Genetic Engineering, Eugenics and the Ideology of the Rich

Social Control In The 21st Century
by Colin Todhunter

Whatever the publicly stated aims of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) sector, and however terrible its impact is on health, the environment and cotton farmers in India, there is a much more sinister side to this industry.

In order to govern and control a population, apart from the use of violence, people’s consent must be achieved via what Louis Althusser once called ideological state apparatuses: the education system, entertainment, religion, the political system and so on. Noam Chomsky’s book ‘The Manufacture of Consent’ discusses the important role of the media in this, and Antonio Gramsci wrote much about hegemony – the methods used by the dominant class to legitimize their position in the eyes of the ruled over – a kind of ‘consented coercion’ that disguises the true fist of power.

However, possibly the most basic and arguably effective form of social control is eugenics, a philosophy that includes reduced reproductive capacity of ‘less desired’ people.

There is a growing fear that eugenics is being used for the purpose of population control – to get rid of sections of the world population that are ‘surplus to requirements’. In the West, due to automation and the outsourcing of jobs, there is likely to be a large section of the population that will be permanently unemployed or underemployed. In places like China, Africa and India, promoting birth control has been high on the agenda for some decades.

Millionaire US media baron Ted Turner believes a global population of two billion would be ideal and billionaire Bill Gates has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to improve access to contraception in the developing world. Based on the misguided premise that the world is getting overpopulated, fewer people means elites and the better off can reduce the competition for the resources they covert so much and maintain their current high levels of material consumption. Gates has also purchased shares in Monsanto valued at more than $23 million. His agenda is to help Monsanto get their genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into Africa on a grand scale.

Here’s where things get interesting. In 2001, Monsanto and Du Pont bought a small biotech company called Epicyte that had created a gene that basically makes the male sperm sterile and the female egg unreceptive. In the US, GM foods are already on the market and unlabeled. The GM sector has spent millions to ensure this remains the case. US citizens thus have no idea of what could be in their food. These foods where not independently tested for their impact on health.

Would you like to know whether you are eating stuff that (according to Professor Seralini of the University of Caen in France) damages health?

Would you like to know if what you are eating contains something that could make you sterile?

Bill Gates’ father has long been involved with Planned Parenthood:

“When I was growing up, my parents were always involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.”

The above quotation comes from a 2003 interview with Bill Gates.

Planned Parenthood was founded on the concept that most human beings are reckless breeders. Gates senior is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a guiding light behind the vision and direction of the Gates Foundation, which is heavily focused on promoting GMOs in Africa via its financing of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

The Gates Foundation has given at least $264.5 million to AGRA. According to a report published by La Via Campesina (The Peasants’ Way) in 2010, 70 percent of AGRA’s grantees in Kenya work directly with Monsanto and nearly 80 percent of the Gates Foundation funding is devoted to biotechnology. The report also explains that the Gates Foundation has pledged $880 million to create the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), which is a heavy promoter of GMOs.

Rather than embrace a move towards genuine food sovereignty and address the underlying political and economic issues that cause poverty, the Gates Foundation has chosen the promotion of corporate-controlled agriculture which has led to the disempowerment of farmers.

As the GM sector continues to hammer at India’s door, we have every right to be concerned, not only because of the much reported impact of seed monopolies and GMOs’ well-documented detrimental effects on health and the environment, but also because of concerns over just which genes may be in the foodstuffs that we eat and are unknown to us.

Researcher F  William Engdahl states that genetic engineering cannot be understood without looking at the global spread of US power. Leading figures in the US financed ‘Green Revolution’ in the agriculture sector of developing countries in order to create new markets for petro-chemical fertilizers and petroleum products, as well as to expand dependency on energy products. Food has now become weaponised to secure global dominance.

The world’s problems are not being caused by overpopulation, but by greed and a system of ownership that ensures wealth flows from bottom to top. It’s not about stopping population growth in its tracks, but about changing a widespread global system and mindset that is based an over reliance on oil and unsustainable depletion of natural resources, with the US being the biggest culprit.

Millionaires like Ted Turner believe it should be a case of carry on consuming regardless, as long as the population is cut. This is the ideology of the rich who regard the rest of humanity as a problem to be ‘dealt with.’ He says there are “too many people using too much stuff.” He couldn’t be more wrong. For instance, developing nations account for more than 80 percent of world population, but consume only about one third of the world’s energy. US citizens constitute 5 percent of the world’s population but consume 24 percent of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians and 370 Ethiopians (mindfully.org)

So, should we be weary of a hugely politically connected sector that has ownership of technology that allows for the genetic engineering of food and a gene that could be used (or already is) for forced sterilization? Of course we should. This is a sector whose stated objective is to control the world’s food chain and, by implication, the global population.

In today’s technologically-driven world, state-corporate concerns are using the full panoply of hi-tech means to control us. Some decades ago, theorist and social philosopher Herbert Marcuse summed up the problem facing modern society by saying that the capabilities— both intellectual and technological— of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than before, which means that the scope of society’s domination over the individual is also immeasurably greater than ever before. It appears none more so than where the GM sector is concerned.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/genetic-engineering-eugenics-and-the-ideology-of-the-rich/5329025

James Corbett on Brave New World, Eugenics, The Huxley family (Video)

www.corbettreport.com
http://www.youtube.com/corbettreport

In this installment of "Film, Literature and the New World Order," The Corbett Report explores Aldous Huxley's classic work of science-fiction, Brave New World. Brave New World is a dystopic vision of a nightmare future in which worker drones are engineered from birth to perform slave labour for a world dictatorship. Even more frighteningly, the workers have even been engineered to love their servitude. Most frightening of all, Huxley's own family background and experience might show that Brave New World is not so completely fictional as we would like to believe...

James Corbett on Eugenics (Video + Transcript)

www.corbettreport.com
http://www.youtube.com/corbettreport

 

TRANSCRIPT:

The first person to stand up to any great evil is always the most courageous. To be the first one to call out any great injustice is to invite ridicule, scorn, even persecution. It is difficult to imagine today just how brave were the first slave owners to call for the abolition of slavery, the first men and women to advocate women's suffrage, the first activists to call for the end of Apartheid. In the end, their cause is recognized as just and these brave souls are lauded, often posthumously, as heroes. But in the beginning, no one wants to admit that they are a party, even unwittingly, to a great evil. The wildest injustices can be legitimized simply because they are popular.

Today, just such a popular injustice exists. It has been infused into our culture and taken up as a cause. It is fervently believed in and advocated with great passion and force, and to speak out against it is to risk persecution and scorn. But speak out against it we must.

The terrible injustice of our age has its roots in a most unlikely place: in the quaint villages and manicured gardens of the 19th century British gentry. Amongst that set lived one Francis Galton, a gentleman scientist who had investigated everything from meteorology to statistics. Shortly after his cousin, Charles Darwin, published his Origin of Species, Galton became fascinated with the idea that the "survival of the fittest" did not just take place between species, but within them. This idea became a pseudo-science, a study of the presumed racial characteristics of this group or that group with an aim to explaining why the various peoples of the world occupy the positions they do.

In order to confirm their pre-conceived notions of their own self-worth, Galton and his friends started a new field of inquiry called eugenics. Unsurprisingly, it concluded that the rich and powerful were rich and powerful because they were genetically superior, and it offered a simple solution for improving the lot of humanity: make sure that the affluent upper classes breed as much as possible (preferably within their own families, in order to preserve their superior stock), and make sure the lower classes breed as little as possible.

This junk science, pandering as it did to the most rabid the most racist the most elitist interests of the moneyed class, became universally accepted in the Western world within a generation. Soon, country after country had implemented laws to allow the government to sterilize those citizens it deemed to be "unfit."

The true horrors of this strain of thought came to light when the German eugenicists, based at the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute , gave the Nazi regime an ideological excuse to take the idea to its logical conclusion. Many of the Germans who went along with the holocaust did so because they genuinely believed the scientists who were telling them that the Jews and Gypsies, the communists and homosexuals were genetically inferior and needed to be eliminated from the gene pool.

After World War II, when the full magnitude of the slaughter that had taken place in the name of eugenics began to become apparent, the eugenicist pseudoscientists scrambled to find a way to re-legitimize their racist and classist drivel. They wrote openly in the journals of their once-esteemed eugenics societies that they would now have to continue their studies and practices in a more covert fashion. Eugenics had to become crypto-eugenics.

