Eugenics and the NAZIs -- the California connection

[Octafish]

Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

by Edwin Black
Sunday, November 9, 2003

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

CONTINUED...

http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/www.sfgate.com/index.html

In order to make things better, We the People need to face some unpleasant realities.

[leveymg]

1. Whoever put together that sign wasn't a "high grade" sign painter. Note the odd wording -

"Every 7 1/2 minutes (sic) a high grade person is born in the United States, will will (sic) have the ability to do creative work & be fit for leadership. . . "

("Will will" - Not like that Fitter Families display was a blog post that someone dashed out in a hurry on a smart phone).

BTW: The Eugenics movement didn't really have much impact until the aforementioned Robber Barons seized a hold of it, and financed the original "research." It wasn't really a California thing. Read Christopher Simpson's, "The Blonde Beast" about the All-American origins of Nazi ideology and its anti-democratic wealthy benefactors.

[Octafish]

3. Good catch! ''Yea, I have a goodly heritage.''

Fitter Families Contest

(BETTER IMAGE AT LINK BELOW)

When one considers the strong contribution of agricultural breeding to the eugenics movement, it is not difficult to see why eugenicists used state fairs as a venue for popular education. A majority of Americans were still living in rural areas during the first several decades of the 20th century, and fairs were major cultural events. Farmers brought their products of selective breeding — fat pigs, speedy horses, and large pumpkins — to the fair to be judged. Why not judge "human stock" to select the most eugenically fit family?

This was exactly the concept behind Fitter Families for Future Firesides — known simply as Fitter Families Contests. The contests were founded by Mary T. Watts and Florence Brown Sherbon — two pioneers of the Baby Health Examination movement, which sprang from a "Better Baby" contest at the 1911 Iowa State Fair and spread to 40 states before World War I. The first Fitter Family Contest was held at the Kansas State Free Fair in 1920. With support from the American Eugenics Society's Committee on Popular Education, the contests were held at numerous fairs throughout the United States during the 1920s.

At most contests, competitors submitted an "Abridged Record of Family Traits," and a team of medical doctors performed psychological and physical exams on family members. Each family member was given an overall letter grade of eugenic health, and the family with the highest grade average was awarded a silver trophy. Trophies were typically awarded in three family categories: small (1 child), medium (2-4 children), and large (5 or more children).

All contestants with a B+ or better received bronze medals bearing the inscription, "Yea, I have a goodly heritage." Childless couples were eligible for prizes in contests held in some states. As expected, the Fitter Families Contest mirrored the eugenics movement itself; winners were invariably White with western and northern European heritage.

SOURCE: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/view_image.pl?id=9

MORE: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/topics_fs.pl?theme=8

Readers are leaders, leveymg. You should be an editor.

[LongTomH]

2. A lot of those discredited ideas resurfaced during the Bell Curve debate of the '90s.

in 1994, conservative polemicist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein published: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The authors attempted to "prove" that:

• Intelligence was mostly inherited, and fixed for life and therefore,
  
• classes were 'inevitable', and
  
• black people were genetically 'inferior,' and therefore,
  
• any attempt at anti-poverty programs were doomed to failure.

Murray has always been infamous for writing polemics to 'prove' whatever supported the agenda his conservative masters. The scientific community (mostly) denounced The Bell Curve; the modern scientific community didn't want to repeat the mistakes of their forebears.

Carl Sagan refuted some of those arguments in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. The debate over The Bell Curve caused evolutionary biologist, paleontologist, and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould to revise his 1981 classic: The Mismeasure of Man with chapters devoted to debunking The Bell Curve. Gould's book was devoted to analyzing the historical misuse of science to 'prove' that certain classes or races were inherently inferior, and white, European, middle and upper class males were inherently superior.

[Octafish]

6. Amazing how many creeps believe 'The Bell Curve' crapola.

Herrnstein and Murray begin by telling us that the liberal position on IQ--namely, "Intelligence is a bankrupt concept"--has been discredited, and that "a scholarly consensus has been reached" around their position. This consensus is "beyond significant technical dispute." Thus, by the end of their introduction, they have arranged matters so that if intelligence has any meaning at all, the idiotic liberals stand discredited; and meanwhile, extremely broad claims for intelligence have the cover of "consensus."

-- Nicholas Lemann

SOURCE: http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/1997/01/the_bell_curve_flattened.html

OTOH, Sagan was a sage.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

SOURCE: http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/

[JEB]

4. K&R for exposure.

[Octafish]

7. The Splendid Blond Beast

The Splendid Blond Beast

excerpted from the book
The Splendid Blond Beast
by Christopher Simpson
Common Courage Press, 1995

Friedrich Nietzsche called the aristocratic predators who write society's laws "the splendid blond beast" precisely because they so often behave as though they are beyond the reach of elementary morality. As he saw things, these elites have cut a path toward a certain sort of excellence consisting mainly of the exercise of power at the expense of others. When dealing with ordinary people, he said, they "revert to the innocence of wild animals.... We can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank-convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise.'' Their brutality was true courage, Nietzsche thought, and the foundation of social order.

