The Coastal Post - May 1997
The lights go down in the theater. The young (late teens to early 20s) males stare in awe as the latest psycho-murderers-from-Arkansas splatter movie vomits its imagery into their minds. Along the top border of the movie screen are secret viewing ports. Infrared video cameras scan the testosterone-frenzied audience for the hottest of the hot, those individuals who really get a rise in blood pressure from degradation and violence. Telephoto lenses beam in on the eyes of the viewers. Pupil dilation is measured and recorded against the carefully engineered subliminal mind manipulation buried in the imagery of the movie. By the end of the movie the five best candidates are picked out of the audience of 200 young men. They will have tasks assigned later.
Fiction so far? I sure as hell hope so. But the rest of what you are about to read is based upon clinical papers and the guarded opinions (some off the record) of a minority cadre of this nation's most outstanding psychological researchers. My extrapolations into the recent history of America are my own, but are shared by a growing number of concerned observers who have supplied me with disturbing, mainstream, correlative material over the past five years.
Hypnosis has a dark side. College students are taught, parroting the optimistic opinion of the late, great Milton Erickson (one of the founding fathers of modern hypnotherapy), that no one can be hypnotized to do anything against his or her will. The 18th century novel about Svengali, and Trilby, his helpless trance-state sex puppet, is scoffed off as simple sensationalism born in ignorance. Psychologists assure us that hypnosis is safe and virtually foolproof "in the hands of trained professionals". If commanded to do anything against his or her moral fiber, the subject will balk at the order or snap out of the trance. In most cases this is absolutely true.
But can some subjects, a small minority of fundamentally unstable individuals, be hypnotized and successfully commanded to commit suicide? Clinical investigators of lofty moral sense claim the answer is no, because they would never take such an experiment through to its ultimate completion. Think about it. How many psychologists, even if they were sufficiently bent to conduct such an experiment, would come forward and publish their startling discovery that they had succeeded in getting subjects to willingly jump out of high buildings? So, if it has been done, you just aren't going to hear about it. Personally, I think it has been done, many times.
The next potentially dark facet of hypnosis has to do with what is called "induced hallucination". Stage hypnotists play with this one all the time. The hypnotic subject is put into a trance and told that a huge, cuddly dog has wandered out on the stage. The subject kneels down and pets the imaginary dog and, if snapped out of the trance suddenly, often asks where the "dog" went. Post-hypnotic suggestion, planted in the mind of the subject, can reintroduce the "dog" into the subject's consciousness at a later date. The subject is simply told that he will come across the imaginary dog on the sidewalk after the show is over.
In 1947 a researcher named J.D. Watkins induced hypnotic hallucination in the minds of American servicemen. They were told that they would enter a room and be faced by a bloodthirsty Japanese soldier. The subjects entered the room, where they encountered, not a crazed Japanese soldier, but the commanding officer of the Army base. The entranced subjects threw themselves at the commanding officer with unrestrained violence, and in one case the subject produced a pocket knife that the researchers did not know he kept concealed on his person. Only the fast action of Watkins and a powerful MP kept the subject from slitting his own commanding officer's throat! Watkins was suitably sobered by these experiments. He became one of the dissenting voices in American hypnotherapy who has asserted quietly, but persistently, over the years that "anti-social behavior" could be induced via hypnosis.
Watkins later became the prime researcher in post-traumatic stress syndrome, or "shell shock." Thousands of American soldiers owe the reconciliation of their horrendous memories and the healing of their psyches to Watkins and his ground-breaking work. Watkins' textbook on trance induction and hypnotherapeutic technique is fascinating reading.
Enter the "Lone Gunmen." Beginning the early '60s, with Charles Whitman, the "Clock Tower Sniper" in Texas, certain types of individuals committed despicable acts of murder with various firearms. Sirhan Sirhan had an obsessive fascination with hypnosis and visited more than a half dozen hypnotists prior to killing Bobby Kennedy. Sirhan's behavior after the tragic shooting in L.A. is textbook trance state. Lee Harvey Oswald's demeanor while under arrest by the Dallas police was dazed and confused. "I'm a patsy" is one of American history's most mysterious declarations.
The official autopsy report and police background biography of Patrick Purdy, the young man who committed the Stockton school yard massacre, is eerie reading. Purdy had earplugs in his ears when he mowed down those children with a semi-auto rifle and then shot himself with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. This young man, with a background of years of rampant drug abuse and addiction, had only traces of nicotine and caffeine in his bloodstream the day he did his filthy deed. He was strangely clean and sober.
The list goes on and on, from the Texas cafeteria shooter, to 101 California Street, to the Long Island railway shooter. Colin Ferguson, the Long Island railway gunman, swears vehemently that someone else did the shooting. Ferguson was tackled by brave bystanders before he could reload his semi-auto pistol and shoot more people...or himself.
Each of these tragic events propel the burgeoning wave of "gun control" legislation and the eventual confiscation of firearms from the sane, and law-abiding, American citizenry.
In Australia, after the recent Tasmania massacre, the people of that nation were ordered by their government to turn in all pump-action shotguns and semi-automatic rifles. Believe it or not, it is now against the law to protect oneself with a firearm in Australia! It can happen here, and your current President and his minions of naive, ignorant or downright evil "gun control" advocates quiver with spasms of unconstitutional legislation every time a "Lone Gunman" strikes again.
Every major genocide of the 20th century has been preceded by firearms registration campaigns and the resulting confiscation of those firearms from the citizens who then became the helpless, unarmed victims of their own government-gone-bad. A police state must disarm the citizenry. The twisted acts of "Lone Gunmen" are having an immense impact on the social and political realities of millions of people in the free world. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: "Never have the lives of so many been so affected by the actions of so few."
I sadly predict that in the near future a crazed "Lone Gunman," using a scoped hunting rifle, and with plenty of time and ammunition, will open up in a crowded sports stadium or concert venue and wreak abominable mayhem. I predict the shooter will kill himself or be killed by security guards. We will then see hunting rifles, aka "sniper rifles" (Teddy Kennedy's turn of speech) outlawed. All this will take is one entranced subject, properly programmed on top of an innate, sociopathic disposition.
The movie The Manchurian Candidate is scientifically valid. There is a reason that movie was pulled out of circulation shortly after its theater release in the '60s and only recently allowed to surface. "Gun control" had been soundly entrenched in the American way of life by the time The Manchurian Candidate was finally shown in a few theaters and offered in video decades after it was produced. Listen to the soundtrack carefully (when the Korean shrink lectures his audience). You will be told exactly how to find the actual clinical research papers on the induction of anti-social behavior via hypnosis. This is what is known as "Revelation of the Method". Let those who have ears, hear.
[author's March 2009 note: "The Manchurian Candidate", I have since learned, was actively suppressed by Frank Sinatra (a close personal friend of the Kennedys), but actually did air a few times in the 60s and 70s. It was, however, very, very long in coming to video.]
