Monday, June 22, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
THE JAPANESE WAY OF SUICIDE
Recently I ran across an article which was published in Bioethics by Jerome Young of Keio University of Kanagawa, Japan, addressing the dilemma which sucide poses for Japanese psychiatrists. These people, having unwisely embraced the Western notion of suicide as an irrational reaction to mental illness, have trouble coping with the fact that many of the most famous figures in Japanese history took their own lives with widespread public approval. His explanation is that Japan is a group-centered society, in which individual sacrifice for the good of the whole has traditionally been viewed in a positive light. The implication is that a person from a culture which values individual freedom and autonomy would find nothing admirable in that tradition. He could not be more wrong. I know for a fact that there are Westerners who are passionately devoted to the ideal of individual freedom who find the Japanese tradition admirable, because I am one of them. And I am not alone. When Thomas Jefferson said, "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them," was he not saying that it was better to be dead than to live without freedom? When John Stuart Mill wrote in his famous and oft-quoted passage in On Liberty, that "the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others, was he not saying that an intention to commit suicide, an act which harms only oneself, is no justification for the exercise of such power? There is every reason to believe that were it not for the idiotic Christian superstition against suicide-- and let us be perfectly clear about this-- it is the superstition, not necessarily the act itself, which is irrational-- both men would have come out and said what they really thought, that suicide can at least under some circumstances be perfectly rational and even admirable. Obviously there is something which the advocates of personal freedom have in common with the group-centered Japanese. What can that something be?
Daisetz Suzuki provides the answer in his classic, Zen and Japanese Culture: "It is only man who commits suicide, showing that there is something of more worth than life, the preservation of which we are most intensely concerned with." (pp. 197-8). In other words, both the Westerner and the Japanese commit suicide for a cause, whether that be the defense of individual liberty, loyalty to the emperor, or the protection of one's lord and clan. It has been said that the ancient Greeks were able to produce heart-breaking tragedies only because their civilization was so strong and positive in its outlook that they could endure the thought of tragedy, and similarly, the samurai willingness to die was indicative of the vigor of traditional Japanese civilization. People who regard suicide with composure do so because they do not fear that they will ever resort to it unless they have to; while those who attempt to suppress it do so because they do not have the courage to face life and fear that they will kill themselves for no good reason. More specifically, they fear that someone else will kill himself or herself because of their own misdeeds. Coercive suicide prevention thus stems from a sense of cowardice and weakness, which was absent in the classical Japanese warrior. Although seppuku was the catch-all term for suicide in Japan (hara-kiri being a the vulgar term used by the masses), there were many other terms used for different kinds of suicides. In fact, Japan is the only country in the world which has a term for suicide committed in protest against the actions of a superior, which makes it of particular interest to modern-day dissidents in opposition to their government. That term is kanshi.
Commission (or one should really say "performance", for "commission" makes it sound like a crime) of kanshi must necessarily be public, meaning not that the person doing the act must necessarily force everyone to see the blood and gore, but that he must make his reasons clear, so that it will be generally known that he did not kill himself as a result of some irrational impulse stemming from mental illness. Thus does Thomas Szasz reveal himself as just phony an advocate of the right to die as is Derek Humphrey, for his rejection of public suicide is a rejection of one of the most potent weapons against totalitarianism in the activist's arsenal (see Fatal Freedom, p. 130). If we are to judge the person who performs kanshi as mentally ill, then we must we judge every one who volunteers for military service to be so as well. The soldier who is honest with himself knows that active combat duty may very well kill him, but he volunteers because he believes that there are things worth dying for. It will no doubt be argued that the soldier does not volunteer because he wants to die, but then, neither does the political dissident who commits suicide in order to avoid mind-destroying psychiatric treatments want to die either. He may in fact be completely happy with his personal life and resent deeply the fact that he has been forced to make the decision to die in order to avoid a fate worse than death. The person who has accepted suicide as an inevitable concomitant of political protest in today's world is not "depressed" or "suicidal"-- he or she is a realist. And in a sense he is a soldier-- or more accurately, a warrior, like the samurai.
