Tommy Douglas’s enthusiasm for eugenics being airbrushed by Canadians: MD

[Magda Hassan]

Tommy Douglas's enthusiasm for eugenics being airbrushed by Canadians: MD

Tom Blackwell Mar 14, 2012

Postmedia News files
Tommy Douglas in 1961 after being chosen NDP leader in Ottawa.




Canadians suffer from a "collective national amnesia" regarding Tommy Douglas's support for eugenics, likely because they are reluctant to taint the medicare pioneer's glowing image with unsavoury ideas, suggests a prominent McGill University physician in a new analysis.
Biographies and other accounts of Mr. Douglas's life have either ignored or down-played his striking embrace in the mid-1930s of forced sterilization and segregation for people of "sub-normal" intelligence and morality, says Dr. Michael Shevell in a newly published academic paper.
He argues that people should instead make a point of remembering the CCF/NDP leader's early advocacy of eugenics as a cautionary tale about simplistic medical solutions to social problems even as they admire his many other, positive accomplishments.
"We need to know as Canadians that our past isn't just one long, unblemished record, and that we have gone down the wrong path on several occasions. We need to be aware of that so we don't make these mistakes now or going forward," the head of pediatrics at Montreal Children's Hospital said in an interview.
"Any type of malicious behaviour or moral indiscretion in medicine starts with the assumption that somebody is not a person. That's the beginning of the slippery slope."
The spectre of eugenics may not be so remote today, in an age when technology has linked increasing numbers of diseases, psychological conditions and even personality traits to specific genes, said the neurologist and molecular geneticist. DNA testing of embryos already makes it possible for parents to pick and choose specific attributes in children born from in-vitro fertilization.
Writing in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, Dr. Shevell also suggested Mr. Douglas's support for eugenics in a 1933 Master's thesis and other writings is not as contradictory as it might seem for someone who was both a Baptist preacher and left-leaning politician.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/14/tommy-douglas/

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda - thank you for posting this.

As we have often discussed, a passionate belief in Eugenics is the dirty secret of the western intellectual tradition.

This belief was made Flesh by Hitler, and has since been preserved Secretly by the power elites that backed him.

The end scene of Peckinpah's masterpiece Cross of Iron fittingly ends with Brecht's nailing of this shamefulness:

Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men.
For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.

As true in 1945 as it is in 2012.