The US War Against the Weak

by MANUEL E. YEPE

War Against the Weak is a well-documented book of more than half a thousand pages, written by Edwin Black. It describes a criminal operation planned by the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century and put into practice between the 1930’s and 1960s  with the purpose of creating a dominant superior race.

That U.S. campaign, virtually ignored in the world today because of the media cover up to which it has been subjected, served as a model for the Holocaust of the Jewish population carried out by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Characters and institutions in politics and the economy that today are presented as respectable champions of democracy and respect for human rights, were involved in this genocide.

The book tells us that, in the first six decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Americans labeled as feeble minded –because they did not conform to Teutonic patterns– were deprived of their right to reproduce.

Selected in prisons, asylums and orphanages because of who their ancestors were, their national origin, ethnicity, race or religion, they were sterilized without their consent, and prevented from procreating and getting married. They were separated from their partners by governmental bureaucratic means.

This pernicious white collar war was conducted by philanthropic organizations, prestigious professors in elite universities, wealthy businessmen, and senior government officials who formed a pseudoscientific movement called Eugenics Its purpose, beyond racism, was to create a superior Nordic race that would impose itself at global level.

The eugenics movement gradually built up a national legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to cleanse the United States of the “unfit.” Intelligence tests colloquially known as “IQ measurements” were invented to justify the exclusion of the “weak-minded”, who were often nothing more than shy people or persons who spoke another language, or who had a different skin color.

Forced sterilization laws were enacted in some 27 US states to prevent the persons so detected from reproducing. Marriage bans proliferated to prevent race mixing. Numerous lawsuits, whose real purpose was to impose eugenics and its tactics in everyday life, reached the Supreme Court of the United States.

The plan was to immediately sterilize 14 million people in the United States and several million more in other parts of the world so that, at a later stage, they could continue eradicating the rest of the “weak” and leave only the purebred Nordics on the planet.

In the 1930’s, some 60,000 people were coercively sterilized. and an incalculable number of marriages were banned by state laws stemming from racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, covered with a mantle of respectable science.

Eugenics, whose objectives were global, was spread by U.S. evangelists to Europe, Asia and Latin America forming a well-woven network of movements with similar practices. By means of lectures, publications and other means, they kept its advocates on the lookout for opportunities for the expansion of their ideas and purposes.

Thus it arrived in Germany, where it fascinated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. German National Socialism transformed the U.S. search for a “superior Nordic race” into what was Hitler’s struggle for a “dominant Aryan race.”

Nazi eugenics quickly displaced American eugenics because of its fierceness and speed, as well as by the scientific rationality applied by the murderous doctors of Auschwitz. The process had been previously rehearsed at the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenic Labs on Long Island, New York, with the financial support of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman foundations in whose laboratories the eugenics experiments, that culminated in Auschwitz, began.

When the extermination of Jews was described as genocide in the Nuremberg Trial, the U.S. institutions linked to the practice of eugenics, it was renamed “genetics” and continued its sinister projects for more than a decade.

Edwin Black’s book, a jewel of investigative journalism, provides the reader with the possibility of seeing the common kinship and features of this tragic history with the circumstances the U.S. population faces today.

For electoral purposes, from the beginning of his election campaign, Donald Trump raised the “America First” slogan, backed up with many of his own manifestations of xenophobia, rejection of immigrants and proven identification with white supremacists. He did this within the scenario of deep political fragmentation of a country whose ruling elite has been able to keep the population focused on the naïve alternative between Democrats or Republicans.

Any similarity is purely coincidental!

A CubaNews translation by Walter Lippmann.

Manuel E. Yepe is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He is a professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/21/the-us-war-against-the-weak/