rigorousintuition.ca

Already one of the most interesting threads in RI history.

William Sargant of brainwashing book fame?

Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing - How Evangelists, Psychiatrists, Politicians, and Medicine Men Can Change Your Beliefs and Behavior Paperback
by William Sargant (Author), Charles Swencionis (Preface)
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brain ... 1883536065
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

... and in Albarelli's A SECRET ORDER (pg 58) he has a section called "Aline Mosby is Drugged in Moscow" and alludes to a period of time when the Russian's were dosing a lot of folks with LSD in Moscow.

American Dream » 23 Mar 2014 00:42 wrote:

guruilla » Sat Mar 22, 2014 7:20 pm wrote:

While in New York, Orage and Jessie often catered to celebrities such as Paul Robeson fresh from his London Tour.

Robeson was a friend of my grandfather.

Paul Robeson's son thought his farther was a victim of a Cold War drugging with LSD or a similar substance at a party inside a Moscow hotel room. After Robeson suffered a psychotic break, he was taken to London where he was put under the "care" of a powerful spychiatrist: William Sargant, I think.

And of course Gurdjieff- not unlike Crowley- was alleged to contract his services out to various secret services...

William Sargant

".....Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern treatments...."

elfismiles » Sun Mar 23, 2014 11:02 pm wrote:
William Sargant of brainwashing book fame?

American Dream » 23 Mar 2014 00:42 wrote: Paul Robeson's son thought his farther was a victim of a Cold War drugging with LSD or a similar substance at a party inside a Moscow hotel room. After Robeson suffered a psychotic break, he was taken to London where he was put under the "care" of a powerful spychiatrist: William Sargant, I think.

And of course Gurdjieff- not unlike Crowley- was alleged to contract his services out to various secret services...

Ooops- I went back and refreshed my memory- the basic outlines of the story I said are real: Paul Robeson's son did think his farther was a victim of a Cold War drugging with an LSD-like substance at a party inside a Moscow hotel room, Robeson did suffer a psychotic break, and he was taken to London where he was put under the "care" of a psychiatrist who is suspect- in part- because of his association with Maudsley Hospital, which is also where the notorious Dr. Sargant is known to have worked. It was other clinicians besides Sargant though that gave Robeson suspicious treatments- both in London and later in New York.

Robeson was surely drugged.

http://www.counterpunch.org/1999/04/01/ ... l-robeson/

But he was also almost as surely a Soviet-controlled asset.
Him getting sabotaged like that is just spy vs. spy shit.
I don't weep much for Paul Robeson.

FourthBase » Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:50 am wrote: I don't weep much for Paul Robeson.

Much.

He's a tragic figure, though, sure, ultimately.

A few more linkages:

A second bout of tuberculosis and depression in 1954 gave Sargant time to complete his book Battle for the mind (and also an opportunity for giving up his 30-year heavy smoking habit).[33] He spent his convalescence in Majorca, and Robert Graves helped him edit the book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

From Modern History Project (very interesting looking site, wiki for alt. researchers):

At Oxford, [TS] Elliott had consorted with the occultist literary figures of The New Age. He was part of a late-night drinking circle including Aleister Crowley's one-time lodge brother, the Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats, and long-time Fugitive intimate Robert Graves. Future CCF [Congress for Cultural Freedom] operative Graves is known today for his adoring history of the Roman Empire, I Claudius and his promotion of the cult of the White Goddess.
http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Art ... #Fugitives

This was the first I had heard of the CCF, turns out they were

an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. In 1962, the World Marxist Review published an article entitled, "Who Financed Anti-Communism?" by Ernst Henri which revealed the CIA, also through the Ford Foundation, as the secret financial backers of the CCF. In 1966, the New York Times published an article exposing the CIA as secretly funding the CCF's British magazine Encounter. Finally, in 1966, it was revealed (first by the New York Times and later by Ramparts as well as mainstream news outlets) that the United States Central Intelligence Agency was instrumental in the establishment and funding of the group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_f ... al_Freedom

Guess who one of their chairmen was? My family's pal Bertrand Russell! (And acc to Mona Brand, JB Priestley was the guest of honor at a CCF meeting in the 1950s.)

