To understand how our current policies of secrecy
sew things together in ways that will always result
in the implementation of endgame
weapons and strategies,
it’s easiest to start where motivation and preparation
for the next war are sparked
– in the fires of the previous war.
There were a few other significant events that happened within those prison walls that would end up having an impact on my life, some sooner rather than later. The results of one would shake my world the most and cast a shadow on an otherwise exciting landmark moment in my life.
At roughly the age of three, we were finally allowed to play outside. Prior to that, many of my brief moments outdoors had been briskly walking between administrative buildings while hurried along by cruel chaperones who promised us, small children who had done nothing wrong other than being born into the circumstances, that “this didn’t count as being outside.” That level of bullying from the adults would be reflected in the behavior of the children as they became older. There were quite a few children who were simply too abusive and angry to deal with, and I went out of my way to avoid any interactions with them. Avoiding any unnecessary interactions with the adults was a given.
When one of the adoption workers told me the news that I was finally allowed to play with the older children, I checked twice to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood or misheard. I was very aware of the danger of breaking the rules. After all, they had callously threatened us with the removal of our mothers multiple times for the slightest of infractions. That threat left me in a constant state of anxiety more than anything else. I was always acutely aware of every microscopic part of my behavior and how it might result in losing my mother. Often, the result was me being frozen, silent, and afraid to do anything at all, even when I needed something simple, like access to a restroom after three hours of desperately needing to use it.
Once I had confirmed what the adult had said was real, I went bounding through the doors and down the stairs, finally allowed to experience playing with the older children.
I went through one room and then entered another. Or at least I thought the second one was a room. Having mostly believed the lies that our prior moments outside “didn’t count as outside,” and due to the fact that the area they now sent us into was blocked off on most sides by the surrounding buildings, I naturally assumed that it was simply a large room decorated to appear like it was outside. After all, in my mind, while I knew the outdoors existed, I did not think that they were actually reachable.
My excitement became apprehension, being suddenly surrounded by older children in a setting unfamiliar to me. I stood against a wall not far from the door and watched the game, listening to the bouncing of the ball and the shouts of the children echoing loudly between the buildings. The level of noise was painful to my ears, something that was often the case during my time in the prison, especially with the noise level of the combined screams of the women in the larger prison area at the end of the hall my cell was on. My ears always ached.
I waited patiently, with my head resting against the wall, until an older boy invited me to join the game. I would not have entered the game without the invite. My shyness in that moment had been overwhelming.
Later, I would hear about that day from a different perspective, from an adult observer from the United States whom I had not noticed in the moment. The foreigner, brought in to assist with Operation Condor, explained that she saw a child who stood silently on the side, observing and learning the rules of the game before entering it. She spoke positively about the trait and saw it as useful.
She – not the prison, not the state terrorism and senseless deaths – but she would become the darkest shadow that would hang over the rest of my life. That first moment of truly breathing in and acknowledging the outside air was both my first and my last moment of freedom.
That was the moment she chose me as her own.
If you’re still among the “that doesn’t happen” crowd, I’d like to introduce you to two concepts:
One: Once a military policy is established, it is written into procedures manuals and continues, regardless of the particular war, state terrorism, or catastrophe.
Two: Operation Baby Lift had recently set a policy precedent and established a roadmap for largescale confiscation of children over international borders during the later stages of wars and during the post-war cleanup stage, permanently removing healthy adoption-age infants and children, very frequently without their parents’ consent and/or knowledge.
Image: Operation Babylift Infants, Source: The Australian Women’s Weekly via PressReader
Image: Operation Babylift Newborn Infants, Source: SelfCare for Healthcare
The pictures above were taken only five years prior to U.S. military involvement in my removal from Argentina. Even if the fallacy of militaries becoming “more evolved and more humane” during the time it takes to declassify something were true, no one had time to evolve and learn from their mistakes in five years. If they had evolved, they would have returned those Vietnamese babies to their parents. If they had evolved, they wouldn’t still be writing it into their policies nine years after they took me (dated document below). Even now, in the 2020s as I write this, they still haven’t evolved to embrace humane practices or to return the stolen children.
Operation Babylift was the large-scale removal of infants and small children from Vietnam to countries including the United States, France, Austria, and West Germany towards the end of the Vietnam War. In April of 1975, approximately 3,300 children were transported out of Vietnam.
Image Source: U.S. Department of Defense
“Military Airlift Command…November 1989:
The evacuation of orphans… was a unique episode in the annals of USAF history. As no precedent for this type of operation had been previously established… The knowledge acquired as ‘lessons learned’ at Clark was passed on in the form of TDY assistance in establishing Operation Newlife at Guam.
Major General Leroy J. Manor, Commander, 13th AF.
…There have been few substantive changes in noncombatant evacuation operations since 1975, therefore the lessons of BABYLIFT are still relevant to today’s planners.”
Text Source: U.S. Department of Defense
If you think the government baby snatching policies has changed since 1989, the odds are extremely high that your perspective, as well as the lives of tens of thousands of children, may be a victim of a different government policy: one of using secrecy to hide potential embarrassment and tarnishing of a country’s reputation, rather than simply behaving in a way that would not cause embarrassment to begin with.
