[OFF] The photo that’s become the emblem of Brazil’s political turmoil

STEPHANIE NOLEN. RIO DE JANEIRO — The Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Mar. 14, 2016 7:48PM EDT

Last updated Monday, Mar. 14, 2016 9:46PM EDT

On a day when every Brazilian, or so it seemed, was sharing protest pictures on social media, there was one picture that became the picture, the one everyone was talking about – a sort of Rorschach test for the country.

On Sunday, nearly two million people took to the streets in 121 cities across Brazil to protest government corruption and to demand the impeachment or resignation of President Dilma Rousseff, whose government is enmeshed in a massive graft scandal.

Among the people who went to march were Claudio Pracownik and Carolina Maia Pracownik, a white couple who live on a leafy street in Ipanema. They brought with them their little white dog, on a colour co-ordinated leash, and their two toddler daughters, who rode in a stroller pushed by a black maid wearing the all-white uniform that some wealthy Brazilians prefer their domestic employees to wear.

Joao Valadares, a photographer with the newspaper Correio Braziliense, snapped their picture on the street in Copacabana, and before the protest was even over, it had been shared thousands of times – millions, by nightfall, here in this country that has the second-largest number of daily Facebook users.

Some Brazilians looked at the picture and saw a patriotic family, fed up with a seemingly unending series of revelations about politicians and kickbacks, on their way to make their voices heard – accompanied by a woman who has “an honest job”, as a great many commentators put it, at a time when millions of Brazilians are unemployed.

Others saw the poster-couple for elite Brazil. “I look at this photo and I see primarily the repetition of a scene going back to the time of slavery,” Deborah Thome, a Rio writer and political scientist, wrote on her Facebook page Sunday night. “I am disgusted by the sight of a nanny dressed in a slave-maid’s clothes.”

And that, she said, is emblematic of everything that’s troubling about the current protests.

Polling suggests that Brazilians across all social classes and ethnicities are extremely frustrated with corruption and with the crisis currently paralyzing government. But they differ in where they apportion blame. The half-dozen large anti-corruption demonstrations in the past year have been dominated by white and upper-middle-class protesters, who tend to be supporters of the opposition Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), and to have little love for Ms. Rousseff’s left-leaning Workers’ Party, which has won four successive elections, the last one with a narrow defeat of the PSDB in 2014. Rousseff supporters say they are using the corruption scandal – in which politicians from virtually every party have been named – to try to unseat a democratically elected government.

The research institute Datafolha said that 77 per cent of participants at the demonstration in Sao Paulo, which was the largest in the country, were university graduates, versus the overall rate of 28 per cent in the city. Half of participants said they earned “between five and 20 times minimum wage,” versus 23 per cent of people in the overall population who earn in this range; 77 per cent self-identify as white although the last census showed just 45 per cent of Brazilians are white.

It’s a troubling moment for the country, Ms. Thome said. “The debate now –nothing will convince me otherwise – is between different and conflicting political visions. I don’t support the protests, but like many friends who went to the street, I want a better country. But the paths we want to take to get there are very different. And, in most cases, those paths will not meet.”

But Joana Gryner, a Rio clinical psychologist who marched on Sunday, said she is frustrated by the suggestion that the Pracowniks have less right to protest than anyone else in this democracy.

“It’s too harsh to say that a particular social group cannot protest,” she said. “We have to stop churning out rules and dictating what is the correct way to protest. They were not hurting anyone, and plenty have done harm to them.”

Ms. Maia Pracownik and Mr. Pracownik did not return calls from The Globe and Mail. But in a Facebook post of his own, he expressed disgust at what he called the violation of his privacy, saying a photo without context was being used as a “distraction” from the country’s political and economic crisis. And he made a pointed reference to Lava Jato, the investigation into an alleged $2-billion (U.S.) contracts-for-kickbacks scheme at the state energy company Petrobras, in which many senior political figures, including former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are now implicated.

“I earn my money honestly,” wrote Mr. Pracownik, who is the vice-president for finance at the Rio football club Flamengo. “My assets are in my own name, I don’t get gifts from construction companies, I pay taxes (not bribes), I employ hundreds of people in my business and four more in my home. … Everyone gets paid on time. And everyone has a registered employment card and I pay social benefits for every one of them.”

He said the nanny in the picture only works for them on weekends, and is paid extra because of it. “She is free to resign if she would prefer other work or another employer,” he said. “I don’t treat her like a victim, or as if she is a member of my family. I treat with respect and with the dignity that any employee deserves.”

But in the furious debate about the photo, many have expressed scorn – at Ms. Maia Pracownik in particular – that she wasn’t pushing the stroller herself, that she has a nanny even on Sunday. “You don’t know enough to handle a baby carriage, but you think you can give your opinion on how to run a country,” sniped an engineer named Francielle Soares in Sao Paulo.

