NOTES

Where possible a freely accessible URL is provided below for newspaper and other material. All were accessible, online, when the book went to press in early 2022.

Preface

1.In the 1970s and 80s, the politics of news was a prominent subject of academic research. Much was written about implicit biases, with critics on the Left highlighting small ‘c’ conservative assumptions prevalent on the BBC. See, for instance, analyses by the Glasgow Media Group, resulting in publications such as Bad News (1976), More Bad News (1980) and Really Bad News (1982). Political coverage during the miners’ strike of 1984 was also much criticised. More recently, right-wing critics as well as government ministers have complained of the BBC’s liberal, or left-leaning, journalism, threaten to break up the corporation and advocate its complete commercialisation in a global marketplace. See, for example, Rowena Mason, ‘Dominic Cummings thinktank called for “end of BBC in current form”’, Guardian, 21 January 2020, www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/21/dominic-cummings-thinktank-called-for-end-of-bbc-in-current-form. Cf. Adam Forrest, ‘Government accused of attacking BBC to stop PM becoming “dead meat” as licence fee frozen’, Independent, 17 January 2022, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bbc-licence-fee-dorries-boris-b1994782.html.

2.George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980).

3.Bess Levin, ‘White House: We’re Going to Have to Let Some People Die So the Stock Market Can Live’, Vanity Fair, 23 March 2020, www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/donald-trump-coronavirus-deaths-vs-economy. Cf. ‘President Trump has shown a unique obsession with the financial markets, tweeting that high stock prices proved he was making America great again.’ Ruchir Sharma, ‘Trump’s Dangerous Obsession With the Markets’, The New York Times, 9 April 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/opinion/trump-stock-market-results.html. Also, Heather Boushey, ‘The stock market is detached from economic reality. A reckoning is coming’, Washington Post, 9 September 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/stock-market-unemployment-disconnect/2020/09/09/087374ca-f306-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html.

4.John Steiner, Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organizations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients (Hove, 1993); and idem, Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat (Abingdon, 2011).

5.Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, 2000).

6.Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (London, 2018).

7.Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London, 2017), p. 13.

8.Raworth suggests that rather than be fixated on charts about growth, we need to hold in mind an image of a doughnut, i.e. its two rings – the one indicating the resources required for human flourishing, the other the limitations of what the planet can sustain. Policy makers need to steer the economy within them.

9.Sigmund Freud, ‘Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis)’, 1915, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1953), vol 12, pp. 157–71.

Part 1: Brainwashing

1.Prior to Hunter’s account, a French journalist, Robert Guillain, had written an article entitled ‘China Under the Red Flag’ in the Manchester Guardian on 3 January 1950 about Maoist re-education, or ‘what Chinese papers graphically term “washing one’s brains”’. For the origins of the term, see Marcia Holmes, ‘Edward Hunter and the origins of “brainwashing”’, 26 May 2017, www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/hunter-origins-of-brainwashing/. See also Charlie Williams, ‘Battles for the Mind: Brainwashing, Altered States and the Politics of the Nervous System (1945–1970)’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2018); Timothy Melley, ‘Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War’, Grey Room, 45 (2011), 19–41, p. 28.

2.Edward Hunter, ‘“Brain-Washing” Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of the Communist Party’, Miami News, 24 September 1950.

3.Gordon Shepherd, Creating Modern Neuroscience: The Revolutionary 1950s (Oxford, 2010); Andreas Killen, The Cold War Brain (New York, forthcoming), and online lecture, www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/a-cultural-history-of-the-brain-in-the-1950s/.

4.Edward Hunter, Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It [1956] (Toronto, 2012). See also William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-washing (London, 1957).

5.Reports in 1966 and after suggested how Mao was calculatedly unleashing collective ‘madness’, and ‘brainwashing’ hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of Red Guards. See, for instance, this account of the Cultural Revolution which appeared in the Taiwanese media: ‘Red Guards – A Calculated Madness’, Taiwan News, 1 October 1966, taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=4&post=6958.

6.Hunter, Brainwashing, p. 3.

7.Ibid.

8.Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 1986); Paul Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials (Basingstoke, 2004).

9.Hunter, Brainwashing, p. 3.

10. Ibid., p. 4.

11. Ibid., p. 16.

12. The word did not necessarily translate directly into the vernacular of other languages; so in French, for example, in the 1950s and 60s, other ways existed to convey the basic idea; furthermore, the new term if used at all was sometimes given in English rather than presented as ‘lavage de cerveau’.

13. For a set of visual essays by school students, reflecting on brainwashing, see the ‘Hidden Persuaders’ website, www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/outreach/. For the context, Daniel Pick, Mary-Clare Hallsworth and Sarah Marks, ‘Hidden Persuaders on Film: Exploring Young People’s Lived Experience Through Visual Essays’, Research for All, 5:2 (2021), 382–99, www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/RFA.05.2.13.

14. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, 2016); and idem, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (London, 2019).

15. ‘The Affair of the Brains’ appeared in a popular US publication, Astounding Stories, in 1932. It was written by H. G. Bates, a sci fi writer and editor, who had various noms de plume, including Anthony Gilmore. The story was also included in Space Hawk: The Greatest of Interplanetary Adventurers (New York, 1952).

16. Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943) can be located on YouTube, as can Stranger’s Voice (1949), www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzScYtmg0yY. For the context, Ülo Pikkov, ‘On the Topics and Style of Soviet Animated Films’, Baltic Screen Media Review, 4 (2016), 16–37, content.sciendo.com/view/journals/bsmr/4/1/article-p16.xml.

17. Ben Child, ‘Fox host Lou Dobbs slams Arrietty and The Lorax for “liberal agenda”’, Guardian, 23 February 2012, www.theguardian.com/film/2012/feb/23/fox-lou-dobbs-lorax-liberal-agenda.

18. ‘Living My Life – Lyrics’, genius.com, genius.com/Grace-jones-living-my-life-lyrics.

19. Jones remarked in an interview, ‘there were ways of escaping the brainwashing but not for long’. Quoted in Grace Jones and Paul Morley, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (New York, 2015), p. 38.

20. Clive Stafford Smith, ‘Welcome to “the disco”’, Guardian, 19 June 2008, www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo. Cf. Morag Josephine Grant and Anna Papaeti, ‘Introduction’, The World of Music, special issue on Music and Torture, 2:1 (2013), 5–7.

21. In the case of James Vance vs. Judas Priest (1990), the band were accused of including subliminal messages in their 1978 cover of the song, ‘Better by You, Better than Me’. It was alleged to have inspired teenagers James Vance and Ray Belknap to attempt suicide in December 1985. (The latter succeeded, while the former was left permanently disfigured and died three years later.) The judge concluded that the band could not be held responsible. For the context and outcome, see Dominic Streatfeild, Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control (London, 2007), pp. 178–218, and Kory Grow, ‘Judas Priest’s Subliminal Message Trial: Rob Halford Looks Back’, Rolling Stone, 24 August 2015, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-priests-subliminal-message-trial-rob-halford-looks-back-57552/. See also James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (Abingdon, 2012).

22. Randall Stephens, The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘N’ Roll (Cambridge, MA, 2018), especially the Introduction and Chapter 3. See also Ed Vulliamy, ‘For young Soviets, the Beatles were a first, mutinous rip in the iron curtain’, Observer, 20 April 2013, www.theguardian.com/music/2013/apr/20/beatles-soviet-union-first-rip-iron-curtain; and Lily Ford’s 2021 short film, The Stuff that Screams are Made of, www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/documentaries/three-films-about-mass-influence-by-lily-ford.

23. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999).

24. Josh Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968–1978 (Carbondale, 2003), p. 60.

25. Olivia Waxman, ‘The Story Behind That Famous Photograph of Elvis and Richard Nixon’, Time, 15 August 2017, time.com/4894301/elvis-president-nixon-photo/. For a transcript of the letter, see www.archives.gov/exhibits/nixon-met-elvis/assets/doc_1.1_transcript.html.

26. Martin Chulov, ‘My son, Osama: the al-Qaida leader’s mother speaks for the first time’, Guardian, 3 August 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/03/osama-bin-laden-mother-speaks-out-family-interview. This interview, Chulov noted, had been sanctioned by the Saudi authorities. ‘The people at university changed him,’ Osama’s mother said to him; her son ‘was a very good child until he met some people who pretty much brainwashed him … You can call it a cult. They got money for their cause. I would always tell him to stay away from them, and he would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much.’

27. Some columnists urged a compassionate response be shown by the UK authorities to Begum’s situation; others approved, even celebrated the government’s refusal to allow her ever to return to the UK. See, for instance, Allison Pearson, ‘Sorry my heartless little jihadi bride, but you made your bed and now you can lie in it’, Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2019, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/14/sorry-heartless-little-jihadi-bride-made-bed-now-can-lie/.

28. It appeared that the relevant authorities in Bangladesh had not been consulted before some British officials assured the world that she could claim citizenship there, although more likely she would have faced prosecution, and perhaps even, it was said, the death penalty, ‘Shamima Begum: IS bride “would face death penalty in Bangladesh”’, BBC News, 3 May 2019, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48154781.

29. Anthony Lloyd, ‘Shamima Begum: I was brainwashed. I knew nothing’, The Times, 1 April 2019, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/isis-bride-shamima-begum-i-regret-everything-please-let-me-start-my-life-again-in-britain-9g0tn08vn.

30. petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/259723.

31. See, for instance, Al Jazeera English, ‘Dominic Ongwen ICC trial: Child victim or war criminal?’, YouTube, 18 September 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rh08MNlBXo&vl=en. Ongwen was found guilty by the ICC of crimes against humanity and war crimes in February 2021; see www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=pr1564.

32. On Jonestown, see Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid: A Survivor Remembers Jim Jones’, Atlantic, 18 November 2011, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/drinking-the-kool-aid-a-survivor-remembers-jim-jones/248723/. The ‘Unabomber’, as Ted Kaczynski was known in the press, had undergone various psychological experiments from around 1959, while a student at Harvard. The experiments were designed by psychologists to explore, among other things, resistance to enemy interrogation. He and others were subjected to ‘vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive’ interrogations, during which members of the research team attacked the student-subjects’ beliefs, as gleaned from their essays. Kaczynski later described these experiences as traumatic, and quite the worst of his life. During the 1960s, he lived in a hut in remote woodland. In the late 1970s, he began to send parcel bombs through the post, continuing until 1995, when he was arrested. Alston Chase, ‘Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber’, Atlantic, June 2000, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/378239/; see also Brian Dunleavy, ‘Did Ted Kaczynski’s Transformation Into the Unabomber Start at Harvard?’, History, 25 May 2018, www.history.com/news/what-happened-to-the-unabomber-at-harvard.

There are various published investigations of Manson, the 1960s ‘family’ that formed around him at a run-down ranch, and the murders committed by ‘family’ members in Los Angeles, including of Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of the film director Roman Polanski. Public interest was recently revived after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. For a news article recalling these crimes and referring to Manson’s ‘brainwashing’ of his followers, see Jennifer King, ‘Charles Manson, the cult mastermind who brainwashed hippie youth to kill’, ABC News, 20 November 2017, www.abc.net.au/news/2017–11–20/charles-manson-mastermind-of-murderous-cult-dead/8163390.

33. Numerous speculations on this homegrown terrorist ensued, including prominently by Gore Vidal, about possible conspiracies, cover-ups, brainwashing and the supposed effect of a notorious book containing bomb-making instructions. Gore Vidal, ‘The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh’, Vanity Fair, 10 November 2008, www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/09/mcveigh200109.

34. To protect patient confidentiality, these passing examples, drawn from clinical experiences, are not individual portraits, but camouflaged, illustrative composites. The purpose here is to discuss general features, not individual cases.

35. For a critical review of such approaches, see, for instance, Stephen Mitchell, ‘The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Homosexuality: Some Technical Considerations’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 3:1 (2002), 23–59; see also Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, 2016). Cf. Naomi Richman, ‘Homosexuality, Created Bodies, and Queer Fantasies in a Nigerian Deliverance Church’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 50:2/3 (2021), 249–77.

36. Victor Tausk, ‘On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia’ [1919], Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 133:2 (1933), 519–56, pp. 521–2.