Back to Sargant, via Labor MP & Savile-enabler David Owen:

In 1960, Owen joined the Vauxhall branch of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. He qualified as a doctor in 1962 and began work at St Thomas's Hospital. . . . He was neurology and psychiatric registrar at St Thomas's Hospital for two years, as assistant to Dr. William Sargant, then Research Fellow on the Medical Unit doing research into Parkinsonian trauma and neuropharmacology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Owen

As everyone here probably already knows, J Savile's "involvement at Broadmoor was rubber-stamped in 1974 by Dr David Owen, now Lord Owen"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...the-wards.html

Owen was born 4 years after my father, and was also somehow involved in the Suez affair as a young man, though wiki doesn't say how (except for, urm, emotionally?):

Owen was deeply affected by the Suez crisis of 1956, when Anthony Eden's Conservative government launched a military operation to retrieve the Suez Canal from Nasser's decision to nationalise it. At the time, aged 18, he was working on a labouring job before going to Cambridge.

Owen went to school at Mount House School, Tavistock, an English town written about by AC Doyle and Neal Stephenson. I can't find any link between the Tavistock Inst. and the town, though it stands to reason they must have taken the name from somewhere.

Meaning of the word Tavistock also unclear, here's a nicely apropos tongue in cheek def. from urban dic:

1. Tavistock
A Tavistock is derived from the old English terms of Tavi and Stock.

Tavi - meaning a smallish stannary market town full of a mix of grave dodgers, middle class social climbers with no social conscience and working class locals who think that feminism is for queers.

Stock - from the Latin meaning of St "looks nice in summer if you can see through the tourists and hear the birds above the American Tourists exclaiming their surprise that this Tavi has a shoe shop" and Ock - nice place to go before you die
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... =tavistock

Oops, and then I found this while looking for a link between Sargant and LSE:

1926 [DOB of JS, pls note] An appeal to The Commonwealth Fund (New York) by Cyril Burt and Amy Strachey, (born Amy Simpson 1866) "Mrs St Loe Strachey" for funds to start training psychiatric social workers at the London School of Economics (see below) and support for Child Guidance.

AIM25 contains "material relating to the Mental Health Course, 1926-1957, including papers of the Child Guidance Council, the Commonwealth Fund and the Mental Health Training Committee; material on the teaching of Statistics and Computing Methods, Insurance, Social Studies, Latin American Studies, Management and Management Studies." - A grant is recorded to "London, University of, 1926- 1968" in the Commonwealth Fund archives.

[And sure enough, 3 yrs later:] 1929 With money from The Commonwealth Fund, a Diploma in Mental Health started at the London School of Economics to train Psychiatric Social Workers. The fund's Director, Barry Smith, had written in 1928 that "the training of psychiatric social workers is an essential and fundamental part of [a] child guidance program."
http://studymore.org.uk/mhhtim

The Commonwealth fund (see http://www.commonwealthfund.org/About-U ... story.aspx) has no immediately obvious relation to Acland et al.'s Common Wealth, but I haven't done any digging yet, if anyone feels like looking into it.

Cyril Burt was a member of the London School of Differential Psychology, and of the British Eugenics Society.

Amy Strachey "Mrs. St Loe" is wife of John Strachey, father of the other John Strachey already mentioned at this thread:

As did this fellow John Strachey, who keeps popping up, with links to Oxford, Boothby (whom he probably met there), Wintringham, Keynes, Snowden, Oswald Mosley, Gollancz, Laski (LSE), Acland, Driberg (etc., etc., the gang's all here).

As confirmed by a genealogy site:

John St. Loe Strachey [Parents] was born 1, 2 on 9 Feb 1860 in Clifton, Bristol, Gloucester. He died 3 on 26 Aug 1927. He married 4 Henrietta Mary Amy Simpson in 1887 in Kensington, London (Sep qtr).
[Notes]
Henrietta Mary Amy Simpson [Parents] was born 1, 2 in 1866 in Kensington, London (Jun qtr). She married 3 John St. Loe Strachey in 1887 in Kensington, London (Sep qtr).
http://www.beanweb.net/ft/frippuk/pafg112.htm

All this and I haven't had my breakfast yet!

Be careful to keep this exploration uncontaminated by Larouche-ness.
Tavistock as a subject is something I associate only with Larouche.
What's the actual deal with it, apart from Larouche theorizing?

