British Found Training Afghan Terrorists For UK-US Attacks

Russian Military Analysts are reporting today that the government of Afghanistan is ‘enraged’ over the discovery by Afghan Secret Police of a top secret British Military computer memory stick revealing the United Kingdoms plan to train over 2,000 Taliban rebel fighters and provide them with a base of operations.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had previously stated to his Parliament on contacting their Afghan enemy that "Our objective is to defeat the insurgency by isolating and eliminating their leaders. We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”, which with the discovery of their plans showed the duplicity of the United Kingdom and its US allies.

Upon their learning of the treachery by their British NATO allies, Germany was quick to state that they would send no further troops to Afghanistan and the Canadian Prime Minister, Steven Harper, has, also, told his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, that Canadian Military forces could soon leave Afghanistan.

So serious has the Western Allies mission NATO mission in Afghanistan been compromised by these new charges against Britain that European support for the US led war has erupted in fresh tensions among the West, and as we can read as reported by Britain’s Guardian News Service:

"The past fortnight, leading up to a Nato defence ministers' meeting in Lithuania tomorrow and then a summit in Romania in April, has witnessed a transatlantic shouting match between the Pentagon and Europe over mismatched abilities, alleged cowardice and incompetence from Kunduz to Helmand.

The Dutch called in the US ambassador for a dressing down after Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said the Europeans were no good at counter-insurgency. Gates climbed down, partly, but then fired off a letter to Berlin demanding the Germans put their lives on the line in combat in the south rather than enjoying the relatively cushy conditions of the north. A furious German response followed."

According to these reports, however, the most catastrophic revelation contained on the captured British Military computer memory stick were plans by the United Kingdom, and their American ally, to ‘utilize’ these 2,000 Afghan Taliban rebel fighters as terrorists against UK, European and US civilian ‘targets’ in a bid to further their effort towards igniting their populations passion for Total World War.

The West’s greatest fears, these reports state, are being further fueled by Russia and Irans growing blockade of Afghan opium supplies which have supplied the coffers of the British and Americans vast spy apparatus’ with untold billions of dollars of hidden wealth since 2002.

The United Nations is also reporting that ‘Afghanistan, the world's biggest opium producer, is set for another bumper crop in 2008’. But, with the inability to for Afghan opium to reach their Global markets, the United States and Britain are left with only their protected cocaine revenues from Colombia, as Israel has refused to share their revenues generated from their Global Ecstasy trade, and which leaves them with a serious shortfall of monies to fund their growing police states.

As the former Taliban rulers had nearly wiped out Afghanistan’s opium crop, as reported by the United Nations in 2001, Russian historians have long stated that the ‘roadmap’ being followed by the United Kingdom and their American allies is that of the British Empires flooding China with opium in the 19th century which destroyed the Chinese people and led to their defeat by Britain.

To the Western people themselves, and who are intended by their rulers to be victims, there remains no appetite among them to know the truest state of a World which is rapidly plunging into the chaos of Total War, and all the misery it entails. No greater evidence of this fact can be found than a newly released poll which finds that, astoundingly, 1 in 4 British citizens believe that their own World War II Leader, Winston Churchill, is a mythical person.

One can only wonder how these people can be saved from themselves before all is lost for them.

Please Europe, help USa kill more

Rice Tries to Convince Europe on Afghanistan

With criticism of the war in Afghanistan increasing on both sides of the Atlantic, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that European governments needed to convince their people that sending troops to Afghanistan — and keeping them there — should remain a priority for NATO.

“I do think the alliance is facing a test here,” Ms. Rice said in a visit to London. “Populations have to understand that this is not just a peacekeeping fight.”

Her comments came before she and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, left for an unannounced trip to Afghanistan, where they intend to meet with President Hamid Karzai to discuss the deteriorating situation in his country. They arrived in Kabul Thursday morning.

Underscoring the challenge for the United States, which wants Europe to increase its troop strength in Afghanistan significantly, Germany announced Wednesday that it would send only enough additional troops to replace a Norwegian contingent of about 250.

The German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, rejected a sharply worded letter last week from his United States counterpart, Robert M. Gates, asking that Germany send soldiers and helicopters to southern Afghanistan, where the heaviest fighting has taken place. Instead, Mr. Jung said Wednesday that Germany would deploy a rapid reaction force in northern Afghanistan to replace the Norwegians.

“An expansion into the south is out of the question,” Reinhold Robbe, the armed forces commissioner for the lower house of Parliament, said on television.

In Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Gates said he planned to raise his concerns about insufficient support from some NATO allies in a speech in Germany this weekend, and Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said the international military mission there was “under-resourced.”

As the Taliban insurgency has gathered steam, Bush administration officials have been trying to prod reluctant European allies to bolster the United States contingent of about 26,000. Mr. Gates in recent days signed a temporary deployment order for 3,200 more marines in Afghanistan.

The entire international force totals about 40,000 troops.

Germany is perhaps under the greatest pressure to increase its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s force in Afghanistan. It has roughly 3,200 troops there, making it the third largest contributor, after the United States and Britain.

Some of that pressure has come from Canada, whose 2,500 troops in Afghanistan have suffered heavy losses, including 78 deaths. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said he will withdraw his force on schedule next year unless NATO adds 1,000 troops.

His government said Wednesday that if NATO agreed to add the troops, it would introduce a motion in the Canadian Parliament to prolong the Canadian mission for one more year beyond February 2009.

Referring to American pressure on Germany, Peter Schmidt, a security analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, said, “Partners in an alliance have to also understand the domestic debates in a partner country like Germany.” He added: “The Americans quite often show up in Europe and the president tells us, ‘Look I’ll never get that through Congress.’ Something similar is happening here.”

Mr. Gates, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had not received any responses yet to the letters he sent recently to the defense ministers of Germany and other NATO countries suggesting greater military commitments.

“I worry a great deal about the alliance evolving into a two-tiered alliance, in which you have some allies willing to fight and die to protect people’s security, and others who are not,” Mr. Gates said. “There are allies that are doing their part and are doing well,” he added, citing the Canadians, British, Australians, Dutch and Danes.

General McNeill, speaking at a Pentagon news briefing, said that if official American military counterinsurgency doctrine were applied, more than 400,000 allied and Afghan troops would be required in Afghanistan.

