Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

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value
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Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by value »

I have investigated eugenics and the Nazi ideology as precursor to my study of GMO (eugenics on nature) and it was discovered that the true origin of the Holocaust was not hatred but an at that time developing status quo of the international psychiatric establishment that believed that the human mind causally 'originates' in the brain (the belief in validity of the philosophical concept psychopathology).

The ideal that arose was for humanity to self-control evolution (eugenics) which in practice at that time resulted in an attempt to kill off weak parts of humanity starting with psychiatric patients.

German psychiatry started killing psychiatric patients systematically countrywide using starvation diets 20 years before the Nazi party was founded. The following German book by well known author Heinz Faulstich provides information:

(1998) Forced euthanasia by Starvation in Psychiatry 1914-1949
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/H ... 0ab29306d2

The idea behind eugenics – racial hygiene – that led to the Nazi Holocaust was supported by Universities around the world. It started with an idea that was not naturally defensible and that was thought to require trickery and deceit. It resulted in a demand for people with the capabilities of Nazis.

The famous German Holocaust scholar Ernst Klee has described the situation as follows:

“The Nazis didn't need psychiatry, it was the other way around, psychiatry needed the Nazis.”

A video report by Holocaust scholar Ernst Klee: “Diagnose and Exterminate


The Holocaust started with the killing of 300.000 psychiatric patients and the starvation practice that was later discovered in the camps originated from psychiatry.

The Holocaust was performed by people that believed that what they were doing was 'good' and the justification for their idea of 'good' originated from the international psychiatric establishment of that time.

The German extermination program originally had a scientifically acceptable basis and was supported by Universities around the world, including in England and USA. The USA started with mass sterilization programs for psychiatric patients based on the same eugenic ideas and similar programs have also taken place in several European countries.

In 2014, New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau published the book The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men, which showed that more than 10,000 high-ranking Nazis emigrated to the United States after World War II. Their war crimes were quickly forgotten, and some received help and protection from the US government.

(2014) The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men
https://www.amazon.com/Nazis-Next-Door- ... 0544577884

People weren't being a 'monster' or doing evil from their own perspective. They were fulfilling a honourable task for the status quo idea of 'good' of the psychiatric establishment at that time. A status quo that demanded barbaric practices as a 'necessary evil' to cleanse the human race from what was deemed a true evil for humanity's evolution and future. They were serving a 'greater good'.

Critical psychiatrist Dr. Peter R. Breggin has researched it for years and says the following about it:

The psychiatric eradication program was not a hidden, secret scandal of psychiatry—at least not in the beginning. It was organized in a series of national meetings and workshops by leading professors of psychiatry and directors of psychiatric hospitals. So-called euthanasia forms were distributed among the hospitals and each death was then given final approval in Berlin by a committee of the country's leading psychiatrists.

In January 1940, patients were transferred to six special extermination centers with a staff of psychiatrists. At the end of 1941, the program was clandestinely outraged by Hitler's lack of enthusiasm, but by then between 100,000 and 200,000 German psychiatric patients had already been murdered. Since then, individual institutions, such as the one in Kaufbeuren, have continued on their own initiative, even taking in new patients for the purpose of killing them. At the end of the war, many large institutions were completely empty and estimates from various war tribunals, including that of Nuremberg, range from 250,000 to 300,000 dead, mostly patients of psychiatric

“The tragic thing is, the psychiatrists didn't need a warrant. They acted on their own initiative. They did not carry out a death sentence handed down by someone else. They were the legislators who set the rules for deciding who should die; they were the administrators who worked out the procedures, supplied patients and places, and determined the methods of killing; they pronounced a sentence of life or death in each individual case; they were the executioners who carried out the sentences or – without being forced to do so – handed over their patients to be murdered in other institutions; they guided the slow dying and often watched it.”

The bond between Hitler and psychiatrists was so close that much of Mein Kampf literally corresponds to the language and tone of the major international journals and psychiatric textbooks of the period. To quote some of many such passages in Mein Kampf:

“To demand that the feeble-minded be prevented from producing equally feeble-minded progeny is a demand made for the purest of reasons and, if carried out systematically, represents the most humane act of mankind…”

“Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy should not let their suffering continue in the bodies of their children…”

“Preventing the ability and opportunity to procreate in the physically degenerate and mentally ill… would not only liberate humanity from an immense misfortune, but also lead to a recovery that seems hardly conceivable today.”

After taking power, Hitler gained support from psychiatrists and social scientists from all over the world. Many articles in the world's leading medical journalThe patients were killed for their own good as well as that of the community.


(1938) Exterminaton of life unwrothy of life (Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens)
Author: Psychiatry professor Alfred Hoche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life

The personal hatred of Hitler might be the reason that certain groups of people, such as the Jews, were included in the originally psychiatric extermination program. While that might be considered pure evil, in practice for people on the ground it might not have been easy to oppose the propagated idea that the status quo of the psychiatric establishment - a greater good - was being served.

