The Official Story vs. Reality: Survivors as Whistleblowers
This weekend’s conference is 2011 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, August 2011 in Connecticut. Some of our goals are to help stop future occurrences of ritual abuse, to help survivors of ritual abuse, to name the groups that have participated in alleged illegal activities and to unite those working to stop ritual abuse. This weekend, you will get to hear a variety of speakers talk about ritual abuse, secretive organizations and mind control from different perspectives, showing the possible connections between them. Thanks.
Please use caution while reading this presentation. It may be very triggering. All accusations are alleged. The conference is educational and not intended as therapy or treatment.
Carmen Yana Holiday is a survivor of child pornography, human trafficking, ritual abuse-torture and mind control. She has been an advocate for other survivors since 2001, developing and facilitating trauma recovery workshops and presenting as a survivor of RA-MC for several organizations. Her topic is: The Official Story vs. Reality: Survivors of Extreme Abuse as Whistleblowers.
S.M.A.R.T. Conference
August 2011
The Official Story vs. Reality: Survivors as Whistleblowers
Carmen Holiday
Hi everybody. It’s a great honor to be here again, and I want to thank Neil for working so hard year after year to create this rare space for us, where we can come together and forge an ever stronger community. It’s an honor to be in the same room with so many extraordinary human beings, and I’m grateful to you all for making your way here.
I’m going to talk about survivors as whistleblowers today, and this time I’ll try to keep the weeping to a bare minimum.
What follows are my personal opinions and views, and all allegations are my own unless otherwise noted.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
In spite of everything our perpetrators tried to take from us – power, meaning, hope and faith – we had the heart and resourcefulness to hang onto our humanity. What we choose to do with our hard fought freedom can help us restore much of what was lost to us, and what continues to be lost to us as a society, if we choose to tell the truth.
Several years ago, a movie came out called The Truman Show. It was about a guy who lived in a world that was actually an enormous studio set, but he didn’t know it. Natural elements, community and relationships were all carefully orchestrated to keep Truman locked in the belief that he was in a “normal” world, having a “normal” life, when in fact it was all meant to exploit his ongoing life story for a nationwide television audience.
We, as survivors of the darkest deeds of our society, are in a unique position to expose the lies those in power have imposed upon us. We have a vantage point unfamiliar, even unfathomable to our fellow citizens, because we’ve been dragged outside the set. If anyone can help our allegorical Truman see the hidden seams of his world, it’s us.
Peter Phillips, Professor of Sociology and Director of an organization called Project Censored, has recently expressed great dismay over what he describes as American citizens’ inability to distinguish fact from fiction. In an article called “Truth Emergency: Inside the Military Industrial Media Empire,” he writes:
“How can this mass ignorance and corporate media deception exist in the United States of America, and what impact does this have on peace and social justice movements in the country? … In the United States today, the rift between reality and reporting has reached its end. There is no longer a mere credibility gap, but rather a literal Truth Emergency.”
The chasm between the reality projected in corporate media and what’s really happening on the ground has never represented a more serious threat. Because the current trifecta of political, economic and ecological crises we face today has been so effectively masked and distorted that even now, with basic civil rights vanishing over the horizon, and life on our planet imperiled, the majority of Americans still generally believe what they see, hear and read in corporate sponsored media, which is essentially that the corporatocracy’s interests and the people’s interests are one and the same.
In a cynical coup of misdirection, mainstream media outlets dangle fluffy faux news and disinformation in front of consumers while the ruling elite carefully pull the rug out from under them, to the point where Americans seem to be more informed about the trifecta of Brad Pitt, Angelia Jolie and Jennifer Anniston than about the true current state of affairs.
As survivors of outrageous corruption and homegrown atrocities, we constitute an invaluable resource as potential agents of change. We have long been aware of a “truth emergency” in this country. And we’ve witnessed the darkest, most egregious violations of human rights imaginable, having had the misfortune of getting caught up in the greasy undercarriage of a society that believes itself to be humane and civilized.
