In our latest podcast, (left to right) editors Henry
See, Scott Ogrin, and Joe Quinn chat with guests
from the US, UK, and Canada about the differences between
the US educational system and those of other countries.
This week, we take a more detailed look at education
in the US, and what that system has done to facilitate
the current slide of freedom and democracy in the Land
of the Free. With the help of our guests, we
also get an idea of how the US compares to other countries
not only in education, but also in terms of the likelihood
that the population can be hoodwinked by the Powers that
Be.
If you have any questions for the Signs Team
or would like to suggest a topic for future Podcast discussion,
you can write us at:
Comment: A
reader sent us this link. It is a series of man on
the street interviews carried out in the US by some
Australians. The Americans were asked where the US
should attack next...
We offer this as an introduction to this week's
topic: education in the US.
Every parent knows the feeling
of seeing one of their children in pain, sick, gazing
up with a beseeching look of
"Make it stop!" It has been often remarked
that it is unnatural for a parent to outlive a child,
the gut-wrenching heartache, the visceral screaming from
deep within, the anguished cry of "Why!"
Cindy Sheehan is transmuting her agony at the loss
of her son by demanding that the culprit, George
W. Bush, be held accountable, that he take the time
to acknowledge her suffering and answer the simple
question of "Why?" She speaks to all parents;
we all recognise her pain as it lives in a dark corner
of all of our imaginations.
One of the propaganda goals when a country goes to
war is the successful transformation of the enemy from
human being with hopes and fears, family and friends
just like ourselves, into sub-human monsters who eat
their young. Brutalised to consider the enemy as wholly other,
we no longer care about their losses, about the mothers
and fathers weeping at the deaths of their young men
and woman. We no longer care when we hear that as many
as one million Iraqi children died as a result of the
US-backed and UN-imposed sanctions after the first
Gulf War.
"We think it was worth it," infamously responded
Madeleine Albright on CBS in 1996.
When you kill a country's children, you are killing
its future.
Every town in France has a cenotaph with the names
of the children sacrificed during the First World War.
To what?
Yet there is a more subtle killing of our children
that goes on every day, the killing of the spirit that
happens in school. Curious children, open to the world,
are turned into consumers and cogs in the corporate
machinery, learning how to sit still, follow orders,
respond to bells like Pavlovian dogs, memorise and
recite, and refrain from asking questions. What they
don't learn how to do is think.
The National Adult Literacy Survey represents
190 million U.S. adults over age sixteen with an
average school attendance of 12.4 years. The survey
is conducted by the Educational Testing Service
of Princeton, New Jersey. It ranks adult Americans
into five levels. Here is its 1993 analysis:
Forty-two million Americans over the age of
sixteen can’t read. Some of this group
can write their names on Social Security cards
and fill in height, weight, and birth spaces
on application forms.
Fifty million can recognize printed words on
a fourth- and fifth-grade level. They cannot write
simple messages or letters.
Fifty-five to sixty million are limited to sixth-,
seventh-, and eighth-grade reading. A majority
of this group could not figure out the price per
ounce of peanut butter in a 20-ounce jar costing
$1.99 when told they could round the answer off
to a whole number.
Thirty million have ninth- and tenth-grade reading
proficiency. This group (and all preceding) cannot
understand a simplified written explanation of
the procedures used by attorneys and judges in
selecting juries.
About 3.5 percent of the 26,000-member sample
demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional
college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high
school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent
of secondary students in other developed countries
can reach today. This last fact alone should warn
you how misleading comparisons drawn from international
student competitions really are, since the samples
each country sends are small elite ones, unrepresentative
of the entire student population. But behind the
bogus superiority a real one is concealed.
Ninety-six and a half percent
of the American population is mediocre to illiterate
where deciphering print is concerned. This
is no commentary on their intelligence, but without
ability to take in primary information from print
and to interpret it they are at the mercy of
commentators who tell them what things mean.
A working definition of immaturity might include
an excessive need for other people to interpret
information for us.
Think about it. "Ninety-six and a half percent
of the American population is mediocre to illiterate
where deciphering print is concerned."
The real makers of modern schooling weren't at all
who we think.
Not Cotton Mather.
Not Horace Mann.
Not John Dewey.
The real makers of modern schooling were leaders
of the new American industrialist class, men like:
Andrew Carnegie, the
steel baron...
John D. Rockefeller,
the duke of oil...
Henry Ford, master of the assembly
line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular
dynasty...
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist
finance...
Men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick
W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social
efficiency" movement of the early twentieth
century, along with providing the new Soviet Union
its operating philosophy and doing the same job for
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger
dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne,
these were the makers of modern schooling.
If modern schooling has a “Fourth Purpose,” there
must be an earlier three.
Traditional forms of instruction in America,
even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes:
To make good people
To make good citizens
And to make each student find some particular
talents to develop to the maximum.
The new mass schooling which came about slowly but
continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose.
The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional
three to the margins of schooling; in the
fourth purpose, school in America became like school
in Germany, a servant of corporate and political
management.
We should reveal the mechanism of mind control
training, habits, and attitudes.
Children were literally trained in bad habits
and bad attitudes!
Teachers and principals, “scientifically”certified
in teachers college practices, were made unaware
of the invisible curriculum they really taught.
The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases,
meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories
where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.
Since bored people are the best consumers,
school had to be a boring place, and since childish
people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture
of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be
the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers
and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they
didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions
passed down from increasingly centralized school offices,
they didn't last long.
In the new system, schools were gradually
re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to
have standardized customers and employees, standardized
because such people are predictable in certain crucial
ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government)
can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned
to meet simplified specifications. As the century
wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit
by bit to commercialization.
These processes didn't advance evenly.
Some localities resisted more than others, some decades
were more propitious for the plan than others. Especially
during and just after national emergencies like WWI,
the Depression, WWII, and the Sputnik crisis, the scheme
rocketed forward; in quieter moments it was becalmed
or even forced to give up some ground.
But even in moments of greatest resistance,
the institutions controlling the fourth purpose—great
corporations, great universities, government bureaus
with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate
journalism—increasingly centralized in fewer
and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, kept
a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources
to wear down and outwait the competition.
The prize was of inestimable value--control
of the minds of the young.
After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas
slowly became impersonal places where children
were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear
this term, you are certain to be in the presence
of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting.
Human resource children are to be molded and shaped
for something called "The Workplace," even
though for most of American history American children
were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.
In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to
work for large corporations or large government agencies,
if they worked at all.
This revolution in the composition of the
American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since
systematic forms of employment demand that employees
specialize their efforts in one or another function
of systematic production, then clear thinking warns
us that incomplete people make the
best corporate and government employees.
Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were
well aware of this paradox, which our own time
has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests
of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest
tasks assigned to forced schooling.
Not only was the new form of institution
spiritually dangerous as a matter of course,
but school became a physically dangerous
place as well.
What better way to habituate kids to abandoning
trust in their peers (and themselves) than
to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress
and danger, relief from which is only available by
appeal to authority? And many times not even then!
Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists
of the mid-nineteenth century as the best "police" to
create moral children, but ironically, as it turned
out in the twentieth century, big business and big
government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers
to Hell.
As the twentieth century progressed,
and particularly after WWII, schools evolved into behavioral
training centers, laboratories of experimentation in
the interests of corporations and the government. The
original model for this development had been Prussian
Germany, but few remembered.
School became jail-time to escape if you
could, arenas of meaningless pressure as
with the omnipresent "standardized" exams,
which study after study concluded were measuring
nothing real.
For instance, take the case of Bill Bradley. . .
and George W. Bush,
two of the four finalists in the 2000 presidential
race. Bradley had a horrifying 480 on the verbal part
of his own SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won
a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a senator; Bush graduated
from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president
of the United States—with a mediocre 550.
If you can become governor, senator, and
president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly
do the tests measure?
Perhaps they sort out good scientists from
bad? If so, how is it that both the scientists
principally involved in the Human Genome Project
have strange scholarly backgrounds to say the least!
Francis S. Collins, the head of
the public portion, was homeschooled, never followed
any type of formal curriculum, and is a born-again
Christian.
Craig Venter was a very bad boy
in high school, a surfing bum who nearly flunked out,
and he didn't go to college after graduation, but into
the U.S. Army as an enlisted man before being shipped
off to Vietnam!
As you'll learn when you read The Underground
History of American Education the
new purpose of schooling—to serve business
and government—could only be achieved efficiently
by isolating children from the real world, with
adults who themselves were isolated from the real
world, and everyone in the confinement isolated
from one another.
Only then could the necessary training in boredom
and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary
to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens
who would always look for a teacher to tell them what
to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad
man or television anchor.
Comment: We
have talked before of the plans implemented by people
like the Rockefellers in the early decades of this
century. In our new book, 911:
The Ultimate Truth, we discuss the existence of
the Institute for Higher Mathematics at Princeton and
how it was stuffed with important Jewish scientists
prior to the war while poor Jews were left to die.
So we are aware of the process that Gatto describes
in his work.
It is no accident that the American people have
been dumbed down over the decades. It is part of
a larger plan. Obviously, we don't think that everyone
involved in the planning of the US educational system
was consciously part of a larger conspiracy. Having
limited knowledge of why the schools were organised
as they were was enough: we need automatons for our
factories and for our offices. For most people, there
didn't need to be any other reason. It is only with
the benefit of hindsight and history that we can
see that these pieces are part of a much larger plan,
an even more sinister plan. But to understand the
depths, one needs an understanding of hyperdimensional
reality, the highly probable hypothesis that we are
not the top of the food chain, that we are someone
else's experiment. See Laura's The
Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive for
more on this.
But let's look again at Gatto's description of US
schooling. The following is taken from an article that
appeared in Harpers in 2003.
John Taylor Gatto is a former
New York State and New York City Teacher of the
Year and the author, most recently,
of The Underground History of American
Education. He was a participant
in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on
a Hill,"
which appeared in the September
2001 issue.
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst
schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and
during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom
was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the
kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they
always gave the same answers: They said the work
was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already
knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something
real, not just sitting around. They said teachers
didn't seem to know much about their subjects and
clearly weren't interested in learning more. And
the kids were right: their teachers were every bit
as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers,
and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge
can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited
attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel
bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you
might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students
who are rude and interested only in grades? If even
that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of
the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that
so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel
they are trapped inside structures even more rigid
than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is
to blame?
We all are. My grandfather
taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I
complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard
on the head. He told me that I was never to use that
term in his presence again, that if I was bored it
was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to
amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and
people who didn't know that were childish people,
to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That
episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and
there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson
to some remarkable student. For the most part, however,
I found it futile to challenge the official notion
that boredom and childishness were the natural state
of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy
custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break
out of this trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults
regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once
returned from a medical leave to discover that all
evidence of my having been granted the leave had been
purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated,
and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license.
