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mind control
“Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law (as well as the church) on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.”
- Historian Alan Bullock
Toward the end of this video, John Taylor Gatto, the iconoclastic critic of compulsory education and state schools and ardent advocate of “unschooling,” has an especially memorable passage.
He points out that while the state can violently coerce a few people at a time (through arrest and shooting), there’s no way (outside war or genocide, I [...]
n “Enronathon,” Seth Mnookin of The Wall Street Journal suggests Bethany McLean wasn’t quite the first person to break the story of Enron…and that she had a good bit of unacknowledged help:
“If journalism were in the Olympics, the Enron story might well be pairs figure skating. Bethany McLean, the young Fortune writer who first wrote [...]
From Black Star News:
“In the 1980s there was one great stock fraud, which captured the imagination of the American public. That stock fraud involved a chain of electronics stores, which went by the name of “Crazy Eddie.” These stores were founded by Eddie Antar (“Crazy Eddie”) of Brooklyn. “Crazy Eddie” used radio advertising to hype [...]
Mind-reading passengers for terrorist potential - (note, potential) i.e. “thought crimes” - is here, folks, and seriously being batted about by Homeland Security: “The aim of one company that blends high technology and behavioral psychology is hinted at in its name, WeCU — as in “We See You.” The system that Israeli-based WeCU Technologies has devised and [...]
A European friend with whom I’ve been engaged in an ongoing conversation about domestic violence and rape sent me this for publication. Even though the events described are well behind her and even though she’s a much stronger person today, she still wishes to remain anonymous for a number of reasons.
Dear friend, thank you for speaking out.
I dreamt it again. I dreamt someone stole my backpack – where I keep all my ‘precious’ things, the ones I use for my work, that is actually my life: books, camera, notebook, pens, few money, documents and mobile phone. My ‘safety’ objects, the ones that help me keep track of the people I meet and I work among.
I know this theft is an evolution of an older one – a folder with the content related to my studies in the past, a collection of essays. In my dreams – for months – it was stolen by my former boyfriend, the ‘psychotic bastard’ as I call him now after many years, and I know this time it’s him stealing my backpack again.
He does so because he hasn’t a life by himself. He has no character, nor personality, nor passions, nor interests. He has nothing. He is nothing. He steals other people’s lives, sucking their energy to the bones, to survive. And when he finds a weak, good, sweet one, he destroys him/her – by manipulating, by violence, by humiliation. Because this is his strategy to survive, while conscious of being nothing and so not having any alternative to base his existence upon.
There are some men who continuously humiliate and/or beat their women. Sometimes they kill them too. The amount of ‘private violence’ is unbelievable, and something striking us in our everyday life, among most of the women we know or get in contact with. A man killed his wife in Sevilla yesterday. And yesterday I did also get the information about a new (attempting to be funny?) group on Facebook calling rape a ‘natural masculine instinct’, so that it should be not considered a crime. Everywhere I look around, I see women acting as nurses to men – hoping to lighten their existential pain, allowing them to take it out on them, and repeating “he will change, because of my love and care; he will change, because of my love and care…”
No, he will not change. Because, as he opened his eyes, he would recognise he has/is nothing – so he won’t do it. And he doesn’t ‘have’ you, either: not being in love with you, because he is not he will be twice angry against ‘life’ that didn’t give him the ‘perfect woman’. And he will beat you: you may not be ‘perfect’, but still you are useful for his needs – that means physically absorbing his frustrations.
I rushed away – luckily after less then two years. The damage he left on my body and my soul can’t be counted. It can’t. I still face the physical consequences, 15 years later. Law protects them: as police told me, they can do something against him only in case of a failed attempt to kill me. But who says how deep is the beating you received? How painful is it? What did you think about during and after? And what if he was successful in his attempt to kill you?
I do also think, after so many years of slow psychological recovery, that it was also my fault. I had been a stupid idiot. I have no other words to define my dumbness. I wasn’t able to protect myself from him: I had no idea of what an equal relationship was, and I thought to ‘sacrifice for him’ was a value and a ‘right effort’. No, it wasn’t. It was only a stupid action by a stupid woman in love with a rapist – protecting him from all the ones who had already recognised him as he was. It was my fault to authorize his violence, to allow it to go and to repeat it in the future with someone else.
