# American Eugenics Movement and Euro Nazism **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 17, 2011, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759 "2011-04-17T21:53:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/21 "2011-04-20T14:39:30Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Currently, most western countries are experiencing [dysgenic](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/01/where_dysgenics.html) fertility rates where [chav’s](http://www.google.co.nz/url?q=http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Chav&sa=U&ei=zWWuTanGHoX0swOGwOmSAw&ved=0CC0QFjAL&sig2=Tyy9dJNpPvedGq3e2jngYg&usg=AFQjCNE4v6_Bg2sF2aB2DEsNYrYcOvmoFQ)have the most children. This can’t possibly be a serious argument. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/22 "2011-04-20T15:39:50Z")
Chen019 writes: \> Currently, most western countries are experiencing dysgenic fertility rates \> where chav’s have the most children. No, it’s quite clear. In so far as there has been any change in the average I.Q., it’s been increasing everywhere and during all the period that I.Q. tests have been generally used. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/23 "2011-04-20T17:37:32Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Not a good book to recommend. > > [Introduction — History News Network](http://www.hnn.us/articles/122469.html) If he does read the book he will find that critique of it laughable. The reason the Nazis outlawed independent unions is the same reason the Bolsheviks did, since the german workers were running the state there was no longer any need for an independent union movement. The Nazis and Fascists presented themselves as revolutionary socialists because that is what they were. That is why the word “Socialist” is right in the title of the Nazi party. But do not take my word for it read the book and decide for yourselves. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/24 "2011-04-20T18:09:48Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > That is why the word “Socialist” is right in the title of the Nazi party. Kind of like how East Germany was a democracy? That’s why the word “democratic” was the middle D in DDR. Apparently it was a republic as well. ---
**Author:** ![Anticounterrevolutionary](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f04885/32.png) [@Anticounterrevolutionary](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anticounterrevolutionary)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/25 "2011-04-20T20:08:08Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Currently, most western countries are experiencing [dysgenic](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/01/where_dysgenics.html) fertility rates where [chav’s](http://www.google.co.nz/url?q=http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Chav&sa=U&ei=zWWuTanGHoX0swOGwOmSAw&ved=0CC0QFjAL&sig2=Tyy9dJNpPvedGq3e2jngYg&usg=AFQjCNE4v6_Bg2sF2aB2DEsNYrYcOvmoFQ)have the most children. > [@Marley23](#): > > This can’t possibly be a serious argument. Actually a very serious and widely used argument. Margaret Sanger, a member of both the American Eugenics Society and the English Eugenics Society, and the founder of the American Birth Control League wrote, “Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly … Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.” from _The Pivot of Civilization_ by Margaret Sanger (with an introduction by H.G. Wells.) It’s in the public domain and available at Project Gutenburg. “Race Building in a Democracy” was the topic at the 1940 joint meeting of the Birth Control Federation of America and the Citizens Committee for Planned Parenthood. The Federation then said: "We, too, [like Germany] recognize the problem of race building, but our concern is with the quality of our people, not with their quantity alone … " (Birth Control Review, vol. XXIV, January 1940.) ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/26 "2011-04-20T20:51:03Z")
> [@Anticounterrevolutionary](#): > > Actually a very serious and widely used argument. Margaret Sanger, a member of both the American Eugenics Society and the English Eugenics Society, and the founder of the American Birth Control League wrote What did Sanger have to say about the chavs? ---
**Author:** ![Anticounterrevolutionary](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f04885/32.png) [@Anticounterrevolutionary](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anticounterrevolutionary)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/27 "2011-04-20T21:32:41Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > What did Sanger have to say about the chavs? Sanger, while in the U.K. “…advocated the use of artificial contraception and campaigned among the middle class to win the support of doctors, feminists, politicians, and the clergy, who, in turn, would convince the lower classes to use birth control.” “Our statistics tell us that the birth rate of the college men and women is lower than it should be. This applies to all the professional classes, doctors, clergymen, lawyers and skilled workers.” “Margaret Sanger’s assertion that upper- and middle-class women had greater access to contraception than working-class women is borne out by the dramatic decline in middle- and upper-class family size after 1850.” “Deletante Birth Control Leagues may help as the workers take their morals from the upper class, but they will not go very far. They will not reach down to the bottom, anymore than they have ever reached down to the bottom in England and other countries.” Cite: _The selected papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 1_ Unless your question was directed at **Chen019** ’s use of ‘chav’ instead of low-income or lower classes, in which case never mind. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/28 "2011-04-20T21:39:41Z")
> [@Anticounterrevolutionary](#): > > Unless your question was directed at **Chen019** ’s use of ‘chav’ instead of low-income or lower classes, in which case never mind. That’s exactly where it was directed. It sounds like **Chen019** ’s argument is now ‘there are too many people I don’t like.’ ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/29 "2011-04-20T22:34:07Z")
