Fascism: everything you wanted to know | History Extra - "‘Italy didn't sleepwalk into the First World War, it entered deliberately. While it was still allegedly a liberal state of its own peculiar kind, and it then had a very difficult war. It spent more on waging the war than all the Italian governments had spent since 1860, up to 1913. It had heavy casualties. So it had far more casualties in the First World War than it actually would do, in the more notorious Second World War when Italy was fighting on the German side. And so it emerged from the war in a battered state, with lots of social division. Like other European societies, the liberal elite were trying to work out what on earth to do with socialists, who had not supported Italy's war, and tried to in a rather feeble way to remain neutral during it. And in 1919, there were lots of strikes. The Socialist Party in elections in November, it became, well there wasn't really a liberal party, but if you forget about liberals became the largest party in the Italian chamber of deputies, and so on and so forth. So there was a sense in which Italy looked as though it might be about to go the way that Russia had already gone and there's a socialist song from the period all about how we will do what they're already doing in Russia. And whoever doesn't work won't eat, are the words, the first words of the song. Mussolini had been a socialist before 1914. He was a very bright young man, editor of the main national socialist newspaper, when he was still only 29, a very successful editor, quadrupling the sales of the paper up to 1914. But then when the First World War started, he, like many other Italian intellectuals decided that really, Italy couldn't be a great power and stay out of the First World War. And in his mind, it couldn't have a revolution, which he still wanted, without going into the First World War. So he served for a while at the front, was wounded in practice, it behind the front, and then by 1917, was back making a career as a journalist, which is an important position in the Italian political system...
Anglo Saxon society say, tended to be pretty much as racist about Italians as, as were most Germans, etc, of Hitler. In other words, you thought that I mean, the key phrase of course, was, Italians can't fight, can they? The British had a leading member of British Foreign Office, tended to write down in his little minutes that these people are a bunch of ice creamers. So they’re soft and their power melts away, if you lick it with British firmness. And so you can find Churchill, of course, in 1927, in one of his anti Marxist moments, came out with a fascinating statement that had I been an Italian I would have been with you from start to finish in your struggle against the bestial passions and appetites of Leninism. A nice Churchilian phrase. His wife, also rather liked Mussolini’s musculature, and wrote a rather sweet letter back to Winston, when she went to a fascist parade in I think 1927. But I could be wrong, saying that she did hope those wicked Italians didn't kill Mussolini because he was such a effective leader. And so the idea that Mussolini and fascism are okay for Italy, but only okay for Italy and not necessarily for, say liberal parliamentarism in Britain. In the United States, Italian immigrants tend to be, notably pro fascist, the regime is, has makes lots of propaganda statements towards those immigrants… The Economist for example, in March 1936, forgives Hitler and the Germans for re militarizing the Rhineland, and then their editorial runs on well, they're nothing like those horrible Italians who are murdering Ethiopians and dropping poison gas on them and generally behaving in a way that you'd expect the inferior people like the Italians. In a way, the most interesting part of that story is why on earth does Hitler not join the general German right wing view that the Italians are belong to a racial group that's inferior to the superior German racial group. Partly perhaps that's his artistic temperament or something in the fact that he likes looking at paintings in Florence or such places...
It has, of course been used very readily for Trump and his aspirations in the United States. I do think there's a big problem there, because Trump is, of course, a zillionaire. He's not a poor boy from the provinces, as Mussolini was. And he certainly doesn't believe in much state welfare to go a long way down. He might, might like to make it sound as though, but he is not willing to have his taxation bill vastly increased so the state has money to spend on welfare, and he certainly doesn't believe in regulation. And obviously, a fascist does believe in regulation. I don't think he really wants to invade other places very much’"
No one cares about racism against white people
The Jacobites: everything you wanted to know | History Extra - "‘The accession of George I to the throne, to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, led also to Hanover being incorporated into the possessions of Great Britain and he was the king of Hanover. And the, only with Queen Victoria did that stop because Hanover wouldn't allow a woman to come to, come to the throne. But Hanover was a small Central European state. And basically, a lot of the support and the political language about the, about support the Jacobites had, came from the fact that other European states didn't like the fact that this small state Hanover, effectively now had the backing of this very large offshore island with a colonial empire behind it. And of course, in England people didn't much like the fact that British money and troops were sent to support Hanover. So it was a two way street. But we kind of write Hanover out of British history, but it was actually you know, a just, I would say not quite just as much a part of Britain as Wiltshire in 1750. But it was a lot closer than then you might think.’"
