The Evil Empire

The phrase may seem to be excessively hyperbolic, but an examination of a few details of the Soviet Union's history will bear out its accuracy. This was, indeed, for the length and breadth of its existence, an evil empire.

From the very birth of the Soviet Union, there were mass pogroms designed to eliminate 'lesser races' by any means necessary, often including violence. Various of the indiginous races inhabiting Soviet territories were brutalized in these eliminationst frenzies; 'white Russians' dragged non-whites from their homes, beat them with whips, raped and tortured them, stole and destroyed their property, and committed horrific acts of mass murder on them. Entire peoples and cultures were driven to the brink of extinction by the crazed, vicious, genocidal xenophobia of the Soviet Union's dominant white class, often with the explicit aid of the Soviet government and the Soviet military.

One such infamous Soviet program was conducted by the State's Commissiariat for Health. Known as the Ukraine Syphilis Experiment, it can best be described by the following extract:

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the Soviet Commissiarat for Health (CSH) conducted an experiment on 399 native 'black' Ukrainian men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate hunters and trappers from one of the poorest regions of the Ukraine, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected non-white Russians as opposed to whites—the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis whereas 'blacks' were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage. How this knowledge would have changed clinical treatment of syphilis is uncertain. Although the CSH touted the study as one of great scientific merit, from the outset its actual benefits were hazy. It took almost forty years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that “nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the Soviet Union.”

By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. How had these men been induced to endure a fatal disease in the name of science? To persuade the community to support the experiment, one of the original doctors admitted it “was necessary to carry on this study under the guise of a demonstration and provide treatment.” At first, the men were prescribed the syphilis remedies of the day—bismuth, neoarsphenamine, and mercury—but in such small amounts that only 3 percent showed any improvement. These token doses of medicine were good public relations and did not interfere with the true aims of the study. Eventually, all syphilis treatment was replaced with “pink medicine”—aspirin. To ensure that the men would show up for a painful and potentially dangerous spinal tap, the CSH doctors misled them with a letter full of promotional hype: “Last Chance for Special Free Treatment.” The fact that autopsies would eventually be required was also concealed... Even the Soviet Commissioner of Health participated in enticing the men to remain in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after 25 years in the study.

Despicable though this program was, it was charitable and altruistic when compared to the moral grotesqueries initiated and perpetuated by the Soviet intelligence community for purposes of 'State security' in various other deeply covert, unspeakably evil programs such as:

* Operation бумажный зажим, or schoon bereik, or, in English, "Clean Sweep" -- a program begun in 1943 and continued beyond the end of World War II, in which the Soviet Union partnered with, of all entities, the Vatican in Rome, to offer a safe haven to top Nazi scientists in every field, especially rocketry, chemistry, and bio-genetics. Literally thousands of Nazi war criminals escaped post-War justice by hiding in Soviet laboratories under assumed identities set up for them by the Soviet government. With new identities, these aiders and abetters of mass murder, frequently serial murderers themselves, lived often luxurious lives, and their work and research, much of which had been conducted in Nazi concentration camps before and during World War II, was the basis for the Soviet space program and several more secret Soviet mind control and biological engineering programs.

* Operation кукушка, or koekoek, or "Cuckoo" -- a covert program begun in 1948 with the explicit purpose of influencing the free Western media and through that media, the peoples of the West, to have a more tolerant, even sympathetic attitude towards the Soviet Union. According to respected insiders, "by the early 1950s, the KGB effectively 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles." The influence of "Operation Cuckoo" on the Western media cannot be overestimated; it is very probable that much if not all of the well documented and inarguable 'liberal bias' of American journalism can be traced back to the influence of KGB-trained Soviet operatives inserted as 'sleeper agents' into U.S. news organizations in the early 1950s.

It is very possible that even today, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of the KGB, "Operation Cuckoo" continues to function as an independent, extranational program whose purpose remains the paralysis through the Western media of any attempt to effectively further the legitimate goals and policies of American national security.

Immoral, illegal, and unethical as these two programs are, they pale into insignificance compared to the true institutionalized depravity of the Soviet Union's top secret "Operation бабочка, or, vlinder -- literally, "Butterfly".

Operation Butterfly originated with Nazi mind control research programs begun and greatly advanced within German concentration camps, specifically death camps like Auschwicz and Treblinka, where inmates were not only worked to death and/or mass murdered in ovens, by gas, and by machine gun fire, but where thousands died in the name of dubious and horrific Nazi experiments. With the results of these experiments augmented by a newly synthesized experimental drug that would soon come to be known throughout the world as LSD, Operation Butterfly quickly established a hellish series of procedures whereby an adult, or especially a young child, could be subjected to scientifically designed traumas which would result in the mind of the subject fissuring into dozens, hundreds, or thousands of 'alters' -- alternate personas -- as a defense mechanism for coping with the terrors and abuses inflicted by this program.

