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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: With technological advances leading some analysts to conclude that the future will feature a largely “employment-free” world, the concept of a “universal basic income” has taken hold in some circles. Concluding that all people will be given a “workable” sum with which to live, adherents of the concept envision a quasi-utopian world.
We fear the development of something far more dystopic. With the continued popularity of the austerity agenda, despite strong evidence that it is counter-productive, we fear that a largely “employment-free” environment will lead to the elimination of human beings seen as “superfluous.”
The Third Reich’s extermination programs have been popularly viewed as aberration, an occurrence that was separate from “normal” political and historical events. This is not the case. Murderous Nazi racial and social policy were the outgrowth of mainstream intellectual trends that are very much with us today.
At the epicenter of the intellectual nexus underpinning the Nazi extermination programs are the overlapping international eugenics and international mental hygiene movements. Seeking to promote the “right kind” of mental development, the international mental hygiene movement promoted the elevation of the right kind of genetic makeup as a means of realizing its goals. In turn, terminating people born with disabilities, people who were old and poor, sterilizing those with psychological disorders and those with chronic illnesses, advocates of euthanasia paved the way for the Third Reich’s T‑4 extermination program.
In time, the T‑4 program yielded the broader-based Nazi extermination programs, as those trained in the euthanasia institutions “graduated” to positions in the extermination camps, having acquired the necessary skills and demeanor.
Josef Mengele’s Auschwitz work with twins in many ways highlighted the evolution of mainstream eugenics research. Long preoccupied with the study of twins, eugenicists celebrated the Nazi dictatorship for its ability to use coercion to achieve their objective of detailed, intensive research of the subject.
Lavishly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation well into the tenure of the Third Reich, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were the primary focal point of eugenics research on twins. Mengele conducted his brutal, lethal research at Auschwitz in conjunction with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and his intellectual mentor at that institution, Dr. Freiherr Otmar von Verschuer, filling out paperwork for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for each of the sets of twins on which he experimented before proceeding with his work.
With physician-assisted suicide legislation gaining in many places, at the same time as the austerity agenda continues to be popular in elite economic and social planning circles, we should be on the alert for lethal, and altogether “final” solutions to the problem of large numbers of economically displaced people.
Most of the program is excerpted from Miscellaneous Archive Show M12, recorded in February of 1988. Other programs dealing with the eugenics movement include: FTR #‘s 32, Part I, 32, Part II, 117, 124, 140, 141, 534, 664, as well as Miscellaneous Archive Show M60.
Program Highlights Include:
- The role of Ernst Rudin in shepherding Nazi philosophy from eugenics to euthanasia to extermination.
- The role Wilhelm Ploetz in shaping the Nazi eugenics program.
- Review of the Knauer case, a key legal and philosophical step in the realization of the Nazi extermination programs.
- Enthusiastic reviews of the early Nazi eugenics programs by intellectual counterparts in the United States and other Western countries.
- The extensive use of extensive official secrecy to further the efficiency of the euthanasia centers.
1. Opening the program, a dialogue between two New York Times economics columnists lifts the curtain on the concept of the Universal Basic Income. We feel that, given the proclivities of the world’s power elites, the probability of a lethal solution to the problem of widespread joblessness is far more probable.
In the utopian (dystopian?) future projected by technological visionaries, few people would have to work. Wealth would be generated by millions upon millions of sophisticated machines. But how would people earn a living?
Silicon Valley has an answer: a universal basic income. But what does that have to do with today’s job market, with many Americans squeezed by globalization and technological change?
Two columnists for Business Day, Farhad Manjoo, who writes State of the Art on Thursdays, and Eduardo Porter, author of Economic Scene on Wednesdays, have just taken on these issues in different ways. So we brought them together for a conversation to help sharpen the debate about America’s economic future.
Eduardo Porter: I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast.
But the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.
A problem I have with the idea of a universal basic income — as opposed to, say, wage subsidies or wage insurance to top up the earnings of people who lose their job and must settle for a new job at a lower wage — is that it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.
The former seems to me a not unreasonable forecast — we’ve been losing good jobs for decades, while low-wage employment in the service sector has grown. But no paid work? That’s more a dream (or a nightmare) than a forecast. Even George Jetson takes his briefcase to work every day.
