Dark days: Examining Europe’s history of eugenics, including forced sterilizations in Sweden

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George Bernard Shaw. Image: Irish Central

In Sweden the self-examination has already begun. A government minister has admitted that “what went on is barbaric and a national disgrace”, with more than 60,000 Swedish women sterilised from 1935 until as late as 1976. What has shocked most observers is that all this was committed not by some vile fascistic regime, but by a string of welfare-minded, Social Democratic governments.

[Similarly,] eugenics is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a roll call of British socialism’s best and brightest.

Thus George Bernard Shaw could write: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.”

For years, leftists, historians and everyone else have drawn a veil over Adolf Hitler’s naming of his creed National Socialism. It has been dismissed as a perverse PR trick of the Fuhrer’s, as if Nazism and socialism represented opposite faiths.

But the early history of British socialism tells a different story. It suggests that socialism – with its unshakable faith in science, central planning and the cool wisdom of the rational elite – contained the seeds of the atrocities that were to come later.

Read full, original post: Eugenics and the master race of the left – archive, 1997

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