TAVISTOCK

 

 

 

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
February 11, 2008

www.NewsWithViews.com
http://www.newswithviews.com/Cuddy/dennis122.htm

 

[Note: Regarding my recent article mentioning Benazir Bhutto's December 27, 2007 assassination, in a November 2, 2007 interview with David Frost she mentioned that an earlier assassination attempt by a former military officer connected with Omar Sheikh, "the man who murdered Osama bin Laden." Have you heard the power elite-controlled American press or media mention this? Bhutto was the woman the U.S. State Department wanted to become Prime Minister of Pakistan. Now why would the U.S. want someone to head Pakistan who has and publicly uses very bad information (Osama's murder) if she was wrong? Or, if she was correct, why would the press and media censor such important news from the American people? Could it be that the power elite doesn't want the public to know Osama's dead because that would decrease interest in the "war on terror"? And could Bhutto's "spilling the beans" have played a role in her own assassination? Concerning another of my recent articles, "The Power Elite's Use of Wars and Crises" (January 28), someone may have gotten the impression that the First World War was planned beginning around 1910. Actually wars are planned by the power elite far in advance, and the First World War, followed by a world government, was planned long before 1910. For example, in 1908 THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY (Vol. 2, No. 4) begins with these words: "'The most fearful war of the century is coming soon. After the war, will come world-peace--the highest development of the race in this cycle.' This is the prediction made a few days ago by a distinguished political economist."]

I was listening to a discussion regarding the Middle East and thought to myself "Don't they understand that what's happening has been planned?" This is not only true in geopolitics (FDR said nothing happened in politics by accident) but in all facets of life. In music in the 1950s and 1960s, rock music didn't just happen by accident. Theodor Adorno and others theorized years earlier how it could change people. Similarly in art, Bertolt Brecht said, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it."

Many people are familiar with the impact of the Leipzig and Frankfurt Schools upon society, but relatively few understand the impact of Tavistock. Therefore, this article will look at that organization and how it has shaped/planned our lives and the course of the world.

The name Tavistock is associated with human relations and psychiatry (see statue of Freud in front of Tavistock Institute). Charles Dickens (who had written of "pencils of light," which is similar to the term "points of light") moved to Tavistock House in October 1951. Tavistock is an area in southwest Devon in England, but the story begins elsewhere.

The term "psychiatry" was first used in 1808 by Johann Christian Reil, and it means "doctoring of the soul." The primary schools of psychiatry were established in the early 1800s in Leipzig and Berlin.

At Leipzig University in 1879, Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychological laboratory, and among his students were Ivan Pavlov, William James (the "Father of American Psychology"), and G. Stanley Hall (who would become the mentor of John Dewey, the "Father of Progressive Education"). Pavlov is well-known for his stimulus-response experiments with dogs. In Clarence Karier's SCIENTISTS OF THE MIND (1986), one reads concerning James that "we pass from a culture with God at its center to a culture with man at its center." James was also noted for his famous description of reality as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." Of possible interest in this regard is that a symbol of Rosicrucianism is "buzzing" bees seeking the nectar (wisdom) of a (blooming) rose. And Hall founded "genetic psychology" while also using Wundt's experimental psychology in the area of child development. Hall and James meshed in John Dewey, an educational psychologist, who co-authored the first "man-centered" HUMANIST MANIFESTO in 1933. Dewey, John B. Watson and other leading psychologists in the early 20th century were interested in the behavior of people. They didn't believe that man had a soul in the Biblical sense of the word. Thus it was not surprising that at the 6th International Congress of Philosophy, which took place at Harvard University in 1926, it was stated that the "soul or consciousness... now is of very little importance.... Behaviorism sang their funeral dirge while materialism--the smiling heir-- arranges a suitable funeral for them."

What does all this have to do with Tavistock? In 1920, the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology (TIMP) was founded. It was involved in psychotherapy, and psychiatrists at the Tavistock Clinic wanted to apply their findings to the general public in the form of certain social service programs.

John Rawlings Rees (who would be a co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health in 1948) was Deputy Director of Tavistock at this time (he would become Director in 1932). Rees developed the "Tavistock Method," which induces and controls stress via what Rees called "psychologically controlled environments" in order to make people give up firmly held beliefs under "peer pressure."

