Sir, - Catherine Cleary (The Irish Times, August 30th) blames the usual suspects - fascism, racism, sexism - for Sweden's sterilisation policy. These played their part, but blaming only them reinforces both stereotypes and a simplistic view of history as a conflict between the forces of progress and reaction.
Facism prospered primarily in Catholic lands (e.g. Italy, Iberia), eugenics in primarily progressive, Protestant ones (Canada, the US, Scandinavia, Switzerland). They overlapped and peaked in Germany.
Eugenics was a secular, "scientific" creed spread across a wide spectrum. Churchill favoured sterilisation, Engels looked forward to a world war in which entire (white) races would be wiped out. Britain's Marie Stopes advocated mandatory sterilisation of parents exhibiting disease, drunkenness or bad character. Her slogan was "Joyful and deliberate motherhood. A safe light in our racial darkness". In 1942 she penned the lines: "Catholics, Prussians,/ The Jews and the Russians,/ Are a curse,/ Or something worse .. ." On her death in 1958 she left her clinic to the Eugenic Society.
In the US Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, opposed free maternity care for the poor but did want birth-control clinics to be located where "dysgenic" races lived. She instituted the Negro Project to encourage sterilisation among blacks.
Eugenicists were also concerned with what happened within a race. In the US two important trials concerning science took place in the 1920s. The Scopes trial is famous, what was in his textbook less so. On "Parasatism" it said: "If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off . . . Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of . . . preventing . . . perpetuating such a . . . degenerate race."
William Jennings Bryan, prosecutor of Scopes, was a reformer, not a reactionary. He had a poor understanding of science but a good one of the danger of "a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and movements of the mass of mankind."
Every society and age has its failings and when we're judging our immediate forebears we should bear in mind not just the current ideal but what was going on elsewhere at the same time.
If I had been asked to guess which European country, other than Nazi Germany, had embraced eugenics, Sweden would have been at or near the top of my list precisely because of its progressive record. What other "small people" might it be failing today? - Yours, etc.,
Drimnagh Road, Dublin 12.