Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Mass Graves: A Comparison

Mexico is a crime free paradise due to its strict gun control laws. Thus, for instance, when we read headlines like "Mexican authorities find 29 bodies in a hundred plastic bags," we can rest assured that the it's the punchline to a bad joke, like "what's worse than finding 29 bodies in 29 bags?"

     So Mexico has a lot of mass graves due to its extremely high crime rate. But the United States apparently has its mass graves as well. But in the United States, it is expressed this way: "Two thousand two hundred and forty-six fetuses were found 'medically preserved' in Ulrich Klopfer’s garage last week after he died on Sept. 3." Klopfer was an abortionist. He is not alone, though, in his "taste" in collecting. "America’s most infamous baby killer, Kermit Gosnell, also kept fetal body parts in 'milk jugs and glass jars' at his clinic in Philadelphia before he was convicted in 2013 on three counts of murder for snipping the spinal cords of babies born alive." Now, if we were talking about other killers, we would be referring to this as a collection of trophies. But the media doesn't like anything that portrays abortion as bad, so we don't talk about it.

      The mass graves haven't been disclosed in Sweden, but surely they exist. Phillip W. Magness, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, notes that "Even Swedish Socialism was Violent." Socialism in Sweden was born out of the same milieu that gave us Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. So when the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SDP) was voted into power in 1932, it immediately followed a program of integrating government, industry, and the private sphere. But with falling birthrates, the SDP recognized that it would have a problem funding its socialist paradise as its population aged. It's response was to initiate programs to encourage more births. But this brought with it another problem: the proletariat would reproduce at higher rates than the upper classes, and ultimately overwhelm the upper classes by shear numbers. It's solution was typically socialist:
       To counteract the perceived risk of welfare dependence, the SDP government consciously paired its new welfare policies with a complementary system of eugenic laws — intended to prevent or dissuade “unfit” persons from reproducing. These included a narrow compulsory sterilization program, applied to persons with hereditary “defects,” and a much larger “voluntary” sterilization program targeting behavioral considerations. As part of the latter program, the government could induced lower-class citizens to submit to the procedure by using the suasion and levers of the new welfare state itself.

      The “voluntary” measures went far beyond involuntary sterilization, which was restricted by law to explicit eugenic reasons. As a 1997 study of the program documented, government officials are known to have used submission to “voluntary” sterilization as a condition for release from mental institutions and public hospitals, for continued access to certain forms of public housing, and even marriage licensing among the poor. In total, an estimated 63,000 Swedes were sterilized between the 1930s and the expiration of the main eugenic law in 1976.

      Coercive policies also extended beyond eugenic sterilization, forced and voluntary. As part of the same effort to limit the fiscal strain of welfare dependents, Sweden adopted a parallel system of “environmental” policies where children were forcibly removed from parents and households that the government deemed unsuited for a child’s social development. Swedish authorities used poverty, alcoholism, perception of mental disorders, and a multitude of other discretionary diagnoses to forcibly remove an estimated 250,000 children into state-supervised foster care during this period. According to the theory, this socially engineered change in environment would reduce the child’s likelihood of becoming a dependent.
The authors of this plan were the husband-wife team of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. Gunnar Myrdal would receive a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. Their policies were very popular with other Nordic countries, and they even had their following in the United States.

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