A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  As David Dorado Romo describes it in his Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893–1923 (available from Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B had become available in the US in the early 1920s when fears of alien infection had been inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them from the “progressive” end of the political spectrum.

  It should be noted that while the Americans sprayed their victims with toxic chemicals, they restricted use of Zyklon B to freight and clothes. As the Nazis understood, spraying it directly on a human caused almost immediate death. We can only guess what effect it had on the thousands of Mexican men, women, and children who, after a “bath” in DDT or gasoline, were sent away in clothes drenched with Zyklon B.

  Romo’s book comes at a time when Mexican immigration is at the top of the list of US political issues. There are twelve million illegals in the United States by official count, and certainly twice that unofficially. Among the solutions is the right-wing’s vociferous call to build a “Berlin wall” 2,000 miles long across the entire Rio Grande border. Unsurprisingly, Mexican Americans hate this idea. Their memories—the emerging truth of Mexican-American history—and their votes seem certain to undermine it.

  Zyklon B came to El Paso in the 1920s. In 1917 the US Congress passed the Immigration Law and the United States Public Health Service simultaneously published its Manual for the Physical Inspection of Aliens. The Manual had its list of excludable aliens, a ripe representation of the obsessions of the eugenicists: “imbeciles, idiots, feeble-minded persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority (homosexuals), vagrants, physical defectives, chronic alcoholics, polygamists, anarchists, persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases, prostitutes, contract laborers, all aliens over 16 who cannot read.”

  In that same year US Public Health Service Agents “bathed and deloused” 127,123 Mexicans at the Santa Fe International Bridge between Juarez and El Paso. The mayor of El Paso at the time, Tom Lea Sr., represented, in Romo’s words, “the new type of Anglo politician in the ‘Progressive Era.’ Progressive didn’t necessarily mean liberal back then. In Lea’s case, ‘progress’ meant he would clean up the city.”

  As part of his clean-up operations Lea made his city the first in the US to ban hemp, aka marijuana, as an alien Mexican substance. He had a visceral fear of contamination and, so his son later disclosed, wore silk underwear because his pal, Dr. Kluttz, had told him typhus lice didn’t stick to silk. His loins thus protected, Lea battered the US government with demands for a full quarantine camp on the border where all immigrants could be held for up to fourteen days. Local health officer B. J. Lloyd thought this outlandish, telling the US Surgeon General that typhus fever “is not now, and probably never will be, a serious menace to our civilian population.”

  Lloyd was right about this. Lea forced health inspectors to descend on Chihuahuita, the Mexican quarter of El Paso, forcing inhabitants suspected of harboring lice to take kerosene and vinegar baths, have their heads shaved and clothes incinerated. Inspection of 5,000 rooms did not stigmatize Chihuahuita as a plague zone. The inspectors found two cases of typhus, one of rheumatism, one of TB and one of chicken pox. Ironically, Kluttz, presumably wearing silk underwear, contracted typhus while supervising these operations and died.

  But Lloyd did recommend delousing plants, saying he was willing to “bathe and disinfect all the dirty, lousy people coming into this country from Mexico.” The plant was ready for business right when the Immigration Act became law. Soon Mexicans were having their bodies checked, daubed with kerosene where deemed necessary, and their clothes fumigated with gasoline, kerosene, sodium cyanide, cyanogens, sulfuric acid and Zyklon B. The El Paso Herald wrote respectfully in 1920, “hydrocyanic acid gas, the most poisonous known, more deadly even than that used on the battlefields of Europe, is employed in the fumigation process.”

  The delousing operations provoked fury and resistance among Mexicans still boiling with indignation after a lethal gasoline blaze in the El Paso city jail. As part of Mayor Lea’s citywide disinfection campaign, prisoners in the jail were ordered to strip naked. Their clothes were dumped in one bath filled with a mixture of gasoline, creosote, and formaldehyde. Then they were forced to step into a second bath filled with “a bucket of gasoline, a bucket of coal oil and a bucket of vinegar.” At around 3.30 p.m., March 5, 1916, someone struck a match. The jail went up like a torch. The El Paso Herald reported that about fifty “naked prisoners from whose bodies the fumes of gasoline were arising,” many of them locked in their cells, caught fire. Twenty-seven prisoners died. In late January, 1917, 200 Mexican women rebelled at the border and prompted a major riot, putting to flight both police and troops both sides of the border.

