" (Adams et al.)
What the report went on to show was how a decades long deception was practiced on a race that was viewed primarily as a guinea pig for medical science.
The Tuskegee Institute had been established by Booker T. Washington. Claude McKay had passed through there in 1912 to study agriculture (under the patronage of Walter Jekyll, a man who provided the basis for Robert Louis Stevenson's classic horror tale character). Around the same time that Eleanor Dwight Jones was striving to preserve the white race, the United States Public Health Service began the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. What took place was a forty year analysis of the life of syphilis. The two hundred black men who had syphilis were "deliberately denied treatment" (Adams et al.) in what was just one more step in oppression and callous social engineering.
And at the same time the Tuskegee experiment was going on, W.E.B. Du Bois was focusing on the "Negro problem" again -- only now in Africa. Missing the social ramifications of the elitist platform that reduced life to a Malthusian principle and an economic conundrum, Du Bois failed to recognize where the dagger was hiding. Economics were only part of the problem for the plight of the Negro. The overwhelming portion of that problem was the elitist culture that served as a kind of prop for Du Bois himself. As long as he continued to say things like, "Unless this question of racial status is frankly and intelligently faced, it will become a problem not simply of Africa but of the world," ("The Realities in Africa" 231), he was no threat to the liberal white establishment. As soon as one began to attack the ethos at the heart of WASP America, he had to be silenced (like McKay and Eldridge Cleaver after him).
One-time leader of the Black Panthers, Cleaver would become the ex-Panther ex-con author of Soul on Fire -- a kind of Christian apologetic and a 180 degree turn from his book Soul on Ice written over a decade earlier while incarcerated for rape. Once Cleaver became a revolutionary in the opposite direction (away from the rhetoric backed by the cultural elite), he ceased to hold any import in the realm of politics, and he was forgotten by the liberal movement that had formed behind him. The anger that Cleaver represented before his conversion, however, had been a by-product of Malcolm X's crusade to bring violent revolution to the streets of urban America. Violence, of course, has always played right into the hands of those willing to take control. The French Revolution produced Napoleon. The Civil Rights movement did nothing more than cement the walls protecting the American oligarchy: as William Julius Wilson notes, "African-Americans still have the highest rates of concentrated poverty of all groups in the United States" (58). Such is not by accident, but by careful organization of the ruling class. Yet such would seem to be untrue: After all, the counter-culture movement that took place from the Sixties onward seemed to have the Negro at the heart of it -- but the Negro had always been used as the puppet of the oligarchy. When that puppet threatened to step out of line, the oligarchy had tricks to snap it back into place.
Such was exactly what happened with Project MKULTRA. In 1977, Sen. Edward Kennedy testified before the Ninety-Fifth Congress following "reports of the abuses of the drug testing program and reports of other previously unknown drug programs and projects for behavioral control" ("Project MKULTRA" 2). What the Senate Health Subcommittee uncovered, according to Kennedy, was
Chilling testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an 'extensive testing and experimentation' which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens…Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to 'unwitting subjects in social institutions.' ("Project MKULTRA" 2)
The death of Dr. Frank Olson in 1953 was one of the early signs of the operation. Richard Helms, director of the CIA, would two decades later consign all records of the Project to the flames. But a deeper probe revealed that the number of universities involved in the experiment was nearly one hundred. Kennedy put the matter bluntly: "The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent. It used university facilities and personnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge" ("Project MKULTRA" 3). The question was why?
Mark Stahlman pointed to the English conspiracy, which paralleled the WASP elitist mindset of cuius region, eius religio.
Al Hubbard…the Johnny Appleseed of LSD…renounced his U.S. citizenship...
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