We are in the midst of a public health crisis – the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. We are also in the midst of another global public health crisis – fascism. We are in the midst of a pandemic of the body and a pandemic of the mind.
The first reported cases of Covid-19 were in Wuhan, China on December 31, 2019.[1] The first case in the United States was January 19, 2020.[2] Viruses teach us that we are all connected. As human beings we are all connected, but we are also interconnected with nature – a bat was thought to be the vector for the virus into humans through the wet markets in China. Other viruses have come through birds and pigs to humans. This is the first teaching of the virus – we are all interconnected.
Covid-19 magnified the cracks in our infrastructures of interconnection. In the US, our health system was quickly overwhelmed in areas of high virus concentration. We thought that because we have the most expensive health care system in the world that we were protected – actually our health care system is ranked 37th in the world.[3] World economies ground to a halt. We realized how many people were living paycheck to paycheck, despite the economy appearing healthy on the surface. We thought our democracy was strong and healthy – but it was already suffering since 2016, since 2001.[4] We thought we had a multi-cultural democracy, but we suffered outbreaks of xenophobia, racism, white supremacy, and nationalism.
The Sickness of Our Health Care System
There were problems with our health care system even before Covid-19, the pandemic just magnified our vulnerabilities. Timothy Snyder writes of the short-comings of commercial medicine: “We would like to think we have a health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care,” (Snyder, Our Malady, 14). Victor Montori also diagnosed the sickness in our health care system in his 2017 book, Why We Revolt: A Patient Revolution for Careful and Kind Care. He describes the cruelty of systems, policies and procedures, and greed that drives dehumanization in medicine. I wrote about the pandemic of burnout and suffering in physicians, the dehumanization of both health care workers and patients, and a way of healing our system in my 2014 book, Re-humanizing Medicine: A Holistic Framework for Transforming Your Self, Your Practice, and the Culture of Medicine.
Our health care system was already sick, and then the pandemic hit, and then fascism revealed itself and turned a public health pandemic into an opportunity for consolidation of power. Montori starts his book by citing George Orwell, “Orwell proposed that one must write, among other reasons, to ‘see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.’ This book arises out of my need to do just that,” (Montori, 1). Montori evokes facts, revolution, and caring as treatments for our health care system.
Timothy Snyder did not have Covid-19, but his journey of illness took him through five hospitals in two countries, and two states from December 2019 to March 2020. His notes and observations on his illness and recovery started with a focus on the health care system, but became inextricably entangled within the broader politics of our age. Whereas Camus wrote about a plague as an allegory for fascism. Snyder sees how fascism and health are interwoven. “Our malady is physical illness and the political evil that surrounds it. We are ill in a way that costs us freedom, and unfree in a way that costs us health. Our politics are too much about the curse of pain and too little about the blessings of liberty,” (Snyder, 4).
The health of the individual, the health of the population, the health of a country, the health of global democracy, and the health of the Earth are all interconnected. These are truths that should be self-evident, and yet we have somehow forgotten them. We have not only forgotten them, large numbers of people across the globe are embracing the opposite idea – concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, us vs them thinking, policies of exclusion, wall building, name calling, dividing and conquering rather than uniting and preserving. This philosophy of me-ism, of unbridled and unchecked capitalism, of unbalanced materialism is now blossoming forth as fascism – in the United States of America, England, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, India, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, and many countries across the globe.
Lumpers and Splitters
Charles Darwin described two contradictory approaches to natural observation. Some naturalists he described as “lumpers” and some as “splitters.” Lumpers looked at two birds and saw similarities and called them the same species. Splitters looked at two birds and saw differences and called them different species. The intellect and science functions by discrimination and division of one thing from the other. Materialism and capitalism extract numbers, in the form of dollar signs, from every possible interaction. What of the Lumpers? What is that drives some people to see similarities and other people to see only differences? We can see lumpers as holistic thinkers, systems thinkers, ecological philosophers who see the underlying similarities beneath the surface differences.
Splitting is not just something that is happening on the right, it is happening on the left as well. On the left there is also a kind of political correctness of seeing every group as so different that there is an unbridgeable gap between human beings. Splitters on the left argue that this gap is unbridgeable and compassion is an aggressive act. If this is taken to the extreme, everyone will end up isolated monads. I do not believe our healing will come through splitting. Respecting and acknowledging differences is important, but it must be balanced with acknowledging our common underlying similarities as well, our common humanity.
