Really stretching the definition of “motivated by racism” here.
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Well, for what it is worth, if we are discussing college educated professionals, there is currently a dire shortage of primary care doctors in this country. Not because we don’t graduate enough med students, but with the debt levels many of them carry, they just cannot afford to go into the lower paying fields. H1B visa holders provide a disproportionate amount of rural primary care, as they will generally work for much less than US grads.
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Kanner wasn’t the first to describe autism.
And Kunkel fled Hitler to the US.
“When Hitler came to power, Kunkel became increasingly disturbed by the restrictions being placed on psychotherapy, and he planned to immigrate to the USA with his family. He accepted an invitation by the Quakers to give a lecture tour in the United States in 1936, and again in 1939. When the war broke out in September 1939, he could not come back to Germany to pick up his family.”
Fritz Künkel
Fritz Künkel (September 6, 1889 – April 1, 1956) was known both as a German psychiatrist and an American psychologist. He might best be understood as a social scientist who sought to integrate psychology (especially the work of Freud, Adler and Jung), sociology and religion into a unified theory of human being. He consolidated these insights into a theory of character development and finally into his “We-Psychology”. The following material comes from the brief life written by John A. Sanford …
“Kanner Syndrome”: No Way!
Kanner was not the first scholar to consider the subject of pediatric autism
I think Asperger was Austrian - and came later.
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That’s an unsupported assumption. People coming from more educated backgrounds in less developed countries are perhaps more likely to be part of a conservative power structure and had those advantages because of that.
The history of immigration is people more often coming to the US as your poor huddled masses who were able to achieve much more here because of the opportunity they found. They were often looked down upon here and seen as constitutionally inferior.
But coming from more modest backgrounds and having the audacity to emigrate kinda means they were the best of those coming from their homelands.
Rich people can buy entree already by investing in the US. Not sure that importing more 1%ers will benefit the Dems.
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Racists push for “merit-based” immigration systems for the same reason they pushed for literacy tests and poll taxes for voting.
They know the net effect is to hurt or push away non-white people.
Even when they’re not implemented as strongly as first proposed, they always benefit racists because they always create a “discussion” about “well, of course all voters should be literate, what’s wrong with a test?” or “of course the only valuable people are ones with degrees, what’s wrong with discriminating against people without them?”
The goal is extra hoop-jumping for non-whites, under any workable criteria that will divide liberals and progressives.
Immigration net-benefits countries, even when the immigrants have no degrees. Limiting it in this way isn’t based on a desire to get “better immigrants”, it’s based on a desire to get less immigrants overall, at some cost to the economy and basic human morality.
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And of course they will carefully tweak the criteria for what constitutes “merit” to favor European immigrants so they won’t all get pushed out in favor of all the highly qualified MBAs and Doctors and Engineers from India.
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The thing with these systems, is that the criteria almost doesn’t matter as long as it sets up the hoop to jump.
Racists would be completely happy with a “only left-handed people” policy, as long as there were still exemptions for only the richest and whitest people to game.
Anybody who then gets suckered into long debates about “the merits of handedness” is only helping lay the groundwork for racist-friendly policies.
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“Stretching” is putting it mildly, both in the case of LBJ and (I assume) Han Asperger.
LBJ was a casual racist, but his signing the Civil Rights Act didn’t have much to do with getting the Dems more net votes (especially in light of his acknowledgment that signing it lost the party the white Southern vote for many years to come). It was more about positioning the Dems as the party of progress and basic human decency on social issues despite his casual racism rather than an (inherently and uncharacteristically flawed) electoral calculation driven by his casual racism.
As for Asperger, even assuming one considers autism a “race” targeted by the Nazis it doesn’t make sense. First, Asperger was not a policy-maker or an official functionary of any of the Nazi eliminationist programmes (indeed, he was not a member of the party) – he was a military doctor who held membership in Nazi-affiliated organisations. In that capacity, he did participate in sending some children to be euthanised while sparing others, but it’s not clear if all or any of them were on the autism spectrum. Finally, he did not come up with his diagnosis (which did not in and of itself “create” the spectrum) to distinguish between high-functioning (and, presumably “higher-value”) autistic children and lower-functioning (and, presumably “lower-value”) ones to save the former from being murdered by the regime.
Narratives that presents bigoted white men as heroes who did the right thing because of their bigotry (as opposed to other factors) are truly bizarre. They also imply that drawing distinctions between “the good ones” and the “valueless” ones in a given victimised group (Jews, autistic people, etc.) is somehow a path to virtue instead of a mark of shame.
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They barely hide it in their rhetoric. Pete King (R-NY) rails against Latinx and Muslim undocumented immigrants but never makes a peep about all the undocumented Irish immigrants tending bar and being servers at pubs in the greater NYC region.
