“WHEN FANTASY MEETS AN EVIL & BRUTAL REALITY” …. IT’S ALL HERE AND A GREAT DEAL MORE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, LITTLEDEAN JAIL, UK
PLEASE BE WARNED … THIS EXHIBITION ALONG WITH THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL IS NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN OR THOSE EASILY DISTURBED OR OF A SENSITIVE NATURE ….
With some of the scenes from the new Star Wars film ” The Force Awakens” having been filmed at Puzzlewood here in Coleford ( not too far from Littledean Jail) , we have ourselves now added an intriguing and volatile mix of myth and reality with our own insight into THE FEDAYEEN SADDAM ( Saddam Hussein’s “Men of Sacrifice”) . This was an Iraqi paramilitary militia and personal bodyguard division formed by Saddam’s equally brutal dictator son Uday, who were accountable only to Saddam and Uday .
THE FEDAYEEN SADDAM ENFORCERS wore a helmet that was designed by Uday to mirror the helmet worn by Star Wars villain Darth Vader. Also the all black uniform , though without the “Darth Vader” cape .
Both Saddam and his son Uday were keen fans of Star Wars films . Even Saddams infamous “Hands of Victory ” monuments at the gateways to Baghdad, to celebrate the defeat of Iran in the Iran – Iraq War… were based on the “Empire Strikes Back ” film poster image (see below) depicting Darth Vader holding crossed Lightsabers .
Here on display at The Crime Through Time Collection , Littledean Jail , and new for 2016 … we have pieced together ” The Dark Side of the Fedayeen”exhibition, This to compliment Saddam and Uday’s fascination and interest with Star Wars phenomena . This being alongside various other Star Wars signed memorabilia , action figures and also on a more serious note, the brutal acts of the Fedayeen and the Iraqi regime .
NOT FORGETTING OF COURSE THAT AFTER THE FALL OF SADDAM’S REGIME IN 2003 , THE FEDAYEEN AND SOME 100 OR SO OF SADDAM’S CHIEF COMMANDERS BECAME THE FOUNDERS AND LEADERS OF THE ISLAMIC STATE (ISIS), FOR WHICH IS STILL VERY MUCH CONTROLLED BY SADDAM HUSSEIN’S FORMER CHIEFS SOME 13 YEARS OR SO LATER .
THE VIEW OF MANY IS THAT WE SHOULD HAVE LEFT SADDAM HUSSAIN’S IRAQI REGIME TO RULE IT’S OWN COUNTRY AS THEY FELT FIT TO DO SO . .
TO A GREAT MANY ….A SEEMINGLY COSTLY AND POINTLESS WAR AGAINST A CULTURE AND RELIGION THAT MOST OF THE WESTERN WORLD DO NOT UNDERSTAND AND YET HAVE SEEMED FIT TO INTERFERE IN.
THIS HAVING RESULTED IN A TRAGIC LOSS OF A GREAT MANY LIVES ON ALL SIDES. MANY ARGUE THAT WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE GOT INVOLVED IN THIS EQUALLY SEEMINGLY NEVER ENDING WAR?
Above from left: ORIGINAL STAR WARS FILM POSTER ADVERITISING “THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK” PICTURED HERE ALONGSIDE SADDAM HUSSEIN’S INFAMOUS “HANDS OF VICTORY ” MONUMENTS AT THE GATEWAYS TO BAGHDAD , IRAQ
Fedayeen Saddam (فدائيي صدام) was a paramilitary organization loyal to the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein. The name was chosen to mean “Saddam’s Men of Sacrifice”. At its height, the group had 30,000-40,000 members.
BELOW: THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS DARTH VADER HELMET ALONG SIDE AN ORIGINAL FEDAYEEN SADDAM ( SADDAM’S MEN OF SACRIFICE ) HELMET . THEY CERTAINLY MIRROR EACH OTHER AS WAS UDAY HUSSEIN’S WISH
BELOW ARE VARIOUS INFORMATIVE AND INTERACTIVE ILLUSTRATIONS AS FEATURED HERE ON DISPLAY AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL , UK
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ABOVE IS A SLIDESHOW OF SOME OF THE FEDAYEEN SADDAM ( SADDAM’S “MEN OF SACRIFCE”) UNIFORM AND OTHER ASSOCIATED EXHIBIT ITEMS ON DISPLAY AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL .
The Fedayeen Saddam was not part of Iraq‘s regular armed forces but rather operated as a paramilitary unit of irregular forces. As a result of this, the Fedayeen reported directly to the Presidential Palace, rather than through the military chain of command. Whilst paramilitary the Fedayeen were not an elite military force, often receiving just basic training and operating without heavy weapons. In this they were somewhat similar to the Basij of Iran or Shabbiha militia of Syria.
Much like other paramilitaries, the Fedayeen was volunteer based and the units were never given an official salary. As a result, most of the members resorted to extortion and theft of property from the general population, even though the members had access to sanction-evading trade and high quality services (i.e. new cars, hospitals reserved for officials, expensive electronics) and a general standard of living considerably higher than that of the average Iraqi of the time.However, they were ordered not to threaten or harm any government officials. This group wasn’t religious or anything so it had a mix of sunni and Shia minority.
ORIGINAL FEDAYEEN SADDAM UNIFORM ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL
ORIGINAL FEDAYEEN SADDAM UNIFORM ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL
The Fedayeen were among the most loyal organizations to the government of Saddam Hussein and were a politically reliable force against domestic opponents. The Fedayeen played a role in the 2003 war, resisting the American invasion.
BELOW: MEMBERS OF FEDAYEEN ON TRIAL FOR THEIR BRUTAL EXECUTIONS AND TORTURE …..
PLEASE BE WARNED … THIS VIDEO CONTAINS VERY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING FOOTAGE OF EXECUTIONS AND IS NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN OR THOSE WHO ARE EASILY DISTURBED OR OF A SENSITIVE NATURE …..
The secret to ISIS’s success: Over 100 former Saddam Hussein-era officers run jihadi group’s military and intelligence operations in Iraq and Syria
Intelligence source said 100 to 160 former Iraqi army officers with ISIS
The 2003 US led invasion of Iraq led Saddam Hussein to allow foreign fighters to join the resistance against the invaders
ISIS’s deputy leader Abu Muslim al-Turkmani was an Iraqi army major
Once part of one of the most brutal dictator’s army in the Middle East, over 100 former members of Saddam Hussein’s military and intelligence officers are now part of ISIS.
Now they make up the complex network of ISIS’s leadership, helping to build the military strategies which have led the brutal jihadi group to their military gains in Syria and Iraq.
The officers gave ISIS the organization and discipline it needed to weld together jihadi fighters drawn from across the globe, integrating terror tactics like suicide bombings with military operations.
Self-appointed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the formation of an Islamic Caliphate in June 2014
While attending the Iraqi army’s artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words ‘God is great.’
‘It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this,’ Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani.
Omran didn’t see al-Ani again until years later, in 2003. The Americans had invaded Iraq and were storming toward Baghdad. Saddam Hussein’s fall was imminent.
At a sprawling military base north of the capital, al-Ani was directing the loading of weapons, ammunition and ordnance into trucks to spirit away. He took those weapons with him when he joined Tawhid wa’l-Jihad, a forerunner of al-Qaida’s branch in Iraq.
Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran, who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now commands its 5th Division fighting IS.
He kept track of his former comrade through Iraq’s tribal networks and intelligence gathered by the government’s main counter terrorism service, of which he is a member.
Surrounding al-Baghdadi, ex-Baathists continue to drive forward the group’s military strategy in Iraq and Syria
One of the most prominent former Iraqi Army generals within ISIS was Abu Muslim al-Turkmani (left) who led the terrorists’ operations in Iraq until he was killed in an American airstrike last November. Abu Ayman al-Iraqi (right), a former colonel in Iraqi Air Force intelligence now plays a leading role in ISIS’ military council
Tyrant: Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein built his regime and cult of personality through his use of fear
Deadly: Foreign fighters have flocked from around the world, attracted by the brutal group’s propaganda
They have been put in charge of intelligence-gathering, spying on the Iraqi forces as well as maintaining and upgrading weapons and trying to develop a chemical weapons program.
Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who has served in Iraq, said Saddam-era military and intelligence officers were a ‘necessary ingredient’ in the Islamic State group’s stunning battlefield successes last year, accounting for its transformation from a ‘terrorist organization to a proto-state.’
‘Their military successes last year were not terrorist, they were military successes,’ said Skinner, now director of special projects for The Soufan Group, a private strategic intelligence services firm.
The group’s second-in-command, al-Baghdadi’s deputy, is a former Saddam-era army major, Saud Mohsen Hassan, known by the pseudonyms Abu Mutazz and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, according to the intelligence chief.
Hassan also goes by Fadel al-Hayali, a fake name he used before the fall of Saddam, the intelligence chief, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.
Targeted: Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi (left) – who had been the head of Baghdadi’s four man military council – was killed by a coalition warplane last year. Another militant reportedly killed in an airstrike was Abu Hajar Al-Sufi (right) who had been one of Baghdadi’s most trusted advisers on the Shura Council
US soldiers and Iraqi civilians pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein at the start of the 2003 Iraq War
ISIS’s strength of ideology in vowing to maintain an Islamic state governed by Shari’ah law, has attracted considerable support from Islamists
During the 2000s, Hassan was imprisoned in the notorious U.S.-run Bucca prison camp, the main detention center for members of the Sunni insurgency, where al-Baghdadi also was held.
The prison was a significant incubator for the Islamic State group, bringing militants like al-Baghdadi into contact with former Saddam officers, including members of special forces, the elite Republican Guard and the paramilitary force called Fedayeen.
In Bucca’s Ward 6, al-Baghdadi gave sermons and Hassan emerged as an effective organizer, leading strikes by the prisoners to gain concessions from their American jailers, the intelligence chief said.
Former Bucca prisoners are now throughout the IS leadership. Among them is Abu Alaa al-Afari, a veteran Iraqi militant who was once with al-Qaida and now serves as the head of IS’s ‘Beit al-Mal,’ or treasury, according to a chart of what is believed to be the group’s hierarchy provided to the AP by the intelligence chief.
Al-Baghdadi has drawn these trusted comrades even closer after he was wounded in an airstrike earlier this year, the intelligence chief said.
He has appointed a number of them to the group’s Military Council, believed to have seven to nine members – at least four of whom are former Saddam officers. He brought other former Bucca inmates into his inner circle and personal security.
Saddam-era veterans also serve as ‘governors’ for seven of the 12 ‘provinces’ set up by the Islamic State group in the territory it holds in Iraq, the intelligence chief said.
Iraqi officials acknowledge that identifying IS leadership is an uncertain task. Besides al-Baghdadi himself, the group almost never makes public even the pseudonyms of those in its hierarchy.
When leaders are killed, it’s often not known who takes their place – and several have been reported killed multiple times, only to turn up alive. Figures are believed to take on new pseudonyms, leaving it unclear if a new one has emerged or not.
Brutal: ISIS continue to carry out horrific public executions and floggings in Syria and Iraq
Gunned down: Iraqi army recruits were executed in the Speicher massacre last summer
No mercy: The militants have targeted religious minorities, particularly the Yazidis and rebellious tribes
‘IS’s military performance has far exceeded what we expected. The running of battles by the veterans of the Saddam military came as a shock,’ a brigadier general in military intelligence told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.
‘Security-wise, we are often left unable to know who replaces who in the leadership. We are unable to infiltrate the group. It is terrifying.’
Estimates of the number of Saddam-era veterans in IS ranks vary from 100 to 160 in mostly mid- and senior-level positions, according to the officials.
Typically, they hail from Sunni-dominated areas, with intelligence officers mostly from western Anbar province, the majority of army officers from the northern city of Mosul and members of security services exclusively from Saddam’s clan around his hometown of Tikrit, said Big. Gen. Abdul-Wahhab al-Saadi, a veteran of battles against IS north and west of Baghdad.
For example, a former brigadier general from Saddam-era special forces, Assem Mohammed Nasser, also known as Nagahy Barakat, led a bold assault in 2014 on Haditha in Anbar province, killing around 25 policemen and briefly taking over the local government building.
Many of the Saddam-era officers have close tribal links to or are the sons of tribal leaders in their regions, giving IS a vital support network as well as helping recruitment.
These tribal ties are thought to account, at least in part, for the stunning meltdown of Iraqi security forces when IS captured the Anbar capital of Ramadi in May.
Several of the officers interviewed by the AP said they believe IS commanders persuaded fellow tribesmen in the security forces to abandon their positions without a fight.
Skinner, the former CIA officer, noted the sophistication of the Saddam-era intelligence officers he met in Iraq and the intelligence capabilities of IS in Ramadi, Mosul and in the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria.
‘They do classic intelligence infiltration. They have stay-behind cells, they actually literally have sleeper cells,’ Skinner said.
The process of giving former Iraqi commanders senior roles was started by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s predecessor Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (left) who was a former Iraqi Army officer nother former member of Saddam Hussein’s army turned ISIS commander, Abu Musa al-Alwani (right), has also been killed
Militant Islamist fighters wave flags as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria’s northern Raqqa province in 2014
Bleek future: With their black flags and military gear, the new ISIS recruits graduate in Deir ezzor
‘And they do classic assassinations, which depends on intelligence,’ he said, citing a wave of assassinations in 2013 that targeted Iraqi police, army, hostile tribal leaders and members of a government-backed Sunni militia known as Sahwa.
In the run-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Saddam publicly invited foreign mujahedeen to come to Iraq to resist the invaders.
Thousands came and Iraqi officials showed them off to the media as they were trained by Iraqi instructors. Many stayed, eventually joining the insurgency against American troops and their Iraqi allies.
After the collapse of the Saddam regime, hundreds of Iraqi army officers, infuriated by the U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi army, found their calling in the Sunni insurgency. In its early stages, many insurgent groups were relatively secular.
But Islamic militants grew in prominence, particularly with the creation and increasing strength of al-Qaida in Iraq. Some Sunnis were radicalized by bitterness against the Shiite majority, which rose to power after Saddam’s fall and which the Sunnis accuse of discriminating against them.
