a social menace to the present generation, but it harbors the potential parenthood of the social misfits of our future generations.  It therefore largely constitutes the socially inadequate varieties of the American population.

Insofar as the defective traits of the members of these varieties are inborn, they are to be cut off only by cutting off the inheritance lines of the strains that produce them. This is the natural outcome of an awakened social conscience; it is in keeping not only with humanitarianism, but with law and order, and national efficiency. Under an older and harsher order of civilization these lower classes were cut down by disease, famine and petty strife, while the stronger survived, albeit when petty strife took on the aspects of serious warfare then, too, the upper levels suffered most severely; under the present social order there is a bolstering up of the lower and more helpless levels so that their fecundity is evidently operating against these older inhuman, but race-purifying, agencies.

It now behooves society in consonance with both humanitarianism and race efficiency to provide more human means for cutting off defectives.  Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not solely to the individual who carries it. Humanitarianism demands that every individual born be given every opportunity for decent and effective life that our civilization can offer. Racial instinct demands that defectives shall not continue their unworthy traits to menace society. There appears to be no incompatibility between the two ideals and demands. 

CHAPTER II.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SOCIALLY UNFIT FROM DE-FECTIVE INHERITANCE:
THE CACOGENIC VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN RACE.


The basis for measuring social inadequacy is purely functional, but, in considering the removal of such inadequacy, the causes of the lack of proper functioning must be studied, and hence, for such purposes, the logical basis of classification is etiological. And, if the eugenical rather than the environmental side of the problem is to be considered, then, quite properly, the practical classification scheme must be primarily a biological one based upon hereditary qualities.

For a long time students of human society have practically agreed that, along with the circumstances of environment, the anti-social individuals of the human race originate to some degree from innate characteristics; that there are families and strains of low social value or of positive social menace.

Individual misfits in the social fabric are sometimes classified as “the Defective, the Dependent, and the Delinquent.” Sometimes this classification of “the three D’s” is recast and increased to the five D’s by adding the “Deficient” and the “Degenerate” classes. In this classification:

1, a tramp or a pauper would be called a Dependent;
2, an idiot or an imbecile would be called a Deficient;
3, the manic depressive or the senile dement would be called aDefective;
4, the thief or the truant would be called a Delinquent;and,
5, a sadist or a moral imbecile would be called a Degenerate.

This classification is, however, inadequate from the eugenical point of view, for the eugenical classification of individuals is based upon innate traits and hereditary potentialities. Whether wholly of defective inheritance or suffering from an insurmountable hereditary handicap, the members of the following groups are, in so far as their traits are hereditary, cacogenic, and the following classification is, therefore, presented as being constructed on a eugenical basis:

1, the feeble-minded class ;
2, the pauper class ;
3, the inebriate class ;
4, the criminalistic class;
5, the epileptic class;
6, the insane class;
7, the constitutionally weak, or the asthenic class;
8, those predisposed to specific diseases, or the diathetic class;
9, the physically deformed class;
10, those with defective sense organs, as the blind and the deaf, or the cacæsthetic class.

This classification of the socially inadequate is obviously partly legal and partly medical, but if is in most part biological, although a
purely biological classification would be extremely complex, since it must be based upon unit traits of defective inheritance and their combinations into personalities of the various legal, medical and social types. For an exact scheme of classification no simple basis has yet been found. Such a scheme would involve as many classes as there are anti-social individuals, for no two individuals, even though they may belong to the same general class, will have exactly the same combination of traits. It is sufficient for present purposes to find a scheme providing for the grouping of related types on the basis of those hereditary qualities which appear to dominate their respective personalities. In such a scheme the general lines of demarcation are clearly enough drawn, but the specific boundaries must be arbitrarily and tentatively indicated.

In the classification of the cacogenic varieties of the human race just rendered many of the classes overlap and oft times a given individual may belong to two or more classes. Thus, for instance, factors of feeble-mindedness doubtless run through some of the other groups, and insanity and criminality often overlap and so on. The problem of eugenics would be infinitely simpler if segregable traits rather than individuals could be made the immediate rather than the ultimate basis of selection. But the individual with his or her composite of good and bad qualities must be the immediate basis for eugenical classification, since he or she is the immediate basis for selection for parenthood.  This classification on the basis of individuals is further justified by the fact that, in the case of defectives, one type of defect usually stands out prominently above the rest and the individual, although he may possess a complex of defects, is thus called blind or insane or criminalistic, according to his most prominent characteristic, athough he may possess innately any or all of these characteristics, any one of which makes him cacogenic. Hence, because members of the above enumerated classes possess in common a number of traits incompatibile with the best social adjustment, this classification appears to fit well into both the social and the biological scheme and may, therefore, well be used as the practical working basis for the profitable study of the best practical means for cutting off the supply of human defectives.

1. THE FEEBLE-MINDED CLASS


The greatest of all eugenical problems in reference to cutting off the lower levels of human society consists in devising a practicable means for eliminating hereditary feeble-mindedness. From a functional point of view, there are all grades and qualities of this defect from the lowest idiot with the mentality not greater than that of the normal two-year-old child to the imbecile with the mentality not greater than that of a twelve-year-old child and the “backward” child or adult.  The chronological age of such individuals is always somewhat and may be greatly in excess of their mental years.

From a social point of view this classification is perhaps sufficient.  Tredgold in his book on mental deficiency defines the defectives of these three groups in accordance with the basis recommended by the Royal College of Physicians:

1.    Idiocy (Low Grade Amentia). The idiot is defined as “a person so deeply defective in mind from birth or from early age that he is unable to guard himself against common physical dangers.”

2.   Imbecility (Medium Grade Amentia). The imbecile is defined as “one who, by reason of mental defect existing from birth, or from an early age, is incapable of earning his own living, but is capable of guarding himself against common physical dangers.”

3.   Feeble-mindedness (High Grade Amentia). This is the mildest degree of mental defect, and the feeble-minded person is “one who is capable of earning a living under favorable circumstances, but is incapable, from mental defect existing from birth, or from an early age, (a) of competing on equal terms with his normal fellows; or (b) of managing himself and his affairs with ordinary prudence.

Tredgold suggests that, in addition to this classification, it might be well to define the moral imbecile as “a person who displays from an early age, and in spite of careful upbringing, strong vicious or criminal propensities, on which punishment has little or no deterrent effect.” In its more restricted sense the term “degenerate” seems to mean practically the same as the expression “moral imbecile.” It is the moron or high-grade feeble-minded class of individuals that constitute the greatest cacogenic menace, for these individuals, with little or no protection by a kindly social order, are able to, and do, reproduce their unworthy kind. The still lower grades possess such inferior and ill co-ordinated natural qualities that they require great bolstering up in order to reproduce at all. Under the selfishly severe stress of a primitive order of social affairs, natural selection would readily cut off these lowest classes.

In classifying individuals on the functional basis, the general or average end result in their functioning must be considered, but there is also a qualitative difference. Two individuals may grade, according to Binet test, as mentally, say, five years of age. Whereas one may possess a remarkable memory, but be totally unable to calculate or to be educated in manual skill; the second may be manually skillful and at the same time possess a very poor memory, and so forth throughout all the possible combinations of normal traits and defects.

This peculiar combination of good and bad qualities is further exemplified in the case of idiot savants. Tredgold describes the Genius of Earlswood Asylum: “A patient whose skill in drawing, invention and mechanical dexterity is certainly unequalled by any inmate in any similar institution in existence.” In general this individual who, at the time of Tredgold’s book ( 1908) was 73 years old, functioned as feeble-minded, but, in certain lines of manual skill, he must be ranked as a genius.

But it is necessary for the study of heredity to classify individuals who function as feeble-minded, according to their hereditary traits.  The following classification on the basis of clinical variety and hereditary etiology seems to be eugenically logical. This series is arranged approximately in descending order of hereditary causal factors and in ascending order of exogenous causal factors.

Feeble-mindedness

1.   Moronic. (Simple functional.)
2.   Microcephalic.
3.   Epileptic.
4.   Amaurotic-idiotic.
5.   Cretinic.
6.   Mongolic.
7.   Anæsthetic.
8.   Toxic. (Resulting from disease.)
9.   Traumatic. (Resulting from injury.)


2. THEPAUPERCLASS


Individuals belonging to this class fall quite naturally into the fol-lowing three groups:

1, Tramps;
2, Beggars;
3, Ne’er-do-wells.

Many of these individuals belong properly to the feeble-minded class. Oftentimes their special defect or deficiency takes the form of shiftlessness or laziness. Adults of normal traits, who have been socially adequate, but have, through accident, and children who have, through an absolute lack of training and opportunity, become defective and dependent upon charity are not, for the purposes of this study, to be included in the pauper class. It is only with the individual of a hereditary, degenerate make-up which manifests itself in an inability to get on, or lack of ambition, or laziness which drives him or her beyond the bounds of self-maintained usefulness in an organized society that this study is concerned. These individuals are so strikingly anti-social that society is justified, if the general uselessness can be shown to be hereditary, in cutting off the descent line of this whole group of individuals, even if their specific traits and defects cannot be catalogued.

3. THE INEBRIATE CLASS


With this class as with the paupers, mental deficiency appears to be the endogenous cause. In this particular group the deficiency appears to be of a moral nature, preventing the individual from exercising his moral purpose or inhibitions. Under a purely functional classification, many of the feeble-minded, the criminals, the paupers and the inebriates would be called simply Degenerates, but, as just pointed out, the peculiar type of degeneracy that appears in the in-ebriate seems to be quite different from other sorts of degeneracy herein described.

Individuals belonging to this class present the following special varieties:

1, Dipsomania;
2, Chronic Alcoholism;
3, Pharmacomania.

Alcoholism has a peculiar eugenic signification in that it appears to be inextricably tangled up with mental and physical degeneration of all kinds. From a biological point of view, it is difficult to obtain a clear-cut classification of inebriates.
Havelock Ellis in his book, “The Criminal,” says: The relation of alcoholism to criminality is by no means so simple as is sometimes thought; alcoholism is an effect as well as a cause. It is part of a vicious circle. For a well-conditioned person of wholesome heredity to become an inebriate is not altogether an easy matter. It is facilitated by a predisposition, and alcoholism becomes thus a symptom as well as a cause of degeneration.  * * * It may be added that the danger of alcoholism, from the present point of view, lies not in any mysterious prompting to crime which it gives, but in the manner in which the poison lets loose the individual’s natural or morbid impulses, whatever these may be.

The following statements are taken from the report of the Board of Trustees of the Foxborough State Hospital, Massachusetts, 1909:

Drunkards are often classified for courtroom purposes as follows :
1.   The accidental drunkard.
2.   The occasional drunkard.
3.   The habitual drunkard.

1.   The accidental drunkard is one who has unwittingly drunk too freely of alcohol at saloon or club. His drunkenness is often unintentional, and fre-quently due to inexperience in drinking. If found without escort, he is arrested, quite as much for his own protection as for that of the public. A large percent-age of cases of first arrests belong to this group.

2.   The occasional drunkard is one who becomes intoxicated infrequently, and without morbid predisposing cause. Such especially are the convivial drunk-ards, for whom holidays or celebrations involve excess in drinking. These men seek intoxication from bravado or as the inevitable result of conviviality. Often such customs can be followed without noticeable detriment to the man’s labor.  Cases on their second, third and even later arrests belong largely to this class.

The accidental and occasional drunkards are cases commonly accounted responsible for their act. They are capable of refraining from intemperance when they so wish, and to that extent are willful. These two classes, which comprise the majority of individuals arrested for intoxication, are amenable to correctional treatment.

3.   The habitual drunkard is one in whom intoxication is either frequent or constant.Medical experts show that, where drunkenness has become habitual, a predisposing cause is almost invariably traced in the mind or body of the patient. Drunkenness must in such cases be regarded as a disease, or as the form which certain illnesses take with certain patients.
The starting point of disease is often difficult or impossible to trace. The habitual drunkard cannot be sharply distinguished from the occasional drunkard.  There is an intermediate group, in whom, through use of alcohol, a craving for that drug is developing.

They drink not to satisfy the thirst, which water satisfies, but to fill a craving for either the immediate (stimulating) or remote (narcotic) influence of the drug alcohol.  Continued use of alcohol, especially in large quantities, weakens will power and gradually destroys responsibility. In this borderland are cases who begin to show signs of abnormality—men ordinarily industrious, who let their business suffer through debauch; men ordinarily affectionate, who neglect their homes for saloon or club. They are habitual drunkards in the making.

Medical specialists in inebriety classify habitual inebriates as follows:

(a)The first group comprises men originally of normal health of mind and body, but who, through overwork, domestic or business troubles, coupled perhaps with poor hygiene, insanitary homes or poorly cooked and ill-chosen food, have lowered their power of resistance.With frequent indulgence in alcohol or drugs, self-control gradually has been destroyed, and the patient be-comes powerless to discontinue his habit. The craving for narcotics (narcota-mania) becomes all-absorbing. Under ordinary conditions he is unable to over-come the habit. Cases of this kind studied at the Foxborough State Hospital almost invariably have displayed further symptoms of mental abnormality.This is the most curable class of pathologic inebriates.

(b)The second group, whom physicians often treat apart, are the “periodic drunkards”—men ordinarily temperate, or even abstinent, who at periods some weeks or even months apart are seized with a mania for drunkenness, which may be continuous through a number of days. This period is followed by complete sobriety for weeks or months. This form of dipsomania, which is sometimes stimulated by willful drunkards, is more rare than other forms of inebriety, and is often classed technically as a variety of insanity.

The last group comprises the defectives and degenerates among drunk-ards. Alcoholism of the patient or of his parents may in some of these cases have brought on directly or indirectly the low mental or physical condition. But it is equally true in other cases that imbecility, insanity or other forms of defec-tiveness or degeneracy have preceded and have been responsible for the excessive use of alcohol. The physicians in charge of the larger houses of correction and other institutions in Massachusetts to which drunkards are sent are inclined to assert that the large majority of habitual drunkards in their care are men of less than normal mentality. To this class must be added a considerable group of men past their prime of life, in whom the habit of drinking has intensified as the period of mental and physical decline (involution) has set in. Resistance in such cases is constantly lessened, and inebriety may become chronic.

The reduction of mental power characteristic in all members of this group renders cure improbable.  There is another classification of drunkards which deserves to be considered apart. * * * This differentiates the criminal from the non-criminal drunkard.  The inebriate who offends against the law by larceny, assault or any crime other than public intoxication may be found obviously among accidental, occasional or habitual drunkards. But the type of treatment which he should receive should be different from that of other members of the foregoing groups. Even among criminal drunkards, each case should be considered with reference to whether the man is criminal during periods of sobriety or only during periods of intoxi-cation. Among women drunkards also distinction should be made with regard to the morality of the case during periods of sobriety and intoxication. If a man or woman is criminal or immoral only when intemperate, the vice may be but a phase of the disease of inebriety, and curable with the cure of the original malady.  Obviously, the individual who inherits a craving for alcohol or other poisonous stimulants and inherits at the same time a lack of moral stamina enabling him to resist the temptation is eugenically as well as socially dangerous to the State. Such individuals are cacogenic and must therefore be prevented from contributing their traits to the new generation.

4. THE CRIMINALISTIC CLASS

From a eugenical point of view, there are two sorts of persons legally condemned as criminals. First, individuals who commit technical civil offenses, but whose instincts are social. Second, individuals who commit crimes against society on account of a lack of social moral-ity. The second class of individuals are properly called criminalistic.  If on them neither punishment nor moral precept has much effect, they are properly, then, classed as moral imbeciles and, as such, constitute a biological variety of the human stock. They are the individuals to be considered in this study, which seeks to cut off the supply of individ-uals innately anti-social. The following classification is based upon the nature of the crime rather than the nature of the individual. Yet there is a closer relationship between the two than would appear at the first inspection, for it appears to require a definite innate type of personality-complex to commit, in spite of punishment and efforts at reformation, the same offense naturally and continually and ofttimes almost irresistibly.

1.Crimes Against Chastity.
 
a. Adultery. 
b. Fornication. 
c. Bigamy and polygamy. 
d. Incest. 
e. Prostitution. 
f. Seduction. 
g. Pandering. 
h. Sodomy. 
i. Beastility.


2. Crimes Against Persons.


a.   Slander.
b.   Assault.
c.   Extortion.
d.   Robbery.
e.   ****.
f.   Homicide.
g.   Suicide.

3.Crimes Against Property.

a. Malicious mischief and trespass.
b. Petty larceny.
c. Fraud.
d. Embezzlement.
e. Forgery.
f. Grand larceny.
g. Burglary.
h. Arson.

4.Crimes Against Public Policy.


a.   Disorderly conduct.
b.   Drunkenness.
c.   Vagrancy.
d.   Truancy.
e.     Incorrigibility.
f.   Perjury.
g.   Illicit liquor trade.
h.   Counterfeiting.
i.   Treason.

Havelock Ellis in “The Criminal” says:

* * * Moreover, the attitude of society toward the individual criminal and his peculiarities must be to some extent determined by our knowledge of criminal heredity.

The hereditary character of crime, and the organic penalties of natural law, were recognized even in remote antiquity. They were involved in the old Hebrew conception, which seems to have played a vital part in Hebrew life, of a God who visited the sins of the parents upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. We know also the story in Aristotle of the man who, when his son dragged him by his hair to the door, exclaimed: “Enough, enough, my son; I did not drag my father beyond this.”

A biological, psychological, or genetic analysis of criminalistic persons better adapted to eugenic studies is up to the present time lacking. Socially these individuals are outcasts; biologically many of them are feeble-minded, but the precise manner in which selfish instincts, certain types of cunning and even ability, laziness, irritability, inborn love of cruelty, lack of inhibition, lack of social appreciation and other specific ancestral traits recombine in heredity to form a new criminalistic personality, remains to be formulated. The development of the genetics of the criminal is one of the pressing tasks of eugenics.  Any one or any complex of these traits so highly developed as to prevent an individual from leading a normal and socially adequate existence, if such condition is hereditary, renders that individual cacogenic and places him under the ban of unfitness for reproduction.  Before a given individual’s line of heredity is cut off, it must be shown that such individual carries a hereditary taint—such as those just described—of danger to the race.

5. THE EPILEPTIC CLASS


Among degenerates epilepsy is so common that it deserves a separate classification under the anti-social group. Functionally this disease is often associated with feeble-mindedness, crime, inebriety and insanity, but, on the other hand, sometimes it is associated with sterling personalities of great social worth.

Epilepsy varies in degree, and, on this basis, an arbitrary scale could be elaborated. Such scale would take into consideration intensity of attack, duration of attack, exciting causes of attack, rate of convalescence, intervals between attacks, etc. Clinically, epileptics are classed under the following heads, depending upon the prevalent type of attack: 1, Grand Mal; 2, Petit Mal; 3, Mental Epilepsy.  No clearer cases of specific hereditary degeneracy than those of epilepsy have been established. Even when associated with sterling traits in worthy personalities, epilepsy is a deteriorating factor. When associated with other defects, they appear to be inter-accelerating causes of deterioration.

6.   THE INSANE CLASS


There is no class of anti-social individuals more definitely and sharply marked off from the general social body, so far as their principles of conduct are concerned, than the insane class. With this class heredity plays an important part, and here again the basis of social classification is purely functional, while that of eugenics is heredity.  The very complexity of the functions of the nervous system in-sures the certainty of numerous kinds of nervous and mental disorders, and, although speaking in the very strictest sense, there are as many types of psychoses as there are insane persons, still mental disorders tend to follow definite directions. Dr. Wm. A. White, in his Outline of Psychiatry, says:

It is the duty of the nervous system to see that the functions of the several organs are rightly timed and properly adjusted in relation to one another. This is the function of the lower nerve centres.

