Eugenics is the great uncle of the social engineering that dominated--and wrecked much of--the twentieth century and continues to dog us today. Social engineering, of course, is nearly synonymous with "Socialism" and "liberalism," but it takes awhile to trace out the intellectual path for people who are unacquainted with the history. For those who want to see the path in action, find commentary about Margaret Sanger or Nazi Germany.
And you may want to click here (registration required) and read about one of the most revered of Canada's leftists: Tommy Douglas. Excerpt:
The greatest Canadian of all time said we should sterilize mental defectives. Wait. Before you report this magazine to the human rights commission, or press hate crime charges for attempting to glorify some neo-Nazi or antiquated bigot, you should know this: we're talking about Tommy Douglas. The Tommy Douglas. The New Democrat pioneer. The socialist icon. The father of our vaunted medicare system. The man voted the Greatest Canadian of all time by CBC viewers. His 1933 master's thesis in sociology--"The Problems of the Subnormal Family"--staunchly advocated eugenics in the most merciless terms. And almost nobody dares mention anything about it.
That Tommy Douglas holds a venerated place in Canadian mythology is beyond dispute. He's not just a hero to left-wing nationalists like Mel Hurtig or CBC television viewers. When the Reform party created a portrait gallery of "bridge builders" in their caucus room in 1996, Douglas was there (along with Louis Riel and three of the Famous Five). What's especially disquieting about Douglas's flirtation with eugenics is that, like recent revelations about Pierre Trudeau's youthful anti-Semitism, reactionary clerico-political views and blindness to Nazi aggression, these are not things we did not know. We just chose not to think about them.
Douglas's attitudes and vocabulary are troubling. But it is his recommendations that are truly alarming. First, he advocates compulsory certificates of "mental and physical fitness" and seven days' public notice before marrying. He goes on that since "Society does not hesitate to segregate criminals, lepers or any others that threaten the well-being of society" it should put defectives "on a state farm, or in a colony where decisions could be made for them by a competent supervisor." He discusses segregating the sexes within such colonies, but says it "would be very difficult to enforce, and would be an unnatural mode of life. It should only be tried if the next suggestion were rejected, namely sterilization."
Thus we come to Douglas's most appalling proposal: "Sterilization of the mentally and physically defective." To meet anticipated criticism he adds, "medical science declares that it is possible to be sterilized and yet have sexual intercourse. In the main this is all the defective asks." He concedes "that sterilization might be abused . . . There are possibilities of abuse in any forward step . . . The matter would have to be handled carefully. Only those mentally defective and those incurably diseased should be sterilized." The subnormal, he suggests, should simply be discreetly given "contraceptive knowledge . . . when the family had reached a set figure." Douglas never defines the difference between a "defective" and someone who's merely "subnormal."
