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, 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 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
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 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 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.
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