> [@Anticounterrevolutionary](#): > > Actually a very serious and widely used argument. Margaret Sanger, a member of both the American Eugenics Society and the English Eugenics Society, and the founder of the American Birth Control League wrote, > > “Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly … Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.” from _The Pivot of Civilization_ by Margaret Sanger (with an introduction by H.G. Wells.) It’s in the public domain and available at Project Gutenburg. It’s extremely unfortunate for the world that Sanger didn’t confine her statements to the benefits of _individual_ choice and family planning. Social conservatives condemned birth control on moral grounds, on the premise that it encouraged promiscuity. The bitter, eugenicistic tang of Sanger’s remarks, like the one **Anticounterrevolutionary** quotes, made unpalatable to progressives any notion of encouraging family planning on a larger scale. And world population growth has not helped the labor movement anywhere by providing an endless supply of cheap labor. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2011, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/30 "2011-04-20T23:32:24Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > If he does read the book he will find that critique of it laughable. The reason the Nazis outlawed independent unions is the same reason the Bolsheviks did, since the german workers were running the state there was no longer any need for an independent union movement. The Nazis and Fascists presented themselves as revolutionary socialists because that is what they were. That is why the word “Socialist” is right in the title of the Nazi party. But do not take my word for it read the book and decide for yourselves. I guess you did not even read the quote itself: > [@](#): > > Goldberg responded by arguing that the fascists were just foreclosing on their competition: “All that need be said is that if Hitler’s ban on independent trade unions disqualifies him as a leftist, then Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were not leftists either.” This is, in fact, the argument that Goldberg attempts to make in his book as well: That the fascists occupied the “political space” on the Left, and thus were simply out to compete against their fellow leftists. > > **But this is where Goldberg most deeply portrays a lack of respect for the historical material available to him, because any careful study of the actual details of how the fascists came to power in both Italy and Germany makes abundantly clear that they were occupying the available political space on the right – and had charged hard in that direction from early on in their drive to power. The ideological shift by Mussolini and Hitler away from appeals to socialist sensibilities occurred in the defense of wealthy landowners and the established economic and cultural powers, and it entailed a wave of murderous violence against socialists, leftists, and any form of progressive.** ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/31 "2011-04-21T02:34:16Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > This can’t possibly be a serious argument. You should really watch [more](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSROlfR7WTo) [documentaries](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-L3JMk7C1A). ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/32 "2011-04-21T03:57:42Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > I guess you did not even read the quote itself: Unfortunately, GIGObuster, that doesn’t hold. I’ve read the book. I think he takes some things incorrectly and some too far, but the basic premise is correct and he backs it up amply. You may not like the implication or the facts, but he explains clearly and explicitly where exactly the relevant support came from, how, and why. He provides clear evidence of his thesis. It can’t be simply handwaved away with accusations of partisanship; he is partisan, but he is hardly dishonest. Goldberg doesn’t hold that Liberals are Nazis, or anything like it. Instead, he traces the ideological origins (something of a dirty little secret for so many leftists) of many groups. He is not exactly pro-Republican, or even pro-conservative (in the modern sense). Moreover, that critique always comes down to a giant No True Scotsman fallacy. This is a very common defense on the left. (They never really tried the real ideas! No, they were really Right-Wingers!) And Goldberg demonstrates considerably the origins, methods, and actual governance of the Nazis - ideas all created, endorsed, and supported by Leftists around the world. I do not say, and neither does he, that you are somehow responsible. What he does do is more guarded, which is to point out that an awful lot of that ideology comes down directly from very unpleasant sources, and somehow never changes even though the stated reasons change every generation. Another point is that quite often liberals are demonstrating and demonizing not conservatives, but the intractable problems caused by previous generations of liberals. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/33 "2011-04-21T04:02:50Z")