Others expressed disapproval that employers would take their nanny to a political demonstration. But that part came as no surprise to the nannies watching over toddlers in a childrens’ park near the family’s apartment on Monday. “She’s working, right?” said one of the women – none was willing to be quoted by name talking about their jobs. “She’s obliged to go – she’s earning, so it’s her responsibility to accompany the parents wherever they want to go.”

Brazilians, who are deft and fast with memes, reposted the picture with a thousand snarky captions, such as “Speed it up, there, Maria [the generic ‘maid name’], we have to get out to protest against this government that made us pay you minimum wage.”

Brazil’s economic crisis has seen a huge spike in unemployment – 1.5 million jobs were shed in 2015 and another 2.2 million are expected to be lost as the contraction continues this year. For many women who had new pink-collar positions in the economy that boomed under Mr. da Silva, that has meant a reluctant return to domestic work, traditionally the chief occupational sector for women of colour in Brazil.

When the picture began to be shared with scornful comments, some domestic workers wrote their own comments, pointing out they would be glad to have the job. “What’s the problem?” wrote Marcela Margiotta on the popular Facebeook site Humans of the Protest. “I’m going crazy looking for a job to work on weekends. … Thank god there are nanny jobs out there, because these days you graduate and then, surprise: there are no jobs!”

Source: The Globe and Mail (Canada)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-photograph-thats-become-the-emblem-of-brazils-political-turmoil/article29230399/

Michael S. Bryant. Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953

Unpunished and Unreformed

Michael S. Bryant's Confronting the "Good Death" is a legal history of the postwar Nazi euthanasia trials conducted from 1945 until 1953 by U.S. and German courts in what would become the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Nazi context, euthanasia, of course, meant the murder of mentally and physically ill people without their request or consent. Meaningful legal confrontation after the war, Bryant shows, was short-lived and seriously flawed. His thesis is that the reason for the failure of various courts to punish the killers lies in the fact that "[f]or both Americans and West Germans, concerns about preserving or recuperating sovereign power consistently bedeviled the neutral quest for justice" (p. 2).

In the first chapter, Bryant provides a concise history of the Nazi euthanasia program and its administration. The chapter begins by describing the ways in which competition for scarce material and human resources during the First World War devalued the lives of mental patients, and extends beyond the Nazi killing of the mentally ill and weak to the elimination of any "life unworthy of life," including German women traumatized by allied bombing, tubercular Russian laborers, Jews, and Gypsies. This background chapter, based on existing historiography, emphasizes continuities in personnel, technologies of killing, victim control techniques, and rationalization processes that extended the moral possibility of mass murder from euthanasia to the Holocaust.

Bryant underscores the economic rationale behind the destruction of those who euthanasia proponents regarded as "useless eaters." This was indeed a critical consideration, particularly in connection with allocating resources in anticipation for and during war. However, since both the allied and German courts took pains to consider the motivations behind the perpetrators' actions, it would have been helpful if Bryant had given more attention to the larger racial ideology behind eugenics. The mentally ill and retarded were deemed not only useless, but also genetically dangerous, and this was important to the medical killers who saw themselves as physicians to the nation first and to the individual patient only secondly. Racial ideology, not merely "uselessness," was even more of a factor in the deaths of other groups that Nazis marked for mass murder. A more extensive treatment of ideological motives could have set the stage for a useful discussion of comparisons between racial hygiene programs targeting "worthless" Germans and those aimed at perceived racial outsiders. Most outsider groups were, as Bryant points out, able-minded and able-bodied who could, and often did, contribute useful work to the Nazis and their war effort.

Bryant's own research forms the basis of chapters 2 through 5, which treat the U.S. euthanasia trials from 1945 through 1947 and the German trials in three different phases from 1946 through 1953. The study focuses narrowly on a close reading of the texts created by the trials themselves--transcripts and verdicts--in search of evidence of extrajudicial influences on their outcomes.

Bryant describes two sets of U.S. euthanasia trials. The United States Army conducted the first set in October 1945 against members of the medical staff of the Hadmar killing center in Hesse-Nassau. The second set was part of the Nuremberg medical trials between November 1946 and August 1947. In both instances, the defendants were charged with war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. The last category was not defined until the Allies created and agreed to the London Charter in August 1945. Unlike German courts that began trying euthanasia cases in 1946, U.S. courts apparently had few qualms about invoking an ex post facto law against Nazi murderers. However, they were extremely hesitant to put Germany's internal domestic affairs on trial, because, Bryant claims, they did not want to establish a precedent that in the future could subject the United States to a similar international tribunal which would undermine its sovereignty. To get around the sovereignty issue, the United States interpreted euthanasia (as well as other National Socialist atrocities) as an extension of aggressive war by claiming that disabled persons were killed in order to dedicate medical supplies, hospital spaces, and personnel to a grand plan of subjugating the people of Europe. To attach this war-related motive to individual perpetrators, they then adopted the questionable tactic of holding all members of criminal organizations (like the Nazi Party) jointly and severally liable for the same grand conspiracy against peace.

Bryant's thesis is difficult to prove with the types of sources he uses. None of the trial records or the correspondence between various actors actually states that the main reason for the circuitous prosecution strategies chosen was to preserve or regain state sovereignty. However, it is plausible enough in the American case, given the U.S. history of avoiding such challenges to its autonomy from international organizations. It is less convincing for the Germany, where there were simply too many additional motives, and too many personal and group interests militating against conviction to assign precedence to national sovereignty. Among other factors, the author lists confusion over investigative and court jurisdictions, statutes of limitations, the feeling among many Germans that Allied war crime trials were enforcing a mere "victor's justice," the desire of both Germans and Americans to tie Germany firmly to the West during the Cold War, and Konrad Adenauer's insistence on reintegrating former Nazis into the German civil service, including the judiciary.

Reservations aside, Confronting the "Good Death" is an important book that deserves a wide readership. Despite the fact that Americans and Germans started out determined to see Nazi atrocities revealed and punished, both quickly abandoned vigorous prosecution. The contorted legal logic that ultimately led courts to exonerate and even commend men and women, who in some cases had murdered hundreds of helpless patients with their own hands, is astounding. Anyone interested in broad issues surrounding the administration of international justice; medical ethics; human rights; tensions between morality, law, and politics; or the ways that societies retrospectively deal with wartime atrocities will find a compelling case study in Bryant's work.

Michael S. Bryant. Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. x + 269 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87081-809-7.

Reviewed by Lora Knight (Department of History, Southern Virginia University)
Published on H-Eugenics (January, 2008)

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Lora Knight. Review of Bryant, Michael S., Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953. H-Eugenics, H-Net Reviews. January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14041

Source: H-Net/H-Eugenics
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14041

German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945

Germany and the "Laissez-Faire" Imperialism of the United States

Linked to the rise in domestic industrial capacity and the ascent of an educated, commercially minded liberal political class desirous of expanded economic opportunities, Germany’s global penetration during the long nineteenth century was predicated on the conviction that overseas expansion would deliver both mercantile benefits and domestic political change. Over the past decade, this period of domestic change and international activity has been a fruitful field for researchers studying the historical development of Germany. Historians have variously framed this penetration through the superordinate concept of “globalization”; or alternatively, imperialism, which is one of globalization’s primary historical forms.

Whether viewed as imperial or globalizing endeavors, German attempts at overseas penetration during the nineteenth century did not take place in a historical vacuum, with numerous, preexisting European empires all but crowding Germany out of the ranks of the global empires. While the antiquated Iberian empires offered a counterexample to German liberals, the blue water empires of the British, the French, and the Dutch were perceived by German liberals as exemplars of successful European liberal imperialist ventures. With great verve and clarity, Jens-Uwe Guettel makes the case that missing from this picture is the key role of the United States, which he argues was central to German understandings of liberal empire and in some respects offered a template for German approaches to expansionism. Guettel traces Germany’s liberal imperialism, or as he terms it, “imperial liberalism,” from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, showing the numerous points of transatlantic overlap. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, and Christoph Meiners’ respective meditations on slavery, which derived their content from Anglo-American models, he illustrates how the tension between the negative experience of the condition of slavery for the slave and the utility of slavery as an institution enabling further European economic development was resolved in favor of the latter. From here, Guettel’s account moves on to a refutation of the notion of any special German affinity or empathy for the plight of Native Americans. He does this by demonstrating the favorable reception in Germany of American narratives of the “vanishing” Amerindians, which presented the extraordinary excess death rates associated with imperial expansion as either inexplicable “natural” occurrences or, quite often, a process in line with world-historical developments which dictated that “higher” forms of life must displace “lower” ones. Astutely, Guettel points out that this racializing discourse was multidirectional, with Friedrich Ratzel not merely transmitting current U.S. thought on indigenous policy, but also contributing to the renewal of liberal imperialist thought in the United States, influencing figures such as Frederick Jackson Turner. At this point it might have been interesting to see Guettel go even further and try to assess the impact and agency of ordinary German settlers in the United States on this transcontinental exchange. An admittedly difficult task, it might nonetheless have been possible by utilizing the material uncovered by Stefan von Senger und Etterlin in his 1991 work Neu-Deutschland in Nordamerika: Massenauswanderung, nationale Gruppenansiedlungen und liberale Kolonialbewegung, 1815 – 1860.

