The modern Ministry of Information often seeks to revive WW2 folk memory. The psychiatric evidence is that Blitz spirit does not so much “strengthen resolve” as induce helplessness and obedience.
Cynthia Chung uncovers the method behind the madness - and the frequent evocation by the British government of wartime spirit - through the work of British psychologist William Sargant and its accurate representation in popular format by George Orwell in this article: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/07/08/how-to-take-back-control-of-your-mind/
William Sargant “British psychiatrist and, one could say, effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West” studied the heavy bombing of London and its impact on the citizen's mind. Rather than creating a “can do” spirit, people coped by recognizing their helplessness. The healthy and normal, in Sargant’s view, remains functional in a ever-changing environment (see the article above).
As Chung puts it, the best survivors had the best potential for brain washing. You brainwash the strong, not the weak. The higher up the food chain, the more brainwashed. So that as Orwell observed, “It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest.“
Sargant recognized that those who didn’t co-operate could be eliminated: “…the stake, the gallows, the firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for the failures”.
In the 1910 minutes of the Carnegie Foundation’s Endowment for International Peace, the trustees asked themselves “if there is any way known to man more effective than war to so alter the life of an entire people”. They concluded there was not.
Given that Hitler was a joint Anglo-American-German project, it does make you wonder if the V2 campaign wasn’t itself a psycho-social experiment. The British government certainly studied it as such. The British conducted their own psychological experiment on Dresden: it was intended from the start to induce mass terror.
Is the drone of incoming bombers more terrible than the silent plunge of a rocket? How does the mass bombing of cities compare with the terror of random elimination?
People appeared more pragmatic in WW2. Few people bothered to carry gas masks by spring 1940. That September the German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom known as the Blitz took place, lasting through May 1941.
Yet what happened during the air raids was that traumatized civilians simply stayed in their homes, often in bed. Absenteeism at factories after air raids rose to 15 per cent. [1]
It was at this point that government propagandists created the Blitz Spirit and the culture of the stiff upper lip (the part of the mouth that tends to sweat and tremble under pressure). Aubrey Lewis (1942) was commissioned to write a report showing that those who broke down had prior stress-related illness. Other psychologists not writing reports-to-order, said the effect of stress would be delayed. “A national survey of mental health services conducted in 1943 by Dr C.P. Blacker found that many directors of psychiatric clinics believed that ‘latent neurosis’ existed in the civilian population.” [1]
A different impact on the public mind was had by the V1 Doodle Bug flying bomb and the V2 Wernher von Braun rocket campaign in 1944. Once their engines cut out the rockets were silent as they plunged earthward. The V2 rockets could leave a crater 20 meters wide and eight meters deep.
The
government initially blamed the sudden blasts on rupturing gas mains. “The
Germans themselves finally announced the V2 on 8 November 1944 and only
then, on 10 November 1944, did Winston Churchill inform Parliament, and
the world, that England had been under rocket attack “for the last few
weeks”.”
Von Braun’s experiments were undoubtedly monitored by the U.S. and Britain. He was one of the first recruits under Operation Paperclip. The British government lost out on von Braun but got its share of the hardware, under Operation Backfire.
Sadly I can’t access the following document because I’m not a librarian –
Effect on home morale of flying bombs and V2 rockets: reports, minutes and correspondence (1944) published by the Ministry of Information (Themes Information Services and Propaganda, Bombing and Attacks on the Population; Subthemes: Damage to property, Public opinion and morale, Casualties and injuries, Psychological impacts, Rumours and gossip)
The impact on unseen terror from the air continued: The carpet bombing of Dresden after the Allies had won the war was an acknowledged attempt to terrorize the population. Government psychologists descended hungrily on the surviving human meat. I would like to write about that but the technical jargon is impenetrable. For internal use only, I suppose.
As for the British, broken mentally by two devastating wars within 20 years, they were never allowed to heal, except in a field hospital, permanently reliving the war (with the unspoken threat of the next one - remember the nuclear war public information films?). That's the purpose of thrusting the Blitz into everyone's face, relentlessly.
After WW2 freedom for Brits was just to be alive. To have anything to eat. Of course many people on the continent experienced much worse. But note that rationing was deliberately prolonged in Britain until 1954, almost a decade after the end of the war. Conscription continued until 1960, with the last cohort completing their National Service in 1963.
