"Euthanasia of the weak and the sensual"

Michael Coren in the National Post reviews an exhibit at the Canadian War Museum about "those scientific ideas that gave a grimy intellectual veneer to the Nazi genocide." Among them:

The most vociferous and outspoken of the socialist eugenicists was the novelist H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. He argued in best-selling books such as Anticipations and A Modern Utopia that the world would collapse and from this collapse a new order should and would emerge.

"People throughout the world whose minds were adapted to the big-scale conditions of the new time. A naturally and informally organised educated class, an unprecedented sort of people." A strict social order would be formed. At the bottom of it were the base. These were "people who had given evidence of a strong anti-social disposition", including "the black, the brown, the swarthy, the yellow." Christians would also "have to go" as well as the handicapped. Wells devoted entire pamphlets to the need of "preventing the birth, preventing the procreation or preventing the existence" of the mentally and physically handicapped. "This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and the sensual is possible. I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved." ....

In the United States socialist writer Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the mother of the abortion movement, called for a radical eugenics approach as early as the first years of the 20th century. She wrote of the need for "a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. Herein lies the key of civilization." .... (more)

I recall that when my denomination was first considering taking a firm position against abortion, some of those most emotionally against adoption of the resolution were theologically liberal. I vividly remember one of them recounting his visit to a nursing home for the retarded and physically disabled with the implication that it would have been better if they had not been born. An elderly gentleman wrote me a letter informing me that my grandfather certainly would not have agreed with my anti-abortion views. He may have been right about that. Turn of the 20th century theological and political liberalism (Progressivism) seems to have been perfectly compatible with racism and eugenics. Witness, for instance, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Buck decision.

Socialists made eugenics fashionable