Communist Indoctrination

Its Significance To Americans

By MAJOR WILLIAM E. MAYER

TO FREEDOM FORUM XVIII, SEARCY, ARKANSAS. APRIL 15, 1957

Distributed by THE NATIONAL EDUCATION PROGRAM

Introducing Major Mayer:
Major William N. Slayer is instructor in Neuropsychiatry at the U.S. Army Medical
Service School, Fort Sam Houston. He is the Army's foremost authority on Communist
''brain-washing.'' As a top psychiatrist on the prisoner-study project m Japan, he
interviewed and examined the complete records of more than 1,000 American soldiers
released from prisoner of war camps in Korea. Since then he has addressed military
and civilian groups all over the United States.
Major Mayer took his undergraduate work at the University of Washington,
Seattle, and North western University, Evanston. After considerable psychiatric practice
in service and a period of teaching at the University of California Medical School, Major
Mayer, in July, 1950, was sent to the Far East as Chief of Psychiatry and Neurology
Service of the U. S. Naval Hospital at Yakosuka, Japan, and in six months saw the
hospital expand from 80 to 5000 beds.
In 1952, after service with the Marine Corps, he was transferred to the Regular
Army Medical Corps and became assistant chief of the Neuropsychiatric Department at
the 8167th U.S. Army Hospital and Tokyo Army Hospital in Japan. It was during this
period that he was assigned to the special project of studying returning prisoners of war.
Major Mayer holds the Bronze Star Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, Presidential
Unit Citation for Marine Corps, Navy Unit Commendation, Korean Service Medal, and
other decorations. He is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honorary Medical
Society, Nu Sigma Medical Fraternity, the American Medical Association, and he is a
Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

By MAJOR WILLIAM E. MAYER
TO FREEDOM FORUM XVIII, SEARCY, ARKANSAS. APRIL 15, 1957

Dr. Benson, Ladies and Gentlemen: On this the last unpenalized day of paying 2
the subsidy you are paying to support the United States Government I am acutely aware
of the privilege of talking to you. I was trying to figure out a few moments ago how much
it is costing each of you to keep me in business and I figure there's hardly anyone in the
room who is paying less than a dollar a day for the defense establishment, which is
considerable. You have a right, we think, therefore, to know something about where
your money is going and what problems we're having using it properly; and I personally
also think you have not only the right but the obligation to know even more about the
reason Dr. Benson mentioned for our existence: the nature of international Communism.
We exist for almost no other reason.
Unlike most armies on earth we are not also an internal security organization.
And we are genuinely, and feel it more acutely these days than ever, the servants of the
sovereigns of this country.
We are having problems in the military service which I would like to talk to you
about, because these are problems insoluble within the framework of the Defense
Department. They are problems for the whole social organization. They are reflections,
as are most of our attitudes and trends and techniques in the armed forces, of attitudes
and trends and techniques in industry, primarily, from whom we borrow very freely; and
of some currents which exist throughout the whole society.
I'm going to talk about Communist indoctrination, for the very simple reason that
only in the last few years have we really had a chance to learn anything about it that
wasn't just horror stories, or the sometimes objective but statistically insignificant stories
of individuals who'd been held in Communist captivity.
PRIMARY WEAPONS
Communist indoctrination and their methods present to us the Communist
primary weapon, the weapon with which they've done this fabulous thing that was
mentioned here a few minutes ago, in expanding to such an incredible degree just in the
last few years.
Our primary weapon in this country, despite the fact that everything you read and
see and hear is about guided missiles and push-buttons and gadgets, is still the human
being. And the quality of the human beings which make up our defense establishment is
something which has to be scrutinized from time to time and really continuously, and the
attempts to make them into finer instruments for the preservation of our freedoms
against foreign intrusion is an effort that can never be let down. We've reason to believe,
I think, that this weapon needs some work.
Now what I'm about to say will be drawn primarily from data which was collected
officially by the United States and its military and some civilian agencies. The facts I will
give are facts. The opinions and conclusions I shall draw are mine and not necessarily
those of any agency of the United States, particularly the Department of Army or the
Department of Defense.
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LETHARGY OUR DANGER
I couldn't agree more that Americans are in danger of something connected with
lethargy. We've been manifesting a good bit of lethargy about civil defense, for one
thing. For about twenty years we've been manifesting a good bit of it about
Communism. Now this is partly by design of the Communists. Their program for tyranny
is clothed in such complicated and often boring and repetitious and abstruse economic
and political theory that a great many people who could understand Communism simply
abandon the attempt because it gets so complicated that it's almost not worth the effort;
and you get lost and we're content to call it names and realize and agree among
ourselves that it's bad; and yet we're terribly unrealistic about it; it's awfully hard to
convince people that there it is, well, much of the Fifth Column that Dr. Benson
mentioned.
It's hard to realize that these people are any more serious than Hitler was when
he wrote that book and said that he was going to do exactly what he went ahead and
did. And the Communists have been doing this for thirty-five years: writing and stating in
their official documents that sooner or later and one way or another - and they think now
they can do it internally without having to shoot - one way or the other they're going to
destroy us.
And so it's time that we slipped out of this lethargy a little and tried to understand
Communism, its mechanics and its intentions, in a much more specific way. We haven't
ever before overcome any kind of an adversary by calling it names and then trying not
to think about it and hoping it will go away.
"LABORATORY" EXPERIMENT
In 1950 the first random samples crosssection of healthy young adult Americans
in our history got an opportunity to live in a Communist state. They lived there for almost
three years. We viewed these men as sources of a tremendous amount of information
about Communism, and so they were. More important, however, they proved to be a
tremendous source of information about Americans. And so I'll try to intertwine these
two things and describe to you what happened to them and how they reacted to it.
It shook us, those of us who did the study, to find that our preconceived ideas
were wrong - about how invulnerable we Americans are to anything as pointless and
kind of stupid and unrealistic as many Communist ideas seem to be.
There were 7000 American soldiers - they were mostly Army troops - who were
captured in Korea - and they provided us almost with a controlled study of a sort of a
microcosm of the Communist state. These men were, as I said in the beginning and I
wish to re-emphasize, a fair crosssection of young American males: the same ones that
worked in your shops, the same ones that you in education are turning out; they were
not garrison soldiers; they were not maladjusted civilians who sought refuge in the
armed forces: at least half of them were drafted in honor of the occasion. And these
men were also not uneducated. Compared to the troops who fought in World War II they
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were slightly better trained on the whole, militarily, and of a slightly higher over-all public
educational level.
They fell into enemy hands not because they were incompetent soldiers - which
is sometimes true of prisoners. They fell into those hands because they were suddenly
surrounded by such hordes of Chinese that there was no other alternative possible.
Many of our troops were captured in groups of several hundred.
STRANGE BEHAVIOR
Now these men behaved in a way that was so profoundly different from our
expectations about the behavior of American soldiers under prolonged stress that we
began searching to see if we could find reasons - reasons outside the rather narrow
framework of the Armed Forces - for their behavior - not misbehavior. And as a result of
our search we found that the men who fought in Korea were a strikingly different group
of human beings from those who fought in World War II, in spite of the fact that they
were selected by the same procedure.
During the war we expected that those men who were unfortunate enough to
become prisoners of an enemy would behave as Americans had, in all our recorded
history, behaved when someone attempted forcibly to deprive them of their individual
and collective freedom.
We knew that in the past Americans subjected to this have always reacted by
forming, first of all, tight little units - called the "Buddy System" in the service - units of
two or three or four, individuals. And this Buddy System operates, before organizations
develop, to preserve life of the individual. From these tight little groups develop the
characteristic kinds of social organization we're used to seeing, the stafftype
organization: collections of groups of human beings who more or less voluntarily band
themselves together under what they consider to be competent leadership, impose
certain checks on this leadership, and then support it for the purpose of gaining
strength. This never happened in Korea.
NO EFFORT TO ESCAPE
Secondly we know that Americans when confined have an almost overwhelming
impulse to get away. And the Japanese and Germans both wrote at some length about
the most uncooperative, noisiest, recalcitrant, stubbornest, most irreverent prisoners
that they ever tried to hold; namely, the Americans, who invariably had a kind of
diabolical sense of humor along with their attempts to get away. This apparently never
happened in Korea.
Well, we've seen other things among prisoners. We've seen the development of
a system of justice, based upon the presumption that laws and not men must govern.
And what could be remembered of the laws in the code of military justice and other
codes the men were familiar with have always taken precedence among groups of
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prisoners and been established as the laws under which men live. This never happened
in Korea.
