PSYCHOPOLITICS The War Against the Mind

In 1955, a Soviet manual entitled Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics
was translated and distributed as a public warning by a New York professor.* The manual was based on the methods of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychiatrist who developed “conditioned response” theories through experiments on dogs in the early 1900s.

Pavlov’s work laid the groundwork for a fundamental psychiatric misconception that remains to this day: that, like dogs, men are basically programmable animals, influenced only by fear and reward. Pavlov’s experiments established the foundation for much of the inhuman brainwashing techniques used by the Soviet Union and China in the mid-twentieth century.

The manual revealed, “The early Russian psychiatrists, pioneering this science of psychiatry, understood thoroughly that hypnosis is induced by acute fear. They discovered it could also be induced by shock of an emotional nature, and also by extreme privation, as well as by blows and drugs.”

“By perverting the institutions of a nation,” it continued, “and bringing about a general degradation to the degree that privation and depression come about, only minor shocks will be necessary to produce, on the populace as a whole, an obedient reaction or hysteria.” The manual instructed that the mere threat of war or bombings can create this hysteria.

These are the methods that terrorist psychiatrists like Aziz al-Abub learned from KGB (Soviet secret service) psychiatrists at the Patrice Lumumba campus in the USSR. During the Soviet era, Patrice Lumumba and the Lenin Institute trained students in social psychology, unarmed combat and guerrilla warfare. Between 1968 and 1975, an estimated 2,500 terrorists and guerillas were trained there.

“The curriculum at Patrice Lumumba covered all aspects of the techniques of persuasion,” including the means to “manipulate and, when needs be, coerce without resorting to physical force,” wrote Gordon Thomas, author of
Journey into Madness, Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers. Soviet psychiatrists, who saw themselves “as not so much acting on orders from the KGB as performing the normal functions of a doctor,” advised terrorists on how to gain cooperation from a captive with the use of drugs. Such drugs were able to reduce a person to “near imbecility, or caused joints to become inflamed or shrink from the bones, created temporary blindness, impaired speech, produced incontinence, resulted in loss of hair and led to frightening rises in body temperatures,” stated Thomas.

Thomas noted that seminars were also devoted to “the deliberate and active steps required to strip an individual of his selfhood, and how to build up something new from the bare psychic foundation which remained. In this assault upon identity, a key factor was to create a state of infantile dependency, so that a person became disoriented, until finally ... he ‘dies to the world.’ Only at that stage, lectured the KGB psychiatrists, was the victim ready to receive the ‘salvation’ of those who now controlled his every action.” Other “psychopolitics” centers include Tavistock Institute in Britain and The Frankfurt School in Germany.

Techniques were developed to “crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything,” stated CIA mind-control psychiatrist Sidney Gottlieb. British psychiatrist William Sargant, Gottlieb’s peer, advised the use of drugs on “resistant sources,” noting that the drugs’ “function is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation.”

*Psychopolitics was described by the Soviets as the “art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through ‘mental healing.’”

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