Farhad Manjoo: Because I’m scared that they’ll unleash their bots on me, I should start by defending the techies a bit before I end up agreeing with you.
So, first, I don’t think it’s quite right to say that the proponents of U.B.I. are envisioning a future of no paid work at all. I think they see less paid work than we have today — after software eats the world, they say it’s possible we’ll end up with a society in which there’s not enough work for everyone, and especially not a lot of good work.
They see a future in which a small group of highly skilled tech workers reign supreme, while the rest of the job world resembles the piecemeal, transitional work we see coming out of tech today (Uber drivers, Etsy shopkeepers, people who scrape by on other people’s platforms).
Why does that future call for instituting a basic income instead of the smaller and more feasible labor-policy ideas that you outline? I think they see two reasons. First, techies have a philosophical bent toward big ideas, and U.B.I. is very big.
They see software not just altering the labor market at the margins but fundamentally changing everything about human society. While there will be some work, for most nonprogrammers work will be insecure and unreliable. People could have long stretches of not working at all — and U.B.I. is alone among proposals that would allow you to get a subsidy even if you’re not working at all.
Eduardo Porter: I know what you mean by thinking big. Many of these new technology entrepreneurs think more like engineers than social scientists. In the same breath they will extol the benefits of individual liberty and the market economy and propose some vast reorganization of society following an ambitious blueprint cooked up by an intellectual elite. A few months ago I interviewed Albert Wenger, the venture capitalist you cite in your column. He also told me about his vision of a future world in which work would be superfluous. It made me think of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
If there are, in fact, jobs to be had, a universal basic income may not be the best choice of policy. The lack of good work is probably best addressed by making the work better — better paid and more skilled — and equipping workers to perform it, rather than offering a universal payment unrelated to work.
The challenge of less work could just lead to fewer working hours. Others are already moving in this direction. People work much less in many other rich countries: Norwegians work 20 percent fewer hours per year than Americans; Germans 25 percent fewer. They have taken much more of their wealth in the form of leisure rather than money. But they still work for a living.
And, by the way, I’ve read about robots that can program. So maybe the programmers aren’t safe either.
Farhad Manjoo: One key factor in the push for U.B.I., I think, is the idea that it could help reorder social expectations. At the moment we are all defined by work; Western society generally, but especially American society, keeps social score according to what people do and how much they make for it. The dreamiest proponents of U.B.I. see that changing as work goes away. It will be O.K., under this policy, to choose a life of learning instead of a low-paying bad job.
Eduardo Porter: To my mind, a universal basic income functions properly only in a world with little or no paid work because the odds of anybody taking a job when his or her needs are already being met are going to be fairly low. The discussion, I guess, really depends on how high this universal basic income would be. How many of our needs would it satisfy? We already sort of have a universal basic income guarantee. It’s called food stamps, or SNAP. But it’s impossible for people to live on food stamps alone.
This brings to mind something else. You give the techies credit for seriously proposing this as an optimal solution to wrenching technological and economic change. But in a way, isn’t it a cop-out? They’re just passing the bag to the political system. Telling Congress, “You fix it.”
If the idea of robots taking over sounds like science fiction, the idea of the American government agreeing to tax capitalists enough to hand out checks to support the entire working class is in an entirely new category of fantasy.
Farhad Manjoo: Yes, this is perhaps the biggest criticism of U.B.I.: It all sounds too fantastical! It’s straight from sci-fi. And you’re right; many of these proponents aren’t shy about being inspired by fantasies of the future.
But paradoxically, they also see U.B.I. as more politically feasible than some of the other policy proposals you call for. One of the reasons some libertarians and conservatives like U.B.I. is that it is a very simple, efficient and universal form of welfare — everyone gets a monthly check, even the rich, and the government isn’t going to tell you what to spend it on. Its very universality breaks through political opposition. And I should note that it’s not only techies who are for it — Andy Stern, the former head of the S.E.I.U., will soon publish a book calling for a basic income.
Still, like you, I’m skeptical that we’ll see anything close to this sort of proposal anytime soon. Even Bernie Sanders isn’t proposing it. The techies, as usual, are either way ahead of everyone, or they’re living in some other universe. Often it’s hard to tell which is which.
