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Thread: Stockholm Syndrome is not a thing. It isn't real. It is a phrase that was published in news stories after a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in which the police were dumbfounded that the hostages were protective of their captors.
The hostages had spent six days locked up with two men in the bank and had developed friendships with their two captors. It's reported that a Swedish criminologist, Nils Bejerot is the first one to name the "phenomenon." Afterward, an FBI and later Scotland Yard psychologist
decided that this was an actual illness that he would hang his hat on to gain himself a bit of notoriety. He didn't do clinical trials (well how could you?) but did map out the process by which all of this sickness might take place. Even so he called the syndrome RARE.
And it is rare. But it isn't "Stockholm Syndrome." It's just human empathy and compassion. The head captor, Jann-Erik Olsson, blamed the hostages for his incarceration: 'They did everything I told them to do. If they hadn't, I might not be here now. Why didn't any of them attack
'me? They made it hard to kill. They made us go on living together day after day, like goats, in that filth. There was nothing to do but get to know each other.' Kristin Ehnmark was the hostage who seemed to perplex authorities the most. It was she who talked to negotiators and
tried to convince the Prime Minister to allow the robbers a getaway car and the hostages to accompany them. Was this a twisted sense of morals that she had adopted? No. She believed that the police were planning to kill the Robbers. She saw them as human. She felt any attempt
would also put the hostages in danger. On the phone with the Prime Minister from within the bank: 'I think you are sitting there playing chequers with our lives. I fully trust Clark and the robber. I am not desperate. They haven't done a thing to us. On the contrary
'they have been very nice. But you know, Olof, what I'm scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die." Rather than apply occam's razor and admit that empathy in situations like this not only the pinnacle of human behavior it is indeed self-preserving, authorities
gave it a disease-sounding label and reported that it was aberrant. And now, instead of this event being celebrated, the event is held out as the worst sort of sickness. And whose narrative is advanced in that case? Why it is the police state's and the media's. The real sick
people are those who use this example to shame the world away from protecting our fellow citizens from the merciless who run the carceral apparatus of the state. It is they who need treatment. We pray they get it.
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