IBM: Computerised crimes against humanity

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See also: Edwin Black – IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (2002)

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In December 2023, IBM released Quatum System 2

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Version 1

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Benthams Panopticon

 


Further References

  • Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York:Viking Penguin, Inc., 1963; Penguin Books, 1965.
  • Armanski, Gerhard, Maschinen des Terrors: Das Lager (KZ und GULAG) in der Moderne. Munster: Verlag Westfalisches Dampfboot, 1993.
  • Austrian, Geoffrey D. Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
  • Baumgartner, Andreas. Die vergessenen Frauen von Mauthausen: Die weiblichen Haftlinge des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen und ihre Geschichte. Wien: Verlag Osterreich, 1997.
  • Barker, Kenneth, ed. The NIV Study Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995.
  • Belden, Thomas Graham and Marva Robins Belden. The Lengthening Shadow: The Life of Thomas J. Watson. Boston: Litde, Brown and Company, 1962.
  • Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know. Boston: Litde, Brown and Company, 1993.
  • Black, Edwin. The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. New York: Macmillan, 1984; Chicago: Dialog Press, 1999.
  • Borkin, Joseph. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. New York: The Free Press, 1978.
  • Bradsher, Greg, comp. Holocaust-Era Assets: A Finding Aid to Records at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. National Archives and Records Administration, 1999.
  • Breitman, Richard. Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
  • Browning, Christopher R. The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  • Brynen, Rex. Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990.
  • Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany,’ 1900-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  • Carmille, Robert. Des Apparences A La Realite: Mise au Point, Le “Fichier Juif”: Rapport de la Commission presidee par Rene Remond au Premier Ministre, 1996.
  • Centre Historique des Archives Nationales. Inventaire des Archives du Commissariat General aux Questions Juives et du Service de Restitution des Biens des Victimes des Lois et Mesures de Spoliation. Paris: Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, 1998.
  • Choldin, Harvey M. Looking for the Last Percent: The Controversy Over Census Undercounts. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
  • Clements, Bruce. From Ice Set Free: The Story of Otto Kiep. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.
  • Connolly, James. History of Computing in Europe. IBM World Trade Corporation, circa 1967.
  • Cortada, James W Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
  • Dassbach, Carl H. A. Global Enterprises and the World Economy: Ford General Motors, and IBM, the Emergence of the Transnational Enterprise. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989.
  • De Jong, L. Het Koninkrijk in de Tweede Wereldoorlog Vol. 3: Mai 1940, ‘s Gravenhage, 1970.
  • De Jong, L. Holland Fights the Nazis. London: Lindsay Drummon.
  • Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972.
  • van den Ende, Jan, Knopen, kaarten en chips: De geschiedenis van de automatisering bij het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Amsterdam, 1991.
  • Engelbourg, Saul. International Business Machines: A Business History. Arno Press, 1976.
  • Erwich, B. and J.G.S.J. van Maarseveen, eds., Een eeuw statistieken: Historisch-Methodologische schetsen van de Nederlandse officiële statistieken in de Twintigste eeuw, Amsterdam, 1999.
  • Fein, Helen. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: The Free Press, 1979.
  • Ferencz, Benjamin B. Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
  • Foy, Nancy, The Sun Never Sets on IBM, New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1975.
  • Flint, Charles R. Memories of an Active Life: Men, and Ships, and Sealing Wax, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923.
  • Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
  • Friedlander, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Volume 1: The Years of Persecution. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
  • Garr, Doug. Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround of the Decade. New York: HarperCollins 1999.
  • Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.
  • Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996; Vintage Books, 1997.
  • Gutman, Israel. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.
  • Gutman, Yisrael and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994; published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
  • Haft, Cynthia J. The Bargain and the Bridle: The General Union of the Israelites of France, 1941-1944. Chicago: Dialog Press, 1983.
  • Herzberg, Abel J. Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen. Translated by Jack Santcross. New York: IB. Tauris.
  • Hilberg, Raul, ed. Documents of Destruction: Germany and Jewry 1933-1945. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1971.
  • Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1961; Harper Colophon Books, 1979;
  • Hilberg, Raul, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, eds. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow; Prelude to Doom. Translated by Stanislaw Staron and the staff of Yad Vashem. New York: Stein and Day, 1979.
  • Hirschfeld, Gerhard. Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands Under German Occupation, 1940-1945. Translated by Louise Willmot. New York: Berg, 1988.
  • Hoess, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. New York: Popular Library, 1959.
  • Ioanid, Radu. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.
  • Jagendorf, Siegried. Jagendorf’s Foundry: A Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust, 1941-1944. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
  • Kahn, Annette. Le Fichier. Paris: Robert Laffont, S.A., 1993.
  • Katsh, Abraham I., ed. and translator. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965.
  • Katsh, Abraham I., ed. and translator. The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. New York: Collier Books, 1973.
  • Kermish, Joseph, ed. To Live With Honor and Die With Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” [“Oneg Skabbath”] Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986.
  • Klee, Ernst. “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens.” Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag GmbH 1999.
  • Kleine Chronik der IBM Deutschland, IBM Corporation, 1993.
  • Kolb, Eberhard. Bergen-Belsen: From “Detention Camp” to Concentration Camp, 1943-1945. Translated by Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985, 1986.
  • Krausnick, Helmut, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen. Anatomy of the SS State. Translated by Richard Barry, Marian Jackson, and Dorothy Long. New York: Walker and Company, 1968.
  • von Lang, Jochen, ed. Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Farrar. Straus and Giroux, 1983.
  • Lewin, Abraham. A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto. New York: Free Press, 1988.
  • Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986.
  • Linden, Michael. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001.
  • Littman, Sol. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Watson Publishing International, 2002.
  • Lochner, Louis P. What About Germany? New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1942.
  • Löwenthal, Richard. Report from Berlin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948.
  • Lüthy, Herbert. Der Weltkonzern IBM: Eine Unternehmensgeschichte. Berlin: Verlag Chemie, 1985.
  • McFee, Inez N., ed. IBM World Trade Corporation: World Trade Corporation Facts. IBM Corporation, 1970.
  • Medoff, Rafael. Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948. University of Alabama Press, 2002.
  • Mendelsohn, John and Donald G. Schilling. The IBM 360/67 and CP/CMS: Introduction and Availability of a Time Sharing System. Watson Research Center, IBM Corporation, 1967.
  • Miczek, Eva. At the Mercy of Strangers: Growing Up on the Edge of the Holocaust. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1998.
  • Minco, Marga. Het Bittere Kruid. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1957.
  • Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur. Das Dritte Reich. Hamburg: Verlag Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1931.

