War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black, 2003.
The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea by Elof Axel Carlson, 2001.
American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism by Nancy Ordover, 2003.

A review of three recent books on eugenics by Matt Nuenke, October, 2003.
 

POSTSCRIPT FEBRUARY 2005

I just finished an article entitled "Talent, Character, and the Dimensions of National Culture" by Gerhard Meisenberg, Ross University—Mankind Quarterly, Winter 2004. He had a short comment on eugenics that also shows how distorted the movement has been portrayed: 

"The observation that in our time this value system is associated with high IQ at the level of whole national populations suggests that historically, the Enlightenment was triggered by rising intelligence among the culturally creative sections of the European population. Since IQ tests were unknown before the opening years of the 20th century and time machines are not yet in common use, there is no direct test for this hypothesis. However, the pervasive progress in science, technology and social complexity from the 17th century onward provides additional circumstantial evidence for the conjecture that the Age of Enlightenment was a time of rising intelligence. There can be no progress without rising intelligence.

"In philosophy, the Age of Enlightenment paved the way for the utilitarian ethic of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. During the 19th century, the utilitarian maxim demanding the pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number became a leading influence on political and social thought. It inspired the abolitionist movement during the mid-19th century and the socialist movement during the late and early 20th centuries; and it produced the eugenics movements in the decades after Darwin.

"All these social reform movements were based on the same utilitarian ethic. They all shared the rationalist approach of attempting to maximize human welfare, and they all were universalist. They were not egalitarian in the sense of believing in equal ability or character. However, they were universalist in the sense that they valued every person's welfare alike. They were ethical egalitarians. Abolitionists valued the slave's welfare as highly as the master's, socialists valued the laborer's welfare as highly as the capitalist's, and eugenicists went to the extreme of valuing the welfare of future generations as highly as the welfare of those living now."

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POSTSCRIPT JULY 2004

I came across an article (July, 2004) written by Richard Koenigsberg (do a Google search on his name for several sites he is involved in), entitled "Dying for One's Country: The Logic of War and Genocide." His research is far more extensive than mine with regards to the Holocaust and its links with eugenics, and I found this article to be a valuable addition to refuting Black's claim (critique following this postscript) that eugenics and/or White supremacy had anything to do with the Holocaust. Here is a summation of Koenigsberg's article.

Much of Hitler's attitudes towards the nation-state, war, community and obligation came from his participation in the First World War, where 6,000 men died every day. Contrast that with the 3,000 that died in one day in the U.S. on 9/11, but not day after day for four years. Miraculously Hitler fought heroically, survived, and did it without complaint for his nation; the same that we have always expected of our own soldiers.

And like our own returning veterans, there is a great distaste for shirkers and deserters with deserters seen as deserving the death penalty. With Hitler however, he came to loath those who would not fight for their country. When he left the hospital after losing his eyesight from poisonous gas for a period of time, "He claimed that 'nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk.'" In his mind, the Jews were traitors to the nation. This festered in his mind for the next twenty-five years leading up to the World War Two—an insatiable hatred for shirkers, and Jews were easily stereotyped as such and deserving of punishment—the supreme punishment.

Today we can see a great deal of similarity between Hitler's militaristic ideology and that of the United States. We are willing to kill thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children as part of our war on terrorism, and claim it is just collateral damage. We are willing to set off World War Three against a two-bit dictator, Saddam Hussein, because we felt endangered and a preemptive attack was thus justifiable. This is in contrast to Hitler's preemptive attack against the Soviet Union that was busily slaughtering millions of its own people, and was only separated from Germany by Poland, it was equal in strength to Germany, and the Soviets declared openly that there objective was world domination in the name of Communism. The similarities and the differences are so glaring that the only way the connection has not been made between Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union versus the United States' invasion of Iraq has to do with the ongoing demonization of anything connected with Hitler. In addition "Hitler glorified war and the death of the German soldier in battle." I don't know about death, but our present government, Democrats and Republicans alike, seem to have embraced a desire to use the American war machine over and over again.

However, I digress. Koenigsberg's article shows clearly that the Jews were slaughtered because in Hitler's mind, if Germans were to be slaughtered, then the Jews would likewise have to die. Not because they were inferior, but because they must suffer the same as the German soldier—war and genocide were the same parts of warfare. Hitler was the archetypical patriot: he led an ascetic life, devoted to his people, willing to sacrifice all for Germany's survival, and willing to die as any other soldier. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin all hid safely in the background while others died for them. If Hitler had a severe fault, it was his blindness to the consequences of war itself.

The Nazi state stressed communitarianism over bourgeois individualism, just like Communism and increasingly in the Western socialist states where free markets are criticized, and global obligations to every form of suffering is seen as a mandatory obligation. The only difference is one of drawing the boundary for the perceived community: will it be the family, the town, the nation, people of the world, all living organism, or Gaia—all things living and dead.

Hitler wrongly saw in the Jews a materialistic individualism. He failed to see that they were not prepared to die for Germany because Germany was not theirs. They were Jews, and as such, they had a similar devotion to their own people as Hitler had towards his. National Socialism was in fact a mirror image of Jewish tribalism (http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/nazis.htm). Still, Hitler was prepared to kill anyone that was not part of his vision, and the Jews, Gypsies, and others had to die because the best Germans were dying by the thousands. It had nothing to do with eugenics and what is called White or Aryan supremacy anymore than Americans feel that their nation is the supreme democracy and must lead other nations towards our divine will.

Koenigsberg states, "According to Hitler's theory propounded in Mein Kampf, what was unique about the Aryan was his willingness to abandon self-interest and transcend egoism in the name of surrendering to the community. What was 'most strongly developed in the Aryan,' Hitler said, was the 'self-sacrificing will to give one's personal labor and if necessary one's own life for others.' The Aryan was 'not greatest in his mental abilities as such,' but rather in the 'extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community.' The Aryan according to Hitler willingly 'subordinates his own ego to the life of the community' and 'if the hour demands it' even sacrifices himself."

"The Jew by contrast, Hitler said, represented the 'mightiest counterpart to the Aryan.' Whereas the Aryan willingly sacrificed himself for the community, in the Jewish people the 'will to self-sacrifice does not go beyond the individual's naked instinct of self-preservation.' The Jew lacked completely, Hitler believed, the 'most essential requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude.' The Jew's 'absolute absence of all sense of sacrifice' expressed itself as 'cowardice.'"

We know now of course that devotion and self-sacrifice can come and go in any race, nation, religion, etc., depending on the group's level of tribalism and/or indoctrination at the time. Nations have swung back and forth between communitarianism and individualism, between peace and barbarity, depending on who is holding the puppet strings.

Though eugenics was introduced late into Germany, eugenics and attitudes of genetic superiority had nothing to do with Hitler's slaughter of "vermin" where he found them: Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc. Koenigsberg sums up how other humans could be sacrificed on the alter of one's God:

"Thus a conundrum arose that would preoccupy Hitler throughout his life: Why in war do the best human beings die while the worst survive? Our ordinary expectation is that if we perform in accordance with morality or virtue, we will be rewarded; whereas if we act immorally, we will be punished. Yet Hitler discovered that what occurs in war acts in opposition to what we feel should occur. In war, those who adhere to societal norms by enthusiastically performing their duty are killed. While those who behave immorally by evading their responsibility to society survive. Hitler was alarmed and agitated by the profound unfairness or injustice of this state of affairs."

A feeling of injustice led Hitler to kill the shirkers and deserters, not any perceived differences in genetic quality as was understood at the time. The Final Solution was payback time for hatred towards the cowardly that he had nurtured since World War One. Nurture, not nature, worked its magic on Hitler as love of Germany, and hatred of all those who could not sacrifice for the common good, overtook his very being. Had he had a better understanding of "the other," he would have understood that the Jews and the Slavs (if not the Gypsies) could be allies under the right conditions. Nevertheless, like the Communists, he embraced uncompromising Total War. The death of individuals was irrelevant.

John Glad, a Jewish eugenics' advocate, has also written a short rebuttal of Black's assertions. See note [6] for the complete text.

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War Against the Weak, like so many books by the Left, is really about the continuing war against the strong. Black tries to link eugenics with everything evil, and especially with the Holocaust. However, his contradictions, overt omissions, and slanted text show more about his own political agenda than anything to do with the history of eugenics. Nowhere in this book does he seem to be able to link the similarities between Nazi Germany of the past and Israel today when it comes to displacing other people (the Palestinians) for the expansion of the Jewish nation. But first, let me get out of the way all of the "Nordic super race" nonsense he scatters throughout the book:

"Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race."

Black makes it sound like eugenics was a conspiratorial plot like the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, where the Jews were said to be plotting a take-over of the world. Nonsense, eugenics had many faces and many advocates from Marxists to outright racists with little interest in eugenics. It fact, it was no movement at all when one compares the different players and objectives—they were all over the ideological map which he goes on to show throughout his book (as well as the second book I will be reviewing—The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea).

"Specious intelligence tests, colloquially known as IQ tests, were invented to justify incarceration of a group labeled 'feebleminded.'"

Wrong—intelligence tests were first devised in France by Alfred Binet, and had nothing to do with eugenics.

"The goal was to immediately sterilize fourteen million people in the United States and millions more worldwide—the 'lower tenth'—and then continuously eradicate the remaining lowest tenth until only a pure Nordic super race remained. Ultimately, some 60,000 [later he states 70,000] Americans were coercively sterilized and the total is probably much higher."

Now isn't it odd that if the eugenics' movement was devised to create a pure Nordic super race, worldwide, that other nations that were not Nordic also joined in the eugenics movement? In addition, isn't it even odder that he makes no mention of what races were eventually sterilized in the United States? It seems to me if eugenics was all about creating a Nordic super race, then other races would have been sterilized in much higher numbers in proportion to their numbers than so-called Nordics/Anglo-Saxons. I have never seen any kind of breakdown by race, because the evidence would show that Whites were as likely to come under the scalpel as Blacks, Indians, or Jews. This contradiction alone makes the primary assertion of this book absurd. Black clearly had access to the numbers sterilized by race—why not publish them? (Maybe too few Jews were sterilized percentage wise, so his whole Nordic supremacy argument would be falsified by just one group's under-count.)

"The victims of eugenics were poor urban dwellers and rural 'white trash' from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified."

What? No rural 'white trash' with 'blond and blue-eyed Nordic' features? How about all those Irish that I know (like my wife) with their Viking-like red hair, blue eyes and freckles—isn't that Nordic enough? Hitler seemed to think so. And yet the Irish were as unwelcome as any other immigrant group at the time.

"As I explored the history of eugenics, however, I soon discovered that the Nazi principle of Nordic superiority was not hatched in the Third Reich but on Long Island decades earlier—and then actively transplanted to Germany…."

"The intent was to create a new and superior mankind. The movement was called eugenics. It was conceived at the onset of the twentieth century and implemented by America's wealthiest, most powerful and most learned men against the nation's most vulnerable and helpless. Eugenicists sought to methodically terminate all the racial and ethnic groups, and social classes, they disliked or feared. It was nothing less than America's legalized campaign to breed a super race—and not just any super race. Eugenicists wanted a purely Germanic and Nordic super race, enjoying biological dominion over all others…. Decades after a eugenics campaign of mass sterilization and involuntary incarceration of 'defectives' was institutionalized in the United States, the American effort to create a super Nordic race came to the attention of Adolf Hitler…."

