A Clockwork Orange official trailer

[Jan Klimkowski]

For those of us interested in Stanley Kubrick's occult and deep political dimensions, the official trailer to "A Clockwork Orange" is a provocative watch:



It contains elements not seen in the final version. Subliminal flashes resonant with the disclosure of Lt Commander Thomas Narut.

In addition, a recent biographer claimed that the spook and novelist, Anthony Burgess, based A Clockwork Orange on real behaviour modification programmes carried out in secret American experiments in military bases such as Fort Bliss, probably involving Paperclip Nazis, that Burgess had learned of through his intelligence connections.

The late great Walter Bowart wrote the following about the Narut incident.

According to the Sunday Times story, naval psychologist
Lt. Comdr. Thomas Narut was assigned to the
U.S. Regional Medical Center at Naples, Italy. When he
first made public the navy's part in programming assassins,
he was attending a NATO conference in Oslo on "Dimensions
of Stress and Anxiety." In attendance at that conference
were 120 psychologists of all descriptions and from
many countries. Many of them were involved in research
on how to improve man's ability to cope with stress, but
none of them felt compelled, as Narut did, to discuss their
work so fully or so frankly.
The stated objective of the conference was to exchange
information on how soldiers and people in difficult jobs
could cope with stress. Dr. Narut's talk was on "The Use
of a Symbolic Model and Verbal Intervention in Inducing
and Reducing Stress." His speech began with a plug for the
navy. He knew, he said, that many of the scientists present
had often encountered problems in their purely scientific
research because of the military's inclination to research
that would yield quick and useful results. He sympathized
with those who had trouble getting subjects, funds, or both,
out of the military for their purely scientific research. But
things were different in the navy he said.
In the navy, Narut bragged, there were plenty of captive
personnel who could be used as guinea pigs. In the navy
there was a computerized record of each man's background
and psychological profile, so that a quick selection of men
with suitable psychological inclinations for experiments
could be made. Navy psychologists not only had access to
computerized records, but also to psychological tests and
background data on a large number of people. In the navy,
Narut said, funds were plentiful, and there were no problems
with transporting subjects for study to nearly any
place in the world. Narut stated proudly that the U.S.
Navy provided scientists with the most advanced research
facilities in the world.
A Canadian psychologist at the conference later remarked,
"Narut's message was loud and clear�'Join the
navy and study the world.'"
In his brief discourse, Dr. Narut did no more than hint
at the work he had been doing in teaching "combat readi-
Operation Mind Control 163
ness units" to cope with the stress of killing. Later, however,
during private questioning with a small group of listeners
(reporter Peter Watson of the Sunday Times, a
former psychologist, among them), Narut unfolded the
amazing story of the navy's programming of assassins on
an assembly-line basis.
In his mid-thirties, Dr. Narut had just completed his
doctoral dissertation on the question of whether certain
films provoke anxiety, and whether forcing a man to do
irrelevant tasks while watching violent films would help
him cope with the anxiety they produced.
When pressed by Watson to explain the details of this
kind of conditioning, Narut said that he had worked with
"combat readiness units" which included men being programmed
for commando-type operations and for undercover
placement at U.S. embassies. These, Narut said, were
"hit men and assassins" (Narut's words) made ready to kill
in selected countries should the need arise. Dr. Alfred Zitani,
an American delegate to the conference, was very surprised
by Narut's disclosure. "Do you think Dr. Narut realizes
what he has just said?" Zitani asked. "That kind of
information must be classified."
The conditioning of Narut's assassins was accomplished
by audio-visual desensitization, a standard behavior modification
process. These men were "desensitized" to mayhem
by being shown films of people being killed or injured in a
number of different ways. At first the films would show
only mild forms of bloodshed. As the men became acclimated
to the scenes of carnage, they would see progressively
more violent scenes. The assassin candidates, Narut
explained, would eventually be able to dissociate any feelings
they might have from even the goriest scenes they
viewed.
Narut said that of course U.S. naval psychologists would
have first selected the candidates for training by their psychological
makeup. Those selected for assassination assignments
were often from submarine crews and paratroops.
Others were convicted murderers from military prisons
who had already shown a proclivity for violence.
Still others were men who had been given awards for
valor. World War II Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy
was a subject of extensive research.
The best killers, according to Narut, were men whom psychologists would classify as "passive-aggressive" personalities.
These were people with strong drives that were
usually kept under tight control. Such types were usually
calm, but from time to time would exhibit outbursts of temper
during which they could literally kill without remorse.
Narut said that through psychological testing, he and his
colleagues were looking for more such men, for further
conditioning.
Among the tests used by the navy to determine violent
natures was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,
which is used widely by educators and businessmen to
determine psychological qualities of students and employees.
The tests consist of hundreds of questions designed to
measure such personality traits as hostility, depression, and
psychopathy.
According to Narut, the men selected by the tests, or by
evidence of past violence, were taken for programming to
the navy's neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego, California,
or to the Naples medical center which employed
Dr. Narut.
Audio-visual desensitization was the major technique
used in programming the assassins. Psychological indoctrination
completed the programming by instilling the desired
prejudicial attitudes.
The audio-visual desensitization began with the subject
strapped into a chair with his head clamped so that he
could not look away from the screen. A special mechanism
prevented the subject's eyelids from closing.
The candidate was then shown a film of an African
youth being crudely circumcised by fellow members of his
tribe. The youth was circumcised with a blunt knife, painfully
and without anesthetic. This well-known film is used
widely in psychological experiments to create stress. Afterwards
the candidate was asked about details of what he had
seen. He was asked, for example, to describe the color of
