Section 2--- The Original Film "Manchurian Candidate"--Strategic Study In Breaking The Trumpworld Brainwash Program

Section 2--- The Film of The Century, And What It Means For Today's Conflict With Trumpism

This retrospective of the 1962 film, "Manchurian Candidate", directed by John Frankenheimer and produced by Frank Sinatra was the result of a spirited debate on Facebook between myself and some friends. My intent was not to write the authoritative history of "mind control". The purpose was to convey an appropriate analogy between the film's most dramatic and climactic scene, and a potential paradigm shift ongoing among some Americans today, which this author believes to be real and decisive, if not self-evident.

I know. Your neighbors have a Trump sign on their lawn and are idiots. We will deal with them a bit later. For now, we need to do some homework, and then we'll circle back to your neighbors.

Section 1 is a background piece on the history of US government secret projects in mind control using drugs like LSD, which incorporated techniques of human medical experimentation pioneered by Nazi Doctors, and at that time were justified as "Cold War" secret weapons research. For those who have not read it, the link is here:

https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-compelling-strategic-and-political.html

The relevant scene I'm referring to is pictured above, with Sinatra's character Major Marko using a full deck of "Red Queens" to deprogram the victim of Communist brainwashing, Sgt. Raymond Shaw before he carried out his mission of a political assassination. 

Below are excerpted sections of a film review in the New York Times written in 2003, which includes important background and a brief synopsis. It was written shortly after the announcement of a remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, produced by Sinatra's daughter Tina.

[[[[["By J. Hoberman

Sept. 14, 2003

INTENTIONALLY or not, all movies are time capsules, preserving in some form a particular historical moment. A few embody something more -- the imaginative history of their times. Such movies realize social anxieties and desires not yet fully articulated. ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (1962), which inaugurates Film Forum's John Frankenheimer retrospective next weekend, is such a movie, steeped in what Norman Mailer called ''that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.''

Mr. Mailer was contemplating the 1960 Democratic Convention, which nominated John F. Kennedy, and ''The Manchurian Candidate'' belongs to a cycle of movies specific to the Kennedy era. Kennedy glamorized politics and embraced danger, and Hollywood responded in kind. The Kennedy scenarios of the early 60's -- ''Advise and Consent,'' ''Seven Days in May,'' ''The Best Man,'' ''Dr. Strangelove'' and ''Fail-Safe'' -- conceived American democracy as an excitingly perilous arena. Shot in sober black and white and populated by demagogues, dupes and traitors, such movies were delirious news bulletins that set American presidents and presidential candidates in the midst of some personal or public Armageddon.

Adapted from Richard Condon's 1959 novel, starring Frank Sinatra and produced by his company, ''The Manchurian Candidate'' is the quintessential Kennedy-era thriller. A Korean War hero (Laurence Harvey), brainwashed by the Chinese Communists, returns home programmed to commit murder, and triple agents plot a televised coup d'état that will sweep them into the White House with, as one exults, ''powers that make martial law look like anarchy.'' ''The Manchurian Candidate,'' in a sense, is an anthology of cold war concerns that materialized at the height of the Cuban missile crisis to startle audiences with a baroque tale of mind control, assassination and conspiracy. 

The star was known to be a friend of the president's, and, indeed, Kennedy had been instrumental in getting ''The Manchurian Candidate'' made.

Sinatra had a distribution deal with United Artists, but the studio head, Arthur Krim, who was also the Democrats' national finance chairman, feared ''The Manchurian Candidate'' was political dynamite. Sinatra secured a presidential blessing on a visit to the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass. ''That's the only way that film ever got made,'' Condon told the Sinatra biographer Kitty Kelley years later. ''It took Frank going directly to Jack Kennedy.''

The president saw ''The Manchurian Candidate'' at the White House on Aug. 29, 1962. History does not record his response. (Perhaps he was distracted -- that day a U-2 spy plane over Cuba reported eight missile installations that were only weeks from operational.) In its futuristic technology and jokey violence, ''The Manchurian Candidate'' is a bit like the Bond movies that Kennedy was reputed to enjoy and, in its integration of dreams, flashbacks and waking reality, a bit like ''Last Year at Marienbad,'' on which, according to Arthur Schlesinger, the president had walked out.

