Nazis were apt pupils of American eugenics

[Minstrel Boy]

Posted to my blog here.

Repealing Godwin's Law


"Evil is real and it must be called by its name and
it must be confronted" - Dick Cheney at Auschwitz

It's been several days now, but I still can't get past the peculiar disgrace of Dick Cheney. The green parka with white fur, and the brown, lace-up hiking boots were inappropriate enough for a solemn ceremony at the world's most notorious symbol of runaway eugenics. But the toque, with the words "Staff 2001" - that's almost too much, even for a conspiracy theorist. Cheney might as well have been cradling Flight 11's "unrecovered" flight recorders in his lap, and sneering into the camera, "What you gonna do about it?"

It's easy to ask, What was he thinking? Harder, is to answer, Was he thinking that? Because without knowing his mind, we can assert with some confidence that Cheney's choices were deliberate. Unlike a thoughtless tourist, the Homeland's acting President would have been conscious of the impression he was making. And if, somehow, he wasn't, he had the fail safe of a staff well-versed in protocol to set him right. (In other words, no need to call Putin the night before and say, "So, what are you wearing to Auschwitz?")

But I'm going to cut myself some slack on this singular morbidity. As I said, it's been just a few days. And after all, it's been 60 years, and we still can't get past the Nazis. None, more so than the CIA.

Saturday's New York Times:

CIA Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files

The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that requires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals, say Congressional officials from both parties.

Under the law, the CIA has already provided more than 1.2 million pages of documents, the vast majority of them from the archives of its World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. Many documents have been declassified, and some made public last year showed a closer relationship between the United States government and Nazi war criminals than had previously been understood, including the CIA's recruitment of war criminal suspects or Nazi collaborators.

For nearly three years, the CIA has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed requests for additional records, say Congressional officials and some members of the working group, who also contend that that stance seems to violate the law.

These officials say the agency has sometimes agreed to provide information about former Nazis, but not about the extent of the agency's dealings with them after World War II. In other cases, it has refused to provide information about individuals and their conduct during the war unless the working group can first provide evidence that they were complicit in war crimes.

Former Congresswoman and member of the working group Elizabeth Holtzman contends that "the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." Looking at Cheney, maybe there's a pattern emerging.

If the Nazis are truly in the dustbin of history, what are we to make of the fact that, 60 years on, the Agency is still keeping secrets about their post-war recruitment, even violating the law to do so? (And these are just the secrets that we know they're keeping. I would expect that the most privileged secrets have left no paper trail.)

But when we talk about the relationship between the Nazis and American institutions, we must talk about more than Project Paperclip. Because there's more going on here than the virtual co-founding of America's National Security State by thousands of Nazi scientists. Before the CIA existed, before the War, even before Hitler's rise to power, Anglo-American eugenics was informing and inspiring apt pupils in Germany, including the future architects of genocide.

The Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, JP Morgan and Averell Harriman can be counted among the head cheerleaders and principal financiers of the American eugenics movement, which found keen partners in great academies like Harvard and Yale and in numerous state and federal departments. Edwin Black writes in War Against the Weak that "they were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior." Sixty thousand Americans were sterilized in the process, many without their knowledge.

Black adds:

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.



Investigative journalist Jon Rappaport makes a similar point regarding MK-ULTRA and related programs, and draws an even more distressing conclusion, in his 1997 lecture "The CIA, Mind Control and Children":

I would say this is a Nazi project, but a lot of the Nazis are American-born. It shouldn't be excused or explained away on that basis because as we know, if we look at Nazi psychiatry for example, they learned a lot from the Americans, especially about eugenics. This is not something where we should say, " ... well, the Nazis took over ..." This is home-grown stuff. This is Americana at its worst, at its lowest form. This is also the sub-sub-basement that you walk into when you are a materialist, when that is your philosophy. And I don't mean you are a materialist in the sense that you want money, possessions ... I mean, philosophically. The materialist position is that we are meat, and tissue, and cells, and electrical impulses, and that's it. When that system collapses, we are gone, never to return. My own feeling is that when you espouse and embrace that philosophy, the ultimate, ultimate sub-basement that you end up in is that sub-basement ... that's where you end up. Finally, that's where it all comes out.



