“Saudi Arabia Uncovered” this Tuesday, March 29, on Frontline

“All the people are angry, but the problem is that they can’t speak. Everyone is scared of being imprisoned…. If the truth comes out it will be the beginning of the end for [the regime].”

Frontline on PBS will be airing “Saudi Arabia Uncovered” this Tuesday, March 29, at 10 PM Eastern, 9 PM Central. People, at least in the US (I’m not sure about other countries), will also be able to watch it online beginning on Tuesday.

Courage

“A lawmaker who spent a decade in a Turkish prison after speaking in Kurdish in parliament, again began her oath in Kurdish during a swearing-in ceremony in Ankara on Tuesday.

Turkey’s parliament convened on Tuesday for the first time since the November 1 election, as newly-elected deputies were sworn in to the 550-seat assembly.

Leyla Zana could not be sworn in after she started to speak in Kurdish and changed the wording in the oath of office.

At the swearing-in ceremony, Zana began her oath by saying, ‘With the hope of an honorable and lasting peace’, in Kurdish and finished by changing the official wording of ‘Turkish people’ to ‘people of Turkey’.

The acting speaker of parliament, Deniz Baykal, asked Zana to return to the lectern for an exact recitation but she left the chamber, live footage on state broadcaster TRT showed….”

[Source]

Quote of the day – a system of violence

“What’s missing is what happens in between and always, and that is the status quo of military occupation, which is itself a system of violence, a system that holds Palestinians, that holds human beings, in a condition that is contrary to the natural human condition of freedom, and uses force, uses violence, to keep them in that position. So this systematic violence, which Palestinians are essentially acting out against in these outbursts, which eventually get covered, does not get covered the way that it should. And so what we end up getting is a very skewed representation in our media of what the real dynamics of violence are.”

- Yousef Munayyer

Quote of the day – the joint struggle

“We offer this statement first and foremost to Palestinians, whose suffering does not go unnoticed and whose resistance and resilience under racism and colonialism inspires us. It is to Palestinians, as well as the Israeli and US governments, that we declare our commitment to working through cultural, economic, and political means to ensure Palestinian liberation at the same time as we work towards our own. We encourage activists to use this statement to advance solidarity with Palestine and we also pressure our own Black political figures to finally take action on this issue. As we continue these transnational conversations and interactions, we aim to sharpen our practice of joint struggle against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and the various racisms embedded in and around our societies.”

- 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine (read the whole thing here)

Saudi Arabian government plans to crucify kid

Really.

Sevil Rojbin Çetin

“State prosecutors have charged her with ‘breaking the unity of the state’ and are pushing for life in prison.”

Quotes of the day - policies of violence, denial, and annihilation

“The hunger strike started by us as PKK and PAJK prisoners on August 15 has entered its 26th day. We salute the resistance of our people and all those resisting bravely for the building of self-rule in neighborhoods, towns and districts. We would like to state that we will enhance our resistance further as long as the AKP government’s policies of denial and annihilation against the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the Kurdish people continue.”

- from statement by Deniz Kaya on behalf of PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) and PAJK (Kurdistan Women's Liberation Party, Partiya Azadiya Jin a Kurdistan) prisoners

“We now need the support of the international public more than ever in order to achieve the realization of a lasting peace in the Middle East, Turkey and Kurdistan.”

- from statement by the Foreign Affairs Commission of the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) calling for “urgent international action against the policies of violence that have escalated after the general elections of June 7 led by the AKP provisional government”

The existentialism of Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) is almost an existentialist manifesto. Here are a few quotes:

“Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe.”

“There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

“I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.”

Coates’s Dream is Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s bad faith. It’s Baldwin’s innocence. And his vision of living and struggling authentically is an existentialist one. The book contributes to the long and great tradition of humanistic, atheistic political writing.

Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law

“Trans resistance is emerging in a context of neoliberal politics where the choice to struggle for nothing more than incorporation into the neoliberal order is the most obvious option. We are invited to seek recognition in law that will deliver no actual redistribution of life chances. We are being offered a limited form of visibility, only to the extent that that visibility can prop up existing norms about whose lives matter and whose do not. We are encouraged to fight for inclusion in the systems that the most important movements of our times are trying to dismantle. The paths to ‘equality’ and ‘success’ being modeled by lesbian and gay rights will not reduce the premature death that pervades trans communities, and, in fact, those paths lead to legitimization and expansion of the very systems that most endanger trans lives.”

“[T]he picture of economic marginalization, vulnerability to imprisonment, and other forms of state violence that trans communities are describing suggests that the ‘successes’ of the lesbian and gay rights organizations do not have enough to offer in terms of redistribution of life chances – and that their strategies will in fact further endanger the most marginalized trans populations. If formal legal equality at best opens doors to dominant institutions for those who are already closest to inclusion (i.e., they would be included if it wasn’t for this one characteristic), very few stand to benefit.

