stand up against: hitler didn't have asperger

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Maybe Google can find a medium with a psychology degree?
(no; not seriously)

dear readers,

is not yet serious enough, if you can find the link to asperger syndrome on the wikipedia site of "adolf hitler"?

Just check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Health

Yeah, of course, people which know more about autistics won't believe that Hitler had it, but thats on good assumption. Most people who are not familiar and read this, will think that hitler really had AS, believe it or not!

I think, there are not many people who fight for a better understanding and against false images of autistic people. And I think linking AS to hitler is nothing else than character assasination, one of the worst thing which can happen to a person. And i would suggest that we do something on our own, against this wrong images, against this character assinations by so called "scientists" who didn't get the picture.

So is there no one who would like to write sth. against this crap?

thanks,
anton

You overstate your case. From your link



All this implies is that somebody said that they think Hitler might have had Asperger's. It is not a declaration of that fact, only a reference to speculations about his health.

If someone reads that and concludes that Hitler had Asperger's then they have no capacity for clear thinking.

Well, since we cannot interview his parents to confirm his behaviors as a child, there is no way we could possibly dx Adolph...

I can really sympathize with people's need to confirm some sort of mental instability in the man. People want proof that 'normal' people aren't cpable of this sort of horror. Unfortunately, Hitler was only one man. I'm fairly certain that even if he DID have Asperger's, or a psychosis, or was spirit channeling Napoleon it wouldn't change the faqct that he was surround but very intelligent, very driven and very 'normal' men in the Nazi party. The horrors of WWII can only be blamed on one mental condition - human nature.

What if the only two things he had was syphilis and amphetamine addiction. It would explain everything.

This is what really freaks me out about Nazi Germany. A lot of regular ordinary people participated in the the Holocaust. People are too quick to think that they are incapable of such crimes. It's sobering when you realize how easy it is to slip into the dark side.

So just go edit the Wiki article. Kids aren't allowed to use Wiki for homework research, because any know-nothing can write or contribute to a wiki article. It's so flawed it's laughable; I always approach wiki with suspicion.
I believe there's a place on the wiki site where you can open a debate and/or complaint as to the information in an article.
Several years ago there was a blowup over the entry for Pedophilia(written by a pedophile of course), man talk about having some angry villagers at your door. Wiki was very quick to make things right.

So go edit the article.

I think somebody here told me that assumptions are emotional ejaculation. I wouldn't be so comfortable that lying, manipulation and evil are solely NT traits.

By the way, just an observation;

Whenever people on WP talk about good things they always refer to ASD in terms of "Aspergers" or "Aspies"
Whenever they talk about bad things or bad people they always use the word "Autism" relating to ASD

It's funny how positive self attribution programming works in the human mind.....

I've read people ask if Hitler has Asperger's.

Hi ooOoOoOAnAOoOoOoo,

why does this explain everything? - I am not very familiar with both phenomens, please explain me why you think thats suffcient to have.


anton

What if Hitler wasn't really that unusual? IOW, what if there is no "mental illness" than can be uniquely applied to him, but not to millions of other people on this planet? Maybe he was just a (publicly) charismatic Walter Mitty who happened to be in the right place at the right time in order to be catapulted into a position to be able to carry out his 'daydreams'/vision on a vast scale. (Sort of like Bill Gates, if he'd been born 10 years earlier might've ended up as just another average businessman.) It's not as if Hitler invented racism, xenophobia, eugenicist ideas/feelings, and scapegoating. And it's not too hard to find people on the internet advocating "race war" or otherwise of killing people on racial or other grounds.

Dr. Phillip Zimbardo (famous for his "Stanford Prison Experiment"), has the theory that pretty much everyone has the capacity to become a brutal, sadistic oppressor, if put in the right situation. As someone (whose name I can remember, ATM), said (paraphrasing) "Power doesn't feel like power. It feels like nothing at all. It feels perfectly natural." In the Stanford Prison Experiment there was a former actual prisoner, who only later realized how he had fallen into the role of the sadistic prison administrator, like those he had hated when he was a prisoner. He didn't even realize at first that he had fallen into that role, when it was happening (and he was wracked with guilt afterwards).

Zimbardo said about Abu Grahib that it's not a matter of bad apples, but rather that the whole place was a "bad barrel" that contaminated everything it touched (everyone who was there in that environment). He interviewed some of the guards who were sent to prison for the abuses, and sauid he didn't find them to have any mental illness or other pathologies.

link --> 5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed

I think it would be very difficult for an autistic person to be a demagogue, mainly because doing so essentially requires one to have the ability to know how to appeal to the masses and manipulate them to your advantage. A mind-blind person would have a lot of trouble with this. Hitler was a mixture of paranoia (not of the schizophrenic variety, though) and megalomania.

On the other hand, there was another thread speculating that the Unabomber may have had Aspergers, and after watching a documentary on him, I'd have to agree.

