Imbeciles !

[Shimatoree]

It’s impossible, especially, to read “Imbeciles” without thinking of the current election cycle. –( 2016)-
Although the concerns of the eugenics movement don’t map neatly onto today’s political divides, patterns of thought are repeated:
fears of procreation and infiltration still have force, although they’re directed not at “hopelessly vicious protoplasm” but at “anchor babies”;
instead of the pure blood of the Nordic races, we hear invocations of that other superior species, the Winners.
The 2016 Presidential campaign has reverberated with appeals to strength and victory and virility and contempt for weakness and failure and foreigners, hitting notes of blatant ugliness that we’re not used to hearing in the public sphere.
The response in some quarters has been bafflement, as though this way of speaking had materialized out of nowhere.
But perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to a friend, about his pleasure in writing the Buck decision, “Sooner or later one gets a chance to say what one thinks.”

Just read the following case and you will know the truth…………………..

Carrie Buck was nobody you would have heard of. She was born in 1906 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon afterward, her father either abandoned the family or died—there’s no reliable record—leaving Carrie and her mother, Emma, in dire poverty. As a toddler, Carrie was taken in, with the approval of a municipal court, by a well-to-do couple, John and Alice Dobbs, who asked to become her foster parents after seeing Emma on the street. Carrie lived with the Dobbses and went to school through the sixth grade, after which they pulled her out of school so that she could do housework full time. She cleaned their house and was hired out to clean neighbors’ homes, until, at seventeen, she was discovered to be pregnant—she later said that she’d been raped, by Alice Dobbs’s nephew—at which point her guardians moved to have her declared mentally deficient, although there was no prior evidence that this was the case. They then had her committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.
When Carrie was sent to the Virginia Colony, in 1924, the forward thinkers of America were preoccupied by the imagined genetic threat of feeblemindedness, a capaciously defined condition that was diagnosed using often flawed intelligence tests and by identifying symptoms such as moral degeneracy, an overactive sex drive, and other traits liberally ascribed to poor people (especially poor women) who were seen as having stepped out of line. (Just a few years before Carrie was committed to the Virginia Colony, Emma was also sent there. It seems that she had turned to drug use and prostitution—although it’s hard to say, since many female vagrants were labelled prostitutes.) A sloppy reading of Gregor Mendel’s pea pods and Charles Darwin’s theories gave a scientific veneer to the conclusion that many social ills were caused by the proliferation of the wrong sort of people and that they could be neatly nipped in the bud with the intervention of eugenics—a term coined, in 1883, by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, who declared it “a virile creed, full of hopefulness.” Soon, the United States, along with Germany, was at the forefront of the movement to improve the human species through breeding. Scientific American ran articles on the subject, and the American Museum of Natural History hosted conferences. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and many other prominent citizens were outspoken supporters. Eugenics was taught in schools, celebrated in exhibits at the World’s Fair, and even preached from pulpits. The human race, one prominent advocate declared in 1909, was poised “to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.”
The Virginia Colony was one of many facilities for the disabled that were founded in the Progressive Era, partly to provide care for a vulnerable population and partly to remove it from the gene pool, by sequestering those individuals during their fertile years. (On the other side of the coin, Jill Lepore has written about how modern marriage therapy grew out of one man’s effort to promote “fit” unions.) Between 1904 and 1921, the rate of institutionalization for feeblemindedness nearly tripled. Carrie was just one of this crowd, except that she happened to arrive at the Virginia Colony right at the moment when its superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy, was looking to transform his institution from a genetic quarantine center to a sort of eugenics factory, where the variously unfit could be committed for a short time, sterilized, and then released, like cats, back into the general population, with the happy assurance that they would never reproduce.
A number of states passed laws permitting eugenic sterilization in the early twentieth century, some of which were subsequently struck down in court. Virginia passed its law in 1924, largely thanks to Priddy’s advocacy, but he was advised not to carry out any sterilizations until the law had been tested in court as far as appeals would take it. For this, he needed a patient to pin his legal case on. Carrie was a desirable candidate for several reasons. She had been declared a middle-grade moron—a technical designation, based on I.Q., that placed her relatively high on the intelligence scale, above the “idiot” and “imbecile” classifications and just below normal. Morons were considered particularly dangerous: they were smart enough to pass undetected and possibly breed with their superiors. Carrie, moreover, had had a child as an unmarried teen-ager, demonstrating the heightened sexuality and fertility—or “differential fecundity”—said to be common among the mentally deficient. Her mother and daughter had been labelled defective as well—the latter, still an infant, without any testing—providing evidence that Carrie’s reported shortcomings were hereditary. All of this added up to a terrifying spectre: Carrie was a walking womb, a pot of genetic poisons that might seep into purer bloodlines. And that is how Carrie Buck came to be at the center of the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which, in an 8–1 decision, made forced sterilization for eugenic purposes legal in the United States.

“Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck,” by the journalist and lawyer Adam Cohen, gives a detailed account of the many forces that converged to bring about the Buck decision, tracing the intersecting paths of the people involved. He begins with Dr. Priddy, who was a true believer in the pure-blooded future. Priddy began pushing for legislation permitting eugenic sterilizations after he was sued by a patient whom he’d sterilized without her consent. He turned to a friend, a lawyer and politician named Aubrey Strode, who emerges as a fascinatingly banal character in Cohen’s account. Strode apparently wasn’t wholeheartedly in favor of the cause, but he did his job, drafting the law, suggesting the test-case approach, and representing the Colony in court. He argued the case before the Supreme Court, won, and then basically never mentioned it again. Carrie’s attorney in the case, selected by her court-appointed guardian, was a man named Irving Whitehead, a childhood friend of Strode’s and a former board member for the Colony. He collaborated with Priddy and Strode on the appeals process and handled Carrie’s case in a thoroughly negligent way.
Strode wrote his legislation based on a model law drafted by the biologist Harry Laughlin, who was the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Eugenics Record Office (an epicenter for research in the field) and perhaps the most influential eugenics advocate in the country. If Strode is Eichmann in this story, then Laughlin is Goebbels. (The Nazi comparison feels justified here, if only for its literal relevance: Laughlin corresponded with German eugenicists and was enthusiastic about Hitler’s leadership, praising him for realizing that the “central mission of all politics is race hygiene.” He was also a driving force behind the Immigration Act of 1924, which set strict quotas on various undesirable races, including Jews. He urged maintaining these quotas when, not many years later, large numbers of Jews were trying to flee Europe.) The team in Virginia asked Laughlin to be an expert witness in the Buck case, and he was happy to oblige. Without meeting Carrie, he submitted a notarized statement saying that she had a “record during life of immorality, prostitution, and untruthfulness” and belonged to “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” He supported her proposed sterilization as a “potential parent of socially inadequate or defective offspring.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes was on the Court when the case was tried and wrote the majority opinion. Cohen pays particular attention to his role, arguing that Holmes’s reputation as a paragon of democratic wisdom is largely undeserved, and that he was, in reality, a flinty character and an arrogant élitist whose decisions favored the powerful and whose ostensibly progressive opinions were arrived at through illiberal rationale. This reading is certainly borne out by the decision he wrote for Buck v. Bell, which is five paragraphs and contains several coolly vicious flourishes, such as “It is better for 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.” He declared, in reference to Carrie’s family, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Cohen provides a detailed backstory for each character who appears, wandering sometimes confusingly far afield. But the panoramic view is instructive: one can see these men marching their agendas forward over bridges formed by social connections, whether it’s Priddy asking a friend to write him a law, Holmes being recommended for the Supreme Court by a fellow Boston Brahmin, or Laughlin getting his job at Cold Spring Harbor because he bonded with its founder over their shared love of chicken breeding. Cohen writes that there was widespread skepticism about eugenics among those whom Oliver Wendell Holmes once referred to as “the thick-fingered clowns we call the people,” but the opposition wasn’t large or organized enough to effectively counter the influential network behind the movement.
