If I remember correctly, in Indonesia they used “communists are witches”
For people reading this who want to learn about the context: watch this film. or read The Jakarta Method .
My personal favorite one to pull out just because it sounds so cartoony but the reality is horrific:
The Canadian Government at one point knowingly allowed a literal mad scientist to run brainwashing and mind control experiments on uninformed patients in a literal castle called Ravenscrag.
CW for torture in the spoiler, there’s some really horrific stuff in here
spoiler
Of course our mad scientist friend, Dr. Cameron, was also funded by the CIA as part of MK ULTRA, but the Canadian government provided more funding for it for longer than the CIA did. These experiments were touted as a new treatment for psychiatric disorders, so many of the victims were people struggling with their mental health to whom Cameron was their last resort. They were told that this was the best treatment money could buy.
The “treatments” involved being restrained to a hospital bed, given absurd doses of LSD to the point of near-unconsciousness, electrocuted, and forced to listen to a series of messages on repeat through headphones or speakers installed directly into their pillows whether the person was awake or not. These sessions could go on for up to 20 hours at a time. The goal was to “depattern” a person and reduce them to a “clean slate” that Cameron could work off of. A person was considered “completely depatterned” when they were incoherent, incontinent, had trouble swallowing, and couldn’t even remember their own family. One man, after reaching this state, was repeatedly told that he was in Ravenscrag as punishment for murdering his own mother, to the point where he had memories of doing it, and only found out that it wasn’t true when the program ended and she greeted him at the door, alive and well. At least one of the victims was pregnant during this, and only got a break from the electrocution when she had reached the 8 month mark. She had to re-learn how to boil water.
Cameron’s “research” would later be referenced in the CIA’s Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, which would be used as the basis for the infamous “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA in black sites such as in Indonesia and Guantanamo. The Canadian government has acknowledged the experiments and “compensated” some victims, but refuses to take responsibility.
The treatments you describe is a carbon copy of what they did to prisoners in the states. I wonder your mad scientist was the pioneer of the program? MK ULTRA was fucking wild.
They were eventually used to torture prisoners in Guantanamo, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were linked.
Sometimes I wonder what was in all those files that were destroyed by the CIA before they could be released to the public. If they deem stuff like this acceptable to admit to, what did they do that was so bad they felt the need to destroy all evidence of it?
yeah this showed up in “The Jakarta Method”
they also created a moral panic in indonesia saying communist women were attacking military men and gelding them.
This resulted in massive amounts of
CW
rape and murder
against women in general, especially women on the Indonesian left
CIA used to hide speakers in the jungle in Vietnam to play spooky ghost recordings in Vietnamese telling the locals not to fight
:marx-hi: Capital is dead labour, vampire-like
:cia: No, actually it’s real vampires
