Racismo uma história - (legendas PT) - (part 2de 3)

from deep within the dunes of Africa's Namib Desert a terrible secret is beginning to emerge these are the remains of victims of the world's first death camp a place where thousands of Africans were exterminated by the German Army 30 years before the Nazis came to power these remains have Lain here forgotten for over a hundred years but this terrible place is not unique scattered across the world are the sights of the massacres and genocides of imperialism where Millions died in an aspect of colonial history that Europe often chooses to forget these people were victims of

the truth that lies behind the myth of The White Man's Burden throughout the 19th century European scientists writers and philosophers developed ideas to justify the mass killings of the Age of Empire these same theories went on to inspire some of the horrors and the savagery that would consume Europe in the 20th century the 19th century was to end with the worst crimes of Empire but it began with a great moment of optimism in the 1830s in the great plantations of the Caribbean Britain prepared to become the first nation to end slavery three quarters of a

million slaves across the Caribbean were about to be freed and as Britain basten her sense of national benevolence it was presumed that the Grateful slaves would transform themselves into a hardworking and Christian peasantry [Music] the battle against slavy had been LED from the pulpit by an alliance of Christian abolitionists and missionaries they had fought the campaign from their churches and meeting Halls in the 1830s it was their views that dominated the national debate on race when slavery was finally abolished there would have been an enormous sense of elation and achievement on the part of the

abolitionists don't forget this was a 50-year campaign from 1787 onwards involving hundreds of thousands of ordinary British people partitions Etc so that when slavery was abolished the abolition had won a sense of Triumph I think they also felt that that question am I not a man and a brother was answered the Abolitionist response to that great question was that although men and brothers black people were lesser men and lesser Brothers I think in that moment the dominant perspective is of a hierarchical racial order but one in which it's a question of culture and civilization they

certainly do not think that black people are equal to them at this time they think maybe at sometime in the future they will be equal the mission to raise up the black and brown peoples of the world to the supposedly Superior level of white Englishmen was not to be confined to the former slaves this was to be the great task that would justify the expansion of the British British Empire the abolitionists satisfied one aspect of their chage and governance of black people in that they fought and won for the freedom of black people The Next

Step was to send your Stormtroopers your missionaries into Africa and the Caribbean to finish off the job as it were you know these are heathens who have to be brought into into the fold of Christianity that notion of giving civilized values and modes of behavior to other peoples that's the ideology that underpin the empire in the Empire that the missionaries and abolitionists set out to create indigenous peoples would see their cultures destroyed and their religions eradicated and yet all this seems almost benign when compared with the Grim reality of what imperialism became because during the

19th century their dream was gradually overwhelmed by another vision one that claimed that the dark races could not be civilized and should instead be exterminated the event that began the slow collapse of the missionaries Vision took place in a then little known Outpost of Britain's vast and expanding Empire this is Tasmania on the southern coast of Australia what the British did did on this small island was to resonate down through the Victorian age when the British started to settle in Tasmania in 1803 they encountered the ancient Aboriginal peoples of the island only 5,000 strong they

had lived in complete isolation for 10,000 years on the very edge of the habitable world the settlers saw these people through ideas brought with them from Europe quite early you get expressions of disgust and shock about the way the tasmanians lived to the Europeans it appeared that the tasmanians were without culture they were without religion they were Godless so they looked upon the tasmanians as people who' been left behind by history and they also related to a very popular idea of the late 18th century that is the great chain of being that the various races

of humankind were arranged in hierarchical order and that the tasmanians were uniquely Savage and primitive and therefore can be treated almost as animals the British set about building a new capital and settling the surrounding Countryside land that for Millennia had been the prime hunting ground of the aboriginals out in these fields and pastures far from the control of the authorities the settlers were free to displace and abuse the [Music] aboriginals from the 1820s huge amount of Abal land has been taken up and there is this enormous struggle between Aboriginal people and whites of course it's

very hard to document a lot of the settler of violence because they know that it is against the law to kill Aboriginal people they are being told that Aboriginal people are British subjects but they certainly reveal in their Diaries and journals the desire to kill abigal people What became known as the black war was a hidden conflict the landscape itself was the only Witness the British settlers killed any aboriginals they encountered whole groups were massacred kidnapping and rape became Common Place the aboriginals regularly attacked the settlers as they fought desperately to defend their land and

as the death toll Rose fear fused with hatred in such circumstances it was very easy um on both sides no doubt to regard the other side as being totally subhuman I've got no doubt that the Aborigines thought the Europeans were people totally without morality uh or without any restraint equally the the Europeans uh slipped very quickly into a view that these people were animals and Savages so that conflict in such a racially divided Society so easily tips over into an extreme feeling of hatred the death toll of the black War had terrifying implications for the