The notion that suicide is an acceptable and indeed laudatory adjunct to political action grew out of the tradition of bushido, which was formulated in the Tokugawa or Edo era (1600-1868), when the samurai class was under attack as never before. The Tokugawa shogunate, usually referred to as the bakufu, was unlike any regime which had preceded it in Japan. Whereas traditionally the shogun, having risen to his position from within the samurai class, ruled essentially as primus inter pares, the Tokugawas set themselves above other samurai and embarked on a policy of toritsubushi, or smashing of the warrior class. They were essentially the equivalent of the absolutist monarchs of the West. The proud samurai did not take this lying down. From the beginning, they fought back. When the Shimabara Rebellion, a mass uprising of disgruntled peasants and native converts to Christianity led by samurai was put down with appalling loss of life, they turned to political assassination combined with suicide. Their model was the fourteenth-century warrior Kusonoki Masahige, who fought valiantly for the emperor Go-Daigo in battle and, when the cause was lost, committed seppuku. the best-known example of a Tokugawa-era assassination (perhaps tyrannicide would be a better word) combined with seppuku was the Ako Vendetta of the Forty-Seven Ronin, celebrated in kabuki theater, bunraku or puppet drama and in modern film as Chushingura. There is such a rich embroidery of legend and good storytelling about this event that we cannot know for certain that every aspect of it is true, but it does seem to be based upon an actual incident. In 1701 the young daimyo of the Ako domain, Lord Asano, incurred the displeasure of a bakufu official, Kira, because he refused to bribe him. Enraged over the man's insulting behavior, Asano drew his sword in the shogun's castle and wounded but did not succeed in killing Kira. For this offense he was ordered to perform seppuku (this was a favor accorded to him on the basis of his rank-- had he been of lower birth he would simply have been beheaded). In revenge, forty-seven of his vassals pursued an elaborate plot to avenge their lord, pretending to lead a dissolute life in order to throw the official off-guard, and finally, on December 14, 1702, launching a concerted attack on Kira's mansion and beheading him. From the moment they decided to avenge their lord they knew that they would have to pay with their lives, and accordingly they did, being forced, as their lord had been, to perform seppuku.
In this connection, the samurai's chosen method of "committing" suicide requires some comment. No one to my knowledge has ever explained satisfactorily why seppuku involved slitting the abdomen, which was bound to cause terrible suffering. One explanation was simply machismo-- the warrior wanted to display his courage. But there is another possible explanation, which fits in well with the contrast between the luxury-loving and corrupt Kira and the virtuous Lord Asano. In slitting his belly, the warrior was showing his contempt for the lower side of himself, because the belly (and the genitals, which are below it) symbolized desire for and attachment to purely physical pleasures, and hence that base materialism which the samurai despised. It was the side he had in common with both infants and beasts, and in attacking it, the warrior felt that he was overcoming the infantile and animal side of himself in favor of a higher one. This is borne out by the fact that when seppuku went out of fashion, for quite obvious reasons, and the actual death-slash was made by a kaishuku or second, the samurai had to make some rudimentary assault on his belly-- if even a small slit-- in order to trigger the kaishuku's merciful beheading. This indicates that slitting the belly was an act which possessed a powerful symbolism. Nothing stands in more marked opposition to modern psychiatry, which treats people like mere animals or infants. The reader should rest assured that not all samurai suicides involved slitting the belly. It was only when there was time to engage in an elaborate ritual that this was the preferred method, at least for men. On the battlefield, in an emergency situation when one might well be captured by the enemy before one had the opportunity to perform seppuku, it was perfectly honorable to simply slit one's own throat or use any other method of killing oneself which presented itself. Women and underage males were also accorded this mercy. The point remains that in performing suicide, the samurai was displaying his allegiance to something higher than mere physical existence and material well-being, to a cause.
The best exponent of the philosophy which underlay seppuku was the leading intellectual of the late Tokugawa period-- a worthy equal to his contemporaries Mill and Henry David Thoreau-- Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859). Yoshida was born to a minor samurai family in the Choshu domain, a major thorn in the side of the Tokugawa shoguns. After being fully educated to the point where he could lecture on Mencius before he was in his teens, Yoshida spent the rest of his short life agitating against the Tokugawa bakufu. For this he was more than once imprisoned, which did not discourage his political activities in the slightest, the Tokugawas being in this respect more humane than the U.S. government, which tries to break its opponents by means of psychiatric torture. Although a leader of the Sonno-joi ("Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarian") movement, Yoshida was not averse to Western learning. Indeed, he made quite a daring attempt to board one of Commodore Mathew Perry's ships in order to study in America, an attempt for which he was punished by the bakufu. His interest in the West was motivated above all by a desire to obtain that technological acumen which would enable Japan to fend off Western military might, but he was not interested in Western military skills alone. Indeed, his writings reveal a good deal of knowledge about Western history. At one point, despairing over the state in which Japan found itself, he wrote: "My torment will only be appeased if a Napoleon could be raised up to proclaim liberty!" (Paul Akamatsu, Meiji 1868, p. 126). Although he was of course wrong in associating Napoleon with liberty, when he was in fact a tyrant who betrayed the French revolution, the association is not surprising in someone whose knowledge of Western history was of necessity only partial, and a mistake made by many Western scholars who should know better. But the reference to liberty was not simply a figure of speech. In advocating a restoration of the Emperor to power he was not simply calling for the exchange of one master for another, for the emperor had never never exercised, and never would exercise, such tyrannical power as the Tokugawas. His ascendancy rather ensured that the Japanese were free to do as they pleased, whether this was to erect a democratic and constitutional government or, as it turned out, tragically under Meiji, to place in power a tyrannical oligarcy based upon excessive fear and imitation of the West.
