Posted by Kromey at 6:56pm Jun 20 '11It's a piece of our (American) history so dark that few talk about it, leading to fewer even knowing about it. It's something that we have used to describe just how vile and evil our enemies were, implicitly making us the knights in shining armor riding in on the white horse to free the oppressed. But one simple fact dashes that romantic notion to pieces:
Eugenics started with us.
That's right, the practice of sterilizing people deemed "unfit" for society for one reason or another was not an invention of the Nazis trying to resurrect/purify the Aryan race, but rather it was the brainchild of our own scientists, and was carried out with Nazi-like efficiency and dispassion on American soil. We were the first to build sterilization camps directly on rails, allowing those rounded up to be carted in, sterilized, and then carted right back out. The Nazis copied us on that one, although added their own flair by removing the "out" part and creating concentration camps (which we then copied back ourselves, shutting in the Japanese Americans after Japan attacked us -- but for some reason that part is in the common history books).
With WWII, though, eugenics suddenly became evil, because it's what the Nazis did; ironically, the Nazis gave us something good, forever tainting the very word "eugenics" as something too vile to ever considering doing. And that was the end of eugenics in the US.
Well, almost. It turns out that North Carolina actually continued the practice up until 1974, and that there are still an estimated 3,000 people alive today who were victims of the state's eugenics program! The state's now trying to figure out how to squeeze $60 million dollars out of their budget to pay reparations of $20,000 to each surviving victim.
All I can say is... well, shoot, I don't know what to say. Like I said, it's something so dark that it's just not talked about anymore, but I thought I'd shed enough light to know about the extent of eugenics in the US. I think what disturbs me the most about this is not the fact that there are 3,000 sterilized people today still waiting for reparations from the state, but that this revelation means that there could be so many more out there, other eugenics programs that survived the [private] of Nazism to persist for decades after the end of WWII.
That scares the shit out of me...
Eugenics started with us.
That's right, the practice of sterilizing people deemed "unfit" for society for one reason or another was not an invention of the Nazis trying to resurrect/purify the Aryan race, but rather it was the brainchild of our own scientists, and was carried out with Nazi-like efficiency and dispassion on American soil. We were the first to build sterilization camps directly on rails, allowing those rounded up to be carted in, sterilized, and then carted right back out. The Nazis copied us on that one, although added their own flair by removing the "out" part and creating concentration camps (which we then copied back ourselves, shutting in the Japanese Americans after Japan attacked us -- but for some reason that part is in the common history books).
With WWII, though, eugenics suddenly became evil, because it's what the Nazis did; ironically, the Nazis gave us something good, forever tainting the very word "eugenics" as something too vile to ever considering doing. And that was the end of eugenics in the US.
Well, almost. It turns out that North Carolina actually continued the practice up until 1974, and that there are still an estimated 3,000 people alive today who were victims of the state's eugenics program! The state's now trying to figure out how to squeeze $60 million dollars out of their budget to pay reparations of $20,000 to each surviving victim.
All I can say is... well, shoot, I don't know what to say. Like I said, it's something so dark that it's just not talked about anymore, but I thought I'd shed enough light to know about the extent of eugenics in the US. I think what disturbs me the most about this is not the fact that there are 3,000 sterilized people today still waiting for reparations from the state, but that this revelation means that there could be so many more out there, other eugenics programs that survived the [private] of Nazism to persist for decades after the end of WWII.
That scares the shit out of me...