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Editors' Introduction on Brainwashing

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Editors' Introduction on Brainwashing Editors’ Introduction On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare ANDREAS KILLEN AND STEFAN ANDRIOPOULOS As the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) nears its conclusion, army intelligence officer Bennett Marco tries to free Raymond Shaw, a decorated Korean War hero, from the hidden compulsions implanted in him by Communist brainwashers. Marco first elicits from Shaw the story of how he was programmed, then tells him that he is “tearing out the wires . all the beautifully conditioned links.” Shortly thereafter, Marco returns to the headquarters of his operation. The camera shows, in a medium shot, a dingy set of offices strangely festooned with wires and cables that crisscross the ceiling and dangle down nearly into the center of the camera frame. In the background a TV set transmits a live broadcast of the excited crowd gathered at the Republican National Convention, where the assassination Shaw has been programmed to commit will occur. The dangling wires seem both to material - ize the circuitry in Shaw’s brain and to allude to the wider conditioning of audi - ences and publics that is one of the film’s themes. They provide visual confirmation of the way this film continually blurs the boundaries between external and internal threat, juxtaposing Chinese techniques of mind control with American advertising and television. How exactly are we to account for the sense of threat associated with brainwashing? From the beginning this was an unstable construct. In 1975, brainwashing specialist Louis Jolyon West, expert witness at the trial of Patricia Hearst, heard his own words (originally written in 1963) quoted back to him: “Perhaps the most insidious threat posed by ‘brainwashing’ is the tendency of Americans to believe in its power.” 1 This scene of reversal can serve as an initial point of departure for an inquiry into the his - tory of this construct in political and cultural discourse from the Cold War to the present. Accordingly, one of the questions posed in this special issue is, Why and how did Americans come to believe in the power of brainwashing? How can we explain the surprising longevity of this notion, which persisted long after the imme - Grey Room 45, Fall 2011, pp. 6–17. © 2011 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_e_00047 by guest on 30 September 2021 diate crisis that gave birth to it? To what older narratives and anxieties did it relate? In short, how can we contextualize this term? One answer lies in the outbreak of the Cold War and the sense of panic it created in American society. Efforts to master this panic found expression in the rapid creation of a massive new intelligence infrastructure and in new frameworks of discourse, knowledge, and terminology. But if the notion of “brainwashing” emerged out of this conjuncture, it also resonated—and continues to resonate—in numerous other contexts, and one of the aims of this collection of essays is to explore these as well. In addition to its place in the political demonology of the early Cold War, as prime emblem of the “paranoid style” that invaded political culture in the 1950s, another context that was constitutive of the emergence and acceptance of the term brainwashing was the contemporaneous literature on public relations and advertising. In this form the notion served as part of a critique of capitalist and technological modernity, an expression of anxieties about mass media and other forms of “pro - gramming.” The notion of brainwashing then reemerged in the 1970s, in connection with the discourse surrounding cults (in which Patty Hearst served as the main exhibit), but also, following the Church hearings that grew out of Watergate, in the exposure of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) clandestine “mind control” programs, which had been implemented in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 Most recently, the term has gained a new currency in accounts of radical Islam as a new totalitarian enemy that recruits followers through techniques of propagandistic and educational “brainwashing.” At the same time, the revelations surrounding the techniques adopted by the United States in its “war on terror” testify to the longevity of the paranoid practices associated with the term. Today, brainwashing has become part of the prehistory of contemporary techniques of “enhanced interrogation” or torture. 3 A growing body of literature has traced these practices back to the CIA’s KUBARK training manual, which was issued in 1963 and was itself the end result of a series of experiments, projects, and debates extending back to the beginning of the 1950s. 4 The reverberations of these historical moments within political and cinematic narratives of mind control—beginning with The Manchurian Candidate itself and extending to the Jason Bourne series, Shutter Island (2010), and Inception (2010)— attests to the continual fascination exercised by the glimpse such narratives seem to offer into the secret operations of modern warfare. Edward Hunter, a CIA operative with a journalist cover, offered just such a glimpse in his first book about Communist brainwashing. 