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felis_ultharus) wrote2010-06-17 07:41 pm
felis_ultharus) wrote2010-06-17 07:41 pm
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About a decade ago, I paid a visit to the Allan Memorial Institute - a psychiatric hospital where a friend of mine was being kept against his will. His parents had him committed. We snuck in to perform a Pagan ritual to mark the beginning of spring, which involved sneaking a ceremonial sword called an athame into his room. We made a little bit of sacred space in that ugly spot.
For anyone who's never seen the Allan Memorial, it's an imposing, grim building. It's a stone mansion up on a hill whose original owner named it Ravenscrag. It looks like the kind of building that would be haunted in a Gothic novel.
I didn't know anything about the building's history then. I'd never heard about MKUltra, and the now well-documented "Sleep Room" experiments. But if Naomi Klein is right, much of the uglier aspects of the modern world was born in that mansion on a hill in Montreal.
Klein sets herself an ambitious thesis - that both post-WWII American foreign policy and CIA torture methods are based on psychological models and assumptions created as part of the Sleep Room experiment.
The way it works is this. Traditional interrogation-by-torture simply uses pain to try and overcome loyalties and values. The idea was to use pain as a battering ram against the wall of resistance.
The Sleep Room stuff promised a new form of interrogation, as outlined in a declassified CIA document called Kubark.
In these experiments, a doctor named Ewen Cameron took a group of people with minor psychological complaints, and subjected them to a series of procedures to destabilize them. They removed all fixed references, all routine, all markers of identity, even names. The belief was that human beings could be erased, that they would then revert to a childhood state, and then essentially be re-made by their therapists.
Of course, human beings don't actually work that way. We aren't blank slates. People who went into the program with minor depression came out schizophrenic or with severe memory loss. But they were still themselves.
But what was a failure as psychology was considered a success for the torture business. The new kind of torture that emerged from the sleep-room experiments worked differently. Instead of battering down the wall of resistance, it sapped it. It removed fixed reference points, confused the victim, set their value system off balance. It did it with pain (shock especially) and humiliation, but also by removing routine from people, cutting them off from the outside world, and stripping them of their names.
Postmodern torture.
She successfully draws a connecting line from the Allan Memorial to CIA-sponsored torture. The documentation is plentiful here. "Kubark" outlines the MKUltra's benefit as a method of torture.
Her more ambitious thesis - that MKUltra also formed the basis of US foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century, and domestic policy in the 21st - is not quite on as solid footing. It does have merit, but it's harder to prove.
It is an intriguing idea, though. She argues that everything from the CIA-backed coup in Chile to the invasion of Iraq to the response to Katrina were based on MKUltra theories about human psychology. She suggests that they were designed to throw whole populations off balance, break their routines, destroy their identities, and remake them and their countries in a preferable form. She argues that "Shock and Awe" in Iraq was part of that.
She also argues that the US missed the most important lesson of the experiments - they don't work. The patients were psychologically damaged, but they were still who they who were, and they'd come to hate their torturers. And that's exactly what's happened in Iraq, and everywhere else it's been tried.
As I said, ambitious. But it's an engaging work, but it has changed my perspective on some things.
In particular, the pattern she describes - where a natural disaster or artificial crisis becomes an excuse to sweep in and re-invent an economy - does accurately describe the events of the last 25 years. And as she says, it always does come with a declaration that the crisis has made all past history irrelevant. That was then, this is now. A post-911 world. Post-Katrina. Post-Saddam. As she points out, the neo-liberal types are forever looking for blank slates. They'll make one if they have to, but they're also happy to take advantage of one that falls into their laps by accident, like 9/11 or Katrina.
Problem for them is, there are no blank slates. Not in the real world. Only constant violence can create the appearance of one. And as Klein says, shock wears off. If you want to know what that looks like, she says, just look at the radical South American leaders. Look at the resistance in Iraq.
I leave it open whether she proves the pedigree of this political approach. But this is still probably the most important political book written in English in the last ten years. Klein does her research well, drawing only on mainstream sources and eyewitness interviews and biographies. She's fond of hoisting her subjects on their own petards. Her best evidence against the CIA, for instance, tends to be their own documents.
She never gets loopy, keeps things grounded. She knows she's treading in conspiracy theory territory, and is always careful to deflect the crazy theories. For all the criticism of her, she's actually one of the most accessible and down-to-earth political writers on any side of the spectrum.
