Showing posts with label Dunkirk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dunkirk. Show all posts

Saturday 7 February 2015

The Enigma of Rudolf Hess and his Controllers

General Karl Haushofer and Rudolf Hess, c.1920

"We need a fellow at the head who can stand the sound of a machine gun. The rabble need to get fear into their pants. 

We can't use an officer, because the people don't respect them any more. 

The best would be a worker who knows how to talk... He doesn't need much brains.... 

He must be a bachelor, then we'll get the women."

- Dietrich Eckart
Founding Member, Thule Society
Concerning the proposed founding and leadership of a German Workers Party,
19/1/1919


"According to the American military attaché at the London embassy, who claimed to have spoken with Hess after the latter arrived in England, the Deputy Fuhrer supposedly confessed to a British psychiatrist sent to examine him that the Nazis were on the verge of obliterating the Jews "

(Louis Kilzer, Churchill's deception. The Dark Secret that Destroyed Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 60-2). 




Moreover, author Alfred Smith relates that on May 13, 1941, only three days after Hess landed, Churchill sent a memo to his colleague, Anthony Eden...It concludes with the words 

‘Like other Nazi leaders this man is potentially a war criminal and he and his confederates may well be declared outlaws at the close of the war. In this his repentance stands him in good stead.’ 

Smith raises the question: ‘Why did Churchill describe Hess as a potential war criminal?...The “Crimes against humanity," and in particular the Holocaust, did not take place until after the launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, a month after Hess's flight...?’ 

Smith concludes: ‘The only construction that makes sense of Churchill's remarks is that he was aware of the war crimes that were going to be committed in the future...."



"When necessity commands, he does not shrink from bloodshed... In order to reach his goal, he is prepared to trample on his closest friends."

- Rudolf Hess,
"How Must the Man be Constructed who will lead Germany back to her Old Heights?"
1919

Anton Drexler


"Success and money finally won for Hitler complete domination over the National Socialist Party. He had grown too powerful for the founders; they - Anton Drexler among them - wanted to limit him and press him to the wall. But it turned out that they were too late. He had the newspaper behind him, the backers, and the growing S.A. 

At a certain distance he had the Reichswehr behind him too. To break all resistance for good, he left the party for three days, and the trembling members obediently chose him as the first, unlimited chairman, for practical purposes responsible to no one, in place of Anton Drexler, the modest founder, who had to content himself with the post of honorary chairman (July 29, 1921). From that day on, Hitler was the leader of Munich's National Socialist Movement."

Konrad Heiden



Hess was an active supporter of the preparations for war. His signature established military service. He expressed a desire for peace and advocated international economic cooperation. But none knew better than Hess how determined Hitler was to realize his ambitions, how fanatical and violent a man he was.

With him in his flight to England, Hess carried certain peace proposals which he alleged Hitler was prepared to accept. It is significant to note that this flight took place only ten days after the date on which Hitler fixed, 22 June 1941, as the time for attacking the Soviet Union.

That Hess acts in an abnormal manner, suffers from the loss of memory, and has mentally deteriorated during the Trial, may be true. But there is nothing to show that he does not realize the nature of the charges against him, or is incapable of defending himself. There is no suggestion that Hess was not completely sane when the acts charged against him were committed. 

Defendant Rudolf Hess, the court sentences you to imprisonment for life.

Judgment on Rudolf Hess at Nuremberg War Crimes Trial.



Rochus Misch, Hitler's bodyguard, claims that in May 1941 he was at Berchtesgaden with Hitler and Hess. According to Misch: 

He (Hitler) was talking to Hess, when somebody brought in a dispatch. The Führer read it and exclaimed: 

'I cannot go there and go down on my knees!’ 

Hess replied: 
'I can, my Führer.’ 

At the time a German diplomat was meeting the Swedish emissary, Count Bernadotte, in Portugal. The British were very active in Lisbon, so I think there might have been some peace offer from London.” It is impossible to know if Misch is right about this as the official British documents relating to it are still classified.

On 22nd May 1940 some 250 German tanks were advancing along the French coast towards Dunkirk, threatening to seal off the British escape route. Then, just six miles from the town, at around 11.30 a.m., they abruptly stopped. Adolf Hitler had personally ordered all German forces to hold their positions for three days. This order was uncoded and was picked up by the British. They therefore knew they were going to get away. German generals begged to be able to move forward in order to destroy the British army but Hitler insisted that they held back so that the British troops could leave mainland Europe.
Some historians hav
e argued that this is an example of another tactical error made by Adolf Hitler. However, the evidence suggests that this was part of a deal being agreed between Germany and Britain. After the war, General Gunther Blumentritt, the Army Chief of Staff, told military historian Basil Liddell Hart that Hitler had decided that Germany would make peace with Britain. Another German general told Liddell Hart that Hitler aimed to make peace with Britain “on a basis that was compatible with her honour to accept”. (The Other Side of the Hill, pages 139-41)

According to Ilse Hess, her husband was told by Hitler that the massacring of the British army at Dunkirk would humiliate the British government and would make peace negotiations harder because of the bitterness and resentment it would cause. Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary in June 1940 that Hitler told him that peace talks with Britain were taking place in Sweden. The intermediary was Marcus Wallenberg, a Swedish banker.

We know from other sources that Winston Churchill was under considerable pressure to finish off the peace talks that had been started by Neville Chamberlain. This is why George VI wanted Lord Halifax as prime minister instead of Churchill. There is an intriguing entry into the diary of John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, on 10th May. In discussing Churchill’s talks with the king about becoming prime minister Colville writes: “Nothing can stop him (Churchill) having his way – because of his powers of blackmail”.

George VI was bitterly opposed to Winston Churchill becoming prime minister. He tried desperately to persuade Chamberlain to stay on in the job. When he refused he wanted to use his royal prerogative to appoint Lord Halifax as prime minister. Halifax refused as he feared this act would have brought the government down and would put the survival of the monarchy at risk. (John CostelloTen Days that Saved the West, pages 46-47).

On 8th June 1940, one Labour MP suggested in the House of Commons that Churchill should instigate an inquiry into the “appeasement” party with a view to prosecuting its members. Churchill replied this would be foolish as “there are too many in it”. Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, recorded in his diary that the “appeasement party” was so powerful within the Conservative Party that Churchill faced the possibility of being removed as prime minister.