The highest nerve centres of the cerebral cortex that constitute the physical basis of mind have quite a different function. Their duty is to so regulate and control the actions of the individual as to best serve his interests in his relations with his environment.
As with the feeble-minded, a classification based upon etiology and the degree of hereditary factors rather than one based upon social adequacy more nearly approximates the eugenic basis. The following classification is so based:

Insanity

1.   Functional dementia.
        a.   Dementia praecox.
        b.   Manic depressive insanity.
        c.   Involutional melancholia.
        d.   Chronic delusional insanity.
        e.   Senile dementia.

2.   Psychoneuroses.
        a.   Neuresthenia.
        b.   Hysteria.
        c.   Psychasthenia.

3.   Psychoses following or accompanying organic disorders.
        A.   Nervous disorders leading to dementia.
            a.   Epilepsy.
            b.   Huntington’s chorea.
            c.   Polyneuritis.
            d.   Multiple sclerosis.
        B.   Arterial disorders leading to dementia.
            a.   Apoplexy.
            b.   Arteriosclerosis.

4.   Toxic Psychoses.


        A.   Caused by endogenously produced toxins.
            a.   Uremia
            b.   Diabetes.
            c.   Gastro-intestinal disorders.
            d.   Thyroidal malfunction.
                1.   Hypo-secretion—Myxoedema and cretinism.
                2.   Hyper-secretion—Exophthalmic goitre.
        B.   Psychoses caused by infectious diseases.
            a.   Paresis.
            b.   Pellagra?
            c.   Hydrophobia and other acute infectious deliria.
            d.   Febrile delirium.

        C.   Psychoses caused by exogenously produced toxins.
            a.   Chronic alcoholism.
            b.   Pharmacomania.

5.   Psychoses of exhaustion—Delirium grave.
6.   Psychoses caused by brain tumor.
7.   Psychoses caused by trauma.


The first group of psychoses above named is called functional because, if lesions accompany these mental disorders, they have not yet been discovered by the pathologist but, if the theory that every psychoses is based upon a neurosis becomes established, then the sharp line of demarcation between the organic and the functional psychoses disappears and, rather, one end of the scale represents the psychoses accompanied by gross lesions and the other that accompanied by the more minute lesions.

Dr. Wm. A. White, in his book above referred to (Outline of Psychiatry), says:

* * * Mental processes, from their incidence in sensations to the release of the motor responses constituting conduct, are conceived to have as their phy-sical substratum a continuous neural process. The process, although differently named in different parts of its course for convenience of designation, is a continuous one.

* * * The standpoint of this new-psychology is distinctly differ-ent from the standpoint of a few years ago. Until its development the attitude of the psychiatrist was that of the systematic biologist classifying the several cases into families, genera, species, but classifying upon the basis of the obvious symptoms only. The keynote of the new standpoint is its distinctly individual-istic trend.

* * * The so-called clinical types are not clean-cut entities, but are only groups of symptoms, which either seem to occur more frequently in combination or else have been more definitely and clearly seen because of that combination. In fact types as such may be said to be in the minority. The great mass of cases seen are combinations more or less intermediate in character. The conception of types in order to be accurate must be from a broadly biological viewpoint. Types are like species. They have innumerable transition and inter-mediate forms.

* * * Insanity, therefore, is not a disease; it is rather a class of disorders, which tend to arrange themselves with greater or less distinctiveness into groups of reaction types.

In relation to practical eugenics a specific psychosis may be directly inherited as such, in which case the disease will appear in due onto-genetic sequence. Or its diathesis only may be transmitted. In some types, such as chronic alcoholism and paresis, heredity appears to be the foundation factor, but the poisons respectively of alcohol and of treponema pallidummust conspire with this defective background in order to produce the disease. So in the group of so-called functional psychoses there may be either a weak or strong diathesis—the one requiring a relatively great stress and the other a relatively little stress to bring on the ailment. To the extent that a given strain possesses a hereditary constitutional make-up liable to display a psychosis under anything less than an extraordinary formidable stress of circumstances, there exists in such strain a cacogenic variety of the human race.
 
As in the case of the feeble-minded and criminalistic, the personality of the individual is subject to great variation. It appears that
practically every normal function is susceptible of disorder and the extraordinarily numerous possibilities of combinations of traits, some normal and others perverted, make the total array of possible psychic conditions almost incomprehensibly great.

Psychiatrists, however, have found that the commonest disorders tend to fall along certain definite lines and hence the possibility of classifying this sort of degeneracy.
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7.  THE ASTHENIC CLASS

The great bulk of the world’s work is accomplished by strong and hardy individuals. It is true that great contributions have been made to civilization by physical weaklings, but this is rather the excep-tion: Physical weakness, if hereditary, is cacogenic, for a race of weaklings cannot long endure. Physical weakness is not the menace that feeble-mindedness is, but it is, nevertheless, great. A logical classi-fication of physical weaklings has not yet been made. This class includes individuals who are sane, are not feeble-minded, are not de-formed and are not paupers, nor do they belong to any other of the socially inadequate groups, but still they lack constitutional vigor and stamina. Some of the older physicians refer to “tone” as a state of general weakness that appears to complicate all diatheses.  It might be possible to classify asthenic individuals in reference to the organs and tissues that are weak, such as individuals with weak bones or muscles, or with weak vital organs, such as lungs, arteries, stomach, or kidneys. Although not especially predisposed to any specific disease, yet they fall prey to almost any stressful circumstance, and the innate weakness appears to interfere with the full exercise of the normal function of mind and body in either physical or intellectual pursuits. “A sound mind in a sound body” is as much the motto of eugenics as it appeared to be the motto of the ancient Greeks. Hereditary physical inadequacy is cacogenic.

8. THE DIATHETIC CLASS


In regard to the diathesis or predisposition to a specific ailment or undesirable condition, the problem does not turn upon whether diathesis exists at all, but only to what degree and in what cases diathesis is a fact and to what degree it is injurious to the welfare of the race.
Hereditary traits do not date from birth, for birth is only a change of environment. The hereditary potentialities of an individual are determined past recall when the two parental gametes meet in fertilization to form the zygote.

By direct heredity is meant the transmission of a trait or a quality that will, in spite of controlled environment, appear at some time in the course of development of the individual. Thus the extra digit in polydactylism appears early during the second month of gestation. In children destined to be brown-eyed, the brown iris pigment appears during the first few days after birth. Normally, a child begins to shed his milk teeth at the age of about six years. With males, the beard appears in early manhood. Usually Huntington’s chorea appears in tainted individuals at the age of approximately 50 years. All of these are traits of direct heredity. In these, heredity is the primary factor, environment has but little to do with them.

There is a second type of heredity, which might well be called “indirect heredity” or “heredity-diathesis,” “susceptibility” or “pre-disposition.” In this sort of heredity environment plays a much greater part in determining the human trait or condition than it plays in direct heredity, but even in such cases the exogenous forces are not all-important. Heredity is as it were the foundation upon which environment builds the trait. In such cases heredity, although a less powerful factor, is just as definite as with direct inheritance, and the end product is a composite of hereditary and extrinsic factors.

Thus, people do not, biologically speaking, directly inherit tuberculosis and yet they inherit directly a constitutional make-up possibly both functional and chemical, as well as structural; that causes them to fall an easy prey to this disease. People do not inherit poisoning of the poison ivy (Rhus toxicodendron) type, still some persons are immune to the effects of this poison, while others readily become affected by it. Thus, in reference to their susceptibility and immunity, there appears to be a chemical difference in persons which is directly hereditary, but it requires the presence of an exogenous agent, in addition to the innate lack of resistance, to cause the affection.

Thirdly, there are many diseases and conditions in which the hereditary difference of people plays a very minor role or is entirely negligible as a causative factor, while environment plays the all-important part. Thus, everybody appears to be more or less susceptible to “colds,” and possibly to the more infectious virulent infectious diseases such as rabies.

There are thus all degrees of the influence of heredity in deter-mining a human condition. Let the following scale, beginning with absolutely no influence and ending with all influence, represent this fluctuation.




10.   Polydactylism.


There is, thus, no sharp line between diathesis and direct heredity, on the one hand, and between diathesis and purely extrinsic influences, on the other. They appear to grade into one another.

Even within the same group of disorders,e. g.,insanity, there is a wide range in the relative roles of heredity and of extrinsic factors in the etiology of the disease.

The Twenty-third Annual Report of the New York State Commission in Lunacy (February 14, 1912) gives the following table, showing heredity in cases of admissions to the fourteen state hospitals for the insane for the year ending September 30, 1911:



Excepting at the Kings Park and the St. Lawrence State Hospitals, none of the fourteen New York State hospitals for the insane maintains field workers for the express purpose of studying, in the home territories, the family histories of persons committed to their respective institutions.

The very cursory examinations into family histories, which are doubtless the best that can be provided with the present facilities—or rather lack of facilities—for such study, render it impossible to secure conclusive data from such records. “Heredity” without extended data for each specific case means but little. However, the result of the examinations recorded in this table are at least indicative of the true conditions, and are so evaluated.
If it can be established that some families and some individuals of the human race are by nature susceptible to specific diseases, while others are not, then there is a difference in the eugenic value of such families and such individuals.

A.Species Difference


There is no one who can doubt that the species differ in their susceptibility and immunity to specific diseases. Every hog breeder knows that hog cholera may destroy his whole herd, while the other animals of the same farm (including the owner himself), although doubtless infected, do not contract the disease. Other diseases, such as tuberculosis, affect men, cattle, and chickens, but apparently do not affect horses. The development of varieties of wheat and corn resist-ant to certain fungous diseases are among the greatest joint triumphs of modern breeding and agronomy. The immunity of the zebra and the susceptibility of the horse to the disease following the bite of the tsetse fly is a known fact.

Differential immunity in reference to species has ample and obvious data to support it. The determination of the degree of variation in immunity among races of the same species—in this case the human species—and among strains or families within these races and in turn among individuals of the same family is the problem that concerns this study.

B.Racial Difference


The following study in “Biostatistics of the Jewish Race Pertaining Especially to Immunity and Susceptibility,” by Lester Levyn,
M. D., of Buffalo, N. Y., is reprinted with his permission from the New York Medical Journal of May 10, 1913.

It establishes the racial differentiation in immunity:


The relative immunity to many contagious and infectious diseases and susceptibility to certain other infections (principally of a neurotic origin) possessed by the Jewish race present a field of study of a most interesting nature.The immunity can be traced as far back as the Talmudic periods, and well proved facts and statistics give evidence of its survival today.

Why should the Jew, physically inferior to his Christian brethren, ward off with more potent factors the onslaught of disease and emerge from the conflict with a lesser mortality? 

Let us for a moment make a brief anthropological study of the Jew. His average height is 162.1 cm., span of arms 169.1 cm., girth around chest about 81 cm., making him the narrowest and the shortest of races. The skulls are chiefly brachycephalic, probably attributable to cerebral development.There is no race that appears less strong, and none that can so well resist misfortune. The reason for this is that in soul as well as in body, morally as well as physically, the Jew is the product of a selection that has lasted two thousand years, and has been the most severe and most painful which living beings have ever had to endure. In appearance, notably in the large Jewries of the East, he is small, puny, sickly, pale and shrunken, yet under this frail exterior is hidden an intense vitality.“The Jew may be likened to those lean actresses, the Rachels and Sarahs, who spit blood, and seem to have but a spark of life left, yet who when they have stepped upon the stage put forth indomitable strength and courage.” Taking into consideration then the mode of life to which the race was so long subjected it is not strange that it should present peculiarities to the physiologist and statisician.

The first thing to attract our attention is the fact that the longevity of the Jew is greater than that of any other race. This is so well established that in certain countries, America for instance, the Jews are regarded by life insurance companies as especially desirable clients. Almost anywhere, particularly in those countries where the laws are not such as to render existence intolerable to them, the average duration of life among the Jews is considerably higher than that of adherents of other religions and faiths. This does not apply solely to countries where the Jews are largely of the well-to-do classes, but as well to the poor Jews of Germany, Hungary, England and Roumania. The United States Census Report states his “expectation of life” to be fifty-seven years, while that of his Christian brother is but forty-one years.The difference is visibly one of distinction.

We should not be justified, however, in regarding this superiority as a racial phenomenon of a purely physiological nature.  It is doubtless due in large part to the difference in customs, to the family spirit of the Jews, to their devotion as parents, to the care of the mother for her children; and also to the chastity in the marriage relations; to the prescriptions of the law, and to the consideration and respect shown by the husband for the health of his wife. Much of the racial relative immunity to various diseases may be directly attributed to a strict adherence to the laws governing the Jewish faith, which embody rigid aphorisms on bodily and dietary cleanliness. Many of the fundamental laws of Judaism have for a nucleus hygienic principles.

The early rabbinical teachings forbade eating the flesh of an animal that had taken poison, or the eating of meat and fish together, or drinking water left uncovered over night. The danger of drinking water at the beginning of the seasons was taught the people. In times of plague the rabbis advised the necessity of remaining at home and avoiding the society of men. It was forbidden to touch during a meal parts of the body, where perspiration was profuse, to eat from unclean vessels or with dirty hands, or to eat hearty meals before retiring. It is thereby seen that the Torah wished to make of Israel a people that should be healthy and holy, sanus et sanctus.

The laws concerning the preparation and selection of all flesh for food, scorned and ridiculed for many generations, are now regarded as important
factors in the eradication of disease. In the slaughter houses the methods employed by the shochetsin the selection of animals for consumption are worthy of mention. No animals are considered fit for food which show but the slightest evidences of illness or whose bodies in any way are wounded or injured. Such animals are branded unclean, and therefore unfit for food. True the sacrifice of such animals creates a monetary loss, but any sacrifice conducive to an increased resistance to disease and prolongation of life is one which the public will gladly suffer.

In enumerating the various diseases to which the race is comparatively and relatively immune, that which stands pre-eminently foremost on the list is tuberculosis. Unfortunately, advancing civilization, with its congestion of population and subsequent increase in ghetto life, is tending to diminish the extent of this immunity. Dr. Behrend says: “The comparative immunity from the tuberculous diathesis has been recognized by all physicians whose special experience entitles them to express an opinion.” Despite the horrible ghetto environment statistics evidence a lesser extent of the disease than among other races, while in the better classes of Jews, not restricted by ghetto life, they are but rarely victims of the disease.

Many factors peculiar to the race are instrumental to the production of this immunity. Lombroso considers the immunity to be in large part attributable to the fact that the vocations of the Jews require little or no exposure.  Another important cause is the cleanliness of the housewives. Instead of resorting to extensive use of the dusting brush they utilize damp cloths in wiping all surfaces, by this means raising less dust and diminishing the risk of inhaling tubercle bacilli. Lastly, but of vast significance, is the fact that the body vitality is not diminished by excessive alcoholic indulgences.

The liability of the race to pneumonic infection is less than that of other races. Reasons for this are that their occupational pursuits are largely of a confining nature, and do not necessitate exposure to the vicissitudes of the weather. Of greater moment is the fact of the race being non-alcoholic.  Smallpox has a less marked affiliation for the race. This malady attacks the Jew far less frequently than the non-Jew. During the epidemic of smallpox of 1900-1903 it is remarkable to note that the race was virtually free from its ravages. The urgency and necessity for vaccination have always held sway among the Jews, they being strong supporters of the efficacy of vaccination, and the promptness with which they accede to it has established this freedom.  The existence of typhoid fever is somewhat less among the Jews than among other races, and the death rate from that disease is lower among them. For a period of six years in the city of New York the typhoid mortality rate was as follows:Germans, 28.01; Italians, 26.16; Irish, 25.56; English, 19.77; French, 18.29; Bohemians, 18.04; Armenians (white), 17.40; Hungarians (mostly Jews), 12.36; Russians and Poles (mostly Jews), 9.19.

The racial resistance to intestinal disorders is far greater than that of other peoples. In the city of New York, in the most densely populated Jewish settle-ment, where 80 per cent. of the inhabitants are of that faith, an analysis of the statistics of the Department of Health shows that for a period of ten years diphtheria and croup killed 5 per 100,000 less than among the Christian race.  Bearing in mind the low morality of urban Jews, remembering the admirable conditions for the spread of infection prevalent in the East Side, knowing the congestion, the poverty, the miserably ventilated sweatshops, the never-ceasing toiling, can we place belief other than in their wonderful powers of resistance!  The low mortality is not confined to the adults of the race, but applies to infants as well. The enjoyment of a lower infant mortality is traceable to the deeper devotion bestowed in the children by parents, and the fact that weakened vitality due to alcohol and lues is not inherited. The precocity of the Jewish mind and the rapidity of mental growth are also largely due to this abstemiousness.  The number of stillborn children is much smaller among the Israelites than others, and there are notably fewer illegitimate births.

The prevalence of venereal disease is not nearly as widespread as is seen in others. The ancient and ever present custom of circumcision is the main
contributing factor to this absence, enhanced by generations of culture, suffering and tribulations, which have placed the senses under the rule of reason. The race stands today as the least carnal of all.

While the race enjoys this relative immunity to many diseases, it is not to be envied in every respect, for there remain afflictions which seem particularly prone to attack the Hebrew. Especially noteworthy of mention are maladies of the nerve centres, cerebral and spinal diseases and diabetes mellitus. The latter occurs from two to six times more frequently among Jews than among non-Jews. Strangely, while the disease exhibits such a marked predilection for the race, it is better endured than among other races. Von Noorden states that patients with glycosuria lasting for years, without much discomfort, die from what is supposed to be heart failure. Death through coma is more commonly seen in the Jew (Stern).

With our present knowledge of the etiology of diabetes mellitus the only reasons offered for the predisposition of the race to the disease are the nervous theories, together with such contributing factors as sedentary habits, lack of exercise, high living and overfeeding.

Of the nervous disorders, hysteria and neurasthenia affect the race most frequently. The causes commonly assigned are:

(1) The fact that they are largely town dwellers, these functional nervous diseases being common to the population of a great city;

(2) neurasthenia is seen mostly among the commercial classes, bankers and speculators, of whom the Jews comprise a great proportion.  However, those of the poorer classes, laborers and artisans, are not exempt;

(3) consanguineous marriage was at one time a reason offered, but the more modern views that such marriages when contracted between healthy individuals are not at all detrimental to the health of the offspring contradict this theory;

(4) the repeated persecutions and abuses to which the race has been subjected;

(5) such massacres as occurred in Kishineff, in 1903, were of frequent occurrence in the Middle Ages, and their effect on the nervous system of the race could not be other than a rigorous one, transmitted hereditarily;

(6) the excessive mental and intellectual tax demanded to overcome and outspread environment.  While these conditions rarely, if ever, cause death, yet they exert a most harmful tendency. Kraft-Ebing states: “Neurasthenia and other nervous dis-eases affect the Jews with exceptional severity.”

Amaurotic idiocy and the Mongolian type of idiocy are frequently observed among Hebrews. The causes again advanced are referable to neurotic taints.  Marriages of those of near kin have been considered a prominent cause for the prevalence of idiocy in the race, but statistics do not bear out this contention.  “It appears that the proportion of idiotic children who are the offspring of cousins is not in excess of the ratio of consanguineous marriages to marriages generally, and the sole evil result of such marriages is the intensification in the offspring of some morbid proclivity common to both parents.” In summarizing, it may be said that the race suffers chiefly from the functional nervous diseases, and that the organic nervous degenerations such as locomotor ataxia and pro-gressive paralysis of the insane are uncommonly seen. Minor states that serious organic diseases of the brain and spinal cord are less frequently met with among Jews than among others.

Apoplexy is another affliction which attacks the Jew with a great degree of frequency.  Lombroso attributes the connection to the racial temperament of emotion, struggling with adverse conditions and the persecution of centuries.  Diseases of the heart and circulatory system are more common in Jews, in the United States being double that of the general population. Articular rheumatism so frequently seen in the race is an important etiological factor in the production of organic heart disease. Arteriosclerosis also prevails largely among members of the race, owing to excessive activity, worry and care. Intermittent claudication attacks the race more often than others, which condition is possibly due to the prevalence of arteriosclerosis.