How could people in that dark time oppose a force such as an international psychiatric establishment?

--

The advertisement for the first eugenics congress shows a link with psychiatry or people who believed in it, which can help explain the origin.

Psychiatry is based on determinism (a belief that there is no free will) and the idea that mind originates in the brain causally (the belief in validity of the philosophical concept psychopathology). The flyer for the first eugenics congress shows how the brain causally explains mind.

Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution
Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution

The idea at the foundation of psychiatry, the idea that there is no more to life and the human mind than what can be shown to exist using empirical science (determinism), is the same idea that lays at the basis of eugenics. For a desire to 'stand above life' to arise, one has to be convinced that life is meaningless.

What is the meaning of life?” is a question that has driven many to atrocities, against themselves and against others. In a wicked attempt to overcome the 'weakness' resulting from the inability to answer the question, some believe that they should live with a gun under their nose.

An often cited quote from Nazi Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word culture, I unlock my gun!”

It is easy to argue that life has no meaning because empirical evidence is impossible.

In science the inability to define the meaning of life has resulted in an ideal to abolish morality.

(2018) Immoral advances: Is science out of control?
To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... f-control/

Morality is based on 'values' and that logically means that science also wants to get rid of philosophy.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 – We Scholars) shared the following perspective on the evolution of science in relation to philosophy.

The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the self- glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime – which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct of the populace cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master” – what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account.

It shows the path that science has pursued since as early as 1850. Science has intended to rid itself of philosophy, which includes morality.

When science is practised autonomously and intends to get rid of any influence of philosophy, the 'knowing' of a scientific fact necessarily entails certainty. Without certainty, philosophy would be essential, and that would be obvious to any scientist, which it is not.

It means that there is a dogmatic belief involved (a belief in uniformitarianism) that legitimises autonomous application of science without thinking about whether it is actually 'good' what is being done (i.e. without morality).

The idea that the facts of science are valid without philosophy results in the natural tendency to completely abolish morality.

This might explain why in that dark time before the Holocaust morality was stand to lose ground in the face of an international scientific establishment that was reaching its heights. The rise of science resulted in an attempt to shed humanity of morality.

The root of the problem that led to the Nazi holocaust and barbaric (immoral) practices therefore has been the preceding evolution of science that resulted in the suppression of philosophy and morality.

--

What do you think of my evaluation of the history of the Holocaust and my conclusions with regard its origin?
value
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by value »

Eugenics is an emergent topic in recent years. In 2019 a group of over 11,000 scientists argued that eugenics can be used to reduce world population.

(2020) The eugenics debate isn't over – but we should be wary of people who claim it can reduce world population
Andrew Sabisky, a UK government adviser, recently resigned over comments supporting eugenics. Around the same time, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins—best known for his book The Selfish Gene—provoked controversy when tweeting that while eugenics is morally deplorable, it "would work."
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-eugenics- ... eople.html

(2020) Eugenics is trending. That’s a problem.
Any attempt to reduce world population must focus on reproductive justice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ ... s-problem/

The Nazis planned during their downfall that they would come back to power through an economic empire to put into practice their fascist plans (eugenics): a 4th empire through the power of big corporations.

The Daily Mail published a classified military intelligence report in 2009 revealing the scope of the plans.

Revealed: The Secret Report Showing How The Nazis Planned A Fourth Reich… In The EU
The Red House Report is a bridge from a sunny present to a dark past. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, once said: 'In 50 years' time nobody will think of nation states.'

Extraordinary revelations: The 1944 Red House Report, detailing 'plans of German industrialists to engage in underground activity'
Extraordinary revelations: The 1944 Red House Report, detailing 'plans of German industrialists to engage in underground activity'

For now, the nation state endures. But these three typewritten pages are a reminder that today's drive towards a European federal state is inexorably tangled up with the plans of the SS and German industrialists for a Fourth Reich - an economic rather than military imperium.

The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire - but not just German.

Nazi Germany did export massive amounts of capital through neutral countries. German businesses did set up a network of front companies abroad. The German economy did soon recover after 1945.

The Third Reich was defeated militarily, but powerful Nazi-era bankers, industrialists and civil servants, reborn as democrats, soon prospered in the new West Germany. There they worked for a new cause: European economic and political integration.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... h--EU.html

--

I noticed the following blog on Townhall.com in 2020:

(2020) Is America Starting Down the Path of Nazi Germany?
I cannot express how truly sad writing this op-ed has made me. But I'm a patriotic American. And I'm an American Jew. I have studied the beginnings of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. And I can clearly see parallels with what is happening in America today.

OPEN YOUR EYES. Study what happened in Nazi Germany during the infamous Kristallnacht. The night of Nov. 9-10, 1938, marked the beginning of the Nazis' attack on the Jews. Jewish homes and businesses were looted, desecrated and burned while the police and “good people” stood by and watched. Nazis laughed and cheered as books were burned.

