Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

give an individual ‘enough rope’ with which he can hang himself out of pure
ignorance of matters that come his way. In fact, penal institutions in the
‘free and democratic societies’ are faced with a crisis that the men and
women who established CTC 50 years ago anticipated: a legitimacy crisis.
By firmly enshrining an historical narrative that establishes Hitler’s
Germany as the absolute evil, as the pinnacle of an authoritarian system
where the original celebration of physical work is linked to the fictitious
extermination process, it was possible to destroy traditional relationships in
favour of Jewish supremacism that had only one goal, world domination
through enslavement to financial materialism–consumerism and the
establishment of the Zionist homeland Israel in Palestine.
When CTC was established there was talk about character development and
how prisoners would be subjected to programs that enabled rehabilitation
that prepared them to be re-integrated within a society which had subjected
them to punishment. Any kind of victim mentality musings on behalf of the
convicted did not arise because it was their responsibility for being inside in
the first place. This assumed the prison sentence was a just one, not like mine
which expressed a political will dressed up as legal restraint.
Today many prisoners see themselves as victims of some form of power,
and medication time attests to that where liquid handcuffs enable
administrators to develop punitive measures on a softly, softly rationale –
any physical form of punishment, a flogging for example, is dealt out only
to those prisoners who offer a physical pretext by lifting an arm, which
officers, especially at Yatala’s G Division, would interpret as a physical
threat to their well being.
I found all this of interest because especially during the 1980s the government
education systems in Australia, and elsewhere in the ‘free and democratic
western world’, moved through a similar mindset of deconstruction.
But then even in music there is this destructive impulse that masquerades as
innovative. For example, Greenaway celebrates his opera where at the end
the singers are bucketed with water from above. That is ugly and a clear
perversion, and not at all innovative nor worthy to be called an artistic
creation. Even the Greenaway musical score is full of screeches that cannot
express anything but the inherent empty wilfulness in the composer’s mind
as to what he considers to be innovative. There is no spark of genius nor
any other redeeming value in such barrenness sold as an artistic creation.
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