Kerry Bolton - The Psycho-Hell of Frederick Seelig

At the time when Yockey was being threatened with mental house railroading by the State, long-time journalist Frederick Seelig had discovered a nexus between the Communist Party and homosexual child molesters at State and Federal levels. Seelig had his 11-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son taken from him and handed over to the custody of proven child abusers. He had brought down the ire of the Kennedy Administration for his investigative journalism. His children had been threatened with death should Seelig report what he had found out about corruption in California’s social services and he was warned that he would be locked away as criminally insane. During court hearings throughout 1958–1959, Seelig was accused of being ‘psychiatrically ill’ for opposing the homosexual network in child services. He had shown with medical reports that his children had been abused.

This was happening in the same state and at the same time, indeed the very month, that Yockey was being set up for enforced psychiatric examination.

Seelig, with the help of several other veteran reporters, worked to uncover a subversive network involved with child abuse, some of whose communist connections had been exposed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. This homosexual-communist network had set up a slush fund for political candidates at local and national levels. FBI agents warned Seelig that the information he had put him in danger. 1347

Seelig was arraigned on the pretext of libel. The Justice Department confiscated his files and property worth $60,000. However, instead of being tried for libel, Seelig was confined to a prison hospital in Texas, without a doctor’s examination, court hearing or counsel, from December 1960 until November 1962. Seelig had been found by a state medical board to be of sound mind and with a high IQ but the Justice Department refused to allow Seelig’s release on bail. It had taken seven separate proceedings to have Seelig committed. Seelig writes: ‘Three times I was transported across the country shackled in chains, leg-irons and handcuffs; starved, degraded, demoralised and humiliated. Clothing rotted off my body; maltreatment caused toenails to curl into the flesh. For weeks my toes were caked with blood.’ 1348

The Los Angeles sheriff’s department stated that it would not release Seelig unless he was arraigned for trial. He was brought before a Los Angeles court not on a charge of libel but to have him committed as insane. He was not permitted his own witnesses nor evidence as to his mental health and was denied the return of confiscated evidence. Thomas Gore was the ‘mental health director’ for California, whose claims to being a doctor and a psychiatrist were fraudulent and who had himself been diagnosed as insane. Gore had been a loan shark when coming out of an administration role in the Army and had been dismissed from hospital service for mishandling funds and other criminal activities. 1349   He had met Seelig once, for an hour, and testified that Seelig had been insane for ‘five years’ — the period during which he had been investigating corruption. 1350   The five-man psychiatric board that had examined Seelig for a month and determined that he was normal was disregarded.

In January 1962 Dr Richard Stamm, senior surgeon with the US Health Service, attempted to have Seelig’s sister sign permission for her brother to be given electro-shock treatment, claiming that Seelig was incurably insane and dangerous. Seelig’s older son from a prior marriage was threatened with psychiatric incarceration if he persisted into looking into his father’s predicament.

Seelig was told that there was ‘no escaping the new social order’ and that he would never see his children again. Disagreement with this ‘new social order’ is diagnosed as ‘rigidity of mind’. 1351   This means that anyone with conservative or ‘right-wing’ opinions and with moral values that were until recently regarded as ‘normal’ has symptoms of ‘mental illness’. Indeed, the seminal study, The Authoritarian Personality, funded by the American Jewish Congress, established an entire school of thought that has remained dominant and basically states: ‘Left is normal, Right is sick.’ 1352

Seelig’s court-appointed Attorney, Gilbert Seton, warned him:

There will never be a trial or a hearing allowed you on your charges. Nor will you get your property or files back. Refuse to plead guilty and you will be found insane, imprisoned for the rest of your life. You will never see your children again or know what became of them. That attitude will destroy you. You can’t fight the new society. After two years, nothing has been gained except your arrest and indictment. 1353 

It was with Seelig’s refusal to plead guilty for sending ‘libellous’ materials in the mail that the bogus ‘doctor’ Gore sat in the corridor of a prison with Seelig for an hour. On that basis he determined that Seelig was insane, regardless of the previous month-long examination by a panel of five to the contrary. Seelig was not permitted by Judge Leon R Yankwich (of Romanian-Jewish descent) to dismiss his lawyer. Yankwich had a typically antagonistic attitude toward Seelig because he was a conservative, and referred to Seelig as a ‘witch-hunter, Red-baiter and lunatic’, making comparisons to the late Senator McCarthy. 1354   Both Yankwich and Gore had concluded that Seelig was ‘insane’ on the basis of his opinions. These opinions were formed both by his work as a well-experienced journalist and his own observations of the social services in a custody dispute.

Yockey had faced the same predicament, in the same state, with the same types of threat, during the same era. Yockey appeared before a rabbi, Karesh. Seelig appeared before a Jewish judge, Yankwich, who, like Karesh, cared nothing for the defendant’s Constitutional rights, which could be denied by the expedient of ‘mental health’.

Seelig pointed out that in a ‘psychiatric prosecution’ the defendant is not allowed his own witnesses, medical experts or evidence. This is what Yockey would have faced. Like Seelig, Yockey would have received nothing but ridicule and degradation — assuming that his plight would even be publicised, as such a hearing is not open to public or media. Indeed, Seelig, a veteran investigative journalist, was given the silent treatment by the Los Angeles press. 1355   He was not permitted to contact anyone and his clothes were literally rotting on him after months of confinement in jail cells.

