Chapter 6

A HISTORY OF BRAINWASHING THEORIES

    Since the Korean war a lot has been written on how to control people's minds. The controversy first hit the public's attention in the mid 1950's after a writer, Edward Hunter, published a book about brainwashing.69

    American prisoners of war had been reported to have made anti-American statements, and other prisoners had chosen to remain behind after they had been liberated. Hunter, proposed that a new process of indoctrination had been developed by the Chinese communists, and "that they had discovered an intense manipulative process that had insidious power to actually alter the mental outlook of those who fell victim to it." While Hunter was later exposed as an under cover CIA agent, Americans become gripped in the fear of being brainwashed.70

    So what was brainwashing? As early as 1955 the author and philosopher, L. Ron Hubbard spoke of it when he had been dropped off some manuals on brainwashing. Apparently they were sent by a professor "Charles Stickly" from Columbia University in New York City. The manuals appeared to be a German translation of a 1947 Russian instruction book, a synthesis on brainwashing. n

    Brainwashing is a term given to the methods employed to have a person alter his basic beliefs about a subject. Those methods should not be confused with those methods which use psychiatric drugs and hypnosis to control a person. Both methods are examined in this article, but only brainwashing specifically refers to non-drug or nonhypnotic means.

    In researching the materials sent to an organization which in turn sent them on to Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard found that brainwashing was just a new term for an older term called "psychopolitiks. ",z L. Ron Hubbard wrote, "in the original text of this book there was a warning to psychopolitical operatives that they must stamp out Dianetics, Christian Science, and practical psychology, as these alone represented a menace to the brainwashing programs. This reference in the text to Dianetics (which has been known to the Russians since 1938) makes the matter very much our business, quite aside from research."

    Mr. Hubbard's research consisted of not only of finding out what was brainwashing, but also how to deal with it and undo its affects should it exist. Prior to receiving the brainwashing manual in 1955, the organization was working with ex-Korean prisoners of war in 1954 to remove the ill mental affects from their prisoner experience.73

    Mr. Hubbard also wrote in December 1955 of his vital concern of the source of brainwashing, and why communism had made such vast progress across the face of the world, "It is an idea advancing against arms, and the arms of course will never be able to stop an idea. An idea will be necessary to stop the idea. We may very unfortunately be those persons in the possession of the idea that will stop the other idea. Certainly the way things are going, if we don't use our ideas to stop the incoming ideas across the face of the Earth, we are going to wind up one of these days in the middle of a total communism, living in a totally brainwashed society, the way I look at it."

    But Mr. Hubbard's conclusions on brainwashing was finally reached and given in a lecture in September 1956.7a After carefully studying the works of Pavlov, which he found full of gaps and holes as scientific theories. Mr. Hubbard announced that the communists had in fact no such technology as brainwashing, and that it was all just a propaganda hoax. Quite clearly brainwashing did not work. Mr. Hubbard explained that he had personally interviewed many Japanese war prisoners after their release from the Second World War, and they had undergone a much harsher treatment than those prisoners at the hands of Korean communists. None of these Korean prisoners had suffered mentally. Mr. Hubbard was a naval officer himself during the second world war. He explained, "This whole subject of brainwashing is the greatest hoax of modern times." But, Mr. Hubbard did acknowledge, that if a person was placed under physical duress and harsh conditions then at that time he could be affected, but no permanent mental damage could be inflicted on the prisoner. The hoax he points out was developed by the Russians who had based their hoax of Pavlov, the Russian psychologist, and his faulty work on the behavior modification of dogs.75

    However, the communist propaganda on brainwashing, along with the CIA counter propaganda about brainwashing by Hunter (1951, 1958), popularized the term brainwashing and it entered the psych of the West.

    After the Korean armistice was signed psychologists and psychiatrists traveled to Korea. Among them were J. Robert Lifton and Edgar Schein in 1961. Basically their research

    also concluded that Hunter's theories were not valid. They also found that people could be made to do things under intense physical deprivation, such as lack of food, sleep or clothing, but that a person's basic beliefs would not alter. As soon as the physical environment returned to normal the individual would generally return to his prior stated beliefs. Additionally, the Korean prisoners had never been requested to convert to communism. However, regardless of these results, and that those prisoners who had made "un-American" statements had not changed their basic attitudes, "the term "brainwashing" persisted and many people adopted Hunter's original perspective as truth."

    In Freedom Magazine 11 March 1969 Mr. Hubbard wrote further on the subject of brainwashing.76 Part of what he wrote was about the source of brainwashing, "Pavlov turned out a 400-page book. That is the text book which covers the subject of "brainwashing." The word brainwashing means "the technology of Pavlov used to convert or pervert political allegiance."

    "The psychiatrist and psychologist, being "experts" count on the "ignorant public" to use the word loosely. The whole idea and technology is Russian communist and is their primary tool. "Pavlov (Ivan Petrovich, 1949-1936), specialized in treating animals. He was Director in the Communist Russian Academy of Medicine and the Institute of Experimental Medicine. In 1928 Stalin is stated to have put Pavlov in the Kremlin with orders to write all he knew about animals so that it could be used to coerce men." The point being here that the term is both communist and psychiatric.

    In Britain the psychiatrist, William Sargant came out in support of Hunter's theories, but he was later discredited as he was found to be a pioneer in methods of placing false memories into patients. He attested at a U. S. Senate hearing, "that the therapist should deliberately distort the facts of the patient's life-experience to achieve heightened emotional response and abreaction. In the drunken state of narcoanalysis patients are prone to accept the therapist's false constructions. "77

    The brainwashing debate got a lot more publicity when in 1975 the media-empire heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was locked in a cupboard for long durations of time, physically raped and indoctrinated into the leftist theories of her captors. She was later

    photographed carrying a rifle during her participation in a bank robbery. She was soon captured and sent to trial.

    During the trial several people spoke on her behalf. Two of them were psychiatrists stating that Hearst was subject to brainwashing and thus not responsible for her decision to participate in the bank robbery. Those psychiatrists were Louis J. West and Robert J. Lifton. There was also another person, Margaret Thaler Singer, but she did not testify. Hearst received no compassion because of the brainwashing arguments.

    During the 1970s as new religions rose in popularity in the USA, so did an anti-religious movement became popular. Several psychiatrists became involved promoting the concept of brainwashing as a term that could account for these unexpected religious conversions. It should be noted that it was the very same psychiatrists and psychologists who studied and used the works of Pavlov who were leading the charge against religion. One of those psychiatrists, Louis J. West, (who testified at the Hearst trial) was later to be exposed and having himself been active in CIA mind altering LSD experiments.78

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