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Soviet Gulags
Chinese footbinding
Aztec Sacrifice
The Lobotomy Clinic
Torture Links
Of all of the dictators in history, Joseph Stalin is probably the most hated, by the most people, alive or dead. During his reign as dictator of the Soviet Union from 1929 until 1953, an estimated 30 Million people met premature and dismal deaths to satisfy Stalin's power hunger. His main 'Purge' occurred between 1936-1939, but that was only the high point of 20 years of attacking his people. Details of his crimes came to light only in recent years, most notably in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's massive 'Gulag Archipelago', 1973.
In it he describes the epic scale of oppression: waves of people arrested constantly, everywhere, in every city and town, incessantly, for twenty years. Everyone was encouraged to be an informer; children on parents, neighbors on neighbors, wives on husbands. Everyone, important or unimportant, lived in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night. People were arrested on ridiculous, trivial charges, and given horrific sentences. A woman was given ten years in the labor camps for stealing a spool of thread. Whole trainloads of freezing, starving prisoners were regularly deposited in the northern camps.
Solzhenitsyn describes the constant gushing river of new prisoners as the 'Soviet Sewage System'.
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
During the 20's and 30's, the newly formed Soviet Union was racked by famine and depression. Poverty and starvation were everywhere. Stalin's edict to collectivize (put under government control) industry and agriculture caused the farmers to rebel, and they destroyed half of the U.S.S.R.'s livestock and produce. Millions of whole families were sent to the camps. Or, farmers were sent to the camps for losing their crops to bad weather. They were 'sabotaging state agriculture' or 'wrecking'. A clerk late for work was arrested for 'economic subversion', and given a ten year sentence. "A plumber turned off the loudspeaker in his room every time the endless letters to Stalin were being read. (Every day for hours on the radio). His next-door neighbor denounced him. He got 'Socially Dangerous Element'; eight years. "An electrician had a high-tension line break in his sector: Twenty Years.""Six geologists, (the Kotovich group) were sentenced to ten years under 58-7 'for intentionally concealing reserves of tin ore in underground sites in anticipation of the arrival of the Germans." In other words, they had failed to find the deposits."(p. 64)
Stalin's self created 'Cult of Personality' compelled near worship from his countrymen. Just talking about the famine was defaming the government, insulting Comrade Stalin: Ten Years. At a district Party Conference, when at the end a tribute to 'The Great Leader' was given, the standing ovation lasted for five minutes, then eight minutes. No one dared to be the first to stop clapping. The crowd kept clapping for eleven solid minutes, until the the Director of the town's paper factory 'assumed a businesslike expression and resumed his seat.' The factory director was arrested that night and given ten years in the Gulag.(p. 69-70) Stalin even executed thousands of his own party members, including the chiefs and countless officers of the Soviet Army.
Arrest and Interrogation
The Soviets were not as imaginative as the Spanish Inquisitors, but were equally effective. They had some inhibitions about drawing blood, but they knew how to break people. A constantly used technique was sleep deprivation, ever new shifts of guards keeping a subject awake for days, endlessly questioning, over and over with the same questions. Testimony was carefully recorded, and when a person's story differed in the slightest on the twentieth or thirtieth exhausted telling, new charges and suspicions were brought up. People were confined to tiny boxes infested with bloodsucking bedbugs, and left there for days. Others were packed into tiny rooms with a crowd of other prisoners, left there indefinitely. Prisoners would be made to stand at attention, under a bright light for a solid week, well fed and rested guards kicking or clubbing them, or burning them with cigarettes at the slightest signs of sleep.
A male prisoner would be held to the floor while the interrogator's boot toe crushed his testicles. Attractive females were used as sex objects; when no longer fresh, thrown back into the sewer.
The accused would be compelled to kneel on concrete for twelve, twenty-four or forty-eight hours, waiting to be questioned. Constantly starved prisoners were taunted by fat guards mowing through plates of lamb, potatoes, bread and borscht.
Tens of thousands of victims were simply shot, anything more too complex for dull-witted bureaucrat-thugs.
The Gulags
The Soviet prison camps brought a new meaning to the word 'suffering'. Situated in the icy north of Russia, bitter cold and starvation became the constant dominant feature in every prisoner's life/mind. Worked mercilessly for 16 hour days building government projects 12 months a year, getting four or five hours of 'sleep' a night on frozen boards, subsisting on watery soup and tiny scraps of bread, prisoner's humanity dwindled to a shred as the years ground by.
