I was and still remain strongly for military action in Afghanistan as a legitimate and necessary act in response to 9/11: an attack on two American cities and on the infrastructure of government cannot be ignored... - Dave Neiwert aka 'Hunter' - Daily Kos, May 10, 2006
..Sanger saw birth control as the highest form of eugenics. "Birth control, which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health."
More than a Malthusian, Sanger became an outspoken social Darwinist, even looking beyond the ideas of Spencer. In her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, Sanger thoroughly condemned charitable action. She devoted a full chapter to a denigration of charity and a deprecation of the lower classes. Chapter 5, "The Cruelty of Charity," was prefaced by an epigraph from Spencer himself: " Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles."
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Sanger's book, Pivot of Civilization, included an introduction by famous British novelist and eugenicist H.G. Wells, who said, " We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us."
Later, Sanger's magazine reprinted and lauded an editorial from the publication American Medicine, which tried to correct "the popular misapprehension that [birth control advocates] encourage small families. The truth is they encourage small families where large ones would seem detrimental to society, but they advocate with just as great insistence large families where small ones are an injustice to society. They frown upon the ignorant poor whose numerous children, brought into the world often under the most unfavorable of circumstances, are a burden to themselves, a menace to the health of the not infrequently unwilling mother, and an obstacle to social progress. But they frown with equal disapproval on the well-to-do, cultured parents who can offer their children all the advantages of the best care and education and who nevertheless selfishly withhold these benefits from society. More children from the fit, less from the unfit - that is the chief issue in Birth Control."
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Sanger would return to the theme of more eugenically fit children (and fewer unfit) again and again. She preferred negative, coercive eugenics. "Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsibility and uncontrolled fertility of the 'unfit' and the feeble-minded establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate among the 'fit.' But in the so-called 'constructive' aspect, in seeking to reestablish the dominance of [the] healthy strain over the unhealthy, by urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a 'cradle competition' between the fit and the unfit.
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Sanger surrounded herself with some of the eugenics movement's most outspoken racists and white supremacists. Chief among them was Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. Stoddard's book, devoted to the notion of a superior Nordic race, became a eugenic gospel, It warned: " 'Finally perish!' That is the exact alternative that confronts the white race...If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption...Not to-day, nor yet to-morrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If th present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed.
Stoddard added the eugenic maxim, "We now know that men are not, and never will be, equal. We know that environment and education can develop only what heredity brings." Stoddard's solution? "Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat...[which will] as with all organisms, eventually limit...its influence."
Shortly after Stoddard's landmark book was published in 1920, Sanger invited him to join the board of directors of her American Birth Control League, a position he retained for years.
War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black. Pgs 129-133
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Note:
No mention of Sanger and Eugenics in a recent Democracy Now! program detailing the history of Reproductive Rights and Abortion Activism. No mention of Sanger or Eugenics at all in the DN! online archive.
Meanwhile, Dave Neiwert, the pseudo anti-fascist who apparently has never heard of the term Zionism, yet likes to assume National Alliance related screen names while writing mainstream Democratic 'con and bullshit' (or is it endlessly blathering kitsch?) at CIA-Mockingbird front, Daily Kos, stoops to the level of outright disinformation and lying regarding Sanger and Eugenics:
Foremost among these was the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, as well as other multiculturalists such as Margaret Mead and Franz Boas. These thinkers specifically and ardently rejected the tenets of white supremacism and "negative" eugenics. Of course, in subsequent years, all of these people have been tarred -- mostly by anti-abortion activists -- with guilt by association to the eugenics movement. (Planned Parenthood has a thorough and well-argued defense of Sanger up on its Web site.) But there was no mistaking the differences between them at the time.
Dave Neiwert is now managing editor at Firedoglake. With gatekeepers like Neiwert at the levers of information control for citizens seeking an alternative to the corporate media, is it any wonder the U.S. has become an uninhabitable Fourth Reich, populated by selectively bred 'imbeciles' ? .