So who could be in a better position to expose systemic corruption of our trusted institutions? Who better than those of us who have seen what we’ve seen to point out the extreme hypocrisy of those in power?
Well, as fate would have it, this moment in US history happens to be a tricky moment for whistleblowers in general. Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are both facing possible death sentences for leaking thousands of diplomatic cables through Wikileaks. And the Obama administration’s reactive crackdown on whistleblowers has been of historic proportions.
Blowing the whistle on official corruption is almost always exponentially more dicey for us, because what we know is so much more damning and dangerous than what your garden variety whistleblower knows.
We’re also at a disadvantage because we usually have to start from scratch when we try to expose our perpetrators, because people don’t generally have any realistic frame of reference for our stories. And this general ignorance isn’t accidental; the “official story” almost always leaves out the chapters on ritual abuse and mind control all together.
So, who does control the narrative, how is this social denial of our experiences rendered so absolute? Well, to quote Peter Phillips again: “Not only is the corporate media deeply interlocked with the military industrial complex and global dominance policy elites in the US, but the media is increasingly dependent on various governmental and corporate sources of news.”
And when the news is centralized in this way, the elite get to control the language, which is to say, they get to frame our collective sense of reality. They have the power to control awareness and attention, much as they did to us, except in terms of scale. And the part about the torture. As John leCarre, the famous British novelist put it, “the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear.”
So the Truman Show world of conventional wisdom is that DID doesn’t exist, or if it does, it’s an extremely rare phenomenon. Ritual abuse doesn’t exist at all, and mind control was a fleeting fancy of rogue and overzealous CIA spooks in the mid 20th century that had something to do with LSD, and didn’t really go anywhere. If one person claims to be multiple, or to have suffered ritualized abuse, they’re either seeking attention or are delusional, and if a community claims to have ritual abuse perpetrators in their midst they’re suffering from mass hysteria.
In 1994, when the backlash against victims of extreme abuse and their advocates was in full swing, Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional IQ, summed up the official story about ritual abuse in an article published in the New York Times. He writes:
“Tales of satanic ritual abuse, with well-organized cults sacrificing animals and babies and engaging in sexual perversion and cannibalism, is the stuff of tabloid television. Now the first empirical study of its actual prevalence, based on information from district attorneys, social service workers, police officials and psychotherapists, suggests that these tales are just that — figments of imagination.”
And he goes on to say: “The survey found that there was not a single case where there was clear corroborating evidence for the most common accusation, that there was a well-organized intergenerational satanic cult.” So why would the “most common accusation” be so common? He states in this article that there had been thousands of such cases reported.
Goleman goes on to quote psychiatrist Bennett Braun: “There’s clearly been a contagion, a contamination of what people say in therapy because of what they see on TV or read about satanic ritual abuse.” So, we were either coerced by dodgy therapists, whose possible motives are rarely addressed, or we’ve snatched a story from TV or from books, and again for reasons unknown, adopted them as our own.
Hal Pepinsky, professor of criminal justice and member of the North America Truth and Reconciliation Coalition, or NATRC, has offered this astute observation:
“If these narratives are essentially fabricated, they must have been fabricated in many different ways at once. It would require a more elaborate “conspiracy” to account for how similar narratives could be falsely implanted in so many survivors’ minds in so many different ways … than to account for how so many cults and mind control programmers could operate essentially in secret, with impunity.”
Well Goleman’s galling article goes on to quote Dr. Goodman, the psychologist who directed the survey: “After scouring the country, we found no evidence for large-scale cults that sexually abuse children.” But, she added, her group did find “convincing evidence of lone perpetrators or couples who say they are involved with Satan or use the claim to intimidate victims.”
Ritual abuse crimes have now been well-documented, cases in which there have been criminal convictions and so forth, and have been extensively catalogued in Neil’s S.M.A.R.T. web pages, so corroboration is out there.