…

A critical trans politics imagines and demands an end to prisons, homelessness, landlords, bosses, immigration enforcement, poverty, and wealth. It imagines a world in which people have what they need and govern themselves in ways that value collectivity, interdependence, and difference.” - Normal Life

Dean Spade’s Normal Life, with its criticism of the elitist priorities and hierarchical structures of mainstream LGBT organizations and celebration of grassroots trans groups mobilizing to dismantle oppressive systems in coalition with other social and economic justice movements, is of course welcome reading for me. His radical, essentially anarchist, vision of trans politics is naturally one I can support, even if in some cases I think he pushes his critique too far. (On a personal note, it was refreshing to read something on the subject that wasn’t a treatise on identity or a personalized argument about bigotry.)

The LGBT movement hasn’t been immune from the effects of neoliberalism, the reactionary backlash against the radical politics of the 1960s and ‘70s, growing inequality, the expansion of the police/prison/security state, and the “professionalization” and NGOization of leftwing organizations. Spade does a fine job of showing how many of the largest LGBT organizations have succumbed to these pressures and enticements in their priorities, practices, and structures. More generally, drawing on the insights of Critical Legal Studies, he argues that the top-down law-centered battles prioritized by these organizations do little to improve the lives of the vast majority of LGBT people, marginalize and exclude those not seen as “deserving” of liberal equality, and often serve to perpetuate the same systems that do the most harm to these groups. His description of an effective and inclusive trans movement is equally thorough, especially in that he addresses several of the obstacles radical activists face in the present context (though he could have said more about the organized opposition of powerful countermovements).

One of the most interesting sections of the book argues for a shifting legal focus. Spade suggests that an exclusive focus on reformist efforts to include trans people in marriage, the military, antidiscrimination and hate-crime laws should give way to campaigns that challenge the administrative systems that categorize and shape people’s life chances – healthcare institutions, welfare programs, employment, shelters, addiction “treatment” programs, immigration bureaucracies, prisons, and so on – and their practices of categorization and surveillance. These systems control “access to food, transportation, public safety, public health, and the like.” As such, they’re “the legal systems that distribute security and vulnerability at the population level and sort the population into those whose lives are cultivated and those who are abandoned, imprisoned, or extinguished.”

I was especially intrigued by the discussion of the “War on Terror” and the expansion of the security state and its surveillance apparatus. The security state, as it always has, attempts to shore up traditional categories and to exclude and police anyone whose identity or behavior is seen to threaten them. The ID programs of recent years also, as Spade points out, push in the direction of fixed and stable identities. “The augmentation of US security culture,” including the sharing and cross-referencing of information across agencies, “has raised the level of stability demanded of our identities and has sharpened the tools that heighten the vulnerability of those who are not ‘fully authorized’ in any particular administrative context.”

For trans people, this creates an impossible dilemma, given the widely varying requirements for altering identity documents (when they can be altered at all). More generally, in this sense, the state itself, in its most seemingly prosaic administrative acts, institutionalizes and enforces the practice of bad faith. While “people who find the commonly evoked societal norms used in classification familiar and comfortable tend to take these classification systems as neutral givens in their lives,” “the ubiquity of gender data collection in almost every imaginable government and commercial identity verification system” is necessarily “an area of great concern” for trans people and many others. “The consequences of misclassification or the inability to be fit into the existing classification system,” Spade shows, “are extremely high.”

Also significant was his discussion of the administrative denial of health care needed by trans people. I’ve been arguing that this care is comparable to reproductive care and should be socially and materially supported. But Spade introduces another aspect which also relates to bad faith and the essentializing of identity:

Much of the care provided to nontrans people but routinely denied to trans people by Medicaid programs has the sole purpose of confirming the social gender of nontrans patients. Reconstruction of breasts or testicles lost to cancer, hormone treatment to eliminate hair that is considered gender-inappropriate, chest surgery for gynecomastia, and other treatments are provided solely because of the social consequences and mental health impact faced by people who have physical attributes that do not comport with their self-identity and social gender.

Once again, systems prop up “given” identities while denying some people the possibility of living their identities authentically in practice. The costs to trans people, as Spade describes, are enormous: profound emotional suffering, lack of access to other needed services, vulnerability to illness through unsafe procedures, and vulnerability to harassment and violence. But there are costs to all of us.

I do have some criticisms. For one, this is probably the most repetitive book I’ve ever read. One sentence – about mainstream LGBT organizations’ equality and antidiscrimination campaigns pinkwashing, perpetuating, and even expanding the systems that are destroying the lives of LGBT people – appears in some form or another literally dozens of times. But several sentences and ideas reappear frequently throughout the text. I’m OK with this to a point, but here it’s excessive and leaves less space for other worthwhile information.

For example, I would have loved to have seen more, in the last chapters and the afterword, about grassroots trans organizing for social and economic justice in other countries and about cross-national efforts and solidarities. Spade mentions the role of Palestinian activists in bringing attention to Israeli pinkwashing efforts, but provides no sense of what Palestinian or other Middle Eastern LGBT activists are doing on the ground. Similarly, despite the solid discussion of grassroots movements against immigration enforcement in the US, there’s no mention of, for example, Honduran activists and their struggles against the US-supported coup.

