The American Left picks up yet another technique from the Soviets.
It was from the 1940s through the 1970s, the height of the Cold War, that Soviet authorities notoriously politicized the field of psychiatry. One should always be very suspicious of any government official appealing directly to the “science.” Politicians know science like they know ethics. In 1963, Russian-Jewish poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was twice placed in a pyschiatric facility against his will, and ultimately charged with the crime of “social parasitism” (according to the lawful authorities, not making sufficient contributions to society). He was eventually expelled from the country.
The Soviet government even went so far as to make up fictitious psychological illnesses like “sluggish schizophrenia” to justify the forcible psychiatric incarceration of people who committed no obvious wrongs, but were simply brave enough to criticize the Soviet regime or to reject communism altogether. Not that governments making people into criminals for entirely contrived, inane, power-serving reasons is historically abnormal. Jesus of Nazareth was a famous criminal of course. So were Tresckow and von Stauffenberg. So were all the Founders. This is really quite normal for “law” and “order,” but adding the “crazy” element to the equation (placing people in institutions Russians came to call “psikhushkas”) was really the cherry on top. Using phony science to discredit and destroy enemies of the state for rejecting the state’s official ideology is a quintessentially lefto-bolshevist tactic.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_lefts_psychiatric_weapon.html
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