Formally stated, Godwin's Law, or the Rule of Nazi Analogies, posits that, "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." The law was articulated about ten years ago by Mike Godwin, then-legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to counter a proliferation of Nazi analogies online which he regarded as illogical and offensive rhetorical overreach. As popularly understood, the law implies that the first person to invoke the Nazis in a debate loses the argument.

Godwin can be forgiven for believing, in the mid-90s, that Nazi comparisons were overraught. To think the same now must require a massive infusion of Kool Aid from Sidney Gottlieb's punchbowl. But as suggested, much of what we're seeing in America today has antecedents which pre-date Nazi Germany, with a significant homegrown component, that give the appearance of German Naziism but which actually served in part as its inspiration.

It is a project which Franklin Roosevelt frustrated, and the heirs of the project mean to see through now to conclusion. We can see it show its public face in such things as the recent New York Times article "Can Anyone Unseat FDR?" ("Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," says Stephen Moore, who wants to "jab a spear through it"), and Bush's only seemingly empty jargon of an "ownership society." If the project succeeds, then Nazi Germany, rather than a grotesque aberration of modern history, will be regarded as merely "ahead of its time."

As we trundle on towards this century's astonishing convergence of crises, we should remember there are many powerful people with familiar names who believe the problem is not that there are too few resources; the problem is there are too many people. And what are we going to do about them?

[Karenina]

1. OK, MB...

I'll tend the bar. Got your back as you speak the TRUTH to power. THIS BIT is a BIG PILL and our dear ones will certainly require their beverage of choice to wash it down.
:toast: :loveya: :toast:

[seemslikeadream]

2. Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word

...

The stock market crashed just after the Bush family got into the oil business. The world financial crisis led to the merger of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers in 1931. Former Brown partner Montagu Norman and his prote@aage@aa Hjalmar Schacht paid frantic visits to New York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime for Germany.

The most important American political event in those preparations for Hitler was the infamous `` Third International Congress on Eugenics, '' held at New York's American Museum of Natural History August 21-23, 1932, supervised by the International Federation of Eugenics Societies.@s9 This meeting took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans and other allegedly `` inferior '' and `` socially inadequate '' groups in reproducing, expanding their numbers, and amalgamating with others. It was recommended that these `` dangers '' to the `` better '' ethnic groups and to the `` well-born, '' could be dealt with by sterilization or `` cutting off the bad stock '' of the `` unfit. ''

Italy's fascist government sent an official representative. Averell Harriman's sister Mary, director of `` Entertainment '' for the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her state supplied the speaker on `` racial purity, '' W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly held the delegates spellbound with his account of the struggle to stop race-mixing and inter-racial sex in Virginia.

...

Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word, these British-American-European groups called openly for the elimination of the `` unfit '' by means including force and violence.@s1@s2

Ten months later, in June 1933, Hitler's interior minister Wilhelm Frick spoke to a eugenics meeting in the new Third Reich. Frick called the Germans a `` degenerate '' race, denouncing one-fifth of Germany's parents for producing `` feeble-minded '' and `` defective '' children. The following month, on a commission by Frick, Dr. Ernst Ru@audin wrote the `` Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity, '' the sterilization law modeled on previous U.S. statutes in Virginia and other states.

Special courts were soon established for the sterilization of German mental patients, the blind, the deaf and alcoholics. A quarter million people in these categories were sterilized. Ru@audin, Plo@autz and their colleagues trained a whole generation of physicians and psychiatrists--as sterilizers and as killers.