the belt on the doctor's trousers, or the motif on the handle
of the knife that cut off the foreskin.
The next film showed a man in a sawmill, where planks
were sliced from huge logs. In the operation of the saw the
man slipped and cut off his fingers.
As the films progressed in gruesomeness, the reactions of
the candidate were measured by sensing devices. Heartbeat,
breathing rate, and brain waves were recorded, very much
Operation Mind Control 165
as on a polygraph. If the physiological responses, which
might have been great in the beginning, slowed down and
resumed normal patterns as the more bloodthirsty scenes
were viewed, the candidates were judged to have completed
this stage of conditioning.
The last phase of conditioning, Narut said, was to indoctrinate
the candidates to think of their potential enemies as
inferior forms of life. By this stage, the candidates would
have already been selected for assignment to particular
countries. They would be shown films and given lectures
which portrayed the customs and cultural habits of the foreign
countries in a biased fashion. The people of those
countries would be portrayed as enemies of the United
States and were always spoken of in demeaning terms.
They were often presented as if they were "less than human."
Their customs were ridiculed, and local leaders were
presented as evil demagogues, even if they were legitimate
political figures.
According to Dr. Narut it took only a few weeks to indoctrinate
susceptible candidates by this process. Those
who were not susceptible to the conditioning were dropped
earlier in the program and returned to other assignments.
Narut admitted that he did not have the necessary "need to
know" as to where all the programmed men were sent, although
at one point in his conversation with Peter Watson,
Narut specified that programmed assassins have been installed
in the Athens embassy. He said that his busiest time
was when a large group of men went through such training
towards the end of 1973, at the time of the Yom Kippur
War.
After the Oslo conference interview, Watson returned to
London to file his story. Writing up the details, he found a
few points which needed clarification but he could not
reach Narut either at his home or in his laboratory in Naples.
Watson then asked the U.S. embassy in London to
comment on the information Narut had volunteered. The
embassy passed the buck to the U.S. Navy.
Within a few days the Pentagon issued a categorical denial
that the U.S. Navy had ever "engaged in psychological
training or other types of training of personnel as assassins.
"They also denied that any such training had ever taken
place either in San Diego or in Naples. They said they too
had been unable to contact Lieutenant Commander Narut, but they did confirm that he was on the staff of the U.S.
Regional Medical Center in Naples as a psychologist. But
Dr. Zitani later offered to testify about what Narut had told
him to "appropriate authorities." Watson was also approached
later by a psychologist in Los Angeles who said
he had seen the Pentagon denials so thought Watson would
like to know that he had lent the San Diego psychologists a
copy of his film on circumcision which was used in the
desensitization conditioning.
A few days later Narut was located. He flew to London
to discuss the matter ostensibly with Watson's paper, the
Sunday Times, but instead he held a press conference saying
only that he had been talking in "theoretical and not
practical terms." He then flew back to the Naples base.
After his return to Naples, U.S. naval headquarters in
London offered the official explanation for Narut's statement:
Narut had "personal problems." A few days later
Watson was able to contact Narut at the U.S. hospital in
Naples, but he refused to elaborate on his disclosure.
During the Oslo conference interview, Narut had said
several times that what he was saying about the assassins
was "coming out anyway." He was referring to the congressional
disclosures about CIA assassination plots. But the
fact that the navy had been operating along lines similar to
the CIA was not known to the public nor has it subsequently
been admitted. The details of the story that Lieutenant
Commander Narut related have been strongly and
categorically denied in all subsequent queries of the navy.
It came as no surprise to many that the navy had been
interested in psychological research to help its men cope
with "stress." Several years before, one of the organizers of
the Oslo conference, Dr. Irwin Sarason, had been approached
by the navy to work on projects similar to Narut's.
At the time, the navy had said nothing to him about
programming assassins; it said it wanted him to adapt his
work for applications to "spies."
In response to that request, Sarason devised a film which
showed how successful students asked questions in school.
The film was shown to a group of juvenile delinquents for a
period of time until they, too, learned how to pose the right
questions. As a result, over the next two years they did
much better in their studies and got in trouble less. The
control group who had not seen the films did just as poorly
Operation Mind Control 167
in school as they'd always done and were just as delinquent.
Since his "symbolic modeling" study had been successful,
Sarason wanted to continue his research and applied to
the Office of Naval Research for more funding. A few
weeks after his application was received, Sarason was
called by a navy official who asked him if he would object
to having his work classified. Sarason wondered why, and
the navy official told him his research would be most valuable
to the navy's neuropsychiatric laboratory in California,
as spies were being trained there to resist interrogation.
The naval official said that if Sarason would allow his work
to be classified, he'd get all the funds he needed.
But Sarason was interested in the peaceful scientific nature
of his work, not its military applications, so he refused
to have the project classified. His goal was the exception
rather than the rule.
The federal government supports most scientific research
in the United States. Enough psychologists and other social
scientists haven't asked questions about what their research
is to be used for; their main objective has been to get the
grant, so they could support themselves and their scientific
curiosity. Since too many of them have been politically disinterested
or naive, they have been easy prey for the cryptocracy.
Lieutenant Commander Narut was therefore but
one in a long line of psychologists being employed for psychological
warfare and illegal clandestine operations.
Another such operation was the training of security officers
at the Washington-based International Police Academy
by psychologists and sociologists. The officers were
supposedly being taught interrogation techniques for Third
World countries; actually it was a highly sensitive clandestine
operation organized for the training of U.S. spies. Congress
closed the Academy on January 1, 1974, after its real
purpose was disclosed to the press.