Psychological austerity. Deliberate repression. Sapping much of their sense of humour - Britons have been changed by a mental-psycho-social-economic attack that's been waged against them since the Second World War. The recent censoring of the 1970s series Fawlty Towers shows that Britons are now being denied even humour, a cathartic way to dealing with trauma. John Cleese's joke, "Don't mention the war," is now to be taken literally by comics, presumably to leave government propagandists with exclusive rights to mention the war, relentlessly.
Generations have been subjected to a propaganda machine that has gradually narrowed their understanding of what freedom is. In Britain, freedom is a choice between Strictly Come Dancing and The Great British Bake Off... and in case you missed it on TV, the British press never tires of telling you about those same television shows day after day, year after year.
Tea dances and cake bake-offs could not be a more obvious throwback. Bringing the nation together. Sure. Circa 1945.
It treats the public mind - an arena that should be alive to the sights and sounds of new music and arts, humour and national self-reflection - like a demented spinster to be entertained with an ancient ritual in an attempt to keep her synapses engaged.
Americans were more insulated from WW2. They still understood freedom was to eat what you wanted, to educate your children as you wished. Aspire to wealth, spiritual and material. Then U.S. society also came under attack.
Since the Phoenix Program was brought home from Vietnam, Americans have seen the gradual expansion of Homeland Security, with the potential to offer Americans many of the features and amenities enjoyed by the Viet Cong (See Douglas Valentine). War, it seems, is always conducted with one eye to reshaping the domestic population.
Don't worry about it. Think about slavery instead. The focus on slavery diverts the search for atonement past the democides that happened within the lifetime of our relatives – to events safely beyond the historical horizon. War will be used to manipulate the masses – but responsibility for war, unlike that for slavery, will not be a matter for the public to debate.
[1] Air raids and the crowd – citizens at war. The British Psychological Society.
Edgar Jones explores how British people responded to air raids during the Second World War, and what this tells us about coping under extreme stress. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/june-2016/air-raids-and-crowd-citizens-war
[2] Sargant talks about Christianity and mind control BULLETIN OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PSYCHIATRISTS, VOL 11, SEPTEMBER 1987 In Conversation with William Sargant (PDF)
Cynthia Chung uncovers the method behind the madness - and the frequent evocation by the British government of wartime spirit - through the work of British psychologist William Sargant and its accurate representation in popular format by George Orwell in this article: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/07/08/how-to-take-back-control-of-your-mind/
William Sargant “British psychiatrist and, one could say, effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West” studied the heavy bombing of London and its impact on the citizen's mind. Rather than creating a “can do” spirit, people coped by recognizing their helplessness. The healthy and normal, in Sargant’s view, remains functional in a ever-changing environment (see the article above).
As Chung puts it, the best survivors had the best potential for brain washing. You brainwash the strong, not the weak. The higher up the food chain, the more brainwashed. So that as Orwell observed, “It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest.“
Sargant recognized that those who didn’t co-operate could be eliminated: “…the stake, the gallows, the firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for the failures”.
In the 1910 minutes of the Carnegie Foundation’s Endowment for International Peace, the trustees asked themselves “if there is any way known to man more effective than war to so alter the life of an entire people”. They concluded there was not.
 |
| Scheme of a V2 Rocket by U.S. Army. Public domain. |
Given that Hitler was a joint Anglo-American-German project, it does make you wonder if the V2 campaign wasn’t itself a psycho-social experiment. The British government certainly studied it as such. The British conducted their own psychological experiment on Dresden: it was intended from the start to induce mass terror.
Is the drone of incoming bombers more terrible than the silent plunge of a rocket? How does the mass bombing of cities compare with the terror of random elimination?
The V2 rocket scene from the movie of the novelist Graham Greene's The End Of The Affair - with Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore. Greene's answer to the trauma of war was to not to submit to fear, but others would say that as an establishment writer and an Mi6 man, his appeal to God is still consistent with the State's concept of the just war.
During the First World War the Zeppelin raids killed relatively few
people. The British government saw the public’s tendency to shelter in
Underground stations as a lack of resolve (Wilfred Trotter) and planned
to draft police and troops to control the expected mass exodus from the
capital. People appeared more pragmatic in WW2. Few people bothered to carry gas masks by spring 1940. That September the German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom known as the Blitz took place, lasting through May 1941.