When the war started, the eugenicists, doctors and psychiatrists staffed the new `` T4 '' agency, which planned and supervised the mass killings: first at `` euthanasia centers, '' where the same categories which had first been subject to sterilization were now to be murdered, their brains sent in lots of 200 to experimental psychiatrists; then at slave camps such as Auschwitz; and finally, for Jews and other race victims, at straight extermination camps in Poland, such as Treblinka and Belsen.@s1@s3

more
http://www.tarpley.net/bush3.htm

:loveya:

[Mizmoon]

4. Cold Spring Harbor Labs was deeply involved

...
There is a darker history to the lab as well. It was the epicenter of the American eugenics movement, and many wealthy patrons like the Rockefeller Family supported research there with the intention of promoting Social Darwinism. Dr. Charles Davenport and his Eugenics Record Office headed the work, which was located on the lab’s campus. Davenport authored the sinister tome “Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding” and personally wrote a model sterilization law that would eventually be adopted by twenty-two states.

Davenport’s work was eventually adopted and radicalized by the German Nazi Party and led to the Holocaust. All of those film clips you have seen of German school children measuring their noses and using eye color charts to determine how “Aryan” they were came from Davenport’s work at Cold Spring Harbor.

http://www.psychosurgery.org/index_files/Page4212.htm

[Quakerfriend]

3. Great post! We need to be talking about this topic a lot more!

Read Dr. Gary Glum's book "Full Disclosure" to learn the truth about the CREATION of the aids virus. It is stunning, and fits with the above evolution of eugenics in this country.

Having worked as a gov't scientist for many yrs I have no doubt that what Dr. Glum says is probably true.

[Karenina]

5. Mineral Wasser, anyone?

Perrier, Evian...

[Swamp Rat]

6. When I moved back from Brasil, the first thing I saw on TV was Edwin Black

on CSPAN's Book Notes.

The "Nazis" have been here for a long, long time... and they're making a comeback.

[Karenina]

15. Name your poison, my man!

(Pssst... I got a taste of that green stuff in the back! ;-))
:loveya:

[Jose Diablo]

7. The story "Apt Pupil" by Bachman (King)

is interesting from the standpoint of how degenerate 'normal' people can become, with the 'right' teacher. Reminds me of how the fundies are being turned into nazis.

[Minstrel Boy]

8. "The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and

German National Socialism," by Stefan Kuhl.

From a review:

The central theme in Kuhl's book is the intimate relations between American eugenicists and Nazi racial scientists during the period of classical fascism. Eugenics - a term invented by Francis Gaiton that refers to ensuring "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable" - had from its beginning in America, a political orientation. Wealthy individuals from within the highest levels of the American exploiting class funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the eugenics movement. Laws were implemented in state legislatures to prevent the procreation of "inferior families:" At the federal level, legislation was passed to restrict immigration to largely "Nordic" populations. American scientists stated the racist position publicly. The eugenicist Charles Woodruff declared, "It is clear that the types of human beings from northwest Europe are our best citizens and have, therefore, to be conserved;" while the sociologist Edward Ross, in a phrase now used repeatedly by contemporary neo-Nazis, spoke of the "race suicide" that would result from "inferior" segments of the population gaining power. By the early 1930s, the American eugenics movement was the most influential and prestigious among those Western capitalist powers who were interested in genetic and racial manipulation. Nor was this fact lost on the rising Nazi movement; even Hitler, in "Mein Kampf", wrote admiringly of the US Immigration Restriction Act with its intended purpose of ranking "races" according to their genetic "suitability."

