Eugenics (fl. 1880s-1940s) aims to make the human race better through selective breeding, by controlling who can have children. It is what humans have been doing to cats and dogs and cows and pigs for thousands of years. The eugenics movement reached its height in the early 1900s in the US and Germany.
Some of its achievements:
- Forced sterilization of at least 65,000 in the US and some 400,000 in Germany, mainly the mentally disabled, Black “Rhineland Bastards” and criminals.
- Extermination, killing some 5 million Jews, 1.8 million Slavs, 220,000 Romani, 200,000 mentally disabled people and 5,000 homosexuals by the Germans.
- Immigration laws to keep the US, Canada and Australia White.
- Marriage laws to prevent Whites from marrying Blacks (in the US) and Jews (in Germany).
- Planned Parenthood in poor Black neighbourhoods in the US.
- The Mississippi appendectomy: Fannie Lou Hamer and at least 60% of the Black women in her county had their wombs taken out against their will or knowledge. The same went on in Boston and New York and no doubt elsewhere.
- The Pioneer Fund, which paid for much of the research behind “The Bell Curve” (1994).
In 1883, Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, invented the term “eugenics”, from the Greek eugenes, “well-born”. He added -ics to make it sound like a science, like physics. Galton studied twins and geniuses, concluding that intelligence comes mainly from your parents at birth. He wanted the government to give money to highly intelligent people who married each other and had children. That never caught on.
What caught on was turning eugenics against people who were mentally disabled, poor, criminal, Black, Jewish, Polish, etc. The genes of well-to-do people of northern European blood – the genes of people just like the eugenicists, in other words – needed to be saved for the sake of mankind!
In the US this was done through laws on immigration, sterilization and marriage, by pushing birth control, especially in poor Black neighbourhoods. Margaret Sanger, who gave us the term “birth control” (1914), often quoted W.E.B. Du Bois:
“The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”
Eugenics in the US was taught at top universities. It was backed by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, by the Supreme Court itself. It was opposed by Catholics and socialists.
In the early 1930s, Hitler rose to power and took US eugenic laws as a model. And then went one step further: extermination.
Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, but the eugenic mindset lives on, at least in the US:
- Norplant birth control was aimed at Black teenage girls – even though White teenage girls had more babies out of wedlock.
- Overpopulation: India, Japan and Haiti are commonly seen as “overpopulated”, but not the Netherlands, Belgium or Israel. People per square kilometre:
- 411 Netherlands,
- 371 Israel,
- 368 India,
- 362 Haiti,
- 355 Belgium,
- 337 Japan.
Darwin, by the way, was against the idea of eugenics.
– Abagond, 2016.
See also:
- eugenicists
- Francis Galton
- Madison Grant
- Walter Plecker
- Margaret Sanger
- Planned Parenthood
- Hitler
- Pioneer Fund
- The Nadir of American race relations
- Aryanism
- Hitler: Race and People
- Nazi Germany, brought to you by…. – features the Rockefeller Institute
- Black illegitimacy argument
- Fannie Lou Hamer
- Charles Darwin – against eugenics
- Mendel – misunderstood by eugenicists
- IQ test – an instrument of eugenics that grew out of Galton’s work
569
This is disgusting on every level and people should fight against it. It’s scary how many people still believe in this or think that it might be a good practice.
Also, I don’t want to play the Oppression Olympics or anything, but why no mentions of Slavs killed in the Holocaust? The millions of people who died? Like, I see it over and over again that it’s kind of… ignored. Is it because Slavs are white (or considered the whitest of the victims?) But it doesn’t matter because Hitler’s idea of race wasn’t the same as seen in the US. Rest assured that his regime did not see Slavs as “one of their own”. So idk why Slavs are regularly ignored in these discussions or are maybe mentioned as an afterthought. /rant end
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Regarding sterilization of black women and the Mississippi Appendectomy, In the words of the Louisiana judge Leander Perez ” The best way to hate a nigger is to hate him before he is born.”
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@ Mira
My sources said nothing about Slavs, but I should have known better (they are in my Holocaust post). My mistake. I updated the post. Thank you.
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@ Kiwi
Good point.
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Abagond,
Thank you. It’s not that it’s my “pet issue” (even though it’s deeply personal, for the obvious reasons) but I do think it’s important to present these things in order to make people understand that not everything regarding race, ethnicity, eugenics (or, well, most of the things) is understood in the same way it is in the US. Namely, just because something is defined in one way in the US doesn’t mean it’s the same everywhere. (In this case, who is considered “white/one of our own” by the dominant group).
