Ronald Reagan’s presidential style always divided public opinion. During the 1980s his poll numbers fluctuated, but he gained broad approval from a majority of American voters, much of the time.1 He was known by turns as ‘the Great Communicator’ and ‘the Teflon President’, because the mess he made never seemed to stick to him. His messages were sunny, self-deprecating, avuncular and sometimes mercurial; he promised to make the nation great again; under his leadership, it would be ‘morning in America’, he said, an age of strong law and order, lower taxes, free enterprise, national security and proper veneration of military veterans. Gargantuan military spending was to be the order of the day, and on a scale, it was calculated (rightly), that the crumbling Soviet Union could never match.
Reagan was by then renowned as a staunch critic of liberal soft-heartedness and the excessively permissive society. For many, he seemed to satisfy a nostalgic wish to get back to the 1950s. On the Right he remains to this day an admired political figure, an icon of a certain form of masculinity, laced with ideals of independence, muscularity and common sense. Here was the man, conservatives felt, who hastened the end of the Cold War – perhaps even the end of history – and who stood (in the words of former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich) stalwart against ‘America-hating totalitarianism’ and the ‘hard Left’.2
Many years before his presidency, Reagan (in keeping already with the tough brand of reactionary politics he came to personify) narrated a hard-line documentary, The Ultimate Weapon. This 1962 film argued that military personnel who had not held firm and remained disciplined during their captivity in enemy hands were weak-minded, believe-in-nothing, unpatriotic types. But Reagan was not entirely consistent in delivering such an unforgiving message. Perhaps he was still sorting out his own views, as a well-known former Democrat sympathiser who turned Republican that very same year.
Reagan’s communications about prisoners of war depended on which role he was playing, be it in movies or in his own evolving public life. As Phil Tinline has deftly shown in a 2017 documentary, The Ultimate Weapon was certainly at odds with a softer message Reagan had communicated, with feeling, in a now-forgotten Korean War film, Prisoner of War (1954).3 In that movie, Reagan’s thinly drawn character, a US military officer named Web Sloane, told viewers that ‘every man has his breaking point’.4 POWs who cracked, succumbed to the pressure, talked, collaborated or even changed allegiance should not be regarded simply as turncoats or weaklings.
The film had its own ideological axes to grind: it was obviously anti-communist, and its ‘baddy’ characters provided a set of negative Russian and Asian stereotypes. Yet it also took issue with a more ruthless style of punditry. That style was familiar enough during the 1950s (and, also, in a variety of Reagan’s later pronouncements); some critics had demanded that POWs bear responsibility for all that they said and did – indeed, for every personal sin of omission or commission – during their years of imprisonment.
In Prisoner of War and in some other statements that Reagan made, there seemed to be obvious sympathy for the plight of veteran POWs. (Well over seven thousand Americans were held prisoner during the Korean War, of whom nearly three thousand died.) The film had sent out a clear message and invited public humility, as though to say, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. The picture showed why people, however seemingly tough minded or well disciplined, can be gravely damaged by their cruel captivity, perhaps left with permanent mental scars or even notable long-term changes to their personalities. The US army had initially supported this production but was not pleased by the final version and withdrew co-operation with the producers: for the story seemed to imply that no amount of training, and no stamp of personal character, guaranteed a prisoner would not ultimately break.
Prisoner of War was part of a wave of US responses to the barbarities inflicted by ‘enemies of liberty’ in modern war; it expressed revulsion against the entire panoply of Korean detention conditions for Western POWs, including brutal, exhausting marches, beatings, inadequate food, freezing cold, insufficient (or completely absent) medical aid, rife disease and poor shelter. Those conditions had precipitated some camp inmates’ growing doubts about the war, in some cases (thanks, it was said by the critics, to coercive ‘re-education’) resulting in alienation from their own nation, curiosity about the cause of the communist side, or even, it was feared, more unconscious and mysterious psychological identifications with Mao.5
In the film, Sloane is tasked with stealthily entering one of the POW camps, investigating what the North Korean side were doing to men in their custody, identifying contraventions of the Geneva Conventions and reporting these grim discoveries to his military superiors. He finds his compatriots depleted, tormented, crushed, confused and, sometimes, turned by their own jailors.
What are we to make of the insistence on ‘every man’ having his inevitable ‘breaking point’? First, to recognise it was a commonplace, if not universally shared, view of that time. Other Cold War reports, films and stories also made the presumption that POWs had this vulnerability to breaking down, and perhaps also to acquiring hard new convictions drastically divergent from former beliefs. Several notable prisoner dramas zeroed in on this chapter in modern history and offered similar general lessons. They spoke, as in the case of Prisoner of War, to the human condition. Women were not ignored entirely in this kind of cultural representation and psychological debate, but notable attention, certainly, was paid in 1950s popular culture and academic discourse by men to the state of men, at war with themselves and not just the enemy, inside such camps.
Prisoner of War offered the audience a story to inspire contemplation; a story that suggested we are all more-or-less breakable creatures at heart. Who would now really want to argue with that proposition – the notion that people can be brought bit by bit, through pain and suffering, humiliation and terror, to face their own all-too-human limitations and fragility?
Another question, however, is historical: why was the figure of the prisoner, brought to his ‘breaking point’, such a notable concern of that time? How do we explain the proliferation of clinical accounts, political analyses, novels and films about fractured, crumbling or collapsing military men? Why this focus on people brought to recant former views; to lose (putting it more psychoanalytically) faith in previously cherished good objects; to feel hopeless, confused and utterly abandoned; and then to become vessels for alien thoughts, even thereafter to be induced to profess some foreign ideology?
In this investigation I will return to the Korean War, and also note the United States’ lavishly funded secret psychological research projects, developed around the same time, the early 1950s; a covert world of experiments into the mind – what can be done to control, transform or fortify it – that was only much later revealed to the public. Historians and journalists pieced together much of that clandestine story in the last decades of the twentieth century; but it was only after 9/11, in the new century, that the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation’ brought it back into prominence, with further research published about mind-control experiments conducted fifty years earlier; experiments in which people were, among other things, confined, medicated, isolated, deprived of sleep, harangued and bombarded with messages and overwhelming sensations. This fear of individual fragility and the larger vulnerabilities it suggested about the nation was matched by a desire to probe those practices and explore potential weaknesses, and more generally to use such insights to advance upon the terrain of psychological warfare.
Hunter, as we saw earlier, promoted the idea that a new threat stalked the earth. He also warned of the psychological fate of inmates cast adrift in enemy territory, and then, perhaps, completely remade. Nonetheless, he rejected what he called a mood of defeatism, proposing instead an urgent set of measures be established to brace Americans and to strengthen all freedom-loving people around the world against brainwashing. He urged the case for a political and psychological fightback, and suggested that resistance had to begin with research, analysis and education about the tools of psychological manipulation at the disposal of the communist state. He wanted to see such measures as reactive – a response to the other side, rather than as practices of experiment and coercion on captives already rife in the West.
Physical and emotional duress, Hunter argued, could be combined by skilled communist jailors; they could develop a softening-up operation conducted in ways that led the prisoner to do much of the job for the captors, destroying the mind from within. Guilt, shame, humiliation, and so on, were to be deliberately engineered by such powers. But ultimately the tormented subject might well start, as he put it, ‘smashing up from the inside’, unable to withstand such total assaults and tolerate the most lacerating thoughts.6
Techniques to destroy minds and bodies had been used on a vast scale in camps within immediate living memory. Modernity and the Holocaust were henceforth inextricably entwined. The Nazis had treated millions of Jews and other inmates as though animals or inanimate objects, stripped of all humanity, mere tattooed numbers, ‘vermin’ or creatures destined for ‘euthanasia’, to be massacred in woods and fields, or processed in such ‘industrial’ plants. No sooner was Hitler established in power than various clinics and hospitals were to become experimental sites of Nazi ‘euthanasia’ for those deemed degenerate and unworthy of life. And then on an ever vaster scale, as the ‘Third Reich’ proceeded, concentration camps could be turned into factories of death. They could also be used by certain states across the twentieth century for other purposes – including as part of a project to create ‘new men’ and ‘new women’. The Nazi camps themselves had evolved between the 1930s and 40s from barbaric sites of punishment, intimidation and deterrence for those deemed criminal and for all troublesome opponents of the regime, including many German communists, to the death camps of the ‘Final Solution’, intended to eradicate the entire Jewish ‘race’.
Hunter and others had in mind both Nazism and communism. He argued that the latter, now established so firmly post-war in two vast regions of the world, was in the business of imprisoning enormous numbers of people, physically and mentally; smashing and overwhelming the person, and doing so as but a prelude. For the aim of the communist enemy was not just to break but also to reshape minds, systematically, on behalf of the Party. The ‘crack-up’, or breaking point, was simply an intermediate stage in an inmate’s wretched experience on the conveyer belt to brainwashing. Stalin and Mao’s apparatchiks, Hunter explained, wanted to make you ‘lap up [your] sorry victuals like a dog’, to force you into ‘humiliating postures’, working you towards the ‘crack-up’. Only then could the real ideological work of thought-insertion begin.7
Not everyone according to Hunter was inevitably bound to ‘crack’ in detention, however: some, he insisted, have greater ‘mental stamina’ than others; even in some cases the power to resist to the end, obstinate through and through. It was as though he was taking issue here with Sloane, or with other writers who expressed any note of what he saw as national defeatism about the presumed total helplessness in ‘every man’.8 The task of resilience-building, he insisted, must be the priority of government: to train soldiers, and also populations at large, to better cope with brainwashing operations in theatres of war and on the home front as well. There was no safe space; the entire world was now being fought over, he implied. ‘Free society’, he wrote, ‘must teach each man and woman that this is everyone’s business, for everyone is the target of total war. There is no front and no rear in mind attack.’9
It is important to pay attention here to the fanciful and bizarre elements of such analysis as well as the scientifically credible, as we might now see it. The overheated accounts to be found in some journalism, political discussion, cinema or even pulp fiction had material consequences and moral effects; they fostered both a climate of fear and a certain kind of excitement, thus intensifying pressure for new countermeasures to combat the putative danger, or at least providing a moral fig leaf for those who wanted to expand the security and surveillance state in the United States and elsewhere. A great deal of debate has ensued about how minds can be attacked, bodies overwhelmed and brains flooded, even without recourse necessarily to outright physical torture as traditionally understood.
As well as Prisoner of War, the 1950s saw diverse works of cinema, fiction, science and reportage address the theme, including the film The Rack, another notable Hollywood feature about the Korean War, released two years after Prisoner of War. The title references an ancient physical torture, but the film was really concerned with carefully calibrated mental torture conducted upon a severely physically depleted subject, with inmates who might have particular exposure (perhaps running back to a damaged infancy) singled out and targeted.10 This was a period when book titles on brainwashing appeared, warning of ‘The Rape of the Mind’; and concepts such as ‘menticide’ (the systematic undermining and destruction of the mind) were also suggested by post-war psychiatrists to focus public attention.11 It was a decade that witnessed many stories about ‘puppet masters’, ‘caged minds’ and ‘alien invaders’, along with multitudes of speeches, films and essays advertising the brainwashing crisis ushered in by the Cold War.
News of poor morale, protests, breakdowns or, worst of all, supposedly total ‘thought reform’ and conversion among those American POWs in the Korean War caught the attention of powerful figures in Washington and Hollywood, as well as many academics in policy think tanks and universities. Officials and experts turned their attention afresh to prisoner psychology. Commentary abounded, not just reprising older historical concerns with psychiatric conditions in ailing soldiers such as ‘nostalgia’ (in the nineteenth century), ‘shellshock’ (in the First World War), ‘barbed-wire disease’ (in the 1920s, a syndrome supposed to account for captive soldiers’ reported hopelessness, memory loss and general fatigue) and ‘war neurosis’ (in the Second World War), but also charting new paths.12 The literature was varied, examining the scale, novelty, geography, history, methodology and credibility of the brainwashing threat. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, duly took note, and recognised an opportunity in his own organisation for fostering technological and psychological research and development.
While some commentators viewed these dangers as nothing new, others warned that the latest generation of troops were especially breakable and labile, and now also exposed to means of attack quite unlike anything seen hitherto in the West, a mode of psychology, an arsenal of techniques, designed to destroy the discrete form of the free-thinking self. These sciences were now supposedly in the process of being perfected in communist Russia and China.
Not everyone went along with the most alarmist warnings about prisoners’ brainwashing. The psychiatrist, researcher and writer Robert Jay Lifton, for example, provided more balanced and exploratory papers during the 1950s, and then a landmark book, in 1961, entitled Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in Communist China. His work took a more careful and circumspect approach. Even in the title, he insisted on writing ‘brainwashing’ with scare quotes around it. He wanted to signal the hype and the spin, the many inflated, and vague, assumptions that the word carried.13 Yet, conversely, he cautioned against dismissing the notion of brainwashing as bunk. Studies such as his delved behind populist headlines and fearmongering, but without underplaying the seriousness of the issue, and they too confirmed the importance of continuing scrutiny.
