|
THE NAZIS
| "The Nazi doctors…had created the beginning of what…had [been] defined as a psychology of torture. It had enabled them to embrace a wide range of evils…[and] finally to exist, the Nazi doctors had needed to virtually eliminate any capacity for normal human feelings; it was the only way for them to kill their victims."55 Gordon Thomas
Journey into Madness, 1989 | Most terrorist groups today have radical political views and hold racist positions which range from "white supremist" type views to anti-Semitism. According to one of these groups, "blacks, oriental, and other races," unlike "Aryans," do not have souls.56 However, behind some of the most significant terrorist activities there has been a psychiatric or psychological influence, whether directly in terrorist training, or through a racial ideology first propagated by psychiatrists. Nowhere is that more evident than in Nazi Germany from the 1930s to1945. In 1999, German psychiatrists publicly admitted that psychiatry had spawned "eugenics" and the racial "inferiority/superiority" ideology almost three decades before the Nazis took power in 1933. Indeed, it was this ideology that turned the Nazis into mass murderers. The following is a brief history: 1895: German psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz and jurist, Karl Binding, published their theories about race inferiority in the book, The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak. In 1909, Ploetz founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene. Ploetz's theory was that destroying unworthy life was "purely a healing treatment." 1920s: Psychiatrist Alfred Hoch's book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, demanded euthanasia be conducted on "mental defectives." This, and another psychiatric text, Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, helped form the "scientific" basis for the Nazi racial purity program. According to Hoche and Binding, the acceleration of the death process is not an act of murder but "in truth a pure act of healing" and there are people who are "worthless" to society. Primary among these are the inmates of the "idiot institutes," who are "not only worthless, but of absolutely negative value." As for the "incurably dumb," "Their death will not be missed in the least except maybe in the hearts of their mother or guardian.... When we become more advanced, we will probably be saving those poor humans from themselves."
THE IDEOLOGY OF HATE - continued  |
