Individuals who had previously been skeptical of communism emerged from these sessions, proclaiming their firm belief in communism and confessing their previous ‘errors’ and even ‘crimes’ in opposing communism.
Robert Lifton described the psychological techniques of such mind control in his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China.
The Chinese used these techniques to help North Korea during the Korean War (1950 to 1953). Captured American soldiers were made to confess to crimes which they had not committed. Edgar Schein documented these instances of ‘thought control’ in his book, Coercive Persuasion: A socio-psychological analysis of the “brainwashing” of American civilian prisoners by the Chinese Communists.
Louis West also analyzed China’s use of undue influence in an article, “Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread).”
The term ‘brainwashing’ became a permanent part of the popular vocabulary, although specialists prefer phrases like ‘thought control,’ ‘mind control,’ ‘thought reform,’ ‘unethical influence,’ and ‘undue influence.’
Spy novels and movies about secret agents began to regularly feature the ideas of brainwashing.
In The New York Times, Tim Weiner writes that, during the 1950s, China was “a strange enemy driven by an alien ideology, killing Americans abroad, threatening Americans at home.” Bit by bit, the public learned “that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war.”
There are at least two variants of brainwashing: the first changes a person’s beliefs and values; the second induces him to make false confessions of crimes he never committed.
The type of brainwashing which changes beliefs and values has wide-ranging implications. The person will view his own past differently: what was good is now bad, and what was bad is now good. The person will act differently: actions are based on values. The person will speak differently: he’ll give up military secrets, or make propaganda statements for the media.
Tim Weiner recalls that Edward Hunter popularized the word:
The Korean War had just begun in 1950 when The Miami News published his article, “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party.” He determined that “the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels,” experts in the use of “drugs and hypnotism.”
Although forms of mind control had been featured in fiction, like Brave New World and 1984, Weiner notes that
It took Mao’s China — and the forced “confessions” of some American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict — to make brainwashing a centerpiece of 1950s culture.
In the context of the Cold War, China seemed better than the Soviet Union at thought control techniques, and used them more often. Weiner cites “A Dutch psychologist, Joost A. M. Meerloo,” who wrote
in a New York Times Magazine article in 1954: “The totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their own purposes. They have applied the Pavlovian technique — in a far more complex and subtle way, of course — to produce the reflex of mental and political submission of the humans in their power.”
After the Cold War, the practice of mind control is more commonly found in ‘destructive cults’ like the Scientology organization or the Unification Church (known as the ‘Moonies’). Mind control, as unethical influence, can also be found in personal relationships in a family, a group of friends, or a workplace.