Why is this important? Well, other than providing accurate information to people it can also serve as a reminder that certain things we see as normalized aren’t truly universal or the same everywhere. Not knowing or not thinking about the broader picture can lead to false conclusions or oversimplification. Which is never good.
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Hey, was it W.E.B Dubois who said that or was it Margaret Sanger? If it was him he sounds like those bougie black people that believe in assimilating to the white mainstream culture and ideologies to prove how they are special. I thought he wasn’t that type of person.
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@ helena
It was Du Bois who said that.
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Abagond,
This current day eugenics agenda very likely ties into the Genetically Modified foods complex.
“Kissinger, one of the key strategists of Nixon, nurtured by the Rockefellers, prepared what is known as National Security Study Memo (NSSM#200), in which he elaborated his plan for population reduction. In this Memo he specifically targets thirteen countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, and The Phillipines.
The weapon to be used was food; even if there was a famine food would be used to leverage population reduction.”
see also:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/genetically-engineered-destruction/24598
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Kiwi,
I meant on today’s US ideas about race. I might be mistaken, but I do think the main reason Slavs are often forgotten in these discussions (when non-Jewish victims are mentioned, like Roma people) is because Slavs are white and… Well, Americans don’t really like Russians. I don’t know, but I’ve noticed this tendency to kind of ignore Slavs when it comes to the Holocaust, which makes no sense.
As for Jewish people, you gotta understand them: they weren’t treated well by many Slavs in Europe (not just Slavs – Europeans in general, but Slavs were common victims here). This is probably why Jewish people do not like to put themselves and Slavs into the same group (victims of the Holocaust).
Plus, when you are a victimized group you mainly see thew wrongdoings done to your group and any other victimized group may be seen as usurpators to the victim status, as if there can’t be more than one victimized group. It is not unique to the Holocaust but can be seen everywhere. It’s one of the reasons why different POC groups may be antagonistic toward each other or why, idk, white women push for feminism while silencing discussion about racism, etc.
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Kiwi,
Why cite Harry Truman, of all people? Anti-semitism is a bad way to go. We can talk about exclusion of groups in victimization but I can assure you that it’s not a “Jewish thing”. Why anti-semitism?
I actually argue that the main reason Slavs are often “forgotten” in the Holocaust victim discussion by US authors is because Slavs are not seen as a distinctive (oppressed) group in the US. It’s like… Those people are whites and (majorily) Christian, so what’s their deal? There’s no deal, no oppression I can see here, moving on.
Again, this is nothing against Abagond, who is usually informed about these issues and reasonably open-minded. But I’ve noticed it way too many times. I have a feeling it’s simply because Slavs as a victim group do not make sense to Americans because Slavs are not seen as an oppressed group based on the parameters Americans see as valid (race, religion) – in fact, in the US, Slavs’ race and religion are seen as belonging to the dominant group. So I guess this is why it’s difficult for some people to make a connection/understand the victimization.
But I might be wrong about these motives (and I’d like if someone could clarify). However, I am, like, 100% sure it’s not about Jewish people.
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@ Mira
I co-sign.
In fact, besides the actual murders of Slavs during the East campaign of Nazi troops, the plans that Hitler had for that region were chilling behind anything seen before in the whole history of mankind.
Had Hitler not been defeated by a combination of factors: a) the rigorous Russian winter, b) the fact that he was combating in many fronts, c) and also the fact that the Soviets were able to built a heavy industry on their own, that enabled the production of weapons, then the Slavs would have been slaughtered behind horrific.
The creation of the Lebensraum would mean the murder of tens of thousands of Slavs, in a relatively short time!
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ERRATA:
Where is:
murder of tens of thousands of Slavs
should be:
murder of tens of millions of Slavs
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“Depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S.foreign policy towards the Third World.” Dr. Henry Kissinger
.
“Bill and Melinda Gates have been on a crusade for at least the past decade to vaccinate every single child on the planet. And one of their primary geographical targets has been the continent of Africa, where poor sanitation’s and lack of clean water have created conditions in which diseases like meningitis and malaria run rampant.
But rather than try to meet these basic needs, the multi-billionaires and their many allies have instead thrust vaccines on indigenous populations as the solution, which has in turn sparked a wave of paralysis among Africa’s younger populations.”
“According to a cousin of two of the vaccine-injured children, the horrific side effects of MenAfriVac began to appear within 24 hours of its administration.
Many of the children affected by it immediately began to experience headaches and vomiting, which later progressed into “uncontrollable convulsions while bent over with saliva coming from their mouths.” But when parents and local authorities tried to call on higher-up government officials to take action and help the affected children, their petitions for relief were all but ignored.”