This was accomplished in a number of ways. The British Eugenics Society, for one, merely changed its name to The Galton Institute. The American Eugenics Society morphed into the Population Council, a group set up by John D. Rockefeller III, where members continued to advocate the same policies for reducing the population of third world countries as they always had, only now they did so in the name of fighting "overpopulation" rather than fighting "bad genes."

Julian Huxley, brother of the famous writer, helped organize UNESCO in 1945. In the founding document of UNESCO entitled UNESCO: its philosophy and its purpose, he argues that one of the key aims of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization would be the re-legitimization of eugenics so the idea would once again become thinkable. He also went on to co-found the World Wildlife Fund with Nazi SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

Within a generation, science was once again ready to tell us why the only way to save humanity was to stop people from breeding: this time, the public was whipped into a furor not about Jews and Gypsies, but about carbon dioxide and environmental sustainability. The cover had changed, but the racist eugenicist text remained the same.

In the logic of the eugenicists, the meaning of human life is itself transformed. Instead of something valuable, something precious, something to be desired and nurtured, fought for and celebrated, humanity is re-imagined as a cancer, something inherently evil, the mere existence of which is a burden on the world. This, unsurprisingly, encapsulates the modern environmental movement's position almost perfectly: human life is no longer something to be treasured, but something to be measured in carbon and then reduced.

In the manmade global warming myth, humans are merely an obstacle to the proper functioning of nature. In the eugenicist fantasy, the earth is saved when people die. In both ideologies (if they really are separate) the ultimate genocide becomes thinkable.

Now the "leaders of the world" are meeting in Copenhagen to decide on the future of your world, of my world, of the world of our children and grandchildren. They are proposing a reorganization of the world economy. Punishing austerity is being urged in all corners. Groups of population control eugenicists are now arguing for carbon offsets to be used to stop the developing world from having children. The choir of madness is growing by the day and everything seems set to reach an intolerable crescendo.

And then, in the darkest hour, just as it seems the eugenicists are about to take over, along comes an insider—a hero—at the University of East Anglia to leak the emails and documents with which the entire manmade global warming myth is exposed and the carbon reduction agenda is delegitimized.

It is not always popular to stand against great injustice, but it is always right.

The Rockefeller Foundation's Molecular Vision of Life

How the Aims of Eugenics, Social Control, and Human Engineering Shaped Molecular Biology and 20th Century Science

A Review of Lily E. Kay's The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (Oxford University Press, 1993) by Chris Masterjohn, January 16, 2009

Is the molecular biology we have inherited from the twentieth century merely a product of the scientific method, an inevitable set of conclusions spawned by the cumulative impartial deduction of theoretical principles from objective observations? Or was it molded, shaped, and directed by an elite establishment that had aims much broader than the pursuit of science?

In her 1993 book The Molecular Vision of Life, Dr. Lily E. Kay, whom a 2001 MIT News Office obituary referred to as "one of the outstanding historians of biology of her generation," argued that the "new biology" was largely created by the Rockefeller Foundation and its subsidiary program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) through a consensus between a scientific elite and a business elite whose broader aims centered on eugenics and the need to create a mechanism of social control and human engineering:

The new science did not just evolve by natural selection of randomly distributed disciplinary variants, nor did it ascend solely through the compelling power of its ideas and its leaders. Rather, the rise of the new biology was an expression of the systematic cooperative efforts of America's scientific establishment -- scientists and their patrons -- to direct the study of animate phenomena along selected paths toward a shared vision of science and society.

The term "molecular biology," in fact, was coined in 1938 by Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller's natural sciences division, to rename for the third time the program originally known as "psychobiology," the aim of which was "the rationalization of human behavior."

The model Kay uses to describe this historical process is one of "consensus" that does not necessarily require the active complicity of all scientists. Many of them did not share the goals of eugenics, social control, or human engineering. Many of them, even at the elite level, were interested in the pursuit of "pure science," even though they were certainly aware of the goals of the business and administrative elites within the Rockefeller Foundation. Scientists and Foundation elites needed each other, however, and the end result was that the "new biology" would not be an open-ended investigation of "the riddle of life" but would rather be a directed investigation to answer specific questions in ways amenable to the goals of eugenics and social control.

In This Review:

• The Rockefeller Foundation, Caltech, and the New Molecular Biology
• The Rockefeller Foundation and "Social Control"
• Molecular Biology as a Means of Social Control and Human Engineering
• The Rockefeller Foundation and Eugenics
• Unconnected Dots — Allen Dulles and the CIA's MKULTRA Program
• More Dots to Connect — The Rockefeller Foundation and the UN World Population Panel
• The New Frontier in Social Control: Zbigniew Brzezinski's Technetronic Age
• Conclusions: Does Social Control Even Work?

The Rockefeller Foundation, Caltech, and the New Molecular Biology

The Rockefeller Foundation, founded in 1913, poured $25 million dollars of support into the molecular biology program of the United States between the years 1932 and 1959. The extent of its influence during this intensive period, however, went far beyond simple funding. The Foundation's molecular biology program permeated the academic infrastructures of all of the critical institutions, with Rockefeller trustees holding top administrative positions in universities. Officers of the foundation created an informal yet de facto peer review system, with scientific advisors providing them detailed knowledge of academic traffic and scientists and administrators consulting their judgment on academic appointments, reputations, personalities, travel, and potential projects. Warren Weaver, director of the Foundation's Natural Sciences Division, was often invited to sit in on faculty meetings.

World War I ushered in a new political and economic ideology of "cooperation" that departed from nineteenth century individualism and stressed interdisciplinary projects, "team players," and coordinating managers. The Rockefeller Foundation stepped in during this reorganization of science and played a critical role in shaping it.

The Foundation supported molecular biology projects at many institutions, but it invested the largest sums of money in six: the University of Chicago, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin. Ultimately, Caltech became the most important center of the new biology. Because it lacked a medical program and an agricultural mandate, molecular biology was free to thrive there as a new, independent discipline. Caltech swiftly adopted the interdisciplinary model borrowed from post-War corporate culture, and along with the University of Chicago it garnered vast sums of money from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Caltech produced many of the "founding fathers" of molecular biology. These include Thomas Hunt Morgan, Max Delbruck, George Beadle, and Linus Pauling. James D. Watson, who with Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA at Oxford, was a disciple of Delbruck; his investigations with Crick were largely based on Pauling's paradigm of molecular structures, and he later joined Caltech.

In the dozen years following the elucidation of the structure of DNA in 1953, 17 of 18 scientists awarded Nobel prizes for research into molecular biology were fully or partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation under Warren Weaver's guidance.

The molecular vision of life is not the only possible vision of life. According to Kay, the Rockefeller Foundation singled out this vision from among many others and cultivated it for purposes broader than the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake:

The evolutionary, ecological, and organismic standpoints spotlighted many secrets of life to be unraveled. They supplied different kinds of knowledge about the human body and mind as well as alternative paths to understanding social and environmental maladjustments. In short, there were different possible human sciences. Why then did the Rockefeller Foundation's "Science of Man" agenda privilege a molecular vision of life? The answer to this question is embedded in the matrix that linked the particular forms of social control sought by that agenda with the specific kinds of control supplied by the new biology.

The Rockefeller Foundation and "Social Control"

The sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross coined the term "social control" in 1894 as an answer to the debate between capitalism and socialism in which he argued that class conflict and social inequality were inevitable but that "society" had to modify individual feelings, ideas, and behavior to conform to social interests — rather than nationalizing the means of production and exchange as advocated by socialists, "social control" advocated the nationalization of the thoughts, feelings, and desires that would drive the private sector.

The Rockefeller Foundation was founded in 1913, the same year that the Federal Reserve was created by the Rockefellers and related financial interests.

One of its critical missions was to support the development of social control. Trustee Harry Pratt Judson's 1913 policy outline for the foundation categorized its goals into uncontroversial ones like medicine and education and controversial ones that conflicted with human wants, for which "the real hope of ultimate security lies in reinforcing the police power of the state by training of the moral nature so painstaking and so widespread as to restrict these unsocial wants and substitute for them a reasonable self control."

John B. Watson wrote his "Behaviorist Manifesto" in 1913 as well, in which he promoted a new psychology whose "theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior."

