RANT: WE'RE ALL NEIGHBOURS

I DROVE TO THE GYM THE OTHER DAY, across the county line into another town. Our own gym closed, and I’m grateful for having one nearby that’s still open. It’s only about a twenty-minute or so drive and a surprisingly pleasant one once you’re outside the city, past all the strip malls and suburban developments. Driving in the country, I’d forgotten what a horizon looks like. In town, the skyline is crimped and clipped by the buildings and structures of the cityscape and the surrounding hills in the background—we’re in a kind of half-bowl affair that embraces the long reach of the bay like an elongated “C”. And as pleasant as our town’s lakefront is with its bracing winds, racing clouds and distant, watery horizon, in the end I like my distance to come from the land, from across fields and farms and forests, stretching (it seems) out to where the sun and moon abide. It's where most of us live, after all. We may have grown up in the trees, but we first walked on the plains—those flat lands with their forever vistas and waves of encroaching mysteries. We learned to talk and think there. I’d like to imagine it’s also where we learned to love.

In the forests of our beginnings, our “monkey fears” had us leaping from branch to branch, scurrying for safety under cover of the great tree canopies where we hid from creatures of the earth and sky. Some were our equals, our passive neighbours, but there were others whom we feared, who were stronger and quicker than us. When danger approached in the form of tooth and claw, we could flee into the trees, staring out from behind the shielding foliage, screaming our fears for all our kind to hear. And huddling at night in the deep forest’s high branches, safe in the dark, perhaps out of our fears, perhaps with them, we learned to hate those forest dwellers who threatened us. And as the long ages passed and forests gave way to grasslands, and we no longer had the option of fleeing up tree trunks to hide whenever danger or strangeness came our way, we were forced to learn another way of being in the world.

Robert DeNiro in "The Deer Hunter"

On the land, the savannas and plains of our youth, we were forced to meet and learn to exist with creatures who were not our kind: insects, birds, other terrestrial animals with which we arrived at some sort of accommodation—an armistice with some, a playful friendship with others. Some would kill us, others we would kill. Some shared our lives. Others we would only catch glimpses of. My point is that we had no choice in the matter—we had to deal with those creatures great and small; we couldn’t hide from them. We had to establish some sort of relationship. And in establishing relationships with them, perhaps we learned or developed, or honed, our ability to love. Perhaps love is a universal trait. Perhaps it is something so deeply engrained in our psyches as to be coded in our genes. Possibly. But love doesn’t flourish everywhere and all the time. For example, in the human activity we call war, where we kill members of our own kind, love seems to be in short supply. (Among mammals, humans are among the most violent, though it seems among our primate cousins we’re about average in intraspecies killing.) Soldiers have the choice of kill or be killed, or else ducking and staying out of the way until the fighting is over. Feelings of love for our fellow humans might come after. But during? Not so much. My point being, is that this thing we call ‘love’ is not a default mode or attribute we fall back on automatically in our dealings with one another and with species not our own (and that should include the ecologies we encounter, as well).

Our primate heritage has given us two distinctive traits: First, we are social beings in that we live in groups, creating an ‘us versus them’ mentality when we interact with others outside our immediate circle. Secondly, we are territorial—my space is my place! These two engrained traits, part of our genetic makeup, continue to dictate in us a greater propensity towards violence. *

Love may be innate, a universal force in principle but we still must learn about it. We must nurture and grow it, and grow with it. Hatred and violence are much easier for us to express.

Chris Hedges wrote about the struggle between these two forces, between good versus evil, to put it another way:

 

“The good draws to it the good, and this good is incomparable. It is part of the eternal battle against evil, and it has the power to transform the world. It is not the human that is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against humankind. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid the more senseless and helpless it may seem the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The profits, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb blind love is humankind's meaning. Human history is not about the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fraught by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness and if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now then evil will never conquer.” (From his keynote speech given at 2020 Allard Prize ceremony, Nov. 3/20.)

 

On these flat, terrestrial plains, where so much ‘otherness’ confronts us constantly, and where our territorial imperatives, clan laws and tribal customs guide us in our dealings with the world, how will we respond? With love? Or with fear and hatred?

IIRC, in the post-script to his fantasy novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie’s narrator, a speaker from the distant future, tells the reader how his world came about in the aftermath of the conflict, in our time, between the spirit realm of the “gennies” (of Arabian myth) and the human. In the cataclysm that resulted, humanity was nearly destroyed. But, thanks to “Dunni”, the powerful jinni princess who came to love humanity, the door between the spirit world and our own was sealed forever. This meant there would be no more ‘magic’, no more “genies” in bottles granting wishes, but it also meant there would be no more eruptions of impossible to resolve conflicts between the spirit world and our own. In a sense, the earth would be a place where the divine was no longer present.