The essence of Yoshida's philosophy was the contrast between the principles of ri and gi. Ri represented the self-seeking quest for power, profit, and material advantage-- all those things symbolized by the belly which the samurai attacked in performing seppuku-- and was exemplified both by the Tokugawa bakufu and the imperialistic United States, which (as Yoshida pointed out) was at that very time engaged in a self-seeking war with Mexico. In opposition to this principle, Yoshida advocated gi, which can be translated as "justice", "honor", or "prinicipled loyalty". He founded a school, the Shoka Sonjuku, to promote the ideal of gi. When Ii Naosuke, the powerful tairo or chief minister of the Tokugawa Regime, signed a commercial treaty with American Ambassador Townsend Harris in 1858, Yoshida was outraged. Although by no means averse to opening Japan to trade and commerce, he believed that this should be done under a government centered about the emperor and devoted to the principle of gi. To his mind, a union between the cowardly and materialistic Tokugawa bakufu and an aggrandizing West could only mean the ruination of Japan. And he was not the only critic of the treaty. All across Japan, a chorus of voices arose in opposition. The tyrannical Ii responded by launching the Ansei Purge, in which his opponents were, according to their rank, placed under house arrest, imprisoned or executed. Yoshida was one of its victims, who was executed on Ii's direct orders. Just before his death, he wrote his followers with instructions on how to react to it. After telling them that death is the price which men always paid if they were to rise above the superficialities of traditional behavior, he said, "You all know what my purpose has been. Therefore I wish that you not grieve over my execution. Grieving over me is not as important as acceding to my ideas and goals and developing them further." Although he did not have an opportunity to perform seppuku, his death was in effect just as much a chosen one-- a kanshi-- for he had opposed the bakufu with full knowledge that doing so would get him killed. Thus he may stand forever as a model of how one should fight injustice. Thoreau only spent some time in jail for opposing the Mexican War; Yoshida, by contrast, for his opposition to a similar outrage, gave his life.
But how is one who loves life to steel himself to face the inevitable? That is a subject which I hope to deal with in my next blog (unless they get me first!)
Daisetz Suzuki provides the answer in his classic, Zen and Japanese Culture: "It is only man who commits suicide, showing that there is something of more worth than life, the preservation of which we are most intensely concerned with." (pp. 197-8). In other words, both the Westerner and the Japanese commit suicide for a cause, whether that be the defense of individual liberty, loyalty to the emperor, or the protection of one's lord and clan. It has been said that the ancient Greeks were able to produce heart-breaking tragedies only because their civilization was so strong and positive in its outlook that they could endure the thought of tragedy, and similarly, the samurai willingness to die was indicative of the vigor of traditional Japanese civilization. People who regard suicide with composure do so because they do not fear that they will ever resort to it unless they have to; while those who attempt to suppress it do so because they do not have the courage to face life and fear that they will kill themselves for no good reason. More specifically, they fear that someone else will kill himself or herself because of their own misdeeds. Coercive suicide prevention thus stems from a sense of cowardice and weakness, which was absent in the classical Japanese warrior. Although seppuku was the catch-all term for suicide in Japan (hara-kiri being a the vulgar term used by the masses), there were many other terms used for different kinds of suicides. In fact, Japan is the only country in the world which has a term for suicide committed in protest against the actions of a superior, which makes it of particular interest to modern-day dissidents in opposition to their government. That term is kanshi.
Commission (or one should really say "performance", for "commission" makes it sound like a crime) of kanshi must necessarily be public, meaning not that the person doing the act must necessarily force everyone to see the blood and gore, but that he must make his reasons clear, so that it will be generally known that he did not kill himself as a result of some irrational impulse stemming from mental illness. Thus does Thomas Szasz reveal himself as just phony an advocate of the right to die as is Derek Humphrey, for his rejection of public suicide is a rejection of one of the most potent weapons against totalitarianism in the activist's arsenal (see Fatal Freedom, p. 130). If we are to judge the person who performs kanshi as mentally ill, then we must we judge every one who volunteers for military service to be so as well. The soldier who is honest with himself knows that active combat duty may very well kill him, but he volunteers because he believes that there are things worth dying for. It will no doubt be argued that the soldier does not volunteer because he wants to die, but then, neither does the political dissident who commits suicide in order to avoid mind-destroying psychiatric treatments want to die either. He may in fact be completely happy with his personal life and resent deeply the fact that he has been forced to make the decision to die in order to avoid a fate worse than death. The person who has accepted suicide as an inevitable concomitant of political protest in today's world is not "depressed" or "suicidal"-- he or she is a realist. And in a sense he is a soldier-- or more accurately, a warrior, like the samurai.