The basic premise is only correct in the same sense that the Republicans are the party who freed the slaves. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/34 "2011-04-21T05:12:44Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Unfortunately, GIGObuster, that doesn’t hold. I’ve read the book. I think he takes some things incorrectly and some too far, but the basic premise is correct and he backs it up amply. You may not like the implication or the facts, but he explains clearly and explicitly where exactly the relevant support came from, how, and why. He provides clear evidence of his thesis. It can’t be simply handwaved away with accusations of partisanship; he is partisan, but he is hardly dishonest. > > Goldberg doesn’t hold that Liberals are Nazis, or anything like it. Instead, he traces the ideological origins (something of a dirty little secret for so many leftists) of many groups. He is not exactly pro-Republican, or even pro-conservative (in the modern sense). > > Moreover, that critique always comes down to a giant No True Scotsman fallacy. This is a very common defense on the left. (They never really tried the real ideas! No, they were really Right-Wingers!) And Goldberg demonstrates considerably the origins, methods, and actual governance of the Nazis - ideas all created, endorsed, and supported by Leftists around the world. I do not say, and neither does he, that you are somehow responsible. What he does do is more guarded, which is to point out that an awful lot of that ideology comes down directly from very unpleasant sources, and somehow never changes even though the stated reasons change every generation. Another point is that quite often liberals are demonstrating and demonizing not conservatives, but the intractable problems caused by previous generations of liberals. Ah, no, you really have not looked at the site I linked, \*\*several \*\*historians do take Golberg to task. The book you are pushing is not respected at all, and not just because of ideology, the book has bad research and preconceived conclusions. > **[Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions](https://www.hnn.us/article/poor-scholarship-wrong-conclusions)** > > "Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and the economic sphere," proclaimed Mussolini in his co-written The Doctrine of Fascism from 1932, for > [@](#): > > Then again, this book is selective of facts and irresponsible of interpretation to the point historical obfuscation. This is in order to serve the underlying thesis, such as it is: “many of the ideas and impulses that inform what we call liberalism come to us through an intellectual tradition that led directly to fascism.” (9) From this utterly fanciful suggestion follows, astonishingly, that “Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator…. In Italy they were called Fascists. In Germany they were called National Socialists. In America we called them progressives.” (80-1) Never mind that Mussolini founded the first fascist movement in 1919, just as Wilson was being outflanked by Congress on the Treaty of Versailles. And never mind that Mussolini was totalitarian precisely because he sought to abolish a constitutional order with checks and balances for an explicitly proclaimed revolution against liberal decadence. In fact, never mind that “he made up the word,” (52) but that, in actuality, the term “totalitarianism” was coined earlier by an Italian anti-fascist liberal named Giovanni Amendola (and it is worth noting, killed for his opinions by Fascist Italy). And again, never mind that Gregor Strasser’s quote advocating socialism was made in the mid-1920s (71) – a time when Nazism sought working-class support from Northern Germany via regional leaders like the Strasser brothers and Joseph Goebbels – a few years before just such “left-wing” views helped cost him all Nazi Party posts in late 1932, finally resulting in his murder during the “Night of the Long Knives.” > > It is the latter tactic Liberal Fascism deploys most frequently throughout: selectivity. For Gregor Strasser’s story is that of the crushing of leftism by the NSDAP (even before abolishing the German trade unions on 2 May 1933), not proof of the Nazis’ embrace of socialism, let alone liberalism. Yet reading Goldberg’s account, you might forget that Wilson’s famed “Fourteen Points” were democratic blueprints for a peaceful future in Chapter 3; or even, in Chapter 4, you may think that FDR actually fought alongside Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy rather than first acting as the “arsenal of democracy” and then joining the Allies in World War II. Similarly in Chapter 5, Nazi scapegoating of Jews during the 1930s betrayed “an identical spirit” (178) later shown by “black fascists” (174) on 1960s American college campuses – but only if you forget that both were historically persecuted groups, and the latter were not acting in the context of an ethnocentric dictatorship. The same interpretative shenanigans is at work everywhere in Liberal Fascism: from JFK’s “fascist aesthetics” in Chapter 6 (209) to America’s “fundamentally fascistic economic system” decried in Chapter 8 (303); from Hillary Clinton’s “politics of meaning” as “thoroughly totalitarian” (330) in Chapter 9 to the rant against American popular culture in Chapter 10 [e.g. “Hip-hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of fascist themes,” or, “in terms of what we like on both big screens and small, we are all fascists now” (368, 374)]: all these things are only true if you treat fascist ideology so elastically as to make it mean whatever you want. > > Despite superficial