A number of news items, seemingly unrelated, come together to form a coherent subject. Indigenous Australian news is the starting point for us today, and this will lead us into an examination of racism, eugenics and World War 2. Let’s begin…

University of Melbourne truth telling project

This year, three scholars from the University of Melbourne released a documentary report regarding the treatment – indeed, mistreatment – of indigenous Australians by the University of Melbourne governing forebears. The report called Dhoombak Goobgoowana – which translates as truth-telling – is a disturbing report into the dark underbelly of racism and eugenics underpinning the institution of the university.

In the words of the authors of the project, the university throughout its history honoured racists, eugenicists, Nazi apologists, grave robbers and body snatchers. One professor of veterinary science, Daniel Murnane, not only participated in a massacre of indigenous people, but also advocated restricting the ‘lesser races’ to avoid polluting the superior white-Anglo stock. Until this year, the university had a scholarship and a building named after him.

The list goes on – numerous Australian academics, members of eugenics societies, advocated the forced sterilisation of ‘undesirables’, meaning those with developmental delays – to reduce the numbers of useless eaters. Celebrated anthropologists, doctors, scientists and others whose names adorn buildings at the university, were proponents of a ‘master race’ perspective, proposing the racial stratification of society, and restricting the breeding (and immigration) of nonwhite deemed to be unfit.

Legacy of eugenics

The documentation of the University of Melbourne’s truth telling report highlights just how ubiquitous the philosophy of eugenics was in academia. However, it is not only in the hallowed halls of university departments where eugenics made a lasting impact that resonates until today.

News item: This year is the one hundredth anniversary of the US Immigration Act. Named the Johnson-Reed act after the main politicians pushing for its approval, the Immigration act excluded nonwhite ethnicities, including European Jews, from entering the United States. This included those southern and Eastern Europeans fleeing Nazism in Europe. The act was a practical application of the eugenicist philosophy.

It is difficult to overstate just how restrictive the Immigration Act was. The New York Times, commenting on the law passed by then President Coolidge declared that America as a melting pot has ended. Immigrants from nations deemed inferior – Eastern Europeans, Jews, Arabs and other nonwhites – were subject to strict quotas. The alleged purity of the white Anglo stock had to be preserved, so immigrants from northern and Western Europe were prioritised.

The eugenicist underpinnings of the 1924 were well established in the decades prior to its enactment. There were already laws on the statute books prohibiting Asian immigration, legislation passed with the support of American labour leaders. Being of ‘pure’ blood was of incredible importance to American legislators, economists, scientists and journalists. The US enacted numerous ‘one drop’ laws, which deemed a person of mixed race if they had at least one nonwhite ancestor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court justice and advocate of liberal causes, spoke out in favour of eugenics, and helped to pass the Buck vs Bell judgement in 1927, opening the way for thousands of forced sterilisations of those deemed ‘feeble-minded’.

It is interesting to note that the 1924 Immigration act, and American eugenics laws and programmes, were an inspiration for Hitler and the Nazi party. German scholars, looking for a successful example of a racially stratified society, examined the laws and practices of the United States. Eugenics was a mainstream ideology, influencing the passage of racial laws and antisemitic legislation in the US.

We like to think of eugenics as a relic of a bygone era, consigned to the dustbin after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. In many ways that is true – the immigration was finally repealed in 1965, after decades of struggles against it by antiracist activists and legislators. The defeat of the Nazi white supremacist regime put a seemingly definitive end to the antiquated notions of breeding a ‘superior’ stock of humans through restricting immigration and forced sterilisation.

It would be wrong to let knowledge of eugenics to fall into an amnesiac gap. Ignoring the strong and intimate connections between American and German eugenicists in the prewar years is a serious omission, leading to widespread ignorance regarding the crucial and very real role of white supremacy in shaping domestic legislation.

News item; this month witnessed the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Allied landings. The veterans of that campaign confronted a monumentally powerful German military, implementing white supremacy in Nazi-occupied Europe. When African American soldiers returned home, they found a society unwilling to accept them as equals.

Eugenics dominated academic thinking and legislative policies on population and immigration. In Europe, and across the Atlantic, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory is becoming normalised and mainstreamed, influencing increasing numbers of political parties and policy makers. This trope asserts that white Anglo majority societies are under threat of being ‘replaced’ by mass immigration. Allegedly orchestrated by liberal elites – usually meant to indicate Jewish elites – this ideology motivates the violence of the far right.

In Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the Great Replacement has become an official ideology. Providing a lightning rod for the ultranationalist Right, Orban has provided an ideological cement to solidify a European, and global, ultrarightist political force.

Reinvigorating white supremacy with false ideas and demographic paranoia, both eugenics and Great Replacement regard nonwhite immigration as an existential threat, unassimilable into the Anglo-majority national culture.

Did the D-Day veterans fight white supremacy eighty years ago, only to see the resurgence of that ideology in a new, mutated form today? Portrayals of immigration as a menace to Western society has a long pedigree. Elevating them to mainstream doctrine has real-world consequences.