Hitler was adjudged as crazy, and righly so ofcourse, but ive wondered how he managed to make those around him evil, with what i always was led to believe was his madness.
But the reality as normal is not in the spin, the reality is eugenic's was implemented europe wide, with most luminaries of the time fully behind it, Gorge Bernard Shaw being one of its most vocal advocates, Hitler along with other European state's started eliminating their 'runt' in the early 1930s.
Even after the war eugenics was still strongly advocated in europe, even the contrecetive pill was developed to stop the genetically deficient from reproducing, burdens to the state.
The very man the created the welfare state in Britain was a vocal eugenics advocate, Hitler AND his henchmen were a product of THEIR time.
William Beveridge, who argued that those with 'general defects' should be denied not only the vote, but 'civil freedom and fatherhood'. Photograph: Hans Wild/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
It is eugenics, the belief that society's fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and "moral worth" to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts.
Such talk repels us now, but in the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man", even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a "lethal chamber".
Such thinking was not alien to the great Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge, who argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood". Indeed, a desire to limit the numbers of the inferior was written into modern notions of birth control from the start. That great pioneer of contraception,
Marie Stopes – honoured with a postage stamp in 2008 – was a hardline eugenicist, determined that the "hordes of defectives" be reduced in number, thereby placing less of a burden on "the fit". Stopes later disinherited her son because he had married a short-sighted woman, thereby risking a less-than-perfect grandchild.
Yet what looks kooky or sinister in 2012 struck the prewar British left as solid and sensible.
Yet what looks kooky or sinister in 2012 struck the prewar British left as solid and sensible. Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: "The time is surely coming … when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself." Meanwhile, JBS Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: "Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of 'undermen'." That's
Untermenschen in German.
I'm afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". If it's any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.
According to Dennis Sewell, whose book The Political Gene charts the impact of Darwinian ideas on politics, the eugenics movement's definition of "unfit" was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held, he writes, "
that most of the behavioural traits that led to poverty were inherited. In short, that the poor were genetically inferior to the educated middle class."
It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor.
Hence the enthusiasm of John Maynard Keynes, director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, for contraception, essential because the working class was too "drunken and ignorant" to keep its numbers down
Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's closet | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian
