All: quite a few comments in this thread swerved into religious flamewar and generic ideological flamewar. Those are not allowed on HN. They're nasty and repetitive, the two qualities we most want to avoid here. Therefore, please don't.
If you're going to comment on HN, please make sure you're up to date on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using the site in the intended spirit, which is curiosity. That is a quite different quality.
White Stolen Generation (Australian variant), checking in.
My mother was physically, emotionally and pyschologically tortured by her own government for the simple fact of having had me, out of wedlock.
I was taken as a baby, to be relocated to another family - a "proper, white one", that met the standards of the government at the time.
Mum fought and screamed and kicked down the doors, and got a lawyer. And, a little while later, she got me back.
Australias dark relationship with the criminal UK's baby-stealing human trafficking government is a story that has yet to be fully told... not to mention the atrocities committed on my aboriginal friends during the same period, another heinous circumstance from a fundamentally racist government.
Was this standard practice, or was your case a failure of the system? We have in Switzerland the KESB - children and adults protection they call themselves - which as concept is great but they run totally unsupervised so sometimes situations like the one you lived happen under our eyes. Example? Baby taken away without right to recourse right after birth from mother living on social support, under suspicion she was taking drugs (no other motivation).
I can’t imagine anyone doing this to a mother/family. It sickens me. The desperation your mother must have felt is unbearable to think about. I’m glad she fought for you. Thanks for sharing your story.
Medicine and psychiatry often seem to be at the center of these regimes. Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together? Maybe it's the pretext the regimes to suspend rules and rationality. German doctors began a "euthenasia" program several years before the war broke out, and no governing body of theirs seems to have historically been above using prisoners for medical experiments. Even recently, doctors even consult on enhanced interrogation techniques, and seem to favour some pretty heavy handed public health policy. As a profession, is there something fundamentally wrong with many of them that we tolerate for their expertise?
Radical ideology craves credibility. I would suppose that for that reason, the regimes interested in treating a subset of people as inferior would look for experts who could testify to that fact. These end up being doctors and psychiatrists, since they are considered authorities on the human body and mind respectively.
As for doctors themselves, I would think they are exactly like any other group of people: when a radical regime establishes itself, some will embrace it, some will be bullied into compliance, and others will be violently opposed. You can find examples of all of those in any historical regime.
I think what twigged me is the expectation that doctors are supposed to be better than that. Doctors are explicity not like any other group of people. The whole point in giving them the immense powers we do comes with the expectation that when it falls to them to be brave or noble, they are willing to take that responsibility. Otherwise, there is no reason not to have barbers do most surgeries, apothacaries prescribe drugs, and nurses make treatment decisions, especially given the technological advances of even the last 30 years.
These are people who explicitly must not be seized by mass political hysterias, and it's not a right/left thing, as they seem like a necessary constituency in every totalitarian movement. Other professions, like judges and guards you can just appoint from the ranks of true believers, most professors can be relied upon to be complicit, and their institutions can tell whatever legitimizing story you bully them into. Doctors (and perhaps armed police) are the only ones with leverage, which means it is their personal responsibility to guard against this stuff, imo.
In an ideal world yes, but in the real one they are just normal people like you and me. Some are good, some bad, some in the middle. My personal experience has been the overwhelming majority have been kind, intelligent people. But even if 5% are bad, that is still enough for any despotic regime to make use of.
I would agree with the small minority argument, but it still understates their impact. They aren't like you or I either, because when you spend an extra decade in school, their life experiences are essentially alien to people outside it.
Cops are similar, where at a point, you have to ask how good the rest of a closed loop and gated network could be if they haven't isolated the worst ones. Doctors as a profession lost a lot of public trust over the pandemic because of the few who gave up their integrity to become political actors, and then the colleges punished doctors who stood up to them. The problem is that the 5%-bad minority just happen to be in the professional governance and administration, similar to how police union/associations were responsible for the worst abuses.
Perhaps you could go a step further and say that, whatever the regime, these institutions that decide who is healthy and who is sick, who is sane and who is insane, can never be neutral. They are always also instruments of (social) control. Michel Foucault is probably the go-to guy if this topic interests you[1].
Do you have rationale supporting the hand of the Church in fascist regimes?
The Catholic Church expressed its rejection of fascism via the strongest possible channel: an encyclic written by Pius XI in 1937, _Mit Brennender Sorge_, was read during the Sunday mass in all churches of Germany although the Nazis were already repressing opponents.
Even more: according to statistical studies, out of many socioeconomic variables, being Catholic had the strongest positive correlation with _not_ voting for the Nazis [1].
Regardless of what the encyclic said, the truth is that in Spain the Church closely colaborated with the fascist Franco regime, to the point that in many practical respects they were one and the same.
There is ample evidence that you can find with some obvious Googling, but I think this image is a good visual summary:
This is how the Catholic Church treated Franco (not sporadically, but as a custom, you can find plenty of images like that): under a canopy, like they do with images of Saints or the Virgin.
I think in the face of that, anyone will agree that encyclic was not worth the paper it was written on.
