Brainwashing

[Sharing Lights]

Ber·i·a, Lavrenti Pavlovich 1899–1953.

Soviet secret police chief (1938–1953) during the regime of Joseph Stalin. In the power struggle following Stalin's death, Beria was convicted of conspiracy and executed.





Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovich, 1899–1953, Soviet Communist leader, b. Georgia. He rose to prominence in the Cheka (secret police) in Georgia and the Transcaucasus, became party secretary in these areas, and in 1938 became head of the secret police. As commissar (later minister) of internal affairs, Beria wielded great power, and he was the first in this post to become (1946) a member of the politburo. After Stalin's death (Mar., 1953), Beria was made first deputy premier under Premier Malenkov, but the alliance was shaky; in the ensuing struggle for power Beria was arrested (July) on charges of conspiracy. He and six alleged accomplices were tried secretly and shot in Dec., 1953.




The noun Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria has one meaning:

Meaning #1: Soviet chief of secret police under Joseph Stalin; was executed by his associates in the power struggle following Stalin's death (1899-1953)
Synonym: Beria



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Lavrenty BeriaLavrenty Pavlovich Beria (Georgian: ლავრენტი ბერია; Russian: Лаврентий Павлович Берия; (29 March, 1899 – 23 December, 1953), Soviet politician and chief of the Soviet security and police apparatus.

Beria is now remembered chiefly as the executor of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, even though he actually presided only over the closing stages of the purge. His period of greatest power and influence was during and immediately after World War II — after Stalin's death he was removed from office and executed by Stalin's successors.

Rise to power
Beria was born the son of Pavel Khukhaevich Beria, a peasant, in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi in the Abkhazian region of Georgia. He was a member of the Mingrelian ethnic group and grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family. His mother, Marta Ivanovna, was a deeply religious, church-going woman; she was previously married and widowed before marrying Beria's father, and had a son from her first marriage.[1] He was educated at a technical school in Sukhumi, and is recorded as having joined the Bolshevik Party in March 1917 while an engineering student in Baku. (Some sources say that the Baku Party records are forgeries and that Beria actually joined the Party in 1919. It is also alleged that Beria joined and then deserted from the Red Army at this time, but this has not been established.)

In 1920 or 1921 (accounts vary) Beria joined the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), the original Bolshevik political police. At that time, a Bolshevik revolt, supported by the Red Army, occurred in the Menshevik Democratic Republic of Georgia, and the Vecheka was heavily involved in this conflict. By 1922 Beria was deputy head of the Vecheka's successor, the OGPU (Combined State Political Directorate), in Georgia. Some sources allege that Beria was at this time an agent of the British and/or Turkish intelligence services, but this has never been proved.

Beria, as a fellow Georgian, was an early ally of Joseph Stalin in his rise to power within the Communist Party and the Soviet regime. Disputed, Beria was not introduced to Stalin until 1926, and worked hard to further his own cause by wooing Stalin to get into the inner circles of the Soviet regime; and he was hardly an "ally", more of a henchman. In 1924 he led the repression of nationalist disturbances in Tbilisi, after which it is said that up to 5,000 people were executed. For this display of "Bolshevik ruthlessness" Beria was appointed head of the "secret-political division" of the Transcaucasian OGPU and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In 1926 he became head of the Georgian OGPU. He was appointed Party Secretary in Georgia in 1931, and for the whole Transcaucasian region in 1932. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934. Even after moving on from Georgia, he continued to effectively control the republic's Communist Party until it was purged in July 1953.

[Sharing Lights]

By 1935 Beria was one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which rewrote the history of Transcaucasian Bolshevism emphasizing Stalins's role in it. When Stalin's purge of the Communist Party and government began in 1934 after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Beria ran the purges in Transcaucasia, using the opportunity to settle many old scores in the politically turbulent Transcaucasian republics. In June 1937 he said in a speech: "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed".

Beria at the NKVD

An official poster eulogising BeriaIn August 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD carried out prosecution of the perceived enemies of the state known as the Great Purge, that affected millions of people. By 1938, however, the purge had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure of the Soviet state, its economy and armed forces, and Stalin had decided to wind the purge down. In September Beria was appointed head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as head of NKVD (Yezhov was executed in 1940). The NKVD itself was then purged, with half its personnel replaced by Beria loyalists, many of them from the Caucasus.