The heated tone of public discussion during the 1950s soon led to critique and sometimes to satires – as we can see in the iconic 1959 novel and 1962 film about brainwashing, The Manchurian Candidate. That story seemed as much concerned with the shrill and paranoid anti-communist atmosphere in US politics as the supposed psychological threat emanating from the East. It was hard, no doubt, for readers and viewers to know where plausible warnings ended and the fictional horror began: had we really entered a world order where alien creatures could seize and render us helpless and ensure we ended up brain-dead, something akin to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers – as another perhaps tongue-in-cheek horror film put it?
This constant circulation of torrid accounts as well as drier research papers meant that ‘brainwashing’ became part of the zeitgeist: here was a topic as much at home in Ivy League University seminars, broadsheets, radio debates and psychiatric symposia, as in lurid journalistic exposés, tub-thumping speeches by Red-baiting politicians and popular magazines. Although the Korean War was the setting for the initial political alarm, journalists and academic researchers on brainwashing saw the longer historical reach of the problem, and the much wider geographical context as well.
They sought to show how psychological knowledge could be put to work by the great powers to destroy the mind, or to help free it. Psychiatrists and other clinical experts could then be perceived as both part of the problem and potentially part of the solution to brainwashing. Specialists in mental health, including psychoanalysts, were widely regarded post-war on both sides of the Atlantic as important contributors to political debate; they were often lauded as experts with something important to say about domestic policies and foreign affairs. At post-war international forums, including those provided by the World Health Organization, mental health was treated as a crucial matter for all, an urgent concern for global security, not just a question of personal well-being or misfortune. Good mental health was a prerequisite, argued the WHO’s first director, the Canadian psychiatrist Brock Chisholm, for sustaining liberal democracy against calamitous political extremes.
Psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychologists were thus to avail themselves of new opportunities; they were sought after as consultants in the political sphere, experts in this brave new world of mind and brain; and frequently regarded as dispassionate and scientific observers who could provide cases, experiments, theories, profiles, models and, not least, various important conceptual tools for the study of liberal democratic processes and states of mind, or conversely of fascist, communist or other totalitarian means to transform human beings.
Some mental health experts had played important roles in intelligence work both during and after the war, for instance in ‘denazification’ measures, in techniques for training military forces and in refining interrogation procedures. The ‘psy’ professions were also (by dint of these roles, and others) soon the target of evaluation and a source of apprehension too; cast by critics as dangerous mind-shapers and secret state adjuncts. Such concerns echoed and amplified earlier historical fears that ‘mind-doctors’ might conspire with others to wrongfully confine the perfectly sane.
Clearly, these psychological sciences, post-war, could be redeployed by both liberal and illiberal states, for purposes quite other than personal therapy, benign social policy or ‘pure’ research. ‘Psy’ expertise, warned a growing band of critics, could aid and abet old imperialist endeavours; be used to help crush or postpone new nationalist movements;14 or be mobilised to reinforce broken political systems. In short, ‘psy’ science and therapies might serve the state, not the suffering individual; they could work, indeed, for or against revolutionary movements, and in support of or in opposition to ideals such as freedom, democracy and universal human rights.
The abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union extended this theme. Incarceration of the politically ‘disturbed’ became an increasing focus of inquiry and protest by many activists and intellectuals during the 1960s and 70s. This was the most obvious example, a catalyst for a more general and pervasive critique of ‘psy’ expertise. A stream of clandestine writings about such abuses of clinical knowledge and power were produced in the Soviet Union. Open protests against the abuse of the asylum, and the perversion of psychiatry, also multiplied in the West. Many analyses emerged of how psychiatrists in both systems had been co-opted to lock up dissidents, pacify difficult and marginal people, or to destroy the resistance of rebels.15
Robert Jay Lifton’s personal interest in the subject of Chinese thought reform had initially been stirred when he worked as a psychiatrist in the US air force at the close of the Korean War. As part of his job he was required to assess POWs’ mental states before they were demobbed. Thousands of American and other prisoners, fighting against communism, were filtering back from their military units or from the POW camps: mostly they travelled home slowly by ship, rather than plane, to their country. He accompanied some of them in 1953, on a troop carrier bound for San Francisco.
That vessel (named after a former army man, General John Pope) housed contingents of soldiers now struggling to make sense of what they had experienced in the war and in those grim enclosures as POWs. They were, as Lifton described, often fractious, divided, tense and initially suspicious of him and his medical colleagues.16 However, over time, on board or later back home, some shared tales with medics, psychiatrists and psychologists about POW camp life. They would offer researchers insights into their views of conditions in the army, on the battlefield or in those communist prisons, and on occasion reveal mixed feelings about coming home.
One man said to Lifton that his worst fear now was ‘being babied’ by his family; another confessed that all he wanted to do was to disappear from view and go fishing alone, forever.17 Such men yearned to escape the past, and also, perhaps, to bypass families who they suspected would find it impossible to comprehend what they had suffered and witnessed, or what they had inflicted on others. Over the 1950s Lifton first began to piece together a picture of techniques of thought reform prevalent in Chinese society, as well as in prison camps, during those years.
The issue of brainwashing in Korea thus focused a great deal of research energy as well as public attention on the ordeals suffered by soldiers and prisoners in an age of Cold War. Some of this work insisted the world had entered a quite new phase, while some drew links to older cultural and political phenomena, and pointed back to previous social fears about, say, demonic possession, or debates in nineteenth-century political psychology about mass irrationality.
Long before the word ‘brainwashing’ entered the lexicon, much had already been written about crazed and possessed ‘masses’, and about the systematic manipulations that could be effected upon prisoners’ state of mind. Prison might destroy the captive’s reason, not restore it, as had once been hoped by penal reformers in the nineteenth century. Criminologists had long argued about the role of heredity and milieu in constituting the character of the criminal type, and about whether delinquents were born as such, and if their behaviour could be altered at all. A large psychiatric literature existed on delinquency and moral reform, as well as on the dangers of suggestion, persuasion and hypnosis on vulnerable captive minds. In the wrong hands, hypnosis, it was thought, could lead to crimes of passion or collective acts of murderous violence. There had been much debate too about the mind-bending powers of certain orators and stage hypnotists, and speculations about how modern crowds might be tamed, diverted and mobilised by ‘elites’, for instance into a new debased form of imperialism and overblown patriotism and jingoism, rather than into class warfare.
Particular mesmerising figures – real or fictional – were to provide lightning conductors for these anxieties about politics and reason. Such concerns snowballed in the Victorian period. Benjamin Disraeli, who became British prime minister twice during the 1860s and 70s, provided one focus of concern; an exemplar, said critics, of the arts of political bewitchment, and a man sometimes credited with special psychological powers. The Victorian historian and sage Thomas Carlyle warned that Disraeli was ‘a superlative Hebrew conjurer, spellbinding all the great Lords, great parties, great interests of England’.18
The period also saw much discussion of spell-binding musicians and conductors, in real life or in imaginative tales, such as George du Maurier’s best-selling novel of the 1890s, Trilby, featuring the repugnant but irresistible character Svengali.
These fears about toxic charmers or hypnotic entertainers who might invade, feed off, destroy and remake people’s minds soon spread, sometimes intersecting with conspiracy literature, specifically with anti-Semitic representations. A plethora of images was produced of the dangerous psychological power of the Jews (including Disraeli, and the mythic Svengali) over a mass of gentiles. But the issue was certainly not confined to discussion of one supposedly dangerous people or race.19
Speculative political analyses multiplied around the fin de siècle, warning of the regression of the mind that occurred in any great aggregate; the numberless masses were often described in crowd-psychology treatises as descending into some atavistic, singular, supposedly feminine and devouring mob. Such states of altered consciousness (as well as unconsciousness) in individuals, couples or larger groups were explored in novels and dramas, as well as in psychiatric treatises and criminological accounts, long before all this talk of brainwashing and automaton assassins made the headlines.
The context for this growing anxiety about brainwashing was thus apparent well before the post-war period. Furthermore, show trials in the Soviet Union provided an important catalyst for debate just before the Second World War. These featured prominent victims of Stalin, including some former very high-ranking Soviet Party officials who had fallen from grace. Their fate aroused much consternation and speculation as to how they had been broken down and then made to speak out before facing the inevitable guilty verdicts in court. These dramatic court-room events in Moscow, at their height between 1936 and 1938, revealed how proud people could be brought humiliatingly and, in some eyes, bizarrely to confess to any number of things: former comrades of Stalin publicising the fact they were spies and traitors – a disgrace to their leader, comrades, ideology and motherland.
During the Second World War, Western public attention on ‘confession extraction’ by Stalin’s agents lessened. The focus in the English-speaking world was predominantly upon combatting Nazism rather than communism. However, the alliance of the Free World (as US presidents were now calling it)20 with the Soviet Union was short-lived, and the dangerous mass psychology of communism soon re-emerged as a regular theme after 1945. Images of monstrous tyrant Stalin, which sometimes in wartime Western coverage had softened (for instance in the more palatable ‘Uncle Joe’), reverted to the more sinister version shortly after the victory.
As the Cold War set in, there came a new stream of strange and seemingly will-less confessions, most notably emanating from communist-run Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Union was now exerting control. These inscrutable court-room offerings revived public memories of the admissions by self-sacrificing or psychically destroyed apparatchiks in Moscow before the war. Those reports were now dusted off and revisited. By the late 1940s, observers could link such true-life cases with George Orwell’s vision of Winston Smith, or with the story in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s landmark fictionalised account of Soviet confession extraction, published in 1940.
In Budapest, 1949, the most eye-catching and perturbing post-war example of indoctrination during interrogation took place, likewise reviving memories of earlier conversion scandals and incantatory states. A new high-profile prisoner of the communist world was on trial; the ‘guilty man’ was the leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church, Cardinal József Mindszenty. The prelate revealed to Hungarians his copious crimes against the state: treason, conspiracy, espionage, etc. The trial was not broadcast on film, although some of it was relayed on radio. Reports, disseminated by word of mouth and in print, told of the cardinal’s troublingly spaced-out appearance and wooden-toned speech.
Mindszenty’s case led to a storm of protests in the West, some of which were spearheaded by the Vatican and the Catholic press. In the dock, Mindszenty appeared to have lost his gravitas, and perhaps also his mind. Suffice to say that he was somehow induced to make extravagant and improbable admissions; he appeared, it was said, to be a man not only confused, but also broken and terrified, or even terrorised, apparently transfixed, and bathed in a deep sense of guilt.
The scale of Western media attention to this story of a man who was broken, lost, yet so open to the minds of others (his jailors), and now so willing to do his tormentors’ bidding, should not be under estimated. It garnered much publicity and speculation, even prompting a notable 1955 feature film starring Alec Guinness, The Prisoner. Mindszenty’s trial had occurred just before that key word ‘brainwashing’ entered circulation. Commentaries using other related words were already plentiful in the late 1940s, warning about the science of confession through interrogation, and a form of mass conversion that could be occurring in society and most acutely in the prison system. Here was an exemplary case: a once strong-willed Catholic prelate and anti-Nazi stalwart who had been broken and led, it appeared, to a new state of consciousness, directed by others.
Some wondered if his compliance was secured with the aid of Actedron, a drug that stimulates the brain and nerves, potentially interfering drastically with mood and sleep and instigating various side effects. Others speculated about the well-practised skills of the interrogators and jailors who perhaps knew something of the modern psychology of the unconscious and were adept at more subtly triggering and then working over the cardinal’s particular constellation of childhood fears and memories. Physical torture in this case was firmly suspected, but nobody could reliably tell exactly what had happened. The case was splashed across the press for months in Europe and the United States. The New York Times, Manchester Guardian and Le Monde were among the papers to devote dozens of articles to the elucidation of this murky tragedy.21
Hot on the heels of the cardinal’s tale came another case, concerning a travelling American businessman, Robert Vogeler. He too had been arrested and imprisoned in Hungary on charges of spying and sabotage. His court case took place in February 1950, and was soon labelled in the United States as an outrageous show trial of an innocent American visitor.22 The question, again, was why and how he then not only made his mea culpa, but perhaps even internally accepted it. After a period in custody and undergoing interrogation, Vogeler, likewise, confessed to his crimes. He was duly sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. The authorities had somehow managed to overwhelm his ‘resistances’, provoke ‘regression’ and perhaps even half or fully convince him that he was truly guilty. No ego, this case seemed to suggest, was able to withstand the most desolate and disturbing environmental experiences.