But let’s get back to the question of productivity. You’re right that software hasn’t produced the sort of productivity gains many had said it would. But why do you disagree with the techies that automation is just off beyond the horizon?
Eduardo Porter: I guess some enormous discontinuity right around the corner might vastly expand our prosperity. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian that knows much more than I do about the evolution of technology, argues that the tools and techniques we have developed in recent times — from gene sequencing to electron microscopes to computers that can analyze data at enormous speeds — are about to open up vast new frontiers of possibility. We will be able to invent materials to precisely fit the specifications of our homes and cars and tools, rather than make our homes, cars and tools with whatever materials are available.
The question is whether this could produce another burst of productivity like the one we experienced between 1920 and 1970, which — by the way — was much greater than the mini-productivity boom produced by information technology in the 1990s.
While I don’t have a crystal ball, I do know that investors don’t seem to think so. Long-term interest rates have been gradually declining for a fairly long time. This would suggest that investors do not expect a very high rate of return on their future investments. R.&D. intensity is slowing down, and the rate at which new businesses are formed is also slowing.
Little in these dynamics suggests a high-tech utopia — or dystopia, for that matter — in the offing.
2. Most of the program consists of an excerpting of Miscellaneous Archive Show M12, recorded in February of 1988. The program traces the evolution of German eugenics thinking, its evolution into a eugenics program and the gradual intensification and escalation of that program into the full-blown Nazi extermination programs.
Charles Murray, the academic of choice for contemporary eugenicists, recently had another piece advocating a Universal Basic Income. Or, rather, advocating his specific vision for how a Universal Basic Income (UBI) should work. It’s an important piece because it serves as a warning for the phase in the far-right’s attack on public services in the context of the employment environment of the future where hyper-automation and AI make a growing percentage of populace as basically redundant. Because as Murray makes clear in the article below, he agrees that automation and AI are potentially going to transform the nature of and employment in coming years and stable, non-poverty wage jobs are going to be increasingly out of reach for a growing segment of the populace.
And while a UBI would seem like exactly the kind of thing society would want in that kind of future, there are a few strings attached to the the UBI Murray has in mind: it must replace all public assistance programs and the safety-net: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program must be replaced with the UBI or Murray sees it as an inevitable failure that would just result in people living on the dole and societal implosion. And no extra income for children.
What’s the level of income Murray envisions for the UBI? $13,000 per year, with $3,000 allocated towards medical care. So individuals will have $10k to live on and that’s going to replace Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program. And no extra income for kids. Keep in mind that the poverty level for a single individual in the US is around $11k for a single individual and $23k for a family of four and there’s presumably public assistance programs that are supplementing that income. So Murray’s plan is for the UBI to replace the current safety-net with something that will presumably make many poor individuals much poorer. Especially when you consider the potential cost of medical expenses that are covered by programs like Medicaid. As Murray sees it, the private charity and social groups will step in to cover the newly created gaps in things like medical costs and other needs that can’t be adequately paid for with an individual’s the UBI. So in addition to shifting many existing social services into private sector functions that are paid for with the UBI, Murray’s plan also assumes that private charity will just step in to also fill in the gaps. In other words, Murray’s UBI is basically a catalyst to privatize the public saftey-net.
But Murray’s version of the UBI does envision creating one big new kind of saftey-net in American society: individuals will now feel safe and secure in just telling people who are still in need that they are on their own and if the UBI can’t cover their costs, oh well. And by giving people the new found freedom to just say, “we no longer feel any responsibility to those in need because they have a (poverty-level) UBI,” individuals will feel more personal responsibility and therefore become better, more virtuous people.
That’s seriously how Murray’s version of the UBI is supposed to work. It’s a reminder that the list of Charles Murray’s lifetime accomplishments includes smearing the idea of a Universal Basic Income:
“The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.”
Yep, somehow social costs would be hundreds of billions of dollars cheaper under Murray’s UBI plan. How does accomplish this while still provided the same level of public services or better? By not providing then and just telling people “you better start pulling those bootstraps because you’re on your own!”
“Some people will still behave irresponsibly and be in need before that deposit arrives, but the UBI will radically change the social framework within which they seek help: Everybody will know that everybody else has an income stream. It will be possible to say to the irresponsible what can’t be said now: “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act together. Don’t try to tell us you’re helpless, because we know you aren’t.””
Oh how nice. After gutting all social welfare programs and effectively making the poor poorer, American society will just become like one giant family where no one is allowed to starve. What exactly we’ll do when it isn’t, “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act together. Don’t try to tell us you’re helpless, because we know you aren’t,” but instead, “We won’t let you die from [insert expensive medical circumstance] before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act together. Don’t try to tell us you’re helpless, because we know you aren’t,” is unclear, but presumably private charity will assume the growing medical expenses of an increasingly poor aging American population or, you know, just tell them “Don’t try to tell us you’re helpless, because we know you aren’t.” Either response appears to be a viable option under Murray’s plan. After all, the threat of letting people starve is is key ingredient of Murray’s UBI secret sauce.
And, again, since there’s a very high probably that getting rid of the minimum wage would also be part of any UBI plan note how Murray sells his UBI plan as a response to a future job market where automation and AI make quality employment
So we need a UBI to address the looming job-pocalypse. But the UBI is going to be a poverty-level income, with no backup for when medical or other expenses exceed that poverty level, and the only way to achieve non-poverty-level income is to get the extra income in the job-pocalypse job market. That should go well:
“The downside of making something 100 times cheaper means that someone—and probably lots of people—are losing money. A few pathologists needing to retrain might not upset you, but how exactly can people like Harry live on 60 cents an hour? In 2010, researchers at New York University calculated the median wage of Mechanical Turk workers at $1.38 an hour. While a few experienced crowdworkers say they earn between $5 and $12 an hour, many requesters continue to pay far below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 (which does not apply to independent contractors).”
Have fun working you way out of UBI poverty in the job market where making something 100 times cheaper by reducing labor costs is the new hot thing and a long-term employment mega-trend. And remember, you and you alone are responsible for your future under the new UBI ethos. What a great recipe for invigorating America’s civic culture!
Part of what makes Murray’s UBI-trolling so unfortunate is that it really is one of those policy tools that could be invaluable, but not if folks like Murray trash the concept in advance. Or do worse and actually get the Murray UBI implemented as law. Because let’s imagine a UBI on top of basic services like healthcare. One that allows people to live in dignity without having go out and get a Mechanical Turk job for scraps.
What kind of economy would that create? Well, the “non-poverty UBI + services” model would basically act as a public union, which could have a profoundly positive impact on the ‘disposable’ labor market that’s emerged in recent years. And the stronger that “public union”, the higher wages would be and more people would be tempted to enter the labor market.
But let’s also not forget one of the biggest positive impacts a “non-poverty UBI + services” model could have on the US labor market: It would finally free of the labor force for the biggest “Mechanical Turk” job in the country. A job that no one gets paid to do but requires virtually everyone to do anyway. Democracy.
Think about it: while the main positive features of democracy that we’re taught to celebrate is that, regardless of the quality of the government, at least that government has a semblance of legitimacy, that’s really just one of its main benefit. Because don’t forget that democracy is also a giant exercise in crowd-sourcing and utilizing the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to shape and direct public policies across a broad array of different issues. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work...as a giant Mechanical Turk-like exercise in information digestion and analysis. Except unlike the Turk jobs, where you’re net output is accumulation of a series of microtasks for pennies apiece all under the direction of some central organization, with democracy we (hope) voters are freely and independently taking in all sorts of information from a variety of sources and the final output comes in the form of voting for the kinds of policy-makers who seem the most likely to achieve better results for everyone. So it’s a very different Mechanical Turk-like task than what Amazon is peddling. And it’s far more vital, especially in an increasingly economically and environmentally stressed out world where intelligent collective sacrifice is going to be a critical survival skill. And in a Mechanical Turk future, where hours of human potential are wasted on a microtask race to the bottom, that critical Mechanical Turk-like unpaid job called democracy is going to continue to face major labor shortages.
So let’s hope the debate over the potential utility of a Universal Basic Income isn’t dominated by the Charles Murrays of the world. Because the most important job in the world requires us all. And it doesn’t pay. At all.
