I Know Someone Who Committed Suicide

He was a pretty good writer until the CP squelched him and made him write stilted Party propaganda. He won a Pulitzer prize for his short stories. The admiration of the men was sincere, not syncophantic. He seemed quietly proud, like a general whose sons had fallen on a battlefield and the men responded as if they were soldiers who had fought in the same campaign.

@greenmountaingal: I still regard it as misguided admiration and a lot of that goes on in this world.

@berangere: Why express admiration when a man speaks of a tragedy to friends he's known for decades? Sympathy maybe. I think there was a reason that is secret among those in the know...because a LOT of people in my childhood world committed suicide. And many of the children I knew wound up in mental institutions. I am pretty sure a lot of what my mother did to me was designed to get me to kill myself (which she suggested to me at one point) or to make me behave badly so she could get me put away in a mental hospital. I am pretty sure that this had to do with Party security; putting children and young adults in a place where the three lettered agencies could not get to them for questioning nor use them as torture by proxy to cause the parents to give information. That, at least, is my current theory. Since the parents believed their children would be kidnapped, tortured, and probably killed, they decided that death or institutionalization was preferable. If you watch the Jonestown death tape, you can hear Jones talking to his crowd of neo-socialist followers and telling them that the CIA was about to descend on them and kidnap their children for torture and death. This was quite easily believed by nearly all of them. Most of us would assume such a statement is ridiculous, or at least not very likely. They accepted this idea easily because most of them believed before they got to Jonestown...and most of them had been involved with the Communist Party.

@greenmountaingal: What happens with cults and politics is simply unbelievable! And what people are capable of in order to follow their agenda.Members of the Communist party and those suspected of it, were persecuted in America during the McCarthy era,even executed as spies.It was terrible.

Cults, I believe, are used as prisons by certain political power groups of both the extreme right and the extreme left. That's where they put people to punish them.

While it's true that many basically decent citizens (like my father) got caught up in the red scare of the 1950s and suffered unjustly, there was a dark side of Communist Party membership after 1950 when the Party went secret. And my mother was, I believe, involved in Internal Security within the Party, a particularly secret and deadly group in the CP.

@greenmountaingal: It seems they were so driven by their ideology that they sacrificed what was dear and near to them to achieve their agenda.Like the man talking about his two sons committing suicide,probably because of that agenda. They lost a sense of balance and their being driven became form of insanity.

@berangere: I agree with that. The psychological term for this type of sociopath is: Elite deviance, the belief that one's conduct falls outside the usual laws and rules and is fully justified by one's beliefs or affiliations.

@greenmountaingal: Exactly,well put!