War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
War Hostile to the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Make a Master Race Books
Product Description
In War Hostile to the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early twentieth century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics started in laboratories on Long Island but finished in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Ultimately, over 60,000 untrained Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes agains humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of terrible science at its most terrible–which holds vital lessons for the impending genetic age.
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Edwin Black should have a fantastic sense of satisfaction, as reviewers unanimously express shock, outrage, horror and disgust at this book’s revelations of America’s complicity in the pseudoscience behind the Master Race and the Final Solution. Had some of the fantastic philanthropic institutions and social engineers of the time had their way, America would have tried to keep up with the Nazi’s!
Our knowledge of the past may preclude us from repeating our mistakes, but unfortunately, this tome, with its academic aura of footnotes and references, serves primarily to solidify the perception that ALL things linked to Nazism must be summarily rejected. Barely beneath the “factual reporting” surface of this book seethes a swirling hatred of the Third Reich’s creators and supporters. It makes for gripping reading and allows the author to foster a sense of foul conspiracy and sinister plot in the reader’s mind. Entertainment trumps scholarship.
I have no problem with entertainment, as long as the masquerade serves to deliver some grains of truth. What I do take come forth with is the abandonment of scholarship in the book’s eye to the future. Yes, there were horrors; yes, we went off beam; but to reckon that we can everlastingly reject EVERYTHING associated with eugenics is to bury our heads in the sand. Sooner or later, we will be forced to deal with corporal and biological facts that will not go away-our resources are not infinite; our genes, the foundations of our order existence, are physically frail and in constant need of assessment and selection; our current infatuation with the sanctity of the individual must eventually be balanced by an increased sense of each individual’s responsibility to our society. War Hostile to the Weak, even as obliquely referencing these issues, ultimately contributes to their perpetuation because Mr. Black fails to suggest that some aspects of eugenics should be retrieved from the dustbin of history.
Common wisdom teaches that noble ends do not justify ignoble means. But noble goals are not made disgraceful when pursued by foul means. It is the means that were misguided, not the goal. To reckon that we will in some way survive and prosper without doing our genetic housekeeping is pure folly.
Rating: 4 / 5
“War Hostile to the Weak” takes American history as a facet of pop culture. Even as factually based, Black undermines the historical importance of eugenics and the debate. Black, a journalist by nature, is not a historian and his book should not be taken as a only historical text. Even as he does cite his evidence, Black only touches the surface of Eugenic history. Ultimately, “War Hostile to the Weak” was written for well loved reading and is an adequate basis for those with no knowledge on the theme
Rating: 3 / 5
Edwin Black writes books, that not only go you emotionally, but educate you with page turning energy. This is a book that will not only scare you and tell you about the horrors of what mankind can reckon of but how this type of horror can become “usual” in a society that goes mad. This book is relevant today as never before, as we are facing a crisis of war hostile to the “infidels”, which in its own way is a war hostile to the weak, or the politically right who refuse to acknowlege that we are fighting a war of terror, below the guise of religion, and one party choosing who lives and who dies. This book is well researched, documented, and filled with facts. Bravo to Edwin Black. Now if only the State department may possibly reead this……………..
Rating: 5 / 5
Maybe if this was the first book I had read on eugenics, I would have liked it better. There is no doubt that Black did his research…but much of this in rank had been given in a few books I prefer, including Daniel Kevles “In the Name of Eugenics,” and in “The Mismeasure of Man” by Stephen Jay Gould. Part of what bothered me about Black’s book is the title. As someone who is deaf and works in the bioethics/disability community, I was not crazy about perpetuating the thought that those of us with differences are ‘weak’. I know that is what they plotting back in the early 1900s, and they used much more derogatory terms like feeble-minded and idiots! But the word ‘weak’ is not one I want conveyed to others who read these books. It’s fantastic to have authors write with concern about eugenics raising it’s hideous head again…even if they have no disability. But, there are many of us with differences who are working on our own to preclude another medical holocaust here…please do not spread the image that those of us with disabilities need protection from the world. We will kick our own ass thank you!
The book was very repetitive of in rank I had garnered else where. Black provides very small new in rank in this huge, heavy tome. I reckon Black is trying to say that the U.S. needs to look at itself first, instead of getting on Germany’s case about the Holocausts…because the U.S. provided the groundwork for the Nazis eradication programs of the disabled as well as the Jews and the Gypsies.
Black’s writing in this book lacks passion. This is what gripped me in Gould’s and Kevles’ books…is they felt very strongly about statistics being used to mark and denigrate people, and about our people’s own holocausts. When writing a paper, social commentators need dispassion; in writing a book, passion should underline the stand the author takes. I don’t see that here.
Black writes well…his book on “The Transfer Agreement” is spell-binding. This particular book lacks the emotion and yes, even the opinions, that drove that book.
Karen Sadler,
Science Education,
University of Pittsburgh
Rating: 3 / 5
Many are familiar with the litany of 20th century regarding the superfluity of ways in which the Nazi thugs used the much-hyped science of eugenics to gain acceptance for their many horrific activities, from programs of forced sterilization, euthanasia of the ancient and unwell, and later even as the justification of genocide during the conduct of the war by the side of the Eastern front. In fact, much of the rationalization for the racist phlegm spouted by Hitler and his ilk was derived from the semi-scientific thoughts of the eugenics movement. Much less well known is the fact that the early medical experiments and notions spouted by medical doctors like the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele were highly respected and even revered in the United States as well as Europe, and that Dr. Mengele in fact held broadcast presentations that were hugely successful in this people. Moreover, as the author of this provocative book reveals, there were several well loved centers of eugenics research and support for such research for well over thirty years before the Second World War.
Even as the book is both fascinating and full of shocking facts, it is also not especially convincing nor especially well written. It appears to be a to some extent muckraking attempt to sensationalize a particularly lurid aspect of 20th century history in American history, and much of what he purports does not appear to be independently verifiable or consistent with in rank one finds elsewhere on the topic. In fact, his most outrageous claim, one that argues that the notion of so-called “Nordic ” racial superiority originated here in the United States, is quite poorly supported by the evidence he cites. Even as it is admittedly a sad and disgraceful period of our history, there is small verifiable documentary evidence to lend credence to such a thesis.
This is not to deny there is much of interest in this book. He traces the sad progress of the so-called Immigration Act of 1924, showing how it was inextricably tied to the pseudo-scientific notions popularly associated with the eugenics movement, and with a rampant dread of foreigners as well. Given the rapid entry of immigrants from both eastern and southern Europe at the time, the purported facts regarding potential hurt to the genetic makeup of the people was seen to be at risk, and some sad and retrogressive legislation attempted to stem the tide hostile to such potential dangers. The legislation led to a number of state laws outlawing interracial marriage, and were part of a growing campaign of both racial and ethnic intolerance most Americans would just as soon forget rather than learn about in the kind of detail offered here. Thus it is a potentially valuable book, but one which one can urge only with apt caution regarding its veracity and accuracy.
Still, even as the author does admit as to the fact that the eugenics movement arose in an atmosphere of ignorance, dread and intolerance, and added and aggravated the long-term manifestations of such emotive passions, the kind of complied list of eugenic sins delivered in a polemic style is hardly the sort of dispassionate and right document one would associate with a more scholarly approach that attempts less to sensationalize and much more to elucidate, clarify, and question the topic at hand. It is indeed a sad period of time in our history, but one that deserves a more dispassionate, less muckraking, and more scholarly approach to truly serve the admirable stated purpose of this work. Delight in!
Rating: 3 / 5