The Menace of Eugenics

http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2008/11/20/the-menace-of-eugenics/

[Culture Watch] 21 Nov 2008--Most people know about Hitler’s plan to create a master race and to weed out the unfit and inferior races. His horrible plans resulted in the Second World War, the deaths of millions, and the Holocaust. His notions of racial and national superiority did not come out of thin air however, but were based upon ideas and practices going back at least to the nineteenth century.

Indeed, the idea of weeding out the imperfect to develop an ideal race has been around for quite some time. People have long been interested in perfecting the human species by means of medicine, technology and even coercion. The term for all this is ‘eugenics’ (from the Greek, ‘well-born’ or ‘good birth’), a phrase coined in 1883 by English statistician and mathematician Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, believed that some races were superior to others, and that we could take evolution into our own hands by selectively breeding superior human beings. He said that “blacks were genetically inferior, the Jews were ‘parasitical’, and that poverty was transmitted in the genes.”