Al-Qaida in Iraq was initially led by a Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and had a strong foreign presence in its leadership. But after al-Zarqawi’s death in a 2006 U.S. airstrike, his Iraqi successor, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, began to bring in more Iraqis, particularly former Saddam officers. That process was accelerated when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took over after his predecessor was killed in a 2010 airstrike.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s first two deputies, who each played a major role in setting up what would become its sweep over Syria and Iraq, were both Saddam-era officers, according to those interviewed by the AP.
They were Sameer al-Khalifawy, an air force colonel killed in fighting in Syria in 2014, and Abdullah el-Bilawy, a former intelligence officer who was killed in Mosul by the Iraqi military in May 2014, a month before the city fell to the Islamic State group. He was replaced by the current deputy, Hassan.
‘It’s clear that some of these (Saddam-era officers) must have been inside the core of the jihadist movement in the Sunni triangle from the beginning,’ said Michael W.S. Ryan, a former senior executive at the State Department and Pentagon, referring to the Sunni-dominated area that was the most hostile to American forces in Iraq.
‘Their knowledge is now in the DNA of ISIS,’ he said, using an alternate acronym for the extremist group.
‘This melding of the Iraqi experience and what we might call the Afghan Arab experience became the unique ISIS brand,’ said Ryan, now a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
‘That brand ultimately became more successful in Iraq than al-Qaida in Iraq … and, at least for now, stronger in Syria than al-Qaida.’
TRUE CRIME , MURDERABILIA, MAIMERABILIA, DISMALABILIA, WITCHCRAFT, SATANISM AND THE OCCULT …. IT’S ALL HERE AND MUCH MORE ON DISPLAY AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL, FOREST OF DEAN , GLOUCESTERSHIRE , UK .
ABOVE: Original painting by Gloucestershire artist Paul Bridgman of John Wayne Gacy on display at Littledean Jail .
All of Gacy’s known murders were committed inside his Norwood Park, Illinois home. His victims would typically be lured to this address by force or deception, and all but one victim were murdered by either asphyxiation or strangulation with a tourniquet (his first victim was stabbed to death). Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home. Three further victims were buried elsewhere on his property, while the bodies of his last four known victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River.
Gacy became known as the “Killer Clown” due to his charitable services at fundraising events, parades, and children’s parties where he would dress as “Pogo the Clown”, a character he devised himself.
BELOW : Various exhibit items to include one of Gacy’s “Pogo The Clown ” suits , handwritten and signed correspondence , a hand painting and various other memorabilia, all of which is on display here at The Crime Through Time Collection , Littledean Jail , Forest of Dean , Gloucestershire, UK .
ABOVE AND BELOW : One of John Wayne Gacy’s original worn clown suits. There are two other known Gacy clown suits on display at The National Museum of Crime , Washington DC , USA .
BELOW: picture of 2 other Gacy clown suits, on display at The National Museum of Crime, Washington DC ….. Previously owned ( not sure if he still owns them ) by Jonathan Davis, lead singer of American Heavy Metal Band “Korn .”
ABOVE: John Wayne Gacy pictured in jail, so say, shortly before his execution by lethal injection
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A BRUTAL TYRANT – SADDAM HUSSEIN …..
A GREAT MANY WOULD SAY AND FIRMLY BELIEVE THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN DEPOSED BY INTERFERING WESTERN POLITICAL LEADERS AND SHOULD HAVE REMAINED IN POWER ???
POLITE WARNING… WE ARE PREDOMINANTLY A HISTORICAL AND HOPEFULLY EDUCATIONAL MUSEUM OF CRIME, SLEAZE, SCANDAL AND THE TABOO ….THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL IS NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN OR THOSE EASILY DISTURBED OR OF A SENSITIVE NATURE ….
TRUE CRIME MURDERABILIA, MAIMERABILIA, DISMALABILIA AND MUCH MORE HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL, FOREST OF DEAN, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK .
ON DISPLAY WE HAVE A VAST ARRAY OF TRUE CRIME RELATED MEMORABILIA ITEMS COVERING MANY OF THE WORLDS MOST EVIL MEN AND WOMEN, TYRANTS, WARLORD, SERIAL KILLERS, GANGSTERS, CRIMINALS, ETC.
A UNIQUE PRIVATE COLLECTION LIKE NO OTHER
BELOW IS THE GENUINE ORIGINAL TOILET SEAT REMOVED FROM SADDAM HUSSEIN’S BASRA PRESIDENTIAL PALACE AT THE TIME OF LIBERATION IN 2003 BY NEWS OF THE WORLD REPORTER CHRIS BUXTON WHO WAS THERE WITH THE UK’S DESERT RATS ON 7 APRIL 2003 . THIS NOW ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL
Below : News Of The World Journalist Chris Buxton pictured at Saddam Hussein’s Basra Palace in Iraq inside the toilet area
BELOW: CLOSE UP OF SADDAM’S TOILET SEAT, UNDOUBTEDLY USED BY SADDAM AND HIS ROYAL FAMILY ON A GREAT MANY OCCASSIONS PRIOR TO THE LIBERATION OF IRAQ AND HIS SUBSEQUENT CAPTURE IN 2003
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (Arabic: صدام حسين عبد المجيد التكريتي Ṣaddām Ḥusayn ʿAbd al-Maǧīd al-Tikrītī;[2] 28 April 1937[3] – 30 December 2006)[4] was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003.[5][6] A leading member of the revolutionary Iraqi Ba’ath Party, which espoused a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the party to long-term power of Iraq.
As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time when many groups were considered capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he tightly controlled conflict between the government and the armed forces. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and other industries. The state-owned banks were put under his control, leaving the system eventually insolvent.[7] Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatuses of government as oil money helped Iraq’s economy to grow at a rapid pace.[8] Positions of power in the country were filled with Sunnis, a minority that made up only a fifth of the population.
Saddam suppressed several movements, particularly Shi’a and Kurdish movements seeking to overthrow the government or gain independence, respectively.[citation needed] Saddam maintained power during the Iran–Iraq War of 1980 through 1988. In 1990 he invaded and looted Kuwait. An international coalition came to free Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991, but did not end Saddam’s rule. Whereas some venerated him for his aggressive stance against Israel, including firing missiles at Israeli targets,[9] he was widely condemned for the brutality of his dictatorship.
In March 2003, a coalition of countries led by the U.S. and U.K. invaded Iraq to depose Saddam, controversially citing his weapons of mass destruction and terror links. Saddam’s Ba’ath party was disbanded and the nation made a transition to a democratic system. Following his capture on 13 December 2003 (inOperation Red Dawn), the trial of Saddam took place under the Iraqi interim government. On 5 November 2006, he was convicted of charges related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi’ites and was sentenced to death by hanging. The execution of Saddam Hussein was carried out on 30 December 2006.[10]
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was born in the town of Al-Awja, 13 km (8 mi) from the Iraqi town of Tikrit, to a family of shepherds from the al-Begat tribal group, a sub-group of the Al-Bu Nasir (البو ناصر) tribe. His mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat, named her newborn son Saddam, which in Arabicmeans “One who confronts”; he is always referred to by this personal name, which may be followed by the patronymic and other elements. He never knew his father, Hussein ‘Abid al-Majid, who disappeared six months before Saddam was born. Shortly afterward, Saddam’s 13-year-old brother died of cancer. The infant Saddam was sent to the family of his maternal uncle Khairallah Talfah until he was three.[11]Youth
His mother remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly after his return. At about age 10, Saddam fled the family and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle Kharaillah Tulfah. Tulfah, the father of Saddam’s future wife, was a devout Sunni Muslim and a veteran from the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War between Iraqi nationalists and the United Kingdom, which remained a major colonial power in the region.[12] Later in his life relatives from his native Tikrit became some of his closest advisors and supporters. Under the guidance of his uncle he attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad. After secondary school Saddam studied at an Iraqi law school for three years, dropping out in 1957 at the age of 20 to join the revolutionary pan-Arab Ba’ath Party, of which his uncle was a supporter. During this time, Saddam apparently supported himself as a secondary school teacher.[13]
Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Partystudent cell, Cairo, in the period 1959–1963
Revolutionary sentiment was characteristic of the era in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. In Iraq progressives and socialists assailed traditional political elites (colonial era bureaucrats and landowners, wealthy merchants and tribal chiefs, monarchists).[14] Moreover, the pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt profoundly influenced young Ba’athists like Saddam. The rise of Nasser foreshadowed a wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, with the collapse of the monarchies of Iraq, Egypt, and Libya. Nasser inspired nationalists throughout the Middle East by fighting the British and the French during the Suez Crisis of 1956, modernizing Egypt, and uniting the Arab world politically.[15]
In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba’ath party, army officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq. The Ba’athists opposed the new government, and in 1959 Saddam was involved in the unsuccessful United States-backed plot to assassinate Qasim.[16]
Rise to power
Army officers with ties to the Ba’ath Party overthrew Qasim in a coup in 1963. Ba’athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba’athist leaders later that year. Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964. Just prior to his imprisonment and until 1968, Saddam held the position of Ba’ath party secretary.[17] He escaped from prison in 1967 and quickly became a leading member of the party. In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif. Al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy, and deputy chairman of the Baathist Revolutionary Command Council. According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba’athist government, which formed the basis for his measures to promote Ba’ath party unity as well as his resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability.
Iraq was a strategic buffer state for the United States against the Soviet Union, and Saddam was often seen as an anti-Soviet leader in the 1960s and 1970s. Some even suggested that John F. Kennedy’s administration supported the Ba’ath party’s takeover.[18] Although Saddam was al-Bakr’s deputy, he was a strong behind-the-scenes party politician. Al-Bakr was the older and more prestigious of the two, but by 1969 Saddam Hussein clearly had become the moving force behind the party.
Political program
Promoting women’s literacy and education in the 1970s
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, formally the al-Bakr’s second-in-command, Saddam built a reputation as a progressive, effective politician.[19] At this time, Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba’ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country’s major domestic problems and expanding the party’s following.
After the Baathists took power in 1968, Saddam focused on attaining stability in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi’ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant.[20] Stable rule in a country rife with factionalism required[dubious – discuss] both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.[20]
Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs.
At the center of this strategy was Iraq’s oil. On 1 June 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, which, at the time, dominated the country’s oil sector. A year later, world oil prices rose dramatically as a result of the 1973 energy crisis, and skyrocketing revenues enabled Saddam to expand his agenda.
Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the “National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy” and the campaign for “Compulsory Free Education in Iraq,” and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO).[21][22]
With the help of increasing oil revenues, Saddam diversified the largely oil-based Iraqi economy. Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign helped Iraq’s energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas.
Before the 1970s, most of Iraq’s people lived in the countryside and roughly two-thirds were peasants. This number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise from less than a half billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars and the country invested into industrial expansion.
Saddam was lucky for the revenue.[23] The Economist described the sentiments, stating that “Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanising German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. He had a good instinct for what the “Arab street” demanded, following the decline in Egyptian leadership brought about by the trauma of Israel’s six-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970, and the “traitorous” drive by his successor, Anwar Sadat, to sue for peace with the Jewish state. Saddam’s self-aggrandising propaganda, with himself posing as the defender of Arabism against Jewish or Persian intruders, was heavy-handed, but consistent as a drumbeat. It helped, of course, that his mukhabarat (secret police) put dozens of Arab news editors, writers and artists on the payroll.”[23]
In 1972 Saddam started developing his chemical weapons program. In 1973 he signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union.
Saddam focused on fostering loyalty to the Ba’athists in the rural areas. After nationalizing foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture on a large scale, and distributing land to peasant farmers.[13] The Ba’athists established farm cooperatives and the government also doubled expenditures for agricultural development in 1974–1975. Saddam’s welfare programs were part of a combination of “carrot and stick” tactics to enhance support for Saddam. The state-owned banks were put under his thumb. Lending was based on cronyism[7]
Development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two million people from other Arab countries and even Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor.
Succession
In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government. As the ailing, elderly al-Bakr became unable to execute his duties, Saddam took on an increasingly prominent role as the face of the government both internally and externally. He soon became the architect of Iraq’s foreign policy and represented the nation in all diplomatic situations. He was the de facto leader of Iraq some years before he formally came to power in 1979. He slowly began to consolidate his power over Iraq’s government and the Ba’ath party. Relationships with fellow party members were carefully cultivated, and Saddam soon accumulated a powerful circle of support within the party.
In 1979 al-Bakr started to make treaties with Syria, also under Ba’athist leadership, that would lead to unification between the two countries. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad would become deputy leader in a union, and this would drive Saddam to obscurity. Saddam acted to secure his grip on power. He forced the ailing al-Bakr to resign on 16 July 1979, and formally assumed the presidency.