In short, highly recommended.
In more personal news, I know I need a vacation when I almost use the word "embiggens" in a student's English report card.
For anyone who's never seen the Allan Memorial, it's an imposing, grim building. It's a stone mansion up on a hill whose original owner named it Ravenscrag. It looks like the kind of building that would be haunted in a Gothic novel.
I didn't know anything about the building's history then. I'd never heard about MKUltra, and the now well-documented "Sleep Room" experiments. But if Naomi Klein is right, much of the uglier aspects of the modern world was born in that mansion on a hill in Montreal.
Klein sets herself an ambitious thesis - that both post-WWII American foreign policy and CIA torture methods are based on psychological models and assumptions created as part of the Sleep Room experiment.
The way it works is this. Traditional interrogation-by-torture simply uses pain to try and overcome loyalties and values. The idea was to use pain as a battering ram against the wall of resistance.
The Sleep Room stuff promised a new form of interrogation, as outlined in a declassified CIA document called Kubark.
In these experiments, a doctor named Ewen Cameron took a group of people with minor psychological complaints, and subjected them to a series of procedures to destabilize them. They removed all fixed references, all routine, all markers of identity, even names. The belief was that human beings could be erased, that they would then revert to a childhood state, and then essentially be re-made by their therapists.
Of course, human beings don't actually work that way. We aren't blank slates. People who went into the program with minor depression came out schizophrenic or with severe memory loss. But they were still themselves.
But what was a failure as psychology was considered a success for the torture business. The new kind of torture that emerged from the sleep-room experiments worked differently. Instead of battering down the wall of resistance, it sapped it. It removed fixed reference points, confused the victim, set their value system off balance. It did it with pain (shock especially) and humiliation, but also by removing routine from people, cutting them off from the outside world, and stripping them of their names.
Postmodern torture.
She successfully draws a connecting line from the Allan Memorial to CIA-sponsored torture. The documentation is plentiful here. "Kubark" outlines the MKUltra's benefit as a method of torture.
Her more ambitious thesis - that MKUltra also formed the basis of US foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century, and domestic policy in the 21st - is not quite on as solid footing. It does have merit, but it's harder to prove.
It is an intriguing idea, though. She argues that everything from the CIA-backed coup in Chile to the invasion of Iraq to the response to Katrina were based on MKUltra theories about human psychology. She suggests that they were designed to throw whole populations off balance, break their routines, destroy their identities, and remake them and their countries in a preferable form. She argues that "Shock and Awe" in Iraq was part of that.
She also argues that the US missed the most important lesson of the experiments - they don't work. The patients were psychologically damaged, but they were still who they who were, and they'd come to hate their torturers. And that's exactly what's happened in Iraq, and everywhere else it's been tried.
As I said, ambitious. But it's an engaging work, but it has changed my perspective on some things.
In particular, the pattern she describes - where a natural disaster or artificial crisis becomes an excuse to sweep in and re-invent an economy - does accurately describe the events of the last 25 years. And as she says, it always does come with a declaration that the crisis has made all past history irrelevant. That was then, this is now. A post-911 world. Post-Katrina. Post-Saddam. As she points out, the neo-liberal types are forever looking for blank slates. They'll make one if they have to, but they're also happy to take advantage of one that falls into their laps by accident, like 9/11 or Katrina.
Problem for them is, there are no blank slates. Not in the real world. Only constant violence can create the appearance of one. And as Klein says, shock wears off. If you want to know what that looks like, she says, just look at the radical South American leaders. Look at the resistance in Iraq.
I leave it open whether she proves the pedigree of this political approach. But this is still probably the most important political book written in English in the last ten years. Klein does her research well, drawing only on mainstream sources and eyewitness interviews and biographies. She's fond of hoisting her subjects on their own petards. Her best evidence against the CIA, for instance, tends to be their own documents.
She never gets loopy, keeps things grounded. She knows she's treading in conspiracy theory territory, and is always careful to deflect the crazy theories. For all the criticism of her, she's actually one of the most accessible and down-to-earth political writers on any side of the spectrum.
In short, highly recommended.
In more personal news, I know I need a vacation when I almost use the word "embiggens" in a student's English report card.