Operation Mind Control (Bowart, 1978)

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Download book as PDF: libgen.gs/ads.php?md5=5b759b56e154df6303bb47b051dfb3db
Audiobook: open.spotify.com/show/18iTbULC7tuii1Y3qf9LOr
Interview with James Martinez: vimeo.com/7952557

BiBTeX
@book{book:{91532088},
title = {Operation Mind Control},
author = {Walter Bowart},
isbn = {0440167558; 9780440167556},
year = {1978},
url = {libgen.li/file.php?md5=5b759b56e154df6303bb47b051dfb3db}}


This text is an excerpt from a chapter of Bärtås and Ekman’s collection of essays Orienterarsjukan och andra berättelser.

URL: biblioteket.stockholm.se/titel/516229
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The letter from Professor Delgado carries two insignias. One is made of Hebrew letters on what looks like a Torah scroll. Under the scroll it says “lux et veritas”—light and truth. The other insignia reads “Investigacion Ramon y Cajal.” In our letter to him, we have explained that we are two artists who have been studying his “astonishing research,” and that we are interested in his views on the relationship between humans and machines. José M.R. Delgado has written that he will be most happy to receive us at his home in Madrid.

Delgado’s name is a constant on various conspiracy websites dedicated to the topic of mind control; those with names like The Government Psychiatric Torture Site, Mind Control Forum, and Parascope. The Internet has in fact become the medium of conspiracy theorists. The network functions as an endless library where the very web structure lends itself to a conspiratorial frame of mind. The idea that every phenomenon and person can be connected to another phenomenon and person is the seed of the conspiracy theorist’s claim to “make the connections between things,” track the flow of power, and show how everything hangs together within some larger murky context.

Before traveling to Madrid, we get a hold of Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, the 1969 Delgado book most often cited on the Net. The book has has been gathering dust for 30 years at the university’s psychology library: it has never been cracked open. It is a disturbing book, less because of its photographs of animal experiments than because of the triumphal tone of the writing. Delgado discusses how we have managed to tame and civilize our surrounding nature. Now it is time to civilize our inner being. The scientist sees himself on the verge of a new era where humans will undergo “psycho-civilization” by linking their brains directly to machines.

“Ramon y Cajal”—the name on one of the two insignia—is referred to in Delgado’s book. Cajal was a famous histologist who became the young Delgado’s mentor and inspiration. In his acknowledgements, Delgado cites Cajal’s telling claim that “knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make man the true master of creation, that his most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquering of his own brain.”1

Professor Delgado is now 85 and lives in a suburb of Madrid. Madrid is also the home of an anonymous group of people who call themselves Nosman, and are dedicated to gathering information about Delgado and his career. We e-mail Nosman and receive some awkwardly written responses that oscillate between warnings about the Spanish security agencies and suspicious questions about us and our interest in Delgado. For some reason, they refuse to meet with us but give us Delgado’s email address anyway. Delgado, on the other hand, responds immediately when we get to Madrid. He is very eager to invite us to lunch.

It was at Madrid University that Delgado began his research on pain and pleasure as the means of behavior control. After World War II, he became the head of the Department of neuropsychiatry at Yale’s medical school. In 1966, he became a professor in physiology. By that time, he had further developed the research of the Swiss physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Walter Rudolph Hess who had used electric stimulation to chart how different parts of the brain control different motor functions.

