From Sleeper Agents to Scrolling Minds, the New Manchurian Candidates
Meta’s recent apology to the Indian government for briefly restricting a video posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the turbulent education protests spearheaded by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) was yet another reminder that some of the most consequential battles of our time are fought in the invisible territory between grievance and manipulation.
The larger issue was that a private technology company thousands of kilometres away today possesses the power to determine what millions see - and, through the mysterious alchemy of algorithms, what they are repeatedly encouraged to notice. While the voter still casts the ballot, it is increasingly doubtful who controls the information environment in which he makes up his mind.
Unlike the political propagandist, the power wielded by a technology platform is subtler and arguably more puissant. It need not persuade anyone of anything. It can simply determine which facts, fears and grievances people must encounter repeatedly.
As recent events have shown, India today confronts an increasingly complex information battlespace. Cross-border propaganda, organised disinformation, online Islamist radicalisation and digitally amplified political polarisation have all become familiar features of public life.
The recent CJP protests unfolded amid a fog of misinformation, blurring the line between authentic grievance and manufactured outrage. This is hardly new. Foreign influence operations, some well documented and others still contested, have long sought (and continue to seek) to shape perceptions of India at home and abroad.
The cauldron has also produced a peculiar class of Indian political commentator - the self-styled elite which includes journalists and laymen alike, at home and abroad. Professionally successful and largely insulated from India’s hardscrabble realities, they remain perpetually agitated by its politics, pronouncing on the failures of Indian democracy with impressive certainty while giving their critical faculties an extended holiday.
Unlike the Cold War, today’s ‘useful idiots’ do not need a handler in the Kremlin or a briefing room in Langley. A personalised algorithm can do much of the work by feeding conviction, grievance and the agreeable vanity of believing oneself enlightened.
This manipulation has a distinctly Cold War ancestry. The word ‘brainwashing’ entered the American vocabulary in the early 1950s, popularised by the journalist Edward Hunter in his accounts of Chinese Communist methods of ideological ‘thought reform’. Hunter adapted the expression from the Chinese xǐnǎo (literally to ‘wash the brain’) and gave the West a word for an old fear wherein the enemy might not merely imprison the body but colonise the mind.
Mind Games
The Korean War (1950-53) supplied the nightmare with its most potent imagery. American prisoners of war returned from Chinese captivity having made confessions, signed petitions or uttered statements sympathetic to Communism.
Whether these episodes represented the near-mystical mind control by the Communists was another matter, but the possibility that personality itself could be dismantled and reconstructed seemed suddenly less like science fiction.
The irony was that America was investigating similar possibilities. “We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night,” says Control in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This potent line wonderfully captures the Cold War’s moral ambiguity that Western intelligence agencies were no less ruthless than their Communist counterparts.
The CIA’s secret MKUltra programme, begun in 1953, explored hypnosis, psychoactive drugs and other techniques of behavioural modification.
Out of this Macbethian witches’ brew of Cold War tensions, writer Richard Condon created one of the great political nightmares of modern fiction with his The Manchurian Candidate (1959) – a nightmare that became visual shorthand for Cold War brainwashing with the wonderfully sinister 1962 film adaptation of Condon’s novel.
Condon’s book was much stranger, darker and more satirical than its reputation as a mere ‘Cold War thriller’ suggests. It was not merely a story about Communists converting American soldiers into assassins. It was a grotesque comedy of American political life, held in thrall by McCarthyism, of electoral manipulation, family ambition and the possibility that democracy itself could become a theatre in which everyone was playing a part.
John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film, blessed with George Axelrod’s cracking screenplay and bolstered immensely by Frank Sinatra’s participation, transformed that anxiety into one of cinema’s most unsettling political visions.
The famous plot has Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw, unforgettably essayed by a glazed and glacial Laurence Harvey, returning from the Korean War as a decorated hero, unaware that his mind has been conditioned and that he has been transformed into a sleeper assassin, awaiting a psychological trigger to set him in motion.
His former platoon commander, Major Bennett Marco, played by Sinatra, slowly begins to suspect that something is terribly wrong when several members of the unit recall the same recurring dream: a seemingly innocuous military lecture that gradually reveals itself as something far more sinister.
The men have, in fact, been subjected to a demonstration of psychological conditioning by their Communist captors. Shaw has been programmed to respond to a specific trigger and, when activated, to carry out an assassination. The trigger is the Queen of Diamonds in a deck of cards When Shaw is shown the card, he enters a trance-like state and becomes susceptible to commands that would ordinarily be unthinkable.
In playing the ultimate ‘mother from hell,’ Angela Lansbury delivers one of the most chilling performances in American cinema as Eleanor Iselin, Shaw’s mother, whose insatiable political ambition turns even maternal love into an instrument of manipulation.
Mythical Quality
The timing of the film’s release has lent it an almost mythical quality. It opened in October 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had ever been. American audiences were watching a story about invisible enemies, programmed killers and political assassination while wondering whether global catastrophe itself might arrive within days. Barely thirteen months later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
The popular belief that The Manchurian Candidate was immediately suppressed after Kennedy’s murder is more complicated than the legend suggests. But the coincidence was irresistible. A film about a manipulated assassin, released at the height of Cold War anxiety and followed so soon by the murder of a president, acquired a permanent aura of unease. The mythology deepened further because Lee Harvey Oswald was reportedly fascinated by Suddenly (1954), another Sinatra film about an attempted presidential assassination, although claims that it influenced his actions remain disputed.
The phrase ‘Manchurian candidate’ has since entered the political lexicon, describing someone who appears to act independently but is secretly serving another power. The film itself has become shorthand for the darkest Cold War fear that the most dangerous weapon in an ideological war may not be a missile or a bomb, but a human being whose mind has been captured and turned against his own country.
Prior to the Candidate’s explosive arrival on scene, a little-seen film had directly tackled the issue of brainwashing Korean War. Directed by actor Karl Malden, the tense and intelligent Time Limit (1957), starring Richard Widmark and Richard Basehart, offered a more sober and psychologically realistic examination of coercion by graphically showing captivity, exhaustion, fear, guilt and impossible choices in the brainwashing process adopted by the Chinese Communists.
By the 1970s, however, American cinema began looking inward. The enemy was no longer simply a foreign ideological power. Vietnam had shattered confidence in government while Watergate damaged trust in institutions. By then, assassinations had become a defining feature of the national consciousness and manipulation seemed to be carried out on a corporate, industrial scale.
This was reflected in the strangely titled ‘WUSA’ (1970) about a cynical disc jockey played by Paul Newman who finds himself bang in the middle of a conspiracy hatched by a right-wing radio station in the deep South. The unjustly-derided film is a chilling and eerily relevant drama in the era of Trump and MAGA.
Newman plays the amoral drifter who ends up deferring to the caprices of WUSA. Edgy Anthony Perkins, a social activist commissioned with a Kafkaesque ‘survey’ who discovers WUSA’s sinister intent, plays the ineffectual moral center of the film.
Also in the high-powered cast is Laurence Harvey as the snake oil salesman ‘priest.’ The film, based on acclaimed writer Robert Stone’s thoughtful novel ‘A Hall of Mirrors,’ often plays like a cross between two of the finest American political allegories - The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Network (1976), with a riveting crowd climax.
Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), where Warren Beatty plays a journalist investigating political assassinations and discovering a mysterious corporation recruiting killers, pushed the idea of corporate brainwashing even further. Gone was the old Communist laboratory. In its place, a professional organisation had turned manipulation into a business.
The film’s famous ‘recruitment’ sequence remains one of the most extraordinary depictions of psychological conditioning in cinema. Beatty’s character watches a rapid montage of images which depicts a rapid cascade of flags, children, mothers, religion, sex, violence, patriotism and death. There is no argument being presented. Instead, emotions are triggered solely through association with those images.
Watching that sequence today is an eerie experience because Pakula, who would go on to direct All the President’s Men, appears to have anticipated the visual language of the algorithm decades before Silicon Valley transformed attention into a commercial resource.
Don Siegel’s Telefon (1977), a middling but occasionally delicious Cold War thriller, returned to the sleeper-agent fantasy. Charles Bronson plays a Soviet intelligence officer hunting a rogue agent, played with characteristic relish by Donald Pleasence, who is activating dormant Soviet agents planted across America years earlier. The trigger is a coded telephone call containing a line from Robert Frost: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep.’ The agents, ordinary Americans who have long forgotten their programming, suddenly awaken to their buried instructions and go about their assigned tasks of chaos and destruction.
The great propaganda systems of the twentieth century were broadly hierarchical. Nazi Germany had Goebbels and the radio; Stalin had Ilya Ehrenburg (no comparison with Goebbels of course) and the Soviet press; Mao had the Communist Party apparatus and its mass campaigns.
The digital world has made that chain of command harder to see. While there may still be a hand on the tiller, the message now travels through a vast, decentralised swarm of platforms, influencers and ordinary users.
The system learns from its audience, identifies what provokes anger, fear or affirmation and then feeds it back in ever greater quantities.
Perhaps that is why The Manchurian Candidate remains so haunting nearly 65 years after its release. Raymond Shaw required a hypnotic trigger in the form of pack of cards. The contemporary information environment requires none of these. Today, the trigger may simply be the next mobile phone notification.
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