Dangerous far-right rhetoric and unscientific views from the Deputy Minister of Health, Dimitris Vartzopoulos, directly from the cave of the modern homo sapiens. With a few sentences, 160,000 years of evolution and several centuries of Enlightenment, Science and progress were thrown over board.
The views of Vartzopoulos, a psychiatrist and in charge for Mental Health policy at the ministry, are shockingly misogynistic and to think he was talking about femicide and violence among minors..
In a recent interview with LiveMedia, the deputy minister claimed that women are in charge of other issues than those for men and that is giving birth to children.”
“It is the nature of things for the male to be aggressive” as he “hunts for food. therefore therefore the concept of femicide really has a biological basis,” Vartzopoulos said.
“When someone is aggressive, they are aggressive because they are born aggressive and because the way they have lived all these years reinforce this aggression,” he added.
“The female is for other jobs, to bring children into the world,” the 66-year-old psychiatrist and father of three stressed.
“Among all the fauna, in every form of living being, the male is more aggressive because in nature it is he who hunts for food and undertakes the aggressive claim. The female is for other jobs. To bring children into the world. Either it happens in the herd, or it happens in the binary form that we have in homo sapiens. It is the nature of the male to be aggressive, therefore femicide has a biological basis.”
Arguing that an aggressive person in born aggressive, Vartzopoulos said “what we can do is when we find such aggression in an early phase, to guide this aggression into social channels, that is to say that this aggression serves the purposes of this society, that is, to have a value system which serves society. That is, not to kill or attack in order to steal, to attack the enemy of the country, or to attack the enemy of society.”
He argued that quite a significant part of people with mental health problems “will at some point end up having a chronic form of psychopathology, that is, an illness. This new chronicity should be detected at a very early stage, so that we try to deal with it and in case we cannot deal with it, we can easily send these people to psycho-social rehabilitation structures, that is, to keep them as close as possible to the their family, in their work and in society.”
Vartzopoulos’ primitive point of view triggered an outrage and provoked the Movement for Mental Health whose members accused him of “sexism, biological determinism, repression and punishment: a totalitarianism in progress at its best and an advocate of those “good old days” when two sexes had exact roles to fulfill in the society.
It could be a simple comparative puzzle for the proponents of the view that science is constantly progressing by looking only to a better future. It could be a farce if we were not currently living through a genocide and the era of “return to normalcy”. But it could just be expected if one looks at the coming winter.
The recent statements of the deputy health minister made us re-examine the work of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), world-renowned for his studies and theories in the field of characterization and his theory of the “criminal mind”. The theories formed the basis for “criminologist anthropology”, the Movement for Mental Health commented on social media, among others.
With Vartzopoulos’ statements meanwhile all over the media, main opposition party, left-wing SYRIZA asked PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis to dismiss him, while sharp criticism came also from socialist PASOK and left-wing New Left.
PS No wonder that psychiatrists in Greece block any civic society initiative, any progressive legislation to establish modern support structures for people suffering of mental health issues and have the country be at last a modern European state, at last.
They are control-freaks, afraid to lose the power the state allows them to have.
Can’t believe what I just read….. Is this “human” (refuse to call him a male) really head of Greece’s psycologial care?????
So, in his opinion, it is justifyed to kill a woman because the male is aggressive in his “nature”??! Well, if the male wants children, then he just killed the chance to get them…. Any sense in that, NO, dont think so……..
Such stupidity! Women can, and will, fend for themselves and their children as they have done during many thousands of years when the males have disapeard in some way, either through beeing killed in a stupid war or by accicent or illness…….
If women had relied totally on males there would be no mankind today!!
I just don’t get it, how such guys can survive spreading their idiocy publicly in Greece.
In most other civilized countries this would be political suicide.
Have they got a breeding farm somewhere that turns out this type and lets them loose on us poor suffering citizens,imagine what policies they put forward for us behind closed doors,we can only hope someone somewhere tells them…that might be a bit too extreme(at the moment) think of the elections…..