Good and Evil?

[kokopelli]

Forgetting the atrocities of Hitler and experimentation in the USA, there is a postive side to eugenics if properly applied. One such is voluntary eugenics in which women use birth control because they lack financial and family support for unwanted children. I have read that, in some cases, crime rates have decreased simply because unwanted children are not being brought into a world where their chances for success are dim. I am also guessing that birth control med are being provided to some mental patients or mentally or physically challenged persons who cannot provide for offspring.

 

Oftentimes at the supermarket at home, I see grandma, mama and pregnant daughter in a cluster and wonder "what if" ! Yes, I am all for abortions and birth control.

[Bob]

One such is voluntary eugenics in which women use birth control because they lack financial and family support for unwanted children.

 

No big deal but not an apt term for what you are describing. Eugenics is hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding and normally connotes an evil motive. Using the term to describe women or men who use birth control methods to avoid having children they either don't want or can't afford isn't even close to the meaning of that term.

 

And there's a very real dilemma with what to do with severely mentally handicapped people who are nevertheless procreating children who won't have capable parents and do add a significant financial burden on the state. I realize that one needs to tread carefully in this area but some thoughts of eugenics (if you broaden that term out to mean prevention of births) make perfect moral and maybe even some legal sense. And I can conjure up potential positive aspects of eugenics practiced under some strict ethical guidelines (i.e., should a government stop people from having a genius child or a child with blue eyes or a child that would live to be 150 years old if science could allow it?).

 

As to being "shocked" at all by the notion that some in the US (and other nations) have considered the whole issue, I'm not. But the notion that the US or some other nation is somehow responsible for what the Nazis atrocioualy did with the concepts is totally beyond me.

[Guest fountainhall]


the notion that the US or some other nation is somehow responsible for what the Nazis atrocioualy did with the concepts is totally beyond me.

 

With all respect, I merely quoted from wikipedia. I did not make anything up. You are right that the US was not the only country involved in eugenics research. But you cannot fly in the face of what seem irrefutable facts - e.g. The Rockefeller Foundation helping “develop and fund various German genetics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschitz.” That is certainly not fanciful fiction. It is borne out by many sources, including this article in The History News Network dated 25 November 2003 –

 

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in 21st-Century money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression . . .

 

Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "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…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough" . . . Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense . . .

 

While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html

 

Did you know that 1927 Supreme Court ruling has never been overturned? This is from a review of another book – The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism by Stefan Kuhl – in Freedom Daily

 

The court, in other words, went beyond saying that a person is guilty until proven innocent; it declared that hypothetical persons were presumed guilty of criminal intent even before being conceived and may not be brought into existence. The 1927 decision has never been overturned, and is still a part of the law of the land.

 

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0894g.asp

 

Hitler himself became aware of American eugenics programmes whilst in prison in 1924 and closely studied the work of “American ethnological stalwarts.” This is even mentioned in Mein Kampf. A 2004 review in Britain’s Guardian newspaper of anothe book – War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black – states

 

Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modelled on laws already introduced across America and upheld by the supreme court. Nazi doctors, and even Hitler himself, regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the US. American eugenicists (who) were eager to assist.

 

http://www.guardian....feb/06/race.usa

 

But I agree. The US (and other nations) can not be held responsible for what happened in Nazi Germany. But given the above, we surely have to wonder what might not have happened had US research, US funding and US eugenics programmes not been in existence.

[Bob]

While we likely don't disagree in general, FH, I wasn't the one who said:

 

"How many of us, I wonder, have ever bothered to ask where the inspiration came for such atrocities?

I never realised until this morning that the United States provided Nazi Germany with much of that inspiration and, what’s more, much of the research!"

 

Suggesting that the "United States" was the inspiration for such atrocities is what I take issue with.

 

[Have sent a PM to FH as maybe the rest of what I was going to say might be off topic to some degree; regardless, so nobody gets the wrong idea, poster FH and I get along just fine although we do occasionally argue a bit (geez, sounds like some falang/thai couples I know! haha)]

[Guest thaiworthy]

To really explore the source of "cleansing" in mankind's history, you have to go back pretty far into ancient history.

 

History is speckled with cleansing stories such as Atlantis, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the story of Noah's Ark.

 

Despite religious dogma, this is not punishment but Universal Law (or if you were a Christian, you would say, "God's law.") Ịf we were meant to perish or ascend for all eternity during each cleansing, then all souls would already exist in "heaven or hell" from past cleansings, but the fact is, the cycle goes onward still. An example of this would be the cleansing that is rumored to have happened with Noah. "And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.... ~Genesis 6:13-14." This is a prime example of a negative build up of energies resulting in an earth cleansing.

 

I do not abide by fear. All that I have seen from fear is that it is the opposite of love. Man has interpreted the natural cleansing cycle of old to instill fear in his fellow man so that he can keep him under control.

 

http://www.spiritual...h-cleansing.php

 

Only God can take a life. As a supreme being and creator of man, that's what we're led to believe. So if you consider yourself a supreme race, then this follows in line quite nicely and you can eliminate Jews and the mentally retarded just as God did with Noah's flood so that only the "pure" remains. It's documented that God was grieved by man's wickedness, and only God really knows what is meant by "wicked." It is entirely credible to believe the Nazis considered Jews "wicked."