One of the main elements of U.S. imperialism that Guettel sees as translating well to the German context was the emphasis on what he terms the American-style laissez-faire approach to empire, which he argues particularly informed the views of not only Ratzel but also the left-liberal colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg. Central to this American model were political liberty, economic self-reliance, a decentralized approach to settlement patterns, and a localized, “rational” approach to issues of colonial racial hierarchy. While the first three were certainly laissez-faire, the decentralized aspects of U.S. racial policy that Germany adopted were, at least in the late imperial period, not always apparent, as Guettel admits. A tension between localizing and centralizing impulses was apparent, pronouncedly so under the left-liberal colonial secretary Wilhelm Solf, who in 1912 moved from a reliance on colony-specific ordinances forbidding miscegenation and mixed marriages towards a demand that such measures be enacted from Berlin and enshrined in national legislation. With Solf’s call for a law against mixed marriages defeated by the combined forces of the Catholic Centre Party and the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Guettel explains how Solf once again turned to the example of the United States; this time to study how the segregationist Jim Crow laws of some states coexisted with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which seemed to contradict them at the federal level.

Guettel quite correctly reveals just how much changed for Germany after World War One. Germany lost a significant portion of its territory, including all of its overseas colonies, while also enduring a period of partial occupation, including occupation by African troops brought in under French auspices. This inversion of the hitherto-prevailing colonial socio-racial order was decried in the German press. In addition, as a result of the American entry into the war, Germany’s relationship with the United States suffered greatly, to the extent that favorable allusions to U.S. racial conditions in post-1918 German debates fell off markedly. Even more obvious, Guettel reveals, was the Nazi Party’s disdain for the state of racial law in the United States. Rejecting the prewar enthusiasm for a decentralized approach to racial law, the Nazis instead argued that the United States was in fact a racially degenerating counterexample which should follow the new, highly centralized German approach. “Unlike in 1912,” Guettel argues, “in 1935 America was not allowed to be exemplary” (p. 200). The previously admired liberal mode of U.S. imperialism was necessarily criticized on the same grounds--it lacked centralization and was too heavily bound up in notions such as individualism and political liberty which, the Nazis claimed, they had superseded. In this way, Guettel convincingly disrupts accounts of Nazi imperialism that stress its continuity with prewar forms of liberal imperialism, suggesting instead that “the pre-1914 imperialism and post-1918 visions of living space in the East existed as perceived opposites within a framework of dialectical tension” (p. 223).

A natural field of further inquiry for both the author and other future researchers is the liberal depictions of Central Europe in nineteenth-century Germany. Raised briefly in the first chapter, it is one area that might profit from further analysis. Perhaps in deference to Woodruff Smith’s seminal Lebensraum/Weltpolitik distinction, Guettel seems to stress the distinction between overseas empire and contiguous European empire in liberal circles.[1] While he correctly points out the marked differences between liberal imperialism and Nazi imperialism in terms of political modality, racial policy, and manner of execution, it is worth remembering that German liberals such as Friedrich List, Friedrich Naumann, and Max Weber also had their own sense of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) that complemented liberal demands for an overseas empire, as Guettel acknowledges (p. 63). The partial overlap in the imperial topography of liberal Germans and Nazi Germans does not mean that there were uniquely German structural or political continuities that determined the shift from liberal to Nazi imperialism. Given too that U.S. liberal imperialism largely (but not exclusively) took the shape of contiguous territorial expansion, Guettel might profitably assess how Central Europe looked to not just the Nazis but also nineteenth-century liberal Germans familiar with U.S. expansionism. This could potentially strengthen his already detailed and convincing refutation of overarching and idiosyncratic lines of political and imperial continuity in German history.

Guettel’s book is admirable for a number of reasons. It expertly dissects the twin myths that U.S. expansionism was uniquely devoid of violent, imperialist characteristics, and that the history of German imperialism is somehow reducible to proto-Nazi violence. Citing the myriad statements of violent intent against indigenous people made by U.S. liberals and noting the transferal of these statements to German public discourse, Guettel lays out precisely how strategies for imperial consolidation were not contained to individual nation-states but were translocated. The book also successfully contextualizes prewar German imperialism within a liberal milieu which shared a set of assumptions with its American counterpart regarding the correct forms of imperial penetration and the requisite means for dealing with recalcitrant indigenous populations unwilling or unable to submit to the rigors of European politico-military dominance and work discipline. As Guettel shows, imperialism and the forms of socio-racial knowledge it engendered were an integral part of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Note

[1]. Woodruff D. Smith The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Jens-Uwe Guettel. German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 292 S. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-02469-4.

Reviewed by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (Flinders University)
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2013)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Source: H-Net
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38209

How a new edition of 'Mein Kampf' hopes to debunk Hitler's lies

A mesh of "half-truth and outright lie" in Adolph Hitler's memoir-manifesto, "Mein Kampf," prompted scholars to spend three years completing a new edition chock-full of fact-check annotations, according to The New York Times.

That's to "defang any propagandistic effect while revealing Nazism," Alison Smale wrote for The Times. The work's copyright expires Dec. 31, which made the academics' efforts possible.