And here, I thought of the concept of “immanence”**, which states that the divine is imbued in everything throughout the material world, and that, in Rushdie’s novel, the divine is now gone from the world by Dunni’s closing the gate to the jinni realm. The jinni’s magical realm—call it the divine—will no longer manifest in the human world. Instead, it will be transcendent, existing beyond the reach of humanity. (The Christian concept of God in heaven separate from the world is an example of a transcendent divinity. Christ on earth is an example of an immanent one.) His narrator goes on to say that humanity survived by learning to live rationally, logically, through science and to renounce their unconscious dreams and irrational desires. He says that the humanity of his time lives in peace and prosperity, and in harmony with the world, but they lost something in the process: they no longer dreamed when they slept. That was the price they paid. Dreams were a vestige of the magical, the immanent, and were thus potentially dangerous and destabilizing to their calm and orderly world. Still, the speaker ends his narration wondering, wistfully, what it would be like to dream.

 

I’m not sure how all this fits with my driving to the gym through the flat farmlands of Southwest Ontario, but it has something to do with the imagination and how these wide, open spaces allow it to flourish and suggest future possibilities, and even magical encounters. And maybe these spaces encourage us, whether we like it or not, to greet others, whom we are bound to meet in our journeys across the land, less with fear and hatred, and more with love and compassion.

Something like that, anyway. It’s a pleasant dream.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

* Interestingly enough, studies have suggested humans are particularly skilful at adult-to-adult killing and violence.

* Immanent—adj. Existing or operating within: inherent.

                     —(of God) Permanently pervading and sustaining the universe. Often contrasted with Transcendent (O.E.D.)

 

QUOTES: ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger...is as good as dead."

RANT: "WE LIVE IN A BROKEN WORLD."

"I really want to leave now. I really do. Really."

I REMEMBER READING ABOUT AN AMERICAN CHEMIST named Sidney Gottlieb who joined the CIA in the late 1940s as a “poison expert” and established himself as head of a psychology research team during the 1950s and early 60s in which, among other things, he and his colleagues gave unwitting subjects multiple doses of Mescaline and LSD, even methamphetamines and heroin, sometimes on daily regimes, for extended periods of time. Many of his test subjects were CIA employees, but during the years the program was in operation, Gottlieb used prisoners, mental patients, sex workers—people “who could not fight back,” as one CIA employee put it. Many were not told they were being made the subject of an experiment, nor were they given adequate information that would allow them to make informed decisions about their participation in such research.

[Interesting side note: Two of Gottlieb’s test subjects became well known personalities: Author Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as a young student willingly took LSD—then a newly synthesized drug and not yet illegal—when recruited on campus by the CIA. He went on to become an ardent proponent of the drug’s use for recreational purposes. The other subject was Ted Kaczynski, later of “Unabomber” fame. So, a 50% success rate, I guess? It should be noted that LSD’s reputation has been somewhat reprieved. Today, it is being used in some carefully monitored therapeutic treatments, and there are calls for its de-criminalization, along with other Schedule 1 drugs. Ed.]

During the 1950s, particularly following the Korean War, the perceived twin threats of Chinese and Russian communism loomed large in the minds of the American populace and in the halls of congress, and at the CIA as well. As the ground-breaking Church Committee Congressional hearings of 1975 uncovered, the spy agency during those years sidestepped legal and ethical considerations in the pursuit of techniques, practices, devices and substances that would aid them in their hidden wars with communism. “MK-ULTRA”, (“MK” being code letters signifying the CIA and “ULTRA” meaning “Top, Top Secret”) was part of a larger, umbrella project which explored a variety of interrogation methods and coercive techniques developed for use by the agency’s field operatives. One so-called research project (“Operation Midnight Climax”) operated out of a brothel in San Francisco, where agents secretly dosed clients with LSD and filmed their encounters with prostitutes through hidden cameras in the next room in order to see what effects the drug had on their behaviour.

