Stephen Donnelly: McKinsey’s Irish Manchurian Candidate…

freepress.ie –

MICHAEL J SULLIVAN

Released in 1962, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was JFK’s favourite movie. Starred Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, the film revolves around an American patrol captured and brainwashed by Chinese communists during the Korean War. One of the soldiers, a Medal of Honour winner Raymond Shaw, is programmed to become an assassin. Two years later he is triggered by his handlers to kill a presidential candidate. It’s a great movie, remade in 2004 starring Denzel Washington.

The idea of a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ has since entered the modern lexicon as shorthand for a brainwashed sleeper, a subject who has been hypnotized and instructed to act when his controllers pull the psychological trigger. Near the film’s conclusion, as Shaw’s fellow brainwashed soldier Marco tries to peel away layers of false memories to uncover the plot, he presses Shaw and asks him, “What have they built you to do?”.

That same line is uttered in the 2004 movie remake starring Denzel Washington. Of the many tweaks made to the original, the most relevant one was changing Manchuria from a region in communist China to an American private equity firm, ‘Manchurian Global’, with its hands tucked elbow-deep into their own army of political puppets.

Sergeant Raymond Shaw has a powerful U.S. Senator for a mother who has been central to her son’s brainwashing from the very start (a character played by Meryl Streep, who many believe Pollak intended to represent Hillary Clinton). In Shaw, the Medal of Honour winner and great American hero, nefarious parties see a chance to install ‘the first privately owned and operated Vice President in the history of the United States’.