By 1925, "social control" had become the dominant paradigm of the social sciences. In his Means of Social Control published that year, F. E. Lumley described the phenomenon as "the practice of putting forth directive stimuli or wish-patterns, their accurate transmission to, and adoption by, others whether voluntarily or involuntarily."

The type of "social control" the Rockefeller Foundation advocated was not necessarily a nefarious type that conspirators would use to control the population for their own ends. Many of the trustees and directors of the Foundation saw the institution of social control for the general good as part of their Christian duty. Raymond Fosdick offers an illustrative example. Fosdick was a foundation trustee, a counselor to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and eventually a Foundation president. He believed that technology was progressing much more rapidly than the understanding of human behavior and that social ills such as the xenophobia that manifested itself as the big red scare and post-WWI racism, were a result of this lag. He thus steered the Rockefeller Foundation towards much greater support for the human sciences than the physical sciences during his presidency in the 1930s.

Herbert Hoover, a product of the 1920s corporate culture that emphasized cooperative projects and teamwork a no longer adhered to nineteenth century ideas about individualism and laissez-faire economics, brought similar views to the highest levels of the federal government with his ascendancy to the presidency in 1929. According to Kay, "Hoover intended to plunge the nation into social programs of a scale and urgency comparable to wartime mobilization." The Chicago sociologist and Rockefeller Foundation advisor William F. Ogburn became a member of Hoover's Committee on Social Trends in the United States. He blamed growing divorce rates, delinquency, crime, mental deficiency, personality difficulties, immigrant assimilation, prostitution, alcoholism, and job instability all on the lag between the development of technology and the development of the science of social control.

The Rockefeller nexus was not in a rush to institute social control. Wickliffe Rose, head of the Foundation's International Education Board, used to remind his colleages, "Remember we are not in a hurry." Fosdick wrote in the 1920s, "There is no royal road to the millenium, no short cut to the promised land."

Molecular Biology As a Means of Social Control and Human Engineering

Scientists who followed Thomas Huxley's 1864 "protoplasmic theory of life" that attributed all physical and mental attributes of life to the physical substance within the cell and shared John B Watson's 1913 theoretical goal of "the prediction and control of behavior" would see the elucidation of the physicochemical foundations of life as the preeminent means of developing a science of social control.

In 1929, the Rockefeller Foundation merged with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and took over the International Education Board's Natural Sciences Division, appointing the physicist Max Mason as its temporary head and as the president of the Foundation. By that time, Mason had, in later Natural Science Division head Warren Weaver's words, developed "a consuming interest in behavioral research and particularly in the possibility that the physical sciences, working closely with and through the biological sciences, could shed new and revealing light on the normal and abnormal behavior of individuals, and ultimately on the social behavior of groups of men."

The "Science of Man" agenda that the Foundation articulated in 1931 called for a greater emphasis on biology and psychology and the special developments in mathematics, physics, and chemistry that are fundamental to those fields, for the purpose of the analyzing and controlling behavior:

Science has made significant progress in the analysis and control of inanimate forces, but science had not made equal advances in the more delicate, more difficult and more important problem of the analysis and control of animate forces.

Edmund E. Day, director of the Foundation's Division of Social Sciences, had written in 1930 that "the validation of the findings of social science [must be] through effective social control," by creating a system of human engineering through communication, advertising, and mass psychology.

The Rockefeller Foundation and Eugenics

The earliest means of making social control into an exact science was found in the promise of genetics. Thomas Huxley's "protoplasmic theory of life" reduced the mental attributes of the person to the physical substance within his cells. The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in 1900 suggested that each of these attributes corresponded to a single "gene" and could thus be controlled by selective breeding. In 1904, Charles B. Davenport under the aegis of the Carnegie Institution of Washington launched the eugenics movement as an alliance of businesses, Protestant churches, the American intelligentsia, and most American geneticists that would address social dysfunction by controlling the breeding of psychological traits they associated with race and class.

The Rockefeller Foundation supported eugenic projects such as the sterilization campaign of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene to restrict breeding of the "feeble-minded." Its sibling philanthropies, the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH) and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) advocated domestic and international programs of birth control and population control that were in part based on eugenic principles.

In the 1920s, the eugenics movement suffered major setbacks with the realizations that many genes were pleiotropic, affecting multiple traits, and many traits were polygenic, being affected by more than one gene. The polemics surrounding sterilization of the unfit and restricting immigration based on race combined with these factors to tarnish the reputation of eugenics as a science.

In 1931, Rockefeller Foundation advisor Frank R. Lillie advocated the pursuit of a scientifically sound eugenics while discarding the polemics and propaganda of the eugenics movement, stressing that the Foundation's biology program "should be kept free from all propaganda concerning eugenics, birth-control, etc.; and in such connections aim merely to furnish the indispensible scientific foundations on which social prophylaxis must depend."

It would not be until after World War II, however, that the Foundation would completely dispense with the language of eugenics. In its 1933 "Science of Man" agenda, the Foundation asked, "Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men?"

Eugenics, however, suffered a much greater setback in the late 1940s than it had suffered in the 1920s. Kay notes a striking linguistic discontinuity between the Foundation's policy descriptions written in the 1930s and early 1940s and those written after the social taboos surrounding the Holocaust developed. Buzzwords such as "understanding" and "international cooperation" appeared as "social control," "eugenics," and "rationalization of human behavior" disappeared.

Already by 1943, the eugenics movement was declining, or at least going into hiding. Pasadena, California business leader and Caltech Associate Ezra Gosney had founded the Human Betterment Association (HBA) in 1928, the same year the Rockefeller-supported biology division at Caltech was formed. The HBA was devoted to the mass sterilization of the unfit — indeed, by 1940 half of the 30,000 sterilizations performed in the country had been performed in California — and its literature lamented the mental degeneration that was supposedly occurring because "families that send their children to an institution for the feeble-minded average twice as large as families that send a child to the university," stating emphatically that "it is time for society to act." With Gosney's death in 1942, however, Caltech absorbed the HBF and established the Gosney Research Fund, to "be devoted in perpetuity to the promotion of research into the biological bases of human qualities and for making known the results of research for the public interest," a substantial watering down of eugenic language.

By the late 1950s, however, the scientific establishment began flirting with a new science-based eugenics openly again. Linus Pauling, a critical leader of the Rockefeller-supported Caltech program, stated the following:

It will not be enough just to develop ways of treating the hereditary defects. We shall have to find some way to purify the pool of human germ plasma so that there will not be so many seriously defective children born . . . We are going to have to institute birth control, population control.

Joshua Lederberg, co-discoverer of genetic recombination in bacteria, held a similar view, which he believed to be popular among the scientific establishment:

[T]he ultimate application of molecular biology would be the direct control of nucleotide sequences in human chromosomes, coupled with recognition, selection and integration of the desired genes, of which the existing population furnishes a considerable variety. These notions of a future eugenics are, I think, the popular view of the distant role of molecular biology in human evolution.

By the late 1960s, Pauling even suggested a disturbing "yellow star" policy of eugenic prophylaxis:

There should be tattooed on the forehead of every young person a symbol showing possession of the sickle-cell gene or whatever other similar gene . . . It is my opinion that legislation along this line, compulsory testing for defective genes before marriage, and some form of semi-public display of this possession, should be adopted.

Caltech's Roert Sinsheimer, however, predicted that genetic engineering would bring us a more democratic eugenics:

The old eugenics was limited to a numerical enhancement of the best of our existing gene pool. The new eugenics would permit in principle the conversion of all the unfit to the highest genetic level.

Most of the scientists making such pronouncements in the late 1960s, according to Kay, later retracted them and admitted they had been based on social and scientific naivete. But Kay compellingly argues that the pronouncements nevertheless present us with two important historical lessons — that the progress of science results from a synthesis of the mutually reinforcing scientific and social imaginations, and that the quest for science-based social control is a resilient and durable one that has, while being repeatedly modified, resurfaced in the mind of scientists and other elites repeatedly over the course of the twentieth century.

