3. TIL that the refrain “when one door closes, another opens" is actually an Alex...

TIL that the refrain “when one door closes, another opens" is actually an Alexander Graham Bell quote which he followed by saying "but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

An entire day of Reddit freaking out about a Nazi running over people at a rally. Next day the top post is a quote from a well known eugenicist. Bell was partially responsible for the American eugenics laws that the Nazis used as models for their own and which lead to the Holocaust.

He was a disgusting human being. Bell was married to a deaf woman but fought against other deaf people getting married and against sign language because he thought they would lead to a permanent deaf population.

Those who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriages of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.

People with other "defects" were treated more harshly by the eugenics movement. Abortion clinics were opened in black neighborhoods. Hospitals sterilized minority babies after birth either without telling the parents or after tricking the parents into signing documents giving consent. Mental hospitals infected their patients with tuberculosis to euthanize them. Doctors performed tubal ligations on women in prisons. Black women in the South were told they would be denied welfare if they didn't get a "Mississippi appendectomy", a hysterectomy. As late as the 1970s doctors were sterilizing women for having illegitimate children or for being bad parents.

I know I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist writing this but it's all plainly true. It's just not talked about. The United States continued a limited practice of eugenics for decades after defeating the Nazis and learning about the holocaust.

I don't know why everyone wants to forget all the evil done by fuckers like Alexander Graham Bell. Even Nixon, universally loathed, gets a free pass for using federally funded contraception to decrease black births and ordering the sterilization of 1/4 of the Native American women of childbearing age in the 1970s. People talk about all the other awful things he did but never the eugenics. I just don't get it.

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