Sorry, I should have made it clear from the start that I was regarding nazy Germany and fascist Italy as the "fascist regimes", Franco's Spain being fascist is debated (seems to have changed throughout time, see [1]). Interesting point for Spain though, direct religious implication in governments always seems to go wrong.
Coming back to the encyclic, I think it did have an impact, judging by the measurable refusal of Nazism in Catholic counties as mentioned in my previous comment. The Catholic Church had strong moral authority, and this kind of condemnation was rare: the Red Cross for instance did not raise any [2].
You also has Ustasě in Croatia and Josef Tiso in Slovakia.
On the other hand - although Catholic higher-ups were generally spared, not the same could be said about other priests in Poland (like Kolbe) . During 2 WW, it's hard to treat Catholicism as a one religion, because it was very important to put it into national-ideological context of the country. Most often church was supporting more conservative, right-leaning groups, as a contra to socialist, who were much more anticlerical then.
Germany had issues with Catholics long before III Reich. Check the Kulturkampf under Bismarck - it had a stong national element, as Catholicism was tied to Poles, and Poles and their interest in Silesia weren't exactly liked by German authoroties.
It's no different than the current day catholic church saying "oh gays are people too we should treat them nicely" and then remind you that the bible says sinners spend eternity in hellfire and sort of wink at the American evangelicals that spend their time screaming that the bible says gay people are an abomination.
Nah, that’s just talk. Doing something is cooperating with fascists (Lateran Pacts), supporting Catholic-Nazi regimes (Franco, Tiso, and many others), and helping Nazis evade justice (ratlines).
We've asked you many times before to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. This was a doozy—snarkily veering straight into religious Nazi flamewar, which is close to pure internet hell.
Please don't do this on HN. It's nasty, repetitive, and off topic.
Two reasons: (1) The GP comment seemed less flamebaity to me because it acknowledged its bias. Yours, by contrast, went straight into battle mode. (2) Your account has a history of posting flamewar comments here and us asking you to stop (including recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580711).
The word "factual" is basically a no-op in these things since mostly what flamewar commenters do is bash the opposing side with their carefully selected "facts". No doubt some are genuine facts, some not, and some are facts-with-spin—but if the spirit of an argument is to smite enemies, then it's against the site guidelines regardless of how facty it is. (As I've pointed out before, there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves—humans do that.)
What we want here is curious conversation, where commenters seek to learn from each other, not tell each other how wrong and bad they are. Curiosity is an open state, where flamewar and battle are (very) closed ones.
The pope may not have been, but several german priests such as Herman Muckermann certainly gave german Catholics a way to support eugenics and race theories.
Some priests did, but overall the Catholic Church was very against eugenics.[1] On the other hand eugenics was quite popular among US intellectuals.[2] Forced sterilization of the mentally disabled is still legal in the US.[3] Herman Muckermann was at one point in favor of forced sterilization, but turned against it when the pope denounced it. Herman Muckermann was also against Nazism and euthanasia.
>In 1933, he left his post at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, as he opposed Nazi biological racism and the belief that the Nordic race was superior (Dietrich, 1992).[4]
I don't think "not as bad as Hitler" is a bar one should be aiming for. I was specifically referring to the Catholic Church's penchant for treating unmarried mothers and poor children like trash.
Hmm, well let's ask a poor child born to an unmarried mother about his experience.
I was born in a Catholic hospital, where abortion was out of the question. My father refused to marry my mother, so she felt she didn't have a "choice", and wept many tears as she "voluntarily" signed the papers to relinquish custody to the State, placing me for adoption.
I was adopted by Catholic parents who ensured I received the Sacraments regularly, as well as religious instruction and we attended Mass always. They sent me to Catholic schools run by religious orders whose mission and charism involves caring for the poor, needy, and marginalized.
These religious orders (including Irish sisters) upheld my dignity, respected me and my classmates, and they demonstrated in tangible ways how much God loves us. They did all of this while giving me a top-notch education, often at discounted tuition or on scholarship as necessary to keep me in school.
When I was homeless, unemployed and penniless, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul met my material needs and helped me survive long lonely nights with a few meals and kind words.
I dunno, if anyone ever made me feel like trash, it wasn't the Catholic Church. Quite the opposite.
Doctors used to be viewed with (justified) suspicion. That suspicion is mostly still justified, but doctors are riding the coattails of several significant medical inventions in the last 100 years, especially antibiotics. This gives them a lot of credibility (justified or not), and the political consequences of this are not ideal. Hopefully this will eventually return to equilibrium and people will stop treating doctors like they're a couple stddev smarter or more trustworthy than they actually are.
Just look up for the amount of deaths for medical malpractice in most developed countries.
Not all doctors and nurses are that technically good to justify that we don't keep a sensible amount of suspicion, or when receiving a diagnosis shouldn't look for a second, or even third opinion.