As Vogeler explained after returning to the United States (the beneficiary of hasty diplomacy), within three months of his arrest, alone in his cell, he had completely collapsed. To place a person in isolation, to leave them waiting in anticipation of torments to come, can be torment enough. People may well break down when left long enough to stew. Routine procedure and deadening certainty can lead to despair; and uncertainty too can drive us mad, prompting the mind to play the cruellest tricks on itself. The Vogeler story was just one more illustration of how prisoner psychology and scientific interrogation made great waves in Western political discourse in this period, and another prefiguration of that movie refrain: ‘every man has his breaking point’. Vogeler later gave a speech describing the ordeal he had suffered; what it felt like to be stripped, led to a grim cell, 6 feet by 9 feet, there to sit alone on the wooden bed, with a wet floor, in the unbearable cold. He spoke of the horror of the demoralisation he felt at the authorities’ refusal to allow him to wash, the psychological and physical impact of the diet he endured of black bread and water three times a day. The worst thing of all, he said, was the steel peephole, which opened every six minutes only to clang shut.23
Vogeler added:
At the time of my trial … I was in no condition to do anything but recite my lines. I had been imbued with such a feeling of desolation that my one desire was to say my piece and have done with it. My voice quavered as I spoke into the microphone that was placed before me. It sounded to me like the voice of another person, and, in a sense of course, it was.24
These high-profile cases were far from being the only ones. Each new example, in the Soviet sphere or, soon after, in China, kept the question of how crack-ups and confessions were secured firmly in the Western media eye. Cases were duly added to the brainwash literature; a basis for theories about how best to control, fully know, and break down and/or remake the pliable human subject. The range of possibilities was duly explored – secretly administered ‘truth drugs’ and ‘lie detectors’ (both innovations of the 1920s), the offer of traumatic choices (such as the hope dangled before an inmate that they would survive by being an informer or punisher of others), confusing claustrophobic architecture, solitary confinement, deprivation of food, manipulation of light and dark, intrusion of sound or prolonged silence, the warping of time and space, the endless play of the inquisitorial team’s alternating kindness, mockery, harshness and cruelty, or the sheer impact of peer pressure, where prisoner groups were required to ‘re-educate’ one another.
Many of these techniques had been explored and discussed in an emerging literature between the 1920s and 1950s. On a small scale, for example, an experiment was conducted in the Spanish Civil War on some prisoners held by the Republican side. It was an adaptation of certain ideas from modern art: just as modernist pictures might challenge the idea of the traditional frame or enclosure, so jail walls and floors might be designed to look out of kilter, with zigzag patterns and psychedelic effects – a built-space that could disorientate minds and then, maybe, loosen tongues.
Such fringe experiments, interwar, came in the wake of earlier, far more important, innovations, affecting much larger numbers: prison design had been radically rethought in many countries during the nineteenth century to suit either utilitarian philosophy or religious creeds (or both); hence the advent of silent and solitary penitentiary systems that could, perhaps, bring the prisoner to a state of complete subjection and compliance as well as repentance.
Post-war, brainwashing was part of a wider conversation, therefore, about the vast range of tools that could be used to extract information and to possess and redirect minds and bodies: architecture, sound, drugs, temperature, precise increments of pain, sudden and bewildering changes of circumstance, and many other variables that made it hard to resist, and that might also reshape the prisoner’s inner beliefs. The pharmaceutical revolution of the twentieth century fostered many new aspirations and fears, although it might also have led to exaggerated expectations of scientific ‘truth extraction’. British and US intelligence sought to refine such methods and treatments during the Second World War, with mixed results, as for example in the use made of Evipan, the trade name of a particular form of barbiturate, during the interrogation of a notoriously ‘amnesiac’ prisoner of state held by the British, the former Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess. The army doctors treating Hess were puzzled by what they called his ‘hysterical’ behaviour, worried by his attempt at suicide, and unsure whether he subsequently faked his claimed memory loss in order to defy his captors, or was suffering deeply neurotic, or perhaps far more serious psychotic, symptoms. Even under the influence of Evipan, known for its sedating and hypnotic effects, Hess left his interrogators and physicians little the wiser. One of the psychiatrists asked the medicated prisoner in 1944 to ‘Tell us now what you have forgotten’, to which he replied: ‘I don’t know. Pain! Thirst! … Water! Pain in my body! A fog.’25 At the Nuremberg trial, Hess’s behaviour and statements continued to puzzle the lawyers and even his fellow defendants, and would lead to a great deal of psychiatric speculation.26
Lifton, as I have noted, provided one of the most compelling post-war studies of how conditions might be created, above all in totalitarian states, to inculcate beliefs in prisoners. A typical method, he argued, in his exposé of Chinese ‘brainwashing’, was to wear someone out, intimidate, confuse, terrify and shame, and then provide a new source of identification. The captive subject would ‘learn’ that they had fundamentally misunderstood their previous life and best future path. A set of techniques was repeatedly used, he argued, to convince people of the unreliability of their prior memories, beliefs and political interpretations, and to induce them to see their story quite differently, thereby to cement new allegiances.
Most conducive to the process, Lifton explained, was creating a closed milieu, cutting off routes to any alternative opinion, promoting a sacred language, exerting the power of life and death, and introducing a culture of confession, purification rituals, loaded language and repetitive slogans – thus first decimating the mind, then possessing and redirecting it. The subject could ‘awaken’ and take up their place, embrace a new totalised narrative, where the past-present-future all now made sense, the way ahead beautifully clear.
After the breakdown of previous beliefs in a prisoner came the gradual or sudden breakthrough into new and bullet-proof ‘understanding’. Or, rather, into a heavily coached and coerced form of personal tale – utterly congruent with the view of the group, the community and, ultimately, the state. It was frequently regarded as essential, at least in some communist states (most obviously China), for such ‘re-educated’ prisoners not only to obey, but to convey this tremendous sense of moral and political awakening out loud to others (for instance, their appreciative and encouraging fellow prisoners).
According to Lifton, a new ‘totalistic’ state of the mind is consistent with the politics of totalitarianism: no hesitation, doubt, contradiction, dissent; no counter-thoughts or ambivalence; just harmonious oneness, the transcendence of all messy everyday feelings, singular direction, utter (and terrifying) congruence. Lifton’s account of ‘totalism’ is still, in my view, an important and relevant account in understanding some cases of what we now call ‘radicalisation’. However, it is harder to determine so clearly and to know so fully what any individual subject feels, thinks or believes, consciously or unconsciously, during and after such a process. It is easier to formulate the nature of such psychological projects, to break down the elements of the procedure – isolation, humiliation, shame, repetition, group ‘support’, and so on – than to be sure of quite where it leaves a ‘re-educated’ person, deep down, in their own inner world.
But what, asked what we might here call the brainwash ‘research community’ during the 1950s, of the peculiar features of this process? What if the point of bringing a man or woman to a breakdown in precisely calibrated fashion was to ensure not only such disintegration, but total conversion to a new secular form of religion, world communism? Conversion, that is, to a faith implacably at odds with liberal democracy and the market system, the world that we know, above all, in Western capitalism? Lengthy interrogations, blandishments and enticements, constant thumping slogans, and so on, might all be used, mused such Cold War observers, to break and then reconstruct a person for the sake of the Communist Party and its totalitarian creed in the global struggle that was now underway.
The question of state-orchestrated mind-control projects, and the pliability of political subjects to enemy hidden persuasion, thus exercised numerous officials in the Cold War. Many in Western intelligence had followed the Mindszenty story and others like it. Dulles and his colleagues at the CIA knew about previous intelligence efforts, during the Second World War, by the CIA’s forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, for which Dulles and some other CIA staff had also worked; efforts to develop for the ‘free world’ the science of interrogation, and to dabble in new psychological and medical methods, including those forays into so-called truth drugs and other adaptable chemical products. During the Korean War and after, Dulles received bulletins about these various communist ‘advances’ in the field of human-behaviour management. The West had to do better, he and his colleagues decided. So, with his blessing, CIA operatives set up secret research programmes to investigate and corner the field; these were given esoteric code names such as ‘Bluebird’, ‘Artichoke’ and, by 1953, ‘MK-Ultra’.
The CIA, in short, invested heavily in research on the mind and the brain. Once this got going, there was shockingly little central oversight of their clandestine work on human psychology, physiology and neuroscience. Many unwitting human guinea pigs, including psychiatric patients, would suffer the consequences. Such prolific research work in the field of ‘altered states’, later exposed and investigated by outsiders, was found to be dubious at best, and illegal, outrageous and totally unethical at worst.27 Conversely, the CIA and the armed services sought to develop new ideas about resilience for servicemen and women abroad, in order for them to be able to endure captivity more effectively, just as Hunter and his peers had proposed.
Such work on the psychology of interrogation and resistance was later described in a notorious CIA secret report, known as the Kubark Manual, published in 1963, now available online.28 It ran through the gamut of methods of interrogation; it discussed the pros and cons of death threats, sensory deprivation, drugs and other methods of influencing behaviour, while also insisting on the enormous variety of human responses to such methods. This ‘science’, in other words, could never yield entirely reliable and predictable results in a particular case.
That report brought together some of the work that had been written in the previous decade, a good deal of it sponsored directly by the CIA, to discover what happens, for example, when people are kept awake for days, put into induced comas, loaded with LSD, restricted in small spaces, subjected to stress positions or endless looped messages, or deprived of any obvious sensation at all, just left alone, in terror, in the darkness.29 As the report coolly observed, ‘[t]he point is that man’s sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through those links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided internal resources.’30
While the CIA’s work and that of other intelligence agencies expanded in this field, university and hospital staff in many places were recruited, encouraged and sometimes covertly financed to develop unusual experiments and trials. Looking back at the extent of this ecosystem of research, one historian, Alfred McCoy, compared it (admittedly with a touch of hyperbole) to the top-secret research operation behind the atomic bomb. Here, he said, was the CIA version of ‘the Manhattan Project of the mind’.31
The extent of such inquiry into mental states and human behaviour in extreme conditions was indeed very considerable; the projects are well described in a pioneering 1979 book, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, by John Marks. This publication helped inspire numerous other researchers who subsequently fleshed out many of the details. Marks made ample use of Freedom of Information requests to piece together his story, and thus to reveal many schemes that took place under the watch of the long-term director of MK-Ultra, Sidney Gottlieb.32
An especially shocking example of participation by a mental health expert requires a mention here: the work of the Scottish-born psychiatrist Dr Ewen Cameron. He conducted so-called ‘psychic driving’ experiments on patients in the psychiatric facility at McGill University in Canada. Cameron and his team, beneficiaries of some covert intelligence funding, attempted to see what would happen when repetitive messages were played over and over to patients already heavily subdued with drugs. He also sought to erase the memories of schizophrenic patients through electroconvulsive therapy and the use of anti-psychotic medications such as Thorazine. Cameron was willing to conduct experiments in ‘psychic driving’ on patients without informed consent. The severe and even disastrous consequences for victims would gradually emerge over the years.
Another troubling case was the work of the neuroscientist John Lilly. Post-war, Lilly had undertaken a variety of brain experiments involving the insertion of electrodes into primates and other animals, before his focus turned back to the impact of sensory deprivation on humans. During the 1950s, Lilly, in the United States, and other colleagues, such as Donald Hebb, working primarily in Canada, researched, with ample funding, the effects of total isolation on the brain and the personality. Such forms of research were well conveyed in a 1963 movie, The Mind Benders, where we can witness the drama of an obsessive scientist, watched by a senior representative of the intelligence services, going out of his mind after many hours submerged in a tank full of water.33 Hebb’s research students volunteered to sit inside an isolation chamber: eyes covered with goggles, ears subjected to silence or white noise, so the team could see the effects.
What could not be simulated completely was the terror of actual detention by enemy forces. Nonetheless, Hebb also wanted to find out how people changed and grew more suggestible under such circumstances. He hoped to see if they might be susceptible to the implantation of new or different ideas. Lilly, not to be outdone by his colleagues, had created his own purpose-built isolation chamber. His technique involved the total submersion of a subject inside a tank of water, at body temperature. Lilly and Hebb were both appointed to consultancy roles to help establish sensory-deprivation research at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.