What Kuhl has succeeded in doing, in this masterful book, is to sketch in telling detail the cross-currents of influence between the American-dominated eugenics movement, and the rise and implementation of the Nazi racial program; In 1934, for example, some eighteen months after the Nazis came to power, Falk Ruttke, a member of both Hitler's elite SS and the Committee for Population and Race Policies, spoke at an international meeting of eugenicists in Zurich. Ruttke thoroughly outlined the steps the Nazis had already taken toward rebuilding Germany along racial lines. These included the infamous Law on Preventing Hereditarily Ill Progeny which allowed for the sterilization, and ultimately the gassing, of persons with mental or physical afflictions and the Decree for the Granting of Marriage Loans, which explicitly excluded Jews. The US Journal of Heredity appreciatively reported Ruttke' s speech as reflecting the eugenic foundation of the Nazi state. Even more to the point, Kuhl recounts how Clarence G. Campbell senior member of the American contingent at the 1935 eugenics conference in Berlin, praised Hitler's race policies in glowing terms, referring to them as "epochal in racial history", and as setting a pattern "which other nations and racial groups must follow." In Germany, his remarks were widely published as particularly valuable propaganda. Back in the US, Campbell busied himself drumming up support for the Nazi regime.

Throughout the pre-war period, there was considerable influence of American eugenics policy on Nazi racial policy. Kuhl notes that specific Nazi legislation on sterilization was based on similar American laws, or on model legislation proposed by Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office, and that US scientists were proud of their influence on the Hitler regime. German publishing houses eagerly reprinted American racial and eugenics books and articles, while American foundations such as the Pioneer Fund, underwrote the distribution of Nazi race propaganda films in the US. In an almost incestuous mutuality, the Nazis used the prestige of the American scientists and legislators to validate their own eugenics and racial policies, while American eugenicists used the ne6r Nazi eugenics laws as evidence that widespread human sterilization policies could be feasibly put into practice with a minimum of social resistance.

Even after World War II had begun, notable American eugenicists continued to visit Nazi Germany; such visits were virtual collaborations. Ellinger, a geneticist, met with Wolfgang Abel, a scientist and SS officer, who was active in sterilization programs involving both blacks and Jews.

http://bethuneinstitute.org/documents/naziconnection.html

[htuttle]

9. We never confronted our own Nazis after WWII

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, it was like everyone who had supported Nazi Germany before that vanished. At least their opinions did. And they knew what they were supporting back then. Even before Pearl Harbor, Nazi literature and media was full of anti-semitism (supplemented by additional anti-minority sentiments here in the US).

Where did all these people go?

(German-American Bund rally, 1939)

There were some big names, and big corporations, involved in supporting Hitler. In fact, without a few of their support, he may never have gotten to where he did. Certainly his war machine wouldn't have been what it was without the key support of corporations like Ford and IBM.

But we never hear about that, they don't teach about the Bund in school, and we come off as nothing more than heroes in WWII in our history.

This caustic plague has been eating away at the soul of this country under various disguises ever since. It will continue to do so until it's finally rooted out.

[seemslikeadream]

10. Where DID all these people go?

and where are their children?

[Octafish]

11. Got a pretty good idea...

[seemslikeadream]

12. First Amendment no big deal, students say

Study shows American teenagers indifferent to freedoms

...

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

“These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous,” said Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the $1 million study. “Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.”

...

Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It’s not. About half the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the Internet. It can’t.

...

“The last 15 years have not been a golden era for student media,” said Warren Watson, director of the J-Ideas project at Ball State University in Indiana. “Programs are under siege or dying from neglect. Many students do not get the opportunity to practice our basic freedoms.”
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6888837/

[Karenina]

13. What more do they need to learn

than "Want some freedom fries with that?"

[Octafish]

14. Ya don't need no book learnin' to shoot a gun.

Or to have the sense to question why some rich and powerful (Commie, NAZI, capitalist -- Is there a difference?) turd wants to make one into cannon fodder.

[Sparkly]

17. That's right

This whole topic is my tinfoil hat. Prescott's dealings with Nazi's, Poppy's dealings with the CIA and frequent "fishing" trips to Argentina (where many Nazi's fled after WWII), and Chimp's ultra-right, hegemonic, fourth-reich-ish agenda are all VERY weird to me. :tinfoilhat:

[bobthedrummer]

21. I have a hunch along those lines too.

All Power To The People.

