Customer Reviews

Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control

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4 star:		(1)
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I enjoyed the author's writing style, in-depth coverage, and exclusive interviews. The interviews are invaluable because they occur decades after some of the events and the people involved are more forthcoming.

Everything related to mind control is here: the CIA and drugs, subliminal messages, cults, the Judas Priest trial, and so much more that you haven't heard about before.

The book is frightening and a good example of "truth is stranger than fiction". The guys in "1984" are nothing compared to some of these doctors. The fact that some of these experiments were done on unwilling people is even more disturbing. "Hey guys, let's dose this guy with 50x the normal dose of LSD and not tell him!" Or the sleep experiments where they forced people to sleep for months at a time using drugs, waking them up for ECT "therapy".

The final chapter (worth the cost alone) is a graphic step-by-step of how the West is interrogating terrorists in Gitmo and elsewhere.

Highly readable and recommended.

This is great stuff. First of all, mind control's a fascinating topic. (In fact, I've always been surprised there hasn't been more out there on it.)

Second, the author seem to cover the whole gamut - the Moscow show trials of the 30s, sensory deprivation, drugs, cults, crazy psychiatrists, subliminal messages, satanic ritual abuse, Guantanamo ... you name it. (If there was any one theme typing it together, it would have to the use of mind control by intelligence services.)

The author is also a fine writer. Most of the stories read like a good suspense novel. He also seems to be quite a good interviewer, giving the reader a very good feel for the people involved (when they're available).

That said, I actually think the book was a little too journalistic for me. A lot of the chapters focus around a single story, with a very strong emphasis on the characters involved. The chapter on subliminal messages, for example, is all about 2 teenagers who commit suicide after listening to a death metal album - and the resulting trials that ensue. Another chapter, on what the British did to some IRA prisoners, talked very little about what was done and what impact it had, and more on how it all played out in the news.

Overall, I would have liked a lot more on technique, theory, psychology, etc. In this regard, I found it rather ironic that the author used the Eleanor Roosevelt quote that "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."

Another annoying tic of the author's was his attempt to shoehorn journalistic balance into every story. In other words, no matter how crazy the topic and the people involved, the author felt compelled to emphasize the two sides of the story. For example, he seems to have no problem equating religious cults like the Moonies and the Family with the deprogrammers and anti-cult organizations. Same deal with the Satanists.

Dominic Streatfeild has done an incredible amount of research and conducted numerous interviews with those who used the methods he writes about and also the victims of such methods.

The author does not insist on his point of view, but compares and contrasts available information and leaves the room for the readers to come up with their own conclusions.

This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the history of mind control and the current use of it in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere!

The title says "The Secret History of Mind Control", but it's not secret at all, as the contents in this book which relate to mind control have been lifted almost solely from The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. There are factual errors which made me question the reliability of other material in the book. For instance, reference is made to a Richard Hillenkoetter, who I presume is meant to be either Richard Helms or Roscoe Hillenkoetter. Also the author refers to a Ewen D. Cameron, whose real name was Donald Ewen Cameron.

The book is a bit of a sprawling mess, in my opinion. The cover of the book shows an interrogation scenario, but the title is "Brainwash". It's a bit of an unsuccessful mixture of three separate books on brainwashing, mind control and interrogation. There is also a chapter on psychiatric abuses, which also probably deserves a separate category.

The author can't seem to decide where he stands on brainwashing or mind control. For example, page 156: "Estabrooks seems to have been regarded as a joke by the intelligence community." But on page 352 George Estabrooks is a "master of hypnosis". With regard to brainwashing in general, he states that it is "a comforting bedtime story that made us all feel better" and that it "should have outlived its usefulness years ago." However, in chapter 9, on false memory syndrome, the implication seems to be that people who claim to have suffered abuse were brainwashed. However, only one case is mentioned. If he is making a general point on the basis of just one case then that seems somewhat presumptuous to me.

He discounts the idea that it would be possible to create a killer using post-hypnotic suggestion because "modern experts generally agree that hypnotising people to break the law, and especially to commit such a serious crime as murder, is not possible." He doesn't say which experts say this. For what it's worth George Estabrooks, that "master of hypnosis", in the books Spiritism and Death in the Mind, states how to make someone kill using hypnosis, e.g. to put live bullets into a gun, but tell the hypnotized person that they are only blanks, and that it is just a training exercise.

