Month: June 2023

Was Stalin Mentally Ill?

Soviet ruler Josef Stalin caused the death of some twenty million innocent people in his storied career. Some had challenged him, others had offended him and still more just simply existed. That was reason enough. He had the power, and he enjoyed using it and frankly, took pleasure in killing. He never showed any regret for his atrocities while he held sway over a good chunk of mother earth and its people. What can we say? Was he mentally ill, a category to which we assign today many malefactors?

Let’s say the great dictator assembled a group of psychiatrists to tell him what was wrong. They dutifully examined his words and deeds and came to the unanimous conclusion that he was mentally ill. Unfortunately, the psychiatrists got the remedy, not Stalin. They couldn’t even make it to a labor camp in Siberia. They couldn’t even escape the room. “I may be mentally ill,” said Stalin as he quickly disposed of them, “but you’re dead and I’m alive.” And ready to go on to greater glory and renown as arguably the most effective ruler of the 20th century.

That’s psychiatry Stalin-style. But what does it say about our world today? Is mental illness congruent with remarkable statesmanship and the ruthlessness that accompanies it? If so, we may have to reconsider the casual way we equate mental illness with crime. It can be inaccurate and misleading. Crime speaks for itself. Today’s drug cartels gained control of Mexico some years ago, yet they are as violent as ever, displaying their joy in killing fellow Mexicans and maybe planning the same fate for Americans. The only cure is getting them somehow out of the picture.

Mercy and compassion alone will not do. As long as it’s not punished, crime will spread. What happened in Mexico is a wake-up call for the U.S. Over and over mental illness is cited as the cause for the rapidly increasing crime in the inner cities where drug cartels prey on local gangs. But does sympathy for the addicted also explain the inattention of the media and the U. S. Government to the drug trade? Do they think it’s a system that needs counseling, not suppression? The same goes for violent local criminals. In a typical case Kemal Rideout casually slashed a woman to the bone on the New York City subway for no apparent reason. When he was caught about to leave town, his lawyer claimed – what else? – he was mentally ill and could not help himself. This had worked four times before when he had committed violent crimes and avoided prison. Why not try again? Others look to his example.

Oddly, while the U.S. is increasingly lenient with drug cartels and inner-city criminals, it’s issuing more threats than ever against foreign powers, large and small, with economic sanctions and military action. It’s now engaged in a proxy war with Russia that doesn’t have a clear purpose and is not going very well. It may be time to look back at an earlier great power, the Roman Republic-Empire, which had a run of close to ten centuries – impressive; we’re just getting started – that historians say became so enfeebled at home it could no longer hold off the barbarian forces that finally took it over. Could a plague of mental illness spell the end of the U.S.?

Evolution Wins along with War

The courtroom combat was a clear mismatch. The most celebrated defense attorney in the U.S., Clarence Darrow, was pitted against the boisterous spokesman of populism, William Jennings Bryan. It was, said many, a contest of wit against half-wit over the credibility of evolution. This famous encounter In the Dayton, Tennessee, trial of 1925 is described, blow by legal blow, in a recently published book, “Trial of the Century,” by Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, who while sympathetic to the lost cause of Bryan, makes it clear that the good guy won: “Darrow’s brilliant and devastating cross-examination of Bryan turned the tide in education. It spelled the beginning of the end of the kind of religious intrusion our Constitution forbids. The wonders and benefits of science were untethered. Generations of Americans became Darrow’s beneficiaries.”

Known derisively as the “Monkey trial,” the event was more spectacle than substance. People flocked to it to see the grandiloquent orator Bryan in action, even if content was not always up to delivery. Twice nominated for the U.S. Presidency by the Democratic Party, he lost both elections to Republicans but remained a key figure in American politics as the tireless spokesman for the underprivileged and overlooked people of the farm and prairie states. As such, he is given much credit for the expansion of democracy in his era.

Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan (right) during the Scopes Trial in 1925. 1925. Brown Brothers, Sterling, PA.

But reasoned debate was not his strong point. Knowing this, Darrow called him as a witness for his defense of John Scopes, a local schoolteacher who had been arrested for teaching evolution in violation of state law for which he could even go to prison. Evolution, insisted believers, contradicted the Biblical account of Creation. The trial judge and the community were sympathetic to the prosecution, but they had not counted on Darrow who in cross-examination mercilessly challenged Bryan’s literal interpretation of the Bible. Did he really believe that the Old Testament Prophet Jonah was swallowed by a whale and then disgorged still alive three days later? Sweating and fanning himself in the summer heat, Bryan gave an evasive answer, disappointing his followers to the delight of his opponents.

Illustration from page 88 of The World’s Most Famous Court Trial. 1925. Unknown engraver.

Darrow lost the battle. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 with no jail time. But Darrow won the war in that his courtroom performance largely discredited fundamentalist doubts about evolution. Yet there was more to Bryan than evolution. With his rousing oratory in a time of no radio or tv, he became the leading opponent of U.S. involvement in the stupendous carnage of World War One. As U.S. Secretary of State, he pressed President Woodrow Wilson to mediate the conflict. When Wilson chose war instead, he resigned his office. Assured that a majority of Americans shared his view, he proposed a national referendum on the issue. But the peace inclined populace was overruled by a war demanding elite, not for the first or the last time. A growing consensus a century later suggests that U.S. entrance into the war prolonged its savagery, led to a vindictive post war settlement and the emergence of the poisonous ideologies of communism and Nazism. If so, Bryan was as right about war as he was wrong about evolution. For which should he be remembered?