Politics
Out of context: Reply #7677
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- ukit0
It is funny how these this stuff gets used and reused...
1956
The Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act passed to improve mental health care in the United States territory of Alaska became the focus of a political controversy after opponents nicknamed it the "Siberia Bill" and denounced it as being part of a communist plot to hospitalize and brainwash Americans.
Campaigners asserted that it was part of an international Jewish, Roman Catholic or psychiatric conspiracy intended to establish United Nations-run concentration camps in the United States.
A small anti-communist women's group in southern California, the American Public Relations Forum (APRF), issued an urgent call to arms in its monthly bulletin. "We could not help remembering that Siberia is very near Alaska and since it is obvious no one needs such a large land grant, we were wondering if it could be an American Siberia."
The APRF had a history of opposing mental health legislation; earlier in 1955, it had played a key role in stalling the passage of three mental health bills in the California Assembly. It was part of a wider network of far-right organizations which opposed psychiatry and psychology as being pro-communist, anti-American, anti-Christian and pro-Jewish.
The Keep America Committee, another Californian "superpatriot" group, summed up the anti-mental health mood on the far right in a pamphlet issued in May 1955. Calling "mental hygiene" part of the "unholy three" of the "Communistic World Government", it declared: "Mental Hygiene is a subtle and diabolical plan of the enemy to transform a free and intelligent people into a cringing horde of zombies".
- right wingers have always been nutcases.DrBombay
- Creativity is kinda against the grain for "conservatives"TheBlueOne
- haha agreedtommyo