“A small price to pay for Salvation… Little One, it’s a simple Calculus. This universe is finite, its resources finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correction. I’m the only one who knows that. At least, I’m the only one with the will to act on it.” The idea of removing out a certain section of population was spurred by The Avengers antagonist Thanos, whose sole objective was to wipe out half of the universe’s population, based on the belief that our world was broken and needed corrections for cosmos. However, Thanos is not the first ‘Eugenicist’ for that matter.
Did Someone Say Eugenicist? Yes, With Avengers Endgame sprawling across as the highest blockbuster it promulgated back to the question of Eugenics and ethnic cleansing to a certain extent. The demarcations that are mostly talked about are through the lines of class consciousness and economic parameters but the racial superficiality that has been deep rooted into our minds, what about that?
Generally, referred to the Platonic idea of a modification of natural serving through selective breeding, eugenics aims at the improvement of humankind. Through the application of principles of selection to humans, this practice developed in 4th Century BCE in ancient Greek for the production of ‘Guardian Class’, those adjudged as unworthy by the Council of Gerousia were obliged to end their lives by drowning or other means. Modern Eugenics lends it’s foundations to Darwinian Theory of Evolution that was perceived accordingly by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton who coined the term ‘eugenics’ in it’s first place. Early disciplinary discussions were more oriented with genetic determinism ‘the evolution of Eugenics’is controversial in itself.
1907 marks the establishment of The British Eugenics Education Society & it’s American Counterpart in 1921, but these education societies allegedly received support from the clergy and religious authorities. But as my political science professor says, ‘The Americans are foolish people’ and someone also puts rightly ‘even the god can’t trust the English in the dark’, the American administrator Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their pro-eugenics stance seems deplorable. Hitler’s Germany post the second World War took inspiration from the American Eugenics to devise what we today know as Nazi Eugenics.
Nazi Eugenics was certainly one of it’s kind and depicts the practice in its worst form with Gas Chambers, Concentration Camps, Clinics like that of Hadamar, Genetic Health Courts and Nuremberg Laws, Hitler’s regime and adulation for Eugenics is substantial enough to testify why eugenics shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
The Eugenics that was adopted promulgated an elimination of people who were feeble-minded, epileptic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, deaf, blind, homosexual, idle, insane, and the weak, for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will in Germany alone. The practice isn’t something different from genocide and disavows the very existence of these people, ridiculing the idea of Global Multiculturalism that stresses for acknowledging equal rights and opportunities for all the groups that exists is bizarre altogether.
The modern vibrance and multilinearity that encompasses in the present context is as essential as the connectivity that these strands engender together. Demarcation of any community, group, race or ethnicity is as heretic as murder of any kind. With current detest for specific communities reiterating, chances of recrudesce are at an all time high and must be checked for in these authoritarian regimes.
Faizan Salik
Feature Image Credits: Wall Street Journal
