The-Anti-NY-Times

 Research into psychological manipulation had been gathering pace in the USA and the UK since shortly after World War I, mainly in connection to victims of shellshock. The Tavistock Clinic in London was established in 1921 to research the effects of hypnotism on shell-shocked WWI soldiers; the institute later supplied personnel for psychological warfare initiatives during WWII and in recent years has been the driving force behind transgenderism.

Among the central doctrines of the post-war moral economy is the contention that “they” committed medical atrocities, and “we” did not. The credibility of this myth is already thrown into question by the circumstances surrounding their foundational moment at the post-war Nuremberg Trials. Both US and UK intelligence were involved in extracting testimony. Both agencies were experimenting with truth serums at the time. Many of their doctors and scientists — such as William Sargant, an expert in planting false memories — would later be directly associated with MKULTRA research. The possibility that the authorities involved in creating the foundational mythos of the post-war global order used hypnosis, pharmaceutical torture and similarly illicit means of securing testimony in order to generate that mythos is too much to bear, even for the men involved. As Henry Dicks, consultant psychiatrist to MI19, attendant psychiatrist at the interrogation of Rudolf Hess, advisor to SHAEF on psychological warfare (1944-1945) and to the Control Commission for Germany on De-Nazification put it: “British psychiatrists learn with horror of the shameful re-arrest and mistreatment of Vladimir Borisov in your hospital […] Unless this ceases, your names will be linked in history with the Nazis, whose methods you have copied. Shame on you and your contemptible masters.”

… the secretive Division 19, run by Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell, later connected to “brainwashing” projects and the CIA’s role in UFOs. Most of the documents concerning the work of Division 19 are still classified and the full scope of its activities may never be known. But most of the special weapons developed for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, were developed by Division 19. These included the “Tree Spigot Gun,” “Firefly,” the “Panic Creator” which simulates the sound of falling bombs and explosions, the suppressed M3 “Grease Gun” and the ”Bushmaster” remote trigger mechanism which allowed the M3 submachine gun to be made into an autonomous booby trap, along with incendiary notebooks and briefcases, signet rings containing L-pill Zyankalium (“L” for lethal) and poison dart pens. It also dreamed up ideas such as the ill-fated ”Beano” baseball grenade, the surreal “bat bomb” project, “Aunt Jemima”, a special pancake batter which could be used either for baking or as an explosive, and Operation Skatole, an extreme stink-bomb used for demoralization.

the psychiatrists and government scientists who helped to create the Nuremberg spectacle, formulated the Nuremberg code and constructed the post-war moral order never had any intention of abiding by the standards they employed to damn their German colleagues. In reality, the standard of so-called “informed consent” which the Nuremberg trials established is not educated consent, and participants in experiments rarely fully understand the risks involved. Human test subjects are still drawn from uninformed, vulnerable and desperate populations. The abundance of risky and abusive behavior modification experiments on prisoners continues to this day. Despite all the lip service paid to it, at no point in the post-war era has the Nuremberg code been respected by Western government scientists: not in Cold War mind control experiments, not in the War on Terror’s “enhanced interrogation” studies, and not in the medical terrorism of the current COVID-19 era.

An additional myth consists of misunderstanding the real direction of pressure. When seminal MKULTRA researcher John Marks, former intelligence analyst and author of The Manchurian Candidate remarked that “the intelligence community […] changed the face of the scientific community during the 1950s and early 1960s,” he is obscuring the real structure and origin of MKULTRA research. Although it is true that the CIA’s seemingly infinite black budget made it possible to bring these projects to monstrous scale, the driving force behind this research were networks of scientists, not networks of spies.

For example, Robert Galbraith Heath’s research into “gay conversion therapy” was in reality concerned with the use of pleasure to control human behavior.

At the root of scientific abuse of human beings is the Faustian figure of the “mad scientist.” The archetype is a part of an “invisible college”, as they sometimes call themselves, of gnostic geeks: the transhumanist, the alchemist, the technocrat, and the cybernetician. After WWII, a “revenge of the nerds” ensued, first on the defeated Axis, and then on pathologized sections of the citizenry. This “scientific dictatorship” over society has resulted in the revolutionary use of “social engineering” to achieve what is considered, by the new managerial class, to be social goods.

...from the beginning of the war until the end, the most significant campaign of psychological warfare conducted against the United States population was the campaign conducted by the US government. Americans were radically isolationist at the time and the weight of the entire psychiatric establishment was brought to bear to change their minds. Isolationist sentiment was portrayed as a dangerous “fifth column”; the aviator Charles Lindbergh, leader of the America First isolationist movement, rejoined “the one-fifth who are for war call the four-fifths who are against war the ‘fifth column’. They know that the people of this country will not vote for war, and they therefore plan on involving us through subterfuge.”

From this perspective, America’s involvement in World War II was the result of a coup by intelligence agencies, psychiatrists and social scientists which succeeded in subverting the will of the American people. The public mind was now a battlefield whose front was everywhere and centered nowhere. The success of this coup is what characterized “the Golden Era of psychiatry” that followed the war, and the abuses of MKULTRA. Once the “fifth column” of militarized psychiatrists was mobilized, the war for hearts and minds never stopped. As Rees put it: “If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity […] Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’”