Afghan Protest Against Soviet Occupation Looks Familiar In Scarce Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

A set of nine dramatic anti-Soviet propaganda posters lithographed on thin paper and published in Pakistan c.1980-81 by the Internal Islamic Fronts/Afghanistan is being offered by Bonham's in its Fine Books and Manuscripts sale February 10, 2014.

Each poster (approximately 375 x 250 mm) is ink-stamped with the publisher's imprint in Arabic and English but without captions. They are somewhat crudely printed; on one poster the inky red fingerprints of the pressman are clearly visible. These were printed on the fly under difficult  circumstances and we should not be surprised that the result was less than perfect.

The initial Soviet deployment of its 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 24, 1979, under then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The final troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989, under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets had been caught in what has been called "the bear trap" and the Soviet war in Afghanistan would become its Vietnam: an intractable morass, a political and military quicksand that sucked Soviet troops deep in over their heads, as it had in the past for every other power that tried to bend Afghanistan to its will. The United States poured billions into the country in military support of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets, the Moujahadin, playing out another Cold War conflict with the U.S.S.R.

In the poster above, Brezhnev is scolding his Afghan parrot, Babrak Karmal, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council. Karmal's policy failures, iffy cooperation, and the stalemate against the Resistance led the Kremlin to become highly critical of its puppet's leadership. Brezhnev appears to be saying, "now, now, repeat after me, 'I will behave, I will behave, I will behave!'" Yet as every parrot caretaker understands but civilians don't, if you wag a finger close to a parrot's beak the bird will treat it as a chew toy on a serving tray and act accordingly. 

Substitute President G.W. Bush or President Obama for Brezhnev and insert current Afghan leader Hamid Karzai for Karmal and the situation has not changed.

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Image courtesy of Bonham's, with our thanks.

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L. Ron Hubbard's Infamous Forgery on Soviet Brainwashing

by Stephen J. Gertz

This notorious forgery, "A Synthesis of the Russian Text Book on Psychopolitics," originally published in 1955 and falsely attributed to Lavrentii Beria, the Chief of Stalin’s Secret Police, was actually written by science-fiction novelist and Scientology founder, in 1953, L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), who had a flair for creating pure fantasy worlds, including a fantasy religion-for-fee, and, apparently, fantasy politics. Until recently, American politics has rarely been more psycho.

The pamphlet was published under the imprint of the American Public Relations Forum, a conservative Catholic women’s group founded in 1952 by Southern California housewife, Stephanie Williams, who proclaimed to the opening meeting of the group, "We are the wives and mothers who are vitally concerned with what is happening in our country." David Seed, in Brainwashing: the Fictions of Mind Control (Kent State University Press, 2004) calls it “one of the strangest publications of the Cold War.”

Brain-Washing... purports to reprint a secret Soviet textbook and speech by Beria on mass mind-control techniques. Among the document’s many astounding claims is that “every chair of psychology in the United States is occupied by persons in our [Communist] connection.” Hubbard distributed the pamphlet to law enforcement agencies, and the forgery was sufficiently sophisticated to be taken seriously by President Eisenhower’s National Security Council.

While authorship has long been attributed to Hubbard, no one, to the best of our knowledge, has drawn a direct connection between this pamphlet and the contemporary hysteria surrounding the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act of 1956, widely decried as the “Siberia Act” by conservative conspiracy theorists who claimed the law would be used to subject anyone outside the liberal political mainstream to psychiatric testing and, of course, subsequent banishment.  The APRF claimed that the law, which provided for the transfer of a million acres of Federal land in Alaska to the local authorities to fund the cost of providing modern mental health service facilities in the territory, was intended to give the government authority to abduct citizens at will and imprison them in concentration camps in Alaska. Glenn Beck could not have said it better. Actually, Stephanie Williams did:

"We could not help remembering that Siberia is very near Alaska and since it is obvious no one needs such a large land grant, we were wondering if it could be an American Siberia."

