Eugenics Is Not Right Wing by Ian Thorpe March 17, 2013.

Eugenics: The Hiddeen Agenda

Following Conservative Howard Flights breaking of the unofficial rule that no one in politics should ever speak the truth about anything, Dave Osler at the far left Liberal Conspiracy blog wrote, in an article titled Eugenics and the Tory (Conservative) Right: "It seems that Flight is just the latest supporter of the traditional class-based Eugenics that has been a singularly ugly undercurrent in British intellectual life at least since 1798, the year in which an anonymous pamphlet entitled 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' first saw the light of day." Liberal Conspiracy, known for it's readiness to brand any dissenting voice a

racist, bigot, genocidist or right wing nut job is probably the most illiberal British political blog, an organ of the extreme left's lunatic fringe whose conviction that they are right about everything protects them against attacks by Star Wars type weapons. Osler does the blogs noble tradition of ignorance, stupidity, uninformed bigotry and support for pseudo science proud by showing he does not understand the difference between eugenics and family planning. (Hitler's Final Solution was not eugenics, it was genocide) Where did that ugly undercurrent of class based eugenics come from? you might well ask. There was no Conservative party in 1798, just a bunch of people nicknamed Tories who supported the King, the Empire and the Church of England, they had never heard of class politics. In fact the notion of Eugenics (literally young gene - not an idea the traditionally inbred aristocracy who ran the show in 1798 ever embraced with great enthusiasm) had not around long enough for traditionalists to have any truck with it. No, the idea of Eugenics came from the left. While Volta in Austria and Galvani in Italy were planting the seeds of the Frankenstein myth with their argument about the relationship between electricity and life, British political thinkers were toying with the idea that physical and mental defects were due to hereditary factors and could be eradicated by preventing imbeciles and cripples from breeding. Both the electricians and the eugenicists were aiming in the right direction but not right on target. Look back to the early decades of the Twentieth Century and we find such luminary socialists as Virginia Woolfe, Marie Stopes,Marga ret Sanger, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and the left's leading couple Beatrice and Sidney Webb, all social progressives from the Leftie pantheon (look them up if you don't want to take my word),shared a common belief the state had not just the right but the duty to forcibly sterilise large sections of the population. The Fabian society, a left wing talking shop formed by the more disconnected intellectuals of the UK Labour Party has always been at the forefront of authoritarian socialism and one of its leading intellectuals Harold Laski was also a member of the British Eugenics Society and even penpals with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr.,

who once wrote to his British friend that he had "delivered a decision upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilising imbeciles the other day and felt that I was getting near to the first principle of real reform". Laski certainly didnt object. In fact, as Dennis Sewell recounts his book The Political Gene support for eugenics was largely contained within the left wing metropolitan intellectuals who by the 1930s had infiltrated and hijacked the UK Labour Party, founded by and for the men and women who worked in factories, shipyards, docks,
The Hidden Agenda: Item 1

in construction, on the railways and the land. These trendy left wing intellectuals desperately

wished to improve the lot of people in the lower strata of society but had no understanding of the lives and attitudes of people who lived in working class communities. The left wing intellectuals were in fact more elitist than the Conservatives. Although eugenics is often and unfairly branded with a racism label and some of the policies of 1930s socialism had strong racist undertones, the bulk of the 65,000 forced sterilisations in the US were against white country folk. A boy who smiled was likely to be sterilised for being an idiot, but any hillbilly could be victimised. Deliverance, as Sewell writes, was just a movie, while the brutality visited upon the people of Americas rural heartlands by well intentioned reformers and "progressive liberals" was real, and has left a long trail of agony leading to the present day. It might surprise readers to learn that the science of eugenics (and it is a science)was developed not by "right wing nut jobs" but Darwinists whose hyperactive God complex led them to believe nature could not be trusted to manage natural selection alone and needed a helping hand from scientists) was developed by a Briton, Francis Galton and an American, Charles Davenport. Though the forced sterilisation program in the USA is mentioned above the most extensive experiment in eugenics was conducted in politically correct, socialist Sweden with forced

