Eugenics to the Left of Us

Jonathan Freedland is shilling his latest book over at CiF today and presents us with an article about the history of eugenics in Britain. The point he makes is that eugenics was a popular philosophy during the early twentieth century. Importantly, he reminds his readers that this idea was lapped up by the Fabians and their fellow travellers on the left.

None of this is anything we didn’t already know. However, he has dared to say it in Guardianland. No, the fun is to be had below the line. That popping noise you hear is the sound of heads exploding as the cognitive dissonance inhibitors go into overload.

Popcorn time.

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I’ve only had time to wade through the first couple of pages of this wank, however, for the aficionado of the logical fallacy, the tirade of wounded self-righteous wailing contains a rich seam to be mined. I’ve seen so far; desperate attempts to redefine the left so as not to include the suspects named in the article (no true Scotsman), nasty right wingers did worse (tu-quoque) and the inevitable “you are a nasty right winger” (the ad hominem).

10 Comments

  1. Curmudgeon
    Sorry WRONG
    Fascism and Nazism were politics of the extreme Right, as communism (which is actually a RELIGION) was/is of the extreme Left.
    Where thet are similar is that they are very strongly authoritarian.
    It makes much more sense if you plot your politics in a plane, not along a line.

    Eugenics was “fashionable” then as “anti-racism” is now ….

    • I don’t know though, National German Socialist Workers party, in the absence of any definitive ruling on what socialism is it doesn’t seem to be unreasonable to assume that if someone calls themselves a socialist then that’s what they believe themselves to be. If the party they found then enacts policies which look very similar to those being enacted by other self proclaimed socialists then why is it unreasonable to describe the end result as socialist ? This is what gets the left so riled up, the ‘wrong’ socialists keep grabbing power and doing terrible and disastrous things, so they have to pretend they were never socialist in the first place. Which creates the bizarre situation whereby socialism has never actually been tried but is certain to work when eventually it is, apparently !

  2. Indeed, Curmudgeon, although I don’t know whether ‘left’ and ‘right’ are particularly useful. Nazism, economically speaking, was certainly a form of socialism, albeit a different variety to Bolshevism. There was no market economy operating under the nazis. Prices and production were determined, not by the market, but by the central planning committees. It probably owed more to Bismarck than it did to Marx and Engels.

    What the bosheviks, nazis, fascists, fabians, progressives in the US etc agreed upon was the real enemy, and that was laissez-faire capitalism and individual liberty.

    • I don’t think that’s very fair to Bismarck, he wasn’t in favour of the state interfering in private business, he was certainly a statist or rather an absolutist but this didn’t extend to central direction of the economy.

  3. “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg gives a good account of how Italian Fascism and German National Socialism originated from the political Left. IIRC Mussolini had been a leading light in the Italian Socialist Party.

    Any political movement that is antipathetic to the Churches and the traditional aristocracy cannot be said to be wholly of the Right.

  4. Badges aside; how does one tell fascism and socialism apart?

    Both heavily statist.
    Both rely on centralised planning as an economic strategy.
    Both end up relying on the ‘cult of personality’.
    Both virulently anti-semitic.
    Both philosophies support eugenic type policies.

    The only real overall difference I can see is that one creed is Nationalist, the other Internationalist. Two sides of the same vile coinage.

    Still, it’s fun to watch heads exploding as the zealots try to reconcile their unpleasant belief systems. Noooo, we’re the nice ones. We don’t kill, yes we did, oooohh shiiitttt! (Boom)
    😈

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