''If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won't know what it's all about!'' a trailer for ''The Manchurian Candidate'' warned. It is impossible to know if Kennedy appreciated the energy that the movie's political demagogue draws from his own televised image or the idea of a fabricated war hero as the unwitting dupe of his unscrupulous parent (memorably played by Angela Lansbury). But once it becomes apparent that the cold war is the nightmare from which Sinatra's character is trying to awake, the movie -- as imagined through presidential eyes -- becomes almost self-reflexive: Communists are repeatedly identified with elderly women; marijuana is presented as an aid to behavior modification; assassination is recognized as a political option.

''The Manchurian Candidate'' had its New York premiere on Oct. 24, two days into the Cuban missile crisis. The administration released 14 aerial photographs of the missile installations, Soviet ships steamed toward the American quarantine line surrounding Cuba and Under Secretary of State George Ball warned the United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, that ''there could be a shooting war by tomorrow afternoon.''...

...''The Manchurian Candidate'' came into its own after Kennedy was assassinated the following November. ''Was 'Manchurian' Film a Prophet?'' The Hollywood Citizen-News wondered. Condon, pursued by numerous journalists, published an article in The Nation arguing that Lee Harvey Oswald had been no less brainwashed by his society than the assassin Condon had invented. In June 1968, Truman Capote made waves on the ''Tonight Show'' when he proposed that Robert F. Kennedy's killer, Sirhan Sirhan, had been another such Manchurian candidate.

The movie's literal yet fanciful view of behavior modification was not only an explanation but ultimately even an illustration -- 25 years after ''The Manchurian Candidate'' was released, an ABC television documentary on C.I.A. mind control supported its thesis with clips from the movie."]]]]]

(*Italics for emphasis are mine-- lfr)

Strategic Context For The Film-

The two paragraphs highlighted above underscore the importance of the film at that time and for today. The content and the strategic context were sensitive enough that producer and lead actor Sinatra felt compelled to make a personal visit to Hyannisport Mass. to meet with President Kennedy and gain his approval for the film. 

It is not known whether the book's author, Richard Condon, director John Frankenheimer or Sinatra himself were aware that the CIA was then engaged in Mind Control research with LSD to build "supersoldiers" and assassins, or otherwise to research avenues for social control of larger populations through use of hallucinogenic drugs. (Though the premise that the author Congdon had no inkling of it or no Intelligence sources at all strains credulity. As they say, he "knew too much")

We do know that President Kennedy was keenly aware of it, and had recently fired the project's leading author, CIA Director Allen Dulles following the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

It is well known that both JFK and his Democratic predecessor Harry Truman were fearful and distrustful of Dulles and the CIA. After Bay of Pigs, the following quote was attributed to Kennedy in a New York Times piece written April 25, 1966.

["Former President Truman, whose Administration established the C.I.A. in 1947, said in 1963 that by then he saw “something about the way the C.I.A. has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic positions, and I feel that we need to correct it.”

And President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he “wanted to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”]

The timing of this New York Times article is of interest, as it coincides with the CIA sponsored military overthrow of the President of Ghana, Kwame Nkruma in  that year 1966 while he was out of the country.  Many people in and out of government began to characterize the CIA as a "rogue agency" which used the various strategic crises of the Cold War to gain outsized budgets and autonomy with virtually no oversight. 

In a typical earthy remark, Lyndon Johnson told his National Security adviser McGeorge Bundy, "Mac, I'm gettin' sick and tired of this Coup shit". 

That was the broader context of Sinatra's visit to JFK to get his ok to make the film given the sensitivity of the plot, in which a brainwashed assassin is deployed by the Communists  to shoot a presidential nominee with a sniper's rifle, at a time US agencies were themselves researching the means to do the same. 

President Kennedy was deeply involved with Hollywood, both with its content and also as is well known on a personal level with many of its stars and starlets. He had previously agreed to allow filmmakers to film inside the White House while making "Seven Days In May" whose plot revolved around Right-Wing Generals contriving a crisis as cover for a military Coup d' Etat. 