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I have noticed that the Planned Parenthood centers in my city and my parent’s city are both near the Latino part of town.
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ERRATA 2:
In my first comment above where is:
behind
should be:
beyond
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“The eugenics movement reached its height in the early 1900s in the US and Germany.”
@Abagond,
If only that were true!
The fat lady has only been warming up her vocals/singing.
She has yet to sing, according to just some of the evidence that’s out there!
Their unrelenting war against us involves many prongs and sophisticated methods of attack.. by any means necessary.
“U.S. environmental racism: the creation of an environment in which Blacks have been made to disappear.”
http://blackagendareport.com/ethnic_cleansing_environmental_racism
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So Nazi Germany responsible for the eugenics movement losing favor in the US?
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I know it may come from a bad place, but planned parenthood and birth control are good for society in general (white, black, rich, or poor). Planning to be a parent is more than going to the clinic for an abortion
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Physicist William Shockley – whom Dr. Frances Cress Welsing defeated in a 1974 racial debate – devoted the latter part of his career to the study of eugenics. The racist Shockley believed that race-mixing is nothing but de-evolution which lowers and destroys both races. He basically viewed race-mixing as genocide. In the debate, I like how Dr. Welsing made it clear to Shockley that Whites have an intense fear of white genetic annihilation when it comes to the racial amalgamation of White and non-White people.
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@ Kiwi
I’m not sure what are your numbers, but Hitler wanted to reduced drastically the population of Slavs (East European) in order to create the needed Lebensraum.
If you take in account that East Europe was at the time already significantly populated then, it’s clear that such enterprise would require the slaughter of tens of million of human beings.
Moreover, the killings would begin as soon as those territories were occupied!
A blueprint for those killings was indeed the Final Solution of the Jews!
But with not that many Jews as Slavs, you can see that the Final Solution would be rather mild compared to the creation of the Lebesnraum in East Europe.
The genocide of Native Americans took many years to happen and the absolute numbers were relatively smaller, too.
I do not believe that Europeans in America, or Australia or Genghis Khan, killed so many people.
Those historic facts make me wonder why some East European support Nazi movements today. It seems that they don’t even know that if Hitler had defeated his international adversaries, they, themselves, would probably not been born! Amnesia of history and its consequences…
But those historic facts also explain, at least partially, the stubborn attitude of Mother Russia and her clinging to the nukes in the tango of Mutual Assured Destruction, vis a vis the Western Powers (the USA, in particular).
She has not forgot and she knows that at her minimal mistakes or weakness her very existence will be in stake!
For Third World countries is also important the existence of a militarily powerful Russia as a counter-balance to the USA.
I believe that the day Russia collapses as a powerful military power, the Apocalypse will be materialize on Earth. All those attempts at reduction of whole populations using covert methods (spreading of diseases, etc) will become more open and cynical (eventually, things like nuking out Lagos or Jakarta will be on the table!)
As it is today those Western powers can not go further in their eugenic attempts because, at some point, they will cross with the opposition of Russia.
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@ The Pragmatist
It was not the only thing. In the early 1930s US scientists were already pulling away from eugenics as scientifically unsound. In the 1970s eugenic laws and practices were still being overturned because of the civil rights movement.
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A woman’s access to birth control/abortion is one of the great civil rights issues.
Abagond, do you plan on doing a post on this?
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I totally did not want to insinuate that it’s unfair to mention Jewish victims of the Holocaust or that it’s somehow their fault that Slavs are ignored in this discussion. Please, guys, if you wish to argue those things, do not take my initial comment as a starting point. A victim is a victim and victims should never be pitted against each other in order to prove an agenda. The anti-semitic undertones are uncomfortable and unfair.
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@ Solesearch
I will probably do a post on Margaret Sanger at some point.
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Margaret Sanger did help to provide birth control to poor Blacks and get them to see it as a good thing (by using Black religious leaders), but her intentions were eugenic and genocidal.
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munubantu,
“Those historic facts make me wonder why some East European support Nazi movements today.”
I suspect it’s because Eastern Europeans want to distance themselves from their socialist past. Socialism promoted anti-fascism, equality among people (regardless of race, gender, class, etc.) and was also in some (many) ways anti-nationalist. If you want to erase that you go to the other extreme: nationalism, essentialism, capitalism. And when you get to that, you get the whole package: racism, anti-semitism, etc.
This is an over-simplified look and there are definitely more factors to this but it’s one of the driving forces between the irony of so many Slavs embracing this crap (if not literally neo-Nazi movements then something close to that).
It is, by the way, one of the most embarrassing and saddest things going on in EE right now.
