“Removing Your Face” is an MKUltra Dogwhistle 🎭

The tragedy of so many intellectuals in the contemporary world is that while opposing extreme forms of totalitarianism, they are themselves half-totalitarians; that is to say, they express a desire for a society which is half-controlled, half-regimented, half-planned, part capitalist and part socialist. This strange hybrid they will find (indeed, have found) to be a Frankenstein monster which, ironically, they have a great responsibility for creating. Thus, the Fabian [Britain’s “democratic socialists”] of yesteryear becomes inexorably the totalitarian of tomorrow, and ultimately the victim of his own creation. Horrified by some evils and excesses in a free society (which will always be imperfect) he turns hopefully to the blueprint of a controlled society which promises a heaven on earth in the very near future. But since the individual must always be imperfect this side of paradise, his society must always be imperfect, and the more absolutely it is controlled by single committees or groups of imperfect men with unlimited power, the more imperfect it is likely to be.

If [J.B.S.] Haldane’s opinions were sui generis, they would be of only minor interest. But far from expressing views that were unique Haldane’s linked beliefs in socialism, inequality, and eugenics were widely shared on the left, particularly amongst Marxists and Fabians with scientific interests. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Eden and Cedar Paul, H.J. Laski, Graham Wallas, Emma Goldman, H.G. Wells, Edward Aveling, Julian Huxley, Joseph Needham, C.P. Snow, H.G. Muller and Paul Kammerer-to note just some of the more prominent figures-all advocated (though in varying forms; some “positive” and some “negative,” some here and now and some only in the socialist future) the improvement of the genetic stock of the human race through selective breeding.[3] It was Shaw who argued that “there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization,” Eden Paul that “unless the socialist is a eugenicist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial degradation” and H.J. Laski that “the different rates of fertility in the sound and pathological stocks point to a future swamping of the better by the worse. As a nation, we are faced by race suicide.”[4] In the approximate half-century separating the work of Galton from the rise of fascism (which more than any other factor was responsible for the collapse of socialist enthusiasm for eugenics), such views were common.