On 10th September 1940, Karl Haushofer sent a letter to his son Albrecht. The letter discussed secret peace talks going on with Britain. Karl talked about “middlemen” such as Ian Hamilton (head of the British Legion), the Duke of Hamilton and Violet Roberts, the widow of Walter Roberts. The Roberts were very close to Stewart Menzies (Walter and Stewart had gone to school together). Violet Roberts was living in Lisbon in 1940. Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland were the four main places where these secret negotiations were taking place. Karl and Albrecht Haushofer were close friends of both Rudolf Hess and the Duke of Hamilton.

Heinrich Stahmer, who worked with Haushofer, claimed that meetings between Samuel HoareLord Halifax and Rudolf Hess took place in Spain and Portugal between February and April 1941. The Vichy press reported that Hess was in Spain on the weekend of 20/22 of April 1941. The correspondence between British Embassies and the Foreign Office are routinely released to the Public Record Office. However, all documents relating to the weekend of 20/22 April, 1941 at the Madrid Embassy are being held back and will not be released until 2017.

Karl Haushofer was arrested and interrogated by the Allies in October 1945. The British government has never released the documents that include details of these interviews. However, these interviews are in the OSS archive. Karl told his interviewers that Germany was involved in peace negotiations with Britain in 1940-41. In 1941 Albrecht was sent to Switzerland to meet Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador to Spain. This peace proposal included a willingness to “relinquish Norway, Denmark and France”. Karl goes onto say: “A larger meeting was to be held in Madrid. When my son returned, he was immediately called to Augsburg by Hess. A few days later Hess flew to England.”

On 10th May, 1941, Hess flew a Me 110 to Scotland. When he parachuted to the ground he was captured by David McLean, of the Home Guard. He asked to be taken to Duke of Hamilton, the “middleman” mentioned in the earlier letter. In fact, Hamilton lived close to where Hess landed (Dungavel House). 

If Hamilton was the “middleman” who was he acting for? 

Was it George VI or Winston Churchill

Shortly afterwards Sergeant Daniel McBride and Emyr Morris, reached the scene and took control of the prisoner. Hess’s first words to them were: “Are you friends of the Duke of Hamilton? I have an important message for him.”
After the war Daniel McBride attempted to tell his story of what had happened when he captured Hess. This story originally appeared in the Hongkong Telegraph (6th March, 1947). “The purpose of the former Deputy Fuhrer’s visit to Britain is still a mystery to the general public, but I can say, and with confidence too, that high-ranking Government officials were aware of his coming.” 

The reason that McBride gives for this opinion is that: “No air-raid warning was given that night, although the plane must have been distinguished during his flight over the city of Glasgow. Nor was the plane plotted at the anti-aircraft control room for the west of Scotland.” 

McBride concludes from this evidence that someone with great power ordered that Hess should be allowed to land in Scotland. This story was picked up by the German press but went unreported in the rest of the world.

According to Lieutenant-Colonel Malcolm Scott, Hess had told one of his guards that “members of the government” had known about his proposed trip to Scotland. Hess also asked to see George VI as he had been assured before he left Nazi Germany that he had the “King’s protection”. 

The authors of Double Standards, believe the Duke of Kent, the Duke of HamiltonSamuel Hoare and Lord Halifax, were all working for the king in their efforts to negotiate with Adolf Hitler.

Karlheinz Pintsch, Hess adjutant, was given the task of informing Hitler about the flight to Scotland. James Leasor found him alive in 1955 and used him as a major source for his book, The Uninvited Envoy. Pintsch told Leasor of Hitler’s response to this news. He did not seem surprised, nor did he rant and rave about what Hess had done. Instead, he replied calmly, “At this particular moment in the war that could be a most hazardous escapade.”
Hitler then went onto read the letter that Hess had sent him. He read the following significant passage out aloud. “And if this project… ends in failure… it will always be possible for you to deny all responsibility. Simply say I was out of my mind.Of course, that is what both Hitler and Churchill did later on. However, at the time, Hitler at least, still believed that a negotiated agreement was possible.

Raymond Gram Swing of the Chicago Daily News was invited to Chequers two months after Hess arrived in Scotland. In his autobiography, Good Evening(1964) he explained: 

"After the meal, the Prime Minister invited me to take a walk with him in the garden. 

This turned out to be the occasion for an unexpected and, I must say, somewhat disconcerting exposition to me of the terms on which Britain at that time could make a separate peace with Nazi Germany. The gist of the terms was that Britain could retain its empire, which Germany would guarantee, with the exception of the former German colonies, which were to be returned. 


The timing of this conversation seemed to me significant. Rudolf Hess, the number-three Nazi, had landed by parachute in Scotland less than two months before, where he had attempted to make contact with the Duke of Hamilton, whom the Nazis believed to be an enemy of Mr. Churchill and his policies... 

Mr. Churchill said nothing to me about Herr Hess. But he expounded to me the advantage of the German terms; and he seemed to be trying to arouse in me a feeling that unless the United States became more actively involved in the war, Britain might find it to her interest to accept them. I may be ascribing to him intentions he did not have. 

Later I was to learn that Hitler himself had proposed broadly similar terms to Britain before the war actually began. But I was under the impression that the allurements of peace had been recently underlined by Rudolf Hess... But it troubled me to have him give me his exposition, which must have lasted a full twenty minutes.

For my part, I believed that the United States's interests made our entry in the war imperative. 

But I did not believe it would spur the country to come in to be told that if it did not, Winston Churchill would make a separate peace with Hitler and put his empire under a Hitler guarantee of safety."

Eventually Adolf Hitler became convinced that Winston Churchill would refuse to do a deal. Karlheinz Pintsch was now a dangerous witness and he was arrested and was kept in solitary confinement until being sent to the Eastern Front. Hitler also issued a statement pointing out that "Hess did not fly in my name." Albert Speer, who was with Hitler when he heard the news, later reported that "what bothered him was the Churchill might use the incident to pretend to Germany's allies that Hitler was extending a peace feeler."

Pearl Harbour Changed Everything.


It was not until 27th January 1942 that Winston Churchill made a statement in the House of Commons about the arrival of Hess. Churchill claimed it was part of a plot to oust him from power and “for a government to be set up with which Hitler could negotiate a magnanimous peace”. If that was the case, were the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Hamilton part of this plot?

