The U.S. Wars against the Weak

When a good friend from Canada told me he was sending me a book with content that he personally recommended, I assumed from the title he mentioned, “War Against the Weak,” that it would be about the frequent aggression against Third World countries executed by Washington since the end of Cold War, when it became the only superpower on the planet.

However, I was astonished to discover, when I received it, that the book in question referred to another unequal conflict the United States has participated in since the beginning of the 20th century and put into practice between the 1930s and 1960s with the purpose of creating a dominant superior race.

This U.S. campaign, practically ignored around the world today because of media concealment, to which it has been subjected for obvious reasons, served as a model for the Holocaust, in which the Jewish population was subjugated by the German Nazism led by Adolph Hitler.

Important political and economical figures and institutions who are now presented to us as respectable defenders of democracy and human rights were involved in this genocide.

This book describes how, during the first six decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Americans, labeled as “feeble minded” because they did not conform to Teutonic standards, were forbidden to reproduce.

Selected in prisons, asylums and orphanages due to their ancestry, their national origin, ethnicity, race or religion, these people were sterilized without consent, prohibited from procreating and getting married or separated from their partners by bureaucratic governmental means. This clandestine, non-violent but devastating war was conducted by philanthropic organizations, well-known professors, prestigious universities, wealthy entrepreneurs and high-ranking government officials, which established a pseudo-scientific movement called “eugenics.” Its intention, beyond racism, was to create at the global level a superior Nordic race.

The eugenics movement gradually built a national juridical and bureaucratic infrastructure to wipe out the “unfit” from the United States. Intelligence tests, informally known as IQ measurements, were invented to justify the exclusion of the “feeble minded,” who frequently were merely timid, spoke a different language or had a different skin color. Twenty seven states of this country introduced laws issuing forced sterilizations in order to keep selected people from reproducing.

Prohibitions against marriage proliferated to prevent racial miscegenation. Numerous litigations arrived at the United States Supreme Court for the purpose of establishing eugenics and its tactics as a commonly accepted law.

The plan was to immediately sterilize 14 million people in the United States and millions more in other parts of the world to subsequently continue eradicating the remaining weak and leave the Nordics as the only remaining race on the planet.

Ultimately, in the decade of the 1930s, 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized; no one knows how many marriages were forbidden by state laws that arose from racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism disguised under the veil of respectable science.

Eventually, eugenics, the objectives of which were global, was spread by evangelists to Europe, Asia and Latin America to create a well-knit network of movements with similar practices that, through conferences, publications and other means, kept their leaders and advocates on the lookout for opportunities to expand their ideas and objectives.

This is how it arrived in Germany, captivating Adolph Hitler and the Nazi movement. German National Socialism transformed the North American search for a “superior Nordic race” into Hitler’s battle for a “dominant Aryan race.”

Nazi eugenics, due to its fast pace and brutality, quickly displaced the North American movement. In the pages of this book, Edwin Black — son of a Polish Jewish mother — demonstrates how the scientific rationale applied by the Nazi doctors in Auschwitz, Germany, had been previously conceived in the eugenic laboratories of the Carnegie Institution at their Cold Spring Harbor site in Long Island, where the Nazi regime was enthusiastically promoted. This publication also depicts the substantial financial aid granted by the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman foundations to German scientific entities that began the eugenic experiments that culminated in Auschwitz.

When the Nuremberg Trials denounced the Jewish extermination by the Nazis as genocide, the North American institutions practicing eugenics retitled their projects “genetics” and continued sterilizing and forbidding “unwanted” marriages for more than another decade.

Edwin Black’s book published by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 2003 is a jewel of investigative journalism whose 550 pages allow the reader to attest to the similarities between the tragic story he narrates and the policies U.S. powers apply today against national minorities, immigrants and the Third World.