Tasmanian aboriginals the British who arrived in ever increasing numbers could replace their dead but the aboriginals only 5,000 strong before the war could not and by the end of the 1820s they were at risk of being completely annihilated the only man who had any hope of halting the violence was the colonial Governor George Arthur now the governor of Tasmania is an Evangelical he knows Wilbur Force and he is aware that his future and his reputation depends on how he deals with this problem above all else now he's already been warned in the late 1820s by

the British government that the rapidly declining numbers suggests that these people might be extermin minated and were this to happen it would be an indelible stain on the reputation of the British Empire but by implication it would be disastrous for his [Music] career Governor Arthur set out to save the aboriginals from the violence of the settlers and to convince them of his good intentions he produced a poster that was attached to trees in their Homeland it showed a fantasy of interracial Unity the poster spoke of British Justice promising equality before the law the white killer

of an Aboriginal would be hanged if an Aboriginal killed a settler he would be hanged the poster also propagated the lie that the British wanted to integrate with the aboriginals it was both a fiction and a complete failure because out in the bush the killings on both sides continued and in 1830 Governor Arthur embarked upon a new policy he ordered the Army to sweep across the area of European settlement in an attempt to capture the remaining aboriginals he offered a bounty for every Aboriginal taken alive but the operation was a complete failure only two were

captured an old man and a young boy [Music] after years of Guerilla Warfare the last few hundred of the original 5,000 aboriginals had learned to hide themselves in the bush determined to save them and determined to take their land for White Settlement Governor Arthur changed tactics he now turned away from the Army and looked instead to a missionary George August Robinson he was the leader of a band of Aboriginal converts and was now hired to go into the bush and bring in the remaining aboriginals Robinson took a message that the government wanted to come to

some sort of an agreement a negotiation a peace treaty and that is I believe undoubtedly the way the Aborigines saw it they too saw this as a way to end a conflict which they had realized they could never win they could never get rid of the Europeans if they stayed in fought they would be wiped out and Robinson and His intermediaries convinced them that they should temporarily go to an island where they'll be looked after and fed and that they will ultimately come back to their [Music] homelands the island was called flinder's Island and 300

Tasmanian aboriginals who had been collected by Robinson were transported [Music] here Robinson came with them in the official role of Chief protector of aboriginals a job for which he was paid a total of £8,000 a small fortune in the 1830s a settlement was constructed for them complete with houses farmland and a chapel Robinson called it Point civilization and a local artist was brought in to paint the portraits of the last of the tasmanians jinny had been captured by Robinson following the near annihilation of her people by the settlers Wadi had been a chief until his

community had been wiped out by a European virus another local leader man alaga had been lured to flinder's island with a promise that the convicts who had attacked his people would be brought to Justice and there was cherini whose husband had been murdered in front of her all of them had seen their culture almost wiped out what little was left Robinson Now set out to erase because Point civilization was not merely a settlement it was essentially a factory to transform so-called Savages into civilized Christians to become a successful Christian he believes you have to settle

down you have to live in a village he wants to send the children to school he wants to teach them to to plow and to so and to become agriculturalists forced to adopt an alien way of life and confined to an island hundreds of miles from home they began to succumb to European diseases and what the local doctor called dejected Spirits they die one by one by one children are not being born and there must have been this enormous sense of trauma amongst them a people that had once been strong and healthy suffering this enormous

decline within a generation George Robinson the supposed savior of the aboriginals was reduced to sketching out his plan for their future Graves frequently he he cries with the mourn he weeps himself he's so moved by their fate But ultimately he says well it is better that they die here having Leed the message of of the gospels rather than be killed in the bush by the settlers he finds a way to ease his own conscience so that Robinson's own beliefs you see protect him against a full accounting of what he was partly responsible for of the

