Framing disability as an outside invader justifies any cruelty toward the disabled child

Evidence

This is the chilling consequence of so many parents, coached by con artists of various stripes, deciding that their child’s disability is not actually a part of them, but rather some outside malevolent force that invaded them. If disability is an invader, an outsider, a soul-stealer, then, as with a changeling, almost any cruelty can be justified as parents attempt to exorcise the invader and bring back the normal, perfect life they had pictured for themselves. Like the barely suppressed rage at people who are fat and less workout-obsessed in parts of the wellness world, this, too, is a deeply dangerous mindset, playing out inside the family, inflicted on the bodies and minds of vulnerable children. And it is bound up in another kind of doppelganger turn, this one afflicting whole societies, whose entire mood and personality can seem to flip under certain extreme circumstances. Places like Vienna. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 679

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Klein’s move from the private family cruelty to ‘another kind of doppelganger turn… afflicting whole societies’ is the hinge where the changeling logic becomes an analytic instrument for reading collective political transformation — this is the method working at full power.
• XREF: The phrase ‘a doppelganger turn… afflicting whole societies, whose entire mood and personality can seem to flip under certain extreme circumstances. Places like Vienna’ explicitly bridges to the Nazism chapters and to Klein’s earlier analysis of the Mirror World metabolizing grievances elsewhere in the book.
• QUESTION: Is Klein claiming changeling-logic as the psychological mechanism behind societies flipping, or a metaphor held loosely? This is where the analytic device is doing its heaviest lifting — worth tracking whether she earns it.