TRACES OF MIND CONTROL FROM COLD WAR AMERICAUllman, S.Martschukat, J.Stieglitz, O.Arzouni, N.Fischer, R.Mackert, N. & Taubitz, J.2011. Retrieved from http://traces.brynmawr.edu/traces/

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-228
Author(s):  
William Douglas Woodypi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mind Control

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Did L. Ron Hubbard Believe in Brainwashing?

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 62-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Introvigne
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Control Techniques ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
Other Information

In 1955 the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International claimed it had obtained a secret Soviet brainwashing manual, and then published it. Based on that text, and other information he claimed to have received on Communist mind-control techniques, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard mentioned brainwashing in several lectures. In this article, I discuss the contested authorship of this manual and conclude that it probably was written by Hubbard, although other hypotheses cannot be entirely dismissed. I also distinguish between the Communist brainwashing Hubbard described within a Cold War context, and anticultists’ claims that brainwashing is practiced by “cults,” including Scientology.

Technologies for Intuition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaina Lemon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Dyadic Communication ◽  
Collective Effervescence ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Over Time

Cold War paranoia can only partly describe or explain the twentieth-century dreams of telepathy. The nightmare shades of mind control and crowd frenzy have long alternated with the pastels of love and collective effervescence. Both extremes materialized over time, along tangled circuits of wars, events, and interactions staged across borders since at least the nineteenth century. The Cold War and its fences fed fascination with the workings and the failures of contact and communication. Opposed sides accused each other of jamming media and spinning propaganda even while they mirrored fantasies of connection. This book contrasts and connects Russian and American channels and means to check channels, with special attention to intersections of the telepathic with the theatrical. It theorizes links between historically layered struggles over technologies for intuition and dominant models of communication—commonsense or theoretical. It demonstrates that theories resting on models of individual sincerity and of dyadic communication warp understandings of the Soviet Union and Russia—and thus of the United States as well. It proposes that attention to the means of making and checking contact, that is, to the phatic functions in language, offers a way out of the impasses and paradoxes of paranoia.

Music at the Edge of the Construct

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-273
Author(s):  
Phil Ford
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
War Discourse

Abstract Writers across a wide spectrum of cold war discourse voiced an anxiety that American minds could be made to see things as some alien will might want us to see them. Cold War popular culture drew on such notions to fashion a spectacle of mind control and depicted advertising, Hollywood, and politics as sites for the manufacture of illusions. Each site finds its critique in a film from the first postwar decades: A Star Is Born (1954) shows Hollywood myths overwhelming the lives of their creators; John Cassavetes's Shadows (1957/1959) voices the hip critique of commodified mass culture; and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) spins a paranoid scenario in which American politics, Communist brainwashing, and television conspire to create a counterfeit reality so total there may be no escape. These films picture their characters struggling to escape the construct of false images that besets them. The musical scoring of these films, though while radically different, defines the boundary of the construct and marks the distance between reality and image.

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