This next article talks about either unauthorized sterilizations or ones being performed on misleading pretenses at an ICE facility housing illegal migrants. However, this is not the first time that the US has been practicing Eugenic experiments on unwitting human beings. The article states:
“In the early 20th century, white American intellectuals were pioneers of race science, advancing the idea that “undesirable” traits could and should be bred out of the population with government planning and selective, involuntary sterilization programs. Everything the Nazis knew about eugenics, they learned from the United States. The 1927 Buck v Bell supreme court case, in which the court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a 20-year-old named Carrie Buck against her will, led to an era of enthusiastically racist population engineering by state governments. Federally funded eugenics boards were established in 32 states, through which tax dollars were spent to sterilize approximately 70,000 people, mostly women. These programs were used to enforce via state law the racist fiction of America as a white country, and forced sterilization disproportionately targeted Black women.”
“A separate federal program in the 1960s and 1970s deputized doctors with the Indian Health Service to choose which Native American women they personally deemed fit to reproduce, and to make those women’s reproductive choices for them accordingly. They decided that approximately a quarter of Native American women were unfit to have children, and sterilized them. As with the migrant women at the Irwin county center, many of the Native women were lied to about the nature of their procedures, or were sterilized without their knowledge during other surgeries. Some Native women were told, incorrectly, that the sterilizations were reversible; others were told that they were being treated for appendicitis, or needed to have their tonsils removed. They discovered the truth when they woke up.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/17/ice-hysterectomy-allegations-us-eugenics-history?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
This next article 9-17-2020 Guardian Article by Moira Donegan talks about either unauthorized sterilizations or ones being performed on misleading pretenses at an ICE facility housing illegal migrants.
However, this is not the first time that the US has been practicing Eugenic experiments on unwitting human beings. The article states:
“In the early 20th century, white American intellectuals were pioneers of race science, advancing the idea that “undesirable” traits could and should be bred out of the population with government planning and selective, involuntary sterilization programs. Everything the Nazis knew about eugenics, they learned from the United States. The 1927 Buck v Bell supreme court case, in which the court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a 20-year-old named Carrie Buck against her will, led to an era of enthusiastically racist population engineering by state governments. Federally funded eugenics boards were established in 32 states, through which tax dollars were spent to sterilize approximately 70,000 people, mostly women. These programs were used to enforce via state law the racist fiction of America as a white country, and forced sterilization disproportionately targeted Black women.”
“A separate federal program in the 1960s and 1970s deputized doctors with the Indian Health Service to choose which Native American women they personally deemed fit to reproduce, and to make those women’s reproductive choices for them accordingly. They decided that approximately a quarter of Native American women were unfit to have children, and sterilized them. As with the migrant women at the Irwin county center, many of the Native women were lied to about the nature of their procedures, or were sterilized without their knowledge during other surgeries. Some Native women were told, incorrectly, that the sterilizations were reversible; others were told that they were being treated for appendicitis, or needed to have their tonsils removed. They discovered the truth when they woke up.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/17/ice-hysterectomy-allegations-us-eugenics-history?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
There have been many recent rumblings about European Community President Ursula Von Der Leyen and her husband’s possible family ties to fascism. While it is clear that there was a Freiherr Joachim von Der Leyen who committed atrocities in Ukraine during WW2, there is no hard evidence that he is closely related to Ursula’s husband, Heiko. It is quite likely that they are at least distantly related, however, there are no genealogical records that prove this and I could find no genealogical interlinks between Heiko’s wing and Freiherr Joachim’s in the past few centuries.
However, Ursula’s own family has some interesting characters! There has been well-sourced discussion of her family ties to the Ladson Southern slave-owner family and she even used the Ladson name in her earlier years. There has been much less discussion of her actual grandfather, Carl Albrecht.
It is quite likely that he was involved with the Nazis, however, it wouldn’t have been in a frontline stormtrooper capacity or managing slaughters in Kiev. He was a well-regarded psychologist... who specialized in meditation and spirituality! He seemed to be doing fine in Bremen during the war and his son, Ursula’s father, was accepted to Cornell in 1947. So he seems to have done well under the Nazis, then remained fat and happy with the US occupation after the war. Interesting. I just thought about something that may reflect some spin from Ursula. She describes her father seeing the horrors of the war “as he helped his father Carl during the war”. But he was a psychologist? How could a preteen “help” a psych? I guess maybe Grandpa could have been doing psych help on German patients, but it sure reads like she wants us to think he was a medical doctor. I could be misreading that, but it just came off weird. FFT. It’s possible that the Nazis were so short on medical doctors they were pressing psychs into service. It is also possible that he started as a medical doctor, then switched focus to psychology. Inconclusive.
