Hans Asperger

I'm not in disagreement with the term Asperger's being dropped for a place on the spectrum either. I agree with her comment that people that have been given the diagnosis as "Asperger's" or identify as such shouldn't worry.

One thing that did stand out for me was the part in the article where Czech was quoted as saying........

“Asperger refused to acknowledge the reality of anti-Jewish persecution by the Nazi regime; this indifference is visible both during and after the war,” said Czech.

The historian admitted that his findings might well be painful for autistic people and their families to digest, but said he was obliged to reveal them. (as a person with Jewish heritige and ASD I find it offensive that he is using both Jews and Autism as currency for his career, what does Asperger's opinion have to do with a diagnosis made on a person with nothing to do with Asperger's opinion and their families? It's not like they are Nazi!)

“It would have been wrong for me to have withheld this information, however difficult it might be to hear,” he said. “At the same time, there is no evidence to show his contributions to autism research were tainted by his problematic role during National Socialism. So purging the term Asperger from the medical lexicon would not be helpful. Rather, this should be an opportunity to look at the past and learn lessons from it.”

Earlier in the article it says........

In his 43-page paper, Czech is deeply critical of authors in the English-speaking world, who he accused, over decades, of perpetuating a “predominantly apologetic narrative” of Asperger, “based on the limited range of sources available to them”. He also criticised Uta Frith, considered one of the UK’s leading autism experts, saying she had barely mentioned Nazism in her 1991 book Asperger and His Syndrome, which he believed had been instrumental in establishing the common view that Asperger had “defended his patients against the Nazi regime at great personal risk”, when the opposite had been the case, Czech said. Frith declined to comment for this article.

So it seems Czech finds it OK to defend Asperger's research by his own standard but Frith cannot. He even admits it she was using a "limited range of sources". I'd rather have Frith using her time on research in Autism anyway.

Frith is an expert in Autism, Czech is a not particularly prominent historian from what I can make out. Czech seems like an attention seeker. He could have written the paper on Asperger and not used it as a hit piece on Frith.

Frith has done far more for Autistic people than Czech ever will. Frith has the potential to do more if she isn't dragged through the mud. My fears are already being confirmed! I just hope that this whole thing doesn't affect anything inside of current research!

DragonCat16 said:

Scary stuff, especially considering the participants were under no perceived threat against themselves, but simply given orders by another person. Imagine how many people would have gone all the way to 450 V if their own lives, or the lives of family members, had been threatened (I'm guessing closer to 100%).

There was also the Stanford Prison Experiment, in the early seventies, which went rather wrong, and was recently made into a film and released on DVD etc.

The descriptive on the back of the DVD reads in part as follows:

What happens when a college psych study goes shockingly wrong?

In this tense, psychological thriller based on the notorious true story, Billy Crudup stars as Standford University Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who in 1971, cast 24 student volunteers as prisoners and guards in a simulated jail to examine the source of abusive behaviour in the prison system.

The results astonished the world, as participants went from middle-class undergrads to drunk-with-power sadists and submissive victims in just a few days.

And for a bit of further reading:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html

DongFeng5 said:

In the same way I have felt compelled to get involved when complete strangers are getting assaulted in public. It's wrong, and I won't stand for it.

I do not do the 'irked' thing myself, as I just stay neutral or calm, whether it involves verbal or physical abuse, or whether it requires verbal or physical measures. The calmer or more neutral I am in general, the less intense my seizures are, and the shorter their hangover durations are.

I used to get irked about things, but I just deal with them now and put the available energy to more efficient use.

DongFeng5 said:

If I do nothing, what does that make me, and what kind of society will we be living in as a result?

That is an impossible question to answer specifically, as you are referring to your personal field of experience, and as such asking me to make a judgement of your character in relation to society, as based upon that which you have not done, or would not do.

There is also the further difficulty that your question involves judging the structural character of your writing ~ rather than as such you; then applying that incomplete judgement to you ~ and not thereby respecting you as a complete individual.

The words NAS ban are quite ridiculous sometimes. I was told that the algorithms, or whatever, that run this site simply detect and delete regardless of context but I don't understand how that correlates with the news I keep hearing about how 'smart' these algorithms are becoming. Can't they detect context?  

Deepthought said:

did you decide to be irked about that and do likewise

Yes. 

In the same way I have felt compelled to get involved when complete strangers are getting assaulted in public. It's wrong, and I won't stand for it.

If I do nothing, what does that make me, and what kind of society will we be living in as a result?

DongFeng5 said:

It just irks me when people start getting hysterical and demanding that someone/something be completely disowned by society because they've decided to be offended. 

