Culture Of Life 101 . . . The Racism Of Eugenics

By BRIAN CLOWES

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 24 of The Facts of Life, “Eugenics,” from which these articles are drawn, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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“At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization 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” — Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, 1946.
We have seen that eugenicists in general focus entirely on a person’s physical characteristics when gauging their perceived usefulness to society. This purely utilitarian thinking has culminated in the attempted extermination of entire classes of people — the handicapped, the elderly, other ethnicities, and Jews.
The only difference between eugenics practiced a century ago and in our current day is that now, those who are deemed nonproductive or “unwanted” are killed individually instead of en masse — usually by the people who should be protecting and caring for them.
From its beginning, the leadership of the eugenics movement has been drawn exclusively from influential white elitists. And those targeted by eugenics measures have invariably been minorities, the poor and the powerless.
Julian Huxley’s quotation above, made the year after World War II ended, shows that the eugenicists learned nothing from the Nazi horror. And now that we are well into the 21st century, we have witnessed that absolutely nothing has changed. The eugenic evil has been camouflaged and perfumed — but it is still as great a danger as it ever was.
The Link. In his vividly titled 1922 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard described what he considered “the root of all our problems.” He demonstrated beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt the intimate connection between eugenics and goal-oriented racism which is also the motivating force behind the worldwide population suppression movement:
“None of the colored races shows perceptible signs of declining birthrate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available subsistence. . . . It can mean only one thing: A tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands. . . . But many of these relatively empty [Northern] lands have been definitely set aside by the white man as his own special heritage. . . .
“For race betterment is such an intensely practical matter!. . . We or the next generation will take in hand the problem of race depreciation, and segregation of defectives and abolition of handicaps penalizing the better stocks will put an end to our present racial decline.”
Stoddard’s prediction has unfortunately been fulfilled. The Culture of Death in our time that has eagerly taken up the task of “abolishing handicaps” with the devastatingly effective weapons of amniocentesis, abortion, and infanticide. And they are targeting other races on a worldwide scale; two-thirds of all population control dollars expended by the West over the past two decades have been directed toward suppressing the populations of African nations.
It is interesting to note that Stoddard sat on the board of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, and his book was promoted by Sanger’s magazine The Birth Control Review.
Stoddard’s books won him wide acclaim in Nazi Germany, and, when he visited that country, he was allowed access to the highest elements of the Reich’s hierarchy. He had cordial meetings with Heinrich Himmler, head of both the Nazi secret police and the Schutzstaffel [SS], with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German minister of Foreign Affairs, and with Adolf Hitler himself.
He also met with leading Nazi racialists and eugenicists, including Hans F.K. Gunther, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, and visited their institutions. The famous war historian William L. Shirer noted that Stoddard was given preference by the German brass because his racist writings were “featured in Nazi school textbooks.”
Still “Good Germans” in the 1960s. The eugenics mentality is not only prevalent among the elite, it is steadily spreading into the general populace as well. In 1970, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence found: “The overwhelming majority of white Americans would be ‘good Germans’ if the government turned to massive racial repression.”
There was ample cause for the commission’s concern, because “racial repression” was happening on a wide scale at the time. Experts testified that there had already been many cases of outright propaganda and coercion directed against minorities by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies in numerous states.
For example, in the 1960s, the Chicago Planned Parenthood Association sponsored birth control “coffee parties” all over the black sections of the city — but none in the white-dominated suburbs. In Pittsburgh, representatives of federally financed “family planning” programs sent a brigade of “home visitors” and public assistance workers to the homes of thousands of black women in order to convince them to make use of family planning clinic services. If a woman did not immediately comply, workers directly threatened her with a cutoff of all public assistance if she had any more children.
When black citizens exposed this coercion and called it “genocide,” the Pittsburgh Antipoverty Board voted down funds from the United States Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) that would have continued Planned Parenthood clinic operations in six of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. The OEO, in fact, had actually funded thousands of the involuntary sterilizations of poor black women across the South in the 1940s and 1950s.
During the same period, the South Carolina and Delaware legislatures considered laws that would mandate the sterilization of all welfare mothers after they had borne two children out of wedlock. In New York, municipal judges commonly offered women the choice of sterilization or a cutoff of welfare benefits. These laws directly targeted black women.
These racist programs did not escape the notice of civil rights activists. Dr. Constance Redbird Uri testified before her state legislature:
“What is family planning for Indians? The highest priority is abortion. We have been controlled by your government for 200 years now, but you have another weapon [abortion]. We often doubt whether we will be here in another 200 years.”
And Raoul Silva testified that “California is waging a war of genocide against blacks, Latins, and Indians. They offer abortions to minority women who don’t even ask — and they get teenage girls to decide for abortion before they’re pregnant. That’s how they play the genocide game in Los Angeles County.”
And They’re Still at It : The corrupt and racist theory of eugenics, which seeks to create a “race of thoroughbreds” through birth control, abortion, and sterilization (without consent, if necessary) certainly did not die in a bunker with Adolf Hitler in 1945. Many of the world’s most distinguished and influential scholars and social engineers still advocate the widespread use of eugenics to rid society of its ever-present “undesirable elements.”
Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling has suggested that those who carry “dysfunctional genes” have information on their disabilities tattooed in code onto their foreheads.
And the late renowned biologist John Maynard Smith wanted to give tax breaks and bonuses to the educated and intelligent who have children and heavily penalize others (i.e. minorities and those with “dysfunctional genes”).
In a classic example of racist eugenics, deputy editorial page editor Donald Kimelman of the Philadelphia Inquirer stated in an article, ominously entitled “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” that:
“As we read these two stories [about Norplant and black poverty], we asked ourselves: Dare we mention them in the same breath? To do so might be considered deplorably insensitive, perhaps raising the specter of eugenics. But it would be worse to avoid drawing the logical conclusion that foolproof contraception could be invaluable in breaking the cycle of inner-city poverty — one of America’s greatest challenges.”
Kimelman continued in his 1990 editorial by suggesting that welfare mothers could be implanted with Norplant for free and perhaps receive increased welfare benefits as a reward. He apparently failed to realize that this was one of the first elements of the coercive Chinese population program that features mandatory sterilization and forced abortions even in the ninth month of pregnancy.
The editorial met with an uproar, even from with the newspaper’s ranks.
As one more example, Anthony Bouza, a former Minneapolis police chief and columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, wrote a 1990 Mother’s Day editorial with the incredibly oxymoronic title “A Mother’s Day Wish: Make Abortion Available to All Women.” He described the “at risk” population as “poor, black, and Indian,” and said that their offspring are “marked for failure.” Then he went on to say:
“When abortions are illegal, poor women deliver and keep their babies. Then they plunk them in front of a TV set, watch them get abused and conditioned to violence by parades of males, and expose them to all the factors the criminologists describe as the precursors to a life of crime. . . . Making abortions freely available to the impoverished young women who produce our criminals is very likely the most important crime-prevention measure adopted in this country in the last 25 years.”

The Next Step

The last several articles have dealt primarily with negative eugenics, the idea that the “unfit” should not “breed.” Lately, we are witnessing the growth of a branch of positive eugenics that might be called “self-directed evolution.”
This mania has lost sight of who we truly are as human beings, and of God’s plan for our lives. We are by now all familiar with transgenderism — but it has gone far beyond that, from trans-racialism, trans-speciesism and transablism, to the strangest phenomenon of all: Transhumanism, which will be covered in the next several articles.