Ted Kaczynski "Unabomber"

They hoped to use the powerful hallucinogen as a method of mind control and manipulation to be used on enemy agents, Russian spys and the like. [Incidentally, in 1945 we had our own Cold War spy scandal when a Russian embassy clerk named Igor Gouzenko defected, his face kept concealed and his new identity a secret. Igor was sure lucky to get into Canada before Gottlieb and Cameron started their operations! See picture below. Ed.] As absurd as such cowboy antics seem today, some seventy years later, it was research and projects like these that laid the groundwork for today’s “black sites”, “enhanced interrogation techniques”, water-boarding*, electroshock treatments and other forms of physical and psychological manipulation that by anyone’s definition falls under the label of torture, and flies in the face of the 1984 United Nations Convention on Torture, of which the United States is a signatory. 

"Did I take the Red pill or the Blue one?"

Gottlieb, because of his chemistry background, focused his attention on the pharmacological side of things (including poisons to be used for assassination purposes), and during his tenure at the spy agency he and his colleagues became obsessed with the idea of “mind control”. His goal was to ultimately break down a person’s will, destroy their personality through chemical intervention, and then replace the empty vessel with his own programming—like wiping a hard-drive and installing a new operating system. Fun times! Author Timothy Findlay used Gottlieb’s cold war operation as a plot thread in his 1982 novel, The Telling of Lies that I reviewed in a post last year. Of course, one of the main outcomes of this research was the finding that, while a person’s personality could be severely damaged, even destroyed using LSD and other drugs, shock therapy, sleep deprivation and so on, it was much harder to establish a functioning alternative personality in its place. 

"I'm Invisible! He can't see me! Hahaha!"

Indeed, there were a number of test subjects (how many exactly will never be known—most of the records from the MK-ULTRA project were destroyed by the CIA in 1972 following the Watergate scandal and increased public scrutiny of the spy agency’s domestic activities) who remained hospitalized and psychologically crippled for the remainder of their lives. One infamous case that did gain public notice was that of Frank Olsen, a CIA employee who was dosed with LSD at a cocktail party in 1953. A week later he fell to his death from the window of a New York hotel in an apparent suicide. (The actual events surrounding Olsen’s death remain clouded, and rumours persist he was ‘assisted’ in his defenestration because he contemplated becoming a whistleblower.)

The MK program was in operation for about a decade and a half, officially closing its doors in 1964. (Though some operations may have continued.) That year, the CIA published (presumably for internal consumption) its KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual which utilized research taken from the various MK projects. A 1997 F.O.I.A. request by the Baltimore Sun brought this shameful publication into the light of day. [Tip of the Hat to The Baltimore Sun and their fine piece of investigative journalism. Journalists were still journalists back then, doing real journalism! Ed.] 

Interestingly, in 1959, the political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate** by Richard Condon, was published. The novel depicts a returning American soldier, held captive by the North Koreans for some years and freed after the war, who, in reality, had been ‘brainwashed’ by his captors, and turned into a political puppet and killing machine whose mind could be controlled by the dastardly Orientals with the utterance of a particular word. This fictional portrayal of mind control, and a case where life would attempt to imitate art was, of course, the wet dream of Gottlieb and his researchers—to achieve robotic control over someone’s mind. It was a dream that fortunately never came to pass, but MK’s research into pharmaceuticals as aids in interrogation techniques has proved over time to be an invaluable resource for torture advocates and black site operations everywhere. 

 

Angela Landsbury Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate

I would stop my Manchurian Candidate-like rambling at this point, but I feel compelled to add a further layer to the MK-ULTRA story, with its strange and disturbing Canadian connection. (Say what?! Shut your mouth! Canadians don’t torture! Its…unCanadian.)

Ewen Cameron

Canadians and torture? Cummon. Really? Yes, really. Though I doubt the word was ever used at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, where chief psychiatrist Ewen Cameron developed his theories of “depatterning” and “psychic driving” and put them to use. With terrible consequences.

Cameron had a busy and storied career. He took part in psychiatric examinations of captured German war criminal Herman Hess, during the Nuremburg trials in 1945. There, he developed theories and concepts around what types of personalities and citizens were most beneficial in maintaining a healthy society. In addition, he advised the Allied administration there, after the war, and took part in research providing data on the characteristics of modern German society that was to be used as an aide in planning reconstruction of the country.

