Closed System of Logic

My handful of readers are, I'm sure, tired of me comparing terrorists to abusers. For everyone else - I have to put these articles out there. One after the other. Yes, I do see abuse around every corner. Especially when it comes to these animals.

You'll get it. Honest, you will. Now if people like Obama & Biden would just answer the clue phone.

TWO LOOKS AT THE CRITERIA FOR THOUGHT REFORM

Dr. Robert J. Lifton's 8 Criteria for Thought Reform

1. Environmental Control - The purposeful limitation of all forms of communication with the outside world.

2. Mystical Manipulation - Extensive personal manipulation is used to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that they will appear to have arisen spontaneously.

3. The Demand for Purity - The world is sharply divided between pure and impure with the group in the role of ultimate judge. Normal urges and tendencies become sins, and shame is used to control.

4. Confession - Carried beyond its ordinary expressions to the point of becoming a cult itself. This enhances the group's hold upon the person and their guilt; is an act of symbolic self-surrender; is a means of maintaining a tone of total exposure; and makes it impossible to attain a reasonable balance between worth and humility.

5. The Aura of Sacred Silence - Prohibiting any questioning of the basic dogma, the cult's laws, regulations and rules are absolute and must be followed.

6. Loading the Language - Characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most complex of problems are compressed into brief, definitive sounding phrases, easily memorized and expressed.

7. Doctrine Over Persons - The value of an individual member is insignificant compared to the value of the group.

8. Dispensing of Existence - The cult environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be reorganized and those who possess no such right. The religious cult draws a sharp line between not only those who will or will not be saved but other individuals and groups who are not acceptable.

Source: Margaret Thaler Singer with Janja Lalich, "Cults in Our Midst", copyright 1995, John Wiley and Sons Inc., pp. 69-74
~~~
Dr. Margaret T. Singer's 6 Conditions for Thought Reform

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step-by-step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group. The goal may be to make them deployable agents for the leadership, to get them to buy more courses, or get them to make a deeper commitment, depending on the leader's aim and desires.

2. Control the person's social and/or physical environment; especially control the person's time. Through various methods, new members are kept busy and led to think about the group and its content during as much of their waking time as possible.

3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person. This is accomplished by getting members away from the normal social support group for a period of time and into an environment where the majority of people are already group members. The members serve as models of the attitudes and behaviors of the group and speak an in-group language.

4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experience in such a ways as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person's former social identity. Manipulation of experiences can be accomplished through various methods of trance induction, including leaders using such techniques as paced speaking patterns, guided imagery, chanting, long prayer sessions or lectures, and lengthy mediation sessions.

5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group's ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group's beliefs, and compliance are rewarded while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, he or she is made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.

6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing. (Singer, 1995)

Source: Margaret Thaler Singer with Janja Lalich, "Cults in Our Midst", copyright 1995, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., pp. 64-69.

ORIGINAL

Roxana's Spy Conviction:
A Good Day for Iran's Crazies
by Scott MacLeod

Roxana Saberi convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison: as weird as it is unfortunate. Her lawyer will appeal the conviction, and hopefully this game will come to an end and Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist who filed for several news organizations including NPR, will be free.

It's unfortunate, because the Iranian regime--Saberi was tried in a revolutionary court--seems with this episode to be willfully snubbing President Obama's distinct, historic olive branch for better relations between Washington and Tehran. After living and working as a journalist in Iran for six years, Saberi was initially detained for the illegal purchase of alcohol and only later charged with being a spy. And the trouble for her only began a few weeks after Obama's inauguration and his explicit reach-out to the Islamic world including the Iranian authorities. Saberi's case is bound to complicate Obama's olive branch--and that may be precisely the aim of those behind the case against her. Better relations with the U.S. suits many in Iran, including inside the regime, but it doesn't suit the hard-line factions who use their control of the security apparatus to advance their political and personal interests.

There are many on the American side, too, not to mention in the Netanyahu government in Israel, who will be only too happy to point out how Saberi's case proves there's only one way to deal with the Iranian regime and that's to bomb it out of existence. Obama's team will have to stay cool and patient and not let some internal power play in Iran to become a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads to war. But if there are moderates inside the Iranian regime, as I believe there are, they're going to have to start challenging the crazies before they take the country over the cliff. If Obama isn't successful in talking to the Iranian regime, neither he nor his eventual successors are likely to put much stock in that approach. That's a dangerous road to travel.

The conviction is also weird. If Saberi is the spook the regime claims she is, wasn't that a doozy of a failure for Iranian intelligence not to unmask her for six whole years? Eight years is a harsh sentence for an innocent woman, but to accept the Iranian claim against her for a moment, then what kind of foreign spy and traitor gets off with an eight year jail term in a country where they will hang you for much less? It's almost as if the Iranians are openly saying, "Yeah, this isn't really about Saberi. We're just messing with everybody!"

NPR President Vivian Schiller speaks for us all:

We are deeply distressed by this harsh and unwarranted sentence. Ms. Saberi has already endured a three-month confinement in Evin Prison, and we are very concerned for her well-being. Through her work for NPR over several years, we know her as an established and respected professional journalist. We appeal to all of those who share our concerns to ask that the Iranian authorities show compassion and allow her to return home to the United States immediately with her parents.

--By Scott MacLeod/ Cairo

SOURCE

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO JBLOG ME