The Original Film "Manchurian Candidate"--Strategic Study In Breaking The Trumpworld Brainwash Program
Section 1
Introduction-- What Is The History Of Mass Brainwashing, And How Do We Overcome It?
Oddly enough, despite my sometimes visceral rejection of Hollywood as a reliable source of historical or political analysis, I find myself drawing upon a film as a reference point for the entirely new potential which exists today, in real time, as a consequence of Vladimir Putin's war against humanity commenced in Ukraine.
Yes, a movie. One which has burned itself into my mind and which I often periodically reflect upon in struggling for answers to the questions, "why do people think the things they do and act the way they act"? "How much of what people think they believe are actually their own thoughts generated internally, as opposed to being procured, borrowed, absorbed, or even imposed by others from the outside"?
We like to believe that we are independent or critical thinkers, "Captains of our own ships" to coin a phrase. Then a phenomena like a Reverend Jim Jones, or a Donald Trump and his following emerges, and we are forced to reflect a bit on how apparently intelligent people will propel themselves over the edge of a cliff to "follow the leader" like lemmings, or Wile E. Coyote in pursuit of the Roadrunner. Before taking this up directly however, a little background would be of help.
Many of us who studied some Psych or Sociology in school have considered these questions when grappling with various thinkers, from the Behaviorists like B. F. Skinner, the Freudians, or Jungians, and even some of the 60's mystics and advocates of "better living through chemistry" such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. We might even have dipped our toes into the 60's New Age Esalen Institute pool of "primal scream therapy" and adult breastfeeding, in the belief that full immersion in both our pre-natal and post-natal personalities could reconnect us with our "Spiritual Mothers", to help make us whole, live in harmony with nature, and find contentment.
And of course, there were many alienated folks who sought solace and "rules for daily life" in the Bible or a church format, who needed that structure and discipline to avoid the traps of addiction, depression and violence to which they might have been susceptible. These were the "born again" Christians. The 50's and 60's were indeed a volatile time, as it is again today, given the immediate and ever present threat of nuclear annihilation and social chaos. For many, adopting new ideologies and philosophies became a form of psychological "bomb shelter" inside of which we hoped to shield ourselves from the anxiety and fear of an uncertain and dangerous world.
Part 1-- After World War II
Then of course, there were the Nazis. The continuing revelations of their unfathomable crimes continued to resonate powerfully among the post war intelligentsia, as scholars, writers, social scientists and public opinion makers struggled to answer the questions of "why, and how" it all happened. Even years after the fact, there was still a level of incredulity that such a thing actually did happen, and was perpetrated by a people who had appeared on the surface otherwise to be modern, cultured and civilized.
Most modern 20th Century concepts of Psychology, Psychiatry, the Social Sciences and public opinion were turned on their heads by the post war revelations of Nuremberg and the challenges of denazification in Allied occupied Germany. Consequently, our Intelligence agencies, affiliated academic institutions, and writers mobilized themselves to take up the questions of "why, and how,"and did so for a variety of reasons.
Without going into a great detail, this all occured within the backdrop of the US Soviet conflict known as the Cold War. This was a classic misnomer, as there was nothing "Cold" about it. After the War ended, the USSR militarily occupied and blockaded East Berlin. China underwent a bloody revolution and regime change, which in turn led to a Chinese invasion of Korea, consequently leading to US and UN involvement, then the creation of NATO. Superpower contrived bloody ethnic, tribal, and border conflicts in developing nations led to civil wars, including proxy wars such as Vietnam, all fought on battlefields of nations whose only crime was trying to establish independence from their previous Colonial status.
Additionally, we almost had nuclear war over Cuba and Berlin. Political assassinations, Coups and great power sponsored guerilla movements in African nations and Latin America replaced both diplomacy and all out war, in favor of the perverse doctrine of limited war. And the aim of both superpowers was not justice or development, rather carving out spheres of geopolitical influence, in pursuit of access to raw materials, control of energy, (Oil) technology and shipping lanes. And not least was having bases for deployment of strategic weapons.