I like the joke, but in truth it is often failed to secure residency. What do you call the resident who did worst in his residency? just doesn't role off the tongue as nicely :)
There's bad doctors, just like there are bad people in every profession. How many software engineers does it take to make a dystopian spy state or spy company? You probably need many more than you would need doctors for unethical experiments. What's wrong with software engineers that they would knowingly do such a thing? I suspect the motivations for wanting to push the technological limits in advertising or spying are the same as the ones for pushing the limits of medical science.
No. It's not "just like". People with Cluster B personality disorders, especially the ones at the end of the spectrum with ASPD/psychopathy crave power over others. They enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering. They like, crave direct contact. It is VERY different to cause suffering in a dispassionate way through software and hear about it on the news, or do it yourself in person 1on1.
So, no. Besides, it has been shown that there are professions with disproportionately much more psychopathic people than others. Which makes perfect sense, considering what I just said, even though there's more to be said about this subject.
Do you have any research about other Cluster B personalities that "enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering" ? Or you just want to write about APD, but want to add some science-based words?
Also, the "APD-prone" positions are often higher management. Which are causing every possible type of pain, from 1 to 1, to massive downsizing on the other part of the world, but more of the second type - one would assume they would choose something closer to victims, if their only motive is causing pain. There is also their tendency for risk-taking and ease with making "hard decisions (due to lack of empathy and mentioned tendency for risk-taking), which also explains such high positions in companies.
You're onto something - the roots of totalitarian-authoritarian desire can be traced back to the impulse to be free of the "disease and infection of others".
I don't feel there is anything "fundamentally wrong with many of them", but the role medicine plays in our lives makes it susceptible to exploitation by both messianic and psychopathic personalities.
As a counter-example of medicine going hand-in-hand with despotism, there's Stalin's Doctors Plot, though there was a a lot of antisemitism there as well.
I think you should probably limit it to psychology. The whole point of psychology is social control. Making society into what someone wants it to be instead of what it needs to be (from the perspectives of individuals who are trying to survive/do well, whatever that means to them).
Changing individuals while doing only things to the individual, not touching the problems their behaviour is trying to solve. Pointing out that only a house solves homelessness, there's nothing a therapist can do. And research points out that therapists are destructive rather than helpful as soon as they go further than giving information or providing practical help.
So psychology/criminology/orthopedagogy/sociology is a fraud. The basic promise of these sciences is simple: that they can, through talking and "interventions" change the behaviour of unwilling humans (especially children). Time and time again research shows: they can't. It just doesn't work. They can cause extreme trauma, using some combination of violence, isolation and 24/7 stress, which results in specific behaviour patterns that can be summarised as long-term fear and extreme aggression, which, to put it mildly, isn't a recipe for a successful fulfilling life. Aggression by the psychologists is usually masked, by pretending locking up kids, or forcing isolation up to and including the use of isolation cells, "isn't violence".
Currently, the popular technique is called "applied behaviour analysis". Lock up kids, in isolation (no contact allowed), and cause 24/7 stress. But variants have many names: "New authority". "Non-violent resistance". "Rock and water". All have essentially been exposed as not changing behaviour, "not sticking", and the like. Not that practitioners actually follow these techniques particularly well.
If you think that the elan school and where it got its teachings were genuinely psychiatric best practice at the time those projects were created, then you know nothing of the field of psychology.
I think people should be judged by what they DO, not what ideal picture they put forward of themselves.
And as mentioned, the majority of kids were sent to elan school ... by youth services. Not by parents.
Was it "psychiatric best practice"? Probably not. Was it "psychiatry IN PRACTICE"? Yes, absolutely, for thousands of kids. It's far from the only such institution, or even the worst.
By the way, the very large majority of people who "help" kids aren't psychiatrists, a bigger part are social workers, and an even bigger portion don't have any training at all. That too defines what they do, what happens in practice. This sector doesn't follow any method or rules, they just randomly try things, whatever the individual randomly assigned feels appropriate.
>Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together?
Have you met many doctors? Some are amazing, hard-working people really doing their best to help humanity, but a non-trivial number are just arrogant jerks who only went into the profession for money and social status. It's natural that a profession seen as particularly "high status" will attract a lot of soulless status seekers.
Medicine? It's racism and classism. People with racist views can become medical drs and other racists can become powerful heads of state to order genocide.
What became Germany's eugenics program began in the United States and it was blatantly racist.
> Even recently, doctors even consult on enhanced interrogation techniques, and seem to favour some pretty heavy handed public health policy. As a profession, is there something fundamentally wrong with many of them that we tolerate for their expertise?
Why you want to blame it on a profession and assume the distribution of crazies is not uniform?
Only difference is that doctor can pretend it's for medical reasons, while say, a plumber, wouldn't be able to fabricate plausible evidence to support their derangements.
And as usual with large groups the extremes are loudest and most noticeable.
If the postwar trials have any integrity—and I believe they had some if certainly not enough—you could say the same of people organizing rail schedules. And you’d be right if your ire is directed at Eichmann, but probably wouldn’t be able to reasonably generalize it to rail operators. I can’t imagine a similar extrapolation being reasonable to any doctor whose field isn’t directly implicated in the “race science” and various other explicit fascist ideological ideas.
