I guess I really should at least get one more text done today. It's not that I haven't been working on this today, it's just that it's been more behind the scenes work. Now I think there are 2 articles I can't find. So that makes me think I may have more material stashed somewhere, so I've started rummaging through things trying to figure out where that might be.
I don't know if you know what it's like to move and then not be able to find everything for a while afterward... well it's like that, except I've had 2 moves back to back where a lot of things weren't unpacked between moves. I got handy the things I use all the time, but when I was arranging things for ready access to what I thought I would need, I didn't know I would need these things yet. I thought I'd get better quicker and be able to get a part-time job sooner. With my health demands and limits working part-time might not make it so feasible to work on this blog, certainly not as much as I have been.
Also, I have bad news on the garden front. I haven't heard back from the the extension people yet, but I'm getting more and more problems with the squash and cucumbers, so I'm seriously considering just digging them up. The good news, though, is that more of the plants from the butterfly garden seed packet that I planted have started blooming. Some are still just coming up too, so there will definitely be more to come. I would have felt badly if the flowers came out as badly as the vegetables seem to have, since it's something I did for the neighbor and not for myself. It's one thing for things to bomb out if you're doing it for yourself, and it's another thing if you're doing it for someone else.
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Okay, the next one is a big one, so fasten your seat belts...
Radine, Lawrence B. (1977). The Taming of the Troops: Social Control in the United States Army. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. (Contributions in Sociology, No. 2)
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"Manipulative controls are difficult to recognize because they are subtle and rational and seem liberal in contrast to coercive controls....
The Taming of the Troops develops two key themes: (1) the overall shift in Army controls from coercion to manipulation and (2) the change in military controls to more closely resemble civilian controls... The result is an organization that, in my opinion, is all the more capable of controlling deviant and politically outspoken soldiers....
Furthermore, some of the techniques developed in the Army have been borrowed by civilian sectors... Some leadership and organizational principles discussed in this book have been taken up by industrial organizations... [T]he Army can be viewed as a vanguard bureaucracy in the development of new techniques of control, as well as a recipient of civilian controls." (p. ix-xi)
This is a little different tack then we've taken before. We saw earlier that there were some authoritarian aspects of the Vienna mission, but this might go further in explaining some things I experienced. We'll see if the Vienna mission picked up any military approaches to things.
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"This pattern of increasing oppressiveness is effective because repression is difficult to respond to when it is applied in small increments; no one step is sufficient cause to rally opposition around... Thus, repression on the installment plan can institute a form of domination that would almost inevitably be resisted if one of the later steps were applied to early... Thus, there is an internal logic to techniques of domination: they are most effective when applied in a sequential pattern." (p. 4)
A couple of things here. First of all, I don't know how the mission in Vienna got to be the way it was. Since it was an agglomeration of a bunch of missions, I assume you'd have to look to those founding missions, and then the others as they were added too, and the governing board, which met twice a year. Those of us who came after it was well up and running didn't see that incremental aspect, if it existed.
As far as how I personally was treated - my experience of the mission - I don't see anything incremental about it. Rather, I see a patchwork hodgepodge of back to back encouragement and being knocked down. As such, it was hard to make sense of, as far as what was really wanted of me. That's how I felt.
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"If an individual resister is considered to be a security risk, evidenced by his having belonged to a subversive organization or committing certain politically motivated acts, his personnel file is flagged. His file is thus spotted as belonging to someone whom the Army will not assign to certain positions, such as missile duty, Army intelligence, and so forth." (p. 7)
About the only thing I could have been flagged for before arriving in Vienna is disagreeing with some of the things the Slavic Gospel Association did. Unfortunately, they were a very powerful mission and one of the founding missions of the collaborative mission I was assigned to work with. ECM, my sending mission, knew of these issues from discussions during Candidates' Course, so that probably followed me there. But I don't think they thought they'd have any problems with me. Maybe I'm just too American for my own good - after all that's why we fight most of our wars, isn't it (at least on paper). so we can keep our freedom. I just happen to like thinking for myself, especially where values are concerned.
But to be honest, they could have been as puzzled about me (what I was thinking) as I was of their behavior toward me. And in going through my materials, what little I have left, of that time, I see that I seem to have seldom let on what I was really thinking. I think that was because I didn't trust them and there was a certain amount of fear of them too, although not right away.
