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Since
1945, international relations have played themselves out in the framework of a
world order remade by the Soviet and US power elites, and then by the latter
alone. So a grasp of contemporary geopolitics requires understanding the US
power elite’s role in World War II, the most important geopolitical event of
the 20th c. But
few understand that. What
caused World War II? Most historians answer: Hitler and the Nazis. Indeed.
And what caused Hitler and the Nazis? The
eugenics movement: German Nazism was an outgrowth of eugenics. And what
caused eugenics? The US power elite.
You
didn’t know that? You didn’t know that hundreds
of thousands of innocent US citizens were either incarcerated or forcibly
sterilized in the United States for lack of superior ‘Aryan’ blood long before
the same was done in Germany? Well, it’s hardly surprising. The main works
that teach WWII history to Westerners don’t mention it. And this admits of a
short demonstration. Two
authors are mainly responsible for our Western historical consciousness of
World War II: Winston Churchill and William Shirer. “[Churchill’s]
historical writings,” comments historian David Reynolds, “have been immensely
influential.” None more so than The
Gathering Storm, which sold its first 200,000 copies in just two weeks. “Between 1948 and 1954,” Churchill’s entire
Nobel Prize-winning magnum opus, The Second World War (of which The Gathering Storm is the first
part), “was
serialised in eighty magazines and newspapers worldwide, and went on to
appear in hardback in fifty countries and eighteen languages. …[A]s Plumb
observed, subsequent historians have moved down ‘the broad avenues which
[Churchill] drove through war’s confusion and
complexity,’ with the result that ‘Churchill the historian lies at the
very heart of all historiography of the Second World War.’ ”[1] In
1960 came William Shirer, an obediently Churchillian “subsequent historian”
who would become the next great influence. Historian Gavriel Rosenfeld
comments: “In
the vast historiographical literature on the Nazi period... William L.
Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich... has, over the years, acquired a status unparalleled by any prior
or subsequent historical work on the subject. ...[I]t has sold millions of
copies in the United States and millions more worldwide. Still in print
today, Shirer’s work has been translated into numerous European and
non-European languages and published in several special editions. It has even
been made into a documentary film and recorded as a dramatic cantata.
Undoubtedly the best known book ever published on the Nazi era, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
has become more than just another work of history. A singular literary
institution, it has acquired a reputation as ‘the bestselling historical work
ever written in modern times.’ ”[2] We
see World War II through Churchill and Shirer, whether or not we have read them, for their ‘official’ narrative
is reinforced in untold numbers of other articles, books, movies, and TV
shows—and, indeed, in countless other historical works. This is the
interpretive paradigm for World War
II—the one we learn in school.
So it
matters that the word ‘eugenics’ does not appear even once in either The
Gathering Storm (Churchill’s explanation of the causes of the war) or in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. What
is the downstream consequence for our education? In order to appreciate that,
just leaf—to pick one representative example—through The Origins of the Second World War in Europe, a 1997 text by
P.M.H. Bell, employed to teach university undergraduates. You will find not one mention of ‘eugenics.’ I’ve
seen the effects. I used to ask my students at the University of Pennsylvania
to raise their hand if the word ‘eugenics’ rang a bell, but nobody moved.
These Ivy League students, at one
of the most prestigious institutes of higher learning in the United States,
have never heard of the most important social and political movement of the
first half of the 20th c.—which, to boot, had its first great flowering in the United States. If we
wish to understand World War II, we must correct this educational deficiency.
So what was eugenics? It
was a reaction to 1848. In
1848 the Western working and middle-classes took violently to the streets to force power elites to accept universal
suffrage, constitutions, parliaments, charters of rights, separation of
Church and State, etc. Here was born the political grammar of the modern West
(Part
2). The power elites didn’t like that, and the search began for
modern ways to combat the new power of the people. Enter
the Briton Francis Galton, a founding father of ‘psychology.’
