Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It

Edward Hunter

• Editorial: Hauraki Publishing
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781787202290
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

First published in 1956, this book by U.S. journalist and intelligence agent Edward Hunter comprises dramatic first-hand accounts from Korean War veterans who survived P.O.W. camps and Communist attempts to brainwash them."The new word brainwashing entered our minds and dictionaries in a phenomenally short time. […] The reason the word was picked up so quickly was that it was not just a clever synonym for something already known, but described a strategy that had yet no name. […] The word came out of the sufferings of the Chinese people. Put under a terrifying combination of subtle and crude mental and physical pressures and tortures, they detected a pattern and called it brainwashing. […] What they had undergone was more like witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons, and potions, with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo, carrying his magic brew in a test tube."A true and terrible story of the men who endured and defied the most diabolical red torture—the war book you will never forget."A fascinating document."—Chicago Tribune

CHAPTER ONE—A NEW WORD

The new word brainwashing entered our minds and dictionaries in a phenomenally short time. This sinister political expression had never been seen in print anywhere until a few years ago. About the only times it was ever heard in conversation was inside a tight, intimate circle of trusted relatives or reliable friends in Red China during the short honeymoon period of communism. The few exceptions were when a Red indoctrinator would lose his temper and shout out, “You need a brainwashing.”

The reason the word was picked up so quickly was that it was not just a clever synonym for something already known, but described a strategy that had yet no name. A vacuum in language existed: no word tied together the various tactics that make up the process by which the communists expected to create their “new Soviet man.”

The word came out of the sufferings of the Chinese people. Put under a terrifying combination of subtle and crude mental and physical pressures and tortures, they detected a pattern and called it brainwashing. The Reds wanted people to believe that it could be amply described by some familiar expression such as education, public relations, persuasion—or by some misleading term like mind reform and re-education. None of these could define it because it was much, much more than any one of them alone. The Chinese knew they hadn’t just been educated or persuaded; something much more dire than that had been perpetrated on them, similar in many peculiar ways to a medical treatment.

What they had undergone was more like witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons, and potions, with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo, carrying his magic brew in a test tube.

The communist hierarchy preferred people to believe that there was no such thing as brainwashing. So long as they could keep it concealed, without a name, opposition to it could be kept scattered and ineffective. As explained by Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo, a psychiatrist of Dutch origin, in his book Conversation and Communication, it is practically impossible to fight something until it has been given a name. “To name an object is to bring it within the sphere of human control,” he wrote. “Without a name it arouses fear, because it is unknown....Whoever knows the name has power.” Dr. Meerloo coined the fine laboratory word menticide—murder of the mind—for this atrocious quack science devised by the Reds to bring about the voluntary submission of people to an unthinking discipline and a robot-like enslavement. The popular word remained brainwashing, for it has a flesh-and-blood quality which characterizes any expression arising out of real-life experience.

The German-born Sinologue, Max Perleberg, who is fluent in both modern and classical Chinese, told me that the term might well have been derived from the Buddhist expression “heart-washing,” which goes back to the time of Mencius. Heart-washing referred to the withdrawal into meditation of a middle-aged man—perhaps weary of worldly cares—living in a bare pavilion in some placid corner of his garden, leaving his offspring to attend to his business.

The reaction among my newspaper colleagues in Hong Kong when the term was first introduced in print was typical of the horror, disbelief, and skepticism that it initially aroused everywhere. These newspapermen were human beings like everyone else, part of the public to whom they were reporting, susceptible to the same emotions and holding identical attitudes.

An outstanding foreign correspondent came to me at once and exclaimed, “I knew that word!”

“Then why didn’t you use it?” I asked him.

“Because it’s such an ugly word,” he retorted feelingly. “I never could persuade myself to put it down on paper.”