Although I'm currently not involved in anything, after my return to the States from Russia I did quite a lot that would have flagged me as a potential troublemaker. For example, I hadn't yet been arrested for trespassing on Lockheed-Martin's property in a protest near Philadelphia. We just stepped foot on the grass and were arrested for trespassing.
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"As we shall see in the next chapter, basic trainees are usually too psychologically disorganized and overwhelmed to think of formulating a coherent resistive response." (p. 8)
Since we already know I never left the boot camp/introductory socialization phase in Vienna, I think this is a pretty good one-sentence summary of why it would have been very difficult for me to openly protest. At least part of why it would have been difficult. I didn't understand it myself at the time, which is why years later when my life just seemed to go from bad to worse (well, maybe awful to more awful), I did the research that I'm sharing with you now. It really was hard to make heads or tails of what was going on.
And I'm also generally the kind that doesn't stand up for something unless I'm pretty well convinced I'm right and I have something good to back up my position too. I was just 18 years old, fresh out of high school, and that summer, since I could work full time with no school commitments, I was in charge of pictures and pets - two small departments. That meant I had to do the ordering, keep the shelves looking nice, set up displays for sales, etc. However, I didn't have to do this all the time, so I also worked a lot in the garden shop, home improvement and building materials departments. The garden shop manager had been asking me to help him a lot and I always tried to accommodate, but it was getting so that I was neglecting my departments and we were in the back room, where the ordering was done, and I stood up for myself and laid out what had been happening and said I couldn't right then. It just so happened that the marketing manager was in the room too and heard the whole thing and nothing else was said about it. I think Randy was pretty taken aback that I'd be so firm and logical in my response.
But I couldn't do that in Vienna because, beside the issues being a lot bigger, I didn't understand what was going on well enough and I felt like anything to make myself vulnerable was just an opportunity for them to just sort of swoop down and snatch me away. Well, not exactly, but it would give them an in, a hook to drag me into this thing that I didn't think I wanted to conform to. That's how I felt, although I'm probably being clearer in expressing it now than I could have then.
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"Many people maintain a fiction of their omnipotence: they feel that if they were really committed to something, they were not back down to any power. But GIs I have interviewed have asserted that the Army, at least during basic training, seems to be interested in destroying that self-confident state of mind that is so important for resistance." (p. 8)
The GIs should be glad boot camp lasted only 8 weeks (or however long), because I had this kind of treatment for 2 years!! I know it's not exactly the same - the other components of boot camp, but this part is strikingly familiar to me. In my 1989-1990 journal after returning home I laid bare and even wrote that I was afraid to even write my true thoughts in Vienna, and I was devastated, convinced that I had all these bad qualities that had finally sunk in from those 2 years.
Of course, then the question is, if it was that bad, why did you stick it out even? Well, getting out wouldn't have been quite as hard as trying to get out of the military early, but it would have been pretty hard. Think about it: I had prepared for 8 years (1978 to 1986) for that ministry. I had worked part-time with one of the most influential missions to that world and had major ethical disagreements with them. I had written a questionnaire to 30+ missions to that part of the world and only 2 had responses that I thought were at all reasonable. So what would I have done if I'd left? In fact, when I did leave, after my 2-year term had expired, I eventually came to the conclusion that I couldn't work with a mission, although even when I was in Russian I contacted a couple groups working with women.
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"Rather than being carefully assigned, a flagged soldier may temporarily be unassigned to any permanent work detail or base but held in what is called a holdover company. Thus while everyone he knows is sent off to various bases, he exists in a kind of limbo, unable to develop his organization or maintain contacts." (p. 10)
This could very easily have been written with me in mind. Technically, I had a position, but I wasn't treated as if that was really what they wanted... Sort of like how the Komsomols (Young Communist League) got me to Siberia a few years later. Be upfront people... what do you REALLY want? I'm ready to be a secretary; I brought my little secretary handbook, which I assiduously studied before arriving. I offered to take a computer class, but couldn't be told what software I'd be using. And being a secretary is more or less 9-5, right? I mean, okay, you have other little things that need doing here and there, social interactions and helping others, but otherwise, I'm not supposed to be a secretary, right? My job descriptions says I'm a secretary, right? Right? Hello? Hello? That's a little of how I felt.