And then something new was added. Before the men came home to us their
letters started coming home to us, letters written by PFC John Smith, U.S. Army; 81/2
years of formal education, lower middle-class social and economic background, small
urban community; and a letter written not as he learned it in composition class in 9th
grade but in the language of the materialist dialectician exhorting mother to band
together with other progressive and informed citizens and stop the senseless slaughter
of innocent civilians for the profit of the imperialist Wall Street warmongers.
Now, coming from Private John Smith this seemed a little odd and especially
when more and more of these came.
AIDING RED CAUSE
Then we saw articles written by similar soldiers appearing in those well-known
documents such as the Daily Worker and Masses and Mainstream and the Shanghai
Daily News, Pravda, The Peoples World; also written by Americans and also written in
the typical Communist dialectics, and always there was something about the imperialist
Wall Street warmongers "who sent us here."
Then we started seeing cartoons (by American prisoners of war) printed in
Crocodile and other Communist publications: and even in the non-Communist
(supposedly) propaganda material which is disseminated in such huge quantities all
over the earth today by the Communists: cartoons defaming American characters or
American institutions.
Well, taking all these things into account, the letters and the newspaper articles
and the cartoons and the fact that nobody seemed to be getting out of these camps and
escaping back to our lines, and nobody ever managed to steal enough radio equipment
from the Chinese to communicate with us - which incidentally they have always done in
the past - all these things combined led us to believe something strange indeed had
been done to this group of young men. After all they couldn't in ten years be so
profoundly different, could they, from the men who fought in World War II?
FIRST-HAND STUDY
Then they came home. We took about a thousand of them and for comparative
purposes had several hundred troops who had also been prisoners of other
nationalities, particularly Turks, and some Columbians, and we studied them all in
Japan, before they got home.
We noticed some very odd things about these American men. First of all we
noticed that they wouldn't talk to each other. They would talk about each other like no
Americans we had ever seen before. They would talk about each other with a strange
absence of affect, no feeling, no emotion; they simply would talk about each other,
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anything. But not to each other.
And then when they were checked out medically and we knew they were OK we
would say, "You can go down town on a pass if you like, and see the sights and sounds
and smells of Tokyo" - which is quite a city to see - and some did, about one out of five
went on a pass, after three years of being locked up. And those that did go on a pass
went on pass by themselves, which soldiers never do.
Then we noticed what happened when the Red Cross came by with a wonderful
proposition, that you could call home, call anybody you wanted, your friends or your girl
or your mother or your wife, if you had one - anybody, any place in the United States,
talk as long as you wanted and the Red Cross would pick up the tab - it normally, you
know, costs $5 a minute from Japan and these people hadn't been paid. We found
curiously enough that more than half of the returning prisoners said there wasn't
anybody they thought they wanted to talk to. And that seemed odd.
FIRST CONCLUSION
Well we jumped to the conclusion, and it was an easy one, based upon our apathetical
approach to Communism, that these men had been subjected to a strange and
wonderful and mysterious and irresistable procedure called "brain-washing." This was
something we'd been hearing about from Hong Kong. It was a procedure apparently in
use in China for coercing human beings; it was a procedure which involved all the
classical forms of inhumanity to man from the mass execution to the highly-organized
Communist public lynching which is endorsed by the whole village. In its application in
China it included such things as the disruption of families, special schools for reeducation,
reduced diets for certain areas, the redistribution of land, and then all of a
sudden undoing of this redistribution with the establishment of the collective farm; it was
the Chinese version of the Soviet system.
We know that it was pretty much irresistable, or at least it seemed that way; after
all, Cardinal Mindszenty seemed to acquiesce to Soviet secret police methods and he
must have been a convinced man before they got hold of him. An AP correspondent
some of us know named Oatis, who was certainly a convinced human being, was pretty
well handled by the Soviet method. A number of American missionaries were coerced
successfully in China; they came home after having made confessions of being agents
of the United States, which they most assuredly were not; spies for the United States,
which they were not; enemies of the people, imperialist agents; and they would come
home and they would admit to us when they got home that, "No, they never touched
me. Oh, I got beaten up once by some stupid jailer, but this wasn't policy." "No, I didn't
confess because they put burning bamboo splinters under my fingernails." "No, I'm not
ready to recant my confession." And these were odd things.
ALMOST BEYOND UNDERSTANDING
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It's enough to make one believe that they had survived some system for the
coercion of human beings that goes something beyond any of our previous
understanding. Well,this is the weapon that I believe accounts in larger part for
Communist success than any of the mechanical devices that they have.
You know, no tyrant in history using machine guns or primitive variations of
machine guns, or slave camps or forced labor, has ever succeeded for very long in
controlling very large numbers of people. And as you've already heard from 10 per cent
up to 40 per cent in just a few years. Looking at it in a different way, only forty years ago
there was no Communist state on earth. And today about four out of every ten living
human beings live in a Communist dictatorship. Why? They can't kill that many people.
And certainly you cannot believe that they're selling a product that is so irresistable that
people just simply flock to get it.
Now, both of these things are true in part. The product looks awfully good to a
coolie who was kicked around all his life, whereas now he eats a little better and he can
talk a little better. But it isn't that good. And the slave camps and the executions are very
effective, but they are not that effective. And much of their success can be attributed to
this particular weapon which is called brain-washing.
Now it doesn't conform to any of our preconceived ideas, really, and it didn't in
North Korea as the Chinese applied it. Many of the things we expected were possibly
true some years ago but we would be making a terrible mistake and we would very
seriously underestimate the most dangerous enemy we've ever faced to think he hasn't
adapted and become flexible.
NO TORTURE
The average soldier in a front-line bunker in Korea fully expected that if he were
ever captured by this diabolical oriental enemy who, according to what he'd learned in
this country, doesn't care about human life, starves people to death, and so on - he fully
expected that he would be slapped and spat upon and then possibly executed. But,
contrary to popular belief among the soldiers, when they were captured nobody had
burning bamboo splinters put under their fingernails; in fact the Chinese didn't even
seem to be interested in what military information they had and never did interrogate
them along those lines. They didn't use any special drugs to coerce our men, and we
sort of thought they might. We know they have a good deal to do with the international
narcotics traffic, illicit; this is part of the over-all Communist conspiracy today and a fairly
important one; it supplies a tremendous number of dollars which find their way into Red
China.
But they didn't use narcotics, nor did they use marijuana, nor did they use
tranquilizing drugs or any other special kinds of medicines which change men's minds -
in order to get their American prisoners to acquiesce. They didn't use any magic, magic
like Pavlov's conditioned reflex, or hypnosis, or stimulus deprivation, or any other
particularly new or magical device of any sort in coercing Americans.
They didn't use the technique that was in use in some American universities back
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in the thirties when they were recruiting for the Young Communist League. I remember
in Chicago, their recruiting at the university there; their recruiting took the form of a sort
of whispering campaign to the effect that there was free love practiced at the Young
Communist League meetings; and of course they got flocks of curious recruits this way,
but they got practically no Communists. And they gave this method up.
They didn't use any variation of this in handling 7000 American soldiers, who
were really the first the Communists ever had had a chance to work with, too.
CONSTANT INDOCTRINATION
No, what we found in use on them was a system of indoctrination, of education
really, which was of the very highest order of excellence from the standpoint of the
method used and the standpoint of the stewardship shown in the application of this
education. It was very much like-and I hate to keep going back to what Dr. Benson said
- but it, most of it is so appropriate - very much like what God said to Moses; they taught
them as they woke up and they taught them as they went to bed and they taught them
on the way, every day, seven days a week. And with a great deal of evident sincerity.
It was a procedure, however, which differed from most of our preconceived ideas
about the nature of education in that they made an attempt to employ systematically and
deliberately a number of perfectly sound and familiar and tested principles of
psychology and psychiatry, the same ones we use in the treatment of patients. They
used these backwards by our standards, not in any attempt to make people any better
adjusted, more productive, giving adults; but certainly neither in an attempt to deprive
them of their reason or their power of choice or their ability to be responsible.
They did use these principles in an attempt to devalue certain very fundamental
values which we hold to be self-evident and important in our kind of social and
economic system. And they used them to interfere with the basic human relationships
without which we would have no commercial credit, without which we would have no
free enterprise, no healthy competition; and they did this with a remarkable degree of
success.