37. Ibid.

38. For instance, A. M. Kasper, ‘The Narcissistic Self in a Masochistic Character’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 46 (1965), 474–86. The author described how a patient, Mr B., ‘said I [the analyst] only wanted to brainwash him into mediocrity’. See also D. S. Jaffe, ‘The Role of Ego Modification and the Task of Structural Change in the Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 52 (1971), 375–93. This author describes how a patient tells her analyst how her mother was a ‘dangerous person who “can get to you, brainwash you, have a power over you”’. The use of the words ‘brainwash’ and ‘brainwashing’ in these psychoanalytical papers and in other examples from the 1960s and 70s can be found by using the search facility at www.pep-web.org/.

39. Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (London, 2014), p. 80. Cf. Robert Hinshelwood, Therapy or Coercion: Does Psychoanalysis Differ from Brainwashing? (London, 1997).

40. Weller Embler, ‘Metaphor in Everyday Speech’, ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 16:3 (1959), 323–42, pp. 341–2.

41. See Emma Graham-Harrison and Juliette Garside, ‘Complete Control’, Guardian Weekly, 29 November 2019, 10–14, p. 13; and the series of articles filed by these reporters in the Guardian online, for example, ‘“Allow no escapes”: leak exposes reality of China’s vast prison camp network’, 24 November 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/24/china-cables-leak-no-escapes-reality-china-uighur-prison-camp. See also Raffi Khatchadourian’s harrowing account in the New Yorker, ‘Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang’, 5 April 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/surviving-the-crackdownin-xinjiang.

42. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London, 2011).

Part 2: Breaking Point

1.news.gallup.com/poll/11887/ronald-reagan-from-peoples-perspective-gallup-poll-review.aspx.

2.Newt Gingrich lauded Reagan as a trailblazer and beacon of hope, who restored the nation, at least for a time, despite ‘three generations of brainwashing’, he said, by ‘the hard Left’. Gingrich, ‘Three Generations of Brainwashing Is Paying off for the Left’, Newsweek, 17 June 2020, www.newsweek.com/three-generations-brainwashing-paying-off-left-opinion-1511553. See also Rebecca Klar, ‘Trump says Biden has been “brainwashed”; “He’s been taken over by the radical left’”, The Hill, 9 July 2020, thehill.com/homenews/campaign/506700-trump-says-biden-has-been-brainwashed-hes-been-taken-over-by-the-radical.

3.‘Every Man Has His Breaking Point’: Reagan, Brainwashing and the Movies (2017), directed by Phil Tinline, www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/documentaries/every-man-breaking-point-reagan-brainwashing-movies.

4.Charles S. Young, ‘Missing Action: POW Films, Brainwashing and the Korean War, 1954–1968’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 18:1 (1998), 49–74. Cf. Michael Strada and Harold Tropa, Friend or Foe? Russians in American Film and Foreign Policy, 1933–1991 (Lanham, 1997), pp. 79–80. For the broader context, see David Seed, Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control: A Study of Novels and Films Since World War II (Kent, OH, 2004).

5.The film was rushed through by MGM, initially with considerable encouragement from officials in the US defence establishment. However, signals were apparently crossed at some stage about what kind of tale this would turn out to be. Whatever the military establishment may have hoped for, it was clearly not this production; see Young, ‘Missing Action’.

6.Hunter, Brainwashing, pp. 14, 86.

7.Ibid., p. 14.

8.Ibid., p. 268.

9.Ibid., p. 270.

10. In The Rack (1956), Paul Newman played a disgraced but likeable captain, Edward Hall, court-martialled for betraying fellow American soldiers in a Korean War POW camp. We are shown how the camp guards destroyed his resolve; how his identity was attacked, and his mind overwhelmed. The argument made in the film is that his fragile personality could be traced to a painful infancy and childhood, indeed a disastrous family history, with an absent mother and cold, authoritarian military father.

11. Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (Cleveland, 1956).

12. Barbed-wire disease or syndrome was named by a Swiss doctor who had looked at evidence about German POWs. See Avi Ohry and Zahava Solomon, ‘Dr Adolf Lukas Vischer (1884–1974) and “Barbed-Wire Disease”’, Journal of Medical Biography, 22:1 (2013), 16–18. For the longer history from shellshock to PTSD, see Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatry in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

13. Sargant, Battle for the Mind; Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in Communist China (Chapel Hill, 1961). This notion of brainwashing, as Lifton pointed out, came to be applied ‘to just about anything which the communists did anywhere’ (ibid., p. 3).

14. Eric Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2016). On psychiatry, for and against decolonisation, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952); and idem, Alienation and Freedom, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young (London, 2018); cf. Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago, 2021). See also Nasheed Faruqi’s film Re-reading Fanon (2021), www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/documentaries/re-reading-fanon/.

15. Rebecca Reich, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (DeKalb, 2018).

16. Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Home by Ship: Reaction Patterns of American Prisoners of War Repatriated from North Korea’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 110:10 (April 1954), 732–9. This article is contained, with additional notes, in Lifton’s archives; see Lifton Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, box 57. See also Lifton’s memoir, Witness to an Extreme Century (New York, 2011).

17. Lifton, ‘Home by Ship’, p. 736.

18. Quoted in Anthony Wohl, ‘“Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as Alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34:1 (1995), 375–411, p. 404.

19. Clara Gallini, La sonnambula meravigliosa: magnetismo e ipnotismo nell’Ottocento italiano (Rome, 1983); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 1998); Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, 2000).

20. The phrase ‘Free World’ was used frequently in the 1940s and after by US presidents, and in stirring works of cinema, to suggest a contrast with a ‘slave world’ or a ‘tyrannised world’. It featured notably in Frank Capra’s Second World War propaganda film series Why We Fight. See John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (London, 2000).

21. Paul Betts, ‘Religion, Science and Cold War Anti-Communism: The 1949 Cardinal Mindszenty Show Trial’, in Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe, edited by Betts and Stephen Smith (London, 2016), pp. 275–307 (p. 286).

22. Susan Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing (Berkeley, 2009), Chapter 4.

23. Archive footage of Vogeler’s speech, containing these phrases, can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4hmNsv1VwE&ab_channel=historycomestolife. See also Sam Licklider, ‘Robert Vogeler’, Cornell Daily Sun, 1 May 1951, cdsun.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cornell?a=d&d=CDS19510501-01.2.25.

24. Quoted in Matthew Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (Boston, MA, 2013), p. 40.

25. John Rawlings Rees et al., The Case of Rudolf Hess: a Problem in Diagnosis and Forensic Psychiatry, by the Physicians in the Services Who Have Been Concerned with Him from 1941–1946 (London, 1947), p. 88.

26. On the treatment of Hess, Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (Oxford, 2012), Chapter 8. On the use of Evipan see ibid., p. 61. On truth drugs, Alison Winter, ‘The Making of “Truth Serum”’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 79:3 (2005), 500–533. For the Korean War and interrogation practices, Monica Kim, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton, 2019). For experiments in prison design during the Spanish Civil War, Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London, 2012), p. 418; Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom, ‘“Enhanced Interrogation” in the Spanish Civil War: The Curious Case of Alfonso Laurencic’, 15 July 2016, www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/enhanced-interrogation-spanish-civil-war-curious-case-alfonso-laurencic/.

27. The subject has been copiously studied; see John Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control (London, 1979). More recently, Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Values (London, 2008). See also Scott Selisker, Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (Minneapolis, 2016); Streatfeild, Brainwash; Rebecca M. Lemov, The World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men (New York, 2005); Joel Dimsdale, Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media (New Haven, 2021). On some of the wilder intelligence-based experiments during the Cold War and after, see Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (London, 2004). On US and Canadian experiments on ‘brainwashing’, see Charlie Williams, ‘Battles for the Mind’. For the post-war context in Eastern Europe, see Mat Savelli and Sarah Marks (eds), Psychiatry in Communist Europe (London, 2015); Ana Antiü, Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the New Nazi Order (Oxford, 2016); for the abuses of ‘psy’, East and West, also see Knuth Müller and Ana Antiü’s contributions to Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, edited by M. ffytche and D. Pick (London, 2016), Chapters 11 and 12.

28. Central Intelligence Agency (hereafter CIA), Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963, nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/docs/doc01.pdf.

29. On the Cold War language (freedom, tyranny, totalitarianism) through which MK-Ultra and other related projects were defended and criticised, see Andreas Killen and Stefan Andriopoulos, ‘Editors’ Introduction’ to feature, ‘Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War’, Grey Room, 45 (2011), 7–17. On Cameron’s work and reputation, Rebecca Lemov, ‘Brainwashing’s Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron’, Grey Room, 45 (2011), 61–87. Timothy Melley suggests that what began as an orientalist propaganda fiction exploited by the CIA, in the end convinced some of the staff at the agency. See his article, ‘Brain Warfare’. Some commentators on 1950s Maoist brainwashing, such as Edgar Schein, returned in a new guise in the following decade as advisers on how to use solitary confinement, sensory deprivation and sedatives in the US prison system. See Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis, 2013), p. 87. As Guenther puts it, in Schein’s account, ‘If coercive persuasion is approached in the right way, with the proper goals, it can be good for both the individual prisoner and for society as a whole’. Ibid.

30. CIA, Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, p. 86.

31. Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York, 2006), p. 7. See also McCoy, ‘Mind Maze: The CIA’s Pursuit of Psychological Torture’, in The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, edited by Marjorie Cohn (New York, 2011), pp. 25–52 (p. 25); Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, 2012); Streatfeild, Brainwash.

32. Various think tanks, institutes, clinics and research centres were involved, including the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the Human Ecology Fund and the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Kentucky. See Melley, ‘Brain Warfare’; Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’; Williams, ‘Battles for the Mind’; Lemov, ‘Brainwashing’s Avatar’.

33. See Williams, ‘Battles for the Mind’; and idem, ‘On “Modified Human Agents”: John Lilly and the Paranoid Style in American Neuroscience’, History of the Human Sciences, 32:5 (2019), journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695119872094.

34. Quoted in Williams, ‘Battles for the Mind’, p. 97. Williams cites John Lilly, ‘Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as Reconnaissance and Intelligence Devices (Committee D, Intelligence and Reconnaissance)’, [n.d.], John Cunningham Lilly Papers (1915–2001), Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Library, Palo Alto, CA, USA, box 54, folder 17.

35. See the conference website, www.floatconference.com/. According to a UK company, Floatworks, floating is ‘scientifically proven to increase … mental and physical wellbeing’, and leaves participants ‘more happy and relaxed, with fewer aches and pains’, ‘confident of a better night’s sleep’, all within an hour. ‘The benefits of floating’, floatworks.com/.

36. Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats; David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (eds), Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation and American Counterculture (London, 2016).

37. Raffi Khatchadourian, ‘High Anxiety: LSD in the Cold War’, New Yorker, 15 December 2012, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/high-anxiety-lsd-in-the-cold-war.

38. Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China, www.documentcloud.org/documents/4334133-ISC-Full-Report-Pub-Copy.html.

39. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Bloomington, 1998); Judith Miller et al., Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (New York, 2001).

40. Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York, 1968); Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge, 2014); on the use of ‘agent orange’ in Vietnam, see Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990 (New York, 1991), pp. 325–6; for the Korean War context, see Max Hastings, The Korean War (London, 1987); Bruce Cummings, The Korean War: A History (New York, 2010).

41. ‘Dr. Mayo Calls Reds’ Torture Method Subtle’, Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1953, p. 9, www.newspapers.com/clip/22881732/the-los-angeles-times/.

42. Sam Roberts, ‘Harriet Mills, Scholar Held in “Brainwashing Prison” in China, Dies at 95’, obituary, The New York Times, 29 March 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/world/harriet-mills-scholar-held-in-brainwashing-prison-in-china-dies-at-95.html.

43. I rely for this account on Thought Reform, Chapter 7; ‘Jane Darrow’ was the pseudonym used here by Lifton to protect his source.

44. Alexandra Stein, Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems (London, 2016); see also idem, ‘Attachment Theory and Post-Cult Recovery’, Therapy Today (September 2016), 18–21; and ‘Terror and Love: A Study of Brainwashing’, Anthropology Now, 4:2 (September 2012), 32–41.

