Against Good Breeding: Understanding Jewish Opposition to Eugenics
Source: counter-currents.com
The story of eugenics has been a tragedy.
The basic idea goes back to antiquity – the belief that the world would become a much better place if healthy and intelligent people had the most children. But in the 20th century, in a bizarre and mysterious twist of fate, something went terribly wrong, and what began as an altruistic movement to help future generations ended in the barbaric murder of millions. This fantastical tale has long been the accepted history of eugenics – but is that really what happened?
Recently, John Glad published Jewish Eugenics,[1] which adds important new pieces to this puzzle, and when combined with already-established facts, a radically different picture of the history of eugenics emerges. JE gives an overview of Jewish participation in eugenics which shows consistent support in Israel from its birth in 1948 to the present, and among the majority of Jews in the West until the late 1960s, at which time most Jewish social scientists and journalists reversed themselves to vehement denunciation, which remains their position today. The question immediately arises: “Why the mass reversal?” Glad states matter-of-factly that most Jews in the West altered their position 180 degrees, and then he moves on, offering no explanation for this extraordinary event, but that will be the central focus of this paper.
JE is a scholarly work about an extremely important subject, but there’s also an inescapable element of sensationalism simply because of the topics addressed. Eugenics is widely reviled as “the ideology of the holocaust,” the most diabolical scheme in all of history.Furthermore, the very idea of Jewish eugenics may seem strange, since eugenics is associated in the minds of most people with the Nazis. Nevertheless, eugenics is now, and has always been, practiced in Israel:
Unlike the U.S. situation, this anti-eugenics view never even got off the ground in Israel. Behavioral scientist Aviad Raz (b. 1968) of Ben Gurion University is quite open in pointing out that both the word ‘eugenics’ and the actual practice of eugenics enjoy broad approval in that country, and objections to eugenics – at least as far as genetic screening combined with eugenic abortions – are a ‘non-issue’ in Israel: Eugenic ideologies and practices have persisted in Israel, in a thinly disguised mode, even after the holocaust, because they were an inherent and formative part of Zionism . . . [P]renatal genetic testing was eugenic and was indeed supported precisely for that reason, since ‘eugenic’ for them meant the improvement of the health of progeny and carried positive rather than negative connotations.[2]
Today in Israel, abortion is not a controversial issue. Human embryos are not considered sacred. The new eugenic reproductive technologies – pre-natal diagnosis, abortion of defective fetuses, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy – are all encouraged by the government and widely utilized by the population. (It should be noted, however, that Palestinians are not encouraged to take part, as their fertility is seen as a threat to the state.) In fact, surrogate mothers are paid by the government. There are 16 sperm banks in Israel, and more in vitro fertilizations are performed there per capita than in any other country in the world. Stem cell research is not strictly regulated in Israel. In short, their pragmatic attitude towards issues surrounding human reproduction contrasts sharply with that in America.
[...]
Jewish Attitudes towards Eugenics do an About-Face in the West
Glad quotes a Jewish eugenicist in a 1930s journal: “The eugenicist . . . does not aim to establish a race of supermen, but rather, a race of sturdy, intelligent and healthy individuals similar to the large proportion of the human family now in existence.”[6]
Later, he cites another Jewish eugenicist’s 3-point plan:
Social Eugenics will accomplish the following: It will reduce future welfare rolls. It will reduce our prison population. It will reduce future crimes. It will consist of a simple three-point plan: First, the Aid to Dependent Children will be phased out. . . . Second . . . Persons on Welfare who consent to sterilization will receive a one thousand dollar cash bonus. . . Third, all prison inmates will be [given] a three-year reduction in their prison sentences if they consent to sterilization.[7]
In much of the Western world during the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics was a popular cause. Some of its more notable proponents include H. G. Wells, Charles Darwin, Margaret Sanger, Winston Churchill, Francis Galton, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Lindbergh, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Julian Huxley. Huxley described eugenics as “of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive and of longest range.” Wells said, “It seemed to me that to discourage the multiplication of people below a certain standard, and to encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior people, was the only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world.”[8] It was neither a liberal nor a conservative cause, with supporters along all points of the political spectrum.
Then in the late 1960s, the majority of Jewish social scientists and journalists in Europe and North America did an about-face, reversing their position to one of harsh denunciation of eugenics, and since there was no organized opposition, their beliefs became both the academic orthodoxy and the “conventional wisdom.” This has lasted about 50 years to the present day. Although Glad never even speculates about why this remarkable event occurred, he provides the first clue – that it coincided with the birth of the Holocaust Memorial Movement, which can hardly be an insignificant coincidence.
Perhaps the second clue towards explaining anti-eugenics lies in the content and tone of their works – they became more dogmatic, and less rigorously scientific. Their readers were taught that certain opinions are acceptable, even praiseworthy, whereas others are forbidden, held only by screwballs and evil-doers. For example, according to them, all good and decent people believe the following: that heredity counts for nothing; that race doesn’t exist; that IQ is a fraud invented by White men who wanted to feel superior; that everyone is born exactly the same on everything that matters. Obviously, if only the environment determines human behavior, then there’s no point in eugenics.
The Nature-Nurture debate took center stage in public awareness in the latter part of the 20th century because of a media blitz engineered by the political left. It wasn’t much of a “debate,” however, because, for the most part, only their side was presented to the public. Eugenics was given a leading role – along with heredity, environment, race, and IQ tests – in their little “morality play.” Hereditarians believe both Nature and Nurture are important – they were cast as the heartless, bigoted villains. “Environmentalists” (a.k.a. “egalitarians”) should not be confused with those who want to protect the natural environment – in this context, environmentalists are those who believe that all human beings are born exactly equal on everything that matters, and that differences in behavior are determined by the environment. The environmentalists portrayed themselves as the “good guys” who bravely defend the public from the hateful influence of wicked hereditarians and eugenicists.
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As touched on earlier, eugenics is part of a cluster of issues along with IQ, race, and the Nature-Nurture question. These, in turn, are part of a larger matrix known as “political correctness,” or “leftist fascism,” and this includes immigration, intermarriage, diversity, and multi-culturalism. Much has been written about political correctness – nobody knows quite where it came from, and why it has taken over the Western world with a vengeance. Political correctness didn’t just occur arbitrarily like a change in the weather, it happened because people made it happen, people who derived (and continue to derive) benefit from it. MacDonald believes that the current Zeitgeist, with its various manifestations, is the product of Jews and Jewish organizations working for decades to re-create the social and political landscape, bit by bit, into one which benefits their own narrow ethnic interests.
Read the full article at: counter-currents.com
The Case for Eugenics in a Nutshell
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Tune into Red Ice Radio:
Jeanice Barcelo - Hour 1 - The Dark Side of Reproductive Technologies & Quest for Aryan Genetics
Daniel Estulin - Hour 1 - TransEvolution: The Coming Age of Human Deconstruction
Zoltan Istvan - The Transhumanist Wager: In Favor of Eugenics & Technological Dictatorship
Sofia Smallstorm - Hour 1 - Chemtrails to Pseudo-Life & Synthetic Biology
Ramzpaul - Hour 1 - Multicultural Chaos, Peaceful Nationalism & White Guilt
Stephen A. McNallen - Ancestral Roots & Metagenetics
Kevin MacDonald - The Dispossession of Europeans & Pathological Altruism
John Lash - White Genocide & The Archontic Infection
Kyle Hunt - Hour 1 - White Identity in a “Post Racial” Society
