Phobia?

What, exactly, is a 'phobia?'  Let's ask the folks at the Mayo Clinic.

A phobia is an overwhelming and unreasonable fear of an object or situation that poses little real danger. Unlike the brief anxiety most people feel when they give a speech or take a test, a phobia is long-lasting, causes intense physical and psychological reactions, and can affect your ability to function normally at work or in social settings.

Emphases mine.  Now, let's take a look at this new concept of "Anti-Government-Phobia," invented out of whole cloth by people who have obviously been educated far beyond their intelligence.

One tactic that big governments utilize to deflate the legitimacy of its opposition is the political use of mental health.  A pioneer of this technique was the German National Socialist Workers’ Party. Over 300,000 “mental defectives” were sterilized, and over 100,000 executed in Germany alone.  Dr. Joseph Mengele, who actually managed to escape justice, carried out cruel psychiatric experiments on Jewish people, including children.  There was definitely something mentally dysfunctional with the Nazi Party elite, which executed over seven millions Jews, Roma, and Slavs for “racial purity” reasons; but there also had to be something wrong with a people that allowed it to come to power. Germany, lest people forget, was considered to be a highly civilized society; that is, before such schemes as socialized medicine began distorting people’s views of the value of human life.

The abuse of psychiatry to discredit dissidents in society was notorious in the Soviet Union. As a 2011 Moscow Times article put it, “In the Soviet Union, dissidents were labeled schizophrenics, thrown into psychiatric hospitals and drugged just for questioning the government. It wasn’t until the Soviet demise that officials grasped the difference between criticism and mental illness.” Indeed, we should take such warnings seriously in the present; the article goes on to explain how the practice is making a comeback in Russia.

One prominent Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, who has published previously classified documents on the political abuse of psychiatry, wrote, [Soviet premier Nikita] Khrushchev reckoned that it was impossible for people in a socialist society to have anti-socialist consciousness, and whenever manifestations of dissidence could not be justified as a provocation of world imperialism or a legacy of the past, they were merely the product of mental disease...

The government IS force.  They have more guns than you, and, generally, the support of the masses.  They can take your property, incarcerate you, or beat you up or kill you without consequence...and they've been shown to do just that, all over the world, in every different culture and climate.  On any pretext.  On no pretext at all.  And our current regime has made it clear that America's rule of law, meant to restrain government, means not one damn thing to them.

If you're an arachnophobe, you might run screaming from the room at the sight of a daddy longlegs--a spider that couldn't cause you the slightest harm if it tried.  That's a phobia.  Concerned about becoming yet another footnote in history, marked "Dissident," or "Queer," or "Jew," or "Capitalist?"  That's as much of a "phobia" as worrying about falling to your death if you step off a 30-story building. 

A rational reaction to the scientific analysis of historically-proven patterns is not a "phobia" any more than being tired when you work the night shift is a "disorder," you quacks.  There is no such thing as "Shift Work Disorder."  If you're up all night, you'll get tired.  It's not a 'disorder,' it's how the human body works.  And there is no such thing as "Anti-Government Phobia."  It's not a 'phobia,' it's the natural instinct of self-preservation.

Why is it that a dumb truck driver knows more about how life works than a bunch of Ivy-League graduates?  Oh, yeah--because I live in the real world.  Must be nice up in that ivory tower, but I'll take reality any day of the week...

...because, in the end, I really have no choice.  And you don't, either.

UPDATE 2.12.12:  ROFL!  We've been had...it's a brilliant bit of satire found here.  Check out the author of this so-called study:  "Ivor E. Tower."

I will say this, though--when this kind of stuff is so believeable, it points out exactly how whacked-out our country has become.