45. William Graebner, Patty’s Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America (Chicago, 2008). Stockholm Syndrome is named after a robbery in the Swedish capital (23–28 August 1973) in which several employees were held hostage in a bank vault. The victims rejected assistance from government officials, became emotionally attached to their captors and even defended them after they were freed from the six-day ordeal. The term was coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot and developed by the psychiatrist Frank Ochberg.

46. Interwar, various psychoanalysts, including Sándor Ferenczi and Anna Freud, had written about victims of various kinds of trauma, and of their potential ‘identification with the aggressor’. Bruno Bettelheim would then explore the issue autobiographically in his influential paper about his experience in a concentration camp. See ‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38 (1943), 417–52. Hannah Arendt took note of his work as she prepared The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), as did Stanley Elkins as he developed a substantial account of the psychological legacies of slavery across generations. See his Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959).

47. Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage (London, 1991), p. 294.

48. Keenan, An Evil Cradling.

49. See Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control (Oxford, 2004).

50. Note Allan Young’s controversial and pioneering study, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, 1996). See also the recent volume edited by Mark Micale and Hans Pols, Traumatic Pasts in Asia: History, Psychiatry and Trauma from the 1930s to the Present (New York, 2021). For valuable contemporary clinical and theoretical reflections on trauma, see Susan Levy and Alessandra Lemma (eds), The Perversion of Loss: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Trauma (Chichester, 2004); Joanne Stubley and Linda Young (eds), Complex Trauma: The Tavistock Model (London, 2021). In the half century after 1945, a large literature had emerged on the psychology of survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Gulag. By the 1970s PTSD diagnoses were increasingly commonplace. Symptoms include nightmares, insomnia, rage, loneliness, acute anxieties, depression, dissociation, numbness, skin conditions, gastrointestinal disorders, cognitive impairments of one kind or another, in some cases psychoses, and in many others chronic physical illnesses or general malaise. Clinicians also wrote powerfully of the transmission and diverse impacts of ‘intergenerational trauma’. See Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, ‘From Concretism to Metaphor: Thoughts on Some Theoretical and Technical Aspects of the Psychoanalytic Work with Children of Holocaust Survivors’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 39:1 (1984), 301–19. In 1945 René Spitz had also written influentially about the psychological consequences of ‘institutionalisation’ and employed another term, ‘hospitalism’. He sought to convey the devastating psychological impact of a long-stay institution upon the mental development of infants and children; see ‘Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1 (1945), 53–74.

51. The sociologist Albert D. Biderman challenged those who offered blanket descriptions of the ‘weak-willed’ POWs. See his March to Calumny: The Story of American POWs in the Korean War (New York, 1963), especially pp. 14–16.

52. William E. Mayer’s lecture, ‘Brainwashing: The Ultimate Weapon’, was delivered at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard in the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. A. W. Kramer, ‘Brainwashing: The Ultimate Weapon: William E. Mayer’, Sound Recording (2016 [4 October 1956]), deepblue.lib. umich.edu/handle/2027.42/121557. Cf. Mayer, ‘Why did Many GI Captives Cave In?’, US News and World Report, 24 February 1956, p. 56. For the context, Lewis H. Carlson, Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War POWs (New York, 2002), pp. 1–8. Eugene Kinkead described this supposed weakening of moral character in a prominent New Yorker article in October 1957, and at more length, two years later, in a book. See Kinkead, ‘The Study of Something New in History’, New Yorker, 26 October 1957; and In Every War But One (New York, 1959). Such dramatic exposés of the exceptional nature of prisoner breakdowns in Korea downplayed reports about the many military psychiatric casualties who were treated during and after the two world wars. See Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity (London, 2015), pp. 336–7.

53. Kim, The Interrogation Rooms.

54. Among POWs from the North Korean side, 75,823 chose repatriation and went back to the North, while 7,826 opted against repatriation and headed for South Korea or Taiwan; 74 chose a neutral nation such as India or Argentina. Among the Chinese POWs, 6,670 chose to repatriate; 14,342 decided not to, and 12 preferred to resettle in a neutral nation. See David Cheng Chang, The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWS in the Korean War (Stanford, 2020), p. 4; Kim, The Interrogation Rooms, pp. 288–99, 357; Hastings, The Korean War, p. 406. Despite earlier signals to the contrary, none of these POWs were offered the option of direct transit to the United States. However, some would make the passage later, their journey facilitated by 1965 US legislation (the Hart–Celler Immigration Act) that removed de facto racial or ethnic ‘quotas’ for entrants. I am grateful to Monica Kim for advice on these POW figures, and on the wider context.

55. On this subject, Lewis Carlson writes: ‘[a]fter being exposed to extensive U.N. indoctrination sessions, at least half of the 140,000 taken prisoner insisted they did not want to return to their communist homelands’. Remembered Prisoners, p. 280, n. 4.

56. Kim, The Interrogation Rooms, pp. 288–99.

57. Ibid., p. 8.

58. Ibid., p. 271; Hastings, The Korean War, pp. 377–8.

59. Carlson, Remembered Prisoners, Chapter 9. See especially p. 205.

60. Hastings, The Korean War, p. 407.

61. I draw here on the archive footage, interviews and commentaries provided in a documentary film about the twenty-one POWs, They Chose China, directed by Shui-Bo Wang (2005). It can be found online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDTPhT8mZ9o&ab_channel=AaronShang. For the historical context, see Carlson, Remembered Prisoners; Carruthers, Cold War Captives; Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind; Charles S. Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad (Oxford, 2014).

62. See They Chose China.

63. Virginia Pasley, 21 Stayed: The Story of the American GIs Who Chose Communist China: Who They Were and Why They Stayed (New York, 1955), p. 207.

64. Quoted in ibid., p. 122.

65. An excerpt from an interview with Tenneson’s mother is included in They Chose China. See also her son’s rebuttal of her claims in Pasley, 21 Stayed, p. 153.

66. Hunter, Brainwashing, p. 11.

67. The camps were usually known by their number (‘1’, ‘2’, etc.). See Carlson, Remembered Prisoners, for an account of the conditions, and for many of the soldiers’ reminiscences of the life they endured in the various camps.

68. Quoted in Carson, Remembered Prisoners, p. 200.

69. Pasley, p. 179.

70. Ibid.

71. See They Chose China.

72. Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (London, 2019).

73. Clarence Adams, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China, edited by Della Adams and Lewis H. Carlson (Amherst, 2007), p. 39.

74. Ibid., p. 44.

75. Ibid., p. 40.

76. Ibid., p. 50.

77. Ibid., p. 51.

78. Quoted in Carlson, Remembered Prisoners, p. 208.

79. They Chose China.

80. Adams, An American Dream, pp. 64, 66.

81. Ibid., p. 66.

82. Ibid., p. 104.

83. These recollections by Adams are included in They Chose China.

84. Quoted in Carlson, Remembered Prisoners, p. 210.

85. Quoted in ibid.

86. Carlson, Remembered Prisoners, and We Were Each Other’s Prisoners: An Oral History of World War II American and German Prisoners of War (New York, 1997).

87. Carlson, Remembered Prisoners, p. 205. See also The Graybeards, 16:4 (2002), www.kwva.org/graybeards/gb_02/gb_0208_final.pdf.

88. See, for instance, B. Palmer et al., ‘Aging and Trauma: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Among Korean War Veterans’, Federal Practitioner, 36:12 (2019), 554–62.

89. ‘Ex-P.O.W. and Wife Into Seclusion at Oklahoma Home’, St. Joseph News-Press, 6 October 1957, news.google.com/newspapers?id=tCZUAAAAIBAJ&sji d=MDoNAAAAIBAJ&pg=3511,631797&dq=korea+david-hawkins&hl=en/.

90. David Hawkins: A Battle of the Mind (2017), directed by Nasheed Faruqi, www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/documentaries/david-hawkins-battle-mind.

91. Extracts from the interview can be heard in Faruqi’s film. Hawkins can also be heard talking about his experiences in a radio documentary, ‘Brainwash Culture’, that the author presented on BBC Radio 3, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03m8ltq.

92. The interview can be found in the Mike Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, hrc.contentdm.oclc. org/digital/collection/p15878coll90.

93. Personal communication by David Hawkins to the author (21 October 2014).

94. Ibid.

95. Kim, The Interrogation Rooms.

96. Adriana Carranca, ‘Absolution: A former child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army tells his story’, Granta, 18 March 2020, granta.com/absolution/.

97. Eric Weiner, ‘Waterboarding: A Tortured History’, NPR, 3 November 2007, www.npr.org/2007/11/03/15886834/waterboarding-a-tortured-history.

98. Reuters suggested in 2019 that 1 million or even 1.5 million of the approximately 8 million Uighurs inhabiting the region had been held in custody and subjected to a panoply of mind-control measures. Stephanie Nebehay, ‘1.5 million Muslims could be detained in China’s Xinjiang: Academic’, Reuters, 13 March 2019, www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-rights/15-million-muslims-could-be-detained-in-chinas-xinjiang-academic-idUSKCN1QU2MQ. See also Amnesty International UK, ‘Urgent Action update: Detained Uighur has nervous breakdown’, 2019, www.amnesty.org.uk/resources/urgent-action-update-detained-uighur-has-nervous-breakdown. Later estimations raised the figure to 2 million detained, or more.

99. Emma Graham-Harrison, ‘Secret memo on how to run China’s prison camps – annotated’, Guardian, 24 November 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2019/nov/24/china-cables-instructions-on-how-to-run-a-chinese-detention-centre-annotated-document. Cf. Graham-Harrison and Garside, ‘Complete Control’, p. 13. Emphasis added.

100. Graham-Harrison and Garside, ‘Complete Control’, p. 13.

101. Lily Kuo, ‘China claims detained Uighurs have been freed’, Guardian, 9 December 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/09/china-claims-detained-uighurs-have-been-freed.

102. ‘China state TV pulls Arsenal game after Ozil Uighur comments’, Al Jazeera, 15 December 2019, www.aljazeera.com/sports/2019/12/15/china-state-tv-pulls-arsenal-game-after-ozil-uighur-comments.

103. Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, ‘Leaked China Files Show Internment Camps Are Ruled by Secrecy and Spying’, The New York Times, 24 November 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/world/asia/leak-chinas-internmentcamps.html.

104. Aminda Smith, Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People (Lanham, 2013), p. 2.

105. Edgar Schein, Brainwashing (Cambridge, MA, 1960), p. 1. Available online at dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/83028/14769178.pdf.

106. Lovell, Maoism.

Part 3: The Captive Mind

1.Tony Judt, ‘Captive Minds, Then and Now’, New York Review, 13 July 2010, www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/07/13/captive-minds-then-and-now/.

2.See, for instance, Sladja Blazan, ‘Urban Dwellers: Women Writers Who Left Eastern Europe Never to Arrive in the United States’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 53:2 (2008), 189–208.

3.Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York, 1989).

4.Eva Hoffman, ‘Complex Histories, Contested Memories: Some Reflections on Remembering Difficult Pasts’, UC Berkeley Occasional Papers, 1 September 2000, escholarship.org/content/qt25p7c0v4/qt25p7c0v4.pdf.

5.Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), p. 474.

6.Eli Zaretsky, ‘The Big Lie’, London Review of Books, blog, 15 February 2021, www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/february/the-big-lie.

7.Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol II: 1795 to the Present (Oxford, 1981), pp. 578–9. On the scale of deportations in the Soviet-controlled zones of eastern Poland during the war, see ibid., pp. 447–8. See also Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford, 1986), pp. 3–9.

8.Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London, 2010); Working Towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw, edited by Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk (Manchester, 2003).

9.Edna Friedberg, ‘The Truth about Poland’s Role in the Holocaust’, Atlantic, 6 February 2018, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/poland-holocaust-death-camps/552455/.

10. Miłosz, ‘Elegy for N. N.’, Czeslaw Milosz: The Collected Poems (1931–1987) (London, 1988), p. 240. Cf. Sven Birkets, ‘Last Things First: Czeslaw Milosz’s Witness of Poetry’, Agni Review, 19 (1983), 113–29, p. 115.

