Victimized Twice 3 of 4

Victimized Twice:

Part 3 of 4:  Tule Lake; Stockholm Syndrome

Many of the workshops in the 2009 Tule Lake Pilgrimage were highly emotional and very informative, not just about what had happened during the forced removal and illegal incarceration nearly seventy years before, but as to how these traumas were still affecting people, families, and communities today.  During one break-out session, I sat and listened to several elderly Japanese Americans tell their stories.  Suddenly two middle-aged Japanese Americans were yelling at each other.  One of the gentlemen was a leader in the Japanese American Citizen League (JACL) and the other was from a family whose members had been out-spoken draft-resisters during the incarceration.  Yes, the Japanese American soldiers who served with valor during WWII while their families were in concentration camps deserved lauding and recognition.  And these soldiers’ actions provided numerous examples of how and why Japanese American were “full-fledged” American.  But the point is, this is America-- where people are innocent until proved guilty.  In 1942, the federal government declared all Japanese Americans guilty of being unworthy of American citizenship with no other evidence than a racist distaste for the Japanese.  It took as much courage to fight for the rights of yourself and your family in a concentration camp as it did to fight in the battlefield.  There is nothing more American than the right to protest, dissent, and practice civil disobedience when faced with institutionalized injustices.

Why did the JACL and other hyper-loyal elements of the Japanese American community buy into the federal government racist bullshit? There is a very disturbing undertone here that no one has ever had the courage to look at.  I suspect that the position taken by the JACL and by many people who went through the American concentration camp experience (and even for some of those watching the trauma from outside) can only be describe as the result of Stockholm syndrome victimization.  The Stockholm syndrome plays a key component of this narrative and deserves a closer look: 

From Wikipedia-

Stockholm syndrome, or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness. The FBI Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27% of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they no longer become a threat.

Inferred in the definition above, but not clearly stated in the concept is that the Stockholm syndrome produces a degree of self-hatred on the part of the victim.  This self-hatred is very clear in some of the absurd stands the JACL took in the 1940’s (like suggesting Japanese Americans should be allowed to take the role of suicide troops for the American military).  This stance clearly shows an “identification” of the victims (the Japanese Americans) with their “captors” (the racist-elements of the American government). This “identification” reflects and reiterates position the federal government posited at that time by describing Japanese Americans as not quite qualified for American citizenship by nature of their ethnic origin.  Let’s not mince words here or buy-into the US government rhetoric.  One-hundred and ten thousand people of Japanese ancestry, both American citizens and resident aliens were institutionally victimized, abused, and held hostage by the US federal government during WWII.  Nowhere was this crime more egregious than at Tule Lake.

Chad Montreaux

Newell, CA

A Cult of Abuse and Victimization Part 4 of 4

A Cult of Abuse and Victimization;

            The Dysfunctional Inner Circle of the National Park Service

Part 4 of 4- Isolation and Domination- Inherent Conditions of NPS Employment

The second step for abuse requires the predator to isolate the victim.  The very nature of work in the remote locations of most NPS sites isolates employees from friends, families, and support systems.  Isolation is inherent in the job.  Isolation, in and of its self, is not necessarily abuse.  The totalitarian and authoritarian structure of the NPS, however, creates situation where if managers and supervisors in remote National Park site have the least inclination toward predatory behavior, they can and readily do take advantage of the isolation to victimize their employees.  In his book The Case of the Indian Trader describes the potential risk of this NPS authoritarian structure in the isolation of NPS sites: “the social environment is often rigidly stratified, and the agency is able to exercise a level of control over the resident and even visiting population not seen elsewhere in normal American society.”  This lethal combination isolation and authoritarian power can produce situations where employees may even be isolated from their Constitutional rights by predatory supervisors and managers.  Supporting this idea, Berkowitz offers the following observation from The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) in 2002: “It’s apparent that the NPS needs to be reminded again that its employees are American citizens with First Amendment rights.”