300 aboriginals lured to flinder's Island by the mid 1840s around 260 were dead jinny managa and Wadi had all succumbed Kini was one of the few survivors she lived on growing into old age when she finally died in 1876 she was regarded by some as being the last full-blooded Tasmanian a people whose story could be traced back 10,000 years had within the span of a single lifetime been almost exterminated what had happened in Tasmania was far from being a unique event across the world indigenous peoples were being pushed to the brink of Extinction in the

South African Cape the kisan peoples have been driven from their land enslaved and killed in their thousands by British settlers and the BS the same forces had also attacked the ancient San Bushmen of the Kalahari hunting them down as if they were animals in New Foundland the native beer thuck peoples have been completely wiped out by Europeans and in South America Wars of extermination sanctioned by the Argentinian government were raging against the pampus Indians everywhere it seemed white settlers were destroying indigenous peoples and in these very same years the old racism that had been born

in the age of slavery began to reemerge in the aftermath of abolition competition from new sugar producers began to undermine Britain's once Mighty sugar plantations and as their Estates rotted the former slave owners began to blame their r on the people who had once made them Rich when the Caribbean plantations started to lose money in a big way um they fell back to The Stereotype of the lazy negro the PLS were then able to say to the abolitionists and to Britain look we are now in ruin because we no longer have the freedom to coair

blacks to work we no longer have the freedom to to drive them to work these people are intrinsically lazy you know you were arguing that they were human beings a man and a brother but in fact they're not they're still at the level of beasts whereas up to the end of the 1830s it's been pretty unpopular to talk about Africans in those ways and the respectable Talk of the humanitarians about Africans has been you know far more prevalent by the mid 1840s that's beginning to shift those who argued that abolition had been a failure due

to the laziness and savagery of the slaves now claim that the Christian vision of a civilizing Empire was also [Music] doomed you might say that the moral momentum ran out of the Abolitionist Movement people found that other races were not becoming civilized there was something difficult they fought back they didn't seem to learn as fast as we would appreciate to make them more pliable for us Christian optimism about the spread of civilization and the christianization of people of color around the world began to drain away if the nonwhite races seem to reject the message of

the missionaries some in Britain began to ask if they could be civilized at all one of those who thought not was the eminent writer and historian Thomas carile in 1849 carile published an essay entitled occasional discourse on the Negro question in which he appealed for a return to some form of slavery it was printed and reprinted in magazines across the world and helped transform the 19th century debate about race carle's voice is a kind of prophetic voice you know which booms out from his study in in Cheney walk in Chelsea and he writes these you

know extraordinarily powerful prophetic pieces which were read you know with gusto by victorians and they I mean one can imagine them all sitting around their fires reading the latest periodical that's come out with this flow of rhetoric in in this case in the occasional discourse on the Negro question the flow of rhetoric is about the necessity for inequality inequality is the proper way to run a society those who know should rule those who don't know men should rule women white people should rule black educated people should rule the masses The Depths to which these ideas

became embedded within mid Victorian society was revealed by one of the most controversial events of the whole 19th century in 1865 the people of Morant Bay a tiny settlement in East Jamaica attacked a cour house during a minor demonstration in return the governor general imposed martial law and ordered his soldiers to go on a killing spree it was a killing time nearly 500 people were just executed 600 people just flogged some of them to the point of death and a thousand homes torched enormous um disparity in terms of the retaliation against these people and you

know when all this was being done the so-called Rebels didn't put up a fight you know when their houses were being burned they didn't they weren't terrorists they weren't murderers you know all they wanted was for the the Judiciary to treat them with with a with a sense of justice the man who ordered the killings was governor Edward a and when news of what he had done reached Britain the liberal establishment was shocked and the cause is taken up by the old abolitionists who've kept going and kept going and kept going and the old anti-slavery

societies kind of wrenched themselves back into action and mobilized themselves again and all the ladies who've been doing it for decades es when the men have gone off and done more interesting things you know there they are with the Machinery still in place that can be mobilized when you need to their tactic was to put Governor air on trial for mass murder but in court he was acquitted due in part to a huge wave of popular support he had the whole of House of Lords parliamentarians bishops priests The Establishment the aristocracy backing him saying that