Unconnected Dots — Allen Dulles and the CIA's MKULTRA Program

While Lily Kay provides an excellent analysis of the development of the Caltech molecular biology program, she provides us with many dots peripheral to this focus that she never connects. She states that in 1948 the Council on Foreign Relations under the leadership of Allen Dulles undertook a research project for the shaping of the industrial and agricultural development of the post-World War II world that supplied guidelines to Rockefeller Foundation interests abroad, while his brother John Foster Dulles was simultaneously a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1953, however, John Foster Dulles became the Secretary of State under Eisenhower and Allen Dulles became the head of the CIA. Allen Dulles was head of the CIA until 1961 when he was forced to resign by JFK and was later appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of JFK. Under Allen Dulles, the CIA imported hundreds of Nazi scientists into the military-industrial complex as part of Operation Paperclip. Dulles also oversaw the infamous MKULTRA program, which used LSD and other drugs as mind control agents, and was the basis for the Bourne Trilogy in which Matt Damon recently starred. These programs were documented by the Senate's Church Committee in the 1970s.

Kay quotes F. E. Lumley's 1925 tract, Means of Social Control:

Ideally social control would be in the hands and the interests of the inclusive group whatever it is; practically, however, it is in the hands of, and often in the interests of, some few members who have usurped power and know how to use it.

The mere mention of a connection between the Dulles brothers and the Rockefeller Foundation makes one wonder whether there may have been a dichotomy among the Foundation's trustees between those who wished to wield social control in the public interest and those who wished to wield social control as nefarious conspirators towards their own corrupt ends.

Kay reports that the Foundation's influence over research waned after World War II as the federal government's influence increased, but it appears that the Dulles family simply moved its pursuit of mind control techniques underground as the new CIA, being the first such organization to persist during peacetime, provided the opportunity for scientific research hidden from public view.

The Dulles brothers were also lawyers for Union Banking Corporation (UBC) before and during World War II while Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker sat on its board. UBC brokered many deals in support of the Hitler regime right through the end of the war, and Bush was prosecuted for them under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The support for the Hitler regime and the MKULTRA program indicates that the Dulles brothers may have had much more extreme and nefarious ideas about eugenics, social control, and human engineering than other Rockefeller Foundation leaders like Raymond Fosdick had.

These connections deserve to be elucidated by reputable, scholarly research of Kay's caliber and it is unfortunate that Kay chose to avoid going down that path.

More Dots to Connect — The Rockefeller Foundation and the UN World Population Panel

Kay briefly mentions that the Rockefeller Foundation eventually moved on from supporting domestic interest in social control to supporting international concerns with overpopulation. The UN World Population Panel, headed by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, prepared a document in 1969 entitled "World Population: A Challenge to the United Nations and Its System of Agencies," however, that suggests the Rockefellers' interest in social control never waned.

"Contraceptive techniques (conventional and new, such as the oral steroid and intra-uterine device) can be available to parents wishing to plan their families and to governments wishing to plan their populations," the document stated.

The development of a world population program, spearheaded by the UN, which it referred to as "the world's highest authority" and "mankind's global agency," would require wholesale modification of societal values:

But even if the 'perfect pill' could be found, many serious problems would remain. Reducing fertility does not depend only on an efficient means of contraception. Fundamental values and attitudes of society are involved. Patterns of child-bearing, sometimes forming the basis of a society's cultural life, need to be modified. Deep-seated psychological, sociological and economic prejudices in favor of large families may have to be countered. Religious preconceptions must be overcome. . . . Equally important will be the effect on the attitude of the medical profession which is often less than totally committed to the family planning effort. Insofar as the training doctors have traditionally received teaches them to think of preserving rather than preventing life, this is understandable. Nevertheless it remains somewhat ironic that medical men, who were so largely responsible for creating the population problem by their magnificent achievements in the field of death control, have been reluctant to solve it by similar efforts in the field of birth control.

Achieving this form of social control would require control of mass media:

The press, radio, television and movies can play an important part in legitimizing the concept of family planning and in developing broad community acceptance of the principles of responsible parenthood. UNESCO should provide technical advices about the use of mass-media in family planning programs and design major projects in this area.

The document suggested that the World Council of Churches and other non-governmental organizations should be used to achieve "total involvement" of the community, that systems of taxation should be designed to discourage high fertility, and that teachers should train students in "population awareness" and "appropriate attitudes toward family size."

Some teachers have apparently recently gone off the deep end trying to teach their students this, like Eric Pianka.

The New Frontier in Social Control: Zbigniew Brzezinski's Technetronic Age

Zbigniew Brzezinski brought the idea of the Trilateral Commission to David Rockefeller in the early 1970s. Once formed, its members occupied top spots in presidential cabinets from Carter through the present day. Brzezinski was National Security Advisor under Carter, had a hand in the formation of the Mujaheddin, precursor to Al-Qaeda, and played lesser roles in foreign policy under Reagan and Bush. He endorsed Barak Obama for president in September 2007 while his son Ian worked for the McCain campaign.

David Rockefeller, for his part, extends his influence far beyond the Trilateral Commission:

Brzezinski wrote a 1968 article entitled "America in the Technetronic Age" in the journal Encounter,which was co-founded by the Trotskyist-turned-neoconservative Irving Kristol and which was reportedly funded by the CIA. In it, Brzezinski promised that, not molecular biology, but electronic technology would lead to the perfect means of social control:

Human conduct will become less spontaneous and less mysterious — more predetermined and subject to deliberate "programming." . . . The same techniques could serve to impose well-nigh total political surveillance on every citizen, putting into much sharper relief than is the case today the question of privacy. . . . The achievement-oriented society might give way to the amusement-focused society, with essentially spectator spectacles (mass sports, TV) providing an opiate for increasingly purposeless masses. . . . In the technetronic society, the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.

Brzezinski identified a major problem of nineteenth and twentieth century industrial capitalism as the confrontation of opposing values between capital and labor classes. Two things would accomplish the resolution to this problem. First, private and public institutions would melt together: "As economic power becomes inseparably linked with political power, it becomes more invisible and the sense of individual futility increases." Second, technological programming of the population's values would allow the cultivation of talent for the "meritocratic democracy" from even among the bottom rungs of society: "The recruitment and advancement of social talent is yet to extend to the poorest and the most underprivileged, but that too is coming. No one can tell whether this will suffice to meet the unfolding challenge, but the increasingly cultivated and programmed American society, led by a meritocratic democracy, may stand a better chance."

Brzezinski advocated the death of the nation-state in favor of a world government run by interlocking networks of institutions that were a result of the blending together of the public and private spheres. He expanded on this in his 1970 book, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, in which he stated that the coming computer information grid, presumably meaning the Internet, would be used to gradually melt governments into one another, and that the World Bank could be used to establish a global taxation system. Brzezinski believed, however, that the aim to abolish national governments should be done subtly and quietly over the course of gradual regionalization, so as not to provoke adverse reactions from "the masses." He described the need for this subtlety in his 1968 article:

International co-operation will be necessary in almost every facet of life: to reform and to develop more modern educational systems, to promote new sources of food supply, to accelerate economic development, to stimulate technological growth, to control climate, to disseminate new medical knowledge. However, because the new elites have a vested interest in their new nation-states and because of the growing xenophobia among the masses in the third world, the nation-state will remain for a long time the primary focus of loyalty, especially for newly liberated and economically backward peoples. To predict loudly its death, and to act often as if it were dead, could prompt (as it did partially in Europe) an adverse reaction from those whom one would wish to influence. Hence, regionalism will have to be promoted with due deference to the symbolic meaning of national sovereignty — and preferably also by encouraging those concerned themselves to advocate regional approaches.

Conclusions: Does Social Control Even Work?

Eugenics, genetic engineering (which was part of Pauling's promise of "orthomolecular psychiatry"), molecular pharmacology, and television have all failed to cure divorce, alcoholism, prostitution, delinquency, crime, mental deficiency, job instability, and all the other ills that social control was promised to cure. And the Internet, despite Brzezinski's predictions, so far has served to undermine the established order and provide a way out of the mass media effect far more than it has served the purpose of dissolving the nation-state.

Television may indeed have become a distraction and perhaps for some people even an opiate, but none of the positive promises of social control have materialized. A 2005 study found that the lifetime prevalence of depressive, anxiety, impulse control, and substance abuse disorders — about fifty percent — is twice as high for people born after 1945 than for those born earlier, and the proportion of Americans suffering from three or more disorders — nearly a fifth — is more than triple.