Eugenics was all the rage in the early XX century. A lot of countries practiced mass sterilizations and other niceties to the "unfit", and the catholic church was among the few that opposed to it. Nazi Germany (and others) just pushed it to the limit.
You could still see some eugenics going on around the workd after II WW for some time.
The T4 program started in September 1939, same time as the war (in Europe), but the pilot was run in the summer. Considering the Nazis didn't think their invasion of Poland would turn into a general war, it's highly unlikely there's any relation between the two.
Except that people undergoing these surgeries do so willingly, face massive barriers to ensure they are thinking clearly and understand the consequences, show minimal regret rates, often have to undergo extensive psychological counseling beforehand, etc...
Except that is not the case where many people who now wish to "detransition" claim neither them or their parents got a good explanation of the consequences of such surgical procedures or the medicine they'd be prescribed, from medical doctors, who guess what, are in it for the money.
It is hard to find good numbers on detrans minors, simply because there are so few minors who transition in the first place. But here's one study showing that the regret rate for gender affirming surgery in general is ~1% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8099405/
Detransitioners get so much media attention simply because it's good transphobia fodder. All there is to substantiate these claims is anecdotal stories from a handful of individuals. These cases should be investigated of course, everyone has a right to make fully informed decisions about their body and it's problematic if that wasn't possible for some reason. However, it is simply untrue that there's a systemic problem with this at the moment.
Again anecdotally, among the (few) detrans people I know, all of them agree they made their decisions fully informed, and take ownership of their decisions rather than blaming doctors.
But it’s so easy to portray doctors as money-hungry child predators! After all, doesn’t Beautiful Perfect American Capitalism encourage individuals to participate in the market, if not live their lives, as ruthless profit-seekers?
Aren’t politically and socially conservative, evangelical-proximal, moderately wealthy Tucker-Carlson-consuming Americans constantly re-trained into that frame of mind?
Is it so surprising that people see what they want to see, or expect to see, or have been taught to see, in everything around them?
“Many people” being substantially in the minority, like 1-5% of an already microscopic population. Non-surgical puberty blockers are completely reversible and do not sterilize. Please don’t spread irrelevant, hateful flamewar bait and FUD in random threads as a way to Cunningham yourself out of ignorance.
Edit: I'm not permitted to reply to the comment below, but I would like to point out that it's a rather shallow dismissal of a well-researched paper. I would recommend actually reading the whole paper, at the very least to challenge one's preconceptions on this issue. Personally, I find such challenge to be an intellectually stimulating experience.
This paper casts doubt on the current evidence for "completely reversible" as well as their efficacy without really providing evidence of the opposite. I would invite you to read further studies showing that puberty blockers are safe, reversible, and extremely important to trans youth's health:
For example. There's definitely still studies to be done, but there is good evidence that puberty blockers are safe and reversible that this author seems to have missed
The blockers themselves are reversible. The treatments that may follow are not necessarily reversible.
Do you really expect to simply point at a single-author paper that came out last week to “win” this discussion? Why the hour-old account focused purely on promoting trans hate?
What are you talking about? Children can't give consent. Also don't talk like the only way for children to access this process is through legitimate methods while there are online HRT sellers marketing primarily to children.
These people always want to portray kids seeking treatment as just kids looking to do something rebellious instead of, you know, a tiny portion of kids being miserable because they have to lead a basically fake life while half the country tells them they are stupid and wrong and pedophiles
> increased time since last gender-affirming surgery was associated with reduced mental health treatment (adjusted odds ratio=0.92, 95% CI=0.87, 0.98).
> In this first total population study of transgender individuals with a gender incongruence diagnosis, the longitudinal association between gender-affirming surgery and reduced likelihood of mental health treatment lends support to the decision to provide gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them.
Okay seems to agree that gender affirming surgery is a good thing, thanks for agreeing.
[edited because I mistook which of your sources is which]
Number 4 is behind a paywall so I can't really comment. But to be honest I doubt that their methodology is valid, and the summary includes no statistics so it's likely the conclusion is overblown
With regards to money: this is true of every major health issue in our society, as long as capitalism is at all involved in our health care system there will always be this incentive and we should aim to minimize it. Can you provide some evidence that there is more corruption in gender health care than in other health care?
And with regard to Littman, you can't honestly expect me to take the founder of the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" nonsense seriously? She and her "research" methods have been so thoroughly discredited I don't think that even warrants a response. If there's a reputable figure who has similar concerns, this would maybe cast some doubt on more common detrans statistics
There's also the case of US immigration services separating children from their parents 2016-2020 and not tracking where those children were sent in conjunction with their parents' identity.
Worth noting that it is hotly disputed if this actually happened, or if it was just a handful of cases. I don't really have an opinion - my understanding is that it's plausible but there is currently no evidence for it. (Except for the government acting quite suspiciously every time it's asked to investigate.)