references to scholars of fascism on pages 2 and 3 (and conservatively scattered throughout the rest of the book), there is virtually no engagement with the term beyond, ironically, precisely that which Goldberg accuses his liberal straw-men of throughout: employment of “fascism” as a simple term of abuse. The only difference here is that this bestselling book uses fascism as a complex term of abuse over nearly 500 pages (including outdated references and a detailed index). Needless to say, Goldberg’s use of scholarship on fascism, like his use of the term itself, is haphazardly employed throughout. Despite Liberal Fascism’s attempt to muddy the conceptual waters, fascism remains a coherent ideology defining itself against liberalism and socialism (hence “Third Way” in a decisively non-democratic sense) by way of revolutionary change, one aimed at comprehensively purifying and homogenizing all aspects of society – political, cultural, and economic. This was to be a national regeneration, or more specifically and explicitly during fascism’s heyday in the 1930s, a revolution from the right. > > For a decade or more, an impressive array of scholars has subscribed to this “new consensus” on generic fascism. For instance, it has long been recognized, as Mussolini notes in the quotation above, that fascist ideology was “syncretic”; that is, it was a notorious ideological “scavenger” – it appropriated ideas from both left and right, conservative and radical, foreign and domestic, in its formation between the wars. Because fascist ideology was the “latecomer” vis-à-vis liberalism and socialism, radical nationalists needed to play the hand they were dealt. But Goldberg studiously ignores such consistency of interpretation in favor of merely selecting characteristics frequently visible from interwar fascist movements, like youth activism or racism, and then haphazardly applies them to a risible rewriting of twentieth century American history. Thus when Goldberg compares, say, Hillary Clinton’s child welfare programs to a Hitler Youth manual asserting “‘you have the duty to be healthy!’” (388), it may sound credible at first – but only until it is remembered that young male membership was mandatory for the Hitler Youth, whose motto was “We were born to die for Germany.” There is nothing remotely resembling a eugenic cult of a single racial type like this in the annals of liberal democracy, of course. How about Goldberg’s asides such as “Or as the Nazis said more pithily, ‘Work makes you free’” (334; actually used over the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau); or again, “This is the Volksgemeinschaft reborn as a Social Gospel day-care center” (339): no it isn’t, not nearly. In fact, it is irresponsible to make the comparison. > > In sum, Liberal Fascism is less a work of neutral scholarship or unbiased journalism than thinly veiled historical revisionism. It is this latter point that bears underscoring in conclusion: irresponsibility. For in so one-sidedly, so superficially, so wrongly applying fascist ideology to American history, Goldberg does not just confuse understandings of generic fascism – proper scholarship will be untroubled by this nonsense, although popular views of the term may be set back a generation. Worse still, he gives aid and succor to enemies of liberal democracy, enemies who wish to see fascism rehabilitated, normalized, and recognized as beneficial. To name but one: actual fascist ideologues like Lyndon LaRouche gain tremendously from calling liberal democrats “fascists,” and Goldberg’s handful of caveats will do little to dispel his catchy semantic elision “liberal fascists.” In fact, it has been part of LaRouche’s shtick for years – calling his enemies “fascists”, seeking to invert the term for his own prejudices and political purposes – despite running for president on the Democratic ticket (!) no less than nine times. The political cult’s campaign against “Green fascism” (381ff) is but one longstanding example amongst many. Unlikely bedfellows, perhaps. But no less an ideological conflation and historical caricature than Goldberg’s wholly unrecognizable portrait of what is, and must remain, an oxymoron for the perverse formulation “liberal fascism.” More from the George Mason University Symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s _Liberal Fascism_ here: > **[The Scholarly Flaws of "Liberal Fascism"](https://www.hnn.us/article/the-scholarly-flaws-of-liberal-fascism)** > > Jonah Goldberg tells us he wrote this book to get even.  The liberals started it by “insist\[ing\] that conservatism has connections with fascism” (p.  22).  Conservatives “sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of the slander” (p. ... > **[Introduction](https://www.hnn.us/article/introduction)** > > . > [@](#): > > If it were only a work that, like so many other right-wing polemical tracts of the past decade that traduce history (Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment springs to mind) faded from public view and had little effect on the public, it might be acceptable to simply let it fade into obscurity. But Goldberg’s book has not faded; and its toxic effects seem to be growing with time. > > Realizing this, I corresponded with some of the historians and political scientists whose work I’ve found helpful in trying to understand the nature of fascism. All of them – Roger Griffin of Oxford Brookes, Robert O. Paxton of Columbia, Matthew Feldman of Northampton, and Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates – are widely recognized specialists in the study of fascism, and have played large roles in shaping the academic discussion of the phenomenon. They agreed that it was time for historians to step out from behind the academic curtain, take a stand and call out the book for the historical travesty that it is. And so each of them has tackled four different, yet interrelated, aspects of Liberal Fascism’s misbegotten nature. > > Thanks to History News Network, we present our modest effort to correct the historical record regarding the nature of fascism, and to draw attention to the toxic effects of Goldberg’s fraud. If nothing else, it’s become manifest that a serious national conversation about right-wing populism – of which fascism is a distinct species – needs to be had, and without the haze of irrationality that now hangs over it. Perhaps these essays will help spark that conversation. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/35 "2011-04-21T05:16:34Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Moreover, that critique always comes down to a giant No True Scotsman fallacy. This is a very common defense on the left. (They never really tried the real ideas! No, they were really Right-Wingers!) I never seen anyone on the left who’s tried to claim that Stalin or Mao were conservatives. It’s the right that’s trying to claim that Hitler was a liberal. ---
**Author:** ![Anticounterrevolutionary](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f04885/32.png) [@Anticounterrevolutionary](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anticounterrevolutionary)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/36 "2011-04-21T06:03:01Z")
This isn’t supposed to be a discussion about fascism, Republicanism, or liberalism. The OP mentioned they might not be around much, so I’ll ask that we get back on track. The idea of eugenics, and indeed the term itself, was put forth by Sir Francis Galton. He was a relation of Darwin whose idea of natural selection led Galton to the conclusion that humans were exempting themselves from that process. He used the term “nature vs. nurture” and wondered if through scientific and medical advancement we might be thumbing our noses at natural selection. As the punk band Devo noted, in part, > [@](#): > > The fittest shall survive, yet the unfit may live. > Lay a million eggs or give birth to one, so shall your species survive. > Wear gaudy colors or avoid display, it’s all the same. The OP asked almost as an aside about eugenics in the UK. Darwin and Galton were Brits. If it weren’t for _The Origin Of Species_ the Nazis might not have had any science to appropriate as a justification for their mass murders. As in America, it led to negative eugenics being practiced against the blind, the deaf, and mentally handicapped. It’s fucking insane to me that the US tried to implement “the final solution to the blind and deaf question” in the form of forced sterilization. Of course, this was when the science of genetics was in its infancy. It would be easier to accept the ignorance of our predecessors if their solutions weren’t so barbaric. The first half of the 20th Century was a brutal time politically and scientifically. The Nazis made eugenics a dirty word, but it’s still practiced today. It’s called genetics. ---
**Author:** ![Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/aca169/32.png) [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inbred_Mm_domesticus)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/37 "2011-04-21T06:11:58Z")
> [@Anticounterrevolutionary](#): > > The Nazis made eugenics a dirty word, but it’s still practiced today. It’s called genetics. I would love to understand this sentence. How is the study of genes and inheritance the same thing as eugenics? Also, is your background in the social sciences? ---
**Author:** ![Anticounterrevolutionary](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f04885/32.png) [@Anticounterrevolutionary](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anticounterrevolutionary)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 6:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/38 "2011-04-21T06:49:35Z")
> [@Anticounterrevolutionary](#): > > The Nazis made eugenics a dirty word, but it’s still practiced today. It’s called genetics. > [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](#): > > I would love to understand this sentence. How is the study of genes and inheritance the same thing as eugenics? Also, is your background in the social sciences? How is the study of genes and inheritance the “applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population,” usually referring to human populations, eugenics? It is by definition. I don’t think my background has any bearing on the discussion. However, I did include that sentence as a means for continuation of the discussion and not as an aim to provide a final word. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 7:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/39 "2011-04-21T07:05:26Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > It can’t be simply handwaved away with accusations of partisanship; he is partisan, but he is hardly dishonest. > > Goldberg doesn’t hold that Liberals are Nazis, or anything like it. Instead, he traces the ideological origins (something of a dirty little secret for so many leftists) of many groups. He is not exactly pro-Republican, or even pro-conservative (in the modern sense). Heh, my favorite review from **GIGO’s** link is the one by [Robert Paxton](http://www.hnn.us/articles/122231.html). > [@](#): > > Jonah Goldberg tells us he wrote this book to get even. The liberals started it by “insist[ing] that conservatism has connections with fascism” (p. 22). Conservatives “sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of the slander” (p. 1). “The left