The late former foreign minister of Guyana, Dr. Fred Wills, once said that most of the diplomatic corps of the former colonies of Great Britain spent too much time trying to perfect their "Oxbridge" accents; the rest of the time, he stated, they spent searching "for a British rump to kiss." Trying to explain this behavior to his American friends, Wills said that colonialism still exists in its most powerful form, "as a state of mind of the subject peoples," even if the former colonies have been given their nominal freedom.
Wills was commenting on the success of a long-term project of the British imperial elite, effectively keynoted in remarks by Winston Churchill to an audience of Anglophiles at Harvard University on Sept. 6, 1943. Churchill was then locked in battle with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had, on several occasions, made clear his intent to dismantle the British and all other empires at the conclusion of the war. While refusing to concede American authority to impose a "post-colonial solution" on the Empire, a consensus emerged in the imperial elite, among the families closest to the royal family, that the old imperial structures could not be continued. To maintain control, it was proposed to shift the battlefield, away from control of territory, to control of the minds, not merely of the colonial peoples, but of United States and the rest of the Western world.
In his remarks, which were broadcast internationally, Churchill proposed that his Anglophile allies within the United States join with their Mother England in a new enterprise. 1t is our two countries, he said with his typical pompousness, that control the destiny of the world; who control science and technology; who control culture. These are weapons far more potent than military power, Churchill declared. To control what men think "offers far better prizes than taking away other people's lands or provinces or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind."
Churchill's "secret weapon" in this battle for the mind was an elite group of brainwashers and psychiatrists, then operating in the Army's Directorate of Psychological Warfare under the command of Brig. Gen. John Rawlings Rees. These were the cadre of the Tavistock Clinic, based in London's suburbs; they had already built a network of co-thinkers in the United States in various university locations, including Harvard, and wartime operational bases within the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In addition, Britain's psychological warriors had established a beachhead in Hollywood, in the emerging radio, television, and motion picture industries.
At the end of the war, the Tavistock network, which numbered several hundred individuals; reentered civilian life, but remained under the central command of British policy circles. They proceeded to spawn numbers of think-tanks, institutes, and other "nodes" (Tavistock's term for its various allied centers of activity) in every part of the globe, dominating every key aspect of social policy; today, the Tavistock core group numbers in the several score thousand. That core group, in tum, has trained close to 1 million cadre, by their own estimates, who serve as teachers and advisers to nearly all business, military, political, and educational elites. In ways subtle, and some not so subtle, operating as a conspiracy intervening on individual human consciousness, they have attempted to not only shape what people think, but to establish the parameters and limits of thought itself. (more...)
Empire of the Mind: Tavistock's imperial brainwashing project
Some context:
The Sun Never Sets on the New British Empire
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