Yet what happened during the air raids was that traumatized civilians simply stayed in their homes, often in bed. Absenteeism at factories after air raids rose to 15 per cent. [1]
It was at this point that government propagandists created the Blitz Spirit and the culture of the stiff upper lip (the part of the mouth that tends to sweat and tremble under pressure). Aubrey Lewis (1942) was commissioned to write a report showing that those who broke down had prior stress-related illness. Other psychologists not writing reports-to-order, said the effect of stress would be delayed. “A national survey of mental health services conducted in 1943 by Dr C.P. Blacker found that many directors of psychiatric clinics believed that ‘latent neurosis’ existed in the civilian population.” [1]
A different impact on the public mind was had by the V1 Doodle Bug flying bomb and the V2 Wernher von Braun rocket campaign in 1944. Once their engines cut out the rockets were silent as they plunged earthward. The V2 rockets could leave a crater 20 meters wide and eight meters deep.
 | |
|
Von Braun’s experiments were undoubtedly monitored by the U.S. and Britain. He was one of the first recruits under Operation Paperclip. The British government lost out on von Braun but got its share of the hardware, under Operation Backfire.
 | |
|
Effect on home morale of flying bombs and V2 rockets: reports, minutes and correspondence (1944) published by the Ministry of Information (Themes Information Services and Propaganda, Bombing and Attacks on the Population; Subthemes: Damage to property, Public opinion and morale, Casualties and injuries, Psychological impacts, Rumours and gossip)
The impact on unseen terror from the air continued: The carpet bombing of Dresden after the Allies had won the war was an acknowledged attempt to terrorize the population. Government psychologists descended hungrily on the surviving human meat. I would like to write about that but the technical jargon is impenetrable. For internal use only, I suppose.
As for the British, broken mentally by two devastating wars within 20 years, they were never allowed to heal, except in a field hospital, permanently reliving the war (with the unspoken threat of the next one - remember the nuclear war public information films?). That's the purpose of thrusting the Blitz into everyone's face, relentlessly.
After WW2 freedom for Brits was just to be alive. To have anything to eat. Of course many people on the continent experienced much worse. But note that rationing was deliberately prolonged in Britain until 1954, almost a decade after the end of the war. Conscription continued until 1960, with the last cohort completing their National Service in 1963.
Psychological austerity. Deliberate repression. Sapping much of their sense of humour - Britons have been changed by a mental-psycho-social-economic attack that's been waged against them since the Second World War. The recent censoring of the 1970s series Fawlty Towers shows that Britons are now being denied even humour, a cathartic way to dealing with trauma. John Cleese's joke, "Don't mention the war," is now to be taken literally by comics, presumably to leave government propagandists with exclusive rights to mention the war, relentlessly.
Generations have been subjected to a propaganda machine that has gradually narrowed their understanding of what freedom is. In Britain, freedom is a choice between Strictly Come Dancing and The Great British Bake Off... and in case you missed it on TV, the British press never tires of telling you about those same television shows day after day, year after year.
Tea dances and cake bake-offs could not be a more obvious throwback. Bringing the nation together. Sure. Circa 1945.
It treats the public mind - an arena that should be alive to the sights and sounds of new music and arts, humour and national self-reflection - like a demented spinster to be entertained with an ancient ritual in an attempt to keep her synapses engaged.
Americans were more insulated from WW2. They still understood freedom was to eat what you wanted, to educate your children as you wished. Aspire to wealth, spiritual and material. Then U.S. society also came under attack.
Since the Phoenix Program was brought home from Vietnam, Americans have seen the gradual expansion of Homeland Security, with the potential to offer Americans many of the features and amenities enjoyed by the Viet Cong (See Douglas Valentine). War, it seems, is always conducted with one eye to reshaping the domestic population.
Don't worry about it. Think about slavery instead. The focus on slavery diverts the search for atonement past the democides that happened within the lifetime of our relatives – to events safely beyond the historical horizon. War will be used to manipulate the masses – but responsibility for war, unlike that for slavery, will not be a matter for the public to debate.
[1] Air raids and the crowd – citizens at war. The British Psychological Society.
Edgar Jones explores how British people responded to air raids during the Second World War, and what this tells us about coping under extreme stress. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/june-2016/air-raids-and-crowd-citizens-war
[2] Sargant talks about Christianity and mind control BULLETIN OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PSYCHIATRISTS, VOL 11, SEPTEMBER 1987 In Conversation with William Sargant (PDF)
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