The tactic adopted by the technicians who managed the unmaskings from the
outside was to liquidate the opposition from periphery to center; in other
words, to begin with the victim's beliefs that were external to his ego and to
proceed by calculated stages to the destruction of the inner man. When the
student had "proved by deeds" that he had repudiated everything that
had theretofore constituted his world and thought, he was made to repudiate
himself by defaming himself. He had to compose an "autobiography"
that proved that he had been brought to his present predicament by a "lack
of inner character," and moral perversity and mental sickness that had
made him unreceptive to Communism.
He had to begin his autobiography from the moment of his earliest
recollections. The predominant theme had to be a negative one, and expressed in
superlatives. Vices and deficiencies had to appear in his early years so that
his faulty upbringing would form part of a consistent pattern. Contact with the
outside world began in his elementary school, where every student must have
been taught to steal, and to despise those poorer than himself, so that he
would create for himself a superiority complex -- a complex that later would
make him susceptible to the reactionary doctrines of the idealist bourgeois
criminals. Attending secondary school, he had necessarily to deepen his
perversity and develop his egocentrism, love of money, and ambition to achieve
social status rapidly by ambiguous means, the first of which was to incriminate
others in order to court the good will of the professors, the possessors of
"power. "
The educators, of course, were engaged in an illicit traffic in influence,
granting special favors to students whose parents returned the favor by
augmenting the social position of teachers. The rotten environment in which the
student was reared also had to lead him necessarily into frequenting
establishments which were "officially" offlimits to all students, but
which actually were open to those with the money to pay but closed to sons of
workers or the poor.
The literature one read in school (and the students had to cite specific
books) could not be anything but a police novel, pornographic literature, the
tendentious novel written to aggravate the feeling of hatred toward workers and
defenders of the proletarian class. Lastly, movies of the gangster type had to
be mentioned, or of frivolous adventure, or films playing up banditry, the
heroes of which became idols and models of these students.
Naturally, the result of such an environment led one into the kind of
politics natural to Romanian life between the two wars, namely (as
characterized by the Communists) one of dishonor, corruption, thievery, blackmail
and political assassination. One also developed a disdain toward inferiors, and
exercised flattery toward superiors, with the sole aim that of climbing
socially. The principal purpose was to become wealthy through exploitation of
the working class.
Now, in order to illustrate for his listeners as graphically as possible the
moral decadence of his background, the student had to attribute to himself all
the possible sins of that environment and claim he had committed them,
including all imaginable perversions. His character included without exception
all the deformed aspects of man, everything psychopathology considers abnormal.
Whoever would not recognize every sin and vice as his own only proved he was
not yet permeated with the true meaning of "unmasking," and those in
charge of his "re-education" missed no opportunity to remind him of
this with their bludgeons.
Finally, he saw the only thing to do was admit those vices were in him and
tell about them in detail. Pederasty, incest, masturbation, every depravity a
student had read about or heard of as practiced anywhere on earth, all were
described by him as his own actions, bestiality (intercourse with animals) not
being excluded. In this way the student was forced to wallow in a quagmire of
filth to its very dregs, as if some Satanic force had assumed mastery over him,
ordering him to burden his soul with everything which had in the past roused in
him the profoundest revulsion.
This imposition of self-degradation became a sort of psychic hysteria that
at a given moment seemed to fuse the re-educator's command with a desire for
self-destruction in the re-educated. By injecting gradually into the victim's
subconscious information different from what he had always accepted as real and
true, by altering and constantly deprecating existing reality and substituting
for it a fictitious image, the re-educator at last achieved the final purpose
of the unmasking: to make the lie so real to the victim that he would forget
what had formerly for him made sense. His chaotic mental state and the unreal
coordinates along which his consciousness moved throughout the months of
torture turned lies into truth and truth into lies, much as the body gradually
accustoms itself to narcotic poisons and develops a dependence on them.
As long as his nervous system responded to only rational commands, the
student could maintain a normal line of behavior. But the moment fear altered
this subordination, his nervous system became his mind's greatest enemy. Any
kind of reaction was possible when the entire organism was set quivering, as if
touched by fire, by the appearance of the bludgeon, an instrument which
attained apocalyptic proportions in the tormented memory of the sufferer. And
if natural reticence and dignity endeavored still to hide something in his
inner self, his nervous system betrayed him unequivocally. It was at this
moment the fusion took place, the hoped-for result of all the planning by the
experimenters: the complete reversal, for an indeterminate time, of the values
in which the student had always believed.
From then on for an indefinite period, the student would see the world as a
god with two faces; the first, which he had thought was real was now become
unreal; the second, fantastic and ugly beyond any previous imaginings, now had
become real, obsessively and painstakingly so, even though deep down within him
a stifled warning might still question its authenticity. And the impossible and
the absurd, gradually taking on the semblance of actuality in his
consciousness, became the sole standard of value in the student's thinking. The
artificial reality step by step displaced every trace of truth from previously
verified fact.
But who can fathom the bottomless depths of man's soul? Who knows but that
the life of one's past, stubbornly resisting annihilation, may not take refuge
somewhere in the depths of the subconscious, while the lie, becoming more and
more dominant as truth is denied, invades the entire consciousness of the
individual, who finally accepts it as a biological necessity for survival?
Whatever the answer to this question, all the students who revealed their drama
to me said that even when they believed the lies, they could still feel a vague
anxiety, a sort of warning from the subconscious that disturbed the smooth
functioning of the new order, like a ghostly intimation that something
was not in its proper place.
