going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

Have you ever had unkind thoughts about LRH?
Are you upset about this Confessional List?
The result of the sec-check procedure is that the person expressing doubts about the
church is steered into thinking about his own faults that led him to question Scientology
in the rst place. In the Chinese Communist example, Lifton points out, the combination
of enforced logic and clichéd discourse creates a kind of melodrama, in which formulaic
thoughts and handicapped language substitute for real emotions and complex
understandings of human nature. Once inside the powerful logic of the group, one drifts
further and further from the shore of common understanding.
According to Lifton, factors such as these award the group life-and-death authority
over individual members. And yet, despite the Communists’ absolute control of the
environment, of the forty victims that Lifton studied, only three were “apparent
converts” to the ideology. That gure has been used to discredit the notion of
brainwashing, although Lifton himself later said that he was impressed by the extent to
which minds could be altered and “truth blurred to the point of near extinction.”
The CIA, alarmed by the reputed success of Chinese indoctrination, started its own
research into mind control, through a program called MKUltra. In the mid-1950s, the
agency began funding Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born American citizen who was
then directing the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Cameron
was one of the most eminent psychiatrists of his time: earlier in his career, he had been
a part of the Nuremberg tribunal that examined the atrocious human experiments of
Nazi doctors; later he became president of the American Psychiatric Association, the
Canadian Psychiatric Association, and—when the CIA stumbled onto his work—
president of the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron hoped to cure mental illness by
eliminating painful memories and reordering the personality through positive
suggestion. The agency’s goal was somewhat dierent, of course; the stated reason was
to uncover eective methods of mind control and then train American soldiers in ways
of resisting such eorts. The CIA eventually destroyed the les of the MKUltra program,
saying that it had acquired no useful information, but the real intention of the agency
may have been to learn scientic ways of extracting information from unwilling
subjects. (After 9/11, documents emerging from the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base
showed that the methods used by US interrogators to question al-Qaeda suspects were
based on Chinese Communist techniques.)
The methods that Cameron used to erase his patients’ memories certainly meet the
denition of torture. Electroshock therapy was administered to break the “patterns” of
personality; up to 360 shocks were administered in a single month in order to make the
subject hyper-suggestible. On top of that, powerful drugs—uppers, downers, and
hallucinogens—were fed to the incapacitated patients to increase their disorientation.
According to author Naomi Klein, who wrote about these experiments in The Shock
Doctrine, when Cameron nally believed he had achieved the desired blank slate, he
placed the patients in isolation and played tape-recorded messages of positive
reinforcement, such as “You are a good mother and wife and people enjoy your