All of you are from Manchuria!

Reality is worse.

Published on August 2, 2004 By Phil Osborn In International

No, we don't - repeat, don't have the technology to do exactly what the movie showed. OK?

However, we've been doing essentially the same thing for decades. Try the best-seller "Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." A truly good read, anyway. One of the very rare unique takes on basic questions of philosophy. Pirsig, the author, died and was reborn, essentially. He had a breakdown, and they built him a new personality, after using shock "therapy" to destroy what was left of the original one.

Here's how that works: Electroshock both kills brain cells in large numbers and damages internal systems, resulting in memory loss. That much is clear. So, instead of just destroying massive numbers of these cells, you figure that the ones that are active at the moment of the shock will be hardest hit. Also, you are doing major aversion training at the same time. Whatever is associated by the nervous system with electroshock will be avoided at all costs. So, it's also a form of programmed repression - repression being defined as the automatic shift of focus from areas one has learned not to look at.

So, you make the subject focus on something - ask him or her questions about it, whatever - then hit him with the shock. Eventually, he physically cannot recall that material - and a lot of related stuff as well. Combining that with drugs that sap the will, such as the date-rape drugs or scopalomine helps the process along.

Then, with the will out of the loop due to the drugs, you start feeding the subject new data about their new life, such as their new personal history, background, what their family life was like, videos of their home town, etc. All the while, you're springing tests to see if they're going along with the program. If not, then you zap them again. Since they can't help free-associating under the drugs, they are defenceless, and, after a while, they find it much easier just to accept whatever you're feeding them as reality.

Our human history is repleat with this sort of thing, going back very likely at least several thousand years. Scopalomine, which is readilly available from the leaves of the tree it comes from, was used for mind-control by the South American Indians long before the Europpean invasion. Today, scopalomine - which is nasty stuff that can permanently impair your memory - along with a host of other date-rape drugs are used by a growing epidemic of kidnappers in South America and Mexico, and likely elsewhere, including here.

Readers may recall that enormous recent protest in Mexico City over the crime wave in Mexico, of which kidnapping is a prominent part. Kidnapping for ransom is still prevalent in Mexico, but kidnapping in which the victim wakes up in a cab three days later, with no memory of the intervening time, only to discover their bank account wiped out, their securities and stock sold, their home vault empty, is growing.

On a related note, there was the New York Times expose of white slavery in Mexico, in which young - teenage - girls are lured from Eastern Europe by promises of easy nanny jobs in the U.S. They fly to Mexico City, where they are met by people who say that they are going to help smuggle them accross the border for their new job. This is literally true as far as it goes. But the job is not being a nanny. Before they are taken to the U.S., they are subjected to about a month of continuous gang-rape and other sexual torture, along with heavy drugging, until they completely lose any will to resist. Then these sex slave zombies are brought to underground brothels in the U.S. - or sold to the highest bidder for whatever purpose in street auctions held in Mexico City.

And most of you have probably read something about the notorious CIA mind-control experiments in the '60's, in which, among other things, clients of San Francisco brothels were fed various concoctions, including LSD, without their knowledge or consent. The parallel organization in Canada was also conducting joint operations of the same sort in Toronto, as came out years after the Freedom of Information Act exposed the ones here. The goal of these ops was in fact to create a "Manchurian Candidate," specifically someone who would not realize they had been subverted and would respond like a robot to a preprogrammed cue. The CIA hoped to create a cadre of captured Soviet agents who would report back to them. They claim now that they failed to achive their objective, and that all such projects have long been terminated... And we know that these brave freedom fighters would never lie to us...

However, I have yet to hear them fess up to the alleged experiments done on unsuspecting GI's in VA hospitals.

In the early '80's, I heard a talk by Armen Condo, founder of the then popular tax resistance group "Your Heritage Protection Association." Armen was speaking at the local OC libertarian supper club that used to meet monthly at the Revere House restaurant. He discussed, among other subjects, something he had learned as a scientologist - allegedly fairly high up in the (now) Dianetics organization founded by L. Ron Hubbard.