Lilly apparently envisioned a not-so-distant future in which his techniques could be employed to obtain, as he put it, ‘push-button control over the totality of motivation and behaviour’, leading to ‘master-slave controls directly of one brain over another’.34 Later, however, this once reliable insider and laboratory scientist working for the government changed direction, or as some saw it made a volte-face, a life choice which has since been much explored by scholars. Lilly did not exactly drop out, but altered course, ever more interested in countercultural moods and a range of more arcane social and biological issues. He was not alone in moving from work in the ‘military–industrial complex’ to rather more obstruse pursuits, including personal researches on the paranormal. Lilly, moreover, came to suggest that isolation, far from being exclusively a means of mind manipulation and control, could also be used to empower and open a greater awareness, a mode of consciousness-raising, autonomy-building or freedom enhancement. Eventually the kind of isolation he and other such scientists researched seemed to find a new context, feeding a novel element into the growing popularity of retreats in the West. Even flotation tanks became part of a set of new practices for securing quiet, contemplation, meditation or general ‘well-being’, subsumed in a booming therapy and relaxation industry that today is being developed and promoted by companies around the world. In the United States, for example, large sales fairs such as the Float Conference take place, where consumers and industry experts can gather to hear talks about the benefits of the procedure for body and mind, and to explore the latest devices.35
Lilly, admittedly, was an exceptional case; an eye-catching story of someone going from the world of such Cold War ‘psy warfare’ research off into the wonders of the natural world, moving from military to civilian experiments, and enjoying a more off beat personal life in Big Sur in California. Lilly had, in fact, a long-standing interest in dolphins, their large brains and high intelligence. Early works had considered their potential naval and military value. But publications including Man and Dolphin (1961) and The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) also helped raise the profile of the dolphin to the status of intelligent and sentient being for which it is widely regarded today. His story, well charted elsewhere, serves to illustrate the potential cross-over points between 1950s intelligence and the ‘counterculture’ of the 1960s, or, much later, those fringe intelligence and military inquiries into the paranormal; a secretive world, as the writer Jon Ronson put it, where ‘men stare at goats’.36
In another such cross-over, LSD was procured for intelligence purposes, and also feted by experimenters as a drug to lead the mind to new worlds of colour, shape and sound. By the 1960s, it had become a vehicle for many people interested in tuning in or dropping out, expanding or investigating mundane quotidian consciousness, and finding an ‘altered state’; or as Aldous Huxley famously put it, opening ‘the doors of perception’.
But for our purposes, its military and intelligence uses need to be kept in mind: LSD was a chemical that the CIA had a great interest in exploring as a mode of mind control, or an aid to interrogation. Much experimental work on the impact of such drugs on the detainee was conducted in a military context, for example through the US Army Chemical Corps at the Edgewood Arsenal facility in Maryland. Soldiers, psychiatric patients and prisoners in the United States and in outreach projects abroad (including one in Europe in 1961 which was code-named ‘Third Chance’) were subjected to such experiments, in the 1950s and after. In one calamitous case at Edgewood in 1953, a lethal amount of mescaline was injected into a patient, a tennis player named Harold Blauer, who was undergoing treatment for depression. He was never told that he was part of a military experiment. In another trial, also at Edgewood, it was reported that recipients saw ‘horrible green-eyed monsters’ or felt ‘a constant flow of electricity’ throughout the body.37
Such drugs, the experimenters discovered, could prove powerful but also remarkably unpredictable, affecting people profoundly differently. If one goal of such research was simply to disable, another was to expose the captive’s thoughts to the interrogator. A working assumption at Edgewood during some of the experiments was that LSD would prove most effective when administered to people who were given no prior information at all about what the drug would do to them, or even that they were being medicated. Guinea pig soldiers were thus sometimes misled about the trials, given LSD without their knowledge, and then closely observed. Effects could be extremely disturbing, with the subjects left confused, desperate or frantic.
So, stories of brainwashed Western prisoners in the Korean War need to be seen in context. There were prior and subsequent developments, a host of ideas, theories, experiments and suppositions. An extensive literature, exploring a new kind of battle for control of the mind, emerged in the interwar decades and was extended during the Second World War. It was further amplified and dramatised by mysterious and much-publicised occurrences during the early Cold War.
Instances of confession extraction once again made the news, causing puzzlement and consternation during the war in Korea. In 1952 and 1953, several new cases emerged of guilty, or at least seemingly guilt-ridden, military men from the United States, confirming their crimes (including participation in germ warfare attacks) while in enemy hands. What were the Western public to make of the news of captured US personnel who ‘revealed’ their own participation in such biological warfare in Korea? Was this brainwashing, or were they broken down and thus encouraged to tell the truth? Accusations spread by the communist side about US use of such armaments circulated from 1951, although the story really gained legs the following year, when imprisoned pilots began to confess. Rumours also emerged about this new warfare method, some telling of autopsies conducted on civilians in communist-controlled Korea; victims who had suffered vomiting and headaches, or, much worse, haemorrhages in the brain and damage to the lungs, the lymph and adrenal glands. Such accounts were reinforced by reports of Western use of anthrax, or other poisonous substances, and of strange objects dropping out of the sky from US planes.
In January 1952, the crew of a US bomber was shot down while flying over the north of Korea. Months later, the pilot, John Quinn, and another officer in the bomber crew, Kenneth Enoch, were produced by the Chinese and North Koreans to go on record and acknowledge their roles in such germ attacks.
The confessing airmen, so it was said by US spokesmen, must have been either consciously feigning their ‘crimes’, or else had somehow been persuaded erroneously, even influenced unconsciously, to assume that they were responsible. In sum, the government refuted the claims and continued to declare indignantly that the stories made no sense, and that these men must have been abused and overwhelmed, no longer able to tell up from down. The airmen were sowing disinformation under intolerable pressure, claimed angry officials in Washington.
Beijing denied this, insisted on the accuracy of the confessions, and organised a supposedly objective international scientific committee (in fact, comprising broadly sympathetic experts) to investigate. The Chinese authorities published a report to confirm the United States had indeed used such weapons, citing testimony from the captured air crews and others, alongside scientific data (soil samples, evidence of poisoned insects, and so on).38 Whatever the truth, imagine the further consternation in 1953 when a still more senior US air force officer, Colonel Frank Schwable, also acknowledged his own active participation.
This claim, again, did not seem entirely implausible to anyone neutral, let alone anyone opposed to Western imperialism. After all, in lieu of dropping nuclear bombs (as the US air force had done in Japan in 1945, and as some in the US top brass would at least consider doing when the Korean campaign foundered), it was conceivable to many people even outside the communist world that US forces could have aimed to poison the people and land, ruining agriculture and infecting bodies, so as to bring about mass starvation, not just demoralisation. Debate surrounding this case of cover-up and/or fake news concerning the Korean War continues to this day among historians.39 Clearly many critics felt that the devastating policy choices made by the United States in the war that unfolded in Vietnam in the following decade only made the earlier germ warfare claims about Korea seem more plausible with hindsight.40
Dr Charles Mayo, a prominent surgeon, medical administrator and commentator on the Korean War, exemplified the indignant response to such claims at the time. He was apparently convinced by the US government’s denials and declared these arrested airmen had been broken and brainwashed to say whatever was demanded. Such POWs, he explained, had been left in rags, with untreated wounds, their bodies infested with lice. The men were brutally exposed to the elements, forced to drink infected water and eat terrible food, subjected to threats of execution, bullied and harried constantly, kept awake and regularly beaten. The communists had ‘extorted’ confessions by ‘perverting’ Pavlov’s work, he said, to ‘mould’ their minds. Any signs of co-operation by such prisoners, Mayo explained, were rewarded with slight improvements in treatment, thus establishing a circuit of associations inside the brain. Neuroscience, or behavioural psychology, rather than psychoanalysis, he implied, could explain the deep changes affected in their attitudes as well as their public statements.
Mayo asked his readers to understand and sympathise – to see how such captives were brought to the point of desperation and then offered a way out; they might well be simply incapable of resisting, given the state of their brains. The miracle was that some men could still resist and not break, could endure this treatment at all, even for a day, and still string their own thoughts together. It was entirely understandable that ordinary people would crack, or be confounded, he insisted; imagine a systematic assault so complete and bewildering that all you cared about was a crust of bread, and that all you desired was an hour of sleep.41
You could get most people to say or believe anything, so Mayo continued, given the necessary environmental inputs. Those confessions by the ‘guilty’ prisoners were thus regularly revisited and set alongside a different story. To the consternation of hawkish politicians and generals, hundreds of American POWs had also signed petitions for peace, expressing their criticism and doubts about war, certainly about this war. As the 1950s wore on, bulletins also circulated of disillusionment, cynicism, poor morale in the armed forces; accounts that were very different to those cases of ‘cracking’ airmen put before kangaroo courts. There were other reports of imprisoned brainwashed men and women: for instance, Western students in China who also fell apart and recanted, sometimes swiftly, under interrogation and declared themselves to be, well, whatever the interrogators demanded they should be. One of these students, a Fulbright scholar in China, Harriet Mills, taken into custody in 1951, was brought to a point where she declared herself an unpaid espionage agent, and confirmed US germ warfare in Korea.42
Some of those captives seemed to have been trained, during captivity, to respect, admire or even positively love their jailor teachers. Consider the plight of the person known as Jane Darrow, the Canadian daughter of a Christian missionary, who lived and worked in China as a teacher. Following her arrest, soon after Mao took full command of the state in 1949, she spent four years in captivity. Although perhaps never entirely converted, her thinking and emotional life were altered during her years of imprisonment. From life in a family intent upon spreading the Word, encouraging faith, converting people to Christianity, she was schooled to feel a new zeal as a convert to Mao. After her release, she described how she had found herself enthusiastically endorsing the new communist system, voicing an ever more jubilant yes, even as she remained trapped.
Between her first arrival and later ‘promotion’ to act as a kind of informal instructor to others, Darrow apparently suffered a great deal of shame which was nurtured by fellow inmates, as well as by guards. She was regularly set straight about any lingering idea that she was superior; although whether she began with such a premise was not clear. The task of the group was to ensure her humility, to bring home to her fully her shameful membership of an exploiter class, an idea that increasingly she came to acknowledge quite openly, and, for a time, to feel despairing about. She grew horrified, so she later told an investigator, by her prior identity – an exemplar of a foreign and privileged imperial world. In time, she was able to dis-identify, up to a point, from that position and instead align her thinking and feeling with the Chinese communist cause.
Darrow, despite her political ‘development’, was never quite fervent enough to be accepted by the authorities as a fully trusted prison-house teacher herself; being a foreigner cannot have helped. When she was finally released, she thanked the judge copiously, expressed warmth towards her captors, spoke with gratitude of what she had learned from other inmates – and denounced with conviction all those historical US crimes, including the most recent atrocity, germ warfare.
Such prisoners would thus ‘progress’ through a custodial system, navigating as best they could amid interrogation, instruction, punishments and rewards. Gradually the new community – its approval and approbation, even its ‘love’ – might well grow more and more important to inmates, perhaps quite consciously, but also, analysts argued, unconsciously. The prisoner, as post-war commentators on brainwashing explained, ‘transferred’ to the new figures or to the new group much deeper and more archaic wishes and feelings. This, as Lifton and others would note, was also the classic modus operandi of cults. Darrow, he showed, was gratified by the prison group’s extremely enthusiastic acceptance of her statements that she had been leading hitherto an indefensibly ‘parasitic life’.43 Her autobiographical account was thus gradually reworked, out loud, as well as inside her mind, with much support from the others in custody around her. She was cheered on as she made her confessions and expressed bitter self-reproaches for her many past mistakes.
We can only speculate as to what personal feelings or defences may have been disturbed and broken in her, as for any other such confessing subjects who underwent this form of process. We may want to ask what might have made Darrow especially vulnerable to such personal shaming and guilt-tripping. There is much, inevitably, that is unknowable about this experience and the later outcome. I rely here on the vivid description provided by Lifton in 1961. This account serves to suggest how a person can come to be contemptuous of their former self, to believe in the purity of their new-found group membership, to be convinced they now enjoy a deeper liberty than they had before, and to view themselves as more available, thanks to this ‘help’ in moving towards ‘the truth’. Suffice to say that what Darrow and similar inmates might previously have viewed as their cruel and unfair punishment, inside a prison, could morph in the mind into something far more cathartic.
Discourses about brainwashing have been through numerous iterations since that era, from tales of false memory syndrome and reports about the victims of so-called Stockholm Syndrome, to current exploration of young people’s ‘grooming’ and ‘radicalisation’ to the cause of jihad.44 The 1970s case of the young heiress Patty Hearst, for example, who was kidnapped by a small, extreme and violent US left-wing group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, echoed such earlier accounts and provided a new kind of label; the case caused a particularly great stir in the media. Hearst apparently came to ‘identify with her aggressors’ (the kidnappers) and participated with them in a bank robbery in San Francisco. Her conduct and subsequent trial turned Stockholm Syndrome into a household name. This is the condition where hostages develop a strong, positive psychological bond or identification with those who are holding them in captivity. Hearst’s defence team argued that none of her criminal actions while in detention had been undertaken freely: she had been abused, drawn into an intimate relationship with one member of the group; she was already a fragile person, suffering a serious psychiatric condition, and was manipulated. In short, she was afflicted by a syndrome that, if not born entirely out of the captivity, and perhaps reflected earlier problems, was exploited by others to control her once she had been abducted. Expert medics who appeared on her behalf seeking clemency included Lifton, and other notable writers on brainwashing.45
Over the last fifty years some of the arguments that were once contentious have become more akin to common sense: the argument that an abuser, who creates a menacing, bullying, brutal or highly perverse milieu for a victim, may well affect, even transform, the conscious and the unconscious psychic life of the captive, generating massive confusion, before demanding and gaining inner compliance.46 There are tales of victims who remain in the kidnapper’s jail even when that jail has no bars. Sometimes an abuser may do the most lasting damage by making victims active participants, collusive agents, ‘partners in crime’.
