According to Jeffrey K. Hadden, the concept of brainwashing first came into public use during the Korean War in the 1950s as an explanation for why a few American GIs appeared to defect to the Communists. Brainwashing consisted of the notion that the Chinese communists had discovered a mysterious and effective method of causing deep and permanent behavioral changes in prisoners of war ...
http://www.psychologistworld.com/influence_personality/brainwashing.phpHere's a discussion from a military website:
... Daily propaganda lectures and broadcasts that attacked capitalist society were conducted, and the CCF persuaded some POWs to sign peace petitions and make pro-communist statements. The term "brainwashing" obtained notoriety at this time and caused concern to American authorities. Brainwashing was defined as an intense and prolonged psychological process designed to erase an individual's past beliefs and to substitute new ones. Even though some American POWs collaborated with their captors, most of them did so for personal convenience. No confirmed cases of brainwashing came out of the Korean War ...
The techniques alleged in the Korean war era were those now used by the US at GITMO:
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 2, 2008
... Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.
But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all&oref=sloginThere is no question that some American cold warriors were fascinated with the idea that human behavior might be engineered and re-engineered
Gov't settles with CIA brainwashing survivor
Updated Tue. Jul. 3 2007 5:43 PM ET
Canadian Press
MONTREAL -- A Montreal senior who survived Cold War-era brainwashing experiments picked up a cheque for compensation from the federal government .... which jointly funded the experiments with the Central Intelligence Agency ...
On and off for ... 15 years, she was one of hundreds of patients of Dr. Ewan Cameron subjected to experimental treatments that included massive electroshock therapy, experimental pills and LSD ...
The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge, according to testimony before a 1977 U.S. Senate committee ...
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070703/cia_lawsuit_070703/20070703Since then the term "brainwashing" has acquired a vaguer and more general sense
Fuzzy Definition, Poor Resolution: Early Television, The Korean War and the Brainwashed American Mind
by Alan Nadel
... I have started with this anecdote to introduce two central points of this talk: one, that Cold War brainwashing was not a myth, and two, that it was fundamentally connected to understanding the world televisually. In regard to that second point, let us remember that the word television has numerous, discrete meanings. A television is an appliance. It is also a set of programs; the thing one watches when one watches television, after all, in not the television set, but the signals that the appliance receives and decodes, signals produced outside and independent of it. Television is also an activity outside of and independent of the programs, such that one can decide to spend the evening watching television without having any specific program in mind. Television is also a medium, a mode of organization and presentation. Finally, and most subtly but also most pervasively, it is a way of knowing the world, a mediation between knowledge and identity, a way of fixing the self in the matrices of time, space, distance, history, and the myriad nodes of personal affiliation.
On this last sense of television I shall focus in order to suggest some of the connections between it and the sundry indeterminacies that the Korean War introduced into global consciousness, particularly the concept of brainwashing as the evil Other of the national conformity promoted by American television. In this light, I want to suggest that the Korean War and television both helped give credibility to brainwashing as a perpetuation of the narrative of demonic otherness that has infused American culture in numerous forms since the colonial period. Although nearly half a century's distance makes it impossible to reconstruct fully the impact of television's arrival, I think we have to suppose it would have been organized and construed differently had it not entered the public imaginary at roughly the same time as the atomic bomb, the babyboom, McCarthyism, suburbia, and the Korean War; had it not entered the lives of a nation fixated on politically mandated normality and obsessed with uprooting non-conformists; had it not become the unifying common experience of a nation constantly on the watch, lest it blink and its unprecedented prosperity be stolen, unobserved, by subversives ...
Television, in other words, supported a way of knowing the world consistent with the principles attributed to communist brainwashing, the chief common characteristic being a relentless indoctrination into a set of homogeneous norms. The goal of brainwashing is to create in the subject a different understanding of reality, an outcome made possible only through a set of scientific advances, allegedly based on the work of the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. In his classic 1956 study of brainwashing in Korea (a sequel to his 1951 book on brainwashing in China), Edward Hunter portrays as Pavlov an old man duped by the Soviets. Hunter found most threatening the implication in Pavlov’s work that humans are animals. He describes a central scene in a Russian film, titled The Nervous System, demonstrating that a dog could be taught to salivate. Hunter viewed the film with novelist Ayn Rand and another friend named Dr. Leon Freedom. (Dr. Freedom, according to Hunter, was a professional "neuropsychiatrist" not, as one might assume from his name, a professional wrestler). For this sage triumvirate—Hunter, Rand, and Dr. F—the scene revealed something "unnatural," as signified by what they regarded as an oxymoron: the phrase "conditioned-reflex" ...
Far from deploying the best of American art, performance, or reportage, however, in practice television presented the nation’s lowest common denominators. With two networks monopolizing the competition for viewers, the safe, the cliched, and the uncontroversial had enormous advantage over the experimental, the original, and the challenging. This economic mandate when applied to the concept of citizenship obviously effected a very conservative citizen. Television could thus function as the site of "democracy" to the extent that "democracy"--representing what the most people had in common—was defined in opposition to "idiosyncrasy." Broadcasting nationalized the common person in every way that his or her values were common rather than unique, cliched rather than original, status quo rather than progressive ...
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/korea/nadel.htmClearly, a number of GITMO inmates complain of being subjected to techniques classically associated with brainwashing. And Janine Huard certainly knows she was damaged by CIA's effort to develop analogs of such techniques. Moreover, for many years, a number of Americans have been aware of the "relentless indoctrination into a set of homogeneous norms" promoted by corporate media such as television.
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