Disabled people in Tudor times | History Extra - "'I think you've revealed a really interesting picture that might surprise a few people, that there was this aspect of support and compassion shown towards disabled people in Tudor times. Because I think a lot of people won't be expecting that that's the story they were going to hear in this podcast. What do you think that looking at the history of disabled people can reveal about the Tudor mindset and the Tudor era more generally?'
'Well we always just tend to look at the brutality of it. With the executions and the battles and the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Cromwell going around destroying all of that and Henry just becoming more powerful financially and, you know, the drama of the six wives. But, this I think, the way that they cared for disabled people and supported them shows a completely different side of the dynasty. And it's really important because not only did Henry VIII have natural fools - disabled people - living with him, Henry VII did as well. And Wolsey did as well. For example Wolsey had a natural food with a disability living with him and when he fell from grace and gave Henry VIII Hampton Court Palace, he also gave Henry Patch, his natural fool, as a present. And Patch didn't actually want to go to the king. He was dragged away by guards kicking and screaming back to Henry VIII and didn't want to leave Wolsey...
I think we should have a lot more representation. Disability needs to be seen as a normal part of our everyday life like the Tudors thought it was. We've done a lot on black history and people are looking at LGBT community history. But disability history is always the poor relation and we're always left last because people see it as a very taboo topic. And I have no idea why. And we should have airtime to tell our stories to show what we can actually achieve, to make a difference, to encourage other disabled people, and that's my whole point of also doing the history - is so that the general public and history students and historians will view disabled people from a completely different perspective because it's about time'"
Of course, disabled history needs to be politicised rather than its case made on its own merits. This is what identity politics leads to - everyone wants their share
Magellan: daring explorer or doomed failure? | History Extra - "He's usually credited with making a profit on the voyage. Or he's, the survivors came back with a profitable cargo of spices on board. That's a myth. In fact, the value of the cargo they brought back didn't remotely cover all the costs. That myth is based on a misreading of an enquiry by the Spanish Crown's agents in 1537 which produced some figures that were... ridiculously massaged. In fact, the voyage was a failure even commercially but, it just raises the possibility that maybe if it could be done again in a better way with better planning with the value of hindsight and experience, maybe, maybe the sort of route that Magellan followed could be profitably exploited. And the Spanish Crown does make further efforts to follow up on that possibility, but they all fail. So even that hope that Magellan's voyage inspired in the contemporaries who survived it, proved in the long run to be illusory"
A legacy of inequality: the economic impact of empire | HistoryExtra - "Following the emergence of Mohamed Mossadegh as the prime minister of Iran, he sought to use the sovereignty of Iran to claim ownership over the oil refineries in the Abadan region, which were the property of the Anglo Iranian oil company. And this conflict put the British government in a really curious position, because at the same time that Mohamed Mossadegh was nationalizing the oil refineries in Iran, the British government of Clement Attlee, now famously canonized as you know, one of the most progressive Prime Ministers in British history, was also nationalizing failing industries here in Britain, in order to establish the welfare state, the National Health Service, and the expansive programme of council house building… the British government lent its weight and support with the Anglo Iranian oil company. Not only seeking the UN Security Council resolution in order to be able to wage war on Iran, which failed. They then took Iran to the ICJ which also failed, and eventually were able to replace Mossadegh by a coup d'etat with the allegiance of the United States as well. And so by supporting the Anglo Iranian oil company against the sovereignty interests of what was then called Third World nationalism, I think that the British government at the time, that a lot to create the world that we live in today, where multinational corporate power seems to be free of accountability to any sovereign government, not only in the developing world, but maybe also in the developed world as well...
