Eugenics: Deadly medicine

[Mugu]

A new Science Museum exhibit explores how a flawed science paved the way to atrocities.

By MAURA LERNER, Star Tribune

At the dawn of the Nazi era, a prominent Minneapolis physician sent a letter to Adolf Hitler, praising his "plan to stamp out mental inferiority among the German people."

At the time, Dr. Charles Dight was an influential public leader, a former city alderman who had founded the Minnesota Eugenics Society. As such, he believed that the "feebleminded" were unfit to have children. He didn't hide his admiration for the German chancellor.

"I trust you will accept my sincere wish that your efforts along that line will be a great success," he wrote on Aug. 1, 1933, "and will advance the eugenics movement in other nations as well as in Germany."

Dight died before he could see where that movement would lead.


Complete article at:
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/family/15948397.html

[gabeana]

1. Article seems to side step Americas involvement

The idea for Nordic Ideal was started in Long Island New York, not Germany
and it went after all ethnic groups, the only criteria that cut across all lines was poverty. California is where most of sterilization took place
The blue print came from an American idea, the hope was that eventually in the United States, the public could be made to understand the need for public Gas chambers to get rid of the feeble minded. I recommend a great book on this matter "War against the weak"


Thanks for sharing this

[jwirr]

2. This is a story that needs to be told and taught to adults. We have

buried the truth about this way too long. I am proud to be from Minnesota where we can talk about the bad things that have happened in history without being called unpatriotic.

If you are really interested in this subject read "War Against the Weak" by Edwin Black. And if your family has a great aunt that no one talks about and who lived or died in an institution somewhere in this great country of ours ask the right questions. I did and now I know about that poor lady. She fought her war all alone.

[aikoaiko]

3. The history of Eugenics is long and interesting:progressives and conservative, politics and science

Indeed a more palatable, micro-level based eugenics may well define the 21st century.

[Popol Vuh]

4. Some chilling history

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4306881339761809723

Eugenics started here in the U.S. The accounts I am aware of is the Eugenics sterilizing of Native women.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

5. American Roots of Nazi Eugenics By Edwin Black

Black's work plays merry hell with the comfort of
good old American denial!


American Roots of Nazi Eugenics By Edwin Black

...the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed
master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The
idea was created in the United States, and cultivated
in California, decades before Hitler came to power.
<>
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities,
such as the New York Bureau of Industries and
Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other
immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and
subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or
forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German
eugenics program and even funded the program that
Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
<>
The superior species the eugenics movement sought was
populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people.
Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This
group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the
earth. In the process, the movement intended to
subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian
laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews,
dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and
really anyone classified outside the gentrified
genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html