The Political Gene
by Dennis Sewell
Picador, £16.99
Between 1915 and 1919 a leading Chicago surgeon, Harry Haiselden, quite openly and publicly allowed six infants in his care to die, in one case actively killing the child. The justification was that his victims were “hereditarily unfit”. But rather than being arrested or vilified, Dr Haiselden became a cause célèbre among progressive thinkers who shared his wish to “have a debate” over eugenic euthanasia. As Dennis Sewell explains in this eye-opening book: “Haiselden lambasted a society in which ‘horrid semi-humans drag themselves along all of our streets’ and put the dying babies and their mothers on show to journalists as he explained why he thought these babies should not be allowed to live.”
Haiselden was at the forefront of the eugenics craze of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one that had tragic and terrible consequences for millions of people. Indiana became the first state to pass forced sterilisations laws in 1907 and Oregon was the last to abolish it, as late as 1983. By then 33 US states had passed and repealed sterilisation laws, and 60,000 to 65,000 people were forcibly sterilised
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Tags:Adolf Hitler·Charles Darwin·Dennis Sewell·Nazis·The Political Gene
There’s no proof that it works, so why is the NHS spending £4 million a year on a placebo, asks Ed West (from the Daily Telegraph)
It was a small victory for science, and an even smaller one for taxpayers. But opponents of public-sector mission creep will be cheered by this week’s news from the British Medical Association conference in Brighton. It has recommended that the NHS should no longer fund homeopathy, on the grounds that there is no evidence that it works, and that it runs counter to all principles of evidence-based medicine.
The most outspoken supporter of the motion, Dr Tom Dolphin, had earlier compared homeopathy to witchcraft, but then apologised to witches on the grounds that this was unfair. Homeopathy, he said, was “pernicious nonsense that feeds into a rising wave of irrationality which threatens to overwhelm the hard-won gains of the Enlightenment and the scientific method”.
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From the Catholic Herald. Ed West meets the academic who predicts that the future will be dominated by radical religious groups
One reviewer of Eric Kaufmann’s book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, wrote that it would “send Richard Dawkins on to antidepressants”. Which may sound encouraging, but if Kaufmann’s fascinating and rather disturbing thesis about religion and demographics is true, Prof Dawkins won’t be the only one on happy pills.
The basic premise is this: across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that Europe, North America and the Middle East will eventually become dominated by fundamentalists as mainstream Christianity, Islam and Judaism are squeezed by secularism and religious extremists.
It may well be one of the most significant books of our era, all the more interesting because it goes completely against the thinking of the previous decades.??It used to be taken for granted that, just as liberal democracy meant the end of history, so it also meant the end of religion. Once people became rich, educated and sexually liberated, they would leave irrational beliefs behind and spend their Sundays shopping in malls rather than worshipping these old desert idols.??But things aren’t turning out that way – rather the sexual revolution and the wholesale use of contraceptives and abortions have increased the fertility gap between secular liberals and religious conservatives, which itself is tiny compared to the gap between fundamentalists and the rest.
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Tags:Eric Kaufmann·fundamentalism·Islam·religion
At 20 the National Front’s youth leader was sent to jail. Today Joseph Pearce is a leading Catholic writer.
From The Catholic herald
Joseph Pearce is a happy man. He is one of the leading Catholic biographers in the English-speaking world, and his studies of Tolkien, Solzhenitsyn, C S Lewis, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare, among others, have gained him an enviable reputation as a writer who knows his subjects inside out and understands their religious dimensions like few other writers.??
Today this burly but rather boyish-looking Englishman is the image of the contented middle-aged Catholic family man, living with his wife and two young children in sunny South Carolina eight months of the year and spending the rest in even sunnier Florida, where he lectures at the Catholic Ava Maria University.??It is hard to square this man with the figure familiar to anti-racist campaigners of the Seventies and Eighties: the pugnacious and frightening leader of the Young National Front, pictured at extreme Right-wing rallies alongside the likes of his friend, Nick Griffin. That Pearce ran a racist magazine called Bulldog, a cross between the Beano and Der Stürmer, which spewed out hatred of Asians and blacks and encouraged readers to denounce Left-wing teachers. That Pearce ended up in jail.??
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Tags:BNP·Catholic·GK Chesterton·Joseph Pearce·National Front
From The Catholic Herald
It is only October and already the newspapers are publishing round-ups of the first decade of the 21st century, an era that we’ve never satisfactorily found a name for – I for one could never bring myself to say “Noughties” without smiling inanely, for some reason.