No, he will not change and he will not stay with his victim/wife/mate (stupid words these last two in this case) the rest of his life. When the victim begins reacting, he will hate her and make her feel deeply guilty. He will cry for compassion. He will ask for pity and assure his love. I remember him crying, and now also his sneer after he was successful once again because of that, and I came back. But the truth is that – at his eyes – as soon as you will react you’ll be guilty of not behaving as his victim and toy anymore. And he will humiliate you and get even more violent, as much as he can, and then quickly and simply find another one to replace you. These people have a strong consciousness of who their next potential victim might be.
He is not helpless. Not even to comfort – no matter what he had to face in his life. An attitude to violence can be explained by previous bad experiences, but not justified by them. These are two different things. Nothing justifies humiliation, violence, insults, manipulations. This is not love. Such as being in love can explain why it took me so much time to get out of this situation, but not justify my stupidity in case I remained, repeating the idiot mantra “he will change, because of my love and care” (errare humanum est,perseverare autem diabolicum).
Differently from many other women, I soon got out of Stockholm syndrome, but it took me time not to be instinctively scared by a caress, and even more time to manage my feelings toward the next men properly. Well, I guess I didn’t reach this last point yet, and maybe I never will. I’m very envious of those persons who never had to face such violent relationships, because somehow they do better than me in this. But I know I will always be a careful person, and, even if not interested, I will be always honoured by being loved by someone – as falling in love with someone means to see some beauty in him/her. And I know I will be careful of my actions toward these persons, knowing the weakness caused by being in love, and will never abuse this power.
This is the only good thing I got from / in spite of that relationship, and I’m not grateful I had it – I would gladly avoid it, if I could. But I couldn’t. No, I correct myself: I didn’t. As I could choose, and I made the most stupid choice for a long time, thinking everybody was allowed to do to me what he wanted, as I meant nothing. Well, I mean something, as I am something. First of all I am myself, with my folders and backpack full of notes, pictures, experiences, feelings and past. I have an identity, and nobody can steal nor rape it anymore. When I wake up, my backpack is still there. And the guy? I have no idea – the last time I met him (10 years after our relationship and 5 years ago) by chance in the train, I went away ignoring him and not even greeting him (there’s no reason to talk, he does not belong to my life, by my choice, anymore – no way, ever!) and kept asking myself “what the hell did I see beautiful, to fall in love with him?” But no reason to waste time to think about it, anyway, anymore…
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“I Want Out”, Helloween, 1988
From our lives’ beginning on We are pushed in little forms No one asks us how we like to be In school they teach you what to think But everyone says different things But they’re all convinced that They’re the ones to see So they keep talking and they never stop And [...]
Notes from the Asperance Expedition
Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording
Page Seventeen:
Tom Paine Maru by L. Neil Smith
Repression spares us the memory of birth, along with the painful remembrance of many agonies of childhood or adult life, but it has unfortunate side-effects. It creates the subconscious, which is simply a repository of repressed data. According to the praxeologists, a sane person would have no subconscious. It lowers effective intelligence by tying up physiological hardware, intellectual software, also, physical energy.
Worse, by separating the process of cognition from sensation, repression separates the human “life” — which suffers any number of painful experiences daily — from the human mind, in a misdirected attempt at protecting it. The mind — which evolved for billions of years to control a life — naturally looks for other lives to control, instead. The life, because it must, looks for other minds to control it.
The is the essence of the authoritarian personality, inclined to be as fully submissive as it is to be brutally domineering. The praxeologists believe the drive for power is inversely proportional to the remaining operative intelligence, which explains why individuals, climbing up the ladder of society, appear more stupid the higher they get.
Religion serves many functions in a culture. It gives supreme leaders the comforting feeling that there is a controlling mind above them.
According to Confederates, the happiest non-sane human being is a mid-level bureaucrat with lives to control below, minds above for guidance.
I would have to think about that one.
It certainly matched my experience.
– L. Neil Smith, Tom Paine Maru
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All around the world, including on the other side of this screen you are reading now, people act according to what I call little mental programs.