it was justified uh he was justified in imposing severe order in these people because that's the only language they could understood because the black people were brutes Air's defense was orchestrated by the high priest of the new racism Thomas carile but behind him stood many members of the British literary Elite all of whom made known their support for governor a and his actions at Morant Bay the art critic and writer John Ruskin the author of Vanity Fair William makepiece zakary the Reverend Charles Kingsley writer of the children's classic the water babies and Charles Dickens the

most celebrated author of the century the notion of treating other people with some degree of justice and rule of law finally went out of the window and was demolished in uh in the 1860s over moreen B you know from then on we knew that the empire was about ruling people with the maximum degree of cerion some of the new ideas about race in the high Victorian age Drew their evidence from the world of the dead based on the study of corpses and skeletons the burgeoning science of anatomy laid the foundations for a new scientific racism

in Britain the most important race scientist was a now forgotten Edinburgh surgeon ruined by a body snatching scandal in the 1820s he had fled Britain in disgrace but in the 1840s Dr Robert Knox resurfaced with a publication of a new book race is everything literature science art in a word civilization depends on it for robbert Knox in that book race is everything it determined your character it determined your position in Civilization it determined your destiny can the black races become civilized I should say not he saw racial conflict and extermination happening all around the world

it was natural for him to believe beli that racial types were bound to struggle and that the superior races would dominate the naturally inferior ones the Saxon race will never tolerate them never amalgamate never be at peace it is a war of extermination one or other Must Fall Robert Knox was not a lone voice in America a group led by the renowned craniologist Samuel George Morton had begun to collect the skulls of different races and compare them skulls were chosen to be measured because it was reckoned that the skull was the container of the most

important part of the human body the brain the bigger the skull the bigger the brain the shape of the skull the shape of the brain the American School of race scientists concluded that the races as measured through their skulls were so different as to be separate species tasmanians Africans American Indians were not the lower races of men they were perhaps not fully human at [Music] all one writer compared the extermination of these Races by white settlers as being like the melting of snow before the advancing rays of the Sun but the theory that was to

have the most powerful impact upon race came not from the anatomists or the skull measurers but from the work of one of the 19th Century's greatest [Music] Minds The Origin species really threw a bombshell first of all into science it really invented the science of biology and then into religion and into society and what dwin did in some ways was to give an by for being a judge if evolution had changed the races and the species of the world why hadn't it done the same to humans many believed that Darwin's laws had done just that

natural selection they claimed neatly explained and Justified the global expansion of the Great British race life favors a hierarchy of specialists and you find that throughout the plant and the animal [Music] world there are bugs on top of bugs on top of bugs each one surviving at another's expense each one filling a niche that another can't [Music] occupy people do said are the same way they are expansive organisms in other words englishan are just like other organisms they are successful because they are good at expanding those who understood colonialism and human competition in terms of

Darwin's theories became known as the social darwinists men like the radical biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the famous economist Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism foresaw very different Fates for the various races of mankind kind Evolution was in operation it was advancing the most recently evolved the most successfully evolved that is the northern Europeans the British but evolution also suggested that there had to be losers in this great Cosmic process and the losers were those peoples who could not compete and once put into competition with Superior races were doomed to disappear and this was likely to

happen to all the native peoples in North America in the Pacific and in Africa across the world the crimes of imperialism now came to be taken as proof that the social darwinists were right in North America centuries of disease and War had devastated the Native Americans whole Nations had been all but annihilated in parts of the Australian Mainland the peoples of the Outback were it seemed going the same way as their cousins in Tasmania and across Africa the Scramble for Empire had brought the might of Europe to Bear against innumerable peoples killing literally millions [Music]

the social darwinists predicted a future in which these races like many animal species would only be remembered as curios stuffed exhibits in anthropological museums The White Man's Burden and the Christian dream of benign imperialism were rendered obsolete old missionaries who still talked about the equality of humanity and talked about about everyone descended from Adam and Eve and talked about that the truth the only truth came from the Bible was seen as being extraordinarily old-fashioned who simply had failed to come to terms with the great scientific thinking of the age and these racial theories were not

only applied in new colonies but also in the oldest parts of the empire in the traditional story of imperialism British India has usually been represented as an example of benign Imperial rule the British Raj we are told was run by men who were competent professional and wise men who brought order and prosperity to a chaotic land but there is an aspect of Indian history that has been written out of this account of the Imperial [Music] past in the mid 1870s the great DeCamp plain of India was affected by the climatic phenomenon we now know as

