Canadian government gag order in CIA brainwashing case
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
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-...
edit: and please do read it before judging, the evidence is more convincing than you think.
[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-pr...
[1] http://www.esotericonline.net/forum/topics/jordan-maxwell-ma...
[0] https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9...
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".
It covers MKUltra’s LSD experiments.
Who else is making FOIA requests, interviewing people, and systematically collecting evidence? [0] Nobody.
[0] https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9...
Haven't read the linked article, but for a tl;dr, how reliable are the accusations, and what are the sources?
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.
[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-...
Sorry, this is just too much. "Deadhead" means a fan of the Grateful Dead. Is he just making stuff up?
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.
https://deprogramwiki.com/deprogramming/deprogramming-modali...
Not sure why canadians got involved in this mess though.
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:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/07/world/volkswagen-s-history...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/20/mitsubishi...
Surely people on HN care more about real facts, right?
But like the parent poster said, some people can only think black and white.
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.
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.
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?
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.
really? you should read some Egyptology.
If the Constitution were a living document, the Originalist viewpoint would not make any sense.
In many other countries, constitutional laws get semi-regularly rewritten and modernized, not just amended.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
Have to guess the Aztecs and many other civilizations before that had it figured out before us.
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?
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)
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only...
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.
Conspiracy theories are the sum total of everything that could be true, so consequently the "theory" parts are a dime a dozen.
you think of you stopped a random person on the street and asked them about MKULTRA, they would know?
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.
That's just the meta discussion.
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)
1 - www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california-genocide-20160522-snap-story.html
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?
I don't think anyone in the current government had any role in Indian genocide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is morality powerful enough to stop actions?
Government thugs can survive with a guilty conscience.
"A kills B" wrong
"A kills B".bind("B tries to kill A") righteous?
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.
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)
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"
Google Ryan Fogle.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-er...
Nothing of value to society anyway; looking at the 1979 reunion video, it seems like they were pretty happy with the return on investment overall.
[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-...
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.
This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.
I would say without their consent, but it's likely there is a clause buried in the user agreement that means that you consent to it.
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 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.
if you don't believe me, jump down the rabbit hole and you will become a bit jaded
here you go; it's from the proceedings of the senate select intelligence committee; this evidence is in fact unimpeachable government record.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear...
On pages 123-124:
> A portion of the Research and Development Program of TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods:
> [...]
> 14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
i see crimes against humanity that are ready for prosecution
Oh wait.
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.