by Beverly Eakman,
Author, Educator
Former Editor-In-Chief, NASA’s Newspaper (JSC)
October 30, 2009
It’s zero hour in America. Do you know where your country went?
Now that America’s education system and parenting “experts” have brainwashed a generation of now-grown schoolchildren-cum-parents into believing that what we once called personality quirks, character flaws and moral issues are, in essence, mental disorders, politicians have taken the ball and run with it. Law enforcement agencies and the judicial system are in the process of adopting Stalinist and Mao-inspired methods of controlling dissidents at home.
Only a few, short years ago, what was held up as independent thinking, speaking one’s mind, and robust dialogue is now decried as a prelude to terrorism. Our nation’s leaders are pulling off communist-style thought-control by implying that any words uttered in print or out loud that run contrary to “accepted wisdom” (and that can change in a “New York Minute”) is the result of mental illness.
Don’t believe it? Well, “google” this:
A recent report out of Missouri labeled “not-for-public-distribution” (circulated anonymously by a shocked and patriotic police officer) specifically describes supporters of the three presidential candidates as potential “militia”-influenced terrorists and instructs police to be on the lookout for bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated with, of all things, the Constitution—such as “Campaign for Liberty.” Even a few Members of Congress were implied to be security risks themselves (potential domestic terrorists). The document, entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” (February 20, 2009), emanated from the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), one of several so-called “Fusion Centers” established by the federal government around the country.
Most people are probably not familiar with the term “Fusion Center.” These were originally intended to allow local and state law-enforcement agents to work alongside federal officers after 9/11 so that terrorist-related activities could be identified, then pounced upon by all three entities at once. “Fusion Center” offices, therefore, incorporate local, state and federal law-enforcement personnel, a strategy which, prior to the launching of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was deliberately avoided to maintain independence and preserve impartiality. Predictably, these Centers got out of hand and fell into what is referred to as “mission creep.”
Mission creep is defined by Wikipedia as:
“the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes…. [I]t is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts, only stopping when a final, often catastrophic, failure occurs. The term was originally applied exclusively to military operations, but has recently been applied to [other] fields, mainly the growth of bureaucracies.”
Ongoing improvements in tracking and monitoring of opinions via magazine subscriptions, charitable gifts, school and household surveys, and other computerized data collection has made political prediction on hot-button topics that much easier to secure. “Predictive computer technology” (already a staple of school assessment testing) entails analysis by behavioral psychiatrists with concurrent degrees in statistics. This same capability has greatly accelerated mission creep among the nation’s Fusion Centers.
The PBS News Hour (not known for its conservatism or, for that matter, for being “alarmist”) recently reported on how political dissidents in China are forced into to psychiatric hospitals Video: Chinese Dissidents Committed to Mental Hospitals. In the segment, aired September 13, 2009, the manner in which complainants (called petitioners), whistleblowers and outright protesters are “managed” bears an eerie resemblance to a policy shift right here in America. States’ rights (or the 10th Amendment) are among the first casualties of a top-down, federal effort to minimize, and eventually suppress, dissent.
Psychopolitics is as the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and “the masses,” via various techniques ranging from “group dynamics,” “cognitive dissonance,” “de-sensitization,” “super-imposing alternate value structures,” “artificial disruption of thought,” the Delphi Method, the Tavistock Technique, to negative or positive “reinforcement.” If you don’t recognize any of these, don’t feel too badly, because they are not part of any school curriculum. The people who created them are, for the most part, unknown in our own country, except among those groomed by extremist political organizations to become “change agents,” professional agitators or “provocateurs.” The pioneers of psychopolitics, including attitude prediction, include individuals such as Wilhelm Reich, Kurt Lewin, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm (Germany); A. S. Neill, A. J. Oraje and John Rawlings Rees (Great Britain); Antonio Gramsci (Italy); Anatoly Lunacharsky and Georg Lukacs (Russia); G. Brock Chishom and Ewen Cameron (Canada); and the U.S.’s own Ralph Tyler and Ronald Havelock.
