Nationalism, Racism and Eugenics: What are the Facts?

Written by Jodie Cook on July 31, 2018. Posted in Current News

As the mainstream media screams loudly of the perils of the rise of the ‘alt-right’ and the dark new age of Trump, more sensible folk are independently fact checking this purported rise of racism.

While the European and north American press is unequivocal – anyone who speaks proudly in nationalistic terms should be immediately labelled a far-right racist – what do more scholarly folk say?

For a moment consider a new book by William Kay:

Title: From Malthus to Mifepristone: A Primer on the Population Control Movement

Author: William Kay

Review: The key focus of this book is eugenics. Eugenics is the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Eugenics was penned by pen of Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton’s revelation, illuminated with statistical rigour, was that the children of bankers and cabinet ministers are more likely to find fame and fortune than are the children of sharecroppers and ditch diggers. It is without doubt a tool for a rich and powerful elite to retain and affirm control over an inferior mass population. The iconic historical figure of the movement is the English clergyman, Thomas Malthus.

The first major piece of legislation that spurred Malthus into action was the Berkshire Bread Act (1795), this act used parish levies to supplement the income of the poor. Elites represented by Malthus feared that this piece of legislation would undermine labour discipline. However, it has to be said that Malthus didn’t want English labourers to emigrate, he didn’t want them to stop having kids. Malthus simply didn’t want them breeding beyond the market demand for their labour. Kay also discusses the rise of eugenics, which peaked at the Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York City (1921).

Moving into the late 1880s Galton proposed mass sterilization to stem to rise of those he deemed inferior. In the USA, state legislatures began passing compulsory sterilization bills although these were blocked by courts until 1907 until Indiana introduced the world’s first compulsory sterilization law and was soon followed by thirty other states. The nucleus of American sterilization activism, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), began in 1910.

ERO’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law stipulated forced sterilization for the feeble-minded, criminalistic, inebriate, and chronically unemployed. These methods of forced sterilization can be seen in The Third Reich’s sterilization law. Hitler’s chosen Reich Commissioner for Eugenics had earlier been chosen to lead the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations at a conference in New York. While much of these forced sterilization laws aren’t around today, much of today’s modern population control stems from these ideas and most types of population control boils down to: abortion, IUD installation, and female sterilization.

William Kay’s new book gives us plenty of history on population control and Malthus himself and his ideals. Kay is thorough and the details extensive so we won’t go over everything here.

But as a summary guide to readers, we can note that the Berkshire Bread Act of 1795 provoked Thomas Malthus into writing the first edition of his famous Essay which became the rallying point of future generations of populations control doomsayers.

Under this British Act of Parliament, local parish tax funds provided wage supplements for the landless rural poor. This system indirectly proved a windfall for some wealthier landowners as it sustained their employees during seasonal and economic downturns. Independent small farmers paid much of the tax but benefitted little as they rarely employed workers.

Despite enjoying some potential indirect benefits, rural elites generally feared these welfare payments would undermine labour discipline. However, it is important to note that Malthus didn’t advocate contraception but rather he supported abstinence before marriage, late marriage; and fidelity during marriage as a way of control the population.

Kay moves onto to talk about Eugenics, Social Darwinism, and Conservationism with particular focus on Eugenics and Social Darwinism. He discusses in-depth the ideas of Darwin and his cousin Sir Francis Galton. Galton is an interesting person to look at because he concocted “eugenics” to refer to what he sometimes called a science, and sometimes a religion. Eugenicists sought to improve the human stock.

Here is where we get a feel of the scientific gloss Adolf Hitler glibly added to Nazi Germany’s policy to eradicate the Jews.

‘Superior breeds should have more children; inferior breeds fewer.’ Galton encouraged caste sentiment and strong rural communities. To Galton, the life of the individual was trifling compared to the life of the race.

Kay then goes to talk about how these ideas changed and developed over time right up to the early 1910’s before he moves onto Anglo-American Population Control during the Fascist Era, which again is just another huge history lesson on the subjects rather than projecting new ideas and thoughts on the topic which continues into the next chapter Anglo-American Population Control Movement Thought Leaders 1947-1952.

Here we evince some of the real nuggets of fact, for example: “Racism slipped into remission in the USA and UK during WWII. Only murmurs of eugenics remained audible on campus. White supremacism became unacceptable in polite society.”

For the next several chapters Kay does a splendid job of serving the needs of serious students wanting to glean a history lesson of geopolitical ideas on eugenics.

