The CCF and the ‘God of Thunder’ Cult

 

In 1974, the well-known British psychiatrist, Dr. William Sargant, published a book, The Mind Possessed: A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism and Faith Healing. The book was a sequel to his 1957 study, The Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing, the earlier book being a how-to-do-it manual for producing a “cultural paradigm shift” towards an existentialist, irrationalist dark age society, which was precisely the agenda of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

In the 1957 study, Sargant had written: “Various types of belief can be implanted in many people, after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgment and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of ‘herd instinct,’ and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility.”

Dr. Sargant was a prominent British Tavistock Institute psychiatrist, who spent two decades, beginning in the mid1950s, working in the Congress for Cultural Freedom-linked Cybernetics Group/MK-Ultra project on the use of psychedelic drugs and other forms of brainwashing for mass coercion.

The traumatic events of the 1960s—from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis near-eruption of global thermonuclear holocaust, to the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the subsequent flagrant coverup; to the later assassinations of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy; to the urban race riots, and the mass carnage of the American war in Southeast Asia—transformed the post-World War II Baby Boomer generation from an optimistic, future-oriented generation, into a collection of irrationalist, babbling counterculturalists and drug abusers, in total denial of reality, and living from one sensuous experience to the next.

When the dust finally settled on the 1960s, the Baby Boomers emerged with a new set of wildly irrational axiomatic beliefs, typified by the mass appeal of radical environmentalism, and the even more widespread belief in consumerism and the “magic of the global market.”

Such ideas would have been shunned but a decade earlier when America was still a production-oriented society. But that was before the great “shock traumas” of the 1962-71 period.  (more...)

The CCF and the ‘God of Thunder’ Cult

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The CCF and the ‘God of Thunder’ Cult