Western Racialism and Eugenics

[Fade the Butcher]

I challenge anyone on this website to a formal debate who denies the following:

1.) That a thriving indigenous racialist and eugenics movement existed in the United States long before the Third Reich.

2.) That the international eugenics movement was led by Americans during the early twentieth century.

3.) That Americans were instrumental in spreading eugenics and racialism to other countries.

4.) That the public policies of Nazi Germany, through the eclectic reading habits of Adolf Hitler, were influenced by long existing Anglo-American ideas and practices.

5.) The existence of what I have termed "Western racialism" or a separate racialist tradition from that of Nazism that extends from the Confederacy, Manifest Destiny, Indian Removal, and Jim Crow in the United States to White Australia to white supremacy in the British Empire to the sterilization of the mongrels in Norway and beyond.

[Der Sozialist]

I want to add one more if you don’t mind:

6.) The modern Genetics movement is really the Eugenics movement incognito.

[Fade the Butcher]

Eugenics is basically the idea that heredity can be manipulated to enhance human beings for desirable traits like health, intelligence, and character. There is nothing farfetched about eugenics. The logic of eugenics is relatively straightforward: we have been doing this for thousands of years with various plant and animal species. We have bred wolves into chihuahuas and teostine into corn. There is nothing special about humanity, since humans are also organisms, that would prevent us from successfully applying these methods to human beings, as we know that humans are far more similar to other mammals than anthropocentrists have made them out to be.

The line that separates genetics and eugenics has never been a clear one. In fact, genetics grew out of eugenics, not the other way around. It was the dream that increasing our knowledge of human genetics could one day enable us to eugenically enhance human beings that inspired much of the initial research into genetics, for example, the pursuit of the gene. The eugenics movement arose and swept across much of the West during the early twentieth century, but the movement was crippled by the twin disasters of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Eugenics became associated with Nazism and political climate became inhospitable to eugenicists in the ensuing egalitarian backlash that lasted several decades.

It was at this point, around the late 1930s/early 1940s, that the eugenics movement began to reinvent itself. The old guard of eugenicists began to die off and the new leadership shifted the focus of the movement from lobbying for political legislation to genetics research. The label eugenics was dropped again and again in favor of genetics (and sociobiology in later years). The most pressing concern of eugenicists in the postwar years was to reestablish genetics as a credible science so they could continue to pursue their work without arousing controversy. There was also a shift in focus towards "crypto-eugenics" or promoting eugenics through seemingly unrelated organizations like the Population Council and Planned Parenthood. Eugenicists were intimately involved with the development of modern birth control methods in the fifties and sixties and the pro-choice movement of later years.

It was during the forties, fifties, and sixties that genetics and molecular biology came of age. DNA was identified as the transmitter of hereditary information. The structure of DNA, the double helix, was discovered in 1953. An enormous amount of progress was made during this period in understanding the functioning of the cell. It was clear during this period that the old dream of eugenics had not died amongst geneticists and other influential Americans. Hermann J. Muller wrote about the menace of genetic load and breeding a superior race of human beings. His ideas would later come to fruition as The Repository for Germinal Choice. Francis Crick suggested that blacks of low intelligence should be paid by the government not to reproduce themselves. William Shockley also warned about the dysgenic threat to the United States.

The turning point came in the seventies. The civil rights movement began to whither and decline during these years, but the most important development was the beginning of the second phase of the DNA revolution: the birth of genetic engineering (i.e., the development of recombinant DNA technology) and the biotechnology industry. Big Science and Big Business began to come together. The first biotech corporations, Genentech and Biogen, were founded. We had moved from understanding the gene and the cell to manipulating genes for human purposes. An important line had been crossed. It was also during the sixties and seventies that in vitro fertilization technology was developed. In 1979, Louise Brown became the first human born using IVF.

The revolutionary potential of IVF technology went unnoticed at first, but another important step had been taken. Human reproduction had been separated from the natural act of sexual intercourse for the first time in history. IVF quickly became the foundation of the new technologies of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (i.e., embryo screening), family balancing, and embryo selection during the eighties. It was now possible to create embryos in the laboratory and screen them for various diseases like cystic fibrosis before implanting them in the womb. The number of genetic diseases that embryos could be screened for steadily became ever more numerous. Sperm banks were also proliferating during the eighties and voluntary eugenic selection began to become a reality. The Human Genome Project finally kicked off in the late eighties.

It should have been clear by this point where all this would ultimately lead. History had shown time and time again that the acquisition of genetic information was but the prelude of the manipulation of it for human purposes (especially when billions of dollars were to be made). The use of DNA fingerprinting by law enforcement became quite common by the nineties. DNA databanks began to rapidly proliferate and identification ultimately became an end in itself. Biotech corporations were using GE to make human insulin and were reaping enormous profits. GE began to revolutionize agriculture during the nineties and the first GE crops began to hit the supermarket.

In 1997, we cloned the first mammal, the sheep Dolly in Scotland. We have cloned many other mammals since then. We created the first artificial chromosome in 1998. By the late 1990s, the subject of human germline genetic engineering, creating "designer babies" or a genetically enhanced race of human beings had become a quite common topic of discussion. The ultimate biotechnology market beckoned: if people are willing to spend millions of dollars every year on drugs, plastic surgery, exercise machines and so on to enhance themselves in various ways or on their children's college education, how much money could be made engineering them to be pretty, or smart, or likeable, or all of the above?

It suddenly began to occur to many observers around the turn of the millennium that human germline genetic engineering was eugenics under fresh colors. At first, this was denied, and suddenly a flurry of books were released about the eugenics movement and how horrible it was (which initially caught my attention), but lately the possibility of a new eugenics has begun to catch on. There has been a definite change in tone. We have gone from eugenics is Nazism and completely horrible to the old eugenics was flawed, but now . . . If we are willing to spend so much money to improve the environment of our children, then what is wrong with improving their heredity, especially if this doesn't require hurting anyone?

It's not like the biotechnology industry is going to back away from this either. Just imagine how much money there is to make. Think about how much money humans spend every year trying to improve themselves in various ways. The scientific community isn't going to back down either. Just look at the debate over embryonic stem cell research going on right now. We have already come this far in trying to understand our biology and manipulate it to improve our lives and we are not about to give up on this because of religious fundamentalists or moralizing windbags. Polls have shown time and time again that millions of Americans have no objection to eugenics and would use GE technology if it was safe and affordable. We can already see the first GE centers appearing. The dawn of eugenics is coming.