"But they did give birth to a burning desire to understand how the most powerful, intelligent, scholarly and respectable individuals and organizations in America came to mount a war against the weakest Americans to create a super race…."

"Defective humans were not just those carrying obvious diseases or handicaps, but those whose lineages strayed from the Germanic, Nordic and/or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal…."

"Indeed, the eugenicists would push further, attempting a constantly upward genetic spiral in their insatiable quest for the super race…."

"In 1914, Dr. Kellogg organized the First Race Betterment Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan. The conference's purpose was to lay the foundations for the creation of a super race, amid an atmosphere of lavish banquets, stirring calls to biological action, and scientific grandiloquence…."

"Madison Grant was internationally known for his bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race, which promoted Nordic whites as the superior race…."

"They would be prohibited from marrying and forcibly sterilized. Eventually—perhaps within several generation—only the white Nordics would remain. When their work was done at home, American eugenicists hoped to do the same for Europe, and indeed for every other continent, until the superior race of their Nordic dreams became a global reality…."

Does Black really believe that once every race other than the Nordic race was sterilized in Europe, that eugenicists could just go into other countries, like India or China, and just start sterilizing all non-Nordics? That would be the entire nation! Black suffers from some kind of conspiratorial delusions as I will show later.

"He was simply a racist. Plecker's passion was for keeping the white race pure from any possible mixture with Black, American Indian or Asian blood. The only real goal of bureaucratic registration was to prevent racially mixed marriages and social mixing—to biologically barricade the white race in Virginia."

Black spends a whole chapter on Plecker, an ineffective player in the anti-miscegenation movement, that had little to do with eugenics. But does Black want us to believe that other races do not try to prevent race mixing: Hindu Asian caste system, Koreans, Black nationalists, Arab tribes, etc? Or how about Black's own race: "The new Zionism has grown in part only out of the internal impulsions of Judaism itself, out of the enthusiasm of modern educated Jews for their history and martyrology, out of the awakened consciousness of their racial qualities, out of their ambition to save the ancient blood, in view of the farthest possible future, and to add to the achievements of their forefathers the achievements of their posterity." (Max Nordau and Gustav Gottheil in Zionism and Anti-Semitism; from The Unfit by Carlson.)

"As such, even the [Anglo-Saxon Club's] constitution proclaimed its desire 'for the supremacy of the white race in the United States of America, without racial prejudice or hatred.' This was the powerful redefining nature of eugenics—in action."

"Pure whites could only marry pure whites. All other race combinations would be allowed to intermarry freely." And now in America, we have Jews promoting racial mixing while they preach to their own kin not to marry outside their race. I guess Jews must have been the real masterminds behind eugenics (MacDonald 2002b).

"By 1912, America's negative eugenics had been purveyed to likeminded social engineers throughout Europe, especially in Germany and the Scandinavian nations, where theories of Nordic superiority were well received. Hence the First International Congress of Eugenics attracted several hundred delegates and speakers from the United States, Norway, Belgium, Germany, England, France, Italy, Japan, and Spain." How did they persuade the last four nations into thinking they were Nordic? What a trick! Moreover, they did it again later:

"During the congress Davenport orchestrated the renaming and broadening of the International Eugenics Committee into a Permanent International Commission on Eugenics. This renamed entity would sanction all eugenic organizations in 'cooperating' member countries, which now included Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Germany was not included because it refused to sit on the same panel with its World War I enemies Belgium and France. Germany was also struggling under the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which made international eugenic cooperation difficult….To keep the eugenic directorate truly elite, commission rules permitted no more than three representatives of each cooperating country to be empanelled. Davenport and Laughlin sat at the apex of this group. All commission members were dedicated to the American-espoused belief in Nordic supremacy, a sentiment which was also growing in Germany…."

"Ironically, while Ploetz believed in German national eugenics and harbored strong anti-Semitic sentiments, he included the Jews among Germany's most valuable biological assets. After returning to Germany, Ploetz in 1904 helped found the journal Archiv fiir Rassen- and Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of Race Science and Social Biology), and the next year he organized the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene) to promote eugenic research. Both entities functioned as the principal clearinghouses for German eugenics for years to come. Understandably, Ploetz emerged as Germany's leading race theorist and was often described as 'the founder of eugenics as a science in Germany….' With Nordic superiority as the centerpiece of American eugenics, Davenport quickly established good personal and professional relations with German race hygienists."

As even Black unintentionally shows throughout his book, the Jews were murdered not because of eugenics (thought to be an inferior race) but because they were seen as extremely dangerous to the Nazis because the Jews were perceived as being highly intelligent (which they were/are) and the most dangerous race in terms of power—internationally and internally. On the other hand, races like the Gypsies were killed because they were thieves and seen as worthless; the Jews were competitors in racial warfare.

"By the time Hitler's concept of Aryan superiority emerged, his politics had completely fused into a biological and eugenic mindset. When Hitler used the term master race, he meant just that, a biological 'master race.' America crusaded for a biologically superior race, which would gradually wipe away the existence of all inferior strains. Hitler would crusade for a master race to quickly dominate all others. In Hitler's view, eugenically inferior groups, such as Poles and Russians, would be permitted to exist but were destined to serve Germany's master race. Hitler demonized the Jewish community as social, political and racial poison, that is, a biological menace. He vowed that the Jewish community would be neutralized, dismantled and removed from Europe…."

Yes, the Jews needed to be removed from Europe because they were superior to the Aryan racial plan. Hitler knew how powerful they were, he felt their wrath from around the globe, and as the Jews (and Anglophiles) pushed the West into war with Germany, as well as being perceived as the brains behind Bolshevism—Hitler's (and Germans) primary fear was from the Communist East.

"During the Reich's first ten years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilizing hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society."

Black again conflates German eugenics with Germany's annihilation of political enemies during Hitler's Third Reich. They were not connected, and with several missions undertaken for race betterment, another to make room for wounded soldiers, and yet another for political purges and destruction of the enemy. Black labels them as all eugenic when clearly most of the efforts in disposing of enemies and invalids alike had to do with the war effort, not eugenics. In fact, unlike the American's negative eugenics' movement, the Germans also had a positive eugenics' program:

"Hitler's master race would be more than just chiseled blond and blue-eyed Nordics. Special breeding facilities were established to mass-produce perfect Aryan babies. They would all be closer to super men and women: taller, stronger and in many ways disease-resistant."

The German eugenics' program did want to eliminate disease, just like the American eugenics' program that focused on degeneracy, but they also wanted to breed a super-race. What is odd to me, is that the Nazis seemed to be more influenced by looks (height, hair color, blue eyes, etc.) rather than on intelligence. Today, the eugenics' programs are almost singularly focused on intelligence, because intelligence is seen as a human trait that is universally desired. Few people want their children to be stupid rather than intelligent.

"But while openly eschewing eugenics with statements and memos, Rockefeller in fact turned to eugenicists and race scientists throughout the biological sciences to achieve the goal of creating a superior race." Just how were they going to do that without a positive eugenics' program? Getting rid of defectives does not simultaneously produce a super-race. Black never seems to understand the difference between breeding and weeding—they are different approaches that try to achieve different ends.

"America's retreat from eugenics was precipitated by the convergence of two forces: Hitler's ascent in Germany and the climactic exit of the pseudoscience's founding fathers from Cold Spring Harbor. But it was not a moment of truth that finally convinced the Carnegie Institution and the eugenic establishment to turn away from their quest for a superior Nordic race…."

"With Holmes' decision in hand, Carnegie's Cold Spring Harbor enterprise had unleashed a national campaign to reinforce long dormant state laws, enact new ones and dramatically increase the number of sterilizations across America. Sterilizations multiplied, marriage restrictions were broadened. Hundreds of thousands were never born. Untold numbers never married. The intent had been to stop the reproduction of targeted non-Nordic groups and others considered unfit. It continued into the 1970s, probably even later…."

"As early as December of 1942, the Nazi plan was obvious. In a highly publicized warning simultaneously broadcast in more than twenty-three languages the world over, the Allies announced that the Nazis were exterminating five million Jews and murdering millions of other national peoples in a plan to perpetrate a master race…."

"Reed added defiantly that the AES should cast off any guilt about the Holocaust. 'My final point,' Reed declared, 'is concerned with the allocation of guilt for the murder of the Jews. Was this crime really abetted by the eugenics ideal? One should remember that the Jews and other minorities have been murdered for thousands of years and I suspect that motives have been similar on all occasions, namely robbery with murder as the method of choice in disposing of the dispossessed individuals.... I do not wish to make Charles Davenport my scapegoat for this, as seems to be the fashion these days. As far as I can see, the motives behind the liquidation of the Jews were not eugenic, not genocide ... but just plain homicidal robbery….'"

"Yet humanity should also be wary of a world where people are once again defined and divided by their genetic identities. If that happens, science-based discrimination and the desire for a master race may resurrect. This time it would be different. In the twenty-first century it will not be race, religion or nationality, but economics that determines which among us will dominate and thrive. Globalization and market forces will replace racist ideology and group prejudice to fashion mankind's coming genetic class destiny. If there is a new war against the weak it will not be about color, but about money. National emblems would BOW to corporate logos."

Spoken like a true Marxist, Black is firmly entrenched in the delirium that race doesn't matter—only class. Yet, all around us, what do we see, but diversity, multiculturalism, and racial preferences—all in the name of group identities: my racial group against your racial group. These are not based on economics but on race, gender and abilities—class is nowhere to be found in the undercurrent of hostilities. Latinos threaten to retake the southwest United States. Islamists declare that they will bury us via our open borders and our decadency, while we declare all Islamists to be inherently evil—no need for an analysis of cause here. The essence of Arabs and/or Islamists is just plain pure evil (except for the few that want peace on the West's terms). Race, not class, is the salient factor in coalitions forming against one another.

Black could not be more incorrect, the world is all about race and genetic differences (the disabled form another victimhood group based on genetics or misfortune). The clashes are all around us—in the Balkans, throughout Latin America, Africa, the Middle East's tribalism, South Asia, everywhere. The conflicts are based on racial rivalries (see my review of World on Fire), not economics. Economic arguments are used in the battle for power, but the battle lines are always drawn between the haves of one race against the have-nots of another race. Race, ethnicity, religion, tribalism—these are what sets human groups apart.

The above quotes are just a sample of how Black tries to canalize eugenics with White supremacy, but the evidence he provides shows how eugenics had a multitude of goals and defenders, and how it was forced eventually into abeyance by academic Marxists (Franz Boas) and the defeat of Nazism. After all, they who win the wars write the history. While Germany lost the war, it only allowed Stalin to hide the fact that Soviet Communism was responsible for the deaths of 60 million of its own people, while the Holocaust was responsible for only 6 million. Then ask yourself, how many movies have you seen on the Holocaust, and how many have you seen about the Soviet death machine—the Red Terror? The only movie I am aware of that shows Communist atrocities as its main theme was The Killing Fields. That's it—one movie about tiny Cambodia for over 100 million people slaughtered during the 20th century (Rummel 1997).

Therefore, Black's intent in this book is not to explain eugenics, but to attack Caucasians for their "racialism." That is, it is all right for Jews to celebrate their essence, but not Whites. We must never be allowed to probe into the very nature of race and genetics—even in our own defense. This book is just another hateful screed attacking the West.

