[Psychiatrists] from the euthanasia program[s] [in Germany] helped set up [the] extermination camps [in the east]

Wirth's successor at Hartheim, Franz Stangl, later became commandant of Treblinka.  Asked how he became inured to killing people, Stangl explained that he had been trained by doctors in the euthanasia program in 1940

Rosonoff later raises the question whether or not eugenics itself smacks of "nazism and fascism" (p. 812), but concludes that the ethics of eugenics are "scientific" rather than political in origin.

How many times have we heard White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, tell her audience that COVID was not political, but only a program to protect the American people?  That they rely not on politics, but on the science. 

Trying to give COVID of 2020 to 2021 a historical context, most people, most media, and pundits are framing its importance to the wrong event.  Too many like to compare COVID to the Spanish Flu of 1918.  The more accurate historical frame should be the WWII holocaust, mainly for the role that psychiatry and medical experts played in delivering so many Germans and Jews to their death.  Check out what Peter R. Breggin wrote about the role played by psychiatry in that holocaust.  

German psychiatrists proposed the extermination of mental patients before Hitler came to power. Then in Nazi Germany, organized psychiatry implemented involuntary eugenical sterilization and euthanasia, ultimately killing up to 100,000 German mental patients. The six psychiatric euthanasia centers utilized medical professionals, fake death certificates, gas chambers disguised as showers, and the mass burning of corpses. Psychiatrists from the euthanasia program also participated in the first formalized murders in the concentration camps. Inmates were “diagnosed" on euthanasia forms and sent to the psychiatric euthanasia centers. These facilities late r provided the training, personnel, and technology for the large r extermination camps. Medical observers from the United States and Germany at the Nuremberg trials concluded that the holocaust might not have taken place without psychiatry. This paper summarizes psychiatric participation in events leading to the holocaust and analyzes the underlying psychiatric principles that anticipated, encouraged, and paved the way for the Nazi extermination program. 

This was something.  

The crematorium ovens had been active up to the arrival of the American soldiers, with an admitted 350-400 cremations during the first 6 months of 1945. But unlike the extermination camps, which shut down with the impending arrival of allied troops, the psychiatrists had maintained their extermination program.

Abrams reported that a psychiatrist who led him through the hospital showed no remorse. He was not a Nazi party member, and believed that he had acted in the name of medicine. The nurses belonged to religious orders. The psychiatric director of the institution hanged himself in reaction to Abrams' arrival. 

We've all heard of Nazi death and concentration camps in Poland and Germany during WWII, but how many of us have heard of psychiatric extermination centers?  They were Hartheim [where 18,000 people were murdered], Hadamar, Sonncenstein, Grafeneck, Brandenburg, and Bernbcrg.

When one of the Berlin professors approved euthanasia, the sentence was carried out. Chronicity and incapacity for work were key criteria. The selected patients were then shipped to holding facilities and then ultimately to one of the six psychiatric extermination centers - Hartheim, Hadamar, Sonncnstein, Grafeneck, Brandenberg, and Bernbcrg [5]. Up to 100000 German psychiatric inmates were killed before Hitler ended the official program late in 1941 [6,7]. 

Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by euthanasia.  

The euthanasia centers were structured like medical schools. That's frightening. 

In The Murderers Among Us [11], Simon Wiesenthal observes that the psychiatric euthanasia centers were structured like medical schools: Hartheim was organized like a medical school--except that the "students" were not taught to save human life but to destroy it as efficiently as possible. The deaths of the victims were clinically studied, precisely photographed, scientifically perfected. 

That is something.  Here's your COVID alert.  Remember how the hospitals were fudging the COVID deaths to make the tally seem worse than it actually was to justify continued fear and further measures, like masks, extended lockdowns, and now vaccines?  [check out the first video and the comments below for a refresher] The psychiatrists and doctors running the psychiatric extermination centers did exactly the same thing. 

The presence of physicians and other health professionals in the euthanasia centers gave a false security to the victims who did not realize their fate until the very end. Faked death certificates were intended to disguise the deaths as natural in origin in order to hide an inmate's fate from his or her family and the public. 

One question arises is, how was it that these psychiatric executioners were so hardened, what made them continue with their enterprise given what they were doing to their fellow citizens?  

How had the perpetrators of the holocaust become emotionally hardened to performing their grim tasks?

Machines broke down, but the people handling them never did. How could it be that the people operating the gas chambers and ovens were more reliable than the machines? Had they been trained mechanically and psychologically to stand the terrific strain? The question bothered me for years. All facts pointed toward the conclusion that special cadres of technically skilled and emotionally hardened executioners were trained somewhere. Castle Hartheim and the other euthanasia centers were the answer. (p. 315) 

Continue reading Breggin's "Psychiatry's Role in the Holocaust," 1993 . . .

A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence, Fredric Wertham, 1966.  

The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Weisenthal Memoirs, Simon Weisenthal, 1967.

Nazis had a phrase which covered all abuses by the state, "fur Ihre Sicherheit" . . . "For your safety."

