Endgame Vol.1 (37 page)

I’ve seen drawings by children of both groups. Those by children exposed to pesticides are pathetic, and I mean that in its deepest sense of raising pathos, except among the fully enculturated, who probably won’t notice, or even noticing won’t feel, or even feeling won’t act.

Instead of the fully formed figures created by children four to six years old—stick figures with smiling faces or balloon men complete with belly buttons—the creations become instead unidentifiable scratches, as though a chicken stepped in ink then made its way across the paper.
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Let’s be clear: Those in power are poisoning children, stealing their physical and cognitive health: making them weak, sick, and stupid.

How close must the culture cut before you will fight back?

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

WHY CIVILIZATION IS SKILLING THE WORLD, TAKE ONE
. Here are the words of Marine Corps Sergeant Sprague of Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, part of the U.S. force invading Iraq: “I’ve been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain’t seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant. These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of twenty-five hundred you got a McDonald’s on one end and a Hardee’s at the other.”
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WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWO
. I received a note from a friend, Katherine Lo, a sophomore at Yale University. She set up a talk for me there. Soft-spoken almost to the point of shyness, she nonetheless possesses courage far beyond that held by most of us.

Her note: “I hung an upside-down American flag outside my window facing the main campus to express my dissent with the war the U.S. government is waging on the Iraqi people and the wars it has waged and is waging economically, politically, militaristically, and culturally on other countries and peoples.

“The next night several males carrying 2 x 4s entered my dorm suite without permission, then attempted to break into my bedroom, which was locked. After about ten minutes, they left the following note on my message board: ‘I love kicking the Muslims ass bitches ass! They should all die with Mohammad. We as Americans should destroy them and launch so many missiles their mothers don’t produce healthy offspring. Fuck Iraqi Saddam following fucks. I hate you, GO AMERICA.’”

She continued, “It is hard for me to fathom that people are capable of such malevolence. But this same hatred and racism is prevalent in the very policies of the U.S. government, the blind patriotism of many Americans, and the deeply sickening aspect of the dominant culture that has led some Americans to believe that an Iraqi life is somehow worth less than an American life. There is something seriously and fundamentally wrong here.”

The incident in her room was not unique. She compiled a list of similar incidents that took place at Yale in just thirty-six hours. You could probably do the same for your own locale. The evening after the men entered her room, a group
of undergraduates participated in a silent, non-violent vigil in the university’s dining halls to mourn the deaths of Iraqi civilians. One participant, Raphael Soifer, was followed outside and spat on by a white male. That same evening, in response to an article Kat wrote, a number of anonymous, racist, and threatening posts were made on an online forum. Late that night, perhaps in response to posts on that forum signed by an African American, the following note was left on the door of the Afro-American Cultural Center: “I hope you protesters and your children are killed in the next terrorist attack. Signed Fuck You.” Many undergraduates decided to fly flags upside down outside their windows as a sign of dissent, distress, and solidarity with Kat. At least one student’s suite was illegally entered, her flag reversed. The next morning, students put up an art installation, permitted by the President’s Office. The work included twenty-two American flags representing twenty-two U.S. invasions. One flag, in the center, hung upside-down. A group of husky white males confronted the activists, demanded to see the permit. When it was produced, the group ripped down the flags anyway (forming a parallel to the U.S. demanding that Iraq allow U.S. weapons inspectors into its country, and when Iraq acceded the U.S. invaded anyway). That morning, another upside-down flag outside a student’s window was torn down and stolen.

Smackyface
.

