A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION

Happy New Year.  And let's hope we can make some progress against the forces of darkness this year.  It has always been a struggle and progress has been achieved with considerable pain.  We've come a long way, but there is a long way to go.

I've been reading a book called The War of the World by Niall Ferguson.  It's pretty heavy reading at times.  He talks about the mass atrocities that occurred during the 20th century, which included pogroms against the Jews in Russia,  the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks, the barbarity of Josef Stalin, and the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.

I hadn't thought about it, but Hitler got many of his ideas about eugenics from laws that existed in the United States.  For years and years interracial marriage was actually illegal in many parts of the United States.

Ferguson notes that forty-one states used eugenic categories to restrict marriages of the mentally ill.  Twenty-seven states even had laws mandating sterilization for some categories of people.

In many ways the United States has been the light of the world, but we have some dark blotches in our history.