After nine months of tormented effort I was able to
retrieve the license when a school secretary testified
to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family
suffered more than I care to remember. By the time
I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason
to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style,
forced confinement of both students and teachers-as
virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could
not see why they had to be that way. My own experience
had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn
along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear
of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively
jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take
an education rather than merely receive a schooling.
We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity,
adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising
insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts,
and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults,
and by giving each student what autonomy he or she
needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the
more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about
the "problem" of schooling as an engineer
might, the more I missed the point: What if there
is no "problem" with our schools? What
if they are the way they are, so expensively flying
in the face of common sense and long experience in
how children learn things, not because they are doing
something wrong but because they are doing something
right?Is it possible
that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth
when he said we would "leave no child behind"?
Could it be that our schools are designed to make
sure not one of them ever really grows up?
Do we really need school? I don't mean education,
just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days
a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this
deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?
Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic
as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers
have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even
if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known
Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer
our kids currently go through, and they turned out
all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to
be sure, but they were not products of a school system,
and not one of them was ever "graduated" from
a secondary school. Throughout most of American history,
kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled
rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like
Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller;
writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even
scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty
recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't
looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote
an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of
the world with her husband, Will, was happily married
at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel
Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps,
but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is,
schooled) in this country to think of "success" as
synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but
historically that isn't true in either an intellectual
or a financial sense. And plenty of people
throughout the world today find a way to educate
themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory
secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons.
Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just
such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our
public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got
its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915,
though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed
for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The
reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life
and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2)
To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his
or her personal best. These goals are still
trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of
us accept them in one form or another as a decent
definition of public education's mission, however
short schools actually fall in achieving them. But
we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact
that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly
consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true
purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken,
who wrote in The American Mercury for April
1924 that the aim of public
education is not
to fill the young of the species
with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ...
Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim
... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible
to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized
citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That
is its aim in the United States... and that is its
aim everywhere else.
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we
might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of
hyperbolic sarcasm. His article,
however, goes on to trace the template for our own
educational system back to the now vanished, though
never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And
although he was certainly aware of the irony that we
had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to
Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly
serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian
in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools
pops up again and again once you know to look for it.
William James alluded to it many times at the turn
of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher
Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven,
was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American
schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh
Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board
of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the
land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling
to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large
in America is hardly surprising, given our early association
with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's
aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking
people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered
publishing a German-language edition of the federal
laws. But what shocks is that
we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst
aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system
deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects,
to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable
leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete
citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard
for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive
on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the
American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one
of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that
I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling.
Without Conant, we would probably not have the same
style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy
today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high
schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a
time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton,
Colorado. Shortly after I retired
from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length
essay, The Child the Parent and the State,
and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention
in passing that the modem schools we attend were the
result of a "revolution" engineered between
1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate,
but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to
Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary
Education, in which "one saw this revolution
through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education
at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that
compulsory schooling on this continent was intended
to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s:
a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement
that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians
a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized,
compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical
incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses.
Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant
rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means,
and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind,
separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into
a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose
- of modem schooling into six basic functions, any
one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent
enough to believe the three traditional goals listed
earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function.
Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction
to authority. This, of course, precludes critical
judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys
the idea that useful or interesting material should
be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience
until you know whether you can make kids learn, and
do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function.
This might well be called "the conformity function," because
its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People
who conform are predictable, and this is of great
use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a
large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function.
School is meant to determine each student's proper
social role. This is done by logging evidence
mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records.
As in "your permanent record." Yes, you
do have one.
4) The differentiating function.
Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children
are to be sorted by role and trained only so far
as their destination in the social machine merits
- and not one step further. So much for making
kids their personal best.
5) The selective function.
This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's
theory of natural selection as applied to what
he called "the favored races." In short,
the idea is to help things along by consciously
attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools
are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades,
remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly
enough that their peers will accept them as inferior
and effectively bar them from the reproductive
sweepstakes. That's what all those little
humiliations from first grade onward were intended
to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function.
The societal system implied by these rules will
require an elite group of caretakers. To that end,
a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught
how to manage this continuing project, how to watch
over and control a population deliberately dumbed
down and declawed in order that government might
proceed unchallenged and corporations might never
want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory
public education in this country. And lest you take
Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical
take on the educational enterprise, you should know
that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas.
Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann
and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school
system designed along the same lines. Men like George
Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling
throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian
system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate
and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of
mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial
titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be
had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via
public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John
D. Rockefeller.
There you have it. Now you
know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand
warfare between the classes to see that it is in
the interest of complex management, economic or political,
to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide
them from one another, and to discard them if they
don't conform. Class may frame the proposition,
as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton
University, said the following to the New York City
School Teachers Association in 1909: "We
want one class of persons to have a liberal education,
and we want another class of persons, a very much
larger class, of necessity, in every society, to
forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit
themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But
the motives behind the disgusting decisions that
bring about these ends need not be class-based at
all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the
by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is
the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty,
laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from
simple greed.
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in
an economy based on mass production and organized to
favor the large corporation rather than the small business
or the family farm. But mass
production required mass consumption, and at the turn
of the twentieth century most Americans considered
it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't
actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend
on that count. School didn't
have to train kids in any direct sense to think they
should consume nonstop, because it did something even
better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And
that left them sitting ducks for another great invention
of the modem era - marketing.
Now, you needn't have studied
marketing to know that there are two groups of people
who can always be convinced to consume more than
they need to: addicts and children. School has done
a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts,
but it has done a spectacular job of turning our
children into children. Again, this is no accident.
Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis
knew that if children could be cloistered with other
children, stripped of responsibility and independence,
encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions
of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow
older but never truly grow up. In the 1934
edition of his once well-known book Public Education
in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed
and praised the way the strategy of successive school
enlargements had extended childhood by two to six
years, and forced schooling was at that point still
quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of
Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor
at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent
at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922
edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our
schools are ... factories in which the raw products
(children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And
it is the business of the school to build its pupils
according to the specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what
those specifications were. Maturity
has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of
our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need
to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the
need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has
removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy
answers have removed the need to ask questions. We
have become a nation of children, happy to surrender
our judgments and our wills to political exhortations
and commercial blandishments that would insult actual
adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy
the things we see on the television. We buy computers,
and then we buy the things we see on the computer.
We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and
when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair.
We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute
a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down
in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when
Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what
you say," even if we remember having been told
somewhere back in school that America is the land of
the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling,
as intended, has seen to it.
Now for the good news. Once you
understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks
and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children
to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be
leaders and adventurers. School trains children to
obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically
and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold
for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life
so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on
the serious material, the grown-up material, in history,
literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology
- all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to
avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude
so that they can learn to enjoy their own company,
to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are
conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant
companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell
phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired
and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a
more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake
up to what our schools really are: laboratories of
experimentation on young minds, drill centers for
the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.
Mandatory education serves children only incidentally;
its real purpose is to turn them into servants.Don't
let your own have their childhoods extended, not
even for a day. If David Farragut could take
command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen,
if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the
age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself
to a printer at the same age (then put himself through
a course of study that would choke a Yale senior
today), there's no telling what your own kids could
do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public
school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as
common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because
we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population
of educated men and women. The solution, I think,
is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Comment: It
all fits, doesn't it? The United States has the population
that was needed to support George Bush and the war
on terror. It can be argued, of course, that the population
got the president that reflects their own level of
being, their state of awareness. This is where a study
of history is necessary, where one must put together
the jigsaw puzzle that stretches back thousands of
years to the time when Yahweh spoke to Abraham, also
known as Moses. You didn't know they were one and the
same person? Then you are missing an important piece
of the puzzle.
But, then, it is absurd to think that there exists
a conspiracy of such cunning and cohesion that it
could last for five thousand years or more!
To which we reply, "Hyperdimensions. Beings who
can move through space-time as easily we move through
our own homes."
But we have moved from our initial subject, our children.
Or have we?
What kind of a world are we bequeathing to our children?
In what kind of world are they being raised? If we
continue to deny and block out the fundamental fact
of our existence, the one piece of the puzzle that
makes sense of the terror and violence, what hope will
they ever have of understanding what is happening to
them, their friends and family, as well as the other
6 billion people with whom they share the planet?
If we do not give them the intellectual tools coupled
with the emotional strength and security to go their
own way, to think through problems on their own, refusing
to go along with the crowd because it is the easy thing
to do or the socially necessary thing to do, how will
they ever be able to deal with the struggles and suffering
that life provides? But we live in a narcissistic society,
a self-perpetuating prison of the emotions and our
psychic structures that mechanically reproduces itself
as generation after generation sets a example for the
next based upon stunted emotional development and the
enshrining of the self and the satisfaction of its
basest desires as the pinnacle of evolutionary and
technological progress. And most people don't know
any better. Not only that, they are on some level,
because of their programming, incapable of understanding
it. The circuits that have been laid down are hard
to destroy. It takes courage and will power to do so.
There is much evidence that children pass through
certain, specific developmental stages as they grow.
There are moments in a child's life when these circuits
are being laid. If the circuit is not laid as it should
be at the appropriate step, then that lack will be
felt throughout the child's life. In reflecting upon
the "scientific"
manner in which the American school system was planned
and organised in its perfection of the perfect control
mechanism for creating sheep, we wonder whether the
knowledge of developmental stages was used in order
to purposefully stunt and inhibit the growth of what
Woodrow Wilson called "this very much larger class".
We think that it is likely.
Gatto speaks of schools turning our children into
children, of extending their childhood. Ariel Dorfman
touches on the infantilisation at the heart of the
mass media and what he calls industrial culture in
his book The
Empire's Old Clothes. In his conclusion he
writes:
It's no accident that this infantile
core emerges time and again in these essays dealing
with some of the major successes of mass media
culture. It has been constantly observed that the
culture industry, tailored to answer to the simultaneous
needs of immense groups of people, levels off its
messages at the so-called lowest common denominator,
creating only that which everybody can understand
effortlessly. This common denominator (as has been
pointed out frequently) is based on a construct
of -- what else? -- the median, quintessential
North American common man, who has undergone secular
canonization as the universal measure for humanity.
What has not been so clearly stated is this: When
that man is reduced to his average, shaved of his
adult faculties and conflicting experiences, handed
a solution that suckle and comfort him, robbed
of his future, what is left is a babe, a dwindled,
decreased human being.