But these cases rarely get widespread exposure in the press, and the ones that do break through that firewall are universally framed as one-offs, as in the small concession Goreman’s article makes: that they’re independent perpetrators committing isolated crimes. And in a moment we’ll revisit what colossal lengths the power-brokers will go to to suppress a story when a whistleblower dares to expose the whole kit and caboodle.
Wikipedia’s current entry on Satanic ritual abuse, no less appalling than Goreman’s ’94 sampling, shows that in terms of mainstream disinformation, not much progress has been made. Here are some excerpts:
“Satanic ritual abuse … refers to a moral panic that originated in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout the country and eventually to many parts of the world, before subsiding in the late 1990s … Official investigations produced no evidence of widespread conspiracies … only a small number of verified crimes have even remote similarities to tales of SRA.”
The reason “official investigations” haven’t produced any evidence of widespread corruption is that official investigators are too often criminal conspirators themselves. And when they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, as in the case of the Finders, and other scandals where official investigative cover-ups were documented, the popular press turns a blind eye.
And speaking of sins of omission, mind control allegations and relevant documentation don’t even warrant press exposure when there’s an official government hearing on the topic, as was the case the ’95 hearings before the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
Another example of this unfortunate phenomenon just played out this past June, when a 2009 class action suit filed by Viet Nam vets against the CIA and other government agencies was finally dismissed. The suit claimed they experimented on at least 7,800 soldiers during the cold war, mainly at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, and exposed them to drugs and electronic implants. If you haven’t heard about this, it’s probably because mainstream media categorically ignored it.
Projects named in this suit included “Bluebird,” “Artichoke” and “MKUltra.” Alleged goals of the projects included controlling human behavior, and developing drugs that would cause confusion and induce hypnosis. The veterans say that some of the soldiers suffered from paranoia, grand mal seizures and epileptic seizures, and some soldiers died.
Perhaps not as compelling as Brad Pitt and Angelia Jolie’s latest domestic squabble, but information the public probably should have, nonetheless.
Hollywood has been right up there with news media in terms of manipulating public perception. Obvious big screen tactics include presenting a protagonist who believes they’ve been a victim of mind control and then condemning them as a lunatic, as happens in Shutter Island or, in a more subtle approach, setting up a protagonist as a victim of mind control, but glamorizing and romanticizing their role, and sanitizing the context, as they do in the Bourne series and in Salt.
In the case of Jason Bourne, they go so far as to show him being tortured as part of his training process, but they have him volunteering, consenting to this program as a fully conscious adult, and the motivating factor is that it’s all for a good cause, it’s an honorable, noble endeavor. And the other huge distortion there is that the parties involved in illegal operations are framed as a rogue element, a deviation from the moral and principled main body.
As far as mind control operations are concerned, documented players like Allen Dulles and Sidney Gottleib were no rogue operatives. The CIA was founded by men on record as being involved in these projects, and it was the CIA director himself, Richard Helms, who ordered the MKUltra files destroyed. So there’s no plausible deniability there to speak of.
Some feature films include fairly accurate details about our experiences, which on the face of it seems counterproductive in terms of denying our stories, but on the other hand, you can’t accuse a victim of having derived their fantastical claims from watching too many movies if there aren’t any movies like that out there.
Another part of that equation has to do with what the CIA historically referred to as a “limited hang-out.” This propaganda technique involves giving away some legit information in order to effectively hide a larger truth. In some cases that means putting information out there that’s 99% accurate, but then adding a few drops of poison to the mix that essentially negates or seriously undermines the real story.
And speaking of the CIA, the way they’re portrayed in Hollywood in general seriously undermines the credibility of whistleblowers who’ve been victimized by them. Like the iconic James Bond, CIA assets are usually portrayed as classy, upstanding gentlemen whose mad skills enable them to get the upper hand on evil antagonists, who are well deserving of their terrible fates.
I think it’s safe to say those of us who were allegedly co-opted into the intelligence world as children generally knew them more as manipulative liars, child rapists, and cold-blooded killers.
