Suicide or Political Persecution? The Mysterious Deaths of Ernest Hemingway and Iris Chang

 

 

If the implications of the sinister dimension of Hoover's FBI are not acknowledged, it is not possible to realistically assess the actual substance of the relationship between Hoover and Hemingway. There is in fact a huge gaping omission in the historical record because deception, denial, fraud and evasion has too often provided the opportunity to cover up Hoover sponsored crime. Moreover, the common tendency to ignore the significance of Hoover's ferocious, anti-Hemingway crusade certainly dulls the prospect of reconstructing the elusive truth. In retrospect, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the extreme hostility between Hoover and Hemingway drew battle lines which were clearly defined and courted predictable casualties. In particular, Hemingway despised and opposed the McCarthy-style persecutions that Hoover secretly supported, criticized the practise of using the FBI to harass American citizens without justification and was predictably "exiled" for vigorously condemning the tyranny that Hoover promoted and encouraged. Quoted in Look in May of 1954, when McCarthy was at the height of his power, Hemingway said that there is nothing "wrong with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin that a .577 solid would not cure". McCarthy and Hoover evidently incited the worst and destroyed the best of everything they touched. Hemingway was not a gun-toting extremist. It was Hoover who induced that spirit. Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway, who was born 21 July 1899 15th July 1944: American writer and war correspondent Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961). Original Publication: Picture Post - 1748 - Hemingway Looks At The War In Europe - pub. 1944 (Photo by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images) The frustration of being persecuted by Hoover's FBI had taken its toll as early as 1954, when FBI agents evidently shadowed Hemingway wherever he went. Recall that Frank Wilkinson, a relatively obscure target had as many as eight FBI agents tailing him -an internationally reputed author like Hemingway was invariably the victim of an equally outrageous degree of unwarranted, illegal surveillance. But despite the fact that he was a target of covert, illegal operations, Hemingway was provided no recourse to justice and could do very little beyond mock the "obtrusive, inescapable FBI men, pleasant and all trying to look so average, clean-cut-young-American that they stood out as clearly as though they had worn a bureau shoulder patch on their white linen or seersucker suits". Hoover used the "infallible" wing of the FBI to spy on Hemingway, and unbeknownst to agents who were simply following relatively innocuous instructions, they ultimately aided and abetted a murderer like J. Edgar Hoover. Clearly, when FBI agents placed Hemingway under surveillance to develop a derogatory profile, the plot to discredit Hemingway escalated from the effort to label him a drunk, a liar, and a Communist to the determination to declare him insane in order to justify his alleged suicide. FBI smear campaigns against Hemingway were extremely secretive because Hoover was afraid to confront him in public and public ignorance made it easy for him to promote the suggestion that Hemingway was paranoid. How, for example, could Hemingway convincingly claim that Hoover's FBI was America's Gestapo, when the FBI did not publicly demonstrate any interest in him? In the final analysis, it is the extreme secrecy that Hoover maintained which provided the opportunity to promote the claim that Hemingway was paranoid and unstable when in fact he was more reasonable and more perceptive than most. Critics who harp on common misrepresentations had a field day with the claim that Hemingway committed suicide, but they merely promoted common ignorance. Hoover had spent over a decade trying to convince anyone who would listen that Hemingway was unreliable, and it was only a matter of time before his relentless, illegal intrusions destroyed Hemingway. Having committed the unpardonable sin of challenging the infallible reputation of the FBI, Hemingway was clearly a priority target who was always shadowed by the FBI until the very day he was murdered or, as the official record dictates, "committed suicide".  "Hemingway doing something badass." American author Ernest Hemingway, who, at the time, was a reporter and paramilitary aide in the liberation of France from German occupation in World War II, is shown wearing boxing gear in July 1944. (AP Photo) In late 1960, when Hemingway arrived in New York, having left Cuba for the last time, Hemingway told his wife Mary: "They're tailing me out here already... Somebody waiting out there."9 Hoover's FBI was indeed always tailing Hemingway -a harassment that disturbed him so profoundly that he didn't even want to leave his small apartment. Hemingway's wife dismissed his legitimate concerns and developed the belief that he was "losing it". Ironically, it is the fact that Hemingway was perceptive enough to challenge unwarranted FBI surveillance which prompted the allegation that he was suffering from delusions, paranoia, fear of persecution -mental illness. But it is the people who claimed that Hemingway was unstable who were ultimately deluded. Hoover's FBI in New York had nothing better to than to tail so-called Communist subversives and prominent adversaries like Hemingway were invariably smothered by overzealous FBI agents who thrived upon the opportunity to satisfy the Director's paranoia over public literary enemy number one. Hemingway's deepest and most disturbing fear concerning the FBI was well grounded, yet he was constantly branded paranoid whenever he exposed what was essentially the truth. Perfectly logical commentary like "nobody likes to be tailed... investigated, queried about, by any amateur detective no matter how scholarly or how straight", reflected legitimate frustrations not paranoia -frustrations that Hemingway had to deal with all by himself. Even his wife and his so-called friend Hotchner, who called him paranoid simply because he acknowledged the obvious, inadvertently made it easier for Hoover to persecute Hemingway. Determined to "prove" that Hemingway was unreliable, paranoid and delusionary, the secrecy that Hoover imposed ultimately granted the opportunity to exploit the ignorance of those who did not acknowledge the threat that Hoover's FBI posed. Mary and Hotchner certainly manifested the phenomenal ignorance which shaped their frivolous perspectives: Both Mary and Hotchner have said that Hemingway imagined he was being followed and spied on by FBI agents in Ketchum and in the Mayo Clinic, and that no kind of argument or evidence could change his mind or alleviate his irrational but quite terrifying fear. Mary and Hotchner thought his fear of the FBI meant that he was losing touch with reality and heading for a mental breakdown -[all music to Hoover's ears] Hemingway, who was invariably always followed by Hoover's FBI, has been posthumously vindicated. Hemingway wasn't paranoid. Hotchner and Mary were ignorant. In 1960, suffering from high blood pressure, liver and kidney diseases and haemochromatosis, a rare, chronic form of diabetes, Hemingway sought medical treatment to relieve his physical ailments. Hemingway was not, as has been frequently suggested, a psychiatric patient. Having endured a liver malady since 1937, Hemingway had given up drinking on the advice of his doctor, but by 1960, his worsening condition prompted the need for further medical attention. Thus, on November 30, 1960, Hemingway entered the Mayo clinic and hoped to return home by Christmas. Knowing that the FBI was monitoring every move that he made, Hemingway sought to enter the Mayo clinic under an assumed name to keep his visits to the Mayo a secret, but despite Hemingway's expressed orders, Dr. Rome, a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic, violated Hemingway's right to privacy. The FBI was carefully monitoring Hemingway's treatment at the Mayo clinic and "a letter from special agent in Minneapolis to J. Edgar Hoover on January 13, 1960 reported that Hemingway had secretly entered the Mayo Clinic and the FBI knew about his treatment." Indeed "the FBI had, in fact, tracked Hemingway to the walls of the Mayo Clinic and discussed his case with his psychiatrist." Dr. Rome was evidently cooperating more with Hoover's FBI and not at all, to the concerns of Ernest Hemingway. This direct, unethical violation of Hemingway's rights and expressed orders is directly responsible for his murder. At the Mayo Clinic, instead of treating the physical ailments that concerned him, Hemingway was given a series of electric shocks to the brain. Electro-convulsive therapy was the best-known treatment for hopeless psychiatric patients, it was not a cure for liver disease. It was, above all, an extreme, illegal, perverted effort to induce a stubborn non-conformist to become the docile and passive FBI cheerleader that Hoover demanded. Prior to having received shock therapy at the Mayo, Hemingway had never attempted suicide and had never sought out or received psychiatric treatment. Moreover, there is no credible evidence to suggest that he required a treatment as harmful and as controversial as shock therapy. When medical experts like Dr. Bonnie Burstow, an outspoken critic of ECT, describes the treatment, it sounds like the entire procedure was the ideal behaviour modification tool that Hoover spent a life time seeking to acquire. According to Dr. Burstow: Why am I opposed to shock treatment... To begin with, because of what it is, intrinsically a brain damaging treatment. To understand this, it is important to know how the treatment works. Shock treatment is one in which sufficient electricity is passed through the brain to produce a grand mal seizure, thereby resulting in cell death. This is what it does; this is all it does. Brain damage, to be clear, is not a side-effect of shock treatment. It is the primary effect. Moreover, there is absolutely no reliable evidence to even remotely suggest that Hemingway would ever submit to such a radical method of treatment. On the contrary, his lifelong scorn of psychiatrists coupled with his assertion that his analyst was "portable Corona No. 3", strongly suggests that the treatment that he received at the Mayo Clinic, a direct violation of everything that Hemingway believed in, was as improper and as unethical as aiming a gun at his head and pulling the trigger. If Hemingway cooperated with Dr. Rome, it was probably because, as Anthony Burgess has indicated, Dr. Rome "was a psychiatrist but