Dan Carlin & his ideas... [Archive]

Lacrimi de Chiciură

3rd January 2016, 15:03

Exploring the concept of “government mind control” beyond Project MK-ULTRA tends to lead pretty quickly to the “tinfoil hat” stuff, but it is nevertheless, I think, deserving exploration in a serious way. If nothing else, so that this field of inquiry is not monopolized by the incoherent ramblings of Alex Jones/InfoWars types.

I'm not familiar with his work or the reputation he cultivates, but I get the impression that this Dan Carlin guy is touching on the fringes of conspiracist ideation (e.g., "playing in the darkness realm" @54:30) while trying to be careful not to get into outright conspiracy theorizing, if that makes sense. Citing Project MK-ULTRA is a relatively "safe move" as far as his argument goes, since it is relatively well documented (even if most of the records were destroyed), but you are right that it is perhaps not all that convincing. But, to be fair, what he refers to was hardly “hundreds or even thousands of years ago”. Project MK-ULTRA went well beyond the '50s; it didn’t come to a halt until 1973, less than half a century ago.

It can be useful to go back a ways into the past to get a good handle on present situations. For example, it’s well established that domestic law enforcement in the US applies the same “counterinsurgency”, or “COIN” approach to both organized criminal and politically “subversive” groups as the military has developed in circumstances of imperialist occupation, going all the way back to the US occupation of the Philippine islands, which was ongoing at the time when the FBI was established. Then Vietnam, with its “hearts and minds” programs, and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan, have all developed counterinsurgency a few stages further. US police are being training in occupied territories of Palestine, creating an occupation policing psychology. One of the basic ideas of counterinsurgency is that of a struggle for the “hearts and minds” (i.e., the support) of a population. Its components include psychological operations (or PSYOP, which has gone back and forth from being called “Military Information Support Operations” [MISO]) and information warfare.

Beginning from the 1970s you have concept of memetics emerging, the theory of “memes” as a sort of mental “genes” (analogized with genetics). Memes have to do with imitation, ideas replicating themselves, sometimes mutating from person to person. But successful, “fit”, ideas are not always the “best” ideas. Some memeticists conceptualize memes as viruses, infectious ideas. For example, some parasites cause sterility, so the idea of celibacy’s desirability could be seen as a form of mind virus which causes sterility. Conceivably such an idea could even lead to the extinction of our species if the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” were to catch on. If a meme is "an element of culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation", you could also see how the CIA-backed “Revolutionary Development cadres” in Vietnam operated in a memetic way by replicating the “Viet Cong” organizational model in an effort to spread anticommunist ideas among the South Vietnamese people, to create an epidemic of anticommunist thought. More recently, in Afghanistan, villagers are said to call (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/counterinsurgencys-resurrections/) American Special Forces “the American Taliban” because of the ways they seem to imitate them in their style and behavior (wearing long beards and operating at night).

You could also look into “memetic engineering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetic_engineering)” - “The process of developing memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others in society or humanity; The process of modifying human beliefs, thought patterns, etc.” The US military is currently researching memetic engineering as a scientific way to manipulate the way we interpret violent acts as desirable and undesirable. Coincidentally, the “discoverer” of memes was the notoriously islamophobic Richard Dawkins.

This is from a Wired Magazine article on memetic engineering, 1996:

“...our best hope for eventual liberation from an endless succession of dangerous ideologies and blinding prejudices – our best chance for overthrowing the tyranny exercised by blindly replicating memes indifferent to their often devastating impact on the mortal vessels they selfishly commandeer – may lie in a 21st-century enlightenment centered, at least in part, on a rigorous new science of the meme.”

A “memetically engineered society” is not far from what we might call a “psychocivilized society”, which is a term coined by Jose Delgado, one of the pioneers in the field of “mind control”, who wrote Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society in 1969, a work which was said to be reviewed by Sidney Gottlieb, who was in charge of Project MK-ULTRA. Delgado’s idea was that while culture, machines, economic prosperity, industrial, agricultural, scientific development, etc. increasingly give us “ecological independence”, more attention should be paid to the ways in which “Man” as such is cultivated, to “human ecology” (the cultural, psychological environment our minds inhabit). (Human Ecology Fund was a major CIA front for covertly funding academic research around the Vietnam era.)

An example of our human ecology: Delgado talks about stopping at a red traffic light, a beneficial form of “mind control”. It’s learned and becomes automatic; you don’t have to consciously think about doing it. It’s said that during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards tried to change the red traffic lights to mean “go” in some places in China. Sure, we’re used to going on green, but a lot of us are also used to measuring the temperature in Fahrenheit; it’s not necessarily better. Granted, reading a traffic light wrong is a lot more dangerous than misreading a thermometer, it might not be such a stretch to suppose that the automatic association between the color red and stopping, made very strong by the growth of car culture (which occurred subsequently to the association between the color red and communism), could influence cognition outside of traffic navigation.

