The two previous posts address the history of the English and American eugenics movements, so make sure to check those out before reading this. In this post, we’ll explore the consequences of the eugenics movement in our modern era. As the old saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Although the heyday of the eugenics movement wasn’t even a century ago, you don’t hear much about the movement today, and it disturbs me how much of the eugenicists’ rhetoric is still around.

The eugenics movement is a cautionary tale about what happens when we set aside our morality in the name of societal betterment. The eugenicists believed wholeheartedly that their actions (which, again, included the forced sterilizations of 64,000 people and the racially-motivated blocking of immigrants) were creating a better human race. Scarier still, the American public bought into this, and had it not been for a few heroic scientists speaking up, we might have gone down the same road as the Nazis. The crimes of the United States during the height of the eugenics movement are unconscionable, but these crimes might have occurred on an even larger scale if Harry Laughlin and his contemporaries had had their way.

And that’s the real terror of the Nazis:
we actually shared many beliefs with them,
we almost became them,
and we’re still always in danger of becoming them.
The Nazis aren’t scary just because they were so horrifyingly efficient at murder. They’re scary because they were ordinary people who were led into committing some of history’s most vicious atrocities in the name of nationalism and purity and cultural identity. The Nazis are scary because they followed the misguided notion of genetic purity to its coldly logical conclusion, and they’re scary because Americans believed a lot of the same things, and even today, we must always guard against repeating their cardinal sin: letting our ideology compromise our humanity. That’s why we must always be aware of our own bigotry and how it informs our political decisions. Decades from now, do we really want it said of us:
“Oh, he was a great writer, but look what he thought about Mexicans.”
“Oh, she was a great scientist, but look what she thought about Muslims.”
“Oh, he was a great philanthropist, but look what he thought about trans people.”
The Nazis show what happens when bias and hatred and bigotry dictate large scale policy decisions, and their mention should bring up chilling memories of when our country believed many of the same things.

And that’s why “Nazi” can’t just be an insult on picket signs and comment sections. If I’m going to bring up the Nazis in conversation, I’m going to use them as a warning. That’s the difference between yelling “NAZI!” and saying, “Hey, friend, that comment you just made about Muslim refugees really has some terrible implications. I’m not calling you a Nazi, but the fact that your comment makes me think of the Nazis should give us pause.”

So please, don’t be the commenter who cried “Nazi”,
because our country’s almost gone down that road before,
and if we let this word lose its impact,
if we make it just another insult,
if we hear it so much that we stop taking it seriously,
I’m really concerned we could go there again.