Here is some bio info on Carl, translated from the German from this “Christlike Contemplation” site. I have a hard time believing that a guy like this doing groundbreaking research on meditation and spiritual consciousness during WW2 would have escaped Himmler’s attention. Hell, I have a hard time believing that someone was doing research like this without DIRECT encouragement and funding from Himmler. It is right down his alley. When I saw analyst Jacques Baud discussing “murderous decisions” made by Ursula’s elders, I assumed he was talking about front-line decision-making. However, it is possible he was talking about such “decisions” being made at a much higher level... like the Himmler level? Again, FFT. Where he worked, when, etc. are just completely opaque. Just “important psychologist from Bremen”.
https://www.christliche-kontemplation.ch/josuab.htm
Carl Albrecht was born on March 28, 1902 in Bremen. After his medical studies, he became acquainted with autogenic training, which he later developed into his own immersion technique in his medical-psychotherapeutic practice, which finally opened the gates to religious-mystical experience after many years of approach to faith. After the experiences of the 2nd World War and a health breakdown, Albrecht had doubts in 1947 about the mystical quality of his immersion experience. This irritation formed the starting point of his research.
In a letter, he commented retrospectively on the motive of his scientific work: “For years, I myself was in the mystical reference to experience. Like any serious mystic, I was tormented by the question of whether the mystical experience was “real”. Since I do not live in the 16th century, but in the twentieth, I did not go to my confessor like Theresa, but had to try to solve the phenomenon in the sphere.
To examine the sphere of critical thinking.” The fruit of this catharsis of thought is his mystic studies, unique in their own way, which were received with great approval by thinkers such as Gabriel Marcel and Karl Rahner soon after their appearance. In the course of his life, he succeeded in switching back and forth between the introspection of the contemplative and the diagnostic gaze of the doctor and, through patient research, phenomenologically brightened and arranged the variety of mystical forms of experience. Albrecht died on July 19, 1965 after a prolonged heart disease.
Here is his wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Albrecht_(psychologist)
Carl Albrecht was an expert in and something called “autogenic training”, which is basically self-hypnosis. Let’s read about autogenic training. FYI: This piece gets nuts, and one of the most important parts is at the bottom of the email.
The godfather of autogenic training was a guy named Johannes Heinrich Schultz. He was a T4 guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Heinrich_Schultz
In 1933 he began research on his guidebook on sexual education, Geschlecht, Liebe, Ehe, in which he focused on homosexuality and explored the topics of sterilization and euthanasia. In 1935 he published an essay titled Psychological consequences of sterilization and castration among men, which supported compulsory sterilization of men in order to eliminate hereditary illnesses. Soon after he was appointed deputy director of the Göring Institute in Berlin, which was the headquarters of the Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (German institute for psychological research and psychotherapy).
Through this institute, he had an active role in the extermination of mentally handicapped individuals in the framework of the Aktion T4 program.[3]
There he began to test many of his theories on homosexuality. Schultz strongly believed that homosexuality generally was not hereditary and that most homosexuals became so through perversion. He stated on numerous occasions that homosexuals displayed “scrubby and stunted forms of personality development”. Consequently, he also believed that homosexuality was curable through intense psychotherapy. During his time at the Göring Institute, 510 homosexuals were recorded to have received numerous psychotherapeutic treatments and 341 were deemed to be cured by the end of the treatments. Most of his subjects were convicted homosexuals brought in from concentration camps. After treating his patients, Schultz tested the treatments’ effectiveness by forcing them to have sex with prostitutes. In a case study he later released, in which he briefly discussed the process of determining whether a young SS soldier, who had been sentenced to death for homosexual acts, was ‘cured’, Schultz stated: “Those who were considered incurable were sent back to the concentration camps, but ‘cured’ homosexuals, such as the previously mentioned SS soldier, were pardoned and released into military service”. In this way Schultz actually saved numerous accused homosexuals from the hellish life of a concentration camp but he stated later that “successfully treated subjects were sent to the front, where they most probably were killed in action”.