ROOTS GO BACK
Now this weapon, this indoctrination system, was on the surface a very simple
thing. Tracing it back we could see that its roots lay in Czarist, pre-Communist secret
police methods, adapted and changed by the Communists for their own use, by the
Soviets; further expanded by the Chinese and expanded for use not on criminals and
certainly not on individuals, but for use on groups. And these methods we find are
almost identical tothose which are in use every day in every industrial shop, every
platoon of the Chinese army, every school classroom, and every neighborhood in
Communist China.
And so this has provided us with a way to understand Communism quite devoid
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of its conclusion aspects: to understand it on the basis of the daily life experiences of
the human being who lives in this severest and most competent of all the tyrannies
which have ever been imposed on human beings.
I have here a document which I would like to read to you, which gives some
understanding of the way the education was applied, simply because it illustrates the
Communist attitude toward the student; the student in this case being the American
soldier. What I'm going to read you is a composite of two or three documents we
intercepted, which were written by Communists entirely for Communist eyes. These
reports were evaluations of the nature of the average American soldier, the average
American in other words. They were written in an attempt to be objective, not just
propagandistic, and they were written by people who evidently had some social science
background, as a number of the new Soviet humans do.
In form this was mainly taken from a message written by the Chief of Intelligence
of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army in North Korea to the Chief of Intelligence of the
Chinese Peoples Republic in Peiping. It said this:
ANALYZING AMERICANS
"Based upon our observations of American soldiers and their officers captured in
this War for the Liberation of Korea from Capitalist-Imperialist Aggression, the following
facts are evident:
"The American soldier has weak loyalty to his family, his community, his country,
his religion and to his fellow-soldier. His concepts of right and wrong are hazy and illformed.
Opportunism is easy for him. By himself he feels frightened and insecure. He
underestimates his own worth, his own strength, and his ability to survive. He is ignorant
of social values, social tensions and conflicts. There is little knowledge or understanding
even among U.S. university graduates of American political history and philosophy, the
federal state and community organizations, states and civil rights, freedoms,
safeguards, checks and balances and how these things allegedly operate within his own
system.
"He is insular and provincial with little or no idea of the problems and the aims of
what he contemptuously describes as foreigners and their countries. He has an
unrealistic concept of America's internal and inherent rather than earned or proven
superiority and absolute military invincibility. This is his most vulnerable weakness. He
fails to appreciate the meaning of and the necessity for military or any form of
organization or discipline. Most often he clearly feels that his military service is a kind of
hateful and unavoidable servitude to be tolerated as briefly as possible and then
escaped from as rapidly as possible with as little investment as possible.
"He is what he himself calls sometimes a peacetime soldier and both of these
latter types look upon military service either as a soft and a safe job or hardship and
sacrifice which are unfair and unreasonable to them personally.
"Based upon these facts about the imperialist United States aggressors the
reeducation and reindoctrination program for American prisoners proceeds as planned."
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THEN TO "BRAIN-WASHING"
They then proceeded to educate their Americans. They had quite a problem
since they captured almost all their prisoners within weeks. And so, what they did with
them was take them off in small groups and instead of pulling out their toe-nails and
pouring water in their nose and torturing them in all the exotic ways that people had
thought about, they would get them together in small little groups and give them the first
lesson in the indoctrination, one that was precribed from Peiping and was given in the
same words all over Korea by a large number of young Chinese instructors.
These instructors were there in a ratio of one to about every twenty or thirty
prisoners. They were graduates of American educational institutions, university level.
Mostly they were social scientists. They spoke "1950 U. S. English." They were familiar
with our idiom and with our attitudes and with our primary values. They knew all about
batting averages and Cadillacs and big buildings, and they were still Communists.
And one of these instructors who wore no uniform and carried no weapon would
get together about twelve of his new American students and he would give this speech,
which I quote almost verbatim; he would say:
"Gentlemen, we welcome you to the ranks of the people. We are happy to have
liberated you from the imperialist warmongers who sent you here. We know that you
didn't want to come here, you didn't start the war, you really don't know why you're here"
- (which was true).
THE OLD COME ON
"And therefore we have nothing against you and we want to offer you a
proposition. The proposition is this" - it was a deal; in fact is was almost as irresistible as
the deals you hear over the radio and in the want ads and all the other material the 'Getit-
now, don't-deny-yourself-a-thing' philosophy being fostered on the American public
today. The deal was very simple. You hardly had to do a thing and they gave you
everything. All they wanted from you was your physical cooperation: don't fight the
problem; sit back; be like other people, relax, see how it goes. Just don't fight.
Now in return for this they offered (1)No work: "There are no slave camps here;
no capitalist propaganda that they feed you in the United States. We have no coal
mines for you, no road gangs, no overseers."
Secondly, they said, "We will give you the best food and clothing and shelter and
medical care that we possibly can. Now it won't be good; we're a poor country. It will be
the best we've got."
And third, "We'll give you the thing we know you Americans really like most of all:
a chance to learn the truth. We're going to tell you what we think is the truth, about your
country and ours; what is going on in the world; about your system and ours; about how
the people are rising up today. And you've only heard one side of the story before
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because it's the capitalist-imperialists who publish your papers and run your radio
stations and publish your comic books and your textbooks, and after all, what other side
of the story have you therefore ever been allowed to hear? And so all we ask of you is a
little American fair play. Listen to both sides. And after you've heard our side, make up
your own mind what the truth is. And when the imperialist Wall Street warmongers have
decided they've used enough of the excess tanks made by General Motors and the
excess petroleum produced in Texas and the profits are large enough and the people
have been exploited enough and they let this senseless slaughter end, we want you to
go home to your own good homes and fine families and simply tell them the truth as you
yourself decide the truth to be."
THIS SET THE TONE
Well, you've got to admit, this beats burning bamboo splinters under your
fingernails. It didn't turn any American soldier into a Communist but it set the tone and
the atmosphere for the years that were to follow in this kind of strange new type
captivity. For about six months there was no further indoctrination at all, and yet even
during this period - and I can't believe that it was due to only one speech - during this
period we saw an almost total absence of spontaneous organization among the men.
We saw in short what the prisoners called a "dog-eat-dog" period, a period of every man
for himself, of a living out of a fantastic philosophy which has never before been
comprehensible to Americans, which can be expressed in terms such as "My survival is
going to be my private affair, buddy, and yours is your private affair." "You leave me
alone and I'll leave you alone."
And it was during this period that out of every ten Americans captured, four died:
the largest death rate of any group of Americans in any kind of captivity or in any war in
any country in any prison since the American Revolution. Four out of ten.
SECOND DOSE
Then the Communists started their education. The education was standard Communist
material. It was success stories of American capitalists, with a fairly objective evaluation
for a couple of months of the American economic system, the profitmaking system. But
then to offset the first two months of reasonably objective description of how our system
operates there followed four to six months of discussions about how this system
depends for its profits upon the exploitation of the surplus value of labor, and how the
people must be thrown sops so that they'll stand for this. And of course everybody
knows examples, like the libraries Mr. Carnegie built so we wouldn't get mad about how
Mr. Carnegie got his money; and the foundations that the Fords finance, and the
Rockefellers.
And in the course of this - it was a twelve-phase education program, the
curriculum was printed at a school I'm sure you've heard of, Dr. Benson: the Jefferson
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School of Social Sciences. It's the East Coast equivalent of the California Labor School.
It can be found under "J" on the AttorneyGeneral's list. It's in New York City and it
printed a twelve-page curriculum which was given to each and every student (American
GI) so that he'd know what his 24 months of education were going to include. Actually
before he was through he had received more hours of formal structured education than
in his total previous education in the United States.
EMPHASIZED INJUSTICES
They tended to emphasize chiefly the very real, perfectly true social injustices
which have been committed in the name of free enterprise in our country, and in Britain
also. They talked, for example, about child labor. They talked about "company scrip" in
the Pennsylvania coal mines, and of economic bondage. They talked about slavery.
They talked about the westward expansion of the railroads and what happens to the
settler who wouldn't get out of the way - which of course anyone who watches TV knows
- they talked about murderous plant police which, they said, every big business hires "to
shoot down innocent labor union organizers." They could show you copies of the
Chicago Tribune not too many years ago that did describe some pretty bloody shootings
down around Gary and Indiana Harbor.
They talked about the Oklahoma farmers who had to take off when the dust
moved into Oklahoma and mentioned that some of those farmers worked a whole day
for as little as a dollar in the Imperial Valley. That's a dollar for a family of five, you
understand. And they had books by John Steinbeck and others to prove that.
They leaned very heavily on Steinbeck and Dos Pasos and Hemingway; and on
Charles Dickens, surprisingly. If you look back, Charles had a good deal to say about
things like child labor, and so they used him in the camp library in every camp.
