ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Gondolinian 08 December 2014 12:06AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 10 December 2014 03:08:53AM 2 points [-]

After WWI Germans did try to copy American culture and might have copied scientifically motivated racism. On the other hand that stopped a bit with the Nazis. They didn't care about copying the US. "Blut und Boden" ("blood and soil") was a quite old idea.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 10 December 2014 03:58:33AM *  0 points [-]

"Racial hygiene" isn't really the same as "scientific racism". The latter seems to be used more to refer to the anthropological theories of racial superiority, now euphemistically called "human biodiversity" by their advocates.

But "racial hygiene" policies included the elimination of "undesirable" gene lines within the advocates' favored race — first through forced sterilization, and later through killing.

The German 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring reads like an echo of Harry Laughlin's 1922 Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, which was the model for the sterilization provisions in Virginia's 1924 law.

Comment author: ChristianKl 10 December 2014 01:28:56PM 1 point [-]

In 1933 in some sense yes. Hermann Muckermann who was co-author of the law did study in the US. By 1936 the Nazi however forbid him from speaking publically.