As we plunge toward “climate change” legislation and government health care, let us realize that so much is being done in the name of “science.” And let us realize that the ideological perversion of science has been the source of the greatest evil in human history. Particularly when liberal progressives have been involved.
Let us begin with one particularly unpopular group of socialist progressives, the Nazis, and see where the thread leads:
Exhibit displays Nazis’ ‘Deadly Medicine’
By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
Story posted 2010.10.15 at 10:27 PM PDTThe image of the Nazi doctor is a vivid one — and “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race” doesn’t give it short shrift.
At this traveling exhibit, now on view at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, visitors can see photos of creepy gadgets like the calipers used by Nazi physicians to quantify racial characteristics. They can watch video of doctors testing how long it takes mental patients to die after inhaling tailpipe exhaust. They can learn about Dr. Julius Hallervorden, a neuropathologist who dissected hundreds of brains harvested from “euthanized” children.
But “Deadly Medicine” also aims to show that doctors’ and scientists’ role in the Holocaust wasn’t limited to measuring noses or conducting gruesome experiments in concentration camps.
The exhibit argues that by advancing the theory of eugenics — and then providing cover for the Nazi regime when it used that theory to buttress its racist and genocidal policies — German scientists helped lay the foundation upon which the Holocaust was built.
“This is important in understanding the context of the Holocaust,” said exhibit curator Susan Bachrach of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “Presenting these ideas under the rubric of science made them more palatable.”
“Deadly Medicine” traces the roots of Nazi science back to the early 20th century and the rise of eugenics, an outgrowth of Darwinian thought that argued it was best for society if healthy people — and, some believed, only healthy people — were encouraged to reproduce. Allowing the “unfit” to thrive and multiply, the thinking went, interfered with natural selection and “degenerated” the population.
Some of the eugenics research funded by Germany after World War I actually led to improvements in public health, including an emphasis on prenatal care. (One poster urges pregnant women not to drink or smoke.)
“There’s been a tendency to dismiss everything done under the Nazis as pseudoscience, to distance ourselves,” Bachrach said. “That’s dishonest. A lot of the scientists we feature in this exhibit were legitimate.”
But most of the exhibit’s artifacts illustrate the dark side of Nazi eugenics, in which scientists called for mass sterilization — and eventually “euthanasia” — for people with a variety of sometimes haphazardly defined physical and mental illnesses.
It wasn’t a terribly long leap, the exhibit suggests, from the (comparatively limited, though still horrifying) task of sterilizing or killing the ill to coordinating the mass murder of ethnic groups that the Nazis — and their scientists — deemed defective, including Jews. “The euthanasia program provided a model for the much larger project that was to come,” Bachrach said.
“Deadly Medicine” offers some surprises. Germany wasn’t the only country to dabble in eugenics — one photograph shows a crowd at a Pasadena exhibit that extolled the “social benefits of sterilization.”
Another display reports that “doctors joined the Nazi party earlier and in higher numbers than any other professional group,” some driven by the hope that forcing Jewish physicians out of German hospitals would create job opportunities.
The exhibit raises thought-provoking questions about how good science — and good scientists — turn bad, said Kristine Brancolini, dean of university libraries at Loyola Marymount.
“At what point does something become unethical?” she said.
For Bachrach, another question is how far scientists might be willing to go to study their ideas — and how to stop them when they go too far.
“As a society, we’ve gone a long way toward establishing safeguards that didn’t exist,” she said. “But this exhibit continues to underscore the importance of informed leadership.”
The exhibit will be on display at the university until Nov. 24.
eryn.brown@latimes.com
For the record, I was writing about this subject long before I ever heard about this exhibit. Having said that, the “Deadly Medicine” exhibit strongly reinforces everything I said.
The reporter says, “‘Deadly Medicine’ offers some surprises. Germany wasn’t the only country to dabble in eugenics.” And of course, it might be a surprise to Ms. Brown, but it certainly isn’t a surprise to – oh, I don’t know, Glenn Beck – or to anyone who has actually made an effort to actually learn history.
Where else did we see eugenics? And where did this monstrously evil form of science begin? From CBS:
The Fernald School, and others like it, was part of a popular American movement in the early 20th century called the Eugenics movement. The idea was to separate people considered to be genetically inferior from the rest of society, to prevent them from reproducing.
Eugenics is usually associated with Nazi Germany, but in fact, it started in America. Not only that, it continued here long after Hitler’s Germany was in ruins.
At the height of the movement – in the ‘20s and ‘30s – exhibits were set up at fairs to teach people about eugenics. It was good for America, and good for the human race. That was the message.
But author Michael D’Antonio says it wasn’t just a movement. It was government policy. “People were told, we can be rid of all disease, we can lower the crime rate, we can increase the wealth of our nation, if we only keep certain people from having babies,” says D’Antonio.
But surely it came from conservative Republicans, someone might say. Something so evil could never come from Democrat progressives.
Wrong.
Margaret Sanger, hero of liberalism and feminism, and founder of Planned Parenthood, was an ardent eugenicist. You can see it in her own words.
Here’s an interesting quote from one of the greatest patron saints of liberalism:
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.
Don’t worry, Margaret. Your secret is safe with the mainstream media. They’ll never betray the secret that abortion is morally evil, that it is the murder of an innocent human being, and that liberal Democrats to this very day are trying to destroy the black population.
Three out of every five pregnancies of black women in America are exterminated through abortion. And every three days, blacks kill more of their own through abortion than all the black people lynched between 1882 and 1968.
