DaGip wrote:Logic drives genocide?
To use the famous Dr. Who example of logic ...
All cows are purple ...
Flossy is a cow ...
Therefore Flossy is ...
When initial inputs are incorrect, logic always drives towards an incorrect answer. Darwinian eugenics of the late 19th century and early 20th century demanded that the inferior (who tended to be both poor and who had lots of children) should be eliminated, one way or the other. Some people wanted them killed outright, but humanely, others wanted them to be simply never be born.
H.G. Wells (a very logical man indeed) "
I believe that if a canvass of the entire civilized world were put to the vote in this matter, the proposition that it is desirable that the better sort of people should intermarry and have plentiful children, and that the inferior sort of people should abstain from multiplication, would be carried by an overwhelming majority."
George Bernard Shaw "
The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?"
Margaret Sanger "
We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all—that the wealth of individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization."
Now there is a subtle difference between the classical eugenicists and the German Nazi beliefs, but that is a result of the former concentrating on class while the later concentrated on race.
Moreover, I believe I have heard recent arguments that it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that had convinced Hitler that sweeping the Jews from Europe would only have them flood into Jerusalem so that the only "final" solution would be their extermination. Thus the "logic" went from removing them to exterminating them.