Shortly afterwards, he convened an assembly of Ba’ath party leaders on 22 July 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped (viewable via this reference[24]), Saddam claimed to have found a fifth column within the Ba’ath Party and directed Muhyi Abdel-Hussein to read out a confession and the names of 68 alleged co-conspirators. These members were labelled “disloyal” and were removed from the room one by one and taken into custody. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. The 68 people arrested at the meeting were subsequently tried together and found guilty of treason. 22 were sentenced to execution. Other high-ranking members of the party formed the firing squad. By 1 August 1979, hundreds of high-ranking Ba’ath party members had been executed.[25][26]
Saddam was notable for terror against his own people. The Economist described Saddam as “one of the last of the 20th century’s great dictators, but not the least in terms of egotism, or cruelty, or morbid will to power”.[23]
The New York Times described in its obituary how Saddam “murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule”.[29] Others have estimated 800,000 deaths caused by Saddam not counting the Iran-Iraq war.[30] Estimates as to the number of Iraqis executed by Saddam’s regime vary from 300–500,000[31] to over 600,000,[32] estimates as to the number of Kurds he massacred vary from 70,000 to 300,000,[33] and estimates as to the number killed in the put-down of the 1991 rebellion vary from 60,000[34] to 200,000.[32] Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.[35]
Iraqi society is divided along lines of language, religion and ethnicity; Saddam’s government rested on the support of the 20% minority of Sunnis. The Ba’ath Party was increasingly concerned about potential Shi’a Islamist influence following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Kurds of northern Iraq (who are Sunni, but not Arabs) were also permanently hostile to the Ba’athist party’s pan-Arabism. To maintain power Saddam tended either to provide them with benefits so as to co-opt them into the regime, or to take repressive measures against them. The major instruments for accomplishing this control were the paramilitary and police organizations. Beginning in 1974, Taha Yassin Ramadan (himself a Kurd Baathist), a close associate of Saddam, commanded the People’s Army, which was responsible for internal security. As the Ba’ath Party’s paramilitary, the People’s Army acted as a counterweight against any coup attempts by the regular armed forces. In addition to the People’s Army, the Department of General Intelligence (Mukhabarat) was the most notorious arm of the state security system, feared for its use of torture and assassination. It was commanded by Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s younger half-brother. Since 1982, foreign observers believed that this department operated both at home and abroad in their mission to seek out and eliminate Saddam’s perceived opponents.[36]
As a sign of his consolidation of power, Saddam’s personality cult pervaded Iraqi society. Thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals were erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen on the sides of office buildings, schools, airports, and shops, as well as on Iraqi currency. Saddam’s personality cult reflected his efforts to appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. He appeared in the costumes of the Bedouin, the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant (which he essentially wore during his childhood), and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in Western suits, projecting the image of an urbane and modern leader. Sometimes he would also be portrayed as a devout Muslim, wearing full headdress and robe, praying toward Mecca.
He erected statues around the country, which Iraqis toppled after his fall.[37]
Iraq’s relations with the Arab world have been extremely varied. Relations between Iraq and Egypt violently ruptured in 1977, when the two nations broke relations with each other following Iraq’s criticism of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat‘s peace initiatives with Israel. In 1978, Baghdad hosted an Arab League summit that condemned and ostracized Egypt for accepting the Camp David accords. However, Egypt’s strong material and diplomatic support for Iraq in the war with Iran led to warmer relations and numerous contacts between senior officials, despite the continued absence of ambassadorial-level representation. Since 1983, Iraq has repeatedly called for restoration of Egypt’s “natural role” among Arab countries.
Saddam developed a reputation for liking expensive goods, such as his diamond-coated Rolex wristwatch, and sent copies of them to his friends around the world. To his ally Kenneth Kaunda Saddam once sent a Boeing 747 full of presents — rugs, televisions, ornaments. Kaunda sent back his own personal magician.[38]
Saddam had close relationship with Russian intelligence agent Yevgeny Primakov and apparently Primakov helped Saddam to stay in power in 1991.[39]
Saddam’s only visit to a Western country took place in September 1975 when he met with his friend, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in Paris, France.[40]
Several Iraqi leaders, Lebanese arms merchant Sarkis Soghanalian and others have told that Saddam financed Chirac’s party. In 1991 Saddam threatened to expose those who had taken largasse from him: “From Mr. Chirac to Mr. Chevènement, politicians and economic leaders were in open competition to spend time with us and flatter us. We have now grasped the reality of the situation. If the trickery continues, we will be forced to unmask them, all of them, before the French public.”[40] France armed Saddam and it was Iraq’s largest trade partner throughout Saddam’s rule. Seized documents show how French officials and businessmen close to Chirac, including Charles Pasqua, his former interior minister, personally benefitted from the deals with Saddam.[40]
Because that Saddam Hussein rarely left Iraq, Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam’s aides, traveled abroad extensively and represented Iraq at many diplomatic meetings.[41] In foreign affairs, Saddam sought to have Iraq play a leading role in the Middle East. Iraq signed an aid pact with the Soviet Union in 1972, and arms were sent along with several thousand advisers. However, the 1978 crackdown on Iraqi Communists and a shift of trade toward the West strained Iraqi relations with the Soviet Union; Iraq then took on a more Western orientation until the Gulf War in 1991.[42]
After the oil crisis of 1973, France had changed to a more pro-Arab policy and was accordingly rewarded by Saddam with closer ties. He made a state visit to France in 1975, cementing close ties with some French business and ruling political circles. In 1975 Saddam negotiated an accord with Iran that contained Iraqi concessions on border disputes. In return, Iran agreed to stop supporting opposition Kurds in Iraq. Saddam led Arab opposition to the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel (1979).
Saddam initiated Iraq’s nuclear enrichment project in the 1980s, with French assistance. The first Iraqi nuclear reactor was named by the French “Osirak“. Osirak was destroyed on 7 June 1981[43] by an Israeli air strike (Operation Opera).
Nearly from its founding as a modern state in 1920, Iraq has had to deal with Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country.[44] Saddam did negotiate an agreement in 1970 with separatist Kurdish leaders, giving them autonomy, but the agreement broke down. The result was brutal fighting between the government and Kurdish groups and even Iraqi bombing of Kurdish villages in Iran, which caused Iraqi relations with Iran to deteriorate. However, after Saddam had negotiated the 1975 treaty with Iran, the Shah withdrew support for the Kurds, who suffered a total defeat.
In early 1979, Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The influence of revolutionary Shi’ite Islam grew apace in the region, particularly in countries with large Shi’ite populations, especially Iraq. Saddam feared that radical Islamic ideas — hostile to his secular rule — were rapidly spreading inside his country among the majority Shi’ite population.
There had also been bitter enmity between Saddam and Khomeini since the 1970s. Khomeini, having been exiled from Iran in 1964, took up residence in Iraq, at the Shi’ite holy city of An Najaf. There he involved himself with Iraqi Shi’ites and developed a strong, worldwide religious and political following against the Iranian Government, whom Saddam tolerated. However, when Khomeini began to urge the Shi’ites there to overthrow Saddam and under pressure from the Shah, who had agreed to a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, Saddam agreed to expel Khomeini in 1978 to France. However this turned out to be an imminent failure and a political catalyst, for Khomeini had access to more media connections and also collaborated with a much larger Iranian community under his support whom he used to his advantage.
After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arabwaterway, which divides the two countries. During this period, Saddam Hussein publicly maintained that it was in Iraq’s interest not to engage with Iran, and that it was in the interests of both nations to maintain peaceful relations. However, in a private meeting with Salah Omar Al-Ali, Iraq’s permanent ambassador to the United Nations, he revealed that he intended to invade and occupy a large part of Iran within months. Later (probably to appeal for support from the United States and most Western nations), he would make toppling the Islamic government one of his intentions as well. Iraq invaded Iran, first attackingMehrabad Airport of Tehran and then entering the oil-rich Iranian land of Khuzestan, which also has a sizable Arab minority, on 22 September 1980 and declared it a new province of Iraq. With the support of the Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein had become “the defender of the Arab world” against a revolutionary Iran. The only exception was The Soviet Union, who initially refused to supply Iraq on the basis of Neutrality in the conflict, although in his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev claimed that Leonid Brezhnev refused to aid Saddam over infuriation of Saddam’s treatment of Iraqi Communists. Consequently, many viewed Iraq as “an agent of the civilized world”.[45] The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international borders were ignored. Instead Iraq received economic and military support from its allies, who conveniently overlooked Saddam’s use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians and Iraq’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons.[45]
In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq launched an attack on Khuzestan. After making some initial gains, Iraq’s troops began to suffer losses from human wave attacks by Iran. By 1982, Iraq was on the defensive and looking for ways to end the war.
At this point, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. Health Minister Dr. Riyadh Ibrahim suggested that Saddam temporarily step down to promote peace negotiations. Initially, Saddam Hussein appeared to take in this opinion as part of his cabinet democracy. A few weeks later, Dr. Ibrahim was sacked when held responsible for a fatal incident in an Iraqi hospital where a patient died from intravenous administration of the wrong concentration of potassium supplement.
Dr. Ibrahim was arrested a few days after he started his new life as a sacked Minister. He was known to have publicly declared before that arrest that he was “glad that he got away alive.” Pieces of Ibrahim’s dismembered body were delivered to his wife the next day.[46]
Iraq quickly found itself bogged down in one of the longest and most destructive wars of attrition of the twentieth century. During the war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces fighting on the southern front and Kurdish separatists who were attempting to open up a northern front in Iraq with the help of Iran. These chemical weapons were developed by Iraq from materials and technology supplied primarily by West German companies as well as [47] theReagan administration of the United States which also supplied Iraq with “satellite photos showing Iranian deployments”[48] and advised Hussein to bomb civilian targets in Tehran and other Iranian cities.[49] France sold 25 billion dollars worth arms to Saddam.[40]
Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after Iraq’s oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf. Iraq successfully gained some military and financial aid, as well as diplomatic and moral support, from the Soviet Union, China, France, and the United States, which together feared the prospects of the expansion of revolutionary Iran’s influence in the region. The Iranians, demanding that the international community should force Iraq to pay war reparations to Iran, refused any suggestions for a cease-fire. Despite several calls for a ceasefire by the United Nations Security Council, hostilities continued until 20 August 1988.
On 16 March 1988, the Kurdish town of Halabja was attacked with a mix of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 civilians, and maiming, disfiguring, or seriously debilitating 10,000 more. (see Halabja poison gas attack)[50] The attack occurred in conjunction with the 1988 al-Anfal campaign designed to reassert central control of the mostly Kurdish population of areas of northern Iraq and defeat the Kurdish peshmerga rebel forces. The United States now maintains that Saddam ordered the attack to terrorize the Kurdish population in northern Iraq,[50] but Saddam’s regime claimed at the time that Iran was responsible for the attack[51] which some including the U.S. supported until several years later. (See also Halabja poison gas attack.)
The bloody eight-year war ended in a stalemate. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties with estimates of up to one million dead. Neither side had achieved what they had originally desired and at the borders were left nearly unchanged. The southern, oil rich and prosperous Khuzestan and Basra area (the main focus of the war, and the primary source of their economies) were almost completely destroyed and were left at the pre 1979 border, while Iran managed to make some small gains on its borders in the Northern Kurdish area. Both economies, previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins.
Saddam borrowed tens of billions of dollars from other Arab states and a few billions from elsewhere during the 1980s to fight Iran, mainly to prevent the expansion of Shiite radicalism. However, this had proven to completely backfire both on Iraq and on the part of the Arab states, for Khomeini was widely perceived as a hero for managing to defend Iran and maintain the war with little foreign support against the heavily backed Iraq and only managed to boost Islamic radicalism not only within the Arab states, but within Iraq itself, creating new tensions between the Sunni Baath Party and the majority Shiite population. Faced with rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and internal resistance, Saddam desperately sought out cash once again, this time for postwar reconstruction.
Tensions with Kuwait
The end of the war with Iran served to deepen latent tensions between Iraq and its wealthy neighbor Kuwait. Saddam urged the Kuwaitis to forgive the Iraqi debt accumulated in the war, some $30 billion, but they refused.[52]
Saddam pushed oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices by cutting back production; Kuwait refused, however. In addition to refusing the request, Kuwait spearheaded the opposition in OPEC to the cuts that Saddam had requested. Kuwait was pumping large amounts of oil, and thus keeping prices low, when Iraq needed to sell high-priced oil from its wells to pay off a huge debt.
Saddam had always argued that Kuwait was historically an integral part of Iraq, and that Kuwait had only come into being through the maneuverings of British imperialism; this echoed a belief that Iraqi nationalists had voiced for the past 50 years. This belief was one of the few articles of faith uniting the political scene in a nation rife with sharp social, ethnic, religious, and ideological divides.[52]
The extent of Kuwaiti oil reserves also intensified tensions in the region. The oil reserves of Kuwait (with a population of 2 million next to Iraq’s 25) were roughly equal to those of Iraq. Taken together, Iraq and Kuwait sat on top of some 20 percent of the world’s known oil reserves; as an article of comparison, Saudi Arabia holds 25 percent.[52]
Saddam complained to the U.S. State Department that Kuwait had slant drilled oil out of wells that Iraq considered to be within its disputed border with Kuwait. Saddam still had an experienced and well-equipped army, which he used to influence regional affairs. He later ordered troops to the Iraq–Kuwait border.
As Iraq-Kuwait relations rapidly deteriorated, Saddam was receiving conflicting information about how the U.S. would respond to the prospects of an invasion. For one, Washington had been taking measures to cultivate a constructive relationship with Iraq for roughly a decade. The Reagan administration gave Saddam roughly $40 billion in aid in the 1980s to fight Iran, nearly all of it on credit. The U.S. also gave Saddam billions of dollars to keep him from forming a strong alliance with the Soviets.[53] Saddam’s Iraq became “the third-largest recipient of U.S. assistance”.[54]
U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie met with Saddam in an emergency meeting on 25 July 1990, where the Iraqi leader stated his intention to give negotiations only… one more brief chance before forcing Iraq’s claims on Kuwait.[55] U.S. officials attempted to maintain a conciliatory line with Iraq, indicating that while George H. W. Bush and James Baker did not want force used, they would not take any position on the Iraq–Kuwait boundary dispute and did not want to become involved.[56] Whatever Glaspie did or did not say in her interview with Saddam, the Iraqis assumed that the United States had invested too much in building relations with Iraq over the 1980s to sacrifice them for Kuwait.[57] Later, Iraq and Kuwait met for a final negotiation session, which failed. Saddam then sent his troops into Kuwait. As tensions between Washington and Saddam began to escalate, the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, strengthened its military relationship with the Iraqi leader, providing him military advisers, arms and aid.[58]
On 2 August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, initially claiming assistance to “Kuwaiti revolutionaries,” thus sparking an international crisis. On 4 August an Iraqi-backed “Provisional Government of Free Kuwait” was proclaimed, but a total lack of legitimacy and support for it led to an 8 August announcement of a “merger” of the two countries. On 28 August Kuwait formally became the 19thGovernorate of Iraq. Just two years after the 1988 Iraq and Iran truce, “Saddam Hussein did what his Gulf patrons had earlier paid him to prevent.” Having removed the threat of Iranian fundamentalism he “overran Kuwait and confronted his Gulf neighbors in the name of Arab nationalism and Islam.”[45]
When later asked why he invaded Kuwait, Saddam first claimed that it was because Kuwait was rightfully Iraq’s 19th province and then said “When I get something into my head I act. That’s just the way I am.”[23] With Saddam’s seizure of Kuwait in August 1990 an UN coalition led by the United States drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait in February 1991. The ability for Saddam Hussein to pursue such military aggression was from a “military machine paid for in large part by the tens of billions of dollars Kuwait and the Gulf states had poured into Iraq and the weapons and technology provided by the Soviet Union, Germany, and France.”[45]
Shortly before he invaded Kuwait, he shipped 100 new Mercedes 200 Series cars to top editors in Egypt and Jordan. Two days before the first attacks, Saddam reportedly offered Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak 50 million dollars in cash, “ostensibly for grain”.[59]
U.S. President George H. W. Bush responded cautiously for the first several days. On one hand, Kuwait, prior to this point, had been a virulent enemy of Israel and was the Persian Gulf monarchy that had had the most friendly relations with the Soviets.[60] On the other hand, Washington foreign policymakers, along with Middle East experts, military critics, and firms heavily invested in the region, were extremely concerned with stability in this region.[61] The invasion immediately triggered fears that the world’s price of oil, and therefore control of the world economy, was at stake. Britain profited heavily from billions of dollars of Kuwaiti investments and bank deposits. Bush was perhaps swayed while meeting with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who happened to be in the U.S. at the time.[62]
Co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union made possible the passage of resolutions in the United Nations Security Council giving Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait and approving the use of force if Saddam did not comply with the timetable. U.S. officials feared Iraqi retaliation against oil-rich Saudi Arabia, since the 1940s a close ally of Washington, for the Saudis’ opposition to the invasion of Kuwait. Accordingly, the U.S. and a group of allies, including countries as diverse as Egypt, Syria and Czechoslovakia, deployed a massive amount of troops along the Saudi border with Kuwait and Iraq in order to encircle the Iraqi army, the largest in the Middle East.