Perhaps it is inevitable that
the consumer should be treated as an infant, helpless
and demanding, in societies such as ours. As a member
of a democratic system, he has the right to vote
and the even more important right to consume; but
at the same time he is not really participating in
the determination of his future or that of the world.
People can be treated as children because they do
not, in effect, control their own destiny. Even if
they feel themselves to be utterly free, they are
objectively vulnerable and dependent, passive in
a world commandeered by others, a world where the
messages they swallow have originated in other people's
minds. [pp 199-200]
Dorfman's book considers the effects of American industrial
culture on what was then known as the Third World.
He writes:
Since those communities, classes,
races, continents, and individuals who don't fit
the official mold tend to be viewed as "children",
as incomplete beings who haven't yet reached the
age of maturity, it is children's literature, or
the infantilization of mass market adult literature,
which forms the basis for the entire process of
cultural domination. Henry Kissinger, the whiz
kid of international politics, put it in those
terms when he justified the intervention of the
CIA in the overthrow of my country's legitimate
president by saying, "I don't see why we need
to stand by and watch a country go Communist due
to the irresponsibility of its own people".
[p. 8]
We see that this same attitude extends towards the
people of the United States itself, that those in control
consciously think of and treat their co-citizens as
children, as immature, as incapable of running their
own affairs. Not only that, they have organised the
entire society based upon and to perpetuate that idea.
By Duke Helfand
LA Times Staff Writer
October 1, 2005
Nearly 100,000 California 12th
graders - or about 20% of this year's senior
class - have failed the state's graduation exam,
potentially jeopardizing their chances of earning
diplomas, according to the most definitive report
on the mandatory test, released Friday.
Students in the class of 2006, the first group to
face the graduation requirement, must pass both the
English and math sections of the test by June
The exit exam - which has come under
criticism by some educators, legislators and civil
rights advocates - is geared to an eighth-grade level
in math and to ninth- and 10th-grade levels in English.
But the report by the Virginia-based Human Resources
Research Organization showed that tens of thousands
of students, particularly those in special education
and others who speak English as a second language,
may fail the test by the end of their senior year despite
remedial classes, after-school tutoring and other academic
help.
Teachers, according to the report, said that many
students arrive unprepared and unmotivated for their
high school courses and that their grades often reflect
poor attendance and low parental involvement.
The group reviewed the test results as part of a report
ordered by the Legislature when it instituted the exit
exam several years ago.
Among its findings: 63% of African Americans and 68%
of Latinos in the class of 2006 have passed both parts
of the exam.
By comparison, 89% of Asians and 90% of whites have
passed. The report recommended that the state keep
the exam but consider several alternatives for students
who can't pass.
"Clearly, we need to have some options for these
students," said Lauress L. Wise, the firm's president,
in a telephone interview with reporters.
The state, for example, could allow seniors to submit
portfolios of work that demonstrate mastery of English
and math, the report's authors suggested.
The report also proposed that schools allow students
to spend an extra year in high school or earn diplomas
by completing special summer school programs in lieu
of the exam.
Additionally, the state could establish
alternate diplomas or graduation certificates for students
who pass part of the exit exam, the group said.
But California's superintendent of public instruction,
Jack O'Connell, said he opposes any change that would
diminish the worth of a high school diploma.
"It's important to keep one core principle front
and center: awarding a student a diploma without the
skills and knowledge to back it up does the student
a disservice," said O'Connell, who added that
his staff would study the options outlined in the report.
The exit exam was originally slated for students in
the class of 2004. But disappointing passing rates
prompted state education officials to push the requirement
back two years. The state also shortened the test from
three days to two.
Students get several opportunities
to pass the exam in high school, and they have to correctly
answer only a little more than half of the questions
to succeed.
Even so, the exam has come under legal attack by disability
rights advocates who fear the effect on special education
students; just 35% of such students have passed both
parts of the exam so far. [...]
Opponents of the exam said that it
penalizes minority students and those in low-income
communities whose overcrowded schools often lack experienced
teachers and other necessary resources.
"It's
unfair to give this test because of the unequal school
system we have," said Edgar Sanchez, who teaches
U.S. history at Washington Preparatory High School
in South Los Angeles. "Every day I see students
go through conditions of overcrowding. Sometimes
students don't have a desk to sit at." [...]
Springfield,
Missouri--I met a man today who
did not know the difference between Saddam Hussein and
Osama bin Laden; he did not even know the difference
between Iraq and Afghanistan. But he did know about the
War on Terrorism--well, sort of.
"We had to do something when they knocked those
buildings down in New York," Joe insisted, his
mouth twisted with anger.
I calmly explained to this World War
II veteran and former mechanical engineer that it was
not Iraqis who flew those airplanes into the World Trade
Center towers but al Qaeda, which was based not in Iraq
but in Afghanistan, two very different countries.
Joe replied with a look of confusion,
and then said, "When they say all those foreign
names, I just turn my mind off."
"Turn your mind off?"
"Yeah, turn off my mind" he
repeats defiantly.
Missouri is the demographic center of the United States,
and some Americans believe it is also the soul of America.
"The heart and soul of America," President
Bush said on a recent visit, "is found right here
in Springfield, Missouri."
But what I found in Springfield,
Missouri, was an America where intensely personal politics
swamps thoughtful public dialogue, where simplistic
slogans like "freedom" are a substitute for
understanding the substance of freedom. What
I found was an America dominated by intransigent minds
and tightly sealed mindsets. What
I found was not pretty.
From "Turned Off Mind" to "Kill Them
All"
I've seen a humongous amount of stupid nonsense--too
often originating from my own twisted thinking--so I'm
not surprised by what the turned off mind says. Yet,
what Joe said next surprised me. Leaning
forward, looking directly at me, he said slowly: "I
say kill them all."
Joe is in his 80s and lives in rural southwest Missouri,
an area that identifies with the long-time embittered
Deep South--Missouri was the northernmost slave state--as
opposed to the metropolitan areas of St. Louis and Kansas
City that feel more like the moderate North. Joe thinks
it was the liberal media, and "those liberal politicians,"
who lost the Vietnam War, so today he watches Fox News,
and only Fox News. Joe doesn't have to learn those strange
sounding foreign names because he trusts his basic instincts,
or as he says, "his gut feelings," and of course
Fox News. Joe's mind can be turned
off--Fox is turned on!--and with complete confidence
scream, Kill them all!
A turned off mind does not see
a four-year-old Iraqi boy with both arms amputated
squirming in excruciating pain. A turned off mind does
not see a mother's contorted face, a face insane from
unbearable horror. A turned off mind does not hear
screams or pleas. A turned off mind cannot understand
the futility of occupying Iraq; it does not remember
Vietnam. A turned off mind just says, Kill them all!
A turned off mind can be informed of
everything, yet know nothing. It is the only mind to
have when reality is the enemy.
Here in Springfield, Missouri, the hometown of John
Ashcroft, there are churches on nearly every corner,
bookstores are hardly anywhere, yet turned off minds
are everywhere: in the motel lobby, a man handed me a
Jesus Saves brochure, insisting my soul was in jeopardy;
on my car radio an angry young man screamed, "Those
liberals are the devil's work"; sitting in a bar,
several locals complained that the Democrats run America
(aren't all three branches of the federal government
run by Republicans?). But don't even try to have a discussion
with Jesus when you're the devil.
This is where I heard Saddam
Hussein was involved in 9/11, as some 40 percent of
Americans doggedly insist. In Springfield, the
big lie thrives. This is where I heard that we actually
found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but that
the U.N. stole and destroyed them. This is where I
heard we must support our wartime president, yet I
never heard we must pay for this war. And this is where
I heard that John Kerry is a traitor.
Here in the Show Me State, there is much they don't
want to be shown.
From "Kill Them All" to Killed Democracy
Anti-intellectualism has a long
tradition in America, a
long tradition in every country, yet today in our country
it seems stronger and more vicious--a
relentless plague wiping out reason in whole sections
of our country. Males
especially, admiring our inarticulate, dimwitted president,
have never been prouder of their own inarticulateness
and wear shallow thinking as evidence of their swaggering "manhood." John
Kerry not only rubs them the wrong way, he outrages
them.
Sometimes I think our advanced technology
and great wealth is only a fig leaf for our pathetic
primitiveness. Lately I have been thinking that a lot.
Although many of us still cling to the Jeffersonian
promise that common citizens in public dialogue can craft
thoughtful solutions, we can't hide from the spreading
darkness.
Harry Truman lost the presidency because of the Korean
War, Lyndon Johnson quit his job--before he could lose
it--because of the Vietnam War, yet George Bush is running
neck-and-neck with John Kerry although the Iraq War is
clearly a disaster. The difference for America could
not be greater.
Our ballooning federal deficit has reached a record
$445 billion, yet Congress just approved additional tax
cuts. We have allocated $200 billion for Iraq, yet in
America 77 million Baby Boomers will soon begin retirement
and be dependent upon federal money. Health care costs
are skyrocketing, rising 36 percent in the last four
years, yet government is doing nothing. Where are the
plans to pay for all of this? Where are the public debates?
Where is our democracy?
Joe had not heard about the tax cut, which surprised
me since he supports all tax cuts, although don't suggest
that government services be cut back for anything that
will affect him. He was only vaguely aware of the spiraling
deficit, but our national debt doesn't seem important
to him. Health insurance is an issue, but Joe has his.
In fact, Joe is busy thinking about something else, about
"getting those A-rabs." Where is our democracy?
It's being swallowed by the politics of illusion that
screams kill them all and says little else.
Then Joe dropped another surprise on me, one quite different
from wanting to kill them all. After taking a sip of
his coffee, he looked at me and with deliberation said, "I
know I should vote for Kerry, but I just can't."
It was a confession, a sad confession. Retired and living
on a fixed income, Joe knows (yet nearly always represses)
that he should vote for John Kerry. Yet the warping rhetoric,
his revved-up emotions, and the suffocating unitary culture
ensure that he will vote for George Bush. The fig leaf
was suddenly gone; it was clear that Joe was not in control.
Joe was an advocate against his own self-interests.
"Against his own self-interests"? you ask.
Is it in his interest to continue the transfer of funds
from his dwindling bank account to a small number of
wealthy individuals? For each year that George Bush has
been president, the average American family has lost
$1,600. Is it in his interest to have more unnecessary
wars and more unnecessary dead Americans? Will it be
one of his grandchildren next year? Is it in his interest
to saddle his children with a record debt, which they
will be forced to pay off for many years to come? Is
it in his interest to continue under-funding veterans'
programs? He needs those Veterans Administration's programs.
Yet this is exactly what Joe will be voting for next
week by casting his ballot for George Bush.
Freedom for Joe is the opportunity to do what he should
not do, and voting is the right to vote for whom he should
not. This is not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when
he wrote about the common sense of common people. This
is not what can sustain American democracy.