In the chapter on the use of subliminals in the media I thought he was unfair towards Wilson Bryan Key. He dismissed the idea of any erotic content in Picasso's painting La Reve and stated that Key's "subliminal paranoia was spiralling out of control". Well, on the Wikipedia page for this painting, mention is made of people observing erotic content. He also includes this statement: "Meanwhile, for every genuine subliminal image, there are ten examples of cases where people have spotted subliminals that weren't there. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Jessica Rabbit appears without underwear for three frames ... Is this really true". If he had bothered to investigate then he would have discovered that it is true in this case. There was a documentary Cartoons Kick Ass on Britain's Channel 4 a few years ago that showed a slowed down moment from the scene from that movie where Jessica Rabbit is thrown from a car and the frames displaying her without underwear clearly exist.

The only chapter I found interesting was Chapter 7, Sleep. The work of British psy/'spy'chiatrist William Sargant is discussed. Streatfeild states he was a "British brainwashing expert". I was confused. The implication seems to be that old-school psychiatry is a form of brainwashing. Streatfeild also queries why someone like Sargant would associate with Ewen Cameron, "whose theories had spiralled so far out of control". Perhaps if Streatfeild had read Sargant's book on physical methods of treatment in psychiatry then he would have realised that Sargant's methods had spiralled out of control, for example Sargant recommends lobotomies for women who are married to psychopaths, who for social reasons can't leave their husbands, so that they can "return to the difficult environment and cope with it in a way which had hitherto been impossible." This book reveals that Sargant was MI5's in-house psychiatrist. British politican Dr. David "Lord" Owen is quoted saying that Sargant had "the therapeutic courage of a lion". Anaesthetists who sedated Sargant's patients referred to his sleep room, Ward 5, as "the black hole of Calcutta". The book on Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey Deep Sleep: Harry Bailey and the Scandal of Chelmsford is worth a look for more on the horror of psychiatric coma treatment.

The chapter on cults features Streatfeild making the claim that the incident at Waco offers "clear proof, apparently, that religious cults lead to suicide". That is contentious. See for instance, Waco Rules of Engagement and New Revelation. He attempts to differentiate between cults and religions by saying that "When the Church of England or the military make recruits they are upfront about who they are, what they are doing and how they will go about it." That is contentious also. He then makes the silly comment "Jesus and Mary were probably none too happy the day Jesus came home and told them what he'd decided to do with the rest of his life." If there is one area where brainwashing can be said to occur then it is in religion. Rather than examine how Christianity of Islam can be said to brainwash people, he picks the somewhat soft target of the Moonies. An opportunity missed.

As I said earlier, the subject of intelligence agency research into mind control draws exclusively on the research of John Marks. Streatfeild even claims that Frank Olsen committed suicide, despite subsequent findings that he had been asssaulted and then thrown out of a window. He quotes John Gittinger saying that the Manchurian Candidate movie "really set us back a long time because it made the impossible look plausible". He states that Edward Hunter was a "salaried propagandist for the CIA", but doesn't say if he actually bothered to read Hunter's, in my opinion, highly insightful Brainwashing in Red China. And he makes no mention whatsoever of the research of Morton Prince (The Dissociation of a Personality; A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology or of Jose Delgado. With regard to the subject of bio-implants, he states anyone who thinks they have an implant is in fact suffering from schizophrenia.

The epilogue covers the subject of interrogation. Streatfeild states that there is no such thing as a truth drug, but in the next paragraph starts talking about sodium amytal and pentothal. If he had read William Sargant's book on physical treatment in psychiatry he would have seen how sodium amytal is recommended to get patients to disclose "vital secrets". In that book Sargant states that "'beating up' patients defeats its own ends". However, it appears that current military interrogation policy in Afghanistan is to use methods applied in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and which were mentioned in inquisition manuals Directorium Inquisitorium and Malleus Malleficarum. The point is made that such techniques served as a recruiting tool for the Provisional IRA in the 1970s when it became known what the British army was doing to Northern Irish civilians.

Overall, occasionally interesting, but a sprawling mess of a book by an opinionated and biased author.

Very good at covering the older information on drug, hypnosis, and group mind control.....
Lack explaining in the newer more subtle methods for conditioning individuals (NLP) and the combined uses with the new technologies used for mind control....

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