"One night in a bar called St. Supice, I met the man who became Dr. X. The cold, calculating, vicious personality of this man still makes me feel uneasy as I write this. His character and alleged involvement with a terrorist organization coupled with other personalities I had met on my travels truly were the inspiration for this record."
― Geoff Tate,
liner notes to 2003 Capitol Records reissue of Operation: Mindcrime
"Too much bloodshed, we're being used and fed | Like rats in experiments."
― Nikki in "Suite Sister Mary", Operation: Mindcrime
Why does Operation: Mindcrime have a broader significance? In the triumvirate of Dr. X, Nikki and Mary, Queensryche's Geoff Tate demonstrates a counterterrorism enigma: the 'screening' process to recruit new members, who undergo a deindividualisation process.
Counterterrorism researchers have rediscovered this key process, such as Albert Bandura's studies on the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Weather Underground (moral disengagement), Philip Zimbardo's epochal Stanford Prison Experiment (situated character transformation), David Grossman's study of desensitisation training (killology), and Jessica Stern's face-to-face interviews (extreme doubling). However, Tate's narrative makes this process emerge visibly from the shadows.
The result is that Operation: Mindcrime becomes a 'meta-album' that like the 'meta-fiction' of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and Umberto Eco, capturing oblique, dangerous insights in fictional form. Framed by the Platonic anamnesis or self-remembering of "I Remember Now", Mindcrime's tracks document the processes identified by Bandura, Zimbardo, Grossman, and Stern. "Revolution Calling", "Operation: Mindcrime", "Speak", "Spreading The Disease" and "The Mission" capture Nikki's ideological radicalisation at Dr. X's hands. The romantic-idealist arc of "Suite Sister Mary", "The Needle Lies", "Breaking The Silence", "I Don't Believe In Love" and "Eyes Of A Stranger" capture the personal costs for Nikki and Mary. "Underground Revolution" becomes a no-win game.
Although he doesn't explicitly state it, Tate's description above and his Montreal, Canada, location at the time suggests that his model for Dr. X was a recruiter and propagandist for the Front de Liberation du Quebec (1967-70), a short-lived right-wing paramilitary group that waged a violent campaign in October 1970 including the assassination of a Canadian politician. This fits Mindcrime's narrative and Nikki's actions, and if confirmed by Tate, would strengthen the rock opera's conceptualisation of terrorist psychology and initiation. (Tate also references German revolutionary anarchist Johann Most in "Freiheit Overture" which opens Operation: Mindcrime II).
Philip Zimbardo's recent study The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (2007) is useful for framing Mindcrime's narrative in three different dimensions. The rock opera begins and ends with Nikki's brutal hospitalisation, an exemplar of Zimbardo's "administrative evil" (pp. 381 - 382) reminiscent of the anti-psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Much of Tate's background narrative is about Zimbardo's "system evil" as an 'enabling environment': Reagan-era corruption and political zero-sum games such as the Iran-Contra affair, the collapse of the bank BCCI, fallen televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart, and the 'Greed is Good' wave of corporate mergers and leveraged buyouts. Finally, Dr. X's "Underground Revolution" embodies the 'situational evil' which turns Nikki's disillusionment into sociopathic hatred before Mary becomes his super-ego conscience.
Mindcrime's narrative can also be understood as a prism for an open-ended discussion of how counterterrorism has evolved from its Year Zero in 1968 to the Obama Administration's re-evaluation of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror":
• The disillusioned Nikki mirrors a criminological tradition in counterterrorism, from Ted Gurr's 'relative deprivation' thesis to William L. Pierce's call for 'lone wolves' and Mark S. Hamm's belief that terrorism is best treated as crime.
• Dr. X exemplifies Simon Reeve and Michael Ledeen's separate analyses of Al Qaeda as 'terrorist entrepreneurs', possibly Marc Sageman's 'Bunch of Guys' theory about the 7/7 bombers, and definitely Jerrold M. Post's psychological profiling of political leaders.
• Dr. X's "Underground Revolution" illustrates David C. Rapoport's early research on the "assassination game" and Peter Dale Scott's 'parapolitics' of covert operations. Nikki and Mary's relationship in Mindcrime and all of Operation: Mindcrime II (2006) traverses Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's grief cycle.
• Apart from Zimbardo, Mindcrime also evokes the earlier Tavistock tradition of Erich Fromm's research, notably Escape From Freedom aka Fear of Freedom (1941) and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973).
Tate's achievement is that whatever your stance or worldview on terrorist motivations, you can still find explanations and insights in Mindcrime's rock opera. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Tate's Internet postings also mentioned state terrorism.
Recent events capture why Mindcrime's exploration of a young, motivated terrorist still has relevance:
• Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary The Weather Underground (2002) hints that Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and other members underwent a similar radicalisation process to Nikki, a factor that foreshadowed the 2008 U.S. Presidential election debate about Ayers' connections with now President-Elect Barack Obama.
• Jane Mayers' The Dark Side (2008), and Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch's book and documentary film Standard Operating Procedure (2008) reveal similar processes at work in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
• MSNBC, The New York Times and other media outlets reported in December 2008 that Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, Massive Attack and Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello will lobby the U.S. Army to stop using their music as a psychological warfare tool in military interrogations (a conspiracy rumour that Jon Ronson confirmed in his 2004 book The Men Who Stare At Goats scheduled as a 2009 film starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey).
• Finally, New York Times journalist Katherine Zoepf reported on "Deprogramming Jihadists" on 7th November 2008 that Saudi Arabia is using a similar strategy to reintegrate former militants, extremists and jihadists back into mainstream society.
There were rows and rows of Pro Tools servers and gear. Which was a clear indication that Axl and I had very different ideas of how to do this record. I was open to using Pro Tools, to trying new things--but everyone had to be on the same page and in the same room to explore new ideas. The band managed to do a little bit of jamming and come up with some things. A couple of the ideas I had come up with Axl apparently liked and they were recorded onto Pro Tools and stored for him to work on later.]]>
We'd show up at different times every evening, but by eight p.m. generally everyone in the band would be there. Then we'd wait for Axl, who, when he did come, arrived much, much later. That was the norm; it was a dark, miserable atmosphere that lacked direction of any kind. I hung out for a bit; but after a few days I chose to spend my evenings at the strip bar around the corner, with orders for the engineers to call me if Axl decided to arrive.
If past investigations into such groups prove to be any guide, it may be difficult to find clear-cut evidence of direct involvement by Pakistani intelligence or army personnel. This is because Pakistan, knowing the stakes of getting caught red-handed, has increasingly pursued its clandestine proxy war against India in Kashmir and on the Indian mainland through layers and layers of self-managing and non-state groups. The Pakistani government and its domestic Islamist proxies, including nominally peaceful charities based in Pakistan but with operations in Kashmir, almost certainly pass through money and weapons on a large scale. They do so, however, in such a way that is very difficult to trace these supplies back to the government.Applebaum highlights the epistemological challenges that counterterrorism analysts face; Coll offers some guidance on how to conduct an investigation on the basis of 'contingent' beliefs and alternative hypotheses.
Embodied Foresight offers some emergent solutions for the individual practitioner to the challenges and difficulties of Integral Futures practice. These reflexive 'problems' are part of diffusion, initiation and knowledge transfer in many wisdom traditions. Our 'trialogue' has raised several 'reflexive' problems-from Teacher-Student relationships and pedagogical barriers to the archetypal dangers of Phobos and Thanatos-that each of us has personally experienced within the Futures Studies community and in other initiatory and wisdom traditions.]]>