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
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.
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!
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 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
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