Although in 2000 Al Gore won St. Louis and Kansas City,
the rest of Missouri, including its third largest city,
Springfield, went for George Bush and went in a big way:
58 percent to 39 percent. It's not surprising that the
Kerry campaign gave up on Missouri; there are too many
Joe's here. The question for this election, then, is
this: how many Joe's are there in Ohio and Pennsylvania
and the other swing states? If many, then the politics
of ignorance will win, and George Bush will win the election.
Maybe America is not as dark as I fear,
as I have written; maybe Americans will vote with their
brains instead of with twisted feelings and stunted thinking.
We shall know soon.
CBC News
Last Updated Thu, 06 Oct 2005 12:08:45 EDT
United States
President George Bush says at least 10 serious al-Qaeda
terrorist plans have been detected and disrupted by
the U.S. and its allies since the devastating attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001.
In a major speech on terrorism Thursday, Bush said
three of the planned attacks were against the U.S.
"We've stopped at least five more al-Qaeda efforts
to case targets in the U.S. or infiltrate operatives
in our country."
Bush strongly defended the war on terrorism and the
war in Iraq. He said progress
is being made in Iraq and that the U.S. will
remain committed in the fight against terrorism.
Support for the continuing campaign in Iraq has dropped
in the U.S., with recent polls showing as much as 60
per cent of the population now believing the war was
a mistake.
The president also has faced intense recent criticism
on domestic issues, especially for what many called
inadequate preparation for and a slow response to the
destruction of Hurricane Katrina.
Bush drew parallels between the war on terrorism and
the earlier fight against communism.
"Evil men obsessed with ambition
and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously,
and we must stop them before their crimes multiply.
"Defeating a militant network
is difficult because it thrives like a parasite on
the suffering and frustration of others."
The Bush speech Thursday is against a backdrop of
increased daily violence in Iraq, which threatens to
disrupt the Oct.15 referendum on a proposed new constitution
for the country.
Deep religious and political differences have set
the majority Shia in Iraq, with support of the Kurdish
minority, against the Sunni Arabs, the displaced ruling
faction that supported former president Saddam Hussein.
Comment: Progress,
eh? We wonder what scale the Bush Reich is using to
measure this progress. Number of innocent Iraqis slaughtered?
Number of successful American/British/Israeli false
flag operations? Number of days Bush stays in office
after 9/11 while continuing to lie through his teeth?
Last Updated Thu, 06 Oct 2005
18:32:24 EDT
CBC News
The New York
City police department and the FBI said Thursday they
have received information that the New York City transit
system may be the target of terrorism in the coming
days and they are on high alert.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the NYPD is
taking the threat seriously but so far it is uncorroborated.
Bloomberg and NY Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly
said at a news conference Thursday the threat is
the most specific they have received to date.
A law enforcement official, who spoke on condition
of anonymity, said the threat is "specific to
place, time and method" and involves a bombing.
Neither the Mayor, the Police Chief nor the FBI would
provide any details on the nature of the threat.
Mayor Bloomberg asked New Yorkers to be vigilant and
alert. He said "If they see something, they should
say something". He also said people should live
their lives and have faith in New York's finest. He
said he himself would take the subway at the end of
his day.
Kelly said there are more uniformed and undercover
police officers on the transit system. More random
searches are also being conducted.
Comment: The
great thing about these terror scares is that there
is no way to verify them. They can be announced when
and as the politicians need them, much as we saw the
Terror Alert warnings being used. Above we saw that
Bush claims they have foiled ten al Qaeda plots since
9/11. Sure. Why not a dozen? Two dozen? Certainly a
network with the resources of al Qaeda ought to be
able to pull off more than ten bombings. Heck, that
works out to just a couple a year since 9/11. With
all of the sleeper cells they have in the US, you'd
think they'd be more active than that!
But, hey, the guys in blue are doing their best
to protect the citizens of the Big Apple...
NEW YORK (AP) - A newly disclosed
terror threat against the New York subway has raised
the specter of an attack with explosives
concealed in a baby stroller and prompted an
underground show of force by the nation's largest police
department.
Officials in New York revealed
the threat Thursday, saying an FBI source warned
that terrorists had plotted to bomb the subway in
coming days. But Homeland Security officials in Washington
downplayed the threat, saying it's of "doubtful
credibility." Mayor Michael Bloomberg called
it the most specific terrorist threat that New York
officials had received to date, and promised to flood
the subway system with uniformed and undercover officers.
"We have done and will continue to do everything
we can to protect this city," Bloomberg said at
a nationally televised news conference. "We will
spare no resource, we will spare no expense."
Comment: Uh,
so is it a real threat, as Bloomberg is stating, or
is it of "doubtful credibility"? Those mixed
messages are so disconcerting!
The New York Police Department
boosted existing measures to search for bombs in
commuters' bags, brief cases and luggage. The
threat also involved the possibility that terrorists
would pack a baby stroller with a bomb, a law enforcement
official said, speaking on condition of anonymity
because the investigation is ongoing.
The official said the threat was "specific to
place," and that the window for the attack was
anywhere from Friday through at least the weekend.
In Washington, Homeland Security Department spokesman
Russ Knocke said "the intelligence community has
concluded this information to be of doubtful credibility.
We shared this information early on with state and
local authorities in New York." Knocke did not
elaborate.
A counterterror official, who was
briefed about the threat by Homeland Security authorities
and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intelligence
did not reflect "on-the-ground, detailed, pre-surveillance" methods
consistent with credible information. Rather, the official
said, the intelligence was similar to "what can
be found on the Internet and a map of New York City."
Some commuters took the threat in stride.
"I'll think about it, but I'm not scared, really," commuter
Leila Fullerton said as she was about to board a subway
for Brooklyn after work.
But she added that since the London train bombings
in July, she has found herself scanning the car at
times looking for suspicious characters.
"It's a terrible feeling going down there sometimes," she
said, gesturing at the subway stairwell.
The law enforcement official in New York said that
city officials had known about the threat at least
since Monday, but held the information until two or
three al-Qaida operatives were arrested in Iraq within
the past 24 hours. Once the arrests were made, officials
felt they could go public, the official said.
Authorities are concerned, the official
said, that there might be al-Qaida operatives in New
York City connected to the plot. They
have no hard evidence of that, but are investigating.
The U.S. military spokesman's office
in Baghdad had no information on the arrests. Pentagon
spokesman Bryan Whitman said he had seen no indication
of a U.S. military operation to round up al-Qaida operatives.
On Thursday, a television station said it held off
on reporting about the subway threat for two days because
officials in New York and Washington voiced concerns
that public safety could be affected and ongoing operations
jeopardized.
WNBC reporter Jonathan Dienst, who covers security
and terrorism issues, said he started making calls
about the threat on Tuesday. Local and federal officials
then got in touch, expressing concern that airing the
story would do damage.
The station decided to hold off, citing "the
intensity of the level of the request," said Dan
Forman, vice president of news.
An estimated 4.5 million passengers ride the New York
subway on an average weekday. The system has more than
468 subway stations. In July, the city began random
subway searches following the London train bombings.
Gov. George Pataki said Thursday the state would call
up hundreds of National Guard troops and ask Connecticut
and New Jersey to patrol commuter trains.
New York's security level remained at orange, the
same level it has stayed at since the Sept. 11, 2001,
terror attacks. Bloomberg said there was no indication
that the threat was linked to this month's Jewish holidays.
Comment: Once
more, when the details are brought to light, we see
that it is as flimsy as George's reasons for invading
Iraq and killing the civil population. Al Qaeda is
being blamed, and yet there is no hard evidence that
they are involved. There is no evidence that any "al
Qaeda operatives" were arrested in Iraq.
From Jamie McIntyre CNN
Friday, October 7, 2005;
Posted: 2:50 a.m. EDT (06:50 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An intercepted
letter from Osama bin Laden's deputy to the al Qaeda
leader in Iraq complains that the terrorist network
is short of cash and faces defeat in Afghanistan, a
Pentagon spokesman says.
The United States obtained a recent
letter that appears to be from Ayman al-Zawahiri,
al Qaeda's No. 2 figure, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
outlining both the strategy and concerns of the terrorist
network, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.
In the letter, al-Zawahiri warns
that some of the tactics currently employed by the
insurgency, including the slaughtering of hostages
and the suicide bombings of Muslim civilians, may
risk alienating the "Muslim masses," Whitman
said Thursday.
Comment: Yeah,
it is the resistance that are killing the Muslim civilians!
Right! The ones who are disguising themselves as British
SAS disguised as Arabs. Pretty damn clever.
Reading from a summary of the letter, Whitman said al-Zawahiri
concedes that al Qaeda has lost many key leaders,
is resigned to defeat in Afghanistan, and that its
lines of communication and funding sources have been
seriously disrupted. Al-Zawahiri includes a plea
for financial support, indicating he is strapped
for money, Whitman said.
Comment: Is this
convenient or what! Just as Bush tells us things are
going so well in Iraq, we get this letter from al-Zawahiri
moaning about al Qaeda's woes! See, the war on terror
is working! Really!!!
He could not say when the letter was intercepted or
when authorities believe it might have been written.
The lengthy communication was said to detail the strategy
of Muslim extremists to push the United States out
of Iraq and establish an Islamic state that could expand
its form of governance to neighboring countries, Whitman
said.
Senior U.S. officials told CNN that the 6,000-word
letter is believed to have been written within days
of the July 7 terror attacks in London. Only parts
of the letter have been made public, the officials
said.
The decision to confirm the existence of the letter
came after an incomplete and partially inaccurate version
was leaked to news organizations, the senior officials
said.
Earlier Thursday, President
Bush made similar points about the terror network in
what aides billed as a "major speech" on
the war on terrorism, which was launched after al
Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and
Washington.
Comment: No!
Really! What a coincidence!
Bush repeated his long-standing contention that Iraq
had become the central front in that conflict, and
said a U.S. withdrawal from that currently unpopular
conflict would leave behind a country ruled by bin
Laden and al-Zarqawi.
"We will not stand by as
a new set of killers dedicated to the destruction
of our own country seizes control of Iraq by violence," Bush
said.
Comment: As
opposed to the killers who are there now?
You might think that reading about
a podunk university's English teacher's attempt to
connect the dots between the poverty of American education
and the gullibility of the American public may be a
little trivial, considering we're about to embark on
the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent
capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question
my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these
young people been educated to such abysmal depths of
ignorance.
"I don't read," says a junior
without the slightest self-consciousness. She
has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual
preference for not reading at a university is like
bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not
to breathe. She is in my "World Literature"
class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American,
and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's
just a "distribution" requirement for graduation,
and it's easier than philosophy--she thinks.