Carrie herself all but disappears in the book. This isn’t Cohen’s fault: unlike the men in this story, she wasn’t the sort of person to leave behind an archive. Cohen, in fact, does an admirable job collecting scraps of information about her life. She was sterilized soon after the trial, and eventually released from the Colony. She was married in 1932, and again in 1965, after her first husband died. Her daughter, who was raised by the Dobbses, died in 1932; Carrie wasn’t told about her death until months later. Her own mother, Emma, died in 1944, and Carrie found out when she arrived for a visit, two weeks after the funeral. Carrie was evidently a devoted wife who enjoyed reading the newspaper and doing crosswords and never had much money. People who knew her said that they never noticed any signs of mental deficiency. In 1980, some reporters found her and asked what she thought about the Supreme Court case that bore her name. (No one seems to have asked her before.) She said that she would have liked to have a couple of children, and that she hadn’t fully understood the nature of the sterilization procedure until several years afterward. She died in 1983, in a home for the indigent elderly.
Thirty-two states passed eugenic-sterilization laws during the twentieth century, and between sixty and seventy thousand people were sterilized under them. The rhetoric of the movement toned down after the U.S. went to war with Germany; most American eugenicists abandoned their explicit praise of the Nazi project, and the field dwindled as an area of officially sanctioned research. (The disassociation did not go both ways: Buck v. Bell was cited by the defense at Nuremberg.) But the sterilization rate remained high even after the Second World War. So many poor Southerners underwent the procedure that it became known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” It was only in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, with evolving attitudes toward civil and human rights, that states began repealing their sterilization laws.
The culminating shock of “Imbeciles”—a book full of shocking anecdotes—is the fact that Buck v. Bell is still on the books and was cited as a precedent in court as recently as 2001. Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that at least a hundred and forty-eight female prisoners in California were sterilized without proper permission between 2006 and 2010. Last year, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals.
Despite these contemporary remnants of America’s involvement in eugenics, and despite the fact that the movement shaped national policy and held sway in the upper reaches of society for many years, this chapter of American history is surprisingly absent from the common conception of the country’s past. It’s not that it has been ignored by historians or journalists. The New Yorker ran a lengthy four-part series on eugenics in 1984, and a number of books have been published on the topic. Many of these works approach the story of American eugenics as though it will be a surprise to the reader, which is probably a safe bet. Of the two other books on Buck v. Bell that have appeared in the past ten years, one has the subtitle “The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” while the other ends by noting that the history of eugenics in the U.S. is “often forgotten.” Cohen, too, writes that “Buck v. Bell is little remembered today.” Yet it seems that the collective forgetfulness is not a matter of some well of information remaining untapped but of our inability or unwillingness to soak up what is drawn out of it.
What is hardest to forget about “Imbeciles” is the stream of grandiose invective against the supposedly unfit—the diatribes concerning “germs of dependency and delinquency” and the “world peopled by a race of degenerates and defectives.” It’s a language that combines the detachment of scientific terminology with the heat of bigoted slurs. It’s clearly from another time, but, lacking any lip service to equality and opportunity and the other touchstones of American political rhetoric, it also seems to come from another country. This is not how we talk about ourselves. And yet there are passages that sound startlingly familiar. In the debate over the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded eugenically undesirable races from the U.S., a senator from Alabama declared, “We are coming to a pitiful pass in this great country when it is unpopular to speak the English language, the American language”—a lament that might have been taken from yesterday’s paper, except that he was bemoaning the proliferation of Yiddish.