5 Based on Hunter’s travels in and encounters with citizens of the Far 8 Grey Room 45 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_e_00047 by guest on 30 September 2021 East, the book provided for the American public a cognitive map of the new terrain of psychological warfare, a field that included propaganda (Hunter’s own specialty) and morale-building but also more covert programs, as well as the tactics of Communist interrogation and indoctrination that CIA director Allen Dulles dubbed “brain warfare.” Such operations defined a conflict that encompassed much of the globe and was untethered from any conventional battleground. Hunter’s new construct was perfectly matched to this new postwar geopolitical situation; it both grew out of and provided dramatic confirmation of the conceptual shift that marked the onset of the Cold War. As numerous scholars then and since have noted, the Cold War signaled a new era of conflicts not over direct domination but over “spheres of influence.” War was reconceived as having shifted from a “battle to conquer geography to a battle to persuade hostile minds.” 6 Once the inven - tion of brainwashing as a propaganda notion and practice is placed within a longer historical frame, it can be seen as part of a shift in forms of governmentality that made population rather than territory the key focus of administration and that correspondingly emphasized new methods of mass mobilization, ideological inter - pellation, and surveillance. 7 At the same time, the birth of the national security state was marked by the insti - tutionalization of a new and permanent state of emergency. One key moment in this development was the drafting in 1950 of National Security Council Report 68, a policy analysis that defined the new Cold War state of exception in terms of a para - digm that replaced containment with a global sense of threat and the need for force - ful response. 8 As U.S. specialists realized, this “unending state of emergency” demanded “new forms of mental preparedness.” 9 Yet for a populace weary of conflict and still harboring deep isolationist tendencies, such preparedness and the sacri - fices it implied demanded more than mere propaganda. As few other concepts could, brainwashing provided virtual laboratory demonstrations of what was at stake in the superpower conflict. Confined at first to Chinese citizens or to the trials of prominent Eastern Europeans like Cardinal József Mindszenty, the problem remained abstract. But it was soon brought closer to home with the first revelations of the strange behavior of U.S. Korean War POWs. Despite the considerable destruc - tion and loss of life that marked this first test of the new national security paradigm, what turned the war into a major crisis for the United States was the spectacle of “brainwashed” American servicemen—whether confessing to germ warfare on radio broadcasts or refusing repatriation. 10 From the first reports in the early 1950s the problem was cast as one in which Killen and Andriopoulos | Editors’ Introduction: On Brainwashing 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_e_00047 by guest on 30 September 2021 ordinary Americans, naive to the ways of a depraved world, were disadvantaged by a lack of knowledge. This knowledge deficit became a structural element of the dis - course about brainwashing; it is made plain in a classified document from the mid- 1950s that circulated in U.S. intelligence circles. Titled “Report on Brainwashing from a Psychological Viewpoint,” the report blamed U.S. soldiers’ inability to resist Communist interrogation on a basic lack of awareness: they “were unprepared to face,” “did not know,” “had not been taught,” and so on. 11 On the one hand, the problem called for a massive public education campaign (such as that offered by Hunter’s writings) as a means of stiffening resolve and creating a consensus for sacrifice. On the other hand, this problem demanded the mobilization of govern - mental and institutional resources on a large scale and a new alliance between the state and a host of social science disciplines. On both fronts, brainwashing quickly assumed its place as one of the essential forms of “knowledge of the enemy,” an indispensable trope in the discursive construction of the Cold War as a “battle for the mind.” 12 But what did this knowledge consist of? In his early writings, Hunter assembled a wide range of materials to make a case for the plausibility of brainwashing: inter - views with Chinese citizens and analysis of pamphlets; the practice of stage hypno - sis; contemporaneous developments in psychiatry and cybernetics. 13 Over time, more elaborate theories, and forms of evidence, found their way into the writings of Hunter and other authors, many of whom, such as Joost Meerloo and William Sargant, had credentials as psychiatric specialists.
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