The final step of victimization requires the predator to exercise control and domination over the isolated and defenseless victim.  It would be imprudent to believe that the National Park Service was created to provide opportunities for predatory managers and supervisors to victimize employees.  It would be criminal, however, not to accept that circumstances associated with working for the NPS have created a cult of abuse that quickly overwhelmed all the positive aspirations of the NPS.  The overwhelming evidence from employees and from  internal NPS documentation suggests the latter statement is true.  Despite all the rhetoric and seductive statements of the NPS mission, NPS management has de-evolved into one of the most authoritarian and tyrannical agencies in the US government.  The cult of predation that feeds this system begins in the isolated parks where managers and supervisors have nearly complete control over the lives of their employees.  NPS management has hijacked the rights and avenues for advocacy implicit in the boards, program, and departments outlined above.  The explicit purpose for this coercion of these programs is to strengthen the tyrannical authority and power that NPS management holds over its employees.  Paul Berkowitz, in his book The Case of the Indian Trader, corroborates this observation:

The unspoken social pressures and psychological impacts of this type of environment where employees may literally live next door to or across the street from their own supervisors, produce workers that over time become extremely obedient to and dependent on their employer for virtually every aspect of their lives.  

This sounds exactly like the final requisite stage that Leslie Morgan Steiner describes as being necessary for predation, victimization, and domestic violence-- domination over the victim. 

Again, I’m not suggesting that the NPS has become a haven for domestic violence.  However, abuse is abuse; victimization is victimization.  Rating levels of abuse and victimization and drawing an arbitrary line where one type of abuse is unacceptable (physical abuse) and another type of abuse is tolerated (emotional and psychological abuse) only serves to empower a culture of predation and abuse that judiciously avoids leaving physical bruises. Out of the ground of circumstances required for work in the NPS, the obnoxious weeds of predation, abuse, and victimization have grown and flourished. This is not surprising that all the requisite elements for traditional models of predation and victimization are present in the circumstances of NPS employment.  What is surprising is that so many good people have tolerated and even supported this dysfunctional and predatory behavior within the NPS.  To stand idly by while predatory managers write their own performance standards and work frenetically with other predator managers to create an insulate, abusive culture shrouded in confidentiality and secret records is to deny accountably for your own inaction.  To accept the current double standards for NPS managers’ ethical behavior is to provide tacit approval for these predatory people to act out their personal perversions of justice with impunity.   It is way past time to say “no” to the type emotional and psychological abuse that NPS employees are regularly victimized by.  It is time we recognize that not all injuries bleed and not all scars are visible.  It is time for transparency and accountability in the NPS. 

Chad Montreaux

Newell, CA

A Cult of Abuse and Victimization Part 3 of 4

A Cult of Abuse and Victimization;

            The Dysfunctional Inner Circle of the National Park Service (NPS)

Part 3 of 4- The NPS Rhetoric of Seduction

Every year, hundreds of idealistic people are seduced into working for the NPS as a federal employee, a volunteer, or as an interns because of the high-minded values of the NPS mission and by a personal commitment for a working relationship that includes public service. After joining the NPS workforce, these people are continually bombarded with infinite variations of these seductive values cascading down through emails from the President’s office, the Secretary of the Interior’s office, and the NPS Director’s office.  Each one of the messages are designed to reiterate the NPS commitment to merit, equally opportunity, mission, and public service.  A large number of these emails inform NPS employees that they are the single most important resource the NPS has for fulfilling its mission.  These same messages also state the importance of NPS employees in participating in the management of the NPS and promise employees that their perspectives and comments are an integral part of NPS managerial decision-making.  In addition to the top-down emails, NPS employee must take numerous, on-line trainings on the ethical standards expected for NPS employees and on the right and duty of NPS employees to bring issues and problems to the attention of NPS managers.  Processes for NPS accountability are touted as being available through such programs as Equal Employment Opportunity, the Whistler-blower Program, the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and the NPS Human Resources Division. If an NPS employee is fortunate enough to obtain a career track position, all of these values and advocacy tools will be reiterated in NPS Fundamentals Training and additional training workshops such as Operational Leadership. These are indeed, high-minded ideals and values.  They would not be seductive, however, if they were true. 

These high-minded ideals and values are categorically not true.  The reality of the values and ethics described above is that none of them are actually available to victims of predatory manager and supervisor.  The systems described above are a one-way street the serves only NPS management. Paul Berkowitz, in his book The Case of the Indian Trader, paints a picture of how the upper management of the NPS is completely insulated from being held accountable to the mission of the NPS, ethics, or the other high-minded ideals outlined above:

In his February 2007 testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee, Inspector General Devaney once again addressed the magnitude of ethics and integrity deficiencies permeating DOI agencies like the NPS. Devaney cited “a culture that lacks accountability,” observing that supervisors generally received lighter punishments than lower-ranking employees and that senior executive service members were “remarkably immune to any adverse action greater than a reprimand.”