Commenting on the level of involvement among NATO nations, General McNeill said, “It is probably an incontrovertible truth that if you pull a huge alliance together, that the going-in position of different nationalities of that alliance, or at least their military forces, is somewhat different.”

Bush administration officials have been on the defensive about Afghanistan since a critical report was released last week by an independent commission whose co-chairman was Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO supreme commander. The report concluded, “The U.S. and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid, and without a clear and consistent comprehensive strategy.”

A United Nations report this week said that opium production, which officials believe has helped to finance the Taliban and Al Qaeda, had increased.

Appearing with Ms. Rice in London before reporters, Mr. Miliband, the foreign secretary, signaled the growing frustration felt in Europe over the Afghan government’s inability to confront the Taliban or to halt opium production. He stressed the need for a “joint effort” of NATO and the Afghan government and said Britain had no plans to send additional troops. “We’re not there to create a colony,” he said.

Helene Cooper reported from Kabul and London, and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin. Michael R. Gordon and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.

Deconstructing the Myth of AIDS

Syracuse listed as terror target

So we're about to celebrate being on a list of possible terror targets. Great! We can get public fund to protect our infastructure. What concerns me, is that now we have a greater chance of a "false flag operation," setting off a suitcase nuke in our backyard. So not only do I have to worry about the suspension of the Constitution and Marshall Law, but if I survive an attack, I have to cleanup after these Neocons on their quest to world domination. Are we now heading towards the depopulation of America?


Syracuse will be added today to a list of 60 cities and regions nationwide considered most at risk of a terrorist attack, a label that makes the area eligible for federal counterterrorism money.

The designation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security means the region will be able to compete for grants from a pool of $782 million available this fiscal year.

"This is welcome news for the Syracuse area, which will now be eligible to compete for grants that could give local law enforcement officials the tools and resources they need to improve security," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

The Department of Homeland Security is mandated to look at the 100 largest metropolitan areas nationwide to determine which are eligible for the grants. It uses a risk-based formula that looks at a community's proximity to a border, military bases and other potential terrorist targets.

"Our geographic location, in and of itself, kind of puts us at risk," said Peter Alberti, Onondaga County's commissioner of emergency management. "We're at the crossroads of the state. Some of our business and industries make us at risk, also. For example, we're one of the main railway intersections for the Northeast."

AT-

Homeland Security officials declined to discuss the changes Thursday. But a congressional aide said the department will expand the list of eligible cities from 46 last year to 60 this year.

Syracuse, Albany and Rochester were added to the list as second-tier cities, making them eligible for less money than the seven highest-risk cities on the list, including New York City.

Syracuse and Onondaga County will work together in deciding which projects to target for grant applications, Alberti said.

"It's a big deal," Alberti said. "There are all kinds of infrastructure security projects, and information and intelligence projects that we have been talking about doing."

Without providing specifics, Alberti said the targeted projects would provide protection for critical facilities, including hospitals, water supplies and communication networks.

"It's for those critical things that keep a community going," Alberti said. "We all have to sit down and prioritize what we are looking for."

More world depopulation via US military

Bombs away over Iraq: Who cares?
By Tom Engelhardt

A January 21 Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ("Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.") Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:

The US military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds [8,600 kilograms] of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of



Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches. In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad.

And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22 story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:

The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and IEDs [improvised explosive devices].

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq".

Note that both pieces started with bombing news - in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these past days - those 45,000 kilograms or so of explosives that US planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad - simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while in the New York Times it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the George W Bush administration's invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.

For those who know something about the history of air power, which, since World War II, has been lodged at the heart of the American way of war, that 45,000 figure might have rung a small bell.

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000 people, including refugees, in the town which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 45,000 kilograms of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 45,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 16 kilometers south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 45,000-kilogram barrage, has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as "al-Qaeda", so in situations like this it's hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down. In the Spanish situation, however, four reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed to the scene of destruction. Steer's first piece for the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was headlined "The tragedy of Guernica" and called the assault "unparalleled in military history". (Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that this had been an attack on a civilian population, essentially a terror bombing.

The self-evident barbarism of the event - the first massively publicized bombing of a civilian population - caused international horror. It was news across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last century, Pablo Picasso's Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems and other works of art.

As Ian Patterson writes in his book, Guernica and Total War:

Many attacks since then, including the ones we have grown used to seeing in Iraq and the Middle East in recent years, have been on such a scale that Guernica's fate seems almost insignificant by comparison. But it's almost impossible to overestimate the outrage it caused in 1937 ... Accounts of the bombing were widely printed in the American press, and provoked a great deal of anger and indignation in most quarters ...

Those last two tag-on paragraphs in the Parker and Rasheed Los Angeles Times piece tell us much about the intervening 71 years, which included the German bombing of Rotterdam and the blitz of London as well as other English cities; the Japanese bombings of Shanghai and other Chinese cities; the Allied fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities; the US atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Cold War-era of mutually assured destruction in which two superpowers threatened to use the ultimate in airborne explosives to incinerate the planet; the massive, years-long US bombing campaigns against North Korea and later North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; the American air power "victories" of the first Gulf War and Afghanistan (2001); and the Bush administration's shock-and-awe, air-and-cruise-missile assault on Baghdad in March 2003. The latter, though meant to "decapitate" the regime of Saddam Hussein, killed not a single Iraqi governmental or Ba'ath party figure, only Iraqi civilians. In those seven decades, the death toll and damage caused by war - on the ground and from the air - has increasingly been delivered to civilian populations, while the United States has come to rely on its air force to impose its will in war.

Forty-five thousand kilograms of explosives delivered from the air is now, historically speaking, a relatively modest figure. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a single air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf, did that sort of damage in less than a day and it was a figure that, as again last week, the military was proud to publicize without fear of international outrage or the possibility that "barbarism" might come to mind:

From Tuesday afternoon through early Wednesday the air wing flew 69 dedicated strike missions in Basra and in and around Baghdad, involving 27 F/A-18 Hornets and 12 Tomcats. They dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of ordnance, said Lieutenant Brook DeWalt, Kitty Hawk public affairs officer.