El Nino and within months millions of peasants had begun to starve the monsoons had failed people had eaten their food reserves India stood on the precipice of a great human tragedy at this point the vice Roy of India Lord Linton was totally absorbed in in what was probably the largest party in world history uh celebrating the coron of Queen Victoria's Empress of India this is one of the great catering Feats in history since it me whining and dining uh more than 60,000 sat traps and princes and retainers and Friends of the British Empire uh in

India over the course of a long week as Lord Lon and the ruling Elite of the Raj feast Ed at Banquets and posed for official photographs Millions were slowly dying in the countryside and the vicroy Justified his inaction with arguments gleaned from the social darwinists this was a very very crass use of a darwinian evolutionary notion of survival of the fittest whereby a famine could be actually seen as an instrument of of darwinian winnowing yes people who were unfit uh would effectively perish as a result of this and to intervene to stop them perishing was

really to interfere with with almost a rule of nature what made the famines especially deadly was that the British had dismantled ancient systems that had for centuries prevented food shortages from turning into famines if you'd had a poor Monsoon and there was a food shortage many people still still had enough they may have had less but they would have had enough because they grew their own food or they would have had access to it from from other groups in the community who would share it with them during a time of Crisis all this had been

wiped away when the British forced the poorest peasants to grow cash crops like wheat and rice for export thereby ushering them into a global market and in the 1870s that market condemned them to death by 1877 millions in Southern and Central India were starving in desperation parents sold their children for scraps of food many thousands committed suicide and in some places the people were forced into cannibalism and all the while the food that could have saved them was piled up on the docks of Madras ready to be shipped to Britain and America but to Lord

Lon it was no more than an unfortunate byproduct of the iron laws of social Darwinism if you read the letters of Lord Linton what is so striking about them is not simply their fanatical Devotion to uh to the market and the and and Market forces it's not simply their you know parsimony and desire to spend as little as possible but the enormous calm with which they accept the fact that millions of Indians would die because these are Indians they believe are the useless part of the population the poorest of the poor people condemned to death

by Nature when finally Lon was pressured into action his solution proved just as deadly as a famine itself Lord Linton sets up his system of outdoor relief that looks more like Nazi concentration camps than anything repres presenting decent human charity first of all there's the obligatory test you can't be relieved that is given a job or food within 10 miles of your residence you must walk and you must walk sometimes distances of hundreds of kilometers and tens of thousands of people die in the course of that then you're put to work doing heavy labor very

heavy labor breaking stone working on the railroads and you're confined them to swallowed camps where your daily diet is in caloric terms less than that provide to inmates of buken wall and other Nazi concentration camps they become literally and simply death camps and perhaps worse of all children were now too weak and small to do the necessary uh work children became the the main victims of linton's coolart [Music] policy 8 million Indians died in the famines of the 1870s but they were not the only famines of the British Raj and they were not the last

famines returned in the 1880s and the 1890s and in all almost 30 million Indians starve to death under British rule a story airbrushed out of the Glorious accounts of the Raj and the men who ruled over [Music] it social Darwinism had Justified genocidal policies in the colonies and in the same years it also fueled new fears amongst the British Elite fears of other dangerous races living in their midst the working classes of their own cities [Applause] race and class are actually very close to each other if you look at books about race around Darwin's time

they often talk about the Cockney race the English country race the the Scottish race they were drawings of the head of a typical member of the Cockney race and the Word was used quite seriously there were Maps made of where the criminal races lived these were the rookeries this was the East End the uh the Melting Pot of all the horrors that going to go out infect the rest of part the population race scientists and social reformers visited prisons to study the criminal races at firstand and among them was Charles Darwin's cousin Francis gton gon

was terrified by the fact that the underclass were reproducing faster than the middle classes darwinian law had it seemed been turned on its head the least fit was surviving reversing this situation became his mission darwi that looked backwards where have we come from gton turned the telescope around and looked forward where were we going and he devoted much of the rest of his life to the idea of understanding Homo sapiens us as a species and trying to direct where Homo sapiens was going to go in order to become more Sapient more wise in the future