What was eugenics all about, at least in the United States? Humans are followers, and when told what moral system to embrace, what dogma to believe in, they will dutifully obey. One-hundred years ago, our morality was focused on degeneracy—masturbation, epilepsy, prostitution, alcoholism, pauperism, tuberculosis, and a host of other sins that needed to be stamped out. Today, we have a host of new sins to be attacked: smoking, driving SUV's, not recycling, capitalism, globalization, ethnic pride (if your White, otherwise it is laudable), drugs, land mines, toxic waste, etc. As moral animals, even if the morals do keep changing according to what our elite tell us to believe, we will always be on one crusade or another to stamp out the impure. Black then gives us a look at those absurd moral outrages that we held so dear 100 years ago, and tries to link this morality with eugenics.

Chapter by Chapter, a quick review of the portrayal of the characters let's us look back and yes, shake our heads at the ignorance of the times. However, fifty years from now, future generations will look back on us and shake their heads at how we held so long and so tenaciously to the dogma that there are no differences in average intelligence between races. Modern pseudoscience by social scientists, politicians, the courts, and group identity advocates were able to suppress what should have been obvious to all in a multicultural world where we interact so closely with different races—we are genetically different in many ways, and not just, in how we look.

Another lesson we can learn from the early eugenicists is to understand how to use statistics, and not rely on anecdotal presumptions of causation. Theories should be tested multiple times under varying methods, and most importantly, do not assume genetic causes when an environmental cause is more valid—and vice versa. Some of the early eugenicists' major mistakes were to always assume that if a person was poor, sickly, promiscuous, alcoholic, or feebleminded, that it was due to genes alone. Today, we make just the opposite mistake. Social Science, educational research, etc. denies the implications of genetics and assumes that outcomes are always due to the environment. For example, when children fail educationally, the schools are always blamed, never the children. If inner city schools fail because of the preponderance of low intelligent minorities, genes are never considered as a contributing cause. Just like 100 years ago, the Left proceeds with all research on the base assumption that everyone is equal, and any differences must be due to the environment. So one thing that we can learn from early eugenics is that we must be careful to never assume just a genetic or an environmental causation. They are intermingled, but they can be separated out and apportioned accordingly when it comes to behavioral traits, disease, intelligence, religiosity, ethnocentrism, and even sexuality. The shared environment is now being displaced more and more by an understanding of genetic effects. One hundred years ago, just the opposite stance was taken.

INTRODUCTION
Black states, "Nazi eugenics quickly outpaced American eugenics in both velocity and ferocity. In the 1930s, Germany assumed the lead in the international movement. Hitler's eugenics was backed by brutal decrees, custom-designed IBM data processing machines, eugenical courts, mass sterilization mills, concentration camps, and virulent biological anti-Semitism—all of which enjoyed the open approval of leading American eugenicists and their institutions. The cheering quieted, but only reluctantly, when the United States entered the war in December of 1941. Then, out of sight of the world, Germany's eugenic warriors operated extermination centers. Eventually, Germany's eugenic madness led to the Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe."

The above has been the lie, the dogma, and the simplistic analysis of the new moralizing gods of diversity, multiculturalism and immigration. If everything that happened during World War Two can be linked to genetics and racial differences, then the Left can use it as a weapon against scientific efforts to unravel human genetic differences. The fact is that the Holocaust had nothing to due with eugenics—it was born out of the need for total war. Eugenics practiced before and during the war was aimed at Germans, and both negative and positive eugenics were promoted. After the war started, Germany found itself with new Jewish refugees, as well as Slavs. The Nazis needed both slave labor and a means of destroying what they saw as potential partisans behind enemy lines, and they chose to annihilate them—just as Stalin did to people under his domain. It had nothing to do with eugenics, and everything to do with warfare, where one people try to destroy another.

Up until the war, Hitler repeatedly stated that he planned to relocate the Jews to Madagascar, not kill them. But the war radically altered his options, and in the end, it was easier to kill the Jews either directly or to work them to death as slave laborers, again just as was done in the Soviet Union. Biology was not the issue, but competing groups.

Black continues, "I began by saying this book speaks for the never-born. It also speaks for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who attempted to flee the Hitler regime only to be denied visas to enter the United States because of the Carnegie Institution's openly racist anti-immigrant activism. Moreover, these pages demonstrate how millions were murdered in Europe precisely because they found themselves labeled lesser forms of life, unworthy of existence…."

Several comments: first, does Black consider abortion as a heinous crime because of the millions "never-born?" He laments eugenics, but isn't abortion similar to steriliztion for the child, whether it is the mother or society that decides it shall not breath life? I am also pro-choice, but since Jews are by far more pro-choice than pro-life, he should at least be consistent with his objections of "life not lived."

Second, immigration can be opposed on many grounds besides disliking other races. I have taken the liberty of appending an article about immigration into Israel that could easily reflect concerns during the debates leading up to the 1924 immigration laws in the United States.[1] Black attempts to show that opposition against open immigration was based on stereotyping of immigrants from other countries. In fact, just like today, the debate about immigration includes considerations about unemployment, terrorism or political agitation by immigrants from certain countries, citizens concerned about their own kin being allowed in, the assimilability of current and future immigrants, crime, overpopulating the cities, etc. The same concerns exist today, with a consistent majority of Americans wanting a reduction in immigration, while the politicians ignore what the public wants, and instead yield to the special interest groups who benefit from large numbers of immigrants being let into the country. (I will cover immigration again in a review of chapter 10.)

CHAPTER 1: Mountain Sweeps
Black's first chapter is a few pages that discuss the hillbillies of Appalachia, how they were rounded up, and systematically sterilized for feeblemindedness. He says nothing about Blacks or Indians or other racial misfits. These were Whites, stuck in poverty with little hope of making a better life. Remember Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, where we were once again shown these hillbillies, along with poor Blacks, and their destitution? It does appear, that no matter what society does for some groups, they will persist as part of a systemic underclass, generation after generation.

CHAPTER 2: Evolutions
"Eventually, the Judeo-Christian world codified the principle that all human life should be valued. A measure of our turbulent civilization and even of our humanity has always been how well people have adhered to that precept. Indeed, as societies became more enlightened, they extended respect for life to an ever-widening circle of people, including the less fortunate and the less strong."

"Racism, group hatred, xenophobia and enmity toward one's neighbors have existed in almost every culture throughout history. But it took millennia for these deeply personal, almost tribal hostilities to migrate into the safe harbor of scientific thought, thus rationalizing destructive actions against the despised or unwanted."

In this short chapter, Black warns us that science is responsible for our moral failings—that if it were not for science, we would not have had eugenics. However, throughout the book, he calls eugenics pseudoscience. So, what is it, is science the danger he makes it out to be, or is it only naïve science or pseudoscience that is a danger? Today, genetics and eugenics are firmly grounded in science, while the social sciences have slipped into pseudoscience, refusing to consider the nature side of human behavior. As a result, the radical environmentalists are being left behind, without answers and without hope for the hillbillies, the black underclass, and all the other people who are not equipped for a technological society. They have lost the scientific battle for nurture, so they now turn to historical revisionism to make their case.

CHAPTER 3: America's National Biology
"Everything Galtonian eugenics hoped to accomplish with good matrimonial choices, American eugenicists preferred to achieve with draconian preventive measures designed to delete millions of potential citizens deemed unfit. American eugenicists were convinced they could forcibly reshape humanity in their own image. Their outlook was only possible because American eugenicists believed the unfit were essentially subhuman, not worthy of developing as members of society. The unfit were diseased, something akin to a genetic infection. This infection was to be quarantined and then eliminated. Their method of choice was selective breeding—spaying and cutting away the undesirable, while carefully mating and grooming the prized stock."

For Black, everything that had to do with eugenics points to White supremacism. There were a handful of Whites obsessed with race during the 1800s, who were vocal about the superiority of the Nordic race, but certainly no more than those who were writing about the superior Jewish racial essence. So to take selective quotes, and attribute them to a whole movement, is false. Those who made up the eugenics movement, especially during the 1800s, included socialists, progressives, religious moralists, Lamarckian evolutionists, Marxists. However, the biology of heredity was not the only driving force behind eugenics, it was also believed that environmental causes also needed to be prevented from being passed on from generation to generation. If your family was unfit, it would pass that environment onto the children no matter what society could do. It was better therefore that they be eliminated because it would reduce the number of unfit later on before they overwhelmed society.

Remember, most people did not believe in evolution, and virtually no one understood heredity during the 1800s, and yet Black wants us to believe that genetics was driving eugenics. That is simply false. From reading this book and others, it seems to me that the main driving force for eugenics was a belief that for what ever reason, it was immoral to live a decadent life. This was a moral crusade, not a racial one, though there were some people concerned with race. Nevertheless, race was not the compelling impetus behind eugenics. That is why in the United States, only negative eugenics caught on. It was not about breeding a "super race," it was all about the immorality of the unfit that had to be stamped out.

Even today, the United States is far more religious than other European countries. One has to wonder, were those who first came to America from Europe for religious reasons more religious on average genetically? We now know that religiosity is highly genetic (but the religion you adopt is highly environmental—adopted usually from one's parents). Maybe we are just a highly religious nation of tight-asses? As like all religious fanatics, we were willing to sterilize the immoral ones. As is pointed out in The Unfit, one of the first reasons used to castrate and sterilize people was because they masturbated! Turn-of-the-century eugenics was perverse, but not because of genetics or race, but because of rampant social moralism. The unfit were contaminating society with their drunkenness, promiscuity, disease, shiftlessness, etc. Not much has changed, now we berate drunk drivers, White privilege, drug addicts, institutionalized racism, intolerance, gentrification, terrorists, and a host of new villains. Same morality—new targets.

CHAPTER 4: Hunting the Unfit
In this chapter, Black discusses the opening, funding, and organizational goals of the new Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Springs Harbor and specifically the Eugenics Record Office there, in 1904. The two main advocates were Davenport and George Laughlin. It was the beginning of Mendelism, the belief that single genes were responsible for the unfit, and that unfit traits would skip generations so they had to be located in family genealogies and rooted out. Black seems to be especially annoyed that Davenport was zealous in his efforts, a trait we usually admire unless they are found in our enemies.

Laughlin was equally fanatical, a deeply religious college professor turned pastor, one gets the feeling that for him, eugenics was one long sermon against evil. Nevertheless, between the two of them, Davenport and Laughlin, the process of finding those families that carried the evils of the day would be found, by finding their bad ancestors. In terms of what we know today, it would result in a meaningless mass of data, useless in the end. Today, no eugenicist would embrace any aspect of the old eugenics—it was based on flimsy anecdotal sociology and medicine. But that was true of virtually every aspect of science 100 years ago—scientific use of statistics was in its infancy and there was far more speculation and theorizing than there was verification and proofs. But it was all that was available. To single out eugenics as flawed, when the same charges could be leveled at medicine, psychiatry, psychology, political science, economics, or social science, is clearly unfair.

Black laments: "Davenport's scientific conclusion was already set in his mind; now he craved the justifying data. Even with the data, making eugenics a practical and governing doctrine would not be easy. American demographics were rapidly transforming. Political realities were shifting. Davenport well understood that as more immigrants filed into America's overcrowded political arena, they would vote and wield power. Race politics would grow harder and harder to legislate. It mattered not. Davenport was determined to prevail against the majority—a majority he neither trusted nor respected."

