"Exhibit Considers Nazis' Deadly Medicine" Eugenics

[GreenPartyVoter]

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Adolf Hitler used the theory of eugenics in his quest to create a master race, legitimizing the murder of thousands deemed unfit for the German race and culminating in the genocide of 6 million Jews.

But the idea behind eugenics - improving a population's health through genetics - was hardly unique to Germany, as shown by a traveling exhibit developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and on display at The Andy Warhol Museum.

"Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" uses 200 photographs, videotaped survivor stories and several dozen artifacts to trace eugenics' development as a perversion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to its Nazi justification for genocide.

The exhibit also looks at eugenics in other countries, including Norway, Spain, Brazil, Japan and the United States, where nearly 300 "eugenic sterilizations" were done at Mendocino State Hospital between 1909 and 1935.

http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20070311/D8NPUPVO0.html

[shain from kane]

1. Google Prescott Bush and eugenics.

[friendly_iconoclast]

4. Google Margaret Sanger and eugenics while you're at it.

Planned Parenthood doesn't talk about her views on eugenics for some reason...

[Wilber_Stool]

2. "Three generations of idiots are enough."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

[friendly_iconoclast]

3. The eugenics movement was largely American

As illustrated in two excellent books:

"War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race"
by Edwin Black, and
"The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea" by Elof Axel Carlson

After the Second World War, the story of the American roots of eugenics theory
was (mostly) thrown into the memory hole. A lot of prominent people thought
it was a great idea in its time.