Racial Hygiene

Abstrakt Die, Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts entstandene Wissenschaftsdisziplin Eugenik, zählt zu den Grundlagen des Nazi-Euthanasieprogramms. Wie die Wissenschaft zu Geopolitik wird zeigt sich anhand des folgenden Artikels. Abstract The scientific discipline of eugenics, which emerged at the end of the 19th century, is one of the foundations of the Nazi euthanasia program. The following article shows how science becomes geopolitics.

Abstract
The dissertation straddles the interface of mass media, social engineering and advertising in 1930s Stockholm. Its twofold objective is firstly to outline their cultural output, targeting predominantly feminine audiences. Discussions oscillate between intertextual and contextual levels, and elucidate the spaces providing the respective settings for these media. Advertising is claimed to establish spatiotemporal spheres where the everyday meets with the semi-fictional framework of films or tie-in contests, which are thereby expanded in multifarious ways. The study also argues that newsreels visualize history overlooked in canonized history writing, by providing documentary and navigatory instruments in urban milieus now lost.

Secondly, the study encircles two sets of discourses underpinning the mass media of the nascent welfare state, the former encompassing advertising, hygiene and eugenics.The latter is a prismatic construction of the public — highlighted as citizens, consumers and patients. Exhibitions and non-fiction films often encouraged spectators to compare their life projects, medical profiles and lifestyles with those of object lessons or newsreels, channeling imperatives into them by elevating their everyday experiences and concerns to issues of national importance. The methodology is partly drawn from early film and visual culture theory, partly from feminist early film scholarship on filmgoing and the problematic of feminine mobility in consumerist culture. Contrary to the conceptualization of feminine fl nerie as contained by patriarchal capitalism, the dissertation holds that a gender-coded framework docs not nullify the value of women’s
mobility, or reduce it to capitalist goals. A wider understanding of consumerist spaces and venues entails treating them as spheres simultaneously harboring commercially homogenizing and polysemic capacities.

Chapter 1 highlights the Stockholm Exhibition 1930, presenting the grounds as a literal and conceptual panorama of architectonics, objects and issues. In contrast to several analyses of its reception, this concerns the modes of spectating adopted or rejected by audiences and critics, and the sensory and bodily implications of disorientation or discomfort brought about by glass architecture.The film Brokiga Blad is regarded as an instance of film-mediated reception, involving a gaze precipitated by a mixture of awe and rural skepsis towards functionalism.

Chapter 2 presents case studies of media with the welfare effort and the eugenics program as a backdrop. The exhibition “Mor och Barn” specifically targeted female visitors, who were called on to reflect on their part in the nation’s dwindling birth rates. This and other media events concretized the eugenic ideology’s vision of a healthier human type, and provided training grounds for opening up the private sphere to scrutiny, and the spectators themselves to civic soul-searching
and introspection.

Chapter 3 accounts for marketing policies, elucidating the interrelationship of exhibitions, films, contests and discourses on advertising. To reconstructs filmic arenas offering readers a peak at their local stars, or to learn screen dance, a few periodicals and film-related ephemera are presented.

Chapter 4 first discusses buildings offering women architectonic, cinematic, and commodity-trapped attractions. The second part is devoted to the moral outrage expressed by social reformists, worried by the perceived expansion and fusion of degenerating urban pleasures.They believed that the lifestyles of Hollywood films would jeopardize young women’s sexual virtue by, putting “ideas” into their heads. Nevertheless, indications are given that some girls were in fact attracted to the commodity values of urbanity, to the point of transgressing sexual norms to attain a desired lifestyle.

Chapter 5 focuses upon the movement H lsa genom Nakenkultur (HgN) and its alternative to urban popular culture: nudism. If the imagery carried the strongest rhetorical force for spreading the nudist credo, the exposure of nakedness was a delicate matter. To contain the potentially expansiveness of sexual connotations, the dissertation argues, nudity was screened with acculturating codes, and a repertoire of legitimizing poses, gestures and activities.

Chapter 6 discusses exhibitions launched as lobbying tools for putting the Vacations Act into operation, and the formulation of the issue as a social, economic and cultural problem. Visual culture theory is the framework for teasing out the educational aspects of displays and tableaux. From its overall topography down to vehicles, tents and books,
“Fritiden” is likened to a Heideggerian toolbox, providing a connection between eye and hand, necessary for achieving an embodied understanding of the vacation and its attributes.

Die Frage, wem die Auszeichnung „Genie“ gebühre, wurde vor hundert Jahren in unterschiedlichen geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen und in literarisch-philosophischen Texten, unter anderem von Walter Benjamin, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Julian Hirsch, Jakob Wassermann, Otto Weininger und Edgar Zilsel, hitzig debattiert. Die Monographie wirft einen Blick auf die glorifizierenden Zuschreibungen und epistemologischen Funktionen, die der Wissensfigur „Genie“ in der damaligen Scientific Community zugewiesen wurden. Sie untersucht, wie sich Vertreter vor allem neuerer Fachdisziplinen mithilfe der Geniefigur ihrer eigenen intellektuellen und schöpferischen Potenz versicherten, welche politischen, rassistischen und geschlechterspezifischen Implikationen das „Genie“ in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts transportierte und wie sich der geisteswissenschaftliche Geniekult um 1900 in der späteren Populärkultur, ausgewählten Spielfilmen ab Mitte der 1980er Jahre, widerspiegelt.