This doesn't seem drastically different than what was openly happening to Native Americans in the US until the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. By some estimates, as many as 3/4ths of Native American children were taken from their families for adoption or foster care.
And that's assuming the law stopped the practice, some states still see many Native American children shipped to non-Native communities to get federal welfare money.
“Openly” is probably going to throw some people off here, because it’s knowable history but not widely broadcasted or widely known.
I think (and hope) your intent is to draw the parallel so similar programs targeting natives in the US (and Canada, I’ll add, they seldom diverge very far) can be viewed in the same light. I’m not adding much nuance besides noting that your wording could be misinterpreted as a dismissive “nothing new under the sun, happened openly in the US well after too” rather than what I think (and hope) you mean as a more inclusive “these programs which continued in the US very closely resemble fascist programs, and that’s important too”.
I was saying these programs don't need to be run by fascist dictators who forged documents far away in the distant past. The democratic US either did or does the same kind of thing without that kind of deception.
It's a painful reminder that just installing a new government (or new leadership in any context) doesn't magically make all the power structures that existed before it go away.
Could you write out the implication arrow you think you're seeing for the people who genuinely don't see anything here beyond what has been spelled out explicitly, like me? (I'm not from the US, I presume I'm missing some context)
The implication is that the USA does it and therefore it doesn't need to have fascists and eugenicists in power and can happen in a democratic country.
So I'm not trying to pick a fight (I may very well be agreeing with your views as far as I know), but I'm genuinely still lost at what you mean.
I don't think I see what's wrong with that direction, unless I'm reversing it along a different axis than what you have in mind.
I were to attempt to reverse that statement it would say "this can happen in a democratic country, a country doesn't need to have fascists and eugenicists in power => therefore the USA does it".
I mean I know the USA does this, but stating it can happen in a democratic country therefore it must happen in the USA isn't how causality works I think.
Wait, are you saying the reversed implication is that the USA isn't actually a democracy and or that it is a fascist country?
Thank you for clarifying, I can see that argument (although truth be told I think no country on earth truly qualifies as a real democracy in the way that their governments function).
I think they’re making the same point I meant to make. Which isn’t exactly the same as the interpretation of my point that another comment added.
US policy towards natives was directly cited as a model for nazism, and has been a model for programs in fascist and non-fascist regimes implementing similar policies for a long time. The US isn’t fascist, as another response interprets my meaning, but establishing a prototype for fascist policies should be recognized as such. The extent to which the US isn’t fascist is mostly lucky internal trivia for those of us who get to experience that luck. And that pendulum has a lot of inertia in the wrong direction.
Best to recognize when we influenced some of the world’s worst mass crimes. That’s my point.
>Best to recognize when we influenced some of the world’s worst mass crimes. That’s my point.
I largely agree with that point, but was making a separate one that these issues don't just happen far away or a long time ago. At best, it happened in the US in living memory, at worst some version of it is still happening.
i take their meaning to be that the conclusion to draw is that the united states is fascist because (among other things i'm sure) they ran a program a fascist government ran (before the fascist government even), rather than concluding that even non-fascist countries run these types of programs.
The more appropriate description is taken by STATE. These and more issues come from state bureaucracies irrespective of any other trappings.
Otherwise decent people will do terrible things when given a bureaucratic goal, just to achieve said goal, and then will say they were only doing their job or following orders.
We've asked you more than once not to use HN for religious flamewar. If you keep doing it (and you've done it repeatedly in this thread already), we are going to have to ban you. No more of this, please.
This is not flamewar. It’s not even a controversial statement.
The word you are looking for is “political correctness”. I have no problem with plural “you” prohibiting easily verifiable, but politically incorrect facts, but let’s not pretend it’s something else - have some guts and explicitly write it down in site rules instead of (repeatedly) pushing bullshit like this.
I don't care about the individual comment, I care about the pattern.
Given that your account has had such a clear pattern of posting religious flamewar comments* that we've had to warn you multiple times in the past, and given that you were resuming that pattern several times in the current thread, it seems natural to let you know that we need you to stop posting like this and if you don't we will ban you.
Re "facts": people repeat their favorite "facts" all the time to bludgeon the enemy side in whatever internet battle they're prosecuting, so the but-it's-a-fact defense doesn't hold much water. It's a red herring, which is why it's the most beloved response of trolls. There are infinitely many facts, and the choice of which ones to make explicit is always done by a person with a point of view. If you or anyone wants more explanation about this, I've posted about it many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
If you want to have repetitive internet wars on grand rhetorical subjects, please do it someplace else. We're trying to optimize for curiosity here.
* or whatever you want to call denunciatory generic rhetoric about religion that leads other users to respond in kind and produce dumbed-down, nasty, repetitive threads
Perhaps I'm just missing it, but I haven't sensed any curiosity in your comments about religion. They have seemed to me to come from a pre-existing agenda.
In Australias case this is absolutely what happened - and you should not be down-voted for pointing it out. It is the truth - not flamebait - Australia's government conspired with religious organizations to execute its racial purity programs. Fact.
