We Must Remember

I’m either mentally ill or Jewish. I can’t sometimes tell the difference.”—Rosanne Barr

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, began at sundown on Wednesday night. A memorial day for those who died in the Shoah, which means catastrophe or utter destruction in Hebrew and “sacrifice by fire” in Greek, it awakens our memories of the atrocities that were committed against the Jewish people during World War II by the Nazis.

Last year I wrote a blog post titled, “The Ultimate Violation of My Civil Liberties: The Final Lockdown; I am a Jew. And I’ll prove it!” In the article I fully documented one of my many unlawful detainments in a mental institution that began on March 17, 2017, and lasted ten days as a result of my psychiatric label of “bipolar disorder.” I use the words Jew and Nazi to describe figuratively the oppressed mentally ill by the psychiatric system, the oppressor. I found that using these words in metaphor irked a handful of readers.

Millennials most of all, who live with a sanitized and virtual version of history through Facebook article-bites and watered-down mega-information, questioned my word choices and told me that they were offensive in their far-reaching comparisons. I have heard the same group flippantly debate the artistic validity of Stephen Spielberg’s choice in using black and white in his movie, “Schindler’s List.” As if we shouldn’t associate the living hell the Nazis perpetrated upon the Jews with vile grey tones. As if it does not merit being solidified in our memories as it was recorded in its present time period—through black and white colorless images in the newspapers that delivered them to the world. Eliminate the last memories of those still alive who remember such atrocities? The last remnants of the stories left behind are dismal recollections in black, white, and grey.

This is the real dishonesty, the true crime. Manipulating our language so that we can more easily digest the past and potentially forget the meaning of its context in the future. I refuse to give up words in my vocabulary that contain worlds of meaning through connotation and symbolism. Why lose that in our current language so that we can adhere to a politically correct one that zaps away any discomfort we may have regarding the shame and disgust associated with such words? On Holocaust Remembrance Day, more than any other day, we should not be afraid to use the words Jew and Nazi. Otherwise the atrocities would have been committed without any meaning at all. We must remember what happened. And not be afraid to speak about what happened. And in my life, living an oppressive existence chained down by a psychiatric label, I will not forget it. Because the thought-forms that are wildly alive in today’s psychiatric profession stem from the very same ideals that perpetuated the Nazi agenda of extermination.

I am among the marked Jews of today—the silenced minority.  And I’m not afraid to say it, although who really am I in comparison to the slaughtered millions? This sentiment is in the foreground of my mind, I assure you. As Elie Wiesel, the human rights activist and author of Night, the internationally acclaimed memoir based on his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1986, “It frightens me because I wonder: do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? … I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.” And yet with humility I assert I speak for many. I speak for all of the ones who cannot speak for themselves, as well as all the mentally ill during the beginning of WWII whose words can no longer be heard, and who we are also memorializing on this day.

In Nazi Germany, the designated “mentally ill” were, in fact, the first to be sterilized and later exterminated during the trial experiment of the Nazi Tiergarten 4 program. They tested eliminating the worst undesirables first and murdered 70,000 mental patients quietly and discreetly before they unleashed their horrific practices upon the Jewish population. The proceeding gas chambers were copies of the facilities in the program but with greater capacity. The medicalization of social problems and systematic euthanasia of people in German mental institutions in the 1930s provided the procedures of mass murder for WWII. No other profession at the time could boast as many party members, as 45% of German physicians belonged to the party.

In believing themselves to be the superior master race, Nazis were out to destroy non-Aryans, cleansing the world to attain heavenly perfection on Earth, driven by the concern that people who had poor genes were reproducing faster than those with superior genes. As a logical course of action, those with better genetics needed to guide human evolution toward a more superior genetic composition for the future benefit of humanity. From Mein Kampf, “A state which preserves in a time of pollution its finest racial elements must one day be lord of the Earth.” Starting with the mentally ill, the plan to eradicate unwanted genes had begun and continues to this day.

Early on in the Second World War, a Nazi propaganda film was to be shown in every cinema across Germany called, “A Life Unworthy of Life.” Throughout the film ideas are explored under the themes of race theory, race hygiene, the theory of heredity, and eugenics. The film exposes the ideological roots of the horrors of Nazi Germany as it gave rise to an obsession with cleansing the human gene pool from “unhygienic” populations. It dedicates a large section to those they referenced as “mentally ill.” As Jews were considered pests and lice, mental patients were seen as germs.

Hitler’s goal was to have the incurably ill liquidated. And today, the mentally ill are purported by science to be the incurable. The film quotes, “We humans have transgressed the law of natural selection in the last decades. Not only have we supported inferior life forms, we have encouraged their propagation.”  These obsessions with steering the course of evolution by man-made means was a driving motivator in Nazi ideology. The party took their mission very seriously. In seeing themselves as superior, they wanted to help nature along so that it would not default to selective factors randomly. They believed that certain traits they deemed as stronger and fitter for the advanced human being—such as toughness, bravery, and social utility—could only be accomplished through a human institution. They could not accept the idea that natural selection might steer humanity towards competition for resources between the superior white races and the colored populations, the Jewish lineage, or the mentally ill. Elimination of the imbecile population would ensure the master race’s chance to proliferate quicker and more efficiently.