The proportion of blindness is greater among modern Jews than among nonJews. In America, however, this does not hold true, owing to the stringency of the immigration laws, which prevent the entrance of defective classes, including the blind. Considering the etiology of blindness it might be expected that the 35 affliction should attack the race less than others. The most important cause of blindness in the new-born from 30 to 50 per cent. of cases is gonorrhea infection from the mothers.

It is a well-known fact that gonorrhea is comparatively rare in Jewish women.  Conceding this it would be reasonable to think that Jews would have at least 25 per cent. less blindness than non-Jews. In spite of this the condition is common to the race. Consanguinity, careful investigators con-tend, is not a factor in the production of blindness, apart from heredity. Trachoma, glaucoma and diseases of the cornea and uveal tract are largely seen in the race, all of which conditions may lead to blindness.  It is most interesting to note that suicide in the race appears to be less common than among others. Among ancient Hebrews but few cases are recorded, only four cases being specifically mentioned in the Old Testament, those of Samson, Saul and his arrow bearer, and Ahitophel. Later it appears to have occurred with greater frequency. Josephus records the suicide of several thou-sand Jewish soldiers who were besieged by the Romans in the stronghold of Masaden in the year 72 or 73 A. D. During medieval periods of persecution the Jews often chose self-destruction as a means of relief. In modern times the Jews are less liable to suicide.  It is generally known that suicide is on the increase in most of the European countries as well as in America.Marselli explains this increase as due to the effects of “that universal and complex influence to which we give the name ‘civilization’.” Yet, notwithstanding this pres-sure, the Jew at present rarely resorts to self-destruction. Among non-Jews about one-third of all suicides are directly or indirectly attributable to abuse of alcoholic beverages, and the paucity of such cases in Jews is again explained by their abstemiousness.

References

1.  John S. Billings: Vital Statistics of Jews in the United States.
2.  M.Beadles: The Insane Jew, Journal of Mental Science, xxvi.
3.  M. Fishberg: Health and Sanitation of Immigrant Jewish Population of New York City.
4.  Idem: Comparative Pathology of Jews, New York Medical Journal, lxxiii, 13-14. 
5.  Idem: Relative Infrequency of Tuberculosis Among Jews, American Medicine, Nov. 2, 1902.
6.  Hugo Hoppe: Krankheiten und Sterblichkeit bei Juden und Nichtjuden, 1903.
7.  Hugh: Longevity and Other Biostatic Peculiarities of the Jewish Race, Medical Record, 1873.
8.  Jacobs: Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews.
9.  Lombroso: The Man of Genius.
10. Pollatschek: Zur Aetologie des Diabetes Mellitus, Zeitschrift fuer klinische Medizin.
11. Ripley: The Races of Europe.
12. Heinrich Singer: Allgemeine und specielle Krankheitslehre der Juden, 1904.
13. Von Noorden: Uber Diabetes Mellitus, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, pp. 1117, 1900.
15. Funk & Wagnalls: Cyclopedia of Temperance and Prohibition.
14. Singer Et Alii: Jewish Encyclopedia.

C. Family and Individual Differences

Besides the species and racial differences, there is also a family or strain difference and lastly within the fraternity an individual differ-ence in natural susceptibility to a specific disease. The following case and family histories were selected by Dr. A. J. Rosanoff from his histories to illustrate these facts.
The first history is that of a family characterized bymanic-depressive insanity, in which family many of the individuals appeared to break down almost independently of exogenous causes. In the second family there is a nervous tendency, but, compared to the first family, they are quite stable. In an affected individual of this second family it required agreat array of formidable exogenous causes to bring about this disease.



Family history: II-7. 2678-6624. Admitted Dec. 20, 1905—53 years. First attack 20 years ago, 1885 (at 33 years). Was in Bloomingdale for two months, has had several attacks since. Present attack, commitment paper says: “Wishes to use the telephone to speak to Mr. Ryan and others with whom he has important financial engagements. Said that he went into business in Wall Street three months ago without a cent and now is worth $2,000.000; that his present incarceration is due to a conspiarcy of his wife and certain financial people, who are afraid of his power, fear he will ruin them.” On admission: “Said he was glad to be sent here, that he was of a happy disposition and could get along any place.” Exceed-ingly irritable when questioned ; shows distractibility and flight. May 7, 1906: “Quiet and composed.”  June 11, 1906: “Discharged as recovered.”  Readmitted April 29, 1910: “Elated, said he was perfectly contented with life.” “Could draw a cheque for any amount, which would be immediately honored at any of the banking houses in New York City. His influence is so great that, should he enter any broker’s office, he could immediately cause a rise or precipitate a fall of stock on the market by purchasing it for a rise or a fall.” “Restless, does not sleep at night.”  June, 1910: “Noisy, destructive and mischievous; tears clothing, breaks plaster, etc.” “Urinated and defecated on the floor of his room and threw faeces out on the hall.”July, 1910: “Today climbed water leader in court-yard and escaped to roof of cross hall; was gotten down by charge nurse.” Oct.  2, 1910: Died of dysentery. Patient had graduated from C. C. N. Y. Said he was not a good student, because he was always mischievous, never inclined to study. II-6. 2676. Admitted Nov. 6, 1905. First attack 20 years; was at Black-well’s Island in 1862. “Many previous attacks.” On admission : “Great depres-sion and agitation, cried, stated he was justly punished for all the sins of his past life.” “I will be lost and damned; I am more than an outcast; my friends do not recognize me or care for me; there is no worse sinner on earth; if I was ground up into smoke I would not think that I had been punished enough.” Jan., 1906: “Failing physically, now confined to bed, as he is too feeble to be up and around.” “Questions had to be frequently repeated, and after long pauses he answered in a barely audible tone of voice.” Oct., 1906: “Constantly picks at his ears and hands.” Nov. 3, 1906: “Died.”  II-2. 2882-4427-30067. Admission May 8, 1906—29 years. First attack in 1894 (age 29 years) was at Amityville. Second, third, fourth and fifth attacks between 1895 and 1904 at New Jersey State Hospital, Morris Plains, N. J. Sixth attack: Admitted to K. P. May 8, 1906: “Laughs and talks incessantly for hours at a time. Sleepless for the past five nights; spends sleepless nights singing and talking wildly for hours at a time.” May 25, 1906: “Assaulted night nurse; kicked her in the stomach and pulled her hair.Nov. 21, 1906: “Cheerful, agree-able, industrious.” Aug. 25, 1907: “Discharged as recovered.Seventh attack:
Admitted to K. P. Nov. 20, 1907: “Would lie in bed all day without excuse; has been delirious and wild.” On admission: “Elated, very loquacious, showing dis-tractibility and flight of ideas, restless, very erotic, making obscene suggestions and remarks. Jan., 1908: “Improved, works in embroidery class.” March, 1908: “Disturbed, noisy, threatening.” June, 1908: “Quiet, neat, industrious.” March, 1909: “Paroled.”  Nov. 22, 1909: “Returned from parole by two attendants, resisted and caused much trouble en route.  April, 1910: “Disturbed, receiving paraldehyde.” Oct. 25, 1910: “Paroled.” April 24, 1911: “Parole extended.June 15, 1911: “Returned from parole; somewhat confused; careless, untidy, indolent.” Aug., 1911: “Disturbed, restless, untidy.” Nov., 1911: “Much improved, very industrious, doing fancy work, cheerful.”  Dec. 21, 1911: Paroled.
II-10. 6295-44746. Admitted Jan. 5, 1910-62years. “Has had epileptic con-vulsions since she was in her ‘teens.’ ” Commitment paper: “Patient sad; at times she has thought she saw her parents and others in their heavenly home.  “At times she is very irritable and abusive.” Jan. 31, 1910: “Three convulsions since admission.” “Thinks her aunt, who died some time ago, will meet her when she is called home by Jesus Christ, her Blessed Savior.” March, 1910:
“Screams if assisted at dressing, going to and from meals, etc. Says everyone is trying to kill her.” Aug., 1910: “Neat, tidy, clean, industrious, assisting with the mending.” Sept., 1910: “At times thinks she hears God’s voice. Reads her Bible a great deal.” March, 1911: “Irritable, childish, easily excited. At times very noisy and yells. Convulsions at irregular intervals.” III-3.2125-2769-4215-16424. Admission Oct. 27, 1904—19 years. First attack 1898 (age 19): “Despondent, wept, conversed but little, slept poorly, appetite was not good, heard strange voices; was three months in sanitarium; recovered.” Second attack 1900: “Again despondent; three months in sanitarium; recovered.”
Third attack 1901: “Again despondent; five months in sanitarium; recovered.” Fourth attack: “Same; in sanitarium six months; recovered.” Fifth attack began Oct. 15, 1904: “Downhearted, laughed to herself, wept, talked to herself, slept and ate poorly, imagined people were in her room, heard strange voices; remained in one place for hours taking no notice of anything; then became disturbed, destruc-tive, and violent and was committed to K. P.” On admission: “Depression, re-tardation in movements and speech, difficulty in thinking; thinks she is dead.” June 14, 1905: “Discharged as recovered.” Sixth attack admitted to K. P. March 15, 1906: “Patient said she quarreled with her mother; does not sleep well nights; she hears noises and voices; at times she is so depressive that she has thought of killing herself; was restless.” July, 1906: “Filthy in habits, requires to be dressed and undressed, destroys her clothing, exposes her person.” Feb., 1907:
“Discharged as recovered.” Seventh attack, admission Aug. 10, 1907: “Boisterous, says her mother is a damned fool; says all the time she wants to get married; at times extremely erotic and obscene; often says, ‘Oh, I am going out of my mind, I know I am, I can’t control myself.’ ” Nov., 1907: “Says she is so restless that she cannot keep still.” Feb., 1908: “Very stupid and untidy; has to be dressed and undressed; when addressed will not converse; retarded in move-ments, but shows no depression.” March, 1909: “Destructive, noisy and violent.” Nov. 9, 1911: “Has shown steady improvement; is less irritable; industrious and interested in ward activities.” Paroled Nov. 12. March 30, 1912: “Returned from parole; patient was restless both day and night; interested in every man that passed the house.”
Sept., 1909: ‘‘Parole extended.”
June 18, 1912: “Parole extended.”




Family History. Paternal grandmother (I, 2) died at 78 years of age of dropsy; she was bright, but cranky; would often scold her son for no cause; was emotional, had strong unreasonable likes and dislikes; was more fond of her other children than of her son (II, 1) (patient’s father), who kept her when she was old until she died. Father (II, 1) is excitable, emotional, rather effusive, becomes lacrimose when speaking of his father, who died many years ago.  Mother (II, 2) is normal, but is said to be somewhat inclined to worry over trifles. One brother (III, 4) has “a bad temper,” abused his younger sisters; eloped and married at the age of 19 years, and has kept away from the family ever since. One sister (III, 6) is loquacious and egotistical. Another is more or less “nervous” and “excitable.”

Personal History. Psychosis allied to manic-depressive insanity. Age 28.  Admitted May 27, 1911, ——.The conditions which brought about the psy-chosis were truly formidable.The patient, a young woman, of excitable, emo-tional and rather unstable stock, described as cranky, hot-tempered and stubborn in disposition, becomes involved in a love affair followed by an engagement at the age of 23 years. During the engagement period she reluctantly permits her fiance to have sexual relations with her, and during the same period she dis-covers in him disagreeable and repulsive traits, but at the end of a year marries him in spite of her repulsion, feeling that it is “too late to back out.”Her married life is unhappy. The husband turns out to be a selfish, inconsiderate and jealous man; he supplies her with money very stintingly, though he goes out, plays cards, stays out evenings; he prevents her from having any diversions and objects even to her visiting her own relations. She desires children, but the husband does not, and she is deprived of sexual gratification owing to the pre-cautions taken to avoid impregnation. About a year after marriage, after a quarrel on account of her going out to visit her folks, her husband leaves her.  At the end of a week “her pride is broken” and she goes to his place of business to beg him to return. Friction between them continues, and two years later he deserts her again.
She becomes depressed, discouraged, develops self-accusations; suffers much from insomnia and loss of appetite and becomes much run down physically; then she grows very irritable, has occasional agitated tantrums; later begins to think people are watching her and taking snapshots of her to obtain evidence to be used by her Though she begs him to return he refuses.   She  becomes depressed, discouraged, develops self-accusations;  suffers  much  from  insomnia and loss of appetite and becomes much run down physically; then she grows very irritable, has  occasional agitated tantrums; later begins to think people are watching her and taking snapshots of her to obtain evidence to be used by her husband in a suit for divorce; finally she makes several suicidal attempts and is committed.

Patient was born in New York on Nov. 20, 1883. In childhood had measles, but otherwise had been physically well. She went to school at the age of 8 years and left at 17, having reached the fifth grammar grade; she did not get along well in her studies, was left back several times, but her failures were attributed to disinclination to study and not to dullness; her attendance was regular. After leaving school she stayed at home and did housework.

Patient describes her own disposition as sociable, but cranky and easily irritated and “soft,” that is to say, easily moved to tears when her feelings were hurt. Was rather fond of going out. Occasionally read a newspaper, but very seldom any novels. Physically she was evidently somewhat run down; weighed 115 pounds—her usual weight being 130 pounds. She had frequent crying spells; she never thought she would land in a place like this. During the first two or three months following her admission her condition improved slightly, as her listlessness and bewilderment disappeared. She cooperated better in medical examinations and was found to be well oriented, showed a normal grasp of her surroundings and a good memory of recent and remote occurrences. She continued, however, to have crying spells and even tantrums of agitation; said she wanted to die, etc.  From time to time she would express delusional ideas, which were, however, rather in the shape of suspicions and conjectures, and not well-established delusions. Thus she thought that her husband had been the cause of insanity, not in her case alone, but also in the case of some other patients here. She thought also that he had people here spying on her in order that they might obtain evidence for a suit of divorce. She believed that many people here knew of her disgrace and humiliation, and that they talked about her. At one time she expressed the idea that her sister and parents wanted to be rid of her, as she had caused them so much trouble.

She improved, however, gradually. In the latter part of September, 1911, she weighed 135 pounds. She was more composed mentally and more rational.  She now (October, 1911) employs herself in making baskets.  In November, 1911, though not yet recovered completely, she was discharged into the custody of her relatives at their request.  Some weeks following her discharge she wrote a letter to the hospital stating that she was again living with her husband and that she was feeling entirely well.  These two family histories justify the statement that there is a difference in families in reference to their innate resistance to manic-depressive insanity. In the first family the disease might almost be said to be inherited, so surely was the trait to appear; in the second family it is quite clear that there is not a direct inheritance of this disease, but there is, nevertheless, a specific predisposition or diathesis to it.



To summarize—the factors of heredity and environment are constantly interacting to bring about end results in human as well as in plant and animal characteristics. No useful purpose is served either by eugenists or by humanitarians in striving to claim for the one or the other of these forces the all-important role in human affairs. One might as well contend that the sodium plays a more important part than chlorine in the organization and characteristics of common salt.  Truth, not victory for an object of especial solicitude, should be sought.

We should be content to determine the relative influence of nature and nurture in selected cases or groups of related cases. In those wherein heredity is demonstrated to be the prime factor, the control of heredity should be the means used by society in controlling the qualities so determined. It is the business of eugenics to seek out such instances and to develop a practical method of control. It is the business of education, medicine, humanitarianism and other environmental or euthenical agencies to find out to what extent and how the hereditary qualities of individual human beings can be directed along desired channels and to exert every possible effort in so directing them. The one concerns educability; the other education.

9.  THE DEFORMED CLASS

The extent of hereditary ailments in the human race is extremely great. The more complex the organism or machine, the greater the likelihood that it will develop a serious defect. The human organism is the most complex of all and, for each functional trait, there is doubtless a complex structure susceptible of defects and variations tending to follow certain set lines, upsetting the essential functioning and more or less handicapping the entire organism. Organic progress seems to have been effected by the “rouging out” of individuals possessing in their make-up unfit traits. Nature has been fully as ruthless in her processes of eliminating physical deformity as in striking down the possessor of mental feebleness. The more grossly deformed individuals such as acephalus(“freaks” or “monsters” as they are sometimes called) are not in themselves cacogenic, for they are either cut down early in ontogenesis, or, if permitted to live, they are incapacitated for parent-hood. If such individuals could reproduce, many of their traits would doubtless be hereditary, but as such defects are serious enough to cause death before the reproductive age or to prevent reproduction, such deterioration has so overdone itself that the excess acts eugenically.  The following table excludes these so-called monsters because not they, but the stock that produces them, is cacogenic. At this juncture, it is again opportune to call attention to the fact that it is the border-line defect that is most cacogenic, for it is a hereditary defect that can, with the aid of a kindly civilization, be bolstered up into a semblance of social fitness and then encouraged, and often enabled thereby to propagate its kind.

A deformity is a variation from the ordinary or normal structure that interferes with the normal functioning of the organ, and, consequently, handicaps or incapacitates the individual possessing it. So close is the relation between structure and function that deformity in its more general sense can be made to include at least the basis of all human ailments. The following table outlines this view:





Eugenics is concerned with physical fitness no less than with mental and moral adequacy, for a race cannot long endure and rise in culture unless its members be strong and dexterous physically.  Mate selection has always been and doubtless always will be greatly influenced by patent personal physical fitness and comeliness; it is a determining factor of high value. Following the growth and dif-fusion of knowledge concerning the hereditary nature of physical defects, hereditary physical potentialities will also become assets in selection. Thus eugenical education influencing mate selection on a nation-wide scale must be depended upon to stamp out physical de-formity when it is not associated with mental or with moral unfitness; when it is so linked segregation, supported, if need be, by sterilization, appears to be the proper eugenical remedy.

10.   THE CACÆSTHETIC CLASS

Social adequacy depends so much upon the proper functioning of the organs of special sense that individuals suffering from their absence or their deformity are properly considered as one of the primary groups of the socially inadequate. The organs of special sense are very intricately constructed and hence subject to a corre-spondingly numerous and serious group of disorders.
The following classification of hereditary defects of the sense organs is based upon anatomical defects, which in turn destroy or pervert normal function:

I.   Eye.
    1.   Microphthalmus (including anophthalmus).
    2.   Megalophthalmus.
    3.   Atrophia Nervi Optici.
    4.   Retinitis Pigmentosa (including hemeralopia).
    5.   Color Blindness.
    6.   Glaucoma.
    7.   Cataract.
    8.   Ectopia Lentis.
    9.   Degeneration of the cornea.
  10.   Nystagmus.
  11.   Ophthalmoplegia (including ptosis and squint, which latter is also called strabismus or cross-eye).
  12.   Aniridia (including colobomba).

II.   Ear.

1.   Rudimentary development of tympanic cavity.
2.   Absence of tympanic membrane.
3.   Absence of ossicles.
4.   Absence of lanima spiralis.
5.   Displacement or Reissner’s membrane.
6.   Mucus vegetation of connective tissues.
7.   Absence of organ of corti.
8.   Too few ganglionic cells in spiral canal.
9.   Too few nerve fibres in modiolus.
10.   Atrophy or failure of auditory nerve.
11.   Ankylosis of ossicles.
12.   Obliteration of tympanic cavity by bony exostosis, mucus or connective tissue.
13.   Formation of bone in tympanic cavity.
14.   Vestibular windows filled with bone or connective tissue.
15.   Formation of bone or connective tissue in aqueductus
16.   Atresia by bone or connective tissue of external canal.  cochlea.

III.  Defects in the organs of taste, smell and touch are less clearly defined than those of sight and hearing, because doubtless of their less specialized constitution.

