Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Films, Eugenics

Eugenics, "the wellborn science," was a staple of sociologic and intellectual inquiry during the late nineteenth century. Springing from social Darwinism and the social theories of Sir Francis Galton in England, eugenics became first a philosophy and then a movement. One of its foundations was a belief in human perfectablity. As a discipline, eugenics overlapped with many other disciplines. Eugenics-related discourse took in discussion of criminal behavior, anthropology, immigration policy, IQ testing, and racial theory. In approximately thirty countries in which a burgeoning eugenics movement took root, government policy came under the sway of the movement's basic principles of racial superiority, which in turn would provide a philosophic rationale for genocide. Clarence Darrow, Helen Keller, John D. Rockfeller, Andrew Carnegie, and E. H. Harriman were unable to see the implications of eugenics principles and to recognize the slippery...