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That quote from the man who wrote The Soulsof Black Folk. I am not surprised Du Bois would make such a statement he seems like one of those typical elitist negroes who used his light skin privilege and education to look down on the underprivileged black people.
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Henry Kissinger, amongst many others and people of the Slavic nations are those who WISHED they were Jews! These are funny statements, in any event, … carry on!
Jeremiah 14:2 Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish; they are black unto the ground.
Song of Solomon 1:5 I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Isaiah 29:22 Therefore thus saith the LORD, who redeemed Abraham, concerning the house of Jacob, Jacob shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his face now wax pale.
Sorry Abagond, I know this is somewhat off topic.
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@Abagond
This reminds me of a great Op Ed I read recently about Population Control, which is the term espoused by advocates of eugenics these days.
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/jan/11/europe-africa-overpopulated-global-population
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Abagond,
So that’s a no?
Do you plan on doing a post on the attempts to limit women’s access to birth control and abortion? About how the right uses racism to demonize birth control and abortion?
This is a very current topic. How does your post tie to today? Presenting this post in light of the current conversation comes off as demonizing birth control. Is that your intent?
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Women give away their power when they sleep with and become impregnated by men they have no desire to procreate with, the abortionists makes it so these events can continue unaborted.
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Although I love the 1988 movie ‘Twins’ (with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito) I recently learned that it deals with eugenics. Two brothers are fraternal twins (subliminally Black and White people) who are the result of a secret experiment carried out at a genetics laboratory to produce the perfect child.The stereotypes of White people (good) and Black people (bad) are infused in Schwarzenegger and DeVito’s characters, respectively.
List of movies about eugenics: http://www.filmaboutit.com/en/shop/topic/eugenics-342/
Although it’s not mentioned in the list of movies about eugenics (above), the 1974 “blaxploitation” movie ‘Three The Hard Way’ – one of my favorite movies – deals with combating and defeating the White scientists (bad guys) of eugenics.
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Human perceptions on who is “well born” change over time. In the past, the ideal bull was one that had more fat than flesh; then they discovered that animal fat was not healthy for human consumption. Now they are breeding bulls to ensure they only produce lean meat. I wonder what human beings would look like now had eugenics succeeded..lol.
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@mira
“I suspect it’s because Eastern Europeans want to distance themselves from their socialist past. Socialism promoted anti-fascism, equality among people (regardless of race, gender, class, etc.) and was also in some (many) ways anti-nationalist. If you want to erase that you go to the other extreme: nationalism, essentialism, capitalism. And when you get to that, you get the whole package: racism, anti-semitism, etc. ”
Interesting.I thought it is mainly because of the economic crisis that was pushing people to look for a scape-goat. When there is a sense of hopelessness in a society people tend to turn to religion and nationalism.
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@Kiwi
Why do we bring up Japanese-American internment during WWII, more often then German-American and Italian-American internment? That is because even though all three groups were forcibly interned, the Japanese were interned in much greater numbers, and were interned longer. In other words, the Interments affected them disproportionately.
Slavic peoples suffered horribly under Nazi Germany. It is unfair to exclude them when discussing victims of the Holocaust. But at the end of the day, aside from the Roma, who also suffered genocide during WWII, no group was really targeted anywhere near the way the Jews were by Nazi Germany.
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@ Solesearch
That is not my intent. I promised to do a post on Walter Plecker, which in turn led to promising to do a post on eugenics. So here we are.
My point about birth control in the post is not to demonize it but to question the motives of Whites who push it among people of colour.
The interplay between racism and birth control does deserve a post, though.
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@Kiwi
Right, and a key difference between the treatment of Jews and Roma, and other peoples in Nazi occupied Europe, was also racial in nature. Jews and Roma were killed just for being Jews and Roma, irregardless of anything else. A good portion of the Slavs who died in Nazi occupided Europe were not killed for just being Slavs. Rather, they seemed to have been killed for the following reasons:
1 – They resisted Nazi occupation in some way (hid Jews, took up arms against the Nazis, ect.)
2 – Were killed in retaliation for resistance actions performed by other Slavs in their area. For example, a Slavic resistance group might murder a Nazi official, and the Nazis would respond by executing members of their community.
3 – They were Soviet POWs.
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Benjamin,
No, I can assure you that Slavs were seen as lesser beings and targeted for racial reasons. Idk why it’s so difficult to grasp. Like, German vs Slavic tensions go back to Middle Ages or so.
Like, yeah, many Slavs died for being majority of the population in the occupied areas but Slavs were targeted for racial reasons. Again, I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to grasp.