I never read LaRouche, or Coleman for that matter, but I can't even seem to confirm the ubiquitous "Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961" speech, except that it happened. I have been wondering if the Tavistock meme was part of the "noise."

Funny thing is, I once had a very intense dream that Whitley Strieber belonged to a secret group called Tavistock. At the time I hadn't heard the conspiracy lore about them (or if I had I'd forgotten it), and it was years before I started to suspect that WS was group-affiliated at all. Maybe I was dream-controlled.

And what about the Tavistock Clinic..or was it the Tavistock Neighbourhood centre?
Contact if you've had a bad trip, or was it, if you'd been busted, I forget which. ..It was part of the 'nurturing' '60's' London vibe
There were always little ads in underground papers for that...
Was that connected to the 'other' Tavistock? ...were they the same thing?
Since 'conspiricy culture' started I've always wondered about that....

In case this got passed over, maybe I didn't spell it out clearly enough:

guruilla wrote:1926 [DOB of JS, pls note] An appeal to The Commonwealth Fund (New York) by Cyril Burt and Amy Strachey, (born Amy Simpson 1866) "Mrs St Loe Strachey" for funds to start training psychiatric social workers at the London School of Economics (see below) and support for Child Guidance.

AIM25 contains "material relating to the Mental Health Course, 1926-1957, including papers of the Child Guidance Council, the Commonwealth Fund and the Mental Health Training Committee; material on the teaching of Statistics and Computing Methods, Insurance, Social Studies, Latin American Studies, Management and Management Studies." - A grant is recorded to "London, University of, 1926- 1968" in the Commonwealth Fund archives.

[And sure enough, 3 yrs later:] 1929 With money from The Commonwealth Fund, a Diploma in Mental Health started at the London School of Economics to train Psychiatric Social Workers. The fund's Director, Barry Smith, had written in 1928 that "the training of psychiatric social workers is an essential and fundamental part of [a] child guidance program."
http://studymore.org.uk/mhhtim

Whether Broadmoor is directly linked to this program I don’t know, but what we do know is that it became a way for uber-predators like Savile to have access to mental patients, as well as children via the many care homes where, presumably, these LSE-trained social workers ended up “holding the keys”...?

guruilla » Mon Mar 24, 2014 1:29 pm wrote:A few more linkages:

A second bout of tuberculosis and depression in 1954 gave Sargant time to complete his book Battle for the mind (and also an opportunity for giving up his 30-year heavy smoking habit).[33] He spent his convalescence in Majorca, and Robert Graves helped him edit the book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

From Modern History Project (very interesting looking site, wiki for alt. researchers):

At Oxford, [TS] Elliott had consorted with the occultist literary figures of The New Age. He was part of a late-night drinking circle including Aleister Crowley's one-time lodge brother, the Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats, and long-time Fugitive intimate Robert Graves. Future CCF [Congress for Cultural Freedom] operative Graves is known today for his adoring history of the Roman Empire, I Claudius and his promotion of the cult of the White Goddess.
http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Art ... #Fugitives

This was the first I had heard of the CCF, turns out they were

an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. In 1962, the World Marxist Review published an article entitled, "Who Financed Anti-Communism?" by Ernst Henri which revealed the CIA, also through the Ford Foundation, as the secret financial backers of the CCF. In 1966, the New York Times published an article exposing the CIA as secretly funding the CCF's British magazine Encounter. Finally, in 1966, it was revealed (first by the New York Times and later by Ramparts as well as mainstream news outlets) that the United States Central Intelligence Agency was instrumental in the establishment and funding of the group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_f ... al_Freedom

Guess who one of their chairmen was? My family's pal Bertrand Russell! (And acc to Mona Brand, JB Priestley was the guest of honor at a CCF meeting in the 1950s.)

You may want to check this one out:



Also known by its original title, Who Paid the Piper?

-

Robert Graves is a fascinating figure to me for a variety of reasons. I'm partly thinking of his relevance to the work of Colin Wilson and that of holy conman Idries Shah, but his book "The White Goddess" is also quite interesting due to its influence on the ideas of Robert Anton Wilson.

thanks, that definitely looks worth a splurge.