CIA, MKUltra, and the cover-up of U.S. germ warfare in the Korean war (2022)

My understanding is that the US were worried about the communists and Japan's stability in general and decided not to unduly rock the boat.

A bit tangential to the central thesis, but John Marks' 1979 classic The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, referenced by TFA, is online[2].

Chapter 8, Brainwashing[3], has interesting details about CIA-friendly journalist Edward Hunter's PR campaign to frame "brainwashing" (a term he coined) as a uniquely communist form of political indoctrination via technological means.

> In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chinese.

> American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. [...] Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear.

Marks then touches on the bioweapon allegation without further examination:

> The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.

1: https://archive.is/8stAi

2: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm

3: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm

You're not wrong. We've been incredibly shitty domestically and internationally.

> Perhaps more than all other countries combined.

Uhhhh, yeah, not really. The last century or two, humanity's hands have been pretty collectively bathed in blood.

I'd say easily the most bloody are those of the British, whose oppression and exploitation is unmatched in modern history for how pervasive, long-running, and brutal it was. I'd guess figures well into "hundreds of millions", possibly a billion or more across the several centuries. People look at Blackwater and their ilk and think it was some sort of new boundary being crossed. East India Company for two and a half centuries placed large swaths of the world's populace under corporate rule and had its own standing army and navy.

Japan committed so many wartime atrocities during WW2 it's difficult to summarize or account for them all, and estimates go as high as 30M killed.

Stalin's regime is estimated to have killed around 20 million people.

Mao could have been responsible for as many as 40 million.

Then there's all manner of dictators in the Americas and Africa (some propped up by America, of course), the various southeast asian regimes (Indonesia for example) and so on.