Yay! The lost papers have been found. In the process of looking I also realized I hadn't opened a box with some portfolio documents in it, and there are a few useful things in it too. And the box that has the articles in it also has more Vienna documentation and files on other topics.
I don't know how I'm going to deal with this, because I have so many of these files that fitting them in and still getting to my actual chronological narration is going to be hard. One thing nice about discussing these articles, is that I think it provides more insights, at least to my experience of my time in Vienna. I think it gives a lot richer understanding of it than if I just sat down and told the story.
Since I have a fairly small place here, things are stacked up a lot and these files were in a wooden chest that was under another wooden chest and a small bookcase. So I had to move everything to get into the bottom chest. But at least I was rewarded with success for my efforts.
But now I'm ready to sit down an discuss another chapter...
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Chapter 2: Coercive Control
Here's one advantage the military has over certain Christian missions:
"There are other forces, such as civilian criticism of the military, that are outside the scope of this study." (p. 35)
That would really be a shocker, to see some real criticism of these missions! In my experience with these missions to former East Bloc countries criticism was all but unheard of. I did find one article from a Christian publication that suggested after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe that this might be an opportunity to remedy some problems in these missions. But why couldn't they have tried to remedy these things earlier?
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"Writing in the 1960s, Peter Bourne, an Army psychiatrist, divided basic training into four stages. First, there was a stripping away of civilian cues, which are ways of telling the world how one wants to be interacted with and identified. This was done to more easily inculcate new identities and appearances. Second, there was a process of insults and mortifications that were intended to break down the individual's pride in himself, which is essential to his capacity to resist. In the third stage the Army began to rebuild and reorganize the personality by providing a few much desired rewards. Finally, there was some kind of final test of proficiency and often a graduation ceremony." (p. 40)
Not all of these stages fit my experience. There certainly wasn't anything akin to a graduation ceremony. And the second stage wasn't as brutal as it would have been in the Army, but still, I think there was some of this too. So stages one to three fit relatively well in the Vienna mission experience. That's a much tougher kind of "socialization" (which is a prominent subject in another file) than for the average job, or even mission experience. I don't think, for example, that Wycliffe Bible translators are subjected to this kind of experience in their orientation, and probably not Child Evangelism Fellowship missionaries either.
Reading this now (the passage), I was thinking to myself, "Wow, if we can't get you to come as a tabula rasa (blank slate), we'll turn you into one so that we can then make you into what we want you to be."
The author develops these stages more in the following paragraphs.
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"The first few days a recruit experienced in the military were a period of great stress and shock for him. In this first stage, he actually did very little except respond to routine induction procedures such as filling out forms, being issued uniforms, and so forth." (p. 40)
I have a big asterisk by this section. I'll get in to this more when I get to the chronology, but I felt like I was doing a lot of grunt work, unnecessary work and/or not enough work, especially at the beginning, but it never got very good for me in this regard.
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In discussing the second stage:
"Recruits quickly learned the do's and don'ts that would please the drill instructor and would keep them from being picked out for embarrassing individual harassment in front of others." (p. 40)
I don't think there was public harassment in Vienna, but the learning of do's and don'ts is worth taking a look at here. Because of the great ambiguity (another subject in a different file) for virtually all the time I was in Vienna (it's very difficult to live that long under so much ambiguity, let me tell you!), I never really caught on exactly to the do's and don'ts. But I think that if I had sort of followed the indirect signals, tested them out more, I would have eventually caught on, but by doing so I would have sort of "entered there world" which I wasn't sure I wanted to do - wasn't sure at all that I liked there world.
