We are all Carrie Buck

‘Eugenics(dʒɛnɪks - from Greek εὐ- "good" and γενής "come into being, growing") is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior, and promoting those judged to be superior.’

 

Carrie Buck was born in poverty in 1906 in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was fostered and lived with John and Alice Dobbs. She cleaned their house and was hired out to clean neighbours’ homes. 

 

Pregnant at seventeen, she claimed that she’d been raped, by Alice Dobbs’s nephew. Her guardians committed her to the ‘Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded’.

 

It was 1924, and at that time there was a growing movement amongst politicians and academics to view the plight of the poor as a genetic attribute which resulted in moral degeneracy. 

 

Meanwhile Carrie had turned to drug use and prostitution which were, of course, supportive evidence of natural, genetic inferiority. 

 

A sloppy reading of Charles Darwin’s theories on the ‘survival of the fittest’ gave cover to the conclusion that social ills were caused by the proliferation of the wrong sort of people such as Carrie and a word was invented to encapsulate this – Eugenics. 

 

The United States, along with Germany, was at the forefront of this movement to improve the human species through breeding. Scientific American published articles on Eugenics, and Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., were outspoken supporters. 

 

Let us not foget that the word itself was first used by an Englishman, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s and that it was Winston Churchill who cautioned, “The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”.

 

But back to poor Carrie who had arrived at the Virginia Colony when its superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy, was looking to transform his institution from a genetic quarantine centre to a Eugenics factory. It was a place where the Carries of the world could, like cats, be committed, sterilized, and then released back into the general population, with the assurance that they wouldn’t reproduce.

Priddy began pushing for legislation permitting Eugenic sterilizations and turned to a politician named Aubrey Strode, to draft the legislation.

Priddy and Strode were, of course, enthusiastic about Hitler’s leadership, praising him for his “race hygiene” policies.

That’s your history lesson.

 

 

Eighty six years after Carrie’s commitment we arrive in the world of Dominic Cummings. When he was a senior adviser to Michael Gove, then UK Secretary of State for Education, he claimed that "a child's performance has more to do with genetic makeup than the standard of his or her education." He added,"There is strong resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on genetics. Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless."

In his new role as Boris Johnson’s ‘special adviser’ Cummings hired Andrew Sabisky after placing a bizarre advert encouraging “weirdos and misfits” to apply for government positions.

Sabisky once called for contraception programmes to be expanded to stop the creation of a "permanent underclass". He also advocated for children to be given mind-altering drugs - even if it results in "a dead kid once a year". He has said that existing vaccination laws could pave the way for mandatory birth control.

 

“One way to get around problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty,” he wrote. “Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.”

It won’t surprise you to learn that he suggested African-Americans are less intelligent than whites.

Sabisky was one of the planned speakers at a Eugenics event at the London Intelligence Conference at UCL in 2018, alongside white supremacists.

His employment in government prompted a fierce backlash from anti-racism campaigners. Unite Against Fascism said that the language of Eugenics “has no place in government ...These people give a nod and a wink to the politics and ideology that led to the Holocaust,”

Sabisky was shown the door, but Michael Gove and his boss, Boris Johnson, remained in the building which brings us to the herd.

 

 

Johnson and Gove’s strategy to minimise the impact of Covid-19 was “to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity”.

Implicit in this is the acceptance of large numbers of deaths of vulnerable people, with Johnson saying that many families will lose loved ones.

They claim to no longer be following the Eugenicist ‘herd’ programme so when confronted with the absence of action to slow down Covid-19, Gove tells us that mass testing of the popuation is impossible for lack of re-agents. This is a lie.There is no lack. 

 

(Robert Peston )

 

The absence of PPE for NHS staff and shortage of ventilators is blamed on the suppliers. Any lie will do to avoid telling the truth and that is that a leopard does not change its spots and neither does a goat desert its herd.

The Eugenicists are still here and we are back with Carrie Buck in that Virginia ‘colony’ for the feeble-minded.