Friday, September 24, 2010

Eugenics Came First Nazis Came Second

The eugenics movement actually began a long time before Hitler's National Socialist movement (the Nazi Party) came to power. In 1883 Darwin came up with his evolutionary theory. This was later expanded upon by his cousin Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term, "eugenics". Farther back in time, the Greek Spartans were encouraged by their philosopher Plato, to kill off their weak children. These same practices have continued throughout history, such as the Eskimos who put their aged and infirm on ice floats, and set them adrift. Other aboriginal tribes would kill off their firstborn child if it was a female. A practice China continues today.

Moving up to the early 20th century, in the United States, our own Margaret Sanger joined the mantra of the eugenicist's ideology of racial supremacy and "purity". Eugenicists of the early 20th century envisioned a world where racial purity would be established through encouraging the "fit" to reproduce, while discouraging the "unfit" to inhibit reproduction. They sought segregation, sterilization, birth-control and abortion to eradicate, what they deemed, inferior races.

Hitler's National Socialist movement were actually late-comers, who did not jump on the band-wagon until 1941, with their' Lebensborn program. This program began a sort of "human farm" where young male soldiers with the Waffen-SS, thought to be the purest Aryan stock, were brought together with blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan women, to breed more human citizens for their new master-race.

Hitler's violent approach to the eugenicist movement with his extermination of millions in his death camps, forever tied the Nazis with eugenics. This has wrongly given people of today the idea that eugenics is only related to the Nazis of WW II Germany. However, in 1973 eugenics became the law of the land in the U.S. It started with abortion, then went to the medically disabled, now is attacking the elderly and only God knows where it will end. Make no mistake. The Nazis are not the inventors of eugenics, or the only ones to perpetrate it's evil upon the human race.

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