He was telling me the truth. He was a middle-aged man with Latin sensibilities. But making believe that brainwashing didn’t exist could not make it disappear. Neither could people wish it away, any more than the witch doctor I recently watched in the interior of Ceylon could exorcise the evil spirits of kidney disease out of a Singhalese cook by all-night Kandyan dancing and frenetic tom-tom beating. The patient, after going through this costly nerve-deadening ceremony, really believed that he was a well man again. He felt well, too; he was sure of it for more than a month. Then the old pain began racking his back again, fiercer than ever. Neither can brainwashing be exorcised by any journalistic mesmerism, nor by recourse to the comforting escape of hush-hush.

Another colleague came to me and said, “You beat me to it! Congratulations!” He had first heard the word after the Reds came into Canton when he was taking a course at Ling Nan University. “I still remember how it sent shivers down my back,” he said. “I couldn’t forget the eerie sensation that I had gotten from that word brainwashing. I wanted to find out everything I could about it. I hoped to do a book on it.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked him.

“I was constantly discovering new material and could never get my story pieced together satisfactorily.” This, too, was typical, especially in academic and research circles, where professors and investigators ordinarily don’t dare publish their findings until they have obtained a complete picture of their subject, neatly framed and ready for the judgment of history. They feel that then their reputations are safe, no matter what the future brings forth. Of course, by that time nothing they say can affect a current situation.

One correspondent, among those who had served the longest in China, smiled knowingly when he first heard of brainwashing and asked if I was writing a novel. His was typical of the customary reactions, “Such things can’t happen” and “I simply won’t believe it.” People closed their eyes to brainwashing. How much of this was calculated and how much naïveté can be argued indefinitely. What was obvious was that the communists were very profitably exploiting the opportunity this provided.

After the exchange of prisoners of war in Korea, I was asked a number of times by repatriates, now sadder and wiser, “Why wasn’t I told?”

“If I had only been told, I don’t believe it could have happened to me,” they said. Colonel Frank H. Schwable, who confessed participation in a non-existent germ warfare, and Corporal Claude Batchelor, the impressionable lad who declared he didn’t want to come home and then changed his mind, each said this to me, the former in his Arlington residence and the latter in the model guardhouse at historic Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

My first acquaintance with brainwashing came from Chinese who had undergone it on the mainland. They were of all occupations, from merchant to teacher, and included some women. During this early period I saw white men coming out of China, across the plank railway bridge at the border of Hong Kong’s leased territory, or through the medieval archway at the Portuguese colony of Macao. I remember one in particular because he seemed to symbolize them all. He walked across the boards feebly, his eyes staring ahead with frightful intensity. He looked centuries older than his middle age. He kept on walking until he was recognized and stopped by a fellow Catholic priest, assigned to the bridge for just such meetings. His Leninist uniform, adapted by Dr. Sun Yat-sen for the Chinese and slightly altered by the Reds, gave no hint of his religious calling. He stood and stared at his colleague and barely answered. He could not grasp the fact that he was out—out of reach of the brainwashers. He just stood and stared for several minutes.

Then, suddenly, realization broke through to him. This was freedom. He was in the Free World. This was more than he could bear. He took a few steps to the side of the bridge and sat down! Then he burst into tears. He was a big man, no longer young, yet he wept like a little child. I do not know how long he cried this way, for I felt as if I were intruding on a man’s Calvary. I turned away and left him to his coreligionist.

None of these white people would speak to the press during that early period, and very few of the Chinese would, either. They were being blackmailed. This tactic used to enforce silence was not new, but still terrifying. The Reds threatened to severely punish and even kill the closest associates of any man who broke the hush-hush. Before leaving Red China, each person had to designate a hostage who would sign a guarantee for him. This enabled the communist authorities to avoid making direct threats. The hostages did so for them in the new, so-called voluntary method. “Please do not talk; my life is dependent on it,” such persons would beg of their departing friend. They had been his associates, perhaps in church work or in business. The nightmare vision of such old colleagues being put to the rack and tortured unto death rose before a man’s eyes and gagged his throat when he wanted to speak out.

