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
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 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 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."
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 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 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 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.
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