did not present himself as one." In retrospect, the fact that J. Edgar Hoover exploited the prestige of the FBI and used the behavioral sciences to control people like Hemingway, is not at all surprising. Given Hoover's paranoia and obsessions, it is not unreasonable to assume that there exists a closet full of controversial "suicide" cases which reflect Hoover's tendency to use the influence of his "infallible" FBI to enlist the services of unsuspecting or sympathetic professionals, in his private, covert war against domestic "subversives". The two most common cases which evidently reflect Hoover-sponsored tampering are Dr. Rome who treated Hemingway and Dr. Greenson, who treated Marilyn Monroe. Hoover had essentially cultivated the extraordinary capacity to "dictate individual sanity" and that evidently intoxicated Hoover with the sense that his power was absolutely divine. Indeed, when Martin Luther King, Jr., became his priority target, Hoover's FBI actually sought to induce him into committing suicide. The astounding arrogance of the belief that Hoover's FBI could simply will King into committing suicide by promoting the belief that the civil rights champion was perverse and mentally unstable, is evidently an astonishing insight into what Hoover's FBI deemed possible -like the capacity to prompt the "suicide" of Hemingway. The bizarre plot to provoke the "suicide" of King had to be linked to previous Hoover-instigated perversions like the "suicide" of Hemingway -it just doesn't make sense in isolation. But if Hoover had made Hemingway kill himself, why couldn't he attempt to do the same to King? In the final analysis, the missing ingredient in the attempt to cause King's suicide was a "politically reliable" Doctor who could be prevailed upon to manipulate King and to maintain the level of secrecy that Hoover demanded. Indeed, without Dr. Rome, Hoover could not have possibly prompted Hemingway's "suicide" because he would have been denied the opportunity to exploit the influence of the "behavioral sciences" in the ongoing effort to "prove" that Hemingway was insane. The cooperative, extremely secretive relationship between Dr. Rome and Hoover's FBI, ultimately determined that Hemingway was hopelessly insane. In the midst of it all, secrecy is ultimately responsible for the perverted plots that Hoover managed to get away with. Secrecy provided J. Edgar Hoover the opportunity to recruit "politically reliable" doctors who did little beyond perform what they saw as their patriotic duty by taking Hoover's FBI at face value. Secrecy provided Dr. Rome the opportunity to zap Hemingway's brain with electric currents while he slept, and secrecy provided J. Edgar Hoover the opportunity to cover it all up. In retrospect, the aura of secrecy which surrounds the treatment of Hemingway is repugnant. Dr. Rome conveniently claimed patient/client privilege and refused to talk but he was evidently quite comfortable talking to Hoover's FBI about Hemingway. Despite violating Hemingway's trust by cooperating with Hoover's FBI, Doctor Rome demonstrated the shameless audacity to hide behind the censorship refrain: "I've made it practice never ever to reveal any of my contacts with Mr. Hemingway because I gave him my word when he was my patient."14 It all sounds very ethical, but under the circumstances, an orchestrated cover up is the only rational explanation which accounts for the extreme secrecy. Psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom made a futile effort to uncover the truth, but "gag orders" effectively denied the opportunity to penetrate all the deception. Doctor Irvin D. Yalom is as specific as Rome is evasive. According to Yalom: I attempted to interview Howard Rome, the psychiatrist who treated Hemingway in his final depression but he informed me, with a finger across his mouth, that before treating Hemingway he had been obliged to promise that his lips would be forever sealed. How convenient. Here you have the murder of an internationally celebrated genius and Doctor Rome's "lips were sealed". At the same time, while Doctor Rome distorts the truth through his refusal to tell it, he belittles the opinions of psychiatrists through arrogant commentary like "That's his opinion", and "I don't know that Dr. Robitscher ever saw Mr. Hemingway", and having been told that he had not, he pompously added, "Then that's his opinion, gratuitously." In actual fact, even if Dr. Robitscher had tried to see Hemingway before his death, he would have been denied access, and in that respect, Dr. Rome is not at all authoritative, just evasive. Indeed, even Hemingway's friend, Winston Guest, was denied access to Hemingway. According to Mr. Guest: I knew he'd gone to a hospital, but I was very naive about it; I didn't know how ill he was. I'll never forget finding out who was the top psychiatrist at the hospital and I called him and said I wanted to talk to Ernest. I told him who I was. The doctor said practically, "Are you mad? Are you crazy? You can't talk to him at all." So then I guessed he must have been seriously ill, mentally ill. And I never saw him again after that." Mr. Guest illustrates the ease in which the assumption that Hemingway was insane was, without good cause or authority, matter-of-factly accepted. A more scrupulous analysis, offered by author Jeffrey Meyers, effectively challenged the credibility