Today genocide-the deliberate destruction of a racial, cultural, or political group-is the paramount example of the institutionalized and sanctioned violence of which Nietzsche spoke. Genocide has been a basic mechanism of empire and the national state since their inception and remains widely practiced in "advanced" and "civilized" areas. Most genocides in this century have been perpetrated by nation-states upon ethnic minorities living within the state's own borders; most of the victims have been children. The people responsible for mass murder have by and large gotten away with what they have done. Most have succeeded in keeping wealth that they looted from their victims; most have never faced trial. Genocide is still difficult to eradicate because it is usually tolerated, at least by those who benefit from it.

The Splendid Blond Beast examines how the social mechanisms of genocide often encourage tacit international cooperation in the escape from justice of those who perpetrated the crime...

According to psychologist Ervin Staub, who has studied dozens of mass crimes, genocidal societies usually go through an evolution during which the different strata of society literally learn how to carry out group murder. In his book The Roots of Evil, Staub contends that genocidal atrocities most often take place in countries under great political, economic, and often military stress. They are usually led by authoritarian parties that wield great power yet are insecure in their rule, such as the Nazis in Germany or the Ittihad (Committee of Union and Progress) in Turkey. The ideologies of such parties can vary in important respects, but they are nonetheless often similar in that they create unity among "in-group" members through dehumanization of outsiders. Genocidal societies also show a marked tendency toward what psychologists call "justworld" thinking: Victims are believed to have brought their suffering upon themselves and, thus, to deserve what they get.

But the ideology of these authoritarian parties and even their seizure of state power are not necessarily enough to trigger a genocide. The leading perpetrators need mass mobilizations to actually implement their agenda. For example, the real spearheads of genocide in Germany-the Nazi party, SS, and similar groups- by themselves lacked the resources to disenfranchise and eventually murder millions of Jews. They succeeded in unleashing the Holocaust, however, by harnessing many of the otherwise ordinary elements of German life-of commerce, the courts, university scholarship, religious observance, routine government administration, and so on-to the specialized tasks necessary for mass murder. Not surprisingly, many of the leaders of these "ordinary" institutions were the existing notables in German society. The Nazi genocide probably would not have been possible without the active or tacit cooperation of many collaborators who did not consider themselves Nazis and, in some cases, even opposed aspects of Hitler's policies, yet nonetheless cooperated in mass murder. Put bluntly, the Nazis succeeded in genocide in part through offering bystanders money, property, status, and other rewards for their active or tacit complicity in the crime.

The actions of Nazi Germany's business elite illustrate how this works. Prior to 1933, German business leaders did not show a marked impulse toward genocide. Anti-Semitism was present in German commercial life, of course, but was often less pronounced there than in other European cultures of the day.4 Among the Nazis' first acts in power, however, was the introduction of incentives to encourage persecution of Jews. New Aryanization laws created a profitable business for banks, corporations, and merchants willing to enforce Nazi racial preferences. Tens of thousands of Germans seized businesses or real estate owned by Jews, paying a fraction of the property's true value, or drove Jewish competitors out of business. Jewish wealth, and later Jewish blood, provided an essential lubricant that kept Germany's ruling coalition intact throughout its first decade in power. By 1944 and 1945, leaders of major German companies such as automaker Daimler Benz, electrical manufacturers AEG and Siemens, and most of Germany's large mining, steelmaking, chemical, and construction companies found themselves deeply compromised by their exploitation of concentration camp labor, theft, and in some cases complicity in mass murder. They committed these crimes not so much out of ideological conviction but more often as a means of preserving their influence within Germany's economy and society. For much of the German economic elite, their cooperation in atrocities was offered to Hitler's government in exchange for its aid in maintaining their status.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Genocide/SplendidBlondeBeast.html



Thanks for giving a damn about the situation, JEB! Democracy still has a fighting chance.

[JEB]

17. Octafish, thanks for the link and

all the informative and thoughtful contributions you give us.

[KamaAina]

5. Xposted to California group

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1040

[Octafish]

8. The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics

by Edwin Black

EXCERPT...