I also notice that Margaret Sanger also wanted to do this in the name of a “religious appeal.” Let me say this: Don’t you DARE call yourself a Christian if you support “a woman’s right to choose” to kill her baby. Because by obvious extension you also then support the Virgin Mary’s “right” to choose to kill Baby Jesus in her womb. And so Jesus can’t save such a liberal progressive “Christian” from his or her sins, because the Jesus of liberal progressive “Christianity” is dead in an abortion mill. And so hell awaits you for your part in the murder of nearly 50 million innocent unborn babies in America alone.
Planned Parenthood, founded on the scientific principles of Darwinian-based eugenics, has never changed. They are still primarily located in minority (read that as “genetically inferior”) populated neighborhoods. And they are still perfectly at home with the genocide of the black race through abortion. In fact, not all that long ago, they were caught red-handed:
LOS ANGELES, February 28, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – UCLA’s pro-life student magazine, The Advocate, has revealed an undercover investigation in which representatives of Planned Parenthood enthusiastically accepted a financial donation targeting the abortion of an unborn black baby for racist motives.
And what does the “great” liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have to say about that?
“Frankly I had thought that at that time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of” — 7/2/09 Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The article detailing the apology over American scientists deliberately infecting Guatemalan men with syphilis pointed out that our fascination with eugenics and the ugliest forms of “science” continued long after Hitler was defeated and Nazism destroyed. And it did.
The Tuskegee experiment – in which black men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated so scientists could study the advance of the symptoms – thrived under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. And we just recently discovered that another similar study thrived under the administration of fellow Democrat president Harry S. Truman:
WASHINGTON (AP) — American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted U.S. officials to apologize Friday and declare outrage over “such reprehensible research.”
The U.S. government-funded experiment, which ran from 1946 to 1948, was discovered by a Wellesley College medical historian. It apparently was conducted to test if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infection with sexually transmitted diseases. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.
Liberal progressives haven’t changed their spots. They arrogantly claimed that they represented the movement of “progress” and “science” when they were leading the way for Adolf Hitler and the most genuinely evil human depravity ever seen in human history. And they’re saying the same things now.
Barack Obama’s “spiritual mentor” Jeremiah Wright believed and taught all this depraved garbage. And it should come as absolutely no surprise that Barack Obama is so deeply steeped in the culture of abortion that he supports even abandoning babies who survived the horrific procedure and had been born alive to die.
And, yes, the same Hitler who embraced the Darwinian eugenics movement devised and championed by 20th century American progressive liberal Democrats also embraced the government health care and embraced the environmental movement championed today by 21st century American progressive liberal Democrats.
Same moral garbage. Same Democrat Party.
Science in and of itself is morally neutral. There is no conflict between good science and good Christianity. In fact, science flowed from the universities that themselves emerged directly from the great Christian monasteries. The man who formulated the scientific method was a publicly confessing Christian, as were the discoverers of every single major branch of modern science.
Science goes “bad” when it is hijacked by an ideological agenda. And that is precisely what we are seeing over and over again today. We’ve certainly seen it with “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever the hell you want to call it. And we have certainly seen the same ideological poison of science and of scientific methodology by advocates of ObamaCare.
Science serves mankind when it is a method. It becomes man’s greatest enemy when it becomes a tool.
Barack Obama tried to claim that he was somehow above distorting science to serve a political agenda not long after becoming president. But he has done precisely that more than anyone who has preceded him. For just two recent examples, Barack Obama distorted the scientific report by scientists who argued that there was no scientific basis to shut down drilling. And then he again distorted the scientific reports from scientists who tried to assess the extent of the Gulf oil disaster (see here also).
Obama is no guardian of scientific legitimacy. He is its leading perverter.
I have mentioned abortion several times in this article. What does science really say about abortion?
To put it simply, science properly understood tells us that human embryos are human by virtue of their parents, and beings by virtue of the fact that they are living things (they grow, feed,respire,excrete,respond to stimuli, and reproduce): they are human beings. Science further tells us that human embryos are NOT part of their mother’s bodies; rather, they are clearly unique genetic individuals, with their own unique human DNA. Moreover, scientifically, every single living thing is rigorously classified by the science of taxonomy into the categories of: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. And a human embryo – an unborn baby – is of the kingdom Animalia, of the phylum Chordata, of the class Mammalia, of the order Primates, of the family Hominidae, of the genus Homo, and of the species sapiens. Same as you, same as me, and same as any human being who has spent a lifetime living outside of his or her mother’s womb.
Any attempt to claim that “science” legitimizes abortion is totally false and totally perverted science. And yet science is falsified and perverted on a daily basis today.
Democrats have for years characterized themselves as the party of “science,” while demonizing Republicans as the party that stands in the way of science or progress. But they long ago forfeited any legitimate credibility that they had to make such a claim.
Update, October 18: It didn’t take long for Obama to prove me right again.
“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama told the assembled Democrats, who paid $15,200 a person to attend. “And the country is scared.”
This from the man who said as he justified the culture of abortion:
“It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,”
Let me leave you with an alternate “scientific” examination of what is going on today: Americans are “hard wired” to survive, and they are growing increasingly fearful as they realize their president is destroying their and their children’s country.
That answer not only is equally “scientific,” but it has the virtue of NOT basically calling the American people a bunch of non-rational meat puppets.
Barack Obama was quite fine with the “scared” American people “not thinking clearly” when they voted for him two years ago. And the reason it bothers him so much that his demagoguery is now backfiring on him has nothing whatsoever to do with “facts and science and argument.”
Unless you think Obama saying “They’re fighting back. The empire is striking back” was somehow about “science,” when, given the Star Wars analogy, no one better qualifies as the evil emperor bent on ruling the universe than Barack Obama himself.
It’s bad enough that Barack Obama is a demonizing demagogue to the very core of his political, if not his moral, being. But when he wraps his demonizing and demagoguery in the mantle of “science” as so many “progressives” have before him, you should step back and see how this movie has played out in the past.