Mental health workers today in all likelihood will work under the assumption that what we call the ‘internal world’, while not just a reflection of the ‘external world’, can be deeply and permanently affected by traumatic experiences inflicted by others, in very early life, or thereafter at any stage of existence. Abusers can stir up in children as well as in adults complicated feelings, including guilt, shame and mortification. Enforced complicity in actions that contravene the victim or prisoner’s own prior belief system can cause a kind of psychic havoc. Later abuses may exploit a person’s earlier vulnerabilities, compounding early traumas with others, hence the now commonplace term ‘re-traumatisation’. Nobody comes out psychologically undamaged from long-term captivity, although some people’s capacity to hold on to their minds, even against the greatest of odds, can be a remarkable thing.
Recall Brian Keenan, the Northern Irish writer and long-term hostage in Beirut, who described in an outstanding book the vast range of emotions he went through in four and a half years of captivity. He wrote of the oscillations in his states of mind: times of defiance, courage, compassion, fortitude and camaraderie; and periods of massive and overwhelming psychic disturbance. Between 1986 and 1990 Keenan was held in isolation at some points, and at others in confined spaces with other men, including, most importantly for him, fellow hostage John McCarthy. Keenan provides moving accounts of the love and care of prisoners for each other; of shifting states of terror, rage, desolation, despair; the moments when the mind would fall apart, or perhaps heal a bit; the solace that could sometimes be found in the company of another fellow sufferer.
Who knows how Keenan or McCarthy would have fared had they been entirely alone for all those years; there were occasions, Keenan reports, when his mind seemed to be screaming soundlessly. He gives a sense of what it is to experience the self in its own descent into delirium; but he also conveys the rapid shifts of behaviour and emotions he experienced – fits of the giggles, absorbing daydreams, ingenious games, discussion, rage, argument, even a sense of serenity (however fleeting). He documents well the see-saw between sanity and impending madness, the insight, evasion and confusion, and the terrible occasions when ‘[w]e [the prisoners] became self-loathing creatures, unable to bear ourselves, and we chose to off-load this burden onto others, someone we admired, perhaps even someone we loved. All of us had to struggle with this inward-turning anger and seek to take control.’47 To hold on to hope in captivity may be the hardest thing, after years of what Keenan calls an ‘evil cradling’.48
In more ordinary domestic life, too, a dominant figure may ensnare another, and make that partner betray themselves, think and act like them; for example by committing a crime to win approbation. Much now is made of the psychology and sexual politics of ‘gaslighting’. People, in short, can reside in many versions of a micro-tyranny, in couples, or families, as well as in closed communities, or inside a larger society where basic freedoms may exist for the majority. And educators, doctors, jailors, politicians, interrogators, priests and army trainers may profoundly affect the way people feel, behave and think; all the more so if there is no open exit path for the victim.
Some who have suffered at the hands of gangs, or who have lived inside cults that intimidate or seduce them, and require initiation, certainly want to insist that we recognise the reality of brainwashing, and do not focus too much on the mythological components, least of all dismiss it as overblown rhetoric. The guilt of participation may also be the hardest to bear, especially if the perpetrator or jailor manages to stir something more actively cruel, hateful and dehumanising (a thought, or an action) towards fellow victims.
As various writers on the most egregious varieties of thought reform have also been pointing out for decades, not only our feelings and deepest emotions, but even our biochemistry can be damaged by stressful and constricting incarceration and brainwashing.49 A burgeoning literature on PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) intersects with the literature on brainwashing. PTSD, a term elaborated during the 1970s, has been widely applied in both military and civilian contexts. The term is, admittedly, still contested and open to question.50 It can be a catch-all, and lead both mental health professionals and patients to become over-invested, trying at all costs to align a bewildering and idiosyncratic personal story to the general model, thereby distorting the complexity and variety of each situation. But whatever vocabulary we may choose, it is surely true that people can suffer immense psychic damage, even long after they escape a wicked regime or set of ‘evil cradling’ experiences.
PTSD is one way, though not the only one, to designate such haunting legacies inside the body and mind – the psychological and physical aftermaths, overwhelming feelings of assault and invasion, states of disorientation and terror – that a person cannot manage to contain and work through in their minds. People can be profoundly afflicted with nightmares, flashbacks, sweats, tremors and more, long after they have been formally rescued from harm’s way. So, while we need to scrutinise carefully the rhetorical use of the label ‘brainwash’, or, indeed, the sometimes casual and ever more elastic recourse in our culture to terms such as ‘trauma’, it would be a travesty to somehow focus just on the diagnoses, and the vagaries of these labels, and downplay the devastation and cruel suffering that the terminology describes.
Conversation around brainwashing in the early Cold War was often characterised by inflated claims, and sanctimonious assumptions about Western civilised values and moral ascendancy. The unstable combination of evidence-gathering and myth-making reflected the political climate. It was a time, certainly in the United States, of an intense paranoid style in political discourse; a period of grave suspicion not only about communism, but also, on the Right, about liberalism, and on the Left about the brainwashing required by the capitalist state to produce compliant workers and docile voters. Reactionary critics were not in short supply in the United States, lambasting the failings of what they felt to be the weak and excessively liberal administrations of Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and decrying modern society, in which supposedly lay a profound loss of moral fibre and a new vulnerability to brainwashing.
The ‘callow’ Western POWs in Korean detention, men who were now signing petitions for peace, were thus seen by some pundits as a worrying sign of the times. Enter here the US army psychiatrist William Mayer, an inspiration for the aforementioned documentary featuring Reagan, The Ultimate Weapon. Mayer apparently had little sympathy for those who wavered, confessed, collaborated or petitioned for peace.51 Moreover, Mayer detected in this whole sorry saga evidence of a serious national condition: a propensity to ‘give-up-itis’. There were too many pathetic young people – warriors in name only – who believed in nothing, he grumbled. In combat and then in custody, so Mayer concluded, they had revealed their ‘disease of non-commitment’.52
Such arguments were pitched as diagnoses of large groups, not just individual cases. How to explain this shared ‘disease’? Some observers in the media, as well as characters playing their part as advocates in the debate on brainwashing in movies such as The Rack, suggested the causes lay in disastrous failures of modern parenting. What if boys, especially, were psychologically weakened by absent mothers and cruel authoritarian fathers, and thereafter wide open to new forms of conversion? Or by the loss of their fathers, away on war service, or dead? What if, by contrast, dominating, smothering mothers and other threateningly assertive matriarchal figures were overwhelming young people? Mothers from hell populated the movies; this conceit of maternal brainwashing or maternal failure paving the way to enemy brainwashing was played with in The Manchurian Candidate, and was also referenced in many other tales in print and on screen.
The argument (if we can dignify it as such, since it is so clearly misogynistic) was taken up in polemical essays and books: boys were in thrall to a new age of ‘momism’, confused in their sexuality, and prone to becoming national traitors after their feeble embrace of communist brainwashing. Warnings about the impact of these fearsome and over-influential maternal figures, either too stern and powerful or too soft, sentimental and gentle (but smothering), were set out in various diagnoses of the state of the nation, including in a provocative 1943 book by Philip Wylie, The Generation of Vipers. Different versions of this figure of the demanding ‘mother in mind’ who never lets her son go, or son who never lets his mother go, were presented by Alfred Hitchcock: the comic, neurotic version in North by Northwest; the horrific, psychotic version in Psycho. This was a theme prevalent in culture, not just in debate about the vulnerable and breakable prisoner-soldier.
The uncomfortable sight of those aircrews confessing to germ warfare would thereafter frequently be understood through the lens of brainwashing. Those far larger numbers of petition-signing POWs, meanwhile, would divide opinion, seen by various critics as evidence of a mass psychological problem. Prisoner psychology in Korea was raked over with great intensity by an army of experts and partisan opinion-makers. These ‘defeatist’ POWs became entangled with broader concerns – about correct upbringing, abuses of power, the nature of proper education and knowledge-exchange, and the malleability of the generation now coming to maturity after the Second World War. What if ‘new’ men and women could be made to march in the West too, without exercising any will of their own, to the beat of Mao’s drum, just as millions interwar had been persuaded to sacrifice their all in Germany and Russia for Hitler and Stalin? The Korean crisis and the long aftermath of debate on military brainwashing brought then, as we have noted, huge additional prominence to the question of psychological warfare in general; it provided a series of prominent case studies and compelling psychodramas. And it certainly also turned into an important catalyst for inquiries, experiments and subsequent propaganda battles. Experts considered the relative importance of heredity, class, age, environment, religion, education, sexuality, race and national character in steeling the subject against any future possible enemy conversion strategies.
It was as summer turned into autumn then, in 1953, after three years of fighting and the resulting stalemate, with the Korean War armistice signed and peace restored, and after all those earlier tales of confession by captured airmen, that the issue of brainwashing impinged on general, public consciousness. News swiftly spread of twenty-one American POWs who had quite simply refused to come home.
At the declaration of peace, Korea remained divided and neither the North (backed by the Soviet Union and China) nor the South (backed by a coalition under UN auspices and led by the United States) had ended victorious. Large numbers of prisoners had been held by both sides and a prisoner-swap operation now had to be organised. The large contingent of POWs who had been detained in North Korean camps were processed through a reception centre at a place known as Freedom Village, near the tense border that still divides Korea’s capitalist and communist states today. And at the same time the many prisoners from the communist side were also readied for release to their homelands.53
Repatriation was not automatic: a released prisoner could opt to move to a new country. Thousands who had fought for the North Korean People’s Army were thereby able to opt for a new life in South Korea; others ended up in Taiwan.54 Many factors influenced such decisions. Chinese and North Korean prisoners might at that time be treated in the West as just some faceless horde, but their stories were equally complex and varied. For some, there was no intact home to go back to; for others, family ties remained compelling; and for others again, ideology itself, pro- or anti-communist, might be the crucial factor, with each person sifting a panoply of information (or disinformation).55 Some POWs (amounting to a few dozen) from the communist side looked beyond South Korea and Taiwan for their own route to freedom or new adventure, and ended up still further afield: Argentina, Brazil and Mexico were to receive a few of these men, while a small number found refuge in India.56
During the war, US officials had strongly pushed the case for this individual choice of ultimate destination: they insisted that none should be forced back into bondage.57 So long as the preferred country agreed and the soldier remained steadfast, arrangements were made. But first, in this drawn-out process, mediated by the UN, the soldiers who sought to relocate were held in a transitional space, a kind of decompression chamber, a place that allowed them some time to adjust and reflect for ninety days, before their decision to go into exile was implemented. It was a means to test if their preferences were consistent and solid; or that at least was the hope.58
From the Western point of view, this challenge to any rote assumption of automatic repatriation for POWs was a means to help enemy soldiers escape the hammer and sickle, as well as to gain a propaganda coup. However, to much surprise, a small group of American POWs, numbering twenty-three men at the outset, along with a solitary British soldier and a larger contingent of Korean soldiers, proposed to move in the other direction. They preferred to live, so they declared, in the People’s Republic of China – the state founded in 1949 under the leadership of Mao.
Before their final decision was realised, a couple of them, Claude Batchelor and Edward Dickenson, changed their minds and decided to return home after all. When they arrived on US soil they found themselves in disgrace and were dealt with harshly by the army. They were court-martialled, found guilty of various crimes and given substantial custodial sentences.59 The remainder stayed resolute, at least for the time being. They insisted that they wished to cross the so-called Bamboo Curtain and resettle permanently. This was to the bemusement, apparently, not only of US officials, but also of their Chinese counterparts.60
Several of the ‘twenty-one’ doubled down in front of cameras, insisting on their new enlightened political views, explaining that they did not wish to return to a ‘fascist’ political landscape in the United States.61 The men expressed positive views, even a sense of revelation and inspiration, about the egalitarian society that Mao was creating. They gave interviews to explain their decisions and to express commitment to global peace, while criticising the toxic anti-communist McCarthyite atmosphere which prevailed back home.62
Meanwhile, in the United States, worried observers, hostile journalists, angry politicians and even members of the men’s own families suggested that these ex-POWs may or even must have been brainwashed. A vituperative, if supposedly in-depth, analysis of their choices was provided in Virginia Pasley’s 1955 book, 21 Stayed. This noted the soldiers’ often poor education, hinted at a lack of intelligence and knowledge, yet also presented the affair as a ‘horror story without relief ’ about a group of hapless ‘victims writing their own death warrants’ and ‘supplying the weapons for their own destruction’. She saw the situation as more than an exercise in ‘group tyranny’; it might even be evidence, apparently, of a world that would lead to ‘the blanking out of free will and finally of personality itself ’.63
The mother of one of the men in the group, Clarence Adams, argued they had been doped and subjected to hypnosis by the enemy.64 The mother of another, Richard Tenneson, informed the media that these long-confined soldiers were victims of torture and must have been forcibly broken. The sustained hardship and psychological disorientation of these captives, she argued, was the prelude to brainwashing.65 This mode of explanation was echoed by others, and presumably made perfect sense to many Western readers and listeners. How else could these men have made such a choice?
