Footnote to my post #17020:
EUGENICS SOCIETY
(a book review)
by Mark Burdman
Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain
by Pauline M.H. Mazumdar
Routledge, New York, 1992
373 pages, hardbound, $74.50
Pauline Mazumdar's book is written in an objective, academic manner, often with technical sections that would tend to appeal only to someone with a professional interest in genetics, and her objectivity often makes it impossible to know what her moral attitude is toward the subjects she is describing. While these three elements conspire to make Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings tedious reading at times, this problem is more than balanced by the fact that the book is dense with explosive material about one important trend in the thinking of British political, scientific, and intellectual elites from the period of the 1880s until the Second World War. Paradoxically, the dry, objective tone has the effect of making such material all the more shocking, and her devotion to her subject-matter has produced a lot of useful research. Mazumdar has written a book that is required reading for those seeking to understand crucial features of the last 100 years of history, particularly the period from roughly 1880 to the Second World War, and to counter the simplistic notions of this period purveyed in our media and university textbooks.
For all the voluminously documented crimes of the Nazis, the fact is, leading British circles were the earliest proponents and developers of eugenics, a pseudo-science that these British influentials--including Charles Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton and various sons of Darwin, members of the Huxley family, International Monetary Fund founder John Maynard Keynes, and others--concocted to promote the reduction in numbers, if not the eventual elimination, of categories of people whose existence was undesired by them. Such undesirables were, in the earliest years of the history of the Eugenics Education Society (the name of the group at the time of its founding in 1907), referred to dismissively as ``the residuum'' and later as ``the paupers''; in order to study them, the eugenics mob sponsored so-called ``Pauper Pedigree Projects,'' to reinforce the notion of ``social class biologically defined.''
Eventually, the name ``social problem group'' was used, to describe what is today often termed ``the underclass.'' According to Mazumdar, ``from its beginning in Britain, eugenics spread to many other countries,'' creating a kind of ``eugenics international.'' It was the British eugenists who, years before the Nazis existed, synthesized the philosophical ravings of the late 19th century's Friedrich Nietzsche about the Ubermensch (``Superman'' or ``Over-Man'' in English) into a coherent matrix, to justify measures against what Nietzsche labeled ``the inferior race.'' It was they who, starting about 1930, together with the Rockefeller Foundation and related circles in the
United States, promoted the work of the notorious German race scientist Ernst Rudin, including into the 1933 period when Rudin's work provided the basis for the Nazis' compulsory sterilization law, and then used his work to promote eugenics measures in Britain. Beginning in 1929, the same individuals launched the institutions of the neo-malthusian population control movement. It was Sir Francis Galton, the proponent of ``hereditarianism,'' who declared in 1883 that the ``Age of Eugenics'' had begun (the name of the Eugenics Society today is the Galton Institute).
From:
bosnet.org |