While the section on the history of neoliberalism and the deradicalization of the LGBT movement is strong, I do think it leaves out the role of the AIDS epidemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands of gay men in the US since the 1980s, including many leading activists. You could of course argue that this could have led the movement to become more radical had people made different choices – especially given the continuing crisis - but any such history has to recognize the psychological, emotional, and social toll of that plague, and the impact of a deadly sexually transmitted disease on efforts to organize around sexual liberation. (The women’s and gay health movements, the struggle for reproductive freedom and care, and the psych rights movement are also the precursors of the trans health activism Spade recognizes as so important today. In those cases, too, some organizations and campaigns have been co-opted and “mainstreamed,” but others have remained radical. This history could have been emphasized more, especially given the wide potential for solidarity and coalitions in this area.)

The book is also missing a full discussion of what movements are doing, in practical terms, in the area of administrative systems. Spade makes a solid argument that legal efforts should be focused on these systems, but he doesn’t say enough about what these efforts entail on the ground. In some cases – concerning prison and immigration enforcement, for example – he argues that the ultimate goal is abolition, and the movements he discusses in depth are fighting for the abolition of the system as they support those most trapped in and endangered by it. But in terms of the more immediate struggles – eliminating the various impediments to changing identity documents, fighting for the public provision of trans health care, and so on - he provides less information. There’s one interesting discussion of a grassroots New York campaign, but I wanted more detail.

I recommend this book for anyone concerned with the struggles of trans people, the landscape of LGBT politics in the US, and larger questions about movement priorities and practices and the role of legal struggles in advancing radical goals.

“Making signs in large Letters that spelled out ‘Libertad’”

US Marines are headed to Honduras. I’m still unclear on the relationship of these Marines to the 250-Marine unit. Some articles seem to suggest that that force is still being reviewed, while several hours ago the Argentina Independent (which might be confused) reported that it’s been approved.

In any case, it’s clear that they’re going to Honduras on the pretext of providing humanitarian aid, the precise forms of which seem to change with every announcement – hurricane response, other unspecified disaster relief, building schools, providing medical care [!!!],… These claims are implausible in light of, well, many things, but especially the public statements to the effect that the Marines would also be dedicated to fighting drug trafficking and organized crime and the most recent impetus for the genesis of the unit, the Central American Regional Security Conference held in Honduras a few weeks ago:

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez welcomed security and defense leaders from 14 nations as they gathered in Tegucigalpa March 25 for two days of talks on ways to strengthen their ongoing security cooperation and counter transnational organized crime in Central America.

The president spoke to more than 100 participants during the opening ceremony for the annual Central American Regional Security Conference (CENTSEC), co-hosted by the Honduran armed force's Joint Staff and U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

‘We've reached a conclusion that regional efforts and approaches are fundamental, because those we are up against also have a regional approach and have a very high level of sophistication, so the only way to confront them is by working together,’ he told them.

I wonder when hurricanes were discussed…

The increasing US military presence in Honduras comes amid calls from Latin American leaders to eliminate existing US bases in the region. UNASUR head Ernesto Samper called recently for their closing, arguing that they were a relic of the Cold War and a symbol and means of US political dominance.

The claims of humanitarian motives strike an especially bitter chord given the treatment of people seeking asylum from these countries in the US. Democracy Now! is reporting on a hunger strike of women with children held in a for-profit internment center in Texas.

After five months in detention with her two-year-old son, Kenia Galeano joined a hunger strike with about other 70 mothers to push for their release. Today she described how she and several others were held in isolation as punishment.

‘Inside this room it was really cold. It was dark. The toilet was right next to the bed. My son was in there with me this entire time’, Galeano said.

She also recalled threats that families would be separated if the strike continued.

‘A guard told us if we didn’t eat we would not be equipped to take care of our children, and risked having them taken away’, Galeano said.

The women ended their strike on April 3 but now ten more have vowed to begin again Wednesday to refuse to eat except for one meal each evening. Like last time, they want bond hearings so they can be free while seeking asylum, as well as improved food and conditions at the Karnes County Residential Center in Texas, which is run by the private prison company, The Geo Group.

Galeano, who is from Honduras, was released on a $7,500 bond after the hunger strike ended. Her family paid $3,000 and the rest was supplemented by the Family Detention Bond Fund. But she said she can’t stop thinking about the hundreds of women she left behind, like her cellmate who had an eleven-year-old son.

…

Two incident reports provided to Democracy Now! show a group of Karnes detainees tried to draw the attention of a helicopter that flew overhead on April 2 by making large letters on signs that spelled out ‘libertad’ which means liberty. Staff who documented the incident called it an ‘insurrection’.

On May 2 a nationwide protest is planned outside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, the other facility where hundreds of women and children have been detained since seeking asylum from violence in Central America. The event will kick-off a week of actions that end on Mother’s Day.

Here are the two original reports:

UN torture monitor denied access to US prisons

The Guardian/AFP reports:

The United Nations’ top investigator on the use of torture has accused Washington of dragging its feet over his requested visits to prisons and refusing to give him access to inmates at Guantánamo.

Juan Méndez said he had been waiting for more than two years for the United States to provide him access to a range of state and federal prisons, where he wants to probe the use of solitary confinement.

Méndez told reporters in Geneva he wanted to visit federal prisons in New York and Colorado and state prisons in New York, California and Louisiana, among others.

He said the US state department had been working to help him gain access to the state prisons, but after two years of discussions he had yet to receive a positive answer.

