27 Jan 2023 20:54:46 As the late Mickey Nardo (See: http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2012/12/21/hide-and-go-seek/) wrote: Its always funny when small children try to play hide-and-go-seek by covering their eyes, but when grown-ups do it, it loses its charm. Today, first-time visitors to the institute -- housed in a drab concrete building at the Peoples Friendship University of Russia -- are asked to watch a half-hour television program dedicated to Smirnov, who is called the father of "psychotronic weapons," the Russian term for mind control weapons. On social media, there's a campaign to get the upcoming presidential debate fact-checked. Students and others would also benefit from training in internet literacy: What sources can one trust, and how can one fact-check various claims, especially before reposting them? Congress Has a Lo-Fi Plan to Fix the Classified Documents Mess. Required fields are marked *. The example of the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic by the democratically-elected government of South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008) should serve as a warning to us today as we grapple with COVID-19. The contract is a small victory for the Psychotechnology Research Institute and its leaders, who have struggled for years to be accepted in the West. Advancing psychology to benefit society and improve lives. Such accusations seemed plausible to many, given the history of racism in the United States, including in the medical field. For example, the KGB was not the first to accuse the US government of constructing the AIDS virus. The New York Timeseven decided to use it as the title for its series of popular videos about Soviet and Russian disinformation. One particularly reprehensible episode was the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which the US Public Health Service had observed the long-term effects of syphilis on infected African-American sharecroppers and their offspring for four decades, from 1932 to 1972, without providing them with effective medical treatment, even after penicillin had proven effective against the disease. Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.46a, Powered by Infopop www.infopop.com 2000 Click accept to close this message. To the untrained ear, the demonstration sounds like squealing pigs. One term that never came up in talks between the Stasi and their Bulgarian counterparts, let alone in talks between the KGB and the Bulgarians, was Operation Infektion. Despite this fact, practically the entire internet continues to use this incorrect codename in discussing the KGBs AIDS disinformation campaign. Selvages article appeared a few months before COVID-19 burst into public consciousness. These days, Rusalkina explained, the institute uses its psychotechnology to treat alcoholics and drug addicts. As early as 1987, the Stasi officers responsible for the AIDS disinformation campaign began using the terms Denver and Detrick interchangeably in talks with their Bulgarian counterparts. PBS America In the case of the AIDS disinformation campaign, the KGB simply picked up on existing conspiracy theories in the US, added a new element that conformed to its disinformation goals (i.e., the exact location of HIVs construction, Fort Detrick), and spread the resulting conspiracy theory internationally to its own ends. Not surprisingly, there are also individuals who have turned a profit by selling publications with their own versions of the HIV/AIDS conspiracy theory alongside their own unproven, alternative therapies for the disease. Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News. His answer was to create the Cheka, an abbreviation of "The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage." [3], Bittman recounts other case studies, including efforts by the Soviet intelligence services to influence the views of the Third World against Americans so that such countries would support Russian interests in the United Nations. Yet thats what happened earlier this year, when Illinois-based Surgisphere Corporation began a publishing spree that would trigger one of the largest scientific scandals of the COVID-19 pandemic to date. http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2012/12/21/hide-and-go-seek/. They learned that if you bombarded human subjects with fear messages non-stop, by the end of two months most of the subjects became brainwashed and believed the false message, to the point that no amount of clear (truthful) information they were shown would change their minds. [3][5], The book received a positive reception from SAIS Review, where it was called "fascinating reading". In the 60s, the KGB did some fascinating psychological experiments. Most of the lab's research is focused on what it calls "psychocorrection" -- the use of subliminal messages to bend a subject's will, and even modify a person's personality without their knowledge. A former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov claimed in 1984 that Russia has a long-term goal of ideologically subverting the U.S. Of course, political extremists, in and out of power, often develop or exploit conspiracy theories to their own ends. In the 60s, the KGB did some fascinating psychological experiments. Getentrepreneurial.com: Resources for Small Business Entrepreneurs in 2022. [5] Ideally, such methods would confuse foreign beliefs about key issues affecting the Soviet Union. Photo: Nathan Hodge"If it's a clean result, the passengers are allowed through," said Rusalkina, during a reporter's visit last year. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia's capital. The second-ranked search engine is getting a new chatbot interface that attempts to synthesize information from sites across the web. Such weapons, she asserts, are far more dangerous than nuclear weapons. The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View is a 1983 non-fiction book by Lawrence Martin-Bittman (then known as Ladislav Bittman), a former intelligence officer specializing in disinformation for the Czech Intelligence Service and retired professor of disinformation at Boston University. Yuri Bezmenov, known by the alias Tomas David Schuman, was a Soviet KGB informant who defected to Canada. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave . The author defines disinformation as "a carefully constructed false message leaked to an opponent's communication system in order to deceive the decision-making elite or the public". GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. "We could have stabilized the situation in the concert hall, and the terrorists would have called the whole thing off," she said. True Anomaly, a startup backed by US senator JD Vance's VC firm, plans to launch prototype pursuit satellites on a SpaceX flight later this year. [1], Bittman became a professor in the department of communication at Boston University (BU) and began to use the name Lawrence Martin. WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. The KGB and StB agents were able to turn the Indonesian Ambassador to their interests and through him they passed along to President of Indonesia Sukarno fabricated analyses and false documents, alleging the Central Intelligence Agency was planning to harm him. Hide-and-go-seek The Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong? American Psychological Association. But the idea of psychotronic weapons enjoys some respectability in Russia. Documentary OPIOIDS, INC. tells the story of Insys Therapeutics a drug company that bribed doctors and committed insurance fraud as its Wall Street investors looked the other way. Bittman writes that for disinformation covert operation campaigns to succeed, "every disinformation message must at least partially correspond to reality or generally accepted views". Insys Therapeutics profited from Subsys, a fentanyl-based painkiller up to 100 times stronger than morphine, by targeting high-prescribing doctors and nurse practitioners known within the company as whales, misleading insurers, and holding contests for the sales team. But the U.S. war on terror and the millions of dollars set aside for homeland security research is offering Smirnov a chance at posthumous respectability in the West. Bearded and confident, Smirnov in the video explains how subliminal sounds could alter a person's behavior. Through the operation, the Stasi sought to expose the dangers to mankind arising from the research, production, and use of biological weapons, to strengthen anti-American sentiments in the world, and to spark domestic political controversies in the USA. To this end, the Stasi promised to provide their Bulgarian comrades with a scientific study and other materials that prove that AIDS originated in the USA, not in Africa, and that AIDS is a product of the USAs bioweapons research., Also Read: Rumours, Misinformation and Self-Verification of Facts in the Age of COVID-19. The official Soviet press agency Novosti also helped to spread the thesis abroad, alongside the KGB. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. In the 60s, the KGB did conducted psych experiments and learned that if you bombard human subjects with nonstop fear messages, most are completely brainwashed to believe the lies in 2 months or less, and no amount of evidence to the contrary can change their minds. Photo: Nathan Hodge MOSCOW The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a [], All the Settings You Should Change on Your New Samsung Phone, Fat, Sugar, Salt Youve Been Thinking About Food All Wrong, You Can Turn Your Backyard Into a Biodiversity Hotspot, No, the James Webb Space Telescope Hasnt Broken Cosmology, The Scramble to Save Twitters Research From Elon Musk. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. "The goal of these measures," the KGB wrote, "is to create a favourable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type . This site participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns revenue from qualifying purchases (links to books or products). The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. He noted for example, studies showing that images displayed for milliseconds -- too short for people to perceive consciously -- may influence someone's mood. Fear produces a significant though small amount of change across the board. MK: What was the main purpose of Operation Denver? [1][2] In 1967, he was assigned to Vienna, Austria in an undercover operation as a press attach, to recruit European reporters as secret agents that Soviet intelligence could use to spread disinformation. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Smirnov moved from military research into treating patients with mental problems and drug addiction, setting up shop at the college. The result you can see is most of the people who graduated in 60s are drop outs or half-baked intellectuals who are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, the educational system; you are stuck with them. [5] Foreign Affairs gave a mixed review saying the author exaggerated the role of the KGB. The first one being demoralization, it takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. [1][2] Prior to the publication of The KGB and Soviet Disinformation, Bittman had written a book on the history of disinformation in Soviet covert operations, The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare (1972). In the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, the head of the newly formed U.S.S.R., needed a way to keep the population (and his fellow revolutionaries) in check. Still, as a historian, I am not surprised that conspiracy theories would arise in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies show that individuals who believe in conspiracy theories regarding the origins of HIV/AIDS are less likely to follow medical advice regarding safe sex, to test themselves for potential infection, or to take effective medications to contain the disease. The institute claims its technology can read the subconscious mind and alter behavior. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/opioids-inc/, S this film is unavailable, just a wee trailer , The Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong? Ghost-managed medicineis an antidote to such childish behaviour. All of the technology at the institute is based on the work of Rusalkina's late husband, Igor Smirnov, a controversial Russian scientist whose incredible tales of mind control attracted frequent press attention before his death several years ago. Mark Root, a spokesman for ManTech, deferred questions to DHS, noting, "They are the customer. 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