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@Mira
I never said Slavs weren’t targeted for racial reasons. I said that Jews and Roma, for racial reasons, were treated even worse. I said in one of my earlier posts that Slavs were treated horribly in Nazi occupied Europe, and it is unfair to not include them when discussing the Holocaust.
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Benjamin,
You said: “Jews and Roma were killed just for being Jews and Roma, irregardless of anything else.”
Which implied that Slavs weren’t killed just for being Slavs… ? The main difference is that, unlike Jews and Roma, Slavs also made the majority population in the occupied countries. So you have racial targeting + casualties as a result of other factors (like local resistance fighters, etc.) But it doesn’t erase racial targeting. Slavs were one of the “undesirable” group along Jews, Roma, disabled, LGBT, etc.
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@Mira
Yes, some Slavs were killed for being Slavs. Yes, as a people, Slavs were targeted for their ethnicity. But at the end of the day, being Jewish or Romani in Nazi occupied Europe was pretty much a death sentence. Was that the case for being Ukrainian or Croatian?
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@ Mira
Slavs were NOT in the same category of “subhumans” as Jews and Gypsies in the Third Reich. Slavs were NOT automatically marked for extermination solely on the basis of their ethnicity. Yes, they were viewed as somewhat “inferior” to the master Germanic race, but it was not that level of “inferiority” that necessitated eradication according to the Nazis. Moreover, some Slavic nations were approved as “Aryan” and as such were viewed as natural allies of the Aryan Germans (for example Croats, Slovenes etc.) It’s no wonder that these nations contributed to the Reich some of the largest concentration camps (like Jasenovac run by the Croatian regime) and some of the most notorious war criminals (like the ethnic Slovene Odilo Globocnik)
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@Kiwi
Yes, I know what Lebensraum is. That doesn’t change what I said. The Nazis never attempted genocide on the Slavs during WWII. Had they won WWII, they certainly may have attempted genocide on some Slavic groups. But as it stands, they never got the chance to act out that scenario.
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@Kiwi
The Nazis did not carry out the same kind of extermination against the Slavs that they did to the Jews and Roma. The Poles were probably the Slavic ethnic group most hated by the Nazis. Even so, only 9 ~ 10% of ethnic Poles died during the Holocaust. Compare to 90% of Polish Jews. And of that 9 ~ 10% that died, hundreds of thousands were killed for being resistance fighters, as oppose to merely “being Polish.”
As I said earlier, being a Jew or a Roma was an automatic death sentence in Nazi occupied Europe. That was not the case for being a Slav. In fact, some Jews even survived the Holocaust by hiding with Slavic families, or taking on fact Slavic identities. That wouldn’t have saved them if the Nazis were killing Slavs at the same rate, and with the same zeal, that they were killing Jews.
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That being said, I concede that the Slavs did suffer a genocide. My goal is not to minimize their suffering, what happened to them should certainly be acknowledged. But clearly, it was NOT the same thing that was happening to the Jews or Roma.
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I can’t with this. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to understand that Nazis targeted Slavs for racist reasons… Like, it’s Nazis we’re talking about, their whole politics was based on pseudoscience along the lines of eugenics and the whole “blood and soil” philosophy and Slavs were seen as inferior and bad in both aspects: their blood and the presumed German territory they occupied (which was seen as “rightfully German territory”).
Nazis did have different plans for different subhuman groups (often based on number – again, let’s not forget that there were many more Slavs than other targeted groups) but to insinuate that the targeting wasn’t racial makes no sense. It would be like saying that Nazis didn’t really hate black people because they didn’t kill that many of them nor did they attached predominately black countries.
The number of Slavs did not realistically allow for extermination so the plan was for the remaining Slavs to be forcefully moved from the “German” territories to the territories where they “really belong” (I think somewhere in Asia).
And yes, certain Slavs enjoyed privileged treatment for the fact they were colonized by “real people” for centuries and thus deemed useful for using them in the war. These Slavs killed other Slavs (of different ethicities), along with other undesirable groups.
The point is not that all undesired/subhuman groups were treated the same – the point is that they were all targeted racially, or to use an even better term, based on eugenics (since certain groups, like disabled people or LGBT people were not targeted racially). But Slavs def were (racially + the “soil” argument of occupying and multiplying on the “German” territories).
But the thing I mentioned all of this in the first place was that it was all clear to them in their day – nobody mistook Nazi ideas about Slavs as anything other than racial politics. It’s just that it is difficult for US, TODAY, to see it like that because unlike other “subhuman” groups (Jews, Roma), Slavs are usually seen as belonging to the same group as Germans (white, Christian) – especially in the US, I’d say. (In Europe, there is still a clear divide between Western Europeans and Eastern Europeans… Being white is not enough in Europe if you are not of the right type of white).
