Here’s a little game to play. Here are some quotes from various people on the subject of eugenics. Eugenics as many will understand is now a concept permanently tainted by what we know went on during the German administration that existed between 1933 – 1945. Many of have read the accounts of atrocities such as the Shoah and Aktion T4 and may be tempted to believe that it is Nazis, Neo-Nazis or the precursors of Nazism from the political Right who have been enthusiasts for doing away with ‘life unworthy of life’.

So who said the following and where were they on the political scale?  Most people I would guess would say that such people are or were aligned with the political Right on the grounds that what we call far right has been at the heart of one of the worst atrocities of the 20^th century.

Here’s the quotes

“A large number of offspring among the lower classes would increase the number of individuals of an ‘injurious or retrograde kind’. 

‘We have every need to strengthen by training the partially dormant socialistic spirit, if we as a nation are to be among the surviving fit’

‘XXXXX have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post’.

‘Individual societies have the strongest interest in educating, training, and organizing the powers of all their individual members, for these are the sole conditions under which a society can survive in the battle for life.

 ‘The only fundamental and possible XXXXX is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man’.

‘avoid degeneration of type – that is, race deterioration, if not race suicide’.

“The fundamental idea upon which Socialism rests is the same fundamental idea as that upon which all real scientific work is carried on. It is the denial that chance impulse and individual will and happening constitute the only possible methods by which things may be done in the world,”

‘a complete organization for all those human affairs that are of collective importance. He says, to take instances almost haphazard, that our ways of manufacturing a great multitude of necessary things, of getting and distributing food, of conducting all sorts of business, of begetting and rearing children, of permitting diseases to engender and spread, are chaotic and undisciplined.’

What makes the garden’s ‘graciousness and beauty possible, is the scheme and the persistent intention, the watching and the waiting, the digging and burning, the weeder clips and the hoe.

‘These men of the XXXXXXXXXXX, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity – beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge – and to check the procreation of base and servile types.’

 “the men of the XXXXXXXXX will have little pity and less benevolence. […] The men of the XXXXXXXX will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death. […] They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while’. These men would ensure that undesirable elements were removed from society. ‘This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible’, 

‘The majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing trustworthy human material for society’.

‘I think we ought to tackle the Jewish Question by admitting the right of the State to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to’

All these statements sound more than a little ‘Nazi-like’ do they not? You’d think you were being reasonable if you attributed these words and policy statements to Adolf Hitler or Oswald Mosley or Benito Mussolini or any of the other myriad fascist or racialist politicians that the 20^th century gave us.

The problem is you’d be wrong. All of these statements come from British socialists. People like George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and those venerated Labour Party activists the Webbs.

Whilst there is no doubt that the Nazis and those aligned with them committed eugenic atrocities we cannot forget or ignore the fact that British socialists might have done little different to what the Nazis and those like them did if they had the power to do so.

See the link below for more details.

https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/eugenics-among-british-socialists/

Edit to add.  I should have credited Jon MC over at Harry’s Place for the link above but I forgot so my apologies for that omission.