The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting #3

By Gena Mason, with artwork by Keith Rosson

Now in its second printing and available through Microcosm Publishing.

A look at the way the PATRIOT Act and post-9/11 "security" infected our civil liberties and infringed upon basic American rights.

An excerpt:

AMERICA'S SECRET HISTORY OF FORCED STERILIZATION

"America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races." --President Calvin Coolidge

...Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. government launched an aggressive campaign to monitor and assault its most vulnerable citizens. U.S. presidents, judges, legislators, and doctors proposed the forced institutionalization and sterilization of all socially unacceptable, poor women of childbearing age--to keep them from breeding.

... The Eugenics Record Office set out to locate every "defective" American citizen and assemble a government database cataloguing every "unfit" family in the country. In 1914 Harry Laughlin created a model sterilization law, and proposed sterilizing 15 million people over the next two generations. Laughlin and Charles Davenport sent out hundreds of fieldworkers from the Record Office, to gather family histories and locate potential victims.

...Throughout the rest of the century, state and national governments used sterilization as the "weapon of choice against...the menace of racial pollution." Government-paid doctors coerced minority women into being sterilized. In 1980, there were more than 700,000 sterilization cases. Many physicians and medical students nationwide have confirmed the practice of sterilizing women through trickery or deceit. One hospital director in New York admitted, "In most major teaching hospitals in NYC, it is the unwritten policy to do elective hysterectomies on poor black and Puerto Rican women...to train residents."

One lawsuit revealed that roughly 150,000 poor women (about half of them black) had been sterilized annually under federally-funded programs. The drive wiped out an entire nation of Oklahoma Indians by sterilizing all of the pureblood women of the tribe. ...

AMERICA AND THE THIRD REICH

"To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!" --American eugenicist Clarence Campbell, during the 1935 Int'l Population Congress

After California passed its eugenics laws, one of Adolf Hitler's first acts was to pass a sterilization law that he based on the American statutes. The Nazis justified passing the law by pointing to the United States, and confessed that Germany lagged behind in terms of eugenics legislation.

But not for long. Germany quickly implemented the ideas of the U.S. Eugenics Records Office. According to the Nazi decree, everyone working in health care and the legal system had to list every "hereditary defective" they knew. Those appearing on the lists were examined by a "Hereditary Health Court" that determined whether they would be forcibly sterilized. Women from ten to fifty years old, and men of all ages, were targeted. Many women were sterilized using radiation. In less than two years, over 150,000 German citizens were forced to undergo sterilization, paving the way for genocide...

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