“And in one of my last conversations they said that federal prisons were unavailable,” he said.

Rosewater

Ben Affleck was a guest on the Daily Show a little while ago promoting some film or other. In the course of the discussion, he mentioned that now both he and Jon Stewart had made films about Iran. I’ve been plain about my opinion of Affleck’s dreadful Argo, which Peter Van Buren has recently called “honorary war porn,” and its undeserved Oscar. It shouldn’t be likened to Rosewater in any sense other than that they both concern Iran. (And not even in that sense, really, since Argo isn’t meaningfully about Iran at all, but uses Iran and its people as a backdrop for the struggles and heroics of innocent USians and their swashbuckling covert agents.)

Rosewater is a very different sort of film, both from Argo and from most political films about the Middle East. It actually treats its Iranian characters as human beings, with their own personal and national histories.



This compassionate attitude extends even to the “interrogators” of the nightmarish Evin Prison, like the man assigned to break journalist Maziar Bahari. In this sense, it reminded me somewhat of the fiction film The Lives of Others:



The character Georg Dreyman’s bitter remark to former minister Bruno Hempf after the fall of the GDR – “To think that people like you ruled a country” – could equally describe the pathetic bureaucrats of Iranian repression and their terrible work.

At the same time, unlike Argo and its ilk, which portray Iranians as driven by religious fanaticism, irrational paranoia, and instinctive hatred, Rosewater situates their motives within the real historical context of violent US and UK interference in the country and the region. And it does so without making the film “about” US crimes past or present - it keeps its focus on Iranian experiences.*

My biggest criticisms would be, first, that I wish the film had featured more of Bahari’s imagined conversations with his father and sister, which I found among the most interesting segments, especially as they related to (and to some extent subverted) notions of strength and masculinity. (Perhaps there’s more in Bahari’s book.) Second, the depiction of the democratic movements, while it did capture the energy and optimism of the 2009 election protests, didn’t show the activists and their goals in enough intellectual depth. This leaves the movements vulnerable to being set by British and North American audiences in a self-serving narrative - seen in simplistic terms as reflecting a desire for “Western” consumerist freedom.

* We shouldn’t, of course, lose sight of the fact that the US, UK, and other powerful states haven’t slackened in their efforts to overthrow democratically elected governments and install friendly dictatorial regimes, using slightly more sophisticated versions of the same techniques they employed in Iran in 1953.

Judge to US government: Release pictures of detainees being abused

The Intercept reports on a federal judge rejecting the pretexts the government has been using to fight the release of photos of detainee abuse and demanding that they justify withholding each photo on an individual basis or comply with his order to release them:

A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.

He was “highly suspicious” of the government’s attempt to declare the whole lot of the photos dangerous. “It’s too easy and too meaningless,” he said.

…“We’re at a line in the sand,” Hellerstein declared. “I’m not changing my view.”

He gave the government a week to decide what it wants to do: appeal the order, or put forward a plan to comply with it. He suggested that the government could present the photos to him, in a closed session, and explain their rationale for keeping them secret. He also advised the government not to try to delay “the day of reckoning” by drawing the case out on appeal.

From Edmund Burke to the Twitter jerk

Over the past couple of weeks, Public Shaming has featured callous and hypocritical tweets about the loss of public benefits for poor people during the government shutdown: see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

These examples provided the perfect context for reading Corey Robin’s post about conservative icon Edmund Burke:

…Throughout his career, Burke’s financial state had been precarious. Much to his embarrassment, he was periodically forced to rely upon well timed gifts and loans from his wealthier friends and patrons.

So terrified was he of dying in a debtor’s prison that he struggled in his retirement to learn Italian. His hope, claimed one of the many visitors at his estate, was to flee England and “end his days with tollerable Ease in Italy.” (He also floated, apparently, the possibility of fleeing to Portugal or America.) “I cannot quite reconcile my mind to a prison,” he told a friend.

Thanks to the interventions of his well connected friends, Burke secured from Pitt in August 1795 two annuities that would wipe out his debts and a pension that, along with an additional pension and the income from his estate, would enable him and his wife to live in comfort into their old age.

Three months later, when Burke took up his pen against a proposal for the government to subsidize the wages of farm laborers during bad harvest years (so that they could sustain themselves and their families), he wrote, “To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government.”

Ah, a fine tradition of thought persisting through the centuries. Also, it's funny to imagine Burke tweeting.

In political prison news,…

Will Potter reports:

An inmate in Illinois has been in solitary confinement since July for possessing "copious amounts of Anarchist publications" and "handwritten Anarchist related essays," according to prison documents.

Mark "Migs" Neiweem is a prisoner at the maximum security Pontiac Correctional Center who, in addition to the publications and his writings about the prison industrial complex, was also found in possession of anarchist symbols including a "Circle A" and "Circle E" (the latter, which stands for equality, is described in prison reports as representing "class warfare, the 99%").

"I've been doing this work since 1979 and I can't think of another case where someone has gotten a disciplinary report for something so obviously political as this," said Alan Mills, who is Neiweem's lawyer and a professor at Northwestern University....