Saddam’s officers looted Kuwait, stripping even the marble from its palaces to move it to Saddam’s own palace.[7]
During the period of negotiations and threats following the invasion, Saddam focused renewed attention on the Palestinian problem by promising to withdraw his forces from Kuwait if Israel would relinquish the occupied territories in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. Saddam’s proposal further split the Arab world, pitting U.S.- and Western-supported Arab states against the Palestinians. The allies ultimately rejected any linkage between the Kuwait crisis and Palestinian issues.
Saddam ignored the Security Council deadline. Backed by the Security Council, a U.S.-led coalition launched round-the-clock missile and aerial attacks on Iraq, beginning 16 January 1991. Israel, though subjected to attack by Iraqi missiles, refrained from retaliating in order not to provoke Arab states into leaving the coalition. A ground force consisting largely of U.S. and British armoured and infantry divisions ejected Saddam’s army from Kuwait in February 1991 and occupied the southern portion of Iraq as far as the Euphrates.
On 6 March 1991, Bush announced:
“
What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea — a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.
”
In the end, the over-manned and under-equipped Iraqi army proved unable to compete on the battlefield with the highly mobile coalition land forces and their overpowering air support. Some 175,000 Iraqis were taken prisoner and casualties were estimated at over 85,000. As part of the cease-fire agreement, Iraq agreed to scrap all poison gas and germ weapons and allow UN observers to inspect the sites. UN trade sanctions would remain in effect until Iraq complied with all terms. Saddam publicly claimed victory at the end of the war.
Postwar period
Iraq’s ethnic and religious divisions, together with the brutality of the conflict that this had engendered, laid the groundwork for postwar rebellions. In the aftermath of the fighting, social and ethnic unrest among Shi’ite Muslims, Kurds, and dissident military units threatened the stability of Saddam’s government. Uprisings erupted in the Kurdish north and Shi’a southern and central parts of Iraq, but were ruthlessly repressed.
The United States, which had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, did nothing to assist the rebellions. The Iranians, despite the widespread Shi’ite rebellions, had no interest in provoking another war, while Turkey opposed any prospect of Kurdish independence, and the Saudis and other conservative Arab states feared an Iran-style Shi’ite revolution. Saddam, having survived the immediate crisis in the wake of defeat, was left firmly in control of Iraq, although the country never recovered either economically or militarily from the Gulf War. Saddam routinely cited his survival as “proof” that Iraq had in fact won the war against the U.S. This message earned Saddam a great deal of popularity in many sectors of the Arab world. John Esposito, however, claims that “Arabs and Muslims were pulled in two directions. That they rallied not so much to Saddam Hussein as to the bipolar nature of the confrontation (the West versus the Arab Muslim world) and the issues that Saddam proclaimed: Arab unity, self-sufficiency, and social justice.” As a result, Saddam Hussein appealed to many people for the same reasons that attracted more and more followers to Islamic revivalism and also for the same reasons that fueled anti-Western feelings. “As one U.S. Muslim observer noted: People forgot about Saddam’s record and concentrated on America … Saddam Hussein might be wrong, but it is not America who should correct him.” A shift was, therefore, clearly visible among many Islamic movements in the post war period “from an initial Islamic ideological rejection of Saddam Hussein, the secular persecutor of Islamic movements, and his invasion of Kuwait to a more populist Arab nationalist, anti-imperialist support for Saddam (or more precisely those issues he represented or championed) and the condemnation of foreign intervention and occupation.”[45]
Saddam, therefore, increasingly portrayed himself as a devout Muslim, in an effort to co-opt the conservative religious segments of society. Some elements of Sharia law were re-introduced, and the ritual phrase “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”), in Saddam’s handwriting, was added to the national flag. Saddam also commissioned the production of a “Blood Qur’an“, written using 27 litres of his own blood, to thank God for saving him from various dangers and conspiracies.[63]
Relations between the United States and Iraq remained tense following the Gulf War. The U.S. launched a missile attack aimed at Iraq’s intelligence headquarters in Baghdad 26 June 1993, citing evidence of repeated Iraqi violations of the “no fly zones” imposed after the Gulf War and for incursions into Kuwait.
The United Nations sanctions placed upon Iraq when it invaded Kuwait were not lifted, blocking Iraqi oil exports. This caused immense hardship in Iraq and virtually destroyed the Iraqi economy and state infrastructure. Only smuggling across the Syrian border, and humanitarian aid ameliorated the humanitarian crisis.[64] On 9 December 1996 the UN allowed Saddam’s government to begin selling limited amounts of oil for food and medicine. Limited amounts of income from the United Nations started flowing into Iraq through the United Nations Oil for Food program.
U.S. officials continued to accuse Saddam of violating the terms of the Gulf War’s cease fire, by developing weapons of mass destruction and other banned weaponry, and violating the UN-imposed sanctions. Also during the 1990s, President Bill Clinton maintained sanctions and ordered air strikes in the “Iraqi no-fly zones” (Operation Desert Fox), in the hope that Saddam would be overthrown by political enemies inside Iraq. Western charges of Iraqi resistance to UN access to suspected weapons were the pretext for crises between 1997 and 1998, culminating in intensive U.S. and British missile strikes on Iraq, 16–19 December 1998. After two years of intermittent activity, U.S. and British warplanes struck harder at sites near Baghdad in February 2001.
Saddam’s support base of Tikriti tribesmen, family members, and other supporters was divided after the war, and in the following years, contributing to the government’s increasingly repressive and arbitrary nature. Domestic repression inside Iraq grew worse, and Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, became increasingly powerful and carried out a private reign of terror.
Iraqi co-operation with UN weapons inspection teams was intermittent throughout the 1990s.
Saddam continued involvement in politics abroad. Video tapes retrieved after show his intelligence chiefs meeting with Arab journalists, including a meeting with the former managing director of Al-Jazeera, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, in 2000. In the video Saddam’s son Uday advised al-Ali about hires in Al-Jazeera: “During your last visit here along with your colleagues we talked about a number of issues, and it does appear that you indeed were listening to what I was saying since changes took place and new faces came on board such as that lad, Mansour.” He was later sacked by Al-Jazeera.[65]
In 2002 Austrian prosecutors investigated Saddam government’s transactions with Fritz Edlinger that possibly violated Austrian money laundering and embargo regulations.[66] Fritz Edlinger, president of the General Secretary of the Society for Austro-Arab relations (GÖAB) and a former member of Socialist International‘s Middle East Committee, was an outspoken supporter of Saddam Hussein. In 2005 an Austrian journalist revealed that Fritz Edlinger’s GÖAB had received $100,000 from an Iraqi front company as well as donations from Austrian companies soliciting business in Iraq.[67]
In 2002, a resolution sponsored by the European Union was adopted by the Commission for Human Rights, which stated that there had been no improvement in the human rights crisis in Iraq. The statement condemned President Saddam Hussein’s government for its “systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law“. The resolution demanded that Iraq immediately put an end to its “summary and arbitrary executions … the use of rape as a political tool and all enforced and involuntary disappearances”.[68]
In the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme, Saddam was supposed to trade oil for food. In practice, the program benefitted political parties, politicians, journalists, companies, and individuals around the world.
The Russian state was the largest beneficiary.[69]
Satellite channels broadcasting the besieged Iraqi leader among cheering crowds as U.S.-led troops push toward the capital city.[70]
4 April 2003.
The international community, especially the U.S., continued to view Saddam as a bellicose tyrant who was a threat to the stability of the region. After the September 11 attacks, Vladimir Putin began to tell the United States that Iraq was preparing terrorist attacks against the United States.[71] In his January 2002 state of the union address to Congress, President George W. Bush spoke of an “axis of evil” consisting of Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. Moreover, Bush announced that he would possibly take action to topple the Iraqi government, because of the threat of its weapons of mass destruction. Bush stated that “The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade … Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.”[72][73] Saddam Hussein claimed that he falsely led the world to believe Iraq possessed nuclear weapons in order to appear strong against Iran.[74]
With war looming on 24 February 2003, Saddam Hussein took part in an interview with CBS News reporter Dan Rather. Talking for more than three hours, he expressed a wish to have a live televised debate with George W. Bush, which was declined. It was his first interview with a U.S. reporter in over a decade.[75] CBS aired the taped interview later that week.
The Iraqi government and military collapsed within three weeks of the beginning of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq on 20 March. By the beginning of April, U.S.-led forces occupied much of Iraq. The resistance of the much-weakened Iraqi Army either crumbled or shifted to guerrilla tactics, and it appeared that Saddam had lost control of Iraq. He was last seen in a video which purported to show him in the Baghdad suburbs surrounded by supporters. When Baghdad fell to U.S-led forces on 9 April, marked symbolically by the toppling of his statue by iconoclasts,[76] Saddam was nowhere to be found.
Photograph taken by American soldiers during Saddam’s capture.
Saddam shortly after capture by American forces, and after being shaved to confirm his identity
In April 2003, Saddam’s whereabouts remained in question during the weeks following the fall of Baghdad and the conclusion of the major fighting of the war. Various sightings of Saddam were reported in the weeks following the war, but none was authenticated. At various times Saddam released audio tapes promoting popular resistance to his ousting.
Saddam was placed at the top of the U.S. list of “most-wanted Iraqis“. In July 2003, his sons Uday and Qusay and 14-year-old grandson Mustapha were killed in a three-hour[77] gunfight with U.S. forces.
On 13 December 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr near Tikrit in a hole in Operation Red Dawn. Following his capture on 13 December Saddam was transported to a U.S. base near Tikrit, and later taken to the U.S. base near Baghdad. The day after his capture he was reportedly visited by longtime opponents such as Ahmed Chalabi.[citation needed]
On 14 December 2003, U.S. administrator in Iraq L. Paul Bremer confirmed that Saddam Hussein had indeed been captured at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr near Tikrit.[78] Bremer presented video footage of Saddam in custody.
Saddam was shown with a full beard and hair longer than his familiar appearance. He was described by U.S. officials as being in good health. Bremer reported plans to put Saddam on trial, but claimed that the details of such a trial had not yet been determined. Iraqis and Americans who spoke with Saddam after his capture generally reported that he remained self-assured, describing himself as a “firm, but just leader.”[citation needed]
British tabloid newspaper The Sun posted a picture of Saddam wearing white briefs on the front cover of a newspaper. Other photographs inside the paper show Saddam washing his trousers, shuffling, and sleeping. The United States Government stated that it considers the release of the pictures a violation of the Geneva Convention, and that it would investigate the photographs.[79][80] During this period Hussein was interrogated by FBI agent George Piro.[81]
The guards at the Baghdad detention facility called their prisoner “Vic,” and let him plant a little garden near his cell. The nickname and the garden are among the details about the former Iraqi leader that emerged during a 27 March 2008 tour of prison of the Baghdad cell where Saddam slept, bathed, and kept a journal in the final days before his execution.[82]
On 30 June 2004, Saddam Hussein, held in custody by U.S. forces at the U.S. base “Camp Cropper“, along with 11 other senior Baathist leaders, were handed over legally (though not physically) to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for crimes against humanity and other offences.
A few weeks later, he was charged by the Iraqi Special Tribunal with crimes committed against residents of Dujail in 1982, following a failed assassination attempt against him. Specific charges included the murder of 148 people, torture of women and children and the illegal arrest of 399 others.[83][84]
Saddam and his lawyers’ contesting the court’s authority and maintaining that he was still the President of Iraq.[85]
The assassinations and attempts on the lives of several of Saddam’s lawyers.
The replacement of the chief presiding judge, midway through the trial.
On 5 November 2006, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam’s half brother, Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court in 1982, were convicted of similar charges. The verdict and sentencing were both appealed, but subsequently affirmed by Iraq’s Supreme Court of Appeals.[86] On 30 December 2006, Saddam was hanged.[10]
Saddam was hanged on the first day of Eid ul-Adha, 30 December 2006, despite his wish to be shot (which he felt would be more dignified).[87] The execution was carried out at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base in Kadhimiya, a neighborhood of northeast Baghdad.