[MountainLaurel]

26. ROFL

Got it in one!

[TWiley]

31. You can find them here.

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=507

[Minstrel Boy]

16. from "Funding the Eugenics Movement":

Lots of "Great American" names on this page, like Carnegie, Harriman, Ford, Kellogg, Gamble, Morgan....

John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937) made his fortune in the oil industry. He founded Standard Oil, which at one time controlled 95 percent of the oil refining business in the country. He and his descendants gave away hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Rockefellers funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany, when eugenicists were preparing the way ideologically for what eventually became the world's most infamous slaughter, the Nazi holocaust. The Rockefeller Institute supported Alexis Carrel, who advocated the use of gas to get rid of the unwanted. John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council. Rockefeller money made Alfred Kinsey's sex research possible.

In the fall of 1993, the Rockefeller Archive Center Newsletter published "The Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council and the Groundwork for New Population Policies" by John B. Sharpless of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sharpless had been studying the files of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), the records of the Population Council, and the personal papers of John D. Rockefeller III. He concluded that "Foundations and individual philanthropists are important in understanding the impressively quick and nearly unanimous change in attitudes and ideas about population that occurred during the 1960s." Such foundations funded the development of contraceptives, but also built the international network of experts who shaped the public debate, who shared "a core body of knowledge and a common mode of discourse" as well as a "shared set of assumptions about how population dynamics worked."

Sharpless wrote, "The power to accomplish this task was based on their relationship with the philanthropic community. In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Council, other Foundations active in this area included the Ford Foundation, the Milbank Memorial Fund and, to a lesser extent, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Conservation Foundation."
http://www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap12.html

[bleedingheart]

18. Sadly there are a lot of people in this country that would agree

with Eugenics...it is sad but I have met some of those frightening people...

People, who view themselves as superior to others..they hate paying for welfare and social services and view the recipients of such services as inferior....they go to church, spout religious doctrine but they have a heart that is as black as coal.

[Karenina]

33. Kick!

:kick:

[bobthedrummer]

19. Tommy Thompson and "The Bell Curve" co-author, eugenicist Charles

Murray are pals. As Wisconsin's Governor Tommy Thompson hired him for input into the Wisconsin Works!/W2 welfare reform program that has since become the federal model for welfare reform.

That our Tommy!:puke::argh::nuke:

[Rapcw]

20. wow, thanks for posting this! n/t

[BoogDoc7]

22. Couple things...

Several interesting articles about eugenics in Fred Pelka's The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement

Interesting conundrum in the disability rights movement and the semi-euginics thinking in some abortions taking place:

Under the Eugenics entry:

"Some disability rights advocates see the development and unquestioning use of in-utero testing (allowing doctors to identify some disabilities before birth and then urging that the "defective" fetus/baby be aborted) as a new phase in the effort to "purify" society by eliminating people with disabilities."

There's quite a few disability activists that are also anti-euthanasia as well, the thinking being "decisions about suicide, just like decisions about aborting...should not be made based on stereotypes about the quality of life with a disability..."

Just felt that this should be added to the topic of eugenics, and that there's thinking from many sides on this issue...

[bobthedrummer]

34. The Nazis used the living organism model to describe The Reich.

And a lot of occultic ritualism within the Party.
Cults are thriving in the US today using the basic fascist ideology of the Nazis, including eugenics-and the completion of The Human Genome Project.

[TWiley]

23. Great Post.

As our government considers its populace like a farmer views his cattle, the linkage to American extreme right wing groups continues to flourish under the bush administration.

Parts of this reminded me of a SPLC article I read (in its latest Intelligence Report" about a racist Christian fundamentalist preacher called "the Wick" who proselytized the Midwest while family farms were being foreclosed on. His message was crafted in language the farmer would understand, which effectively recruited new membership. You can read the article here:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=507

These are not past threats that we read about with interest today, it is a current and growing threat to every American. A clear and present danger.

