Counterinsurgency

Techniques for psychological manipulation of society are about as old as humanity itself. Feudal lords, to preserve and consolidate their power, forever have used punishment and torture as dissuasive agents of change. "Even thousands of years ago, it was not the techniques per se, but their conscious application as divide-and-conquer tools, which aided the ruling classes. No matter how anti-human a particular technique or therapeutic approach may be, it is not in itself counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency cannot proceed merely on horrors; it requires conscious and systematic application by the ruling class, or its dupes. This was achieved by fusing psychology and psychiatry in the 1930s.

"The first massive application of psychology as a conscious weapon took place, in Nazi Germany, especially in reference to eugenics, which played upon the most backward Aryan illusions held by and imposed on portions of the masses. While the cause and development of Nazi butchery stemmed wholly from the world economic collapse, its specific form, eugenics, was devised by the Nazi's favourite theoreticians and technicians – the psychiatrists."

Since then, the "science of the mind," has been converted into the craft of mind destruction. Legitimate, therapeutic approaches have given way to behaviour-modifying pseudo-science in the name of aversion therapy.

This conversion of the mind science was truly shaped by war – "the war of mental genocide waged by the bourgeoisie against the working class." The essential premise of the work of Tavistock is the premise that certain kinds of democratic "institutions represent far more efficient instrumentalities for fascist dictatorship than the traditional, straightforwardly" authoritarian models. "From the great oil hoax and CIA-style brainwashing, the psychological sciences have followed the route initially outlined in 1945 by Dr. John Rawlings Rees, grand master of psywar counterinsurgency, in his book, The Shaping of Psychiatry by War." Rees called for the development of psychiatric shock troops in order to develop "methods of political control based upon driving the majority of the human population toward psychosis" through procedures of so-called programmed behavioural modification. He proposed this to render the population submissive under the post World War II economic world order.

Rees told a group of U.S. Army psychiatrists in 1945, "If we propose to come out into the open and to attack the social and national problems of our day, then we must have shock troops and these cannot be provided by psychiatry based wholly in institutions. We must have mobile teams of psychiatrists who are free to move around and make contacts with the local situation in their particular area."

Rees logic is clear. For true mental health, there must be a complete transformation of society along the lines of rational selection. But, as he laments in his book, "many don't see reality this way, including most workers who believe that any method of selection is a mechanism by which the wicked capitalist aims to get more work out of the workers, and that argument dies hard." In the Reesian world-view, such nay-sayers, along with anyone who engages in "strikes" or "subversive activity," are themselves neurotic, desperately "in need of treatment, but unfortunately unable to see that they are ill. In such a world of unwitting neurotics, psychiatry, the only arbiter of sanity, can be exercised only by a cabal in every country, groups of psychiatrists, linked to each other" prepared to muster all their weapons and influence for a move "into the political and governmental field."

Only a "conspiracy of psychiatrists" – as Reed meant when he spoke of his mission – "could build a society where it is possible for people of every social group to have treatment when they need it, even when they do not wish it, without the necessity to invoke the law." For Rees, the construction of that cabal became his lifelong 'mission.' As L. Marcus writes in his excellent investigative piece, "Reesian methods rely, completely and consciously, on the destruction of the mental life of world society and a forced march into universal sadism." Within this lies their affinity – men as mindless beasts whose minds, according to Tavistock, are something to be manipulated and destroyed.

Since then, different methodologies of psychological warfare developed at Tavistock Institute have been the central features of the activities of a world-wide set of interlocking think tanks in consultative capacity and special commissions, government agencies and corporations, their developmental studies and pilot projects with the clear-cut objective of shaping political techniques of social control. Rees and Tavistock organised their cabal according to public dictum: we are not large but well placed. Rees had a clear understanding of power structures, of organising key individuals who will in turn spread ideas and influence.

When we speak of psychological warfare we are often speaking of ways to make the enemy afraid, and in order to do this we must understand an enemy's psyche: what makes them love, hate, fight, run. That enemy might be foreign or domestic, an army of men or an enraged mass of workers. And in order to find an effective antidote, Tavistock and company need to understand how this enemy will react under stress: will he fight harder or simply surrender? Or will he start making errors in judgement, winning the war for the enemy, in a manner of speaking? The costliest mistakes of psychological warfare operations are always those made in ignorance of an enemy's mindset. This implies a deep knowledge of human psychology by Reesian "shock troops," a knowledge which is itself a kind of black art. And since this is a war of perceptions, of "world views," it is important that the psychologists and the psychiatrists and the sociologists and the anthropologists, these unidentified little grey men in flannel suits working for Tavistock, understand the impact of art, music, literature and other cultural modes of expression and how world-views are represented by them ...