Within the NPS it is well known that any employee who files a grievance against a manager or supervisor will eventually be terminated or forced to leave the NPS. The same goes for whistle-blowing.  The NPS has its own Whistler-blower Program, Merit Systems Protection Board (MPSB), Human Resources Division, and even its own Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) program.  These programs are typically housed in the same buildings as the regional NPS management offices.  All of these programs work only to maintain the rigid authoritarian stratification of the NPS and nearly always find in favor of NPS management, not NPS employees.  Many of the officers of these programs designed for NPS accountability are former NPS managers themselves who still have connections and friendships with NPS managers and supervisors.  These accountability program officers often find themselves in the ludicrous position of investigating accusations of hostility, abuse, and ethics violations by their friends and former coworkers.  The results of these investigations are rarely unbiased and the victims of the abuse and hostility from these NPS predators are further victimized by the favorable findings for the predator by the accountability program officers.  These accountability programs serve as advocacy for NPS management, not NPS employees. The same Human Resource officer who advises an employee about filing a grievance against his supervisor will, in all likelihood, be counseling that supervisor on how to defend herself from the very same grievance. It is an incestuous circle that only tends to feed predation and victimization.  MSPB investigations into favoritism and unprofessional behavior by managers and supervisors; Human Resource grievance investigations; and even Equal Employment Opportunity actions are often decided by accountability officers on the basis of secret and (most often) fabricated “insider” records that managers and supervisors illegally keep and share on their employees. 

When one NPS informant requested to see the documents (a right guaranteed by the grievance process) that were used to make the decision on a grievance he filed with a NPS Human Resource officer against a hostile and abusive manager, he was told by the Human Relations officer that no documentation had been used in making the decision.  This same Human Resources officer informed the employee that all of the accusations and complaints against his supervisor had been categorically dismissed and that she had been completely exonerated.  This institutional exoneration provided the predatory supervisory with a “green light” to resume her abuse and victimization with tacit impunity. Another NPS informant described how the MSPB, without consulting with him, subsumed and dismissed an EEO claim he had made against a NPS manager when the MPSB made a decision on another, unrelated matter.  NPS management is also vehemently anti-union and will spend untold tax-payers’ dollars in obstructionist actions to prevent NPS employees from exercising their rights to organize into unions and create a system of advocacy for their rights as employees and citizens. 

The above represents but a fraction of the methodology and deceptions NPS management uses to assure that the high-minded ideals, ethics, and values that were used to entice employees into a relationship with the NPS are not actually available to the employees after NPS managers have subsumed control of employee’s lives.  Clearly, this seduction satisfies the conditions of deception and lies that forms the first requisite step in creating a path to predation, victimization, and abuse. 

Chad Montreaux

Newell, CA

Manzanar: 70 Years Later It's Business as Usual

Manzanar: 70 Years Later It’s Business as Usual

In 1942, as people of Japanese ancestry were being removed to the concentration camps throughout the interior west, the primary mission of the newly-formed War Relocation Authority (WRA) was to sanitize gross injustices and criminal violations of the Constitution, and to control the people illegally forced into these concentration camps.  To this end, the WRA created the facade of self-governance in the camps.  At Manzanar, this took the form of the “freely-elected” block leaders.  

The problem with this form of representation was that the Issei (people born in Japan) and anyone who was critical of the forced removal and illegal incarceration were immediately disqualified from participating in this self-rule.  This left a very small subset of the people eligible to participate in system that served, at best, as a rubber-stamp for WRA unilateral administration policies.  Many of the block leaders were reluctant and apathetic about their positions (this can clearly be discerned in statements made in the block leader reports available in the Manzanar archives). 