The treatment of Neiweem (and of Jerry Koch and others) is of a piece with ongoing government efforts to pathologize and criminalize anarchism and more generally to go after radical leftwing movements while minimizing or ignoring the real violence perpetrated by groups on the Right.

Meanwhile, in Russia,* Nadezhda “Nadya” Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, following in the proud tradition of Kropotkin, is starting an NGO for prisoners’ rights in the region where she’s imprisoned.

*Where the political abuse of psychiatry appears to be making a comeback.

Biopsychiatry, neo-eugenics, and prison reform

The biologization/medicalization of psychological distress, as I’ve discussed, serves to depoliticize these experiences. It enhances corporate power and the political authority of drug companies and psychiatrists. It impedes the development of a (post-)humanistic approach to human suffering.

But there are two other complementary aspects of medicalization tying it to conservative politics that don’t receive as much attention. The first is that, in practice, the biologization of psychiatry has tended toward geneticization and then toward eugenics. The second is that it's subverted social justice efforts, turning a genuine wish to help into support for oppression and collusion with authoritarian systems.

A comment in a recent thread alerted me to this 2012 piece by Robert Whitaker, “The Taint of Eugenics in NIMH-funded Research Today.” Whitaker argues that the “Top 10 Research Advances in 2011” celebrated by NIMH head Thomas Insel have, in fact, no real connection to positive therapeutic interventions. He challenges the reader:

See if you can find even one item that tells of research designed to help living, breathing human beings get well and stay well. See if you can find anything that tells of research designed to identify the strengths that can be found in people struggling with their minds, and all the ways that, in fact, such struggles can be an ordinary part of human experience.

He suggests that the original biological-genetic commitment of the NIMH and the organizations involved with psychiatry hasn’t just led to an impoverishment of understanding - of the roots of suffering, of human potential, of possible therapies (of which it’s led to none¹). It’s also fostered dangerous assumptions about people labeled “mentally ill” and the social transmission of “mental illness”:

Insel’s list tells of a research enterprise devoted to identifying what is genetically wrong with the “mentally ill.” As the history of eugenics reminds us, that is a pursuit, unless it is handled with great care, that can engender bad social policy and a great deal of harm.

Echoes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seem especially clear when it comes to the reception of the Smoller et al. study recently published in the Lancet, which, it’s claimed, finds a genetic link among five different “disorders”: autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and schizophrenia.² Used by Insel as part of the rationale for a renewed focus on the genetic roots of “mental illness,” it has the potential to lead to a renewed fear of “neuropathic” individuals and families, which can negatively affect policy. When a web site with the seal of the Department of Health and Human Services declares that “No one is sure what causes schizophrenia, but your genetic makeup and brain chemistry probably play a role,” it’s not a statement that should be passed over lightly.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that future discoveries are actually going to turn up evidence of the genetic causes of psychological problems and lead to genuinely effective interventions which might have some negative political consequences. It’s a nonzero possibility, of course, but given the extant evidence I’d say it’s pretty damned close to zero. No, the danger lies in the cultural power of the genetic model itself, how it gives a fake scientific sheen to stigmatization and marginalization and how this shapes the treatment of people diagnosed as mentally ill. In other words, the problem isn’t that it’s true; it’s that so many people are convinced that it’s true. (Similarly, as an atheist, I don’t fear a vengeful god. I am, though, concerned about the consequences of millions of people, including those in positions of power, believing one exists.)

It’s easier to see, with the benefit of hindsight, and especially with the knowledge of the extremes to which some of the pseudoscientific notions of a century ago led, a) that they were pseudoscience and b) that they served authoritarian, bigoted ends. But the passage of time has obscured important aspects, like how mainstream and respected many of the people and institutions promoting these ideas were at the time and how many of them regarded the programs based on these notions as politically progressive and helpful.

What makes biopsychiatry palatable and even alluring to many, including many on the left, is precisely that it’s presented not as a means of authoritarian social control but as a therapeutic mission dedicated to combating illness. (This has changed over time: when it was a matter of psychiatrists talking amongst themselves, they could be more open about viewing drugs as tools for better controlling and managing people. As they began to market the drugs to the public, the rhetoric changed to one claiming they’re therapeutic agents, although the language of social control is still very much around in certain contexts, including when speaking of children and adults in various institutional settings and of people deemed criminally violent.)

A huge number of people in mental health professions and government, as well as political activists, believe the model is valid and thus see psychopharmacology in terms of care. It’s presented to the public in humanitarian language. When Thomas Insel writes “Our patients deserve better,” he’s appealing to an ethos of care. He’s also appealing to a paternalistic impulse that is in no way alien to social justice activists.³

Due to the widespread acceptance of the brain-disease-drug model, those who oppose systems which deny people care of any sort and treat them disrespectfully and cruelly tend to join in the chorus calling for better care in the form of improved “accessibility” to psychiatric “services,” including drugs. So entrenched are these beliefs that the unavailability of drugs is seen as a violation of human rights.

