Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

Based on the book by New York Times best selling author and nine time Pulitzer Prize nominee, Edwin Black, War Against the Weak is the untold story of American Eugenics, a movement that attempted to breed a Nordic master race through the elimination of those deemed "unfit'.In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy, combined with the efforts of the scientific, academic and politcal elite, created the pseudoscience eugenics, and institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal was to create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the virtually everyone else.Eugenicists went about identifying so-called 'defective' family trees and subjected individuals to legislated segregation and sterilization programs, and sometimes even euthanasia. The victims were poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main funders were The Carnegie Institution, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Harriman Railroad fortune. The main actors included America's most respected scientists, hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all dedicated to breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn, and to eliminating the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior.American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, culminating in Third Reich's infamous genocide. American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One doctor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was Josef Mengele, who continued his eugenic research in Auschwitz, focusing on twins.The Nazi's were eventually tried at the Nuremberg trials, for their long list of genocidal activities. One of the Nazis asks a question: What is the difference between the actions of the Germans and those of the Americans?We say, 'never forget,' and yet we have completely forgotten our own history. War Against the Weak is a gripping narrative of bad science at its worst, and a warning bell for the impending genetic age.