Shortly before his death, retired CIA operative George White, an especially crass individual by all accounts, described his career in a letter to his former boss, Gottlieb, as “Fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest?”
The sexy and glamorous work agents do on the big screen is inevitably motivated by an honorable and urgent need to protect the state. And of course there’s nothing glamorous or honorable about what they did to us, or about what deliberately dissociated assassins or death squads really do, or whom they really do it for.
A third major piece of subterfuge in the popular media regarding the CIA is that it’s a highly centralized organization, represented by one or two super agents. And they’re at Langley testing cool gadgets. The reality is that right now there are an estimated 854,000 people in our country walking around with top secret security clearances from one intelligence agency or another, and that of those people, 265,000 are private contractors.
So the net result of the Hollywood spin is that if a survivor discloses a history of abuse involving the CIA, the knee-jerk reaction is likely to be that no one they know could possibly have anything to do with that organization, even that no one in their town could be associated with them; it almost has a mythical status in that regard.
TV is as rife as the big screen with disinformation and not-so-subtle distortions. To take the most obvious example I’m aware of, the series Fringe is a paragon of re-framing and shameless propagandizing. (It’s also loaded with blatant triggers and thought control related terminology, so consumer beware.)
The series features a young woman who works for the FBI as a special agent, Agent Olivia Dunham, all business, who is teamed up with an old man who turns out to be one of the Harvard mind control doctors who worked on her as a child, Walter Bishop. Bishop is portrayed as a charming and eccentric sympathetic character.
In an episode called “The Dreamscape,” he plays some archival footage from his early days for his FBI cohorts. In a blatant attempt to normalize something that would otherwise be viewed as repugnant, they show him chuckling at images of a hypnotized young man holding his arm out as the doctor presses an ice cube to his skin, while persuading him that it was burning coal. The man reacts as if he’s been burnt, and they cut to a close up of his skin turning red and blistering dramatically. The doctor says “Cruel, I suppose, but very enlightening.”
In an episode called “The Road Not Taken,” Agent Dunham, who gradually remembers bits and pieces of her history with the doctor, confronts him about what he did to her. Walter’s response is: “We were trying to help. We meant no harm.”
Dunham says: “No harm? You were drugging children, Walter. Why did you do it?”
Walter’s voice breaks with emotion: “We were trying to prepare you – to make you capable. Able. Something terrible is coming.”
Dunham: “What?”
Walter: “I don’t know.”
By the end of this scene, he breaks down crying. Back in his basement lab at Harvard, he plows through old notes until he finds what he’s looking for and reads it aloud: “We must nurture them, and protect them. We must prepare them so they can one day protect us.”
In the next episode, Dunham apologizes for, “being so hard” on him. And all of this is brought to you by a production company called Bad Robot.
So, the official story that’s been rolled out in the media is that ritual abuse is nonexistent except in rare cases where a psychotic couple has tormented a child spontaneously and inexplicably in much the same way other psychotic couples have been known to do. The CIA is all glam and righteousness, and mind control, if it ever really happened at all, was perpetrated by compassionate doctors who were just looking out for the best interests of their subjects and countrymen.
So we’ve really got our work cut out for us.
Well, thanks to an ever-increasing number of brave and determined survivors and their allies, there’s a hard-fought track record from which much can be learned. For example, many survivors have stepped up and written autobiographies, including invaluable recent contributions like those of Janet Thomas, Dave Silvey and Anne Johnson Davis.
Davis’ book, Hell Minus One, published in 2008, was the result of seven years’ hard work, and marked the first time a survivor had succeeded in garnering signed confessions from perpetrators of ritual abuse: her own parents. The personal risks she took, and the sacrifices she made to get the truth out are exemplified in this passage describing her experience of writing letters detailing her abuse:
“Each time I sat down to write another letter to the stake president, I had to force myself to move through paralyzing fear … As I read what I had written, tears welled up from my heart and flowed down my face. I could barely see what I was typing … Underneath it all, I was disturbed and intimidated by the realization that, at any time, my abusers could shoot me or someone I loved. I was afraid for the safety of my children, my husband and me. Though my mind wanted to take the words back, I was determined to speak the truth and withhold nothing.”
