Psycho Jail: Cruelest Twist in U.S. War on Free Speech

I HARDLY KNOW how begin this piece because it covers three subjects – each controversial – that at a glance might seem only distantly related.

First and most obvious is the rapidly intensifying political oppression within the United States. Its newest manifestation is the unprecedented arrest-without-charges and psychiatric confinement of Brandon Raub – another example of the smirking, any-cruelty-allowed tactics by which the One Percenters boast to the world they have terminated the American Dream, slain the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and are now burying the remains forever.

The second topic is the self-serving (and ultimately self-defeating) hypocrisy of our domestic Leftist media. The third is journalistic ethics in general: whether to report atrocities we know are intended mostly to intensify fear and thereby bully us into (further) relinquishment of our (former) constitutional rights.

Which – if I am to practice full disclosure – links to a fourth topic: my own growing terror at the encroaching police-state darkness that moves ever closer to becoming the defining characteristic of governance in the United States.

Dare I, for example, even write this essay? 

*** 

 

Never in my journalism career – it began in 1956, now spans 56 years and includes extensive daily-newspaper coverage of The Decade of Political Murder that effectively terminated our republic – have I encountered a story as frightening as the RT exclusive I summarized, live-linked and forwarded to everyone on the Outside Agitator's Notebook mailing list earlier this week:

Federal agents employed a terrifying new tactic to silence protest when they apprehended an alleged Libertarian activist in Virginia and – instead of charging him with a crime – confined him in a psychiatric hospital.

Fearing the government's intent was to "disappear" him permanently, several friends intervened, and  a judge eventually ordered the man's release. Nevertheless the permanent, indelible  odium of "involuntary commitment" to a mental hospital – infinitely more damning than a felony rap sheet – has undoubtedly ruined his life in ways he probably has not even begun to discover.     

Here's the story as broken last night by Liz Wahl of RT: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogVdPvNoVQQ&feature=related

This is the most terrifying news report I have ever heard. What it means is that the feds can now seize and detain anyone without charges merely by jailing them in a mental institution, theoretically forever. What happens next -- what can and does happen in such places -- is rightfully the stuff of horror films: brains destroyed by electric shock, lobotomy, psychotropic drugs or all of these together, once-functional people reduced to drooling, mewling cretins urinating and defecating uncontrollably and covered in their own reeking filth. 

Unfortunately some of you who receive this mailing will note the fact the victim is a Rightist and gloat accordingly. But what the federal secret police agencies can do to a Rightist they can also do to a Leftist – or anyone else.

Make no mistake: this arrest marks a new escalation in government efforts to silence protest. Indeed this is precisely the tactic the Soviet Union used against dissidents: locking them up as psychiatric patients, then methodically destroying their minds.

***

Exactly as I predicted, Leftist media ignored the illegal detention and involuntary commitment by which the federal government has forever destroyed the life-prospects of a retired Marine named Brandon Raub.
 

Ruling Class Media ignored it too.

The Left undoubtedly suppressed the story out of ideological hatefulness – the fervent belief right wingers deserve not even the few considerations (allegedly) accorded criminals.

This is precisely the principle described by Nat Hentoff in his superlative book Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee (HarperCollins: 1992). Hentoff's subtitle, How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, tells us why the Brandon Raub atrocity never made it into Reader Supported News or Truthout or Common Dreams or – at least to my knowledge – never saw the proverbial light of day via any other such publication whether on-line or off.

When Ruling Class Media censored the story, it also most likely acted from ideological motives. Take your pick: (A)-Since the Raub atrocity occurred on President Obama's watch, Obama and the Democrats will get the blame, making the story an election-year no-no for any pro-Obama news outlet; (B)-The infinitely sinister extra-legal method employed for the permanent destruction of Raub's quality of life vividly reflects the ongoing overthrow of our constitutional democracy, which makes the story verbotten – bad propaganda – in any international-circulation U.S. media; (C)-This same revelation of hideous truth – again the bad-propaganda factor – makes the story unsuitable for mainstream/Right news outlets; (D)-All of the above.

I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if publications written primarily for capitalists – business magazines like Forbes or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal – tacitly applauded the tactic by giving it at least some coverage, however subdued.

Meanwhile I myself hesitated several hours before forwarding the story.

Part of my hesitation was concern for journalistic ethics, specifically traditional journalism's entirely proper prohibition against blatant fear-mongering. I recognized the Raub story as a 21st Century variant of a witch-burning: a public example so horrific – as involuntary confinement in an insane asylum undeniably is – it will deter the modern-day heresy of opposition to capitalism.

Heresy? Indeed: the increasingly dominant Christian fundamentalists increasingly zieg-heil the capitalist aristocrats – the new Ruling Class – as their vindictive god's chosen vessels: men whose edicts are therefore the “word of god” and who therefore tyrannize by Divine Right.

Hence to forward the story was to intensify the very climate of oppression I deplore.

But not to forward it was to leave the relatives, friends and colleagues on my mailing list possibly ignorant of a new threat: as if had I refused to shout “snake” when I knew someone was about to step on a cottonmouth.

There was also the dark side of my hesitancy: I was terrified.

What might be done to me if I forwarded the story?

Now too I wonder what might be done to me in retaliation for all my other criticism of the status quo.

Such terror cannot but dilute one's writing.

***

Both as a journalist and because two of my late relatives were repeatedly locked up in mental institutions, I am fully aware of the Bedlam horrors that persist in such U.S. facilities to this day.

I also recognize these unspeakable realities for what they are: direct expressions of the hatred and contempt with which Moron Nation views mental patients. According to any number of sources, ours is by far the most sadistically backward, bigoted and brutal such stance anywhere in the industrial world. (Google: “stigma as related to mental disorders,” no quotes.) 

Here of course is why involuntary confinement in a mental institution is such an unspeakably terrifying prospect. 

One so detained becomes the powerless victim of a society in which the prevalent belief is little changed from the Middle Ages: that mental illness is demonic possession or, at the very least, punishment for sin, the viewpoints of a surprising plurality of U.S. Christian clergy as revealed by a Baylor University survey in 2008.

While the Baylor study was confined to local churches, a more broad-based Northwestern University investigation completed in 2011 reveals such attitudes are widespread and intensifying, no doubt paralleling the wildfire growth of Christian fundamentalism and its ever-more-rapacious imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy.

***

Perhaps – if beyond the terminal climate change the capitalists have inflicted on all of us there is by some miracle a future for our species – historians to come will grant the decade of the 1960s its proper lamentation: not for the failure of its pseudo-revolutions, but rather because it was The Decade of Political Murder, when We the People were robbed of the last men who could have saved us from ourselves: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy.

That plague of death – and the failure of any woman or man to pick up the banners of the slain – was the death of our Republic.

Thus today we grovel in ever-more-restricted, ever-more-terrorized poverty beneath the ruthless paradigm of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Though it is still new to the USian homeland – “USian” because journalistic ethics forbid I slander the other American peoples by furthering the misappropriation of their continent's name – such governance is old news everywhere else in the empire so mislabeled.

But now, just as Malcom X predicted, the proverbial chickens – vultures actually – are coming home to roost.

LB/2 September 2012

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(©Loren Bliss 2012: permission to quote or reproduce is conditional upon attribution to the author and link to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)