might makes right and other ideological stances that lead to violence -or how i learned to love to shock and awe

Recently, while listening to Naomi Klein speak about her new book, I was struck by the metaphor she used to symbolize the agenda of the current administration, an administration that condones the infliction of trauma on others for both profit and hegemony. Naomi Klein coins the phrase “disaster capitalism” in her book, The Shock Doctrine. In this volume, she considers the current trend of using shocking disasters and torture as an economic opportunity to privatize everything (Klein).

In the 1950’s, the US government supported horrific experiments conducted through McGill University, in Montreal, Canada. Klein exposes these experiments, developed and conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron, as an example of an ideological template- one that also underlies the devastating “War on Terror”, the brutality of Guantanamo and the ineptitude of disaster management. In an effort to radically shift the ideological foundations of the market toward the free-market theories of Milton Freidman, disasters are used to “wash” the economic slate of pesky social programs. Klein uses the case of Cameron, who believed that it could be possible to entirely wipe away the “tainted” personality of ailing patients to start anew, as an example of totalistic ideology and dehumanization. He called this method de-patterning. Without the knowledge or consent of the vulnerable patients, he drugged them and shocked them into infantile states where he became the “master re-creator ” of who they would become. Klein uses this episode as a metaphor for the way the military industrial complex inflicts damage and profits from it, while pushing a free market agenda that increases the profits of the few at the exploitation of many (Klein).

Reading about Cameron brought me back to my own encounter with “shock and awe”. The behavior modification therapeutic model that Cameron utilized was not isolated to this incident. Here in the US, there has been outright support for “therapeutic” programs that aim to “break” and “remake” patients by inflicting punishment. This purported “tough-love” approach has had significant support by influential figures like George H. W. Bush, Nancy Reagan and Robert DuPont, early proponents of the “War on Drugs”. This high profile support has helped legitimize another billion dollar industry, that markets “therapeutic”, privatized prisons, to the terrorized parents of troubled teens; “therapy” made from the same ideological perspective of those “totalists” currently in power. Ideological totalism, like fundamentalism, dehumanizes the “other” and is proliferated systematically to varying degrees. It manifests globally as the “War on Terror”, terrorizing the less powerful while creating landfall profits for the elite. It manifests as torture perpetrated on the innocent. It manifests in the privatized prison industry in the US. This dehumanizing ideology and methodology extend to the current strain of “therapeutic” “tough-love” boot camps that thousands of young people find themselves in. Underlying this torture-spawning ideology, where domination in the name of hegemony and profit is rewarded, hide intrinsic cultural beliefs about conquest, domination and punishment and who has the right to impose their world view on everyone else.
William Norman Grigg writes of Behavior Modification programs that have proliferated,

BM programs are advertised as a variety of “tough love.” This concept appeals to the reasonable belief that some adolescents inclined toward violent crime or self-destructive behavior need both strong discipline (toughness) and compassion (love). This approach, when built on a foundation of biblical principles, can and does yield positive results, since it is designed to cultivate within each participant a sense of responsibility–to others and to himself–within the framework of God’s law.BM programs, however, are secular exercises in tearing down willful personalities and re-casting them as conformists. Where the approach typified by Father Flanagan and his legendary “Boys Town” is motivated by Christian charity, the motives of many involved in the BM industry are mercenary and ideological (44).

In 1958, Charles Dederich Sr. created Synanon, a prototype for a category of therapeutic modalities that continue to proliferate in changing guises. Synanon began as a drug rehabilitation program using the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, but breaking the most fundamental tenet of AA, which is, that the 12 steps can only work if the addict chooses them. Coercion and choice are obviously on opposite poles. Dederich developed “The Game”, a punitive group therapy approach where the group confronted the individual and caused change through peer pressure. Synanon used techniques similar to those used during the Cultural Revolution in China to ” re-educate” the “impure”, “breaking” new initiates with isolation, humiliation, hard labor, and sleep deprivation”(Szalavitz “The Cult”). Synanon framed the coercion as therapeutic; peer-confrontation as a means of creating crisis and change.

