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
---
{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
Edited by drwhat ()
which makes me wonder if that was the sort of stuff that wasnt destroyed, what the hell was in the majority of docs that were?
The plan was to corral peasants into armed stockades, thereby depriving the Vietcong of their support, which could not survive without the population just as fish die outside water, as Mao Zedong's image put it. The agroville scheme, a similar effort three years earlier, had been a botch, yet Diem and his brother Nhu clung to their brainchild, and they were encouraged by Robert Thompson, a British counterinsurgency specialist who had successfully promoted a similar program in the fight against Communist guerrillas in Malaya.
from "Vietnam: A History" page 255-256. Karnow doesn't note any end of the program but does say that by December 1963, 75% of the 200 strategic hamlets in Long An province had been destroyed by either the occupants and/or the Vietcong. this is according to an U.S admin type doing surveys Earl Young (page 324). if so many were destroyed it makes good sense to re-brand the whole thing at the very least.
John Lewallen in "Ecology of Devastation: Indochina" says that the Strategic Hamlet Program program ended in "the fall of 1965" (page 32). Wikipedia cites its end as 1964 according to Spencer Tucker's "The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History" (page 1011) - i'm sure this kind of thing is accurate as to the official retirement of the name of Strategic Hamlets, but the question is what happened to the remaining camps, how the administrators themselves saw their roles, etc etc. a good project would be to try to work out some sort of continuity - for example was the area described in your John F. Mason article already there in 1962 and was it called a strategic hamlet at the time?
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
lo posted:wasn't a bunch of this stuff basically following on from the experiments mengele and friends were getting up to? possibly also some of the unit 731 people?
The OSS/CIA sucked up a lot of Nazi scientists as part of operation paperclip, we normally hear about the rocketry/nuclear ones but it also included a lot of medical scientists; ill bet my rep page that OSS/CIA MK-ULTRA stuff not just followed on but utililised many of the same scientists who had been involved in nazi human experimentation programs
looking forward to this bit
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.
swampman posted:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2785980
edit: aaaaa wait i messed this up its Harlow, not faber who was the monkey torture guy, fortunatly he is also the authour of this torture paper, phew
Edited by tears ()
tears posted:
tears posted:ill bet my rep page that OSS/CIA MK-ULTRA stuff not just followed on but utililised many of the same scientists who had been involved in nazi human experimentation programs
i just finished blitzed: drugs in nazi germany and, in fact, nazi experiments with mescaline as a truth serum did lead to mkultra, lol
Caesura109 posted:Could you expand on the Farber monkey torture stuff?
sorry i messed this up its Harlow, not Faber who did the money torture stuff - fortuantly for me Harlow is the third authour on the paper about torturing people and somehow i accidentally wrote faber.
Anyway, harlow is famous for doing experiments like "what happens if you lock a monkey in a sensory deprivation box for 24 months" and the sequel "same as before but what if its a baby monkey" - he was also head of the American Psychological Association at one point, probably on their ethics committee too :rolleyes:
1. that the CIA research during the known period of BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTRA, in their search for means to control populations were blown away by the capability of LSD but didnt know what to do with it, they ran lots of experiments and were particularly interested in psychosis, induced psychosis, the effect of LSD on people with psychosis etc etc. They did lots of experiemnts giving people lsd wittingly and unwittingly. Basically what we can know they were doing and who we can peice together was involved + vietnam "special advisors" period.
2. The mysterious origin of the "Laurel Canyon set", the hippie movement and the Haight-Ashbury centered "counterculture" and its origin from the sons and daughters of military-intelligence agents. Its existence as a counter-revolutionary movement. Vietnam during the period of "official war"
3. Jim Jones, and the peoples temple period in California. THeir control of Mendocino State Mental Hospital.
4. Jonestown, the invasion of grenada, and where it all went next :spooky:
I might drop occasional bits but this is going to take me long time so :shrug: dont hold your breath
Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, Including Material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco, and Their Followers
by David Felton, Robin Green and David Dalton
https://www.amazon.com/Mindfuckers-Fascism-Including-Material-Followers/dp/0879320389
http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-809-days-of-future-passed-all-in-the-manson-family/
i didnt know about mkultra or jonestown when i listened to it, i'm sure there are connectives within... i do remember one concern troll article giving airtime within called "did hate kill tate" written by a intel asset in 1969 pinning the manson murders on 'black millitants' was nice & obnoxious
Maybe Doug valentine's book CIA as organised crime is in the right direction?