Other courageous, precedent-setting attempts to break through the silence include masterful works of art, as the talented Lynn Schirmer has shared, public lectures and personal testimonials. We have Dr. Corydon Hammond’s groundbreaking “Greenbaum Speech,” Valerie Wolf’s, Claudia Mullen’s and Chris Ebner’s incredible testimonies from the ’95 Presidential Hearing, and we have Trish Fotherington and her therapist Ellen Lacter’s amazing, inspirational documentary, among many other examples.
Perhaps the most iconic of all survivor whistleblowers is Alisha Owen, victim of a child pandering network for which the Franklin Credit Union was allegedly a front. Because the Franklin scandal is arguably the most well-documented survivor debacle to date, it’s especially instructive in terms of exposing both the extent of this kind corruption and the mechanics of oppression.
We’re very fortunate to have a meticulously researched record of this cover-up in the form of Nick Bryant’s amazing and mind-boggling book, The Franklin Scandal. To give you some idea of how well-researched this account is, the last 103 pages of his book are devoted to documentation.
For those of you unfamiliar with this particular scandal, it centered around Larry King, CEO of the Franklin Credit Union (whose early history, interestingly enough, included a stint for the air force handling “top secret” military communications). King was accused of looting $40 million dollars from Franklin, and in 1988, the credit union was raided by the authorities, and a Nebraska subcommittee was formed to investigate King’s misdeeds.
A number of people from child protection agencies came forward to say that state and federal law enforcement agencies had been categorically ignoring their reports concerning King’s interstate child pandering network, so the committee agreed to investigate these allegations as well. And thus begins the macabre and ultimately tragic epic battle between the victims of sadistic exploitation and their allies, and the wealthy and powerful.
As the committee was forming, one member, conservative Senator Loren Schmit, received an anonymous phone call warning him against pursuing the Franklin investigation because it would “reach to the highest levels of the Republican Party.”
By the time this gushing calamity plays itself out, longtime civil servants like Schmit will end up sacrificing their careers, and victims and their advocates will be plagued by threats, shuffled off to psychiatric facilities, shredded in the press, crucified in the courts, and several even die under suspicious circumstances.
The victims who came forward were absurdly out-gunned. Larry King is on record as having bragged that high-ranking military and intelligence officers attended his parties, and his social circle at the time reportedly included an attorney general, a governor, a former secretary of state, US congressmen, a US ambassador to the U.N., the current HUD secretary, a former CIA director, a former president and George H.W. Bush himself.
Part of the gift survivors give when they risk telling the truth is that they force the hand of criminal networks by compelling them to come out of the shadows to take defensive action. Much can be learned by paying attention to who comes to bat to cover the backsides of their brethren, and how they do it.
Some of the alleged participants in this cover-up include the publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, the Omaha chief of police, the Nebraska attorney general, a US District Judge, a US Magistrate, one of our nation’s leading newspapers and a major television network. The full spectrum of folks who allegedly helped to silence victims and keep this story under wraps included teachers, school administrators, journalists, counselors, psychiatrists, politicians of every stripe and of course, the top of all Mafioso food chains, the banking industry, or as they’re now sometimes called the “banksters.”
The extent of the corruption was also betrayed by the drastic nature of the steps taken to hush people up. Among the suspicious deaths associated with Franklin were the kid brothers of two of the main witnesses, Alisha Owen and Troy Boner, and crack investigator Gary Caradori and his eight year-old son Alex.
As many of you know, Caradori’s private plane broke up in mid-air after he’d finally allegedly acquired solid evidence of King’s guilt: photos of his and his associate’s sadistic exploitation of children. His attaché case was never found.