11. The Soviet penal establishments came to stretch from sites of former Nazi concentration camps in East Germany to the vastly expanded former Tsarist dumping grounds for political ‘undesirables’ in Siberia. In 1954, around 85,000 political prisoners were still in custody in Poland, in camps closely modelled on their Soviet equivalents. Many thousands of Poles were also killed or deported much further to the east. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London, 2003), p. 41; cf. Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (London, 2016).

12. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2008).

13. For the background, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, 1992); Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Post-War France (New Haven, 1993).

14. The best-known works in the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1974).

15. Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography (Cambridge, MA, 2017), pp. 305–6. In this sketch of Milosz, I draw heavily on Franaszek’s excellent biographical study. See also Bruce Donahue, ‘Viewing the West from the East: Solzhenitsyn, Milosz, and Kundera’, Comparative Literature Studies, 20:3 (1983), 247–60. Miłosz was warmly appreciative of Camus, the author of The Outsider, The Plague and The Rebel. See Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953), p. vii. Camus, as Miłosz noted at the start of his book, had recognised that the Soviet Union had a system of concentration camps; and yet this was something many French intellectuals, including Sartre, were reluctant to dwell upon.

16. Some early readers of The Captive Mind found nothing in the book other than the anti-Stalinist message, ignoring the challenge that Miłosz posed to the West. For example, Paul Kecskemeti, a hawkish observer of communism who wrote for the RAND Corporation and various US journals, used the book as ammunition to expose the evils of communism. Having lavishly praised the writer for his ‘extraordinary’, ‘noble’, ‘frightening’ and ‘magnificent’ achievement, he commented on how it revealed the ‘projects of regimentation’ that ultimately led those on the other side of the Iron Curtain to accommodate themselves to a pack of state lies. Eventually, Kecskemeti warned, the mind is ‘transformed from within’; under one-party rule the subject lives on but is effectively dead; in those totalitarian societies, the citizen endures, but with a new ‘master’ inside their own head. Paul Kecskemeti, ‘The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz: Coercion from Within’, Commentary, 1 September 1953, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-captive-mind-by-czeslaw-milosz/.

17. Gobineau made these remarks in his study Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia (1865).

18. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, pp. 56–7.

19. I refer here to the depiction of Hamlet’s visceral revulsion in Zbigniew Herbert’s great poem ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, published in 1961, a work he dedicated to Miłosz. For the context, and discussion of the uses of Shakespeare to comment on contemporary political life in communist Poland, see Celina Wieniewska, Polish Writing Today (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 133. Regarding Shakespeare and Polish poetry, note that Miłosz translated, with Peter Dale Scott, ‘Hamletism’, a poem of 1933 by Antoni Słonimski, and included it in Postwar Polish Poetry, edited and translated by Miłosz (New York, 1965). See also Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London, 1964). Cf. Krystyna KujawiĔska Courtney, ‘Celebrating Shakespeare under the Communist Regime in Poland’, in Shakespeare in Cold War Europe: Conflict, Commemoration, Celebration, edited by Erica Sheen and Isabel Karremann (London, 2016), pp. 23–35.

20. That argument, widely made in the anti-psychiatry movement, has recently been revived in Adam Curtis’s BBC TV documentary series, billed as an ‘emotional history of the modern world’, Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021). Cf. Interview by David Runciman with Adam Curtis, Talking Politics podcast (April 2021) no. 314, www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/.

21. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, p. 5.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. vii.

24. Marcia Holmes and Daniel Pick, ‘Voices off: Stanley Milgram’s Cyranoids in Historical Context’, History of the Human Sciences, 32:5 (2019), 28–55, doi.org/10.1177/0952695119867021.

25. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10 (1929), 303–13.

26. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [1959] (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 1.

27. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics (Ithaca, 2012).

28. Jenni Marsh, ‘Chinese Dissident Ai Weiwei Dismissed Tennis Star Peng as Party “Soldier”’, Bloomberg, 6 January 2022, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-06/china-s-ai-weiwei-dismissed-tennis-star-pengas-party-soldier.

29. Lee Edwards, ‘Is China Totalitarian?’, The Heritage Foundation, 26 February 2020, www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/china-totalitarian.

30. Ma Jian, ‘Tiananmen Square 25 years on: ‘Every person in the crowd was a victim of the massacre’, Guardian, 1 June 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/01/tiananmen-square-25-years-every-person-victim-massacre.

31. James Griffith, The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Internet (London, 2019).

32. For instance, as Ross Andersen puts it in the Atlantic (‘The Panopticon is Already Here’, February 2020 issue): ‘Even in the U.S., a democracy with constitutionally enshrined human rights, Americans are struggling mightily to prevent the emergence of a public-private surveillance state. But at least America has political structures that stand some chance of resistance. In China, AI will be restrained only according to the party’s needs.’ www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/. Cf. Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond, ‘China’s Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone’, Atlantic, 2 February 2018, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/.

33. This argument is well set out by Bruce J. Dickson, in The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century (Princeton, 2021).

34. Eric Schlosser, ‘The Prison-Industrial Complex’, Atlantic, December 1998, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/304669/.

35. For an account of the medical treatment and institutionalisation of Soviet dissidents, see Reich, State of Madness.

36. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY, 1961), p. 14.

37. Rachel Aviv, ‘The Shadow Penal System for Struggling Kids’, New Yorker, 11 October 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/the-shadow-penal-system-for-struggling-kids.

38. Linda Mussell, ‘Intergenerational Imprisonment: Resistance and Resilience in Indigenous Communities’, Journal of Law and Social Policy, 33 (2020), 15–37. See also the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), irsi.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/inline-files/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf.

39. Streatfeild, Brainwash.

40. Another controversial film that sought to illuminate the inhumanity of the asylum and of psychiatry that might be compared with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the hard-hitting Titicut Follies, in 1967, directed by Frederick Wiseman. For the broader context, see Glen Gabbard and Krin Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema (Washington, DC, 1987).

41. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1961).

42. A powerful Hollywood example of that scenario was Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). The film, based on a play by Tennessee Williams and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, shows how a surgeon in search of research funds might be manipulated by a devious relative to confine and then lobotomise a vulnerable young woman, to eliminate her ‘dangerous’ memories.

43. Gretchen Diefenbach et al., ‘Portrayal of Lobotomy in the Popular Press: 1935–1960’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 8:1 (1999), 60–69, p. 67.

44. Kate Millett, The Loony-Bin Trip (New York, 1990), pp. 314–15. But contrast Millett’s account with Barbara Taylor’s history of the asylum, and personal account of her time residing in a mental hospital while contemporaneously continuing psychoanalysis, in The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times (London 2014). Institutions and psychiatrists varied, as did patients’ circumstances, needs, support system and treatments, as Taylor shows.

45. Reich, State of Madness.

46. Diego Gambetta, ‘Primo Levi’s Last Moments’, Boston Review, 9 July 2012, bostonreview.net/articles/diego-gambetta-primo-levi-last-moments/.

47. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London, 2004), p. 751.

48. Keenan, An Evil Cradling, p. 294.

49. Wyatt Mordecai Johnson, ‘The Faith of the American Negro’ [1922], www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1922-wyatt-mordecai-johnson-faith-american-negro/.

50. Frederic Douglass, speech, 5 July 1852, in Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present, edited by Sherrow O. Pinder (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 40–44 (p. 44).

51. James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’, first published in the New Yorker, 9 November 1962, reprinted in The Fire Next Time [1963] (New York, 1993).

52. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit, 1972), p. 86. Cf. Richard Flyn, ‘“The Kindergarten of New Consciousness”: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood’, African American Review, 34:3 (2000), 483–99, p. 483.

53. Toni Morrison, The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (New York, 2020), p. 57.

54. Alison Walsh, ‘The criminal justice system is riddled with racial disparities’, Prison Policy Initiative, 15 August 2016, www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2016/08/15/. See also solitarywatch.org/2019/01/04/how-many-people-are-in-solitary-today/.

55. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York, 1970), p. 21. See also idem, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore, 1996).

56. For the context, see Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, 1994).

57. See ‘New German Ghetto Show’ [1960], ‘Napalm and Pudding’ [1967] and ‘Water Cannons: Against Women, Too’ [1968], in Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, edited and with an introduction by Karin Bauer (New York, 2008).

58. Davis at that time was already a prominent campaigner for the rights of Black political prisoners. She was in correspondence with the ‘Soledad Brothers’. It came to light that she owned some weapons that were subsequently used, on 7 August 1970, by the seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson, younger brother of George Jackson, in his attempt to storm a courthouse and free three Black prisoners on trial in Marin County, California. He took the judge, a prosecutor and three jurors as hostages. In the subsequent confrontation with police, the judge, Jonathan Jackson and two armed prisoners were killed. Davis went into hiding, but, once arrested, was charged with conspiracy to murder and other offences. A public campaign for her release gained momentum. After sixteen months in detention, she was released on bail, and on 4 June 1972 found not guilty by a jury, unpersuaded that her ownership of the guns was sufficient grounds to assume her culpability.

59. Angela Davis and Dylan Rodriguez, ‘The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation’, Social Justice, 27:3 (2000), 212–18, p. 213. See also Angela Davis, Abolition: Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York, 2003), and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire (New York, 2005).

60. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, p. 55.

61. Quoted in ‘Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism’, The New York Times, 27 February 1982, movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html.

62. Franaszek, Miłosz, p. 303. An influential elaboration of this argument about positive and negative liberty can be found in Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford, 1958).

63. Franaszek, Miłosz, p. 251.

64. Keith Somerville, Radio Propaganda and the Broadcasting of Hatred: Historical Development and Definitions (London, 2012), p. 56.

65. Franaszek, Miłosz, p. 252.

66. Ibid.

67. Quoted in ibid., p. 251.

68. Young, The Vietnam Wars, pp. 201–2. On Miłosz’s sympathies with the US civil rights movement and views about protests against the Vietnam War, see Franaszek, Miłosz, pp. 373–4.

69. See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), p. 243.

70. See Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge, 2004), pp. 26–9.

71. Tori DeAngelis, ‘Unmasking “racial micro aggressions”’, American Psychological Association, February 2009, www.apa.org/monitor/2009/02/microaggression. Cf. David Theo Goldberg, ‘On Racial Judgment’, 2018, www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/on-racial-judgment/.

72. CNN, ‘“Plaid shirt” guy removed from Trump rally for facial expressions’, YouTube, 8 September 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFnF3jAvpTw.

73. This point has been developed by recent theorists, for example, in Lacanian terms, notably in the work of Slavoj Žižek. See, for instance, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989).

74. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley, 2009). Cf. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999] (London, 2018); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015).

75. Judt, ‘Captive Minds, Then and Now’.

76. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York, 2010), p. 34.

Part 4: Groupthink

1.William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York, 1956). On his career and later writings, see The Essential William H. Whyte, edited by Albert LaFarge (New York, 2000); cf. Michael T. Kaufman, ‘William H. Whyte, “Organization Man” Author and Urbanologist, Is Dead at 81’, The New York Times, 13 January 1999, www.nytimes.com/1999/01/13/arts/william-h-whyte-organization-man-author-and-urbanologist-is-dead-at-81.html. Whyte’s 1952 ‘groupthink’ article was first published in Fortune. It can be found online at fortune.com/2012/07/22/groupthink-fortune-1952/. This monthly magazine had been created in 1929, with a self-consciously deluxe, glossy image, and a direct pitch to the rich and successful. As its founder, Henry Robinson Luce, declared in the first prospectus for advertisers, Fortune’s purpose was to be ‘the Ideal Super-Class Magazine’ for ‘wealthy and influential people’; Joseph Epstein, ‘Henry Luce & His Time’, Commentary, 44:5 (1967), 35–47, p. 37. See also Anon, ‘About Us’, Fortune, [n.d.], fortune. com/about-us/. The sociologist and author of The Power Elite (1956), C. Wright Mills, later declared admiringly of Whyte, he ‘understands that the work-and-thrift ethic of success has grievously declined – except in the rhetoric of top executives; that the entrepreneurial scramble to success has been largely replaced by the organizational crawl’. Quoted in Kaufman’s obituary. Another obituarist observed of Whyte when he passed in 1999, that he ‘was straight Establishment and a card-carrying, socially conservative member of the American gentleman class’. Godfrey Hodgson, William H. Whyte, obituary, Guardian, 15 January 1999, www.theguardian.com/news/1999/jan/15/guardianobituaries1.