See also, the White Stolen Generation, where poor mostly unmarried (Catholic) mothers were forced - across the British Empire - to send their children, never to be seen again, off to Australia. To make it white.
A truly vulgar and heinous facet of Australian/British history - alongside the already heinous acts committed against the original owners.
Some of the "orphan trains" in US history were populated with children stolen from urban hospitals & orphanages. Poor, unwed and/or Catholic mothers were told the child was stillborn, but it was instead sent "out West" to be raised Protestant.
19th Century America was extremely anti-Catholic. Many immigrants from predominantly Catholic countries were treated as "not white" or "not white enough" and discriminated against.
notice that it does not say that the children didn't need to be removed from their family situations, just that a new policy was put in place to place them in foster care within Native American culture, contrary to what had been happening, so the extremely high percentage of children to whom this was happening which you refer to seems to be a serious problem in its own right.
And the supreme court is set to severely weaken the Indian Child Welfare Act within the next year. We are likely to see even more native children basically kidnapped like this as a result
This story reminds me of a movie I once saw. I thought it would be a comedy (because of an actor in it) but the movie was extremely sad but I was hooked and needed to see it. I really recommend it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2431286/
This has been a big topic in Spain in the last 10 years. It's great to see that most of the cases are being opened to the public now. Note: I'm from Spain
While it's true that this happened under the fascist rule of Franco, I'm not sure that the fascists had nothing to do with it, so I think the article title is a bit misleading.
In my view, this issue was mainly caused by two things:
1. Imbalance of power, where powerful entities were able to "buy" influence over the hospital personel (usually with some relation with the Church) to get the babies of poor people that will not be able to fight back (because of lack of knowledge or resources)
2. Lack of a formal registry log of births and hospital happenings
If any of these two things are addressed, I'm pretty sure we will hardly get into a similar situation again.
> I'm not sure that the fascists had nothing to do with it
How will large-scale abduction of babies and deceiving of the parents by telling them that their baby died can happen without the cooperation of the state - openly or clandestinely. Especially considering how a lot of those related to these incidents belonged to the Catholic church and they were not only protected by the fascists but were an actual appendage of the regime...
> Imbalance of power, where powerful entities were able to "buy" influence over the hospital personel (usually with some relation with the Church) to get the babies of poor people that will not be able to fight back (because of lack of knowledge or resources)
I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a connection between this and the fascist principle of individual subordination. Particularly when Franco's government directly controlled the church and mandated its omnipresence[1].
"But one of the most lasting abuses of the era was borne by children. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, a leading psychiatrist in the regime who was trained in Nazi Germany, promoted the idea of a Marxist “red gene” carried by the children of Franco’s left-wing opponents. The gene, he said, might be suppressed by removing children from their mothers and placing them with conservative families. Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun."
the transfer of the babies, predominantly from low class families to high ranking Catholics, allies of Franco's regime of course makes the ideological connection clear.
Antonio Vallejo-Nájera was explicit about the political/eugenic character of these transfers:
"Vallejo’s conclusions were that the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of the Spanish was to take away the red children from their mothers in places "away from democratic environments and where the exaltation of bio-psychic racial qualities is encouraged". By 1943, 12,043 children had been taken from their mothers and handed over to orphanages or Francoist families"
> Antonio Vallejo-Nájera was explicit about the political/eugenic character of these transfers
There's nothing "eugenic" about a policy with a premise of "these children have bad genes, but we can overcome that by getting the right people to raise them". That is the opposite of eugenics.
No it isn't, which is why the man himself identified as a eugenicist. For starters there is the obvious (scientifically wrong) idea of tying complex, abstract beliefs to identifiable genes ('marxist genes' etc), there's the identical goal, in his own terms "improving the spanish racial body and ridding it of bad elements", the only difference is the means which he dubbed 'environmental eugenics', which is to say eugenics by the means of Lamarck instead of Mendel.
These forms of eugenics that stop one level before literal Nazi Lebensborn programs are by no means less vile and came in many different forms during the 19th and 20th century. They're no less deserving of the label.
I feel like "Being a Commie is genetic" is perfectly representative of the oddball ideological thinking that eugenics policies rapidly acquire, even if they didn't forcibly sterilize them.
I don't think either of these things have anything to do with it. The reason this happens is because it's easier to execute parents than to execute children and infants. Especially when you want a child of your own and have been having trouble conceiving.
It wouldn't have happened as often if the people being executed were usually racially distinct from the executioners, such as in South America, because of the difficulty of integrating that child into the family, and the relative ease of killing children of a different race.
Russians are really intent on setting the clock back. Fighting in the Donbass, trenches, poorly equipped human waves, genocide through attacks on civilians and kidnapping of children. It's like Putin and co are stuck in WW2 (at best).
This sort of ethnic/nationalistic slur is totally unacceptable on HN and if you post anything like this again we will ban you. I'm shocked that any longstanding HN user would stoop to this degraded and shameful level. Yes, there's a war going on; nonetheless this line is not so hard to draw and you crossed it terribly. No more of this, please.