What the Nazis called Aktion T4 was a euthanasia program, officially started on August
18th, 1939. The registration operations for individuals with physical or mental handicaps
were followed by forced sterilization and transfer to clinics organized to kill. In this
article, I try to explain the mechanisms that allowed the memory of Aktion T4 to be
preserved and passed from one generation to the next; memories of the “merciful death”
of approximately 70,000 “lives unworthy of life,” that find themselves embedded in
family records and family history. In the first section, I summarize the discussion that
resulted from the theories of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Even if those theories
do not in any way allude to the consequences that we have witnessed decades after their
publication, they started a debate about the value of life and the legitimacy of human
intervention in the selection of hereditary character traits, as well as the concept of race
and the different methods and forms of theories and eugenics that were later adopted in
Europe and in the United States. In the case of Germany, translated into Rassenhygiene,
those concepts flowed into the Nazi project of purification of the German people.
Through interviews with families who had a relative interned in one of the program's
clinics spread across the Reich territory between 1939 and 1945, I investigate the
evolution and passage of memories stored within the family sphere, paying attention to
the generational steps and processes of trauma. These stories are born from a complicated
process of reconstructing these memories via interviews. Their recollections were full of
painful silences and negations, similar to the thought process which led the victims to
live in a condition that they could not understand, and separated them from the world
before they were each made to face a solitary death, far from any contact with their
families. The trauma that I analyze concerns actions that had been carried out by previous
generations; in the majority of cases, younger generations were not aware of the destiny
of their murdered relatives and therefore tried to rebuild the stories of people who they
never had the opportunity to meet. I examine the problematic relationship of those being
interviewed with the end-of-life issue and also the sense of guilt which is generated by the
awareness of crimes that were committed. Aktion T4 was not a crime committed outside
the national borders, nor a crime that extended beyond the private sphere to the “others.”
Instead, it existed within the most central and intimate place of Nazi culture: the family.

This chapter examines the role of two non-governmental expert organisations in the construction of public health discourses, agendas and policies in 1940s’ and 1950s’ Finland: Samfundet Folkhälsan (the Public Health Association of Swedish Finland) and Väestöliitto (the Finnish Population and Family Welfare League). Drawing from the literal, ‘people’s health’ meaning of the Swedish and Finnish public health concepts (folkhälsa and kansanterveys, respectively), this chapter analyses what the association meant by ‘people’, ‘health’ and ‘people’s health’. These concepts are reflected against historical conceptions and analytical interpretations of ‘race’, ‘hygiene’ and ‘racial hygiene’ of the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter concludes that the 1940s–1950s constituted a transition period when notions of race and people, hygiene and health, and racial hygiene and public health were closely intertwined in conceptions, practices and rhetoric. This was coupled with pronounced pronatalism in which motherhood was framed as a civic duty of the (‘fit’) woman. Furthermore, the construction of the ideal ‘people’ promoted bourgeois-conservative family, gender and socio-cultural models which created explicit and implicit exclusive criteria for the ‘people’. This was seen as a survival strategy against external threats to the collective: the Soviet Union vs. the Finnish nation or the Finnish-speaking majority vs. the Swedish minority.

On the 66th Anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the GREAT Ethical Corpus | Corpus GREAT, renews its call for the United Nations to call an Emergency Session of its Security Council to unanimously Admit Africa [the African Union] as the 6th Permanent Member of the Security Council with full VETO Rights. The UN’s institutional prejudicial resistance for the inclusion of Africa onto the Security Council contradicts its Foundational Key Documents including the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, France and the International Bill of Human Rights which became International Law in 1976; the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination [ICERD] adopted in New York on 7 March 1966; and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the General Assembly on Thursday, 13 September 2007. The current composition of the Permanent Membership of the UN Security Council with VETO Rights smacks of Global North Caucasian Supremacism and rotational expansion of the UN Security Council itself is nothing but tokenistic which camouflages the Exclusive Veto Power Monopoly by the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France and China. This is a true reflection of the nature and character of Tyrannical, International, Institutional, Afrophobic and Anti-African Racism that disenfranchises and marginalises Africa’s 1.3 Billion Citizens, including Indigenous African Natives and by extrapolation hundreds millions more Global African Diaspora.
On this 66th Anniversary of the UDHR, we renew our Ethical Request of the UN to convene an Emergency Session of the UN Security Council and any other bodies critical by the UN Charter to free itself of this amoral Institutional Supremacist Complex and admit the African Union as a Legitimate Representation of the African Continent and her Peoples with deliberate haste. The League of Nations failed Africa and defied the Divine Principle of the Equality of Human Lives and Rights. This led to WWII. Sixty Four years on, the United Nations Organisation has proven non-the-wiser and continues to practice Afrophobic and anti-African Racism in violation of the Divine Principle of the Respect for the Equality of Human Lives and Rights through Ethical Representation. This supports the Racial Supremacist Philosophies of Social Darwinism, Hitlerite Nazism and Mussolinist Fascism which led to WWII and sends out the wrong message to Extremists who want to New Empires grounded on Philosophies of Exclusion, Disrespect for Human Lives and Rights, Tyranny, ethnic cleansing and intolerance of Human and Religious Diversity. It is no coincidence that in 2014 United States of America, under the Presidency of the first ever African-American President, Grand Juries are acquiescing behind closed doors and condoning Police Institutional Afrophobic and anti-African Racist killings, brutalities and murders against unarmed African-Americans by acquitting trigger-happy Caucasian Police Officers of blatant criminality, when the UN Security Council Permanent Membership and Veto Rights Construct reflects unjustified Caucasian Supremacy.