From Brainwashing by Edward Hunter, 1956

. . . the customary reaction, “Such things can’t happen” and “I simply won’t believe it.” People closed their eyes . . .  How much of this was calculated and how much näiveté can be argued indefinitely. What was obvious was that the communists were very profitably exploiting the opportunity this provided.

After the exchange of prisoners of war in Korea, I was asked a number of times by repatriates, now sadder and wise, “Why wasn’t I told?”

"If I had only been told, I don’t believe it could have happened to me,” they said. Colonel Frank H. Schwable, who confessed participation in a nonexistent germ warfare, and Corporal Claude Batchelor, the impressionable lad who declared he didn’t want to come home and then changed his mind, each said this to me, the former in his Arlington residence and the latter in the model guardhouse at historic Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

( pages 5-6 )

 

Threats are . . . generously added . . .  What must have been routine—so many p.o.w.’s from Korea told me of it happening to them—was the mock execution. A “stubborn” man was led into a field and made to kneel. A Red guard stepped up and pressed the cold steel of a pistol against the recalcitrant’s temple. Sometimes he was asked once more if he would co-operate, other times the trigger was pulled at once. Usually there was no bullet in it. But it was like the game of Russian roulette. Every once in a while, to make it more exciting, the pistol did have a bullet in it.

Another time, newly captured prisoners would be lined up facing a ditch. They would hear the enemy officer clicking his pistol. Every one had heard of men being shot that way from behind and their bodies let fall into a common grave. The thoughts that went through one particular young man’s mind at that moment were a mixture of stoicism and stupor. He told me so himself.

Instead of being shot, he noticed from the corner of his eye that the officer was passing up the line behind the fellows, turning them around and then shaking their hands. Although neither the young man nor the officer, who was probably just following orders, understood it that clearly, this was symbolic rebirth. The soldier who told me it happened to him was Claude Batchelor. “I never got over it,” he said. The relief he felt must have been akin to gratitude, almost as if the man had saved his life.

( pages 216-7 )

 

The . . . insistence that a man rid himself of “bourgeois poisons” was like mumbo-jumbo. Only when a chap had been brainwashed this way did he fail to see that far from “helping the people,” he was only betraying his buddies and his country. Clarity of mind was needed to see through this, and the whole Red drive was to make a brain [‘mind’?] foggy instead.

How could a chap with only a few years of education and little or no Sunday school, who had gone directly into the military as a raw recruit, who found himself in Korea a few months later and in a p.o.w. camp a few months after that—all before his twenty-first birthday—see through such sleight-of-hand when people at home were daily falling for card sharks, quack doctors, and communist fronts in spite of all the warnings given about such sharp practices?

Yet such was part of the personal story of many. One such was Claude Batchelor, the Texas country boy who broke away from the wretched group which said it didn’t want to go home. He was sentenced to a life term by courtmartial, which was reduced on appeal to twenty years. After serving several years, he was transferred to civilian custody, which freed him. I interviewed him before his trial, when he was filling reams of pages with “thought conclusions” and “thought criticisms” in the Red confessional manner. The heaps of pages should make instructive reading . . .

( pages 241-2 )

 

The element of conviction, which was such a tremendous factor in preserving stamina, requires separate consideration. Without convictions, a man was soft clay in the hands of the Reds. I heard of no case where anyone without convictions was able to resist brainwashing in an effective manner once the communists began to apply the heat. Extra proof came from an entirely different direction, from those who had capitulated miserably. They had invariably been lacking in strong convictions. Whether they were well educated, well proportioned, wealthy, or of high position, the result was the same as with anyone else who lacked convictions.

Claude Batchelor was a tragic example of this lack. His lawyer asked me for a deposition, which I wrote after prolonged sessions with his client in the modern prison at old Fort Sam Houston. I summarized my conclusions in two paragraphs. Indeed, only one phrase was needed to tell the whole dismal story; “A lack of settled convictions and with no depth of feeling given to him by home, church, or school.”

Not one in the many hours I spent with him did Batchelor allude to positive convictions. The words “I believe . . .” seemed no part of him. He was a handsome, tall lad with clean-cut features and a patient manner. What had he been taught at home, church, and school?

( pages 274-5 )

 

Brainwashing is not only used against foreigners and selected nationals, but is imposed on whole populations in the Soviet bloc, everywhere from Russia to Vietminh. Obviously, it has to be modified immensely for such widespread application. The Reds do not have anywhere near the trained personnel for such a program. The overwhelming majority of the communists themselves have only gone through a softening-up process. Inside the power framework of communism, this is all that is required as long as people have no alternative but to do as the Politbureau wants. If they talk and act as if they were truly indoctrinated, they are just as useful to the Reds.

Those two tiny words, “as if,” are power elements. When a person can be made to perform as if by his own free will, even if he hates it, the result is the same. A great proportion of these individuals, as time goes on without hope being restored, try to justify their surrender by finding excuses for it, convincing themselves that they are not living a lie and that the Communist Party has as much right to chastise them as a parent has to punish a wayward child.

The Red hierarchy is obliged to select its underlings mostly from among such people. They are the “active Party members” and even the indoctrinators. I met some of them among the Chinese Red Army troops who had gone over to the side of the Free World. A surprisingly large number had been Communist Party members. They told me how they had joined the communists as young men, accepting Red claims and promises at face value. The cynicism and cruelty they had to indulge in as they advanced in Party trust conflicted with the idealism that had brought them into communism. They became confused and a creeping disillusionment spread through them.

( pages 281-2 )

 

. . . Chinese brainwashers, stationed in the Red hospital and at other points around Panmunjom, retained control over Batchelor’s little coterie of men who said they did not want to go home. They were set to spying on each other in a collectivity of fear and distrust disguised as unity, to dancing the yangko and beating drums, interpreted to the outside world as enthusiasm, and to smoking hasheesh.

The prisoners were induced to edit and read each other’s mail and were persuaded to announce that they did not want any more letters from home. They took the bundles of mail handed over to them and put them unopened under a cot to be distributed after the end of the negotiations, when the words of their loved ones would be too late to have effect. They were never alone, never outside the collectivity. Any slight jar would have put an end to the trance-inducing pitch of hysteria on which the Reds depended.

Batchelor told me that one night he noticed a few pages from Reader’s Digest poking through the edges of a stack of mail under the cot. He managed to slip them out without the others seeing, and found an article by Whittaker Chambers on communism. What he read conflicted so drastically with every word he had been hearing for several years that its effect was like a hammer blow. The multitude of concealed doubts and worries that had been torturing him settled into one clear thought. He had to get away. He consciously set his mind on escape, and before dawn managed to slip out. The Pavlovian animal,* when its conditioned environment is interfered with, tends to forget what it has been taught!

The Red hierarchy cannot help but suspect this, and so cannot trust its own adherents. This prospect of an explosive collapse from within drives the Politbureaus to madder and madder lengths in their internal controls. The terror they impose outside their ranks reflects the terror they feel within. If mutual accusations and purges cease for even a brief period in any communist country, this internal crack-up would begin at once.

Confusion, the first requirement in brainwashing, is also the initial step in communist disintegration. But the clarity of mind that can best safeguard a free man is the greatest threat of all to the communist plan.

( pages 284-5 )

Brainwashing The Story of Men Who Defied It by Edward Hunter,
New York : Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956.
Brainwashing from Pavlov to Powers by Edward Hunter,
New York : Bookmailer, 1960.

    * Not quite accurate, the Pavlovian animal cannot “change his mind” about any subject at all in any circumstances at all. The analogy may be partially correct but not entirely applicable. Perhaps a “Freudian slip” by the generally reliable author. — (WPT)