After a series of spectacular experiments on animals in Bermuda, Delgado wrote: “If you insert electrodes directly into the brains of cats and apes, they will behave like electronic toys. A whole series of motor functions can be triggered based on which button the experimenter pushes. This applies to all body parts: front and back paws, the tail, the hind parts, the head, and the ears.”

Using electrostimulation in a group of gibbon apes, Delgado succeeded in dismantling the usual power structure within the group. He gave a female ape with a low ranking a control box connected to electrodes that were implanted in the group’s alpha male, and the female learned to use the box to turn the alpha male on and off at will.

The electrodes were inserted into the ape’s brain and connected to an instrument that Delgado called the stimoceiver. The stimoceiver was an ideal instrument for two-way communication. Researchers could affect and at the same time register activity in the brain. From earlier prototypes where the lab animals were connected with wires, a remote control model was later developed that could send and receive signals over FM waves. The device was developed from the telemetric equipment used to send signals to and from astronauts in space. “We have already established radio contact with space; it is now time to establish contact with the human brain,”—a recurring refrain in Delgado’s articles.

The taxi lets us out in an upscale suburb of Madrid where a light rain is falling on the brick houses. A church service has just finished and people in Burberry clothes are streaming out of a strange concrete church. At the entrance of the apartment building where Delgado lives, we are met by a fashionable and exuberant American woman of indeterminable age. The woman, who is Delgado’s wife, talks nonstop in the elevator that opens directly into the apartment. The apartment is decorated in a fussy, bourgeois style. If it were not such a bleak day, the view would extend all the way to the Pardo Mountains. Delgado gives us a very cordial welcome. He is a proper old gentleman with sharp, intelligent eyes.

Delgado says that he has had a nightmare about our visit and woke up crying in the middle of the night. In the dream, we had showed up barefoot and in short sleeve shirts and had proceeded to gulp down all of his meringues. An hour later, we are seated at the marble table in his dining room and are served meringues and strawberry tarts after a large meal. We do not want to have more than one meringue each.

In a CNN special from 1985 called “Electro-magnetic Weapons and Mind Control,” the reporter claims that Delgado’s experiments were limited to animals. Nor is there anything in the texts on the various websites that indicates how far Delgado went in his research. His experiments on humans seem to have fallen into a strange collective amnesia. But anyone can walk into any well-stocked American medical library and take out Delgado’s own reports and articles on the subject. There we can find his own candid, open descriptions of how he moved on from experimenting on animals to humans. In an article called “Radio Control Behavior” in the February 1969 issue of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Delgado, Dr. Mark, and several other colleagues describe what was the first clinical use of Intracerebral Radio Stimulation (IRS) on a human being. The stimoceiver itself only weighed 70 grams and was held fast by a bandage. One of the patients hid her stimoceiver with a wig because the experiments lasted days or weeks. The patients were scrutinized thoroughly. Everything they said was taped, their EEG was recorded, and they were photographed at regular intervals in order to document changes in their facial expressions.

In one of the article’s photographs, we see two of the subjects engaged in “spontaneous activity.” They are both girls with bandages over their heads. The girl in the background is holding something to her mouth, perhaps a harmonica. The other girl is bent over a guitar. Delgado’s colleague, Dr. Mark, is smiling at them. Mark had already achieved some notoriety at this time by claiming that all anti-social behavior is caused by brain damage. His recommendation had been the mass scanning of the American population in order to detect such damage in time and “correct” it.

Delgado and Mark’s article offers short descriptions of the patients who have had the device affixed to their brain. A black fourteen-year-old girl on the border of developmental disability who grew up in a foster home suddenly goes into a fury that leads to the death of her two stepsisters. A thirty-five-year old white industrial designer who ends up killing his wife and children flies into a rage when other motorists try to overtake him and he chases them and tries to run them off the road. Their aggressive behavior is supposed to be registered by the stimoceiver in the way a seismograph registers the earth’s tremors and the same stimoceiver is then to “turn them off” via the FM transmitter.

Delgado bombards us with a steady stream of anecdotes, scientific comments, and provocative rhetorical questions that are only interrupted by occasional tender comments directed to his wife. He tells of his work at the Ramon y Cajal Institute in the 1930s. In order to save a few paltry pennies, he would take a short cut through the zoo on his way to and from work. He would wander through the zoo alone at dawn and dusk and would hear lions and tigers roaring in this jungle in the city. After the War, he came to conquer nature in his own way in Bermuda. Even his wife was delighted to see the alpha male gibbon collapse when the underlings pushed the control lever. “Do you remember how we thought of Franco?” says his wife. “Imagine being able to turn off the Generalisimo.” Delgado responds “But who could have put the electrodes into the dictator? With electromagnetic radiation we could have controlled the dictator from a distance. We did some experiments at Yale where we influenced the brain from up to 30 meters away.”

