Is brainwashing possible? How does it work? Does the government really use it? How would I go about brainwashing someone? –JRMecca, via e-mail
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The term brainwashing was invented by a journalist (and, it turned out, CIA hireling) named Edward Hunter, who in 1951 published a book called Brainwashing in Red China. As portrayed by Hunter and later writers, brainwashing was a scientific program of mind control in which masterful communist manipulators used techniques such as Pavlovian conditioning, drugs, and hypnosis to turn ordinary folks into robotlike tools of the state. The public ate it up and soon was calling any type of communist indoctrination brainwashing. When U.S. servicemen captured during the Korean conflict publicly confessed to war crimes, the cry went up: They’re brainwashing our boys! Subsequent scholarly studies of civilians released from communist Chinese prisons confirmed that something akin to brainwashing really was going on. Robert Jay Lifton, whose 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China remains one of the classic works in the field, interviewed dozens of ex-prisoners. He concluded that they’d been subjected to a multistep program starting with an assault on the prisoner’s identity through brutality and humiliation and often leading to an admission of guilt, betrayal of friends and associates, and finally submission and (for some) release. In Lifton’s persuasive depiction, several former captives, in particular a Catholic priest compelled to confess to implausible crimes, sound eerily like the broken protagonists in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Brainwashing became a hot topic again in the 1970s with the rise of religious cults such as the Hare Krishnas, the Moonies, and, more chillingly, the People’s Temple–you know, Jim Jones, poisoned Kool-Aid, etc. Cultists sometimes did crazy things; obviously, alarmists argued, they’d been brainwashed. Calmer sorts eventually established that in most cults physical coercion, an essential element of brainwashing as commonly understood, was missing. If anyone was doing any brainwashing it was the deprogrammers hired by families to kidnap their cult-member relatives and hold them captive for days in an effort to knock some sense into them.