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior--the so-called "unfit." The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point eight was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a "lethal chamber" or public locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, Applied Eugenics, which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution… Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to forty percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalized, the main solution for eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as more marriage restrictions. California led the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first twenty-five years of eugenic legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women. Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate," "oversexed" or "sexually wayward." At Sonoma, some women were sterilized because of what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed, 700 of which were on women. The state's two leading sterilization mills in 1933 were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with 363 operations. Other sterilization centers included Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.

Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "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…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense.

CONTINUED...

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796

Thank you, KamaAina! This stuff is a drag, but if we don't talk about it, those who want to see it carried out, will.

[bobthedrummer]

9. Much of this is found in the "neurosciences" today too Sir. K&R

Book Review-Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America (Reviewer Jeffrey Kaye 7-17-13 The Public Record)
http://pubrecord.org/special-to-the-public-record/10884/review-against-their-will-secret

"All lives matter" except those of "life unworthy of life" here in the genetically modified USA, that's what seems to be the case imo Sir.

[Octafish]

10. ''Against Their Will''

EXCERPT...

Ostensibly practicing science in the heroic mold — science was to cure all of mankind’s ills — doctors and scientists turned to the youth warehoused in orphanages, children’s homes and hospitals as apt subjects for medical and other experiments. The children, who could not make any informed consent, were often labelled “feeble-minded,” or were children with Downs Syndrome or cerebral palsy, or were just too poor and illiterate to make any fuss. Their parents often were not notified of the experiments, or they were overtly or subtly coerced to give consent.

The result was a series of experiments in hospitals and children’s homes — like Vineland, Willowbrook, or Wrentham — seeking cures or treatments for pellagra, ringworm, hepatitis, diphtheria, and any number of ills. But the experiments wreaked untold and possibly still unreported havoc on the young children involved. One child subject the authors interviewed years later in adulthood insisted that some victims at Fernald State School in Massachusetts were “buried out there in paupers’ graves… They killed them” (p. 146). Some of the experiments involved treatments for birth control, including use of forced sterilization and castration.

The children used as experimental subjects were often deliberately infected with diseases, and then given experimental treatments (many quite dangerous), or even no treatment at all, the better to observe the natural course of the disease for science’s sake. Dr. Albert Kligman, a key figure in Hornblum’sAcres of Skin, reappears in this new book, deliberately introducing ringworm fungus into experimentally induced wounds on retarded children, and withholding treatment to observe the course of the disease.

Between the early negative eugenics inspired experiments and the later use of children as experimental subjects, the monstrous example of Nazi science and bizarre and deadly medical experiments cast a shadow across the subsequent decades. Hornblum et al. describe the rise and rapid fall of the Nuremberg protocols, which were generally ignored by U.S. doctors and scientists. These professionals eviscerated the ethical commands around informed consent. One doctor, associated with the Army Epidemiological Board, is quoted as criticizing “the Nuremberg specter”, which drives out “rational approaches” to using children as human subjects in medical research (p. 66).

But as the title of the book suggests, it was Cold War exigencies that gave medical and scientific researchers seeming carte blanche to conduct experiments on children (and prisoners, and elderly patients, and even prostitutes’ clients), and all in the name of national security and protection from communism. Hornblum and his co-authors do an excellent job in explaining this complex history, and showing how the Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Committee and the CIA funded experiments, including use of electric shock and LSD.
The book describes the work of noted child researcher Lauretta Bender, known for her famous Bender Gestalt Test, taught to generations of psychologists, who used both electric shock and LSD on children deemed schizophrenic or behaviorally disordered. Many of these experiments were reported in medical or psychological journals, discussed at public conferences. (Hank Albarelli and I explored some of this history as well in a 2010 article at Truthout.) In the Cold War environment that prevailed, few saw any problem with using children this way. Few objected they represented a vulnerable population.

CONTINUED...

http://pubrecord.org/special-to-the-public-record/10884/review-against-their-will-secret/

Thank you for the kind words, Sir. These guys with the needles and the fascist glints are counting on those of us who know dying off. As most of this never makes it on the tee vee or the classroom, they're likely right, unless more people demonstrate some backbone.

[Mrs. Overall]

11. I have relatives who were in Sonoma State Home during the forced sterilization/experimentation...

My family has a history of genetic seizure disorders (epilepsy) and in doing genealogical research, I discovered not only that several of my great great aunts and uncles were in Sonoma State Home (also called The California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble Minded Children), but they were patients during the years that the hospital was run by a proponent of eugenics. Forced sterilizations and medical experimentation were commonplace at Sonoma State Home.

I have been able to obtain some records, but many remain sealed or were destroyed.

To me, one of the most horrible aspects of the story is that my relatives were buried at the Sonoma State Home Cemetery. All of the grave markers have been removed by the facility for fear of family lawsuits. The cemetery is now an overgrown, abandoned field with over 1,400 unmarked grave sites.

