Please let as many people know about this as you can.

Cleveland antiwar activist Carol Fischer is being held incommunicado in the psychiatric of the Cuyahoga County jail in on the orders of Judge Timothy McGinty. Fischer, who at 53 years old stands 5’4″ and weighs 130 pounds, was convicted of a felonious assault she allegedly committed against two Cleveland Heights police officers last year. The cops claim that Fischer bit and tried to hit them when they arrested her for posting Bush Step Down posters in violation of the city sign ordinance; Fischer and her supporters claim that she was cooperating and the police attacked her without cause:

According to her statements, Fisher was hanging posters announcing the World Can't Wait Cleveland action during the State of the Union, when a passing officer told her it was a $100 fine if she didn't take it down.

Fisher turned and walked toward the poster, in compliance with the officer's warning. But instead of allowing her to take it down or just issuing a citation, Downey and Frinzl were on top of her grinding his knee into [Fisher's] back and [her] face into the sidewalk.

Fisher said she told the officers she could not breathe. That didn't matter. Two more officers showed up, and they dragged her to a bench, shackled her legs, and handcuffed her tight enough to cause serious bruising.

Fisher objected to her arrest, telling the officers that as citizens we have the responsibility to stop the crimes of the Bush regime.

According to her statements, this inflamed the officers. One told her, I am sick of this anti-Bush shit, and they threatened to kill her. You are definitely going to the psych ward, said another. And that's where she ended up, incommunicado, even to her Power of Attorney for health care. University Hospitals personnel were forbidden by the police to allow visitors or for Fisher to make a phone call.

— Eric Resnick, Cleveland Independent Media Center (2006-02-16): Not Guilty, Carol Fisher arraigned this morning

Fischer was found guilty on all charges after a controversial trial in which the judge repeatedly blocked defense testimony. Now, I don’t have any particular knowledge of Carol Fischer, or the cops, or the case, so I have no particular way of knowing whether she is innocent or guilty. What I do know is that this is obscene:

According to World Can’t Wait, Judge Timothy McGinty has forcibly incarcerated Carol Fisher in the psych unit of the Cuyahoga County Jail in downtown Cleveland, for an undetermined period of time. McGinty is forcing Fisher to undergo a state psychological exam as part of her pre-sentencing investigation. During yesterday’s hearing, McGinty stated that Fisher’s opposition to the Bush regime indicates to him that she is delusional.

At the hearing held yesterday, McGinty wore a t-shirt which read: Wanted for Illegally Crossing Borders: The Bush Regime If you are going to insist that crossing borders illegally is a crime which cannot be tolerated, how about George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice (and yes, Colin Powell) and the rest of that gang, with their highly illegal, and violent, crossing of the border — into Iraq, among other places?! McGinty stated that Fisher’s t-shirt evidenced her delusion. When Fisher began to explain her opposition to psychological testing, McGinty stated: I do not negotiate with felons. World Can’t Wait reports that in a telephone conversation with Fisher yesterday, she stated she had inexplicably been put on suicide watch and her eyeglasses had been taken from her. If she continues to refuse the psych exam, she will be forcibly sent to North Coast Mental Institute for a 20-day evaluation.

— Heart, Women’s Space / The Margins (2006-05-11): Free Carol Fisher! Judge Orders Peace Activist to Jail Psych Unit

Hey, McGinty, Comrade Brezhnev sends his fraternal greetings. Lest we forget:

Thanks to [Vladimir] Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad. It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky–so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead. The era of the psikhushka–the special mental hospital–had begun.

… In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents–a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?

With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of sluggish schizophrenia or creeping schizophrenia. This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure, wrote two Soviet professors, both of the Serbsky Institute:

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas in the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled rights, and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to explit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.

And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. … In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they try to found new parties, organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.

… If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. … In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation. Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given treatment. As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned in the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers [antipsychotic neuroleptics, such as Thorazine and Haldol –R.G.] which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.

… Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. After all, he wrote, it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.

— Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History (2003), pp. 547–550.

Here’s what World Can’t Wait suggests you can do to support Carol Fischer:

• Donate to Carol’s legal defense. It costs a lot of money to get transcripts, file appeals, etc. Make checks payable to Carol Fisher Defense Fund and mail to NION/WCW PO Box 609034 Cleveland, OH 44109.