more of a genius and less of what he saw more stupid more ignorant and more decayed gon designed a new science of human selective breeding he dreamed of encouraging the middle classes to have more children and inhibiting breeding amongst the lower and criminal classes and he named his new science eugenics in the last Decades of the 19th century it became widely respected attracting an array of high-profile supports qus they included many of the Great figures of the late 19 30 20th century people like George bernon Choy G Wells uh Winston Churchill all of them absolutely

convinced [Music] eugenicists in the first years of the 20th century all the racial theories developed in the Victorian age Eugenics social Darwinism and scientific racism came together in a forgotten Outpost of colonialism this is Namibia but at the dawn of the 20th century it was the German Colony of Southwest Africa and home to an ancient people called the Herrero in 1904 they rebelled against the brutality of German rule What followed was to prefigure the worst Crimes of the 20th century the Germans committed innumerable massacres and atrocities but they were unable to hunt down and destroy

all the Herrero people across such a vast landscape and when the Nama another of the namibian peoples rose up the Germans turned instead to a recent invention the concentration camp in these camps the herero and Nama were imprisoned and enslaved thousands were worked to death others raped beaten or simply murdered by the guards the most infamous and deadly of the camps was at a place called Shark Island shark Island was established for the express purpose of killing people anybody placed on that island everybody knew they were going to die people knew that the German officers

knew that if I were to have to use the language of the Nazi period Then I would certainly see shank Island as a death camp the people were bang and Shak Island for all our Namibia Heros tamaras Bushman Nama and they had cool blooded Mor there my own family my ancestors they were also killed there in this desolate place on the southern edge of Africa 3 and a half thousand people were exterminated with a speed and efficiency that was become the Hallmark of 20th century Slaughter the genocides which took place in Namibia in 194 to

199 they are the precursor to what happens in the Nazi period they are the precursor they have the same symptoms in the sense that you can see the bureaucratization of mass killing and this for me is the central thing is not just killing for killing no it's a combination between killing and bureaucracy today shark Island is a campsite for tourists the Africans who are frozen and starved to death here have been almost erased from [Music] memory but a century after the namibian genocide the true horror of what happened on shark island is beginning to [Music]

reemerge in a recently discovered Mass grave just a few kilometers from the site of shark Island lie some of the victims of the 20th Century's first [Music] genocide other victims were denied even the meager Dignity of a mass grave they became the raw material of racial [Music] science their skulls and even severed heads were sold to museums in Europe and used to prove the inferiority of [Music] Africans the trade in skulls was so accepted that it was even depicted on a postcard in the aftermath of the genocide German racial scientists continued to use Namibia as

a field laboratory and the African peoples who had survived as their subjects in 1908 a eugenicist called oan Fischer traveled to the the small town of rabo home to a people of mixed bore and African Heritage who called themselves the rabo bastards Fisher and his assistants spent months photographing measuring and examining the inhabitants of this town people whose descendants still live here the person at the bottom there is my grandfather malcol McNab and above him is his brother Charles McNab my grandfather used to talk a lot about what they did measurements the eyes the nose

the lips the ears Hair Etc they was not aware of the nature of the experiment lying in the vaults of an archive in modernday Namibia oan fish's original files and photographs remain as he left them a century ago they reveal his methods and also his aims here Oran Fisher has lined the different pictures up next to each other to try to trace very specific facial features like the eyes or the noses and the reason he's done this is to try to show how very specific African facial features like high cheekbones and the the drawn out

eyes that represent the African genes are very prominent and become more prominent through the degenerations oran Fisher came to Namibia to prove one basic point and that was that racial mixing was always bad and that the African Gene is dominant over the white [Music] Gene fishes work in re both sealed his reputation as one of Germany's leading racial scientists it also brought him recognition from a nation that was then experiencing the greatest influx of immigration the world had ever seen in the first years of the 20th century the ethnic makeup of America was being transformed

as millions of immigrants poured into her great cities many of those who feared that mass immigration would lead to widespread racial mixing look to the ideas of eugenics an increasingly powerful science Eugenics flourished mutated and went out of control when it got to the United States and the irony is that the Eugenics movement in the United States which which uh certainly descended directly from gton um had the great advantage of having a lot of money huge amount of money some of that money was used to establish the Eugenics Records Office ran by the infamous Charles