CURRENT EVENTS TOO
They also talked about current things and in many ways did a very realistic job.
They talked about the UN Charter and after teaching it in their words and with their
interpretation, without telling any out-and-out lies they proved to the satisfaction of a
great many of those youngsters that the UN Charter really was something and that we
were violating it right and left: there was the Seventh Fleet around Formosa, there was
our intervention in Korea, there was our prohibition of China in the UN.
You know, we don't do too much talking to our eighteen-year-olds about these
subjects; and I suppose partly on the presumption that they're really not interested and
wouldn't listen to us anyway. I grant you that the Chinese had an advantage: they had
them all there in the camps. It's just remarkable the degree of participation that they
managed to encourage among these kids, talking about things of this nature.
Because adolescents are concerned with values; They want to know about
things of this kind! They want to find right and principle - if you give them a chance! And
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the Chinese gave them every chance.
Every morning there was a lecture. It started about seven, you attended it
outdoors, standing up, and it lasted four or five or six hours, which is standard, in many
Communist teaching environments.
Following the lecture the students were all divided into guided discussion groups,
the seminar method. Now in such groups of 12 or 15 at the very most, you were not
required to agree with the few simple points that had been presented and reiterated
again and again in the morning's lecture: you were merely required to put them into your
own words and comment upon them any way that you wanted. You did have to take
part in the discussion. The penalty for not doing so was that your discussion group
wasn't allowed to have supper until you did; which meant that the pressures of course
became internal. They came from other Americans, not from the Chinese.
SPORTS A WEAPON
Now this was the basic outline of the education. Actually there were a great many
extracurricular activities, the same kind we have right here at this college. For example,
there were athletic programs, because youngsters need athletics. But the Communists
don't permit athletics to become a subsidized sport except in the international Olympics.
It isn't a semi-professional endeavor to get the alumni to contribute more to your school
or anything like that; nor is it something restricted to those who have somehow
undemocratically been endowed by nature with certain abilities that the rest of us don't
have. In fact, they made a great point of that.
They said "If you want to pitch for the baseball team, you don't pitch because
some accident of nature endowed you with a good pitching arm and a sharp pitching
eye; no, that wouldn't be fair. You can pitch for the baseball team if you wish as long as
you demonstrate in your attitude and your learning and your school work, and mostly
your attitude, that you are a progressive and worthwhile and deserving member of the
People's Democracy.
"And just to prove it, there is a little rally that you take part in before the baseball
games: no short-dressed girls twirling batons, nothing like that; a bunch of boys
marching around, carrying banners and shouting slogans in unison, which is very
moving; and singing rousing songs with a moral like 'solidarity forever,' the 'Communist
International' - and then you play baseball."
ART PROPAGANDA
And so, even a baseball game becomes a lesson. As did the art classes where
you couldn't draw pictures of girls, because 'that's not art.' But you could draw pictures
of the workers doing something ... throwing off the shackles of duPont. Or you could
draw a picture of Harry Truman with bloody, dripping claws gathering up us exploited
tools of the imperialist warmongers and sacrificing us on the altar of profits in Korea,
14
with General Motors and Standard Oil applauding in the background: this was
considered art. You could draw it all you wanted. You got paid for it, in the only currency
that matters in capitivity, like cigarettes, or sugar, or a little currency with which to buy
those things. And it was this kind of art we started seeing all over the world in
Communist propaganda documents.
They had Little Theatre groups in the 12 different camps in which they were
educating their American guests. The Little Theatre groups invariably as their first
production put on the Communist version of the non-communist Harriet Beecher
Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" because it's such a good lesson in imperialist exploitation.
They just never let them alone, never. They had camp newspapers for those who
wanted to write and it was from those newspapers that we saw the articles reprinted
that I mentioned earlier. One of them in particular that I'll never forget was written by a
kid who had less than an eighth-grade education, and his article read, word for word:
"I wish to express my profound and heartfelt gratitude to the members of the
Chinese People's Volunteer Army for teaching me to read and write English, because in
the capitalistic-imperialist community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from which I come,
only the sons of wealthy capitalists are ever permitted to read and write English" -
signed "Private So-and-So," with his serial number.
"EVERYBODY DOING IT"
Well, since he obliged us so by identifying himself naturally we waited with a
certain degree of enthusiasm for him to come home so we could talk to him about this!
He freely admitted that he'd written the article and that he couldn't see that there was
any point in not doing it because - and this is something we began to hear over and over
and over - everybody else was doing it. Which made it all right. Also, he said, it was
such an obvious lie that nobody would believe it.
And that young fellow, of course, never did see Mein Kampf and Hitler's
description of the lie technique and how if you're going to tell one you'd better tell a
really big one. If you tell a big one nobody will believe you could lie about anything that
important. It's the little lies that you and I tell that get us into trouble. And that's what
they were encouraging: ridiculous things, like only capitalists read and write in Pittsburg.
But the 900-some-million people in the Communist world today don't know it's a lie.
And the second third of the earth that is the object of Communist attention today in
Indonesia, in Pakistan, in India and the Middle East, those people who are getting tons
of this kind of material every day - it sells real cheaply on the newsstands - they don't
know it's a lie either. And even we can participate in our own destruction by helping
them propagandize.
THE THREE GIMMICKS
Well, this was the formal structure of the education but the thing that made it
15
work so well for the over-all objective was the gimmicks that were connected with it: the
informing, the self-criticism, the control of the soldiers' mail. Informing is a way of life in
the People's Democracy. If you're to understand anything about Communism you must
understand this: Informing as it is done in the Communist state can only be done when
you reject our basic premise that the individual is an entity, that he has dignity and
worth; that he is entitled to certain things like privacy. Once you abandon this concept of
the individual and visualize man, as does the Marxist, as a fragment of a class in that
greatest of all realities, the struggle between the classes, then of course informing
becomes not a miserable, mean, nasty, renunciation of individual loyalty: it becomes an
exercise in social responsibility which is exactly the way it was encouraged and exactly
the way it grew even among Americans. And this is the thing that disturbs us most, that
it can be done; that it can be done even to us indicates not that we have gone to pot
somehow. It does indicate that some of our values are being validated because they are
being so intently attacked.
It does indicate that some of these values need some further strengthening.
TURNING ON ONE ANOTHER
Now we found that men were encouraged to inform against each other about little
things. Not military things: Stealing a turnip; not using a latrine properly. They were
encouraged to inform because they were given material rewards promptly: Communists
paid on the barrelhead! They were encouraged to inform because they were given
status and approval, publicly. They were held up as examples of "worth-while members
of the People's Democracy who are really interested in your welfare" - the Chinese
would say to the other students.
The man informed upon, on the other hand, was never punished. In the past, the
man who was informed upon in a POW camp usually wound up dead, but then, so did
the informer. And that usually controls the informer system very nicely. In our culture we
consider informing to be about as low a human activity as one can engage in. But here
we saw it grow and grow and grow because the man informed upon was simply taken
aside by one of these young Chinese, who would put his arm about his shoulder and
would take him on what they called the "walking conference."
He would say to him, "Now, George, we know you've done this, don't deny it,
you're not on trial here. That isn't our way. We're disturbed that you've done this thing
which is antisocial and destructive to your fellow members of the People; not to us
Chinese, the other students. We want you to confess that it's wrong." Confession is
terribly important in the Communist state.
"Confess that it's wrong and analyze your confession and analyze it's wrong, why
it's destructive. Assert your determination not to do it again in the future. And preferably
write this down and sign it. And if you do, that's all we want."
SOLDIERS COOPERATE
16
And sure enough, that was all the Chinese seemed to want. The average soldier
thought, "Gee, this is silly; it's like grade school. It can't be harmful; I'm not giving away
military secrets, and I can't get very mad at whoever informed upon me because I didn't
get hurt." This simply revealed the fact that this value about the relationships, the basic
relationships between individuals, was hazy in the minds of a great many youngsters.
Because the Chinese weren't interested at all in what you told them and they couldn't
care less about antisocial activities. 'What they were interested in was what happened
between you and the man who informed, after he informed. Even though it doesn't hurt
you at all.
Well, it was summed up very well in the words of a soldier who would come
home and say: "You know, after a few months in the camp you got the feeling that they
knew everything you were doing. In fact there were so many informers around that you
just didn't know who you could trust. And so you didn't quite trust anybody."
Let's digress for a moment and look at the nature of a revolution. The Hungarian
revolution warmed our hearts and was undoubtedly a terrifying thing to the Soviet world.
