I just finished listening to Jim Braude and Andrea Cabral struggle (on Boston Public Radio) with Nazi ideology and and lose. The topic was a “judge in Tennessee somewhere” who is offering lenient sentencing in return for vasectomies or sterilization.
Cabral was disturbed by the possible racial implications of this “but” she looked up the offenders for that county and found that they were overwhelmingly white. So while she is sort of still against the sterilizations, she guesses it’s not so bad.
Braude is kind of against the “slippery slope” this might lead to, “however”, “we” have to think carefully about letting some kinds of people reproduce.
As to who “we” are, I don’t know. Maybe it’s Braude, Cabral, and the Koch brothers.
Wow.
For the record, it isn’t just Nazi ideology.
One of the more despicable aspects of American “morality” was our enthusiastic embrace of Eugenics in the early twentieth century, peaking in the 1920s and 1930s.
In fact, Hitler and Nazis proudly cited the US government’s enthusiastic embrace of Eugenics as justification for its expansion of Nazi racism.
It is a terribly dark chapter of American history that all too few Americans know about.
And ironically it was tied into lowering health care costs. Similar arguments used against trans soldiers and prison inmates today were used against the disabled during that time.
And our nation was the inspiration.
Indeed, and not just the disabled.
The forced sterilization programs targeted the POOR, as well as blacks. The infamous Carrie Buck case exemplified the immoral embrace of Eugenics by pretty much all of America at the time. While the state of VA claimed that Ms. Buck was “feeble minded”, further investigation shows that she was not. Her school records showed that she was, if anything, brighter than average.
She was, in fact, poor — that was her primary “offence”, and she was involuntarily sterilized for that offence by the state of Virginia.
There’s no link for me to verify here, but what I recall of this story is that it was presented as an OPTION specifically for sex offenders. I can see arguments either way on this, but we went from zero to Godwin awfully quickly on this thread!
Come on, Christopher, it’s just NOT that hard to find the story.
Tennessee judge Sam Benningfield offered male inmates a reduction in sentence in exchange for vasectomies (in contrast to some misleading news stories, a properly-performed vasectomy is nearly always permanent. It is occasionally possible to reverse the procedure). The order applied to DRUG offenders, not sex offenders. The order was rescinded as it became a national embarrassment.
In this case, the Godwin reference is irrelevant — we went to Eugenics, American-style. That started before Hitler and lasted well into the 1950s.
I remind you again that references to behavior like that of the Nazis (such as Eugenics) is NOT a “Godwin” reference. In this case, you Godwin complaint is very much misplaced.
Ok, so I was wrong about type of offender, which does make the solution less logical. However, there is no evidence of a eugenic motive and I stand by my complaint that references to Nazism (in the very first sentence of the diary) were uncalled for.
The point of my comment was to change the focus from “Nazi” to “Eugenics”.
Is this another case where we need to demonstrate a “Eugenic motive”? What the heck is that? What we have is a judge offering decreased sentences in exchange for sterilization.
It sounds to me as though you perhaps need to learn more about what Eugenics was. I suggest that this is another case where motive is irrelevant
I actually did go back and brush up on my eugenics a bit. I was thinking it was entirely about stopping certain races from reproducing, but it could be used against the disabled or mentally ill as well. Was the judge using as an excuse that drug addiction is a disease that in his mind is hereditary and thus addicts shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce? If so that does sound more eugenic in nature than I originally thought and may want to revise and extend my remarks.
The original intent of Eugenics was to breed “superior” babies — more intelligent, more handsome/beautiful, etc.
The disabled and mentally ill were primary, rather than secondary, targets. The poor were targeted because a larger number of people believed then, as too many in the GOP do now, that poverty is a reflection of the individual (and therefore something to be bred away) rather than a condition imposed by society.
The Nazis embraced Eugenics (as part of Hitler’s vision of a superior “Aryan race”) as a way of “improving” Germany. At the time that they did so, America and the American government “led” the world in the institutionalized practice of Eugenics.
Hitler’s genocide emerged from his embrace of Eugenics — essentially, he came to conclude that exterminating the “undesirables” was a faster way to stop them from breeding than simply sterilizing them.