These specific torments, combined with forced administration of brain altering and behavior controlling chemicals and rigorous applications of hypnosis, allowed these fractured shards of a once healthy persona to be sculpted into whatever the master programmer might desire -- an undetectable courier, a spy with total recall of anything heard or seen, a seemingly fervent and zealous infiltration agent, a pre-programmed assassin with actual 'superhuman' mental and physical abilities, or a sex slave, among many other potential applications. All of these tasks and/or roles could be, and generally were, present within each finished 'product' of the Butterfly Program.

From a security standpoint the most appealing thing about 'Butterfly' operatives was that due to their forced and hypnotically controlled schitzophrenia, they could be commanded to carry out covert tasks for their control agencies with little to no risk of exposing the agency, or the Butterfly Program itself, since if the operative was caught, they were generally programmed to either 'self destruct' (commit suicide, or go into a catatonic state from which they could not be awakened) immediately, or to 'shift' to another of their many split personas, which would have no memory of their covert activities.

Operatives could be given vital messages while in a trance state, sent around the world to deliver such a message, and never even know they were carrying any sensitive information at all. These "Butterfly" operatives were perfect spies and couriers -- they couldn't betray sensitive data they didn't know they were carrying, nor could they endanger an operation they had no conscious knowledge actually existed.

Had Operation Butterfly been confined to willing subjects, its morality might at least be arguable, but the Nazi scientists who founded the program, and their Russian proteges', quickly found that the techniques needed to be applied as soon in the formative processes of the human psyche as possible for this process to be truly effective. In other words, the best "Butterfly" operatives were inducted into the program as children. Often members of the Soviet Union's political elite volunteered their children in exchange for political influence and favor; other times, the KGB simply confiscated entire orphanages full of "wards of the State" to be transformed into mind controlled slaves in the service of Soviet national security.

As sex has always been a key weapon in intelligence work, both to inveigle information out of key sources, and for purposes of blackmailing otherwise unwilling individuals into cooperating with efforts they would normally find repugnant, "Butterfly" operatives were rigorously trained in sexual techniques as well as other useful espionage skills. And while it is problematic to call anything done to people already so victimized as 'abusive', it was inevitable that "Butterfly" operatives came to be utilized by Soviet officials on the highest level as easily available, utterly compliant and controllable sex slaves. For people holding high positions, blackmail is always an imminent, hovering threat; the enormous attraction of programmable, expendable sex objects whom one can do anything one wants to and with, and who can then be induced to forget about the sexual abuse entirely as soon as it is over, or to never speak of it to anyone else, is immediately obvious.

Like Operation Cuckoo, Operation Butterfly has been reported as surviving the end of the Soviet Union, and, in fact, continuing to thrive today. The techniques for turning children and even adults into programmable, compliant slaves and tools that can be employed to any illicit or covert purpose did not die with the KBG, and there may very well be a secretive network of controllers and "Butterfly" trained, mind controlled slaves still in existence at this moment, still actively being accessed and used by members of various international governments and espionage agencies. It is even rumored that there continues to be a thriving trade in missing children who are stolen and sold to "Butterfly" training camps all over the world.

Horrific? Fantastic? Incredible? Beyond belief? Something out of some purple, melodramatic pulp fiction fantasy? No. These are, in fact, just a few of the terrible, obscure aspects of the Evil Empire's undeniably evil history.

I have, however, been deliberately misleading my reading audience about one particular aspect of all of this: the Evil Empire in question is not Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is, rather, my own nation, and perhaps yours -- the United States of America.

For murderous frenzies of violence by whites against non-whites in the Soviet Union, substitute the historically documented surges of vicious anti-Asian and anti-Negro eliminationalism here in the U.S. And I didn't even mention here, because as far as I know the Soviet Union has no equivalent to, the unprecedentedly widespread genocidal campaigns undertaken against the Native American by the United States government and its white citizenry through much of our nation's history.

Revise the phrase 'Ukraine Syphilis Experiment' only slightly to 'Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment', and you have the name of one of the most hideous publicly known events in American medical history. All quoted passages were taken from the linked source material and given minor alteration to support the central conceit of this essay.

For Operation Clean Sweep, substitute "Operation Paper Clip". For Operation Cuckoo, substitute Operation Mockingbird.