They learn to obey mommy and daddy (or whomever the child-rearers are in their lives), and to transfer those patterns of obedience on to and to adopt them from individuals and institutions of all sorts: schools, churches, teams, states, media, politicians, leaders, prophets, bosses, generals, traditions, cultures.
The Bellamy salute, Occupied Hawai'i, 1941
Precious few seem to ever learn the value of questioning everything put to them by these people and institutions, to deconstruct the self-perpetuating mind-viruses they transmit, and to confront the truths of our common reality for themselves. Instead, too many fall into those patterns and enact those little mental programs.
The most successful of these programs ultimately include directives to retransmit them to others — and to shun those who refuse to absorb and adopt them.
“Christmas is the most important holiday of the year” is a proposition many would agree with — despite the fact that “Christmas” and “holiday” are mere social constructs built upon thousands of years of mindless obedience to unfounded tradition. Their value emerges not from any aspect or quality of the world as it is, but rather from the social acceptance gained by going along with and acting according to the proposition.
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” — a mind-control slogan if there ever was one, cloaking the interests of power elites to enslave and exploit their subjects in wars for profit, while invoking “goodness” and “community” in the form of the imaginary construct called “one’s country”. Militarism reached its pinnacle thus far in the 20th century, and one can only hope that the mountains of millions of corpses it generated will be its only legacy into the future. I can’t help but wonder, though, if we as a species, as a global culture, have been at all purged of the tendencies and weaknesses which led to all that slaughter.
Indeed, as I look around, I seriously doubt it.
Mind you, writing your own programs for life in this world we share is hard. Nobody teaches you this in school. In some ways, it is a skill that can’t be taught in traditional fashion, since metaprogramming the human biocomputer is not something which lends itself well to being broken down into the component bits that the Prussian-model education system we are all products of requires.
Be born to Muslim parents, and you’re expected to be a Muslim. Grow up in Pittsburgh, and you’re expected to be a Steelers fan. Become a citizen of Norway by accident of birth, and you’re expected to self-identify as “Norwegian” for the rest of your life. Be born to “democracy”, and you’re expected to be a voter. And on and on.
Violate these patterns, and those around you brand you odd.
And this is considered “normal”.
Normal people scare me.
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I have for long years been influenced, impacted and affected by the suffering of people who are and who have been the victims of violence — be it at the hands of states, spouses, parents or random monsters on the street.
I have done my best, in those years, to understand and to relate to what happens to them. I have cried with them, cried for them, and cried for the awful horror that is our common, human milieu.
I have cried and felt, especially, for those women — far too many — whom I have met, who have told me their stories of rape, spousal abuse, imprisonment at the hands of “lovers”, ongoing exploitation and debasement. And I have tried to relate. I have related to the level where, as above, I have cried not only for them, but for all of them who suffer these horrors — especially when, for whatever reasons, they feel they must remain silent.
And then, without being raped specifically, I’ve become a victim, too.
I haven’t been in a physical confrontation, prior to seven weeks ago, since the playground days of the mid-1980s. Those, always, I lost in short order. Some sand to the face, a punch in the belly, or, later, a deft evasion on my part, and the confrontation dissolved rather quickly.
I found myself, though, seven weeks ago, facing a monster far greater than any playground bully. I ultimately have no idea whatsoever what a woman trapped by her circumstances into either remaining silent about rape or deciding to tolerate daily abuse undergoes.
I do, however, map some of my own feelings in reaction to those I have come to known from those of my friends who have been there. The correspondences are not always perfect. I did not have to face the situation that Miroslav Pašek would continue living in my home, continue to pretend to be my protector or lover, or continue to play a part in my life.
Even so, I ran. I ran from Pašek’s territory. I ran from his hunting grounds.
I have never really understood before recently what it is to be a victim. I’m not entirely sure that I understand now, especially to the depth that the victims of rape and domestic violence I have known have been.
If I have gotten even the slightest taste, however, by means of what I have experienced, then I know that their reality is, in fact, far worse than I ever imagined.
This realization, along with my own emotions, makes me want to sleep all day, and shut out the world.
And, yet, I cannot.
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