"Christian" mind control

In the past, I've discussed Melvin Sembler -- friend to the Bush family, former ambassador to Italy, and founder of the "Straight" program, a fake drug rehabilitation center which tortured teens until they mentally broke. Straight was part of a larger problem. A growing problem.

Abusive "Christian" schooling is a subject that deserves book-length treatment. I was both intrigued and appalled by this Buzzflash interview with Julia Scheeres, whose book Jesus Land describes in horrifying detail the abuses she underwent while growing up in a family of Fundamentalist savages.

At one point, these followers of the Prince of Peace trucked young Julia off to Escuela Caribe, a torture/mind control camp posing as a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Since the off-shore location places the school beyond American law, the sadistic "instructors" can can commit pretty much any act of barbarism:

Julia Scheeres: They beat and abused children in God’s name -- using Proverbs 23, 13-14 as justification: "Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell." I was very wary or leery about this. The day that I arrived, they staged a boxing match between this big, big man and an adolescent boy.

BuzzFlash: That’s the second point at which the book reaches a crescendo that is almost impossible to bear. It is horrifying. This man appears in shorts, bare-chested, and he is literally going to beat the devil out of this young kid who’s pretty weak and frail, and defiant. They call all the students down to witness this. It is like something from Abu Ghraib.

Julia Scheeres: This school is predicated on fear and humiliation. You conform or be conformed. That was the message. It’s like, this too could happen to you.

BuzzFlash: There is no chance for this kid, who is thirteen and basically a weakling, to have any power against this bulky forty-year-old. It’s a cruelty that simply is beyond imagination. He literally beats the heck out of this kid in a so-called boxing match. We’ll give you a "fair chance" if you want to say the devil’s word -- fight me, come on, show you’re stronger. He just pummels him until he practically breaks the kid’s jaw.

Julia Scheeres: He leaves him bleeding on the ground, and just stoops down and says a prayer over him...

Escuela Caribe is part of a larger network of alleged "reform schools" called New Horizons Youth Ministries. Scheer's experience was hardly unique.

I encourage readers to study the testimony found at a site called The Truth About New Horizons Youth Ministries. Some of the accounts are sickening.

For example, a victim named Tara Ketola was sent by her parents to Escuela Caribe because she had shown evidence of depression and other psychological issues, as well as "interest in world religion, the occult, and science; association with non-christian peers, music, movies, etc." For these "crimes, she received this punishment:

I was led to believe that my mother had permanently disowned me, while my mother was led to believe that I needed to be institutionalized for life.

I was forced to machete cane while visibly & severely ill (with typhus) until I finally lost consciousness.

I was under the authority & care of a house father who was later convicted of sex crimes, and whose behavior was far from appropriate. Every night before bed, for example, we were expected to line up to hug him. He had frequent and unsolicited physical contact with the girls in my house.

It was commonplace to be ordered to exercise past the point of pain, usually while being belittled, threatened & intimidated.

I was subjected to corporal punishment for rule violations I had not committed. (Whether or not swats are considered abusive, note that they were given while the child was kneeling with his or her head & entire upper body positioned under the seat of a chair.)

More:

Bathroom requests were frequently denied although it was a standard rule to drink 2-3 full glasses of water every day, along with 1-2 full glasses of milk with every meal. Repeated requests and accidents were viewed as insubordination.

Low rankers were required to ask a high ranker or staff member to visually verify incidences of fecal abnormality...

All students were forced to deny the existence of any child sentenced to isolation in the Quiet Room. This room was a small concrete cell without lighting or furniture. Students sent there first had their hair chopped off and were stripped to their underwear. They had to sleep on the concrete floor and scrub the cement for hours on end until they earned back the privilege of wearing clothes and sleeping on a cot.

These same techniques -- in particular, the strange emphasis on bathroom habits -- are also described by the victims of the Straight program.

I am becoming persuaded that these "schools" are working from the same template. The ownership may vary and the veneer of religion may be thick or thin, but the basic song remains the same. One can only wonder whether these programs were based on military research into behavior control.

Who owns New Horizong Youth Ministries? Scheers says that the place is run by a family in Indiana; alas, she gives no names. The school's official history says nothing about the individuals who bear legal and moral responsibility for these outrages -- a blank spot that I find intriguing. We do learn that a couple named Hugh and Nancy Maclellan funded the Canadian school in the 1970s.

If I may be permitted a very speculative observation, I would note that the time and location of the the ministry's origin point -- Indiana in the early 1970s -- is strikingly redolent of the early days of the Jim Jones cult. Jones, who also had an interest in thought control and jungle locales, began his operations in Indiana at a slightly earlier time. Could there be a connection?

We need to follow the money trail behind each and every one of these academies. I suspect that this trail may lead us to the rich and powerful, as was the case with Sembler.

Books about the ghastly practices of the Scientologists have shocked the world, yet these "Christians" have managed the formidable trick of making the Hubbardites seem relatively benign. In recent days, I've wondered how "our boys" could commit such atrocities in Iraq. Now I'm wondering how many of them had a history of Fundamentalist cult abuse.