Racial hygiene Racial hygiene (often labeled a form of "scientific racism") is the selection, by a government, of the putatively most physical, intellectual and moral persons to raise the next generation (selective breeding) and a close alignment of public health with eugenics.
Racial hygiene was historically tied to traditional notions of public health, but usually with an enhanced emphasis on heredity. The use of social measures to attempt to preserve or enhance biological characteristics was first proposed by Francis Galton in his early work, starting in 1869, on what would later be called eugenics. Contents [hide] 1 In Germany 2 After World War II 3 See also 4 Further reading 5 References [edit] In Germany It was the German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz who introduced the term Rassenhygiene in his "Racial hygiene basics" (Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene) in 1895. In its earliest incarnation it was concerned more with the declining birthrate of the German state and the increasing number of mentally ill and disabled in state institutions (and their costs to the state) than with the "Jewish question" and "de-nordification" (Entnordung) which would come to dominate its philosophy in Germany from the 1920s through the second World War. One of the confusing aspects of "racial hygiene" is that "race" was often interchangeably used to mean "human race" as well as "German race" as well as "Aryan race" — three quite different concepts with three quite different implications. In the 1930s, under the expertise of eugenicist Ernst Rüdin, it was this latter use of "racial hygiene" which was embraced by the followers of Nazi ideology, who demanded "Aryan" racial purity and condemned miscegenation. This belief in importance of German racial purity often served as the theoretical backbone of Nazi policies of racial superiority and later genocide. These policies began in 1935, when the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which legislated "racial purity" by forbidding marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans. A key part of Nazism was the concept of racial hygiene and during their rule the field was elevated to the primary philosophy of the German medical community, first by activist physicians within the medical profession, particularly amongst psychiatrists. This was later codified and institutionalized during and after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, during the process of Gleichschaltung (literally, "coordination" or "unification") which streamlined the medical and mental hygiene (mental health) profession into a rigid hierarchy with Nazi-sanctioned leadership at the top. Racial hygienists played key roles in the Holocaust, the Nazi effort to purge Europe of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, the mentally retarded and the insane. [edit] After World War II After World War II, such attempts have been widely reviled as cruel and brutal, and the racialist ideology behind them as un-scientific and pseudoscience. What the racial hygienists didn't concern themselves with, was the fact that it is the variety and diversity within the human genome that accounts for the health and beauty of an observable human specimen, for it is the practice of inbreeding and isolation within a racial sect that accounts for at least some of the physical and mental deformities and retardations that the eugenicists observed and used as evidence of undesired genetic "flaws" that could be bred out by only allowing the "pure" Aryan race to procreate. However, in the days of the most influential eugenicists, little was known about genetic heredity and DNA, and it relationship to diseases such as Down Syndrome. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
