BNP successfully leaves past behind; transforms into credible political party

Views such as yours, little more than early 20th century eugenics, are outdated and incorrect at best.

In the United States, the ideology became an underlying influence for several health campaigns of the second Clean Living Movement. Mark Haller (1963, 5) points out that "eugenics at first was closely related to the other reform movements of the Progressive era and drew its early supporters from many of the same persons. It began as a scientific reform in an age of reform." Unlike other health crusades of this era, such as prohibition and tuberculosis, the eugenics movement never became popular among the masses. Eugenics largely remained a movement of the upper middle class. It was a kind of secular religion for academics, social workers, and criminologists, who dreamed of a society in which each child might be born endowed with vigorous health and an agile mind. Opponents considered eugenics "a religious cult" or a "panacea for all human ills." Some religious organizations, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, were against eugenic reforms (Bruehl 1928, 52-53, 183; Haller 1963, 3-5, 177; Hague 1914, xxix-xxx; Pickens 1968, 4, 36).

The eugenics movement became intertwined with many other movements of the progressive era...The birth-control movement emerged as a rebellion against strict Victorian morality and laws.

The Liberal Government's support needs to be understood in the context of its broader programme of welfare reform between 1906 and 1914 and an ideological shift towards 'collectivism' which was epitomized by the 'New Liberalism'. It was gradually being accepted within the Liberal Party that the liberty of the individual sometimes had to take second place to the good of the community. Liberal MP C. A. McCurdy was attracted to the Mental Deficiency (Act) as one of the first real attempts to deal with social evil through a scientific approach, and argued that this type of subject should be more important to the Party than the old Liberal campaigns over Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment:To McCurdy, and an increasing proportion of those in his party, it was wrong to be unduly deterred by worries about protecting the liberty of the subject:As the Liberal Westminster Gazette put it: 'It would, indeed, be the last crime in the name of liberty if we were prevented, by some fanciful or superstitious regard for our own personal freedom, from applying a rational treatment to these unfortunate beings.' Because New Liberals placed so much emphasis on the importance of character, they could adopt surprisingly draconian policies towards mental defectives, who, by definition, had a biological lack of character, and who threatened to disrupt social policies which were designed for those citizens who did.

The silence or support of the majority of Labour MPs suggests that they did not regard the Mental Deficiency Act as anti-working class. They were not even swayed by Josiah Wedgwood's jibe that the proposed definition of mental defect would be used to put away people like Keir Hardie. The most prominent Labour supporter was Will Crooks, who had experience of the subject of institutional care in both a professional sense, through his work on the Metropolitan Asylums Board, and in a personal sense, having been placed in a workhouse as a boy of 8. Nevertheless, Crooks scorned the 'liberty of the subject' argument, arguing: 'There is talk of liberty of the subject. I sometimes feel inclined to prosecute the fathers and mothers of those children for not allowing them to be cared for.' As far as Crooks was concerned, the bill was a humane and Christian measure which was greeted by the working class themselves.

And it may well be the case that Labour MPs, who were usually drawn from the 'respectable working class', supported the Act as a way to ensure control over members of the 'profligate and unrespectable poor'. Crooks, for instance, though keen for a humane reform of the poor law system, had a harsh attitude towards the 'unemployable', and it seems that this influenced his attitude towards the mental defectives: with considerable distaste, he explained that many of the unemployable,

The remarks of Mrs Nevitt, of the Manchester District Co-operative Guild, quoted in the parliamentary debate; again reveal the often harsh attitudes of representatives of the working class towards mental defectives:

He has not the slightest idea that the ability of children to develop depends on the development of their parents and that all this crippling under existing social relations has arisen historically, and in the same way can be abolished again in the course of historical development. Even naturally evolved differences within the species, such as racial differences, etc., which Sancho does not mention at all, can and must be abolished in the course of historical development. Sancho — who in this connection casts a stealthy glance at zoology and so makes the discovery that “innate limited intellects” form the most numerous class not only among sheep and oxen, but also among polyps and infusoria, which have no heads at all — has perhaps heard that it is possible to improve races of animals and by cross-breeding to create entirely new, more perfect varieties both for human enjoyment and for their own self-enjoyment.. “Why should not” Sancho be able to draw a conclusion from this in relation to people as well?" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03n.htm

"In January 1849, months before he migrated to London, Karl Marx published an article by Friedrich Engels in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung announcing that in Central Europe only Germans, Hungarians and Poles counted as bearers of progress. The rest must go. "The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."

Genocide arose out of Marx's master-theory of history -- feudalism giving place inevitably to capitalism, capitalism to socialism. The lesser races of Europe -- Basques, Serbs, Bretons and others -- being sunk in feudalism, were counter-revolutionary; having failed to develop a bourgeoisie, they would be two steps behind in the historical process. Engels dismissed them as left-overs and ethnic trash (Voelkerabfall), and called for their extinction.

So genocide was born as a doctrine in the German Rhineland in January 1849, in a Europe still reeling from the revolutions of 1848. It was to become the beacon light of socialism, proudly held and proudly proclaimed."
http://web.archive.org/web/19990909235844/http://www.lutterworth.com/lp/titles/lostlit.htm

In the USA, the great eugenicists of the first half of the 20th century were the "Progressives". As it says here:


A significant number of Progressives -- including David Starr Jordan, Robert Latham Owen, William Allen Wilson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Latou Dickinson, Katherine Bement Davis, and Virginia Gildersleeve--were deeply involved with the eugenics movement.
And as we read further here:


The second stage in the development of the eugenics movement extended from 1905 to 1930, when eugenics entered its period of greatest influence. More and more progressive reformers became convinced that a good proportion of the social ills in the United States lay in hereditary factors....

An educator, biologist, and leader of the American peace movement, Jordan's main contribution as a major architect of American eugenics was to bridge the gap between eugenics and other reform groups. Like other progressives, Jordan subscribed to the Populist-Progressive criticism of laissez-faire capitalism.
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And in Great Britain, too, the leftists of the first half of the 20th century were outspokenly in favor of eugenics. As just one instance, that famous philosopher, peacenik and anti-nuclear camapaigner, Bertrand Russell spoke in favor of it. Writing in "Icarus Or the Future of Science" in 1924 he clearly approved of it, though he did voice doubts about its being employed for the wrong purposes. In a letter to his first wife, feminist Alys Pearsall Smith, about socialism and "the woman question," he wrote of eugenics in words that could well have been Hitler's -- even echoing Hitler's bad grammar:

"Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child -- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways."
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And are feminists conservative? Hardly. And feminists are hardly a new phenomenon either. In the person of Margaret Sanger and others, they played an active and prominent role in the USA in the first half of the 20th century, advocating (for instance) abortion. For her energetic championing of eugenics, Margaret Sanger won a public admirer in no less a figure than Hitler himself. Naturally, the American eugenicists were virulently racist, desiring to reduce the black population. They shared Hitler's view that Jews were genetically inferior, opposing moves to allow Jews fleeing from Hitler into the United States. If Hitler's eugenics and racial theories were loathsome, it should be acknowledged that his vigorous supporters in the matter at that time were leftists and feminists, and their opponents were conservatives.
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The few real critics of eugenics in the early 20th century were mainly conservatives and Christians like G.K. Chesterton who saw eugenic planning as just another arm of the wider campaign to impose a "scientific" socialist planning. In fact Chesterton subtitled his anti-eugenics tract "Eugenics and Other Evils" as: "An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State."