Brainwashing

Brainwashing is any form of mental conditioning under torture, starvation, sleep deprivation, or hypnotism to coerce captives either to make propaganda statements or to perform some other act not in keeping with one's loyalties or moral code.

History of the term

The first modern use of the word was by CIA operative Edgar Hunter. He used it to describe "re-education" practices used on prisoners of war by the Communist Chinese during the Korean War. The chief concern was that seventy percent of American prisoners of war had confessed to various activities, including without limitation the use of biological agents, that fall under the category of "war crimes." Another fifteen percent collaborated actively with their captors, and only five percent resisted to the end. All prisoners had been subject to often brutal interrogation techniques, including sleep deprivation.

Marks reports that the CIA attempted to develop a brainwashing technique of their own. After years of experimentation, they concluded that no reliable method existed to make anyone do or say anything he would not otherwise want to do, except that months of the brutal regimen in Soviet or Chinese prisons would be sufficient to cause a prisoner to say or do anything to bring the ordeal to an end. Marks also notes that British and other allied prisoners did not confess or collaborate in such large numbers.

The term later appeared in the context of religious conversion to the Unification Church, and the controversial services of Ted Patrick, who called himself a "deprogrammer." However, an investigation by the American Psychological Associations in the 1980s ended with the conclusion that "mind control" (as applied to religious conversion of volunteers) was not a scientifically viable theory.

The concept in detail

Allegations of techniques for impressing an idea or a command on the subconscious mind arguably date back to the Crusades. Specifically, the Nizari Ismailis, under the leadership of Hassan-e Sabbah, gained a reputation for secret murder against the enemies of Shi'a Islam. Marco Polo and others alleged that the operatives of this sect that committed these murders did so while under the influence of hashish, administered to them in a training facility that was part barracks, part bordello. Thus this sect gained the Arabic name hashishiyyim, or hashshasheen, which in Vulgar Latin became asesini, or Assassins in English.

Robert Jay Lifton studied former American POWs from the Korean War and published a description of the specific techniques used on them. He determined that all prisoners who made confessions to imagined war crimes had undergone the following stages in their conditioning:

1. Assault on identity
2. Guilt
3. Self-betrayal
4. Breaking point
5. Leniency
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling of guilt
8. Releasing of guilt
9. Progress and harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth

The CIA did in fact study the use of hypnosis as a technique either of interrogation or of strengthening resistance to interrogation. The CIA concluded that hypnosis was not a reliable interrogation technique. Nor did the CIA have any confidence that a hypnotized subject could perform an action under a post-hypnotic suggestion. But at the time of the writing of this paper, the authors stated that further research was indicated. Whether such research was ever conducted is unclear.

References in popular culture

• The most thoroughgoing mention of brainwashing in popular culture was The Manchurian Candidate. This was also the most controversial such mention, because the theme involved inducing a person not only to confess to a crime he had not committed, but to commit murder on command and then forget that he had done so.

• In the more modern motion picture The Family Man, a young woman pleads with her father, "Promise you won't kidnap me and my brother and plant stuff in our brains?"

External Links

• How Brainwashing Works by Julia Layton

See Also

• The Manchurian Candidate
• Barack Obama