The impetus for his search for these photographs had been that he’d heard through the grapevine that he was going to be set up as a fall guy because of evidence he’d uncovered. In The Franklin Scandal, Bryant quotes a letter Caradori wrote to an attorney requesting his representation. He writes:
“In short, what we have discovered is only a small part of a nationwide child exploitation network. It is obvious that the people behind this organization are powerful and ruthless, and are going to great lengths to keep this matter contained.” He further stated that the network extended “to the highest levels of the United States.”
And through it all, Owen and Owen alone refuses to recant her original testimony, throwing a giant monkey wrench into an otherwise neat and complete cover-up. In the face of what amounts to psychological warfare on the part of state and federal officials and the media, Owen never gives an inch, and, even more incredibly, never gives up. And what does she get for her trouble? She’s set up as a scapegoat designed to send a chilling message to other potential witnesses.
Owen was sentenced to 9 to 15 years in prison for perjury. She ended up doing more than nine years behind bars, two of them in solitary confinement. The first time she was up for parole it was granted unanimously, because of her impressive list of accomplishments while incarcerated.
In 1993, Senator Schmit lost his seat of twenty-four years, and this is his take on what it cost him personally to pursue the Franklin investigation in spite of dire warnings:
“I had, I think, as distinguished a record as anyone could put together in twenty-four years – I was told that that would be curtailed, and it was … I was told I would have financial problems, and I did. The message was not lost on most of the politicians in Nebraska – I think the message that was delivered was that if any legislative committee ever tries to conduct a thorough investigation again, the same thing will happen. It has shaken my faith in the institution of government.”
On the face of it, this story should have irresistible Hollywood appeal, so why isn’t it a feature film? Not for lack of trying. Bryant has pursued both feature film and documentary production, to no avail. What we have instead is a grainy, bootleg copy of the ‘94 Yorkshire Television version, Conspiracy of Silence, circulating in relative obscurity on the internet. Bryant has commented that “just about every major media personality in America has my book, and they won’t touch The Franklin Scandal.”
As he observes in his book:
“The Franklin story is a cautionary warning for America – not only does it provide a glimpse of a stratum of government corruption that is opaque and unfathomable to the majority of Americans, it also demonstrates that the government, together with the media, have the potential to spin fictions into facts, and facts into fictions.”
We need to stand up and fight that spin with everything we’ve got.
Whistleblowing is hardly foreign territory for many of us in this room. For some of us, just escaping a toxic system alone amounted to a threatening leak. And a number of us have experienced the wonders of blowing the whistle within the context of our families of origin.
In my childhood family, there were no blurry lines; there was no overlapping of criminally dysfunctional behavior and socially acceptable behavior. There was the version of reality with my parents’ stamp of approval on it, and there was the other one, which was basically an unmitigated nightmare. Like many other survivors I know, when I began to recover, years after physically leaving the family system, I dared to point out this unfortunate discrepancy.
Among other drastic measures, word went out to extended family, friends and in-laws that I was a raving lunatic. When my aunt and uncle came to visit shortly thereafter, my aunt was actually afraid to come into our house. And this strikes me as something of a microcosm of how we’re all socially marginalized, ostracized and otherized, as truth tellers.
Because my transition from ignorance to awareness of my dissociated past was relatively stark, it almost felt like one minute I was a suburban soccer mom, and the next minute I was sitting in a squeaky plastic chair at a conference, listening to “experts” talk about me and my ilk as if we were some terribly alien, almost unknowable subspecies of humanity. And the only way I can see around this absurd otherization is to get out there en masse and show them who we really are.
Historically, we’ve been branded and re-branded every which way, almost always skewing toward dehumanization. When we were being exploited as children, some of us were called “subjects,” “dwarfs,” “utensils,” “profits,” “contraband,” and worse. As adults, we’ve been labeled “crazy,” “paranoid,” “borderline,” “schizophrenic,” and “psychotic.”
We can’t continue to let them name us. We need a whole lot of us out there demystifying what it means to be dissociative, and not cowering in shame when the monsters responsible for this condition enjoy standard social status and apologize for nothing. We need to step up and name ourselves: “fellow human beings.”