• Call Judge Timothy McGinty and express your outrage: 216-443-8758

• Join us at a Speak Out! for Carol Fisher — Saturday, May 13 at 7pm at the corner of Coventry and Euclid Heights Blvd in Cleveland Heights.

• Get your legal organization to be part of Carol’s defense: make statements, file friend of the court briefs, etc.

• Have your church group, school group, organization or club join this battle by sending statements of support, donating funds, etc.

• Request radio stations play any of the following songs, dedicate it to Carol Fisher and explain what is going on with her case:

  • Tom Petty's Won't Back Down
  • Pearl Jam's World Wide Suicide
  • Pink's Dear Mr President
  • Neil Young's Let's Impeach the President

• Write letters to the editor of:

  • The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Go to website: http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/lettertoeditor
  • The Cleveland Free Times. Email: editor@freetimes.com
  • The Sun Press. Email: sun@sunnews.com

• Send this article to your list serves and post to blogs.

Of course, WCW also wants you to join up with World Can’t Wait. I wouldn’t advise it, unless you like hanging out with well-intentioned peaceniks being steered by creepy Maoist cultists. But McGinty’s efforts to build his own psychoprison system must not stand. Free Carol Fischer! Free all psychiatric prisoners!

In a remark on my last post on Iraq, Sam Haque points out:

The situation is that occupation forces have taken for themselves the role of guardians by and large without the consent of those who they are ostensibly protecting.

— Sam Haque, comment (2006-05-10) on GT 2006-05-08: Why We Fight

This is true, and not just of the situation in Iraq. It is as accurate and concise a description as you could make of what governments do for a living, always and everywhere. It’s war that brings this into the sharpest relief, because the normal restraints on brutality are released, the beneficiary-victims are strangers in a faraway land, and the public intellectuals and the official press line up to shout down any serious challenge to the progress of war aims. But war and occupation are only the starkest and most explicit expression of what State power essentially means, not just with bombers and soldiers and tanks, but also with every spook, cop, G-man, prosecutor, jailer, and hangman whose paychecks we are forced to cover. Consider, for example, the local cops in New Britain, Connecticut, who protected the hell out of an 11 year old boy and his mother in the name of serving a drug search warrant without interruption, or last week’s riot and reign of terror by Mexican police asserting their authority to protect and serve the people of San Salvador Atenco, whether they like it or not.

The State is, as Catharine MacKinnon says, male in the political sense. But not only because the law views women’s civil status through the lens of male supremacy (although it certainly does). It is also because the male-dominated State relates to all of its subjects like a battering husband relates to the household of which he has proclaimed himself the head: by laying a claim to protect those who did not ask for it, and using whatever violence and intimidation may be necessary to terrorize them into submitting to his protection. The State, as the abusive head of the whole nation, assaults the innocent, and turns a blind eye to assaults of the innocent, when it suits political interest — renamed national interest by the self-proclaimed representatives of the nation. It does so not because of the venality or incompetance of a particular ruler, but rather because that is what State power means, and that is what the job of a ruler is: to maintain a monopoly of coercion over its territorial area, as a good German might tell you, and to beat, chain, burn, or kill anyone within or without who might endanger that, whether by defying State rule, or by simply ignoring it and asking to be left alone.

Or, as Ezra Haywood once put it, A cruel kindness, thought to be friendly regard, assumes to protect those who, by divine right of rational being, are entitled, at least, to be let alone. We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors. And so it is for us civilians, facing the doorkeep before the Law.

Further reading:

• Randolph Bourne (1918): War is the health of the State
• Lysander Spooner (1867–1870): No Treason

So that moderate cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani can exercise his God-given right to organize anti-gay death squads:

[Fourteen-year-old boy] Ahmed Khalil was shot at point-blank range after being accosted by men in police uniforms, according to his neighbours in the al-Dura area of Baghdad.

Campaign groups have warned of a surge in homophobic killings by state security services and religious militias following an anti-gay and anti-lesbian fatwa issued by Iraq’s most prominent Shia leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

… Neighbours in al-Dura district say Ahmed’s father was arrested and interrogated two days before his son’s murder by police who demanded to know about Ahmed’s sexual activities. It is believed Ahmed slept with men for money to support his poverty-stricken family, who have fled the area fearing further reprisals.