The world became like a chessboard in which the players came armed with automatic weapons. And the pieces in this game, the people and their nations, ultimately meant very little to the players, being used as cannon fodder. Our pundits and political leaders at the time cynically called this war "Cold" for our own psychological well being, not because it was.
Part 2-- American Academia Conducts Nazi Experiments
Throughout the 1950's and 60's there was a concerted effort to understand how Adolf Hitler commanded such authority and obedience from his underlings. Specifically, how did he succeed in forcing compliance with his direct orders to commit mass murder. There were specific areas of concentration, which included the so-called "loyalty oaths" sworn to Hitler by the Armed forces, the Nazi Party political leadership and population. There were OSS and British studies on the effects of Allied strategic bombing of Germany's civilian populations in uniting them behind Hitler to "fight until the last man".
Historians investigated and wrote about Hitler's "Big Lie" and the Nazis pioneering use of propaganda through their new mass media (Radio) to propagate that lie, which was the "Jewish Conspiracy" to destroy Germany and seize world power. Repetition, and more repetition of that lie and others became the forcing medium for the mass indoctrination of a people, taking place under the aversive conditioning of economic deprivation, uncontrolled "left versus right" violence, social chaos, the denouement of German life by the humiliating Postwar Treaty, and the technicolor pageantry of Roman Empire styled spectacle, which combined with the mind altering hypnotic effects Hitler's speeches made at huge events by torchlight. That and the fulfilled promise of jobs, bread, and honor were the ingredients for the first mass based experiment in mind control, though the use of those terms is mine, not those of the historians.
There were also in depth studies of the indoctrination of Hitler's hard core followers in the different branches of the SS. Most people think of the SS as one group, when it was in fact several. There was the Waffen SS, which was the military branch of the SS, and the Allgemeine SS which was the paramilitary leadership, the Einzatzgruppen, (Special Action) who were the special forces killing units deployed for massacres on the Eastern front, and there was the SS branch which ran the death camps, the "Totenköpfverbande", which committed the most war atrocities. And there was the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) branch of SS, known to us today as the Gestapo. (And to Marjorie Taylor Greene as the Gazpacho) which enforced internal security. And lastly was the SD, (Sicherheitdienst des Reichsführers-SS) the Intelligence agency of SS which ran espionage and so-called diplomacy.
Psychoanalytic studies of the SS and Hitler himself are well known and available. Their psychological profiles conformed to a similar type. Essentially, with the exception of the Special Forces and Death Camp units who were psychopaths, the SS and Party leadership had the mindsets of both bureaucrats and newly converted religious zealots. Indeed, for the upper echelon of the Nazi leadership, their belief structure had the dominant features of an occult or esoteric religious order. They were able to separate their human personalities from their slavish obedience to Hitler in carrying out high crimes through a process which was described as "doubling" by author Robert Jay Lifton in his important work, "The Nazi Doctors".
In short, "doubling" was Lifton's clinical term for a form of induced schizophrenia in which the person was trained to split their personalities between the person with a family, a home, and personal interests, and the person who was a Nazi Party member, whose raison de etre was their service to the Reich, and their sole God-like authority Adolf Hitler. In carrying out his orders, there was to be no consideration given to the personal inclination at all, only their sworn duty to Hitler and The Reich. In effect, they were conditioned to suspend all moral judgment. They were indoctrinated as children by offering a daily prayer to the Führer as the deified person to whom they are most loyal and devoted.
Also an extremely important contribution by Lifton was his account of the Nazi Euthanasia program, initially carried out solely against Germans, known as "T-4", short for the address of the main office of administration at Tiergarten 4 in Berlin. The first tasks of the SS and their medical assistants in mass killing were the administration of lethal injections for the chronically ill, mentally ill, handicapped and other categories of people deemed "useless eaters" by the authorities. German citizens were told their loved ones were being hospitalized for treatment, and they were never seen again. The personnel doing the killing was told theirs was a mission of mercy, to end pain and suffering, and would amount to savings of vast resources for the Reich. To their credit, the German Catholic Church fought this policy and paid a high price for their opposition.
