When atomic scientists warn us all about the dangers of falling under the reality bending (brainwashing) spell of the kleptocrats that control the populists, it is time to listen (see the image of the relationship of Trump, the novel/movie "The Manchurian Candidate" and populist brainwashing):
http://thebulletin.org/trumping-manchurian-candidate10848Extract: "Both novel and film focus on brainwashing and its potential for skewing US politics. (Brainwashing back then was a new term in English, a literal translation of a Chinese phrase.) In both novel and film, scientists from the Soviet Union collude with their Red Chinese counterparts to turn an American soldier, Sgt. Raymond Shaw, into a killing machine, one whose ultimate job will be to assassinate the American president.
But the number one villain of the piece is Shaw’s own mother, indelibly played in the 1962 film version by Angela Lansbury—for which she was named one of the top 25 cinema villains in Time. It is she, as the “American operative” working hand-in-glove with Communist masterminds, who will direct the mission intended to hand the reins of national power to her new husband, the buffoonish vice-presidential candidate. (She chillingly sums up the plot’s goal as “rallying a nation of viewers to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.”) Though her stated political views are conservative and overtly anti-Communist, she is in fact ruled by a pragmatic determination to serve herself, even at her country’s expense. The derailing of her plot by the end of the story means we don’t know just how far she was prepared to go, but her steadfast exaltation of self above the public’s interests suggests a clear and present danger to the people of the world.
Sound familiar?
One overall message of The Manchurian Candidate is that Russia and its allies are not to be trusted. Nor should we trust those who make nice with the Russians for their own personal gain. The striking thing about Lansbury’s character, Mrs. John Yerkes Iselin, is the way she plays both sides of the street. As the ambitious wife of a lackluster politician (in an era when a woman could only aspire to be the power behind the throne), she has carefully molded her spouse into a populist, a chap whose amiable mediocrity is attractive to the common man. Then she plays the anti-Communism card: Soon Senator Iselin is grabbing headlines with sweeping McCarthy-esque allegations about the number of Reds in the State Department. Underneath it all, though, Mrs. Iselin is using covert Soviet tools to undermine an American presidential election. The fact that her own son, Sgt. Shaw, is to be the assassin is something she accepts with equanimity.
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There’s little sense, thank goodness, that our current administration is made up of murderous stooges whose brains are addled (or, in Condon’s term, “dry-cleaned”) to this degree. Rather, the Trumpians who hold the reins of power seem to feel that they’re clear-eyed patriots mandated to shake up a moribund system by inventing rules of conduct as they go along. In their own minds, they’re independent thinkers. Still, it’s entirely possible they can be tripped up or compromised by forces much too subtle to reveal their true intentions. After all, there’s more than one way to be duped—or to dupe oneself.
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Although The Manchurian Candidate is by no means an exact prediction of what is happening today, book and film are starting to look extremely prescient. In the course of the story, the mechanism used to control the actions of the brainwashed Sgt. Shaw is the Queen of Diamonds in an ordinary deck of playing cards. Whenever Shaw (Laurence Harvey in the film) threatens to exert his own independence, a voice on the phone suggests that he pass the time with a little game of Solitaire. As soon as he turns up the Queen, he’s under the thumb of whomever issues a firm command. Right now the Queen of Diamonds seems to be running rampant in Washington, DC. And basic democratic principles are being trumped by the man with the loudest voice."