You could say, then, that it might have been possible do this testing out, and then proceeding to follow the ones that received positive feedback, as a sort of going through the motions and then be sucked into it so that before you know it your thinking as well as your interaction style had changed. Or, you could approach it the other way and start with accepting the apparent values of the group and then have actions follow. For someone who didn't notice any potential problems with values, or who didn't put as high a value on them as I did, you could probably have gone either way. But if someone had a problem with the values, I think the only way to really gain a good foothold in the organization would have been to have the actions precede the change in thinking process, so that incrementally you'd change your thinking and finally accept as not being so bad after all. Somehow, though, the values struck me as so bad that I couldn't even let myself go through the motions of testing the apparent relatively indirect cues. How they treated me early on made me dig my heels in even more and actually served to reinforce my concerns.
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"In the third stage of basic training, some of the recruit's repressed desires were allowed to come to the for - for example, a recruit's desire for individuality and recognition - and the Army made use of them." (p. 41)
Shortly before my parents came to visit me in Vienna I was sent my one and only teaching trip (other than ESL trips across the boarder to Czechoslovakia, which the secretaries did) into Eastern Europe. I think this was one way they may have tried this with me and also I started to be involved in a planning group for starting work in the Soviet Union. But it never was exactly clear what the significance of these things were and there were also issues of competition with others for positions, that I couldn't figure out the significance of. Ironically, not long after the teaching trip I was demoted to receptionist. So how is one supposed to read these signals? It was like that the whole time, but the ambiguity increased at the end.
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"Recruits learned that the way to beat the system was to excel in it.
Uncooperative recruits were isolated and ostracized with ridicule and insults, which even the other recruits joined in...
The harassment (although mixed with rewards) that continued through this third stage functioned ostensibly to ensure that soldiers would follow direct orders immediately." (p. 42)
I think the first line fits my experience in Vienna. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
We didn't have the ridicule and insults, but towards the end I was getting more comments pointing to my noncooperation, for example, and I was also ostracized socially.
The last line here is very interesting. This mixing of positive and negative rewards would be a way to test and/or teach submission and obedience. It could have served that purpose in Vienna too, although the "immediately" part wasn't as crucial there, but you could substitute with with "unthinkingly". That is, don't think too much (critically, I mean) about the instructions, just do it.
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"The treatment in the novel [From Here to Eternity] requires various officers and NCOs to act in concert to pressure a soldier to conform. These pressures entail social isolation, extra duty, disallowing of passes, withholding expected promotions, and assignment to unpleasant details such as KP (kitchen patrol)." (p. 43)
This describes most of my time in Vienna.
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Speaking of the Army's efforts to quell dissidents:
"And they mobilize their full efforts to drive the guy nuts, to get rid of him, or disband a unit, or how can we court martial him, or put him in a stockade, or do something." (p. 44)
I wasn't an organizer, and I didn't talk about my thoughts in while Vienna, not like I'm doing now, but I still felt like this at times. I might not have been trying to organize anyone and I didn't do anything (not that I can remember) that might have caused others to join me in my internal questioning of the mission, but the very fact that I wasn't progressing well along the intended socialization path was enough to deal pretty forcefully with me. I'm not aware of anyone else there in a comparable position to me, not during my time there or prior to my coming.
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During an interview with an enlisted soldier:
"I asked, 'Doesn't the Army want solidity?'
Yeah, but it's got to be a different kind, you know what I mean? It has to be their form of solidity. In other words, if it's going to be esprit de corps, it got to be their way." (p. 46)
The concept that the organization determines the rules of play period, no discussion, was my experience in Vienna. Not that it was an issue of solidity or esprit de corps, but in general about how things were done there.
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"I asked an exasperated soldier what he meant by harassment.
That's really harassment when they keep moving you around. And not just moving to another unit. They say you can't work here any more; you have to move to this other building. Then they say you can't work upstairs any more, you have to work downstairs. You move downstairs, then they say you're at the wrong end of the building, you have to move to the other end. That's harassment." (p. 47)
I had a lot of that. I like the label "harassment".
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That's all for tonight and it's late anyway. I've had this light headache all day for some reason. I thought maybe it was sinus related so I took a sudafed, but it didn't help. Maybe Aleve would be better.
Goodnight.
~ Meg
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