The execution was videotaped on a mobile phone and his captors could be heard insulting Saddam. The video was leaked to electronic media and posted on the Internet within hours, becoming the subject of global controversy.[88] It was later claimed by the head guard at the tomb where his body remains that Saddam’s body was stabbed six times after the execution.[89]
Not long before the execution, Saddam’s lawyers released his last letter. The following includes several excerpts:
“
To the great nation, to the people of our country, and humanity,Many of you have known the writer of this letter to be faithful, honest, caring for others, wise, of sound judgment, just, decisive, careful with the wealth of the people and the state … and that his heart is big enough to embrace all without discrimination.You have known your brother and leader very well and he never bowed to the despots and, in accordance with the wishes of those who loved him, remained a sword and a banner.This is how you want your brother, son or leader to be … and those who will lead you (in the future) should have the same qualifications.Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if He wants, He will send it to heaven with the martyrs, or, He will postpone that … so let us be patient and depend on Him against the unjust nations.
Remember that God has enabled you to become an example of love, forgiveness and brotherly coexistence … I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave a space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking and keeps away one from balanced thinking and making the right choice.
I also call on you not to hate the peoples of the other countries that attacked us and differentiate between the decision-makers and peoples. Anyone who repents — whether in Iraq or abroad — you must forgive him.
You should know that among the aggressors, there are people who support your struggle against the invaders, and some of them volunteered for the legal defence of prisoners, including Saddam Hussein … some of these people wept profusely when they said goodbye to me.
Dear faithful people, I say goodbye to you, but I will be with the merciful God who helps those who take refuge in him and who will never disappoint any faithful, honest believer … God is Great … God is great … Long live our nation … Long live our great struggling people … Long live Iraq, long live Iraq … Long live Palestine … Long live jihad and the mujahedeen.
Saddam Hussein President and Commander in Chief of the Iraqi Mujahed Armed Forces
Additional clarification note:
I have written this letter, because the lawyers told me that the so-called criminal court — established and named by the invaders — will allow the so-called defendants the chance for a last word. But that court and its chief judge did not give us the chance to say a word, and issued its verdict without explanation and read out the sentence — dictated by the invaders — without presenting the evidence. I wanted the people to know this.[90]
”
— Letter by Saddam Hussein
A second unofficial video, apparently showing Saddam’s body on a trolley, emerged several days later. It sparked speculation that the execution was carried out incorrectly as Saddam Hussein had a gaping hole in his neck.[91]
Saddam was buried at his birthplace of Al-Awja in Tikrit, Iraq, 3 km (2 mi) from his sons Uday and Qusay Hussein, on 31 December 2006.[92]
Saddam married his first wife and cousin Sajida Talfah (or Tulfah/Tilfah)[93] in 1958[94] in an arranged marriage. Sajida is the daughter of Khairallah Talfah, Saddam’s uncle and mentor. Their marriage was arranged for Hussein at age five when Sajida was seven. They were married in Egypt during his exile. The couple had five children.[93]
Uday Hussein (18 June 1964 – 22 July 2003), was Saddam’s oldest son, who ran the Iraqi Football Association, Fedayeen Saddam, and several media corporations in Iraq including Iraqi TV and the newspaper Babel. Uday, while originally Saddam’s favorite son and raised to succeed him he eventually fell out of favour with his father due to his erratic behavior; he was responsible for many car crashes and rapes around Baghdad, constant feuds with other members of his family, and killing his father’s favorite valet and food taster Kamel Hana Gegeo at a party in Egypt honoring Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak. He became well known in the west for his involvement in looting Kuwait during the Gulf War, allegedly taking millions of dollars worth of Gold, cars, and medical supplies (which was in short supply at the time) for himself and close supporters. He was widely known for his paranoia and his obsession with torturing people who disappointed him in any way, which included tardy girlfriends, friends who disagreed with him and, most notoriously, Iraqi athletes who performed poorly. He was briefly married to Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri‘s daughter, but later divorced her. The couple had no children.
Qusay Hussein (17 May 1966 – 22 July 2003), was Saddam’s second — and, after the mid-1990s, his favorite — son. Qusay was believed to have been Saddam’s later intended successor, as he was less erratic than his older brother and kept a low profile. He was second in command of the military (behind his father) and ran the elite Iraqi Republican Guard and the SSO. He was believed to have ordered the army to kill thousands of rebelling Marsh Arabs and was instrumental in suppressing Shi’ite rebellions in the mid-1990s. He was married once and had three children.
Raghad Hussein (born 2 September 1968) is Saddam’s oldest daughter. After the war, Raghad fled to Amman, Jordan where she received sanctuary from the royal family. She is currently wanted by the Iraqi Government for allegedly financing and supporting the insurgency and the now banned Iraqi Ba’ath Party.[95][96] The Jordanian royal family refused to hand her over.
Rana Hussein (born c. 1969), is Saddam’s second daughter. She, like her sister, fled to Jordan and has stood up for her father’s rights. She was married to Saddam Kamel and has had four children from this marriage.
Hala Hussein (born c. 1972), is Saddam’s third and youngest daughter. Very little information is known about her. Her father arranged for her to marry General Kamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan al-Tikriti in 1998. She fled with her children and sisters to Jordan.
Saddam married his second wife, Samira Shahbandar,[93] in 1986. She was originally the wife of an Iraqi Airways executive, but later became the mistress of Saddam. Eventually, Saddam forced Samira’s husband to divorce her so he could marry her.[93] There have been no political issues from this marriage. After the war, Samira fled to Beirut, Lebanon. She is believed to have mothered Hussein’s sixth child.[93] Members of Hussein’s family have denied this.
Saddam had allegedly married a third wife, Nidal al-Hamdani, the general manager of the Solar Energy Research Center in the Council of Scientific Research.[97]
Wafa el-Mullah al-Howeish is rumoured to have married Saddam as his fourth wife in 2002. There is no firm evidence for this marriage. Wafa is the daughter of Abdul Tawab el-Mullah Howeish, a former minister of military industry in Iraq and Saddam’s last deputy Prime Minister.
In August 1995, Raghad and her husband Hussein Kamel al-Majid and Rana and her husband, Saddam Kamel al-Majid, defected to Jordan, taking their children with them. They returned to Iraq when they received assurances that Saddam would pardon them. Within three days of their return in February 1996, both of the Kamel brothers were attacked and killed in a gunfight with other clan members who considered them traitors.
In August 2003, Saddam’s daughters Raghad and Rana received sanctuary in Amman, Jordan, where they are currently staying with their nine children. That month, they spoke with CNN and the Arab satellite station Al-Arabiya in Amman. When asked about her father, Raghad told CNN, “He was a very good father, loving, has a big heart.” Asked if she wanted to give a message to her father, she said: “I love you and I miss you.” Her sister Rana also remarked, “He had so many feelings and he was very tender with all of us.”[98]
Built in 1791… Littledean Jail was a former House of Correction, Court House, Police Station and is now home to The Crime Through Time Collection .
HERE IS A BRIEF INTERACTIVE, HOPEFULLY EDUCATIONAL VIDEO AND PICTORIAL INSIGHT INTO SOME OF THE VERY THOUGHT PROVOKING ELECTROCONVULSIVE THERAPY TREATMENT (ECT) .. USED ON PATIENTS HOUSED IN LUNATIC AND MENTAL ASYLUMS . BOTH HERE IN THE UK AND WORLDWIDE FROM THE VICTORIAN ERA THROUGH TO THE 1960’S . ALL OF WHICH WE FEATURE HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL .
ORIGINAL 1930’s LEATHER BODY BELT COMPLETE WITH WRIST RESTRAINTS ACQUIRED FROM THE NOW CLOSED MONICA BRITTON MUSEUM COLLECTION AT FRENCHAY HOSPITAL , BRISTOL AND NOW ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL , GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UKKK
ORIGINAL 1930’s LEATHER BODY BELT COMPLETE WITH WRIST RESTRAINTS ACQUIRED FROM THE NOW CLOSED MONICA BRITTON MUSEUM COLLECTION AT FRENCHAY HOSPITAL , BRISTOL AND NOW ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL , GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK
ORIGINAL 1930’s LEATHER BODY BELT COMPLETE WITH WRIST RESTRAINTS ACQUIRED FROM THE NOW CLOSED MONICA BRITTON MUSEUM COLLECTION AT FRENCHAY HOSPITAL , BRISTOL AND NOW ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL , GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK
ORIGINAL 1930’s LEATHER RESTRAINT STRAPS ACQUIRED FROM THE NOW CLOSED MONICA BRITTON MUSEUM COLLECTION AT FRENCHAY HOSPITAL , BRISTOL AND NOW ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL , GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK
ORIGINAL 1930’s LEATHER RESTRAINT STRAPS ACQUIRED FROM THE NOW CLOSED MONICA BRITTON MUSEUM COLLECTION AT FRENCHAY HOSPITAL , BRISTOL AND NOW ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL , GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK
ORIGINAL 1930’s LEATHER RESTRAINT STRAPS ACQUIRED FROM THE NOW CLOSED MONICA BRITTON MUSEUM COLLECTION AT FRENCHAY HOSPITAL , BRISTOL AND NOW ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL , GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK
ABOVE IS A VERY RARE “GLOUCESTER MENTAL HOSPITAL ” – METROPOLITAN WHISTLE DATING BACK TO THE EARLY 1920’S AS WAS USED BY THE CHIEF WARDEN IN THE INFAMOUS HORTON ROAD MENTAL ASYLUM , GLOUCESTER . USED PRIMARILY AS A FORM OF ALARM … PARTICULARLY SHOULD THEIR BE CAUSE FOR CONCERN WITH THE PATIENTS .
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The History of the Asylum
This section has been written to ammend the previous history pages of the Asylum, which were in desperately in need of replacing. The Victorian Asylum is a system that has long gone and it is doubtful that such a system will exist again. This section is dedicated to a building system that is now defunct and disappearing fast, planning mix ups and the will of the establishment to abolish the system have prevailed. We don’t hope to cover everything, or answer all your questions. But this should hopefully answer a few questions you may have. Please note, any phrases used within this page is used within its historical context.
How did the Asylums come about?
The first recorded Lunatic Asylum in Europe was the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, it has been a part of London since 1247 when it was built as a priory. It became a hospital in 1330 and admitted its first mentally ill patients in 1407. Before the Madhouse Act of 1774, treatment of the Insane was carried out by non-licensed practitioners, who ran their “Madhouses” as a commercial enterprise and with little regard for the inmates. The Mad House act established the licensing required to house insane patients, with yearly inspections of the premises taking place. In 1792, the York Retreat was set up by William Tuke. This was the first establishment in the UK to treat their patients as human beings and offer a therapeutic setting for them. Mechanical restraints were discontinued and work and leisure became the main treatment. In 1808, the County Asylum Act was passed, which allowed counties to levy a rate in order to fund the building of County Asylums. The intention was to remove the insane from within the Work Houses and provide them with more a sufficient and dedicated care system. However, due to the Act deficiencies, only 20 County Asylums were built around the country.
How did the mass construction come about?
Due to deficiencies of the 1808 Act, counties did not begin mass construction of Asylums throughout the country. It was not until the passing of the County Asylum / Lunacy Act in 1845 did the construction begin to take hold. Due to a change in the law, Counties were legally obliged to provide Asylum for their Lunatics. This Act, based on the work of John Conolly and Lord Shaftsbury saw the lunatics being treated as Patients and not prisoners. It also took into account the moral treatment pioneered by William Tuke and saw the care of the lunatics being funded by the individual County. During this time, the Asylums become vastly overcrowded and rapid expansion of the ensued. Between the passing of the act and 1890, when the next act was passed, over 60 Asylums were built and opened (A further 40 were opened after this date).
What was it like for the Patients?
Without a time machine, it is hard to say! In all honesty, it varied depending on which era you looked at, conditions were ever changing. The most notable condition for the patients was the segregation of the sexes. It was not until the early 20th century that the sexes were allowed to mix, albeit they still slept in same sex wards. Patients lived within the confines of the hospital, privacy was minimal. Wards were able to house up to 50 patients, in very close proximity and little personal space. The daily regime was strictly regimented, with little room for variation and often under the watchful eye of staff. During the early years of the Asylums, wards were locked and security was kept high as attendants were fined for every patient that escaped on their watch. As the years passed, this was more relaxed, and by the time the asylums were coming to a close, patients were allowed much more freedom and were actively encouraged to leave the hospital and visit the local towns. Throughout the entire life of the Asylum system, patients were encouraged to work and undertake recreation. Local artisans were employed to teach skills and aid in the production of goods that were sold and used to fund social events. Sports teams were formed, and inter-hospital rivalries were formed. The able bodied were put to work around the hospital grounds, males running the farms and traditional male activities, and the females the laundry and kitchens. The sick and infirm patients were housed in their own wards and will have spent the majority of their time there. Angry, violent or suicidal patients were housed within the wards, and on occasions, locked within a padded cell. Seclusion rooms were also employed, but these were mainly used for patients who would disturb others during the night, in latter years they were sued for patients as a reward so that they could have some privacy.
What was the Work and Recreation?
Work and Recreation was central to life within the Asylum. Sport was made available to the patients, but walking within the grounds and woodlands was the most widely available. This started out as being heavily supervised walks, but as time passed, it was realised that other activities such as art, music and dancing were beneficial. The social activities of the hospital progressed with those of society as a whole, and holidays and interaction with outsiders was encouraged, helping to rehabilitate them. Sports became more prevalent as time passed, and many different teams were formed. The Farm was the main centre of employment for the male patients, where they grew food stuff for the hospitals consumption. The farms proved to be one of the most profitable activities the patients undertook, but with the advent of the NHS the farms began to close and the land sold off. The kitchens were also a great source of employment, with food grown and produced by the patients being served. Patients were also employed in the distribution of the dinners, and each patient undertook that task every day. So one patient would make porridge for the entire hospital, everyday! The Laundry was the largest female employer within the Asylums. Clothing and bedding were sorted in the wards, booked out and transported to the laundry for washing. Patients who worked in the laundry were normally housed within the Laundry Ward. There was also various other work departments around the buildings, dealing with trades such as shoe repair, printing, clothing repairs, the libraries and various aspects of the engineering departments. It was known for patients to be paid for the work.
