By Melissa Farley

Like pimps on the street and pimps in strip clubs, the US military is using psychological methods to harm, not heal. Many of the practices systematically used by pimps to control women in prostitution – sensory deprivation, dehumanization, threats to family, deliberately induced exhaustion – are the same as those used by military torturers. I’ve written briefly and plan to write more about these practices. See click here. Also see the kink.com torture pornography thread on this blog.

The US military has used psychologists to assist in the practice of torture, now it’s funding psychological research on the use of mind control as a weapon of destruction. This is nothing new – similar research was conducted in the 1950s-1980s. The American Psychological Association has miserably failed to oppose these practices, while other groups such as Physicians for Human Rights and Psychologists for Social Responsibility have taken far more ethical stands against psychologists’ participation in torture and mind control.

The National Science Foundation, through Project Minerva (they love being perverse. She’s the goddess of wisdom) is offering $50 million to fund psychological counterinsurgency programs that further military goals of the United States. For a chilling analysis of this program, please read Tom Burghardt’s Militarizing the Social Sciences click here For those of you who know the ways that pimps use mind control, this will be all-too familiar.

Melissa Farley