Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
Part 2 - Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Part 2 focuses on the three main and mutually interrelated realms of producing and practicing the violence of knowledge: special education, physical anthropology, and genetics. Their interplay is explored as a main prerequisite for coalescing disability and ethnicity in the practices that led to structural violence against the Roma after 1945.
This part focuses mainly on the postwar period in terms of reproducing and deepening the practices and ideas concerning disability and ethnicity as the basis for framing the public policy of the interwar period. The Protectorate period is seen here as the transition from the interwar rhetoric concerning functional health and its potential coalescing with ethnicity to reproducing the postwar hierarchy of defectivity that absorbed the Nazi as well as the Soviet approaches in the division of people with mental disabilities, culminating in categories according to the degree of their usefulness. Additionally, the pathos of interwar rhetoric within the postwar practices operated in favor of legitimizing the hierarchy of defectivity – one of the most visible traces of Soviet influence on the Czechoslovak rhetoric concerning people with disabilities and the Roma.
This section revisits the concept of the socialist legacy in the politics of segregation and surveillance by bringing into focus the main challenges faced by socialist authorities in Czechoslovakia and the options at their disposal to meet such challenges. The role of massive antisocialist propaganda that stressed the inability of the socialist state to provide public security is seen as one of the driving forces that led the authorities to reproducing the interwar rhetoric concerning the Roma. The call to be in line with official Marxism is contextualized as a source of additional arguments in favor of intractable backwardness of the Roma. And the pressure of international attention to the issue of segregation against the Roma since the late 1970s is explored as a factor of making arbitrary the practice of surveillance, including forced sterilization. Along with these topics, this part focuses on the role of demographic crisis and the obviously insufficient attempts to reverse it until the early 1970s as the main driving force that rendered the application of a nationalist narrative stemming from the interwar period essential for the socialist authorities.
Between 1948 and 1989, the Czechoslovak authorities experimented with a wide range of strategies toward solving this issue that directly determined the other realms of policy making, including the politics of disability.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist CzechoslovakiaSegregating in the Name of the Nation, pp. 105 - 108Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019