of the erroneous assertion that Hemingway was insane and highlights the simple fact that Hemingway was essentially murdered through shock therapy when he said: For some people, yes [shock therapy is an effective treatment]. But when it didn't work with Hemingway the first time they tried it a second time. And when it didn't work a second time, they tried it a third time. Rome should have gotten the picture that with this patient it's not working. He just had one way of doing everything. If somebody came in to Rome with cancer or a hang nail, he'd probably get shock treatment. When author Denis Brian asked Doctor Rome to justify repeated shock therapy treatment, he predictably said: "Unless you know the whole content of what he had... But I choose not to talk about that." To talk about the "whole content," Ernest Hemingway was obsessed by the incredible passion to live -he even gave up drinking for it. In fact, throughout his life, he repeatedly equated the act of committing suicide with cowardice, and one would really have to stretch the imagination to suggest that Hemingway was a coward. Indeed, the very thought of what he perceived to be a cowardly act like suicide repulsed Hemingway and in 1935, he clearly exposed his unequivocal, anti-suicide "crusade" when he wrote: My father was a coward. He shot himself without necessity. At least I thought so. I had gone through it myself until I figured it in my head. I knew what it was to be a coward and what it was to cease being a coward. Now, truly, in actual danger I felt a clean feeling as in a shower. Of course it was easy now. That was because I no longer cared what happened. I knew it was better to live it so that if you died you had done everything that you could do about your work and your enjoyment of life up to that minute, reconciling the two, which is very difficult. Having equated the act of suicide to cowardice, Hemingway was effectively immune. The ending of A Farewell to Arms, rewritten seventy times, reflects Hemingway's general philosophy: He has the most profound bravery that it has ever been my privilege to see... He has had pain, ill-health, and the kind of poverty that you don't believe-the kind of which actual hunger is the attendant; he has had about eight times the normal allotment of responsibilities. And he has never compromised. He has never turned off an easier path than the one he staked himself. It takes courage. In the final analysis, the claim that Hemingway committed suicide is patently absurd. Hemingway was in fact the last person in the world who can credibly be called suicidal. Even despair, which is commonly used to justify suicide, was a hurdle that motivated Hemingway to strive to become the very best that he could possibly be. In a letter to Scott Fitzgerald in 1934, Hemingway essentially exposed the motivation that made him both a great writer and an unlikely suicide victim, when her wrote: We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it -don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist. Despair was never a serious obstacle, it is actually what made Hemingway put pen to paper. Living through his work, Hemingway retained his zest to live and to write for as long as he was not the victim of shock therapy. That became quite obvious in February of 1961, [after shock therapy treatment] when Hemingway tried to pen a few words to commemorate the newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy. The month previous, an invitation to attend the Kennedy inauguration had cheered Hemingway, but he was too ill to attend. And so he continued to try to pen just a few words, to thank the new President for the invitation. Hours latter, the paper was still blank. J. Edgar Hoover had finally destroyed Hemingway's capacity to think and to write. Just a few words, any school child, gifted or not, could pen just a few words. Hemingway, the literary genius, father of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls could not pen just a few words. Hemingway was dead. It had taken a long time for Hoover to determine how to deal with a popular dissenter like Hemingway without arousing suspicion and he had finally figured it out. In retrospect, it was all a typically perverted J. Edgar Hoover plot -it was the most bizarre, unbelievable exploitation of power imaginable. The golden rule of pre-watergate, mainstream America was to obey and not to question authority and that gave Hoover's highly trusted FBI agents an extraordinary degree of power. But in the context of the abuse of power that Hoover practised, FBI agents were essentially spies who provided Hoover the opportunity to target and to scheme the murder of his enemies. Indeed, even unsuspecting FBI informants like Ronald Reagan, who spied on his fellow co-workers in hollywood and branded them Communists, ultimately furthered the perverse ends of J. Edgar Hoover. In the final analysis, the evil inherent in spying on law abiding citizens is clear. History clearly records the fact that there is very little, if any distinction between politically motivated spying and counselling to commit murder, and intelligence agencies and their informants have established an extremely deplorable record of criminal culpability. Indeed, throughout North America, the most enduring legacy that intelligence agencies have established on the domestic front is a record of