[Marxism] Re: The Disability Gulag

["David Quarter" <davidquarter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Yoshie:

 thanks for posting the article. These types of 'human rights
abuses' ( I don't like the term, but I'll use it here) are pervasive in
NA and Europe (and I would suspect in other parts of the world as
well). For example, I just received an article from a friend, which I
will post to Marx mail, discussing how persons in the UK labeled
with 'learning disabilities' have been locked up indefinitely in
asylums, some of them for their whole lives. I also know of
someone who writes for disability rights magazine in the U.S. that
spent over 20 years locked up in state and privately run so-called
mental insitutions., where she was beaten and raped repeatedly by
personel. These type of crimes are something marxists and others
on the left SHOULD be speaking out against, let alone trying to put
an end to. Yet, aside from disability rights activists and former
psychiatric patients who identify as anti psychiatry (and their
supporters)
there has been little discussion of such matters. Which is a type of
crime in itself.


 I would also take issue with the author's characterization of these
people as 'feebleminded and physically defective'.  These are
eugenic terms. When you here them, the first thing that  should
come to mind is: Nazis policies of extermination. They imply that
there is something defective about the people in question. Yet,
what is really in fact defective is a society which refuses to
accomodate those of us who require particular supports to get on
with our business.


DOQ



 Grandmother lost her mother in the early 1900's to what was
considered
> progressive policy. To protect society from the insane,
feebleminded and
> physically defective, states invested enormous public capital in
> institutions, often scattered in remote areas. Into this state-
created
> disability gulag people disappeared, one by one.
>
> Today, more than 1.7 million mothers and fathers, daughters and
sons,
> are lost in America's disability gulag. Today's gulag characterizes
> isolation and control as care and protection, and the
disappearances are
> often called voluntary placements. However, you don't vanish
because
> that's what you want or need. You vanish because that's what
the state
> offers. You make your choice from an array of one.
>
> But now the gulag faces a challenge from people who know the
fear
> firsthand. . . .
>
> Hariett McBryde Johnson last wrote for the magazine about her
exchanges
> with Peter Singer.





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