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Comment by rixed | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how the article turns a story of mass torture and killings akin to nazy mad-science into a story about one individual murder.

Makes one wonder why would a state research mind control from drugs, when mind control from history books and newspapers is already so efficient.

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They were researching mind control to extract information from individual subjects. (Because torture doesn't work) It has nothing to do with propaganda.

Maybe mind control from history books or whatever is not as efficient as you're thinking it is?

Just speculating that if I was a military commander, yeah, I'd go for saturating a place with drugs to keep the people there from planting IED's way before I would trust history books to do so. Just strikes me as way more reliable.

If history is any indication, using history books to get people to behave decently doesn't seem terribly reliable at all.

I believe the vast majority of people in the west believe that the west, despite some fixable issues, represents the Good, whereas for instance Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia are the worst Evil Nations ever created, while when one stick to the facts it's much harder to tell them apart (but for the fact that one side won and therefore can tell its own story).

This observation alone leads me to believe that there is some very effective propaganda that's been going on for a good while.

Impossible to find out for sure of course, as the only propaganda that is visible is the propaganda that fails.

Especially unreliable if you want people to do horrible things. Drugs may help you more then than books.

I can think of two very influential books that have caused (are still causing) untold human misery.

But it's far easier to think up drugs that have caused untold human misery, and do so much more reliably. Every human who takes these drugs will suffer through the misery. No such thing as "I'm too strong to be affected by this drug." (heroin, crystal meth.) Or "I can quit whenever I want." (opium, flakka.) Or, "My neighborhood, or community, or nation won't fall into ruin because of this drug." (China with opium, black americans with crack.)

And that's just the drugs we know about, just imagine the secret ones we don't know about.

Take X drug, it will have Y effect on every human. Immediately. That's the definition of efficiency. Keeping with the original example, that's the sort of efficiency and effectiveness a military leader would want when waging a campaign against an enemy. Far more swift, efficient, and effective than using a history book.

> Every human who takes these drugs will suffer through the misery.

Blatantly false. Not everyone you uses XYZ drug ends up a hopeless addict. The vast majority of people use the drug with no long term negative effects addiction, including methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine et al

> No such thing as "I'm too strong to be affected by this drug." (heroin, crystal meth.)

Sure they will effect you

> Or "I can quit whenever I want." (opium, flakka.)

Within addiction, sure. Non-addiction use, false. You can stop whenever you want. Getting addicted to a substance is not as easy as people think. You need to be using through the day for multiple days in a row. You can use heroin every weekend without getting addicted, so long as you stop during the week

> Take X drug, it will have Y effect on every human

To an extent, different people can vary degrees of effects from the same dose when tolerance is not an issue

This is a recklessly false statement. Please do research into current literature before relaying dangerous anecdotes that you believe to be true about you.

1. Good night moon 2. That Marie Kondo tidying book

The article is an excerpt from a book on Sydney Gottlieb, which is linked at the bottom. It’s one chapter, not a summary.

The CIA is the Nazi's fourth reich. They escaped Europe, found themselves with new resources in America's military-industrial complex, and have been fucking shit up around the world ever since. There are many in the world who believe we're still fighting Nazi policies, only its the USA this time around, doing the implementing.

And its hard to disagree that secret torture chambers (like, literally, thousands of them) being operated by shadowy figures who are not accountable to anyone is anything less than a total usurpation of the founding principles of the USA ..

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