Tag Archives: Nazi Germany

Normalizing Evil

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by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

In the past week or two there have been doctors saying how healthy Felon 47 is, along with Fund Managers openly wondering if he is insane. I have another hypothesis.

I don’t really think Felon 47 is insane, I think he is evil and crazy (there is a difference). I still remember when the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing wrote that we have never scientifically studied “Evil.” She noted that at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazis where they were tried for “Crimes Against Humanity,” where they exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, Afro-Germans, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled, those Nazis were ruled to be perfectly sane by the world’s leading psychologists.

Now, I don’t want to make light of anyone’s mental health or this nation’s severe mental health crisis. Yet, every time some man does something horrible, particularly if he’s a white man, people speculate about his mental health instead of calling him the evil son-of-a-bitch that he is. I feel the same way about these school shooters who are overwhelmingly white and male who try to kill everybody they can, all because they can’t get a girlfriend.

Felon 47 is trying his best to get rid of every brown skinned person who migrated to the USA without giving any of them due process as he shreds all the basic tenets of our Constitution. He’s sending a majority of people who are not criminals off to other countries while his sycophants explain these actions as a part of keeping America safe. Short of putting them all into ovens to get rid of them the way Nazis would, he has ordered them all to an uncertain fate somewhere else in the world.

Everything Felon 47 is doing to immigrants and legal citizens, who happen to not be white, is going to make this nation a hundred times less safe. Go piss off the world and you will find out that the world is not majority white; it never has been. 

People who voted for Felon 47 are also crazy and evil too—and dumb.  Did this previous italicized sentence upset you a bit? Did it sound like I was unfairly vilifying an entire segment of the US population without giving them an opportunity to explain their choices or even redeem themselves? Well, I don’t give a damn because that is exactly what Felon 47 and his supporters are doing to immigrants, women, Black folks, Latinos, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled. 

Felon 47 supporters voted for this; and even if some of them can prove they didn’t think Felon 47 would do all of this harm, no self-respecting Black or Brown person with half a brain is going to try to weed out who might be on their side from those who would kill or harm us. We have never had that kind of time to deal with anyone or anything that normalizes evil.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author.  Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers.  All Rights Reserved.

Race and Reproductive Rights

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by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I remember a conversation with my late cousin Billie Allen, who was an actor, dancer and stage director. She was here in Atlanta in 2003 directing her close friend, actor Ruby Dee in “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” a play written by Bridgette Wimberly.

The play was about a woman who performed back room abortions for young women who were in serious trouble. The protagonist named “Old Woman” performed abortions out of mercy and out of a sense that those pregnant women were having their futures derailed by unplanned pregnancies.

Billie mailed me a copy of the play before it came to Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, and not long after it had a successful off-Broadway premiere at New York’s Women’s Project Theater in 2001. Turning me into her personal dramaturge again, she and I discussed the hot topic of abortion. Then she shared with me something I did not know.

She told me that back in the 1940s and 1950s, when a Hollywood actress became pregnant and had too many professional and contractual obligations to a studio, she typically went to Puerto Rico to have an abortion.

I soon learned that in 1937, the Puerto Rican legislature made abortion and contraception legal. It also made sterilization legal. That’s the kicker—sterilization. An island with a population of people, many of who have Indian, African, and Spanish ancestry were often seen as expendable.

Puerto Rico’s legislature voted with all of the eugenicist and racist taint that emanated from the United States’ highly racist sterilization programs that were completely in line with the eugenics (racial cleansing) going on in Nazi Germany.

I mentioned to Billie that I had seen a short documentary called “La Operación,” by Ana María García back in the early 1980s. It was a documentary about how people involved with “population control” arrived in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 1960s and sterilized about a third of the island’s women who were of childbearing age.

While there were certainly Puerto Rican women who no longer wanted to have more children, many women were sterilized without knowing exactly what was being done to them.

Puerto Rico was the location of where the first large scale trials of birth control pills took place before “the pill” debuted in 1960 in the United States. Various pills were first tested on a tiny group of women in Boston. Yet, the largest group of clinical guinea pigs were Puerto Rican women; other women of color in the Western hemisphere soon followed.

In 1933 Margaret Sanger, long heralded as a leader in the birth control movement, wrote in Birth Control Review that “Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need …We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.” People of color were the bad stock.

In 1939 in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, one of the architects of the United States’ eugenics movement (and heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune), Sanger wrote that they should use Black male ministers to appeal to Black women to get them to agree to be sterilized. She sought to use Black women’s typical deference to Black clergy to accomplish her mission.

By 1955 biologist Gregory Pincus visited Puerto Rico and found it the best location to test birth control pills. After all, the island had no laws preventing contraception. Pincus and his partner John Rock, a gynecologist, promoted their work as poverty-prevention by making it possible for poor Puerto Rican women to have fewer babies.

And here we cisgender women are right now in 2025. We all worry about losing the right to make decisions about our own bodies; and we should. Yet, early birth control and abortion initiatives were never about women having the right to make their own reproductive choices.

The primary objective was to slow or stop the biological reproduction of any woman who did not belong to an accepted class or status of women classifiable as “white.”

Without fully understanding the racist origins of the state’s reproductive control over women, you will miss its original intent. Reproductive procedures, no matter how necessary they are, remain a political football; and Puerto Rican women, and other women of color were its first sacrifices.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks via my CashApp.

My copy of the script of “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” and one of several promotional posters for “La Operación.”

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author.  Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers.  All Rights Reserved.

A Holiday Thought: What Educators Cannot Do Alone

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©️ by Leslye Joy Allen

In my previous blog about the USA’s Literacy Crisis, I mentioned the tragic fact that only 25 percent of American adults read above the 6th grade level; and the consequences of not reading is a poorly informed population that voted against their own interests in this previous presidential election.

But this blog is not just about reading, it is also about developing a wider sense of civic responsibility in the aftermath of this presidential election because not all reading serves equitable and fair purposes. The literature so many members of the Right Wing want to ban are books that often tell inconvenient truths; truths that make some people uncomfortable. But here is another uncomfortable truth.

I can never forget that when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Germany was one of the most literate nations on this earth. Nazi Germany effectively used written propaganda to foster public support for a corrupt and merciless regime that ended the lives of over 6.0 million Jews, along with Afro-Germans, Gays and Lesbians, Gypsies, and the disabled. The Nazis also burned well over 25,000 books that are lost forever.

Therefore, a literate and book-loving population alone will not save the USA. (God knows the folks who purchase a Trump Bible are living proof that literacy isn’t a perfect cure.) Nevertheless, many US Teachers, Instructors, and Professors will inevitably choose books that the Far Right will dislike. In the coming months and years, I anticipate battles between Republican officials and school boards, and challenges to college curricula. Yet…

Educators cannot fight alone. So, from Black Friday to Christmas Eve, if you know any children—your own and other kids—forego the video games and high-priced sneakers, and other useless items for Christmas. Go to your local bookstore and buy them books.

If you know kids that do not have a Library Card, take them to your Public Library and get them a Library Card. While there, ask them if they are interested in any particular thing and let the librarian introduce them to a new subject or area of interest. This is not a miracle cure for what we all may be facing in the next four years, but a better informed population beats one that is not informed at all.

The recent presidential election proved two things: people who don’t read often lack critical thinking skills and can be led to vote against their own interests; and many more can be led to not vote. I just had a heated discussion with someone who did not vote; and I don’t have the strength to write the details of the 45-minute lecture I gave to this individual.

©️ Leslye Joy Allen

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https:/leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers.  All Rights Reserved.