Each of these more generalized senses, however, appears to be affected with a diminution of sensitivity and in others with a hyper-sensitive functioning. In still others there appears to be a perversion of a lack of trueness in their functioning, however, and in what manner such variations are hereditary has not yet been made clear by pedigree studies.

Many individuals belonging personally to the socially unfit classes are not cacogenic because their conditions have been caused primarily by extrinsic agencies rather than by innate heredity. Thus, with the blind, a large percentage—from 20 per cent. to 40 per cent.—are known to have lost their sight by the easily preventableophthalmia neonatorum.Many individual persons legally counted insane are so, not because of heredity, but because of some extraordinary harshness of circumstance.

It is known beyond dispute that many cases of mental defects and physical deformities are caused almost entirely by disease or injury to persons of sound constitution. Such cases should be charged largely to the fault of environment and not to that of heredity. There is much personal and social salvage in them, and a solicitous social order can well afford to lend them personal aid and to help them rear their families. Such individuals, although both personally and socially inadequate, are, because of the persist-ency of ancestral germ-plasm and the falsity of the doctrine of the transmission of acquired traits, not cacogenic, and for the purposes of this study are not, therefore, to be considered as proper subjects for eugenical segregation, much less for sterilization.

Eugenics concerns only innate qualities. It is therefore the task, riot of eugenics, but of education, preventive medicine, mental hygiene, sex hygiene, movements for the conservation of vision, for the prevention of in-dustrial accidents, and for similar agencies to protect the members of society from socially inadequating forces, and for the medical and philanthropic sciences to treat individuals who, in spite of these preventative agencies, do fall the victim of crippling forces.


CHAPTER III.

SUGGESTED REMEDIES.

In a study of this sort it is proper carefully to consider each of the several different remedies which have been proposed or suggested or which appear as possibly efficacious for purging from the blood of the race the innately defective strains described in the previous chapter.  The following list is a catalog of such agencies.

1.   Life segregation (or segregation during the reproductive
2.   Sterilization.
3.   Restrictive marriage laws and customs.
4.   Eugenical education of the public and of prospective marriage period).  mates.
5.   Systems of matings purporting to remove defective traits.
6.   General environmental betterment.
7.   Polygamy.
8.   Euthanasia.
9.   Neo-Malthusianism.
10.   Laissez-faire.

Which of these remedies shall be applied? Shall one, two, or several or all be made to operate? What are the limitations and possibilities of each remedy? Shall one class of the socially unfit be treated with one remedy and another with a different one? Shall the specifically selected remedy be applied to the class or to the individual? What are the principles and limits of compromise between conservation and elimination in cases of individuals bearing a germ-plasm with a mixture of the determiners for both defective and sterling traits? What are the criteria for the identification of individuals bearing defective germ-plasm? What can be hoped from the application of some definite elimination program? What practical difficulties stand in the way?  How can they be overcome? These and other questions arise. It is therefore, the purpose of this investigation to study in the light of first-hand knowledge these problems, and to present the results of its work to the public in order to aid in some degree society’s efforts to work out a practicable program for effecting the desired ends.

The following studies of this committee appear to justify the following attitudes respectively toward each of the several proposed or suggested remedies:

(1.)Life segregation(or segregation during the reproductive period).


This remedy must, in the opinion of the committee, be the principal agent used by society in cutting off its supply of defectives.  Defectives must be, and with continually finer discrimination are being, segregated from the general mass of society; and it will require but little modification from the present custodial systems in effecting the eugenical end as well as protecting the immediate present-day society from the socially inadequate individual, and administering to the latter’s most pressing needs.

(2)  Sterilization.


Among  the  students  of  the  eugenical  status and movement  of mankind  there  is  a  wide  range  of  opinion  as  to  the extremity  to  which  society  itself  should  go  in  applying  sterilization, and  concerning  the  part  this  remedy  should  play  in  relation  to  other remedial agencies.  It would be  possible  theoretically  to  sterilize  wholesale those individuals thought to carry defective hereditary traits, and thus at one fell stroke cut off practically all of the cacogenic varieties of the race. On the other hand, belief in the efficiency of natural selection under existing social conditions is held by some. Between these two extremes what effective and practicable working basis can be found?

In the program proposed by the committee sterilization is advocated only as supporting the more important feature of segregation when the latter agency fails to function eugenically. The relation between these two agencies is automatic, for it is proposed to sterilize only those individuals who, by due process of law, have been declared socially inadequate and have been committed to State custody, and are known to possess cacogenic potentialities. The committee has assumed that society must, at all hazards, protect its breeding stock, and it advocates sterilization only as supplementary to the segregation feature of the program, which is equally effective eugenically, and more effective socially.

(3) Restrictive marriage laws and customs will have but little effect upon the socially inadequate classes. This is amply demonstrated by Davenport in Bulletin Number Nine of the Eugenics Record Office: “State Laws Limiting Marriage Selection Examined in the Light of Eugenics.” For persons of sound mind and morals, but suffering from severe hereditary handicap, these remedies will be efficacious; but individuals are given the designation “socially inadequate’’ because, among other reasons, they are not amenable to law and custom. 

(4)The eugenic education of the public and of prospective marriage mates must become an active force in American social life, else no eugenics program looking ultimately toward cutting off the supply of defectives or favoring fortunate marriages and high fecundity among the favored classes can be carried out. Individuals possessed of a fine mentality and high moral sense are amenable to law and custom and, in a large measure, govern their conduct in consonance with the ad-vance of scientific knowledge. The basis of progress is the growth and diffusion of knowledge. Faith in the development of the eugenics program is based upon faith in this principle.  For certain classes of individuals with hereditary defects, who withal are educable and are susceptible to social influences, eugenical education rather than compulsory segregation or sterilization appears to be the proper method for society to employ in cutting off their lines of descent. As an illustration of this the following is quoted from an
address delivered by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell to the deaf-mute members of the Literary Society of Kendall Green, Washington, D. C., March 6, 1891:

    I think, however, that it is the duty of every good man and every good woman to remember that children follow marriage, and I am sure that there is no one among the deaf who desires to have his affliction handed down to his children. You all know that I have devoted considerable study and thought to the subject of the inheritance of deafness, and if you will put away prejudice out of your minds, and take up my researches relating to the deaf, you will find something that may be of value to you all.
    We all know that some of the deaf have deaf children—not all, not even the majority—but some, a comparatively small number. In the vast majority of cases there are no deaf offspring, but in the remaining cases the proportion of offspring born deaf is very large, so large as to cause alarm to thoughtful minds.  Will it not be of interest and importance to you to find out why these few have deaf offspring? It may not be of much importance to you to inquire whether by and by, in a hundred years or so, we may have a deaf variety of the human race. That is a matter of great interest to scientific men, but not of special value to you. What you want to know and what you are interested in is this: are you yourself liable to have deaf offspring? Now, one value in my researches that you will find is this: that you can gain information which will assure you that you may increase your liability to have deaf offspring or diminish it, accord-ing to the way in which you marry.

He then quoted statistics which he had gathered at great expenditure of time and effort concerning the outcome of marriages among congenitally deaf persons, and continued:

    Persons who are reported deaf from birth, as a class, exhibit a tendency to transmit the defect; and yet when we come to individual cases we cannot decide with absolute certainty that any one was born deaf. Some who are reported deaf from birth probably lost hearing in infancy; others reported deaf in infancy were probably born deaf.For educational purposes the distinction may be immaterial, but, in the study of inheritance, it makes all the difference in the world whether the deafness occurred before or after birth.Now, in my researches, I think I have found a surer and more safe guide for those cases that are liable to transmit the defect.

    The new guide that I would give you is this: Look at the family rather than at the individual.You will find in certain families that one child is deaf and the rest hearing, the ancestors and other relatives also being free from deafness. This is what is known as a “sporadic” case of deafness—deafness which affects one only in a family. * * * The statistics collated by me (Memoir, p. 25) indicate that 816 marriages of deaf-mutes produce 82 deaf children.  In other words, every 100 marriages are productive of 10 deaf children. That is a result independent of the cause of deafness—an average of all cases considered. * * * Now, the point that I would impress upon you all is the significance of family deafness. I would have you remember that all the members of a family in which there are a number of deaf-mutes have a liability to produce deaf off-spring, the hearing members of the family as well as the deaf members.  This, I think, is the explanation of the curious fact that the congenitally deaf pupils of the Hartford Institution who married hearing persons had a larger percentage of deaf children than those who married deaf-mutes. It is probable that many of the hearing persons they married had brothers or sisters who were born deaf.

Of course, if you yourself were born deaf, or have deaf relatives, it is perfectly possible that in any event some of your children may be deaf.

Not only those concerned with the education and welfare of the deaf, but also the advisors and teachers of the blind are discouraging cacogenic marriages. Such at least is the testimony of Dr. Campbell, of the Ohio State School for the Blind. That persons of even less than average intelligence are liable to bring unfortunately endowed children into the world is evidenced by the testimony given the committee by several men, five or six out of a total of thirty, who were cross-examined and who were sterilized in the Jeffersonville (Indiana) Reformatory.

They expressed their satisfaction with their sterile condition, and said in substance that they were glad that they would not curse the world with “criminal children.”  The following extracts from letters written by intelligent persons demonstrates the fact that such persons are susceptible to eugenic education:
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« Reply #10 on: August 25, 2010, 05:59:08 pm »

Letter number one:

I am an “albino,” thirty-seven years old and single; the chief reason I am not married is I am unwilling to bring into existence another life to labor under the same disadvantages as I. I write this not in a grumbling, but simply a plain statement of a plain fact.
 

Letter number two:
 
My husband used to drink hard, and died of tuberculosis last October.  Both his father and mother drink hard * * * and all of the family on his side drink. Now what I would like to know is, will my two children, a girl of 18 months and a boy of 5 years and 6 months, inherit their father’s health and characteristics, or will they inherit my health, as I was the strongest both mentally and physically? I would like to know, as it has often worried me when I think of my children; if they should be like their paternal grandmother and grandfather I am sure I would rather the Lord would take them now while they are both innocent children.

Letter number three:

The male’s grandmother, on his father’s side, died from heart disease, and the female’s mother had a very serious case of valvular heart trouble, I should like to know as to whether heart diseases are inherit-able or, if there is only a tendency, may this be effectually warded off?  I shall very sincerely appreciate reliable advice you can matter. Perhaps it may assist in securing a freer expression that the parties interested broke the engagement on account of the above considerations, the facts being not known when the engagement. The following extracts from a letter, and the pedigrees that if describes, are presented in order to illustrate the fact that many per-sons upon being educated as to their own and their prospective mar-riage mate’s hereditary qualities, will, if hereditary defect be found, forego a contemplated marriage; or, if already married, will forego the privileges and comforts of parenthood if it be established that their offspring would be defective or degenerate. give me on this for me to state was entered into.

The following extracts from a letter, and the pedigrees that if describes, are presented in order to illustrate the fact that many persons upon being  educated as to their own and their prospective marriage mate’s hereditary qualities, will, if hereditary defect be found, forego a contemplated marriage; or, if already married, will forego the privileges and comforts of parenthood if it be established that their offspring would be defective or  degenerate.



Letter number four:


I am deeply interested in uncovering a family taint, which comes to me as a thunderbolt from a clear sky and which bids fair to wreck my own life in the possible permanent separation from my beloved son, a really brilliant youth of 22 years, a senior in the electrical engineering class at Armour Institute, to have graduated this past year, but who was compelled to leave school owing to a nervous breakdown. * * *Dr.—made a diagnosis of dementia præcox in January last, but did not tell me what the diagnosis was. * * * I find there is a deep-seated family taint, which I want to know is or is not responsible for the possible total annihilation of the only child I have — one I love better than my own life. My mother was the oldest of ten children, born near ——, New York. She is living today a healthy, normal woman at 74. She had five brothers, whose children were apparently normal with the exception of one, whose daughter had a few epileptic seizures. ——, one of the brothers, was insane for a short time, and confined in the—Asylum, but never had a recurrence of the attack. Of the girls in the family my mother was normal. The next had epileptic fits and was advised to marry young. She married a coarse, drunken farmer; had two normal daughters, so far as I know, and one who was an inmate of the—Insane Asylum, an epileptic until her death at 18 or 20 years. Mary, the next married, had epileptic fits, and died before middle age, had no children.—married, had a son and daughter normal, had epilepsy at 52 and lived but two years. The youngest was epileptic from birth, probably insane, died at about 24. My mother’s mother was a normal woman, lived to be 76, I believe, her father likewise, although I shall find that out later; her grandmother lived to an extreme old age, and my mother tells me now she believes she drank constantly. I am anxious to go farther back than that, if I can find the way. My father was a high-strung, nervous man of violent temper, and describes his mother as having been the same. My father was a graduate of—College, —— Theological, a minister, but his temper made life a hell on earth for us. My sister is 36, unmarried, a fine musician, pianist, but given to extreme sick headaches. My oldest brother was pronounced insane from birth, was whipped and punished by my father, and finally received a severe injury to the skull and brain in the coal mines at ——, Indiana, was sent to the insane asylum at ——, where he ran away some months later.  As there were few asylums in Indiana at that time, they did not take the trouble to go after him, and his life from that time on was a series of commitments to workhouses, jails and penitentiaries, for petty offences, insane with criminal tendencies. A year ago he died from enlargement of the spleen. * * * My younger brother was well educated, a fine musician, married a young girl, had two children, left taking a position with a circus, and we have not located him for thirteen years. The boy, his son, 14 years, is described as being exception-ally clever and interested, but played truant, lies and steals, and is at present in the Boys’ Reform School, at ——, Indiana.The little girl, about 11, is wayward, hard to control, and I should describe her as sex offending, if not held with a firm hand.My boy’s father was a drunkard, an easy-going, good-natured man, a steady drinker, had amassed a fortune of probably $30,000. The whole family are queer—one brother a spirit medium, the other a spirit photographer. I know little of them. His father was 20 years older than myself, died of Bright’s disease at 45. The boy is an only child, the father died when he was 14 months old. * * * My son was a brilliant student, a genius in fact, and would have made a name in the world. That he should be consigned to oblivion behind the walls of an insane asylum for the remainder of his life is a blow almost to great to bear.I want to find out whether he is punished for the sins of his ancestors in this rotten family.He did not smoke, drink, associate with lewd women, never had a venereal disease and did not practice ****. He had typhoid and scarlet fever, his sight was defective, born so. * * * If I could only assist you in establishing one little valuable item that would help us to understand why these fearful things have to be!If you would only help to educate the poor mothers and fathers of these neurotic children.


Letter number five:

I am referred to you with a problem of heredity in the case of epilepsy, and should appreciate being informed whether, in your judgment, the young man of whom I write should marry at all, and in case of marriage what are the prob-abilities of transmitting the disease. Inasmuch as I am the woman whom he wishes to marry, I wish to know as nearly absoutely as possible what the risk is. * * * Two physicians have told me that the danger of passing on the heritage of disease is too great—one a specialist in nervous diseases. * * * I should like to have it settled and to feel that my stand is taken in accordance with the best authority.I am sorry my information is not more complete and detailed.I have been told that the young boy who died in the home was very bad off, and a continual care all his life, requiring one person’s constant atten-tion. My physician in—said the disease never was stamped out in a family where it once existed, that it might skip one generation or two, but was sureto appear again.


Then follow extracts from a series of letters from the young man, giving quite extended and apparently frank descriptions of epilepsy in his own family.

Letter number six:

I have read in a number of magazine and newspapers articles of the work being done by you, and, if you can consistently consider the same, desire to present a personal case to you for consideration and advice.  At about the age of 12 years the writer suffered from a case of acute Anterior Poliomyelitis,the same affecting the lower limbs only, from the hip joints. After a period of some three or four months, during which time the limbs were in a completely paralyzed condition, the strength began to slowly return, and after a lapse of some eight to ten months was able to get about with a cane.
All this was some ten or twelve years ago, the writer at the present time being 24 years of age. He still uses a cane in walking, both lower limbs are somewhat undersized, the bones apparently not being fully developed and the muscles scanty, the right leg being a very small amount shorter than the left.  The party is fitted for any kind of office work or other light occupation, which does not require manual labor or necessitates being on the feet all the time, but does not possess sufficient strength or agility to do manual labor or move about rapidly or very quickly.
The writer is one of a family of four children, three of whom are living, one having died of some kidney trouble recently, the remainder, excepting the writer, being in apparently normal condition. The parents are both living, aged about 55 years, both normal and healthy. The grandparents were all strong and healthy, both families raising a family of ten children, and living to the age of near 75 years, except maternal grandfather, who died of some fever when he was near 50 years of age. Great-grandparents were normal in all respects, as far as I can learn. The case referred to is the only one ofAnterior Poliomyelitis known to occur in four generations referred to.

The information desired is this: Would the offspring of a union between the writer, constituted as covered in the former part of this communication, and a woman, to all appearances in a perfectly normal condition, and whose family record for three generations shows no cases ofAnterior Poliomyelitis,be likely to develop this disease, or a tendency toward the same?  If you can give me any information along this line the same will be very much appreciated.

P. S.—As a matter of information, will add that since childhood, aside from the disease referred to, the writer has been in absolutely perfect health, the only difficulty being that of imperfect power of locomotion.


This letter is quite typical of those received from persons suffering not only from the so-called functional disorders, but also, as in this case, of persons suffering from the results of infectious diseases wherein the exciting cause is not hereditary and the factor of heredity in the predisposing causes cannot in the present state of knowledge be accurately measured. Such mental attitudes are eugenically wholesome.

With the growth and diffusion of knowledge concerning human heredity a national eugenic conscience will develop. Eugenics should not—and could not often, if it would—prevent lovers from marrying; but early eugenical training will in a measure regulate “falling in love.” If an individual whose personality, or whose family, is weak or defective in reference to a particular trait, marries, he should for his own and his descendants’ sake, seek a mate who is strong and whose family is strong, wherein he and his family are weak. If, however, it is the good of the race that is at stake, such a person possessing a very serious or handicapping hereditary defect may well not marry at all; and the person of high talent in one direction would seek—other things being equal—a consort from a family characterized by distinction in the same direction. Specialization in human, no less than in plant and animal, strains would result in greatly increased efficiency. 

Society must at all costs encourage an increased fecundity of the socially fit classes and must cut off the inheritance of individuals suffering from hereditary defects, which seriously handicap their fitting into the social fabric.
It, therefore, behooves the American people to educate along eugenical lines, not only the more sterling classes, to the end that they may make fortunate matings, but also those individuals with educable minds, who suffer from serious hereditary defects, to the end that they will voluntarily decline to increase their kind. These letters just quoted indicate that hereditary traits influence mate selection among persons knowing the manner of the inheritance of specific traits.  With intelligent people, then, eugenical marriage appears to be largely a matter of education. In individual cases, wherein this remedy fails, segregation or sterilization should be resorted to as a supporting measure. It may be fitting again to call attention to the eugenic value of the policy of resorting to segregation or sterilization in all cacogenic cases wherein it is apparent that preventive agencies have failed or will fail. If sterilization is opposed, let its opponents bestir themselves and make efficacious other remedies.

(5) Systems of matings purporting to remove defective traits.

Although it is known that defective traits of the recessive type will disappear somatically, in subsequent matings, so long as matings with normal individuals of pure strains are made, still in such families there is always a likelihood that a simplex (i. e.,a tainted germ-plasm, but normal personality) individual will mate with another person similarly descended. For the sake of brevity and conciseness, the accompanying hypothetical pedigree, rather than a series of actual histories, is given in order to illustrate what happens in such cases:



Hence the selection of certain potential parents, and the elimination of others, is the only basis of a possible effective eugenics program of any sort. It, therefore, behooves society to set in operation selective forces which can control mate selection in a practicable manner consonant with the highest moral and social ideals.

