Societies may enable or hinder disabled people through policies and attitudes. We have moved such a long way from the Labour era of “celebrating diversity and equality” and from a time of simply celebrating the achievements of disabled people. Now we can’t walk with our head up for fear of attack, or someone telling us we are faking our disability in some way. We are labelled the undeserving, This government have lied and lied to try and justify their punitive policies. Our lives have become the moral property of the government, public and wilfully ignorant, egocentric celebrities. We are no longer free to just be.
How did this happen in a so-called civilised liberal democracy?
Our own government have deliberately manufactured and perpetuated misconceptions about disabled people via their rhetoric, intentional, strategic lies and manipulated statistics.
The Tories have unforgivably cultivated and manipulated the very worst of the public’s prejudices. They have created cultural scripts that justify their policies, which also serve to alienate and demonise us, we have become excluded – we are the other.
The idea of techniques of neutralisation was first proposed by David Matza and Gresham Sykes during their work on Edwin Sutherland’s Differential Association in the 1950s. Matza and Sykes were working on juvenile delinquency, they theorised that the same techniques could be found throughout society and published their ideas in Delinquency and Drift 1964.
They identified the following propaganda methods by which, they believed, delinquents justified their illegitimate actions, and Alverez identified these methods used at a socio-political level in Nazi Germany to “justify” the Holocaust:
1. Denial of responsibility …
