Ryven wrote:
One also has to stop and wonder that maybe the reason the numbers of deformed or retarded children is because we let them live and have children of their own? I know a family of nothing but retarded people. Their mom and dad are mentally impaired, and so are both of their boys. The mother and father are so impaired that they don't work, but live off of government funds, as do both of the boys. At the risk of sounding like a horrible person, I personally think that mentally impaired people such as this should be sterilized, so they can still have sex, but not procreate.
Cannot give any specific sources, as there are so many good ones, but here is a cautionary tale . . .
This sort of sterilization was common policy in the hey-day of the American eugenics movement back in the early decades of the last century. The proponents included many distinguished citizens, scholars, legal experts, social workers, and politicians of various beliefs. Some sterilizations were carried out in private sanitariums and asylums and others in institutions run by state and city governments. The Federal government had little to do with public health programs and mental health facilities until after World War II, although a couple of New Deal programs may have been involved.
What happened to the sterilization movement is what invariably happens to all programs to arbitrarily rid society of the "non-productive." The people with the power to decide abused that power. They went from sterilizing obviously incapacitated individuals to people who were just a little stupid or illiterate, or the "undeserving" poor. Some turned their scalpels on minority groups, homosexuals, underage negro girls who were "out of control," or young women who were just desperately poor and unpleasantly slutty.
There wasn't much the people being sterilized could do to protect themselves in those days. The politically active American middle-class had a depression to deal with and very little empathy with the "trash" who were the usual subject of these programs. To the extent that they cared about the poor, they usually reserved their charitable thoughts for the army of decent folk ruined by hard times. Not much left for the whorish daughter of the town drunk the sheriff collected from the shacks down by the river. Decent people tried to avoid thinking about those things.
What sank the entire project was the rise of the Nazis in Europe. Hitler and his ruling clique studied American eugenics and made it public policy in Germany. It emptied out the madhouses and no one had to put up with cross-dressers and queens in the streets of Berlin at night, so the whole thing was fairly popular.
When Hitler moved on to getting Gypsies and Jews off the streets, it hurt Germany's international reputation a bit, but not that much. Most people who might have raised a fuss, like politicians and journalists, felt it was Germany's business what she did with her undesirables. After all, Italy and a number of other European countries were also trying to purify their national stock. They were never as pushy and thorough about it, of course.
World War II slammed the security lid down on Germany's eugenics program and Hitler's bad reputation made it uncomfortable for Americans to discuss eugenics in public. Those activists, Jews and socialists and such, who tried to get some help for the people locked in prisons and camps across Europe never made much headway, for reasons still fiercely debated. One major problem may have been a failure of imagination. It took a great deal of it to carry a eugenics program to its logical extreme, and not much less, for someone raised in American middle class comfort, to understand what that final solution would look like.
When the Soviets captured the installation at Majdanek in 1944, the eye-witness testimony began to build, along with the piles of bodies and charred remains and the crates and boxes of meticulously kept records showing how Europe's undesirables had finally made a contribution to society. Western elites were leery of Soviet propaganda claims about German atrocities, as they made a lot of them.
Americans didn't pay close attention until the spring of 1945, when their own troops captured Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Dachau and other camps. At these places, they could witness rows and rows of stacked, skeletal corpses. They could walk up to lines of the walking dead, humans so emaciated they could not eat or drink on their own, could not hold their bowels or bladder, or do much of anything except stare at their liberators and die. Of course, there were also the ovens, the piles of gold teeth and personal effects. They also found a great deal more of that careful record-keeping, showing how much profit had been exacted from the troublemakers kept safely behind the gates of the facility.
Many of the soldiers who first entered the camps were combat veterans, men who had seen friends blown to bloody shreds of gut and skin, who had beaten other men's heads in with rifle butts until the brain tissue stained the wood, who had used brush and hose to clean bits of face and hair out of the treads of their tanks. At the camps, a lot of these hardened men found that there were still things in this world vile enough to make them retch or faint or cry.
Against that kind of testimony, all the good intentions of all the eugenicists in the world could not stand. Sterilization, human medical experiments, lobotomies and shock treatment, all the unpleasant things government institutions could do to people too helpless or hopeless to fight back, gradually became unfashionable. A lot of important people who had supported eugenics denied they had ever done so. Most just dropped the subject amid a tacit agreement among the American social elite never to bring it up again.
The lesson here, I think, is that you should never give the authorities power without considering how it might be abused once they get used to wielding it. It is also good to be cautious about the power you grant yourself, but that is another topic.