According to a Psychology Today hit piece written by psychologist John Gartner, people prone to thinking that powerful men might actually get together and plan to maintain and advance their power are borderline psychotics who are a danger to society. In reality, hundreds of years of history has taught us that psychologists routinely aid authoritarian regimes in enforcing tyrannical and inhumane policies while helping them crush political opposition by defining suspicion of authorities as a mental illness.
According to a Psychology Today hit piece written by psychologist John Gartner, people prone to thinking that powerful men might actually get together and plan to maintain and advance their power are borderline psychotics who are a danger to society. In reality, hundreds of years of history has taught us that psychologists routinely aid authoritarian regimes in enforcing tyrannical and inhumane policies while helping them crush political opposition by defining suspicion of authorities as a mental illness.
As we highlighted in our article yesterday, psychologists in the Soviet Union were used to stifle free speech by classifying skepticism and political opposition to the state as a mental illness, which is precisely the implication littered throughout Gartner's crass hit piece [2].
But the use of psychologists in the pursuit of inhumane policies is not just resigned to tyrannical regimes of the first half of the 20th century.
Recent revelations surrounding the torture scandal highlight the role of psychologists in what the Physicians for Human Rights organization alleges amounted to 'unlawful human experimentation' and torture on inmates at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other U.S. detention sites.
'PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA's secret 'torture programme,' reports the London Guardian [6].
Doctors and psychologists actively monitored CIA torture techniques and helped evaluate their effectiveness, a 'violation of core ethical values' according to the American Medical Association and a flagrant abuse of the 1947 Nuremberg Code, which forbids experimentation on humans without their consent.
The CIA's close relationship with psychologists and psychiatrists in conducting illegal torture programs stretches back decades.
'Historian Alfred W. McCoy has shed light in this area in his recent book A Question of Torture and in numerous articles and interviews,' writes Stephen Soldz [7]. 'He documents the decades-long CIA effort to utilized psychological expertise to develop forms of torture that could break down the personality of detainees, rendering them, it was hoped, incapable of withholding desired information. Many of these technique were utilized during the Vietnam conflict and in the various brutal U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin American in the 1970s and 1980s.'
While Psychology Today's John Gartner cites a single example of a 'conspiracy theorist' who voiced support for Alex Jones entering Bohemian Grove armed with guns, and uses it to make the implication that 'conspiracy thinking' is a major threat to society, documented history stretching back hundreds of years shows that psychologists, and particularly their tactic of classifying suspicion of authorities and 'conspiracy thinking' as a mental illness, have played a key role in preserving the power of dictatorial elites and helping them to carry out inhumane practices while crushing free speech and legitimate political opposition
http://www.infowars.com/why-psychologists-are-infinitely-more-dangerous-than-conspiracy-theorists/ [1]
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Links:
[1] http://www.infowars.com/why-psychologists-are-infinitely-more-dangerous-than-conspiracy-theorists/
[2] http://prisonplanet.com/images/september2009/020909pt.pdf
[3] http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nG9TDItv-QQC&dq=role%2Bof%2Bpsychologists%2Bin%2Bnazi%2Bgermany&source=gbs_navlinks_s
[4] http://reference.findtarget.com/search/Robert%20Ritter/
[5] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16082
[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/02/cia-usa
[7] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14329.htm
[8] http://www.geocities.com/questministry
[9] http://www.nationalwardogsmonument.org/
[10] http://www.disclosureproject.com/