Are you aware that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, found common cause with proponents of eugenics? Did you know that even Margaret Sanger denounced abortion as “barbaric” and called abortionists “blood-sucking men with M.D. after their names”? Did you know that the number of abortions in the US is almost ten times the amount of people killed in the Jewish Holocaust? Our postmodern culture and American progressivism actually have much in common with fascist ideology.
In my article Emergent Deconstruction: Train Tracks to Aushwitz, I documented how postmodern liberalism, which has slithered into the Church with the Emergent movement, shares intellectual roots with fascism. Also in our interview with Dr. Gene Edward Veith, it is clear that the ideology of fascism is alive and well in some of the most unsuspected areas of our society. Dr. Veith explores the fascist influences that continue to permeate postmodern culture and thought in atheistic existentialism (Martin Heidegger and his following), literary deconstructionism (Paul De Man and his following), Darwinian evolution, relativism, mass media culture, violence, abortion, environmentalism, and rock concerts. Veith even demonstrates how fascism, perhaps unknowingly, permeates the current thinking in the Church, especially the postmodern Church. (For more information, see Chris Rosebrough’s Resistance is Futile: You Will Be Assimilated into the Community and my articles The Führerprinzip and Fascist Trends of Passion 2014.)
Prior to WWII, the avant garde poets, writers, artists, and philosophers existed in an intellectual cocktail of Romanticism, Darwinism, Existentialism and philosophical irrationalism which countered the Enlightenment “Age of Reason.” In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg noted: “By lending credibility to the Hegelian and Romantic view of nations as organic beings, Darwinism bequeathed to scientists a license to treat social problems like biological puzzles.”1 In his book, Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview, Gene Edward Veith writes:
Fascism is a worldview. The elements of this worldview derive from romanticism, Darwinism, and existentialism. They are part of the mainstream of Western thought. As such, they were basic assumptions of the intellectual elite of the 1930’s. They remain so today.2
Important to any study of fascism is a reflection upon the consequences of the war against the Enlightenment, the rights of man and the idea of equality. Ideological fascism and postmodernism share the counter-Enlightenment worldview. Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned Israeli political scientist and historian, is one of the leading experts on Fascism. He marks the beginning of the 20th century with the “intellectual, scientific and technological revolution that preceded August 1914 [World War I] by 30 years.” This intellectual revolution “prepared the convulsions which were soon to produce the European disaster of the first half of the 20th century.” Sternhell continues:
Indeed, right in the midst of a period of unprecedented scientific and technological progress, the rejection of Enlightenment’s humanism, of rationalism, universalism and the idea of the rights of man reached a point of culmination and was followed by a similar rejection of the Christian vision of man.3
According to the Enlightenment, individuals had inherent axiomatic rights which were self-evident. But fascist ideology was anti-individualistic. The fascist movement therefore represented the Volk, the people, the community, which was unique in each fascist nation. Apart from the community, the individual did not exist. In fascist thought, the individual was only seen in terms of their social purpose and role in the community. Only in subordination to the group did the individual find fulfillment and purpose. Sternhell says,
However much fascist thinkers may have differed on other questions, on this point they were all agreed. From José Streel, who asserted that “the individual does not exist in the pure state” to José Antonio in his polemic against Rousseau, it was the “mechanistic” view of society as nothing more than an aggregate of individuals that was attacked.4
What does this have to do with abortion today? The very same kind of evil thinking has led to the “pro-choice” premise that at no point in the gestation of a human infant does this living being have a trace of personhood that must be respected. Effectively stating he does not believe all human beings are people and denying the inherent rights of the individual, President Obama called Personhood USA and Personhood Missisippi’s personhood amendment “absurd” when speaking at a Planned Parenthood fundraising gala. The personhood amendment essentially said that every human being is a person.5
Fascist ideology is today being echoed by apologists for abortion who argue that a child does not have the right to life until they are wanted by their mother and accepted by the human community. To the fascists, “the individual had no autonomy and only achieved the status of human being as a member of a community.”6
Rather than morality, reason or medical evidence being the issue of debate on abortion, the only issue becomes whether or not the mother has a choice. One of the best examples of existential principles can be found in abortion advocates who call themselves “pro-choice.” In other words, it makes no difference what the woman’s choice is, only that she makes the authentic choice whether or not to have her baby. “Pro-choice” advocates are astonishingly disinterested in any objective information in regard to the morality of abortion or the individuality of the unborn. Whatever the mother chooses is “right for her.”