Seelig was taken to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Forth Worth, Texas. He was given sweat-soaked shoes that were too tight for his feet, known as the ‘shoe torture.’ This was the first part of a routine for his ‘psychiatric treatment’.

Seelig states of his time in the Federal ‘drain hole’ that:

Prisoners stripped nude in the drain-holes are denied medication for injuries, illness, or infections. In the Kremlin manual it is called “punishment therapy”. Cuts and wounds fester until scabs form and harden. The shoe torture was “therapy” for rejecting obedience on prescribed thinking. Nights I often heard the cries and moans of prisoners begging for water. Many times they were not cries but screams from unmerciful beatings. That was more “therapy”. 1356 

Any prisoner who objects to prison conditions is given “insanity status” and this status is permanently on his record and might be used at any time in his life. 1357 

Among the inmates that Seelig met was 80-year-old Richard Pavlic, committed as insane because of his intense dislike of the Kennedys. 1358

Seelig was told by the ward psychiatrist that he was in need of a lot of treatment and he would be put in a ward where the ‘animals’ were kept — that is, those in a zombified and vegetative state. 1359   When four inmates crapped on the floor, squatted in it and ate it, Seelig was forced to mop it up as punishment for not giving the ward guard due respect. Seelig’s refusal brought forth a psychiatrist and Seelig was sent to ‘building 10’, which housed the ‘strip nude drain holes and nerve breaking cells’. In the centre of the cell was a stinking drain hole used as a toilet. There was nothing for a bed. The inmates had to lay naked on the cement floor. High-pitched, shrill music was played into the cell day and night. The ward psychiatrist was Dr Charles Keith, notorious for his experiments. 1360

 ‘Therapy beatings’ for disobedience were conducted in the showers and included stomping and kicking the inmates. Electric shock ‘therapy’ was another punishment. Seelig was on three occasions surrounded by staff and doctors and a light focused on his eyes, while they tried to prompt him into saying he ‘felt persecuted’. When Seelig commented on the treatment at the institution he was sent to the ‘hole’ with the diagnosis that his comments were ‘insane’. 1361

 Infected sores on Seelig’s feet and legs compelled him to crawl for food like an animal. Judge Yankwich and others actively sought to prevent Seelig from filing affidavits on conditions at the institution and he was not permitted to communicate with attorneys.

Dr Keith told Seelig that he would break his nerves and he was sent to the tiny cells at 10-D. Seelig’s oldest son was also threatened that he also would be declared insane and institutionalised if he continued making allegations about his father’s situation.

In October 1962, Seelig was transferred to a Los Angeles jail to stand again before Judge Yankwich. A psychiatrist examined him for less than 10 minutes and considered Seelig sane. US Attorney David Smith moved for the dismissal of the libel and other indictments and in less than 10 minutes Seelig was free on $100 bail. 1362

    In less than 10 minutes — but after nearly two years in a hell-hole — the case was closed. Seelig was suddenly sane and free. It was made clear that Seelig could be recommitted if he ever caused further trouble.

Seelig, over the course of several more years, attempted to raise the issues with the courts but was met with silence. He had the support of Westbrook Pegler, who wrote the introduction to Destroy the Accuser, and radio commentator Richard Cotten also attempted to highlight these issues.

In his ‘commentary’ to Seelig’s book, Dr Revilo P Oliver, at the time Classics professor at the University of Illinois, a luminary of the right and an avid promoter of Imperium, alluded to a similar case. Fletcher Bartholomew, temporarily working for Radio Free Europe, reported to the CIA, which ran the radio station, that homosexuals were working there. At the time, homosexuals were regarded as security risks. On July 28, 1956, an Army chaplain lured him into an Army hospital, where he was forcibly strapped to a bed and drugged. He was flown back to the USA to be placed in a mental ward. His wife alerted some prominent individuals in Washington and he was released. In late 1958, conservative commentator Fulton Lewis Jr published the incident. 1363

Seelig’s book was endorsed by Westbrook Pegler, Congressman William Dorn of South Carolina, Congressman John Dowdy of Texas and Congressman John Rarick of Louisiana. Seelig, as predicted by his tormentors, died of a heart attack because of his ordeals, in September 1967. He did not finish a sequel to Destroy the Accuser.

Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey

Notes

F Seelig, Destroy the Accuser, (Miami: Freedom Press Publishing Co.),  pp. 9–11.
[1348 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 12.
[1349 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 66.
[1350 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 12.
[1351 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 23.
[1352 ]
 For an examination of the mentalities of Left-wing luminaries such as Rousseau, Marat, de Sade, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Abbie Hoffmann, Jerry Rubin, Jim Jones, et al, see Bolton, The Psychotic Left (London: Black House Publishing, 2013).
[1353 ]
 F Seelig, Destroy the Accuser, op. cit., p. 59.
[1354 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 61.
[1355 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 74.
[1356 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 24.
[1357 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 23.
[1358 ]
 F Seelig, ibid.
[1359 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 80.
[1360 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., pp. 96–97.
[1361 ]
 F Seelig,  ibid., p. 105.
[1362 ]
 F Seelig, ibid., p. 123.
[1363 ]
 Revilo P Oliver, ‘Commentary’, in Seelig, ibid., p. 143.