One of the most significant projects of trying to readdress this global power imbalance came with the attempt to create a new international economic order through the United Nations that was really led by the Jamaican Prime Minister of the 1970s, Michael Manley. And so Michael Manley, like Mossadegh, like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana realize that the achievement of legal sovereignty, of political sovereignty was only one step in the decolonization project, because so much of the wealth of Empire was not held in that realm of political sovereignty, but in that realm of private capital. And so once they faced that obstacle, Manley thought it was important to unify all of the recently decolonized nations in the United Nations in order to get a new resolution passed that would allow a rebalancing of power between those private corporations that operate in their territories, and the new governments that have emerged. And this resulted in the drafting and passing of a UN resolution that still reads incredibly radically today, which is the New International Economic Order resolution. And this resolution included a commitment to allow countries to have permanent sovereignty over their national resources, and allow them to be able to hold transnational corporations to account in terms of their own local regulations. It allowed things like a right to food to be enshrined in international law. And even though it was passed at the UN level, eventually it was defeated and placed into the, into the kind of dustbin of history by what we call the neoliberal revolution in the Atlantic world. And so, in the only North South Conference in 1980 in Cancun, the representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, went over and above themselves to ensure that the provisions of the New International Economic Order would not receive binding commitment from all of the different nation states that have gathered there today. And instead, the answer for the decolonized world became foreign investment, loan agreements from the IMF, and structural adjustment programs... we can see how the consequences of supporting the Anglo Iranian oil company, are now impacting on daily life here in the United Kingdom, the Anglo Iranian oil company, of course, after the Abadan Crisis became British Petroleum now known as BP. And as we're in the midst of the energy crisis, the chief executive of BP has gone on record talking about how the energy crisis is going to turn his company into a cash machine, whilst the cries from British people for there to be a windfall tax on these energy companies in order to help everyday people pay their escalating bills is being ignored...
I think that there's a real attempt to make the history of empire a divisive project by focusing on the cultural and racial aspects of it, because there's a recognition and perhaps even a fear that some of the more material, the legal and economic aspects of it, are things that are very popular... there's a certain exhaustion that a lot of us are all feeling with the attempt to try and relegate all of these significant histories into questions simply of identity and culture. And that's not to say that there isn't a significant importance in the reframing of our cultural and symbolic sphere, you know, nothing's ever purely cultural"
Of course, if they had really managed to nationalise all the industries, any subsequent poor performance and failures (given generally poorer results at state-owned enterprises [especially in the developing world]) would still have been the fault of the colonisers and the international companies sabotaging them
Carrot conspiracies & digging for victory: feeding Britain in WW2 | HistoryExtra - "‘There's a major attempt to persuade people to eat substitute meats. I mentioned previously about the way in which rabbits were in plentiful supply, that there's a incentive to eat rabbits because they're an important pest and consequently, we could actually increase food production by just reducing the rabbit population. Children were often encouraged to keep a pet rabbit, which would when it had grown to adult size might disappear and be replaced by a small, a smaller version... The Minister of Food embarked upon increasing extraction rate, that is the amount of flour extracted from a quantity of grain. So consequently, you've got a bran style loaf which becomes… dominant, and people, the so called National loaf, and this brownish bran style loaf wasn't really kind of a, very popular amongst the population. But it was encouraged and directed by the government. There's a great emphasis on encouraging people to eat the crust. In the 1930s, perhaps the richer members of the community didn't bother to eat the crust, and the government comes up with propaganda ideas like, ah, eating the crust makes it, makes your hair curl. And consequently, it helps us to encourage the eating of items, which previously would have been perhaps less appealing.’"
Our Winston Churchill obsession | HistoryExtra - "‘Churchill became all things to all people... when Fidel Castro was visiting New York in 1961, for the United Nations General Assembly, by which time he, he could always go to New York for the UN, even if you were on the brink of war with the United States. And he said he'd been reading the Second World War by Winston Churchill, had been inspired by the story of a little island, heroically resisting a bullying, much larger continental neighbor, which is really almost amusing... … every single time in my lifetime, when politicians or generals have invoked the aura of Churchill and using Munich and appeasement, and Chamberlain as curses, every time it has led to disaster. In Korea, in the Suez expedition in 1956, which was the work of people like Sir Anthony Eden was prime minister who himself had resigned from the government in 1938, in the opposition to appeasement, and he saw quite wrongly, Colonel Nasser of Egypt as a new Hitler. Then Lyndon Johnson stepped up the American war in Vietnam, because he said you didn't want to be seen as another Chamberlain, appeasing the enemy, and then all the way through to Iraq, when Churchill was practically held up aloft as, as the invasion took place...