This disastrous Korean conflict, sometimes dubbed ‘the forgotten war’, was eclipsed by the 1960s catastrophe of the United States’ escalating war in Vietnam. Yet one of its never-forgotten legacies, it was said, was ‘[taking] the lid off the story’ of brainwashing.66
Some, like Hunter, as we have noted, called for massive new programmes of training, for armies and civilians alike, to build resilience, enhance strength and fortify mental stamina: people needed rigorous preparation to avoid ‘cracking up’, he insisted, in this new global conflict. Others joined him too, in extolling the virtues of critical thinking, as taught in the best contemporary Western schools and universities. For a total war on the mind, the brainwash experts warned, was in full swing, now and everywhere, and we all had to be carefully schooled to decipher as well as to resist the dangers. For Hunter at least, nobody, at home or abroad, was ever entirely safe. He certainly was granted his wish for a sustained government response to these SOS signals and the need for heavy investment, as we have seen with MK-Ultra and other such programmes.
Let us revisit in a little more detail some of those twenty-one men’s narratives, amid all that megaphone diplomacy; and consider the differences between such typical headlines about their condition, and what they may have thought, felt or sought. I will single out three striking examples that may suffice to suggest the gap between generalised formulations, and the varieties of experience.
One of the twenty-one was James Veneris, from Pennsylvania, the son of a Greek communist couple who had migrated from Europe to the United States. Veneris had fought in the Pacific during the Second World War, only to re-enlist in 1950, after falling on hard times. This case is perhaps the least amenable of all to the melodramatic depiction painted thus far. Veneris seemed, as far as one knows, competent to decide, sanguine and, for all one can tell, ultimately reasonably content to accept and embrace the life-changing choice that he had made.
Sent to fight in Korea, he was captured and held prisoner in Camp 3, where fellow inmates knew him simply as ‘the Greek’.67 He was apparently well regarded even by men with very different political affiliations. Lloyd Pate, one of the so-called ‘reactionaries’ (i.e. the most obdurate anti-communist prisoners in the camps), encountered Veneris, whom he knew to be a ‘progressive’; a man who would be willing to offer more than simply name, rank and serial number, to negotiate with the camp authorities and perhaps ultimately to be drawn to their cause. But Veneris, he said, was never a ‘rat’, and was perhaps the only one of that twenty-one-strong group, in his view, who truly believed in communism. And that, Pate added, was ‘because his own parents were communists’, thus implying the power of family influences rather than just the lure of alien states.68 And yet some of Veneris’s family were clearly aghast, it would also seem, and far from proud of his choice. His mother told Pasley, author of that critical set of profiles, that poor James had never been a communist; she insisted ‘[h]e must have come under terrible pressure to come to believe such things’.69
Veneris evidently held the view that he had taken this fateful decision of his own accord.70 After biding his time during the transitional period, he made the train journey to China and settled down there. He studied, acquired some grasp of the language, married Chinese women (twice, in fact; his first wife died of cancer after some years together) and had a family. In a moving documentary directed by Shui-Bo Wang, They Chose China (2005), we catch up with Veneris and encounter pictures of him in his old age in the People’s Republic, with his children and grandchildren around him. Local people can be seen in the documentary speaking fondly of Veneris, who had passed away the year before the film came out: he was their neighbour, colleague and friend.
Veneris seemed to have done well; he had gained a degree, became a teacher and then a factory worker, a man praised as a loyal, skilled and conscientious comrade, living among the local population. The quiet American had worked for years in steel and paper mills (mostly in a pulp factory), stalwart about his decision, despite requiring protection from the Party to save him from serious trouble during the 1960s when militant young Red Guards suggested he might be a spy.71 The Chinese leadership praised and possibly saved him: Veneris, they said, was a good freedom fighter.
Veneris survived the ferocious onslaught of the Cultural Revolution and lived long enough to see China’s transformation into a dynamic, partially capitalist economy, while still an extremely authoritarian state.72 He is buried in Shandong province in the east of the country, where he had lived. That 1953 decision proved lasting in his case, although after the thaw in the relationship between the United States and China that led to Nixon and Mao shaking hands in 1972, he was able to make occasional trips back to the United States. As far as I am aware, there were no definitive changes of heart for him.
Others in that self-selecting POW group, however, drastically altered course once again during the later 1950s and 60s and sought repatriation to the United States. Grudgingly allowed back by the US authorities after their years in China, these returnees faced a barrage of criticism and possible arrest, as we can see in the case of another POW, Clarence Adams, one of three African-American soldiers in the original group. His story was primarily bound up, one might well argue, not with Chinese brainwashing, but with race and politics in the United States.
Adams grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. As he later explained, his decision to settle in China was informed by the racism he suffered throughout his life, including during his time in the US army. He believed that white officers regarded him and fellow African-American soldiers as the most easily expendable cannon fodder. Racism was endemic in the army, as throughout civilian society.73
Adams was captured in combat and nearly died, like so many other POWs. When he dropped out of a forced march, through exhaustion and injury, he was lucky not to have been shot on the spot. He escaped, ending up desperate on a mountain footpath, menaced by Korean teenagers, when ‘an old Korean with a long stringy beard’ mysteriously appeared to save him.74 Shortly afterwards, he fell into the hands of enemy soldiers, whereupon an interpreter declared to him, in words Adams said later he never forgot, ‘[y]ou are not the exploiters, you are the exploited!’75
Inspired by such comradely messages, and by subsequent political teachings in the camp to which he was taken, Adams hoped to find a new freedom never available to him in the United States. I dwell on his case here to show how the Cold War story of brainwashing could be questioned at the time, as well as interpreted in many ways later, and to emphasise such an ex-soldier’s understandable choice to escape his homeland. For Adams conveyed at that point that the United States had nothing for him, or at least nothing worth the harassment, pain, restriction and cruelty.
While a prisoner, Adams was impressed that the communist authorities encouraged him to take on responsibilities, including mediating on behalf of other soldiers in securing improvements to camp conditions. He negotiated for alterations to the catering arrangements, for example, so that the POWs might cook their own food in a manner more palatable to them. He even obtained official consent to introduce certain games, to alleviate the men’s boredom. Whatever was provided by way of food, medical care and resources, later in the war, cannot be used to sugar-coat the fact of the many hardships and brutalities suffered. Adams made that clear. Others, to be sure, provided less sanguine portraits of those final years spent in the Korean War camps than had he; many were left wrecked by their custodial treatment. Worst, for most of these men, had been the forced marches over long distances, after arrest, before the arrival in camps. Adams wrote in his memoir of his own desperation during those ‘death marches’, how close he had come to killing himself, and how brutal had been the Korean People’s Home Guard, as they pushed their prisoners to walk faster, despite the sub-zero temperatures and lack of food. The prisoners had been guarded by men who had no compunction about shooting those too weak to keep up. Adams survived, despite his injuries and near bodily collapse, only to face the initially extremely bleak conditions of life (and death) in Camp 5. He remarked that he and other soldiers of colour had fared better than many white soldiers because ‘[m]ost of us were accustomed to getting along on very little’.76 It was only some months later, in the spring of 1951, when Chinese authorities took over the running of the camp, that conditions improved, he explained, and for the first time the men received a bowl of hot food every day.77
Reports suggested that for many POWs prison conditions did indeed improve markedly during the war. Adams noted he had some scope, once his ‘progressive’ status was clear to the authorities, to secure minor but important adjustments for himself and the prisoners around him. Others praised the assistance he offered to new US arrivals. Another captured man, Jim Crombie, recalled the time he entered Camp 5, sometime after Adams had arrived: ‘I have to say in Clarence’s defense when I first arrived … he really helped me. He was a short, stocky, very personable guy. He really gave me a hand, asking what he could do to help.’78
Adams paid heed to the political lessons provided by camp officials; he was primed, in turn, to give talks to fellow prisoners, to share his evolving views about war and peace, capitalism and communism. Education, or indeed re-education, was regularly on the camp menu, with challenging questions raised and political explanations duly provided. Some of the guards recalled years later that they had been under instruction from their own managers to call the prisoners their ‘students’.79
Adams had every reason for doubting his prospects in the United States. Racism had been, since childhood, his daily experience. He associated the US South not with the Free World, but rather with violence, hatred and lynching. The Civil War of the 1860s may have led to the end of slavery in the formal sense, but racism was structured into institutional and everyday life at all levels, as Adams sharply pointed out. He remained in the People’s Republic for twelve years, clear enough about why he had done so. ‘I might not have known what China was really like before going there but I certainly knew what life was like for blacks in America and especially in Memphis … I decided to go to China because I was looking for freedom and a way out of poverty and I wanted to be treated like a human being instead of something sub-human.’80
Adams continued to question US propaganda and to recall his own experiences of oppression in the United States, although he also subsequently protested that he was not a communist, had not joined the Party, and in no sense considered himself a traitor to his own country.81 Yet, in the early 1960s, he broadcast for Hanoi Radio, sending targeted propaganda messages against another war the United States fought in Asia. He addressed himself to Black US soldiers: ‘[y]ou are supposedly fighting for the freedom of the Vietnamese, but what kind of freedom do you have at home, sitting in the back of the bus, being barred from restaurants, stores and certain neighborhoods, and being denied the right to vote? … Go home and fight for equality in America.’82
Like Veneris, Adams adapted as far as he could and made use of the offer of further education after his resettlement. He undertook a variety of jobs, including work for a publishing house, the Peking Foreign Press. He married a Chinese woman, Liu Linfeng (‘Lin’), herself a student in Beijing and later a university teacher. They started a family and went on to have two children.
However, Adams had gradually come to see that his situation was precarious, and so he sought a possible new destination. His close contacts in China with other foreigners, including diplomats from abroad, brought him under growing suspicion. As he recalled, while initially he was addressed warmly as ‘comrade’ (‘one of them’, as he put it), in subsequent years he was referred to rather more coolly as a ‘fighter for peace’ (a relegation in status, he explained, from ‘comrade’). In the end, he was sometimes just ‘Mr Adams’ to erstwhile friendly acquaintances. He felt there was a marked falling-off in the nature of his reception by officialdom from those heady early days when, despite the Party’s mixed feelings about these foreign ‘guests’, the twenty-one soldiers were treated as significant men, even dignitaries, offered better pay than average Chinese workers and invited to witness the May Day Parade in Beijing in 1954.83 He, in turn, increasingly questioned the lack of personal freedom in China and had second thoughts about what country would best meet the needs of his family.
In 1966, Adams and his wife returned, with considerable difficulty, to the United States, travelling via Hong Kong with their two young children. They left just before the Cultural Revolution was fully unleashed. He had been given a possible alternative escape route from China, as Ghanaian diplomat friends offered the family potential asylum, but ‘he thought it was just time to go home’.84 From one kind of coolness, suspicion or even growing threat to his safety in China, Adams now endured another set of problems.
Thanks to the FBI and a hostile political climate, Adams faced interrogation and the prospect of a trial; he was subpoenaed to answer questions in Congress. He told those hounding him that, as a Black man, he had done what anyone was entitled to, and gone in search of better opportunities. His daughter Della Adams recollects how ‘[h]e later told me it was a kind of psychological torture, even worse than the Chinese had ever done. Over and over again, they would ask the same things. They were trying to get him to confess that he was a traitor and had sold secrets.’85 The case was not pursued, but as a known former ‘Red’ Adams was put through the mill and struggled to find work and to remake old friendships.
All the same, the couple battled against these difficulties; they managed to open a Chinese restaurant in Memphis, on Elvis Presley Boulevard, and built up a business. Adams remained a volatile, moody figure. He wrote a notable memoir about his experiences, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China, which was published in 2007 eight years after his death, thanks to the editorial efforts of Della Adams and Lewis H. Carlson, a historian who had already done a great deal to chronicle the plight of POWs in the Second World War and the Korean War.86
A number of the other former members of the ‘twenty-one’ also returned to the United States, or moved elsewhere – one headed to Poland, another to Czechoslovakia, a third to Belgium – in search of a better life.87 Several of the men suffered mental health problems, further evidence not just of their own personal fragilities, but also of wider psychological disturbances faced by so many returnees from combat and custody in the Korean conflict, as later in Vietnam. Their collective plight and vulnerability to PTSD has been canvassed in more recent psychiatric literature.88 Corporal Lowell Skinner, for instance, who, like the others, had temporarily made a life in China, marrying and finding work, grew disillusioned. He returned to the United States in 1963; however, he had grown dependent on alcohol and spent months in a psychiatric hospital.