The “attack therapy” structure of Synanon, rehabilitation using incarceration, coercion and terror, became the template for a program called The Seed. The Seed operated with government funding from the Department of Health Education and Welfare. The founder, Art Baker, had developed the program with support of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, then headed by Dr. Robert Dupont, who was to become Reagan’s “drug tzar” in the “War on Drugs”. The program was scrutinized in 1975 by Congress and subsequently, it folded. According to Congressional findings, The Seed used similar coercive tactics as those employed by North Korean Communists in POW camps. One parent, who had a child in that program was Mel Sembler. He and his wife, Betty went on to open Straight Inc., the predecessor to Kids of Bergen County (Gorenfeld 2). In 1985, I found myself on a blue chair in Bergen County, N.J., with “peers” screaming at me in an atmosphere of terror and re-channeled rage. Unfortunately, I was caught in the stream that has since become a torrent, despite the numerous reports of severe abuse and even death, that are the legacy of Synanon and the “War on Drugs”. As military munitions and reconstruction of battle zones are growth industries overseas, privatized prisons are a domestic equivalent.

Fragmentation, disintegration, un-integrating, breaking, fragmenting-the post-modern condition-the condition of a broken psyche. I start here, but cant stay for long, must keep moving, in fits and starts, always looking behind my shoulder, a hyper vigilant, dissociated dancer. In this flying, flailing chaos, only breathing brings me back.

Much has been written since Dr. Robert Jay Lifton offered a framework to discuss thought coercion as a tactic of torture in 1961. Lifton’s incisive work examined ideological totalism, abuse of power and dehumanization from the interviews of victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution(Lifton Thought Reform). He used the word “brain wash”, which came from a direct translation from Chinese, meaning to clean the mind of past belief, ideas even memories and replace them with “right thinking”. He identified a list of “themes” that induce brainwashing. These themes are “milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, confessions, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence”. (Lifton “Cult Formation”) I read about his work in the early 1990’s, when I began searching for answers for what had happened to me. In 1984, while I was a junior in high school, I had been chosen to represent my school in the state talented and gifted program for creative writing. Two years later, after my experience in KIDS of Bergen County, I lost my desire and ability to communicate. I felt as though I had lost my voice. Twenty years ago, in 1987, I escaped from KIDS of Bergen County. This is the first time I am writing about it.

Milieu Control
The first method characteristically used by ideological totalism is milieu control: the control of all communication within a given environment. In such an environment individual autonomy becomes a threat to the group. There is an attempt to manage an individual’s inner communication. Milieu control is maintained and expressed by intense group process, continuous psychological pressure, and isolation by geographical distance, unavailability of transportation, or even physical restraint. Often the group creates an increasingly intense sequence of events such as seminars, lectures and encounters which makes leaving extremely difficult, both physically and psychologically. Intense milieu control can contribute to a dramatic change of identity which I call doubling: the formation of a second self which lives side by side with the former one, often for a considerable time. When the milieu control is lifted, elements of the earlier self may be reasserted (Lifton Thought Reform).

The program was located in a small office park in Hackensack NJ. The building was a banal warehouse structure. Inside, the lobby entrance looked like an ordinary office entrance. Once you were buzzed in beyond that entrance, everything changed. Behind that locked door was a corridor with several rooms, maybe 10’x 12′. I entered the room with no hint as to what was to come. What began as an odd interview became a17 month incarceration in an insanely disorienting environment. Suddenly, the rug is pulled from under your feet, the door locks behind you and, the next thing you know you are literally on the floor with people holding you down, calling you ugly slurs and mocking your effort and pain.