This hypervigilant splitting and focus on differences has been carried over to the natural world as well. Many argue that animals are so irrevocably other that we cannot presume to understand them. Those who try to bridge this gulf are accused of anthropomorphizing animals. While it is wise to be cautious to attributing your own emotions or motives to other humans or to animals, it is foolish to think that we are so different as to all live within unbridgeable and unbreachable walls. This social-intellectual wall building is dangerous, as is the real-world wall-building and caging of individuals. I don’t mean to say they are equal offences, but they both create fear, separation, isolation, and alienation.
Charles Foster, in his book Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, is a lumper, although he recognizes and honors differences as well. He believes that we can cross the species divide. He does this through literally walking in the footsteps of the other, to live as the other, to take the perspective of the other. To this end, he builds a burrow underground and eats earthworms as a badger does, he tries to catch a fish with his hands and mouth like an otter does, he sleeps on the ground and eats out of rubbish bins as an urban English fox does. And then he tries to take the perspective of the flying swift and he still finds commonalities.
“These are facts about swifts because they are facts about the world, and swifts are part of the world, as I am. The facts indicate that no qualification other than occupancy of a shared world is necessary for me to write about swifts. That is a great relief, because swifts are the ultimate other. I can write about them only because I’m other too, or (depending on my mood) because nothing is other,” (Foster, 188).
As human beings, we have our differences, but if we stop focusing on our similarities we become dehumanized. Foster tells us with effort we can cross the species divide, if that is possible, we can definitely cross the divides and heal the splits that separate us as human beings. To only see differences leads down the slippery slope of xenophobia, fascism, and genocide.
Science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, was concerned with two questions in his work: what is real and what is human? Both of these are relevant in our present age. Reality is under continual assault for political reasons – fake news, propaganda, and lies spew from the mouth of our current president: 20,055 lies as of July, 2020.[5] Reality is also under siege in the assault on science and the silencing of journalists. What is human is also under assault as fascism eats away at our souls, disconnecting us from other human beings and other living beings. PK Dick cautions us about becoming overly enamored with splitting and seeing ourselves as separate from the environment:
“A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with purpose, a life, that is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane. Or scientific. But one wonders: Has he not also, in this process, reified – that is made into a thing – other people? Stones and rocks and trees may now be inanimate for him, but what about his friends? Has he now made them into stones, too?” (PK Dick).[6]
What is it that allows us to feel alive and vibrant? What is it that allows us to feel interconnections with other human beings, to recognize us all as brothers and sisters in the human family? What is it that allows us to feel communion with nature and our animal brothers and sisters? I will call this ability: soul. I do not mean this in a religious sense and yet I do not use it in only in a metaphorical sense, for it is real. I mean it in the sense that PK Dick illustrates. We have the choice to be lumpers or splitters. True enough, we need both abilities to survive in this world – we must be able to distinguish between an oncoming bus and a friendly dog. However, for human things, we need to be able to make the choice to see our common humanity, our common shared soul. And for dealing with the Earth we need to be able to see the anima mundi, the soul of the world. These are human capacities and capabilities that we have, but first we must acknowledge their non-material reality and then we must practice them, lest we lose them and end up at the end of Martin Niemöller’s poetic warning:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[7]
Medicine and Politics
Foucault wrote, the “first task of the doctor is therefore political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.”[8] Virchow wrote, “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale,”[9] and that doctors “are the natural attorneys of the poor.”[10] While it may seem radical and revolutionary, and some may say “stay in your lane,”[11],[12] the health of the individual and the health of the population are inextricably and irrevocably interconnected.
Snyder wrote from his personal experience as a patient and his professional experience as a historian of fascism and totalitarianism about the intersections of politics and health.
“Our botching of a pandemic is the latest symptom of our malady, of a politics that deals out pain and death rather than security and health, profit for a few rather than prosperity for the many…If our federal government and our commercial medicine are making us unhealthy, they are making us unfree…The struggle begins when we claim health care as a human right,” (Snyder, 16-18).
