The Rise of the Fourth Reich

by Jim Marrs

  “Today, though psychiatry may still be suspect among the public, it has won over both government and the media. The profession and its treatments inundate talk shows, magazines, and the front pages of our newspapers,” wrote Bruce Wiseman, the U.S. national president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and former chairman of the history department at John F. Kennedy University.

  In the 1970s, when the drug companies tried to find substitutes for LSD because of its serious side effects, they developed the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) followed by Zoloft (sertraline), Effexor (venlafaxine), and Paxil (paroxetine). Dr. Helmut Remschmidt, who directed the Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry until 1984, was a leader in research into hyperactivity in children. He studied under Dr. Hermann Stutte, who was associated with Nazi psychiatrists involved in the German euthanasia program and had received his doctorate from Robert Sommer, director of the Deutscher Verband fur psychische Hygiene, or the German Association for Mental Hygiene. Dr. Remschmidt, long after the war, still pointed to “a genetic answer” to hyperactivity and was a leading proponent of the use of drugs such as Ritalin.

  “It is by no means shocking for Remschmidt to be a prominent advocate of horrible things,” commented Roeder, Kubillus, and Burwell. “After all, he is a disciple and protégé of Nazis…. What is equally frightening and obvious is that the racist and elitist theories of the original child psychiatrists—as documented in 1940 at the First Congress—have not only survived but flourished. It has been a natural passage of poison from teacher to student, from the Nazis to subsequent generations of child and adolescent psychiatrists. The efforts ‘to spot and screen’—that is, to distinguish between the valuable and less valuable human beings—are more than dubious—they are indefensible.” Yet, the number of child psychologists in U.S. schools grew from a mere 500 in 1940 to more than 22,000 by 1990.

  According to Kelly Patricia O’Meara, a former chief of staff in the U.S. House of Representatives, whose investigative reports on child vaccines and mood-altering drugs prompted congressional hearings, “Thirty years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that Ritalin was pharmacologically similar to cocaine in the pattern of abuse it fostered, and cited it as a Schedule II drug—the most addictive in medical use. The Department of Justice also cited Ritalin as a Schedule II drug under the Controlled Substances Act, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) warned that ‘Ritalin substitutes for cocaine and d-amphetamine in a number of behavioral paradigms.’” O’Meara pointed to a 2001 study at the Brookhaven National Laboratory that confirmed the similarities between cocaine and Ritalin, but found that Ritalin is more potent than cocaine in its effect on the dopamine system, an area of the brain many doctors believe is most affected by these drugs.

  Drugs such as Ritalin, now used to treat questionable mental afflictions, are taken by tens of millions of American youngsters. A 1986 edition of The International Journal of the Addictions listed 105 adverse reactions to Ritalin, including suicidal tendencies.

  Americans wonder why there has been a rash of school shootings and teen suicides in recent years, yet virtually all of these killings have involved a student on mood-altering drugs or just coming off them. In five cases of school shootings between March 1998 and May 1999—including the tragedy at Columbine High School—at least seven of the students involved were being medicated. It was downplayed but reported that Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman in the Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007, had been undergoing psychological counseling and had prescription psychoactive drugs in his possession.

  In his book Reclaiming Our Children, psychiatrist and drug critic Dr. Peter Breggin analyzed the clinical and scientific reasons for asserting that Eric Harris’s violence at Columbine was caused by the prescription drug Luvox. “I’ve also testified to the same under oath in depositions in a case related to Columbine,” Breggin wrote, adding, “I also warned that stopping antidepressants can be as dangerous as starting them, since they can cause very disturbing and painful withdrawal reactions.”

  A Web site called TeenScreenTruth is dedicated to gathering information off the Internet to help teens “connect the dots to see the revealing connections” between mood-altering drugs and teen violence. The Web site states: “Here’s a statistic that is rarely mentioned in news reports: in nearly every school-shooting incident, the children and teens involved were already taking one or more psychiatric drugs or had just recently come off them, and had been under the care of a psychiatrist or mental-health practitioner. The same is true for the majority of child and teen suicides—they were already on some type of psychiatric drug program that was supposed to be treating their ‘mental illness’ yet they killed themselves anyway.”

  This assessment was echoed in a 1999 article in Health and Healing by Dr. Julian Whitaker, who stated, “[V]irtually all of the gun-related massacres that have made headlines over the past decade have had one thing in common: they were perpetrated by people taking Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Paxil, or a related antidepressant drug.”

  In 1998, GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Paxil, was ordered to pay $6.4 million to surviving family members after Donald Schnell, sixty, flew into a rage and killed his wife, daughter, and granddaughter just forty-eight hours after taking Paxil.

  The TeenScreenTruth site and the Indianapolis Star compiled a list of violent episodes dating as far back as 1985, when Steven W. Brownlee, an Atlanta postal worker on psychotropic drugs, killed two coworkers. The list includes:

  In 1986, fourteen-year-old Rod Mathews of Canton, Massachusetts, beat a classmate to death with a baseball bat while on Ritalin.

  In 1988, thirty-one-year-old Laurie Dann, who had been taking Anafranil and lithium, walked into a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, and began shooting. One child was killed and six wounded.