Davenport in order to defend the health and purity of the white race Davenport and his followers sought to identify those classes and those races in America whom they considered genetically unfit identified and monitored the scientists would then take control of their lives and their fertility once you were identified as a certain class it meant what school you could go to what cemetery you could be buried in where you could live it was a matter of life and death marriage laws were established in dozens of states around the United States saying that people could not marry

outside of their group blacks could not marry whites um Indians could not marry blacks in Virginia if you married the wrong person meaning interracial marriage they would unmarry you they would invalidate your marriage 27 States passed eugenic marriage laws and the eugenicist spread their message using the new medium of [Music] Cinema the propaganda was intended to protect the genetic health of the white race [Music] this would be achieved by eradicating those deemed unworthy through forced Mass [Music] sterilization they went about methodically tracking ancestry and taret and targeting Bloodlines for extinction that's Eugenics the effort to

create a white Master blonde blue-eyed Master Race by wiping out other Bloodlines until there were left only with themselves and people who resembled [Music] themselves and what's important here is that these people thought they were saving Humanity these people thought they were liberals they were [Music] reformers eugenic was a worldwide movement in Sweden an official program forcibly sterilized 60,000 people mental patients and members of the ethnic minorities in Britain the eugenic society received widespread support from across the political [Music] Spectrum but it was in Germany that the radical ideas of the American Eugenics movement found

its most receptive audience anything connected to America would be seem to be modern Progressive scientific Democratic reasonable so it must be good America was the future the force of the future secondly I think that many European eugenicists including the Germans like the tone adopted by American eugenesis which was very radical and sort of No Nonsense and they didn't use euphemisms they said exactly what what they meant the Americans provided more than just inspiration American foundations also bankrolled the development of German Eugenics this was the Kaiser vilhelm Institute of anthropology and human heredity in the 1930s

the men and women who worked here received grants from the American Rockefeller foundation and the leading scientist here was the man who made his name in Namibia oan fiser under the Nazis fiser was empowered to sterilize the racially mixed people of German's reinand 400 of them all children the majority of those sterilized by the Nazis before 1939 however were the mentally ill but when the Nazis began their War they abandoned sterilization in favor of adult euthanasia the Nazi euphemism for murder the victims of this program were amongst the first people GED by the Nazis but

the program wasn't restricted to the mentally ill when um they have killed the target figure of mental patients they want to kill which is roughly 70,000 people they slightly exceeded it so the first thing they do then is to contact the SS who have large numbers of what they deem to be sick um concentration camp prisoners in other words people who might have got wear glasses or you know be myopic or have a wooden leg or something so they want them out of the way so these people oblige and they take 15 or 20,000 people

from the concentration camps and kill them on behalf of the SS it's a bit like sort of contract work and then when the um uh SS and other people have decided they're going to go for the big project which is to kill the Jewish population of Europe and in particular that of Poland which is the biggest population they're concerned with then those people push themselves forward and say well hey we can do this we've done it we have a record of doing this we murder people and they become the core Personnel in all the big

extermination camps these killing centers were the second network of concentration camps and death camps in German history and the experts in Eugenics or race hygiene as the Germans called it were involved not just in their day-to-day running but also in the highest levels of planning it's worth reminding ourselves that the Von conference which was the one that set up the plan for the final solution almost half the people around that table had doctorates phds in race hygiene or genetics as we'd say today so there really is a genuine link between the galtonian agenda and the

horrors which happened in Germany the German experts in race h who assembled here at the van Villa outside Berlin dreamed of racial genocide just like their spiritual predecessors the race scientists and the social darwinists of the Age of Empire but the colonial genocides inspired and justified by the 19th century theorists have been written out of Europe's history the horrors of the shark Island death camp the destruction of the Tasmanian aboriginals the 30 million victims of the Indian famines all have been forgotten the Eraser of this memory encourages the belief that Nazi violence was an aberration

in European history though the Holocaust itself was motivated by the fanatical anti-Semitism of the Nazis it can also be seen as part of a longer historical Continuum one that identifies it as a logical extension of scientific racism but this history like the bones in the namibian deserts refuses to remain buried forever [Music] [Music] [Music]