I was honoured to be William Ramsey’s guest on his William Ramsey Investigates podcast. We spoke about Exterminating Poverty.
Exterminating Poverty book
Here is a link to the book, summarised in under three minutes.
Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians (1922)
You can read and download a scan of Birth Control here. The copy is the book used and marked up by the trial. The defamatory words are on pages 101-2. If you read the paragraph that follows:
If, instead of bearing children, women practise birth control, and if children are to be denied to the poor as a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes … The English poor have already lost even the meaning of the word “property,” and if the birth controllers had their way the meaning of the word “home” would still follow. The aim of birth control is generally masked by falsehood, but the urging of this policy on the poor points unmistakenly to Servile State.
Margaret Sanger’s “A Plan for Peace”
Margaret Sanger’s A Plan for Peace was published in Birth Control Review (April 1932, pp. 107-108). It read as follows:
A Plan for Peace by Margaret Sanger
First, put into action President Wilson’s fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918. Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals.
The main objects of the Population Congress would be:
a) to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.
b) to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.
c) to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.
d) to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
e) to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
f) to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
g) to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.
The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics. The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strenghtening and development of moral conduct. Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense— defending the
unborn against their own disabilities.
The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers’ health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives—thus reducing maternal
mortality.
The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.
With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.
There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.
In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace.[Emphasis added].
GB Shaw’s progressive idea – kill the unfit
Lest there be accusations that this film is the creation of AI, there is further evidence here. In a speech to the Eugenics Education Society Shaw said:
We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment. It is right if a man cannot be trusted to go about in society without injuring other people that he should be killed. But a man may commit murder and be a perfectly safe and desirable citizen afterwards. It might be that it was desirable to have removed the man he murdered. A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.
Shaw was a member of the Fabian Society. While one might imagine that the “left” championed the working classes; this simply isn’t the case as outlined in Johnathan Freeland’s article in the Guardian: Eugenics: The Skeleton that Rattles Loudest in the Left’s Closet.
As I wrote (in the footnotes) in Exterminating Poverty:
In the conclusion to Eugenics and Politics in Britain 1900-1914. G.R. Searle wrote: “For those socialists prepared to base their case on the essential inequality of man, eugenics has proved to be extremely attractive, as can be seen from a study of the writings of socialist intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw to Professor J.B.S. Haldane, both of them ‘reform eugenists’ of a sort. True, trade union leaders have mostly ignored eugenics, and often seemed unaware of its very existence. It still remains a matter of some interest that the fiercest opposition to eugenics has come, not from the Labour/Socialist camp, but from Roman Catholics and from a certain kind of individualist liberal”
Searle, G. (1976). Eugenics and Politics in Britain 1900-1914. Leyden: Noordhoff International Publishing. Page 113.
Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968)
Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb (1968) predicted a Malthusian crisis if we didn’t act soon. I have become less sensitive to the prophets of doom whose predictions never eventuate.
On pages 135-36, Ehrlich suggested that sterilizing agents be added to the water supply on page 135-6. He stated that his idea was not legal but then says that “powerful governmental agency” is required, and that they should research it further.
Erlich later contributed to Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (1977) a text book with John Holdren and Anne Erlich, which suggests similarly extreme measures which are outlined at http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/). Holdren was the “Science Czar” in the Obama administration (in full, the “Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology”).
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