{"id":5640,"date":"2022-04-07T20:02:52","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T18:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=5640"},"modified":"2022-04-07T20:02:52","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T18:02:52","slug":"liberals-soviet-tactic-opponents-mentally-ill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2022-04-07\/liberals-soviet-tactic-opponents-mentally-ill\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberals are adopting an old Soviet tactic: Painting opponents as mentally ill"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Trump\u2019s shock success, centrists urgently need a narrative that leaves untouched the status quo and its claim to moral superiority<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

Mint Press – 7 April 2022<\/p>\n

Back in the dark days of the Soviet Union, dissidents risked being locked up \u2013 but not, officially at least, on the grounds that they had committed a political crime. In the Soviet regime\u2019s imagination, treason and mental illness were often two sides of the same coin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a <\/span>brief description<\/span><\/a> from Wikipedia of the phenomenon:<\/span><\/p>\n

The KGB [the Soviet secret police] routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing public trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. Highly classified government documents which have become available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The weaponization of mental illness by the Soviet Union against internal critics has been described as \u201cpunitive psychiatry.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian human rights activist who spent many years confined to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, wrote \u201cA Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters\u201d, together with a Ukrainian psychiatrist, Semyon Gluzman. The pair observed: \u201cThe Soviet use of psychiatry as a punitive means is based upon the deliberate interpretation of dissent … as a psychiatric problem.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The medicalization of dissent was not unique to the Soviet Union, of course. It is a feature of authoritarian and repressive states. An ideological consensus is cultivated in the population by portraying opponents as traitors whose behavior is proof of a mental disturbance or insanity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Publicizing dissent, and the reasons for it, through criminal trials risks dangerously challenging dominant social assumptions inculcated by propaganda. Instead, the dissenter can be quietly detained for his or her own good without their political ideology getting an airing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Medicalizing dissent<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This is why the growing trend in the West\u2019s supposedly free and open societies towards conflating dissent with treason \u2013 and medicalizing its causes \u2013 should concern us. It is likely to be a barometer of how authoritarian our liberal democracies are rapidly becoming.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This has not happened overnight. It has been a gradual process that accelerated with the trauma for liberals of discovering that the political system they so revered was capable of spawning a president like Donald Trump. How could the most evolved of the Western democracies \u2013 which had defeated the evil Soviet empire ideologically, economically, and militarily \u2013 end up electing such a wretch for a leader?<\/span><\/p>\n

The proper conclusion to draw was that Trump was a symptom of an entirely dysfunctional, corrupt Western political system \u2013 one with which liberals had closely identified even when it was being led by the right. (United States politics had thrown up plenty of other clearly lamentable presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but none exhibited the same degree of vulgarity and vanity that so troubled liberals.)<\/span><\/p>\n

It should have been a moment for the scales to fall from their eyes. But that would have meant questioning everything liberals held dearest. So Instead they found other reasons to explain the rise of President Trump.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He had to be treated as an aberration, not the exemplar of a system that had long served people very much like Trump: whether it was the billionaire-owned media, the moneyed donors that had captured both political parties, or the corporate lobbies that deprived the public of proper health care and channeled public wealth into endless, devastating wars that enriched a narrow elite.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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It's disturbing how many people are peddling the idea that Nato is a 'defensive alliance'. It *claims* to be defensive. Actually, Nato is a central pillar of the highly lucrative war industries. This may help clarify: https:\/\/t.co\/SL2MA1ASMh<\/a><\/p>\n

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 26, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n