The notion that suicide is an acceptable and indeed laudatory adjunct to political action grew out of the tradition of bushido, which was formulated in the Tokugawa or Edo era (1600-1868), when the samurai class was under attack as never before. The Tokugawa shogunate, usually referred to as the bakufu, was unlike any regime which had preceded it in Japan. Whereas traditionally the shogun, having risen to his position from within the samurai class, ruled essentially as primus inter pares, the Tokugawas set themselves above other samurai and embarked on a policy of toritsubushi, or smashing of the warrior class. They were essentially the equivalent of the absolutist monarchs of the West. The proud samurai did not take this lying down. From the beginning, they fought back. When the Shimabara Rebellion, a mass uprising of disgruntled peasants and native converts to Christianity led by samurai was put down with appalling loss of life, they turned to political assassination combined with suicide. Their model was the fourteenth-century warrior Kusonoki Masahige, who fought valiantly for the emperor Go-Daigo in battle and, when the cause was lost, committed seppuku. the best-known example of a Tokugawa-era assassination (perhaps tyrannicide would be a better word) combined with seppuku was the Ako Vendetta of the Forty-Seven Ronin, celebrated in kabuki theater, bunraku or puppet drama and in modern film as Chushingura. There is such a rich embroidery of legend and good storytelling about this event that we cannot know for certain that every aspect of it is true, but it does seem to be based upon an actual incident. In 1701 the young daimyo of the Ako domain, Lord Asano, incurred the displeasure of a bakufu official, Kira, because he refused to bribe him. Enraged over the man's insulting behavior, Asano drew his sword in the shogun's castle and wounded but did not succeed in killing Kira. For this offense he was ordered to perform seppuku (this was a favor accorded to him on the basis of his rank-- had he been of lower birth he would simply have been beheaded). In revenge, forty-seven of his vassals pursued an elaborate plot to avenge their lord, pretending to lead a dissolute life in order to throw the official off-guard, and finally, on December 14, 1702, launching a concerted attack on Kira's mansion and beheading him. From the moment they decided to avenge their lord they knew that they would have to pay with their lives, and accordingly they did, being forced, as their lord had been, to perform seppuku.
In this connection, the samurai's chosen method of "committing" suicide requires some comment. No one to my knowledge has ever explained satisfactorily why seppuku involved slitting the abdomen, which was bound to cause terrible suffering. One explanation was simply machismo-- the warrior wanted to display his courage. But there is another possible explanation, which fits in well with the contrast between the luxury-loving and corrupt Kira and the virtuous Lord Asano. In slitting his belly, the warrior was showing his contempt for the lower side of himself, because the belly (and the genitals, which are below it) symbolized desire for and attachment to purely physical pleasures, and hence that base materialism which the samurai despised. It was the side he had in common with both infants and beasts, and in attacking it, the warrior felt that he was overcoming the infantile and animal side of himself in favor of a higher one. This is borne out by the fact that when seppuku went out of fashion, for quite obvious reasons, and the actual death-slash was made by a kaishuku or second, the samurai had to make some rudimentary assault on his belly-- if even a small slit-- in order to trigger the kaishuku's merciful beheading. This indicates that slitting the belly was an act which possessed a powerful symbolism. Nothing stands in more marked opposition to modern psychiatry, which treats people like mere animals or infants. The reader should rest assured that not all samurai suicides involved slitting the belly. It was only when there was time to engage in an elaborate ritual that this was the preferred method, at least for men. On the battlefield, in an emergency situation when one might well be captured by the enemy before one had the opportunity to perform seppuku, it was perfectly honorable to simply slit one's own throat or use any other method of killing oneself which presented itself. Women and underage males were also accorded this mercy. The point remains that in performing suicide, the samurai was displaying his allegiance to something higher than mere physical existence and material well-being, to a cause.
