Thursday 20 May 2010

Advertising Marie Stopes

Will this advert mention her extravagant, versified love letters to Hitler? Or that she disowned her own son because he married a woman who wore glasses? Or her campaign for the compulsory sterilisation of "the C3 population", of "half-castes" and of "revolutionaries", among numerous others?

Or the dozens of clinics that she opened in working class areas to reduce the number of "undesirables" by persuasion if force were politically impossible? After all, those clinics are the very thing being advertised. They still carry her name. Our televisions are now to carry their adverts. Our 50p stamps have recently carried her image. And we all carry the shame.

3 comments:

  1. Break Dancing Jesus20 May 2010 at 17:16

    Why not, you praise authoritarian fascist dictators like Salazar.

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  2. And you don't know what you are talking about.

    But then, we have always known that, anyway.

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  3. @BDJ,

    Interestingly, eugenics never really caught on in the Catholic states, even those run by authoritarians. In fact, eugenics never made much of an impact in the actually fascist Italy of Mussolini, although some of the more pro-Nazi fascists would have perhaps wanted it another way. For all its faults, Italian Fascism never really contained a significant pro-eugenics element.

    Furthermore, even when the Fascist government did, for example, institute anti-Semitic laws, many Italians, including National Fascist Party members, refused to enforce them. This is not to absolve the Italian Fascist regime of its many, many misdeeds, including racism, but it is true that it never got as bad as it did in Germany, or even, to my country's shame, the United States.

    Now, why did eugenics fail to catch on in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, but did in the U.S., Germany, and Scandinavia? Note, while Great Britain did have a eugenics movement, I don't think it ever got as far as it did in the countries I mentioned above, at least in terms of legislation. But I could be wrong, Mr. Lindsay would definitely know better than I would

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