Edit: from your recent comments it also looks like you've been using HN primarily for political/nationalistic battle. That's not what this site is for and we ban accounts that do it, so please stop.
This is a common propaganda tactic as well. so it really does require evidence....it seems a conflict isnt a conflict until the incubators get in the news.....
The article gives no evidence for any of its claims of kidnapping. Also, instead of attempting to propose a coherent reason why Russia would be kidnapping children and other civilians from areas that largely support Russia in the conflict, they just talk about other historical incidents of child adoption after massacres during domestic extermination by fascist regimes who we supported and allied with.
The article touches on this - the practise began with orphans (from the regiemes executions!) and illegitimate children from poor single mothers handed over to the church. But as social mores changed in the sixties, single parenting was not such a social stigma and so the "supply" dried up. At this point the church had people "alongside" management of hospitals etc, so the institutions were compromised, and the next more awful step could go forward.
It's interesting to compare the institutions being compromised by putting idealogues in hierarchical power with Hitler and the SA / SS. It seems that is the "playbook".
I am surprised that so many written traces were left behind.
It was not something you wanted to make public so I would have expected swapped birth certificates (with the older ones destroyed). It was as if there was no longer term thinking (just the immediate action to cover up the abduction/fake pregnancy here and now)
It is kind of hard to "assume the best" in case of your comment, ie. that you are supposedly just not aware what i'm talking about given that the info is just one google search away. Anyway, given the very familiar style, impeccable logical consistency and convincing strength of that an argument of yours i suppose that you're a Russian and thus can read this for example (i just don't have nor time nor desire to work through very slow Rutube to find the TV reports, and the text article is more useful for non-Russian speaking people here who can use Google Translate on it):
(by the March 10 date of the article they already report 1090 children taken away to Russia since beginning of the war on Feb 24, and they also report there about expected law changes to simplify adoption of Ukrainian children into Russia)
By the way, what Russia has been doing here - forceful taking away of children by a nation A from a nation B and bringing those children up in the culture and spirit of the nation A - is a cultural genocide.
>and flamebait.
i guess you are an expert here.
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This is my original, GP, comment which seems to have been flagged:
These days we have Ukrainian children being massively taken away into Russia. In particular from Mariupol where Russians killed something like 50K civilians. On state TV they even happily report how those children get new Russian families.
As an example of an end result - there was a POW who was taken away in 2014 who was drafted into Russian army and sent to fight in Ukraine.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. We've had to ask you this many times.
Attacking another user for their ethnicity is going to get you banned here, regardless of who you have a problem with. I realize that people feel strongly in a war but you can't do that here, so please don't do it again.
You're serious? The guy brings in the trolling from Russian propaganda forums- you should see the trash they spread there - the Russian here isn't ethnicity, it is the country Russia which has many ethnicities - and you let him just do it.
I'm not attacking him for ethnicity - i'm pointing that it is pretty obvious that he is a Russian troll. Do you really think that his comment isn't in a gross violation of all the rules, and such comment requires an answer with specific facts/references i gave? You're really on the wrong side here.
>We've had to ask you this many times
sorry, i don't remember those many times.
In this specific case what do you see as a "flamewar" on my side? Do you see any fake facts or lying? Qualification of cultural genocide as what being committed by Russia isn't just my words here - it follows definition, just google it.
Whereis the guy clearly lied without any possible factual backing when he made that statement of "fake". That is one of the main points and tools of Russian propaganda, and you just let it here. That propaganda right now is a weapon used by Russia together with other weapons in that war.
His "fake" to the cultural genocide being performed by Russia is no different than a "fake" in response to Armenian genocide or Holocaust. How can you let it here?
If one says that Turks committed Armenian genocide or Germans - Holocaust would it be attacking Turks or Germans on their ethnicity? How is that different when applied to Russians?
If you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33004414, that comment was heavily downvoted and has now been flagkilled. You broke the site guidelines badly in how you reacted to it, which is why I'm asking you to (1) review the site guidelines, and (2) follow them in the future.
Your comments in this thread went full bore into denunciatory rhetoric on an inflammatory topic. They were also egregiously offtopic. That's pure flamewar, and if you keep doing that we're going to have to ban you. This point doesn't change depending on how right you are or feel you are, or how justified your cause is.
Religious flamewar is not allowed on HN. Please don't post like this, regardless of how badly other people have behaved or how strongly you feel about it.
Other kinds of flamewar aren't allowed either, but religious flamewar is particularly bad and particularly avoidable.
Edit: comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33003645 are particularly not ok. Please don't do that on HN! we have to ban accounts that post like that and I don't want to ban you.
What I stated is factually correct, unlike the BS from the troll who created an account just to reply to this thread (see the comments under his account). Facts are not allowed on HN when they bother other people?
You're also falsely accusing me of religious flamewar. This has nothing to do with religion; my snarky remark on Jesus not approving was just to show that the Catholic Church bears no moral authority, really since its inception. Let's not even discuss crusades or Spanish genocide in South America. These are simple facts that anyone who has studied history can see for themselves. I obviously mean no disrespect to Jesus or his followers.