A few
years after 1848, Galton began to argue that the exalted position of the
Western ruling elites followed from good genes (initially called ‘germplasm’),
which made them far superior to the working class ‘degenerates,’ as he called
them. The State should use his newly invented ‘mental tests,’ Galton
insisted, to identify the inferior. And so, in his words, “
‘…by means of isolation, or some other drastic yet adequate measure, a stop
should be put to the production of families of children likely to include
degenerates.’ ”[3] The
general goal was to use fraudulent ‘intelligence tests’—later called ‘IQ
tests’—to restrict the opportunities and rights (reproductive, medical, citizen,
educational, political) of the masses. As it spread throughout the upper
classes all over the Western world, the eugenics movement quickly became one
with the goals of ‘Aryan,’ ‘Nordic,’ or ‘Germanic’ supremacists. This
may seem surprising: Why should the idea of Germanic supremacy appeal to
elites all over the West? But it is easily explained: the Western elites so
enthralled with eugenics can all reasonably lay a claim to ‘Germanic’
ancestry. How
so? After
the ‘Western’ Roman Empire came to a close towards the end of the 5th c., it
was German military aristocrats who became overlords of the non-Roman,
non-German populations formerly under the Roman boot. The new German lords
were Visigoths in Spain; Ostrogoths and Lombards in northern Italy; Franks in
what is now France, most of Germany, and the Low Countries; Anglo-Saxons and
then also Normans in Britain. The Scandinavians in the north, never ruled by
Romans, were also German. When Charlemagne, the Frank who conquered most of
Europe, was crowned ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ by Pope Leo III in the year 800, the
Empire was reborn as a Germanic
affair, and the European nobility was founded on the basis of land grants to
Charlemagne’s Germanic military allies all over Europe.
In
the second half of the 19th c., this proud memory of Germanic ancestry became
the solidary glue for Western power elites finding common cause against the
(to them) horrifying ascendance of popular power. The US ruling-elite—whose
‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage, according to many eugenicists, hailed from the ‘purest’
Germanic stock, whatever that meant—took leadership of the movement. The goal
was to roll back the gains of the Enlightenment. But
there was a major difficulty. The Enlightenment, and the revolutions it
inspired, had established the cultural dominance of liberal democracy and
scientific inquiry—this was the new political grammar. In this more
compassionate or ‘progressive’ era, with the concerns of the lower classes
now politically important, the problem of poverty had become an official
priority, and science had been recruited to find solutions. It
was obligatory for the power elite to pay lip service to this newly dominant
grammar—they had to speak its language (see Part
2). So they created a pseudoscience
to deal with the problems of poverty: eugenics.
This new field, which soon taught high-school and university courses all over
the United States, argued that poverty was a genetic disease, a consequence
of ‘mental retardation.’ The uncontrolled breeding of the poor, said the
eugenicists, threatened to overwhelm Society and cripple it fatally. Bedecked
in shiny ‘progressive’ clothing, eugenicists urged philanthropic emergency measures to save Society! These measures amounted to draconian State
powers to abolish the rights and freedoms of the (‘non-Aryan’) poor to stop
them from spreading their genes overmuch. Many in the middle classes were beguiled
with assurances of their superior ‘intelligence,’ and, in thrall of ‘science,’
bought the snake oil of ‘IQ tests.’ To
get a sense for the scandal of these ‘intelligence diagnoses,’ consider that
Henry Goddard, the most prominent American intelligence-testing
‘psychologist’ involved with the eugenics movement, considered that a quick
glance was enough to identify the ‘mentally retarded.’ By such ‘methods,’
when the US government sent Goddard and his team to evaluate immigrants at
Ellis Island (New York), he diagnosed 83% of arriving Jews as ‘mentally
retarded.’[4] These ‘retards’ and their
descendants—though they are no more than 2% of the US population—would go on
to win 40% of all US Nobel prizes. Precisely
because the assessment of ‘intelligence’ was wholly fraudulent, eugenicists
had great latitude to arbitrarily diagnose and imprison any troublemakers in
special ‘colonies’ until their reproductive periods lapsed. In this manner, a
regime of ‘sloppy totalitarianism’ took hold (Appendix
A). As
historian Edwin Black documents in detail in War against the
weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create a master race,
the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ US power elite quickly became the international leader of
the eugenics movement. From Black’s introduction: [Excerpt
from Black begins here] “Throughout
the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of
thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted
to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their
ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized,
wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers,
prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. ...[T]his pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors,
elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials
colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race. To
perpetuate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined with
almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological
rationales for persecution. ...[T]he eugenics movement slowly constructed a national bureaucratic and juridical infrastructure
to cleanse America of its ‘unfit.’ Specious intelligence tests, colloquially
known as IQ tests, were invented to justify incarceration of a group labeled
“feebleminded.” ...Collusive litigation was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court,
which sanctified eugenics and its tactics. …Eugenics
targeted all mankind, so of course its scope was global. American eugenic evangelists spawned
similar movements and practices throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Forced sterilization laws and regimens took root on every continent. Each
local American eugenic ordinance or statute—from Virginia to Oregon—was
promoted internationally as yet another precedent to be emulated by the
international movement. A tightly-knit network of mainstream medical and
eugenical journals, international meetings and conferences kept the generals
and soldiers of eugenics up to date and armed for their nation’s next
legislative opportunity. Eventually,
America’s eugenic movement spread to Germany as well, where it caught the
fascination of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement.”[5] [Excerpt
from Black ends here]
Who
were these “wealthy industrialists,” so busy institutionalizing eugenics in
the United States and then exporting it to the entire world, and especially to
Germany, “where it caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi
movement”? The
main players were the Carnegie and Rockefeller networks. “the
[pseudo-]scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were
first concocted on Long Island at the Carnegie Institution’s eugenic
enterprise at Cold Spring Harbor. ...[D]uring the prewar Hitler regime, the
Carnegie Institution, through its Cold Spring Harbor complex,
enthusiastically propagandized for the Nazi regime and even distributed anti-Semitic
Nazi Party films to American high schools. ...[T]he Rockefeller Foundation’s
massive financial grants [to] the German scientific establishment... began
the eugenic programs that were finished by Mengele at Auschwitz.”[6]
Henry
Ford, for his part, became the most important distributor of Nazi antisemitic
propaganda worldwide. Hitler called him his “inspiration” and awarded him the
highest German medal to foreigners in 1938.
