"Progressive Eugenics" Part I
The British Class system, genetic superiority and a history of able-ism
In the first part of this series on the influence of the rise of progressive eugenics in libertarian circles we compare support in March 2020 for a cull of the vulnerable to previous attitudes and policies disproportionately impacting the poor and disabled.
"They want us to live in a segregated society"
"They want to keep us locked down for ever"
"Now we have protected the vulnerable, it's time to learn to live with the virus"
"Those at risk need to balance the harms and stay inside to protect themselves, but why should the rest of us have to face restrictions like mask"
The arguments against controlling SARS2 have become the lived reality for many of those who are at higher risk to the virus. We have abandoned the most vulnerable to the fatalistic attitude that everyone will be infected multiple times.
Eugenics?
Eugenics, the word has been thrown around at times throughout the pandemic. How fair are the accusations? Without doubt the pandemic has been a tale of inequality, the statistics clearly show a disproportionate impact on certain groups, and we’ve certainly heard ableist attitudes and language such as “But did they have comorbidities?” “Only six healthy children have died” and “Only the vulnerable are dying”. This is of course untrue, every infection is a roll of the dice, while some people will have a higher probability of severe illness, the dice can come up with the wrong numbers for any of us. There is also long covid which those supporting mass infection will do all they can to ignore or minimise.
We don’t know the motivations of those who have pushed a mass infection strategy, some will believe it's a pragmatic approach that causes the least harm in the long term, however as we face wave after wave of variants and herd immunity remains ever elusive we do need to question the motives of those arguing this is the answer, particularly those using misconceptions, flawed assumptions and manipulated statistics to support their entrenched position.
Accusations of eugenic attitudes have been thoroughly rejected by those saying we should just accept everyone being regularly infected while telling those at higher risk they should just be cautious, presumably for the rest of their lives if endemic means maintaining high levels of community transmission. When people say “we have to get back to normal” they mean for the majority, the vulnerable are an inconvenience who are dismissed with a single sentence, it's clear not all lives are valued equally by some.
March 2020: Sacrifice the vulnerable to protect the economy
At the start of the pandemic as the UK Government first dithered and then tried to sell us herd immunity as a strategy it wasn’t difficult for the media to find voices to argue that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of elderly and vulnerable people was a price worth paying to avoid a lockdown like we were seeing occur in other countries. Charles Moore editor of the Telegraph questioned if we should lockdown to save the lives of people who were likely to die soon anyway, professional contrarian Toby Young said 250,000 lives was a price worth paying to avoid the economic damage of a lockdown and Robert Dingwall, a Government adviser on NERVTAG and the JCVI at the time asked,
“Who says its desirable to prevent every death regardless of the cost? My impression is that the loudest voices are coming from the young or middle-aged people who have yet to accept death is a normal part of life. A wise person would, of course, prefer to die later rather than sooner, but they might also consider that some deaths are easier to bear than others, it is not for nothing that pneumonia was described as the old man’s friend in the days before antibiotics.” He went on to argue “we should acknowledge that many frail old people might see Covid-19 infection as a relatively peaceful end compared with, say, several years of dementia or some cancers. Government encouragement to discuss this question within families would not be a plan to cull the elderly but respect for their autonomy and their right to make such decisions rather than have others make them on their behalf.”
Of course this ignores the fact people suffering from dementia have diminished autonomy, and in practise the decision to let the virus rip would be made by the Government not families, and this is before we get around to discussing if dying from Covid struggling for breath or from organ damage is a “good death”. The Telegraph went on to mainstream disinformation groups with some of its writers going as far as to cooperate with members of anti-vax groups, Toby Young set up Lockdown Skeptics (now Daily Skeptic) to act as a hub for “alternative” experts, while Robert Dingwall went on to sign the precursor letter to the Great Barrington Declaration and was described by the increasingly unhinged conspiracy theorist Michael Yeadon in the #HARTleaks as “staying in to try and influence from the inside”.
Class & Genetic Superiority
We like to think we live in a country that cares for the most vulnerable in our society, we are told fair play, democracy and charity are traditional British values however in a country where the class system is still evident, our ruling elite have struggled to face up to a past where wealth was grown through colonialism, the dehumanisation of slavery and the treatment of the working class from feudalism, to factories, sweatshops and the Victorian poor laws that gave us work houses and “the feckless poor”.
There is also a tendency to forget just how sympathetic many of the British ruling class were towards the Nazi regime. As the book The Third Reich’s Elite Schools explains, from 1934 up to 1939 there was even a series of pupil exchanges between Germany’s elite National Socialist schools and British public schools including Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster and Rugby. The Nazi’s saw these schools as character forming models to raise the children of the upper echelons of the Nazi party while many of the British elite thought they could do well to emulate Germany’s racial confidence. Papers such as the Daily Mail cheered on Oswald Moselys fascist blackshirts and opposed the Kinder Transports that saved innocent lives from the horrors of the Holocaust.
UN Report: Systematic poverty and DWP deaths
In a country where hereditary lords still maintain seats in our secondary chamber, a sense of superiority still runs deep. We saw this after the 2008 banking crisis when the language of deserving and undeserving poor was resurrected to justify austerity and the systematic dismantling of public services that were broken up and privatised resulting in profit for vested interests.
The brutal impact of austerity disproportionately impacted disadvantaged and marginalised groups. In 2019 a special UN report described poverty in the UK as systematic and tragic, saying the UK’s social safety net had been removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos, it estimated austerity policies were responsible for 120,000 deaths with disabled people suffering most at the hands of the Department of Work and Pensions. Household incomes fell in real terms and economic growth became stuck in a rut of around 1% while the stock market thrived and wealth inequality widened with the number of billionaires in the UK increasing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48354692.amp
The media pundits and commentators who have been most vocal about the harms of lockdown on the disadvantaged were often those most supportive of austerity dismissing the UN special report as “playing politics”. The abandonment of the vulnerable in this phase of “living with the virus” is not an aberration, it is the continuation of long standing attitudes by generations of the political class.
Part II will examine inequality in the education system