Wow, it sounds just like the neoconservatives surrounding President Bush—they don't trust the majority, they will crush Iraq no matter what lies they have to fabricate, and the end justifies the means. It seems human nature does not change that much, even though science has become far more sophisticated.

Black actually does provide evidence that looking at "tribes" is sometimes necessary: "Mary Drange-Graebe was assigned to Chicago where she worked with the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute under Dr. William Healy. After four months in Chicago, she was reassigned to track down the so-called Ishmael clan of nomadic criminals and vagabonds in and around Indianapolis. The tribe of racially mixed white gypsies, Islamic blacks and American Indians had been described years earlier in the study The Tribe of Ishmael: a Study in Social Degeneration, as a prime example of genetic criminality. This book had become a fundamental text for all eugenics. Now the ERO considered the book, written a generation earlier, as 'too advanced for the times.' So Drange-Graebe would resume tracing the family lineages of the infamous Ishmaelites. Within months, she had assembled 77 pages of family pedigrees and 873 pages of individual descriptions."

Was it unfair to look at a tribe of Gypsies, to determine if they were in fact just a criminal underclass that would never change? The evidence is still the same today, Gypsies both in Europe and in the United States have an interesting history, and one that makes them incapable of mixing amicably with other races or changing into productive members of society. Based on both culture and genes, they are of average low intelligence, extremely xenophobic, and hostile to outsiders (MacDonald 2002b).

So where was the positive eugenic program that Davenport and Laughlin would undertake to breed the Nordic super-race that Black contends was behind eugenics? "But Laughlin and his fellow breeders envisioned eugenical measures beyond mere sterilization. To multiply the genetically desired bloodlines, they suggested polygamy and systematic mating." That's it—a footnote to negative eugenics.

CHAPTER 5: Legitimizing Raceology
Black discusses both sterilization and intelligence testing in this chapter, and then returns to sterilization again in the next chapter. By skipping around, especially in terms of time periods, he selects anecdotes and particular people to try to link eugenics with Nordic supremacism, as if they were one and the same. He starts out by discussing the very earliest cases of castration and sterilization of penal system inmates to cure masturbation, a condition that was believed to lead to all kinds of disease and mental conditions. This was widely held among doctors, and had nothing to do with eugenics. (In The Unfit, the bizarre beliefs about masturbation are discussed in much greater detail, and without the bias that Black carries into every aspect of his White supremacist theories.)

Black then discusses intelligence testing: "In the same textbook, Davenport insisted that if immigration from southeastern Europe continued, America would 'rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.' He added a scholarly note about Jews: 'There is no question that, taken as a whole, the horde of Jews that are now coming to us from Russia and the extreme southeast of Europe, with their intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest, represent the opposite extreme from the early English and the more recent Scandinavian immigration with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement by the sweat of the brow, and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and the love of country….'"

"Predictably, Goddard's version of the Binet test showed that 40 percent of immigrants tested as feebleminded. Moreover, he wrote, '60 percent of the [Jewish immigrants] classify as morons.' In reporting his results in the Journal of Delinquency, Goddard further argued that an improved test would reveal even greater numbers of feebleminded immigrants. 'We cannot escape feeling,' wrote Goddard, 'that this method is too lenient ... too low for prospective American citizens.' He explained, 'It should be noted that the immigration of recent years is of a decidedly different character from the earlier immigration. It is no longer representative of the respective races. It is admitted on all sides that we are now getting the poorest of each race.'"

This issue of intelligence testing after World War I, and Goddard's findings, have been used by Marxists for 80 years now to ridicule all intelligence testing. By quoting selectively, they try to show that it was the races that were deemed unfit—from Eastern Europe—but the story is more complicated than that. There was a general feeling that immigration should be reduced and to that end it was asserted that:

— The new immigrants were less intelligent than before, because it was the poor and less educated of the whole group who were coming to America.
— Many of these new immigrants were communists, socialists, and/or anarchists and were therefore potentially politically troublesome.
— The races from Eastern Europe were less intelligent on average than races from Northern Europe.

Note that all of the above arguments are still being discussed with regards to immigration, only with different participants involved. However, the assertion that Eastern Europeans were all morons was quickly dispelled—even Goddard realized that the tests were poorly constructed and that they were flawed. In the end, the intelligence of the immigrants had virtually nothing to do with immigration restrictions. The biggest factors were a shortage of jobs for Americans and potential labor unrest from Eastern European political radicals. John Ashcroft and William Kristol could easily relate to these concerns today.

Black is careful to never go beyond the earlier intelligence tests because he would have to admit that in 1995, the American Psychological Association convened a task force that concluded that intelligence tests are meaningful, unbiased, and predominantly due to heredity (Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns).  The APA was not willing to assert racial differences are due to our genes however—that will take more fortitude considering the explosiveness of that evidence.

CHAPTER 6: The United States of Sterilization
In 1927 the Supreme Court decided, in Buck v. Bell, that sterilization was a legal means of preventing generation after generation of the unfit from propagating:

"Then [Chief Justice] Holmes wrote the words that would reverberate forever. 'It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.'"

Of course, many would like to make the case that generation after generation of low intelligent families is not a reality, plus the Buck case was further complicated by the fact that Carrie Buck was raped or seduced by a member of the family she was being cared for, and her daughter from that mating may have been more intelligent than would have been the case than if she had married and had children with a man more near her own intelligence. However, remember, just being allowed to be raped or seduced in 1927 was as bad as being feebleminded. It was bad science, throwing the feebleminded in with masturbators along with those with epilepsy. Nevertheless, that was the morality of the times, and sterilization was justified as much on environmental determinism as it was genetic determinism. Almost any excuse was good enough to sterilize the degenerates. It was a sin to be unfit, the cause of that unfitness need not necessarily be genetic or environmental. In either case, the sinfulness was to be terminated.

Black points out that "In Davenport's mind, Mendel's laws hovered as the sacred oracle of American eugenics, the rigid determiner of everything tall and short, bright and dim, right and wrong, strong and weak." That is true of those eugenicists who were genetic determinists of the simplest sort, but science was inherently simplistic then, as our science today will seem simplistic to those who live 100 years from now. But there were many perspectives with regards to eugenics' sinfulness at the time. It was a slow progression from environmentalism, to simplistic genetics, to genocide in the name of military conquest, by the Communists as well as the Nazis. Eugenics was just one part of the social puzzle at any one time, it was not the only program or agenda driving public policy.

CHAPTER 7: Birth Control
Black quotes Lothrop Stoddard: "Just as we isolate bacterial invasions and starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of their food-supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat ... [which will] as with all organisms, eventually limit ... its influence." That pretty much sums up how the Palestinians are being walled off and isolated in Israel's West Bank and Gaza Strip. I wonder if Black also equates Israel with trying to breed a super race of Jews? He certainly does a lot of bending of the truth to link all eugenics with Nordic supremacism.

This chapter deals with sterilization, but Black completely skips the very beginning of the story. In the late 1800s, as told in the book The Unfit, sterilization and castration began with an effort to treat masturbation. Masturbation was seen as a terrible offense, and a behavioral problem that led to a host of other diseases and conditions that must be controlled for the sake of the individual. It had nothing to do with eugenics, or stopping "the spread" of people who masturbated, for whatever reasons.

In telling the whole story, and not distorting the facts and the linkages, The Unfit shows how different movements and programs incorporated eugenics in different forms, and it also shows how much of what Black attributes to racism or eugenics was really a part of a host of other problems faced by society. That is, there were multiple philosophies, imagined pending catastrophes, etc. Eugenics just floated along with the rest of the cultural changes, and it was supported by conservatives, liberals, Marxists, socialists, progressives, the clergy, etc.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in a society that regularly recommended castration or sterilization for the problem of masturbation, that sterilization was also seen as being useful for eliminating defectives. The world was a very different place a hundred years ago, where individuals were sterilized to make the world better. In today's world, we are less selective than they were then. Now we just bomb entire countries until the country in question suites our agenda. Much simpler really, we don't need to look at individuals. We just judge the entire nation as needing to be sterilized through death or changed to our liking. Yes, eugenics sure was different, but it was no less rational than what we are doing today. It was just sidetracked by the Left for political purposes.

CHAPTER 8: Blinded
Black states "Why did blindness prevention rise to the top of the eugenic agenda in the 1920s? Because mass sterilization, sequestration, birth control and scientific classifications of the mentally defective, socially unfit and racially inferior were just the leading edge of the war against the weak. Eugenic crusaders were keen to launch the next offensive: outlawing marriage to stymie pro­creation by those deemed inferior. To set a medicolegal precedent that could be broadly applied to all defectives, eugenicists rallied behind the obviously appealing issue of blindness. Who could argue with a campaign to prevent blindness?"

"Eugenicists, however, carefully added a key adjective to their cause: hereditary. Therefore, their drive was not to reduce blindness arising from accident or illness, but to prevent the far less common problem of 'heredi­tary blindness.' How? By banning marriage for individuals who were blind, or anyone with even a single case of blindness in his or her family. Accord­ing to the plan, such individuals could also be forcibly sterilized and segre­gated—even if they were already married. If eugenicists could successfully lobby for legislation to prevent hereditary blindness by prohibiting suspect marriages, the concept of marriage restriction could then be broadened to include all categories of the unfit. Marriage could then be denied to a wide group of undesirables, from the feebleminded and epileptic to paupers and the socially inadequate."

Interesting conspiracy theory, but Black contradicts himself later on. This chapter is really all about one person, Lucien Howe, who devoted his whole life to the prevention of blindness. Was he some mad eugenicist, trying to use blindness to sterilize the masses? Of course not, he was interested in preventing blindness, and using eugenics later on in his career was just one more way of reaching his goal—even if it was overstated by him as an advocate.

Black goes on, "Lucien Howe was a legendary champion in the cause of better vision. He is credited with helping preserve the eyesight of generations of Americans. A late nineteenth-century pioneer in ophthalmology, he had founded the Buffalo Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1876. He also aided thou­sands by insisting that newborns' eyes be bathed with silver nitrate drops to fight neonatal infection; in 1890, this practice became law in New York State under a statute sometimes dubbed 'The Howe Law….' As though his statistics and projections were authentic, Howe railed, 'It is unjust to the blind to allow them to be brought into existence simply to lead miserable lives.... The longer we delay action to prevent this blind­ness, the more difficult the problem becomes.' His plan? Give blind people and their families the option of being isolated or sterilized. 'A large part, if not all, of this misery and expense,' promised Howe, 'could be gradually eradicated by sequestration or by sterilization, if the transmitter of the defect preferred the later.' Howe suggested that authorities wait to dis­cover a blind person, and then go back and get the rest of his family."

It is clear that Howe wanted to prevent all blindness, and hereditary blindness was not embraced by him until well into his campaign over many decades. It was just one more tool to prevent blindness, and the eugenicists used it as well for their own agenda. Again, that is no different from today when organizations, individuals, and factions use each other to further their own programs. Nothing has really changed; Howe was not some mad fanatic. He just wanted to prevent blindness, in a world where the blind suffered far more than they do now. What he was trying to do was admirable, not some satanic plot as Black likes to portray.