The novel she has trouble
reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows,"
set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style
regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including
the English majors, can write a focussed essay of analysis,
so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows
where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information
from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism
or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible
definitions. No one knows what Plato's
"Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it
because it's impossible to understand the theme of
the novel without a basic knowledge of that work--which
used to be required reading a few generations ago.
And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September
1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's
mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply
US de-classified documents proving US collusion with
the generals' coup and the assassination of elected
president, Salvador Allende.
Geography, history, philosophy, and political science--all
missing from their preparation. I realize that my students
are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's
"The Education of the Oppressed" pointed
out, and that they are paying for their own oppression.
So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not
been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government
did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine;
yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then,
one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the
CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world
in part because of the ignorance of the people of the
United States, which apparently is induced by formal
education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by
Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know
and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this
national enabling stupidity to attain which they go
into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic,
it would be funny.
Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US
funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas,
and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are
about to wage--an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical,
and expensive war, which announces to the world the
failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping
weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman,
and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted
water will be murder--and a war crime. And it will
signal the impotence of American education to produce
brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic
survival: analyzing and asking questions.
Let me put it succinctly:
I don't think serious education is possible in
America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge
is a foe of this system of commerce and profit,
run amok. The only education that can be
permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo,
as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces
people to police and enforce the status quo, as
in the state school where I teach. Significantly,
at my school, which is a third-tier university,
servicing working-class, first-generation college
graduates who enter lower-etchelon jobs in the
civil service, education, or middle management,
the favored academic concentrations are communications,
criminal justice, and social work--basically how
to mystify, cage, and control the masses.
This education is a vast waste of the resources and
potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief
and useless--except to the powers and interests that
depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week
arrival on these shores, writes the best-organized
and most profound essay in English of the class, American
education has something to answer for--especially to
our youth.
But the detritus and debris that American
education has become is both planned and instrumental.
It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's
why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student
paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data
came from the highest intelligence sources. It's
why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered
up during his preposterous
"report" to the UN without anyone guessing
the political significance of this gesture and the
fascist sensibility that it protects.
Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to
thought and cultural refinement.
"When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels
said, "I reach for my revolver." One of the
infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented
was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the
university's role as a source of social criticism and
political opposition. The order came to dismantle the
departments of philosophy, social and political science,
humanities and the arts--areas in which political discussions
were likely to occur. The universities were ordered
to issue degrees only in business management, computer
programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry--
vocational training schools, which in reality is what
American education has come to resemble, at least at
the level of mass education. Our students can graduate
without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy,
elements of any science, music or art, history, and
political science, or economics. In fact, our students
learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics--
a feature the dwindling crowds at the voting booths
well illustrate.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity
that the industrial revolution created, people first
surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason,
then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until
all that was left of the original human equipment was
the senses or their selfish demands for gratification.
At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities
and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial
landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized
to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened
senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt
educations.
Meanhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a
10% cut across the board for all departments in the
state--including education.
Comment: Many
people decry the state of education in the US. However,
they do not, cannot, accept that this dumbing down
of the population was deliberate, part of a plan
to keep them doped up on bread and circuses. And
how many Americans would even know from whence comes
the reference to "bread and circuses"?
A phrase used by a Roman writer to deplore the
declining heroism of Romans after the Roman Republic
ceased to exist and the Roman Empire began: "Two
things only the people anxiously desire - bread
and circuses." The government kept the Roman
populace happy by distributing free food and staging
huge spectacles.
panem et circenses (Latin),
from the Roman poet Juvenal.
Bread and circuses in our day
can be television and the movies, but it can also
be phony terror alerts and the generalized, though
vague, threat of attack from a generalized, though
vague, enemy.
In seeking to impose their power,
fascists like Bush need a strong external enemy in
order to crank up the fear factor of the population.
In our case, we know that it is "Islamic terrorism" that
serves this purpose. But as more than one writer
has underlined, the connections between the US and
these "terrorists" are not as simple as
Bush would have you believe.
Project Paperclip is initiated. The
U.S. State Department, Army intelligence, and the
CIA recruit Nazi scientists and offer them immunity
and secret identities in exchange for work on top
secret government projects in the United States.
In other words, while other American agencies are
hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S.
intelligence community is smuggling them into America,
unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The
most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's
master spy who had built up an intelligence network
in the Soviet Union. With full U.S. blessing, he
creates the "Gehlen Organization,"
a band of refugee Nazi spies who reactivate their
networks in Russia. These include SS intelligence
officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred
Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher
of Lyon"), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust
mastermind who worked with Eichmann) . The Gehlen
Organization supplies the U.S. with its only intelligence
on the Soviet Union for the next ten years, serving
as a bridge between the abolishment of the OSS and
the creation of the CIA. However, much of the "intelligence" the
former Nazis provide is bogus.
"Program F" is implemented
by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This
is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects
of fluoride, which was the key chemical component
in atomic bomb production. One
of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride,
it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the
central nervous system but much of the information
is squelched in the name of national security because
of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale
production of atomic bombs.
Human plutonium injection experiments. The
Manhattan Project was asked to inject a hospital patient
at either Rochester or Chicago with 1 to 10 micrograms
of plutonium and send the excreta to Los Alamos for
analysis. The first human plutonium injection took
place on April 10, 1945, without the informed consent
of the patient.
CIA created - President
Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating
the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security
Council. The CIA is accountable
to the president through the NSC - there is no democratic
or congressional oversight. Its charter allows
the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties.
As the National Security Council may from time to time
direct."
Control of US atomic energy passes from the US Military
to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.
Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of
the U.S. Atomic Energy Comission issues a secret document
(Document 07075001, January 8, 1947) stating that the
agency will begin administering intravenous doses of
radioactive substances to human subjects.
The CIA begins its study of
LSD as a potential weapon for use by American
intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military)
are used with and without their knowledge.
Paper clip scientist Kurt Rahr. Rahr
was a convicted criminal with an extensive Nazi past.
In September 1947, he conducted mind control experiments
at Edgewood Arsenal, where such experiments flourished
until at least 1966.
The CIA creates its first major
propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe. Over
the next several decades, its broadcasts are so blatantly
false that for a time it is considered illegal to
publish transcripts of them in the U.S.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD -
The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations
and journalists to become spies and disseminators of
propaganda. Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms
and Philip Graham head the effort. Graham is publisher
of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player.
Eventually, the CIA's media assets will include ABC,
NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United
Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard,
Copley News Service and more. By the CIA's own admission,
at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will
become CIA assets.
The Army began widespread spraying
of 239 U.S. cities with bacteria and pathogens
as part of the secret testing of biological weapons.
Department of Defense begins
plans to detonate nuclear weapons in desert areas and
monitor downwind residents for medical problems and
mortality rates.
The CIA initiated studies in
mind control programs "in 1950, with
Project BLUEBIRD, rechristened ARTICHOKE in 1951. To
establish a ' cover story' for this research, the
CIA funded a propaganda effort designed to convince
the world that the Communist Bloc had devised insidious
new methods of re-shaping the human will;
the CIA's own efforts could therefore, if exposed,
be explained as an attempt to ' catch up' with Soviet
and Chinese work. The primary promoter of this '
line' was one Edward Hunter, a CIA contract employee
operating under-cover as a journalist, and, later,
a prominent member of the John Birch society."
"Hunter offered 'brainwashing' as the explanation
for the numerous confessions signed by American
prisoners of war during the Korean War and (generally)
UN-recanted upon the prisoners' repatriation. These
confessions alleged that the United States used
germ warfare in the Korean conflict, a claim which
the American public of the time found impossible
to accept. Many years later, however, investigative
reporters discovered that Japan's germ warfare
specialists (who had wreaked incalculable terror
on the conquered Chinese during WWII) had been
mustered into the American national security apparatus
-- and that the knowledge gleaned from Japan's
horrifying germ warfare experiments probably WAS
used in Korea, just as the 'brainwashed' soldiers
had indicated.
Thus, we now know that the
entire brainwashing scare of the 1950s constituted
a CIA hoax perpetrated upon the American public:
CIA deputy director Richard Helms admitted as much
when, in 1963, he told the Warren Commission that "Soviet
mind control research consistently lagged years behind
American efforts."
CIA and Department of Defense
begin Project MKSEARCH, a program to develop
a capability to manipulate human behavior through
the use of mind-altering drugs.
Prisoners at the Holmesburg
State Prison in Philadelphia are subjected to dioxin,
the highly toxic chemical component of Agent Orange
used in Vietnam. The men are later studied for development
of cancer, which indicates that Agent Orange had
been a suspected carcinogen all along.
CIA initiates Project MKOFTEN,
a program to test the toxicological effects of certain
drugs on humans and animals.
U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus
subtilis variant niger throughout the New
York City subway system. More than a million civilians
are exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs
filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.
MK-Search reactivates previously
abdandoned projects under Richard Helms, new
Director of Central Intelligence. One such project
was Spellbinder. Its goal
was to create a "sleeper killer," someone
who could be turned loose after receiving a key word
planted in his mind under hypnosis. According
to Gordon Thomas, the project was a failure.
The American media contributed
toward maintaining a rigid status quo, almost
obsequious in its compliance to the national security
community. Senator William Fullbright commented about
this on August 13, 1966, during Senate hearings on
government and media. He said it was very interesting
that so many prominent newspapers did not contest
or even raise questions about government policy.
Dr. Gordon J. F. MacDonald,
science advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote,
"Perturbation of the environment can produce changes
in behavioural patterns." He was referring to
low frequency EM waves in the ionosphere affecting
human brain wave patterns. (From his book, Unless
Peace Comes, a Scientific Forecast of New Weapons,
cited in "New World Order ELF Psychotronic Tyranny",
a paper by C. B. Baker.)
CIA experiments with the possibility
of poisoning drinking water by injecting chemicals
into the water supply of the FDA in Washington, D.C.
CIA continued its work on mind
control. Dr. Robert Keefe, a neurosurgeon
at Tulane University, conducted work in Electrical
Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). The experiments involved
implanting electrodes into the brain and body, with
the result that the subjects' memory, impulses, and
feelings could all be controlled. ESB could also
evoke hallucinations, fear, and pleasure. "It
could literally manipulate the human will, at will," said
Keefe.
George Estabrooks, another
scientist, stated to the Providence Evening Bulletin
that the key to creating an effective spy or assassin
is by creating a multiple personality with the aid
of hypnosis, a procedure he described as "child's
play." Estabrooks suggested that Lee Harvey Oswald
and Jack Ruby could have been controlled in this manner.
Operation CHAOS - The
CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens
since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson
dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover
as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations
protesting the Vietnam War. They
are searching for Russian instigators, which they never
find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals
and 1,000 organizations.
