Survival Arts

National Socialist eugenics... in Sweden

Ah, yes, the benevolent Swedish model of democratic socialism. Here's an interesting piece, "Sweden and the Myth of Benevolent Socialism"; an excerpt from a Washington Post article of 1997 is included in the piece:

From 1934 to 1974, 62,000 Swedes were sterilized as part of a national program grounded in the science of racial biology and carried out by officials who believed they were helping to build a progressive, enlightened welfare state...In some cases, couples judged to be inferior parents were sterilized, as were their children when they became teenagers.

This was not a secret program:

Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish Minister of Health and Social Affairs, told the Post that "there was nothing secret about the sterilization program. It was carried out in the light of public debate at a time when Swedes believed they were creating a society that would be the envy of the world." The Swedish Institute for Racial Biology, founded in 1922, was the first national institute of the kind. The Swedes were also the first to sterilize the mentally ill, beginning in 1934.

The next coffee-shop socialist you meet who blathers about the benevolence of the Swedish model should check out the "World Socialist Web Site" article on the matter. These folks bill themselves as "The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)... the leadership of the world socialist movement, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938," so it might be worth checking them out for this bit of hot socialist-on-socialist criticism:

Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for "crimes" such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children's homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their "low intelligence", being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.

The article notes that "...per head of population... only Nazi Germany sterilised more people than Sweden." For those few of you who don't know this little fact, it's worth pointing out that "Nazi" is short for NSDAP, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei... National Socialist German Workers Party.

Posted by Russell Whitaker at May 20, 2004 08:55 PM | TrackBack