In his chapter entitled Population Control in Imperial Japan and Occupied Japan 1925-1955 Kay offers a fascinating insight into Japanese history, culture and everything in between and suggests why Japan had become a nation perceived as utterly contemptible of other races.

Kay shows how Japan differs greatly from China who had implemented the one-child policy, however in Japan a five-child family became the national standard. In the 1930s birth control advocates and abortion providers were repressed. During WWII, despite suffering three million fatalities and having millions of men overseas, Japan’s population did not decline. Right after the war, between 1945 and 1950, 12 million Japanese babies arrived.

Kay tells us the American occupiers then launched the next ‘war’ in utero – the United States began this demographically, conducting five censuses in five years.

In 1949 Warren Thompson joined Japan’s occupation authorities to help coordinate the birth control campaign. Thompson oversaw an immediate fourfold increase in the number of articles on overpopulation in the Japanese press.

Kay then goes onto to talk about the methods and implementation of population control in different countries which concludes the first half of this highly-detailed book.

The second part of this scholarly volume focuses on The Modern Population Control Movement. Kay does take a slightly different turn here and discusses several different organisations that focus on population control like ‘Having Kids.’

Having Kids is a small California-based society advocating for small family sizes. Their board is stacked with animal rights activists. Founder Courtney Dillard formerly sat on the steering committee of Oxford University’s Population Ethics and Policy Research Centre. Having Kids uses lobbying and litigation to prohibit “bad” parents from having kids.

Another organisation mentioned is the Population Action International (PAI) began in 1965 as the Population Crisis Committee, an astonishingly influential and militantly Malthusian cabal. Presently PAI has annual budgets of $8 million and 34 employees. They aim to increase contraception use in the Global South. PAI’s favorite buzz-phrases are: preventing unwanted pregnancies, preventing unsafe abortions, family planning, and reproductive health.

Kay does not editorialise or seek to impose his own thoughts and lets the reader formulate their own opinion.

The clever subtleties of how an elite has sought to impose eugenics upon the masses may be adduced from the workings of the Contraceptive Manufacturers in the Population Control Complex. You may not be aware of it, but the global contraception market is probably worth around $20 to $25 billion a year. The worldwide condom industry (male and female) has annual sales of around $10 billion.

Over 25 companies manufacture condoms, but in the West 3 firms (Church & Dwight Co., Inc., Reckitt Benckiser Group plc, and Ansell) dominate the market. Each of these 3 multinationals manufactures an array of products, reaping sales of over $1 billion annually. While they sell most of their condoms to individual consumers; they also sell billions of condoms to non-government organizations and government services contractors from within the population control movement.

We might infer that these firms also share a common interest with the population control movement in disseminating pro-condom, anti-nationalist propaganda.

As the say, ‘follow the money’ and as such we see that manufacturers of surgically-implanted and/or pharmaceutical contraceptives are far more dependent on the population control movement for sales.

Across much of the developed Western world (at the movement’s behest) governments now fully or partially cover the costs of contraceptive purchases of low income women. The US federal government has since 1970 subsidized the contraceptive purchases of low income women.

In 2017 the US Health and Human Services’ Office of Population spent $286 million on contraception (including sterilization). This “pregnancy prevention” program routinely makes million-dollar grants to Planned Parenthood affiliates and independent family planning associations.

Some of the statistics Kay throws at you are simply mind-blowing:

• Currently there are around 56 million abortions are performed annually around the world. Forty-nine million occur in the developing world.
• Seven million occur in the developed world. The global annual abortion rate is 35 per 1,000 women of reproductive age (15 to 44 years old).
• The abortion rate in the developing world is 37 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, compared to 27 per 1,000 in the developed world.
• In the Anglo-America states, as in North-Western Europe, abortion rates are in the 14 to 18 per 1,000 range.
• In the most recent year of record (2014) there were 926,200 surgical and pharmaceutical abortions performed in the USA.
• One in 5 US pregnancies ends in abortion.
• One in 4 American women has had an abortion. The US abortion rate is 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. This rate is half what it was in the 1980s. The decline is attributable to increased contraception usage.

Such is the depth of research and thoroughness provided by the author that fellow scholars in this field will greatly appreciate Kay’s 10+ pages of footnotes. 

In conclusion, this extremely well-researched book is a perfect educational resource for students and laypersons studying eugenics – well worth the modest price.

Buy this excellent book here: Kindle Edition amazon.com

Jodie Cook is a professional book reviewer and editor. Read more of her work at: forthenovellovers.wordpress.com

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