Experiments in the Gulag

Jeff Wells of the Rigorous Intuition blog wrote a post recently on gatekeepers, conspiracy and the need to be normal:

So DailyKos has conducted a "mass banning" of those who had been "perpetuating a series of bizarre, off-the-wall, unsupported and frankly embarassing conspiracy theories." I hope no one is terribly surprised by this development. From the darlings of alternative media, purges usually follow their contributors' binges of unproscribed spelunking into the deep politics of a mass event. If someone like Kos doesn't distance himself from inquiries that offend mainstream sensibilities he risks the loss of the honourary privileges extended to the pacified blogosphere, and where is he then? Just another former Republican who has a problem with women. And since inquiry isn't his strong suit - Kos regards the theft of the 2004 election as just another "conspiracy theory" and can write with a Bushian lack of irony that he has a "high tolerance level for material I deem appropriate" - making it a sacrificial offering to the incurious middle couldn't have been a tough call.

More than truth, such people crave respectability, which they call "credibility" because it conforms to the conventional wisdom of those whose approval they seek. This becomes the capital they believe they trade for "influence," which is nothing more than their place in punditry's pecking order.

They want, dear God, to be normal. That was never much to which to aspire, and it ain't what it used to be.

If we want to uncover hidden truths then we have to go deep, and when we go deep we have to get our freak on, because the truths we dredge up transgress the assumptions of respectable society.

Those who choose the course of bobble-headed agreement with their "betters" in hope of finding favour, may very well find it. As far as the mainstream consenus is concerned, it's the only avenue of reward. But the truth will be closer to the freaks who don't worry about getting down and dirty.

Naturally, the trigger for this latest round of house cleaning was the attack on London. And, as usual on such occasions, the hammer came down just as things are getting interesting.

Even though all speculation at this early stage is conspiracy theory, only some speculation is expected to wear that demeaning epithet like a dunce cap. A "senior US counterterrorism official" can say, anonymously and without support, that he worries it may have been the work of al-Zarqawi. And reporters, rather than convulse in spit-takes or consider why it serves US interests to float such a preposterous allegation, write it all down as though he were serious. Such figures are considered, by default, to be "informed" sources, even though they are actually the worst kind of conspiracy theorists: they don't respect their theory enough to back up their baseless assertion, which they make only because they are pushing an agenda.

Regardless of how informed our speculations may be, we should know by now they will never be respectable so long as the conventions that protect the criminals in high places remain assumed by the Gatekeepers, and uninformed argument-by-ridicule is sufficient to silence critics beyond the gate.

It seems that even people who think pretty far outside the box have boundaries. There are places that even they don’t want to go. The problem is that we then end up fighting with one hand tied behind our back. By having internal censors THEY don’t have to employ external censors.

One of the areas that people don’t want to confront is programmed, mind-controlled killers. That research by our government and others has been done on how to do this is a fact beyond dispute. People then try to maintain that the efforts were not successful, or that they were tied to “excesses” of the past and that “they” wouldn’t do that now. Then, thirty years later we find more past excesses that we wouldn’t have believed at the time. Or, as Jeff Wells wrote in another post:

Of all the crimes of the National Security State we're not supposed to discuss, mind control - specifically, mind control induced by ritual abuse and torture - is the one most people don't need telling to keep quiet about.

The subject is so beyond most realms of our experience, and the subject matter, and its implications, so disturbing, it's easier and more respectable to pretend it's not there. Denial may be a comforting fiction, but it revictimizes survivors, and worse: it ensures the abuse perpetuates itself, and towards an end we can only imagine.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes about a classic case of denial:

There is a little known fact about hypnosis that is illustrated by the following story:

A subject was told under hypnosis that when he was awakened he would be unable to see a third man in the room who, it was suggested to him, would have become invisible. All the "proper" suggestions to make this "true" were given, such as "you will NOT see so- and-so" etc... When the subject was awakened, lo and behold! the suggestions did NOT work.

Why? Because they went against his belief system. He did NOT believe that a person could become invisible.

So, another trial was made. The subject was hypnotized again and was told that the third man was leaving the room... that he had been called away on urgent business, and the scene of him getting on his coat and hat was described... the door was opened and shut to provide "sound effects," and then the subject was brought out of the trance.

Guess what happened?

He was UNABLE TO SEE the Third Man.

Why? Because his perceptions were modified according to his beliefs. Certain "censors" in his brain were activated in a manner that was acceptable to his ego survival instincts.

The ways and means that we ensure survival of the ego are established pretty early in life by our parental and societal programming. This conditioning determines what IS or is NOT possible; what we are "allowed" to believe in order to be accepted. We learn this first by learning what pleases our parents and then later we modify our belief based on what pleases our society - our peers - to believe.

Anyway, to return to our story, the Third Man went about the room picking things up and setting them down and doing all sorts of things to test the subject's awareness of his presence, and the subject became utterly hysterical at this "anomalous" activity! He could see objects moving through the air, doors opening and closing, but he could NOT see the SOURCE because he did not believe that there was another man in the room.

