BELGIANS IN THE CONGO!
— Billy Joel

Leopold the Second had wanted to expand Belgiums colonial dreams, his realisation that the wealth of the European nations depended upon the exploitation of colonies that they had conquered. Belgium did not have the military power to conquer territories, so the king came up with various schemes to purchase a colony, from Argentina, Phillipines, and Borneo. The king was not an absolute monarch and thus needed approval from the parliament, the government of the day thought these were financially risky enterprises, and so they were rejected.

Thus Leopold II decided that he would personally finance the scheme entirely as a private citizen. He would setup the “Brussels Geographic Conference”, in which he would invite wealthy philanthropists, renowned cartographers and scientists. The whole thing was a sham, some of the discussion involved setting up the International African Association a organisational front for the kings colonial ambitions.

Through clever manipulation, and company structuring the king would send his envoys to purchase the lands required, for his own private colony. He had done this promising humanitarian assistance, the outcome was one of the bloodiest and horrific periods of European colonial history, all the time deceiving his own population and peers.

Virginia - 1930

Bloody moon rising with a plague and a flood
— Tom Waits

In the Appalachian mountains, clans of people lived in abject poverty, an event that regularly took place a country sheriff drove to Brush Mountain and started a raid against many of the families that lived there, these families where deemed “unfit” by the authorities.

One authority recalled with pride on their work:

"The children were legally committed by the court for being feebleminded, and there was a waiting list from here to Lynchburg. If you’ve seen as much suffering and depravity as I have, you can only hope and pray no one else goes through something like that. We had to stop it at the root.”

The strangeness of the event was the crime, feebleminded which was odd as in the term was never fully defined, or more cynically it was left as vague as possible to allow more broad interpretations. However the implication was simple, a person declared feebleminded could not take care of themselves, and thus was a risk to themselves and society, more importantly their off-spring would also inherit this feeblemindedness. The outcome was always certain sterilisation. This definition of feeblemindedness would also include poverty, as many of the intelligentsia/academia insisted that it should - the scientific consensus was established. Poverty was related to feeblemindedness, which was linked to Genetics.

Those arrested or seized in police raids were generally sent to workhouses, where they were treated as slave-labour. Runaways were subjected to beatings, corporal punishment, tortured in isolation rooms for more than 90 days. Their release was always on the condition that they’d be sterilised.

Others perhaps were not so lucky, most didn’t know that they had been sterilised some like went to their doctors, like Mary in this account:

“They ask me, ‘Do you know what this meeting is for?’ I said, ‘No, sir, I don’t.’ ‘Well this is a meeting you go through when you have to have a serious operation, and it’s for your health.’ That’s the way they expressed it. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if it’s for my health, then I guess I’ll go through with it.’ See, I didn’t know any difference.”

Mary didn’t know until five years later she had been sterilised. These people have been forgotten in the tragedy that happened, many lead broken lives with out knowing what had happened to them, more than eight-thousand alone in Virginia, sterilised as a result of force/coercion, stealth and also deception. It was a wide scale program that in the US alone it had done irreversible damage to over sixty-thousand people, with almost half in California alone.

This was a wide scale program that wanted to prevent unwanted racial, social and ethnic groups from reproducing, more than a mere medical travesty, this was the outcome of a grandiose vision with decades-long social movement. The intent was to obliterate, biologically cleanse the inferior, and breed a new type of mankind. It’s name eugenics.

1883

The higher that the monkey can climb
The more he shows his tail
— Tom Waits

Polymath and discoverer of the statistical distribution, and inventor of this board Francis Galton, while writing his book “Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development” termed the word eugenics. His cousin Charles Darwin had written the Origin of Species, and Galton himself became especially taken by it, he applied its principles to animal breeding.

He extended this concept to Humanity in general, used this new science of evolution to introduce the concepts of Scientific Racism.

Types of Mankind

Scientific Racism and it’s cousin Social Darwinismthe two sides of the same supremacists core.

1 AD

You can drive out nature with pitchfork
— Tom Waits

Since the start of the Christian church and its ethos of universalism (Catholic means Universal), was a culture shock to most peoples at the time. For one for the pagans like the Romans, a persons position was determined entirely by race. In some cases cults were only open to those who were deemed worthy by blood and race.

If you were of the wrong tribe, wrong colour or even the wrong language, cultures at the time treated you as inferior. The notion of religion was constrained to the tribe, not to other people.

Christianity changed this, specially its Apostle Paul, advocated a religion in which was openly accessible.

For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, 27 for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are descendants of Abraham, heirs according to the promise.
— Galatians 3:26–29.

However it wasn’t just universalism that Christianity preached, it was a sense of justice and duty of care for the weak and poor.

“Woe to you who are rich, for you have your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.”
-- (Luke 6:20-25)

The Sermon on the Mount the first saying is ”Blessed are those poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven”. One needs to understand that poverty was seen as spiritual sin. The poor were poor because they had committed sin and thus deserved their status. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest refused to help the poor because it would taint him.