But this was no revolution: it was a revolt. It was very largely a disorganized revolt. It
was a group of human beings who could just be pushed no further and who, at terrible
risk, started fighting back.
A revolution is not like that. A revolution includes these elements, but to be
anything with any dream of success it has organization and planning and staffing and
logistical support. None of these did the Hungarian revolt have in any significant degree.
And so when an organized military machine is drawn up against these people, no
matter how heroic, they die.
SHREWD STRATEGY
What the Communists are doing with their informing and their self-criticism and
their devaluation of the basic relationship between individuals is: they're preventing the
counter-revolution. Because every revolution has got to begin with a conspiracy
between you and me, between two men. And if you can divide, on this individual level, if
you can drive a wedge between each of the first two men, you've got no revolution. You
may have revolts. This is why we think this weapon is so fantastically good for doing
what the dictator wants to do - control human beings.
They drove wedges even among young, healthy, spontaneously grouping,
basically loyal, American soldiers. The self-criticism helps this and that's why it is done
not only by the Chinese Army and in their prison
camps but it's done in the Kremlin; it's done in the cells of the party here in the United
States. It's a collectivized group religious confessional sort of, and here our soldiers
were gotten together again in groups of ten or twelve and required simply to confess for
other soldiers - not for the Chinese - their bad attitudes; you know: the foreman's
nightmare, the thing you can't quite put your finger on, the thing you can't legislate
against; the sergeant's problem: your bad attitudes, your selfishness, your
17
impulsiveness, your willingness to use other human beings.
Soldiers were encouraged to do this (self criticism) and did it because first of all it
was the only group to which they were permitted to belong, and youngsters need to
belong - oldsters too. And secondly, because it was so harmless. After all, you weren't
talking to the Chinese, you were talking to ten other Americans, and as they would all
say, "Well, we were all friends, you know, and everybody kind of giggled when they
gave these self-criticisms; it seemed so stupid," but it kept the Chinese off your back.
TRAPPED BY PARTICIPATING
And again, the Chinese couldn't have cared less about what you talked about
really; it was the function of talking, because very rapidly this was no longer a joke; very
rapidly other soldiers began to stop smiling and started listening. Very rapidly the soldier
who was talking got the feeling that somehow, he couldn't say just how, he'd gone too
far, he'd exposed himself too much. He came home and said, "You know, Doctor, I felt
like these people knew more about me than I know about myself. They could even tell
what I was thinking about." Which is something that good dyed-in-the-wool Communists
have mentioned to us before, too. "They can even tell what you're thinking about."
Of course they can't really; but if you have this feeling it doesn't matter whether
they can or not. And so, when ten men would walk out of a self-criticism group they'd
walk in ten separate directions, divided, like those sticks in the Old Testament that you
can break so easily when they're apart, and that are so strong if they're together.
THE MAIL WEAPON
And finally they isolated men from one another and really introduced them into
the most superbly constructed solitary confinement cell that man has ever constructed,
not out of steel and concrete but out of feelings and attitudes, a psychological and
emotional solitary confinement cell, the feeling of being alone in a crowd of people. They
constructed this partly by simply preventing them from having their faith in their families
and their homes, their communities reaffirmed by the kind of mail that every soldier
wants to get. Every soldier overseas, whether he's a Pfc. or a Lt. General, needs a very
standard form of expression basically: it should say something about "We love you and
we wait for you and we pray for you to help you: and we don't want you worrying about
things here at home, about which you can do nothing. Just come home safely as soon
as you can."
No matter how sophisticated a way in which it is put, or no matter how simply,
this is what the solider wants to know. This kind of communication gives men strength,
because men fight not for very large abstraction; they fight for things that are meaningful
in their own terms. And so, the Chinese knowing this, simply never let a soldier get that
kind of a letter. If it was warm and loving and reassuring, you just didn't see it. But what
soldiers call "Dear John" letters, you got. Divorce subpoenas you got. Notices from
18
collection companies; complaining letters from your mother; or the notice of somebody
ill in your family: this letter you got - living in a mud hut in Korea, where you could do
nothing.
Well, the result at first was resentment on the part of the soldier, and then later a
process of denial where he tried simply not to think about it. And to many of these
youngsters, such relationships became unreal; they just didn't exist in a way that gave
them strength and support. It began to make us wonder just a little (as we studied these
cases) about how much dynamics had gone on in the families of those people to
prevent such a breakdown from taking place when they just didn't get mail.
AMAZING SUCCESS
Well, this was brain-washing. Frankly it did everything the Communists wanted it
to do. It didn't turn anybody into a Communist because it wasn't designed to turn
anybody into a Communist. A small percentage of the people in the Communist world
are Communists. The great majority are acquiescors. The great majority are simply
cowed and somehow pushed along by this system which doesn't look like something
you can fight; it's not very dangerous-appearing; it just controls you. You don't have to
be a coward to give in to it. The majority of Americans (in the Korean prison camps) in a
sense did give in to it.
Now the majority of Americans, more than half in these camps, never did
anything they could really be criticized for. But just doing nothing has never been the
way that America in 168 years got the work done which produced this fabulous society.
When we get to the point where we just do nothing and enjoy it, maybe we've become
an old country and not a new one, and maybe we are well on the way down the western
slope. This is a valid question for us to debate: whether our own success can destroy
us?
If we can get so comfortable and so secure and so materialistic in our outlook, in
our objectives, that we don't recognize a threat when it exists, and we don't keep vital
the only kinds of principles which work against this kind of a threat, and if we go along
with the abdication of our own sovereignty as individuals to the sovereignty of a few -
well, we're trying to do something about this in the Service. We're trying to do something
on the basis of a remarkable military document called the Code of Conduct.
BACKED BY PRESIDENT
This is a document unlike any other in recent military history, considered so
important that it was announced not by the Services but by the President of the United
States himself, who tried to clear up the misunderstanding that inevitably arose about it
by saying "This is not a formula for being a prisoner of war," because you see, we just
don't think that's part of our mission, to train soldiers to be prisoners of war.
The President said, "This is a statement of first principles which every male and
19
female in our society should know." Principles that are so obvious that maybe we're just
taking them for granted. I think a great many parents and teachers somehow believe
that children get such principles by osmosis or simply by being exposed to them in
some vague way that doesn't require any direct, conscious attention.
NO. 1: RESIST
Look at them; the first principle: If you're ever captured, resist; try to resist, no
matter how minor your resistance; fight your enemy. Don't cooperate with him. Now this
is pretty important militarily. It's important - well, I think if you will recall the trouble we
had on Kojedo (where Communist prisoners revolted and at one time seized a U.S.
General) you can see just what a problem resisting prisoners can be. We used over
15,000 fully armed troops to guard the Chinese we'd already beaten: 15,000 soldiers
who should have been on the front line shooting at Chinese.
In contrast to this the Chinese managed to hold at least one camp that we know
of, holding as many as 600 Americans with as few as six armed guards. Six - no barbed
wire fence, no electric fence, no machine gun towers, no searchlights, no guard dogs;
just six Chinese. And of course the instructors, the disarmed non-military instructors.
Where were the other 594 Chinese who should have been guarding those
Americans? Why, they were down on the 38th Parallel shooting Americans. So militarily
this is important. But it's more important yet in another way, a way we didn't expect; we
didn't prepare people for it, we didn't think perseverance was really a matter of life or
death; we all know it's a great old value. But we saw what happens when men fail to
resist, in Korea, in terms of a new disease that we'd never before seen among young
adults. Oh, we see it among abandoned infants that we find in alleys and ashcans, who
won't respond to medical treatment and yet shouldn't die but do.
We see it sometimes among patients who have a stroke and who can remember
everybody that's died that they know of; died from a stroke and so they think they're
going to die and they literally do. And there's no reason.
"GIVE-UP-ITIS" CATCHING
But we've never seen twenty-year-old white American adults do this. They did in
Korea. There was a disease there called "give-up-itis." It was a disease of what we
psychiatrists make ourselves so unpopular by calling "mother's boys"; the passive, the
dependent, the inadequate; the kid who cried himself to sleep at night; the kid who
would look at the food that looked bad and smelled bad and wouldn't eat it - he'd throw it
on the ground and maybe stomp on it. The kid who would take no initiative, who would
not respond to leadership, who would look around hopelessly, pull his blanket over his
head, tell the rest of the soldiers to leave him alone. And if they did, in 48 hours he was
dead.