CHAPTER 9: Mongrelization
This is another chapter that is not about eugenics, but about one man's campaign against miscegenation in Virginia. Ashby Plecker was determined to prevent the pollution of the White race—he was obsessed with racial purity—just like Orthodox Jews are today. He may have been a fanatic, he may have been a bit insane, but he had little to do with eugenics. He was one man, who tried to stop race mixing, and he failed miserably. Love was just too strong in many cases for him to prevent the unholy union between races.

But why attack this one man for what is practiced throughout the world even today, especially among Semitic and Asian Indian (Hindu and Muslim) races, where marriages are still arranged, and marrying for love into another tribe is considered worthy of death for the offending son or daughter? Black had one goal in mind when writing this book, to disparage all Whites, while defending all other races. But even he admits throughout the book, that the story of eugenics is a complicated one. One that he is unable to treat in an objective way.

CHAPTER 10: Origins
Like today, immigration is a huge problem and getting worse, as politicians pander to newcomers while flouting the wishes of the majority of voters. Black admits this in his book, and yet, to him, opposition to immigration was all about the unfit.

"Eugenicists viewed continued immigration as an unending source of debasement of America's biological quality. Sterilizing thousands of the nation's socially inadequate was seen as a mere exercise, that is, fighting 'against a rising tide,' unless eugenicists could also erect an international barrier to stop continuing waves of the unfit. Therefore the campaign to keep defective immigrants out of the country was considered equally important to the crusade to cleanse America of its genetic undesirables. This meant injecting eugenic principles into the immigration process itself—both in the U.S. and abroad…."

Then he goes on to admit that "The threat of Bolshevism worried the government and the average man. The Red Scare in the summer of 1919 pitted one ism against another. Marxism, communism, Bolshevism, and socialism sprang into the American consciousness, contending with capitalism. Race riots against African-Americans and mob violence against anarchistic Italians and perceived political rabble-rousers ignited throughout the nation. A man named J. Edgar Hoover was installed to investigate subversives, mainly foreign-born. As the twenties roared, they also growled and groaned about immigration. Along with the most recent huddled masses came widespread vexation about the future of American society. Legitimate social fears, ethnic combat and economic turmoil stimulated a plethora of restrictive reforms, some sensible, some extreme"

Were these "rabble-rousers" all feebleminded? Of course not—the battle over limiting immigration at the beginning of the last century was very similar to the debate today. What groups will gain, who will lose, who's job will be lost, are they terrorists, will more people ruin the environment, will they be able to assimilate, etc? Same issue, same questions, same animosities.

As Black himself explains it, politicians never change: "In the second half of 1926, the quota champion himself, Albert Johnson, came up for reelection. By now the immigrants in his district had come together in opposition to further restrictions. He began to equivocate. In August of 1926, Johnson gave a campaign speech opposing the 'national origins' provisions because too many foreign elements would vote for repeal anyway. At one point he publicly declared in a conciliatory tone, 'If the national origins amendment ... is going to breed bad feeling in the United States ... and result in friction at home, you may rest assured it will not be put into effect.' He added that his own 'inside information' was that the quotas would never be instituted. Disheartened eugenicists sadly concluded that Johnson and his allies had completely succumbed to the influence of foreign groups."

The fact is, any argument about the "feeblemindedness" of the new immigrants is nonsense. During the immigration debates, any indication that the new immigrants "were all morons" was recognized early on as the results of bad intelligence tests. What eugenicists did want however was the testing of all new immigrants, to make sure we were not taking "defectives." Is this concern any different from the concern we had when Castro opened up the prisons in Cuba, and flooded Florida with mental and criminal defectives? The United States screamed "foul!" Moreover, today, we watch for terrorists from the Middle East. So was it so unreasonable for us to ask then, as we do now, "Who are these immigrants that we are allowing to enter our country?"

Black moans, "The best and worst of the nation's feelings about immigration were exploited by the eugenicists. They capitalized on the country's immigration stresses, as well as America's entrenched racism and pervasive postwar racial anxiety. Seizing the moment, the men of the Carnegie Institution injected a biological means test into the very center of the immigration morass, dragging yet another field of social policy into the sphere of eugenics."

How the tables have turned! Black does not like it when an advocacy group "exploits" a "nation's feelings." Yet, that is exactly what the Jewish lobby did for the next forty years, culminating in the 1964 immigration act. As a group, they were singularly responsible for opening up our borders in order to dilute the evil Anglo-Saxon majority. Now they revel in the Anglo-Saxon's eventual shrinkage to minority status by the year 2050 (MacDonald 2002a). Of course, once the flood gates were opened, many other groups started supporting open immigration, including unions, immigration lawyers, the welfare industry, educators, big business, agriculture, the politicians hoping to win immigrant votes, etc. All while the American voters by an overwhelming majority want immigration reduced, for the same reasons that existed in 1924—jobs, assimilation, and the environment, etc.

CHAPTER 11: Britain's Crusade
Why Black discusses eugenics in Britain is not obvious. Maybe it was because England is where Francis Galton first proposed the breeding of the most fit (positive eugenics) during the same time that Charles Darwin was advancing the theory of evolution—long before the eugenics movement was established in the United States. As Black points out, negative eugenics did eventually make its way to England, but was opposed and never really found a home there. As for negative eugenics, he could have looked at the Scandinavian countries where much higher percentages of the people were sterilized, for many years after the Second World War.

CHAPTER 12: Eugenic Imperialism
"After purifying America from within, and preventing defective strains from reaching U.S. shores, they planned to eliminate undesirables from the rest of the planet. In 1911, the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, in conjunction with the Carnegie Institution, began work upon its Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population. The last of eighteen points was entitled 'International Co-operation.' Its intent was unmistakable: the ERO would undertake studies 'looking toward the possible application of the sterilization of defectives in foreign countries, together with records of any such operations....' The American eugenics movement intended to turn its sights on 'the extent and nature of the problem of the socially inadequate in foreign countries.' This would be accomplished by incessant international congresses, federations and scientific exchanges."

So again, Black has provided in this short chapter, a reflection on American might. Today, we are still setting the international agenda: Black laments our global eugenics, but he sees no problem with our invasion of Iraq to "spread democracy" through lethal force. So America is still doing what it does best, spreading its moral agenda (whatever is current) around the world.

CHAPTER 13: Eugenicide
"In 1905, the British eugenicist and birth control advocate H. G. Wells published A Modern Utopia. 'There would be no killing, no lethal chambers,' he wrote. Another birth control advocate, the socialist writer Eden Paul, differed with Wells and declared that society must protect itself from 'begetters of anti-social stocks which would injure generations to come. If it [society] reject the lethal chamber, what other alternative can the socialist state devise?'"

The above is only one of two places in War Against the Weak where Black mentions socialist' eugenics. Even though socialists were as involved in eugenics as any other group, Black conveniently only focuses on a very narrow slice of eugenicists, those that he can link to the Holocaust through his twisted logic.

In this short chapter, he tries to set the stage for connecting eugenics to the Holocaust, via linking eugenics with euthanasia. The problem is, euthanasia can and has been used for many different purposes: infanticide (Hrdy 1999),  mercy killing, death with dignity, stopping plagues, and in the future it may be needed because medical science will make it possible to sustain life almost indefinitely. At some point, the plug must be pulled—that's euthanasia.

Euthanasia for the purpose of eugenics is not very attractive. In fact, Hitler was forced to stop a euthanasia program to make room for war casualties—Germans would not allow it. However, Black fails to mention that mass euthanasia was only used during peacetime by Communist regimes—to liquidate certain classes of people (Sixty million under Stalin alone). Of course, they usually used a slightly different method than the eugenicists were discussing, they killed people by slave labor, unfed, until they starved to death to maximize their return on human slaughter. This is Black's vision of the good life—Marxism.

CHAPTER 14: Rasse and Blut
Black now turns to German eugenics, where he attempts to link eugenics with the Holocaust, and yet he fails miserably. An accurate reading of what he presents, clearly shows that eugenics and anti-Semitism were only loosely linked in a bizarre way—Nazism saw Jews as competitors for supremacy, not as an inferior race.

"Ploetz believed that a better understanding of heredity could help the state identify and encourage the best specimens of the German race. Ironically, while Ploetz believed in German national eugenics and harbored strong anti-Semitic sentiments, he included the Jews among Germany's most valuable biological assets. After returning to Germany, Ploetz in 1904 helped found the journal Archiv fiir Rassen- and Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of Race Science and Social Biology), and the next year he organized the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene) to promote eugenic research. Both entities functioned as the principal clearinghouses for German eugenics for years to come. Understandably, Ploetz emerged as Germany's leading race theorist and was often described as 'the founder of eugenics as a science in Germany.'"

This same theme is played out repeatedly when it comes to the Jews and anti-Semitism. While on the one hand Jews were hated, they are begrudgingly respected for their high intelligence and success. Of course, these were cruder times, and people generally threw ad hominem arguments and slurs around rather loosely. That was the culture. Overall however, the Nazis did not include the Jews in their eugenic program. The Jews were simply a powerful and competing race that had to be destroyed in order to win.

Even Black concurs that, "When Hitler used the term master race, he meant just that, a biological 'master race.' America crusaded for a biologically superior race, which would gradually wipe away the existence of all inferior strains. Hitler would crusade for a master race to quickly dominate all others. In Hitler's view, eugenically inferior groups, such as Poles and Russians, would be permitted to exist but were destined to serve Germany's master race. Hitler demonized the Jewish community as social, political and racial poison, that is, a biological menace. He vowed that the Jewish community would be neutralized, dismantled and removed from Europe."

Yes, the Jews would be neutralized because they were a danger, not because they were thought to be inferior. Black actually seems to acknowledge this fact, but perhaps he hopes no one will notice the subtle difference. Also, contrary to what Black states, and even as he admits but then continuously flip-flops on the issue, the American eugenics' program was negative only, while Hitler's was both positive and negative. He started with sterilizing the unfit, and later wanted to breed a more fit Aryan race—but it was hardly started and the war ended. Black just seems hopelessly confused about cause and effect, timing, and real motivations. The Holocaust came about primarily because the German army found itself with millions of Jews in its conquered territories, and they were a danger—a real and sustainable enemy that could not be pacified. These were partisans held together by race, and could not be allowed the freedom to fight back. Other races or nations could be pacified by setting up puppet governments—like the Vichy government in France.

Black also quotes what he assumes is pseudoscience that is actually in keeping with modern genetics, "Repeating standard American eugenic notions on hybridization, Hitler observed, 'Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one.... Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life.'" This is a well-established fact in breeding programs. One can argue about any "will of Nature," but that is subjective. I can't imagine a breeder not breeding the best stock to improve the breed. And most parents are concerned about who their children will marry—and they want them to marry up, not down.