This was not unique to just the jews at the time, this was almost a universal, in fact even in the Americas the Aztecs, Maya and Inca all performed gruesome rituals on tribes that were outsiders.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must
— Siege of Helios

The retort reply from the Athenians to Melians was the justification or seen as the morality at the time. Christianity inverted that it was seen as a core duty to help the poor and the weak. The rich had a moral duty to see that they used their fruits to share and make sure that the poor were taken care of. Through out the Christian narrative, the parable of the Rich young man whom Jesus asks him to give everything up, to the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus where the lesson is to show charity and love to the poor.

The many radical notions of the Christian message seem to us rather self evident, however they were not, as historian Tom Holland covers in his book Dominion in great detail.

Plato’s Republic

But it always comes roaring back again
— Tom Waits

Galton, and many others like him Christianity was an impediment to the primal urges of racism and hate. Ideas such as every person was equal as a child of god, leading to the notions of human rights, although not entirely a show stopper for power wanting to exploit the vulnerable, it had a stigma in European Society.

However with eugenics, that changed. The Eugenicists envisioned man as refining himself towards perfection, and old racial ideas of supremacy, combined with the optimistic view of Rousseau’s ideas of man.

”Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they."
— Rousseau, The Social Contract

The concepts of the Noble Savage were tied to his ideas that lead to the concepts of the Social-Contract. However Rousseau while an optimist about human nature, did not believe that one should be without religion.

Rousseau’s ideas flourished, in the New Romanticism with the ancient world in the Enlightenment. In 1776 a book called The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire written by Edward Gibbon was published. This man and his book managed to stage the three biggest myths that persists to this day the first is that of the Dark Ages, The Renaissance, and that of the Christian’s causing the fall of Rome.

Gibbon was a staunch anti-catholic, and a lot of the protestants work was not entirely accurate, mixed in was a lot of polemics attacking the church. Ideas such as that the un-educated and unenlightened medieval folk believed the earth was flat, kind of ironic that in this century we have more Flat Earth believers and societies than we ever did in the past. A lot of the misinformation we have about history was caused by Edward Gibbon himself.

Gibbon’s views also portrayed the pagan Romans and Greeks as people to be emulated, as such a lot of the intelligentsia who had bought in to Gibbon’s narrative began to emulate those societies. Casting away Christianity as a backward regressive religion. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the Romans committed the genocide against Carthage.

In fact the Enlightenment is also a contentious issue, in modern society talk of liberal or enlightenment values. To quote:

The parts of the Enlightenment that are most admired are partly legacies of a Christian tradition. Medieval canon law began to codify individual rights; Tom Holland has argued that the Enlightenment arguments for universal values were modelled on similar arguments made by the Catholic Church; the practical goal of spreading liberty and education to the masses wasn’t achieved by the powdered-and-pomaded intellectuals of the coffee house but by pious Quakers and evangelical priests. Is there any clearer pre-Enlightenment argument against tribalism than this one from Galatians 3:28, which affirms a metaphysical unity of the human race, not merely a physical or social one?

In this period of great historical misinformation, Plato’s book “The Republic” was required reading for the educated. The book contains many great philosophical teachings, including the Allegory of the Cave. However it is also a very dangerous book, as Plato discusses his interpretation of the ideal state, which consisted of three classes.

1. The Ruling Philosophers
2. The Warriors
3. The Merchants/Artisans

It demanded that information be controlled, people should be told Noble Lies, thus education was not about the truth but what was good for the republic. Reproduction was also to be controlled, regulating the familial lines to produce the best of each class. Familial structures were also to be replaced by the state. As loyalty was not to a tribe or family, but rather to the Republic.

Finally the whole system depended on the King, one who mastered philosophy and be born from the republic it self. Plato’s book inspired Nietzsche, whose concepts of the ubermensch can be traced to Plato’s ideal of the philosopher King.

Plato’s book is not with out criticism, it has observations we need to take heed, for example the cycle of degeneration. As virtues are carved from a society, Aristocracy turns to Timocracy - where the latter is purely concerned on the wealth and power of oneself, at the detriment of the Republic.

I don’t know if Galton was thinking of these things when he birthed eugenics to the world. However it certainly unleashed the idea, there was rational justification for racism and hatred, there was a rational idea on why some were superior. The rationality wasn’t couched in might makes right, rather in the new scientific consensus one had station above another human due to superiority in ones genes, that they had inherited by birth.

While Plato spoke of his King being taught strongly, the Eugenicists now had a pure materialist mechanism to make him be. They where to make man-kind better, by removing the flawed stock, and only breeding the good stock, much like they Galton had done his in Animal Husbandry experiments.

Malthus Flame

God builds a church
— Tom Waits

Thomas Robert Malthus and English cleric, whose influence also included demographics and economics. The book "An Essay on the Principle of Population” raised alarm bells to the bourgeoisie, the basic ideas of Malthus was based on the observation that as food production increased so did the population. This would lead to a trap in which the situation would cause the lower classes to suffer incredible hardship as resources would be stripped and famine and disease would take large sections of the population.