I saw this play out recently in an article by Andrew Cohen, “One of the Darkest Periods in the History of American Prisons.” Cohen discusses recent disclosures about the horrendous conditions in US prisons, including a report from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department [!] documenting widespread abuses of human rights in violation of the Constitution. All of the reports, as Cohen describes, emphasize the indifferent and brutal treatment of “the mentally ill” – prisoners experiencing extreme psychic distress:

On May 30th, the ACLU filed a long-awaited federal lawsuit against state officials for the atrocious conditions at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility. "The lawsuit filed today," the lawyers wrote, "describes a facility where [mentally ill] prisoners are often locked in filthy cells and ignored even when they are suffering from serious medical issues. Many cells lack light and working toilets, forcing prisoners to use trays or plastic bags that are tossed through slots in their cell doors. Rats often climb over prisoners' beds, and some prisoners capture the rats, put them on makeshift leashes, and sell them as pets to other inmates."

EMCF's solitary confinement zones house dozens of seriously mentally ill prisoners who are locked down in filthy cells for days, weeks, or even years at a time. . . It is commonplace for cells to lack working lights, leaving prisoners with barely enough light to see during the day and in total darkness at night. . . Correctional officers seldom appear on the housing zones and prisoners are left to fend for themselves, sealed behind solid-front doors.

In addition to finding that Cresson routinely resorts to locking prisoners with serious mental illness in their cells for 22 to 23 hours a day, for months or even years at a time, the department also found that Cresson often denies these prisoners basic necessities and subjects them to harsh and punitive conditions, including excessive uses of force. The department concluded that Cresson's misuse of solitary confinement on prisoners with serious mental illness leads to serious harms, including mental decompensation, clinical depression, psychosis, self-mutilation, and suicide.

Examples of mistreatment range from not providing any care at all to punitive responses to distressed behavior. A problem, though, emerges in the descriptions of the problem in the reports themselves and in Cohen’s article:

Prison officials have failed to provide a constitutional level of care in virtually every respect, from providing medication and treatment to protecting the men from committing suicide.

the Jail routinely fails to provide appropriate medications to prisoners with mental illness

missed and inadequate diagnoses

Among the hundreds of mentally ill prisoners at EMCF are many whose untreated illnesses lead to extreme behaviors such as screaming, babbling, throwing excrement and starting fires.

At Cresson, there is not enough staff, not enough medicine, and not enough accountability.

inadequate intake procedures, to negligent supervision of mentally ill prisoners, to inappropriate delivery of medicine and therapy, to the indifference and lack of accountability displayed by prison staff,… [my emphases]

Any decent person will agree that, as we fight the system of mass imprisonment itself, major reforms are urgently needed within that system itself – the conditions described in these reports have to end. But in characterizing denial of “access” to proper psychiatric diagnosis and medication as a major problem, writers like Cohen make themselves complicit with authoritarian and pseudoscientific institutions.

Prisoners are among the most vulnerable people in society, and to assume that “access” to psychiatric diagnosis and drugs is the same as access to medical care is to provide a justification for coercive or forced labeling and drugging. There can be little doubt, given existing laws that allow for forced interventions for people in the general US population, that greater access to “medications” for people in prison would mean in practice the increasing use of drugs to change and control, and even to punish, rebellious or disruptive prisoners. At a time when the US is being challenged on human rights grounds for allowing forced psychiatric interventions, it’s ethically and politically reckless to call for improved “access” to psychiatric “medications” for prisoners.

People on the left readily scoff at attempts to couch imposed austerity programs and the destruction of government protection and support in the language of “access” to markets and freedom, rightly recognizing that this is a cover for exploitation – “access” to the plunder of neoliberal capitalism. But belief in biopsychiatry leads many of the same people to promote similar “access” to coercive biopsychiatry with a clear conscience and the firm belief that they’re helping.

A good part of the problem, in addition of course to inadequate skepticism about the biopsychiatric model, is, I think, a failure to consult people currently or formerly in prison about the reforms they want to see – an inattention to what imprisoned people themselves are demanding. Given the centrality of the problem of forced drugging to the psych rights movement generally, it’s pretty much impossible to believe that people in prisons are clamoring for more access to psychiatric diagnoses and drugs.

To be sure, it’s an enormously complicated and difficult problem. The current regime of violent, punitive responses has to end, of course. The problems transcend the immediate environment, and won’t be resolved through any sort of individual-level or prison-based interventions; at the same time, individual-level and prison-based interventions of some sort are necessary. But these should not be based on a model that further stigmatizes, marginalizes, and disempowers people in prison while empowering those who want to intervene by force to “treat” them.

¹ Whitaker’s concern about a lack of any therapeutic value is echoed by Brett Deacon in response to Insel’s 2012 propaganda list. As he suggests:

NIMH director Insel's zeal for the biomedical model is reflected in his list of the “Top Ten Research Advances of 2012” (Insel, 2013). The advances concern topics such as epigenomics, neurodevelopmental genomics, “optogenetics and oscillations in the brain,” “mapping the human brain at the molecular level,” and “mapping the human connectome.” Each of these is regarded by Insel as potentially leading to innovation by suggesting “new vistas for biology that will almost certainly change the way we understand serious mental illness and neurodevelopmental disorders.” None of Insel's “Top Ten Research Advances” concern an actual improvement in the assessment, prevention, or treatment of any mental disorder.