One of the things that I have always found curiously intriguing, is the tendency that we have along with others to contradict ourselves. My most poignant experience, as a child, was me at full volume yelling at my parents that I was not shouting, so loudly actually that I realised I was shouting!

I felt puzzled and strangely enlightened by this experientially.

One thing that I have learned since from that experience, is that when we get triggered, or set off, by events or things people say, do or write ~ the behavioural reaction or reproduction to which is subconsciously automatic, and not so much or even at all a conscious decision.

So in the same sense as people getting hysterical and demanding, in order to exclude something from some aspect of societal acceptance, did you decide to be irked about that and do likewise by degree?

Keep secure in mind here I am in no way judging your character, as I am just drawing attention to the intricacies of how we communicate, as a species, in many languages and dialects.

Senor said:

That isn't exactly a huge revelation

I don't think I claimed that it was?

It just irks me when people start getting hysterical and demanding that someone/something be completely disowned by society because they've decided to be offended. 

"I am offended, therefore you must all think and do what I say, otherwise you're clearly evil..."

Sorry, but no. No one is entitled to anything. Least of all telling other people how they must think. 

Senor said:

We will probably never know exactly what happened, but I believe we would also be extremely naive to just carry on remembering the heroic stuff.

Social hero to social martyr at the drop of paper session ~ 'fickle-factor-ten' is so not unusual in society; what with all that 'raise 'em up and bring 'em down' stuff. 

Science that is deplorably researched, proven or used, in part or whole, needs to be more morally and ethically applied as a matter of respect to those who were not treated accordingly, and for those who can and are being so more now.

There is still a long way to go yet as far as societal moral and ethical standards go, and although we are currently experiencing a regression in this respect, we are still making progress and achieving a great deal, none the less.

That isn't exactly a huge revelation. I would argue that not much has changed since the 70s, and fundamentalist notions of what is and isn't useful are actually resurgent in recent years. We will probably never know exactly what happened, but I believe it would be of very dubious benefit to just carry on remembering the heroic stuff alone. The use of Asperger's as a diagnostic term will probably continue, but it will perhaps now carry with it some additional history that is still worthy of consideration.

So, given the above, it logically follows that we should continue to use the term Asperger. All the "oh but he was a Nazi" fuss ignores the hard fact that western society generally was demonstrably fascist and in the case of the USA continued to be so well into the 1970s at least. 

A1) Ideas about Eugenics go back to ancient Greece, but I was thinking of:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton

I'll let you have the USA though, on account of:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Davenport

There's a saying that when you're pointing a finger at others ("the *** did it"), there are three more fingers pointing back at you (!)

Clearly, although everyone obsesses about the *** - owing to the Hitlerfication of history - the ideas of eugenics were prevalent throughout the western world. The whole "wait, no, that's not what we meant..." in 1945 in response to the full implementation of these ideas under the third reich are therefore hypocritical in the extreme, especially since so many scientists were spirited away to the USSR, Britain and the USA after the war to continue their work, and the americans in particular persisted with their eugenics programmes until well into the 1970s, and in some cases beyond. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

A2) Yes, i was thinking of the 1970s. Well beyond the full, unfettered implementation that was supposedly so evil - so evil that they carried on with it in america after the war! 

This rather reminds me of that song Where is the love? by the Black Eyed Peas e.g.:

Overseas, yeah, we try to stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin'
In the USA, the big CIA
The Bloods and The Crips and the KKK

But if you only have love for your own race
Then you only leave space to discriminate
And to discriminate only generates hate
And when you hate then you're bound to get irate, yeah

The rest of the lyrics can be read here: 

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/blackeyedpeas/whereisthelove.html

It’s funny because whenever I hear that song I think of how relevant it is to the world we live in today, and the world decades ago, but the song was released in 2003, which just goes to prove that the world isn’t really moving on in some aspects. I think it’s really sad, but some people will always hate other types of people and there will always be wars...indeed, where is the love?

Some people have already indicated that they no longer wish to use 'Asperger's' and aspie. It makes me wonder if DSM-5 was aware this issue might eventually arise and so sought to replace it with a position on the ASD spectrum. I'm still not feeling particularly condemnatory about this, but I support Cloudy Mountains. With big names signing an editorial in support of Czech, I don't think it will disappear any time soon. I have heard that some people who worked with Asperger in his later life formed the impression he was somewhat aspergic himself. One imagines that might not have been an entirely insignificant factor in such troubled times. One thing that caught my attention was that he seems to have deliberately played up labels indicating high-functioners with the idea that they would be more useful alive to the Third Reich. But he also must have known that those people he deemed less 'useful' were going to be sent to institutions where euthanasia was practiced. And sometimes he was stricter in his classifications than the Nazi administrators of those institutions - although being permitted to survive in such a harsh environment was of extremely dubious worth.