Wayne Allyn Root – bestselling author and nationally syndicated talk show host on USA Radio Network


https://townhall.com/columnists/wayneal ... y-n2570979
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by Gee »

Value,

Thank you for researching and producing this thread. There is a lot of information that I have not seen displayed so well before. And yes, I have seen the parallels, but don't know what I can do about these issues, if anything.

Gee
value
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by value »

The following post by well known philosopher Bonnie Burstow, an anti-psychiatry scholar (someone involved in criticism on psychiatry), might be of interest for a more current perspective paired with ideological views, especially concerning psychiatry in the US.

The post started with the following citation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)

(2019) Psychiatric Eugenics Then and Now—You Betcha It’s Still Happening
https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/07/ps ... n-and-now/

Madinamerica.com is an initiative by bestseller author and medical journalist Robert Whitaker who was nominated for the Pulitzer price for articles about psychiatric drugs in the Boston Globe. The platform is quite popular and professors from all over the world participate with podcasts and other content. The website might have more articles on the subject from prominent authors.

With regard my research. It merely concerned theory for me, not an intend to change anything or to argue how things should be (i.e. no politics). I have never been ideologically or politically minded and tend to view things from multiple perspectives (i.e. I intend to remain neutral).

My research led me into questioning science and specifically the idea that the facts of science are valid without philosophy (a belief in uniformitarianism). The result of such a dogmatic belief is the natural tendency to abolish morality and that might explain - in part - what has happened during the Nazi-era, especially when it concerns the question why people in general would cooperate with horrific immoral practices.

The ideal of science to abolish morality and the consequent ideas propagated as a greater good for humanity by a scientific establishment is hard to challenge for individual people. It would require 'philosophy beyond science' to do so and science was in its infancy and fighting its way into the world by suppressing philosophy and religions, as shown by the quote in the OP of Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 – We Scholars).
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by Sculptor1 »

value wrote: September 2nd, 2022, 5:55 pm I have investigated eugenics and the Nazi ideology as precursor to my study of GMO (eugenics on nature) and it was discovered that the true origin of the Holocaust was not hatred but an at that time developing status quo of the international psychiatric establishment that believed that the human mind causally 'originates' in the brain (the belief in validity of the philosophical concept psychopathology).
You cite a thing that does not agree with you.

The ideal that arose was for humanity to self-control evolution (eugenics) which in practice at that time resulted in an attempt to kill off weak parts of humanity starting with psychiatric patients.
That accounts for the genocide against mental and physical disability, and maybe homosexuality. Possibly against slavs, but not the chief victims the Jews.

German psychiatry started killing psychiatric patients systematically countrywide using starvation diets 20 years before the Nazi party was founded. The following German book by well known author Heinz Faulstich provides information:

(1998) Forced euthanasia by Starvation in Psychiatry 1914-1949
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/H ... 0ab29306d2

The idea behind eugenics – racial hygiene – that led to the Nazi Holocaust was supported by Universities around the world. It started with an idea that was not naturally defensible and that was thought to require trickery and deceit. It resulted in a demand for people with the capabilities of Nazis.

The famous German Holocaust scholar Ernst Klee has described the situation as follows:

“The Nazis didn't need psychiatry, it was the other way around, psychiatry needed the Nazis.”

A video report by Holocaust scholar Ernst Klee: “Diagnose and Exterminate


The Holocaust started with the killing of 300.000 psychiatric patients and the starvation practice that was later discovered in the camps originated from psychiatry.

The Holocaust was performed by people that believed that what they were doing was 'good' and the justification for their idea of 'good' originated from the international psychiatric establishment of that time.

The German extermination program originally had a scientifically acceptable basis and was supported by Universities around the world, including in England and USA. The USA started with mass sterilization programs for psychiatric patients based on the same eugenic ideas and similar programs have also taken place in several European countries.

In 2014, New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau published the book The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men, which showed that more than 10,000 high-ranking Nazis emigrated to the United States after World War II. Their war crimes were quickly forgotten, and some received help and protection from the US government.

(2014) The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men
https://www.amazon.com/Nazis-Next-Door- ... 0544577884

People weren't being a 'monster' or doing evil from their own perspective. They were fulfilling a honourable task for the status quo idea of 'good' of the psychiatric establishment at that time. A status quo that demanded barbaric practices as a 'necessary evil' to cleanse the human race from what was deemed a true evil for humanity's evolution and future. They were serving a 'greater good'.

Critical psychiatrist Dr. Peter R. Breggin has researched it for years and says the following about it:

The psychiatric eradication program was not a hidden, secret scandal of psychiatry—at least not in the beginning. It was organized in a series of national meetings and workshops by leading professors of psychiatry and directors of psychiatric hospitals. So-called euthanasia forms were distributed among the hospitals and each death was then given final approval in Berlin by a committee of the country's leading psychiatrists.