So because of this, people who talk about Nazi eugenics and racial politics often “forget” Slavs because Slavs do not belong to the oppressed groups (as seen in the US today). Maybe it feels almost wrong to include white Christians in the list of the oppressed groups, I don’t know, but the point is that to Nazis, they were def not seen as proper fully human. (I’d say that this sentiment stays with us to this day in Europe, but that’s another story).
Today’s Slavic attitudes do not help, either. Because many Slavs do pride themselves at being white and thus they are first ones to discriminate against Roma people and many of them do not like Jewish people. So Slavs themselves do not like to be grouped with Roma and Jews. Which is wrong on its own but it’s yet another story. Still, that one contributes to the whole problem described here. (Also, let’s not pretend that Slavs back in the day liked Jews or Roma in the first place – which is yet another issue).
But the point is that we should NOT look at things from our point of view or to judge the past with today’s categories about race. Again, I can assure you that Nazi categories – or even racial categories present all over the world during that day – targeted Slavs as subhuman and def not as part of the same race as Germans.
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@Mira
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I wasn’t never trying to insinuate that Slavs were not seen as inferior. I was simply saying that they were not exterminated like the Jews and the Roma were. Like you said, eventually the Germans had plans to forcibly deport most Slavs from German territories into Asia. The Nazis also planned on – and did – use the Slavs as a slave labor force in their conquered territories.
@Kiwi
Oh, come on. Emil Maurice was only 1/8th Jewish. The Nazis sorta had a cutoff for “being Jewish” at 1/4th. And even then, quarter Jews, being “second degree Mischlings”, usually weren’t treated as badly as full blooded or “half Jews” were. The Nazis didn’t have a “one drop rule” like White Americans do.
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I agree with Mira. The Nazis did plan the genocide of “Slavic” people, not a total one, but a “reduction” of population by one third. The war dead among Poles, Russians and Serbs cannot be seperated from this genocidal idea. The Nazis fought the war in the East very differently from the war in the West – for racist reasons.
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@ Mira
I also agree with your points. The Nazis did plan a horrific “population reduction” of the Slavs. Most people in the US tend to fixate on the murder of six million or more Jews. We are fairly ignorant of the half million Roma murdered in what they call “the great devouring”. We are only dimly aware of the systematic murder of the disabled, same gender loving men and women, communists and tens of millions of Slavs (Russians, Poles, Ukranians, Belarusians and Romanians, etc.).
Most of that ignorance is due to a poor educational system, a media system that does a mediocre job of explaining the world to Americans and a film industry that is soley focused on the Jewish experience in World War II.
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@ Afrofem Romanians are not Slavs (at least, technically). Romania was an important ally of Nazi Germany and Romanians were definitely NOT targeted by the Nazis. Many Romanians Jews and Gypsies died in Nazi extermination camps, though.
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@Kartoffel
During the WW2, Russians and Ukrainians killed more ethnic Poles than Germans did.
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@ Mira
> Slavs are usually seen as belonging to the same group as Germans (white, Christian) – especially in the US, I’d say. (In Europe, there is still a clear divide between Western Europeans and Eastern Europeans… Being white is not enough in Europe if you are not of the right type of white)
Racial relations in Europe (at least today) are nothing like these in USA have ever been. Some of our American friends can get the wrong impression from your words, which are clearly exaggerated. And I should know, as I’m both Eastern European and Slavic.
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@George
> Many Romanians Jews and Gypsies died in Nazi extermination camps, though.
I meant “Many Romanian Jews and Gypsies died in Nazi extermination camps, though.”
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@ Mira – Who are/were the Cossacks?
Do you think that Hitler planned on a Shark Island-like approach when it came to dealing with Slavs?
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Some Native Americans were killed as resistance fighters, so their genocide was not as bad as the Jews.
/sarcasm off
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From my post on Aryanism:
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In the 1910s and 1920s, many in the US would have understood Hitler’s feelings about Slavs. They were not then seen as fully White in Anglo American eyes.
From my post on the Third Enlargement of American Whiteness:
In the 1920s, Madison Grant, a eugenicist and best-selling author, received a fan letter from – Adolf Hitler.
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@ George
“Romanians are not Slavs (at least, technically).”
I stand corrected.
You are right. Romanians are still very bigoted and violent to the Roma population in their country.
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@George
Which modern European states are considered majority Slavic?
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@Abagond
” …IQ tests) prove they lack intelligence.”