To anyone reading I didn't use a swear word before reductions. For some reason the female mammary gland is considered a swear word. Look. Chicken ***.

Q1) Modern Eugenics was American

Q2) The late 70's?

They are still sterilizing female convicts in the USA.

I agree with Carol Povey's comment. Completely.

The whole affair is troublesome to say the least. As someone with Jewish heritage I'd have had 2 reasons to worry. Looking at the whole picture though what would have happened if Asperger didn't do the research. I feel for the children that were euthanised. One problem I do have with this piece is that because of Czech's paper Asperger's work might be buried due to the moral dilemmas this may raise in academia.

I'm really not surprised by it though. The Nazi's performed hysterectomys and *** reductions routinely for cruelty and research. They use the techniques today that were born out of those horrors. They basically went wild with research because of the excuses the ideology gave them. I don't see any stigma being implied to people who have these procedures or any mention of the Nazi's that did them. Why should Asperger's be any different? The answer for me is controversy.

The Japanese were terrible too. Unit 731 was a Japanese unit that did medical experimentaton and biological weapons experimentation on large numbers of people in WW2. Their "inventions" killed half a million. The medical techniques they discovered are used today and the biological weapons were of great interest to the allies. The Americans granted many Unit 731 members immunity. Many went on to practice medicine and some carried on the research in allied nations. This bothers me greatly. Asperger gets highlighted (and rightfully so) but people who did experiments on live subjects (I won't detail them here because they are very, very, extreme) and created devastating biological weapons (which were continued to be developed) are never mentioned. The Soviets went after them as criminals but the Americans rolled out the red carpet for them. They also did this for Nazi's they deemed useful.

There have been eugenics issues for Autistic people far more recently. In nations that never get criticized or mentioned. Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark had programs up until the late 70's. The mentally ill, people with PDD's such as Autism, and lots of other "burden's to society". It's never mentioned. These countries should be dragged over the coals. We knew the Nazi's were pieces of *** but why should they get away with it.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225135

Sweden started in 1906 and didn't stop until 1975.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden?wprov=sfla1

Even more recently Belgium have been allowing people with Autism to "euthanise" themselves. Also people with depression, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses. They should be helping people deal with their problems. Maybe they are considered "a burden to society". That's a phrase from facist ideology.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/europes-morality-crisis-euthanizing-the-mentally-ill/2016/10/19/c75faaca-961c-11e6-bc79-af1cd3d2984b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b31509b04502

There are injustices going on right now that are just as bad as Nazi Germany. You won't find them being reported on. We need to stay vigilant.

I think this is a non-story, really.

Pop quiz:

Q1) Where did eugenics originate?

Q2) In what year did the USA cease forcible sterilisation of "mentally defective" individuals?

StephenHarris said:

Indeed, but an awful lot of them were in some form or another; denouncing neighbours or turning a blind eye to the regime's abuses.

There is a thing called Adulteration Abuse, which is not often mentioned, given that Normalised Abuse is the more palatable and less inflammatory version. Basically the vast majority of the human population operate according to societal "Group-Think", which is shared and enforced amongst the egotised masses, and involves to some extent more or less ~ ageism, sexism and tribalism, as amounts to generalised elitism.

When then work, basic food supplies and services start getting short in supply or too expensive, people die. When people keep dying it becomes traumatically normalised due to shock, and increasing fear ~ as rationally balanced thinking is obstructed by quasi-rational and thus misdirected delusional thoughts.

Add sociopathic, nihilistic and necrophilic dictators, who like getting other people paranoid, and stirring up hatred and violence ~ then such societies start finding it a lot more acceptable to let or make other people die instead of themselves, and their families.

Option one is conform and perhaps live,

Option two is rebel and most likely die.

Suicide is for most not an option.

If you look at the link, when they held the experiment in a run-down building, the percentage of people that would deliver a lethal shock went down significantly, but not right down to zero. Obviously many of them believed that the shocks they were giving were real, because otherwise why would so many of them have stopped at 300 V? The person who was "receiving" the shocks was sitting in the room with them and pretending to feel pain, and, as far as the participants knew, that person was simply another experiment participant, just like them.

The experiment was designed so that the participants believed that everything was real. They weren't told beforehand what they would be asked to do, so did they really have time to think about how many corpses the university were disposing of?

I know.