Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Fukushima's Children

I normally like Jeff Rense's interviews but this one with Tim Rifat is very disturbing: Fukushima: The End of the West as We Know It
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUjJxTevy6k

What is so disturbing is not the news that Fukushima is going to produce genetically damaged children in Japan, Canada, the U.S., and the northern  hemisphere in general.

What is so disturbing is Rifat's description of Fukushima's children as "degenerates" and "mutants."

Fukushima's children may be born with anatomical anomalies caused by DNA damage. They may develop cancer and they very may well suffer terribly.

But these children are not going to be degenerates. These children are not going to be mutants.

These children are victims.

The real degenerates are those who built these temples of doom and then silenced and discreditted those who tried to warn us of their terrible dangers.

We must fight any eugenics efforts to hide and marginalize Fukushima children in Japan and the across the rest of the world.

We must recognize that their suffering was caused by our greed, our disregard, our corruption and we must do all we can to enable them to live as best as possible.

We must see them and we must accept them and try to make up for what we have done to them.

--
I'm Responding to the pointed comment made by nobody special. (I cannot post a comment because of a problem with google blogger.) Youu are correct about the semantics. Unfortunately, the biological and normative senses of degeneration were linked in nineteenth century psychiatry. I'm quoting from my book on Governmentality:
Morel wrote: “Degenerations are deviations from the normal human type, which are transmissible by heredity and which deteriorate progressively towards extinction” (cited in Alexander & Selesnick, 1966, p. 162). By articulating mental illness within a somatic/medical framework and by linking “madness” and “idiocy” with hereditable degeneracy in behavior and mind, Morel ushered in a social paranoia of the contagion posed by all those deemed degenerate. The asylum served as a disciplinary space that could contain contagion and thereby protect the health of the larger population.

 

1 comment:

  1. There are definitions for "degenerate" other than the common one to which you are obviously referring. "[Biology:] having reverted to a simpler form as a result of losing a complex or adaptive structure present in the ancestral form" would seem to apply to Rifat's context. The Latin root of the word is *degeneratus*, "no longer of its kind".

    Similarly, unfortunately *yes* these children *will* be (genetic) mutants.

    'just tryin' to help keep things clear ...

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