(6)General environmental betterment.  It is held by some schools of social workers that better schools, better churches, better food, better clothing, better living, and better social life will remedy almost any social inadequacy in individuals. The studies of this committee point strongly in the opposite direction. They prove conclusively that much social inadequacy is of a deep-seated biological nature, and can be remedied only by cutting off the human strains that produce it.

Heredity and environment work hand in hand; rarely do they pull oppositely.  As a rule, a good ancestral germ-plasm will furnish a good environment for the offspring and a bad ancestral germ-plasm will add to the degenerate hereditary gifts of its offspring a poor environment. Eugenics and euthenics each have their tasks to perform. Neither can perform the whole work required in advancing the social condition of mankind. 

(7)Polygamy. In animal breeding polygamy or the “pure sire method” has been one of the most potent agencies in rapid advancement and, could the essential biological principles of polygamy be applied to mankind, we should expect these same biological values to accrue. An eugenical program that advocates polygamy must be doomed to failure because it strikes at one of our most priceless heritages so laboriously wrought through centuries of moral struggle. It would be buying a biological benefit at vastly too great a moral cost. 

A eugenics program to be effective must and can be based upon an enhanced sense of monogamy, and of the sacredness of love and marital fidelity. If any serious students of the modern eugenical studies advocate polygamy, it is unknown to the members of this investigating committee, although many uninformed critics of the eugenics program unhesitatingly complain that eugenics proposes “to apply the methods of the stud farm to mankind.”

(8)Euthanasia.  The ancient Spartans were a race of fighters.  The business of the Spartan mothers was to grow soldiers for the State, and Spartan social life and customs appear to have been well directed toward this end. However much we deprecate Spartan ideals and her means of advancing them, we must admire her courage in so rigorously applying so practical a system of selection. According to history and tradition, Spartan officials exposed to the elements children who promised unfitness as adults for effective hand to hand combat.  Sparta produced soldiers and she consumed them, and left but little besides tales of personal valor to enhance the world’s culture. With euthanasia, as in the case of polygamy, an effective eugenical agency would be purchased at altogether too dear a moral price. Any individual once born should, in the opinion of the committee, be given every opportunity and aid for developing into a decent adulthood of maximum usefulness and happiness. Preventing the procreation of defectives rather than destroying them before birth, or in infancy, or in the later periods of life, must be the aim of modern eugenics.

(9)Neo-Malthusianism, or the purposeful limitation of the number of offspring, is a problem for the constructive side of the eugenics program to cope with, rather than an important factor for society to consider in its efforts to cut off the supply of defectives, for defectives of the lower types do not greatly limit sex indulgence by the fear of having children, nor do they resort to artificial means to prevent conception. Hence this remedy does not apply to them. Above this class there is doubtless another class of potential parents of all grades of mentality, and of all grades of social and financial standing who resort to artificial means to prevent conception.

With such classes selfishness is a ruling motive, but doubtless in many such cases the determining factors are traceable to current social influences, and as such should be combatted. In a letter dated January 14, 1913, to this committee, Theodore Roosevelt says:

As you say, it is obvious that if in the future racial qualities are to be improved, the improving must be wrought mainly by favoring the fecundity of the worthy type and frowning on the fecundity of the unworthy types.  At present we do just the reverse. There is no check to fecundity of those who are subnormal, both intellectually and morally, while the provident and thrifty tend to develop a cold selfishness, which makes them refuse to breed at all.

It is not an impossible conception to think of a future social status wherein selection for parenthood will be not held a natural right of every individual; but will be a prize highly sought by and allotted to only the best individuals of proven blood, and those individuals who are not deemed worthy and are by society denied the right to perpetuate their own traits in subsequent generations, will be held in pity by their fellows. In pointing out the possible ways of accomplishing it, and in perfecting the practical methods for its execution, the achievement of this ideal is, to speak briefly, the task of the eugenics program for the long indefinite future.

The choice between large and small families for provident parents of good innate traits will be made instantly in favor of large families by all eugenists, just as the same eugenists will insist that defective parents must be stopped from having any children at all.  The committee feels constrained to condemn in no uncertain terms the purposeful limiting of offspring of parents of worthy hereditary qualities.

(10) Laissez faire:
It is held in many quarters that a rational eugenics program is impossible, or, at best, that eugenic efforts are unnecessary, for, during the ages mankind appears to have improved and advanced without such a program. In reply, let it be said that modern social conditions have themselves in a large measure brought on the problems that face us; and it behooves society to bestir itself to solve them.

Natural selection would continue to cut off the individual blood lines grossly unadapted to modern conditions if it were permitted to operate. It is the bolstering up of the defective classes by a benefi-cent society that constitues the real menace to our blood, because it lowers the basis of parenthood. Usually nature does not long main-tain an unused function. If she gave mankind reason and under-standing, and such reason and understanding are not used for pro-moting their own conservation, then such faculties are apt to be dis-carded in the ruthlessness of natural selection. In this case the means would consist in disseminating defective traits among the general population, and such deterioration would continue until society itself would no longer be able to bolster up the defectives. Then fortunate combination of traits and natural selection would again operate, and in the long cycle a few worthy strains of mankind would again rise. 

There must be selection not only for progress, but even for maintaining the present standard. To the degree we inhibit natural selection, we must substitute rational selection, else our blood will deteriorate.  The marvelous rise of plants and animals under domestication—accomplishing in a few years results that in nature might never have been wrought, or if wrought would have consumed many times the length of time found sufficient by man—has been due to man’s applying a rational method in selecting parents. A similar possibility for the rise of the innate specialized qualities of the human stock is within the grasp of society; but like all great prizes it must be fought for and purchased at the price of great effort.


SUMMARY

Human society needs to avail itself of every possible means for its own advancement. Quite naturally, these means fall into two classes—

(1)   those pertaining to improving the condition of individuals already born;

(2) those concerning the improvement of the innate qualities of future generations.

The latter means is the concern of the science of eugenics, and eugenics in turn works quite naturally along two channels—

(1) concerning the increased fecundity and fortunate matings of the better classes;

(2) concerning the cutting off of the supply of defectives.

Eugenics is at best a long-time investment, and will appeal only to far-sighted patriots. Like all other long-time investments, the earlier and the greater the primary investment, in accordance with the familiar principle of geometrical progression, the vastly greater the end result. This particular investigation aims to fit into the general scheme of social betterment by attempting to point out a practicable means for accomplishing the cutting off of the supply of innate social misfits. 

It thus purports to be only one of several agencies of social advancement. It is the duty of human society to grasp every possible means for its amelioration, and, if it finds in the segregation and sterilization of defectives a means for improving the innate qualities of future generations without inflicting a present moral wound, it is the duty of society even at great cost and effort to bestir itself in applying such remedy. This investigation points very strongly to the fact that with all of the upbolstering influences of modern humanitarianism, natural forces no longer suffice to select only the fittest for the human breeding stock. We contend that the perpetuity of our civilization depends primarily upon the conservation of the best inborn traits of our citizens; and that a social order finding a key to the conservation of its best units—and failing to use it, is remiss in its social duty and will suffer racial deterioration. A successful society must at all hazards protect its breeding stock, and since, under modern conditions, a vigorous program of segregation supported by sterilization seems to present the only practicable means for accomplishing such end, a progressive social order must in sheer self-preservation accept it.

By the time a consistent elimination program has been in operation for two generations, the lines of descent of lowest levels of the American population will have been cut off, and during this time the institutions can be made more and more self-supporting, due continually to receiving a higher class of inmates and to administrative reform, and experience in practical self-maintenance. Gradually these institutions can be transformed into industrial schools, and can be used perpetually for educating, training and segregating the more unfortunate, and the least gifted members of the population. There will always be insane, feeble-minded and deformed individuals; but they need not constitute so large a proportion of our total population, nor need they contaminate our more worthy families.

If the history of human civilization and of plant and animal breeding have taught us anything they have taught us clearly that the human race is capable of vast improvement by rational selection of parents. And this can be done without sacrificing one whit our ideals of love and fidelity. Hand in hand with the working out of the eugenical program will come an increased and enhanced feeling of the sanctity of life and of parenthood.

This program for cutting off the lower levels of the human breeding stock is only a part of the general eugenics program, which must include also the positive side, namely, that of encouraging increased fecundity and fortunate matings among the better classes. Indeed, as time goes by, the business of eugenics will tend more and more toward this positive side,

aristogenics, it is sometimes called.

The program as outlined by the committee calls for a task that will require two generations for the completion of its first stage. No matter to what extent laws may be passed, unless the eugenics program becomes a part of the American civic religion, the financial support necessary to put it into execution cannot be secured from the several legislatures. Nor, with-out such general feeling, will it be possible even with abundant money to effectively execute a program.

If America is to escape the doom of nations generally, it must breed good Americans. The fall of every nation in history has been due to many causes, but always chiefest among these causes has been the decline of the national stock. Nations must change, but they need not of necessity die out. A quickened eugenics conscience is one of the prerequisites necessary to the working out of a successful eugenics program. Eugenics must be diffused through our religious and moral codes. It must be taught throughout our national educational system.  It must be the subject of continued research.

Along with eugenical advance will come social and moral advancement, for, if not, why should we try to breed better persons? The more moral society will foster the eugenics ideal, and the eugenics program will in turn produce people susceptible of a higher social and moral development.

To epitomize—of the several remedies reviewed
segregation and sterilization are the ones deemed by this committee
to be most feasible and effective in cutting off
from the human population the supply of defectives
.

Restrictive marriage laws and customs, eugenic education of the public, of prospective marriage consorts, and in youth of potential parents, and general environmental betterment are all eugenic agencies of great value.

In this particular problem, however, they rank greatly below segregation and sterilization, although in other social programs they are of prime importance. We condemn Neo-Malthusianism because in it we fail to find an agency able to cut off the supply of defectives, but, on the other hand, we find it fraught with great danger, in that it is more apt to strike at fecundity in our better classes than among degenerates. Systems of matings purporting to remove defec-tive traits, polygamy, euthanasia, and laissez-faire, are condemned unreservedly.

In the subsequent reports of the studies of this committee, we propose, by the means of first-hand facts, a considerable body of which has already been secured and studied, to present to the public data for weighing the several problems that appertain to this investigation. 


CHAPTER IV.

SUMMARY OF THE PRELIMINARY STUDIES.

In the preliminary studies of this committee facts concerning each of the several related aspects of the problem, enumerated in the preface of this study, have been and are still being collected. These studies appear amply to justify the commendation to the American people of the following program, which, if consistently followed by all of the states and the general government, will, we believe, in two generations largely but not entirely eliminate from the race the source of supply of the great anti-social human varieties which now (1913) constitute approximately 10 per cent. of the total population:

1.   That, in case sterilization is limited to the inmates of institu-tions, the American state institutions for the segregation and treatment of the anti-social classes continue to receive public support enabling them for at least two generations to increase their capacity for inmates at a ratio differential in reference to the increase of the total population, equal at least to one-half such differential growth of such institutions, taken as a whole, during the two decades 1890-1900. Such increase requires that by 1980 the custodial institutions of the country must be able to care for 1,500 persons per 100,000 population.

2.   That the present apparent tendency of society to commit to institutions the socially inadequate at an early age and for a less ex-treme type be encouraged in order (a) to insure the segregation of the varieties sought to eliminate before the beginning of, or as early as possible in, the reproductive period, and (b) that the earlier treatment and training may the more surely and safely restore such individuals to society.

3.   That the segregation program be supported by a sterilization program as follows: That during the period while under State custody every inmate (except those committed for life) of an institution maintained in whole or in part by the public funds be examined as to innate personal traits and family pedigree, and that all such inmates found to be potential parents with undesirable hereditary potentialities and not likely to be governed by the highest moral purpose shall be humanely sterilized prior to release from their respective custodians. Such a supplementary sterilization program will call for surgical sterilization of inmates prior to their release from institutions as follows: beginning with approximately 80 persons per year per 100,000 total population in 1915 and increasing to approximately 150 persons per year per 100,000 total population in 1980.

4.   Attention is called to the fact that the relation between the segregation feature and the sterilization feature of the program here-with proposed is automatic. If for humanitarian, social or other rea-sons, objection is made to sterilization, let society keep the potential parent with dangerous hereditary qualities segregated during the repro-ductive period ; if the objection to sterilization can be overcome, then convalescent inmates or persons having served their allotted commit-ments in institutions, though they be potential parents with dangerous hereditary qualities, can be first sterilized and then from a eugenical—but not necessarily from a social—point of view safely be returned to society. The committee feels that the proposed model sterilization law (Chapter VIII, Bulletin 10 B) provides amply for safeguarding the rights of the individual, for conserving humanitarian principles and at the same time for protecting society against the deterioration of the innate qualities of its members.

5.   From a moral, social, and religious, as well as from a biological and legal point of view, the program of segregation and sterilization is, the committee feels, justified because

(a)   It appears to be the duty of society to foster by all possible means the innate, as well as the acquired physical, mental and moral well-being of the race, and this program promises the promotion of such an end.

(b)   It proposes to sterilize and thus cut off the lines of descent only of persons amply demonstrated in each particular case to be unable to understand, or, if understanding, morally unable to inhibit or control himself or herself in a manner preventing the continuance of his or her unworthy traits.  To permit such individuals to reproduce their kind is neither merciful nor just.

(c)   The consent of the inmate (or his guardians) to the necessary operation can often be secured, thus relieving the State from imposing upon an individual, even though he be defec-tive or insane, who may, because of such operation, bear some resentment against society. When possible such con-sent should be secured, but if such consent cannot be secured then the operation must proceed, for the protection of society must outweigh the desires or privileges of an anti-social individual.

(d)   There is evidence to show that sex immorality is not encour-aged or increased as a result of the sterilization of those manifestly unfit for parenthood. Our investigations indicate that such persons seldom are deterred from immoral prac-tices by any consideration which sterilization would remove, nor does the sterilization of degenerates appear further to break down the modicum of self-respect and control that normally belong to such individuals.

6.   It is felt that the sterilization law proposed by the committee will stand the test of constitutionality by the courts. The purely punitive sterilization law of the State of Washington was recently held by the Supreme Court of that state to be neither “cruel nor unusual.” A purely eugenical law, expertly drawn and operating humanely and applicable only to individuals who by due process of law and by scien-tific investigation are demonstrated to be social menaces of the gravest character, would probably be found constitutional in any of the several States.

7.   The Federal Government should exercise the same care in preventing the landing of inferior human breeding stock that the State governments should take in eliminating the inferior varieties from the stock already settled here. It should also apply eugenic principles in the administration of its several institutions for criminals and insane.

8.   That the segregation and sterilization feature of the proposed program be further supported by legislation and by education applic-able to persons with physical disabilities (such as hereditary blindness, deafness, deformity, constitutional weakness, and predisposition to specific diseases), but still possessed of normal mind and subject to social influence and amenable to law. If the defect be an extreme sort, such persons should be deterred from parenthood by eugenical educa-tion during their youth. Such education should be supported by laws and customs limiting or prohibiting their marriage. With some in dividuals of these classes sterilization by consent may be desirable. If these remedies fail with any particular group of the physically inade-quate, then such group of individuals should be classed as socially inadequate and as such should be subjected to the legal segregation and sterilization features of this program.

9.   Due continually to receiving a higher grade of inmates and to extending the colonization and industrial systems for better treatment and partial self-maintenance of inmates, it is probable that the necessary increased institution capacity demanded by the recommended program can be provided for without greatly increasing the expense burden in relation to the total state budgets and to the per capita expense to the total population. With institutional growth will come a greater de-mand for trained physicians, eugenists and administrators with a con-sequent increased skill in diagnosis and treatment and in determining the hereditary qualities and innate traits of the inmates, all of which will tend to accelerate the attainment of the desired ends.

10.   Sterilization of a male by vasectomy skillfully executed is a simple, safe, and effective method for preventing procreation by him without otherwise greatly disturbing his physiological, mental or social economy. By skillful surgical technique and sometimes—though very rarely—by natural processes the vas may be re-anastimosed and the procreatory functions thereby restored. Castration therefore appears to be the only absolutely sure method of sterilizing males, but when young boys are thus operated upon it appears also to inhibit the develop-ment of their secondary sexual characteristics as well as to destroy the procreatory functions. Castration of adult males seems to be unaccom-panied by any great physiological change other than sterilization. For general eugenic purposes, vasectomy carefully executed is considered sufficiently certain to insure effective sterilization. It is recommended as the best general method where it is considered desirable to sterilize cacogenic males; to be supplanted by other operations only for addi-tional medical or social reasons.

11.   The sterilization of the female—whether ovariotomy, salpin-gectomy, or hysterectomy—is a more serious matter. However, mod-ern surgery and hospital care have greatly reduced the danger of such operations. Salpingectomy and hysterectomy successfully executed have but little physiological effect other than the effective sterilization of females of any age, nor does ovariotomy often have any apparent untoward effects upon adult women. Rare cases of women regenerating ovaries—which were thought to have been entirely removed—and bearing children have been reported. In any effective sterilization program, defective females will have to be sterilized in fair proportion to the number of males thus operated upon, else a substantial reduction in the anti-social strains of our population will be greatly retarded.

12.   In some individual cases of sterilization, a therapeutic value, and in others—though quite rarely—an injury, appears to have been wrought.Oftentimes the inmates of institutions are sterilized for purely therapeutic reasons. The committee feels that the application of eugenical sterilization should in no way interfere with such practice.  If, incidental to such an operation, a defective line of inheritance is cut off, a eugenic end is also accomplished. Nor should there be any law forbidding in private practice the surgical operation of sterilization for eugenical reasons upon persons at their own or their families’ request. In general the same laws that govern criminal surgery and malpractice should govern a possible abuse of these operations.

13.   By the consistent application of the segregation, sterilization, and education program herewith reported the American people can in two generations largely purge their blood of the great mass of innately defective traits from which they now suffer.
For the negative side or the cutting off of defectives, it would appear to be a good policy continually to attack in the manner described in Chapter IX of study No. II, the descent lines of the lowest one-tenth of our population. 

Continuous decimal elimination should become a part
of the eugenics creed of civilized people.


The future efforts of this committee will be directed toward extending, evaluating, analyzing, and interpreting the data now being accumulated; and reporting the results of its investigations in a series of studies...
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CHAPTER THREE


General Electric Funds Hitler

http://www.reformation.org/wall-st-ch3.html

Among the early Roosevelt fascist measures was the National Industry Recovery Act (NRA) of June 16, 1933. The origins of this scheme are worth repeating. These ideas were first suggested by Gerard Swope of the General Electric Company ... following this they were adopted by the United States Chamber of Commerce .... (Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952, Nuremburg 420).

The multi-national giant General Electric has an unparalleled role in twentieth-century history. The General Electric Company electrified the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and fulfilled for the Soviets Lenin's dictum that "Socialism = electrification."1 The Swope Plan, created by General Electric's one-time president Gerard Swope, became Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, by a process deplored by one-time President Herbert Hoover and described in Wall Street and FDR.2 There was a long-lasting, intimate relationship between Swope and Young of General Electric Company and the Roosevelt family, as there was between General Electric and the Soviet Union. In 1936 Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, an early Roosevelt supporter, became aware of Roosevelt's betrayal of liberal ideas and attacked the Roosevelt New Deal program as a "tyrannical" measure "leading to despotism, [and] sought by its sponsors under the communistic cry of 'Social Justice.'" Senator Reed further charged on the floor of the Senate that Franklin D. Roosevelt was a "hired man for the economic royalists" in Wall Street and that the Roosevelt family "is one of the largest stockholders in the General Electric Company."3

As we probe into behind-the-scenes German inter war history and the story of Hitler and Nazism, we find both Owen D. Young and Gerard Swope of General Electric tied to the rise of Hitlerism and the suppression of German democracy. That General Electric directors are to be found in each of these three distinct historical categories — i.e., the development of the Soviet Union, the creation of Roosevelt's New Deal, and the rise of Hitlerism — suggests how elements of Big Business are keenly interested in the socialization of the world, for their own purposes and objectives, rather than the maintenance of the impartial market place in a free society.4 General Electric profited handsomely from Bolshevism, from Roosevelt's New Deal socialism, and, as we shall see below, from national socialism in Hitler's Germany.