excessive, unmerited use of covert action. The tragic, senseless murder of Ernest Hemingway is just one of countless cases where targets of illegal surveillance were exterminated like flies. The only reason we can determine what happened to Hemingway is that he was famous enough for people to have written books about him. Lesser targets or relative unknowns, were even easier to victimize through the power of secrecy. A staged suicide, a staged burglary, a staged car accident or any other perverted scheme that lurks in the minds of the Gordon Liddy's and the Howard Hunt's of this world, should be exposed by the vast resources of the intelligence community, they should not be facilitated. Like Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe was also a victim of Hoover's McCarthyite witch hunts. Since 1956, when Marilyn Monroe's husband, playwright Arthur Miller, was hauled before the Un-American Activities Committee to purge his so-called Communist associations, Monroe developed a serious hatred for Committee supporters like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover and she didn't hesitate to make her views known. Like Hemingway, who had lashed out at McCarthy, Monroe was livid with anger and in 1958, she blasted: Some of those bastards in Hollywood wanted me to drop Arthur. Said it would ruin my career. They're born cowards and want you to be like them. One reason I want to see Kennedy win is that Nixon's associated with that whole scene.

Suicide or Political Persecution? The Mysterious Deaths of Ernest Hemingway and Iris Chang   Five decades after his suicide by shotgun, it appears that what had been assumed to be simple paranoia on the part of literary giant Ernest Hemingway was in fact grounded in the reality of his systematic persecution by certain elements within the US government.  Veteran writer A. E. Hotchner, a close friend and author of the classic biography Papa Hemingway (1966), recounted the days spent with a demoralized, confused, and frustrated individual who was struggling to complete basic creative tasks central to his work. Hemingway had contacted Hotchner in May 1960 to ask for his help in editing an overly-long article that had been commissioned by Life magazine.  In an article published July 01, 2011 (New York Times), Hotchner now realizes that government harassment and surveillance by wiretaps, tax audits, and pharmacologically induced mind control claimed by his increasingly harried and depressed friend were indeed valid.[i] The revelation that Hemingway had been targeted for surveillance by the government intelligence unit headed by J. Edgar Hoover, is consistent with a well-documented history of American citizens held under suspicion by the FBI or the scores of other less well-known spy agencies within the government, military, and civilian sectors.[ii]   There is a bounty of literature that raises disturbing questions about the murder of individuals ranging from community organizers such as Fred Hampton to prominent artists such as John Lennon.[iii]  The examples of assassination as politics by other means abound:  JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy.  According to opinion polls the overwhelming majority of Americans today do not believe the official findings of the Warren Commission that had been formed to investigate the public killing of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.[iv] It is in this historical context that the seemingly paranoid claims made by Iris Chang in the months prior to her death in 2004 must be taken seriously.  Chang had become a literary sensation at age twenty-nine with the publication of the incendiary study The Rape of Nanking (1997).[v]  Like Hemingway, Chang also died by her own hand.  On November 09, 2004 she was found dead in her car was parked on an isolated road near Los Gatos, California.  It was determined that Chang had taken her own life with a pistol she had purchased the day before the incident.  She was thirty-six years old. Former journalism school classmate and personal friend Paula Kamen advanced the notion that the Chang suicide was the result of  “mental illness.”  She first had believed the “dark topics” that Chang was writing about had drove her over the edge, but then concluded that the ambitious author suffered from “bipolar disorder.”[vi]  In Finding Iris Chang (2008), Kamen interprets her friend’s demise through the lens of the medico-pharmacological orthodoxy that has come to predominate throughout a society that is viewed as being composed of sick and debilitated individuals that suffer from an ever-lengthening list of ailments grouped under the heading of “mental illness.” The “mental illness” characterization was rejected out of hand by Ying-Ying Chang in The Woman Who Could Not Forget (2011).  As her mother, it was she who had been the principal person caring for Iris Chang during her final months of dark despair.  Instead, she points to the side effects caused by experimental “anti-psychotic” drugs prescribed by a succession of psychiatrists as responsible for the downward spiral of a spirited woman who, although sensitive, never before betrayed signs of so-called mental illness. . Ernest Hemingway, Milan 1918 Ernest Hemingway, American Red Cross volunteer. Portrait by Ermeni Studios, Milan, Italy. (Credit: Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.)

