28th April 1948, an Order for the Sterilization or asexualizationof Willie Lynch, aged 14 years

We nowadays equate the "bad old days" of eugenics primarily with Nazi Germany, and indeed by the time of the date above, the Nuremberg tribunals had heard and made judgment upon examples of the excesses committed in the name of racial purity.

So who was Willie Lynch?   Maybe a black boy in South Africa, not yet officially established re apartheid but as near as damn it.  No, not a British colonial possession (not a current one anyway), and Willie was white.

The scene is North Carolina, US of A, and it was an Eugenics Board, with legal powers, which made an order that he, aged 14, be sterlised ... ostensibly for his own good .... or the public's (of course).  Here's the paperwork:

Whereas .....

Was he represented?  Read it, no such niceties .... his mother had consented - we have no record of the process by which she was persuaded or consented.

The social annals of the early 20th century are littered with such gross injustices, in the USA, and also here - no need to go to Germany.  Yes, the gas chambers had a test run with the 'feeble minded', those who would 'degrade' the stock if allowed to breed.  Qualifications - disability of any kind, but especially mental; single motherhood (children taken into care, unfit person).  At its worst, the woman arrested in Nazi Germany by the Gestapo because a neighbour thought she was 'odd', anti-social, probably lesbian wrote to the Gestapo, woman sent to camp, died there.  When this letter was discovered, a German TV crew tracked the informant down decades later.  "Yes this is my signature but I did not write this."   Did a whole nation suffer from such amnesia?

And in the State of South Carolina, who now can explain the morality and decency of such provision?  Moral amnesia - discuss.

In that case, as in so many, poverty not race alone, is the key factor.   The propensity of the rich to laud their status as somehow something of which they naturally deserve.

Willie Lynch is fighting for justice, however belated in every sense.   Here, it's not just Alan Turing who deserves even posthumous justice but tens of thousands of others who didn't become the father of the computer et al.   Turing took cyanide coated onto an apple - and no prince came to revive him.  Not a happy ending Walt.

This Government, not alone, has embraced the ethos of "helping the deserving poor".   This has a shadow presence - "not helping the undeserving poor".  Scapegoating, the tool of those who wish to maintain their status and position, readily attractive to those who don't understand their position outside of that "god-given" privilege.  Willie doesn't just stand for all those like him who lost their posterity to bureaucratic fascism.  He stands for all those at the bottom of the pile, pushed around, labelled (so neet-ly) - their children are malnourished, poorly housed, looked down upon, selected for the next generation so the game can continue.

I remember a worker, let us say, of less than liberal views, who heard that someone had died of AIDS.  "Was it good AIDS?"   ??????   This referred to those receiving contaminated blood in transfusions, obtained by paying the most wretched and the outcast for their donations of blood ....  AIDS is AIDS lady, it's a frickin' disease.

The price of liberty - but especially to be vigilant for those on the bottom of the pile.   As we saw in Nazi Germany, they were first through the door to extermination ..... but the doors opened ever wider.

Currently, I am in a great project with kids aged 14 etc, some of them coming out as gay or bi.  I hope they may read this and see what can happen when ignorance and injustice are permitted to rule, instead of the Rule of Law, humanity's greatest achievement.