2.Quoted in William Dalrymple, ‘The Original Evil Corporation’, The New York Times, 4 September 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/opinion/east-india-company.html. See also Arthur Meier Schlesinger, ‘The Uprising Against the East India Company’, Political Science Quarterly, 32:1 (1917), 60–79. For the context, Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London, 2019); Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998).

3.Dalrymple, ‘The Original Evil Corporation’.

4.See Nick Joyce and David Baker, ‘Husbands, rate your wives’, American Psychological Association, Monitor on Psychology, 39:5 (2008), 18, www.apa.org/monitor/2008/05/marriage. See also Loxley Nichols, ‘Keeping Up with Dr. Crane’, Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, 20 (1991), 22–32.

5.Marilyn Loden, ‘100 Women: “Why I invented the glass ceiling phrase”’, BBC News, 13 December 2017, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-42026266.

6.The term ‘WASP’ emerged after the war and was used by a variety of writers to expose the true nature of US elites; to challenge racial or religious barriers to entry; and to protest about the lack of transparent, open competition for coveted places in prestigious institutions of education, and in well-paid, high-status employment. A notable study, in this regard, was E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America (New Haven, 1964). Cf. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Lies That Divide Us (New York, 2020).

7.Truman’s speech, to dedicate the new Washington headquarters of the American Legion, a national organisation of veterans, appreciatively noted its pledge to ‘uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States … to foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism … to safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of justice, freedom and democracy’. Truman insisted that Americanism meant liberty of the individual to enjoy free expression and choice of religion, to live without social discrimination and prejudice, to assume the prospect of a fair trial and to have confidence in an American system. It required work, vigilance and a struggle against dark interests. The people must keep ‘working together’, he urged, ‘in one great community’. The United States was under attack, he warned, not only from communism, and from spies and saboteurs, but also thanks to the conspiratorial fantasies of some Americans who undermined ‘Americanism’, intent upon ‘chipping away at our basic freedoms just as insidiously and far more effectively than the Communists have ever been able to do’. They had departed from ‘the American way’, he concluded. ‘We have got to make a fight for a real 100 percent Americanism.’ ‘Address at the Dedication of the New Washington Headquarters of the American Legion’, 14 August 1951, www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/191/address-dedication-new-washington-headquarters-american-legion. As historians have shown, the unity and homogeneity of this supposed American community conjured up in such rhetoric was misleading. Mary Caputi, for instance, in a book on myths of the 1950s, points out that tens of millions of Americans lived in poverty in the middle of that decade, and only 6 per cent of schools were racially integrated. See A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s (Minneapolis, 2005), pp. 141–2.

8.For an illuminating comparison of the privileged role of schools and colleges, and more generally on entry routes and barriers to advancement for applicants for senior roles in business and government, in Britain, Germany, France and the UK, see Elise S. Brezis and François Crouzet, ‘Changes in the Recruitment and Education of the Power Elites in Twentieth Century Western Democracies’ (2002), Bar-Ilan University Department of Economics, Working Papers, ideas.repec.org/p/biu/wpaper/2002-15.html.

9.Ed Catmull, ‘How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity’, Harvard Business Review, September 2008, hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity. Cf. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York, 2011), pp. 362–3, 431.

10. The novel portrays the logical end point of corporate surveillance of employees at a business akin to one of the great tech enterprises in the United States. Staff enjoy extravagant perks but are bombarded with praise and rewards, or expressions of ‘concern’, and then punitive and sinister action if they opt out. Dave Eggers, The Circle (London, 2013).

11. Alex Osborn, Your Creative Power: How to Use Imagination (New York, 1948), p. 265. He wrote that it was in 1939 ‘when I first organized such group-thinking in our company’. The early participants dubbed them ‘Brainstorm Sessions’.

12. The term ‘critical mass’ was first used by physicists to describe the minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. Writers soon adopted it, however, to suggest the sufficient level of resources required in a company, for instance, to efficiently produce certain results; too little and the task (whatever it was) did not really get going.

13. William H. Whyte, Is Anybody Listening? How and Why US Business Fumbles When It Talks with Human Beings (New York, 1952), pp. 88, 97, 140; Osborn, Your Creative Power, pp. 5, 313, 317.

14. This expansion of corporate America abroad led to considerable pushback as well, notably so in France where some right- and left-wing politicians objected strongly, by the late 1940s, to what they called the ‘coca-colonization’ of society. See Mark Prendergast, ‘Viewpoints; A Brief History of Coca-Colonization’, The New York Times, 15 August 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/business/viewpoints-a-brief-history-of-coca-colonization.html; Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, 1994); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

15. Osborn, Your Creative Power, p. 274.

16. Ibid., pp. 265–7.

17. Donald W. Taylor, Paul C. Berry and Clifford H. Block, ‘Does Group Participation When Using Brainstorming Facilitate or Inhibit Creative Thinking?’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 3:1 (June 1958), 23–47.

18. In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (London, 2012), Susan Cain elaborates that point; she recognises that teamwork can be effective, and collaboration vital, in many instances. But she also puts in a plea for workers to be left with more peace and quiet, allowed to get on with things separately, without the constant influence of the group (and by implication the valorisation of extroverts). See also Cain, ‘The Rise of the New Groupthink’, The New York Times, 13 January 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html.

19. Gary Younge, ‘The view from Middletown: a typical US city that never did exist’, Guardian, 18 October 2016, www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/oct/18/view-from-middletown-us-muncie-america.

20. Reflecting on ‘Middletown’, Igo notes how much was left out in such surveys, and how the very sample constituency was often skewed, reducing or leaving out portions of the local population. Furthermore, not every region or population of the United States was deemed suitable to make the same leap from the local to the supposedly national and typical. ‘Southerntown’ (Indianola, Mississippi), the location of John Dollard’s 1937 study Caste and Class in a Southern Town, was not regarded as similarly quintessentially American. It remained an ‘average small Southern town’, while Middletown, despite being ‘small, isolated, midwestern, industrial, white, native-born – required no similar list of qualifiers’. Studies of Middletown were still ‘straitjacketed by the lack of early data on African Americans as well as Catholics, Jews, and immigrants’, she adds. Depictions, Igo concludes, were ‘less an empirically typical place than an ideologically-loaded argument about which Americans properly stood for the nation’. Her book also shows well how the surveyors of public opinion could themselves be surveyed; so we now know from such historians a good deal about how each decade had its particular polling emphases. By the mid-1960s, pollsters and other social surveyors, influenced by new rebellious social movements, more emphatically called attention to the nation’s fractures than had their predecessors. Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA, 2008), p. 84. Cf. Adrian Bingham, ‘The “K-Bomb”: Social Surveys, the Popular Press, and British Sexual Culture in the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of British Studies (2011), 50:1, 156–79.

21. Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, 2000).

22. Tom Harrison, Bion, Rickman, Foulkes and the Northfield Experiments: Advancing on a Different Front (London, 2000).

23. Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London, 1961), p. 56.

24. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism [1933] (London, 1972). For the context, see Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind; ffytche and Pick (eds), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism.

25. See Lifton, Thought Reform.

26. There is an extensive literature on the vicissitudes of training, with significant papers on the subject by Michael Balint, Otto Kernberg and others, that I do not list here but can be consulted most easily online via PEP-Web. A notable book on this issue is Moustapha Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training, translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose (London, 2000).

27. Joyce McDougall, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (New York, 1992); Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment (Abingdon, 2018); and idem, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (New York, 2006). Cf. Harold Kelman, ‘Training Analysis: Past, Present and Future’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 23:2 (1963), 205–17, p. 208. This refers to increasing numbers of candidates with a ‘facade of normality’.

28. Ralph Greenson, ‘The Origin and Fate of New Ideas in Psychoanalysis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50 (1969), 503–15, p. 513.

29. Lewin moved to the United States in 1933 and died in 1947. Along with his students Ronald Lippitt and Ralph K. White, he studied, from his position at the University of Iowa, the effects of different organisational structures upon behaviour and thought processes. He was interested in what he called the space of free movement of thought. In a 1939 paper for the Harvard Educational Review he described the boys’ club project. For the context and consequences of his work, see Clem Adelman, ‘Kurt Lewin and the Origins of Action Research’, Educational Action Research, 1 (1993), 7–24, doi.org/10.1080/0965079930010102.

30. K. B. Clark and M. P. Clark, ‘Racial identification and preference in Negro children’, in Readings in Social Psychology (New York, 1947), edited by T. M. Newcomb and E. L. Hartley, Chapter 3, pp. 169–78. A later project that invites comparison with their innovative research was the ‘Bobo doll experiments’ at Stanford between 1961 and 1963, led by the psychologist Albert Bandura. This body of work explored behaviour of children towards a particular doll; it considered the degree to which they were influenced by first witnessing an adult model behave in a violent and cruel way towards the doll. The project was to generate, in turn, a great deal of further inquiry and debate on the shaping of infantile attitudes, the link between seeing violence and acting aggressively, and the social transmission of hate.

31. Katharina Rowold, ‘“If We Are to Believe the Psychologists …”: Medicine, Psychoanalysis and Breastfeeding in Britain, 1900–55’, Medical History, 63:1 (2019), 61–81.

32. Martha Harris et al., Your Teenager (London, 1969), pp. 90–91.

33. Ibid., pp. 96–7, 109, 111, 117.

34. Solomon E. Asch, ‘Opinions and Social Pressure’, Scientific American, 193:5 (1955), 31–5, p. 33.

35. For the context, see Foner, The Story of American Freedom.

36. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948), p. xxxiii.

37. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society [1964] (London, 2002), p. 3.

38. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses [1970] (New York, 2014).

39. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 22.

40. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley, 1996).

41. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ [1951], reprinted in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London, 1991), pp. 132–57; cf. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950).

42. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (1938), quoted in Robert Winston Wilkin, Adorno on Popular Culture (London, 2003), p. 57.

43. The United States and the USSR came close to nuclear war in 1962, after the Russians appeared determined to transfer and then retain ballistic missiles in Cuba. This moment, the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’, became a test case for exploring the concept of groupthink, and was used to highlight how easily a sense of inevitability about war’s ‘necessity’ might take hold.

44. ‘House of Commons: Health and Social Care, and Science and Technology Committees – Coronavirus: Lessons Learned to Date, Sixth Report of the Health and Social Care Committee and Third Report of the Science and Technology Committee of Session 2021–22’, committees.parliament.uk/publications/7497/documents/78688/default/.

45. Irving Janis, Groupthink (Boston, MA, 1982). Cf. Patrick Dunleavy, ‘How “groupthink” in Theresa May’s Downing Street delivered another round of UK political chaos’, London School of Economics, blog, 9 June 2017, blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/06/09/how-groupthink-in-theresa-mays-downing-street-delivered-another-round-of-uk-political-chaos/.

46. Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London, 2016), p. 523.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., p. 527.

50. Various influential Western social scientists made assumptions about Japanese workers’ natural propensity to groupthink, and their supposedly age-old willingness to sacrifice all for the collective cause. See Elson Boles, ‘Ruth Benedict’s Japan: The Benedictions of Imperialism’, Dialectical Anthropology, 30:1/2 (2006), 27–70. Cf. Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (New Haven, 2013). For an example of such stereotypes, consider the following: ‘Managers in the USA seem to seek activities that require high intellectual curiosity and adventurousness’; their Japanese counterparts by contrast, shaped by a culture where individuals subsume themselves in ‘group-oriented’ practices, value ‘a sense of harmony’, share in an enthusiasm for ‘brainstorming’, and reflect a general propensity to ‘fusion’. See Paul Herbig and Laurence Jacobs, ‘Creative Problem-Solving Styles in the USA and Japan’, International Marketing Review, 13:2 (1996), 63–71.

51. See, for instance, Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London, 1986).

52. This was a term that combined the names of two well-known Tory and Labour figures, Butler and Gaitskell, both of whom occupied the role of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and who thought, so critics complained, broadly alike. Later some proposed ‘Blatcherism’ (i.e. Thatcherism merged with Blairism).

53. Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago, 2014).