In September, 1943, Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, admitted in the House of Commons that Hess had indeed arrived in Scotland to negotiate a peace settlement. However, Eden claimed that the British government had been unaware of these negotiations. In fact, he added, Hess had refused to negotiate with Churchill. Eden failed to say who Hess was negotiating with. Nor did he explain why Hess (Hitler) was willing to negotiate with someone other than the British government. The authors of Double Standards argue that Hess was negotiating with Duke of Hamilton and the royal family, via the Duke of Kent. It is true Hamilton had a meeting with Churchill and Stewart Menzies two days after Hess arrived in Scotland. We also know that MI6 was monitoring these negotiations. If Hamilton was truly a traitor, surely Churchill would have punished him. Instead, along with the Duke of Kent, who were both in the RAF, were promoted by Churchill. In July 1941 Hamilton became a Group Captain and Kent became an Air Commodore.

This did not stop journalists speculating that the Duke of Hamilton was a traitor. In February 1942, Hamilton sued the London District Committee of the Communist Party for an article that appeared in their journal, World News and Views. The article claimed that Hamilton had been involved in negotiating with Nazi Germany and knew that Hess was flying to Scotland. Had this information come from Kim Philby? The case was settled when the Communist Party issued a public apology. Clearly, they could not say where this information came from.

Later that year Hamilton sued Pierre van Paassen, who in his book, That Day Alone, described Hamilton as a “British Fascist” who had plotted with Hess. The case was settled out of court in Hamilton’s favour. Sir Archibald Sinclair also issued a statement in the House of Commons that the Duke of Hamilton had never met Rudolf Hess.
However, recently released documents show that this was not all it seemed. The Communist Party threatened to call Hess as a witness. This created panic in the cabinet. A letter from the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, to Sir Archibald Sinclair, dated 18th June 1941, shows that the government was extremely worried about Hess appearing as a witness in this libel case. Morrison asks Sinclair to use his influence on Hamilton to drop the libel case. It is interesting that this letter was sent to Sinclair as he is the man who made the public statement about Hamilton and Hess, carried out the investigation into the Duke of Kent’s death and whose estate Hess was supposed to be living when the crash took place. Hamilton clearly took Morrison’s advice and this explains why the Communist Party did not have to pay any money to Hamilton over the libel.

The Pierre van Paassen’s case is also not as clear-cut as it appears. Hamilton sued him for $100,000. In fact, all Hamilton got was $1,300. The publisher had to promise that future editions of the book would have to remove the offending passage. However, he did not have to recall and pulp existing copies of the book.

However, it is the third case that tells us most about what was going on. On 13th May 1941 the Daily Express published an article detailing the close relationship between the Duke of Hamilton and Rudolf Hess. The Duke’s solicitor had a meeting with Godfrey Norris, the editor of the newspaper. The solicitor later reported that Norris appeared willing to print a retraction. While the discussion was taking place Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the newspaper, arrived. He overruled his editor and stated that the newspaper would stick to its accusation. Beaverbrook added that he could prove that Sir Archibald Sinclair lied when he claimed in the House of Commons that Hamilton had never met Rudolf Hess. Understandably, the Duke of Hamilton withdrew his threat to sue the Daily Express. (Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie, Beaverbrook, A Life, pages 409-10)

What is clear about these events is that Churchill and Sinclair made every attempt to protect the reputation of the Duke of Hamilton following the arrival of Hess. However, Beaverbrook, who like Hamilton was a prominent appeaser before the war, let him know that he was not in control of the situation.

After the war the Duke of Hamilton told his son that he was forced to take the blame for Hess arriving in Scotland in order to protect people who were more powerful than him. The son assumed he was talking about the royal family. It is possible he was also talking about Winston Churchill.

There are other signs that Hess had arrived to carry out serious peace negotiations with the British government.. On the very night that Rudolf Hess arrived in Scotland, London experienced its heaviest German bomb attack: 1,436 people were killed and some 12,000 made homeless. Many historic landmarks including the Houses of Parliament were hit. The Commons debating chamber – the main symbol of British democracy – was destroyed. American war correspondents based in London such as Walter Lippmann and Vincent Sheean, suggested that Britain was on the verge of surrender.
Yet, the 10th May marked the end of the Blitz. It was the last time the Nazis would attempt a major raid on the capital. Foreign journalist based in London at the time wrote articles that highlighted this strange fact. James Murphy even suggested that there might be a connection between the arrival of Hess and the last major bombing raid on London. 

(James Murphy, Who Sent Rudolf Hess, 1941 page 7)

This becomes even more interesting when one realizes at the same time as Hitler ordered the cessation of the Blitz, Winston Churchill was instructing Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, to reduce bombing attacks on Nazi Germany. Portal was surprised and wrote a memorandum to Churchill asking why the strategy had changed: “Since the Fall of France the bombing offensive had been a fundamental principle of our strategy.” Churchill replied that he had changed his mind and now believed “it is very disputable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war”. 

(John TerraineThe Right Line: The RAF in the European War 1939-45, 1985 page 295)

Is it possible that Hitler and Churchill had called off these air attacks as part of their peace negotiations? Is this the reason why Hess decided to come to Britain on 10th May, 1941? The date of this arrival is of prime importance. Hitler was no doubt concerned about the length of time these negotiations were taking. We now know that he was desperate to order the invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in early Spring. According to Richard Sorge of the Red Orchestra spy network, Hitler planned to launch this attack in May 1941. (Leopold TrepperThe Great Game, 1977, page 126)

However, for some reason the invasion was delayed. Hitler eventually ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22nd June, 1941. It would therefore seem that peace negotiations between Germany and Britain had come to an end. However, is this true? One would have expected Churchill to order to resume mass bombing of Germany. This was definitely the advice he was getting from Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris also took a similar view. In June 1943, Harris was briefing American journalists about his disagreement with Churchill’s policy.

Douglas Reed, a British journalist with a good relationship with Portal and Churchill, wrote in 1943: “The long delay in bombing Germany is already chief among the causes of the undue prolongation of the war.” (Douglas Reed, Lest We Regret, 1943, page 331). One senior army figure told a journalist after the war that Hess’s arrival brought about a “virtual armistice” between Germany and Britain.