 

Cameron stated, "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves – and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them." He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. For Cameron, the traits were contagions, and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. Cameron used his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and parent in society.¹

One of his main concerns was how to eliminate unhelpful or harmful personality traits in his patients. He reasoned that by somehow temporarily regressing their personalities back to an infantile level of development, he could then insert such training and safeguards he saw fit that would assist them, in essence, to learn proper formulations of social behaviour and personal control, thus over-riding their entrenched, anti-social behaviour patterns. Over time, he came up with a regime of drug therapies, electro-shock, induced coma and sensory deprivation techniques to achieve in his patients this ‘clean slate’ personality. The drugs he used included those his counterpart in the United States, Gottleib, used in his CIA experiments, but Cameron went further, using prolonged and dangerous levels of ECT to “depattern” as he called it, or de-couple the conscious mind from its memories—to disorient the patient to such an extent that they were receptive to his second therapy, his “psychic driving” regime of behaviour modification. A patient, after being subjected to, in some cases, dozens of ECT treatments would then be given headphones which repeated the same message over and over, even while the patient was asleep. Weeks and months of what can only be described as torture might pass in daily schedules of this kind, with Cameron noting any changes in behaviour.

Taken from E. Cameron Daily Log

At some point in the late 1950s the CIA heard of Cameron’s work in Montreal and through a “false front” foundation, funded some of his work for several years. It came as a surprise to me to learn that the Canadian government was also interested in Cameron’s work and provided funding for him as well. And this begs the question: What were the CIA and the Canadian government really after? (Additionally, I would be interested to know which branch of our government provided the funding. Was it Defence?) So, was it funding for pure research to better understand people with social pathologies? Was it to make improvements in psychological and psychiatric services? To promote new drug therapies.

Igor Gouzenko: "Yes, but can he play hockey?"

Well, since I am a cynic, I think they were really after something resembling mind control, or ways to control or influence  individuals as well as their domestic populations, and to discover new methods of coercive interrogations to pry information from uncooperative subjects (i.e. “torture”), where drugs and techniques like “psychic driving” truly came into their own. Who’s to say for sure, but I think that both Gottlieb and Cameron were blinded by their unwavering belief in the “correctness” of their research, and this caused their understanding about what they were doing to people’s lives to atrophy and fall away. Gottlieb was immersed in the environment of Cold War paranoia and McCarthyism as were—to a lesser extent—Cameron and his colleagues, and this atmosphere may have clouded their judgement. Nevertheless, the harm these two researchers, 'men of science', one a medical doctor, did to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people and their families over nearly two decades of abuse cannot be overlooked or forgotten, or the lessons learned from this period go untaught.

The child of one of Cameron’s patients discussed her mother’s treatment at the Montreal psychiatric hospital in a recent interview on CBC’s Fifth Estate:

 

Diane McIntosh's mother, Helene, spent two years in and out of the Allan. She suffered from postpartum depression after the birth of her second child and was generally depressed because her marriage wasn't working out.

"I think it's unbelievable that they would give themselves the right to affect somebody's life in that way," said McIntosh, who now lives in British Columbia.

"They must have known that those extreme experiments would have lasting effects. They didn't just change four years of her life; they changed her whole life."  (CBC “Fifth Estate”)²

My own take, for what it’s worth, is that Cameron was profoundly affected by his experience in Germany following WWII. I think his theories on social order and control, sick and healthy personalities were strongly influenced by what he saw there, and instilled in him a need to find a way to prevent the disorder he saw all around him from happening elsewhere. That’s my two bits, anyway. Cameron, incidentally, was President of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations as well as the World Psychiatric Association. He retired and lived the remainder of his life in the pleasant village of Lake Placid, New York, dying at age 65, still successfully battling occasional lawsuits from former patients and their families. He died, having lived a busy and, by all accounts, a personally rewarding life. Such could not be said for the many victims of his pride and malfeasance.

Cameron believed that breaking down a patient's minds to a childlike state — through drugs and electroshock therapy — would allow him to work from a clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed "psychic driving," which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up to 20 hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake. (CBC Podcasts “Brainwashed”)³

 

Naomi Klein states in her book, The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to MK-ULTRA were not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture.” She then cites Alfred W. McCoy: "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method.”⁴

 

And the CIA’s Gottlieb? Interestingly, he had some sort of ‘come to Jesus’ moment following his retirement from the agency in 1972, when he renounced his life’s work as being “ineffective”. He spent time in India with his wife working in a leper colony, later raising goats on his farm in rural Virginia and honing his folk-dancing skills. He also practiced meditation and was considered by those who knew him to be a sensitive, spiritual person. He, too, raised a family and lived a life that could, when seen through a certain prism, be considered rich and rewarding.