[tom_paine]

24. What does the "Staff 2001" hat mean to you, MB?

Just curious at the line

But the toque, with the words "Staff 2001" - that's almost too much, even for a conspiracy theorist.

What do you think that means?

[Minstrel Boy]

25. Have you ever seen the movie Cutter's Way?

It's been a while, but this is what I remember, and where I'm going with this:

A physically and emotionally crippled Vietnam vet becomes obsessed with the thought that a wealthy pillar of society has murdered a young girl and dumped her body in a garbage can, and sets out on a crusade to bring him to justice. He's helped by his beach bum friend, who doesn't want to get involved. They crash the rich guy's party, are caught, and taken to his office. They tell him their story, which in the context, sounds crazy. Then, left alone with them, the rich man confides, "And what if I did?"

Cheney knew what he was wearing, and what impression he was making. And that it doesn't matter; he can get away with it. He's in his power.

I really don't know what he was thinking, but to me, crazy man that I am, the message sounded like, "And what if I did?"

[poe]

27. Minstrel Boy-truth teller Breed 'em White

Imagine yourself in the heart of Kansas, at the annual state fair, in 1928. Past the dunking booth and Ferris wheel, the stands selling corn dogs and cotton candy, farmers from around the state have gathered to show off the year's yields. Amid the horses, cattle, and hogs, a blue-eyed blonde family of four is displayed on an elevated platform. Over their heads is a large banner: fitter families contest.

Not unlike dog shows today, Fitter Family contests pitted American citizens against one another in a battle to determine whose facial characteristics, posture, health, and habits judges deemed the most fit. The winners were usually Aryans who, if not Christian themselves, could pass as models of godly living--which isn't to suggest that the contests were strictly a rural phenomenon. Fitter Family and similar contests were popular throughout the U.S., a visible face of a long-burgeoning movement that was quickly coming to a head: eugenics.
Such harsh remedies were deemed necessary to prevent the unfit from polluting the gene pool and were surprisingly well-received by government officials. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was closely aligned with the American Breeders Association, a prominent supporter of eugenics. And in 1907, states began sterilizing citizens they considered a problem. Indiana was first, followed by Washington, Connecticut, Virginia, and California. Often surgery was performed without the victims' knowledge. Poor women admitted to a hospital for a minor illness might leave with their tubes tied, only to discover later that they couldn't get pregnant.

The vast majority of sterilizations were carried out on the underclass: poor people, immigrants, those in jails or public mental hospitals. (Delaware even managed to criminalize marriage between poor people!) Making matters worse, the institutions set up to serve these populations were in some cases the very forces that enslaved them. As Edwin Black notes in his book War Against the Weak, eugenics infected many reform movements, from child welfare to public health. The New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration was founded to help immigrants but employed investigators to screen out "defectives." The National Committee on Prison Labor expanded its mission to include documenting hereditary criminality. New York State's Commissioner of Public Health advocated a plan by Lucien Howe to investigate hereditary blindness. The investigation never happened, but if it had gone according to Howe's plan, the state would have ultimately rounded up blind people and imprisoned them, an effort to save taxpayers' money. And these are just the negative eugenics efforts! Attempts to push positive eugenic remedies were equally far-out, with calls for polygamy, systematic mating, and even marriage among cousins--all in an attempt to multiply desirable bloodlines. Some argued that the government should offer genetic superiors financial incentives to have children, a tactic later used by Nazi Germany. As one Dr. Sharp of Indiana Reformatory argued in 1902: "We make a choice of the best rams for our sheep…and keep the best dogs.… How careful then should we be in the begetting of children?"
A prominent Virginia doctor, dismayed at the rapid growth of undesirables, urged the state legislature to broaden its sterilization law by warning, "Hitler is beating us at our own game!" Such true believers held to their guns with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, applauding Hitler and seething with envy as their utopian fantasies played out across the Atlantic.

