The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Most experts, investigators, and interrogators were therapists acting as policemen and policemen trained as therapists. The result was an inquisitorial regime dedicated to a search for both lost memories and hidden enemies. The number of memories and enemies grew in direct proportion to the investment of effort. One of the pioneers of abuse archaeology, the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, claimed that sexual abusers were organized into a powerful coven of “normal-looking” monsters, who had deliberately infiltrated all strata of society and posed as “doctors, ministers, professionals of every kind.” According to a 1991 poll, about one-half of California social workers “accepted the idea that SRA [satanic ritual abuse] involved a national conspiracy of multigenerational abusers and baby-killers and that many of these people were prominent in their communities and appeared to live completely exemplary lives. A majority of those polled believed that victims of such extreme abuse were likely to have repressed the memories of it.”18

  The form of “repression” theory that enabled the therapeutic terror of the 1980s posited (as had Freud in his pre-Oedipal period) that what was repressed was not forbidden wishes but actual abuse by elders. The memories of such events were banished as soon as the acts of abuse had occurred; therapy consisted in “recovering” those memories for the purpose of healing the victim and punishing the perpetrators. Confessions were obtained and interpreted by counselors not bound by any confirmation or verification requirements. Deputy Sheriff Paul Ingram was both a Pentecostal Christian used to speaking in tongues and a police officer trained in recovered-memory cases. After several hours of questioning, he told his interrogators: “I really believe that the allegations did occur and that I did violate them and probably for a long period of time. I’ve repressed it.” Three days later, he asked Pastor John Bratun, of the Church of Living Water, to exorcise the demon that had taken possession of him. The combined efforts of the police interrogator and the exorcist, both practicing counselors, produced immediate results: “Ingram began seeing people in robes kneeling around the fire. He thought he saw a corpse. There was a person on his left in a red robe who was wearing a helmet of cloth. ‘Maybe the Devil,’ he suggested. People were wailing. Ingram remembered standing on a platform and looking down into the fire. He had been given a large knife and was expected to sacrifice a live black cat. He cut out the beating heart and held it aloft on the tip of the knife.”19

  Another method of extracting confessions was plea bargaining (the suspension of a show trial in exchange for an admission of guilt). The twenty-five-year-old Gina Miller, seen as the least culpable defendant in one of the Kern County cases, was offered immunity, a new identity, financial assistance, and custody of her four children if she confessed to engaging in ritualistic sex abuse and testified against her codefendants. She refused, insisting on her innocence, and was sentenced to 405 years in prison—several decades more than the alleged cult leaders. In a Freudianized (inquisitorial) criminal justice system, denying one’s guilt was further evidence (symptom) of guilt; not an act of self-defense but a “defense mechanism.” On July 7, 1995, nine years after his conviction for sexual abuse at a day-care center in Pennsylvania where he was a substitute janitor, Thomas McMeachin wrote a letter to the journalist Mark Pendergrast: “I’m one of them people that was falsely accused.… I’ve went up for parole 3 times since 1992 and each time I was turned down because I didn’t finish the sex offender program. Well now that I completed the program the psychologist told me that he could not recommend me for parole because I’m in denial of my crime because I won’t admit to it.”20

  When the Paul Ingram case began to collapse under the weight of the Boschian detail the defendant kept providing, the investigators invited an expert on “cults” (Richard Ofshe, of the University of California, Berkeley, Sociology Department), who concluded that the memories had been manufactured and urged Ingram to withdraw his guilty plea. After two months of reflection (he kept a log of his memories, classified by degree of certainty), Ingram wrote “Died to Self” in his Bible and petitioned to change his plea. His request was denied. At the sentencing hearing, he said: “I stand before you, I stand before God. I have never sexually abused my daughters. I am not guilty of these crimes.” He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, with the possibility of parole in twelve years. He served fifteen.21

  Frank Fuster, a thirty-five-year-old immigrant from Cuba, and his seventeen-year-old Honduran wife, Ileana Flores, were arrested in August 1984 for ritually abusing twenty children in a “gated” Miami suburb. The Dade County state attorney and head prosecutor, Janet Reno (who had an election coming up), promised to do “everything humanly possible to see that justice is done.” Ileana spent six months in solitary confinement with the light permanently on. As she said later in an interview, “I was there alone in a very small cell with a bed and a toilet. But the thing is that they would switch me from cell to cell. There was this other cell—I’ll never forget. It was called 3A1. I’ll never forget that, because most of the people that were there, it was like a big room with little cells next to each other. And most of the people—well, all the people that were there were suicide or suicide watch or they were crazy. Everybody was naked.” Ileana’s defense attorney told her that her only hope was to plead guilty and testify against her husband. Two psychologists, who ran a business called Behavior Changers Inc., visited her on at least thirty-five occasions. “It’s kind of a manipulation,” one of them, Dr. Michael Rappaport, explained. “You could make them feel very happy, then segue into the hard things.” Several times, she was visited by Janet Reno. According to Ileana, “She was like, ‘Hi, how are you? I’m Janet Reno, the State Attorney.’ And I would tell her, ‘I am innocent.’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry, but you are not. You’re going to have to help us.’ … I’d been in jail already a year or so; I’m not sure. I wanted her to help me. But I was afraid of her after she told me—she was very clear—if I didn’t help, she was going to make sure I was never going to get out of there.”22