Although psychopolitics originated under Vladimir Lenin as “political literacy” and “polytechnical education” in the old Soviet Union, and was carried to the free world via Peter Sedgwick (1934–1983) a translator for Victor Serge, author of PsychoPolitics and a revolutionary socialist activist as well as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the term psychopolitics found its way into the American lexicon via Isaac Asimov, a master of the sci-fi genre. But psychopolitics is no science fiction adventure, and never was.
By the 1970s, a slew of enablers were establishing a system of numerical codes for so-called mental disorders that would accommodate computerization. This lent legitimacy to what would otherwise have been considered “questionable illnesses.” The goal was to ensure that medical professionals, the media and government accepted these terms as they might “diabetes,” thereby ensuring that the mental illnesses so codified would remain indelible, beginning with the youngest and most vulnerable.
The long-term game plan of psychopolitics is the conquest, usually by proxy, of enemy nations through “mental healing,” better known as “re-education.” This entails what we know as “encounter groups,” extensive self-disclosure surveys and peer pressure to conform. If all that doesn’t work, if certain individuals are still not amenable, then the first step is marginalization as “mentally unbalanced.”
Example: A study by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $1.2 million, announced on 1 August, 2003, that adherents to conventional moral principles and limited government are mentally disturbed. NIMH-NSF scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford attribute notions about morality and individualism to “dogmatism” and “uncertainty avoidance.” Social conservatives, in particular, were said to suffer from “mental rigidity,” a condition which, researchers assert, is probably hard-wired, condemning traditionalists to a lifelong, cognitive hell, with all the associated indicators for mental illness: “decreased cognitive function, lowered self-esteem, fear, anger, pessimism, disgust, and contempt” (Jost, J. T., J. Glaser, et al. (2003). “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” Psychological Bulletin 129(3): 339-375 online at http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~hannahk/conservatism.html).
This is the sort of unprovable, but nevertheless libelous condescension that is heaped upon anyone from talk show hosts, to authors to patriots who dare to contradict “common wisdom” (a.k.a. “political correctness”). If that doesn’t work, contempt may be followed up with “mandatory [psychiatric] counseling” (already a feature of the American judicial system), or even forcible psychiatric drugging (well on its way to legitimacy in this nation’s schools). Finally there is incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, which gratefully is not yet a fixture in American democracy for potential dissenters, but the handwriting is on the wall, as the expression goes.
Totalitarian states like Communist China and Russia may be more blatant in their affronts to human rights and personal property — inasmuch as they don’t need a “reason” — but the differences are narrowing precipitously.
As emphasized during interviews on the PBS segment, the Chinese system is set up in such a way as to pre-empt complaints. The Chinese government doesn’t wait around for somebody to sound off; it pre-emptively seeks out individuals likely to become troublesome, by assigning a mental-health diagnosis to anyone at the first sign of a provocative or inflammatory remark.
This lies at the heart of what is going on here in America, and we absolutely must put a stop to it, if it isn’t already too late. Data-mining (which actually pre-dates 9/11), along with longitudinal tracking (that’s tracking over long time periods) and, therefore, ongoing monitoring of individual perceptions, worldviews and beliefs is gaining momentum with every moment that computer technology evolves — which means constantly. Combine this with the practice of assigning mental-illness labels to private opinions, based on snippets of various information — with anything that might be favorable to the individual conveniently left out!
This “diagnosis,” like the American school child’s, follows the person for life, often compromising his or her college and career prospects. An why not, after all? Computerization makes it impossible for anyone to prove that an erroneous or falsified accusation has been purged from the system with no backup copy.
Today’s Chinese authorities, like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) before them, in order to avoid drawing attention to policies that may be morally or ethically distasteful abroad (e.g., the one-child policy and forced abortion) or invite protests that coincide with an event at which international media attention is expected (such as the Olympics), they employ spies, block careers and intimidate family members.
