Bartholomew's Notes

Disgraced MP Andrew Bridgen continues is his predicable descent into the conspiracy milieu:

Very important debate on Monday on the WHO treaty amendments and the proposed changes to the international health regulations. Especially when you consider the remarks of the first director-general of the WHO.

There follows a screenshot of a supposed quote attributed to G. Brock Chisholm, the Canadian pychiatrist who was head of the World Health Organization in 1948:

To achieve world government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.

Presumably the argument is that is quote reveals a secret principle and aim that has guided the WHO for three-quarters of a century; how it has been put into practice, though, remains unexplained, and it is difficult to see how it has any explanatory value when assessing the WHO’s work and projects either during Chisholm’s lifetime or in the 52 years since his death.

There is also reason to believe that the quote is fabricated. Certainly, Chisholm was an enthusiast for world government, and he saw religious and nationalism dogma as obstacles to world peace in the atomic age. In his 1946 publication “The Reëstablishment of Peacetime Society”, based on two 1945 lectures about the public role of psychiatry (1), he stated:

For many generations we have bowed our necks to the yoke of the conviction of sin. We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers and others with a vested interest in controlling us. “Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil,” good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to prevent free thinking, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage. Misguided by authoritarian dogma, bound by exclusive faith, stunted by inculcated loyalty, torn by frantic heresy, bedevilled by insistent schism, drugged by ecstatic experience, confused by conflicting certainty, bewildered by invented mystery, and loaded down by the weight of guilt and fear engendered by its own original promises, the unfortunate human race, deprived by these incubi of its only defences and its only reasons for striving, its reasoning power and its natural capacity to enjoy the satisfaction of its natural urges, struggles along under its ghastly self-imposed burden. The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in.

The rhetoric is overheated and bombastic, and the argument simplistic. However, the contrast he sets up is between “local and familial and national loyalties” and “free thinking”. This is the antithesis of a call “to remove from the minds of men their individualism”. And the context, of course, was the recent defeat of authoritarian regimes in Europe and Japan whose subjects had very obviously been “misguided by authoritarian dogma”.

Brock Chisholm’s remarks in these areas were controversial, as discussed in John Farley’s 2009 book Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization, and the Cold War. The quote promoted by Bridgen, though, does not feature in Farley’s study and it does not ring true.

It has, though, been a regular feature of Christian Right and conspiracy literature for decades, and it is all over the internet. In a 1985 it appeared in a book called The Unseen Hand: An Introduction Into the Conspiratorial View of History, written by a conspiracy theorist named A. Ralph Epperson. He quotes Chisholm as follows (ellipses in Epperson’s book):

To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism and religious dogmas…

We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers and others with vested interests in controlling us.

The reinterpretadon and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substituion of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives… for charting the changes in human behavior.

An endnote cites “The Utah Independent, (September, 1977)” – this was a fringe-right newsletter. The second and third paragraphs do appear in “The Reëstablishment of Peacetime Society”, but the fact that the first one is not there is more evidence that it is bogus. Possibily it arose as a distorted summary in some other polemic work before being mistakenly incorporated into the quote itself (assuming it wasn’t done deliberately to deceive).

The third last part quoted by Epperson also deserves a bit more context. Here’s Chisholm again in full:

The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy. Would they not be legitimate objectives of original education? Would it not be sensible to stop imposing our local prejudices and faiths on children and give them all sides of every question so that in their own good time they may have the ability to size things up, and make their own decisions.

The suggestion that we should stop teaching children moralities and rights and wrongs and instead protect their original intellectual integrity has of course to be met by an outcry of heretic or iconoclast, such as was raised against Galileo for finding another planet, and against those who claimed the world was round, and against the truths of evolution, and against Christ’s re-interpretation of the Hebrew God, and against any attempt to change the mistaken old ways or ideas.

The references to Galileo and Christ are grandiose and reflect a superficial (and outdated) understanding of both, but again we can see that he was railing against perceived authoritarianism, not plotting against individualism. It is therefore ironic that he should now be a bogeyman within an anti-vax conspiracy movement whose adherents regard themselves as heroic “critical thinkers” who see through “narratives” concocted by scientists and governments for nefarious reasons.

Note

1. Chisholm’s two lectures were given in October 1945, and comprised the second series of the William Alanson White Memorial Lectures – “The Reëstablishment of Peacetime Society” was the series title, and the two lectures were called “The Responsibility of Psychiatry” and “The Responsibility of Psychiatrists”. The first was given in Washington, DC and the second in New York; they were afterwards published in Psychiatry volume 9, issue 1, in 1946, and then reprinted as a pamphlet entitled The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress. In both cases Chisholm is billed as “G. B. Chisholm”. The publication also incorporates an appreciation by US Under Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas, and panel responses from Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, Federal Security Administrator Watson B. Miller, Deputry Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion Anthony Hyde and the President of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Association, Ross McClure Chapman. There is then an “appreciation and critique” from Samuel W. Hamilton, billed as “Mental Hospital Advisor to the United States Public Health Service”, followed by Chisholm’s response. Those two dots in the word “Reëstablishment” are a diaeresis, a diacritical mark that has now largely fallen into disuse.

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