Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement
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linger, in reply to
I love what I do and have enormous opportunities (teaching, writing, thinking) and I suspect that retirement would be much duller.
Only if you let it be. Got any research projects that interest you but which don’t have a snowball’s chance of attracting funding?
Or are you able to pursue all of those in your current position? (In which case: you lucky, lucky ß@$†@®∂)
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
You've given me a new path to wander down though. I've read a lot of nonfiction re the treatment of the disabled during the third reich. But need to seek out the art...
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
. . . most people don't even realise the Nazis systematically exterminated disabled people as well.
Those stories seemed to be common knowledge in my youth. I remember having a bad childhood dream about Hitler turning up at the head of an armoured column at the Levin 'mental farm' where I grew up, with the clear intention of liquidating the lot. Staff and patients peeped out of windows, probably my dad in his white coat was among them. No-one wanted to front Hitler.
Suddenly struck with powers of oratory that I'd never had in real life I climbed to the top of the enormous coal heap by the laundry, and made an impassioned speech about what fine folks the 'patients' were. Hitler glared at me from where he stood in the back of his half-track, but my pompous gassing on wore him down. He gestured impatiently to his driver, and the whole bloody lot of them zoomed off.
Of course it should have ended with them bearing me on their shoulders to the mess for celebratory bangers & mash, but dreams are rarely so tidy.
Anyway, it wasn't just the Nazis.
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Geoff Lealand, in reply to
The research I am interested in doesn’t usually cost much and my faculty generously offers contestable funding every year. So, I am currently seeking around $5000 for 2012 to add South Island cinemas to my www.cinemasofnz.info site. In the arts/social sciences, there is really only the highly competitive Marsden fund but we do have two funded projects in our department (on gaming, and online documentaries). In general, govt departments favour often crappy market research.
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Islander, in reply to
Joe, that is one of the best dreams I've ever read.
Thankyou, n/nKeri whose dreams are mainly despair situations these days= -
Sacha, in reply to
common knowledge
You might be understating the difference your particular upbringing made.
it wasn't just the Nazis
I was looking forward to Gerard Smyth's promised doco about NZ's own eugenic history after his film about Templeton. Haven't heard anything for the past half-decade though. (Yes, that Gerard)
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Hilary Stace, in reply to
There have been several museum exhibits and art installations related to both the specific Nazi programme re disabled people (led by clinicians - and reaction to that is where our modern research ethics requirements have come from) and eugenic programmes in various countries particularly the US which had extensive sterilisation practices.
There is a collection of eugenic political pamphlets in the Turnbull Library from early in the 20th century including WA Chapple's 2003 Fertility of the Unfit which was published in several countries. I think not currently available as packed away somewhere while they renovate.
But are you just looking for fictional accounts of that particular programme?
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Kate - I just read this thread again and see now what you are doing. I have come across several such sources while doing my history of disability policy research. I will try and recall what they were.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
You might be understating the difference your particular upbringing made.
Probably because I'd read somewhere - and from a few certain reference points I can't have been older than 13 - that the nazis targeted the 'mentally disabled' or 'intellectually handicapped'. As you've rightly suggested these were common phrases in the world I grew up in, and the connection with people I knew was horrifying.
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Sacha, in reply to
I have come across several such sources while doing my history of disability policy research
Excellent
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Sacha, in reply to
the connection with people I knew was horrifying
I can imagine
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
Was hoping you might chime in, Hilary. Would love some ideas of places to look - I've seen images from various exhibitions, haven't looked in the Turnbull for that particular strand of the story... PAS - a wonderful place.
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Hilary Stace, in reply to
When I was researching the history of New Zealand eugenics in the 1990s (when that Swedish history first came to light which was genuinely shocking - and also Frieda from Abba was revealed as a child of a eugenic pairing of a Swedish mother and a German father) I came across some wonderful 'positive' eugenic NZ fiction c1920s. Can't remember who it was by but was the era of Ettie Rout and her friends and was all about the wonderful physical specimen of the noble bronzed native.
On the other hand the Public Historian (US) a few years ago (c 2004?) had a whole issue on historical aspects of eugenics including the eugenic basis of oralism for Deaf people, and a report of a museum exhibition of sterilisation policy in California. Should be online?
The disability listserv from Leeds University has a wealth of international contributors and is where I have heard of various artistic tributes to the Nazi 'silent holocaust' - the experimentation on and extermination of possibly hundreds of thousands of disabled people.You could put your request in and people will give you info.
Joe, the language was much worse than that - 'mental defective', 'unfit' (nouns not adjectives) used generally in NZ and elsewhere, and used as synonyms for morally suspect as well - 'useless eaters' was the Nazi description.