Beria's name has become closely identified with the Great Purge as well, but in fact he presided over the NKVD during an easing of the repression. Over 100,000 people were released from the labour camps, and it was officially admitted that there had been some injustices and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed on Yezhov. Nevertheless this liberalisation was only relative: arrests and executions continued, and in 1940, as war approached, the pace of the purges again accelerated. During this period Beria supervised the deportations of population from Poland and the Baltic states following their occupation by Soviet forces.

In March 1939 Beria became a candidate member of the Communist Party's Politburo. Although he did not become a full member until 1946, he was already one of the senior leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941 Beria was made a Commissar General of State Security, a highest military-like rank within the Soviet police ranking system of that time.

In February 1941 he became a Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), and in June, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he became a member of the State Defence Committee (GKO). During World War II he took on major domestic responsibilities, using the millions of people imprisoned in NKVD labour camps for wartime production. He took control of production of armaments and (with Georgy Malenkov) aircraft and aircraft engines. This was the beginning of Beria's alliance with Malenkov, which later became of central importance.

In 1944, as the Germans were driven from Soviet soil, Beria was in charge of dealing with the various ethnic minorities accused of collaboration with the invaders, including the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans. All these were deported to Soviet Central Asia. See "Population transfer in the Soviet Union".

In December 1944 Beria was also charged with supervision of the Soviet atomic bomb project. In this connection he ran the successful Soviet espionage campaign against United States atomic weapons programme which resulted in Soviets obtaining a nuclear bomb technology, building and testing a bomb in 1949.

[Sharing Lights]

In July 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a uniform military system, Beria's rank was converted to that of a Marshal of the Soviet Union. Although he had never held a military command, Beria, through his organisation of war production, made a significant contribution to the Soviet Union's victory in World War II.

Postwar politics

Beria with Stalin (in background) and Stalin's daughter SvetlanaWith Stalin nearing 70, the postwar years were dominated by a concealed struggle for the succession among his lieutenants. At the end of the war the most likely successor seemed to be Andrei Zhdanov, party leader in Leningrad during the war and placed in charge of all cultural matters in 1946. Even during the war Beria and Zhdanov had been rivals, but after 1946 Beria formed an alliance with Malenkov to block Zhdanov's rise.

In January 1946 Beria left the post of the head of the NKVD (which was soon renamed MVD), while retaining general control over national security matters from his post of Deputy Prime Minister, under Stalin. The new head, Sergei Kruglov, was not Beria's protégé. In addition, by the Summer of 1946, Beria's loyalist Vsevolod Merkulov was replaced by Viktor Abakumov as head of the MGB. Kruglov and Abakumov then moved expeditiously to replace the security apparatus leadership with new people outside of Beria's inner circle, such that very soon Deputy Minister of MVD Stepan Mamulov represented the only remnant of it outside of foreign intelligence on which Beria kept a grip. In the following months, Abakumov started carrying out important operations without consulting Beria, often working in tandem with Zhdanov, and sometimes on Stalin's direct orders. Some observers argue that these operations were aimed---initially tangentially, but with time more directly---at Beria.

One of the first such moves was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair that commenced in October of 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels and the arrest of many other members. The reason this campaign had negatively reflected on Beria was that not only did he champion creation of the committee in 1942, but his own entourage included a substantial number of Jews.

Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, and Beria and Malenkov then moved to consolidate their power with a purge of Zhdanov's associates known as the "Leningrad Affair". Among the more than 2,000 people executed were Zhdanov's deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov, the economic chief Nikolai Voznesensky, the Leningrad Party head Pyotr Popkov and the Prime Minister of the Russian Republic, Mikhail Rodionov. It was only after Zhdanov's death that Nikita Khrushchev began to be considered as a possible alternative to the Beria-Malenkov axis.

Zhdanov's death did not, however, stop the anti-semitic campaign. During the postwar years Beria supervised the establishment of Soviet-style systems of secret police, and hand-picked the leaders, in the countries of the Eastern Europe. Again, a substantial number of these leaders were Jews. Starting in 1948, Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November of 1951 of Rudolf Slánský, Bedřich Geminder, and others in Prague, who were generally accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism, but, more specifically, of using Czechoslovakia to funnel weapons to Israel. From Beria's standpoint, this charge was extremely explosive, because massive help to Israel was provided on his direct orders. Altogether, 14 leaders of Czechoslovakia, 11 of them Jewish, were tried, convicted, and executed in Prague (see Prague Trials). Similar investigations have concurrently proceeded in Poland and other Soviet satellite countries.