Eldon Byrd who worked for Naval
Surface Weapons, Office of Non-Lethal Weapons,
was commissioned in 1981 to develop electromagnetic
devices for purposes including 'riot control', clandestine
operations and hostage removal."
"Byrd also wrote of experiments where behavior
of animals was controlled by exposure to weak electromagnetic
fields. 'At a certain frequency and power intensity,
they could make the animal purr, lay down and roll
over.'" (Keeler, Anna, "Remote Mind Control
Technology")
"Between 1981 and September 1982, the Navy
commissioned me to investigate the potential of developing
electromagnetic devices that could be used as non-lethal
weapons by the Marine Corp for the purpose of 'riot
control', hostage removal, clandestine operations,
and so on." Eldon Byrd, Naval Surface Weapons
Center, Silver Spring MD. (From "Electromagnetic
Pollution" by Kim Besly, p 12.)
Electronic, multi-directional subliminal suggestion
and programming
Location: Boulder, Colorado (Location of main cell
telephone node, national television synchronization
node)
Targeting: national population of the United States
Frequencies: ULF VHF HF Phase modulation
Power: Gigawatts
Implementation: Television and radio communications,
the "videodrome" signals
Purpose: Programming and triggering
behavioral desire, subversion of psychic abilities
of population, preparatory processing for mass electromagnetic
control
Pseudonym: "Buzz Saw" E.E.M.C.
TOWER, CIA, NSA:
Electronic cross country subliminal programming and
suggestion
Targeting: Mass population, short-range intervals,
long-range cumulative
Frequencies: Microwave, EHF SHF
Methodology: Cellular telephone
system, ELF modulation
Purpose: Programming through neural resonance and encoded
information
Effect: Neural degeneration,
DNA resonance modification, psychic suppression
Pseudonym: "Wedding Bells"
More than 1500 six-month old
black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles are
given an "experimental" measles vaccine
that had never been licensed for use in the United
States. CDC later admits that parents were never
informed that the vaccine being injected to their
children was experimental.
Comment: Our Cosmic
COINTELPRO Timeline has many more interesting
entries, covering the years 1700 to 2002.
According to Harry V. Martin and
David Caul, authors of the following excerpt about "Dr.
Delgado," he is clearly an "insider"
of the "Consortium." A large portion of the
following material from "Mind Control: The Current
Situation" is concerned with the experimental us
of chemical mind alteration for various purposes. It
is worth reading in its entirety.
In Part II we find the following regarding a Dr. Jose
Delgado,
Doctor Jose Delgado: "Man does not have the right
to develop his own mind." (Congressional Record,
New York Times)
"We need a program of psychosurgery for political
control of our society. The purpose is physical control
of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm
can be surgically mutilated.
"The individual may think that the most important
reality is his own existence, but this is only his
personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.
"Man does not have the right to develop his own
mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal.
We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies
and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation
of the brain."
These were the remarks of Dr. Jose Delgado as they
appeared in the February 24, 1974 edition of the Congressional
Record, No. 262E, Vol. 118.
Despite Dr. Delgado's outlandish statements before
Congress, his work was financed by grants from the
Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Aero-Medical
Research Laboratory, and the Public Health Foundation
of Boston.
Dr. Delgado was a pioneer of the technology of Electrical
Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). The
New York Times ran an article on May 17, 1965 entitled
"Matador With a Radio Stops Wild Bull". The
story details Dr. Delgado's experiments at Yale University
School of Medicine and work in the field at Cordova,
Spain. The New York Times stated:
"Afternoon sunlight poured over the high
wooden barriers into the ring, as the brave bull
bore down on the unarmed matador, a scientist who
had never faced fighting bull. But the charging
animal's horn never reached the man behind the
heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen,
Dr. Delgado pressed a button on a small radio transmitter
in his hand and the bull braked to a halt. Then
he pressed another button on the transmitter, and
the bull obediently turned to the right and trotted
away. The bull was obeying commands in his brain
that were being called forth by electrical stimulation
by the radio signals to certain regions in which
fine wires had been painlessly planted the day
before."
According to Dr. Delgado, experiments
of this type have also been performed on humans.
While giving a lecture on the Brain in 1965, Dr.
Delgado said,
"Science has developed a new methodology for the
study and control of cerebral function in animals and
humans." […]
Herein is the lecture by D.C.Hammond,
originally entitled "Hypnosis in MPD: Ritual Abuse," but
now usually known as the
"Greenbaum Speech," delivered at the Fourth
Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple
Personality, Thursday June 25, 1992, at the Radisson
Plaza Hotel, Mark Center, Alexandria, Virginia.
Sponsored by the Center for Abuse Recovery & Empowerment,
The Psychiatric Institute of Washington, D.C. Both
a tape and a transcript were at one time available
from Audio Transcripts of Alexandria, Virginia (800-338-2111).
Tapes and transcripts of other sessions from the
conference are still being sold but -- understandably
-- not this one. The transcript below was made from
a privately made tape of the original lecture.
The single most remarklable thing about this speech
is how little one has heard of it in the two years
since its original delivery. It is recommended that
one reads far enough at least until one finds why
it's called
"the Greenbaum speech."
In the introduction the following background information
is given for D. Corydon Hammond:B.S. M.S. Ph.D (Counseling
Psychology) from the University of Utah,
- Diplomate in Clinical Hypnosis, the American Board
of Psychological Hypnosis,
- Diplomate in Sex Therapy, the American Board of Sexology,
- Clinical Supervisor and Board Examiner, American
Board of Sexology,
- Diplomate in Marital and Sex Therapy, American Board
of Family Psychology,
- Licensed Psychologist,
- Licensed Marital Therapist,
- Licensed Family Therapist, State of Utah,
- Research Associate Professor of Physical Medicine
and Rehabilitation, Utah School of Medicine,
- Director and Founder of the Sex and Marital Therapy
Clinic, University of Utah.
- Adjunct Associate Professor of Educational Psychology,
University of Utah Abstract
- Editor, The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis
Advising Editor and Founding Member, Editorial Board, The
Ericsonian Monograph - Referee, The Journal of Abnormal
Psychology - 1989 Presidential Award of Merit, American
Society of Clinical Hypnosis
- 1990 Urban Sector Award, American Society of Clinical
Hypnosis
- Current President, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis
THE GREENBAUM SPEECH of D.C. HAMMOND
We've got a lot to cover today and let me give you
a rough approximate outline of the the things that
I'd like us to get into. First, let me ask how many
of you have had at least one course or workshop on
hypnosis? Can I see the hands? Wonderful. That makes
our job easier.
Okay. I want to start off by talking a little about
trance-training and the use of hypnotic phenomena with
an MPD dissociative-disorder population, to talk some
about unconscious exploration, methods of doing that,
the use of imagery and symbolic imagery techniques
for managing physical symptoms, input overload, things
like that. Before the day's out, I want to spend some
time talking about something I think has been completely
neglected in the field of dissociative disorder, and
that's talking about methods of profound calming for
automatic hyper-arousal that's been conditioned in
these patients.
We're going to spend a considerable length of time
talking about age-regression and abreaction in working
through a trauma. I'll show you with a non-MPD patient
-- some of that kind of work -- and then extrapolate
from what I find so similar and different with MPD
cases. Part of that, I would add, by the way, is that
I've been very sensitive through the years about taping
MPD cases or ritual-abuse cases, part of it being that
some of that feels a little like using patients and
I think that this population has been used enough.
That's part of the reason, by choice, that I don't
generally videotape my work.
I also want to talk a bunch about hypnotic relapse-prevention
strategies and post- integration therapy today. Finally,
I hope to find somewhere in our time-frame to spend
on hour or so talking specifically about ritual abuse
and about mind-control programming and brainwashing
-- how it's done, how to get on the inside with that
-- which is a topic that in the past I haven't been
willing to speak about publicly, have done that in
small groups and in consultations, but recently decided
that it was high time that somebody started doing it.
So we're going to talk about specifics today.
[Applause]
In Chicago at the first international congress where
ritual abuse was talked about I can remember thinking, "How
strange and interesting." I can recall many people
listening to an example given that somebody thought
was so idiosyncratic and rare, and all the people coming
up after saying,
"Gee, you're treating one, too? You're in Seattle"...Well,
I'm in Toronto...Well, I'm in Florida...Well, I'm in
Cincinnati." I didn't know what to think at that
point.
It wasn't too long after that I found my first ritual-abuse
patient in somebody I was already treating and we hadn't
gotten that deep yet. Things in that case made me very
curious about the use of mind-control techniques and
hypnosis and other brainwashing techniques. So I started
studying brainwashing and some of the literature in
that area and became acquainted with, in fact, one
of the people who'd written one of the better books
in that area.
Then I decided to do a survey, and from the ISSMP&D
[International Society for the Study of Mulptiple Personality
and Dissociation] folks I picked out about a dozen
and a half therapists that I though were seeing more
of that than probably anyone else around and I started
surveying them. The interview protocol, that I had.
got the same reaction almost without exception. Those
therapists said, "You're asking questions I don't
know the answers to. You're asking more specific questions
than I've ever asked my patients." Many of those
same therapists said, "Let me ask those questions
and I'll get back to you with the answer." Many
of them not only got back with answers, but said, "You've
got to talk to this patient or these two patients." I
ended up doing hundred of dollars worth of telephone
interviewing.
What I came out of that was a grasp of a variety of
brainwashing methods being used all over the country.
I started to hear some similarities. Whereas I hadn't
known, to begin with, how widespread things were, I
was now getting a feeling that there were a lot of
people reporting some similar things and that there
must be some degree of communication here.
Then approximately two and a half years ago I had
some material drop in my lap. My source was saying
a lot of things that I knew were accurate about some
of the brainwashing, but it was telling me new material
I had no idea about. At this point I took and decided
to check it out in three ritual-abuse patients I was
seeing at the time. Two of the three had what they
were describing, in careful inquiry without leading
or contaminating. The fascinating thing was that as
I did a telephone-consult with a therapist that I'd
been consulting for quite a number of months on an
MPD case in another state, I told her to inquire about
certain things. She said, "Well, what are those
things?" I said, "I'm not going to tell you,
because I don't want there to be any possibility of
contamination. Just come back to me and tell me what
the patient says."
She called me back two hours later, said, "I
just had a double session with this patient and there
was a part of him that said, 'Oh, we're so excited.
If you know about this stuff, you know how the Cult
Programmers get on the inside and our therapy is going
to go so much faster.'"
Many other patients since have had a reaction of wanting
to pee their pants out of anxiety and fear rather than
thinking it was wonderful thing.
