War Against the Mind

Bluebird, Deliberate Creation Of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists

In 1955, a Russian manual entitled, "Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics," was translated and distributed as a public warning by a New York professor. Psychopolitics was described by the Soviets as the "art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through 'mental healing.'"

The manual was based on the methods of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychiatrist who developed conditioned response theories using experimental dogs in the early 1900s. This work laid the groundwork for a fundamental psychiatric misconception that remains to this day: that, like dogs, men are basically stimulus-response mechanisms. These experiments established the foundation for much of the inhuman brainwashing techniques used by the Soviet Union and China in the mid-twentieth century. Utilized by both Lenin and Stalin for political ends in the then USSR, Pavlov's methods helped spread communist rule over almost half the world.

The manual stated, "The tenets of rugged individualism, personal determinism, self-will, imagination, and personal creativeness are alike in the masses antipathetic to the good of the Greater State."48 Further, "The early Russian psychiatrists, pioneering this science of psychiatry, understood thoroughly that hypnosis is induced by acute fear. They discovered it could also be induced by shock of an emotional nature, and also by extreme privation, as well as by blows and drugs."49

"By perverting the institutions of a nation," it continues, "and bringing about a general degradation to the degree that privation and depression come about, only minor shocks will be necessary to produce, on the populace as a whole, an obedient reaction or an hysteria." The mere threat of war or the mere threat of aviation bombings can create this hysteria, it says.50

These are the methods studied by the likes of terrorist psychiatrist Dr. Aziz al-Abub and "The Jackal" at the Patrice Lumumba campus in Russia, and then exported to the Middle East and elsewhere.

During the Soviet era, Patrice Lumumba and the Lenin Institute both trained students in social psychology, unarmed combat and guerilla warfare. From here the students were sent to specialized training centers. Between 1968 and 1975, an estimated 2,500 terrorists and guerillas were trained there.51 Other "psychopolitics" centers include Tavistock Institute in Britain and The Frankfurt School in Germany.

The world's major cause for concern was once the cold war between Soviet Russia and America. At its height, Russia was guided by individual psychiatrists who trained terrorists, and who were the guardians over the Gulags. With the fall of Soviet Russia however, the world has a new trouble spot, one that has taken that psychiatric brainwashing technology and put it to work through another brand of terrorism.

A Covert Assault On The West

"Many of the methods used by Dr. al-Abub [terrorist doctor] are standard techniques among doctors who use behavior technology to achieve control either within other terrorist groups or inside the framework of state-sponsored terrorism."52

Gordon Thomas,
Veteran Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Journey into Madness, 1989

The modern version of brainwashing is "Sensitivity Training," introduced into western countries in the 1940s and 50's. It originated with Kurt Lewin, a German psychologist who migrated to the U.S. in 1933, where he became a professor of child psychology. With his associates he evolved the concept of "T-groups" ("T" for training). In 1932, Lewin was the director of Tavistock, the psychological warfare department of the British government. Tavistock's pioneer work in behavioral science along Freudian lines established it as a world center for this ideology.

As a result of Lewin's work, the National Training Laboratories (NTL) was established in 1947, and by 1950, the T-group concept had gained rapid popularity amongst psychologists. The term "Sensitivity Training" was later coined.

Adherents of this, such as psychologist Ed Schein, who studied brainwashing techniques in Korea, admit that it derives from Pavlov's brainwashing methods. In an introduction to one of his papers on Sensitivity Training, Schein writes that this method "fits into a context of institutional influence procedures which includes coercive persuasion in the form of thought reform or brainwashing as well as a multitude of less coercive, informal patterns."

It was defined as a three-stage process involving "unfreezing," "changing," and "refreezing."

"Unfreezing" physically removes the person from his accustomed routines, sources of information, and social relationships, then undermines the normal social support structures, humiliates the individual so that he sees his old self as unworthy and supposedly motivates him to change. The process was later compared to those methods employed by the Chinese Communists in their attempt to inculcate [instill] Communist attitudes into their youth or into prisoners.

"Changing" was defined as directing the person towards learning new attitudes, quite often through coercion.

"Refreezing" was defined as "...the integration of the changed attitudes into the rest of the personality...."53

In reality, Sensitivity Training is the invalidation of the individual through the refuting, denying, degrading or discrediting of anything he considers to be a fact or a certainty-for example, a principle of moral conduct. This effectively knocks whatever props the person may have out from under him. The inevitable disorientation that follows is then used to force another person's or group's point of view or set of values onto the individual. In practice, it destroys individualism, moral judgment and personal responsibility.

