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A Possible Relationship b/w Mental Disturbance and Genocide Denial

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  • A Possible Relationship b/w Mental Disturbance and Genocide Denial

    AZG Armenian Daily #024, 08/02/2008

    Armenian Genocide

    THE QUESTION OF A POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MENTAL
    DISTURBANCE AND DENIALS OF KNOWN GENOCIDES SUCH AS THE
    HOLOCAUST AND ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

    By Professor Israel W. Charny Ph.D, Editor-in-Chief
    Encyclopedia of Genocide, Past President,International
    Association of Genocide Scholars, Executive Director,
    Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide

    Israel Charny is the author of Fascism and Democracy
    in the Human Mind which has been hailed as one of the
    outstanding works of the decade. The Book was
    published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2006,
    and will be republished in the Spring of 2008 as a
    paperback

    Perhaps it is because I am also a practicing clinical
    psychologist, but I suspect others will also identify
    with the observation that at some point, another
    question crosses one's mind as to whether there is any
    possibility that some deniers of the Holocaust or
    other genocides are, in fact, quite crazy, or in more
    polite scientific parlance, mentally ill. For on the
    surface of it, the basic claim that a major historical
    event of genocide, which the whole world knows took
    place, never took place, is madness; let alone that
    many of the particularly sloppy kinds of denials and
    revisions of history, for example the claim that the
    gas chambers in Auschwitz were built only after the
    war in order to vilify the hapless Nazis, are
    manifestly the ravings of mad men.

    In one case where a denier of the Holocaust was
    involved in court proceedings which had been initiated
    by him, a reporter for a major American newspaper (The
    Atlantic Constitution) described the structure of the
    denier's thought processes in the courtroom as
    "rambling," and in another instance characterized the
    structure of the denier's argumentation as "bizarre."
    In textbooks of abnormal psychology, these are both
    characteristic of the thinking of a paranoid.

    Is there not room to pause to think about the fact
    that classical psychiatry describes various paranoid
    conditions as characterized by tortured accusativeness
    of someone(s); litigiousness or a need to go to legal
    or other kinds of overt conflict with said other(s); a
    concealing framework of ostensible and at times even
    intricate and impressive logic but in which are
    embedded bizarre denials of and breaks with reality,
    including delusory fantasies and wild constructions of
    a non-existent reality. Thus, in the earlier days of
    the 20th century, many self-respecting paranoid
    patients would understandably seize on themes of radio
    waves speaking to them, penetrating them, or what have
    you as civilization grappled with the mystery of the
    new-found radio; in subsequent years, chemical and
    germ warfare devices became a heady basis for paranoid
    ideation; and there is absolutely no reason to think
    that denials that masses of human beings were taken in
    freight cars to gas chambers and then incinerated in
    ovens would not be a delicious invitation for mayhem
    in the mind of a paranoid in our times.

    But even if there is a possible relationship between
    mental illness and denials of genocide, there are
    enormous problems in working with the mental health
    aspects of denials. For one thing, on a clinical level
    it is characteristic that much of the argumentation,
    including even persecutory contents, of a
    well-organized paranoiac is well reasoned and
    presented in coherent and logical forms; and insofar
    as this would be true of a denier who is also mad, we
    as a community are still required to address the
    coherent aspects of presentations of denials and not
    simply dismiss them as the ravings of a lunatic, so
    that there can be no suggestion of our having walked
    away from confronting the issues raised.

    Moreover, as we have learned, so many denials are
    inherently political strategies in the service of
    bigotry and hatred, e.g., antisemitism, and
    celebrations of and calls to collective violence; and
    so many other denials are also political statements
    espousing policies such as realpolitik, even a
    decently motivated search for reconciliation and
    cessation of conflict, and these and other not-crazy
    assertions of deniers cannot be dismissed as the
    doings of mad people, but have to be confronted for
    their intrinsic immorality, nastiness and self-serving
    political agendas at the expense of the integrity of
    historical memory and the heartbreak and protests of
    decent people against mass murder.

    Finally, what is possibly the really deeply
    challenging truth in respect of the relationship
    between mental illness and denials of the Holocaust,
    the Armenian Genocide, or other genocides is that
    looking in depth at the thinking of deniers brings us
    in touch not simply with the madness of a given
    individual, but with a close-to-madness aspect of the
    normal human mind which we have all been issued from
    the original factory, as well as at a `larger than
    life' grand madness of our human readiness to destroy
    so much of life. By the former or close-to-madness
    aspect of the normal human mind, I refer to so many
    evidences that the human mind inherently is given to
    stereotyped thinking, magical thinking, totalistic
    thinking, massive projections of one's weaknesses onto
    others, deep difficulties in discerning the difference
    between legitimate self-defense and unduly suspicious
    paranoid attributions of dangers to others, undue
    needs for power, and other attributes which in effect
    are found in the minds of all people, and which good
    mental health requires us to work at overcoming (see
    Greenwald, 1980 on characteristics of the mind as
    initially and naturally "totalitarian" - his word).

    By the latter or larger than life grand madness of
    destructiveness, I refer to the readiness of perfectly
    sane human beings, as far as the psychiatric
    establishment is concerned, to round up masses of
    others, torture them cruelly, and destroy them
    unconscionably. Albert Camus (1980, initially 1946)
    said following World War II that he discerned that all
    human beings have to choose whether they are available
    to be executioners, for in the psychological language
    I am presently using this is at least a default option
    waiting in the natural machinery we have, and Camus
    said of himself that he had chosen neither to be a
    victim nor an executioner:

    ...The years...have killed something in us. And that
    something is simply the old confidence man had in
    himself which led him to believe that he could always
    elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to
    him in the language of a common humanity. We have seen
    men lie, degrade, kill, deport, torture - and each
    time it was not possible to persuade them not to do
    these things because they were sure of themselves.

    Before anything can be done, two questions must be
    put: "Do you or do you not, directly or indirectly,
    want to kill or assault?"...

    ...For my part, I am fairly sure that I have made the
    choice. And, having chosen, I think that I must speak
    out, that I must state that I will never again be one
    of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder...
    (Camus, 1946, p.5)

    So whether or not a denier is also mad-and for the fun
    of it I may want to publicly tell him to his face that
    he is meshugah, I prefer to fight the denier by
    discrediting his ideas and argumentation as dangerous
    to human life, rather than taking him out on the
    grounds that he specifically is psychiatrically
    incompetent. On the individual level, there may very
    well be in a given denier a bona fide psychiatric
    paranoid personality disorder or even a worse
    psychotic paranoid condition, but first there is a
    diagnostic problem that the mad person is riding the
    tail (or broomstick) of an as if accepted madness of
    our human society in first committing mass murder and
    then in denying the facts, and diagnosis can be
    difficult. The really disturbed organism is man the
    species, and our human society, and it would set us
    back to focus on the individual and not do battle with
    denials as an aspect and reflection of the madness of
    our human readiness to commit genocide let alone then
    to deny it.

    Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider the
    possibility that some deniers are also mental cases.
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