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Dictionary of Gross Human Rights Violations

Eugenics

Eugenics is the belief that humankind may be improved through the elimination of negative inherited traits. Eugenics can be further divided into positive eugenics, which seeks improvement of genetic stock through selected “breeding”, and negative eugenics which seeks the reproductive isolation (through measures such as sterilization) of those deemed to possess negative traits.

Eugenics is closely related to the ideology of social Darwinism, which seeks to extend the theory of evolution pioneered by Charles Darwin into the social realm. The concept of “survival of the fittest” is transposed into an argument for the elimination of those deemed to be unfit. The initial foci of social and biological theorists (such as Thomas Robert Malthus, Herbert Spencer, and Francis Galton) were largely criminals and the indigent (in the 18th and 19th centuries), but eventually these theories were extended to race. It is this racially-charged brand of social Darwinism and negative eugenics that fuelled many of the gross human rights violations that occurred in Nazi Germany such as the euthanasia of the mentally ill, and the eventual “final solution” that sought to eliminate Jews, who were deemed to be a ‘cancerous growth’ on the “Aryan race.”

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