The same Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller
networks that pushed the eugenics movement and nurtured the German Nazis led,
after World War II, a second attempt at ‘sloppy totalitarianism’ with
the creation of the US
psychological warfare regime (Part 1). What
for? To manage US ‘democracy’ (and
the world) with propaganda messages crafted to steer mass acquiescence to
their domestic and foreign policies, leaving “selective violence” for last resort
when “persuasive communication” failed to get people compliantly on the path
of directed history (Part 1
and Part 2). But
in which direction were the US power elite hoping to direct history after
1945? Given their past activities, one might hazard a guess. It is better,
however, to infer it from postwar US policy toward Nazi war criminals. We consider
that next.
[1] Reynolds, D. (2001). Churchill's Writing of History:
Appeasement, Autobiography and "The Gathering Storm". Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 11, 221-247. [2] Rosenfeld, G. D. (1994). The Reception of William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Germany, 1960-62. Journal of Contemporary History, 29(1), 95-128. (p.95) [3] Black, E. (2003). War against the weak: Eugenics and
America's campaign to create a master race. New York: Four Walls Eight
Windows. (p.18) [4] Sometimes
Goddard used Binet tests, important to him because Alfred Binet, the father
of what we now call ‘IQ tests,’ was a true scientist, and Goddard meant to claim
scientific status based on the prestige of Binet’s work. But “Goddard’s
original translation of the Binet scale,” explains Stephen J. Gould, “scored
people harshly and made morons out of subjects usually regarded as normal” (Gould 1981:166). As Raymond Fancher, another historian of the intelligence
movement, explains, Goddard “did not say exactly how all of his diagnoses of
feeblemindedness were made, but apparently only a few were based on actual
Binet tests, while the majority came from possibly unreliable personal
impressions” (Fancher 1985:114). Indeed, according to Goddard himself, he could sniff them out
in a second. Edwin Black, historian of the eugenics movement, writes that
Goddard “believed in the ‘unmistakable look of the feebleminded,’ bragging
that to spot the feebleminded, just ‘a glance sufficed’ ” (Black 2003:78). This
could be done at some distance. In Goddard’s own words: “ ‘After a person has
had considerable experience in this work, he almost gets a sense of what a
feeble-minded person is so that he can tell one afar off.’ ” At Ellis Island,
a team of Goddard assistants, all females, “were instructed to pick out the
feeble-minded by sight” (Gould 1981:165). By such ‘methods’ Goddard found, in that population of
immigrants, that “83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, 79
percent of the Italians, and 87 percent of the Russians were feeble-minded”
(Gould 1981:166). SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE: Black, E. (2003). War against the weak: Eugenics and
America's campaign to create a master race. New York: Four Walls Eight
Windows. Fancher, R. (1985). The intelligence men: Makers of the IQ
controversy. New York: Norton. Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. New York:
Norton. [5] Edwin Black’s introduction may be
read here: [6]
Edwin Black’s introduction may
be read here: |
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.%20Before%20the%20war,%20these%20same%20players%20had%20a%20major%20hand%20in%20the%20rise%20of%20German%20Nazism.%20This%20information%20is%20of%20some%20importance%20in%20evaluating%20the%20probable%20aims%20of%20US%20power-elite%20geopolitics%20today.%20But%20it%20is%20next%20to%20impossible%20to%20pursue%20this%20analysis%20because%20the%20US%20power-elite%20role%20in%20causing%20World%20War%20II%20has%20been%20almost%20completely%20expunged%20from%20historical%20education.%20Here%20we%20document%20this%20whitewashing%20and%20provide%20the%20missing%20context.){kind=small}