Another of those who returned (a good deal earlier than Adams) was Samuel David Hawkins. He was usually known by his middle name. David was the youngest of the group who had gone to China, a deprived, unhappy, white teenage boy from Oklahoma, who had willingly joined the army as soon as he could. After his release from the POW camp and his decision about his future, he lived in various parts of the People’s Republic, worked as a lorry driver and married a Russian woman, Tanya, he had met in Beijing. But after four years in the communist world, he changed his mind about the life he was leading; he found himself once again restless and dissatisfied; oppressed, he said later, by the lack of individual freedom he felt under Chinese communism. His wife would follow him back to the United States.89
Hawkins’ troubles were different, but no less enduring than that of some other men in the group. His case serves here to suggest how ex-prisoners such as he were far from just passively ‘brainwashed’; they made their choices, albeit with limited knowledge of what they were choosing; and then, caught between two worlds, they grappled with the multiple labels that they were offered or had hurled at them – comrade, freedom fighter, turncoat, traitor, brainwashed victims or even, as in Hawkins’ case, later, exemplars of Stockholm Syndrome and PTSD.
I had the chance to talk to Hawkins late in his life, and he left a powerful impression. I had been put in touch with him in 2014, when he was living in California. Knowing I was a psychoanalyst as well as a historian, Hawkins addressed me throughout our long-distance conversations as ‘Dr Dan’. He joked to me, and my research group, about his continuing need for psychological treatment. He was feisty and witty, quick to spot when we were not following the twists and turns of his story precisely enough regarding his time in Korea, China or back in the United States.90 Across these interviews, we learned how, for Hawkins, the army provided a welcome escape from a difficult childhood: an absent father (who subsequently died in a fire, while David was a POW), a disciplinarian matriarch, not to mention the shrill sermons he had to hear in a ‘fire and brimstone’ church – a life of loneliness and considerable bleakness. He was delighted, he told us, to join up and say goodbye to that past, and then, again willing to give it a go, to sign on for a new life in China.91
An accomplished storyteller, David Hawkins also spoke grippingly about the experience of re-education in which he had been inadvertently caught up. He was familiar with the experience of being interviewed as a POW by officials on both sides and, after his return from this self-imposed exile in China, by journalists, keen to pin a label on him – although he did not hear much of that other name for this Maoist re-education, he said, until his arrival in the United States, when he was asked if he had been brainwashed.
On occasions, his interviewers had functioned more like interrogators, as when he appeared on US television on the popular show The Mike Wallace Interview, shortly after his return from China in 1957.92 Wallace, a smooth broadcaster, was scathing, demanding that the former soldier account for himself as either a turncoat or a brainwashed person, or both. Asked by Wallace about foreign affairs and what stance the United States should now most appropriately take regarding Mao’s China, Hawkins calmly suggested diplomatic relations should be restored, given that this was a rising world power with hundreds of millions of citizens.
But, Wallace bluntly asked Hawkins, how do we know if someone like you may have been brainwashed? The ex-soldier replied equally coolly ‘you wouldn’t know’ – hardly a way to reassure his fellow Americans that he hadn’t been brainwashed! Hawkins seemed capable enough of managing the ordeal of that TV cross-examination. He remained rather thoughtful and appeared relatively poised, even when it was put to him that the twenty-one men may really have chosen China to escape justice, having committed certain unspecified crimes in the camps against other Americans. Hawkins again quietly rejected this explanation as false. He was not to be so easily browbeaten. (Mike Wallace meanwhile smoked his way encouragingly through the programme, which was sponsored by a tobacco firm. So as they discussed these dangerous foreign assaults on the mind, the show also sought to influence its watching consumers. But that is to anticipate our discussion regarding the ‘hidden persuaders’, in Part 5.)
Hawkins, like Adams, found his personal story printed in the press, and in books such as Pasley’s 21 Stayed. What struck me, talking to this man so many decades later, was his painful feeling of injury, and his enduring sense of injustice about the dishonourable discharge he received from the US army. He battled over many years to clear his name, restore his rights and secure a decent army pension. Other labels emerged later, he explained to us, which he seemed more inclined to embrace than ‘brainwashed’. These included, as noted, Stockholm Syndrome and PTSD, a diagnosis suggested to him by a helpful therapist. With hindsight, he took the view that ‘the choice that I had made to go to China was not really a free choice at all’, as though inching his way back to the conditioning, thought-reform or brainwashing diagnosis that he had earlier eschewed.93
Hawkins’ tone may have been light at points in our conversations, but the content of what he said about his Korean War captivity and subsequent personal difficulties was not. He still recalled vividly his arrest in 1950 by the enemy forces and what he subsequently endured. He recounted that he was about one day’s journey from the Yalu River in late November that first year of the war, driving an army truck on the main supply route south. The Chinese blocked one of the main mountain passes, and before he knew it an explosive went off and he found himself lying at the bottom of a dry creek bed. Unable to move normally and realising he had blood on his uniform, he then ‘blundered into a Chinese patrol and was taken prisoner’.94 He told us, almost performed to us in the very drama of his spoken delivery, the intense feelings he had about those key points of transition in his life; from freedom to captivity, from life to near-death, from relative comfort to intense hardship; from the problem of his own survival to the horror of all those other casualties. He could not escape from those memories of dead men who did not make it through the war at all, unlike himself, a long-term survivor. He spoke, for example, of his own awful experience of huddling against a fellow soldier for warmth in the night, only to find upon waking that the man next to him was dead.
Clearly each personal resolution to go to China at the end of hostilities was not as cut and dried, nor monocausal, as some pundits suggested. Hawkins insisted to us that the decision he made in 1953 was neither simply coerced, nor entirely premeditated, and certainly not a reflection of some settled ideological view. His opinions changed with time. His experiences in childhood, in the army, in war, in the camp, in China and then back in his homeland had complex origins and multiple subsequent impacts on him. The decision, he added, to choose China, at the very moment of his release from detention, also owed a good deal to impulse and irritation. He was positively annoyed, he explained, that US officials had arrogantly presumed he would inevitably head back home during that prisoner-swap operation.
Re-education or thought-reform procedures are not equivalent to a uniform factory-production line, churning out products. We should be wary of assuming that those on the receiving end of a skilled re-educative or for that matter brainwashing process are reduced to identikit hollowed-out persons all now entirely the same, as is sometimes presumed, for instance, in depictions of a homogenous re-educated population in North Korea.
There are no will-less homogenous masses of people in any societies, nor in cults or movements, in fact; we are each vulnerable, suggestible and destructible, and can bear only so much; but we are always far more than mere products, never just automata, however compliant, alienated and dissociated or ‘mass-like’ our actions and thoughts may sometimes become.
All the evidence I’ve seen on such matters suggests that the captive victim, the potentially brainwashable subject, does not become someone else entirely, never a mere machine-like tool or robot in the manner presented in some reportage and melodramas. Lifton was right to personalise his brainwashing study; to approach it via individual cases, each sharing certain features, but each one also a story unto itself. The historian Monica Kim has more recently provided rich evidence of the lived experiences of the imprisoned men on the other side in the Korean War, of their ordeals of captivity and interrogation, and of the guiding assumptions made about them by their interrogators.95 People, brainwashed or otherwise, are never truly alike, even if, admittedly, mechanisms of traumatisation and conversion are now well studied by researchers: the sense of entrapment, the induced state of helplessness, the shocks to the body and mind, the removal of other support or explanatory systems, the insertion in the captor’s own explanatory grid, the gradual offer of some new saviour, and so on.
Follow that thought experiment further, for a moment, if you are inclined to treat brainwashing simply as some assured science on one side, or scare story on the other, an antiquarian piece of history best confined to the Cold War past. Imagine yourself, in the most extreme situations now, abducted, then trapped in a grim, unknown, deliberately disorientating place; picture yourself terrified, deprived of care or ordinary sensations, locked up in a site (maybe even in a small box), and then, worse, invited to harm another thereby to save yourself or to avoid the torture of a loved one in another room.
How long might you expect to hold out or on to your former sense of identity? If you were still ‘yourself’, it would not presumably be quite the self you knew beforehand. It is hard to tell in advance, no doubt, whatever your history, faith, training or character, how you might change, under the most extreme duress, and to know where the breaking point might lie.
To acknowledge that our minds are indeed breakable is not to deny that the notion of brainwashing is freighted with a great deal of ideological baggage. Nonetheless, those old concerns – or sometimes dramatised visions – of a process designed deliberately to crush and remake people are still surely salient: they invite consideration of what can be done malevolently to create despair, unbearable anxiety and deepest dread, and perhaps thereafter to raise our awareness of how a person may be drawn into the most twisted and perverse ‘love’. Alternatively, would-be re-educators can start with a child, get straight to work early, train or reshape a subject from infancy. An old and famous adage of the Jesuits was ‘give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man’.
Early interventions can change us profoundly, needless to say; and, at worst, be used to break and remake the nascent personality. Work on infants may indeed prove the most far-reaching and for some surely the most permanently affecting, as one imagines in seeing those terrifying images beamed to the world of child soldiers drilled for service to Islamic State and other militias. To imagine the therapeutic recovery programme required after all that has occurred is surely daunting, especially when the young victims have been made into perpetrators, required to kill and torture others.
Consider that same question in another setting and note what happened to a boy called Okello Moses Rubangangeyo, who grew up in Gulu, northern Uganda, in the 1980s. When he was seven, in 1987, a marauding and crusading movement, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), gained strength in that part of Africa. The LRA combined elements of Christianity, local beliefs about spirit possession, charismatic authority, a substantial military organisation and the most sadistic rites of passage imaginable.
Rubangangeyo had every reason to be terrified of Joseph Kony, leader of this movement. Kony directed a force that had waged war against the central government in Uganda and, without mercy, upon the local population. When he was sixteen, in 1996, Rubangangeyo was awakened in his dormitory at school one night and led away, along with other youngsters, by men from that force. He and the others were taunted, tortured, trained and turned into participants: those others, that is to say, who survived the ordeal at all. There was no third way, he later explained: either the abductees learned to do as required by the LRA, or they died. Eventually, Rubangangeyo made his escape and began to refashion his life: in 2014, he met and started to recount his story to a journalist, Adriana Carranca, who subsequently published an account in Granta magazine.
Rubangangeyo described to her how he and dozens of others were seized in the night, viciously clubbed, while the rebels who had taken them prisoner mocked and jeered. They had to endure the pain without tears, for crying, they learned, could cost them their lives. ‘They put you at gunpoint, and you are not allowed to make any sound,’ he said. ‘The first twenty strikes you believe you won’t survive the pain. But then you stop feeling it.’ That was precisely one of the purposes: rendering the victim into a condition of numbness. You either died or survived; the aim was that – numbly – you functioned thereafter and questioned nothing. This strategy, he later believed, after his escape, was systematically pursued to desensitise, depersonalise and ‘transition you to the military’, as he put it, i.e. to the LRA.96
Such abductees were sometimes required to be the executioners of their own family and former neighbours. Rubangangeyo himself, on pain of death, was made to use a small axe to cut off a man’s legs. The man before him, in custody, had broken some LRA ‘rule’ by riding a bicycle. ‘I was forced to … I was forced to do it,’ he told Carranca with shame, while ‘avoiding eye contact’. He spoke to her of his regret that the axe given to him had not been bigger, thereby allowing him to amputate those limbs with fewer blows. Carranca reported her own extreme mixed emotions as she recorded his horrendous life story; she recoiled from the man who was talking to her, even as she sympathised with the devastated boy.
Rubangangeyo was taken by the LRA to South Sudan some months after his abduction. There, Kony appeared, a man in a light-brown suit, a leader who spoke softly, and declared to the abductees that the LRA had liberated them from the African dictators. He anointed these young people ‘the new Acholi’, held a Bible, and quoted Matthew 5:30: ‘And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell,’ so he declared.
Rubangangeyo recalled that Kony seemed a ‘very gentle man’, even as he wielded absolute power over them. Rubangangeyo also remembered the message Kony offered: ‘We are going to kill all the stupid [people] in Uganda … We are uniting our brothers and sisters.’ ‘Have we abducted anyone among you here?’ the leader asked the crowd. ‘No, no, no sir!’ the terrified boys and girls responded.