  Later that same year, nineteen-year-old James Wilson went on a shooting rampage at the Greenwood, South Carolina, elementary school and killed two eight-year-old girls and wounded seven others. He had been on Xanax, Valium, and five other drugs.

  In 1989, Patrick Purdy, twenty-five, opened fire on a schoolyard filled with children in Stockton, California. Five kids were killed and thirty wounded. He had been treated with Thorazine and Amitriptyline.

  In 1993, Steve Lieth of Chelsea, Michigan, walked into a school meeting and shot and killed the school superintendent, wounding two others, while on Prozac.

  In 1996, ten-year-old Tommy Becton grabbed his three-year-old niece as a shield and aimed a shotgun at a sheriff’s deputy who had accompanied a truant officer to his Florida home. He had been on Prozac.

  In 1997, Michael Carneal, fourteen, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in Heath High in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three died and one was paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.

  In 1998, Kip Kinkel, a fifteen-year-old in Springfield, Oregon, murdered his parents and proceeded to his high school, where he went on a rampage, killing two students and wounding twenty-two others. Kinkel had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.

  In 1998, eleven-year-old Andrew Golden and fourteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson apparently faked a fire alarm at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and shot at students as they left the building. Four students and a teacher were killed. The boys were said to be on Ritalin.

  In 1999, Shawn Cooper, fifteen, of Notus, Idaho, took a shotgun to school and injured one student. He had been taking Ritalin.

  On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, shot and killed twelve classmates and a teacher and wounded twenty-four others at Columbine High School in Colorado. Harris had been taking Luvox.

  In 1999, Todd Cameron Smith walked into a high school in Taber, Alberta, Canada, with a rifle and killed one student and injured another. He had been given a drug after a five-minute phone consultation with a psychiatrist.

  In 1999, Steven Abrams drove his car into a preschool playground in Costa Mesa, California, killing two. He was on probation with a requirement
to take lithium.

  In 2000, T. J. Solomon, fifteen, opened fire at Heritage High School in Conyers, Georgia, while on a mix of antidepressants. Six were wounded.

  The same year, Seth Trickey of Gibson, Oklahoma, thirteen, was on a variety of prescription drugs when he opened fire on his middle-school class, injuring five.

  In 2001, Elizabeth Bush, fourteen, was on Prozac. She shot and wounded another student at Bishop Neumann High in William-sport, Pennsylvania.

  Also in 2001, Jason Hoffman, eighteen, was on Effexor and Celexa, both antidepressants, when he wounded two teachers at California’s Granite Hills High School.

  Same year, in Wahluke, Washington, Cory Baadsgaard, sixteen, took a rifle to his high school and held twenty-three classmates hostage. He had been taking Paxil and Effexor.

  In Osaka, Japan, also in 2001, Mamoru Takuma, thirty-seven, went into a second-grade classroom and started stabbing students. He killed eight. He had taken ten times his normal dose of an antidepressant.

  In 2005, sixteen-year-old Native American Jeff Weise, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota, was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac when he shot and killed nine people and wounded five before committing suicide.

  In 2006, Duane Morrison, fifty-three, shot and killed a girl at Platte Canyon High School in Colorado. Antidepressants later were found in his vehicle.

  Other incidents cited, but not apparently related to schools, included:

  In 1987, William Cruse was charged with killing six people in Palm Bay, Florida, after taking psychiatric drugs for “several years.”

  The same year, Bartley James Dobben killed his two young sons by throwing them into a 1,300-degree foundry ladle. He had been on a “regimen” of psychiatric drugs.

  In 1989, Joseph T. Wesbecker, forty-seven, just a month after he began taking Prozac, shot twenty workers at Standard Gravure Corporation in Louisville, Kentucky, killing nine. Eli Lilly, which makes Prozac, later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.

  In 1991, sixty-one-year-old Barbara Mortenson was arrested by San Jose, California, police, who said she had “cannibalized” her eighty-seven-year-old mother while on Prozac.

  In 1992, Lynnwood Drake III shot and killed six in San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay, California. Prozac and Valium were found in his system.

  In 1993, sixteen-year-old Victor Brancaccio attacked and killed an eighty-one-year-old woman and covered her corpse with red spray-paint. He was two months into a Zoloft regimen.

  In 1995, while on four medications, including Prozac, Dr. Debora Green set her Prairie Village, Missouri, home on fire, killing her children, ages six and thirteen.

  In 1996, Kurt Danysh, eighteen, shot and killed his father seventeen days after his first dose of Prozac. He told authorities, “I didn’t realize I did it until after it was done…. This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun.”

  It would appear that German drug science and German psychiatry have provided the foundation for action toward today’s schoolchildren who are being increasingly steered to drugs for any complaint, from true antisocial behavior to mere daydreaming.