  The use of Zyklon B swiftly became habitual. How many Mexicans suffered agonies or died, when they put on those garments? As Romo recently told the El Paso–based journalist Paul Spike, “This is a huge black hole in history. Unfortunately, I only have oral histories and other anecdotal evidence about the harmful effects of the noxious chemicals used to disinfect and delouse the Mexican border crossers—including deaths, birth defects, cancer, etc. It may well go into the tens of thousands. It’s incredible that absolutely no one, after all these years, has ever attempted to document this.”

  The use of Zyklon B on the US–Mexican border was a matter of keen interest to the firm of DEGESCH. In 1938 Dr. Gerhard Peters called for its use in German Desinfektionskammern. Romo has tracked down an article Peters wrote in a German pest science journal, Anzeiger fur Sahahlinskund, which featured two photographs of El Paso delousing chambers. Peters went on to become the managing director of DEGESCH, which handled the supply of Zyklon B for the Nazi death camps. He was tried and convicted at Nuremberg. Hilberg reports that he got five years, then won a retrial that netted him six years. He was retried in 1955 and found not guilty.

  In the US the eugenicists rolled on to their great triumph, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which doomed millions in Europe to their final rendezvous with Zyklon B twenty years later. By the 1930s the eugenicists were mostly discredited, though many—particularly in the environmental movement—remained true to those racist protocols much longer. The Restriction Act, that monument to bad science married to unscrupulous politicians and zealous public policy, stayed on the books unchanged for forty years.

  June 21

  Summer’s hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Undoubtedly beach chat among both analysts and analysands will focus on the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco’s Jennifer Melfi—Tony Soprano’s analyst—has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in The Three Faces of Eve.

  Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the “breach of professional ethics” at a shrinks’ dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr. Melfi’s patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren’t seducing their female patients (seventy percent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Berggasse 19, Freud’s chambers in Vienna.

  It’s true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr. Tony David as the collision of “the superego of Melfi’s civilised values and the intellect … with the murky id that is Soprano’s stock in trade.” “The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association,” wrote one APA member furiously, “do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unl
ess there is danger to the therapist).”

  It so happens that these same “strict ethical principles” of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke that probably won’t be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the US military in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA.

  The APA leadership has piously maintained that “psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective.” The Pentagon Inspector General’s Report makes clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano’s brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag.

  August 4

  Was there ever a luckier clan than the Bancrofts, whose elders okayed the $5 billion sale of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. on Tuesday? There’s been some solemn talk about the Bancrofts’ “stewardship of this national institution” since they acquired the Dow Jones company a century ago. In fact the Journal was an undistinguished little sheet till a journalistic genius called Barney Kilgore—to whose daughter Kathryn I had the pleasure of being married for a few years in the 1980s—decided in the years after World War II that a businessman in San Francisco should be able to read the same paper as one in Chicago or New York. Kilgore devised the technology to do this, along with the paper’s reportorial stance, serious but often humorous, in the style of the Midwest where Kilgore—a Hoosier—was from.

  Kilgore made the Bancrofts, though not himself, really rich and they continued in that state for almost half a century though their stewardship was either indifferent or inept, beyond the pleasant chore of raking in the money. Now they can trouser Murdoch’s gold and trot off into the sunset, mumbling that they have extracted all the usual pledges from Rupert Murdoch that he will respect the Journal’s editorial independence.

  The Journal’s editorial stance of fanatic neoconnery was established by the late Robert Bartley from the mid-1970s onward, and his pages bulged with every mad fantasy of the cold war lobby. Bartley led the charge against effete liberalism, and since by the late ’70s American liberalism had thoroughly lost its nerve, he carried the day, becoming by far the most influential editorial page editor in American journalism. More than its sometimes excellent reporting, Bartley gave the Journal its high profile in Washington as well as on Wall Street.

  August 7

  Right now they’re hosing down Barack Obama after he said in the YouTube debate in South Carolina that he would be prepared to meet with Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chávez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Fidel Castro to hash over problems face to face. The pundits promptly whacked him for demonstrating “inexperience.” Experienced leaders order the CIA to murder such men.

  Then Obama drew even fiercer fire by saying he would not use nuclear weapons to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” Obama told AP on August 2, adding after a pause, “involving civilians.” Then he quickly added, “Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

  I’m beginning to respect this man. He displays sagacity well beyond the norm for candidates seeking the Oval Office. He comprehends, if only in mid-sentence, that when you drop a nuclear bomb, it will kill civilians. He also realizes that strafing Waziristan with thermonuclear devices in the hopes of nailing Osama Bin Laden is a foolish way to proceed.