One of the most important reasons why we wanted to meet Delgado is that we imagined him and his activities as belonging to a borderland between fiction and reality, between science and madness. People in psychotic states of mind often feel themselves controlled by foreign voices or spend their lives trying to prove that they have had a transmitter implanted inside their skulls that dictates their actions and thoughts all day and night. We ask Delgado what he thinks of the fact that his research provides a realistic edge to such fantasies.

He answers that he has on several occasions been contacted by strangers who say they want to have their implants removed and also that he has been sued by people he has never seen. Delgado is silent about the article that appeared in the Spanish monthly magazine Tiempo last year, where he was interviewed about exactly such accusations. The Tiempo reporter claimed that Delgado has ties with the Spanish secret police.

Delgado stretches out after the strawberry tarts. He has come to think of a case in Pittsburg in the 1950s where a robber was offered a milder sentence in exchange for being lobotomized. “I was operating electrodes into people’s brains at that time together with my good friend David Koskoff.” It was Koskoff who carried out the lobotomy on the robber. The patient was quiet for a while after the operation but then reverted to carrying out robberies again. In despair over his own unreliability, he decided to take his own life. He wrote a suicide note addressed to Dr. Koskoff: “Doctor, all your work has been in vain. I am an incompetent man and a criminal. I am taking my life but I am shooting myself in the heart and not the head. I donate my brain to you for research.”

Delgado’s wife puts her arm on his shoulder and says “And very little has happened since then, dear. There are still lots of bums running around.” The comment makes us both look away.

A moment later, we are sitting on the sofa. Delgado admits that not one useful application of the stimoceiver has come out of his research. “We knew too little about the brain. It is much too complicated to be controlled. We never knew which parts of the brain we were stimulating with the stimoceiver. We didn’t even manage to prevent epileptic attacks, which we thought would be the simplest of things. We never found the area where epilepsy attacks originate.” He says all of this without a trace of bitterness, as if in passing.

We are surprised by his casual attitude toward the stimoceiver, which in the 1960s and 70s was heralded as a great contribution to science. To demonstrate the power of their invention, Delgado and his colleagues orchestrated violent scenes in the lab. In her book, The Brain Changers: Scientists and the New Mind Control, Maya Pine describes a film where Dr. Mark attaches a stimoceiver to an electrode in a woman’s brain:

As the film opens, the patient, a rather attractive young woman, is seen playing the guitar and singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” A psychiatrist sits a few feet away. She seems undisturbed by the bandages that cover her head like a tight hood, from her forehead to the back of her neck. Then a mild electric current is sent from another room, stimulating one of the electrodes in her right amygdala. Immediately, she stops singing, the brainwave tracings from her amygdala begin to show spikes, a sign of seizure activity. She stares blankly ahead. Suddenly she grabs her guitar and smashes it against the wall, narrowly missing the psychiatrist’s head.2

The same incident was described in one of Delgado’s own articles. This experiment was repeated three days in a row.

If there were any problems with the experiments for Delgado, these were not ethical in nature but technical. How do you replicate the lab situation in society? How do you cut off the electricity to the stimoceiver? How do you avoid scarring and inflammation where the stimoceiver enters the brain? But the problems did not provoke any doubts about the supposed success of the stimoceiver. In the long run, the technique could be used to make people happy from a distance.

“When did you stop the stimoceiver experiments?” we ask him. To our surprise, he responds indignantly that he has yet to do so. “After Yale, I have continued my experiments here in Spain, both on animals and on humans.” Delgado’s pragmatism does another pirouette and we are beginning to have trouble following him.

Delgado pours coffee with his trembling hands. Spanish guitar music from the stereo fills the silence. We look together through the three recent collection of essays that Delgado has placed in front of us. Their publication dates range from 1979 up to this year. There is no emphasis on neurophysiology in any of them. Instead, they address questions of learning and upbringing from a more general psychological point of view.

Until the end of the 70s, Delgado and his colleagues were considered conquerors of an unknown territory, a wild and expansive jungle, the landscape of the brain and the soul. Apparently Delgado never got very far into the jungle, which proved to be much too thick and impenetrable. He has apparently retired without any regrets. He has instead started to cultivate his own garden. “My new book is going to be called The Education of My Grandchildren and Myself.”

We ask if it is possible to learn to interpret the electrical language of the brain and mention the Swedish science journalist Göran Frankel’s interview with Delgado back in 1977.3 In the interview Delgado claims that it is only a question of time before we connect the brain directly into computers that can communicate with the brain’s electrical language.

Delgado makes a dismissive gesture and looks at us as if we are numskulls. “It is impossible to decode the brain’s language. We can obviously manipulate different forms of electrical activity but what does that prove?” When we ask him about his colleague, Dr. Robert G. Heath, who claimed to be able to cure schizophrenic patients with electrostimulation, Delgado breaks into a patronizing smile and says, “Yes, yes, you’re supposed to have a box on your stomach with cables coming out of it that attach to electrodes in your brain and you stimulate yourself. It never worked.”