I was a young woman of 18 that September of 1985. Having just graduated high school, an honor student, in the top ten percent of my class, I, never the less, struggled with an eating disorder and a difficult relationship with my family. After viewing a commercial for a program for problem teens, endorsed by then vice president George H. W. Bush, my well meaning, but limited, parents brought me to Kids of Bergen County, under the pretext of family therapy. I was restrained, forced to sign myself in, under duress, with the threat that I would be court ordered if I did not sign in voluntarily. I was strip-searched nightly for the first three months of my incarceration. I was forced to make humiliating confessions, denouncing myself and those I loved. In order to move ahead in the program and to eventually get out, I, too became a perpetrator of harm to other victims. I still struggle with the repercussions of the 17 months I spent in that totalistic environment.

In Kafka’s, short story In The Penal Colony, the condemned man does not know his crime, does not understand what is happening for the first six hours of his execution. Meanwhile, “the apparatus” has been inscribing his sentence as punishment into his flesh with hundreds of tiny needles that slowly embroider his crime deeper and deeper into his flesh (Selected Short Stories 90-128). In our “therapeutic” penal colony, our crimes were seared into our psyches, scaring them thickly. We betrayed ourselves and our truth over and over. We were forced to become our own perpetrators in a methodology based on the ideology of total control. Some still have the scars on their skin to prove it. Others have them carved deep in their memories.

What is it like to have a human who knows nothing about you scream inches from your face that you are a scum, a failure, a druggie, a slut and that you will die if you don’t sign in? It’s disorienting, shocking, unreal. Time changes, slows then speeds up as you realize that you are someplace reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia. Panic sets in as the two teens, who have been asking insulting questions started to accuse me of behavior that I hadn’t ever engaged in. I try to leave, only to find myself flattened on the floor with the two big teens holding me down. I feel an intense emotional pain until I cant stand it. I try to leave my body because there is no physical way out. The violence is too much for my already fragile psyche. I find a numbness that I hide behind as much as I can, but the screams, the blood, the abuse, and the confessions are unrelenting.

The entire structure and dogma of the program recalled the Orwellian in its use of specialized and limited vocabulary, its absolute certainty of its judgment, its omniscient ever-presence. It was a surreal environment, where victims understood the only way out was psychic death. Once the patient was remade into the proper image of a “straight/conservative”, actively engaged in coercing others, they were allowed to “move on”, which meant being rewarded with trust and responsibility they were divested of on the first phase. The first phase of “treatment” consisted of stripping all vestiges of who the victim was, from clothing and music, to language, memories, and dignity. We were not allowed to look at others in the eyes, read, speak or walk by ourselves. We could not think outside the structure provided by the program. To do so required a confession. We had no communication with the outside world. We were walked by the belt-loop, meaning that other teens further along in their program held on to us by our pants. We were watched on the toilet. We occasionally had to ask to use toilet paper. These tactics were designed to deprive us of all dignity, while the integrity of our psyches were viciously attacked. We spent an average of 12 hours daily in the windowless warehouse room, empty except for 170 or so blue chairs, filled with young, sleep-deprived bodies, struggling to confess. After we had “cleared up our past”, we literally confessed thought crimes, thinking about things in a “druggie” way. Those who had crossed the line from compliant to “rebellious”, hung their torsos over their legs, occasionally for months at a time, occasionally carving into their limbs with chips of blue fiberglass chair, occasionally eating holes into their limbs, frequently spending a lot of time on their backs with others holding down their bodies. I was compliant. I still feel the sting of shame for that. It was a constant betrayal of who I was, that I still live with. I ended up on the floor twice. Once when I was initially overpowered and told that I had to sign myself in or be court ordered, (which was illegal) and once when I needed to use the restroom and I stood up to walk to the bathroom. Consequently, I was tackled-just another victim of the unregulated free market that profits over the exploitation of those stripped of all power, a statistic in a billion dollar industry.