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no American reporters rushed there - in person or by satellite phone - to check out the damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only significant if it's of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the "bombs" can be produced at approximately "the cost of a pizza", (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 45,000 kilograms of bombs just doesn't have the ring of something that matters.

Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon's success in creating a dismissive, sanitizing language in which to frame war from the air. "Collateral damage" stands in for the civilian dead - even though in much of modern war, the collateral damage could be considered the dead soldiers, not the ever-rising percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of course, delivered "precisely" by "precision-guided" weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even virginal. Army Colonel Terry Ferrell, for instance, described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference:

The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape the battlefield and take out known threats before our ground troops move in. Our aim was to neutralize any advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs and other weapons.

Reports - often hard to assess for credibility - have nonetheless seeped out of the region indicating that there were civilian casualties, possibly significant numbers of them; that bridges and roads were "cut off" and undoubtedly damaged; that farms and farmlands were damaged or destroyed. According to Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press, for instance, Iraqi and American troops were said to have advanced into Arab Jabour, already much damaged from years of fighting, through "smoldering citrus groves".

But how could there not be civilian casualties and property damage? After all, the official explanation for this small-scale version of a "shock-and-awe" campaign in a tiny rural region was that American troops and allied Iraqi forces had been strangers to the area for a while, and that the air-delivered explosives were meant to damage local infrastructure - by exploding roadside bombs and destroying weapons caches or booby traps inside existing structures.

As that phrase "take out known threats before our ground troops move in" made clear, this was an attempt to minimize casualties among American (and allied Iraqi) troops by bringing massive amounts of firepower to bear in a situation in which local information was guaranteed to be sketchy at best. Given such a scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this, increasingly, is likely to be the American way of war in Iraq.

The ABCs of air war in Iraq
So let's focus, for a moment, on American air power in Iraq and gather together a little basic information you're otherwise not likely to find in one place. In these past years, the Pentagon has invested billions of dollars in building up an air-power infrastructure in and around Iraq. As a start, it constructed one of its largest foreign bases anywhere on the planet about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. Balad Air Base has been described by Newsweek as a "15-square-mile mini-city of thousands of trailers and vehicle depots", whose air fields handle 27,500 takeoffs and landings every month.

Reputedly "second only to London's Heathrow Airport in traffic worldwide", it is said to handle congestion similar to that of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. With about 140,000 tons a year of cargo moving through it, the base is "the busiest aerial port" in the global domains of the Department of Defense.

It is also simply massive, housing about 40,000 military personnel, private contractors of various sorts, and Pentagon civilian employees. It has its own bus routes, fast-food restaurants, sidewalks and two PXs that are the size of K-Marts. It also has its own neighborhoods, including, reported the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks, "KBR-land" for civilian contractors and "CJSOTF" (Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force), "home to a special operations unit [that] is hidden by especially high walls".

Radar traffic controllers at the base now commonly see "more than 550 aircraft operations in just one day". To the tune of billions of dollars, Balad's runways and other facilities have been, and continue to be, upgraded for years of further wear and tear. According to the military press, construction is to begin this



month on a US$30 million "state-of-the-art battlefield command and control system [at Balad] that will integrate air traffic management throughout Iraq".

National Public Radio's Defense correspondent Guy Raz paid a visit to the base last year and termed it "a giant construction site ... [T]he sounds of construction and the hum of generators seem to follow visitors everywhere. Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las Vegas: while the surrounding Iraqi villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights never go out at Balad Air Base."

This gargantuan feat of construction is designed for the military long haul. As Josh White of the Washington Post reported recently in a relatively rare (and bland) summary piece on the use of air power in Iraq, there were five times as many US air strikes in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of course, started off with a literal bang from those 45,000 kilograms of explosives dropped southeast of Baghdad. That poundage assumedly includes the 18,000 kilograms of explosives, which got modest headlines for being delivered in a mere 10 minutes in the Arab Jabour area the previous week, but not the 7,200 kilograms of explosives that White reports being used north of Baghdad in approximately the same period; nor, evidently, another 6,800 kilograms of explosives dropped on Arab Jabour more recently. (And none of these numbers seem to include US Marine Corps figures for Iraq, which have evidently not been released.)

Who could forget all the attention that went into the president's "surge" strategy on the ground in the first half of last year? But which media outlet even noticed, until recently, what Bob Deans of Cox News Service has termed the air "surge" that accompanied those 30,000 surging troops into the Iraqi capital and environs? In that same period, air units were increasingly concentrated in and around Iraq. By mid-2007, for instance, the Associated Press was already reporting:

[S]quadrons of attack planes have been added to the in-country fleet. The air reconnaissance arm has almost doubled since last year. The powerful B1-B bomber has been recalled to action over Iraq ... Early this year, with little fanfare, the air force sent a squadron of A-10 "Warthog" attack planes - a dozen or more aircraft - to be based at al-Asad air base in western Iraq. At the same time it added a squadron of F-16C Fighting Falcons ... at Balad.

Meanwhile, in the last year, aircraft carrier battle groups have been stationed in greater numbers in the Persian Gulf and facilities at sites near Iraq, like the huge al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, continue to be upgraded.

Even these increases do not tell the whole story of the expanding air war. Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press reported recently that "the military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq". The use of such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including Hellfire-missile armed Predators, doubled in the first 10 months of 2007 - with Predator air hours increasing from 2,000 to 4,300 in that period. The army alone, according to Baldor, now has 361 drones in action in Iraq. The future promises much more of the same.

(American military spokespeople and administration officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for "hiding" behind civilian populations - in essence, accusing them of both immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do admit to inflicting "collateral damage" on civilian populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for making civilians into "shields". And all of this is regularly, dutifully reported in the US press. On the other hand, no one in our world considers drone warfare in a similar context, though armed UAVs like the Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed Reapers are generally "flown" by pilots stationed at computer consoles in places like Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. It is from there that they release their missiles against "anti-Iraqi forces" or the Taliban, causing civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan.)

As one American pilot, who has fired Predator missiles from Nellis, put it:

I go from the gym and step inside Afghanistan, or Iraq ... It takes some getting used to it. At Nellis you have to remind yourself, "I'm not at the Nellis Air Force Base. Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago, like talking to my bank, aren't important anymore."