[Sharing Lights]

Around that time, Abakumov was replaced by Semyon Ignatiev, who further intensified the anti-semitic campaign.

On January 13, 1953, the widest anti-semitic affair in the Soviet Union—that later came to be known as Doctors' plot—was initiated with an article in Pravda. A number of the country's prominent Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, hysterical anti-semitic propaganda campaign sprang in the mass-media. Altogether, 37 doctors (most of them non-Jewish, 17 of them were Jewish) were arrested, and MGB, on Stalin's orders, started to prepare for deportation of the entire Jewish population to Russia's far east.

Had Stalin lived, the whole, Jewish population of the Soviet Union would have been sentenced to the, almost, concentration camp mode of living in the regions of Sibir.

Stalin feared that Jews were too smart for him and would have dethroned him.

He decided to finish what Hitler didn't finish.

Just before the plan was implemented, Stalin died suddenly.

There was no evidence of the violent death or foul play.
It is s believed that there was a Higher Forces' interference, as Stalin contemplated the destruction of the whole nation of one People in his domain.

Certain prophesies came to life.

Amazingly, as ruthless Beria was, himself, days after Stalin's death, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, as it was, completely, fabricated, and indeed arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved.

After Stalin
Stalin died on March 5 1953, four days after collapsing during the night following a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders. The political memoirs of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claim that Beria boasted to Molotov that he had poisoned Stalin, although no hard evidence has ever been produced to support this assertion. There is evidence, however, that for many hours after Stalin was found unconscious, he was denied medical help. It is possible that all the Soviet leaders agreed to allow Stalin, whom they all feared, to die.

After Stalin's death Beria was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister and reappointed head of the MVD, which he merged with the MGB. His close ally Malenkov was the new Prime Minister and initially the most powerful man in the post-Stalin leadership. Beria was the second most powerful leader and, given Malenkov's lack of real leadership qualities, was in a position to become the power behind the throne and ultimately leader himself. Khrushchev became Party Secretary, which was seen as a less important post than the Prime Ministership.

Beria was at the forefront of liberalization after Stalin's death. Beria publicly denounced the Doctors' plot as a "fraud," investigated and solved the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, and released over a million political prisoners from labour camps. In April he signed a decree banning the use of torture in Soviet prisons. He also signaled a more liberal policy toward the non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. He persuaded the Presidium (as the Politburo had been renamed) and the Council of Ministers to urge the Communist regime in East Germany to allow liberal economic and political reforms. Beria maneuvered to marginalize the role of the party apparatus in the decision-making process in policy and economic matters.

Some writers have held that Beria's liberal policies after Stalin's death were a tactic to maneuver himself into power. Even if he was sincere, they argue, Beria's past made it impossible for him to lead a liberalizing regime in the Soviet Union, a role which later fell to Khrushchev. The essential task of Soviet reformers was to bring the secret police under party control, and Beria could not do this since the police were the basis of his own power.

Others have argued that he had represented a truly reformist agenda, and that his eventual removal from power delayed a radical political and economic reform in the Soviet Union by almost forty years.


"Beria: Enemy of the people". TIME magazine cover, July 20 1953.

Given his record, it is not surprising that the other party leaders were suspicious of Beria's motives in all this. The alliance between Beria and Malenkov was opposed by Khrushchev, but he was initially unable to challenge the Beria-Malenkov axis. His opportunity came in June 1953 when demonstrations against the Communist regime in East Germany broke out in East Berlin (see Workers Uprising of 1953 in East Germany). There was a suspicion that the practical Beria was willing to trade the reunification of Germany and end the cold war, for massive aid from the United States such as had been received in World War II. The East German demonstrations convinced Molotov, Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin that Beria's policies were dangerous and destabilizing to Soviet power. Days after the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a party coup against Beria, whose principal ally Malenkov quickly decided to abandon him.

