Statism, Health Fascism, and Eugenics

Ugly and coercive health measures have long been with us:

We are NOT learning the lessons of history. I mentioned in a recent piece that the same government that can force you to have an experimental drug injected into your body can force you to do anything – even be sterilised against your will. Critics will think I am out to lunch here, but they simply need to read their history. It has already happened, and not just in Nazi Germany.

It is all part of the eugenics ideology – you know, the idea that we must weed out all the undesirable types and breed a race of superior men and women. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was of course a eugenicist, as were many other respectable types. People like Francis Galton (half-cousin of Charles Darwin), Clarence Darrow, Helen Keller, George Bernard Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sidney Webb, and John Maynard Keynes were also key proponents of eugenics.

So the idea and practice has been around for a while, and there is nothing to prevent states from pursuing this evil agenda again – all in the name of public health and safety. One of the most important volumes looking at this pernicious movement is the classic 2003 work by Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. His opening paragraphs will suffice here:

Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race.

 

To perpetuate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined with almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological rationales for persecution. Employing a hazy amalgam of guesswork, gossip, falsified information and polysyllabic academic arrogance, the eugenics movement slowly constructed a national bureaucratic and juridical infrastructure to cleanse America of its “unfit.” Specious intelligence tests, colloquially known as IQ tests, were invented to justify incarceration of a group labeled “feebleminded.” Often the so-called feebleminded were just shy, too good-natured to be taken seriously, or simply spoke the wrong language or were the wrong color. Mandatory sterilization laws were enacted in some twenty-seven states to prevent targeted individuals from reproducing more of their kind. Marriage prohibition laws proliferated throughout the country to stop race mixing. Collusive litigation was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sanctified eugenics and its tactics.

A recent article ties in this older movement with a much-newer one: the Covid hysteria movement. His title is telling: “Did You Ever Notice How the Same Supreme Court Precedent Used to Rationalize Vaccine Mandates Also Justified Involuntary Sterilization?”

He discusses how Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate has been challenged by various US federal courts, and says this:

The federal government generally has no authority to issue regulations requiring civilians to receive vaccines. More of a mixed bag is state vaccine mandates. Some have been upheld, and some have been struck down. What all of the state vaccine bans have in common are they rely in some part on a Supreme Court decision called Jacobson vs. Massachusetts. In 1902, a Swedish pastor named Henning Jacobson was fined by the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for refusal to get a free (does this sound familiar?) smallpox vaccine because Cambridge feared it was facing an outbreak of that disease. In a 7-2 opinion written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, the court upheld Jacobson’s conviction and the $5 fine it brought with it.

He continues:

In short, Justice Harlan upheld the police power of the state in attempting to protect citizens during a public health crisis. Since then, Jacobson has been used to buttress all sorts of rulings. . . . I question whether regulations imposed by executive fiat are legitimate and thus fall under Jacobson. I also have grave doubts that most of the actions taken to “protect” us from the Wuhan virus would qualify as reasonable. I definitely don’t buy any comparison between Wuhan virus and smallpox. Be that as it may, what Jacobson shows is the danger posed to all of us by any law that purports to protect us from some ill-defined threat. The best example of what Jacobson portends, if allowed to continue to metastasize, is exhibited in the 1927 case called Buck vs. Bell.

In that case the Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision that Carrie Buck could be involuntarily sterilized: “She wasn’t alone. She was followed by some 70,000 Americans who were deemed to ‘sap the strength of the State.’ These were the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the chronically indigent, those with low IQs and psychological disorders.”

He then quotes from a New England Journal of Medicine article discussing the smallpox outbreak in Boston in 1901–1903:

In November 1901, the Boston Board of Health ordered “virus squads” to vaccinate men living in inexpensive rooming houses. A reporter for the Boston Globe accompanied a squad one night and described the scene: “Every imaginable threat from civil suits to cold-blooded murder when they got an opportunity to commit it, was made by the writhing, cursing, struggling tramps who were operated upon, and a lot of them had to be held down in their cots, one big policeman sitting on their legs, and another on their heads, while the third held the arms, bared for the doctors.” One “fighting tramp,” who “went down in a heap on the floor” from the blow of a policeman’s club, received both vaccination and suturing of his scalp. In hearings on compulsory vaccination, opponents alleged that in Massachusetts, boards of health “in many cases had acted with autocratic power and forcibly assaulted persons to vaccinate them.”

Wow, this is all starting to sound VERY familiar! He continues:

The men who were clubbed senseless and forcibly vaccinated did not have the resources to mount a court challenge. Sarah Prince was a Jehovah’s Witness. Her case was brought shortly after World War I when Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned for their pacifist beliefs leading them to refuse conscription. In fact, nearly all that denomination’s leadership was arrested under the 1918 Sedition Act. She was another person outside the social mainstream. Carrie Buck was impoverished, uneducated, and mildly retarded, and she came from a family that was very much the same. Have you noticed how the “unvaccinated,” and now the “un-boosted,” are talked about in the media?…

 

I will be the first to admit that I don’t know how this drama will play out. What I do know is this. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I think Jacobson is the on-ramp to a superhighway leading down. Once the state has the authority to force you, against your will and without your consent…or, in the case of the current set of vaccines, without even informed consent…to undergo treatment for a disease you do not have, you have ceased to have any autonomy. As I’ve warned before, by giving the government, and I mean any level of government, a “public health exception” to the First Amendment, we have opened the gates to using the same methods to tamp down “handgun violence” or the “obesity epidemic” or boils on the ass. https://redstate.com/streiff/2021/12/08/did-you-ever-notice-how-the-same-supreme-court-precedent-used-to-rationalize-vaccine-mandates-also-justified-involuntary-sterilization-n488230

Yes, I have been sounding the alarm for nearly two years now on all this, imploring people to remember the events of recent history. Yet most folks seem utterly clueless, and have the same mindset now that most did back then: ‘The State cares for us. It knows what is best. Who am I to question things? Our rulers are trying to keep us safe.’

I close by quoting someone who long ago was fully aware of the dangers of eugenics, and he even penned an entire volume on it. Back in 1922 G. K. Chesterton wrote Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State. Here is just one quote from that important work:

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.

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