ASSAULT ON THE PAST

Everything I have written in the last two blogs should be of the most urgent concern to American citizens. It's not just a matter of giving prisoners more humane treatment: the whole point is that what is being done to them can be done to us. After all, José Padilla is an American citizen! The three years he spent in the brig without formal charges or access to a lawyer-- three years which destroyed his life-- were completely uncalled for. Under the Military Commissions Act, the president and his chosen henchmen can at will do the same to any citizen. The recent Supreme Court ruling in Boumediène v. Bush states that detainees in the so-called "War on Terror" have the right to a writ of habeas corpus, but it is almost certain that the executive branch will refuse to abide by it. The intention of the MCA is clear: American citizens are unambiguously included among those who are liable to be arrested as Unlawful Enemy Combatants (UECs)-- just read the law! The fact that they may not be terrorists at all means nothing so long as they have no way of proving that they are not. The situation created by the Military Commissions Act is a Catch-22: the provision denying habeas corpus to UECs has been ruled to be unconstitutional, but if you or I are arrested under its provisions tomorrow, we shall have no way of challenging our imprisonment because we will be denied access to a lawyer. After all, the judicial system is essentially passive-- it cannot rule upon a case until it is brought before it, and if the executive chooses to ignore its rulings and deny people their right to due process, there will be no way that they can bring their case before it. If tortures such as ECT (electroconvulsive treatment) are being used to destroy the minds of people classified as UECs right now, they can be used against us. We are in imminent danger not only of suffering hideous tortures, but of losing both our identities and our minds.

The danger to American democracy exactly parallels that which our present government presents to the individual. For what it means to be an American is eing re-defined: instead of fierce love of freedom and independence, patriotism today means being willing to go off to fight senseless wars at the whim of an all-powerful "commander-in-chief". The version of "Americanism" taught to José Padilla in the brig is one which sets President Bush in the position of Hitler or Stalin. Orwell said that someday the entire Declaration of Independence may be impossible to convey except by the term "Crimethink", and we are closer to that day than most people realize. Already schools are stressing practical skills such as computer science (which incidentally, through the internet, presents all the more opportunity for government spying) at the expense of the study of history. It is clearly the government's intention to cut us off not only from the knowledge of our own ethnic roots, which is essential to our identities, but most especially, from the history of democracy. What can be more dangerous to them than a study of fifth-century Athens, or the events which led to the signing of Magna Carta in the thirteenth century, or indeed of the Age of Enlightenment which gave birth to our own republic? No doubt the teaching of history will eventually be banned. In order to acquire absolute power, our government must erase all memory of America's past just as it has erased the memory of their own past from the minds of ECT victims. What Orwells' O'Brien says to Winston holds true for nations as well as individuals: "He who controls the past controls the future."

How could a nation which was once the freest on earth have taken such a path? The most immediate answer is the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. But as Montesquieu would have said, that was only the occasion, not the underlying cause. Surely the failure of the Founding Fathers to include the Right to Revolution, which is invoked in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution was a mistake. But it is not at all clear that the majority of Americans would revolt even if they believed that they had the right to. Many intellectuals would say that the thirst of Americans for material gain is the root of the problem, and they have a point. Certainly the notion that "the business of America is business" has been very bad for democracy, which demands a vigilant and politically aware citizenry. In connection with the subject of my last two blogs, it is interesting to note that two major advocates of ECT, Harold Sackheim of Columbia University and psychiatrist Richard Abrams, who wrote the only medical school textbook on ECT, have long had a financial interest in companies which manufacture ECT devices (Sackheim was a consultant to Mecta Corporation, and Abrams owned Somatics Inc.; see ect.org). But I think that by far the most dangerous tendency in American life is the fascination with technology, a technology which is now destroying the environment as well as threatening our liberty.

I have written before about the theories of James Burnham and Karl Wittfogel, the first of whom exercised a decisive influence upon Orwell (see "The Bell Telephone Hour", http://tortureandtotalitarianism.blogspot.com). It is difficult not to conclude that the increasing complexity of modern technology is the underlying factor which is facilitating the growth of an all-powerful executive in the same way that irrigation agriculture furthered the development of Oriental Despotism. But no society is doomed to tyranny by mere physical factors alone. No, it is an attitude characteristic of all too many Americans (and as the whole world becomes Americanized, of people in general) which is at fault here: the conviction that technology can solve every problem ("better living through chemistry") and the constant search for a "quick fix". I first became concerned about this tendency in the early nineteen-seventies, when B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theories became an object of controversy. Skinner, a psychologist who wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, believed that people with psychological problems could be spared years of psychotherapy through his system of rewards and punishments, which treated only symptoms and ignored the causes of the mental illness. Although he personally stressed rewards over punishments, I feared at the time that his mechanistic approach to human behavior would be misused in a most inhumane way and I was right. Today young people at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Massachusetts-- some autistic, some mentally disturbed-- are given painful electric shocks to correct even such minor infractions as yelling or cursing. One mother sent her troubled son there in the expectation that in addition to the immediate modification of his destructive behavior, he would receive psychotherapy to determine its underlying causes. The director, Mathew Israel, told her that if she wanted psychotherapy for her son, she should take him home (http/www.caica.org/Shock_tactics_10-28-07.htm) The victims of Israel's "school for shock" remain in a hellish situation from which no amount of negative publicity has been able to save them (one can only hope for a rebellion such as is portrayed in the British film If!)

When Senator Thomas Eagleton had ECT in 1960 and 1966, he no doubt was looking for a "quick fix" which would end his depression and still enable him to continue his political career without the embarrassment of having to admit that he had emotinal problems. In fact, the ECT effectively ended his career when Senator George McGovern was forced to reject him as his running mate because of revelations that he had received this treatment. At the time, I felt rather sorry for him, and considered his removal from the ticket as an indication of the widespread and unfounded prejudice against mental patients. As my local Congressman Ron Dellums said, "Eagleton on the couch is better than Spiro Agnew standing up!" Today, when the negative effects of ECT are better known, I would not want anyone who was so unwise as to have chosen it as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate. I would have more faith in someone who was truly "on the couch"-- that is to say, in long-term therapy-- than someone who had voluntarily submitted his brain to such a dangerous procedure. Little did I know then that we would someday all be faced with the possibility that we might be imprisoned without access to a lawyer and forced to endure such tortures. It is quite conceivable that our government, which is displaying a sudden and sinister concern for the mental health of its citizens, will follow the lead of the Soviet Union and start sending dissidents to mental hospitals, where they will be treated as badly as if they were in prison. We are seeing the beginnings of a new kind of holocaust, in which the goal is not the extermination of the body but of the spirit.

The only long-term answer to this situation is to reduce our dependence upon technology. If we do not return to a simpler way of life that is more in harmony with the Earth, Mother Nature may force us to, for a rupture of the Cascadian Fault in the Northwest Pacific, another major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, or worse yet, an eruption of the Long Valley or Yellowstone Supervolcanoes is a distinct possibility. With all the tragedy that such events would entail, they seem easier to face than the prospect of being ruled by an Orwellian, unassailable totalitarian state.