Welcome back to the Audacious Aspie! This week, we will look into something that might shake the you to your very core (though whether it will be with rage, excitement or an unsettling amount of...uh, pleasure, is unknown) and, while it won’t change our characteristics like stimming, rocking and such, it might change how we see ourselves and, more worrying I should think, how others, will see us. If we think of it in a fashion sense, our body will not change in and of itself (we will not grow an extra arm or something), but the clothes of which we are wearing, parading in front of the public might change drastically, or at least the message behind the clothing. Our vision of ourselves, and the worlds vision of us, could very will change. For better, or for worse.
What am I talking about? Well, a little history first. Hans Asperger, a doctor in Vienna back in the day, is the one of which our condition (mine anyways, and those in Europe) is named from. Tame stuff, I know, but hold on. Things get rather unsettling. See, in an article/interview by NPR “Doctor Behind Asperger's Syndrome Subject To Name Change”, Mr. Aspergers was a Doctor in a particular type of Vienna back than: Nazi occupied Vienna. While he’s always been suspected of Nazi sympathies, no one has been able to definitively prove such a claim until now. Now asking the question: because of this bombshell of information coming to light, should we rename the Aspergers condition?
Hans Asperger was a pediatrician who, as the interviewee claims, was part of the children euthanasia program which, surprise surprise as this is the Nazi’s we are talking about, had the sole goal of killing children who were considered to be disabled or, to use the (in my view) more progressive wording of Specialisterne, to have a condition. Now, he did not have a large part to play in the mass slaughter of children, not even in Vienna, “But he was involved in transferring children to Viennas killing centre at Spiegelgrund” (NPR: Doctor Behind Asperger's Syndrome Subject to Name Change, Paragraph 4).
What's more, it’s possible top link him to dozens of deaths at the killing centre. Why did he do the things he things he did? Will, it certainly was not for anything high-minded. Put simply, “he was up for promotion” (Paragraph 5). Working under a true-blue Nazi, a director for the University of Viennas Children Hospital, Hans himself was looking at possibly being an Assistant Associate Professor, no small thing. How-ever, as much of a Nazi he might have been, he held a particular and, for them anyways, progressive belief.
We shall find that out, next week (going out on a cliff-hanger. Cheap? Maybe, but fun nonetheless). For lack of anything to say to say at the end of this post (not sure if anything we say can properly do it justice. Not even any pictures! The madness! Madness!), I will leave this post here. Until next week, this continues to be, the Audacious Aspie.
Sources used:
https://www.npr.org/2018/05/12/610716324/doctor-behind-asperger-s-syndrome-subject-to-name-change