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Transnational Thursday for March 13, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen.

As spook world "standard candle" we can always use one well proven evil conspiracy, the infamous MKULTRA (and adjacent projects).

For 20+ years, in peace time, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of professionals engaged in Nazi/Imperial Japan style extremely unethical human experimentation. And it was all successfully kept secret (until handful of files who escaped destruction were discovered by accident).

All commonly proposed mechanisms to uncover and stop such nefarious activity failed.

No one talked (or if someone talked, no one listened to him)

No investigative journalists uncovered this scandal.

No elected representative of the people did anything.

No conspiracy theorist found what is going on, when MKULTRA was revving up, tinfoil hat crowd debated whether Eisenhower is willing Communist agent or naive Communist dupe.

One exception was this book from 1967, describes mind conditioning methods similar used by MKULTRA

If course, in the book the perpetrators are nasty South American Nahzees who want to manipulate stock market and get rich, not American patriots bravely fighting communism (and the book was, anyway, just drop that vanished in ocean of conspiracy/parapolitic writing at the time).