Monday February 9, 2004
America the Model for Nazi Eugenics?
"Biological courts, forced sterilisation, detention for the socially inadequate," and euthanasia were among the pre-war "American eugenic accomplishments."
LONDON, UK, February 6, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A recent article in the UK's The Guardian reveals the disquieting roots of Nazi eugenics.
As an illustration of the American pre-war eugenics disgrace, the exposé describes a famous Chicago court case involving the killing of a newborn for an alleged deformity. The court, in the case against Dr Harry Haiselden, who refused to perform an operation which would have preserved the baby's life, stated that "We believe that a prompt operation would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the child. We find no evidence from the physical defects that the child would have become mentally or morally defective." Despite this assertion, the court incongruously "decided that Haiselden was within his professional rights to decline treatment," and was released without punishment. When questioned by a reporter about the incident, he told him "Eugenics? Of course it's eugenics."
Haiselden became a Eugenics champion, and "an overnight celebrity;" he wrote newspaper articles, went on speaking tours. There was even a Hollywood movie, called The Black Stork which was "unbridled cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement; the film played at movie theatres around the country for more than a decade." "In 1917," the writer continues, "a display advertisement for the movie read: 'Kill Defectives, Save the Nation and See The Black Stork.'"
Methods for the extermination of the 'defectives' "- including gassing the unwanted in lethal chambers -" was a part of national debate and common-day conversation.
The American eugenics movement became a model, inspiring similar ideas and discussion in Europe. German eugenicists formed relationships with American eugenicists; "A number of charitable American bodies generously funded German race biology with hundreds of thousands of dollars, even after the depression had taken hold," the article reveals.
Although Germany had its own authorities, Germans "still closely followed American eugenic accomplishments as the model: biological courts, forced sterilisation, detention for the socially inadequate, [and] debates on euthanasia."
Read The Guardian article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1142027,00.html
Also see the following related LifesSiteNews.com reports:
Eugenics was Common Cause Between Nazis and the Modern Left:
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2003/sep/03092604.html
And the January, 1999 Interim article which quotes Pro-life Jewish actor and writer, Ben Stein, who parallels the abortion movement with Hitler's Nazi movement, saying that "the pro-abortion ideology is 'very similar to Marxism and Nazism,'" at: http://www.theinterim.com/1999/jan/03jewish.html
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