Marie Stopes, the birth control pioneer, is an icon of BBC lefties, feminists and trendies, as this glowing tribute posted today on the BBC website makes clear. Reporter Howard Falcon-Lang shows his breatheless admiration for what he portrays as a saintly pioneer of Darwinian science (thousands of brownie points in the BBC lexicon)and ensuring that women should be “liberated” through sex manuals (another brownie point subject, especially for contemporary ones that denigrate men and are aimed at five-year-olds).
What Mr Falcon-Lang leaves out of his eulogy is a few other less savoury but rather more important facts about Ms Stopes. Like that her views on evolution led her to become an ardent admirer of Hitler, and that she wrote to him a month before the war broke out in 1939 telling him so. The reason? Well, she was a central figure in Anglo-US eugenics movement (along with leftie friends like George Bernard Shaw) and believed in every element of his views about race and selective breeding. This heroine of the left was as much a believer in racial superiority and getting rid of lesser races as most Nazis.
As with the inconvenient truths about Islam, the fanatics at the BBC airbrush out with wearying predictability the facts that don’t fit with their systematic bending of history.
Update: Paulo states (below) that the version of the Stopes story he saw mentioned Hitler and that I must have only skim-read the story. Not true; that’s never my approach. I’ve double-checked the edition I read when I posted the story and it definitely did not contain the reference to Hitler. Mmm…curious, that. This was the intro on the edition I have:
Marie Stopes (1880-1958) shook the world. She wrote a best-selling sex-manual for women and was a controversial birth control pioneer.
When Stopes set up her first birth control clinic in 1921, all assumed that she had trained in medicine.
Yet, bizarrely, she was an expert on fossil plants and coal.
So how did this young palaeontologist come to transform Western society and become one of the most infamous women in history?
Somehow you appear to have missed the very first paragraph of the article which states (in bold in case we might miss it):
“On a darker note, she also corresponded with Hitler and believed in the creation of super race.”
Wow, that’s some gotcha (not withstanding Paulo’s spot of the passing reference)!
Wiki says:-
After her son Harry married a myopic woman, Stopes cut him out of her will. The daughter-in-law—Mary Eyre Wallis, later Mary Stopes-Roe—was the daughter of the noted engineer Barnes Wallis. Stopes reasoned that prospective grandchildren might inherit the condition.[5]
Supporters of Stopes[who?] generally concede that she made such remarks, but argue that they should be read in their historical context.[citation needed]
Following the death of Marie Stopes in 1958, a large part of her personal fortune went to the Eugenics Society.[6]
“Howard Falcon-Lang”, crazy name , crazy guy !
Look forward to the BBC pushing birth control at muslims.
Paulo, sorry but Hitler just gets a passing mention at the top of the article, it makes no further reference, I’m sure beeboid supporters like you woul dbe very angry if one of Goerge W bush only made ONE reference to iraq at the top of a similar article.
Martin,
Call it what you want, I just wanted to point out that Robin’s claim that the author had ‘left out’ these ‘important facts’ was complete rubbish and he clearly had only skim-read the article.
It made me laugh because the BBC’s opening paragraph neatly summed up exactly the points Robin clumsily claimed had been ‘airbrushed’ from the article.
😀
Sorry Paulo but it states she wrote to Hitler but the article doesn’t go into any great detail about what they discussed.
I think that the article should have made a specific mention of it in more detail (the article is quite long) rather than in passing at the top.
This article seems to give much more detail about her and the fact she seemed to like the Nazis a lot, wow possibly a Jew hater, no wonder the BBC like her.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/5051109/Marie_Stopes_is_forgiven_racism_and_eugenics_because_she_was_antilife/
I think the phrase “on a darker note’ is racist. It’s a nice throw-away line, though, quickly getting that out of the way, so no need to discuss it further.
Churlishness aside, there is one thing the BBC does leave out: The US equivalent of Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), was also heavily into racial purity and eugenics. Funny, that. Since both legendary pioneers of a just cause shared this predilection, one would have thought it merited more scrutiny, esepcially considering the two were friends and co-conspiritors.
The BBC did their best to sanitize Stopes’ connection to Hitler and her love for eugenics a couple of years ago when that stamp with her picture on it came out. They even go so far to say as the only thing she ever did was mail a book of poetry to Hitler one time, and that’s the entire basis for any accusations of Nazi sympathizing. And eugenics was fashionable at the time, so not such a big deal. Does that sound familiar?
The text from the article on ukwirednews at http://www.ukwirednews.com/news.php/84205-The-secret-life-of-Dr-Marie-Stopes is exactly the same as Robin describes. ie it does not reference Hitler.
It would seem likely that the BBC amended the article after publishing to add the reference to Hitler.
Stopes will of course be a secular saint at the Beeb.
To put her Hitler-worship and her eugenics ahead of her sons right to choose a bride(albeit one with glasses!) sums up the anti-family hypocritical patronising elitist that would be a BBC commisssioning editor today.