Churchill then complained about the Iron Curtain in 1946, the iron curtain which has fallen across Europe, but nobody alive, bore more responsibility for that than it, he himself. That he had decided to fight on in 1940, rightly. He embraced Starlin as an ally: rhetorically in 1941, physically in 1942. He dragged his feet as long as he could about a Western invasion of Northern France, which was the only real contribution the allies could make, the Western Allies could make to defeating Germany. And the result was that for, for three years, almost all the fighting was done by the Russians. And, and the fact that Stalin ended up in control of half of Europe was a direct consequence of Churchill's own policies’"
The Franks: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Were the nicknames given to the Carolingian rulers ever ironic, or were they a way sort of exact effect? So you've mentioned Pippin the Short for instance, they're these these these rulers who have the interesting nicknames was, what's the story there?’
‘It's worth pointing out that that, I think before we before we get into it, that many of these nicknames aren't actually from the Carolingian period itself. But they were only later applied to many of these rulers that were, that we're talking about. So yeah, Pippin the Short, for example, is only first named as being short, a few 100 years after his death, which makes it very difficult to verify whether he was actually short or not. But some of these kinds of epithets may have been coined during the actual period itself. And I think that a good place to start is, is not so much Pepin the Short but probably King, Charles the Bald. Now, Charles the Bald was a grandson of, of Charlemagne. And even though the earliest written evidence for his nickname, The Bald is from the mid 10 century, it may already have been in use during his lifetime. Now, we don't have any particularly strong evidence to suggest that Charles was actually bald, we do have a number of contemporary descriptions and depictions of him, but he seems to have hair on his head in all of those. So it's, it's been suggested that the term may have in fact been used, ironically, and that he was actually you know, really hairy, not, you know, not bald at all. So, there are also theories that perhaps it could have been applied in a metaphorical sense, that the baldness, you know, could have referred to maybe his piety, you know, like a tonsured monk, for example, or that it may have referred to him lacking an inheritance at first, or that it was really that, that it was simply because he was a really, you know, ineffective ruler. And maybe it could have been used even as as a type of an emasculating term. But there's, there's really no strong evidence that you know, supports or discredits any of these theories in particular, and we have, you know, similar discussions for, you know, other rulers like King, Charles the Simple and Louis the Stammerer and various other people. And unfortunately, at the moment, all we can really do is sort of speculate when it comes to comes to these kinds of nicknames’
‘But the nicknames do at least make it easier to remember who's who don't they?’
‘For sure. Yeah, everyone is called Charles or Louis in those days’"
The secret WW2 mission to save Britain’s art collections | HistoryExtra - "‘Were the hosts of these sites in these locations, did they have a choice in supporting these efforts? Or how were these collections greeted by their new hosts?’
‘Well, in terms of whether they had a choice very often, the host had volunteered their services. Because before the war, people knew that they were likely to have evacuees and they'd much rather in some cases have art evacuees, which they thought were going to sort of add to their own local art collections and be decorative than having you know kids from the East End who are incontinent or squaddies practising maneuvers in the landscape park. So actually offering yourself up to host, you know, a museum or gallery collection was actually very, very popular. But the reality turned out to be somewhat different because very often, these hosts discovered that they didn't just get, you know, they didn't have the Turners and the Constables ready to hang on their walls. All of these things were packed up, they were covered with blankets and brown paper. In the case of museum collections, they were often in very large crates, that simply were stacked up in the best rooms of the house, forcing the families out into the servants’ quarters. And the hosts also had the responsibility of keeping the conditions right for the collections as well, they'd got to heat the rooms, so that we didn't get mold growing on them. And that cost a lot of money. And then there were rows between them and the government about how much of the cost have been in which proportion belonged to the house and which proportion belonged to the museum collections and so on. And yes, in some, in some places, that ,relations relations broke down between the the host families and, and the the organizations themselves. So you know, there were the warders who'd come to guard, the, the items, you know, sort of wanted extra meals, and maybe they wouldn't help out with household chores, or they, they'd go off to the pub and come back drunk, or in one case, you know, be harrassing, harrassing, parlor maids or, you know, just just basically being in the way and being unwelcome guests. So the reality did not, did not often meet the, the expectations of the volunteer custodians...
The black book actually lists the different cultural institutions in London. And so you can see that there were potentially preparations taking place before before invasion, to identify which would be the target institutions, where looting would take place or confiscation of works to be sent back to Berlin to perhaps potentially become part of Goering’s bloated collection of Western masterpieces… The black book… was really put together from tourist guides, it wasn't actually, sort of hadn't been put together from in person research. It was really a digest of tourist guides, available in… 1930s Germany, but it did give an insight into where the Nazis felt that they would they would be targeting their heritage interests. Let's put it like that’"
The Normans: beyond 1066 | HistoryExtra - "‘Is Normandy in any way an equivalent to the English Danelaw? The English Danelaw was where Scandinavian settlers came and established a territory of sorts. Is the same sort of thing going on in Normandy. vis-a-vis the Franks?’
