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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32475 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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JarJar presented the perspective that eugenic thinking is threatening to Jews, "because Auschwitz." That is a direct reading of his post.

If so, it is very recent attitude, originating in 1960's and 70's, not in 1940's.

Until then, eugenics was seen as uncontroversial progressive and scientific (including by Jews) and militarism, agressive war were seen as the major drawbacks of Nazism.

Nazis were not seen as "pinnacle of modernity", but obscurantist remnant of the primitive past, wanting to retvrn to the Germanic Dark Forest of ancient times.

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_strange_evolution_of_eugenics_steve_sailer/

John Glad, retired director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, wrote an important book in 2011, Jewish Eugenics documenting the Jewish love-hate relationship with eugenics.

The most striking revelation is that, contrary to the current impression, Jews largely approved of eugenics until the end of the 1960s. (The most effective opponents tended to be Catholics, such as G.K Chesterton, author of 1922’s Eugenics and Other Evils.) Glad quotes endless Jewish spokesmen from the first seven decades of the 20th century to the effect that Jews had been practicing eugenic marriages for 3,000 years. The medical profession, which was largely secular and progressive, was enthusiastic about eugenics, and there was little evidence that the sizable number of Jewish doctors objected.

...

Using many hundreds of quotes from contemporary publications dating back to the 19th century, Glad traces the broad enthusiasm for eugenics among Jewish leaders, both progressive and conservative, assimilationist and Zionist, up through the 1960s. Then, following the rise of 1960s radicalism, Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, the UN’s 1975 vote to condemn Zionism as racism, and the subsequent Holocaust memorial movement, there emerged a new historical orthodoxy. Jewish intellectuals such as Gould systematically demonized eugenics as heavily responsible for the Nazis and much else that wasn't good for the Jews.

According to Glad, the first books linking the Holocaust to the eugenics movement did not appear until the 1970s. Yet, by 2004, at least 131 such books had been published, most of them "shrill."

If so, it is very recent attitude, originating in 1960's and 70's, not in 1940's.

The attitude is not new, the mythos used as a driver for the attitude is what emerged in the 1960's and 70's. Earlier today Keith Woods posted a Twitter thread regarding the academic forces that were opposing racial thinking well before the 1940s. Those academic forces won. It's hard not to notice that the conflict between the eugenicists and Boasian anthropologists largely broke along the lines of white protestants and immigrant Jews. You still see that pattern today with the likes of Stephen Jay Gould versus E.O Wilson, or Eric Turkheimer vs Charles Murray.

This attitude is not new, the mythos used to manipulate the culture is what is new.

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