To American reporters, this seems neither cowardly, nor in any way barbaric, just plain old normal. Those pilots are not said to be "hiding" in distant deserts or among the civilian gamblers of Caesar's Palace.

Anyway, here's the simple calculus that goes with all this: militarily, overstretched American forces simply cannot sustain the ground part of the "surge" for much longer. Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who surged into Iraq in the first half of 2007 will soon be coming home. But air power won't be. Air force personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty in the region. In Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn, air power ramped up. This seems once again to be the pattern. There is every reason to believe that it represents the American future in Iraq.

From barbarism to the norm
The air war is simply not visible to most Americans who depend on the mainstream media. In part, this is because American reporters, who have covered every other sort of warfare in Iraq, simply refuse to look up.

It should be no surprise then that news of a future possible escalation of the air war was first raised by a journalist who had never set foot in Iraq and so couldn't look up. In a December 2005 piece entitled "Up in the Air," New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh suggested that

... a key element of [any] drawdown plans, not mentioned in the president's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower ... The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the overall level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

After Hersh broke his story, the silence was deafening. Only one reporter, as far as I know, has even gone up in a plane - David S Cloud of the New York Times, who flew in a B-1 from an unnamed "Middle Eastern airfield" on a mission over Afghanistan. Thomas Ricks traveled to Balad Air Base and did a superb report on it in 2006, but no reporter seems to have bothered to hang out with American pilots, nor have the results of bombing, missile-firing or strafing been much recorded in the US press. The air war is still largely relegated to passing mentions of air raids, based on Pentagon press releases or announcements in summary pieces on the day's news from Iraq.

Given American military history since 1941, this is all something of a mystery. A US Marine Corps patrol rampaging through an Iraqi village can, indeed, be news; but American bombs or missiles turning part of a city into rubble or helicopter gunships riddling part of a neighborhood is, at best, tag-on, inside-the-fold material - a paragraph or two, as in this Associated Press report on the latest fighting in an undoubtedly well-populated part of the city of Mosul:

An officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said three civilians were wounded and helicopters had bombarded buildings in the southeastern Sumar neighborhood, which has seen frequent attacks on US and Iraqi forces that have led to a series of raids.

The predictably devastating results of helicopters "bombarding" an urban neighborhood in a major Iraqi city, if reported at all, will be treated as just the normal "collateral damage" of war as we know it. In our world, what was once the barbarism of air war, its genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum ordinariness (if, of course, you don't happen to be an Iraqi or an Afghan on the receiving end), the stuff of largely ignored air force news releases. It is as unremarkable (and as American) as apple pie, and nothing worth writing home to mom and the kids about.

Maybe then, it's time for Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the US) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the US Air Force looses 45,000 kilograms of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

In the meantime, brace yourself. Air war is on the way.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Laws to decrease the monitoring of our demise

NYC Ban Private Toxic Sampling?

Intro 650 will require permits for the possession or use of any instruments which monitor chemical, biological or radiological contamination. The NYC Police Department has testified that the impetus for the bill came from the Department of Homeland Security. Intro 650 will give NYPD the power to authorize, deny, or delay any workplace or environmental sampling. NYPD has testified that the Department of Homeland Security intends to use this legislation, if enacted, as a model for other cities throughout the country. We believe the bill, if enacted, will restrict, and could prevent altogether, independent environmental monitoring by unions, community organizations, and others, including university programs. We believe this would pose a significant threat to our civil liberties.

Homeland Security is taking away the public's ability to monitor our poisoning by the government. I don't see how independent sources threaten our national security unless our government has something to hide...and it does.


1. Intro 650 is aimed at fixing a problem that does not exist. The stated purpose of
the bill is to reduce “excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety.” No data
are presented to support the claim of “excessive false alarms,” nor are the types
of alarms that are presumed to be excessive defined. No evidence is presented
to document “unwarranted anxiety.” It is likely that no such data or evidence
exist. Neither press reports nor the scientific literature nor the city’s own web site
provides any support for the assertion that “excessive false alarms and
unwarranted anxiety” have been or are real-world problems.

2. Intro 650 would make it more difficult for the public, and for government
agencies, to obtain environmental sampling data in a timely manner. The inability
of government agencies to rapidly deploy air monitoring instruments is well
documented. For example, the earliest sampling of workers’ breathing zones at
Ground Zero was conducted by the National Hazmat Program of the International
Union of Operating Engineers, which came in from West Virginia. OSHA did not
begin taking personal samples until September 20. Had Intro 650 been in effect
on September 11, 2001, it would have been illegal for technical experts from
West Virginia to respond at Ground Zero.
3. Intro 650 would make it more difficult for the public to obtain independent
environmental sampling data and to assess the accuracy of government
statements. For example, elected officials representing the areas of Manhattan
most affected by the September 11th attack, including members of this City
Council, employed nationally-recognized experts to conduct indoor sampling of
residences adjacent to Ground Zero within days of the attacks. Sampling results
indicated dangerously high levels of WTC-derived asbestos in downtown
residences. At the time, EPA was proclaiming that the air was safe to breathe
and NYCDOH was stating that indoor dust could be cleaned up by residents.
Government agencies did not conduct indoor tests in residences until December.
Had Intro 650 been in effect on September 11, 2001, it would have been illegal
for the City Council and other elected officials to bring in technical experts from
outside the city to test downtown residences.

4. Intro 650 would inappropriately and impossibly task NYPD with assessing the
capabilities of air monitoring instruments and of the individuals, agencies, and
organizations that utilize them. It would put NYPD in the position of determining
which employers, unions, landlords, tenants, community-based organizations,
and others would be entitled to conduct independent environmental
assessments. For example, community-based organizations in Harlem and
Chinatown concerned about the incidence of asthma and other respiratory
diseases would have to obtain police permits to monitor diesel emissions in the
public streets outside bus depots.

