TollandRCR wrote:
majorbabs wrote:
With these guys, close doesn't count. Being 100 percent German as far back as we can trace, I'm lucky with my blond hair, blue eyes and skin so white I make albinos seem tanned by comparison, I met these folks criteria for "white." Those with southern Euopean backgrounds like Italians are really big ? when it comes to the "are they white?" question.
This "Nordic race," the greatest of all white Caucasian races, soon became the basis for Hitler's concept of the Master Race. Much of his ideology, especially that of eugenics, was imported directly from the U.S.
Found on a link on Free Republic, an article in the
Jerusalem Post that tells much of the ugly story of the U.S. eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (expiring only with World War II).
Jerusalem Post Wednesday Feb 01, 2012
Eugenics, euthanasia and American race improvement by David Turner. Emphasis in the original.
Quote:
...
Eugenics “ideal” for America’s racial stock was the Nordic blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan. The “unfit” included the “feeble minded,” homosexuals; persons evidencing criminal traits, alcoholism, blindness, deafness, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and a wide range of “mental illnesses.” To eugenicists even “laziness” was understood as a genetic trait to be eliminated from the race.
Also slated for elimination were “emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark- haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.” To secure the racial stock eugenics promoted strengthening existing laws prohibiting sexual contact between whites and non-whites (miscegenation). Race-segregated population centers was another humane option. As regards the Jews, at least in the years before National Socialism in Germany, eugenics promoted anti-immigration laws, which were discussed last week.
But there was another instrument of racial cleansing that, while not formally legal, was still selectively applied.
Euthanasia and the “unfit”: Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population. Point No. 8 was euthanasia.
The American eugenics movement fed directly into Nazi "science" and ideology. Turner notes that his focus on the U.S. is not because he holds that the U.S. is more guilty than France, Germany, or Hungary. He sees the guilt of the U.S. for the Holocaust as being an act of omission, not of commission: had it wished to do so, the U.S. could have provided the Jews of Europe a place of refuge, something that it had done for other peoples. Europe killed the Jews, not America. But if the pro-Nazis Henry Ford or Charles Lindbergh had decided to run for President and had defeated FDR, what would have happened with eugenics and euthanasia in the U.S.? I would add, what would have happened to the American role in Europe? I know that electing Ford or Lindbergh would not have happened. At least I think that I know that.
As would be expected, the Freepers turn this sordid bit of U.S. history into an attack on a woman's right to choose and Planned Parenthood.
More about the American Eugenics Society is on the Web, including this
annotated image archive. This article is part of a series that I intend to follow.