This is why I don’t put any stock in the notion of measuring intelligence of groups of people or individuals. People in one group can always come up with measurements and methods that are biased toward their own group and condemns another group as hopelessly unintelligent.
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@ Afrofem
Nations aren’t Slavic, languages are. I think the following are alive today: Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovacian, Slovenian, Sorbic and Ukrainian.
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Afrofem,
“You are right. Romanians are still very bigoted and violent to the Roma population in their country.”
Eastern Europeans in general are very bigoted when it comes to the Roma population, though it doesn’t necessarily mean that Western Europeans are better per se – it’s just that there are more Roma people in Eastern Europe.
That being said, the animosity toward Roma has nothing to do with being or not being Slavic. Yes, Slavs were racially targeted during WWII but as we all know, being an oppressed group doesn’t automatically mean to be free of your own bigotry.
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Kartoffel,
There are Slavic ethnic groups (more or less corresponding with Slavic languages) so yeah, nations can be Slavic and there are Slavic countries (as in, countries with Slavic majority).
Slavs (typically corresponding with their countries and languages): Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians and people of former Yugoslavia: Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Slovenes and Macedonians.
According to Wikipedia, “here are more Slavic peoples than any other ethnic group in Europe”, but this is incorrectly worded because Slavs do not consider themselves one ethnic group – each group is a different ethnicity. (Keep in mind that in the European context, “race” and “ethnicity” are not synonyms. Slavs are white (as in, race) but there are different Slavic ethnic groups (Russians, Poles, Croats, and so on).
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_peoples
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Uglyblackjohn,
I don’t know much about Cossacks, except that they emerged as a nomadic group in parts of today’s Russia and Ukraine.
I’m sorry I don’t know what’s a “Shark Island-like approach” or what it refers to.
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George,
“Racial relations in Europe (at least today) are nothing like these in USA have ever been. Some of our American friends can get the wrong impression from your words, which are clearly exaggerated. And I should know, as I’m both Eastern European and Slavic.”
I don’t know what you mean but I do think racial distinctions in Europe and USA were more similar back in the day than they are today. In the US today, if you are white, you are white and you typically get privileges that go with being white. In Europe, you can be recognized as white but still seen as inferior if you are not of the “right” ethnic group. Back in the day in the US, however, it made a difference between being a WASP and being from Greece, Italy, Balkans, Ireland, etc. It doesn’t make so much of a difference today in North America – it’s more of an interesting fact about someone than a reason for oppression.
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@ Mira
I guess it comes down to at what point you regard a social construct as a thing existing in reality. I’d say the notion of “Slavis people” is a failed construct of he Panslavists that has little relevance today. A Pole sees himself and is seen by others as a Pole, not as a Slav.
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Kartoffel,
The fact something is a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in reality. Something doesn’t need to be based in biology to exist in reality.
It is true that many (most of?) Slavic groups do not base their identity at being Slavs. Some do (I think Bulgarians are into this, but I am not sure). Most don’t mainly because their main enemies are their neighbors, meaning, other Slavs.
That being said, Slavs know they are Slavs… It is not something enforced from the outside.
Plus, it’s important to remember that a lot depends on the others’ opinion, especially those with power. If someone powerful targets “Slavs” you know you’re included. It doesn’t matter that you do base your identity on being a Slav – if those in power see you that way, you suffer all the consequences that go with it.
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Also, there are different levels of identity and it depends on the context. In some context a person sees themselves as a Slovakian, in another as a Slav, and in another as European. These things do not negate each other.
Plus, even with the main enemies often being other Slavic groups there is also some sense of pride about “Slavic soul” and other notions along those lines and “why we are different (and better) than Germans and other westerners”.
PS- I forgot to add Montenegrins on the list of Slavic nations from exYugoslavia.
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@ Mira
Agreed. But it needs at least some traction, my question is: At what level do we consider a social construct as existing in reality. An example I like to bring up is the idea of Latin Africa that was once propagated. It didn’t catch on so it would be nonsense to consider it a thing today.
In my experience the Slavic identity (other than in linguisitcs) doesn’t play a role. Maybe my exposure to people who could consider themselves Slavs is too small or to specific. I also have never heard it from a German, they identify people from the East either by their nationality or as Eastern Europeans which includes the non-slavic-speaking peoples.
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Why don’t the eugenists ever choose themselves to be the first to be rid of?
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Reading an interesting article in Harvard Magazine about this subject. The article mentions how in 1912 Harvard emeritus Charles William Eliot addressed the Harvard Club of San Francisco on a subject close to his heart racial purity. How he spoke on how racial purity was being threatened by immigration. Elliot said he was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups could bring a grave danger. “Each nation should keep its stock pure. “There should be no blending of races.” Elliott even included Irish Catholics marrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jews marrying Gentiles, blacks marrying whites was a reason for eugenics. So Harvard University had a role in this disgusting movement.