Joris Ivens, Ernest Hemingway, and Ludwig Renn (Spanish Civil War, 1937) Ernest Hemingway fishing postcard Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21, 1899. In 1953, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Old Man and the Sea" and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He is considered by many to be the greatest, most influential American writer of all time.       Kamen herself suffered from chronic pain and the overriding theme of her book on Chang is that the revolution in anti-depressant pharmacology has been a boon to the sad and afflicted masses.  Against Kamen, however, there is a sizeable and growing body of literature that traces the less-than-altruistic origins of psychopharmacology in the mind control human experiments conducted by the CIA beginning in the 1950s.  Based upon documents that saw limited release due to pressure from the US Congress and its Church Committee investigation, The Search For The “Manchurian Candidate” (1979) by John Marks is a good place to start for those ignorant of government initiatives in mind management and political pacification.[ix]  More recent publications issued from perfectly respectable quarters (as opposed to those tagged as “conspiracy” buffs) contend that the system of mind control research, development, and application remains in place albeit in a far more sophisticated guise.[x] The pervasiveness of pharmacological mind control is evident to anyone (i.e. anyone not on psychotropic medication) who works in a classroom environment with the current generation of students who have been labeled as “depressed” or plagued by “attention deficit disorder” and are then promiscuously prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).[xi]  Young people who would otherwise be in prime physical and intellectual condition have been transformed into zombie-like creatures whose flat affect and deadened eyes betray their forced chemical romance with the military-pharmacological complex.[xii] According to Hotchner, Hemingway complained that the feds had his telephones tapped; automobile and rooms bugged.  His mail was being intercepted and sifted through.  He was being tailed as well.  Then Hemingway was admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota in November 1960 for psychiatric treatment.  He underwent electro-shock therapy and endured eleven separate sessions.  Hemingway became even more depressed and attempted suicide on more than one occasion.  In response to Hotchner asking him why he wanted to kill himself, Hemingway said that everything he valued in life—friends, sex, health, and creative work—had been taken from him.  He ended his life on July 02, 1961.  Documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that Hemingway had been under FBI surveillance since the 1940s. Prior to her suicide, Chang had told those close to her that “powerful” forces linked to the government were closing in on her.  She left written statements that unambiguously outlined the contours of the plot laid against her while attempting to complete an historical account of the “Bataan Death March” as it is known popularly.  Most attributed her mounting “paranoia” to stress, overwork, and exposure to stories told to her by survivors.  Chang was also a new mother, so some felt that this only compounded matters.  Although Chang hid the fact, Kamen discovered that her son had been adopted.  This ruled out the “post-partum depression” theory. In one of the notes addressed to her parents, Chang wrote: “There are aspects of my experience in Louisville [in a mental hospital in August 2004] that I will never understand.  Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do.  I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined.  Whether it was the CIA or some other organization, I will never know.  As long as I’m alive, these forces will never stop hounding me…. “Days before I left for Louisville, I had a deep foreboding about my safety.  I sensed suddenly threats to my own life:  an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box.  I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government’s attempt to discredit me. "I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead."[xiii] Read in proper context, these words make perfect sense.  They are far from being the ravings of a “paranoiac.”  Ying-Ying Chang, who suspects that Japanese rightists might have been responsible for the harassment of her daughter, accepts the claims of Iris Chang that she had been approached personally and threatened.  Nor does she dismiss the possibility that images of “horrible atrocities and ugly images of children torn apart by wars” had been streamed purposely to the television set of the Louisville hotel where Chang had been staying while on a research trip. In acting as unofficial spokesperson for the post-1965 Taiwanese American cohort composed of scientists and engineers who were pushing for a stronger political voice commensurate with their significantly large representation within the academic/military/corporate complex, Chang had the temerity to accuse the US government and President George W. Bush of attempting to stonewall the movement by Taiwanese Americans pressing its demands for reparations to those who suffered at the hands of the Imperial government during World War II.  Since Japan is an important US ally in East Asia it was thought that Washington was loath to support an initiative that would harm the postwar relationship and consensus formed between the top two economic powerhouses in the world. Predictably, assertions that ultranationalist Japanese elements in some way were implicated in the death of Chang appeared online and in print almost immediately after the news of her suicide appeared.  