General Electric in Weimar Germany

Walter Rathenau was, until his assassination in 1922, managing director of Allgemeine Elekrizitats Gesellschaft (A.E.G,), or German General Electric, and like Owen Young and Gerard Swope, his counterparts in the U.S., he was a prominent advocate of corporate socialism. Walter Rathenau spoke out publicly against competition and free enterprise, Why? Because both Rathanau and Swope wanted the protection and cooperation of the state for their own corporate objectives and profit. (But not of course for anybody else's objectives and profits.) Rathanau expressed their plea in The New Political Economy:

    The new economy will, as we have seen, be no state or governmental economy but a private economy committed to a civic power of resolution which certainly will require state cooperation for organic consolidation to overcome inner friction and increase production and endurance.5

When we disentangle the turgid Rathenau prose, this means that the power of the State was to be made available to private firms for their own corporate purposes, i.e., what is popularly known as national socialism. Rathenau spoke out publicly against competition and free enterprise. inheritance."6 Not their own wealth, so far as can be determined, but the wealth of others who lacked political pull in the State apparatus.

Owen D. Young of General Electric was one of the three U.S. delegates to the 1923 Dawes Plan meeting which established the German reparations program. And in the Dawes and Young Plans we can see how some private firms were able to benefit from the power of the State. The largest single loans from Wall Street to Germany during the 1920s were reparations loans; it was ultimately the U.S. investor who paid for German reparations. The cartelization of the German electrical industry under A.E.G. (as well as the steel and chemical industries discussed in Chapters One and Two) was made possible with these Wall Street loans:



In 1928, at the Young Plan reparations meetings, we find General Electric president Owen D. Young in the chair as the chief U.S. delegate, appointed by the U.S. government to use U.S. government power and prestige to decide international financial matters enhancing Wall Street and General Electric profits. In 1930 Owen D. Young, after whom the Young Plan for German reparations was named, became chairman of the Board of General Electric Company in New York City. Young was also chairman of the Executive Committee of Radio Corporation of America and a director of both German General Electric (A.E.G.) and Osram in Germany. Young also served on the boards of other major U.S. corporations, including General Motors, NBC, and RKO; he was a councilor of the National Industrial Conference Board, a director of the International Chamber of Commerce, and deputy chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Gerard Swope was president and director of General Electric Company as well as French and German associated companies, including A.E.G. and Osram in Germany. Swope was also a director of RCA, NBC, and the National City Bank of New York. Other directors of International General Electric at this time reflect Morgan control of the company, and both Young and Swope were generally known as the Morgan representatives on the G.E. board, which included Thomas Cochran, another partner in the J.P. Morgan firm. General Electric director Clark Haynes Minor was president of International General Electric in the 1920s. Another director was Victor M. Cutter of the First National Bank of Boston and a figure in the "Banana Revolutions" in Central America.

In the late 1920s Young, Swope, and Minor of International General Electric moved into the German electrical industry and gained, if not control as some have reported, then at least a substantial say in the internal affairs of both A.E.G. and Osram. In July 1929 an agreement was reached between General Electric and three German firms — A.E.G., Siemens & Halske, and Koppel and Company — which between them owned all the shares in Osram, the electric bulb manufacturer. General Electric purchased 16% percent of Osram stock and reached a joint agreement for international control of electric bulbs production and marketing. Clark Minor and Gerard Swope became directors of Osram.7

In July 1929 great interest was shown in rumors circulating in German financial circles that General Electric was also buying into A.E.G. and that talks to this end were in progress between A.E.G. and G.E.8 In August it was confirmed that 14 million marks of common A.E.G. stock were to be issued to General Electric. These shares, added to shares bought on the open market, gave General Electric a 25-percent interest in A.E.G. A closer working agreement was signed between the two companies, providing the German company U.S. technology and patents. It was emphasized in the news reports that A.E.G. would not have participation in G.E., but that on the other hand G.E. would finance expansion of A.E.G. in Germany.9 The German financial press also noted that there was no A.E.G. representation on the board of G.E. in the United States but that five Americans were now on the board of A.E.G. The Vossische Zeitung recorded,

The American electrical industry has conquered the world, and only a few of the remaining opposing bastions have been able to withstand the onslaught...10


By 1930, unknown to the German financial press, General Electric had similarly gained an effective technical monopoly of the Soviet electrical industry and was soon to penetrate even the remaining bastions in Germany, particularly the Siemens group. In January 1930 three G.E. men were elected to the board of A.E.G. — Clark H. Minor, Gerard Swope, and E. H. Baldwin — and International General Electric (I.G.E.) continued its moves to merge the world electrical industry into a giant cartel under Wall Street control.

In February General Electric focused on the remaining German electrical giant, Siemens & Halske, and while able to obtain a large block of debentures issued on behalf of the German firm by Dillon, Read of New York, G.E. was not able to gain participation or directors on the Siemens board. While the German press recognized even this limited control as" an historical economic event of the first order and an important step toward a future world electric trust,"11 Siemens retained its independence from General Electric — and this independence is important for our story. The New York Times reported,

The entire press emphasizes the fact that Siemens, contrary to A.E.G., maintains its independence for the future and points out that no General Electric representative will sit on Siemens board of directors.12


There is no evidence that Siemens, either through Siemens & Halske or Siemens-Schukert, participated directly in the financing of Hitler. Siemens contributed to Hitler only slightly and indirectly through a share participation in Osram. On the other hand, both A.E.G. and Osram directly financed Hitler through the Nationale Treuhand in substantial ways. Siemens retained its independence in the early 1930s while both A.E.G. and Osram were under American dominance and with American directors. There is no evidence that Siemens, without American directors, financed Hitler. On the other hand, we have irrefutable documentary evidence (see page 56) that both German General Electric and Osram, both with American directors, financed Hitler.

In the months following the attempted Wall Street take over of Siemens, the pattern of a developing world trust in the electrical industry clarified; there was an end to international patent fights and the G.E. interest in A.E.G. increased to nearly 30 percent.13

Consequently, in the early 1930s, as Hitler prepared to grab dictatorial power in Germany — backed by some, but by no means all, German and American industrialists — the German General Electric (A.E.G.) was owned by International General Electric (about 30 percent), the Gesellschaft für Electrische Unternemungen (25 percent), and Ludwig Lowe (25 percent). International General Electric also had an interest of about 16 2/3rds percent in Osram, and an additional indirect influence in



Osram through A.E.G. directors. On the board of A.E.G., apart from the four American directors (Young, Swope, Minor, and Baldwin), we find Pferdmenges of Oppenheim & Co. (another Hitler financier), and Quandt, who owned 75 percent of Accumlatoren-Fabrik, a major direct financier of Hitler. In other words, among the German board members of A.E.G. we find representatives from several of the German firms that financed Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s.


General Electric and the Financing of Hitler

The tap root of modern corporate socialism runs deep into the management of two affiliated multi-national corporations: General Electric Company in the United States and its foreign associates, including German General Electric (A.E.G.), and Osram in Germany. We have noted that Gerard Swope, second president and chairman of General Electric, and Walter Rathanau of A.E.G. promoted radical ideas for control of the State by private business interests.

From 1915 onwards International General Electric (I.G.E.), located at 120 Broadway in New York City, acted as the foreign investment, manufacturing, and selling organization for the General Electric Company. I.G.E. held interests in overseas manufacturing companies including a 25 to 30-percent holding in German General Electric (A.E.G.), plus holdings in Osram G.m.b.H. Kommanditgesellschaft, also in Berlin. These holdings gave International General Electric four directors on the board of A.E.G., and another director at Osram, and significant influence in the internal domestic policies of these German companies. The significance of this General Electric ownership is that A.E.G. and Osram were prominent suppliers of funds for Hitler in his rise to power in Germany in 1933. A bank transfer slip dated March 2, 1933 from A.E.G. to Delbruck Schickler & Co. in Berlin requests that 60,000 Reichsmark be deposited in the "Nationale Treuhand" (National Trusteeship) account for Hitler's use. This slip is reproduced on page 56.

I.G. Farben was the most important of the domestic financial backers of Hitler, and (as noted elsewhere) I.G. Farben controlled American I.G. Moreover, several directors of A.E.G. were also on the board of I.G. Farben — i.e., Hermann Bucher, chairman of A.E.G. was on the I.G. Farben board; so were A.E.G. directors Julius Flechtheim and Walter von Rath. I.G. Farben contributed 30 percent of the 1933 Hitler National Trusteeship (or takeover) fund.



Original transfer slip dated March 2, 1933 from German General Electric to Delbrück, Schickler Bank in Berlin, with instructions to pay 60,000 RM to the "Nationale Treuhand" fund (administered by Hjalmar Schacht and Rudolph Hess) used to elect Hitler in March 1933.

Source: Nuremburg Military Tribunal, document No. 391-395.

Walter Fahrenhorst of A.E.G. was also on the board of Phoenix A-G, Thyssen A-G and Demag A-G — and all were contributors to Hitler's fund. Demag A-G contributed 50,000 RM to Hitler's fund and had a director with A.E.G.— the notorious Friedrich Flick, and early Hitler supporter, who was later convicted at the Nuremberg Trials. Accumulatoren Fabrik A-G was a Hitler contributor (25,000 RM, see page 60) with two directors on the A.E.G. board, August Pfeffer and Gunther Quandt. Quandt personally owned 75 percent of Accumulatoren Fabrik.

Osram Gesellschaft, in which International General Electric had a 16 2/3rds direct interest, also had two directors on the A.E.G. board: Paul Mamroth and Heinrich Pferls. Osram contributed 40,000 RM directly to the Hitler fund. The Otto Wolff concern, Vereinigte Stahlwerke A-G, recipient of substantial New York loans in the 1920s, had three directors on the A.E.G. board: Otto Wolff, Henry Nathan and Jakob Goldschmidt. Alfred Krupp yon Bohlen, sole owner of the Krupp organization and an early supporter of Hitler, was a member of the Aufsichsrat of A.E.G. Robert Pferdmenges, a member of Himmler's Circle of Friends, was also a director of A, E.G.

In other words, almost all of the German directors of German General Electric were financial supporters of Hitler and associated not only with A.E.G. but with other companies financing Hitler.

Walter Rathenau14 became a director of A,E.G. in 1899 and by the early twentieth century was a director of more than 100 corporations. Rathenau was also author of the" Rathenau Plan," which bears a remarkable resemblance to the "Swope Plan" — i.e., FDR's New Deal but written by Swope of G.E. In other words, we have the extraordinary coincidence that the authors of New Deal-like plans in the U.S. and Germany were also prime backers of their implementers: Hitler in Germany and Roosevelt in the U.S.

Swope was chairman of the board of General Electric Company and International General Electric. In 1932 the American directors of A.E.G, were prominently connected with American banking and political circles as follows:



In brief, we have hard evidence of unquestioned authenticity (see p. 56) to show that German General Electric contributed substantial sums to Hitler's political fund. There were four American directors of A.E.G. (Baldwin, Swope, Minor, and Clark), which was 80 percent owned by International General Electric. Further, I.G.E. and the four American directors were the largest single interest and consequently had the greatest single influence in A.E.G. actions and policies. Even further, almost all other directors of A.E.G. were connected with firms (I. G. Farben, Accumulatoren Fabrik, etc.) which contributed directly — as firms — to Hitler's political fund. However, only the German directors of A.E.G were placed on trial in Nuremburg in 1945.


Technical Cooperation with Krupp

Quite apart from financial assistance to Hitler, General Electric extended its assistance to cartel schemes with other Hitler backers for their mutual benefit and the benefit of the Nazi state. Cemented tungsten carbide is one example of this G.E.-Nazi cooperation. Prior to November 1928, American industries had several sources for both tungsten carbide and tools and dies containing this hard-metal composition. Among these sources were the Krupp Company of Essen, Germany, and two American firms to which Krupp was then shipping and selling, the Union Wire Die Corporation and Thomas Prosser & Son. In 1928 Krupp obligated itself to grant licenses under United States patents which it owned to the Firth-Sterling Steel Company and to the Ludlum Steel Company. Before 1928, this tungsten carbide for use in tools and dies sold in the United states for about $50 a pound.

The United States patents which Krupp claimed to own were assigned from Osram Kommanditgesellschaft, and had been previously assigned by the Osram Company of Germany to General Electric. However, General Electric had also developed its own patents, principally the Hoyt and Gilson patents, covering competing processes for cemented tungsten carbide. General Electric believed that it could utilize these patents independently without infringing on or competing with Krupp patents. But instead of using the G.E. patents independently in competition with Krupp, or testing out its rights under the patent laws, General Electric worked out a cartel agreement with Krupp to pool the patents of both parties and to give General Electric a monopoly control of tungsten carbide in the United States.



Original transfer slip dated March 9, 1933 from AccumulatorenFabrik to Delbrück, Schíckler Bank in Berlin, with instructions to pay 25; 000 RM to the "Nationale Treuhand" fund, administered by Hjalmar Schacht and Rudolph Hess to elect Hitler in March 1933.
Gunther Quandt, the dominant shareholder (75 percent) of Accumulatoren, was also a director of German General Electric.
Source: Nuremburg Military Tribunal, document NI-391-395.

The first step in this cartel arrangement was taken by Carboloy Company, Inc., a General Electric subsidiary, incorporated for the purpose of exploiting tungsten carbide. The 1920s price of around $50 a pound was raised by Carboloy to $458 a pound. Obviously, no firm could sell any great amounts of tungsten carbide in this price range, but the price would maximize profits for G.E. In 1934 General Electric and Carboloy were also able to obtain, by purchase, the license granted by Krupp to the Ludlum Steel Company, thereby eliminating one competitor. In 1936, Krupp was induced to refrain from further imports into the United States. Part of the price paid for the elimination from the American market of tungsten carbide manufactured abroad was a reciprocal undertaking that General Electric and Carboloy would not export from the U.S. Thus these American companies tied their own hands by contract, or permitted Krupp to tie their hands, and denied foreign markets to American industry. Carboloy Company then acquired the business of Thomas Prosser & Son, and in 1937, for nearly $1 million, Carboloy acquired the competing business of the Union Wire Die Corporation. By refusing to sell, Krupp cooperated with General Electric and Carboloy to persuade Union Wire Die Corporation to sell out.

Licenses to manufacture tungsten carbide were then refused. A request for license by the Crucible Steel Company was refused in 1936. A request by the Chrysler Corporation for a license was refused in 1938. A license by the Triplett Electrical Instrument Company was refused on April 25, 1940. A license was also refused to the General Cable Company. The Ford Motor Company for several years expressed strong opposition to the high-price policy followed by the Carboloy Company, and at one point made a request for the right to manufacture for its own use. This was refused. As a result of these tactics, General Electric and its subsidiary Carboloy emerged in 1936 or 1937 with virtually a complete monopoly of tungsten carbide in the United States.

In brief, General Electric — with the cooperation of another Hitler supporter, Krupp — jointly obtained for G,E. a monopoly in the U.S. for tungsten carbide. So when World War II began, General Electric had a monopoly at an established price of $450 a pound — almost ten times more than the 1928 price — and use in the U.S. had been correspondingly restricted,


A.E.G. Avoids the Bombs in World War II


By 1939 the German electrical industry had become closely affiliated with two U.S. firms: International General Electric and International Telephone and Telegraph. The largest firms in German electrical production and their affiliations listed in order of importance were:



In other words, in 1939 the German electrical equipment industry was concentrated into a few major corporations linked in an international cartel and by stock ownership to two .major U.S. corporations. This industrial complex was never a prime target for bombing in World War II. The A.E.G. and I.T.T. plants were hit only incidentally in area raids and then but rarely. The electrical equipment plants bombed as targets were not those affiliated with U.S. firms. It was Brown Boveri at Mannheim and Siemensstadt in Berlin — which were not connected with the U.S. — who were bombed. As a result, German production of electrical war equipment rose steadily throughout World War II, peaking as late as 1944. According to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports, "In the opinion of Speers' assistants and plant officials, the war effort in Germany was never hindered in any important manner by any shortage of electrical equipment."15

One example of the non-bombing policy for German General Electric was the A. E.G. plant at 185 Muggenhofer Strasse, Nuremburg. Study of this plant's output in World War II is of interest because it illustrates the extent to which purely peacetime production was converted to war work. The pre-war plant manufactured household equipment, such as hot plates, electric ranges, electric irons, toasters, industrial baking ovens, radiators, water heaters, kitchen ovens, and industrial heaters. In 1939, 1940 and 1941, most of the Nuremburg plant's production facilities were used for the manufacture of peacetime products. In 1942 the plant's production was shifted to manufacture of war equipment. Metal parts for communications equipment and munitions such as bombs and mines were made. Other war production consisted of parts for searchlights and amplifiers. The following tabulation very strikingly shows the conversion to war work:



Original transfer slip dated February 27, 1933 from I.G. Farben to Delbrück, Schickler Bank in Berlin with instructions to pay 4000,000 RM to the "Nationale Treuhand" fund (administered by Hjalmar Schacht and Rudolph Hess) used to elect Hitler in March 1933.

Source: Nuremburg Military Tribunal, document No. NI-391-395.

The actual physical damage by bombing to this plant was insignificant. No serious damage occurred until the raids of February 20 and 21, 1945, near the end of the war, and then protection had been fairly well developed. Raids during which bombs struck in the plant area and the trifling damage done are listed as follows:



Another example of a German General Electric plant not bombed is the A.E.G. plant at Koppelsdorf producing radar sets and bomber antennae. Other A.E.G. plants which were not bombed and their war equipment production were:



That the A.E.G. plants in Germany were not bombed in World War II was confirmed by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, officered by such academics as John K. Galbraith and such Wall Streeters as George W. Ball and Paul H. Nitze. Their "German Electrical Equipment Industry Report" dated January 1947 concludes:

    The industry has never been attacked as a basic target system, but a few plants, i.e. Brown Boveri at Mannheim, Bosch at Stuutgart and Siemenstadt in Berlin, have been subjected to precision raids; many others were hit in area raids.17

At the end of World War II an Allied investigation team known as FIAT was sent to examine bomb damage to German electrical industry plants. The team for the electrical industry consisted of Alexander G.P.E. Sanders of International Telephone and Telegraph of New York, Whit-worth Ferguson of Ferguson Electric Company, New York, and Erich J. Borgman of Westinghouse Electric. Although the stated objective of these teams was to examine the effects on Allied bombing of German targets, the objective of this particular team was to get the German electrical equipment industry back into production as soon as possible. Whirworth Ferguson wrote a report dated March 31, 1945 on the A.E.G. Ostland-werke and concluded, "this plant is immediately available for production of fine metal parts and assemblies.18

To conclude, we find that both Rathenau of A.E.G. and Swope of General Electric in the U.S. had similar ideas of putting the State to work for their own corporate ends. General Electric was prominent in financing Hitler, it profited handsomely from war production — and yet it managed to evade bombing in World War II. Obviously the story briefly surveyed here deserves a much more thorough — and official — investigation.



Footnotes

1 For the technical details see the three-volume study, Antony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1968, 1971), 1973), hereafter cited as Western Technology Series.

2 (New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1975)

3 New York Times, October 6, 1936. See also Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and FDR, op. cit.

4 Of course, socialist pleading by businessmen is still with us. Witness the injured cries when President Ford proposed deregulation of airlines and trucking. See for example Wall Street Journal, November 25, 1975.

5 Mimeographed Translation in Hoover Institution Library, p. 67. Also see Walter Rathenau, In Days to Come, (London: Allen & Unwin, n.d.)