The Times noted why the release of the edition, which includes 2,000 pages and 3,500 academic annotations, wasn't possible until now.

"Not since 1945, when the Allies banned the dubious work and awarded the rights to the state of Bavaria, has Hitler's manifesto, 'Mein Kampf,' been officially published in German," The Times reported. "Bavaria had refused to release it. But under German law, its copyright expires Dec. 31, the 70th year after the author's death."

This time around, the work will "dismantle the core doctrines" Hitler deployed to justify the Holocaust, Marie Solis wrote for Mic.

The bottom line: "Scholars want to disrupt a narrative of hate," according to Mic.

Still, some argue in regards to whether reprinting such a controversial text is a good idea.

Svati Kirsten Narula wrote for Quartz many scholars and librarians view "Mein Kampf" — translated in English to "My Struggle" — as a "toxic and dangerous text."

And German authorities refused to allow reprintings of the book in fear it would incite hatred, according to BBC News. Because of that, officials indicated they'll limit the public's access to the new "Mein Kampf" edition "amid fears that this could stir neo-Nazi sentiment."

However, Caroline Mortimer wrote for The Independent that the team of academics said a scholarly version to refute Hitler's lies is an appropriate way to reprint the book.

Christian Hartmann, lead of the team, told David Charter for The Times they created a "very reader-friendly edition."

"We firmly connect Hitler's text with our comments, so that both are always on the same double page. I could describe it in martial terms as a battle of annihilation — we are encircling Hitler with our annotations," Hartmann said, according to The Times. "Our principal was that there should be no page with Hitler's text without critical annotations. Hitler is being interrupted, he is being criticised, he is being refuted if necessary."

According to The Independent, many Jewish leaders remain opposed to the reprint.

"I am absolutely against the publication of 'Mein Kampf,' even with annotations," The Independent quoted Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism, as saying. "Can you annotate the Devil? Can you annotate a person like Hitler? This book is outside of human logic."

Mic reported the edition will cost $63 and hits bookstore shelves in January.

Payton Davis is the Deseret News National intern. Send him an email at pdavis@deseretdigital.com and follow him on Twitter, @Davis_DNN.

Source: Deseret News National
http://national.deseretnews.com/article/6921/How-a-new-edition-of-Mein-Kampf-hopes-to-debunk-Hitlers-lies.html

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89
By Staff Reports October 31

Willis Carto, who spent decades leading an influential network of far-right organizations, including the Washington-based Liberty Lobby and a California institute dedicated to denying the Holocaust, and whose extremist views resonated with generations of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements, died Oct. 26. He was 89.

His death was announced by the American Free Press, a publication he founded. No further details were available. After spending much of his adult life in California, Mr. Carto apparently lived near Jacksonville, Fla., in recent years, according to public records.

Mr. Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in the 1950s, and the organization maintained a presence on Capitol Hill for decades. He had a publishing company, Noontide Press, that distributed extremist literature and launched several publications, including the Washington Observer newsletter and a weekly newspaper, the Spotlight, which had a national circulation of 300,000 in the early 1980s.

In letters and other statements, Mr. Carto voiced admiration for Nazi Germany and recommended that black Americans be deported to Africa. In 1981, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that monitors anti-Jewish slurs and threats, called Mr. Carto “a professional anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer and the mastermind” of a “propaganda empire.”

The reclusive Mr. Carto “does not speak in public,” a 1971 Washington Post investigation found. “He refuses to be interviewed. He shies away from cameras. He keeps an unlisted telephone number. He shields his residence address in suburban Los Angeles from public scrutiny.”

Yet he controlled or maintained connections with a variety of far-right groups that opposed taxes, gun control, foreign aid and school busing to achieve racial integration. One of his groups supported the minority white rule of defiant segregationist Ian Smith in the African country of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

The Liberty Lobby’s political committee was led by former Texas congressman Bruce Alger, a right-wing zealot who once incited a riot in Dallas against then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1978, Mr. Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review, which promulgated anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and denounced the Holocaust as a hoax. Mr. Carto reportedly kept busts of Adolf Hitler in his office at the California-based institute.

Through his publications and interconnected organizations, Mr. Carto exerted outsize influence on a variety of political issues and campaigns. He organized Youth for Wallace to support the 1968 presidential bid of Alabama segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace. The group was later renamed the National Youth Alliance, which, under its next leader, William L. Pierce, became the National Alliance, one of the country’s most prominent white separatist groups.

In the 1980s, Mr. Carto helped found the Populist Party, whose 1988 presidential candidate was David Duke, a onetime leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Carto was treasurer of the Liberty Lobby, which took in about $1 million a year by 1970, and also controlled the purse strings of other allied organizations. Over the years, employees accused him of financial improprieties and having an imperious style of leadership.