Nazi style. https://t.co/I4CHGZ2J8M

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) September 30, 2021

12 Reasons NOT To Speak Up!

I actually believe that there are cases and instances where you should not speak up, where discretion is the better part of valor.  Do you speak up when you learn some compromising detail of a friend or family member?  Do you speak up when you learn some compromising detail of an enemy, or even a stranger?  Maybe that latter one you might because you feel like you have no skin in the game and it's an easy way to win and show your power to crush some anonymous person.  Wow, what courage.  And that's what the call to speak up is really about: it's either your conscience or someone else, an ally, that is asking you to act courageously.

There are lots of injustices in the world that need attention that is true.  If someone is being physically harmed by another person, then, yes, by all means, speak up.  If someone is being psychologically abused, then, yes, by all means, speak up to bring restitution to the victim.  But besides exercising your mouth during speech, you should also exercise your brain and think before you speak.  And measure the risks to you and to the person you're talking about and how your audience will react.  Will your audience be offended as much as you are?  Did the person you're talking about offend some kind of community standard for which you and your life is the exemplary standard-bearer?  Is it worth it to you to bring the community down upon one individual and that once that individual has been dealt with you and your life has been restored?  Just because you're encouraged to speak up doesn’t mean that your speech edifies your audience.  They may not care as much as you do about someone else's activities unless they're being directly harmed, assaulted or stolen from.  How involved or invested are you in someone else’s life?  

The other thing to consider is that people are petty.  They don't require much of an ethical standard for them to destroy and degrade other people.  And those who like to destroy others will do so just because it's a lift to their perceived power or self-esteem, which is even more of a banal motive.  There's that song by Band of Horses, called The Funeral," about a guy who hates the ethics of small talk and other people's expectations of you at social gatherings.  It's the lyrics that are stark, 

I'm coming up only to hold you under
I'm coming up only to show you wrong
And to know you is hard, we wonder
To know you all wrong, we warn

Ooh, ooh
Ooh...
Really too late to call, so we wait for
Morning to wake you, it's all we got

Danny MacAskill made that song famous by his 2009 video of him pulling bike tricks around Edinburgh.

The lines are interesting for they tend toward mean interpretation of others and events.  The speaker is talking in general about his performance at informal and formal social events.  His line of "I'm coming up only to hold you under" is in itself vicious envy with the subsequent line "I'm coming up only to show you wrong" tempered by argument; it's less violent.  

I'm coming up only to hold you under
I'm coming up only to show you wrong
And to know you is hard, we wonder

The 3rd and 4th line seem to temper his opening envy, 

And to know you is hard, we wonder

To know you all wrong, we warn

"We wonder" is the narrator admitting that he doesn't have any social skills to know someone, so instead of getting to know another he is left to wonder, left to construct the details of someone else's life in the abstract.  And conceding the limits of this form of acquiring knowledge of another person by saying, ". . . To know you all wrong," meaning that in conjecture people get it wrong, that we mistake someone for who they are. 

I am not a fan of this.  I am not forgiving of these kinds of errors.  

Back to the speaking up.  The real courage required to speak involves taking on the government or corporation oppressors.  Speaking against these folks, whistleblowing against these institutions is different that spreading destructive and unproductive gossip about a coworker, friend, or family member.  Betraying your family, why, that's just shitty.  Likewise is betraying a friend.  But I've seen one coworker gossip about another and the gossip left her crushed and she quit her job.  I knew the gal who quit.  Whether what was said about her was true or not, I found her to be a competent and decent woman.  

Too many folks think they need to be cruel to gain respect from others as though cruelty is a kind of virtue.  In war, maybe.  Least that's what the American soldiers in Vietnam admitted from those involved in the My Lai Massacre.  

There is that famous phrase, “

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 

I don't even think that most young people today know this phrase or understand it.  It’s a quote routinely attributed to Edmund Burke. Apparently, he never uttered these words.  It looks like the quote can be traced back to the utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who delivered an 1867 inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews and stated: 

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

Understand the context here.  This was said on the cusp of the revolutionary war, a statement that was made to indict the complacency of fellow citizens to rise up against a tyrannical government.  This is not one person indicting another and challenging him to a duel.  This is not someone making a speech to incite a mob to go kill a single man.  This is not the context of a fight between two individuals.  But in today’s social justice world, its acolytes adopt this mob-like tactic to every personal grievance, to every personal offense.  It’s that jealous boyfriend who writes on a freeway wall, “Jeffrey Sucks Dick.”  We don’t care.  But in today’s social justice world, corporate heads are now forced to care and delegate to managers to make sure they care about the slightest offense to one of the little women at the water cooler. 

So think first before you speak.  Think about what the pay-off is.  Think about what you gain by it.  Think about who it hurts and if that punishment is just or equal to the offense or crime.  It’s just as Carl Jung said, "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge."  And it was English writer, Graham Greene, who said, "We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts."

2021 Jab Cup Melbourne, Australia

Thank you to the great Lew Rockwell.

A man walking his dog is detained. Arresting officer felt good about it.

Australian man arrested for maskless dog walking—a serious offense in Chairman Dan’s Victoria.  pic.twitter.com/OLJRkjXapF

— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) September 28, 2021