The medicalization of rebellion: Stigmatizing Resistance to Authority

Sheldon Richman

In 1861 Samuel A. Cartwright, an American physician, described a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” As Wikipedia points out, the term derived from drapetes, Greek for “runaway [slave],” and mania for madness or frenzy.

Thus Cartwright defined drapetomania as “the disease causing negroes to run away [from captivity].”

“[I]ts diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers,” Cartwright wrote in a much-distributed paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana. Yet this disorder was “unknown to our medical authorities.”

Cartwright thought slave owners caused the illness by making “themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals.” Drapetomania could also be induced “if [the master] abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him, or punishing him in anger, or by neglecting to protect him from the wanton abuses of his fellow-servants and all others, or by denying him the usual comforts and necessaries of life.”

He had ideas about proper prevention and treatment:

[I]f his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the sane [sic] time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away. . . .

If any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good requires that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy in all after-time. . . . They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children, with care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away. [Emphasis added.]


Thank Goodness for WikiLeaks

Sheldon Richman

[A picture taken on March 30, 2007 shows an Iraqi woman walking past a US soldier with 4-9 Cavalry 2BCT 1 Cavalry Division B-troop as he patrols Sheikh Ali Muslim Sunni neighbourhood in Baghdad. Al-Jazeera released "startling new information" from US documents obtained by WikiLeaks on October 22, alleging state-sanctioned Iraqi torture and the killing of hundreds of civilians at US military checkpoints. (Patrick Baz/AFP/CSM)]

In October WikiLeaks released close to 400,000 U.S. classified military documents relating to the Iraq war. The American people, the theoretical masters of the government, were not supposed to see them. The government preferred that they not know. So just as when the website released 77,000 documents on the Afghan war in August, government officials and apologists for the empire’s war policies roundly condemned WikiLeaks. Apparently, the greatest breach of decorum is to let the American people know how their government conducts its wars. In November WikiLeaks began to release more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables, creating even more heat for the organization.

In December the U.S. Justice Department was deliberating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be charged with conspiracy to obtain government documents. The government was looking for evidence that Assange assisted or encouraged Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is in custody on charges of leaking the information, rather than being merely a passive recipient of the information. The website Daily Beast said that “the U.S. effort reflects a growing belief that WikiLeaks and organizations like it threaten grave damage to American national security....” Or, at any rate, to the government’s ability to shape public opinion by withholding the truth of its wars.


None Dare Call It Tyranny

Sheldon Richman¨
The Future of Freedom Foundation

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults. It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.


Endless Occupation?

Sheldon Richman
Freedom Daily

So Gen. Stanley McChrystal is out and Gen. David Petraeus is back at the helm in Afghanistan. I don’t like hackneyed phrases, but if this isn’t rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, what is it?

America’s occupation of Afghanistan has no end in sight. The July 2011 date for the beginning of withdrawal is something that even President Obama doesn’t want to talk about. It is clearer than ever that the date was a crumb thrown to the American people so they wouldn’t grumble when Obama announced the troop buildup last year. As Petraeus told members of Congress this month, “It’s important that July 2011 be seen for what it is, the date when a process begins based on conditions, not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits.”

Obama presumably would like to get out — he can’t be thrilled about presiding over America’s longest war — but the cross-currents may leave him no choice but to tread water. The military wants to “win,” whatever that means, while the Right is ready to pounce on Obama as an appeaser of terrorists if he acknowledges the reality of this inglorious war. (Al-Qaeda has moved on.)

We call the operation in Afghanistan a “war,” but in fact U.S. forces are occupying the country in order to suppress any opposition to the corrupt and inept Karzai government that the United States helped put in power and has protected ever since. In the parlance of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, any enemy of President Hamid Karzai is an enemy of the United States, which is ridiculous. Afghans don’t like invaders, be they Britons or Russians or Americans. That they attack occupying forces and the governments those forces support means nothing more than that they want to rid their land of foreign troops. That doesn’t make them anti-American terrorists. It makes them Afghans. Let’s leave their country to them.


Health Care Reform: We're Being Fooled Again

Sheldon Richman
Campaign for Liberty

The medical system does need reforming -- radical reforming. It's more expensive than it ought to be, and powerful interests prosper at the expense of the rest of us. The status quo has little about it to be admired, and we shouldn't tolerate it.

Thus, the American people should be fed up with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid for insulting our intelligence with their so-called heath-care reform. It is nothing of the sort. What they call progressive reform is little more than reinforcement of the exploitative system we suffer today.

Whether intentionally or not, Obama & Co. have misdiagnosed the problem with the current system and therefore have issued a toxic prescription as an alleged cure. They essentially say that the problem is too free a market in medical care and insurance; thus for them the solution is a less-free market, that is, more government direction of our health-care-related activities.

Yet if the diagnosis is wrong -- which it is -- the prescription will also be wrong.

Note that the attention of nearly all the "reformers" is on the insurance industry. What ostensibly started out as "health-care reform" quickly became health-insurance regulation. A common theme of all of the leading proposals is that insurance companies have too few restrictions on them. So under Obamacare, government will issue more commands: preexisting conditions must be covered; policy renewal must be guaranteed; premiums may not reflect the health status or sex of policyholders; the difference between premiums charged young and old must be within government specs; lifetime caps on benefits are prohibited, et cetera.


The Sad Legacy of Ronald Reagan

Sheldon Richman
The Free Market

This is the Reagan legacy. He was to be the man who would turn things around. But he didn't even try. As he so dramatically illustrated when he accepted the plant-closing bill, there has been no sea-change in thinking about the role of government.

On August 2, 1988, President Ronald Reagan announced that he had changed his mind about the pro-union plant-closing bill. He had vetoed it three months earlier, but now let it become law without his signature after intense pressure from presidential nominee George Bush and former Treasury Secretary James Baker, now Bush's campaign chairman. Reagan claimed that only this action would enable him to sign a Congressional trade bill almost unequaled in its anti-consumer protectionism.

Ronald Reagan's faithful followers claim he has used his skills as the Great Communicator to reverse the growth of Leviathan and inaugurate a new era of liberty and free markets. Reagan himself said, "It is time to check and reverse the growth of government."

Yet after nearly eight years of Reaganism, the clamor for more government intervention in the economy was so formidable that Reagan abandoned the free-market position and acquiesced in further crippling of the economy and our liberties. In fact, the number of free-market achievements by the administration are so few that they can be counted on one hand—with fingers left over.


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