wields the term fascism like a cudgel” (p. 3). So Jonah Goldberg has decided it is time to turn the tables and show that “the liberal closet has its own skeletons” (p. 22). After years of being “called a fascist and a Nazi by smug, liberal know-nothings” he decides that “responding to this slander is a point of personal privilege” (p. 392). > Feeling oneself a victim is wonderfully liberating. Anything goes. So Jonah Goldberg pulls out all the stops to show that fascism “is not a phenomenon of the right at all. It is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left” (p. 7). The reader perceives at once that Goldberg likes to put things into rigid boxes: right and left, conservative and liberal, fascist and non-fascist. He doesn’t leave room for such complexities as convergences, middle grounds, or evolution over time. Thus Father Coughlin was always a man of the left, and so was Mussolini (Giacomo Matteotti or the Rosselli brothers, leaders of the Italian left whom Mussolini had assassinated, would have been scandalized by this view). The very mention of a “Third Way” puts one instantly into the fascist box. > … > The bottom line is that Goldberg wants to attach a defaming epithet to liberals and the left, to “put the brown shirt on [your] opponents,” as he accuses the liberals of doing (p. 392). He goes about this task with a massive apparatus of scholarly citations and quotations. But Goldberg’s scholarship is not an even-handed search for understanding, following the best evidence fully and open-mindedly wherever it might lead. He chooses his scholarly data selectively and sometimes misleadingly in the service of his demonstration. > > Jonah Goldberg knows that making the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and FDR the creators of an American fascism – indeed the only American fascism, for George Lincoln Rockwell and other overt American fascist or Nazi sympathizers are totally absent from this book – is a stretch, so he has created a new box: Liberal Fascism. Yup, no partisanship, dishonesty or painting the left as fascist there. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2011, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759/40 "2011-04-21T07:09:24Z")
> [@Anticounterrevolutionary](#): > > How is the study of genes and inheritance the “applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population,” usually referring to human populations, eugenics? It is by definition. > > I don’t think my background has any bearing on the discussion. However, I did include that sentence as a means for continuation of the discussion and not as an aim to provide a final word. Good, because it is not. [http://chronicle.com/article/Medical-Genetics-Is-Not/25463](http://chronicle.com/article/Medical-Genetics-Is-Not/25463) > **[postbiota.org](http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2008-May/002958.html)** > > This domain may be for sale! > [@](#): > > The connection that critics make between medical genetics and eugenics is historically fallacious. Activists on the political right are as mistaken > as activists on the political left: Genetic screening was not eugenics in the past, is not eugenics in the present, and, unless its technological systems become radically transformed, will not be eugenics in the future. The technologies of medical genetics were not constructed with eugenic goals, and the practices of medical genetics will not produce eugenic results […] > > There is, to start with, no meaningful historical connection between the enterprise once called eugenics and the enterprise now called medical genetics. There were certainly some Mendelian geneticists who were eugenicists, but the vast majority of classical geneticists figured out, early on, that most of the eugenic claims made about the inheritance of feeblemindedness and alcoholism were, if not entirely false, then at least undemonstrated. […] > > Classical geneticists were not, by and large, eugenicists, and neither were the physicians who constructed those systems on the foundation that the geneticists laid. […] > > The chief goal of the eugenicists, “improvement of the race,” was never one of the goals of genetic screening --and it did not become one, even after genomic research had identified the locations of dozens of disease-causing mutations. The founders of eugenics differed about which race they had in mind: Some meant “the white > race,” some “the German race,” some “the Mexican race,” and some, even, “the human race.” The founders of medical genetics, however, made deliberate efforts to separate themselves from what James Neel called “the parlous intellectual state” of eugenic research and practice because they thought it politically and scientifically correct to do so. > > From the very beginning, the founders of medical genetics --people like Neel, Fritz Fuchs, Michael Kaback, and Robert Guthrie --viewed their basic project as the relief of human suffering, not improvement of the race. […] > The reproductive goals of medical genetics are thus precisely the opposite of those of eugenics. Eugenicists wanted to ensure that the people they defined as genetically unfit did not reproduce; that is why they pushed for sterilization and segregation. Genetic screening was developed by medical geneticists to help the genetically “unfit,” precisely the people the eugenicists would have sterilized, have as many children as they wanted. The earliest patients who were referred to medical geneticists for counseling were people who suspected (or whose doctors suspected) that they carried the genes for serious diseases. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-eugenics-movement-and-euro-nazism/578759.md?page=3)