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> I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life. In the long run, in the cosmic sense, I t
by AndrewBissell 6y ago
> I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life. In the long run, in the cosmic sense, I think you can say that commitment to a cause always gives you the justification for immoral acts. And patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes because it posits the nation as a value that's so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous.
I can buy that patriotism was used to sell MKULTRA to some of the rank and file who carried it out, but if I'm to believe that it's what motivated Sidney Gottlieb, Jolly West, and all the rest of its leading lights, I find the idea naive in the extreme. Even their stated motivation for originally undertaking a mind control program (after U.S. pilots supposedly came back brainwashed from Korea) is mendacious. Those pilots didn't need to be programmed to testify that we engaged in germ warfare in Korea because we actually did it!
- bigbubba 6y agoPerhaps the CIA's hope was to brainwash American pilots, not deprogram them. From what I understand, cult deprogramming is often a weird mirror of cult programming, using many of the same methods, with deprogramming organizations sometimes becoming cult-like themselves. That one could be confused or disguised as the other doesn't surprise me.
- AndrewBissell 6y agoI think the whole "we got the idea from the Koreans/Soviets" thing is just a cover, and the truth is that MKULTRA was an extension/continuation of experiments which got their start in the Nazi concentration camps.
- meowface 6y agoPretty much. It's the job of an intelligence agency to research all such theoretical tools. There are just ethical and unethical ways of doing so. The key issue with MKULTRA was the use of unwitting subjects. They'd dose people with LSD without their knowledge, let alone their consent, causing at least one person to kill themselves. If any of us worked for the CIA, we'd probably be interested in researching LSD, too; just not like that.
- baybal2 6y agoDulles would've been more successful as a circus player, yet the understanding how easily politicians, and generals bought into his utter bullshit is even more unnerving. If he got to do succeed with it, you can now feel that you have to give gravity to claims of KGB defectors how USSR's influence operators were running circles around USA's political establishment. The leadership in the business of employing hardcore, weaponized bullshit will certainly never be on the side of Countries of the Free World.
- Symmetry 6y agoHierarchical organizations with strict information controls are terribly vulnerable to group think. Compartmentalization means that even if the US was really using biological weapons the people terrified of brainwashing at the CIA probably wouldn't know that. And it wasn't just the existence of the US brainwashing program that was a consequence of this belief. Angleton threw every Russian who attempted to defect to the US into jail because he thought that Soviet brainwashing made true defection impossible.