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Why do states bother to deceive? Managing trust at home and abroad
John Kurt Jacobsen, Review of International Studies / Volume 34 / Issue 02 / April 2008, pp 337-361
Why do democratic states try to deceive their own citizens as to the foreign policies they practice, their motives, and their consequences? This question presupposes not only that states craft ‘stories’ to disguise activities abroad, but that they do so because they are constrained by an audience of non-elite actors. Theories derived from realpolitik, at best, make little allowance for such domestic ‘interference’. Yet there is evidence that in democracies the role of mass publics in driving, curbing, or modifying the conduct of foreign policy is a force, and explanatory factor, to reckon with.
Grey Room #45, Fall 2011: On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare
MIT Press
- Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War (Timothy Melley)
- Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject (Andreas Killen)
- Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron (Rebecca Lemov)
- The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism (Stefan Andriopoulos)
- Manchurian Candidates: Forensic Hypnosis in the Cold War (Alison Winter)
Osiris Vol. 22, No. 1, 2007: The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences
Published by The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Weimar Psychotechnics between Americanism and Fascism
Andreas Killen
In the aftermath of the Great War, the new science of psychotechnics was enlisted in the construction of the democratic social order that emerged from the ruins of German authoritarianism, a key component of the fragile social compromise between capital and labor that was a foundation of the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s, representatives of this branch of social engineering promised to use science to conjure away the workplace conflicts that had wracked Wilhelmine Germany and to usher in a new era of social harmony and productivity. Advertised as modern, rational, and humane, psychotechnics became a cornerstone of the rationalization movement that, originating in America, swept Germany in the 1920s. This article, focusing on interactions between psychotechnicians and female switchboard operators, places the objectives and contradictions of this new science of the working self within the context of wider debates about Germany’s postwar economic and political restructuring as well as the process of personal restructuring associated with the so‐called new woman. Ultimately, the article shows that the psychotechnicians’ failure to realize their aims within the Weimar system led them to reposition their science as handmaiden to the new National Socialist order, which they embraced as the best means of bringing about this process of restructuring.
Sick Heil: Self and Illness in Nazi Germany
Geoffrey Cocks
Illness in Nazi Germany was a site of contestation around the existing modern self. The Nazis mobilized the professions of medicine and psychology, two disciplines built around self, to exploit physical and mental capacity. Nazi projects thus instrumentalized the individual and essentialized a self of race and will. A cruel and anxious obsession with health as a means of racial exclusion was a monstrous form of the modern turn inward to agency of body and mind. The Nazis regulated the individual through family and factory (social control), areas of ordinary life in which modernity located human activity and meaning, and propagandized traditional values the populace internalized (social discipline). A Nazi premodern warrior ethos was served by a liberal ethic of productivity and an absolutist tradition of state control. Medicalization and commodification of health was continuous with modern trends and became a wartime site of attempted well‐being of the self at the expense of the Nazi ethnic community.
“New Soviet Man” Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism
Slava Gerovitch
Soviet propaganda often used the Soviet space program as a symbol of a much larger and more ambitious political/engineering project—the construction of communism. Both projects involved the construction of a new self, and the cosmonaut was often regarded as a model for the “new Soviet man.” The Soviet cosmonauts publicly represented a communist ideal, an active human agency of sociopolitical and economic change. At the same time, space engineers and psychologists viewed human operators as integral parts of a complex technological system and assigned the cosmonauts a very limited role in spacecraft control. This article examines how the cosmonaut self became the subject of “human engineering,” explores the tension between the public image of the cosmonauts and their professional identity, and draws parallels between the iconic roles of the cosmonaut and the astronaut in the cold war context.
Cultures of Categories: Psychological Diagnoses as Institutional and Political Projects before and after the Transition from State Socialism in 1989 in East Germany
Christine Leuenberger
How can psychological categories be understood as historical, political, and cultural artifacts? How are such categories maintained by individuals, organizations, and governments? How do macrosocietal changes—such as the transition from state socialism in East Germany in 1989—correlate with changes in the social and organizational structures that maintain psychological categories? This essay focuses on how—pre‐1989—the category of neurosis (as a mental disorder) became entwined with East Germany’s grand socialist project of creating new socialist personalities, a new society, and a new science and on how diagnostic preferences were adapted, modified, and extended by local cultural and institutional practices. It also examines how post‐1989 the category of neurosis became redefined in accord with a formerly West German psychotherapeutic paradigm and was eventually obliterated by the bureaucratic health care system of the new Germany. East German practitioners adopted new therapeutic guidelines and a new language to make sense of the “normal,” “neurotic,” and “pathological” self in terms of “individualizing forms of knowledge” that tied in with efforts to remake East German citizens as liberal democratic subjects. At the same time, practitioners’ clinical practice remained based upon face‐to‐face encounters in which formal guidelines and stipulations were often superseded by local, interactional, institutional, and cultural practices and contingencies.
Joao » 03 Oct 2013 02:26 wrote:Grey Room #45, Fall 2011: On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare
MIT Press
- Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War (Timothy Melley)
- Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject (Andreas Killen)
- Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron (Rebecca Lemov)
- The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism (Stefan Andriopoulos)
- Manchurian Candidates: Forensic Hypnosis in the Cold War (Alison Winter)
Grey Room #45, Fall 2011: On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare [complete issue]
- Contributors
- Editors' Introduction
- Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War
- Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject
- Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron
- The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism
- Manchurian Candidates: Forensic Hypnosis in the Cold War
- Biomusic
Osiris Vol. 22, No. 1, 2007: The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences [selections]
- Weimar Psychotechnics between Americanism and Fascism
- Sick Heil: Self and Illness in Nazi Germany
- “New Soviet Man” Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism
- Cultures of Categories: Psychological Diagnoses as Institutional and Political Projects before and after the Transition from State Socialism in 1989 in East Germany
Sociotechnics: Basic Concepts and Issues
Adam Podgorecki, Knowledge in Society, Spring 1990, Vol. 3, Issue 1.