In January 1940, patients were transferred to six special extermination centers with a staff of psychiatrists. At the end of 1941, the program was clandestinely outraged by Hitler's lack of enthusiasm, but by then between 100,000 and 200,000 German psychiatric patients had already been murdered. Since then, individual institutions, such as the one in Kaufbeuren, have continued on their own initiative, even taking in new patients for the purpose of killing them. At the end of the war, many large institutions were completely empty and estimates from various war tribunals, including that of Nuremberg, range from 250,000 to 300,000 dead, mostly patients of psychiatric

“The tragic thing is, the psychiatrists didn't need a warrant. They acted on their own initiative. They did not carry out a death sentence handed down by someone else. They were the legislators who set the rules for deciding who should die; they were the administrators who worked out the procedures, supplied patients and places, and determined the methods of killing; they pronounced a sentence of life or death in each individual case; they were the executioners who carried out the sentences or – without being forced to do so – handed over their patients to be murdered in other institutions; they guided the slow dying and often watched it.”

The bond between Hitler and psychiatrists was so close that much of Mein Kampf literally corresponds to the language and tone of the major international journals and psychiatric textbooks of the period. To quote some of many such passages in Mein Kampf:

“To demand that the feeble-minded be prevented from producing equally feeble-minded progeny is a demand made for the purest of reasons and, if carried out systematically, represents the most humane act of mankind…”

“Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy should not let their suffering continue in the bodies of their children…”

“Preventing the ability and opportunity to procreate in the physically degenerate and mentally ill… would not only liberate humanity from an immense misfortune, but also lead to a recovery that seems hardly conceivable today.”

After taking power, Hitler gained support from psychiatrists and social scientists from all over the world. Many articles in the world's leading medical journalThe patients were killed for their own good as well as that of the community.


(1938) Exterminaton of life unwrothy of life (Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens)
Author: Psychiatry professor Alfred Hoche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life

The personal hatred of Hitler might be the reason that certain groups of people, such as the Jews, were included in the originally psychiatric extermination program. While that might be considered pure evil, in practice for people on the ground it might not have been easy to oppose the propagated idea that the status quo of the psychiatric establishment - a greater good - was being served.

How could people in that dark time oppose a force such as an international psychiatric establishment?

--

The advertisement for the first eugenics congress shows a link with psychiatry or people who believed in it, which can help explain the origin.

Psychiatry is based on determinism (a belief that there is no free will) and the idea that mind originates in the brain causally (the belief in validity of the philosophical concept psychopathology). The flyer for the first eugenics congress shows how the brain causally explains mind.


eugenics-congres-flyer.jpg


The idea at the foundation of psychiatry, the idea that there is no more to life and the human mind than what can be shown to exist using empirical science (determinism), is the same idea that lays at the basis of eugenics. For a desire to 'stand above life' to arise, one has to be convinced that life is meaningless.

What is the meaning of life?” is a question that has driven many to atrocities, against themselves and against others. In a wicked attempt to overcome the 'weakness' resulting from the inability to answer the question, some believe that they should live with a gun under their nose.

An often cited quote from Nazi Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word culture, I unlock my gun!”

It is easy to argue that life has no meaning because empirical evidence is impossible.

In science the inability to define the meaning of life has resulted in an ideal to abolish morality.

(2018) Immoral advances: Is science out of control?
To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... f-control/

Morality is based on 'values' and that logically means that science also wants to get rid of philosophy.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 – We Scholars) shared the following perspective on the evolution of science in relation to philosophy.

The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the self- glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime – which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct of the populace cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master” – what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account.

It shows the path that science has pursued since as early as 1850. Science has intended to rid itself of philosophy, which includes morality.

When science is practised autonomously and intends to get rid of any influence of philosophy, the 'knowing' of a scientific fact necessarily entails certainty. Without certainty, philosophy would be essential, and that would be obvious to any scientist, which it is not.

It means that there is a dogmatic belief involved (a belief in uniformitarianism) that legitimises autonomous application of science without thinking about whether it is actually 'good' what is being done (i.e. without morality).

The idea that the facts of science are valid without philosophy results in the natural tendency to completely abolish morality.

This might explain why in that dark time before the Holocaust morality was stand to lose ground in the face of an international scientific establishment that was reaching its heights. The rise of science resulted in an attempt to shed humanity of morality.

The root of the problem that led to the Nazi holocaust and barbaric (immoral) practices therefore has been the preceding evolution of science that resulted in the suppression of philosophy and morality.

--

What do you think of my evaluation of the history of the Holocaust and my conclusions with regard its origin?
Eugenics was common enough at the time with mass sterilisations in many western countries including the US and the UK. Additional barriers to reproduction were also levelled at other "racial" groups throughout the empire and amongst native peoples, where breeding was disincentivised.
So much is history.

The Jews can not be explained in this way and was more about Hitler's personal hang up and generations of prejudice.
value
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by value »

Sculptor1 wrote: September 3rd, 2022, 2:40 pmYou cite a thing that does not agree with you.
The right link should have been https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psyc ... index.html

A specific citation from that article:

If psychiatry is really? a branch of medicine, we should see the specific causal hypotheses emerge about mechanisms that cause the symptoms of mental illness. Psychopathology is to be identified as the departure of a psychological system from its proper state.