How was it different for the sexes?
The Females
According to case notes, most women came in for short periods only simply to recover from the stress and exhaustion of their domestic lives – once rested and relaxed they were sent on their way. Women were also admitted from problematic marriages or as a result of giving birth to illegitimate children – even if a result of rape. Post natal depression was also a common reason for a women admittance. The females wards differed vastly from the male wards; they were based around Victorian ideals of femininity with little opportunity for them to go outside and even fewer opportunities to play games. It was only later that this changed. As with the tradition at the time the women’s activities were confined to the indoors, which led to a strong bond being formed between both female patients and staff. The women were put to work throughout the asylum, mainly undertaking jobs in the needle room, the laundry and general housekeeping duties around the ward – the latter was kept for problematic patients. The daily routine of the ward remained unchanged for many many years, patients would rise at 7am for breakfast which would consist of coffee, tea or cocoa with porridge and bread as the main. After breakfast the ‘good’ patients would have been taken to there respective jobs in the laundry or needle room – the others would have waited around until the airing courts were opened later in the morning. Lunch would have been served at around 12:30 and would have consisted of food produced on the local farm; this was the main meal of the day. The airing courts were then opened up again in the middle of the afternoon for just over an hour. Tea was served in the early evening and was known to consist of bread and cake. Due to staff shortages on the female side of the hospitals, nurses were known to have dosed the patients with paradehyde in the evenings to ease the load.
The Males
The majority of male patients within the asylum system before the first world war were often poor and without spouses to look after them. After WWI, ‘Shell Shock’ was a prevalent condition among men admitted to the Asylums. At the time of this condition being diagnosed it cause controversy due to the condition being similar to the female psychosis. Alcoholism and the delusion related with it were also common reasons for certification. Unlike the female sides of the asylums, the male sides were smaller in numbers. Escape was more common with male patients than females; but due to the smaller numbers of males in some hospitals it was noted that they had a more stable time within the ward. The males wards had the same daily schedule as the female wards and instead of being involved with the laundry and needle rooms, they worked the kitchen and the bakehouse. They were also involved in the daily housekeeping of the wards. Other than the difference in activities the male wards were normally run with a stricter discipline; which most of the patients would have been used to given their backgrounds within the military. The male population of the Asylums received a wider range of activities for their recovery; they were allowed to join sports teams and the hospital band (if there was one); there were also inter-hospital leagues fort hem to compete in. Rational patients were also employed on working the farms and the upkeep of the grounds and gardens; they were also employed in various workshops and engineering practices. One such example is an account from Severalls of a male patients were used to lay 2-inch piping to the cricket ground, and build a band stand.
What were the treatments that were used?
The treatments used throughout the history of the Asylums have varied massively. When the Asylums first opened, there was little knowledge of the psychiatric conditions or how to treat them. The lunatics were kept calm and occupied as much as possible, and when the need arouse then restraint was employed. The first therapy that was employed throughout the Asylum system was the treatment of General Paralysis of the Insane, caused by Syphilis, with Malaria infected mosquitoes. This treatment was used through until the 1950’s when a new drug was developed. The next treatment that was developed was the Deep Insulin Therapy, where it was believed that Schizophrenia was caused by a high blood sugar in the brain. Insulin would be administered until the body went into shock and then the patient was revived with a sugary dose of tea. In the 1930’s, two major treatments were developed in Europe, these were the Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and the Lobotomy. Both these treatments involved stresses to the brain. ECT involved passing a current through the brain and induce an epileptic fit, which was known to cause injury to the patient. ECT proved to be very effective for patients suffering with depression and still used in very rare cases today. The lobotomy involved cutting the brain tissue within the frontal lobes of the brain. This had mixed results and was discontinued in the 50’s. The big breakthrough in the psychiatric treatments was the introduction of drugs to the Asylum system. The first drug to be used, discovered by a French Naval Surgeon was (Largactil) and was the first antipsychotic to be developed and it had a huge impact on the condition of patients. This development led to the rapid introduction of drugs within the psychiatric world. The next large development was talking through patients problems, and occupational therapy.
Were mechanical restraints used?
In short, yes. Before the advent of drugs and other treatments, manic, aggressive and suicidal patients were dealt with through restraint. Padded cell were also used to house patients who were self harming, or violent towards other (see our padded cell section). The most common restraints were the “straight jacket” and fingerless gloves. Both of these inhibited the movement of the patient. Less common forms were the used of continuous baths – patients were placed in a warm bath and a sheet affixed over the top, with their head and shoulders coming through it – and bed restraints. In the early years of the Asylums, restraints were common place, and their used recorded. After the 1890 Act, the use of restraints was severely limited and had to be approved by a medical officer and each use recorded.
Why did they close?
They had become to large, unwieldy and the system had opened itself up to abuse. In 1961 the Minister of Health, Enoch Powell was invited to speak at the AGM of the National Association for Mental Health. In his speech he announced that it the government of the day intended to “the elimination of by far the greater part of the country’s mental hospitals.” At the same time, regional boards were asked to “ensure that no more money than necessary is spent on upgrading and reconditioning”. This announcement had stunned the medical professions as there had been no indication that the government was going to head in this direction; only a handful of experimental community care programmes existed around the country. It would take 25 years for these plans to take afoot and the closures to start. There were two reasons for the decline in the large institutions, the advancement in psychiatric treatment meant that a standard hospital was able to provide care to acute cases that required immediate attention, and the drugs available meant that patients did not need twenty-four hour care. This meant that the traditional asylum was left with fewer long term patients to care for – patient numbers reduced from over 150,00 in 1950 to 80,000 in 1975. The second reason for the closure of the mental hospitals was the passing of the Mental Health Act 1983 – this saw the people being committed to the large asylums being given back their full rights and having the ability to appeal their certification; it also saw the mentally deficient being moved back into the community under the care in community projects. The first hospital to close due to the shift in medical treatment and public perception was Banstead Hospital in 1986, others followed suit over the next twenty years, with only a handful remaining open today. The medical staff at many hospitals still keep in contact with their old patients to make sure that the arrangements are working for them. The hospitals themselves either stand empty and derelict, or have been demolished and converted to cheap affordable housing, with only a few reminders to the residents of the previous history there. The Victorian Asylums are now a long forgotten memory, however in a recent NHS study, they have found that people suffering from mental illnesses recover when they are in a safe environment and are involved in their treatment, rather than being allowed to fend for themselves. In speaking with a number of retired nurses who had worked within the system, they were unsure as to whether the mass closures and the entire move to the care in the community method was the right one. One even felt that the number of hospital that closed shouldn’t have been so high, with a few being kept as regional specialists that could provide a more comprehensive support system. At the grounds of Horton Hospital, two of the old villas have recently been refurbished to act as a care home for the mentally ill.
WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THESE WALLS …. STAYS BEHIND THESE WALLS .!!!!!!!!!!
THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION
PLEASE DO BE AWARE THAT WE HAVE NO LINKS OR AFFILIATION TO ANY EXTREMIST ORGANISATIONS OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER ….. WE ARE SIMPLY A FREE SPEECH, POLITICALLY INCORRECT VISITOR ATTRACTION THAT FEATURE A GREAT MANY HISTORICALLY SENSITIVE AND TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTION DARES TO COVER .
AS WE ALWAYS SAY …. IF EASILY OFFENDED , DISTURBED OR OF A SENSITIVE NATURE THEN PLEASE DO AVOID A VISIT TO LITTLEDEAN JAIL
Above is an intriguing video showing Mo Asumang, daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother, talks to BBC News about her experiences making her new documentary, The Aryans, in which she confronts racists, both in Germany and among the Ku Klux Klan in America.
THE KU KLUX KLAN EXHIBITION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL …. Deemed by many to be politically incorrect.. though in our view and indeed by a great many black people, an historically significant and educational insight .
Above : US President Donald Trump allegedly pictured here with members of the infamous and notorious Ku Klux klan .
THE KU KLUX KLAN EXHIBITION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL ……A PART OF BLACK AMERICAN HISTORY THAT SHOULD NOT BE HIDDEN UNDER THE CARPET .
Below is an interesting video news item relating to an insight into the new KKK
PLEASE DO BE AWARE THAT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , IT’S OWNER , OR ANY OF IT’S STAFF HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL HAVE NO AFFILIATION , CONNECTION OR INVOLVEMENT WITH ANY EXTREMIST , POLITICALLY MOTIVATED OR OTHERWISE MOVEMENTS WHATSOEVER …… WE SIMPLY EXHIBIT AND TOUCH UPON A GREAT MANY POLITICALLY INCORRECT AND TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTIONS DARE COVER IN THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO DO HERE. …. “IT’S ALL HISTORY FOR GOODNESS SAKE”….EVEN IF ON OCCASIONS, SENSITIVE , THOUGHT PROVOKING SUBJECT MATTERS THAT INCITE STRONG DEBATE
BELOW IS A VERY BRIEF PICTORIAL INSIGHT INTO SOME OF THE KU KLUX KLAN EXHIBITION ITEMS ON DISPLAY HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL
1The 3rd Klan is decentralized, with approx. 179 chapters.
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right[4][5][6][7] organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through terrorism.[8][9] Since the mid-20th century, the KKK has also been anti-communist.[8] The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters and is classified as a hate group.[10]
The first Klan flourished in the South in the 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities.[11] The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid 1920s, and adopted the same costumes and code words as the first Klan, while introducing cross burnings.[12] The third KKK emerged after World War II and was associated with opposing the Civil Rights Movement and progress among minorities. The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent reference to the USA’s “Anglo-Saxon” and “Celtic” blood, harking back to 19th-century nativism and claiming descent from the original 18th-century British colonial revolutionaries.[13] The first and third incarnations of the Klan have well-established records of engaging in terrorism and political violence, though historians debate whether or not the tactic was supported by the second KKK.
First KKKThree Klans
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a charitable organization to help widows and orphans.[14] by veterans of the Confederate Army.[15] They named it after the Greek wordkuklos, which means circle. The name means “Circle of Brothers.”[16]
Although there was no organizational structure above the local level, similar groups arose across the South, adopting the name and methods.[17] Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes.[18] Prosecution of Klan crimes and enforcement of the Force Acts suppressed Klan activity. In 1874 and later, however, newly organized and openly active paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, started a fresh round of violence aimed at suppressing blacks’ voting and running Republicans out of office. These contributed to segregationist white Democrats regaining political power in all the Southern states by 1877.
Second KKK
In 1915, the second Klan was founded in Georgia. Starting in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of recruiting (which paid most of the initiation fee and costume charges to the organizers) and grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration, its membership grew most rapidly in cities, and spread to theMidwest and West out of the South. The second KKK preached “One Hundred Percent Americanism” demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality and better enforcement ofprohibition. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism.[19] Its appeal was directed exclusively at white Protestants.[20] Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South.[21]
The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation’s eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.[22] Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926-28, where it attacked immigrants from Eastern Europe.[23]
Third KKK
The “Ku Klux Klan” name was used by many independent local groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor’s offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.[24] Several members of KKK groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Today, researchers estimate that there may be approximately 150 Klan chapters with upwards of 5,000 members nationwide.[25]
Today, a large majority of sources consider the Klan to be a “subversive or terrorist organization”.[25][26][27][28] In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan to be a terrorist organization.[29] A similar effort was made in 2004 when a professor at the University of Louisville began a campaign to have the Klan declared a terrorist organization so it could be banned from campus.[30] In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and to blow up a natural gas processing plant.[31]
Six well-educated Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, during Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War.[32][33] The name was formed by combining the Greek kyklos (κύκλος, circle) with clan.[34] The group was known for a short time as the “Kuklux Clan.” The Ku Klux Klan was one among a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, including the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865) and the Knights of the White Camelia (1867) in Louisiana.[35]
Historians generally see the KKK as part of the post Civil War insurgent violence related not only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their effort to control the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means to restore white supremacy. In 1866, MississippiGovernor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control and lawlessness were widespread; in some states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will. The Klan used public violence against blacks as intimidation. They burned houses, and attacked and killed blacks, leaving their bodies on the roads.[36]
A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic Party as continuations of the Confederacy
In an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting up to a national headquarters. Since most of the Klan’s members were veterans, they were used to the hierarchical structure of the organization, but the Klan never operated under this centralized structure. Local chapters and bands were highly independent.
Former Confederate Brigadier General George Gordon developed the Prescript, or Klan dogma. The Prescript suggested elements of white supremacist belief. For instance, an applicant should be asked if he was in favor of “a white man’s government”, “the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights.”[37] The latter is a reference to the Ironclad Oath, which stripped the vote from white persons who refused to swear that they had not borne arms against the Union. Gordon was said to have told former slave trader and Confederate GeneralNathan Bedford Forrest about the Klan. Forrest allegedly responded, “That’s a good thing; that’s a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their place.”[38] Forrest went on to become Grand Wizard, the Klan’s national leader.[15][39][40]
In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan’s primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republicanstate governments, people like Tennessee governor Brownlow and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. He argued that many southerners believed that blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.[41] One Alabama newspaper editor declared “The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan.”[42]
Despite Gordon’s and Forrest’s work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously. There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters. Klan members used violence to settle old feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore white dominance in the disrupted postwar society. The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:
Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartimeguerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskeydistillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.[43]
In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.[44]
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To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks.[44] The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a “reign of terror against Republican leaders both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions.”[45]
Activities
Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family.
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Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks. Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other’s faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers. “The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night.” With this method both the high and the low could be attacked.[46] The Ku Klux Klan night riders “sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously.”[47]
The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen’s Bureau workers. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society. Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks. “Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites.” Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. “Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault.”[48]
Klan violence worked to suppress black voting. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grant’s opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.[49]
Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties. Freedmen’s Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen’s beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies.[51]
Milder encounters also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry:[52]
One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois), whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited … between one and two o’clock in the morning on March 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes. She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of device in front. The lieutenant had a pistolin his hand and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten men stood inside the door and the porch was full. They treated her “gentlemanly and quietly” but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second notice. She heeded the warning and left the county.