  On August 22, 1985, Ileana agreed to plead guilty. “Judge,” she said in court, “I would like you to know that I’m pleading guilty not because I feel guilty, but because I think—I think it’s the best interest … for my own interest and for the children and for the court and all the people that are working on the case. But I am not pleading guilty because I feel guilty…. I am innocent of all those charges.”23

  Sitting between Rappaport, who hugged her from time to time, and Janet Reno, who held her hand, she told the court that Frank had raped her, put a crucifix up her rectum, put a gun and a snake in her vagina, poured acid on her in the shower, and forced her to have oral sex with the children she was babysitting. When she could not recall a certain incident, Rappaport would request a break; after a few minutes in private, they would return to the courtroom, and she would continue her testimony. Frank was sentenced to six life terms and 165 years in prison. Ileana was sentenced to ten years in prison and ten years’ probation, served three and a half years in a youthful offender program, and was deported to Honduras. In March 1993, Janet Reno was appointed US attorney general (after two previous appointees had withdrawn because they had employed illegal immigrants as nannies). One month later, she ordered an assault on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians (offshoot of Seventh-Day Adventists) were an apocalyptic millenarian sect led by the last days prophet David Koresh (Vernon Howell, who renamed himself after King David and the liberator of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, Cyrus the Great). The assault resulted in a fire, in which seventy-six sect members, including David Koresh, died. Reno’s official reason for ordering the assault was the allegation that the children within the compound were being abused.24

  In the summer of 2001, Ileana contacted the PBS documentary program, Frontline, and requested an interview. The reporter asked her if the events she had described in her testimony actually occurred.

  A. No, they didn’t.

  Q. Frank Fuster—aside from how
you feel about him as a husband or as a man—was he guilty of the things that he was accused of and convicted and is serving prison time for?

  A. No, he’s not guilty, sir.

  Q. Did he do these things? Did you witness any of these acts of which he was accused, those children you all brought into your home?

  A. I never witnessed it.

  Q. Did any of this nightmarish scenario that came to be known as the Country Walk child abuse case—did any of this happen?

  A. No, sir. None of that happened…. I never hurt any children specifically or anybody. Country Walk just didn’t happen.25

  In July 1998, the same reporter interviewed Frank Fuster, who was serving the first of his six life sentences:

  Q. Frank, did the state ever offer you a deal?

  A. Oh yes. They insisted. They offered me 15 years, regular 15 years. And if I had taken those, I would have been home 10 years ago.

  Q. Why didn’t you take it?

  A. Because I am innocent. I went to trial not only for me. I went to trial also for the children. I went to trial for Ileana. I went to trial for everyone involved. Someone had to say the truth. I decided to do it, and I did it.26

  As of this writing, Frank Fuster has been in prison for thirty years.27

  ■ ■ ■

  Scapegoats are sacrificed everywhere, all the time: symbolically (in myths, films, tales, and temples) and in the flesh (at the same time that the devil worshippers were being hunted down in the United States, hundreds of “traitors,” many of them accused of witchcraft, were being burned alive in South Africa, and hundreds of thousands of people were being “ethnically cleansed” in the former Yugoslavia). Some societies succeed in limiting sacrificial offerings to special occasions; others have to improvise acts of atonement in response to unexpected catastrophes. Sects, or “faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world,” are besieged fortresses by definition. Millenarian sects, or sects living on the eve of the apocalypse, are in the grip of a permanent moral panic. The more intense the expectation, the more implacable the enemies; the more implacable the enemies, the greater the need for internal cohesion; the greater the need for internal cohesion, the more urgent the search for scapegoats.28

  The Münster Anabaptists began by expelling Catholics and Lutherans, went on to mandate universal adult baptism (compulsory sect membership for all citizens), and ended up discovering that none of the apparently faithful were “as perfect as their heavenly father is perfect.” The Taiping warriors found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the Manchu barbarians outside the heavenly capital and the hidden enemies within. Robespierre argued that the true “enemies of the people” were not the foreigners and aristocrats assembled at the border, but the citizens who sought “to deprave morals and to corrupt the public conscience.” Every Armageddon requires a witch hunt.29

