FYI, this is just one of the known experiments out of MK-ULTRA. Victim testimonies describe being immovably bound to chairs for all of their waking existence and forced to listen to a short, recorded tape on loop while blindfolded for sensory deprivation.
One victim was unable to recount the message as they suffered PTSD flashbacks and dissociated if they even thought about it. IIRC official records show the tape was something like “I did not kill my mother”, however there were other inclinations that the actual played message was the opposite - “I killed my mother”.
At least hundreds of years of torture were carried out on unwitting Americans and Canadians; on a magnitude that is comparable to human experimentation astrocities of the worst regimes in history; just less in numbers.
Jan Irvin at GnosticMedia has done a lot of interesting research on MKULTRA. I learned that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent and basically the counterculture of the 60s was manufactured (see "manufacturing the deadhead" [0]). Personally I find his "unspun" show refreshing, if nothing else it seems like an attempt at honest reporting, which is rare.
edit: and please do read it before judging, the evidence is more convincing than you think.
I'm also familiar with Jan's work and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of mind control and psychedelics. He's uncovered a lot of interesting history. It has been interesting to see Jan's development from being pro-psychedelics (e.g. his film Pharmacratic Inquisition) to his stance today which place psychedelics and mysticism mostly in the realm of mind control tools. To say the least, there are some very bizarre connections between military intelligence and the formation of the "counter culture". And seemingly, this is nothing new, with these types of links going back to at least classical civilization with Eleusinian cult initiations.
Does that mean he no longer agrees with his findings in "The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity" and "The Pharmacratic Inquisition"? Which later works are you referred to? Because I wouldn't even define him or Andrew Rutajit as necessarily "pro psychedelics" even if you can read between the lines that they used psychedelics that's never a major point in either of these works. Their works are not even remotely some kind of commercial for psychedelics. The documentary "The Pharmacratic Inquisition", of which one can find a LQ version on YouTube, is a complimentary work to the book which has a foreword by Jordan Maxwell (aka Russell Pine, a jehova witness), a fraud from whom Irvin has distanced himself [1].
I suggest you look at Irvin's brain [0], which contains a lot of the connections. Red items are confirmed, documented CIA, yellow is "highly likely but not 100% confirmed".
Confirmed by whom? Which source? I went to the entry about "Robert Anton Wilson" and I didn't see any quotes to references that he is linked to the CIA. It is also not mentioned on his Wikipedia page AFAICT.
That R. Gordon Wasson was part of the US government doesn't surprise me. That fellow thoroughly grilled John Marco Allegro with all kind of fallacies which are thoroughly debunked in Irvin's "The Holy Mushroom".
Leary, you mean? He admitted that straight up himself, and you can just look at the 1979 MKULTRA reunion video if you have any doubt that he was involved with the CIA [0]. That it's not covered on wikipedia is hardly surprising.
Regarding reliability, Irvin promotes critical thinking through the trivium method [1], and the conclusions are drawn from primary documents. You really should look into it.
>One accurate term used for the individuals who were victims of this debasing was "Deadhead," which is an equivocation for a "dead mind" or "a drugged, thoughtless person."
Sorry, this is just too much. "Deadhead" means a fan of the Grateful Dead. Is he just making stuff up?
The way things are trending is in the opposite direction of free speech. The loss of net neutrality, bills to control the media (anti-"fake news" bills), and tightening control by all the main social media outlets seem to indicate that any content that directly challenges authority will not be surfaced to anyone but a tiny audience.
The person who wrote what I'm going to link you is clearly mentally ill, and it's hosted on a conspiracy theory wiki. I hope linking it doesn't get me flagged as a spammer or nut. You can take the author at face value in regards to them actually having gone through what they're describing, I'm 50/50 split on that.
Despite that, I think it's interesting stuff to read about, basically the adult version of ghost stories. It's what initially made me make the connection between MKUltra (as explained by those who believe in it) and splitting/disassociation.
It's really long and rambling, and I don't blame you if you end up deciding not to read through it.
Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US. We've been experimenting on natives, blacks, minorities a long before the nazis. And we even tested nuclear fallout on pacific islanders long after ww2. I believe the "father" of unethical japanese human experimentation was trained in the US before ww2.
Not sure why canadians got involved in this mess though.
I know. It's really funny how people seem to have a knowledge of history that begins solely with the colonization of the new world. They have zero recollection of the horrors of past civilizations. As if, somehow, the founders of the USA, are responsible for all evils in the world and everyone else was just getting along and hugging up until 1776.
And I recommend those people ask for a refund from their history teachers, because anyone who tells you history is black-and-white, good-and-evil, is selling you something. Humanity is one long stream of moral ambiguity. Any moral lessons derived from it are done by omitting contradictory evidence. A simple cruise through a Wikipedia article offers plenty of moral ambiguity--and that should be the minimum starting point for considering yourself knowledgeable in a subject.
Even the archtype of evil himself, Hitler, (and likewise Stalin with Russia) still managed to re-vitalize broken countries into industrial titans that we still benefit from today. Russia was literally a pre-industrial society before WW2. And it's interesting how people who believe in rigid good-guys/bad-guys have no problem driving a VW Beetle, or a Mitsubishi--they made the Kamakazi Zeros, by the way. And both companies benefited from slave labor. It's not even hidden knowledge:
I think it is a reflection of the zeitgeist - things are once again either only good, or only bad. There is no space for bad people to also have done some good things, and vice versa.
Talk of thinking in black and white! So when you say "after WW2", do you mean the shattered, occupied Germany of early 1945, or the revitalized Germany of later years, after Europe and the US - and, to a lesser but still real extent, the Soviet Union - rebuilt it?
Yes, Hitler and his mad, failed quest for power ruined Germany. I don't know if maybe you've never seen them, but the Bundesarchiv has some pictures which seem pretty starkly clear on that score. And then more or less everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere provided the resources and a lot of the labor to unruin Germany, because everyone still remembered what happened the last time they'd had to deal with a ruined postwar Germany, and after what had come out of it that time, no one wanted to find out what would come out of it this one.
To add to what my sibling says: when you say "before WW2", do you mean the shattered, financially devastated Germany under the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 and the global Depression of 1929, or the industrialized welfare state of 1880-1910?
The brokenness of Germany was not Hitler's doing; rather, its brokenness is what gave Hitler his platform.
His move to Montreal was funded by the Rockefellers, he was given Sir Hugh Allan's mansion, and he was endored by the pioneering neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield.
The unapologetic close-mindedness of Americans, even in the more intelligent parts of the web, never ceases to baffle me. Really? Human experimentation started in the US?
It's a facet of the American exceptionalist mindset filtered through a Biblical worldview. Good things become enshrined and eventually turn into unquestionable scripture (cf. the Constitution); bad things are whispered in conspiracy theories until they become the Original Sin ("nobody else could have been so evil as us").
On the other hand, we really did invent the eugenic concept, as implemented for example by the Nazi regime, and even that example wasn't enough to stop some states, such as California, forcibly sterilizing their own citizens for explicitly eugenic purposes until at least a couple of decades after.
You're not quite wrong about American exceptionalism in its negative application here. (You're far from wholly right, though - people question the Constitution, for example, all the time.) But the Progressive Era in the US really does have a hell of a lot to answer for. That's whence came the modern concept of engineering a society en bloc, and treating its members however harshly seemed necessary to fit them into the overarching structure of some notional greater good. That's what Huxley was satirizing in Brave New World. Where did you think he got the idea?
Sir Francis Galton (a Brit) invented the term "eugenics." The Wikipedia article on Eugenics notes that the concept of selective breeding of humans dates back to at least Plato.
Additionally the Wikipedia entry indicates that the modern Eugenics movement started in the UK before spreading to the US, Canada and most other European countries.
> That's whence came the modern concept of engineering a society en bloc, and treating its members however harshly seemed necessary to fit them into the overarching structure of some notional greater good.
I've never heard anyone say that you can't change the Constitution, only that if you want to do something that is current unconstitutional, you have to change it first. See gun control, the belief in the hard-line pro-2A community is that if you want to restrict the right to purchase, own, and use firearms, you have to introduce another amendment either changing or clarifying (based on your viewpoint) the second amendment. Please don't start a[n anti-]gun control argument here, that's not the point.
I was reading about this a long time ago, and remember the de-programming research experiments were initially proposed to be done in US, but was rejected based on ethical grounds. So they just took the project up north.
They were religious about it, and offered no inspiration to modern societies. We were scientific about it, and inspired, among much else, many enormities of the Nazi regime. I get that American exceptionalism galls people, and I don't ask that they feel otherwise on the subject. But having inspired the 20th Century's greatest horrors - we had a strong, if still rather quiet, hand in the Soviet Union's origins as well - seems pretty legitimately exceptional to me.
I don't know. No one I've ever heard has argued other than that the British Empire bestrode the world as the titan of its age, leaving the places where its feet fell forever changed in its wake. Why is it "American exceptionalism", rather than simply historicity, to suggest that the inheritor of that empire, in its own now fast closing age, did the same?
what makes you think that scientific rationalism isn't a religion, or that despite 'being religious about it', prevous experiments weren't done in a rational, controlled, repeatable way by practitioners?
Man, I don't know. Only the one of them having made it possible to build the technology by which we're communicating with one another right now? Assuming we are communicating with one another right now, a point on which I have my doubts. I mean, I'm placing the responsibility for eugenics and its consequent enormities squarely upon those who saw no reason to involve any concept of morality other than the most reductive utilitarianism in their development of the science of heredity into the technology of eugenics, and you seem to find that in so doing I'm saying something laudatory, so...
How can anyone discount so called 'conspiracies theories' so quickly when accounts of such atrocities are now mainstream knowledge? I am not saying one should suspend critical thinking and logic to accept anything they are told, but clearly there are some instances where history has proven such conspiracies have taken place and harmed many innocent lives.
I used to be of the mind that ideas within the conspiracy theory realm were most likely utter nonsense. After Snowden and the DNC scandal, I've opened up the possibility for a lot more critical thought.
If you take a look at the conspiracy sub on reddit, which became popular after the DNC Scandal, while there is some nonsense, the most-upvoted stuff are often quite interesting. In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum, often being even quite the opposite of the identity politics seen in those places, ie the #3 most upvoted post this year is exactly that.(1)
That post re enforces my view of /r/conspiracy posters as people who believe their ideas are "deep" but they really just remove all nuance and context.
>" In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum"
I'm confused by this statement. /r/conspiracy has been shown to have been heavily used by Russian bots/trolls to spread propaganda and truly fake news.
Can you elaborate, or give an example? What about my example/observation screams 'Russian propoganda?' Russians want us to throw away identity politics and work together to fight against the abuses of the plutocracy?
Hey long time /r/conspiracy user here, and there are indeed some "Russian bots", but the real bots got started around 2011 ish when the gov started putting out bids in sock puppetry as a service aka persona management, so I'd say there is about an even distribution of bots between all the actors at play, be they Russian, TD, share blue, etc.
If only places like HN listened to us conspiracy theorists. I'm sure people will use this to talk about how illogical we are or how Hanlons razor is their favorite thing (a logical fallacy on its face), but in the end the red pill is a choice. Now the main problem too many take the red pill but don't have the rational/logical training to approach such deep subjects correctly, and therefor many have given up one half-truth or lie for another. Not to mention active forum tactics are frequently used against conspiracy forums and websites, for example the flat earth movement is a known grass-man used to discredit conspiracy theories in general.
The reality of history is that it is filled with page upon page of conspiracy, and IMHO the conspiratorial view of the world is the correct one. Of course that doesn't mean every presented hypothesis is true either, each case must be weighed with the evidence.
That said, the number one issue otherwise intelligent people have with conspiracy theory is the inability to use the inductive logical approach instead of the deductive one. When we don't have evidence due to coverup, etc, inductive logic is the only tool left in many cases. In most of the well thought out criticisms I see its generally due to the fact that so many expect and want the deductive approach and don't even know there is another.
So to answer your main question, people don't listen to conspiracy theorists because: many conspiracy theorists have week rational skills and adopt views without proper scrutiny, various government and corporate shills actively monitor and attack conspiracy forums, and due to the tribal mentality of desiring superiority, and other factors, people dismiss conspiracy because they have been trained to do so.
Of course there is a lot of plain crazy talk in these types of forums, but oh the diamonds in the rough that can be found.
Because people would rather believe that terrible things happen because of unhappy accidents, as opposed to deliberate, willful, secret misbehavior. They'd rather trust, and not verify.
funny, i think people swallow a lot of nonsense because it's nicer to believe the world is orderly and under control -- even if the order is bad and the ones in control are malevolent -- rather than a chain reaction of accidents that no one is in control of.
A lot of people in the world are thought to identify with their nationality and believe their society to have good ethical and moral qualities. In an us-versus-them worldview that means somebody else has to be the bad guy.
Not surprisingly, the mere though of your government kidnapping and torturing innocents or taking part of genocides is deeply traumatizing.
Denial, distrust or anger directed to people exposing terrible facts is to be expected.
(I'm not referring to the US specifically. This patterns of denial seemed to be common under nazism in Germany where a lot of people refused to believe the magnitude of atrocities committed by their government)
The government has tortured its citizens in the past and is covering up that torture in the present. It sounds like a Royal Commission or similarly significant investigation is needed.