Rubangangeyo later told Carranca how they were pretending, but eventually he also suggested – once they were fully habituated to all this, once they had been ‘baptised’ anew – that they also grew increasingly ‘brainwashed’, no longer sure what was good and bad, who was wrong and who was right:
their naked chests, backs and arms marked with a cross, using a mixture of white clay and water. They were anointed with ‘holy oil’ made of Areca palm nuts, poured on their forehead and parts of their body. During the ceremony they were asked to confess their sins. If they refused, they were told they would die soon. If they confessed, they’d become invisible to ‘enemies’ and no bullets would ever reach them. ‘They were indoctrinating us, brainwashing our minds!’ Moses said. ‘You start thinking that maybe the polygamy, the killings or even chopping … might be connected to something spiritual.’
Rubangangeyo eventually seized his chance, as the LRA disintegrated, to find a way back to Gulu, and to gain not only physical but also increasingly some psychological distance from all that had happened: he began to assemble these elements of his story, not merely to live with them, mute inside him, while he sat, silent and numbed. Carranca reports his impressive rehabilitation and how he’d become a caring father. All the same, I wonder what legacies he and other child and teenage soldiers were left with; and what a full recovery from that kind of history might mean, how far it is feasible and faceable. That too must depend on many things.
Here my point is simply that such a story might invite doubt about your or my mental capacities, any more than his, in such adversity to resist or to avoid brainwashing: who can be sure how long they would remain non-compliant or actively defiant, willing instantly to die, or to live and to act on such terms? Who would not lose their mind, even if they preserved their life in the process? A sense of selfhood is never truly iron-clad; self-perception, self-awareness and resilience are, I assume, only ever partial at best.
Perhaps certain people may be better than others, even at surviving rape, or the requirement to rape, mutilation, or the requirement to mutilate, torture, or the act of torturing, with some vestiges of hope, some spark of rebellion, some enduring sense of human goodness, some capacity to go on willing their own escape and eventual rehabilitation. It may be possible with the right kinds of help and resources for survivors to do remarkable psychological work over time; we have common expressions, after all, that reflect that achievement, or at least that hope, such as ‘come to terms’, ‘move on’, ‘work through’ or ‘find closure’. But clinicians who work in this field also point out ways that later traumas may compound earlier traumas, leaving complex unconscious legacies in mind and body that are never fully ‘recovered from’ or ‘cured’. The ability to cope with the shame and the guilt, to resist such manipulation, and subsequently to grieve, or even to think for any length of time about the tumble of terrifying thoughts that can come to mind unbidden, is surely variable, as well as limited, in all of us. In the religious belief systems of some African societies, such suffering and horror might be conceived of as a state of possession by spirits, in a manner quite different to forms of explanation assumed in, say, Western psychoanalytic accounts of guilt, trauma or depression. Different societies have all kinds of rites for helping people tell their stories, recover their health, or go through processes of mourning or reintegration. But sometimes a community, just like a person, can also break down entirely, leaving the sufferer entirely adrift. Mourning what we have done or what we have lost, and thinking about our feelings and our experiences, are precious and precarious achievements, not guaranteed mental states. Minds as well as bodies can certainly break, whatever our culture and society, or faith, our explanatory framework or our inner resources.
Human ingenuity at breaking captive people down through mental and physical torture, cruel inductions, the manipulations of guilt, shame, panic and states of abjection, knows no real limits. Torture, we know, has been widely used by liberal democratic states as well as dictatorships since 1945, often as systematic policy too, even without necessarily declaring states of emergency as formal cover. Waterboarding, for example, which has the advantage of leaving no obvious sign on the body, caused an outcry in the ‘War on Terror’; this method of torture has a long history, and in fact has been widely used by Western and other powers in many other settings.97
It would be comforting if one could think of the mass projects of psychic and social destruction sketched out here as just occasional and sporadic fringe occurrences, and entirely outside the purview of the modern functioning nation state, or as the occasional remnants and artefacts of some other lost time, existing in war zones, or in those places we call failed states. Today, just as in the most terrible earlier decades of the twentieth century, when people were also re-educated inside camps, the sheer scale of what is being done to process people through closed re-education facilities and systems is hard to grasp. Perhaps the most chilling state-orchestrated example of all is the fate of the Uighurs, so we need to return at this point to contemporary China. For in recent years a stream of reports and campaigns (spearheaded by organisations such as Amnesty International) has highlighted the plight of this ethnic minority in Xinjiang, in the north-west.98 The Uighur re-education project dwarfs all other such current global initiatives; it has become, in fact, the largest internment policy for an ethnic-political minority since the Second World War. The policy apparently aims at the systematic transformation of the prisoners’ minds and their social behaviour.
New light was cast on this programme in 2019, when a cache of secret documents was leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an unspecified individual or group. This material, dating from two years earlier, included a nine-page memo from Zhu Hailun, who was then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang’s Communist Party and the region’s top security official. It instructed the directors of detention facilities to ensure no escapes; to punish all ‘behavioural violations’; to promote repentance and confession; and to ‘encourage students to truly transform’, whatever that may have meant. Zhu Hailun made clear that inside these facilities, lives should be regulated, surveyed, reviewed and timetabled daily in every respect. Repentance and confession, his memorandum made plain, were a key requirement in the process: it was crucial that the detained men and women should come to ‘understand deeply the illegal, criminal and dangerous nature of their past behaviour’.99
When the Chinese ambassador to London made an appearance on the BBC shortly after these revelations became public, he dismissed these charges of brainwashing out of hand: ‘fake news’, he said. These measures provided by the Chinese state were about voluntary vocational training, lifting the Uighurs up, furnishing the people with opportunities, promoting their interests and needs.100 Beijing claimed that its policy was a proportionate and balanced response to Islamic extremism and the rise of al-Qaeda, which had affected the Uighur population so adversely.
All societies, the ambassador pointed out, are entitled to defend themselves with every appropriate means. But what is appropriate? Some Chinese officials have claimed that the data leak, so widely reported in the West, was an orchestrated foreign ‘smear’. Others have insisted the whole point of the programme in these ‘voluntary’ facilities is, precisely, to un-brainwash the Uighurs, to ensure they are not radicalised by Islamic fundamentalism. Rather than focusing on the scale of arrests, they urged journalists to report the very opposite: the supposed flood of recent releases of these inmates, aka students, from custody.101 (One indication of the Chinese sensitivity to such foreign accusations: when in December 2019 the German footballer Mesut Özil, a practising Muslim of Turkish descent and at that time an Arsenal player, had the temerity to protest publicly against the treatment of the Uighurs, Chinese state television pulled its live coverage of that weekend’s Arsenal game from the nation’s screens.)102
Yet, whatever officialdom in China declares, many people are not persuaded by these sanguine accounts of what has so recently been happening to the Uighurs. Former inmates tell different stories to the one presented by the Chinese government. Zharqynbek Otan, for example, who was held in one of these facilities for seven months after his arrest in January 2017, and who subsequently fled the country, claimed the goal of this mass detention was to destroy prior bonds and impose in the minds of all inmates a form of ultra-loyalty, in fact ‘to brainwash you’, he said, ‘so you forget your roots and everything about Islam and ethnic identity’.103
In some of the cases reported in this chapter, the aim of incarceration is to produce confession and then dispense with the person altogether. In others, to create inviolable bonds, produce foot soldiers, or even unquestioning killers and torturers. In instances such as the Uighur camps, the goal is to neutralise opposition and engender the wholesale political re-education of that minority population, to subdue and ultimately manage the future of ‘troublesome’ people inside a larger state. Reports of compulsory sterilisation of Uighurs have accompanied others of such psychic and physical subjugation. These policies are conducted in the name of the defence of society, i.e. for the greater protection of the majority. Indeed, brainwashing, as with the Uighurs, is perhaps always most likely to be conducted in the dubious name of un-brainwashing and some greater enlightenment.
The central role of camps in the twentieth century has been underlined in many important works of philosophy, social theory, reportage, film, memoir and history. Camps have served to destroy people in their millions, but also to sequestrate, punish and transform. The scale of forced conversion in totalitarian societies gives us pause for thought regarding those less obvious, more morally uncertain examples, where supposedly anti-brainwashing procedures occur, with people in custody, for instance, in the name of decriminalisation, deradicalisation or anti-terrorist measures, in liberal, democratic societies. Some advocates of ‘de-programming’ otherwise impervious fanatical cult members here in the West also assume the best way to go about the task is to mimic in reverse the approach of the original brainwashers. One tactic is to undertake a violent, cathartic and bullying experience to draw the victim out of their former delusional system, as though freedom must be recovered, in extremis, through some form of counter-tyranny.
There are other ways to look at the process of re-education under Chinese communism. In the 1930s, Mao had already signalled his intent: to take the ‘lumpenproletariat’, the so-called dregs of society – vagrants, prostitutes, petty criminals, hoodlums, etc. – and enlighten and recast them as part of the revolutionary struggle. If some landlords and counter-revolutionary spies were to be eradicated, others, the downtrodden underclasses, previously seen as incorrigible or hopeless (the old ‘dangerous classes’ so often also envisioned in Europe during the nineteenth century), were now to be redeemed by Mao as comrades, via new forms of labour camps and classrooms. This was to be a mass project in China to make the wretched of the earth understand their past exploitation and victimhood, and to grasp their own shining future destiny inside a permanent form of revolution. The theory and practice of thought reform was thus, from Mao’s point of view, about taking the unenlightened person, including the desperate, exploited outcasts, and reintegrating them with the peasants and workers to produce a productive, determined, cheerful and wholeheartedly united People.104
Obviously, that was not how Western critics of brainwashing saw it; re-education and thought control were now precisely the same thing, according to anti-communist US commentators such as Edgar Schein. ‘Brainwashing’, he wrote in a 1960 report, published by the Center for International Studies at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts (here summing up the previous decade’s starkest warnings), is ‘a colloquial term which has been used in reference to the systematic efforts by the Chinese communists (and by implication the Soviets) to persuade non-believers to accept communist allegiance, commands and/or doctrines by coercive means’.105
Maoist re-education, according to Western liberals, was a gross perversion of an idea that was previously compatible with liberal democracy; the communists had taken a benign idea and made it something else entirely. The efforts of the Allies, after the occupation of Germany, to re-educate Germans, weed out Nazis from influential positions and implant liberal democracy, had now been trumped as well as twisted, they said. Re-education in the East was the anti thesis of such liberal ideas, they complained; it was now a project to destroy critical thinking and counter any pluralism. Re-education was the pathway to some singular vision of communist truth.
As Lifton pointed out, Maoist mass re-education in China was indeed at odds with individualistic values and modes of thought. Not everyone in the West, however, shared that sense of revulsion about such Chinese ambitions to transform the ‘mass’ in society and harmonise the beliefs of the population with the will of the Party: it all depended on your political viewpoint. Mao, after all, had many admirers and defenders in the West too, from the 1930s onwards. Decades after achieving power, as Julia Lovell has shown in an illuminating, wide-ranging history, Maoism still appealed to large numbers of people outside China. Indeed, it was adopted, and partially refashioned, by a remarkable array of groups and movements around the globe.106 Maoism meant many things to people, according to time and place. It was a contradictory, variegated and evolving ideology, discourse and style of life. Mao had said many things at different stages. But to those in the 1950s who were hostile to communism and alert to brainwashing, the project of re-education that was so central to Maoism was certainly deeply ominous and deplorable, even diabolical: for the practitioners it was a means of dictating the truth, sowing terror, and producing a form of compliance, an idealisation of leader-ship and a total obedience to the Party, as the price of survival.
For many of those who wrote of such matters in the post-war United States, the modern totalitarian state was now corralling ever more people in a zero-sum game. The story was national, regional and global, the fear of an operation that would never stop at any borders; brainwashing not only through coercion and terror, but also through seduction, temptation and desire, as in the case of those ‘twenty-one’: a psychology designed to instil mass conviction, a culture that inculcated the most fervent enthusiasm. It was more akin perhaps to a revivalist religious meeting, in a territory where all the exit doors are nailed permanently shut; it was also an ideology, some people feared, that could develop underground in the so-called Free World.
In prisons, villages and towns across China, a new and orchestrated form of group psychology was emerging, they warned, built around a mode of extremely coercive storytelling, in which there is always the same basic plot, a story in which ‘I’ takes its place in the homogenous and clamorous ‘we’. In fact, as recent scholars have shown, Chinese communism may operate through severe crackdowns and repression, but also through a more complex process for registering public attitudes and recrafting policy to meet dissatisfactions. It is not just about a top-down management style in which hundreds of millions of people adapt to the dictate of the Party. But be that as it may, there were also many other stories of brainwashing emerging elsewhere in the world, including accounts of hidden persuasion and moral compromise; tales with more nuance, illustrations of a less polarised kind; reports from writers behind the Iron Curtain; accounts that complicate the history depicted thus far, and which cast a very different, but no less troubling, light on the discussion. These were visions of the captive mind in all its gradations; an array of new metaphors, parables and images of psychic life under pressure that emerged post-war, and which enriched the familiar Orwellian nightmare of total bondage and mental enslavement.