Kennedy was sympathetic with that movie concept, because he himself had stared into the barrel of such a potential plot during the Cuban Missile crisis, when there were two rogue operations to provoke war with the USSR which Kennedy suspected emanated from his Joint Chiefs, for whom the descriptive term "bellicose" was not adequate. 

(Some background on the JFK conflict with the JCS was covered here, in The Atlantic--)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/jfk-vs-the-military/309496/

It should be considered that JFK in signing on to support these types of films was engaged in a form of political warfare against this destructive rogue element within the Military Industrial Complex. There is no other rational explanation for him agreeing that such sensitive matters be covered by filmmakers with whom he was personally associated. He was using Hollywood for a purpose, and they him. 

The Climactic Scene--

First it is important to clarify a misunderstood aspect of the film and the book. It is a common mistake to think that the term "Manchurian Candidate" refers to the Communist brainwashed assassin. It does not. It refers to the puppet Vice-Presidential nominee Senator Johnny Iselin. (modeled on the anti-communist witch hunt leader Sen. Joseph McCarthy)  He is the character that will supposedly be catapulted to the Presidency by the assassination of his running mate. He is the step-father of the prospective assassin Shaw, and the object of his hatred. 

One subtext of the film which is central to the novel but underplayed in the film (for obvious reasons given the standards of the time) is the parallels and references to Greek tragedy's Orestian Trilogy by Aeschylus. In particular the Oedipus Myth is a driver for the plot given the incestuous relationship between Raymond and his Mother, who is also his "American Operator."

The "key and code" for Raymond's drug and hypnosis induced conditioning is the playing card,"The Red Queen", which in the context of this Oedipal drama is symbolic of Raymond's Mother.  This is one of the many satirical references of the film which renders it a tragicomedic tour de force. Raymond, despite his huge ego, is mother-dominated and a very Oedipal personality, which is why the Communist masterminds picked him to be the brainwashed asset of their longtime agent, his Mother.

The assassin is ordered to murder his first love and newlywed bride along with her Father before the climactic assassination, because they are "loose ends", and also as a test run to insure the programming is still intact. 

In real life, it is established that no form of brainwashing can actually compel a person to do anything which truly conflicts with their character or personality, no matter how thoroughly their memories are wiped, so this aspect of the plot is truly fictional. But it is central to the resolution of the drama. Why?

Because the act of murdering the only person whom the previously narcissistic and egoistic Raymond has ever loved stays in his memory, as opposed to his previous killing in Korea in a control group situation. The memory is not supposed to be retained, and the expected human emotions of guilt, loss, grief, all well up and override his programming, which is that of a robotic killing machine. The programming of Raymond has been corrupted by this unscripted killing, ordered by his jealous incestuous Mother. 

Major Marko, played by Sinatra, has been laboring to uncover the source of his awful dreams of his and Shaw's captivity in North Korea, as the brainwashing has broken down for him as well. He is a Greek scholar, a military intelligence professional, and an investigator. He also despises Shaw. But Shaw holds the secret of the nightmares of his captivity, and fixing him is the key to unraveling the whole plot. 

Marko finds Shaw, brings him to a hotel room and uses a deck of 52 Red Queens to rip out his conditioning, in effect deprogramming him, and undoing his control mechanisms. (ie; his Mother's psychological hold on him) 

Remember that this is fiction, but the concept of deprogramming is real. In this case, a personal crisis of such traumatic influence creates the opening to reach the real person, to retrieve their actual personality, character and memories, bringing that person back to their true selves, instead of the remote controlled thoughtless tool or weapon under their previous conditioning.

Hold on to that thought, because it all leads to the point of this discussion. 

The Final Act--

Raymond was programmed to shoot the presidential nominee, launching the likely Presidency of his hated step-father Iselin in order to be used as the tool under his Mother's control for subverting the US. Instead, he shoots his step-father first and then his Mother. Lastly in front of Major Marko, Raymond shoots himself because he can't live with what he has done. When Marko tells his superiors the whole story, Shaw is posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and Sinatra gets to walk off into the sunset with his girlfriend played by Janet Leigh. 