The film quotes, “In the past 70 years, our people have increased by 50% while the hereditarily ill have increased by 450%! If this development continues, in 50 years there will be one defective for every 4 healthy people!” Ironically, they were well on target with their predictions. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) quotes that every one of four Americans is suffering from mental illness, many of whom don’t even know it.  But the state keeps track. The physicians in Nazi Germany were there to fix the problems of the human race from its defects, and they were often the men in uniform. Currently the state through psychiatry is utilizing the same philosophy to keep everyone in line. Almost every state now has some sort of version of in-home compulsory court-ordered medication treatment based on state law. In New York, that’s Kendra’s Law, where police are actually protected by law to show up at someone’s doorstep and escort the patient to the clinic for their anti-psychotic medication injection if they have not kept their medication appointments, and it also provides grounds for forced hospitalization against a person’s will based on their diagnosis alone. Reinstatement of Kendra’s Law went into effect in June 2017, three months after the unlawful detainment I suffered in March 2017.

Genetic Engineering: Creating the Superior Human

Those who have psychiatric labels from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) know only too well the limitations and heartache that can result from it. My psychiatric label brands me forever in this lifetime as a less evolved specimen type. Evolutionarily speaking, I am a defective gene, which is on its way to being cleansed from the future of our human gene pool. And my diseased mind, they have convinced the masses, is derived from my faulty genetics.

Much of psychiatry is based on the idea of genetic mistakes in our personal traits, and the field has been on the move to prove its flaccid theories in biological psychology for decades. On the cover of the January 28th 1998 issue of Newsweek, Robin Williams stares pensively into the distance with a stethoscope to his forehead. The article, “Is Everybody Crazy?,” shares that in 1997 researchers claimed to have found that some traits in combination with other genes trigger mild or full-blown mental illness. Dr. Frances McMahon led the research project at John Hopkins University to trace a gene for manic depression to chromosome 18, (making it five genes associated with this illness), which was largely represented among artists and creative types. Says neuroscientist Dr. Samuel Barondes of UC, San Francisco, “Maybe having one of these genes is really good for you, but having all of them makes you crazy.” Bipolar “illness” is considered a “complex genetic disorder,” meaning the very gene that is responsible for bipolarity is fused together with a DNA composite that contains a great many first-rate genes as well. My genes contain characteristics I regard as gifts, not a list of symptoms that were spawned from inherited defects. In the past, a conglomeration of traits that could not be broken apart from one another might have been identified as a personality. Now, if one genetic trait within a combination has only the potential to present problems in the future for its owner, the entire cluster is deemed abnormal.

The psychiatrically labeled, whose genetics are seen as flawed and defective, may not see our special inherent traits passed down to our children. If any woman labeled with manic depression has any doubt that molecular biologists aren’t currently trying to eradicate the genetic bipolar composite for the health benefits of future generations, all one needs to do is take a shot at getting pregnant. Most women who are lucky to be fertile never have to contend with a doctor viewing their DNA as so defective that the future of humankind should be spared from it. My doctors in consensus actually discouraged me from having a child and passing along my defective genetics.  I was continually reminded in covert language that bipolar disorder was among the genetic aggregates that weren’t likely to make the cut-off list into the more evolved future gene pool of humankind. In the efforts to slow down the rate of propagation among the defective mentally ill population, (or what the Nazis called the “life unworthy of life”), the medical community held to my face a soulless, sterile mirror telling me that I didn’t deserve to be a mother. I was made to feel that I was being selfish for thinking about passing down such horrendous genes, that if they were to show themselves one day in my offspring, they can only do harm and no good. In tomorrow’s world, Jack may have no chance to have children since he is linked to my genetics, so as an imposed result, I will have no grandchildren. No chance for my name and the stories of my life to own any legacy to be passed down to my future generation. And that is because I am a defective bipolar. I am an undesirable marked with a pharma code linked to the DSM. I have a number: 296.41. I am a Jew.

Before I was labeled, when I attended college in the early 1990s, I took Dr. Bettica’s class, “Bioscience, Ethics, and Culture.” I loved that blessed class—it was ballsy of Dr. Bettica to be so forthright and honest about the unethical direction that science might take mankind. Genetic engineering was in the front headlines at the time and seemed to be only moving in one direction. Who would stop them when they were motivated by the ethics and moral obligations of science? I was terrified to think of what could happen with the technology of that time period, but most of what was to come I could never imagine.

Throughout the 1990s molecular biologists worked steadily at mapping the entire human genetic blueprint through the Human Genome Project (HGP), claiming it was in our best interest so that future diseases can be eliminated. The goal instead was to gain a genetic profile of the “superior” human being so as to direct the best course of gene selection for the future development of a more advanced species. On the National Human Genome Research Institute website it explains that HGP was “an international research effort to sequence and map all of the genes – together known as the genome – of members of our species, Homo sapiens. Completed in April 2003, the HGP gave us the ability, for the first time, to read nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being.” Just as in Nazi Germany, in the name of scientific study, they are being driven by the urge to identify the inferiors and get rid of those with defective genes.