Early in 1944, John Franklin Carter, who was in charge of an intelligence unit based in the White House, suggested to President Franklin D. Roosevelt a scheme developed by Ernst Hanfstaengl. He suggested that Hanfstaengl should be allowed to fly to England and meet with Hess. Roosevelt contacted Winston Churchill about this and then vetoed the scheme. According to Joseph E. Persico, the author of Roosevelt's Secret War (2001): "The British, he explained, were not going to let anyone question the possibly insane Nazi, who had recently hurled himself head-first down a flight of stairs."

On 6th November, 1944, Churchill made a visit to Moscow. At a supper in the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin raised his glass and proposed a toast to the British Intelligence Services, which he said had “inveigled Hess into coming to England.” Winston Churchill immediately protested that he and the intelligence services knew nothing about the proposed visit. Stalin smiled and said maybe the intelligence services had failed to tell him about the operation.
Hess was kept in the Tower of London until being sent to face charges at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. On 13th November, 1945, American psychiatrist Dr Donald Ewen Cameron was sent by Allen Dulles of the OSS to assess Hess’s fitness to stand trial.
Cameron was carrying out experiments into sensory deprivation and memory as early as 1938. In 1943 he went to Canada and established the psychiatry department at Montreal's McGill University and became director of the newly-created Allan Memorial Institute that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. At the same time he also did work for the OSS. It is almost certain that the US intelligence services were providing at least some of the money for his research during the war.

We know by 1947 he was using the “depatterning” technique to wipe out patients memories of the past. Donald Ewen Cameron believed that after inducing complete amnesia in a patient, he could then selectively recover their memory in such a way as to change their behaviour unrecognisably." In other words, Cameron was giving them a new past. Is it possible that Cameron and the OSS was doing this during the Second World War. Is it possible that the real reason for Cameron’s visit was that he wanted to assess the treatment he had been giving Hess since 1943? That Hess was one of Cameron’s guinea pigs.

When he came face to face with Hermann Göring at Nuremberg, Hess remarked: “Who are you”? Göring reminded him of events that they witnessed in the past but Hess continued to insist that he did not know this man. Karl Haushofer was then called in but even though they had been friends for twenty years, Hess once again failed to remember him. Hess replied “I just don’t know you, but it will all come back to me and then I will recognise an old friend again. I am terribly sorry.” (Peter PadfieldHess: The Führer’s Disciple, page 305).

Hess did not recognise other Nazi leaders. Joachim von Ribbentrop responded by suggesting that Hess was not really Hess. When told of something that Hess had said he replied: “Hess, you mean Hess? The Hess we have here?” (J. R. Rees, The Case of Rudolf Hess, page 169).

However, Major Douglas M. Kelley, the American psychiatrist who was responsible for Hess during the trials, stated that he did have periods when he did remember his past. This included a detailed account of his flight to Scotland. Hess told Kelley that he had arrived without the knowledge of Hitler. Hess claimed that “only he could get the English King or his representatives to meet with Hitler and make peace so that millions of people and thousands of villages would be spared.” (J. R. Rees, The Case of Rudolf Hess, page 168).



"Dulles first swore Dr Cameron to secrecy, and then told him an astounding story. He had reason to believe that the man Dr Cameron was to examine was not Rudolf Hess but an impostor; that the real Deputy Fuhrer had been secretly executed on Churchill's orders. Dulles had explained that Dr Cameron could prove the point by a simple physical examination of the man's torso. If he was the genuine Hess, there should be scar tissue over his left lung, a legacy from the day the young Hess had been wounded in the First World War. Dr Cameron had agreed to try to examine the prisoner."
Gordon Thomas, 
Journey into Madness (1993)
"Cameron's original interest - indeed obsession - was in finding a cure for schizophrenia (which makes it all the more significant that he failed to note any signs of it in Hess), but his driving professional ambitions could make him very difficult as a person. One member of the Rockefeller Foundation wrote that he had "a need for power which he nourishes by maintaining an extraordinary aloofness from his associates". 
Becoming disenchanted with psychoanalytical methods for curing schizophrenia, he turned to the now largely discredited electroshock therapy and also the use of drugs: his method involved first wiping the patient's memory clean by applying intensive electric shocks combined with virtually twenty-four-hour-a-day drug-induced sleep, resulting - as may be imagined - in total amnesia. 

Although Cameron himself had not invented this traumatically radical - perhaps even soul-destroying - technique, he had worked intensively with it since at least the 1940s. But perhaps more important is the fact that the electroshock therapy part had been originally recorded by two British psychiatrists, L. G. M. Page and R. J. Russell, who published a paper about it - after many years of intensive experimentation - in 1948.

Another major inspiration was the British psychiatrist William Sargent, whom Cameron considered to be the leading expert on Soviet brainwashing techniques." Cameron took this work and used it for what he called 'depatterning'. He believed that after inducing complete amnesia in a patient, he could then selectively recover their memory in such a way as to change their behaviour unrecognisably. If 'depatterning' has a bleak Orwellian ring to it, then 'psychic driving' - which Cameron invented in 1953 - takes us into an even more terrifying world. He discovered that once a subject entered an amnesiac, somnambulistic state, they would become hypersensitive to suggestion. If a statement was repeated to them over and over again (for example, on a tape loop), it would penetrate so deeply into their subconscious mind as to change their behaviour completely; their personality would undergo such a radical metamorphosis that they essentially became someone else. Such a powerful tool was not going to remain exclusively in the hands of therapists for long: soon the CIA became interested in the extraordinary potential of Cameron's 'psychic driving'.

There was no doubting its value to them. This sinister technique could be used to implant all manner of ideas in the mind of either a willing or an unwilling subject. For example, an agent on a secret mission could have his cover identity mentally implanted, not only enabling him to recall all the details of his assumed identity much more fluently than if he merely learned them off pat, but effectively turning him into that person. To all intents and purposes he would become his cover. However, the technique was by no means foolproof: there was always the danger of mental conflict between the real and induced memories, possibly resulting in bizarre and unpredictable behaviour.

Perhaps Cameron's work was directly responsible for changing the course of history. Although he was responsible for 'programming' several American agents through psychic driving in the late 1950s, the most notable was certainly Lee Harvey Oswald before his 'defection' to the USSR in 1959. Psychic driving was, as may be guessed, the first step in the creation of 'Manchurian Candidate' assassins, whose usual human scruples about committing murder had been wiped away with their real personalities. 