Sculptor1 wrote: September 3rd, 2022, 2:40 pmThat accounts for the genocide against mental and physical disability, and maybe homosexuality. Possibly against slavs, but not the chief victims the Jews.[

...

Eugenics was common enough at the time with mass sterilisations in many western countries including the US and the UK. Additional barriers to reproduction were also levelled at other "racial" groups throughout the empire and amongst native peoples, where breeding was disincentivised.
So much is history.

The Jews can not be explained in this way and was more about Hitler's personal hang up and generations of prejudice.
While that may be so, what about the justification for what was done towards the regular public?

Arguably, it originated from his book Mein Kampf that he wrote while imprisoned.

In "Mein Kampf," published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He started to hate Jews only after Germany's loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaus ... ff47c10000 (Why Did Adolf Hitler Hate the Jews?, 2016)

To cite psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin that has researched the role of psychiatry during the Nazi period:

The bond between Hitler and psychiatrists was so close that much of Mein Kampf literally corresponds to the language and tone of the major international journals and psychiatric textbooks of the period.

After taking power, Hitler gained support from psychiatrists and social scientists from all over the world. Many articles in the world's leading medical journals studied and praised Hitler's eugenic legislation and policies.

The patients were killed for their own good as well as that of the community.


While personal hate might be the reason that groups of people such as the Jews were included in the eradication program, that eradication program was originally psychiatric and - as it appears to me based on my research - the rise of the Nazi's followed a strong demand for breaking with morality (and therewith religions) by psychiatry as a honourable branch of a greater international scientific establishment that sought to break free from moral constraints on behalf of the deemed 'greater good' scientific progress.
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by Sculptor1 »

value wrote: September 4th, 2022, 3:54 am
Sculptor1 wrote: September 3rd, 2022, 2:40 pmYou cite a thing that does not agree with you.
The right link should have been https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psyc ... html[quote]
You cite a thing that does not agree with you.

A specific citation from that article:

If psychiatry is really? a branch of medicine, we should see the specific causal hypotheses emerge about mechanisms that cause the symptoms of mental illness. Psychopathology is to be identified as the departure of a psychological system from its proper state.

Sculptor1 wrote: September 3rd, 2022, 2:40 pmThat accounts for the genocide against mental and physical disability, and maybe homosexuality. Possibly against slavs, but not the chief victims the Jews.[

...

Eugenics was common enough at the time with mass sterilisations in many western countries including the US and the UK. Additional barriers to reproduction were also levelled at other "racial" groups throughout the empire and amongst native peoples, where breeding was disincentivised.
So much is history.

The Jews can not be explained in this way and was more about Hitler's personal hang up and generations of prejudice.
While that may be so, what about the justification for what was done towards the regular public?

Arguably, it originated from his book Mein Kampf that he wrote while imprisoned.

In "Mein Kampf," published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He started to hate Jews only after Germany's loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaus ... ff47c10000 (Why Did Adolf Hitler Hate the Jews?, 2016)
[/quote]
Antisemitism has been part of German culture since there were Jews in Germania.
Martin Luther ranted against Jews vociferously.
These remarks her are quite amusing. As if anyone would trust Hilter's words concerning his prejudices?
LOL
To cite psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin that has researched the role of psychiatry during the Nazi period:

The bond between Hitler and psychiatrists was so close that much of Mein Kampf literally corresponds to the language and tone of the major international journals and psychiatric textbooks of the period.

After taking power, Hitler gained support from psychiatrists and social scientists from all over the world. Many articles in the world's leading medical journals studied and praised Hitler's eugenic legislation and policies.

The patients were killed for their own good as well as that of the community.


While personal hate might be the reason that groups of people such as the Jews were included in the eradication program, that eradication program was originally psychiatric and - as it appears to me based on my research - the rise of the Nazi's followed a strong demand for breaking with morality (and therewith religions) by psychiatry as a honourable branch of a greater international scientific establishment that sought to break free from moral constraints on behalf of the deemed 'greater good' scientific progress.
It's more than personal hate. It has been a socially and systematically organised hatred since time immemorial. Eugenics was just one more tools to be used to try to rationalise it.
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

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value wrote: September 2nd, 2022, 5:55 pm
The idea behind eugenics – racial hygiene – that led to the Nazi Holocaust was supported by Universities around the world. It started with an idea that was not naturally defensible and that was thought to require trickery and deceit. It resulted in a demand for people with the capabilities of Nazis.
Guess who invented eugenics? It was Sir Francis Galton in England.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1960236 ... 0in%201883.
Not only was Sir Francis Galton a famous geographer and statistician, he also invented "eugenics" in 1883. Eugenics, defined as the science of improving racial stock, was developed from a new heredity theory, conceived by Galton himself, and from the evolution theory of Charles Darwin, transposed to human society by Herbert Spencer. Galton's eugenics was a program to artificially produce a better human race through regulating marriage and thus procreation. Galton put particular emphasis on "positive eugenics", aimed at encouraging the physically and mentally superior members of the population to choose partners with similar traits. In 1904, he presented his ideas in front of a vast audience of physicians and scientists in London. His widely-publicized lecture served as the starting point for the development of eugenics groups in Europe and the United States during the first half of the 20th century.


