Degree Absolute and the JFK Assassination Conspiracy
This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by Sissyk (a host of the General Discussion forum).
Having recently been turned on to the joys of internet TV, I spent the early part of autumn with my family watching The Prisoner on Crackle. This is a British TV series that ran just one season, 17 episodes from 1967-68, but I've had a number of people recommend it over the years. Now that I've seen every episode from start to finish, I understand why it got so many raves. It was groundbreaking, truly ahead of its time, not just for its presentation but also its content. The presentation has its origins in the creator and star (and producer, director and writer of many of the series episodes, often under an alias) Patrick McGoohan, who had risen to fame from 1960-62 for his role as John Drake in Danger Man, playing a secret agent. Three years later, the series was revamped as Secret Agent. While this was one of the first British TV series to gain fame in the United States, by 1966, McGoohan yearned for something a little different.
The Prisoner, like Danger Man, has a British secret agent played by McGoohan as the lead character. This secret agent (there is much debate among fans as to whether it is the same character in both series or not) abruptly turns in his resignation. However, the agency he works for is not so eager to accept his resignation. While packing his bags in preparation for departure, his home is gassed and McGoohan passes out. When he comes to, his home seems just as it was, completely undisturbed. When he opens the window, he is startled to discover that instead of London skyscrapers, he has the view of a garden. Upon further investigation, he finds he is in a secluded coastal place called The Village where everyone is either a prisoner or a warden, but there are no identities; everyone is assigned a number. McGoohan is assigned Number Six (which he resists proclaiming, "I am not a number! I am a free man!"
and is constantly kept under surveillance by Number Two. In almost every episode, Number Two is replaced by a "new Number Two", either to confuse Number Six or because the 'old' Number Two was outsmarted by Number Six.
I loved every episode from the pilot to the finale, even the episode set in the Wild West, which actually fit into the pattern of interrogation perfectly. My favorite episode was the penultimate titled Once Upon a Time. It begins with Leo McKern, who had previously played Number Two in the second episode of the series, The Chimes of Big Ben, returning to the role for one last shot at breaking Number Six. He asks on the phone to his superior and gets approval to use "Degree Absolute" on Number Six. Degree Absolute is an extreme form of regressive therapy in which Number Two guides Number Six, who has mentally regressed to a child, through Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man in the hopes of discovering, as every Number Two throughout the series has attempted, why Number Six resigned. Throughout these seven ages, Number Two conducts tests in which he plays an authority figure and Number Six must react in a subordinate role. However, Number Six turns the tables eventually locking Number Two in a room for torment as time for the session runs out. Number Two collapses, apparently dead, and when the Supervisor played by Peter Swanwick enters to ask what Number Six wants, he agrees to give Number Six an audience with the figure he's been asking to confront ever since his imprisonment in The Village: the elusive Number One.
What makes this episode both ahead of its time and incredibly relevant to today is in illustrating how the combination of torture and drugs have been used in the pursuit of mind control. I've written previously on this blog about the subject of MK-ULTRA, the CIA mind control program conducted in secret during the 1950s. Yet knowledge of this classified program did not become public until the 1970s. So in that regard, McGoohan seems to be extremely prescient (or extremely connected) in his enactment of mind control techniques. As for contemporary relevance, one need only read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine to understand that these same techniques have become the favored method of pressure on "enemy combatants" kept prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Not only has this "enhanced interrogation" been applied to foreign detainees, but in the case of Bradley Manning we have an American citizen whose lawyers alleged that while in solitary confinement at Fort Quantico, Manning was alternately kept naked and forced to sleep in a straitjacket, while being "drugged heavily with antidepressants." Whatever you may think of what Edward Snowden did with his subsequent leak, in the wake of these allegations, can you blame him for escaping from the USA and preferring to spend the rest of his life in exile?
But I digress. We're approaching another anniversary where JFK's assassins have escaped justice. Strangely enough, there is an incident where an intelligence operative who sought to expose part of the charade erected by the conspirators faced his own Degree Absolute.
Read more at the link...
http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2014/11/degree-absolute-and-jfk-assassination.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Precious salt for Captain Alfred Dreyfus or the victims of the Tuskegee experiments. No doubt, they were simply bored also. 
(may want to move the goal posts at this point...)
Would you care to weigh in on what really happened with the "little incident in Mexico City" I referred to? Did you even bother to click the link? Cuz I gotta tell ya: I did read that Slate link you keep pimping and they didn't expalin it at all. So what's your spin on how that fits into your lone nut thesis?
Great show, The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan as Number 6 and Leo McKern as Number 2 are two of the great characters in all fiction. The show was a primer on how to break a man and how the man who refuses to break, in turn, breaks those trying to break him. There's a lesson there for Democrats.
Yuri Nosenko seems to have been a false defector sent by his KGB bosses to make clear to America that the USSR was not behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Angleton didn't like what he heard, especially after J Edgar Hoover and the FBI reported that they had heard the KGB suspected Oswald as being an American agent. So, Angleton (Helms) locked the guy up in solitary confinement for three years and dosed him with drugs until he started to froth. DUer John Simkin's Spartacus Schoolnet has great background and links.
Regarding 51 years: Kennedy did all he could in his 1,037 days in office to keep the peace and make life better for ALL Americans. Those too young to remember and those who weren't then born can be forgiven for not understanding just how different the nation has become since then.
"Once Upon A Time" was a tour-de-force of acting brilliance.
But the most chilling moment in the series - one that still makes my flesh creep to this day - is the shot of Number Six's London townhouse at the end of the last episode. The door opens automaically as The Butler stands in front of it. One of the most unsettling things I have ever seen in drama and I am a David Lynch fan. 
We All Live In The Village.