It may be shocking to hear from your college-age children that we going down the same road. Several universities, like the University of Delaware, in which a lawsuit was filed, have planted paid opinion-monitors in university dormitories (called “resident assistants,” or RAs).
Adam Kissel, Director of the Individual Rights Defense Program, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, explains in a 2008 speech:
The freshman arrived for her mandatory one-on-one session in her dormitory at 8 pm. Classes had been in session for about a week. Her resident assistant handed her a questionnaire. He told her it was “a little questionnaire to help [you] and all the other residents relate to the curriculum.” She “looked a little uncomfortable.”
“When did you discover your sexual identity?” the questionnaire asked.
She wrote in response: “That is none of your damn business.”
Another question: “When was a time you felt oppressed?”
Her response: “I am oppressed every day [because of my] feelings for the opera. Regularly [people]…jeer me with cruel names.… But I will overcome! Hear me, you rock-loving majority?”
The resident assistant felt appalled…. He wrote up an incident report and reported her to his superiors.
This one-on-one session was not a punishment…for a recalcitrant student who had committed an infraction. It was mandatory sensitivity training, indeed, but it was part of a program that was mandatory for all 7,000 students in the University of Delaware dorms. It was a thorough thought-reform curriculum that was designed by the school’s Residence Life staff in order to treat and correct the allegedly incorrect thoughts, attitudes, values, and beliefs of the students….
Many other features — the mandatory one-on-one and group sessions throughout the year; the “confrontation” training to help RAs challenge students who were not complying [with political correctness]; the posters with [politicized] messages spread throughout the dorms; the zero-tolerance policy against anything deemed “oppressive”; the individual files on students and their beliefs, in some cases called “portfolios,” which were to be archived after graduation; the RA reports on their “best” and “worst” one-on-one sessions; the scientific analysis of the questionnaires in order to measure improvement toward the “educational objective”; the “strong male RAs” who were hired to break the “resistance to educational efforts” among [especially] the young male students — all of this, according to the university’s own materials, was part of a cutting-edge educational model that had won awards from a professional association for university administrators, the American College Personnel Association.
As if this weren’t enough to prove that psychopolitics is alive and well in America, with the pervasive undercurrent of “mental illness” as justification, schools below the college level have thoroughly succeeded in exchanging academic testing for mental-health “assessment”; left out, rewritten, and altered history texts until virtually nothing is left of the Framers ideals of a constitutional republic; redefined and watered down morality into something called “situation ethics”; removed the physiology from health classes and replaced it with graphic sex education, beginning in kindergarten.
Already, we see the results:
Do you vocally promote the right to self-defense? Do you voice support for the intact family; national sovereignty and strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? Do you criticize easy immigration (i.e., without a citizen-sponsor); unrestricted free trade; free condoms hanging on some college freshmen’s dormitory doors; formalization of same-sex unions; abortion on-demand; mandatory mental-health screening of all pregnant women and schoolchildren? Do you have a problem with the policies of the Federal Reserve; with “traffic” cameras and other surreptitious surveillance devices; industry-wide bailouts; no-fault divorce and illegitimacy? Then, my friend, you are not merely holding to a “divergent viewpoint,” to use the 1950s term; you are mentally ill and a potential terrorist. You are a person who is ripe for radicalization and therefore suspect. Did you volunteer for certain political candidates in the 2008 election? Do you, by your choices of magazine literature and religious preference, show that you have “bought in to” theological tenets such as the Creation?
If any of these apply to you, good luck in ever securing a government grant or contract, or getting your child into a top university, when there are others who carry none of this psychological “baggage.”
Americans are supposed to view any opposition to all this as “paranoia.” Of course, the term paranoia carries a chilling effect, because it screams “mentally unbalanced” to the world.
Once it becomes possible, via technology, to track and legislate private opinions — and even to classify those that don’t conform as “mentally ill” — then we have left the realm of politics and moved into coercion. We have facilitated the stigmatization of political dissent and vocal objection using labels like “acute stress disorder” or “paranoid schizophrenia,” just as they do a right now, today, in China, according the aforementioned PBS segment.