“Several former Liberty Lobby executives say Carto makes all major decisions, delegates little authority and trusts hardly anyone,” The Post noted in 1971. Behind his back, his employees called him “Little Hitler.”

Source: Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/willis-carto-influential-figure-of-the-far-right-dies-at-89/2015/10/31/80eb8aee-7f36-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html

See more:
Willis Carto, Far-Right Figure and Holocaust Denier, Dies at 89 (NY Times)
Willis Carto has been a major figure on the American radical right since the 1950s, when he set up his anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby with offices not far from the White House (SPLC)

Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth - Book

Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth
Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle

Race has provided the rationale and excuse for some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, according to many biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists, there is no valid scientific justification for the concept of race.

To be more precise, although there is clearly some physical basis for the variations that underlie perceptions of race, clear boundaries among “races” remain highly elusive from a purely biological standpoint. Differences among human populations that people intuitively view as “racial” are not only superficial but are also of astonishingly recent origin.

In this intriguing and highly accessible book, physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall and geneticist Rob DeSalle, both senior scholars from the American Museum of Natural History, explain what human races actually are—and are not—and place them within the wider perspective of natural diversity. They explain that the relative isolation of local populations of the newly evolved human species during the last Ice Age—when Homo sapiens was spreading across the world from an African point of origin—has now begun to reverse itself, as differentiated human populations come back into contact and interbreed. Indeed, the authors suggest that all of the variety seen outside of Africa seems to have both accumulated and started reintegrating within only the last 50,000 or 60,000 years—the blink of an eye, from an evolutionary perspective.

The overarching message of Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is that scientifically speaking, there is nothing special about racial variation within the human species. These distinctions result from the working of entirely mundane evolutionary processes, such as those encountered in other organisms.

IAN TATTERSALL, curator emeritus in the American Museum of Natural History, is also the author of Paleontology: A Brief History of Life (Templeton Press, 2010), The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know about Human Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2009), and The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE (Oxford University Press, 2008).

ROB DESALLE is a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics. He curated the American Museum of Natural History’s new Hall of Human Origins (2006) and has written more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications and several books. Tattersall and DeSalle recently coauthored Human Origins: What Bones and Genomes Tell Us about Ourselves (Texas A&M University Press, 2007).

What Readers Are Saying:

"In the footsteps of Haddon and Huxley, a prominent anthropologist and a prominent evolutionary geneticist have teamed up to give us a powerful scientific critique of the commonsensical idea of race. Distinguished scholars and skilled communicators, Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle show clearly how “race” simply cannot be used as a synonym for “human biological diversity”. In the age of genomics, this partnership of intellectual specialties is particularly valuable, and the result is a splendid testament to the merits of trans-disciplinary collaborations."--Jon Marks, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina-Charlotte

"If you think you understand what 'race' is, read this book!"--Ian Paulsen, Birdbooker Report, The Guardian

"Tattersall and DeSalle argue that not only are the differences between the classically defined "races" very superficial, they are also of suprisingly recent origin...The diversity among us has risen in a blink of evolution's eye...began to reverse as formerly isolated human groups came back into contact and interbred...Tattersall and DeSalle confront those industries head on and in no uncertain terms, arguing that "race-based medicene" and "race-based genomics" are deeply flawed."--Jan Sapp, professor in the biology department at York University in Toronto, American Scientist

"This well-written, enjoyable book should be suitable for a broad range of readers interested in human diversity, its origins, and its future."--S.D. Stout, Choice

"Race? is an accessible primer on much of the biological theory relevant to the question of race...this book appeals to both general readers and students of biology, anthropology, and the history and philosophy of science as a valuable, if incomplete, overview of the topic's major themes."--Paul Mitchell, Expedition

"In Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth, they [the authors] dismantle the biological notion of race...the authors argue that a valid justification for the concept of race does not exist...that all the variations we characterize as 'racial' accumulated over a relatively short time span...an informative, well-researched, and well-written contribution to the scientific, intellectual (and even mundane) discourse on the lingering problem of race."--Okori Uneke, International Social Science Review

"This is a helpful book for anyone who wants a short, accurate and scholarly appraisal of race as a concept . . . Students in both anthropology and human genetic courses will benefit from the discussions this book will provide."--Quarterly Review of Biology

“Tattersall and DeSalle expertly and clearly summarize the scientific findings that provide the best evidence about the insignificance of race. They also survey, usefully and succinctly, the history of ideas about race from the Enlightenment through the genome project. Summarizing current biological and archaeological work, Tattersall and DeSalle note that all humans have a genetic make-up nearly 100 percent African in Origin.” — Victorian Studies

Source: Texas A&M University Press website
http://www.tamupress.com/product/Race,6744.aspx

Race Finished - Jan Sapp

Race Finished. Jan Sapp

RACE?: Debunking a Scientific Myth. Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle. xviii + 226 pp. Texas A&M University Press, 2011. $35.