As American researcher John Marks writes: "By literally wiping the minds of his subjects clean by depatterning and then trying to program in new behaviour, Cameron carried the process known as brainwashing to its logical extreme

- Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior, 
Double Standards (2001)

"Mr. Justice Jackson, U.S. Chief of Counsel, had been fully aware of the peculiar psychiatric problems that might present themselves, not only in the case of Hess, but also in regard to certain of the other defendants. There had in consequence been some discussion on the advisability of a thorough examination in two phases: 


(1) before trial, to assess fitness to plead and similar matters; 
and 

(2) after sentence, when it was felt that a team of psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists from each of the Allied countries might produce a complete survey and report on these men which would be of value for the future understanding of the Nazi mentality and the nature of the movement which had led to so great disasters. 

This clearly fitted in well with the expressed hope of the Tribunal that they would write an effective chapter in history.
Phase 1 of this plan was put into operation in November, 1945. On November 8th, Dr. Rees saw the British War Crimes Executive in London, at their request. He was told he was nominated to be asked to go out to Nuremberg. A later telegram asked, however, for an eminent physician and a neurologist to go also, as the Soviet consultant delegation had been so constituted. It was clearly preferable to refer this to the Royal College of Physicians for names, and this was done. Lord Moran and Dr. George Riddoch completed the party, which left on November 12th. Because of bad weather and a very slow and tiresome journey both ways, the stay in Nuremberg was less than twenty-four hours in duration, and the time for consultation and discussion with our colleagues was short.Colonel Schroeder and our three Russian colleagues were already there-Professor Delay arrived from Paris just before we left. Professors Lewis and Cameron did not arrive from U.S. till a day or two later."

The Case of Rudolf Hess (1947)
J. R. Rees

Friday 6 February 2015

William Sargent and British Mind Control Methodologies

from Spike EP on Vimeo.

"Sargant’s vision was endorsed by the top ranks of the British intelligentsia. Even more enthusiastic than Bertrand Russell was Aldous Huxley, who had already explored the extremes of religious fanaticism and possession in The Devils of Loudun (1952). In its appendix he had drawn chilling parallels with the modern age of brainwashing: ‘Herded into mobs’, he wrote, humanity en masse is liable to ‘fall into a state of heightened suggestibility, resembling that which follows an injection of sodium amytal…while in this state they will believe any nonsense bawled at them, will act upon any command…’. Huxley welcomed Sargant’s ‘enlightening book’ in his Brave New World Revisited (1958), and spread its influence considerably through his lectures and broadcasts. The following year Sargant noted with delight that ‘Aldous Huxley mentioned the book on television and this had the immediate result of selling over 1000 copies the next week!’.

Sargant’s transition from psychiatrist to populist was aided by his collaboration with the poet Robert Graves, who reworked his original manuscript extensively, adding classical and Shakespearian references that, in Sargant’s archly Pavlovian phrase, ‘certainly make the saliva flow’. Along with literary gloss, Graves contributed the preface that Bertrand Russell found too apologetic: both he and Sargant were concerned that without it the book would be seen simply as an attack on religion, and its deeper message lost. This was also the reason Graves gave for keeping his co-authorship ‘as much as possible in the shadows’, as he put it: ‘I am Public Enemy No. 1 to the churches’.

Battle for the Mind brought together researches from within and outside Sargant’s psychiatric career; it was both highly idiosyncratic and unmistakably a product of its times. He came from a family of devout Methodists, and although he had long rejected their faith he had their missionary zeal. From the beginning his career had been a crusade for mental illness to be viewed and treated as a physical disease of the brain. It was characterised by the search for the magic bullet: a drug potent enough to ‘wipe the slate clean’ and allow the brain’s deep structures to be reprogrammed. Whenever a new drug or physical therapy emerged, he would be among the first to try it – and if it failed, to double the dose, or the voltage.

Throughout his career, Sargant’s defense of his extreme methods would return to the horrors of Hanwell Mental Hospital, where he first worked as a locum in Hanwell-236x300the early 1930s: a grim Victorian asylum where the majority of patients had been ‘put away’ for life, kept docile by bromides and straitjackets. The latest therapeutic ideas revolved around the theories of Freud and his associates, but it was abundantly clear to Sargant that talking cures would never heal more than a tiny percentage of these chronic cases. At the same time, evidence was emerging from the wider medical world that so-called ‘mental illness’ could be responsive to physical treatment. The dementia of tertiary syphilis was now treatable by the new ‘magic bullets’ of salvarsan or the malaria ‘fever cure’. Other experimental therapies, such as electric shock treatment for depression, seemed poised to reduce further intractable categories of mental illness to treatable brain disorders, and establish psychiatry on a solid bedrock of clinical medicine.

When he joined the staff of the Maudsley Hospital in 1935 Sargant found a regime receptive to these ideas. The superintendent, Edward Mapother, was an old-time Victorian neurologist distrustful of intellectuals and their theories and open to practical experiments. Sargant, who by his own account revered Mapother ‘to the point of hero-worship’, joined battle with him against both the Freudians and the left-liberal proponents of ‘community therapy’ who saw the roots of mental illness in poverty and social exclusion. Together they pioneered aggressive interventions such as ECT and huge doses of barbiturates and insulin.

Yet in his many tellings of the Hanwell story, there was one crucial fact Sargant always omitted: he himself had been institutionalised there as a patient. He had originally wanted to be a teaching hospital physician, and his first job was as a medical superintendent at St. Mary’s in Paddington. He began researching pernicious anaemia, then a chronic condition that could only be treated by eating liver; almost immediately, he announced a dramatic breakthrough, claiming it could be more effectively treated with massive doses of iron. He wrote papers that were published in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, but his theory was conclusively shot down: it turned out it was not the iron in liver that made it effective, but the complex of chemicals that would later be known as Vitamin B-12. Sargant subsequently fell into a severe depression and was hospitalised for several months."