This means that the money thrown into this gargantuan effort is being wasted, diverted from more promising avenues. At the end of his article, Deacon asks: “If decades of biomedical research have not resulted in the development of clinically useful biological tests, innovative psychotropic medications, or improved mental health outcomes, should billions of dollars of taxpayer money continue to be preferentially allocated to biomedical research? Should zealous advocates of the biomedical model continue to head governmental agencies that determine national research and policy agendas?” I agree that these are important questions.

² Coincidentally, this study is mentioned in a talk I listened to recently by Ian Hacking, “Making Up Autism” (which I didn’t think was very good overall). When he brings up this research, he explicitly suggests that he sees in it “a curious throwback to the 19th century” origins of eugenics. He mentions Jean-Martin Charcot’s arguments about “degeneracy” and how its appearance varied across different individuals and generations of families, taking the form of antisocial deviancy, dipsomania, idiocy. (Whitaker discusses Aaron Rosanoff and his pseudoscientific search for the insanity gene.)

I won’t say much about this – single, unreplicated - study here, but I do find it bizarre. If you’re acknowledging that these aren’t “diseases” or “disorders,” that these diagnoses aren’t valid - as Insel surely is now since he’s citing this study as one factor in the NIMH’s decision to stop using them and explicitly remarked on their invalidity – then you’re admitting that what you’re talking about are shifting constructs and not biomarkers. So you’re looking for a genetic basis for a construct. Grouping these constructs together or dividing them up in new ways doesn’t address the basic problem that they’re constructs.

You might wonder why these five disorders were included. Thinking it wouldn’t make sense for them to include PTSD? Think again.

³ Anarchists have always been relatively more immune to this tendency - if not always to the underlying ideas, at least to the implementation of programs based on them. This has been due to a rejection of coercive authority even in its progressive and therapeutic guise and to a recognition of the political nature of human science.

The US in Honduras: analysis

My posts about Honduras have decreased of late because I’ve been encouraging people to read Quotha. But I think it would be helpful to offer a smaller selection of pieces found there in recent weeks. These focus on the role of US-based (and Canada-based) interests, both private and governmental, in the disastrous situation that continues to develop in Honduras and the region.

· Dana Frank, “In Honduras, a Mess Made in the US”

· Robert White, “A Diplomat’s View on Honduras”

· Mark Engler, “Honduras: Our Continuing Catastrophe”

· Paul Imison, “Violence Sweeps Central America”

· Honduras Resists, “Delegation Report: Standard Fruit [Dole] Uses the Army and Police to Attack Campesinos”

· Adrienne Pine, “Honduran mining set for boost from new mining law”

Pine has of course been covering the prison fire. Here’s Democracy Now!’s recent interview with Dana Frank about the tragedy:

Ag gag laws and other environmental, animal rights, and food news...

First (via Climate Change), as this article in, of all places, Forbes, reports, environmentalists joined the Occupy Wall Street protests last week.

Wednesday’s march was also buoyed by another group of rabble-rousing upstarts: environmentalists. Fresh off their own nonviolent stand outside the White House — where they spent two weeks protesting the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline — the re-energized U.S. environmental movement has now found an even bigger, broader stage. And like most factions of Occupy Wall Street, it seems perfectly happy to share that stage with other interests.

...McKibben and 350.org now hope to conjure some of that mojo in Washington (which also held its own “Occupy D.C.” march Thursday) for “ Occupy State Department,” a protest to stop lobbyists from dominating Friday’s final public hearing on Keystone XL. The State Department will rule on the proposed pipeline by year’s end, and critics have accused it of “bias and complicity” in favor of the project. On top of that, Haigh says, many hearings so far have suspiciously become pro-pipeline pep rallies.

The inclusion of organized environmentalists, as the story points out, should come as no surprise:

Occupy Wall Street’s first “official” statement lists an array of grievances with corporate America, many of which are at least indirectly related to environmental and public health. Referring to corporations in the third person, some of its most clearly environmental grouses include:

“They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”

“They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.”

“They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.”

“They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.”

“They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.”

Second, on the other side, corporate interests and their political lapdogs continue their offensive against animal rights and environmental organizations that interfere with their profiting through destruction.* As Food & Water Watch reports:

Today, the vast majority of animals raised for meat, milk and eggs live in extreme conditions where they are unable to express their most basic instinctual behaviors. Many of these animals never once feel grass under their feet or the sun on their back.

Numerous organizations are committed to exposing the reality of what factory farming means for animals welfare. This has always been a challenging task, but it may soon become even more difficult. With the help of several state legislators, the meat industry is working harder than ever to ensure they maintain exclusive control over their public image by banning unauthorized images from their facilities.

Over the past year, representatives in four states (Florida, Iowa, Minnesota & New York) have introduced legislation that would make it illegal to record any image or sound inside a farm without the owner’s permission. The Iowa and Minnesota bills would also criminalize the re-broadcasting of these images by the media.

Proponents say the legislation is necessary to protect private property from theft and vandalism and to ensure bio-security. But all of these concerns are already well covered under current laws. The real motivation behind this legislation is unmistakably clear—the videos recorded on these farms confirm the worst fears of conscientious consumers and severely damage the industry’s carefully crafted public image.