And guess who was vice president for the British Eugenics Society? Winston Churchill. Other prominent members were Keynes and Bernard Shaw.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
value
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by value »

Sculptor1 wrote: September 4th, 2022, 7:11 am Antisemitism has been part of German culture since there were Jews in Germania.
Martin Luther ranted against Jews vociferously.
These remarks her are quite amusing. As if anyone would trust Hilter's words concerning his prejudices?
LOL
Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in Why Men Fight - A method of abolishing the international duel (1920) the following about Germany's history which seems to indicate that just a few centuries ago Germany wasn't originally nationalistic in nature.

The grandfather of Bertrand Russell had twice been a prime minister and met with once with Napoleon in France. Bertrand Russell therefore has a certain qualitative view when it concerns politics, especially since he has been a frontrunner in the pacifist movement and more specifically the international campaign to ban the nuclear bomb. He lived for years in the US where he was once exiled for his views and almost starved.

The usual view in this country is that it is due to the wickedness of the Germans; the view of most pacifists is that it is due to the diplomatic tangle and to the ambitions of Governments. I think both these views fail to realize the extent to which war grows out of ordinary human nature. Germans, and also the men who compose Governments, are on the whole average human beings, actuated by the same passions that actuate others, not differing much from the rest of the world except in their circumstances.

No sooner was France free from the English, in the fifteenth century, than it embarked upon the conquest of Italy; no sooner was Spain freed from the Moors than it entered into more than a century of conflict with France for the supremacy in Europe. The case of Germany is very interesting in this respect. At the beginning of the eighteenth century German culture was French: French was the language of the Courts, the language in which Leibnitz wrote his philosophy, the universal language of polite letters and learning. National consciousness hardly existed. Then a series of great men created a self-respect in Germany by their achievements in poetry, music, philosophy, and science. But politically German nationalism was only created by Napoleon’s oppression and the uprising of 1813. After centuries during which every disturbance of the peace of Europe began with a French or Swedish or Russian invasion of Germany, the Germans discovered that by sufficient effort and union they could keep foreign armies off their territory. But the effort required had been too great to cease when its purely defensive purpose had been achieved by the defeat of Napoleon. Now, a hundred years later, they are still engaged in the same movement, which has become one of aggression and conquest. Whether we are now seeing the end of the movement it is not yet possible to guess.


https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55610/5 ... 5610-h.htm

(2020) The politics of logic - Philosophy at war: nationalism and logical analysis
Russell’s antiwar protest was so extensive that it would cost him both his job and, for a time, his personal freedom. His theoretical antidote to the irrational, sectarian vitriol between European nations was to try to show how logic could function as an international language that could be used impartially and dispassionately to adjudicate disputes. His theoretical antidote was, in other words, analytic philosophy.

‘The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany … it is in its essence neutral’

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophy-at-wa ... l-analysis

Sculptor1 wrote: September 4th, 2022, 7:11 am
While personal hate might be the reason that groups of people such as the Jews were included in the eradication program, that eradication program was originally psychiatric and - as it appears to me based on my research - the rise of the Nazi's followed a strong demand for breaking with morality (and therewith religions) by psychiatry as a honourable branch of a greater international scientific establishment that sought to break free from moral constraints on behalf of the deemed 'greater good' scientific progress.
It's more than personal hate. It has been a socially and systematically organised hatred since time immemorial. Eugenics was just one more tools to be used to try to rationalise it.
And who or what was doing that? Isn't the responsibility for that to be addressed to the international scientific establishment?

My view is: there have been people that collectively committed suicide. People are capable of a lot for an idea or belief. That doesn't prove anything. When it concerns humanity's evolution and progress one is always to seek the source of reason and seek responsibility in the face of the available capacity and potential. In this case it seems to me that responsibility of what happened during the Nazi-era lays with the international scientific establishment and the underlying belief that the facts of science are valid without philosophy and the consequent ideal to free humanity from moral constraints on behalf of the deemed 'greater good', scientific progress.
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by value »

Count Lucanor wrote: September 4th, 2022, 1:27 pm Guess who invented eugenics? It was Sir Francis Galton in England.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1960236 ... 0in%201883.
Not only was Sir Francis Galton a famous geographer and statistician, he also invented "eugenics" in 1883. Eugenics, defined as the science of improving racial stock, was developed from a new heredity theory, conceived by Galton himself, and from the evolution theory of Charles Darwin, transposed to human society by Herbert Spencer. Galton's eugenics was a program to artificially produce a better human race through regulating marriage and thus procreation. Galton put particular emphasis on "positive eugenics", aimed at encouraging the physically and mentally superior members of the population to choose partners with similar traits. In 1904, he presented his ideas in front of a vast audience of physicians and scientists in London. His widely-publicized lecture served as the starting point for the development of eugenics groups in Europe and the United States during the first half of the 20th century.


