Better for All the World...Secret History of Forced Sterilization...America's Quest...Racial Purity

Amazon ^ | 2006 | Harry Bruinius

[combat_boots]

"In the early years of the 20th century, a fixation on eugenics led several states to approve forced sterilization to keep thousands of Americans from producing "morally inferior" or "feeble-minded" offspring. Bruinius's greatest accomplishment in his retelling of this blot on our nation's history is forcing readers to recognize the humanity of the victims of these policies. He begins with Carrie Buck, a young Virginia woman used by state medical authorities as a test case to get the courts to legitimize their program. At times, Bruinius's account of the events leading up to her sterilization employs a novelistic level of detail, such as recreating the mental state of participants, a technique also applied to discussing the lives of the scientists whose theories drove the eugenics movement. (These stories have their bittersweet ironies; one leading eugenicist was an epileptic, while another's daughter showed signs of dyslexia.) The tone occasionally slips into excessive moralizing when he underscores the relationship between American eugenics and Nazi Germany, but the connections are certainly there. This history isn't as "secret" as the title makes it out to be—it's been told most recently by Edwin Black in War Against the Weak—but Bruinius brings compelling drama to the narrative that should give it broad appeal. Photos. (Feb. 27)" Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker "In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of sterilizing a twenty-one-year-old woman thought to be 'feebleminded,' and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority, 'It is better for all the world, if . . . society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.'"

[combat_boots]

I don't know what to say.

[cripplecreek]

You of all people shouldn’t be surprised. You research this stuff pretty much every day.

[SF_Redux]

I do, it is another book sale

[CondorFlight]

Is this any different from Ruth Bader Ginsburg saying that the expectation was that abortion would get rid of the wrong kind of people (or words to that effect)?

ie—likely meaning, I assume, to be the feeble minded,
the injured, and the unwanted offspring of “welfare mothers”?

(She is free to elaborate on what she meant if I have the above categories wrong...)

[the invisib1e hand]

I don't know what to say.

I don't know what to say about all press given to America's alleged sordid past, being reconstructed in an era when America bashing sells.

There's no way this subject will get objective treatment, and it's clearly opportunistic in its timing.

I guess refabricating the national sins of other lands just doesn't get you time on Oprah (or serve your president's warped ends).

[2banana]

Blacks make up 11% of the population yet have 40% of all abortions...

Nuff said.

[tndarlin]

Is this the book Glenn Beck just discussed?

[combat_boots]

Well, Yeah. I research these things. But it's getting to the point that other than posting stick figures, I don't know what words will explain these things. Right now, there are 404 non-fiction books on Progressivism 2 Amazon. I don't have the stomach for it all. Not right now, anyway.

Please post a tree pic, CC, would you?

[combat_boots]

Oops. SB @, not 2.

[cripplecreek]

"We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living... A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them."

"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself."

"The most elaborate code of law... would still have left unspecified a hundred ways in which wreckers of Communism could have sidetracked it without ever having to face the essential questions: are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth? have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized community? That is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate" persons who could not answer them satisfactorily."

-All George Bernard Shaw. I especially like the last quote where he blames the victims for forcing the communists to "liquidate" them.

[combat_boots]

Yeah. This is the book. There was another one, though, that I didn’t catch. Did you?

[2banana]

Blacks make up 11% of the population yet have 40% of all abortions...

Nuff said.

[cripplecreek]

Mental floss?

[umgud]

I’m all for eugenics, but the only criteria I would allow would be directed solely against liberals.

[Outlaw Woman]

That is absolutely beautiful. Would love to be on horseback riding down through there. (the mental floss works!)

[little jeremiah]

Placemark for the morrow.

[RegulatorCountry]

One of the more impressive propaganda coups of the past century would be the progressive left and Planned Parenthood divorcing themselves from forced sterilization and eugenics, and blaming racists, which of course cannot have ever been them, as everybody knows.

[combat_boots]

I just had a book title thread on a new book by Ablow & Beck pulled. Here is an example of a book title that I posted in 2010. I post these titles for discussion, not recommendations on whether to buy or not.

I also see that others post reviews or quarterly book lists or requests for books to read. Or book titles, CD tracks, other music, or YouTubes. Conceptually, I honestly don’t see the difference between posting a book title thread and these references.

You listed as the reason to pull the thread on the new book Ablow & Beck put out as ‘solicitation.’ It was meant as a point of discussion, not a point to purchase anything.

I have come watch and listen to Beck when I can. I have just under 21,000 posts and somewhere around 690 threads here at FR. I post to get to know people, encourage others and provide some of my own opinions. I make no money for doing so.

Please answer this question for me. How is listening to any radio show, or reading any article or opinion here on FR, by a published writer or talk show or musician, etc., not advertising?

For the sake of consistency, all threads containing any references to books, e.g., “Decision Points” by George W. Bush, or anything by Sarah Palin, or Obama, or Ayres or Huffington or John Q. Public, should also be pulled, no? And, frankly, that list should include the book of Mormon, the Koran, the Torah and “The Holy Bible.” For consistency.