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
Ooh yay have a contact at Leeds whom I will email forthwith.
And yes. The language of othering mastered by the Nazis has to be read to be believed. -
Joe Wylie, in reply to
Joe, the language was much worse than that - 'mental defective', 'unfit' (nouns not adjectives) used generally in NZ and elsewhere . . .
I believe that the term 'oxygen thief' had its origins back then. Never heard anything that bad first-hand. The ugliest stuff I recall was from the season where I was the only non-'patient' in the Levin Hospital & Training School hockey team. A bit of a revelation to hear what people would say when they assumed you were 'special'. Also a sweet victory to trounce a 'proper' hockey team.
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I was looking forward to Gerard Smyth’s promised doco about NZ’s own eugenic history after his film about Templeton. Haven’t heard anything for the past half-decade though. (Yes, that Gerard)
After a heap of work, I don't think he could find a broadcaster. Not a ratings winner, they said. Ratings: the road to television most people don't mind :)
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@Joe:
Also a sweet victory to trounce a ‘proper’ hockey team.
Depends what you mean by “proper” I suppose.
When I was much younger, I was in the school’s lowest ranked soccer team.
(Those who know me will start laughing at this point. I don’t really do physical.)
In a school where team sports were compulsory, and rugby vastly preferred to soccer, this team was pretty much selected to be hopeless: uncoordinated, ill at ease in our developing bodies, and even more ill at ease on a sports field.
And our only opponents were the IHC team, who were all physically adult.
Unsurprisingly, we got slaughtered. Every bloody time. -
Sacha, in reply to
Ta for the update
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
And there's unfortunately a far more recent example: Alberto Fujimori's Peru.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
Depends what you mean by “proper” I suppose.
Heh.
I played hockey for a bit to spite my dad, who was a rugby tragic. And because school sport was, you know, compulsory, I played with the shufflers who couldn’t be bothered coming in on Saturdays to be properly coached.Anyway, a couple of the guys from the ‘mental farm’ team spotted me biking to school with my hockey stick, and told their coach, an attendant who my dad affected to pity because of his dedication to an inferior sport. Because one of their less stellar players had been released into the wider world and gone up north I let myself be talked into donning the green & gold of Levin H & TS. And hell, we beat the A team from my high school, though I doubt that my participation was crucial to that victory.
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andin, in reply to
Hah! Getting any "older client" to attend on of Paula Bennett's WINZ "How to get a Job Seminars" (which are nothing more that 70's recycled self-help jargon repackaged) would probably do exactly the same thing.
How do I know?
You think they aren't doing it already, in anticipation!
Some people are more naive than I thought. -
Kate - the black triangle, which was the Nazi disability symbol has been adopted by several disability groups in the UK, who have got very active in response to the current government's attacks on services and support for disabled people. Many have a presence on Facebook.
Joe - 'mental deficiency colonies' was official government language of the 1950s for psychopaedic institutions so I'm pleased to hear those on the ground didn't use that term.
Steven - There are a lot of potentially eugenic public policies and it depends how they are implemented. For example there is that undercurrent for anything about single parents and you always get mentions of 'breeding for a business' which are eugenic dog-whistles. Labour's raising the retirement age apparently has transition arrangements for those who are worn out and also part of a series of policies on health, education etc - so not eugenic, but it all depends on implementation. (Euthanasia and neonatal testing also have eugenic risks).
Sacha - Gerard Smythe's excellent doco on the closure of Templeton played on TV1 on I think Christmas Eve 2004 and was widely viewed and remembered. The preview and interview with Gerard on Media7 last night must lead to pressure to someone screening it (hopefully).
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
Joe – ‘mental deficiency colonies’ was official government language of the 1950s for psychopaedic institutions so I’m pleased to hear those on the ground didn’t use that term.
Hilary, while we find the term objectionable today, please consider that it would have been common currency back then among people who were probably every bit as progressive and humanitarian as you are now, in the context of their time. For all any of us know, future generations may be similarly judgmental of our present use of autism and associated terms.
Naturally I’ve tried to discover what I can about what really went on in the world I witnessed for the first seventeen years of my life. While I appreciate that the book is now somehow officially closed, I believe that you’d have found more than a few fellow spirits in those genuinely reformist years before the empire building mentality set in. A pity that their stories will never be told.
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(filmed by Ronnie van Hout, with Bob Scott looking just
like one of his illustrations! And showcasing an alley that
no longer exists in the same state...) -
Sacha, in reply to
Gerard Smythe's excellent doco on the closure of Templeton played on TV1 on I think Christmas Eve 2004
Certainly made an impression on me. He said at the time he was working on the broader one as a follow-up. No surprise to hear that the network gatekeepers would prefer a charitable disease-of-the-week weepie instead.
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