Ableism: Luke Mockridge and Florian Schroeder: gone swimming

Florian Schroeder is considered one of the smarter comedians in this country, which says a lot about the German level of humor. Schroeder enjoys the role of the reflective observer who maintains a healthy equidistance from everything and therefore comes to sensible, balanced judgments – in contrast to all the other discussion participants who speak purely from emotion. Ironically, the affectless is Florian Schroeder’s affectation, a pure ploy based on discursive reflexes and not a will to knowledge. It is purely a production.

Accordingly, his verdict on the discussion surrounding Luke Mockridge – who many people described as a comedian – was predictably aloof: “The knee-jerk, compassionate defense of disabled people is, in its self-obsession, ultimately almost as discriminatory as Luke’s joke itself. It makes disabled people as small as they never want to be.” Luke Mockridge had speculated in some podcast that at the Paralympic Games people without limbs would be thrown into the water and then everyone would drown.

Florian Schroeder nonchalantly ignores the fact that the criticism originally came from disabled people: it was Kristina Vogel, two-time Olympic champion and paraplegic herself, who drew attention to Mockridge’s attempt to ingratiate herself with the podcast hosts. It’s not the case that people are celebrating their moral superiority; Schroeder could have noticed that if he had listened. But instead of listening to those who talk about themselves and the discrimination they experience, Schroeder prefers to maintain a comfortable equidistance: as if disabled people didn’t even exist in this discussion. If he can do it, that’s the last shit. If he wants to make disabled people great, he would first have to notice them; But that doesn’t seem to be the case for him. There’s a word for that: ableism.

What Florian Schroeder and the handful of people who try to do it in a similar way don’t understand is that speaking of, about and with disabled people has to be constantly relearned. Of course, this is only possible if you are not as ideologically encrusted as Schroeder. If he were honest about it, he would now have to come out with a lot of ableist slogans to expose the woke cancel culture and then see that the public is simply further along than him: but he doesn’t mean it honestly. He is what he accuses others of being: a bateau ivre in the storms of discourse who can think of nothing better than to cling to himself again and again. His goal, he says again and again, is not to understand, but to irritate. He doesn’t understand that irony requires someone to have already understood something.

What Florian Schroeder doesn’t understand is that speaking of, about and with disabled people has to be constantly relearned.

But enough about Schroeder, who is basically just a symptom of bothalism. Just like his rougher (and therefore more honest) colleagues Mario Barth and Didi Hallervorden, who have all made it their mission to encrust thinking under the pretext of freeing it.

Talking about disability affects how society deals with disability. The term as it is used today has its origins in the 19th century and describes a loss of expected performance – this is also what Mockridge’s joke is based on, which is what makes it so bad, the punchline is simply almost 200 years old. The disability is based on a medical diagnosis, after which this disability is then treated. This can be more or less successful (prostheses, cochlear).

Disability cannot be understood without the concept of performance. That is the tragedy of the story of the emancipation of disabilities: This story is also one that repeatedly tries to show that disabled people are also capable. That’s why the word “idiot” still exists today; this word has an amazing history behind it.

It once meant something like a private person: people who were kept out of public questions in the societies of the Greek city-states. In ancient Rome the meaning shifted to a synonym for lay people. In the 19th century, the doctor Édouard Séguin made the term fruitful for psychiatry. He is considered the father of disability education, a pioneer of inclusion, and tried to use the concept of “idiocy” to establish a new, more humane approach to describing children with so-called mental disabilities. He also came up with the idea of ​​the “idiot savant,” which describes insular talents in the autism spectrum, a concept that experienced an unbroken revival a hundred years later in the film “Rain Man.” That’s how powerful the ideas are that want to relate individual deviations back into the system.

Of course, there was also something paternalistic about this concept, and this repressive potential became more and more apparent – at the same time as the decline of psychiatry at the beginning of the 20th century – until a discussion that had begun long before that under National Socialism resulted in the murder of so-called “idiots”. The extermination centers for the various extermination campaigns were located in the middle of Germany, and yet resistance to the killings of so-called “life unworthy of life” remained very manageable.

The term idiocy (or in German, feeblemindedness) lost its diagnostic meaning and was replaced by the concept of the so-called “mental disability”. In Germany, parents of affected children introduced the term in collaboration with experts in 1958. It later emerged that some of these experts were responsible for the murders during the Nazi era.

The term “mental disability” is now outdated again: What is it supposed to be, this mind that is disabled? It may seem silly to many uninvolved people the frequency with which new self- or other-names appear; On the other hand, experience has shown that the time windows in which people with disabilities can even be heard are very narrow.

The murders of disabled people were completely kept quiet until the 1980s, and the majority of doctors and nurses who were involved in them were not prosecuted. The practice of continuous sterilization, which had become established in the “Third Reich,” was implemented across the board in the West until the 1970s. Nobody takes responsibility for this because it could be expensive. If Schroeder would think about what makes people so small, he might have an idea.

What Schroeder and company don’t understand: The outrage over Mockridge also arises from the knowledge that the situation for disabled people is de facto becoming more precarious: It has been fifteen years since the German federal government signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The WHO report published last year found that there had been little improvement and even regression in some areas.

At the same time, a new ableist narrative was established with the pandemic, when the “risk groups” were invented, which for a year and a half it was just okay to think about and who were then left to their own devices. The pressure that not only, but especially the CDU is now building up on poor people (Jens Spahn and Carsten Linnemann want to withdraw all benefits from so-called “total refusers” and thereby break the constitution) will reach disabled people 1:1. Mockridge’s joke about throwing disabled people into the water to see how long they stay up reflects very well the sadism that disabled people are now having to face again.

It’s not just about sensitivities and semantic exercises. The struggle is real, but you don’t know anything about it if you’re only interested in yourself.

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