Rees' Tavistock Method was based on work done by British psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion regarding the roles of individuals within groups. This design was later shifted in a series of conferences (1957-1965) led by A. Kenneth Rice, chairman of Tavistock's Centre for the Applied Social Research. The shift was to the dynamics of leadership and authority relations in groups. According to the A.K. Rice Institute, "In 1965 Rice led a conference in the United States, as the Tavistock Method began to be developed in the U.S. by Margaret Rioch and others. The A.K. Rice Institute is now the U.S. equivalent of the Tavistock Institute."

In 1930, TIMP had been involved with the second biennial Conference on Mental Health, where psychiatrist J.R. Lord advocated challenging old values, saying "the aim should be to control not only nature, but human nature." And he spoke of the "necessity to disarm the mind."

Rees went even further than this on June 18, 1940 at the annual meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene of the United Kingdom. In his speech on "Strategic Planning for Mental Health," he proclaimed: "We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life.... We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine.... Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people, I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity.... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists.'" (See MENTAL HEALTH, Vol. 1, No. 4, October 1940)

In 1935, Harvard psychologist (1930-1967) Gordon Allport co-authored THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RADIO with Hadley Cantril. Allport would be a leading agent in the U.S. for the Tavistock Institute, and Cantril in 1937 would be a member of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Office of Radio Research at Princeton University established to study the influence of radio on different groups of listeners. In 1940, Cantril would author THE INVASION FROM MARS: A STUDY IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PANIC regarding the radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Tavistock senior staffer, Fred Emery, would later (HUMAN RELATIONS, Vol. 12, No. 3, August 1959) begin his article on "Working Hypotheses on the Psychology of Television" with the words: "The psychological after-effects of television are of considerable interest to the would-be social engineer."

During the Second World War, Tavistock was part of Great Britain's Psychological Warfare Department. On May 7, 1944, Dr. Rees of Tavistock and the British War Ministry injected Nazi prisoner Rudolf Hess with the narcotic Evipan. According to Lt. Col. Eugene Bird in PRISONER NO. 7: RUDOLF HESS (in the chapter titled "A Secret Drug"), Rees examined Hess 35 times. Rees and his associates via chemicals caused Hess's memory to fail and then "explained that they could bring back the memory with an injection of Evipan." Hess was told that "while under its influence he would remember the past he had forgotten."

In 1945, Rockefeller Foundation medical director Alan Gregg was touring various institutions that had been involved in war medicine to see if any group would commit to undertake the kind of social psychiatry that had been developed by the Army during wartime (e.g., cultural psychiatry for the analysis of the enemy mentality), and see if it could be relevant for the civilian society (on April 11, 1933, Rockefeller Foundation president Max Mason assured trustees that in their program, "the Social Sciences will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control,... the control of human behavior"). This led to a Rockefeller grant that resulted in the birth of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London in 1947. Tavistock would join with Kurt Lewin's Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at the University of Michigan the next year to begin publication of the international journal, HUMAN RELATIONS, relating theory to pracice. The first volume contained articles such as "Overcoming Resistance to Change," and "A Comparison of the Aims of the Hitler Youth and the Boy Scouts of America." The Tavistock Institute would use Lewin's techniques to arrange "therapeutic communities."

Lewin had received his Ph.D. from Berlin University in 1914, and in 1932 came to the U.S. in the area of child psychology. During the Second World War, he worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (which would become the CIA) in psychological warfare. He founded the RCGD in 1946. The next year his research center along with a division of the National Education Association (NEA) began the National Training Laboratories (NTL) which furthered Lewin's social engineering via "T-groups" (training groups), where group consensus is facilitated by trained individuals.

Over the next two decades, the NTL would spread its operations to various countries around the world. And in its ISSUES IN (HUMAN RELATIONS) TRAINING (1962), its sensitivity training is referred to as "brainwashing." Recently, NTL has conducted programs relevant to Tavistock such as "NTL and Tavistock: Two Traditions of Group Work," "Tavistock Program: Re-Thinking and Planning for Organizational Change," and "The Tavistock--Task Working Conference which is a program structured around various group configurations.... Periodically each group will review its actions and results to learn from processes, roles, values, and methods as they evolve." Other recent NTL programs have featured people such as New Ager Jean Houston and the witch Starhawk.

