In a lot of cases the science for these techniques is between sketchy and nonexistent. It's very attractive to general audiences in today's liberal societies to believe that ideology is this overly simplified operation of switches in people's heads, all catalogued and well understood, and that brilliant technocratic experts know all the secrets to changing people's minds for good or ill. But there is not a lot of evidence statistically or anecdotally that any of these techniques work reliably. Advertising campaigns often make mascots or commercial formats recognizable while the products and brands they promote continue to fail. Success is so haphazard that I would consider advertising (and its sister discipline, marketing) not even at the level of pseudo-science. These act more as ideological training programs, much like "business" as an academic pursuit, with all its journals and papers full of meaningless p-values and made-up quadrants.
As for "MKULTRA", it's used nowadays as a large umbrella term to describe a lot of different intelligence/security-agency schemes to influence minds and opinions. This is fine imo, like using "Gladio" to describe similar operations, and for much the same reason: because the name people recognize adheres to a specific and documented operation that proves that such operations really did happen, when most of officialdom in the West continues to deny they happened. So when people talk about "MKULTRA" in general, they may very well be referring to something sound or established.
That said, a lot of the CIA/academic work torturing student volunteers and the like didn't seem to result in anything useful. It seems instead to have been pursued out of a sincere belief that advanced science in the USSR must have discovered some subliminal technique, chemical formula or EM-wave device to control people's minds, because otherwise, so the belief went, the USSR would have collapsed following World War II at the latest. The thinking went that if the USSR's scientists could figure this stuff out, so could the U.S. scientific-military-industrial apparatus, that or discover analogous techniques.
But the underlying, unquestioned assumption at the start of the program was that the USSR couldn't possibly persist as a superpower in defiance of the "natural" order of capitalism, so its continued existence proved mind-control techniques existed, Q.E.D., and because Soviet science couldn't possibly be all that far in advance of Western science, a crash program would put those presumed mind-control abilities into the hands of the CIA. And of course the USSR was not actually held together by KGB-trained telepaths.
This is another aspect where Marxists tend to be smarter than most conspiracy theorists, because the free-flying conspiracy theorist doesn't really have a comprehensive idea of ideology, so there's a tendency on their part to view things like MKULTRA as perfectly masterminded and cynical and never a shaky product of wrong beliefs.
tears posted:the CIA engaged in a systematic program of torture for decades on the off chance that it would give them total domination over the human mind. if you do that to enough people you'll cook up a few mansons along the way
yeah agreed. Like... clearly Ted Kaczynski is a product of institutional torture and abuse. I just have doubts that the bourgeois police state successfully radio-programmed him as a living weapon 30 years in advance to infiltrate / disarm the #1 existential threat to capitalism, the AmeriKKKan anarcho-primitivist movement, through letters from prison.
cars posted:clearly Ted Kaczynski is a product of institutional torture and abuse
grad school isn't THAT bad
cars posted:i'm a little skeptical of the sensationalized, Adam Curtis-level stuff about genuine mind control capabilities of CIA torture rooms, corporate advertising, etc.
Great post overall but I'm wonderin if I'm readin this part wrong, but from what I understand Adam Curtis exclusively talked about that stuff being failed pseudoscience. Hypernormalization was a severe turd though and I haven't seen his latest so maybe I'm missing something
Not Marxist, erases class, etc., but still worth a watch, so long as you keep in mind the materialist concept of ideology, which Curtis lacks for obvious reasons.
chickeon posted:cars posted:
i'm a little skeptical of the sensationalized, Adam Curtis-level stuff about genuine mind control capabilities of CIA torture rooms, corporate advertising, etc.
Great post overall but I'm wonderin if I'm readin this part wrong, but from what I understand Adam Curtis exclusively talked about that stuff being failed pseudoscience. Hypernormalization was a severe turd though and I haven't seen his latest so maybe I'm missing something
tentativelurkeraccount posted:The latest one does yes
cars posted:I'm talking specifically about The Century of the Self, where Curtis presents the glib argument that an aggressive attempt to market cigarettes to women in the late '20s/early '30s coincided with more women smoking at the beginning of the Great Depression, therefore governments can control the brains of the populace using perfectly weaponized Freudian psychoanalysis. If he's pulled back on that since then I don't blame him. It's a fun movie but it's also a fawning and naive ad campaign for advertisers / marketing consultants themselves, presenting them as having ludicrous superpowers, the same way that it didn't exactly hurt Cambridge Analytica when the entire left-liberal establishment decided that a bunch of nerd hacks personally fixed the 2016 presidential election through Facebook brainwashing, so no deeper examination was needed of the electorate or mechanism that put Trump's administration in the White House.
