Intellectual Morons by Daniel J. Flynn

Author:Daniel J. Flynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400082698
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2004-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

UPROOTING “HUMAN WEEDS”

During the 1920s and ’30s, a mass movement gained traction for the furtherance of “race betterment.” Its charismatic leader called for putting millions of people in concentration camps. Those the movement deemed subhuman would be sterilized to protect future generations from the corruption of the gene pool. The campaign would give special attention to racial minorities.

These ideas evoke images of an angry man sporting a Charlie Chaplin mustache, a bad haircut, and a blood-red armband. Yet it was an attractive woman donning the latest fashions, rather than the Hun dictator parading around in a ludicrous military costume, who specifically promoted these ideas. The movement occurred in America, not Nazi Germany. The leader was Margaret Sanger, not Adolf Hitler.

Idealism run amok fueled the international eugenics movement. Herbert Spencer, an early eugenics backer, declared that “all imperfection must disappear.”19 Like Communism, eugenics—creating the well born, the biologically pure, the master race—is a utopian delusion. God had created a flawed world. Man would make things perfect. The hominid god, however, proved an unworthy successor to the biblical God. The road to Eden always detours to Hell. The detours on the path to Immaculate Man led to the gas chamber, the concentration camp, and the operating table. Human perfection, an unattainable goal, relied on euthanasia, segregation, sterilization, and abortion to achieve its dream of the ubermensch. Margaret Sanger rejected putting the unfit to sleep, but she promoted aborting, sterilizing, and segregating them. She did this to make the world perfect. The pursuit of the loftiest goals condones the employment of the basest methods.

Like playing the role of god, racism is an exercise in narcissism. The eugenicist’s ideal man always seemed to resemble the eugenicist—fair haired, light complexioned, and Nordic. People who looked like Margaret Sanger needn’t worry about the state coming after them for polluting the gene pool.

Thankfully, Sanger’s vision of work camps for the “unfit” never came to fruition—at least in the United States. Still, in the first half of the twentieth century, state governments sterilized upwards of sixty thousand Americans. More than half the states sterilized citizens, with Virginia, California, and Kansas leading the way.20 What Indiana introduced to the world in 1907, European governments soon adopted. Prideful of standing on the cutting edge of “progress,” Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and, of course, Nazi Germany introduced compulsory sterilization laws to disastrous results. In all instances, the laws disproportionately targeted women and minorities.21 While sterilization doesn’t seem high on its agenda these days, the birth-control movement’s focus on keeping minority populations from growing has outlived Sanger. Today, about a third of all abortions performed in the United States are on unborn African-American children, with predominantly black areas like Washington, D.C., witnessing more abortions than live births.22

Incredibly, Margaret Sanger’s hagiographers, and her most devoted followers in the abortion-rights movement, deny and gloss over the eugenicist nature of her program. But Sanger herself trumpeted her belief in the birth-control aspect of eugenics.

In accepting an award in 1937, Sanger proclaimed that blocking the procreation

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