San Diego Jewish Film Festival preview: ‘War Against the Weak’

  
By Paul Greenberg
 
LA JOLLA, Caifornia — In his ambitious, fact-filled, quick moving, visually appealing, but at times quite disturbing 2009  documentary, War Against the Weak (English, 90 minutes), director Justin Strawhand effectively traces the history of the devolution of the theory and practices of eugenics from the 1880’s to the end of World War II.

The film primarily uses archival footage and historical re-enactments held together by sometimes heavy-handed narration to show the growth of eugenics in the United States and how its export to Germany served as the basis and inspiration for its inhumane forced human experimentation, sterilization, and extermination programs. In a nice human touch, the film is interspersed with people from modern times talking directly to the camera about their illnesses-including albinoism, alcoholism, epilepsy, deafness, and blindness–illnesses that sadly would have them categorized as “undesirables” under eugenics theory.
 
War Against the Weak will be shown on Sunday, February 20, at 1:00 PM at the Clairemont Reading Town Square 14 as part of the 21st Annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival.

Director  Strawhand is scheduled to appear and a panel discussion will follow the showing of the film.
 
Biometrician Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, is the father of eugenics, actually coining the word in 1883, which means “well-born.”  He believed that blood transmitted both physical and mental traits and advocated controlling overpopulation through selective breeding.

Eugenics is the applied science (some would argue, pseudoscience) and biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population. Early proponents tended to believe in the genetic superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples, supported strict immigration, anti-miscegenation laws, and the forced sterilization of the poor, disabled, and immoral. Terms like pedigree, moron, and intelligence testing came directly from this movement.
 
Eugenics quickly gained currency in the United States starting in the early part of the 20th century with help from such wealthy families as the Kelloggs, Carnegies, Harrimans, and the Rockefellers. Beneficiaries of such extensive funding included  Charles Davenport ( founder of the Eugenics Records Office in New York) and his associate, Harry Laughlin.  Davenport and others believed in getting rid of the “submerged tenth,” the lowest 10 % of the population .
 
By the 1920’s, more than half the states in the union had laws to eliminate “undesirables,” leading tens of thousands to be forcibly sterilized, denied the right to marry, or institutionalized.
 
Early  proponents of eugenics included Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger (“Birth control is the best tool for eliminating human waste.”), founder of Planned Parenthood.
 
The issue of forced sterilization even reached the US Supreme Court in Buck vs. Bell in 1927, with esteemed Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. writing  the majority opinion, which upheld a Virginia statute that permitted the forced sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, “for the protection and health of the state.”
 
By 1928, there were 376 eugenics courses taken by about 20,000 students at some of America’s most prestigious universities.
 
The most eye-opening part of the film was how much the theory, research, and practices of the American Eugenics movement influenced the German idea of “race hygiene.”

Perhaps ironically, the film reveals Harry Laughlin, a proponent of breeding a better race and segregating and sterilizing epileptics, didn’t have children and eventually discovered that he, too, suffered from epilepsy.

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Greenberg is a freelance writer based in La Jolla

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