 

You may argue that this great flood was nothing more than a global catastrophe, the same as a meteor collision or any other natural disaster. But the Bible talks about the laws of God, and thru some fashion of his own self-inflated image, man mimics Godhood with such programs as sterilization and genocide.

 

In my opinion, the truest and oldest inspiration for the atrocities done by man came first by none other than God himself.

[Guest fountainhall]

Bob and I have indeed exchanged cordial PMs. We do have a difference of view, but I admit that I only know what I have read today about the history. My shock was perhaps a result of knowing absolutely nothing of the extensive research that had been going on, not only in the US but also other countries. And it had been going on for many decades prior to the 1920s. Many important people and institutions seemed quite keen on pursuing ways of purifying a race, alas.

 

And I would like to clarify one issue. When I started the thread, I was not specifically referring to the Nazis' determination to exterminate the Jewish race. It was to consider how the theories of genetic tinkering came to be adopted by Hitler and his thugs, tinkering that included weeding out those of their own Aryan race who might hinder its development into the 'master race' - including homosexuals. We'll probably ever know the answer. But I was shocked to learn that the theories and to a certain extent the practise were, if not widespread, not uncommon.

[Guest]

Only God can take a life. As a supreme being and creator of man, that's what we're led to believe.

That's what some people are led to believe.

[kokopelli]

No big deal but not an apt term for what you are describing. Eugenics is hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding and normally connotes an evil motive.

 

I suppose my description of grandma, mama and pregnant teen daughter, all fat, missing teeth and smoking cigs is best described as an example of "dysgenics".

[Bob]

I suppose my description of grandma, mama and pregnant teen daughter, all fat, missing teeth and smoking cigs is best described as an example of "dysgenics".

 

Or sounds like a group of extras for the movie "Deliverance?"

[KhorTose]

Only God can take a life. As a supreme being and creator of man, that's what we're led to believe. So if you consider yourself a supreme race, then this follows in line quite nicely and you can eliminate Jews and the mentally retarded just as God did with Noah's flood so that only the "pure" remains. ........................................................................................

In my opinion, the truest and oldest inspiration for the atrocities done by man came first by none other than God himself.

 

Is this why we see the "choosen people" behaving so badly towards the Palestinians? There may be another explanation why FH's friend has a swastika in the middle of the star of David.

[ChristianPFC]

Is this common knowledge? Am I the only one completely shocked by this?

 

You will be even more shocked to learn that concentration camps were invented by the British during the Second Boer War 1899-1902. The British Empire led a war of conquest against the Boer republics (descendents of Dutch settlers in South Africa) to gain access to the gold and diamond under their (the Boer's) soil and to get a colonial empire from Kap to Kairo. It didn't run well for the British, so they decided to put all the civilians, women, children, old into concentration camps and let them starve or die of diseases. It worked well, the Boers finally gave up fighting.

 

http://en.wikipedia....Second_Boer_War

 

But back to the subject.

 

In an opening scene in the movie "300" (about the fight between Spartans and Persians) they show how new born Spartan babies are examined and thrown down a cliff if they appear weak or ill. I don't know if this has any historical background.

 

There is Thallasemia, a hereditary disease that is/was spread around the mediterranean sea, in areas where Malaria was rife. Those who carry it are partially protected from Malaria, but suffer from other ailments.

 

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Thallasemia says:

 

Carrier detection

A screening policy exists in Cyprus to reduce the incidence of thalassemia, which since the program's implementation in the 1970s (which also includes pre-natal screening and abortion) has reduced the number of children born with the hereditary blood disease from 1 out of every 158 births to almost zero.

 

Read between the lines: they aborted children if they detected the disease in the foetus and got close to eradicating thallasemia! I'm in favor of this policy: abort children if you can detect a disease in the foetus and make a new one (and hope it's healthy)! Eradicating a disease has never been so easy.

 

(Disclaimer: I'm not a specialist on any of the subjects I wrote about. Please allow minor inaccuracies.)

[Guest fountainhall]

You will be even more shocked to learn that concentration camps were invented by the British during the Second Boer War 1899-1902

 

Actually it was the Spanish who invented concentration camps during the Spanish-American War a few years earlier in 1896. But the British certainly adopted the policy with fervour during the Boer War, and goodness knows how many were killed or died in appalling conditions. I have no idea.

 

As in other colonial enterprises, successive British governments believed that colonialism was not just of economic benefit to the colonial power, but of a civilising benefit to the colonised. This was the White Man's Burden, as the poet Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1899. Yet, the history of colonialism by all colonial powers, not just Britain, is littered with incidents of massive abuse and slaughter of innocent men, women and children. The Black Hole of Calcutta incident in 1756 may have resulted in only a small number of deaths - about 123 out of 146 prisoners - but it was indicative of many more that were to follow, highlighting the callous disregard of the British forces for the lives of civilians and prisoners of war.

[ChristianPFC]

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse.

 

Bangkok's 'Hitler chic' trend riles tourists, Israeli envoy:

 

 

 

 

They are rising their left arm instead of the right arm, so technically this is no proper Hitler salute! (Rising the left arm was only acceptable if your right arm was wounded.)