And guess who was vice president for the British Eugenics Society? Winston Churchill. Other prominent members were Keynes and Bernard Shaw.
A quote by a philosopher in a discussion about eugenics:
blond hair and blue eyes for everyone

utopia

-Imp
With eugenics, one is moving 'towards an ultimate state' as perceived from an external viewer (the human). That may be opposite of what is considered healthy in Nature that seeks diversity for resilience and strength.

The nature of eugenics resides on the essence of inbreeding of which it is known that it causes fatal problems. Evidence can be seen in the effects of eugenics on cows.

While there are 9 million cows in the USA, from a genetic perspective, there are just 50 cows alive.

(2021) The way we breed cows is setting them up for extinction
Chad Dechow – an associate professor of dairy cattle genetics – and others say there is so much genetic similarity among them, the effective population size is less than 50. If cows were wild animals, that would put them in the category of critically endangered species.

“It's pretty much one big inbred family,” says Leslie B. Hansen, a cow expert and professor at the University of Minnesota. Fertility rates are affected by inbreeding, and already, cow fertility has dropped significantly. Also, when close relatives are bred, serious health problems could be lurking.

https://qz.com/1649587/the-way-we-breed ... xtinction/

In my opinion the ideology of eugenics originates from weakness that seeks to escape its outer world instead of finding an a priori (and thus insecure) drive to develop strength from within. The foundation of the ideology is the dogmatic belief that the facts of science are valid without philosophy and thus without morality.

The fight to overcome defects or diseases makes a life form stronger. Filtering out genes (eugenics) would be like fleeing instead of overcoming problems and thus logically results in increased weakness over time.

An easy life or offspring with genes linked to social prosperity (financial, career, etc) may not be what is good for longer term evolution.

In the case of cows the professors for example mention: "The ideal Holstein cow—at least in the view of people who judge these things—is “feminine and refined.” That means thin and angular. The problem is, a tall, thin cow isn’t necessarily the healthiest cow and shorter and rounder cattle are more likely to get pregnant."
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by Sculptor1 »

value wrote: September 5th, 2022, 2:10 am
Sculptor1 wrote: September 4th, 2022, 7:11 am Antisemitism has been part of German culture since there were Jews in Germania.
Martin Luther ranted against Jews vociferously.
These remarks her are quite amusing. As if anyone would trust Hilter's words concerning his prejudices?
LOL
Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in Why Men Fight - A method of abolishing the international duel (1920) the following about Germany's history which seems to indicate that just a few centuries ago Germany wasn't originally nationalistic in nature.

The grandfather of Bertrand Russell had twice been a prime minister and met with once with Napoleon in France. Bertrand Russell therefore has a certain qualitative view when it concerns politics, especially since he has been a frontrunner in the pacifist movement and more specifically the international campaign to ban the nuclear bomb. He lived for years in the US where he was once exiled for his views and almost starved.

The usual view in this country is that it is due to the wickedness of the Germans; the view of most pacifists is that it is due to the diplomatic tangle and to the ambitions of Governments. I think both these views fail to realize the extent to which war grows out of ordinary human nature. Germans, and also the men who compose Governments, are on the whole average human beings, actuated by the same passions that actuate others, not differing much from the rest of the world except in their circumstances.

No sooner was France free from the English, in the fifteenth century, than it embarked upon the conquest of Italy; no sooner was Spain freed from the Moors than it entered into more than a century of conflict with France for the supremacy in Europe. The case of Germany is very interesting in this respect. At the beginning of the eighteenth century German culture was French: French was the language of the Courts, the language in which Leibnitz wrote his philosophy, the universal language of polite letters and learning. National consciousness hardly existed. Then a series of great men created a self-respect in Germany by their achievements in poetry, music, philosophy, and science. But politically German nationalism was only created by Napoleon’s oppression and the uprising of 1813. After centuries during which every disturbance of the peace of Europe began with a French or Swedish or Russian invasion of Germany, the Germans discovered that by sufficient effort and union they could keep foreign armies off their territory. But the effort required had been too great to cease when its purely defensive purpose had been achieved by the defeat of Napoleon. Now, a hundred years later, they are still engaged in the same movement, which has become one of aggression and conquest. Whether we are now seeing the end of the movement it is not yet possible to guess.


https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55610/5 ... 5610-h.htm

(2020) The politics of logic - Philosophy at war: nationalism and logical analysis
Russell’s antiwar protest was so extensive that it would cost him both his job and, for a time, his personal freedom. His theoretical antidote to the irrational, sectarian vitriol between European nations was to try to show how logic could function as an international language that could be used impartially and dispassionately to adjudicate disputes. His theoretical antidote was, in other words, analytic philosophy.