Some interesting passages from Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society:

“Because of the magnitude of our material and intellectual powers, the directive resolutions made by elite groups may be decisive for the development of scientific and economic fields of endeavor, for the evolution of civilization in general, and for the very existence of man”
(...)
A complete change in personality is beyond the theoretical and practical potential of ESB [electrical stimulation of the brain], although limited modification of a determined aspect of personal reactions is possible. In spite of important limitations, we are certainly facing basic ethical problems about when, why, and how some of these changes are acceptable, and especially about who will have the responsibility of influencing the cerebral activities of other human beings.

Supposing that long-term stimulation of a determined brain structure could influence the tendencies of a patient to drink, flirt, and induce fights; would it be ethical to change her personal characteristics? People are changing their character by self-medication through hallucinogenic drugs, but do they have the right to demand that doctors administer treatment that will radically alter their behavior? What are the limits of individual rights and doctors' obligations?
(...)
As science seems to be approaching the possibility of controlling many aspects of behavior electronically and chemically, these questions must be answered.”

The fear Dan Carlin describes, in Marxist terms, is this: the discovery or invention of an effective method of using pure violence/coercion as a way to change people’s ideas could result in a fusion of what Althusser called the "Repressive State Apparatus" and "Ideological State Apparatuses". In this scenario, the ISAs are rendered virtually obsolete, because the RSA is sufficient to reproduce the state's ideology.

Some of the differences between the RSA and ISAs, according to Althusser:

1. The RSA belongs entirely to the public domain
2. much larger part of the ISAs are part of the private domain (Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural ventures)
3. the Repressive State Apparatus functions ‘by violence’, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function ‘by ideology’.
4. RSA functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology. (There is no such thing as a purely repressive apparatus.)
5. ISAs function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus.)

"Mind control" as a tool of State Apparatuses would make it so that an ISA can "function massively and predominantly by repression, while functioning secondarily by ideology" It would also result in the abolition of private sector ISAs as sites of class struggle, since individuals would not have the means to engage in critical thought and contestation (the means being an "uncontrolled" mind).

Insofar as surveillance is inducive of self-censorship, it could also be regarded as an form of mind control. It facilitates internalization of the bourgeois cultural super-ego’s understanding of what a “bad thought” is. Despite all the hype around unethical LSD experimentation, mass surveillance was actually the primary impetus behind the 1975 Church Committee investigation of CIA, NSA, FBI activities. This was what Senator Church was talking about when he said (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAG1N4a84Dk):

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

Then in 1980 you have the US military psyops officer Michael Aquino, who is also an occultist who led a split from Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan to form his own religious sect, writing the paper "From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory (https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-Mv-q4qGq8_TBPcwL/Michael%20Aquino%20(US%20Satanist)%20-%20From%20PSYOP%20to%20MindWar%20-%20The%20Psychology%20of%20Victory%20(1980)_djvu.t xt)". There Aquino describes MindWar as "overwhelming your enemy with argument". He describes the US defeat in Vietnam as being due to the superior PSYOPs of "the enemy", the US "national will to victory" being more effectively attacked than that of "the enemy" will. With the question "Was the United States defeated in the jungles of Vietnam, or was it defeated in the streets of American cities?" he identifies domestic dissidents as enemies as well.

MindWar is thus proposed as a reframing of psyops to make it “okay” for them to target US citizens. This is supposed to be ethical because truth claims in MindWar are subordinated to the US government's ability to construct truth:

Under existing [1980] United States law, PSYOP units may not target American citizens. That prohibition is based upon the presumption that "propaganda" is necessarily a lie or at least a misleading half-truth, and that the government has no right to lie to the people. The Propaganda Ministry of Goebbels must not be a part of the American way of life.

Quite right, and so it must be axiomatic of MindWar that it always speaks the truth. Its power lies in its ability to focus recipients' attention on the truth of the future as well as that of the present. MindWar thus involves the stated promise of the truth that the United States has resolved to make real if it is not already so.

(...)Unlike PSYOP, MindWar has nothing to do with deception or even with "selected" - and therefore misleading - truth. Rather it states a whole truth that, if it does not now
exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States.

Here Aquino gets to the essence of what Kodwo Eshun calls the “futures industry” (http://sdonline.org/42/afrofuturism-science-fiction-and-the-history-of-the-future/) (big science, big business, and global media). MindWar is coercion (its truth is “forced into existence”), but it’s also the concretization of the (abstract) future (“history of the future”).

Cultural critic Kodwo Eshun proposes that mainstream understandings and representations of the future derive from three closely related sources. These sources include big science, which generates data about the past and the present in order to predict the future; big business, which funds scientific research and acts upon its results; and the global media, which synthesizes scientific and corporate activity into a relatively coherent narrative and then disseminates this narrative throughout the world. Together, these institutions constitute what Eshun calls the “futures industry.”

More from Aquino on coercion:

For the mind to believe in its own decisions, it must feel that it made those decisions
without coercion. Coercive measures used by the operative, consequently, must not be detectable by ordinary means. There is no need to resort to mind-weakening drugs such as those explored by the CIA; in fact the exposure of a single such method would do unacceptable damage to MindWar' s reputation for truth.