While many of the promoters of social control, such as Raymond Fosdick, may have had genuinely altruistic motivations, and while others, such as the Dulles brothers, may have had much more nefarious plans, the historical evidence seems to suggest that attempts to engage in top-down manipulation of culture for any purpose only contribute to social ills.

Gideon Rachman, a columnist for the Financial Times recently remarked that "for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible." He pointed out that the financial crisis and climate change were pushing governments toward more global solutions.

Twelve days after he wrote that article, however, the Native American Lakota People of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming seceded from the United States and formed a tax-free republic. Their solution to the financial crisis was not world government, but more localized government and a non-fractional reserve bank where all currency is backed by gold and silver.

As long as the ability to engage in private initiative exists, it will undermine cartels. As long as social ills are solved by crushing private initiative, social ills will increase. This seems to be a governing law of nature.

Lily E. Kay's book, The Molecular Vision of Life, leaves many dots for us to connect, but it is a fascinating account of how the Rockefeller Foundation shaped the development of molecular biology and Caltech, and how the social aims of scientific and associated elites shape the development of science. And the failure of the "salvation through experts" that she documents is an important reminder of the need to maintain decentralized power in society, and to cure social ills by providing good examples in our own social lives, contributing directly to those in need, and encouraging others to do the same.

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Rockefeller-Foundation-Social-Control-Eugenics.html

Deselection of the Bottom 8%: Lessons from Eugenics for Modern School Reform

By Cedar Riener | July 19, 2011

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1927)

The majority of our teachers are hardworking and effective. But the previous estimates point clearly to the key imperative of eliminating the drag of the bottom teachers.

Eric Hanushek (2011)

One common strain of modern education reform has a direct, yet familiar logic: An education crisis persists despite more spending, smaller classes, or curricular changes. We have ignored the major cause of student achievement: teacher quality. Seniority and tenure have diluted the pool of talented teachers and impeded student learning. Reformers such as Michelle Rhee have acted on this assumption, implementing test-based accountability measures, merit pay, and lesser job protections. Unfortunately, the current educational reform movement shares its logic with the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement, which in efforts to improve our gene pool, wrote a horrific chapter in our history.

In suggesting this provocative comparison, I hope to guide readers through three shared errors. Both eugenics and modern school reform view education too deterministically, share a faith in standardized tests, and exaggerate the fixedness of traits. Considering this comparison requires a reconsideration of early eugenics, not as merely precursors to Nazis, but as an optimistic and Progressive movement. What is now disdained as pseudoscientific racism was once widely accepted. To learn from history, however, we must not dismiss our ancestors as evil or senseless. Recognizing the noble intentions of the past allows us to compare it to the present and find the same misguided assumptions about human nature.

What was eugenics? In the decades after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859) loud protests became acceptance, and many hoped to combine Darwin’s findings with newly re-discovered genetic mechanisms of inheritance. Scientific research satisfied a collective urge for deterministic explanations; if our genes determine our intelligence, our personalities, and our futures, this knowledge could be used to improve humanity. How could a society use these discoveries to improve livestock, but refuse to use them for the betterment of society?

The first error of the eugenicists, and of the school reformers, is a deterministic view of a complex and uncertain process. The eugenicists began with Darwin’s animal models and findings that diseases run in families and jumped to the conclusion that genes determine everything from criminality to genius. Today’s school reformers begin with the finding that the teacher is the relatively largest in-school predictor of academic achievement as measured by test scores, and quickly jump to: ". . . the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income — it is the quality of their teacher." Without a doubt, teachers matter. But to argue that a child’s teacher is the single most important factor in school success writ large is an unsupported leap from suggesting that certain test scores are more influenced by good teaching than by other conveniently measured variables.

If good genes singly cause success, and good teachers are responsible for student learning, then how do we define "good"? Many eugenicists and school reformers dismiss the problem. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton wrote, "There is a sufficient consensus of opinion as to what kind of human beings are desirable in an ideal state, so that we need not trouble ourselves about further details for some time to come." The school reformers agree: We all know the difference between a great teacher and a poor one; we can worry about the details later. A great teacher imparts great learning, a poor teacher doesn’t.

The second common error becomes apparent once the need arises to concretely measure quality. Both eugenics and modern school reform share an overabundant faith in standardization, and in testing in particular. Eugenics arose just as the first intelligence tests were being created. Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, who adapted a pioneering French intelligence test into the IQ test, was an early supporter of eugenics. Many statistical techniques now used by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek to measure teacher quality through student achievement were invented by Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Raymond Cattell, all pioneers in intelligence testing, and often supporters of eugenics ideas. Of course, "achievement" is now used instead of intelligence, as if the tests are entirely different from intelligence tests of days past. The tests have changed, but the unbounded faith in testing has not.

I do not wish impugn the statistical techniques themselves, or doubt progress in measuring what we aim to measure. However, in each moment, a refinement of the science of testing has been mistaken for readiness to apply to public policyand specific individual cases. A strong general relationship between conveniently measurable variables becomes riddled with errors when applied to individual personnel decisions. As these tools leave the lab (or the economist’s model) and enter policy reality, the uncertainty magnifies the bias and corruption that science is supposed to prevent. Whether using early IQ tests to reject immigrants at Ellis Island, or using Value-Added Measures (VAM) scores to fire or reward teachers, policymakers convinced they are using the latest microscope, are later seen holding a distorted mirror.

The third error is a belief that important traits are fixed rather than changeable. Eugenics advocates regarded many human traits as fixed and hence sought to manage reproduction. Early supporters of eugenics began positively, by encouraging society’s winners. Galton’s book Hereditary Genius documented how genius ran in families, using the latest statistical techniques (some of which he invented; his contributions to statistics were impressive). "Positive" eugenics found acceptance among Progressives eager to use the tools of science improve their country’s future. Contests for "Fitter Families" and "Better Babies" were a staple at state fairs from 1915 through the 1920s. Another example of positive eugenics was a bonus (bankrolled by a conservative, segregationist organization) given to Air Corps officers. Some officers were offered a $4,000 bonus for fathering a child in 1940.

Although these relatively harmless positive eugenics efforts remained limited, negative eugenics became the most popular aspect of the eugenics movement, "successfully" promoting involuntary sterilization. Tens of thousands of poor women in mental institutions were involuntarily sterilized. In the Deep South, the "Mississippi appendectomy" was part of a systematic effort to reduce the "undesirable" population. These efforts were only accepted because of the premise of rigid and unchanging genetic traits (race, but also intelligence).

School reformers are not so stark or broad. For example, involuntarily sterilization is different from telling someone to find another job. Further, overt racial resentment and competition is mostly absent from the current wave of education reform. But their writings and policies make it clear that reformers often regard good teaching as a permanent trait. This position is evident in the priorities of standard-bearer Teach for America, which places far more emphasis on recruitment and selection than on their five-week training program. Rhetoric that refers to "teacher talent" instead of "teaching effectiveness" reflects different assumptions about the possibility of improving teaching skills. These assumptions suggest improvement through performance bonuses and firing as opposed to support for training or classroom resources. Modern reform hopes to shape teacher selection, not behavior in the classroom. While suggesting "lowering barriers to entry" by reducing certification requirements, many reformers seek to improve the teacher corps through selection pressures, via increased competition from better teachers.

Both sets of reformers share good intentions. Just as many of the current school reformers consider themselves to be progressive, American eugenics was considered a progressive movement, and was often couched in terms of concern for the children and for the future of society. Like modern school reform, eugenics supporters included billionaire philanthropists (John D. Rockefeller), government luminaries (Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, President Theodore Roosevelt), non-profit activists (birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger), and eminent scientists (Alexander Graham Bell, Francis Galton, and several Nobel Prize winners).

I contend that policy efforts urgently focused on improving through selection, rather than supporting all who have chosen a profession, are doomed to fail. Despite confidence that we know the right people, and that science can reliably identify them, science has taken only small tentative steps using convenient measures. There is some genetic basis for intelligence. Teacher quality does matter. But the uncertainty and flexibility of both intelligence and teachers makes policy applications counterproductive. A few bold scientists, hoping to apply limited findings to solve social problems, make ridiculously confident assertions (e.g., "Getting rid of the bottom 8% of teachers would be worth 100 trillion dollars for our economy"). A few wealthy individuals, eager to use their fortunes for social good, support these assertions.