5. Intro 650 would immediately make illegal scores of thousands of safety devices
already in place in homes, schools, businesses, and public buildings. These
devices include carbon monoxide detectors and legally required smoke
detectors.
NYPD testified earlier today that it may ultimately exclude certain yet to be determined
monitoring equipment and activities from the permitting requirements. However, as
Councilpersons Liu and Garodnick correctly noted, the current legislation would grant
NYPD a “blank check” on rule-making, not subject to further City Council oversight or
direction.
NYPD testified that its interest is detection of chemical, biological, radiological, and
nuclear weaponry agents. However, this bill is not that. It is not a CBRN bill. As currently
written, it covers emergency response, industrial, environmental, and academic
activities unrelated to CBRN warfare. It would significantly curtail public access to
independent environmental data, in line with the post-9/11 Bush agenda.
In conclusion, the goal in science is generally to obtain more data, not less. Intro 650
would serve to drastically impede independent collection of and public access to
environmental sampling data. There is no danger to public safety or public health from
the acquisition of additional data. NYCOSH and NYCCLC urge this Committee and the
City Council to reject this bill in its entirety.

The Roots of the I.Q. Debate: Eugenics and Social Control

Whatever the Jukes stand for, the Edwards family does not. Whatever weakness the Jukes represent finds its antidote in the Edwards family, which has cost the country nothing in pauperism, in crime, in hospital or asylum service.
—Albert E. Winship, Heredity: A History of the Jukes-Edwards Families, Boston, 1925

During the first three decades of this century, a small but influential social/scientific movement known as the eugenics movement extrapolated from the new science of human genetics a complex set of beliefs justifying the necessity for racial and class hierarchy. It also advocated limitations on political democracy. The eugenicists argued that the United States was in immediate danger of committing racial suicide as a result of the rapid reproduction of the unfit coupled with the precipitous decline in the birthrate of the better classes. They proposed a program of positive and negative eugenics as a solution. Positive genetics would encourage the reproduction of the better-educated and racially superior, while a rigorous program of negative eugenics to prevent any increase in the racially unfit would include compulsory segregation and sterilization, immigration restriction, and laws to prohibit inter-racial marriage (anti-miscegenation statutes).

I will argue that the eugenics movement of the early 20th-century was primarily a political movement concerned with the social control of groups thought to be inferior by an economic, social, and racial elite. I reject the contention that the movement was primarily scientific and apolitical. I have looked here primarily at the organized eugenics movement and its leading figures, rather than at the average rank-and-file follower within the movement.

My interest in the eugenics movement stems from my fear that the basic principles of the eugenics debate, even its most discredited aspects, are resurfacing in the 1990s. To revisit the eugenics movement of the early 20th-century is to be reminded of the harm the movement intended toward those members of society least able to defend themselves. History, in this case, may help to provide an antidote to contemporary manifestations of eugenicist arguments--the I. Q. debate and the right’s anti-immigrant campaign.

Any historical appraisal of the eugenics movement needs to step carefully to avoid imposing the values of the late 20th-century upon eugenicists, especially concerning the question of motivation. The legitimate, scientific framework of the eugenics movement, a mainstream view at the beginning of the century, has been for the most part abandoned by scientists in the years since then.

Similarly, to a great extent, racialist thinking, and in particular white supremacy, was neither questioned nor challenged among the white-dominated intelligentsia of the time. At the same time, the fact that white supremacist views were more acceptable in white society at the turn of the century still allows for gradations of focus and virulence; the question of the extent to which hereditarian arguments may have functioned as a pretext for a movement primarily concerned with the continuation of social and political dominance by upper-class, Protestant men of Anglo-Saxon background is unavoidable.

The roots of the eugenics movement have been traced variously to social Darwinism; social purity, voluntary motherhood, and the perfectionists; the naturalist tradition; Malthus and the neo-Malthusians; and the Progressive political and social movement.

This paper emphasizes instead that the roots of the eugenics movement can be traced to the 19th-century scientific racism movement.

Scientific racism is a term capable of diverse definitions. For this discussion, I have adopted a slightly modified version of historian Barry Mehler’s definition: [Scientific racism is] the belief [often based on skin color, country of origin, or economic class] that the human species can be divided into superior and inferior genetic groups and that these groups can be satisfactorily identified so that social policies can be advanced to encourage the breeding of the superior groups and discourage the breeding of the inferior groups.

It is possible to argue that notions of control by a racial and economic elite were key to the eugenics movement without embracing reductionist or conspiratorial theories that do damage to the diversity and scope of the movement.

It has been the diversity of the eugenics movement--the wide range of followers it was able to encompass--that has proved most difficult to explain. The eugenics movement was not monolithic: conservatives, progressives, and sex radicals were all allied within a fundamentally messianic movement of national salvation that was predicated upon scientific notions of innate and ineradicable inequalities between racial, cultural, and economic groups.

These scientific notions tended to maintain the status quo by obscuring the racial and class basis of poverty and advancement in the United States. The middle- and upper-class professionals of Anglo-Saxon descent who were leaders in the eugenics movement acted in and out of their own interests.

Those interests led to the development of a political program in which an extreme economic conservatism was marked by a virulent anti-communism linked to an embrace of the untrammeled, unregulated capitalist state. Some eugenicist leaders rejected democracy in favor of the corporate state and, in the 1920s and 1930s, several leaders of the eugenics movement were active in the promotion of German and Italian fascism.

The eugenics movement put forth a coherent, consistent social program in which eugenical sterilization, anti-immigrant advocacy, and anti-miscegenation activism all played crucial roles in the primary eugenicist goal of advancing social control by a small elite. Particularly now, when familiar eugenicist arguments echo within contemporary scientific and political circles, questions of motivation and intent are compelling.
Background of the Movement

The American eugenics movement came into being primarily through the efforts of Charles Benedict Davenport, a biologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University. While at Harvard as an instructor in the 1890s, Davenport became familiar with the early eugenicist writings of two Englishmen, the independently wealthy Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson.

By 1869, Galton had published several articles and a book, Hereditary Genius, which argued that human traits, and particularly great ability, can be inherited from previous generations.

It was not until 1883 that Galton coined the term eugenics, and it was 1904 before he formulated his classic definition of eugenics as the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.

Galton had been tremendously influenced by his cousin, Charles Darwin, whose study of human evolution, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859. The eugenicists, led by Galton in England and Davenport in the US, were fascinated more by the idea of the inheritability of human traits than by Darwin’s focus on the evolution of species over time.

Charles Darwin thought highly of his cousin’s book on the inheritance of genius; he wrote, I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.