The biomedical model in psychiatry supports this movement because it only analyzes the material aspects of ourselves implying that we are nothing more than genetic material on a strand of DNA, and our descendants—or our children—are a continuation of that genetic material, either fit or unfit for the future evolution of our species. Many evolutionary biologists agree that man-directed evolution is wrongly submitting our future as a race to deviation from natural selection. Over the course of time, as nature roughly weeded out less desirable genetic strains, it was not always in a predictable way. Natural selection allows for genetic variation, which then determines how our species needs to evolve. Molecular geneticists who view mutations as abnormal or as errors in the genetic code, (in this case, traits associated with the mentally ill population), impose their limited understanding as to how our species should successfully evolve. According to principles of evolution, humans today are an integrated amalgam of such unpredictable mistakes.

Now more than ever before scientists are motivated to influence the outcome of gene inheritance through man-made evolution, and are doing so much more discreetly than the Nazis did. The most sophisticated technology has been developed to prevent the passage of defective genes to our future offspring. In an article entitled, “Could CRISPR Gene Editing Help Cure Mental Illness?” published on October 16, 2016 on the Edgy Labs website about tomorrow’s technology, writer Zayan Guedim reports that researchers at the Stanley Division of Developmental Neurovirology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine identified the genetic commonalities in the brains of deceased patients diagnosed with three different mental illnesses, one being bipolar disorder. Scientists worked on over a hundred sample brain tissues and noted that mRNA production (which is the blueprint created by DNA for corresponding protein growth) was either higher or lower than levels seen in “normal” subjects.

Explains Sarven Sabunciyan, Ph.D., one of the authors of the study, “There are subtle differences in individual genes, and these differences are enriched in sets of genes involved in specific cell processes in the brain tissue of people with a variety of severe mental disorders.” The researchers say that theoretically, MRNA production imbalance can be regulated via gene editing, which introduces a “working” version of a defective gene into the DNA of an individual. CRISPR-Cas9 technology specifically targets, cuts and replaces an abnormal gene. In the January 2018 issue of Scientific American, an advertisement for a subscription of Nature magazine already places type images of CRISPR Gene Editing in the layout right alongside Einstein’s gravitational waves.

The January/February 2018 issue of Discover magazine shared that in February 2017, dozens of experts connected to embryology convened at the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, urging caution and putting forth guidelines on “germline editing” in human embryos, in which these genetic changes are passed down to future generations. The field is making speedy progress. Nature magazine reported that in August 2017, the field’s latest efforts led by a team at Oregon Health and Science University, showed success in fixing a “mutation” by removing a “disease-causing gene” from an embryo. Study co-author, Paula Amato, asserts that this embryo gene-correction method “can potentially be used to prevent transmission of genetic disease to future generations.”  Because bipolar disorder is seen as an illness, we bipolars in the name of mental health, are selected to be at the top of the list of the genetically diseased that should be “fixed,” or more precisely, among the first to be sliced out of the next generation and eradicated. From here forward, every future generation will be convinced that people like me do not have a right to exist. In the name of scientific progress, just like the Jews, the mentally ill have been designated as the next abolished race. Based on psychiatry’s biomedical model, the labeled are being encouraged to give up their basic human right of procreation and to happily prepare for their one-day cure of getting their genes spliced.

They are now using cyber-linked Deep Learning techniques to program A.I. systems, and in that program is instilled Deep Patient, which is used to download medical files of patients in order to arrive at a quicker resolution of the most efficient and successful treatments for illnesses on the verge of symptoms in a way that no “dedicated psychiatrist ever could.” The article, “Can We Trust Artificial Intelligence?” (Science Focus, Christmas 2017), shares how researchers in 2016 at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, used Deep Patient to review 75,000 patient records and 78 “diseases,” including schizophrenia, to predict the presence and potential outbreak of symptoms. My psychiatric hospital records throughout the course of my lifetime constitute hundreds of pages in the medical online storage system—a system that is now neurally linked to A.I., that is thousands of times smarter than human beings in determining outcomes, and that is being slowly put in charge of whose bloodlines get to move forward into our future. The complexity of this agenda is so widespread in the sciences that there is very little we can do to fight against it. But we must try.

In his acceptance speech Wiesel shares further, “And then I explained (to him) how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.” What they are doing, while everyone remains asleep year after year, needs to be challenged. Because it is wrong. It is wrong to convince the world that some people do not have the right to exist in the future. And it is even more ghastly to make it so.

Celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, in his indispensable 1946 psychological memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, writes, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

In the face of my enemies, I choose to openly tell the truth and I am not afraid. I will not stand to be gassed, and I will not be erased from existence. I refuse to be part of the silent majority. I see what it is, and I call it what it is. I look in the mirror and say what it is. It is a Jew. And I’m proud to be a Jew on Yom HaShoah. Let us give the millions who were slaughtered in WWII honor on this day. And let us not forget the worlds of meaning held preciously behind the words, Nazi and Jew.