She became a martyr for the truth in the Peoples Republic of China but especially among overseas Chinese in the US.  In the former case, reminders of the “Asian Holocaust” perpetrated by Imperial Japan has been a useful tool in the hands of the communist oligarchs to deflect attention from the tens of millions of fellow Chinese that were sacrificed to consolidate power during the reign of Mao.[xiv]  Today, orchestrated anti-Japan agitation via the internet helps maintain one-party dictatorial control in a nation roiling with internal conflict and rebellion in its far flung regions. For Taiwanese Americans—a large number (including both parents of Chang who earned Ph.D.s at Harvard) of whom have been recruited since the 1950s specifically to staff highly specialized positions within (ironically) the death-dealing US military-industrial complex—the “Asian Holocaust” has been an effective rallying point in attaining the level of political clout that matches their professional status and economic standing.[xv]  Moreover, a shared historical memory of the widespread destruction and atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese military during World War II eases political tensions between the PRC and Taiwan via a shared sense of victimhood directed against Japan.  At the same time, the US arms industry continues to reap enormous profits through the sale of aircraft, communications systems, and all manner of advanced weaponry to Taiwan despite protests by PRC officials.  Complicating the campaign to promote memory of the “Asian Holocaust,” a number of highly placed Chinese Americans have been implicated in brokering the transfer of strategically sensitive American satellite and missile technology to the People’s Liberation Army.[xvi] In the battle over historical memory and the role that Iris Chang played in massaging it, however, there is one possible scenario that has been overlooked:  That she might have been silenced for having ventured too close to truths that if exposed would have put the US—not Japan—in a most unflattering light.  More significantly, the investigative trail she was following with her most recent book project involving The Philippines could have led to wider exposure of the not widely known historical circumstances that undergird the very basis of the postwar economic and political order led by the US. An incredible book that went largely un-reviewed by the corporate press was published by the independent Verso imprint in 2003 titled Gold Warriors:  America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold written by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave.[xvii]  Well-researched and thoroughly documented (including a CD containing facsimiles of original papers), the book reveals the process whereby hundreds of tons precious metals, gems, and countless art treasures that had been looted by the Japanese Imperial Army throughout Asia fell into the hands of Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies in the waning days of World War II en route to Japan where they would be kept as spoils of war.  The vast quantity of gold bullion produced from the booty that came into the possession of the United States was instrumental in the postwar economic recovery of Japan.  America’s special friend Marcos had succeeded in locating much of “Yamashita’s gold” thanks to the torture of key informants who pointed to vast stores of purloined wealth had been cleverly hidden. Iris Chang began her career as a hard charging and ambitious crusader for truth.  Beginning with her first book Thread of the Silkworm (1996), she only touched upon the duplicity of government and the utter cynicism in which its interests are pursued.[xviii]  The subject of the work, research scientist Tsien Hsue-Shen who helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, was sacrificed to anti-Red hysteria that took hold when the Communist Party came to power with the Chinese Revolution.  With the Rape of Nanking, Chang discovered that historical truth is never self-evident nor is it necessarily welcomed.  This is the point at which she might possibly have come to the realization that real politik was grounded in cynicism, opportunism, and exploitation.  The political-economic oligarchs that use government for their own purposes will tolerate and even encourage truth seeking up to a point.  After all, these elite families dole out millions of dollars each year in sophisticated tax-avoidance and wealth-maintenance schemes to all manner of idealists, reformers, and truth tellers through private foundations bearing their names.  Should anyone come too close to exposing the source of their totalistic power, however, like the Venetian families of old they will not hesitate to have such persons eliminated.  Poisons have been their proven specialty. So long as the work of Iris Chang satisfied the agendas of the different interest groups, governmental entities, and political factions that benefitted from the good will and public sympathy garnered by The Rape of Nanking, she functioned as a useful asset.  But with her final book project, thorough and meticulous researcher that she was, Chang independently of the Seagraves might have uncovered truths that would undermine the very foundation of the US monetary system, which had been taken off the gold standard by President Richard Nixon in 1971.  Not coincidentally, early in his political career Nixon reportedly received large cash payments from Ferdinand Marcos, who as dictator of The Philippines enjoyed political and generous financial support from the US.