[Sharing Lights]

Beria's fall

Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably. According to the most recent accounts Khrushchev convened a meeting of the Praesidium on June 26, where he launched an attack on Beria, accusing him of being in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich?" Molotov and others then also spoke against Beria, and Khrushchev put a motion for his instant dismissal. Malenkov then pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They immediately burst in and arrested Beria. Some accounts say that Beria was killed on the spot, but this is incorrect.

Beria was taken first to the Lefortovo prison and then to the headquarters of General Kirill Moskalenko, commander of Moscow District Air Defence and a wartime friend of Khrushchev's. His arrest was kept secret until his principal lieutenants could be arrested. The NKVD troops in Moscow which had been under Beria's command were disarmed by regular Army units. Pravda announced Beria's arrest only on July 10, crediting it to Malenkov and referring to Beria's "criminal activities against the Party and the State." In December it was announced that Beria and six accomplices, "in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies," had been "conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union and restore capitalism."

Beria was tried by a "special tribunal" with no defense counsel and no right of appeal. When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko's later account, Beria begged on his knees for mercy, but he and his subordinates were immediately executed.

However, according to other accounts including his son's, Beria's house was assaulted on 26 June 1953, by military units and Beria himself was killed on the spot. A member of the special tribunal, Nikolay Shvernik, has subsequently told Beria's son that he had never seen Beria alive.

Beria's wife and son were sent to a labour camp, but survived and were later released: his wife Nina died in 1991 in exile in Ukraine; his son Sergo died in October 2000 still defending his father's reputation. After Beria's death the MGB was separated from the MVD and reduced from the status of a Ministry to a Committee (known as the KGB), and no Soviet police chief ever again held the kind of power Beria had wielded.

In May 2000 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused an application by members of Beria's family to overturn his 1953 conviction. The application was based on a Russian law that provided for rehabilitation of victims of false political accusations. The court argued, however, that "Beria was the organizer of repression against his own people, and therefore could not be considered a victim".

Allegations against Beria
Although Beria was formally convicted for being a British spy, the Communist Leadership early on sought to spice up the charges with informal accusations of a more personal nature. These included allegations that he raped numerous women, and that he personally tortured and killed many of his political victims.

Charges of sexual assault and sexual deviance against Beria were first made in the speech by a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikolay Shatalin, at the Plenary Meeting of the committee on July 10, 1953, two weeks after Beria's arrest. Shatalin said that Beria had had sexual relations with numerous women and that he had contracted syphilis as a result of his sex with prostitutes. Shatalin referred to a list (supposedly kept by Beria's bodyguard) of over 25 women with whom Beria had sex. Over time, however, the charges became more dramatic. Khrushchev in his posthumously published memoirs wrote: "We were given a list of more than a 100 names of women. They were dragged to Beria by his people. And he had the same trick for them all: all who got to his house for the first time, Beria would invite for a dinner and would propose to drink for the health of Stalin. And in wine, he would mix in some sleeping pills..."

[Sharing Lights]

By 1980s, the sexual assault stories about Beria included rape of teenage girls. The author Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, who wrote a biography of Beria, said in an interview: "At night he would cruise the streets of Moscow seeking out teenage girls. When he saw one who took his fancy he would have his guards deliver her to his house. Sometimes he would have his henchmen bring five, six or seven girls to him. He would make them strip, except for their shoes, and then force them into a circle on their hands and knees with their heads together. He would walk around in his dressing gown inspecting them. Then he would pull one out by her leg and haul her off to rape her. He called it the flower game." [2]

Numerous stories have circulated over the years involving Beria personally beating, torturing and killing his victims. Since the 1970s, Muscovites have been retelling stories of bones found in either the back yard, cellars, or hidden inside the walls of Beria's former residence, currently the Tunisian Embassy. Such stories continue to re-appear in the news media. The London Daily Telegraph reported in December 2003: "The latest grisly find — a large thigh bone and some smaller leg bones — was only two years ago when a kitchen was re-tiled. In the basement, Anil, an Indian who has worked at the embassy for 17 years, showed a plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars."

Such reports are treated with scepticism by many commentators due to prevalent bias of their sources. It should be noted that despite partial opening of Soviet archives since 1991, most of the Beria-related material remains classified. Memoirs by the people close to Beria, such as his son Sergo Beria and a former Soviet foreign intelligence chief Pavel Sudoplatov deny these charges and draw a very different portrait of Beria.

