"Implicit racism" as a "medical condition"

[NewsFeed]

“Implicit racism” as a “medical condition”

There has been a general trend in academia for several generations to de-legitimise views that are contrary to the dominant liberal foundations of post-1945 Western society. A primary aim of this movement is to portray illiberal views as mentally questionable. It is part of a political agenda masquerading as objective scholarship, and has aims akin to the use of psychiatry as a political weapon in the USSR. This paper briefly considers the implications of a new study that suggests that ‘racism’ is a treatable medical condition.

The portrayal of one’s political opponents as ‘insane’ and in need of psychiatric treatment was used to wide effect in the USSR. It served to both discredit the targeted subject and generally place whatever political views he had as being beyond the pale of normal society; perhaps as even ‘dangerous’. It was not until 1971 when the psychiatric reports of six Soviets dissidents were smuggled to the West that it was concluded that there was a “gross abuse of professional practice in the USSR”. This had begun in the 1930s when ‘political patients’ (sic) were committed to a psychiatric hospital in Kazan. The scenario that was maintained in the USSR for decades was that a dissident would be arrested for “anti-Soviet activities,” examined by a psychiatric commission, “and found to be insane and not responsible. This eliminated the need for a trial”. [1] Professors Block and Reddaway wrote:

“The authorities’ goal is to ensure future conformism and compliance. In addition, to label the ideas of a dissenter as a manifestation of madness is an easy and convenient way of discrediting the group he represents. How could any normal person agree with such nonsense when even the dissenter himself, after a little medical acutance, sees that he had propagated pure fantasy?” [2]

Block and Reddaway explained that in 1950 at a meeting of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky founded a new school of psychiatry in which schizophrenia came to be the diagnosis most commonly applied to dissenters, as well as ‘paranoid personality disorder’. Dissent was viewed as a ‘symptom of several mental illnesses’.[3]

However, the Soviets’ Western counterparts in the social sciences have been no less zealous in establishing the limitations on what is a ‘normal’ political opinion and what is to be de-legitimatized as ‘personality disorder’. For this purpose the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was enlisted. This had been established in Weimar Germany, and it exponents had then moved en masse to the USA under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, where it was re-established as the Institute of Social Research, in New York City, with the help of Columbia University. In Germany the Marxian-Freudian synthesis of revolution and sexology had not been well-received by the orthodox Communists, but it received a ready welcome in the USA where the Frankfurt School became a major influence

----- snip -----


read full article at source: http://www.quarterly-review.org/impl...cal-condition/