April 17th, 2019

The Gulags of Death 

“Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be at ease in the world. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again. -
Jean Améry

    Unprecedented horrific crimes against the women and children were committed in all the Religious run Institutions in Ireland, including murder. The total number of babies killed in the Mother and Babies of Ireland is unknown, but the numbers must have been high, based on the number of female inmates (185,000). Only now are we slowly prying open the drapes to learn the extent of the brutality committed on these woman and children in both the Mother and Baby Homes and the Magdalene Asylums of Ireland. All forms of torture are clearly and unequivocally condemned and banned by -The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the “Torture Convention”)

https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cat.aspx

The 1984 U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment provides a regular definition of torture as follows. 
    “For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”

    One of the central objectives of torture carried out by the Religious Orders who ran the Religious Institutions in Ireland was the humiliation of the unmarried women and their children, which generated deep feelings of shame and inferiority by the unmarried women and their children who were detained in these Religious run Institutions, for the rest of their lives. We need as a society to honestly evaluate the role of humiliation used as torture by the Irish Catholic Orders who ran these Institutions. In fact torture has been carried out against both the body and the mind of the victims, the women and children. 

    Those who were detained in the Magdalene Asylums were often violently treated, by the Nuns, the Nuns tactics included humiliation, beatings, murder and torture of unmarried women and their children. This was intended to created tension and fear throughout the Magdalene Asylums systems in Ireland. Members of the Cult had powers to arrest and detain those women and their children who were considered enemies of the Catholic Church. Hard to believe that these preventative arrests of unmarried women and girls were carried out separately from Irish judicial control, or in many case with the full support of the Irish Judiciary. No-one at the time investigated the crimes committed by the Cult, the Irish Catholic Church, that’s how powerful they had become. The Cult controlled the Magdalene Asylums and the Industrial Schools, where ‘undesirable people’  the unmarried women and their children were imprisoned and used and kept as slaves.

    Forced-labor camps, such as the Magdalene Asylums and the Industrial Schools existed from before the founding of the Irish State as part of the Irish Catholic Church’s penal and repressive system. The Irish Catholic Church established the main administration of the gulag of Magdalene Asylums and the Industrial Schools throughout Ireland. Building dozens of “corrective labour camps, known as the Magdalene Asylums, Industrial Schools and Orphanages, in which tens of thousands of women and children were detained illegally by the Irish Catholic Church. The Cult, known as the Catholic Church terrorised Irish Society, the families of the unmarried women and their children were left ignorant of their whereabouts in the gulags. Many of the unmarried women and children detained in these gulags were never to see any of their families again. Fear and intimidation, propaganda and social control kept the Irish population in line. The Irish Catholic Church created a terror-state. The enslaved unmarried women were made to work in horrendous conditions at the Magdalene Asylums. 

    These Magdalene Asylums and the Industrial Schools served as systematic slave-labour camps. The Magdalene Asylums and the Industrial Schools were the inmates, the unmarried women and  their children, worked under appalling conditions. The women and children suffered from monstrous workloads daily in the gulags. They were fed daily on hunger, cold, exhaustion, fear, rape and brutality. Thousands of them, the unmarried women and their children died from overwork and for many in agony. The Nuns calculated displays of extreme callousness, was part of their cruel scheme. The final indignity of the unmarried women and their children was a painful death, they were to be dumped into mass graves and septic tanks on the Institutional grounds, with no markings, or records of their deaths, family names nor their age.


    Magdalene Asylums and the Industrial Schools or forced-labor camps, were also an essential part of the Irish Catholic Church’s systematic oppression of the Irish People. The living conditions in these, Religious run Institutions or camps were brutal and inhumane. By deliberately denying medicines to the women, the Nuns who ran these Religious Institutions were in effect killing the women and their babies. Psychological torture was effectively used, especially by the Nuns, in the isolation of the women from their children. Also in telling some of the women that their babies died at birth, when in fact the babies were stolen and sold off for cash. The Nuns also produced feelings of complete loneliness and isolation of their unmarried women in their slave camps, the Magdalene Asylums, through the severance of all social contact with the unmarried woman’s family and friends, even contact with fellow women in the Magdalene Asylums they slaved in. In many instances some of the women were moved repeatedly to other Institutions to work as slaves in rural Magdalene Asylums or sold out to Farmers, Hotels or Great Houses and all for cash. 


    This was and is “unacceptable” the treatment of the Irish unmarried women and their children in all the Religious run Institutions in Ireland. Let us not forget it was, pure and simple, torture and humiliation of the unmarried women and their children. The Religious Orders of Ireland, the men and women who ran the Religious run Institutions of Ireland, commit extraordinary atrocities against their own kind, defenceless women and their children. The German born philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term -
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“die Banalität des Bösen” (the Banality of Evil)

    How humiliation works and the effects it had on the slave unmarried women and their children in the Religious run Institutions of Ireland. The humiliation by the Nuns or other Religious Orders of both Men and Women worked, by rendering the individual woman or child physically and completely defenceless. The women and children were at the complete mercy of the Religious Orders, with no help from family or friends, or Irish Governmental agencies on the outside. In the case of the woman resisting is no longer possible, she is left alone without any recourse open to her. The unmarried woman knows she must comply with her tormentors the Nuns and she has to agree to actions that aim to destroy her personal integrity, self-esteem, and pride. The first cruel act of the Nuns will be to cut of all the hair of the unmarred woman, and strip the unmarried woman of all her remaining dignity with her cloths.

    This action will lead to dehumanisation of the unmarried woman, as the Nuns intended. This action alone by the cruel Nuns will saddle the unmarried woman with the profound feeling of personal guilt, her complete loss of dignity, and destruction of both her mental and psychological capabilities. This trauma of this dehumanisation is the humiliation that has been suffered, and will stay with the unmarried woman for her entire life. This simple cruel act by the Nuns, strips away the unmarried woman’s pride, her honour and her dignity. Only a specific type of fascist personality, displayed by the Nuns that is able to commit such atrocities on a fellow human being. Only a sick religious Cult could allow and commit unthinkable evil against vulnerable unmarried women and their vulnerable children. 

    Humiliation and shame, as well as guilt and embarrassment were the order of the day at all the Religious run Institutions in Ireland. Sadly the Nuns who commit crimes against the unmarried women and their children in the Magdalene Asylums, or the Christian Brothers or other Religious Orders who ran the Industrial Schools, really do not differ fundamentally from ordinary people like you and me. The Religious Orders of Nuns, Priests and Brothers claimed when asked, that they acted on command of the Catholic Church, (The Cult.) Demagogues such as Archbishop Charles McQuaid and other Irish Catholic Church Bishops, used such shame, combining them with current feelings of injustice, to exercise absolute power and to divide Irish people into friends and foes. Unmarried women and their children were especially singled out by The Cult for humiliation as enemies of Catholic Ireland, and in many cases, the unmarried women and their vulnerable children were in fact murdered in these Religious run Institutions of Ireland or Irish Religious Gulags. 

    Over 170,000 vulnerable children passed through the Religious Gulags of Ireland. Over 185,000 unmarried women, slaved in the Religious Gulags of Ireland. What is a fact is that over 60,000 of their children were stolen and sold overseas for cash and over 20,000 unmarried women and their children died or were murdered in these cruel Religious Gulags of Ireland. It’s time to dig up the Secret Grave Pits, Convent and Industrial School dumps and Septic Tanks, attached to all the Religious Gulags of Ireland. Owen Felix O’Neill

  Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist, said -

“that a man (or woman) feels responsible only to the authority directing him (or her) and feels no responsibility for the kind of actions that the authority expects him to carry out.”