Controlled Aversive Environments

This is an expression that might be applied to the numerous town hall meetings taking place around the U.S. over the past month or so, in which Representatives and Senators of both parties have been subjected to angry mobs of their constituents, furious over a panoply of issues, from "Obamacare" to the Wall Street bailouts. The hapless politicians at these events have been bewildered at the phenomenon.

From whence did this fury come? In particular, the public vitriol has been most concentrated upon the issue of the "death panel" provisions of the health care bill. However one might go about discrediting the use of the term (not our concern here to confirm or refute), it has proven to be a most potent political weapon in opposing Obama's program, and in contributing to a steep decline of his popularity.

This "meme" finds its origins circa mid-May, in Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review, where it is argued that Obama has adopted in its essentials Adolf Hitler's T-4 program, a health policy designed to sort out "lives unworthy of living," with medical treatment to be determined by health boards reviewing case by case the overall condition of patients (i.e. their age, other medical conditions, and of course, racial fitness).

According to Jeffry Steinberg, on behalf of LaRouchePAC, the "death panel" term and the Hitler comparisons have indeed traveled from LaRouche to Sarah Palin (who suggested that "Obamacare" would do away with her down-syndrome baby Trig) and onto the angry mobs:

One senior political operative told EIR that the Republican Party, desperate to regroup after the electoral defeats of 2006 and 2008, picked up the LaRouche attacks on the Obama health-care swindle, studied the documentation, concluded that LaRouche was absolutely correct, and jumped on the bandwagon. By last week, according to the source, every faction within the GOP had picked up on the LaRouche message—to the point that a frantic Karl Rove jumped in, to warn Republicans that they were losing control over the issue to LaRouche.

But Rove was really kicking himself: "Why didn't I think of that!"

The campaign that LaRouche has been waging against Obama had its inception on his April 11th webcast, where he presented a psychological profile of the President as suffering from a Nero complex. LaRouche suggested that Obama so badly wanted to be liked that he bowed down to "that shrinking woman," the reviled British Queen at the G-20 meeting in London the previous week, and in so doing he neglected the interests of the nation that he was there to represent. LaRouche at this time effectively declared war against the Obama administration (and particularly against the Benthamite economic behaviorists who have been running the show thus far), this being essentially the current campaign of his greater war against the British Empire.

This "war" is of course not of a military sort, and it is not merely a political campaign, but it is being waged, I shall argue, as psychological warfare against the President himself.

To begin with, the date of the April 11 web-cast will doubtless have been noted by LaRouche's inner circle, and by those who have followed the goings on of this political personality cult over the years. Two years previous, on April 11th 2007, Ken Kronberg, a LaRouche follower and publisher since the 1970s, committed suicide after LaRouche issued an internal memo suggesting that the "Boomers" - and in particular the print shop - needed to forget their old ways and get on with the new program, now being propelled forward with the LaRouche Youth Movement and its focus on the website. "The Boomers will be scared into becoming human..." he reportedly said. "Unless they want to commit suicide." The latter is precisely what his printer did just hours later.

Dennis King, a long time foe of LaRouche, argues that the responsibility for Kronberg's suicide was not his own:

Lyndon LaRouche and the Art of Inducing Suicide

(In reply, LaRouche wondered aloud: Is Dennis King Planning Suicide?)

Make whatever one wants out of this affair. What is of import here is the date itself, and the association with the alleged induced suicide. Given the nature of the personal attack against Obama, and of his psychological profiling, the latent message LaRouche was sending to his minions was: 'We're going to induce the President to commit political suicide!' - Unless, of course, if he were to jettison the behavioral economists, reject the British interests, and adopt LaRouche's policies.

This might not be such a bad thing, after all, but it is not our intent here to critique LaRouche's political, economic, and philosophical ideas (in fact, we might be rather sympathetic). Our concern is to understand how he is operating.

We'll note a few examples of his campaign over the past several months. Most famously, there is the "Obama-stash" - Obama as Hitler - an image which has been introduced at the town hall meetings and propagating through numerous media outlets worldwide (along with Alex Jones' chroma key minstrel, Obama as the Joker poster). In his August 1st web-cast (time-stamp 1:06 to 1:12), LaRouche said that Obama, Peter Orzag, the brothers Emanuel and other officials responsible for the design of this euthanasia program should suffer the same fate as the condemned Nazis at Nuremberg. Basically, without spelling it out, he suggested that Obama should hang - an explosive image, given this country's not too distant past. Then, taking the opposing position, from would-be executioner to defender against murderous, imperial scoundrels, LaRouche asked the question: Are the British Planning a Hit on Obama?

Knowing that the President must harbor an acute sense of paranoia, being in the unprecedented position that he finds himself (black and POTUS), a suggestion of assassination will only contribute to the "controlled aversive environment" that LaRouche is designing for Obama. And, it seems to be working, or at least LaRouchePAC is thus congratulating itself...

Is the President going mad?

We encountered the expression "controlled aversive environment" in the above cited article by Dennis King, where he characterizies it as a methodology for mind control:

The basic tactic is to develop psychological profiles of persons... and then, based on such profiling, to construct a "controlled aversive environment" around the targeted individual and exert insidious and ever-escalating psychological pressures that will hopefully cause the person to commit suicide (or that will increase the person's stress level to the point at which he or she will die from a coronary). One might call it psychological terrorism--or death via mental judo.

But a brief google search revealed the term's earliest known use in an article by LaRouche in the April 1974 issue of The Campaigner, Pg. 30, under his psuedonym, L. Marcus. In the paper, LaRouche describes the brainwashing techniques as developed by Tavistock psychologist John Rawlings Rees, whose methods were adopted by the Rockefeller/CIA interests and applied to whole populations. And indeed, as "Marcus" writes, profiling is a first step:

Since the system of social control and brainwashing developed by that gifted reactionary psychopath, [Rees], premises its fascist schemes on pathological features of the victims' existing belief system, it follows that the individual will refuse to assimilate the evidence on this point unless he is also prepared to deal with those profound neurotic disorders which render him so vulnerable to Reesian forms of fascist manipulation. -Pg. 8

The "unless" in the sentence is the term upon which the whole operation hinges. Similarly, we find it in the April 11 2007 memo. The individual will fall to the Reesian ruse, unless he doesn't. Kronberg did. But, what will Obama do? LaRouche profiled, he then adeptly controlled the aversive environment, and now it is Obama's time to act. This Wednesday, before a joint session of Congress, he will act. It is being hyped as if his Presidency hinges on this address. Perhaps it does.


Sept. 12: Update & Correction

Our assertion that the comparisons of Obama's health care plan to that of Hitler originated with LaRouche is over-stated. As History Commons reveals, such comparisons were being made as early as February in the Washinton Times. But regardless, the Obama-stash poster, which has become iconic of the mass strike at the town hall meetings, most definitely was issued by LaRouche's organization.

Speaking of the town hall phenomena, this was somewhat channeled into the joint sesssion of Congress for Obama's 9/9/9 speech Wednesday night when Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina very vocally called the President a liar as he delivered his address. While it is doubtful that Wilson got his nerve from LaRouche, it is worth noting that on his Sept. 8 web-cast (on the occasion of his 87th birthday), LaRouche himself called Obama a liar, then an idiot...

Mr. President, be a Mensch!

But, going beyond the LaRouche campaign, in another incident further contributing to the controlled aversive enviroment growing around the President, there was a temporary terrorism scare as Obama crossed the Potomic following a 9/11 memorial ceremony at the Pentagon.

Taking into account the comments of former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in a recent interview with Brad Friedman, this is the controlled aversive environment that Obama seriously needs to fear...

"Let me just leave you with this thought," he said, "and that is that I think Panetta, and to a degree President Obama, are afraid --- I never thought I'd hear myself saying this --- I think they're afraid of the CIA."...