WHAT A SHOCK!
Now tell me again, how does the British Justice system work?
An email from Ken Norman the week before Christmas 2000.
Did you see the BBC2 programme Five Steps to Tyranny. Some fascinating details on how Goebbels must have brainwashed Germany . . .and how our legal system works. Sheena McDonald argued that every one of us can be made bestial.
An American schoolteacher, after the death of Martin Luther, tried an experiment on primary school pupils, telling them that blue-eyed kids were smarter (and got privileges); the brown-eyed were stupid and were correspondingly deprived. Within minutes, the blues were bossy, and the browns had became depressed, withdrawn and emotionally fragile (a very dangerous experiment).
A Yale psychologist proved that so long as a man in a white coat told subjects it was OK they would administer electric shocks to "recalcitrants", even shocks they believed to be lethal.
Another experiment was to divide older students into "prisoners and guards", and the "guards" degenerated into sadistic screws.
A man on a train politely asked passengers at random, to move to another seat so that he could sit there. 50% did so. When accompanied by a man in uniform, the response was 100% without a murmur. I reckon this is exactly how the law works.
They can torture folk without any response from ordinary, decent folk because there's faith that the law is right.
Added words by Tom Watkins.
I too saw this programme (for the second time, I am sure
it was broadcast some years before). For the electric shock experiment, volunteers
had been told they were taking part in a test to see if it would improve memory [like
the gestapo! My words]. One man had an ointment rubbed into his arm to stop blisters,
an electric lead was then attached. He was then told to memorise words from a list.
The second man was taken elsewhere and sat at a desk with a row of switches. Via
a microphone he then asked the victim for answers and when the wrong, or no answer
was given, he was told to press a switch. This transmitted an electric shock to the
other man. Each wrong answer meant that the next switch was to be pressed. Cries
of pain were heard and eventually silence.
As the voltage increased the torturer questioned the safety of what he was doing but was told to go ahead. After being told that the person in charge took full responsibility for whatever happened more than one person was willing to press switches transmitting in excess of 400 volts.
(We were afterwards told that in fact no voltage was transmitted and the victim was an actor).
Now if you think people in real life would have refused, then think again. This programme reminded me of another I had seen some years before. In this I saw people from the medical profession applying electric shocks to patients they had diagnosed with a mental illness. The voltages were so great that the patients' muscles contracted causing them to arch their whole body up from the bed they were lying on.
Rather like the former practise of cutting and bleeding people I thought it had little to do with real science.
www.slimeylimeyjustice.org