From The New Yorker

[Mirza Ghalib]

I've read this once before, but it is no less sickening now than when you first posted it.

As you point out in your opening sentence, a link seems inevitably established between the eugenics movement (which was used against the Blacks and also those belonging to the poor white class) and the recent US presidential election. Right. I don't say you're wrong. But there is something that escapes me totally. Trump (unlike Merkel of Germany, for instance) has spoken up against uncontrolled illegal immigration of Muslims and Mexicans to the US. Not our favourite topic by any means. But what bothers me is that when the US has killed thousands and thousands of Muslims since 2001 and carries on down the path of genocide, that does not seem to call for condemnation and a determined stand against the continuation of the wars. Refugees have been very deliberately created to obfuscate the main issue at stake, i.e. the future of the planet under one world govt led by the USA. This would be the last word in the globalism doctrine ao many have come to worship.

I hate the way Pakistan is run, but if push came to shove I'd still rather have mafia boss Nawaz hammering us back to the dark ages than get our orders direct from the US.

[Shimatoree]

Mg

I had thought that I had posted it before but I was not sure.

As to Trump and whatever else or whoever else.........I would suggest to you that it is always the ECONOMICS that dictate Policy......it is highly unlikely that the USA would lead the world in anything.
Trump is a merely a symptom of a systemic ailment. All his proclamations and bombast cannot change the group reality of the world's economic dynamics. He is a CON man who used this rhetoric to bamboozle the lower middle class white males to get to the white house. Do not expect anything substantive from him for the simple reason that the economic reality dictates otherwise. The Chinese are the ones in the driver's seat and that is unlikely to change. Yes the USA will continue to dominate creativity for the short term but only in the short term. 90 % of the Noble prize winners in the USA were born and EDUCATED abroad. Take the immigrants away....you take the creativity away. The Mexicans provide 95 % of the manual labour.in everything.
So as they say TALK is CHEAP and that to from a Bogus Con Man.

As it has been said Money Talks....and BULL SHIT..WALKS.

The purpose for re-submitting the article was to bring forth the fact that the USA has always been a racist society inspire of all their claims for human rights etc ......will always be a racist society ....what Trump has done is simply to take away the VENEER and expose the truth.

Thats all.

[Mirza Ghalib]

Goes without saying your contention that the big stick of economics leads nations. Even with the best will in the world, Trump's scope of action will remain limited, that's for sure. Glad to hear you acknowledge that China has become one powerful country. Although the rest of the world still haven't quite grasped just how powerful. RE: immigration. From what I've been able to understand, it is not immigration in itself Trump is opposed to. It's illegal immigration which he has targeted as the problem. Fair enough when all's said and done. Anyway, hope things will go back to normal soon. Time enough then to seperate Trump bluster from his actual deeds.

[Shimatoree]

Mg

Trump is an amoral crooked CON man with an attention span of 2 1/2 minutes. I have not failed to notice that you like all of the poor white folks have been affected by his sales pitch You are in for a lot of shocks which are coming for sure. to say that he is ONLY against ILLEGAL Immigration.....is false. He is FOR it as his previous business practices confirm. Check your facts please.
I will also predict that it is likely that he will get IMPEACHED by the Republican Conress with the multiple cases in the pipeline and you will have a President Pence.
His presidency has less to do with him or the support.... than the utter -(arrogance and)- incompetence of Clinton and her campaign leaders.
Now that Trump has gotten into the White House, what happens will be determined by which of his selected incompetent buffoon talks to him last.
I have no political affiliations per se but Troubled times are ahead for sure.

As for China..yes they ARE an Economic power house but to become a world power takes more than that. They have a long way to go.For starters, they will need to design and manufacture their own JET engines rather than buying or borrowing them from Russia

[Shimatoree]

On Trump's Immigration Policies

By Robert Fisk....The Independent

I’ve just visited the hiding place of some troublesome refugees who should make Donald Trump very angry. It’s not the first time I’ve called at the little house on the old canal, but you only have to glance at the family’s papers to see how they fall under Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. They fled a dangerous country full of extremists– a nation which threatened its own neighbours – and they sought their first new home for “economic reasons”. Worse still, they even tried to enter the United States. They were turned away – on the grounds that even if they had good reason to flee their persecutors, they didn’t have good enough reason to choose America as their place of refuge.
No, they’re not Syrians or Turkmens or Yazidis or Afghans, although the younger daughter of the family was reading a book about ‘Palestine’ and was very much a member of a persecuted race. She was, of course, Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl who with her family fled the Nazis in 1933 and was given sanctuary in Holland – until Germany invaded the Low Countries in 1940 and she found herself under the rule of her own vicious country all over again. By 1941, her father Otto – realizing that the Nazis had in store for Jews in Holland the very same fate that was already being perpetrated against the Jews of Germany – sought visas to the United States. And the door was slammed in their face.
scald=5033231:sdl_editor_representation
Yup, I do wonder what the Trump administration would have done.