As Peter Levenda writes in Sinister Forces, "eventually, the temptation will arise to test some of these principles on the domestic population. After all, with whose mindset are we the most familiar but our own? What better place to test new theories of psychological warfare than among our native population?" As Rees said in 1945, "Wars are not won by killing one's opponents but by undermining or destroying his morale whilst maintaining one's own."

One of the key individuals involved in behaviour modification was psychologist, Kurt Lewin. Lewin was the father of group dynamics and one of Rees's first cadre recruits who began his career at Cornell University, "where he worked on a systematic series of studies of the effect of social pressure on the eating habits of children." He came to the United States in 1933. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Lewin, like many other German intellectuals was forced out of Germany "not because of any basic political differences but as a sacrifice to Hitler's divide-and-conquer anti-Semitism. Lewin, in fact, is noted for his refinement of the Nazi-formulated leaderless group technique into a sophisticated tool of counterinsurgency." One of the lesser known facets of Lewin's work is related to psychological warfare programs, especially showing proper relations between psychological warfare, target-setting, field operations and evaluative reconnaissance. His first overt assignment was to utilize "group decision-making" in changing food preferences away from "meat" towards "whole-wheat bread" as substitutes.

The following passage from his book Time Perspective and Morale, illustrates his understanding of psychological warfare: "One of the main techniques for breaking morale through a 'strategy of terror' consists in exactly this tactic – keep the person hazy as to where he stands and just what he may expect. If in addition frequent vacillations between severe disciplinary measures and promises of good treatment together with spreading of contradictory news, make the 'cognitive structure' of this situation utterly unclear, then the individual may cease to even know when a particular plan would lead toward or away from his goal. Under these conditions even those who have definite goals and are ready to take risks, will be paralyzed by severe inner conflicts in regard to what to do."

Lewin's most significant proposal made during the period of World War II and its immediate aftermath, was his conception of 'fascism with a democratic face.' The common psychopathological feature of all fascist's demand is infantilism who defines himself by his attempts to "impose the principle of the autonomous extended family, and to block out the reality" of the outer world. For example, "nationalism" (mother country), "racialism" (mother), "language group" (mother tongue), "cultural affinity group" (family traditions), "community" (extended family, neighbourhood).

Lewin was the first to realise through close observation of his tested cadres that the imposition of fascist-like forms of small group organisation and corporatist "structural reforms" could induce fascist ideology in a subject population.

In a sane and moral society, Lewin's proposals would be used for toilet paper and Lewin himself would have been put under protective, psychiatric care. Instead, he was given a lot of money, U.S. citizenship and a grant from the Rockefellers to craft social engineering projects.

Lewin proposed that through a use of "small group" self-brainwashing techniques, a more efficient form of fascist dictatorship could be established. "The ratio and visibility of a horde of jackbooted enforcers characteristic of the Nazi regime, could be reduced by creating fascist forms of small self-administering 'community groups.' They see themselves as existing by means of their ability as individuals to influence the behaviour of those immediately around them." The result, thought Lewin, would be a more efficient form of fascist regime with the superficial appearance of special democratic forms. In other words, "if the atomised individual's world is converted into a controlled environment which conforms to such 'fascist structural reforms,' the victim's mind will discover that only its potential paranoid self provides it with the means for agreement with that controversial environment." In other words, fascism is the world desired in the paranoid drams of the "Id."

