Over the next years, within the wake of the Korean Struggle, “brainwashing” grew right into a catchall rationalization for any type of radical or nonconformist habits in america. Social scientists and politicians alike latched onto the concept. The Dutch psychologist Joost Meerloo warned that tv was a brainwashing machine, for instance, and the anticommunist educator J. Merrill Root claimed that excessive faculties brainwashed children into being weak-willed and weak to communist affect. In the meantime, fashionable films like 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, provided thrilling tales of Chinese language communists whose superior psychological methods turned unsuspecting American POWs into assassins.
For the army and intelligence communities, thoughts management hovered between fable and science. Nowhere is that this extra apparent than within the peculiar case of an anonymously revealed 1955 pamphlet referred to as Mind-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, which presupposed to be a translation of labor by the Soviet secret-police chief Lavrentiy Beria. Full of untamed claims about how the Soviets used psychology and medicines to manage the plenty, the pamphlet has a peculiar part dedicated to the ways in which Dianetics—a pseudoscience invented by the founding father of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard—might stop brainwashing. Because of this, it’s broadly believed that Hubbard himself wrote the pamphlet as black propaganda, or propaganda that masquerades as one thing produced by a overseas adversary.
ALAMY
Nonetheless, US officers apparently took it critically. David Seed, a cultural research scholar on the College of Liverpool, plumbed the Nationwide Safety Council papers on the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, the place he found that the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board had analyzed the pamphlet as a part of an investigation into enemy capabilities. A member of the board wrote that it may be “pretend” however contained a lot correct info that it was clearly written by “specialists.” When it got here to brainwashing, authorities operatives made nearly no distinction between black propaganda and so-called experience.
This gobbledygook may have struck the NSC investigator as authentic as a result of Hubbard borrowed lingo from the identical sources as many scientists of the period. Hubbard selected the identify Dianetics, as an example, particularly to evoke the pc scientist Norbert Wiener’s concept of cybernetics, an influential concept about info management programs that closely knowledgeable each psychology and the burgeoning subject of synthetic intelligence. Cybernetics advised that the mind functioned like a machine, with inputs and outputs, suggestions and management. And if machines might be optimized, then why not brains?
An excuse for presidency abuse
The fantasy of brainwashing was at all times one in every of optimization. Navy specialists knew that adversaries might be damaged with torture, however it took months and was typically a violent, messy course of. A quick, scientifically knowledgeable interrogation methodology would save time and will probably be deployed on a mass scale. In 1953, that dream led the CIA to speculate tens of millions of {dollars} in MK-Extremely, a undertaking that injected money into college and analysis applications dedicated to reminiscence wiping, thoughts management, and “reality serum” medication. Frightened that their rivals within the Soviet Union and China had been controlling folks’s minds to unfold communism all through the world, the intelligence group was keen to strive nearly something to battle again. No operation was too bizarre.
One in every of MK-Extremely’s most infamous tasks was “Operation Midnight Climax” in San Francisco, the place intercourse staff lured random American males to a protected home and dosed them with LSD whereas CIA brokers covertly noticed their habits. At McGill College in Montreal, the CIA funded the work of the psychologist Donald Cameron, who used a mixture of medication and electroconvulsive remedy on sufferers with psychological sickness, making an attempt to erase and “repattern” their minds. Although lots of his victims did wind up affected by amnesia for years, Cameron by no means efficiently injected new ideas or reminiscences. Marcia Holmes, a science historian who researched brainwashing for the Hidden Persuaders undertaking at Birkbeck, College of London, informed me that the CIA used Cameron’s information to develop new sorts of torture, which the US adopted as “enhanced interrogation” methods within the wake of 9/11. “You can put a scientific spin on it and declare that’s why it labored,” she mentioned. “But it surely at all times boiled right down to medieval techniques that folks knew from expertise labored.”