To speak of human rights brings together discussions of medicine and politics. Snyder sees that we are unfree if we are unwell and we are unfree if we are “othered.” We must strive to be brothered and sistered rather than othered. The Lakota understood this with their saying mitakuye oasin, all of our relations. Joseph Rael often tells me that we are all brothers and sisters and we write of this brotherhood and sisterhood in Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD. This is simple ecology – we are all related and interrelated. Genetic science tells us this through our common ancestors, who lived at different times, Mitochondrial Eve and Y Chromosome Adam. We also all come from Africa – the common home of ancient humanity. Snyder tells us, “A virus is not human, but it is a measure of our humanity,” (Snyder, 16). The virus is reminding us – we are all connected, even while the fascists say it is us versus them. When we enter the non-ordinary realm of the shaman, the visionary, the mystic – we move beyond even the separation of interconnection to the experience of non-dual Oneness. It is as the virus teaches, we are all One, what happens to another happens to us and our shared Earth.
Human Rights
Human rights recognizes us all as equal. Let us turn to the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, July 4, 1776. While the United States cannot, by any means, show that it has enacted universal human rights for all people (women, blacks, the indigenous population were originally excluded), still this is an important document in the history of modern democracy.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.―That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,―That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.[13]
While I initially was just going to quote the beginning of this paragraph on what unalienable Rights and self-evident truths are – equality and Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – the later part of the paragraph starts to sound a lot like our current age a long train of abuses and usurpations, which has been leading down the slippery slope toward absolute Despotism. Let’s take a look at the list of abuses and usurpations of the King against the colonies, reading with an eye toward the list of abuses and usurpations of the President against the people.
“―Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
…
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
…
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
…
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
…
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”[14]
Apologies to the Indigenous peoples of this land for the slur of “Indian Savages” in our Declaration of Independence and for all of the past abuses and genocides that the United States perpetrated under the guise of its own freedom.
A quick read of these offences of King George bear some resemblances to our current tyrant-in-training: subverting the laws of the land, convening people in unsafe rallies, not filling government positions, undermining government institutions, he has been impeached for “abuse of power and obstruction of Congress,”[15] he has stacked the courts with loyalists, he has pardoned criminal cronies, he has instructed witnesses to ignore requests to testify in Congress, he has sent in federal officers into states without their consent, he has attempted to decriminalize the actions of white supremacists and tried to criminalize those he disagrees with, he has interfered with trade agreements, global treaties, and membership in international organizations, he has abandoned responsibility for the country during a pandemic – denying help to those he disagrees with politically, he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and he has perpetuated “works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”
In the days of the American Revolution tyranny was the word of the day. In this age we have more words to describe abuses of power: authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and fascism.
Fascism and Public Health
The other component to our public health crisis is fascism. It compounds the adverse health effects of the pandemic and it infects the minds of the people, undermining the health of our democracy.
Even back in 2018, before the pandemic, Freedom House reported that we were in the 13th consecutive year of decline in freedom and that “Democracy is in retreat.”[16] In 2020, Freedom House warned of the “Dropping of the Democratic Façade.”[17] That same report also documented links between lack of democracy and poorer health.
Snyder summarizes a number of studies that showed that:
“People in places wracked by opioids voted for Donald Trump. The one piece of information that best predicts whether Mr. Trump won or lost a county in November 2016 was the degree of opioid abuse,” (Snyder 53).[18]
A phenomenon has been noted in recent years called “deaths of despair”[19] in which people in certain regions in the United States are dying at younger ages, decreasing the average lifespan statistics. They are called deaths of despair because they are linked to overdose, suicide, and liver disease related to drinking. This increased mortality over the past 20 years cannot be blamed on fascism – rather it is linked to capitalism without a human face: income inequality, joblessness, unemployment and underemployment, breakdown of support mechanisms and the social safety net, social isolation, and the loss of hospitals and health care in rural areas. Scutchfield and Keck describe the political causes of this public health crisis:
“We are trapped in our culture of hyperpartisan politics in which too many of our policymakers are driven to support small government and a focus on profit before people, to the degree that developing a needed and coherent national approach to address the issues identified by the authors seems impossible. Our gerrymandered political system fueled by large amounts of dark money is ill-suited to help address the problem. Solutions to this public health crisis must start with political change—that may be the ultimate social determinant of health.”[20]
While fascism did not cause this despair, it is making good use of it and a despairing population appears to be infected with fascism, voting in an autocrat, liar, and rule-breaker. These votes of desperation still appear to be strong as the base of the current president holds despite a constant stream of lies and catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic. This population appears to value strong talk over reality and not to value objective science or objective facts in politics and the media. Over Truth and complex reality, many prefer a “strong man” who “gets things done” (the end justifies the means).