  Egypt could be struck with many plagues, but when contagion began to spread to the chosen people, Moses stood at the entrance to the camp and said: “‘Whoever is for the LORD, come to me.’ And all the Levites rallied to him. Then he said to them, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: “Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.”’ The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, ‘You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.’”30

  Apostates are not simply allied with the outside enemy; they are worse than the outside enemy because they have seen the truth. As Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, “It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. Of them the proverbs are true: ‘A dog returns to its vomit,’ and, ‘a sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.’”31

  On the eve of the End, all enemies are connected to each other (and to impure thoughts). Those who are free to choose are more dangerous than those who have never heard the sacred command. Hidden enemies are more dangerous than the clearly branded ones. Within a millenarian sect (and in unitary states with serious sectarian aspirations, such as Aragon and Castile under the “Catholic Monarchs”), all enemies are both deliberate and hidden, and no enemies are as dangerous as those closest to the inner sanctum.

  Satan is a fallen angel; Antichrist is pseudo-Christ; and Jesus had Judas. Korah, who challenged Moses’s monopoly on virtue by saying “the whole community is holy, … why then do you set yourselves above the LORD’s assembly?” was himself a Levite, set by God above the assembly. Aaron, who corrupted the public conscience by making the Golden Calf, was Moses’s brother and the assembly’s head priest. And Miriam, who joined Aaron in saying “has the LORD spoken only through Moses? Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” was their older sister who had saved the baby Moses from Pharaoh’s spies. The Hebrew God could afford to be a nepotist (Korah was swallowed by the earth; Miriam was affected with leprosy for seven days; and Aaron was spared at his brother’s request), but his more consistent successors could not. As Calvin told his Geneva audience in a sermon on the Levites’ massacre, “you shall show yourselves rightly zealous of God’s service in that you kill your own brethren without sparing, so as in this case the order of nature be put under foot, to show that God is above all.”32

  All millenarians practice self-monitoring and mutual surveillance with the purpose of identifying and punishing heterodoxy. What makes them both more anxious and more hopeful than other besieged fortresses is that the current set of enemies is going to be the last one. For, as Peter argued in his Second Epistle, against his own evidence,

  If God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)—if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.33

  The fact that it happened before is the best guarantee that it will never—after the coming day of judgment—happen again. The unrighteous are like animals, “born only to be caught and destroyed,” and “like animals they too will perish”—this time for good.34

  ■ ■ ■

  The Bolsheviks lived in a besieged fortress. The Revolution and Civil War involved the use of “concentrated violence” against the easily classifiable enemies from the top of Bukharin’s list (“parasitic strata,” “unproductive administrative aristocracy,” “bourgeois entrepreneurs as organizers and directors,” and “skilled bureaucrats”) and their properly uniformed and color-coded defenders. The purges of the 1920s confronted the revolutionaries’ great disappointment (as Peter did in his Second Epistle, whose main subject was the apparent nonfulfillment of the prophecy). The third and final battle was the Stalin revolution against the remaining targets from Bukharin’s list, including “technical intelligentsia,” “well-off peasantry,” “middle and, in part, petty urban bourgeoisie,” and “clergy, even the unskilled kind.” The Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934 had then proclaimed victory, provisionally pardoned the doubters, and inaugurated the reign of the saints.35

  There were no open enemies left. One of the most important and least discussed consequences of the proclamation of victory in 1934 was the assumption that most Soviets were now “non-Party Communists.” There was no act of collective baptism accompanied by the expulsion of nominal unbelievers, as in the case of the Münster An
abaptists or fully “reconquered” Spain, but the outcome was the same: all subjects were by definition believers, and all remaining corruption was a matter of heresy and apostasy, not enemy resistance. The Party’s main instrument of maintaining internal cohesion was no longer concentrated violence but the “transverse section of the soul” (as the administrative director of the State New Theater put it, apropos of The Other Side of the Heart). Bukharin called it “coercive discipline”: “The less voluntary inner discipline there is, … the greater the coercion. Even the proletarian avant-garde, consolidated in the party of the insurrection, must establish such coercive self-discipline in its own ranks; it is not strongly felt by many elements of this avant-garde because it coincides with internal motives, but it exists nonetheless.” Since 1920, when he wrote this, Bukharin had experienced several occasions on which to feel it; now, in the wake of the victory celebration that he had joined as part of the “supply train,” every Soviet citizen was, theoretically, in his position.36

  How effective were coercive discipline and self-discipline? On the one hand, family apartments were filling up with nephews and tablecloths; Don Quixotes were being replaced by Sancho Panzas; and Izrail Veitser was marrying Natalia Sats and buying himself a suit. On the other—and much more consequentially, according to Arosev’s diary—a combination of schooling, newspaper reading, and “work on the self” was producing such “non-Party Bolsheviks” as Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov. Socialism was a matter of time, and time was apparently elusive but ultimately predictable. As Peter wrote in that same epistle, “do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”37