>
> >We should focus on the motivation of the sane, not the insane. We
> >should emphasize the feelings of the everyday Muslim, not the small
> >group of psychotics who make up the Taliban. There has been a lot of
> >talk about "blowback." Cause-and-effect should not be ignored, but
> >irrationality fights against such mechanical explanations. I believe
> >we should accept the WTC attack as an act of insanity and leave it at
> >that. We should not argue that if the US government had been more
> >critical of Israel, then the Trade Center would still be standing. We
> >should argue that such acts of madness become the dominant driving
> >force behind history as long as we do not admit to our own errors.
> >
> > -- David.
>
I'm going to make my objects to the use of "sane" and "insane" which
seems to be such a common leftie language trap that already I have
done this on three lists.
One writer labels the Taliban a "cult of ignorant psychotics," pundits and government officials have called them "madmen" and "insane". Then their is the use of the "sick people." These are all misuses of impairment and are built on assumptions of 'Normalcy." The men here were not insane, they were not mentally disabled nor are they diagnosed with any sickness yet they are being constructed that way.
Here is why IMO. Those society identifies as "abnormal" inspire fears of moral collapse. Intellectual impairment, for instance, has often wrongly been linked to criminal deviance. The easy way out is to use polarized conceptions of normal and abnormal, sane and insane, healthy and sick in order to demean and make the objects of scorn subhuman.
Then it is OK to carpet bomb them or in the case of disabled persons segregate and institutionalize them. I object to such use of this language because it fosters the idea that disabled people are a social problem, here, even a menace to society. The hegemony of "normality" is a bourgeoise construct and we should recognize it as such.
Such language as someone on another listserve rightly observed:
when we talk about our enemies as "sick" and "psychotic", we are using the language in a very strange way. SICK people should be cared for compassionately and given appropriate medical care. Psychotic (and insane) people are affected by one of several kinds of biological disorder. They also deserve compassion and understanding. Some people with mental disorders take medication to reduce their symptoms.
The disease of schizophrenia is commonly grouped with the psychoses. At least one member of WWP that I know of is taking medication for schizophrenia."
And so the ruthless acts of the CIA are labeled "insane" too, but the workers at the CIA are not insane, they are carrying out institutional orders. The terrorists are not insane no matter how we may disagree with their acts. Sane people commit murder every day. They fill the courts of our land.
As someone on another list serve poignantly remarked: What you are really trying to do is to be as insulting as possible toward the perpetrators of the WTC disaster, and to say that they are really evil and you really hate them. But when we use words like "insane," "sick" and "psychotic" as all-purpose synonyms for "evil" or ruthlessness or "reactionary", and insult reactionaries by likening them to people with certain illnesses, who moreover are very much stigmatized and oppressed in this society, this is just not correct.
Further I would make it clear that such thinking is eugenic in its origin. Psychology or psychiatry which defines the normal on an average and then calculates who doesn't fit creates a division of 'normal and abnormal'. Such societial division can be traced back to eugenic thinking which groups disabled persons with the 'unfit' and those who carry out unwanted acts. One example -- Karl Pearson a leader in the eugenicist movement defined "unfit" as "the habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculocous, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from excess" (cited in kelves, 1985, p. 33)
There is a harmful association between disability and criminal activity, mental incompetence etc. The conflation of disability with depravity expressed itself in the formulation of a "defective class." (see L. Davis, Constructing Normalcy)
Such correlations were used against immigrants as well. Charles Davenport, an American eugenicist, thought the influx of European immigrants would make the American population "darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature...more given to crimes of larceny, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality." (cited in Kelves, p. 48)
And such thinking infiltrated the left. Emma Goldman, also a eugenicist, wrote that unless birth control wa encouraged, the state would "legally encourage the increase of paupers, syphilitics, epileptics, dipsomaniacs, cripples, criminals, and degenerate" (Kevles 1985, p. 90)
This doesn't seem to to a critique of capitalism to me, seems rather to reinforce capitalist social darwinist thinking. Rockefeller, Carnegie, alexander Graham Bell were saying the same thing.
The culture continues to produce these ideas -- obviously. The 19th century construction of the "norm" is one of the most dangerous notions that the disability movement has had to confront.
Marta