sterilisations only being ended by law in 1975. Taken at face value, eugenics is not a bad idea, eradicating a gene that causes congenital defects or makes a person susceptible to hereditary diseases is a laudable intention. But as with all such scientific developments, once established it is open to abuse. Politicians were quick to see the opportunities to eradicate not just those destined to be a burden on society throughout their lives but troublesome minorities, mavericks, habitual dissidents, blacks, jews, homosexuals, artists and anyone who the establishment did not like the look of. Science was ever fascism's whore of course and once politicians in Germany and elsewhere saw the possible advantages of racial purity there was no shortage of scientists ready to help them achieve it. To understand why eugenics was not Right-wing one only has to look at the Scopes Trial, historically seen as a battle between modernism and fundamentalist forebears of today's Religious Right. Sewell , again, explains it is remembered entirely falsely. Supposedly heroic teacher John Thomas Scopes was just a football coach with "no special commitment to his pupils, and was not planning on staying in Dayton very long" and "probably never really taught his class about evolution". The trial itself was described by contemporary commentators as a cynical contrivance, a plot hatched by local businessmen to make Dayton famous, and a response to an advert by eugenicists hoping to challenge the anti-evolution Butler Act. That Act was not some reactionary and archaic ruling, having only been signed into law by the Governor on March 23, less than two months previously, passed by overwhelming margins by both houses. Sewell comments: "These margins reflected the Butler Acts enormous popularity among the people of Tennessee. In 1925, the nationwide eugenics campaign was at its
Science giving nature a helping hand

height. In the rural areas of Tennessee folk may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian science, but they knew the eugenicists who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them imbeciles and defectives and would sterilise them if they got the chance. They knew they despised God and the Bible too. Now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. But America was a democracy, and that meant that simple people, if they made their views plain, could fight." While not persuading me to move one millimetre toward creationism it does put into perspective the deification of science. Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, portrayed as a reactionary and idiot in the Spencer Tracey film glorifying Scopes, has been described as the most radical and socially progressive man to ever stand for the American presidency, and saw the trial as a contrivance on the part of a middleclass elite to cheat the ordinary citizens of Tennessee out of a law that they very much wanted. Here we see the left's contempt for
The Scopes Trial

democracy and the will of the majority most recently displayed when after a political activist

Appeal Court Judge in California overturned a democratic vote to repeal a law permitting same sex marriage. "Progressives, who have the effrontery to describe themselves as Democrats, were saying that in cases where the popular vote produces the wrong answer to a question, central government must step in and "do what is right." Obviously to anyone who understands the concept of a democratic society a majority in a popular vote can never produce the wrong answer. To call for government or the courts to overturn such a decision is a call for tyranny. But what else can we expect from people sympathetic to the tyranny of eugenics. It is not just in the USA that such a contemptuous attitude towards poor and

uneducated people is blindingly obvious among the new elitists of the intellectual left. Eugenics and Fabian Socialism shows that many leading British socialists in the 1930s supported if not forced then certainly coerced stetilization. Though the Labour Party has now dropped its official support foe Eugenics as social engineering, the Fabian Society still exists and still supports eugenics, though not as noisily as in the past. In his book The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (review - Google Books) Professor John Carey comments on the elitism and intellectual snobbery of leading left wing academics and writers from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Professor Carey's thesis proposes that modernism was born out of snobbish revulsion to the spread of literacy and popular culture. Modernism, he says, is less a cultural movement motivated by certain aesthetic and spiritual imperatives than a closing of ranks by social cabal. Its chief ambition is to exclude as many people as possible from the enjoyment and understanding of culture so the self-appointed elitists of culture may enjoy their own superiority unhindered by the press of common folk. Or, put more simply: If a lot of people like it we must dismiss it as crap. In this sense, modernism is fundamentally "antidemocratic." "Intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy," Professor Carey explains. "But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand - and this is what they did. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture." Hence the aesthetic experiments of writers like Mallarme, T S Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were undertaken not for any compelling aesthetic or spiritual reason but simply as an exercise in obscurantism. Literature is not unique but special in holding the ability to educate and entertain simultaneously. People who have followed Bernard Cornwell's "Sharpe" series will have learned a lot about Wellington's Iberian Campaign against Napoleon Boneparte's French Empire and a good deal about nineteenth century military technology. Likewise the books of John Steinbeck give us a vivid picture of

California in and just after the Great depression but deliver the message in a much more engaging narrative that some weighty social history written by the type of person who would sneer at Steinbeck's populism. A progressive, Left-wing middle-class elite, as most of the eugenicists were right up until the Second World War, was entirely comfortable with eugenics not just as a philosophical idea but as a social policy to be implemented with enthusiasm. After WW2 eugenics became discredited and, surprise, associated with conservatives. The left are nothing if not hypocritical and had conveniently forgotten Hitler's political party was the National Socialists and that the other nations to have pursued eugenics as a policy were Soviet Russia under Stalin and Communist China under Mao Tse Tung. Now when online writers and commentators encounter "progressives" shouting "Eugenics" at any mention of the idea that we should perhaps discourage the unemployed and the underclass from producing children by making the benefits system less generous, do not be intimidated by their assumptions of intellectual or moral superiority. It is they, the left as they like to style their authoritarian politics, who have traditionally supported eugenics and not for the entirely supportable reason of economic pressures but for the unsupportable and illiberal reason of advancing a political agenda that involves eliminating certain social groups from the population. Curtailing benefits is not in any way related to eugenics, it is simply a common sense attitude to persuading people to take responsibility for their own lives.

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