As long as we let them hide us under the invisibility cloak of damning labels our stories will be hidden as well. As long as people dismiss us as human beings, our stories are also going to be dismissed, and the atrocities will continue unabated, and the perpetrators of these crimes will prevail.
I realize not all of us are at a place in our healing trajectory that’s conducive to speaking out, and for too many of us the risks are just too grave. I think in every case we need to be careful and brutally realistic in terms of analyzing and assessing true risks.
If you can’t speak out now, maybe you can support someone who can. No one can do this hard work without moral support. You can choose to help amplify someone else’s message, or you can choose to help to build networks to strengthen our community. You can join or support advocacy and activist organizations like the NATRC and Survivorship. And, as Neil pointed out this morning, you can do research and post informational blogs.
You can do educational outreach around dissociative issues; there’s a lot of resistance out there to the idea that many different people can inhabit one body. And there’s a pretty steep learning curve, there, in terms of how it can develop, how it can manifest, and how it can be used for sinister purposes.
You can help by committing yourself to healing. Mahatma Gandhi once said: “We are able to be of service to those who suffer only to the extent that we have been able to transform fear in our own lives.”
You can find someone out there who understands what you’ve been through and never, ever again believe you’re in this alone.
Dr. Valerie Sinason, director of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, summed up a sad truth about victims of extreme abuse. She writes: “Legions of warriors are lost to society through suicide, psychiatric hospitals, addiction and prison.” My feeling is that those who are fortunate enough to be in a place where they can come forward have a special responsibility to those who, for one reason or another, aren’t able to, including children who are suffering helplessly right now.
As Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor and famed Nazi hunter, once put it: “We, as survivors, have an obligation not only to the dead, but also to future generations: We must pass on to them our experiences.”
In 2005, Evangeline Wright wrote, in an article about mind control experimentation, that “the names and stories of the survivors are, for the most part, not found in court documents, government documents, or mainstream media reports. Instead, their stories are told in web postings and the notes of mental health workers, the outlets available to the marginalized and ignored.”
We need to drag our stories out of the therapists’ and clerics’ offices, out of the chat rooms, and into the daylight. We need to tell our neighbors, our hair stylists and our doctors what we know. Society at large can dismiss us in a facile way that one person who knows us is much less likely to manage.
And we need all hands on deck, every able-bodied, empowered survivor out there spreading the word, so that when a powerless child tries to tell her “safe parent,” or neighbor, or doctor that they’re being abused, they won’t be met with bewildered disbelief or admonishments, but with compassion and understanding. And their abusers will be held accountable.
Another reason we need the whole team to show up is that we need to dilute the risks any one of us takes. Right now there are people out there who’ve taken it upon themselves to risk it all for our cause. And, as most of you probably know, some of them have taken a lot of heat. No one survivor should have to bear the brunt of our collective secrets. Why leave it to a handful of survivors on the front lines to try to tear a hole in the Truman Show sky, when there are enough of us to tear down the whole set?
A number of courageous souls have made selfless sacrifices on our behalf. Shortly after Dr. Hammond gave his “Greenbaum Speech,” he had to stop speaking about mind control due to intense threats, and has remained quiet since. Loren Schmit sacrificed his career and his innocence, Alisha Owen sacrificed nine years of freedom, and Caradori and his son, and countless others have lost their lives. But what incredible gifts these warriors have given us. We need to ensure that their terrible sacrifices haven’t been in vain, and build on the momentum for which they’ve paid such a high price.
Valerie Sinason wrote, in her introduction to her revised edition of Attachment Trauma and Multiplicity:
“Despite the clear description of what constitutes DID in the DSM-IV … this condition is still seen by some mental health professionals as a hysterical confabulation. It is 10-20 years too early for it to be picked up and dealt with well. What is it like to be suffering from something that is not yet adequately recognised? And not only is the DID not recognised, but the nature of the sadistic abuse that has caused it in the majority of cases is even less recognised.”