I suspect ALEC ghostwriting...

Finally, The Nation last month ran a set of pieces about social justice and the food movement, kicked off by Frances Moore Lappé's essay.

Frances Moore Lappé, "The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities"

Raj Patel, "Why Hunger Is Still With Us"

Vandana Shiva, "Resisting the Corporate Theft of Seeds"

Eric Schlosser, "It's Not Just about Food"

Michael Pollan, "How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System"

They're quick reads; the quality varies. My favorite line is from Vandana Shiva: "That is why we have to make food democracy the core of the defense of our freedom and survival. We will either have food dictatorship for a while and then a collapse of our food systems and our societies, or we will succeed in building robust food democracies, resting on resilient ecosystems and resilient communities. There is still a chance for the second alternative."

*I've finished Green is the New Red,



and highly recommend it. It moves, in two important senses - touches the reader (through substantive reporting and without heroizing activists) and zips along. The best aspect is the way Potter situates the environmental and animal rights movements and the onslaught against them within a historical context, particularly with reference to the McCarthy era. Also important is the discussion of the special "terrorist" prisons that have emerged in the US in recent years.

Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars

Great book. Highly recommended.



I was slightly wary when I read that much of it was about generals, but even for those like me with limited patience for battle sagas, the war sections are gripping. Because it’s not about battles, but about people. And the people Hochschild describes are fascinating, inspiring, imperfect.

My favorite thread concerned the various social movements in their encounters with the government and the Right. Given the contemporary partial, prettified view of the fight for women’s suffrage (and other women’s struggles of the era), the confluence of leftwing movements and the doggedness and suffering of some of the activists are stories that need to be told. The growth of media spin, which I've talked about here extensively, is also colorfully documented. One of the most interesting aspects is the connection shown between imperialism and “domestic” national or European politics – the overlapping ideology, personnel, and tactics, and their connection to the rise of fascism. This is an area in which not enough has been done. The book points to the relationship between rebellion, the war, and “security” throughout the empire, but the non-Western people involved in this resistance aren’t featured as much as they could be. But this is a minor criticism.

Here’s Hochschild on Democracy Now!:





And on Book TV.

Speaking of DN!, Hochschild’s book casts an interesting light on recent events in the US military. So tragic I won't say more.

More repression in Honduras; (possible) (delayed) justice for Guatemalans

Repression and impunity continue in Honduras. Meanwhile, as in Argentina and Spain, there is some possible progress in Guatemala in bringing those responsible for human rights crimes to justice. As reported by UNREDACTED:

Judge Santiago Pedraz of the Spanish National Court* has issued an international arrest warrant for Jorge Sosa Orantes, the Guatemalan ex-Kaibil officer suspected of participation in the 1982 Dos Erres massacre that left more than 250 people dead, according to the Associated Press yesterday. Pedraz moved against Sosa as part of his investigation into Guatemalan genocide and other crimes against humanity in the case filed in Spain in 1999 by Nobel laureate and Guatemalan rights activist Rigoberta Menchú.

The arrest warrant was sent via Interpol on April 1 to authorities in Calgary, Canada, where Sosa has been detained since January on U.S. charges of lying on his citizenship application to the United States in 2008. Although Sosa’s defense lawyer asked in March that his client be released on bail, Judge Suzanne Bensler denied the request, saying Sosa had already proven himself a flight risk. Last September, as the U.S. was preparing to arrest Sosa for naturalization fraud, he fled his home in southern California, first to Mexico and then Canada.

It is not immediately clear how the Canadian government will respond to the Spanish arrest warrant. Sosa was scheduled to appear in a Calgary courtroom on April 20 for a hearing on his extradition to the United States. But Canada, like Spain, recognizes universal jurisdiction and could decide to open its own investigation into Sosa’s alleged role in the Dos Erres massacre. Meanwhile according to a prosecutor in the Guatemala attorney general’s office, the Public Ministry issued extradition requests last year for Sosa and three other ex-Kaibiles connected to Dos Erres who were located in the United States; the requests are still being examined by a Guatemalan court, however.

I don’t know if it would help for people in Alberta to take action, or if some already are – I’ll try to find out. Here’s more information from the National Security Archive about “the scorched earth operations that decimated hundreds of Mayan communities in the department of Quiché in Guatemala’s highlands during the early 1980s” and other crimes against humanity there. Genocidal policies and actions against indigenous communities, very much ongoing, have received far too little attention.

In writing my very first post here, I had come across this video, which I didn’t include at the time but will now:



*The Spanish government has its own problems, as the UN the other day spoke its disapproval of Spain’s human rights violating system of detention:

In Spain, people held in incommunicado detention may be deprived of effective access to a lawyer as well as access to a doctor of their own choice, and are unable to inform their family or friends of their detention. Incommunicado detention can be imposed both before and after the detainee is brought before a judicial authority.

In addition to the UN, other human rights organizations have pointed out that in this situation the detainees are deprived of their most basic rights and guarantees and are in optimal conditions to be victims of torture and ill-treatment, given the relative impunity with which the police and law enforcement bodies can act under these circumstances.

This and Spanish penal policy in general have long been condemned by international human rights organizations and numerous groups within the country.