Little by little the killing expanded, as did the categories of people considered "useless". Criminals, Jews, Gypsies, drunks, prostitutes, anyone with an STD, vagrants, etc. At a certain point lethal injections in hospitals became too costly, so a transition was made to driving the victims around in specially modified vans whose exhaust systems pumped carbon monoxide into the van, killing the passengers. Gradually the personnel became accustomed to killing through incremental increase in numbers and barbarity. Finally, because of the need to conserve Petrol, the idea of vans was scrapped, and plans made for building facilities which combined poison gas and incinerators to dispose of the "unfit and unwanted". The personnel who were gradually introduced to mass killing under the T-4 program became the original staff for running what evolved out of it, which were the mass extermination camps that carried out "The Final Solution".
Lifton documents clearly how through this process of "doubling" and gradualism, the SS trained their forces to conduct large scale remorseless killing. It became "their job, their duty", after which they could just go home and play with their children and cook dinner, as if nothing odd had happened at work that day.
This is how it is possible, for example, that Reinhold Heydrich, one of the most murderous and cold blooded leaders of the SS who helped plan "The Final Solution" to the Jewish problem with Eichmann at the 1942 Wansee Conference, could entertain and bring to tears his fellow SS men at parties by beautifully playing "Du Bist Die Eine Blüme" on his Violin. This anecdote is to me the most efficient and personally devastating Gestalt which explains "doubling".
There were other studies by American academics which were in my view more malign in intent. It is important as background to know that significant numbers of so-called leading US and British academics were advocates of Eugenics, and espoused racial theories of Intelligence as did leading Nazi academics. They became infamous and were later exposed as such in the context of the African American Civil Rights Movement strengthening resistance to this barely concealed racist outlook. Jensen, Shockley, E. O. Wilson, Watson, you can find their histories easily if you like. Their legacy of disgrace is written.
One of these outposts for Nazi experimentation was the notorious "Milgram Experiments" at Yale, made famous in the book on the subject "Obedience To Authority". I believe that the purpose behind this was to create a new cleaned up version of authoritarianism for purposes of social control, mind control, and social engineering.
Stanley Milgram was fascinated with the Nazi career of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann. His social psychology theories derived from this area. (An unrelated factoid is that he has been popularized as inspiring the popular culture Meme of "Six Degrees Of Separation". The human race might have been better off had Milgram been "separated" from his teaching position many decades ago.)
The question behind Milgram's research was to understand how the SS succeeded in attaining the compliance and assistance from Jewish prisoners in maintaining discipline and order in the camps, through an informer network along with authorized beatings by Kapos, who were basically SS deputized Jewish enforcers in the camps, and a system of rewards and bribes. To this day, the most awful and denigrating thing that any Jew could say to another is to call them a "Kapo". They are the most reviled among those who participated in the Holocaust. Milgram sought to understand how this death camp system was made to work with so few SS soldiers guarding so many prisoners who already knew their fate.
And his intent was to prove that such obedience to authority could be exercised "democratically", meaning that people could be controlled by offering them a variety of pre-defined "critical choices" in carrying out commands such that the subject believes they are acting of their own free will, not under duress from another.
To summarize, an actor was strapped into a chair with fake electrodes attached. The subject/particpant volunteer (actually paid) was given a remote dial at a console connected to the electrodes. The actor was in a separate room, visible through a one way mirror. The Administrator would ask the subject to turn up the dial to increase the bogus electrical shock to the actor, who at first would simply jump a little. Gradually the subject would comply and turn up the current further and further, eliciting scripted screams of agony from the actor. (Of course the subject was not told it was an actor and that there was no electrical current) The subject was told he or she could withdraw at any time, but in order to be paid had to finish to the end. Some did. Others listened to their conscience and either refused to participate at all, or dropped out early.
(As you assimilate this, think back on Lifton's account of the incremental steps toward mass killing which the German Euthanasia program represented, lfr)
The patterns of behavior of the subject, their relationship to the actor's suffering, their conflicts if any with the administrator, their emotional states, all became the data for the study, all in the name of supposedly understanding what made the Nazi death camp system run. This experiment had a longer history, but was carried out in the 1960's.
