Donald Ewen Cameron - After Nuremberg

After Nuremberg

After Nuremberg, Cameron published the text titled Nuremberg and Its Significance. In this, Cameron hoped to accomplish a suitable method to re-instate a form of justice in Germany that could organize society to keep it from recreating the German that was born before and during World War II. Cameron viewed German society throughout history as continually giving rise to fearsome aggression. He came up with the idea that if he confronted the world and the Germans with the atrocities committed during the war, the world and the Germans would refrain from what were their repeated acts of extreme aggression. If the common population of Germany saw the atrocities of World War II they would surely submit to the re-organized system of justice that Cameron had created because the evidence at Nuremberg proved the Germans to be guilty. Cameron would decide that Germans would be most likely to commit atrocities due to their historical, biological, racial and cultural past and their particular psychological nature. All Germans on trial would be assessed according to the likeliness for committing the crime. As a result Cameron diagnosed Germans as the race most likely to rise and commit atrocities again because of their inherent nature.

Cameron began to develop broader theories of society, developed new concepts of human relations to replace the psychiatric concepts he deemed dangerous and outdated. These became the basis of a new social and behavioral science that Cameron would later institute through his presidencies of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. With the results of the Manhattan project, Cameron feared that without proper re-organization of society, atomic weapons could fall into the hands of new, fearsome aggressors. Cameron argued that it was necessary for behavioral scientists to act as the social planners of society, and that the United Nations could provide a conduit for implementing his ideas for applying psychiatric elements to global governance and politics.

Cameron started to distinguish populations between "the weak" and "the strong". Those with anxieties or insecurities and who had trouble with the state of the world were labeled as "the weak"; in Cameron's analysis, they could not cope with life and had to be isolated from society by "the strong". The mentally ill were then labeled not only as sick, but weak. Cameron further argued that the weak must not influence children. He promoted a philosophy where chaos could be prevented by removing the weak from society.