Anne Frank’s diary was the first book my mother wanted me to read ‘on my own’ (without having it read to me) and this wonderful narrative of childhood-growing-into-adulthood, of fear and love and joy and fury – especially at the other refugees crowded into the family hiding-place behind Otto’s office on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam – has stayed with me all my life. With other people too. It has been translated into 70 languages. It’s even been translated into Arabic. Officials at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam tell me, sadly, that – despite its awful relevance – they sell only about one copy a month in the Arabic language.
No matter. So powerful, so tragic and so relevant is Anne’s story to us today – and that of her mother Edith and her elder sister Margot and the others squeezed into the secret annex in Prinsegracht – one of them a boy called Peter van Pels with whom Anne is slowly falling in love – that queues stand round the block in the cold Amsterdam rain to take their turn to walk up the stairs behind the false bookcase to see where these frightened Jewish men, women and children lived until, two years after they first hid here, the Gestapo arrived. You can still see – it’s so genuine, it allows of no clichés – the newspaper photographs of 1930s film stars (Ray Milland, Diana Durbin, Ginger Rogers) and of a very young Princess Elizabeth of England (plus sister Margaret and corgis) and of the Dutch royal family in exile whose nationality Anne wished to adopt after the war and whose pictures she glued to the wall of her room.

The Dutch nation would certainly have been more loyal to her than the Americans. Otto sought help for US visas from friends who were relatives of those who owned Macey’s department store. He had two brothers-in-law in the States. He wrote of the plight of his wife and two daughters. The State Department was not interested. Otto even pleaded for Cuban visas. He got one – on 1st December 1941 – but it was cancelled a week later when Germany declared war on the US after Pearl Harbour. Thus did Japan as well as Hitler and the Americans join hands to doom the refugees on the Prinsengracht Canal. Roosevelt’s US – and Democratic – administration did a ‘Trump’ on the Frank family.
To add to the travails of refugeedom, Nazi Germany had already deprived German Jews of their own citizenship – so the Franks, originally – and legally – in exile in Holland, also became stateless under their own country’s occupiers. Stateless? Economic migrants? Illegal migrants in Holland now that their German passports were invalid? What earthly chance did they have?
Each time I read Anne Frank’s diary – and reader, if you haven’t read it, make up for lost time, as they say, and do so – I find something new which I missed on my previous journey through her pages. She wanted to be a writer. She wanted to turn her diary into a novel called ‘The Secret Annex’. And she wrote, on May 11th 1944, “my greatest wish is to become a journalist one day.” You can’t beat that.
I find that one day she is about to read a book called ‘Palestine at the Crossroads’. Although she does not say so, it was published in 1937 by a Jewish writer called Ladislas Farago – an author I read many years later when he wrote a best-selling biography of General Patton – which is a rather plodding pro-Zionist book, put together after Farago visited, rather indifferently, the old British Mandate. I’ve read bits of it. I doubt if it would have persuaded Anne to help found the state of Israel, had she lived long enough to do so, for she was wedded to European culture and wanted to live among the Dutch and return to school with their children. She waited with childish excitement for her liberation, recording in her diary the joy of learning about the Allied landings at D-Day, writing movingly of the plight of the crew of an RAF bomber which she sees – through the secret office skylight – shot down over Amsterdam.
But then – and her story sometimes seems to have the inevitability of Greek tragedy about it – her family was betrayed and three members of the Dutch Nazi Party and an Austrian (and therefore Reich) SS officer came storming up the staircase behind the false bookshelves on 4th August 1944. And that was the end of all of them. Except for Otto. He was eventually freed from Auschwitz by the Soviet army and travelled slowly back to Amsterdam to find that his family were dead. Edith died in Auschwitz, Margot and Anne at Bergen-Belsen, both of typhus. Anne, now 15 years old, died last. An old school friend says she caught sight of Anne in her last days and threw food to her over the camp barbed wire.