  And why hasn’t the “watchdog” media put these stories together and presented it to the public? Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising grew from $791 million in 1996 to more than $3.8 billion by 2004. Those familiar with this subject claim media executives fear the loss of advertising revenues from the giant pharmaceutical corporations, some of the largest advertisers in the nation. Why haven’t physicians spoken out about this? Many have, but they don’t receive significant coverage in the corporate mass media, and many more fear reprisals from both the drug corporations and the federal government. Additionally, corporate drugs are heavily promoted to physicians. “The pharmaceutical companies send representatives to physicians’ offices talking about their drugs, giving free samples of their drugs, those types of things. That effort dwarfs the [pharmaceutical corporations’] advertising expenditures,” explained Alan Mathios, a dean at the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University.

  BUT THE EDUCATION issue that has drawn the greatest recent controversy is Public Law 107-110, better known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), a prized legacy of the Bush administration. According to the act, its purpose is “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.”

  Signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002, the act nevertheless brought immediate criticism from educators, state authorities, and libertarians alike. They questioned the act’s sweeping proposals, which range from forcing teachers to conform to federally mandated curricula to inflicting monetary punishments on school districts that do not live up to federal expectation, and even taking state control or turning them over to private management companies. They also questioned the $410 million apportioned for the education of migratory children, most of whom come from the families of illegal aliens. Standardized testing has proven a handicap to children who speak English as a second language.

  While no caring person would want to be caught leaving some poor child “behind,” there was nevertheless the irksome feeling by many that the act was a thinly disguised attempt to force conformity on students and standardize the minds of American youth. It smacks of the same uniformity of education sought by the National Socialists under Hitler. Some conservatives and libertarians even claim that the act is an usurpation of state authority by the federal government. In 2007, the new Congress began taking steps to protect states from the controls and punishments of NCLB. For example, in 2005, when Utah passed a state law allowing school districts to ignore portions of NCLB, the Department of Education threatened to withhold federal education funds.

  The backbone of NCLB is federally mandated standardized testing, which long has been accused of cultural bias. In fact, the entire practice of testing as a determinant of educational quality has been called into question, because the emphasis on tests forces teachers to teach only material that will get students to pass the tests, leaving a deficiency in grasping greater understanding and thinking critically. It should also be realized that both the textbook publishers and the standardized testing firms are, for the most part, controlled by the same globalist corporations under discussion.

  The act rewards districts with better test scores, so critics claim that schools lower their standards to show improvement on test scores. The kids are not learning more, just being assessed differently. A 2007 report from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) indicated increased test scores in reading and math, but it was unclear if this reflected enhanced learning or lower standards on student tests. “Look at any state that has a 90 percent proficiency level with lots of students in poverty,” commented Jack Jennings, president and CEO of CEP. “That doesn’t happen without either an extraordinary effort to raise the quality of education for all students or setting lower standards.”

  Another portion of the NCLB Act that rankled libertarians was Section 9528, which requires schools to give military recruiters the name, home phone number, and address of every enrolled student. Schools are not required to tell the students or parents that their information has been passed on, but students can ask to not have their contact information shared. But filing the required form often means student information is withheld from universities and job recruiters as well as the military.

  Unlike the Nazis, who placed great emphasis on athletics and physical fitness, the NCLB Act narrowly focuses on two main skills: reading and math. As a result, there are claims that other areas of schooling have been neglected, especially physical education.

  This idea was reinforced by recent data from the Centers for Disease Control, showing kids between the ages of six and nineteen, some nine million youngsters, suffer from obesity. “With the obesity rates going up an
d it’s in our face, why are we cutting PE time? I don’t get it,” questioned PE teacher Garrett Lydic, Delaware’s 2006 Teacher of the Year. “The focus right now is on testing,” he said, referring to a series of academic tests now mandated by federal law. “The result is that there’s less time to get kids more active.”

  “It’s a stretch even to call the law ‘well-intentioned’ given that its creators, including the Bush administration and the right-wing Heritage Foundation [Paul Weyrich, its founder, has been accused of ties to Nazi collaborators] want to privatize public education. Hence NCLB’s merciless testing, absurd timetables and reliance on threats,” commented USA Today education writer Alfie Kohn. “No wonder 129 education and civil rights organizations have endorsed a letter to Congress deploring the law’s overemphasis on standardized testing and punitive sanctions. No wonder 30,000 people [mid-2007] have signed a petition at educatorroundtable.org calling the law ‘too destructive to salvage.’”

  Like Hitler, the globalist creators of a new empire carry an innate distrust of education that might explain why their education programs appear to savage true learning. “I do not wish any intellectual upbringing whatsoever, knowledge may only demoralize youth,” Adolf Hitler once said. He echoed the statement of John D. Rockefeller, founder of the National Education Board, who said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.”

  Hitler also felt that intellectuals might not only present a rival to Nazi ideology but could form a group separate from the common man through a feeling of superiority due to their knowledge and education. “What we suffer from today is an excess of education,” he stated in 1938. “What we require is instinct and will.”

  Hitler’s sentiment was echoed recently by President George W. Bush. Journalist Ron Suskind, writing in the New York Times Magazine, reported an incident in Washington: “Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March [2004] just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ‘I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,’ he began, ‘and I was telling the president of my many concerns.’…Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. ‘Mr. President,’ I finally said, ‘How can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?’ Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator’s shoulder. ‘My instincts,’ he said. ‘My instincts.’”