Providing the 10,000 + people in Manzanar with food became the biggest endeavor of the people incarcerated in the camp.  Unlike the block leaders, the kitchen workers represented a true cross-section of the population at Manzanar.  The Kitchen Workers’ Union formed at Manzanar in the summer of 1942 to help address working and health conditions in the camp and to assure equitable pay and distribution of food.  This union rapidly grew into the peoples’ most vocal mouthpiece for human and civil rights within the camp.  The WRA response to this threat against their authority was two-fold: 1) to persuade the FBI to enlist some of the hyper-loyal elements of Manzanar to act as informants and stir-up trouble, and 2) to discredit and criminalize the loudest voices of opposition to the WRA tyrannical authority within the union.  These actions directly contributed to the incident referred to as the “Manzanar Riot.” This incident resulted in military troops (called into the concentration camp by the WRA director of Manzanar) firing weapons, including a machine gun, into an unarmed crowd of the illegally imprisoned people.  This resulted in 6 people receiving gunshot wounds and two innocent young men dying from these injuries.

The WRA used the “Manzanar Riot,” as a catalyst to blame all the problems in the concentration camp on the kitchen workers’ union and subsequently outlawed all union activity in all the concentration camps.  These actions and this rhetoric by the WRA obfuscated the true causes of the unrest at Manzanar: systematic violation of civil and constitutional rights and illegal imprisonment.  As a result of actions by the WRA, the leaders of the union at Manzanar were removed from the camp to prohibit them from questioning the decisions and rhetoric of the camp administration.  Any true form of representation within the concentration camps vanished with these actions.

In the fall of 2011, the National Park Service (NPS) was presented with the required paperwork and the sufficient number of votes from NPS employees at Manzanar National Historic Site to become full-members of Labor Local 220.  The management of the NPS is notoriously anti-union and refused to recognize the union status of employees at Manzanar.  Eighteen months and two court decisions later (both decisions were in favor of the rights of Manzanar National Historic Site’s employees to unionize), the NPS management is still being obstructionist and filing sequential appeals to keep the employees from organizing at Manzanar.  Like the actions of the WRA before them, this action by NPS management is designed to deny the current workers at Manzanar their rights as employees and as American citizens.

It is no mere coincidence that the WRA and the NPS were both formed under the same department of the federal government, the Department of the Interior.  The agenda the WRA and the NPS converge over the span of 7 decades.  Their shared objective regarding authoritarian control over people is identical: to deny true democracy and representation to the people in their charged.   I would compel each of you to consider whether or not it is in the best interest of Manzanar, a historic site dedicated to human rights, social rights, and justice, to be administered by an agency that is so flippant and dismissive of employee rights as the National Park Service. Or do some people take perverse pleasure in knowing that Manzanar is once again in the hands of an agency that is mirroring the obsession with tyrannical power and the disregard for social justice and individual rights that characterized the WRA’s tenure over America’s concentration camps 70 years ago?

Please think about these things the next time you visit Manzanar.  And think about the amount of tax-payer dollars that have been squandered by the NPS to fight against the right of American citizens to organize.  Nearly every NPS employee you will meet and interact with at Manzanar, from the maintenance staff, to the grounds keepers, to the interpretive rangers, to the tour guides that lead school programs are qualified to join the union and have, in fact, shown an interest in doing so.  As these dedicated federal employees talk to you about the rights violations experienced by those incarcerated at Manzanar in the 1940’s, they themselves are experiencing similar rights violations at the hands of an agency, the NPS, that differs only by degrees from the WRA. But please, do not ask these hard-working folks about the union or the efforts and risk they have taken to bring the union to Manzanar.  The management at Manzanar, the upper NPS management in San Francisco, and the utmost NPS management in Washington, DC are all viciously anti-union.  If this management knew which employees at Manzanar were pro-union—let me just say, the NPS, like the WRA, has many avenues to discredit people and destroy lives. 

As we move toward a more democratic future, perhaps we should reconsider whether an agency of the same government historically responsible for civil and constitutional rights violations can be an effective steward of a site dedicated to revealing these types violations.  At best, the NPS interpretation of Manzanar can only be an ironic hypocrisy.  Perhaps it is time to consider removing Manzanar from the administration of the NPS and creating a non-governmental agency to operate and interpret Manzanar in a manner that is in the best interest of social justice and the American people. 

Chad Montreaux

Newell, CA

If you would like to know more about NPS anti-union activities, particularly at Manzanar contact:
Laborers Local 220 representative Douglass Kessler <estellack@aol.com>
Former NPS employee Nina Weisman <ninaweisman@hotmail.com>