 

THE OTHER NIGHT ON TV I WATCHED THE WIFE of an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer killed recently in the line of duty speaking at a memorial for her husband. In trying to articulate, through her loss and pain, the reasons why her husband died and what factors and circumstances led to the tragic shooting that morning, why fate’s thread broke at that particular time and place, one sentence had special resonance for me when she said, “We live in a broken world.” I don’t know why I wrote this post on MK-ULTRA and the horror shows of Gottlieb^ǂ and Cameron, but this decades-old scandal is a piece of that brokenness the grief-stricken woman spoke of. It is a shard, a broken bit of existence, just one among the countless many that lay scattered across the field of our world. And it behooves us all to pick one up, regardless of whether its sharp edges may sometimes cut, and through understanding and compassion return it to its place—not to the same, exact place from where it had come. Why would you want that? Rather, we should return it to one more fitting.

 

Cheers, Jake

______________________________________________

 

 

Waterboarding c. 1900 in the Philippines

[The CBC has a new podcast series on the MK-ULTRA project and the work of Gottlieb and Cameron. I was surprised to learn there are lawsuits currently before the courts, some recently settled, that have been filed by families of the victims of Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute against the federal government for its funding of Cameron’s experiments. In addition, their lawsuits also seek compensation for the children of patients whose families were damaged or destroyed because of their parents’ treatment at the Montreal institution. They are unlikely to win their court battles, however. As an aside: there is an ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that says we must ensure that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future, suggesting that we must act with a clear understanding of how our actions will affect the future. Unfortunately, neither the effects upon their patients nor upon future generations were considered by Gottlieb and Cameron and their research teams as they performed their experiments, and the painful results of the MK-ULTRA program in the 1950s and 60s continue to be felt by survivors and their families all these years later.

That said, weasel-words, lawyer-lingo and non-disclosure agreements will ensure enough cover for those responsible to remain in comfortable retirement or painless oblivion, dead and buried, while some of their victims still walk around with parts of themselves destroyed by the thoughtless actions of those reckless men and women decades ago. Most of the patients have since gone to their graves without either acknowledgment or recompense for the criminal assaults they experienced at the hands of those they thought they could trust. Ed.]

 

* For torture aficionados, waterboarding has a long and storied history, from the oddly gentle sounding “Chinese Water Torture” to the more robust versions we have today. It’s interesting to note that the American military used this helpful technique more than a century ago during the Spanish-American war of 1898 and afterwards in their decades-long occupation and pacification of the Philippines. Also readers will be pleased to learn that the CIA’s KUBARK torture manual made its way into Latin American torture seminars where personnel, trained in some instances by CIA field operatives, utilized its helpful and proven techniques to acquire intel for their regimes. An updated version was published by the CIA in 1984, the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (HRE), a title and publication date that’s sure to please fans of dystopian literature, everywhere.

 

** And for those who like political dramas and intrigue of the highest order, see the classic 1962 movie adaptation of the Richard Condon novel of the same name  by director John Frankenheimer. [Trigger Warning: Anyone still working their way through Oedipal Complex issues might want to give this one a pass. Otherwise, Angela Lansbury is a definite MILF in this movie! Ed.]

 

ǂ Gottlieb may have had a more extensive resumé with the spy agency than just heading up his section of MK-ULTRA. It’s alleged he was involved in plots to poison Fidel Castro, for example, though all attempts obviously failed. Also, he may have been involved in some capacity with the U2 Spy Plane program. But it’s all cloak and daggers, so who really knows? Anyway, he retired from the spy biz and, happily enough, ended up raising goats in his twilight years. So, I guess he deserves a break. Right?  

 

 

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron The quote is from the book Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein, son of a former patient at “the Allan”.

 

² https://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2017-2018/brainwashed-the-secret-cia-experiments-in-canada

 

³ https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/brainwashed-mkultra

 

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

 

 

[Interesting Joe Rogen podcast clip on YouTube discussing MK-ULTRA and the book Chaos, by author Tom O'Neill. Joe discusses the book with former CIA agent Mike Baker and they review O'Neill's suggestion that the infamous killer, Charles Manson, may have had connections with the CIA and some still-active, LSD-dispensing sections of MK-ULTRA in the mid to late 1960s. In 1969, Manson and some of his followers were arrested for the infamous, ritualistic killings of several people in Los Angeles, including actress Sharon Tate. Could Manson's CIA-enabled LSD use have led to the bloody murders? Curiouser and curiouser.]

 

"I'm mad I tell you! Madmadmad!"