CHAPTER 15: Hitler's Eugenic Reich
This chapter is hardly different from the previous. Black goes to great lengths to find a connection between eugenics and anti-Semitism: "Unqualified German racial references to Jews gradually became commonplace in American publications as well. For example, in the April 1924 issue of Eugenical News, an article reviewing a new German 'racial pride' book published by Lehmanns mentioned, 'In an appendix the Jews are considered, their history and their role in Germany.' A German article on consanguineous marriages [inbreeding] summarized in the November 1925 issue of Eugenical News stated, 'Their evil consequences ... are pointed out [and] ... are commoner among Jews and royalty than elsewhere in the population.' A December 1927 summary of a German article reported, 'The social biology and social hygiene of the Jew is treated by the distinguished anthropologist, Wissenberg of Ukrania. This has largely to do with the vital statistics of the Jews in Odessa and Elizabethgrad, with special relation of the Jews to acute infection.' In April of 1929, a Eugenical News book review entitled 'Noses and Ears' informed readers, 'The straight nose of Gentiles seems to dominate over the convex nose of Jews.' No explanation was necessary or offered for these out-of-context references to Jews. That Jews were eugenically undesirable was a given in German eugenics, and many American eugenicists adopted that view as well."

"Eugenically undesirable?" Is that Black's way of saying everyone hates Jews, but they don't really consider Jews as unfit or inferior? Was there anything wrong with discussing Jews? In fact, inbreeding and hybridization, racial differences in disease, are current subjects in genetics, and as for noses—get over it! If this is all that Black could find, it proves to me that aside from mud-slinging propaganda, the eugenics movement in Germany did not find Jews inferior to Germans. In fact, Germans felt routinely humiliated by the success of Jews in general, and that was one of the major causes of anti-Semitism.

Black states that, "Nine categories of defectives were identified for sterilization [by the Nazis]. At the top of the list were the feebleminded, followed by those afflicted by schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington's chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body deformities, deafness and, of course, hereditary blindness. Alcoholism, the ninth category, was listed as optional to avoid confusion with ordinary drunkenness. The Reich announced that 400,000 Germans would immediately be subjected to the procedure, beginning January 1, 1934." What? No Jews?

Black continues, "JAMA, in another 1933 issue, continued its tradition of repeating Nazi Judeophobia and National Socialist doctrine as ordinary medical news. For example, in its coverage of the German Congress of Internal Medicine in Wiesbaden, JAMA reported that the congress chairman 'brought out the following significant ideas:... A foreign invasion, more particularly from the East, constitutes a menace to the German race. It is an imperative necessity that this menace be now suppressed and eliminated.... Racial problems and questions dealing with hereditary biology must receive special consideration.' The article continued, 'Eugenics and the influences of heredity must be the preferred topics [at future medical meetings],' and then warned of 'the severity of the measures to be adopted for the preservation of the German race and German culture.'"

What the Germans, and many other countries were afraid of, was Bolshevism, and the impending slaughter that would follow in its wake. Germans were well aware of millions dying in Soviet Russia, and the desire the Communists had for global expansion. Also, Jews were perceived to be behind Bolshevism.

As Black admits, the Germans had much to fear from the power of Jewish influence: "With each passing day, the world was flooded with more Jewish refugees, more noisy anti-Nazi boycotts and protest marches against any scientific or commercial exchanges with Germany, more public demands to isolate the Reich, and more shocking headlines documenting Nazi atrocities and anti-Jewish legislation. Still, none of this gave pause to America's eugenicists. Correspondence on joint research flowed freely across the Atlantic. American eugenicists, and their many organizations and committees, from New York to California and all points in between, maintained and multiplied their contacts with every echelon of official and semiofficial German eugenics. As the Reich descended into greater depths of depraved mistreatment and impoverishment of Jews, as well as territorial threats against its neighbors, these contacts seemed all the more insulated from the human tragedy unfolding within Europe. Eager and cooperative letters, reports, telegrams and memoranda did not number in the hundreds, but in the thousands of pages per month."

What we are witnessing here is the escalation of hate between Jews and Nazis. Was it due then to eugenics, or to the escalation of fear and hatred? Up until the start of the war, the Jews were not treated any worse than the Palestinians are in Israel today. What Black is admitting here is not only did the Jews appear to be a threat to Nazi Germany, they were indeed a threat in reality as they mobilized the world against the Third Reich—long before the Holocaust started. I don’t' mean to minimize what the Nazis did, but I am submitting that the Holocaust was independent of eugenics. The Jews were the main enemies of the Third Reich in the eyes of Germans. The Jews helped Hitler solidify his nation behind him based on fear.

The truly unfit, in the eyes of the Nazis, were handled differently than the Jews, "There was room in the issue to discuss other minorities as well. One article discussed the question of sterilizing some six hundred 'negroid children in the Rhine and Ruhr districts—Germany's legacy from the presence of French colonial troops there during the war.' In a salute to the Fuhrer, another article clearly suggested that Hitler's eugenics would soon be applied across all of Europe. 'This State Cause does not only concern Germany but all European peoples. But may we be the first to thank this one man, Adolf Hitler, and to follow him on the way towards a biological salvation of humanity.'"

The eugenicist Eugen Fischer stated while in Germany, "The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people."

Repeatedly, even Black supports the obvious—eugenics did not include Jews in the category of inferior race. Jews were considered a threat because they were felt to be superior—especially in intelligence.

And again, back to Black's attempt to link euthanasia with eugenics, he states just the opposite: "On September 1, 1939, Germany launched its blitzkrieg against Poland, beginning Word War II. The Reich needed hospital beds, and had to ration its wartime resources. Now the medical men of German eugenics would graduate from sterilization to organized euthanasia. Lenz helped draft euthanasia guidelines whereby a patient could be killed 'by medical measures of which he remains unaware.' The continued existence of those classed defective could no longer be justified in Hitler's war-strapped Reich. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed. Psychiatrists, steeped in eugenics, selected the victims after a momentary review of their records, jotted their destinies with a pen stroke, and then personally supervised the exterminations." Because they needed the beds for war casualties! Euthanasia had nothing to do with eugenics—contrary to what Black stated earlier. 

Black repeatedly tries to link eugenics with the Holocaust, and fails, "As Hitler's divisions smashed through Europe, his eugenic ideal would be enforced not only against those in Germany, but also against those in conquered or dominated countries. In country after country, Hitler rounded up the defective Jews and other sub-humans, systematically—making one region after another judenrein—Jew free. As Hess insisted, 'National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.'"

Yes, National Socialism may have been nothing but applied biology, but Black provides no evidence that the Jews were eliminated because they were perceived to be "defective." Black has a habit of mixing up statements that just do not go together. What happened before the war cannot be mixed in with what happened after the war started. Hitler had always planned to relocate the Jews to Madagascar or some other country after the Nazis won the war. Things didn't turn out as he planned, and he turned to annihilating Jewish partisans, not Jewish defectives.

Black states in his acknowledgements, "Where do I begin to express gratitude, when so many people in so many places have lent so many hands to advance the cause of this years-long project? More than fifty researchers in fifteen cities in four countries, assisted by scores of archivists and librarians at more than one hundred institutions, combined to ingather and organize some 50,000 documents, together with hundreds of pages of translation, as well as to review hun­dreds of books and journals, all to collectively tear away the thickets of mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world."

What is truly amazing is that Black, after all of this research, fails to find anything more than an occasional innuendo to connect eugenics, with euthanasia, with concentration camps, and genocide. They occurred at different times, under different directives, for different purposes. When you read between the lines, much of what Black presents shows clearly that the Holocaust had nothing to do with eugenics, though the Holocaust did eventually deter eugenics, slow it down, but never could stop it. To produce better offspring is an innate human desire. Thousands of years of arranged marriages have shown us that—as well as the desire of women to select males that are as fit as they can attract. That is eugenics in its natural state. Now we have better tools to help us select fitter children.
 
CHAPTER 16: Buchenwald
In this short chapter, Black slips into one of the most egregious examples of Jewish apologia I have ever come across:

"Many found Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen and the many lives he led incomprehensible. How could he alternately function as a gifted psychiatrist and as a murderous man of medicine? At the time, none understood that Katzen-Ellenbogen viewed humanity with multiple standards. He was an American eugenicist. Nor was he just any eugenicist. Katzen-Ellenbogen was a founding member of the Eugenics Research Association and the chief eugenicist of New Jersey under then Governor Woodrow Wilson."

"Viewing humanity through a eugenic prism, Katzen-Ellenbogen was capable of exhibiting great compassion toward those he saw as superior, and great cruelty toward those he considered genetically unfit. In Buchenwald, the French, with their Mediterranean and African hybridization, were eugenically among the lowest. They were not really worthy of life. At the same time, in Katzen-Ellenbogen's view, those of Nordic or Aryan descent were treasured—to be helped and even saved. It all followed classic eugenic thought. But in Buchenwald, it was the difference between life and death."

"How did one of America's pioneer eugenicists wend his way from New Jersey to Buchenwald's notorious Little Camp? The story begins in late nineteenth-century Poland. Katzen-Ellenbogen was the name of a famous line of Polish and Czech rabbis going back centuries. However, as the doctor's life was built, he—or perhaps his immediate branch of the family—obscured any connection with a Jewish heritage. Like many European Jews who had drifted from tradition, he spelled his last name numerous ways, hyphenated and unhyphenated, and sometimes even signed his name 'Edwin K. Ellenbogen.' He was probably born as Edwin Wiadyslaw Katzen-Ellenbogen in approximately 1882, in Stanislawow, in Austrian-occupied Poland."

This bizarre reflection on a single Jew at Buchenwald, a prisoner no less, seems to be a standard refrain when Jews are bashing Whites (Anglos, Aryans, Nordics or your generic European—depending on the mission at hand). I have seen it so many times and every time I just cannot believe it. If a Jew does something evil or bad, then the Jew must not really be a Jew. Maybe Hitler really wasn't an Aryan? Or Clarence Thomas really isn't Black? Jews seem to switch conveniently to being a race or a religion, depending on how they want to be perceived by others. I have no explanation why Black would devote a chapter to Katzen-Ellenbogen, except to make the point that if any Jew believes in eugenics, then they really aren't a Jew at all. This argument is similar to the one used by Blacks: "Blacks can't be racist because only an oppressor can be a racist, so only Whites are racists." This is par for Anglophobic Jews and their need to lump all Whites together for every evil found in the world.

CHAPTER 17: Auschwitz
Black desperately tries to link eugenics with the Holocaust by discussing the infamous Josef Mengele, The Angel of Death. When I started to read this chapter, I braced myself. I really do not like to read about torture or brutality. When reading several books about Communist atrocities, I often had to scan over the material on human torture; I've learned how brutal humans can be and I do not need to be saturated with the gory details.

To my surprise, there is relatively little gore in this chapter. Mengele as it turned out was just an extremely conscientious, dedicated doctor, the way he is portrayed by Black. As part of the ongoing eugenics program, he used concentration camp prisoners for his studies, some quite horrendous. But it had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and everything to do with using prisoners for research.

Again, Black tends to provide more evidence that the Germans did not classify Jews as inferior, but rather as a threat. Contrast this with the Nazis extermination of Gypsies, who were eliminated because they were truly an unfit race that survived by begging, stealing, and conning others (and they are still living as bottom-feeding parasites—see MacDonald, 2002b).

Black notes, "In 1924, at about the time Hitler staged his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Verschuer lectured that fighting the Jews was integral to Germany's eugenic battle. He was speaking on race hygiene to a nationalist student training camp when the question of Jewish inferiority came up. 'The German, Volkisebe struggle,' he told the students, 'is primarily directed against the Jews, because alien Jewish penetration is a special threat to the German race.'" The meaning of course is that the Jews were more successful and more intelligent on average than Germans, and wherever they insinuated themselves into society, they tended to dominate. That is, Jews were singled out because they were "too fit." Germans could not compete against them in business, medicine, law, and a host of other fields where the high Jewish intellect humiliated and frustrated the Germans.