Also there are several threads where Narut's revelations are discussed in context, eg:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...t#post6740
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...ut#post778
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...t#post5432
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...t#post5678

The first edition of Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control can be found here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...ght=bowart

The revised and heavily updated second edition was a limited edition samizdat photocopy.

[Jan Klimkowski]

PS for aficionados, note Stanley's moon shot 34 seconds into the trailer.... :mexican:

[Myra Bronstein]

Clockwork Orange used to be my favorite movie in the whole wide world until I saw the stage version on the West End and realized that the American version of the book, which the movie was based on, was missing the entire last chapter. This changed the story and message completely, 180 degrees. I'm surprised that Kubrick opted to use the incomplete version of the story that corrupted Burgess' original message. I'll never understand that. Burgess was thrilled with the restored stage version because it had his original ending.

I know that wasn't the point of your post Jan, but I tangent.

The back story of Clockwork Orange is noteworthy too. Poor (literally) Burgess sold the rights for $100 or so. Then Kubrick bought the rights and... well, ouch. Not the best business decision Burgess ever made but he needed the money.

Anyway, I didn't realize that Burgess had such insight into MKUltra kinda activities.

[Magda Hassan]

Anyway to get this to go in slow motion?

[Myra Bronstein]

Anyway to get this to go in slow motion?

I did a quick google of "Youtube slow motion" and it looks like there are many ways to do it, though most would require downloading the video and running it through another program or media player.

[Magda Hassan]

Ah, thank you Myra. I'll check it out.

[David Guyatt]

PS for aficionados, note Stanley's moon shot 34 seconds into the trailer.... :bandit:

Indeed. And the subjects eye being forced, and held open, at 36 seconds.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Anyway to get this to go in slow motion?

Magda - once the entire clip (only a minute) has played once, if you hit play again you can use the round circle icon on the red-filled toolbar beneath the clip to slide the picture backwards and forwards by grabbing it with your mouse.

This is pretty crude - it's not giving you frame by frame control - but it does enable you to see and pause/freeze most of the imagery.

[Ed Jewett]

Yikes, I need to retire to a quiet bungalow somewhere with book delivery service and a stable high-speed broadband connection just to keep up with you folks, let alone fill in the missing gaps. [Oh, wait, he added.... "I'm already there."]

[Magda Hassan]

Anyway to get this to go in slow motion?

Magda - once the entire clip (only a minute) has played once, if you hit play again you can use the round circle icon on the red-filled toolbar beneath the clip to slide the picture backwards and forwards by grabbing it with your mouse.

This is pretty crude - it's not giving you frame by frame control - but it does enable you to see and pause/freeze most of the imagery.

Thanks Jan!