We lead him to a discussion of his own patients. Delgado interrupts us: “I have never done experiments on people.” For a moment, we wonder if we’ll have to take out one of his own scientific articles and hold it in front of him as evidence. We start to look for our file with hundreds of medical reports and articles. “You have to understand,” he says. “There are incredibly stringent rules around experimenting on humans. All the experiments I was involved in had a therapeutic goal. They were for the patients’ best.”

In one of the Yale reports in our file, there is a description of an experiment on an epileptic mental patient. The report states that the woman has been in asylums for a long time, she is worried about her daughter, and suffers from economic hardship. Electrodes measuring 12 centimeters have been stuck into her brain, 5 centimeters of them inside the brain tissue. She is interviewed while being given periodic electrical stimulation. The woman is tossed between various emotional states and finds that strange words are coming to her mind. She experiences pain and sexual desire. At the end of the interview, she becomes flirty and her language becomes coarse, only to be ashamed later and ask to be excused for words that she felt had come to her from outside. The woman has been transformed into a speaking doll that unwillingly gives voice to her brain’s every whim.

Delgado, who had previously been so flattered by two artists being interested in his work, now seems to be looking at us with new eyes. Who are we? And what do we want? His tone is short and sharp. The temperature in the apartment has dropped a few degrees.

In Physical Control of the Mind, Delgado proudly sums up how he has “used electrodes implanted for days or months to block thought, speech, and movement, or to trigger joy, laughter, friendliness, verbal activity, generosity, fear, hallucinations, and memory.” With this in mind, we ask him what therapeutic results came from these experiments. “As a whole, they didn’t result in any methods, except in the case of patients with chronic pain.”
Delgado in his apartment in Madrid. Video still courtesy of Magnus Bärtås.

He looks at the clock and says that we only have five minutes left. But we do not want to abandon our questions about the patients. What happened to them? How long were the implants in their brains? Delgado now becomes somewhat vague. He says that it was other researchers that left the implants in for a long time, not him or Dr. Heath, and he does not recall which patients it was. The electrodes were taken out of his own patients after a couple of days and did not cause any injuries. “We killed maybe a few hundred neurons when we inserted the electrodes. But the brain has millions of neurons.”

When Delgado spoke in the 60s of “the precise interface between brain and machine,” it gave rise to a number of far-fetched military visions. His research was also mainly funded by military institutions such as the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force AeroMedical Research Laboratory.

In the US, the CIA and government research in (and use of) different means of behavior control was made public in a series of congressional hearings in 1974 as well as in a Senate investigation three years later. Witnesses offered a glimpse of the CIA’s astonishing experiments in the so-called MK-Ultra program. The list of MK-Ultra experiments is like a group photo of the extended family of behavioral technologies: hypnosis, drugs, psychological testing, sleep research, brain research, electromagnetism, lie detection. The specific operations had very imaginative names: Sleeping Beauty, Project Pandora, Woodpecker, Artichoke, Operation Midnight Climax.

One of MK-Ultra’s fields of interest was electromagnetic fields and their effect on human beings. In 1962 it was discovered that the Russians had directed microwave radiation at the American embassy in Moscow with the hope of penetrating through to the ambassador’s office. The CIA immediately mounted an investigation under the codename Project Pandora. Concurrently with his research on the stimoceiver, Delgado had begun research on electro-magnetic radiation and its capacity for influencing people’s consciousness, and there is speculation that Delgado may have been involved in Project Pandora.

The CIA arranged for apes to be brought to the embassy. When the apes were examined after a period of being radiated, it was discovered that they had undergone changes in their chromosomes and blood. The personnel at the embassy was later reported to have increased white blood cell counts of up to 40 percent. The Boston Globe reported that the ambassador himself suffered not only from bloody eyes and chronic headaches but also from a blood disease resembling leukemia.

We take up Delgado’s research on electromagnetic fields and their effect on people. “I could later do with electro-magnetic radiation what I did with the stimoceiver. It’s much better because there’s no need for surgery,” he explains. “I could make apes go to sleep. But I stopped that line of research fifteen years ago. But I’m sure they’ve done a lot more research on this in both the US and Russia.”

We understand now that Delgado thinks the meeting ought to come to an end. We ask him about Project Pandora and he confirms the story of the Moscow Signal without any hesitation but he denies being involved in the operation.