Every correspondent in Hong Kong came across living proof of Red pressures. A missionary would arrive at the border by rail, or a businessman on a ship from Tientsin. Usually they were in no shape to speak coherently even if they wanted to. They were sick in mind as much as in body. Horror spoke eloquently through their eyes, but the reporters needed specific details to quote. The pro-Communists who came out of China provided them; they did not hesitate to speak. They filled the gap left by the silence of the browbeaten.

When a reporter detected a desire in a man to let go with his true feelings and tell what he had seen and suffered, there usually was a representative of the home office or some official to intervene and say, “Let the man rest,” or to take him aside and warn him not to say a word, to wait until a later date, “when you will be in better shape,” and “after you have consulted your headquarters.” The “later date” during that first year or so never came. The hush-hush dragged on.

This was not the first time that the communists had been able to keep a deadly secret from the Free World as well as from the bulk of their own population. The existence of tremendous slave-labor camps in the Soviet Union was kept hidden for many years in this same manner. They were begun as far back as 1920, in the Solevetsky Islands in the White Sea, not far from Leningrad. A quarter of a century and World War II were to pass before these became fairly wide knowledge. Yet ten to twenty million persons at a time were incarcerated in these forced-labor camps. Untold millions of men and women perished under bestial treatment and merciless overwork. Inside the barbed-wire enclosures enormous industrial enterprises of every kind were set up, from textile production to mining. When vast labor gangs were required for back-breaking work on such enormous projects as the Volga-Don Canal network linking the Caspian and the Black seas, untold hundreds of thousands of slave laborers of both sexes were used like animals, regardless of beating sun, drenching rain, or deadly cold.

The secret police, under whose direction all these enterprises operated, had a simple method for finding technicians and filling managerial posts. All they had to do was to locate a man or woman with the necessary qualifications. They had no labor unions to worry about or problems of negotiation. Once they found their prospective employee, they could pick him up under any one of the numerous regulations that allowed them to arrest anyone, put him on trial, and sentence him to any work camp, without any publicity except what they might choose to write themselves. If the individual objected, they could put the brainwashing screws on him and exact a confession. How many scientific laboratories working on war secrets have been staffed this way by slave labor—and slave professors—is yet to be known.

Normal people in the Free World refused to believe that such barbarities could exist in our civilized day and age. Proof had slipped out years before to a small circle of politically alert persons, but they were stymied whenever they tried to get the facts to the public. Every sort of diversionary and string-pulling tactic was brought into play to keep the operation secret. What is scarcely appreciated even yet is that these vast slave establishments are a vital part of the brainwashing strategy. Communism requires them both as a softening-up medium against minds and as a source of production.

The hush-hush methods that kept slave labor a secret were employed all over again for brainwashing. Actually, brain-washing was first put on display at the Red purge trials of 1936, when the world was horrified by a procession of “Old Bolsheviks” in the dock in Moscow, announcing that they were traitors to the Bolshevism to which they had given their lives. They were the persons responsible for the Soviet seizure of power. Now they were denouncing themselves as anti-Soviet.

Other big show trials followed at short intervals, each providing the world with still another baffling performance in self-accusation, with insistence on personal guilt and whining appeals for punishment unto death. These persons acted as if possessed. After the occupation of such countries as Hungary and their absorption into the communist orbit, such keen brains as Cardinal Mindszenty’s broke under similarly obvious but unproven circumstances. This gave the communists and the anti-anti-communists all around the world what appeared to be incontrovertible evidence that what Moscow was claiming was correct. These men and women had confessed. What more could be asked? Until the strategy of brainwashing was brought out into the open, this question could be answered only in the Reds’ favor.

Communist Russia was able to keep brainwashing secret by its thorough control of information, which made an isolated island out of every man and office in the Soviet Union. No individual or bureau dared to communicate with any other except through the approved channels. When the Chinese mainland fell to the communists, brainwashing began to be employed in a slipshod and roughhouse manner as a national policy against the whole population. Security was sacrificed in this reckless, unskilled use of it on a tremendous scale. The secret that Moscow had guarded so successfully at its front door in Europe slipped out through the back door in China.