The best exponent of the philosophy which underlay seppuku was the leading intellectual of the late Tokugawa period-- a worthy equal to his contemporaries Mill and Henry David Thoreau-- Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859). Yoshida was born to a minor samurai family in the Choshu domain, a major thorn in the side of the Tokugawa shoguns. After being fully educated to the point where he could lecture on Mencius before he was in his teens, Yoshida spent the rest of his short life agitating against the Tokugawa bakufu. For this he was more than once imprisoned, which did not discourage his political activities in the slightest, the Tokugawas being in this respect more humane than the U.S. government, which tries to break its opponents by means of psychiatric torture. Although a leader of the Sonno-joi ("Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarian") movement, Yoshida was not averse to Western learning. Indeed, he made quite a daring attempt to board one of Commodore Mathew Perry's ships in order to study in America, an attempt for which he was punished by the bakufu. His interest in the West was motivated above all by a desire to obtain that technological acumen which would enable Japan to fend off Western military might, but he was not interested in Western military skills alone. Indeed, his writings reveal a good deal of knowledge about Western history. At one point, despairing over the state in which Japan found itself, he wrote: "My torment will only be appeased if a Napoleon could be raised up to proclaim liberty!" (Paul Akamatsu, Meiji 1868, p. 126). Although he was of course wrong in associating Napoleon with liberty, when he was in fact a tyrant who betrayed the French revolution, the association is not surprising in someone whose knowledge of Western history was of necessity only partial, and a mistake made by many Western scholars who should know better. But the reference to liberty was not simply a figure of speech. In advocating a restoration of the Emperor to power he was not simply calling for the exchange of one master for another, for the emperor had never never exercised, and never would exercise, such tyrannical power as the Tokugawas. His ascendancy rather ensured that the Japanese were free to do as they pleased, whether this was to erect a democratic and constitutional government or, as it turned out, tragically under Meiji, to place in power a tyrannical oligarcy based upon excessive fear and imitation of the West.
The essence of Yoshida's philosophy was the contrast between the principles of ri and gi. Ri represented the self-seeking quest for power, profit, and material advantage-- all those things symbolized by the belly which the samurai attacked in performing seppuku-- and was exemplified both by the Tokugawa bakufu and the imperialistic United States, which (as Yoshida pointed out) was at that very time engaged in a self-seeking war with Mexico. In opposition to this principle, Yoshida advocated gi, which can be translated as "justice", "honor", or "prinicipled loyalty". He founded a school, the Shoka Sonjuku, to promote the ideal of gi. When Ii Naosuke, the powerful tairo or chief minister of the Tokugawa Regime, signed a commercial treaty with American Ambassador Townsend Harris in 1858, Yoshida was outraged. Although by no means averse to opening Japan to trade and commerce, he believed that this should be done under a government centered about the emperor and devoted to the principle of gi. To his mind, a union between the cowardly and materialistic Tokugawa bakufu and an aggrandizing West could only mean the ruination of Japan. And he was not the only critic of the treaty. All across Japan, a chorus of voices arose in opposition. The tyrannical Ii responded by launching the Ansei Purge, in which his opponents were, according to their rank, placed under house arrest, imprisoned or executed. Yoshida was one of its victims, who was executed on Ii's direct orders. Just before his death, he wrote his followers with instructions on how to react to it. After telling them that death is the price which men always paid if they were to rise above the superficialities of traditional behavior, he said, "You all know what my purpose has been. Therefore I wish that you not grieve over my execution. Grieving over me is not as important as acceding to my ideas and goals and developing them further." Although he did not have an opportunity to perform seppuku, his death was in effect just as much a chosen one-- a kanshi-- for he had opposed the bakufu with full knowledge that doing so would get him killed. Thus he may stand forever as a model of how one should fight injustice. Thoreau only spent some time in jail for opposing the Mexican War; Yoshida, by contrast, for his opposition to a similar outrage, gave his life.
But how is one who loves life to steel himself to face the inevitable? That is a subject which I hope to deal with in my next blog (unless they get me first!)
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
IMPLICATIONS OF THE LINDAUER CASE
It happens nearly every day-- every day we hear about more shocking incursions on our liberties. First there was the Patriot Act, and then the Military Commissions Act, which was not overturned by Boumediene v. Bush. This decision, which has not even been implemented yet, applied only to the detainees at Guantanamo-- it is still possible for American citizens to be arrested on charges of being "unlawful enemy combatants" and incarcerated without due process. If one receives a trial at all it will not be a fair one, as was the case with Joe Padilla. And now we hear, from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, that President Obama is considering instituting an unconstitutional "preventative detention system" (BORDC Newsletter, "Dissent is Patriotic", June 2009 Vol. 8 No. 6). Most sinister of all are the plans of the so-called "New Freedom Commission on Mental Health" to initiate universal mental health screening, helped by TeenScreen, the Mother's Bill, and policies which force dangerous drugs on our soldiers. These measures are threatening precisely because most people think that a psychiatric diagnosis of mental illness and psychiatric "treatments" are instruments designed to help people. They are not. They are weapons designed to reduce all American citizens to what Henry David Thoreau called "conscienceless robots". Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the case of Susan Lindauer.
Susan Lindauer is a former journalist and Congressional aide with links to the American intelligence community. I have never seen any credible evidence that she has any history of mental illness whatsoever, and her writings reveal a mind which is not only sane but possessed of an insight and prescience lacking in any government official. The only thing which might indicate a lack of judgement is her faith in the United States government, but this failing is all too common today. Her intelligence connections enabled her to see as early as 2001 that not only did Iraq have no weapons of mass destruction, but that Saddam Hussein was eager to distance himself from Islamic extremists. From that year until 2003 she sent a series of impassioned memos to her second cousin, Andrew Card, who was then White House Chief of Staff, arguing against an invasion of Iraq. In these memos she said that Saddam Hussein would welcome an FBI task force into Baghdad, which would be able to "interview witnesses and make arrests." If the U.S. did not accept this offer of cooperation on Saddam's part, the consequences could be catastrophic, because Iraqis already hated the U.S. as a result of the U.N. sanctions it had sponsored: "That hatred has kindled deeply because of the sanctions, Andy. Sanctions have killed 1.7 million human beings, including almost one million little children. Stop and think. What would an American father do to the man who had killed three of his children, once that father could lay hands on the aggressor? [H]e'd beat him to death and stab him 100 times until his arms were sore. And then he'd look for the next man..." In her last memo, Lindauer warned that an invasion would only strengthen terrorism: "Above all, you must realize that if you go ahead with this invasion, Osama bin Laden will triumph, rising from his grave of seclusion. His network will be swollen with fresh recruits and other charismatic individuals will seek to build on his model multiplying those networks." (Interview with Michael Collins, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0710/S00266.htm)
As we all know, Lindauer's predictions have proven accurate. But what did she get for her conscientious efforts? On March 11, 2004, she was shocked to find FBI agents pounding on the door of her Takoma Park house in Maryland with a warrant for her arrest. She had been accused of acting as an "unregistered agent" for Saddam Hussein. If that was what she really was, she could have been easily tried and convicted for the crime. But the prosecution must not have been serious, because it never tried her for it. Instead it sent her to a prison on a military base in Carswell, Texas, where she was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation. The Carswell psychiatrists decided that she was "deluded" into thinking that she had worked as a CIA asset, although had she been given a trial, she could easily have called witnesses to prove that she had. Most tellingly, they pressured her into taking Haldol, a neuroleptic drug which the Soviet government had favored for use against dissidents. Its effects were described in a 1976 interview with Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch: "I was horrified to see how I deteriorated intellectually, morally and emotionally from day to day. My interest in political problems quickly disappeared, then my interest in scientific problems, and then my interest in my wife and children." (Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 57-8). She wisely refused to take the medication, and her refusal was upheld in a hearing before Judge Michael Mukasey (later Attorney General) in September 2006, but in terms which completely discredited her as a person capable of influencing anyone. "The record shows that even lay people recognize that she is seriously disturbed," said Muakasey. It seems that a neighbor had suspected her of being mildly schizophrenic. That such flimsy evidence could take precedence over the undeniable rationality of her argument against an invasion speaks volumes about how low the legal system-- indeed the entire government of the United States has sunk.
In one of a series of exclusive interviews which she granted to Michael Collins, Lindauer exposed the corrupt nature of forensic psychiatry in this country, in terms which suggest that psychiatry as a whole is corrupt. She said, "I am furious about the abuse I have suffered. I regard this as a Soviet-style attackon my rights to dissent from the government... Psychiatry was corrupt enough to help the Bush Administration out of a jam, which says a lot. Forensic psychiatry is a profitable business. In my opinion they are charlatans and court prostitutes who are abusing their access to the courts in order to get money out of the state and federal budgets. They have little or no value. For myself, I have never engaged in therapy or counseling. I would never confide personal affairs to them, or listen to anything they have to say. In a weird twist, anything I say could get reported to pre-trial services. It's not private. They were a huge waste of time, burning the clock on my 6th Amendment rights... Psychiatrists are terrified of witness testimony to the point of psychotic reaction. They're so insecure as to be deeply threatened that reality will impose limitations on their phony authority in the courtroom. The consequences for due process of law is quite terrifying. On horrific shrink-- Dr. Robert L. Goldstein-- actually testified that the depth of my belief in witness testimony confirmed "the seriousness of my mental illness"... It was the most terrifying and Kafkaesque experience of my life. Truly it proves that psychiatry is out of control in the courts. They invent and fabricate, and if the truth contradicts them, they don't even care. As Dr. Vas at Carswell put it, "We'll just tell the court you made it up. Who do you think the judge is going to believe? I'm a doctor!" (http://thejournal.epluribusmedia.net) If Lindauer was indeed deluded about having worked as an intelligence asset, this fact could have been proven within a single session in court. She says that she could, using witnesses, prove her case in fifteen minutes. But the evidence for or against her contention has in fact never been heard. To date, the government has not permitted her a fair trial, instead declaring her mentally incompetent on the testimony of the sort of psychiatrist she described.
Lindauer was fortunate in that she was spared the necessity of taking Haldol. Perhaps this was the one benefit she reaped from having had a second cousin working as Chief of Staff in the White House. But what about the dissident with no such connections? For American dissidents must recognize that the time is coming when we will all be arrested for our convictions. The government has been keeping tabs on our organizing and protesting activities-- indeed, as soon as this blog is published, it will be split off from all irrelevant, non-political material in a special room at my local AT&T office and sent to the National Security Agency. It would be wisest under the circumstances for me to keep silent, but I am conscience-bound to do my best to save others. And what can we expect if the FBI should one day pound on our doors and say that they are there to arrest us for some imagined crime? Should the dissident suspect cooperate under the illusion that certainly, in this great nation of ours, he will have his day in court? That even if he is sentenced to prison, it will be for something which all recognize as a crime of conscience, like refusing to go to Vietnam in the nineteen-sixties? That he will emerge from the crisis a hero, like Henry David Thoreau? If he thinks this, he is a fool. The authorities will incarcerate him and subject him to psychiatric examination as they did Lindauer-- and most probably, if he has no relatives in the White House, psychiatric torture as well. It will use ECT to wipe out his memory and psychiatric drugs to remove his emotions, causing him to forget all the convictions for which he was arrested and why they mattered to him. By the time he emerges, it will be as a broken man or woman, a walking advertisement for totalitarianism.
Under these circumstances, he must fight to the death in order to avoid apprehension, and either take his own life or place himself in a position in which his assailants will be forced to kill him. The decision to die is not an easy one, but there is much to be learned from the traditions of the Japanese samurai who steeled themselves every day for this eventuality and about which I shall be writing in future blogs. For the time being I have only this to say: never allow yourself to be arrested, never allow yourself to be taken alive, for to do so in today's society is to surrender and suffer total defeat. Suicide under such circumstances is not an expression of depression or despair but rather of defiance. Today's dissident is like a soldier--nay, more like a warrior-- although he does not want to die, although he may passionately love life and resent those who have pushed him to this choice, he must recognize that for him, death is the only alternative to defeat. In the end the decision to die at a moment of our own choosing, in defiance of the totalitarian monster under which we live, will be the most important choice we will ever make.
Susan Lindauer is a former journalist and Congressional aide with links to the American intelligence community. I have never seen any credible evidence that she has any history of mental illness whatsoever, and her writings reveal a mind which is not only sane but possessed of an insight and prescience lacking in any government official. The only thing which might indicate a lack of judgement is her faith in the United States government, but this failing is all too common today. Her intelligence connections enabled her to see as early as 2001 that not only did Iraq have no weapons of mass destruction, but that Saddam Hussein was eager to distance himself from Islamic extremists. From that year until 2003 she sent a series of impassioned memos to her second cousin, Andrew Card, who was then White House Chief of Staff, arguing against an invasion of Iraq. In these memos she said that Saddam Hussein would welcome an FBI task force into Baghdad, which would be able to "interview witnesses and make arrests." If the U.S. did not accept this offer of cooperation on Saddam's part, the consequences could be catastrophic, because Iraqis already hated the U.S. as a result of the U.N. sanctions it had sponsored: "That hatred has kindled deeply because of the sanctions, Andy. Sanctions have killed 1.7 million human beings, including almost one million little children. Stop and think. What would an American father do to the man who had killed three of his children, once that father could lay hands on the aggressor? [H]e'd beat him to death and stab him 100 times until his arms were sore. And then he'd look for the next man..." In her last memo, Lindauer warned that an invasion would only strengthen terrorism: "Above all, you must realize that if you go ahead with this invasion, Osama bin Laden will triumph, rising from his grave of seclusion. His network will be swollen with fresh recruits and other charismatic individuals will seek to build on his model multiplying those networks." (Interview with Michael Collins, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0710/S00266.htm)
As we all know, Lindauer's predictions have proven accurate. But what did she get for her conscientious efforts? On March 11, 2004, she was shocked to find FBI agents pounding on the door of her Takoma Park house in Maryland with a warrant for her arrest. She had been accused of acting as an "unregistered agent" for Saddam Hussein. If that was what she really was, she could have been easily tried and convicted for the crime. But the prosecution must not have been serious, because it never tried her for it. Instead it sent her to a prison on a military base in Carswell, Texas, where she was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation. The Carswell psychiatrists decided that she was "deluded" into thinking that she had worked as a CIA asset, although had she been given a trial, she could easily have called witnesses to prove that she had. Most tellingly, they pressured her into taking Haldol, a neuroleptic drug which the Soviet government had favored for use against dissidents. Its effects were described in a 1976 interview with Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch: "I was horrified to see how I deteriorated intellectually, morally and emotionally from day to day. My interest in political problems quickly disappeared, then my interest in scientific problems, and then my interest in my wife and children." (Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 57-8). She wisely refused to take the medication, and her refusal was upheld in a hearing before Judge Michael Mukasey (later Attorney General) in September 2006, but in terms which completely discredited her as a person capable of influencing anyone. "The record shows that even lay people recognize that she is seriously disturbed," said Muakasey. It seems that a neighbor had suspected her of being mildly schizophrenic. That such flimsy evidence could take precedence over the undeniable rationality of her argument against an invasion speaks volumes about how low the legal system-- indeed the entire government of the United States has sunk.
