1) “It is better for all 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.”
2) “Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.”
3) “Whereas the hereditarily healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community.”
4) “In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents… society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
Sound like pieces of Nazi propaganda? In fact, only one of the above quotes is from the Nazis. Can you guess which one? And, would you believe the other three are from two prominent American progressives writing in the 1920’s?
If you find it difficult to identify the Nazi quote, it is because the science of eugenics was very influential in the thinking of both the Nazis and American progressives. In fact, something liberal historians won’t tell you, the Nazis used American laws passed by American progressives to justify their own eugenics program, which was ultimately transformed into the Holocaust.
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” (Eugenics and the Nazis — the California connection)
Eugenics is one aspect of the dark side of “progressive’ thought.
Oh, for those still wondering, the third quote is from a Nazi pamphlet written in 1933. Quotes 1 & 4 were written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the case of Buck v. Bell, 1927, upholding Virginia’s involuntary sterilization law. Quote 2 is from the book The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922) written by Margaret Sanger. (Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood Founder)