[seemslikeadream]

28. live natives from backward jungle regions were exhibited in special cages

The British connection had paid for Walker summer houses in Santa Barbara, California, and in Maine-- "Walker’s Point" at Kennebunkport. Bert Walker had been sent to England for his prep school and college education. By 1919 Bert Walker had strong ties to the Guaranty Trust Company in New York and to the British-American banking house J.P. Morgan and Co. These Wall Street concerns represented all the important owners of American railroads: the Morgan partners and their associates or cousins in the intermarried Rockefeller, Whitney, Harriman and Vanderbilt families. Bert Walker was known as the midwest’s premier deal-arranger, awarding the investment capital of his international-banker contacts to the many railroads, utilities and other midwestern industries of which he and his St. Louis friends were executives or board members. Walker’s operations were always quiet, or mysterious, whether in local or global affairs. He had long been the "power behind the throne" in the St. Louis Democratic Party, along with his crony, former Missouri Governor David R. Francis. Walker and Francis together had sufficient influence to select the party’s candidates.

See Letter of G.H. Walker to D.R. Francis, March 20, 1905, in the Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri, on the organization of the Republicans and Democrats to run the election of the mayor, a Democrat acceptable to the socially prominent. The next day Walker became the treasurer and Francis the president of this "Committee of 1000." See also George H. Walker obituary, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 25, 1953.


Back in 1904, Bert Walker, David Francis, Washington University President Robert Brookings and their banker/broker circle had organized a world’s fair in St. Louis, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. In line with the old Southern Confederacy family backgrounds of many of these sponsors, the fair featured a "Human Zoo" : live natives from backward jungle regions were exhibited in special cages under the supervision of anthropologist William J. McGee. So Averell Harriman was a natural patron for Bert Walker. Bert shared Averell’s passion for horse breeding and horse racing, and easily accommodated the Harriman family’s related social philosophy. They believed that the horses and racing stables they owned showed the way toward a sharp upgrading of the human stock--just select and mate thoroughbreds, and spurn or eliminate inferior animals. The First World War had brought the little St. Louis oligarchy into the Confederate-slaveowner-oriented administration of President Woodrow Wilson and his advisors, Col. Edward House and Bernard Baruch. Walker’s friend Robert Brookings got into Bernard Baruch’s War Industries Board as director of national Price Fixing (sic). David R. Francis became U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1916. As the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, we find Bert Walker busy appointing people to Francis’s staff in Petrograd.

Letter of Perry Francis to his father, Ambassador David R. Francis, Oct. 15, 1917, Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society. "... Joe Miller left for San Francisco last Tuesday night, where he will receive orders to continue to Petrograd. I was told by Mildred Kotany that Bert Walker got him his appointment through Breck Long. I didn’t know Joe was after it, or could have helped him myself. He will be good company for you when he gets there...."


Walker at length agreed to move to New York. But he kept his father’s summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919. Walker became the bank’s president and chief executive; Averell Harriman was chairman and controlling co-owner with his brother Roland ( "Bunny" ), Prescott Bush’s close friend from Yale; and Percy Rockefeller was a director and a founding financial sponsor. In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker’s daughter Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were married in August, 1921.

Prescott Bush, Columbia University, op. cit., p. 7.

From
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography --- by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

[Swamp Rat]

29. Kickity kick kick kick... Herr Gropenführer ist unser folgender Meister!

[robertpaulsen]

30. Wow! I thought the Warren Commission kept secrets longer than anyone.

I guess the Nazis have that beat.

Great post Minstrel Boy! I knew about the Bush family connections with the Nazis, but did not know specifically about Project Paperclip. I'll definitely be bookmarking this to check out all the links.

Thanks!

[bobthedrummer]

32. Kick

:dem::kick:

[ArkDem]

35. Did his socks match his trousers?

[bobthedrummer]

36. We have a culture of death in high government-the "shadow government"

make no mistake about those fascists.:grr: