Galton also created the word for the opposite of “eugenic.” The word was “kakogenic,”derived from the Greek word kakos, meaning “bad.” “Kakogenic” (or“cacogenic” or its much more commonly used synonym, “dysgenic”) means “of low birth and tending towards, or productive of, racial degeneration.”
With these two words, Galton now brought into being the cult of eugenics, which today is recognized as having approximately the same relationship to the legitimate biological science of genetics that astrology bears to astronomy, or numerology to mathematics. “He had in view,” wrote Karl Pearson, Galton’s foremost interpreter, “eugenics not only as a science, not only as an art, but also as a national creed, amounting, indeed, to a religious faith.”
To the palpably class-conscious Francis Galton, only the breeding successes of the eugenics movement could prevent the superior hereditary qualities of the“race” from being overwhelmed by the rising tides of equally white, equally Anglo-Saxon, equally Protestant Englishmen of inferior hereditary and bank balances. As the high priest and theologian of this Victorian racist cult, Galton even established its very “scientific” scale of racial values. [8]
Galton wanted eugenics to become a religion and it did. Eugenics is a religion with dogmas that claims to be a science. You can use eugenics to convince people in the world that they’re born “inferior” and there isn’t anything they can do about their “inferiority.”
Since breeding up was so vital, [Francis] Galton concluded that “enthusiasm to improve the race is so noble in its aim that it might well give rise to a sense of religious obligation.” Eugenics was and is, after all, a religion. [10]
“Why bother with the facts of biology when you already have the dogmas of eugenics?”[11]
[Charles B.] Davenport was not only the scientific spokesman of the American eugenics movement but, also, its spiritual head. It was in 1916, five years after the publication of his Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, that Davenport composed his credo of eugenics. It was unveiled in an address—”Eugenics as a Religion”—Davenport delivered at the ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle Creek (Michigan) Sanitarium. As Davenport told the gathered celebrants, he had written this creed in response to the fact that“Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement, once expressed the anticipation that some day, when eugenics had come into its own, it would be accepted as a religion.” What Galton anticipated, Davenport delivered. [12]
As a religion, eugenics was to provide the moral and spiritual motivation to encourage increased fecundity in families of Anglo-Saxon, noble, wellborn, affluent (Galton always equated fat bank balances with the noblest of all human qualities), and thus superior human breeding stock. [13]
The principal benefactress of the American eugenics movement, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, contributed generously to help met the dollar costs of the Congress. She delivered her checks to the chairman of its Finance Committee, Madison Grant. [22]
The power of truly bad ideas survives their originators for lifetimes without end. [23]
Adolf Hitler was influenced by American people like Madison Grant, active treasurer of the Second (1921) and Third (1932) International Congress of Eugenics, and Grant’s protégé Lothrop Stoddard, the Harvard law school graduate with a Harvard Ph.D. in history.
There was, however, one of [Madison] Grant’s Nordic claims that cannot be ignored so readily, since it was taken up by no less a maker of history than Grant’s fellow Teutonist and Defender of the Great Race—Adolf Hitler.
In the revised edition of The Passing of the Great Race (1918, pp. 184-86), Grant claimed that because of the staggering losses of the Thirty Years’ War, which bore, of course, most heavily on the big, blond fighting man, at the end of the war most German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood… This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed [Grant neglected to say by whom] that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature, and skull characteristics. . . .
In 1925, Hitler, whose closest advisers were avid readers of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard (and whose Nazi-era scientific advisers and leaders were long-time personal and professional friends who had arranged for the German editions of their books years before the Third Reich), wrote in Mein Kampf, in his discussions of Race and State:
Unfortunately, our German nationality is no longer based on a racially uniform nucleus. .. the blood-poisoning which affected our national body, especially since the Thirty Years’ War, led not only to a decomposition of our blood but also of our soul… even today we still have in our Germanic national body great stocks of Nordic-Germanic people who remain inblended, in whom we see the most valuable treasures for the future.
… as Grant made plain in hundreds of these letters and in his published writings, no cause was dearer to the heart of Madison Grant than the total annihilation of the Jews. [26]
People who believed in eugenics believed in what Hitler was doing. What Hitler was doing, according to eugenicists, was “fearless” and “heroic” applications of biology and eugenics.
The fact that 1934 was also the year of the great blood purge of June, in which the nakedly brutal treatment of Christian and Jewish adults and children demonstrated to the world the true nature of [Adolf] Hitler’s branch of the Nordic movement, in no way diminished the enthusiasm or the collaboration of American eugenicists such as [Henry F.] Osborn and [Lothrop] Stoddard.
(In) 1940, … Stoddard paid a long visit to his admired Nordic state on the eve of its plunging into war against his native America. The climax of this pilgrimage, described in Chapter 17 of the book Stoddard wrote about it, Into the Darkness, was his visit with Adolf Hitler himself. [27] … During his visit to Nazi Germany he had met with many Nazi raceologists, such as his old admirer Hans Günther, Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, and Paul Schultz-Maumburg, as well as with official spokesmen such as Reichsministers Wilhelm Frick and Walter Darré. Through the kind assistance of these ranking Nazis, Stoddard was invited to join the judges on the bench of the Eugenics High Court of Appeals.
Stoddard said, for example (p. 189), that “the purity of the racial strains must be preserved.” And, Stoddard explained, “this is the Nazi doctrine best described as racialism” (Stoddard’s italics). So that, once the Jews and other inferior stocks were annihilated, the Nazi state would be able to concern itself with “improvements within the racial stock, that are recognized everywhere as constituting the modern science of eugenics, or race-betterment” (Stoddard’s italics). [28]
Benito Mussolini was another person liked by eugenicists. The historic function of fascism and that of scientific racism were one and the same: to keep what [Thomas] Malthus had contemptuously termed the “lower and middling classes of people” from ever aspiring to rise above their stations at birth.
No sooner did Mussolini’s Black Shirts start rounding up, torturing, and killing his non-fascist domestic opponents than he became the darling of the [Henry F.] Osborns, the [Charles B.] Davenports, and the [Madison] Grants. No visit to Europe was complete without a visit to Il Duce, who went out of his way to discuss eugenics and other race problems with Osborn, [Jon A.] Mjöen, [Charles B.] Davenport, and all other eugenics leaders whom his scientific adviser, Corrado Gini, could steer his way. In return, these foreign eugenicists made speeches and wrote articles in praise of the new Caesar. [29]
Most of …(the) scientific precursors of IQ test scores as scientific measurements of inherited individual and racial traits and characteristics have long since been forgotten. But some of them, notably craniometry, persisted well into the IQ testing phase of scientific racism. [33]
What you basically are trying to do with this “pseudoscientific” stuff is convince people that they are born “inferior” and there isn’t anything they can do about their “inferiority.”
The whole“it’s in your genes” goes back to the “bad blood” belief that, “according to the eugenicists, consisted of a hereditary endowment made up primarily of the unit character of pauperism—in the eugenic literature the major geneticdefect of the poor—as well as the unit characters for insanity, epilepsy, criminalism, immorality, low Binet-Simon IQ test scores, graft (at least, wrote [Charles B.] Davenport, in the Irish), nomadism, shiftlessness, pellagra, laziness, feeblemindedness, asthenia (general physical weakness), lack of ambition, and general paralysis of the insane.” [35]
It was also a major postulate of eugenics that inferior heredity was, as well, a human genetic endowment in which the blood of an individual was lacking in any of the unit characters (genes) that were supposed to provide the body with inborn immunity or resistance to tuberculosis, pellagra, infant diarrhea, dysentery, measles, malaria, cholera, pneumonia, influenza, and all of the other deficiency and infectious or parasitic diseases associated with poverty.
Most of our better psychiatrists and nonmedical behavioral scientists have long since rejected the notion that there even exists any single discrete biological or mental trait than can properly be labeled as “intelligence.” For example, the psychologist John Ertl, director of the Center of Cybernetic Studies at the University of Ottawa and developer of a neural-efficiency analyzer that combines electroencephalographs and computers to measure brain functions, was quoted as declaring: “Intelligence is a concept equivalent to truth and beauty. I don’t really know what it is, but I do know what it is not. It’s not the score of an I.Q. test, and it is not what our equipment measures.” Dr. Ertl said this after his brain-wave measurements had proven that large numbers of children who had been labeled as retarded on the basis of their IQ test scores were, actually, quite bright.
[John] Ertl is also fearful that, like Binet’s well-intentioned IQ tests, his own neural efficiency tests will be used not to help children who can be helped, but to hurt children who do not deserve to be misbranded by the willful abuse of his work. “There is no question,” he said, “but that poor nutrition affects the neural efficiency score just as it affects the IQ test score, just as does prenatal and postnatal brain and other organ damage caused by infectious diseases. But mass screening with brain wave techniques will probably not be preceded by mass medical and neurological examinations—any more than mass IQ testing has, up until now, been preceded or accompanies by mass clinical screening for anemia, eye and ear acuities, and neurological damage in the same children.” [39]
In our own times, a famous study begun in Riverside, California, over a decade ago by the University of California sociologist Jane E. Mercer has revealed that 75 percent of the Mexican-American and black-American children classified as being mentally retarded solely on the basis of their IQ test scores—and who were subsequently placed in psychologically deforming school classes for the mentally retarded as a result—were of perfectly normal mentality. According to Dr. Mercer, these pseudo-retardates would never have been mislabeled as“mentally retarded” if their adaptive behavior and other equally significant behavioral and sociocultural variables had been taken into account in their diagnoses. [40]
[Alfred] Binet himself railed against those who had, as had [Lewis M.] Terman and [Henry H.] Goddard after Binet’s death in 1911, “given their moral support to the deplorable verdict that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity.” Such statements caused Binet to “protest” against “this brutal pessimism” about the inborn mental potential of most human beings, since he felt that “a child’s mind is like a field for which an expert farmer has advised a change in the method of cultivating, with the result that in place of desert land, we now have a harvest.” [44]
You don’t have to bother with all this pseudoscientific stuff to find out if you’re “superior.” You can just do two things: 1. Check to see if you come from a “superior blood-line.” A “superior blood-line” is selective breeding of “superior” people... 2. Check your bank balance. If you have a lot of money in the bank then you just might be a “superior” person. ...
The goal of the “superiors” is to profit 100% off the “inferiors.” If scientific racism tells the “inferiors” that they’re born “inferior” and there is nothing that can be done about their “inferiority” then why bother spending money on the “inferiors”? So if an “inferior” is injured on the job, born with a disability, or starving, then all you have to say is that it’s nature’s way of showing how “inferior” they are. “To [Herbert] Spencer, the Malthusian par excellence, the sufferings of the poor were nature’s mechanism for assuring the survival of the fittest—just as the wealth of the rich was nature’s means of assuring the propagation of superior types.” [50] So then the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Scientific racism supplanted Scripture as the fount of “scientific” rationales for do-nothingism in terms of the promotion of the general welfare of the greatest numbers of the people of the rapidly industrializing nations of Europe and, shortly, North America. [52]
Historically, such vetoes of new programs, and cutbacks in our ongoing governmental programs to improve the basic qualities of human life and to widen the opportunities to develop our human genetic endowments, always add up to a continuation of the misguided compulsions to preserve the social biology of what the father of scientific racism, Thomas Malthus, had called the “necessary stimulus to industry”—poverty. [53]
Every child, every mother, every adult who dies for lack of a sufficient supply of doctors in this nation, is and will continue for decades to be a victim of the new scientific racism. [54]
The White House … announced that Mr. Nixon had vetoed a bill that would have set up a three-year $225-million program to train family doctors. —The New York Times, December 27, 1970 [55]
To Spencer, the Malthusian par excellence, the sufferings of the poor were nature’s mechanism for assuring the survival of the fittest—just as the wealth of the rich was nature’s means of assuring the propagation of superior types. Thus, whereas [Jeremy] Bentham and his followers called for living wages and free education and factory safety, and public sewage, clean-water, and other environmental hygienic improvements for the growing populations of urban poor, to Spencer “the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.” It was not overcrowded slum living that produced tuberculosis and other infectious diseases; it was the innate lack of the human will to survive. Therefore Spencer could write, of the victims of slum living and mine and mill accidents: “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.” [56]
“Two nations: between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
“You speak of . . .” said Egremont, hesitatingly.