We cannot deny the parallels between the society which crammed Jews into gas chambers and our society which legalized abortion. Jews were murdered there and babies are murdered here. The SS men threw Zyklon B gas into the locked and sealed chambers where Jews and other “undesirables” were gassed to death. The abortionist uses a sharp instrument to kill and dismember the “unwanted” baby before suctioning him or her remains out of their mother’s womb. The Jew and the unborn baby are both denied by the community the most basic individual human right–the right to life.
With few exceptions, America acknowledges the murderous atrocity of the Jewish Holocaust under Hitler’s Nazi regime of WWII. However, recognition of the abortion Holocaust pales in comparison even though its bloodshed far exceeds in comparison (6 million in Jewish Holocaust versus almost 60 million in the abortion Holocaust). We wonder how human beings in Nazi Germany became anti-human. Actually, they only became “anti-some humans,” against those people who were not of the elite, not the right race, or unfit to reproduce. While Nazi fascism was at war with Jews and other undesirables, our modern fascist and postmodern culture has declared war on baby humans who are unwanted by their mothers.
These two holocaust’s have more roots in common than one might think. Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood (the world’s largest abortion provider), promoted Hitler’s eugenics program in the United States and became very interested in National Socialism.
In Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, George Grant wrote about the Planned Parenthood connection to Malthusian Eugenics. It is worth quoting at length:
Eugenics–like Darwinism, Marxism, Fascism, Freudianism, and any number of other revolutionary pseudo-sciences was an offshoot of Malthusianism. Through his writings, Thomas Malthus had convinced an entire generation of scientists, intellectuals, and social reformers that the world was facing an imminent economic crisis caused by unchecked human fertility. Some of those Malthusians believed that the solution to the crisis was political: restrict immigration, reform social welfare, and tighten citizenship requirements. Others thought the solution was technological: increase agricultural production, improve medical proficiency, and promote industrial efficiency. But many of the rest felt that the solution was genetic – restrict or eliminate “bad” racial stocks, and gradually “aid” the evolutionary ascent of man. This last group became known as the Eugenicists. The Eugenicists unashamedly espoused White Supremacy. Or to be more precise, they espoused Northern and Eastern European White Supremacy. This supremacy was to be promoted both positively and negatively.
Through selective breeding, the Eugenicists hoped to purify the blood lines and improve the stock of the Aryan race. The “fit” would be encouraged to reproduce prolifically. This was the positive side of Malthusian Eugenics.
Negative Malthusian Eugenics on the other hand, sought to contain the “inferior” races through segregation, sterilization, birth control, and abortion. The “unfit” would thus be slowly winnowed out of the population as chaff is from wheat.
By the first two decades of this century, according to feminist author Germaine Greer, “the relevance of Eugenic considerations was accepted by all shades of liberal and radical opinion, as well as by conservatives.” Some forty states had enacted restrictive containment measures and established Eugenic asylums. Eugenics departments were endowed at many of the most prestigious universities in the world. Funding for Eugenic research was provided by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations. And Eugenic ideas were given free reign in the literature, theater, music, and press of the day.
The crassest sort of racial and class bigotry was thus embraced against the bosom of pop culture as readily and enthusiastically as the latest movie release from Hollywood or the latest hit tune from Broadway. It became a part of the collective consciousness. Its assumptions went almost entirely unquestioned. Because it sprang from the sacrosanct temple of “science”-like Aphrodite from the sea – it was placed in the modern pantheon of “truth” and rendered due faith and service by all “reasonable” men.
Of course, not all men are “reasonable,” and so Malthusian Eugenics was not without its critics. The great Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton, for example, fired unrelenting salvos of biting analysis against the Eugenicists, indicting them for combining “a hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head,” and for presuming to turn “common decency” and “commendable deeds” into “social crimes.” If Darwinism was the doctrine of “the survival of the fittest,” then he said, Eugenics was the doctrine of “the survival of the nastiest.” In his remarkably visionary book Eugenics and Other Evils, Chesterton pointed out, for the first time, the link between Neo-Malthusian Eugenics and the evolution of Prussian and Volkish Monism into Fascist Nazism. “It is the same stuffy science,” he argued, “the same bullying bureaucracy, and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors; that has led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumphs.” . . . .
Margaret Sanger was especially mesmerized by the scientific racism of Malthusian Eugenics. Part of the attraction for her was surely personal: her mentor and lover, Havelock Ellis, was the beloved disciple of Francis Galton, the brilliant cousin of Charles Darwin who first systemized and popularized Eugenic thought.
Part of the attraction for her was also political: virtually all of her Socialist friends, lovers, and comrades were committed Eugenicists as well-from the followers of Lenin in Revolutionary Socialism, like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Julius Hammer, to the followers of Hitler in National Socialism, like Ernest Rudin, Leon Whitney, and Harry Laughlin. But it wasn’t simply sentiment or politics that drew Margaret into the Eugenic fold. She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.” She believed that “social regeneration” would only be possible as the “sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility” were repulsed. She had come to regard organized charity to ethnic minorities and the poor as a “symptom of a malignant social disease” because it encouraged the prolificacy of “defectives, delinquents, and dependents.” She yearned for the end of the Christian “reign of benevolence” that the Eugenic Socialists promised, when the “choking human undergrowth” of “morons and imbeciles” would be “segregated” and “sterilized.” Her goal was “to create a race of thoroughbreds” by encouraging “more children from the fit, and less from the unfit.” And the only way to achieve that goal, she realized, was through Malthusian Eugenics.
Thus, as she began to build the work of the American Birth Control League, and ultimately, of Planned Parenthood, Margaret relied heavily on the men, women, ideas, and resources of the Eugenics movement. Virtually all of the organization’s board members were Eugenicists. Financing for the early projects from the opening of the birth control clinics to the publishing of the revolutionary literature – came from Eugenicists. The speakers at the conferences, the authors of the literature and the providers of the services were almost without exception avid Eugenicists. And the international work of Planned Parenthood were originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society while the organizations themselves were institutionally intertwined for years. . . .
The bottom line is that Planned Parenthood was self-consciously organized, in part, to promote and enforce White Supremacy. Like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, it has been from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist. And this racist orientation is all too evident in its various programs and initiatives: birth control clinics, the abortion crusade, and sterilization initiatives.7
We find that Sanger’s goals were rooted in racism and fascist ideology. Based upon Darwinian evolution, Sanger and the Nazis sought to improve human population by controlling procreation in order to increase the occurrence of desirable and heritable characteristics. She said, “Birth control: to create a race of thoroughbreds,”8 and, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit–that is the chief aim of birth control.”9 Thus, Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, which aims to improve human hereditary traits through social intervention by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered “unfit” such as those with mental problems, handicapped, blacks and poor people.
In her 1921 speech called “The Morality of Birth Control,” Sanger classified society into three groups:
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“Those intelligent and wealthy members of the upper classes who have obtained knowledge of Birth Control and exercise it in regulating the size of their families.”
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“The second group is equally intelligent and responsible. They desire to control the size of their families, but are unable to obtain knowledge or to put such available knowledge into practice.”
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“The third are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequence of their acts, or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers. Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent entirely upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped. For if they are not able to support and care for themselves, they should certainly not be allowed to bring offspring into this world for others to look after. We do not believe that filling the earth with misery, poverty and disease is moral. And it is our desire and intention to carry on our crusade until the perpetuation of such conditions has ceased.”
Sanger concluded: “We desire to stop at its source the disease, poverty and feeble-mindedness and insanity which exist today, for these lower the standards of civilization and make for race deterioration.”10
Sanger’s book The Pivot of Civilization featured an introduction by H.G. Wells who proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children . . . and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.”11 In the book, she advocated coercion to prevent the “undeniably feeble-minded” from procreating.12 She also wrote:
The philanthropists who give free maternity care encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future race of the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.13
Margaret Sanger invited Eugene Fischer, Hitler’s advisor on race hygiene, for a speaking engagement in the United States. Her magazine, The Birth Control Review, regularly and openly published the racist articles of Eugenicists. For example, in 1920, the magazine published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. Stoddard was also a board member of Sanger’s American Birth Control League. He interviewed Adolf Hitler and was impressed by his ideas. In 1923, the Birth Control Review editorialized in favor of restricting immigration on the basis of race. In 1932, the magazine outlined Margaret’s “Plan for Peace,” calling for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and concentration camps for all “dysgenic stocks.” In 1933, Ernst Rudin, Adolf Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and one of the founders of the Society for Racial Hygiene, published an article entitled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” in a special eugenics issue of Birth Control Review. The same year, the magazine published “Selective Sterilization,” an article by Leon Whitney praised and defended the Third Reich’s racial programs.14
“A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman–another eugenicist,” says Goldberg, “Sanger became the nation’s first ‘birth control martyr’ when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917.” Goldberg points out that Sanger’s marriage with H.G. Wells “fell apart early, and one of her children–whom she admitted to neglecting–died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”15
With an evolutionary worldview, Sanger believed that social problems were the result of biological determinism and could be eliminated by “sterilizing” the poorer classes. She sought to stop the population growth of blacks, Jews and southern Europeans. For instance, she created the “Negro Project” in 1939 which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. In her proposal for the project, she quoted W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the NAACP: “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”16
Planned Parenthood has been successful in fulfilling its racist goals. According to the Centers for Disease Control, black women were 3.7 times more likely to have an abortion in 2011 than non-Hispanic white women.17 Says Goldberg:
After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in the political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as “barbaric” and called abortionists “blood-sucking men with M.D. after their names.” Abortion resulted in “an outrageous slaughter” and “the killing of babies,” which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.”