What is undeniable, is that Rees and Tavistock were seriously organising "a cabal to take over the councils of those who are attempting to re-establish the world after the war." Given the training of military, psychiatric and other hard-core fascist cadres, the establishment of a fascist political order would proceed, according to Rees-Lewin Tavistockian model in the following normal steps:

1. Break down the existing democratic-constitutional institutions. The military and police forces would be reorganised for "civil action," as they are now in the United States. One of the lesser known actions being readied by the government revolves around the "replacement of ordinary state and local police forces by a national counterinsurgency police force modelled on Hitler's S.D. Gestapo, and such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is in Canada." At the same time, existing mass institutions would be destroyed by 'spontaneously' organised insurgency. 'Local community control' groups would be used to destroy broad-based political institutions. Among these recruits to fascist community control, gangs and counter gangs of terrorists would propagate crime and mutual terroristic confrontations, with both sides under the control and direction of behind-the-scene intelligence operatives. This programmed insurgency of gangs and counter-gangs, mixed with doses of police-controlled terrorist gangs, create the political conditions in which the majority of the population more readily tolerates or even demands various degrees of military and police government, thus creating your "democratic" fascist regime.

2. Eliminate through subversion, assassination, military intervention, embargoes or popular and "spontaneous" uprisings the regime that has outlived its usefulness, and appoint "democratic" civilian government. The appointed "democratic" government can now function only within the limits defined for it by representatives of the supranational agencies.

The specific topics towards the establishing of fascism with a democratic face are as follows:

1. Area Population Psychological Studies. During World War II, the Anglo-American psychological warfare services developed a number of studies of specific neurotic susceptibilities of various national cultures. The most famous of these was the so-called Strategic Bombing Survey. It was conceived as a basis for co-ordinating allied bombing of Germany with propaganda and other psychological warfare campaigns against the morale of various enumerated strata of the Third Reich's population," and was the precursor of CIA-led Vietnam's 'Operation Phoenix,' which was a genocide operation in South Vietnam against supporters of Vietcong. In a nutshell, Strategic Bombing Survey mapped out best ways to destroy the morale of the civilian population at the lowest cost.

2. The media. The use of control of major media news and cultural media as instruments of inducing desired forms of partial insanity among large populations. In general, by controlling the editorial policies, the news slant concerning national and international issues, the key news agencies and main mass circulating media determine what the population generally knows and considers credible. Deliberate and habitual falsification of the information is a way of creating "desensitization effects in the mass population by causing the socially-accredited interpretation of cause-effect relations to violate sensuous rational interpretation of experience. This is furthermore is supplemented by the introduction of programmed subliminal psychological material, whose predetermined effect is to accentuate infantile impulses among targeted portions of the population, such as 'human interest' stories which are relatively more gratifying to the infantile impulses and which de-emphasise a rational and scientific overview."

3. Local Community Control. "The object of 'local community control' as a fascist counterinsurgency tactic is to fragment the subject population into relatively hermetic political groupings," narrowing the scale of the groups by separations according to race, sex, language background, regional background, national origin, recreational interests, age groups and neighbourhood. "Setting such groups into competition against each other under the conditions of general austerity is an effective Lewinite technique for inducing self-brainwashing among these groups and progressive psychological deterioration toward polymorphous perverse pseudo-families and outright clinical psychosis."

* "The first degree of brainwashing is accomplished by setting 'local community autonomy' into principled opposition to 'big business,' technology, and progressive programs" meant to improve the lives of people within the community. "Programs with emphasis on technological advancement are denounced as efforts of 'outsider elitist groups' to interfere in the autonomous affairs of the local group. At that point, the 'community group' has become functionally semi psychotic and clinically paranoid as a group. To the extent that the member restricts their social identity to within such a group, the effort to adjust to the group ideals induces corresponding pathological states in the member.

* "By setting such groups into competition, and by splitting the group internally through sex, race, income, etc., the paranoia is intensified, the movement toward semi-psychotic is increased" as smaller and smaller sub groups within the community find themselves in cut-throat hostility toward one another.

4. The application of task-oriented small group brainwashing techniques to leaderless groups. "These groups operate on the basis of an environment" of reduction in real-income levels and working conditions. Under the conditions of austerity, the brainwashing consists in getting the workers "to make up for part of the lost standard income-rates by ingeniously speeding themselves up." By recycling the employed and the unemployed and large-scale relocation programs and introduction of "group work incentives" and performance-reward competition among competing groups transforms the small production team into a potentially self-brainwashing group. "Under these conditions, semi-psychosis and psychosis cause the group to 'voluntarily' attain degrees of intensification of labor, which cannot be forced from sane labor. The members of such self-brainwashing leaderless group work teams emulate the 'racehorse' syndrome, driving hysterically toward literally suicidal work-paced. Tavistock Institute and University of Pennsylvania are two of the best-known centres where such experimental practices."