The killing of Ahmed is one of a series of alleged homophobic murders. There is mounting evidence that fundamentalists have infiltrated government security forces to commit homophobic murders while wearing police uniforms.

Human rights groups are particularly concerned that the Sadr and Badr militias, both Shia, have stepped up their attacks on the gay community after a string of religious rulings, since the US-led invasion, calling for the eradication of homosexuals.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani recently issued a fatwa on his website calling for the execution of gays in the worst, most severe way.

The powerful Badr militia acts as the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which counts Ayatollah Sistani as its spiritual leader. Another fatwa from the late and much revered Ayatollah Abul Qassim Khoei allows followers to kill gays with a sword, or burn him alive, or tie his hands and feet and hurl him down from a high place.

Mr Hili said: According to our contacts in Baghdad, the Iraqi police have been heavily infiltrated by the Shia paramilitary Badr Corps.

Mr Hili, whose Abu Nawas group has close links with clandestine gay activists inside Iraq, said US coalition forces are unwilling to try and tackle the rising tide of homophobic attacks. They just don’t want to upset the Iraqi government by bringing up the taboo of homosexuality even though homophobic murders have intensified, he said.

A number of public homophobic murders by the Badr militia have terrified Iraq’s gay community.Last September, Hayder Faiek, a transsexual, was burnt to death by Badr militias in the main street of Baghdad’s al-Karada district. In January, suspected militants shot another gay man in the back of the head.

The US State Department has yet to document the surge in its annual human rights reports. Iraq’s neighbours, however, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are often criticised for their persecution of gays.

Darla Jordan, from the US State Department said: The US government continues to work closely with our Iraqi partners to ensure the protection of human rights and the safety of all Iraqi citizens.

— Jerome Taylor, Independent (2006-05-05): Iraqi police killed 14-year-old boy for being homosexual

Please bear in mind, if you are in the United States, that your money has been taken from you by force, in order to make you pay for the arms and the training for this police force. Please also bear in mind, if you are in the United States, that the polite functionaries and well-dressed men and women who have collaborated with al-Sistani, who are now turning a blind eye to this and covering it over with some diplomatic words in the name of nation-building, are also pretending to do so in your name and with your authorization.

You need to understand that anger and facile sarcasm are the way that I make it through the newspapers these days without collapsing into tears.

Further reading:

• GT 2003-05-29: Rumsfeld: What an Awful Outcome
• GT 2002-08-24: With allies like these, who needs terrorists?
• pink-triangle.org

It might not seem like a poetry reading from Rudyard Kipling is the most promising way to commemorate ongoing events in South Asia. But, by jingo, he did turn a good one out in protest of the Boer War; and the Ministry of Culture for this secessionist republic of one would like to offer it in honor of recent events, and in recognition of the danger posed by Geyanendra’s moves toward restoring his political patronage to would-be opposition leaders, in an effort to buy off the opposition. This may also have some application to other deciders I could mention, beyond the Himalayas.

The Old Issue

October 9, 1899

HERE is nothing new nor aught unproven, say the Trumpets,
Many feet have worn it and the road is old indeed.
It is the King–the King we schooled aforetime!
(Trumpets in the marshes–in the eyot at Runnymede!)

Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger, peal the Trumpets,
Pardon for his penitence or pity for his fall.
It is the King!–inexorable Trumpets–
(Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall!)

. . . . .

He hath veiled the Crown and hid the Sceptre, warn the Trumpets,
He hath changed the fashion of the lies that cloak his will.
Hard die the Kings–ah hard–dooms hard! declare the Trumpets,
Trumpets at the gang-plank where the brawling troop-decks fill!

Ancient and Unteachable, abide–abide the Trumpets!
Once again the Trumpets, for the shuddering ground-swell brings
Clamour over ocean of the harsh, pursuing Trumpets–
Trumpets of the Vanguard that have sworn no truce with Kings!

All we have of freedom, all we use or know–
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw–
Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law.

Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King.

Till our fathers 'stablished, after bloody years,
How our King is one with us, first among his peers.

So they bought us freedom–not at little cost
Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost,

Over all things certain, this is sure indeed,
Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed.

Give no ear to bondsmen bidding us endure.
Whining He is weak and far; crying Time shall cure.

(Time himself is witness, till the battle joins,
Deeper strikes the rottenness in the people's loins.)

Give no heed to bondsmen masking war with peace.
Suffer not the old King here or overseas.

