The System Was Built This Way: From Operation Paperclip to HHS
On Autism, Inheritance, and the Violence of Normalisation.
From Nazi youth camps to behavioural therapy, this essay traces how fascist ideologies were absorbed into U.S. institutions—and how their legacy still shapes autism policy, care, and the politics of compliance today.
Introduction: The Unseen Foundations
RFK Jr. now stands at the helm of the United States Department of Health and Human Services—an appointment that, in and of itself, might seem like a quirk of modern politics. But pair it with the department’s recent push for a nationwide autism study, now cancelled or quietly paused after considerable backlash, and the picture becomes far more unsettling. The proposed study was framed, on the surface, as a data-gathering exercise—an innocent attempt to “understand” autism at the population level. But for many of us who’ve lived under the weight of institutional scrutiny, medicalised intervention, and behavioural correction, it felt hauntingly familiar. Not just because we’ve seen it before, but because we’ve inherited it. This isn’t new. It is, in fact, remarkably old.
There’s a pattern here—one that stretches back decades, hidden in plain sight. What happens when a nation builds its systems not on justice or healing, but on the bones of other regimes? What happens when the architects of atrocity are not only welcomed but canonised as scientific pioneers? What happens when those legacies are never dismantled, only rebranded—folded neatly into government departments, school policies, and therapeutic protocols? These aren’t abstract questions. They are the ground beneath our feet. And if we’re to understand where we are now—why autistic people are still being studied like problems to be solved, why behavioural compliance remains the currency of belonging—we have to begin not with the present, but with the foundations. Because the truth is: the system was built this way.
Before the Ashes Cooled: The American Scramble for Power
Before the war had even ended—before the bodies were buried, before the gas chambers were dismantled, before the full horror had settled into public consciousness—the United States had already begun collecting. Under Operation Paperclip, it recruited over 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, doctors, and intelligence officers, not to prosecute them, but to preserve and reassign their expertise. Their affiliations with the Nazi party were not obstacles; they were inconvenient details to be concealed, rewritten, or, in many cases, simply ignored.
Among the most infamous was Wernher von Braun, architect of the V-2 rocket programme that rained terror on London, killing thousands. Rather than face charges, he was brought to America, celebrated as a genius, and appointed head of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He became the father of the U.S. space programme—a national hero, a face on television. Meanwhile, Kurt Debus, a former SS officer, oversaw NASA launch operations. These men did not abandon their ideologies; they merely found new desks to sit behind, new flags to work under.
The logic extended beyond rockets. Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief of military intelligence on the Eastern Front—whose operations were soaked in the blood of anti-communist purges—was installed by the CIA to lead West Germany’s new intelligence agency, the BND. His entire network of former Nazis was left intact. Even Hans Speidel, who had served on the Eastern Front and worked with Wehrmacht units responsible for mass killings, was later appointed Supreme Commander of NATO ground forces in Central Europe. A Nazi general now stood at the head of Western military defence.
These were not isolated or rogue decisions. They were statecraft. Strategic alignments forged in the crucible of Cold War fear—justified, then normalised, then forgotten. And when fragments of these operations became public—when survivors, journalists, and historians uncovered what had been done—the official response was not apology, but rebranding. Conspiracy theories, they said. Wild speculation. Until the records emerged and silence replaced denial.
And it wasn’t only Europe. In Japan, the same script played out. Unit 731, the biological warfare unit responsible for vivisection, frostbite torture, plague bombs—atrocities that rivalled anything in Europe—was spared prosecution in exchange for their research. Scientists like Shirō Ishii walked free. Their findings were handed to U.S. military intelligence. The cost of that knowledge? Justice, memory, accountability.
This was no passive absorption of knowledge. It was an ideological graft—one that embedded itself in American governance, medicine, psychiatry, and education. Control over care. Surveillance over support. Efficiency over ethics. The blueprints of the post-war world weren’t drawn in democratic halls; they were copied from bunkers. And they live on—in our policies, in our programmes, in the institutions that claim to serve us.