It always feels like the other person started it and did worse. From my perspective your comment was just as flamey as the others.
On HN, we want curious conversation. Denunciatory arguments on inflammatory topics are the easiest thing for internet forums to degenerate into, and when they do, curious conversation is quickly destroyed. That's why we have to expend a lot of energy trying to moderate this tendency.
The moderation point doesn't change based on how factually correct your comments here. People bring facts into these flamewars all the time—carefully selected to bolster their side, of course. The other side has its arsenal of facts as well.
From a moderation point of view, it doesn't much matter if the flaming arrows people shoot at each other happen to be made out of fact-wood or some other material. What we want is for users to use HN as intended, and that is something else entirely.
Ok, 'Jesus approves' was unnecessary. But the article is about the Catholic Church aiding in the robbery of babies during the Spanish dictatorship, and I thought it useful to point out that this was not just an isolated data point in the Church's wrongdoing and complete lack of morals, but rather, the Church was a fundamental component in the backbone of the regime. I thought readers would find the background useful.
I appreciate the reply! I think there's room for an argument like that. The only point I'd push back on is "complete lack of morals" - this is again the type of generic/overheated rhetoric that we're trying to avoid here. The rest seems fine.
Result of 500 year old Elizabethan propaganda. Actual historical records show that Inquisition persecution was SO lightweight and tolerant that even ordinary criminals tried to get themselves reclassified as religious offenders to be able to get off lightly.
Ah, Encyclopedia Britannica - the British Empire, having established the Anglican ecclesial community in defiance of Rome, mortal ancient enemies of the Spanish Empire. I'm sure they have no motive to embellish black legends about the Romish Church and English Catholics like St. Thomas More and William Shakespeare were perfectly safe to practice their faith and attend Popish Masses and priests never needed to hide from British authorities. Yeah, totally unbiased source, that Britannica. God save the King.
The french revolution killed in a couple of years a high multiple of what the Spanish inquisition killed in over a century. Of all the crimes, massacres and genocides of the last centuries, it probably doesn't even register in the top 200.
If the Church is acting as a vehicle for a military coup that seeks to depose the democratically elected regime, then it is not invulnerable from the law.
What an absolute pile of BS you just barfed there. Franco saved Spain...for example, by asking the German Condor to bomb Guernica and using state-sponsored media to accuse the communists instead?
>I feel like a lot of Spain's history (note, I am casual observer) mentions "fascist"
That's because the same guy, Franco, the dictator, stayed in power the whole time. He wasn't fascist one year and something else the other one, and the fascist history of Spain was when Franco was in power.
oh I just meant that it seems to me that everyone is quite open to saying it was fascist Spain, including (as far as I know) francoists themselves.
I don't mind the title, and I know that it was only semi-fascist, but the main point I'm making is that the title seems to bring about connotations that might not warrant it (from my casual observations).
So? There are people in South Africa who think things were better under apartheid. Just because some subset of the population harks back to an earlier time, that doesn't mean they have a point.
laws don't dictate morals.
laws were enacted in Australia to stop collecting rainwater to drink.
What are the bad parts? I ask as a genuine question, the only bad things I can find is poor treatment of jews and killing of political opponents, which is pretty similar to everything else that was going on at the time, and seems tame contrasted against communist powers.
Sorry, I fail to see how denouncing a coup and a dictatorship is off-topic in a post about stealing children under a dictatorship. Maybe I'm wrong but I think defending democracy and denouncing a fascist regime should not be seen as generic ideological but common sense.
We're trying to avoid denunciatory rhetoric on inflammatory topics, regardless of how right or obvious your views are or you feel they are. It's a kind of reductio to a hellish internet end state, and there's nothing more destructive to curious conversation, which is what HN threads are supposed to be for.
I've seen this reply several times under OP so I assume it's either automated or a mod, I'm not familiar enough with the site.
If a mod, why is a post answer which is basically bait, allowed to stay up, but people are being asked to refrain from answering it?
The topic is clearly ideological. A post defends a dictatorship with poor arguments and accused, among many other attrocities, of stealing thousands of babies. But the answers to such a troll are being asked to stop.
I did my best to moderate all sides in this thread when I saw people breaking the site guidelines, regardless of what point they were making. If I neglected to post a scolding in reply to a comment that deserved it, that would be either because (a) I already replied to that commenter elsewhere in the thread; or (b) I just missed it.
Of course the topic has a lot of ideological overlap, but that makes it more important not to descend into flamewar. That's why the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? I think if you take in the intended spirit of the site, it should be clearer why we moderate it the way we do—and also that we're not taking any side in any of these flamewars.
Btw, the site guidelines also contain this: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." — that is the answer to the question in your second paragraph. This is our version of the old internet adage "Please don't feed the trolls."
If you're going to comment on HN, please make sure you're up to date on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using the site in the intended spirit, which is curiosity. That is a quite different quality.