The article draws the links between social engineering and sociotechnics (and its various forms). It introduces and gives examples of the concepts of sociotechnical duels, social warpiness, and maneuverability of social factors. Also an attempt is made to describe links among various types of social systems and types of sociotechnical activities. Finally, the concept of sociotechnical paradigm (teleological scheme of efficient social activity) is developed.
The Value Of Ignorance
Anke S. Kessler, The RAND Journal of Economics, volume 29, 1998.
This article provides a new perspective on the information structure of an agent in a standard model of adverse selection. Before contracting takes place, the agent has the opportunity to gather (private) information on a relevant parameter that affects final payoffs. I allow for the possibility that the agent remains uninformed with some probability. The agent's optimal choice of information structure is derived, and it is shown that in the case of two states of nature, the possibility of remaining ignorant has a positive strategic value for the agent. Since a poor information structure generates strategic benefits, there will be no equilibrium in which the agent is perfectly informed even if additional information is costless at the margin.
Anti-Communism and PsyWar in the 1950s
Giles Scott-Smith, Chapter 1 of Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale (Palgrave Macmillan 2012)
Interdoc was established in 1963 by Western intelligence services as a multinational effort to coordinate an anti-communist offensive. Based in The Hague in the Netherlands, Interdoc sought to link up with allies across Western Europe, North America and beyond to become the central point through which anti-communism--ranging from propaganda to covert action--could be organized. Drawing on exclusive sources, never-before-released material, and the memories of its participants, this book charts Interdoc's remarkable campaign, the people and ideas that lay behind it, and its rise and fall during the Cold War.
Interdoc and West European Psychological Warfare: The American Connection
Giles Scott-Smith, Intelligence and National Security, April–June 2011
Interdoc, or the International Documentation and Information Center, was established in The Hague in early 1963 in order to coordinate a transnational network of institutes active in the field of analyzing trends in communist ideology and societies. The product of deliberations between intelligence agencies and the private sector in Western Europe during the late 1950s, Interdoc reflected a need to develop and project a European stance on Cold War issues separate from an all-dominant US influence. Yet the Americans were present from the beginning, and their involvement gradually increased over time. This article covers the details of this involvement and uses it to comment on how Interdoc represents an interesting case of inter-service cooperation in anti-communist activities in the West.
barracuda wrote:The path from RI moderator to True Blood fangirl to Jehovah's Witness seems pretty straightforward to me. Perhaps even inevitable.
Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons: Twentieth Century Reports in the Psychiatric Literature
Richard Noll, 1992
Richard Noll ventures where few psychologists dare to go. With a scholar’s eye and the zeal of a horror movie devotee, he treads the bizarre and macabre netherworld of vampirism, lycanthropy, and demonical possession. Bringing to bear his unique qualifications in psychology, folklore, religious history, and anthropology, Noll leads the reader into the darker regions of the human psyche in search of the syndromes and disorders that modem psychiatry refuses to acknowledge.
PART I: VAMPIRISM
1. Vampirism: A Review with New Observations
2. Vampirism: Historical Perspective and Underlying Process in Relation to a Case of Auto-Vampirism
3. Cannibalism and Vampirism in Paranoid Schizophrenia
4. Clinical Vampirism: A Presentation of 3 Cases and a Reevaluation of Haigh, the "Acid-Bath Murderer"
5. Vampirism: A Clinical Condition
PART II: LYCANTHROPY
6. Lycanthropy Revisited
7. A Case of Lycanthropy
8. Another Case of Lycanthropy
9. Lycanthropy Lives On
10. Lycanthropy: Alive and Well in the Twentieth Century
PART III: DEMONIACAL POSSESSION
11. Demonomania
12. Cinematic Neurosis Following The Exorcist: Report of Four Cases
13. Cacodemonomania and Exorcism in Children
14. The Possession Syndrome on Trial
15. Cacodemonomania
The anarchism of fools: Conspiracy theory as a substitute for social critique
Peter Staudenmaier, 2004
Conspiracy theory continues to enjoy a generally positive reception within many sectors of the contemporary North American anarchist movement. As this presentation will argue, conspiracy models of social reality consistently distort and obfuscate the power relations they purport to explain. Instead of examining or refuting specific instances of conspiracy thinking within the popular anarchist milieu, this analysis will concentrate on the logical structure of conspiracy theory as such, and attempt to illuminate its psychological, political, philosophical, and historical roots.
Revisiting the "Nazi Occult": Histories, Realities, Legacies
Monica Black and Eric Kurlander (eds.), 2015
Historians have long debated the role of the occult in the Third Reich. After 1945 the consensus held that occultism, an ostensibly anti-modern, irrational blend of pseudo-religious and -scientific practices, directly facilitated the rise of National Socialism. More recently, scholarly debate has denied the occult a role in shaping the Third Reich, emphasizing the Nazis' hostility to esoteric religion and alternative forms of knowledge. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship on the topic, this volume calls for a fundamental reappraisal of these positions. The book is divided into three chronological sections. The first, on the period 1890 to 1933, looks at the esoteric philosophies and occult movements that influenced both the leaders of the Nazi movement and ordinary Germans who became its adherents. The second, on the Third Reich in power, explores how the occult and alternative religious belief informed it as an ideological, political, and cultural system. The third looks at Nazism's occult legacies. In emphasizing both continuities and disjunctures, this book promises to re-open and re-energize debate on the occult roots and legacies of Nazism, and with it our understanding of German cultural and intellectual history over the past century.
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