Fear and prejudice

Fear and Prejudice - AIDS Fears as the Subject of Prejudice Research is a book published in 1989 by the German sociologist and ethnologist Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg . The title of the book is based on Pride and Prejudice , a novel by Jane Austen ( Pride and Prejudice , 1813).

Origin background

In 1988 Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg was appointed by the German Bundestag to head the Enquête Commission Dangers of AIDS and Effective Ways to Contain It for research into the social, legal and health policy effects and challenges of the disease on the basis of her previous work . Her book Anxiety and Prejudice is based on the work of this commission as well as her own final report to the Kohl government .

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Hostility, epidemics and natural disasters

In Anxiety and Prejudice , Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg fundamentally supplements her research presented in Tabu Homosexuality , as to some extent already in The Pedophile Impulse , on occidental hostility to the body through the numinous , religious and later ideological-pseudoscientific connection of hostility to body and the associated pressure to conform to the entire personality (see Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg's repeated use of the term authoritarian personality in the sense of critical theory , as well as its further development Right-Wing Authoritarianism ) with epidemics and natural disasters originally sent by gods as punishment. Here draw a straight line from leprosy as punishment for sinful and vicious life in general, but in particular lasciviousness and fornication in the Old Testament, initially to the plague in the Middle Ages. When science began to slowly break away from religion, syphilis came from the New World to confirm the traditional numinous prejudices that surpassed sexuality by linking them to the hostility of the body, which is central to our western Indo-European culture, and only a few AIDS emerged decades after penicillin was introduced .

Erroneous, ethnocentric reduction in sexuality

The erroneous, according to Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, originally based on homophobia, the reduction of sexuality exclusively to heterosexual reproduction by means of genital intercourse among adults always supported the prejudice that any fornication, even masturbation committed alone, is associated with illness and physical and psychological degeneration . Before syphilis, the criminal religious and moral guilt for any other sexual act was even greater than for the only rudimentary recognized sexual act, but from the onset of syphilis the usual reduction of sexuality to disease-transmitting acts strengthened prejudice. For the erroneous nature of this reduction see also frotteurism (see the article Frotteur ) among homosexuals, which Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg mentioned as early as 1978 in Tabu Homosexuality (although not under this name). Due to this wrongly constructed social reduction to penetration as a prescribed norm sexuality, which contributes to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the book is under the preceding motto: The protection of minorities is the protection of the majority .

Body hostility, xenophobia and racism

In addition Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg also speaks, as in their preparatory work Mannbarkeitsriten (1980) and partly in taboo of homosexuality in the traditional linking opposed to the body with an ancient Indo-European xenophobia, the latter with increasing influence of science since the Enlightenment to the ideological and pseudo-scientific racism changed . Examples include: the medieval myth of the complicity of Jews and Arabs in the well poisoning allegedly causing the rampant plague epidemics by means of orgiastic and murderous debauchery at witches' Sabbaths (note the numinos-xenophobic composition of the compound of the magician on the one hand and the foreign cult festival on the other hand) obtained poisons, the topos of the "primitive", above all dark-skinned, unbridled lecher and rapist, who played a role that should not be underestimated in the development of the racist ideology of inferiority, as well as the idea of the Jew as an alleged racist .

The conflict that had already initiated the traditional hostile xenophobia, which had arisen at the beginning of the Iron Age due to the ethnic conflict of the invading Indo-European tribes with remnants of travestite shamanism among the European pre-population, repeated itself with the colonization of the globe by Indo-Western cultures, as invaders and ethnologist turn on shamanist , in part, on sex magic based local religions met (note also the simultaneous occurrence of syphilis). As a result, the old xenophobia, which, like the underlying hostility itself, had been sustained for a millennium by religious arguments since the end of antiquity, was finally perpetuated in the form of pseudoscientific racism due to the apparently renewed confirmation, in which the xenophobic component of the Indo-European antiquity handed down the hostile image of the enemy of the lustful and nonhuman monster and magician named Neiding .

Hostility and intoxicants

An additional component of occidental hostility to the body had also developed through shamanistic substance magic of the Stone Age, magic potions and poisoning of the Iron Age-Ancient and Medieval magic sorcery, and finally intoxicants / drugs as an expression and trigger of moral degeneration, excess and licentiousness (cf. inter alia in this context the magical transformation of the ancient envy into raging and / or as unclean animals, see also Judensau ).

Taboo and cultural cipher

At the same time, from time immemorial, the entire complex of topics was taboo , i.e. the numinous fear of conjuring, that is, evoking, through direct pronouncement, from which, among other things, the medieval practice developed, everyone who was noticed by naming the taboo, sometimes under the rationalizing Justification of alleged complicity with fiends and magicians of harm, producing knowledge of expressions and alleged facts, to be handed over immediately to the Inquisition , from which the veiled term the silent sin for lasciviousness, fornication (in the terminology of the time sodomy ), magical harm ( witchcraft , partly also with it) simple deviations from belief due to superstition, heresy and heresy) and poisoning, which were regarded as partly identical, resulted in the fact that no one dared to express what was taboo. This tabooing of direct naming only slowly decreased with the Enlightenment , although the corresponding sociocultural connotations and derivations were not eliminated due to the above-mentioned factors.

Numinous connotations and derivations of occidental hostility towards the body such as harmful magic, poisoning, mental as well as cultural and / or ethnic strangeness, physical as well as mental and mental illnesses (in modern times especially the ideological-pseudoscientific, moral insanity diagnosed in connection with lasciviousness and fornication ), epidemics, natural disasters , Effeminacy and feminization, weakness and cowardice etc. (see also envy and taboo homosexuality ) are therefore fundamentally to be regarded as a cultural code for the numinous, feared lustfulness and fornication underlying all these ideas.