About a year or so after I first began hearing about brain-washing from the Chinese, I began to discuss it with white people who also had gone through the process in Red China. The futility and tragic consequences of secrecy had begun to dawn on the Free World. I had seen some brainwashed Americans briefly after they had left the mainland; then again, perhaps more than a year afterwards, at home in America. They were now capable of analyzing what had happened to them. What struck me most was the similarity of all their experiences, not only to each other but to that of the Chinese whom I had previously interviewed. Later, I met people who had gone through brainwashing in the communist satellite countries of Europe. Except for the change in locale, the details they told me corresponded exactly with what I had heard from these others. There was no doubt about the pattern, this was a uniform strategy, differing only in degree according to the personality and the local circumstances. The strategy was the same everywhere.

The Free World began to hear strange reports from the communist-operated prisoner-of-war camps in North Korea. Broadcasts were heard in voices recognized as those of normal young men of the American, British, and other U.N. forces. The voices belonged to these men, but the language did not. Pro-communist publications everywhere began to carry purported confessions and grotesquely worded statements said to have been signed by these soldiers in support of whatever propaganda appeal international communism was making at the moment. The free press generally referred briefly to these matters, smelling a rat somewhere, but was confused by the problem of how to handle them. Each editor had to determine for himself, out of his own experience and conscience, whether this material was to be treated as straight news or enemy propaganda. Technically, there was no war. That they avoided falling into the Red propaganda trap to the extent they did was a great tribute to their overriding sense of national responsibility and a confirmation in a time of trial of the dependable qualities of a free press, even when faced by almost insuperable handicaps to the exercise of judgment.

The tendency to suppress discussion of brainwashing and to keep it from public knowledge still had the upper hand. The word continued to be generally ignored, even boycotted. People still kept hoping it was merely a novel word for something old and familiar. Indignation, lacking a target, frequently was vent against the purveyors of the information. In olden times, couriers who brought bad news were often done to death.

This state of affairs, it was evident to me, was fast building up to a declaration by the communists that certain U.N. officers and troops captured by the Red Armies did not want to return home, but preferred to stay with the enemy. The dispatches I wrote warning about this were carried by two national news agencies. The editor of one confided in me later how client papers protested against his carrying the story, insisting that it simply couldn’t happen, the old it-can’t-happen-here delusion. A few months later, Peking went on the air to boast that a group of U.N. soldiers, mostly American, had decided to remain inside the Red orbit and not go back to their respective lands. This, and the statements made by released p.o.w.’s themselves revealing how they had been brainwashed, tore the lid off the story and forced the facts out into the open. What they said was exactly the same, detail for detail, as what had been related to me first by the Chinese civilians, then by the white civilians put under brainwashing in China, and next by the Americans and Europeans who had suffered the same atrocities in Eastern Europe.

The American public had reason enough now for alarm and shock. Never before had the citizens of a rich, ripe land such as the United States, beneficiaries of the highest standard of living that the earth had e...

Índice

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• CHAPTER ONE-A NEW WORD
• CHAPTER TWO-IVAN P. PAVLOV
• CHAPTER THREE-BRAINWASHING IN ACTION
• CHAPTER FOUR-THE NEGRO AS P.O.W.
• CHAPTER FIVE-CAMP LIFE
• CHAPTER SIX-THE INDEPENDENT CHARACTER
• CHAPTER SEVEN-THE BRITISH IN KOREA
• CHAPTER EIGHT-WHAT BRAINWASHING IS
• CHAPTER NINE-THE CLINICAL ANALYSIS
• CHAPTER TEN-HOW IT CAN BE BEAT
• CHAPTER ELEVEN-A MATTER OF INTEGRITY
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER