Brainwashing - The Secret History of Mind Control

Brainwashing: The Secret History of Mind Control

Mind Reading: Brainwashing - The Secret History of Mind Control
Brainwashing: The Secret History of Mind Control by Dominic Streatfeild

ISBN: 0-312-32572-X

Published by: St. Martin’s Press

Pages 341-342

‘Brainwashed’ is a useful term because it can be used to describe anybody who performs actions out of character. If your kids become Moonies or Muslims, plants bombs or shoots civilians (or themselves) – well, - they must have been brainwashed. After all, normal people don’t do things like that, do they? Although no one really seems to know exactly what ‘brainwashing’ entails, how it works or who uses it, the term is applied all over the place. It makes sense. Besides, we’ve read about it in the papers.

When people strap explosives to themselves and blow up buses and trains, there are only two possible explanations. If they’re foreign, they’re EVIL. If they’re not, they’re BRAINWASHED. Why would John Walker Lindh join the Taliban? Why would Richard Reid put a bomb in his shoes? Why would John Muhammad and Lee Malvo shoot ten people dead, and injure three more, from the back of their car? Why would anyone fly a jet into the World Trade Center? Because they were brainwashed, of course. The solution is as simple as it is elegant. Brainwashing eliminates the need for complicated explanations that involve research, analysis or thinking. It makes complicated situations simple. And because it makes us feel better.

Unfortunately, while brainwashing may be a great comforter, there are a number of reasons why applying the term is a bad idea. The first is that it distracts us from the true causes of destructive or uncharacteristic behaviour, leaving us unable to eliminate them, and susceptible to further similar behaviour. The second is that brainwashing itself, while reassuring us that we are normal and others abnormal, can become a scare story in its own right. At various points in the phenomenon’s history, brainwash-phobia has reached near-epidemic proportions: it makes our enemies seem even more cunning and sinister than they really are. If they’re clever and evil enough to do this, well, what aren’t they clever and evil enough to do?…

By the early 1980s, [John] Mark’s investigative triumph was feeding the arteries of a rich network of conspiracy theories. JFK’s assassin, Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Charles Manson’s Family, the Jonestown suicide victims and Patty Hearst: all ‘brainwashed’. To individuals with the right take on things, brainwashing offered a brilliant way of incorporating the CIA into any conspiracy theory. All that was needed to construct a plausible story was the following piece of beautifully warped logic”

The CIA worked on brainwashing.
Religious cults, assassins and terrorists either use brainwashing techniques or are themselves brainwashined.

Therefore:

(3) The CIA is behind religious cults, assassinations, and terrorism.

Page 346

Hopelessly optimistic, in the 1950s and 1960s the CIA’s experts saw the brain as something that could easily be tampered with, using chemicals or physical methods to achieve specific ends. But it was rather more complicated than that. Gottlieb and his team discovered that it was possible to make people freak out, forget things and scare them out of their wits – but there was no magic bullet to induce subservience. ‘Truth drugs’ delivered as much fantasy as truth; LSD did something different every time; hypnosis was unreliable; subliminal techniques didn’t work, full stop; and trying to induce amnesia with ECT was like shutting down your laptop with a mallet. As intelligence historian Thomas Powers later wrote: ‘Powerful drugs can indeed wipe out the memory, but the sweep is clean. If the year in Berlin went, the wife and kids went with it.’

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy this brainwashing recording available as an mp3 download titled “Spin Cycle.”