stegosaurus posted:where does this fit in with historical materialism though.
it fits in, uh, over here *gesturing*
xipe posted:Maybe Doug valentine's book CIA as organised crime is in the right direction?
epic thissery
http://ourhiddenhistory.org/entry/steve-smith-s-the-psychopath-machine-mkultra-linked-torture-at-oak-ridge posted:Steve Smith I think Matt Lamb's case, it may be the one case that absolutely defines what this place was about. Matt Lamb, he shot four people in Toronto for no apparent reason, killed two of them and maimed two of them with a shotgun back in I believe it was 1965. He was a very intelligent, articulate, attractive ... He was the typical psychopath through and through. He was one of Dr. Barker's favorite patients. He was given more LSD apparently than anyone in clinical history and he was one of Barker's main subjects.
His fate ... He was released from Oak Ridge in 1972, where he went to live with Dr. Barker and his family on Barker's farm, doing manual labor for him. He next went to Israel and joined the IDF and fought in the Yom Kippur War. Now this is where it gets really complicated. If you look up Matt Lamb on Wikipedia ... You know that Wikipedia is just filled with lies and manipulations.
The story has been altered. He did indeed go to Israel, but they're claiming that the Israeli military refused him. They didn't refuse him. He joined the IDF, where he fought in the Yom Kippur war. I have Barker's own words telling me this, which I will publish. He fought in the Yom Kippur War. He returned afterwards, disillusioned with the IDF, that's Barker's words, and went back to Barker's farm.
He next went to Rhodesia, where he was killed in the Bush War in 1976. He was killed in the Bush War by friendly fire apparently. The questions that this brings up ... First of all, Matt Lamb was under the Lieutenant Governor's Warrant. That is, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. That would mean that he would essentially be locked up in a mental hospital forever until he could prove that he was no longer a danger to anyone.
The very fact that he told Barker that he wanted to join the military, that means he wanted to have a gun in his hands again. As far as I know, the only time he ever had a gun in his hand was to kill some innocent people. As soon as he indicated that he wanted military experience, he should have been immediately returned to Oak Ridge, not given a passport and sent to Israel. Not to mention, why would Israel want a convicted psychopathic killer in their ranks? Why would they accept him? What did it take to have this guy transferred to Israel and into the military, where he gets military training, then he comes back to Canada -- clearly a psychopath -- with military training? There you go.
Matthew Charles Lamb was the Manchurian Candidate and he was proof, definitive proof that their program worked. That they could take a psychopath and direct him into something useful, i.e. a soldier of fortune, and that's the Matt Lamb story. Very, very interesting story.
lo posted:why would Israel want a convicted psychopathic killer in their ranks, when they've already got thousands of them
He certainly was "culturally fit".
tears posted:
very good move to make their site "OHH" & then not use colons in their interview(s)
GUY so i did this thing
OHH that's so interesting
xipe posted:Well I don't see any question marks there but Michael parenti talks about structural conspiracies a bit, he's probably written a book about it.
Maybe Doug valentine's book CIA as organised crime is in the right direction?
i think this makes sense. i remember when i read Excellent Cadavers (a book on the history of the Sicilian mafia) there was a bit in the beginning about how during the end of WWII/immediately after it seemed like the CIA considered the mafia to be a valuable resource, not to mention all of the P2 stuff. And then it was only in the 90s when the communist militas in the north folded that real progress against the mafia was able to be made on an institutional level (the implication being that the various organized crime groups were effectively a guarantee against mass left politics in the south of Italy). if we want to keep following the analogy, there was also some stuff the proposed origins for organized crime in those areas as intermediaries between the landlords and the peasants, that is, as a petit bourg group that supported itself by acting as enforcers for the owners of capital.
with that in mind, i guess the practical implications wrt historical materialism are probably in terms of raising awareness that this whole range of bourgeois activity as an especially brutal form of class struggle? but maybe that obvious from the outset, idk
the nazis won the second world war