Larry Summers And The Original Nazi Doctors

May 26, 2009 (LPAC)—The two behavioral economists, chief White House advisor Lawrence Summers and Budget Director Peter Orszag, are pushing a healthcare reduction plan to cut trillions from maintaining the lives of the elderly, the sick and the poor, as lives not worth living. Adolf Hitler decreed in 1939 that expensive patients were to be killed to save money. The euthanasia killing centers were later expanded into racial genocide.

As Harvard University's president (2001-2006), Lawrence Summers showed his self-identification with this legacy, and with the British racial imperialism and eugenics behind it.

In 2003-2004, Summers on his own initiative recruited into the Harvard faculty two spokesmen of the British-fascist tradition: England's imperial historian Niall Ferguson, and Canada's eugenical ("evolutionary") psychologist Steven Pinker. At the same time, throughout his presidency at Harvard, Summers himself promoted the eugenics-based Human Genome Project as the summit of modern accomplishment.

Steven Pinker is the star popularizer of eugenics in psychology. After World War II, the Nazi genocide's underlying theory, that genetics determines the relative worth of different individual lives and different ethnic groups, was euphemistically renamed from "eugenics" to "social biology" or "sociobiology" or "evolutionary psychology."

In his 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker explains how this legacy has emerged in the work of the Behavioral Economists — the Summers clique which now rules White House policy.

Pinker's book attacks the Platonic and Christian concept of the human soul, and sets up as a straw man the combined views of Hobbes, Rousseau and Descartes. He counters with the genetic basis of psychology: different compartments of the mind can be traced to their distinct evolutionary origins, and the differences between people (talents, intelligence, preferences) tie into their biologically determined inherent nature.

Pinker says that family life and upbringing have little impact on the child, that the genetic contribution is 40-50%, the family 0-10%, and the random or unexplained contribution is around 50%.

He champions the work of Thomas Bouchard, Minnesota eugenicist whose "twins studies" were financed by the master-race think tank Pioneer Fund: "Thomas Bouchard, who directed the first large-scale study of twins reared apart, is one of the pioneers of the genetics of personality.' Pinker complains that "Campus activists ... distributed handouts calling him a racist and linking him to 'German Fascism,' ... [and were] calling him a Nazi... The psychologist Barry Mehler accused him of 'rehabilitating' the work of Josef Mengele, the doctor who tormented twins in the Nazi death camps under the guise of research. As usual, the charges were unfair not just intellectually but personally: far from being a fascist, Bouchard was a participant in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960's...."

Pinker writes on behalf of eugenicists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the authors of The Bell Curve, as progressive thinkers, arguing, "if some souls have the misfortune of being born into brains with lower ability, they could fall into poverty through no fault of their own .... If social justice consists of seeing to the well-being of the worst off, then recognizing genetic differences calls for an active redistribution of wealth. Indeed, though Herrnstein was a conservative and Murray a Right-leaning libertarian and communitarian, they were not opposed to simple redistributive measures such as a negative income tax for the lowest wage earners, which would give a break to those who play by the rules but still can't scrape by."

He applauds the Summers clique. "An important challenge to conservative political theory has come from behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler and George Akerlof, who were influenced by the evolutionary cognitive psychology of Herbert Simon, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman... These psychologists have argued that human thinking and decision-making are biological adaptations rather than engines of pure rationality...."

The "twins research" forming a spurious evidentiary basis for the Pinker book goes back to the work of Otmar Verschuer, wartime director of the Rockefeller family's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity in Berlin, and Verschuer's assistant, Doctor Josef Mengele, medical director of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Verschuer wrote that Mengele's "anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial groups in the concentration camps and blood samples will be sent to my laboratory for investigation." Mengele prowled the railroad cars coming into Auschwitz, looking for twin children — a favorite research subject of psychiatric geneticists. Arriving twins filled out a detailed questionnaire from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. There were daily drawings of blood, needles were injected into eyes for work on eye color, there were experimental blood transfusions and experimental infections, experimental sex changes and castrations.

In 1948, Britain's main former Hitler-sponsor, Montagu Norman, gathered psychiatric and psychological leaders together at the United Kingdom's Ministry of Health to establish a World Federation for Mental Health. A vice president of this founding meeting was Tavistock Clinic psychiatrist Cyril Burt, a eugenics activist notorious for fraudulent twins research later continued by Thomas Bouchard.

The "Human Genome Project," relentlessly pushed into Harvard by Lawrence Summers, has the same pedigree, from a Nazi emigre' named Kallmann.

Otto Verschuer's mentor Franz J. Kallmann spoke at a British-sponsored meeting on Population Science in Berlin in 1935, hosted by Hitler's Interior Ministry. Kallmann demanded the sterilization of even the apparently healthy relatives of schizophrenics, along with the schizophrenics themselves, to securely eliminate all the defective germ plasm.

