Racist folks who have passed away—Robert Mathews, David Lane, Dr. Pierce, Revilo Oliver, Ben Klassen, George Lincoln Rockwell—were tougher than the younger white nationalists of today. They were also far less compromising with the System’s lies than what we see nowadays in the Alt-Right scene. This reminds me an obituary that I wrote on October 16, 2012 and I translate now into English:
Tom Szasz (1920-2012)
I heard that Thomas Szasz died last month, who had a great influence on my thinking while writing the second book of Hojas Susurrantes twelve years ago. After learning about his death I visited YouTube and watched a long lecture by Szasz at his ninetieth birthday.
Although my critical study of psychiatry is now a thing of the past in my life—the race replacement that occurs throughout the West is infinitely more alarming—I had not seen critical material about psychiatry since then. But I used the news about Szasz’s death to watch other anti-psychiatric videos.
I was surprised to discover that Robert Whitaker [not to be confused with the one who coined the mantra], another of the authors mentioned in Hojas Susurrantes, has published a book critical of the profession that became a bestseller. Anatomy of an Epidemic is even influencing the fraudulent profession that we call psychiatry (this is just one of the several didactic videos of Whitaker that I watched following the death of Szasz).
Finally, remembering the trauma model of mental disorders, so central to my Hojas Susurrantes, yesterday, as I continued to refresh myself on the latest news in psychiatry criticism, I saw several interviews with Colin Ross including this one about trauma. (I quote Ross at length in a pivotal chapter in Hojas Susurrantes.)
How interesting was it to learn that it was the elder Szasz the only one in these videos who, at the beginning of the Q&A session, spoke with the right emotional tone—an open and emotional condemnation—that if a child is sent to a psychiatrist, it is because ‘the parents had done something wrong’, not the child!
Ross, on the other hand, the very psychiatrist who coined the term ‘trauma model’ when referring to parents who drive their children mad, spoke sparingly about the parents in the above-linked interview: as if he wanted to soft-pedal his main message, or convey a politically-correct image to a wider audience.
Whitaker, the psychiatry critic with the most momentum because of his bestseller, doesn’t even know that abusive parents are the cause of mental disorders. He even thinks—as orthodox psychiatrists do—that the aetiology of mental distress and disorders ‘could be biological’!
I’ve already said it elsewhere and I’m not afraid to say it again: Psychiatry critics of the first generation of critics, now all dead—Szasz, Lidz, Laing, Miller—were much braver than critics who are still with us—Whitaker, Ross and those scholars who publish in the journal that Breggin founded.
I am writing this post to reassess the critics of the old guard, and especially Szasz, who has left us.