At the same time, due to the concealing taboo on direct pronunciation, the difference between all these things and especially the indecent debauchery was not known in detail, so that for example the conquerors and ethnologists of modern colonialism, their language and views as a result of the apparent confirmation of the hostile prejudices now in foreign countries, in turn, had a retroactive effect on modern science, medicine, sociology, forensics, etc. and apparently found a modernist entrance there, due to the socio-psychological-ethnocentric cognitive distortion, perceived and documented everything together, or at least a large part of the subject complex, as soon as they appeared in foreign countries individual components of the complex came across. Here, as everywhere in connection with Western hostility to the body, there is a rich number of veiled metaphors that are almost inviting to confusion and misunderstandings, such as lust epidemic , ulcer or plague of debauchery, as well as words with sexual, but at that time still mostly indefinite and multiple Significance such as the consistent use of pederasty or sodomy for anal intercourse as well as for travestitic or magical rituals or same-sex intercourse, lack of differentiation between the aforementioned things and also mixing with cult prostitution, castration, travesty and biological hermaphroditism , animal traffic, ritual murder , cannibalism Coprophagia etc., all of which had been part of the Indo-European envy in one form or another ; Just as these Western observers were unable to differentiate between social tribal norms, their own Western morality and individual (instinctual) properties of individual tribal members, so that from their point of view all these abnormalities were only committed or could take place on the basis of inferiority and / or malice.

Modern Effects of AIDS

With the emergence of AIDS, as in connection with syphilis, openly and openly instead of as a permanent but taboo cultural subtext, the supposed and / or actual sexual minorities took on the former role of the non-human monster, the magician of harm and the alleged lower races one, although all the older numinous components of hostility were still at work. For example, from the conservative environment of the then US President Reagan , AIDS was God's gift to homosexuals (the now classic saying probably comes from the influential Republican TV preacher Pat Robertson , who also proclaimed that homosexuals would provoke future natural disasters, and Robertson's secular counterpart Pat Buchanan , at that time also a Republican, seconded that AIDS was nature's just punishment for unnatural fornication), while at the same time the CSU politician Peter Gauweiler called for the immediate introduction of laws for the compulsory detention of all homosexuals, members of sexual minorities and promiscuous people in general, drug users as well HIV and AIDS sufferers in concentration camps (sic, original quote Gauweiler) demanded to protect the decent majority from the "epidemic" allegedly spread by the morally inferior (which, despite the corresponding media torment, never had epidemic proportions in western Industrialized countries, which would be comparable to plague and syphilis, assumed). The propagandistic catchphrase of a so-called moral immunodeficiency as a designation for AIDS and the alleged causes of the disease was popularized in the service of the reactionary role backwards in sexualibus.

One of the most influential and most obvious expressions of this further perpetuation of occidental hostility due to AIDS was found in the final report of the parliamentary Meese Commission appointed by the American President Reagan (whose official task was to investigate the allegedly diverse "damage caused by pornography"), the closest connection among other things between promiscuity, consumption such as the production of pornography, potential for aggression, readiness to use violence, skin color, drug consumption and drug trafficking, sexual deviations, arms-pushing, prostitution and human trafficking, etc. and so on.

In this way, the irrational derivations of occidental hostility that were at best partially buried by the so-called sexual revolution after the Second World War were reactivated in a very short time and converted into a modern medical, psychological, sociological, socio-hygienic and forensic terminology, so that after the previously sought individualization and Democratization in sexualibus with social debates under liberal auspices, the focus of sexual research and debates, above all by means of gossamer reports about alleged causes and consequences of sexual libertinage, is again, despite the fact that the number of actual moral crimes has been falling steadily in the western industrialized countries for decades (cf. as more recent study for both the old and the new Federal Republic, for example Weber & Narr 1997), on sexuality as an obscure and latent threat, especially from depraved and degenerate individuals en (“sexualized violence” and violence per se by sex criminals , in the eighties the catchphrase of so-called AIDS desperados , which was particularly widespread at the time, and other marginalized groups such as foreigners or drug users) and a collective need for security against apocalyptic catastrophes caught the eye Demands for anti-individualistic classification in hostile discipline was postponed.

Prejudice research

In addition, fear and prejudice offers a thorough, comprehensive presentation and explanation of socio- psychological as well as zoological-anthropological (see sociobiology ) prejudice research, its possibilities, as well as the historical development of the subject. Here Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg emphasizes, as already in Tabu Homosexuality , that the main function of prejudices would be to serve social group cohesion ; The ruling in-group distinguishes itself from an out-group defined in this way by means of its own social authority to interpret (the demarcation made by the in-group on partly fictitious, partly actual, but always negatively assessed characteristics of the out-group defined in this way only in this demarcation and exclusion and the associated devaluation of out-group minorities in the sense of identity- forming enemy images to find their own identity and the resulting group cohesion.

However, since this process as the learned social identity (s. Also labeling theory , Eng. Labeling approach ) the outside through the interpretative authority of the ruling in-group defined, often stigmatizing pathologisierten and often criminalized out-group determined is found in this society The fact of the social identity learned from outside, also in the case of the negative propagandistic caricature, is the second reason for the above-mentioned motto of the book, according to which the protection of minorities is synonymous with protection of the majority.

literature

Fear and Prejudice - AIDS Fears as the Subject of Prejudice Research , Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg. ISBN 3-499-18247-5