In 1972, an article citing Delgado’s views was presented at Congress’s MK-Ultra hearings:

We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically manipulated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.4

When we confront him with this statement, he falls silent for a second. His crystal-clear memory of a moment ago suddenly evaporates. A fog sweeps in, the words become hard to get out. He does not recall ever being called to Congress. And he has no desire to acknowledge the kinds of statements we have just mentioned. For a second, Delgado becomes a very old and fragile man. But in the next moment, he is standing up straight again and has shaken off all these unpleasantries. Now he is in a hurry. He has to meet his sick sister-in-law. We try to secure a second meeting but he is evasive and talks about the vagaries of the weather and trips to his country house. Out the door in a cloud of cigar smoke, the taxi takes us back to Madrid.

Translated by Sina Najafi

This article was corrected on 29 November 2014. Since publishing this article in Cabinet no. 2 (Spring 2001), several errors have come to our attention. Together, these support Delgado’s claim that he never appeared before Congress or made the statement that the authors attributed to him. Delgado never testified before Congress during the MK-Ultra hearings, which in fact took place not in 1974 but in 1977. Neither is his name present in any of the transcripts of the hearings. Additionally, as far as we have been able to determine, the cited statement does not exist in this form in any of Delgado’s publications, though some of the phrases do occur in his book Physical Control of the Mind. The sole reference to Delgado in the Congressional Record that we have been able to locate appears in Dr. Peter Breggin’s “The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery.” This article, which was critical of Delgado’s methods, was entered into the Congressional Record on 24 February 1972. We regret the errors.


Schleim, S.. (2021). Neurorights in History: A Contemporary Review of José M. R. Delgado’s “Physical Control of the Mind” (1969) and Elliot S. Valenstein’s “Brain Control” (1973). Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15

Plain numerical DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.703308
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Vera, J. A., & Martínez-Sánchez, F.. (2016). Ethics, science and mind control: J. M. Rodríguez-Delgado’s legacy. Spanish Journal of Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/sjp.2016.2
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Sultanov, M.. (2019). Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Past to Future. American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research

Plain numerical DOI: 10.34297/ajbsr.2019.04.000799
DOI URL
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Wilder, J.. (1971). Physical Control of the Mind. Toward a Psychocivilized Society. American Journal of Psychotherapy

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1971.25.3.485
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Blackwell, B.. (2012). Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado. Neuropsychopharmacology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1038/npp.2012.160
DOI URL
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Faria, M.. (2013). Violence, mental illness, and the brain – A brief history of psychosurgery: Part 3 – From deep brain stimulation to amygdalotomy for violent behavior, seizures, and pathological aggression in humans. Surgical Neurology International

Plain numerical DOI: 10.4103/2152-7806.115162
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Marzullo, T. C.. (2017). The Missing Manuscript of Dr. Jose Delgado’s Radio Controlled Bulls.. Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education : JUNE : A Publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience
Zemelman, B. V.. (2017). Uncovering key neurons for manipulation in mammals. In Optogenetics: From Neuronal Function to Mapping and Disease Biology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/9781107281875.004
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code

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Shuster, E.. (1997). Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code. New England Journal of Medicine, 337(20), 1436–1440.

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199711133372006
DOI URL
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The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.

4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.

6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.

7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.

8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.

9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill, and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

Inattentional blindness: The 5G rollout and its ramifications

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This post is under construction…

 

Daniel J simon, C. F. C. (1999). Gorilla in our midst – reference. Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained, Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events – Perception.
Simons, D. J. (2010).
Monkeying around with the Gorillas in Our Midst: Familiarity with an Inattentional-Blindness Task Does Not Improve the Detection of Unexpected Events. I-Perception, 1(1), 3–6. doi.org/10.1068/i03865

5G map: www.nperf.com/de/map/5g
5G has been developed by the US/Israeli military as a weapon to disperse crowds (directed energy beams which are harmful to biological organisms). It has been used twice during the illegal Irak-war. There are virtually no studies about the safety of 5G and it can be regarded as a social experiment without consensus and control-group. The 60Ghz frequency interferes with oxygen absorption of hemoglobin.

Tretyakov, M. Y., Koshelev, M. A., Dorovskikh, V. V., Makarov, D. S., & Rosenkranz, P. W. (2005). 60-GHz oxygen band: precise broadening and central frequencies of fine-structure lines, absolute absorption profile at atmospheric pressure, and revision of mixing coefficients. Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy, 231(1), 1–14. doi.org/10.1016/j.jms.2004.11.011


Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psycho-civilized Society by José M. R. Delgado. Publication date 1969

archive.org/details/PhysicalControlOfTheMindJosM.R.Delgado1969

Electronic technology has reached a high level of sophistication,
and two-way radio commJ’nication with automobiles, airplanes,
and outer space vehicles is commonplace today. The
notable lag in development of similar instrumentation for communciation with the depth of the brain reflects the already
mentioned unbalanced evolution of our technological civilization,
which seems more interested in accumulating power than
in understanding and influencing the basic mechanisms of the
human mind.
This gap is now being filled, and as Figures 4 and 5 show, it
is already possible to equip animals or human beings with
minute instruments called “stimoceivers” for radio transmission
and reception of electrical messages to and from the brain in
completely unrestrained subjects. Microminiaturization of the
instrument’s electronic components permits control of all parameters of excitation for radio stimulation of three different points
within the brain and also telemetric recording of three channels
of intracerebral electrical activity. In animals, the stimoceiver
may be anchored to the skull, and different members of a colony
can be studied without disturbing their spontaneous relations
within a group. Behavior such as aggression can be evoked or
inhibited. In patients, the stimoceiver may be strapped to the
head bandage, permitting electrical stimulation and monitoring
of intracerebral activity without disturbing spontaneous activities.

