Reply #69: Black's last book [View All]

[seemslikeadream]

the award winning bestseller IBM and the Holocaust, told of how Big Blue created what marketers call a customized business solution to help their Third Reich clients plan and carry out the Final Solution. The shocking revelation of War Against the Weak is how much German ideas about rassenhygieme(literally "race hygiene") were modeled on research methods and social engineering practices that began in the United States decades before Adolf Hitler wrote a single word of Mein Kampf. Nearly as astonishing is the overwhelming evidence linking the eugenics movement to the highest levels of American academia, philanthropy and government. And there are other surprising facts as well.

The central theme of War Against the Weak can be summed up in the declarative sentence that opens the second chapter: "Mankind's quest for perfection has always turned dark." From the first statement by Herbert Spencer in the mid-1800's of the concept of the survival of the fittest to Hitler's announcement nearly a century later that he would exterminate the Jews "like lice," Black chronicles a descent into horror Even Joseph Conrad's character Mr. Kurtz would be loathe to imagine.

By the late '20s, more than half the states in the union had laws to eliminate "undesirables." Tens of thousands were forcibly sterilized; tens of thousands more were denied the right to marry or were institutionalized. Some died because doctors withheld treatment from them in an effort to stop "defective germ plasm" from flowing into the American gene pool. The "Ultimate Program," as it was called in 1923, was to extend negative eugenics to every nation on earth.

The weaker members had long been eliminated by natural selection. This was set out in texts like The Passing of a Great Race by American eugenicist Madison Grant, which Hitler read while imprisoned in the mid '20s for inciting mob violence. (The German translation was published by Hitler's co-conspirator Julis Lehman; Hitler even wrote Grant a fan letter declaring the book his "Bible".)

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