Although I suppose because he makes an exception for certain preferred undocumented immigrants some here would see him as a potential hero because of his racism.
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Show me citations and not just your opinion if you want to make claims about something that’s very personal to me and my family. I have a family member with autism and I’ve heard it portrayed this way by PhD’s at various conferences about autism and mental illness.
Asperger’s biography, including the basis of his “little professor” diagnosis (again, this was not “creating the spectrum”) and the relatively new information about his involvement with the Nazi state, is summarised in his Wikipedia entry – plenty of references there for you to follow. It’s also well understood that autism was not considered a race by the Nazis (or anyone else), as you characterise it.
The narrative you’re pushing, in which Asperger identified high-functioning autistic kids specifically in order to inform the Nazi policies of euthanasia and make exceptions, is an outmoded one after the release of Edith Sheffer’s recent scholarship. Individually, he saved some children with mental disabilities and/or conditions at the institution where he worked toward the end of the war, but it’s not clear if they were exclusively autistic kids. Any influence he had on the regime’s general policies as a physician was limited to supporting its policies regarding “euthanasia” and forced sterilisations.
I have autistic family members, too – both high- and low-functioning – and have done my research. Meanwhile, you continue to stretch.
In short, your statement that…
is factually incorrect on a number of levels:
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the austism spectrum was not “created” by Asperger. Different degrees of functionality were previously known.
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Asperger, while he supported aspects of the Nazi programmes, was not a member of the Nazi party nor a high-ranking government official and had negligible influence on the regime’s overall policy.
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Asperger himself may have personally contributed to the Nazis not killing a small number of autistic children of varying levels of functionality in his care. This is not the same thing as making or influencing government policy.
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Asperger, as a result of his research, pointed out that certain high-functioning autistic children had related special talents that allowed them to have successful careers. That was not him ascribing special value to them as humans deserving of life in comparison to lower-functioning autistic children, and certainly not him presenting it to or developing it on behalf of the Nazi government as the basis of their policy (not that it hesitated to murder hundreds of thousands of demonstrably talented Jews and LGBTQ and other people who were not “pure” enough for it to value).
None of that is “just my opinion”.
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This is entirely off-topic. The question was “can you name a government policy motivated by racism that led to more positive outcomes for society at large?” because that’s what you suggested could happen with Trump’s racism-driven immigration policy.
So even if you believe Autism diagnosis was invented by Nazis that still doesn’t support your point, because the government policy in the Nazis’ case was “kill or sterilize the undesirables” not “help provide resources to people with neurological differences.”
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Well, no, the goal in killing people with various mental disabilities was to strengthen the aryan race, not to categorize them as a race of their own. The nazi plan was a procreative plan as much as it was a destructive one. They wished to create a race of perfect humans and had to destroy all those who did not fit in and eliminate competition.
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I think you’ll find that the real nazis are the people who were against nazis. /s
No, that’s not right.
I think you’ll find that the real nazis were the journey we made along the way. /s
No, sorry, that’s wrong too.
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Absolutely. Let’s generously assume for a moment that’s what @Espry0n meant when he discussed autistic people in the context of racism. It still doesn’t make sense, since the Nazis would have never as a matter of government policy tolerated “higher value” autistic people (as posited), including savants, because they still would have not fit into the very neurotypical and conformist ideal Aryan society. It’s wishful thinking to imagine otherwise, especially considering how much trouble our own relatively liberal society has given non-neurotypical people.
The best I could imagine for high-functioning autistic savants in a Nazi society would be the government allowing a tiny number of them with what the regime considered useful skills to exist by being what the Nazis called “intelligence-slaves”. In the one instance I’m familiar with of a non-autistic “intelligence-slave”, that of Curt Herzstark, he had a very unique skill and still survived his imprisonment in Buchenwald only by stalling on his work and stringing his captors along. It sounds like it would be a miserable existence for anyone, autistic or not, similar to that of the “House Negro” in the antebellum American South.
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The “intelligence slave” model sounds more accurate for what we know of how things actually worked in Nazi germany. Ultimately, everyone was a slave to the structures of control that the nazis wished to build. None of it was good for anyone. All that murder and destruction for something that doesn’t even actually exist in reality.
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You’re the one making exceptional claims that don’t seem to comport with reality.
The burden is on you to provide not just credible evidence- but rather superlative evidence. Saying that you heard some guy say something isn’t any evidence.
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Nope - not saving kids at all. Quite the opposite.
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The banality of evil…
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But I’m sure there were some very fine people on both sides of the argument over whether there was something positive to come out of Nazis exterminating children.
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