Eugenicists originally believed in the inheritability of virtually all human traits. Charles Davenport’s work provided a typical list of hereditary traits: eye color, hair, skin, stature, weight, special ability in music, drawing, painting, literary composition, calculating, or memorizing, weakness of the mucous membranes, nomadism, general bodily energy, strength, mental ability, epilepsy, shiftlessness, insanity, pauperism, criminality, various forms of nervous disease, defects of speech, sight, hearing, cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, skeletal deformities, and other traits.

Davenport is reported to have hypothesized that thalassophilia, love of the sea, was a sex-linked recessive trait because he only encountered it in male naval officers.

For the most part, the eugenicists emphasized inheritance and trivialized the importance of environment. Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, an important American eugenicist, was typical in his dismissal of environmental arguments:

No doubt poverty and crime are bad assets in one’s early environment. No doubt these elements cause the ruins of thousands who, by heredity, were good material of civilization. But again, poverty, dirt, and crime are the products of those, in general, who are not good material. It is not the strength of the strong, but the weakness of the weak which engenders exploitation and tyranny. The slums are at once symptom, effect, and cause of evil. Every vice stands in this same threefold relation

In the same vein, another eugenicist wrote:

The. . .social classes, therefore, which you seek to abolish by law, are ordained by nature; that it is, in the large statistical run of things, not the slums which make slum people, but slum people who make the slums; that primarily it is not the church which makes people good, but good people who make the Church; that godly people are largely born and not made. . . .

The US eugenics movement grew out of the American Breeders’ Association (later the American Genetics Association), which was founded in 1903 to apply the new principles of inheritance to the scientific breeding of horses and other livestock. In 1906, at Davenport’s urging, the ABA established a Eugenics Section (later the Committee on Eugenics). Stanford University president David Starr Jordan chaired the committee and Davenport was its secretary. These men and others active in the Committee on Eugenics (including the founders of the Nativist Immigration Restriction League, Robert DeCourcey Ward and Prescott F. Hall; Henry H. Goddard and Walter E. Fernald, who both joined a subcommittee on feeble-mindedness; Alexander Graham Bell; and Edward L. Thorndike) would form the core of the eugenics movement for the next 25 years. y The organized eugenics movement revolved around Davenport’s Station for Experimental Genetics, at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York, which itself came increasingly to focus on eugenical studies. In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was established with Davenport as director and Henry H. Laughlin, key eugenicist and leader of the eugenical sterilization movement, as its superintendent. Two other important eugenics organizations were the Eugenics Research Association (with Davenport and Laughlin as its key members) and the American Eugenics Society (AES).

The Eugenics Research Association described itself as a scientific rather than political group and the AES, established in 1921, was visualized as the propaganda or popular education arm of the eugenics movement.

The eugenics movement advocated both positive and negative eugenics, which referred to attempts to increase reproduction by fit stocks and to decrease reproduction by those who were constitutionally unfit. Positive eugenics included eugenic education and tax preferences and other financial support for eugenically fit large families. Eugenical segregation and, usually, sterilization (a few eugenicists opposed sterilization); restrictive marriage laws, including anti-miscegenation statutes; and restrictive immigration laws formed the three parts of the negative eugenics agenda.

Virtually all eugenicists supported compulsory sterilization for the unfit; some supported castration. By 1936, when expert medical panels in both England and the US finally condemned compulsory eugenical sterilization, more than 20,000 forced sterilizations had been performed, mostly on poor people (and disproportionately on black people) confined to state-run mental hospitals and residential facilities for the mentally retarded. Almost 500 men and women had died from the surgery. The American Eugenics Society had hoped, in time, to sterilize one-tenth of the US population, or millions of Americans. Based on the American eugenical sterilization experience, Hitler’s sterilization program managed to sterilize 225,000 people in less than three years.
Eugenics’ Racial Bias

From the beginning, the eugenics movement was a racialist (race-based) and elitist movement concerned with the control of classes seen to be socially inferior. In proposing the term eugenics, Galton had written, We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving the stock. . .to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.

Galton believed that black people were entirely inferior to the white races and that Jews were capable only of parasitism upon the civilized nations.

Karl Pearson, Galton’s chief disciple, shared his racial and anti-Semitic beliefs. For example, in 1925, Pearson wrote The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children, which argued against the admission of Jewish immigrants into England.

In the US, the eugenics movement started from a belief in the racial superiority of white Anglo-Saxons and a desire to prevent the immigration of less desirable racial stocks. In 1910, the Committee on Eugenics solicited new members with a letter that read, The time is ripe for a strong public movement to stem the tide of threatened racial degeneracy. . . .America needs to protect herself against indiscriminate immigration, criminal degenerates, and. . .race suicide. The letter also warned of the impending complete destruction of the white race.

Eugenical News, which was published by the Eugenics Research Association and edited by Laughlin, welcomed racist and anti-immigrant articles. At the Second International Congress on Eugenics in 1921, one of the five classifications of exhibits was The Factor of Race.

Similarly, the American Eugenics Society’s Ultimate Program, adopted in 1923, placed chief emphasis on three goals:

1. a brief survey of the eugenics movement up to the present time;
2. working out and enacting a selective immigration law;
3. securing segregation of certain classes, such as the criminal defective.

The Eugenics Research Association included among the major issues its members addressed [im]migration, mate selection. . .race crossings, and. . .physical and mental measurement.

When the World War I-era IQ testing of all soldiers indicated that almost half of all white recruits were morons according to the newly developed Stanford Binet test, as were 89 percent of all black recruits, the eugenics movement seemed more important and believable.

Although some commentators questioned the validity of the test, and noted that questions on such topics as the color of sapphires and the location of Cornell University might reflect qualities other than intelligence, the statistics, when released, created great anxiety and gave the eugenics movement a substantial boost.
19th-Century Scientific Racism

The scientific racism movement of the mid-nineteenth century provided a number of important legacies to the eugenics movement. American scientific racism was primarily preoccupied with the attempt to establish that blacks, Orientals, and other races were in fact entirely different species of man, which the scientific racists claimed should be seen as a genus, rather than a species. The theory that the integrity of the human species derived from the creation of one Adam and one Eve was called monogenism or specific unity; monogenists believed that the races arose as a result of the degeneration of human beings since creation. The separate races were essentially the same human material, but different races had degenerated to different extents. Polygenists, by contrast, believed that the races were created separately in a series of different creations. The separate races were entirely different animals. The mid-century theory of polygenism, or specific diversity, was one of the first scientific theories largely developed in the US and was approvingly called the American School of anthropology by European scientists.

Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, a prominent natural historian of the 19th-century, was the most important promoter of polygenism. Agassiz, an abolitionist, insisted that his adoption of polygenism was dictated by objective scientific investigation. Nevertheless, historian Stephen Jay Gould’s translation of Agassiz’s letter to his mother in 1846 shortly after his emigration to the US, reveals a profound, visceral aversion to blacks.

Not surprisingly, Agassiz was also passionately opposed to racial miscegenation. He believed that racial inter-mixture would result in the creation of effeminate offspring unable to maintain American democratic traditions. Agassiz wrote:

The production of half-breeds is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized community is a sin against purity of character. . . .No efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and to the progress of a higher civilization and a purer morality.

In part because the classic definition of a species revolved around the ability to mate and produce children with each other but not with others, and in part because of a drive toward racial hierarchy, the questions of hybridization and fecundity were of great import to the early American scientific racists. For the eugenicists, these questions were also tremendously important. Much of the early scientific racist rhetoric on hybrids later reappeared in eugenicist writings where it came to form the basis of eugenicist arguments against racial miscegenation. The early concern with fecundity fueled later eugenicist claims that differential racial fecundity was leading to white racial suicide.

The eugenicist recapitulation of earlier scientific racist arguments was not cursory, but deep and enduring. In one of many examples, a 1925 bibliography on eugenics published by the American Eugenics Society recommended the book, Uncontrolled Breeding, Or Fecundity versus Civilization.

At the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, author V. G. Ruggeri, despite his concern with race-mixing, put forth Mendel’s monogenism to bolster his own argument in favor of monogenism; and Lucien March spoke on The Fertility of Marriages According to Profession and Social Position. The opening of Raymond Pearl’s lecture on The Inheritance of Fecundity made clear his position within this tradition:

The progressive decline of the birth rate in all, or nearly all, civilized countries is an obvious and impressive fact. Equally obvious and much more disturbing is the fact that this decline is differential. Generally it is true that those racial stocks which by common agreement are of high, if not the highest, value to the state or nation, are precisely the ones where the decline in reproduction rate has been most marked.

Family Studies, Social Darwinism, and Race Suicide

Eugenical family studies were an important component in the movement’s political development; family studies functioned as an objective, scientific basis for the twin myths of a feeble-minded menace and an impending white race suicide. The invention of feeble-mindedness, typically used as a term of art to cover broader issues related to social control, allowed the eugenicists to claim that social (and racial) classes were biological and hence immutable.

The first important eugenicist works in the US were a series of studies of American families supposedly plagued by hereditary feeble-mindedness, beginning with Richard Dugdale’s exposition of the Jukes family, published in 1877.

All of the family studies claimed to prove that a single feeble-minded ancestor could (and did) result in generations of poverty-stricken and degenerate offspring. The families in the studies were rural families, of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant descent, and for the most part, their lineage dated to the colonial settlers. The families were remarkably similar to the eugenicist activists in these traits; the main difference between the two was the poverty of the rural families. The equation by the eugenicists of poverty with degeneracy was quite explicit. Eugenicists believed that poverty was no more than a manifestation of inner degeneracy. Charity was therefore unlikely to lead the pauper out of poverty and, in fact, misguided charity might prove very costly to society. In the heightened tone that is common to writers in the family studies, one eugenicist wrote, It is impossible to calculate what even one feeble-minded woman may cost the public, when her vast possibilities for evil as a producer of paupers and criminals, through an endless line of descendants is considered.

Another writer said, for example, A habit of irregular work is a species of mental or moral weakness, or both. A man or woman who will not stick to a job is morally certain to be a pauper or a criminal.

In the same vein, a third wrote, Pauperism and habitual criminality are respectively passive and active states of the same disease.

Feeble-mindedness for the eugenicists was a designation that created a difference between the eugenicists and the families they studied. One group of social reformers described in detail the nature of the feeble-mindedness which they had found characterized prostitutes:

The general moral insensibility, the boldness, egotism and vanity, the love of notoriety, the lack of shame or remorse. . .the desire for immediate pleasure without regard for consequences, the lack of forethought or anxiety about the future--all cardinal symptoms of feeble-mindedness--were strikingly evident.

Thus the prostitute’s failure to adhere to social conventions of behavior for women is here called feeble-mindedness.

The deliberate and even fraudulent misrepresentations of the people in the family studies have been established. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has shown that H. H. Goddard, author of The Kallikak Family, retouched photographs to make the Kallikaks appear mentally retarded.

Family studies were used to support the myth of the feeble-minded menace, which claimed the US was in imminent danger of being swamped by the degenerate and dangerous masses of the feeble-minded. When the feeble-minded menace was linked at the end of the 19th-century to the idea that the better stocks were failing to produce enough children, the idea of race suicide emerged. Race suicide captured the US imagination and lent support to the entire eugenics agenda.

The race suicide theory which developed during the first decade of the new century claimed that the greatly lowered birthrate of the better classes, coupled with the burgeoning birthrates of immigrants and the native-born poor, endangered the survival of the race. The race was clearly a term that referred to the white, Anglo-Saxon race and a deep racism permeated the racial suicide period from its beginning in 1900 to 1910. One classic racial suicide work is Robert Reid Rentoul’s Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? (A Plea for the Unborn), published in New York and London in 1906. Rentoul speaks of the terrible monstrosities created by racial intermarriage and points out that the Americans are poor patriots for repealing their racial miscegenation statutes.

The concept of the feeble-minded menace provided a way to make the rural families, who were neither institutionalized, foreign, nor colored, into people who were different from the eugenicists. Underlying the family studies and the myth of the feeble-minded menace was the theory of Social Darwinism, which assumed the existence of a struggle between the individual and society, and of an adversarial relationship between the fit and unfit classes. Eugenical family studies and social Darwinism both involved a transmutation of nature into biology and the eugenics movement frequently acknowledged its debt to Social Darwinism.

