LESSON 3 EUGENICS AND SOCIAL DARWINISM

We made great in-roads into Assignment One and began looking at colonial expansion and the issue of Social Darwinism and eugenics.  The Merriam Webster dictionary provides a succinct definition:

: a science that tries to improve the human race by controlling which people become parents.

As we discussed, this was seen as part of a humane movement and in the 1920s and 30s was supported by many socialist intellectuals including H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and Sydney Webb.  In the USA eugenics was promoted as evidenced in the photograph below.  Although elitist in its ethos,to eradicate genetic traits that caused deformity, illness and misery, it was under the Nazis that the concept was perverted to include not only sterilisation but the murder  of those seen as impure or physically or mentally infirm.  

This can be seen as one aspect of Social Darwinism and a belief in a superior race of people (the Aryan race) who were naturally destined to govern and control the weaker and "lesser" races, especially the Slavs in the East.  

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