They that beg us barter–wait his yielding mood–
Pledge the years we hold in trust–pawn our brother's blood–

Howso' great their clamour, whatsoe'er their claim,
Suffer not the old King under any name!

Here is naught unproven–here is naught to learn.
It is written what shall fall if the King return.

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.

He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware;
He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear.

He shall break his judges if they cross his word;
He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord.

He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring
Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King–

Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies;
Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies.

Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
These shall deal our Justice: sell–deny–delay.

We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse
For the Land we look to–for the Tongue we use.

We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,
While his hired captains jeer us in the street.

Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun,
Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run.

Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled,
Laying on a new land evil of the old–

Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain–
All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again.

Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue–
Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.

Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
Step for step and word for word–so the old Kings did!

Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read.
Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed–

All the right they promise–all the wrong they bring.
Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!

— Rudyard Kipling (1899-10-09): The Old Issue

Here’s conservative scholar Harvey C. Mansfield, interviewed a few days ago in the New York Times Magazine by Deborah Solomon, about his new book Manliness. Let’s how leading conservative scholars from Harvard stand up for academic integrity and daring, substantial research, in the teeth of the anti-intellectual and anti-scientific hordes of lazy Black philosophers and hysterical female biologists…

Q: As a staunch neoconservative and the author of a new feminism-bashing book called Manliness, how are you treated by your fellow government professors at Harvard?

Look, if I only consorted with conservatives, I would be by myself all the time.

So your generally left-leaning colleagues are willing to talk to you?

People listen to me, but they don’t pay attention to what I say. I should punch them out, but I don’t.

…

In your latest book, you bemoan the disappearance of manliness in our “gender neutral” society. How, exactly, would you define manliness?

My quick definition is confidence in a situation of risk. A manly man has to know what he is doing.

Hasn’t technology lessened the need for risk taking, at least of the physical sort?

It has. But it hasn’t removed it. Technology gives you the instruments, and social sciences give you the rules. But manliness is more a quality of the soul.

Here’s how the contenders stack up:

How does someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger stack up?

I would include him as a manly man.

… What about President Bush? He’s a risk taker, but wouldn’t his penchant for long vacations be a strike against him?

I wouldn’t say industriousness is a sign of manliness. That’s sort of wonkish. Experts do that.

What about Dick Cheney?

He hunts. And he curses openly. Lynne Cheney is kind of manly, too. I once worked with her on the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In your book, you say Margaret Thatcher is an ideal woman, but isn’t she the manliest of all?

I was told by someone who visited her that she is very feminine with her husband.

Why is that so important to you in light of her other achievements?

We need roles. Roles give us mutual expectations of what is either correct or good behavior. Women are neater than men, they make nests, and all these other stereotypes are mostly true. Wives and mothers correct you; they hold you to a standard; they want to make you better.

I am beginning to wonder if you have ever spoken to a woman. …

Here’s political scientist Mansfield’s vigorous defense of economist Larry Summers’ genetic theories against the politically correct sniping of female biologists:

Were you sorry to see Harvard’s outgoing president, Lawrence Summers, attacked for saying that men and women may have different mental capacities?

He was taking seriously the notion that women, innately, have less capacity than men at the highest level of science. I think it’s probably true. It’s common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are.

But couldn’t that simply reflect the institutional bias against women over the centuries?

It could, but I don’t think it does. We have been going a couple of generations now. There are certain things that haven’t changed. For example, in New York City, the doormen are still 98 percent men.

Yes, but fewer jobs depend on that sort of physical brawn [?! sic] as society becomes more technologically adept. Physical advantages are practically meaningless now that men are no longer hunter-gatherers.

I disagree with that.

When was the last time you did something that required physical strength?

It’s true that nothing in my career requires physical strength, but in my relations with women, yes.

Such as?

Lifting things, opening things. My wife is quite small.

What do you lift?

Furniture. Not every night, but routinely.

Further reading:

• Ann Bartow, Feminist Law Professors (2006-03-12): Lynne Cheney is kind of manly, too.: Anyone else read "Of Manliness and Men" in the 3/12/06 NYT and think, this is like some kind of Monty Python skit?

• Irfan Khawaja, Theory and Practice (2006-03-13): Hans and Franz Go to Harvard: I have but one question: Is this or is this not the most embarrassing interview ever to see the light of day?