The Yellow Peril then;
The Filthy Disease Ridden Oklahoman Children Now
In the 1870's the Yellow Peril referred to a racist perception that Chinese immigrants were an enormous threat to whites. The fear was of a horde of yellow people swamping Western societies and that the Chinese were lesser men, apes, too primitive and childlike to adopt Western ideals. The threat was later used as a pretext to actually invade China and carve concessions and territories by Germany, Brittan, the U.S., and a host of other countries.
Working class men were worried about lower wage Chinese immigrants stealing their jobs which lead to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred Chinese immigration and existing Chinese legal residents from becoming citizens. None other than Horace Greeley proclaimed that Chinese were "uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female a prostitute of the basest order."
The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 ended in a Japanese victory which stoked another round of racism, a sense of unease of the vast number of the yellow horde ready to boil out of their ancestral lands and overwhelm Western culture. Once again we saw legislation like the Immigration Restriction Act of 1917 and the National Origins Act of 1924 that kept nearly all Asian immigrants from entering the U.S..
Such racism existed back in those days but we don't put up with it now some will say. So it is all the more ironic that a state senator of Chinese ancestry is using the same tactics against some Oklahomans, labeling them as unclean, filthy, disease spreading child like figures with no concept of doing what is right for society and too ignorant to know what is best for themselves and their children.
We are looking at thirteen states with legislation introduced that would eliminate exemptions from compulsory vaccinations caused by hysteria arising from 150 measles cases this year out of the 360 millions living in the U.S.. Here in Oklahoma Yen and his fascist followers are going to point to the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts, one of the few Supreme Court cases on compulsory vaccination and we ought to take a closer look at that case to see if the same legal reasoning still applies. Can we not use the modern understandings of immunology that reduce risk of transmission and avoid forcing children and adults to accept vaccination.
Noted Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes was one of the justices that gave us the decision that decided that a citizen had no right to refuse vaccination. Holmes also gave us Buck v. Bell that allowed sterilization of undesirables and the feeble minded in which Holmes quoted the Jacobson decision. Holmes was a proponent of eugenics, the Nazi policy of eliminating the feeble minded in order to build a master race. Holmes went even further in supporting dysgenics, the execution of the feeble minded, the undesirable, and the inadequate.
These days any sane person is going to recoil in horror at the thought of creating a particular bloodline through infanticide and sterilizations but Holmes thought it was a noble idea that would create a better America. So the idea of forcing a simple vaccination was hardly something of any real concern as the purification of the bloodline was more important than the individual's rights. And when the state is allowed to compel vaccination then the state also has the power to test for heritable disease such as breast cancer, Down Syndrome, or cystic fibrosis and forcibly sterilize people to eliminate the diseases?
National Socialism, the party of Adolph Hitler, believed that the state had ultimate control to decide was best for the individual by deciding what was best for society. Holmes went so far as to advocate substituting artificial selection for the natural death of those deemed inadequate. He advocated contempt for those societies not prepared to kill anyone below standard, stating that: "condemn at once with instant execution what now is left for nature to destroy." That included putting infants to death if they were born with defects to prevent the continuance of the unfit. In one of his more brutal opinions he said this:
"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Like Holmes Senator Yen wants to transform law to lessen individual rights in favor of the power of the state to force medical procedures for the "good of society". Like Holmes Senator Yen is advocating that the liberty of the 14th Amendment is not an absolute right and that the safety and health of the community will override personal liberty.
However the Supreme Court started moving away from an absolutely powerful state long ago and replaced that with requiring the state to take the least restrictive means to achieve a public purpose. If we start off with the belief that vaccines work and protect the vaccinated child then it is a given that the only child at risk is the child that is unvaccinated.
Comrade Yen is actually advocating the creation of a better race of citizens, free from all manner of diseases, no different than advocating for the sterilizing the disabled or for preventing mixed race marriages. The idea that each of us lives our own lives obeying our own will as long as we don't harm the rights of others is completely rejected by Comrade Yen.
