Brainwash

"This is a review of all the different means of influencing people’s thinking, primarily without their consent. So, you’ve got things like hypnotism, interrogation, people putting pressure on in all sorts of different ways, the religious cults, the Moonies, the question of whether you could have a Manchurian Candidate. Streatfeild goes into it in enormous detail and has done a great deal of research, but it’s fascinating in that it puts so many things in context and it also makes one realise that obviously you can get anyone to say anything if you torture them, but you can also get anyone to say anything if you’ve got enough time and put enough pressure on them because everybody has a breaking point. That makes one very sceptical of anything anyone says when they’ve been in captivity. A very tenuous link would be to illustrate how you create a culture in which it’s all right to torture people morally, by exposing their private life, when no one would agree to them being tortured physically. Yes, but you see the problem with the privacy thing is that most of the things that people do are arguably quite harmless. For example, when I give these little talks, I always have a go at Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, because he has twice written pieces saying that what I did was ‘unimaginable depravity’. So I wonder what he thinks is ordinary depravity, and I speculate that it’s leaving the light on during sex. And then you go on to what ‘imaginable depravity’ might be, the point being that what for one person is depraved is for another person their everyday sexual activity. If what a rather stuffy newspaper editor sees as unimaginable depravity takes place between consenting adults who are not just willing but enthusiastic, then what’s the harm? Is society entitled to say: ‘That’s not something I want to do myself, therefore it’s wrong?’ Or should society say: ‘As long as everybody agrees and they’re all grown-up and there’s no coercion and I don’t have to watch, it doesn’t involve me, then get on with it?’ Me? I think it was Kelvin Mackenzie who summed it up quite well. He said: ‘If you’re an editor and someone puts that on your desk, you look up and say: “Ah, there is a God in Heaven after all”.’ I thought that was quite funny, except it isn’t funny, but it was quite funny. You’d probably never buy a copy of the News of the World but if you were sitting in a train and there was a copy on the seat opposite and the headline was something like ‘Madonna in Sex Games’, how many people would resist the temptation to pick it up? They only stitched me up in the sense that they paid somebody to carry a hidden camera. She was the long-time best friend of the main lady, Woman A, and it was unthinkable in that world – in all those funny sort of worlds – secrecy and not telling outsiders is absolutely fundamental. She did it because her husband pushed her into it. He was at the time working for MI5, but I don’t think it was necessarily anything to do with that organisation, but if there were people who were paying him to do it then they might have got to him via that organisation. I think if the News of the World were given the opportunity to write that about anybody, they would. If a top footballer liked dressing up as a woman and going to transvestite clubs and they could get a picture, they would. But, again, my view is that activity is private and by definition belongs to the person. If someone wants to have sex in public or make a porn video then it’s up to them. But if they don’t then it’s not up to the News of the World to do it for them."