Stephen Murdoch discusses IQ testing at Ellis Island:

 

The three errors above are human errors, often stemming from sympathy and a desire to see a simple yet hidden lever to alleviate injustice in our society. We see a monster guarding that lever, behaving poorly as we try to move it. Yet despite our noble intentions, we will not be remembered as heroes or Supermen, striking down a monster. We will be not be saluted for our urgency. The monsters in our society are not unintelligent degenerates or teachers unions. When teachers are fired in front of crowded classrooms, escorted out by security guards, when standardized scores areprinted in the newspaper to shame "ineffective" teachers, when we say that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans, we will not be remembered for putting students first. When we agree that we need a dictator to slay those monsters keeping us from greatness, we are the monsters. And as our children get older, if they aren’t too busy taking a reading test to read a history book, they will look at us with uneasy shame and ask us why we didn’t do anything to stop it.

About the Author: Cedar Riener is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Randolph-Macon College, where he teaches General Psychology, History of Psychology, as well as courses in Sensation and Perception. His academic research focuses on embodied perception, or the way in which the state of our body influences our perception of the world. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Virginia and an A.B. in the History of Science from Harvard University. Several members of his family are teachers and involved in public education, which might explain his occasional lapses from scientific detachment into passionate advocacy for the profession of teaching. He blogs at Cedar’s Digest and can be found on Twitter (@criener)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/07/19/deselection-of-the-bottom-8-lessons-from-eugenics-for-modern-school-reform/

North Carolina's reparation for the dark past of American eugenics

North Carolina's compensation to victims of forced sterilisation is a chance to illuminate a gruesome US tradition of racial 'science'

by Edwin Black
Tuesday 28 June 2011, guardian.co.uk

Oil magnate John D Rockefeller, in 1930. Millions of dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and the railroad fortune of the Harrimans, funded racial 'science' eugenics programmes in the US and Nazi Germany.

Twenty-seven American states joined a decades-long pseudo-scientific crusade to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior "master race". Their misguided utopian quest was called eugenics. But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial reparat.... Just how much North Carolina should pay is now the subject of a historically wrenching debate.

Eugenics was a fraudulent social theory that a better society could be created by eliminating "undesirable" human blood lines and promoting the desirable types. Race science sprang to life in the socioeconomically convulsive first decade of the 20th century, during which Asians, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Native Americans, blacks and other ethnic groups and racial mixtures flowed into US cities, creating overcrowding and class conflict. The intellectual, academic, scientific and financial elite believed better men and women could be cultivated using the same techniques a farmer would employ to create a better herd of cattle or field of wheat – eliminate the bad stock and proliferate the good. They planned to eliminate all those who did not resemble themselves, 10% at a time – that is, as many as 14 million people, at a slice. Their eventual goal was to eliminate as much as 90% of the population from the reproductive future of the United States.

The preferred method was gas chambers and other forms of euthanasia. The first public euthanasia laws were introduced into the Ohio legislature in 1908. That measure was unsuccessful, as were other death panel bills. The next best thing was forced surgical sterilisation under specific state authority that was validated as the law of the land in the US supreme court by one of America's most stellar jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1927, Holmes ruled on an obviously collusive lawsuit seeking to justify the forced sterilisation of three generations of Carrie Buck's family. Holmes infamously noted:

"It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind … Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Ultimately, more than 60,000 Americans, mainly women, were coercively sterilised. Many victims were systematically tricked into thinking it was a harmless procedure. At all times, California led the nation in the number of such sterilisations.

America's eugenics movement, powered by millions of dollars from the opulent Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, sought to extend its reach into Germany. Rockefeller and Carnegie spent Depression-era fortunes to finance the worst Nazi doctors and race institutes. Hitler promptly implemented American precepts with stunning ferocity and velocity. Among the chief recipients of Rockefeller money was top Nazi doctor, Otmar von Verschuer. During the Holocaust, Verschuer's assistant, Josef Mengele, continued eugenic twin research at Auschwitz; Mengele's efforts yielded monstrous experiments.

In the tear-stained ashes of post-Nazi Europe, Americans recoiled at the fruit of their official "raceology". Collective amnesia set in. Eugenics was renamed genetics, and states began repealing or dead-lettering their sterilisation-enabling laws.

But not North Carolina, which continued the practice for years, with a vestigial race law designed and purportedly deployed to eliminate poverty. Thousands more were sterilised, mainly poor blacks. Now, the state, under the weight of a multibillion-dollar deficit and a rising black political power base, is struggling to augment an official apology for its racist ways with financial compensation.

Some have suggested $20,000 per survivor. Others suggest $50,000. An estimated 2,900 medically ravaged victims may be qualified. But can you write a wrong by merely writing a cheque?

The true victims of this tragic national disgrace are not only the survivors now telling their stories, but millions more never born. How do you compensate people and families who do not even exist because of pernicious eugenic laws that criminalised or negated interracial marriage, murdered helpless patients by institutional medical abuse, and sterilised "undesirable" segments of entire generations?

While money to victims who present themselves can constitute a token of governmental remorse, the best compensation is illumination. Spend resources to document the crime, teach the revelations in our schools and ingrain the stain, so that the next wave of race scientists will be met with the historical imperative "never again".

Then, the cheques can actually make a downpayment on righting a wrong.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/28/north-carolina-forced-sterilization

Here Comes the Master Race

By Daniel J. Kevles
Published: October 5, 2003; New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/here-comes-the-master-race.html

EUGENICS -- the idea of manipulating human genes to the end of improving individuals, groups or entire populations -- is strongly associated with the Nazi programs of sterilization, euthanasia and genocide. But during the first third of the 20th century, eugenics movements flourished in many nations, including the United States. In the last few years, newspaper articles have called attention to -- and prompted official apologies for -- state-mandated sterilizations done legally to rid society of its alleged human trash, the ''weak'' in the title of Edwin Black's new book, notably in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon and California.

Black is the author previously of ''IBM and the Holocaust,'' a work strongly suggesting that the company, with its punch-card machines, knowingly assisted Hitler's brutalities. His ''War Against the Weak,'' apparently written with similar intent, is a muckraking book about a subject incontestably awash in muck. In the vein of the genre, it is a stew rich in facts and spiced with half-truths, exaggerations and distortions. The most pungent ingredient is its central thesis: eugenic doctrines and policies favoring ''Nordic superiority'' were in fact invented in the United States, were developed in alliance with American wealth and power, and were then exported, inspiring Hitler and achieving their ultimate realization in the Holocaust.

Black pursues his thesis across largely familiar ground -- the eugenic theories that attributed costly physical conditions and socially deleterious behaviors to genetics, accounting for many of them as expressions of ''feeble-mindedness''; the claims in the United States that such deficiencies occurred with particularly high frequency among African-Americans and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe; the respectable standing of eugenic science at leading universities, state agencies and institutions, public interest organizations and research installations, notably the Eugenics Record Office, which was part of what became the department of genetics at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and which was financed in the main by the widow of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman and in part by grants from the Rockefeller philanthropies. Black rightly observes that eugenic research into heredity combined ''equal portions of gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked together by elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter of a genuine science.''

The eugenics movement provided a biological rationale for the Immigration Act of 1924, which discriminated against immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and for laws in a number of states that restricted interracial marriage. It scored a major victory with the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, in which the United States Supreme Court, by a vote of 8 to 1, upheld the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenic sterilization law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing for the majority that the principle that upheld vaccination for the good of the community's physical health could sustain cutting the fallopian tubes for the benefit of its social health.

Black has used the considerable work on eugenics, assiduously checking sources, including my own, and drawn on original published and archival materials in the United States and Europe, collecting some 50,000 documents, he tells us, with the aid of numerous volunteers working in several dozen repositories. If he covers what is in the main a well-known story, he adds to it substantial new detail, much of it chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States. Some American eugenicists argued for killing the ''unfit,'' and a few indeed practiced it by subjecting newborns to euthanasia (not a merciful death for those in pain, Black points out, but a painless death for those ''deemed unworthy of life'').

In support of his main thesis, Black stresses that European eugenicists were linked with their American counterparts through international organizations, meetings, correspondence and visits several made to the United States, some to work at the Eugenics Record Office. German eugenicists praised American policies, research and writings and incorporated accounts of them into their works. In ''Mein Kampf,'' Hitler himself praised America's sterilization laws and immigration restriction act. Black also emphasizes that beginning in the 20's and continuing well into the Nazi period, the Rockefeller Foundation provided sizable funds for research at three eugenically oriented research institutes in Germany. All, he writes, would ''make their mark in the history of medical murder.''