"Ritual Sex Possession in Witchcraft Ceremony, England"
"Collapse Phase in Orgasm"

"Beatle Possession" 
(c.1964)


Mike Jay
OVER THE EDGE

‘Absorbingly interesting’, wrote Bertrand Russell to William Sargant in 1957, on reading an advance copy of his book Battle for the Mind; ‘I have not enough medical knowledge to form a critical estimate of your theory but it is the kind of theory I feel inclined to accept’. He was a little puzzled, however, as to why Sargant had included a foreword stressing that his book was not an attack on religion. ‘There is no more materialism involved’, he wrote, ‘than in the generally accepted truth that alcohol intoxicates’. But Sargant was anticipating greater resistance. He replied: ‘We shall find out how many are still terrified by the thought that they may be ruled by their brains rather than their souls!’.

Battle for the Mind was the public showcase for Sargant’s claim to have discovered a universal truth: that the human brain has a hidden back door through which its programming can be hijacked and overwritten. When subjects are driven over the edge by relentless stresses or stimuli such as drumming, dancing or drugs, their rational faculties and willpower are disabled; the mental slate can be wiped clean, and the most bizarre beliefs imprinted so deeply that they are powerless to doubt them. Although this mechanism had lain undiscovered through history, the techniques and practices that induce it had controlled humanity, in Sargant’s words, ‘from the Stone Age to Hitler’.

Sargant’s theory caught the wave of Cold War paranoia about ‘brainwashing’ that began with the Stalinist show trials of 1936-8 and had been heightened during the 1950s by the mysteriously glazed confessions of the Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty and the US pilots shot down over North Korea. His chilling descriptions of Pavlovian conditioning dovetailed with rumours that Stalin had extracted from Pavlov techniques for human manipulation that he had never committed to print. His status as a leading psychiatrist both drew on and enhanced the profession’s postwar mystique, and the book’s startling photographs of orgasmic trance states, from bare-breasted voodoo ceremonies to Appalachian serpent-handling cults, combined sensationalism with clinical authority. Sargant’s reduction of faith to mental programming – describing John Wesley as ‘the greatest brainwasher of the last two hundred years’ – presented a stark image of a modern world that had outgrown religious consolation but was not yet mature enough to resist the new forms of control rising up to replace it.

voodoo

Sargant’s vision was endorsed by the top ranks of the British intelligentsia. Even more enthusiastic than Bertrand Russell was Aldous Huxley, who had already explored the extremes of religious fanaticism and possession in The Devils of Loudun (1952). In its appendix he had drawn chilling parallels with the modern age of brainwashing: ‘Herded into mobs’, he wrote, humanity en masse is liable to ‘fall into a state of heightened suggestibility, resembling that which follows an injection of sodium amytal…while in this state they will believe any nonsense bawled at them, will act upon any command…’. Huxley welcomed Sargant’s ‘enlightening book’ in his Brave New World Revisited (1958), and spread its influence considerably through his lectures and broadcasts. The following year Sargant noted with delight that ‘Aldous Huxley mentioned the book on television and this had the immediate result of selling over 1000 copies the next week!’.

Sargant’s transition from psychiatrist to populist was aided by his collaboration with the poet Robert Graves, who reworked his original manuscript extensively, adding classical and Shakespearian references that, in Sargant’s archly Pavlovian phrase, ‘certainly make the saliva flow’. Along with literary gloss, Graves contributed the preface that Bertrand Russell found too apologetic: both he and Sargant were concerned that without it the book would be seen simply as an attack on religion, and its deeper message lost. This was also the reason Graves gave for keeping his co-authorship ‘as much as possible in the shadows’, as he put it: ‘I am Public Enemy No. 1 to the churches’.

Battle for the Mind brought together researches from within and outside Sargant’s psychiatric career; it was both highly idiosyncratic and unmistakably a product of its times. He came from a family of devout Methodists, and although he had long rejected their faith he had their missionary zeal. From the beginning his career had been a crusade for mental illness to be viewed and treated as a physical disease of the brain. It was characterised by the search for the magic bullet: a drug potent enough to ‘wipe the slate clean’ and allow the brain’s deep structures to be reprogrammed. Whenever a new drug or physical therapy emerged, he would be among the first to try it – and if it failed, to double the dose, or the voltage.

Throughout his career, Sargant’s defense of his extreme methods would return to the horrors of Hanwell Mental Hospital, where he first worked as a locum in Hanwell-236x300the early 1930s: a grim Victorian asylum where the majority of patients had been ‘put away’ for life, kept docile by bromides and straitjackets. The latest therapeutic ideas revolved around the theories of Freud and his associates, but it was abundantly clear to Sargant that talking cures would never heal more than a tiny percentage of these chronic cases. At the same time, evidence was emerging from the wider medical world that so-called ‘mental illness’ could be responsive to physical treatment. The dementia of tertiary syphilis was now treatable by the new ‘magic bullets’ of salvarsan or the malaria ‘fever cure’. Other experimental therapies, such as electric shock treatment for depression, seemed poised to reduce further intractable categories of mental illness to treatable brain disorders, and establish psychiatry on a solid bedrock of clinical medicine.

When he joined the staff of the Maudsley Hospital in 1935 Sargant found a regime receptive to these ideas. The superintendent, Edward Mapother, was an old-time Victorian neurologist distrustful of intellectuals and their theories and open to practical experiments. Sargant, who by his own account revered Mapother ‘to the point of hero-worship’, joined battle with him against both the Freudians and the left-liberal proponents of ‘community therapy’ who saw the roots of mental illness in poverty and social exclusion. Together they pioneered aggressive interventions such as ECT and huge doses of barbiturates and insulin.

Yet in his many tellings of the Hanwell story, there was one crucial fact Sargant always omitted: he himself had been institutionalised there as a patient. He had originally wanted to be a teaching hospital physician, and his first job was as a medical superintendent at St. Mary’s in Paddington. He began researching pernicious anaemia, then a chronic condition that could only be treated by eating liver; almost immediately, he announced a dramatic breakthrough, claiming it could be more effectively treated with massive doses of iron. He wrote papers that were published in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, but his theory was conclusively shot down: it turned out it was not the iron in liver that made it effective, but the complex of chemicals that would later be known as Vitamin B-12. Sargant subsequently fell into a severe depression and was hospitalised for several months.