The Conclusion?

Now you might be asking, "what has this got to do with the potential to defeat Trumpism"? It's fairly simple really. We are in a moment of world crisis which could rise to the threshold of nuclear conflict. As opposed to the Cold War, this is directly the result of one Imperial nuclear armed dictator who is engaged in a global onslaught against democracy. This is a person, Vladimir Putin who has made himself a hostile adversary through hacking, election interference, poisoning and murder of his domestic opposition, enabling of mass murderous dictators from Syria to Belarus, armed our adversaries to kill our soldiers in Afghanistan, and is now obliterating the nation and people of Ukraine. 

Everyone knows that Putin's nuclear arsenal is second only to ours, and that it is pointed at us. 

And the former President, the "controller" so to speak of MAGA, is praising the actions of this "butcher of Ukraine", the man who also holds a nuclear gun to the head of Europe and the American people. 

Americans of all stripes are praying for the people and leaders of Ukraine. Many are rallying around President Biden who are not even necessarily his supporters, as did Americans who previously reviled FDR but united behind him after the attack on Pearl Harbor. People might not admit to or be conscious of this because it is a historically and culturally determined reflex. 

Your neighbor who has the Trump sign on their lawn will not experience a "conversion", nor will they remove their sign. But inside they are shaken. Destabilized. Their "programming" is weakened, as they have observed treason by the leaders in whom they trusted, and outright lying by their favored news sources like Tucker Carlson. 

Trump's endorsement of Russia's invasion conflicts with their identities as conservative Christians who supposedly value freedom and human life---that is unless they are part of the small minority of Putin admiring white nationalists of the Nazi/QAnon/MTG/Carlson variety. The coverage of young Ukrainian Moms fleeing with their babies who remind them of their daughters and grandchildren is tearing them up inside. 

Look into your neighbor's eyes. Have a conversation about Ukraine, or anything for that matter. Don't listen to what they say. Focus on what interrogators call "the tell". Excessive blinking, a tic, body language, breathing, avoidance of eye contact. You will see the signs of a raging internal battle, of the same sort as poor Raymond Shaw who could not "unremember" his own crimes in killing the only people who meant anything to him. They have been betrayed, and in their heart of hearts they know it, unless they are spiritually dead. 

For ordinary Trump supporters who are not in their identities terrorists or Nazis, their psychological reaction to Trump's endorsement of Putin's attack on Ukraine is the equivalent of having 52 Red Queens shoved in their faces. You need not directly confront them, reality has confronted them. 

Expect that their pride and fear will not let them admit to you that their core beliefs are shaken, yet they are. Even as you are speaking, they are questioning and rethinking a good amount of what they think they know. They will not give an inch on their conservative political single issues, so don't expect they will. But, their faith, ie; the control mechanisms which have held them in thrall to Donald Trump for all this time have been destabilized. Not broken but weakened. 

"Why is he on the wrong side of this", they are asking themselves. And this, my friends is the long awaited opening through which you can reach them. Right now, while the betrayal is still raw. Don't miss it.

I've been involved in helping people for decades who desired political change, as I have changed my own views on many things, and helped change the thinking of others. This was my job for 35 years as a political organizer. I know what change looks like, and the potential for change in others. 

This is a moment of opportunity to reach numbers of people who were previously unreachable, because Putin and Trump did something equivalent to Raymond Shaw's Mother in demanding he murder his newlywed  bride and father-in-law. They broke the control mechanisms that they themselves had depended upon to maintain the conditioning to which your neighbor was captive. You can have a conversation now which would have been impossible a few weeks ago. 

This is why the film Manchurian Candidate, like the Greek tragedies which it echoed at the time of it's writing are a strategic study guide for how to fix your Trumpian neighbor, your Pastor, estranged friends, your stubborn uncle, even your Mothers, assuming they need fixing. 

Take this leap of faith with me. The laws of the Universe changed last week, which means that so can we.  And watch the film.