Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [111]
Smackyface.
What does that mean?178
We need to be explicit about interrogation techniques employed by the CIA and associated groups. I’m sure you’ve seen the CIA Torture Manuals—oh, sorry, Pain Compliance Manuals, oh, sorry, this time a real title (and I’m not making this one up) “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, 1983”—and I’m sure you can guess their contents. I’m sure you’ve seen the chapter from the 1963 CIA “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual” entitled Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources. These manuals are explicit: “The following are the principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis, and induced regression.” They go on to describe the advantages and disadvantages of each technique, and how each of them can be most effectively used to break their victims, that is, to cause three important responses, “debility, dependency, and dread,” that is, to cause their victims to “regress,” that is, to lose their autonomy. As one manual puts it: “these techniques . . . are in essence methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence. . . . As the interrogatee slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state, his learned or structured personality traits fall away in a reversed chronological order, so that the characteristics most recently acquired—which are also the characteristics drawn upon by the interrogatee in his own defense—are the first to go. As Gill and Brenman have pointed out, regression is basically a loss of autonomy.”179
In short and in vernacular, the point is to mindfuck victims (or as the manual also puts it: “Coercive procedures are designed not only to exploit the resistant source’s internal conflicts and induce him to wrestle with himself but also to bring a superior outside force to bear upon the subject’s resistance”) until they give the perpetrators what they want. This is the essence of abuse. It is the essence of civilization. Every day we see these processes and purposes at work in the culture at large, whether it is teachers, bosses, cops, politicians, or abusive parents who try to exploit our internal conflicts to increase their control, safe in the knowledge that if we refuse to be so exploited they will use force to achieve the same ends.180
The manuals often describe the techniques with an absolute lack of attention to morality and humanity (and of course the same can be said for many manuals for teachers, bosses, cops, politicians, and [abusive] parents), as though they’re talking not about the destruction of human psyches (and bodies), but about how best to get to the grocery store: “Drugs are no more the answer to the interrogator’s prayer than the polygraph, hypnosis, or other aids.” Or this: Techniques are designed “to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee,” and “not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird.” When victims have been hammered with “double-talk questions” and “illogical” statements long enough, all sensible points of reference begin to blur, and “as the process continues, day after day if necessary, the subject begins to try to make sense of the situation, which becomes mentally intolerable. Now he is likely to make significant admissions, or even to pour out his whole story, just to stop the flow of babble which assails him.” Or this: “The manner and timing of arrest can contribute substantially to the interrogator’s purposes. What we aim to do is to ensure that the manner of arrest achieves, if possible, surprise, and the maximum amount of mental discomfort in order to catch the suspect off balance and to deprive him of the initiative. One should therefore arrest