See also
History of the Soviet Union
List of Georgians
Further reading
Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton, Beria, Moscow, 1999
Avtorkhanov, Abdurahman, The Mystery of Stalin's Death, Novyi Mir, #5, 1991, pp. 194-233 (in Russian)
Beria, Sergo, Beria: My Father, London, 2001
Knight, Amy, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant, Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN 0691032572
Khruschev, Nikita, Khruschev Remembers: Last Testament, Random House, 1977, ISBN 0517175479
Rhodes, Richard, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Simon and Schuster, 1996 ISBN 0684824140
Stove, R. J., The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims, Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003). ISBN 189355466X
Sudoplatov, Pavel, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster, Little Brown & Co, 1994, ISBN 0316773522
Yakovlev, A.N., Naumov, V., and Sigachev, Y. (eds), Lavrenty Beria, 1953. Stenographic Report of July's Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Other Documents, International Democracy Foundation, Moscow, 1999 (in Russian). ISBN 5895110061
External links
Interview with Sergo Beria
An outline of the Russian Supreme Court decision of 29 May 2000

[Sharing Lights]

Chapter III

Man as an Economic Organism


Man is subject to certain desires and needs that are as natural
to his beingness as they are to that of any other animal.
Man, however, has a propensity to exaggerate some of
these beyond the bounds of reason. This is obvious through the
growth of leisure classes, pseudo-intellectual groups, the ‘petit bourgeoisie’,
Capitalism, and other ills.
It has been said, with truth, that one-tenth of a man’s life is concerned
with politics and nine-tenths with economics. Without food,
the individual dies. Without clothing, he freezes. Without houses
and weapons, he is prey to the starving wolves. The acquisition of
sufficient items to answer these necessities of food, clothing, and
shelter, in reason, is the natural right of a member of an enlightened
State. An excess of such items brings about unrest and disquiet. The
presence of luxury items and materials, and the artificial creation and
whetting of appetites, as in Capitalist advertising, are certain to
accentuate the less desirable characteristics of Man.
The individual is an economic organism, in that he requires a certain
amount of food, a certain amount of water, and he must hold
within himself a certain amount of heat in order to live. When he has
more food than he can eat, more clothing than he needs to protect
him, he then enters upon a certain idleness, which dulls his wits and
awareness and makes him prey to difficulties which, in a less toxic
state, he would have foreseen and avoided. Thus, a glut that is a
menace to the individual.
It is no less different in a group.

Where the group acquires too much, its awareness
of its own fellows and of the environment is
accordingly reduced, and the effectiveness
of the group in general is lost.

The maintaining of a balance between gluttony and need is the
province of Economics proper, and is the fit subject and concern of
the Communist State.
Desire and want are a state of mind. Individuals can be educated
into desiring and wanting more than they can ever possibly obtain,
and such individuals are unhappy. Most of the self-willed characteristics
of the Capitalists come entirely from greed. They exploit the
worker far beyond their own need as Capitalists.
In a nation where economic balances are not controlled, the
appetite of the individual is unduly whetted by enchanting and fanciful
persuasions to desire, and a type of insanity ensues, whereby
each individual is persuaded to possess more than he can use, and to
possess it even at the expense of his fellows.
There is, in economic balances, the other side. Too great and too
long endured privation can bring about unhealthy desires, which, if
allowed to be gratified, lead to the accumulation of more than the
individual can use. Poverty, itself, as carefully cultivated in
Capitalist States, can bring about an imbalance of acquisition. Just as
a vacuum will pull into it masses, in a country where enforced privation
is the lot of the masses, and where desire is artificially whetted,
need turns to greed, and one easily discovers in such states
exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.
If by the technologies of Psychopolitics one were to dull this excessive
greed in the few workers who possess it, they would be freed to
seek a more natural balance.
Here we have two extremes. Either one of them is an insanity. If
we wish to create an insanity we need only glut or deprive an individual
beyond his ability to tolerate the extremes and we have a mental
imbalance. A simple example of this is the alternation of too low
with too high pressures in a chamber, an excellent psychopolitical
procedure. The rapidly varied pressure brings about a chaos wherein
the individual will cannot act and where other wills then, perforce,
assume control.
Essentially, in an entire country, one must remove the greedy by
whatever means and must then create and sustain a semi-privation
in the masses in order to command and utterly control the nation.