I plan on fighting Sonoma State Home (now Sonoma Developmental Center) and the state of California in order to have the cemetery burial information made public.

So upsetting....

[Octafish]

13. Thank your for sharing your family's important story, Mrs. Overall.

The State of California and the Government of the United States are responsible for great injustices against the most gentle of people -- our children. Just the little I know about the history of the Sonoma State Home is harrowing. Knowing that the place to you is personal made my heart sink.

What are you doing, moving forward? Are others in your family helping you get information? Have you spoken in public about your search?

[Phil Barber]

18. Any further information?

Hello. I’m replying to a 6-year-old message, so you probably won’t see this. But if you do… I’m a reporter working on a story about sterilizations at Sonoma State Home. Would you email me? I’m interested in family stories:
[email protected]

[gopiscrap]

19. welcome to DU

[hedda_foil]

12. If it had been left up to the oligarchs and their flunkies, the USA would have allied with Hitler.

And the many, many of us would have wound up in the gas chamber.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

<snip>
The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the Earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark- haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

How? By identifying so-called defective family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior -- the so-called unfit. The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.

<snip>

During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association

There's still much more, like the gas chamber was the brilliant idea

[Octafish]

14. Hiya, Hedda! 'Member Hannah?

Chris Hedges brought her up just the other year...

The Last Gasp of American Democracy

By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014

EXCERPT...

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.

The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

[font color="green"]The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. [/font green]

The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

Edwin Black also wrote about one American company indispensable for the Big Round Up

The company and its Hollerith machines enabled the fascists to tabulate census data and find out "who was who?" and "who did what?"and "who lives where?"



Oh. The IBM machines and the cards they used to process information also were used to find out "how many Jews?" and "where are they?"

IBM & "Death's Calculator"

by Edwin Black

EXCERPT...

When the Reich needed to mount a systematic campaign of Jewish economic disenfranchisement and later began the massive movement of European Jews out of their homes and into ghettos, once again, the task was so prodigious it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed. When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.

However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.

SNIP...

I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists? For decades, no one has known. Few have asked.

The answer: IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies. IBM was founded in 1898 by German inventor Herman Hollerith as a census tabulating company. Census was its business. But when IBM Germany formed its philosophical and technologic alliance with Nazi Germany, census and registration took on a new mission. IBM Germany invented the racial census-listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust. Not just to count the Jews — but to identify them.

CONTINUED...

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/gypibm.html

Thanks for caring about this over the years, hedda_foil! This all should be front-page news and taught in schools. Even DUers find it difficult to grasp, let alone see, where today's secret government and all its illegalities will lead us -- We the People.

[hedda_foil]

15. Hannah, IBM, the senior Bushes' romance with Eugenics... ah yes, I remember it well.

Of course, their good buddy Harrimans were their role models.

Thank you, Octafish, for continuing to teach us all what lies both behind and ahead of us. I am in awe of your knowledge and ability to find and use each teachable moment.

[hunter]

16. I'll add something possibly inflammatory here...

...the Mormons and other racist missionary churches in the west were all very keen on importing "Nordic" women.

Quite a few unaccompanied young women escaped war in Europe, and the U.S. Civil War, with their travel to the U.S.A. west subsidized. One of my ancestors was a "mail order bride" to Salt Lake City, her pedigree approved, but she didn't like sharing a husband and ran away.

My dear rocket scientist grandfather, who was a white Western U.S.A. liberal for his time, a Nazi fighting Army Air Force Officer, a man who was appalled by overt racism, antisemitism, and homophobia, still freaked out when I decided to marry in his words, "a Mexican girl." To his credit, he did get over that. His wife, my grandmother, was a white affluent University of California educated woman born in San Francisco just after the Great Earthquake. She was clueless about "white privilege," simply accepting it as a natural state of humanity. She always spoke fondly of the household help she'd known and loved -- the Chinese Laundryman, the Irish cook and housekeeper, the Japanese gardener, the Jewish accountants, the Black and Mexican laborers... I'm certain she never thought a second about eugenics. Why would a girl like her ever marry anyone but a handsome white guy with good prospects?

Sometimes my grandma could casually say racist things that would make me and my siblings cringe. And when we called her on it she'd wave her hand as if to brush it away and say something like, "Oh, you knew what I meant..." Her sister was like that too.

In too many ways the Nazis were a reflection of fascism and racism here in the U.S.A., England, France, Spain, and other nations of Europe.

U.S. fascists were financing Nazi redevelopment in Germany just as they were financing fraudulent eugenics "science" here at home. They didn't quit until it became politically dangerous for them, some of them not until Nazi bombs were falling on "White Anglo Saxon Protestant" London.