The slightest infraction of camp rules quickly incurred additional sentences of ten or twenty years. People did get released from the camps, having lived out their sentences, often to be re-arrested days or weeks later on absurd charges, and sentenced to ten or twenty more years.
Sections of the Soviet Union were 'liberated' from Stalin during WWII by Hitler, whose oppressive techniques are well known; out of the frying pan and into the fire. In fact, Stalin and Hitler had made an alliance in 1939, but Hitler, in his frenzy of viciousness, turned on Stalin in 1941 and attacked the U.S.S.R.
Widely varying estimates claim that between 30 million to 100 million souls met untimely deaths under Joseph Stalin. Stalin was also a fundamentalist, but instead of the Bible or the Koran as his authority, he had his own twisted whims, and his "Seven Year Plans."
The Seven Year Plan was his system of "un-rooting" the populace by constantly relocating it, every seven years at the least. The idea is to break up community loyalty and identity, and rendering the individual helpless in the face of the government.
This same thing is going on in Western Culture, but instead of resisting it, Americans are plunging headlong into it, throwing away their individuality as fast as they can just to be wearing that Nike logo, or to be driving that shiny, impressive SUV.
The homogenization of the business landscape into one McKFC-Bell-Mart turns every place into every other place. Everything becomes replaceable. Cars, shoes, food, entertainment, art, and people all become components; machine parts. It's the Totalitarian's Dream Come True.
Lily Feet- Chinese Footbinding
From the 10th century until the 1930's, a common practice in China was binding the feet of women and forcing them into doll-like points. This rendered them unable to walk normally, and reduced them to helpless sex objects for the men who owned them.
The process began in early childhood, for to attain the coveted 'Three Inch Foot' as an adult, the woman's foot had to be deformed from a very early age. (5 or 6) Mothers bound their daughter's feet unquestioningly, if they expected them to ever find a husband.
The physical process which created this foot is described
by Howard S. Levy in Chinese Footibinding: The History of a
Curious Erotic Custom:
"The success or failure of footbinding depended on the
skillful application of a bandage around each foot. The bandage,
about two inches wide and ten feet long, was wrapped in the
following way. One end was placed on the inside of the instep, and from
there it was carried over the small toes so as to force the
toes in and towards the sole. The large toe was left
unbound. The bandage was then wrapped around the heel so forcefully
that the heel and toes were drawn closer together. The
process was then repeated from the beginning until the entire bandage
had been applied. The foot of the young child was subjected to a
coercive and unremitting pressure, for the object was not merely to
confine the foot but to make the toes bend under and into the sole
and bring the heel and sole as close together as physically possible.
Another observer reports:
"The flesh often became putrescent during the binding and portions sloughed off from the sole;
sometimes one or more toes dropped off."
Alum was used to absorb swelling and pus, and one victim
describes it this way:
"Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Each new pair
was one to two tenths of an inch smaller than the previous
one. The shoes were unyielding, and it took pressure to get
into them...After changing more than ten pairs of shoes,
my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. I had been in
binding for a month when my younger sister started; when no one was around, we would weep
together. In summer, my feet smelled of pus and blood;
in winter, my feet felt cold because of lack of circulation...
Four of the toes were curled in like dead caterpillars; no outsider
would have believed they belonged to a human being.
Millions of Chinese women endured this atrocity for generations, and it is an example of another kind of fundamentalism, sexist fundamentalism.
Aztec Sacrifice
The Aztec gods were remarkably bloodthirsty; their favorite offering was the still beating heart freshly ripped from the chests of sacrificial victims. Another ritual consisted of royal personages pulling spiked cords through holes pierced in tongues, lips and foreskins. The dripping blood was collected and used ritually.
Xipe Totec was the Aztec god of spring, and every March the priests flayed living victims and paraded in their skins. At the feast held in honor of the maize goddess, young women were beheaded as they danced, to symbolize the harvesting of the maize cobs.
The Aztec sacrifices were grisly enough to disgust even the Spanish conquistadores used to the inquisition. Bernal Diaz explored the temple quarter of Tenochitlan, the Aztec capital, where he was shown baskets of human flesh which had been prepared for the ceremonial cannibalism which played a part in certain festivals. The temple walls were crusted with blood, as were the clothes and the long hair of the officiating priests. Diaz said, with great disgust, that the place stank like a Spanish slaughterhouse. A great rack was filled with the skulls of thousands whose hearts and blood had been offered to the insatiable gods.