He’s Our Bully
T LAWSON: The – most of the people I know that don’t like him, don’t like him for those very reasons – that he’s a braggart. He’s got a big mouth. He’s a bully. He bullies people.
S LAWSON: Yeah, but he’s our bully.
T LAWSON: He’s our bully. You know, I didn’t vote for Trump – I didn’t vote for him because he was a nice, gracious man. I voted for him ‘cause he got stuff done. [21]
When a little kid lords power over others in the school yard, he is a bully. When the President of the United States bullies others, he is on the slippery slope of colluding with foreign governments to get his way, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and fascism. John W. Dean and Bob Altemeyer authored the book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. Dean, a member of the Nixon administration, testified against Nixon and helped lead to his resignation. Altemeyer is a psychologist, researcher on authoritarianism, and the author of The Authoritarians and Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism. In their book they focus more on Trump’s followers than on Trump himself – because a bully without any followers is just a loud-mouth you can ignore, but a bully with a bunch of loyalist followers is the start of a fascist movement. Dean & Altemeyer summarize the research on American authoritarianism:
- “Donald Trump’s supporters are, as a group, highly authoritarian compared to most Americans”
- “They are also highly prejudiced compared to most Americans”
- “You can explain the prejudice in Trump’s supporters almost entirely by their authoritarianism”
- “Authoritarianism is a strongly organized set of attitudes in America that will prove very difficult to reduce and control”
- “Far more…Double High authoritarians exist in the United States than we imagined, with most of them now affiliated with the Republican Party”
- “The pillars of Trump’s base, white evangelicals and white undereducated males are highly authoritarian and prejudiced”
- “The connections among prejudice, authoritarianism and support for Donald Trump are so strong that no other independent factor can be as important in supporting his reelection”[22]
Why Facts and Logic Do Not Influence Trump Supporters
Dean & Altemeyer describe the difficulty of bridging the divide between those using rationality and facts and those using emotionality and anger in their decision-making. They summarize research on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale that persons who score highly on this scale:
- have “highly compartmentalized thinking”
- “use a lot of double standards”
- “believe many conflicting and even contradictory things”
- “have a lot of trouble deciding what is sound evidence and what is not”
- have “highly ethnocentric” thinking
- “are decidedly prejudiced in what they believe about others”
- “are very dogmatic about what they believe”[23]
We see then a kind of social pathology in authoritarianism that can lead to fascist behavior through demonizing and othering groups of people. This dehumanization is very concerning because it is the basic building block for violence against others and can lead to a spectrum of bigoted and racist speech, hate speech, individual violence based on ideology, the formation of vigilante justice groups,[24] to organized genocide.
Any student of history would have been worried upon hearing Mussolini’s words “drain the swamp,” and Stalin’s, Hitler’s, and Mao’s words “enemy of the people.” “Words create worlds”[25] said Rabbi Heschel, warning of how the words of a bully ended up creating genocide.
“They” Are the Disease
Authoritarianism leads to fascist action when all the ills of the world are projected on to the other. Thus, the current president’s use of the phrases, the “Wuhan virus,” and the “Chinese virus.”[26] If the problem is out there, it can’t be in here. If I’m all good (narcissism) then if something bad happens it must be someone else’s fault. Here is how Snyder summarizes the current president’s response to the pandemic:
“This is how tyranny works: the truth tellers are banished as the sycophants huddle close. Mr. Trump then wonders aloud whether Americans should inject themselves with disinfectants.
“We did not test for coronavirus for a reason that has been understood for thousands of years, at least since Plato…an unchecked ruler never hears what he should from his yes-men; he then projects fictions, which he may actually believe, upon everyone else. This leads to suffering and death, which means more bad news, and so the cycle begins again. Once Mr. Trump made it clear that his priority was to see low counts of infected Americans, the simplest way to please the tyrant was not to count,” (Snyder, 91-92).
Are Racism & Fascism Mental Illnesses?
Psychiatrist, public health advocate, and violence researcher Carl Bell thought we should consider racism as a psychological disorder.
“Covert racism is a psychological attitude and as such, should fall under the scrutiny of psychiatry as a psychopathological symptom of personality disturbance…The racist individual suffers from a psychopathological defect of developmental processes involving narcissism, which precludes the subsequent development of such qualities as creativity, empathy, wisdom, and integrity,” (Carl Bell).[27]
Snyder, in describes the current president’s apparent reasoning and illogical actions that
“Such magical thinking was tyrannical, delusive, and irresponsible…It was delusive because it confused looking away with taking action, the absence of testing with the absence of infection. Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to test did not mean we were healthy, only that we were ignorant,” (Snyder, 92).