My captor was Dr. Virgil Miller Newton, director of KIDS of Bergen County. Newton and his wife Ruth-Ann had a son in Mel Sembler’s Straight program in Florida. Newton was given the position of Clinical Director at the original Straight program. After that program was “re-structured” amidst accusations of child abuse and human rights violations, Newton moved to Bergen County, N.J. He opened KIDS in 1984. The laws in N.J. had loopholes in their regulation of treatment programs that allowed Newton and his wife re-create the Straight program under a new name. Meanwhile, in Florida, the Straight program was restructured into Drug Free America Inc (Fager “Reverend Doctor”).

Newton was a medical anthropologist and used the title, doctor, to legitimize his authority. A tall, imposing man, he entered the room after I was subdued. I could not believe what was happening. Why were these crazy girls attacking me? I looked in his face. He was an adult, not some deranged, cultish, teenage girl, like the two that attacked me when I tried to leave. Most adults were usually fond of me. This man had cold eyes. He did not care that your reality was shattering. He could look at you, be cruel and ugly and be righteous at the same time. It was like looking into a face devoid of humanity, no compassion, no empathy, just absolute certainty. Until today, I still try to understand how someone can cause so much distress to so many victims and not feel anything. No remorse. No acknowledgment of anything.

KIDS of Bergen County continued to operate until 1990. When it was in danger of being closed by a prosecutor’s investigation, Newton moved the program to Secaucus, in Hudson County, and changed its name to KIDS of North Jersey. It stayed open until 2000 when a former victim, Rebecca Ehrlich sued and won 4.5 million dollars. Newton and his wife moved back to Florida, where he changed his name to Father Cassian and started an Orthodox Catholic church (Fager “Reverend Doctor”).

What do you tell yourself when you look in the mirror in the morning? How can you cause so much anguish and not feel anything? There are some people who dehumanize others so completely that they don’t even register that that is repugnant. In their universe, they are cleaning the world, making it a “better” place without ambiguity, diversity, authenticity. Dogma and orthodoxy, how does it color our current historical context?
According to Lifton, totalism and fundamentalism are similar if not interchangeable ideologies(Lifton “Cult”).

What does it mean when a society tolerates torture? How is it expressed in our daily lives? How can we stop it on a larger scale if shock tactics silence the victims into muteness? L C was a young girl in 1985 when I found myself in Kids of BC. Her brother was in the program for a drug problem. She was forced into the program because she wore black “pleather” to a sibling rap. According to program wisdom, wearing black was a sign of having a problem, wearing leather-like clothing was another sign of “druggie” behavior. This child, who had survived incestual sexual abuse was punished for her outfit. She was thirteen when she was incarcerated. She remained in the program for 13 years. I sat next to her occasionally, because at one point, they (the clinical staff) decided that she was there for an “alledged” eating disorder. A young girl of 14 at the time, she seemed terribly overwhelmed. She was eating her arm. It reminded me of stories I heard of animals stuck in traps gnawing their limbs off. The image of the hole she had eaten in her arm is something that haunts me. L C brought charges against the program in 2003. She was awarded 6.5 million dollars for 13 years of unspeakable torture. (Szalavitz Help 246).

According to Salavitz’s research at least 1,000 young people were subjected to Kids in New Jersey alone (Help 250). Straight Inc. boasted that they “treated ” over 50,000 (Szalavitz “Private Teen” 1). And what of the rest of us? What is it like to have one’s psyche broken?

