>Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved.
I thought this was something that happened in one or two labs somewhere. It's surprising how far reaching this was. Giving nitrous oxide, lsd, and amphetamines to kids see if you can control their minds is insane.
If you're ever mindlessly scrolling through whatever streaming platform looking for something to watch, check out The Sleep Room* which is about this hospital and the experiments that went on there. Bewarned though, it's very made-for-TV level of quality.
Famously Ted Kaczynski was alleged to have been an MKUltra participant.
Lesser known is that Jeffrey Dahmer also is alleged to have been an MKUltra experiment possibly carried out by his own father.
Louis Jolyon West, one of the primary MKUltra "contractors," was also Jack Ruby's psychiatrist when he was in jail for the murder of Lee Oswald. Jack Ruby went "insane" shortly after. West was also responsible for an LSD experiment on an elephant, wherein he incorrectly calculated the dose, delivered in intravenously, and panicked the animal so badly it had to be killed.
Not much is said in this story, but the explicit goal of the CIA and Ewen Cameron was to completely erase minds ("de-patterning") so they could be built back up again. It was scientific quackery that was part of the trendy fascination with psychedelics and the propagandistic idea that POWs in the East were being "brainwashed" into thinking that US imperialism was bad, rather than simply being convinced.
It's a little unfair to say that they were all convinced; if you're held prisoner and you're rewarded for agreement, maybe that's the Skinnerian reinforcement you need to change your mind. This mode of thought would reach its peak in the SERE program, and the black sites and torture chambers of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars.
But the interesting part that I wanted to mention is that when people started investigating Cameron seriously, and his ties to the CIA (and pretending they didn't know anything), he suddenly burned all of his records, retired and immediately took a trip into the mountains with his son where he died of a "heart attack" or after falling off a cliff - I get inconsistent answers on this.
I almost think all of the hysterical, lurid coverage, and the connection made to the Unibomber (who described his experience as a bit insightful, but obvious iirc, and wasn't traumatized at all) aims to drive all of the actual primary source documents into the shadows. It's painful to find the papers that he published (although I've been able to find a couple dozen over time), his assistants and coworkers have written about what they saw, but all we get is tabloid drama from the mainstream press.
The fact that the CIA was actively trying to empty people's brains and fill them up with new things is interesting. Cameron was a quack, but a kind of quackery that aroused the US government, and other governments and universities that worked with it. It should be horrifying. Instead, the concept of brainwashing is worming its way back into our legal system, and simultaneously the effort to brainwash is coming back into vogue with a political elite that hates democracy.
There are a lot of defensive but revealing responses to a recent book on him by people who worked with him at https://inhn.org/inhn-projects/perspectives/thomas-a-ban-the... but they are a little difficult to get to (the menu is broken for me) without going through the sitemap. The linked page is actually the entry point for a bunch of subpages.
>Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved.
I thought this was something that happened in one or two labs somewhere. It's surprising how far reaching this was. Giving nitrous oxide, lsd, and amphetamines to kids see if you can control their minds is insane.
> I thought this was something that happened in one or two labs somewhere. It's surprising how far reaching this was.
It was such a pity that only japanese (Unit 731) and the nazis did it. The CIA didn't want it to be left behind. /s
If you're ever mindlessly scrolling through whatever streaming platform looking for something to watch, check out The Sleep Room* which is about this hospital and the experiments that went on there. Bewarned though, it's very made-for-TV level of quality.
* https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0138104/
Pure conspiracy theories:
Famously Ted Kaczynski was alleged to have been an MKUltra participant.
Lesser known is that Jeffrey Dahmer also is alleged to have been an MKUltra experiment possibly carried out by his own father.
Louis Jolyon West, one of the primary MKUltra "contractors," was also Jack Ruby's psychiatrist when he was in jail for the murder of Lee Oswald. Jack Ruby went "insane" shortly after. West was also responsible for an LSD experiment on an elephant, wherein he incorrectly calculated the dose, delivered in intravenously, and panicked the animal so badly it had to be killed.
nowadays they doing same crap over microwave auditory effect
Not much is said in this story, but the explicit goal of the CIA and Ewen Cameron was to completely erase minds ("de-patterning") so they could be built back up again. It was scientific quackery that was part of the trendy fascination with psychedelics and the propagandistic idea that POWs in the East were being "brainwashed" into thinking that US imperialism was bad, rather than simply being convinced.
It's a little unfair to say that they were all convinced; if you're held prisoner and you're rewarded for agreement, maybe that's the Skinnerian reinforcement you need to change your mind. This mode of thought would reach its peak in the SERE program, and the black sites and torture chambers of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars.
But the interesting part that I wanted to mention is that when people started investigating Cameron seriously, and his ties to the CIA (and pretending they didn't know anything), he suddenly burned all of his records, retired and immediately took a trip into the mountains with his son where he died of a "heart attack" or after falling off a cliff - I get inconsistent answers on this.
I almost think all of the hysterical, lurid coverage, and the connection made to the Unibomber (who described his experience as a bit insightful, but obvious iirc, and wasn't traumatized at all) aims to drive all of the actual primary source documents into the shadows. It's painful to find the papers that he published (although I've been able to find a couple dozen over time), his assistants and coworkers have written about what they saw, but all we get is tabloid drama from the mainstream press.
The fact that the CIA was actively trying to empty people's brains and fill them up with new things is interesting. Cameron was a quack, but a kind of quackery that aroused the US government, and other governments and universities that worked with it. It should be horrifying. Instead, the concept of brainwashing is worming its way back into our legal system, and simultaneously the effort to brainwash is coming back into vogue with a political elite that hates democracy.
There are a lot of defensive but revealing responses to a recent book on him by people who worked with him at https://inhn.org/inhn-projects/perspectives/thomas-a-ban-the... but they are a little difficult to get to (the menu is broken for me) without going through the sitemap. The linked page is actually the entry point for a bunch of subpages.