This was a significant factor in the death of at least half of the 3000 Americans who died
20
in captivity. RESIST, we tell the soldiers: "Your life depends upon it." But it's an exercise
for more than one man. No individual hero in a movie-type television epic resists by
walking up and clobbering the nearest Chinese guard. We resist in groups. Our strength
is in groups. And it's on the basis of faith between men.
NO. 2: ESCAPE!
So also is the next point which says "try to escape." This country exists because of an
impulse to freedom. And violations of this freedom have always in the past stimulated
the most violent reaction on the part of Americans. And yet out of the 7000 men
captured, the 4000 of those who survived were over three years in captivity, or about
three years in Korea. At no time did a single American ever succeed in an engineered
escape from an established POW camp. Ever!
And why not? Well, it's a hard country to escape in. And the Chinese had a good
system. Well, why didn't they escape before the Chinese system? Because escape too
is not like something Gregory Peck does in an MGM-type epic; it's an exercise of a large
group of human beings. It's a military operation against an enemy. It might take a
hundred men six months to get one person out of a camp. Americans have been
traditionally, fabulously good at escaping, under impossible conditions. They escaped in
Japan sometimes when they were in groups of ten, and the word was out that if one
man got out of that group and the others didn't, the Japs would kill the other nine. Men
still escaped, and they escaped with the help and the support of the other nine.
And yet in Korea we saw a man get up and say "We've got to have an escape
committee." And another man would get up and say, "No; you do something like that,
you're liable to make the Chinese mad - now just wait and see how things go." And it's
true, you are liable to make the Chinese mad. You're liable to make him mad when you
stick your head out of a foxhole and take a shot at him, too.
So try to escape, we say to the soldiers in the new code. And then we get
completely off the military line and we make a moral point, and we insult the churches
and the Sunday Schools and the American families by making this point; we insult you.
Yet I think it's a point that has to be made. It's made in this Code of Conduct, as are
each of these points, because in a significant proportion of the young American
prisoners of war whom we had a chance to study, it was not a meaningful value.
NO. 3: MAKE NO "DEALS"
All we say here is the very obvious thing: "If you're captured by an enemy, don't take
any favors from him; don't make any deals with him." Of course fifty years ago they
would have said "Don't make a deal with the devil" and it would have been perfectly
clear. Or we could refer him to Faust or to many of the other speculations of man about
compromise with his principles. And it seems that in talking about compromise and
getting along with people today and being nonaggressive and everything being quiet
21
and nobody raising his voice if possible, that we've gotten compromise on a minor level
mixed up with compromise on the level of principle.
Time and time again parents say to me, "Well, what you say is right, you know,
and it's just exactly what ought to be said in our PTA meeting. I've been thinking so for
six months."
And I say, "Why don't you get up and say so?"
"Oh," they say, "I'm not the kind that ever gets up in a group and talks."
Or it's like the parents, one of whom is a Baptist and one of whom is a
Presbyterian, and they decide not to make their kid go to either one but let him pick for
himself. They don't want to commit themselves to him because it's not democratic. Well,
maybe it's not, but in effect all you have communicated in this kind of system is that
neither one of you cared enough that you would try to convince him that this is what you
thought was right.
We make deals all over the place. In a St. Louis paper the other day I saw an ad
just like this. "Why deny yourself; would you change jobs for nine cents an hour? Would
you move out of the city for nine cents an hour? Then why not buy our Pontiac, because
for only nine cents an hour you can. We've got a wonderful deal for you." And it is only
nine cents an hour - sixty bucks a month!
NO. 4: LOVE THY BROTHER
And then in the Code of Conduct we say to the soldier: "If you're ever captured,
don't do anything to hurt your fellow-American soldier." Don't do anything to hurt your
fellow-Americans. Don't say anything, don't do anything. Love your neighbor.
To a great many people this just isn't meaningful. Because love is not a passive
thing and that isn't what's meant in the commandment "Love Thy Neighbor . . ." Love is
an act. And the reason this is in the Code of Conduct is because of a most remarkable
phenomenon that showed up again and again. One example will demonstrate it, I think.
There was a man named Gallagher. He was tried and convicted in New York in a
military court about a year and a half ago, on two charges of first degree murder in a
POW camp. Gallagher was a monster. He was in a hut in North Korea and there were
some men in the hut whom he considered socially unacceptable: they had very bad
dysentery, they were smelling up the place, and so forth - and so he threw them out. It
was thirty degrees below zero outside that hut. And they died. Right away.
So we tried him and convicted him of murder. Now we know that nothing like
saying "Don't hurt your fellow-Americans" is going to reach Gallagher at all, or the few
people who are like Gallagher. But they're really not our problem at all; I don't think they
ever will be. They couldn't possibly be.
We've got a worse problem than that. The Gallagher-type problem you can see
and you can deal with; you can fight it. The worst problem is the one that this point was
designed for. It was the other forty men in the hut. It was the witnesses we collected for
that trial, who on their interrogations would go through something like this:
22
"NONE OF MY BUSINESS"
We'd say: "Soldier, did you see Gallagher throw these men out of the hut?" The
soldier would say, "Yes, sir, I did."
"And what were you doing at the time he threw them out of the hut, soldier?"
"Well, I was huddling together with everybody else to try to keep warm; it was
very cold up there and you had to just get heat from other peoples' bodies."
"Well, what were you doing to try to keep Gallagher from throwing these men out
in the freezing cold?"
"Well, nothing, sir."
"And why not, soldier?" we'd ask.
And invariably or almost invariably the answer would come back: "Well, sir, I just
didn't feel it was any of my business to interfere." And so men died.
When we get to the point where loving your neighbor is a totally inactive thing,
where love is no longer taking the responsibility for other peoples' welfare, where we
can become passive witnesses - and granted in daily life, not in a POW camp, what we
witness is often not quite as dramatic as that- but no less real - and when we become
passive witnesses to those who destroy us, then we're in very serious trouble.
So don't do anything to hurt your fellowsoldier, we say.
NO. 5: ESTABLISH LEADERSHIP
Well, the final point I want to mention in this Code and almost the final in this
speech, is really a one-sentence indictment on leadership. I'm not talking about two-star
general leadership, I'm talking about shop foreman leadership and leadership in
peoples' families and in Boy Scout troops and in school classrooms, and among kids
who come up to the Principal and want their names taken off the honor roll because the
other kids make fun of them if they're on the honor roll.
I'm talking about being different and being aggressive, not in a destructive way,
but in the way that is healthy American competition. And this sentence merely says:
"Soldiers, if you're ever captured by an enemy and you're the senior man, take
command. And if you're not the senior man, support and back up those who are."
We thought, you know, if a man ever worked in an A&P store he'd know this,
because they have an assistant manager and a manager. We thought if he'd ever been
on a football team he'd know this. But fewer young Americans are playing on football
teams. More and more are watching them.
OMISSION IN TEACHING
So we have to put this terribly obvious statement in the Code because it
becomes clear that somehow we are not teaching about the attitude of leadership, the
willingness to take this responsibility, the willingness to be other than merely popular.
23
Oh, we've got lots of leaders who lead on this basis: personal popularity; which is only a
version of the political seduction that we're subjected to. Sort of "I'll be good to you and
you be good to me." Such leaders showed up on our side of the 38th Parallel, too. The
young company commander named Fred and all his men called him Fred; and he
loaned them money and he buddied with them and he drank beer with them and he
never tried to assert himself very much; he was just one of the fellows, and they all liked
him just fine. Until that fellow Fred had the gall to tell them they were going to have to go
up that hill against a machine gun: that's where they could get killed.
Whereupon they all agreed among themselves that Fred was a real good guy,
but he was strictly out of line now, and they wouldn't follow him up the hill.
Well, these are our problems. Each of these points in the Code of Conduct
reflects a very serious problem in management and in attitudes, attitudes which we
know very well we can't really teach to an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old, because it's
quite late then to do it. These are attitudes that have to be taught primarily in peoples'
families; attitudes about loyalty, about initiative, about perseverance, about having a set
of principles that you're willing to defend.
And contrary to what I hear from some educators in the country today, I think
also this is the responsibility to communicate on the part of the public educational
system. I'm horrified by what Dr. Benson called the objectivity which leads to the point
where the teacher also doesn't commit himself to his students; where no principle is
taught. Just technique or methods.
THE IMPORTANT "WHY'S"
Now we know, and many of the soldiers who came back said to us, - well, first of
all, we know that no simple education in American History or in Civics can defend an
individual against a good communist dialectician, and experts. We know that simply
knowing about how this country developed and the dates the battles were fought, and
that the Supreme Court and the Congress and the President have these different
functions which check on each other - this by itself isn't going to defend anybody.