[xix]  Ed Rollins, former campaign director for Ronald Reagan, wrote of ten million US dollars allegedly handed over by high-level political operators from the Philippines.[xx]  Indeed, structural corruption has defined the relationship between the US and The Philippines from the start.  Quite possibly Chang had found during the course of her research and political involvement on behalf of those who experienced profound losses during wartime that her own American government was complicit if not at the center of the multiple holocausts of the twentieth century. In August 2004, while conducting interviews with survivors of Bataan in Louisville, Kentucky, Chang exhibited signs of mental instability.  With the assistance of a certain “Colonel Kelly” whose presence she stated had frightened her severely, Chang was committed to the Norton Psychiatric Hospital.  There she was diagnosed as having experienced a “brief reactive psychosis.” For at least three days Chang was subjected to “antipsychotic” drugs until her parents arrived to take their daughter back to California.  Once returned home, she was placed on a regimen of “anti-depressants” that did little to improve her condition.  Brett Douglas, the IT professional to whom she was married appeared to offer scant emotional support to his wife other than insisting that she hew to the treatment prescribed her by medical professionals.  His seeming callousness toward her was remarked upon by Kamen in Finding Iris Chang when upon visiting with Douglas at his home for an interview, she was introduced to a Chinese woman also named “Iris.”  He had met her online only months after the suicide death of his wife. In an age when Big Pharma has succeeded in enslaving an alarmingly large percentage of American women to SSRIs—commonly known as “anti-depressants”—the   death of Iris Chang should serve as a cautionary warning.  The historical origins of the psychiatric dictatorship lie in the Cold War mind control experiments known collectively as MK-ULTRA.[xxi]  Instead, the totalitarian triumph of the medico-pharmacological model combined with the so-called “mental health” establishment is embraced and welcomed by well intentioned but dangerously compromised medical professionals and psychotherapists held in the thrall of the insurance industry and drug makers. Although the “suicides” of Ernest Hemingway and Iris Chang are separated in time by close to five decades, they are connected in a closed loop formed by the dark history of authoritarian regimes that actively suppress the truths that would subvert their rule.  The oligarchs will go so far to order that the life force be snuffed out of those who dare bring light to the world.  Instead of murdering directly two well admired literary figures of worldwide stature and thereby run the risk of official inquiries, Hemingway and Chang were harassed, gang stalked, and psychiatrically maimed to the point where they found it too painful to live. The twin orthodoxy of psychiatry and pharmacy provided the respectable cover to preclude a closer look into the deaths of Hemingway and Chang.  As it was in the case of Hemingway, however, the death of Iris Chang is not a closed book.  Further investigation into the circumstances of her mental breakdown, coerced psychiatric treatment, and the identification of persons such as the mysterious “Colonel Kelly” who had her committed in Louisville, will shatter the easy and conveniently premature conclusion that the death of Chang was due to so-called “mental illness” alone. In time, it will be seen that in her death the final gift to humankind bequeathed by Iris Chang will be the exposure of the system announced in 1969 by José M. R. Delgado of Yale University in Physical Control of the Mind.[xxii]  Chang was far from being “mad” or “paranoid.”  Rather, Chang to the very end was engaged in a quite sane but desperate struggle for the recovery of the humanity that had been stripped from her.  Instead of allowing herself to be forced into a permanent state of narcotized semi-awareness and zombie-like passivity, Chang mustered the courage to end her life by a method so disturbing and sensational that questions concerning the circumstances leading to this final act of resistance will be asked far into the future.  This is made clear in the intimate account given by Ying-Ying Chang, who was closely involved with her daughter in seeking therapeutic approaches that in the end failed to restore the élan vital that had been sapped by fear and loathing. In this, Chang left the door open for future researchers and writers to enter the dark house of pain to poke about just as she had done.  Once inside, she had gained deeper knowledge of the slithering political realities that go largely unremarked by corporate journalism and unexamined in foundation-funded academic research.[xxiii] Chang had stumbled across a venomous nest of vipers and was bitten hard, repeatedly.  Though slowly poisoned, her core strength caused her to remain lucid amidst the institutionalized madness.  Such fortitude allowed her to leave behind a wealth of written clues, personal leads, and questions that cry out for follow-up.  Instead, the political importance of her legacy fades as Chang continues to be memorialized in books, statuary, and film by those no doubt motivated by the utmost sincerity.  Let the example of Hemingway and his documented state-facilitated suicide serve as a reminder that repressive governments over the course of human history are the leading cause of death.  If Iris Chang claimed that government forces were “hounding” her, then it would be wise to heed this last testament and treat it with the grave seriousness it warrants.