‘We assume so but the current thinking is that there were so few of them in Normandy that they soon assimilated with the Frankish population, and that's why we don't have any physical remains. The other complication is that whereas in, in the British Isles, quite a lot has been done on Viking DNA, my understanding is that's not allowed in France, so people can't just dig up Viking sites and test the bones to find out where these people came from...
In the early years, you get the sense of they're interested in the Viking past, but then their own historians want to show how they became Christian and because the writers are writing from a clerical perspective that then is more important. So they present the Viking leaders, the Norman leaders as Christians and then doing the right things Christian rulers should do, founding monasteries being kind to the clergy etc, etc. So you get a turning away from the the Viking past by the early 11th century I think’
‘So it hasn't taken very long for them then, a century to sort of move into quite a different characterization.’
‘Yeah. Which is why the current thinking is there can’t be terribly many of them.’"
Stonehenge: everything you wanted to know (part two) | HistoryExtra - "‘One of the curious facts about Stonehenge is there's actually more Roman pottery than there is Neolithic. So we know Roman people were there, or at least, you know, Britons were there in Roman times, possibly doing no more than having the old picnic, going along with a jar, possibly doing more than that. I mean, it has been suggested in the past that one of the reasons Stonehenge looks as dilapidated as it is today is that Romans attacked it, they saw it as a pagan monument, associated with druids, and that they had a kind of war against druidry. And knocking down Stonehenge will be a great symbolic act to to show their power over native religion, that they wanted to wipe out. That doesn't really stack up for all sorts of reasons. One is that the archaeological evidence that Romans did anything like that just doesn't exist. Although to be honest, it's difficult to know exactly what you might find to prove, what you could find to prove it, but but it’s not there. But more importantly, we've got no indication that this was the Roman approach to native religions. Across Europe what tended to happen is that local religious sites, local religious traditions were adopted and merged with Roman beliefs. And they were very, they worked with indigenous communities in that sense in really quite clever way. It's one of the reasons why the Empire was so successful. We also need to remember that when Romans came to Britain, Stonehenge was already a ruin. There's no evidence at all that it was an active religious site. So in a sense of Roman seeing Stonehenge might well have thought much the same that we might think today and look at it and think what the hell is this? You know, no Roman soldier would have seen anything like Stonehenge any more than, than we do today.’"
Periods, fertility & childbirth: a pre-modern history | HistoryExtra - "‘To pick up on something that you just mentioned there, which I think a lot of people might be surprised by. And it's something we've had questions in on, you said that there was a belief that a baby could not be conceived unless the woman orgasmed in sex. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about the idea because it seems to run counter to what we might think about gender relations and women's sexuality in this period.’
‘Sure. And I think sometimes people read back a kind of Victorian prurience onto the earlier time period, which frankly isn't true of the Victorian period as much as you might think. But definitely not true earlier in, sort of the 16th 17th 18th century, women are the lustier of the two sexes. The one you have to watch out for is a widow, because she's known the pleasures of the marriage bed, and she wants more. So they definitely thought women were much lustier than men and much more dangerous in that regard. So the idea of both partners, achieving sexual pleasure has to do again with heat. Heat is the source of life. And so both people have to reach this heat for the seed to be emitted, so that there can actually be a new being. So it's very much about the physiology of warmth and heat. Now, there is a downside that may have already occurred to you, which is that if a woman got pregnant as a result of being raped, clearly, she had granted consent because she'd experienced pleasure...