‘The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany … it is in its essence neutral’

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophy-at-wa ... l-analysis

Sculptor1 wrote: September 4th, 2022, 7:11 am
While personal hate might be the reason that groups of people such as the Jews were included in the eradication program, that eradication program was originally psychiatric and - as it appears to me based on my research - the rise of the Nazi's followed a strong demand for breaking with morality (and therewith religions) by psychiatry as a honourable branch of a greater international scientific establishment that sought to break free from moral constraints on behalf of the deemed 'greater good' scientific progress.
It's more than personal hate. It has been a socially and systematically organised hatred since time immemorial. Eugenics was just one more tools to be used to try to rationalise it.
And who or what was doing that? Isn't the responsibility for that to be addressed to the international scientific establishment?

My view is: there have been people that collectively committed suicide. People are capable of a lot for an idea or belief. That doesn't prove anything. When it concerns humanity's evolution and progress one is always to seek the source of reason and seek responsibility in the face of the available capacity and potential. In this case it seems to me that responsibility of what happened during the Nazi-era lays with the international scientific establishment and the underlying belief that the facts of science are valid without philosophy and the consequent ideal to free humanity from moral constraints on behalf of the deemed 'greater good', scientific progress.
Germany was a collection of warring states for 100s of years.
Your point is meaningless, since I was not talking about "Nationalism", but Antisemitism.
value
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by value »

Sculptor1 wrote: September 5th, 2022, 5:29 am Germany was a collection of warring states for 100s of years.
Your point is meaningless, since I was not talking about "Nationalism", but Antisemitism.
The cited article on Haaretz Newspaper (from Israel) concludes otherwise:

(2016) Why Did Adolf Hitler Hate the Jews?
When imperial Germany went down to defeat in 1918, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, was forced to abdicate, a popular theory that Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by the Jews took hold. Jews’ role, on the one hand, in the socialist and Communist movements that led revolutions in both Germany and Russia, and their prominence in international finance, on the other, led to dark theories about Jews’ lack of national loyalty, their treachery, and their degeneracy.
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaus ... ff47c10000

It would support the citation in the same article about Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf.

In "Mein Kampf," published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He started to hate Jews only after Germany's loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.

This would make it seem that nationalism was the reason that the Jews were included in the originally psychiatric eradication program. It would also explain why psychiatrists and society in general with them would have let it pass. Without it their desired political revolution that would lead to the realization of their desired 'eradication camps', might not have taken place.

Psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin:

The bond between Hitler and psychiatrists was so close that much of Mein Kampf literally corresponds to the language and tone of the major international journals and psychiatric textbooks of the period.

After taking power, Hitler gained support from psychiatrists and social scientists from all over the world. Many articles in the world's leading medical journals studied and praised Hitler's eugenic legislation and policies.


The pictures of starving people are an iconic reference for the horror of what happened during the holocaust. German psychiatry systematically started to euthanise psychiatric patients by starvation 20 years before the Nazi party was founded.

(1998) Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914-1949
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/H ... 0ab29306d2
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Re: Psychiatry and the Nazi holocaust

Post by Sculptor1 »

Count Lucanor wrote: September 4th, 2022, 1:27 pm
value wrote: September 2nd, 2022, 5:55 pm
The idea behind eugenics – racial hygiene – that led to the Nazi Holocaust was supported by Universities around the world. It started with an idea that was not naturally defensible and that was thought to require trickery and deceit. It resulted in a demand for people with the capabilities of Nazis.
Guess who invented eugenics? It was Sir Francis Galton in England.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1960236 ... 0in%201883.
Not only was Sir Francis Galton a famous geographer and statistician, he also invented "eugenics" in 1883. Eugenics, defined as the science of improving racial stock, was developed from a new heredity theory, conceived by Galton himself, and from the evolution theory of Charles Darwin, transposed to human society by Herbert Spencer. Galton's eugenics was a program to artificially produce a better human race through regulating marriage and thus procreation. Galton put particular emphasis on "positive eugenics", aimed at encouraging the physically and mentally superior members of the population to choose partners with similar traits. In 1904, he presented his ideas in front of a vast audience of physicians and scientists in London. His widely-publicized lecture served as the starting point for the development of eugenics groups in Europe and the United States during the first half of the 20th century.


And guess who was vice president for the British Eugenics Society? Winston Churchill. Other prominent members were Keynes and Bernard Shaw.
Galton was anti-Semitic for sure.
I am surprised to hear that Shaw was involved.

In the early days the idea of passive encouragement for those with desirable characteristics made Eugenics a nice concept.
However the political lines were soon drawn between those that wanted to engage in active inheritable modification, by sterilising "defectives" and others who wanted to encourage greater breeding for those with "good qualities" became clear.
Hitler's actions tended to render all thoughts negative.
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