The deeply conservative implications of such philosophies included the rejection of government welfare programs or protective legislation on the grounds that such reforms as poorhouses, orphanages, bread lines, and eight-hour days enabled the unfit to survive and weakened society as a whole. From the beginning, the eugenics movement accepted the regressive implications of Social Darwinism. Karl Pearson believed that such measures as the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, free medical advice, and reductions in infant mortality encouraged an increase in unemployables, degenerates, and physical and mental weaklings.

Pearson’s friend, Havelock Ellis, known as a sex radical and free thinker, shared Pearson’s elitist views, writing in his 1911 eugenicist book, The Problem of Race Regeneration, These classes, with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity, contain the people who complain they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them. Ellis suggested in the same book that all public relief be denied to second generation paupers unless they voluntarily consented to be surgically sterilized.

One American eugenicist said harshly:

The so-called charitable people who give to begging children and women with baskets have a vast sin to answer for. It is from them that this pauper element gets its consent to exist. . . .So-called charity joins public relief in producing stillborn children, raising prostitutes, and educating criminals.

The economic conservatism of the movement was very clear. Faced with a social problem, the eugenicist leapt to the conclusion that it was the individual who must change to accommodate society (which is one reason why conservative commentators frequently argued that eugenics was a liberal movement committed to the supremacy of the community over the individual). The prevalence of the appeal to economics in eugenics writings led G. K. Chesterton to claim that the eugenicist was, at heart, the employer. Chesterton wrote:

[N]o one seems able to imagine capitalist industrialism being sacrificed to any other object. . . .[the eugenicist] tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them, marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market.

The eugenicists’ family studies were one aspect of the movement’s domestic program of scientific racism. The eugenics movement concentrated on differences: its roots in scientific racism looked to the differences between the white and other races, while the family studies created a distinction between fit and unfit white folks. At the same time, eugenicists and other scientific racists were discovering many different races among the foreign immigrants, all previously conceived as members of a single, white race.
The Eugenicist Role in Anti-Immigrant Organizing

The involvement of the organized American eugenics movement with the advocacy of immigration restriction was deep and long-standing. Although the organized anti-immigrant movement predated eugenical organizations by a few years, immigration restriction was from the beginning a key component of the eugenics program. For example, the American Eugenics Society published a wide variety of materials on immigration restriction and the 1923 Original Ultimate Program to be Developed by the American Eugenics Society listed immigration restriction as one of the top three goals of the society.

The first organized anti-immigrant group, the Immigration Restriction League, was founded in 1894 in Boston by a small group of Harvard-educated lawyers and academics; Prescott Hall and Robert DeCourcey Ward were the driving forces behind the League. The Immigration Restriction League was based on a belief in the superiority of the white races. Ward summed up the group’s philosophy when he wrote the question [of immigration] is a race question, pure and simple. . . .It is fundamentally a question as to what kind of babies shall be born; it is a question as to what races shall dominate in this country.

Most eugenicists agreed, and Yale Professor and prominent eugenicist Irving Fisher’s comment that The core of the problem of immigration is. . .one of race and eugenics was typical of the eugenicist position.

In the first decade of the century, the men of the Immigration Restriction League became active members of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association and other eugenics organizations, focusing their attention primarily on immigration issues. The connection was so compatible that the Immigration Restriction League almost changed its name to the Eugenic Immigration League. Hall and Ward even had sample stationery drawn up with the new name, but found the Board of Directors was unwilling to adopt the name of a movement younger than its own.

In 1918, Davenport and his fellow eugenicist, and virulent racist, and anti-immigration activist Madison Grant (author of The Passing of the Great Race and The Alien in Our Midst) set up the Galton Society. The Society was established for the promotion of study of racial anthropology and from the beginning, immigration restriction was a subject of much interest.

As John Higham has noted, one strand of nativism in the US derived from a conviction that the immigrant was a political and social radical, importing communistic or anarchistic ideas into the United States. Grant and Davenport both shared this conviction and established the Galton Society in part to bar such foreign radicals. The independently wealthy Grant wrote to the other organizers, My proposal is the organization of an anthropological society. . .confined to native Americans, who are anthropologically, socially, and politically sound, no Bolsheviki need apply.

Other prestigious members of the Galton Society included Henry Fairfield Osborn (who wrote the introduction to Grant’s book) and Grant’s friend and protégé, Lothrop Stoddard. Like his friend Grant, Stoddard was a strong anti-communist. His book The Rising Tide of Color argued that Bolshevism was a dangerous theory because it advocated universal equality rather than white supremacy.

H. H. Laughlin, of the Eugenics Research Association and Eugenics Record Office, was also very involved in anti-immigrant work. He produced many pamphlets on immigration, including Biological Aspects of Immigration, Analysis of America’s Melting Pot, Europe as an Emigrant-Exporting Continent, The Eugenics Aspects of Deportation, and American History in Terms of Human Migration. Because Laughlin had been appointed the Expert Eugenics Agent for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization by the committee’s chair, Congressman Albert Johnson, many of these nativist pamphlets were published by the Government Printing Office in Washington, DC. In 1923, Johnson, a confirmed eugenicist, was appointed to the presidency of the Eugenics Research Association, a post held before him by Grant.

The immigration restrictionists were motivated by a desire to maintain both the white and the Christian dominance of the US. A year after the eugenicists’ victory in securing passage of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which established entry quotas that slashed the new immigration of Jews, Slavs, and southern Europeans, Davenport wrote to Grant, Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island but we have no place to drive the Jews to. Also they burned the witches but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population. Meanwhile we have somewhat diminished the immigration of these people.

Similarly, the racial nature of the anti-immigration position was not veiled. In 1927, for instance, three years after the restrictive act of 1924 was passed, Grant, Robert DeCourcey Ward, and other eugenicists were still anxious to cut non-white immigration further. They signed a Memorial on Immigration Quotas, urging the President and Congress to extend the quota system to all countries of North and South America. . .in which the population is not predominantly of the white race.

The early 20th-century eugenics movement, often dismissed as a fad, provided a coherent and consistent political program to enforce the racial, class, and sexual dominance which was perceived to be under attack in American society. Its program has, in large part, reasserted itself in the late 20th-century, at a time when racial and economic elite dominance of US society is again under attack. The continuing vigor of scientific racism in the United States is in part a testimony to its strong, deep roots.