6 Ibid, p. 249.

7 New York Times, July 2, 1929.

8 Ibid, July 28, 1929.

9 Ibid, August 2, 1929 and August 4, 1929.
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« Reply #12 on: August 25, 2010, 06:08:22 pm »

Eugenics Record Office.

BULLETIN No. 10A:

Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population.

I. THE SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE'S WORK, by HARRY H. LAUGHLIN,
Secretary of the Committee,
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York, February, 1914.

Since the above report so reeks of social darwinism, I thought I'd post an extensive excerpt from Book X (Chapters 1 & 2) of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, wherein George provides one of the most powerful refutations of social darwinism ever written:

----------------------------------------

http://schalkenbach.org/library/henry-george/p+p/ppcont.html

Progress and Poverty

Book X: The Law of Human Progress

Chapter 1: The Current Theory of Human Progress—Its Insufficiency

If the conclusions at which we have arrived are correct, they will fall under a larger generalization.

Let us, therefore, recommence our inquiry from a higher standpoint, whence we may survey a wider field.

What is the law of human progress?

This is a question which, were it not for what has gone before, I should hesitate to review in the brief space I can now devote to it, as it involves, directly or indirectly, some of the very highest problems with which the human mind can engage. But it is a question which naturally comes up. Are or are not the conclusions to which we have come consistent with the great law under which human development goes on?

What is that law? We must find the answer to our question; for the current philosophy, though it clearly recognizes the existence of such a law, gives no more satisfactory account of, it than the current political economy does of the persistence of want amid advancing wealth.

Let us, as far as possible, keep to the firm ground of facts. Whether man was or was not gradually developed from an animal, it is not necessary to inquire. However intimate may be the connection between questions which relate to man as we know him and questions which relate to his genesis, it is only from the former upon the latter that light can be thrown. Inference cannot proceed from the unknown to the known. It is only from facts of which we are cognizant that we can infer what has preceded cognizance.

However man may have originated, all we know of him is as man—just as he is now to be found. There is no record or trace of him in any lower condition than that in which savages are still to be met. By whatever bridge he may have crossed the wide chasm which now separates him from the brutes, there remain of it no vestiges. Between the lowest savages of whom we know and the highest animals, there is an irreconcilable difference—a difference not merely of degree, but of kind. Many of the characteristics, actions, and emotions of man are exhibited by the lower animals; but man, no matter how low in the scale of humanity, has never yet been found destitute of one thing of which no animal shows the slightest trace, a clearly recognizable but almost undefinable something, which gives him the power of improvement—which makes him the progressive animal.

The beaver builds a dam, and the bird a nest, and the bee a cell; but while beavers' dams, and birds' nests, and bees' cells are always constructed on the same model, the house of the man passes from the rude hut of leaves and branches to the magnificent mansion replete with modern conveniences. The dog can to a certain extent connect cause and effect, and may be taught some tricks; but his capacity in these respects has not been a whit increased during all the ages he has been the associate of improving man, and the dog of civilization is not a whit more accomplished or Intelligent than the dog of the wandering savage. We know of no animal that uses clothes, that cooks its food, that makes itself tools or weapons, that breeds other animals that it wishes to eat, or that has an articulate language. But men who do not do such things have never yet been found, or heard of, except in fable. That is to say, man, wherever we know him, exhibits this power—of supplementing what nature has done for him by what he does for himself; and, in fact, so inferior is the physical endowment of man, that there is no part of the world, save perhaps some of the small islands of the Pacific, where without this faculty he could maintain an existence.

Man everywhere and at all times exhibits this faculty—everywhere and at all times of which we have knowledge he has made some use of it. But the degree in which this has been done greatly varies. Between the rude canoe and the steamship; between the boomerang and the repeating rifle; between the roughly carved wooden idol and the breathing marble of Grecian art; between savage knowledge and modern science; between the wild Indian and the white settler; between the Hottentot woman and the belle of polished society, there is an enormous difference.

The varying degrees in which this faculty is used cannot be ascribed to differences in original capacity—the most highly improved peoples of the present day were savages within historic times, and we meet with the widest differences between peoples of the same stock. Nor can they be wholly ascribed to differences in physical environment—the cradles of learning and the arts are now in many cases tenanted by barbarians, and within a few years great cities rise on the hunting grounds of wild tribes. All these differences are evidently connected with social development. Beyond perhaps the veriest rudiments, it becomes possible for man to improve only as he lives with his fellows. All these improvements, therefore, in man's powers and conditions we summarize in the term civilization. Men improve as they become civilized, or learn to co-operate in society.

What is the law of this improvement? By what common principle can we explain the different stages of civilization at which different communities have arrived? In what consists essentially the progress of civilization, so that we may say of varying social adjustments, this favors it, and that does not; or explain why an institution or condition which may at one time advance it may at another time retard it?

The prevailing belief now is, that the progress of civilization is a development or evolution, in the course of which man's powers are increased and his qualities improved by the operation of causes similar to those which are relied upon as explaining the genesis of species—viz., the survival of the fittest and the hereditary transmission of acquired qualities.

That civilization is an evolution—that it is, in the language of Herbert Spencer, a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity—there is no doubt; but to say this is not to explain or identify the causes which forward or retard it. How far the sweeping generalizations of Spencer, which seek to account for all phenomena under terms of matter and force, may, properly understood, include all these causes, I am unable to say; but, as scientifically expounded, the development philosophy has either not yet definitely met this question, or has given birth, or rather coherency, to an opinion which does not accord with the facts.

The vulgar explanation of progress is, I think, very much like the view naturally taken by the money maker of the causes of the unequal distribution of wealth. His theory, if he has one, usually is, that there is plenty of money to be made by those who have will and ability, and that it is ignorance, or idleness, or extravagance, that makes the difference between the rich and the poor. And so the common explanation of differences of civilization is of differences in capacity. The civilized races are the superior races, and advance in civilization is according to this superiority—just as English victories were, in common English opinion, due to the natural superiority of Englishmen to frog-eating Frenchmen; and popular government, active invention, and greater average comfort are, or were until lately, in common American opinion, due to the greater "smartness of the Yankee Nation."

Now, just as the politico-economic doctrines which in the beginning of this inquiry we met and disproved, harmonize with the common opinion of men who see capitalists paying wages and competition reducing wages; just as the Malthusian theory harmonized with existing prejudices both of the rich and the poor; so does the explanation of progress as a gradual race improvement harmonize with the vulgar opinion which accounts by race differences for differences in civilization. It has given coherence and a scientific formula to opinions which already prevailed. Its wonderful spread since the time Darwin first startled the world with his "Origin of Species" has not been so much a conquest as an assimilation.

The view which now dominates the world of thought is this: That the struggle for existence, just in proportion as it becomes intense, impels men to new efforts and inventions. That this improvement and capacity for improvement is fixed by hereditary transmission, and extended by the tendency of the best adapted individual, or most improved individual, to survive and propagate among individuals, and of the best adapted, or most improved tribe, nation, or race to survive in the struggle between social aggregates. On this theory the differences between man and the animals, and differences in the relative progress of men, are now explained as confidently, and all but as generally, as a little while ago they were explained upon the theory of special creation and divine interposition.

The practical outcome of this theory is in a sort of hopeful fatalism, of which current literature is full. In this view, progress is the result of forces which work slowly, steadily, and remorselessly, for the elevation of man. War, slavery, tyranny, superstition, famine, and pestilence, the want and misery which fester in modern civilization, are the impelling causes which drive man on, by eliminating poorer types and extending the higher; and hereditary transmission is the power by which advances are fixed, and past advances made the footing for new advances. The individual is the result of changes thus impressed upon and perpetuated through a long series of past individuals, and the social organization takes its form from the individuals of which it is composed. Thus, while this theory is, as Herbert Spencer says—"radical to a degree beyond anything which current radicalism conceives," inasmuch as it looks for changes in the very nature of man; it is at the same time "conservative to a degree beyond anything conceived by current conservatism," inasmuch as it holds that no change can avail save these slow changes in men's natures. Philosophers may teach that this does not lessen the duty of endeavoring to reform abuses, just as the theologians who taught predestinarianism insisted on the duty of all to struggle for salvation; but, as generally apprehended, the result is fatalism—"do what we may, the mills of the gods grind on regardless either of our aid or our hindrance." I allude to this only to illustrate what I take to be the opinion now rapidly spreading and permeating common thought; not that in the search for truth any regard for its effects should be permitted to bias the mind. But this I take to be the current view of civilization: That it is the result of forces, operating in the way indicated, which slowly change the character, and improve and elevate the powers of man; that the difference between civilized man and savage is of a long race education, which has become permanently fixed in mental organization; and that this improvement tends to go on increasingly, to a higher and higher civilization. We have reached such a point that progress seems to be natural with us, and we look forward confidently to the greater achievements of the coming race—some even holding that the progress of science will finally give men immortality and enable them to make bodily the tour not only of the planets, but of the fixed stars, and at length to manufacture suns and systems for themselves.

But without soaring to the stars, the moment that this theory of progression, which seems so natural to us amid an advancing civilization, looks around the world, it comes against an enormous fact—the fixed, petrified civilizations. The majority of the human race today have no idea of progress; the majority of the human race today look (as until a few generations ago our own ancestors looked) upon the past as the time of human perfection. The difference between the savage and the civilized man may be explained on the theory that the former is as yet so imperfectly developed that his progress is hardly apparent; but how, upon the theory that human progress is the result of general and continuous causes, shall we account for the civilizations that had progressed so far and then stopped? It cannot be said of the Hindoo and of the Chinaman, as it may be said of the savage, that our superiority is the result of a longer education; that we are, as it were, the grown men of nature, while they are the children. The Hindoos and the Chinese were civilized when we were savages. They had great cities, highly organized and powerful governments, literatures, philosophies, polished manners, considerable division of labor, large commerce, and elaborate arts, when our ancestors were wandering barbarians, living in huts and skin tents....While we have progressed from this savage state to Nineteenth Century civilization, they have stood still. If progress be the result of fixed laws, inevitable and eternal, which impel men forward, how shall we account for this?

One of the best popular expounders of the development philosophy, Walter Bagehot ("Physics and Politics"), admits the force of this objection, and endeavors in this way to explain it: That the first thing necessary to civilize man is to tame him; to induce him to live in association with his fellows in subordination to law; and hence a body or "cake" of laws and customs grows up, being intensified and extended by natural selection, the tribe or nation thus bound together having an advantage over those who are not. That this cake of custom and law finally becomes too thick and hard to permit further progress, which can go on only as circumstances occur which introduce discussion, and thus permit the freedom and mobility necessary to improvement.

This explanation, which Mr. Bagehot offers, as he says, with some misgivings, is I think at the expense of the general theory. But it is not worth while speaking of that, for it, manifestly, does not explain the facts.

The hardening tendency of which Mr. Bagehot speaks would show itself at a very early period of development, and his illustrations of it are nearly all drawn from savage or semi-savage life. Whereas, these arrested civilizations had gone a long distance before they stopped. There must have been a time when they were very far advanced as compared with the savage state, and were yet plastic, free, and advancing. These arrested civilizations stopped at a point which was hardly in anything inferior and in many respects superior to European civilization of, say, the sixteenth or at any rate the fifteenth century. Up to that point then there must have been discussion, the hailing of what was new, and mental activity of all sorts. They had architects who carried the art of building, necessarily by a series of innovations or improvements, up to a very high point; shipbuilders who in the same way, by innovation after innovation, finally produced as good a vessel as the warships of Henry VIII; inventors who stopped only on the verge of our most important improvements, and from some of whom we can yet learn; engineers who constructed great irrigation works and navigable canals; rival schools of philosophy and conflicting ideas of religion. One great religion, in many respects resembling Christianity, rose in India, displaced the old religion, passed into China, sweeping over that country, and was displaced again in its old seats, just as Christianity was displaced in its first seats. There was life, and active life, and the innovation that begets improvement, long after men had learned to live together. And, moreover, both India and China have received the infusion of new life in conquering races, with different customs and modes of thought.

The most fixed and petrified of all civilizations of which we know anything was that of Egypt, where even art finally assumed a conventional and inflexible form. But we know that behind this must have been a time of life and vigor—a freshly developing and expanding civilization, such as ours is now—or the arts and sciences could never have been carried to such a pitch. And recent excavations have brought to light from beneath what we before knew of Egypt an earlier Egypt still—in statues and carvings which, instead of a hard and formal type, beam with life and expression, which show art struggling, ardent, natural, and free, the sure indication of an active and expanding life. So it must have been once with all now unprogressive civilizations.

But it is not merely these arrested civilizations that the current theory of development falls to account for. It is not merely that men have gone so far on the path of progress and then stopped; it is that men have gone far on the path of progress and then gone back. It is not merely an isolated case that thus confronts the theory—it is the universal rule. Every civilization that the world has yet seen has had its period of vigorous growth, of arrest and stagnation; its decline and fall. Of all the civilizations that have arisen and flourished, there remain today but those that have been arrested, and our own, which is not yet as old as were the pyramids when Abraham looked upon them—while behind the pyramids were twenty centuries of recorded history.

That our own civilization has a broader base, is of a more advanced type, moves quicker and soars higher than any preceding civilization is undoubtedly true; but in these respects it is hardly more in advance of the Greco-Roman civilization than that was in advance of Asiatic civilization; and if it were, that would prove nothing as to its permanence and future advance, unless it be shown that it is superior in those things which caused the ultimate failure of its predecessors. The current theory does not assume this.

In truth, nothing could be further from explaining the facts of universal history than this theory that civilization is the result of a course of natural selection which operates to improve and elevate the powers of man. That civilization has arisen at different times in different places and has progressed at different rates, is not inconsistent with this theory; for that might result from the unequal balancing of impelling and resisting forces; but that progress everywhere commencing, for even among the lowest tribes it is held that there has been some progress, has nowhere been continuous, but has everywhere been brought to a stand or retrogression, is absolutely inconsistent. For if progress operated to fix an improvement in man's nature and thus to produce further progress, though there might be occasional interruption, yet the general rule would be that progress would be continuous—that advance would lead to advance, and civilization develop into higher civilization.

Not merely the general rule, but the universal rule, is the reverse of this. The earth is the tomb of the dead empires, no less than of dead men. Instead of progress fitting men for greater progress, every civilization that was in its own time as vigorous and advancing as ours is now, has of itself come to a stop. Over and over again, art has declined, learning sunk, power waned, population become sparse, until the people who had built great temples and mighty cities, turned rivers and pierced mountains, cultivated the earth like a garden and introduced the utmost refinement into the minute affairs of life, remained but in a remnant of squalid barbarians, who had lost even the memory of what their ancestors had done, and regarded the surviving fragments of their grandeur as the work of genii, or of the mighty race before the flood. So true is this, that when we think of the past, it seems like the inexorable law, from which we can no more hope to be exempt than the young man who "feels his life in every limb" can hope to be exempt from the dissolution which is the common fate of all. "Even this, O Rome, must one day be thy fate!" wept Scipio over the ruins of Carthage, and Macaulay's picture of the New Zealander musing upon the broken arch of London Bridge appeals to the imagination of even those who see cities rising in the wilderness and help to lay the foundations of new empire. And so, when we erect a public building we make a hollow in the largest corner stone and carefully seal within it some mementos of our day, looking forward to the time when our works shall be ruins and ourselves forgot.

Nor whether this alternate rise and fall of civilization, this retrogression that always follows progression, be, or be not, the rhythmic movement of an ascending line (and I think, though I will not open the question, that it would be much more difficult to prove the affirmative than is generally supposed) makes no difference; for the current theory is in either case disproved. Civilizations have died and made no sign, and hard-won progress has been lost to the race forever; but, even if it be admitted that each wave of progress has made possible a higher wave and each civilization passed the torch to a greater civilization, the theory that civilization advances by changes wrought in the nature of man fails to explain the facts; for in every case it is not the race that has been educated and hereditarily modified by the old civilization that begins the new, but a fresh race coming from a lower level. It is the barbarians of the one epoch who have been the civilized men of the next; to be in their turn succeeded by fresh barbarians. For it has been heretofore always the case that men under the influences of civilization, though at first improving, afterward degenerate. The civilized man of today is vastly the superior of the uncivilized; but so in the time of its vigor was the civilized man of every dead civilization. But there are such things as the vices, the corruptions, the enervations of civilization, which past a certain point have always heretofore shown themselves. Every civilization that has been overwhelmed by barbarians has really perished from internal decay.

This universal fact, the moment that it is recognized, disposes of the theory that progress is by hereditary transmission. Looking over the history of the world, the line of greatest advance does not coincide for any length of time with any line of heredity. On any particular line of heredity, retrogression seems always to follow advance.

Shall we therefore say that there is a national or race life, as there is an individual life—that every social aggregate has, as it were, a certain amount of energy, the expenditure of which necessitates decay? This is an old and widespread idea, that is yet largely held, and that may be constantly seen cropping out incongruously in the writings of the expounders of the development philosophy. Indeed, I do not see why it may not be stated in terms of matter and of motion so as to bring it clearly within the generalizations of evolution. For considering its individuals as atoms, the growth of society is "an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." And thus an analogy may be drawn between the life of a society and the life of a solar system upon the nebular hypothesis. As the heat and light of the sun are produced by the aggregation of atoms evolving motion, which finally ceases when the atoms at length come to a state of equilibrium or rest, and a state of immobility succeeds, which can be broken in again only by the impact of external forces, which reverse the process of evolution, integrating motion and dissipating matter in the form of gas, again to evolve motion by its condensation; so, it may be said, does the aggregation of individuals in a community evolve a force which produces the light and warmth of civilization, but when this process ceases and the individual components are brought into a state of equilibrium, assuming their fixed places, petrifaction ensues, and the breaking up and diffusion caused by an incursion of barbarians is necessary to the recommencement of the process and a new growth of civilization.

But analogies are the most dangerous modes of thought. They may connect resemblances and yet disguise or cover up the truth. And all such analogies are superficial. While its members are constantly reproduced in all the fresh vigor of childhood, a community cannot grow old, as does a man, by the decay of its powers. While its aggregate force must be the sum of the forces of its individual components, a community cannot lose vital power unless the vital powers of its components are lessened.

Yet in both the common analogy which likens the life power of a nation to that of an individual, and in the one I have supposed, lurks the recognition of an obvious truth—the truth that the obstacles which finally bring progress to a halt are raised by the course of progress; that what has destroyed all previous civilizations has been the conditions produced by the growth of civilization itself.

This is a truth which in the current philosophy is ignored; but it is a truth most pregnant. Any valid theory of human progress must account for it.


Chapter 2: Differences in Civilization—To What Due

In attempting to discover the law of human progress, the first step must be to determine the essential nature of these differences which we describe as differences in civilization.

That the current philosophy, which attributes social progress to changes wrought in the nature of man, does not accord with historical facts, we have already seen. And we may also see, if we consider them, that the differences between communities in different stages of civilization cannot be ascribed to innate differences in the individuals who compose these communities. That there are natural differences is true, and that there is such a thing as hereditary transmission of peculiarities is undoubtedly true; but the great differences between men in different states of society cannot be explained in this way. The influence of heredity, which it is now the fashion to rate so highly, is as nothing compared with the influences which mold the man after he comes into the world. What is more ingrained in habit than language, which becomes not merely an automatic trick of the muscles, but the medium of thought? What persists longer, or will quicker show nationality? Yet we are not born with a predisposition to any language. Our mother tongue is our mother tongue only because we learned it in infancy. Although his ancestors have thought and spoken in one language for countless generations, a child who hears from the first nothing else, will learn with equal facility any other tongue. And so of other national or local or class peculiarities. They seem to be matters of education and habit, not of transmission. Cases of white children captured by Indians in infancy and brought up in the wigwam show this. They become thorough Indians. And so, I believe, with children brought up by Gypsies.