After emigrating to America, Kallmann published in the U.S. and Nazi Germany his 1938 book, The Genetics of Schizophrenia. It was used by the "Action T4" euthanasia department as a rationalization to begin in 1939 the murder of mental patients and various other "costly" people. Gas and lethal injections were used to kill 250,000 under this program, in which the staffs for a broader murder program were desensitized and trained.

Lawrence Summers and Peter Orszag now drive the steamroller for a similar health-care-denial policy in America — President Obama says $2-3 trillion must be subtracted from "wasteful" procedures.

As a pioneer of the Evolutionary Psychologists such as Summers' hireling, Steven Pinker, Nazi Franz Kallmann created and led the American Society of Human Genetics, which organized the "Human Genome Project" — and mobilized race-supremacists such as James D. Watson behind it. Today's eugenics crusaders often speak of the useful features of medical genetics; but they themselves aim to prove that some lives are not worth preserving.

The building tension at Harvard blew up when Harvard president Summers spoke at a January 14-15, 2005 conference, "Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce," Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Bureau of Economic Research, two main backers of the Behavioral Economists. A principal organizer of this work, officiating at the meeting, was Sloan Foundation executive Michael Teitelbaum, the former president of the American Eugenics Society (which had renamed itself the Society for the Study of Social Biology).

Summers shocked the conference participants by claiming that women are genetically disposed to have less aptitude for science than men.

In the ensuing heated controversy, Steven Pinker was trotted out to explain to the Harvard Crimson that Summers views were mainstream, that his "hypotheses ... could certainly be considered at most major conferences in scientific psychology."

The Empire, According to Hitler

Summers recruited Oxford historian Niall Ferguson just after he had written the 2003 book Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. The book posits the British Empire as the founder of the modern world, and the USA as "a product of that Empire" and its successor and continuator under "globalism."

Without blushing, Ferguson presents Rudyard Kipling's imperial "white man's burden" that the USA is destined to pick up; and he gives Adolf Hitler's lengthy testimony as to the benevolence of the British Empire.

Ferguson writes that in the 1930s "inter-war anxiety, there was one man who continued to believe in the British Empire. In his eyes, the British were 'an admirably trained people who had 'worked for 300 years to insure themselves the domination of the world for two centuries. They had 'learned the art of being masters, and of holding the reins so lightly with all, that the natives do not notice the curb.' Even his favorite film, Lives of the Bengal Lancers, had an imperial subject.

"In Mein Kampf and in his later dinner table monologues, Adolf Hitler repeatedly expressed his admiration of British imperialism. What Germany had to do, he argued, was to learn from Britain's example. 'The wealth of Great Britain, he declared, 'is the result of the capitalist exploitation of the 350 million Indian slaves. That was precisely what Hitler most admired: the effective oppression of an inferior race.

"If Hitler had a criticism of the British it was merely that they were too self-critical and too lenient toward their subject peoples: 'There are Englishmen who reproach themselves with having governed the country badly. Why? Because the Indians show no enthusiasm for their rule....'

"Yet Hitler disavowed any such desire to 'take' India. On the contrary, as he said in Mein Kampf, 'I, as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under English rule than under any other.' He insisted that he had no desire to bring about the destruction of the British Empire, an act which (as he put it in October 1941) 'would not be of any benefit to Germany [but] would benefit only Japan, the United States, and others.'

"On 28 April 1939, Hitler [told the Reichstag of] 'my realization of the importance for the whole of mankind of the existence of the British Empire.... The thought of destroying this [Imperial] labor appeared and still appears to me, seen from a higher human point of view, is nothing but the effluence of human wanton destructiveness....'"

Appointed by Summers as professor of history and of business administration, Ferguson wrote a sequel to Empire, called Colossus: The Rise And Fall Of The American Empire, which followed Hitler's lead in urging more toughness and cruelty by Bush and Cheney. Before the book came out he said publicly that the "United States needs to learn from the British experience. Putting this rebellion down will require severity. In 1920, the British eventually ended [Iraq's] rebellion through a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions. It was not pretty.... Is the United States willing or able to strike back with comparable ruthlessness?.... only by quelling disorder firmly and immediately will America be able to achieve its objective...."

Harvard president Summers, aligned with American neo-conservatives, could appreciate Ferguson's taking note, in Empire, of such permanent war advocates as Thomas Donnelly and Max Boot, for their boasting of America as the new British Empire.

In 2006, the Harvard faculty forced Summers' ouster following years of his racial and other bullying.

Now Summers is in power in Washington. To continue Bush's disastrous bailout of the financiers, Summers is demanding the identical medical-care "cost savings" ordered by Hitler's 1939 euthanasia decree.