to be continued

[Sharing Lights]

A continuous hope for prosperity must be indoctrinated into the
masses with many dreams and visions of glut of commodity, and this
hope must be counter-played against the actuality of privation and
the continuous threat of loss of all economic factors in case of disloyalty
to the State in order to suppress the individual wills of the masses.
In a nation under conquest such as America, our slow and stealthy
approach need only take advantage of the cycles of booms and
depressions inherent in Capitalistic nations in order to assert increasingly
strong control over individual wills. A boom is as advantageous
as a depression for our ends for during prosperity our propaganda
lines must only continue to point up the wealth the period is
delivering to the selected few in order to weaken their control of the
state. During a depression one must only point out that it came
about as a result of the avarice of a few and the general political
incompetence of the national leaders.
The handling of economic propaganda is not properly the sphere
of psychopolitics but the psychopolitician must understand economic
measures and the Communist goals connected with them.
The masses must at last come to believe that only excessive taxation
of the rich can relieve them of the "burdensome leisure class" and
can thus be brought to accept such a thing as an income tax, a Marxist
principle smoothly slid into the Capitalistic framework in 1909 in the
United States. This even though the basic law of the United States
forbade it and even though communism at that time had been active
only a few years in America. So successful was the income tax law,
that had it been followed thoroughly, it could have brought the
United States and not Russia into the world scene as the first
Communist nation. But the virility and good sense of the Russian
peoples won. It may be that the United States will not become entirely
communist until past the middle of the century, but when it does
it will be because of our superior understanding of economics and of
psychopolitics.
The Communist agent skilled in economics has as his task the suborning
of tax agencies and their personnel to create the maximum
disturbance and chaos and the passing of laws adapted to our purposes;
and to him we must leave this task. The psychopolitical operator
plays a distinctly different role in this drama.

The rich, the skilled in finance, the well informed in government are particular
and individual targets for the psychopolitician.
His is
the role of taking off the board those individuals who would halt or
corrupt Communist economic programs. Thus every rich man, every
statesman, every person well informed and capable in government
must have brought to his side as a trusted confidant a psychopolitical
operator.
The families of these persons are often deranged from idleness and
glut and this fact must be played upon, even created. The normal
health and wildness of a rich man’s son must be twisted and perverted
and explained as neurosis and then, assisted by a timely
administration of drugs or violence, turned into criminality or insanity.
This brings at once someone in "mental healing" who could then
by his advice or though the medium of wife or daughter, guided by
his opinions, direct the optimum policy to embroil or upset the economic
policies of the country and, when the time comes to do away
forever with the rich or influential man, to administer the proper
drug or treatment to bring about his complete demise in an institution
as a patient or dead as a suicide.
Planted beside a country’s powerful persons the psychopolitical
operator can also guide other policies to the betterment of our battle.
The Capitalist does not know the definition of war. He thinks of
war as attack with force performed by soldiers and machines. He
does not know that a more effective if somewhat longer war can be
fought with bread or, in our case, with drugs and the wisdom of our
art. In truth, the Capitalist has never won a war. The psychopolitician
is having little trouble winning this one.

[Sharing Lights]

