Cordelia wrote:I won't touch whatever purposes (other than 'prominent' assassinations) a 'witting' Manchurian Candidate might serve. Because if your 'condemnation' is only warranted if you can see it lined up neatly, then, if that works for you, I'd say your mind is effectively controlled. Congratulations.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. Maybe I shouldn't have even attempted to read this while trying to staunch the deafening ocean of rage building in my ears. Lives are destroyed. That's all. Lives are destroyed.
And I give myself permission not to respond and try to explain or reason with that which I cannot explain or reason with. I'm done.
My points are that:
First.1. Unlike the programs formally persisting into the 1970s, there has been no disclosure by the responsible parties on present-day or post-1980 mind control that approaches what happened with, e.g., the Church Committee. It is true that there are ample amounts of witness testimony, but some of it is specious and some of it has clearly been misdirected, willingly, by fabulists and likely disinfomers. IOW, there isn't a corpus of material that can be referred to reliably. There is a big unknown in the midst of it. Look, e.g., at Cathy O'Brien, because it's obvious she has a handler and obvious she's been through something, but how can I tell them apart and have reliable evidence? If you're aware of some airtight incident that hasn't already been disclosed, let us know.
2. There is, however, very salient manifestation of a program, or policy umbrella or both, involving torture and the use of psychiatrists. As far as I am concerned subjecting someone to thirty hours of sensory deprivation, to disorienting drugs or to razor blades as part of GWOT serves to do nothing more than cause pain, restrict their world to that pain. Even if some advanced psychiatric theory informs this, the intent and ends are the same as tying someone to a chair and beating them. The alternative press discusses this almost every day.
3. This leads me to say that the grounds for looking into the persistence of any mind control program are not survivor narratives, but first the widely-accepted reality of the events at Gitmo, Bagram and elsewhere, which ape the Artichoke/MK Ultra projects, *then* the glut of survivor narratives, which would suggest that there has been either renewed interest in more esoteric mind control, or that it never in fact ended. *Because* some of the most prominent MC narratives are specious, and because of obvious and apparently successful attempts by either charlatans or actual agents to handle some people with narratives, it simply can't be held that just because many narratives of mind control exist that's grounds for whatever action it might be grounds for. I'm going to suggest that you would need someone to compile narratives and find elements that remain constant and can't be traced to specific works of fiction--like "Monarch," WHICH MARK PHILLIPS ADMITTED HE MADE UP. The fact that so many people have latched onto Monarch only shows how muddied these waters are and how difficult it would be to use them as a basis. OTOH the prevalance of them suggests there is something going on, and I think the dots are easy to connect, but I'll admit I've filled in some of those dots myself.
After all, Monarch is what this thread is about. Monarch is about the fact that people are in fact lying about mind control experiments while claiming it is real and significant, which makes anyone claiming that tainted by association. This is the one bad apple rule, only it's not one bad apple, it's a blight someone sprayed on a bunch of them and it's an uphill battle to convince people that even the 1960s experimentation happened and that was before the Prophecy Clubs and the Mark Phillips of the world dumped a bucket of shit over it.
Second.To be very, very clear, I do not believe in the existence of some black magic charismatic secret animal magnetism hypnosis power that will let anyone at any time so much as walk up to someone, destroy their will and implant some hidden command with a trigger instantly, or something similar. This sounds like the sales pitch for "speed seduction." The idea that drugs can accomplish this sounds like nonsense that people who have never used drugs make up. Light or sound entrainment takes at least ten minutes to have any efficacy and even then doesn't give anyone the key to the mind; sensory deprivation or Ganzfeld take even longer to take effect, and all of these require careful environmental control, which means physical control. I can't say much for hypothetical microwave devices, and suspect that brain implants are are. So I am only willing to consider "mind control" that involves physical custody of someone for the time needed to train them--which is kidnapping and makes whatever follows, in my mind, torture--an effort to undo some part of all of the kidnapped for the sake of molding them as one pleases.
But specific psychiatric techniques that are not centered on pain or isolation, either physical or otherwise and including without doubt sexual violence, are not inherently evil. If you think that there is something generically wrong with, say, attempting to change memory, you should start lobbying against any treatment of PTSD.
Of course these things can be abused. But they are not intrinsically evil. I've used a number of the things that I've seen condemned as the vehicles of mind control on myself and will inform you the devil himself did not show up and the local Satanists' Dog-Sacrificers' Exchange did not mail me a membership card. In the case of using surreptitious use, submission, coercion or duress rather than consent, they will always be evil. I consider training children to accept these things non-consensual. But as a rule it would be difficult or impossible to learn of surreptitious use something without actual disclosure so this leaves the coerced methods. It is about control--brute control--and domination.
The one outlier is pain. Maybe people can be taught to consent to having pain inflicted on them, but it is still as I understand it about domination--in this context it is about using pain to undo whatever might make an individual other than what you hope to mold them into.
But the problem with coercion is that it is coercion--violence or the threat of violence, which from someone who is kidnapped's perspective, may as well be the same thing, and if that person is subject to one, they'll likely face the other. If you take that away, how can you criticize these things? Maybe the drugs or methods (like magnetic entrainment) can be physically damaging. But it isn't right to call it "mind control" if you do it yourself or if you ask someone to do it to you, like I said, excluding cases of submission or long-term control, which isn't consent, which I said again.
But you're going to have to tell me how putting someone in a giant Skinner box, or turning his or her life into one, isn't torture. And that is really all it is, no matter how many bells and whistles you put on it, no matter how many super-secret speculative militarized drugs or how much electromagnetic cranial stimulation goes into it and no matter how many sychophantic Harvard Ph.D.s pen defenses of and apologism for it. It shows nothing but total disregard for them and nothing but a will to cause the furthest reaches of pain.