Now that Abu Ghraib is back in the news thanks to the refusal of the military to release photos showing much more severe abuse of detainees, including unspeakable crimes committed by “our troops” on women and children, these reflexes of denial are going to have to kick into overdrive. What has been going on in all the secret prisons of the gulag? Why? Are they just “excesses,” or are the excesses the point of the enterprise? A look at some of the darker aspects of American History might help us understand.

Here is Peter Levenda in his new book, Sinister Forces, about Dr. Ewen Cameron and the early MKULTRA research:

Cameron believed that schizophrenia and other psychotic states were caused by physical conditions in the brain; like his friend and colleague of many years, Dr. William Sargant, he had a mechanistic view of consciousness and felt that with the right drug and the right procedure all could be made right as rain. This was an approach very attractive to the Technical Services Staff at the CIA. The CIA wanted to hear that there were easy techniques—whether drugs, or hypnosis, or some other mechanisms—to give agents in the field additional weapons in their arsenal. Cameron obliged. To that end, and to both test and prove his theories, he developed procedures known as “psychic driving” and “depatterning.” The procedures were radical and extreme, designed to totally disorient a human being, to strip away layers of consciousness and memory until one came to bedrock, and then to rebuild the personality step by step.

Unfortunately, his patients—some of whom had come to him for mild disorders, such as anxiety—had no foreknowledge of the treatments and had not volunteered for the experimentation….

In the case of Cameron’s psychic driving technique, a patient would be kept isolated in a room—the “sleep room”—and would be administered some combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (what is popularly known as “electroshock”). Sometimes the shocks were given were staggeringly high, and repeated more often than is usual in a therapeutic setting. The normal [p. 228] voltage is usually 110 volts; Cameron used 150 volts. The normal dosage was a single shock lasting a fraction of a second; Cameron’s shocks lasted longer, up to one second (and thus and average of 30 times more powerful than normal) and were done 2-3 times a day as opposed to the more usual once a day or once every two days. Electroshock causes a major convulsion, which is then followed by several minor convulsions. Cameron’s was a variation of the already intense Page-Russell method, but taken up quite a few notches to the point where his patients became disoriented and confused. This was Cameron’s aim, which ws the opposite of what was intended by the already controversial electroconvulsive therapy method.

The drug regimes wasequally severe: a “sleep coctail” was administered to the subjects—one can hardly call them “patients” anymore—consisting of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal and Phenergan. The subject would be awakened several times a day for the electroshock treatment and for the drug concoction. The combination kept the subject asleep day and night except for the electroshock, during which time his screams could be heard all over Ward 2.

This treatment typically would last from two weeks to a month, with some subjects being “treated” in this manner for over two months. In some cases they would lose control over their bowels, be unable to feed themselves or to tend to normal bodily functions…

The effect of this treatment was to cause the subjects to lose their memory, usually in three stages. In the first stage,much memory was lost, but not the facts of the subject being at the clinic, knowing he is at the clinic and why, and who the doctors and nurses are. The second stage involved the loss of what Cameron called “space-time image”; the subject would not know where he was or why he was there…

The third and final stage of memory loss is complete amnesia. There is only knowledge and memory of the present; there is no reference to past events or feelings. Cameron proudly pointed to this stage as the one where any schizophrenia has disappeared (along, of course, with a lot more!). The mind of the subject is a blank slate. He has been depatterned.

The CIA, satisfied with this level of progress, then asked Cameron to go to the next level: to implant new behavioral patterns in place of the old, erased ones. To do this, Cameron turned to another technique he had developed, which he called “psychic driving.”

This method is, if anything, even more hellish than depatterning, and involves blasting the subject with tape recordings of verbal messages—usually specific for each subject—that played in a loop for sixteen hours a day for weeks. Normally, two tapes were used: the first was a “negative conditioning” tape which concentrated on, obviously, the negative facts of the subject’s life, continually reinforcing these unhealthy images. This would then be replaced by a “positive conditioning” tape,alsoin a loop,also for sixteen hours a day for weeks, which would emphasize the desired behavior instead of the unwanted behavior of the first tape.

[Cameron also used sensory deprivation] In Cameron’s program, though, no one was allowed out of sensory deprivation until he said it was okay. In one particularly harrowing episode, he left a woman, who presented as simply suffering from menopause—in sensory deprivation for thirty-five days… and this was after a prolonged period of depatterning and 101 days of psychic driving. Cameron wrote this one off: “no favorable results were obtained.” We don’t know what eventually became of this poor woman—whom we know only as “Mary C.”—except for a notation by a CIA official at the time that it was impossible to tell if the sensory deprivation or the psychic driving had done the most damage.

In case the reader is wondering if Dr. Ewen Cameron was a fluke, an accident that was taking place in the backwater of the psychiatric field, it is well to note at this time that Cameron was elected prsident of the American Psychiatric Association (in 1953) and was the first-ever president of the World Psychiatric Association. (Peter Levenda. Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft. Waterville, OR: Trine Day, 2005, pp. 227-30)

Knowing what they’ve done to North Americans, it’s not hard to imagine they are doing the same or worse to the detainees in the gulag.

To be continued…