But the interesting thing was that she then asked, "What
are these things?" They were word perfect -- same
answers my source had given me. I've since repeated
that in many parts of the country. I've consulted in
eleven states and one foreign country, in some cases
over the telephone, in some cases in person, in some
cases giving the therapist information ahead of time
and saying,
"Be very careful how you phrase this. Phrase it
in these ways so you don't contaminate." In other
cases not even giving the therapist information ahead
of time so they couldn't.
When you start to find the same highly esoteric information
in different states and different countries, from Florida
to California, you start to get an idea that there's
something going on that is very large, very well coordinated,
with a great deal of communication and sytematicness
to what's happening. So I have gone from someone kind
of neutral and not knowing what to think about it all
to someone who clearly believes ritual abuse is
real and that the people who say it isn't are either
naive like people who didn't want to believe the Holocaust
or -- they're dirty.
[Applause]
Now for a long time I would tell a select group of
therapists that I knew and trusted, information and
say, "Spread it out. Don't spread my name. Don't
say where it came from. But here's some information.
Share it with other therapists if you find it's on
target, and I'd appreciate your feedback." People
would question -- in talks -- and say, you know, they
were hungry for information. Myself, as well as a few
others that I've shared it with, were hedging out of
concern and out of personal threats and out of death
threats. I finally decided to hell with them. If they're
going to kill me, they're going to kill me. It's time
to share more information with therapists. Part of
that comes because we proceeded so cautiously and slowly,
checking things in many different locations and find
the same thing. So I'm going to give you the way in
with ritual-abuse programming. I certainly can't tell
you everything that you want to know in forty-five
or fifty minutes, but I'm going to give you the essentials
to get inside and start working at a new level.
I don't know what proportion, honestly, of patients
have this. I would guess that maybe somewhere around
at least fifty percent, maybe as high as three-quarters,
I would guess maybe two-thirds of your ritual-abuse
patients may have this. What do I think the distinguishing
characteristic is? If they were raised from birth in
a mainstream cult or if they were an non-bloodline
person, meaning neither parent was in the Cult, but
Cult people had a lot of access to them in early childhood,
they may also have it. I have seen more than one ritual-abuse
patient who clearly had all the kind of ritual things
you hear about. They seemed very genuine. They talked
about all the typical things that you hear in this
population, but had none of this programming with prolonged
extensive checking. So I believe in one case I was
personally treating that she was a kind of schizmatic
break-off that had kind of gone off and done their
own thing and were no longer hooked into a mainstream
group.
[Pause]
Here's where it appears to have come from. At the
end of World War II, before it even ended, Allen
Dulles and people from our Intelligence Community
were already in Switzerland making contact to get out
Nazi scientists. As World War II ends, they not only
get out rocket scientists, but they also get out some
Nazi doctors who have been doing mind-control research
in the camps.
They brought them to the United States. Along with
them was a young boy, a teenager, who had been raised
in a Hasidic Jewish tradition and a background of Cabalistic
mysticism that probably appealed to people in the Cult
because at least by the turn of the century Aleister
Crowley had been introducing Cabalism into Satanic
stuff, if not earlier. I suspect it may have formed
some bond between them. But he saved his skin by collaborating
and being an assistant to them in the death-camp experiments.
They brought him with them.
They started doing mind-control research for Military
Intelligence in military hospitals in the United
States. The people that came, the Nazi doctors, were
Satanists. Subsequently, the boy changed his name,
Americanized it some, obtained an M.D. degree, became
a physician and continued this work that appears to
be at the center of Cult Programming today. His name
is known to patients throughout the country.
[Pause]
What they basically do is they will get a child and
they will start this, in basic forms, it appears, by
about two and a half after the child's already been
made dissociative. They'll make him dissociative not
only through abuse, like sexual abuse, but also things
like putting a mousetrap on their fingers and teaching
the parents, "You do not go in until the child
stops crying. Only then do you go in and remove it."
They start in rudimentary forms at about two and a
half and kick into high gear, it appears, around six
or six and a half, continue through adolescence with
periodic reinforcements in adulthood.
Basically in the programming the child will be put
typically on a gurney. They will have an IV in one
hand or arm. They'll be strapped down, typically naked.
There'll be wires attached to their head to monitor
electroencephalograph patterns. They will see a pulsing
light, most often described as red, occasionally white
or blue. They'll be given, most commonly I believe,
Demerol. Sometimes it'll be other drugs as well depending
on the kind of programming. They have it, I think,
down to a science where they've learned you give so
much every twenty- five minutes until the programming
is done.
They then will describe a pain on one ear, their right
ear generally, where it appears a needle has been placed,
and they will hear weird, disorienting sounds in that
ear while they see photic stimulation to drive the
brain into a brainwave pattern with a pulsing light
at a certain frequency not unlike the goggles that
are now available through Sharper Image and some of
those kinds of stores. Then, after a suitable period
when they're in a certain brainwave state, they will
begin programming, programming oriented to self-destruction
and debasement of the person.
In a patient at this point in time about eight years
old who has gone through a great deal early programming
took place on a military installation. That's not uncommon.
I've treated and been involved with cases who are part
of this original mind-control project as well as having
their programming on military reservations in many
cases. We find a lot of connections with the CIA. This
patient now was in a Cult school, a private Cult school
where several of these sessions occurred a week.
She would go into a room, get all hooked up. They
would do all of these sorts of things. When she was
in the proper altered state, now they were no longer
having to monitor it with electroencephalographs, she
also had already had placed on her electrodes, one
in the vagina, for example, four on the head. Sometimes
they'll be on other parts of the body. They will then
begin and they would say to her, "You are angry
with someone in the group." She'd say, "No,
I'm not" and they'd violently shock her. They
would say the same thing until she complied and didn't
make any negative response.
Then they would continue. "And because you are
angry with someone in the group," or "When
you are angry with someone in the group, you will hurt
yourself. Do you understand?"
She said, "No" and they shocked her. They
repeated again,
"Do you understand?" "Well, yes, but
I don't want to."
Shock her again untill they get compliance. Then they
keep adding to it. "And you will hurt yourself
by cutting yourself. Do you understand?" Maybe
she'd say yes, but they might say, "We don't believe
you" and shock her anyway. "Go back and go
over it again." They would continue in this sort
of fashion. She said typically it seemed as though
they'd go about thirty minutes, take a break for a
smoke or something, come back. They may review what
they'd done and stopped or they might review what they'd
done and go on to new material. She said the sessions
might go half an hour, they might go three hours. She
estimated three times a week.
Programming under the influence of drugs in a certain
brainwave state and with these noises in one ear and
them speaking in the other ear, usually the left ear,
associated with right hemisphere non-dominant brain
functioning, and with them talking, therefore, and
requiring intense concentration, intense focusing.
Because often they'll have to memorize and say certain
things back, word-perfect, to avoid punishment, shock,
and other kinds of things that are occurring. This
is basically how a lot of programming goes on.
Some of it'll also use other typical brainwashing
kinds of techniques. There will be very standardized
types of hypnotic things done at times. There'll be
sensory deprivation which we know increases suggestibility
in anyone. Total sensory deprivation, suggestibility
has significantly increased, from the research. It's
not uncommon for them to use a great deal of that,
including formal sensory- deprivation chambers before
they do certain of these things. [...]
Boys at risk from bone tumours, shock research reveals
Bob Woffinden
Sunday June 12, 2005
The Observer
Fluoride in
tap water can cause bone cancer in boys, a disturbing
new study indicates, although there is no evidence
of a link for girls.
New American research suggests that boys exposed
to fluoride between the ages of five and 10 will
suffer an increased rate of osteosarcoma - bone cancer
- between the ages of 10 and 19.
In the UK, fluoride is added to tap water on the advice
of bodies such as the British Dental Association. The
Department of Health maintains that it is a cost-effective
public health measure that helps prevent tooth decay
in children.
About 10 per cent of the population, six million people,
receive fluoridated water, mainly in the Midlands and
north-east, and the government plans to extend this,
with Manchester expected to be next. About 170 million
Americans live in areas with fluoridated water.
The increased cancer risks, identified
in a newly available study conducted at the Harvard
School of Dental Health, were found at fluoride exposure
levels common in both the US and Britain. It
was the first examination of the link between exposure
to the chemical at the critical period of a child's
development and the age of onset of bone cancer.
Although osteosarcoma is rare, accounting for only about
3 per cent of childhood cancers, it is especially dangerous.
The mortality rate in the first five years is about 50
per cent, and nearly all survivors have limbs amputated,
usually legs.
The research has been made available by the Environmental
Working Group (EWG), a respected Washington-based research
organisation. The group reports that it has assembled
a 'strong body of peer-reviewed evidence' and has asked
that fluoride in tap water be added to the US government's
classified list of substances known or anticipated to
cause cancer in humans.
'This is a very specific cancer in a defined population
of children,' said Richard Wiles, the group's co-founder.
'When you focus in and look for the incidence of tumours,
you see the increase.
'We recognise the potential benefits
of fluoride to dental health,' added Wiles, 'but I've
spent 20 years in public health, trying to protect kids
from toxic exposure. Even with DDT, you don't have the
consistently strong data that the compound can cause
cancer as you now have with fluoride.'
Half of all fluoride ingested is stored
in the body, accumulating in calcifying tissue such as
teeth and bones and in the pineal
gland in the brain, although more than 90 per
cent is taken into the bones.
MPs who have recently voted against fluoridation proposals
in Parliament include Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary,
and Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.
Anti-fluoride campaigners argue that the whole issue
has become highly politically sensitive. If health scares
about fluoride were to be recognised in the courts, the
litigation, especially in the US, could be expected to
run for decades. Consequently,
scientists have been inhibited from publicising any adverse
findings.
The new evidence only emerged by a circuitous
process. It was contained in a Harvard dissertation by
Dr Elise Bassin at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.
The dissertation, completed in April 2001, obviously
had merit because Bassin was awarded her doctorate.
However it has not been published.
Environmental organisations were repeatedly denied
access to it, and even bodies such as the US National
Academy of Sciences could not get hold of a copy. Eventually
two researchers from the Fluoride Action Network were
allowed to read it in the rare books and special collections
room at Harvard medical library.
Bassin told The Observer her work was still going through
the peer-review process, and she hopes that it will then
be published.
Dr Vyvyan Howard, senior lecturer in toxico-pathology
at the University of Liverpool, has studied the new material.
'At these ages the bones of boys are developing rapidly,'
he said, 'so if the bones are being put together abnormally
because fluoride is altering the bone structure, they're
more likely to get cancer. It's biologically plausible,
and the epidemiological evidence seems pretty strong
- it looks as if there's a definite effect.'
There is at present no understanding as to why males
should be affected rather than females.
A Department of Health spokesman said that the latest
evaluation of research in the UK had identified no ill
effects of fluoride.
Comment: What
a story; a glimpse into the backrooms of science. Are
dissertations always this difficult to get ahold of and
read?