The year after Tavistock and the RCGD began publishing HUMAN RELATIONS, the journal (Vol. II, No. 3, 1949), published "Some Principles of Mass Persuasion" by Dorwin Cartwright who helped establish the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. In this article, Cartwright reveals: "It is conceivable that one persuasive person could, through the use of mass media, bend the world's population to his will." The article goes on to describe "the modification of cognitive structure in individuals by means of mass media" and how "a person can be induced to do voluntarily something that he would otherwise not do." The article also provides "a list of essential requirements for the success of any campaign of mass persuasion."

Seven years after Cartwright's article appeared, prominent psychiatrist R.D. Laing was appointed senior registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in 1956, three years after he left the British Army Psychiatric Unit. He began experimenting with LSD in 1960, and then in 1962 when he became a family therapist at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, he also met Gregory Bateson while visiting the U.S. Bateson had been with the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), and then led the MK-Ultra hallucinogen (LSD) project. Bateson's and Margaret Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, along with New Ager Jean Houston, would later help Hilary Clinton write IT TAKES A VILLAGE. IN 1964 Laing met LSD proponent Timothy Leary in New York and also authored "Transcendental Experience in Relation and Psychosis" (THE PSYCHEDELIC REVIEW, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1964). Three years later Laing participated in the July 15-30 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress.

In 1964, Fred Emery, who would be a senior member of Tavistock, wrote "Theories of Social Turbulence" which he explained more fully in FUTURES WE ARE IN (1975). According to this theory, individuals or societies faced with a series of crises will attempt to reduce the tension by adaptation and eventually psychological retreat as if anesthetized (similar to Pavlov's "protective inhibition response"). This can lead to social disintegration, which Emery called "segmentation."

In 1970, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) of the NEA published TO NURTURE HUMANENESS: COMMITMENT FOR THE '70s, in which Sidney Jourard (Fellow at the Tavistock Clinic and former president of the Association for Humanist Psychology), wrote: "We are in a time of revolt.... The new society will be a fascist state or it will be pluralistic and humanistic." The primary characteristic of the fascist state is increasing control over people's lives by government in league with corporations. Sound like today?

Relevant to this, in October 1997 the Tavistock Institute (and Manchester University) completed a final report (under Contract ERB-SOE2-CT-96-2011) for the European Commission, and described in a report summary was that there will be "partnerships between government, industry, and representatives of worker organizations." The report summary also described "the relevancy of Goals 2000, SCANS (U.S. Department of Labor SECRETARY'S COMMISSION ON ACHIEVING NECESSARY SKILLS) typology with its profound implications for the curriculum and training changes that this will require," valid skills standards and portable credentials "benchmarked to international standards such as those promulgated by the International Standards Organization (ISO)." The report summary went on to say that "there is increasing attention being focused on developing global skill standards and accreditation agreements."

In the 1990s, the Tavistock Institute not only began a new journal titled EVALUATION in 1995, but the Institute and the European Commission also worked on a feasibility study to research the effect of using "Smart Cards" in competence accreditation. The study was carried out in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The project involved assessing and validating students' skills, with information placed on personal skills Smart Cards which "become real passports to employment." The implication, of course, is that without this "real passport," one will not be employed. 

Welcome to the Tavistock psychologically conditioned feudal fascist state of the future, under the power elite's planned World Socialist Government! This will lead to what Daniel 8:23-25 foretold: "And in the latter time... a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up... and shall destroy the mighty and holy people... and by peace shall destroy many...." 

How is it possible that the "holy people" will be destroyed? It's because today many so-called Christians are sitting on their posteriors while the "religion" of secular humanism has been taught in public schools for over four decades. Values are being taught in public schools based upon situation ethics without reference to God as moral authority. This is a primary tenet of secular humanism (see the first and second HUMANIST MANIFESTO), which was declared a "religion" by the U.S. Supreme Court in Torcaso v. Watkins (1961). Public school students are taught (without reference to God's moral authority) to decide for themselves what's right or wrong based on the situation. And so-called Christians are letting this "religion" be taught in public schools while the Supreme Court has banned the God of THE HOLY BIBLE as moral authority in the same schools. Over four decades of this has produced more secular humanists than God's "holy people," whose dwindling ranks will be vastly outnumbered by secular humanists who will "destroy" them as a result of their "situation." God, please help us!

 

© 2008 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved

[Order Dennis Cuddy's new book "Cover-Up: Government Spin or Truth?" out of print, supply limited]