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 -GW-
There's rather a
lot to mention about the Nederlog of two days ago
- Is the American Psychiatric
Association a terrorist organization?
which I will do
later, while for the time being I refer you to Suzy Chapman's fine site
that the APA tried to strangle
- Dx Revision Watch
(was: dsm5watch)
where you find
quite a few interesting and heartening reactions to that attempt, that
I plan to say a little more about later in Nederlog.
For now, another
item in my
GW series in
Nederlog, following up on my update of Bob Dylan's
- The times
they are a'changin' - 1964/2012
It is a quotation
of a quotation I found in Hazlitt's
essay "On Reason and Imagination", that was reprinted last (I
think) in Penguin's series "Great Ideas". It was first published
in Hazlitt's collection of essays "The Plain Speaker".
Hazlitt gave it as
"an
example of eloquent moral reasoning (..) which was not the less
profound because it was produced by a burst of strong and momentary
feeling. It is what follows: -"
"The name of
a person having been mentioned in the presence of Naimbanna (a young
African chieftain), who was understood by him to have publicly asserted
something very degrading to the general character of Africans, he broke
out into violent and vindictive language. He was immediately reminded
of the Christian duty of forgiving his enemies, upon which he answered
nearly in the following words: - "If a man should rob me of my money, I
can forgive him; if a man should shoot at me, or try to stab me, I can
forgive him; if a man should sell me and my family to a slave-ship, so
that we should pass all the rest of our days in slavery in the West
Indies, I can forgive him, but" (added he, rising from his seat with
much emotion) "if a man takes away the character of the people of my
country, I never can forgive him."
Being asked
why he would not extend his forgiveness to those who took away the
character of the people of his country, he answered:
"If a man
should try to kill me, or should sell me and my family for slaves, he
would do an injury to as many as he might kill or sell; but if anyone
takes away the character of Black people, that man injures Black people
all over the world; and when he has once taken away their character,
there is nothing he may not do to Black people ever after. That man,
for instance, will beat Black men, and say, Oh, it is only a Black
man, why should I not beat him? That man will make slaves of Black
people; for, when he has taken away their character, he will say, Oh,
they are only Black people, why should I not make them slaves? That
man will take away all the people of Africa if he can catch them; and
if you ask him, But why do you take all these people? he will say, Oh!
they are only Black people - they are not like White people - why
should I not take them? That is the reason why I cannot forgive the
man who takes away the character of the people of my country."'-Memoirs
of Granville
Sharpe. (*)
This -
incidentally - is also my own feeling, not only about racial
discrimination, but about the
discrimination, defamation, and character assassination that Simon
Wessely, Peter White, Michael Sharpe and their ilk have been trying to
smear ill people (with ME/CFS) with - a technique which
also is now part, parcel and essence of the
APA's sick DSM-5.
And since a sick
person like Simon Wessely may try to remind his audience that he
is from Jewish descent, and his father survived the
concentration-camp Treblinka - for he has publicly done so, which is
why I know this - let me add that this makes his slander,
defamation, discrimination and character-assassination of millions
of genuinely ill people like myself all the more sickening
for me, since my father and
grandfather were arrested in 1941 for being co-organizers of the
February-Strike, that was a protest against the razzias on the Jews
in 1941, under Nazi-occupation, and were convicted to
concentration-camp imprisonment, where my grandfather was murdered. (**)
(*)
I took this as it appears in "On The
Pleasure Of Hating", which is both the name of an essay by Hazlitt that
the reader can find on my site under the link, and the title of a small
collection of six of Hazlitt's essays,
reprinted in 2004 in the Penguin series called Great Ideas. My
quotation of Hazlitt's quotation is found on pages 91-92 in that
booklet.
Incidentally, Granville Sharpe
was a very interesting and able man, as the link to the Wikipedia
article on him well shows.
(**) In fact, since Simon Wessely
has this background, about which I know rather a lot - the problems of
survivors of camps, that is - I would not at all be amazed if this sick
shrink is trying to "solve" - Vergangenheitsbewältigung
- his own family's problems due to discrimination, namely by creating
problems for others by discriminating them. Also,
having raised this point (I am quite able to support in court, if asked
or pressed) let me also that I have probably known more "Jewish
bolshevists", as the Nazis styled them, than Mr Wessely/Weisel, and
that it so happens that I am a circumcised
atheist,
who strongly objects being discriminated for being ill, for the 34th
year in succession, with a disease that medical science has not
unriddled yet, and who on that ground, like millions of others with the
same disease, is being abused by Mr
Wessely as owing my problems to my - Wessely claims - "dysfunctional
beliefs" (which did not stop me, while being ill, of getting an
excellent M.A. in psychology, but which did stop me from making money
with that, and condemned me to a poor men's life with minimal dole,
without any disability benefits, because
Wessely and his ilk claim people with my disease should not be
entitled to help, because this would strengthen my and their
"dysfunctional beliefs").
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