There is a psychiatric disorder called “Delusional Disorder,” with delusions defined as “false beliefs based on incorrect inference about external reality that persist despite the evidence to the contrary; these beliefs are not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.”[28] By this definition, if others in your sub-culture believe the same as you do, you are not delusional. Right Wing Authoritarians and Conspiracy Theorists are not delusional, in the strictest sense, even though what they believe is not true. Jung, trying to understand how so much of Europe went along with fascist dictators, used the terms “mass psychosis” and “mob psychology.”[29] He saw that entire nations could become sick and lose touch with reality.
The Mind: Tyranny’s Battleground
Forensic psychiatrist, Bandy X. Lee, was minding her own business, researching violence, until one day she found that “politics had invaded my area of expertise,” (Bandy Lee).[30] She convened a conference of mental health professionals on the topic of the president’s mental state and his risk of being a danger to self or others. They felt he was an unprecedented danger and that, under the law of “duty to warn” and under professional ethics and public health, that they were obligated to speak out. This led to the publication of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess the President, then The World Mental Health Coalition Documents, and most recently, Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul. Duty to warn does not require making a diagnosis, it is a professional assessment of a person’s words and actions. Dr. Lee makes her statement:
“As a psychiatrist, I believe there is no greater oppression than the hijacking of the mind, and critical information at a critical time is necessary to empower the public to be able to protect itself and to act while it is still possible. It is always easier to prevent than to try to limit losses after a problem has become barely containable…professionals are supposed to act according to principles of their field as their own moral agents, not as technicians who follow fiats. The latter, a form of ceding one’s autonomy, is a formula for becoming an instrument of authoritarianism if not careful. I maintain the humanitarian goals of medicine and our practice of giving precedence to human lives and safety above all else override any etiquette I owe a public figure. This is why the Declaration of Geneva was established, and what the Nuremberg trials were for; we were never supposed to privilege a powerful political figure…above the foremost principles of medical ethics to which we have pledged. The mind is considered tyranny’s battleground because thought reform occurs through ‘milieu control,’ or the control of information in the environment. Most of this has been done through the spread of false information, but we have the chance to change it through a better understanding of truth,” (Bandy Lee, 19).
Whether we consider racism, authoritarianism, and fascism as mental disorders or not – they all occur in the mind – tyranny’s battleground and psychiatrists are the doctors of the mind. If the battle against fascism, racism, authoritarianism, and tyranny is fought in the human mind, then we need doctors against racism, doctors against authoritarianism, doctors against fascism.
Where Democracy is Limited, Citizens Die
Snyder warns us of the interconnection of health and democracy, “Our failure during a public health crisis is a sign of how far our democracy has declined,” and that “Where democracy is limited, citizens die,” (Snyder, 98). This leads us to the conclusion that fascism is a public health emergency that compounds the emergency of the pandemic. Snyder’s solutions are that, “We should regard health care as a right, take medical and local knowledge seriously, make time for children, and put doctors in charge,” (Snyder, 139).
I don’t know about you, but I voted for Dr. Howard Dean in the 2004 primaries. At that time, it was tragic that one whoop of excitement was overblown in the media and lost him the primary.[31] How different would history have been if we had a Democrat and doctor in the White House instead of the second Bush term. Torture[32] would likely have been taken off the menu. How much of where we are now started after 2001 with the advent of Homeland Security, the militarization of the police, the authorization of torture, and the Kafka-esque fate of “unlawful combatants” detained now going on decades? How ironic that Dean’s one “scream” was amplified by the media to disqualify him as unpresidential, and yet the current president spews forth an unceasing, undignified scream that leaves us all like the figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream?
Maybe the United States of America was never what we thought it was. Maybe it was always hypocritical in declaring some people free and equal and others “savages” and “slaves.” Maybe we are experiencing the unveiling of what has always been there. Maybe we go through times when we are closer to living up to the ideals of democracy and other times where we struggle with the basic foundations of what it means to be a citizen of the United States of America.
The Great Seal of the United States features an eagle with a talon gripping a bundle of arrows and talon holding an olive branch. On the seal, the eagle is looking toward the olive branch, toward peace, but the head of our eagle seems to be looking more toward the arrows lately.
