On the morning of Tuesday, July 9 I received an email from the production manager of Magnum Veritas Productions with the following inquiry:
“We are in the production stage of a PBS program called Human Weeds on the rise of earth's population and whether we need to purge or protect the human surplus. We want you to share about the resurgence of modern eugenics, your opinion of the significance and implications of Earth's growing population, your solutions for ensuring a good life for everyone, and what is in the works behind the scenes to accomplish this.”
The email directed me to the film’s website at www.humanweeds.com and I also visited the company’s website at www.magnumveritasvp.com. Suffice to say I rejected the request to participate.
Purportedly the documentary will address “whether we need to purge or protect the human surplus.” What human surplus? That suggests there are humans on the planet who are in excess of what some genius thinks is the right number. How does anyone even ask if any portion of the human race should be protected or purged?
The Nazis thought that Jews were “life unfit for life” and in need of extermination. They managed to kill six million along with another five million “enemies of the state” that included homosexuals, Seventh Day Adventists, Catholic clergy, gypsies, the mentally challenged, and a long list of others.
It has long been a popular progressive notion that the Earth is over-populated and something should be done about it.
I placed a call to Magnum Veritas Productions and had a conversation with the production manager who sent the email. “Human Weeds” is the “working title” of the documentary. She told me that it is not funded by PBS and, indeed, MVP is currently seeking funding, but that a producer at PBS had “green lighted” the project to air sometime in 2014. Calls to the PBS corporate public relations office went unanswered.
I Googled “PBS and Eugenics” and found a page from “A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries titled “Eugenics movement reaches its height--1923.” Eugenics was the alleged “science” of heredity that traces its beginning to around 1883. It evolved into a social theory about the human race. The text notes that “Even in its day, many people saw that eugenics was a dubious discipline, riddled with inconsistencies.” In 1923, the American Eugenics Society was founded and “quickly grew to 29 chapters around the country.”
“The eugenics craze was already fading when the horrors of institutionalized eugenics revealed in Nazi Germany during World War II doused it entirely as a movement.”
Well, not entirely.
At DiscoverTheNetworks.org its report on“Eugenics and the Progressive Movement”, notes that the movement had many famous advocates in the first half of the last century. They included author H.G. Wells, NAACP founder W.E.B. Dubois, economist John Maynard Keynes, playwright George Bernard Shaw, World Wildlife Fund founder, Julian Huxley, sex theorist Havelock Ellis, and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
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Sanger took issue with the position of the Catholic Church on the sanctity of life, saying, “Assuming that God does want an increasing number of worshippers of the Catholic faith, does he also want an increasing number of feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and diseased worshippers?” She also saw on-demand abortion as a way to reduce the African-American population.
As I noted in May regarding the Supreme Court’s decision, Roe v. Wade, “It has been just over forty years since the Court’s decision. In 2012 The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) released a report that estimated the number of abortions at 54,559,615 based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute. According to the CDC, in 2010 there were 3,999,386 births in the U.S., a rate of 13 per 1,000 of the population. Of these, 40.8% were born to unwed women.”
There is little to be learned about Magnum Veritas Productions which reportedly was established in 2011 and incorporated in Indiana. Its principal executive is Robert N. Blair, but a Google search did not reveal any further information and the MVP website curiously does not cite him by name though it does report on MVP’s—presumably Blair’s—“history and experience.”
There are in my view some serious moral and ethical questions that must be asked about the decision of a PBS producer to approve this documentary for airing. He apparently had no qualms about a documentary that will ask if portions of the Earth’s population should be “purged.”
I would like to see Congress exercise some oversight regarding PBS and this project.
The very name, “Human Weeds”, should be a cause for concern.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
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