Eugenics
Eugenics was an international scientific, political and moral ideology and movement which was at its height in first half of the twentieth century and was largely abandoned with the end of World War II. The movement often pursued pseudoscientific notions of racial supremacy and purity.
Its advocates regarded it as a social philosophy for the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of certain people and traits, and the reduction of reproduction of certain people and traits. Today it is widely regarded as a brutal movement which inflicted massive human rights violations on millions of people. The movement, led by race scientists, financed by private philanthropies such as the Carnegie Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation and implemented by governments was practised in North America, Europe (particularly Nazi Germany), and Australia (among others). The "interventions" advocated and practised by eugenicists involved prominently the identification and classification of individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, 'promiscuous women', homosexuals and entire "racial" groups——such as the Roma and Jews——as "degenerate" or "unfit"; the segregation or institutionalisation of such individuals and groups, their sterilization, their "euthanasia", and in the worst case of Nazi Germany, their mass extermination. The practices engaged in by eugenicists involving violations of privacy, attacks on reputation, violations of the right to life, to found a family, to discrimination are all today classified as violations of human rights. The practice of negative racial aspects of eugenics, after World War II, fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The modern field and term were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, drawing on the recent work of his cousin Charles Darwin. From its inception eugenics was supported by prominent people, including H. G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, William Keith Kellogg, Margaret Sanger, Winston Churchill, and Sidney Webb. Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was however Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated Eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf.