He argued that there was a set of feedback systems that caused the population size to drop. The First Positive Check systems were things like death, famine, war, things that are outside the control of the individual. Preventative Checks Where things like birth control, delayed marriage and celibacy.

Malthus, from my understanding never intended to be used as a way to cause mass misery to the population. His concerns were about keeping the standards of living the same for each generation, along with avoiding the trap he envisioned in his model.

From his theological view it was seen as divine providence, and a moral imperative that one needs to act, that is the moral society can survive by showing restraint, and not acting on vices.

This rather abstract view of the problem didn’t account for technological innovation, not to mention his passion to avoid pain for the poor, lead him to attack laws that intended to provide welfare for the poor (caused inflation). While also leading him to be the only economist at the time to also advocate for trade protection on food - the argument that leading to self-sufficiency, and food security. Malthus argued that the poor where unjustly placed in their lot, criticised the social structures and economic structures, however the idea of not helping the poor was the only message that was heard by the elite.

Malthus ideas was the match that set the Eugenics program on fire and lead the way for the mass murder of millions. The elite labelled the poor as the problem via social darwinism, and Malthus’s idea gave them a moral imperative to avoid the problem. It also meant that now the poor were an existential risk for the state and thus needed to be controlled, sterilisation, birth control, and finally genocide.

Malthus died a long time ago, however his ideas still exist today and are spoken to this day. Neo-Malthusianism never got the skepticism it deserved the same way Eugenics did post World War Two. It heavily influenced the Club of Rome with its Limits to Growth modelling. Paul R Ehrlich famed doom snake oil salesman, whole models have all failed - espouses and constantly pushes the Malthusian trap to unsuspecting people.

Malthus was the anvil on which gave the rational justification to do away with rights, and restrict the population - promote a totalitarian nightmare where your sacrifice is required to avoid a doomed future.

Herbert Spencer in 1850 published his book “Social Statistics”, an agnostic philosopher, he argued that both man and society followed laws of nature, a form of primitive determinism. Thus his argument went counter to the Christian ethos. These cold laws of science were summed up in his term “Survival of the Fittest”.

Edwin Black’s book ”War Against the Weak” covers Spencer’s views

He declared that man and society were evolving according to their inherited nature. Through evolution, the “fittest” would naturally continue to perfect society. And the “unfit” would naturally become more impoverished, less educated and ultimately die off, as well they should. Indeed, Spencer saw the misery and starvation of the pauper classes as an inevitable decree of a “far-seeing benevolence,”

He quotes Spencer directly

“The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, and to make room for better…. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”

The New Religion

The devil builds a chapel
— Tom Waits

Galton knew of the limitations of his new science, he realised in his second edition of his book:

“The great problem of the future betterment of the human race is confessedly, at the present time, hardly advanced beyond the state of academic interest.”

He was admitting that his eugenic formulas and theory was unprovable. Further noting that breeding humans was purely

“speculations on the theoretical possibility.”

In this mathematical ancestral solipsism Galton came to the conclusion that racial improvement was jeopardised by the unfit.

“I do not, of course, propose to neglect the sick, the feeble or the unfortunate. I would do all … for their comfort and happiness, but I would exact an equivalent for the charitable assistance they receive, namely, that by means of isolation, or some other drastic yet adequate measure, a stop should be put to the production of families of children likely to include degenerates.”

The entire eugenics program could be undone by the introduction of unfit stock into the pool, he himself wasn’t concerned about inbreeding apparently. He would move for the regulation of marriages, via licenses, in which eugenically prohibited flawed unions could be avoided. Galton changed the scope of eugenics to that one of encompassing the whole of society, it wed biology to politics.

“is the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”

Galton’s hope for a concrete formulation of laws the governed eugenic waned over time, in his memoirs he came to regret some of his own proposals. He wrote that

“human nature would never brook interference with the freedom of marriage,” further added “I was too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation”

With ever growing uncertainty, Galton changed tact, and hoped to recast Eugenics as a new Religion. He hoped to create eugenic societies that would that would take his epistles of maths, and create their own religious traditions

“strictly enforced as a religious duty, as the Levirate law ever was,” further more “It is easy to let the imagination run wild on the supposition of a whole-hearted acceptance of eugenics as a national religion.”

To Galton he hoped to inspire a new Positive eugenics movement, on which voluntary notions of family planning and marriage with government structures that would help this new voluntary regime. When he died, this fantasy of a positive eugenics died with him. For the true believers it was an incoherent request, why wait for voluntary choice and statutory power, if the quest was for the best to survive against the unfit masses, genetic destiny had to be guaranteed by wiping away the unfit and unwanted. Galton social idealism would degenerate to a new nightmare of abuse of state power, corruption of science leading to the segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilisation, passive euthanasia and finally extermination. The source of this new negative eugenics whose quest was to abolish all human inferiority, was in the United States of America