For former Governors of the state with failed larger ambitions, perhaps, but there was a precedent for internment of U.S. citizens during wartime - and this was a war on Communism - so the American Public Relations Forum, while engaging in pretzel logic, was not completely irrational in its concern.

Whether this pamphlet was part of the APRF's campaign against the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act or not (its initial printing was issued a year before the controversy; subsequent issues may have had that purpose), it stands on its own as one of the most bizarre titles in the annals of American Right-Wing literature, and a testament to the imagination of a grade-z fringe writer who developed his gift of BS for the credulous into a breath- and wallet-taking pseudoscience psychobabble aliens-from-outer-space-our-spiritual-leaders creed that raised him to the status of America's most celebrated - and wealthy - charlatan of the twentieth century (but don't say that to a Scientologist).

Curiously, the electropsychometer (E-meter), Hubbard's quack contraption that he claimed could measure the pain felt by an eggplant and plays an important role in identifying the Scientology novice's psychological issues, is no where to be found within this book. What's brainwashing without a top-loading automatic washing machine?

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[HUBBARD, L. Ron]. Brain-Washing. A Synthesis of the Russian Text Book on Psychopolitics. Including an Address by Beria, Formerly Head of the Russian Secret Police. Burbank: American Public Relations Forum, [ca 1958]. 56pp. Staple-bound, textured buff wrappers, printed in black. 

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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles: The Real Story

by Stephen J. Gertz

Listen, Do You Want To Know a Secret?  The truth has finally emerged, as truthy as truth can be. Finally, the Communist Master Music Plan has been exposed.

Before the Beatles went home, Back in the U.S.S.R. in 1968 and heard balalaikas ringing out, they invaded the U.S.A. in 1964 and  brought with them insidious secret Soviet techniques of Pavlovian mind-control for a thorough wash, rinse, and spin of the cerebral cortexes of American kids:

“...The destructive music of the Beatles merely reinforces the excitatory reflex of the youth to the point where it crosses the built-in inhibitory reflex. This in turn weakens the nervous system to a state where the youth actually suffers a case of artificial neurosis. And the frightening, even fatal, aspect of this mental breakdown process is the fact that these teenagers, in this excitatory, hypnotic state, can be told to do anything - and they will.”

Time has proven that the "artificial" neurosis of 1960s American youth was no more artificial than our sacred right to bear arms and die with a handgun to be pried from our cold, rigid digits. Baby Boomers are genuinely neurotic. Not our Boomers, of course, just Lefty Boomers.

Underground laboratories hidden beneath remote dales and bucolic glens throughout our fair land have discovered that the Beatles' classic love song, Michelle, when played backwards and slowed down,  is an ukase straight out of Red Square and the Kremlin that commands its listeners to, "Kill pigs, bad pigs,  ils sont des porcs bien connu comme étant prigs, oui ces porcs."

It's an all-out assault on liberty and the American way of life.

That French is superciliously recited with airy pretension and an English word thrown in for a cheap rhyme makes this threat even more insidious. We bailed the Frogs out of WWI and II and now they're killing us with French fries and conspiring with The Fab Four and the Comintern to rob our youth of their precious essence. D'gall!

It's enough to drive all true,  red-blooded Americans to purge themselves of godless hemoglobin so that only pure, white blood cells flow through our veins.

Who stands up for our children when they lie down to diabolical foreign influence and are ruthlessly trod upon by Marx and his brothers, Lenin, Stalin, and Zeppo?

I read the news today, oh boy. The Beatles were actually born in Kenya and raised to worship Baal. As if we didn't know.

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NOEBEL, David A. Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music - The Communist Master Music Plan. Tulsa: Christian Crusade Publications, 1965. Revised Third Edition. Octavo. Staple-bound illustrated wrappers. 26 pp.

This book went into not just three editions but, so popular, it went into five editions through 1965, winning that year's Noebel Prize for  Litterature.

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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

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