His depressions, which would recur throughout his life, complicate the no-nonsense certainty of the persona Sargant projected. For some colleagues (such as his one-time registrar David, now Lord Owen) his sensitivity to depression, though concealed behind a carapace of bullish optimism, gave him a profound insight into his patients and their needs. For others, his hidden story revealed him as a physician manqué: drummed out of his chosen profession, he was determined to demonstrate that psychiatry, despite its lower prestige, was ‘proper medicine’ in its own right. His lifelong contempt for talking cures could be seen as an insistence that there was no hidden story to be uncovered; his heroic therapies and extreme doses take on a darker tinge as expressions of frustration or rage at stubbornly persistent mental conditions that mirrored his own; and his reductive physical theories could be read as a lifelong quest to wipe away the stigma of mental illness, for his patients and for himself.

war-300x232It was during the Second World War that Sargant discovered the power of drugs to push the mind over the edge and allow the psychiatrist to reorder its contents. In 1940 his Maudsley department was reassigned to the Sutton Emergency Hospital, an old workhouse and tramp hospice in Surrey, and tasked with treating the sufferers of ‘war neurosis’ flooding in from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. Sargant, along with his friend and superintendent Eliot Slater, began experimenting with injections of sodium amytal, barbiturates and pentothal: sedatives that some in psychoanalysis and the military had begun to refer to as ‘truth drugs’. With large doses, Sargant discovered, some soldiers would begin to talk about their experiences, return to the source of their trauma and even, with prompting, relive it in all its emotional intensity. He discovered that ether was the best drug for ‘artifical excitement of mounting degree’: he would strap subjects down and hold the mask over their face while telling them urgently that they were trapped in a burning tank or exposed behind enemy lines. ‘Physical restraint’, he noted, ‘adds to their excitement’. If more stimulus was needed, he would inject them intravenously with methamphetamine. In a series of papers crammed with dramatic case histories, he claimed that by the end of the war he had treated 10,000 casualties, with many spectacular testimonies of success (‘I feel fine. I am a different fellow!’).

Sargant described this process as ‘abreaction’, a term adopted from Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s technique of relieving hysteria by ‘talking it out’. During the First World War it had been attempted with hypnosis; Sargant’s heroic version, predicated on powerful physical and chemical stimuli, positioned him at the cutting edge of medicine, a position cemented by the textbook he co-authored with Slater that appeared in 1944, An Introduction to the Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry. It would remain a standard work for decades, its last edition emerging in 1981; over the years its list of abreactive drug treatments would swell to include everything from carbon dioxide to mescaline, psilocybin and LSD. Sargant’s pharmacopeia was in constant flux, his treatment modalities always peppered with caveats such as ‘may increase instability’ and ‘many patients are unsuitable’. Breakthroughs were announced in each new edition, but the studies to support them emerged more rarely, and those discredited were quietly dropped.

After the war Sargant was invited to spend a year as a visiting professor at Duke University in North Carolina, and it was here that his ideas took on dimensions that carried them beyond the confines of psychiatry. Shortly after the Normandy invasion he had met an American military psychiatrist, Major Howard Fabing, who had pressed on him with the zeal of a convert a series of lectures entitled Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry, delivered by Ivan Pavlov shortly before his death in 1936.

Pavlov-300x188In Pavlov Sargant found his master theorist, an anti-Freud for the biopsychiatry vanguard. Pavlov’s experiments with dogs had shown that reflexes could not only be conditioned but, under particular forms of stressful stimulus, broken down and reprogrammed. Some character types were more resistant to stress than others but, animal or human, all would eventually be driven through the same stages of collapse: exhaustion would be followed by a breakdown in conditioned behaviour, succeeded by negative or opposite forms of previously established traits. From this point Pavlov’s ungainly terms for the stages of this process – ‘equivalent’, ‘paradoxical’ and ‘ultraparadoxical’ – took on a prominent role in Sargant’s work, setting it apart from the psychiatric mainstream and giving his writings a hermetic aura, alluring to some and exasperating to others.

His discovery of Pavlov awoke his curiosity about the phenomenon of religious conversion, with its similar power to erase and rewrite all previous conditioning. Five of his uncles had been Methodist preachers, and his childhood had been populated by adults who ‘had been suddenly and spiritually changed, as it were in the twinkling of an eye’. Re-reading John Wesley’s Journals, he was struck by how closely the hysteria whipped up by his sermons paralleled his own chemically-enhanced abreaction sessions at the Sutton Emergency Hospital. Delving into William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, he was astonished to discover that the distinctive markers of the conversion experience could be recognised throughout history, from Mohammed to Saint Teresa to born-again Baptism. He took advantage of Duke University’s location to attend the services of North Carolina’s backwoods revivalists, where he witnessed the congregation handling live poisonous snakes and surrendering to hysterical twitching fits that they called ‘exercises of the spirit’. He took photographs to document the facial expressions of mounting tension and terror that preceded the collapse into the arms of God.

snake_handling

Sargant returned to London with his star in the ascendant. He left the Maudsley to become head of the department of psychological medicine at St. Thomas’ Hospital, where he began training up a cadre of junior psychiatrists and developing therapies such as ECT, insulin coma and methedrine abreaction. In public lectures, Sargant hailed his regime as ‘an exciting new beginning in psychiatry’, comparable to the introduction of anaesthesia in surgery. His duties to the newly established NHS left him plenty of time for private practice on Harley Street, for which he was in great demand (he would even, for a suitable fee, undertake talking cures, at which he was quietly rather good). Moving into a Regency apartment behind Lord’s cricket ground alongside publishers, actors and politicians, he felt he had finally attained the status of the senior doctors at St. Mary’s whose Daimlers he had admired and envied as a medical student.

But in 1954 his career was interruped by a recurrence of the tuberculosis that, as a teenager, had put an end to his promising rugby career; his slow recovery was dogged by a severe, though unacknowledged, recurrence of depression. The new drug streptomycin cured the TB, but there was no such magic bullet for his mental condition (he turned down offers of psychotherapy). Instead he reluctantly gave up smoking and went to recuperate in Majorca, where he met Robert Graves and shared with him his convalescent reading on Pavlov and religious conversion.

possessionGraves, who was enthusiastically working Gordon Wasson’s theories about ancient mushroom cults into his new edition of The White Goddess, was equally quick to interpolate Sargant’s ideas into his classical visions of Corybantic rites, Dionysian dithyrambs and oracular possession. He offered to help Sargant turn the material into a popular book against the advice of his friend George Simon, a radiologist at St. Bart’s who told him that Sargant was ‘a charming man known for his eccentric views on lobotomy and hallucinogenic drugs’. Flat broke, Graves ignored Simon and asked for a third of the royalities, which turned out to be considerable.