[1]
It may be that the ego, man's inner self, though subordinated by the biological
laws of self-preservation and displaced by an alien consciousness, may encyst
itself down deep, to remain dormant until outside conditions change and the
enclosing cyst is dissolved by returning normalcy.
So long as the danger persisted, however, the artificially induced
consciousness was supreme, and any suggestion of doubt that might come from the
subconscious was blocked by fear of physical suffering. Fear, deception and
pain pushed to the maximum, become allies in psychopathic states, and make man
his own enemy, making him frantically repress and strangle his own mind and
soul to keep his tormented body alive.
When the victim had become a "new man" and mentally healthy by
Communist standards, he had to give proof of his regeneration. It was not
sufficient to invent the foulest lies about one's dearest friends; it was
necessary to demonstrate one's rehabilitation by physical action, by striking
every friend who could be brought before one. As the unmasking progressed, the
punishments became increasingly harsh as a constant reminder that there was no
escape. The victim had, of course, disclosed in the first stage the names of
all his friends, both those with whom his friendship dated from his childhood
and student days and those whom he had come to know and like in prison. Every
one of these individuals then within the walls of the prison was brought in for
his unmasking, and he was required to strike each of them in the face and in
turn be struck by them.
By such re-education through infinite torment and the destruction of his own
personality, a man -- or rather the physical husk of him animated by an alien
consciousness -- was eventually graduated to become a teacher in his turn, and
to re-educate others. Then he was sent with several re-educated companions into
the cells of prisoners newly brought to Pitesti to greet with feigned
comradeship his old friends and to form, with consummate hypocrisy,
"friendships" with men whom he had not met or known well before; he
would thus gain the confidence of all and extract from each of his
future victims every bit of information that could be used when the time came
for their unmasking. Only when he and his companions had learned everything
that they could in this way were they allowed to produce hidden cudgels and
fall upon the startled and thunder-struck victims to begin their re-education
and to preside over their unmasking with a ferocity stimulated by the awareness
that if he gave the slightest sign of leniency or pity, he would be charged
with having relapsed from his new "purification" and be condemned to
pass again through the whole curriculum of re-education and unmasking.
Could anyone escape from that ultimate degradation and dehumanization? No,
no one -- no one at all, except those who died during tortures, killed by an
unskillful blow or by the internal hemorrhages that not infrequently followed
kicks in the stomach or abdomen. Let me mention a few of those who escaped in
this manner.
Bogdanovici, who had been the friend and even the collaborator of Turcanu in
the period of "rehabilitation through conviction," in the next phase
died by the boot of Turcanu himself. The diagnosis by the prison infirmary:
death by acute dysentery! Actually his "dysentery" was a rupture of
the abdominal arteries, for Bogdanovici died eliminating all his blood through
his bowels.
Gafencu, a student from Iasi, who had been imprisoned continuously from the
time of Antonescu,
[2]
and who was regarded as a leader of the "mystics," perished in the
same way.
A chemistry student, Cantemir, also from Iasi, absolutely refused to speak
evil of anyone in the very first phase of his unmasking, and was murdered in
his cell by his overly enthusiastic re-educators and thus spared all that he
would have had subsequently to endure.
So far as I was told, about fifteen victims escaped the final stages of
unmasking in this way. The re-educators were formally ordered to avoid killing,
but when they did kill one of their victims, they were merely warned not to be
so careless in the future, and were usually promoted, for the zeal that had
caused death was accepted as a proof of their successful
"purification" and complete alignment with the new morality. For some
reason, the majority of the killers came from the ranks of the
"mushroom" resistance organizations that were formed spontaneously
soon after the Soviet occupation by small groups of students who had previously
held themselves aloof from political concerns and ideological commitments. At
least two of them felt remorse after murdering a fellow prisoner, and one
became violently insane.
An apparent anomaly in the behavior of the inquisitors was their treatment
of persons sick with tuberculosis or a comparable disease. They were exempted
from beatings, if they agreed to "unmask" without them, and in order
to convince them that it was best not to refuse, they were usually brought into
cells where violent unmaskings were in progress and forced to witness the suffering
of the victims. If they then refused to co-operate in their re-education, they
were subjected to the same treatment as the others, but they were all given a
chance to escape the prolonged agony of body, and the majority preferred to
take it. Of them, only the outer unmasking was required, that is, the one that
elicited information useful to the Securitate and the unmaskers.
The demoralizing effect of even this limited unmasking, however, intensified
their illness as much as the lack of medicine, adequate food, and wholesome
air. Since persons suffering from consumptive diseases were not likely to be
useful to the experimenters, not much emphasis was placed on their
re-education. It was easier just to let them die slowly, consumed by disease
and despair.
Every student who passed through the re-education had his own story
and his own burden of guilt. The most singular aspect of the Pitesti experiment
was its uniform success in converting the victim into a persecutor and
tormentor of other victims, and this result poses for us one of the most
difficult and unusual ethico-psychological problems. If we are to understand
it, we must study the techniques of re-education in greater detail.
|
1) |
It should be remembered that the author, naturally, was able to interview
only persons who recovered from the "unmasking" far enough, at
least, to be willing and able to describe their experience. (Tr. ) |
|
2) |
General Ion Antonescu, who became the head of the government formed by the
Legionary Movement after the flight of King Carol in September 1940. In
January 1941, by an act of consummate treachery, he carried out a coup
d'etat against his own government and tried to destroy, by mass arrests
and executions, the Legion that had put him in power. (He was eventually
kidnapped and murdered by the Bolsheviks whose cause he had unwittingly
served so well. ) Gafencu, therefore, had been in prison almost ten years
when death released him. (Tr. ) |