I begin with myself. As I mentioned, I was a young woman with an eating disorder, who was struggling with two opposing cultures with little, if any, help. My parents’ culture was patriarchic, hierarchical and conservative. I, on the other hand was independent self-directed and inquisitive. My mother complained to my English teacher that I read too much. I, like many young people rebelled. My youth manifesto was that I could be anything and everything I wanted to be- a professional dancer, a writer, an angry young woman and more. I studied ballet and modern dance in an excellent program for inner-city youth in Paterson N.J.. I was interested in the mechanisms of oppression from both cultural and political perspectives. The Greek Orthodox culture of my family treated women as secondary to men, while American culture was so consumer oriented that there were few services and even less community to help. Reagan was president and I was aware of the patriarchic symbol that he represented, I believed that his administration capitalized on his Hollywood style cowboy/sheriff/father persona, perpetuating a narrative that created oppression and silencing of victims by casting them as criminal “undesirables”. Ironically, I did not think I was in “that” category. Nancy Reagan popularized the “War on Drugs” that spawned this industry. She actively promoted Straight as an exemplary rehabilitation center (Szalavitz “Private Teen” 1). I had no idea I would be caught up in the systems that were being woven at that time. After 17 months of confessing how bad I was, all that was left was a shadow of who I used to be. My younger sister recalls taking me out in public, to a mall, after my escape. She remembers how I was afraid of people, so much so, that I hid behind her because I was so overwhelmed. She has told me that she couldn’t believe it was me, the strong-willed, outspoken, fearless sister she remembered. I don’t want to paint a one-sided picture of myself. I was a shy, but sassy punk-rocker, with a Mohawk haircut and Pointe shoes in my book bag. I was opinionated and occasionally reckless. I did not speak to my parents because we had little common ground. Yet, I did not deserve to be crushed the way I was. No one does. Each “problem” child, that is turned into a statistic, is also a sentient being that needs help to develop, not a criminal that needs to be dismantled. Living with the repercussions has been difficult. There is no “container” for the grief and rage of being betrayed by your family- no forgetting how you betrayed yourself. It becomes woven into your narrative for life. It makes trust and joy difficult.

In Help at any Cost, Maia Szalavitz outlines the rise and development of a billion dollar industry based on totalism, abuse of power and thought coercion. After providing a historic context that begins with Synanon and The Seed, she discusses four cases from four different program permutations. Two of the cases are victims of the latest developments of the industry, wilderness boot-camps and boarding school programs. The other two are Straight, the first program in Florida and Kids, the place I was in. Since programs are legally challenged and closed, they frequently change names and re-open (Szalavitz).

The outcry has gotten louder. This October, Rep. George Miller, of California was part of a Congressional investigation of this industry. The Government Accountability Office
“recently investigated 10 deaths in such facilities and found thousands of other allegations of abuse. Not only are the private prisons for teenagers unregulated, but no one even knows how many there are or how many teenagers are held incommunicado in them without any civil-rights protections (Szalavitz “Private Teen” 1)”.

In conclusion, when the ideological drive of a society is hegemony and profit, people are crushed as “collateral damage”. Despite the hollow rhetoric about “democracy”, torture continues and becomes justified under the guise of “safety”. Are we really safer? Or do our fears and lack of community increasingly control our lives and cause us to reactively destroy others?

Works Cited

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctorine, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, NYC 2007

Grigg, William Norman. “”Tough Love”-Or Torture?.” The New American 20 Mar. 2006: 44. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Tough+love%22–or+torture%3f-a0143720381

Szalavitz, Maia “The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love Teen Industry” Mother Jones

Szalavitz, Maia. Help at Any Cost- How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids Penguin Books, NYC 2006

Szalavitz, Maia. “Private teen prisons need some ‘Tough Love’; Residential programs” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct 28,2007

Lifton, Robert J. M.D. “Cult Formation” The Harvard Mental Health Letter Volume 7, Number 8 February 1981, reprinted in AFF News Vol. 2 No. 5, 1996

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ”Brainwashing” in China. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.

Kafka, Franz Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Modern Library, 1952) iii

Gorenfeld, John. “Ambassador de Sade” AlterNet. November 8, 2005. pg 2 http://alternet.org/story/27725/?page=2 accessed 11/20/2007

Fager, Wes. “Reverend Doctor Virgil Miller Newton at Straight, Inc. and at KIDS of North Jersey / KIDS of Bergen County”
https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/11745005