Importing Ideologies: From Eugenics to Autism Research
While the names Asperger and Kanner still echo through clinical corridors and diagnostic manuals, the legacies they represent are far darker than most textbooks would admit. Hans Asperger, long mythologised as a compassionate clinician working with “little professors,” was, in truth, a willing participant in Nazi eugenics. He cooperated with the Reich’s child euthanasia programme, knowingly referring disabled children—those deemed “uneducable”—to Spiegelgrund, where many were murdered. His work fit neatly within the regime’s framework: a sorting system designed to distinguish the “salvageable” from the “expendable.” The children he deemed worthy of life were spared, not because they were accepted as they were, but because they could be moulded—disciplined into usefulness.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Leo Kanner, though not a Nazi himself, operated within the intellectual climate of American eugenics. His early writings aligned closely with the racialised, class-based anxieties of the early 20th century. Kanner excluded working-class and non-white children from his definition of autism—reserving the label for those who fit a narrow, socially palatable archetype. He described autistic children as “cold” and “inherently disturbed,” and blamed mothers—coining the infamous “refrigerator mother” theory. His diagnostic framework helped medicalise difference whilst divorcing it from social context. In both cases, autism became a tool for classification, not understanding. It was not a window into different ways of being—it was a filter for identifying who could be made to conform.
The irony is grotesque: eugenics was not born in Germany. It was perfected in the United States—within the ivy-covered walls of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. It was American scientists and philanthropists—like Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, and the Carnegie Institution—who built the scaffolding. The Nazis didn’t invent the racial hygiene laws; they modelled them after American immigration policy and forced sterilisation statutes. Germany imported its eugenics from the U.S., then escalated it into genocide. And after the war, America brought those methods back—battle-tested, sharpened by atrocity, and now legitimised as “science.”
This wasn’t merely a matter of ideology. It was one of infrastructure. The tools of classification—of bureaucratic violence—were refined through partnerships like that between IBM and the Third Reich. IBM’s punch card machines, supplied via its German subsidiary, enabled the Nazis to sort, track, and deport millions with industrial efficiency. As Edwin Black has detailed, genocide scaled not just because of hatred, but because of data. Categorisation became policy. Numbers became death sentences. And those same logics of statistical sorting—those tidy rows and clinical labels—found new life in the DSM, in educational diagnostics, in behavioural treatment plans.
Autism’s entry into American psychiatry was shaped not by care or curiosity, but by a relentless drive to pathologise and discipline. The early DSM classifications didn’t seek to support autistic people—they sought to identify and contain us. Behaviour was catalogued. Eye contact, posture, speech patterns—every deviation marked and scored. This wasn’t understanding. It was control. And it still is. The systems that govern diagnosis today retain the fingerprints of these histories. They frame autism as something to be corrected or neutralised—not explored, not honoured, not lived.
These histories are not incidental. They are structural. They show us how ideas cross borders, but methods endure. Behind every checklist and intake form is a lineage—a story of who was deemed worthy, and who was not. To understand that is not to wallow in the past—it is to see the present with clarity.
Behaviour as Battleground: The Rise of ABA and Social Engineering
By the time Ole Ivar Lovaas arrived in the United States in 1948, the war had been over for only three years—but its ideological scaffolding was already being rebuilt, brick by brick, under the guise of science. Lovaas, now known as the father of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), was not merely a psychologist with controversial methods. According to a newly published 2025 study by historian Åsmund Borgen Gjerde, he was also a former youth leader in Nasjonal Samling, Norway’s fascist collaborationist party, during the Nazi occupation. At the age of fourteen, he joined its youth wing. By fifteen, he had completed a leadership course at their political school in Jessheim. His father, Ernst Albert Løvaas, was a high-ranking NS propagandist. Both were listed in the Landsvikarkivet, Norway’s national treason archive. These are not footnotes. They are formative.
Gjerde, Å. B. (2025). Hidden Nazi past: Ole Ivar Lovaas during the German occupation of Norway. History of the Human Sciences, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951251324102
And yet, this past was never reckoned with. Lovaas built his career in American institutions—first at the University of Washington, then at UCLA—where he developed and popularised ABA. His name became synonymous with “early intervention” for autistic children. What the new study underscores is not just a personal history of collaboration, but a broader failure to confront how deeply post-war systems welcomed—and rewarded—those fluent in the language of discipline.
ABA, at its core, was never about understanding autistic people. It was about shaping them into something more palatable. Lovaas famously described his work as an attempt to make autistic children “indistinguishable from their peers”—not through support, but through compliance. Eye contact, tone of voice, posture, affect—all trained through reinforcement, correction, and repetition. The method borrowed not from care but from conditioning. From behaviourist doctrine. From prisons and laboratories. From the same logics that informed military interrogation and institutional psychiatry.