True enough, eugenic actions were pioneered in the United States, and a number of American eugenicists praised the Nazi sterilization law, noting it was devoid of racial intent and robustly consistent with Buck v. Bell. But it greatly oversimplifies matters to say that the American example pointed Nazi Germany down the road to the Holocaust. Many American eugenicists opposed the Nazis outright, and even the most avid enthusiasts of sterilization turned against them after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws. Black basically argues that because the mad beast had some American markings, its chief features must have all been bred in the United States. But as he himself acknowledges, the nations of Europe had their own, indigenous eugenics movements. Notions of Nordic superiority had strong, independent roots abroad, and so did ideas of racial improvement through measures like sterilization. The Nazis did draw on American precedents, but Black neglects to weigh the impact of the imports against the force of native impulses.

Black writes that in the 30's refugees were denied entry to the United States ''because of the Carnegie Institution's openly racist anti-immigrant activism,'' ignoring the far more powerful forces, including anti-Semitism and economic fears, that kept the gates closed. While some Rockefeller Foundation money did go, at least indirectly, to some anti-Semitic scientists and racially oriented research in Nazi Germany, the foundation increasingly aimed at supporting individuals engaged in objective investigations of the genetics of nonhuman organisms as well as of human beings, part of a broad trend then beginning elsewhere in Europe and in the United States to liberate human genetics from socially prejudicial eugenics. Black deals with these efforts dismissively, writing that the Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, remained committed to the goal of ''creating a superior race.''

More important, the fundamental dynamics of the eugenics movement are only partly illuminated by compilations of its cruelties, its philanthropic patronage and its institutional footholds. Eugenics was an insidious doctrine, unabashed in its aim of deploying up-to-date science to solve social problems, even if that meant writing the ostensible dregs of society out of the American social compact. It nevertheless attracted many adherents among the white middle class, not only conservatives but also a number of disparate progressives, including, for example, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger and Rabbi Stephen Wise. Despite its imperfections, Black's book does prompt us to wonder what in medical genetics and biotechnology we are taking socially and morally for granted today that our descendants might indict us for tomorrow.

Daniel J. Kevles's books include ''In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity.'' He teaches history at Yale.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/here-comes-the-master-race.html

His Royal Virus Prince Philip - In His Own Words

 

"In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."
Prince Philip, in his Foreward to If I Were an Animal; United Kingdom, Robin Clark Ltd., 1986.

“I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the ``cull'' to the size of the surplus population.”
Lecture to the European Council of International Schools. Montreaux, Switzerland, Nov. 14, 1986.

What has been described as the "balance of nature'' is simply nature's system of self-limitation. Fertility and breeding success create the surpluses after allowing for the replacement of the losses. Predation, climatic variation, disease, starvation ~ and in the case of the inappropriately named Homo sapiens, wars and terrorism ~ are the principal means by which population numbers are kept under some sort of control.
Introduction to "The Population Factor'' section of Down to Earth by HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1988.

I suspect that the single most important gift of progress to conservation has been the development of human contraception techniques. Yes, but you can't legislate these problems away. You've got to get people to understand the need for it: the more important people, the ones who have responsibilities have got to do it because they're at the receiving end. They've got to accept the measures. Interview with HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in People magazine, Dec. 21, 1981 titled "Vanishing Breeds Worry Prince Philip, But Not as Much as Overpopulation.

The object of the WWF is to "conserve'' the system as a whole; not to prevent the killing of individual animals. Those who are concerned about their conservation of nature accept that all species are prey to some other species. They accept that most species produce a surplus that is capable of being culled without in any way threatening the survival of the species as a whole.

It is curious how many philosophers from Plato to Keynes' time have believed in and advocated the control of society by "philosopher kings.'' According to Plato, "its kings must be those who have shown the greatest ability in philosophy,'' but ~ realistically ~ he added, "and the greatest aptitude for war.''
The Chancellor's Lecture, Salford University, June 4, 1982.

World Evolutionary Humanism, Eugenics and UNESCO - Its Purpose and Its Philosophy Part 1

By Brent Jessop

 

“That [fundamental] task [of UNESCO] is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purpose. This is opportune, since this is the first time in history that the scaffolding and the mechanisms for world unification have become available, and also the first time that man has had the means (in the shape of scientific discovery and its applications) of laying a world-wide foundation for the minimum physical welfare of the entire human species. And it is necessary, for at the moment two opposing philosophies of life confront each other from the West and from the East, and not only impede the achievement of unity but threaten to become the foci of actual conflict.

You may categorise the two philosophies as two super-nationalisms; or as individualism versus collectivism; or as the American versus the Russian way of life; or as capitalism versus communism; or as Christianity versus Marxism; or in half a dozen other ways. The fact of their opposition remains and the further fact that round each of them are crystallising the lives and thoughts and political aspirations of hundreds of millions of human beings. Can this conflict be avoided, these opposites be reconciled, this antitheses be resolved in a higher syntheses? I believe not only that this can happen, but that, through the inexorable dialectic of evolution, it must happen – only I do not know whether it will happen before or after another war.” – 61

As the first Director of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975) wrote a paper entitled UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946) [1] in which he outlined his vision for the newly created international organisation (which grew out of the League of Nations’ Institute of Intellectual Co-operation). According to Huxley, the guiding philosophy of UNESCO should be what he termed, World Evolutionary Humanism. The following article describes this philosophy and its relation to eugenics.

Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist, humanist, and ardent internationalist held many titles including: Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-42), first president of the British Humanist Association (1963), Vice-President (1937-44) and President (1959-62) of the British Eugenics Society. He was also a founding member of the World Wild Life Fund, coined the term “transhumanism” (as a means of disguising eugenics) and gave two Galton memorial lectures (1936, 1962). Huxley also received many awards including the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society (1956), UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize (1953) and the Special Award of the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population (1959) to name but a few. He is also the Grandson of Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog) and brother of author Aldous Huxley.

UNESCO Philosophy of World Evolutionary Humanism

From UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy:

[Italicised text is original emphasis and bolded text is added by author.]

“But in order to carry out its work, an organisation such as Unesco needs not only a set of general aims and objects for itself, but also a working philosophy, a working hypothesis concerning human existence and its aims and objects, which will dictate, or at least indicate, a definite line of approach to its problems.” – 6

“Its [UNESCO's] main concern is with peace and security and with human welfare, in so far as they can be subserved by the educational and scientific and cultural relations of the peoples of the world. Accordingly its outlook must, it seems, be based on some form of humanism. Further, that humanism must clearly be a world humanism, both in the sense of seeking to bring in all the peoples of the world, and of treating all peoples and all individuals within each people as equals in terms of human dignity, mutual respect, and educational opportunity. It must also be a scientific humanism, in the sense that the application of science provides most of the material basis for human culture, and also that the practice and the understanding of science need to be integrated with that of other human activities. It cannot, however, be materialistic, but must embrace the spiritual and mental as well as the material aspects of existence, and must attempt to do so on a truly monistic, unitary philosophic basis.

Finally it must be an evolutionary as opposed to a static or ideal humanism. It is essential for Unesco to adopt an evolutionary approach. If it does not do so, its philosophy will be a false one, its humanism at best partial, at worst misleading. We will justify this assertion in detail later. Here it is only necessary to recall that in the last few decades it has been possible to develop an extended or general theory of evolution which can provide the necessary intellectual scaffolding for modern humanism. It not only shows us man’s place in nature and his relations to the rest of the phenomenal universe, not only gives us a description of the various types of evolution and the various trends and directions within them, but allows us to distinguish desirable and undesirable trends, and to demonstrate the existence of progress in the cosmos. And finally it shows us man as now the sole trustee of further evolutionary progress, and gives us important guidance as to the courses he should avoid and those he should pursue if he is to achieve that progress.

An evolutionary approach provides the link between natural science and human history; it teaches us the need to think in the dynamic terms of speed and direction rather than in the static ones of momentary position or quantitative achievement; it not only shows us the origin and biological roots of our human values, but gives us some basis and external standards for them among the apparently neutral mass of natural phenomena; and it is indispensable in enabling us to pick out, among the chaotic welter of conflicting tendencies to-day, those trends and activities and methods which Unesco should emphasise and facilitate.

