What happened to 26-year-old decorated Marine Brandon Raub – who was targeted because of his Facebook posts, interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for standing by his views, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys – has happened many times throughout history in totalitarian regimes.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum observes in Gulag: A History: “The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can ‘pay their debt to society,’ make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with their ideas or their criminal acts, is a practice as old as civilization itself.”
The advent of psychiatry eliminated the need to exile political prisoners, allowing governments instead to declare such dissidents mentally ill and unfit for society. For example, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally through the use of electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures.
In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, Russian officials also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:
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2 comments:
Clint Eastwood: ‘President Obama is the Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated on the American People’
Wow. Our "leaders", sworn to uphold the Constitution, have legalized warrantless searches, confiscation of property without trial or charges, secret trials and secret prisons (inside the USA!), roaming search teams allowed to stop and search INNOCENT people on our highways, surveillance and monitoring on a scale never seen before in a "free country", and some people are freaking out that they are now using "involuntary commitment" to intimidate and silence critics? Are you kidding? You Nazi loving yes-men for totalitarianism have not only opened the door for this stuff by your hysterical cheering (and the tried and true STUPIDEST line of all -- "if you're not doing anything wrong, then don't worry"), you've kicked the door DOWN and I hope you've packed some bags because you're in line, too. You just never will believe it 'til they come for YOU. But THEN, it will be wrong, right? Clue---it's wrong NOW.
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