The definition of the meaning of the phrase "Manchurian Candidate"

     The term “Manchurian Candidate” came into the language in 1959 when author Richard Condon made it the title of his best selling novel that later became a popular movie starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra.  The story was about a joint Soviet-Chinese plot to take an American solider captured in Korea, condition him at a special training facility.

     Since World War 2, the United States government, led be the Central Intelligence Agency has searched secretly for ways to control human behavior.  The C.I.A. programs were not only an extension of the Office of Strategic Services’s (O.S.S.) quest for a truth drug, but they also echoed such events as the Nazi experiments at Dachau and Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD.  By probing the inner reaches of consciousness, Hofmann’s research took him to the very frontiers of knowledge.  As never before in history, the warring powers sought ideas from scientists capable of reaching those frontiers — ideas that could make the difference between victory and defeat.  While Hofmann himself remained aloof in the Swiss tradition, other scientists like Albert Einstein helped turn the abstractions of the laboratory into incredibly destructive weapons.

     Jules Verne’s notion of spaceships touching the moon stopped being absurd when Wernher von Braun’s rockets started pounding London.  With their creations, the scientists reached beyond the speculation of science fiction.  Never before had their discoveries been so breathtaking and so frightening.  Albert Hofmann’s work touched upon the fantasies of the mind — accessible, in ancient legends, to witches and wizard who used spells and potions to bring people under their sway.  In the early scientific age, the dream of controlling the human brain took on a modern form in Mary Shelly’s creation Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.  The dream would be updated again during the Cold War era to become the Manchurian Candidate, the assassin whose mind was controlled by a hostile government.

     Who could say for certain that such a fantasy would not be turned into a reality like Verne’s rocket stories or Einstein’s calculation?  And who should be surprised to learn that government agencies — specifically the C.I.A. — would swoop down on Albert Hofmann’s lab in effort to harness the power of the mind that LSD seemed to hold?

     From the Dachau experiments came the cruelty that man was capable of heaping upon his fellows in the name of advancing science and helping his country gain advantage in war.

     To say that the Dachau experiments are object lessons of how far people can stretch ends to justify means is to belittle by cliché what occurred in the concentration camps.  Nothing the C.I.A. ever did in its postwar search for mind-control technology came close to the callous killing of the Nazi “aviation research.”  Nevertheless, in their attempts to find ways to manipulate people, Agency officials and their agents crossed many of the same ethical barriers.  The experimented with dangerous and unknown techniques on people who had no idea what was happening.  They systematically violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects, and, like the Germans, they chose to victimize special groups of people whose exsistence they considered, out of prejudice and convenience less worthy than their own.

     Wherever their extreme experiments went, the C.I.A. sponsors picked for their subjects their own equivalents of the Nazi’s Jews and Gypsies:  mental patients, prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts and prisoners, often from minority groups.