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@michaeljonbarker
Imani Gandy, a self described “recovering attorney turned political blogger, journalist, and women’s rights activist” wrote a deeply detailed and unsentimental article about Margaret Sanger, on the site Rewire, entitled:
How False Narratives of Margaret Sanger Are Being Used to Shame Black Women.
https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/
Gandy refutes many of the misconceptions about Margaret Sanger and the organization she founded, Planned Parenthood, with in depth research and quotes from Sanger and the people around her. She provides important context to Sanger’s words and actions without downplaying the racism or the ugliness of some of her positions. For example, Gandy has this to say about Sanger:
“It is true that Sanger was a proponent of eugenics, and pro-choice advocates do themselves no favors by attempting to whitewash this fact and paint Sanger as some infallible feminist hero. Sanger was passionate about contraception—perhaps to a fault—and her fervor about promoting her birth control agenda led her to align herself with eugenicists, along with racists and an assortment of people of questionable character….But it is simply untrue that Margaret Sanger wanted to exterminate the Black race. This is a flat-out lie.”
Gandy also refutes the often repeated claim that the majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in Black neighborhoods. According to Gandy,
“less than 4 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics that offer abortion services are located in communities where more than one-third of the population is Black…[moreover]…data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that fewer than one in ten abortion providers overall are located in neighborhoods where more than half of residents are Black. It is simply false that Planned Parenthood is targeting Black women by setting up clinics primarily in Black neighborhoods.”
It is my personal belief that the uproar and charges of ‘genocide’ by Black allies of the Christian Right are just another ploy to sow division in the African American community. The opening salvo in the abortion as Black genocide campaign began with the Georgia State chapter of Right To Life in 2010. Right to Life of Georgia is an appendage of the Christian Right. They grew out of segregationist Whites fighting for public funding of private schools in the South. In 1973, they found that fundraising for their cause exploded when they latched onto abortion as an issue. They claimed that abortion was a plot to destroy the “white race”. Abortion as a wedge issue has been extremely lucrative for them ever since. It is an issue they had to spend millions of dollars and years of time to develop with White people. With Black people, they spent a measly $20 grand to put up some inflammatory billboards and hire a Black part time speaker to lecture Black women and men about the morality of abortion and contraception. Talk about return on investment!
A lot of the Black people who repeat the talking points developed in that campaign forget that the Christian Right is the religious wing of the White Nationalist Right. Neither, the Christian Right nor their secular Rightwing cousins care one bit about the health and wellbeing of Black folk. They tend to be the people most opposed to universal healthcare, comprehensive sex education, maternity/paternity leave for new parents or any type of support for families with children.
Professor Derrick Bell, in his book Faces At The Bottom Of The Well, summed up the views of the Rightwing (and the vast majority of Whites) when he wrote, “Because of an irrational but easily roused fear that any social reform will unjustly benefit blacks, whites fail to support the programs this country desperately needs to address the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, both black and white.”
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Missing in this discussion are the voices of Black women. A lot of people act as if abortion is something done to Black women instead of something they choose. A lot of people forget that Black women are adults with agency. Adults with responsibilities. Adults with rights.
When racist anti-choice billboards were erected in Oakland, CA in 2011, Black women (along with Latinas and Asian-American women) were outraged. They led a successful multi-ethnic campaign to remove the racist billboards. This young woman’s comments typified reaction to the billboards:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYgGt_X21ZE)
More recent attempts by the Rightwing involve co-opting the language of resistance to police killing with images like this:
Interesting that the web page with this banner sports the word /alllivesmatter/ in the url.
This co-optation has been met with pushback from Black women who question the sincerity of the Rightwing with the query: “Where do they stand on the range of issues that impact black lives on a daily basis?” Monica Raye Simpson asks that question and more in this article:
http://prospect.org/article/anti-choice-activists-dishonor-black-history-co-opting-language-blacklivesmatter
What is most important is what Black women want. Each woman should be free to make her own decisions because she will have to live with the consequences. To me, that would involve Reproductive Justice (RJ).
A multi-ethnic, women-led group called SisterSong defines RJ this way:
Justice is an antidote to the phony ‘genocide’ hysteria of the abortion issue. Justice is also the antidote to the issue of state violence (from the foster care maze to police murder to mass imprisonment) against Black families targeted on multiple fronts.
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@Afrofem
Wow, you certainly know your stuff.
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