In the course of some deep state research into MK-ULTRA, the U.S. mind control programme, I came across a small titbit that I thought would be worth writing up into a full piece. The information surrounds an article in The Reporter, a biweekly magazine which ran from 1949-1968.
The Reporter was a “liberal” magazine, and like the liberal publications of today it banged the drum for war and imperialism, masquerading under explaining the importance “democracy” and capitalism in the “battle of ideas” of the cold war.
In its time The Reporter published articles from the likes of noted Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher (The counterfactual “"The myth of the Chinese landlord" about how "it is a Stalinist myth that the Chinese revolution is freeing the peasant from the domination of the feudal landlord"); Boris Pasternak (Author of Doctor Zhivago, which was revealed in 2014 to have been distributed by the CIA){1}; and noted war criminal Henry Kissenger.
The Reporter is widely suspected to have been CIA funded, set up at the same time the CIA commenced its PSYOPS programme of funding pro-American journals, magazines, reporters and artists{2}. It was the first magazine to present extracts from Doctor Zhivago{3} In 1968 The Reporter was folded into Harper's Magazine.
The Article in question is “Whom the Gods Love”, by John F. Mason. This is his only article published in The Reporter. It was published 21 September 1967. The article purports to be an account of a visit to a “refugee village” - Duc Co (Đức Cơ).
Even a cursory reading will reveal this is not a “refugee village” but a Strategic Hamlet – the U.S. euphemism for the network of concentration camps they set up across Vietnam to contain the civilian population while they waged their genocidal war. It should be noted that this article was written in 1967, while the Strategic Hamlet Program was according to the official (and Wikipedia) account, wrapped up in 1963 after the 1963 Diem coup, only one year after its inception.
I will present some extracts from the magazine to back this up. The whole article makes for surreal and sickening reading.
Here we see a telling description of the villages (note plural) described as “sterile and planned, like prison compounds” - later on we see a comparison to a local Montagnard village where the mood is described as “totally different from that of the North Vietnamese refugee camp”. At Duc Co 12 Special Forces operatives and several hundred Montagnard tribesmen “protect” thirteen thousand North Vietnamese refugees.
The square stockade is surrounded by “bamboo punji spears”; two “vietcong” are tied up outside.
Evidence that all the homes surrounding the area had been burnt out, most likely by US and comprador forces
guard towers
a telling description of the “feel” of the camp
This is the most horrific passage in the whole piece – I’ll just ask one thing, if this is a refugee camp, where are the civilian staff? Why are these people starving?
I highly doubt these people were “refugees from North Vietnam”, or this was anything else but a continuation of the supposedly discontinued US program of forcing the peasant populations into concentration camps.
But now, lets go deeper,
The whole reason I started looking into Duc Co camp had nothing to do with Vietnam at all but to do with MK-ULTRA, the CIA's “mind control” program. I was researching a psychiatrist creep called Dr. Peter Bourne for a much larger piece on MK-ULTRA focusing on Grenada, Jonestown and San Francisco Free Clinics (to be published a few years after the petrol zizek piece), and in the course of that was reading some of Bourne's early published academic work including:
Bourne, Peter G., Coli, William M. and Date, William E. (1968), “Affect levels of ten special forces soldiers under threat of attack”, Psychological Reports, 22, 363-366
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1968.22.2.363
where I saw this mention to the above The Reporter article:
now describing the piece as “colorful” seems like a sick joke, but knowing the context of the concentration camp it puts the Bourne piece into perspective.
Bourne was working for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research at the time and conducted this piece of research along with another from the same institute and William E. Datel from the extremely creepily named Mental Hygiene Consultation Division, Fort Ord.
They were administering psychological tests to the special forces camp guards and checking their piss for stress-hormones; they were described as scoring conspicuously high on the MAACL (Multiple Adverse Adjective Check List) for “Hostility”
(sample text from Bourne's article)
Now I find it interesting that a U.S. Army psychiatrist experimenting on concentration camp guards would move on to volunteering at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco during the summer of love, at exactly the time Charles Manson was regularly visiting the clinic, which if certain rumours can be believes was funneling people to Mendicino Hospital, at the time controlled by Jim Jones of Jonestown fame, and highly suspected to have been used as a MK-ULTRA research facility.
Just a 'lil teaser for you, stick this on the front page
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{1} https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/2014-press-releases-statements/cia-declassifies-agency-role-in-publishing-doctor-zhivago.html; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/during-cold-war-cia-used-doctor-zhivago-as-a-tool-to-undermine-soviet-union/2014/04/05/2ef3d9c6-b9ee-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html
{2} In search of a clear and overarching American policy: The Reporter magazine (1949-68) and the Cold War” Elkie van Cassel in Laville, Helen; Wilford, Hugh (eds. 2005). The US government, citizen groups, and the Cold War : the state-private network. London: Routledge. pp. 116-140; https://www.tijdschriftstudies.nl/articles/abstract/10.18352/ts.232/
{3} http://www.unz.org/Pub/Reporter-1958jul10-00008