The etymological root of the term “Archon”

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How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!
— Samuel Adams

Archon (Greek: ἄρχων, romanized: árchōn) is the Greek term for “ruler”. Cognate derivatives are, e.g., terms such as:

  • monarchy
  • dyarchy
  • hierarchy
  • patriarchy/matriarchy
  • gynarchy
  • autarchy
  • anarchy (etymology discussed subsequently in more detail)

According to Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians (78-c. 100), the power and influence of the king first devolved to the archons, and these offices were filled from the aristocracy by elections on a decennial basis.

Archon Eponymos was the primary magistrate, the Polemarch referred to the head of the armed forces, and the Archon Basileus was in charge of the religious aspects of society.
Various fraternities and sororities use the title of archon or variations on it. Some Gnostic sects used this term for demons associated with the planetspheres.

3-D computer rendering of an “archon”

The term anarchy is the negation of the term archon (i.e., the negatory prefix *a). It thus means “without a ruler/master”, i.e., human beings that do not accept a master and who do not allow others to rule over them (they are not slaves to anyone). Importantly, this derivation should not be confused with “chaos or without rules”. Anarchy simply is the negation of slavery.

Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein. ‘
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Transl.: None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.)

Human beings who are anarchists are thus literally beings that do not accept to be ruled by archons, i.e., they are free and cannot be ruled and suppressed by external forces (they only subordinate themselves to natural law, viz., the timeless universal metaphysical foundation of morality and ethics; cf. the Kantian categorical imperative).

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
— Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Fulltext: archive.org/details/groundingformet000kant

In this context a quotation by the freedom fighter Malcolm X is of great pertinence.
He asked the following quintessential question concerning the highest of all virtues:

What is the price of freedom?

Answer
Death.

P.S. This does not imply that one has to die to be free, but it means that one has to be willing to risk once own life for the greatest of all goods, viz., the ultimate expression of human potential: Absolute Freedom.
If one is not willing to go “all in” one has lost the quest for freedom a priori because one is not willing to risk what it takes to achieve it. Fear is the inhibitor of freedom. Death is the mother of all fears. Ergo, overcoming the irrational fear of death is a condicio sine qua non for the obtainment of superordinate transcendental values.

Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Freedom comes with wisdom, intrinsically. They are inseparable, and no society wants people to be free. The communist society, the fascist society, the capitalist society, the Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Christian – no society likes people to use their own intelligence because the moment they start using their intelligence they become dangerous – dangerous to the establishment, dangerous to the people who are in power, dangerous to the “haves”; dangerous to all kinds of oppression, exploitation, suppression; dangerous to the churches, dangerous to the states, dangerous to the nations.

In fact, a wise man is afire, alive, aflame. He would like rather to die than to be enslaved. Death will not matter much to him, but he cannot sell his life to all kinds of stupidities, to all kinds of stupid people. He cannot serve them. Hence, the societies down the ages have been supplying you with false knowing. That’s the very function of your schools, colleges, universities.

They don’t serve you, remember, they serve the past, they serve the vested interests. Of course, they go on puffing your ego up bigger and bigger, they go on giving you more and more degrees. Your name becomes longer and longer, but only the name – you go on becoming shorter and shorter. A point comes where there are only certificates and the man has disappeared. First the man carries the certificates, then the certificates carry the man. The man is long dead.
~Osho

Call on Congress to Create Modern Day Church Committee

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church_committee
 See also:
www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm

 

Credit Suisse Research Institute “Global Wealth Report” (2018)

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Social disparity has reached an extreme level and current statistics indicate that an ultra-rich segment (>1% of the total population) owns ≈50% of the worlds entire wealth, i.e., ≈$140 trillion are owned by a infinitesimal small minority of humanity; but see the Credit Suisse Research Institute “Global Wealth Report” from 2018.
URL: www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/research/research-institute/global-wealth-report.html

Credit Suisse. (2018). Global Wealth Databook 2018. Credit Suisse doi.org/10.1038/nbt0910-907

Studies on the financial power élite: Behind the façade of democracy

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Davies, W.. (2017). Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism. Theory, Culture and Society

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/0263276417715072
DOI URL
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Foster, J. B., & Holleman, H.. (2014). The Financial Power Elite. Monthly Review

Plain numerical DOI: 10.14452/mr-062-01-2010-05_1
DOI URL
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Hoskin, K. W., & Macve, R. H.. (1986). Accounting and the examination: A genealogy of disciplinary power. Accounting, Organizations and Society