As a former employee of the U.S. Justice Department, I personally saw several precursors to the MAIC document — “watch-out” reports (for lack of a better term), on a smaller scale, under Janet Reno’s tenure there. These were distributed to employees following the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Obviously, such alerts have been greatly expanded, what with the network of government “Fusion Centers” in state after state.
With pharmaceutical company moguls and politicians sitting on each other’s boards (E. I. Lilly’s chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, sat on the Homeland Security Council under George W. Bush’s administration); with nationwide mental health assessments like the New Freedom Initiative (funded by the House in 2002) sizing up the political “health” of schoolchildren (and curriculum being altered accordingly); and with “behavioral detection officers” (“BDOs”) looking for any signs of irritation among model citizens in airport security lines, while U.S. borders are left open for drug-runners, who then get to sue Border Patrol agents for shooting at them—all this points to an America in big trouble.
“Political dissent” is now in the eye of the bureaucratic beholder — or the surveillance camera, erected under the guise of traffic safety to pursue revenue and to intimidate through meaningless “gotchas.”
We’re all in China now.
Beverly K. Eakman is a CCHR Commissioner, a former educator and retired federal employee who served as speechwriter for the heads of three government agencies and as editor-in-chief of NASA’s newspaper at the Johnson Space Center. Today, she is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer, the author of five books, and a frequent keynote speaker on the lecture circuit. Her most recent work is Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks (Midnight Whistler Publishers).
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Tags: Beverly Eakman, Chinese dissidents, Ewen Cameron, Homeland Security, John Rawlings Rees, Mao, mental disorders, mental illness, militia, Mission Creep, National Science Foundation, New Freedom, PBS News Hour, political, political dissidents, psychiatric, psychological, psychopolitics, Stalinist, Tavistock, Totalitarian, U.S. Justice Department
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I received this 10/30, Ezra Pound’s birthday. For thos familiar with Pound he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in D.C., more as a political prisoner rather than truly ill.
St. Elizabeth’s for those who do not know was the national psychiatric hospital that is now empty and set to become the new site of the massive “Homeland Security” agency.
The inclusion of Wilhelm Reich into this list of psycho-political authors is a large error. While being an anti-Nazi dissenter nominally led him to associate with the German CP in the years leading up to Hitler’s ascent to power, Reich publicly denounced both the Nazis and the communists as power-hungry killers as early as 1932, in the work “Mass Psychology of Fascism”, which was quite early for most liberals of the period. “The God that Failed” which included mea culpas from former Socialists of that period did not appear until 1950. Certainly Reich’s vocal assault upon both the Nazis and the communists is what led to his books being burned by both. In the USA, Reich was well-known as a conservative anti-communist, to the point that many left-wing people proclaim he became crazy, a “McCarthite”, etc. His public detractors included well-known communist authors of his day, who railed against him with smears in magazines like New Republic, run by Cambridge Five member Michael Straight. The Roosevelt-era leftist Food and Drug Administration burned Reich’s books also, in typical Stalinist manner, and pushed Reich to an early death in prison for his medical discoveries. That so many old-fashioned “live and let-live” liberals fell victim to Marxist sentiments in the wake of the Russian Revolution is of course a tragedy, but Reich was with them for only the shortest period, being awakened after his first visit to the then-new USSR, after which he broke all those former relationships. By contrast, Marxists today still don’t quite get it that their icon was a racist fanatic who advocated genocide and totalitarianism. (see for example http://marxwords.blogspot.com) But among the former disillusioned liberals (“neo-cons”) one finds some of the most solid voices against the modern trends towards Marxist socialism, if only because they know Marxism and socialism from the inside, and so can better warn against its stealthy and deceptive methods. Reich was a profoundly vocal dissenter against communist violence, but was in fact a victim of leftist aggression. In fact, he’s considered a kind of “old fashioned Puritan” by today’s “standards”, and politically a moderate. He supported Eisenhower, for example. He also was against electroshock and drug therapy, developing methods to help emotionally-suffering people which addressed their social situations. Psychologists and psychiatrists who follow his therapeutic methods (he was a student of Freud) are typically drug-free in their practices. He is therefore an important ally in the fight against totalitarian socialist psycho-babble. He also was partly sympathetic to religion, even while critical on fanaticism. His book “The Murder of Christ” is considered one of his best by many.