Back to Mengele, Black notes that, "By June of 1940, when Germany was advancing on Western Europe, Mengele could no longer wait to enter the battle. He joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to the Genealogical Section of the SS Race and Settlement Office in occupied Poland. He undoubtedly benefited from Verschuer's March 1940 letter of recommendation averring that Mengele was accomplished, reliable and trustworthy. At the SS Race and Settlement Office, his mission was to seek out Polish candidates for Germanization. He would perform the racial and eugenic examinations. Eventually, in 1941, he was transferred to the Medical Corps of the Waffen SS, and then to the elite Viking unit operating in the Ukraine, where he rendered medical assistance under intense battlefield conditions. He was awarded two Iron Crosses and two combat medic awards. The next year, 1942, as the Final Solution was taking shape, Verschuer arranged for Mengele to transfer back to the SS Race and Settlement Office, this time to its Main Office in Berlin."

"By 1942, an aging Fischer was preparing to retire from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. His replacement was a major source of debate within eugenic and Nazi Party circles. By this time, Hitler's war against the Jews had escalated from oppressive disenfranchisement to systematic slaughter."

"Fischer had emerged as a major advocate of 'a total solution to the Jewish question.' His view was that 'Bolshevist Jews' constituted a dangerous and inferior subspecies. At a key March 1941 conference on the solution to the Jewish problem held in Frankfurt, Fischer had been the honored guest. It was at this meeting that Nazi science extremists set forth ideas on eliminating Jews en masse. A leading idea that emerged was the gradual extinction (Volkstod) of the Jewish people by systematically concentrating them in large labor camps to be located in Poland. Later, Fischer specified that such labor must be unpaid slave labor lest any 'improvement in living standards ... lead to an increase in the birth rate.'"

Black notes that Polish children that looked German were adopted into the German fold. Hardly an action that would have been taken if race purity was an issue. Also, he states that Fischer felt the Jews were an inferior subspecies—but he offers no quote to back it up. Most of the evidence produced even by Black is that the Jews were perceived as a threat, not as inferiors like Gypsies or Negroes. Clearly then, the Jewish question was one of conquest and banishment in time of war, not part of the German eugenics' program. The Germans were at war with the Jewish Bolshevists—at least this was the propaganda used by the Nazis. By 1939, Jewish influence in Bolshevism was declining.

Black also has some absurd positions on eugenic practices: "Twins were valued for a second eugenic reason: Nature itself could be outmaneuvered if desirable individuals could be biologically enabled to spawn twins—or even better, triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets. In other words, a world of never-ending multiple births was the best assurance that the planned super race would remain super."

Wrong again. Twins were then and remain today the most effective research tool for determining heritability versus environmental causation. Around the world, research on twins is being used to determine a host of behavior genetic traits. I have never heard of using twins as a means of producing a "super race." Twins, because they share the womb for limited resources from the mother, are on average underweight, have lower intelligence, along with other health problems. Does that sound like what eugenicists would want by the promotion of twinning births?

Black says of Mengele, "That look—Mengele's glare—was the Nazi vision wedded to a fanatical science whose soul had been emptied, its moral compass cracked; a science backed not merely by iron dogma but by men wielding machine guns and pellets of Zyklon B." Earlier, Black disparages judging people in a manner he feels is justified in the case of Mengele: "Crime analysis moved race and ethnic hatred into the realm of heredity. Throughout the latter 1800s, crime was increasingly viewed as a group phenomenon, and indeed an inherited family trait. Criminologists and social scientists widely believed in the recently identified 'criminal type,' typified by 'beady eyes' and certain phrenological shapes. The notion of a 'born criminal' became popularized."

So does Black believe in "born criminals?" He belittles identifying intentions by one's looks, but feels free to pass judgment on Mengele's glare, and sees clearly that it is caused by "the Nazi vision." Apparently, anyone with a "Nazi vision" can be identified by some maniacal "glare." 

CHAPTERS 18, 19, 20 and 21—Newgenics
The last four chapters move on to current issues in eugenics, neoeugenics, newgenics, genetic engineering, etc. Nothing very informative or interesting, so I will just highlight a couple of interesting points I came across.

Black asserts, "By 1943, humanity needed a new word for the Third Reich's collective atrocities. The enormity, of Nazi butchery of whole peoples by physical extermination, cultural obliteration, biological deracination and negative eugenics defied all previous human language. Nothing like it on so sweeping a scale had ever occurred in history."

He seems to be unaware that Stalin had been slaughtering millions of his own people for many years before the Holocaust, but since it was so well hidden by primarily his own kin in the Western media, especially Duranty ("Some, like New York Times Soviet correspondent Walter Duranty, who systematically refused to report Soviet atrocities during the 1930s while praising Stalin"), that it could continue unabated. The totality of Communist genocide didn't become known until the fall of Communism, when the archives were opened: the tally stands currently at about 100 million people slaughtered by those who believed that humans could be molded into new citizens, to take their place in a utopian world—on the backs of the dead. Black continues with this book in his desire to dismiss genetics, so that humans can be shaped by the elite to believe, think and behave as they are told by the state.

Black does seem to understand that dysgenics is also possible for those who have no caring for the unfortunates that are born to serve the selfish needs of the unfit:

"A deaf lesbian couple in the Washington, D.C., area sought sperm from a deaf man determined to produce a deaf baby because they felt better equipped to parent such a child. A child was indeed born and the couple rejoiced when an audiology test showed that the baby was deaf. A dwarf couple reportedly wants to design a dwarf child. A Texas couple reportedly wants to engineer a baby who will grow up to be a large football player. One West Coast sperm bank caters exclusively to Americans who desire Scandinavian sperm from select and screened Nordics."

"All of us want to improve the quality of our children's futures. But now the options for purely cosmetic improvements are endless. A commercialized, globalized genetic industry will find a way and a jurisdiction. It will be an international challenge to successfully regulate such genetic tampering and the permutations possible because few can keep up with the moment-to-moment technology."

And I submit that any attempt to regulate eugenics in the future will fail. The more it is regulated, the more it will be available to the elite only. Those with the resources will find a way to enhance the fitness of their children.
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In The Unfit by Carlson, a more realistic history of eugenics is presented and one that includes the different forces that drove it. There is little bashing of "White supremacists," though he also, like Black, ignores all of the evidence developed over the last twenty years that proves that intelligence and behavioral traits are genetic in varying degrees.

Carlson starts with a chronology that shows how distorted Black's War on The Weak reads:

"THIS CHRONOLOGY PROVIDES A TIME LINE for the history of the idea of unfit people from the publication of Onania [masturbation or coitus interruptus] in 1710 to the revelation of the Nazi death camps in 1945. Not all people mentioned were malicious. Many had no notion their ideas would be used to justify vicious programs. Still others were self-deceived and did not think through the implications of their biases. As one can see from following the time line, there is no chain of causality. For a variety of different reasons, people were classified as unfit, and different, often contradictory, responses were made to claims that these degenerate or unfortunate groups existed and that something should be done for or to them. This is a selection of some of the major (and minor) players in this story to give a sense of what thinking was like among educated classes in two and a half centuries of biological theories of human inferiority:

1710: Publication of the anonymous Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences in Both Sexes leads to the idea of onanism as a cause of degeneracy in the self-abuser and progeny.

1758: Publication of Samuel Tissot's Onania, or a Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation shifts masturbation to a medical problem and makes masturbatory degeneracy a theme of medical school teaching until the end of the 19th century.

1798: Thomas Robert Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principles of Population, blaming the poor for their misfortunes.

1837: The Elizabethan Poor Laws are largely abandoned. Charles Dickens writes Oliver Twist to describe the consequences.

1850: Herbert Spencer publishes Social Statics, the founding document that led to what was later called Social Darwinism.

1853: Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, publishes The Inequality of Human Races, launching scientific racism, which considers races biologically inferior or superior, with Teutons (Nordic or Aryan) as the prized race.

1857: Benedict Morel's Degenerance is published. It argues that degeneracy caused by unfavorable environments leading to progressively worsening heredity is self-extinguishing within five generations.

1859: Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species.

1866: Gregor Mendel's paper on patterns of inheritance in pea plants is published.

1867: Richard Dugdale extends Elisha Harris's study of a criminal family and publishes The Jukes. Michigan marriage act is passed, making it a crime for idiots, the insane, uncured syphilitics, and people with uncured cases of gonorrhea to marry or live together.

1869: Francis Galton founds the eugenics movement (not yet by that name) with publication of Hereditary Genius and stresses what would be later called positive eugenics.

1872-1892: Emile Zola publishes the Rougon-Macquart series of 20 novels exploring hereditary pathology in two families.

1879: Wilhelm Marr publishes The Victory of Jewry over Germany and establishes modern anti-Semitism.

1880s: Oscar McCulloch studies the Tribe of Ishmael, publicizing it as a socially degenerate collection of families. His views are popularized by essays of David Starr Jordan, then active in Indiana.

1880-1890: August Weismann proposes the theory of the germ plasm; he disproves Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Defective germ plasm becomes a medical and social problem.

1883: Galton gives eugenics its name. Frank Hamilton ligates the vas deferens as a treatment for masturbation. Joseph Howe publishes Excessive Venery, Masturbation, and Continence and offers many surgical and medical approaches to treat masturbation.

1892: Henry D. Chapin argues that vagabonds, tramps, and criminals should be isolated from society. Edward S. Morse condemns congenital criminals and paupers, citing Weismann's germ plasm theory for believing that the unfit have an impaired heredity.

1893: F.E. Daniel recommends sterilization of the unfit as being humane.

1894: Reginald Harrison performs vasectomy for reducing enlarged prostate gland. Martha Clark argues mandatory segregation for life of paupers and repeat criminals.

1895: Charles Dana criticizes Max Nordau's Degeneration. He claims that degeneracy is self-eliminating and is not an enduring problem.

1896: Czarist forgery called Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is released and becomes an international bestseller. It is adopted by Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent in 1920 and published by Gerald L.K. Smith as The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.

1897: Michigan sterilization law fails after passing one house.

1898: F. Hoyt Pilcher castrates 58 retarded boys. Martin Barr advocates sterilization of the unfit; he castrates 2 males and 2 females. Everett Flood castrates 24 epileptics and persistent masturbators.

1899: A.J. Ochsner urges vasectomies for prisoners and other degenerates. Harry Clay Sharp performs first vasectomy to treat masturbation in prisoner in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

1900: Mendel's paper is rediscovered.

1901: David Starr Jordan publishes The Blood of a Nation and extols eugenics.

1903: The American Breeder's Association is founded. It creates a committee on eugenics in 1909. In Great Britain, Robert Rentoul proposes sterilization of unfit by vasectomy.

1904: Alfred Ploetz names Race Hygiene (Rassenhygeine) as an extension of Virchow's public hygiene movement. He founds the German Society for Racial Hygiene.

1906: Governor Samuel Pennypacker of Pennsylvania vetoes compulsory sterilization law for feebleminded as a criminal and dangerous act.

