The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 20: Castrate Them The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike Isaacson: Reproductive rights are inmates’ rights apparently.
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi lies
Race and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi lies
Hollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews died
Army, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi lies
Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I’m joined today by Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Michigan State University, Mark Largent, who is with us today to talk about his book Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. This slim volume tells the story of the historical enthusiasm for depriving certain classes of people the ability to reproduce and the efforts towards making that a reality. Really happy to get to read this book a second time for this podcast. Welcome to the show Dr. Largent.
Mark Largent: Thank you for the invitation and for your kind words.
Mike: So I want to start today by talking about what you start the book talking about, which is a discussion of your historical method of storytelling, your historiography. So you make a very deliberate choice of vocabulary that really does have a powerful effect in exposing, kind of, the grittiness of the whole issue. Can you talk about that and what effect you intended to have?
Mark: So I was trying very hard to work in an anti-presentist mode. Presentist mode is most commonly what's used in exploring issues like eugenics, things that have become recognized as problematic for a variety of reasons. What often happens when you take a presentistic view like that is you fail to understand how something that seems so obviously problematic to you could have been acceptable to large numbers of people in the past.
The danger, of course, is that you fall into the trap of becoming an apologist. So it's a fine line to walk between being a presentist and being an apologist when you're dealing with issues like this. You don't want to explain away past people's beliefs and assumptions and actions as merely products of their time because that doesn't treat them fairly; it doesn't treat them as equals; it sort of lets them off merely because they lived before you.
On the other hand, you need to understand the world as it was understood by them. So I think in graduate school is where I first heard the term “doing violence to the historical subject”. That is if you view them through your own eyes, you are doing violence to them. If you view them in such a way as to not hold them to any real standards simply because they came before you and therefore operated in a space of naivete relative to what you think you know, you're doing violence to them. You're treating them as somehow less than you and your present day colleagues.
So to walk that line really requires that you use their language and you try to understand and discuss the world the way that they may have understood and discussed it. Now, the problem, of course, when you're dealing with something like this is that many of the things that they held true, many of the assumptions on which their work is based, are deeply problematic to us today, or we at least on the surface claim that they're deeply problematic.
Because one of the real dangers of presentism is that it allows you to imagine that you're somehow better than the historical subjects were, that you're above whatever it was that they were dealing with, when in fact, you may simply rationalize some of the very same problematic assumptions that they held differently, holding them in a different way. So as a historian, I feel like it's my responsibility to treat the historical subjects fairly, and that means holding them to the same standards that I hold present-d