54. Michael Williams, Crisis and Consensus in British Politics: From Bagehot to Blair (London, 2000), p. 20. Cf. Martin Jacques and Stuart Hall, The Politics of Thatcherism (London, 1983).

55. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London, 2007).

56. ‘From plandemic to breadcrumbs: conspiracy-theory slang’, Economist, 17 September 2020, www.economist.com/1843/2020/09/17/from-plandemic-tobreadcrumbs-conspiracy-theory-slang.

Part 5: Hidden Persuaders

1.Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy [1942] (London, 2003), pp. 258, 283.

2.Ernest Dichter, ‘Persuasion Started with Eve’, The Strategy of Desire [1960] (New York, 1985), Part 1.

3.See Anat Rosenberg, ‘The Market Enchanters: Mind Control in the History of Advertising’, 14 May 2021, www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/the-market-enchanters-mind-control-in-the-history-of-advertising/.

4.Christian Potschka, ‘A Changing Society (1964–1979)’, in Towards a Market in Broadcasting: Communication Policy in the UK and Germany (London, 2012), pp. 74–85.

5.There were precedents for such media monitoring; bodies were set up previously in a bid to put curbs on the public’s exposure to salacious cinema, for example, and to set standards for radio too. An array of legislation in the United States (including the Radio Act of 1927) helped in the policing of who could transmit radio and what kind of material could be decently covered, and set limits on who would be licensed to run companies.

6.Ogilvy was renowned for his panache. He made a splash by having himself driven around New York in his Rolls-Royce. After he won the contract for advertising the Rolls-Royce vehicle in the late 1950s, he developed a campaign emphasising the luxury car maker’s precision engineering, as well as its effortless and timeless sense of style. He came up with the headline, ‘At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock’. He regarded it as one of his best lines, only to find out it had been used in an earlier campaign for the Pierce-Arrow vehicle in an ad which had appeared in 1933. See Kenneth Roman, The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising (London, 2010), p. 99. Cf. swiped.co/file/rolls-royce-ad-by-david-ogilvy/.

7.For example, the Clio awards, created in 1959, celebrate, as the organisers explain, ‘bold work that propels the advertising industry forward, inspires a competitive marketplace of ideas and fosters meaningful connections within the creative community’. clios.com/awards. Other awards include those bestowed by Clutch, for the highest-ranking ‘business-to business’ (or ‘b2b’) companies now; clutch.co/leader-awards. For the AAF awards, see www.aaf.org/.

8.By the late 1950s, Dichter’s business had an annual turnover of a million dollars. See Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries (eds), Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: The Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York, 2010), p. 7.

9.Ibid., p. 4.

10. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders [1957] (Harmondsworth, 1960), p. 31.

11. Michelle R. Nelson, ‘The Hidden Persuaders, Then and Now’, Journal of Advertising, 37:1 (2008), 113–26, p. 116; Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Chapel Hill, 1994), pp. 1–10.

12. Nelson, ‘The Hidden Persuaders, Then and Now’, p. 116.

13. A 1998 report on production, sales and advertising found that California accounted for 99 per cent of US and 70 per cent of the world’s supply. See Julian Alston et al., ‘California Prune Board’s Promotion Program: An Evaluation’, Research Report Series (Berkeley, 1998), escholarship.org/uc/item/8kf3z8zp. The United States remains a major global exporter of prunes, although it is now faced with far more competition and a lower market share than before. ‘Prune’, data for June 2019, Tridge, www.tridge.com/products/prune. Cf. Sunsweet, ‘Our Story’, www.sunsweet.com/sunsweet-story/. Cf. Foodnews Editor, ‘Sunsweet Appoints President’, 5 October 2012, iegvu. agribusinessintelligence.informa.com/CO023359/Sunsweet-appoints-president.

14. For details of the US prune market and international competition today, see Alston et al., ‘California Prune Board’s Promotion Program’.

15. As one newspaper reported on the 1953 ‘new program’ for prune commercials that year, ‘this will be a stepped-up version of last year’s advertising, again using full color ads in Sunday magazine newspaper supplements, four-color one sheet subway posters, strong local television shows, a morning radio newscast in San Francisco, regional and national grocery trade paper advertising, and ads in nationally distributed journals in the hotel, restaurant, hospital and dietetic fields. The campaign theme, based on Industry consumer research and a psychological consumer study conducted by Dr Ernest Dichter, will continue to drive home the story that prunes, California’s Wonder Fruit, are good as well as healthful. The campaign technique will continue to be aimed at the younger market by using fresh, gay and colorful ads that will stimulate the purchase of prunes on a consistent basis. The advertising will also stress the ease of preparation and the variety of uses for prunes.’ Healdsburg Tribune, Enterprise and Scimitar, 25 June 1953, p. 15, cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=HTES19530625.2.152&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1.

16. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, p. 137. Emphasis added. For the context, Lawrence R. Samuel, Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America (Philadelphia, 2010); Sean Nixon, Advertising Cultures: Gender, Commerce, Creativity (London, 2003); and idem, Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations, c. 1951–69 (Manchester, 2016).

17. Dichter described the connotations of the many foodstuffs and beverages that he worked on. The products described included rice, margarine, lamb, eggs, coffee and milk (fresh or evaporated) as well as prunes. Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects (New York, 1964), pp. 59–60.

18. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, p. 137.

19. Packard referred fleetingly to the racial connotations of the ‘black’ prune and commented on how that might vitiate its appeal. He remarked upon how this was sometimes countered by placing the product in pictures alongside white products, such as cottage cheese. The Hidden Persuaders, p. 138.

20. ‘Let’s Have a Prune Party’, www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/4p59r5/lets_have_a_prune_party_1958_california_prune/. Prune advertisers continue to wrestle with the dilemma of how best to sell the health benefits without alienating customers with direct references to bodily functions. In 1990, a campaign was based around a twelve-week-long run of US television commercials in which a magician performed sleight-of-hand tricks, to portray prunes as highly effective, and as containing more vitamins and minerals than other comparable dried fruits. Reviewing the success of that campaign, researchers found what might be called a ‘sleeper effect’. The television advertisements increased prune sales more in the weeks after the series had concluded than during the period when they were shown. Deals and special coupons, which reduced the effective price paid by consumers, so they found, also notably increased the sales figures. Alston et al., ‘California Prune Board’s Promotion Program’, pp. 48–51. In 2000, a further marketing plan came to fruition: the US Food and Drug Administration approved a name change from the still troubling designation ‘prune’ back to the alternative descriptor – dried plums. This apparently resulted the following year in a 5.5 per cent increase in sales. Analysts continue to study the impact of the precise wording, along with special offers, television advertisements, online prompts, and so on, to see what exact degree of price elasticity producers can play with before demand falls off again. The terms still vary; the prune has not been entirely erased in marketing by the maybe more palatable dried plum label. Diane Barrett et al., Processing Fruits: Science and Technology, 2nd edn (Boca Raton, 2005), p. 514.

21. Sunsweet TV commercials in the 1960s featured a sceptical overweight man in a chair complaining that prunes were wrinkled and a problem to eat because of the pits. The interlocutor in the advertisement then introduces him to the marvellous pit-free product, and the man before us, while munching the prune, changes his mind. See ‘Vintage 1960s Prune Commercial – Finicky Prune Eater: Hates Wringled Prunes’, YouTube, 7 March 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lpytcTqaAs.

22. Robert Griffith, ‘The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960’, Business History Review, 57:3 (1983), 388–412, p. 403.

23. ‘Harry S. Truman: 1952–53, containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president, January 1, 1952, to January 20, 1953. Collection: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States’, 370–74, p. 372, University of Michigan Digital Library, quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ppotpus/4729044.1952.00 1/421?page=root;size=100;view=image.

24. ‘Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Twickenham’ [1956] (London, 1957), Wellcome Collection, wellcomelibrary.org/moh/report/b19879349/6#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=6.

25. Economic expansion was notable and consistent in post-war decades. Western European democracies achieved on average around 4 per cent growth in GDP in the 1950s, and closer to 5 per cent in the 60s, compared with 3 per cent in the 70s, and 2 per cent in the 80s. US growth rates went higher than that: in 1955, for example, spiking at closer to 10 per cent. During the later 1930s, the United States had also seen quite high growth figures, as the New Deal injected vast sums, but this followed on years during the depression when the economy shrank severely. GDP growth had been close to -10 per cent in 1930, and -13 per cent in 1932. See Kimberly Amadeo, ‘US GDP by Year Compared to Recessions and Events: The Strange Ups and Downs of the US Economy since 1929’, The Balance, 28 April 2021, www.thebalance.com/us-gdp-by-year-3305543. On the 1950s and 60s, growth rates and how the benefits were widely if never fully equitably spread, see Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor (eds), The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (Oxford, 1990), p. 1. See also ‘GDP growth (annual %), 1961–2020’, The World Bank, data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=US. Cf. ‘US GDP Growth Rate by Year’, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, [n.d.], www.multpl.com/us-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year.

26. Nelson, ‘The Hidden Persuaders, Then and Now’, p. 114; Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing (Cambridge, MA, 2013), p. 94.

27. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, Chapter 15, ‘The Psycho-Seduction of Children’.

28. Cited by Nelson, ‘The Hidden Persuaders, Then and Now’, p. 126.

29. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, p. 32.

30. Ibid., p. 240.

31. See Friedan on ‘the sexual sell’, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963), pp. 166–89.

32. Ibid., pp. 218–19.

33. Steve Craig, ‘Madison Avenue versus The Feminine Mystique: How the Advertising Industry Responded to the Onset of the Modern Women’s Movement: A Paper Presented at the Popular Culture Association Conference (1997)’, online at ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/tdugas/ids3301/acrobat/womensmovement.pdf. For some legacies of this earlier feminist activism against the advertising industry, see Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlyn Regehr, ‘Feminist Counterpublics and Public Feminisms: Advancing a Critique of Racialized Sexualization in London’s Public Advertising’, Signs, 46:1 (2020), 229–57.

34. The transcript is in the Vance Packard Papers, Penn State, University Library, Special Collections, Box 21, Folder 15, ‘TV-Radio, 1957–58’.

35. This was perhaps intended as a reference to a popular Hollywood film of 1956, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It starred Gregory Peck, and explored in a critical light, inter alia, the corporate world, public relations, careerism and consumerism.

36. ‘Every psychologist will tell you that “psycho-seduction” is a natural process which starts on the very first day of the child’s life.’ Ernest Dichter, ‘Persuasion: To What End?’, Motivations, June 1957, p. 15. Cf. Dichter, ‘Buying Is an Expression of Creativeness’, in The Strategy of Desire, p. 170.

37. On this problematic form of measure, see Trust: The Making and Breaking of Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta (Oxford, 1988); cf. Joseph Hamm, Corwin Smidt and Roger C. Mayer, ‘Understanding the Psychological Nature and Mechanisms of Trust’, PlosOne, 15 May 2019, journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215835. See also Mike Wendling, ‘The (almost) complete history of “fake news”’, BBC News, 22 January 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-42724320; and OECD, ‘Trust in government, policy effectiveness and the governance agenda’, in Government at a Glance 2013 (Paris 2013), p. 25, doi.org/10.1787/gov_glance-2013-6-en.

38. adassoc.org.uk/our-work-category/trust-in-advertising/.

39. Alfonso J. Damico, M. Margaret Conway and Sandra Bowman Damico, ‘Patterns of Political Trust and Mistrust: Three Moments in the Lives of Democratic Citizens’, Polity, 32:3 (2000), 377–400, p. 384. See also Bradley Greenberg and Edwin Parker (eds), The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public: Social Communication in Crisis (Stanford, 1965).

40. ‘Letter from Mrs Mary C. McCree’, 1 December 1957, ‘Samples of Reader Mail’, Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 6.

41. Letter dated August 1957, ‘Samples of Reader Mail’, Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 10.

42. ‘Letter from Robert Roffler’, 27 October 1960, ‘Samples of Reader Mail’, Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 5.

43. Letter dated 2 February 1959, ‘Samples of Reader Mail’, Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 5.

44. See Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, Chapter 3.

45. ‘Jane Mayer, New York City’, undated letter, ‘Samples of Reader Mail’, Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 5.