1907: Indiana passes first state compulsory sterilization law. Harry Sharp sterilizes by vasectomy 200 to 500 young men.

1913: Mrs. E.H. Harriman provides funds to establish a building and salaries for the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

1914-1940: Harry Laughlin serves as Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. With Charles Davenport, Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he becomes the leading promoter of the American eugenic movement.

1916: Madison Grant publishes The Passing of the Great Race. He advocates restrictive immigration laws to prevent dilution of the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States.

1920: Euthanasia is promoted in Germany by publication of Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche's The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value.

1921: Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz publish Human Genetics (English edition in 1931), which is read and admired by Adolf Hitler while he is under house arrest after failed putsch. German genetics shifts as new Nazi party endorses race hygiene as its goal.

1924: Johnson Act restricting immigration to ethnic composition of United States in 1890 census becomes law. Harry Laughlin serves as expert witness for the Johnson Committee and provides evidence for the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans.

1927: Buck v. Bell upholds Virginia's sterilization law by 8-1 vote. Harry Laughlin provided the model eugenic law for the state of Virginia. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., argues "three generations of imbeciles are enough."

1933: Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. His Nazi party advocates a program of harassment of Jews and eventually the establishment of a 'Jew-free' Germany. He advocates a widespread state eugenic program favoring the Aryan race and purging it of its alleged inferior strains.

1933-1935: Hitler enacts by decree Enabling Laws that bar marriage of Jews to non-Jews, classify Jews as a biological race, and promote sterilization of the unfit through decisions of eugenic courts.

1939: A secret order, initiated by Hitler with the onset of World War II on September 1, permits Nazi doctors to kill Germany's mentally retarded, deformed, and psychotic through designated centers. Program is stopped after rising protests create a war morale problem in Germany.

1942: Reinhard Heydrich chairs and Adolf Eichmann serves as secretary for a conference on the Final Solution ordered by Goering, Himmler, and Hitler. Death camps are advocated with massive removal of Jews from occupied territories. All activities are disguised with use of a coded language and information passed along a strict chain of command.

1942-1945: Six million Jews are killed primarily by gassing followed by cremation in death camps. Several million Poles, Russians, and smaller numbers of Gypsies, political opponents, and homosexuals are also killed. The event is given its historical name, the Holocaust."

Notice how Carlson's history shows how eugenics came in after, and/or along with many other practices and ideas. Many of them like degeneracy had as much basis in what was deemed sinful as much as it was biological. There were multiple paths, opinions, programs, and numerous changes in thought over the above time span. Black on the other hand lumps all of eugenics and its corollary practices into one Anglophobic tirade. War Against the Weak is about hate—Black's own hatred of Caucasians.

Carlson states, "Readers of this book may feel uncomfortable, as I certainly did, when they realize that there is a lot of mythology associated with the origins of the eugenics movement. It is often portrayed as a philosophy of the successful and well-to-do, conservative, and elitist class in which the unfit are the exploitable, repressed, and victimized classes whose failings were largely attributed to innate factors. The story is far more complex, and eugenicists and their predecessors cannot be classified in such simple terms. It is, indeed, embarrassing to see many strange bedfellows in the development of the idea of unfit people, and it should give us pause if we believe that the Holocaust could have been predicted from its earliest roots."

I think it is obvious that most of the material written about eugenics, the Holocaust, intelligence testing, sterilizing people, etc. are really just meant to deter a modern understanding of human behavior by claiming that any such understanding or research is dangerous, because in the past "bad things happened." Over the last thirty years, science has been demolishing the Marxist/egalitarian radical environmentalist paradigm—and they are now left with no research to counter what we know about gene-nature interactions. The only recourse is to talk about the past, trying to use fear so that people will shun future possibilities.

Before Mendel's theory of inheritance was rediscovered, and even while evolution was just beginning, the moralists were well ahead of science in getting rid of the unfit:

"Those who contributed to degeneracy theory in the 19th century were often professional people—charity leaders, sociologists, physicians, and prison reformers. They were often advocates of public hygiene; they fought for slum prevention through changes in building codes; they became friends of the new labor movement, champions of public education, providers of public libraries, creators of visiting nurse associations, promoters of public bath houses, and founders of settlement houses. Many of them were what today would be called liberals in their political philosophy."

"Throughout the 19th century, social philosophers who sought ways to address the failings of society relied on science for its theories of the causes of human failure and for its technology to prevent or remedy the social pathology of the times. This was considered an advance over asking the local government, organized religion, or the families of the unfortunates to handle a problem of gargantuan proportions. In prior centuries, these three traditional approaches had often been relied on, but they failed to solve the on-going problem of dealing with at least 10% of the population who could not support themselves or their families. It was hoped that science would be the savior of society."

It seems not much has changed since then. We are still perplexed with what to do with the unreachable wretches that stay on welfare or beg in the streets. Of course, today we are far wealthier and most people will tolerate high taxes so that these unfortunates can be taken care of, or at least hidden away. But numerous social programs, promoted by the social scientists, Marxists, and religious do-gooders, have failed to alter the outcomes of the underclass.

But how far back do we have to go to find a practice of genocide based on biological unfitness? It seems the Jews first established these standards of the unfit and the essence of biology in the Talmud. Carlson describes three standards of unfit people in biblical times. First, in Deuteronomy 21:18-21.1, with regards to a "rebellious disobedient son," scholars infer that the son was born with these traits—they are genetic.

The second group of unfit people in the Jewish religion are mamzer, or bastards. "There is an implication that it is not just how a child is brought up [that makes them unfit], but what paternal biological stock the child comes from that matters." Jewish religion preaches that Jews have a different essence in their blood from other races, and only the Jews are free of bad seed (genes) and therefore pure (never unfit). Still today, many orthodox Jews hold shiva, or seven days of mourning for the dead, when one of the tribe marries a non-Jew (miscegenation). Black condemns this when Whites object, but has no objections when practiced by Jews for thousands of years.

The third category of unfit is almost identical to the way early eugenicists viewed the unfit. As Carlson describes it:

"A third category of unfit people in ancient times were the Amalekites. They lived in Ashdod, the most important of the five towns that constituted the Philistines in the southwest of Palestine, or what is called, since the creation of the state of Israel, the Gaza Strip, about 7 kilometers (3 miles) east of the Mediterranean and about 40 kilometers (18 miles) north of Gaza. They were at the time of the Exodus from Egypt a Bedouin tribe that harassed the fleeing Jews in their journey across the Sinai desert."

"The Amalekites were perceived as a degenerate people with evil habits, who should not only be shunned but exterminated, including their wives and children, and even their cattle. In talmudic interpretation, the Amalekites were believed to have been created evil, but their extermination was never to be complete because they had intermarried with other tribes as well as with Jews, and their seed (hereditary nature) was mixed in undetectable ways. The presence of Amalekite heredity is inferred when particularly evil people arise, such as Haman in the book of Esther or, in more recent times, King Ferdinand of Spain in the 15th century, or Hitler in the 20th century."

"The Amalekites may be thought of as a model for racism or even genocide. In this interpretation, the racist often attributes inhuman practices to the offending race, such as the Amalekites with blood in their mouths and abominations between their teeth. These might be examples of their violating dietary laws, Jews being prohibited from eating meat that has not been drained of its blood and Jews being prohibited from eating specified animals or animal parts. The abomination may be more repulsive to the sexual mores of that era, especially if blood as a vital fluid is equated with semen as a vital fluid. In that case, the Amalekites practiced sodomy (fellatio)."

"Even if one acknowledges the source of God's wrath, the slaying of those weak and infirm Jews least able to defend themselves, it is difficult for contemporary readers of Exodus to imagine why the children and future descendants of the Amalekites, no matter how many centuries pass, should be considered as evil in the eyes of the Jews as they were at the time of their original crimes. An inference may be made that the culture is corrupting, and children raised in it are necessarily going to practice the abominations of the parents. This should not apply to infants or very young children, yet there is no sparing of even these children. Nor are there any careful protections of legal rights as in the determination of the rebellious and disobedient son; the Amalekites are perceived evil as a class, and their death is laid down as a commandment. The miscegenation of the Amalekites may have rendered that commandment moot, but nevertheless it might be interpreted as a warning that unspeakably evil people will occasionally appear because they were not destroyed at the appropriate time, and Jews cannot take their freedom or safety as a people for granted. Scapegoating the Amalekites in this interpretation is analogous to 19th-century ideas of atavisms."

So everything that Black accuses early eugenicists of doing, based on a belief that "bad seed" could crop up in future generations if not found and destroyed, had its origins in the Jewish religion! The Old Testament or Talmud, was a book of racial supremacy, genocide, and purity of blood. One must ask then why it is so hard to fathom that prior to the genetic revolution in the last few decades, the belief for thousands of years was that "bad seed" was carried by certain people, and must be destroyed? This was not White supremacy, this was the Jewish understanding of human nature as described by a supposed supreme being, and also found its way into some Christian thinking. (Judaism and Christianity are so different, it is hard to imagine that Christianity also accepts the Old Testament along with the New Testament.)

Carlson describes the full history of eugenics, and what led up to it, "long before Francis Galton introduced the term eugenics, there was a growing concern during the 18th and 19th centuries that degeneracy was a major problem. The degeneracy might be physiological (caused by masturbation, occupational exposure, or alcoholism), moral (leading to innate criminality), mental (resulting in feeblemindedness or insanity), or economic (in which the pauper lacked the ability to rise out of poverty)…. Many physicians attributed the high criminality among illegitimate children to their 'vicious upbringing' and the family environment in which they were raised. In 1836 in Paris, one-third of the births were illegitimate, most of them from working-class women. Foundlings were abandoned in larger numbers during the winter months when the mothers could not feed their children. Those abandoned as infants often died in hospitals, but many were shipped out of Paris to the provinces where they were raised by farmers. The privileged classes often looked upon the less fortunate classes as victims of their own moral failings. They were considered by them to be 'branded with the marks of vice and destitution' and 'reduced by sheer besottedness to a life of savagery.' Their lives inspired 'disgust and horror.'"

When we look at the history of how society looked at the destitute or unfit, two sides have always been at odds: those who think we should help them and those who want to remove support so that they will improve their own lot in life. "Mrs. E.C. Bolles also championed the new charity movement. She deplored a clergyman's 'exhortation to his flock to devote a tenth of their income to the poor.' If this were put into practice she admitted, 'the increase of pauperism would soon be appalling....' She attributed the causes of pauperism in the cities to 'excessive immigration of the worst elements of the Old World,' crowded tenements, the fertility of the lower classes, 'drunkenness, indolence, ignorance, and inefficiency.' Although she did not have any practical remedy to suggest, she wished that 'if criminals, paupers, idiots, and incurables were prevented from self-multiplication the next generation of benevolent workers would meet with less discouragement.' In the meantime, she suggested direct personal influence through 'volunteer visiting' and advocacy of kindergarten classes and industrial schools to improve the skills of the children-of paupers."

Today, we are no closer to a solution for the underclass. All social programs have failed, but of course, they can never be refuted, because they always blame a lack of resources or effort for the many programs that have been tried and fail. The eugenics movement was not new, it was just given a new name to fight degeneracy. Today, one could embrace libertarianism—where everyone is on their own without handouts from the government. Or one could embrace radical environmentalism, and preach the new gospel of quotas, affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, and group identity—with