Monday, July 31, 2023

Coming soon to a surgeon near you . . . .

 

For almost twenty years (1948 – 1966) the country that brought us Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, medical experiments on POWs and sex slaves had brutal eugenics laws.

Recently, it was reported by The Japanese Times that thousands of  nonconsenting men, women, and children were sterilized.

A new parliamentary report from Japan has revealed that approximately 25,000 people were sterilized under the country’s former eugenics laws, the majority of whom did not consent. Some of the victims were children.

“Approximately 65% of the people sterilized were forced to undergo the procedures. Children as young as nine years old were among the victims, and many of them believed they were being treated for a legitimate illness.”

“People with intellectual disabilities, mental illness, or hereditary disorders were among those forcibly sterilized, as the Japanese government wanted to prevent the births of so-called ‘inferior’ children. Japanese politicians also wanted to cut population rates due to food shortages after World War II. Though the law ended in 1966, eugenic propaganda continued to spread long after; The Japan Times cited a high school textbook from the 1970s which said the government was working on the ‘country’s eugenics to improve and enhance the genetic predisposition of the entire public.’”

The United States of America had its own eugenics laws.

As I wrote in The “Living Constitution and the Right to Die (Amazon and other publishers:

"The callous remark of Justice O.W. Holmes, Jr.— “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”was made in his less than three-page majority (8–1) opinion in the 1927 United States Supreme Court case of Carrie Buck v. Bell, Superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded."

Immediately below are the relevant parts of Holmes’s opinion for the Court. [The italics, ellipses, and bracketed words are mine.]

Mr. Justice HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.

[T]he superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck … for the purpose of making her sterile. * * *

Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony…. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.

She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case ….

An Act of Virginia … recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, etc.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who if now discharged would become a menace but if incapable of procreating might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society; and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc.

The statute then enacts that whenever the superintendent of certain institutions including the abovenamed State Colony shall be of opinion that it is for the best interest of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, etc., on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse. [My emphasis.]

[A]ny party may apply to the [Virginia] Supreme Court of Appeals, which, if it grants the appeal, is to hear the case upon the record of the trial in the Circuit Court and may enter such order as it thinks the Circuit Court should have entered. There can be no doubt that so far as procedure is concerned the rights of the patient are most carefully considered, and as every step in this case was taken in scrupulous compliance with the statute  and after months of observation, there is no doubt that in that respect the plaintiff has had due process.

 

Please note the following sentence’s dichotomy between procedu[ral] and substantive law, which, as we shall see, play a crucial role in why Americans have no constitutional right to die.

The [plaintiff’s] attack is not upon the [statute’s] procedure but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment [of the Virginia court] finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck “is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization . . . . * * *  We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives [see In Memoriam and Selective Draft Law Cases, above. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]

It would be strange if it [the public welfare] could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]

Thus does Holmes’s opinion reek of a defense of eugenics. It has been estimated that as many as 70,000 Americans, men and women alike, were sterilized until 1944, most of them because of the widespread belief that eugenics was a solution to reduce reproduction of certain “undesirables.”

Buck v. Bell has never been overruled by the Supreme Court of the United States.

For additional information about Carrie Buck and Buck v. Bell, see Jennifer Senior’s March 6, 2016, New York Times review, Imbeciles on the Supreme Court and Justice Not for All by Adam Cohen. The following quotations are from Ms. Senior’s review. [Bracketed words are mine].

Ms. Buck was neither epileptic nor feebleminded. As time would prove, she was of perfectly average intelligence. She was simply uneducated and luckless—a poor white girl from

Charlottesville who’d had a baby at 17, most likely because she’d been raped by the nephew of her foster mother. Rather than risking scandal, her guardians thought it best to get rid of her.

Nor was Ms. Buck part of three generations of so-called imbeciles.

Of all the tools to stem the tide of feeblemindedness, sterilization was by far the most efficient. During the Progressive Era, a number of states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, including California and Connecticut. So bullish was Dr. Priddy to do the same for Virginia that he worked in concert with a methodical, meticulous local lawmaker, Aubrey Strode, to design a statute that would withstand the test of the highest court of the land. Ms. Buck was the test case.

We learn early on that Ms. Buck’s lawyer, Irving Whitehead, had close personal and professional ties to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded—the superintendent paid his legal fees—which meant he [the lawyer] made no efforts to mount a serious defense for his client.

Justice Holmes [was] himself an eager eugenicist, as were a few of his       Supreme Court colleagues.

 *

So too are many of today’s politicians, academics, teachers, physicians, writers, and others who yield coercive power.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday, July 21, 2023

The consequences of being asleep at the wheel.

 

The Coup We Never Knew

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

 By: Victor Davis Hanson
 
What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did borrowed money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent of dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then, and with impunity, did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it suddenly legal for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures? No, of course not.

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why? And today, the current administration (Biden) is blaming former President Trump for that disaster!

What happened to the once-trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie under oath with impunity?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely labeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare of a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we neither knew about nor recognized.

Sunday, July 2, 2023

The Third and Fifth of July

Just another two days on the calendar.

Independence Day, one of the most important days in the history of the world, should be celebrated (and be referred to) accordingly.

We can hope that remembrance and understanding of this day signals the beginning of the American spirit's rebirth and its blessing of individual rights and limited government.