Hold on to your patience dear souls the Earth and its Spirit is slowly bringing us to harmony. The opposite of what is happening is also happening—the paradox of life—nothing is in isolation. Once we clean up our bodies the mind will follow, clean up the mind the body will follow—you follow??? and clarity will reign supreme. Whole natural foods, getting to bed before ten, exercise some of your muscles, breathe deep and get on the train to graditude every morning. The rest of the day will be handled with care if one goes at the right speed and is not taken in by the over-stimulated, but bored society that is gradually coming back to smelling the roses. Nature is the only buffer—-take a break in it. Stay strong and courages get help if needed and I mean take the friendly user stuff. To know thyself can be good news as far as reclaiming your spirit and the empowerment to think for yourself, and therefore defining yourself thru/by Nature not technology. Remember the further away you are from Nature/God the more expensive life gets. Be responsible for yourself before you become responsbile for others. Every small step counts.
After a couple of different diagnosis of reactionary to general schizphrenia, DSMIII-IV, Knowing that I have a normal cat-scan of the brain. Also, that the DSM-V well be Published in May, 2012. Watching this kind of government power from the caplist side to the red guard side, certainly well turn your head around twice, trying to explain what justice there is for a loyal worker. i.e.LONI site at UCLA schizophrenia. I do not know about you getting an earlier message from me about if there is someone in your org., who may help file a government claim in may 2012. If there is such a person I like to know. Service-Connected veteran Arland Scott Foster thank you
How timely your article really is! Just look below at what Uncle Sam’s psychs think they have in store for everyone, starting with 1.1 civilian military staffers, plus their spouses and their families. The psychs must be thinking BIG since its described as a Global assessment tool:
“Each and every one of the 1.1 million army staffers will participate in a comprehensive soldier fitness mental health assessment and resource program. The assessment is expected to help Army employees, spouses and even children get access to resources that will help them better handle stress. Gen. Casey asked University of Pennsylvania Professor Dr. Martin Seligman to support the Army in developing this global assessment tool. ‘We teach people a variety of techniques in which they take the most catastrophic thoughts they have and we teach them to argue against them,’… The program will identify those soldiers and employees in need of resources…”
“In need” of “resources”… “variety of techniques”… Ha! Give this program a chance to take root and just about everyone will be up to their eyeballs in “resources” in the name of National Mental Health Security (talk about mission creep!).
As I read this article, its already a mandatory program and is intended to be (initially) enforced upon millions of military services members and civilians whose overall purpose is to help protect and serve our country – absolutely insidious in its design – congratulations Dr. Seligman. But forgive me doctor if I argue this catastrophe out loud, and out loud to other free and critical thinking Americans with the question to ask here: Gen. Casey, who directed you to go to Seligam?
The answer will undoubtedly be the names of other dangerous psychs with destructive plans for my country, but WHO are they?
Ref:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,570056,00.html?test=latestnews
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Like Reich’s, the inclusion of A. S. Neill in this list is a HUGE error, and in fact, one may start doubting the credibility of the author and even that of CCHR altogether (and THAT would be a pity!, because CCHR’s work is invaluable and much needed!) Eakmen however clearly has no clue about who A. S. Neill was! Maybe you should read his works, research your sources, understand what the Summerhill School was (and still is!) all about, how Neill defended the rights of children to be and grow and develop and learn in total freedom, his bouts and struggles and resistance to “the system,” and then, revise the article and do everyone a favor and remove Neill’s name from this list, and Reich’s as James DeMeo also points out above, and maybe even others?! If anything, Neill was against conformity, standardization and compliance of any kind. His life was an example in what freedom means… I suggest CCHR makes sure articles publish in their website to not undermine the credibility of their work. Beverly Eakman, signs this article as “Author, Educator and Former Editor-In-Chief, NASA’s Newspaper (JSC)” NASA? Is this an attempt at disinformation? Readers, beware of wolfs disguised as sheep!…
James DeMeo you need to take a closer look at your facts…
Wilhelm Reich was appropriately included in Eakman’s article on current psychological-psychiatric-political threats to the country. Tout all you like about Reich’s denouncement of Nazism, Communism and drugs but that misses the point entirely. Reich, like Kurt Lewin, Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and others was a psychosocial engineer whose humanistic psychology has helped decimate society.
