British Psychiatry: from Eugenics to Assassination

 

A behavior control research project was begun in the 1950s, coordinated by the British psychological warfare unit called the Tavistock Institute, with the Scottish Rite Masons, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other British, U.S., Canadian, and United Nations agencies. The project became famous in the 1970s under a CIA code name, “MK-Ultra.” Its notoriety for brainwashing by drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, and other tortures caused many books to be written about the project, and the U.S. Senate conducted hearings which exposed many of its abusive features. President Gerald Ford appointed a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, to correct the CIA’s misconduct. There was a widespread anti-establishment view at the time, that here was the fox appointed to guard the hen house.

The intelligence agencies offered a public rationale for the project: the need to counteract and compete with the mind-control capabilities of the communists. This was largely based on the fact that U.S. personnel held prisoner by the enemy in the Korean War had signed false confessions of crimes, and some had defected to North Korea, the apparent result of brainwashing.

The Manchurian Candidate, a 1959 book which was made into a popular movie in 1962, reflected this rationale. It told the story of a communist plot to use a U.S. soldier brainwashed in Manchuria as a zombie-assassin, to kill the leading U.S. presidential candidate. A central theme of MK-Ultra was to attempt to control the human mind in a similar way.

Threatened and accomplished assassination of political leaders has become increasingly frequent in public life since the 1960s. Just since the 1992 election campaign, for example, President Bill Clinton has been the target of at least 15 assassination threats. Many of these would-be killers, and many of the assassins of past years, had been in destructive psychiatric programs, or were members of psychiatrically manipulated cults. The present threats are the more meaningful, in the context of the British-led Whitewater scandal directed against the presidency.

It is long past time for a thorough public inquiry into the assassination epidemic, whereby its relationship to the official project to create assassins would be fully explored. A great obstacle to clear thinking in this area has been the assumption that the U.S. government would not sponsor programs for the murder of American leaders. This logical assumption misses the point, that the overall project, including “MK-Ultra,” has been foreign-sponsored and anti-American in its purposes.

We shall outline here the British background of this deeply criminal enterprise, with its roots in the political and psychiatric movement called eugenics.

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