In the 1950's and 60's, the US government was obsessed with discovering secrets of 'mind control'. At McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, the American Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron ran a clinic that rivalled any Soviet interrogation facility. (U.S. law forbade such experimentation, so nearby Montreal was chosen.) His techniques of 'depatterning', 'psychic driving', isolation and drug 'therapies' took many already mentally ill people into depths of madness they could never have imagined. Many of his patients were lobotomized, and sent to an oblivion some remain in today.
'Depatterning' was 'the destruction of the victim's personality' by repeated shock treatments up to forty times the intensity considered safe and drug induced sleep for periods up to ninety days. 'Psychic Driving' consisted of creating tape loops out of therapy sessions: selecting the most painful admissions and looping them, then forcing patients to listen to them over and over for up to 23 hours a day, sleeping or waking. They wore headphones, and even used football helmets with headphones set in them so patients would be unable to escape the electronically induced mantras. Patients were drugged to weaken their resistance, and given curare to paralyze them so they couldn't remove the headphones and helmets.
Dr. Cameron's efforts were supported by the U.S. government, and clandestinely were attempts to find ways to achieve 'mind control'; the ultimate purpose to 'program' assassins and to get secrets from captured enemies.
There are many documented cases of the government and Dr. Cameron using LSD-25, and prolonged isolation and interrogation on both captured prisoners and U.S. military personnel, besides the thousands of mental patients that were considered expendable. Dr. Cameron's special LSD-25 Experiments were part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA project to learn secrets of mind control. Cameron's 'work' was just one of many of their schemes, and imparted a new meaning to 'tripping your brains out.'
In Journey into Madness (by Thomas Gordon, Bantam Books, New York, 1989), the author details many individual cases from the Cameron clinic; one case is followed through most of the book, the reader becoming more and more familiar with a woman named Madeleine Smith.
Madeleine's Story
Madeleine was a 27 year old newscaster in New York city,
in the mid 1950's. She had begun to have delusions and
terrifying dreams. She thought that 'Three Wise Men'
were constantly telling her what to do, and quit
her job because they began to appear sitting on the
microphone. She was referred to Dr. Cameron,
who put her on Thorazine. She feared him greatly,
because he was so grim and forbidding, and he asked
her questions that made no sense; questions like:
'Do you ever imagine you are being struck by molten raindrops?
Fire or bullets?'. Her paranoia was made worse by her fear of
Dr. Cameron. She began to believe he was working with
the Three Wise men. She decided to commit suicide by
taking all of the Thorazine at once, and would pace and
search in her apartment endlessly trying to find where her
husband had hidden the bottle. The Wise men constantly
taunted and ridiculed her, telling her how worthless
she was. Her husband was caring and attentive, but
it had gotten so the only way she could bear to have
sex with him was if she pretended he was her father.
All of her sessions with Dr. Cameron were recorded, and he always called her as he did all women, 'Lassie', or 'Girlie'. His severity and disturbing questions made each 'therapy' session worse for Madeleine.
Madeleine finally found the bottle and took all of the Thorazine at once. Her husband, having called every two hours from work for weeks, rushed home and got her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. On Dr. Cameron's recommendation, she was committed to his facility at McGill University.
At the clinic, Madeleine was now subjected to more intensive 'treatment'. She developed another hallucination she called the 'Sloth', and despite the countless times the electro-shock cart had been wheeled up to her rubber sheeted bed and the paddles on her temples had zapped her into oblivion, the hallucinations got worse.
Over three years she spent forty-four weeks at the clinic, consumed mountains of pills and thousands of volts. Each time she went home, she tried to kill herself.
Her final stay at the clinic was marked by a substantial increase in drugs and electroshock treatments. After each jolt of electricity, Madeleine would have convulsions. A rubber gag was inserted into her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue off. Usually every morning she recieved six separate bursts of electricity.
At this point Madeleine tried to escape from the clinic. Running in her robe in Montreal traffic, she was retrieved by clinic interns and returned to her bed. Dr. Cameron, satisfied that Madeleine's Depatterning was going well, was ready to begin the Psychic Driving phase. Now it was time for Madeleine to go to the 'Sleep Room'.
