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Let's think deep -- and beware

Ameer Hamza | Saturday, 7 March 2009


SOMETIME last year, a fleeting news item on BBC radio let it be known that simple-minded people in violent conflict zones were particularly vulnerable to being chosen as potential suicide bombers. BBC cited research undertaken by MI5, or some such intelligence group in the UK. Not surprising. Manufacturers of consent and dissent can, and do, use such innocents, after appropriate mogoj dholai, to score bloody political points. Worldwatchers can provide hundreds of examples of people blowing themselves up, and of riots, ethnic cleansing and wars being triggered by vested interest groups.

One needn't be a neuroscientist to understand that manipulators can take over the minds of individuals, or large groups, and harness them for a purpose. We are not talking yet about working on the nervous system at the molecular and cellular level, though that is not impossible in the 21st century. Research in the neurosciences in recent decades have been successfully bridging biology and informatics and, we are told, it is probably possible now -- or will be pretty soon -- to monitor and manipulate brain functions and manage humans.

In the subcontinent, of course, old-fashioned thought-insertions work very well, specially if such thoughts can be coupled with festering negative feelings about the perceived enemy. That poison-sowers have been working in our midst is obvious. Note this DU student's testimony. Writing in the letters column of The Financial Express recently (Monday 2 March 2009), he claimed that last year, a 'BDR man' had taunted him because, following the incidents between August 20-22, 2007, DU students had not done anything against the army. '