On a personal note, my wife Martha was drawn into an experiment similar to this at Syracuse University some 50 years ago, and walked out after a few pithy remarks to the presiding Professor. When I was forced to read Milgram's book for my PoliSci course at Temple U. in 1977, I denounced my Jewish Professor as a Nazi after he praised it as a guide for "clean fascism" which would be helpful in the future for dealing "democratically" with such problems as allocating for resource scarcity and Healthcare rationing, ie; global triage. "Critical choices," indeed.
Part 3-- In Search of the "Super Soldier"...The CIA and MK-ULTRA
As one might expect, there were strategists and Intelligence figures in our Military Industrial Complex who were at World War II's end already laying the groundwork and planning for the next war, this one of course with the Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally against Hitler. There were some who advocated preemptive nuclear war at the time, whose position was that since we had strategic advantage and sole possession of the Bomb, our army already in Europe, "do it now, roll them up, and don't wait until they get the Bomb and dig in." Even so-called pacifist Lord Bertrand Russell called for the US to attack Russia with "The Bomb" first.
There were others who saw that as destabilizing to their geopolitical plans of a "bi-polar world" divided between the superpowers, and "managed" through global arrangements like the UN and World Bank. This group adopted the utopian view that full scale nuclear war could be averted under the doctrines of Mutual And Assured Destruction, (aptly named MAD) and later Flexible Response. Meaning, the superpowers would do two things; build up their nuclear arsenals to such large scale that using them meant mass extinction, and therefore represented the ultimate deterrent to full scale conflict. The second was to "let off steam" between the superpowers by conducting limited war through proxies, on battlefields of mostly developing nations. That way, the black, brown and yellow skinned peoples of the world would bear the brunt of the casualties, which suited the former racialist Imperial powers just fine.
The Imperial powers would engage in intelligence warfare, espionage, political assassination of "unruly" or non-compliant leaders, cultural warfare, a science/space race for achieving military superiority in space, and of course secret weapons research.
Covert or irregular warfare would replace "total war" as the centerpiece of US strategy. Both Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles put this doctrine through under Eisenhower, profiling him as being open to any kind of warfare so long as it helped to prevent nuclear war, which terrified him as it would any normal person.
If there were specific persons to identify with this strategy in the US, I would start with but not limit it to the Dulles Brothers, Secretary of State John Foster and Allen, who became CIA director, both under Eisehower's Presidency. (It should be mentioned that both had multiple connections and affinity for Nazi Germany. They were the registered agents for managing Nazi investments in the US through their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell up until the late 1930's. (Notes below-- The Dulles Brothers represented the interests of I.G. Farben, the German manufacturing firm which produced the deadly gas Zyklon B, used for mass extermination of Jews and other prisoners in the death camps. lfr)
Allen's Nazi connections were such that he was deployed by OSS in Wartime to Switzerland where he could conduct communication with Nazi Intelligence chief Admiral Canaris, and maintain Swiss neutrality to defend the Nazis control of the loot from the war)
From Wikipedia--'
["Sullivan & Cromwell was one of the earliest U.S. firms to open overseas offices,[19] beginning with Paris in 1911. By 1928, offices also were open in Buenos Aires and Berlin. In 1935, Allen Dulles, then a partner in the firm and later Director of Central Intelligence, visited Germany and returned somewhat disturbed by the direction of the regime. Over the sole opposition of Allen's brother and fellow partner, John Foster Dulles, the firm's partners voted in 1935 to close the Berlin office and a subsidiary in Frankfurt. However, later the firm backdated the announcement of the closing of their German offices by one year, to 1934.[20] Under Foster Dulles, the firm had helped the regime's arms buildup effort by including the German company I.G. Farben into an international nickel cartel, which included American, Canadian, and French producers.[21]"]
Adolf Hitler, "Dope Dealer"
One of the little known facts of the war was Adolf Hitler's deployment of Methamphetamine as a drug for mass consumption by his armed forces, government officials, and population at large. Germany was literally addicted to Meth, as was documented in an important book by Author Norman Ohler entitled "Blitzed-- Drugs And The Third Reich, which I reviewed here;
https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2020/07/from-may-25-how-hitler-and-his-quack.html
The allies were astounded and mystified by the sustained overwhelming success of the Blitzkrieg attack on France, which had at first been attributed to the innovations in mechanized transport combined with radio communication for rapid advancement. Later, Churchill demanded answers as to how the Wehrmacht was able to sustain their offensive at such a pace for such a time period, remarking upon their near superhuman endurance. And indeed, the Wehrmacht was put on Meth/Vitamin supplements designed and marketed or to be given away for free by German Doctors, invented by Hitler's quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morrell. These developments in warfare were filed away for future reference by the utopian war planners as something they would explore at some future point.