Lewin’s sensitivity training—that permeated nearly every facet of society, from religious orders and our schools to mass marketing and advertising—was described as being “developed to study how people could be socially and psychologically manipulated to give up their souls….” Psychologist Ed Schein wrote that it fit into “coercive persuasion in the form of thought reform or brainwashing as well as a multitude of less coercive, informal patterns.”
Reich argued that neurosis was rooted in the physical, sexual, economic and social conditions of the patient, justifying adolescent sex education programs, open relationships outside marriage and divorce—which people adopted as first off options for handling their troubles and woes. The bottom line I’m going to take from the title of J. Hillman Ph.D.’s book: We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and The World’s Getting Worse. – Wendy Mileson
James DeMeo and Joao Regarding A. S. Neill & Wilhelm Reich
I am very familiar with A. S. Neill’s work; I have read his Summerhill childrearing tome cover-to-cover as well as reviews of it, and even quoted from the book in my 1999 award-winning best-seller Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality Through Education (pp. 111-113, 129 among others). This fellow, Neill, was a first-class screwball who promoted the “New Education [Therapy] Movement,” and who advocated, among other things, teachers inciting more food fights among students in the cafeterias. He was said to have suffered a “mental breakdown” in World War I and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he underwent psychiatric treatment. It apparently did him no favors. He eventually served as a catalyst for changing the very foundations of schooling — through a combined process of chaos, disobedience and non-assimilation, as the reader/commentator says, which was correct insofar as he goes. Neill’s logic, like his mentor’s (Homer Lane) was that if children were to be truly free, it had to include the “privilege of conscious wrongdoing.” But Neill’s post-Craiglockhart /psychiatric treatment experience shows him to be very erratic, making frequent U-turns on positions. Thus the sporadic charges of “McCarthyite,” and so on. Neill simply was not consistent, and drew fire accordingly.
At first, A. S. Neill’s ideas were considered so radical and convoluted that he was denied a visa into the U.S., but what a difference a decade or so makes! Once a few influential American psychologists and psychologists started backing educational and parenting chaos, Neill found himself (in the 1960s) invited to be a guest on the old Johnny Carson Tonight Show. Fortunately, such individuals typically are quickly forgotten and not taken very seriously by sleepy viewers.
Most sixties-era audiences, for example, never dreamed that somewhere in the lounges of academia, someone like Neill would one day serve as a catalyst for changing the very foundations of schooling -— through this combined process of chaos, outright disobedience and non-assimilation. What psychiatrists like what was the “disobedience” part, because it fit into their non-authoritarian-parent beliefs, which today are among the main principles espoused by child “experts.”
So, I included Neill among the contributors to psychopolitics, not because he was against conformity, standardization and assimilation, but because he wound up, helping to institutionalize a virtual “standard,” if you will of chaos. By so doing, he invited, wittingly or not, others to abandon ALL standards, including the moral and ethical ones that hold societies together. He is not the first, of course, to push for dismantling all rules and abandoning discipline. The trouble is, every nation that buys in to it ends up launching the very sort of police state to which Neill would have objected, because a people can stand only so much chaos. In essence, folks end up demanding that someone, anyone, come in and pick up the pieces — i.e., restore order. Our baby boomers, for example, for swore they’d never trust anyone over 30 and wanted free reign to disregard rules—now guess what: They are the reigning adults now and can’t think up enough rules and inconveniences with which to saddle the rest of us!
