The
IAAPA's Mission:
To understand the aim of IAAPA, it is necessary to understand the underlying
structure of our present scientific view of the world, with its roots
in the enlightenment and the decline in the moral and intellectual authority
of the orthodox Christian churches produced by their inquisitorial persecution.
However, despite the eclipse of a theological rationale--"love
thy neighbor", control his thinking--for limiting individual autonomy,
new, intellectually modernized rationales for limiting individual freedom
would arise. Thomas Szasz described this crucial link very well in his
book: "The
Theology of Medicine": "As
we saw earlier, justice may, in its most basic sense, be readily defined
as the fulfilment of contracts or expectations. Contracts, moreover,
consists of performances and counter performances -- that is, of overt
acts. They thus differ from intentions, sentiments or states of mind
- which are private experiences. Accordingly, justice is open to public
inspection, scrutiny, and judgment, whereas love is closed to such examination
and evaluation. Hence, the claim that one is acting justly is a plea
for the support of the good opinion of others, whereas the claim that
one is acting lovingly leaves no room for the judgment of others and
its zeal brooks no opposition. In short, although love appeals to the
ideal of consideration for the need of others, and justice appeals to
the ideal of consideration for agreed-upon rules, in actual practice
just actions afford more protection for the self-defined interests of
others than do loving actions."*
So overall,
the "love your neighbour" rule proves only to be a superior
means of oppression by authority. The next step in the radicalisation
of this path was the Protestant concept that morality - and God - is
in the consciousness of each person. So morality is NO longer a social
(and therefore political) system of values expressed in behaviour and
communicated in the language developed by society, but individualized.
In this concept, the mind of a person was located in and reduced to
his head, later reduced to his brain. Along with this new set of conditions,
the system created a division of the mind in cognition permitted in
objectifying science, declared as truth and, on the other hand the condemned
dissident delusions, hallucinations etc. declared as irrational. This
new church of science was a prolific producer of rationalizations for
capitalism, the protestant work ethic AND - in a negative dialectic
meaning - even more productive of the instruments of destruction: the
production of weapons of war.
The insufficiency
and limited individual sovereignty this theory of cognition recognized
is obvious in the violence used against dissidents incarcerated in asylums.
In this concept, rationality became the measure for being recognized
as a human being. Others were branded as subhuman. We know the abyss
of this concept: T4 and Auschwitz.
Under the
influence of this catastrophe, the human family awoke for a moment out
of the nightmare of rationality and created the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Probably they never thought that this declaration,
having been realized, would wash away the concept of a subhuman created
by the medical slander "mental illness".
Unfortunately
the nightmare of rationality continued to rule, resulting in Resolution
46/119 of the UN General Assembly of December 17, 1991 again officially
denouncing a part of the human family as subhuman by calling them "mentally
ill". So the mission of IAAPA seems to be nearly impossible, as
the united states of the world stand against us, and we have only one
tool at hand for our political struggle: the proper use of language.
We will have to insist on the validity of the UN Human Rights Declaration,
which is a universal declaration with explicit rights to freedom of
thought, freedom from torture, for everybody. Of course our aim requires
all kinds of actions which could be considered to be helpful the statutes
of IAAPA should therefore offer support.
IAAPA,
the legal entity:
Luckily, the UN has also discovered its problem with the governments
representing their states: they regularly and simply lie. So the UN
created within itself a kind of opposition to the governing forces of
the states: the UN accredited NGOs. As explained before, the psychiatrically
oppressed people have the state power against them everywhere, so of
course we should not have any ties to national states and can cooperate
naturally on an international level. But the resultant travel expenses
are the prime problem. The interests of rich people of course regularly
allow for worldwide meetings, but typically psychiatrically oppressed
people are poor. Poverty is the reason why they could be more easily
persecuted. Or they were reduced to poverty by the files with psychiatric
slander which follow them through life, which are accessible to different
sources of power, and/or the corruption in their custody.
So we nevertheless
had to be inventive and found the internet as a means of communication,
with minimal costs, since an internet café can now be found in
almost every city. The difficulty we had to cope with was the use of
media transmitted communication instead of meeting in person in an assembly
room. The pivotal point was to prove the veracity of the voting. We
had to exclude secret ballots in the statutes for the benefit of allowing
everybody to check the voting logs and complain if his/her vote was
falsified or not counted at all. To have no secret voting is the biggest
disadvantage, because it prevents someone from losing face in representative
elections when the losers could see who stood against them. So the association
is automatically very transparent to all its members. The disadvantage
of not meeting personally we hope to overcome by encouraging all members
to visit each other or make regional meetings and enjoy the travelling
as tourism.
Also we
had to accept the disadvantage that state institutions could easily
gain access to our internet communications. But as a political group,
everybody knows that the really discrete communications would have to
be organized without the internet or at least with encrypted communication.
But we
were nevertheless able to create a worldwide operational political association
with regular democratic general assemblies about 9 times a year via
our own internet chat room. With a voting machine, which immediately
displays the results, integrated into the chat-room, we now have a perfect
working platform for our work. For a fraction of the cost of any international
meeting (the cost of the flight for one person covers our communication
costs for several years) we have organized democratic legitimacy within
an internationally operational NGO - a truly revolutionary concept using
modern technology. People from poor countries, as well as poor people
from rich countries, can join the IAAPA and speak for themselves without
the need to rely on representatives who always have a tendency to get
corrupted by the benefits of their endowed privileges. Up until the
end of April 2003 we had 6 General Assemblies including one face to
face meeting for our founding in Basel - and we can proudly say: "It
works!"
IAAPA,
activities:
Despite its brief existence, IAAPA already has members in Algeria, Germany,
Great Britain, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Russia, Switzerland and the
USA. To broaden our membership we plan to cooperate with a computer
producer to sponsor the hardware for the first member of IAAPA from
a new country. Our secretariat is operational and you have the first
issue of our magazine in your hands. Our webmaster, Hagai Aviel, was
able to start an international claims list with the names of 30.076
murdered victims of German doctor-Nazis. This claims list is the start
of a campaign for compensation for the harm and suffering inflicted
by psychiatrists on its victims. We have decided to support the designation
of May 2nd as the international day of remembrance, first of the crimes
committed by the medical mass murderers in Germany from 1939-1948, and
second, of the resistance against coercive psychiatry today.
Footnote:
Thomas Szasz, The Theology of Medicine, Syracuse University Press [1977]
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