Quite a few things are a bigger deal than this, but get no attention. For example, the same could be said for our government-funded genocide of Native Americans. I don't know why the denial is allowed to persist.[1] In Germany holocaust-denial can land you prison time. America has the only remaining legitimate government in the world that committed an attempted genocide against its people.
Although it's not true that the victors always write the history. There are cases where the defeated write books detailing all the injustices committed against them and it gets picked up centuries later after the tides of power have changed again, or so much time has passed that everyone involved is safe or dead -- I guess one can say that's how you know about the Native American version of American history and can talk about it safely.
Want an interesting thought? What in the horrors of hell is being done to Middle-Easterners?
"They don't want to have to deal with more applications," Stein said of the government's requirement the settlement details be kept confidential and out of the public eye.
Cooperation is complicity. If you're party to a gag order and it's not obviously geared towards protecting the basic (not political) safety of specific persons, then you should consider whether you have an obligation to circumvent it, and how.
What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.
They must either be hiring really naive recruits, who are blinded by idealism or really ignorant of the history of the organization they're joining, or they're hiring complete and utter scumbags. Or, perhaps the revelations that have been made public about them are false and they're really the stereotypical "good guys" they try to paint themselves as.
While at school I had endless debates with more pro-US-government students, and it was mind-boggling to see how they refused to acknowledge even CIA-operations that the CIA itself has declassified, or tried to dismiss interviews with past CIA directors.
The ability to just flat out deny these things when they don't fit the narrative of the the government (any government) that people want to believe in.
If people think a given government is good, a large portion of them will not take evidence of said government doing something bad and revise their opinion of the government - they'll write off the evidence instead.
Even when said evidence comes from the very same government.
I attribute this to just a lack of education. I never learned in my public education the darker side of American history, and I think to a lot of people some of the crazy things acronym agencies have done sounds like conspiracy theory (bay of pigs, operation sea-spray, mlk suicide letter, MK ultra). And frankly, I get it, some of these things are fucked up enough that they should be fiction.
Except I think with a free encyclopedia being readily available (i.e. wikipedia) finally the average American is slowly having to reconcile their nationalism with their history. Hopefully change will come with that.
You may classify this under idealism, but I bet a lot of them would claim to just have realistic understandings of the brutalities that are a requirement to keep an empire running. They would say that those who would hold back from exploring any means neccissary to defeat their geopolitical adversaries are the idealists.
ah yes, the pragmatist's prayer-- "it was necessary even if it was immoral, therefore it was right, even if it was wrong, therefore i am noble, even if i have lost my humanity"
everyone jumps to the question of "does the end justify the means?"
a better question: why jump to the most brutal means before questioning whether the end is worthwhile regardless of the means?
is government mind control something we really want them to be able to do in the context of an intelligence agency? no, it is not; it is the apex of the opposite of human rights.
I think you might want to consider context-free vs bound actions and their respective moralities. If an action is wrong, when context-free, can it be right when context-bound?
Or, like many things, they're made up of a mixture of good and bad people. Also, the CIA has either changed a great deal since the Black ops days of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, or they've gotten much better at cover ups.
In any case, they've indisputably saved Western lives in the past ~20 years. Even this week, Putin (!!) thanked the CIA for their help stopping a terror attack in Russia.
It takes a while to understand what's going on in the world. 20-somethings have a simple model with hardly any details filled in. Ambitious people are also purposely ignorant.
A third option: some people may understand and accept the history, but try to change the org and culture from the inside out. Maybe that’s a different kind of naivety.
some people believe that "anything is justifiable" in the name of american security
some people will believe MKULTRA is just a conspiracy people
and some people will view such actions as necessary but messy aspects of the brutally realist struggle between countries (critically forgetting that humanity comes before any individual nation or individual)
>What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.
I saw some CIA recruits, they were not bright boys.
Three letter agencies were and are looking for a specific type of personality in recruits, types that are convinced that whatever they do is right, invariably of what they were told to do.
Three letter services are afraid of hiring people with brains, and even if they do hire ones, they favour people who can be said to be "intelligent, but witless"
> What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.
The KGB never had a shortage of willing applicants. Money, power, being part of a secret society, and SERVING THEIR COUNTRY are things that a lot of men and women find incredibly appealing.
I think a lot of "normal" people can rationalize away these things to get into positions of status and authority. The shame is that they still somehow have that status is western culture.
I live near Montréal and I never heard about it except from US sources. It's weird that it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Also I'm never sure if the sources are accurate or if it's from some conspiracy nuts.