Anne’s was one of tens of thousands of corpses piled into the mass graves of Belsen. Even if he can’t find the time to fly his private jet into Schipol airport and visit the little house on the old 17th century Amsterdam canal, Donald Trump could at least read Anne Frank’s diary. It’s a short book. It’s by a child, and is therefore easy to read. It’s by a Jewish girl, who asks at one point why God has visited such terrors upon her people. Just as refugees today seek to know why God has forsaken them.
Four Dutch citizens helped Anne and her family and friends throughout their two years of solitude, at daily risk of their lives. They said later that it was a natural thing to do. Odd, that. Because today we are supposed to find it ‘unnatural’ to help these people. I guess that’s Trump’s view. Yet in the streets around the Prinsengrach this week – after all the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have arrived in Europe, and just 72 years after the Gestapo came to Anne’s hiding place round the corner, I found small cafes whose Dutch owners had written on their front doors the words: “Refugees welcome”.

[Mirza Ghalib]

Shim Dear, I'm no fan of Donald Trump. I'm mainly an adversary of Hillary Clinton ever since Libya. As for illusions, I garner some as I go along and then suddenly get hit over the head as in the case of Raheel Sharif who turns out to be something quite different from what we imagined him to be.

I wholly agree that Trump might make way as we go along for a President Pence. Such things have been predicted in the past and might well come to pass in a none too distant future.

As for China, it's become the most powerful country in the world without drawing too much attention to itself. Since all this happened because the West, starting with the US, wanted it to come to pass still leaves me without a real explanation of what was behind it all. Or are we to understand it in the One World Govt context so dear to people like Soros, etc.?

Whatver, migration is not what preoccupies me most at the moment, the wars do. Anyone who stands up and condemns them, will find me standing alongside him or her.

[Shimatoree]

Mg

Why does migration take place and why has it taken place over the EONS ?

It takes place because of economic deprivation and PERSECUTION. Human beings want PEACE and they wish to stay in their own motherland or Fatherland.
NOBODY want to go somewhere else............I can say that with some authority since after almost 50 years......the LONGING and URGE to return is INTENSE.....even though my motherland now only exists in my imagination !

I started a fire today in the fire place after a very long time.
A strange thought possessed me then and I thought of PROMETHIUS....
.........the one who stole FIRE from the gods and gave it to man. As a punishment, a giant eagle ate his liver again and again for eternity .
In a strange way we are like Prometheus.........and we are condemned to suffer because we BETRAYED our own selves by abandoning our motherland. Our emotions are our LIVER and the longing and yearnings are the giant eagle eating our " liver" for eternity.
There is no Escape

[Mirza Ghalib]

Beautifully put, Shim. I was most moved. Indeed, immigrants the world over have stolen fire and suffer the tortures of the damned which Prometheus was the first to endure.

We Pakistanis, do the next best thing to returning once and for all to our country of origin: we devote hours of our time daily and a substantial part of whatever income we have to promoting peace and prosperity in Pakistan. More we cannot do.

I am in no way against immigration if that's the impression I gave you. But successful resetllement in a foreign country does demand a certain compliance with the local laws. If the laws are set aside, then troublesome times await both the immigrant and the host country. As for the EU, Germany in particular, the massive influx of people who might every well be ISIS members is a very dangerous move which might even take on tragic dimensions for Europe over time. ISIS can be said to be taking revenge for the wars in Iraq and Libya. Nonetheless, killing other Muslims to get revenge hardly seems like sane behaviour. Thank God, the Afghan Taliban have never resorted to such idiocy. But then the Pukhtoon are a very special people, brave beyond imagination and straightforward.

Last but not least, what Trump's immigration policy might be is as yet unclear, at least to me. I'd say give it time and we'll find out. Trump, however, might turn out to be the saviour of the world if he sticks to what he's been saying and pursues friendship with Russia rather than mutual destruction the price of which - death and destruction - we'll all be asked to pay.