Chapter 4


State Goals for the
Individual and the Masses
Just as we would consider an individual to be ill, whose organs,
each one, had a different goal from the rest, so we consider the
individuals and the State to be ill where goals are not rigorously
codified and enforced.
There are those who, in less enlightened times, gave Man to
believe that goals should be personally sought and held, and that,
indeed, Man’s entire impulse toward higher things stemmed from
Freedom. We must remember that the same peoples who embraced
this philosophy also continued in Man the myth of spiritual existence.
All goals proceed from duress. Life is a continuous escape from
pain. Without the threat of punishment there can be no gain.
Without duress and command there can be no alignment of bodily
functions. Without rigorous and forthright control, the State can
achieve no goals.
Goals of the State should be formulated by the State for the obedience
and concurrence of the individuals within that State. A State
without goals so formulated is a sick State. A State without the
power and forthright wish to enforce its goals is a sick State.
When an order is issued by the Communist State, and it is not
obeyed, a sickness will ensue. Where obedience fails, the masses suffer.
State goals depend upon loyalty and obedience for their accomplishment.
When one discovers a State goal to be interrupted, one
discovers inevitably that there has been an interposition
of self-willedness, of greed, of idleness, or of rugged individualism and selfcentered
initiative. The interruption of a State goal will be discovered
to have been the work of a person whose disloyalty and disobedience
is the direct result of his own misalignment with life.
It is not always necessary to remove the individual. It is possible
to remove his self-willed tendencies in order to effect an improvement
in the goals and gains of the whole. The technologies of
Psychopolitics are graduated upon a scale that starts somewhat
above the removal of the individual himself, concerning itself first
with the removal of those tendencies that bring about his lack of
cooperation.
It is not enough for the State to have goals. These goals, once put
forward, depend for their completion upon the loyalty and obedience
of the workers. These, engaged for the most part in hard labors,
have little time for idle speculation, which is good. But, above them,
unfortunately, there must be foremen in one or another position, any
one of whom might be sufficiently idle and lacking in physical occupation
to cause some disaffecting independence in his conduct and
behavior.
Psychopolitics remedies this tendency toward disaffection when it
supplants and overrides the common persuasions of the immediate
superiors of the person in question.

[Sharing Lights]

Chapter 5

An Examination of Loyalties

If loyalty is so important in the economic and social structure, it is
necessary to examine it further in and of itself.In the field of
Psychopolitics, loyalty means simply "alignment". It means, more
fully, alignment with the goals of the Communist State. Disloyalty
means misalignment, and more broadly, misalignment with the goals
of the Communist State.
When we consider that the goals of the Communist State are to the
best possible benefit of the masses, we can see that disloyalty, as a
term, can include Democratic alignment. Loyalty to persons not
communistically indoctrinated would be quite plainly a misalignment.
The cure for disloyalty is contained within the principles of alignment.
All that is necessary to do, where disloyalty is encountered, is
to align the purposes of the individual toward the goals of communism,
and it will be discovered that a great many circumstances hitherto
distasteful in his existence will cease to exist.
Aheart or a kidney in rebellion against the remainder of the organism
could be seen as being disloyal to the remainder of the organism.
To cure that heart or kidney it is actually only necessary to bring its
activities into alignment with the remainder of the body.
The technology of Psychopolitics adequately demonstrates the
workability of this. Mild shock of the electric variety can, and does,
produce the recooperation of a rebellious body organ. It is the shock
and punishment of surgery which, in the main, accomplish the
realignment of a disaffection portion of the body, rather than the surgery
itself. It is the bombardment of x rays, rather than the therapeutic
value of x rays that causes some disaffected organs
to once again turn their attention to the support of the general organism.
While it is not proven that electric shock has any therapeutic
value, so far as making the individual more sane, it is adequately
proven that its punishment value will create in the patient a more
cooperative attitude. Brain surgery has no statistical data to recommend
it beyond its removal of the individual personality from
amongst the paths of organs that were not permitted to cooperate.
These two Russian developments have never pretended to alter the
state of sanity. They are effective and workable only in introducing
an adequate punishment mechanism to the personality to make it
cease and desist from its course and its egotistical control of the
anatomy itself. It is the violence of the electric shock and the surgery
that is useful in subduing the recalcitrant personality, which is all
that stands in the road of the masses of the State. It is occasionally to
be discovered that the removal of the negative personality by shock
and surgery then permits the regrowth and reestablishment of
organs that have been misdirected by that personality. In that a wellregulated
state is composed of organism, not personalities, the need
for electric shock and brain surgery in Psychopolitics is clearly
demonstrated.
The changing of loyalty consists, in its primary step, of the eradication
of existing loyalties. This can be done in one of two ways.
First, by demonstrating that previously existing loyalties have
brought about perilous physical circumstances, such as imprisonment,
lack of recognition, duress, or privation, and second, by eradicating
the personality itself.
The first is accomplished by a steady and continuous indoctrination
of the individual in the belief that his previous loyalties have
been wasted on an unworthy source. One of the primary instances
of this is creating circumstances that apparently derive from the target
of his loyalties, so as to rebuff the individual. Part of this is the
creation of a state of mind in the individual, by actually placing him
under duress, and then furnishing him with false evidence to demonstrate
that the target of his previous loyalties is, itself, the cause of the
duress.