So forget about the intent: look at the results. Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African-Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions.18
To conclude, I quote Veith who made the following observation in his 1993 book Modern Fascism:
Although there is still some moral consensus in America, this seems to be changing. Utilitarian ethics (what is most useful) and existential ethics (what I choose) have nearly erased the transcendent principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Euthanasia has again become morally acceptable to most Americans. The killing of the sick, still forbidden by the legal system which grew from transcendent ethics, is defended on utilitarian grounds (it is too expensive to keep terminally ill people alive) and on existential grounds (I choose to die). Abortion, considered an abhorrent crime a few decades ago, has now become both morally and legally acceptable. Again, the arguments are utilitarian (there are too many mouths to feed) and, with special force existential (abortion has to remain a mother’s choice). It is true that large numbers of Americans continue to hold transcendental ethics and approach these issues very differently (there is an absolute right to life). Nevertheless, in public policy debates and in popular culture, the Judeo-Christian approach to ethical issues seems anachronistic and is not taken seriously. Once ethics become immanent and provisional, rather than transcendent and absolute it will be more difficult to object to fascist policies.19
Works Cited:
1 Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York, NY: Random House Inc., 2007), 247.
2 Gene Edward Veith, Modern Fascism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1993), 17.
3 Zeev Sternhell, “From Anti-Enlightenment to Fascism and Nazism: Reflections on the Road to Genocide.” http://www.massuah.org.il/upload/Downloads/PdtFile_673.pdf
4 Zeev Sternhell, Fascist Ideology, Ed. Walter Laqueur, University of California Press, 345, http://web.archive.org/web/20060803051322/http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/Dept/PS/Finley/PS425/reading/Sternhell.html
5 Elizabeth Sanchez, “Obama Slams Personhood at Planned Parenthood Fundraiser,” May 2, 2013, available: http://www.charismanews.com/us/39320-obama-slams-personhood-at-planned-parenthood-fundraiser
6Zeev Sternhell, Fascist Ideology, Ed. Walter Laqueur, University of California Press, 345, http://web.archive.org/web/20060803051322/http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/Dept/PS/Finley/PS425/reading/Sternhell.html
7George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Franklin, TN: Adroit Press, 1988, Second Edition), 93-96.
8 Margaret Sanger, Birth Control Review, November 1921 (vol. V, no. 11), 2
9Margaret Sanger, Birth Control Review, May 1919 (vol. III, no. 5), 12
10Margaret Sanger, “The Morality of Birth Control,” November 18, 1921, available: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/margaretsangermoralityofbirthcontrol.htm
11Quoted in Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York, NY: Random House Inc., 2009), 272.
12Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, p. 181; quoted in Charles Valenza: “Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?” Family Planning Perspectives, January–February 1985, 44.
13Quoted in Gene Edward Veith, Modern Fascism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1993), 108.
14Gene Edward Veith, Modern Fascism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1993), 108-109; George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Franklin, TN: Adroit Press, 1988, Second Edition), 96.
15Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York, NY: Random House Inc., 2009), 271.
16W.E.B. DuBois, Birth Control Review, June 1932. Quoted by Sanger in her proposal for the “Negro Project.”
17“U.S. Abortion Statistics,” Abort73.com, available: http://www.abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/
18Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York, NY: Random House Inc., 2009), 277..
19Gene Edward Veith, Modern Fascism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1993), 156-157.