RACE AND THE GENETIC REVOLUTION: Science, Myth, and Culture. Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. xiv + 296 pp. Columbia University Press, 2011. $105 cloth, $35 paper.

Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution. But is the tragic history of efforts to define groups of people by race really a matter of the misuse of science, the abuse of a valid biological concept? Is race nevertheless a fundamental reality of human nature? Or is the notion of human “races” in fact a folkloric myth? Although biologists and cultural anthropologists long supposed that human races—genetically distinct populations within the same species—have a true existence in nature, many social scientists and geneticists maintain today that there simply is no valid biological basis for the concept.

The consensus among Western researchers today is that human races are sociocultural constructs. Still, the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population. This is the message of two recent books: Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth, by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, and Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. Both volumes are important and timely. Both put race in the context of the history of science and society, relating how the ill-defined word has been given different meanings by different people to refer to groups they deem to be inferior or superior in some way.

Before we turn to the books themselves, a little background is necessary. A turning point in debates on race was marked in 1972 when, in a paper titled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin showed that human populations, then held to be races, were far more genetically diverse than anyone had imagined. Lewontin’s study was based on molecular-genetic techniques and provided statistical analysis of 17 polymorphic sites, including the major blood groups in the races as they were conventionally defined: Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians and Australian Aborigines. What he found was unambiguous—and the inverse of what one would expect if such races had any biological reality: The great majority of genetic variation (85.4 percent) was within so-called races, not between them. Differences between local populations accounted for 8.5 percent of total variation; differences between regions accounted for 6.3 percent. The genetic divergence between geographical populations in the course of human evolution does not compare to the variation among individuals. “Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance,” Lewontin concluded.

Further research has supported that conclusion. In 2000, at a White House event celebrating their completion of the first draft of the human genome, Craig Venter of the Institute of Genetic Research and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health declared that the concept of race had no genetic basis. Genetics offered no support for those wishing to place precise racial boundaries around groups. Despite rebuttals and objections, no matter how one cuts it, the data have come out much the same: Between 5 and 7 percent of human genetic diversity is between subgroups within the classically defined races; 6 to 10 percent of the total human variation is between those groups that we think of as races in an everyday sense based on skin color. The remainder of the variation occurs at the individual level and cannot be categorized by group or subgroup.

Certainly some traits are more clustered in specific populations than in others, such as skin color, hair form, nose shape and blood type. But race is little more than skin deep in biological terms, and individuals are frequently more genetically similar to members of other so-called races than they are to their own said race.

Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth is a beautifully presented book, elegantly reasoned and skillfully written. Tattersall, a physical anthropologist, and DeSalle, a geneticist, are both senior scholars at the American Museum of Natural History. Their aim is to explain human diversity in terms of human evolution and dispersal since our ancestors walked out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. The patterns of diversity, they write, reflect the processes of divergence and reintegration, the yin and yang of evolution.

In biology, a grouping has biological meaning based on principles of common descent—the Darwinian idea that all members of the group share a common ancestry. On this basis, and on the ability to interbreed, all humans are grouped into one species as Homo sapiens, the only surviving member of the various species that the genus comprised. Species are arranged within the “tree of life,” a hierarchical classification that situates each species in only one genus, that genus only in one family and so on. Nothing confuses that classification more than the exchange of genes between groups. In the bacterial world, for example, gene sharing can occur throughout the most evolutionarily divergent groups. The result is a reticulate evolution—a global net or web of related organisms, and no species. Among humans, reticulation occurs when there is interbreeding within the species—mating among individuals from different geographical populations. The result of such genetic mixing of previously isolated groups—due to migrations, invasions and colonization—is that no clear boundaries can be drawn around the variety of humans, no “races” of us.

The data for tracking lineages come from genomics, DNA comparisons and the study of genetic markers. Tattersall and DeSalle argue that not only are the differences between the classically defined “races” very superficial, they are also of surprisingly recent origin; the variety of human populations seems to have both accumulated and begun to reintegrate within the past 50,000 to 60,000 years. The diversity among us has arisen in a blink of evolution’s eye. The process of relative geographic isolation of local populations into what might have been true races (genetically differentiated populations) during the last Ice Age began to reverse as formerly isolated human groups came back into contact and interbred. That reintegration, which has occurred intermittently throughout human history, is sped up today because of great migration and widespread mating of individuals from disparate geographic origins. The result is that individuals identified as belonging to one “race,” based on the small number of visible characters used in historical race definitions, are likely to have diverse ancestry. The distinction between ancestry and race has important implications, as the authors discuss.

