Sailing To Oblivium: September 6, 2017

It now appears that the much of the anti-immigrant stench floating about today wafts from the still smoldering “science” of eugenics. Sad.

What is eugenics? It is nothing less that the attempt to improve a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.

Then along came Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, reminding us that, as William Faulkner famously said, in Requiem For A Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Odd that it took one Southerner to frame the obscenity of another. Regard the complete falsehoods— Slate Magazine called them “nativist lies” in fact—Sessions used to justify ending DACA yesterday, remembering that a first step toward the open practice of eugenics could be the dehumanizing of target “unfits:”

“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty (DACA), among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”

Does that perhaps, vaguely suggest a kinship to The Eternal Jew?

Few Americans know that our country flirted, in a most serious way, with eugenics in the first decades of the 20^th Century. Click here for a detailed accounting. Posters announcing that “Only Healthy Seed must be sown” flourished and a belief spread that society must seek out the unfit and prevent them from propagating.

The most famous case, one involving a woman named Carrie Buck, created one of the most odious legal observations in American history. The speaker was a Civil War veteran, and otherwise revered jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Carrie Buck was considered to be “feeble-minded” because her mother and grandmother were considered to be. In summation of a decision justifying her forced (and secret) sterilization, Holmes, then a Supreme Court justice, wrote:

“…if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Too late, it became clear that Carrie possessed normal intelligence. An outstanding account or the sad affair, written by the late biologist Stephen J. Gould can be found by clicking here.

America turned away from eugenics, or so we thought, after Adolph Hitler and the Nazis embraced and employed it to rid the “master race” of the unfits.

 Will it plague us again? One hopes not, but current trend toward the deporting of, denying entry to, and incarcerating people of color evokes the ominous sound of hobnailed boots along the winding road of history.

After she married and couldn't have children

Carrie Buck, of normal intelligence,

discovered she had been sterilized

as a youth for assumed imbecility