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Speaking of the experience of some organizers in the Army: "The Army labeled the incoming organizer as a troublemaker by telling company members that a communist was being transferred into their unit" (p. 12)
I had a friend, the same one that was with me in leaving the USSR after we'd left our study group, who was from a small rural town in the Northeast (USA) who said that sometimes people there thought she was a communist for studying Russian. When I returned from Russia for good in 1997 and people who knew me began to realized that my socio-political views had changed I think there was some of this labeling of me going on, but not so much to my face. Of course, some people in the USA seem to be think that in order to be saved you also have to be a Republican. They might not say that, but it's true. And if you're not a fire-breathing die-hard Republican they'll just as likely treat you as a sinner going to hell, even though you may be otherwise a strong Christian.
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After some discussion about how the Army escalates its treatment of organizers, leading to harassing inspections which can turn up evidence that can lead to direct punishment:
"This demonstrates the usefulness of a military justice system in which substantive law is based on protecting the organization from the individual rather than the reverse." (p. 14)
In the Vienna mission there was NO protection for the individual. In fact, I was very much let down by my sending church's mission board who did nothing in my defense, even writing to the mission or anything. There was absolutely no recourse for a missionary in that setting. The only thing you could ever have had any recourse about is if they blatantly broke the law. But there's a whole machinery in place to support and defend the mission, and the business of that machinery does not include a system of redress. Heck, if I get a secular job and I have a complaint against my boss, there is a whole grievance procedure in place as to how to deal with it. Not so in the Vienna mission. Thee is no recourse, none, zip, nada, and zilch. None.
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"The training military intelligence men receive for handling enemy prisoners of war can easily be put to use in intimidating anti-war GIs." (p. 14)
I've wondered since leaving Vienna what exactly military chaplains do. I mean, I have copies even of some of the manuals explaining how they are supposed to lead religious services according to their church's tradition, when in port make contact with religious leaders there, etc., etc. I do know that they're supposed to be part of the system to keep the morale and the morals high. And they do advise other officers on certain issues in their sphere of work. So it seems they must have to know something about the military and support what it does. This is the kind of think in adult education I didn't like (I wasn't in this aspect of adult education but it's strong in the USA and elsewhere), that human resource development is really ultimately there to build up the organization, so you're like that propaganda person in the Soviet factory, right? And does the mindset of the military rub off on these chaplains? What kinds of things might the 2 chaplains in the Vienna mission human resource office have brought with them from their military experience. I haven't found good answers from the literature.
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"[The Defense Investigative Review]'s director has testified that every request to carry out 'covert surveillance' on a GI anti-war group has been granted." (p. 16)
Those are even worse odds than civilian activists are confronted with. I wish I knew some of the laws and loopholes about things that affected (or seemed to) me later on.
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"Given the vagueness of military law, even the most competent organizer can be arrested eventually by a military authority." (p. 16)
Sounds a bit like what dissidents in the former USSR faced. Not that things are completely cleaned up now, but they're certainly a lot better than they were there. But Putin hasn't exactly been a friend of dissidents.
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Here we are! -
"And at another base, Actions 'that have been taken to minimize the impact of dissident activities' included the following:
... (4)... Counterintelligence efforts have been used for the early identification of dissidence and violence...
(7) Under the sponsorship of the local Chaplaincy, an on-post coffee house activity was initiated in 1969." (p. 26-27)
A couple of things here. First of all, it's nice that they put that in about the Chaplaincy. So the chaplain is involved in quashing dissident activities and religion is a nice guise to do that in. The text goes on to explain how the coffee house did actually provide an outlet for gripes to be aired, which helped reduce tensions that might have otherwise surfaced in less helpful ways.
But also, I would like to bring up another subject that I've wondered for years and my dad consistently balked at, preferring to think of me as mentally unstable, is that there were times when things happened that were otherwise not your everyday occurrence and I wondered if there wasn't something political going on. I mean, really, us Westerners find it much easier to believe that my phone was bugged in Russia than, say, in Vienna. I never thought it was bugged in the USA though. But there were other things in the USA that were puzzling.
Of course, the military has it's own laws and rules, which are quite distinct from the civilian counterparts, but if the issue of concern is my dad, and he's in a responsible, high visibility military-related position... if such things were to happen as seemed to happen to me, would that military connection be enough to have whatever loopholes are available take effect? I don't know.
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I've finished the first chapter (we have 6 more to go), but it's time for me to take a break.
~ Meg
