Chinese turning to mental wards to break activists

[SpankMe]

Instead of imprisoning agitators against the government, the Chinese are calling them insane and are putting them in mental wards.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40146504/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/

We should be doing this with Tea Partiers. In our case, it would be justified.

[Brickbat]

1. I applaud your pushing for more awareness of this problem.

I disagree strongly with your last sentence.

[Dreamer Tatum]

2. Anyone else you want to imprison forever for disagreeing with you? nt

[Posteritatis]

6. "Oh, but it's okay if it's people I dislike!"

It's fascinating how solidly-built some peoples' hypocrisy shields can get with stuff like this, isn't it?

[gratuitous]

3. Gee, the U.S. should strongly protest this

Hopefully, nobody notices that our hands aren't precisely clean. All that Arar* under our fingernails is an unpleasant distraction.

*Reference to Maher Arar.

[Poll_Blind]

4. I find this outrageous but I also strongly disagree with your last sentence.

If we use Stalinist tactics, we become Stalin. It's really as simple as that. If we make choices like that we do so at our greatest possible peril.

PB

[RZM]

7. Stalin didn't even have to bother with this

He would just have people shot or sent to the camps. But later in the Soviet period, this was the 'kinder, gentler' way of dealing with dissidence. Check out this memoir if you're interested -- it's a pretty good read. The author was (is, I guess, he's still alive) a noted Soviet dissident and spent some time in a psych ward:

http://www.amazon.com/Build-Castle-My-Life-Dissenter/dp/0670716405

[Poll_Blind]

8. I won't be able to read that but I was thinking of...

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, though it's been so long since I've read it I can't remember on exactly what "official" grounds he was placed in the camp.

PB

[Posteritatis]

11. He was accused of being captured by the Germans in the war

Soviet POWs - or suspected POWs - were generally imprisoned after repatriation following the war.

[Poll_Blind]

13. Wow, that's insane. Thanks for the info. n/t

PB

[Posteritatis]

17. Yeah, I was certainly stunned when I first heard of the policy

The (ir)rationale was that a Real Proper Soviet Soldier dies rather than surrenders, so anyone who was captured was "obviously" a spy under Order 270.

Ivan Denisovich's case would have been typical of the most harshly-punished ones; some 400,000 were sentenced to long terms in the camps, and were generally released (if they survived) by Khrushchev in 1955.

[RZM]

16. I also read that a long time ago and had forgotten why as well

I looked it up -- the character had been sentenced for surrendering to the Germans in WWII -- any time spent with capitalists automatically opened you up to espionage accusations and Stalin looked unkindly at Soviet soldiers who had surrendered. The plight of Soviet POWs is tragic, because if you were lucky enough to survive conditions in German camps (literally millions of Soviet POWs starved to death or died of disease), you were automatically suspect after the war and were often sent sent to Soviet 'filtration camps' directly from German custody.

Like I said though, what's going on in China here is more reminiscent of 1970s Soviet practices. As bad as it was for Bukovsky, had he lived in the 1930s, he probably would have been shot.

[Brickbat]

9. They also put gay and lesbian people in mental wards.

[Posteritatis]

5. Interesting article, absolutely hideous add-on comment.

This site has enough issues with how stupid attitudes towards mental illness is without tripe like that.

[laughingliberal]

10. Heh! Guess we won't have to worry about that. Reagan closed all of ours. nt

[Posteritatis]

12. Aside from all the ones still in operation, that is. (nt)

[laughingliberal]

14. Yeah, but there's not room to adequately house those in need of help. Doubt we can find room for...

political dissidents.

[Posteritatis]

15. Oh, definitely agree there

Sorry if I seemed snippy; psychiatric issues in the US and Canada are one of my rant topics, and I tend to go off if people sound too cavalier or dismissive about a lot of them.

[laughingliberal]

19. Trust me. The mistreatment and neglect of mentally ill people is high on my list of complaints.

We live in a horrible country.

[KamaAina]

18. Just the way the Soviet Union used to do it

Believe it or not, the Soviet judicial system functioned fairly well. Which is why the regime bypassed it by simply having compliant doctors declare dissidents to be "insane".