Thus the general philosophy of Unesco should, it seems, be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background. What are the further implications, practical as well as theoretical, of such an outlook? We must examine these in some detail before coming down to a consideration of Unesco’s activity section by section.” – 7

“Our first task must be to clarify the notion of desirable and undesirable directions of evolution, for on this will depend our attitude to human progress – to the possibility of progress in the first place, and then to its definition.” – 8

“But once more a new and more efficient method of [evolutionary] change is available. It becomes available to man through his distinctively human properties of speech and conceptual thought, just as Natural Selection became available to life as a result of its distinctive properties of reproduction and variation. Objectively speaking, the new method consists of cumulative tradition, which forms the basis of that social heredity by means of which human societies change and develop. But the new method also has a subjective aspect of great importance. Cumulative tradition, like all other distinctively human activities, is largely based on conscious processes – on knowledge, on purpose, on conscious feeling, and on conscious choice. Thus the struggle for existence that underlies natural selection is increasingly replaced by conscious selection, a struggle between ideas and values in consciousness. [...]

Evolution in the human sector consists mainly of changes in the form of society; in tools and machines, in new ways of utilising the old innate potentialities, instead of in the nature of these potentialities, as in the biological sector. [...] Nor does it mean that man’s innate mental powers could not be improved. They certainly were improved (presumably be [sic] natural selection) in the earliest stages of his career, [...] and they could certainly be improved further by deliberate eugenic measures, if we consciously set ourselves to improve them. Meanwhile, however, it is in social organisation, in machines, and in ideas that human evolution is mostly made manifest.” – 9

Eugenics

In the philosophy outlined above, there is a lot of high sounding idealistic language about equality. For example the quote below.

“Further, that humanism must clearly be a world humanism, both in the sense of seeking to bring in all the peoples of the world, and of treating all peoples and all individuals within each people as equals in terms of human dignity, mutual respect, and educational opportunity.” – 7

Of course, for eugenicists like Huxley, some are more equal than others.

“There are instances of biological inequality which are so gross that they cannot be reconciled at all with the principle of equal opportunity. Thus low-grade mental defectives cannot be offered equality of educational opportunity, nor are the insane equal with the sane before the law or in respect of most freedoms. However, the full implications of the fact of human inequality have not often been drawn and certainly need to be brought out here, as they are very relevant to Unesco’s task. [...]

Still more important, any such generalisations will give us a deeper understanding of the variations of human nature, and in doing so will enable us correctly to discount the ideas of men of this or that type. [...]

There remains the second type of inequality. This has quite other implications; for, whereas variety is in itself desirable, the existence of weaklings, fools, and moral deficients cannot but be bad. It is also much harder to reconcile politically with the current democratic doctrine of equality. In face of it, indeed, the principle of equality of opportunity must be amended to read “equality of opportunity within the limits of aptitude.” ” – 18

“Biological inequality is, of course, the bedrock fact on which all of eugenics is predicated. But it is not usually realised that the two types of inequality have quite different and indeed contrary eugenic implications. The inequality of mere difference is desirable, and the preservation of human variety should be one of the two primary aims of eugenics. But the inequality of level or standard is undesirable, and the other primary aim of eugenics should be the raising of the mean level of all desirable qualities. While there may be dispute over certain qualities, there can be none over a number of the most important, such as a healthy constitution, a high innate general intelligence, or a special aptitude such as that for mathematics or music.

At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for Unesco to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.” – 21

“To adjust the principle of democratic equality to the fact of biological inequality is a major task for the world, and one which will grow increasingly more urgent as we make progress towards realising equality of opportunity. To promote this adjustment, a great deal of education of the general public will be needed as well as much new research; and in both these tasks Unesco can and should co-operate.”

“It is, however, essential that eugenics should be brought entirely within the borders of science, for, as already indicated, in the not very remote future the problem of improving the average quality of human beings is likely to become urgent; and this can only be accomplished by applying the findings of a truly scientific eugenics.” – 37

“The Age of the Common Man: the Voice of the People: majority rule: the importance of a large population: – ideas and slogans such as these form the background of much of our thinking, and tend, unless we are careful, towards the promotion of mediocrity, even if mediocrity in abundance, and at the same time, towards the discouragement of high and unusual quality.” – 15

Evolutionary Values and the Quest for a Restatement of Morality

“Of special importance in man’s evaluation of his own position in the cosmic scheme and of his further destiny is the fact that he is the heir, and indeed the sole heir, of evolutionary progress to date. When he asserts that he is the highest type of organism, he is not being guilty of anthropocentric vanity, but is enunciating a biological fact. Furthermore, he is not merely the sole heir of past evolutionary progress, but the sole trustee for any that may be achieved in the future. From the evolutionary point of view, the destiny of man may be summed up very simply: it is to realise the maximum progress in the minimum time. That is why the philosophy of Unesco must have an evolutionary background, and why the concept of progress cannot but occupy a central position in that philosophy.

The analysis of evolutionary progress gives us certain criteria for judging the rightness or wrongness of our aims and activities, and the desirability or otherwise of the tendencies to be noted in contemporary history – tendencies of which Unesco must take account.” – 12

“Thus Unesco’s activities, while concerned primarily with providing richer development and fuller satisfactions for the individual, must always be undertaken in a social context; and many of its specific tasks will be concerned with the social means towards this general end – the improvement of social mechanisms or agencies, such as educational systems, research organisations, art centres, the press, and so forth. In particular, Unesco must clearly pay special attention to the social mechanism of cumulative tradition in all its aspects, with the aim of ensuring that it is both efficient and rightly directed in regard to its essential function of promoting human evolution.” – 17

“Unesco cannot be neutral in the face of competing values. Even if it were to refuse to make a conscious choice between them, it would find that the necessity for action involved such a choice, so that it would be driven eventually to the unconscious assumption of a system of values. And any such system which is unconsciously assumed is less likely to be true than one which is consciously sought after and studied.” – 39

“Unesco must accordingly promote the study of philosophy as an aid in the clarification of values, for the benefit of mankind in general. It must also do so in order to have its own clearly thought-out scale of values to guide it in its own operations, both positively in what it should undertake or assist, and negatively in what it should avoid or discourage.

Here it will be guided by the philosophy of evolutionary humanism which I adumbrated in my first chapter. Such a philosophy is scientific in that it constantly refers back to the facts of existence. It is the extension and reformulation of Paley’s Natural Theology and those other philosophies which endeavour to deduce the attributes of the Creator from the properties of his creation. [...]

It will accordingly relate its ethical values to the discernible direction of evolution, using the fact of biological progress as their foundation, and shaping the superstructure to fit the principles of social advance. On this basis, there is nothing immutable and eternal about ethics, yet there are still ethical values which are general and lasting – namely those which promote a social organisation which will allow individuals the fullest opportunity for development and self-expression consonant with the persistence and the progress of society.

The social aspect of this dual function imposes itself because social mechanisms provide the chief basis for rapid human evolution, and it is only through improvement in social organisation that progress can be secured. [...]

Further, even if there are broad ethical principles which are general and lasting, yet their detailed formulation will and must change from age to age. The ethics of tribal life differ inevitably from those of feudalism or of industrial civilisation. Our ethical systems to-day are still largely predicated on a pre-scientific and nationally fragmented world. We have to relate them to our new knowledge and our new closeness to each other. [...] In general, we may say, it is becoming necessary to extend our personal ethical judgements and responsibilities to many collective and apparently impersonal actions – in other words to undertake a considerable socialisation of ethics.

It will be one of the major tasks of the Philosophy division of Unesco to stimulate, in conjunction with the natural and the social scientists, the quest for a restatement of morality that shall be in harmony with modern knowledge and adapted to the fresh functions imposed on ethics by the world of to-day.

Still more generally, it will have to stimulate the quest, so urgent in this time of over-rapid transition, for a world philosophy, a unified and unifying background of thought for the modern world.” – 39

Conclusion

The next part of this series describes the purpose of UNESCO, as outlined by Huxley, to mentally prepare the world for global political unification under a single world government. The remaining three parts of this series describe the major mechanisms used by UNESCO: education, science and the creative arts, and the mass media.

[1] Quotes from Julian Huxley, UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946). Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. pdf from UNESCO.