![]() ![]() But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured. For Hunter-who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing-it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. ![]() ![]() The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. “ is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.” “The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. from pouring resources into combatting it. The short answer is no-but that didn’t stop the U.S. Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will? By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides brainwashing? The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces. military denied the charges made in the soldiers’ “confessions,” but couldn’t explain how they’d been coerced to make them. Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was everywhere. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. ![]() When he was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, Colonel Frank Schwable was the highest ranking military officer to meet that fate, and by February 1953, he and other prisoners of war had falsely confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. Hunter’s inflammatory rhetoric didn’t immediately have a huge impact-until three years into the Korean War, when American prisoners of war began confessing to outlandish crimes. Chamber of Commerce was so worried about the spread of Communism that it proposed removing liberals, socialists and communists from places like schools, libraries, newspapers and entertainment. It wasn’t the first time fears of Communism and mind control had seeped into the American public. The process was meant to “ change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet-a human robot-without the atrocity being visible from the outside.” He called this hypnotic process “brainwashing,” a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash ( xi) and brain ( nao), and warned about the dangerous applications it could have. In the article, and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedong’s Red Army used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless, Communist automatons. “Brain-washing Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party,” blared his headline in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm. ![]()
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