This just in: Prozac is a better treatment than talking
to your kid. Isn't life fabulous?
By Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist Friday, June 4, 2004
Is your teenager depressed? Throwing
things? Sulking like she hates you and only speaking
in monosyllabic grunts and playing her Staind or Avril
Lavigne or Hoobastank MP3s way too loud? Sure she is.
Damn kids.
Are they slouching way too much and wearing low-slung
clothes and locking the door to their bedrooms and
masturbating chronically, and then racking up huge
cell-phone bills as they complain endlessly to their
best friend about their unrequited loves and horrible
parents and how much they hate life and how they're
always despondent and put upon and pimply and miserable?
Solution: You need to give them drugs. Lots of drugs.
Expensive ones with nice little corporate logos on
them. This is the only way.
Haven't you been reading the papers? Watching
the commercials? Drugs are in. Drugs are the new
black. Drugs rain down from the sky like pretty purple
Skittles. Drugs are mandatory and the most important
advancement in child rearing since the invention
of the cane and the padlock and the Catholic priest.
No, not the bad drugs. Not the drugs that cool people
take and that make your kids party hard and dance all
night and that make their eyes all red and mushy and
makes colors swirl and skin feel like honey and makes
them horny or hungry or feel really really good for
awhile, until they don't. Not the ones that are cheaply
produced and impossible to regulate and as easy to
get as degrading sexual misinformation in public schools
is. Not those.
No, your kid needs the other kind of drugs. The good
kind. The kind prescribed by overpaid shrinks after
the kid's umpteenth $300 visit. The kind that run about
seven bucks a pop and are made by Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline
or maybe Eli Lilly, and which are roughly three times
more toxic and 10 times more synthetic and a thousand
times more spiritually debilitating than the "evil" street
stuff, given how they're totally legal and corporate
sponsored and therefore radiate this sinister venomous
aura of happy culturally approved doom.
Behavioral modifiers. Prozac. Paxil. Zoloft.
Effexor. Xanax. Et al. You name it, your kids can
have it, and probably should. Millions are already
addicted. Millions more will be by the end of this
year, if not by the end of this column. Maybe you're
one of them, yourself. Hi. Isn't the sky lovely today?
Yes, it sure is.
Just look at them, the well-drugged teens of America,
all calm and happily narcotized, walking around with
their eyes glazed over and their shirts untucked and
their souls drained of all vital juices. God
bless America at its world-record 25 percent mood-disorder
rate! The most-drugged nation on the planet! We're
No. 1! So proud.
Don't you want your child happy and well-adjusted
and violently, chemically torqued, his or her entire
body ravaged by enough synthetic compounds and serotonin
reuptake inhibitors and mood enhancers to numb a horse?
Of course you do.
Hey, they've done studies. Studies that finally
prove once and for all that Prozac is much more effective
on your depressed miserable slouchy door-slammin'
punkass teen than merely talking to him and loving
him well and teaching him to appreciate life and
sex and spirituality and fine artisan cheeses. So
you know it must be true.
And do you know why? Why the Prozac is more effective?
Because it's a potent chemical narcotic, silly! It
rewires their brains and poisons their little juvenile
blood vessels and kills any pesky burgeoning testosteroned
sex drive once and for all!
Imagine! No more worries! No more teen pregnancy!
It's just like neutering your dog! Or getting a catalytic
converter on the car! Or laying down beige shag carpeting
everywhere! Everything calm and soft and nonirritating,
all edges filed right down. Isn't pharmacology fabulous?
Never you mind the pesky lawsuits.
Like the one just filed by the New York attorney general
against Glaxo over how they supposedly suppressed a
bunch of studies that proved how their beloved zim-zammer
brain-slammer Paxil made a bunch of kids even more
twitchy and despondent and, whoops, suicidal.
Shhh. Hey, it was only a handful of kids, all right?
Maybe, like, 10. Or 50. Who knows? "Acceptable
losses," as they say in military parlance. Small
price to pay for a whirling nation of numb smiling
partially lobotomized teens who will open the door
for you and say yes sir and no ma'am and wash your
car for a dollar. Am I right? Goddamn right.
Never you mind, furthermore, that we have become a
nation of sweetly drug-addled automatons begging at
the hand of the giant pharmcos, and that only a fraction
of the kids whose parents now have them sucking down
behavioral meds like M&Ms actually need them, actually
has severe enough brain issues and chemical imbalances
and psychoemotional traumas that these drugs are small
miracles.
Nossir, never you mind that the rest of those millions
of nubile doe-eyed Prozac/Zoloft/Xanax teen addicts
are merely being medicated to death for no viable reason
whatsoever, other than the fact that they're just a
bunch of angry depressed miserable angst-ridden teens
and their parents are sick of trying to cope with it.
But,
wait, isn't the angry-teen thing a part of life? Isn't
that a mandatory stage for just about every kid
nationwide, right before they evolve past it
and their skin clears up and they finally get
laid and then get old enough to drink and buy
a minivan and have kids and finally join AA like
good Christian adults?
And is it worth noting, again, that most of
our drug-happy nation is merely seeking sad, silver-bullet
relief from what has become a truly staggering and
vicious array of social and government-sponsored
ills, and are merely poisoning their bodies and numbing
their minds simply because they're stressed and bored
and overworked and undersexed?
Whoops, sorry. Got carried away there. Let's stay
focused on the kids. Happy, happy kids. Let's not get
away from the frightening fact that the U.S. now harbors
millions -- millions! -- of Prozac-addicted teens and
no one blinks an eye, and yet
one kid ODs on ecstasy at a rave due to rampant insulting
misinfo put out by the CDC and suddenly it's furrowed
brows and pointing fingers and scrunched imbecilic
senators railroading the moronic RAVE Act through Congress
as they suck down another fistful of Vicodin with their
fourth martini. The simpering hypocrites.
Whoops, sorry again. No name-calling. That never gets
us anywhere. Guess I'm just getting a bit angry. Maybe
a little frustrated at the rampant wholesale corporate-sponsored
government-enhanced parentally condoned drugging of
kids in this country, and what that means for our future,
and theirs, and the future of their attitudes and perspectives
and the deterioration of their brains, penises, souls,
karmas, love lives, vibration, evolutionary status.
Maybe I'm just getting a little too goddamn depressed
by it all. Maybe I just need a pill. And a drink. Ahhh,
there now. Much better. Thank you, Eli Lilly. We're
No. 1!
By STEVE GIEGERICH, AP Education
Writer Tue Nov 18, 2003
Devastated by their son's suicide
during his sophomore year in college, Donna and Phillip
Satow channeled their grief into reaching other students
who have contemplated taking their own lives. Now,
three years later, the Jed Foundation is working with
120 colleges and universities around the country, providing
resources that include Ulifeline, a free Web site linking
students to mental health centers and confidential
help. [...]
Second only to automobile accidents, suicide is
the leading killer of college students - claiming
the lives of an estimated 1,100 each year, according
to the Jed Foundation.
The American Association of Suicidology reports
on its Web site that the suicide rate for 15-to-25
year olds is 300 percent higher than it was in the
1950s. [...]
Comment: Perhaps
the introduction of drugs to cure depression has actually
made things worse - and maybe people really are less
happy, despite all the talk of improvements in society
and quality of life over the years.
By FRED GARDNER
Counterpunch
September 11 / 12, 2004
Just about every newspaper and TV
station in America reported August 18 that a study in
the Journal of the American Medical Association showed
Prozac and cognitive behavior therapy, in combination,
to be the most effective treatment of depression in adolescents.
Here are some of the headlines with which we were bombarded: "Drugs
and therapy aid depressed kids, study says."
"Drug Therapy Combo Best for Teen Depression." "Combined
Approach Better Than Drugs or Therapy Alone." "Depressed
Teens Need Drug Therapy." Etc., Etc.
The research, conducted over three years at 12 medical
centers, was funded and coordinated by the National
Institute of Mental Health at a cost to US taxpayers
of $17 million. A total of 439 adolescents aged 12-17
were given Prozac, Prozac plus cognitive behavior therapy,
placebo plus CBT, or placebo alone. After 12 weeks,
71% of those treated with Prozac and CBT showed improvement
(defined by the therapists and the subjects' responses
to questionnaires). Improvement was reported by 60%
of those taking Prozac without CBT, 43% getting CBT
alone, and 35% taking placebo alone.
NIMH Director Thomas Insel told the media it was a "landmark
study" because "it's the largest publicly funded
study and the only study this size that doesn't have
pharmaceutical funding."
Insel would have been accurate if he'd said the NIMH
study didn't get direct funding from the pharmaceutical
industry. But lead investigator John March of Duke University
Medical Center is on the Eli Lilly payroll, and five
of his10 co-authors also get drug-company grants.
Data to which March et al did not draw attention -and
few stories about the study even mentioned- showed a
higher incidence of harmful behavior among teens taking
Prozac (11.9%) compared to those on placebo (5.4%) and
CBT alone (4.5%). Few stories
mentioned that teenagers to whom suicidal thoughts had
occurred had been excluded from the study before it began. A
summary of the study by Jeanne Lenzer in the British
Medical Journal pointed out a structural flaw: two"arms" were
blinded (neither subject nor investigator knew whether
Prozac or placebo was being given), but the two arms
involving CBT were not. The BMJ also quoted a succinct
criticism of the study by David Antonuccio of the University
of Nevada School of Medicine: "The authors' value
judgment is that the benefit of a few extra improved
patients is worth the cost of a few extra harmed patients."
Reports in the popular media
failed to mention the ominous bottom-line conclusion
of the NIMH study:"the identification of depressed
adolescents and provision of evidence-based treatment
should be mandatory in health care systems."In
other words, if Lilly has its way, screening by a doctor
or a school, followed by mandatory Prozac (with a few
hours of talk therapy thrown in for the Colin Powell
effect), may be coming soon to a teenager near you. [...]
Comment: Combined
with Bush's recommendation for widespread screening of
the masses for mental illness, it seems America is heading
towards a "ban" on depression - and a heavily
medicated and brain dead population.
On the fourth
anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk
announces the availability of her latest book:
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books
have sought to explore the truth behind the official
version of events that day - yet to date, none of
these publications has provided a satisfactory answer
as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately
responsible for carrying them out.
Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura
Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of
the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and
ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks
played out.
9/11: The Ultimate
Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September
11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered
the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been
many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed
and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless
individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative
aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as
a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to
keep us confused and distracted to the reality of
the man behind the curtain.
Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk
eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear
evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural
cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity
to the brink of destruction in the present day.
For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core
of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to
be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation
that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover
their tracks, 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE
definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's
true implications are for the future of mankind.
Published by Red Pill Press
Scheduled for release in October
2005, readers can pre-order the book today at our bookstore.