After Battle for the Mind, Sargant’s energies began to ebb away from psychiatric practice and towards popularising his theories. He loved public speaking and broadcasting, and the entrée that his fame gave him to worlds beyond his professional life. Over the following decade he became a global media figure: filming documentaries, travelling to international conferences and networking with the elite of the emerging consciousness-expansion movement. Although his response to the sixties counterculture was cartoonishly reactionary – he wrote newspaper articles warning that ‘drug traffickers in central London watch for ecstatic dancers to find their prey’, who have made themselves suggestible by ‘hyperventilation and rhythmic head movements’ – he was intensely curious about the hidden world of the swinging sixties. Sexual orgasm, he believed, produced a similar state to trance and possession, and he researched its use in spiritual traditions from tantric Hinduism to the group orgiastic rites of Aleister Crowley.

sexThe swinging sixties were a congenial environment for a media-friendly psychiatrist whose theory of abreaction gave him a specialist interest in sex, drugs, trance, possession and voodoo. Popular interest in the extremes of human experience was fed by journals such as the partwork encyclopaedia Man, Myth and Magic; Sargant was invited onto its editorial board, and in turn invited its editor Richard Cavendish to perform Robert Graves’ role in polishing his follow-up book, The Mind Possessed.

Psychedelic drugs were, naturally, a subject of particular interest, and one where he regarded the counterculture as ignorant gatecrashers, having worked with LSD and psilocybin in the fifties. He was dismissive of the claims now being made for the psychedelic experience, which he regarded as intrinsically meaningless: its true significance was its ability to impress any belief, no matter how absurd, with religious certainty. These drugs were a potent tool for indoctrination, whether in the hands of shamans, psychiatrists or hippie priests.

Yet while he was making this global lap of honour at the climax of his career, the foundations of Sargant’s world were being turned upside down. In anthropology, a new generation of ‘participant-observers’ were championing the primitive against the civilised: he was shocked to discover at a conference on ‘Possession States’ at Paris in 1968 that ‘some of the anthropologists present had acquired a semi-belief in the gods whose cults they studied’. For Sargant, this was missing the point on an epic scale: throughout history these suggesible states had been manipulated by the priestcraft who allowed access to the trance, and who had exploited the power it gave them to control the minds of their community. There was no spiritual wisdom to be found here, only a functional glitch in the brain, and a sleep of reason from which humanity was finally waking.

Closer to home, his profession was becoming less friendly. Psychiatry had been revolutionised since the mid-fifties by chlorpromazine (Largactyl), the first of the antipsychotic drugs that had proved more effective and far less damaging than ECT and lobotomy. Sargant hailed it as the promise of his physical therapies fulfilled and the beginning of the end of mental illness, yet he persisted with therapies such as a ‘deep narcosis’ regime of continuous sedation, where severe depressives were kept asleep twenty hours a day for up to three months, taken from their beds only for toilet visits and ECT sessions. The gusto with which he played his role as Cold War alarmist made him a figure of fun to a new generation of psychiatrists who found his heroic therapies ethically dubious and his reductive theories ever less plausible. Despite having built his department from a rat-infested basement to a dynamic teaching clinic, he was never offered a professorship at St. Thomas’. Outside the hospital, the voices of the emerging anti-psychiatry movement were becoming more strident: the likes of Sargant, and not his patients, were the true psychopaths.

Beatles_possessionSargant came to see his mission in ever grander perspective. ‘The whole process of civilisation’, he wrote in 1973, ‘depends almost entirely on a number of people being born in each new generation who have important new beliefs and ideas, and hold on to them with obsessional tenacity’. The modern world was adrift, its population swayed and manipulated by forces that were understood only by a handful of specialists. Its future depended on humanity summoning its powers of reason, but ‘the last dread paradox’ was that the power of reasoned argument was severely limited: minds ‘can only be changed radically and swiftly by the methods we have been considering’. People could be manipulated to do most things, but not to choose freedom.

In 1975 he was offered the biggest stage yet on which to play his role: the trial of Patty Hearst, the heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and filmed two months later carrying out a bank robbery together with them, armed with an M1 carbine. When she was finally captured a year later she gave her occupation as ‘urban guerilla’; her defence team claimed that she had been brainwashed. The trial was a global sensation, and the defining legal test for the reality of brainwashing; Sargant was contacted by the defence attorney Al Johnson, conducted five lengthy interviews with Hearst and prepared an expert witness statement. In it he wrote that Hearst’s state of mind, and her ‘nervous over-breathing’, reminded him of the battle exhaustion he had witnessed in World War 2. He testified that her initial confinement by the SLA had been enough to force a conversion to anything: ‘Had I personally been subjected for nine weeks to such mental stresses, I should have been unable to resist’. He concluded that her renunciation of her bourgeois life had been an involuntary ‘ultraparadoxial’ conversion, comparable to the moment when ‘the fleeing exhausted rabbit suddenly turns and runs into the mouth of the pursuing stoat’.

But this defence was problematic from the start. In correspondence with Johnson, Sargant suggested that juries might prefer the term ‘conversion’ to ‘brainwashing’, with its now dated resonances of the McCarthy era and the Red Scare. The prosecution offered a contrasting picture of Hearst as the child of a new era: one characterised, at least for privileged members like herself, by expansive personal freedoms and restless self-fashioning in search of new identities. Against Sargant’s image of a brainwashed and broken victim were set the defiantly posed photos of Patti in beret and army fatigues, toting her sawn-off rifle in front of the SLA’s blazon of a seven-headed cobra. As the trial progressed it became ever more plausible that Hearst was unrepentant, and the brainwashing defence had been the idea of her family who were unable to believe she might have chosen voluntarily to become a terrorist. Sargant was never called to testify, and the jury agreed with the prosecution that Hearst’s robbery was an act of free will. The battle for the mind was over, for all but the determined few.



Originally delivered as a lecture at Altered Consciousness, Queen Mary College, 17/11/2013

©2015 Mike Jay
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