But knowing the whys behind those institutions, a meaningful version of
American economic and political history which must be taught primarily in schools, I
think, often with the help of private industry if they're interested in helping - this kind of
thing can defend the man because this system is actually based ultimately on these
very individualistic character traits, these principles that we put into military terms in the
Code of Conduct. Loyalty to other individuals, being personally responsible, as Dr.
Benson was saying about the business that's done in America on the telephone.
I think there's hardly one out of twenty people who could buy a refrigerator or a
washing machine without this presumption on the part of American business: that he's
probably going to pay for it, even though it's going to take him thirty-six months. But an
awful lot of kids don't know that. They just don't understand that at all. They think that
whole system is just a reflection of a new philosophy which says "Get anything you
want, get it right away, deny yourself nothing, discipline yourself not at all. Enjoy our
24
wonderful materialistic comforts and rest secure in the knowledge that our country
MUST be better than every other country and MUST be invulnerable because we've got
the best things."
BASIC PRINCIPLES COUNT
We've never been better than anybody else because we had better things. We've
been better because we have for the first time in the history of man attempted to take
basic Judeo-Christian principles and codify them and run an entire country on these
basic principles.
So in the services we're trying to build discipline, we're trying to build it in the only
way it can possibly be built, on the basis of a system of values, on the basis of a set of
principles, something that individuals believe in, ideas that are meaningful to them, that
are inside them - not imposed by some nasty old sergeant with his fist or some
crotchety old colonel - but a set of value systems that were taught, learned by that
individual, and which have become meaningful enough to guide his behavior whether
there's a policeman standing there or not. Unless enough people have such principles
the policeman sooner or later is going to have to stand there.
Well, I'd like to sum up by quoting a soldier who had some thoughts about this
whole subject, General Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr. who was the commandant of the
Marine Corps at the time of the Korean War. He, with a number of civilian educators and
other military people, drew up the Code of Conduct, this remarkably obvious,
unnecessary document. And I say that sarcastically.
General Shepherd said this: "in the struggle against Communism war is no
longer over when men are forced to give up. The prisoner of war camp is only another
kind of battlefield. For they must be taught years before to carry on with the only
weapons remaining to them: courage and faith and a sense of personal responsibility."
The problem won't be solved by magic formula or just by a Code of Conduct. The
only approach lies in an awakening of the consciousness of the nation and of the
individual, you, and me, to the need for a sense of conviction and dedication to our
principles and our cause, which exceeds that shown by our very dedicated enemy
toward his own.
I thank you.
Questions and Answers:
QUESTION: Did you notice any difference in the boy who was brought up in the
country or the city or with higher education or less education?
MAJOR MAYER: Every conceivable correlation, including those, was attempted
on the mechanical marvels of electronics that we use now. No such correlations came
out at a significantly statistical level, surprisingly enough. We found there were not
25
significant differences between urban and rural background, that there were good and
bad among both groups.
As far as education level goes; where people in many educational levels were
held together, there seemed to be a salutary effect of a more prolonged education; and
in fact, the Communists paid great tribute to this, first of all by segregating out those
who had a post-secondary-school education. They told those of our prisoners who
became collaborators to such a degree that they were allowed to take part in policy
discussions within the camp, and they in turn told us when they came home, that
Communists said that a man who was a college graduate or had a managerial position
in a business or had had his own business, or was over 30 to 35, they felt was a
hopeless reactionary.
And they felt that unless they could hold them for five or six years they would
have no real luck with them: and so they didn't.
QUESTION: Did you carry your thinking to affiliation with the Church?
MAYER: In a general way only. Among people who actively resisted we found
men who stated that their resistance was based upon their conviction in strictly religious
terms. We found no such men among those who collaborated.
A word of caution: In this we did no statistical correlation because it became
impossible to set standards. You simply cannot assign degrees of being a good
Lutheran or degrees of being a good Jew. And therefore to do this would be a ridiculous
piece of research.
And also we were largely dependent upon the voluntary statements of men to the
effect that they had resisted on the basis of their religious convictions. But it was
noticeable that among the collaborators, I know of no case of a man who had anything
that I could discern as a meaningful religious experience in his life.
Also among those in the resistor group there was no man who espoused a
religious philosophy who had gotten it in Korea!
QUESTION: Would you compare the differences or compare some American
soldiers to other national groups, such as that of the Turks?
MAYER: I've been answering in less than two minutes because I was hoping this
question would come up. You obviously can't answer it in two minutes.
There were 229 Turks captured. They were captured in the first year, the first
winter of the war; half just before and half just after Christmas. Almost every Turk
captured was sick or wounded; I personally think because it is impossible to capture a
Turk who is not sick or wounded.
They were mostly volunteer soldiers. They were not tough old professionals of a
Foreign Legionaire variety. In Turkey they have a long historical tradition of aggressive
militarism as you know. The average Turk has the, to us, very unsophisticated
philosophy that unless he spends some time in the service of his country he isn't really a
man. So these people volunteered mostly at age 18 or 19 because they had missed
World War II.
They went to fight in Korea; they were captured almost all in groups; and they
26
were subjected to exactly the same conditions of captivity as the Americans. There was
a slightly lower percentage ratio of instructors; but the instructors used on them were not
Chinese; they were Turks, Turks from the Soviet Republics which are ethnologically
Turkish. They spoke Turkish, they looked like Turks, they lived with the Turks.
At the end of almost three years of captivity, the 229 Turks captured - exactly 229
Turks marched back through Panmujon. The survival rate was 100 per cent. Now how
did they do this?
WHY TURKS SURVIVED
First of all they did it on the basis of something we do not normally associate with
Moslems. They supposedly are willing to die in battle more readily than we are; this is a
glorious and honorable way. Also, the people who travel in this part of the world are not
struck by a great deal of humanity, a great deal of self-sacrifice, of the kind we like to
think is our personal property. And yet these Turks survived very largely on the basis of
an exercise of the most devoted kind of love among themselves.
When a Turk was really sick, other Turks bathed him and fed him and washed
his clothes and lay beside him to keep him warm and in general just let that Turk know
he wouldn't die. He was a Turk and they were going to take care of him.
Well, secondly, they survived on the basis of very hard-headed practical reality.
There was a major in command of the Turks, of the several hundred captured. He took
command. There was no voting; nobody told him "Just run along, Buster, because
you're just a prisoner like we are" which is what happened to our majors and our
sergeants and our colonels. He took command. He assigned "this" detail to dig a latrine
in the camp. Some of our camps had no latrines, and then some of our men started
dying from dysentery because they were contaminated throughout the whole camp;
because, simply, they rejected leadership.
Not these Turks. This group led, this group dug a latrine, this group scrounged for
food, this group took care of the more seriously sick and wounded. And the major
himself talked to the enemy. Nobody else talked to the enemy, under any
circumstances. Of course this is not what the Communists want. And the Major would
not cooperate.
So, they segregated the major as a poisonous individualist. You know, this is the
first sin in Communism. Do not have the audacity to set yourself up as a leader. You
cannot have the audacity to set yourself up as a leader. He was segregated and a
lieutenant took over. He did not take over three ranks below the major; he just took
command, that's all. He had the same staff, he organized the same kinds of details. And
he alone talked with the enemy. He was segregated as a poisonous individualist.
A sergeant took over. He was segregated.
REDS CONFOUNDED
27
The Turks finally got down to where all they had was a couple hundred privates
and so they found out who was the senior private, had been a private longest, and he
was put in command. And the Chinese would come in and throw up their hands in
disgust and they'd say: "Now, look, we're appointing this man as group discussion
leader, this man as daily life activities leader, and this man as political leader"; and the
one Turk who was in command would stand at attention, salute them and say, "Yes, sir,
we understand perfectly. Of course you might as well tell only me because I'm in
command."
And they would segregate him. And the next private would take over. There were
no arguments, no voting, no discussion about this. They knew somebody had to lead
and the others had to support him. The Communists finally segregated so many Turks
that they were all back together again. And they lived, a hundred per cent.
QUESTION: Would you comment on the Hungarian Revolution with regard to the
question of leadership and plan and the actual events of the Hungarian Revolution.
MAYER: I think the apparent contradiction arises from the fact that I possibly
implied that the system is more irresistable than it is. This is a good system for doing
what a tyrant wants. It controls people superbly.