46. Rory Sutherland, vice chairman at Ogilvy, has remarked upon how he grew up on Packard’s work. The Hidden Persuaders helped motivate him to enter the field. Paul Feldwick, another prominent British advertising executive and writer on advertising, told me the same. Personal communications to the author, respectively in June 2018 and July 2017.

47. ‘Letter from R. H. Birch’, 10 October 1963, ‘Samples of Reader Mail’, Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 6.

48. ‘The Art of Persuasion’, radio transcript, Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 15, ‘TV-Radio, 1957–58’.

49. Quoted in Streatfeild, Brainwash, p. 193.

50. Ibid. These frightening ideas about irresistible brainwashing through the enforced viewing of rapidly changing screen images were also taken up in notable stories and movies, ranging from A Clockwork Orange to The Parallax View.

51. Streatfeild, Brainwash, p. 193.

52. See the account in Packard’s lecture entitled ‘The Picture Persuaders’; Packard Papers, Box 21, Folder 14, pp. 16–18.

53. I draw here on the discussion of this image in August Bullock, The Secret Sales Pitch: An Overview of Subliminal Selling (San Jose, 2004), pp. 12–14.

54. Robert Heath and Paul Feldwick, ‘Fifty Years Using the Wrong Model of Advertising’, International Journal of Market Research, 50:1 (2008), 29–59. Cf. Rory Sutherland, ‘Reliable Signals in a Post-Truth World’, Barb, 27 April 2017, www.barb.co.uk/viewing-report/reliable-signals-in-a-post-truth-world/.

55. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, p. 32.

56. In a later edition, Packard’s publishers seized on this phrase (from a New Yorker review of The Hidden Persuaders), for promotional purposes: ‘A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command.’

57. Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (New York, 1955). See also Peter Simonson, ‘Politics, Social Networks, and the History of Mass Communications Research: Rereading Personal Influence’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 608 (November 2006), 6–24.

58. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1953), vols 4 and 5.

59. Bernays’ influential work Public Relations appeared in 1945; see also his earlier studies, Crystallizing Public Opinion [1923] (New York, 1926) and Propaganda [1928] (New York, 2004).

60. Bernays, Propaganda, pp. 38–9, 17–20.

61. Margaret Scammell, Designer Politics: How Elections Are Won (Houndmills, 1995), p. 2. See also Election Posters Around the Globe: Political Campaigning in the Public Space (Cham, 2017), edited by Christina Holtz-Bacha and Bengt Johansson, especially the Introduction and pp. 339–60.

62. Claude Robinson’s prediction, at the American Advertising Federation in 1958, cited by Nelson, ‘The Hidden Persuaders, Then and Now’, p. 115.

63. Quoted in Natasha Singer, ‘Making Ads That Whisper to the Brain’, The New York Times, 13 November 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14stream.html.

64. Roger Dooley et al., ‘Neuromarketing’, Neuroscience Marketing, www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/companies/neurofocus.

65. Quoted in Singer, ‘Making Ads That Whisper to the Brain’. Cf. A. K Pradeep, The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Unconscious Mind (Hoboken, 2010).

66. Baudrillard singled out Packard’s notable work and cited Dichter. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects [1968] (London, 1997), p. 164.

67. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, 1970), p. 46.

68. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, pp. 152–3.

69. Jill Lepore, ‘How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future’, New Yorker, 27 July 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-thesimulmatics-corporation-invented-the-future. See also Lepore, If Then: How Simulmatics Invented the Future (New York, 2020).

70. Quoted in Lepore, ‘How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future’. See also David Haven Blake, Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics (Oxford, 2016).

71. Ithiel de Sola Pool and Robert Abelson, ‘The Simulmatics Project’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 25:2 (1961), 167–83.

72. Thomas J. Carty, A Catholic in the White House? Religion, Politics and John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign (New York, 2004); Shaun A. Casey, The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960 (Oxford, 2009).

73. Quoted in Lepore, ‘How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future’.

74. Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel, ‘Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media’, The New York Times, 17 December 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/russia-2016-influence-campaign.html.

75. See, for instance, Ian Failes, ‘“I felt like it was a poem”: the VFX oral history of Guinness “Surfer”’, 18 March 2019, beforesandafters.com/2019/03/18/guinness-surfer-oral-history-vfx/.

76. See Gerry Bowler, Santa Claus: A Biography (Toronto, 2005).

77. Jade Bremner, ‘Coca-Cola faces backlash over seminar asking staff to “be less white”’, Independent, 24 February 2021, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/coca-cola-racism-robin-diangelo-coke-b1806122.html.

78. Eilidh Nuala Duffy, ‘Benetton’s Most Controversial Campaigns’, Vogue, 8 December 2017, www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/benettons-best-advertising-campaigns.

79. Thomas Dichter, ‘The Intrusiveness Of Internet Advertising: The Not So Hidden Persuaders’, Forbes, 11 March 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/thomasdichter/2019/03/11/the-intrusiveness-of-internet-advertising-the-notso-hidden-persuaders/#350b2b142c18.

80. For example, consider the backlash against the Swiss company Nestlé’s selling of artificial milk in Africa and Latin America. A boycott campaign against Nestlé gained traction in the 1970s. Charities such as War on Want referred to the company as ‘baby killers’, and the very brand behind the milk was tarnished. An angry paediatrician, cited in a hard-hitting War on Want report of 1974, put it like this: ‘unaffordable, high-status, processed milks have been thrust upon unprepared communities. These high-pressure advertising campaigns employ all available channels and media making use of modern techniques of motivation and persuasion. In some places firms employ “milk nurses” to make home visits and to attend clinics to promote sales further.’ War on Want, The Baby Killer, pamphlet, 1974, archive.babymilkaction.org/pdfs/babykiller.pdf.

81. Peter Adams, ‘Fail of the Year: Pepsi’s “Jump In”’, Marketing Dive, 4 December 2017, www.marketingdive.com/news/fail-of-the-year-pepsis-jump-in/510322/.

82. See, for instance, ‘Global Trust in Advertising: Winning Strategies for an Evolving Media Landscape’, Nielsen report, September 2015, www.nielsen.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/04/global-trust-in-advertising-report-sept-2015-1.pdf and ‘Millennials Are Most Trusting When it Comes to Advertising’, 13 October 2015, www.nielsen.com/uk/en/insights/article/2015/millennials-are-most-trusting-when-it-comes-to-advertising/. Cf. Osnat Roth-Cohen, Hananel Rosenberg and Sabina Lissitsa, ‘Are you talking to me? Generation X, Y, Z responses to mobile advertising’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, October 2021, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565211047342.

83. Kristen Herhold, ‘How Consumers View Advertising: 2017 Survey’, Clutch, 7 December 2017, clutch.co/agencies/resources/how-consumers-view-advertising-survey-2017.

84. Wally Olins, On Brand (London, 2012), Chapter 1, ‘Why brands are important to customers’.

85. www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/statistics-and-research/publication/understanding-how-consumers-engaged-with-gambling-advertising-in-2020.

86. Sarah Milov, The Cigarette: A Political History (Cambridge, MA, 2019).

87. See for instance this article, published on the website of the Heartland Institute (one of the many enterprises the Koch Brothers funded), entitled ‘Pseudo Scientists Wreak Havoc on Society’s Mental Stability with Fake Data’. It claimed the public are brainwashed to worry about what is happening to the glaciers, oceans, forests and deserts. All this ‘hysterical news’, the author declared, was the thing that was making people seriously ill: ‘The excessive social media coverage and exposure to climate and weather-related natural disasters can result in any number of mental health consequences including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.’ Ronald Stein, ‘Pseudo Scientists …’, 29 October 2019, Heartland Institute, www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/pseudo-scientists-wreak-havoc-on-societys-mental-stability-with-fake-data. Cf. Jane Mayer, ‘Daily Comment: “Kochland” Examines the Koch Brothers’ Early, Crucial Role in Climate-Change Denial’, New Yorker, 13 August 2019, www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought.

88. See the ‘Report of the Independent Expert Drafting Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide’, June 2021, www.stopecocide.earth/expert-drafting-panel. See also ecocidelaw.com/independent-expert-drafting-panel/.

89. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, 2019), pp. 6–8.

90. Ibid., p. 8.

91. ‘How Safe Is Thy Castle?’, Packard Papers, Box 34, Folder 7.

92. Zygmunt Bauman, personal written communication to the author, 3 April 2015. He also develops this image in a subsequent interview recorded with the author; see Lily Ford’s film Onlining, and the filmed interview with Bauman, at www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/.

Part 6: The Paranoid Style

1.Luke Mogelson, ‘Among the Insurrectionists’, New Yorker, 15 January 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/among-the-insurrectionists.

2.Frida Ghitis, ‘QAnon is an American invention, but it has become a global plague’, Washington Post, 10 March 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/10/qanon-japan-germany-colombia-conspiracy-theories-disinformation/.

3.James Shanahan, ‘Support for QAnon is hard to measure – and polls may overestimate it’, The Conversation, 5 March 2021, theconversation.com/support-for-qanon-is-hard-to-measure-and-polls-may-overestimate-it-156020.

4.Tom Dreisbach, ‘Alex Jones still sells supplements on Amazon despite bans from other platforms’, NPR, 24 March 2021, www.npr.org/2021/03/24/979362593/alex-jones-still-sells-supplements-on-amazon-despite-bans-from-other-platforms; ‘Twitter’s algorithm favours right-leaning politics, research finds’, BBC News, 22 October 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59011271; Arash Massoudi et al., ‘Hedge funds make millions as shares in Trump media Spac jump’, Financial Times, 21 October 2021, www.ft.com/content/d266e746-27af-46c8-a6d9-4081cfe3cc00.

5.Long after the organisation withered, folklore continued, suggesting how the Illuminati were intent upon the destruction of all religion and government, hell-bent on instilling a libertine philosophy, destroying property and orchestrating a global criminal underworld. Hofstadter noted how various prelates by the end of the eighteenth century were ratcheting up their language, warning that the Illuminati were hatching ‘plans for making a tea that caused abortion – a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face”, and a device that sounds like a stench bomb – a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours”’. Stories still swarm online. The secret society has been suspected of all kinds of conspiracies, from the toppling of the French monarchy to JFK’s killing, from 9/11 to the orchestration of the global illegal drugs business, pandemics, and more. Richard Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1964), harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/. For the history of the Illuminati, see Isabel Hernández, ‘Meet the Man Who Started the Illuminati’, National Geographic, July/August 2016, www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/07-08/profile-adam-weishaupt-illuminati-secret-society/. Cf. Gordon Fraser, ‘Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy: The Recurrent Aesthetics of the American Illuminati’, Journal of American Studies, 12 November 2018, www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies/article/conspiracy-pornography-democracy-the-recurrent-aesthetics-of-the-american-illuminati/906DDB8C8B609BFC4FD7FA7233D570DC. See also Jonathan White, ‘Political Eschatology: A Theology of Antigovernmental Extremism’, American Behavioral Scientist, 44:6 (February 2001), 937–56.

6.eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/09/jake-angeli-qanon-man-furhat-horns-capitol-riot-arrested/6609039002/.

7.Quoted in ‘Bilderberg mystery: Why do people believe in cabals?’, BBC News, 8 June 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13682082. Cf. Josh Sanburn, ‘What to Know About the Bilderberg Group’s Secret Annual Meeting’, Time, 9 June 2016, time.com/4362872/bilderberg-group-meetings-2016-conspiracy-theories/.

8.Victoria Gagliardo-Silver, ‘Alex Jones: Instagram refuses to remove right-wing conspiracy theorist’s anti-semitic post’, Independent, 29 March 2019, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/alex-jones-ig-antisemitism-instagram-facebook-conspiracy-theories-a8846466.html.

9.R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, 1988).

10. Long after it was first confected in Russia, and then appeared in 1903, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion served in many accounts of global Jewish plots. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York, 1966); and Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York, 1997). On the fictional sources of that text, and the swirl of speculation, often inaccurate, about its provenance, see Michael Hagemeister, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Between History and Fiction’, New German Critique, 103 (Winter 2008), 83–95.

11. Kevin Roose, ‘What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory?’, The New York Times, 3 September 2021, www.nytimes.com/article/what-isqanon.html.