“THE RICH AND THE POOR.” —BENJAMIN DISRAELI, in Sybil (1845) [57]
The historic function of fascism and that of scientific racism were one and the same: to keep what [Thomas] Malthus had contemptuously termed the “lower and middling classes of people”from ever aspiring to rise above their stations at birth. [60]
[Michael] Lewis observed that, in 1973, [Cyril] Burt’s 1934 “view cannot be supported by the data.” In the interim, of course, scores of major studies, such as those of [Otto] Klineberg, [Harold M.] Skeels, Skodak, [Benjamin] Pasamanick, [Cecil Mary] Drillien, Butler, [Dale B.] Harris, [Rick] Heber, and many other scientists, had shown that there is far more to a child’s IQ test scores than the genes that he inherits. “Why then,” Lewis asked in 1973, “should this view of intelligence hold such a dominant position in the thinking of contemporary scientists and public alike?”
It is a question whose answer demands wide public attention: If we cannot make the claim that IQ differences at least in infancy are genetically determined, then we must base them on differences in cultural learning. But these differences, for the sake of the division of labor, are exactly what the IQ tests are intended to produce. The hierarchy of labor is maintained by the genetic myth. The hierarchy produces the test differences and the test differences are used to maintain the hierarchy.
Thus, IQ scores have come to replace the caste system or feudal systems which previously had the function of stratifying society. Wherein these latter systems were supported by evoking the Almighty, the present system evokes Mother Nature.[61]
As Science reported from a scientific meeting in Colorado in 1970, Dr. Roger Revelle, head of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, had to warn scientists newly bitten by the population explosion bug “that the only examples of sustained population decline up to now have followed, not preceded, sustained economic growth.” [62]
… India has the population that it does because of the infant and adult death rates there. “. . . [A] couple must bear 6.3 children to be 95 percent certain that one son will be alive at the father’s 65th birthday. The average number of births in India per couple is 6.5 which tends to support the increasing body of opinion that parents will continue to bear children until reasonably sure of the survival of at least one son.” [64]
It is the combined reality of desire for adult sons and high child mortality that poses the crux of the population dilemma. Paradoxically, the best way to lower the population growth rate may be to keep children alive [italics added].[65]
The demographic transition, writes Princeton demographer Ansley J. Coale, is “the central event in the recent history of the human population. It begins with a decline in the death rate, precipitated by advances in medicine (particularly in public health), nutrition or both. Some years later the birth rate also declines, primarily because of changes in the perceived value of having children.” Before the demographic transition, “the birth rate is constant but the death rate varies; afterward, the death rate is constant but the birth rate fluctuates.”
Historically, the demographic transition, as in Western Europe and the United States, has always followed such life-enhancing developments as the Agricultural Revolution; the Industrial Revolution; the contiguous births of germ theory and immunology; the nineteenth- and twentieth-century enactments of social laws providing free education, vaccinations, and medical care; and enforced statutes mandating minimum wages, maximum working hours, and healthier standards of human housing.
Nearly half a century before Professor Coale wrote the above definition of the demographic transition (in the September 1974 Scientific American), the anthropologist Franz Boas, writing in the February 1927 Current History, observed that “. . . the well-to-do have, ordinarily, a low birth rate and a low mortality. Among the poor, the reverse is true.” As of now, it is the poorest states of this republic and the most impoverished nations of this planet that have the highest death rates and the highest birth rates. Among the more affluent states and nations, “the reverse is true.” See also Sir Dugald Baird’s 1946 table, “Mortality and Live Birth Rates in England and Wales, 1841-1939,” on page 429. [66]
Historically, such vetoes of new programs, and cutbacks in our ongoing governmental programs to improve the basic qualities of human life and to widen the opportunities to develop our human genetic endowments, always add up to a continuation of the misguided compulsions to preserve the social biology of what the father of scientific racism, Thomas Malthus, had called the “necessary stimulus to industry”—poverty. [68]
… (Not) people pollute. No, the things pushed on people pollute. So electric vehicles are less polluting than gas or diesel vehicles, but an example in the book is:
The sudden abandonment of cheap, electrified, and infinitely safer trolleys, trolley-buses, and commuter trains between 1932—when General Motors Corporation, during the Great Depression, “became involved in the operation of bus and rail passenger services”—and 1950 forced millions of Americans previously served by mass transit systems to buy their own cars in order to get to and from work daily.
By 1949, a Chicago Federal Jury convicted General Motors of having criminally conspired with Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and others to replace electric transportation with gas- or diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transportation companies throughout the country. The courts imposed a sanction of $5,000 on General Motors. In addition, the jury convicted H. C. Grossman, the man who was then treasurer of General Motors. Grossman had played a key role in the motorization campaigns and had served as a director of Pacific Electric Railway when that company undertook the dismantlement of the $100 million Pacific Electric system. The court fined Grossman the magnanimous sum of $1. [69]
The thesis of [Dwight J.] Ingle’s book is fully in the orthodox eugenics tradition: Ingle proposes that with or without the consent of the nation’s achievers of low IQ test scores, the time has come for this nation to protect itself against the menace of “genetic enslavement” by sterilizing them. [70]
To insure the non-survival of the unfittest, therefore, [William G.] Sumner violently opposed any laws and actions designed to protect the poor from slum living conditions, from dangerous working conditions, and from the perils of not having enough money to pay for medical and hospital care when ill or injured. To insure the survival of the rich, whom Sumner designed as the fittest by the sole virtue of their wealth, Sumner was equally opposed to the Interstate Commerce Act and all other legislation that proposed to regulate the railroads the nineteenth-century Robber Barons built with federal money and operated under the Vanderbilt slogan: “The public be damned.” [71]
Dr. [Paul] Ehrlich said, “. . . We might, for instance, institute a system which would make positive action necessary before reproduction is possible. This might be the addition of a temporary sterilant to staple food, or to the water supply. An antidote would have to be taken to permit reproduction.” And of course, if need be, the antidote would be doled out by Big Brother in ratios small enough to “produce the desired constance of population size.” [73]
. . . genocide as the ultimate instrument for protecting the genes of the supermen from the “dysgenic” threats posed by the “inferior” races. [74]
Thomas Malthus said, “Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. . . . we should . . . crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.” [75] . . . But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. If by these and similar means the annual mortality were increased from 1 in 36 or 40, to 1 in 18 or 20, we might possibly every one of us marry at the age of puberty, and yet few be absolutely starved.—PROFESSOR THOMAS MALTHUS, in An Essay on the Principle of Population, Book IV, Chapter 5 (second edition, 1803) [77]
Something else that was interesting in The Legacy of Malthus book was with this guy Dr. William Vogt. “[Vogt] wrote (p. 47), “for all practical purposes, large areas of the earth now occupied by backward populations will have to be written off the credit side of the ledger.” Vogt explained, in vivid prose, just how this could be done. The remedy was simple. It was called death.
Of Chile, for example, Vogt wrote (p. 186) that “one of the greatest national assets of Chile, perhaps the greatest asset, is its high death rate.” Of China, an ocean away from Chile, Vogt said (pp. 214-15) that “the greatest tragedy that China could suffer, at the present time, would be a reduction in her death rate.” Therefore the United Nations “should not ship food to keep alive ten million Indians and Chinese this year, so that fifty million may die five years hence” (pp. 281-82).” [78]
[William] Vogt’s Road to Survival, published almost immediately after Our Plundered Planet, was an instant best seller, the selection of major book clubs, and was hailed as a masterpiece by literary critics from coast to coast. - Dr. William Vogt is the former national director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Lawrence Lader, in his highly authorized biography of [Hugh] Moore, Breeding Ourselves to Death, echoed this appraisal: “‘Moore was the first businessman willing to stand up and be counted on this issue, the first to stick his head out,’ commented Dr. William Vogt, former national director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and author of the influential bookThe Road to Survival, which first stirred Moore’s interest in population.” [80]
Daniel Kemp
Footnotes: (gekürzt; Seitenangaben bei Daniel Kemp, siehe Link oben)
1. Ian T. Taylor, In the Minds of Men : Darwin and the New World Order (Toronto : TFE Publishing, c1984), 405 ; 2.-4. ; 9; 46-47 Ibid.,…
5. Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus : The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism(New York : Knopf : distributed by Random House, 1977, c1976), 378 ;
6.-8. ; 11. -44., 51. – 57., 61. - 62. ; 65. - 75. ; 78. - 80. Ibid., …
48. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope : A History of the World in Our Time(New York : Macmillan ; Collier-Macmillan, 1966), 51; 49. ; 59. Ibid., …
63. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages : America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York : Viking Press, c1970), 76
76. John Bryden, Deadly Allies : Canada’s Secret War, 1937-1947 (Toronto : McClelland and Stewart, c1989), 265