After the war, the Göring Institute was disbanded but Schultz faced no repercussions for his more dubious research and methods during the past decade. In fact he released a case study on his work with homosexuals in 1952 titled Organstörungen und Perversionen im Liebesleben, in which he admitted to the inhumanity of some of his experiments but also still supported their results. In fact he continued to support his findings and even continued to advocate paragraph 175 for the rest of his life.[4]
In 1956, he became editor of the journal Psychotherapie, and in 1959 founder of the German Society for Medical Hypnosis (Deutschen Gesellschaft für ärztliche Hypnose).
NOTE: This American group called the Menninger Foundation uses biofeedback with autogenic training. Let’s read about the Menninger Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menninger_Foundation
The Menninger Clinic, also known as the C. F. Menninger Memorial Hospital,[1] was founded in the 1920s in Topeka, Kansas.[2] The Menninger Sanitarium was founded in 1925.[3]
The Menninger Clinic established the Southard School for children in 1926. The school fostered treatment programs for children and adolescents that were recognized worldwide. In the 1930s the Menningers expanded training programs for psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals.
The Menninger Foundation was established in 1941. The Menninger School of Psychiatry was established in 1946. It quickly became the largest training center in the country, driven by the country’s demand for psychiatrists to treat military veterans.
Menninger announced its affiliation with Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital in December 2002. The concept was that Menninger would perform treatment while Baylor would oversee research and education.
...Dr. Will Menninger made a major contribution to the field of psychiatry when he developed a system of hospital treatment known as milieu therapy. This approach involved a patient’s total environment in treatment. Dr. Menninger served as Chief of the Army Medical Corps’ Psychiatric Division during World War II. Under his leadership, the Army reduced losses in personnel due to psychological impairment. In 1945, the Army promoted Dr. Menninger to brigadier general. After the war, Dr. Menninger led a national revolution to reform state sanitariums. In 1948, Time magazine featured Dr. Menninger on its cover, lauding him as “psychiatry’s U.S. sales manager.”
...In the 1960s the Menninger Clinic studied Swami Rama, a noted yogi, specifically investigating his ability to exercise voluntary control of bodily processes (such as heartbeat) which are normally considered non-voluntary (autonomous) as well as Yoga Nidra. It was part of Gardner Murphy’s research program into creativity and the paranormal, funded by Ittleson Family Foundation. In the 1960s the Menninger Clinic studied Swami Rama, a noted yogi, specifically investigating his ability to exercise voluntary control of bodily processes (such as heartbeat) which are normally considered non-voluntary (autonomous) as well as Yoga Nidra. It was part of Gardner Murphy’s research program into creativity and the paranormal, funded by Ittleson Family Foundation.
NOTE: Damn, now I need to look into Swami Rama and Yoga Nidra. Would you believe it? Swami Rama was accused of sexually abusing students. Wow, never heard that one before. This is from Yoga Journal. Man, they do good work cleaning out the trash of yoga, which is considerable. It’s funny that they do significantly better political journalism than supposed political journalists. They also did that great article explaining the German roots of yoga that you have read on air before.
https://books.google.com/books?id=iekDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA58#v=onepage&q&f=false
NOTE: More on “Yoga Nidra”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_nidra
...The modern form of the technique, pioneered by Dennis Boyes in 1973 and popularised by Satyananda Saraswati in 1976, and then by Swami Rama, Richard Miller, and others has spread worldwide. It is applied by the US Army to assist soldiers to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder. There is limited scientific evidence that the technique helps relieve stress.