12. Joe Sommerlad, ‘“Bye Q, I can’t talk to you any more”: What next for Alex Jones, America’s foremost conspiracy theorist?’, Independent, 23 March 2021, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/alex-jones-trump-qanon-capitol-b1799038.html.

13. See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London, 2005).

14. Fredrick Kunkle, ‘Trump supporter in horns and fur is charged in Capitol riot’, Washington Post, 9 January 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/local/jacob-chansely-horn-qanon-capitol-riot/2021/01/09/5d3c2c96-52b9-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html.

15. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers 1871 as a first occasion for the term ‘conspiracy theory’ in the United States; the OED, 1909. ‘Conspiracy theorist’ evolved from a description of a person who happened to have a view about conspiracy, to a type of ultra-suspicious personality, intent upon unearthing plots. See Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, ‘Conspiracy Theory: The Nineteenth-Century Prehistory of a Twentieth-Century Concept’, in Joseph Uscinski (ed.), Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oxford, 2018), Chapter 4. On conspiracy theory, see also Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, 2000); Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley, 2003); Pipes, Conspiracy; and David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (London, 2009). For recent studies of Russia, Latin America and the Middle East, see the special issue on conspiracy theory, Russian Review, 71:4 (2012); Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman, Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows (London, 2021); and Matthew Gray, ‘Conspiracy Theories in the Middle East’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight (London, 2020).

16. Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd, ‘Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be Exploited’ (2019), datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Data-Voids-2.0-Final.pdf.

17. Matt Burgess, ‘A new type of Bill Gates conspiracy theory is going viral on Facebook’, Wired, 9 April 2021, www.wired.co.uk/article/bill-gates-conspiracy-theory-arabic.

18. ABC News reported how Albert Watkins, the St Louis lawyer representing Chansley, had ‘likened the process to brainwashing or falling into the clutches of a cult’. See ‘Capitol Hill rioter “QAnon Shaman” to argue he was brainwashed by online cult, as lawyer plans “dumbass” defence’, 31 May 2021, www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-31/capitol-hill-rioters-claim-to-be-brainwashed-donald-trump-fox/100177896. In November 2021 the verdict came: that argument was (predictably) not accepted by the court; Chansley was sentenced to forty-one months in prison followed by thirty-six months of supervised release.

19. Jan Wolfe, ‘“QAnon Shaman” lawyer says all Americans had a role in U.S. Capitol riot’, Reuters, 22 June 2021, www.reuters.com/world/us/qanonshaman-lawyer-says-all-americans-had-role-us-capitol-riot-2021-06-22/.

20. Even the ‘fall’ of China in 1949, Senator McCarthy insisted, was the outcome of a plot hatched ultimately in the United States; a conspiracy ‘so immense’, he added, ‘as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man’. (sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1951mccarthy-marshall.asp). It was an article of faith for many right-wing commentators, post-war, that the Chinese Revolution required the contribution of American traitors; it could not reflect only the toppled nationalist government’s declining support, and the growing popularity of Mao. See David Brion Davis (ed.), The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, 1971), p. 265. In his ‘Paranoid Style’ essay, Hofstadter also noted the role played by the Far-Right racist candy manufacturer and conspiracy theorist, Robert Welch, who established the John Birch Society in 1958. That organisation sought to represent aggrieved white people who felt they were owed the restoration of former privileges, entitlements and glories, not the continuing advance of civil rights for people of colour. (Welch might well have appreciated Trump’s slogan: not just ‘make America great’, but make it great ‘again’ – for them.)

21. Daniel Rogers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011). What happened to Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963 added a new raft of conspiracy theories that have continued to shape and intensify mass mistrust in government over the last sixty years. Was Lee Harvey Oswald ‘brainwashed’ in Russia, or were millions of people persuaded by forces deep in the state (or abroad) erroneously to see him as the culprit, when really he was the ‘patsy’, as he insisted? Was the Warren Report into the assassination not only wrong, but perversely misleading? Could even the Zapruder film of the moment of death have been manipulated by the security services? There is a vast literature on this topic. One of the best studies I’ve read on JFK and conspiracy is Art Simon, Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (Philadelphia, 1996). Other notable studies that explore shifts in conspiracy theory and discuss contemporary and future social trends, and outlooks for politics, include Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis, 1999); George Marcus (ed.), Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago, 1999); and Melley, Empire of Conspiracy.

22. Gerstle, American Crucible, p. 243. See also www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/goldwater-rule and psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176%2Fpn.42.10.0002.

23. On liberalism, neoliberalism, social justice and anti-democratic politics, see Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, 1982); and idem, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (London, 2020); Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, 2019); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, 2015); and idem, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York, 2019).

24. See the survey (commissioned by a Cambridge University research project, on conspiracy and democracy) conducted by YouGov in 2018 on the scale of belief in conspiracy theory in the United States, the UK and various European states, www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/conspiracy-democracy. See also this summary of the report in the Guardian, Esther Addley, ‘Study shows 60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories’, 23 November 2018, www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/23/study-shows-60-of-britons-believe-in-conspiracy-theories.

25. Mark O’Connell, ‘Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand’, Guardian, 15 February 2018, www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand.

26. The defence official and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who made this leak, became a famous model whistle-blower for others such as Edward Snowden later to emulate. The Pentagon Papers revealed much about policy in Vietnam and laid bare the total bankruptcy of official pronouncements about the scale and consequences of the conflict during the 1960s. Prior to Arendt’s account, a book had appeared providing an overview of this story; Neil Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War (New York, 1971).

27. Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York, 1972).

28. Ibid., p. 6.

29. Ibid., p. 7.

30. Arendt thought that while the French Revolution had long been seen as the key to revolution everywhere (even though it failed, or rather led to new kinds of dictatorship), the American Revolution had been treated as a unique case, or at least as a case that was hard to replicate. She noted the massive contradiction of a land of liberty that also was built on slavery, but she wanted to return our attention to the ideals, nonetheless, of the founding fathers. She thought it was terrible that subsequent generations of Americans, after the creation of the Republic, were not sufficiently encouraged to continue thinking about their revolution and adequately conceptualising the experience. See Arendt, ‘The Freedom to Be Free’ [1966–7], New England Review, 38:2 (2017), 56–69.

31. Arendt wrote in ‘The Freedom to Be Free’ that Adams was ‘entirely right when he said that “the revolution was effected before the war commenced,” not because of a specifically revolutionary or rebellious spirit, but because the inhabitants of the colonies were “formed by law into corporations, or bodies politic” with the “right to assemble … in their own town halls, there to deliberate upon public affairs,” … [Adams’s] point of departure is the observation that “Wherever men, women, or children are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low … ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected by the people about him and within his knowledge.”’ Arendt added: ‘This public freedom is a tangible worldly reality, created by men to enjoy together in public – to be seen, heard, known, and remembered by others. And this kind of freedom demands equality, it is possible only among peers. Institutionally speaking, it is possible only in a republic, which knows no subjects and, strictly speaking, no rulers. This is the reason why discussions of the forms of government, in sharp contrast to later ideologies, played such an enormous role in the thinking and writing of the first revolutionaries.’

32. The argument that liberal democracy can serve as a mere facade for authoritarianism and for corporate capitalism has a long history. It was powerfully portrayed in dystopian literature, including during the 1960s, in novels such as Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra (1964). It has always been a staple of certain Marxist analyses. And since the 1990s, a range of political commentators on the Left have offered new critiques of liberal democracy, challenging the view that communism must now be seen as defunct, irretrievable from Stalinism and the Gulag. They point to liberal illusions about politics, the shaky assumptions of basic consensus about the rules of the game, the limitations of notions of deliberative democracy, etc.

Although there is no single school of thought on such issues, especially influential examples of such critiques include writings by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Jodi Dean. Any analysis here, however, would need to recognise important differences between their political arguments. Dean writes about the illusions perpetrated upon us in what she calls ‘communicative capitalism’. This enables a constant theatre to occur online, an arena of endless subjective expressions, viewpoints, chatter, blogs, feeds, texts; or, as she puts it, the ‘now quaint term from the dot.com years, mindshare’. This present-day system, Dean adds, instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence, or the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom, creates a ‘deluge of screens and spectacles [that] undermines political opportunity and efficacy for most of the world’s peoples’. See Jodi Dean, ‘Theorizing Conspiracy Theory’, Theory & Event, 4:3 (2000). See also idem, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca, 1998); Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, 2002); and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham, NC, 2009). Cf. Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, edited and introduced by Matt Colquhoun (London, 2021).

Complicating any traditional Marxist account today is the challenge of green politics and the realisation that we may have to face the end of models based upon economic ‘growth’. See, for instance, George Monbiot, ‘Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction’, Guardian, 30 October 2021, www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-ourown-destruction.

33. This is well described by journalist Gordon Corera in his 2021 five-part series, ‘The Hack that Changed the World’, BBC Radio 4, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00114h2.

34. Jane Wakefield, ‘Whistleblower breaks Facebook secrecy wall, MP says’, BBC News, 6 October 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58816118.

35. Arendt pointed out Luxemburg’s great anguish about this, and cited a private letter she had written, in the late summer of 1918, that included the lines: ‘With the repression of political life in the land as a whole … life dies out in every public institution, becoming a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.’ Quoted in ‘The Freedom to Be Free’, p. 20.

36. Steve Paulson, ‘How Loneliness Can Lead to Totalitarianism’, WPR, 11 April 2021, www.wpr.org/how-loneliness-can-lead-totalitarianism.

37. Anon, review of The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt, Harvard Law Review, 119:2 (December 2005), 639–45.

38. Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, in The Promise of Politics (New York, 2005), edited by Jerome Kohn, pp. 93–200; see the Epilogue. Cf. Anon, ‘review’, p. 642.

39. The point was also made by the liberal intellectual Arthur Schlesinger Jr, in his defence of an open-ended democracy in The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, MA, 1949). He took from Freud the lesson that just as psychic conflict is inevitable, so societies are bound to face interminable tensions. Nonetheless, liberal democracy was the best means of holding society and the practice of thinking together. There could be no total cure for the psyche or for the polity. ‘Problems will always torment us’, Schlesinger wrote in his conclusion, ‘because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try to solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution … The totalitarians regard the toleration of conflict as our central weakness. So, it may appear to be in an age of anxiety. But we know it to be basically our central strength.’

40. These were most fully set out by Melanie Klein in ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16 (1935), 145–74, and ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27 (1946), 99–110.

41. Wilfred Bion, Attention and Interpretation (London, 1970).

42. Lizzie Cain and Gemma Moore, ‘Evaluation of Camden Council’s Citizens’ Assembly on the Climate Crisis’, Report, December 2019, UCL, www.camden.gov.uk/documents/20142/0/FINAL+UCL+Evaluation+of+Camden+Council%27s+Citizens%27+Assembly+on+the+Climate+Crisis.pdf/e3f39960-76ce-111d-656b-6154465fc095?t=157979908150L1.

43. Tim Berners-Lee, ‘I Invented the World Wide Web. Here’s How We Can Fix It’, The New York Times, 24 November 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/opinion/world-wide-web.html.

44. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London, 2010).

45. In her final paper, published posthumously in 1963, Klein suggested that, in the first instance, loneliness is the result of our infantile yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state. It springs, she thought, from the (often ‘paranoid’) anxieties we all deal with, in, and beyond, our infancies. People often face in life a deep unconscious dilemma: greater psychic integration requires bearing guilt, coping with mixed feelings; splitting and projection, by contrast, might temporarily deal with all that is ‘bad’, but leaves us lonely and empty. And ‘[s]ince full integration is never achieved, complete understanding of one’s own emotions, anxieties and phantasies is not possible, and this continues as an important factor in loneliness’. ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’, Envy and Gratitude, and Other Works, 1946–1963: The Writings of Melanie Klein (London, 1975), vol 3, Chapter 16, p. 303.

46. Sally Weintrobe, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare (London, 2021).

47. Catherine Garcia, ‘New book says Joint Chiefs chairman worried Trump would attempt a coup’, The Week, 15 July 2021, theweek.com/politics/1002626/new-book-says-joint-chiefs-chairman-worried-trump-would-attempt-a-coup.

48. David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (London, 2018); Anne Applebaum, The Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends (London, 2020).

49. Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy.

50. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford, 1996).