This is the through-line: difference as deviance, and deviance as something to be neutralised. Surveillance masquerading as therapy. Control rebranded as compassion. ABA was not a departure from the post-war state’s priorities—it was an extension of them. The state had already absorbed Nazi and fascist expertise across defence, medicine, and intelligence. Education and mental health followed suit. The target simply shifted from “undesirables” to “unrulies”—children who flapped, who spun, who refused to meet your gaze. Children who, by existing outside the norm, threatened it.
And so systems sprang up to bring them back into line. School districts funded ABA because it promised order. Insurance companies covered it because it promised results. Parents, desperate for answers in a world that pathologised their child, were told this was the way. They weren’t warned that the method’s founder once trained under a regime that murdered disabled children. They weren’t told that compliance can look like healing, even when it hollows the self.
And yet—for many African American families, particularly those raising autistic children in a country that polices Black difference with lethal force—this story has always had another layer. They understood what Lovaas meant when he said his goal was to make autistic children “indistinguishable from their peers”—not through support, but through compliance. Eye contact, tone of voice, posture, affect—all drilled through reinforcement, correction, and control. Not because these families believed their children were broken, but because they knew the price of visible difference. Because when your child flaps their hands in a corner shop, or doesn’t answer when an officer barks a question, or walks down the street speaking to themself, the stakes are not institutional—they are existential. For some, ABA became a grim kind of armour: a way to make their children legible to systems that otherwise meet them with suspicion, punishment, or a bullet.
This isn’t a failure of those families. It’s an indictment of a society that forces them into that calculation. That makes survival contingent on erasure. That turns love into strategy.
None of this is accidental. The behavioural model of “fixing” autism didn’t appear out of thin air—it emerged from a historical pattern, a long lineage of institutional responses to neurodivergence that prioritise conformity over connection, obedience over autonomy. What Lovaas developed was never just a therapy. It was a blueprint—a design for how to make difference manageable, digestible, invisible. And that blueprint didn’t stay confined to clinics or classrooms. It seeped into policy frameworks, insurance protocols, special education plans. It shaped what counts as care, and who gets to define it.
This was never about one man. It never could be. It’s about how the post-war world chose to carry forward the ideologies it claimed to defeat—not by rejecting them outright, but by repurposing them. By softening their language, rebranding their aims, and embedding their logics into the everyday machinery of support. The rituals of behaviour modification, the normalisation checklists, the endless data sheets—they don’t look like violence. But they carry its echo. They are the tools of authoritarianism, domesticated and redeployed, dressed up as therapy. They are what happens when a society builds its care systems on the foundations of control.
The Bureaucracy of Continuity: HHS, CDC, and the Medical-Industrial Complex
The blueprint didn’t stay in the past. It scaled—quietly, bureaucratically—into the very institutions meant to protect public health. Agencies like HHS, the CDC, and the NIH didn’t just inherit data or personnel; they inherited a worldview. A belief in classification. In correction. In the supremacy of the normative body and mind.
It’s no accident that the language of “prevention,” “early intervention,” and “risk reduction” still dominates public health documents on autism. These are not neutral terms. They echo with the old logics—of containment, of erasure, of avoiding the birth of future undesirables. The clinical gloss may have softened, but the impulse remains: to manage, to normalise, to protect the majority from the discomfort of difference.
Now, with RFK Jr. leading HHS, that legacy becomes impossible to ignore. His proposed national autism study—framed as data collection—was deeply rooted in the same suspicions that have long marked autistic people as problems to be solved. His anti-vaccine rhetoric, often cloaked in the language of freedom, recycles conspiracies with explicitly eugenic undertones: who gets to be born, who is damaged, who is at risk. It’s not new. It’s the same old fear, dressed up in populist outrage.
The system hasn’t lost its way. It’s stayed the course. This is what continuity looks like.
Cultural Amnesia and the Failure to Reckon
Why haven’t we ever had a truth and reconciliation commission in the United States—not for the sterilised, not for the institutionalised, not for the experimented on, not for the generations shaped or shattered by state policy in the name of progress? Why has there been no public reckoning with the architects of harm whose legacies live on in our systems, our diagnostics, our expectations of what a “good” citizen looks like?