Swami Rama writes that yoga nidra results in conscious awareness of the deep sleep state.[14] He taught a form of yoga nidra (in a broad sense) which involves an exercise called shavayatra, “inner pilgrimage [through the body]”, which directs the attention around “61 sacred points of the body” during relaxation in shavasana, corpse pose. A second exercise, shithali karana, is said to induce “a very deep state of relaxation”, and is described as a preliminary for yoga nidra (in a narrow sense). It too is performed in shavasana, involving exhalations imagined as directed from the crown of the head to different points around the body, each repeated 5 or 10 times. The yoga nidra exercise itself involves directed breathing lying on the left side, then the right side, then in shavasana. When in shavasana, the attention is directed in turn to the eyebrow, throat, and heart centres or chakras.[15]
... Richard Miller
The western pioneer of yoga as therapy, Richard Miller, has developed the use of yoga nidra for rehabilitating soldiers in pain, using the Integrative Restoration (iRest) methodology.[16] Miller worked with Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the United States Department of Defense studying the efficacy of the approach.[17]
[18] According to Yoga Journal, “Miller is responsible for bringing the practice to a remarkable variety of nontraditional settings” which includes “military bases and in veterans’ clinics, homeless shelters, Montessori schools, Head Start programs, hospitals, hospices, chemical dependency centers, and jails.”[19] The iRest protocol was used with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[20][21][18] Based on this work, the Surgeon General of the United States Army endorsed Yoga Nidra as a complementary alternative medicine (CAM) for chronic pain in 2010.[22]
NOTE: The biggest supporter of Yoga Nidra in the West was well-known guru Satyananda Saraswati. Would you believe he also had major sexual abuse scandals? This is some horrible stuff. I’ve heard of him and his Yogaville before. FYI: There is another guru Satyananda who was tight with Savitri Devi, but this is not him.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2859080/This-relationship-don-t-tell-Sexual-abuse-not-uncommon-Satyananda-yoga-movement-celibate-life-promoted.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2860429/Brutal-initiation-ceremony-Satyananda-yoga-movement-saw-seven-year-old-girl-sexually-assaulted-leader-licked-blood.html
NOTE: One of the leaders of the Menninger Foundation was a guy named Otto Fleischmann who was involved in Wallenberg’s rescue operations, which we have discussed before and their historical whitewashing. Not accusing Fleischmann of anything nefarious, but he had interesting associates. He was focused on Hungarian Jewish psychs. Again.... Hungarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Fleischmann
NOTE: OK, here is what I was thinking I might find. Everything about the Menninger Foundation screams “MK-Ultra meets Paperclip”. Yep, they were doing LSD research up through 1969 at least. Rest is behind a paywall, unfortunately.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/354885
...The history of research with psychedelic drugs has produced a variety of methods for their use and conflicting claims about results. First came the wave of excitement among experimentalists in the 1950s when it was claimed that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) could produce a model psychosis which might be useful in understanding schizophrenia. While this promise was fading, enthusiastic reports about the possibility of LSD as an aid to psychotherapy in the treatment of alcoholism and other psychiatric disorders appeared. All these approaches were represented in 1959 at the first international conference devoted entirely to LSD.1 Since then, there have been at least five more published proceedings of such conferences on various aspects of psychedelic drugs.2–6 The most recent conference on various means of producing states of consciousness was sponsored by the Menninger Foundation and the American Association of Humanistic Psychology on April 7 to 11, 1969, in
NOTE: I previously discussed the Menninger Foundation, which was involved with both the “autogenics” stuff that Albrecht was promoting AND LSD research as well as studying a yogi named Swami Rama. That Swami research was funded by a group called the Ittleson Family Foundation. I couldn’t find much of interest about the Ittleson family, but I will point out that they have an Auchincloss on the board! They are also involved in AIDS and mental health research funding. Gulp.
https://ittlesonfoundation.org/about-the-foundation/officers-and-directors/
NOTE: Andrew Auchincloss is a cousin of the Auchincloss who married Jackie O’s mother. He is a trust/estate lawyer for the rich and the trustee of Gore Vidal’s estate. His father Louis Auchincloss worked at Sullivan and Cromwell from 1941–1951, a hell of a time to be there, right? Louis then became an author, writing about the foibles of the Northeast elite in fiction.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/11/08/gore-vidals-final-feud/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Auchincloss
NOTE: I also found this little tidbit in the archives of Karl Menninger at the Kansas Historical Society. As I suspected would be the case, Karl Menninger was absolutely in contact with Jolyon West. Unfortunately, this just mentions the correspondence, it isn’t online. Would probably have to go there to see it.
https://www.kshs.org/index.php?url=camp/units/view/249297