Defenseless children being deliberately dissociated for syndicates that deal in children the same way they deal drugs and arms don’t have ten to twenty years to wait. Mothers who lie awake at night in agony, having lost their children in corrupt family courts to ex-husbands pimping for their fraternal orders don’t have ten to twenty years to wait. Victims of ritual abuse who’ve been hauled off to psychiatric institutions to be chemically incarcerated don’t have ten to twenty years to wait. We can’t afford to sit back and wait for the rest of the world to catch up. We need to start turning this ship of denial around now.
Through no fault of our own, our childhoods were hijacked and we were transformed from defenseless, innocent children into adults who are walking representations of unbearable realities. But we’re walking representations of something else, too, and that’s resilience – the strength of the human spirit.
Sometimes when I get triggered, I try to process the memories and feelings that come up by writing out whatever’s got a hold on me at that moment, and this often amounts to a sort of interview with one split or another.
So I want to share a slice of one of these with you, if you will indulge me, because I think it can serve as a reminder that our perpetrators weren’t always invincible, and we weren’t always successfully subjugated. Also, I think it illustrates, in a small way, how creative and resourceful we all were, by managing split-off parts of ourselves to survive the impossible and hang onto our humanity.
The context is that this split who was triggered, a young teenage girl, and others were allegedly taken to a Freemason camp. So here she’s talking about her main doctor at that point, a former Nazi war criminal.
She says: “He damn near starved us to death in one camp. We was buried under some kind of rubbish for a while, too, to see what would happen to us. There was rats there too in the garbage dump around us. It took a long time, that one. We buried ourselves in the dung heap to keep warm at night, and we had each other. (And here she names another split, a boy) [He] and I was there. He’s more tougher than me so I let him stay. We comfort each other that way. He’s more likeable than me, too. More sincere and happy. He knows none of this matters, it ain’t who we really are.”
So I ask: “What were they testing that way?”
And she answers: “They was gonna see how long we lived I suppose, naked, exposed to rats and such. I don’t know. We ate garbage. I don’t know. They wanted to see what it did to us to be treated like garbage. They asked us lots of questions afterwards, like “who do you want to be now, when you grow up?”
“I want to be a fascist devil like you, sir.” Slap. “I want to be a hooker like your mother, sir.” Slap. It went on and on like that, because, fuck ’em both.”
I think every one of us have a pretty scrappy little rebel in there somewhere, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be here in this room right now. And we can call on that courageous part of us to step up as elders, to hold up a lantern for the next generation. But we need all of us who can do so safely out there doing it. Every disclosure counts. Every time you tell the secret, it’s you one, perps zero. And that’s how we’re going to turn this ship around, one story at a time.
If extreme trauma manifests as catastrophic disconnections, the key to healing is reconnection on every level. And that includes connecting with each other, reconnecting to the society from which we’ve been exiled, and erasing the gigantic disconnect between the underworld we know and the world most people call home. To do this, we need more than leaks, we need a tsunami.
As we move from the Age of Plunder to the Age of Consequences, as peace activist Brian Willson put it, our inside information can help to bridge the dangerous chasm between what the military industrial media complex says is going on, and what the banksters and policy elites are really up to. And that’s because the tyrants at the top of the shadow world’s food chain and the tyrants at the top of the Truman world’s food chain are one and the same. Our truth emergency is everyone’s truth emergency.
Chogyam Trungpa once said “When we talk about compassion, we talk in terms of being kind, but compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up.”
The elite ruling class is counting on the great sleeping giant, the people, to stay disconnected, distracted, deceived, and disempowered. Somebody needs to blow the whistle and wake them up.
I humbly invite you to honour the courage, the heart, and the unyielding faith it took for the child in you to deliver you back into an authentic life by sharing your story, your wisdom, and hope for a better, kinder world. We have the power. Together we can help put an end to this insidious reign of terror.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it – always.”
May you find peace, and may love always, always abide.
Thank you.