Mind War by William S. Burroughs Earlier I have suggested that the CIA, the Russians, and the Chinese have all set up top secret centers to study and apply psychic techniques to political ends. Those of you who have read Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain will infer that the Russians are ahead of us. Now anyone who has lived for any time in countries like Morocco where magic is widely practiced has probably seen a curse work. I have. However, curses tend to be hit or miss, depending on the skill and power of the operator and the susceptibility of a victim. And that isn't good enough for the CIA or any similar organization: `Bring us the ones that work not sometimes but every time.' So what is the logical forward step? To devise machines that can concentrate and direct psychic force with predictable effects. I suggest that what the CIA is, or was working on, at their top secret Nevada installation may be described as computerized black magic. If Curse A doesn't make it, Curse Program B automatically goes into operation -- and so on. I recommend to your attention a book called The Mind Masters by John Rossmann. This is ostensibly a fanastic science fiction novel, interesting more for its content than its style, that may well contain some real inside information. The story concerns a researcher who has been disillusioned by his work on Project Pandora, an American psychic training center run by a Colonel Pickett, who is stronly reminiscent of the mad General Ripper in Doctor Strangelove, right down to the cigar. Only he is unloosing psychic warfare rather than nuclear more effective and more easily controlled for elitiest objectives. The disillusioned researcher, one Britt St. Vincent, is contacted by Mero, a private institute dedicated to opposing these black magic centers. (It should be obvious that only black magic has `military applications.') After he has been taken to Mero's secret hearquarters, Britt is briefed by Dr Webster on the purposes of Mero. Dr. Webster cites an early report by columnist Jack Anderson that the reason the Johnson-Kosygin summit conference in 1967 at Glassboro, New Jersey, was held in such a remote spot was that this was the world's first summit conference on psychic warfare. He recalls for Britt how the CIA, while making an electronic sweep of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for listening devices, discovered some very unusual electromagnetic emanations pulsing through the building. (Later it came out that the Soviets had stepped up the power to a point where Embassy officials and their families were in danger from the high-voltage microwave radiation, which can cause confusion, migraines, and even death.) Not long after, the CIA confirmed that this was in fact part of a much larger psychic attack on the Embassy. When the Defense Department launched its top-secret psychic counter attack, according to columnist Anderson, it was code-named Project Pandora. Dr. Webster goes on to tell Britt: `Glassboro wasn't the end of it, Britt ... obviously. By easily diverting funds within their mammoth defense budgets, small groups of supermilitarists here and in Russia covertly continued psychic programs... The violent student rioting of the late Sixties was largely instigated by electronic mood-control devices that were derived from the psychic discoveries of Project Pandora. The riots, it is now evident, were the first phase of a massive plot. The students were used by U.S. military extremists for two purposes. First, the riots tended to discredit the student causes. Secondly, the civil disturbances conveniently provided the plotters with the necessary reasons to reinstate some of their psychic weapons programs under the guise of `crowd control' research. Britt learns that similar secret psychic research is still advancing rapidly in China, France, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, and Chile, in addition to the United States and Russia. `Although these scattered groups are currently working to beat each other to the secret of powers that will give them world control, there is a good possibility that they could even now join forces and make a combined psychic bid for world control - of succeeding if they joined forces.' And what would the future look like if such groups actually exist and if they do combine and take over? An elitist world state very much along the lines laid down by the Nazis. At the top wold be a theocracy trained in psychic control techniques implemented by computerized electronic devices that would render oppostion psychologically impossible. Entry to this privileged class would be permitted only to those whose dedication to the world state was absolute and unquestioning. In short, you don't get in by merit or ability but by being an all around one hundred percent shit. Under this ruling, elite of power addicts would consist of an anonymous service collective of functionaries, managers, and bureaucrats. And below them the slave workers. The troublesome artist would be eliminated or absorbed. The elite lives happily ever after, at the top of a control state that makes 1984 seem cozy and nostalgic.