The Oxford Group?

Let me know what you want to know about them, there were good parts and bad, Henrieta Seiberling deserves a bigger place in our history

Thing about digging around in America's past in the early part of the twentieth century is what we uncover, The Oxford group (among many many others including our very own Bush family and The Rockefellers) supported Hitler, Henry Ford used machine gunners to break strikes and unions were considered communists, Genocide was pretty much finishing on the indiginous population in America, The British were inventing the concentration camp in The Boer war, in California they were beating people lured in from the dust bowl, Bill W was having seances and much of the Big Book and 12 x 12 was "channeled" by some long dead monk, it was a strange time that is largely covered up now except for the great depression and America the valorous and stainless that emerged from World War II, the truth is a lot more fun and quite a bit more disturbing.

I was actually going to include something about Herbert Spencer, who is quoted frequently from The big book about ignorance prior to investigation because of his alleged ties with eugenics and social darwinism, in which medical advances by keeping the lower classes and "inferior" people alive were actually doing a dis-service to humanity, I mean COLD stuff that was the basis for Hitlers ideas and Propaganda, but everything I read about him was pretty cool, I especially liked this quote:

Spencer argued that the state was not an "essential" institution and that it would "decay" as voluntary market organization would replace the coercive aspects of the state.^[11] He also argued that the individual had a "right to ignore the state." As a result of this perspective, Spencer was harshly critical of ^[12]patriotism. In response to being told that British troops were in danger during the Second Afghan War, he replied: "When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I dont care if they are shot themselves."

I may have missed his ideas about eugenics and social darwinism, in which "might is right" and if we trample on them it is because we are more "fit to live" and it's "natural selection" so it's not only our right, but our duty to kill off inferior species of man, which was the prcursor to Nazi Philosophy and the Neo-Cons today.

This was Darwin's ideas they took and ran with:

In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex of 1882 Darwin described how medical advances meant that the weaker were able to survive and have families, and commented on the effects of this, while cautioning that hard reason should not override sympathy, and considering how other factors might reduce the effect:

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. ... We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected




-- Edited by AGO on Friday 14th of May 2010 05:20:19 PM