What does that mean?
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We need to be explicit about interrogation techniques employed by the CIA and associated groups. I’m sure you’ve seen the CIA Torture Manuals—oh, sorry, Pain Compliance Manuals, oh, sorry, this time a real title (and I’m not making this one up) “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, 1983”—and I’m sure you can guess their contents. I’m sure you’ve seen the chapter from the 1963 CIA “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual” entitled
Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources
. These manuals are explicit: “The following are the principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis, and induced regression.” They go on to describe the advantages and disadvantages of each technique, and how each of them can be most effectively used to break their victims, that is, to cause three important responses, “debility, dependency, and dread,” that is, to cause their victims to
“regress,” that is, to lose their autonomy. As one manual puts it: “these techniques . . . are in essence methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence. . . . As the interrogatee slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state, his learned or structured personality traits fall away in a reversed chronological order, so that the characteristics most recently acquired—which are also the characteristics drawn upon by the interrogatee in his own defense—are the first to go. As Gill and Brenman have pointed out, regression is basically a loss of autonomy.”
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In short and in vernacular, the point is to mindfuck victims (or as the manual also puts it: “Coercive procedures are designed not only to exploit the resistant source’s internal conflicts and induce him to wrestle with himself but also to bring a superior outside force to bear upon the subject’s resistance”) until they give the perpetrators what they want. This is the essence of abuse. It is the essence of civilization. Every day we see these processes and purposes at work in the culture at large, whether it is teachers, bosses, cops, politicians, or abusive parents who try to exploit our internal conflicts to increase their control, safe in the knowledge that if we refuse to be so exploited they will use force to achieve the same ends.
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The manuals often describe the techniques with an absolute lack of attention to morality and humanity (and of course the same can be said for many manuals for teachers, bosses, cops, politicians, and [abusive] parents), as though they’re talking not about the destruction of human psyches (and bodies), but about how best to get to the grocery store: “Drugs are no more the answer to the interrogator’s prayer than the polygraph, hypnosis, or other aids.” Or this: Techniques are designed “to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee,” and “not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird.” When victims have been hammered with “double-talk questions” and “illogical” statements long enough, all sensible points of reference begin to blur, and “as the process continues, day after day if necessary, the subject begins to try to make sense of the situation, which becomes mentally intolerable. Now he is likely to make significant admissions, or even to pour out his whole story, just to stop the flow of babble which assails him.” Or this: “The manner and timing of arrest can contribute substantially to the interrogator’s purposes. What we aim to do is to ensure that the manner of arrest achieves, if possible, surprise, and the maximum amount of mental discomfort in order to catch the suspect off balance and to deprive him of the initiative. One should therefore arrest him at a moment when he
least expects it and when his mental and physical resistance is at its lowest. The ideal time at which to arrest a person is in the early hours of the morning because surprise is achieved then, and because a person’s resistance physiologically as well as psychologically is at its lowest.” Or this: “The effectiveness of a threat depends not only on what sort of person the interrogatee is and whether he believes that his questioner can and will carry the threat out but also on the interrogator’s reasons for threatening. If the interrogator threatens because he is angry, the subject frequently senses the fear of failure underlying the anger and is strengthened in his own resolve to resist. Threats delivered coldly are more effective than those shouted in rage. It is especially important that a threat not be uttered in response to the interrogatee’s own expressions of hostility. These, if ignored, can induce feelings of guilt, whereas retorts in kind relieve the subject’s feelings. Another reason why threats induce compliance not evoked by the inflection of duress is that the threat grants the interrogatee time for compliance. It is not enough that a resistant source should be placed under the tension of fear; he must also discern an acceptable escape route.” Or this: “1. The more completely the place of confinement eliminates sensory stimuli, the more rapidly and deeply will the interrogatee be affected. Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light (or weak artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective. 2. An early effect of such an environment is anxiety. How soon it appears and how strong it is depends upon the psychological characteristics of the individual. 3. The interrogator can benefit from the subject’s anxiety. As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject’s mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact, and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role. 4. The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject’s tendencies toward compliance.” Or this, “It has been plausibly suggested that, whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself. In the simple torture situation the contest is one between the individual and his tormentor. . . . When the
individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter. . . . As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so.”
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We need to bring this discussion to the real world. Twenty-four-year-old Ines Murillo was a prisoner in a secret army jail in Honduras, where she was interrogated by soldiers trained by these manuals, who gave reports on their interrogations to CIA officials who visited the prisons. For eighty days she was beaten, electrically shocked, burned, starved, exposed, threatened, stripped naked, and sexually molested. Her interrogators fed her raw dead birds and rats. To keep her from sleeping, they poured freezing water on her head every ten minutes. They made her stand for hours without sleep and without being allowed to urinate.
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