I find this passage particularly interesting in light of the revelations about the way police used drugs against the Occupy movement. If you saw the Indymedia documentary “MK Occupy Minnesota”, it shows how, under the pretext of recruiting volunteers for the “Drug Recognition Expert” program, police offered an array of illegal mind-altering drugs (“soft” and “hard”) to participants in Occupy, either to discredit them or to elicit intel, it seems. Has “MindWar” already reduced consciousness to such a lowly state that participants in politically dissident movements do not have to be drugged unwittingly, but actually jump up willingly to accept the state’s offer of “mind-weakening drugs”?

There are other interesting things, like the fact that Aquino re-released the paper and wrote an introduction in 2003 in which he talks about the elements of "MindWar" he saw being applied in Bush's invasion of Iraq:

While in the 1980s I had no reason to think that this paper had had any official effect upon U.S. PSYOP doctrine within or beyond the Army, it was with some fascination that I saw specific of its prescriptions applied during the first Gulf War, and recently even more obviously during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In both instances extreme PSYOP was directed both against the object of the attack and upon U.S. domestic public perception and opinion, in 2003 to the extent of "embedding" journalists with military units to inevitably channel their perspectives and perceptions.

The impact of even these minor techniques of MindWar was remarkable. A
psychological climate of inexorable U.S. victory was created and sustained in both the
United States and Iraq, which accelerated that victory on the ground.

Also see: the “Message Force Multipliers (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/the-pentagons-message-for_b_97794.html)” program (military psyop to achieve “information dominance” in lead up to the invasion of Iraq).

Next (and this is where the tinfoil hats come in) you see "psychotronics" becoming a new buzzword around the 1970s-1980s. In the MindWar paper, Aquino defines "psychotronics" (psychological-electronics) as the US military research into parapsychology, things like extrasensory perception and telepathy, which he describes as being "in its infancy" in the early 1980s, shown for example in the film The Men Who Stare at Goats. It is kinda weird how they would do more research into what is more blatantly regarded as pseudoscience after deeming mind control ineffective. However elsewhere you see "psychotronics" defined as things like the electromagnetic weapons, extremely low frequency (ELF) and air ionization which Aquino refers to at the end of his essay, the last of which was being researched by the recently closed HAARP, a DARPA program which generated a lot of conspiracy theories. ("Existing PSYOP identifies purely-sociological factors which suggest appropriate idioms for messages. Doctrine in this area is highly developed, and the task is basically one of assembling and maintaining individuals and teams with enough expertise and experience to apply the doctrine effectively. This, however, is only the sociological dimension of target receptiveness measures. There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves.")

There’s a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8tyi4O0Exw) floating around Youtube where, at a Pentagon press conference in 2003, a journalist asks Donald Rumsfeld (who also played a significant role in limiting the Church Committee dismantlement of national security state surveillance apparatus in ‘75) about when he expected to be able to weaponize “directed energy” and microwave technology in the “War on Terror”; Rumsfeld seems to get nervous and says such technology is “in very early stages”. One example of this type of weapon is the “Active Denial System” (ADS, or heat ray cannon) which was in development between 2002 and 2007, and deployed to Afghanistan in 2010. Yet testimony heard at a Senate Committee hearing in 2007 (http://web.archive.org/web/20071103025251/http://www.senate.gov/~veterans/public/index.cfm?pageid=16&release_id=11326&sub_release_id=11373&view=all) alleges that such weapons were already used in the first Gulf War, in 1990-1991, possibly causing the “Gulf War Syndrome”. The ADS was apparently withdrawn from Afghanistan within a month or two over concerns that it could be considered a form of torture, although last year (2015) a prison in California installed one to use on prisoners. So it’s no surprise that other potential applications for this type of “nonlethal” weapon (such as interference with brain function) would be even more controversial. Scientific American notes that (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-certain-frequencies/) “interpretations of findings in this area of investigation [nonthermal electromagnetic interference with brain waves] are shrouded in controversy, particularly because special interests may influence some of the research.”

Ultimately though, while the militarists’ weapons are surely capable of doing what they are designed to do (that is, terrorize), the only beneficiary of the conspiracy theorist fear of “total mind control” is the state. These types of conspiracy theorist narratives are probably to some extent encouraged by the intelligence community itself. If “they” can get people convinced that their secret technology gives them the capacity for total, irresistible tyranny, then people will do nothing, because doing something is pointless. But “they” are not ten feet tall; they still put their pants on one leg at a time, where there’s a will to resist, there’s a way to resist, etc. The folks who wrote the “How to Overthrow the Illuminati (https://overthrowingilluminati.wordpress.com/)” pamphlet hit the nail on the head:

We believe Illuminati theory is wrong, and we wrote this pamphlet to offer a different answer. We wrote this pamphlet because we know people who think about the Illuminati usually want to stop oppression and exploitation. They’re some of the smartest people in the hood today. Forty years ago, Illuminati theorists would’ve been in the Black Panther Party. Today most of them sit around and talk endlessly about conspiracies.