So unless aliens invade between now and New Year’s Eve, it’s safe to say that the decade will best be remembered for the events of September 11 2001, and the subsequent “War on Terror”.
Aside from Islamism, the major change has been the continuing revolution in communications technology, which has transformed our lives beyond recognition.
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Tags:GK Chesterton·Noughties·Phillip Blond
The Patriarch of Jerusalem tells Ed West that the only thing that will keep the faithful in the Holy Land is a lasting peace
25 September 2009
‘Thank you for this interview, I hope you can help us through your good influence on the news,” says the man opposite me, His Beatitude Fouad Twal, Patriarch of Jerusalem.
It’s not often one meets a man just one rung below the Pope in the pecking order, or the man who leads the oldest Christian community on earth, so his modesty is touching, but the Patriarch of Jerusalem is a warm and charming man. But one with a depressing message.
“We were the first Christian community in the world. We were not converted to Islam, though lots of people were converted by force. And soon - and it is important - there will be a Christian population no more!”
Indeed. At a speech in Westminster Cathedral this month he made this depressing prediction: “From limiting movement and ignoring housing needs to financial taxation burdens and infringing on residency rights, Palestinian Christians do not know where to turn. The number of Jerusalem Christians, for example, is expected to fall from 10,000 to 5,300 in the coming seven years, if these policies are carried out at the same pace.”
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With post-Christian Europe facing demographic disaster,Ed West speaks to the unlikely American prophet of our doom
11 September 2009
There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of empty maternity wards and closed-down schools. Europe is dying - its people have lost confidence in themselves and choose a life of pleasure-seeking over procreation.
And for four decades they have bought the good life, with five-week holidays and retirement at 60, by hiring low-paid, invisible immigrants to do the dirty, dangerous and demeaning jobs, each generation of migrants then joining this giant pyramid scheme once they are granted citizenship. Now Europe is paying the price.
Ignore the exaggerated scare stories about Islamic growth in Europe - the raw statistics are disturbing enough. France and Holland are already 10 per cent Islamic, but that ignores the age gap between native and migrant - Britain is only four per cent Muslim but among new-borns that figure is 11 per cent; the top seven boys’ names in Brussels are all Islamic; at current trends Germany and Austria could be majority Muslim by mid-century.
Like with global warming, these fears used to be the preserve of the eccentric and unpleasant, but they are now entering the mainstream - and the James Lovelock of Islamisation is American Financial Times journalist Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, published this summer with little fanfare, but with a potent and powerful message that European liberals needs to listen to.
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August 29th, 2009 · Telegraph
History records that in the year 2009, the peasants of England rose up in protest, marching on Blackheath to demand change in the kingdom. They came from up and down the land – from Crouch End and Hampstead, from Chiswick, Richmond and Notting Hill, and some even from Gstaad and Verbier.
It might appear typically British to obsess about class while the earth burns, but what seems to distinguish the colourfully attired protesters at the Climate Camp set up in south-east London from previous revolutionaries is the overwhelming dominance of posh, upper-middle-class white people. In fact, since Climate Camp started three years ago, it has become the cheapest – and chic-est – date in the summer festival calendar.
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Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL PENGUIN, £14.99
You might not hear about this book much in the next month, nor even in the next year, but it will affect your life in some way, and that of our country and continent.
Christopher Caldwell is a mildmannered Financial Times journalist who over the past decade has covered continental Europe (France especially) and its relationship with Islam in particular.
That Caldwell is so mainstream, well-respected and analytical makes his conclusion all the more devastating – that the mass migration of Africans and Asians into Europe since the Second World War was an unprecedented, economically unnecessary and ill-thought-out plan that has had a profoundly negative impact on our way of life.
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Catholic Herald Notebook, August 21
This week sees two important anniversaries relating to that glorious year, 1989: the election of Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister since the Second World War, and Hungary opening its border to Austria, signalling the first physical dismantling of the Iron Curtain.
It was an awesome autumn, the first great counter-revolution in European history, with liberal democracy overthrowing hard-Left democracy. As an 11-year-old I was in awe of the brave Germans, Poles, Czechs and especially the Romanians, who had had enough of inhuman socialism and wanted to come back to western civilisation.
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Tags:Catholic Herald·Communism·National Secular Society