She now found herself in a dormitory silent except for the whispering of the tape loops in the helmets of the drugged patients. Many were in beds, some sat at tables being spoon fed by nurses.
"Madeleine had been kept in a chemically controlled sleep for thirty-six days and was awakened only to eat. In between her meals she received thirty more multiple shocks."
During an extended stretch in the isolation chamber,
Madeleine had uttered these words:
"...I used to stay out late just to get him going.
I wanted to arouse him. I wanted him to love me so I could love
him the way my mother never had. I wanted him..." These
words in her own voice were looped for
weeks in Madeleine's helmet, during her stay in the sleep room.
After another forty days in the isolator, Madeleine was not improving. Dr. Cameron decided it was time for her to have a lobotomy.
Between 1944 and 1960, over 100,000 lobotomies had been performed in the United States. The figure for Europe was similar. Tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed in the Pacific Basin and India. There, the technique was simpler- a sufficiently strong electro-shock put them to sleep and was cheaper than an anesthetic. "A 'trocar', a graduated instrument rather like a miniature ice pick, was driven through the bony orbit behind the eye socket and tapped gently with a surgeon's mallet to destroy brain cells and nerve fibers. Three or four patients could be handled in an hour." (p. 219)
Madeleine Smith's lobotomy was slightly more sophisticated:
"A theater porter wheeled Madeleine and he and the nurse transferred her from the trolley onto the operating table. Madeleine wore only a surgical gown. She stared, fully conscious, into the powerful overhead light.
"The radical lobotomy would be performed under a local anesthetic so that the surgeon could immediately judge her disorientation, indicating how successful was his severing of her frontal lobes. Until he observed the required signs, he would continue to destroy that portion of her brain.
"Do you feel anything, lassie?" Dr. Cameron always asked. Madeleine mumbled as he peeled back the skin on her forehead, exposing the bone.
Using the surgeon's drill, "He drilled for a few moments and a fine spray of bone shavings spumed into the air...After he finally retracted the brace, the resident collected the skull shavings from Madeleine's head and placed them in a small gallipot. The dust would be used to fill up the burr hole at the end of the operation."
"Madeleine's brain was exposed, milky pink in color."
"The surgeon asked for a long steel spatula that had replaced the wire stylet Dr. Moniz had used as a leucotome in his first operations; the stylet had proven not to be stiff enough, and the wire had a tendency to bend in a patient's brain, traversing through blood vessels and tissue not meant to be destroyed. The journals had been filled with accounts of patients who had started to have epileptic seizures and other serious complications caused by the wire. The spatula was an altogether more sturdy weapon."
"Lassie, count to ten."
A series of grunts
came from Madeleine.
"The surgeon inserted the spatula into the burr hole. He worked to a definite routine: down a few centimeters, then a pause to move the instrument a few centimeters laterally. Each move destroyed more of Madeleine's brain."
"Can you sing your favorite song?"
A strange moaning came from Madeleine.
"The surgeon drove the spatula further into her brain, extending and widening the wound, from which blood oozed.
"Lassie, count to ten."
There was a grunt from Madeleine.
The surgeon continued to destroy her brain.
"Do you feel sleepy?"
She gave the same response.
The surgeon withdrew the spatula and asked for a cannula, a heavy-gauge hypodermic needle. He inserted it in the hole and, using steady pressure, drove it down to the spheroidal, the bony ridge at the base of the skull. The cannula was withdrawn. Once more he inserted the spatula, and swung its handle upward, so that the blade could be drawn along the base of her skull and a cut made as far to the side as possible in her brain."
"Dr. Cameron continued to ask questions. They were part of what he termed the disorientation yardstick- his means of knowing how much brain destruction was being acheived.
"Lassie, speak to me."
A further grunt.
The surgeon continued, and finally she made no more sounds, closed her eyes and fell into a stupor.
"Dr. Cameron bent over Madeleine. Removing the eyeshield, he lifted one and then another of her eyelids. She stared vacuously back at him.
"Lassie, its all over, no more pain."
Later that day, Madeleine was transferred to St. Jean de Dieu hospital, to enter the custodial care of the religious sisters who maintained a number of zombies like her."
It was (and is) Political Fundamentalism that justifies this kind of madness. The CIA felt justified in its psychological experiments; they believed it was necessary to defeat the communists.
LINKS
Atrocities of the Christian Church
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Bloodshed for the Prince of Peace
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