タイミングのいい放送

たまたまですがアメリカで来週The Eugenics Crusadeが放送されるそうです。動画で出てくるimbecileは知的障害者を指す言葉として使われていたことを示しています。

（ウィズダム）

imbecile

1 ｟くだけて｠ばか, 低能者 (→ fool1).

2 ｟やや古｠〘心〙痴愚者〘中度の知的障害者〙.

1927年にBuck v. Bellで知的障害者への強制的な不妊治療を合憲とした時に裁判官の意見文として“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”と言われて有名になったそうで、今では最高裁の最悪の判決の一つになっているとか。

数年前にこの言葉をタイトルにしたノンフィクションが出ていました。当時の優生思想の背景には、急増する移民への恐怖もあったとか。

Review: Adam Cohen’s ‘Imbeciles’, on the Supreme Court and Justice Not for All

By Jennifer Senior

March 6, 2016

None of this mattered. At the time of Ms. Buck’s institutionalization, the United States was swept up in a mania for eugenics. Part of the obsession was driven by xenophobia: Nativists feared that the sudden influx of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe would make thin gruel of hearty American stock.

But the movement, because of its supposed reliance on science to improve society, also found champions in the progressive and intellectual elite, including Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt.

また、社会を良くしていくためにも優生思想が必要だと考えられていた時代でもあったとか。

‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’

CreditCreditAdam Simpson

By David Oshinsky

March 14, 2016

America in the early 20th century was awash in reform. As giant corporations took root, so too did calls to check their power. Laws were passed setting maximum hours and minimum ­wages, limiting child labor, preserving natural resources and breaking up the “trusts” that were said to be destroying fair competition. Not all of these laws worked out as planned, and some were eviscerated in the courts. But a new force had been unleashed, aiming to serve the greater good not by destroying big business but by curbing its abuses.

Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.

“Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — ­human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feeble­minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.” According to the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose immensely influential 1916 tract, “The Passing of the Great Race,” became standard reading for eugenicists — Hitler himself is said to have called it “my bible” — about 10 percent of Americans produced unworthy offspring and had to be stopped.

優生思想というのが当時広まっていた例の一つとして、文学の古典と言われるフィッツジェラルドのグレートギャッツビーにも登場しているとNew Yorkerの記事では指摘しています。

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.

By Alex Ross

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

グレートギャッツビーを検索してみると確かにありました。もちろんこのことで文学的な価値が下がるというつもりはありませんが。。。

英語

日本語

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we----"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

「デイジーの前に出ると自分が文明の外からやってきたような気がする」とぼくは打ち明けた。2杯めのクラレットは、コルクくさくはあったけど、味はなかなかよかった。「作物の出来みたいな話はだめなのかな？」

ぼくはとりたてて深い意味をこめて言ったわけではなかったのに、予想外の方向へと話は進んでいった。

「文明はいまや崩壊しつつあるんだぜ」と、トムが激しい調子で口火をきった。「おれはひどいペシミストになってな。ゴダードってやつの『有色帝国の隆盛』って本は読んだか？」

「いや、ないけど」とぼくはその口調にあっけにとられたまま言った。

「そう、いい本だよ。だれもが読んでおくべきだ。要するに、もしおれたちが警戒を怠れば、白色人種は――白色人種は完璧に埋没してしまうだろう、っていうんだ。科学的なやつでね、ちゃんと証明までついてる」

「トムはとっても高尚になっちゃって」とデイジーは浅はかな悲しみをこめて言った。「読むのは長い単語がずらずら並んだむずかしそうな本ばっかり。ほら、なんていったっけあの単語、わたしたちが――」

「まあ、どれも科学的なやつなんだけどな」とデイジーをいらだたしげに横目で見る。「この男はそのへんをすべてまとめてひとつに仕上げたんだよ。おれたち次第ってわけだ。支配人種たるおれたちが警戒を怠るかどうか、もし怠れば、他の人種が支配権を得ることになる」

「おれたちはやつらを叩きのめさねばならんのだ」とデイジーは囁くように言った。夕日に向かってウインクしながら。

アメリカの優生思想がナチスに影響を与えたことを取り上げた本として、New Yorkerの記事でThe Nazi Connectionがあげられていましが、War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Raceという本の抜粋がガーディアンで読めました。ヒトラーのMein Kampfでの該当箇所です。

Hitler's debt to America

The Nazis' extermination programme was carried out in the name of eugenics - but they were by no means the only advocates of racial purification. In this extract from his extraordinary new book, Edwin Black describes how Adolf Hitler's race hatred was underpinned by the work of American eugenicists

Edwin Black

Fri 6 Feb 2004 02.36 GMT

Hitler displayed his knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. In Mein Kampf, for example, he declared: "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole."

Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State."

時代がそういう流れだったとしたら日本も無縁ではなかったようで優生保護法というものがありました。

旧優生保護法ってなに？

記事公開日：2018年05月30日

相模原の事件や杉田ナントカの意見は現在のところ批判されていますが、単にそれが現在の風潮だけだったら、時代の流れが変われば我々の態度も変わり得ることになります。