Not Marxist, erases class, etc., but still worth a watch, so long as you keep in mind the materialist concept of ideology, which Curtis lacks for obvious reasons.
It's certainly a problem if that's what people are taking away from it but I'm inclined to think that might be a symptom of how people share and acquire information more generally these days, looking for vulgar reductive prepackaged explanations for shit on youtube etc. A non naive viewer should be able to understand it as describing the emergence of modern advertising and its common origins with modern western state propaganda, the kind of approaches still used for the kind of ideological engineering involved in producing exactly that kind of left-liberal establishment consensus. That this either or ostensibly escapes Curtis in his recent work certainly doesn't help the situation or his general credibility. I don't think it was particularly blameworthy in that regard at the time CotS came out but he should know better these days
radical_dave posted:i love cyclonopedia but that's a brutal own lol
the brutal cyclonopedia own is that the guy basically copped to paying for a suicide girls account
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1919/04/x01.htm
kinch posted:radical_dave posted:i love cyclonopedia but that's a brutal own lol
the brutal cyclonopedia own is that the guy basically copped to paying for a suicide girls account
i'm not personally convinced that the author knows what suicide girls is
tears posted:Reading some Lu Xun
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1919/04/x01.htm
there's a good recent penguin classics edition of all his fiction. the introduction has some liberal crap about the tyranny of socialist realism etc etc but it does also contain this fun anecdote:
(Through the 1910s and early 1920s, Lu Xun may well have remained largely celibate; according to one account, he refused to wear padded trousers through Beijing’s bitter winters in order to freeze out his sexual frustration
tears posted:reading cormac mccarthy - outer dark - i gotta read more fiction dudes style is cracked
read blood meridian if you ha'nt
tears posted:reading cormac mccarthy - outer dark - i gotta read more fiction dudes style is cracked
his style owes a lot to faulkner and faulkner is very good so you may want to read him as well if you haven't.
Edit: More seriously, i have downloaded blood in my eye, hope to get to it in the near future.
Edited by Peentis ()
William Hinton posted:General Yeh Chien-ying, speaking for the Central Committee in
October 1979, finally denounced the whole Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated
disaster. "Ten lost years," the commentators said—and this formulation,
which matched the personal experience of millions of people
(especially large numbers of intellectuals, who had suffered grievous harm,
long terms of labor in the countryside, even physical torture as political
prisoners and the death of friends and relatives), swept the field.
General Yeh's pronouncement opened the way for a series of articles and
speeches that laid the blame for the "false" revolution squarely on Mao's
shoulders and classified the politics of his declining years as ultraleft. As
they developed this theme, Mao's critics began to delve into pre-Cultural
Revolution history. They then extended Mao's ultraleft period backward in
time to include, first, the Socialist Education Movement, then the Great
Leap Forward and the formation of communes, and finally the wholesale
creation of higher-stage cooperatives in the countryside as well as the
headlong merging of handcrafts and service establishments in the cities
during the middle fifties.
This revision of history finally settled on a post-Liberation turning point
for the revolution, a watershed between progress and decline, between
correct and "left" politics, somewhere in 1956. By denouncing all Mao's
subsequent initiatives, his critics avoided grappling in any concrete way
with the questions Mao raised so insistently after that date—questions
concerning the development and consolidation of China's new socialist
relations of production.* Since they rejected the relations themselves, since
they regarded communes, coops, even production teams as premature, they
found it easy to reject a Cultural Revolution designed to solidify these
innovations. "Ten lost years" needed no further analysis.
hinton thinks that the mass mobilizations, of which the cultural revolution was the culmination, failed, and he tried to explain why that might be. one thing that has been stressed throughout the book is the problem of ultraleft currents that would surface during mobilisations and usually mess things up by saying or doing really dogmatic things that tended to alienate people(and allow rightists to then take advantage and discredit the mass movement as a whole). he notes that mao seems to have been happy to encourage mobilisation against rightist forces, but never directed any popular movements against left deviations, either because he was unwilling or unable to do so. there is some more stuff here that is probably important (particularly about the development of a new bureaucracy among ccp officials and how that tended to stifle the mass movements) but i am still thinking about it and getting it clear in my brain so i will end this post here for now