Although race is void of biological foundation, it has a profound social reality. All too apparent are disparities in health and welfare. Despite all the evidence indicating that “race” has no biological or evolutionary meaning, the biological-race concept continues to gain strength today in science and society, and it is reinforced by those who design and market DNA-based technologies. Race is used more and more in forensics, medicine and the genetic-ancestry business. Tattersall and DeSalle confront those industries head on and in no uncertain terms, arguing that “race-based medicine” and “raced-based genomics” are deeply flawed. Individuals fall ill, not populations. Belonging to any socioculturally defined race is a poor predictor of an individual’s genes, and one’s genes a poor predictor of one’s health.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture arose from two projects, both funded by the Ford Foundation and organized by the Council for Responsible Genetics, that “examined the persistence of the concept of human races within science and the impacts such a concept has had on disparities among people of different geographical ancestries.” The first project brought together academics and social-justice advocates to discuss “racialized” forensic DNA databases and seek policy solutions. The second focused on the effects of modern genetic technology in reinscribing and naturalizing the concept of race in science and society. The resulting book is a fine and richly textured compilation, in which a multidisciplinary group of scholars explore racialized medicine, various uses of genetic testing in forensics and the genetic-ancestry industry, and attempts to link intelligence and race.

Sociologist Troy Duster argues that the growing genetic-ancestry industry not only reinforces a biological conception of race but is sorely in need of government regulation in regard to claims made and accuracy of methods used to pinpoint ancestry, as was suggested by the American Society of Human Genetics in 2008.

Nowhere is the need for new government regulations more evident than in the collection, use and storage of DNA for forensic purposes, all of which have increased dramatically over the past two decades. In the chapter opening a section devoted to this subject, Michael T. Risher, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, explains that in California suspected felons are required to give DNA samples. About 30 percent of those suspects are not convicted; whether they are convicted or not, their DNA profile remains in the database, making them “potential suspects whenever DNA is recovered from a crime scene.” A disproportionate number of those innocent people whose DNA is stored are people of color.

The same holds for Britain, as Helen Wallace, director of the advocacy group GeneWatch UK, explains. Six percent of the white population of Britain has records in the country’s DNA database. In contrast, Wallace writes, “approximately 27 percent of the entire black population, 42 percent of the male black population, 77 percent of young black men and 9 percent of all Asians have records on the National DNA Database.” An estimated 55 percent of these people have not been charged or convicted of any offense. The retention of DNA from everyone who has been arrested raises important privacy and civil-rights concerns, Wallace notes. The creation of a permanent “list of suspects” has the potential for various abuses and misuses. The practice may result in “the exacerbation of discrimination in the criminal justice system,” she writes.

A different aspect of racial profiling is evident in the growing industry of racialized medicine, whose proponents might argue that even if race has no evolutionary or biological meaning, it can still be useful for medical treatments. After all, more and more diseases are reportedly correlated with ethnicity and race. But as evolutionary biologists Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Jonathan Kahn argue in their respective chapters on the subject, racialized medicine is a bad investment and is bound to fail for two reasons. First, although individual ancestries are useful on medical questionnaires, ancestry should not be conflated with race. “The issue is not primarily one of whether to use racial categories in medical practice but how,” Kahn writes.

Carefully taking account of race to help understand broader social or environmental factors that may be influencing health disparities can be warranted. . . . But it is always important to understand that race itself is not an inherent causal factor in such conditions.

As an example, he considers the drug called BiDil, FDA approved as an anti–heart-attack agent specifically marketed to African Americans on the grounds that they have a biological propensity for heart disease brought on by high blood pressure. Not only is the drug not effective for all African Americans, it is quite effective for many individuals who self-identify as Caucasian.

The second problem with racialized medicine is that it tends to overlook the evidence that discrimination, poverty, stress and restricted access to education and health care underlie the health disparities between ethnic groups in the United States. High blood pressure may be as much a social disease as a biological one. Graves notes that the U.S. National Institutes of Health allocates $2.7 billion per year for health-disparity research, much of which is based on the assumption that ethnic-minority populations are genetically predisposed to specific complex diseases. Graves argues that until this “false paradigm” that focuses on genes instead of social causes of diseases is toppled, “much of this research is following a fool’s errand.” There is no pill we can take to cure social disorders, but genetic-testing technologies may provide insight into an individual’s predisposition for a disease and the optimal use of certain drugs. Racialized medicine needs to be replaced by sound “evolutionary medicine,” based on ancestral geographic origins, socioeconomic status and other cultural factors.

Science has exposed the myth of race, but as the diverse array of essays in Race and the Genetic Revolution shows, folk conceptions of racial typology are kept alive in various sociopolitical forms, and proponents of various DNA-based technologies continue to use erroneous biological conceptions of race as the rationale for using these technologies. Race is not just a sociocultural construct; it is a technological and commercial artifact that persists today.

Jan Sapp is a professor in the biology department at York University in Toronto. His most recent book is The New Foundations of Evolution: On the Tree of Life (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Source: American Scientist
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/race-finished