By 1868, two years after the Klan’s creation, its activity was beginning to decrease.[53] Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way to avoid prosecution for freelance violence. Many influential southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it.[54] There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating “that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain.”[53]
Resistance
Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized “the anti-Ku Klux”. They put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina and patrolled the streets to protect their homes.[55]
National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed or believed that it was just a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors.[56] Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.
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In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a Congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. They accumulated 12 volumes of horrifying testimony. In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler ofMassachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act). This added to the enmity that southern white Democrats bore toward him.[57]While the bill was being considered, further violence in the South swung support for its passage. The Governor of South Carolina appealed for federal troops to assist his efforts in keeping control of the state. A riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse were reported, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.[58] The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed President Ulysses S. Grant to suspend Habeas Corpus.[59]
In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler’s legislation. The Ku Klux Klan Act was used by the Federal government together with the 1870 Force Act, another act that President Grant signed, to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution. Under the 1871 Klan Act, after the Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve, President Grant issued a suspension of Habeas Corpus, and sent Federal troops into 9 South Carolina counties. The Klansmen were arrested and prosecuted in Federal court. More African Americans served on juries in Federal court than were selected for local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process.[59][60] In the crackdown, hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned.
The Klan declines and is superseded by other groups
Although Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that he could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days’ notice, as a secret or “invisible” group, it had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers. It was difficult for observers to judge its actual membership. It had created a sensation by the dramatic nature of its masked forays and because of its many murders.
In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a “terrorist organization”.[61] It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina.[62] Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan’s costume for anonymity, to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence. Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it was “being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace”.[63] HistorianStanley Horn writes “generally speaking, the Klan’s end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment”.[64]A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870, “A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux”.[65]
While people used the Klan as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted against them. African Americans were kept off juries. In lynching cases, all-white juries almost never indicted Ku Klux Klan members. When there was a rare indictment, juries were unlikely to vote for a conviction. In part, jury members feared reprisals from local Klansmen.
Others may have agreed with lynching as a way of keeping dominance over black men. In many states, officials were reluctant to use black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised.[60] When Republican Governor of North CarolinaWilliam Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, it added to his unpopularity. Combined with violence and fraud at the polls, the Republicans lost their majority in the state legislature. Disaffection with Holden’s actions led to white Democratic legislators’ impeaching Holden and removing him from office, but their reasons were numerous.[66]
The Klan was destroyed in South Carolina[67] and decimated throughout the rest of the South, where it had already been in decline. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions.[68]
In some areas, other local paramilitary organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs continued to intimidate and murder black voters.[69]
In 1874, organized white paramilitary groups were formed in the Deep South to replace the faltering Klan: the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts inMississippi, North and South Carolina. They campaigned openly to turn Republicans out of office, intimidated and killed black voters, tried to disrupt organizing and suppressed black voting. They were out in force during the campaigns and elections of 1874 and 1876, contributing to the conservative Democrats regaining power in 1876, against a background of electoral violence.
Shortly after, in United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the Supreme Court ruled that the Force Act of 1870 did not give the Federal government power to regulate private actions, but only those by state governments. The result was that as the century went on, African Americans were at the mercy of hostile state governments that refused to intervene against private violence and paramilitary groups.
Whereas the number of indictments across the South was large, the number of cases leading to prosecution and sentencing was relatively small. The overloaded federal courts were not able to meet the demands of trying such a tremendous number of cases, a situation that led to selective pardoning. By late 1873 and 1874, most of the charges against Klansmen were dropped although new cases continued to be prosecuted for several more years. Most of those sentenced had either served their terms or had been pardoned by 1875. The Supreme Court of the United States eviscerated the Ku Klux Act in 1876 by ruling that the federal government could no longer prosecute individuals although states would be forced to comply with federal civil rights provisions. Republicans passed a second civil rights act (the Civil Rights Act of 1875) to grant equal access to public facilities and other housing accommodations regardless of race. Ironically, the Klan during this period served to further Northern reconstruction efforts, as Ku Klux violence provided the political climate needed to pass civil rights protections for blacks. Although the Ku Klux Act of 1871 dismantled the first Klan, Southern whites formed other, similar groups that kept blacks away from the polls through intimidation and physical violence. Reconstruction ended with the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who suspended the federal military occupation of the South; yet blacks still found themselves without the basic civil liberties that Congressional Republicans had sought to secure.[70]
Klan costumes, also called “regalia“, disappeared by the early 1870s (Wade 1987, p. 109). The fact that the Klan did not exist for decades was shown when Simmons’s 1915 recreation of the Klan attracted only two aging “former Reconstruction Klansmen.” All other members were new.[72] By 1872, the Klan was broken as an organization.[73] Nonetheless, the goals that the Klan had failed to achieve itself, such as suppressing suffrage for Southern blacks and driving a wedge between poor whites and blacks, were largely accomplished by the 1890s by militant Southern whites. Lynchings of African Americans, far from being ended by the Klan’s disintegration, instead peaked in 1892 with 161 deaths.[74]
The second Klan: 1915–1944
Refounding in 1915
Three events in 1915 acted as catalysts to the revival of the Klan:
The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan.
Jewish businessman Leo Frank was lynched near Atlanta after the Georgia governor commuted his death sentence to life in prison. Frank had been convicted in 1913 and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young white factory worker named Mary Phagan, in a trial marked by intimidation of the jury and media frenzy. His legal appeals had been exhausted.
The second Ku Klux Klan was founded by William J. Simmons at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta. It added to the original anti-black ideology with a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, prohibitionistand antisemitic agenda. Most of the founders were from an Atlanta-area organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, which had organized around Leo Frank’s trial. The new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.
The Birth of a Nation
An illustration from The Clansman: “Take dat f’um yo equal—”
Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation. It has been widely noted for reviving the Ku Klux Klan.
Director D. W. Griffith‘s The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan. His film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard’s Spots, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Dixon said his purpose was “to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!” The film created a nationwide Klan craze. At the official premier in Atlanta, members of the Klan rode up and down the street in front of the theater.[75]
Much of the modern Klan’s iconography, including the standardized white costume and the lighted cross, are derived from the film. Its imagery was based on Dixon’s romanticized concept of old England and Scotland, as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott. The film’s influence and popularity were enhanced by a widely reported endorsement by historian and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.
The Birth of a Nation included extensive quotations from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People, as if to give it a stronger basis. After seeing the film in a special White House screening, Wilson allegedly said, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”[76] Wilson’s remarks immediately became controversial. Wilson tried to remain aloof, but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial.[77] Wilson’s aide, Joseph Tumulty said, “the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it.”[78]
The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a meeting led by William J. Simmons on top of Stone Mountain. A few aging members of the original Klan attended, along with members of the self-named Knights of Mary Phagan.
Simmons stated that he had been inspired by the original Klan’s Prescripts, written in 1867 by Confederate veteran George Gordon in an attempt to create a national organization. These were never adopted by the Klan, however.[79] The Prescript stated the Klan’s purposes in idealistic terms, hiding the fact that its members committed acts of vigilante violence and murder from behind masks.
The Second Klan saw threats from every direction. A religious tone was apparent in all of its activities; indeed, “two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers,” says historian Brian R. Farmer.[80] Much of the Klan’s energy went to guarding the home, in its view, says historian Kathleen Blee, to protect “the interests of white womanhood.”[81]
The second Klan arose during the nadir of American race relations, in response to urbanization and industrialization. Massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe led to fears among Protestants. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North stoked racism by whites in Northern industrial cities; thus the second Klan would achieve its greatest political power not in any Southern state, but in Indiana. The migration of African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern cities further increased tensions. The Klan grew most rapidly in urbanizing cities which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, Dayton, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. InMichigan, more than half of the members lived in Detroit and were concerned about urban issues: limited housing, rapid social change, competition for jobs.[82]Stanley Horn, a Southern historian sympathetic to the first Klan, was careful in an oral interview to distinguish it from the later “spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days”.[83]
In an era without Social Security or widely available life insurance, it was common for men to join fraternal organizations such as the Elks or the Woodmen of the World to provide for their families in case they died or were unable to work. The founder of the new Klan, William J. Simmons, was a member of twelve different fraternal organizations. He recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, and consciously modeled the Klan after those organizations.[84]
Klan organizers, called “Kleagles“, signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK costumes. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a huge rally, often with burning crosses and perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant minister. He then left town with the money. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.
The Klan’s growth was also affected by mobilization for World War I and postwar tensions, especially in the cities where strangers came up against each other more often. Southern whites resented the arming of black soldiers. Black veterans did not want to go back to second-class status in the United States. Some were lynched, still in uniform, upon returning from overseas service.[85]
Activities
Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in raising money, and the Klan remained a small operation in the Atlanta area until 1920, when he handed its day-to-day activities over to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke.[86] The Klan now expanded exponentially, reaching a mass national base by 1925. The remodeled Klan downplayed the old issues left over from Reconstruction, and focused on anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant appeals. It now sold itself as a nativist and strenuously patriotic organization, and it emphasized its support for vigorous enforcement of prohibition laws. Most of its members lived in the North and West.
Prohibition
Historians agree that the Klan’s resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over prohibition.[87] Thus Prendergast contends that the KKK’s “support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation”.[88] The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes with violence. In 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas. The national Klan office was finally established in Dallas,Texas, but Little Rock, Arkansas was the home of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. The first head of this auxiliary was a former president of the ArkansasWCTU.[89][verification needed] Membership in the Klan and in other prohibition groups overlapped, and they often coordinated activities.[90]
Labor and anti-unionism
In southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs but opposed unions. During the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and was open to African-American members. With access to dynamite and using the skills from their jobs in mining and steel, in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham began to perpetrate bombings in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks who moved into middle-class neighborhoods. “By mid-1949, there were so many charred house carcasses that the area [College Hills] was informally named Dynamite Hill.”[91] Independent Klan groups remained active in Birmingham and were deeply engaged in violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.[91]
Urbanization
Stone Mountain, site of the founding of the second Klan in 1915
A significant characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in both the North and the South. In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they made up more than half of the state’s membership. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who were trying to protect their jobs and housing from the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who tended to be Catholic and Jewish in numbers higher than earlier groups of immigrants; and black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the U.S. Midwest. The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.[92]
In the medium-size industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts in the 1920s, the Klan ascended to power quickly but diminished as a result of opposition from the Catholic Church. There was no violence and the local newspaper ridiculed Klansmen as “night-shirt knights”. Half of the members were Swedish American, including some first-generation immigrants. The ethnic and religious conflicts between Worcester residents is discussed. Swedish Protestants fought against Irish Catholics for political and ideological control of the city.[93]
For some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indianashowed the rural stereotype was false for that state:
Indiana’s Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks. Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.[94]
The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long. Membership in the Klan turned over rapidly as people found out that it was not the group they wanted. Millions joined, and at its peak in the 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation’s eligible population. The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan’s decline.
The second Klan adopted a burning Latin cross as its symbol. No such crosses had been used by the first Klan, but the burning cross was used as a symbol of intimidation by the second Klan.[95] The burning of the cross was also used by the second Klan as a symbol of Christian fellowship, and its lighting during meetings was steeped in Christian prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism.[12]
The practice of cross burning had been loosely based on ancient Scottish clans’ burning a St. Andrew’s cross (an X-shaped cross) as a beacon to muster forces for war. In The Clansman (see above), Dixon had falsely claimed that the first Klan had used fiery crosses when rallying to fight against Reconstruction. Griffith brought this image to the screen in The Birth of a Nation; he portrayed the burning cross as an upright Latin cross rather than the St. Andrew’s cross. Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie, prominently displaying it at the 1915 Stone Mountain meeting. The symbol has been associated with the Klan ever since.[96]
Education
In 1921, in an attempt to gain a foothold in education, the Klan bought Lanier University, a struggling Baptist university in Atlanta. Nathan Bedford Forrest, grandson of the confederate general by the same name, was appointed business manager, and the school would teach “pure, 100 percent Americanism”. Enrollment was dismal and the school closed after its first year of Klan ownership.[97]
The Klan had numerous members in every part of the U.S. At its peak, claimed Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas.[98] The Klan also moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.[99]
The Klan issue played a significant role at the bitterly divisive 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. The leading candidates were Protestant William Gibbs McAdoo, with a base in areas where the Klan was strong, and Catholic New York Governor Al Smith, with a base in the large cities. After weeks of stalemate, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise. Anti-Klan delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan; it was narrowly defeated.[100][101]
In some states, such as Alabama and California, the KKK worked for political reform. In 1924, the Klan became active in local politics in Anaheim, California. The city had been controlled by an entrenched commercial-civic elite that was mostlyGerman American. The elite gave little support to the prohibition laws—the mayor, for example, had been a saloon keeper. The Klan, led by the minister of the First Christian Church, represented a rising group of politically oriented non-German citizens who had been shut out of influence and who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic and self-serving. Cocoltchos says the Klansmen sought to create a model orderly community. There were about 1200 Klan members in orange County, and Cocoltchos tracked them through local records, comparing them to 300 prominent anti-Klan activists. The economic and occupational profile of the pro and anti-Klan groups shows the two were similar and about equally prosperous. Cocoltchos finds no evidence of status anxiety. The Klansmen were all Protestants, as were most of the antis, but the antis also enlisted many Catholic Germans. The Klansmen had a much higher rate of voting and joining nonpartisan civic groups (such as the Chamber of Commerce) than the othersbefore they joined the Klan, suggesting to Cocoltchos it was a high sense of civic activism that led to joining the KKK in the first place. The Klan easily won the hotly contested local election in Anaheim in April 1924. They systematically fired Catholic city employees and replaced them with Klansmen. The new city council tried to strictly enforce prohibition, and the Klan held large rallies and initiation ceremonies over the summer. The opposition organized, bribed a Klansman for the secret membership list, exposed the Klansmen running in the primaries and defeated most of them. The antis stepped up the campaign in 1925 and succeeded in a hotly contested election in voting to recall the Klansmen who had been elected in April 1924. The Klan in Anaheim quickly collapsed, its newspaper closed after losing a libel suit, and the minister who led the local Klavern moved to Kansas.[102]
In Alabama the Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other political measures which benefited lower-class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a political force in the state, as leaders such as J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership to try to build political power against the Black Belt planters, who had long dominated the state.[103] Black was elected US senator in 1926; President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court not knowing he had been active in the Klan in the 1920s. In 1926, with Klan support, Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor’s office. He was a former Klan chapter head. He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. Because the Alabama state legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, however, even the Klan was unable to break the planters’ and rural areas’ hold on legislative power.