Let me note that where I described "Operation Cuckoo" as infiltrating Western media on behalf of the Soviet Union, Operation MOCKINGBIRD did exactly the same thing... on behalf of the CIA. It was, in fact, a clandestine operation that is likely still in effect, meant to so utterly control American media as to make the rather Nazi-like message of American 'exceptionalism', and its concomitant 'necessity' to spread the superior American way of life all over the world, by military force when necessary, a concept that most Americans would simply accept as an unquestionable truth.

The effort was and is a stunning success; even the American left wing is largely only horrified by our ongoing campaign of terror in the Middle East because they feel we are doing it wrong. Had U.S. troops invaded Iraq illegally, murdered a few hundred thousand Iraqis, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured a few thousand more, and as a result, quickly managed to set up a friendly, compliant puppet regime that would keep the lights on, the traffic moving, the stores and schools open, and, most importantly, the oil flowing back here to all of us at home, only a tiny percentage of Americans would have any problem with this 'war' at all. Most would think we'd done something wonderful.

In point of fact, the U.S. did manage most of the things I've itemized above; our troops certainly and irrefutably did illegally invade Iraq, we absolutely have murdered several hundred thousand Iraqis during and since that invasion, and we have undeniably arrested, imprisoned, and tortured several thousand more. It's that last bit, where we somehow manage to install a friendly, compliant government, that has eluded us. Honestly, it's hard to see how we could have failed in that endeavor, given how pleasant and respectful we've been towards Iraq as a nation, and its residents as a people, up until this point.

Leaving that aside, though -- for the hellish, horrifying, utterly immoral and terrifyingly atrocious "Operation Butterfly", substitute the CIA sponsored programs known as MKULTRA and Operation MONARCH.

The odd thing I find here is that, speaking only for myself, it's very easy to believe in any or all of these programs when they are ascribed to a nation like the U.S.S.R. It's only when one attempts to intellectually and emotionally accept that such things were done (and perhaps, are still being done) under the aegis and sponsorship of our own U.S. government that disbelief and incredulity sets in. After all, we're "the good guys", the "guys in white hats", the people who saved the world from the Nazis in WWII. We're Americans, and we're essentially kind and generous and noble and decent, valorous and brave and resolute, and there are certain things that, as some British character in some novel once said, "simply aren't done, old bean".

But these things are done, and they're done all the time, and they've been done by every government and power structure in the history of man to the extent that the technology of the times allowed.

The idea that the United States of America, its government, or, for the most part, even its citizenry, is some kind of exceptionally noble nation, authority structure, or people, with a concomitant right and/or duty to spread our exceptionally noble ideals and lifestyle and culture across the face of the globe, by military force if necessary, is a conceit and a deceit deliberately perpetrated on nearly all of us by the carefully edited, exaggerated, and distorted version of American history we are all taught in our childhoods, and which is reinforced constantly to us by all of our pop culture artifacts throughout our lives.

Whether we are educated publicly or privately, the same cheerful Social Studies "George Washington could not tell a lie/America saved the world from the Nazis in WWII/America is ALWAYS THE GOOD GUY" bullshit is fed to us by the bucketful, and we swallow it all whole. In point of fact, we are no more innately decent or uncommonly heroic than any other nation, culture, or people in human history... and we are just as bad as any of them.

Our peculiar contemporary liberal notion that America's current 'descent' into despotism and darkness, hysterical warmongering jingoism and rampant dissent-suppression, and our ongoing campaigns of international lawlessness, genocide, and terrorism against various other nations, is somehow a temporary aberration, and that the 'real America' is a wonderful land of tolerance and liberty and that we ourselves are a tremendously decent, kind, heroic, freedom loving people, is, in all honesty, obnoxious nonsense.

We are not an innately good or inherently heroic nation. We never have been. We are an Evil Empire. We are evil now, and we have been for at least the last two centuries, and if you don't want to believe that, and you also don't want to believe in the various things I've detailed above (all of which actually happened, some of which may still be happening), then study the true history of America's conquest of the Western frontier, or American's annexation of Hawaii, or American's acquisition of the Phillipines or Puerto Rico.

The idea that a never ending battle for truth and justice is somehow the American way is a foolish illusion, as are all the other ringing, jingoistic phrases our culture beats into our brains throughout our lifetimes, each and all of which are meant to create and maintain an illusion that we are (although we never put it this way, even to ourselves) a Master Race, destined to rule the world and remake it in our own image, for the good of all mankind. This bloated, fallacious self image is not true, badly though we want it to be. This image of us is propaganda. It isn't real, it isn't accurate, and it is not us.

Maybe someday it could be, if enough of us wake up to the truth about our history, and strive to change the way we look at ourselves and at our nation, and how our nation looks at the world.

Until then, though, the truth is simple, if horrible:

The Evil Empire... is us.