Even in the Hungarian Revolution you cooperated with a man after you saw him
shoot at a Soviet soldier. Then you knew you could trust him. Because even in the
Hungarian uprising there were still many Hungarians who didn't take part, who wouldn't.
This wasn't the total unanimous expression of seven million people.
Well, certainly once it got going it created more and more support until it was
almost an unanimous expression, that's true. But the fact is simply that while this
procedure is good for doing what the Soviet wants, it doesn't give him license to push
beyond a certain point. And they had obviously pushed beyond this in Hungary.
There is no system on earth that will so coerce people that they will take just
anything indefinitely.
The most interesting apparent contradiction actually is the fact that the Hungarian
Revolution was apparently sparked by young people who presumably had been more
thoroughly - in comparison to their total life experience - brain-washed than the older
people. And yet I think that this too is understandable. Partly because the Soviet
system, which is a little more rigid than the Chinese in this respect, attempts completely,
rigidly to prescribe what you will belong to and what you will participate in. And of course
the strongest urge that the adolescent has is as he's searching for his freedom and his
adulthood, to select and to join the things he himself selects. Part of his very healthy
normal rebellion against the betters of childhood is therefore this business of wanting to
have his group and his emotional relationships.
The Communist system proscribes these. And I think this is its greatest
weakness, especially with youngsters. I believe they will have much more trouble of
very similar nature. You just can't, even using this system, completely denude a country,
not feed them well enough, force them into arbitrary groups, push them beyond human
endurance and expect that they'll acquiesce to it.
28
QUESTION: Would you comment on the English experience in POW camps?
MAYER: No. 1: we wanted to study the British. We were not perhaps as
diplomatic in this as we might have been because certainly the British attitude toward
Communism at the outbreak of Korea was somewhat different from our attitude toward
Communism. And possibly therefore their political progress in the camps might have
been different. In brief, the British said it was none of our business what their people did
and they'd study themselves and "thank you very much," so we don't know what they
did. More of them survived than our people. But that's all I can tell you.
QUESTION: Is there any followup to the initial study?
MAYER: There is no followup on these people.
We had a pilot study of POWs; we had "Operation Little Switch" where we got
about 150 of them, roughly, back. And those of us who studied them wanted to take the
whole group of returnees when we got them, put them back into American uniforms,
back into Army camps, make them feel like human beings again, give them a chance to
settle down and not throw them back on the American community before they
themselves wanted to go.
But the pressure from the - well, like the group of mothers who wanted to go to
Korea and pick up their sons there, that we had forcibly to prevent - the pressure was to
get these kids back.
Now it was damaging to them because no former POW feels like a hero. I don't
care whether you're a hero or not, you don't feel like a hero. Being confined is a very
depressing experience. You begin to have very serious doubts about yourself. Almost
universally. And so we took a bunch of guilty-feeling men and paraded them down the
streets of Little Rock and Chicago and every other town that they came from in open
convertibles and showered them with confetti and treated them like heroes; and they
just felt terrible. I know several, including one general who seriously considered killing
himself because he felt so bad because of his treatment.
Well, to make a long story short: They were then allowed to get immediately out
of the military service. We pretended they are not casualties. The British are much more
realistic. They say if you have been a prisoner three years it will be three years before
you even start to behave like a human being again. You've got problems after you've
been a prisoner.
We do not say that. And so we let all these people out. We have no jurisdiction
over them, there is no followup study of them, we haven't the remotest idea except for
about 200 of them that I just talked to as civilians in a very imperical nonobjective way -
we know nothing about them.
I do think that one of the research foundations is giving a grant this year to a
private agency to try to follow these people up where they are, see them, how they are
getting along. This should be done. In addition to knowing that Communist brainwashing
is a procedure for coercing and controlling human beings, and a good one, we should
also know what the long-term effects are. They have some long-term goals!
29
QUESTION: Was this technique devised in Russia or China, and what would be
the significant differences in the two?
MAYER: Considerable difference exists between the two. The system is not
something that a bunch of diabolical thinkers got together and dreamed up just out of
whole cloth. It's an evolutionary procedure and it's clear that it has had a great deal of
thought given to it. Even in the handling of our prisoners it was clear that here the
Chinese were also studying our prisoners. They had camps that for long periods they
would do nothing to - in very dramatic distinction to the other camps; sort of like control
groups in an experimental situation. They were still learning. It's still developing.
In brief however the Soviet system is still largely an individualistic system. They
have some of these social controls, the selfcriticism, the informing, and so on, that were
encouraged, and the devaluation of individual interpersonal relationships. These are
important basic premises in the Soviet system.
However, for real acquiescence of a noncooperative person the Soviets have an
individual handling - the Mindszenty treatment, which is very rigidly prescribed, has
about a three-months' timetable; there are great limitations and restrictions and
demands made upon the interrogators in such situations. They, for example, must never
hurt their subject. He must not be permitted to become grossly physically ill; he must not
under any circumstances die or become psychotic. He must, without being charged,
produce his own confession.
Now the Chinese are much more socially oriented, I think, than the Soviet
Russians; and the family is so terribly important in the Chinese social system that in a
sense what they started to do even with their state criminals was handle them as if they
were family groups. They used many of the Soviet methods, but instead of handling
them as an individual enemy of the people they would get eight of them together in a
large cell and they would encourage the group activity to develop to the point where the
group became a sort of self-policing outfit. The Chinese hold some people individually,
but this group procedure developed strictly as a Chinese phenomenon and it was then
expanded. It became clear that this was a beautifully coercive educational method. The
point has been reached where now, in Shanghai, for example, the individual
neighborhood is controlled in very much the same way, with study groups, with a sort of
a monitor, a political instructor who may be the product of one of the incredible number
of new social science schools in the Communist world; or maybe a housewife that
they've picked to be the head monitor of that little neighborhood group.
So that, this is very largely a Chinese rather than a Soviet system. But its roots
are Soviet, in effect pre-Soviet: they're Czarist.
QUESTION: The present feeling in the name of humanity to liberalize shall we
say the treatment of the Marines and other members of the services - will you comment
on that and how it might affect this situation?
MAYER: That was a pretty low blow, wasn't it? Percentage-wise more Marines
stayed alive than Army soldiers did. Beyond this I simply am not able to go with any
degree of objectivity.
I said in the very beginning that what we're doing in the Service today is a
30
reflection of industrial psychology, of management philosophy; we borrow, you know, in
great huge chunks from you; about democratic leadership, about not making demands
upon people, about giving every worker a voice in what he's working at. We haven't
done this always judiciously. And it's not really new in the Armed Forces. Ever since the
American Revolution it's been quite clear that American soldiers will not fight unless you
tell them why. And they deserve to know why.
But the WHY is much too BIG to teach in boot camp. It has to be taught in school
and at home. This is the only why that really makes any sense. And certainly telling
them why at the foot of a hill before you charge up against a machine gun nest is just
going to get a lot of people killed and we saw that happen. So this isn't really democracy
at all.
I think that the troubles the Marine Corps are having now - of course we've been
having these for years now in the Army - there is no company commander who hasn't in
his brief career answered congressional inquiries and letters from mothers about dirty
words that were used, or a hand that was laid on her son, or the food he's getting. This
is why we have developed the most incredible complaint system you ever saw. Any Pfc.
can pull in any senior officer in front of the Inspector General practically any time he
wants if he's got any kind of a valid story. We've sort of got something by the tail here;
we don't quite know what to do with it.
But I do think the problems the Marines are now having, and the problems we've
had for a long time with discipline in the Service, are reflections of an increasing
tendency to make fewer and fewer demands upon the growing adult. And really to insult
him thereby; to give him less credit than is due; to assume that he won't take these
things and work if a high standard of performance is demanded of him.
Now I've been a psychiatrist in the Marine Corps and I've been a psychiatrist in
the Army, and I very frankly think that Marine training is the best military training there
is: more Marines stay alive. And no Marine ever finishes boot training without the
absolute conviction, No. 1, that he has accomplished something worth-while: HE IS A
MAN. And No. 2, that no matter what happens to him, some other Marine will take care
of him. And this is not universal in the Armed Forces. And it will never be universal as
long as we succumb to a commercialized kind of approach, as long as we try to sell the
services to the country on the basis of its material rewards or its on-the-job training or its
retirement benefits or its re-enlistment bonuses or any other materialistic kind of reward.
These things are real. But men won't die for these things. They will die only for other
men.
MC: Thank you very much, Major.
After reading this book I agree to pass it on to a friend or associate - providing it has
stimulated my thinking on how we may preserve the American system of free enterprise.
NATIONAL EDUCATION
PROGRAM