Armen said that his information was as follows (or as best I can recall, anyway): Right after the end of WWII, Hubbard had volunteered to do psychological counselling in VA hospitals, especially for WWII GIs who had suffered shell-shock or other extreme trauma. After some time of doing this, he noticed something odd. A number of the GIs were reporting similar dreams about being subjected to strange procedures, including interrogations, by doctors who all had strong German accents. Finally, he started doing some tests, asking for specific non-generic details. He found that the details matched between GIs who had no knowledge of each other.

Hubbard was convinced that these GIs were being used in some kind of mind-control experiment, but he lacked the means to pursue any further investigation at the time. However, later the Freedom of Information Act (FIA) came along, and Hubbard had lots and lots of money and followers who could be trusted within Scientology/Dianetics. About thirty of his people were assigned the job of sending thousands of FIA requests to every agency that might have information related to what Hubbard suspected. For a long time, there were no results - no such program, no data, etc.

Finally, however, the person in charge of lieing to them got unexpectedly ill or some such thing, and the temp they put in charge had not a clue, and wrote back to Hubbard's investigative team that he would be happy to send them all the material they requested, but that due to the huge volume involved, which filled a large room of filing boxes, he first wanted to be sure they were serious and could afford the copying fees...

So, presumeably, somewhere in the Dianetics archives, there is a huge mass of material documenting mind-control experiments in VA hospitals.

So, no chips in the head yet, I think, except perhaps for ID purposes, or to release neurotoxins on radio command, maybe, and no way to program someone on the fly in three days. At least I don't think so. The brain/mind system is pretty versatile, and memories are built out of diverse associations and closely tied to motivation. We remember what is memorable. However, there may well be people out there working for various not-so-nice organizations who were essentially created in a mental facility, as Robert Pirsig was way back in the '60's. We could well have real Manchurian Candidates among us, who think they know who they are, but are really just constructs serving some purpose.

There's also the interesting case of one famous OC writer, Phillip K. Dick. Earlier this year, I was privileged to hear a four-person panel of people who had known Dick personally - including Greg Benford - discuss his life. Two odd things stuck out. First, Dick believed consistently that someone was spying on him and messing with his life, and this was apparently borne out when his house was ransacked - by someone, perhaps Dick himself...

The other thing was Dick's personal religious epiphany, when God literally spoke to him out of the clouds, resulting in his religious conversion. Dick was no dummy, however, and while he accepted the miracle as being such, he also explored other hypotheses, including contacting Julian Jaynes, author of "the Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," another of those BIG idea books which was enormously popular in the '70's and '80's, and is still a very interesting read and still a debatable hyposthesis.

Jaynes' thesis was, in brief, that consciousness itself is not an automatic function of the human brain. In fact, it is something - essentially a program - that evolved with human culture. The early Greeks, for example, did not use any words in the earlier parts of Homer's works which referred to internal mental states. Suddenly, however, about 700BC, such words came into heavy use. Jaynes claims that this and other evidence indicates that consciousness as we know it did not exist until then. Prior to that point, people were basically robots who spoke and thought, but had no real sense of self

What does this have to do with mind control? Well, one of the evidences that Jaynes calls upon to support his theory is the prevalence of hallucinations among otherwise normal people, which is much higher than one might expect, especially when one considers auditory hallucinations. Often, as with "Son of Sam" killer Berkowitz, people relate hearing a voice in their head that told them exactly what to do, and feeling that they had no choice at all in the matter. Berkowitz apparently had a lot of problems in addition, but in many cases, people have done truly bizarre things under the direction of these voices without any prior evidence of abnormaility.

So, my point: Suppose we did have the ability to tap into that? Then the kind of robotic response to a cue shown in the movie suddenly becomes much more plausible... Was Phillip K. Dick actually an early victim of this kind of mind control? Had he himself gotten too close - as he apparently believed - to some dangerous truthes? More later... God is telling me that I have to go answer this knock at my door...

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