Health fascism, healthism, and other purely amateur renderings from an unpaid homeboy.

I’ve been asked to explain my previous references to “health fascism.”

To the best of my recollection, I first encountered this term in the late 1980’s. I believe I read it in The Nation, as used by Alexander Cockburn in one of his “Beat the Devil” columns.

To Google “health fascism” is to find numerous British Isles references. To judge from the Wikipedia entry on “healthism,” the latter carries equal weight, too. Here's an excerpt.

(Petr) Skrabanek: the threat of health fascism

According to Skrabanek, "healthism" begins when the government begins to use propaganda and coercion to establish norms of health and begins to attempt to impose norms of a "healthy lifestyle." All human activities are weighed in the balance of their real or imagined effects on health: all human activities are divided into "healthy" and "unhealthy", prescribed and proscribed, approved and disapproved, responsible and irresponsible, based on this measure.

In Skrabanek's view, "healthism" goes hand in hand with what he calls "lifestylism", another neologism, which Skrabanek uses to describe the view that most diseases are the result of unhealthy habits or behaviour. Skrabanek notes that while "lifestylism" is ostensibly founded on a basis of mathematics and statistics, it nevertheless has a strong moralistic flavour. Skrabanek cites a British epidemiologist, Geoffrey Rose, as expressing the belief that most people live "unhealthily" and constitute a "sick population". But since (according to Skrabanek) this message would lead to a fatalistic rejection of the lifestyle doctrine, it must be recast to be socially and politically acceptable, quoting Rose for the view that the "sick" society must be re-educated in its "perception of what is normal and acceptable."

Ultimately, Skrabanek claims that "healthism" either leads to, or is a symptom of, incipient totalitarianism. Skrabanek claims that healthism justifies racism, segregation, and eugenic control; for the healthist, what is "healthy" is moral, patriotic, and pure; while what is "unhealthy" is foreign, polluted, and impure. The doctrine of "lifestylism" suggests that state actions to prescribe what is healthy or forbid what is unhealthy are limitless in scope, and offer no grounds for privacy.

That’s a lot to digest. Luckily, I believe the following comment, made on councilman John Gonder’s blog earlier in the week, actually makes the case for the existence of “health fascism” with little additional testimony required.

I freely admit to being condescending toward smoking ban opponents and their "reasons" because I have facts and evidence on my side and they have none.

That's even more frightening than second hand smoke, don't you think?