Sensitivity Training was later described as having been "developed to study how people could be socially and psychologically manipulated to give up their souls...."54

Today its siblings comprise more than two dozen names; among them are Reality Therapy, Group Therapy, Conflict Management, Gestalt Therapy, Planned Change, Mind Set, Role Playing, Human Relations Lab, Sensory Awareness Groups, Conflict Resolution, Encounter Groups and Social Psychology.

Social Psychology was also taught at Patrice Lumumba Center and The Lenin Institute in Soviet Russia to train guerillas and the likes of Dr. al-Abub and "The Jackal." Between 1968 and 1975, an estimated 2,500 terrorists and guerillas were trained at these centers.

THE NAZIS

"The Nazi doctors…had created the beginning of what…had [been] defined as a psychology of torture. It had enabled them to embrace a wide range of evils…[and] finally to exist, the Nazi doctors had needed to virtually eliminate any capacity for normal human feelings; it was the only way for them to kill their victims."55

Gordon Thomas
Journey into Madness, 1989

Most terrorist groups today have radical political views and hold racist positions which range from "white supremist" type views to anti-Semitism. According to one of these groups, "blacks, oriental, and other races," unlike "Aryans," do not have souls.56

However, behind some of the most significant terrorist activities there has been a psychiatric or psychological influence, whether directly in terrorist training, or through a racial ideology first propagated by psychiatrists.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Nazi Germany from the 1930s to 1945.

In 1999, German psychiatrists publicly admitted that psychiatry had spawned "eugenics" and the racial "inferiority/superiority" ideology almost three decades before the Nazis took power in 1933. Indeed, it was this ideology that turned the Nazis into mass murderers. The following is a brief history:

1895: German psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz and jurist, Karl Binding, published their theories about race inferiority in the book, The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak. In 1909, Ploetz founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene. Ploetz's theory was that destroying unworthy life was "purely a healing treatment."

1920s: Psychiatrist Alfred Hoch's book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, demanded euthanasia be conducted on "mental defectives." This, and another psychiatric text, Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, helped form the "scientific" basis for the Nazi racial purity program.

According to Hoche and Binding, the acceleration of the death process is not an act of murder but "in truth a pure act of healing" and there are people who are "worthless" to society. Primary among these are the inmates of the "idiot institutes," who are "not only worthless, but of absolutely negative value." As for the "incurably dumb," "Their death will not be missed in the least except maybe in the hearts of their mother or guardian.... When we become more advanced, we will probably be saving those poor humans from themselves."

1933: The German psychiatric community's ideology of racial purity found fertile ground in the new Nazified Germany. Adolf Hitler's accession to power was a major gain. Psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin's Sterilization Law was passed.

1934: The first step in psychiatry's eugenics master plan was sterilization and castration for those deemed biologically unsound. This included the mentally ill, intellectually handicapped, homosexuals and "colored" people. To "cleanse the nation of impure and undesirable elements," it is estimated that between 1934 and 1945, up to 350,000 people were sterilized.

1935: In 1935, with the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, Jews were relegated to sub-citizens by reason of race.

1940: The first "gassing test" was conducted at Brandenburg institution; 18-20 people were exterminated while psychiatrists and staff watched. The "T4" euthanasia program was launched by German psychiatrists to further the objective of a pure German nation, and the first gas chambers were installed in mental institutions. Between 1940 and 1944, 300,000 "mental" patients were murdered by gassing, starvation or drug overdose.

Others were put to more practical use. In one documented case, a single shipment of brains of 33 murdered children between the ages of seven and eighteen, were received at a brain research facility "in the interest of scientific development."

1941: As the final solution to the Jewish "problem" was implemented, the successful psychiatric euthanasia procedures were exported wholesale into the concentration camps and extermination camps run by the Nazi SS — with eminent German psychiatrists acting as consultants. "The killing in the concentration camps went along the same lines and with the same registration forms as in the insane asylums," noted one proud German psychiatrist.

1946: Nuremberg Trials: Only four out of dozens of Nazi psychiatrists were prosecuted, most escaped justice, and many returned to psychiatric practice after the war.