So, that’s why we have so much emphasis on “mental health” now, because of the backlash; yet, police and our nation’s leaders are having trouble reigning in truly vicious behavior without taking away EVERYONE’s rights, because of a political correctness (aimed at shoring up everyone’s self-esteem, among other things) and demands that everybody be treated exactly the same, regardless of what they do. Thus are, say, convicted sex offenders, who may have already been sentenced to some 50 years for horribly violent crimes (like Jaycee Duggard’s kidnapper-rapist), are inexplicably released after a mere dozen years, so that they repeat their crimes. Pretty soon nobody can catch all of them. Indeed, rape is sometimes not even classified as a violent crime anymore. Why? Because doing so might violate the “rights” of some who want to indulge indiscriminately in sado-masochism. Yikes!
Psychiatrists have been quick to support this kind of counterproductive, touchy-feely leadership, knowing good and well that desperate people wind up taking drugs and begging for mental-health facilities. Of course, this backfires “big time” on the country as a whole.
As for questioning my credentials as a former editor-in-chief of NASA’s newspaper at the Johnson Space Center in Houston: For heaven’s sake just get on the computer and look it up. Here’s the main link and enough specifics so you can click get started:
First, click on the main link:
(http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/roundups/roundups.htm).
Then, select the years 1977 and 1978, which takes one to specific issues of the paper. Select anything from August 19, 1977, to April 28, 1978 (when the documentation contract between NASA and Kentron-Hawaii, Ltd. officially expired).
In choosing from so many back-issues, I would suggest those that are most representative, listed below for their relevance to the proposed position or general importance. Some of these were pieces that turned out to be “firsts” in a particular field; others are simply features that might be of interest to the position in question.
§ Aug. 19, 1977 (The above-the-fold title and story are typical of my style even then.)
§ Nov. 25, 1977 (“David gets his suit” was the “tech” version of the famous Bubble Boy story made into a film starring John Travolta.)
§ Dec. 9, 1977 (“Space education on wheels” — I worked closely with/promoted this program due to my education background.)
§ Dec. 23, 1977 (The Helen Ragsdale feature on p. 4 was a typical human-interest piece for me.)
§ Feb. 17, 1978 (The high-profile meteorite find features my interview with the primary researcher on the scene in Antarctica.)
March 17, 1978 (As far as I can tell, this was the first story to explain musical composition by computer. I geared it to the layperson.) This was the forerunner of a genre now frequently referred to as “New Classical” or “New Age” instrumentals.
As for the other reader’s objection to my adding Wilhelm Reich among the contributors to psychopolitics:
As per my award-winning best-seller Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality Through Education (which is where I first placed most of the research relevant to him — some 16 pages’ worth): He was another promoter of anti-authoritarianism of they type which leads to more authoritarian control. He picked up the mantra of “sexual politics” from where its pioneer, Otto Gross (a serious cocaine and morphine abuser), left off. Like contemporaries Horkheimer, Fromm, Adorno and Marcuse, he helped establish the stereotypical authoritarian composite character scale. It became a symbol of intolerance, rigidity and patriarchal oppression that is used even today by psychiatrists. Of course, psychiatry made political hay out of it, launching a wave of undisciplined, amoral and chaotic behaviors. The larger agenda became the abolition of culture — not because Reich said so, but because he and his colleagues served as what Lenin would have dubbed “useful idiots.” They brought in the very thing they claimed to detest because they were working from a “mental hygiene” model that doesn’t work.
I wish I had more time to go into this further, but you can read more in the third part of my five-part book, Cloning of the American Mind, to see how this fits together.
Beverly Eakman
TKU ever so much, Beverly. I just printed this out and intend to distribute it. I hope that is okay. Let me know.
Respectfully Yours,
bj
Fascism is most certainly on the rise. Stop the chemical cocktails. Stop compulsive treatment.
Someone has removed my comment.That is very odd!
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