From the article~

"it's usually fear of repercussion that keeps us from torturing our fellow human beings. Give us absolute power over somebody and a blank check from our superiors, and Abu Ghraib-esque naked pyramids are sure to follow"

I don't agree with this at all. That's like saying that the only reason i don't steal is because I'm afraid I'll go to jail. I don't steal, because it's wrong to take the belongings of a person who has worked to earn those things, when I have done nothing to earn them. I wouldn't want someone to steal the things that I have worked hard for and I have to assume that others feel the same way. I think most people can at least identify with each others feelings when it comes to being wronged. I would never want to be the bringer of anyone's suffering on any level.

The article makes for "juicy" reading, but I'm not buying it. I'd like to believe that most people are good.

Theres a number of articles that would dispute this but essentially it's a combination of personality type. socio-economics and situational factors that dictate whether a person will follow a charasmatic evil leader. In addition to Zimbardo's unethical prison experiment you may want to check out Milgram's electric shock experiment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TAqBbFJtfE

I should've picked a less amusing and more accurate article, as they don't give a great explanation of the phenomenon. I'm probably mistakenly assuming that most people are generally familiar with the Stanford Prison experiment (and the Milgram experiment).

It's not like a child stealing cookies because he knows he can get away with it; with the knowledge of the punishing authority figures being absent being the main factor. It's that when there is a great disparity in power people tend to start acting abusively without even realizing that they are. The people at Abu Grahib didn't do what they did because they thought they could get away with it. In that environment (and given what they were told), they didn't think that what they were doing was wrong in the first place. And when ZImbardo interviewed those who went to prison for AG, he didn't find any particular pathology, save being a bit more of an authoritarian follower than average.

This gets at things like, how is it that a person can work all day in the basement of the Guatamlalan State Police Headquarters, torturing people, and then go home and be a loving husband and father? Or, how could most of the soldiers who ran the Nazi death camps be "normal people" ("the banality of evil").

The difficult thing is that that kind of stuff does happen. We want to think that the 'bad people' are all slobbering maniacs who would be incapable of any normal human existence, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The people who rode in on camels and beat the Egyptian protestors didn't come from Hell, they were always there in the community, just waiting for the right conditions (the right orders from abovem, in that case) to arise. (I've always been amazed how mass beatings are never averted because there aren't enough willing participants.)



The following is about the Migram experiment. A description of the experiment is at Milgram Experiment. (I'm too tired to summarize it.)
From the Wiki page:



Thinking about deliberately doing someone harm is one thing, but the situations that occur in the real world aren't usually like that. There's always something else going on -- a context. Milgram showed that in the context of being ordered by an authority figure (who only had assumed authority -- there actually wasn't any) a majority of people will continue beyond another person's screaming and pleading for the shocks to stop. And the SPE (which has it's criticisms) says that if you give people authority, they will tend to abuse it. Even if they are normal people.

It's not as simple as "are people good or bad"? It seems that good people can do bad things (statistically), given the right circumstances. And this seems important for humanity to know, so we can watch out for those kinds of situations.

I.e. should the guards who committed the abuse at Abu Grahib go to prison (as they did), or should the people who set the place up bear more responsibility? (Especially since some of those people specialized in intelligence, and would likely have backgrounds in psychology (which means they'd know about the SPE and ME).)

Another aspect is to be on the lookout for abuse in places where there is a great disparity in power/authority. I.e. nursing homes, institutions, orphantages, hospitals, prisons.

That's why I would never serve in the military. If your mind is malleable in the hands of another person, then you do well in service and you are a useful tool for the government machine. But I take issue with the very idea that I would be no different than a tank or an M-16...just a tool, or in the case of AG, a weapon used to degrade and demoralize other human beings.



Their minds are not fully formed. And when I say "mind", I don't mean intelligence. What I mean is that they have no deep relationship with their own being, no reverence for themselves as individuals. I don't think we're so far removed from being outright animals other than we have the ability to be self-aware. Unfortunately a large part of humanity doesn't put forth the effort to develop anything deeper than what is required to fit in with the pack. That mentality has use-value to them, it helps them survive. Fitting in is of utmost importance. A great example of this in the average daily life, is organized religion. People want to be spoon-fed their "salvation", rather than seeking it out for themselves on a much deeper level. They're just sort of drifting along with the current. Humans are lazy in that respect.






There is no real authority though in any setting or circumstance. We all hold the same power to direct our own lives. Although It may be a good thing that most people don't question authority on that level, or we may fall into anarchy.




I have to wonder if any of the guards at AG ever stopped to question what might happen to them if they refused to follow orders. If they ever stopped to think that in degrading those prisoners, they were degrading themselves, or if you want to get all patriotic about it...degrading their own country.
If I were in their shoes, I would think, "what can my superiors really do to me? They could Court Marshal me for refusing to obey orders. Orders to do what?? Violate the Geneva Convention, violate my fellow humans, violate my own being."

People don't spend a lot of time in their own minds sorting out their issues because it's hard work, but it's even harder when your mind doesn't even belong to you.