If I understand correctly, the victims are getting gagged. Not the news medias. They can publish stuff and they did in the past, like that The Fifth Estate thing. So I could have heard about it but I didn't. From the news or from people. Maybe the news don't talk about it often enough or that the population don't care.
It's not hard to imagine that a government organization capable of this is almost certainly testing out all types of brainwashing techniques online today. (not that many others aren't)
I'd speculate that, after such an age of barbaric experimentation, new and supposedly more innocuous methods that don't require physically detaining/restraining a subject have long since been conceived, implemented, and tried.
I don't know, some of the things they were doing up there were just ridiculous and useless. Like putting a woman in a chemically induced coma for a year, and playing high volume affirmations though a headset she wore the whole time. The doctor who started all this up there was just Mengele with a Psych degree and some very stupid ideas.
Many MKUltra documents were shredded, and even those recovered were of little scientific benefit due to the way the experiments were carried out. So many people had their lives irrevocably destroyed, and for absolutely nothing of value.
According to Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the purpose of the experiments was to find a reliable way to manipulate people so that they'd stay manipulated. The CIA was having a very hard time establishing reliable agents and informants behind the Iron Curtain, because all they really had to offer was stupendous amounts of money, and people weren't staying bought. Their targets generally didn't buy the ideological angle.
From that (odious) perspective, I don't think the experiments were ridiculous, though they did turn out to be useless. At the time it was pretty common to view breaking a personality down as a viable path to establishing control over it. The Koreans had done similar things to American prisoners, with some minor, temporary effectiveness.
The best approach of all would be to get people to volunteer and consume all the information you want before they even commit a crime. You could entice them with hard-to-resist benefits like cheaper groceries or a more active dating life.
Do any modern day entities (governments, corporations, other) perform ostensibly mild versions of such psychological experimentation, possibly at scale, or with the intention of scaling?
This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.
If their users did not read that clause in the user agreement and knowingly consent to the experiments, then they are being carried out without the users' consent.
Almost certainly. One of the wider goals of past projects was to influence opinion over large groups of people. It seems likely that the various state forces using social media to sway opinion come from research on influencing opinion.
Additionally, the US torture of alleged terrorist detainees was called "enhanced interrogation" as a link to such testing. As we still have black sites, and a desire for more information, I personally assume there is still testing being done.
The biggest impediment to a politician who in good-will wants to implement actually crucial policies is public opinion.
The problem is so bad that politicians don't actually talk about the hard work -- hours of reunions, negotiations, high-stake talks, etc --, because being honest and open has a detrimental effect on achieving their goals. Lies or half-lies are more effective, even when they are honestly doing what's best for us, because it's easier to accept an uncomplicated lie or half-lie than a complicated truth.
The problem, I guess, is that we have a representational democracy but representational democracies have operational flaws and that the will of the people sometimes leads to a mass grave for them. Sometimes our representatives are better educated and positioned to call the shots, but are held back by misconceived public opinion -- aggravated by the fact that the truth is never actually told by any side and debates are over who can "sell" the most convincing story based on "established" lies and half-lies.
It's a delicate balance of power. In a way, it is justifiable for the government (a faceless system where the responsibility is diffused to so many people that no one is almost ever truly individually responsible) to want to manipulate public opinion (or influence public opinion, in politically correct terms). In another, it is tipping the balance of power to the already powerful and this can cause problems.
That says nothing about "populations" or "dispersed", and in fact given the context it's pretty clearly desired as a tool for use by field agents in a targeted fashion.
Probably not. After all, it’s way easier to kidnap an asset in broad daylight and shove them into a van.
Or they can target the asset’s family members to coerce cooperation. Again, very low hanging fruit compared to mind control. Coercion is the best mind control.
This kind of flamebait has no place on HN and will get you banned, so please don't. Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to grok the spirit of the site and abide by that.
It boils down to this: If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
That doesn't make it relevant or a substantial point in this thread. You could pick any link to make any point that way. Moreover your GP comment was baity to the point of trolling, so please just don't do this on HN.
One victim was unable to recount the message as they suffered PTSD flashbacks and dissociated if they even thought about it. IIRC official records show the tape was something like “I did not kill my mother”, however there were other inclinations that the actual played message was the opposite - “I killed my mother”.
At least hundreds of years of torture were carried out on unwitting Americans and Canadians; on a magnitude that is comparable to human experimentation astrocities of the worst regimes in history; just less in numbers.
More reading: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a-...