For public consumption back in Argentina, they would paint the killing of mothers and stealing of their infants with the authoritative and caring undertones of adoption by upstanding and stable military members who would take on the role of parents and guide the infants to live a proper and useful life within society, a type of training that the original sinful parents could not provide.
Obviously, back here in reality and away from their insincere and delirious thoughts of grandeur, when military members use the convenience of war to abduct an enemy’s baby from her family, it is rarely due to compassion or a need to improve the life of the child. And yet, even that gets repainted by self-deception, group authority, and an almost religious sense of infallibility and righteousness on the side of the kidnapping party.
But when I looked into that babysnatching U.S. military woman’s eyes, when she stepped into my world, I was face to face with the glaring truth of being a child in the theater of war. There were no media banalities or distance to insulate me from it. The small dark eyes looking at me were those of a predator seeking someone unprotected and too little to fight back, to utilize as human bait and lure within war and the preparation for war. She wasn’t looking for a child to join her family (and in fact, I would always live separate from her family). She was looking for an untraceable multiuse tool – a living and breathing pocket knife without a paper trail. In other words, a female war baby who was no longer in diapers.
What I experienced and would live through was not an adoption, despite the deceptive paint they thickly layered on it for the public so they could pat themselves on the back and sleep at night, feeling as if the vulnerable orphans created by their political needs were in the care of, at best, heroes, and at worst, stable disciplinarians.
The type of people who kill a dog and take its newborn puppies are not the type of people who care for or have compassion for the puppies. They are almost invariably the ones we later discover have kept those puppies locked in a dark closet in an attempt to mold them into attack dogs. That lingering callous and exploitative psychology of predators is worse when they kill a human mother and take her infant, because the memory of murdering a mother in cold blood to steal her helpless baby remains long after the memory of killing a dog would fade.
They see the reflection of the dead mother in that child’s face, and they become determined to mold the most flawed characteristics in the child in order to create a guilt-free excuse as to why they had attempted to kill the breed. There’s a reason that when most of them looked at me they hoped it was a soulless psychopath looking back at them, just another empty automaton bent on instant gratification above all else.
I know my mother taught me to always meet expectations, even low ones, but I wasn’t going to go around killing other toddlers in an act to convince the adults that they were correct about me. I doubt the thought even crossed my mind. However, a much easier opportunity to make them comfortable still arose, possibly after I’d already developed stomach ulcers from not getting to that point fast enough. My anxiety was sky-high about performing as was expected of me.
The first time I popped a second candy into my mouth after it had been offered by one of the visiting military commanders, I saw them go from tense to relaxed, with their attention moving to other parts of the room. So, to reduce any reasons for both their and my anxiety, I obliged their expectations by always asking for and ingesting an inordinate amount of candy with an addictive level of lack of self-control. I did it to appear that I could be easily manipulated via simple means, addictions. Yep, my mother taught me that too. If I didn’t love her, and if she wasn’t dead, I’d probably strangle her.
A control-distraction works just as well for the liar as it does for the one wanting to be lied to – i.e. if I thought I’d done something out of character from what they expected, I could distract from it by begging for candy, and they would feel in control as the manipulator because they had the say regarding if I got the candy or not. It was child-level simple, but psychology is often that simple. People like to feel like they are in control, so we walk them through the same routines until they become so comfortable with the predictability of those routines that they become comfortable with us and forget that we’re capable of anything else other than being manageable and obedient. It also helped to instill the belief that I wasn’t a threat to anything other than a candy bowl.
That said, playing a long con game from the side of the victim is dangerous. I do not recommend it for individuals or societies. It’s a prisoner’s game intended to get the tiniest bit of leeway to get away with things or to wait for that one moment that offers a potential escape. If you’re in the open air, not chained to a cell, and are still acting this way, you may want to examine why and at what point you became a voluntary prisoner.
To maintain that trust and predictability over the years, I came so close to death on numerous occasions that it’s a miracle I’m still alive. Better people than me have died from it. To prove that I would obediently walk into anything blindly, I “happily” swallowed whatever was placed in front of me and went wherever I was told to, resulting in being drugged beyond comprehension while in dangerous situations more times than I could count.
It would lead down a path in life that had me so exhausted and skirting the edge of death that I had to import my concealer from China because they were the only ones that had the palest ivory makeup to match my near-death and unnaturally pale ghost complexion.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m still supposed to be talking about prison life at this stage, or how my mother seemed to be a little too educated on subterfuge. That last thing may have simply been the result of her growing up in Argentina. Living in a deceived society can teach us more about deceit than any Intelligence training can.
Sometimes, I wonder how anyone managed their mental gymnastics regarding my level of gullibility and malleability after seeing the early school readiness results from the exams they brought us to and performed in the little tower above the bureaucratic hall. But it’s a million times easier to lie to someone than it is to convince them they’ve been lied to. They were happy to continue thinking I was an idiot even when I tested among the highest in the group.
My friend who used to talk about everything we saw while we walked through the prison was the one who probably tested the highest. She would turn out to be too aware of her surroundings for her own survival. Her attempts to evade harm eventually resulted in damage to her health. She absolutely never ate anything they gave her. She didn’t trust it. If this civilization came with a rescue crew, she would have been fine before real damage set in, but there are no rescue crews, and long-term malnutrition and starvation do bad things to a child. I miss her more than anything. This world snuffs out true intelligence before it is old enough to flee.
Next: Recruitment Contracts