The one method that was extant, in the 17th and 18th centuries is the condom. It’ss made of animal guts, but it's really understood as a venereal disease preventive, not as much as a contraceptive. And because it was associated with venereal disease, it was associated with prostitution. And so it was shameful, was nothing that a nice married woman would want to be thinking about, or maybe even know about… What happens in the 1820s, is that a couple of methods get promoted, that are newly available or newly understood, one of them is the use of a sponge. And they recommend soaking a sponge in vinegar or some other, you know, mildly acid solution that will both act as a barrier and the spermicide. And the idea is that women could do that possibly without even their partners knowing… successful may mean, postponing rather than completely succeeding, it may be creating birth intervals, rather than actually not having a child at all. They thought it was effective. Let's put it that way. They also mentioned the age old method of withdrawal, which could be effective. Again, something might not really kind of rate in our day, because it's, our success rate would be too low. But compared to nothing, it actually looks pretty good. And so those methods, they make birth control a natural option in the 19th century, sometimes they also by mid century, especially in the United States. Douching, right after sex was really considered a very effective method. Again, we wouldn't recommend it today. But they saw it as having potential... It was widely believed that women would know right after sex that they had conceived. Truly interesting to us, but felt this little shiver and supposedly and this, this strange feeling, and then you would know. But actually, you wouldn't know you were pregnant until quickening, when the fetus moves within the mother's body. And the mother can feel that and that's like four and a half months… women took medication, took herbal preparations that were designed to return menstrual flow, but we might understand as early abortifacients. And the same plants have been known since antiquity. And they do in fact, stimulate the uterus to contract. The problem is the safety is really difficult to ascertain. There's a little window between enough and dangerously too much’"
Britain’s only war crimes trial | HistoryExtra - "'For many years, he was bullied. He was abused. He was laughed at by his fellow villagers. And then when the Nazis came to power, I think it's one of the misunderstandings that the Nazis, the SS carried out all the slaughters of Jews around Europe and all took place in concentration camps. 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of Jews were killed by Nazi collaborators, by local people. They certainly weren't, weren't enough German soldiers to carry out the executions they wanted to. And German soldiers who were family men began to be shocked and horrified by being asked to kill women and children. And that's where collaborators allegedly like Sawoniuk stepped in, and they proved to be even more ruthless in many cases than the Nazis they were replacing.'"
So much for there being not enough ovens to kill 6 million Jews
Eugenics: a toxic history | HistoryExtra - "‘Something that I was most surprised to read in your book was how also African American people who might be primarily targeted by eugenics would sometimes advocated it. So people like WEB Du Bois thought that it might offer some opportunities for African Americans. Can you explain that connection?’...
‘It's connected again with first wave feminism, because he was he was he was closely associated with Margaret Sanger. And Margaret Sanger was one of the key developers of of reproductive rights for women in in America, and founded what became Planned Parenthood. And DuBois was interested in what has become known as racial uplift. So how do we improve the quality of lives for black people in America. But he also, in some of his writings, as a means of generating racial uplift, the improving the quality of lives for black people in America, he, he took a very eugenicist view, which is that too many lower socioeconomic status black people were having too many children, rather than higher socioeconomic status black people, and that they should be encouraged. So one of the things that happens in America in the early 20th, first two decades of the 20th is that the protagonists tried to encourage working class white Americans to embrace eugenics as an idea via State Farm fares, right? They have better baby contests, in state, state agricultural fairs. And Du Bois adopts a similar sort of attitude that we can have better black baby competitions, in and around places like Chicago and this and this would improve the quality and I'm doing air quotes for people who can't see me, which is everyone the quality of, of, of the people who, who we are concerned with...
Many of the key protagonists, particularly this guy called Alfred Ploetz, who's the kind of the equivalent to Francis Galton in Germany, thinks that because of the successes of Jewish people in various domains, which are considered important, particularly sort of the intellectual domains, he thinks that the Nordic people should breed with Jewish people in order to improve the stock of of Nordic people. But that changes in the 1930s and with with Hitler seizing power in 33...
We still have eugenics organizations in the UK until the 60s and 70s. And in America it’s the same and eugenics labs, sort of, they mutate into human genetics labs. And indeed, the Department of Genes, Evolution and Environment where I am a lecturer was in the 1990s, called the Galton Laboratory where I was an undergraduate. But before that, well, the 1904/1907, depending on how you name it, it's the Eugenics Records Office in in the UK...
You look at India and China and the numbers are huge. So coercive or enforced sterilization in India has been effectively policy since the late 1970s… the legacy of that continues in India to this day in China, which I know is not a democratic political system. 10,000 women over the course of three months were coercively sterilized under the what's known as the Iron Fist campaign. That's 10,000 Women in three months, had enforced sterilization for violating the one child policy. Now, you know, the term has gone out of favor and it's irredeemably toxic, but that that sounds a lot like state eugenics policy to me, happening in the two most populous countries on earth. So, population control is eternal’"
Population control is the same as eugenics. Apparently in China minorities and rural people are considered superior to urban Han, which is why they can have more children under their system of "eugenics"