In one of a series of exclusive interviews which she granted to Michael Collins, Lindauer exposed the corrupt nature of forensic psychiatry in this country, in terms which suggest that psychiatry as a whole is corrupt. She said, "I am furious about the abuse I have suffered. I regard this as a Soviet-style attackon my rights to dissent from the government... Psychiatry was corrupt enough to help the Bush Administration out of a jam, which says a lot. Forensic psychiatry is a profitable business. In my opinion they are charlatans and court prostitutes who are abusing their access to the courts in order to get money out of the state and federal budgets. They have little or no value. For myself, I have never engaged in therapy or counseling. I would never confide personal affairs to them, or listen to anything they have to say. In a weird twist, anything I say could get reported to pre-trial services. It's not private. They were a huge waste of time, burning the clock on my 6th Amendment rights... Psychiatrists are terrified of witness testimony to the point of psychotic reaction. They're so insecure as to be deeply threatened that reality will impose limitations on their phony authority in the courtroom. The consequences for due process of law is quite terrifying. On horrific shrink-- Dr. Robert L. Goldstein-- actually testified that the depth of my belief in witness testimony confirmed "the seriousness of my mental illness"... It was the most terrifying and Kafkaesque experience of my life. Truly it proves that psychiatry is out of control in the courts. They invent and fabricate, and if the truth contradicts them, they don't even care. As Dr. Vas at Carswell put it, "We'll just tell the court you made it up. Who do you think the judge is going to believe? I'm a doctor!" (http://thejournal.epluribusmedia.net) If Lindauer was indeed deluded about having worked as an intelligence asset, this fact could have been proven within a single session in court. She says that she could, using witnesses, prove her case in fifteen minutes. But the evidence for or against her contention has in fact never been heard. To date, the government has not permitted her a fair trial, instead declaring her mentally incompetent on the testimony of the sort of psychiatrist she described.
Lindauer was fortunate in that she was spared the necessity of taking Haldol. Perhaps this was the one benefit she reaped from having had a second cousin working as Chief of Staff in the White House. But what about the dissident with no such connections? For American dissidents must recognize that the time is coming when we will all be arrested for our convictions. The government has been keeping tabs on our organizing and protesting activities-- indeed, as soon as this blog is published, it will be split off from all irrelevant, non-political material in a special room at my local AT&T office and sent to the National Security Agency. It would be wisest under the circumstances for me to keep silent, but I am conscience-bound to do my best to save others. And what can we expect if the FBI should one day pound on our doors and say that they are there to arrest us for some imagined crime? Should the dissident suspect cooperate under the illusion that certainly, in this great nation of ours, he will have his day in court? That even if he is sentenced to prison, it will be for something which all recognize as a crime of conscience, like refusing to go to Vietnam in the nineteen-sixties? That he will emerge from the crisis a hero, like Henry David Thoreau? If he thinks this, he is a fool. The authorities will incarcerate him and subject him to psychiatric examination as they did Lindauer-- and most probably, if he has no relatives in the White House, psychiatric torture as well. It will use ECT to wipe out his memory and psychiatric drugs to remove his emotions, causing him to forget all the convictions for which he was arrested and why they mattered to him. By the time he emerges, it will be as a broken man or woman, a walking advertisement for totalitarianism.
Under these circumstances, he must fight to the death in order to avoid apprehension, and either take his own life or place himself in a position in which his assailants will be forced to kill him. The decision to die is not an easy one, but there is much to be learned from the traditions of the Japanese samurai who steeled themselves every day for this eventuality and about which I shall be writing in future blogs. For the time being I have only this to say: never allow yourself to be arrested, never allow yourself to be taken alive, for to do so in today's society is to surrender and suffer total defeat. Suicide under such circumstances is not an expression of depression or despair but rather of defiance. Today's dissident is like a soldier--nay, more like a warrior-- although he does not want to die, although he may passionately love life and resent those who have pushed him to this choice, he must recognize that for him, death is the only alternative to defeat. In the end the decision to die at a moment of our own choosing, in defiance of the totalitarian monster under which we live, will be the most important choice we will ever make.
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