Symposium on Communist Brainwashing

At the height of the Cold War in 1957, psychiatrist Dr. Robert J. Lifton joined a panel of experts at the New York Academy of Medicine on the topic of mind control: "Well, I'm not going to talk about a mental douche or about brainwashing tonight, but rather...audiological remolding, audiological reform, or thought reform."

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Brainwashing is not really brainwashing. This is the central point of Dr. Harold G. Wolf makes introduction to this panel discussion of “the methods used by the Russian and Chinese Communists in dealing with their prisoners.” He was the lead author of a study conducted by the U.S. Federal Government on the subject.

The Communists, he says, “are skilled in the extraction of information from prisoners and in making prisoners do their bidding. It does appear that they can force men to confess to crimes which have not been committed and then apparently to believe in the truth of their confessions and to express sympathy and gratitude toward those who have imprisoned them.” He claims that these techniques are not new or unique to the communists, however, and the term “brainwashing” come, not from a place of science, but from the journalist, Ed Hunter. 

Instead, the communists “do make an orderly attempt to obtain information from their prisoners and to convert their prisoners to forms of behavior and belief acceptable to their captors.”

His colleague, Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, walks through the methods used by the State Police in communist countries. They don’t use guns or hypnosis, he clarifies, and their techniques are not designed by scientists. Instead, they consider large categories of people as potential criminals. Anyone arrested by the state is considered a criminal ipso facto, he says, and “this is very important to remember because this attitude is not only the attitude of the State Police; it is also shared by the inhabitants of the State in general.”

Prisoners are taken to a detention prison to be interrogated. 

Dr. Hinkle describes the supposed psychological state of the prisoner. As a member of a suspect group, he feels a sense of guilt, and, because only the guilty are arrested, he is abandoned by his friends and neighbors. The prisoner is then put into dramatic circumstances: four weeks in a small cell with a cot and a slop jar, no view, and no contact with the outside world. Dr. Hinkle describes the effects of solitary confinement—days of hyperactivity, followed by despondency, and then fatigue and eventually delirium. 

He is then interrogated by a young police officer who has no special neurological or psychiatric training, but who has on-the-job experience and a good deal of background material on his prisoner, which can be used strategically.

“If the man is known to be proud […], he may deal with him by calling him by his first name. If the man is known to be fearful, he may threaten him. If he's [inaudible], he may attempt violence and so on.”

The prisoner, after such a long period of solitude, wants to talk, and they discuss his biography. Because of the flexibility of the definition of crime, “he knows fairly well that it is very likely that something that he has done can be interpreted as such a crime.” 

The prisoner confesses, and there is the implicit threat that the entire ordeal will be repeated if he retracts that confession. Only a small fraction of these confessions actually go to public trial, however, when the State Police can be sure that nothing will be said that will “upset their own plan.”

This, Hinkle says, is the Russian system. In the Chinese system, there is less solitary confinement. Instead, prisoners are introduced into a hostile prison environment that becomes much less hostile once the prisoner changes his attitudes. 

The panel discusses to what degree this is a matter of method. Dr. Hinkle says, for example, that the process of stringing a person along, letting him watch his friends be seized and forcing him to wait his turn, is not a “diabolical method of torture,” but instead “simply just clumsy cops at work.” 

Similarly, the interrogators are vulnerable because they are so young. He can become emotionally involved with the prisoner, and if he fails to deliver a confession in time, his career suffers.

Dr. Robert Lifton cuts in with a question. He wonders if the devotion to ideology influences the effectiveness of this “so-called brainwashing.” Dr. Hinkle speaks to the patent idealism and emotional fervor of the communists. 

“Even a foreigner,” he says, “when faced with a man who has a set of beliefs to which he adheres very strongly and for which he gives idealistic explanations, is often attracted to this man.”

Dr. Albert Biderman talks about attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force POWs in Korea, based on Air Force research. He says that his interviews captured the dramatic heorism of the soldiers, but that his objective is “science and not drama.” Instead of focusing on their heroic stories, he emphasizes “that the finding that should be reacted to is the finding, the most new and most spectacular finding, is the finding that there was nothing new or spectacular about these events we studied.” The Chinese methods were the same as those used for centuries by other interrogators—with similarly extreme results. He walks through a chart detailing the eight general measures and techniques used. 

“In the simple torture situation, the bamboo splinters thing of popular imagination, the contest is clearly one between the interrogator and the victim,” he explains, “Can the victim endure pain beyond the point to which the interrogator can go in inflicting pain? The answer, from the standpoint of the interrogator, is very frequently yes.”

Instead, victims are made to stand at attention for long periods of time. In this case, “the immediate source of pain is now not the interrogator but the victim himself. The contest becomes in a way one of the victim against himself.”

He goes into more detail about the specific psychological effects of this standing torture, and notes that this form of torture is good from a propaganda perspective—the communists can deny that they ever touched the prisoner. 

Confessions, too, are more complicated “than signing a piece of paper which says on such and such a date I committed such and such a crime, signed John Jones.” He walks through a list of techniques used. 

The panel asks questions about those who did and did not respond to these techniques. Dr. Biderman explains that their compliance and resistance was probably less related to moral character, and more to situational factors. Also, he notes, “No one complied completely; no one resisted completely.”

The panel then turns to Dr. Robert Lifton. He says he will tackle, not brainwashing, but the Chinese concept of “audiological remolding,” or “thought-reform.” The process, he says, is applied, not just to prisoners of war, but to broad swaths of the Chinese population. It consists of four stages: the emotional assault, followed by leniency, then confession, and finally re-education. 

The prisoner is brought in and confronted with his crimes. Then he asked to detail his entire life and experience in China, which, for missionaries, might be a period of 30 or 40 years. After the interrogation, the prisoner endures “the struggle” in his cell: “he sits in the middle of the cell, and the other prisoners, his cellmates, form a circle around him and begin to shot invectives at him denouncing him as an arch criminal, a stubborn imperialist who refuses to recognize his crimes.” These are prisoners working towards their own release. 

After months of this treatment, there is leniency. Lifton quotes a priest, who describes the kindness of a judge—a judge who encourages him to confess and get it over with. The theme of confession is then repeated over and over. 

When he eventually confesses, he is made to denounce his colleagues… and then undergoes a reeducation process, and the end of which there is “the development of a new identity, the recoding of reality, the conversion, if you will, in which the prisoner begins to look at the world through Communist eyes and if the process is successful, is reborn.”