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/0361-3682(86)90027-9
DOI URL
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Froud, J., Johal, S., Moran, M., & Williams, K.. (2017). Outsourcing the State: New Sources of Elite Power. Theory, Culture and Society

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/0263276417717791
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Seabrooke, L.. (2009). The Social Sources of Financial Power: Domestic Legitimacy and International Financial Orders. Economic Geography

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2008.tb00397.x
DOI URL
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Davis, A.. (2000). Public relations, business news and the reproduction of corporate elite power. Journalism

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/146488490000100301
DOI URL
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Boswell, R.. (2005). Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Global Studies in Culture and Power

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.1994.9962492
DOI URL
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Abbink, J., & Salverda, T.. (2012). The anthropology of elites: Power, culture, and the complexities of distinction. The Anthropology of Elites: Power, Culture, and the Complexities of Distinction

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1057/9781137290557
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J. Edgar Hoover on “monstrous conspiracy and morality”

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The individual comes face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind has not come to a realisation of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.

 

When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes. A society unwilling to learn from past is doomed. We must never forget our history.

John Edgar Hoover was an American law enforcement administrator and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. He was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI’s predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77

The Impact of Science on Society – Bertrand Russell

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Take first the question of food and population. At present 
the population of the globe is increasing at the rate of about 
20 millions a year. Most of this increase is in Russia and 
Southeast Asia. The population of Western Europe and 
the United States is nearly stationary. Meanwhile, the food 
supply of the world as a whole threatens to diminish, as a 
result of unwise methods of cultivation and destruction of 
forests. This is an explosive situation. Left to itself, it must 
lead to a food shortage and thence to a world war. Technique, 
however, makes other issues possible. 

Vital statistics in the West are dominated by medicine 
and birth control: the one diminishes the deaths, the other 
the births. The result is that the average age in the West 
increases: there is a smaller percentage of young people and 
a larger percentage of old people. Some people consider that 
this must have unfortunate results, but speaking as an old 
person, I am not sure. 

The danger of a world shortage of food may be averted 
for a time by improvements in the technique of agriculture. 
But, if population continues to increase at the present rate, 
such improvements cannot long suffice. There will then be 
two groups, one poor with an increasing population, the 
other rich with a stationary population. Such a situation can 
hardly fail to lead to world war. If there is not to be an 
endless succession of wars, population will have to become 
stationary throughout the world, and this will probably have 
to be done, in many countries, as a result of governmental 
measures. This will require an extension of scientific tech- 
nique into very intimate matters. There are, however, two 
other possibilities. War may become so destructive that, at 
any rate for a time, there is no danger of overpopulation; or 
the scientific nations may be defeated and anarchy may de- 
stroy scientific technique. 

Biology is likely to affect human life through the study of 
heredity. Without science, men have changed domestic 
animals and food plants enormously in advantageous ways. 
It may be assumed that they will change them much more, 
and much more quickly, by bringing the science of genetics 
to bear. Perhaps, even, it may become possible artificially to 
induce desirable mutations in genes. (Hitherto the only muta- 
tions that can be artificially caused are neutral or harmful.) 
In any case, it is pretty certain that scientific technique will 
very soon effect great improvements in the animals and 
plants that are useful to man. 

When such methods of modifying the congenital character 
of animals and plants have been pursued long enough to make 
their success obvious, it is probable that there will be a 
powerful movement for applying scientific methods to human 
propagation. There would at first be strong religious and 
emotional obstacles to the adoption of such a policy. But sup- 
pose (say) Russia were able to overcome these obstacles 
and to breed a race stronger, more intelligent, and more 
resistant to disease than any race of men that has hitherto 
existed, and suppose the other nations perceived that unless 
they followed suit they would be defeated in war, then either 
the other nations would voluntarily forgo their prejudices, or, 
after defeat, they would be compelled to forgo them. Any 
scientific technique, however beastly, is bound to spread if 
it is useful in war— until such time as men decide that they have 
had enough of war and will henceforth live in peace. As 
that day does not seem to be at hand, scientific breeding of 
human beings must be expected to come about. I shall return 
to this subject in a later chapter. 

Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific tech- 
nique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov 
and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view 
that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure 
will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. 

I think the subject which will be of most importance polit- 
ically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically 
speaking, not a very advanced study, and so far its professors 
have not been in universities: they have been advertisers, 
politicians, and, above all, dictators. This study is immensely 
useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich 
or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science, 
founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has 
employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a 
kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been 
enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of 
propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called 
"education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; 
the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part. 

What is essential in mass psychology is the art of per- 
suasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler's with a speech of 
(say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been 
made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went 
wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man 
is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this 
hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band 
do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant 
train of syllogisms. It may be hoped that in time anybody will 
be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch 
the patient young and is provided by the State with money 
and equipment.