Although the title of this vid was “creepy sounds”, it had quite a collection of psy-ops (Psychological Operations) various militaries throughout history used to frighten and dishearten the enemies will to fight, including quite a few from WW2.
Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!
“In laboratory experiments, a normal cat displays the normal hunter instinct toward a mouse,” a narrator explains in a droning monotone. Donned in a stereotypical white lab coat, the scientist locks the feline in a box and sprays it with lysergic acid diethylamide.
A hallucinogenic drug better known as LSD.
“After 45 seconds, the effects of the psychochemical become apparent,” the narrator adds, as the animal hisses and jumps in terror at two mice.
This isn’t the beginning of some cheap horror movie. It’s the opening scene from a five-minute U.S. Army film entitled Mental Incapacitators — Psychochemicals.
In May 2016, the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Maryland posted a copy of the footage online as part of a larger collection. Though the Army’s Chemical Corps produced the shorts in 1959, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery donated this particular copy to the medical archive. At least one different version of the full compilation of the clips, with a visibly different film quality, already existed on YouTube.
The clip provides an almost painfully clinical look at the ground combat branch’s attempts to turn LSD and other chemical compounds into useful weapons. These days, the Army would probably prefer people forgot about these programs altogether.
While poisons and dangerous chemicals have played roles in battle since ancient times, chemical weapons became emblematic of modern warfare during World War I. But after seeing the devastating and highly visible after effects, the victors banded together to try and regulate deadly gasses and diseases on the battlefield.
In 1925, more than three dozen countries agreed to the Geneva Protocol banning the use of deadly gasses and bacteria in future wars. However, not all the signatories put the deal into practice immediately or without significant reservations. In the interwar period, countries such as Italy, Japan and Spain sporadically deployed chemical weapons, often in conflicts far removed from widespread scrutiny or criticism of any kind.
The United States signed the treaty in 1925, but American legislators didn’t put it into force for another 50 years. Even then, the U.S. military initially reserved the right to use chemical and biological weaponry against anyone who broke the deal.
So, throughout World War II and into the Cold War, the Pentagon went right ahead developing all sorts of new compounds and diseases and plans to use them in combat. The Pentagon put the Chemical Corps in charge of cooking up new agents.
The History of Drugs and War is Long and Sordid to Say the Least
In 1834, the British Government could not have sent a worse person with the worst set of instructions to China. The British Parliament chose William Napier, a Scottish lord, to be the Chief Superintendent of Trade in East Asia. Lord Napier had no experience with Chinese culture or traditions, but was nonetheless sent to Canton to take-up residence as the King’s representative and to ensure unfettered access to the Chinese market. However, setting up residence on Chinese soil without first visiting the Chinese Imperial court and kowtowing to the emperor was a violation of the Middle Kingdom’s laws. The importation of opium, something the British had been smuggling into China well before the arrival of Napier, was also illegal, and he ensured that it continued.
Through an epic series of miscommunication between Napier and representatives of the Chinese Emperor, naval clashes between the two sides erupted shortly after his arrival. The British use of naval power to force the Chinese to accept a drug that was illegal in both China and Great Britain laid the foundation for the Opium Wars. By the time of his death from typhus, Napier would still not know that the Chinese translated his name, not as Lord Napier, but as“Laboriously Vile.”
Laboriously vile might have also described the widespread opium abuse that deeply affected the kingdom’s ability to protect itself. The Chinese may have lost the Opium War due to the mismatch in firepower, but it did not help that 90 percent of the Emperor’s forces were addicted to opium. Strung out or high is no way to face the Royal Navy.
The drug fueled atrocities that pevade today’s world can also be described as laboriously vile. Consider the Libyan army’s perverse use of Viagra as part of a campaign of rape against women in the communities that rose up against Gaddafi in 2011. Consider also ISIL forcing captive women to ingest contraceptives to maintain its supply of sex slaves.
That war has been pharmacological, Lukasz Kamienski, author of a new book on this subject, could not be more correct. As he argues, homo furens (fighting man) has also been homo narcoticus (drugged man). While Clausewitz described war as a duel on a grander scale, Hobbes said that in war there is a great running away. The mediating substance between the two descriptions has been narcotics — drugs help shore one up for the grand duel. War might be, as Clausewitz argues, an extension of policy, but it is also an extension of pharmacology.
Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks
