Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead   (anthropologist, spook)
Born	December 16, 1901
Died	November 15, 1978 (Age 76)
Nationality	US
Alma mater	DePauw University, Barnard College, Columbia University
Partner	• Ruth Benedict • Rhoda Métraux
Children	Mary Catherine Bateson
Spouse	• Luther Cressman • Reo Fortune • Gregory Bateson
Member of	Office of Strategic Services, RAND/Notable Participants
American anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. Close ties to the CIA, including covering up the use of anthropologists as spooks. Husband involved in MK-Ultra program. Later involved in the introduction the agendas "overpopulation" and "global warming".  Adjunct professor In office 1954 - 1978 Employer Columbia University

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.

Education

She got her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia.

Career

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution, but her studies were later exposed to be fraudulent an filled with inaccuracies. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.

On behalf of the U.S. Office of War Information and Propaganda, Mead worked in particular on Japanese culture. Mead also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) and took part in training courses in this regard together with Kurt Lewin. During World War II, Mead’s task was to work out criteria for the Allies for the subsequent occupation of Germany.

Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, the US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.

The Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information was a citizen's organization worried about wind-driven dispersal of nuclear fallout. The keynote speaker at the 1960 meeting of the committee was Margaret Mead. The same news stories that reported her presence also mentioned a generous contribution from the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York, which later would be revealed in congressional hearings to be a covert conduit for funneling CIA cash to subvert organizations

Bateson and MK-Ultra

With her third husband Gregory Bateson (married 1936; divorced 1950, but remained friends all their life), Mead participated in the Cybernetics group at MIT, a group of people who met regularly from 1946 to 1953 to explore the possibility of using scientific ideas that had emerged in the war years, and who thought and argued together about such topics as insanity, vision, circular causality, language, and the brain as a digital machine Mead was the "talk chief", advocate, active promoter and spokesperson for the ideas of the group, , topics of at least some relevance for what later beach MK-Ultra

Bateson, was an OSS operative during WW2, where he spent much of the war designing 'black propaganda' radio broadcasts. He was deployed on covert operations in Burma and Thailand, and worked in China, India, and Ceylon as well.

After the war, Bateson played a significant role in the creation of the CIA. President Truman wished that the OSS be disbanded. Its head, Bill Donovan, wrote to Truman’s budget director, and presented him with a rationale that the organization be not only kept in existence but expanded. At least part of this rationale was written by Bateson. In an article at the CIA website entitled "The Birth of Central Intelligence", Arthur Darling states that Bateson argued as follows:

…the bomb would shift the balance of warlike and peaceful methods of international pressure. It would be powerless, he said, against subversive practices, guerrilla tactics, social and economic manipulation, diplomatic forces, and propaganda either black or white. The nations would therefore resort to those indirect methods of warfare. The importance of the kind of work the Foreign Economic Administration, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Strategic Services had been doing would thus be infinitely greater than it had ever been. The country could not rely upon the Army and Navy alone for defense. There should be a third agency to combine the functions and employ the weapons of clandestine operations, economic controls, and psychological pressures.

Bateson maintained at least some involvement in the CIA’s ongoing drug research and promotion activities, as explained by John Marks in "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate":

[CIA contractor] Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of getting his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to Abramson. In this cozy little world where everyone knew everybody, Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s former husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus. No stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly to what he describes as "the closed little doctor’s room full of instruments," where he took the drug...Ginsberg felt he "was being connected to Big Brother’s brain." He says that the experience resulted in "a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse that."

Following the war Bateson headquarters was at the Palo Alto VA hospital were the CIA developed the MK-Ultra project. For his postwar research, Bateson chose topics which were of crucial interest to some MK Ultra’s goals, which was to use drugs and hypnosis to create dissociative personalities. Bateson’s interest in double binds and the development of schizophrenia was perfectly analogous to this MK Ultra agenda.

Bateson was also involved in the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), an important technology for propaganda.

Cover-up of spook activities

Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung’s revelations in 1965 of Project Camelot, in which anthropologists were working on unclassified CIA and US Army counterinsurgency programs in Latin America, ignited protest in the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Counterinsurgency involves the local police and military identifying, torturing and killing possible resistance leaders, some involved in guerilla activities, but also civilians too sympathetic to the cause, in a strategy of state terrorism. During America’s wars in Southeast Asia the AAA was thrown into a state of upheaval after documents purloined from the private office of UCLA anthropologist Michael Moerman revealed that several anthropologists had secretly used their ethnographic knowledge to assist the war effort.

As a result of inquiries made into these revelations, the 1971 annual meeting of the AAA became the scene of a tumultuous showdown after a fact-finding committee chaired by Margaret Mead maneuvered to create a report finding no wrongdoing on the part of the accused anthropologists. An acrimonious debate resulted in the rejection of the Mead report by the voting members of the association.

Overpopulation

In 1974, she participated in the United Nations World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania. The debate focused on the relationship between population issues and development. Mead said:

At Bucharest it was affirmed that continuing, unrestricted worldwide population growth can negate any socioeconomic gains and fatally imperil the environment.... The earlier extreme views that social and economic justice alone can somehow offset population increase and that the mere provision of contraception can sufficiently reduce population—were defeated

"Global warming"

Mead was one of the organizers of a Oct. 26-29, 1975 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The conference was co-sponsored by two agencies of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Throughout her presentation, Mead stressed the need for consensus, an end-product free from any troubling "internal scientific controversies" that might "blur the need for action."

Executive Intelligence Review wrote:

It was at this government-sponsored conference, 32 years ago, that virtually every scare scenario in today's climate hoax took root. Scientists were charged with coming up with the "science" to back up the scares, so that definitive action could be taken by policy-makers. Global cooling—the coming of an ice age—had been in the headlines in the 1970s, but it could not easily be used to sell genocide by getting the citizens of industrial nations to cut back on consumption. Something more drastic and more personal was needed. Mead's keynote speech set the agenda: Mankind had advanced over the years to have international laws governing the sea and the land; now was the time for a "Law of the Atmosphere." It was a naked solicitation of lying formulations to justify an end to human scientific and industrial progress.

Mead proposed:

Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices—to drill a well, open a road, build a large airplane, make a nuclear test, install a liquid fast breeder reactor, release chemicals which diffuse throughout the atmosphere, or discharge waste in concentrated amounts into the sea—the whole planet may become endangered....

At this conference we are proposing that, before there is a corresponding attempt to develop a "law of the air," the scientific community advise the United Nations (and individual, powerful nation states or aggregations of weaker states) and attempt to arrive at some overview of what is presently known about hazards to the atmosphere from manmade interventions, and how scientific knowledge coupled with intelligent social action can protect the peoples of the world from dangerous and preventable interference with the atmosphere upon which all life depends....

What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats.

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