The answer lies in the story America tells about itself. After World War II, whilst Europe grappled—imperfectly, unevenly—with the fallout of fascism, the U.S. crafted a different narrative. It cast itself as liberator, never oppressor. As saviour, not system. American exceptionalism worked not only to obscure the ideologies it imported, but to erase the need to interrogate them. Fascism, we were told, was something that happened over there. Never mind that our own Jim Crow laws and eugenics programmes inspired Nazi law. Never mind that our institutions welcomed Nazi collaborators into their ranks. Never mind the sterilisation of disabled and racialised people in state hospitals continued after the war.
This sanitised self-image allowed not just individuals, but entire agencies, to escape scrutiny. It paved over complicity with patriotism. And in doing so, it rendered certain histories unspeakable. Survivors—neurodivergent people, disabled people, racialised communities—became inconvenient witnesses. When we tried to name what had been done to us, we were met with disbelief, minimisation, or silence. We were told we were too emotional, too anecdotal, too angry. Told to be grateful for the crumbs of inclusion offered after decades of erasure.
Institutional memory has a selective function. It remembers the victories, forgets the violence. It names programmes after their pioneers, not their casualties. It buries the origin stories in professional journals and closed archives. And because of this, we inherit systems that still ask the wrong questions, still reward conformity, still punish difference—but with a smile, a slogan, and a grant.
There has been no commission because there has been no will to reckon. To do so would mean giving up the fantasy that these institutions are neutral—that they have always worked in service of the common good. It would mean admitting that many of the people and policies we’ve been taught to trust were never designed to care for us. They were designed to manage us. To shape us. To make us disappear.
These aren’t just theoretical legacies. They shape the IEP meetings, the health assessments, the everyday decisions that determine who gets support and who gets sanctioned.
Legacy Embodied: Surveillance, Compliance, and the “Good Autistic”
The legacy lives on in bodies—in classrooms, clinics, care plans, courtrooms. Today’s systems don’t need overt fascism to function. They’ve absorbed its mechanics. Surveillance is now a standard feature of education, healthcare, policing, and public health. For autistic and disabled people, in particular, participation often comes with an unspoken condition: assimilate, or be managed.
Take schools. Behaviour Intervention Plans, social skills groups, token economies—these aren’t neutral supports. They are tools of calibration. Entire funding streams exist to reward schools for enforcing compliance. Billions are spent training staff not to understand autistic students, but to control them. To reinforce “expected” behaviours. To extinguish the unexpected. The IEP process claims to be individualised, but at its core lies a demand: become legible to the system, or risk being cast out as “non-compliant.”
In healthcare and therapy, the same logic persists. “Good outcomes” are defined not by wellbeing, but by proximity to normative standards—eye contact, verbal fluency, calm affect. These are not markers of understanding. They are signs of submission. In public health, the metric is prevention—still laced with the desire to reduce, to avoid, to correct. Even within policing, difference is read as threat. Autistic meltdowns become grounds for restraint. A nonverbal response is mistaken for defiance. The price of being visibly neurodivergent remains terrifyingly high.
“Good behaviour” becomes political currency. For many autistic people, survival means performance—masking, scripting, smiling on cue. But that performance is unevenly distributed. Those of us who can code-switch, who can pass, who are seen as “clever” or “high-functioning,” are often rewarded—not just by institutions, but by neurodivergent spaces themselves. This is where the spectre of “Aspie supremacy” emerges: a hierarchy within the neurodivergent community that elevates the articulate, the system-compatible, the socially acceptable. Those who most resemble the normative ideal are valorised, while those who resist or cannot perform it are pushed to the margins, even within movements that claim to speak for us all.
This isn’t community. It’s a mirror of the very structures we seek to dismantle. A subtle assimilation into the system’s logic—one that mistakes palatability for liberation.
We are told that if we behave well enough, adapt fast enough, suffer quietly enough, there might be space for us. But what kind of space is that? Who gets to enter, and at what cost? These are not rhetorical questions. They are structural ones. And they demand better answers than what compliance can offer.
Refusing the Inheritance: A New Ethical Ground
Refusing this inheritance means more than critique. It means stepping off the path laid for us—refusing the comfort of familiar logics, even when they’re dressed up as help. It means questioning the rituals of “support” that demand we flatten ourselves into something legible. It means recognising that the harm was not just historical, but ongoing—and that our task is not just to name it, but to build something beyond it.
We don’t have to replicate the systems that wounded us to be seen as credible. We don’t have to quantify our pain, produce a perfect performance, or chase proximity to neurotypical norms. The wisdom we need is already here—in the mutual care of disabled communities, in the messy brilliance of neurodivergent storytelling, in the refusal to be efficient or tidy or easily interpreted. We see it in stimmy joy, in parallel play, in access intimacy, in the small collective rituals of surviving systems never meant for us.
There are other ways of knowing. Of being. Of teaching and learning and relating. Community-led models of care, harm reduction, peer support, trauma-informed practice—these aren’t new inventions. They’ve been with us, often passed between marginalised communities like secret blueprints. What they offer is not another method of control, but a different ground altogether. One where the goal isn’t to erase difference, but to make room for it. Where autonomy and interdependence are not in tension, but in conversation.
This is the work: not reforming the machine, but reimagining the terrain. Not fixing the broken parts of a structure designed to exclude us, but asking why it was built that way to begin with. Refusing the inheritance doesn’t mean abandoning care—it means reclaiming it. On our terms. For our kin. For the ones who came before us and the ones who will come after. It is slow work. Uncertain work. But it is necessary.
Because we were never meant to survive these systems. And yet—we’re still here. Imagining anyway.
Final thoughts …
None of this was accidental. The harm, the pressure to conform, the slow suffocation of difference—these weren’t aberrations. They were embedded. Designed. Not as side effects, but as core functions. These systems—education, medicine, mental health, public health—were never neutral. They were built to sort, to correct, to domesticate those of us who live outside the margins of the so-called norm. The cruelty isn’t a glitch. It’s the operating system.
For years, I’ve felt it in my bones—that the language, the policies, the interventions weren’t just misguided, but inherited. That something about their shape, their tone, their grip felt older than the brochures and training manuals let on. When I came across the new article on Ole Ivar Lovaas’s fascist youth past—documented now, finally, in an academic journal—there was no shock. Just a jolt of recognition. A quiet ah hah. Gotcha. I knew it. I’d always known it.
Once you’ve lived inside these systems—as their subject, their target, their data set—you start to see the seams. The way support is conditional. The way compliance is mistaken for success. The way deviation is punished, even when it harms no one. You learn to read the grain of the institution, and you begin to feel the lineage—not just in what’s done, but in how it’s done. The moment I read the new article on Lovaas’s fascist youth leadership, it didn’t feel like revelation. It felt like confirmation. The quiet, steady click of something long suspected falling into place. A paper trail for the intuition so many of us have carried: that the roots of behavioural control and institutional “care” stretch far deeper than we’ve been told, into soil laced with eugenics, with empire, with control disguised as compassion.
The article doesn’t tell us anything radically new. What it does is remove the alibi. There is no plausible deniability left. No comfortable myth of neutrality. No excuse not to reckon with where this all comes from.
And yet—reckoning is exactly what the Global North resists. Reconciliation, when it happens at all, is abstracted, delayed, defanged. Unlike the South African commission that placed testimony and truth-telling at the centre of repair, the U.S. and much of Europe prefer erasure by omission. No formal processes. No public records. No reparations. Just the gradual receding of history into silence. Institutions carry on, uninterrupted, their foundations unexamined. Because to confront those foundations would mean admitting that much of what we call “care” was never about healing—it was about order. About keeping some people safe by keeping others in line.
This is why the ABA industry will do everything it can to shout this down—or ignore it altogether. It will dismiss the findings as irrelevant, historical, a smear campaign. It will double down on its credentials, its “evidence-based” status, its decades of professionalisation. Because it knows what’s at stake. Acknowledging the ideological roots of ABA would mean reckoning not just with its founder, but with its entire methodology. It would mean admitting that its goals—compliance, indistinguishability, normalisation—were never neutral. They were inherited. They were designed.
But we don’t have to wait for the industry to catch up. We can begin the reckoning ourselves. We can name what has been done. We can listen to survivors. We can centre neurodivergent and disabled knowledge—messy, relational, unfinished. We can imagine new forms of support rooted not in conformity but in consent. In presence. In protection that doesn’t demand performance.
Because now the light is on. The documentation exists. The myth of benevolence is cracked. And in its place, there’s an opening—narrow, fragile, but real. We don’t have to keep replicating what was done to us. We don’t have to inherit systems just because they exist.
We were never broken. The system was. And though we were never meant to survive it, here we are—naming it. Refusing it. And imagining what comes next.