Its predecessor had been an exclusively partisan Democratic organization in the South. The second Klan grew in the Midwest, where for a time, its members were courted by both Republicans and Democrats. The KKK state organizations endorsed candidates from either party that supported its goals; Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the Midwest. In the South, however, the southern Klan remained Democratic, closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government. With continuing disfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites, the only political activity took place within the Democratic Party.
Resistance and decline
The Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in Indiana politics and society after World War I. It was made up of American-born, white Protestants of many income and social levels. Nationally, in the 1920s, Indiana had the most powerful Ku Klux Klan. Though it counted a high number of members statewide (over 30% of its white male citizens[104]), its importance peaked with the 1924 election of Edward Jackson for governor. A short time later, the scandal surrounding the murder trial of D.C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the Ku Klux Klan as upholders of law and order. By 1926 the Ku Klux Klan was “crippled and discredited.”[105]
D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. His conviction for murdering a young white schoolteacher in 1925 devastated the Indiana Klan.
D. C. Stephenson was the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states. He led the states under his control to separate from the national KKK organization in 1923. In his 1925 trial, he was convicted for second degree murder for his part in the rape and subsequent death[106] of Madge Oberholtzer. After Stephenson’s conviction in a sensational trial, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana. Historian Leonard Moore concluded that a failure in leadership caused the Klan’s collapse:
Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana’s Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan’s stated goals. They were uninterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan’s behalf.[107]
Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan. In response to blunt attacks against Jewish Americans and the Klan’s campaign to outlaw private schools, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed after the lynching of Leo Frank. When one civic group began to publish Klan membership lists, the number of members quickly declined. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoplecarried on public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied against Klan abuses in Congress. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas of the Midwest began to decline rapidly.[92]
In Alabama, KKK vigilantes, thinking that they had governmental protection, launched a wave of physical terror in 1927. They targeted both blacks and whites for violation of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses.[108] This led however to a large backlash beginning in the media. Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, began publishing a series of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan for its “racial and religious intolerance”. Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for his crusade.[109] Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to the organization as violent and “un-American”. Sheriffs cracked down. In the 1928 presidential election, the state voted for the Democratic candidate Al Smith, although he was Catholic.
Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6,000 by 1930. Small independent units continued to be active in Birmingham, where in the late 1940s, members launched a reign of terror by bombing the homes of upwardly mobile African Americans. Activism by such independent KKK groups increased as a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Imperial WizardHiram Wesley Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They were unable to staunch the declining membership. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944. Local Klan groups closed over the following years.[110]
Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1928
Due in part to the Klan terror directed at them, five million blacks left the South for northern, midwestern and western cities from 1940 to 1970.
After World War II, folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan and provided information to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided secret code words to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy’s intention to strip away the Klan’s mystique and trivialize the Klan’s rituals and code words may have contributed to the decline in Klan recruiting and membership.[111] In the 1950s, Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.[112]
The following table shows the change in the Klan’s estimated membership over time.[113] (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods.)
Soviet propaganda poster (Freedom, American style, 1950, by Nikolay Dolgorukov and Boris Efimov), showing the KKK’s lynchings of blacks.
The name “Ku Klux Klan” began to be used by several independent groups. Beginning in the 1950s, for instance, individual Klan groups in Birmingham, Alabama, began to resist social change and blacks’ improving their lives by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods. There were so many bombings in Birmingham of blacks’ homes by Klan groups in the 1950s that the city’s nickname was “Bombingham”.[24]
During the tenure of Bull Connor as police commissioner in the city, Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with impunity. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack.[24] When local and state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists, the federal government established effective intervention.
In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors’ administrations.[24] In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation and assassination directly against individuals. Many murders went unreported and were not prosecuted by local and state authorities. Continuing disfranchisement of blacks across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all white.
According to a report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of 40 black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some of the bombing victims were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random violence.[115]
The 1964 murder of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in Mississippi. In August 2007, based on the confession of Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted. Seale was sentenced to serve three life sentences. Seale was a former Mississippi policeman and sheriff’s deputy.[119]
The 1965 Alabama murder of Viola Liuzzo. She was a Southern-raised Detroit mother of five who was visiting the state in order to attend a civil rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.
The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of his murder and sentenced to life. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other’s indictment was dismissed.
There was also resistance to the Klan. In 1953, newspaper publisher W. Horace Carter received a Pulitzer prize for reporting on the activities of the Klan. In a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with white people, and they threatened to return with more men. When the KKK held a nighttime rally nearby, they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.[120]
While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had paid informants in the Klan, for instance in Birmingham in the early 1960s, its relations with local law enforcement agencies and the Klan were often ambiguous. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, appeared more concerned about Communist links to civil rights activists than about controlling Klan excesses against citizens. In 1964, the FBI’sCOINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights groups.[24]
As 20th-century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of citizens’ civil rights, the government revived the Force Act and Klan Act from Reconstruction days. Federal prosecutors used these laws as the basis for investigations and indictments in the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner;[121] and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo.[122] They were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic.
Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the KKK in 1979, reported that the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts were highly successful. Rival KKK factions accused each other’s leaders of being FBI informants. Bill Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was revealed to have been working for the FBI.[125]
Thompson, the journalist who claimed he had infiltrated the Klan, related that KKK leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of civil lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center for damages of millions of dollars. These were filed after KKK members shot into a group of African Americans. Klansmen curtailed activities to conserve money for defense against the lawsuits. The KKK also used lawsuits as tools; they filed a libel suit to prevent publication of a paperback edition of Thompson’s book.
Tennessee shooting
In 1980, three KKK members shot four elderly black women (Viola Ellison, Lela Evans, Opal Jackson and Katherine Johnson) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, following a KKK initiation rally. A fifth woman, Fannie Crumsey, was injured by flying glass in the incident. Attempted murder charges were filed against the three KKK members, two of whom—Bill Church and Larry Payne—were acquitted by an all-white jury, and the other of whom—Marshall Thrash—was sentenced by the same jury to nine months on lesser charges. He was released after three months.[126][127][128] In 1982, a jury awarded the five women $535,000 in a civil rights trial.[129]
Michael Donald lynching
After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama, the FBI investigated his death and two local KKK members were convicted of having a role, including Henry Francis Hays, who was sentenced to death. With the support of attorneys Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, sued the KKK in civil court in Alabama. Her lawsuit against the United Klans of America was tried in February 1987. The all-white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Donald and ordered the Klan to pay US$7 million. To pay the judgment, the KKK turned over all of its assets, including its national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa.[130] After exhausting the appeals process, Hays was executed for Donald’s death in Alabama on June 6, 1997. It was the first time since 1913 that a white man had been executed in Alabama for a crime against an African American.[131]
The modern KKK is not one organization; rather it is composed of small independent chapters across the U.S.[137] The formation of independent chapters has made KKK groups more difficult to infiltrate, and researchers find it hard to estimate their numbers. Estimates are that about two-thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the Southern United States, with another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest.[138][139][140] KKK members have stepped up recruitment in recent years, but the organization grows slowly, with membership estimated at 5,000–8,000 across 179 chapters. These recent membership campaigns have been based on issues such as people’s anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime and same-sex marriage.[141] Many KKK groups have formed strong alliances with other white supremacist groups, such as neo-Nazis. Some KKK groups have become increasingly “Nazified”, adopting the look and emblems of white power skinheads.[142]
On November 14, 2008, an all-white jury of seven men and seven women awarded $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages to plaintiff Jordan Gruver, represented by theSouthern Poverty Law Center against the Imperial Klans of America.[143] The ruling found that five IKA members had savagely beaten Gruver, then 16 years old, at a Kentucky county fair in July 2006.[144]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, as well as their right to field political candidates.[145]
Current Klan splinter divisions have grown substantially since the 2008 election of U.S. President Barack Obama, the first African-American to hold the office;[146][147] the Klan has expanded its recruitment efforts to white supremacists at the international level.[148] Current membership estimates by the ADL hold at a national estimate of five thousand.[140]
Ex-Grand Wizard David Duke has claimed that thousands of Tea Party movement activists have urged him to run for president in 2012[149] and he is seriously considering entering the Republican Party primaries.[150] Duke has also released a video detailing his platform.[151] In the video, he pledges that as president he would stop all immigration to the U.S., including legal immigration, and says that he “will not let Israel or any nation dictate our foreign policy.”[152] He has also claimed that he would be “willing to risk life and limb, endure the barbs of the media” to mount “the most honest campaign for president since the time of our Founding Fathers.”[153] However, Duke is legally disqualified from running for public office as part of his 2002 guilty plea for tax evasion.[154]
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by national director and self-claimed pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas.[158] It claims to be the biggest Klan organization in America today.
Other countries
Aside from Canada, there have been various attempts to organise KKK chapters outside of the United States. In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation founding member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country,[159][160] and in recent years the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First.[161] Recruitment activity has also been reported in Britain.[162][163]
Vocabulary
Membership in the Klan is secret. Like many fraternal organizations, the Klan has signs which members can use to recognize one another. A member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) in conversation to surreptitiously identify himself to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.[164]
Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words[165] beginning with “Kl” including:
All of the above terminology was created by William Simmons, as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan.[166] The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were “Wizard” for the overall leader of the Klan and “Night Hawk” for the official in charge of security.
The Imperial Kludd was the chaplain of the Imperial Klonvokation and he performed “such other duties as may be required by the Imperial Wizard.” The Imperial Kaliff was the second highest position after the Imperial Wizard.[167]
HERE IS A BIT OF INTERACTIVE TITILLATING …. “TONGUE IN CHEEK” INSIGHT INTO SOME OF OUR INTRIGUING AND THOUGHT PROVOKING TOOLS OF THE TRADE USED ON LADIES SUFFERING FROM HYSTERIA DURING THE VICTORIAN ERA THAT ARE ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL … IN AND AMONGST OUR VERY CLUTTERED, DIVERSE CURIOSITIES AND OTHER COLLECTIONS
Are these power tools? Medieval torture devices? Ancient hairdryers? Vintage egg whisks? No, they are Victorian, er, personal massagers (including one you had to handcrank)
Late 19th, early 20th century self-vibrators on display in Gloucestershire
Were originally created by Victorian doctors to cure women of hysteria
Female patients were treated with ‘pelvic massage’ using plug-in vibrators
On display at Littledean Jail, former courthouse, in the Forest of Dean
PUBLISHED: 14:18, 26 September 2013 | UPDATED: 18:44, 26 September 2013
Take a look at these pictures and consider for a moment what these rather brutal looking metal contraptions might be.
Are they power tools? Medieval torture devices? The world’s first hairdryers? Archaic egg whisks? Nope, these are actually Victorian vibrators, a collection of vintage self-massagers currently on display at Littledean Jail in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, a former house of correction, police station and courthouse-turned-visitor attraction.
And exhibits include Dr Macaura’s Pulsocon Hand Crank Vibrator, which dates back to 1890 and resembles an old-fashioned egg whisk.
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This may look like an early hair dryer with different attachments, but it is actually a vintage ‘self-massager’, used by women as a vibrator in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
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Dr. Macaura’s Pulsocon Hand Crank (1890) Vibrator, which resembles an archaic egg whisk, is now on display at Littledean Jail, Forest of Dean,
According to Philip Larkin, sex began in 1963, between the end of the Lady Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.
But this collection of Victorian vibrators shows self-pleasuring has been going on for a whole lot longer than that.
Littledean Jail owner and curator Andy Jones, 51, described the assortment of sex toys as ‘a fascinating insight into women’s pleasure during Victorian times’.
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The ‘ACME’ hand-held vibrator shows self-pleasuring has been going on for a whole lot longer than we originally believed
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When compared to today’s vibrators such as the pink plastic rampant rabbit, the ACME is certainly a lot less… girly
But despite its pleasurable connotations, the modern-style vibrator was actually invented by respectable Victorian doctors.
‘Pelvic massage’ was a common treatment for female hysteria during the Victorian era.
However, doctors found the process of administering the massage by hand tiring and time-consuming, and so devised a device to do the job for them.
Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville patented an electromechanical vibrator around 1880, a story told in the 2011 film Hysteria, featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal.
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Despite its pleasurable connotations, the modern-style vibrator was actually invented by respectable Victorian doctors
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‘If you plug them in, the force is incredible. They’re loud and some of them look like hairdryers’
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The vibrators come packed neatly in cases with a number of different attachments, and resembles an old-fashioned drill and its bits
While some of these contraptions now look like they belong more in a torture chamber than beneath the sheets, they serve as testament to the ingenuity of Victorian inventors.
The sex toys also offer a fascinating insight into the supposedly ‘prim and proper’ Victorian world, in which some families would supposedly cover up table legs since they were seen as suggestive and risque.
‘If you plug them in, the force is incredible,’ Jones said. ‘They’re loud and some of them look like hairdryers.
‘I would imagine it would have been quite a painful exercise, judging by what I’ve seen of them, like having a kango hammer pressed against your body.’
Above from left: ORIGINAL STAR WARS FILM POSTER ADVERITISING “THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK” PICTURED HERE ALONGSIDE SADDAM HUSSEIN’S INFAMOUS “HANDS OF VICTORY ” MONUMENTS AT THE GATEWAYS TO BAGHDAD , IRAQ
Tyrant: Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein built his regime and cult of personality through his use of fear
Deadly: Foreign fighters have flocked from around the world, attracted by the brutal group’s propaganda
Militant Islamist fighters wave flags as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria’s northern Raqqa province in 2014
Bleek future: With their black flags and military gear, the new ISIS recruits graduate in Deir ezzor
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