How do we, collectively, turn the head of the eagle from war and division to unity and peace? Snyder, despite his concerns and warnings, feels that it is possible to heal from this crisis, to heal our health care system and to heal our democracy.
“This crisis is a chance to rethink the possible. Health care should be a right, doctors should have authority, truth should be pursued, children should see a better America. Let us begin our recovery,” (Snyder, 142).
To address this global pandemic, we need doctors. To heal our individual and collective minds, we need not just doctors against fascism and violence, we need doctors for peace and compassion.
[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/27-04-2020-who-timeline—covid-19
[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191
[3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/best-healthcare-in-the-world
[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/07/12/getting-away-torture/bush-administration-and-mistreatment-detainees#
[5] “In 1,267 days, President Trump has made 20,055 false or misleading claims,” Updated July 9, 2020. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2
[6] Philip K. Dick, “The Android and the Human,” (1972), in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin, 183.
[7] “Martin Niemöller: ‘First they came for the Socialists…’”. Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 23 July 2018. Retrieved 25 July 2018. Cited on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_…#cite_note-3
[8] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 38.
[9] Quoted in Vicente Navarro. What we mean by social determinants of health. Global Health Promotion Vol. 16 (1):5-16; 2009. Original reference: Virchow R. Die medizinische Reform, 2 in Henry Ernest Sigerist, Medicine and Human Welfare 1941:93.
[10] Mackenbach, J. (2009). Politics is nothing but medicine at a larger scale: Reflections on public health’s biggest idea. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (1979-), 63(3), 181-184. Retrieved August 8, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20720916
[11] “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: At ‘woke’ medical schools, curricula are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness,” Stanley Goldfarb, Wall Street Journal, 9/12/19
[12] Matthew Haag, “Doctors Revolt After N.R.A. Tells Them to ‘Stay in Their Lane’ on Gun Policy,” The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2018. The original criticism was in a Tweet from the NRA, “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.” https://twitter.com/NRA/status/1060256567914909702
[13] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
[14] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
[15] https://www.npr.org/2019/12/10/786579846/read-articles-of-impeachment-against-president-trump
[16] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2019/democracy-retreat
[17] https://freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2020/dropping-democratic-facade
[18] J. Wasfy et al., “Community Health Associations of Net Voting Shift in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” PLOS ONE 12, no. 10(2017).
Shannon Monant, “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Research Brief, 2016.
Kathleen Frydl, “The Oxy Electorate,” Medium, November 16, 2016.
Jeff Guo, “Death Predicts Whether People Vote for Donald Trump,” Washington Post, March 3, 2016.
Harrison Jacobs, “The Revenge of the ‘Oxy Electorate’ Helped Fuel Trump’s Election Upset,” Business Insider, November 23, 2016.
[19] Scutchfield FD, Keck CW. Deaths of Despair: Why? What to Do?. Am J Public Health. 2017;107(10):1564-1565. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2017.303992 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607684/
[20] Scutchfield FD, Keck CW. Deaths of Despair: Why? What to Do?. Am J Public Health. 2017;107(10):1564-1565. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2017.303992 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607684/
[21] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/20/925895703/they-took-a-gamble-and-voted-trump-in-2016-whom-are-they-going-to-vote-for-in-20
[22] John W. Dean and Bob Altemeyer, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, 224-225.
[23] Dean & Altemeyer, 128.
[24] “Trump’s ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ tweets incite insurrection. That’s illegal.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/17/liberate-michigan-trump-constitution/
[25] Life Between the Trees blog, https://lifebetweenthetrees.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/words-create-worlds-monday-morning-parable/
[26] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-criticism-trump-defends-saying-chinese-virus.html
[27] Carl Bell, The Sanity of Survival: Reflections on Community Mental Health and Wellness, 406. Also see my blog post, “Racism & Narcissism: The Work of Carl Bell, MD,” https://beingfullyhuman.com/2020/07/21/racism-narcissism-the-work-of-carl-bell-md/
[28] https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/292991-overview
[29] See my blog, “Words Create Worlds.6 Doctors Against Fascism,” https://beingfullyhuman.com/2020/10/16/words-create-worlds-6-doctors-against-fascism/
[30] Bandy X. Lee, Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind and America’s Soul, 9.
[31] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/howard-dean-s-scream-turns-15-its-impact-american-politics-n959916
[32] https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/07/12/getting-away-torture/bush-administration-and-mistreatment-detainees
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