Eugenics Never Went Away

June 6, 2018

(Aeon) – Both in popular culture and in academia, eugenics is thought of as long-past, going extinct shortly after 1945 due to the extreme forms it took in fascist Germany. The Nazi enthusiasm for eugenics led to concentration camps, involuntary euthanasia, and genocide. Once the rest of the world recognised this, eugenics was done – not simply as a social movement with state support, but as an endorsable idea guiding social policy. But this view doesn’t capture what eugenics feels like from where I have stood for the past 20 years.