Simultaneous with the war, something else of great interest to future CIA Director Allen Dulles was occurring in Switzerland, which was the 1938-1943 research by Dr. Albert Hoffmann of Sandoz Labs into a new drug, called Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, which grew naturally as a fungus called Ergot found on Rye and other grains. We know it as LSD, or "Acid". Hoffman did not discover the drug's hallucinogenic properties until 1943, when he accidentally ingested it. Three days later, April 19th to be precise, he took a full dose and went for a bicycle ride, in which he was the first the have a full "Acid Trip". (To this day, April 19th is celebrated by Acid Heads as "Bicycle Day" to commemorate the occasion)
I think that many American are vaguely aware at least that after the War, as the US was preparing for its inevitable conflict with the Soviets, secret weapons research became the order of the day. Much of the postwar scramble for scientists and research projects involved the very advanced programs of Nazi Scientists in all fields. Jet propulsion, nuclear fission, rocketry, aerospace design, genetics, field artillery, and yes, even the inhuman medical research done on concentration camp victims by Nazi Doctors. With the advent of the Cold War as the world entered the nuclear age, everything was considered fair game, especially if a case could be made that the Soviets were also working on it, and were possibly even ahead of us.
It was with this orientation that Dulles raised the alarm about LSD getting into use by Russia to make advances in developing "mind control", which could have military uses. Soldiers in training under the influence of LSD could be hypnotized, molded, induced to engage in conduct which might conflict with their basic emotions of empathy, fairness, respect for life, compassion, remorse, and conscience.
If a drug and mind control technique could be designed to reduce these impediments to following orders of any kind, killing of innocents, etc, one could have a decisive advantage. For example, one of the great debates at the time was how to insure that SAC Commanders and Strategic Bomber Pilots would follow orders to drop their Atomic weapons.
The argument was that the US should use LSD in Mind Control research to "catch up with the Soviets" in this area to see if LSD could be used to develop "Super Soldiers", who would function as automatons and carry out orders in Nazi-like fashion to kill, whether through a Bombsight or with a sniper's Rifle.
Again, the concept behind the use of LSD as a weapon of war derived from its hallucinogenic properties and its potential to induce schizophrenia, of the type described by author Lifton as the process of "doubling", separating the person from their own most basic human qualities.
A Brief History--
There were two US programs prior to MK-ULTRA which conducted drug experiments, Project Bluebird, then Project Artichoke.
And they actually did this. The CIA project begun in 1953, and was ended in 1973. It was conducted through the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence with the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratory as their base of operations. MK was an acronym for mind control. ULTRA was a reference to the joint US/UK code breaking crash program to decipher the Nazis "Enigma" machine at Bletchley England, famously led by British scientist Alan Turing. The name ULTRA underscores the strategic importance which Dulles and company ascribed to the project.
The United States government with that decision went into the drug dealing business, in order to study the possibilities for mass brainwashing. And it occurred under the false pretext of trying to close the "mind control gap" between the Soviets and US. But the real target of the Dulles utopians was the American population, and the goal to launch a "counterculture" which would render the population malleable and docile enough to accept authoritarianism, while still believing they are free. It was intended to be, in the words of MK-ULTRA's intellectual author Aldous Huxley, "the painless concentration camp" of a "Brave New World".