That this is not so true of the children of Indians or other distinctly marked races brought up by whites is, I think, due to the fact that they are never treated precisely as white children. A gentleman who had taught a colored school once told me that he thought the colored children, up to the age of ten or twelve, were really brighter and learned more readily than white children, but that after that age they seemed to get dull and careless. He thought this proof of innate race inferiority, and so did I at the time. But I afterward heard a highly intelligent negro gentleman (Bishop Hillery) incidentally make a remark which to my mind seems a sufficient explanation. He said: "Our children, when they are young, are fully as bright as white children, and learn as readily. But as soon as they get old enough to appreciate their status—to realize that they are looked upon as belonging to an inferior race, and can never hope to be anything more than cooks, waiters, or something of that sort, they lose their ambition and cease to keep up." And to this he might have added, that being the children of poor, uncultivated and unambitious parents, home influences told against them. For, I believe it is a matter of common observation that in the primary part of education the children of ignorant parents are quite as receptive as the children of intelligent parents, but by and by the latter, as a general rule, pull ahead and make the most intelligent men and women. The reason is plain. As to the first simple things which they learn only at school, they are on a par, but as their studies become more complex, the child who at home is accustomed to good English, hears intelligent conversation, has access to books, can get questions answered, etc., has an advantage which tells.

The same thing may be seen later in life. Take a man who has raised himself from the ranks of common labor, and just as he is brought into contact with men of culture and men of affairs, will he become more intelligent and polished. Take two brothers, the sons of poor parents, brought up in the same home and in the same way. One is put to a rude trade, and never gets beyond the necessity of making a living by hard daily labor; the other, commencing as an errand boy, gets a start in another direction, and becomes finally a successful lawyer, merchant, or politician. At forty or fifty the contrast between them will be striking, and the unreflecting will credit it to the greater natural ability which has enabled the one to push himself ahead. But just as striking a difference in manners and intelligence will be manifested between two sisters, one of whom, married to a man who has remained poor, has her life fretted with petty cares and devoid of opportunities, and the other of whom has married a man whose subsequent position brings her into cultured society and opens to her opportunities which refine taste and expand intelligence. And so deteriorations may be seen. That "evil communications corrupt good manners" is but an expression of the general law that human character is profoundly modified by its conditions and surroundings.

I remember once seeing, in a Brazilian seaport, a negro man dressed in what was an evident attempt at the height of fashion, but without shoes and stockings. One of the sailors with whom I was in company, and who had made some runs in the slave trade, had a theory that a negro was not a man, but a sort of monkey, and pointed to this as evidence in proof, contending that it was not natural for a negro to wear shoes, and that in his wild state he would wear no clothes at all. I afterward learned that it was not considered "the thing" there for slaves to wear shoes, just as in England it is not considered the thing for a faultlessly attired butler to wear jewelry, though for that matter I have since seen white men at liberty to dress as they pleased get themselves up as incongruously as the Brazilian slave. But a great many of the facts adduced as showing hereditary transmission have really no more bearing than this of our forecastle Darwinian.

That, for instance, a large number of criminals and recipients of public relief in New York have been shown to have descended from a pauper three or four generations back is extensively cited as showing hereditary transmission. But it shows nothing of the kind, inasmuch as an adequate explanation of the facts is nearer. Paupers will raise paupers, even if the children be not their own, just as familiar contact with criminals will make criminals of the children of virtuous parents. To learn to rely on charity is necessarily to lose the self respect and independence necessary for self-reliance when the struggle is hard. So true is this that, as is well known, charity has the effect of increasing the demand for charity, and it is an open question whether public relief and private alms do not in this way do far more harm than good. And so of the disposition of children to show the same feelings, tastes, prejudices, or talents as their parents. They imbibe these dispositions just as they imbibe from their habitual associates. And the exceptions prove the rule, as dislikes or revulsions may be excited.

And there is, I think, a subtler influence which often accounts for what are looked upon as atavisms of character—the same influence that makes the boy who reads dime novels want to be a pirate. I once knew a gentleman in whose veins ran the blood of Indian chiefs. He used to tell me traditions learned from his grandfather, which illustrated what is difficult for a white man to comprehend—the Indian habit of thought, the intense but patient blood thirst of the trail, and the fortitude of the stake. From the way in which he dwelt on these, I have no doubt that under certain circumstances, highly educated, civilized man that he was, he would have shown traits which would have been looked on as due to his Indian blood; but which in reality would have been sufficiently explained by the broodings of his imagination upon the deeds of his ancestors.

In any large community we may see, as between different classes and groups, differences of the same kind as those which exist between communities which we speak of as differing in civilization—differences of knowledge, belief, customs, tastes, and speech, which in their extremes show among people of the same race, living in the same country, differences almost as great as those between civilized and savage communities. As all stages of social development, from the stone age up, are yet to be found in contemporaneously existing communities, so in the same country and in the same city are to be found, side by side, groups which show similar diversities. In such countries as England and Germany, children of the same race, born and reared in the same place, will grow up, speaking the language differently, holding different beliefs, following different customs, and showing different tastes; and even in such a country as the United States differences of the same kind, though not of the same degree, may be seen between different circles or groups.

But these differences are certainly not innate. No baby is born a Methodist or Catholic, to drop its h's or to sound them. All these differences which distinguish different groups or circles are derived from association in these circles.

The Janissaries were made up of youths torn from Christian parents at an early age, but they were none the less fanatical Moslems and none the less exhibited all the Turkish traits; the Jesuits and other orders show distinct character, but it is certainly not perpetuated by hereditary transmissions; and even such associations as schools or regiments, where the components remain but a short time and are constantly changing, exhibit general characteristics, which are the result of mental impressions perpetuated by association.

Now, it is this body of traditions, beliefs, customs, laws, habits and associations, which arise in every community and which surround every individual—this "super-organic environment," as Herbert Spencer calls it, that, as I take it, is the great element in determining national character. It is this, rather than hereditary transmission, which makes the Englishman differ from the Frenchman, the German from the Italian, the American from the Chinaman, and the civilized man from the savage man. It is in this way that national traits are preserved, extended, or altered.

Within certain limits, or, if you choose, without limits in itself, hereditary transmission may develop or alter qualities, but this is much more true of the physical than of the mental part of a man, and much more true of animals than it is even of the physical part of man. Deductions from the breeding of pigeons or cattle will not apply to man, and the reason is clear. The life of man, even in his rudest state, is infinitely more complex. He is constantly acted on by an infinitely greater number of influences, amid which the relative influence of heredity becomes less and less. A race of men with no greater mental activity than the animals—men who only ate, drank, slept, and propagated—might, I doubt not, by careful treatment and selection in breeding, be made, in course of time, to exhibit as great diversities in bodily shape and character as similar means have produced in the domestic animals. But there are no such men; and in men as they are, mental influences, acting through the mind upon the body, would constantly interrupt the process. You cannot fatten a man whose mind is on the strain, by cooping him up and feeding him as you would fatten a pig. In all probability men have been upon the earth longer than many species of animals. They have been separated from each other under differences of climate that produce the most marked differences in animals, and yet the physical differences between the different races of men are hardly greater than the difference between white horses and black horses—they are certainly nothing like as great as between dogs of the same subspecies, as, for instance, the different varieties of the terrier or spaniel. And even these physical differences between races of men, it is held by those who account for them by natural selection and hereditary transmission, were brought out when man was much nearer the animal—that is to say, when he had less mind.

And if this be true of the physical constitution of man, in how much higher degree is it true of his mental constitution? All our physical parts we bring with us into the world; but the mind develops afterward.

There is a stage in the growth of every organism in which it cannot be told, except by the environment, whether the animal that is to be will be fish or reptile, monkey or man. And so with the new-born infant; whether the mind that is yet to awake to consciousness and power is to be English or German, American or Chinese—the mind of a civilized man or the mind of a savage—depends entirely on the social environment in which it is placed.

Take a number of infants born of the most highly civilized parents and transport them to an uninhabited country. Suppose them in some miraculous way to be sustained until they come of age to take care of themselves, and what would you have? More helpless savages than any we know of. They would have fire to discover; the rudest tools and weapons to invent; language to construct. They would, in short, have to stumble their way to the simplest knowledge which the lowest races now possess, just as a child learns to walk. That they would in time do all these things I have not the slightest doubt, for all these possibilities are latent in the human mind just as the power of walking is latent in the human frame, but I do not believe they would do them any better or worse, any slower or quicker, than the children of barbarian parents placed in the same conditions. Given the very highest mental powers that exceptional individuals have ever displayed, and what could mankind be if one generation were separated from the next by an interval of time, as are the seventeen-year locusts? One such interval would reduce mankind, not to savagery, but to a condition compared with which savagery, as we know it, would seem civilization.

And, reversely, suppose a number of savage infants could, unknown to the mothers, for even this would be necessary to make the experiment a fair one, be substituted for as many children of civilization, can we suppose that growing up they would show any difference? I think no one who has mixed much with different peoples and classes will think so. The great lesson that is thus learned is that "human nature is human nature all the world over." And this lesson, too, may be learned in the library. I speak not so much of the accounts of travelers, for the accounts given of savages by the civilized men who write books are very often just such accounts as savages would give of us did they make flying visits and then write books; but of those mementos of the life and thoughts of other times and other peoples, which, translated into our language of today, are like glimpses of our own lives and gleams of our own thought. The feeling they inspire is that of the essential similarity of men. "This," says Emanuel Deutsch—"this is the end of all investigation into history or art. They were even as we are."

There is a people to be found in all parts of the world who well illustrate what peculiarities are due to hereditary transmission and what to transmission by association. The Jews have maintained the purity of their blood more scrupulously and for a far longer time than any of the European races, yet I am inclined to think that the only characteristic that can be attributed to this is that of physiognomy, and this is in reality far less marked than is conventionally supposed, as any one who will take the trouble may see on observation. Although they have constantly married among themselves, the Jews have everywhere been modified by their surroundings—the English, Russian, Polish, German, and Oriental Jews differing from each other in many respects as much as do the other people of those countries. Yet they have much in common, and have everywhere preserved their individuality. The reason is clear. It is the Hebrew religion—and certainly religion is not transmitted by generation, but by association—which has everywhere preserved the distinctiveness of the Hebrew race. This religion, which children derive, not as they derive their physical characteristics, but by precept and association, is not merely exclusive in its teachings, but has, by engendering suspicion and dislike, produced a powerful outside pressure which, even more than its precepts, has everywhere constituted of the Jews a community within a community. Thus has been built up and maintained a certain peculiar environment which gives a distinctive character. Jewish intermarriage has been the effect, not the cause of this. What persecution which stopped short of taking Jewish children from their parents and bringing them up outside of this peculiar environment could not accomplish, will be accomplished by the lessening intensity of religious belief, as is already evident in the United States, where the distinction between Jew and Gentile is fast disappearing.

And it seems to me that the influence of this social net or environment will explain what is so often taken as proof of race differences—the difficulty which less civilized races show in receiving higher civilization, and the manner in which some of them melt away before it. Just as one social environment persists, so does it render it difficult or impossible for those subject to it to accept another.

The Chinese character is fixed if that of any people is. Yet the Chinese in California acquire American modes of working, trading, the use of machinery, etc., with such facility as to prove that they have no lack of flexibility, or natural capacity. That they do not change in other respects is due to the Chinese environment that still persists and still surrounds them. Coming from China, they look forward to return to China, and live while here in a little China of their own, just as the Englishmen in India maintain a little England. It is not merely that we naturally seek association with those who share our peculiarities, and that thus language, religion and custom tend to persist where individuals are not absolutely isolated; but that these differences provoke an external pressure, which compels such association.

These obvious principles fully account for all the phenomena which are seen in the meeting of one stage or body of culture with another, without resort to the theory of ingrained differences. For instance, as comparative philology has shown, the Hindoo is of the same race as his English conqueror, and individual instances have abundantly shown that if he could be placed completely and exclusively in the English environment (which, as before stated, could be thoroughly done only by placing infants in English families in such a way that neither they, as they grow up, nor those around them, would be conscious of any distinction) one generation would be all required to thoroughly implant European civilization. But the progress of English ideas and habits in India must be necessarily very slow, because they meet there the web of ideas and habits constantly perpetuated through an immense population, and interlaced with every act of life.

Mr. Bagehot ("Physics and Politics") endeavors to explain the reason why barbarians waste away before our civilization, while they did not before that of the ancients, by assuming that the progress of civilization has given us tougher physical constitutions. After alluding to the fact that there is no lament in any classical writer for the barbarians, but that everywhere the barbarian endured the contact with the Roman and the Roman allied himself to the barbarian, he says (pp. 47-8):

    "Savages in the first year of the Christian era were pretty much what they were in the eighteen hundredth; and if they stood the contact of ancient civilized men and cannot stand ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a meter to gauge the vigor of the constitution to whose contact he is exposed."

Mr. Bagehot does not attempt to explain how it is that eighteen hundred years ago civilization did not give the like relative advantage over barbarism that it does now. But there is no use of talking about that, or of the lack of proof that the human constitution has been a whit improved. To any one who has seen how the contact of our civilization affects the inferior races [read: lesser-developed cultures], a much readier though less flattering explanation will occur.

It is not because our constitutions are naturally tougher than those of the savage, that diseases which are comparatively innocuous to us are certain death to him. It is that we know and have the means of treating those diseases, while he is destitute both of knowledge and means. The same diseases with which the scum of civilization that floats in its advance inoculates the savage would prove as destructive to civilized men, if they knew no better than to let them run, as he in his ignorance has to let them run; and as a matter of fact they were as destructive, until we found out how to treat them. And not merely this, but the effect of the impingement of civilization upon barbarism is to weaken the power of the savage without bringing him into the conditions that give power to the civilized man. While his habits and customs still tend to persist, and do persist as far as they can, the conditions to which they were adapted are forcibly changed. He is a hunter in a land stripped of game; a warrior deprived of his arms and called on to plead in legal technicalities. He is not merely placed between cultures, but, as Mr. Bagehot says of the European half-breeds in India, he is placed between moralities, and learns the vices of civilization without its virtues. He loses his accustomed means of subsistence, he loses self-respect, he loses morality; he deteriorates and dies away. The miserable creatures who may be seen hanging around frontier towns or railroad stations, ready to beg, or steal, or solicit a viler commerce, are not fair representatives of the Indian before the white man had encroached upon his hunting grounds. They have lost the strength and virtues of their former state, without gaining those of a higher. In fact, civilization, as it pushes the red man, shows no virtues. To the Anglo-Saxon of the frontier, as a rule, the aborigine has no rights which the white man is bound to respect. He is impoverished, misunderstood, cheated, and abused. He dies out, as, under similar conditions, we should die out. He disappears before civilization as the Britons disappeared before Saxon barbarism.

The true reason why there is no lament in any classic writer for the barbarian, but that the Roman civilization assimilated instead of destroying, is, I take it, to be found not only in the fact that the ancient civilization was much nearer akin to the barbarians which it met, but in the more important fact that it was not extended as ours has been. It was carried forward, not by an advancing line of colonists, but by conquest which merely reduced the new province to general subjection, leaving the social, and generally the political organization of the people to a great degree unimpaired, so that, without shattering or deterioration, the process of assimilation went on. In a somewhat similar way the civilization of Japan seems to be now assimilating itself to European civilization.

In America the Anglo-Saxon has exterminated, instead of civilizing, the Indian, simply because he has not brought the Indian into his environment, nor yet has the contact been in such a way as to induce or permit the Indian web of habitual thought and custom to be changed rapidly enough to meet the new conditions into which he has been brought by the proximity of new and powerful neighbors. That there is no innate impediment to the reception of our civilization by these uncivilized races has been shown over and over again in individual cases. And it has likewise been shown, so far as the experiments have been permitted to go, by the Jesuits in Paraguay, the Franciscans in California, and the Protestant missionaries on some of the Pacific islands.

The assumption of physical improvement in the race within any time of which we have knowledge is utterly without warrant, and within the time of which Mr. Bagehot speaks, it is absolutely disproved. We know from classic statues, from the burdens carried and the marches made by ancient soldiers, from the records of runners and the feats of gymnasts, that neither in proportions nor strength has the race improved within two thousand years. But the assumption of mental improvement, which is even more confidently and generally made, is still more preposterous. As poets, artists, architects, philosophers, rhetoricians, statesmen, or soldiers, can modern civilization show individuals of greater mental power than can the ancient? There is no use in recalling names—every schoolboy knows them. For our models and personifications of mental power we go back to the ancients, and if we can for a moment imagine the possibility of what is held by that oldest and most widespread of all beliefs—that belief which Lessing declared on this account the most probably true, though he accepted it on metaphysical grounds—and suppose Homer or Virgil, Demosthenes or Cicero, Alexander, Hannibal or Cæsar, Plato or Lucretius, Euclid or Aristotle, as re-entering this life again in the Nineteenth Century, can we suppose that they would show any inferiority to the men of today? Or if we take any period since the classic age, even the darkest, or any previous period of which we know anything, shall we not find men who in the conditions and degree of knowledge of their times showed mental power of as high an order as men show now? And among the less advanced races do we not today, whenever our attention is called to them, find men who in their conditions exhibit mental qualities as great as civilization can show? Did the invention of the railroad, coming when it did, prove any greater inventive power than did the invention of the wheelbarrow when wheelbarrows were not? We of modern civilization are raised far above those who have preceded us and those of the less advanced races who are our contemporaries. But it is because we stand on a pyramid, not that we are taller. What the centuries have done for us is not to increase our stature, but to build up a structure on which we may plant our feet.

Let me repeat: I do not mean to say that all men possess the same capacities, or are mentally alike, any more than I mean to say that they are physically alike. Among all the countless millions who have come and gone on this earth, there were probably never two who either physically or mentally were exact counterparts. Nor yet do I mean to say that there are not as clearly marked race differences in mind as there are clearly marked race differences in body. I do not deny the influence of heredity in transmitting peculiarities of mind in the same way, and possibly to the same degree, as bodily peculiarities are transmitted. But nevertheless, there is, it seems to me, a common standard and natural symmetry of mind, as there is of body, toward which all deviations tend to return. The conditions under which we fall may produce such distortions as the Flatheads produce by compressing the heads of their infants or the Chinese by binding their daughters' feet. But as Flathead babies continue to be born with naturally shaped heads and Chinese babies with naturally shaped feet, so does nature seem to revert to the normal mental type. A child no more inherits his father's knowledge than he inherits his father's glass eye or artificial leg; the child of the most ignorant parents may become a pioneer of science or a leader of thought.

But this is the great fact with which we are concerned: That the differences between the people of communities in different places and at different times, which we call differences of civilization, are not differences which inhere in the individuals, but differences which inhere in the society; that they are not, as Herbert Spencer holds, differences resulting from differences in the units; but that they are differences resulting from the conditions under which these units are brought in the society. In short, I take the explanation of the differences which distinguish communities to be this: That each society, small or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions, and laws. Into this web, woven by each society, or rather, into these webs, for each community above the simplest is made up of minor societies, which overlap and interlace each other, the individual is received at birth and continues until his death. This is the matrix in which mind unfolds and from which it takes its stamp. This is the way in which customs, and religions, and prejudices, and tastes, and languages, grow up and are perpetuated. This is the way that skill is transmitted and knowledge is stored up, and the discoveries of one time made the common stock and stepping stone of the next. Though it is this that often offers the most serious obstacles to progress, it is this that makes progress possible. It is this that enables any schoolboy in our time to learn in a few hours more of the universe than Ptolemy knew; that places the most humdrum scientist far above the level reached by the giant mind of Aristotle. This is to the race what memory is to the individual. Our wonderful arts, our far-reaching science, our marvelous inventions—they have come through this.

Human progress goes on as the advances made by one generation are in this way secured as the common property of the next, and made the starting point for new advances.

[Continued...]

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"For the first years of [Ludwig von] Mises’s life in the United States...he was almost totally dependent on annual research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation.” -- Richard M. Ebeling

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