@MirkoS77 said:
It comes down to defining what a severe mental disorder is, but I'd like to know how supporting an assembly line of the slaughter of millions of men, women, and children is NOT a severe mental disorder, propaganda or otherwise. People are fucking deranged and mentally sick beyond hope if they can even humor supporting such a thing.
The key point is "losing contact with reality". NOTHING about supporting or engaging in genocide inherently says anything about the participants' ability to understand reality.
Never mind whether or not genocide requires "mental illness" in order to support it (and I don't believe it does, because there are purely rational reasons to support it such as SELF-BENEFIT), psychosis is a SPECIFIC mental illness.
You do realize that mental illness is a wide spectrum, right? Someone who is completely incapable of feeling empathy or compassion for other human beings might indeed kill other people, but that doesn't make them PSYCHOTIC. Someone who is clinically depressed is mentally ill, but that doesn't mean they're going to jump on board the genocide train.
Stop throwing around words willy-nilly. These words have MEANINGS. Psychosis doesn't just mean that someone is willing to do horrible shit, psychosis is an inability to understand reality. That has nothing inherently to do with genocide. There were plenty of people who supported the holocaust and knew EXACTLY what they were doing. But they did it anyway because they stood to make money off of it or they wanted to avoid making themselves a target or they just plain AGREED with the Nazi agenda.
It doesn't work that way, and white-washing the meanings in this way diminishes the effect of what actually happened. Again, psychosis doesn't vaguely mean "f***ed up in the head in some way." It's a word applied to people who can't distinguish reality from non-reality. That kind of thing is used in DEFENSE of a person's actions. Saying that the Holocaust has to be mass-psychosis implies that HITLER had to be psychotic. That's actually saying that Hitler's blame is DIMINISHED because he didn't know what he was doing.
Is that what you're saying?
You do realize that in courts, mental illness is used as a DEFENSE because then their actions were the result of their ILLNESS, right? That actually takes at least partial blame away from the perpetrator. If supporting genocide is necessarily a mental illness, and specifically a mental illness that keeps the people involved from knowing what's real, then that's an easy out. We can wash away their role by saying that it wasn't their faults. They didn't know what they were doing, they were mentally ill.
But we know damn well that that isn't the case. There were plenty of people who disagreed with it but were too damn scared to oppose it. And we also know damn well that plenty of people knew EXACTLY what they were doing and did it for money or just plain because they agreed with the agenda. I don't like to throw around this word a lot, but can we agree that not all "evil" people are unaware of the reality of their actions? A lot of them know EXACTLY what they are doing, and they LIKE IT.
Log in to comment