Part 4- Nazi Style Experiments On American and Canadian Indigents
First it is important to know that much of the program engaged in illegal activity, experimenting on disabled veterans, prisoners, drug addicts, mental patients and prostitutes, or as one agent said "people who couldn't fight back" from both the US and Canada. Over 80 institutions were involved, pharmaceutical companies, Universities, Colleges, hospitals and prisons. Much of what we know about it was exposed in the Church Committee hearings of 1975, based on sworn testimony of participants, since CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all documents thus related to be destroyed. However later FOIA document requests uncovered 20,000 documents validating their testimony, and a lot more.
One mental patient in Kentucky was given LSD 174 days in a row. It was administered to CIA employees, military personnel, Doctors, and members of the general public to study their general reactions. Many were administered LSD and other drugs without their knowledge or consent, a violation of the Nuremberg code agreed to by the US after the post war trials.
The goal again was to do things such as extract deep confessions from prisoners, or wipe a person's mind clear to program them as a "robot agent".
During the 1950's the US set up secret detention camps to pursue illegal medical experiments with drugs in Germany, Japan, and the Phillipines to avoid criminal prosecution. People were picked up off of the street and told they were enemy agents, and were "expendable". They were tortured, subjected to drug experiments, interrogated while being administered LSD, electroshock, subjected to extremes of temperature, and sensory deprivation, to better understand how to control and destroy human minds.
These were modeled on the experiments of Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele on Jews, Slavs and other "expendables" at Auschwitz.
In something named "Operation Midnight Climax", (seriously) the CIA set up several brothels within agency safe houses in San Francisco to select a group of compromised men who could be dosed, studied, and kept quiet under threat of exposure. They were filmed through one-way mirrors.
Taken as a whole, this project caused multiple deaths, the most famous of which was Frank Olsen, a US Army employee at the US Biowarfare Lab at Fort Dietrick Maryland, who was dosed without consent by Sidney Gottlieb, then nine days later jumped out of a hotel window while in CIA detention. Many subjects were also debilitated.
Participants in the project as volunteer subjects included several celebrities, such as Ken Kesey, author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest," Harvard Professor Timothy Leary, counterculture poet Allen Ginsburg, song writer and Grateful Dead associate Robert Hunter, mobster Whitey Bulger and Jerry Garcia himself. It is alleged that Ted Kaczynski, aka "The Unabomber was an MK-ULTRA subject in experiments of over 200 hours while at Harvard. The attorney for convicted RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan alleges that his client was an MK-ULTRA subject as well. The well known counterculture project, the "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" was a means for the mass distribution of LSD on the West Coast by various figures who were providing the CIA with a mass based study group.
It was in the 1960's when the project was in full swing and much data had been collected that previously mentioned CIA Doctor Sidney Gottlieb was tasked with transitioning the project from research phase to enabling it for covert activity. At the time it's nominal focus was using LSD and hypnosis to not only extract confessions from prisoners but to help captured agents defeat polygraph tests. This history is one major reason which US law does not recognize polygraph testing as evidence of guilt in criminal trials, because they are easily overcome.
Gottlieb later lied that the project amounted to nothing and was a total waste of time. Presumably that is why we are expected to believe that the CIA kept it going for 20 years until exposed, and destroyed all of their documents, so the public would never know how little it all meant.
All of these things were done behind the backs of the returning WWII Veterans like my Father, who volunteered to go overseas and risked everything to fight the War against the Nazis. That Nazi legacy of inhuman medical experimentation was not only being studied here at home, but was secretly continued by their own political leadership, in their names.
This is the backdrop and context for what I believe is the making of the most important film in history made in 1962, "The Mancurian Candidate," which we will discuss in the upcoming Section 2.
Sources--
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
"The Search For The Manchurian Candidate" -- Author John Marks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Marks
"The Nazi Doctors" -- Author Robert Jay Lifton
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jay_Lifton
"Obedience To Authority"-- Author Stanley Milgram
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram
"Blitzed-- Drugs And The Third Reich" Author Norman Ohler
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Ohler