  So Obama is being flayed for his “inexperience,” first and foremost by Hillary Clinton, who permits no table setting which does not include a couple of nuclear weapons next to the salt and pepper.

  September 1

  Larry Craig of Idaho was a three-term Senator. On June 11, Craig, co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, used a stop-over at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to prowl through a lavatory in the Lindbergh terminal. He spotted under a stall door lower extremities belonging to a man we now know to have been undercover cop Dave Karsnia, who—patient as any spider—had been sitting on the john for thirteen minutes for prey that he could entrap.

  Americans following the case have been learning with fascination how easily some innocent action in a public convenience—known in the argot of gay patrons as “tearooms”—can be misconstrued. Don’t put your bag in front of the door. That’s what Craig did and Karsnia, a youthful-looking blonde decoy, says in his report, “My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall.” Keep your feet still. “At 12:16 hours,” Karsnia relates, “Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.”

  Craig then swiped his hand under the stall divider several times. That did it. Karsnia put down his police ID for Craig to check out. Craig quickly pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and “peeping,” which is defined in Minnesotan statutory lingo as “interference with privacy by surreptitiously gazing, staring or peeping in the window, or other aperture of a sleeping room in a hotel, a tanning booth”—this is Minnesota, after all—“or other place where a reasonable person would have an expectation of privacy and has exposed or is likely to expose their intimate parts, as defined in Sec. 609. 341, subd 5, or the clothing covering the immediate area of the intimate parts and doing so with the intent to intrude upon or interfere with the privacy of the occupant. A Gross Misdemeanor.”

  At some level Craig obviously wanted to get caught, just as compulsive gamblers at some level want to lose.

  September 11

  Leftists used to think that, at least as a general axiom if not by a precise deadline, capitalism was doomed. But today most of these same leftists deem capitalism invincible and fearfully lob copious documentation at each other detailing the efficient devilry of the executives of the system. The internet serves to amplify this pervasive funk into a catastrophist mindset. It imbues most of the English-speaking left after seven years of Bush and Cheney, and frames Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, subtitled The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

  At the outset Klein permits herself a robust trumpet blast as intrepid pioneer: “This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy.” The arc of triumph to which Klein alludes is the half century from the Eisenhower administration’s onslaughts on political and economic nationalism in Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s, to the US attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation.

  These are not decades where official apologetics have been entirely without challenge until Ms. Klein embarked on her researches. There are shelves’ worth of books on the ghastly consequences of the covert interventions and massacres organized or connived at by the United States in the name of freedom and the capitalist way. Klein’s own bibliography attests that there has plenty of detailed work on the neoliberal onslaught that gathered strength from the mid-1970s on, marching under the intellectual colors of one of her arch villains, the late Milton Friedman, the Chicago School economist.

  Where Klein would presumably claim originality is in identifying and describing the taxonomy of what she terms “shock capitalism”; the shock of a sudden attack, whether the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 or the bombing of Baghdad in 2003; the shock of torturers using sensory deprivation techniques and crude electrodes to instill fear and acquiescence; Friedman’s economic “shock treatment.” Methodically combined and
elaborated, these onslaughts now amount, on Klein’s account, to a new and frightful chapter in the history of capitalist predation.

  Klein begins with a chapter on the CIA-sponsored psychic “de-patterning” experiments of that apex monster, Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute, and states explicitly that torture, aside from being a tool, is “a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic.” To use shock literary tactics to focus attention on the deliberate and sadistic engineering of collective social trauma is certainly no crime. But, as often happens after a shock, one eventually retrieves a sense of proportion, one that is not entirely flattering to Klein’s larger ambitions for her book.

  Capitalism, after all, has always been a shock doctrine of selfish predation, as one can discover from Hobbes and Locke, Marx and Weber, none of whom is mentioned by Klein. Read the vivid accounts of the Hammonds about the English enclosures of the eighteenth century, when villagers would find nailed to the door of the parish church an announcement that their common lands had been privatized. Protesters may not have been “de-patterned,” Cameron-style, but were briskly hanged or relocated to Botany Bay.

  Friedman’s Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier a million Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about “the bloody birth of counter-revolution” in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of Presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past.

  De-patterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the Civil War the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use the crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.