Tuesday 19 August 2008

Dogs and eugenics.

I've just been watching a BBC1 exposé about canine breeding. They waxed all dramatic about the culling of Rhodesian Ridgeback puppies born without ridges—how appalling that otherwise healthy puppies should be culled simply because they are not convenient to the breeding programme. The ghost of eugenics was evoked; the horrifying breeding programme for humans of the early 20th century, and Adolf Hitler was again paraded as being a Eugenicist. But of course, not a word about another Eugenicist, that secular saint, Marie Stopes, nor about the culling of perfectly healthy humans because they are not convenient. 

3 comments:

gemoftheocean said...

And I daresay Margaret Sanger's name received nary a whisper.

a few years back Margaret Sanger's supporters were up in arms that some of her early works were due to be removed from copy right protection due to the year they were published in falling by the wayside.

They'd been trying to suppress a lot of copies of her earliest works wherein she nakedly laid out wanting to get rid of what she considered "inferior races" etc.

But US Planned Parenthood constantly holds her up to be some sort of noble woman who "only wanted to help the poor women be able to feed those children they already had." Yeah, if they were white and rich those women she encouraged ....

Auricularius said...

The BBC are being disingenuous in invoking the spectre of Hitler and the Nazis. Like many of the modern animal rights loonies, the National Socialists were perfectly capable of combining a sentimental attachment to animals with a hatred of humanity, or at least those sections of humanity that did not fit in with their ideas on racial purity. One of the earliest acts of the Nazi regime was to pass the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" and Göring (as Prussian Prime Minister), announced an immediate ban on vivisection, actually sending vivisectionists to concentration camps until their sentences could be determined. Later in 1933, Göring's law was extended the whole Reich.

It is hardly necessary to add that the Nazi obsession with animal rights had its origins in an inordinate pre-occupation with Kosher methods of slaughter, or that the animal rights legislation was used as a pretext to persecute Jewish scientists.

Anonymous said...

I see that Marie Stopes is going to feature on a UK 50p stamp next October, with the words FAMILY PLANNING across it. Yuk.