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ethics

fundamental and possible socialism is the
socialisation of the selective breeding of
man”, suggesting that defectives could be
dealt with in a “lethal chamber”.
Using the same haunting phrase, author
writer DH Lawrence declared: “If I had my
way, I would build a lethal chamber as big
as the Crystal Palace, with a military band
playing softly, and a cinematograph working
brightly; then I’d go out into the back streets
and the main streets and bring them all in,
the sick, the halt and the maimed: I would
lead them gently, and they would smile me
a weary thanks; and the brass band would
softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus.”
He could have been describing a
suburban English Treblinka. Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term
It took Nazi Germany and the murder of “eugenics”; Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb
250,000 people deemed to be living “lives supported eugenics; Richard Dawkins said
unworthy of life” to put these fantasies eugenics would work in humans as it did in
into action. But the unhappy truth is that “cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses”
even after the Second World War, the
eugenics agenda in Britain was still current. taboo but their learning disabled
equivalents – “idiot”, “cretin”, “imbecile”
Nazi ideas survive the war and “retarded” – are all too common,
On the day in 1943 when his famous even in supposedly progressive circles.
report was being debated, William Representations in drama and art are
Beveridge, the creator of the welfare state, infrequent and often misguided,
slipped out of the gallery of the House of emphasising individual tragedy, not the
Commons to reassure a meeting of the broader social experience. And
Wellcome Collection: conference paper; Galton; family; LSE Library/Wikimedia Commons: Webbs; David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons: Dawkins
Eugenics Society of his continued support. scholarship is hardly exempt, with moral
In 1952, eminent British neurologist philosopher Peter Singer dismissing our
AF Tredgold concluded that: “Many of the protection of the profoundly disabled on
defectives are utterly helpless, repulsive in the grounds of “speciesism” – declaring Dawkins, in response to an enquiry
appearance and revolting in their manners. that their intellectual capacity is less than from a woman about what to do if she
Their existence is a perpetual source of that of many animals. discovered she was pregnant with a foetus
sorrow and unhappiness to their parents. One of his followers Jeffrie G Murphy with Down syndrome, replied “abort it and
In my opinion, it would be an economical even wrote an article in 1984 entitled Do try again. It would be immoral to bring it
and humane procedure were their very the Mentally Retarded Have a Right to be into the world if you have the choice”.
existence to be painlessly terminated.” Eaten? He insisted this was a philosophical He denied that he was a “eugenicist”
The Nazis had been defeated but, for a exploration, intended to “raise the issue but it is hard to understand what he meant
moment, it seemed possible that one of of rights for the retarded in its hardest by the word “immoral” in such a context.
their most repulsive policies might survive. context”, adding sternly that “too much His comments that eugenics would
Such views are thankfully rarer today, well-meaning sentimentality is allowed to work neglect the fact that eugenics has
but a double standard is still in evidence pass for thought in the discussion of the been tried and it failed abysmally: despite
in the way that abusive language is used, retarded, and I want to shock my way the Nazi programme of murder and
with racist and sexist terms being strictly through this”. sterilisation, Germany’s population of
disabled people is entirely in line with
Image of mother other countries. It takes an intellectual to
and daughters, come up with such poisonous guff.
referred to as the Protecting the rights and opportunities
“lobster claw of the learning disabled is hard enough;
family”, used to
illustrate a lecture what’s striking is the way that so many
given at a medical otherwise clever people fail to get it. n
event in 1912 l This article was published in Byline Times
in 2020 and is reproduced with permission

Stephen Unwin is a theatre and opera
director, founder of the English Touring
Theatre and the Rose Theatre, Kingston,
author of the play All our Children, which
is about the Nazi genocide of disabled
people, and father of Joey, a young man
with severe learning disabilities

www.cl-initiatives.co.uk Community Living Vol 34 No 3 | Spring 2021 13