By Michael F. Duggan
In his World War II memoir, Doing Battle: the Making of a Skeptic, Paul Fussell observes:
“Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all American males? Killed off in their tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcomed or not, of improving the breed. Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.”
When I first read this stark observation, I didn’t want to believe it. It seemed cynical, illiberal, a paragraph designed to grab the attention. Wasn’t the U.S. fighting against an ideology that embraced eugenics (and “improving the breed” sounds like the language of Nazism or at least animal husbandry)?1
I wrote it off as the bitter remembrance of a combat infantry officer who, like Robert Graves before him, disliked the men with whom he trained, “men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid.”2 Any “war buffs” taken in by the élan and esprit de corps of Band of Brothers and other books about elite units, should read this book if they want to know what life was like for a 20-year-old officer in an ordinary leg infantry unit in the Vosges Mountains in 1944-45. It is a wonderful tonic to balance out the uncritical solemnity that infuses myths of the “Good War” (they should also read Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed). Although I never accepted Greatest Generation heliographies uncritically, Fussell’s point seemed to go too far.
But leaving aside such promising individuals as George H.W. Bush, John and Joseph Kennedy, Jr., Lewis Nixon, Eugene Sledge, John Paul Stevens, Byron White, and Fussell himself—all of whom were from the educated middle and upper classes—I now think that he has a point: policy may consciously or unconsciously push unspoken trends and attitudes that are reprehensible when said aloud. After all, the various U.S. wars in the Middle East provided convenient venues to test new weapons under real world conditions, but we would never say so.
Today, an unspoken justification for some bad behavior and policy—the flouting of vaccines and vaccine mandates—is the view that a large majority of those who die are no longer of much importance to the community, economy, and the gene pool. If anything, these people are a burden. Like Fussell’s de facto eugenics of military service, this result may not be intended, but it is real, and some people don’t care enough to use personal responsibility to prevent thousands of deaths in what is now the deadliest single event in U.S. history.
People won’t tell you this, but beloved grandmothers, grandfathers, and the odd special needs child aside, most of those dying of COVID-19 are nameless, faceless numbers of the aged, infirm, and weak. Don’t let some anti-vaxxer tell you that they are bravely advocating greater “freedom.” What they are advocating is a vulgar, primitive understanding of natural selection for the purpose of social improvement, that is akin to the obtuse nineteenth-century construction of evolution as “survival of the fittest.” Clearly they do not understand more nuanced parts of evolution, like group selection.
About 75% of those dying of COVID-19 in the United States are over 65. Those with mental disabilities are also at much greater risk of dying from the disease than the general population. In the eyes of some anti-vaxxers (and in the hearts of those who whip them up), these are people would have died soon anyway or are otherwise costly to society.
Flouting masks and vaccines has nothing to do with courage, Jesus, manhood, patriotism, or “rights.” It is all about callousness to the point of criminality. The result has been a mostly preventable holocaust, a “thinning of the herd” by culling the weak from the herd through the sickness of those healthy enough to endure it. How can this be anything but eugenics? It certainly isn’t Christian.
Although the number of their fatalities is not as great, we should remember that natural selection cuts both ways, and hospital wards and cemeteries are also filling up with younger anti-vaxxers as well as the old and infirm, about whom many couldn’t care less. How would they feel if people began writing off their lives as instances of self-inflicted natural selection that improved the gene pool?
Notes
- Paul Fussell, Doing Battle (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1996) 171-72.
- Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, quoted by Fussell in Doing Battle, 77.